Politics, Re-Spun

Healthcare Before Olympics: Michael Moore-Style

Corey Rollins - http://adhack.com/ads/health-care-before-olympics

We’re days away from the end of the $8 billion obscene Olympic party. Last year, BC’s health authorities were defunded by $360 million. Cut, cut, cut.

Soon the 16-day bash will be over, the guests will leave and we’ll return the empties. Then we’ll walk around the house and tally up the damage. Holes kicked in walls, broken vases, cracked bathroom mirrors, something weird in the carpet that will never come out.

Less than a week after the Olympics end there will be a federal and provincial budget. Expect “tough choices”, which is what neoliberals say when they plan to further separate the rich from the poor.

So in thinking about Danny Williams flying to Florida for minor heart surgery, I went out retrieving this fantastic Olympic maimed-mascot poster.

I also came across something from Michael Moore, from long before Sicko: “The Healthcare Olympics.”

The best part is that Bob Costas, in town now to narrate the Olympics with NBC, is a narrator of this almost 20-year-old piece. Enjoy!

Danny Williams, Class War, and the Illusion of Choice

I was going to write something about the Newfoundland and Labrador premier skipping to Florida for minor heart surgery. He said, “This is my heart, it’s my health, it’s my choice.”

I was going to write about how obvious the two-tier [class war] society is emerging in Canada.

I was going to write about how the private system drains medical talent from the public system.

I was going to write about how the rich and the poor deserve the best health care system Canada can provide.

I was going to write about the millions of Canadians who are too poor to choose to go to Florida and stay in a comfortable condo.

But then Brian Topp wrote something spectacular!

Tuesday, February 16, 2010 7:30 AM

Danny Williams and the separatism of the rich

Brian Topp

Protesting the Corporate-Debauched Olympics

Whither/Wither Schools, Hospitals, Arts

I’ve spent the weekend reflecting on the success of various confrontations to the Olympic brand and the emerging global corporate feudalism.

I’ll start off with a recognition that I’m sitting here in my “I am a free speech zone” t-shirt, having celebrated Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year and observed Vancouver’s Missing Women Memorial March, which saw eagles circling above.

Let them eat cake.

Friday’s Olympics opening day march was a significant success. Elders led the procession. Dancing was prevalent. Agents provocateurs were noted, whispered about, marginalized and videotaped. And our messaging was clear:

1. “No Olympics on stolen native land”: the vast majority of British Columbia, unlike the rest of Canada, is on unceded native land and BC has been a part of Canada for almost 140 years now.
2. “2010 homes, not 2010 games”: the policy choice to host the Olympics has directly impoverished hundreds of thousands of British Columbians.
3. “This is what democracy looks like”: marching through the streets is the active expression of democracy; it is neither illegal nor anti-social.

What is lost in all this is the subtext of class war.

First, watch this clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Funny, eh, but let’s not think we’re past this. We have purged the nobility from our social system, even though the queen is plastered all over our money. Nobility by birth, except in monarchist mags, has been supplanted by corporate and celebrity nobility.

Poverty Isn't a Game

We still have a class system. It’s not upper, middle and lower class anymore; that’s all too impolite. But if we examine income groups in Canada, we have a increasingly wealthy hyper-rich, a rather rich group that is doing quite well, a struggling middle class that is being milked by user fees and needs two incomes to have the same purchasing power as one income did in the 1970s, a growing working poor or subsistence lower-middle class who are a few paycheques away from homelessness, and a growing homeless yet working and pure poverty class. Too many of these lower strata are using food banks.

Through this, our culture endures rampant empathy-free zones.

Gordon Campbell and all the Olympics boosters have chosen to host a global party. The price they have charged society has been in closed schools, reduced mental health services, declining hospital services and cuts to all levels of healthcare, an affordable housing crisis that enriches those who already happen own expensive property in the sexy parts of BC, and an uncounted death toll of people whose lives have been truncated by the service cuts that were the “tough choices” to ensure the tax base of BC funds a global party for the hyper rich: corporations, their serfs, their customers, and those who could afford to bid on Olympics tickets or pay scalpers.

Oh, and we have had the lowest minimum wage in the country and the highest rate of child poverty for more than half the decade.

"Olympics: It's Not a Party for the Poor"

Let them eat fucking cake, hey?

Let’s go back to Friday night’s protest. The few thousand of us who rallied, danced and marched. We did not disrupt the Olympics or the culturally-impaired opening ceremonies. We posited a variety of statements and had good media pickup. We exercised our personal free speech zones and the legal observers were happily mostly bored.

The bottom line was that there is a price paid by hosting the Olympics. The corporate media and other global corporations who only symbolically underwrite the party while the taxpayers of Vancouver, Whistler, BC and Canada actually pay for it, all go on thinking it’s a great time, despite the 12 degree temperatures and shipping snow from Manning Park to Cypress Bowl. So much for green games.

There are those who continue to wear their blood red Olympics mittens and cram themselves onto our transit to get to their events, some of whom vehemently resenting having to take transit at all, and still have no idea the kind of suffering the vulnerable of BC have endured and will continue to endure for decades while we pay off this corporate debauchery.

I don’t know what to say to them. I want to take their pictures, as they are maybe the deluded masses who don’t get the simple connection that voting for Gordon Campbell in 2001 because he said he would cut their taxes meant he’d cut services for the vulnerable and increase user fees for the rest of us. They are also the people who think a party that costs $6b plus the Canada Line and the Sea-to-Sky Highway will not have a collections agent waiting at our house on Sunday morning while we clean up the half empty wine glasses and stale cheese plates. The empty beer bottles won’t pay the debt. My grandchildren will finally burn the mortgage on the excesses we’ll enjoy over the next 14 days.

Olympics as Parasite: "The IOC is a Global Parasite"

And the BC government opened the legislature last week with a warning to fear the March 2 budget. For once the government is telling the truth. We are going to be further debauched in that budget because while VANOC is above the law and keeps its books secret, the government knows how much was spent and they’ll use it as an excuse to cut more, privatize more and gouge any other public, communal asset left in BC.

And if you think I’m crazy, wait 16 more days. I dare you.

Roque Quatchi asks "What Happens Once the Party's Over?"

The best we can hope for is for the Olympics to not bankrupt BC financially because our leaders have already sold our soul and bankrupted our morality, and we’re all going to feel the lashes for decades to come.

BC NDP Convention Minus 5 Days: Why We’re the Natural Governing Party of BC

I had this amazing daydream a few weeks after we failed to win the election last May.

The NDP is the naturally governing party of BC, so when the legislature was to open earlier this fall/summer, the NDP MLAs should stroll in there and behave as if we actually represent the poorest 95% of British Columbians, which we do, and we should do our best to represent them.

And truly, the MLAs are taking it to the streets this session, for sure. Being critics, challenging the government on its priorities and process are reflective of the masses who have been suffering for this whole decade.

But we really should embrace a humility and a public service mode to recognize that we represent the values of most citizens and we should act as if we are governing. It’s just that we can’t pass legislation.

This goes along with this idea I have that behaviour in parliament is a joke, with all the “grand traditions” of idiocy and compromises to actual debate that so many people claim to be an unquestionable tradition.

But honestly, I have never seen a school board, NGO or even city council meeting operate like our provincial leaders. But reforming the operation of the Westminster Parliamentary System is on my list of long-term reform goals.

In the short term, we start with the reality that most working people in this province are being abused by the government. Tiny lures of tax cuts are combined with user fee increases.

Token, cynical concessions to the poorest British Columbians are matched by massive service cuts.

In the end, the intentional defunding of the BC government is designed to undermine the progressive tax system, reduce the tax burden of the rich and bilk the middle class.

The NDP is rich in convention-passed resolutions framing our party’s beliefs. They exist to represent working people in the province and do not cater to the richest 5% that the Liberals worship.

I would direct you to BC NDP policy on our website, except that it is only available in the internal section where party activists can log in to view the resolutions passed by conventions over the last 30 years. This policy needs to be on the outside of the website for members, the public, the Liberals, the media…EVERYONE…to see it so that we can say to the world that we follow our policy.

Not doing so reduces our credibility, which we saw in abundance in how we lost the last election. Our members chose to not vote and risked Campbell getting in again to avoid voting for us. It doesn’t really get any worse for a political party than that.

My first goal upon being elected to the provincial executive is to make sure everyone knows what we stand for. I’ve read our policy documents. I read our campaign platform during the last election. But you shouldn’t have to take my word for it that we represent the majority of British Columbians.

But beyond internal party problems, why don’t most citizens vote for us when we actually represent them?

Well, why did millions of poor Americans vote against their economic interest this decade by supporting Bush as he abused them like Campbell is abusing the working classes of BC?

Fear.

The neoliberals have scared the pants off of citizens with the idea that an NDP government would bankrupt everyone.

Since someone in the NDP is still afraid of the phrase “fast ferries,” the party in general has not spent this decade having monthly lunch meetings with the dozens of progressive economists in BC to bone up on economics. It’s not like the CCPA hasn’t been coming up with innovative alternative budgets every year!

We should be able to clean the Liberals’ cobweb logic. What kind of justification in the universe is there to build BC Ferries in Germany while our industry languishes?

And if you get our your mental calculator and zoom into Burrard Inlet on Google Earth, you can make your little camera zoom from where the fast ferries are parked, and glide over the water to the new convention centre and every second you can tick away the dollars. The new convention centre cost overrun basically matches the fast ferries. So what are we afraid of?

There seems to be a rule in politics to never apologize for the past, never to admit mistakes. Maybe because we’re afraid that the other side will point out that we screwed up.

Well we did screw up. The fast ferries don’t fit BC’s geography. And we knew it.

But who knew it? A bunch of people who aren’t in the party right now. I disagreed with the boats back then and I do now. Integrity means admitting mistakes. What do we owe former party leaders who screwed up? We owe ourselves and our children more integrity than we owe loyalty to the past.

Here’s another mistake. As much as the party had some valid criticism of the Liberals’ specific carbon tax legislation, the Axe the Tax campaign failed almost from the beginning, in part because of the awful coincidence that gas prices went through the roof around the time of the introduction of the tax, making a criticism of a 2 cent tax petty.

Oh yes, the NDP has affirmed policies supporting a carbon tax consistently for this whole decade. So the other reason why the campaign failed was because our party actually wants a large and effective carbon tax, despite the feelings of whoever decided on that campaign.

So. Where does this leave us?

We have lots of policy that most citizens would embrace:

• framing the economy to serve human beings and not maximizing offshore corporate shareholder wealth
• investing in human services and not cutting healthcare and education
• reframing all government policy so that it fits a grand regulatory plan to avert climate breakdown, since we only have a few years left to turn our economy around before we’re past the point of no return
• everything else we love about social, human, economic, environmental and political justice and equality…something the Liberals hate as they pander to greed and elitism.

So we need to post our policy and be proud of it.

We need to acknowledge that the fast ferries were a mistake and reflected bad decision-making among people who haven’t been in the party in a decade. We need to throw them under the bus. Right now.

We need to recognize that good policies designed to avert climate breakdown reflect our values and we need to educate people and bring them along to recognize how domestic food security and bioregional economic development are critical to cutting down on carbon usage. Oh yes, and peak oil is either here now or close by so we need to pro-actively get off oil.

Sounds simple.

Apparently it’s pretty hard though, but that’s just not good enough for me.

So, I’m running for one of the 6 Vice-President positions of the BC NDP to do these “simple” things and sift through whatever rationalizations have kept the party from working with integrity.

In the end, whatever explanation exists for why the party has screwed up the carbon tax, fast ferries and a myriad of other problems, none of them hold water. Why? Because they’re justifications for compromises designed for us to win the election.

We haven’t won an election this decade. So with some pretty simple hindsight, our tactics have failed and are continuing to fail.

If we keep the same tactics and expect a different result, we’re mad.

I’m not mad. And clearly, neither are the members who didn’t show up to donate time, money and their vote to getting us in power.

It’s time for the BC NDP to behave according to its principles so we can properly represent the values and interests of the majority of British Columbians who should feel eager to support us.

If they don’t it’s not their fault, it’s ours.

And I’ve had enough of that.

My New BPA-free SIGG Bottle: I’m Still Bothered

The consumer uproar has been eye-opening for SIGG CEO Steve Wasik. He thought going green just meant being good to the earth; he didn’t realize it meant fessing up too. “Being a green company also means being held to the highest degree of corporate transparency,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I fully expect that SIGG will not let consumers down in the future.”

via Eco-Friendly Water Bottles: SIGG Gets Stung by BPA – TIME.

So Halloween marked the last day that SIGG would exchange your BPA-bottle with a non-BPA bottle. A real commitment to honesty would be to not end the exchange program, and especially not on Halloween.

Greenwashing is distasteful, and increasing infuriating. Time is running out to keep my children from living some version of Mad Max when they’re my age. And if the best the corporate world can come up with is “I fully expect” to not let consumers down in the future, then I am right in having virtually no faith in market capitalism to contribute to meaningful dialog and action on climate change.

Oh wait, I didn’t have any faith in them. So, no change there.

Regulation, regulation, regulation!

Which Politicians Think We’re Imbeciles?

When I try to infer the mental state of some politicians from what they say publicly, I can only conclude that they must think we’re too profoundly stupid that we’d not be able to think for 3 seconds to realize that they are full of shit. Let’s look at Kevin Falcon and Gregor Robertson.

Health Minister Kevin Falcon: “when we are making changes in health care delivery, it doesn’t mean it’s just a cut.” The provincial government decided to “change” the funding to the 6 health authorities in BC by negative $360 million. It’s certainly a change. To stress that it isn’t a cut means Falcon thinks the air coming out of his lungs is worth forming into these words because there is some value to it all, that enough people will believe he has achieved plausible deniability of cuts occurring.

Vision Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson: “The core traditions of the Olympics are very powerful, and we lose sight of that with all the corporate sponsorship, Olympic bylaws and the gigantic scale of the event.” What a nuisance, hey, so let’s get over our criticism of the following and just get that lovin’ feeling!

1. VANOC has bought ALL the outdoor advertising for Olympic corporate sponsors.
2. Corporations are going to wrap ads as mammoth building condoms around the tall buildings all over the place, with video ads broadcast on buildings–think Blade Runner.
3. BC neoLiberal MLAs and cabinet ministers get to use swanky private boxes in stadiums to watch events…paid for with our tax dollars.
4. VANOC has set aside $30 million for bonuses to ostensibly keep their employees WHO ARE ACTUALLY PLANNING THE OLYMPICS from quitting before the big show–hard to imagine; $30 million works out to around $23,000 for each of the 1,300 employees, though I doubt it will all be distributed equally.
5. The IOC business model requires communities to sanitize society of the ugly: homelessness, poverty, dissent; so, we have broad, sweeping legislation that threatens our civil libertiies.
6. The IOC will not allow women’s ski jumping regardless of domestic courts ruling the action unconstitutional.
7. Provincial legislation will allow law enforcement to come into my home to seize anti-Olympics signs, under penalty of up to 6 months in jail and $10,000/day fines, while neoLiberal cabinet minister Bill Bennett says that’s a reasonable thing to do when the Olympics are in town.
8. Officials can now round up the homeless and forcibly house/confine them during the games; this, in the context of massively neglecting effective social housing for the whole decade.
9. $1 billion to be spent on security with 5,000 imported rent-a-cops and military, not to mention the black helicopters that were buzzing the downtown east side this morning, with much more of that to come.

So what core traditions is Gregor Robertson waxing on about as he gets on a plane to go to Greece for the flame lighting? Nobility, competition, purity of athletic competition? Is that what the Olympics mean now? Or is it special rights for global corporations using the Olympics for a marketing bonanza at the expense of democracy, domestic constitutions and court rulings, and civil liberties?

People are coming around to the reality that the Olympics stink, that they aren’t worth the social, political and economic costs and that with the overwhelming majority of Canadians unable to acquire or afford tickets to the actual events…people are starting to feel duped. A recent survey shows only 9% are very excited about the show, while 71% or not very excited or not excited at all.

This is showing up in not enough people volunteering, signing up to rent out extra bedrooms to rich Olympic tourists, or applying for the scut jobs needed to make the whole thing function.

Well. I told you so.

As did the entire No Olympics campaign years ago. And now we all get to eat it…with the black helicopters flying overhead as I test out my remaining civil liberties as I wear my “I am a free speech zone” t-shirt wherever I can. I also have a “Democracy is Nice” sign I carry on the end of my hockey stick. I wonder which of those will be a security threat.

Healthcare as a Human Right for Americans?

Americans have had it rough, what with their rabidly individualistic, anti-communitarian history and social policy.

From that, they have a hard time embracing things of the common good, like healthcare being a human right.

The current debate, with the wingnut lunacy of greedy hyper-individualists wanting to keep poor people without healthcare that others would have to pay for, is quite hard to follow. It’s rife with red herrings.

And the Canadian system is awesome, of course, except for how our own right wing, greedy, hyper-individualists are trying to destroy it through defunding it. Our healthcare crisis is a result of right wing governments privatizing, turning off the taps and trying to bankrupt and impair the public system so people will demand market solutions with health insurance companies poised to make billions off this new desire to pay for what we’ve gotten for free for four decades.

So, in looking for sound analysis of what is happening in the USA, I’ve read Greg Palast slamming Obama for giving backrubs to the healthcare oligarchs, but it looks like that’s the brokerage politics working because in reading Joshua Holland’s analysis, 10 Awesome Things That Would Happen If Health Reform Passes, seeking an achievable solution likely means not destroying the insurance companies and Big Pharma. Yet, anwyay.

Holland:

So let’s get past the fearmongering and look at some of the highlights of what’s really in the more progressive legislation working it’s way through Congress. The proposals aren’t perfect. As I’ve written before, in their current form, the bills fail the test of having a truly “robust” public insurance option, and as such has limited potential for cost savings.

But they are also substantial reforms that would go quite a way toward beefing up the health and economic security of a lot of American families if enacted.

via 10 Awesome Things That Would Happen If Health Reform Passes | Politics | AlterNet.

And in the mess is the new boycott of the otherwise progressive Whole Foods. Why? Their CEO is a rabidly individualistic hater of common social policy:

“We are all responsible for our own lives and our own health,” Mackey wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. “We should take that responsibility very seriously and use our freedom to make wise lifestyle choices that will protect our health. Doing so will enrich our lives and will help create a vibrant and sustainable American society.”

Capitalism first [along with his profits], the health of the vulnerable and poor comes second.

So let’s cross our fingers and hope community, cooperation and the progressive ideals that the majority of Americans possess–despite how the corporate media tries to convince them otherwise–will allow them to see through the rhetoric and nonsense and embrace a real improvement in their human rights.

It’s time to get with the 20th century, America! And while we fight off our own greedy, for-profit healthcare ghouls, we’ll help you get into the 21st century soon!

Shirley Bond’s Marie Antoinette Complex

shirleybond The heat wave continues-imagine being loaded on an Air Canada flight and then sitting on the tarmac in the heat for an hour – yup it was me!10:45 PM Jul 29th from web

Shirley Bond should keep using Twitter so we can see a better sense of her lack of empathy and perspective. Former Minister of Education and Deputy Premier, now Transportation Minister Bond, you’d think, would get some training in how not to offend the poorest 95% of British Columbians with her tweets…and how to update her Twitter profile to recognize her demotion in the cabinet shuffle.

Since her government refuses to choose to fund health care properly, BC’s health authorities are $360m in the hole. I personally know people who will suffer physical and mental trauma because of this. Many of us do.

Choosing to not fund education will mean hundreds of teacher layoffs and thousands of classes over the legal class size limit: a law the neoLiberals themselves enacted.

I’ve sat in hot planes on tarmacs. But I’m not responsible for massively increasing the misery of hundreds of thousands of British Columbians. So she gets no sympathy from me.

And while she doesn’t say “let us all eat cake,” the reverse is “weep for my suffering despite all of yours that I have caused.”

Give me a break.

Obama Is Not Anyone’s Economic Jesus

It’s time to get over ourselves with thinking of Obama being any kind of economic Jesus. Eric Margolis reflects many people’s hopes, but it is time to leave our naivety back in 2008 because its best before date has expired:

“The axis of sleaze between Wall Street and Washington’s politicians has to be broken. Time for Obama to drive the money lenders from the temple.”

- Eric Margolis, columnist, Toronto Sun, April 5, 2009

Margolis’ quote shows up on page 2 of the current CCPA Monitor journal from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Ed Finn, the editor, juxtaposes it with his own assessment of what Obama will not be able to offer:

“Obama may be helping some of the hardest hit victims of the financial meltdown in the US with his huge stimulus budget, but his massive trillion-dollar bailouts of the fraudulent financial system that precipitated the crisis reflect no desire on his part to replace or even moderately change it. Instead, the obvious intent seems to be to restore and perpetuate it.”

- Ed Finn, editor, CCPA Monitor, May 2009, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

Being optimistic for massive reform to global corporate neoliberal capitalism is one thing, but it truly pains me to acknowledge that expecting Obama to have messianic economic reform powers is just not realistic.

While I cheered his election and have significant respect for his demeanor, honesty, boldness in facing dire economic and social challenges domestically, we need to remember that the vetting process that takes place in the two major US political parties precludes any real reformers from having much of a chance at the White House.

Dennis Kucinich has been the most progressive Democrat to seek the nomination in recent elections. His policies reflect a profound desire to make America a beacon of social, economic and political justice and advocacy. 

He never stands a chance.

And I won’t even going into how credible Ralph Nader is on the corporate autocracy that runs America and the world. 

He’ll never make the White House either, barring some massive global economic depression and even more widespread corporate corruption leading to thorough delegitimization of free markets [though the fact that we tolerate this much says little about our civic critical capacities].

So those who have a solid chance of winning big party nominations are able to secure funding from broad sources. And while the stranglehold of corporate control of candidates is diminishing–but by no means disappearing–with more union and citizen financial support of the most progressive of the bunch, America is still America.

American capitalists and the majority of the middle class still believe in the American Dream[tm], or at least the perception that they can buy  in one day, despite Marxist arguments about false consciousness. Canadians exhibit much the same tendencies.

We are not so much interested in anyone challenging our beloved capitalism. When “excesses” occur, some tinkering is good enough because in the end, we can trust capitalists; after all, many of us have them as neighbours and they don’t seem to kill our pets for sport or empty our car tires on rainy Tuesday nights.

Part of the explanation for this lies in the lack of imagination and discourse about alternative economies. Free market capitalism is only about as old as America itself. That probably explains part of it right there. But before free market capitalism, we weren’t pre-social hunter-gatherers. We traded, we had markets, we even used markets to pursue social and economic justice.

And we can do that again, granted we have some leisure time to indulge in imagining economies that actually serve human beings.

But what about Obama, then?

He’ll tinker. He’ll sound resolute. He’ll speak like a disappointed patriarch scolding teenagers who took the car without permission and scratched it at the 7-11. Those capitalists [wag your finger with me, now]: always up to hijinx, so we have to ground them for a week or so to make them reflect on what they did!

He’s certainly better than Bush and McCain/Palin, even with McCain having spent most of the decade plugging his nose to suck up to the radical reactionary right of the Republican party to be a presidential contender, ignoring elements of his more moderate core.

But in the end, there is no way that Obama would have been a contender if the American and global corporate oligarchs weren’t comfortable that he was not going to close down the World Bank, IMF, WTO and OAS and invite Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales to the White House to build a new economic, social and political vision for the Americas.

And while I’ll continue to be pleased with Obama when it’s warranted, our relief at the end of the Bush dynasty should not keep us from recognizing when America is just being America some more. They are economic, political, social and cultural imperialists with a now-global manifest destiny that is rarely questioned, though the Chinese economic war with America may ultimately defeat them, leaving merely another global economic monster to contend with.

So feel free to leave your naivety in 2008 and when Obama does something not so progressive, develop a healthy critique of him. When he buckles to the healthcare lobby over the next few weeks, make sure he knows that Americans deserve to have a better healthcare system than to be stuck at the bottom of OECD rankings.

And if his foreign policy is more engaging and peace-building, celebrate that, but if his diplomacy is twinned with neoliberal assaults on other countries’ ability to develop their own economic, social and political structures, take a moment to demand more.

But in the end, if he leaves office without overturning any money lender tables in the temple of the global economy, don’t be dismayed. Reality will teach you all you need to know to assess his ultimate political value.

The Sick Government BCers Just Re-Elected

$2m is less than 50 cents/resident of BC.

Matt Good’s profound review of contradictions in, around, during and after Woodlands will pummel your soul, but in a good way, unless you’re a heartless misanthropist. And this first bit is just emblematic of how this government views its social responsibilities:

In 2005, Stan Hagen, BC’s Children and Family Development Minister, claimed that the Provincial government did not subscribe to the view that systematic abuse took place at Woodlands despite the fact that in 2002 the Provincial government issued an official apology to some 1,500 survivors of Woodlands, Essondale, Valleyview, and Tranquille. Unfortunately, the $2 million dollars promised to provide counseling for them has never materialized.

Decades ago, as families picnicked across the highway in Queen’s Park, children were being tortured within view of it. The headstones of those unclaimed victims of Woodlands were, over the years, thrown in the nearby ravine, used to build a staff barbecue patio and stairs, and 1,800 of them were ripped out of the ground in late 70’s so that a park could be built. All that is left now is a small memorial that some believe to be enough to mark their passing, a small park in which local residents allow their dogs to defecate and urinate, were graffiti defames shattered headstones.

via matthewgood.org » Archive » A Cannon In My Chest.

Gordon Campbell Fires Himself During the Leaders Debate

I was thoroughly astonished at how effectively Gordon Campbell maimed his political career during the leaders debate. But really, I shouldn’t be because of his utter inability to have any meaningful breadth of vision as a leader.

I can understand why the Liberals are hiding out and not attending all candidates meetings. Their record is so bad, that being perceived as arrogant and dismissive by not showing up is less damaging than having to answer to–or actually not answer to–their record.

But while Campbell is clearly afraid of having his empathy-free personality exposed in a debate with his NDP opponent Mel Lehan, he couldn’t hide from the leaders debate.

And since his no-contest plea to drunk driving in Maui in 2003, after spending years hiding in an undisclosed location with his ego-inflating RCMP security detail, he has clearly lost whatever populist appeal he had in the 1990s as an opposition MLA. I’ve recently looked at the leaders debates going back into the 1990s and he’s certainly lost even that edge. Unfortunately he hasn’t lost that nervous hand thing where he holds his hands in front of his belly, palms facing forward, holding a non-existent soccer ball. In the 1990s, a friend suggested his hands looked like they wanted to strangle someone, but I have always believed Campbell thinks it makes him look pensive.

And tonight he showed us all some of the worst elements of his character while Jane Sterk took adequate shots at the front-running parties and Carole James calmly and empathetically addressed issues, asked fact-based questions of Campbell and showed real maturity in the face of Campbell’s addiction to all things economic, and his chauvinism and condescension.

“It’s the Economy, Stupid!”

One of Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign epiphanies was all about getting elected on this: “it’s the economy, stupid.” Gordon Campbell, being obsessed with neoliberal economics, privatization, and reducing regulation, taxes, the government and all things public, spent much of the debate talking about how an issue or question affects the economy, no matter how far he had to drag the idea over.

Sure the Liberals have polled well on the economy, but he has drunk the neoliberal Kool-Aid so deeply that he still sees the global recession as a means to actually continue advancing his neoliberal agenda! It’s like Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine is his play book.

He knows that the recession is caused by neoliberalism and he loves it. It means more of the same.

What he isn’t hearing is that actual human beings enslaved by this global neoliberal economy are suffering under it since the economy doesn’t currently exist for them. And it scares them. So every time Campbell talks about how everything has to do with the economy, he just names their fear even more. Fear-mongerers like Campbell hopes this translates into votes. But hope and optimism and positive suggestions for a better province and world negate that negativity.

There were plenty of examples of Campbell’s obsession with economics. During the debate moderated by Russ Froese, he criticized Carole James for not having business experience. The assumption is that government is a business. That’s actually an ideology skulking around inside neoliberalism called New Public Management. But there are other more philosophically sound ideas of what a government is than that, the Social Contract, for one.

The pathetic thing about Campbell’s criticism is that elsewhere in the debate he reinforces what is commonly known about him, but seldom analyzed with his claim of being a businessman: he has spent the last 25 years in political life in municipal and provincial politics, so he himself has very little business experience. Whoops. George W. Bush may actually have more than him!

But to get a true sense of how economistic Gordon Campbell is, we only need to listen to the easiest softball question any politician could hope for, in the leadership category: what are three reasons why we should vote for you–and please answer without attacking or referring to your opponents. Sounds awesome. First, Carole James waxed eloquently about her resume and skill sets. To wrap up the trio, Jane Sterk did an good job of explaining sometimes vague experience, but right in the middle, Gordon Campbell failed his job interview:

“Well, Katy, that’s one of the more difficult questions I’m sure all three of us have had to try and answer. First let me say this, I think this is a very critical time in our economy. I think it’s important for us to have people with some business experience who can help deal with that. I think it’s important to have real leadership as we move forward and take advantage of the Pacific Century. That excites me. I also think that it’s important for us to have a government that’s willing to deal up front with the hard decisions we have to make with regard to climate change.”

Beyond the fluff of this nebulous Pacific Century, he went on talking about how the NDP did nothing to stop the pine beetle in the 1990s and why a new relationship with First Nations is important. 

But the beginning of his answer showed just how rarely he thinks about what public service really means–and he’s the premier! And he clearly wasn’t listening to Carole James inadvertently yet utterly destroy his lack of imagination, insight and breadth of personality just before him as he claimed that all three leaders couldn’t answer that question easily.

Still, if we are to take his current dubious First Nations policy seriously as a reflection of his leadership self-concept, we need to also remember that he stormed into office in 2001 and promptly embarked on a province-wide treaty referendum that was panned as purely racist and horribly worded to ensure the government could do whatever it wanted. Now that’s a sign of a special kind of horrible leadership!

Later, in responding to his neglect of the poor by not increasing the minimum wage for 8 years, Campbell again dragged out how the average wage in BC is $22/hour. My eyeballs swell with pressure every time he says this because he assumes we will all think we’re ok with that so we don’t need to care about the poor. But I wrote about that annoyance more here and I can’t go into it again or else I’d have to vomit.

And during his closing comment of the entire debate, the very first thing he said was that this election is about the economy and leadership. It’s clear that he doesn’t even have a vision of his own leadership and the issue around the economy is not whether the neoliberal government should continue to maim us during the recession, but whether we’re fed up with an economy that abuses people so that we can build an economy that actually serves people.

And to close, from the economy he invokes his fear-mongering hobby by threatening thousands of jobs that are at stake if the NDP forms government. Sure, BC is leading Canada by thousands in jobs lost in the last several months, but he’s hoping we’re not paying attention to that right now.

The trouble is, we are paying attention to that right now.

Chauvinism and Condescension

Aside from his reframing of everything into an economic lens, Gordon Campbell’s dark and dirty side came out during the debate as well.

Gordon Campbell’s first slip into condescension–or rather, insight into his character–came when Carole James asked him to justify his tough on crime stance with the cuts to prosecution and corrections officers in his February budget.

Campbell: ”I think, Ms. James, you should understand...I know this is a big job and it’s hard to get it–a handle on it, but the fact of the matter is we’ve added additional prosecutors to fight crime and fight the gansters, BLAH BLAH BLAH,” and at that point nothing else he said mattered.

He just called her stupid!

And it wasn’t like she said anything stupid. She was just asking about line items in his own budget. Of course he had no answer, so he just verbally slapped her on the top of the head. Eight years of bullying policies seem to fit nicely with his personality.

The second condescending gouge came when the three leaders were talking about addressing crime. Campbell was all about the variety of retributive justice and policing interventions. Carole James was talking about policing as well as the prevention programs while Jane Sterk spoke against a policing-only strategy, supporting prevention programs and decriminalizing illegal drugs. 

To this, Campbell mumbles in response to the alternative perspectives, “it is a multi-faceted approach that is required of us.” 

This is one of those phrases people use to let their audience know that they are, again, too stupid to understand the complexities of it all. Yet Cambpell has only a single-faceted policing/prosecution strategy, while both of the other leaders have a multi-faceted approach. So on top of his habit of insulting people to get them to shut up, he wasn’t listening to what multiple approaches actually sound like.

It also means that Campbell is either unaware of the social determinants of crime, or he doesn’t care about them. It’s all about the hammer for him.

The next example of Campbell’s chauvinism and condescension came when Carole James asked him whether he’d fund his pet hammer projects by transferring money from other areas like auto safety or community safety. After the question, the moderator, Russ Froese, said open debate time was up and Campbell would have to answer the question during his rebuttal time.

Campbell laughed.

Sure it could have been the nervous laughter of a child unable to adapt to a tense situation. Or more likely it’s the typical behaviour of someone who enjoys demeaning others in the legislature. Unfortunately, he let that slip during a debate that more than a few people would be watching. It simply made him sound like someone who doesn’t have the time for this nonsense.

It is also at this point that Campbell starts answering questions and issues by speaking to “Russ” by name. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but with two female leaders attacking him, it sure looked like he was seeking a connection with the other male on the stage. It might be out of insecurity. It might be because he is playing to a male voter demographic that happens to dominate his party’s base. It might be to marginalize the women on the stage by establishing the dialogue as a male-to-male context, thereby making the women interrupters. 

Then, in a flagrant violation of the respectful tone of the debate so far, when talking about healthcare, Gordon Campbell got truly ugly.

His government pledged to build 5,000 new long-term care beds for seniors. It turns out they built almost 5,000 assisted living beds, which are useful but are far from the same level of intensive service of long-term care. Then George Abbott, in one of his first public bids to distance himself from the Campbell regime for a leadership run coming soon, ultimately agreed that they didn’t actoually build 5,000 beds, instead it was about 800.

So Carole James asks, “I’d like to ask Mr. Campbell, is his health minister telling the truth or are you?”

It was a classic catch-22. Campbell was screwed. So he did the best thing he could think of, attacking Carole James by saying, “no, you’re not.” And if you saw it, you’d know it was as transparent an attempt at dodging a tough question as Campbell could provide. And it had the added bonus of petulance and absurdity as her question was based on Campbell’s own health minister’s admission of facts.

Then on the environment, Campbell tried to spin his woefully inadequate climate change program with airy nonsense and unicorn tears by saying our grandchildren will thank us for making the hard choices and “building a bridge to the future,” whatever that means, when the climate intervention program will fail miserably based on what scientists say is required. 

Then Carole James replied to his nonsense by saying he is inconsistent on the environment with a pathetic carbon tax along with pushing for offshore oil and gas drilling, irresponsible fish farms, firing park wardens and reducing environmental protection. And during this description of Campbell’s duplicity, a man with a microphone turned on just laughed. 

I doubt it was Russ Froese. If it was Campbell, such a laugh is useful for dismissing the legitimacy of someone’s criticism. But in stating those blatant hypocrisies in Campbell’s approach to all of the environment, there’s nothing illegitimate about the criticism. The laugh just sounds like a desperate attempt to avoid the reality.

So, in an era where electoral reform will likely sweep BC’s electoral system out of the 19th century, it is stunning that the leader of the governing party would allow himself to exhibit such despicable behaviour in public. But then again, for someone who has been in hiding since Maui, he seems to have forgotten that the soon-to-be passe rude and dishonourable behaviour in the legislature is part of the reason why people will vote for change this month.

And it’s not useful to let that nasty behaviour show up in public!

It made him look even more misanthropic than he already is, especially when Jane Sterk was attacking the polarized blame game of BC politics and Carole James was presenting an enlightened, human-centred vision for what the BC government should make the economy do for people.

So in just over 59 minutes, Gordon Campbell’s failure to relate to human beings, his obsession with the economy, and his rudeness, condescension and chauvinism will be a strong likely explanation for significantly increased voter turnout, a new electoral system, and an end to his days as premier.

“Lord Stern on global warming: It’s even worse than I thought”

“Sea levels are likely to rise twice as fast as predicted in the last UN climate change report in 2007.”

via Lord Stern on global warming: It’s even worse than I thought – Climate Change, Environment – The Independent.

As governments continue to craft optics-friendly greenwashing plans while ramping up highways construction, etc., I keep reading reports that estimates from as little as 2-3 years ago were too conservative as new data shows accelerating climate change effects.

Nero fiddled and we’re worried about how to afford a new car during this economic crash!

Stupid.

BC Liberals’ Homelessness Non-Solution

The neoLiberals are such anti-social, free marketeer, social darwinists that when polling shows people are very concerned about homelessness and poverty in BC, they come out with a thoroughly, cynically empty plan full of insubstantial optics that is insulting to people in need and those who advocate for them.

How do we know this? Beyond the empty rhetoric and Rich Coleman’s desire to be the saviour/czar of the homeless [after being the aggravator of those eager for affordable housing], we turn to BC’s auditor general. Whew!

When the neoLiberals first got elected they did two things to signal that they were not as interested in transparent, open government as their rhetoric indicated. They de-funded the auditor general’s office and Elections BC. But in a nice twist of irony, it is the auditor general who came out with some objective truth: the emperor has no clothes because the homelessness plan has no “clear goals and objectives,” “accountability for results is missing,” and they government has “not identified success.”

This is no surprise. I’ve written about the useless Rich Coleman periodically while the government has sworn off recognizing the need to count the homeless in BC to figure out the extent and breadth of the problem. This is especially embarrassing as NDP MLA David Chudnovsky toured the province as housing critic to do just that. Whoops, Minister Coleman, do your job, hey?

In his report, the auditor general’s comes up with one of the best arguments around, if it weren’t for the neoLiberals’ actively ignorant and blind social darwinist ideology keeping them from buying it: “The cost of public services to a homeless person is significantly higher than to that same person being provided with appropriate housing and support services.”

So the neoLiberals are willing to waste taxpayer money–normally repulsive to them–because they can’t bring themselves to admit that the free market forces people to the streets. This is why “pathetic” fits so well.

And it’s also why Rich Coleman won’t be able to rub two sticks together to solve anything before the election. It’s all optics designed to appeal to that element of their base that are actually repulsed by the party’s disdain for the poor or bothered by the presence of such poverty in the streets. Now that they hear the neoLiberals are serious about solving homelessness, that’s good enough. They can show up to vote and believe they aren’t voting for poor-bashers.

It’s just too bad that they’re wrong.

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.

Welcome Back to Civilization, America!