So if we first accept the premise, then express the thought in another way, we should get something to the effect that the more Canadians know about the Fair Elections Act support it less. If you discount members of the Conservative Party Machine and their major beneficiaries (oil, finance, pharma, media and the COC types who would be happy to have the unrestrained playpen for their bad behaviour), the rest of us tend to feel that this is part of the Con plot to enshrine regressive politics as the default and only choice in the way that we run the country. The equating of lack of knowledge with support fits well with the overall strategy of a party that likes to hide behind a cloak of secrecy, to destroy knowledge by shutting down laboratories and discarding research libraries, knowing that people in general will be baffled into accepting disturbing changes if they don’t have the tools to understand the changes, why the changes are taking place, and what are the driving factors and people behind the changes. Ignorance begets compliance, at least to a point, particularly when it is accompanied by repeated chanting of the mantra that all this saves tax money (without the concomitant explanation that fees and prices for everything are also rising as a direct result of tax cuts, and that services are severely curtailed, along with the ability of people to act in common to improve our common lot.
So while we have been shedding tears (some sincere, some crocodile, some of joy) over the death of Jim Flaherty, progress continues apace on stringing the razor-wire circle of constraints on citizen action. We ignore this at our peril and at the peril of all humanity, given the widespread deployment of similar initiatives around the failing globe.
At a very genteel political gathering last evening, over a curry supper put on my several members of a local PAGO Grannies outfit, it seemed clear to me that our organizer, R., was a very sincere young gentleman who was aware of how despicable our current administration is and of how little real difference exists between our current Con admin and the traditional Grit alternance. however, I sensed no feeling of the urgency needed to deal with environmental challenges to go along with the economic and social challenges embodied by current local, provincial and federal régimes. The trick is that if the issues are addressed with any clarity, the party that does so becomes unelectable. Does this mean that we can’t elect a government that will take the necessary steps to ensure our survival?
Punishment. François Hollande has been sent a message, via municipal elections, by the electors in France, though the message may not be exactly what the pundits are saying. Regardless, he was elected to be something other than Nicolas Sarkozy, perhaps, given that he heads the Socialist Party, some rather socialist policies, policies that might redress some of the imbalance of “market” policies outlined and implemented by his predecessor. Instead, he seems to have swallowed the Kool-Aid of the EU bureaucrats, Angela Merkel, the IMF and the World Bank, meaning that there is no way to rebuild any vision of French society that is more egalitarian and humanitarian than the standard Chicago Consensus Milton Friedman homo economicus, a smokescreen for separation of haves and have-nots, environmental degradation, and a further decline of the general standard of living, especially in the areas of health, education, housing and nutrition. These are the very areas, along with gainful employment and participation in the business of society, that the Socialists are supposed to be defending. Perhaps they might have gotten the same slapping down had they governed as socialists, but at least then they would know that they had tried to do what their natural constituency had wanted in the first place. Principle? This is a thought that Federal Liberals might want to consider here in Canada (campaign from the left, govern from the right), and that the New Democrats at all levels might want to embrace.
This topic came up a while back (here), but it seems that a memo surfaced this week in which the head of the corporation suggested that the broadcaster would have to reinvent itself in the face of significant financial difficulties. Part of this is likely that continued scaling back of funding from the current government, part of it through the loss of revenue occasioned by the Rogers takeover of all NHL programming in Canada, and part of it due to the lame programming brought on by the urge by mucky-mucks at CBC to go after a younger demographic (this was over a decade ago, and has given us a rash of patently silly reality and soapy drama and some folks like, but not enough to pay the big money that would turn the CBC into a self-supporting entity: trying to outdo the commercial networks at banality and pandering is a fool’s errand as they perfected that long ago while the CBC was still aspiring to promote a caring and somewhat intellectual vision of Canada). I believe Chrétien was still PM when this process got under way in a serious fashion, that Martin exacerbated to problem, and that Harper, an avowed advocate of a dumbed-down, distracted and disempowered electorate, is moving in for the kill. I suspect that the most valuable, salable bits of the corpse of the CBC are its real estate holdings, likely forfeit to the crown and for sale to the slimiest bidder. Hold onto your drawers…
Any number of organizations may start out with noble goals but morph into entities that exist solely for their own self-perpeutation, rarely to the benefit of anyone outside the organization. A Mexican proverb states:
All revolutions degenerate into governments.
Governments are, by nature, regulatory, regulating in the interest of those who put them in a position to dictate the rules. In the interest of self-perpetuation, governments will do whatever they can to curtail behaviour that runs contrary to the interests of the ruling clique.
This form of rule can have nasty consequences for those who don’t subscribe to the MO and goals of the people in the governing seat, especially when they follow the dictates of the law, as all good citizens are bound to do. We have seen a flood of laws passed with the sole purpose of squelching dissent, allowing unimpeded progress toward the fulfilment of the government’s purpose. The most recent case of this is Bill 45 in the Alberta Legislature that imposes heavy fines on unions who express support for any illegal strike action. These penalties are for saying or writing anything, not even for engaging in the strike action. Leaving aside that this is part of a concerted effort to stamp out any ability of people who work for wages to coalesce in an effort to improve their lot, the bill clearly violates the rights of one group to free speech. There are many examples of governments using legislation to end union action and imposing hefty penalties for both unions and individuals who don’t immediately comply. Here we have an act that criminalizes the expression of thought that the legislation to curtail labour action. How long before the thought itself, or the suspicion of harbouring such thought, will also be criminalized, and no matter that prosecution would possibly be difficult, given that prosecution itself can be used as a form of persecution. What this hides is bad behaviour that belies the idea of democracy and the well-being of the entire population in what is purported to be a democratic system of government, what we call a parliamentary democracy. In Alberta’s case, it is the destruction of vast swaths of the landscape in the interest of extraction of fossil fuels for the benefit of a narrow segment of society, that which controls wealth and, through that wealth, power. It can only accomplish this through anti-democratic and heavy-handed legislation, backed up by enforcement by paramilitary-style policing, as we have seen at a succession of international conferences from which Canadians were excluded and kept outside wide perimeters, subject to arrest and detention and eventual prosecution for the expression of dissent.
An aside: it is interesting to note that Allison Redford recently attended the celebration of Nelson Mandela’s life, having worked as part of a Canadian legal team sent to help Mandela in his struggle against apartheid. I have to wonder what her role was in this caper, how much the Canadian contingent contributed to Mandela’s liberation and triumph in presidential elections. It seems more likely that they might have had a hand in ensuring that South Africa would remain a staunch defender of the kind of crony capitalism promoted by Mulroney and his pal Saint Ronald Reagan. Certainly her subsequent actions would indicate that our delegation was much more interested in perpetuating economic disparity than any actual substantive freedom.
Governments have successfully co-adapted and adopted one of the central tenets of most religions, that of life getting better, but mostly in some undefined future. Religions get to promise us a better afterlife, where governments must generally limit themselves to promises that usually are slated to come to fruition just before the next election, at which point they are deferred until just after the next election. Governments are built on promises, including openness and transparency, and largely on some version of “fair“. The are words that are no longer attached to a concept of action, as they have beed so widely spread without consequence that they have become essentially meaningless, another reason that Ms. Redford is nominated, along with Stephen Harper, Christy Clark, Gordon Campbell and the whole lot of like-minded politicos and their handlers and puppetmasters for inclusion in the special place in hell (oh, crap! there’s that muddy future again) reserved for people who misrepresent themselves in aid of plunder.
…in support of which, I submit the following video, in which Luc deal Rochellière sings:
Thought you were living in a democracy? So we’ve been told. You remember the old refrain you probably tried out on your parents: “It’s a free country!”? Did it ever get you an extension on your bed time or permission to go out with that dodgy new friend? Likely not, but we liked to live with the idea that we would grow up to be autonomous be adults who would really have a say in how our free country was run. Too bad, so sad.
Yes, you do get to vote for who will represent your views. Tough choice: it usually comes down to a holding of the nose and choosing the least of several evils, from those of commission who willingly tear apart the fabric of society and leave individuals to fend for themselves, to those of omission who simply neglect to nurture the public interest, and where the outcomes are similar to, if somewhat attenuated or delayed, those achieved with the first group.
What seems to be happening of late, with its roots in the Reagan-Mulroney loveliest that gave us the FTA, is a complete abdication of the public trust where treaties are negotiated between sovereign nations that essential raise private companies to equal status in dealing with legislation and its enforcement, where even the potential profits, dreamed up by private concerns, get preferential consideration and override concerns of public welfare or environmental well-being. It extends to all official dealings the doctrine that business must be done solely to produce a return to shareholders, and that no social or environmental restraints should impede the pursuit of shareholder return. Once this becomes the theme of government, there is no further restraint on the corporate cavalcade and those not in the investor class must simply take their lumps because, hey! it’s the law of the land.
In the U.S., there is an additional mechanism for the abdication of responsibility to true citizens (as opposed to corporations and lobbyists) known as fast track authority, wherein the House of Representatives provides the negotiating team, through the President, I believe, the mandate to negotiate whatever they wish. In Canada, we call this a majority government in a parliament where MPs are much more beholden to the party through the whip than they are to the people who elected them (not to mention those who happen to live in the riding who may not have voted for that particular candidate), but who are nonetheless constituents and entitled to consideration in the deliberations of the Chamber.
This is all supposed to be a boon to the economy, but we need to keep asking ourselves which economy we want to promote. Our current slate of leaders all subscribe to the Chicago School/Washington Consensus model which places money at the centre of the universe and has everything else subservient. This is particularly convenient for those who have wads of money and especially for those who have converted cash into political clout who are able to absolve themselves of any responsibility with the idea that the market decides what works and what doesn’t. Strangely enough, this market phenomenon is also a human construct and, like the legal fiction that is a corporation, it masks activity that is all too human, primarily greed, rapacity and the fulfilment of grandiose ego. The market vacillations are the product of human action, and the beneficiaries of this system are keen to ensure that the economic playing field is tilted so that the preponderance of wealth ends up under their control. Bad behaviour seems always to be laid at the feet of the market, or, failing that, of a few bad-apple corporations, entities that seem immune to any sort of indemnisation for misdeeds and completely devoid of any moral sense. Even the officers of the corporation skate on piles of sins, even when it’s clear that there is no victimless crime, particularly when economic pain is as deep and broad as that inflicted on all of us in the last five years. The irony of the freemarket freebooters is that they were more than willing to have the government interfere with huge infusions of taxpayer cash and managed to do with it what they wanted rather than perhaps inject it into the small-to-medium sized sector of the business economy in the form of loans. On top of that, much of the money was to be had a little or no interest, but would be either sent out as loans at a vast profit, or used to create more risky derivative investment vehicles that look a lot like the junk that brought the economy to a grinding halt in 2008-09 and has lead to depleted pension funds and bankrupt community organizations and cities who took it on faith of financiers and ratings agencies that this junk was really AAA-quality investment.
It rather makes your puny little vote look even less significant than you thought, particularly when the ballot often resembles one of those telephone surveys where they keep asking you questions that miss the point and offering only answers that represent something other than what you really want to express. These thoughts apply not only here in the frozen North, but I’ve thought that the poor folks in the Ukraine must be feeling a little deprived when it comes to having their say: they get either Timochenko or Yanukovich, European Union or Russia, neoliberal bureaucracy or autocratic oligarchy. There is another way, but it never seems to come to the fore, in part because there are forces at work behind the scenes from both sides trying to push the country one way or another, partly because the other options all require stepping back from both options which will create some dislocation and economic pain. The EU and Russian options will also produce dislocation and pain, and for whatever future is foreseeable in the way that Greece has fallen into the clutches of the EU vultures, but a non-aligned and self-directed economy might well produce better results in the long run than either of the other options. We won’t likely get to find out as Ukranians are little more in control of their fate than we are. The consolation for them is that they are at least aware that they have a crisis on their hands and are willing to get together to try and influence the outcome. In that there is a lesson for Canadians.
So, since this is my post, I get to add a little directed entertainment at the end in the form of another musical social commentator, Georges Brassens ( to go with a couple of Tom Lehrer vids that got appended to other posts). I first ran across GB in 1971, but he had been a figure in the French music scene since the Forties, I believe. My stepson endeared himself to me forever when he brought back a CD boxed set of GB’s complete works in 1991, an item that I had been vainly trying to purchase out here on the Wet Coast for several years. He pokes fun at a lot of folks, including himself, though he would likely have been the least deserving of his targets, from what I can say. Here’s a tune, just to get the flavour of it:
Here’s a version with sketchy, but essentially correct, subtitles and where you actually get to see Brassens play and sing:
According to various headlines, John Baird has expressed deep skepticism about the agreement inked yesterday between Iran and the West over its nuclear program and he will wait to see if Iran abides by the agreement before considering lifting Canadian sanctions. I suspect the Supreme Leader and president of Iran are not quaking in their boots. It was plain that Baird would react thusly once Netanyahu opined that the agreement was a mistake of historic proportions, wherein it remains exceedingly clear why Joe Clark bemoans the state of Canadian “diplomacy”.
I’ve always loved music and have always loved learning. My aunt was a band/orchestra/choral teacher and devoted much time to her church music as well. My mother was a music critic at CBS a long time ago, but made it part of her mission to see that her family had musical opportunities. In the family, we had pianos, a clarinet, an oboe, a trumpet, a French horn, various guitars and even an operatic voice. It pains me when our local schools admin attempts to curtail any arts education. There was a link to this on Facebook this morning. Frankly, lets scrap big sections of the military and do this instead:
Of course, Dad was an architect who also painted when he had a rare free moment, and was more than keen to pass along the rudiments to whoever would sit in front of an easel. Mother took up pottery at age 52 and produced a volume of wonderful creations. We all used to draw (imagine the potential staring you in the face when you unrolled the back of a superannuated blueprint and contemplated a dozen square feet of white waiting to be filled with the childish scrawlings of whatever child held the pencil…
This is sort of a reply to Ross K.’s Covers (Saturday’s All Right For …) and his reference to curling via a video of the Weakerthans. This song might be the pinnacle of the Texas expression of the purest Tartuffian tendencies that we witness each and every day. Now that I know how to embed video content, we might all be in trouble.
