So needing a break from other tasks, I sat down to regain some of my youth.  The song I chose was Phil Ochs’ Here’s to the State of Richard Nixon, itself Ochs’ own rework of his original Here’s to the State of Mississippi.  My lyricist heart got little satisfaction or really any exercise in the end.  I was amazed at how little needed to be changed from a song about Richard Nixon to make it a song about Stephan Harper.   My political soul soared though.  This little exercise in a very few minutes brought home to me the reasons for my nagging discomfort with the Harper government.  I had watched it all unfold before:  The lies, the religious fakery, laws changed quietly, almost secretly through Order in Council.

How many thought after Watergate that government would never be able to get away with such shenanigans again with the watchful eye of the media ready to pounce at the first sign of government subversion and abuse of power.  Yet here we are, thirty-seven years after Nixon’s ignoble resignation.  Is it because of our delusion that Canada is somehow more moral than the United States?  Or is it just because the media we trusted to raise the warning is now owned by a handful of men who create our leaders for us?

Whatever the cause it seems so little changes.  Like lemmings we blindly we run merrily to our demise again and again.  So here it is.  The words are all Phil Ochs except for the name and a few minor adjustments to make it fit more snugly to Stephan ‘Milhous’ Harper.

Here’s to the State of Stephan Harper

Here’s to the state of Stephan Harper.

Where underneath his borders

The Devil draws no lines.

If you drag his putrid tar sands

Nameless toxins you will find

And the fat trees of the forest

Have hid a thousand crimes,

And the calendar is lying

When it reads the present time.

[Chorus]

Oh here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of.

Stephan Harper: find yourself another country to be part of.

And here’s to the schools of Stephan Harper.

Where they’re teaching all the children

That they don’t have to care,

All the rudiments of hatred

Are present everywhere,

And every single classroom

Is a factory of despair.

There’s nobody learning

Such a foreign word as “fair.”

[Chorus]

And here’s to the laws of Stephan Harper.

Where the laws are set in secret,

Proroguing every day.

He punishes with income tax

That he don’t have to pay,

And he’s tapping his own brother

Just to hear what he would say.

But corruption can be classic

In the Stephan Harper way.

[Chorus]

And here’s to the churches of Stephan Harper (and Billy Graham).

Where the cross once made of silver

Now is caked with rust,

And the Sunday morning sermons

Pander to their lust,

And the fallen face of Jesus

Is choking in the dust,

And Heaven only knows

In which God they can trust.

[Chorus]

And here’s to the government of Stephan Harper.

In the swamp of their bureaucracy

They’re always bogging down,

And criminals are posing

As advisors to the crown,

And they hope that no one sees the sights

And no one hears the sounds,

And the speeches of the prime minister

Are the ravings of a clown.

[Chorus]

Make it happen Canada!

If assessed lower taxes do corporations create more jobs or just accumulate more wealth?  The first rule of corporate economics is that you do not use your own money for investment, you always borrow.  Profits are passed to corporate executives and shareholders.  Plant expansion, R & D, etc. (i.e. the stuff that creates jobs) is always financed with borrowed money.  Therefore the quick answer to whether the Tory corporate tax cuts will create jobs is no.

Will corporations flee to countries with lower tax rates?  If a corporation relocates to Mexico or to some other developing country is the tax rate the difference?  If it were then all corporations would flock to whichever country has the lowest taxes today.  Corporations would need to be constantly relocating until finally all states offered them full tax exclusion.  Our current corporate tax rate is half that of our southern neighbour.  Shouldn’t corporations should be flocking across the border as we speak.  And if corporate taxes existed nowhere, what then would tilt the scale to country A or country B?  The scenario is of course absurd.  Tax rates are a part of the equation but they are not the whole story.  Labour exploitation and increasingly weak or nonexistent environmental protection are more powerful incentives for at least manufacturing operations.

Okay, corporations are huge nasty bloodsuckers and no they probably don’t deserve a tax break but you and I do.  Right?  Why shouldn’t we be able to keep more of our paychecks.  Sometimes it seems that Ottawa and the provinces have their hands so deep in our pockets it may soon cross the line into something obscene.  If the government cut taxes I would have more money to spend.  Right?  Wrong!  If the government continues to cut taxes for you and I and the corporations you will have far less money to spend.

We pay taxes to the government for goods and services in return.  The Conservative plan is that we should pay less to the government for fewer services.  We cannot have it all.  The goods and services provided by the government cost money.  If government revenue declines then something has to go.  Health care?  Education?  Pensions?  What will it be?  The Conservative’s know this but say we can then purchase these services ourselves with the money we are no longer paying in taxes.  What they don’t tell you is that you will be paying more.  It is obvious if you just stop and think about it, which explains the Conservative gutting of education at both the provincial and federal level.  Wouldn’t want anybody out there with the capacity to think now would we.  I should maybe mention here that the Liberals are really Tories in red ties and have contributed almost equally to this overall misconception.  They may have less disdain for your intelligence than the Conservative party but they still work for corporate Canada, not you or I.

Let’s look at a practical metaphor.  I have to purchase a new toilet for my downstairs bathroom this year.  When I go to a plumbing supply store to buy one toilet I am going to pay full retail price.  I might get a small discount from one or another seller to entice me to purchase at his establishment rather than the one down the street.  But because I am only purchasing one unit the seller is limited in how much he can discount and still make a profit.  Profit is absolutely necessary for the seller to earn a living.  However, if one hundred of us got together because we all need a new toilet for our homes the seller’s latitude on price increases.  For a purchase of 100 units at the same time the discount can be much larger and the seller can still earn a living.  Everybody is happy.  As the number of purchasers increases, the price per unit can decrease.  This is basic economics.

Conservative policy wants us to each purchase what we need individually rather than collectively.  They say this is a saving.  In the case of policies like child care they actually tell us that this will lead to economic efficiencies.  What non sense.  Are the Conservatives just too simple to understand this basic principle of economics, the principle of economies of scale.  The Conservative party markets itself as the party of good business sense, the party of fiscal responsibility.  Either they are lying about this and they really are the party of business ineptitude or they are lying to the Canadian people that they are trying to save them money or as they put it keep more of your money in your pocket.  The opposite is the real truth.  Tory tax cuts will cut a deep swathe through not just your pockets but your savings and equity.

Political parties do not do things without reason and contrary to some popular opinion seldom do things out of sheer stupidity.  The Conservative party is not the party that will keep more of your hard earned money in your pocket.  Rather it is the party that will put more of your hard earned money into the pockets of their corporate friends.  Not only will corporations contribute less to the society and infrastructure upon which their profits depend but will receive a windfall in the extra profit from each of us lonely independent actors paying more for those services necessary to sustain our quality of life.  It is a win-win for corporations and a lose-lose for you.  Actually in recent years it has been a win-win-win for corporations — lower taxes, higher profits and a great big present of much of the money you gave to the government to buy services which they then never fully supplied because they diverted that money to their buddies on Bay Street.

It is time that police are held to the  same standards as the rest of us.  Were I to attack a child with a potentially lethal weapon I would be behind bars right now.  Not walking free with public money being used to justify my actions.  What I fear is that as time passes and a series of Potemkin investigations carry us farther from the truth, people will begin to forget and be inclined to accept the official (police) version of events.  But no version can justify this action.  Only the complacency of the Canadian public will provide a faux justification.  Don’t give them a victory.  Demand the immediate arrest of the officer involved.  The charge should be attempted murder.

Canadians need to keep their eye on the ball here.  It doesn’t matter if the child was armed.  It doesn’t matter if he approached in a threatening manner.  He is still a child.  Police are trained to subdue people by a number of means.  The taser was the incorrect choice in this case.

Tasers are being used as a great big fun toy by police forces across Canada.  Deaths have already occurred.  It is fortunate that this child is alive.  Next time we may not be so fortunate.  Will it take one of these over sized goons killing a child before Canadians see the light?  The police are no longer the servants of the people in this country.  They are just one more street gang and they need to be brought under control.

Our passivity will only send the message that this behaviour is acceptable in our communities.  It is not in mine.  It is not in the Canada I grew up to know and love.  But I wonder if that place even exists today.

But the question that should be asked is why Libya?  Government forces are cracking down on democracy protesters in a number of countries.  Last weekend another dozen or so people were killed by security forces in Yemen and our friend and ally Saudi Arabia has brutally intervened in Bahrain to prop up the monarchy in that country.  Is their suffering any less deserving of our attention and our intervention?

Once more the myth of Western humanitarianism is exposed.  But the media are silent.  Isolated reports dot the media landscape, because it is virtually impossible to keep events totally secret, but no more.  No theme songs and Hollywood graphics to mesmerize the public into a righteous indignation.  No daily interviews with correspondents on the ground.  The general public accepts what the media give it because they want to.  They want the myth to remain.  To step into the black river of truth flowing silently under the mask of civility would shame them.   Not because it is happening but because they don’t want to do anything to stop it.  How could they maintain the facade of moral civility if forced to face the foundation on which our wealth and power stand.

The Great Powers only engage troops in combat when their self-serving national interests are at stake.  In Yemen and Bahrain the existing governments have been friendly and cooperative with American aims in the Arab world.  In Franklin Roosevelt’s words they are “sons of bitches but they are our (America’s) sons of bitches.”  No depravity is too shocking, no slaughter too brazen but they are forgiven.  Those who are not collaborators are struck down to keep the myth alive.

Ribbons and other stickers on cars and in windows enjoin us to support our troops but it is the war they really want us to support.  Before you kill a human being yourself or by proxy step into that black river of truth.

The poll uncovered the other usual prejudices.  The poor are lazy, have lower moral standards, and any increase in benefits would discourage them from doing anything.  Most Canadians believe that if someone truly wants to work that they could find a job.  Of course the majority of the Canadians polled have likely not had to look for a job in the recent past.  Many of them I suspect are in my age bracket; too young to retire, too old to live a carefree life in my car.  Were my job to disappear tomorrow where would I go now.  Even ten years ago I might have had a competitive chance but at 58 (my current age) what employer would want to invest in me?

I still live in a working class neighbourhood (by choice, middle class people tend to bore me to the point of aggravation).  I see the struggles of some of my neighbours juggling more than one job often with unsympathetic employers who demand priority.  Any one of these are likely no more than three or four paycheques away from the streets.  The farther down the ladder one falls the more difficult the re-ascent.

We applaud corporations that cut costs by divesting themselves of full time permanent employees and then blame those same employees for their misfortune.  I suspect that most of this is just self deluding reassurance on our part.  It couldn’t happen to us.  There must be something wrong with those people.  If they had worked hard their employer could not have let them go.  My wife worked for years with a woman who believed she was indispensable to her employer.  She boasted with justification of being the hardest worker.  Both of them always met their production quotas and most times exceeded them.  Today neither of them have their high paying production jobs and neither will ever find another.  Both are crippled by the abuse of the plant and in their late 50s.  My wife is fortunate I have a good paying job with benefits and although it would be nice to have her $40,000 or so income coming in we live an opulent lifestyle compared to most of our friends.  Her friend from the plant is less fortunate and life is now a struggle with little to no option of retirement to rest her injuries.  Is she the architect of her own poverty?

All of us, myself included, are closer to poverty than we want to admit.  Such an admission would terrify most.  Today we are in the midst of a federal election.  Poverty is not even an issue.  Oh, the NDP and Liberals talk about pension reform for seniors ( a more sympathetic poverty group) but their programs will do little to help even that group.  The rest are left to struggle totally for themselves.  A couple of weeks ago I did my lecture on Pierre Trudeau’s Just Society.  In 1969 one in five Canadians lived in poverty.  The Just Society was to change that among other things.  But today the numbers remain virtually unchanged.  If anything they are higher.  Over the past several years food banks have reported ever increasing numbers of clients.   Those who have given up looking for employment fall unnoticed through the cracks.  When will we as a society finely do something to reverse this taint on our communal honour?

So when one of the party leaders arrives in your town over the next few weeks, tell him to pull his head out of his ass and look around at the reality of Canada.  This is fixable and it is time we did.

Likewise, Canadian media has never been telling us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  How could they?  Professional journalism, first created in the 1920s in Great Britain in order to undermine the unions and break the general strikes plaguing the country, has always only accepted the truth that serves it.  Schools of journalism from that time to this have taught objectivity based on use of only authoritative sources.  So journalists are to seek the authorities (i.e. the government and its agents) and diligently report whatever truth they fabricate.  This is what is called objectivity.  Anyone who is not sanctioned by these authorities is not to be listened to or given credibility.  Authoritative sources include the government itself, academics and think tanks sanctioned by the government and of course the business community.  Labour unions were considered unreliable and biased as were the academics that worked for them.  Anyone who challenged the government’s definition of the truth was considered a crank, and not to be taken seriously.

It is not that all the news is a lie but neither is it the truth.  Perhaps the greatest myth being propounded here is that there is a Truth.  Truth is contextual, temporal and personal.  Our truth is simply reality filtered through our biases.  Empathy is a better professional ethic for journalism than objectivity.  A celebration of all voices is preferable to one person’s supposed truth.  Insight, something truly valuable, can be found anywhere.  Just as the only person who could ever fully explain Nietzsche to me was a homeless alcoholic in Toronto.  While I reject the neo-con reject of all expertise as suspect, expertise and experts might be found in more places than are dreamt of in the philosophy of professional journalism.

With these current CRTC deliberations a number of petitions are circulating along with calls on all of us concerned with the truth to write the agency and anybody else who will listen.  I have resisted.  Not because I don’t want the truth to be reported but because I would be sanctioning an ongoing fraud.  To demand that the current restrictions remain is to give credence to a lie.  How can I sign a petition or write a letter in support of truth to maintain the chimera of the truth?

Now the story repeats itself in Tucson.  Where is the acceptance of responsibility?  Real idea leaders have the character to stand up and admit if there words brought death.  Either to justify it in the cause of a greater good as those who fought the war against fascism or to denounce it as an error in speech, a flaw in their idea that they did not expect or intend to end like this.  Thus far silence broken only by rationalizations that ignore the elephant in the room.  It is difficult to know if people like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity and the rest even believe the non sense that comes out of their mouths.  I suspect it has more to do with ratings and getting their fifteen minutes of fame, of boosting their egos and of raking in the speaking fees than it does with a sense of civic duty or trying to build a better stronger society or hell just reporting the news but that is from a bygone era when news was information not info-tainment.  The cost though is the life of a child among others.  Six people dead, others struggling to recover.  What makes you so important that we must pay like this?

But it is not just the Right Wing that has perpetrated and escalated this sewer of hate on the airwaves and the printed page.  All of the media needs to bear its share of the blame.  Instead of shouldering that responsibility and reflecting on where everything went wrong the media has gone out of its way to focus the blame away from them to the lone gunman.  He was deranged.  He had a history of social and psychological problems.  Geraldo Rivera who has made a bad joke into a career conflates everything from Puerto Rican independence to the plight of the Palestinians together as some sort of background report.  Of course he failed to mention the American Revolution and the acts of terrorism committed against innocent civilians by the Sons of Liberty, men revered as heroes by the very journalists that incite this new psychotic patriotism.  Not everyone who commits an act of political violence is deranged and while some of his examples fit others certainly did not.

In this case the young man does have a history of problems.  There are only two possible groups that will be influenced by the ravings of the lunatic pseudo conservatives:  one is those who believe they can benefit from the chaos, fear and the blind obedience to those who seem to offer control and order; the other group is the weak, the frightened, the disenfranchised, the terminally gullible lost in a world that has left them behind.  An education system has abandoned them leaving them with few skills to discern truth from deception. It has left them hostage to the swirling winds of political manipulation.  Sadly, this is by far the larger of the two.  Our gunman falls within this second group.  Told that the president of the United States and his supporters are actually attempting to destroy his country and told in the same breadth that that country is the best one that has ever been created (both incorrect), what was his simple mind supposed to to?  And what will the next simple mind do?  This is not over.  If nothing changes, if the same morons of media spew their idiocy unfettered, there will be more carnage, more funerals.

We cannot prevent it if we continue to delude ourselves and not take responsibility; responsibility ourselves for allowing this diatribe to continue, responsibility for watching and laughing when we know that others are being duped.  Making the actual announcers who use this hate speech to further their careers responsible will be much harder as they show no moral character themselves.  Appealing to their better natures is an appeal to a void.  But, a start might be to hold them legal accountable when they do step over the line.  When Glenn Beck in the Moyers piece ruminates on whether he would need to hire someone else to kill Michael Moore or if he could do it himself, the law should take him at his word.  It is a  crime under Canadian law to utter a death threat and I believe it to also be a crime in most U. S. states.  I interpret those remarks as a clear threat against Michael Moore’s life and should not be taken as a joke just because Beck is a radio and television personality.  It’s not much of a beginning but if we don’t start somewhere things will only get worse.

Today Remembrance Day has been hijacked by those who would support new unnecessary and counterproductive wars from Iraq to Afghanistan to the amorphous War on Terror.  The poppy is being made the symbol of those who romanticize war as a public good.  I will not join their number.  I will not be a hypocrit.  War is not romantic.  It is not glorious.  It is ugly and wasteful and a cancer upon human society that should be blotted out.  No one should support a war unless they admit the truth behind it.  I suspect that would be very difficult for most people.  How many Canadians would justify the murder of Afghan civilians or even partisan insurgents for the sake of controlling a pipeline route for our southern neighbour?  How many would say those who died to grease the wheels of cross-border trade were heroes?  Parents of the dead and injured must believe the fairy tales to cope with their loss.  But wouldn’t it be better to confront the truth before and have their children and siblings and parents with them still? 

This year I simply mourn.  Not just those whose lives were stolen in wars they were never allowed to fully understand, but those who they killed, who we all have killed.  I mourn the deaths of Afghan civilians and fighters.  I mourn the deaths of the children of Iraq.  I mourn the deaths of Palestinians as they are slowly exterminated in a genocide in which we are compliant.  I mourn the deaths of East Timorese whose killers were in part financed by Canadian taxpayers.  I mourn all those who have died unnecessarily for the greed of others.  And I mourn the poppy.  Murdered at the hand of those who have distorted its simple message and who now make its withered corpse dance to their beat.  If there ever was a death that I would not mourn it would be the deaths of these necromancers of war.  

John Kelly

The Web is a community.  Blogs are coffee shop conversations in a virtual reality.  They are the arguments, stories and laughter we share in a planetary cyber café.  Would the police have arrested Mr. Kelly, the accused in this case, if they had overheard him making similar remarks to some friends over cappuccino and biscotti?  I strongly suspect that the answer would be no.

The cornerstone of their case will be the obstruction of a peace officer in the execution of his duty of his duty.  This is a serious offence and certainly warrants criminal charges.  It is alleged that Mr. Kelly interfered with potential witnesses.  The Calgary Herald reports:

Much more than this should be necessary to charge someone with obstruction.  I fail to see how this would hamper police investigating a crime and so I expect police to explain to all of us clearly and concisely exactly how this action interfered substantially with their investigation.  .

In public service it is never enough to act correctly.  You must be seen to be acting correctly.  Perception is everything in the public domain.  This episode smacks of intimidation.  The CBC reports:

Why go to such lengths to uncover an obscure law?  It begins to sound like Calgary Police found Mr. Kelly to be a right pain in the ass and wanted to show him.   The Calgary Police do themselves or their fellow police services no favour by proceeding with this prosecution.  It makes us all wonder just what they have to be afraid of and unveils the lack of a real freedom in this country.  A revelation I would welcome far more than they.

An inquiry was certainly warranted if allegations were raised.  But in a democratic society that inquiry must be public.  We should not just now be finding out about this problem.  Why would the government not announce the inquiry at the time.  I am confident of the response that will come out once government officials begin their tap dance before the media.  It will all be ‘national security’.  It will all be bullshit.  There is absolutely nothing about an inquiry into the behaviour of our soldiers that will threaten this country or its citizens.  Do we think that the Afghans are unaware if our soldiers have tortured them or facilitated others to do so?  Are we afraid that the Taliban or other groups will torture our people if it becomes apparent we torture prisoners or tolerate others doing so?  Perhaps we think that the result might be terrorist attacks here.  What is it we are so afraid of.  Whenever the great ‘national security’ bogey man is evoked from the mists there is no effort to explain what that means.  It is a hollow threat to put us in our place.  We are being treated like children and frightened into not asking embarrassing questions.

The JTF 2 website contains the following statement:

Myth 11 – JTF 2 conducts activities outside the law.

Answer – All JTF 2 activities are conducted within the bounds of Canadian Law. Furthermore, the Government of Canada authorizes the overall missions and tasks undertaken by JTF 2, at all times. The unit is accountable to the Chief of the Defence Staff. The Chief of the Defence Staff is accountable to the Minister of National Defence who, as a Minister of the Crown, is responsible to the Prime Minister of Canada.

If that statement was made in good faith, and I have no reason to believe that it was not, then JTF 2 should want any investigation of their activities to be transparent.  It is not enough for a public organization to claim ethics it is imperative to be seen to be ethical.  A secret inquiry does not do justice to the service women and men of this unit.  If they have nothing to hide they will survive scrutiny under the light of day and be the better for it.  And it is imperative that we demand public oversight as ultimately you and I are responsible for their every action.  If we sit back and do not due our civic duty in holding our representatives to the highest possible standard then we are as guilty as they of any wrongdoing.

We pump up our chests and announce to the world that we govern ourselves.  Maybe we should drop the sanctimony and get down to the business of governing ourselves.