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:

Mon Dieu, promets-moi que l’enfer existe!

Dear God, promise me that hell exists!

(Quick Addendum: this was over at Pacific Gazetteer’s place:

http://pacificgazette.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-high-flyer-bruce-hyera-victory-for.html)

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: