34 Homeless Deaths in Toronto

This post was supposed to get done yesterday but I did a bunch of other good things instead. It's something that's been on my mind for a while.

I might very well have missed something, but I seem to recall that when a homeless person froze to death in Toronto during the Mike Harris regime, there was a great hue and cry. We were shocked. We were saddened. Even elitist twits like margaret wente felt moved to offer [probably plagiarized] free market "solutions" to the problem they'd created. Because people freezing to death on Toronto's streets was something that hadn't happened  for quite a while. It was Jean Chretien's & Paul ("the last great Liberal") Martin's shutting down the federal department of housing and the slashing of social service funding to joint federal-provincial social programs, coupled with provincial downloading and slashing of services that had produced this tragedy.

I hadn't heard anything for quite a while and then, somewhere, on a passing radio or television perhaps, I heard that last year, 34 people died on the streets of Toronto. 34! And, that apparently, this is part of a fairly common death rate. I mentioned this to ephemeral but while talking about it I was uncertain that I'd even heard it right. 34 deaths! When 20 years ago, one or two deaths was a city, provincial and national scandal!

It doesn't matter if I'm right, and that 20 years ago we didn't have people freezing to death on the streets, or if I'm wrong, and this sort of thing has always occurred. It is simply unacceptable that in a rich country like Canada, that anyone dies on the streets, in the cold, because there's no decent shelter for them.

If this is the sort of society that we've become, it's as merciless an indictment of neo-liberalism that I can think of.

Ontario Liberal Sleaze

 The following post will be an expansion of the ideas in a comment I left in response to today's post at Owen Gray's "Northern Reflections" blog. I very much like Mr. Gray, even as he attempts, now and again, to resurrect the Liberal brand in Canada. In the case of today's post, where he was criticizing ONDP leader Andrea Horwath for calling for a public inquiry into the cancelled gas plants and OPC leader Tim Hudak for launching attack ads against the new OLIBs' new leader, when the tradition is for party leaders to be collegial and welcome the leader of a new party, Gray was basing his argument on the need for a more dignified political culture and was no doubt inspired by the idea that this is a new leader without McGuinty's personal baggage.

But the point is that this leader is saddled with McGuinty's baggage. Furthermore, the more that I typed about McGuinty and the Ontario Liberals, the angrier I became, and that's why you're going to see two posts from me today!

Kathleen Wynne is now the leader of a political party that wasted half-a-billion dollars to cancel contracts for gas plants in two ridings that did not want them and which traditionally voted Liberal. The money went to cancellation fees and the work that is necessary for finding new locations for them. Mr. Gray quotes Martin Regg Cohen of the Toronto Star:

The auditor general will report on the government’s waste of public funds in March. And MPPs now have more than 50,000 documents to wade through in a legislative committee, which is part of their job description.

Now, here's the thing: The Toronto Star is a Liberal rag that is starting to, with distressing frequency, descend into Liberal hackery. I've only recently noticed Regg Cohen myself. He seems to have some very unconvincing things to say about McGuinty's stupid abuse of Ontario teachers, but in that quote on the 50,000 pieces of paper, he descends into hackery.

In the original article, Regg Cohen condemns the ONDP for hypocrisy. "McGuinty cancelled the gas plants that the ONDP would have cancelled too!" Too bad for Regg Cohen and McGuinty that the ONDP was opposed to the plants in the first place and that, therefore, McGuinty's costly cancellations wouldn't have been necessary. The "50,000 documents" is in reference to a dump of useless information in response to opposition demands for information on the true costs of the cancelled projects.

Over 50,000 documents referring to the deal McGuinty’s Government was making for the Mississauga and Oakville gas plants are unsearchable and basically so wrapped up in coded and obscure language that it is taking literally a line by line read to decipher what the hell it all means!
We are talking a potential of ONE BILLION DOLLARS to move 2 gas plants in order to secure elected seats within the jurisdictions of the cancelled plants!
...
This is how OUR money is being manipulated and dispersed to various individuals without having any accountability to slow down the process.

If Regg Cohen wants to pretend that it is in the MPPs' job descriptions to wade through that garbage he can suck my mother-fucking dick.

McGuinty pulled all of this crap and then made a go-for-broke play for the supposedly PC voters in Elizabeth Witmer's riding after she resigned her seat for a more family friendly job offered to her by McGuinty. This was "the education premier's" bullying anti-teacher union law. Hilariously (and happily) it blew-up in his fucking stupid face and the seat went from the OPC's to the ONDP. Then, the jig was up for McGuinty. He was one seat away from a majority before the election. Afterwards he was two seats away. Petulant and disgusted, McGuinty prorogued the legislature.

Let's just review the facts here. McGuinty cancelled those gas plants for electoral gain. These cancellations cost money. Lots of governments bribe strategic ridings with taxpayers' funds. But even then there should be some sort of positive argument to justify the actual project: "This medical centre will provide blah, blah, blah." "This cultural grant will enable blah, blah, blah." And not: "This contract cancellation will cost blah, blah, blah, and will do nothing but stop something you didn't want." And, finally, "For the sake or preserving two fucking seats in the legislature, the McGuinty government is committed to cancelling two gas plant contracts and incurring around $500 million in penalties."

!!!!!

Having wasted our money in a futile attempt to keep those two seats, McGuinty then refuses to tell the people's representatives how much his stupidity cost them. Again: "This medical centre will provide blah, blah, blah, and the price-tag of it is a secret!" ... is not the way accountable, democratic governments do things.

Dalton McGuinty brought harper-level sleaze to Queen's Park. He refuses to respect the right of the people's representatives to have an accounting of their own money. He used that money to buy votes. His prorogation (while constitutional) was just as scuzzy as harper's use of that power to avoid accountability for crimes against humanity.

This is NOT what Canadian democracy is supposed to be. We must all stand on the side of democracy and against the party politicians and media hacks and self-interested corporate slime who seek to disembowel it.

Freedom and Human Rights

So I saw this YouTube video via Sister Sage, and I thought that, well, the first thing then is that a lot of these trolls' comments will dry-up after the taxpayer money spigot has been turned off. Secondly, that when we get power in this country we will destroy the Conservative Party of Canada as a political force by legitimate means and not through such cowardly skulldudgery as they use. But finally, and most importantly, that we should never be afraid of the consequences of free speech except the social ones if we're genuinely offensive, or the legal ones in cases of slander or libel.

As opposed to a genuinely fascist state, Canada allows me to say such things as "stephen harper is an asshole" without fear of reprisals. We should all recognize, embrace and defend this right. We should defend our right to say it in the streets without being the target of authoritarian goons such as our police forces have allowed themselves to become. Federal employees, especially scientists, should be allowed to report on their findings without worrying about manipulating, corrupt, corporate-state scuzz-balls hovering around them. Employees, .... workers of all stripes should be fearless in their expression of their opinions in the workplace.

We have to recognize and understand what freedom is and work to preserve and expand it.

Don't Feed the Trolls!!!

I notice with considerable consternation, that the troll has returned to Saskboy's comments section. The individual in question will obnoxiously guffaw over the slightest errors (either real or the product of a deliberate misreading of what someone says) but lapses into cowardly silence when its own inconsistencies or contradictions or stupid mistakes are pointed out to it in no uncertain terms.

Purple Library Guy (who is one smart cookie) typed an extended lesson in politics to said troll who dismissed it with the most laughable grabbing at straws imaginable.

Don't feed the trolls!

Indeed. Ban them.

I think I'll refrain from reading the comments to Dr. Dawg's posts. It literally sickens me to see that vile troll K babbling stupidly and citing Michelle Malkin or Katy Shaidle to back up his cretinism.

Don't feed the trolls! Ban them.

Whose country is this going to be? Theirs or ours?

And Successive Federal Governments Threw Money at Corrupt Indian Chiefs, why exactly???

 So, it dawned on me this morning, that the "Awesome Canadians" believe that there's no racism in Canada against the First Nations. I mean, sure, we used to kidnap them and forced our religion and culture on them, while denying them their own, and some of the residential schools were full of sexual sadists and pretty much all of the residential schools were in such deplorable, unsanitary condition that sometimes more than half the children died of tuberculosis, whereupon their bodies were dumped in mass graves, ... but that's all water under the bridge. Forgive and forget, the "Awesome Canadians" always say. (At least when it comes to their own fuck-ups.)

So, their way of explaining the hideous conditions and sufferings on many First Nations reserves is corruption on the part of their Chiefs. Because Canada is NOT RACIST. The federal government is NOT COLONIALIST. All these terms are just leftard inventions fomented from stupid white guilt and hippy bullshit fantasies.

If anything (or so their deluded hypocritical fantasies will have it) the "Awesome Canadians" are the ones who are truly standing up for the regular folks among the First Nations by decrying the corruption of their leadership.

Corrupt leadership is the reason for those terrible conditions.(Oh, and okay, a stupid desire to want old treaties respected, and a back-asswards view of how the world works, and alcoholism and laziness and a whole host of other failings, ... What???? They're NOT RACIST! They're not racist goddamit! They're AWESOME!!!!)

Right. Corrupt First Nations leadership. Year after year, decade after decade, non-racist, non-colonialist federal governments shoveled money to 'em despite their criminal failure to provide adequate housing, clean drinking water, decent schools, or even account for where all the money went. And our federal governments threw this money away, decade after decade because ... um, ... because of what exactly?

First Nations "terrorism"? Nope. Things like Oka, Ipperwash, Caledonia, only happen when we try to steal something new from them. For the most part, the First Nations don't like going out and risking arrest. Especially at the orders of a corrupt Band Chief (as the "Awesome Canadians" would have it).

For votes? Nope. Spending money on the First Nations is not a vote-getter in this racist country.

Some sort of vague, divorced from the facts, murky, complicated, not really thought out sort of process whereby problems are devilishly wonderful at evading solutions? Yeah! That's the ticket! Just like the way the "Middle East Peace Process" is just an ongoing, impossible muddle, with Israel wanting peace, but the Palestinians being blood-crazed murderous fanatics who can't seem to stop lobbing their pathetic rockets over the wall and threatening Israel's very existence. (Very often, you'll notice that the right-wing "Awesome Canadians" answer to something hinges on a genocide. "Wipe 'em all out! That'll solve the problem!")

It's not the case that the federal government is trying to avoid its treaty obligations, and harass and mismanage the whole reserve system so that the First Nations people will give up and surrender to us and assimilate on their own?

To conceive of that simple truth, the "Awesome Canadians" would have to do a complete U-turn and understand that in most long-standing conflicts between the strong and the weak, it is the strong who are the aggressors, not the weak. In other words, the "Awesome Canadians" would have to take their heads out of their asses, and that will never happen.

Them or Us: Part II

Remember what I said yesterday. Now ponder this:

And, now  this:

The people we're up against are so deluded and stupid that they deny the truth of evolution. But in reality, we're just descended from a common ancestor of us and the apes. And, as far as we know, we're alone in the universe. This is it. This is all there is.

Are we really going to let it end because of a bunch of chimp-brained fuckwads?

Them or Us

Just been reading about how the usual suspects are pressuring Chief Spence to end her fast while doing sweet fuck all to pressure stephen harper and the GG to meet with her. It's the Canadian Way, I suppose. You know; if there's rampant electoral fraud and the "Contempt of Parliament Party" squeaks out a bullshit majority based on 6,000 votes, and how do we react? We sit picking our noses while the captured Elections Canada conducts a cover-up investigation. No. Keep it as "cover-up."

Elections Canada conducts a cover-up.

Just like Parliament did with the war crimes in Afghanistan.

So, Chief Spence, tired of the racist injustices imposed upon her by the colonialist government of Canada, tired of the insults and the innuendos, tired of her people freezing while she's unable to access the resources to do anything about it, goes on a hunger-strike (after her state of emergency declaration was taken advantage of by the corrupt war criminal anti-democrat stephen harper) and everyone starts telling Chief Spence to stop rocking the boat!

"Chief Spence! We're Canadians! We don't do anything unless it's completely ineffectual!"

Thomas Mulcair tells her to stop her hunger-strike and he'll continue to "put pressure" on harper to do the right thing. What "pressure" are you talking about Mulcair? Don't bother answering. I already know you have no idea. Empty, meaningless rhetoric.

More though, I am quite literally INFURIATED by the racist crap that falls from the mouths of the cretinous harpercon trolls in the comments section to that story.

Enough is enough. What sort of country are we going to have? Theirs or ours?

Is this a country that covers up war crimes such as torture? Is this a country that throws tens of billions of dollars down a rat-hole to prop-up murderous criminal dictatorships? Is this a country that respects treaties it signs on to or not? Is this a country that allows its governments to deny citizens their Charter rights? Is this a country that hides $35-40 billion dollar purchases from Parliament and lies about it to the electorate in the middle of an election?

Are we going to tolerate this buffoonery and thuggery in our elections?

Are we going to tolerate contempt for Parliament as a full-time process?

Are we going to let these hypocritical, racist pieces of shit speak for Canada or are we going to destroy their political bowel movement?

It's them or us. Their future for Canada, of racism, murder, torture, and corruption and eco-suicide and injustice and disaster, or ours, of equality, respect for human rights, democratic oversight and ecological sanity?

Sigh. Busy.

I thought this was funny.

There you go.

CBC Manitoba

double nickel has informed me about a story on CBC Manitoba about the controversy behind the racist comments at the Morris Mirror, the local newspaper in Morris Manitoba:

In a one-paragraph comment, which appeared earlier this week in the Mirror, Turcotte gave a "thumbs down" to the Idle No More movement and wrote that some aboriginals "are demanding unrealistic expectations of the government and … in some cases, natives are acting like terrorists in their own country. Indians/natives want it all but corruption and laziness prevent some of them from working for it."

d.n. referred me to the CBC Manitoba comments section and how so many of the commentators don't even acknowledge their own racism. Happily, by the time I got to it the tone of the latest comments had changed:

Morris has a gem for a mayor....people should try to access some factual and relevant information regarding First Nations before commenting...haven't you noticed the media saying the same thing day after day after day....'chief spence' has become their poster girl for 'lets find fault with the indians to deflect from the real facts'...if they had more 'dirt' they'd be using it...instead story after story has been about government corruption. The only intelligent reports have come from the First Nations themselves... I want to know....legal details, historical details, environmental/scientific details not this silly ' he said, she said, gossip, and tabloid tales. The word on the streets is that scientists, professors, social service workers, teachers, health care workers and yes, even Aboriginals all seem to be angry with Harper's underhanded ways....seems like the government and the media has everyone barking up the wrong tree.....wonder who he is going to 'pick off' next...maybe someone in Morris. the truth is out there...go and get it!!!!

...

Unbelievable. Wouldn't be surprised if they dusted off their white hats and started parading up and down their streets. I feel sorry for their children, who most likely will inherit the views of their parents. Thankfully, the real Canadian history is now being taught in our schools, so there is hope for the little ones.

...

To say that you disagree with the Idle No More movement is one thing. Yes, blocking a railroad is illegal and should be addressed accordingly. But to say that these people are "acting like terrorists" is indeed crossing the line. Terrorists blow up bridges, plant explosives in public places, shoot guns into crowds and kidnap innocent people; all with the goal of creating "terror" in those they are targeting. The last time I checked, Idle No More is doing none of the above. Having passionate debate about the issues is one thing. Making all encompassing, sweeping statements about an entire group of citizens is juvenile at best. "Acting like terrorists"?!! Get real!! 

Sadly, going back through the comments I saw some of the self-righteous, annoying nonsense that d. n. was talking about. I shan't reprint any of it here. We all know the score and I've channeled enought of that drivel here in the last few days.

Anyhoo, I'm about to conduct some quick research.I'm going to go to Google University and see what I can find for "Canadian federal mismanagement of aboriginal reserves":

Holy fuck! A whole lot of racist, right-wing bullshit about how treating the First Nations differently because they're different nations with their own sovereignty and we owe them treaty obligations is the real racism.

This article from the "Red" Star looks interesting though:

But a Star investigation has found the situation on many reserves is becoming increasingly dire.
This, even though the federal government gives about $7 billion a year to First Nations and has added 2,000 bureaucrats to Indian Affairs over the past 15 years.
Mismanagement and poverty have long been problems on many reserves. As has the reality that the daily efforts of the country’s fifth largest bureaucracy — Indian and Northern Affairs — have failed to better the lives of the 430,000 status Indians on those reserves, many of whom live in Canada’s most deprived communities.
And now, Indian Affairs statistics show the gap in quality of life between those living on reserves and the rest of Canada is getting worse.

That story has links to other Star investigations. They look worth checking out.

Now I'll try "liberal neglect first nations":

This is all I got from the first results page.

How about "per capital social services Canadians aboriginals"?

This looks like a valuable read: "CANADA'S ABORIGINAL PEOPLES: SOCIAL INTEGRATION OR DISINTEGRATION?"

Getting With The Program

 So, ... it seems important for me to remind everybody that our political opponents, for the most part, actually believe all the nutty stuff that they say. Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. $3 billion "gravy trains" at Toronto City Hall. Radical left-wing kooks all decided to go into studying the climate in order to concoct the global warming hoax and destroy capitalism and democracy. If we make it difficult to get guns only the criminals will have guns. It's better to make it easy for everyone to get a gun and then the citizenry can have fair gun fights with the criminals who can now buy their guns at the corner store.

The right-wing appears to believe that the world is a fair place where people who work hard can rise to the top. (Except for the fact that all our politicians are crooks who punish success and destroy the economy with their taxes and regulations and corruption.) You see, whereas the left-wing believe that the Palestinians are being oppressed and robbed, the right-wing tends to think that the Palestinians are just crazy sand-niggers who haven't accepted that they've lost and they should stop firing rockets at Israel and start building a country out of the scraps of land the Israelis have magnanimously allowed them to keep.

The left-wing believes that European colonialism, whereby the lands of numerous peoples were stolen and given to white settlers, their resources plundered and their populations plunged into misery and famine, was a bad thing, the right-wing seems to believe that European colonialism gave the colonized the blessings of civilization and Christianity and that, say, if Barack Obama's father didn't like colonialism it was some kind of mental sickness or the product of personal failure or incapacity. (And he may have passed his mental problems on to his son!!!!)

The left-wing believes that racism is a major problem all over the world but especially in our own North America. Blacks, First Nations, Latinos and Muslims are all targeted with over-policing and discriminatory treatment. All non-white, non-Anglo Saxon people are documented as being thought of as less employable than white, Anglo-Saxon job candidates by the majority of employers. The right-wing believes that racism is a figment of jealous people's imaginations. Except when non-white people complain about white people. Or when lib/leftards insult non-white people by giving them special treatment because (according to the right-wing) lib/leftards think non-white people are incapable of achieving anything on a level playing field. Yes, indeedy-do! Lib/leftards MUST think that non-white people are inferior and all their talk of racism and documented studies of discriminatory treatment in the job market are a cover-story for how we really think non-white people are just uniformly "special-needs" people!

After a while, getting into the swamp of right-wing delusions and inconsistencies makes one's head spin.

Pardon me for a second while I recover my equilibrium.

...

Okay.

So, the point of today's post is that the non-racist right-wingers who say that Canada isn't a racist country and all the First Nations have to do is drop the sad pretence that they're "nations" with viable cultures and join the Canadian mainstream that would welcome them with open arms are genuine in their blinkered beliefs.

"We're not racist dammit!"

"You make that accusation because you don't want to argue based on the goddamned FACTS!!"

Case in point is their criticism of the reserve system. "Yes, the conditions on those remote reserves are deplorable. But that's because of mismanagement by their corrupt First Nations leadership. (And only by this First Nations leadership. The federal government has simply stood by, decade after decade, shipping out hundreds of millions of dollars annually to these crooks, unable to stand up against the massive weight of liberal white guilt leftard bullshit until, THANK FUCKING GOD stephen harper, the greatest prime minister in a generation, decided to pull the plug on the whole process and demand some GODDAMNED ACCOUNTABILITY from those corrupt First Nations leaders who are condemning their own people to misery and suicide! And, who's kidding who? There's no jobs up in those remote hell-holes. The whole thing is based on the leftards accommodating these illiterate alcoholics that they can still pretend to be 'nations.' As long as they stay on their reserves where nothing happens and where there are no jobs, they'll be unemployed. It's as simple as that."

So, yesterday, I posted three videos. One of them started by saying that although Aboriginals are only 2% of Toronto's population, they constitute 30% of Toronto's homeless population. Hmmm. Wait a minnit! If those First Nations peoples are in Toronto, they're not on the reserves! What's up with that? Why are they so disproportionately homeless?

"It's very simple. They're all alcoholic losers who refuse to take responsibility for their own lives. They've decided that life on the streets is preferable to sobering up and working. Furthermore, as long as the leftards continue to support them with their social programs and their Native Community Centres, they'll continue to enjoy their lives of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, incarceration, prostitution and suicide. It's all their own damned fault and the fault of their leftard enablers!"

I really hate these fucking right-wing, racist turds.

[NOTE: I really want to make it clear that I'm not trying to portray the First Nations as helpless victims. There are thousands upon thousands of success stories all achieved in spite of the racism of Canadian society. But these statistics do exist and these attitudes do exist and that's what I'm focusing on here.]

Videos

Doing other things today ...

 This is a good listen.

This was interesting.

Hopefully.

John Ibbitson's Stupid Column

So, my previous post was going to describe how Globe & Mail columnist and full-time shit-licker John Ibbitson is nothing more than a mainstream media version of an internet troll and to establish this by going through his execrable column on harper's response to the "Idle No More" protest movement.

But my discussion of Ibbitson as a troll ended up being pretty fucking long, so I'm going to make the specific discussion of his stupid column the subject of a separate post right here.

Let's begin with the title, wherein Ibbitson says that harper should "stay the course" in his strategy of general non-response plus cowardly, anonymous smearing of the First Nations protesters. As I said last time, harper's response is the exact opposite of how decent and sane people would respond which is exactly why a degenerate like Ibbitson likes it.

Public support for the Harper government in the weeks ahead will hinge on how well it handles the native protests that threaten to escalate this week.

 Public support for the harper government rests upon 30% of the voting public, consisting of the most selfish, greedy and stupid citizens of this increasingly debased country.

Thus far, the Conservatives have gotten the big things right, by ignoring peaceful demonstrations and engaging with the responsible leadership in order to marginalize extremists. That is about what Canadians expect from their government at times like this.

 Here we see in Ibbitson in full-on troll mode. You can just picture him smirking as he typed that. Sixth Estate points out the inconsistency of this bit of childish prattle with the professed opinion of Ibbitson's paper's editorial board:

Here’s what the Globe’s non-plagiarizing star columnist had to say about Idle No More yesterday:

Thus far, the Conservatives have gotten the big things right, by ignoring peaceful demonstrations… in order to marginalize extremists.

And here’s what the paper’s anonymous editorial writer proclaimed today:

Chiefs who are advocating radical tactics should reconsider in light of the progress that peaceful measures have brought.

I don’t know which of those statements is more accurate, but I’m not sure how both can be true. And I seriously question Ibbitson’s logic that the more the government ignores peaceful protests, the less radical aboriginal groups will be likely to contemplate non-peaceful ones.

Obviously, the Globe's editors probably agree with Ibbitson more than they do with their own words, but to say so would threaten to pull the wool from over the eyes of all the peaceful chumps who imagine that afternoon demonstrations, camp-outs in public parks, flash mobs in malls and online petitions are the way to change things. Sorry people. Ibbitson (safe from his perch at the nation's newspaper of record) knows the score and he's laughing at you.

Ibbitson then goes on to talk about how important this movement really is, with some people saying it's about finally rectifying over a century of injustice:

But public expectations are low. Last summer, Nanos Research and the Institute for Research on Public Policy produced a study that rated major issues by two criteria: how important a policy challenge was to the public, and how confident the public was that government could meet the challenge.
First nations issues ranked at the very bottom in both public importance and in public confidence that government could make things better.

Ibbitson is such a fucking idiot. What does the cretin do? Look to the TV ratings to decide what he should watch that evening? Attend and enjoy a movie based on its box-office receipts? Listen to the latest boy-band hit on his ipod because it had the most "likes" or downloads or whatever?

It is an asinine argument to say that since many Canadians don't give a shit about the First Nations, harper shouldn't do the right thing on the issue. (Obviously, harper can't do the right thing for any issue because he's a rancid tower of spoiled ham. Secondly, Ibbitson would encourage harper to act against public opinion if Canada's ruling class wanted something. He would then praise harper for his "political courage." Ibbitson is an amoral disgusting hack who uses whatever argument helps his case, intellectual consistency be damned.

Perhaps the word "whore" should be, now and forever, uniformly mean "person who sells out what is really important to their self-worth in exchange for an unequal amount of money" rather than how it's commonly associated with sex-workers. Because a sex-worker might be very casual about what he or she does and considers his or herself adequately compensated for it. But to be called a "whore" is to imply that a person has disgraced his or herself for material benefit . And that's pretty much what Ibbitson does to himself with pretty much ever column he writes.

While the Idle No More Movement and Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike may have increased the importance of native issues for most Canadians, it is unlikely they are any more confident that anything can be done. Mr. Nanos described that attitude as a sense of “public-policy futility.”

More sleaze. If, because of decades of successive federal governments willful failure to do anything to solve the problem of the First Nations, a majority of Canadians begin to think that the problem will never be solved, that's to be used as yet another excuse to do nothing. Actually, that's being charitable. The whole point is to abuse the First Nations so that they'll be forced to join the "mainstream" where they can be discriminated against and abused and used as cheap labour the same as all the other non-whites.

"Malign neglect" is the same sickeningly cynical process used as the "Middle East Peace Process" to steal all of Palestine.

While they may empathize with native Canadians, most immigrant Canadians are willing, even eager, to integrate into Canadian society. It would hardly be surprising in that case if they had only limited empathy for native claims to land and sovereignty, and little sense of collective responsibility for the poverty on many reserves.

Remember: There are roughly 370,000 first nations living on reserves. About 250,000 immigrants, almost all from non-European societies, arrive in Canada every year. Time is not on the natives’ side.

 In other words, Ibbitson recommends that harper take advantage of the ignorance and indifference of immigrants to Canada, to avoid doing the right thing for the First Nations. Complete and total fucking asshole.

There then follows a bit about how harper should utilize divisions among the First Nations to divide and conquer, followed by this bit of insanity:

The wild card is anarchy. If the chiefs opposing Mr. Atleo and the Idle No More activists escalate their demonstrations to the point where there is risk of violence or serious economic disruption, then the federal government will have to be firm in enforcing the rule of law.

 Ha! The criminal harper "enforcing the rule of law." Ibbitson would be funny if it wasn't for the fact that he's being a deliberate disgusting hypocrite. Ibbitson believes that the law is to be used against the weak, and only against the weak. The law, in Ibbitson's warped mind, is a weapon to be employed selectively to reinforce the status-quo. I would thank Ibbitson for being so candid here if it weren't for the fact that I think he's a despicable, monstrous psychotic fuckwad. Do you now see what we're up against peaceful protesters? Do you now see that much more serious thinking is needed about what forms of protest work and what don't? Do you not see that we have to do much more than just resign ourselves to the general public's delusions about how Canada functions and argue with the public to convince them of the amorality and selfishness and naked thuggery of our rulers?

But that is exactly the moment at which events can spiral out of control: Oka; the Dudley George shooting. Then no one can predict what will happen.

Short of that, if the Harper government stays the current course, then the Conservative coalition of support should hold and the government should emerge from this winter of native discontent in reasonable shape – politically, at least.

In other words, harper should continue to enforce a policy of oppression and injustice. Hopefully the diehard opponents of this struggle can be marginalized into insignificance and return to their lives of misery and poverty and systemic racism. There's a possibility that this policy might lead to an explosion of anger and maybe a couple of people (probably poor and therefore of no account) might die, but too bad, so sad, if that comes to pass.

What Ibbitson's disgusting column completely ignores though, is that it is a response to harper's unilateral tearing-up of solemn treaties made by the Crown with the First Nations and recognized and upheld in the Constitution Act of 1982. As well, it is a reaction to harper's evisceration of environmental regulations in the service of the petroleum industry and which will render the communities of many First Nations (located along pipeline routes and etc.,) unlivable.

I'll hazard a guess that Ibbitson deliberately ignores this aspect of "Idle No More" because he's an asshole and an intellectual coward.

John Ibbitson - Media Troll

NOTE: This post ended up being longer than anticipated. I'm leaving this part as the description of Ibbitson as a troll and the critique of the column that inspired this is this subsequent post.

A troll lived under the bridge in the story "The Three Billy Goats Gruff." A troll is a mythical creature - an ugly, greedy, vicious thing. But the origin of the term "internet troll" came out of the habit of some people on internet discussion boards and what-not, to post nasty, vicious, outrageous comments that would invite an avalanche of criticism/attention that these sickos desired. It was said they were "trolling for comments" the way other people troll for fish, by dragging baited lines behind their boats. The two concepts of "trolling" and therefore being a "troll" have been mixed.

Trolls are genuinely sick, pathetic, contemptible and pitiful creatures. They're so desperate for human attention, of for some outlet for their own frustrations, that they'll post hideous insults to the departed loved ones on memorial pages put online by people to commemorate them. Look at this revolting specimen of humanity:

Look at the fear with which this man reacts when it's clear he's been found out. What was it all for? How small is his life and his brain that he behaves this way?

Well, that's armchair psychologizing for another day, ain't it? Most people don't really care. Just another stupid loser. Just another waste of sperm and a womb. One of millions. "Don't feed the troll!" is the response of many. I would eventually concede to this request on discussion boards, until it became clear that the lying, trolling troll wasn't going to be banned from the site. I don't mind debating people who think differently from me, if they'll stick to facts and logic and, when they've lost an argument, incorporate that reality into their subsequent commentary. But it would offend me to see racist, sexist, class-warfare style lying on what was supposed to be a progressive board. It's like this: If somebody graffitis the side of your house with abstract designs, you might be pissed-off, but if you don't have the money to pay to have it removed, few people will complain or blame you for anything. However, if somebody posts some large racist remark on the side of your building and you leave it up, it's going to start reflecting on you. I saw it as offensive to allow these idiotic comments to stand and these idiotic trolls to abuse us. I would quick off the mark to ask that some pussball troll be banned, for which my "free speech" credentials would be called into question. Somehow I doubt that these trolls would tolerate someone showing up at their house making disparaging comments about their parents' genitalia on a regular basis though.

Regardless, trolls are just attention-seeking losers. They say provocative things in order to obtain the only sort of human contact they apparently feel they're capable of getting.

And this, dear readers, brings me to John Ibbitson. Ibbitson wants two forms of attention: a pat on the head from his idol, stephen harper and Canada's corporate elites, and to outrage the progressives who have made this a semi-decent country in spite of people like Ibbitson, harper and their ilk. He's not an internet troll. His national newspaper soap-box and its online presence makes him a media troll. A culture troll. Just like other trolls (Christie Belchforth, Rosie DiMoron, Margaret's Brain-Wente, Ezra ("shitty lawyer") Levant) they're function is to make outrageous comments, stupid, hateful, evil comments, and thereby attract hits to websites, purchases of newspapers, letters to editors and etc.

Well, in my case at least, this tactic has pretty much backfired. Besides the fact that contract employment in the "new economy" is precarious and often low-paying, I've decided that I won't pay to be insulted. I will not give my hard-earned money to a corporate media institution that pays people to belittle me, while spewing lies and stupid delusions at the same time.

"Don't feed the troll!" I don't feed the troll with money. But sometimes, I'll admit to giving the trolls internet hits. I'll link to them and discuss/condemn them. Why? Because the fact of the matter is that trolls like Ibbitson and Belchforth aren't going to go away if we ignore them. And, just like the trolls on discussion boards who don't get banned but continue to pollute with their filth and lies, the noxious views of people like Ibbitson pollute the intellectual climate. Some people have breathed in so much poison, with minds already deformed in other ways, that they actually agree with the trolls.

It's like a dinner party. For some reason, the guy who goes on about feminazis and faggots and foreigners keeps getting invited. Maybe if everyone ignored him, he'd get the picture and go away (maybe not), but it turns out there's an inbred cretin at the table saying "You tell 'em!" and "Finally! A voice of reason!" You have to speak up. You can't allow intellectual and moral garbage to go unchallenged.

Which brings me to Ibbitson's latest puddle of puke. "[h]arper needs to stay the course in winter of native discontent."

To a sane and decent person, harper's "course" is a disastrous, inhuman one. Nobody but filthy, stupid racists believes that Chief Spence of Attawapiskat is a criminal. Sane, decent people know that a woman who is stealing money allocated for her people's shelter and safety from northern Canadian winters does not declare a state of emergency to draw attention to her callous theft. She does not go on a hunger-strike when the anti-First Nations prime minister responds to her state of emergency by trying to take over her community and send in auditors rather than try to fix the problem. Sane, decent people read that in June 2011, the Auditor General, Sheila Fraser reported that federal inconsistency in providing necessary (and obligatory) funding in a timely fashion, accompanied with stringent reporting guidelines for everything done with the money, and they respond to a timely (and cowardly) leak from the government about Spence's administration's lack of proper documentation with a reasoned, restrained attitude. Especially since Spence's period of leadership produced more thorough book-keeping than previous ones. Especially since Spence's life-partner ("boyfriend" to imbeciles like Ezra Levant, trying to insinuate things) helped produce this turnaround, and he did it for $120,000 and not the $400,000 per year that a national accounting firm proposed to charge them.

But John Ibbitson is not a sane, decent person. He's a shit-licking harperscum. He started out defending the murderously incompetent and the moronically racist Mike Harris government of Ontario. Yes indeedy, Ibbitson knows which assholes to tongue to become a part of the Canadian establishment. (Too bad for him and all the other assorted scumbags that this establishment has overplayed its hand and is about to be shown the door.)

Furthermore, if you want to be taken seriously, you don't endorse the unilateral abrogation of treaties and sworn government promises. That's called arbitrary government don't you know. harper used to bray like a jackass about how we had promised NATO we'd continue to bomb Afghan villages to smithereens and impose a narco-gangster-pedophile government on the people of Afghanistan, and therefore we must do so, destroyed Canadian soldiers, billions of dollars in taxpayers' money and war-crimes notwithstanding.

Well, our treaties with the First Nations are even older than our promise to NATO. So why doesn't harper feel bound to respect those? Apparently, the answer is that (according to the Globe & Mail editorial board and other idiots) those treaties are old.  ...  Yep.   .... They're old. "From the early 20th century" in the case of the treaty affecting Attawapiskat. We're too imagine that one day, John Ibbitson will push Jeffrey Simpson in front of a streetcar and it won't matter because Simpson is "old."

Yep.

Such is the brainpower of our corporate media elite.

Oh yeah. And, of course, those dirty, drunken First Nations can't really be imagined to constitute a "nation" can they? Just because this is their land. Just because we obtained their land via treaties on a nation-to-nation basis. Just because they're a separate people with their own cultures and languages. They just don't measure up to us (supposedly) therefore we can do as we like to them, solemn oaths and promises be damned.

My god! The garbage that sits and stinks inside the skulls of these corporate media elites!

Of course, I myself have encountered US-Americans who say the same thing about Canada. Here on this blog you can read their asshole comments. We're a pipsqueak pissant little shit-hole to them. A cold, barren version of the poorest parts of Alabama, ... and that's when they're being charitable.

Lyndon Johnson grabbed our prime minister Lester Pearson by the lapels and lifted him off the floor and shouted obscenities in his face. Hell, Johnson told the Greek ambassador to Washington: "Fuck your parliament and fuck your constitution!"

So, it's really not in Canada's self-interest to go around abrogating treaties. Let alone something that serious, sane and decent people would do ever.

Rachael Maddow talks about trolls in the same way.

Chief Spence Preparing For Death

According to APTN News:

Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence has signed off on her will and is prepared for death, APTN National News has been told.
Spence’s will includes a description of who will care for her daughters and she has also signed off on directions requesting non-intervention if her health takes a turn for the worse. The documents are in the hands of her lawyer, aides told APTN National News.

harper and the rest of the racist stooges in this country are banking on Chief Spence's actions being mere theatre. I fear that they have so denigrated and belittled this woman that they won't realize she's a human being, dedicated to a noble cause, who will not relent until it's too late.

Besides APTN News, don't forget to follow âpihtawikosisân and Indigenous Nationhood (Pam Palmater's blog) which I added to my own blogroll today.

An Insane and Degenerate Political Culture

This country is sick. The Canadian body-politic is sick. I still  believe that most of the racist trolls denigrating "Idle No More" and Chief Spence are a minority of from 20-30% of the population. But I now think that the majority of Canadians sympathizes more with them than with progressives on the First Nations.

I think, for the most part, that Canada's intellectual culture is too childish, ignorant, and, yes, racist, to process the reality of the condition of the First Nations in this country.

The majority of Canadians are so self-centered and ignorant that they're unable to process that harper and his government are shitty economic managers. The meme that it's the Left that screws up the economy in the pursuit of hippy-dippy values is alive and well in most Canadians' hearts.

This country has managed to allow our governments to commit war crimes and to use torture against human beings, citizen and non-citizen alike.

This country is unable to process that harper and the harper scum have eviscerated democracy in this country.

This is a sick, childish country. We're only the slightest bit above US Americans as a people (insofar as the quality of our political culture goes) by the grace of Quebec nationalism, the remnants of social democratic values and institutions, and by the relative weakness of our political and corporate elite compared to the USA's ruling classes.

We have our work cut out for us. That's for damned sure.

No Surprises With the Corporate Media

I've always said that there are good journalists and good pundits in Canada. I do, however, subscribe to the Chomsky-Herman model of the media. The main media has become a big business. As a big business, they share interests with other big businesses. As forms of mass communication, they were engaged in a partnership with elites who desired and who would interest a mass audience. They are part of the system in other words.

The system in Canada relies upon easy access to valuable resources and a fee simple regime of property ownership facilitates this. The treaties with the First Nations obstructs this. As well, the First Nations are an expense to the state and to corporations (who used to pay more in the way of taxes than they do now). The thing is, the people who run Canada want the First Nations gone, and the corporate media are members in the group of the people who run Canada. So they want the First Nations gone too. It's that simple.

Far from being objective reporters about the struggle between the First Nations and the government, they're active participants on the same side as the government. Undermining support for the First Nations' struggle is their contribution to the cause. We shouldn't be surprised by their behaviour. It's their rational self-interest (or, anyway, how they see their self-interest).

What we are seeing though, is how ugly naked self-interest is. That's what's different about the usual run of things. The gloves are off here. The First Nations woke up in the late-1960s when the assimilationist "White Paper on Indians" threatened them with total elimination as a proud and separate people. Things move slow though, when the powerless confront the powerful. Glacially slow. And now, with a racist, deluded scumbag like stephen harper in power, the system has decided on a big push-back. But the First Nations are up against the wall. As they've said recently, they have nothing to lose. This struggle is not going to end. If the system refuses to meet the First Nations peacefully, it will become violent, because this is all-or-nothing for them.

And, therefore, the corporate media's leadership reveal their true colours. Hypocritically damning Chief Spence for missing receipts while endorsing harper for Prime Minister! Letting snarling, drooling attack-dog Christie Belchforth call Chief Spence's hunger-strike an act of terrorism. Calling for the unilateral tearing-up of treaties. Refusing to acknowledge the hideous, widespread and systemic racism in their own comments sections.

We won't be rid of this filth, we won't ever be rid of this filth, without a revolution in social relations that makes the retrograde values espoused by yahoos like Christie Belchforth seen for the insanity that it is. Until then, Belchforth's bile is serviceable to the elites and so, bile she will spew. The extermination of the First Nations as a separate people is serviceable to our corporate masters and so the destruction treaties and the denigration of an entire people we shall see.

More About That Audit

The awesome Canadians are making complete assholes of themselves. (Which, in a sense, is kinda honest!) Setting aside for a moment the obvious hypocrisy they're displaying in calling for Chief Spence to be dragged in chains to the Peace Tower for alleged indiscretions or incompetence that their own governments practice on a routine scale, ... they're also showing themselves to be ignoramuses and racist turds quick to pass judgment on the First Nations just because they're the First Nations

I will say again; I have believed and still believe that there are corrupt First Nations leaders. My gut instinct though, is that if Chief Spence is corrupt or totally incompetent, she wouldn't have declared a State of Emergency about housing on her reserve to draw attention to it. If she was corrupt, she would have stayed quiet herself and come up with excuses exonerating herself (of which there would be many plausible ones) and if she was incompetent and overwhelmed, she would have given up in defeat.

Furthermore, she wouldn't then go out on a hunger-strike. Given the fact that harper has used this crisis (created by decades of federal neglect on the part of successive Liberal and Conservative governments) to seize power and justify his asinine, Tom Flanagan inspired liberal bullshit, I'd say that Chief Spence's hunger-strike has more to do with harper's power grab than with some incoherent conspiracy theory that only makes sense to a racist moron.

In that spirit, it seems appropriate to link to this Rabble.Ca article reminding us about a June 2011 Auditor General's Report on conditions on First Nation reserves.

And then Fraser gets to the nub of the problem that Deloitte describes (but fails to explain) in the Attawapiskat case.
That is the issue of the onerous and inappropriate level of paperwork, record-keeping and reporting imposed on First Nations -- an issue Fraser raised with the Department of Aboriginal Affairs on numerous occasions, to no avail:
"Contribution agreements involve a significant reporting burden, especially for small First Nations with limited administrative capacity. Communities often have to use scarce administrative resources to respond to numerous reporting requirements stipulated in their agreements. We followed up on Aboriginal Affairs efforts to reduce the reporting requirements of First Nations and found progress to date to be unsatisfactory..."
...
Finally, the former Auditor General points out the challenges that small and relatively poor First Nations communities face in providing complex services that, elsewhere in Canada, are provided by larger, well-resourced entities such as school boards:
"The federal government established each First Nation band as an autonomous entity and provides separate program funding to each. Many of these First Nations are small, consisting of communities that often have fewer than 500 residents. There are more than 600 First Nations across Canada. Many of them are hampered by the lack of expertise to meet the administrative requirements for delivering key programs within their reserves. They often do not have the benefit of school boards, health boards, or other regional bodies to support the First Nations as they provide services to community members."

 Finally, let's note that Chief Spence's life partner is calling for a forensic audit if people are so incensed by the Deloitte & Touche audit:

Spence’s partner, Clayton Kennedy, who is also the band’s former co-manager, said financial accountability had improved over the last two years in Attawapiskat, which posts all its financial documents online. He said none of the money was ever misappropriated and every dollar could be tracked by simply approaching the vendors and the banks involved. He said the department should call in the forensic audit requested by the community back in 2004.
“If everyone is so concerned about the lack of documentation, then fine, come back, start contacting the suppliers, go through the banks, get into it in a little more detail because I don’t think you’ll find any misappropriation of funds,” said Kennedy, who was the band’s co-manager between July 2010 and August 2012.
...
Kennedy said he’s not surprised the auditors failed to find documentation for transactions dating back to 2005.
Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan called for the audit in December 2011 at the same time he imposed a third-party manager on the community, seizing financial control away from the band council and administration.
When the auditors landed in the community for two five day stints in early 2012, the band’s staff was already working to the limit dealing with the third-party manager, who was from BDO Canada’s Winnipeg office.
“My staff didn’t have time to get to the nuts and bolts,” he said. “We were worried about payroll and welfare payments that were withheld. I had to provide a raft of information…(The third party manager) wanted to take over all the payroll, he wanted all the information, personal information for every employee by program.”
Kennedy said most of the band’s accounting staff had “no knowledge of the majority of transactions.” He said they pulled out boxes of files from a warehouse to meet the auditors’ demands.
“My staff was preoccupied with operations and did not have a lot of time to devote to the auditor’s queries,” he said.

 Remember people: While there are a lot of fucking racist scumbags in this country, there are almost as many people like us, and, most Canadians actually are so self-centered they don't give a shit and will listen to whoever doesn't sound like a ranting, racist, KKK-loving imbecile.

Rape Culture in Canada and India

Been thinking about the huge national trauma presently going on in India and how it compares to Canada. I've written before about how Canada really doesn't have any claim to advertise itself as a feminist paradise, but I've some thoughts on the matter.

India is a far more puritanical society than Canada is. Watch a few Bollywood movies and see if you ever see a kissing scene. I'm going to do some empty speculating here now. Patriarchal societies (and Canada and India are both patriarchal) that are also puritanical are going to be anti-female. Because the moral code is controlled by males and most males are heterosexual and therefore both attracted to women and resentful of them for this.

The thing that I don't like about puritanism is that it is a sickness based on delusion.While I don't believe that sex is a cost-free endeavour (providing nothing but happiness and pleasure in all circumstances) I do believe that a decent level of sex is required for emotional and physical well-being. It's a natural human need. And while I think that capitalism oversells sex to encourage consumption ("sex sells") I'm also leery of regulating the discussion or depiction of sex through censorship. Puritanism, being a delusion, leads to unhealthy ideas about sex and unhealthy and unrealistic codes of conduct for people. Puritanism deforms, distorts and dehumanizes.

And that's where we get stuff like this:

"Eve teasing." Here's the thing; I'm sure this "Eve-teasing" has been a problem for decades, if not centuries, but that in India it was mainly the problem of poorer women who had to go out to work. Wealthier women would have male relatives to escort them when they went out, which wouldn't be everyday or outside of their own neighbourhood. Now, however, "respectable" middle-class women are going out to work, and they can't be escorted all the time, and they're prey to these twisted young men themselves. (I know that the young woman who was raped and murdered recently was with her boyfriend. The campaign against "Eve-teasing" is about a problem that has only become thought of as a real problem because now it's become a widespread ordeal for women of all social classes.)

But check out that video. Notice anything? Of course! The "hero" of the story is the old man. The patriarch setting things right.

Last speculative outburst. India is becoming wealthier. That means more women being out and about buying things. That has meant more women going out to work. Digital communication means far more access to foreign media, which is going to mean much more access to the hyper-sexualized consumer culture of western capitalism. Combine all of this with India's puritanism and you will have a toxic stew of hatred and rape. Whether Indian feminism will be able to transform the country's culture in time to stem the tide is the big question.

Too Awesome

You might remember my post from a couple of days ago - "The Awesome Canadian." It was about the mindset of those right-wing deluded fucks who genuinely believe (in their own fucked-up way) that there's no racism against the First Nations in Canada and that all the problems those people suffer are all their own fault and the result of their refusal to assimilate to "Canadian values." It's about that mindset, but it was triggered by the comments at the CBC News website about Julian Fantino's ham-handed freezing of Canadian aid to Haiti, wherein the same mindset that semi-honestly believes there's no racism in Canada and we're all sweetness and light to the First Nations (those dirty, drunken, daughter-fucking degenerates) also believes that Canada has been more than generous to Haiti, but those voodoo-swilling darkies just have to learn about their own boot-straps, because the hard-working Canadian taxpayer simply can't afford to continue subsidizing them out of the white-guilt inside libtard/leftard hearts.

Anyway, I wanted a picture to accompany my rant so I google-image searched "Awesome Canadian" and picked a shot of Don Cherry, because isn't he the poster-boy for those pieces-of-shit?

And then, wholly-fukkin-kriest! What do we see in the papers today?

"Don Cherry suggests Canada's $49.5M Haiti aid is 'nuts.'

I won't copy anything from the article. It's just a bunch of stupid crap about what a stupid shit-for-brains like Don Cherry thinks on a subject he knows nothing about.

But can I call 'em or what?

The Bad Audit

Right now, I also know that you can read about it at Dr. Dawg's, Montreal Simon's and the Sixth Estate.

An audit by Deloitte & Touche done last summer shows that the First Nation of Attawapiskat does not have all its paperwork for spending on federal housing from 2005-2011. (Also, according to Simon, it seems they often didn't evict people for non-payment of rent in a timely fashion.) Chief Spence was elected in 2010, and was a co-Chief a couple of years before that. So this audit covers fully one year of her term. I also understand she's known about the audit since September.

I'm not even going to read the audit. Back in the day I used to do a LOT of reading about the sanctions against Iraq and the WMDs and the politics of Afghanistan so that I could come armed to the battle against the right-wing trolls. It turned out that 9 times out of 10, the right-wingers were insane, deluded or lying. I see no reason to do similar unpaid work to refute these imbeciles on this issue. (As well, Sixth Estate clearly seems to have a head for that sort of thing and can read those things quickly. I don't.)

It simply doesn't make sense that the leadership of a small First Nations community, under a co-management regime with the federal government, who are somehow guilty of fiscal malfeasance, would draw attention to the sufferings of their own people (that they themselves caused) by declaring a State of Emergency on the matter. It doesn't make sense that a crooked First Nations Chief would launch a public hunger-strike close to Parliament Hill so that she could be humiliated when her obvious criminality gets exposed.

Who am I going to believe?

The harperscum Canadians who claim they're not racist and that racism is not a problem in Canadian society except in so far as Aboriginal Canadians and non-white Canadians use it as an excuse for their own failings and as a club to beat libtards with?

They're not racist. Oh no, no, no! When they heard about the First Nations people at Ipperwash re-claiming their lands after 50 years [FIFTY YEARS!] of peaceful petitioning went nowhere, their first instinct was to side with the government that stole the lands and to cheer the premier who forced the OPP to go in and beat a man almost to death and to shoot and kill another man. One fuckhead even commented about how his family lost land to the Communists back in 1917. If I was so onside with the First Nations at Ipperwash, perhaps I could help him get his family's land back? In other words, he was so full of racist contempt for First Nations people that when he saw them fighting back against the same injustice his own family suffered he was inspired to side with the state against them! (At the time I'm sure he didn't realize that he sounded like a complete asshole.)

So, if they respond to direct action against an injustice so glaring as occurred at Ipperwash by siding against the First Nations people, it's going to be pretty obvious that they'd naturally side against the First Nations at Attawapiskat. Because they're racist fools.

Only slightly less disgusting than their racism is the devotion to the harperscum government. It's comical, but in a sick way, to engage with these idiots and here them say shit like "stephen harper is the greatest PM we've had in a generation" or "the grown-ups are in charge" when speaking about their harperscum government. It's too much! It's all I can do to not swoon when confronted with such insanity.

These are people who don't bat an eye at throwing $10 billion down a rat-hole in Afghanistan. These are people who don't care that harper spent over $1 billion to prevent a small number of protesters from breaking some windows at the G20 in Toronto, even though the windows got broken anyway. We still don't know where the money went and they don't care. They don't care about the $40 billion that's going to be wasted on the F-35's.

Sixth Estate also points out the relative treatment of Attawapiskat record-keeping and that of Tony Clement:

The reason I make this point is that when similar fiscal shenanigans are documented on the part of the federal government that is answerable to the rest of us, the people who are so angry about Spence are mysteriously and notably muted in their criticism. As just one example, take the G8 Legacy Infrastructure Fund. This $50 million grant pool actually started in the budget as a border security improvement project. Under Industry Minister Tony Clement, it was recast as an infrastructure subsidy fund, and all of the money then vanished, almost without a trace, into his own riding, in exchange for gazebos and other trinkets. The Auditor-General attempted to investigate, but could not fully complete her investigation because no paperwork on the grants process survived and the departments she contacted all denied that they had been involved in that process altogether.
You might think that evidence of such scandalous misuse of public funds — burning up on a two-day Toronto conference in an unrelated cottage-country riding half of what the Attapiskat Cree received over five years in the lead-up to the recently leaked audit — would put a dent in the good minister’s career prospects. After all, people rightly seem to think the audit raises questions about Theresa Spence’s leadership credibility.
If you thought that, though, you would be wrong. Tony Clement didn’t get fired, or even demoted, for the gazebo slush fund. Instead, he got promoted to President of the Treasury Board, a position which now puts him in nominal charge of all government accounts. This promotion passed with hardly more than a sleepy yawn from the press. The gazebo slush fund got a few days of commentary, but reporters let it go quickly enough. Nobody really seemed to care, then or since.

Notice that Sixth Estate is not doing a respectable person's version of the harperscum "B-b-but the Librullls!!!" routine. Neither am I. If it turns out that there has been embezzlement of band money at Attawapiskat, the guilty parties should be punished. I'm just saying, Sixth Estate is saying and, in a masterful post that went online after I began this screed, Dr. Dawg gets down to brass tacks:

The Crommunist Manifesto raises other matters: Parliasmentary Budget Officer Kevin Page, having to sue the government to get details of expenditures. Inflating the salaries of Conservative staffers and cronies while public employees are being laid off in the name of austerity.
None of these stories had the same prominence in the media as tiny Attawapiskat. There was no torrent of paternalistic BS from editors and op-ed authors about the obvious inability of white people to govern themselves properly or keep a clean set of books. There was no advocacy for abolishing traditional Conservative ways and moving into the twenty-first century.
When it comes to Attawapiskat, however, old racist stereotypes still die hard. Never mind the clear racism oozing from media stories and online comments threads. The overall media atmosphere is toxic, and the message, drummed into us day after day, is simple: Indians can’t handle money, they are incompetent, they fear transparency, they are living in the past.

Indeed. The Crommunist Manifesto link ends with sentiments that pretty much reflect my own thinking about Chief Spence:

*It should probably go without saying that I don’t buy the popular conclusions from the audit. It’s entirely possible that Theresa Spence misappropriated some money, but the idea that she would defraud her community and then launch herself into the national spotlight seems a bit far-fetched.

And, remember, not having receipts doesn't mean you stole the money. It's also unclear why the federal government doesn't have the receipts given the band's co-management status.

But I'd like to conclude with my own contribution to the list of scum an villainy that supposedly doesn't reflect badly on white people and our ability to govern ourselves, Paul Carson. Remember him? The sleaze-ball harper confidant who lost his legal practice as a result of robbing his clients? The dweeb who married a woman half-a-century younger than himself? When stephen harper ripped up the Kelowna Accord, he then mandated tough regulations on drinking water on First Nations reserves. But he didn't give them the revenues needed to implement the regulations. Along comes Carson, telling them that the government endorses his H20PRO water filtration system and, more importantly, that he's tight with harper and everyone else. If they buy H20PRO (and add a 20% tip for his lovely wife) they'll be able to access the funding needed to actually use his product. Otherwise, they're SOL and their people will still have unsafe drinking water.

Yep. The grown-ups are in charge. For fuck's sake.

Have I Got Your Number Then, harperscum trolls?

So, let's see if we're clear here. Chief Spence of Attawapiskat is corrupt. That's why her reserve has been crying out for years and years, for a goddamned school and for houses for people whose homes are mold-infested hellholes? Because for years and years she's been corrupt? And now her very public hunger-strike is an attempt by her to sweep her (so-far) unverifiable transgressions under the carpet?

????

Okay. Whatever. But what of the fact that for the majority of these years the federal government has co-managed Attawapiskat??

Oh! I see! It's entirely possible that the federal government has all sorts of hoops to jump through before they can move against some corrupt NDN who takes advantage of "The Indian Act."

Oh but wait! Couldn't the same logic justify Chief Spence's inability to get the federal co-manager to sign-off on needed housing spending?

So, you're prepared to believe the party of an MP who forced teenaged Aboriginal girls to suck his cock, is that it?

Let's get down to brass tacks here mother-fuckers [and i mean that sincerely] ... you're the same fuckers who sided against the First Nations led by Dudley George when they finally re-occupied their own reserve after FIFTY YEARS of peaceful petitioning, ... aren't you?

How about we forget it? How about I dismiss you as racist fuckwads and vow to goddamned BREAK YOU as any sort of political force?

Yeah. That works for me.

How's That Elections Canada Investigation Going?

With all the excitement surrounding "Idle No More" and Chief Spence's hunger-strike, the passing of 2012 and the complete failure of Elections Canada to have completed its investigation into the 2011 election law violations slipped my mind. Until today.

So, ... um, .... yep. Massive violations of our election laws. Wholesale assault on the integrity of our electoral process. Still no report from our elections watchdog.

Sigh.

I guess I'll write about "Idle No More" instead.

So, Montreal Simon has brought the latest example of Christie Belchforth's mental breakdown to our attention. In her column entitled "When aboriginal conflicts aren't stranger than fiction" Belchforth reveals that she's so terrified of "Idle No More" that she can't differentiate between a flash mob and an exploding bomb:

I started to read Doug Bland’s novel Uprising in 2009, shortly after it was first published.
...
The story is one of armed revolution, or insurrection, by aboriginal young people trained and led by a disciplined core of native veterans of the Canadian army, all of them brought together by a charismatic aboriginal leader named Molly Grace.
...
I still haven’t quite made my way through Uprising’s almost 500 pages, despite an all-day effort, but reading it now is considerably creepy-crawlier than it was before, amid the widespread protests, hunger strikes, flash mobs and assorted other actions of the aboriginal Idle No More movement.

HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

"A hunger-strike = terrorism" has now become: "A hunger-strike = military insurrection."

And these dingbats want us to take them seriously???

And when we instead smirk or chuckle at their obvious insanity, we're called "elitists." Well, sorry Christie. Sorry your precious feelings get hurt when you get called on your stupidity. (Actually, I'm more sorry that you make a living from your ravings and get to broadcast your nonsense across the nation.)

Here's the biggest howler though. Belchforth sees fit to draw our attention to this part of the novel:

As Andy Bishop, the book’s Chief of the Defence Staff, tells the waffling defence minister as he dithers about what to do about the increasingly real signs that the country is under threat, “My worry is that very few national leaders, or opinion makers, or members of the courts, seem willing to accept the central notion that as a first principle a liberal democracy has the right to defend itself against anti-democratic elements in its midst.”

That’s, ah, fiction. Of course it is.

 Seriously Christie, do you really want to go there?

A protest movement seeking to resist the gutting of our environmental laws and the unilateral abrogation of treaties is an assault on liberal democracy?

Meanwhile, a government of a party that practices electoral fraud is cool? A majority, quite possibly based on fraud (where oh where is that Elections Canada investigation???) that rams through massive changes in 500 page omnibus bills with no amendments and only grudgingly granted debate is cool with you? Ministers of the Crown who alter official documents and lie to Parliament about it is cool with you? You're okay with the harperscum government lying to Parliament about the multi-billion dollar price-tag of the F-35 purchase and its refusal to provide the actual numbers to Parliament?

We already know that Christie Belchforth is an apologist for torture and a slanderer of whistle-blowers. Torture is not a liberal value.

For this piece-of-shit to even presume to lecture us about the dangers of "Idle No More" to liberal democracy is a travesty.