New – Page 413 – Babel-on-the-Bay

The anatomy of rage.

August 10, 2011 by Peter Lowry

Do we really understand the causes of riots? For all the analysis we do, can we really fathom the minds and attitudes of anarchists? Why are Tottenham and other parts of England burning? Why did the letdown of the Stanley Cup finals produce lawlessness in Vancouver? What does smashing store windows have to do with the G20 in Toronto? Why did Greeks riot against their government in Athens? What formula is producing the Arab Spring?

Isolating and questioning an individual participant, after the infusion of endorphins has subsided, leaves us with fewer answers than questions. Is it the mob mentality that prevails? Though some answers are obvious. Watching a television interview with a British politician about the growing unrest in England, you have a bloody good idea of part of their problem—politicians who have no understanding of the desperation among those they are supposed to represent. The invasive racism in that country is a constant stepping stone to troubles. The mouldering class structure of the English themselves leaves you wondering at such a dysfunctional society. Admire England’s past if you wish, but with so many of them living in that past, you stand back aghast at its present.

Social despair is a quagmire from which few can pull free. Even among the riches of Vancouver, the social outcasts of the Gas Town scene spoil for a chance to fight back. In the black mood and disappointment of the Stanley Cup finals, it was the few who lit the fuse on the emotions of others.

At the G20, it was the easily identified anarchists who chivvied a few street people to join their fun and they did their damage while the police let us down. When they did act, the police took out their rage on the gawkers and justice was brutalized.

The Greeks are more of a challenge to understand. Nobody wants to take their medicine—especially when you lack trust in the prescribing doctor. When their autocratic leaders acquiesced to the European Community’s fiscal demands, the Greeks got mad. It is hard to lay blame in that one.

The Arab Spring, as it has been dubbed, is actually easier to understand. The Arabs of North Africa, for example, were more than aware of the differences of life style between their countries and Europe. They want more. Throughout the Middle East, their news media taunt the subjugated. They are rebelling against their opressors. Just bear in mind that revolutions are a process, not an end. There will be much to watch for in the following Arab seasons.

But Canadians are hardly benign subjects of the Queen. In John Porter’s Vertical Mosaic, some 50 years ago, he said we are complacent because we can ship our disaffected to the United States. That is certainly no longer the case. We have to learn to live with each other. We have to understand ourselves. Next time you see someone drive away from a gas station without paying, are you going to say, under your breath, ‘Good for you. Fuck the greedy oil companies!’?

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Did you think the CIA did not care?

August 9, 2011 by Peter Lowry

Back in the midst of Cold War concerns in North America, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was hardly going to ignore Canada. Why are people surprised about some of their reports on Canada of the time coming to light? They were probably well reasoned, in depth and nothing new. Canada hardly made it difficult to gather the information.

What made the difference in the reports of the American CIA and the Russian KGB operatives of the time, we expect was just the perspective. In a rambling, cocktail-type conversation with the CIA Station Chief in Quebec City in the late 1970s, we asked him what gave him a particular insight. He answered simply that it was in a local newspaper. We came away from that session with the impression that the CIA was doing a better job reporting on Quebec than any of our English-language news media groups. The CIA could be objective. We cannot.

The CIA did not need to spy back in the 1970s and 1980s. Their Royal Canadian Mounted Police counterparts of that time were, in the main, relaxed and cooperative. Even the British Secret Intelligence Service obviously kept a relaxed eye on specific areas of interest. Why not? Canada is a relatively open society and there is no need for the cloak and dagger stuff that carried on during the Second World War. Of course, we could not be unaware of the growing problems of industrial espionage but that was carried out in a generally gentlemanly fashion.

But the relaxed attitude went into the dumpster after 9/11. The World Trade Center came tumbling down and paranoia replaced it. Canada had already given the counter-intelligence role of the RCMP to the new Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Cee-Sis, as it is called, has hardly endeared itself to Canadians. Homeland Security in the United States has also acted irrationally and with a heavy hand and Canadians have been convenient scapegoats for their ineptness.

What we can expect in future releases of CIA documents on Canada is a certain circumspectness that was not in the earlier documents. When you know that what you write might come to light eventually, you write to your audience.

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Busker Bob battles on.

August 8, 2011 by Peter Lowry

The buskers who entertain us on the streets while we wait for the heavy hitters have a tough job. Even getting a little attention is encouraging for them. Imagine how Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae feels out on the summer barbeque circuit. In the midst of backyards full of local Liberals, a reformed New Democrat can feel lonely.

In the doldrums of summer, a little interest from the news media can be a godsend. The media tend to act like lawyers in a courtroom and do not ask any questions to which they do not know the answers. It saves having to write down what the interviewee is saying.

The first question is predictably about the NDP’s Jack Layton and cancer, MP Nycole Turmel and the Bloc Quebecoise. The answer calls for the right level of concern for Jack Layton’s health and the right level of indignation about Jack’s hand-picked stand-in. Consider the nerve of that woman to play footsie with the separatists as well as the NDP. It is not as though Bob knows nothing of flitting between parties.

The turmoil around Turmel is also opening the door for Rae to address Prime Minister Harper’s gaffs. He gets to make scathing comments about Mr. Harper and Harper’s friend Toronto Mayor Rob Ford to the delight of Liberal audiences. Whether this helps Bob’s friend Dalton McGuinty remains to be seen.

If Bob could just redirect a little of that media stardom that he is presently enjoying to what Mr. Harper is currently doing in Brazil, it would be even more helpful to Canadians. After ignoring South America, in fact, everything in the America’s south of Mexico over the past five years, Harper has a lot of catching up to do. Not that the Liberals have a much better record in the southern half of our hemisphere. There are economies down there that are defying the global trends and we can gain much by making more friends and doing more business.

It is just that international affairs are supposed to be Bob Rae’s specialty and he should head to that opening. He has to remember that he is a caretaker and, if nothing else, he should keep things looking operational.

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The American angst of the summer of 2011.

August 7, 2011 by Peter Lowry

What is going on south of that Canada-United States of America border? Democrats are turning on Obama. Republicans are disavowing their motley leadership. The rock that used to be Standard and Poors has turned thumbs down on the American economy.

With the plunging stock market, those of us on fixed incomes have just seen our retirement savings go south again. The stock market does not crash these days, it just bounces like a perpetual motion India rubber ball—not higher and higher, just lower and lower. We are all getting mad as hell and we are not going to take this any more. (You might have heard that before but so what?)

Americans are telling their politicians how mad they are and you can hardly blame them. It is bad enough that the greed of Wall Street drove us all into recession three years ago. For the American politicians to create a stupid, destructive, ignorant artificial crisis such as an arbitrary, unfounded debt limit was a vicious and flagrant disregard for the people they were supposed to serve. They should all be spanked and sent home and the voters should replace them with adults.

One of the obstacles we repeatedly run into calling for a Canadian Constitutional Conference is the people who are deathly afraid that you want a system of government similar to the Americans. Good grief no! Canadians have indirectly suffered the worst effects of the American Constitution for over two hundred years and hardly deserve such a flawed system of government themselves.

But as has been said many times, democracy itself is hardly perfect. It is just much better than the alternatives. The basic problem of the American Constitution is that it is based on a union of states and not a union of people. Even the subsequent civil war that the country suffered only produced necessary band-aids to the problems rather than solutions.

This writer would not have the temerity to suggest what the Americans should do to clean up their act. What they might do is reflect long and hard on the original objectives of their constitutional congress. They were supposed to assure Americans of the individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Concentrating on making that happen would be a damn good start.

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Dalton McGuinty goes to war.

August 6, 2011 by Peter Lowry

It is amazing. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has gone to war. It is a smart war. It is strategic. Why are we so surprised?

The opening salvos have been lobs. They are firing for effect. When McGuinty claimed Harper’s focus was on Western Canada, Harper, with few words, brushed it aside. Harper later retaliated by saying that he wants the provincial Conservatives to win the Ontario election on October 6. He used the analogy of a hockey hat trick. Thinking he was speaking to a solely Conservative audience, Harper went too far by saying the ‘left-wing mess’ that he inherited in 2006 and that Rob Ford inherited in Toronto last year will be the same for (Provincial Conservative Leader) Tim Hudak in October.

This could launch a war of words that will carry through the election. And it will be a war that Dalton McGuinty can fight alone. Stephen Harper has stated his position and that was all that was needed from him. Harper is now the straw man that Dalton can fight instead of Hudak. Why fight lesser players when you can take on the Federal Conservative Leader?

It is a major strategic coup. It denigrates Hudak to the lesser role of someone yapping from the cheap seats but not allowed in the ring with the big kids. At the same time, it elevates McGuinty to the federal level where his federal counterparts are, at the moment, laying low. McGuinty is more than free to attack Harper on the long-term funding needs of Medicare and on Harper’s poor stance on environmental issues. The federal Liberals will appreciate the help.

The only risk in this for McGuinty is the NDP. For every vote he gains in this attack on Harper, he is siphoning off some support to the Provincial NDP. The federal and provincial members of that party are used to working together and the lack of Jack Layton’s leadership can benefit Andrea Horwath as she is the next most prominent spokesperson for the party.

The battle of Ontario is a three-way fight. Nobody is forecasting an NDP breakthrough but it has happened before. Nobody really believes the polls that show Tim Hudak in the lead but some people could not believe the Rob Ford would win in Toronto last year. If you make any bets on this election today, you had better hold out for long odds.

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Babel media spar during summer’s dog days.

August 5, 2011 by Peter Lowry

The dog days of summer are actually rooted in the past but today it an excuse for the media to produce some really cornball material. It is as bad on television as it is in newspapers. They all act as though they have nothing to write or talk about. It is getting so bad that one of the two chain newspapers that ill-serve Babel wrote an extensive editorial about its print competition.

Talk about the skillet calling the frying pan black! This is the blunderer complaining about the incompetent. The Torstar publication, a free distribution grocery and furniture store wrap, the one we call Babel Backward, ran an editorial by Torstar Chairman John Honderich. Entitled Accountable to no one, the editorial complains bitterly about Sun Media, owner of the Barrie Examiner, quitting the Ontario Press Council.

The Ontario Press Council is near and dear to the Toronto Star which helped create the Council. It has made Torstar look good over the years while other people get to arbitrate when someone claims to have been wronged by the publication. It cuts down on cost of lawyers to handle the law suits and usually resolves any incorrect utterance with a deep and moving apology. And who cares?

Sun Media, the print media accumulation of Pierre-Karl Péladeau’s integrated media empire, has dumped all links to other media through such cooperatives as Canadian Press and the Canadian Newspaper Association. It was very amusing to hear that one of Péladeau’s executive’s accused the Ontario Press Council of being ‘Politically Correct.’ It is hard to imagine Péladeau understanding what that term means. It certainly does not apply to his flagship newspapers Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec—publications that could make Rupert Murdoch blush!

What Péladeau is creating across his media empire is best described as editorial anarchy. Conrad Black, no matter how much we hated him, at least brought a level of discipline to the newsrooms when he owned newspapers. Talking to one of the few real reporters at the Sun Media outlet in Babel, we once remarked that the Canadian Press Style Book had stopped spelling a farmer’s plow or a snowplow as ‘plough’ more than 50 years ago. He laughed and told us that the publisher did not care and the reporter liked spelling it the old way. ‘So there!’

John Honderich should try to read some of the sorry excuses for newspapers that Torstar produces across Ontario. The newspaper industry is not dying because of the evolution of electronic media but because of the greed and uncaring attitude of the Canadian newspaper industry’s corporate ownership.

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Contemplation in a summer of hope.

August 4, 2011 by Peter Lowry

It has been that kind of summer. It has been a restorative time. Far too hot to be active but very pleasant to sit on the balcony with a cold drink, watching the boats, the swimmers, the children at play. The only books taken out to that balcony are historical, offering insights into the past. It is more fun to sit and contemplate the future.

Many of the concerns for the future have revolved around the Liberal Party of Canada. Where the party might be headed is a recurring theme for writers as the historical governing party has mainly withdrawn from public life to lick its wounds.

The answer to the federal angst is positive. “We shall rise to fight again,” is the rallying cry. We just have to be a different kind of political party. We have to define our party. We need to seek out our coalition of voters and speak with them and for them. We need to be proudly left of that vague, amorphous political centre. We need to represent justice in a world of injustice. We need to understand that while we have to use the law and to make law, we cannot lose sight of the individual.

The Liberal Party must recognize the power of one. This is the individual and the individual no longer owes existence and rights to the state but the state owes the individual for its acceptance and existence. Similarly, the police to not bring order to the populace but are the delegated force of the populace and owe allegiance to that populace.

Our politicians must be our servants, carrying out the wishes of the populace, always conscious of protecting of the rights and wishes of the individual. These servants protect our environment for now and for the future. They mind our health, they bring order to commerce, they build the infrastructure to meet the needs of all our society, and they assure our rights to learning. There is no fixed list of tasks to be achieved, there are just the needs of people in a successful society.

To create this new approach to politics, we must also change our thinking about how a political party works. It has to be there to work for its supporters. It is there to organize the political priorities. It produces the people who can serve us best in government. It is the conduit for direction from the populace. It is an information network. This will take very hard work to create.

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The possible and the spurious.

August 1, 2011 by Peter Lowry

Watching the television news about the American debt battle in Congress, the wife turned and asked “What comes after a trillion dollars?”

The answer was immediate and regretted: “Confusion.”

We should have said “quadrillion” and let it go at that. Instead we got into a silly discussion of the differences in how Americans count. The problem is that the way Americans count, a billion is only a thousand million. In other systems, a billion is considered to be a million million which is a thousand times as much.

The rest of the world has had to go along with this Americanism but one is still best to check the number of zeros after a number to confirm.

But while that discussion can be considered spurious, hopefully politicians in the United States are now dealing with the possible. They have an annual budget running over three of their trillions of dollars per year which is a lot in anyone’s language. Their right-wing, small government advocates are asking them to start paring this down by an average of about US$20 billion per year which they might be able to do if they are not fighting too many foreign wars and the U.S. banking system cleans up its act.

But trying to balance the U.S. budget and finally gaining some cooperation will not make the foolish right-wing nuts like the Tea Party go away. We have the same problem in Canada with Toronto’s Ford Brothers and Johnny-one-notes such as Ontario Conservative Leader Tim Hudak. And in the meantime, we are on pins and needles waiting for the federal Harper Conservatives to decide where to strike.

Other than that, it really is a pretty summer. We are enjoying it. Hope you are too!

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Let’s hear it for Babel’s Impresario Brown.

July 30, 2011 by Peter Lowry

You have to admit, Patrick Brown is far better at being an impresario and promoting fund-raising events for some of our local charities than at being a Member of Parliament. It figures that the Conservatives had to find something for him to do.

The only question we have is whether this is a very expensive way to help these select charities? Is the job he is doing worth the $157,000 per year we pay him as a Conservative Member of Parliament? Over the past several years, he has set new records in taxpayer funded mailing costs to promote himself. He even has the distinction of being censured by the House of Commons Speaker for spending federal taxpayers’ money to promote the re-election of a city Councillor.

Another of those grey mailers from Patrick arrived in the mailbox the other day. It is for another fund raiser for our favourite hospital. This time it is for an upcoming half marathon (first annual, it tells us) for more Royal Victoria Hospital expansion. (If they keep expanding that hospital, we are going to have to move Highway 400 over to give the hospital more room.)

Brown wants us to run a marathon or at least half a marathon or maybe just five kilometres on August 14. We will pass on that, thank you.

But what concerns us is that Brown keeps spending taxpayers’ money on these selected charities. Is that fair? What about our favourite charities? Do they always have to be his favourites? After all, it is our money he is spending to promote these events. And there are lots of worthy charities.

That leads to another concern. Impresario Brown has been promoting a hockey night event for a few years. It makes money for the hospital. We would like to know who else benefits. Does Mr. Brown benefit or does he figure he gets all that publicity for free? Are there tax receipts given to sponsors? We would really like to see an audit on that event. Mr. Brown does not seem to be above playing fast and loose with our tax money.

We hate to raise these questions but sometimes, we are not sure that Impresario Brown really knows what he is doing.

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The obduracy of the right.

July 28, 2011 by Peter Lowry

The first inclination was to refer to the pig-headedness of the right wing in our North American society. Since ‘obduracy’ means the same, we can sound a bit more refined. What it does not preclude is the opportunity to rail against the ham-fisted idiocy of those people on the right-wing of politics whose destructive obduracy causes so much trouble in our society.

We can see the obduracy at all levels of government. We can see it in Canada and in the U.S.A. It starts at the municipal level.

The Ford brothers in Toronto are an excellent example of the ignorance on which obduracy can be based. The Toronto Mayor and his lieutenant brother think they can casually close libraries and daycare facilities while laying off police to meet their imagined tax savings. They offered a frustrated electorate a chance to end the gravy train and now they learn that they are the gravy train.

It is a lesson that Ontario Conservative leader Tim Hudak has yet to learn. It is an ignorant elector that will go along with the bad economics of Hudak’s foolish promises. The problem is there are lots of ignorant people who vote. People believe what they want to believe and logic does not trump emotion. Hudak can only be defeated by a stronger emotional appeal.

And what can you really say about Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The anger, chagrin and frustration with him will build to a crescendo over the next four years. We have barely scratched the surface of his government’s right-wing paranoia.

The American right-wing adherents are also hardly wallflowers. The Tea Party supporters in Congress have tied that government in knots fighting for their economic plans. The fact that most of their plans cannot work does not seem to bother them.

But the truth in all of this right and left fighting is that nobody has all the answers. The voters have the power to end the nonsense by forcing politicians to sit down with each other to discuss the issues. Cooperation makes for poor media headlines but it certainly makes for better government.

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