In Libération this morning, a little item that the French government is readying a law that would decouple the link between polluters and players when it came to assessing penalties for environmental damage. Our provincial government may not have done this in legislation, but they have surely accomplished the same end without bother of recourse to the law, given what has transpired in the wake of the Mt. Polley tailings dam breach and subsequent run-off. There are many other instances where the law is twisted, flouted or simply ignored, and it wouldn’t surprise in the least to have the CC gang simply change the law in their favour. They seem to have captured the courts, a group where certain strata of the judicial corps seem not to have heard of SC decisions regarding treaty rights. But, what the hell, with CETA and the TPP, the law is pretty meaningless in any case, sort of a glass case through which citizens can witness the destruction of civil society as it is dismantled by secret tribunals in another room, behind the curtain,
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):
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.
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.
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.
Heard CBC announcing again that DeJong had done this or that in his fourth balanced budged, no caveats anywhere, no commentary, just a simple statement of faith. Anyone who puts a lot of faith in the pronouncements of DeJong or any of the current crop of BC Liberal ministers is on a bit of a fool’s errand, but these little gems of chickenshit-that-passes-for-journalism are what keeps the circus in town, and it’s everywhere in the newspapers, on the radio and on television. Some of it is perhaps because of time and budget constraints, but I suspect that there is much of it that lies in direction coming from the top levels of the executive suite. It’s ugly stuff, it’s lying by omission, it’s a crime of lèse-société, and it does real harm to real people.Sadly, there seem to be no consequences for either the (lack of) reporting, or the underlying damage done by the pols in question. Y’all have a nice day, now.
If you ever happen to be watching an American network in the next little while, you’re pretty certain to see some of this, in fact, a lot of this. It may not be this guy for much longer, but you can substitute the clown or your choice, because the clown car is pretty full right about now. Here’s my attempt to be even-handed:
In this case, for the purposes of this piece, we’re less concerned about the people in the foreground and their plenitude of pronouncements (Rex! where are you now that no one needs you?) than about the people who cluster around the speakers and either nod sagely or bobble their heads uncontrollably. Knowing that some of them are hired actors doesn’t make the silliness any more palatable as we watch people agreeing with some of the most patent dishonesty imaginable. It conjures up images of this, an all-too-frequent occurrence:
In a report released this morning, the Fraser Institute continues to build a legend around a theme of digging up novel methodologies for making reality fit their creed of greed (oh, and by the way, you don’t get any, but you don’t need to know that). The report ranks the provincial premiers on their fiscal acumen and, surprise, Christy Clark comes out as the winner. Please go read the whole thing as it encapsulates the decades of depredations occasioned by those who follow the tenets of this well-funded echo chamber of acolytes of the University of Chicago Economic Orthodoxy.
Isn’t it good to know that we’re number one at something other than the lowest minimum wage and the most child poverty?
Evidently, we’re not done praising Mr. Bennett. A memorial gathering was held this past weekend in Kelowna and much praise was heaped on the now-deceased Premier. I know this from hearing some tasty clips on CBC Radio’s On The Island, clips from a couple of my favourite people, Pattison and Spector, commenting that Bennett seemed tough, but that it was tough love and that he always had the interests of the people of BC at heart, in addition to which, he had a knack for telling the truth. Yes, yes he did care about keeping the people of BC in their place as contributors to the Pattison economy, and yes, yes he did tell the truth, exactly as dictated by folks like Pattison and Spector (Spector who worked tirelessly for the likes of Billy Bennett and Zalm, friend to Campbell and to that stirling example of moral rectitude, Brian Mulroney). These people are so generous that they would save us from the sin of greed by being taking on all the greed they can and showing us the true path of poverty and obedience. So now can we call it a day and let Bennett stay dead?
When a newspaper dies, a community is lesser for it, opines Roy Macgregor over at the Globe and Mail, and I would tend to agree, but the timing of the dying is connected to the definition of death. As one who always loved the idea of a weekend morning ensconced on the couch with a pot of coffee and at least one fat weekend edition, it has been wrenching foregoing that often somewhat masochist pleasure, and even the occasion for a few pangs of regret when the daily five-minute scan or our local rag was abandoned for a bouquet of reasons (price hike, less content/more ads, unending editorial spew) and finally had a stake put through its heart when Black Press shut the paper entirely as summer faded into fall this past year. Then yesterday, there was a lot of wiling and gnashing of teeth as the Nanaimo Daily News faded to Black (whew!) after a run of 141 years, amply demonstrating David Black’s utter contempt for anything other than profits and hatred for unions.
Macgregor’s pronouncement has some truth in it, but the reason these papers died was apparent long before management chose to right-size the local paper industry: as I said to the subscription folks locally on a number of occasions that the paper had morphed into utter irrelevance. It died when it ceased to serve the needs of the community, and it’s only now when there is no “paper of record” that people in these parts wander around with blank stares wondering how it is that we don’t have a central organ to connect citizens with each other and with a semblance of knowledge on which to base some form of wisdom and discernement. It reminds me of (wait for it) a line from an old song that Paul Butterfield sang in 1968: “Your mind is leaving’, but your body’s staying’ here.”
By the way, closing small schools is a good way to rip apart rural communities, and, I’ll wager, urban neighbourhoods. This is David Black working from the same plan as our provincial administration in the quest to turn us all into industrial ciphers.
Actually, the is supposed to be good news, but, as is often the case, the joy or pain is related to how one views the subject.
This came up when scanning the Globe and Mail this morning, where Canada has been listed as the ninth least corrupt country in the world. I guess this is reasonable because we don’t have to deal with the level of garbage that happens in much of Africa, say, or the “Stans” (notwithstanding characterizations of Canada as Canuckistan), but with the B.C Rail deal, Site C, the Health Ministry Firings, Quick Wins, LNG, the Massey Tunnel replacement and everything else that just doesn’t smell all that clean, it would seem that someone missed something in this little corner of Canuckistan. Allison Redford showed us that our neighbours aren’t ready to let us steal a march on them, Kathleen Wynne is facing some sharp questions about her practices and those of her predecessors, and, certainly since the days of the Big O and the ’76 Olympics, there are few who would attribute lily-whiteness to Québec politics. For brevity’s sake, we need go no further, without even getting started with the Federal governments of many ages, in wondering if, since we’re so wonderful, how the hell does anyone get anything meaningful done anywhere else without a level of bribery and corruption that boggles the mind and bends the definition.
It’s a sad perversion of the idea of beauty being in the eye of the beholder and conjures up thoughts of the press saying anything it thinks would be cute, of ourselves being smug, and of a wilful ignorance on a grand scale.
For those whose French is a work in progress, the headline, from Libération, states that unfulfilled promises of reform kill the very idea of democracy. Of course, this is very true of the current administration of President François Hollande, as it is of Jean-Marc Ayrault and Emmanuel Valls, his two Prime Ministers, but it seems a recurring theme with governments both in Canada and abroad, and very much on point with current discussions of the signing of the Trans Pacific Partnership, where the meaning of the campaign slogan “Real Change” is shown for the hollow rhetoric that it is. Minister Freeland would have us believe that signing is not ratifying, but with a whipped majority and an ignorant electorate, ratification looks like a reasonably sure thing, showing to what extent the Liberal Party of Canada is in thrall to the same interests, if not exactly the same players, as the previous Conservative administration. Trudeau is looking increasingly like More Of Same rather than Real Change, in much the same fashion as the Hope and Change of 2008 morphed into Wall Street ever present in D.C., Guantanamo still open, another market bubble, increased wars and more carbon than ever pumping into the atmosphere. Is it any wonder why people seem reluctant to spend whatever minimal time it takes to get to the polls? It isn’t as though North America has a corner on the broken promises, given that the hope for a better future engendered by the formation of the EEC and then the EU has turned into a huge bureaucratic boondoggle and an entirely captured enterprise in the neoliberal mode. The rising tide of economic activity in Asia has failed miserably at making a decent life for most Asians, and Russia, post-USSR is a basket case with economic disparity on a level rivalling the Russia of the Tsars. The phenomenon occurs at all levels, not being restricted to national governments, as can be seen here in BC where our current administration wants to pull both triggers of the climate shotgun by giving pride of place to dilbit pipelines and LNG development, having first created conditions to ensure that none of the possible benefits stay here in BC.
Is democracy sacred? We look to find out fairly quickly whether its replacement will do better and creating conditions for inclusive well-being, a state that should be sacred.
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
― Frank Zappa
