Category Archives: Just Stuff

Wherefore The CBC

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WebCBCCrew

Lots of reaction to the news that Peter Mansbridge is stepping down as the figurehead on the bowsprit of the MothershipNews, most of it entreating said Mansbridge to spare himself from bodily harm from the swinging door as he leaves. My sense was that Peter had some credibility in his earlier days, but it became painfully clear once the CBC decided to refresh its programming and seek a younger demographic that he would have to tread carefully or risk being displaced by the news equivalent of Strombo and put out to the senior lecture circuit with a mandate to sell more dietary fiber.

I once thought it would be a good deal to replace Peter with Ian Hannomansing. I really liked his style of reporting when he was with CBC Vancouver, but, of late, he seems to have morphed into a creature of the Harper CBC and is harder to distinguish from the run of CBC faces and names. I’ve thought well of some of Mark Kelly’s investigative material, but what happens when you plunk him in the Big Chair? Rosie Barton looked fresh and stinging when she took over from Evan Solomon, but the gig seems to have rounded off the edges, and the discourse clearly misses the point of serious analysis and reportage.

So here’s a thought: CBC needs to pioneer a new and faceless news stream for serious journalism where the reader never gets seen on screen and where the news can reach into those areas where currently it isn’t considered worthy of television, or too scary because reporting on the item might get the whole crew fired. The names can appear in the cast and credits at the end of the show, or in a byline under the title of the presentation, but no faces.

In addition, with their unlimited resources, the CBC can have a People group on a different broadcast channel where people like Heather Hiscox, Wendy Mesley, Michael Serapio and the like could hold forth on the people and places, the car accidents, marital upsets and petty crimes that seem to be so much a part of what gets passed off as news. There would be a lot of human interest here, but with a real fluff factor.

A third stream would be where we could really connect with the fringe element of the news community, where Jian Ghomeshi could meet up with Ezra Levant, where Evan Solomon could resurrect himself and where Peter could reminisce by interviewing himself one-on-one, complete with Rodin Thinker-like pose. This stream could be sponsored by people who make medication for elevated levels of hypertension.

Given that the whole outfit is still run by Harper Holdovers (is it not? it sure looks as though that’s the case), i don’t see too much in the cards in terms of a constructive rebuild, and I’ll continue to spend more time complaining about the state of news than actually watching it or listening to it. I’m sure glad my parrot had found a worthy recycling use for the moribund newspapers I used to read.

 

Juxtapositions That Scare the Crap Out Of Me

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The End

 

I read this piece from The Disaffected Lib, alias the Mound of Sound, one of the most thoughtful and trenchant of the blogging crew. It’s frightening mostly because it tells a truth that many of us seem to want to duck and delay. Then our Premier unveils a new climate plan that is, in effect, nothing but a stalling tactic to allow the friends of the current government to finish the final pillaging of the public weal. Knowing, and seeing daily, the degradation of the living space that is our planet, and knowing, and seeing daily, the willingness of those supposedly in positions of leadership to completely sidestep the crucial service that they owe to their electors, to future generations, and to all life forms on Earth is a jarring experience. Yes, Christy Clark is showing true leadership, but not of any sort worthy of admiration and emulation: she demonstrates perfectly what is necessary to embody the foot-atomping, fast-talking irresponsible truth-twisting and selfishness that will be the death of many in the short term, and of all of us in the longer term. Admittedly, she can’t accomplish this feat all on her own, but she is being ably abetted by our own Prime Minister of Canada, a suicidally compliant press corps and a business establishment that appears bent on dying young and leaving a big bank account (as a substitute for a beautiful corpse).

 

 

Right.

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DichotomyTwo of my very favourite bloggers, Norm Farrell and Laila Yuile, (and bloggers are an important source of information since the press, both print and electronic, have so precipitously dropped the ball) have made much of the need to abandon the traditional right/left dichotomy in our politics and, eventually, our governance, an idea with which I would wholeheartedly agree but for what I’ve seen happen in efforts to bridge that gap.

People should worry about right & wrong instead of right & left.

As I answered to the above tweet from Norm Farrell, our current situation is based on how wrong the Right has been since the early hours of their administration in May of 2001, and how consistently they have been wrong. Both Campbell and Clark have subscribed to the cover ideology of fiscal restraint, a false financial conservatism based loosely on the Washington Consensus idea of austerity, generally based on falsehoods served up to the press, and generally aimed at enriching their friends and corporate sponsors. The very fact of the protracted and ongoing damage that this group has inflicted on both society and the environment is cause enough to seek the most immediate and credible alternative.

The hitch lies in what is perceived to be a very flawed record on the part of the official opposition, and a lack of willingness (I care not on whose part) to form a cooperative union of all the opposition. I personally feel very cheated of what should have been a decade of social progress from 1991-2001, but it looks, from all the evidence I’ve seen, as though the New Democrats of the day bore much more resemblance to Tony Blair than to Jeremy Corbyn, and that they had adopted the same stance as the Federal Liberal Party of Canada, shamefully campaigning from the Left, only to govern from the Right, embracing some Lite version of the corporatism and cronyism that characterizes the current rascals in  the Rockpile.

As in many jurisdictions, including the aforementioned Tony Blair’s UK, the U.S. under Clinton, France under Mitterrand and now Hollande, Germany under Schroeder, Spain under Zapatero, Portugal under Costa and lately Greece under Tsipras, what is supposed to be the social alternative turns out to be pretty much more of the same slash and burn, corporatism-in-the-guise-of-trade, trickle-down crumbs-off-the-edge-of-the-table kind of administration characterized by our own Stephen Harper and Christy Clark.

This lack of choice is the price we pay for a lack of vigilance and a lack of willingness to put the proverbial foot down when our elected representatives go astray into the fields of pork-barrel politics and cease to govern in the long-term interest of society. The Left and Right are labels that might have outlived their usefulness in the current context, because what we’ve really seen is Right and Right-Lite. The chances of our ever getting a sample of what a real leftist government should be look to be ephemeral at best, and even leaner as we see the possibility that our current mores will lead to a very short future, but that ought not preclude the effort to work for something genuinely better than that under which we currently labour.

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

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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: honesty, probity, rectitude, honor, good character, principle(s), ethics, morals, righteousness, morality, virtue, decency, fairness,

    scrupulousness, sincerity, truthfulness, 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.

 

 

The Mayor Helps

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LH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mayor Lisa Helps of Victoria spoke yesterday at a gathering to memorialize those killed and injured at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and to allow a space for those shocked and traumatized by the events. This is pretty standard procedure for politicians. She also made direct mention of her sexual orientation, something not heretofore known to be part of her rhetoric, though she noted that everyone at City Hall and most of the community had known all along. This is what struck me, and I hope I’m not reading too much into it, but here’s my thought:

Watch it! Gross oversimplification on the way, combined with personal perspective. Bear with me, please.

 

We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, sexual and social beings. Much of what we do, particularly in the long period between puberty and senility, is driven by what is essentially a need to reproduce. Many narratives have grown surrounding our reproductive activity, particularly once the survival of the species seemed to be assured, wherein folks began to focus increasingly on the possible pleasures of the reproductive act and the social aspects of that interaction and its place in social intercourse. This has generated, over the centuries and millennia, a variety of narratives that we use to define our sexual selves and a lot of our social interactions with other individuals and groups. These narratives have become so ingrained that they produce some pretty serious cognitive dissonance when they butt up against conflicting narratives. This might be pretty devastating, particularly where some of the conflict might be internal, and to pile that on the conflicts inherent already in many of the narratives, might produce considerable stress and frustration.

 

We seem to be in a period where there is either an increasing amount of sexual misconduct of various forms and at various levels of harm, or where said misconduct is more readily becoming public. The recent Stanford Rape case, compounded by parental enabling-after-the-fact and what looks a lot like judicial laxism and favouritism, seems typical of current revelations, but then, there are cases such as that of a British MP who apparently interfered with young girls for several decades, something just now coming to light. What makes is acceptable is some people’s minds to unload their sexual tensions on someone else without consent? There must be a story inside these heads that says to them that it’s all right to engage in this kind of conduct, mostly in full knowledge that the law says otherwise, and that it isn’t being done generally in society.

 

Much of the cultural narrative I saw in my formative years was a very traditional look at the roles of men and women, along with a heavy dose of courtly love propaganda. As a counterpoint, my parents shared some of the household chores, discussed issues as equals and clearly formed the closest mutual admiration society I’ve ever known. This held up even after Dad died and continued, as far as I can tell, until Maggie’s death some fifteen years later. So along with all the fiction I read, the television I watched ( I quit for about a dozen years starting around age twelve because I found so much of it to be embarrassingly stupid), all the paintings, sculptures, poems and songs from all the ages, I had a head full of mostly that image of a steadfast, courtly and passionate love, and it was definitely focused on women. As I got into my later teens, I got immersed in blues music, meaning that I also got a big dose of the chest-thumping machismo of many of the big-name artists, the sly references to carnality or Bessie Smith’s bust-outbawd, and this seemed to permeate much of the love ethos of the milieux in which I traveled, with the temporizing influence of parental observation always lurking in the background. Illicit love was cheating on your partner and there was no admission that your partner might be of the same sex. All those perverts out there remained marginalized and stayed on the periphery of consciousness.

As society has adapted, so have I, and I like to think that I might even have been a bit ahead of the curve, particularly as I learned that I had pervert relatives, friends and former girlfriends, people who continued to be, as ever, wonderful people, so hey! what does it matter. They weren’t”out” in the full sense of public disclosure. I was “out”, but as a flaming heterosexual, a label I likely wore proudly.

Here is what Lisa Helps did: she just is who she is, and broadly tolerant of what other people are, but she didn’t walk around with a sign indicating that she was, for instance. the gay city councillor, or the gay mayor. She was a city councillor and her sexual orientation had nothing do to with it. Same for mayorishness.

With all the conditioning that goes on, we have to wonder whether the expectations we get from the narratives that surround us lead us to wear labels in hopes that labels will lead us to the fulfillment of these expectations, cause us to buy into what the extant narratives are selling without necessarily knowing that this is a subconscious act that leads to conscious acts. Lisa Helps waited until it was entirely appropriate to make a grand statement, and there was no judgement, belligerence or hostility in that statement, insisting that we may be different, but that no difference should separate us as social beings if we’re willing to tolerate and embrace plurality and cease to accept that threatening someone else for the peaceful expression of their social mores serves no constructive purpose. It stirs up a good deal of reflection about how the Orlando massacre came to happen and what we need to do to move ahead. It was, I thought,  a pretty neat trick on the part of Her Lordship.

Apologies for the rambling and disjointed nature of the piece. It’s a fragment of a much larger contemplation on narratives that’s been kicking about on and off for a couple of decades and is still very much lacking focus and resolution.

None So Blind As He Who Will Not See

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3 monkeys 3

 

A couple of interesting reads at Common Dreams and DeSmog Canada stirred up the meninges this morning. The first outlines a choice that confronts shareholders at meetings of Exxon-Mobile and Chevron this coming Wednesday with regard to fossil fuels and climate disruption, the second outlines the somewhat disturbing message from Brad Wall’s recent Throne Speech in Saskatchewan as he undertakes another majority mandate.

It is sad that, following the application of major scientific resources to the question, including those of governments and fossil fuel companies, there are still legislators who can characterize climate change as “some misguided dogma that has no basis in reality.” The oil giants’ own documentation aligns closely with the reports of the IPCC, and given that these are the people who own so many governments, including, it would seem, that of Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C., who, even with the introduction of a possible carbon tax in Alberta, continue to push for the construction of major fossil fuel infrastructure, meaning that they intend to get the stuff out of the ground and sell it off as quickly as they can (or as their proponents in private business can).

The fossil fuel industry continues to justify its existence on the basis of the economic activity it generates without mentioning that, for all the dollars it has spent on financing sales of trucks, RVs, ATVs, McMansions, and extended holidays in remote and romantic locations, it has taken out more than it has left. Despite the bleatings about the heavy burden of taxation imposed on fossil fuels, the corporations involved, as well as their executive suites, have made out like bandits, and the least subscribed beneficiary has been the public weal as a succession of federal and provincial régimes has deferred taxes and subsidized both directly and indirectly, those corporations who make such large withdrawals from the common resource. This doesn’t count the costs of remediation of the devastated landscapes of the Athabaska region, oil installations in Saskatchewan, Northeast B.C., along with coal mines hither and thither across the Canadian landscape and the potential for offshore spills in Atlantic Canada. The only reason this economic activity hasn’t been replaced with reconstruction and refinement of public infrastructure and the transition to sustainable energy is the set of close links between business and our various governments, leaving said governments to protect the privileged economic and social position of Bay Street and its equivalents in Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary and elsewhere. It has become abundantly clear that those in the executive suite have known for decades how harmful their activities are and have pursued those activities in spite of the message that they are literally destroying the common living space in a headlong rush to amass wealth before the whole show goes up in smoke. They have essentially taken out a mortgage on the future of humanity (and much of the rest of life on Earth) without having the least hope of paying it back.

 

The rest of us bear much of the responsibility for allowing this to happen. Just as the rise of idiot candidates for high office in many jurisdictions shows a lack of education and the fortitude to call out the insanity that fuels the inane behaviour of the political and mercantile classes, we, as a society, have in large part drunk the Kool-Ade, taken out loans even when we know that we likely won’t be able to pay them back, accumulated material wealth and the trappings of wealth without consideration for the consequences. Perhaps we can excuse ourselves with the idea that everyone around us is doing it: it’s difficult to live frugally in a society that prides itself on freewheeling because there’s always more where that came from, where the cultural norms are modelled around a high level of consumption. Like Cassandra in Greek mythology, telling unpleasant truths brings either disbelief or an unwillingness to act on the consequences of our actions. Repeated warnings about the dire consequences of our inaction on our climate (along with social and economic inequality, water shortages, myriad sources of pollution, toxic diet, nuclear weapons, epidemic outbreaks, genetic roulette, and the headlong rush into technologies whose outcomes are utterly unknown) have met by ordinary citizens (taxpayers, consumers, and the like) with the same contempt, deflection and denial that comes from our elected and mercantile representatives, as well as a sizeable portion of our spiritual advisers.

Over the last four or five decades, we have built an economic system that is willing to pretend that growth can continue uninterrupted ad infinitum and that money can create money. This is particularly evident in the need for people to save money to buffer their economic well-being through times of uncertainty and to ensure that there will be some sort of retirement available when work is no longer feasible for desirable. Both savings and pensions rely on investment, especially where the generation of serious gains is most achievable. The result is that many pension funds and investment vehicles are loaded up with, you guessed it, fossil fuel stocks, as well as arms manufacturers, tobacco, pharmaceuticals and investments in the financial institutions that promote overconsumption, excessive borrowing, occult financial dealings and tax avoidance, and the suborning of the electoral process. The idea that someone might act in the interest of society as a whole is a quaint anachronism, it appears, while it is accepted that doing anything for profit is the new norm, even if that profit derives from cost analysis that excludes “externalities”, including the possibility that the downstream effects of the activity in question might be deleterious to multitudes and span decades. Our work at reprogramming the Universe holds grave risks where it might better suit our purposes to sit back and contemplate the ramifications before charging ahead with all the genetics and  AI that might have disastrous results for life on the planet. The outlook is pretty bleak for those who take the time to connect the dots, and a lot of the bleakness stems from the willful ignorance of those who have taken the whole of humanity down the path toward an early exit from the rolls of the living.

 

 

 

 

(Don’t remember if I’ve used this before, but it seems apocalyptically appropriate)

 

You Have To Ask Yourself

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Aerial view of Syncrude Aurora tar sands mine in the Boreal forest north of Fort McMurray.

Aerial view of Syncrude Aurora tar sands mine in the Boreal forest north of Fort McMurray.

Fire

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ok, so I just donated money to the Red Cross to help out victims of the current wild fires in and around Fort McMurray, but I do so with large reservations. First, there are parts of the Red Cross that have a track record for behaving badly with donated money, and I have a general distrust of large charities, given the level of funds that get plowed back into fund raising and administration, executive salaries being one of the most egregious fouls. I also find it difficult to conceive that our society is built upon such weak links that we have to appeal to people’s empathy to get us to pony up for emergency backstops when this should be a proud function of the common polity through our agent, the government. Sadly, we have too many governments that act as captured read pools for the privileged and who blithely spend money on destruction, administrative waste and subsidies to their sponsors, who even then manage to cook up little schemes such as those highlighted by the KPMG affair and the recent release of the Panama Papers to salt away large swaths of unearned wealth where the common polity can’t touch it and where it can do no good for the general citizenry, as would be the case where we had adequate (or better) resources to fight fires, and to ensure the safety of all those affected by disasters of this, or any, nature.

There is also some (guilty) delicious irony in the location and circumstances of these fires, though, particularly in the face of scientific probity and the more flagrant roadblock of denialism, to actually draw a causal link between the carbon generated by the mining of the Athabaskan Tar Sands and the record hot and dry weather currently contributing to the propagation of hellish levels of forest fire activity. It’s hard to fault those residents of Fort Mac who are the victims of the burn: who turns down the kind of remuneration that oil patchers have been making for the last however many years? But where is the reinvestment resulting from the wealth generated in Canada’s short stint and an Energy Superpower? Not in Canada, mostly, having been shipped out to Shanghai and Houston (Texas, not BC).

As usual, the people in question, in this case the residents of Fort Mac, along with the competent authorities, seem to have made a good job of getting all and sundry out of the place alive, and generally in good health and spirits, if we’re to believe reports in the media (another question entirely, and what else are they hiding under cover of the fire stories?). This speaks to preparation, calm, competence and cooperation, often the operating mode in disasters, per Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell. The conversation about mutual aid needs to be part of our everyday discourse, particularly when we consider how vulnerable we are to all manner of cataclysms, and any safety net structures we can put in place, along with the attitude adjustment that should accompany that building, will likely stand us in terribly good stead as we get further into a destabilized climate and into the destabilized society that has been occasioned by the plundering of the greedy over, in particular, the last forty years.

(I may have used this before, due to its Karmic implications. Sorry.)

I Don’t Have To Write Most Of This Piece…

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CRA

 

…thanks to, amongst others, Dr. Dawg, who beat me to the punch writing about the doings and skullduggery over at CRA with regard to KPMG and its Isle of Man Easter Egg Hiding Scheme. I recall reading some about this a couple of years back when it came to light that KPMG was fighting to keep docs away from CRA’s eyeballs and thinking, in a most un-justiceable sort of a way, something to the effect of there being fire in the proximity of smoke, and lo! the taxmen stumbled onto an inferno. Nice, but they agreed to let the arsonists off easy and throw a blanket of ND silence over the whole thing, so I get to bleat about being one of the fleeced rather than one of the shearers, along with the rest of the chatterers. The thing is, does anyone believe that the Isle of Man is the only haven for refugee tax-free cash? Is KPMG the only wayward “accounting” firm (shares of Arthur Andersen, aka Accenture, perhaps a good place to scout, were CRA to be interested). Are the KPMG clients the only miscreants looking to avoid paying for the lavish lifestyle lived by the DTES crowd or all those oil patch layoffs going home to the various bailiwicks of unemployment and precarity? Interestingly enough, I saw a report on France 2 a week or so ago where the French Ministry of Finance and shepherded 21 billion euros worth of UBS client money back into compliance from illegal offshore (Swiss have a loose definition of “shore”) in the last year, and they expect to do about that much business in the coming year as they engage with some of the big tech companies who have been profiting handsomely from some loopholes that turned out to me more loop than hole.

By all means, people can be forgiven for not paying Canadian taxes, as long as they don’t live in Canada or do business in Canada. Anyone who lives and/or works in Canada, anyone who benefits from Canada should pay a fair proportion of the cost. All those involved at KPMG should be rewarded with a long stay in the GrayBar Hotel, and the wayward clients, having knowingly participated in the export of cash, should bring it back, pay the interest and penalties in full, and a premium for the research and court costs, upon conviction, of course.

In With The Winners

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BG

 

 

 

 

 

Bill Gates has cast in his lot with the FBI in their spat with Apple with regard to opening a back door to an iPhone for the Department of Justice, according to ReCode. This is not surprising as we’ve seen the king of marketing cavort at Davos with the stuff that rises to the neck of the old milk bottle. Not a crowd I would choose, but they certainly wouldn’t choose me, so the feeling is mutual. Gates is also a big fan on GMO products and Monsanto, it would seem, so this is a minor black mark in the book I don’t keep on Bill.

He reminds me of a class of people like Wayne Gretzky who was happy enough to have the protection of the NHLPA as a player; he might have been against them all along, but he sure benefited from the groundwork they laid that allowed him to blossom as a player and a financial entity. The move to LA seemed to coincide with the adoption of the polo pony lifestyle and the attitude of floating above the vicissitudes that trouble the little folk. All just a personal reflection on what I’ve seen of Wayne since 1988, and I have to admit that he hasn’t occupied a great deal of intellectual, spiritual or emotional space in my own little world. He fits in well with other champions of the underclasses like Bono, Sepp Blatter, and any number of athletes who have drawn deeply from the chalice of public support in their quest to carve out a little niche in the pantheon of prolific pulchritude (see? Rex Murphy is paddling like hell to squeeze in!).

Much is made of Mr. Gates, mostly because he has so much money, the Foundation not withstanding, given how the funds seem to get doled out, to whom, and with what strings attached. This is a man who made a fortune of selling bugs as features, who has managed to make the blue screen of death into a daily phenomenon and who, along with Apple and a legion of lesser players, has turned a large segment of the populace into techno-zombies who are readying themselves to surrender their ability to drive, to communicate face-to-face, to distinguish data from wisdom and a host of other functions that link us to our historical selves, as well as any constructive evolutionary future selves. He’s the perfect P.T.Barnum stand-in and has managed to cash in big-time as the one-born-every-minute has accelerated into billions and billions served.

This phenomenon of rising to blend in with the forces of the most destructive reminds me of a song that I first heard on a Bonnie Raitt album in, I believe, 1974:

 

And I did follow it back to its N’awlins roots (RIP AT):

The Good News Is Everywhere

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EU

 

I had a little pass through the site of the Washington Post this evening. Very enlightening, though perhaps not in the intended message.  I just find that I have to spend some time away from the echo chamber of my own building to see what’s out there and how it’s being presented to what seems to be an audience that is content to assume they’re getting the whole picture from mass media.

DC

An article that scores right up there on my own interest scale is the hammering out of an agreement that David Cameron can use to bolster the idea that the UK should avoid a Brexit, a departure from the European Union. On the face of it, the agreement gives special status to the UK in terms of retaining its own currency and making decisions about immigration and border matters (among other items), and this permits Cameron to pursue his policies of disaster capitalism without interference from the European Parliament. It also highlights what the EU has become, that being a vast neoconservative project to bring together as many European nations in a vast trading bloc where competition and flexibility of labour standards trump considerations of equity and well-being, human rights and the process of building a peaceful continent. It really is wonderful that France and Germany haven’t blown each other up for over seven decades, something of a rarity in the course of recent history, but a different kind of warfare is at work with the auto/technocrats centered in Brussels and following the lead of Chancellor Merkel working to ensure that Greek, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Irish assets fall into the hands of banking cartels, and that the large bulk of wealth continues to trickle up to those already on the winning end of the economic scale. At the same time, EU nations who once ruled vast empires, continue to plunder as much abroad as possible to feed the Euro version of the new empire, based partly on the same brute force of old empires, partly on the thumbscrews of capital and market access.

 

Elsewhere, Christine Lagarde has been reappointed as president to the IMF for a second five-year term. She was finance minister of France for a while under President Nicolas Sarkozy, a willing participant in rolling back workers’ rights, gutting protections for ordinary citizens, working to privatize pretty much whatever she could get away with and dodging inquiries into her dealings with Bernard Tapie, a once wunderkind of French business (sounds weird, doesn’t it?). As far as I can tell, she’s brought the same flair to her work at the IMF, continuing to push loans on poorer countries for projects that will benefit the larger concerns in international construction and finance ensure that the peasants everywhere are loaded down with debts they have little chance of paying off.

CL

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We might also recall that she was pressed into service when Dominique Strauss-Kahn was embroiled in a sex scandal in a New York hotel room in the days leading up to the presidential election in France, and election in which he was favoured to win the nomination of the Socialist Party and to very possibly oust Sarkozy. There was speculation that DSK had to go because he was making noises about a major shift in IMF policy away from the model pursued by Lagarde and those of her ilk. Whatever it was, he certainly left himself open to opprobrium and prosecution as multiple incidents of sexual bad behaviour seemed to pop up out of the woodwork like termites exposed to light, and DSK has been effectively sidelined, his place taken by Lagarde, that paragon of social rectitude and financial solidity.

The Post might define these two events as proof that the world is unfolding as it should, but those of us who live outside the fairy tale land defined by the Washington Beltway (and its equivalent at No. 10 Downing, the EU HQ in Brussels and the  Elysée Palace) might be more tempted to see said happenings as yet another shot across the bows of any meaningful undoing of the predations of the last forty years and a harbinger of yet more pillaging to come.

Meanwhile, here’s a little Pure Food and Drug Act from 1972 or thereabouts, Sugarcane Harris, Paul Lagos, Randy Resnick, Victor Conte and Harvey Mandel, something of an offshoot of John Mayall’s Blues Union outfit. Saw them do these tunes at the PNE Gardens about that time.  The second half of the vid has the intended message.

They also did a kind of a modal moan with lots of improv, the main lyric of which was something on the order of “Why don’t you cut that joker loose and come fly with me to L.A.”, I’ve never been able to find a recording and would appreciate knowing if it exists.