The Good Ol' Common Horse Sense of the Canadian People

I'm a political animal. I think about politics to the detriment of succeeding in my everyday life. A lot of people don't really follow politics. They watch the news. But they vote. The thing is, I believe in democracy. I believe people are the best judges of their individual self-interest WHEN THEY HAVE THE CORRECT INFORMATION. I don't believe that our corporate news gives them the correct information most of the time. But even still, ordinary people can figure out what's right in front of their noses.

Take for instance, the fact that the majority of Torontonians (60-65%) think Rob Ford got what he had coming to him when he got turfed from office. At one time, a majority of Torontonians were at least willing to give Ford the benefit of the doubt. But now, after two years of incompetence, buffoonery and self-inflicted crises, ordinary Torontonians are saying "Enough."

Or take the turn towards the NDP after 30 years of neo-liberal failure. It wasn't just in Quebec, where the move could be said to have had more strategic motivations, especially since social democracy is the majority opinion there.

I think people will turn to us if we can get them the information they need.

We Have to Recover Lost Ground

Radicals and centrists will have to cooperate. Social Democrats, Liberals and libertarian socialists will have to cooperate. This is a death struggle for Canadian democracy. We will have to tolerate bourgeois corporate parties that at least respect the traditions of Parliament. (This excludes Liberals who continue to support the behaviour of Dalton McGuinty, who withheld information that the Ontario Parliament had every right to see and then cynically prorogued that legislature to make his problems go away.) By the same token Liberals, if an NDP candidate came second in your riding last time, then that is who you vote for, regardless of how dreamy looking Justin Trudeau is. (That skin! Those eyes! That hair!)

That is all.

Hat-tips to Montreal Simon and Saskboy.

Interesting Take on Recent Egyptian Politics

Counterpunch has an interesting article by Eric Walberg about newly elected Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's power-grab. Given that Morsi's actions are going to be portrayed by the mainstream corporate press in the western countries as "scary, scray Muslim Brotherhood leader assaults nascent Egyptian democracy" (with the sub-text: "We TOLD you that Arabs are incapable of democracy!") and given that this is the same hypocritical bullshit wherein western governments and news media that supported decades-long torturing dictatorships in the past and continue to do so today, I thought it worthwhile to share the article's interpretation of events.

Then, just hours after Morsi, the world’s wise peacemaker, waved good-bye to Hillary, but with his old-guard judiciary poised to dissolve the Constitutional Committee and destroy all hope for carrying the revolution forward, the unassuming president stared them down too, issuing a decree putting his decrees above judicial review. And for the second time, he dismissed the procurator general, Abdel Meguid Mahmud, who has presided over the legal stonewalling of prosecutions of counterrevolutionaries — this time not backing down. The time for dawdling and letting criminals off the hook is over. The new prosecutor general, reformer Talaat Ibrahim Abdallah, has ordered a new trial of Mubarak and police and thugs let off scot-free by the old judiciary.
And watch out, Mubarak-appointed Supreme Constitutional Court, don’t you even think about disbanding the Constitutional Committee that is so painstakingly putting together a constitution. (Liberals and Christian secularists resigned from the committee, doing their best to sabotage it, revealing where their sympathies lie.) Or about disbanding the Shura Council on some technicality, as you did the lower house in May, in a conspiracy with the generals to sabotage the revolution.
The secularists should look at the writing on the wall. Egypt is a devout Muslim country, where Christians are protected by Islam and cultural liberals are tolerated. These Western-inspired forces will never prevail, so they should work with Islamists, not against them, if they want to maximize social harmony and their own rights. Sadly, the opposition is increasingly siding with the Mubarak crowd. “President Morsi said we must go out of the bottleneck without breaking the bottle,” presidential spokesman Yasser Ali said. The opposition would rather see the bottle break that get Egypt’s life blood flowing again.
Islamic civilization has been endangered for centuries now, battered and undermined by the Western secularist onslaught. Finally, Muslims are doing something about it.

I hate religion as much as the next guy. But it should be killed with kindness, not with NATO fighter-jets, and only as a cover for capitalist imperialism.

And that's my post for today.

Rob Ford, Bev Oda and Peter 1

So, surprise, surprise. Sometimes there are consequences for your actions when you're a "conservative." It seems though, that you have to be bone-stupid and meth-addict reckless before you get nailed. Rob Ford solicited for donations to his charity from lobbyists using his City of Toronto Councillor card ("city letterhead"), which, to anyone with half a brain, is a big step on the slippery slope to using your position to obtain personal benefit. Ford was asked by the city's Integrity Commissioner, several times, to return the money and stop doing that. He ignored her. She asked City Council to order him to pay the money back. Then, when he became mayor, there was a vote to overturn the Council order. He voted for letting himself off the hook. A clear conflict of interest. Clear as mud. That's what cost him his job. How obvious does it have to be? Politicians don't vote on matters where they have a personal (especially financial) interest. Bank officers don't approve their own loans. Physicians don't prescribe themselves drugs.

No surprise Ford is too stupid to grasp how difficult giving him a pass on this would make it for legislating against other conflict of interest cases. No surprise Ford is too stupid to see how this is a crisis all of his own making. And no surprise that his deluded fanatics are too stupid to grasp this as well. Ford's enemies are bullies. We don't like him because he's "chubby."

Every day it seems as if our right-wing enemies are intent upon de-legitimizing themselves. There are no crimes they wouldn't defend. There are no consequences for their dim-witted heroes.

In a similar vein, a plurality of the good voters in Durham Region have shown that they simply don't give a shit for election fraud, contempt of Parliament, secret government, official corruption and lies. When their team falls from power, expect them to SQUEAL! SQUEAL! SQUEALLLLL!!! when they get their comeuppance. Oh! It's going to be glorious!

Finally, in a bit of personal pique, I just want to point out that Dr. Dawg's BFF, Peter1 is also continuing to disgrace himself.  In response to Alison's post about the harpercons' election fraud he says:

If you are still trying to argue that this somehow does or should affect the legal legitimacy of the election outcome, you are making an argument similar to the one Rob Ford is making or at least letting others make on his behalf, which is to try and make a legal question a matter of partisan politics. It's either: A) votes were changed or supressed in sufficient numbers to affect the outcome or B) they weren't. If it's A, then there might be a basis for some kind of judicial review of the outcome. It it's B, it's either a political issue for the next election or the subject of charges against specific operatives. As there is absolutely no evidence of A, no court is going to set anything aside.
an illegal move ignored by the ref because in his opinion it didn't change the outcome of the play
Do you think sports leagues overturn games because of missed calls when there are no grounds for believing it made a difference to the outcome?

I'm not even going to bother responding to that bit of intellectual garbage. I'll just let it sit there in its sleaze.

I genuinely admire a whole LOT of the way Dawg thinks and writes. That's why i continue to visit his blog on a daily basis despite having elected not to comment there. I admire Dawg except for his brain-dead (and ultimately hypocritical) calls for "civility." I treat scum the way they deserve to be treated. And I will make no apologies for it.

Alberta

Alberta, to the extent that the petroleum economy and its rural base makes it prone to embrace "free markets" and social conservatism, needs to be controlled. The same way that Bay Street parasites in Ontario who vote harpercon need to be controlled.

By "controlled" I mean that their self-destructive political choices (the Tar Sands are contributing to civilization threatening climate change, their "free market" provincial and federal politicians are selling off their resource for a pittance compared to other jurisdictions, and their deregulatory fervor has produced mad cow and listeriosis and the debt-fueled real estate boom) (social conservatism is based on a lack of reality-based inputs which makes people believe in nonsensical gender stereotypes and religious delusions among other things) have to be blocked from harming both them and us.

But this needs to be done within the realm of respectful debate. We shouldn't demonize an entire region just because social-economic factors have caused them to embrace (on the whole) unpalatable and dangerous political delusions.

As a downtown pinko from Ontario, of working class origins, I don't demonize US Americans, suburbanites or Westerners as a people. I have started to demonize Canadians as ignorant and apathetic and occasionally selfish and greedy buffoons, but, obviously "Canadian" is a demographic that I belong to.

Jeffrey Simpson - Shill

 
 This stupidity has been Jeffrey Simpson's shtick for years and years:

One of the most comforting, yet debilitating, mythologies in Canada holds that we have the best health-care system in the world, or at least among the best.
Canadians desperately want to believe this assertion; hence its mythological status. Politicians have repeated the myth endlessly. The Romanow commission a decade ago stated, “Canada’s health system compares well with those of other wealthy industrialized countries.” Would that it were true then, or now.

Is he stupid or corrupt? Fucking idiot. Big surprise, neoliberal politicians (no doubt partially influenced by Simpson's decade-after-decade harping on the subject in "Canada's national newspaper") slash spending on health care and service declines.

Remember, when these assholes talk about "reforming" health care, they'll mention European policies once in a while, but the reality will be American health insurance companies moving north to exploit and gouge and abuse us.

Thankfully, it's looking like it will take so long that Jeffrey Simpson will have gone on to his final reward by the time it happens and will therefore be unable to reap whatever payments he might have hoped to receive for his services to those parasites.

Would You?

If someone cheated at cards and you know they cheated, would you allow them to keep your money? Would you allow them to keep your money and then play against them at a later date under the same conditions?

Would you allow someone who wants you dead to make your health care decisions for you? Would you allow someone who wants you dead and someone who is a stupid ignoramus to make your life or death decisions for you?

Would you tolerate it if someone stole from you and the police were bought-off or corrupt in some other way and simply refused to investigate?

Would you tolerate it if the police refused to investigate and the judge who tried your case was corrupt?

That's what we, as Canadians, have been putting up with for a long time now.

In related news, The Sixth Estate makes fun of Elections Canada's revolting attempt to foster a dialogue on "lessons learned" about the un-investigated stolen election of 2011.