Monthly Archives: March 2017

If Christy Were In Korea, Would Life Head South?

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The Constitutional Court in South Korea has confirmed the impeachment and removal of the President, Park Geun-hye, as a result of her corrupt dealings with big business. This has been the result of a protracted and sometimes violently repressed series of mass protests, with the citizenry of the Republic of South Korea forcing the impeachment hearings who were confronted with pretty clear evidence of preferential treatment of those who fed the personal and party coffers of the outgoing administration. Does this have a vaguely familiar ring to it? While the multiple donations by lobbyists of funds originating from other donors may be the only legal line crossed, that can only be as a result of the current administration having kept the legal bar so low that it wouldn’t interfere with strawberry pickers, let alone cotton-pickin’ donors looking to circumvent the one person one vote system of elections.

One also might wonder what it was that mobilized so many Koreans to get out in the streets in what might seem like an overwhelmingly difficult task. Could it be the simple knowledge that their system of government was corrupt to the point that it no longer operated in the interests of the general population? Is this part of why people in Canada and, in particular in B.C., stay cozy in their beds and ensconced on their couches with a bowl of popcorn and the latest version of Survivor? The outrage that powered the Korean impeachment, like the movements of the original Arab Spring, the Maidan protests in Kiev. the Velvet Revolution in Prague and a host of other movements was based on knowledge of the corrupt nature and the lack of fairness and voice in the affairs of the various jurisdictions concerned, something that is sadly lacking in Canada for those who haven’t yet had that tingling sensation. that political spidey-sense that tells them that they have to branch out in their quest for what’s bothering them and who are unafraid enough to tumble into the maelstrom of on-line political discourse, armed, hopefully, with a fully-deployed and fine-tuned BS filter, considerable patience and massive doses of discernment.

The fate of Park Geun-hye should also be the fate of Christy Clark and of any person charged with the public well-being who turns instead to the perpetuation of personal aggrandizement and political power.

 

Toad of Toad Hall

 

 

Further Coleman

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“The poor will always be with us.”

 

Deputy Premier gets to be himself today, because his very real lack of care for those who aren’t able to feed the Liberal Donor Bag makes him a perfect example of those who throw up their hands (and perhaps wink) while bleating the above utterance. There is a very clear primary cause for the continued existence of a segment of society that is consistently underserved and excluded, that being people like Coleman who are willing to rig the “Free Market” game so that there are many more aspirants than successes, and where the success of the new is determined by the amount of the productivity of society that they can sequester for their own use. He and his governing party, as is the case with almost all governments of our current crop, got to a dominant position not through virtue, intelligence, hard work, nor through any constructively creative problem solving, but through jiggering the apparatus of the state so that wealth flows from the lower strata up into the hands of the puppet masters. His “boss”, Christy Clark, has said in a blog post cited by Huffpo, that what women lack is  the confidence to compete and to win:

It starts very early. When I was growing up, we didn’t have a lot of mentors or even positive role models, showing us that women could compete and win in any field they chose.

So who would be such a laudable mentor that taught Christy that deceit, obfuscation and outright cheating were the path to success, and that success was best obtained at the expense of society’s most vulnerable?

Really, when it comes to a lament, better than today’s opening statement would be:

The rich will always be with us.

 

I wanted to embed the video 50/50 from the site below, but it appears not to be available. Here is the site, perhaps it will come up again later:

http://www.refinery29.com/tiffany-shlain-50-50-film

The Marie Antoinette Moment

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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.