It’s a banner day for headlines at the Globe and Mail.
It starts with this:
PPF President Edward Greenspon, who is a former editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail and a former senior executive at The Toronto Star and Bloomberg News, oversaw the production of the report that was based on consultations with 300 people and a public-opinion poll.
There are actually some interesting propositions in the report, but the flashing red light on the bullshit filter goes off every time there is a reference to the sorry state of the country’s news media, especially when there is a call for public investment in private (for-profit) “news” outlets. These folks have soiled their own nest and often taken sums of cash out of the enterprise through salaries and dividends and failed miserably at informing the public of the events that have, in many ways, beggared the bulk of the country. There is far too cozy a relationship between the organs of the press and the privateers who siphon off an inordinate share of the wealth of the commons. It’s all free market all the time until there is suffering on the part of Bay Street’s minions, at which point the socialism that is so deadly for the working classes is just about a good fit for the poor starving media moguls.
We also get a screed on:
Look, it was hard enough putting up with his sneering countenance for the decade leading up to the election of October, 2015, but to have him consulted as a first-case consultant on the election of Donald Trump, or on who should be the long-term replacement for the man at the head of the FedCons is adding more than a bit of insult to the injury he has already inflicted on his poor long-suffering homeland. On top of that, does anyone else get the feeling that the FedCon leadership race is beginning to look a lot like the brewing storm of the Republican nominating process leading up to the Convention last August? Do we see mirror images of people like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jed Bush, Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson and Donald Trump in the faces of Kellie Leitch, Lisa Raitt, Maxime Bernier and, for God’s sake, Kevin O’Leary? This would all be so laughable if the clown car in the US hadn’t driven up the sidewalk, running over common sense, fiscal responsibility, several and sundry peace processes, voter integrity and the outcome of the Civil War in the process. I fear that Harper is our GW Bush and has spawned a Hillary figure in the form of JT who makes a good case for anyone else without regard to the sanity of the policies behind the figurehead.
We are also treated to this:
Of course, we know where that might be: in shell companies and offshore accounts, as indicated by the latest from the Panama Papers saga, wherein it turns out that Canada is as opaque as any place in the world when requiring or providing information on corporations, and where Canada Revenue chooses not to prosecute the big players because those folks have effective teams of lawyers who can stand weak and ineffectual laws on their heads in the pursuit of shady deals, while the mistakes of small fish are jerked on a hook in a trice.
Aspect number two of this fine piece is that it indicates to whom the G&M panders, and incites the rest of the G&M-reading proletariat to think of themselves as being in the know and as potentially shifting sides in the epic class warfare when their less-than-one-paycheque reserves eventually grow to the point where they will be in the winners’ circle of the Elect of High Net Worth.
And we’re supposed to subsidize this media slag heap?
