While the governing body of Canada’s broadcasting industry considers slackening the restrictions on truth in the media, I can’t help but reflect on the response of a friend:  “What would be different?”   The simple truth of that statement was reinforced with the reports on the congressional intelligence hearings in the United States.  A news reader confidently, with no affect, talked of the intelligence failures of September 11, weapons of mass destruction and missing Egypt.  Ignoring the ambivalent error of describing September 11 and Egypt as intelligence failures.  The middle one.  The one that led to the Gulf War is a study in media lying.  NO doubt exists that every legitimate intelligence agency from MI6 to the CIA and all the little acronyms in between, repeatedly informed the Bush administration and their Downing Street toady that the meager information extant on Saddam’s weapons was questionable at best and much an obvious fabrication.  The United States did not go to war because it had faulty intelligence.  It went to war because it ignored a mass of good intelligence that did not serve a certain political agenda.  The United States and British governments still maintain that the invasion of Iraq was an error based on faulty evidence.  Documentation clearly disproves this but since the authorities still maintain the lie the media obediently reports it as truth.

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?

Charges of criminal libel by Calgary Police against a local man for opinions expressed on his website will and should send a chill up the spine of all of us who use the web to express our views in one of the few democratic forums open to us.  Websites, such as mine, are opinion driven and allow us to express views without the necessity of providing court ready evidence to back up our assertions.  Lack of such evidence does not make us wrong or frivolous.  It should not be a reason to relegate Bloggers to the lunatic fringe.  Rarely can ordinary citizens with limited means and a life that does not permit the kind of arduous research time available to the major news organizations interview witness and obtain incriminating documents.  Our readers look to our skills of analysis and insight applied to publicly available evidence to adjudicate the quality of our work.  Our skills and our work is vitally important when applied to public services and institutions especially.  The old adage that “I pay your salary” is not a demand for police not to do their job but a demand that all of us, guilty and innocent alike, be treated with respect and that as a public service the public has a right to criticize police behaviour and competence.

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.

Toronto is a major film producing city yet the production values at the G20 summit left much to be desired.  First the placing of the police cruisers to be fired was too static.  The director failed to convey any sense of motivation for their presence;  they stood awkwardly at center stage like a nervous young actress arriving too soon on her mark lacking the stage savvy to carry over the moment.  The ‘Black Bloc’, the equivalent of the chorus from a Greek tragedy, rather than forming from the mists of the protest to give voice to the passion of the moment made stilted entrances past police who openly facilitated their approach for all the audience to see.  Bad form indeed!  The audience should never be privy to the stagecraft.  It spoils the magic and make the whole production amateurish.  Costuming also let down the production.  Wardrobe needed to distress the costumes before the curtain went up to give them the air of the battered uniform, a must for the noble warrior, the Don Quixote.  Instead police agent provocateurs amongst the protesters wore new smartly pressed black outfits and police issue combat boots.  All in all the government’s attempt at Greek tragedy ended up as Roman farce. The government would have been better advised to contract one of the many professional film producers to stage their little show rather than do it themselves.

I know that many out there will think my little choo-choo has finally gone around the bend.  Have I slipped into madness?  To think that the government staged burning police cars and smashing windows is just insane, right?  And that is exactly why governments get away with it.  It is insane.  But let’s look at the most important evidence:  the motive.

The first measure of the veracity of a conspiracy theory is motive.  This is where most conspiracy theories fall apart.  If their is no compelling reason to conspire to do something why go to all the trouble and risk?  Take the Kennedy assassination for instance.  This conspiracy has been around for 47 years now but the problem with every scenario is the why.  Kennedy was in trouble politically.  Why waste a bullet and drawing all that attention on a president that was about to become another one term wonder.  But in the case of the G20 the motives are strong, compelling and multiple.

First there was the enormous cost of the security operation.  While it certainly is the least important of the motives it is still compelling.  An election is almost certain within the next 5 to 12 months.  Having spent over a billion dollars on security how could the Conservative party face the electorate if nothing very notable had happened?  This is a variation on the old saying ‘What if they threw a war and nobody showed up?’ In this case what if they spend all this money and the protesters don’t cause enough damage.  With Canadians suffering economically the Conservatives could not afford to be seen to be spending money frivolously.  Especially not after FakeLakeGate.  The only way to be sure that the protest would get out of hand and frighten Canadians was for police agents to physically start the process.  After all you can’t trust a bunch of tree-hugging, hippie, leftist peaceniks to start a decent riot now can you.

This brings us to the second motive:  frightening Canadians.  In the pages of this blog and billions of others around the globe people like me have been warning of the impending security, financial and environmental reckoning.  Even the Pentagon report to the Bush administration stated clearly that this planet will not be able to sustain a population of more than 3 billion people by 2100.  That is less than half of today’s global population and less than a third of the 9.1 billion projected for 2050.  The Pentagon estimate I should add is the most generous of all I have encountered.  Most others estimate a maximum sustainable population of around one billion and a few even less.  The lowest estimated sustainable population for 2100 that I have come across was approximately 100 million.  Today there are a few hundred thousand climate refugees.  Within a few short years there will be millions and then billions.  James Lovelock suggests we built barricades and heighten security if we happen to be among the fortunate to live in a part of the globe that will still support human life.  To do this we must end this dalliance with democracy.  But we may not have to worry about that.  The financial and security reckonings may preempt the ecological.  Spillover from Iraq or Afghanistan or more likely both has the potential to draw in major powers resulting in large fast population reduction with the added turmoil, dislocation, lingering deaths of such a war destabilizing much of what survives.  And the financial meltdown has only begun.  It will play a role in the timing and ferocity of planetary ecological degradation and destabilization of global security.  The unwavering faith of our leaders in the American economic model shows their intellectual inability to conceptualize anything else thanks to a battered and bankrupt education system rather than the strength of the system.  Laissez-faire capitalism is a chimera.  It has failed every time it has been attempted.  But this time it has been pushed farther and the very institutions that society had created over the centuries to protect itself from the worst consequences have been systematically dismantled or undermined by the priesthood of the New Right.

Government officials may deny the inevitability of these events.  They may assist their lackeys in the main stream media to foster confusion.  But at the highest levels they know as well as I do that these events will take place.  Their plan or assumption is that they will be among the survivors and the rest of us be damned.  To do that they must heed Lovelock and end democracy.  To seize power arbitrarily would trigger a backlash.  Too messy and uncertain.  Much more effective to convince Canadians to surrender their rights and freedoms in the name of security.  A quick survey of the letters to the editor in support of the police actions in Toronto should prove beyond a doubt that the tactic is working.  Canadians seem more than willing to surrender everything they say they fought for in the world wars and are supposedly fighting for in Afghanistan.  What irony to send troops half way around the world to fight for a value we do not prize at home.  The G20 events in Toronto had a powerful effect on the unsophisticated and uninformed.  We will see the anti-terrorism laws renewed expanded when they next come up for review and we will see a general and substantial increase in police powers over the next five years.  The G20 protests will be as powerful a symbol in the hands of Canadian elites as 9/11 was to American elites as they stripped the liberty from Land of Liberty.  They needed it and they got it because they did it.  As simple as that.  Any who question rising authoritarianism will be shown pictures of burning police cars as Americans who question are shown the images of 9/11 and in an earlier generation on another continent those who questioned were reminded of the Reichstag fire until the die was cast and they could be silenced more effectively.

The final motive is chaos.  In chaos it is a human tendency to cling to the known rather than fly to things we know not of as Shakespeare might say.  New economic ideas, new ecological initiatives and new diplomatic peace initiatives all take a leap of faith.  It always seems risky to move in a new direction.  And it is risky but better risk swimming for shore than cling to a sinking lifeboat.  Is it a surprise to anyone that those who benefit most from the status quo should want to disparage alternatives.  By painting the protesters as the lunatic fringe, the current elites can assure the support of the timid which is most Canadians who face the challenges of day to day living.  As Otto von Bismarck said  so eloquently ‘A man who relies upon the state for his pension is not likely to rebel against that state.’ By the time most Canadians realize that their comfort is no longer exists it will be too late.  In this way the political and economic elites of this country smear their opponents and solidify their support.  It is a bold stroke.

So there you have it.  The motives for the government to commit insanity.  I suspect that many remain unconvinced.  They will say that this is too Machiavellian.  After all these are good people, good Canadians.  We just don’t do these kind of things or have these kinds of motivations.  To those I say this.  To deny that the above is plausible is to deny:

• that there were no Residential Schools;
• that there have been concentration camps in Canada (1914-18, 1930-36, 1940-46);
• that Canadian POW camps at the end of World War Two allowed Nazi officers to hold courts martial and execute German prisoners under our protection with guns and bullets supplied by the camp administration;
• that over a million Canadians were spied on and blacklisted by the RCMP during the Cold War.  The information gathered shared with the United States.  Many had their lives and / or careers destroyed.   Several committed suicide or died prematurely from stress.  Their crimes included subscription to the wrong journals, activity in their trade union, support for the United Nations, support for peace, etc.;
• that there was no Maher Arar;
• there is no Omar Khadr.

The list could go on but I think you get the picture.  So before you judge me mad you must first explain why our government should be trusted given the track record.

Tasers are in the news again.  Ontario has announced rule changes for the use of the device and the RCMP will offer a second apology along with compensation to the mother of Robert Dziekanski.  Nothing can compensate the family of Mr. Dziekanski and no apology will return a son to a mother.  All we can do is learn from that tragic night at Vancouver Airport.

So what have we learned?  If the recent report to the Ontario government is any indication, not much.  The report recommends stricter limits on use against ‘vulnerable groups’ such as pregnant women and children.  How I wish Cheech and Chong were still together.  I can hear a rewrite of their famous emergency room sketch where the attendants at the desk are betting whether the old geezer will make it to reception or croak along the way.

Image if you will:

Cheech:  Oh wow!  That poncho is really ripe.  She’s gonna pop any second.  I bet I give her two zaps and that bambino will shoot right out the cruiser.

Chong:  No way man!  I bet she’ll take three zaps without even dilating.

And now a word from our sponsor:

Ed McMahon:  Women are you tired of your pregnancy?  Is that little bugger just refusing to come out?  Well President’s Choice Baby Zap is just the thing for you.  Just place the Baby Zap firmly on your stomach and crank that trigger.  Voila!  Instant motherhood.  Recommended by police wives everywhere.

Why do we pay thousands of dollars for morons to state the obvious?  Of course it is not really the obvious.  The obvious would be don’t use this on pregnant women at all.  If you feel threatened by a bloated human being who needs help to get up out of a chair perhaps policing is not your vocation and you might want to rethink your career choice.  Or perhaps it is a reflection of police intelligence that they need everything spelled out for them.  ‘Duh, I wonder what’ll happen if I zap her?’  Beyond this little gem of reasoning the bottom line is business as usual for Ontario police and tasers.  The only other big recommendation is to discuss expanding their use to all uniformed officers.

Once again police justify the deployment of tasers as less lethal alternative to guns therefore saving lives.  Twenty or more people have died from taser attacks by police across Canada.  I would be curious to see, in say the decade prior to the introduction of tasers to Canadian police agencies, how many people were fatally shot by police.  I have been searching for that information on Statistics Canada but if it’s there they aren’t making it easy to find.  I do know that there are many officers who retire without ever having fired their gun in the line of duty.  The taser has been deployed much more liberally.  I would also like to know how many people have been killed by police using pepper spray or the baton.   In the same breath as saying tasers are less lethal than guns police agencies assert that the taser was never meant as an alternative to the gun but as an alternative to these choices.  Double talk like this by those charged with our safety should make us pause.  Ask yourself this simple question.  If Rodney King had been zapped with tasers instead of beaten with batons do you really think he would have lived to tell about it?

But our politicians are right on the ball.  The Minister of Community Safety is quoted in the Globe and Mail saying:

We’re enhancing Ontario’s position with regards to its measured approach by introducing a very, very significant guideline (that’s) very very prescriptive

Oh that makes me feel so much better to know a genius like you is very, very on top of this.

Tokens come in many forms.  They can express what words cannot and cause memories to rush back.  But tokens can also be an evil thing.  Any of us old enough to remember the civil rights movement, who are active in the feminist movement and the still struggling gay rights movements know that tokens are also a weapon of those for whom change and progress are anathema.  For a few change means direct challenges to their privileged positions as arbiters of social mores.  Change questions their divine right to be right.  Most people are followers, fearful of any turbulence that might shake their comfortable little lives.  For that mass the token is the answer.  Those who would undermine our development into a free and responsible society, who would risk the future of the planet for their own enrichment or position, once cognisant of the inability to just reject the forces of justice, use the token.  The token will appease those masses who fear disruption to their world but have a sense of guilt concerning gross injustice, by creating a semblance of justice.  Like a faux fur makes a middle class woman believe she belongs with the country club set, the token allows us to lie to ourselves. 

Business, government and social organizations rushed to find ‘suitable’ representatives of discriminated minorities (of course in the case of women it has always been a discriminated majority in North American society) to diversify their public image while avoiding any substantive reform.  Society could feel comfortable in pointing to these public images as proof that things were getting better while nothing changed.  The purpose of the token is to deflect scrutiny.  For those individuals being used it was always a moral dilemma.  For them the scam was all too apparent.  Their positions often lacked the substantial authority of their peers and were often artificial creations with little or no meaningful responsibility attached.  But their rise to even those two dimensional positions were a wedge for what dreams may come.  In the ghetto, the barrio and the kitchen their image might and did provide inspiration to countless members of their community.  To youth it signaled hope.  So even in its insipid attempt at retarding change, the token could still fulfill its higher function.  A token is good when it represents substance; it is bad when it substitutes for substance. 

Unfortunately, we see tokens substituting for substance everywhere today.  The token haute architecture and flashing electric gizmos in schools substitute for education.  Twitter and other social media substitute for real friendship for far too many people.  Corporate music, advertising, television etc. substitute for art.  Charisma and glibness substitute for political leadership.  People like Bono use activism to advance their career while enriching themselves on the suffering of the many (FYI:  U2 launders its money through a tax haven which means that the people of Ireland are poorer and Ireland has less wealth to share internationally via aid.  If you talk the talk but don’t walk the walk it is self-serving tokenism.)  President Obama rejects a single payer health care system in favour of fixing Medicare and Medicaid, the fatally flawed one-two punch of American health care.  The token allows Obama to rise to the podium and proclaim himself the messiah of health care without the political consequences of standing for what is right, the health of the American people. 

Recently my local Zehr’s store started charging 5 cents for each plastic bag used to pack a customer’s groceries.  The option was to purchase a reusable cloth bag.  My wife and I have several of these and it is a good idea.  Most tokens are good ideas.  Plastic bags don’t bio-degrade.  They are a hazard to wildlife. particularly waterfowl.  They are a landfill nightmare and should never have been introduced.  It may come as a shock to my younger readers but they did not replace paper bags until well after my marriage.  I might say here that paper would still be an environmentally friendly alternative with the use recycled paper and paper from renewable sources such as hemp.  My problem is not the charge for plastic or the idea to encourage customers to act more responsibly.  Actually I think there should be an outright ban on the use and manufacture of plastic bags.  In a way the policy the store and many others like it are pursuing is actually a token of a token.  If the store, as it should, believes that plastic bags are the scourge that they are then don’t offer the option.  Giving people the choice is just passing the ball onto the consumer instead of being assertive on saving the environment.  

But the bag replacement incentive now seizing the industry is just a marketing token.  It is a token because it does not address the serious environmental problem of our modern supermarket.  I was surprised about a year or so ago to discover that a grocery store has an exponentially larger carbon footprint than a manufacturing facility of the same size.  Looking around my Zehr’s market after my epiphany I felt incredibly stupid.  It had been staring me in the face for years and I had not seen it.  Open freezers caked on the edge with frost, ceilings 25 or 30 feet high, inefficient lighting strategies, it was all there.  My Zehr’s store is less than ten years old.  It was built after global warming had become a major political and social issue.  Environmentalism in general had become a focus of social interest and concern from species diversity to chlorofluorocarbons.  The options were there for Zehr’s and other grocery stores built at the time to act responsibly to incorporate the latest in environmental engineering.  I might not have been aware supermarkets were putrid cesspools of excessive carbon spewage but the scientists were and so corporations like Zehr’s should have.  Even so, they built another environmental catastrophe anyway.  Why?  Because they didn’t care about the environment then and they don’t now.  This current little token is a marketing ploy.  There is an industry-wide competition to out-green your competitor.  The public smiles, self-satisfied in the illusion that they are doing something for the environment while the corporations laugh and rake in the profits and the Earth weeps.

Some say ‘Well they are doing something.’  Music to the ears of the corporation who pray each day that the consumer will stand up and demand they do what is right not what is profitable.  By why would we.  We have our little token, the amorphous ‘something’ is being done.  And when our grandchildren ask why they must wear an air filtration mask to go out and why the weather patterns are so violent and erratic, we can smile self-assuredly and say ‘we did what we could we supported the tokens in the Age of Tokenism.’

How many of us could afford to have our mortgage payment triple overnight?  I couldn’t and I doubt there are many out there that could.  Now with unemployment rising rapidly more and more families will end up watching their possessions parade out of repossessed homes toward an uncertain future.  Billions, trillions have been pumped into the banks and yet no one stopped them from ripping the life out from under the very people who had provided that money.  They are toxic assets now, not people, not families. 

In recent days a housing project a bank seized from a developer that went under was torn down in California.  Bank officials determined demolition would be cheaper than repairing the houses and completing construction.  Twenty houses, homes, were torn down at this particular development and workers on site reported they had a similar demolition order for another development not far away.  Squatters had moved in and vandals had caused damage.   Much of the vandalism, beyond the usual obscene words spray painted on the walls, was theft of fixtures and infrastructure carefully removed by tools.  Sounds to me like someone was cutting a few costs on their home renovations.  Probably some of the very same sanctimonious individuals mentioned above.  The squatters on the other hand may well have included some of the very people this same bank had ripped from the comfort and security of their own living rooms and thrust onto the street.  Now they became squatters and vandals, the mainstream media purposely or ignorantly making them one and the same in the minds of a gullible public.  Sleeping tonight made easier thanks to a propaganda industry dehumanizing them. 

People ask me what I have against a capitalist system.  Well open your eyes.  This is capitalism at work.  The capitalist market is amoral (I would argue immoral).  The bank has no responsibility to care what happens to people.  Bank executives don’t have to answer for the consequences of their acts.  If people suffer it is not their problem and government should not stick its big nose in, that would just mess things up.  Government doesn’t know what they are doing;  the financial geniuses of Wall Street do.   Yeah right!  Try selling that argument to anybody today.  That is why the capitalist system doesn’t work.  It argues that society should be run without any moral oversight.  The law of the jungle; survival of the fitest; all the rest of that crap.  How hypocritical.  Capitalists want society to be dog eat dog until something starts nibbling on their flanks.  Then it is ‘call in our buddies the local, state or federal authorities to pound these nuisances back into the muck they are.’ 

Okay so who brought the vaseline?

The squatters at that development needed a home and they found one.  That is dog eat dog.  They should have been allowed to defend it.  After all a man’s home is his castle and as soon as they laid down amongst their meagre possessions those houses became their homes.   Nothing is more beautiful than when an inert mass of wood and metal begins to breathe with the soul of a home.  Our so-called government authorities are truly agents of the monied classes.  Rather than stand aside and do what the capitalists argue they want from government, let the private sector function, they stick their big noses in, not to tell the bankers that they need to be responsible citizens, but to make sure the vulnerable can’t stand up for themselves. 

The G20 fiddled as London burned with passion.  People from all over descended on the city.  Once more unto the breach Shakespeare said and so they came.  CNN, that bastion of unbiased and insightful news, giggled at the foolish simpletons who clashed with police commenting that the protests would have no effect except perhaps on Gordon Brown, the host.  His public image moving forward in his career might be tarnished.  Oh how sad.  Well let the CNN info-tainers chuckle away.  The result is just to put these passionate people in some pretty fine company.  Thomas Payne, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King.  All of these icons of past days were laughed at, their ideas considered absurd.  Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win!”  So I guess those of us who believe there is something to shout to or at our leaders have reached the second stage.  We are making progress .   And from recent events stage three seems to be warming up in the bull pen. 

Inside the imps of imperialism plotted their next move.  With illusion worthy of the great Harry Houdini they declared they had pulled a diamond out of the dung.  With a trillion dollars to developing economies and a vague promise of greater regulation they announced that they would avert a depression.  Translation:  they can keep the system they so love, which benefits they and their friends greatly.  By so doing they also avert what might be the greatest political upheavals since the Great Depression and the revolutions of 1848.  At least they hope they will.  The trillion dollars is to be dispensed through the IMF and the other usual suspects.  It will come with a heavy dose of liberal laissez-faire political doctrine as is the wont of these agencies of the imperial powers.  These institutions all operate on weighted voting so that the major economic powers can control the show.  Bye-Bye any concept of justice.  States will be told to reduce spending in areas such as education, health care and social services.  These things are all under attack in our own societies so it is necessary to keep THOSE people even worse off. 

Outside people cried for real change.  Shouted to have their voices heard.  The were corraled into small areas by police, a procedure called kettling.  They were not allowed to leave the area.  Parents who had to pick up their children at school were refused.  And by extension, frightened children waited, many probably terrified when parents who were always on time were hours late.  But the British courts had approved the practice.  There were no washrooms.  People were forced to find privacy where they could.  Ostensibly this was done to prevent property damage.  After all property is far more important in our society than people.  But even this formal response to the media, when questioned, was a lie.  Each individual in each area had to submit to be photographed and give particulars before they could leave at end of day.  This violates British law but as we know in Canada the “Law” is above the law. 

So why go through this indignity.  Millions of others sat at home and did nothing, content that their leaders would look after them.  It is simple.  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young put it in a song called Ohio, “How can you run when you know?”  The people in the streets of London knew and they could find their way there, their voices trumpeting the collapse of the walls of the Bank of England.  Others know and they write their politicians.  Others write letters to editors or blogs or let their friends know.  None of us can change the world by ourselves.  But if we all do our part.  Whatever it is.  The world will change and it must.

Photos retrieved from Guardian UK online (see link in sidebar under News).

The RCMP are at it again.  This time the Commissioner, while visiting Kandahar, told Canadians not to jump to any negative conclusions about the force because of recent scandals such as the Dziekanski case.  ‘Walk a mile in my shoes’ he said comes to mind.  Modern policing is very challenging, things are not always black and white and a situation can turn nasty quickly.  All of that is true but it does not change the fact that a man died needlessly.  Testimony at the enquiry continues to raise questions about the training and conduct of the officers involved. 

The inquiry shows no indication that a life or death crisis existed at the time Mr. Dziekanski was killed.  I am not jumping to conclusions.  But I do admit a prejudice against people and organizations that exert maximum effort to deny and obfuscate their mistakes instead of owning up to them.  Something went wrong at Vancouver airport that tragic day and we could have gotten to the bottom of it long ago and implemented corrective measure had the RCMP not dug in their heels, protected officers whose testimony varied, and generally tried to push off the blame on the victim. 

If you want public respect, don’t insult our intelligence with the we know better than you defence and own up to your conduct. 

As a side note of an even scarier nature, the Commissioner was in Kandahar because the RCMP will be training Afghan police.  All I can say is the Afghan better keep their staplers holstered.

President Obama today called for an end to the mentality of boom and bust.  Shades of Herbert Hoover here.  The Depression is psychological so just be happy and it will end.  This was perhaps good politics and certainly good theatre (Obama’s forte) but as economics it is nonsense.  He cannot go on to say he supports capitalism but wants to avoid boom and bust because boom and bust are necessary to a capitalistic system. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if politicians actually talked to us like we were adults.  It is an insult to our intelligence that our leaders should deflect our concerns with scripted gobble-de-goop.  But what really boggles the mind is that we (in the royal sense of society as a whole) accept it, jump in our snugly jammies, nestle in our nice warm beds to dream the sweet dreams of the innocent.  Safe in the knowledge that Daddy president or prime minister will chase away all the monsters and bad men that want to hurt us.  This might be funny if it wasn’t so sad and we could just turn our faces and ignore the sadness if it wasn’t so dangerous.  This complacency is what horror is madeof.  It led to the deaths of more than 60 million people (total death toll of World War 2) in the middle of the last century. 

Politics has followed numbers into becoming a way to turn off the human mind.  It is well established that most modern people shut down as soon as someone starts rattling off statistics or columns of figures.  Most of us are functionally innumerate.  Politics now seems to have the same effect.  I am just not sure when this happened.  Politics really rose as a mass interest as we moved toward a more inclusive understanding of society.  The English Civil War, the American and French Revolutions, the First World War and the Socialist and Communist revolutions that followed propelled the kiss of politics to every lip.  The rights of man, democracy, Liberté Egalité Fraternité, dictatorship of the proletariat, the International Working Man’s Association, the Industrial Workers of the World, and in my own era Students for a Democratic Society, The July 26th Movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Committee and more were founts of information not just for radicals and political specialists but for all.  Politics was the stuff of dinner table conversations (and the cause of my ulcers but I bear them proudly as a battle injury in the war to create the good society).  Politics was not just important, it was exciting.  It offered the possibility of a better society not just a richer one.  The ideal taken from the Christian Bible of ‘What gaineth a man if he should inherit the whole world but lose his own soul’ meant something.  I am by no means a religious person although I do consider myself a spiritual man.  But what that verse stands for is not about religion it is about integrity.  The opposite sentiment is expressed as everyone has a price. 

Today’s world seems to function on the latter sentiment.  When did gluttony replace honour and expediency replace justice?  When did we stop caring about what is right and start closing our minds at the first tones of political thought?  We have surrendered our freedom not to foreign terrorists but to the seductress in our midst.  The syrupy placations of our own political succubi rape our soul and leave us unable to stand for our own beliefs.  Unable to challenge their actions lest the narcotic poison be withheld, we become our own murderers.

The other day I roared with laughter as I read the reports of the testimony of the latest Mountie to take the stand in the Dziekanski Inquiry.  The most recent member of the Royal Canadian Keystone Cops to testify corrected his earlier written reports that stated he had only used the taser twice on Mr. Dziekanski.  Videos of the incident clearly show that the officer zapped the man at least 4 times which is the number the officer is now admitting to.  The internal computer on his taser unit records five uses but at least he is moving closer to the truth. 

The officer testified that Mr Dziekanski seemed to have an ‘intent to attack’, whatever the hell that means.  Mr. Dziekanski raised his hands over his head in a threatening manner while holding a stapler, apparently threatening to collate 4 strapping young officers.  I can certainly see why the Mounties would fear for their lives.  I work often with staplers and can attest to their status as a deadly weapon.  Offices across Canada lose dozens of employees yearly to stapler attacks.  It is no wonder that they felt compelled to kill the man.  It was kill or be killed.

The Mountie on the stand also testified that he considered the taser as a lesser level of force than the baton or pepper spray.  Two things are interesting here.  One is that force was the accepted solution to this situation.  There were other options available.  The taser was applied immediately after the officers arrived on scene.  Maybe they should have considered something other than force.  This is indicative of the problem of police in our society today of which more in a minute.  The second interesting aspect to this testimony is that when tasers were first issued to police in Canada the public was told that the device was a non-lethal alternative to the firearm.  That would suggest that tasers would only be used in those rare incidents where formerly police would have been forced to use their guns.  The Canadian public embraced their use on that basis.  While it was accepted that in some cases a taser might prove lethal it was only being used to avoid a weapon even more often lethal.  Under that assumption issuing tasers seemed prudent.  The number of times tasers have been used by officers since then clearly shows that either the initial justification was a lie or officers in the field were not properly instructed on when to use them. 

The hilarious sight of officers of our national police force squirming to rationalize and justify their behaviour in this incident aside, this is still a tragedy.  The Dziekanski family still has lost a loved one and likely questions the image of Canada that first drew them here.  What went wrong?  The problem is highlighted by the rush to force.  For centuries policing was done by the military.  When we created separate civilian police forces they retained that military culture.  Today in our more sophisticated and complex society such ham-fisted approaches are more part of the problem than the solution.  If the prevention and successful solution to crime is the goal of policing then a thorough re-evaluation of the training, education and necessary skill sets for police needs to be done. 

Police need to be more culturally aware and sensitive.  Canada is far more multicultural today than during my childhood.  With the richness immigrants bring to our country comes also their fears and understanding of a social order different from our own.  Mr. Dziekanski was alone, really alone.  Think of yourself after a very long flight to a foreign country.  You are tired and cranky after spending long hours packed in like a sardine.  Delays which are never explained to you keep  you only inches from your intended destination.  No one can or will even try to understand you.  You cannot communicate effectively with anyone.  You act out and slam a chair.  Suddenly you are confronted by four large, heavily armed uniformed males.  You come from a culture where the police are seldom your friend, even less often your friend than they are here in Canada if you can imagine that.  What do you do?  You raise your arms in defence, a bluff of bravado in hopes they will back off and not attack as you assume they will.  Instead the officers attack, just as you thought they would.  You struggle.  Weapons of great force are being applied to your body.  You muscles contort, you spasm as the electricity courses through you.  And for Mr. Dziekanski in the end you feel your life force slip away and you succumb to the embrace of death.  Could this have all been avoided?  Yes!  Were the officers properly trained and educated? No!  If they had been this would not have happened.  And if the police want to argue that they are trained to diffuse situations and deal with cultural differences, then they must charge these particular four officers with intentional homicide.  If they had the capacity to diffuse the situation and did not do so then they chose to attack Mr Dziekanski with the likely result (after multiple taser applications) that he would die.  That is murder and the four should spend 25 years in prison before being eligible for parole.  The police cannot have it both ways. 

Before a uniform and weapons are issued, a potential officer must be much better educated than is currently the case.  Psychology, sociology, multiculturalism, religion and ethics must be a large part of their curriculum.  No candidate should be accepted at the policy college until they have completed at least 4 years and preferably more of post-secondary education.  Each of the disciplines I have listed need to be taught in depth.  A cursory introduction to terms and concepts is not enough.  These individuals are going to walk the streets of our communities carrying the power of life and death on their hips.  Without the education I am calling for they are as much of a danger to all of us as the criminals they chase.  The entire paramilitary culture of policing needs to be retired and a new more open and less confrontation culture adopted.  A culture where force must be forced upon them.  If not we simply await the next Dziekanski and we probably won’t have long to wait.