Top Of The List!
(still) NEW!!Ammo - selection of very good commentary from other writers on important stuff; - FAAAAARRRRR BETTER THAN TV!!!
Canadians for Canada Coalition (CCC) - United Left, if you will - but bottom of the line - Get Rid of Corporate Government in Canada - 2004 Federal Election may be your last chance - act NOW PLEASE!!
The Debt Conspiracy Theory Fact - do you believe people who email you from Africa wanting to give you 10 million bucks? No? Well WHY DO YOU BELIEVE THE NATIONAL DEBT IS LEGITIMATE?!?!? (Sorry - I get excited about this...)
911 - as important as the debt scam - ask yourself why you are so afraid to admit the truth here, even when it's been kicking you in the face almost since it happened? When the world you live in is operating under a lie this big and obvious and monstrous, you have no security whatsoever.
Unbrand Your Life
![[Blue Ribbon Campaign icon]](http://br.eff.org/br.gif)
Pogo knew....
stop this....
and this....
Thomas D'Aquino
Hand of Mordor
in Canada
stop this...
save this...
random quotes
George Orwell 1984
who dat scary man mama??!!
RM 030629 The Lemming Road
Lead
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by...."
- I'm sure most people are familiar with that - Robert Frost. One of the great poems by one of the great poets - America at its best - and at its best, America was a great thing - as, now, at its worst, it is a very fearsome thing - it is, indeed, one of the most fearsome things in the history of the world. Mr. Frost is, of course, in the way of poets, in the bigger world they see, talking about bigger things than a path or two in the woods, he is talking about decisions, which is what this little ramble seems to be about.
People make decisions all the time, of course - and so do governments. We should never lose sight of that fact - our history, our present society, are not big icebergs lumbering in the ocean, tossed by current and storm, but more like big ocean liners, under the control of someone, steering ably between the bergs on their way to wherever, but hopefully a better place than where we started, or recklessly, playing juvenile chicken games with the bergs or other liners great and small, or heading north into the frozen wasteland rather than south into pleasant and peaceful climes, apparently under the control of some maniac, heedless of the safety and comfort of the passengers. Wherever we are, as a society, whatever we are doing, whether things are great or not so great or just fucking lousy - we are there pretty much because our government made a decision, or series of decisions, that brought us here. Keep that in mind as we ramble - it was not some god that made this happen, or the stars, or the invisible hand of the market, or fate or a bad throw of the dice or any other damn thing that people bring up to avoid responsibility for bad stuff - it was all intentionally done by someone or someones.
And given that after 2,000 years of "western" civilization (or 3,000 or 4,000 or 10,000 depending on where you want to start counting), we are currently, as a whole, not a great deal better off than we were when we started, in terms of overall human development (no I haven't been sleeping all of my life - but I am not counting technological progress as human progress - by human progress I mean the overall quality of life of all citizens - safety, education, health, reasonable freedom from poverty and bullies, general equality of people, our understanding of and relationship with the other parts of nature, things like that) - we are, in fact, the last couple of years, in a pretty tense time, with simmering conflicts all around the world that could very easily erupt in some form of armageddon - and with a leader of the "free world" pretending to take orders directly from god and tens or hundreds of millions of his subjects who pretend to believe him (it is to weep in despair!!!), the prognosis is probably worse than it has been in quite some time.
And we have got to this state not as an iceberg drifting aimlessly through the sea, but by conscious decisions of many people, over time. It is not accidental, it was not inevitable - we could have done much worse, certainly (the Kennedy advisors wanted him to nuke Cuba, Reagan wanted to nuke Russia) - but it could have been so very much better as well. Another road could indeed have been taken.
Why do I remain so SURE there is this big conspiracy here, there and everywhere, the rightwing neoconspiracy of the neoconmen, and what is it all about and why are they doing it, and why don't I get a life and quit going on about it day after day after year after year? A not infrequent question, really, and since most people seem to believe everything is pretty much ok in our country, and the world and universe are unfolding much as they should, not perfect of course but ok, there is not much concern about it, and a tendency to put people like me and sites like RM in the same dismissive category as "Space Aliens" and "Elvis is alive!!" and "CIA conspiracy to kill JFK" and "American government complicity in the WTC takedown" file and what not. And you know what? I really hope they're right (and you if you're one of them), and I'm crazy. I can live with it - considering most people in the country seem to spend their time between some basically meaningless assembly line job making money for their masters, and watching brainless american tv, and wandering around great crowds of their peers in malls on the weekends and some evenings, believe me, I can live with thinking and believing differently from most - I do not consider the time I spend reading and pondering and writing to have been wasted in the same way I would question the value of, for instance, having watched (let's see - 40x365x5=??) maybe 70,000 hours of tv in my so-called life - I have indeed wandered down a lot of wrong paths in my time - but in almost every case, from that wandering have learned something, and would not have missed the experience, and those wrong paths have helped me learn to tell the signs of good paths from poor paths a little better, for instance, helped me learn to distinguish between big colorful plastic sunflowers and smaller but much more real and sublime daisies, or stand a bit on my own feet and think for myself and tell those who would steal my life and time to take a hike. But the alternative to me being wrong this time - the neocon conspiracy that a lot of us believe is underway - is pretty scary shit. So you do what you gotta do, and try. And as I admit I may be wrong, and listen to your tv-based fantasies and coincidence theories that explain your world and the things in it politely, perhaps you might listen to my rather different outlook on how and why things are the way they are. Someday we can look back and decide who was closer to the truth, maybe.
70 years ago, the 1930s, even with the horrible carnage of the first world war still fresh in everyone's minds, hardly anyone wanted to deal with the idea, the possibility, that some madman in Germany was about to do it all over again, barely 20 years later, but with much more powerful weapons causing much greater destruction and death. Go on, I dare you - before you even go any further here, just go and spend a few hours at a library, and read some microfiche of what the newspapers and magazines in the 1930s were saying about Hitler - even though he'd laid the whole thing out in Mein Kampf a decade earlier, and was stumping his country making fiery speeches and getting all the young people brainwashed and in their jackboots carrying around swastikas and declaring themselves the master race about to establish a 1000-year Reich, it was head-in-the-sand time for pretty much everyone. But Reckoning Day was not far off. "Don't listen to your crazy brother, Madge - Hitler's actually quite a nice chap you know - Time's "Man of the Year" and everything - and surely those great Americans like Henry Ford and Mr. Rockefeller and Prescott Bush wouldn't be supporting him if he was going to do anything bad, now, eh?? People like your brother just can't fit in, you know - always making up these crazy conspiracy theories like this - really, Madge - pay no attention!!" Right-o mate. Too bad you didn't get a chance to make the same speech a few years later to about 50,000,000 dead people from the wasteland that once was Europe.
What about the Titanic? Everything was just fabulous, a big party, until - boom. One minute joy and carefree dancing under the stars, champagne and lovers - the next a big sinking ship in the cold north Atlantic - and soon, very soon, after that - 1200 dead bodies floating and then being fish food in that cold dark north Atlantic night, with but a handful of survivors with a terrible, terrible story to tell. Dead also the cabin boy and his mates who had seen the berg and tried desperately to warn everyone to no avail - they were all having a good time and didn't want to spoil their fun. Then BOOM!
The only point being - things can change quick, but in almost every case where things went from great to really bad, there was a period, a time, where it could have been stopped, had those involved wished to stop it - had some other decisions been made, had another path been taken. But for some reason - for some reason - most people preferred to pretend there was no crisis approaching, preferred to keep dancing on the pool deck until the terror came and took them all away.
And it seems, to those of us watching today, that there is an over abundance of signs that a new terror, far, far, far worse than story-book villains like Osama or Saddam, a terror easily as bad as being plunged into the cold dark north Atlantic in the middle of the night with nothing or no one there to save us, is right on our doorstep, knock knock knocking, and everyone is sitting in front of their tvs laughing carefreely, thoughtlessly, at the latest game show, or watching the ball game, or doing their BBQs or going to the malls or anything at all, in general denying the signs and the soothsayers - and won't wake up until the power just suddenly goes off and they go out to their dark porch on the dark street some night, and say "What happened?" - and by then, by then it will be far, far too late to stop the new barbarian horde, or stop the jackbooted soldiers whose footsteps can already be heard. (oh yes indeed I might have been a fiction writer - but the truth, the truth, the truth as they say, is far stranger, and far more deadly.... and none of the things I mentioned above, or dozens of others I could mention, just "happened" - there was a long leadup period to all of them, a period when they could, indeed, have been stopped.)
And there are so many signs that say, no, that fucking SCREAM!! we are in such a lead-up period today. I can't say exactly what is going to happen - but I can say, without a shadow of doubt, that something really big, and really bad, is sneaking at this very moment up our front walk, and if we don't do something really, really soon to stop it, it is going to knock knock knock on our door very soon and do really bad things. The Orcs are coming to Hobbiton - but nobody told Frodo, and nobody is making some desperate dash across Mordor to save us. Unfortunately, although there are lots of orcs (no, we aren't going to equate the current White House gang with Sauron - he was big evil - these guys are just the embodiment of Barbara Erlichman's "banality of evil" - the destruction they are about to bring on us will be just as bad, however), there are no heroes in this story, only you and me and a lot of people in front of their tvs thinking everything is just hunky-dory, as me pa used to say. Just hunky-fucking-dory.
Ominous signs - a crazed warlike puppet leader of the most heavily armed nation the world has ever seen, declaring the right of his country to engage in "preemptive" military action anywhere at all in the world he, and he alone, decides is a "threat" to his country. He will lie to justify it if he has to. As with Hitler, the UN (yeayea League of Nations at that time) and other major countries in the world line up to offer this crazed leader appeasement, in the hope he will stop of his own volition. The media in his own country support him without question, and the media in the rest of the world question him only tentatively, and like the Germans in the late 1930s, the masses in his country cheer his aggression, and his secret police stifle what dissent there is, even in other countries.
And here in Canada, closer to home, the "progressive" society of the post-war years under Diefenbaker, Pearson and Trudeau has gradually become regressive, with the social support systems, the once world-class healthcare and education systems being starved for funds on false premises (again not accidentally, a decision having been made to do this very thing, and then enacted) until they barely function and are on the verge of collapse, the financial protection systems for people without work likewise starved in order to create a compliant, low-expectation work force, necessary for the efficient functioning of the current economic elitist paradigm, until there are new foodbanks established almost every day somewhere in the country, and the thousands of them across the nation can barely meet the demand from the poor and homeless; while on the other side of the coin, the country has more millionaires and billionaires than ever before, the banks rack up record profits quarter after quarter, and the leading businesspeople call for lower and lower taxes, with no care nor concern whatsoever for their less-well-off and suffering fellow citizens. From one of the most progressive democratic-socialist societies in the world, we have regressed a long ways towards a polarized, look-out-for-yourself laissez-faire capitalist society - following more and more faithfully in the footsteps of the growing fascist society to our south. Who decided to follow this path? Do you recall any vote on this - "Two roads are there to choose from, citizens - which do you prefer?" - sure. It has been done by stealth, of course, since poll after poll indicates this is NOT the path most Canadians want to follow - decisions are made behind closed doors, however, to lie to the Canadian people, and to force them down this path.
The question of the day is - is this necessary? Is this the "natural" course of events in a human society, or in Canada? Or were there options - was a choice made at some point to put a stop to this European-style social progressiveness, and embrace American-style "rugged individualism"? (a BAWBL for sure, as should be evident to anyone who pays attention - the Americans like to talk about "rugged individualism" but their fortunes have always been built on huge government transfers of wealth from the taxpayer to the MIC (military-industrial complex) and other corps, outright looting (including of the US treasury and pension funds, of epic proportions under Bush), and very one-sided and protectionist trade practices ("Free Trade" to the Americans means they are free to plunder at will, and you are free to shut the fuck up about it or get liberated)
It's just so obvious that it does NOT have to be this way!! - it would be so very easy to make things good for everyone, or the great majority (there will always be a few (a smaaaalllll few) who don't want anything to do with any government, or turn criminal for one reason or another, or just walk their own paths for awhile before joining the rest of us - and we should allow them their freedom to choose their own path, while protecting ourselves from those who seem genetically predisposed (often encouraged by upbringing of course) to believe they are better than the rest of us, and entitled to live a life of ease by coercing others through violence and theft and sneakery and lies - the elitists, in other words) - and that the things to make it so are not being done, are in fact being rejected in favor of making things worse for the many while the few increase their luxury, is more than enough evidence.
Decisions, again. Which road? And in a community with a shared government "of ALL the people" - who chooses which path shall be taken?
And also, we do believe that it is very important at this time - not to overstate the case, but probably as important as realizing what Hitler was up to in the 1930s and doing something to stop him would have been then. More important, actually, since Hitler did eventually get stopped, at huge and horrendous cost - should it happen that our fears are correct, it is probable that the new American Reich will be more difficult to stop. Perhaps impossible - imagine Hitler at the helm of the current US government - that is to say, controlling the mightiest military machine the world has ever seen, by a large margin. Imagine Hitler with nuclear (ie nukular for George-speakers) weapons, surrounded by advisors of PNAC (google it if you don't know what it means) who believe that it is America's destiny and right to rule the world, and smash anyone who even appears like they might be a threat. Imagine that. And then put your head back in the sand and don't think about it anymore, if you can. Better though, would be to turn off the tv for a few minutes, and think what this might mean for your children, and their children. Think of Hitler's "vision" finally being realized - the 1,000-year Reich wasn't destroyed in 1945 after all, only delayed a few years, while shifting to a different HQ. Think what your daughter or son is going to say to you in 10 or 20 years, maybe - Daddy - why did you let this happen? What will you say - you had to watch Survivor? You didn't have any idea? You were told (and believed) that people who warned about this sort of thing were just wacko conspiracy theorists and everything was just fucking wonderful in the country and the world? Your head was filled with visions of all the neat stuff you could buy with lower taxes? Whatever you tell the kid - do you think they'll believe you? Do you think they'll agree with your decision to do nothing about the crazed captains steering towards the berg? Do you think they'll wonder why you didn't choose a different path - a path perhaps less traveled by in the modern world, but perhaps a more suitable path for creating a decent world for our children?
Crazy, right? Time will tell - but people who said the same about Hitler in the 1930s faced the same situation - and they weren't, as it turned out, very crazy at all. The guy they were talking about and worrying about - well...... as it turned out, they had a pretty good reason to be worried.
Still - that doesn't seem to be a very popular idea, since we hardly ever read about in the papers. What about some examples?
Well, it's not that surprising you're not reading about it in the papers - the rightwing press talks about stuff they want you to think about (lower taxes lower taxes privatisation is good government is wasteful lower taxes lower taxes etcetcetc - heard any of that lately?!?) - and that corps and banks are getting richer and paying less taxes while average Canadians are getting poorer and more stressed out isn't something they want you to think about - if YOU were carrying on some kind of fifth-column activity in Canada trying to undermine the government of the people and entrench your Elitist government - would YOU talk about it in the papers you owned, the papers you had acquired for the dual purpose of spreading your agenda and marginalising all dissent? Sure.
By almost any standards Canada has been one of the most prosperous countries in the world the last half century or so, in terms of a safe society, looking after its people, availability of health care and education for all, and so on. One should not complain about that, right? And really, one doesn't - what one complains about is that all of those good things are being taken away - we are regressing, and regressing at an increasingly rapid rate, since the days of Mulroney (since ten years before Mulroney, actually, but the swinging 2x4 didn't actually make contact with the head of the body politic until Mulroney and Wilson, and their sudden conversion to Free Trade and the formal establishment of the "Debt Crisis" - really, you can date the end of Progressive Canada and the beginning of regressive, neocon Canada to that infamous day in the fall of 1984 when the Mulroney's neo-non-P-Cs took office). This is not a secret - the huge government cutbacks of the last 20 years in the name of "getting the financial house in order" or however you want to phrase it, which has led to the great cutbacks in health care availability and quality, and the closing of schools, the deterioration in education quality and teacher satisfaction, the crumbling of national infrastructure, the shift in work from fulltime good-paying jobs to part-time, insecure, low paying jobs, etc etc etc and et-fucking-cetera - you know all this so why are you hassling me? I guess because you don't read about it much in all the papers, so it isn't right on the tip of your tongue like, oh, for instance, TAX CUTS!!!! might be, or WASTEFUL GOVERNMENT SPENDING!!! or FREE TRADE WILL MAKE US ALL RICH!!!! - stuff like that - you've heard those things before, right? Recently, right? Sure you have - even if you watch tv all friggin day, you've heard that crap in the 30-second news breaks and stuff - trust me, they know what they're doing, it is NOT coincidental that you hear that stuff continually. Not coincidental that it is all lies as well, but you've heard it so many times that you think it must be true, too.
Anyway - are you aware also that something like 20% of Canadian children live in poverty? - when was the last time you heard that in a 30-second news break (man you can squeeze so much cogent commentary about the state of the world into 30 seconds!) - 14 years after a House of Commons Resolution to END child poverty in Canada within ten years, by the end of the century it was, at that time - and that childhood poverty rates have actually INCREASED since then? You might see that going by on the back page somewhere about once a year, in between 4 or 40 thousand TAX CUTS!! stories - it's not something they want you thinking about much - nor would they EVER want you making any connection between the two ("Hmmmm.." the average citizen, brain still intact from NOT watching 6 hours of tv a day (I think there's a handful left out there) might ponder, "the government has less and less money because of these continual tax cuts that the wealthy demand - and the hospitals are closing and child poverty rates increasing because the government says it just can't afford these things ..... hmmmm - hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm..." - well, perhaps you could finish the sentence yourself. (Don't ask the Fraser Institute about poverty - their solution is to redefine what 'poverty' means - fabulous and really cheap and fast way to slash poverty rates!! Unfortunately, as with bringing Bill Gates to Canada to increase the average wealth of Canadians, it's not an idea that actually helps anyone with their head somewhere outside of the corporate asshole.)
Don't you, as a Canadian citizen, find it just a little unsettling that 20% of the children living in this country, in Canada, at the beginning of the 21st century, are facing serious hardship and being slotted into some "poor-quality-lives" stream of our society for no other reason than an accident of birth? Doesn't that offend your sense of fair play somehow? Your sense of human-ness? Don't you fucking care? Doesn't it offend you that all of these children are being denied a decent start in life so that people who already have more fucking money than they could ever use can have MORE!!??? Doesn't if offend you that these sons of bitches with no hearts and no souls and no ethics, nothing in their heads but GREED ME ME ME ME GREED have taken over our government, have bought the favors of the politicians you and other Canadians elected to serve US, and bribed them to take our once so-great country, so looked up to all over the world, and turned it into this little backwoods suckass colony of the United fucking States of America, one of the most brutal and least progressive societies on the planet, and now much of the world is looking at us with a great deal less respect and trust? Doesn't that even start to get you steamed?
Decisions decisions - the people in Germany in the 1930s decided they'd follow along with Adolf - if you could somehow resurrect them for a few minutes now and ask them what they thought of that decision now, they might express some regret. Or not. The people who steered the Titanic who, for whatever reason, chose not to look for icebergs in the cold north Atlantic seem to have made a poor decision. And the people now, not only in the US but in other countries like Canada who could decide to take steps to curtail his activity, are deciding the role of appeasement is better - much like Chamberlain and the Brits in the late 1930s. One can hope that their decision is less disastrous. Or one can choose to stand up and risk ridicule, and say something like SOMEBODY BETTER WAKE THE FUCK UP HERE, I'M TELLING YA!!! Or again, spend their time writing nice polite prose to their MPs or email lists or newspapers, suggesting politely that perhaps, just perhaps, there might be some small problems here... please, sir, will you publish my letter in your paper, sir?.... HAHAHAHAHA - they just fucking LOVE it when you do that!!!
And you - you - you - it is all of YOU together who let these things happen. Without your support, Hitler spends his life speaking to a small band of drunken accomplices in small bars, or goes back to art school. Without your votes here in Canada, the Mulroneys and Harrises and Kleins and Chretiens do not get a chance to give your tax dollars to the banks, instead of providing programs to help the poor - because you have NOT re-elected them! - you have spoken, you have said to them, your lying ways are not acceptable. Your decisions. The road less traveled, assuming responsibility for your decisions - or the easy road, just keep on what you've been doing, proxy your sacred decision making right and duty as a human being to someone else for no acceptable reason (there are none), go back to your comfort zone such as it is (tv anyone?), and temporary though it may be, and hope that things work out ok. The Chamberlain road. The head-in-the-ass road. The Schultz Road ("I know nothing!!" - remember that old series Hogan's Heroes, making a joke out of the war that killed 50,000,000? What a fucking society - further than ever from earning the right to call itself any kind of "civilization")
- and if you're offended now, and protest that things would never go that far, in Canada these people won't use violence to achieve their ends - really, get away from the tvs and think!!! What about the police pepper spraying protestors in Vancouver so one of the world's more brutal dictators wouldn't be offended?!?!? - whose side was the government on there (Chretien thought it was just a joke - no doubt in Jean's mind who the good guys are and the bad guys - he's a good actor, though...)? What about Quebec, a huge barricade, tear gas and pepper spray, to stop average people from trying to get involved with the decision making of the elite, or again at Kanasaksis, or the Toronto cops rioting against the OCAP demonstrators in their black Darth-Vader battle dress? These are not isolated incidents - these are the opening shots of the New World Order coming to Canada. (It's not new either - what about the Winnipeg General Strike (probably didn't learn about that in the history class - or do they even still teach history?!? - but the whole historical analysis would require several more pages and days than we have for this humble little column....) Things have been escalating since the corporate revolt of the 1970s, and this is quickly becoming a police state, and if you don't believe that - well, as they say, what are you doing here - isn't it past your bedtime for heaven's sake child!!??) Some people decide to act, some to watch tv, some to deny. The path of the lemmings or the road less traveled. Conspiracy fact or denial theory.
Or have you all made a decision that what happens to other human beings in other parts of the world, or even your own country, is of no concern to you - you obey the laws the government makes, and don't cause trouble, so things in your life are just dandy and just no need whatsoever to worry about all them other human beings - damned foreigners and Muslims and yellow people and black people - who gives a fuck what happens to them anyway?
I suppose not - if you watch tv enough, and get your news from the National Pispot - why, you never even consider questions like that, so they wouldn't bother you much - you've been well taught that your "responsibility" lies in casting a ballot for tweedledum or tweedledee every few years, then getting back to your tvs and malls and doing what you're told, going to work each day to make sure the elite keep their profits rolling in from your labor. Your government will take care of all them other things for you. A Good Citizen - does the name Boxer ring a bell? If not, check it out (orwell animal farm ought to do it). The poor? Easiest thing, as the Frasers know, is to define them out of existence and don't think about them - and when there gets to be enough of them that they're hard to ignore, why, then pass laws like the Harris neocons did in Toronto so the police can put them in jail if they dare to say anything in public about their miserable lives.
And then you could say, if you had been reading the Pispot or Sun regularly, that "RUDE!! sure things are not perfect - but they are going to get better! - we all KNOW that lowering taxes for the rich really means the government will have more money!!! Because the rich will invest their extra money in new businesses, and then there will be more jobs for everyone, and the government will collect even MORE taxes - so even though the tax rate is lower, the government will have MORE MONEY for all them social things you're worried about!!! - it's so easy, you see....." - yeah, I've been hearing that for what? 20 years? and even though the rich have been getting their lower taxes, and lower taxes, and lower taxes, for all of this time, they don't seem to be opening all these new businesses and creating all these great new jobs - they just seem to be buying more million dollar houses in tropical islands and cars and girls and stuff, and demanding even LOWER taxes, and opening a lot of minimum wage call centers and shit, and demanding government subsidies for that, and ever LOWER taxes!! - I mean, if these lower taxes were REALLY making the government richer, how come there are more food banks and they have to close hospitals and schools and the Toronto hospitals weren't prepared for SARS and the Ontario Ministry of the Environment was slashed so badly that a new Walkerton is almost a certainty and etc and etc? There seems to be a bit of a disconnection between the Trickle Down Theory and reality, if you see what I mean? It kind of seems like the old practice of bleeding patients when they were sick - and this puppy is on its last legs, it seems, and the neocon prescription is BLEED IT SOME MORE!!!?? Me, I think we need a new doctor. This quack's taken us all to the cleaners big time. They got their tax cuts, again and again - but the government didn't get richer, and the neocons didn't get happier and the jobs and increased government revenue didn't happen - sort of like a spoiled kid these days, the neocons, no matter what you give it, it just wants more and more and more and more, and thinks only of itself. Very unhealthy mental attitude, and we do it nor us any favors by pandering to it. There does come a time when the rich spoiled kid needs a little attitude adjustment, as they say, little whack on the ass maybe, to wake it up to the fact that there are other people in the world or country, with needs that have to be seen to as well.
Really, that was kind of sarcasm, if you're still with me - we all know that Trickle Down is somewhere between stupidity and lies, or maybe both - it's hard to think that any sane human being could really believe that kind of nonsense. Right up there with the theory that the earth is 4,000 odd years old and run by a great sky being, or the flat earth theory of awhile ago.
Just another thing about decision making, how things can get decided and done pretty quick if the political will is there to do it, and how other things, with no political will, seem to get talked about a lot but never done.... Around 1986 the Mulroney government started yapping about the great wonders of Free Trade with America (even though he had said very clearly during the election campaign he was totally against it!!) - and shortly after the 1988 Big Business-fixed "Free Trade "election, during which he got around 43% of the popular vote (with about 75% voter turnout, meaning something like 32% of the voting-age population of Canada supported him and the FTA and this major, major shift in the direction of our country - let's hear another big cheer for "Democracy in Canada" - and try to figure out a definition of that illustrious word that covers this type of situation!!), "Free Trade" was the new national policy. No fucking around there, me lads - we want Free Trade, we'll just fucking do it - takes about two years!! Child poverty? - well - we'll kind of study it, you know, for a few years, but gee it's quite expensive 5 - 10 - 14 years still nothing more than pious words (well, there have been a lot of cuts to programs for the poor, so things have actually gotten quite a bit worse for poor children) .... a pharmacare program ... well .... hmmm.... And who was it wanted "Free Trade"? The corps. And who was and is it wants something done about child poverty? Well - it sure as hell ain't the corps. And we really don't need to spell it out a lot more plainly than that.
Think about it - think about it - decisions, roads, the many, the few, the road less taken ....
Well, let's carry on - all that, really, was in the nature of background (HUHNUHUNUU!!!?????)) - what we're leading up to is that in any given situation, the government has a decision to make, and does what it thinks best - well, poor choice of words - it does not necessarily do what it thinks best at all, but it does what it will, whether anyone outside of right wing think tanks or not on the neocon payroll thinks it best or not. It is, in the end, simply a matter of will, political will - and the question of the day is, of course, just whose fucking "will" is the government of Canada carrying out when it decides which road to take - the will of the people, or the will of somebody or something else? It would seem that there is a VERY strong case to be made that it is NOT the will of the people, but the will of the major corporations and banks of Canada, led by ur-Lord Canadian Hand of Mordor Thomas d'Aquino, head of the BCNI/CCCE.
No we don't have any "hard" evidence like confessions or editorials in the Pispot saying "Look how we screwed the idiots again!!" - the evidence is all circumstantial (strong circumstantial if viewed from the proper perspective) - but really, do you expect these people to have secret papers hidden away confessing everything? Sure. (Imagine if the court system worked like that - no confession no crime! - sure free up a lot of space in the nation's jails anyway. As Gestapo leader Rumsfield said not too long ago, in a comment that will surely come back to haunt him much more than it ever helped him (outside of the White House Press Room and CNN and Fox, the man has no credibility at all in the rest of the world, it seems, deservedly so - maybe George and Donald and the rest should have read the story of Chicken Little at some point, although George at least may have stopped reading anything before he got to that level... (I know it was a bad joke but you just can't help it sometimes..)), absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - in this case, of course, lack of evidence of a conspiracy to defraud the Canadian taxpayers of hundreds of billions of dollars and regress one of the most progressive governments in the world to a banana republic shipping the last of its resources to the Great Consumer Society to the south is not evidence of absence of no conspiracy. If you can follow that. But the ground is littered with smoking guns, just fucking littered - but in a tv-society trained to be told what the "news" is by others rather than figuring things out for themselves, all those smoking guns are unseen - and when others point them out in astonishment at their blindness, they deny deny deny - we are going to get into denial theory soon, which has a great deal more credibility than conspiracy theory, but not on this day. sadly it is so - not on this day...)
But let's take a little wander back through time, and have a little overview at the activities of the Canadian government over the last decade or two or three, and see what sort of circumstantial evidence we can round up - the old "smoking gun" theory that has been so much in the news the last few weeks (as in George don't got one (that's good Texas talk) to prove his heart and motives were pure for bombing the fuck out of yet another country - we, on the other hand, have lots - the trail may be a few years old, but the scat is still pretty clear, and pretty smelly, if one takes the tv remote out of one's friggin nose, where it clogs up the eyeballs too it's so big, and apparently the brain cells too - that part behind the nose and eyeballs with neurons and synapses that are supposed to be interconnected (but the tv interferes with a lot) is pretty important).
Also, as usual, this will be from a perspective NOT covered in today's Pispot (or any other day), so use that remote and turn the damn tv off so you're not distracted by the pretty Stepford girls selling whitenoise to flatline your brainwaves. Unless you like flatlining - about 80% of the country seems to, and even more in America (honest to fuck there can be very very little left of the old grey matter in that country when 60-70-80% of Americans can listen to George without gathering en masse in front of the White House and demanding he get the fuck out of there and somebody with at least an average sort of non-psychotic IQ brought in. Maybe that was a bad example - the scary thing is, in that country all indications now are that he may be on the high end of the IQ scale. fuckfuckfuck we're in trouble). But you're here because you're trying to quit the habit, right? Listen, it's ok - the remote's right there on the table, right? Confront your fear. Tell it to FUCK OFF!!! Grab a cold beer if you got one. Hell, close the door and light up - small acts of rebellion can help lay the groundwork for bigger things, like radical thoughts - and you can blame the headache on the butt. They KNOW that too. If you really want to get 'em pissed off, leave your seatbelt off the next time you go to work or the store or whatever - it's like a big neon sign FREEDOM ALERT FREEDOM ALERT!!! flashing on the roof of your car, kind of like a big FUCK YOU to any authority figures in the area, and they don't much like that (hahahaha - little understatement there - they FUCKING HATE IT!!!!). (no don't call me afterwards - you KNOW what's gonna happen - dealing with it is part of your learning experience - you don't really start to understand the corruption of the entire system until you have been tossed around like a sack of shit for a few months by the court system which is supposed to function so wonderfully for simply trying to assert your rights as a citizen to some small component of justice and fair play (HAHAHAHAHAHA - you really have to have done this a couple times to understand how funny that was, the words "justice" and "fair play" in relation to the cops-and-court "JUSTICE IS US!!!NOT!!!" system - another Big Lie for another day), but in reality is just another layer between us and the Elite, to keep us in line and confirm and maintain and consolidate their power - yeah I know how crazy that sounds after you've been brought up your whole life thinking how perfect it is - like I say, it's one of those things that you can only really grok after you've been there and come out the other side more or less intact (many don't) and had a bit of time to reflect on it - sorta like sex, I guess, or a hangover, or a kick in the sack, or the first day you actually woke up knowing that there was no Santa Claus. or god. The things that help you grow are often rather difficult - but you usually are better off for having been through them. There's limits to that sort of thing, of course - I don't, for instance, have any great desire to experience a bullet in the brain, although I understand there are those who would be happy to provide me with the opportunity...)
Shit. Where was I? Still crazy after all these years - and still get that little red film running over my eyeballs like in the early James Bond movies when somebody starts talking about how fucking wonderful it is that we all wear seatbelts now - kind of like saying how fucking wonderful it is that we all have our own private little nutrient eggtanks in the Matrix and the government is providing wonderful free lobotomies for everyone, starting in kindergarten. Think of it in symbolic terms like poets do - strapped in against your will. Because the big man in the black suit, who is really of course your friend as long as you do what you're told, will beat on your head if you don't do what you're told (in Canada anyway - they probably shoot you in the US, where too many guns seem to be matched up with too few brains, especially in the various SS brigades). This is, symbolically, a very important and very cogent lesson - do what you're told, and don't ask fucking questions about it, and see that your neighbors do the same (when was the last time you got in someone else's car and they told you they aren't even starting the engine until you chain yourself up?) - I can't get a grip on the democratic connection here, especially since in not ONE of the provinces that did this seatbelt stuff back in the late 70s (they all did, of course - and watch the dates and think two plus two - Trilateral Commission, crisis in democracy .... symbolically fastening the government chains!!) was there any party EVER that said they were making this part of an election campaign - "HI! Vote for us and we'll pass a seatbelt law!!" - Not a fucking one - I wonder why?? And if the government is so concerned about your safety, what are they doing closing all the hospitals and making policies that increase the number of poor and stressed people, which leads to all kinds of health problems and violence, and doing nothing about child poverty except making it worse? And exactly where do you get off thinking that people who do not choose to put seatbelts on "voluntarily" are too fucking stupid to think for themselves and need to be forced to do it? At what point in time did it become ok for your induced paranoid fears about getting in an accident every time you get in your car become the general case? Do you have any fucking idea at all of the actual odds of your being in an accident severe enough to cause even small bodily injuries let alone serious ones? (check it out I dare you!) Do you base your retirement income on lottery tickets? Better odds!!!! (man see what I mean about the red film?!?!)
Am I rambling again? geez. Back ... back .... Smoking guns. Political will. Two paths diverging.... The gist is hovering nearby....
Let's wander back about 30 years (Canadian time) - the Liberals have just brought in the "Buck is a buck!" budget - one of the most progressive economic statements from any Canadian government ever. And the corps freaked. Just freaked. Among other measures designed to encourage the corps to pay taxes, the budget dared to say that it didn't really matter where a person (even a rich one, oh heresy!!) got money from, it should be taxed the same. Including corporate dividends, for instance, which had been receiving special treatment from the taxman. Well, in the end the Liberals of the day backed off - right the fuck off, as you might say in fighting terms, to be quite clear, to the other side of the equation - and instead of hitting the wealthy with a bit more of a fair and progressive tax to fund the growing and progressive democracy known as Canada using the money generated by the people of this country, actually wound up beginning the long series of corporate tax reductions that have done such damage to the whole idea of social democracy in Canada (and by extension, around the world, since after a generation of that kind of decision making, no longer can emerging or less "developed" countries look to us and say something like, "Look at Canada - that's what we want!" - no longer that, me old son, no sir, not any more, not really, we wouldn't recommend government of, by and for the corporations to any people anytime anywhere.) The government, in effect, which had been elected to do the will of the people, wound up doing the will of the corporations. A decision was made that what was good for the few wealthy was more important than what was good for the many non-wealthy. Not, we might point out, the road less traveled. The Lemming Road, actually...
We mention that in case you are not yet clued in to the Corporate Revolution of the 1970s - I haven't yet done the definitive essay on it (even on the net, it's a bit difficult getting source material from that time - not that that ever stopped us here, but it helps), but it was when the corps decided that the whole "Democracy" experiment in the west had started getting out of hand, and had to be reined in - check the Trilateral Commission and the Crisis in Democracy. The most effective way to deal with this was just to cut back on the money available to the governments, which at that time still had a lot of MPs who actually tried to represent their constituents and do good stuff (NO!! IT'S TRUE!!! DON'T HANG UP!! - there did used to be MPs like that, young Wart!!). This initial corporate tax revolt was followed shortly by the National Debt Scam, and in due course we got to where we are today, with a government 500 Billion dollars in debt, having handed over a Trillion dollars of tax money during the last 20 or so years to banks and wealthy investors in "debt service" (I really like that word - Canada has a big agricultural component, and on the farm, when one of the animals is getting "serviced", it means in more common terms fucked - and that's what we all get when we do this "debt service" scam - royally fucked. again and again and again - every year fucked for 25 - 30 - 40 billion $$$ - again and again and again...), and cutting back hugely on our social infrastructure. Happy banks and corps, not so happy citizens. The corps know why, the citizens are living in mushroom land, led by their tvs down Lemming Road.
There are many other examples besides financial, of course, although in Capitalist society pretty much everything comes back to money, or the lack thereof..
Political will - that's where we were - now I remember. So what else have we got? Well - how about doing something about the poverty in Canada (most people are pretty shocked when someone mentions poverty in Canada - the power of the press and myth!!) Do you know how many more food banks there are now than there were 10 years ago? Or how many more homeless people there are? Do you buy the Fraser Institute "philosophy" that people using food banks and living on the streets of Calgary or Vancouver or Edmonton or Halifax or Toronto are making free choices, and could get a job and buy a nice house like normal people if they really wanted? So what happened over the last ten years, to make the government, well, what shall we say? - not fulfill its all-party pledge to "eradicate the terrible scourge of poverty in this country..."? Might, do you suppose, it have had anything to do with political will?
- and don't rag me about 'get over it' or give it a rest or something - when was the last time in this country we had a rest from the neocon "press" screaming LOWER TAXES LOWER TAXES?!?! - fuck it's what? 10 years now at least? - going back to the 1970s, really, if you consider behind the scenes work - check out the budget debates of the early 1970s in Canada - get them to shut up for a day or two, and I'll consider it too. I mean Christ, really, they never stop - look at this one - Manley's spending RM archive copy Friday's Pispot (find me ONE friggin Pispot since the day they opened their traitorous offices that doesn't have an article or op-ed piece or "news" story about lower taxes - go on, I dare ya!! - just ONE day in what? 4-5 years? HAHAHAHAHAHA) - in this idiotic piece they're absolutely incensed that the Libs are daring to think about spending any fucking money at all on social programs - they just got a $100 Billion dollar tax cut a few months ago, and now the Libs want to spend about $4 billion on child poverty, homelessness, the environment - NO FUCKING WAYY!!! - ".... Not one of these is so desperately needed that it should be carved in stone...." according to these elitists at the Pispot - tax cuts, now - that's another story - .... better still, tax cuts, as recommended yesterday by Jack Mintz of the C.D. Howe Institute...." - it is to puke, seriously. Traitors every one. Get thee gone from me satan, to thy fucking masters in the BCNI/CCCE.
Or this one in one of the Sun papers (can't figure why they chose that name, they are certainly not about shedding light on things - maybe from the Inca Sun God - they certainly do want to cut the fucking heart out of Canadian democracy -) Free from tax in just 6 months - RM archive copy on the hallowed tradition of the "Tax Freedom Day" as declared by the Fraser Institute - wherein they declare (once again, as with almost all neocon "statistics" they decline to describe even briefly how they arrive at their figures) that now, for the rest of the year, the average Canadian is working for him/herself!! - because up to now, EVERYTHING they earn has gone to that damned tax and spend socialist government in complete fucking waste!! And don't you just have to agree that lower taxes are what we need to stop this waste?!?!? I've always found it interesting that the Frasers NEVER give out comparable figures for Corporate tax free day - wouldn't that be interesting, do you think? Somewhat earlier in the year than June, I think - for a lot of them, probably last December or maybe October or August - there are a lot of Canadian corps making big profits not only paying no tax, but getting big refunds one way and another from the friendly folks on Parliament Hill - we can understand to some extent the Frasers not wanting to talk about this, since although they absolutely refuse to say where their funding comes from, a lot of it is undoubtedly from the corps who are not paying taxes. The BIG corps who are not paying taxes. But aside from that, the Frasers never make clear at just what point they think this tax-free day ought to come - that is, what taxes exactly would be appropriate? Is it ok to pay taxes for health care, or to support our universities? We've seen above that programs for the homeless or poor don't impress them much - but then again, the feds aren't spending much on the homeless or poor, so that wouldn't amount to much tax savings. About a quarter of the national income, and thus these taxes of Mr and Mrs average, goes to debt "service" as noted above - I wonder if the Fraser thinks these tax dollars are wasted HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA - sorry, trick question!!!
Oh well, it's getting late, as you can tell.
Just one more quickie - I find that if I put this stuff in the "to do" box they never get done - so let's have a quick gander at one more Pispot story - they're on again about their second favorite topic after TAX CUTS TAX CUTS!!! which is Privatisation - and they're spreading myths and crap once again (surprise surprise) - all part of their free history-rewriting service - they must have read Orwell at some point and, how generous, without even being asked (at least publicly) have taken on the great task of the Ministry of Truth - which was, of course, the continual rewriting of history, to serve the purpose of Big Brother - a euphemism for The Elite in the book. Anyway, here Ontario hydro therapy RM archive copy they are again talking about how the apparent electricity supply problems Ontario appears to be heading for this summer are all because Eves didn't follow through 100% with the Harris scheme of completely privatising Ontario Hydro. After all the billions they paid out to the Brits so they could pick up whatever parts of Ontario Hydro they most coveted cheap without the debt, too - I haven't got time to look it all up right now, and certainly the Pispot isn't interested in stuff like that. Nor is the Pispot interested in bringing up things like the California privatisation scheme, which was a complete disaster, costing the taxpayers there something like 30 Billion bucks, or the Alberta scheme which is still lurching from problem to problem, or the Auckland New Zealand tryout which, after the new privateers had finished gutting the system resulted in what? 3 or 4 weeks of that city being almost entirely without power - and of course the closer to home Ontario experience last year, when hydro rates skyrocketed after even a small privatisation tryout, to where Eves was facing blood in the streets if he didn't step in and impose some government control - even after the obvious non-workability of this stuff, the Pispot is demanding more of it - goddam, lookit all them lemmings left on top of the cliff!! Something's wrong here.....
But it's about decisions, who makes them and for who, and the role of the average citizen in accepting what their masters do or not.
This is late business sort of - I really wanted to get at it the last time, but it got a bit long, as you may recall - something we'd never be accused of this time. But it's important, in the sense of being aware of how deep the rot goes, the assumptions we ALL operate under after a life of indoctrination, how much you have to think about EVERYTHING yourself - this UNREST IN IRAN from PBS in the US RM archive copy, who I used to think was very good - but here, it's just another Bush-Pentagon war show - they talk about the "situation" in Iran (and just this you gotta think about!! - why not the situation in any of 100 other countries? why Iran, why now?!?!?!) - but read the words of the so-called moderator, think about her questions, the underlying assumptions - the whole thing runs on the premise "We are GOOD and well-meaning, "they" are "others" doing something wrong." Is this assumption justified? Take the Iranian guy there - they say he was some part of the Iranian political structure prior to the takeover of the current rulers, who are presented as some kind of Muslim fanatics - for instance, they don't bother to point out anywhere, for some strange reason, that prior to the Iranian revolution of 1979, this guy was part of the government of the Shah of Iran, an American-backed brutal dictator whom the Americans installed in the early 1950s (for this and many other interesting stories about American involvement in other countries all over the world, check out Killing Hope by William Blum - we don't pretend the current Iranian government is a lot better - but surely it's up to them to be governed by a Muslim government if they want - it's getting more than a bit scary to hear George Bush wandering around the world telling everyone he thinks (sorry loose use of the word) this or that government needs to be changed - he probably hasn't actually clued into the fact yet that a WHOLE lot of other governments around the world think it is the American government most in need of a regime change). Interesting sort of omission, to say the least. Nor do they get into any deeper sort of questions such as why exactly is the Bush government so interested in going after Iran now, or at what point in time it became acceptable for an American president to issue statements suggesting this or that government should change their leader? Why wouldn't we then get into the question of the many governments and people around the world who think American should change their leader - and how it is we decide who, if any, should be listened to? And the famous Bush quote a few months ago when confronted by an American protestor - "Who cares what you think?" - before American gets so concerned about the government in other countries, it really ought to look to the state of its own "democracy", which seems to be on VERY shaky ground this last little while.
gotta go - just remember - QUESTION EVERYTHING!!!
Hey! - Happy Canada Day! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!! - sorry, just couldn't resist!
Two roads diverged in a wood, and we
after 70,000 hours of tv
had no fucking idea.....
so here we are on the Lemming Road........
- another great bit from another great poet -
...and this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
not with a bang, but a whimper....
(except at RM of course - lot more bangin than whimperin goin on here!)
Write if ya want.
What direct action did you take today to do something to get rid of corporate government in Canada on this Canada Day Weekend? Do you feel that it was enough, given the situation? Will you feel content telling that to your grandchildren, should they survive, and the country, and the planet?
So much left to say, so little time to say it in - probably only a year or so to the next federal election - do you want to try to save Canada in that frantic four weeks when big Paul drops the writ and EVERY friggin advantage is his - or would you like to start now, when we have some sort of outside chance? Canada for Canadians Coalition - get involved.