Do You Believe What You’re Reading?

So here, you’ll find the Post Media outrage that RT gets paid to be on the cable services, as if pretty much most of the rest of the offerings aren’t mouthpieces for a toxic system of private profit and public plundering.

 

For a bit of perspective, here is a piece from Lee Camp who broadcasts on RT and whose work is highly critical of the bulk of media outlets. It’s eloquent, obviating the need for me to blather on.

 

Blow Back

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

 

The following headline showed up in my Twitter feed this morning:

Local economic impacts would be considerable if Site C

is cancelled: Chamber President

…and you can go to the source here (it was posted by Integrity BC)

The crux of the matter is that there will be a loss of revenue to those providing service to the work site/project and that layoffs will ensue, should the project be cancelled. Yes, there will likely be some of that, though a principled and aware government would be taking steps to mitigate the negative effects by redirecting that portion of the embedded costs to local business for other work that might be deemed in the public interest, and some form of development, if properly thought through, would almost always be appropriate for the region. However, we have to ask ourselves whether any of the local leadership was paying attention as the plans for this project moved forward. The exclusion of the Utilities Commission from any review should have been a red flag, and certainly when the then-Premier spoke of pushing the project past the point of no return, hackles ought to have been fully deployed with the message loud and clear that this was perhaps a politically motivated boondoggle and that those who put their faith in it were those who would be abetting a scheme to defraud taxpayers and ratepayers of substantial sums for decades to come. The documentation was always there, though it might have taken some chasing beyond the confines of Global News or the PostMedia crowd.

The logical course of action now for the Nabobs of the North is to work with Victoria to wind down this project and remediate the entirety of the damages while developing strategies to ensure that an appropriate package of development funds will be earmarked and distributed to northern communities to ensure that they will be equal participants in whatever prosperity flows from the ongoing business of the whole province. Let’s stop making problems to fix, let’s work to ensure that everyone gets a fair shake in an economy that isn’t run for the benefit of large corporate donors to the party of “free enterprise” (and insults in the legislature).

 

The Burden of Politics and Governing

 

Photo by Daniel Malikyar on Unsplash

In the course of many extended conversations with a friend who practices law, mostly pertaining to real estate, we would touch on the essence of what a career entailed. I was a school teacher until I discovered the wonders of retirement, and Scott even went as far as to pay a visit to the small rural school where I spent five really stellar years late in my working life. I had visited his office on occasion, but it would have been somewhat awkward for me to get in any observations of his interactions with clients, so I had to take his word for his thoughts on the law, its deployment, and on how it affected the parties undertaking the legal process.

A recurring theme in our conversations was that education formed a good part of many occupations where one has to deal with human beings, and Scott thought this was very relevant to the practice of law, particularly in the process of bringing parties to an acceptable settlement without engaging the services of the court and burning through exorbitant legal fees. I had observed some of this phenomenon in my father’s architectural practice where clients had, at times, unrealistic expectations of what could be built, and especially what could be built within a realistic budget, along with considerations of light, sight lines, interior spaces, interrelationships within the building envelope and how the building related to the building site. This was a critical part of the work because it was, in essence, the intellectual and spiritual framework for construction and ensured that the client understood well in advance not only the end result, but the journey from conception to planning, to detail preparation and on to construction before final occupancy. Dad’s success as an architect rested on the number of people who would write at the end of the process to say not only that they were deeply enjoying the final project, but also that they could see how those initial consultations had set the course for both the process and the result.

Such is not the case for all practitioners, and the area where education seems to be least central to the work at hand is in politics and government, an area where a good part of the electorate is content to function on preconceived notions of ideology and/or to accept the divisions laid out in the existing political framework of parties, candidates and support groups. As in business, it would appear for secrecy and deception to be largely the norm, sometimes through societal inertia, sometimes through duplicity, sometimes through expediency. The electorate gets bombarded with waves of information, but said information has been carefully chosen to direct attention to whatever the agency deems as good and to distract from the sources of the information and, often, the possible and likely consequences of the decisions being made. Where business is entirely about generating profit for shareholders and the executive suite, there seems little impetus to ensure that we are getting the whole picture and that the profits being generated will do more good than harm. The current and ongoing shut-down of the Sears retailing establishment in Canada is an interesting case study, where layoffs and disappearing pensions are being used to fund bonuses to the executives who have taken the enterprise into bankruptcy and dissolution, where those responsible for the decisions that lead to the downfall reap large rewards and those who toiled in the trenches are stripped of benefits, both present and future.

The same hiding behind a veil of secrecy also prevails in most governing bodies, often for the benefit of small groups of people whose fortunes allows them much greater influence than the one vote to which the general populace can aspire. Where this amounts to corruption, if often goes unpunished because of that same veil of secrecy. This is a legal matter and missed opportunity to hold to account those at fault. Other times, there may be cases where policy seems distant in its origin and benefit, and the implementation seems high-handed and dictatorial. In those cases, what’s lacking in a meaningful effort on the part of those enacting that policy to ensure than all parties are armed with the data and analysis to make sense of the action. All of our elected representatives ought to be armed with the knowledge to explain their decisions and the ability to make sense of those decisions to the people who elected them. as well as those who may have made other, unfulfilled choices at election time.

As an example, the current discussions of reconciliation with First Nations certainly has both supporters and detractors. On this file, we seem to be moving slowly, but there is an ongoing stream of relevant information that needs to be put at everyone’s disposal and there needs to be time for options to be developed and time and resources allotted to First Nations to sort out what might be their idea of the desired outcomes. For those like Senator Lynn Beyak whose sense is that First Nations should just “get over it” and become Canadians, there is a chance to review the information and to show that they have a basis for their beliefs, and for the rest of us to understand that perspective, without necessarily accepting that it might be valid if we have data and analysis to bolster our own thoughts.As new material emerges, we might need to re-evaluate our positions.

There is a certain amount of anxiety in the salmon farming community at this point, where First Nations are occupying a farm and where notice of review of tenures seems to have given the idea to the companies that they are about to be unceremoniously evicted from the waterways of the province. It turns out that the reviews are scheduled and that the panic might reveal more about the outlook of Marine Harvest than about the state of the spaces they occupy. For a group that appears to have done whatever it can to squelch information relating to disease outbreaks, escapes and other negative effects on wild stocks, there might be a tendency to think that the fish farming community senses that the end of their current business mode might be coming to an end. I wonder if they are willing to put all the informational cards on the table and let the public decide in full knowledge of how the industry operates and what are the real benefits and harms involved in their operations. It i here that the government, and especially the ministers responsible, ought to have the duty and the mandate to see that all appropriate information is put at the disposal of the electorate so that, when the government decides to either renew the tenures or to let them lapse, we will all have a clear understanding of the reasoning behind that decision.

When it comes to light that local casinos have become a money laundromat, and where it comes to light that the phenomenon has been known to government for the better part of a decade, and where the knowledge has been buried because it might have a negative impact on certain “commercial” enterprises, and where those enterprises are undertaken by people whose moral, electoral and financial support props up the party that buries the report, we have the exact opposite of a desirable education quotient. This is not a simple oversight, but a fraud on the electorate, even if the law seems not to see it as punishable.

The same applies to the approval of projects that appear, on the fact of it, to contrary to the interests of Canadians as a whole, but that will be good for board rooms in Toronto, Calgary and Houston, projects whose evaluation omits large swathes of data about downstream consequences to be suffered by all of us, but whole effects will be mitigated for those who stand to gain the most.

As a voter, I am willing to revise my position on many files, but I need to see that I’m getting decisions based on the best information, which means all the information. It falls upon my representatives to convince that the revision is warranted.

 

 

Committed to Canada

 

How strange it can seem that, when a trade dispute arises, one of the principals in the dispute seems all of a sudden to become solicitous of the well-being of the constituents of one of the other parties involved in the dispute. Such seems to be the case with the current round of sniping over aircraft contracts, originally between Boeing and Bombardier. With Bombardier having a good chunk of its investment held by the Province of Québec and with Bombardier, over the course of several decades, having been the beneficiary of considerable largesse on the part of the federal government, one might conclude that Boeing has some legitimacy in their claims against Bombardier. Silly me, I neglected to pay attention to the duopoly that is supposed to govern the whole of the aeronautical sphere, airline division, to be divided more or less equally between the lion and unicorn that are Boeing and Airbus. So when Delta Airlines purchased a significant chunk of Bombardier’s C100 (I believe it was), Boeing cried foul and asked for the imposition of tariffs to countervail the unfair advantage that Canada offered in terms of subsidies. 220%, boys, just like that! Make America Great Again, and a follow-up of another 80%. We’ll show them! Never mind that Boeing is so fat with US military contracts of the type that could unto themselves be considered a subsidy that they didn’t, it would seem have a comparable aircraft to sell to Delta, but Delta could easily buy something that Boeing makes to keep Boeing happy…so Canada is making rumblings about playing hardball by negotiation a deal for used Australian F-18s rather than a purchase of new F-18s from Boeing, but would these not be serviced by, hmmm…, Boeing? If this conjures up thoughts of Alice in Wonderland, you’re probably on the right track. And then we get this, on the Web, on television, and who knows, it may be in print as well, I no longer read pulp dailies, so I don’t know:

Committed to Canada

Committed they are, to continuing to sell as much as possible at the highest profit to a country whose aeronautical industry has been consistently suborned over the last many decades to the interests of outfits like Boeing. They will toss us a bone from time to time, but Boeing is committed to generating shareholder value and nothing else. This commitment is reminiscent of the protestations of eternal faithfulness at the altar that is little other than a prelude to divorce. It’s offensive.

The Marie Antoinette Moment

It isn’t quite let-them-eat-cake, but it surely heads in that direction.

“We have to remember that a person on social assistance — a single person on social assistance in British Columbia — gets double the annual income of a person in the Third World. And we should remember that — not because we say it’s right but we should remember actually how good this country is.”

(From a Global News Report)

 

There seems to be more gold than Golden Rule in our current ruling clique in Victoria, but this struck me as callous and over-the-top in its lack of empathy and misdirection from the realities of what his government has done to the citizens of the province.

“The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provide enough to those who have little.

                                                     —Franklin D. Roosevelt

By Roosevelt’s measure, we in BC have bounded backward for the last decade and a half, and we weren’t doing all that well when Gordon Campbell ushered in his New Era in 2001.

 

What Deputy Premier Coleman misses is that our recipients of social assistance don’t have the luxury of flying off to Costa Rica or Nicaragua where their purchasing power might equate to a more reasonable lifestyle, and that they are facing an employment and cost of living situation that is at least difficult, if not hostile, a situation not improved by the use of temporary foreign workers to keep labour costs at a minimum, even though companies employing them are still selling into a market in the high-rent district. It’s rather like offshoring at home.

In addition, the goose and gander get somewhat separated when Minister Coleman’s salary has risen considerably over the time he’s been in government, and we can’t really say the same for social assistance rates, or for the level of service that the province provides to help its citizens find reasonable work that will meet the needs of those having to exist in cities that have become increasingly unaffordable.

The statement is typical of the total lack of care for anyone other than those on the donors’ list and the lists of approved contractors on mega projects.

 

 

 

Food, Life, Profit

In an earlier post, the topic was the usurpation of control and decision-making via the magic of gadgetry, a phenomenon which, for many of us constitutes a step backward in the development of humanity and society. Often of late, so much of the vaunted innovation appears to be for the sake of innovation without a clear set of guiding principles regarding benefits and the recipients of those benefits. We do things because we can, often in the process neglecting more difficult and more pressing challenges, often those requiring sustained and/or concerted effort and little prospect of immediate profit.

The broad strokes of the division between those who would have mankind control all aspects of life on Earth and those who tend to work with and within the forces of Nature is summed up to a point in the following excerpt from an article in Quartz:

The modern food movement has brought us to a fork in the road. On one path are people who say it is enough to eat the fresh fruits and vegetables that spring from the earth, the milk from our cows, and the meat from farmed animals. Simplicity is the path to fulfillment, and sticking close to nature and whole foods is the safest bet for achieving nourishment.
The other vision prescribes that the best diet is one that is predetermined for us, collected by farmers and tinkered with by scientists to help us attain our maximum health and eventually prevent chronic illness. It is more obscure and decidedly high tech.
The argument on both sides of the dichotomy seems almost anodyne and relates to the quest for the ultimate scheme for human nourishment, and perhaps there are points to be made on both sides of the question, but it all falls apart when the underlying notion of the execution of the plan for measured, targeted and controlled nutrition turns out to be more in the interest of a small group than for the betterment of the lot of the majority of living creatures. At the root of the MTC clan is Nestlé, a corporation with a long track record of doing what is profitable, even when the profit is the only benefit and where the source of the profit may be deleterious to society as a whole, thinking of “interesting” recipes for baby formula, the promotion of sugary products and recent pronouncements, backed up by corporate actions, tending to reserve potable water use for the exclusive rights to bottle and sell by none other than Nestlé.
Whatever benefits are outlined in the Nestlé plan tend to induce some head-scratching simply because of the notion that something that might perhaps be for the overall benefit of society might be withheld from those unable to fill the coffers of Nestlé shareholders. It reminds me of a conversation I had with an acquaintance who returned from a retreat with an EST group, a person quite fired up about plumbing the depths and breadths of human consciousness and the attainment of enlightenment. These are laudable enough goals and it all sounded good until the question of “tuition” arose and it became clear that any achieved wisdom would be attained at the cost of a severely depleted bank account, and the sums in question were of a nature beyond keeping the enlighteners in reasonable comfort, and the whole issue sounded as though the enlightened were less concerned about the propagation of wisdom than they were about the accumulation of wealth. Such seems to be mostly the case with the “wisdom” of Nestlé, as well as other purveyors of exclusionary benefits.
It would seem especially and increasingly important that wisdom be shared freely as we approach the apocalyptic consequences of population and consumption overshoot and that we cease to allow the benefits generated by human endeavour to accumulate in the accounts of those who already benefit in outsize proportion to the contributions they make to the future of civilization.

Slapped on Someone Else’s Wrist

 

 

VSun reports that BC Hydro is facing large fines for environmental violations as part of the rush to get Site C beyond the point of no return, an event that must trouble Christy Clark and Jessica Macdonald no end. Firstly neither one seems overly troubled by the optics of blindly pursuing  a folly of pharaonic proportions, and, secondly, both are snickering that the paltry hundreds of thousands of dollars will be coming out of the hide of those same BC Hydro clients who will be forced to bear the burden of the cost of the dam, the cost of financing the dam and the cost of furnishing free electricity to the designated industrial beneficiaries, most of whom are found in listings of BC Liberal funders. It makes a person feel a little like a scapegoat tied up tightly with no recourse, especially for those who didn’t vote for the party of fiscal responsibility and business acumen. I know I prefer bungling to the downright nastiness and greed that seems to characterize out current régime.

Dialogue de Sourds, Headbashing Forever

dotd

Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, amongst others, have long taught that we need to live in a society of unfettered markets, markets defined by and tailored to suit the needs of those whose principal drive is the accumulation of wealth, and therefore power, in the hands of the same people writing the definitions and the laws and processes that derive therefrom. How is this working for you? How is it working for your neighbours, friends, colleagues and fellow citizens. Is it looking as though, words aside, it is taking us to a rosy future of economic, social and environmental security? We will have different answers, of course, and likely depending upon where we sit in the economic hierarchy, and many of us not only have never known any other model, but may also not have considered any other model, along the lines of Margaret Thatcher’s pronouncement about there being no alternative and Francis Fukuyama’s jubilant declaration that we’ve reached the end of history, what with the fall of the Soviet Union.

There are rumblings: Anonymous, Idle No More and a host of protests about particular issues and projects, as is the current No Dakota Pipeline movement in the Dakotas and fanning out into Indigenous communities, and, slowly it is dawning on some groups that they will continue to burn the soles of their feet stamping out wildfires as long as there is systemic creation of irritants. Most of us are so busy with the concerns of day-to-day life, paying the bills, raising the children, ensuring that work is going as well as it can and trying to maintain a decent standard of living with, perhaps, some recreation built into the mix, that we hardly have time to investigate matters of governance, of resource usage and allocation, of attempts to manage the living system that hosts us. Additionally, since our neighbours share the same concerns and burdens as we have, the larger topics are unlikely to make it onto the docket for Friday conversation over coffee, or beer, or dinner. It is no help that what confronts us when we dial in the television, the radio, or go to our favourite respected news site on the Web is an amalgam of feel-good human interest stories, cat videos, fluff posts about health studies, updates on distant wars and terror attacks, threats from asteroids and earthquakes, and inducements to buy as much as you can afford, and then some.

Perhaps everything, as the fictitious philosopher Pangloss oft iterated, is arranged for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. There are those who suspect that there are several things rotten in the Kingdom of Figurative Denmark and whose fears might be quelled by some open dialogue that at least challenges the accepted doctrines of the Chicago School and the Washington Consensus. This falls under the heading of the life needing to be examined in order to gain legitimacy. The prescription is neither endorsement nor condemnation, but the examination through dialogue of what the possibilities might be.

To that end, I would like to invite all and sundry to an event, a ninety-minute film screening with the possibility of a conversation to follow in what seem to be rather convivial surroundings:

webneweconposter

The film is biased as heck in favour of co-operatives. No one has to agree, because alternatives have to withstand challenge. However the simple act of discussion might produce some interesting possibilities.  There is no cost to get in, and you don’t really have to buy anything, though I know Char would welcome your custom and support. No one is taking attendance, and you can leave at any time. Or you can stay and be a champion of your ideas.

Hope to see you there.

 

The Mouse That Mewled

Canada Makes The Big Time…

… for something other than the photogenic quality of its PM.

CF

 

Reported in both the Glob and Male and here, in SF Gate, alternately Canada, or Freeland, walked out of talks with the Walloons (Franco-Belgian Region) in an attempt to bring them to heel so that the EU can sign off on CETA, officially the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, the latest in a series of treaties aimed at removing barriers to corporate profit at the expense of pretty much everything, including sovereignty, way of life, culture, localization, the environment, sane fiscal policy, taxation, judicial matters, oh, and yes, it does reduce tariffs. However the agreement is dominated by the same ISDS clauses that make the treaty so odious in the eyes of those not likely to cash in on the corporate bonanza and also likely, through taxes, likely to pay for the rich settlements awarded by special tribunals for anything that constitutes a barrier to profits, real or merely possible (and sometimes not ever possible, but, hey!, you never know).

This situation is reminiscent of The Mouse That Roareda silly little bit of fiction from the mid-50s that was notoriously made into a film with Peter Sellers, prophetic is that the whole brouhaha centers on a trade dispute and has a ridiculously small and inconsequential jurisdiction holding sway over a much larger and more powerful entity. And it is likely to remain fluffy fiction, given the simple disparity in the weight of the parties in the international community and the rather narrow leverage at the disposal of the blocking party.

It is comforting to think that there is at least one government, even if only a small regional government, who, in the midst of the pressure from the rest of the EU governments and the establishment in Brussels (no small irony), has the fortitude to speak out in favour of its citizens. Many other EU nations have sizeable numbers of people opposed to much of what happens in the current anti-social iteration of the EU and to what compliant governments in component countries are willing to accept as part of what is supposed to be the economic cornucopia conferred by EU membership. The Greeks are likely the best, if not the only, constituency to poll on that score.

The other signatory to this document is, of course, Canada, and we don’t find much about opposition to this and other agreements in the press, likely because those who own and run the presses are happy to let the sleeping dogs lie and to abet the theft of sovereignty because said owners will be full beneficiaries of the shareholding class’s bonus. In addition, it should be noted that the Sunny Ways government currently installed on Parliament Hill has not been a model of communication or candour about the contents of the treaties they’re looking to sign into law, touting the reductions in trade barriers without mentioning the poison pills of dispute settlement, as well as constraints that will kill initiatives to build local economy or preserve some semblance of a livable environment. In this, as in other instances, Sunny Ways means pretty much the same sludge that we got from Harper and Company, regression rather than progression, profits rather than people, and a narrow circle of beneficiaries connected to Bay Street and the inner sanctums of the Liberal and Conservative parties.

 

Faith That Mires, Faith That Inspires (If You Care To Look)

CCFAith

 

 

 

 

 

From the Vancouver Sun, a piece about how Christy Clark’s Christian faith protects her from insults and people who doubt her integrity.

in·teg·ri·ty

inˈteɡrədē/
noun
 1. the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.
  1. “he is known to be a man of integrity”
    synonyms: honestyprobityrectitudehonor, good character, principle(s), ethics, morals, righteousnessmoralityvirtuedecency, fairness,

    scrupulousness, sinceritytruthfulness, trustworthiness

    2.   the state of being whole and undivided.
    “upholding territorial integrity and national sovereignty”

There would seem to be some divergence on Ms. Clark’s part from any claim to the above definition of integrity, though there is another thought about the term as meaning consistent with itself, and on this score, our Premier scores quite high marks. She might well be concerned about perceptions regarding her character, but it doesn’t ring true that she would need the comforting of Christian principles to hold her ground, given how far from the purported message of Christ she has strayed in her doings since being elected to public office. She has consistently chosen the camp of the moneylenders, has steadfastly declined to take action to improve the lives of the downtrodden and less fortunate, and, above all else, seems to have considerable difficulty determining where any truth lies beyond her own self-serving version of making the difficult decisions, putting families first, and building the best economy for all British Columbians. Most of what she terms insults are simple statements of fact, the litany of injury done to the present and future of the province she leads. She reminds me of my reading of Tartuffe, both in high school and again in university, along with a host of other cautionary tales about people who become public figures to feather their own nests and satisfy their own need for recognition. How is it that a major donation of public money ends up in the hands of the religious institution on which Ms. Clark relies for her soul soothing?    It’s enough to drive people to some sort of deep cynicism about religion, though I happen to live with someone who takes the message of Christianity quite seriously,

That person shuns the spotlight, is generous to a fault and invests both time and resources in improving the lives of those not endowed with the advantages of birth, career, relationships and the temporal situation that allowed many of us now retired boomers to live a life of relative comfort and security. Certainly, all humanity gets a place in her prayers, and, despite the rigours of a strict Mennonite upbringing, this includes those of other faiths, those nullifidians (thanks, Anu) she encounters, people of all colours, creeds, political outlooks, social strata and sexual orientation. She has always been and remains a model mother for her boys and a loving and concerned grandmother to the next generation. She isn’t a saint, just an exceptionally considerate, gentle, helpful and hardworking woman who operates on a belief system deeply rooted in the teachings of Christ. It’s a big part of what allows her to live with a heathen like me.