Scurvy’s Selection – Canadaland COMMONS: Monopoly

Scurvy December 8, 2022 anticapitalism, blog, bread price fixing scandal, British Commonwealth, CA4, Canada, Canadaland, Canadaland COMMONS, capitalism, CC3, Climate Crisis, colonialism, corporate greed, decolonization, dehumanization, exploitation, extractive capitalism, extractivism, FotB, Friends of the Blog, genocide, grocery monopoly, Indigenous Rights, land theft, monopoly, monopoly power, neocolonialism, Podcast, price fixing, resource imperialism, Scurvy, Scurvy's Selection, stolen land, WD7, Weston family, white supremacy

Editor’s Note: Scurvy’s Selection brings you the best of left wing vlogs and podcasts from around the web each week; curated by our long suffering NIDC site administrator, Scurvy.

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Greetings and salutations, fellow minds-manning-meat-suits! This week in Scurvy’s Selection, we’re talking about one of my favourite podcast series: COMMONS, by Canadaland. This is COMMONS’ 10th season, and their format for the past few years has been to focus on a single “topic” for the entire season, looking at it from different perspectives every episode. For those of us living north of the imposed border on the 49th parallel, the focus of this season should be no surprise: Monopolies.

The headline for my article is a factually and historically accurate description of the lands known around the world as Canada. “Canada” started with fur traders, an industry the British eventually claimed monopoly on via the Hudson’s Bay Company. French fur traders, rightfully ignoring the British claim to monopoly, were intermarrying with several different Indigenous nations eventually creating a unique Indigenous Nation: The Métis. The Métis themselves grew to be so much of a direct threat to the HBC’s trade monopoly that their elimination was necessary and so, proclaimed as integration, we lied to them, stole the land and named it Manitoba as part of “Canada” then kicked them to the road allowances. No; I mean LITERALLY.

Pretty much every other industry in “Canada” developed along the same lines of land theft, exploitation, dehumanization and death, and COMMONS has had several seasons diving deep into those industries; crude oil, mining, the family dynasties that grow from those things, the inevitable corruption and the policing that holds it all together with violence. This season is talking about Canadian monopolies specifically: Which companies are the monopolies or oligopolies in each industry, how this is further enriching the already disgustingly rich at the expensive of the people already in the gutter.

So I figured, for all those reasons and more (no spoilers), let’s start with episode 1; about groceries. As I pointed out at the start, we’re all walking around in meat suits that need to be fed. And these capitalistic ghouls’ approach is always to fuck us as much as possible for their own personal benefit! Did you think it was only about bread? Check it out online or listen to the episode embedded below: