I'm too busy. Here's a couple of videos other people put on YouTube.
"On It" by Mindless Self-Indulgence
and Cat Power's cover of "Don't Explain"
... which, in the posting of this I discover was a Billie Holiday tune
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
They Really Are Frighteningly Deluded
There's nothing to be hoped for from the capitalist politicians, some of whom will descend upon the G-20 conference.
They all genuinely believe that making the bulk of the population work for the lowest wages is the key to national prosperity. They believe that allowing the financial sector to grow like a parasite on the real economy is the key to economic nirvana. They all believe that the earth's resources are infinite, able to sustain all the mass consumerism that the people of the world can be forced to drown in debt for.
They believe this is all "sustainable" and wise.
It's all a pile of crap.
They all genuinely believe that making the bulk of the population work for the lowest wages is the key to national prosperity. They believe that allowing the financial sector to grow like a parasite on the real economy is the key to economic nirvana. They all believe that the earth's resources are infinite, able to sustain all the mass consumerism that the people of the world can be forced to drown in debt for.
They believe this is all "sustainable" and wise.
It's all a pile of crap.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Why We Mock Them, part six-zillion
Yesterday I posted that I thought the harpocon party of Canada was composed of vermin. This was due to my reading about their sick cat-and-mouse game that they're playing with Abousfian Abdelrazik.
Commentator "L" replied:
And I thought I'd take the opportunity to respond with a blog-post about why these people are so dangerously stupid.
Yes. CSIS and the RCMP also accused Maher Arar of being a high-level Al Qaeda terrorist. We know how well that turned out.
Yes. The US government also said that Iraq had WMDs. That Omar Khader had seen Maher Arar in Afghanistan (at a period when Arar was under surveillance in Canada).
Do the words "due process," "legal rights," "citizenship," "innocent until proven guilty," "human rights" mean anything to you?
You have officially gone on record here for denying the legal rights of a Canadian citizen, based on the accusations of several heavily compromised government bureaucracies. Yet it's people like you who will rant and rave about our values and our way of life. You'd be much more comfortable under a government like Syria's or Egypt's. Their official attitude towards their citizens is similar to your views on the rights that Canadians should expect.
Commentator "L" replied:
You left out the part about:
1)CSIS has accused him of being a member of a Montreal cell that supported Ahmed Ressam;
2) The US State Department has said that Abdelrazik is a personal acquaintance of Osama bin Laden, closely tied to Abu Zubaydah and attended an Afghan training camp in 1996.
Maybe, he should stay overseas.
And I thought I'd take the opportunity to respond with a blog-post about why these people are so dangerously stupid.
1)CSIS has accused him of being a member of a Montreal cell that supported Ahmed Ressam;
Yes. CSIS and the RCMP also accused Maher Arar of being a high-level Al Qaeda terrorist. We know how well that turned out.
2) The US State Department has said that Abdelrazik is a personal acquaintance of Osama bin Laden, closely tied to Abu Zubaydah and attended an Afghan training camp in 1996.
Yes. The US government also said that Iraq had WMDs. That Omar Khader had seen Maher Arar in Afghanistan (at a period when Arar was under surveillance in Canada).
Maybe, he should stay overseas.
Do the words "due process," "legal rights," "citizenship," "innocent until proven guilty," "human rights" mean anything to you?
You have officially gone on record here for denying the legal rights of a Canadian citizen, based on the accusations of several heavily compromised government bureaucracies. Yet it's people like you who will rant and rave about our values and our way of life. You'd be much more comfortable under a government like Syria's or Egypt's. Their official attitude towards their citizens is similar to your views on the rights that Canadians should expect.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Tories are Vermin
That was apparently a famous quote from the Welsh left-wing Labour MP Nye Bevan about the British Conservative Party of the 1920s-1940s.
It applies particularly well to this revolting crew of sadists, morons and con-artists that calls itself the Conservative Party of Canada today. Bevan was talking about the British Conservatives' consistent refusal to pay decent social benefits or to provide equal access to healthcare and other public goods.
Our Conservative Party of Canada is all that, but it's also a revoltingly cruel, racist, craven, criminal bunch. Alison and Dr Dawg both tell us that latest sufferings of our fellow citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik in the Sudan.
Dr Dawg says (and I agree with him) that he does not like metaphysical categories such as "good" and "evil." Vermin is a better description for Stephen Harper and his crew and their supporters.
Indeed. I'll also add to the first definition the fact that vermin tend to have unpleasant effects on their surroundings, often making places unfit for human habitation. Modern "conservatism" has that effect on societies. Bone-stupid, laughable closet-cases and sadists. Thieves and thugs. Incompetent, insecure, destructive scum.
It applies particularly well to this revolting crew of sadists, morons and con-artists that calls itself the Conservative Party of Canada today. Bevan was talking about the British Conservatives' consistent refusal to pay decent social benefits or to provide equal access to healthcare and other public goods.
Our Conservative Party of Canada is all that, but it's also a revoltingly cruel, racist, craven, criminal bunch. Alison and Dr Dawg both tell us that latest sufferings of our fellow citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik in the Sudan.
- Canada has Abdelrazik detained - and tortured, he says - in Sudan in 2003.
- Sudan releases him but not before his passport expires and his name is added to the UN Security Council's list of terrorist suspects.
- Destitute, he moves into the weight room of the Canadian embassy in Sudan.
- His family in Montreal send money for a ticket but Canada refuses to issue a temporary passport.
- In December 2008 Ottawa says he could be given a temporary passport - after he books a flight home.
- He books one; they withdraw the offer.
- Ottawa then says he must first have a fully paid ticket but in February his lawyer says anyone contributing to it can be charged with aiding a possible terrorist.
- Nonetheless in March 170 Canadians including Stephen Lewis and a former solicitor general of Ontario buy him a ticket home.
- [And now he must get himself off that UN no-fly list before the departure date!!]
Dr Dawg says (and I agree with him) that he does not like metaphysical categories such as "good" and "evil." Vermin is a better description for Stephen Harper and his crew and their supporters.
1. noxious, objectionable, or disgusting animals collectively, esp. those of small size that appear commonly and are difficult to control, as flies, lice, bedbugs, cockroaches, mice, and rats.
2. an objectionable or obnoxious person, or such persons collectively.
Indeed. I'll also add to the first definition the fact that vermin tend to have unpleasant effects on their surroundings, often making places unfit for human habitation. Modern "conservatism" has that effect on societies. Bone-stupid, laughable closet-cases and sadists. Thieves and thugs. Incompetent, insecure, destructive scum.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Ignoring Reality: The Liberal Party of Canada
After decades of neoliberal cant which has stripped wealth from the majority of the population, we are faced with what many mainstream economists feel might be the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. We are certainly still at risk of a system-throttling financial crisis, brought about by extreme deregulation of an already over-inflated financial sector.
In this context, the Liberal Party of Canada is having a hard time finding its footing. Since the 1940s the Liberal Party of Canada has been able to portray itself as a steady hand on the tiller. It managed to appear more progressive than its Conservative (or "Progressive Conservative") rival while comforting both the powerful and the timid or complacent amongst the populace that there would be no disturbing of the equilibrium of Canada's traditional political-economy. With the Liberal Party of Canada it was possible to have one's cake (social programs) and eat it too (no wrenching transformations of the power structure or our economic direction).
That illusion worked until the 1970s, the decade when the contradictions of Keynesian capitalism started to become impossible to reconcile and paper over. The bloom was definitely falling off the rose in the brutal last years of the Trudeau government. Fortunately for the Liberals' mythology, the rightward tilt of the Trudeau Liberals was forgotten after two lengthy majority governments for the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney. Between 1984 & 1993, neoliberal free trade deals, tax-cut policies, anti-union policies and slashes to social programs started to make their impact felt on the well-being of the majority of Canadians, but it was the Progressive Conservatives who would be blamed. Jean Chretien's announcement upon his election in 1993 that the good times were back was greeted with much enthusiasm by the party faithful and many centrist Canadians.
Betrayals of Liberal promises on the GST and NAFTA quickly soured this love affair, as did finance minister Paul Martin's destruction of practically every major promise in their "Red Book" of election promises. Chretien and Martin orchestrated deficit hysteria in order to justify their slashing and burning of valuable public programs and to convince Canadians that they were only trying to clean up after Brian Mulroney.
The fact of the matter is that Mulroney's Central Banker (John Crow) was just pursuing a slightly more fanatical monetarist insanity as Trudeau's CB chief Gerald Bouey, who was himself following Paul Volcker and Milton Friedman in the United States. The fact of the matter is that Chretien and Martin would have been pleased to pile on just as much debt as Mulroney did in order to fight inflation by "break[ing] workers."
The Liberals managed to convince a lot of Canadians that once we returned to surpluses there would be a restoration of the public housing, healthcare, education and other social spending that the big, bad deficit had made unaffordable. (They also benefitted from the fact that clueless right-wing voters were forced to split their vote between the remnants of the Progressive Conservative Party and various incarnations of the Reform Party. And by the fact that the left-wing vote had decided either that vote-splitting had brought us Mulroney and the FTA and that only the Liberals were a bulwark against the Conservatives, or that social democrats had thrown in the towel and gone over to "Third Way" Blairite nonsense making voting a waste of time. Chretien's three straight majorities had more to do with the disarray of his opponents and the clumsiness of our electoral system than with massive popularity of his neoliberal agenda.)
By the time Paul "Mr. Dithers" Martin inherited the Liberal leadership the lingering image of a party of compassion and democracy had all but disappeared. As well, Martin demonstrated perfectly the vacuous nature of Canadian liberalism at the end of the 20th century. Martin was regularly derided for his inanely soaring rhetoric and its contrast with his directionless, empty governing style. Having achieved the neoliberal nirvana of balanced budgets and a business class with no social obligations, Martin was at a loss to imagine anything else a government could do (at least domestically; being a Liberal, Martin genuinely believes that US foreign policy is at least benign and currying favour with them is in Canada's best interests).
It was only the spur of being in a minority government (as a result of the absorbtion of the PC's into Stephen Harper's Conservative Party of Canada and widespread disgust with Liberal corruption and austerity) that Martin discovered more uses for public revenues than debt repayment and tax cuts for the wealthy. (The benefits of minority governments would be lost forever if the drooling nitwits who believed Stephen Harper's shrieking about parliamentary "coups" actually had their way!) Martin began to give away in a wholly unsystematic fashion a fraction of the money he'd taken away to pay debts and slash taxes.
It was too late however and he lost power to the Harper Conservatives. But Harper's far-right agenda did not sit well with thinking Canadians. The lunatic fringe that comprises the majority of his colleagues was deeply frightening to the Canadian political culture. For this reason, Harper was only able to construct a minority government. To lull Canadians into a false sense of security Harper ruthlessly suppressed the social conservatives within his party and served up a relatively restrained version of the neoliberalism and authoritarianism that he was harbouring.
Thus began the long twilight of the Liberal Party of Canada. After his defeat, Paul Martin resigned as leader of the Liberal Party to be replaced by what termed out to be the caretaker leadership of failed Environment Minister Stephane Dion. Dion portrayed himself as an environmentalist politician when his signal achievement was the consistent failure of Canada to meet its Kyoto Accord obligations to lower carbon emissions and help reduce global warming. Dion's failure came out of the Alberta Tar-Sands Project which the Albertan provincial government was pursuing full-steam ahead despite it being the single-biggest carbon polluting project in the entire world. A federal environment minister's failure to consider a provincial government's ability to make a hash out of a national commitment to an international treaty is akin to signing over the deed to a house that you do not own. Anyway, Dion's leadership was only meant to preserve the Liberal tradition of rotating English-French leadership and to allow Michael Ignatieff and his shadowy supporters to disabuse NDP-defector Bob Rae's aspirations for the leader's role.
Dion's leadership suffered from the embarrassment of having to oppose Harper's neoliberal, authoritarian policies with the double-whammy of sharing many of the same policy beliefs and of being afraid to bring down the government and face the electorate. Dion and the federal Liberals were reduced to hiding from confidence votes in the House of Commons and enduring the mockery of the Conservatives for their gutlessness. When Harper overplayed his hand following his cynical Fall 2008 election call and tried to force the opposition parties to vote for their own suicide thereby bringing on the threat of a coalition government the Liberal power-brokers moved swiftly to remove Dion from power and replace him with Ignatieff. It just wouldn't do to have a spot-holder actually become Prime Minister through a twist of fate while their golden boy steamed impotently in frustration.
But now, Ignatieff finds himself in the same boat Dion did, despite having the backing of the Liberals' corporate and political masters and having eliminated the threat of a rivalry with Bob Rae, he remains unable to offer genuine resistance to the Harper agenda. Not because the Harper agenda is popular among Canadians. Not because Harper himself is popular among Canadians. No, Ignatieff's problem is that the Liberal Party of Canada embraces the same neoliberal snakeoil as the Conservative Party of Canada but cannot capture Harper's firm grip on the rabid, drooling morons who foolishly vote for that agenda. Ignatieff's Liberals offer nothing to middle-of-the-road Canadians or anyone else. They've lost Quebec as a dependable stronghold and they can't promise anything to most Ontarians besides more of the same deindustrialization and destruction of the welfare state. Years of empty rhetoric have caused Liberal Party of Canada support to wither away to dangerously small proportions and they can't be guaranteed of an election win unless and until the Harper government does something particularly revolting or gets saddled with governing the country during a major recession for which they can (fairly or unfairly) be blamed.
None of this has really registered on a conscious level yet because self-delusion is essential to be a Liberal in Canada today. Ignatieff can talk about values and compassion and Liberal principles tirelessly while pursuing practical policies at variance with them. He can talk tough about holding the Conservatives accountable -- or else, when he has no intention or capability of doing so and it isn't until reality slaps him in the face that he (temporarily) realizes his empty posturing has made him look like a fool.
But more than the Liberal Party has to wake up. The Canadian electorate has to realize that the game they've been playing is rigged against them. They have to realize that the "centre" of a political spectrum in a system created by authoritarian corporate greed-heads and absolute morons isn't any place that sane, self-interested people would want to be. They have to realize that the system needs to be confronted and overturned and that comfortable comprise is not an option.
In this context, the Liberal Party of Canada is having a hard time finding its footing. Since the 1940s the Liberal Party of Canada has been able to portray itself as a steady hand on the tiller. It managed to appear more progressive than its Conservative (or "Progressive Conservative") rival while comforting both the powerful and the timid or complacent amongst the populace that there would be no disturbing of the equilibrium of Canada's traditional political-economy. With the Liberal Party of Canada it was possible to have one's cake (social programs) and eat it too (no wrenching transformations of the power structure or our economic direction).
That illusion worked until the 1970s, the decade when the contradictions of Keynesian capitalism started to become impossible to reconcile and paper over. The bloom was definitely falling off the rose in the brutal last years of the Trudeau government. Fortunately for the Liberals' mythology, the rightward tilt of the Trudeau Liberals was forgotten after two lengthy majority governments for the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney. Between 1984 & 1993, neoliberal free trade deals, tax-cut policies, anti-union policies and slashes to social programs started to make their impact felt on the well-being of the majority of Canadians, but it was the Progressive Conservatives who would be blamed. Jean Chretien's announcement upon his election in 1993 that the good times were back was greeted with much enthusiasm by the party faithful and many centrist Canadians.
Betrayals of Liberal promises on the GST and NAFTA quickly soured this love affair, as did finance minister Paul Martin's destruction of practically every major promise in their "Red Book" of election promises. Chretien and Martin orchestrated deficit hysteria in order to justify their slashing and burning of valuable public programs and to convince Canadians that they were only trying to clean up after Brian Mulroney.
The fact of the matter is that Mulroney's Central Banker (John Crow) was just pursuing a slightly more fanatical monetarist insanity as Trudeau's CB chief Gerald Bouey, who was himself following Paul Volcker and Milton Friedman in the United States. The fact of the matter is that Chretien and Martin would have been pleased to pile on just as much debt as Mulroney did in order to fight inflation by "break[ing] workers."
The Liberals managed to convince a lot of Canadians that once we returned to surpluses there would be a restoration of the public housing, healthcare, education and other social spending that the big, bad deficit had made unaffordable. (They also benefitted from the fact that clueless right-wing voters were forced to split their vote between the remnants of the Progressive Conservative Party and various incarnations of the Reform Party. And by the fact that the left-wing vote had decided either that vote-splitting had brought us Mulroney and the FTA and that only the Liberals were a bulwark against the Conservatives, or that social democrats had thrown in the towel and gone over to "Third Way" Blairite nonsense making voting a waste of time. Chretien's three straight majorities had more to do with the disarray of his opponents and the clumsiness of our electoral system than with massive popularity of his neoliberal agenda.)
By the time Paul "Mr. Dithers" Martin inherited the Liberal leadership the lingering image of a party of compassion and democracy had all but disappeared. As well, Martin demonstrated perfectly the vacuous nature of Canadian liberalism at the end of the 20th century. Martin was regularly derided for his inanely soaring rhetoric and its contrast with his directionless, empty governing style. Having achieved the neoliberal nirvana of balanced budgets and a business class with no social obligations, Martin was at a loss to imagine anything else a government could do (at least domestically; being a Liberal, Martin genuinely believes that US foreign policy is at least benign and currying favour with them is in Canada's best interests).
It was only the spur of being in a minority government (as a result of the absorbtion of the PC's into Stephen Harper's Conservative Party of Canada and widespread disgust with Liberal corruption and austerity) that Martin discovered more uses for public revenues than debt repayment and tax cuts for the wealthy. (The benefits of minority governments would be lost forever if the drooling nitwits who believed Stephen Harper's shrieking about parliamentary "coups" actually had their way!) Martin began to give away in a wholly unsystematic fashion a fraction of the money he'd taken away to pay debts and slash taxes.
It was too late however and he lost power to the Harper Conservatives. But Harper's far-right agenda did not sit well with thinking Canadians. The lunatic fringe that comprises the majority of his colleagues was deeply frightening to the Canadian political culture. For this reason, Harper was only able to construct a minority government. To lull Canadians into a false sense of security Harper ruthlessly suppressed the social conservatives within his party and served up a relatively restrained version of the neoliberalism and authoritarianism that he was harbouring.
Thus began the long twilight of the Liberal Party of Canada. After his defeat, Paul Martin resigned as leader of the Liberal Party to be replaced by what termed out to be the caretaker leadership of failed Environment Minister Stephane Dion. Dion portrayed himself as an environmentalist politician when his signal achievement was the consistent failure of Canada to meet its Kyoto Accord obligations to lower carbon emissions and help reduce global warming. Dion's failure came out of the Alberta Tar-Sands Project which the Albertan provincial government was pursuing full-steam ahead despite it being the single-biggest carbon polluting project in the entire world. A federal environment minister's failure to consider a provincial government's ability to make a hash out of a national commitment to an international treaty is akin to signing over the deed to a house that you do not own. Anyway, Dion's leadership was only meant to preserve the Liberal tradition of rotating English-French leadership and to allow Michael Ignatieff and his shadowy supporters to disabuse NDP-defector Bob Rae's aspirations for the leader's role.
Dion's leadership suffered from the embarrassment of having to oppose Harper's neoliberal, authoritarian policies with the double-whammy of sharing many of the same policy beliefs and of being afraid to bring down the government and face the electorate. Dion and the federal Liberals were reduced to hiding from confidence votes in the House of Commons and enduring the mockery of the Conservatives for their gutlessness. When Harper overplayed his hand following his cynical Fall 2008 election call and tried to force the opposition parties to vote for their own suicide thereby bringing on the threat of a coalition government the Liberal power-brokers moved swiftly to remove Dion from power and replace him with Ignatieff. It just wouldn't do to have a spot-holder actually become Prime Minister through a twist of fate while their golden boy steamed impotently in frustration.
But now, Ignatieff finds himself in the same boat Dion did, despite having the backing of the Liberals' corporate and political masters and having eliminated the threat of a rivalry with Bob Rae, he remains unable to offer genuine resistance to the Harper agenda. Not because the Harper agenda is popular among Canadians. Not because Harper himself is popular among Canadians. No, Ignatieff's problem is that the Liberal Party of Canada embraces the same neoliberal snakeoil as the Conservative Party of Canada but cannot capture Harper's firm grip on the rabid, drooling morons who foolishly vote for that agenda. Ignatieff's Liberals offer nothing to middle-of-the-road Canadians or anyone else. They've lost Quebec as a dependable stronghold and they can't promise anything to most Ontarians besides more of the same deindustrialization and destruction of the welfare state. Years of empty rhetoric have caused Liberal Party of Canada support to wither away to dangerously small proportions and they can't be guaranteed of an election win unless and until the Harper government does something particularly revolting or gets saddled with governing the country during a major recession for which they can (fairly or unfairly) be blamed.
None of this has really registered on a conscious level yet because self-delusion is essential to be a Liberal in Canada today. Ignatieff can talk about values and compassion and Liberal principles tirelessly while pursuing practical policies at variance with them. He can talk tough about holding the Conservatives accountable -- or else, when he has no intention or capability of doing so and it isn't until reality slaps him in the face that he (temporarily) realizes his empty posturing has made him look like a fool.
But more than the Liberal Party has to wake up. The Canadian electorate has to realize that the game they've been playing is rigged against them. They have to realize that the "centre" of a political spectrum in a system created by authoritarian corporate greed-heads and absolute morons isn't any place that sane, self-interested people would want to be. They have to realize that the system needs to be confronted and overturned and that comfortable comprise is not an option.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Conviction of Toronto Terrorist Upheld
From the CBC. This is an incredibly murky affair. The whole thing sounds so contrived: "Behead the PM" indeed.
I recall Alison at Creekside's description of it and I worry about civil liberties in this country.
I recall Alison at Creekside's description of it and I worry about civil liberties in this country.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Monty Robinson's Testimony
In response to the Government of Canada's lawyer, Robinson says he didn't have time to establish if Dziekanski was being compliant or not-compliant.
He later recovers and says Dziekanski appeared to be compliant when he moved towards his luggage, but when told to put his hands on the counter and he didn't, then it was hard to establish his level of compliance.
And then, apparently, Dziekanski brandished the deadly stapler and all hell broke loose.
He later recovers and says Dziekanski appeared to be compliant when he moved towards his luggage, but when told to put his hands on the counter and he didn't, then it was hard to establish his level of compliance.
And then, apparently, Dziekanski brandished the deadly stapler and all hell broke loose.
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