Politics, Re-Spun

The Backstage Lounge, 2002

So Virgin took over Crave 95.3fm in Vancouver recently, which had been Zed 95.3fm since 1991-ish. On Virgin yesterday afternoon they had Marianas Trench in the studio. They talked about compiling a band of folks who could sing really well, which shows because their vocal talent surpasses that of most popular bands in the world today.

They talked about how you spend you whole life on your first album and your goal is to not have your second album suck.

Then they sang some stuff.

This was all really interesting because 7 years ago my best friend lived on Dunbar and worked in a video rental store sporadically to pay off some custom golf clubs made by the store’s owner. So the store was getting rid of some old in-store TVs and I went with my friend to buy one. Josh sold me one of those TVs and my best friend said that he was in a band. Josh explained the band and as I had already been haunting the Backstage Lounge on Granville Island, I was pleased to hear they had a gig there.

The Vancouver Bach Children’s Chorus sure ended up being a useful part of Josh’s past.

They were part punk band, part boy band, spectacular 5-part harmonizers and an all around high energy wild night. 

So when I heard yesterday on Virgin that their album was iTunes top selling album last week, I was not at all surprised. If you run iTunes right now, you’ll see their album on its front screen.

The Backstage Lounge in 2002 was a grand moment in Vancouver’s recent music history with a number of incredibly talented musicians.

Beyond Marianas Trench inspiring grateful folks at the Backstage were Jon Arnot’s Echophone, Welkin, The Clumsy Lovers touring band and Jenny Galt, Sam Soichet and Vicky Sjohall in Cherrybomb.

Trench, Welkin and the Lovers are still going, Echophone and Cherrybomb have moved on. But out of all the great times there 7 years ago, it’s nice to see a well-deserving band contribute on a global level.

BC’s Pathetic Budget: Corporate Over Human Welfare

After cowardly delaying their throne speech for 6 days to avoid criticism before their equally cowardly Bill 42 gag law took effect, the BC government released a budget last week that continues to show how Gordon Campbell is syphoning taxpayer resources to pad the profits of global corporations.

In a time of economic collapse caused by deregulation, privatization, free trade and other neoliberal, anti-social policies, Campbell’s neoLiberal government has perpetuated the destruction instead of introducing a budget that will actually help people.

His economic intervention last fall that forced him to actually hold an insanely short fall legislative session perpetuated the destructive economic policies that caused our recession in the first place as he took advantage of the crisis to continue to de-fund government with more tax cuts.

And in this new budget, the province will, no surprise, reduce taxes as well as actually impede local governments’ attempts to increase taxes, ostensibly to safeguard provincial tax cuts. This amounts to a constraint on municipalities to properly fund themselves.

While BC’s budget does go into deficit to raise the province’s portion of infrastructure spending to receive federal funding, itself a sly Harper ploy, Campbell has not stopped his corporate welfare program of public-private partnerships where citizens are on the hook for decades of guaranteed payments to corporations to provide services that can be done publicly without the profit layer sucking our tax dollars to overseas corporations.

His lust for privatizing our province’s assets has even driven the government to avoid the embarrassment of a failed privatization effort twinning the Port Mann Bridge. That venture has imploded so the government released an expensive new science-fiction, car-worshiping toll bridge rebuild project. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

The government even has the gall to call privatized infrastructure projects “public infrastructure for the benefit of British Columbians.”

Forestry also suffers from the illusion of improvement.

A new Wood Innovation and Design Centre will start up at UNBC. Innovation and design are critical elements to developing a sustainable, high-quality value-added forestry sector. Except for the fact that BC still exports raw logs so global corporations can process them overseas for a fraction of the cost, developing our value-added capacity is a great idea.

While it is within the power of the premier to arbitrarily declare that BC Hydro cannot develop any new power, leaving that up to untrustworthy private bilkers, he can equally stop raw log exports. But he won’t. I hope the innovation centre can figure out how to be meaningful to the province with logs leaving as dozens of mills have closed.

In the end, the tone of the budget is all about expanding business opportunities during this economic crisis, with the help of deficit borrowing. And while there is spending on social welfare services, it doesn’t take a financial genius to recognize that this decade of de-funded social services have undermined BC’s resilience when faced with this existential crisis in capitalism.

This budget shows how Campbell is truly a friend of the corporation while the citizens who elected him are just the means to global corporate profit. Hopefully he will lose his job on May 12 since he isn’t working for us anyway.

BC’s Throne Speech: Already a Huge Disappointment

The BC government is in a self-orchestrated bind. Later today they release their throne speech for this legislative session, 6 days late.

In a fit of transparent and predictable governing, which turned out to be only a veneer, the government committed to fixed election dates, throne speeches and budgets. Circumstances, however, can really cramp such a plan.

Campbell is just like Harper. The federal Conservatives couldn’t even abide by their own October 2009 fixed election date legislation, for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the growing likelihood of an Obama presidential victory in the United States and the reality that Harper wouldn’t even have been able to hold onto a minority government with such a left-ward swing there.

Squishy rationales have forced the same event in BC with the delayed throne speech, which is supposed to establish the tone and priorities for the legislative session.

Past throne speeches and budgets in BC have focussed on improving the state of children or the environment with little or nothing positive in those areas: more veneer and PR.

Last Tuesday’s throne speech, if it were honest, would have had to talk about the lack of a solid excuse to cut short the spring legislative session since a regular length would have presented far too many question periods before the May election, for Campbell to be have to avoid.

His virtually non-existent public profile is still a result of his drunk driving episode in Maui 6 years ago.

An honest throne speech would have had to explain the necessity that on Friday the 13th, the election gag law came into effect, stifling the free political speech of hundreds of groups critical of the government [and maybe 6 groups who support them] all to prevent truth-based ads showing how much Campbell’s mean-spirited, market-worshiping cuts and policies have hurt vulnerable British Columbians.

And if you do some calendar arithmetic, you’ll see that reading a throne speech 3 days before the gag law comes in means 3 days of the worst press and multi-million dollar advertising spending imaginable.

Another reason to delay the throne speech is merely to cut down on the amount time the media can focus on it until the next big event, the budget tomorrow.

But the biggest reason to delay the throne speech is because it will have to introduce a package of economic policies that will make the neoLiberal MLAs vomit in their sugar-coated breakfast cereal on Wednesday morning: a deficit budget.

Like the Harperites, The neoLiberals are so ideologically opposed to deficits, effective social spending, communitarian economic policies or an economy that exists for citizens instead of for pimping workers for global corporate hyper-profit, that they’ve spent weeks now pre-emptively providing excuses for why they will have to go into deficit to mitigate the effects of the global economic meltdown on BC.

But none of this dream throne speech will come forth today. Instead it will be a superficial ramble full of platitudes about strong leadership in an economic crisis, looking out for the economically vulnerable and why the NDP will make you lose your job if they get elected.

The sad truth, though, is that in the government’s attempts to justify breaking its own balanced budget legislation, a few weeks ago the finance minister released a sexy slide show tracking how bad the economy has been in the last 6 months.

But in their zeal to show how awesome their surplus budgets have been recently, they produced a graph that showed the last 2 NDP surplus budgets before they lost government.

This will hurt them in the end because Campbell spent his entire first term in office whining about how they inherited an NDP deficit when we know that massive neoLiberal tax cuts for the rich created the funding crisis that made a mess of BC’s social fabric.

No throne speech today will help them when facts like these are swimming around. They’ll need heaps of luck to keep government on May 12th.

Cultivating Economic Imagination

There are more things in heaven and earth, Mr. Harper and Mr. Campbell, than are dreamt of in your neoliberal economic ideologies.

With the economy crashing all around us yet great uncertainty about how it will affect us all in the long run, we have seen our federal and provincial government spend most of the last 6 months denying reality and continuing to slash and burn our functioning collective government.

But suddenly the federal and provincial government have broken their rigid, ideological opposition to deficit budgets for authentic economic stimulus in deficit budgets.

But with so much denial and delays from our leaders and a corporate media that constantly echoes calls for blind tax and spending cuts, the public has not had a great deal of reflective debate about better ways to fix our economy so that it actually works for people.

In fact, we should evaluate the economy by seeing how well it serves people throughout the land, not just the rich.

This is why the Vancouver & District Labour Council and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives held a workshop on the last weekend of January in Vancouver to do just that.

Just days after a distinctly non-Conservative federal budget and 18 days before the new provincial deficit budget, the workshop allowed dozens of people to explore how the economy should serve us all and not the richest 10% of Canadians who earned over one-third of all taxable income of Canada in 2004, unlike the poorest 30% who earned just 7%.

During the workshop, SFU’s Marjorie Griffin Cohen explored problems with Harper’s stimulus program. So much of the plan rests on individuals’ choices. People put their tax savings in times of crisis like this into savings or debt repayment instead of spending on domestic goods and services that can provide a multiplier effect to help the economy.

More collective planning like infrastructure spending, child care, health and education would provide a much more reliable benefit for our economy.

Bob Simpson, NDP MLA for Cariboo North and Opposition Critic for Forests and Range, also spoke. With a background in history and forestry, he demonstrated some big picture insight into the ecology within which our economy exists. He described how the hyper-consumptive, corporatist American dream “will kill us all and give us no hope for future generations” as it irresponsibly wastes the resources our economy needs to work for all people.

Simpson discussed how GDP as a measure does not tell us how the economy is serving people. We need to use new tools that evaluate what really matters, like the Genuine Progress Indicator, which measures the improvement of people’s welfare.

We also need to stop privatizing our publicly held resources: our forests, rivers and agricultural land. And we must focus on community economic development that works with our ecology without shipping raw logs overseas and risking our aquatic habitat.

In her new book, Naomi Klein explores the neoliberal Shock Doctrine mentality of capitalizing on crises to privatize, deregulate, de-fund and marketize governments. At the workshop, Jim Sinclair from the BC Federation of Labour described that we can take advantage of the clarity of this economic crisis to show the public how bankrupt market capitalism is for providing people’s needs.

We need to rethink how we do politics and economics, enabling workers with expanded rights and focusing on increasing community control of our economics. He used the example of the Queensborough mill that closed because despite being profitable and a solid contributor to the community’s economy, it wasn’t profitable enough for its foreign owner.

Andrew Jackson from the Canadian Labour Congress spoke of the option of actually using the Bank of Canada to finance our own debt rather than privatizing it by borrowing from banks. The USA will likely end up doing this, and when they do we can explore it also to keep our exchange rate from fluctuating too much.

But as well as more typical fiscal areas of intervention in a struggling economy, we need to remember the human face of the effects of the economy.

The CCPA’s Seth Klein spoke about BC adopting a poverty reduction plan to actually set meaningful criteria and targets to focus on, with spending to ensure that improving the economy actually helps real people, particularly our most economically vulnerable. And when we address retraining, we absolutely have to develop green jobs to go along with reducing poverty.

Finally, Adrienne Montani from First Call spoke about BC’s Living Wage campaign that calculated what people need to earn to live in Vancouver and Victoria (over $16/hour). And while health policy researchers have clearly demonstrated how poverty undermines people’s health, Montani mentioned that now even right wing economists are now recognizing the social profitability of eradicating poverty because of increased health costs to society.

So on February 17 when the BC government introduces a deficit budget, we need to remember that there are far more options we can consider than what neoliberal Finance Ministers chooses to embrace.
The VDLC and CCPA have shown in their workshop that we can weather the economic crisis and improve the economy so it actually serves people rather than forcing people to sacrifice for the investment return rates of the hyper rich in Canada.