On
his radio show this past weekend—in the leadup to a contentious
casino proposal at City Hall—Mayor Rob Ford said he’d welcome a
gambling palace in Toronto, and justified the decision on economic
grounds: “We’re in desperate need of revenues,” he said. And
just then, two years into his term in office—the halfway point to
the next election—the last faint signs of life that had once
animated the ideology you might call “Ford Notion” died out.
For
if the mayor has been clear on one thing since the moment he started
campaigning for the job, it’s that the city did not want for money.
“There’s more than enough money,” he told radio host John
Oakley in explaining a tax cut shortly after his election, followed
by the familiar mantra: “We have a major spending problem at City
Hall, not a revenue problem.”
Even
back then, most people who had any familiarity with the reality of
the city’s finances could tell he was wrong, or lying.
Ponder that for a moment.This
is what
I was talking about three posts ago. The political climate is
getting heated because one side, the intelligent, reality-based,
progressive side, is watching neoliberal scumbag politicians turn
everything to shit while the neoliberal propaganda system indulges
and reinforces the utter stupidity and ignorance of their chump voter
base. In this case, it's shit-for-brains, serial liar Rob Ford gets
elected saying he can trim (apparently $3 billion over 3 years!!!) of
wasteful spending at city hall and not have to raise taxes or cut
services ("guaranteed").
Turns out that was the utter nonsense
progressives said it was. He proposed cutting library services,
raising recreation centre fees, closing shelters for battered women,
and slashing TTC services. Now it turns out, that in his lust to
please his paymasters and get some lucrative wingnut welfare, by
getting a casino in Toronto, he's actually saying the city is "in
desperate need of revenues."
I'm sorry, but it's this sort of bullshit,
and this sort of lack of accountability, that is driving progressives
right around the fucking bend. Despite what the self-interested,
contradictory blathering of Ford fuck-toys (like "Scarborough
Dave" at the link), you don't get to be that wrong on something
so relatively major, and get to get away with it.
But they do, don't they? Because unaccountable media hacks
(Sue-Ann Levy, Margaret Wente, John Ibbitson, etc., etc.,) continue
to appear in print (or on radio and television, which I don't listen
to or watch) to lie, lie, lie, and give the impression (by their
consequence-free lying and stupidity) that there's some legitimacy to
shameless lying morons like Ford, or murderous cretins like Mike
Harris, or gibbering Jesus-freak hypocrites like bush II, or
anti-democratic psychopaths like stephen harper, as well as for the
views of the closet-case/religious freak/racist/sexist/homophobic
dunces who vote on their retrograde "values" and against
their material self-interest. Their irrational hatred of the folks
who are right all the time (progressives) is fostered by these media
sleazemeisters.
The question is: What are we going to do about it?
The thing is, for the past 15 years or so, a big part of my real-world thinking and writing has been on using our present parliamentary system of representative democracy/constitutional monarchy/whatever you want to call our quasi-democratic-part-time-rule-of-law system, to constitutionally enshrine the human rights of people within their workplaces.
Barring the possibility that neoliberal scumbag politicians will read our petitions or hear our protests and the scales will fall from their eyes and they'll legislate whatever we want when we want it, or of that the Canadian state will be brought to its knees by a dozen masked anarchists smashing windows on Yonge Street, I argue that the only way that real progress is going to be made on a number of essential fronts is if we attack the capitalist power that distorts democracy, ruins the environment, condemns people to poverty, at its heart, through the legitimate political process.
We will respect their system and we will ask that they respect us should we obtain the right to enshrine the humanity of workers within their workplaces. This was (is still) meant to be an enormous effort. It's called "Workers as Citizens" and we can argue about it some other time.
The main point is that I think that the leftist habit of empty protest, small-scale mitigation of blatant abuses, petitioning and minor acts of vandalism, is ridiculous and we ignore a powerful tool by disparaging and discounting the actual political process.
That's why stephen harper's serial abuses of this process infuriates me. It is the one way we have of peacefully realizing a massive advance in human civilization and he is rendering it null and void. It's personal with me. If I don't succeed in bringing harper to heel (either through a movement of my own or someone else's), then I will say to hell with it all. If you hear of a rising superstar televangelist conman in Canada 5 years from now, you'll know what happened.
What’s going on? Yes, we’re divided over issues like the size of
government and whether women should have control over their bodies. But
these aren’t exactly new debates. We’ve been disagreeing over the size
and role of government since Thomas Jefferson squared off with Alexander
Hamilton, and over abortion rights since before Roe v. Wade, almost
forty years ago.
And we’ve had bigger disagreements in the past – over the Vietnam War,
civil rights, communist witch hunts – that didn’t rip us apart like
this.
He then makes reference to the impact of the current media situation:
But now most of us exist in our own political bubbles, left and right. I
live in Berkeley, California – a blue city in a blue state – and rarely
stumble across anyone who isn’t a liberal Democrat (the biggest battles
here are between the moderate left and the far-left). The TV has
hundreds of channels so I can pick what I want to watch and who I want
to hear. And everything I read online confirms everything I believe,
thanks in part to Google’s convenient algorithms.
So when Americans get upset about politics these days we tend to stew in
our own juices, without benefit of anyone we know well and with whom we
disagree — and this makes it almost impossible for us to understand the
other side.
He also says something about how the right-wing constituency has been feeling under threat from economic, social-cultural and demographic changes. But where he errs is in inferring it's some sort of bipartisan affliction.
It's true that the right-wing has FOX News, and a whole plethora of toxic right-wing hate-sites like "small dead animals" and that leftists have more leftist internet choices to go to. But, as I've said a zillion times before: They have Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. And they have said themselves that our equivalents are Michael Moore, Keith Olbermann and Rachael Maddow. In Canada, there's Ezra Levant on the right and Linda McQuaig on the left.
One team is comprised of serial liars who routinely call for violence upon their enemies. (Those are the right-wingers.)
Look at it this way. The stupid Michelle-Jean, when she was Governor General, looked out the window of Rideau Hall and saw a small crowd of harperites protesting stupidly about a "coup" and she heard stephen harper ranting and raving about how he'd go over her head and trash her and to hell with our constitutional monarchical traditions, and blah, blah, blah. Unless she eviscerated the whole concept of responsible government, there would be trouble with a capital "T."
Why the fuck don't they ever feel so fearful about getting us on the left riled-up? Well, one reason is that they fear the consequences of what we ask for more, so they're even more reluctant to concede anything. ("You want lower taxes right-wing chumps? Here you go!" vs. "You want higher taxes on the wealthy and more pro-union laws left-wingers? Um, ... sorry. Some bullshit liberal economic theory says that would harm more than help and get the fuck away from me.") But it's also the case that they intuit that right-wingers are naturally prone to violence and outrage, given the fact that they're motivated by ignorance, frustrated stupidity, various irrational hatreds and overall boorishness.
And the reason things are so hostile is because these cretins have been indulged by their masters with their right-wing news channels and their own internet narcissism. And, this has all served to invent imbecilic propaganda cover for one right-wing outrage after another. (In Canada, these would be the jingoism over Afghanistan and harper's assaults on parliamentary democracy.) Who can blame leftists for having had to endure decades of this shit?
It's not going to resolve itself by leftists and progressives deciding to live and let live.
So, the Globe & Mail paid lots of young 'uns to hand out special US election editions of their paper. (Paid for with help from the fine people at Nissan!) So, right from the start I'm thinking that one reason I don't buy the Globe is because they don't have the sense to know that this is one of the most farcical, stupid, bullshit elections the world has ever seen. (It's on a par with the goddamned Rob Ford vs. George Smitherman festival of futility.) But let's go through it, shall we, and see why it's indicative of the reasons why I don't bother to shell-out my hard-earned clams for any of Canada's mainstream newspapers.
It begins with the President of Nissan Canada gettting the first word. The inside cover is an advertisement! Some ghost-written public relations crapola I'm not even going to bother to read.
The real fun begins with "The view from up North" by Editor-in-Chief John Stackhouse, which is evidently some sort of self-serving self-promotion that I also have no interest in.
Page five is more navel-gazing, as three Globe correspondents in the field answering questions about their stories from Globe's Foreign Editor Craig Offman:
"Adam, how is Mitt Romney spending the last days of his campaign?"
I'm not interested.
"Patrick, what's Obama planning in Ohio?"
Who cares?
Seriously. Who gives a flying fuck? Barack Obama is a fraud. A Wall Street shill. A war criminal and a betrayer. Mitt Romney is a flake. A moron. He made his fortune throwing people out of work as a vulture capitalist who now stomps around the country blaming Obama for not giving people jobs. He calls 47% of his fellow citizens as dependent losers. Why such a specific number? Because evidently 47% of US Americans are too poor to pay taxes. Romney didn't pay taxes for over ten years himself, but whatever.
Then we get a big, two-page spread, featuring image of the two contenders facing-off in front of their parties' respective colours. "Big Picture: America faces its future."
America's choice on Tuesday is not just betwen one man whose struggle with the economy disappointed so many and another man who has shed so many political skins. As Affan Chowdhry and John Ibbitson observe, this is an election about two starkly different Americas, either one of which could transform the country and the world.
I don't know who Affan Chowdhry is. (He must have arrived after I'd given up on the Globe.) But John Ibbitson is a stupid hack. (By that I mean he's a stupid man who also happens to be a shameless political hack. Dude has a man-crush on tottering tower of shit stephen harper.)
"Two starkly different Americas" 'eh? Let's see; When Obama took over from bush II, Wall Street criminals had sunk the economy, the US was mired in two conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the country had disgraced itself by embracing torture as an interrogation tactic. Now, ... uh, ... well isn't it self-evident that very little has changed? Obama got the troops out of Iraq according to bush II's schedule, after evidence of US war crimes lost him any chance of realizing his goal of keeping them there longer. (The Maliki government would have allowed them to stay, but without legal immunity.)
John Ibbitson might genuinely believe that the differences between these two servants of the financial sector are "stark" but that's why I said he was a stupid man.
There's another two-page spread called "The deciding votes" and it's about the various demographic groups who the two fraudsters are seeking to woo, with all sorts of handy graphics to help you figure out why a member of one of these groups might be conned into voting one way or the other.
Then, for some reason, there's a photo-spread about Williston North Dakota. They struck oil there and a lot of people went to look for jobs in the otherwise depressed US economy. Go figure, these folks like the carbon economy and don't like Obama, who is less delusional than Mitt Romney about global warming. Truck driver Paul Whitcomb doesn't like tree-huggers:
He's leaning Republican, and has a warning for environmentalists who may come to Williston: "People will probably want to tie you to one of the trees you wanna hug."
Ha-ha-ha! What a kidder! Of course, maybe us regular folks should talk that away about these oil industry parasites. Maybe we'd get more of a hearing for our views if people knew how upset we are about how they're putting civilization at risk for their own pecuniary self-interest. (I know, I know. Some environmentalists do talk that way already. Only when they say it, it's not received with a chuckle about the common sense of the salt of the earth. When a greenie talks like that, he or she is condemned for being an unhinged, eco-radical: evidence of the fanatical and authoritarian zeal at the heart of everyone whose concern for the planet goes beyond lip-service.
Page 14 is all about "The swing states." In US-American politics, some states (and their electoral college votes) have a habit of vacillating back-and-forth between the two bullshit parties. As such, the candidates spend extra time and devotion wooing these ... I can't be bothered to write about it anymore.
Page 16 has a feature on "Hispanic Voters: In a state of flux." Obama has deported way more Latinos than even bush II did. But he also cynically halted the deportation of young "illegals" right before the election, with the proviso that they tell the authorities who and where they are so that they can be threatened with deportation all the easier afterwards. As such, Latino voters have a hard time choosing between which piece-of-shit to vote for. Since it's pretty much a wash as to which of them is worse, they often make their choices based on their ignorant, misinformed views on other topics. Take, for example, "Javier Barajas, 54, owner of Lindo Michoacan restaurant. 'The biggest mistake the President made was to give all the money to the banks and the insurance companies.'" [Hey! Not bad Mr. Barajas!] ... Mr. Barajas, who believes too many social programs dull ambition, thinks Mr. Romney would be a superior manager of the eoconomy, and motivate people to become more entrepreneurial." [BLAT!!! Oh! I'm sorry Mr. Barajas. But we have some lovely parting gifts for you!]
Seriously! I wonder if Mr. Barajas ever sits up at night pondering why Latin America isn't an economic paradise, what with the paucity of social programs and the subsequent explosion of entrepreneurial energies?
Page 18 has "EXPATS: Two stark options for one great problem." Basically, the Globe and Mail "hit upon an idea" ... they'd ask some Canadian ex-pats who they liked and why. But I didn't feel like reading about what some strangers on the street in Anytown USA thought. (Although it's not like I cared what John Ibbitson had to think either!)
Uh-oh! Another face-off! "The Case for Barack Obama" vs. "The case for Mitt Romney." The former is argued by Michael Ignatieff, the latter by Paul Wolfowitz. Two shit-heads who thought invading Iraq for its non-existent WMDs was a good idea. What diversity! And, while I normally don't trash people for being wrong once, you'd have to admit that a "mistake" (OOOPS!) that ended up killing over one-million people while devastating the lives of ten million more (OOOPS!) is kinda unforgiveable, y'know?
Argh! I'm getting tired! We're almost done though. The Report on Business has a section on the economic significance of the election for Canada which was done well I suppose. Then there's a story about the impact of the debates which I skimmed because I think the whole process was a sham. Then there's a "Partisan's guide to following the action" wherein leftists are told they can watch Rachel Maddow on MSNBC or Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on the Comedy Network. I suppose I could stomach those voices if I (for some inexplicable reason) decided to break down and watch the pointless pageantry of it all.
The middle is represented by airheads Diane Sawyer (who must have really gifted cosmetic surgeons and make-up people) and Anderson Cooper (whose physique keeps him from looking really funny looking).
If you're a psychotic idiot with a lot of sexual hang-ups and/or racist tendencies, you can apparently watch slimeball Karl Rove and airhead (and former MuchMusic VJ!) John Roberts on FOX, or wingnut welfare recipient Ezra Levant on the I Forget It's Name News Network. ('All the other channels are in the tank for the Obama campaign,' [I Forget] personality Ezra Levant declares in a promotional ...") Yeah, whatever.
And now you know why I don't pay for newspapers anymore.
Welcome to our piece-of-shit home and [stolen from the] natives' land! The first image is a picture of Wally Pickton. A misogynist creep who killed women and fed their bodies to the pigs on his farm. The official count is six convictions for second-degree murder, but it's likely there were dozens more. Here was the response of the guardians of public order, the RCMP and the Vancouver Police Department:
The overall police attitude towards sex workers and Aboriginal women
(60 per cent of the Missing and Murdered Women were Aboriginal) was one
of indifference and disrespect, as if their lives did not matter, as
if they weren't even human. Missing persons reports were often not
taken or not investigated because officers relied on insulting
stereotypes, such as Aboriginal women being "out on a binge," or
survival sex workers being transient and "lacking address books, known
schedules, reliable routines and homes" -- even though most are
residents of Vancouver with homes and families. Police routinely used the word "hooker," even in official documents.
Some officers or staff were hateful or dismissive towards sex workers,
saying things like: "fucking whores," "just a bunch of fucking
hookers," and "we don't look for missing hookers." A witness at the
Inquiry testified that she heard an officer say "good" when told that a
sex worker had been violently sexually assaulted. These discriminatory
attitudes about sex workers undermined the investigation, according to
Gratl, by "precluding the gathering and analysis of vital information
about missing women, by misdirecting police investigators, by
undermining the integrity of investigative teams, and by preventing
investigators from drawing inferences crucial to solving the cases." Comparisons with unrelated cases showed that the VPD had the
resources and capability to carry out large-scale, high-quality
investigations, but the "Missing Women" case was always grossly
underfunded and understaffed. An officer assigned to the file in 1998
worked mostly alone and unsupervised for almost a year even though she
was inexperienced and lacked training in investigative work.
Next up on our list is constable Monty Robinson watching Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski writhe in agony before he and three other RCMP cowardly thugs watched him die after they tasered him relentlessly. Dziekanski had landed at the Vancouver airport and was hoping to meet with his mother who had immigrated here earlier. Because of various screw-ups on the part of airport personnel, Dziekanski's mother had left thinking her son had missed his flight. Nobody thought it worth their time to explain to him what was going on or to help him in any way. Unable to speak English, Dziekanski spent hours in frustration, thousands of miles from home, tired after a long flight, confused by the bureaucratic immensity of international travel and a foreign country. Finally, he began to shout in frustration at the uncaring, thoughtless treatment he was receiving. Eventually, Monty Robinson and his three amigos sauntered in, and, after Dziekanski relaxed but did not respond intuitively to their contradictory hand signals, decided to electrocute him into unconsciousness with their tasers. Then they refused the requests of the emergency first-responders to remove his handcuffs or take other preventive measures that would keep him from dying from his condition. And then, after Dziekanski was dead, the RCMP goons lied through their teeth about what had happened, slandering Dziekanski as being aggressive and out-of-control. Their lies were exposed through the video evidence provided by a bystander at the airport. Clearly, these four men were guilty of murder and perjury. Not one of them has so far served a second in prison for an innocent man's death.
Oh yeah. The RCMP itself conducted an "investigation" of their own into the tragedy. Part of it consisted of going to Poland to try to dig up dirt on their victim.
Ivona Kosowska said the questions the
team was asking about Dziekanski struck her as odd. "What kind of person
was he, was he a drinker, drug user? Was he aggressive?" said Kosowska
through a translator. "Most questions were to expose him as not a nice
human being -- not to find out what kind of person he really was."
Next we have riot police threatening protestors at the G20 conference in Toronto in 2008. That was where we threw over $1 billion at various police and security forces and told them to prevent violence. Curiously, despite the billion dollars, a dozen or so masked protestors were able to break some windows for around half an hour. Obviously this justified gathering up over 900 random other people the next day and holding them under barbaric conditions.
And, apparently, us Canadians are such complacent sheep that the people who were responsible for this failure and brutality are still in power.
The tragedy of Ashley Smith is so indicative of the nature of the Canadian state. Smith suffered from mental health issues. She was imprisoned at 15 for throwing crab apples at a letter carrier she'd convinced herself was withholding a neighbour's welfare cheques. Her short sentence transformed into a multi-year torture session and, eventually, a death sentence. Smith was driven over the edge by constant solitary confinements, punctuated only by injections of powerful drugs against her will and other abuses.
Hell, take a look at this picture:
What is a phalanx of riot-geared police doing surrounding the bed of a 19-year old girl? They're just the same sort of lazy, callous, cowardly, entitled thugs that Canadian ignorance and complacency has enable for decades. We're a lazy, sluggish bunch. These outrages are happening to "other people." We're sure there's another side to the story when some authority figure bashes some defenseless person's head in. These are the same goons who killed Robert Dziekanski. The same thugs who ripped off a man's prosthetic leg and told him to hop at the Toronto G20. The same sexist pigs who jerked off to porn on their office computers rather than do their fucking jobs and look for Vancouver's missing women.
Reminded by the fact that the majority of the missing and murdered women in Vancouver are aboriginal, I'm compelled to mention the tragedy of Attawapiskat.
Because of the laziness and cruelty of federal officials, the First Nation of Attawapiskat have been suffering for years with freezing, leaky, improvised, sub-standard housing. When they finally lost patience with our racist government they declared a state of emergency. Our usurper-in-chef, stephen harper, took advantage of the crisis to blame the First Nations for the problem and moved to takeover whatever autonomy they still possessed. Because that's just the way he rolls.
The majority on the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that procedural errors shouldn't deprive a vote of its integrity. You have to prove fraud in order for votes (with no accompanying verification) to be discounted.
What the SCOC did not do was to say that the government cannot create laws that restrict the right to vote. The point being that if a voter ID card is made mandatory and that voting without one is a felony (as is allowing someone to vote without one), then it's not a "clerical error" that can be discounted, but a true legal barrier.
The Ottawa Citizen sides with the minority SCOC opinion.
Conversely, the minority judgment strikes an appropriate balance between
the fundamental right to vote and procedural safeguards. In this
context, the minority ruling is much more persuasive in its adherence to
a “comprehensive scheme” that defines entitlement to vote. One’s
entitlement to vote does not merely rest on qualification as a Canadian
citizen of age, but must also include appropriate voter registration and
proper identification according to the provisions laid out in the
Canada Elections Act in order to prevent those without the right to vote
from voting.
...
With respect, the majority ruling applies a definition of voter
entitlement that is too loose to safeguard the integrity of the
electoral system. Further, maintaining that procedural errors in
elections are inevitable, and therefore acceptable, is not a persuasive
argument. Nor is such a position sufficient to maintain public trust in
the electoral system. While the principle of entitlement to vote is a
central pillar of the Canadian electoral system, so too are mechanisms
to ensure the integrity of electoral procedure.
How should we respond to the SCOC? If we have decided that it has lowered itself beyond redemption with this ruiling, what do we do? You know, "Well, it's the highest court in our land. Whether we agree or disagree is irrelevant. We have to abide by it."
Rubbish.
When it becomes obvious that the system is corrupt, the system has no legitimacy. A prime minister who doesn't respect the will of the majority in Parliament doesn't get respect for his own majority later. Respecting the will of the majority in Parliament is obligatory for our system and harper decided of his own free will to disregard his obligation. Even if his majority wasn't based on fraud (which it is), harper had already renounced his right to our respecting the source of his legitimacy.
An elections watchdog that can't conduct an election (see: "Etobicoke-Centre") has no business overseeing elections. An elections watchdog that refuses to investigate allegations of voter fraud cannot tell us to withhold our criticisms and denunciations of electoral fraud. It has decided to remove itself from the debate. It has made itself irrelevant.
A Supreme Court justice who decides to rule according to partisan or corrupt lines is a Supreme Court justice who has relinquished his or her right to be respected. You're not supposed to disregard laws to support your masters. We're all supposed to be equal before the law and the laws are to be upheld the same way for everyone In civil disputes over allegations of fraud, to criminal cases involving murder, to political cases over disputed elections and the meaning of democracy, the law is supposed to be the law. We don't have that anymore.
We can acquiesce to this garbage as they did in the USA ever since Bush vs. Gore, and fall to the level where we can be targeted for assassination for leading protests against the criminality of Wall Street, or we can genuinely fight now, to restore the integrity of our political and legal systems.
Asked why he's speaking out now, Sona said he had been willing to
wait out a month or two, but it's been 18 months since the investigation
started and eight months since his name was floated. "Quite frankly, I've realized at this point Elections Canada is not
going to clear my name for me. No one else is going to do that. I'm the
only person that can do that right now," he said.
What it shows me is that Canadian democracy is a sick farce. Case in point:
A spokesman for the Conservative Party said he would not comment on specifics so as not to compromise the investigation.
Yes. The two-year ongoing "investigation" behind which nothing can be discussed and during which evidence can be destroyed. And they expect us to respect them!
I used to hang around on rabble.ca's "babble" until May, 2006, and, since then, I've been found at www.enmasse.ca and www.breadnroses.ca. Even more lately, I've been at EnMasse, but also numerous blogs from the progressive side.
I'm sometimes rude to people and I've been accused of "schoolyard taunts," so, here's my schoolyard.
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