Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, with Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Link of the day:

April 21 2012

Let’s face it, the prophesied brutal global attack on the working class and unions (refer to previous items on David Harvey) is under way, and Canada is part of it, as James Cairns explains in an article  Democracy in the Age of Austerity: Beyond the Robocall Scandal published in SocialistProject • E-Bulletin No. 620. Gird your lions, readers, these Tory governments andthe wealth-owners who dominate them, are after their pound of flesh, and partof their attack is an onslaught on our civil liberties from which we may neverrecover. 

(“The aim of the robo-Conservative black-op was to obstruct anti-Tory voters from casting ballots. But it was also part of the broader agenda of Stephen Harper, Dalton McGuinty, and governments around the world, which is about a full frontal assault on popular power in all areas of life….In the age of austerity, governments around the world say they have no choice but to cut social assistance, pensions, public sector jobs, minimum wages and environmental

assessment programs. We're told that the masses are greedy and lazy and have been living beyond their means for too long. Now it's time to get real about what's affordable.

(“…politicians who serve the austerity agenda don't like even the limited version of capitalist democracy that exists today. It's why they're working hard to bring in new ways of ruling that allow them to erode the minimal democracy that's left within the official political system while leaving the official institutions in place. That's why in Greece, for example, the prime minister was forced to resign in late 2011 after merely raising the idea that unprecedented austerity policies be put to a national referendum. He was replaced by a non-elected technocratic leader who was given the freedom to impose the demands of European ruling classes without even the formal trappings of public accountability ….”)

Jean-luc MELENCHON (Photo credit: Parti socialiste)

Link of the Day April 17 2012

Jean-Luc Mélenchon? Never heard of him? He is the routinely denigrated (by the media commentariat) socialist candidate for president of France, who is putting forward, as this article from The Guardian newspaper shows, a programme of real socialist reform, and is winning support. Read this, and ponder the comparable, feeble policies of our own social democratic parties.

My Log 302 : Chasing Madoff: a film to shake anyone’s faith in the honesty of the capitalist system

Chasing Madoff (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I saw a remarkable film last night, recommended to me by my son Thom, who gets most of his films through a web site called 1channel.

The film is called Chasing Madoff, and has been made by Jeff Prosserman about a Wall street employee called Harry Markopolos, and, in my humble opinion (or as the kids say nowadays IMHO) if you watch this movie and Ferguson’s Inside Job, which won an Academy Award last year, any faith you may have had in the capitalist system should be lying tattered in the gutter.

Of course, I don’t have any faith in it from the beginning, so that conclusion is easily reached for me. Others may be of greater faith.

The story is based on Markopolos and the reaction he had in 1991 when he first saw the figures produced by Bernie Madoff, who, as everyone now knows, conducted probably the biggest fraud in history, involving something like $30 billion of other people’s money.

“It took me five minutes to realize this was a fraud, it couldn’t be anything else, it was all there in the figures,” says Markopolos. “Five minutes.”

Of course, he could have just accepted it and stayed quiet, but, as he explains, he is not built like that. When he discovers a fraud, he wants to do something about it.

So, having consulted three friends within Wall street, who agreed with him, he painstakingly began to gather the evidence he would need to expose this fraud to the authorities.

To make a long story short, he gathered the evidence and sent it to the Securities and Exchange Commission of the US federal government, one of whose jobs is to protect the public from this kind of fraud. He waited for something to happen, but nothing happened.

At first Markopolos and his friends thought only $2.3 billion was involved; only gradually did they begin to realize the immense scope of Madoff’s ponzi scheme, in which he was always borrowing to pay off earlier borrowings, thus giving people the impression he was a safe, legitimate place to put their money. Investors were usually paid six to 10 per cent, but the problem with this kind of scheme is that eventually he is owing so much, and has to pay so much that the whole edifice comes crashing to the ground.

The guts of this story, however, is how successful Madoff was able to be, not just in North America, but as the searchers began to discover, all over Europe: in fact, he seemed to them to be bigger in Europe than in North America. And it was a notable fact that even when he was managing billions of other people’s money, he never showed up on the Wall Street radar as a recognized money manager. He worked away, but somehow or other remained more or less anonymous for many years.

Harry scurried around to identify investors who were being taken by this guy, but Madoff was such a pleasant fellow that none of them would believe he could do such a thing --- and after all, they were being paid all the time, so how could these guys be right?

In May 2001 they enlisted the support of a Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote a great article, and again they waited for something to happen. They waited one week, two, three, four, and now they were realizing that some $20 billion were involved in the scheme. They talked to investors as many as they could find, to banks, to charities, all of whom had dealings with Madoff ---- the film quotes one bank in Paris as saying, “Madoff is a safe place for our money, we never lose any money with Madoff.”

By this time Markopolos’s activities against Madoff were becoming well-known, and with the example of a whistleblower who had been rubbed out by the Mafia before him, he began to get really nervous. “Madoff was running money for offshore banks, which were also involved in organizing money-laundering and like activities for organized crime, but Harry’s gang of four, as one might call them, began to realize they were on their own. Funds that are known as “feeder funds” were making so much out of Madoff that they did not want to know, although, says Markopolos in the film, eventually many people in Wall street began to realize Madoff was running a fraud, but they simply shrugged and walked away. Some of these feeder firms agreed that if the SEC would call them, they would talk, and Harry handed this information on to the SEC. “But those calls were never made.”

At a point at which 29 red flags warning about Madoff had been identified, Harry managed to persuade another Wall Sreet Journal writer, one of the top investigative journalists in the country, about what was happening. He hesitated, wanting to be sure of his facts, but eventually he wrote the story, and Harry and his boys sat back and waited for the exposé. The article never appeared. “Someone higher up in the Wall Street Journal stopped that story cold.”

Markopolos says: “I began to wonder is there someone higher up in the government stopping this? By 2001 I came very close to giving it all up.”

In 2008 came the global financial crisis, and Bernie Madoff ran out of money. Finally it was the market that brought him down. He was arrested, and the government now admitted they had known all the facts for more than a decade. What had happened to the regulatory agencies, established specifically to see that this sort of thing doesn’t ever happen?

“You guys fell down on your job,” shouted a Senator at a line of chastened Wall street types during a congressional hearing.

In the end Madoff pleaded guilty, and went down without talking, facing a 150 year prison sentence. Harry Markopolos was honoured for his sterling work in tracking Madoff by a national organization of fraud examiners. He was described as a hero. “I’m no hero,” he said, “I don’t like it when people say that. I was just doing what I was supposed to do.”

Some 300 firms have since admitted having been involved with Madoff, but only 12 people have been arrested, while hundreds, perhaps even thousands of individuals were totally ruined, not to mention charities that Madoff also targetted.

Markopolos’s conclusion on the SEC: “It roars like a mouse, and fights like a flea.”

This whole story makes me think of a book I read a few years ago by a British writer called Gangster Capitalism. The author's thesis was that all this publicity about organized crime and its misdemeanours is encouraged by the corporate world to draw attention away from the far greater crimes of corporations, that are being perpetrated every day of the year, and going largely unpunished.

My Log 301:BC First Nations chiefs warn Harper: the days when we could be ignored are long gone

Prime Minister Harper has been reminded by a coalition of important British Columbia First Nations chiefs that Canada has constitutional responsibility to consult and accommodate First Nations people even in the making of vital economic and environmental decisions.
This letter should be regarded by Harper as a first shot across his bows as his government pushes on with a policy that, on the surface, seems likely to try to ignore First Nations protests against major directional changes by his government.
This letter reminds me forcefully of the moment in 1972 when the Cree people entered the Montreal courtroom to fight the proposal of the Quebec government to build the huge hydro project in their traditional lands in James Bay area. The lawyers for the Quebec government really did not believe they had a case to answer, an arrogance that was knocked out of them by the persistent six-month case presented by the Cree lawyer James O’Reilly, and by other lawyers representing the Inuit of northern Quebec.
The days when governments could simply ignore the wishes of First Nations are long over, as Harper and his gang are likely to discover to their cost in the next few months.
“We remind you that the Crown cannot legislate itself out of its duties to consult and accommodate First Nations,” the BC chiefs write to Harper in an open letter, commenting on the government’s decision to proceed with changes to the Fisheries Act, and weakening environmental regulations without any reference to First Nations whose lands lie in the path of the so-called Gateway pipeline that the government hopes will carry oil sands oil to the British Columbia coast for export.
The chiefs add: “Removing or weakening environmental reviews for projects will only result in greater uncertainty and conflict. We urge you to reconsider your position and work with First Nations to strengthen habitat protection for the continued survival of fish stocks and for the benefit of our future generations.
“We are similarly concerned with the changes we understand may be included in the Budget to environmental assessment legislation, and other environmental protection laws. These environmental laws and the processes established under them are a central part of the Crown’s relationship with First Nations. Changes to these laws, as with the Fisheries Act, should only be undertaken in meaningful consultation with First Nations, and to the extent these protections are changed they should be improved rather than weakened.
“A recent report by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination further emphasized the need for Canada to include Indigenous peoples in decision making, recommending that Canada ‘Implement in good faith the right to consultation and to free, prior and informed consent of Aboriginal peoples whenever their rights may be affected by projects carried out on their lands, as set forth in international standards and the State party’s legislation.’
“Further, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples sets out in Article 26(1) that ‘Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied, or otherwise used or acquired.’
“We ask Canada to uphold its commitment to this important international doctrine. We also point out that Canada must uphold its commitments in existing treaties to protect fisheries under those treaties.
“Although your government is moving forward with potential economic development projects, this cannot be at the risk of the surrounding environment. We remind you that the Crown cannot legislate itself out of its duties to consult and accommodate First Nations…..”
The letter is sent in the name of the FIRST NATIONS LEADERSHIP COUNCIL, and is signed on behalf of the FIRST NATIONS SUMMIT by Grand Chief Edward John,
Chief Douglas White III Kwulasultun and Dan Smith;
on behalf of the UNION OF BC INDIAN CHIEFS, signed by
Grand Chief Stewart Phillip,Chief Bob Chamberlin, and
Chief Marilyn Baptiste; on behalf of the BC ASSEMBLY OF FIRST NATIONS, signed by Regional Chief Jody Wilson-Raybould.

My Log 300: Keep eyes skinned for ALEC or his brothers --- a corporate entity deisgned to write our laws for us

American Legislative Exchange Council (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Many years ago when I was freelancing around the National Film Board, a little film ran through my hands that dealt with the movement in the United States devoted to destroying the union movement. The footage for this film had been shot by a young leftist couple, earnest but seemingly incompetent, who had produced some incomprehensible mishmash that I was asked to try to make some sense of. The conclusion of myself and my editor was that the young couple should get a day job, forget films. Famous last words: since then, this man has become one of the most successful producers of privately sponsored films and film series in Canada!

However, all this came back to mind with an interesting article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times on March 25 about something called ALEC --- the American Legislative Exchange Council --- which, he said provides template legislation to state and other legislators across the country of a right-wing nature. Specifically, Krugman says ALEC provided the template for Florida’s ridiculous Stand Your Ground law, under which anyone can shoot anyone else who he or she thinks might be threatening him or her, the law under which this black youth Trayvon Martin was recently murdered.

Similarly, Krugman says, ALEC has provided more than 50 bills that have passed into law in the State of Virginia, wholly written, in essence, by this corporate-funded and controlled agency dedicated to preserving and enhancing the private, anti-government bias in American society.

ALEC, says Krugman, is funded by such corporations as EXXON and the Koch Brothers, but has managed to keep a low profile, and was only recently exposed by some good investigative work by the Centre for Media and Democracy. Let’s hope no one in Canada is trying to emulate this success, although, with the encouragement of the Harper government, it would surprise me if we are to remain aloof from this kind of thing.

Not too subtly put, ALEC seems to be interested in making sure that dissenters end up in jail, that the prospect of getting them into jail is made easier for the network of Correctional Officers, lawyers and right-wing legislators who are always at work, burrowing away among the cherished, constitutionally-protected rights of American citizens.

The film we finally got out at the NFB is called Who Needs Unions? It is based on one particular lawyer who takes assignments from companies around the nation and lectures them on how to ensure that their workers never flirt with unionization, and, if they are already unionized, instructs the bosses on how to get rid of the unions. We’ve seen the results of this sort of thing when companies have quit Canada to take up work in places like Indiana or Virginia that don’t allow their workers to unionize.

It is an awesome thing to realize that in these countries that we consider to be free for most activities, the Wealth Owners --- as I insist on calling the people who run everything --- are always at work specifically trying to undermine and abolish the freedoms we take for granted.

We need to be on watch for something like ALEC popping up in
Canada. Tom Flanagan and his boys from the right-wing Western think-tanks are surely preparing the ground for something like this. After all, we know that a global attack on unions and the working class is already underway, and we see the results of it with every strike that is forbidden or ordered back to work, and we see it in the huge propaganda offensive being waged in the newspapers and other media against the rights of workers. Instead of shrinking from workers and the unions that protect them, this is a time we should be rallying around them and their right to organize as a matter of freedom of association, one of the supposed cherished qualities of our way of life.

BEIJING, CHINA - MARCH 09: China's Chongqing Municipality Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai (Right) makes an obeisance to a delegate after the third plenary meeting of the National People's Congress (NPC) at The Great Hall Of The People on March 9, 2012 in Beijing, China. China's Chongqing Municipality Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai said he was surprised to learn that his ex-police chief had run off to a US consulate during the the National People's Congress Chongqing group meeting today. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)Bo Xilai (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

. Link of the Day (2): March 27 2012: The estimable Pepe Escobar tells us what’s behind the sacking of Bo Xilai from the nine-member committee that runs China. He had been running the world’s biggest conurbation, with 31 million people, Chongqing in Sichuan province, and had a Mao-inspired programme for more equality. Nix on that, says the ruling oligarchy. Another revealing commentary from Al Jazeera.

. (“….cohesion, consensus and stability had to be the unified message, as China's fragilities are increasingly exposed: how to lift tens of millions more Chinese from an agrarian dead end, how to get decent healthcare for

. these tens of millions, how to fight multiple instances of party corruption. There's no question that Deng-inspired, modernised China has hurled a

. massive strategic, ideological and political challenge at a still-dazed and confused West.

. (“China is home to an immensely sophisticated, ancient civilisation. It harbours an ocean of humanity, and it has been modernising for only three decades (which is only a minute by Chinese standards). The Bo episode was

. just a minor detail. We will only have a clear picture where China will be in 2020 after next autumn, or by the spring of 2013. But make no mistake: stability, as Buddhism tells us, is an illusion. China's leaders are now riders on the storm.”)

New Haven, Connecticut viewed from an airplane en route to Bradley International Airport (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Link of the day: March 27 2012: A US editor and lecturer gives some pointed lessons about the land of the free: John Stoehr of New Haven reflects on the militarization of the US state, and the crushing of dissent, on Al Jazeera.

My Log 299: A weekend subject to the CBC’s (right-wing) commentariat: why are we subjected to this?

9Français : Thomas Mulcair le 23 avril 2011 à Montréal lors de la campagne électorale fédérale (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I spent the weekend watching the NDP leadership convention, and marveling at the implacably right-wing tone of the CBC’s elected commentariat.

As I said in an earlier post, I voted for Peggy Nash, on the grounds she was the most left-wing of the candidates, with a local second for Paul Dewar, a nice fellow, and Thomas Mulcair third. So, apparently, by the third ballot, my vote was cast for Mulcair, and I was hoping he would win it. I watched half of it on CPAC, anchored by the plodding Peter Van Dusen, and the CBC, for the first day under command of Evan Solomon, and for the Saturday orchestrated by the CBC pillar of the establishment Peter Mansbridge.

One thing I noticed immediately about Mansbridge that many others may not have noticed was that he was allowing himself many jokes, sardonic in tone for the most part, about the whole enterprise, as if the NDP was not really something to which so notable a figure as Mansbridge should lend his authority. I never remember ever hearing this tone from him before, certainly not in the many leadership contests for the Liberals and Tories that I have heard him performing.

So that was a slightly jarring element, not noticeably compensated for by the fact that every hour or two he seemed to feel the need to straighten up and fly right, as it were, pulling himself up and trying, as he put it, “to see things in perspective.” At these moments he tried to give an objective overall account of what we had been watching, whose seriousness made its absence in his previous behavior all the more striking.

Mansbridge was presiding over the full range of what I can only call the CBC’s Commentariat, that phalanx of mostly conservative commentators that they push at us night after night, week after week, month after month. The only one missing was the hapless Kevin O’Leary, the uber-conservative millionaire entrepreneur with whom the CBC apparently has been conducting a passionate love affair ever since they heard him pronounce over and over on Dragon’s Den that nothing matters but money, only the money counts, where is the money, and how can I make money out of this?
So entranced were they by the revelation of this constricted view of life that O’Leary began to crop up on all sorts of programmes, such as the Lang and O’Leary Exchange, others whose names I have forgotten, and the peculiar exercise in colonialism, Redemption, Inc, in which he decided to pick half a dozen ex-convicts, and give them a second chance, as the programme put it, by offering $100,000 (“of his OWN money,”) to whichever of them could convince him they had the royal jelly of entrepreneurship. Each week, the culminating sequence was surely one of the most peculiar ever screened by the CBC --- a sequence in which, having chosen his failure, O’Leary shuts himself in a room with the guy (or gal) and lectures him or her like a district commissioner in the old colonial empire days.

Well, thank heaven, O’Leary didn’t appear at rhe NDP convention. But all of Mansbridge’s other pals did: the so-called Issues panel, with its relentlessly establishmentarian bias; the Insiders, some political operatives who purported to tell us the unvarnished facts about real politique; and then some of Evan Solomon’s pals from the Power and Politics sessions on the late afternoons of every day. As this paragraph might suggest, palsmanship is the prevailing mode of CBC political broadcasting.

These latter were particularly objectionable in the circumstances, especially one called Ian Capstick, a baby-faced political operative, formerly employed by the NDP apparently, whose fatuous opinions about the quality and value of various speeches was forced down our throats for reasons that remain obscure to me still. Why the hell were these people constantly telling us what they thought? Are we idiots that we cannot be trusted to watch proceedings, judge them, and make up our own minds?

Particularly egregious were the comments on Thomas Mulcair’s final speech: quite misleading in their emphasis, and judged according to some standard imposed by these commentators that probably no one else shared.

On CPAC Van Dusen and his colleagues kept taking phone calls from people watching the programmes, many of whom commented on how refreshing it was to have the proceedings straight, without the intermediary of this horde of doubtful commentators provided by the CBC, and subtly designed, as almost all political programming on the CBC is, to denigrate anyone left of centre.

( I should add here a word of praise for an excellent production on

CPAC by Peter Van Dusen of a history of the NDP, screened just after the result was announced, with particular reference to the work of Jack Layton, a documentary in which he leaned heavily on the well-informed and particularly interesting comments of James Laxer, who might have introduced a note of realism into the CBC’s coverage, if he had been asked).

Anyway, we came through it all. Some people stood out heroically, notably Charlie Angus, the NDP who has been such an effective defender of the people of Attawapiskat. And there were some memorable moments: while the commentariat droned on about how tough it was going to be for Mulcair to repair the damage caused by the election, Mulcair himself was embracing Libby Davies, deputy-leader of the caucus, and announcing she would remain in the same position, even though she supported one of the other candidates. Thank heaven for that: Libby is one of the ornaments of the House of Commons, a great lady and an effective MP.

Now, all I am hoping for is that Mulcair will chew up and spit out Stephen Harper over the next three years, and sweep into power in the next election. Don’t bet against it.

My Log 298: History tells us Broadbent is talking nonsense: Mulcair could be the man to take on and get rid of Harper

Thomas Mulcair, who seems to have the old leaders of the NDP shitting their pants, came to Ottawa the other night to meet supporters in a pub. He arrived to applause from the faithful, made his way around the room, shaking hands, and eventually came to the table where I was sitting beside the wall, having withdrawn to the least noticeable spot available. He shoved out his hand towards me, which I had to shake, and asked me my name. I told him. He said, “Were you a journalist?” I admitted to the heinous crime. “I was delivering the Montreal Star when you were writing in it,” he said. And moved on.

So at least I know he has a prodigious memory.

The ridiculous statement made recently by Ed Broadbent, attacking Mulcair with what might be called some viciousness, in this context, seems to confirm that he is the front-runner in the race. He is obviously a very smart guy, he has presence, gravitas, and seems to be the kind of guy who could take on Harper and beat him. What more would we need in a leader?

Well, there is the old, troubling problem that always faces social democratic parties, which is, faced with the implacable hostility of the media and the Wealth Owners, do they turn themselves into their political enemies in an effort to get elected? The history in the English-speaking world is clear enough: without doing that, social democratic parties have seldom had the popularity to get elected.

The great triumph of the British Labour Party in 1945 was one such occasion. But the fact was that this party, founded in 1905 by the trades union movement with the purpose of defending the rights of workers, had in its forty years of existence fallen under the control of a group of university-educated nobs who tended to lack the iron in their souls that a really revolutionary political leadership really needs to get things done.

Here, a brief history lesson might be of advantage in helping to judge Mulcair. The British Labour Party always had a radical left-wing made up of the solid core of the more radical workers and their representatives, and of left-leaning intellectuals. In a country like England, the so-called “embrace of the duchesses” was never far away, always a potential menace, and Ramsay Macdonald, when he had the opportunity in 1931, showed that he had fallen for it, betrayed the movement, and besmirched the name of democratic socialism for a generation.

Brave souls laboured on in the run-up to the war, and when Labour swept all before it in the aftermath of the war --- which most Englishmen thought was fought for social democracy --- the government they formed under Clement Atlee contained quite a number of people who had already quit the Labour Party at least once, formed themselves into a coherent left-wing group, and HAD BEEN READMITTED to the party. So, their most effective minister, Aneurin Bevan, a Welsh miner, pushed through their national health service against overwhelming odds and in 1960 died as a genuine working-class hero, a man of remarkable gifts; their chancellor of he exchequer was Stafford Cripps; others, such as Harold Wilson, later a Prime Minister, were in prominent positions.

In Canada the history has been somewhat different. Canada, even those sections of Canadian society with progressive prejudices, never has had the advantage of a huge working class of politically active people. The CCF was a rural protest movement. (I am not denigrating that: many years later, when I was on a book tour across the country and taking phone in messages from listeners, I can testify that the most intelligent bunch of callers I ran across were in Regina, whose farmers were still fully aware of global politics, and knew what they were talking about, a legacy of the CCF movement’s success.)

When the CCF sensibly merged with the union movement to form the NDP in the 1960s, the imperatives of democratic socialist parties that had shown up in other countries (the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand all had exhibited the same characteristics) became evident in Canada. The Lewis family followed Tommy Douglas in establishing a dominant position in the party, and one of the bad effects of this was that when a group of brilliant intellectuals and leftists rose in the party to challenge them, the son, Stephen Lewis, at that time head of the Ontario DNP, drummed them out of the party. AND THEY WERE NEVER ALLOWED BACK IN.

Thus, Canada’s NDP, from the point of view of the left, was emasculated at a fairly early stage.

I mention all this because of the hand-wringing that the left --- myself included --- is engaging in over the possibility that this former Liberal, Thomas Mulcair, might ruin the leftist credentials of the NDP. From my point of view, they already lie in tatters. It hardly seems worth it, to agonize over the possibility that he might change the party and drag it to the right. He could scarcely drag it further to the right than such leaders as Harcourt in BC, Blakeney and Romanow in Saskatchewan, Schreyer and Doer in Manitoba have already done.

Even so, they were, and are, better than the other parties.

So my message is that we should accept Mulcair if he is elected, and work with him to get rid of Harper, come what may, and, as they say, the devil take the hindmost.

The essential thing is to change this government. A Mulcair-led government would be so much better than this Harper mob that the mouth positively waters at the prospect.

I have some worries about him myself. For example, he is said to be likely to follow a sort of Harper-Obama line in abasing himself to Israel, although to any modern progressive it is undeniable that the once-admired state of Israel has turned into a harsh apartheid state that is cruelly oppressing its subject peoples. No doubt where we should belong in such a confrontation.

Even so, I will shed no tears if Mulcair wins the race and emerges as our new leader. At least he is someone we can rally round in our effort to change the government.

My Log 297 : I come to the defence of the OCtranspo service, their drivers and employees

Image via Wikipedia

I know this isn’t my usual style, but when I read in the newspaper today that OCTranspo is inundated with complaints, I feel like coming to their defence.

I have a very short acquaintance with the Ottawa buses, although I have lived here since 1977. In fact, until last December you could count the number of times I have ridden the buses on the fingers of one hand. But in December I was stricken with an affliction that required me to go several times to hospitals and doctor’s offices, and since I had given up my car two years ago, I had no other way except to take the buses (taxis these days being understandably very expensive, now that taxidrivers are, at last, on a living wage, thanks to the activity of their vigorous union).

I was nervous when confronted with reaching the Ottawa General hospital, but beforehand I phoned one of a few numbers I found for OCtranspo, and asked them how would I get from downtown Slater street, where I live, to the General at such and such a time on such and such a day. A very helpful woman looked up the timetable for me, told me which bus to catch, at which time, and said it would get me there, with a change at Hurdman station, at exactly 10.01 (or some such time).

I caught the bus, having taken the precaution of asking the driver if he was going to Hurdman, where the second bus pulled up in less than a minute, and I was deposited in the grounds of the hospital at 10.01 on the dot.

Later I had to take buses to other hospitals and offices, and each time I phoned the same number for advice, was given the facts by cheerful, polite people, and the bus got me there as promised, on the dot.

I had to go to the airport, and having had this success with the buses, when someone told me an OCTranspo bus ran to the airport, the fare was the usual $3.25, and by taking it I could save on the $30 taxi fare that I usually paid, I could hardly believe my ears.

But once again my informant looked up the timetable for me, told me to be there to catch the 97 Airport bus at 12.58 (or some such time) and exactly half an hour later the bus would deposit me at the airport, which it did, arriving on the dot, just as the schedule promised. On each of these journeys the bus didn’t delay even a smidgen of a minute, but collected its passengers, and then whizzed along rapidly on its way to its destination. On the way back, I had to wait about five minutes for the bus to leave, and then I was delivered on Albert street, close to my house, after all along the way observing the driver deal courteously and expeditiously with a bus that at times became crowded with women and their baby carriages, old people and their ailments, and teenagers hiding behind their earphones.

My conclusion on the basis of this experience is that Ottawa has a wonderful bus service --- I am now able to understand how it has been given such warm accolades over the years (as I remember) by bus service professionals from across the continent --- with polite officials and drivers helping people at every stop, on time almost invariably, and keeping to a schedule which seems designed to deliver passengers in the shortest time possible.

I think this is worth saying, because I never remember hearing anything good being written or said about the service by the Ottawa public in all the time I have been here. Even in today’s newspaper the report says that 2,344 complaints have been received, an average of 75 a day, against five interventions favorable to the drivers. Some of these whingers should try being a driver for a couple of days….

My Log 296: Call me an old-fashioned weirdo, I don’t think governments should be encouraging gambling

Image via WikipediaHorse Races (Photo credit: pandameixiang)Gambling_Bali (Photo credit: Jeda Villa Bali)

When I was a very small boy my Dad once took me to our local village racecourse and gave me 2/6, or half-a-crown, as we used to call it (or about 30 cents in currency converted) for me to spend for myself.

Somehow or other --- no doubt with the help of an adult --- I placed my half-crown as a bet on a horse. The horse, of course, lost. And I have never bet on anything else in the 80 years since. Being bitten once with that precious money --- the first I had ever had that I could call my own --- taught me a lesson; that gambling is a mug’s game. I have never even bought a lottery ticket.

(I should add, simply to add some colour to this piece, that horse racing is almost like a religion in New Zealand, where I was brought up, to such an extent that every small village has its own race track, and its own race horses, trainers, jockeys and owners. The annual “races” were certainly one of the stellar events of the year, and in our village, Wyndham, on the Southland plain in the far south of the South Island, the “races” vied with the annual agricultural fair as the biggest event of the year.)

As I am living through my ninth decade, I think I can say that one thing on which old-fashioned political progressives like myself are almost all agreed is that no government should do anything to encourage gambling. Of course, I should blush at expressing so old-fashioned, so outré an idea. But you can spare me the blushes on my behalf. I was well into my adult life before our governments decided they were so strapped for money that they needed to build casinos where their citizens could gamble legally. I first heard of this in the 1960s, I believe, when gambling dens in London were legalized.

A few years later, proposals were launched for Canadian cities to copy some American cities --- Atlantic City, Las Vegas, Reno --- spring to mind --- which virtually owed their existence to their casinos, and to the huge sums of money that poured into them. Also, I might add, to the tens of thousands of gambling addicts whose activities in the casinos had ruined their lives and that of their families. And of course to he mobsters who ran them.

I wrote articles in Montreal opposing these ideas, offering the undeniable truths that casino gambling was always loaded in favour of the house against the gamblers, and was largely controlled by gangsters, who were attracted like flies to a jar of honey. But I was whistling in the dark, as they say, and while Cuba kicked out the casinos and the gangsters who ran them, all over North America and Europe casinos were built, many of them owned and operated by provincial or municipal governments, or, more recently, by Indian reservations.

It has always seemed to me a bitter irony that the economy of native people, having been totally destroyed by government actions over the years, should lately have been rescued by their being offered the opportunity to run this dreadfully damaging operation, a gambling casino.

Okay, I know one could make similar arguments about alcohol, for example. It is undeniably true that the more easily available liquor is, the more alcoholics are produced whose lives are ruined by their inability to handle the demon drink. I find it hard to make a rational excuse for my adopting different attitudes to these two addictive pursuits, except that alcohol has attained a certain level of general tolerance among the populations that gambling has not.

Okay, okay, I know I am an old fuddy-duddy. But in all my travels around the world I have never been in a casino, and I seriously doubt I ever will be in one.

I’m just against government-sponsored gambling, and don’t think we should build a casino in Ottawa.

My Log 295: Two excellent CBC docs tend to ignore social and political influences on our lifestyles

Haegg and Andersson, great white milers Image via Wikipedia

When I was a kid in New Zealand taking part in athletics, as we called them (track and field over here), the high school teacher who coached us after school used to tell us that black runners were superb in sprints (after all, Jesse Owens was the best ever sprinter), but they were hopeless at long distance.

There seemed to be some proof in the record of what he said, for while Owens and his many black successors over the 100 metres were pre-eminent, in the longer distance the two great runners of that time were Swedes, Arne Andersson and Gunter Haegg, who had taken the 1500 metre and mile times away down below anyone before them had ever attained.

This makes us to laugh today, because black athletes from Kenya and Ethiopia (and you can throw in Sudan, Namibia, Rwanda, Burundi and other previously unheard of countries) now dominate virtually every long distance race to such an extent that white runners have been virtually cut out altogether.

Last night the CBC screened two interesting documentaries, the first of which, The Perfect Runner, was screened as part of the Nature of Things series, the second, about anxiety, in the Doc Zone series.

I really enjoyed the approach taken by the host of the running movie Niobe Thompson, who set the whole thing in an historical context, went back to the very dawn of civilization when human hunters could outrun the animals they lived on, and suddenly brought it forward to the Ethiopian village of Bekoji, where most of that country’s world-beating distance runners have been spawned, coached by a mere local school teacher, who has shown the world something about human capabilities. Then Thompson actually took part in a 100 kilometre race across three mountains in the Rockies, designed to prove that essentially running is the most natural activity for human beings. He wasn’t unfortunately, able to finish, but a woman ultra marathoner did finish.

I paid more attention to the documentary about running than to Ric Esther Bienstock’s on what the moderator described as “a society living on the edge” of its nerves.

Both took science as providing the final answers, although both might have usefully considered political and social conditions in explanation of their subjects. I mean all these poor people who are suffering from anxiety to the point of being mentally ill are the victims of capitalism, this raw, violent cruel economic system to which we are all subject. And it is a curious fact that only when the African colonies were given their political independence did they emerge as the world’s greatest runners. Although Ethiopia was not a colony, its first international running success came only three years after Ghana was granted its independence, ushering in the new African world. No one ever heard of Kenyan runners while they were still groaning under the colonial yoke. Unless I missed something, capitalism --- either in its brutal North American form, or its colonial form --- wasn’t mentioned in either movie, which would have been better if they had taken this aspect of life into account.

As it happens I have just spent most of my last year writing a book that provides something of relevance to this subject. Sheila Van Bloemen and her late husband Michael were two young Canadians who created in London a remarkable coffee house in the 1950s, a place that became a sort of epicenter for creative people and dreamers during the 1960s. By the 1970s, their café was such a wild success that they felt it was choking them, and they got rid of it (the café is still functioning as a successful business in the Old Brompton road) and went to live in Tito’s Yugoslavia in 1972. Sheila is still living there in the same house she managed to buy when she first went there, and in her description of her life in the book I have helped her write she bears eloquent testimony to the superiority of the lifestyle she found here. No one had any money, so there was no need for anyone to be anxious, she says. People were companionable, shared willingly both their miseries and their contentments, and the collective decision to ensure that everyone was supported by everyone else added another level of what might be called societal contentment, as distinct from the North American society described in the CBC movie last night where so many people are living on the edge of their nerves.

In fact, the failure of these two movies to even mention social and political influences seems to me to suggest that the modern media operate in a miasmic fog of self-censorship that softens the edge of all political criticism in almost everything that is produced. Media practitioners know only too well that to express political and even social dissent does not keep them on a profitable and successful career path.

I worked for long enough in this media world to know that no one is really free from these influences imposed on them from above, all designed to protect the world-view of the wealth-owners and their corporate world. No doubt the producers of these documentaries would refute that hey were responding to any such influences. Which, in itself --- remember, I have experienced all this myself --- is just another aspect of what I am talking about.

My Log 294: Two films show us the terrifying power of Nature, and warn us not to abuse it

Tsunami Photo - Unknown (Photo credit: astanhope

There’s something about these tsunamis that has totally gripped me. I suppose it could be that I have been convinced for a long time that if we keep abusing the Earth, or Nature, as we might call it, eventually Nature will strike back. I may have been influenced towards that thinking by my contacts with the indigenous people of Canada, whose fundamental beliefs are built on the assumption of respect for other creatures, and for what they call their mother Earth, respect for the Earth’s rivers, mountains, grasses, winds, rocks and trees. Respect for everything, because, according to their beliefs, every thing has in it a spirit, very similar to what we regard as the spirituality of human beings.

I have known native hunters who told me that you cannot expect just;to take from other entities on this Earth: you also have to give back something. So these people would hang the skull of a rabbit or the paws of a bear they had just eaten, in a tree as a matter of respect for the animals that gave themselves to them to eat, and for the tree which would carry the message to the animal.

In this context, one can see most of the works of industrial human kind as an abuse of Nature, and unfortunately much of it is egregious and offensive. Of all our works, I personally would say the most offensive to Nature is nuclear power, something that, once released, will remain in the environment for thousands of years, something that cannot be adequately stored because we have no storage vessels that we can depend on lasting for thousands of years.

One cannot see the pictures taken of the recent tsunamis without being impressed by the overpowering force of Nature, when it is aroused. Of course, volcanoes have shown us something of the same power; and hurricanes; but nothing equals the destructive power of these tsunamis, which are a force no human can expect to survive, except by good luck.

I am writing this because it is just a year since that malevolent black water swept in along 200 miles of the Japanese coastline, smashing before it towns, villages, humans and all their works. Two programmes screened by the CBC last week paid eloquent testimony to the force of this natural event: the way people talked about it said all that needed to be said:

“The things we were seeing were completely unimaginable,” said one man.

“All we could do was just watch,”said another, who had managed to find higher ground. “We were just speechless, shocked, we just felt it was the end. I could see my house, and I had lost everything.”

“I was not expecting Nature to be so dreadful,” said a fisherman. “It was horrible. We did not know what was happening. I don’t know what to say.”

A man who had taken shelter in a school watched as the water rose around him, sweeping everything before it. Then when fire broke out in what remained of his town, he said, “It was like being in hell. We thought it was the end of the town.”

Fifty years ago, a huge tsunami devastated Chile, and the people in Japan, always conscious of the possibility of tsunamis because of the frequency of earthquakes, had built retaining walls, 17 feet high, that were expected to defend them from any wave. But this wave was bigger, three times as high as the retaining walls, and the movies taken by the amateur photographers who decided it was their duty to record what was happening clearly showed how inexorable these waters were. One group was standing in what they thought was perfect safety above the whole thing, behind a retaining wall, but within a few seconds not only had the waters begun to creep along behind the wall, but they had suddenly turned into raging torrents, deep and powerful, that had carried half the town down towards these people, who niow began to doubt that they were really safe.

Well, I don’t know what good writing about this does, except it gives me a chance to reaffirm my belief in the insignificance of human beings. While I wasin Texas visiting my son recently he showed me a film called The Making of the Earth, which, he said, had influenced him more than anything he had ever seen. It detailed the various phases the Earth had passed through since it was dragged out of the gases in the universe some four and a half billion years ago, (at which time it was an unimaginably hot place), and finished with a firm prophesy that within 15,000 years another ice age, similar to the last one --- that ended 10,000 years ago --- would overtake the earth, completely wiping aside all the works of human kind, all our fabled cities, all our sciences and so on.

To an agnostic like me, all of these things prove the i impossibility that there is somewhere a benevolent God overseeing all this stuff.

A very moving film shown by CBC last week was called Children of the Tsunami, and it had interviews with dozens of very composed Japanese children who spoke in extremely pertinent sound bytes. Here the vulnerability of nuclear power wazs established by little boys and girls who said, “If there is an exclusion zone, it means there is something bad in there, and you cannot go in.” You can say that again, kid, but these kids were restive at having to wear masks, and not being able to go outside to play. Is that a real life? They knew, as did their adults, that the preparations made 50 years before against the possibility of a major tsunami were completely inadequate.

Although the Japanese had been warned of the effects of radiation by being the only nation to have suffered such explosions on their soil, the adults of these children had let them down by building nuclear power stations in areas vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis. Though quite a few people in these films did seem to put their faith in God, or in prayer, none of them, surely, could have expected any help from that quarter. Not against his revenge of Nature, showing us we should be more careful.