You Say You Want a Revolution…

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a newer world, abolish advertising, Alfred Lord Tennyson, American greed, army loyal to who?, Baby it’s cold inside too, ban everything someone hates, banning pop songs, Canadian government, censorship for feminists, climate change, cost of living, cut out middle-man, end bureaucracy, end inherited wealth, end red tape, epater les bourgeoisie, extermination of homo sapiens, feminist nonsense, flat tax at ten percent, food riots, global warming, how to overthrow a state, Indigenous land rights, inflation is a tax, Karl Marx, late-phase capitalism, money v morality, Paris riots, police as paramilitary, police will not kill fellow citizens, revolution, Saudi Arabia, system is broken, the French Revolution II, those who produce only money, time to act, tipping point, Ulysses, useless jobs, vanishing liberty, Wahhabist heresy

Old patient communists in Paris are wondering if their time has finally come, Not since 1968 has there been so much fierce resistance to a system known as status quo. And this is not a trivial issue of girls being allowed to sleeo with boys – the spark igniting ’68. This is fundamental, a 21^st century bread riot about the unaffordable cost of living. Perhaps the dismay over what little has been done about climate change is in there too? But this wave will spread, is already spreading, breaking on other shores with similar concerns as well as ones of their own. It will soon be here, if Carnarcosis wakes up to smell the price of coffee. Cheerfully, so it seemed, we heard today that food prices will rise dramatically next year. Perhaps to head off vegans who imagine it won’t affect them, an emphasis was placed on steep rises in the cost of fruits and vegetables. On a news broadcast that included the blunt message from environment ministers meeting in Poland that we are headed for extinction if we don’t act now. Not assemble committees and commission reports, but ACT, something politicians are usually unable to do because most are lawyers and the law moves so slowly it’s still in the 18^th century. We are the first generation to know in detail the science behind climate change, and we’re also the last generation who may – may – be able to act before the planet becomes too inhospitable for any effective actions to be plausible. In fact it is probably already too late, so is this all just gallows humour?

Unable to broadcast a constant battle-cry for environmental action, so we don’t rubbish the planet and ourselves with it, the CBC, and other court jesters, did manage to ban from the airwaves a perennially popular song from 1944, “Baby, it’s cold outside”. Kudos, bold move! But really? I must have heard that song a few hundred times, and not once did it ever occur to me the lyrics were offensive, a brazen attempt at seduction precluding the female’s rights in such a situation. It didn’t occur to me probably because the lyrics are not in the least offensive. It’s cold outside, baby, stay here where it’s warm. Offensive? Manipulative? Nah, it’s just a lovingly cute conceit in a wintry song that evokes the things that enduringly please us this time of year. “It may have been acceptable back in the forties,’ said some kultural obersturmbanfuhrer, “but it has no place in today’s world.” I think this about a lot of music I hear these days, but I wouldn’t dream of telling everyone their songs are now banned, principally because I don’t like them. Such a problem has a remedy so simple anyone can use it: If you don’t like a song or a book or a film, don’t listen to it, read it or watch it. Who is this solution not good enough for? Ah, you. Well, ma’am, I’m afraid you are a tyrant in cheap clothing, beneath which are a thunderflash and jackboots. We cannot beam you back to the Third Reich, alas – no time machine – but might we suggest an acceptable alternative? It’s Saudi Arabia, where your problems are solved before they arise: all music is banned, along with singing and dancing. A few other things too, but you’ll discover those for yourself, as well as encountering a tremendous need there for more feminist thinking. Perfect? We have a flight this Friday, may I book you on it?

Does whoever in the CBC responsible for this joke think such bans should be extended to all the arts, ancient and modern, if they contain anything someone, or even just you, are offended by? Where to begin? Well, the Bible is a good start, many rapes, sexual chauvinism on a monumental scale, and gender inequality almost worse than Saudi Arabia. I could proceed on through the canon, then the oriental canon (oh, how that Li Po objectifies women!), and African ones, (Wole Soyinka’s male characters drink too much and treat women like chattels) but I think the point is made. We shall be left with nothing if the power to censor is handed to some humourless automaton, in state broadcasting or anywhere else. In fact I am an owner of the CBC, one of 30 million, and I object to censorship in any form being perpetrated by my public broadcaster. Today it’s a harmless pop song, tomorrow it’s Finnegans’ Wake or Lolita. Grow up, ladies, and lighten up too. You don’t want history to remember you as the one who banned “White Christmas” for its overtly racist lyrics – or do you?

A great deal of trivial nonsense flew around just before the French Revolution, possibly to divert attention away from the appalling enormities of a status quo, a 5 percent, who treated the other 95 worse than beasts of the field, squeezing them until many died of want, if despair didn’t get there first. This announced steep rise in prices begs the question: Why? We surely all know by now that Marx was ostensibly right about capitalism’s proclivity to devour itself, or like Saturn its children. Market volatility is a sign, but a volatile bond market is an veritable omen. That market is supposed to be so stable it’s boring, because it was always so safe, the yield-curves pleasingly stable and always heading in the right direction but slowly. Now yield curves are all over the place and prices are up and down like the Assyrian empire. This reflects a general governmental instability, because bonds are mostly government debt. Politicians are obviously on their way out of the rulership game, and no one trusts them because they’re all such untrustworthy liars, lining pockets while doing nothing for the public whose arse they once plated for a vote. In a sunnier age this could be overlooked, but not anymore. When life becomes less affordable we, the people will take a look behind the scenes. What will we find?

 

We will find that between farm or grower and buyer or customer there are layers of middle men and women who produce nothing except money. Every activity creates businesses within it, some of them vital, some not so much. And commerce itself has some gigantic enterprises within it that need to be examined. Take advertising and marketing. These two swallow up a goodly portion of any company’s profits, and they do the rest of us no good at all. One might say they even harm us by interrupting shows or films with moronic exhortations comprised mostly of shameless lies. Who needs this so-called “information of choice” that is the ad man’s clarion call raison d’etre? Not I. On the rare occasions I need anything new, I ask someone to go online and see what the consensus says about this or that product. I can honestly say that no ad has ever influenced me to buy anything at all ever. I don’t have TV in fact because the stultifying ads revolt me. I watch, or really just listen to Netflix because there are no ads. If this changed I would cancel my subscription. Film is or can be a serious art form, in fact it’s the dominant form of our age, and to watch a Bertolucci, an Orson Welles, a Scorsese, or a Bergman and have it interrupted by some inane jingle boosting unneeded rubbish is to me like someone gluing a puerile imogee over Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon, or spraying commercial graffiti on Michaelangelo’s David. Beside those working in it, is there anyone to defend the continued existence of advertising and marketing? No? Away with them then, which is bound to bring prices down.

 

Next we’ll be looking into other areas that suck up money the way an anteater inhales ants. Bureaucracy and the red tape preventing ordinary men and women from opening snall businesses – that will go. We’ll tolerate the consequences of less health regulations and the number of toilets the way we’ve tolerated mindless regulations for years. As capitalism staggers and heads for a terminal collapse, our elites will panic. I mean the one percent who have more than the rest of us combined. These are the people for who the police act as a private army (have you noticed how paramilitary the cops have become?). We shall see what happens in Paris when the police, who after all suffer too in a bad economy, refuse to fire on their fellow citizens, and even go over to their side, as happened in 1789. For a revolution, this is the axial moment. Once police or army, ort both are with you it’s all over. You seize the media broadcasters, or their towers of insolence, and you sit your new leader in a studio: Newsflash! The government has fallen and the Popular Front for Canadian Liberation is now in charge. There is no reason to panic. The police and army will protect us all. But things will change here. And things will have to change. Real liberty must be returned to us all, and those who impoverish us by their unconscionable profits or obscene severance packages must realise it’s all over now, that scam. Tax at a flat 10 percent for all, no exceptions, only necessities written off, all hidden assets confiscated. No more inherited wealth, leave them a house, it’s more than enough, and take pride in the amount you left for your nation. Narrow the gap between haves and have-nots, or else the have-nots will do it themselves. Now we turn to the banks, far trickier than anyone else, but essentially working an astounding angle for the last century. They take your money and loan it to someone else at a percentage of interest you cannot get for yourself, and then they actually CHARGE you for whatever you do with your own money. Amazing racket, no? And now they have encouraged everyone to borrow as much as possible, and spend, spend, spend, whether you need what you buy or not. Interest rates have been very low for very long (I don’t mean the credit card shy operators, who sometimes dare say 28 percent is low interest for them, which is true, and which will also shut their racket down). What we want is a currency actually worth its face value, thus backed, as it used to be, by gold or platinum. It’s important to remember that inflation is actually another tax, and in a tax-ridden nation we do not want another tax, do we? Income federal and provincial, GST whenever you buy or sell anything, vehicle taxation, property taxes, school taxes (if you have kids or not), and a thousand other insidious and invidious ways of taxing us that bring the overall tax rate here up to well over 80 percent. Anything over 10 percent I say is extortionate and antisocial. The free health care where I live is lousy, incompetent and sometimes even dodgy. We shall pay for it through a non-profit state insurance plan. We can now afford it and the system will be better or else forced to get better. Rid of all those who sit in between taking their cut like medieval barons, the economy will thrive like never before, no one in the middle to ad costs by producing nothing but their own wealth. This attitude will prevail in every aspect of commercial life. And it will need to.

 

Desperation will drive this or any country to revolt, and the desperation on its way to us now is a planetary catastrophe unequalled in human history. Survival will be everyone’s main concern, and pure survival brings out the ruthlessness in anyone. Those who cling to old ways and continue forms of theft will be dealt with harshly. It’s unfortunate, but then so is greed and starvation. Reps from the 20 most prosperous nations on earth have now told us the tipping point has passed. We and everything that calls this world home face appalling upheavals, cataclysmic weather and seismic events, and very probably an extinction of species not unprecedented but certainly never seen by human eyes, and one of those species will be our own. The long, long struggles of history, the glorious achievements in art and science, all of it for nothing, lost forever in time. It is indeed unthinkable, but just because we cannot think about it does not mean it cannot happen, because, my friends, it is happening already, and the top climate scientists – women and men who have warned us for years this was going on – aren’t exactly saying we told you so now, but they are pointing out that for all the decades they were ignored by governments their predictions gradually all came true, due to the stupendous inaction of those in positions of responsibility. Now they are saying that their new predictions cannot be averted so easily if at all, because, as was said half a century ago, beyond a certain point there is no possibility of reversing the damage done. Greenhouse gases, human activity, corporate farming techniques, a psychopathic need to burn fossil fuels, and most of all the kind of insane greed that denies the evidence of science for profits, these are among the causes for ecological worry cited over my entire lifetime yet not acted upon. Why? Because, yet again, all governments are controlled by big businesses who have no desire to see a bottom line disfigured by expensive changes to processes or machines merely to save the earth. Business thinks only of the next quarter’s report. Shareholders want to see better dividends, not a falling share price due to environmental restrictions. This ballooning disaster cannot continue, and public rage will be at such a pitch by then that those who placed their wealth above the welfare of all life on earth will be viewed as common criminals and sociopaths. True, it is a good way to build a business, but it is not good for an economy in the long term, and, as we can see, it isn’t good for anything else on the planet either.

 

Perhaps we shall go cap in hand to the Indigenous and ask them to show us a better way. After all, they were here for millennia and did no harm at all. Possibly we should return all the land boosted from them out of sheer guilt? Nonetheless, they know how to survive and be self-sufficient. Few of us know such things, and we shall need to learn very quickly.

 

One feels sorrow and shame for Americans, the only one out of 20 prosperous nations to refuse any action on global warming, with a president who might not understand a scientific paper but knows someone who could explain it to him, still announcing that he doesn’t believe in climate change. Science requires no belief. It is not like politics or politicians. Empirical fact is the essence of science, meaning facts that cannot be fake news because they’re verifiable by anyone. Trump’s followers may get no news except his news and whatever they call the stuff broadcast by Fox, but Trump himself has all news sources available to him. This makes his denial of the inconvenient truth an act of conscious evil – evil being defined as doing harm you are conscious of being harmful as you do it – and such acts are capital crimes when they involve, as this will and already has done, the lives of millions. Motive for evil deed? Profits for friends, family and self. No judge will be remotely lenient, especially if the country is bankrupted by the cost of global warming’s destructive effects, as will be the case. The US dollar will cease being a global currency, its value possibly wiped out overnight, as a debt so vast no one can even tell you exactly how much it is becomes due and there’s nothing to pay with. Creditors will seize assets, at cents on a dollar, so much of the country will be owned by the Chinese or the Russians and others. Not that America was ever great, but the risible slogan will come to seem cruelly ironic when China looks for cheap labour in Wisconsin or Ohio. Trump will forever remain as a cautionary tale, a symbol of what happens when morality caves in to money, and the public is deliberately deceived into electing someone who no one wants to do business with after doing business with him. He is a man too who represents all those whose wealth was obtained crookedly, by not paying contractors, lying to partners, as well as to everyone else including himself, and thinking of a deal only interms of how much he can squeeze out of it. That is a protection racket not a deal. For such a baggy ego this will be a dingy end indeed, yet I doubt if a single soul will feel pity for the Man Who Tried To Sell The World As It’s Warranty Expired. It is the grimmest time I can ever recall, and my heart goes out to those decent simple islanders in the South Pacific whose culture of millennia is inextricable from their island home, a paradise that will have vanished entirely under the sea within five years. Where will 300,000 people go to continue with their lives? What happens to their culture when their world has vanished? Perhaps our Indigenous brothers and sisters can answer this, along with all the other questions we shall have for them. Maybe the National Chief – is it Perry Belgard? – should be asked to head up a provisional government, at least while we all work out the essentials for a better world.

 

Your food prices rise next year, withhold taxes and demand to see the books explaining why the prices rose. Demand an accounting for every penny a politician spends. Every project suddenly costs $500 million – bridge repairs, scheme to help someone, aid to African country, whatever it is –  but when I want to build something and the estimate is $500 I question it, ask for a breakdown, check it all thoroughly. But the government just writes another check. Five years later we hear of massive corruption, bid fixing, kickbacks. Does our money ever come back to us? No, the system is broken, broken deliberately to allow what you have to leak out through the cracks into someone else’s pockets. It is time to make it new again. On that note I shall leave you with the end of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”.

 

Come, my friends,

‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

 

robertspaulwilliam@gmail.com

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Against Democracy

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a no-party system, American decline, are leaders needed, Cambridge Analytica, Canada, change, corporate greed, corporate meddling, corrupt politics, electoral ignorance, fake democracy, fascism, Gandhi, Illiberal democracy, lobbyists, media, paul william roberts, Plato, political hackers, Quebec separatism, revolution, Rousseau, US collapse, vested interests, voter rights

“The inflexibility of the laws can, in some circumstances, make them dangerous and cause the ruin of a state in a crisis. If the danger is such that the machinery of the laws is an obstacle, then a dictator is appointed, who silences the laws.”

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

 

We may well wonder whether Rousseau is stating a fact here or being prescriptive, if indeed he discerned any difference between the two. Popularly viewed as the Father of the French Revolution, and hence a progenitor of European liberty, equality and fraternity, Rousseau is often mistakenly regarded as a proponent of democracy, which he indeed viewed as a perfect system of governance but, he stressed, one that would only work for a perfect society, a society he characterized, inter alia, as “one of gods, not men.” He was in fact an advocate of the simple life, an existence close to nature, in tune with natural cycles and the land. It resembles Gandhi’s vision of an India consisting of villages engaged in rural tasks and farming. These prescriptions for harmonious societies would seem to conflict and contrast with Plato’s Republic, which is distinctly a city-state, yet they all flounder on the concept of democracy, its meaning and function. For Plato, democracy – from demos, loosely ‘the people’ – is undesirable inasmuch as it results in mob rule. He charts four stages of rule: timocracy (rule by property-owners), oligarchy, democracy, and finally tyranny. By ‘tyranny’ he means essentially what Rousseau means by ‘dictator’, the not necessarily bad rule of a strong central figure, who steps in to correct the chaos of mob rule and unite the state. In the tribal or kinship-based societies of Africa, Melanesia and elsewhere, this is the “Big Man”, a perceived natural leader chosen for the position, not born to it. In post-republican Rome such a government was symbolized by the fasces, the commonly-displayed image of an axe bound around by sticks, origin of the word ‘fascism’. We have become so accustomed to thinking of democracy as good and, largely thanks to Nazism, fascism being bad that we now seem to be incapable of an objective view of either.

 

I will limit this mainly to the Canadian situation for brevity’s sake and because it’s where I live. What is democracy in Canada? Well, it’s a vote for everyone of age, a vote they can cast basically for one of three political parties, the winner forming a government, often with a majority in the House of Commons that allows them to enact whatever legislation or reforms they have promised from their electoral platform. The party with the next most votes gets to form an official opposition, and generally spends the next four years decrying everything the government does. The third party, nominally socialistic in ideology, and usually the New Democratic Party, has the luxury of criticizing both parties and proposing reforms it will rarely if ever be called upon to put in place, which creates a tendency towards the impractical if not the downright fanciful, and always prohibitively expensive. While the two main parties present themselves as dramatically divergent in ideology and outlook, citizens are forced to concede that when it comes to actual government there is very little difference between them, and certainly scant difference in the public effects of their rule. Taxes remain far too high; the cost of living steadily increases. Those who can tolerate the schoolyard cacophony of tuning into parliamentary shenanigans are frequently forced to admit the experience is far from salutary and often close to embarrassing. The time and vast amounts of money taken up by committees and commissions – the answers to all government dilemmas – is dishearteningly wasteful, as are the billions apportioned to boondoggles, foreign aid – when aid is needed at home — the military, and countless other dubious enterprises over which the average citizen, who finances them, has no say whatsoever. Ruling parties often come a cropper with corruption scandals, but are rarely called to account for them in any meaningful way, beyond, that is, being short of votes in the next election.

 

What is it that makes up a voter’s mind about which party to vote for? True, there are people who rather inanely and illogically always vote for the same party, presumably wantonly ignorant or uncaring of the position taken on current issues. Perhaps sadder still are those multitudes who vote for a leader they imagine to be attractive or personable, as if a seemingly nice guy or gal cannot fail to be a great Prime Minister. Then there are all those whose vote is based on some envisaged personal gain: Pot will be legal: daycare will be free. And so on. Besides the first group, whose opinion was concretized somehow in a distant era, all of these decisions are based on media coverage in some way, or perhaps we ought to call it media manipulation. The grating shallowness and vacuity of many voters is frequently highlighted by man-on-the-street interviews, where you hear either the repetition of some party boast or slogan, or else mind-boggling nonsense usually addressing the interviewee’s pet peeve. And it is the amassing, measuring and categorizing of such peeves that parties scrutinize avidly for new avenues of vote-trawling. 49 percent think there’s too much immigration? Well, maybe we should say there is too much? Or should we say there’s not enough? What do the 51 percent think? It has nothing to do with the issue itself; it is simply about the votes. This is what Plato means by mob rule, the dictatorship of uneducated masses whose vote is obtained by the chanting of shibboleths: the swamp will be drained; tax dollars will be used to benefit tax payers; economic equality will be striven for; et cetera.

 

Should everyone have the right to vote? Yes, but only if they can prove they know why they’re voting and what for. I proposed a voters’ test years ago, to be howled at: fascist, elitist, and so on. I propose it again. What is wrong with a simple test that proves you understand the issues at stake and the positions taken by standing parties? It strikes me that the only possible objections would be from parties now unable to bamboozle, wheedle and con votes out of a vast chunk of the electorate whose uninformed vote is no more meaningful than the yells of a hockey crowd. But the elected government will place inestimable importance on those votes, proclaiming them as the mandate to do whatever it was they promised to do – although the outcome is rarely anything like the promo for it, and, no matter what happens, the rich will get richer, the poor sink slowly, and everyone else will struggle to remain above water. The rule of law is a boon trumpeted far and wide, but justice is far from just. To the well-off, a hundred-dollar speeding ticket is nothing; to the poor it is a day’s wages, the difference between surviving and suffering a little. This is not remotely just. Nor is a system that makes justice a commodity you can buy: the rich man or the corporation with lawyers on staff or retainer can tie up someone of modest means in a lawsuit that will either bankrupt them or impel them to abandon a civil action that may be just and honorable. The same is true for criminal cases: the person who can afford a good lawyer usually gets a far better result. Our prisons are full of poor people. It is said that anyone can run for political office, but those who have explored the possibility discover you need far more than good will to succeed at this: you need money. Little wonder that the ruling elites of whatever stripe, most but not all of them, come from affluent backgrounds, and some are multimillionaires. Many are lawyers, who earn a thousand dollars an hour or more, and are also trained to present right as wrong, or wrong as negligible. Without inherited wealth it is difficult, but admittedly not impossible, to thrive in business. Big corporations receive government funds – tax dollars – that are frequently spent on giving top executives annual bonuses amounting sometimes to a lifetime’s earnings for the average worker, who is taxed mercilessly on a pittance, and then taxed whenever she or he buys or sells anything, seeks licenses or permits, and in many more insidious ways. In return we get the system, its laws and police, who are surprisingly unhelpful if you ever need their help, and intolerably rude if you fall foul of them in your vehicle. Then there is the health care, which private insurance has to fund anyway for those expecting top-notch care, and which in some provinces is scandalously bad. The inequities go on, and on.   Is this the democracy promised in its brochures? No wonder the young are not voting in ever-increasing numbers. They see through the charade, realize it is merely a performance called Democracy and designed to create an impression that we have one, as if changing parties every four years were the very soul spinning there in the body politic, new brooms sweeping clean, a change finally arrived, the nation great again. Could a business operate on such lines, the owner and employees gone every four years? Perhaps it could, but the real question is why would it run that way, considering the expense involved and an incoming staff, even a chief, with little or no experience of the work? In fact government ministries rely totally on a formidable excess of civil servants who are permanent, unelected and ready to work for whichever government comes next, no matter if they find its stated policies detestable or conducive. The ruling party is then, in very real terms, a façade designed to promote a certain image with its specific message or messages intended to create for citizens the illusion that these people are different. Millions are spent on marketing, branding, psychological studies, niche identification and the innumerable vagaries of leading-edge advertising in order to conceive, shape and create such illusions. Nowhere is more being spent now than on the political weaponization of social media and the Internet. The news that Russia was doing this at home and in our home ought to have galvanized some dog-hole in CSIS rather than, as was the case, setting lightbulbs ablaze inside the brains of campaign managers and strategists, who immediately asked, “Wow, well how is that done, eh?” This, instead of drafting legislation to stop abuses and nail the perpetrators. The circus will now be a CGI show, hard to tell from the real thing, and sending you – just you – news morsels it just knows you’ll adore, because you’ve clicked like thirty times on this or that. They’re vampires of attention, because once they have yours – with some trifle or innocent vice – you’re their creature, moving up to the next level. With referenda like Brexit or Catalan independence, the fear is that an organization on the lines of Cambridge Analytica will be able to sway the vote by fair means or foul. The 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty – to be clear, the dismantling of Canada – was very close indeed. A digital push and the minority becomes a majority. In the recent Quebec election, an extraordinarily large percentage of the electorate was still undecided who to vote for a day before the election. These are voters easily lured by misleading promises or unwarranted warnings.

 

Why hold elections every four years? It is the performance of that drama created so you will know beyond all doubt you dwell in a democracy, one which has of late taken to US-style braggadocio in trumpeting “the greatest country on earth” and seizing on those spurious statisticians who announce “Canada: best country on earth to live for vegetarian flautists and ballerinas of larger body-type.” Statistics, as we know, can be manipulated to show any result desired of them.  A poll or a chart is not, I’m afraid, going to give you even the faintest glimpse of what really goes on in the halls, amphitheaters, chambers, back rooms, cabinets, weekends on the links or in Bermuda, and in the many late night bars where big decisions are made. There is so much for the enterprising investigative journalist here, but who will print it? Objectivity is vanishing fast from the media, so unless a voter is willing to research a bit independently her or his vote may well soon be yet another commodity bought by those who can afford it. Democracy is no longer what it ought to be and is far from democratic. Is it time to change the system to one where there are no parties or leaders, just elected (and thoroughly vetted) experts running the nation for the nation?

 

Regarding Rousseau’s opening quote: One instantly thinks of Doug Ford’s move to shrink town hall. If I trusted Ford and believed his motives were purely altruistic, I’d have to concede that smaller government is a good thing, a thing to aspire to everywhere. But the whole Ford family is too hand-in-glove with big business to be trusted, no matter how much ‘populist sloganeering goes on. What is wrong with big business and a thriving economy, you ask. Nothing inherently, but a corporation is legally bound to make decisions benefitting its shareholders, and legally not allowed to make decisions which will reduce profits. Such restrictions particularly affect environmental issues. A costly waste disposal system that will greatly benefit the environment and is not mandated by law will not be built because its price will reduce profits. Capitalism is a fine way to create and expand a business, but to keep the share price and dividends growing profits must increase quarterly, no matter how this increase is achieved. Lay-offs, reduced quality of manufactures, and other cost-cutting measures often result from this, and as a long-term principle it has obvious problems. Such huge concerns contribute much and in many ways, not all of them legal, to political campaigns. This is not done from sheer altruism of course, and what these companies want in return are a myriad of things only governments can do, from rezoning land to acquiring permits and licenses for all manner of activities. Needless to say, some of these perquisites will not be in the public’s best interests. While Ottawa or Toronto is not infested with lobbyists for vested interests the way Washington is, Canadian politics is far from free of them. The health of the economy is always presented as something of unquestioned good for all citizens, but this is not necessarily so. The increasing privatization of major utilities is provably not in the best interests of anyone, except perhaps the new owners. Such concerns should all be state-owned since they are so vital to the welfare of all. I would include internet service providers in this group too, since the internet is no longer a luxury toy and indispensable to all, rich or poor, young or old. If any of our governments had a real concern for our well-being they would have nationalized all such utilities and operated them on a not-for-profit basis. Instead all have perpetuated the lie that nationalized industries are always badly run and costly. Ontario Hydro users can attest to this falsity, now paying some of the highest rates in Canada for a second-rate, callous and avaricious service. In short, democracy has failed us and continues to fail, continuing also to masquerade as something it is decidedly not. As we watch the steady decline and fall of America, riven by corporate greed and corruption, along with a broken political system, we ought to give serious consideration, we the people, to taking back our governance before it is too late. Revolutions must be planned carefully, to make sure that what replaces the old is not worse than it was. This requires prolonged study and the good will of all concerned; but I believe it is possible in this country, more than most in the West, to evolve a planning committee dedicated to a reasoned approach to replacing what is crumbling and atavistic with something that fully reflects the decency and egalitarianism of the public, while not exploiting the ignorance of some. Change is not just another slogan; it is a viable possibility with an intelligent population such as ours. A better society can only come into being through will, effort and a clear perception that what we currently have is collapsing and, if people of good will do not participate in the transformation, will be co opted by far darker forces, ones whose best interests are their own. I’d be interested in hearing arguments against this modest proposal and for the current system.

 

The Cost of Living in Canada

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anarchism, excessive costs, government corruption, government fraud, government spending, high taxes, Italian politics, justin trudeau, legal swindling, Liberal government, millennials, paul william roberts, Prices in Canada, revolution, taxpayers, unworkable system

Prices in Canada, Liberal government, Justin Trudeau, high taxes, government spending, millennials, government corruption, anarchism, revolution, unworkable system, taxpayers, legal swindling, government fraud, excessive costs, Italian politics, paul William roberts

Here is a brief gripe. Last week I did something I’ve always resisted doing: compiling a budget, or rather assessing my nut, what it costs me to live each month. The conclusion was rather astounding, since we live here extremely frugally, eating meat and buying a bottle of wine once a week, etc.: $6,500 per month. God, I thought, and checked it twice. But 6.5 K it always was. Two days later I realised that, of the $6,500, a third of it was owed to the taxman, so I needed to pull in some $8,500 in order to have the 6.5K I needed just to survive. Then I thought about what this third of my income was buying for me. The only answer, taking into account all the other less overt taxes, was a lousy, inefficient and incompetent healthcare system, a system unhealthy and careless. Next, naturally enough, I thought of this preternaturally bountiful Liberal government we have. $4 million just to restore the formerly abandoned couple of prison farms to arable land; $50 million to assist the entirely useless Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women commission in its pointless and futile work; $80 million for new jets to bolster the image of armed forces unlikely ever to see any combat they haven’t elected to engage in… and so it goes, and goes and goes. Committees for this, commissions for that. Representatives sent here or there when a phone call or televideo conference would serve the purpose perfectly well. A prime minister swanning around the globe to fuck up badly more often than not these days – and at what unmentionable cost? This is where money I can ill afford goes, and I’m heartily sick of it. With food, and nearly everything else costing up to twice as much as it does south of the border, and even Canadian wine or maple syrup costing more than it does an hour or so’s drive away in the US – this cost jacked up by yet more taxes – I think the time has come to reign in these inept politicians and demand them to be called into account for the careless, thoughtless and useless way in which they scatter our money to the winds of fashion or telegenicism. I have been in the excessively-taxed Scandinavian countries, where you see on all sides what your considerable tax dollars are buying. Here you see nothing but a bloated bureaucracy throwing cash at every problem that arises, many of which are, admittedly, dilemmas arising in the equally poorly-run provinces, where every slight renovation or long-needed bridge-building always costs improbable millions. If other Canadians feel the same way as I do – and who but carefree and youthfully idealistic millennials could not do? – the next election wil swipe the Liberals from power and install a Conservative government, which won’t keep its promises of smaller governance and lower taxes either. The time has come, I think, for the kind of major change we’ve just seen in Italy’s recent election, with a new party committed to overhauling the entire system voted into partial power. The self-interested or hamstrung buffoons in Ottawa need to be driven out with billhooks, and a new day proclaimed. Surely any imbecile knows that pushing the envelope so impracticably far one way just guarantees it will be pushed back equally far if not further the other way when the change comes? And the change always comes.

 

robertspaulwilliam@gmail.com

American Racism & Revolution

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politics, race, revolution, United States of America

^{“To be young and Black in America today is to be in a constant state of rage.” –James Baldwin}

Baldwin, one of America’s greatest Black writers, wrote those words some fifty years ago. What has changed? There’s a half-white, or token-Black president – so what? In all of the embarrassments of his lame presidency, Ferguson, Missouri, is looking like the most humiliating of all failures in leadership for Mr. Obama. If he were a voice for Black America – which he has never been – he would be standing in the front line, hand in hand with the protesters, telling the police, “Here I am, shoot me.” That is where Martin Luther King, or any man of principle, would be at this moment.

Anyone who has visited an America beyond New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, knows that the nation is as shamefully divided over the issue of race as it was in 1861. It ought to be viewed as a class and poverty problem, yet the curious thing about the U.S. is that the white poor, generally, cannot see themselves as brothers-in-arms with poor Blacks – indeed, their fidelity to right-wing politics reveals an imbecilic tendency to vote consistently against their own interests. Blacks have mostly voted in vain for a Democratic Party which espouses social egalitarianism yet has made few genuine steps towards it.

Not for many years has the time been more ripe for Black Americans – and anyone else ardent for a massive restructuring of political and social institutions – to press their demands upon Washington. Where are the great Black voices of the past, the real women and men who knew something was rotten in the state of the States? Every Black man and woman able to do so – all the millions of them – should now be marching peaceably on Washington. Every Black soldier or policeman should be deserting his or her post to join in a protest to choke the current system into submission to its demands for a government truly by the people and for the people.

We all know the statistics: 1% of Americans control 95% of the wealth and with it the politics. This is not democracy. Who occupy the prisons, slums, and ghettoes? We all know. 20 million dissidents, Black or White, surrounding the phony monuments to American idealism in Washington could change all this. But civil disobedience must be peaceful; you must be willing to be dragged off to jail. One act of violence would justify – certainly on Fox’s alleged-News – a massively violent reaction; but not if the police and military refused to kill their own people, people whose interests in fact coincide with their own. It happened during the French Revolution, and it has happened since. Now is the time for any American realizing he or she lives in a corrupt and debased, non-egalitarian society to act. Not to exploit the tragedies of Ferguson, but to use them as examples of a system which violates its own Constitution and Declaration of Rights, while pretending to protect these vapid documents, largely written by a man who owned a hundred-odd slaves himself at the time. Native Americans also ought to seize this day, which portrays for the whole world American reality as it has not been glimpsed since Hurricane Katrina.

Guardsmen, soldiers, police, throw down your weapons and join hands with those who are genuinely your fellow Americans. Yes, 1% of your population will lose most of the money they have stolen from you, and they will not like it. What they like is the neo-slavery into which they have chained you all – and for their benefit, not yours. Riots and looting are class and poverty issues, not social evils. With wealth more equitably divided, and true evils like stock and commodities trading abolished, peace and plenty will reign in the land, which will once again live up to the great dream it once represented. That, I believe, is the dream which Dr. King would be expounding today. For the goals of Civil Rights have not yet been attained; there is no ‘Justice for All’. The podium upon which the Statue of Liberty stands ought rightly to read: Promises, Promises, Promises.

Nothing short of a revolution will change the greed and corruption afflicting the U.S. political system. It cannot be fixed from within – ask anyone running for office (a hurdle race). Yet the lessons of history teach that it can be demolished and rebuilt from without – although it will ever require constant vigilance, since scum tends to rise to the surface of any pool.

Citizens of Ferguson, my heart goes out to you tonight. To the thousands of highly-educated Black Americans wondering what their role ought to be in this: remember Ghandi; remember Dr. King – they won, yet not without risking a price which included everything they had. Is that not worth its real goal of ceasing to “live in a constant state of rage”?

With love, as always,

Paul William Roberts.