Robin Trower, 1974, It’s About To Begin…

…except it was already happening, if the snippets I’ve read about the reaction (in more ways than one) to the defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 American presidential election. There was this perceived excess of democracy at home and abroad as control of the economic and political processes slipped from the grasp of monied interests. Already plans were being put in place for a long-term strategy to ensure that the semblance of popular rule would return to and remain forever a semblance, and that there would be little chance that popular demonstrations and voter registration campaigns would have any meaningful effect on the stranglehold the wealthy and powerful would be exercising  over the affairs of the country and the world. My sense is that Bill C-51 is the most open manifestation of the will to openly and boldly exercise that control, particularly combined with the RCMP’s statement of the threat assessment that environmentalists pose to the fossil fuel business, making it clear that our PM’s version of prosperity (that lives in Houston, Texas) will take priority over the survival of life on the planet. As usual, there have been some really clear statements from various of the usual suspects (hasn’t that phrase taken a somewhat sinister connotation?), including this little bit from the Galloping Beaver. There is something in the lapsed Catholic part of me that cries out for some form of compensatory justice in relation to those who have perpetrated this fraud on humanity and who continue to do so under the guise of “sound fiscal management”, but, then, I guess the church would likely tell me that it is for God to judge and that we will all find our justice in the next life, rather like the promises of a burgeoning economy that will happen just after the next election. Watch for a good deal of this to be featured in the upcoming tilt for the PM’s chair this year.