The Poison of Capitalism

The point of this post is that our forty-year infatuation with neo-liberalism and financialization has made us a weaker, sicker society, with a hollowed-out economy and an inability to respond to predictable and inevitable crises. Also, it seems as if the capitalist ruling class has become so used to being pampered, and being held unaccountable for their crimes, their lies, and their hypocrisy, that they are responding to this current pandemic with such brazen selfishness and inhumanity that [even I] think they are going to provoke a reckoning when all this is over.

Around about 1980, neo-liberalism was promoted as the answer to the "failure" of the pseudo-Keynesianism that western governments had adopted following the policy lessons of the Great Depression and World War Two. Neo-liberalism includes "Free Trade" (re: "investors' rights") policies that allow for the exporting of jobs to countries with cheaper labour and less worker rights. It allows for the movement of capital but NOT for the movement of labour.

It allows for the lowering of taxes on the wealthy and corporations. who were wrongly believed would invest this returned income into job creation. Despite there being little evidence for this, western governments (including Canadian federal and provincial ones) offer up new revenue-busting tax cuts to the wealthy year after year. All that has been achieved is revenue shortfalls that have led to to cuts in public services, including healthcare and education, and increased income and wealth inequality as the rich hoard their money in the financial markets and illegal offshore accounts, and the vast majority are forced to pay more (for, say, healthcare and education) from lower incomes due to de-unionization and the loss of jobs in manufacturing and the public sector.

De-unionization is one aspect of another facet of neo-liberalism, which is de-regulation. Regulations that force businesses to protect workers' physical and mental health cost money. Removing them would (again) give business more money to invest in glorious job-creating growth. Regulations protecting the environment cost money. Get rid of them. Laws preventing monopolies and price-gouging and fraud limit corporate incomes. Eliminate them. De-regulation will allow "job-creators" to have more money to "create jobs" and we will all have wonderful income-creating opportunities. Not, mind you, steady jobs: Because a steady job is anathema to neo-liberalism. We'll all have "gigs" and "side hustles" in the "knowledge economy." It will be an exciting life of flitting from one exciting, well-paying challenge to the next. (Of course this is all garbage.)

Alberta's fundamentalist dullard/tormented closet-case premier, Jason Kenney, has made the remarkable achievement of being the epitome of this bankrupt ideology. And the real-world outcomes of these policies reveals its bankruptcies.

Let's state it plainly; if these policies of neo-liberalism really worked, then forty years of pursuing them should have brought us to a wonderland of wealth and productivity. But, as we see now, the opposite is what we see before us.

And one of the things we see before us is our governments' inept responses to the COVID-19 crisis. In Canada we see billions going to bail-out the owners of oil companies while we simultaneously realize that our healthcare system has been starved to the point of inadequacy to deal with this pandemic. We also see millions of Canadians incapable of being able to afford losing a single pay-period. Canadians have been unable to save. NOT because we're such spendthrifts, but because living expenses (education, housing, transportation, etc.) have soared year after year.

Don't take my word for it. Here's Taylor Scollon from "The Passage" to tell us all about it in "The Coronairus Is About To Expose Just How Broken Our Welfare State Really Is."

At the end of a dark week, let’s begin with that most Canadian refrain of positivity: it could be worse, at least we aren’t the Americans. There are more confirmed cases of COVID-19 south of the border (at least for now), and if you do get sick there you can expect to spend thousands of dollars just to get tested. And don’t even contemplate the cost of care if you’re one of the millions of Americans without adequate health insurance. We can find some solace in the fact that, for us, testing and treatment will be free. 

Aside from that there is not much good news. After all, we share a border with the Americans, and disease doesn’t respect borders. But more importantly, after decades of erosion and cuts, our own welfare state can barely get us through normal times, let alone a crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic is finally forcing all of us to confront that harsh truth.

Scallon points out the inability of many workers to afford quarantine or to qualify for the benefits that might allow them to survive:

we can expect 11 million people to enter self-quarantine for at least two weeks, many of them in the next few months. I fear people have not fully grasped the implications of this.

Immediately, most of those 11 million people will be unable to work. ... most of those quarantined will face enormous challenges hanging on to their income.
The majority will not have employer-sponsored paid sick leave. Only 42 per cent of workers in Canada enjoy this benefit. The remaining 58 per cent will be mostly left to fend for themselves. Sick leave rules vary by province, but only Quebec and PEI guarantee any paid sick leave to workers (two days in Quebec, and one day in PEI after you have been with the employer for five years). Premier Doug Ford’s Ontario government scrapped paid sick leave in 2018. ...

...Those who are eligible can receive a maximum of $573 per week for up to 15 weeks. If you live in any urban region of the country, you know this is barely enough to cover rent on a studio apartment let alone groceries.

Scallon continues with the state of our healthcare system:

Distressingly, those with mild infections contending with financial strain may be the lucky ones.  After decades of cuts and neglect, the public healthcare system we are so proud of does not appear equipped to handle the pressure that will soon be placed upon it. While we have yet to see how the stresses of COVID-19 impact us, we can look at what other countries have experienced and extrapolate based on their readiness.

Our caseload now is low: only 152 cases (as of publication on March 13). But a number of epidemiological studies focused on the Chinese experience found that cases doubled every six days. If this holds true for Canada, we would expect to reach around 39,000 cases by the end of April and 300,000 by mid-May.
...

Unfortunately, decades of cuts have left our healthcare system less prepared to handle an outbreak like this. While China has 4.3 hospital beds per 1000 people and Italy has 3.7 beds per 1000 people, Canada has only 2.5 beds per 1000 people — or 92,462 beds in total. This represents a decrease of 32 per cent from our 2000 level of 3.7 beds per 1000 people. We also have one of the highest hospital bed occupancy rates in the world at 91.6 per cent, behind only Israel and Ireland. This means that under normal circumstances, our healthcare system has around 7,776 hospital beds available.
...

Finally, what about the unknown numbers of homeless in Canada? Poor people gravitate to larger cities in search of work and/or government services. But skyrocketing housing costs and the increasing uncertainty of jobs and the persistent stagnation of wages, have all contributed to a rising homelessness. And at the same time, neo-liberal austerity has made being homeless more dangerous and unhealthy:

Without tenant protections and a shelter system already well beyond capacity, people who fall behind on their rent can be evicted and tossed to the street with nowhere to go. Self-quarantine will not be an option for them, or for the 35,000 Canadians who are homeless on any given night.

Everything I've been saying at this blog for years, and which analysis is based upon what many more rigorous and original thinkers have been saying for decades:

It’s important to remember that all of these problems caused by our totally inadequate welfare state are experienced every day by millions of Canadians. It didn’t take COVID-19 to deny people the medication they need to survive, or push more and more people into gig jobs that pay next to nothing, or erode healthcare funding to the point people are regularly treated in the hallway.
For decades our political class told us we need to “cutback”, “trim the fat”, “find efficiencies”, and “sell-off underperforming assets”. They turned our welfare state into a sad joke. Now the bill is coming due, and I fear we are all about to pay for it dearly.

Which now brings us to the sociopathic responses of the US-American and Canadian governments. Justin Trudeau plans on spending $25 billion to shore-up a cratering economy. The 2008 Recession ended up costing Canada around $100 billion just so the economy wouldn't fall into recession. (At least we don't have the total-idiot Conservatives in power. Jason Kenney has responded to Alberta's economic collapse by soiling his diaper and shrieking. In 2008 we had the simpleton Jim Flaherty proposing austerity in the face of calamity. Months previously the imbecile had been forecasting surpluses as far as the eye could see.) Liberals have always been the more reality-based managers of capitalism when compared to their more extremist brethren in the "conservative" parties. "Conservative" politicians can say any fool thing that comes into their heads, fanatically adhere to ruinous tax-cuts and severe austerity for the poor, and so long as they abuse the right scapegoats for their low-information voting base they can continue to be officially respectable.

But, Jason Kirby in Maclean's points out that, once again, Canada's oligarchs and political servants are expecting ordinary Canadian households to shoulder the burden of keeping the Canadian economy afloat. In the 2008 Financial Crisis, Canada's banks got the Canada Mortgage & Housing Corporation (CMHC) to purchase $69 billion in assets and the Bank of Canada to provide billions more in loans to keep them afloat. Canada wasn't hit as hard as Wall Street was because we did not have the same insanely corrupt derivatives market that they did.

But during 2008-2009 (and in housing, up to this very day) Canadians continued to spend, despite generally high unemployment during the crisis and despite a higher average household debt than US households. Something I've remarked upon several times over the years at this blog; The same economic geniuses who warn us about our high debt levels and bemoan our "economic illiteracy" simultaneously exhort us to keep spending to keep the economy moving.

And now, Kirby says:

Instead, with Canada’s economy already more dependent on indebted households than at any time since at least the 1960s, and with the economy facing headwinds from the recent rail blockades and uncertainty over the spread of coronavirus, the hope is that cheap money will keep consumers spending and that households can bail out the economy yet again.
That’s not exactly how Poloz has framed the bank’s rate cut, of course. In his speech the day after the rate announcement Poloz said the goal of the cut was to preserve confidence on the part of consumers and businesses in the wake of steep stock market declines, even if a decade of low rates has done little to spur businesses to invest. But he did warn that the plunge in oil prices to their lowest level since 2016 could spread throughout the rest of the economy as those directly affected “spend less money on everything.”
“The downside risks to the economy today are more than sufficient to outweigh our continuing concern about financial vulnerabilities,” he said, using central banker speak for the state of Canada’s overextended households and the risk they pose to the financial system. He also brushed away concerns that Canadians in some real estate markets will do what they have done every other time rates have been cut — drive expectations of home prices higher and stretch their finances dangerously thin to avoid missing out on the gains. “Declining consumer confidence would naturally lead to reduced activity in the housing market,” he said in his speech. “In this context, lower interest rates will actually help to stabilize the housing market, rather than contribute to froth.”

There are real-world consequences to such blindness and stupidity. This is really happening folks! It really is the case that our leaders expect us to prop-up the economy with money that we don't have. It's as simple (and insane) as that.

But not only are we expected to ignore the ways that they've impoverished us while still expecting us to be happy consumers; we're also supposed to bail them out with scarce public resources while our hospitals go begging during an international pandemic! The goddamned fucking fossil fuels industry, despite having had decades of high profits (in the past) and having paid absurdly low royalties to Alberta and Saskatchewan, and despite having been subsidized with billions of public dollars ever year, and despite their reneging on their obligations to clean up after themselves, ... these corporate titans stand their with their hands out, pathetically mewling that they'll go under if we don't give them billions more, right now. And of course the Liberals are more than happy to accommodate them. (And we're supposed to be grateful that they're not as enormously happy that the detestable Conservatives would have been.)

And jeeziz-fucking-christ! Canada's fucking banks! Our giant, super-profitable, coddled, barely regulated banks! Listen you stupid assholes; the business shut-downs and self-isolation that are the inevitable consequences of this pandemic mean that MILLIONS of Canadians CANNOT WORK and therefore CANNOT GET PAID! To date, the stupid Liberals, led ostensibly by the airhead Justin Trudeau have not implemented a moratorium on mortgages or rents during this time when people CANNOT WORK and therefore CANNOT GET PAID. Instead:

As part of the government's pledge to help Canadians suffering financially due to COVID-19, Finance Minister Bill Morneau asked the heads of Canada's big banks to allow people to defer mortgage payments for up to six months.

In other words, Morneau is asking the banks to voluntarily do the decent and sane thing. Morneau is possibly not stupid enough to think that Canada's bankers can be decent, sane human beings. He probably knows damn well that Canada's bankers will behave just as abominably as they always have. From the same article:

The banks responded by issuing a statement saying they "have made a commitment to work with personal and small business banking customers on a case-by-case basis to provide flexible solutions to help them manage through challenges such as pay disruption due to COVID-19; child-care disruption due to school closures; or those facing illness from COVID-19."

This is public relations talk which means: "We have no intention of doing the sane and decent thing. We want the money! Give us the money! I don't care what you have to do to get it! Give us the money! Can't work? Fuck you! Pay me! Sick in the hospital? Fuck you! Pay me!"

Why the fuck go through all the work of going through mortgage relief on a "case-by-case" basis when you already know that across the board, PEOPLE CAN'T PAY BECAUSE PEOPLE CAN'T WORK BECAUSE OF THE PANDEMIC???????!!!!!!?????

It would be incredibly time-consuming and expensive to review tens of thousands of cases of people needing temporary relief from impending mortgages due to the pandemic. To argue something as stupid as what the banks are arguing is just their being unembarrassed with their lame-ass excuse for their psychopathic behaviour. And these people are psychopaths.

Read that entire article for the various instances of how these monsters are playing ridiculous games with their CUSTOMERS, dicking them around with bullshit demands for information or giving them the runaround. There's too much for me to quote here without simply copying the whole article. I'll just add the following:

CBC News asked each of the big five banks for more information on the criteria for the case-by-case-based decisions on mortgage and credit deferrals.
We asked:

• Who would qualify?
• Is there an application process?
• Does the entire household have to be off work?
• Will they require documentation?

None of the banks answered any of those questions.

TD, CIBC and Scotiabank all responded by repeating their commitment to work with personal and small-business banking customers on a case-by-case basis. Each encouraged customers to contact their call centres directly or visit their websites.

BMO and RBC did not respond to emails from CBC News.

And this:

The government is purchasing up to $50 billion of insured mortgage pools through the CMHC, which says that stable funding for the banks and mortgage lenders is meant to ensure continued lending to Canadian consumers.

This is the same delusional, contradictory horseshit that they sold us in the 2008 crisis. Throwing taxpayers' money at the banks so that they could continue to provide "credit" to people who didn't want to borrow because their lives had been turned upside down by job losses or (in the USA) the devaluation of their homes.

I mean, it's entirely possible that Bill Morneau, who was born wealthy and worked for his daddy's company before taking it over, is a complete moron who owes it all to nepotism, and that he's so fucking stupid that he believes that the banks need an injection of $50 billion so that they can LOAN money to desperate people who are calling up their banks pleading for help because they can't work. But I honestly don't think Morneau is that stupid. I think the CMHC has given the banks that $50 billion so that they can prop-up their own stock prices. Because he's evil.

Well, this is a blog post that hardly anybody reads and I've got other things I want to do. This post has sat in my "Drafts" folder for almost a week and I want to just publish it and move on. So, for posterity's sake, I'll mention a few of the other links that I wanted to speak about and then conclude.

From The Disaffected Lib, there's the possibility that Trump's sustained denialism about the Coronavirus wasn't just due to delusion and selfish politics. He might have been preaching business-as-usual so that he'd have time to dump his own stock portfolio before the market crashed.

We already know how Republican Senator Richard Burr, while publicly advising calm, was telling a small group of wealthy sugar-daddies to head for the hills while he did likewise. A number of other Repugnicans did the same along with Democrat Dianne "Warbucks" Feinstein.

Meanwhile, a group of investment bankers were found to have been inquiring of executives in health care profiting companies that they had invested in if it was possible that they could, you know, maybe engage in a bit of price-gouging during the pandemic, so as to further enrich themselves.

Over the past few weeks, investment bankers have been candid on investor calls and during health care conferences about the opportunity to raise drug prices. In some cases, bankers received sharp rebukes from health care executives; in others, executives joked about using the attention on Covid-19 to dodge public pressure on the opioid crisis.

...

Steven Valiquette, a managing director at Barclays Investment Bank, last week peppered executives from Cardinal Health, a health care distributor of N95 masks, ventilators and pharmaceuticals, on whether the company would raise prices on a range of supplies.

Valiquette asked repeatedly about potential price increases on a variety of products. Could the company, he asked, “offset some of the risk of volume shortages” on the “pricing side”?

Michael Kaufmann, the chief executive of Cardinal Health, said that “so far, we’ve not seen any material price increases that I would say are related to the coronavirus yet.” Cardinal Health, Kaufman said, would weigh a variety of factors when making these decisions, and added that the company is “always going to fight aggressively to make sure that we’re getting after the lowest cost.”

“Are you able to raise the price on some of this to offset what could be some volume shortages such that it all kind of nets out to be fairly consistent as far as your overall profit matrix?” asked Valiquette.
Kaufman responded that price decisions would depend on contracts with providers, though the firm has greater flexibility over some drug sales. “As you have changes on the cost side, you’re able to make some adjustments,” he noted.

The discussion, over conference call, occurred during the Barclays Global Healthcare Conference on March 10. At one point, Valiquette joked that “one positive” about the coronavirus would be a “silver lining” that Cardinal Health may receive “less questions” about opioid-related lawsuits.
Cardinal Health is one of several firms accused of ignoring warnings and flooding pharmacies known as so-called pill mills with shipments of millions of highly addictive painkillers. Kaufmann noted that negotiations for a settlement are ongoing.

And, since I started this post, the US Senate (that home of vermin) has passed a bail-out bill that is an even more brazen theft of public resources to reward criminality and incompetence than was the 2008 bail-out package.

It seems to me that this crisis might be a game-changer. Since 2011 I've become increasingly pessimistic about the collective intelligence of the human race to reverse the calamitous trajectory towards ecocide and dictatorship that we're presently on. But it's just possible that the soon to be revealed total failure of the USA's for-profit healthcare system; the murderous impact of decades of shit-head neo-liberal austerity on other OECD countries' social safety-nets (including healthcare); the absolutely disgusting and shameless nature of oligarchs and politicians using this crisis for personal profit; the obvious failure of the delusions of religion, the assurances of imbeciles and grifters, to protect people from a virus; the bungling of Trump; the insanely idiotic elevation of a dementia case to the Democratic nominee for the office of President; ... all that and other instances of madness, just MIGHT inspire people to think about what's necessary for a genuine, revolutionary transformation of a doomed system.

harper Attacks Wynne, Notley

They were actually good people. Unfair to compare them with Conservatives.

 From the CBC:

A political spat that erupted this week between Conservative Leader Stephen Harper and the Alberta and Ontario premiers is being seen by some as a calculated move on Harper's part to shore up his traditional party base.
...
On Tuesday, Harper took a not-so-subtle swipe at Wynne's performance as premier, saying: "I think I will observe what a senior official told me when I took office. They said, 'You will have your best relations with the premiers who are doing a good job in their own jurisdiction.'"
...
But Harper has also taken aim at Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, referring to her new NDP government's decision to raise corporate and income taxes as a "disaster." (Notley responded that her government's priority is to protect the jobs of "regular working families," rather than "wealthy Conservative friends and insiders.") 

Progressive Strategy For 2015 Federal Election

Slumberjack won't be voting. He'll (ineffectively) try to convince as many other people as he can to stay home as well. He might influence poor people (if he knows any) who were thinking of staying home anyway. The larger anarchist project is, ... well, don't try to impose any sort of oppressive narrative on him. Slumberjack subscribes to the "Human Strike" wherein any petulant refusal to do anything (or nothing [????]) becomes elevated as "revolutionary." And on and on you go until you die.

I suppose we'll all die. And many of our big projects will fail to come to fruition. So perhaps Slumberjack is right with this idiotic "Human Strike" concept. Just tell yourself that your everyday bitching and whining and passive aggression is a revolutionary project and VOILA! you're transformed from pathetic failure to anarchist super-radical!

...

I'd rather not talk about this stupidity any longer.

Sibyn will vote. Even though he/she lives in Vancouver and the election results from Ontario and Quebec will have already been counted and the election decided, rendering his/her vote null and void. And what with party discipline in the House of Commons, and the likelihood of a Librocon or Connibberal government, who cares anyway? Canadian democracy is a joke according to Sibyn. Unless it isn't. And Sibyn is just a powerless nothing in the face of the corporate tyranny. But Sibyn votes out of "civic duty." Because Sibyn is vast and contains multitudes. Either that or Sibyn is just an incoherent whiner.

I accept that as an ordinary person I have little to zero capability of bringing about revolutionary change, and don't feel the need to point fingers and throw all the blame onto the "other" for the state of affairs in the world. I don't blame ordinary people and I don't blame myself. 

Right. That translates as: "I can do nothing. Together, we can do nothing. But what are you going to do? How dare you try to insist otherwise? Now let me go back to complaining about how bad everything is."
 
Stupid shit-head. 

Some progressives continue to push for a coalition between the Liberals and the NDP. Two-thirds of those people are Liberals, for whom "strategic voting" has always meant vote for a Liberal candidate, even if the Liberal candidate is the least viable one. Because they're shameless partisan hacks.

We're more likely to see a coalition of the Conservatives, Liberals, NDP, with the Greenies hanging around the edges clinging to the Liberals. What with all the smoochin' and a huggin' going on in the House of Commons these days.

Thuggish cretin Jim Flaherty retires? Send the obnoxious troll off with accolades. Then he dies? Actually cry for the toad. Then he gets a goddamned state funeral.

A schizophrenic with a seven-shot hunting rifle storms Parliament Hill? Give goddamned stephen harper a goddamned HUG afterwards!!! (OMFG!)

Could it possibly get any more sickening????

Then the buffoonish, boorish, bullying, incompetent, international disgrace John Baird retires. (So he can get his goddamned pension at 55 instead of 65.) And he gets a goddamned standing ovation by everyone in Parliament?

These assholes have demonstrated contempt for Parliament. Do you know what Parliament is Liberal and NDP MP's? It's the place where you work! It's the place you're privileged to represent us. It's where our laws as a people are proposed and debated. It's where you, as our representatives are supposed to keep an eye on the actions of the executive branch. Yes. That place. The place that harper rules with a stolen majority, obtained via widespread election fraud. It's the place where he's used that stolen majority to ram through one omnibus bill after another. It's the place where he refused to give basic financial information on his policies to you when he was in the minority. It's the place where he basically insults you as friends of the "Jihadists" who want Canadian soldiers to die.

What the fuck is wrong with you people?

Seriously! How did you get so fucked-up?

I can't continue today ....

EEEK! A Deficit!!!!

So, there's talk that the falling price of oil, the damage it'll do to Alberta's economy, etc., etc., will prevent the harpercons from meeting their promised surplus in this, an election year.

Whatever.

Thanks to the failure of the unregulated, neo-liberal economic model, since 2008 the economy of the world has been teetering between stagnation and austerity. The opposition wisely forced dim-bulb harpercon finance minister Jim Flaherty, to launch a round of stimulus spending to help Canada avoid a recessionary spiral. They've now spent, what? $100 million? Advertising this piss-poor stimulus program as "Canada's Action-Plan."

The US stock market has been kept on an upward course by massive infusions of taxpayers' dollars. It's all a scam. 93% of the economic growth since 2009 went to the wealthiest 1%. And less and less of that is taxed. So that the rich can keep more of the wealth they've scraped out of the skins of workers, the environment, and the consumers (who are those very same workers suffering with job insecurity and stagnating or declining wages). And, the government gets less revenue.

My only problem with these deficits is that they're partially caused by round after round of income and corporate (and then sales) tax cuts. Tax cuts for people who demonstrably have more money than they know what to productively do with. I wasn't a fan of Paul Martin's ruinous austerity policies and I'm not a fan of harper's cretinous obsession with surpluses either. harper made a stupid promise, and now the falling price of oil is making it difficult for him to keep it.

harper has always been afraid of facts. (Among other things. harper is a shuddering, fearful wreak most of the time.) Facts tend to have a liberal bias. So it's only natural that harper try to dismiss the facts about the government's finances until after he's stolen the next election. Hence delaying the budget until April. And musings about further cuts to public services. Because, oh my god! We can't have a country with a GDP larger than $1,000,000,000,000.00 have a $1,600,000.00 deficit! The earth would swallow us faster than a falling sky could crush us!

Sadly though, even after 70 years of knowing that deficits are necessary during economic downturns, we still hear crapola about bloated government budgets and corrupt unions and chiselers on welfare.

Now, what would happen if, because of some bad news, everyone curtailed their spending? It's been known since the Great Depression that the simultaneous reining in of spending by business and consumers means a recession, which means lower revenues for government, which used to mean cut-backs by the public sector, which would create a downward recessionary spiral.

What the government is supposed to do during times like these is to perform counter-cyclical public spending, to halt the downward spiral and attempt to re-start the economy. Now, obviously, it would help to have had surpluses in good times. And in this day and age, reversing the tax-cuts to the wealthiest (simply because they haven't produced the economic growth that we were promised they would) is necessary to maintain surpluses in good times. The harpercons (and the Liberals) didn't do that. But just because they fucked-up then, doesn't mean that they have to fuck-up now. Austerity in the face of a tanking economy will still make things worse, even if you think the deficits up to now have been harper's fault.

Austerity would, actually, DESTROY the Canadian economy. We've been trundling along with single-minded determination to promote the Tar-Sands, ... buoyed by a real-estate bubble and corresponding construction boom, ... but really it hasn't been all that spectacular. Because to keep things at this anemic pace, Canadian households have now got a household debt-to-income ratio of 162%. Imagine if the feds, and the provinces, decide to slash spending under these conditions!

In all honesty, it's going to take YEARS of reversing the neo-liberal bullshit spewed by economists, to get the economy back on track. To get society back on track. It will take pro-union legislation, and rising wages for workers, and investing in the green, zero-growth economy, and puncturing the real-estate and stock-market bubbles and preventing them from ever inflating again, and closing tax-loopholes and ramping down wasteful spending on imperialist wars.

Don't be sucked-in, yet again, by this stupid deficit hysteria.

The Incompetent Scum-Bags Dither

So, the Great Economist/Warrior leader is having his finance minister delay the budget. It appears that our Great Economist/Warrior leader is as big a coward on facing the economy as he is facing down terrorists.

Unthinking right-wing fuck-faces used to crow about harper's sterling handling of the economy. During the 2008 - Present financial crisis, Canada's banks only needed an injection of $114 of taxpayer's money to save them from their own mistakes. The dollar was strong. Deficits were low. Unemployment was low. The economy grew.

In reality, harper hadn't had the time to free Canada's banksters from the regulations that kept them from emulating the super-criminals in the USA's banking sector. He wanted to though. Just as he wanted to emulate all the ponzi-scheme antics behind the US real-estate bubble. harper was only saved from himself by his relatively late ascension to power. Then, in response to the crisis, his cretinous finance minister, the late, un-great Jim Flaherty, wanted to embrace the austerity policies that have mired Europe in recession, high unemployment, deficits and civil unrest. Thankfully, the incompetent "conservatives" were forced, kicking and screaming by the opposition, to implement counter-cyclical spending that averted catastrophe.

Of course, "averted catastrophe" doesn't mean "economic nirvana." Unemployment remains high. Wages have stagnated or shrunk. Canadian households have gone further and further into debt to keep the economy wheezing and huffing along.

Now, however, the bloom has gone off the rose. harper's policies of class war were all to be mitigated through his delusions about making Canada an "energy super-power." Ignoring the vast scientific consensus about catastrophic global warming, and ignoring his obligations to the lands of the First Nations, and through eviscerating our entire environmental regulatory edifice through omnibus bills, and through harassment of environmentalist groups with CSIS, the RCMP and punitive audits from a corrupted Canada Revenue Agency, harper would use all his fraudulently-arrived at power to champion the Tar Sands over sanity, humanity and the Earth.

Unfortunately for him, Saudi Arabia decided to declare war on fracking, and Obama let them do so because the side-effect would be to weaken the economies of Russia, Iran and Venezuela. stephen harper means shit to the Americans. Always has, always will. Canada means shit to Washington actually. If we get clobbered as an innocent bystander watching the big-boys fight, well, too bad, so sad.

So, now Alberta's economy is going into the shitter. Precious Alberta! The province that super-patriot harper wrote he wouldn't mind if it separated from Canada. (The same way the owner of the super-patriotic "SUN News" network would like Quebec to separate from Canada. Just what is it with these anti-Canadian right-wingers????) Some people are expecting Ontario's manufacturing sector to benefit from a weaker dollar and lower oil costs, but is there much of a manufacturing sector to be revived? And will it produce the jobs?

WTF?!? Hugging harper???!?!?!?!?!?!?

Da fuk???

THIS is why our political system is in a crisis. The inability to recognize stephen fucking harper as the menace to democracy that he is.

What the fuck is going through Mulcair's head when he does stupid shit like hugging a human-rights abusing criminal like stephen harper, or weeping for an anti-democratic, thuggish imbecile like Jim Flaherty???

I wouldn't have hugged harper. After he got out of that closet, I'd consider it back to business-as-usual.

I really don't know what else there is to say.

More on harper and his Brain Farts

Yesterday, I talked about harper as a narcissist, a sociopath and a profoundly superficial thinker. I think the roots of harper's censoring of science; hiding from the press, addiction to propaganda and lies, hatred of democracy, are in his dim understanding that he's a deluded half-wit, and his fear of the unknown that would result if his intellectual house-of-cards were to collapse under the pressure of contrary viewpoints.

Today I'll continue going through the harper quote that I started dissecting. There we discovered that harper opposes "socialist morality," which is to say, attacking social inequality and replacing it with social equality, so that everyone has food, shelter, dignity and worth. Next he accused the left of "moral relativism" ignoring the fact that he practices it on a daily basis. Then he demonstrated that he didn't know what the word "nihilism" means, by equating it with rejection of hoary traditions and uninvestigated conventions. He threw in the term "Post-Marxism" as a meaningless non sequitur. Next, Mr. Contempt of Parliament told us that this caricature of socialist morality leads to a hatred of western democracy. Think of that.

It's not as if young stephen harper from 2003 did not know about the monster he would become after 2006. No. The 2003 stephen harper barely understood what he was saying at the time, hardly believed what he did understand, and easily abandoned any pretense of believing in his platitudes once he seized power.

Make no mistake about it. Stupid people can be dangerous. You wouldn't trust major surgery to a drooling imbecile. In the same way, stupid stephen harper has been an utter catastrophe to the uncertain political project that is Canada. For more evidence of his incapacity, I present paragraph two in his ramblings on socialist morality. Here it is:

This descent into nihilism should not be surprising because moral relativism simply cannot be sustained as a guiding philosophy. It leads to silliness such as moral neutrality on the use of marijuana or harder drugs mixed with its random moral crusades on tobacco. It explains the lack of moral censure on personal foibles of all kinds, extenuating even criminal behaviour with moral outrage at bourgeois society, which is then tangentially blamed for deviant behaviour. On the moral standing of the person, it leads to views ranging from radical responsibility-free individualism, to tribalism in the form of group rights.

Now, it's already been established that the premise the first sentence rests on brazen hypocrisy. It is "conservatives" who cheered on the death-squads policies in Central America throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It was "conservatives" who provided cover for Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980s. It is the "conservatives" in Canada who tried to rationalize Canada's sickening descent into the immoral practice of torture. On and on it goes with them.

harper is right about one thing though. his own moral emptiness is not a sustained, guiding philosophy. We can see this by observing his lurching from one foul act of corruption to the next. We can see it in his cowardly refusal to face-up to and defend his craven service to corporate greed-heads and US and Israeli imperialists.

"It leads to silliness such as moral neutrality on the use of marijuana or harder drugs mixed with its random moral crusades on tobacco."

Here harper is really pulling out all the stops! Marijuana has proven itself to be 7,000X safer than harper's own drug of choice, alcohol.It would be the height of silliness to continue to waste billions of dollars suppressing a drug enjoyed by the majority of the population, diverting policing resources from more necessary tasks and ruining thousands of lives every year. As far as harder, dangerous drugs go, ... I think one would be hard-pressed to find many socialist moral relativists who are "neutral" about these issues. You'll find leftists calling for treating addiction as a disease, not a crime. You might find leftists calling for the decriminalization of drugs, and their subsequent regulation by the government, to take the industry out of the hands of criminals. harper, and his moronic supporters, appear to prefer keeping the drug-trade in hands of gangsters, and maintaining the system of misery and deaths by overdose and police corruption and brutal (and expensive) prison system, over the "moral neutrality" of the left.

And then there's the reality that most of these "tough-on-crime" "zero tolerance for drugs" right-wingers, from Rush Limbaugh to Rob Ford, all turn out to be the most pathetic, total hypocrites. Then there are former Conservative MPs like Rahim Jaffer, whose charges for cocaine possession were dropped as part of a very lenient plea-bargain.  Jaffer and his "busty hookers," along with complete scum-bags like Bruce Carson and Paul Calandra. (I don't know if either of those two have used hard drugs. They just came to mind as examples of immoral sleaze while I was building my list of drug-using hypocrites.)

"... mixed with its random moral crusades against tobacco."

Priceless. Presumably drugs are bad because they destroy lives. But the enormous human suffering caused by the tobacco industry (documented as increasing the addictive nature of their product) is fine with this simpleton because, "Duh! They're legal!" and because "Freedom!" or some other equally vacuous "argument."

Earth to harper! Anti-smoking movements aren't necessarily Post-Marxist moral relativists. And they don't want to throw thousands of people in prison. They want to prevent people from starting a deadly habit. Help people break the habit. And reduce innocent people's exposure to having to inhale health-injuring second-hand smoke.

"It explains the lack of moral censure on personal foibles of all kinds, extenuating even criminal behaviour with moral outrage at bourgeois society, which is then tangentially blamed for deviant behaviour."

I think the dimwit meant "moral backbone" or something. Otherwise he's saying that it's individual failings that produce a lack of condemnation of drug-use and addiction. Which is completely bizarre. I think he meant to say that the absence of a moral compass allows drug-users to explain away their miserable moral failures as the result of a rough childhood, or a propensity to addiction, or some other set of circumstances, and he extends this to the Post-Marxists who also make up any excuse for addicts besides moral failure. The Post-Marxists are so stupid as to blame bourgeois society for the addicts' personal failure. This, harper finds ridiculous. Why should a society that uses people as expendable resources in the service of personal greed drive people to use drugs? Why should a bourgeois politician like stephen harper be blamed for drug-overdoses just because he would rather see people locked-up as criminals if they go for help, and he'd like to shut-down the award-winning InSite clinic, that lets addicts use their drugs in a setting where they're encouraged to get help and there is medical assistance in case they overdose? Why should bourgeois society be blamed for the drug industry, just because its governments have aided and abetted drug-dealing gangsters decade-after-decade?

By  the way; where was the "moral censure" for Rob Ford's gross display of hypocrisy, in consorting with gangsters, smoking crack cocaine, and making a public spectacle of his intoxicated self? Did harper, or Jim Flaherty come out swinging against his disgraceful moral failure? No. As usual, these moral titans did the exact opposite of what they want for everyone else. Flaherty tearfully hoped that Ford would get help. And the cowardly harper simply went without commenting on the horrible example of the politician he once saw as a member of a triumvirate that included himself, and Tim Hudak.

stevie-boy! How are young people supposed to learn to stay off drugs when their drug-abusing mayor is so coddled by the politicians and the courts????

"On the moral standing of the person, it leads to views ranging from radical responsibility-free individualism, to tribalism in the form of group rights."


I think it's already been well established here that harper cares not a whit for personal responsibility when it comes to his friends and allies. And when one thinks of all the cover-ups and blatant refusals to accept consequences for bad decisions of this government, harper's 2003 words start to become nausea-inducing.

One more example: How did harper respond to Peter Penashue being forced to resign for his complete and total disregard of our election finance laws? Simple! harper allowed him to run again as the harpercon candidate for that riding. (And accept Penashue's idiotic claim that his "inexperienced" campaign manager only made honest mistakes when filing his accounts.)


harper leaping from how moral relativism encourages individual moral failure to the seemingly unconnected swipe against "tribalism" and "group rights" is just a final example of the superficiality of his thinking. Like most "conservatives" harper has a laundry-list of grievances and bogey-men, that are all imagined to be connected in an incoherent sort of way.


I made these two posts because I was genuinely surprised to have read harper stepping out from behind his fortress of platitudes and outright lies, and actually trying to connect his thoughts long enough to make a coherent statement about what he really believes. And, not surprisingly, harper doesn't believe in anything in any genuine or rational way.


It's a testimony to our failure as a democratic people that this idiot has imposed himself upon us for so long.


 

Horwath Pulls Plug on Wynne's Liberals

I have long had mixed emotions about the Ontario political scene. I have long been nauseated with the Ontario Liberal government. McGuinty's contempt for the legislature (learned at the feet of his master, stephen harper) and his ministers' and staff's (technologically incompetent) attempts to erase the records of their criminal waste of over $1 billion makes them unfit to govern.

The present premier, Kathleen Wynne, says she had nothing whatsoever to do with that gas-plant fiasco and I believe her. But nonetheless, this whole "look forward, not backwards" mentality for official criminality is a disease affecting our entire political culture. There needs to be accountability.

But speaking of unfit to govern, ... the practical impacts of a Hudak-led Ontario PC government, would be so grievous as to force me to give a pause to my parliamentary principles. But the hell of it is that when they held power, the Ontario PC's were just as contemptuous of the forms and the spirits of our laws as the McGuinty Liberals ever were. Indeed, several of the most vile enablers of stephen harper's anti-democratic reign are former Ontario PC's: Baird, Clement, and the now deceased Jim Flaherty. To defeat the Ontario Liberals only to usher in a mega-incompetent, equally anti-democratic pack of idiots and scum seems, ... what expression suits "worse than Quixotic"?

The unpalatable choice was up to Andrea Horwath of the ONDP. As with partisan imbeciles at the federal level, she could be accused of "propping-up the corrupt Liberals" by the right-wing, or handing power to Tim Hudak, in the same way Liberal partisans whined about Jack Layton. But the thing is, I don't care too much for Horwath's ONDP. (And I campaigned for her.) I hear a lot of right-wing rhetoric coming from Horwath, and a lot of disrespect for democracy and procedure in her foisting SUN News moron Adam Giambrone on the Scarborough riding-association in a recent by-election.

The budget that Horwath defeated was, apparently, a good budget (relatively speaking). But it was also a desperate political ploy. Furthermore, budgets have to be implemented. The long and the short of it is that I don't really know what to make of Ontario politics, except to say that the whole scene is depressing and demoralizing.

Rob fucking Ford

Busy day, as par yooshoo-al. But I can't resist typing something about the cretinous poster-boy for right-wing failure; Rob Ford.

It's in all the papers, yeez can read about it yerselves if you haven't already. Rob Ford was supposedly smoking crack about last weekend at his sister's place. And he was drunk and belligerent in public last Monday. There's a video for the crack smoking and audio of the drinking.

Oh, and "Ford Nation"? Any statements you make about his economic achievements and how they outweigh his gigantic hypocrisy and obnoxiousness just show you for the deluded ignoramuses that you are. He hasn't saved a billion dollars. He's cut some people's taxes while raising other people's costs. He's an idiot and an incompetent. You people are idiots, incompetents, hypocrites and liars for being his fans.

There's a tiny speck left inside of me that feels sorry for this doofus. Sure, he was born rich, white and  male. But he was also handicapped with a severe case of stupidity. And it's got to be fucking frustrating. Especially since there are some people who don't know they're stupid (because they're so goddamned stupid!).

Imagine how frustrating it would be to be a blind person who doesn't know that they're blind (or refuses to accept it). You bump into things all the time and can't figure out why it always happens to you but not so much to other people. People are describing things for you but you don't have a clue what they're talking about, so you pretend that you understand, make comments that, through trial-and-error, seem to make sense to them and make you part of the gang. But it's all a fucking lie.

That's what it must be like to be Rob Ford. That alone would drive me to drink (more than I already do, which is to say, at about the level of Rob Ford)!

But any sympathy I have is mitigated by his bullying behaviour. His homophobia. His predatory sexism. His racism. AND his fucking hypocrisy. No matter how stupid you are, if you're a drug addict, from a family with addiction issues, for you to profess to have "zero tolerance" for drugs and gangs; ... that hypocrisy is no doubt fueled by racism. Ford understands how he and his sister and his immediate acquaintances are human beings; but he pictures the masses of faceless black and brown people selling and taking drugs, committing crimes, and he no doubt thinks "The barbarians are at the gates!"

A last sobering thought: Rob Ford is interesting because he provides a glimpse at how low the human brain can function at. He's a symbol of the depths of the right-wing neurosis. And the continuing loyalty of "Ford Nation" is a cautionary tale of the levels of depravity and degradation a significant portion of the electorate is willing to take this country to. Don't forget, this disgusting piece-of-shit was a boon companion to the recently departed "statesman," Jim Flaherty. Before he became toxic, he was a sought-after ally of both Tim Hudak and stephen harper. "Ford Nation" type people are a big reason why other right-wing parties remain viable in other parts of Canada and in the nation as a whole. This is what we're up against. That is the enemy. To a degree, some of their enthusiasm is based on an ignorant recitation of the dominant themes in the politics of the white, male, Christian-capitalist power-structure (that Bill O'Reilly adores). Some of those people can be turned if you approach them the right way. But unless and until you do that, they and all the hopeless rest of that crowd will do untold damage to you, us and our way of life.

harper putting Canadian lives behind profits, ... as usual

Lorne, over at Politics and its Discontents has the info from the Toronto Star:

Health Canada is keeping secret the vast majority of the drug reviews it conducts despite a clear promise from the federal minister to publish this critical safety information.

Only 24 of 152 drug reviews completed last year by Health Canada are being considered for public release, the Toronto Star has learned. The drug safety reviews that will be open to the public are those triggered by alarms raised by foreign regulators, medical or scientific literature or Health Canada’s routine monitoring activities.

This is par for the course from that pack of scum. (The party of departed saint Jim Flaherty.) Psychopaths. Idiots.

It works like this people; the longer you wallow in TOTAL defeatism, petty bickering, COMPLETE delusion, mental torpor, ... the more unaccountable, inhuman, exploitative, your governments become.

Even if, when one of them croaks, it turns out that these mass-murdering, thieving scum were really nice people when you got to know them. IF you got to know them. Which is never fucking likely.

The Media and Jim Flaherty's Death

It doesn't really surprise me that Jim Flaherty would be remembered as a competent financial manager by the mainstream media. You see, I belong to the team that is never surprised when the corporate-capitalist system falls flat on its face. We instinctively understand that when corrupt greed-heads compel their politician cat's-paws to impoverish and exploit the majority, then the overall economy is not going to prosper. Wealthy media elites and the journalists that they tend to hire are incapable of such insights. Therefore, the fact that Jim Flaherty was a dangerously deluded simpleton with a legacy of disastrous failure simply doesn't compute for them.

But, what does surprise me, and what is far more ominous, is the way these airheads treat Flaherty as more than just an ideological soul-mate. In death, he's been elevated into having been a "statesman." And this, my friends, is what is so disturbing. Presumably, as finance minister, Flaherty would have been one source for the majority in Parliament (you know, the people's elected representatives) to obtain the cost estimates for his governments building of new prisons and purchasing of white elephant fighter-jets.

If so, they were sorely disappointed, weren't they? You see, Flaherty was finance minister in a government that decided that Parliament shouldn't know how much government policies were going to cost before they voted whether to commit the people's tax dollars towards them. The oral statements that this government did provide turned out to be deliberately fraudulent and under-estimated costs by tens of billions of dollars. (Which is why, when the same people who support Flaherty and harper also support Rob Ford, in the name of "fiscal responsibility," I tend to sneer at them. They obviously don't give a shit.)

Flaherty's government was so insistent on not providing the people's representatives with the information they desired that they were prepared to be found guilty of contempt for it. "Contempt of Parliament." It's actually a serious charge. Just because the sun came up the next morning it doesn't mean that demonstrated contempt for our system of democratic accountability is unimportant.

Anyone with a modicum of understanding should have seen that.

It was Flaherty's government that then engaged in a sordid, anti-democratic, debasing, and evil campaign of election fraud in the 2011 federal election that followed their having been found in Contempt of Parliament. Again, you would think people whose job it is to report and comment on "politics" (which is to say, our democracy) would understand that this is a bad thing. Even those pathetic vermin who mewl that nobody says their vote was changed or prevented by the robo-calls, ought to grasp that attempted robbery is a crime in the same way that robbery is a crime. (And, anyway, were people to come forward and say that the harpercons' election fraud impacted on their vote, the harpercon partisan hacks would then insist that they were lying.)

And, after having stolen a majority government, Flaherty's government then crafted an ENTIRE SERIES of anti-democratic MEGA-OMNIBUS bills, to ram through major assaults on our entire system of government and body of laws, with minimal democratic oversight. And it was Jim Flaherty, as finance minister, who allowed his budgets to be the vehicle for this omnibus legislation.

You know, you would think that people whose job it is to watch and report on our democratic system at the federal level would instinctively grasp why such behaviour is wrong, bad, repulsive, appalling. Alas! This is Canada. A brain-dead democracy from the far-right to the far-left of the spectrum.

Typing this entry has changed my opinion of Jim Flaherty. I still believe that he was too fucking stupid to grasp the enormity of his crimes against democracy. But now, having added it all up, and including his alcohol-fueled "friendship" (if the camaraderie of lower life-forms such as Rob Ford and Flaherty can be called such) with likewise repulsive characters, I think it matters not that Flaherty was mentally incapable of knowing what he was doing. He was a villain who has done monumental damage to the health of Canadian democracy. On top of being, among the worst, if not THE WORST finance minister in Canada's history.

And the journalists and the pundits who can't grasp that (let alone the scum who actively supported him) show themselves for the miserable failures that they are by loading this idiot with undeserved accolades and laurels.

EDITED TO ADD

I've been doing my best to shut-out the media coverage of Flaherty's funeral. The whole coverage of this non-event. I therefore forget the even more distressing fact that opposition politicians, who Flaherty had abused for years, were likewise unable to see Flaherty for what he was. Thomas Mulcair's idiotic tears at Flaherty's death were much more disgusting than media fawning over the man. Sadly, ... this whole sordid episode reveals the incapacity of those opposition politicians who, in his death, saw Flaherty as one of their own rather than their enemy.

Thoughts on the Passing of Jim Flaherty

I don't subscribe to the ludicrous notion that we must not speak ill of the dead. Tell you what; after I die, yeez kin say anything you want about me and I PROMISE I won't get mad.

The shameless hypocrites of the right-wing and such institutions as SUN Media will probably take this post as a sign of the burning, irrational hatred typical of the left, but they'll put "ROT IN HELL!!!" beside the picture of someone they don't like on the day of their death. I'm not going to say that about Jimbo Flaherty.

I'm simply going to say that I think he was a dangerously deluded simpleton whose policies hurt a lot of people. It seems, upon reading the eulogies, that he showed compassion for parents of disabled children. This, it is said, was a result of one of his children being disabled. And that, ladies and gentlemen, just goes to show the hypocrisy of right-wing ideologues. They pontificate that it's all about personal responsibility and bootstraps and blah, blah, blah, ... but when they personally experience a challenge, then it becomes a universal and then they understand, but everything outside their own personal experience, forget it. Maybe it isn't hypocrisy, but a marked incapacity for empathy. Which is why better people reject the slurry of ideas that comprise the right-wing worldview.

Finally, returning to hypocrisy, let us not forget that Jim Flaherty, always one of the leading players in two of the most disgusting governments this country has ever seen (the anti-democratic stephen harper and the thuggish Ontario government of Mike Harris), who played so willingly to the "tuff on crime" and "personal responsibility" themes, was a sincere and close friend of an animal like Rob Ford. And really people, the more you observe of Rob Ford, the more loathsome he becomes. Childish, vulgar, stupid, bullying, cowardly, cretinous, oafish, disgusting. It speaks volumes about the shortcomings of Flaherty that he saw something admirable in that misshapen psyche.

No my friends, I think about the single-mothers agonizing over how to pay the rent or heat the house or feed their kids as a result of Flaherty's cuts. I think about the unemployed by Flaherty's policies who were then faced with the loss of their employment insurance thanks to Flaherty's servicing of his Bay Street masters. I think of people dying in ambulances as the drivers tried to find an emergency room that could take them. I think about the sufferings and even the deaths caused by "Conservative" selfishness, incompetence and sheer stupidity. If I were a public figure, I would keep these thoughts to myself out of consideration for whoever his family is. But I'm not a public figure. I'm sure none of them will ever see this. And I simply can't restrain myself from speaking out against all this talk about people being moved to tears at his death and all these efforts to mitigate his appalling legacy.

Weep For Me Jimbo ...

First of all, let me begin by saying that I despise Jim Flaherty. He's a cretin whose economic understanding is stuck in the 19th Century. What he does that isn't based on two hundred year old cliches is based on crude, deliberate fraud. He's a thug, who has made more people homeless, condemned more children to poverty, caused more suicides, caused more suffering overall, than perhaps any other finance minister in Canadian history. He's an enemy of democracy, what with his serial mega-omnibus bills that have entire sections in them with nothing to do with his balliwick. He's a hypocrite. Just recently I pointed out that the snivelling cockroach's yammerings to First Nations peoples fighting for the preservation of their land was rank with double-standard given the career criminals that populate the harper regime.

So, I could do nothing but snicker when I saw Flaherty's stupid face on the TTC's television screens, tearing up  in response to a reporter's question about the drunken, crack-smoking buffoon Rob Ford. Here's a different take on it:

Forget politics, just for a second. Ford’s spectacle has a lot of people talking about politicians as human beings. The mayor deserves not just help, but our sympathy, some say. There’s no place for ridicule that might reinforce the stigma attached to addiction. Ford’s stubborn determination to hold on renders that conversation moot, but at least it reminds everyone that he’s a human being.

Flaherty, standing alone at that podium, gave voice to that humanity. He must have known the question would come. He must have had an answer at the ready. His friendship with the Fords is no secret. Still, he could barely find the words. We expect stoicism from people in power, not tears and tied tongues. Flaherty’s supposed to be able to answer any question. He’s supposed to be measured, or angered, or dismissive, as required. But his friend is going through something no one knows how to handle, and it was all he could do to struggle through a sentence or two.

When politicians show emotion, they’re often subject to ridicule. Yesterday, to the internet’s credit, there was none of that. There was just a man who cares for his friend and wishes him well, otherwise helpless—and dealing with it in public, on the job.

 What bullshit. The mayor and most of his fan-base had zero empathy for crack smokers until Rob himself smoked the shit and then it became impossible to deny it any longer. The shit-head Ford even voted against anti-gang programs, calling them "hug a thug" bullshit. Well, ....

Ford recently teamed-up with uber-shit-head Georgio Mammoliti in a campaign against city workers sleeping on the job. They should be fired. No exceptions, no excuses! ("Fuckin' A Rob Ford! Get those lazy, over-paid sons-of-bitches!") Then it turns out that thanks to police surveillance, we now know that Ford is doing a whole lot of anything but work during all hours of the day and night.

Ford and Flaherty are stupid men. Stupid bullies. I mock Flaherty's tears. They make me smile. It's only when somebody close to him (thanks to similar retrograde political beliefs) is hurting (thanks to his own reckless stupidity) that this imbecile begins to feel emotion.

Jim Flaherty, ... if you feel so bad for Ford (who did have all those possible video holders beaten-up or even killed I wonder?) you can go visit him in prison, in your retirement, after harper's regime goes down in toxic flames. You can then sit and wait after Ford drags his ass back to his cell and talk with the imprisoned stephen harper. Though I bet that even you wouldn't be able to bear the deranged, self-pitying rantings of that egomaniacal mediocrity.

Ah-yasss!!! Ha-ha-ha-ha!

Jim Flaherty on First Nations Protests

Canada's incompetent finance minister, the gnomish Jim Flaherty, warned that a nation-wide campaign of blockades would negatively impact his delusions about Canada's economic growth. (The story is at "Stun New" who I won't give links to.) Flaherty also warned the First Nations themselves that there aren't different legal regimes in Canada. There's one set of laws and if the First Nations break them, they'll be in BIG trouble.

His words would have a lot more weight if his own government wasn't a serial violator of the law. But even if harper wasn't a criminal on many levels, on Native land, retained by them through solemn treaties with the Crown/Us, there ARE different legal regimes. So shut the fuck up you ignorant dweeb.

Two Random Things

Almost a decade ago, I spoke to a group of socialist academics and activists. I said that if we were to move forward we needed to come up with something big but nevertheless doable with the political system as we know it.

I proposed utilizing small-l liberal values about democracy and human rights to begin campaigning for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing liberal rights of citizenship (including freedom of speech, assembly) of workers within their workplaces.

It's rather developed and I've discussed it elsewhere (to no effect!) so you're free to read about it here or at enmasse.ca or rabble-babble. I'm mentioning this today because, for one reason or another, I was reminded of that talk and how the audience just basically stared at me (apart from one Marxist-Leninist who took umbrage with my criticisms of the oppressiveness of the Soviet Union). They didn't guffaw and mock me for the sheer stupidity and insanity of my proposal. They didn't cheer and carry me around on their shoulders. They didn't ask questions or provide comments about the likely feasibility of the project. They just stared at me. About 16 people.

And, you know, given the fact that the left's grand narrative since then has been to "Organize! Educate! Resist!" around the shredding of civil rights, the weakening of the labour movement, the rising levels of inequality, species extinction, global warming, ... all of these defensive campaigns and all of them losing ones, ... it's not like there was something else in the works that they were privileging over my own proposal.

It seems to me that the left (or "progressives") are essentially catatonic.

My other random thought is that yesterday I was talking to ephemeral about imagining how life is actually lived in a wealthy Rosedale or Forest Hill neighbourhood. Specifically (and inspired by real-life examples strolling by as we sat in a park with the dog) I thought about how the wives in these households get plastic surgery done on their faces. How is that lived? Just like you'll see a really obese person in sweat-pants every once in a while in a poor neighbourhood, in my part of Toronto (where I'm definitely an aberration) you'll see women with obvious plastic surgery. Like maybe once a week.

Why do they decide to do it and their husbands don't? How do they talk about it? How do they pay for it? How do they time it? How do their kids talk about it? Basically I was trying to put myself in their lives and imagine how it's all carried out.

And I think that's what we need to do when confronted with this austerity agenda. It's pretty clear that almost the entire political class has bought into this bullshit. And it's not like it's a one-time decision they make based on their decision to screw the working class. Obviously there's some of that. But that whole anti-worker agenda itself, ... it's not the case that a moron like Jim Flaherty sits around cackling about how evil he is. No, the dunce lives his life 24-7. He's motivated by some sort of worldview as we all are. Same as Michael Ignatieff. Same as Barack Obama. Same as Christie Clark.

Quite clearly, it's an imbecilic, incoherent worldview. But they're immersed in it. They FEEL it. And, finally, they're elected at least in part by the lunkhead I was reading in the National Post comment section who was ranting about how terrorist immigrants have made it expensive for Canada Post to ship parcels. (Or something like that.)