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.

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.

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.

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.

So what is an illegal alien?  I suppose Martians who fail to check in at Area 51 in neighbouring Nevada would qualify.  And I hope all those evangelicals have gotten the papers in order for that second coming they keep going on about.  How they are going to do a background check with the Roman administration for that guy I have no idea.  Tiberius was known for keeping track of his pornography not citizenship records.  Of course I am just being silly.  They mean citizens of other states who are in the United States without having jumped through the appropriate bureaucratic hoops so that the unemployable relatives of senators and congressmen can keep getting a paycheck.  Police across the state will be on the lookout for those nefariously beautiful tall Nordic types and stake out any bar and they are sure to find an Irishman, Scotsman and Englishman not to mention the proverbial priest, rabbi and minister.  Germans can be found in the back of bakeries reading Clausewitz and the French are strolling the streets insulting everyone they meet.  No racial profiling here.

What would you like to bet that the only people questioned by police under this law are olive skinned or black haired or have a Hispanic last name?  Of course Italians and other Mediterraneans will get confused in the mix.  One sheriff in Arizona claims he can tell an illegal from a legal by the shoes.  Methinks this has more to do with his foot fetish than with good policing.  How can you tell an illegal immigrant in a nation of immigrants.  You can’t.  And while there may well be undocumented Swedes in Arizona, they are not going to be the ones questioned about legal residency.  This new law shows the depths to which, not just American, but Western societies collectively have descended.  Can a yellow sombrero patch sewn onto their clothing be far behind?

Which one do think police will question?

While some police in Arizona have registered objection to the new law, the official line is trust us we will not abuse this power.  Police in the state promise to apply this law with the same professionalism that they apply all the rest.  I am sure that is what worries Latino Arizonans.  Opponents of the law are characterized as outsiders who don’t understand the state.  Probably the same outside influences that thought Blacks in the South should have rights.  How can we trust an organization to make a ‘reasonable’ judgment in an irrational situation.  We might as well say we are giving police x-ray vision or secret decoder rings to determine who to question and who not to.

The governor raises the violence of drug smuggling against the backdrop of a recent murder of a rancher by drug smugglers to justify this law.  Fear is the best way to make the public accept what they know is wrong.  Most undocumented workers in Arizona are not drug smugglers and most of the key players in the smuggling operations live in Mexico.  Drug smugglers are easy to identify.  They are the ones with 50 kilos of powder in their wheel well and an Uzi on their lap.  Undocumented immigrants who do engage in the smuggling racket are the ones with bloated bellies and super strength ex-lax in their pocket.  They are generally being forced through threats to assist the smugglers.  The vast majority of undocumented immigrants break no other laws than the ones that say they cannot live and work where they live and work.  They know that any arrest will end in deportation.  They can’t complain no matter how egregiously they are treated.  They spend their lives more sinned against than sinning.  But it is not the undocumented worker but the documented immigrant who must endure the degradation of constantly proving his right to be.  This law tells him that he is only an American on paper.  He must constantly prove his identity while his northern European neighbour does not.  All because most Latin Americans are mestizo, mixed blood.  So because his ancestors were less racist than our ancestors and chose not to exterminate the indigenous population as we did he must now suffer our bigotry.  Does no one else see the irony in this?

Probably the most interesting and ignored aspect of this story is the people who are most supportive of this law to assert the most basic right of any state as they call it, the right to assert sovereign borders, are the same people who don’t believe that applies to any other country besides the United States.  It is not the most basic right of any state but of the United States exclusively.  America as a nation and Americans as individuals seem to think that if they violate the borders of other countries it should be just accepted.  Ask Iran or North Korea.  But let hard working families cross the border and perform tasks that we would not take for wages we would not suffer, contribute to the local economy everyday by paying rent on lodgings that most often fail to achieve even the lowest standards conceivable and patronize local merchants and we will bring down our fury to wipe them from our sight.  After all America good; foreigners bad.  That is why the Republicans, the largest group in support of the law, hate the United Nations.  It is too full of foreigners.

Let’s end this nonsense before somebody gets hurt.  At what price salvation?  Security isn’t worth it if the cost is surrendering our humanity and our honour.  And this isn’t security it is security theater.  It provides only the illusion of security at the expense of human dignity.  To paraphrase Phil Ochs, “Arizona, find another country to belong to.”

What the public needs to see is the evidence that could only be attained through the use of the enhanced police powers contained in the anti-terrorism laws and how that evidence directly prevented catastrophic loss of life.  Anything else is diversion.  Everything thus far released could have been achieved using standard police procedures.  Why then do we need the added tools of the anti-terrorism law.  That is what must be justified if those laws are to be extended. 

The weakness of the government’s arguments for maintaining the anti-terrorism laws is demonstrated by the mock explosion.  The only reason to include that footage is to terrorize the public.  Terrorism in service of preventing terrorism, there is a metaphor for the new millennium.  Scared and confused the electorate is prepared to accept whatever the government claims will safeguard them, whether it really will or not.  I am surprised that this footage was allowed in court as it is clearly irrelevant.  Whether you are planting a bomb capable only of cracking a ceramic pot or a nuclear device capable of taking out an entire city, you are still committing a crime.  What possible value could a demonstration of the blast from a particular size of explosive be in a trial to determine if these men were guilty of plotting a terrorist attack?  Would they have been less guilty if the explosion planned had been for instance half the size demonstrated.  Or is this the purpose of out anti-terrorism laws?  Are they needed so that the crown may enter irrelevant and inflammatory evidence in order to convict by hatred and anger rather than law.  If so, then it is a frivolous and dangerous justification. 

Eight years after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington it is time to return to sanity and allow these over-reactions to pass into history.  In the wake of those events a terrified population lost track of what this country and western democracies are supposed to stand for.  Yes it is a dangerous world out there and yes we should be vigilant against those who would threaten our lives.  But in being vigilant let us not become vigilantes.  Let us remember that while law and individual rights and freedoms can leave us vulnerable to dangers, the dangers of a police state without rights are far greater.  In retrospect the chaos of Weimar was preferable to the order of the Third Reich.

Right now Iran seems to be coming apart at the seams.  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed a massive victory in the recent presidential elections which led followers of his opponent Mir-Hossein Mousavi to cry foul.  Taking to the streets, opposition protesters alleged massive fraud in the vote count.  A subsequent partial recount increased Ahmadinejad’s lead rather than diminish it which served only to ratchet up emotions on both sides.  The Iranian government, that is the government of Mr. Ahmadinejad, has cracked down fiercely on the protesters.  Several people have been killed and many more injured in street clashes between protesters and riot police.

Barack Obama and the American government deny accusations coming out of Iran that they, along with their ally Great Britain, are behind the protests.  Both the president and vice-president have specifically denied the allegations coming out of Tehran.  Barack Obama went so far as to say the American administration is making a concerted effort not to impact events in Iran even in their comments.  This is a positive change from earlier American administrations who have not hesitated to interfere in the affairs of other states or movements if it benefited American interests.  Barak Obama promised change and look here we have it.  For those of you who believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale you may be interested in.  Obama and Biden dismiss the accusations with a chuckle as if what idiot would believe the United States is behind a popular uprising in a foreign country.  The insinuation is that only a few conspiracy freaks would be dumb enough to believe the accusations coming from Mr Ahmadinejad and Mr. Khamenei. 

The United States has overthrown more than 50 governments since the end of World War II, most of them democracies.  (Dictatorships are more efficient to deal with when it comes to the bidding of great powers.)  The Kennedy administration was active here in Canada in the downfall of John Diefenbaker although Dief didn’t help his own cause any.  (If they are prepared to interfere in the political affairs of their neighbour and one of their closest allies is there any limit to what they might do?)  More than 3500 people have died in terrorist attacks against the island of Cuba since the revolution came to power in 1959, all funded and logistically supported by the government of the United States.  The Bush administration lied in order to violate the United Nations Charter and pursue an aggressive war against a sovereign member of that organization.  The invasions of Nicaraugua, the Dominican Republic, Panama and Granada; the support of the Contras, the Kosovo Liberation Army, and the Mujahadeen; installation of brutal dictators like Mobutu in Congo, the Somozas in Nicaraugua, Marcos in the Phillipines, and the Shah in Iran; fomenting coups in Chile, Guatemala, and Venezuela;  that is the backdrop to the present administration’s denials of involvement in the Iranian protests.  The list goes on.  I have not even scratched the surface of covert and not so covert American interference in the affairs of others around the world.  How can any reasonable person believe that the United States is not involved in the protests given their track record and the obvious benefits to America if Mr. Ahmadinejad were to be swept from power. The question is not whether they are involved but to what degree and when did the involvement begin.  Were they behind Mousavi from the start or are they just being opportunists?  At what level is the United States active in the protests?  These are questions that may never be answered. 

We all decry the brutality of the crackdown on the protesters.  No one should have to put their life on the line to speak their mind.  So why was there not the same outrage over the treatment of protesters in Britain during the G20 talks?  After all London police murdered an innocent man who was not even part of the protests.  He was simply a news vendor trying to get home after work.  With the addition of the killing of a beautiful young Iranian women, outrage in the West escalated against Iran.  That in itself should scream to us.  Why were the earlier deaths of protesters mere statistics, a passing reference as the political questions were examined in news reporting?  I guess it only matters when beautiful people die.  They are the only ones who have a real future full of promise.  The less attractive only have disappointment to look forward to in this world of image mongering.  The young woman (Neda Agha Soltan) purportedly uttered an heroic phrase just before leaving that day according to a self-described fiance.   Something about staying home giving victory to the regime.  Real people usually don’t make grandiose statements when parting from a loved one regardless of events happening around them.  I would suspect the real conversation was be careful and avoid the protests and her response was something like I’ll be careful, don’t worry.  But that doesn’t make good copy in a newsroom.  That doesn’t sell papers.  Nor do rather ordinary looking plain people.  When the news of Neda’s death appeared I couldn’t help remembering another beautiful young women, with a voice like a song bird that could melt the hardest heart.  During the first Gulf War daddy Bush was trying to get Congress to appropriate money for his ‘liberation’of Kuwait.  The girl appeared before the Senate Armed Forces Committee to give testimony of the brutality of invading Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait City.  When she had finished telling those grizzled Senators how infants at the hospital had been thrown to the floor so that their incubators could be looted back to Baghdad, there was not a dry eye in the place.  Even old Strom Thurman had a tear glistening at the corner of his eye.  At the time I was skeptical about the popularity of incubators as loot but people just called me cynical.  Several months later the story broke that the young girl had not been in Kuwait City during the invasion and the entire episode about the incubators had been the concoction of Hill and Knowlton, the public relations firm.  In democracies wars and all political events have to be sold like soap powder. 

The question for all of us is what are we being sold today.  We know that the United States government is lying about their involvement in the protests in Iran.  We know that their accomplices in the mass media are selling us a point of view that may or may not have any or some legitimacy.  What apportion of guilt should be born by the Iranian government and what apportion belongs to our governments, that it to say us because we constantly tell the world that we govern ourselves.  All we are left with is our own capacity to reason and analyze, to never believe anything we hear and only half what we see and make our own judgements.  Our society and our leaders discourage us from independent thought and dismiss us as fools if we dare to question them.  Who benefits from that if we comply?  Think about it.  All I can say is ‘Fools of the World, Unite.  You have nothing to lose but your complacency.’  Our age is one of great uncertainty, impregnated with fear and possibility.  Complacency is not an option, nor is falling into the trap of lies which has become our political system.  Don’t let your abhorrence of the crackdown in Iran be used for partisan goals you may not support. 

Barak Obama’s health care plan, as it has thus unfolded, should be a clear and final answer to all those who believed this young man would somehow change politics and create a more inclusive, just and caring society.  The pinheads who screamed that socialism would reign and undermine the American way (greed, cynical self-interest, and lack of community) can at last rest comfortably in the certainty that President Obama is different in complexion only from his predecessors.  It is clear that his campaign document, Blueprint for Change, would have been more aptly named, Blueprint for the Appearance of Change. 

Obama still has to announce many of the details of the plan but he has rejected categorically any form of single-payer public system.  His reason:  it would be too expensive given the current state of the economy.  What a crock.  Canadian labour costs have been and remain lower than American in great part because we have a single-payer public health care system  Current closing and downsizing of Canadian automotive plants is due to political considerations not economics.  American political debate would sound like a cacophony of scorched cats if GM were to close American plants and leave all the Canadian plants open.  It would make the company far more competitive if that were the only criteria for restructuring.  So Obama’s proclamation that cost factors prevent him from creating a health care system that would truly address the current crisis in medicine is just a lie.  A stronger argument can be made that the opposite is true.  The United States cannot afford not to create a single-payer health care system given the current state of the global economy if it wishes to remain competitive. 

Surrounded by the executives of the major American health insurance corporations, Obama painted himself as a man of integrity and said he would fix health care regardless of the state of the economy.  As I have said here before, Barack Obama is a master of image.  He spoke of a consensus between the White House and the insurance companies to do what was necessary to see that all Americans would have access to affordable health coverage generously provided by that bastion of social conscience, the health insurance industry.  The question arises what if someone still cannot afford the premiums set by these socially conscious corporations?  First you will have to prove you can’t afford it and if the government decides you could by oh I don’t know living in your car instead of paying rent or whatever, then the talk is that a fine should be imposed.  Only in the United States would anyone think that insurance at gunpoint would be an appropriate solution to assure all citizens have health insurance.  Obviously this policy is not in the interests of uninsured Americans so why even think of it.  Wait a minute.  It was conceived in conjunction with the major insurance companies.  You don’t think that the president and these leaders of American finance would scratch each other’s back and come up with a solution that benefits themselves do you?  Gee, the insurance industry gets to extort millions in profits from a new source, those who can’t afford medical insurance, and the government led by Barak ‘the enforcer’ Obama sees that they cough up the dough or else.  And Barack’s pay-off, I suspect a tidy little kickback to his re-election campaign.  Might as well just call him President Barack ‘Milhous’ Obama and the corporate executives B. B. Rebozo clones.  It is interesting on this note to

Save the cost of health care premiums and rent at the same time. Suicide: the most cost effective option under the Obama Plan.

mention that a criticism of Obama’s current nominee to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayer, is her previous assertion that all campaign contributions are in reality bribes.  She was simply stating the obvious.  A person supports a candidate because she expects him to look after her interests and in a self-serving society like the United States that means the individual’s selfish interests not her communal interest.  A bell should have gone off back in the campaign when Obama rejected public campaign financing.  Guess we know why now.  (Actually the bell did go off but the American public was so caught up in the election of the first Black president and the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream they refused to listen to those voices.  I guess that they just forgot that King’s dream was a society where a man would be judged by the content of his character rather than the colour of his skin.)

I chose to pay the rent. Now I have a permanent home.

Health care is a human right.  Money was quickly found to fight an illegal war of aggression in Iraq.  Obama while downsizing that war is ratcheting up another unwinnable war in Afghanistan and in the process propping up a government rife with war criminals.  (While Obama continually tries to compare himself to Kennedy and Roosevelt, his behaviour increasingly resembles Nixon.  Nixon while taking credit for troop reductions in Vietnam failed to inform the public that they were just secretly being deployed to Cambodia which led finally to the rise of Pol Pot and the systematic murder of millions.  Now that’s the American way in action.)  There is no question of cost for these ill-conceived adventures.   They are being fought in the name of security while they have only succeeded in making Americans less secure and making the entire world more dangerous, and more in danger.  A secure state is one that minimizes the possibility that any of its citizens will die needlessly or preventably.  Health care then is a security issue.  Not just programs to deal with potential pandemics but prompt, quality medical assistance to every citizens who needs it when they need it.  Paying the rent or saving your life should not be a choice for a citizen of any civilized country.  Today in the United States it is.  Therefore the United States in NOT a civilized country.  It is a barbaric despotism where the wealthy and powerful spend their time cheating the weak and vulnerable.  And the ‘President of Change and Hope,’ Barack Obama has revealed his true self as the ‘President of No Change and No Hope.’

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.’