Toronto Poverty Activist
"the racoon blog" |
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send comments/inquiries to; hello@citizensincome.ca |
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Whats up with me, and moving this blog to a new domain. |
| I will in future be found at http://www.blog.citizensincome.ca |
I cannot believe how many people are continuing to visit this site, despite me adding nothing to it for awhile and all the trouble I have had with people trying to take it down. I have had to move it around, change domain names.
The reason is that much of what I have written is fairly topical and is getting linked to. I can write pretty good stuff; I have something to say. But some people do not like me and what I say. I could write a lot about the bullshit politics that is going on. But first I have to deal with some bullshit that has been directed at me.
What I really want is a blog setup that is portable and that can grow into a full web site. I want an easier way of doing a web site. I have tried some software that will let me do that. Elgg is free, but it is too much of a php eggheads thing. Rather than be an Elgg head, I want something that is simple to run but looks good. I like the social engine software, but it costs money.
This blog by itself attracts only a few visitors. A few friends and acquaintances read it. I am not doing serious writing on it. I will not be for awhile. First, I want the money to get the Social Engine. But I want to finish the legal cases I am being forced to do. I will have to spend all my time on that. I find I just cannot divide myself any finer.
And I am a bit tired anyway. I have been ill for a bit, too. My medical problems come and go. But as I said, I should keep a blog, just so people know what I am up to.
Especially, so the people who are still subscribed to that citizensincome list know what I am up to. A purpose of the social engine site I want to start in a year or two will be to begin again promoting the idea of a basic income. The citizen's income thing is going nowhere. I think it is better to start using the term "basic Income" anyway.
But to do anything political in Toronto that involves anything "left", you have to be a good lawyer, too. It is not the conservative types who will go after you, but the NDP. The dipsters are as much a threat to poor people as the conservatives. Why, is something to write about sometime.
I am not alone in this feeling about NDP. It seems to go on across the country too. NDP especially does not like the idea of a Basic Income, for some reason. I correspond with a few people across the country. One in Victoria especially talks about her troubles with the dippers, and how she "toils in obscurity" because of their relational bullying.
But she has not had them actually try to destroy her, using false arrest, false information to police. I do not want to get too much into talking about my legal cases here. But I certainly cannot rely on lawyers to deal with this. I have to learn to be my own lawyer.
The legal aid system in Ontario is totally controlled by the dipsters. There is no possibility of getting a legal certificate with which to fight these things. So, I do what half the people who need to take something to court do; represent myself. "Represent myself" is a stupid term. It should be normal for people to argue their own cases. I do not "represent myself", I am myself.
I will be busy at being myself in several courts or the next year or two. When I am done I expect to have some money as well as some peace and security with which to get back to what I would really like to do.
In the meanwhile, when I need a break from it, I will do a little blogging. But I won't be doing it here anymore. If you want to keep up with me, go to my Elgg blog at www.basicincome.ca/elgg. I have not created an index page for the domain yet. If you have any trouble getting to the Elgg, call me at tar@qaz.ca
It is time for me to write something about what is going on at TCHC. The consequences of the city auditor's exposures of the TCHC's incompetence have bit in and will play out. The authoritarian left's frantic effort to protect part of its empire has failed for now.
Things will get interesting again when a new board is appointed and the new libertarian/reactionary group gets down to running housing. The good part will be the more thorough cleanout of the social engineers; the people hired for their social work qualifications and for their loyalty to salon socialist interests.
It will get more difficult when they have to decide exactly what to do with all this housing. It was 'down jammed' to the city back in 2002 without any extra funding to clear up the maintenance backlog. I have been around long enough to recall Lastman squawking about the repair bill the province was shoving on the city.
Miller and the TCHC manager of those times, Ballantyne, decided they would somehow make up the maintenance overrun over time by 'efficiencies' in other areas. Instead the back log has got worse. A big part of their plan was to get more money from market rents. However, the city has had a high vacancy rate and not too many people choose to live next to mental patients, addicts, and the desperately poor as well put up with TCHC style management.
I think the city's right to complain about the original downjamming has timed out. It is stuck managing the housing. It cannot sell it off. It cannot do much of anything with the stock of run down housing it must manage, given the terms the higher levels of government have dealt it.
However, I believe there have been some studies to show that there is enough money available to be able to run the housing and gradually get caught up on repairs if the places were managed effectively. Anyone who lives in 'housing' knows that the management of these places is stunningly incompetent. They do not even know enough to check that contractors have actually done work before they pay for it.
You have an organization which has had the idea that a back ground in social work is a qualification to run large housing complexes. You have people who were school teachers and legal secretaries suddenly being in charge of 2000 units of housing. Privatization is no answer; one third of TCHC is privately managed and it is run even worse than what TCHC manages directly.
The fears that all TCHC's stock will be sold off are misguided. Nobody would buy it except for a song. That is assuming the federal and provincial governments would let the city sell it. My major point here is that Ford has no choice after getting rid of the salon socialist "entitlement" types, except to run the housing.
There is no other solution in the short term. If it is run badly again, if we go from leftie type corruption, a self serving bureaucracy, to right wing type corruption, handing out buddyola to profiteers, then Ford will soon find himself bitten by the same problems he started out criticizing. The city does not have any answers for the longer term problems of housing, but it can run what it has effectively.
The longer term problems were partly expressed by a Star article, copied below, about the problems Britain had in trying to sell off its housing. The article made the point that there is no way for any urban society to "get out of the housing business".
If there is to be enough decent places for everyone to live, these places must be built. Private developers will not build them; it is always more lucrative to build for the higher end of the market. It is always cheaper to build directly than to subsidize. Government will build housing and will maintain it or will deal with the consequences of failing to do so.
But the same article failed to mention the successful part of the British experiments with housing; tenant self management. Local governments in Canada cannot do much to build housing, but it can maintain it and it can run it effectively. It can do this if it pays attention to the experiences of other countries, especially Britain.
Pat Capponi also wrote an interesting article about the relations between tenants and management in TCHC. It is interesting because Capponi is generally a career cause pimp, running the authoritarian left line and trying to recruit other "survivors" to do the same. I am not sure why she broke that pattern in this article.
The relationship between the TCHC elite and the poverty pimps groups Capponi has connections to is deep and complicated. I know that FMTA has long had the aim of breaking into the social housing area, looking for a fixed membership fee from each resident. The ACORN nuts have been buzzing around as well.
TCHC may have been paying some of these groups, probably just to get them to go away. TCHC has paid other consultant groups to help them manage the thoughts of their tenants, as well as to create astroturf groups to lobby the province for more funding for housing maintenance.
But Capponi puts her finger on the problem with creating a tenant self management system for TCHC. TCHC has operated like a totalitarian state. Its ruling elite has run it in an incompetent and self serving way because it has not needed to run it well.
All they have needed is a propaganda system to create an impression with the outside world that everything is wonderful within TCHC. Or at least, would be wonderful if all these silly people would give TCHC all the money it wants. Journalists and politicians who start asking questions are strongly attacked, for example in the campaign to get the Star to fire Joe Fiorito.
The other leg in their system is the internal suppression system. During the LeSage commission two years back tenant after tenant spoke on this theme, including me. Vicious measures are used against tenants who cause problems. They are usually driven out of their housing.
LeSage never really took this up, at least not in the public part of his recommendations. He missed the real reason why Al Gosling died. It was not because TCHC does not "communicate" right with its tenants. It is that it hates tenants joining together and speaking up for each other.
Gosling's neighbors tried hard to advocate for him; they were suppressed. Yet you had all these scum bums at the mike, TCHC tenants putting down 'apathetic' TCHC tenants, mouthing the line of the TCHC social controllers in the way Capponi described. It is all a perfect example of Marx's idea of the "lumpenproletariate".
The way a police state is maintained is by recruiting the worst of people to dominate and control other people. These are the 'tenant reps' in TCHC. These are what everybody else thinks are typical TCHC tenants, including the other TCHC tenants.
This system has been refined over a long time. Frank Touby in his column attached below, seems to think the resident manager system of the old Cityhome, alias "shittyhomes" was wonderful. I recall one old resident manager of a shittyhome, who ruled her building like a petty tyrant.
She would help the more incapable tenants to prepare the complicated form used to determine the rent they had to pay for that month. She would calculate it according to one system, and pay Cityhome according to another way of reckoning, then pocket the difference. Cityhome also started the system of tenant representatives and tenants councils.
The tenant representation system in TCHC is not an example of participatory democracy, as many idiots think who cannot look past TCHC's glossy handouts and snazzy web pages. It is not an affirmation of the tenants right to organize themselves, it is an interference with it. But the worst thing about it is that you have a corps of trained manipulator/intimidator types who know how to disrupt and control. These will make it very hard to implement tenant self management.
Touby is also in love with the ideal of people of different social classes living harmoniously together. This is idealizing a society that does not exist in Canada. It does not exist in the U.K. either, which is a problem that tenant self management only partly overcomes in some locations.
The dreamers in Canada, and to a lesser degree in the U.K., are looking at continental Europe, where there is a much better developed social system and recognition of people's right to a basic standard of living. You do not have the desperately poor people that you see in the English speaking world. It will be very difficult for people who really do not have the means to survive to coexist with others who are reasonably well off.
In some places in the U.K., the people are able to make mixed income housing work. In other places, it seems that social housing residents are able to make their uniformly poor neighborhoods work in spite of their lack of resources, education, and free time. In other places, they do not succeed.
To succeed with tenant self management in Canada as in the U.K., tenant management organizations will have to overcome the above mentioned social inequalities, as well as the authoritarian left local councils who utterly hate the idea of TMOs, as well as interference from all the usual opportunistic groups. But experience in many other developed countries, over and over, shows that this is the only way to run low income housing. The tenants must be allowed to run it themselves.
To get tenant self management going requires a determined effort. The tenants must be allowed to fail over and over, and take the consequences of failing, until they get it right. Local council authoritarian types who want the social engineers to run housing, and who want to use it as a cheap substitute for supervised housing and supportive housing, will fight it.
There will also be trouble from the "don't get them in, get them out" type of idiot."Get them out" is the "welfare housing" mentality. This is the idea that housing is a form of welfare, which the old Ontario housing was run according to. This made life so wonderful for so many people.
You do not want to have a community where everybody is just transiting through. You want low income housing to be stable, permanent communities.
To discuss what kind of national housing program is really needed is outside the scope of this essay. Until the power of business organizations and business ideology is dissolved in Canada, it is not possible. This essay is about what to do in the meantime.
But I will say this; you can see from the kinds of problems caused by the single owner occupancy system that it is not going to work any further. Most people cannot afford to own their own homes without assistance. But it is better if people own their own homes rather than have to rent. Therefore a system of assisted ownership is the right system for housing.
Toronto, in concert with other large municipalities, should be lobbying higher levels of government for a sensible housing policy. Until that is obtained, here is what can be done with what we have. First, there must be a clean out of TCHC, replacing politically aligned hacks with qualified people.
Second, housing systems of other countries, especially the TMOs of the U.K., should be studied. Something like the "right to manage laws" must be established here. In parallel with this, housing must be brought back into a state of repair and scheduled maintenance and replacement reinstituted.
It must be made clear that TCHC cannot accomodate people whose behavioral problems make them a nuisance or danger to other tenants.
Measures must be taken to insure that housing staff cannot threaten and harass tenants who speak out when they see incompetence or dishonesty. There must be no interference with tenants forming tenant associations, but no tolerance for outside, opportunistic groups attempting to "organize" tenants.
No tenants should be on the board of TCHC, because then they are in a conflict of interest. There should be a tenants advisory council elected by all tenants. It is to advise the city government, not TCHC. When enough TMOs have developed, they can form a council to advise the city.
Impoverished social housing tenants in Toronto are like every other disempowered group with no capacity to advocate for its own interests. Every self interested group around wants a piece of us.
In the short term there is no solution for the problems of impoverishment and 'poor housing'. But it would help if disenfranchised groups like TCHC tenants were at least given a chance to run our own lives. This just might be possible with Ford.
Published On Fri Mar 04 2011 (Star)
Sandro Contenta Staff Reporter
During the last three decades, few Western countries have been as determined as Britain to privatize their stock of public housing. By most accounts, the results have done little to help those in need.
In 1979, 31 per cent of all homes were subsidized. Today, 18 per cent are. During the same period, rent controls were eliminated and the price of housing skyrocketed. The shortage of affordable housing is acute.
In England alone, a record 4.5 million people almost 2 million households ‹ are on waiting lists for what remains of public housing run by local councils. The waits grow longer because "council housing" has been reduced to social ghettos, full of the most marginalized and chronically unemployed.
Three million people also live in overcrowded housing, according to a 2010 survey, and 100,000 households are "officially" homeless.
As Toronto Mayor Rob Ford toys with the radical idea of privatizing this city's public housing stock, British Prime Minister David Cameron and his coalition government are continuing that country's privatization trend.
Last fall, it announced plans to slash 60 per cent of the budget for the building of affordable housing, a move expected to push rents in social housing units up to 80 per cent of market rates tripling the rents of some tenants.
The government expects money from the rent increases to be used to build new affordable housing. But with housing benefits to help pay rents also being cut, London's mayor fears the moves will push low-income people out of his city.
"I'll emphatically resist any attempt to recreate a London where the rich and poor cannot live together," Boris Johnson told the BBC. "We will not accept any kind of Kosovo-style social cleansing of London."
After the First and Second World War, the British government financed the building of public homes to ease severe housing shortages, high rents and slum conditions. Local governments built "council housing," which provided rents at below-market value.
By 1979, England had more than 5 million council homes, run by local councils. Another 370,000 homes were run by non-profit associations. The subsidized rented sector accounted for almost one-third of all homes. (Today, the social housing sector provides below-market rent to almost 4 million households, or 18 per cent.)
In 1980, Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher embarked on a radical program of privatization. She obliged local councils to sell units at a discount to tenants who wanted to buy them.
"This bill lays the foundations for one of the most important social revolutions of this century," said Michael Heseltine, a secretary of state at the time, referring to Thatcher's housing legislation.
Tenants who lived in their council home for three years got a 33 per cent discount on the market value of their home. Longer residency meant greater discounts, up to 50 per cent for a tenancy of 20 years.
Later, when sales dipped, discounts reached 70 per cent. To make as many people as possible eligible, Thatcher also gave tenants the right to stay in council housing as long as they liked.
The scheme was hugely popular. An estimated 2.7 million council homes have been sold under the plan since 1980. The opposition Labour Party, which initially opposed the program, embraced it when it came to power in 1997, although it reduced the level of discounts offered.
Those who exercised the right to buy are the biggest winners in Britain's privatization experiment, says Rebecca Tunstall, lecturer in housing at the London School of Economics. Most have seen the market value of their properties, bought at a discount, increase significantly over the years.
There were, however, problems with speculation: Homes eventually got flipped, some became expensive rental properties, and what used to be working-class communities got gentrified, says Stuart Hodkinson, research fellow in housing and privatization at the University of Leeds.
Some public housing tenants who bought got stuck with properties they couldn't sell in undesirable communities. The biggest problem, however, was that the council housing sold off wasn't replaced, Hodkinson says.
Conservative and Labour governments largely cut off subsidies for councils to build public housing. They redirected it to low-income tenants in the form of housing benefits to help pay rents. At the same time, the money local councils made from the right-to-buy program had to be spent to pay off debt, or was returned to the central government.
By the mid-1980s, local councils stopped building public housing.
Government subsidies to build affordable housing instead went to private, non-profit companies, which had to borrow some of their financing from banks. The rents they offer, while lower than market rents, are on average $88 a month higher than in council housing, according to a 2010 government report.
Governments also encouraged tenants in council housing to vote on transferring management and ownership of their buildings to private, non-profit corporations. Some tenants voted down the idea. But overall, it increased the move to privatization.
Former Labour prime minister Tony Blair then brought in "private financing initiatives." Under the scheme, private consortiums received 30-year contracts that paid them to renovate and run existing council housing. Few such deals got off the ground due to concerns about the long-term costs to taxpayers.
In 2004, a government-commissioned report warned of a massive housing shortage. It estimated that 240,000 new homes needed to be built every year. Plans to do so were scuttled by the recession three years later.
In a bid to save some of those construction jobs, then-prime minister Gordon Brown financed the building of about 3,000 council homes the first to be built in almost three decades.
Cameron's government won't be continuing that historical blip. For better or worse, Britain's privatization push continues.
Pat Capponi Star March 3 2011
The former chair of Toronto Community Housing Corp. has tried to blame Mayor Rob Ford for the board's resignation, miffed there was no courtesy phone call before the mayor publicly called for their heads.
It seems the board hopes the anti-Ford element will see them as victims of a bullying mayor rather than focus on their out-of-control spending. And they still don't get it, still don't understand the massiveness of their betrayal of the public trust. Like Richard Nixon, they grumble and feel hard done by, we won't have them to kick around anymore.
This culture of entitlement at TCHC ‹ underscored by the city auditor ‹ is what rankles most, and amid the charges of untendered contracts and wasted dollars that is saying a lot. Such a culture must be traced to its roots, and those roots are ugly and disturbing.
If the board and senior management had seen their tenants as people much like themselves, people who have faced great hardships and challenges rather than as a ragtag collection of problems and disturbances that needed to be managed and controlled by their betters, they would feel the shame they now reject. Shades of colonialism ‹ the natives are so incapable, so other, that whatever we do must be better than what they would do on their own. The white man's burden.
I have worked with a number of TCHC tenants over the years, as lead facilitator at Voices From the Street, a grassroots initiative that offers a 12-week course on public policy, advocacy, public speaking and leadership for the poor, the homeless and those suffering from addictions, mental illness or physical disabilities.
Last year we did a group in the belly of the beast, and it was clear that management's view had so inculcated all levels of the organization that I had to create a rule that the tenants in the group could not, for at least three days, blame all the ills in their buildings on other residents.
Once that was in place, we could look at where the problems were, what the solutions could be, how people could organize and help themselves and their fellow tenants. People grew in leaps and bounds, their voices became their own, they stopped parroting the staff lines and started to develop their own ideas.
It was interesting and instructive that at the entrance to the room on day one a dead roach, squashed flat, greeted the participants.
This group was the brainchild of TCHC resident Linda Coltman. She fought for it, and brought it about.
There was never any effort by management or the board to develop the potential of their tenants, to ensure that tenant representatives had proper training and exposure to anti-racism and anti-oppression skills, so that those labelled mentally ill were not hounded, harassed and bullied. Tenants lived with the frustration of repairs never done; eviction notices handed out without thought or kindness; management's failure to realize how much tenants dreamed of a better place, where their individual talents could be used, where their contributions could be recognized and their ideas turned into reality. I was so impressed by their courage, their strengths, their tenacity ‹ many of us would have cashed in our chips rather than endure one more day of the horrors they were forced to deal with.
The gap between the upper levels and the mass of tenants yawns wide. So wide that a culture of entitlement (and TCHC is not the only agency that has this viral disease) was inevitable. Poverty works very effectively to camouflage a person's worth and ability, especially when there is no real effort to bridge the gap, to sit down and listen to the individual, really listen with an open mind and open heart.
Instead, we have manipulation and tokenism, not hard when people are so hungry and dependent for any recognition, for any position that says, "I am better than all the other tenants, the staff like me." Shame on those who have allowed this culture of entitlement to take such deep roots, who settled comfortably in offices ‹ bedbug free, I'm sure ‹ and no doubt felt they were acting charitably toward their charges.
What truly rankles is how little is needed to get the tenants back on track to a decent life, one in which they can take control of their immediate environment, their home, and build trusting relationships with one another.
It is to be hoped that the mayor will recognize that tenants have to have a large place on the new board, but that training must be part of the entrance requirement to taking a seat. And that there are many who are quite capable of taking on the jobs of high-paid staff, many who won't feel the need for excess pampering, who will be more than satisfied simply to have work.
Having tenants in numbers on the board, on the staff and on committees will begin to break down that colonialist culture as the poor sit across from the advantaged and speak their truths in ways that must be heard, felt and responded to.
Pat Capponi has lived in poverty, and has written numerous books on the issues.
Margaret Wente Globe and mail March 3 2011
Toronto Community Housing Corp. is one of the world's biggest landlords. As the second-largest provider of social housing in North America, it owns more than 350 apartment buildings and another 800 houses and duplexes. It has 164,000 tenants more than the population of Prince Edward Island and a budget of $600-million a year. Yet, the demand for subsidized housing is always greater than the supply, and wait times are always long.
We used to live across the street from a couple of public housing duplexes. The tenants were lovely. They included two obese ladies who had to take a taxi to the supermarket, and a guitarist who lived in the basement. Since they didn't work, they were always around to keep an eye on the neighbourhood. The buildings were nicely maintained by city workers, and pleasantly located right next to the lake. No wonder the tenants never moved out.
Other tenants aren't so lucky. TCHC is plagued by complaints of decrepit apartments, stuck elevators, vermin and crime. Last fall, a fire in a hoarder's high-rise apartment forced the removal of 1,500 tenants. And now, it turns out, housing executives were buying themselves manicures, pedicures and fancy chocolates with the taxpayers' money. Toronto's new mayor, Rob (Stop the Gravy Train) Ford, is ecstatic. He'd love nothing better than to fire the lot of them.
But chocolates and spa days aren't what's really wrong with Toronto's public housing. There are plenty of signs that the place has been mismanaged for years. And the biggest problem is that the city's got it backward. All the focus is on getting people into public housing not on getting them out.
In Atlanta, it's the other way around. That city's housing authority doesn't believe in owning buildings or playing landlord although it still does some of both. Its long-term aim is to move people out of poverty and render itself obsolete.
"Concentrating families in poverty is very destructive," Atlanta Housing Authority CEO Renée Glover told The New York Times. Over the past decade, the city has demolished a dozen developments, and relocated thousands of residents to private market rental housing with the help of voucher subsidies. The idea is to reduce poverty by decentralizing it, and to gentrify poor neighbourhoods by working with private developers.
To its credit, Toronto is also experimenting with mixed-income development. But it's doing things the hard way by trying to attract higher-income people to lower-income neighbourhoods, rather than dispersing low-income people around the city. Toronto has also pledged to replace every public housing unit it sells off, thus ensuring that the 1,400 staff who work for the public housing authority will have jobs forever.
Many of the elderly and disabled, of course, will always need subsidized housing. But others won't. Subsidized housing, Ms. Glover believes, creates a culture of dependency that she's determined to change. The Atlanta Housing Authority requires its able-bodied beneficiaries to work. People who don't work can lose their right to a subsidized apartment, and management has broad authority to kick out people for misbehaviour.
Social workers, most of whom come from poor backgrounds themselves, work intensively with tenants to help them make it in the job market. They show them how to find jobs, how to dress and how to behave. They tell them: "You can succeed, just as I did."
It works. Before Ms. Glover took over 17 years ago, only 18.5 per cent of household heads in subsidized housing were employed. Today, the figure is 62 per cent. As Sudhir Venkatish, a sociologist at Columbia University, told The New York Times, "Atlanta's plan signifies in a very clear way that the social contract that cities and citizens have with the poor has fundamentally changed."
In Toronto, the average length of stay in public housing is 10 years. Some single-parent families stay in public housing for generations, and only 36.5 per cent of working-age households have employment income. Yet, rather than helping people to move out of public housing, housing lobbyists keep arguing that what we need is more people moving in. Perhaps it's time to change our measure of success. We shouldn't be proud of how many people live in public housing. We should be ashamed.
Well, it is time I put something on the blog. I started writing this on Valentine's day, but then things got so busy for ten days that I have not been able to get back to it. I was hoping to write about something nice, but instead it has been mostly lousy, stressful things.
Much of it is about the legal case I have going on with the city. There is also the problems I have with one of the web sites I do, the cause pimps one. It s not so much with the people whose faces are on it. It is those who have contributed to it in some way, or want to, but are hopelessly paranoid.
I had to spend much of one evening talking to one guy who sent me a large screed in hard copy about the way homeless people were being pimped by social work types in one of the Toronto suburbs. I want to get him to edit it down a bit and be less euphemistic. He is scared that somebody might come after him because of this and wants to be sure he remains anonymous.
In the famous words of Genghis Khan; " I could not hide from the thunder, so I learned not to fear it". I have had various jacks in office coming at me for so long that I have learned not to fear them. When they attack me, it as often works out in my favor as against me.
When they got me, it was generally because of my medical problems which made me too tired to cope with them. My medical situation is much improved in the past few years. I am starting to get the right meds and I have a lot more energy. But I still have to find some way to make the health system pay for them, which is drawing a lot of my attention now.
I have been talking to another guy who has been stupid enough to get himself mixed up with lawyers. I have found it hopeless to try to tell him that he would be much better off if he represented himself. I should not judge him too sharply; he has some assets, a house, which could be seized if he were to lose a case. I find that having nothing can give me a lot of power.
But, the lawyers for the sleazes he is going after are engaged in judicial bullying, throwing motion after motion at him to run up his lawyer's meter. The sleaze gets all his legal costs covered. I suggested to him to just not respond to this crap, deal with it all in court. He can't get his head around that.
Yes, going to court is a risk, especially when you have such totally corrupt courts as you have in Ontario. It amazes me that the masons and orange lodge are not talked about at all. Up until the 1960's, it was generally understood that the orangemen controlled the courts and police in Toronto. Since then it has all become a taboo subject. People talk about how the courts do not work well, there is too much deference to 'institutions' and so on. Really just trying to talk around the problem. If you call it what it is straight up, you get called a conspiracy theorist.
However, there is an obvious campaign to clean up the courts. The trouble is, the people who are doing it think it is just a matter of changing attitudes. They are on a campaign for more efficient delivery of service by the courts. Judges are supposed to avoid the fact or impression of bias.
So this means that judges are not screaming abuse at me, and bringing in security goons to sit next to me, when I try to argue a case in front of them. The court staff are usually polite. But with my case against Ms. K. Harrison, I have ben going around in circles for almost two years now.
Division court tells small claims court that they have to give written reasons for decisions. The small claims judges keep refusing to do it. They listen, but then they come out with complete nonsense and tell me to look it up in the transcripts if I want it in writing.
Some of the judges seem more sympathetic to me, and indignant about the sleaze going on around them. But they do not seem to be the majority, at east not yet in small claims court.
As for speedy service, I was up at small claims yesterday. It was Friday, usually their slowest day. People were almost hanging from the rafters waiting to see the court clerks. The clerks were as harried as I have ever seen them. This is after a change in procedures to streamline them and provide speedier service.
I would suggest that what is tying the courts up is incompetent and crooked judges. I have spend an incredible amount of my own time, used up an incredible amount of court time, to get a case through which even a couple of judges have acknowledged is as simple and straight up a case of fraud by misrepresentation as you can get. But other judges who seem to have me on a black list, keep trumping the honest ones.
But my big case with the city is in mid March. They sent me a huge pile of crap just before the two week deadline, that I had to respond to before then. I have my response in. It took two days to read it, then draft a response, assemble some other information relevant to my reply, print it all off, and bind four freaking copies. Then, spend a day going back and forth between the offices of the two defendants, and the small claims court.
The funny thing is, I delivered these documents in person to the 26th floor of this big law firm, asking for the lawyer on the case. She did not have a clue what to do with it. She never gets people hand delivering things, for some reason. I explained to her that the best method is to stamp the front page as received, then make a xerox of it and give it to me.
In a way it is getting exciting. I am suing them for defamation. They are incapable of coming up with any defense. All they can do is throw more defamation at me, digging a bigger hole for themselves.
One of their own witnesses is going to be the best possible witness for me. They have filed her affidavit, which says nothing about me. She just talks about what other people have told her about me. And she also sent me a letter of sympathy.
As I said in my explanatory note to the judge, either these people are extremely stupid, or they are trying to lose, or they are so confident that they can rely on crooked judges that they do not even care. I do not know how the judge is going to react to this, or to my telling him or her that a finding of defamation is required. The word required underlined.
If I keep building up cases of small claims court decisions being overturned at division court, and of small claims thumbing its nose at division court, pretty soon I am going to be going after the attorney general. It gets easier to do all these court documents once you learn. I might be able to start teaching other people how to do it.
What else is going on? I had some trouble with my internet server. I have just moved my e-mail lists onto a new server. That means opening up a new gnu on the new server, and putting the e-dresses from the old server into the new one. It is an awkward process,but I seem to have lost only one person. Oh, well.
I want to do away with those lists soon anyway. By May I should be able to start up the kind of social engine software I want and then I will go out and start promoting it heavily. The ELGG is okay, but I would rather have the SE or Dolphin. Nobody has gone to the ELGG and signed up.
I want a different server than what I have because, while this one is very high security, tech support is lousy and sometimes the security gets in the way. Their security did not stop them from being taken down a couple of times last month, my sites with it. It seems somebody found the password for one of their clients and messed up their site. It destabilized everyone else's for a few days.
And finally, they are just too expensive. I am going to keep the stuff that the ying yangs especially do not like with that server, on a reduced plan. But I am putting the bulk of my stuff on a cheaper server.
The advantage of HTML is that it does not matter too much if it gets hacked. You can erase everything and reinstall it from the copy that sits on my own computer. But if you need something that has to sit on the server, you can lose it very easily. That is why I never set up one of these blog programs.
ELGG is not as well secured as the ELGG people claim. It seems security is much better on Social Engine; you can make back ups as you go and everything is portable. You do not have to be an ELGG head to do it.
But, moving sites still requires some work. Links have to be tested, and so on. This is why I try to avoid too much cross linking between my different web sites.
What else is going on? I am doing lousy at the logic course I am taking at U of T. It is a different kind of course than I am used to and I have been unable to keep up with it in the midst of everything else going on. I wonder if maybe I am getting too old to learn this. Someone was telling me that I should question the logic of taking a logic course.
There is trouble in my building. People are just starting to wake up to the fact that there are some drug dealer "spots" in here. This has been a nice building up until now, and people are reluctant to admit the problem.
We have had people lighting fires in the garbage chute. The first thing to get across to people is that these are not residents of the building. The next thing, they are not coming in here to get warm. They are here to buy crack and they are going into the garbage chute to smoke it and causing the fires in the bin.
No, putting a lock onto the garbage chutes is not going to fix the problem. If we have to have people throwing away lit matches in the building, we want them thrown down the garbage chute because that is where the fire can be contained. Anywhere else will cause a lot more damage.
Holding building meetings are a little frustrating, because of all this naivety. plus, in any meeting we have the fucking janissiary constantly promoting the company line. This guy works in another TCHC building as a cleaner and lives in this one.
He keeps repeating the same misinformation over and over, which has to be refuted over and over. Yes, TCHC damn well can get the evidence to evict drug people. We made them do it when I lived on George street. You get security people in here to monitor for a few weeks. Then you ask these jokers why they have twenty people a night visiting them between midnight and the dawn, and why they all stay for only five minutes.
Yes, TCHC damned well can refuse to rent to people with known drug problems. The social work mafia within housing keeps saying that TCHC has a 'mandate' to house everyone needing housing. They have no such mandate from anywhere. If they did it would be illegal.
In George street, the jackasses were renting to people whom TCHC had already twice evicted for drug activity. They failed to evict one bastard who kept sabotaging the building and harassing other tenants, because " we will just have to put him somewhere else".
One of the worst things to get across to these people is that the police are going to be of no help at all. Police cannot patrol the building. They can come in only in response to a call. The creeps at 51 division are notoriously uninterested in answering calls to TCHC buildings.
As I keep telling them, and as at least some of them are getting, if the landlord will not screen out destructive tenants, and get them out if they get past the screen, then there is no hope. All the security and calls to cops, all the meetings, will not make the slightest difference.
This was a nice building when I came here. I want it to stay that way.
Well, what did I do on St. Valentine's day, anyway? I have nobody to be my Valentine. Well, maybe Hilda Tenorio will be my cyber valentine.
I watched a few torera videos. I am getting to like watching women do weird things with animals in certain countries where it is legal. That is strange, because I generally find male bullfighters obnoxious.
Maybe this is a thing to write about for Valentine's day. But the topic also generates some incredible acrimony. I read some of the comments from under the lady torera videos on youtube. "Spain people! Why she hurt that animal. What it done? I hope she die real bad, real terrible." "Fukin Mexicans; send em all back home" ( The video very obviously took place in Spain.) "Bull fight is animal torture and I hope they all get skinned alive and thrown in acid."
There must be something good about something these kinds of people hate so much. As Frank Evans, the 68 year old british matador, put it, he has long ago given up trying to argue with them. They have no real argument, they just do not like bull fighting. Of the bunch of fanatics who tried to invade his home in Manchester, who he put the run on; "They don't like me, so I don't like them, and they can have it any way they want it." He has even had letter bombs mailed to him.
The world is full of fanatics who do not like people and need a reason to justify themselves. They tend to collect in political groups too, where they are very useful to people who would like to neutralize any democratic activity. One of the reasons why it is so hard to get anyone involved in anything is that people do not want to be abused by the weirdos.
As most people who have read my various bloggings know by now, I have been a target of some weird people. I have been spending an increasing amount of time suing them. I am getting better at it all the time.
I got a process server at my door on Valentine's day. One of the parties I have been suing has woken up and noticed that they are going to have to find a lawyer and concoct a defense. Now they want a postponement of the hearing. They have asserted some things in their defense that I would love them to say in a sworn affidavit or under oath on the stand.
They assert now that I said to somebody "fuck you, black bitch". Not very original. I think this "black bitch" thing has become a sort of joke among radical leftie types. It is the crudest version of the " June Callwood" thing.
Rather than settling down this kind of thing, the Ford era has intensified it. The fake left sleazes are running scared; Ford is going to take away their gravy. Ford does have a point, there is serious waste of public funds and abuse of power in the areas of the city budget that had been protected by Miller all these years. People will do a lot to hang onto half a million a year they do not have to do anything for.
2011 is going to be a critical year. Much will depend on the capacity of the Ford administration to quickly get rid of the funding bases of the opportunist lefties. This is starting with FMTA. Ford is not off to a good start. He cut their funding by $100 000. This is like just wounding a bear. Rather than hiding and hoping to be overlooked, the bear will go on the attack.
I made a presentation to the city budget committee. This is the first presentation to the city I have made in several years. Usually it is just so insulting and futile. At least the Ford people listen to you. They are not getting up and wandering around, talking with each other while you are speaking.
Unlike the rest of the roster, I was not there whining for my funding to be protected. I made clear that I am tired of being harassed and threatened by thugs who get their funding from the city. 2012 is too late to act to get rid of them. We need FMTA shut down now.
I think I and other people might be having some effects. My acquaintance with the facts and figures has been asked to critique the FMTA's own statements by Del Grande's staff. I think all that can be said for now has been said, and we can only wait for something to happen.
That is the St. Valentine's day situation. The next fun day will be St. Patrick's. What will I do then? I guess watch lots of Irish music and dance videos. Maybe I will go out and blow up the British consulate. No, that is out of fashion, even with the real Irishers. They really should bomb the European Central Bank
That is about it for now. instead of just chattering, Someday soon I will have the kind of blog I want, and I am going to start putting up thoroughly done articles on various topics. I am going to start trying to get them found on search engines. I am not going to try to get left publications to take them any more. I do not want to do 'journalism'. More about why next time.
January 12, 2011
Hello Joyce;
You may remember when you sent me an e-mail inviting me to the launch of John Sewell's book: "Policing in Canada, the real story". I was not able to get to the book launch, or buy the book. But I just finished reading it from the library.
Sorry, that is not the real story of policing in Canada. I am not about to start into the real story of policing in Canada, that would take a pretty serious article, if not a small book by itself. While I know something about it, I do not have the time for that. I am working on things which will lead to a solution for the real problems of policing in Canada, and much else.
When a situation so plainly dysfunctional as the Canadian justice system is so uniform across the country, and so persistent over time, and so intractable, then the problem really lies at a higher level than just police organizations. Some faction of the ruling elite wants it the way it is and has the power to keep it that way.
Yes, there is an elite ruling over us. They are not hard to see and I have little patience for people who try to maintain the illusion that we all live in a condition of democracy. We live under the system of capitalism, which does not coexist with democracy.
It is at this point that Sewell and the kind of people he tends to associate with go into mental lock down and start red baiting me. Few things are as pathetic as the types with an idealized, boy scout notion of society. When they find that template contradicted by systematic injustice, they see it as an abheration of the social order rather than its essence.
The bully boy cops and their apologists sneer at liberal police reformers as having a "Mayberry" mentality. In that they are correct. Sewell and his ilk dream about something that has never existed; police who are in it as a "calling". Anyone who enters a police force with a 'calling' will fail to fit into the cop culture and get weeded out or sidelined.
Sewell understands this as present reality but does not understand that this police culture as been around since modern police forces developed. It is a branch of a subculture of entitlement and elitism that permeates society and takes in the entire justice system, from the cop on the beat to the attorney general's office.
This subculture originates in the very earliest colonial settlement days in this country. It comes from the administrative system the British empire developed for its settler colonies so as to insure no repeat of the American revolution. It has been called the "Family Compact" or the "Masonic system ".
Whether in Ireland, Canada, Australia, or anywhere the British colonized, an aristocracy was deliberately created to rule through secret societies and by control over the police and courts. Now as then, police make up their own rules, judges make up the law on the fly, and all rights are conditional. You know how fast the very limited democracy and rule of law we have can be bypassed in this country when the power decides to do so.
This is the same in most countries formerly under the British empire. There are more rights and a more secure civil society in states, especially developed countries, which came about through popular uprisings. Except for the 1837 revolt, people in Canada have not done much to make rights and civil society. Not much is going to change until they do.
Until then, we are ruled by the successors of the original privilege seekers installed by the first colonial administrators. It is not so much about wealth as about family and social connections and a shared attitude of entitlement. There is no monolithic elite; there are factions and there are counter elites set up by immigrant groups.
The only thing these groups have in common is the attitude of elitism; of knowing what is best for everybody else and of a right to be privileged above those outside the in-group. Police forces in Canada generally reflect the makeup of the local elites, not the local population. The local elites in Toronto are especially factionalized and truculent, and that is reflected in the Toronto force.
At points in the history of Toronto and other localities in Canada, the local police have become so abusive, corrupt, and factionalized that there has been a reaction and a reform. But since the overlying structure of society does not change, the force becomes corrupted again.
Like most local police forces, the Toronto force is not very good at police work. That means, the peace and order keeping, conflict mediating, crime solving functions which any civil society needs a police force to do. This is because that is not their primary role. What police in Canada are for is political supression and they do that fairly well.
So, the problems with police that concern Johnny Sewell are about a conflict of roles which is absolute and unresolvable under the capitalist economic system and colonial age political institutions we live under. Cops have a sense of entitlement because they are entitled. They are not well chosen and trained for their jobs because selection and promotion in the police is more about who you are connected with than about qualifications.
There is no way to really solve the problem of police in Canada without solving the problems of the society it is part of. Any useful measures will go against long entrenched governing principles of the ruling class. For example, municipal governments are where dangerous, democratic ideas break out and are to be kept under strict check. They are to pay for their local police, but to have no real say in it's governance.
Before I conclude, I should clarify my relation to Marxism. I say Marx had things pretty much right. His big mistake was treating the elite as a monolithic ruling class, when ruling elites really have more to do with shared attitudes than with wealth. What most "Marxists" as well as liberals like Sewell do not like to be told is that what needs to be overthrown is not so much the rule of a wealthy few, but an attitude that the majority are pigs who must not be allowed to govern themselves.
This is because their own attitudes are not much different than that.
Thus, to change anything requires an uprising that overthrows the elite mentality, or at least significantly weakens them so as to force real reforms. The reason this keeps failing or leading to a much worse tyranny is that it is led by some of the worst of people. Old Marx was contemptuous of the people crawling out from under the rocks to lead the revolution he proposed. He called them the "lumpenproletariat".
Most of the "Marxist" types we have in Toronto are "Lumpen". For a revolution to succeed in establishing real democracy, it has to be lead by some of the best people in society. That is, not those who are the best in their own minds. I believe that this has not happened because it is not ready to happen yet and explaining why gets too far away from my topic.
I leave it at this; that while we are waiting for the other world that is possible, there are things we can do in this one to mitigate the damage caused by bad policing. And the harm done to society by these scum is severe. Basically, come to the aid of the victims.
This can be done in a direct physical way. One thing that makes cops leave somebody alone and back off fast is a large crowd rapidly and closely encircling them. So far, attempts to start cop watches in Canada have failed because there were not enough people, and too many yo-yos involved. In parts of the United States, a directory of the home addresses of vicious cops has proved very effective.
When somebody is arrested for political reasons, there must be a huge and relentless effort to get him or her back out of jail, without conditions.
Finally, people must forget about lawyers. They have agendas which are in conflict with the accused. Largely, they are another part of the supression system. Don't learn the law, learn the underlying principles of law, and what a proper process is under universal principles of justice. Learn to defend yourselves and each other.
Once you understand how a system of justice is supposed to be, when elitists are not perverting it, you start to see what a real system of policing would be. I do not want to get into spinning utopias here, but there are examples where communities have their own policing systems, which are not somebody's praetorian guard.
They are not "Mayberries" or Boss Hogg type village tyrannies. Their work is not about "law enforcement". Whenever that language is used, the question must be asked; "whose law?" "Lawful" does not equal "Just".
Policing is about keeping the peace or it is not legitimate. If a cop is not there to protect people from victimization, then he is the victimizer and should be punished. It is that simple.
I hope you find this enlightening. I hope the Vass family gets a good chunk of money out of the police.
tr
Well, I think it is time I wrote something for my blog. I am about to test it on my new ELGG site. As I have said in other forums, I am at the limit of what I can do with HTML and I have to get a social media type of site going.
My aim is still to create a place where people who want to be politically active, who want to work on poverty abolition, but who do not want to harassed and bothered to get 'aligned' with some freaking political party, can get together.
I want to create a sort of "rabble for adults". There is no way I have the time to monitor every posting and delete the weirdos who will try to take it over or shut it down. So a discussion board is out of the question.
Using Facebook is way out of the question. I have an ally who tried setting up a Facebook. He became obsessed with all the ways the weirdos were finding to sabotage it. Finally he was convinced to just shut it down and forget it; it wasn't worth the stress. There is no security at all on Facebook.
However, with something like ELGG, it can be self monitoring. I only have to screen the people who sign in, and there is a nice plugin for doing that. The old rule I had when I did e-mail lists, and this was back when e-mail lists were popular, of only allowing people who had an ISP based address, won't work anymore. Everybody has an externally based e-mail address: hotmail, g-mail, etc.
I am going to require everyone to request me to sub them in. I will get them to write a short essay, about 100 words, about...what? Maybe about what they think the ultimate solution for poverty is. But I have found this in the past to be a very effective way of screening the mental misfits out. They might get past me a few times, but I soon notice the patterns in the way they write.
However, more important than me being the nanny over the online community, the way ELGG and Social Engine works should be fairly self policing. Individuals can block out any obnoxious poster. Everyone can write their own blog, build their own network of friends,but it is private. This is the way social networking should be.
But the problem for me is mastering the technicalities of the ELGG. I am probably going to need several years to really do it. I will need to learn something about PHP. I have to get some people interested in signing up and remaining on the ELGG while I get everything sifted and settled. I have to learn it the hard way, just like with HTML, because I cannot afford to have someone teach me.
But what are people going to talk about on this thing? If all that comes out of it is idiot's noise, I will finally have to shut it down and discard my idealism about the internet. I really have better things to do than create a forum for libertarians, basement geniuses, and cyber cranks.
So here is my problem; I can use ELGG, which is free. I can use something like Social Engine, which costs some money. The former will require a long learning curve. The latter can work "out of the box" but will take a chunk out of my finances. But I really would like to spend my time crating content instead of going crazy figuring out software.
There are other social network software out there. JCow is a ripoff of ELGG and does not even have the support available from the EGG community. Dolphin wants to lease their system to you forever. SocEng is just once, and you can buy tech support as you need it. These do not seem to be really portable, and portable is a big thing for me.
I am thinking that I can play around with ELGG for awhile, to learn how to set something like that up, but I really want Social Engine. I want to be creating discussion on the topics related to a Basic Income.
I think there are four topics that interrelate and are critical. There is the idea of a Basic Income, which is what I am going to start calling it because that seems to be winning over other contenders. Getting a basic income is the first, critical reform that gets us away from capitalism toward something better. It is by now well discussed, tested, and understood.
It is also well understood that here is a good BI and a bad version. The bad version is just a wage top up, tied to employment, and used as an excuse to wipe out all other social programs.
Then you have the idea of a direct or participative democracy, which will not work until people have a Basic Income, control of their own time and lives. Participation requires freedom from grubbing after necessities. This has been the big problem with all previous attempts at democracy, including the Porto Alegre model of participatory local government. Most people do not have the time, energy, or money to do anything except survive.
If they do want to become involved in public governance, they find an unwelcoming environment. The so called "left" has become the big neutralizer of any movement away from capitalism and toward socialism. We do not have a secret police to fight against, but this whole network of non profit groups and social work types, all grouped around labor unions and the New Democrat party. The NDP types supposedly reject the communist and anarchist groups, yet these seem to act as dirty-work-doing auxiliaries for the NDP.
Of course, the basic idea of socialism is fundamental. There is a capitalist system. It is based on organizing the economy to use the population like cattle, to extract surplus value for an elite. The alternative is socialism, the organization of the economy to meet human needs. Most people are instinctively socialist, even if they are confused. Those few who seriously support capitalism have checked out of the human race. There should be no room on the planet for them.
This brings me to the idea of a steady state economy. There is a strain of Libertarian idiotism that is obsessed with money. They are convinced that if the government took back control of issuing money, everything would be wonderful again; we would return to some past golden age. There never was any golden age and those who benefit from private issuance of fiat currency are not going to let any government take that power back from them.
Pseudo economics of the academic or cracker barrel kind are obsessed these days with money and monetary schemes. This is because we are living within the age and the rule of monetarist capitalists. They control the economy by controlling the issue of currency.
But once they and their system are out of power, money will be a minor part of economics. Economics will be about matching supply with demand again. And in the new age where productive capacity has reached its ecological limits, it will not be about how to rev up demand to keep growth going. It will be about deciding what demand is justified and realistic, and how to supply it with the least waste.
Governments will issue enough money to cover the justified demands, to the people who will be making the purchasing decisions. In the case of Basic Incomes, to the recipients of the Basic Incomes, meaning almost everybody. Taxation will be about preventing excess concentrations of private wealth, as well as some regulatory functions. There will be no point to "balancing" government, meaning public, spending and revenues.
That is all there is to say about money. There is more to say about the way a steady state economy will work. Democratic planning will have to be developed. There is no such thing as an unplanned economy, at least not at the "macro" level. But any system of planning works for who it works for. Private planning by banks works well for the bankers and not for everybody else. State planning works well for state bureaucrats. Democratic planning works well for the public when it has a chance to work.
So we are back where I started; people need income security for a participating democracy to work. These are the basic components of a post capitalist society. It is Utopian only until we know how it will work and how to achieve it. The world is just about at that point now. Here is the final subject; how to transition away from the terminal stage capitalism we have now into socialism.
So, that is what we have to talk about on the Basic Incomes "online community." But if people would just like to chat about less weighty matters, that is also what it is there for. Actually, people could sign on and use it to talk about anything under the rainbow, as long as they are not there to drive an ideology or generally to shove themselves up the noses of people who are not interested.
The point of any real social networking system is privacy. People can stay anonymous. I am not out to surveil people or collect data on them. People on this system can create and dissolve groups as they please.
One thing I would actually encourage people to do is form groups to keep each other informed about what is going on in their areas; geographical or of endeavor.
Or even, tell people about books they have read, which is what I am about to do. I have finished with "Just Give Money to the Poor" by Joseph Hanlan and crew. It just came out this year and it is about the idea of a Basic Income, with emphasis on the "global south", which is what they call the third world now. We don't have a second world, since the USSR went out of business and China went from red to green.
The Global South is way ahead of the developed countries in figuring out that trying to "help" poor people through non government organizations or through "foreign aid" just does not work. Even very poor countries have been able to make limited forms of cash transfers to its poor citizens. It is they who can teach the developed countries how this sort of thing should be run.
Their experiences are a big slap in the face to paternalism; the idea that people do not know how to run their own lives and need smart people to tell them what to do and punish them like little children for not doing it.
All these "south" countries have come up with many different modalities for a guaranteed income, and motivations. The main bad motivation seems to be to get people to buy into destructive resource exploitation. This is behind the Alaska permanent fund which many BI people are so enraptured with.
It is not enough to create any real independence for people, and only a small part of the revenues go into the income. But it buys off dissent. Mongolia is doing the same thing. But when the U.S. proposed it to occupied Iraq with the idea that it would increase acceptance of foreign control of oil fields, the Iraqi parliament shot it down. That body is not following American orders and noted that the amount being offered would have no effect on the lives of Iraqis.
Iran is only one of several countries which has introduced a kind of Basic Income by giving people directly the money that had been used for ineffective subsidies. Also as with many countries, Iran had the problem of determining who qualified. The attempt to apply a means test to everyone was an administrative mess and was dropped.
Iran discovered, as many nations now have, that the best means of targeting a benefit like this is to give it to whoever applies for it. People who do not need it will not bother applying for it.
Administration of a Basic income is a big problem in African countries, where civil services are poorly developed. Letting the local head man administer it does not work well; he is likely to give it out to his friends. Giving the cash out through the local post office is administratively difficult and having all that cash on hand makes armed robbery a worry.
What some countries did was send armored cars around the country side, arriving at a locality on the same day of each month. Each town got their income on a different day of the month. A system of I.D. cards had to be developed.
There was the problem of exactly who to give it to. In some places it is given to mothers of children, which proved a very good idea; daddy tended to drink half of it away before mommy got her hands on it. In South Africa, there is an old age pension that works effectively as a basic income. Whole families survive on granny's pension.
The authors discuss workfare types of schemes. In Ethiopia, the government creates work projects in the dry season when there is little demand for labor. In India, the government guarantees everybody 100 days of paid work per year on demand. But the universal problem with workfare is that it is always complicated to administer. As well, it is of little use to the poorest of the poor; those who cannot work.
It is puzzling why the authors do not notice the biggest problem with a workfare approach; its tendency to drive down wages for every one. Who was doing this work before the workfare guy was doing it, and for how much?
There is a problem with the author's cognition; they still see things from a liberal bias. They state that the idea of a Basic Income has been around for a long time and "has not gained much traction". The idea of workfare has been around for a long time and has never really gained much traction either. Ditto, the other categories of aid they find; "conditions or co-responsibilities" and "behavioral change or performance bonuses".
"Social pensions" have been around for awhile and the authors admit that these work best in reaching the people they are intended for. They acknowledge that there is no real reason to put conditions on cash grants except to make them more politically salable. The tone of this book suggest to me that the authors started out with a skeptical attitude about "just giving money to the poor", and had to admit it works better than anything else being tried.
At last they got into the implications of this for the north. The big difference in the north countries is that cash transfers are seen as a means of eliminating poverty, rather than as supporting "development". In the south this is often spectacular in promoting development, but the north is already "the developed world".
There is a huge variation in cultural attitudes about the cause of poverty, which cuts across the north-south divide. The "people are poor because they are lazy and lacking in yadda yadda.." idea is very strong in North America, very weak in Europe. But it is strong in China and India, weak in Brazil.
The evidence is very clear from the south that cash transfers directly to the poor have a powerful economic effect. But is this fact enough to overcome the prejudice against the poor that exists in many societies, rich or poor?
As well, economic development is a big issue in the south, while in the north the problem is often one of too much development. So, while this book does contain some useful information about how to run an income guarantee plan, and its real effects on poor people, its usefulness as an argument for a basic income in the north countries is limited.
I conclude that the lesson a supporter of a Basic Income in Canada should take away from this tome is; that achieving a BI has less little to do with whether a country is rich or poor. Even poor countries can do it. It is about attitudes toward the poor, whether they are blamed for their own poverty.
These blaming attitudes are strong in Canada. A Basic Income is not going to happen first here. Canada will be shamed into it when it is established not just in Europe but in poor south countries. But the sooner we have a good BI network on the ground in Canada, the easier and sooner it will happen.
I am preparing a small web page in response to all the idiots who want to be my 'facebook friend'. You know the old saying, better a wise enemy than a foolish friend, and a facebook friend is the worst kind of fool. I have enemies, too. If you look at some of my web pages, you will know why.
But I started working on this after hearing the experience of a friend of mine, I mean a real world friend, and his Facebook page connected to his own web site. I cannot say too much about it without violating his privacy and giving aid and comfort to his enemies. He is being targeted for cyber bullying.
Well, I advised him against setting up the facebook that way. They could see who all his 'friends' are and began contacting them to spread slander. A real friend in my circle of friends is someone, who on hearing this sort of garbage, will immediately inform the target of the slander of the identity of the slanderer and the substance of the slander, and stand ready to cooperate in any court case or police investigation. In these sordid times there are not many people like that.
So my circle of friends is small and I prefer it that way. We communicate by e-mail and telephone. If you are a real citizen activist and not a narcissist or codependant, your circle of friends is small and your circle of enemies is large. This is why facebook will not be a conduit for any real political activism or organizing. It is for the narcissists and the social police.
Flakebook is something cooked up by U.S. intelligence agencies as an easier way of maintaining surveillance over the general population. As a sideline, they can sell all this info to favored businesses. It does not make social networking any easier at all. But everybody thinks they have to be on it because everybody else is; all the cool people are there.
Flakebook is part of a campaign to break up the threat of an 'internet commons' by getting everyone to take their net functions off their own private servers and put it on a server somewhere else. Even businesses are putting all their documents and accounts into the 'cloud'; allowing net firms to do their record keeping and accounting for them.
It is not difficult to maintain control over your own web site. People ten years ago knew how to do this. Now for some reason a generation of teenagers haven't got a clue. They all have their e-mail addresses on Yahoo or Google. They do not know how to set up their own web site, domain, and e-mail address.
You can see what I have done using basic HTML code. It costs maybe ten dollars a month for a good web host, who should be able to provide you with a domain, your own e-mail accounts, a hundred of them if you want, and the software to set up a blog or even a discussion board.
Facebook does nothing that is not available in any such web hosting package. They only require a little time and energy to set up. You can download software that does all the coding for you if you don't want to learn the tricks of web spinning.
In fact, if you want the world to know more about your wonderful self, blogging software has developed to a point where you can use it as a complete personal web site. It does everything Flakebook does.
I am not an expert on using face book. About all I know is that even if I have only had it a few minutes, it is impossible to get rid of the facebook page. It keeps coming back to haunt you. There is a complicated procedure to follow to get out of the facebook entanglement, though if you can master that I don't know why you could not set up a blog or even a chat group. Then you have to wait thirty days, without looking at any other facebook page, before it finally leaves you alone. But then you have to specially request the information already up there be deleted.
So it is a good thing I set up a largely fake facebook. I recommend creating a new e-mail address in order to open a fakebook, which you can discard along with the fakebook. If you have a domain name, you can set up hundreds of web identities for yourself, as many targets of abuse have discovered.
As I said, facebook does not make social networking or political mobilization easier at all. People are marvelling at the speed with which the 'No to Prorogation' group built up on facebook. But I have not heard much of them lately. Their facebook face never really said much about what would happen after parliament came back. It never had much information about anything.
Almost two years ago the "yes to coalition government" group flashed up as suddenly and dissapeared as suddenly. Before that were the 'strategic voting' sites. They were based on simple web sites, not facebook. I think the people who developed a new interest in politics through those endeavors, went into the voting reform movement.
Yes, facebook is free, but it comes at a cost. People who build a 'cause' web site often run out of bandwidth and have to raise some money. But if you have 10 000 people visiting your site and subbed into your e-mail list serve, you should be able to glean a little spare change to pay the service provider. That facebook makes it so easy is part of its invidiousness.
The big problem with organizing anything political on face book is that everyone finds out exactly who is involved. As my friend found out, it can be a very powerful platform for disruption and for isolating people; relational bullying, in other words. If you think 'big brother ' is not watching and taking notes, you are the kind of fool who would start nattering about 'conspiracy theories' in response to what I just said.
There is nothing theoretical about it. Readily available on the net are leaked documents from high in the American government, describing the techniques of disorganizing the opposition using the internet and facebook. The technical term is "cognitive infiltration". A more vulgar term for cognitive infiltrators is 'trolls'.
Do you think all these assholes are just people with nothing better to do with their time? It is well documented that various well funded right wing groups employ people to spend their days monitoring internet groups of all kinds, and often intervening in them with various aims. Facebook is made for this kind of activity.
This is because, as I said at the beginning, facebook was made by the American Intelligence system. Here is a link to a very good web site with a lot of good information, including some about facebook. Paste it to your browser, I do not do links that I do not know I will be able to monitor closely. All links eventually go dead. I cannot check 1000 links every week. I cannot yet afford the software that does this automatically. It is; http://brasschecktv.com/page/603.html
Subscribe to brasscheck's mail list.
The video traces out the DNA of face book. It should not be surprising to any reasonably intelligent and prudent person. The story is that a group of egghead students at Harvard university invented it for other students of Harvard to keep in touch with each other. But this sounds more like a test marketing of something that was already under development.
Suddenly these people got bought up by Peter Theil, who also started PayPal, another internet business I dearly love, and who is connected to right wing establishment think tanks. Then he got $12 million in venture funding from a group called Accel, which is a Branch of In-Q-tel, which is funded by the C.I.A. to provide startup capital for businesses the spooks want to incubate.
The head of Accel, James Breyer, also works with BBN technologies, which is concerned with developing "data mining" technologies for the U.S. department of defense. BBN has been around for awhile and played a major role in the development of the internet. It also works with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, (DARPA). A branch of DARPA is the "Information Awareness Office" which was exposed in 2002 as having a plan "to gather as much information as possible on everyone in a central location for perusal by the U.S. government". There is a Dr. Anita Jones who oversaw DARPA while working for the Department of defense, then worked at In-Q-tel, and then at BBN.
The conclusion of this video is that facebook should be made to adopt a rule that "what is on the facebook stays on the facebook". This is the old demand that "what is on the internet stays on the internet." There is no way to enforce this rule except to turn the whole internet into a public utility.
Some people will immediately chime in that this would make government surveillance over the net even harder to control. How could it be any more out of control than it is now, in the hands of the military-industrial-intelligence complex? This is libertarian thinking, which is not a hostility to government, but to democracy.
The way to net democracy is to have a real democracy first. It is not going to be the other way around.
So, if you have any net group that does anything political, take measures to keep the membership as confidential as possible. Do not confide over the net with anyone you have not met in person. Do not give out your portrait over the net. Do not let your bank information go over the net except to and from your own bank. And..., anyone brainless enough to put their home address on their facebook, I really don't know.....
When confronted with any new kind of software, hardware, networking service, or whatever, ask yourself if it is something you can do anyway, without either having to buy something new or give up your privacy.
To conclude; the power of the net as an organizing tool for a true democracy is in its anonymity. That is what facebook was invented to try to break down.
tr
Hello, I have just set up a new computer and have so far been unable to bring my old address book, etc. over. Likewise, I am not interested in being tracked on facebook. I could suggest you get Fairvote out of that nonsense and into something secure, like Ning or Elgg. But that is another writing.
I want to get something before the electoral reform minded public of Canada, to do with the elections in Venezuela. This should be of some interest to the above mentioned public, especially supporters of MMP.
There is an awful lot of bad air being written about Venezuelan politics and Hugo Chavez. Much of it is right wing propaganda from the American media monopoly and elite which would like to invade Venezuela if it was not so busy losing wars everywhere else in the world. Chavez is not following orders. He is talking back. He is running Venezuela in the interests of working Venezuelans. Of course, the US has already tried to organize a coup against Chavez, which failed rather comically in 2002.
The people who own things in Venezuela really hate Chavez, but like everywhere, they are a minority. There is a larger minority of people who have some sort of emotional attachment to being ruled over by a selfish minority. Since he was elected in 1998, he has been re-elected three times by the majority in Venezuela who do not have any sentimental attachment to being starving peons.
However, Chavez is not a perfect being. Many of his supporters like his policies, but do not like some of the people he has surrounded himself with; people who want to use Venezuela to start a world revolution, and some people with sticky fingers. He has tried to alter the constitution he originally created, in order to extend his term of office. He failed that referendum.
Other people who are not fans of Chavez are extreme left types who think he is a "reformist" or "Bonapartist" or these other terms that only people wrapped up in "Marxism" understand or care to understand. There are lots of them in Toronto.
Now, when Chavez was first elected President of Venezuela, the first thing he did was convene a constituent assembly to write a new constitution. Until then, Venezuela had never really been a democracy. It has been an oligarchy. It had elections but only the wealthy rural landowner class or people tied to the petroleum industry seemed to hold power. The new constitution abolished the Senate. It modified the existing MMP system, in which half the seats were by first past the post and half by lists.
The political parties had been gaming this system, creating one party to contest list seats and one to contest district seats. So, 60% of the seats became district seats, and a parallel system was introduced, with the vote for district and list seats totally separate. Under this system, the anti-Chavez crowd lost every election they contested. In 2000, they got almost half of the 165 seats. In the 2005 vote, they boycotted; a big mistake because it allowed the Chavez bunch to do what it wanted for five years, including increase presidential powers, nationalize industries, etc.
The opposition and the U.S. state department howled about rigged elections but Jimmy Carter came down and observed the votes, and pronounced them clean. So this time, the opposition campaigned and ended up with 65 seats, with 47% of the vote against the Chavezistas 48%. Much of this was because the voting districts gave so much weight to rural areas, where the peons really like Chavez's habit of grabbing large estates and giving it to them.
Even better, giving them technical help to farm it themselves and to reduce the food dependency in Venezuela. This means, where you have vast swathes of very fertile land sitting fallow, vast numbers of peons farming ditches by roadsides, and the country importing most of its food, which is very expensive for slum dwellers in the cities.
In the cities, the anti Chavez vote tended to be concentrated in the wealthier suburbs.
Still, it is surprising that the opposition did not do better than it did, given that they control most of the media, there is concern even among Chavez supporters about the direction he is taking, and that he has not been managing the economy well. Venezuela is in a recession that started in 2008 when the Americans had their falling down and stopped buying so much Venezuelan crude oil.
People are getting fed up with the violence, due to drug trafficking and a totally out of control police force. If you think the Toronto cops are something, here is the joke in Venezuela; if you get held up by bandits, don't cry out, a cop might come.
It is odd why Chavez cannot curb the police because he has been so good at changing the attitude of the army.
But the issue is; what does all this say about the value of MMP? It does not necessarily produce proportional results. It is open to charges of gerrymandering. The head of the Venezuelan voting system in defense of this system pointed out that the district boundaries went against the Chavezistas in a few areas, as if that was the point.
The point is, that with a straight list system, there could be no doubts about the justice of the result, and no worrying about gerrymandering. This would not matter too much in a country like Canada, where people tend to trust the system unless there is something really blatant going on, and assume that everyone will play by the rules. In a place like Venezuela, where a real class war is going full blast, with one side tending to reject voting results for tactical reasons, it creates problems.
But the biggest problem with voting in Venezuela may not be the method of parliamentary elections. Like in most of latin America, they are hung up on a presidential system which gives one person too much power. Political parties tend to be superficial and built around a charismatic leader. The presidency is the big prize and pursuing it perpetuates a "winner takes all" approach to politics in which there is no compromise possible.
Chavez cannot run again. He is gone in 2012. What is going to happen to the progress he made? Will the party he built up fall apart after him? They could easily slip into deadlock if you have a right president and a left legislature, or vice versa.
Presidential systems are plain wrong, and that is why the "strong mayor" system we have in Toronto is wrong. The executive must come from the legislature and must be answerable to it and removable by it. The executive must be aligned with the legislature, not ideologically opposed to it.
One thing that has taken a lot of wind out of the Venezuelan oppositions sails, when they make the usual accusations of voting fraud, has been the ballot system used in Venezuela. Electronic voting, where it is impossible to verify the vote, is garbage. Where it is used, it is a good sign that the vote is a sham and the country is a sham democracy. Like, for example, the United States.
However, hand counted ballots are not ideal either. There are lots of ways to stuff ballot boxes and to deliberately miscount. In complacent Canada nobody seems worried that the incumbent M.P. appoints the chief returning officer for each riding.
Some countries are developing really logical voting technologies that ensure a fair vote by securing the paper vote, rather than replacing it. In Venezuela, international observers admired the system. The voter signs onto the machine using an I.D. card, then uses a touch screen to indicate his/her vote. Then the machine prints out a ballot which the voter checks and takes back to the returning officer and puts in the ballot box.
This not only creates a paper trail to check the machine vote, but provides a check on old fashioned ballot box stuffing. The votes are tallied with the number of voters, and the card ensures that people do not vote twice, dead people do not vote, etc. This also compels a good enumeration, a preparation of a voter list, which has been a problem in Canada lately.
This system was designed by an Italian firm which has an American subsidiary which the American government is now trying to drive into bankruptcy.
So, there is much more to having a fair vote than just choosing the right electoral system. It is usually an endless fight with those who will not accept any result but what they want, and will keep trying to rig it.
tr
There is some commotion now about an academic article by Cass Sunstein, called "cognitive infiltration". Sunstein is an advisor to Barak Obama, and is a corporate lawyer and self styled "libertarian paternalist".
What he was advocating was that some persons, presumably governments agents, monitor internet discussions of "conspiracy theorists" and try to turn the discussion away from what he considers to be misguided and misinformed ideas. This has the Libertarian crowd stirred up. First, many are huffing that "libertarian paternalist" is a contradiction in terms. Second, their conspiracy theorizing already runs to governments agents trying to control people's ideas, discussions, etc.
Both of these ideas are amusing, because he word 'libertarian' was originally used interchangeably with 'Anarchist'. What is now called libertarianism would not have been recognized by Proudhon and Bakunin. It is as paternalistic as it gets. As well, you may notice that the biggest source of "cognitive infiltration" on the net comes from libertarians. Modern libertarianism is something that has been engineered, promoted, and funded by the corporatists as an ideological sword and shield against democracy. Fuse it with "free market" and "social Darwinist" ideologies and is the ultimate in cognitive infiltration and misdirection for social control.
Give your heads a collective shake, libertarians! There is no way that a modern, urban, technological society will operate without a sophisticated system of government. Ideas hatched in the early industrial age when populations were overwhelmingly rural and information travelled on horseback, have no relevance in our present world. I think they often made no sense back then, either.
There is going to be a government. It is going to be a democracy or a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy means a corporate bureaucracy. A democracy means a participatory democracy. The great struggle of the past century has really been between these two models for running a modern society. The triumph of private, corporate bureaucracy and its propaganda is that people believe that what we have now is democracy. And, especially for libertarian types, that there is a difference between public and private bureaucracy; that they are not the same thing.
The worst thing with these libertarian pea brains is the tendency to see democracy as a threat, instead of the only alternative to bureaucratic hegemony. They have this idea that democracy is "the mob" voting itself bread and circuses from the tax money taken from the "productive" people, like them. Yet whenever "the mob" has had a chance to govern themselves, they have done so very prudently and effectively.
Put another way, government is not an issue. It is about who does the governing and to what ends. It has been well explained by numerous writers that there is no real distinction in western countries between governmental and corporate bureaucracies; they are all part of one big bureaucracy. The aim is social control; profits are only a means of maintaining control. Hershel Hardin in "The New Bureaucracy" explained this well.
The way this system protects itself from people, who might collectively decide to start running their own lives, is by controlling opposition from within. Cognitive infiltration, cognitive manipulation and distortion, are nothing new. They are about turning truth upside down. They use what people do not like about the system in which they live, in order to protect that system. It is about redirecting them to attack the only possible alternative to that system.
This strategy of controlling and preempting opposition depends on sharply limiting people's knowledge. Then it depends on pouring misinformation into the vacuum. For most of the population, they can do this effectively with mass media. But for the more dangerous part of the public, those who are willing to make some effort to find out what is really going on, more is needed. The internet is a potential breeding ground of dangerous ideas, so it is policed by the same cognitive infiltration methods long used for public meetings.
It is widely knowable, though not yet widely known, that private corporations, foundations, and institutions all pay people to lurk on the net, seeking out discussions to cognitively infiltrate. Most people who have spent some time on net discussion groups of various kinds have encountered them, usually without understanding what is really going on. When you know what the aims and methods of these people are, they are not hard to spot.
The trouble is, as soon as you try to alert everyone else to them, they target you and try to get rid of you. Also, any discussion that tries to talk about real solutions for real problems is especially targeted for infiltration. We see this in the constant effort to warp the idea of Citizen's Income/Basic Income into a form of libertarianism.
This is why we have people living in extreme poverty, who cannot even afford dental care, and who think a flat rate income tax would be a good idea. And they also think that this has something to do with the Basic Income concept. That is sorrowful!
However, the cognitive controllers, or thought police, generally do not do their dirty work all by themselves. They can find plenty of true believers to do the internet lurking for them. These are usually people who have been unable to get anywhere in the real world and have plenty of time to sit around posting comments on the net. Part of Libertarianism's appeal is that it is a good alibi for failure in life.
This is also why I am reluctant to start a discussion board about Citizen's Income. I am working on a CI primer that will explain to people exactly what the idea is and is not. But in the meanwhile I keep getting approached by people who have the idea that CI is Libertarianism or a revival of Social Credit. They may assume I agree with them or may be to be trying to feel me out.
Like all true believers, they will never accept that you understand what they are saying, you just do not buy into it. They are personally insulted. They are worse than the Marxists for trying to explain that "reasoning" only gets you into a set of dead end truisms. Your reasons are the product of your own mind and reasoning is recycling your own rubbish.
If you want to understand how things work and what are the most probable solutions for a problem, you look at reality and form a theory about it. You test the theory, revise it, improve it. You discard it if it does not work. Modern Libertarianism never starts from an actual problem; it is a solution looking for a problem.
But the thing that really offends me about Libertarians is that they want the benefits of civilization without the obligations. This is narcissism. In this the lIbertarians are the natural allies of the "crony capitalists" they claim to oppose. They are silent about corporatism, especially about the increasingly obvious danger to personal freedom posed by powerful corporate bureaucracies.
Worst of all, Libertarians totally misidentify the cause of the lack of personal freedom in the modern world. That cause is inequality among people and the hegemony of the powerful over the powerless. This is going to be remediated by democratization and socialization; which corporatists and Libertarians despise.
By democratization and socialization, I mean real democracy and real socialism, happening at the same time. This brings me to a point where I agree in part with the Libertarians. There is a big problem in Toronto, which makes it hard to move anything really progressive forward, like a Basic Income. This is that the left here is almost all of the authoritarian variety.
"The revolution" is not going to come from a violent overthrow of the existing order, or through a political party getting power. It is going to come from below, from a powerful movement. It is not going to come from a bunch of people who think they are smarter than the rest of us and are going to lead us to the promised land.
The authoritarian left is strongly opposed on ideological grounds to the idea of a Basic Income; more so than the Libertarians. Why, is a topic for another editorial.
However, I should mention some further exchanges I have had with M. I published a commentary on something he sent me last month. He wanted to know what I thought about various topics, such as using gold as a currency. He did not like my responses. He said I am thinking in a "collectivist" way. Here is what he wrote.
Your libertarian 'funny' does not make sense.....especially not according to a libertarian perspective(it seems to be commenting on cronnie capitalism more than anything)...I am convinced you have chosen to reject human nature, and that you live in a world where altruism is your main virtue. The reality is, we are not a great civilization of altruistic beings. We are selfish individuals who for the most part do things that will directly benefit us, because the benefits are a requirement of survival. I wish money did not have to exist. I wish jobs did not have to exist. But the reality is we live in a world where we have divided the labor up amongst a vast pool of individuals. I hope you are able to make sense of your philosophy, and I wish you the best. At present I just see you as having presented a system that differs little from our current system, other than that you believe under the circumstances you propose, those in positions of power will act altruistically. I believe in charity, I believe in doing good to others. I do not believe in living life for anyone other than oneself. happy trails. -MEw! Yes, they always get very testy when they realize you are not going to agree with them. My Libertarian funny is not funny and I am not only a collectivist but an altruist.
Well, I am not getting into any altruism versus... What is the antonym to altruism,anyway? Autism?
But the human species is a social animal. We evolved to survive by working together. We helped old people to survive so they could pass on their experience. We helped mothers of small children to look after their kids longer so they could have a prolonged childhood and learn more.
People who thought they could make out better without submitting to the collectivity of the tribe were free to do so. They did not pass on their genes. Selfish behavior only became an evolutionary advantage after civilization developed. That is, an advantage for a ruling elite, not for the human kind as a whole, or for the natural world.
The funniest thing about this libertarian funny is the way in which he claims to "believe in charity". The recipients of charity do not believe in it. They have no choice but to put up with it. They would much prefer to have an income.
I am sure I will cross trails with M and his like again and it will not be a happy encounter.
Somebody wrote me an e-mail a little while back. It prompted me to write a reply that grew longer than I intended. But it is not too bad. It covers some issues that need covered, especially about the relative importance of monetary policy. Once we overthrow the monetarists,it will be of minor importance. I sent off the reply. I have not heard anything back. Maybe I will meet this person when I attempt to do a community meeting later this year.
Or, he or she could be just another one of these people with this strange obsession with monetary theories and no real interest in anything else.
Dear Citizen's Income,
I have seen your documents from the beginning as I lived on the Esplanade for many years and there were many posters about Citizens Income over the past few years. I have difficulty understanding the concepts though, mostly because of the economic factors. Currently, in Canada, we use Fiat currency, known as the Canadian Dollar. Much like the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada is able to increase and decrease liquidity in the credit markets, and is responsible for the majority, if not all credit expansion related to the Canadian Dollar. Since the CDN is a Fiat currency, it has nothing of hard value backing it. This has led to rampant inflation over the decades since this policy was was instituted. As a result, most individuals below a certain income level will never be able to attain income security, based on the simple fact that even if they try to save their money, it loses value at a rate that makes it insensible to keep the wealth in the form of dollars. What is your opinion on this? Do you see our current monetary system as something that contributes heavily to the social ills of our democracy? I certainly do. Large corporations and banks have access to discount window borrowing rates, something an individual could never have access too. As well, these large financial and corporate interests have the ability to help shape the direction of public policy in the legislature and at the Bank of Canada. This results in corporate welfare, monetary policy that will only ever benefit corporate interests and more. Now, based on these facts, I see the issue mentioned in your documents regarding 'capitalism' as incorrect. What you are really opposed to is Corporatism, or otherwise known as, Fascism. The Bank bailouts and corporate bailouts of the past few years are a perfect example. Profits get privatized and losses become socialized. It is important to remember though, that these 'profits' will only ever be enjoyed by those who have the financial wherewithal to invest directly into corporate interests who benefit from these policies. Do you believe it would more sense to in the short term, end ALL corporate welfare, allow our financial situation to improve, and then discuss the future of our fiscal philosophies?
What type of monetary system do you see as most efficient to achieve your stated goals? Would a currency(or basket of ) based on commodities work? Fiat? Gold Standard? What do you see as the best way?
I would be more than happy to meet in person to discuss these issues as, I myself, much like you, believe that we are at a crossroads and a serious dialogue must be initiated among all Canadians, both young and old. I used to consider myself a 'socialist', I have wavered far from this. I do not believe government(on a federal or provincial level) should do anything other than protect our liberty and freedom, and see local governance and charitable institutions as the only answer to social ills. Transparency is key, and with such centralized social spending programs, accountability is far from reachable. Good examples of how to achieve this transparency are projects like Open Toronto. The Federal government wont do this, and shouldn't as it's primary goal should be diplomacy and the protection of the individuals rights, along with border security and immigration issues. I do not believe we need a national minister of energy. Or minister of state for womens rights. Along with many others, I believe our federal and provincial governments have become dysfunctional, and they have not followed our constitution when considering much of the existing legislation(ie the drug war, our alcohol laws, our corporate laws and more). I look forward to hearing back from you.
All the best.
M
Hi, M
Pardon my delay in getting back to you. I will not take up too much time on this reply, as I have a lot to do. Also, I get many people writing me asking me about my ideas on certain topics, especially monetary schemes. They do not seem to like what I have to say, and I do not hear back from them.
There is an ocean of people out there who have become obsessed about monetary policy and monetarism. Many come at it out of libertarian ideologies and conspiracy culture.
Right now we are in an age of monetarism. The dominant revenue is income from financial manipulation. Therefore, the prevailing economic dogma is monetarism. Monetarism is the idea that an economy is all about money, and if the money markets are right, everything else will take care of itself.
Before that we were in an age of industrialism, and the dominant revenue was the interest from the ownership of capital, meaning the means of production. Or, the machinery to produce, transport, sell things, provide services, etc. In those times the dominant economic ideology was "Laissez Faire" industrialism, the idea that wealth came from ownership of capital.
Before that you had mercantilism. Wealth was all about owning trade monopolies; Hudson's Bay Company, British India Company, Africa company, etc.
Once upon a time, when the land owning class dominated the world, the economic ideology was physiocracy, the idea that wealth was all about ownership of land. To insure prosperity, large estates had to be created and maintained.
Right now everybody is obsessed with how money and money markets work. Every kind of crack pot theory is put out for making the money system fairer. For example, the idea that the government should just print more of it and give everybody an adequate income. The common feature is that they imagine some magical source of money that can be used to run everything without the country's people having to finally take the bull by the horns and make the wealthy pay their taxes. That is the only way to run a stable economy.
Once the monetarists have fallen from power, money will not matter so much. The government will print enough to fund what it needs to do. It will be printed by the national treasury. Banks will not be allowed to loan out money they do not have. The government will tax those who have more than they need and there will be a maximum income at which tax back is one hundred percent. The problem we have now is not of too many poor people but of too many wealthy people. The object of taxes is not to fund anything, it is to keep the society and economy in balance by not allowing concentrations of wealth. If a government tries to print too much money for things that are not needed or for which there are not resources to produce what will be bought, then there will be inflation. The countries currency will decrease against other countries currencies.
The only currency is what is issued by a government and what is accepted by it for payment of taxes. The idea of gold as money is ridiculous. Like any other mineral, the supply of it is unevenly scattered on the earth, the supply is unstable and subject to wild price fluctuations, and it is very heavy and has to be stored somewhere. There is not enough of it. Gold has never worked well as a currency.
If I owned gold mines and big piles of gold, it would be in my interest to tell everybody that the currency is going to become worthless and to protect their "wealth" they will have to buy gold. The price of gold will go up. But what happens to the price of gold when the currency does become worthless and people have to start selling their gold to buy groceries?
But if you want to buy some gold to keep under your pillow, go ahead. The stuff looks pretty.
Right now we are in the crisis of capitalism. Capitalism is always having a crisis and usually makes out very well with them. But there is something different this time. The world has finally run up to the limit of the world's resources. Every natural commodity, not just oil, is in short supply. The world's economy has become a zero sum economy. In other words, if more people in China or India want to drive cars, some people in Canada or Germany have to give up their cars.
The only way out of this is some sort of planned economy. Market economies are finished. You can have a bureaucratically planned economy, the example of which is the old Soviet Union. Or you can have a democratically planned economy. The are, or were, limited examples of this in Yugoslavia, Cuba, Israeli Kibbutzes, the Hutterite colonies, the Mondragon system in Spain, and even the Soviet Union before Stalin took control.
Most of them worked well while they lasted. They were or are often a threat of a good example to the elites of other systems, or those who want total control. Yugoslavia's limited participatory economy was bombed out of existence. The Israeli Kibbutzes were broken by Israeli state economic policies.
There have been examples of participatory democracy all down history; the city states of Greece, and of medieval Europe, before the rise of kings. Contemporarily, we have the Porto Allegre model of participatory budgeting which is being exported all over the world, and the German experiments with planning cells.
This, plus a guaranteed income for everybody, are the three legs on which a post monetary capitalist world will be based. An assured income gives people the freedom to participate in the governance of their society. This enables control over the economic system by the people who will be hindered or benefited according to how it is run. This in turn assures that enough is produced to meet people's needs, and there is no overproduction of junk in order to make paper profits.
As for 'end all corporate welfare and then discuss fiscal policies', I think that is the biggest mistake of any revolution. You cannot overthrow something until you know what you are going to replace it with. One of the significant things about this time is that in most of the world, most of the aware population now knows, largely through the world social forums, what we are going to replace it with.
The sad thing about Canada is that people are still so brain washed by the media, and still so stuck in libertarian types of hogwash, that nothing is going to happen here first.
When I talk about a citizen's Income, people are mostly so wrapped up in ideology that they are not even aware they have an ideology. There is so much crap they have to forget about first. But I hope this summer I a will be able to start doing some speaks about CI. I will probably start in my own neighborhood around Esplanade.
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Review of "The Spirit Level; why more equal societies almost always do better", by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. ISBN # 978-1-846-14039-6
This book makes some points that are critical to a serious debate about a Basic Income. It is disappointing that the authors never mention Basic Income by any of its names, and seem to be unaware of the concept.
Their first point is that poverty is more about social status than about income. The second is that a rough equality among people is critical to having a workable society. The third is that there is no clear reason why some countries are more equal than others. The fourth is that 'redistribution' is not the only way to achieve equality.
This fourth point is the most interesting and useful, because of the well known problems with redistribution. It leads to the 'welfare state', to demeaning and controlling individuals, and to the creation of a fake public or 'third sector' that preempts real democracy. The authors are broadly familiar with these problems. But they also note that many societies have a high level of equality without high taxation and redistribution.
Internationally, Japan is the most relatively equal of the wealthy countries studied. The ratio between a factory workers income and a CEO's income was sixteen to one there compared with forty-four to one in the United States. Yet it's level of taxation is as low as the Unites States.
Within the United States, Vermont and New Hampshire are neighbors. Vermont has the highest taxes in the states, and New Hampshire close to the lowest. Yet they are both very low in the index of inequality the authors used. In other words, the ratio between the highest earning 20% of the population and the lowest 20% is small.
The authors do not merely draw from this, as some other writers have, that there are two ways to produce equality; before the fact or after. It is not simply a matter of social engineering. However, I would say it is obvious that it is better to build equality into the economy than to have to create it by high taxes and big social programs.
There are many ways by which different societies have become more or less equal, all having to do with their particular history. The United States had a high level of equality after world war two. Their occupation and restructuring of Germany and Japan laid the basis for the present high equality of these countries. But since 1980, the United States has gone backward drastically and is now the most unequal of the countries studied.
So, the authors find equality to be a matter of political will. They show very conclusively the benefits of equality, even for the higher status members of a society. The question is, given this, what is the root cause of the will toward inequality? They do not go into this. It is beyond the scope of their work.
They simply show that inequality seems to be unnatural to humans. They cite behavioral experiments in which people flatly refuse to accept unequal 'take it or leave it' deals; the "ultimatum game". Hunter gatherer societies among humans are very egalitarian; everything is fairly shared. There is a strong human tendency, within small groups, to punish anyone who tries to dominate or take advantage of others.
Yet people accept very unjust and unequal societies and Pickett and Wilkinson do not offer a really satisfactory explanation. Differences in material conditions may cause members of one social class or caste to be incapable of empathizing with a less advantaged group, of recognizing them as people. Conditioning in early life can cause people to be more aggressive and opportunistic or more submissive. All this does not explain how these unnatural conditions developed in the first place.
It is certainly dysfunctional to society, including even the dominant classes. Pickett and Wilkinson have plenty of graphs showing the correlations between inequality and many other undesirable outcomes. For example, the health of people in all social classes is worse in less equal than in more equal societies. The health index of the wealthiest people in each country lines up very well along an axis of unequal to equal.
Even the wealthy in more unequal societies have more problems with drug use, suicide, divorce, etc. And of course inequality is very hard on the lowest on the social scale. Inequality does not even produce greater economic productivity; it correlates strongly to reduced productivity.
While equality correlates statistically with many positives, the total wealth of a society does not. When these wealthy countries are plotted on a graph for total wealth and for things like efficient waste disposal or even numbers of people who say they are happy, they are scattered all over the graph; no correlation.
As countries become wealthier, accumulating further wealth has diminishing returns. The authors think about $25 000 U.S. dollars per capita income is the cutoff point. Further increase in wealth does not make the society a happier place to live; but greater equality does.
The implications of all this for proponents of Income Guarantees is obvious, because we are all about creating greater equality among people. However, the fact that high taxation and social spending/social transfers is not necessary to produce equality is salient. Where further research is really needed is into exactly how some societies are able to do this.
It really does not make sense to engage in high taxes and social transfers if it can be avoided. There are issues of creating a bureaucratic control over those receiving the transfers. The transfers do not always get to the right people. Also, it is often noted that if you let wealthy people get wealth, they tend to use the wealth to fight back against taxation. You do not want them to accumulate excess wealth in the first place.
This suggests that a guaranteed minimum income will not work in the long run without a maximum income. This means, in effect, a 100% tax rate at some point, unless there is a voluntary moderation of income demands among the wealthy. Perhaps you could get the elites of Japan, Scandinavia, or New Hampshire to go along with this, but it is hard imagine it happening in Texas or Singapore.
The optimal degree of equality in a developed country is a matter for debate and research among proponents of a Citizen's Basic Income. It is likely that the most equal countries in Pickett and Wilkinson's study are still far from optimal equality. As well, equality depends on the attitude of the elite, who could change their minds at any time. So, equality will generally have to be imposed from below by a genuine popular democracy.
"Redistribution" as understood by social democrats is not a good mechanism for creating equality. It is much better to merely give people an adequate income to start with and leave them alone. And to repeat, there must be a maximum income, to prevent people from getting excessive wealth in the first place. Genuine democracy is incompatible with private fortunes.
The tired argument will be raised, that without incentives to get rich, there will be no economic growth and improvement in living standards. But growth beyond a marginal point does not improve living standards and quality of life. What is needed is a stable economy that provides enough for all without waste and a draw down of the natural environment.
The authors have given two measures of equality in any economy besides the crude method of comparing the top 20% with the lowest 20% in incomes. There is the Gini coefficient; If one person had everything and everyone else had zero, the Gini would be 1. The lower the number, the more equality. There is the Robin Hood index, which tells how much Robin would have to transfer from the rich to the poor to even things out.
Proponents of a Citizen's Basic Income should be familiar with these measures. The issue of the ratio between the minimum and maximum incomes is up for debate, not how much the poor need in order to get by. It is about justly sharing what can realistically, sustainably be had by a modern society.
"The Spirit Level" is a new addition to the library of those interested in Basic Incomes. It does not have the answers, but it frames most of the right questions.
It is a bit like a matador waving a cape at a bull. The lords of the universe seem to deliberately hold these events in places with large populations and which are easy to get to. So, they get all the local radical dimwits out, plus the traveling international summit groupies, often wearing black and carrying spray cans or worse. So, they advertise their power and ability to shut down any city any time they want in order to make their decisions and issue their orders. The protester types never miss a chance to demonstrate their powerlessness as well as their cluelessness.
It is going to cost a billion dollars in security and shut down the whole downtown core of the city for three days, including the university of Toronto. The time to protest something and make a fuss would have been well before this show came to town. The city government should have been pressured by local business, tax paper groups, as well as leftie types, to tell the G-20 to take it somewhere else. Hold it on a desert island somewhere.
Most of the idiots who instinctively want to protest everything that comes along have no idea what they are really protesting. They would not even know exactly what G-8 or G-20 is. For example, this will be the last G-8 meeting. The G-20 is going to take over as the group who will meet biannually to decide how to run the world. This is part of a process that has been going on for awhile; power is going away from the old super powers, especially the U.S., to the middle level powers.
It has also been moving away from the chiefs of state to the financial bosses. The G-20 meetings in future will be of the finance ministers and central bank heads of the powers, not the heads of state.
Duh, what is a central banker?
When the international financiers were establishing their control between the word wars, they forced each country to establish a central bank. This moved control of the issuance of the nation's currency away from the treasury to the large banks who had seats on the governing body of the central bank. Any country which tried to buck this system had an economic war waged on them to destroy their currency and their economy.
A few token poor countries will be allowed to attend as observers, such as Ethiopia. Various regional and international organizations will also attend, such as the head of the International Labor Organization and the European Union. Some progressive heads of state will attend, such as Kevin Rudd of Australia or Lula De Silva of Brazil. The G-8 heads will meet their last away from Toronto in Huntsville, up in Muskoka country.
So, there is definitely a change of the old order under way. Things are being decided in Toronto about "global governance" and how it will be done from here on. The G-20 heads of state will not attend the next g-20 meeting in Korea this fall. But the "BRIC" countries will be there.
BRIC- Brazil, Russia, India, and China. These are the four strong economies who are no longer under the thumb of the European and American financial elite and are challenging the old order that has ben around since 1945. They may have central banks, but their central banks are not taking orders from the so called "Bretton Woods Institutions", the IMF ( International Monetary Fund and the "world bank". They are under control of their national governments.
So far, these national governments are getting away with it. In world war one, Germany, Russia, and Turkey were attacked because they refused to come under the central bank economic system being put in place then. After a twenty year truce, the second stage of the world war happened, with Nazi Germany, Japan, and Italy being attacked for defying global capital. Hitler could have fried Jews to his little hearts content, but when he started minting his own money, the boom came down.
China and Russia in particular have been aggressive in challenging the domination of the Dollar and the Euro. They have signed the Yekaterinburg agreement to cooperate to break up the western trade monopoly and gain access into the African and Latin American markets. Brazil and India are more coy, but definitely interested. Some smaller powers, especially Iran, have come under the umbrella of the Yekaterinburg alliance.
This is why, if the U.S. or Israel ever attacks Iran, then thats it. The boom goes up; its world war three. The BRIC countries are pretty well positioned to win a third world war with the U.S. The Americans cannot finance a war, the BRIC could. But if the American elite find themselves irreversibly losing power, they might do something drastic.
We will not find out for months or years what exactly went on inside the convention center. But it will effect everyone in the world hugely. It will seriously effect the course of history.
One thing that is going on is the push of the heads of state for global tax on bank deposits in order to fund any further bail outs. Originally it was going to be a 'Tobin Tax', a tax on financial transactions, but they chickened. The problem with this is that it could encourage even more risky speculation, because the banksters know that the fund will be there to cover their gambling losses.
Most countries want this tax on the banks, Steve Harper will be trying to derail it, and not for a good reason. He truly disgraces Canada, placing us on the worong site of history. If he continues, Canada will start to be ignored at world councils.
I think the "Robin Hood Tax" people will be there with their Robin and Marion and merry men suits, trying to convince the bad king John to adopt a financial transactions tax and use the money to fund social programs and other nice stuff. They will probably end up getting whacked and stacked along with the other protesters.
This is the lesson of past summits' there are no safe zones. In every event, the black block anarchist types try to provoke the police. When anyone tells them to knock it off, they snark that there has to be a "diversity of tactics" and that nobody can suppress them. Part of this diversity are hard core Trotskyites who want to get somebody killed by the police so there is a martyr, and they might be able to "accelerate" things into a riot.
It is almost certain that the police will panic over these antics. The black blocks will try to hide in the safe zones, the police will attack there, the "peaceful" protesters will get clobbered, along with local people out walking their dogs.
To conclude and reiterate, a responsible city government should not try to attract these events, even sports types events like the Olympics, to show everyone that we are really a "world class city". Toronto is a backwards city; that is why the G-20 came here. It is willing to put its citizen's peace and safety in jeopardy, and waste their money for no benefit.
G-20 should be told to go do its thing in Antarctica or someplace like that, until there is something like a world parliament to take over from it. That is not as strange an idea as it might seem. The elected European parliament is starting to consider how to put a curb on the European Commission, appointed by the European governments. That could be a model for the development of a world government.
Stay away from these demonstrations. There is no point to them.
( this was an essay I handed in for marks at U of T. I think it is worth a read by the general public)
The evolution of the human species has often been pitched as the rise of 'higher intelligence' or of the triumph of the mind. McBrearty and Brooks denounce this as the "hero myth". I call it the 'heroic brain' trope. It led to the assumption that body evolution followed brain evolution, which resulted in many mistakes. But the opposite mistake is what I would call the 'continuity' error; the idea that everything humans do is a mere continuation from the higher animals; there is no break between humans and other species, nothing really special about us. It seems that McBrearty and Brooks lean toward this trope. To debunk all this is beyond the scope of this paper, and could take up a dozen papers like this. I merely offer a different explanation of the human species which I think avoids these two errors. I call it 'the heroic hand'.
The greatest triumph of evolution is not the human mind, it is the human arm and hand. Everything that the human species is, is a consequence of the development of this incredible means of manipulating the surrounding environment. The human brain itself is nothing really special. It is made of the same stuff as primate brains. But what it does is qualitatively different from what any animal brain does; a sum much greater than it's parts. Any mammalian species could have developed the same capabilities with the same basic materials. Any bird species could have. None have done so because they would have no use for such capabilities. The development of an upper limb free of any involvement in locomotion and dedicated exclusively to manipulation of the physical world, allowed us to reach outside of our skins and begin to adapt nature to us, instead of to adapt to nature, which is all the animals can do. This opened a space which the human brain could grow into, and eventually mind and culture could also grow in and begin an 'evolutionary loop' with each other. What really makes us qualitatively, not quantitatively, different from animals is not our so-called 'higher intelligence' or our ability to speak, make things, make music, and so on. All this came after our hands, and continues to depend on our hands.
Malafouris' hypothesis is that mind is the engagement of the brain with the body and the material world about it. Mind and nature are not separable. The 'cognition' of the human species extends out into the material world, and is "not limited by the skin". As I understand this, mind does not simply react to the world, but interacts with it. Mind shapes the world around it, creating a material culture. The mind is in turn shaped by the natural world, this material culture, and the body, in a continuous interplay.
According to McBrearty and Brooks, they offer an explanation of the emergence of modern humans that is more consistent with the evidence. Homo Sapiens emerged much earlier than the 100 000 years before present (ybp) which is the current wisdom. The 'Homo Helmei' which is dated as beginning at 260 ybp should be considered as a modern human and "rolled into" Homo Sapiens. The "Middle Stone age" (MSA), which they consider the next stage from Acheulian tools, began at about that time. All the 'behaviors' indicative of modern people did not develop suddenly, as in a 'revolution', but came together over a long period; they think 200 thousand years, as the "cognitive equipment" developed that could make use of new opportunities.
The authors note that the tendency to want to prove that the human species is distinct from animals leads to many mistakes, such as the idea that brain expansion or 'intelligence' preceded changes in the body, and that modern humans came about suddenly in a "revolution". They insist that all animal species are unique, with their own form of 'consciousness'. No "gulf" should be drawn between humans and the animal world.
However, according to Lumsden and Wilson, humans are qualitatively different from all other animals by being the only "eucultural" species, having true cultures. We imitate, teach, and reify; create an internal reality from external stimuli, from which new concepts can be derived and transmitted to others. Even the apes are only among the two dozen species at the next stage down, protocultural two; learning by imitation and teaching. Below them are numerous protocultural one species, who can learn by imitation. The rest of the animal kingdom are acultural; do not teach each other. In humans, cultures are transmitted epigenically, through an interaction between genes and cultural environment. Mind is not a mere reproduction of behavioral traits, but of cultural conditioning and the determinations individuals make in their lives. How the human mind developed has much to do with what earlier people considered to be beauty, intelligence, character, rationality, etc. These then created breeding advantages. Genes then reinforced these "culturgens." It does not take eons for this epigenic process to have an effect; it can create a detectable genetic shift in only ten generations.
According to Wilson, the earliest ancestors of humans were the Australopithecines, who existed two to four million years ago. They were the first primates to stand upright and they had an almost modern hand. After Australopithecus was Homo Habilis, soon followed by Homo Erectus, who was around from shortly after 2 million ybp until fairly recent times. In the last few hundred K ybp we have the Homo Heidelbergis and Homo Neandertalis type. There is a lot of confusion about classifying these early humans, but only in the past 100K ybp are people considered to be 'modern' found. Citing Washburn; the organs within an organism evolve in the same way the whole organism does, the upright posture and dedicated upper limb launched the human species, and that human brain evolution was driven thereafter by the brain itself and by 'culture', and "the brain was the last organ to evolve".
The hand of the 'Lucy' Australopithecine from 3.8 million ybp could grip something between the thumb and the middle and index fingers, giving better control than chimps, who can only hold something between the thumb and index finger. Lucy could hold an object in a "three jaw chuck" grip and her pelvis could rotate to allow throwing, clubbing or stabbing. The Australopithecine hand was much better adapted than an ape hand to absorb the shock of pounding at something. Yet its brain was no larger than a modern chimps; 400 grams. There is a gap in the fossil record, and by the time we have a Homo Erectus hand to see, about a million years ago, the development of the hand was completed with the thumb fully rotated and the finger joints, particularly the rotation of the pinkie finger, more flexible, so that he could touch the ends of all his fingers with his thumb; the "precision grip", and close the thumb over the little finger; the "power grip". The wrist could fully rotate. The base of the thumb and the ends of all fingers were enlarged and padded, enabling a sure grip and shock absorption. The Erectus brain was effectively as large as ours; 1100 grams to our range of 900 to 2000 grams. Between Australopithecus and Erectus was the "Homo Habilis", extant around 2 million ybp plus or minus .5 million years. He is associated with the first stone tools which can be recognized as such, and with the first controlled fire. His brain averaged about 600 grams. It is not certain from the archeological record whether the brain growth came before or after these last refinements to the hand. But after Erectus there was nothing the human hand could not do if the mind could master it.
Wilson writes;"Given a creature that loves to play, sharpens what it knows how to do with endless practice, and will try anything that comes into its head, one must expect that new skills, ... will be regularly devised, and will be made part of the repertoire if they can be taught...to others." However, early hominids were slow at first to exploit the opportunities presented by the hand. Lucy was anatomically capable of making the early "oldowan" stone tools but they only appeared with Habilis. Wilson cites Gould that once Erectus had developed the improved Acheulian stone tools, development stopped for about a million and a half years.
After hands, the other big step on the road to 'higher intelligence' was language. Wilson offers us a good explanation of the very hard "Chomsky problem"of how language developed. Of course, he says it followed as a consequence of the development of hands. Chomsky gives his three "incontrovertible facts"; that language is a heritable, species level trait, it is not a specific function of general intelligence, and most importantly for my thesis, it has no analogies in animal communication. This is said to threaten some widely held assumptions of cognitive scientists, anthropologists, and linguists. Wilson suggests that the functional origins of language are in the development of hands. To do any manual task requires what Plotkin called "manual intelligence". It is the ability to produce a sequence of acts/ideas in their correct relation to each other, telling a kind of story that can be reproduced. This is the essence of building a sentence and is exactly what the apes who were taught 'sign language' do not do. Wilson refers to the Charles Turing test as well as Chomsky when he imagines a "Chom-Tur" in the human brain which processes speech. Lacking this, apes will never pass Plotkin's test, or Turing's test of convincing anyone they are talking to a person.
Spoken language began over 100 000 ybp, and the neural infrastructure of language must have been in place well before then. Such complicated traits must have been under development for a very long time and could only have been developed through the use of some sort of proto-language. The brain was wired to understand word symbols not as part of a chain, but by the intent of the symbols and their logical relation to each other. What apes are incapable of, human children pick up at a very early age. It is said by Vygotsky and Greenberg that speech acquisition in children is related to the manipulation of objects in the real world. That this does not require speech, the production of sound, is shown by the great speed and expressiveness of the sign language of the deaf. This is not mere signaling, but signifying; a true language. People who suffer from aphasia due to brain injury often have trouble with movements which had been automatic before the injury. And finally, deaf people who had used sign language and who suffer brain injuries in the same areas where injuries produce aphasia in speaking people, become unable to use sign language in the same way that the speakers could no longer speak. The hand, mind, language nexus is very strong, even though neurologists still have no clear idea about how speech works or even what parts of the brain are involved.
According to Whittaker, flint knapping is the oldest hand craft. It has been practiced from the time of the first Oldowan tool makers. It was not only used by the last stone age people, but for certain types of weapons and tools of the early industrial era. It takes some time to learn this craft, and it needs some instruction because if you do not know how to hold the pieces properly, you can injure yourself.
The Oldowan tools were made from about 2.5 million ybp. Whittaker beleives that the more advanced Acheulian tools were first made in Africa after 2 million ybp and spread through the old world with the Homo Erectus people. Only much later did the Mousterian tools arise; some time before 100 000 ybp.
Johnson-Frey provides additional information about the speciality of human tool use. The primates have the same systems of reach, grasp, and manipulation that humans do. But they cannot grasp the "causal relationships between self, tool, and goal object". For example, a chimp can understand how to pull a rake in order to draw food toward itself. It can see that a broken rake will be no good. But if it must choose between a rake that would draw food to it and one that would draw it into a hole that is clearly visible to it, the chimp chooses wrong half the time.
Humans began using fire and cooking food between 1.9 mybp and 1.6 mybp. This is at about the time the Erectus body form emerged, as well as the modern human life cycle, with a longer, learning enabling childhood facilitated by availability of softer foods. Teeth shrank. Modern humans are fully adapted to a cooked food diet which allows much greater absorption of nutrients and a higher energy level, and ability to meet the energy requirements of the human brain, which has 2% of the body's mass and consumes 20% of the body's total energy. Studies of modern humans who try to live on a raw food diet show that they would be unable to survive in the wild on raw food. Starting and maintaining a fire requires high manual dexterity and planning. Cooking is another cultural trait that led to genetic adaptations.
Fitch reminds us that there are talking parrots and seals, and chimps who can make sign talk. However, human speech evolved from, but is much more complex than, ape vocalizations. The primate vocal tract has three parts; a sound source, formants, and articulators. The sound source is the larynx and vocal cords, which produce pitch. The formants adjust the length of the vocal tract, allowing some frequencies to pass, but not others. The articulators are the tongue, lips, palate, etc., which give us our vowels and consonants. These enable humans to convey a great deal of information in a short time. The basic changes from apes to humans are that the larynx has descended in the throat, allowing greatly increased motion of the tongue. We have much greater motor control over our tongues, lips, etc., vastly expanding our 'repertoire'. And of course we have the mental circuits to be able to create and receive heirarchically organized speech. All attempts to deduce from fossils when speech evolved, such as shape of the hyoid bone or the size of the hypoglossal canal, fail; there is as much variation of these features among living people as among early human fossils.
The thesis is that the human species is qualitatively different from all other species, but that the original cause of this difference is in the development of hands, not brains. This will challenge some "central assumptions widely shared among anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and linguists". I consider most of these assumptions foolish or irrelevant and I am interested in getting beyond them, not arguing against them. Therefore, I hope this paper is assessed within its own frame.
The archeological sequence of events in human development is uncertain. My sources give differing timelines. However, some things are clear. The 'Lucy' skeleton is dated at four to three million ybp. The Oldowan stone tools appeared about 2 to 2.5 million ybp. The Habilis type, with a somewhat larger brain, but no evidence about the hands, was a relatively short interlude between Australopithecus and Erectus. The Erectus type, with a brain as big as ours, appeared in the fossil record shortly after 2 million years ybp and was around until about .25 Million ybp. The first evidence of the use of fire is from 1.9 to 1.6 million years ybp. A more sophisticated type of stone tools, the Acheulian, appeared before one million ybp.
So, essentially modern hands developed, and then nothing happened for a long while. Then stone tools and the use of fire happened, at about the same time as a dramatic increase in brain size. It is impossible to say from the archeological record which of these latter came first. The point is that they happened well after hands and completed the first stage of the development of the mind; driven by the structural development of the human body. After that the brain became more complex, not bigger. This was driven by the genetic feedback between practical know-how which made life easier with more leisure time, sources of higher energy foods to feed the brain's demands, and an increasing social life. It has been a slowly accelerating process, with the development of language at the center of it. Unlike hands, the speech production mechanism could not have come about by good fortune. Speech had to have evolved in the brain before it manifested itself in structural change to the body. It could only have evolved through the use of sign language until vocalization could supplement and then replace it. This was the second stage of development of the mind, the cultural development enabled by tools and fire. The mind is brain plus culture plus technology, and high technology has developed recently, after another long, slow buildup since neolithic times; the third stage of development which was enabled by speech.
However, our advanced technology and culture still depend totally on the hand. If the human race kept our magnificent brains but were returned to the bodies of apes, we would be unable to cope. A computer requires significant manual skill to operate. Its manufacture requires many hours of very precise hand assembly work. Ask yourself how you would cope with your daily activities if your hands lacked the power and precision grips, and dextrous fingers. Our technology would degenerate back to primitive levels, where we would have trouble even getting a fire lit. Our superior brains would no longer have a stimulating environment to play in, and would be an impediment to survival. There is nothing "LaMarckian" in saying that what an organism can no longer use, and which has considerable costs, it will lose over generations. Humans can no longer live as animals, any more than animals can live as people.
The hand was a very fortunate accident of evolution, although no doubt sooner or later some species would have happened to develop something equivalent to hands, had we not. First, our tree dwelling ancestors developed the rotating shoulder in order to be able to move through the trees. They also developed the basic hook grip and independently working fingers. The apes developed the pincer grip with which to hold something between finger and thumb. But it is when Australopithecines developed a habitually upright posture that the opportunity was there. It was not about bipedalism; kangaroos never grew hands. Their front limbs withered away because they never evolved the shoulder motion which can move the hand around. But Lucy could throw, club and stab, making her a formidable opponent. When the hand was perfected by the early Homos, with rotating wrist, fully opposable thumb, and grip adaptions, the master species began to arise. People began to use fire, to make real tools, and to communicate in real language.
No animal without the equivalent of a hand will ever use tools, fire, or language. The ability of even the most primitive people to use tools and fire have given them the time and energy for mind developing recreational and contemplative activities which animals will never be capable of. It has given them the quality nutrition to support their enlarged brain. A chimp which does clever things with rocks and twigs is not in this way "using tools". To make anything properly called a tool requires mastering a hand craft, which requires true hands. No wild chimp will ever be able to get a fire going and keep it going. Many animal species have the ability to signal in various ways. No existing animal species will ever use true speech. Arm and hand have resulted in a creature which is qualitatively, not quantitatively, different from any other animal; the only eucultural species, the only species which can extend its intelligence into the material world around it, to interact with it instead of merely to react.
Whether McBrearty and Brooks like it or not, we are the master species. Unless we use our superior brains to destroy ourselves, our dominance precludes any other species from following a similar path of development.
We are finally starting to get some information back about the Montreal BIENCA/USBIG meeting. It sounds like there were some pretty good discussions, some good papers, that will eventually find their way onto the net, and some ideas about moving the idea forward in North America. However, some people were disturbed by the numbers and poor quality of presentations about the Alaska permanent fund, and ideas for 'funding' a BI.
There was the usual attempt to float the idea of a 'targeted' Basic Income, but one person from Toronto challenged this and was generally supported. He said "Tommy Douglas did not go for a targeted health care system - thank goodness, otherwise we would end up with a total failure, a U.S. style nightmare. The 'targeted GAI' folks seemed persuaded by these arguments for a universal version after some more personal discussion."
But there are a couple of instances where some degree of targeting may make sense. One is in with holding the GAI from the wealthy, people who obviously would not be in any immediate danger if they lost their income stream. Another has to do with aspects of public participation which Guy Standing spoke about.
It is encouraging that many Americans from the land of individualism are talking about the "commons, the common good, commonwealth," and so on.
It seems the hall was not so good, with bad acoustics and the back half cut off from the front half. They had to bring in an audio system for those at the back to hear the proceedings.
The main hoster, the CREAM group of Montreal, has now put up audio of some of the more important presentations. You can find them at [http://www.creum.umontreal.ca/ spip.php?article1168] (Not a link)
One was Louise Haagh, a lecturer at York U. She talked about the public financing of BI. The right of withdrawal from society depends on the social organization of finance.
She referred to a Libertarian called Hollandberg who lived in Holland in the 1920s and has only recently been translated into English. Somehow he has greatly influenced subsequent libertarians. Hollandberg thought that the state did not have the resources to assess an individuals motivation to work and therefore should not attempt to r edi st r i but e incomes.
Haagh found the first part of this statement correct, but the second part off base. The state cannot assess p e o p l e ' s motivation, but it can provi de opportunity. She finds a false equation here, a false dichotomy between state action and personal autonomy. Libertarians seem to see democracy as a threat to freedom. Having a Basic Income depends on the state's role in raising and redistributing taxes.
She also talked about relative poverty and unequal resources. The poor in most cases are not starving, they are excluded from participation in society. They lack opportunity. Public finance is very important or extending equality of opportunity. As for participation, with BI participation, meaning participation in economic life, becomes a choice, not a compulsion.
She challenged some other Libertarian ideas, like self employment. She showed that the poorest countries were the ones with the most self employment. Self employment is always very insecure.
Other points;
She recognizes the old Rifkin point that technology makes jobs unnecessary. In addition, consumption patterns can strongly influence employment patterns. Investment patterns can influence employment, but investment is political. You will not get investment in job creating activities without subsidization.
Increased employment does not reduce control over employees. She introduces the concept of "guard labor". This means, the security guards, supervisors, and so on that keep control over everyone else. Guard labor is 15% of the work force in the U.S. So, rises in social spending do not lead to equality. Often, social spending leads to more inequality. Much social spending is really about control. This would of course explain why inequality has been increasing while social spending does not decline.
I like Louise Haagh.
Guy is one of my favorite Income Guarantees people. He can be hard to take notes on, because he is one of these rare thinkers who can really articulate an alternative frame of reality that holds together. He moves through it very fast.
Guy makes a distinction between labor and work. Labor has exchange value. He says that labor is a commodity; a very controversial point. In the labor market, labor power is restricted. This means the ability of people to negotiate a price for their labor power is restricted.
Work has use value. This means you cannot set a price on it. It is useful and valuable because it maintains society and individuals. One of the reasons everything is breaking down now is that everybody has been forced into the labor market and nobody has time to do the work that keeps society going.
Standing refers back to Karl Polanyi's work on the "Great Transformation" of 1830's England. This was when the state dismantled everything that gave people security, forcing them into a labor market.
Since the 1980s, we have been living in a global transformation, in which everything that gives people security is being stripped away. This is not about de regulation, it is about re-regulation. In the 1830s the state accomplished the transformation by regulating workers through the work house system and other laws.
In the same way, starting in the 1980s, every space where people can stand outside capitalism is being broken. Everything that was protection has now turned into control in order to make people "employable". Occupations which were self regulating are now state regulated.
People in Canada and the U.S. are talking about how they want the "Swedish Model", but the Swedish model does not even exist in Sweden any more. Sweden has gone as far as any developed country in rolling back the social security system, turning it into a system of control and testing.
Standing introduces the term 'tertializing'; controlling people's time. People are still using time notions that applied in the industrial age. In the tertiary age, time is infinitely divisible; multitasking. It is the intensification of time, production, and consumption. Leisure is squeezed out so that people cannot participate as citizens.
The poor are no longer getting social benefits, those with pull are. The working class is disappearing, replaced by a "precariate" with no direction or identity and no social memory. This is the new "dangerous class", which has nowhere to go.
So, it is going to the right, everywhere there is a move to anti-state, anti- participation ideologies. "Chindia", China and India, the worlds big reservoirs of labor, are sending it abroad. This drives wages down elsewhere, resulting in fascist type vigilantism.
"Panopticon" type surveillance is becoming pervasive and a "behavioral economics" is being developed. The panopticon was originally thought of in the eighteenth century by the Utilitarian philosopher Bentham. The watchers can see the inmates, but the inmates cannot see the watchers, so they act like they are being watched all the time; behavioral economics.
More in this vein, Standing talks about "libertarian paternalism". The essence of it is that we make the wrong choices because we have too much information. So, people need to be steered to make the right choices. A book called "Nudge" outlines this. It was written by a friend of Obama's now in his government.
With the lack of time and leisure, there is a democracy deficit. Thus, no progressive agenda is on the table. He says that this is the first time in history that a transformation is imminent without an alternative agenda available.
The right to non conformity must be protected. If you have no personal security, you have no freedom.
The need is to challenge the Utilitarian elite's ideology that everyone should have a job, because a job will make them happy. So, "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy", CBT, is being cooked up to make you employable, to make you think you are happy at a job.
He suggests that, to test this idea out, see if people want the CBT or the equivalent in cash.
Standing is very clear that a Basic Income will only work along with a voice for the people, and a redistribution of income. Otherwise they will lose the extra income tomorrow.
So, the key assets in Standing's 'tertiary society' are time and financial capital. In the industrial age it was factories and in the feudal age it was land.
In 403 B.C. the people of Athens were given grants to participate in government. Should a Basic income be attached to participation? To voting, or attending one political meeting a year? This goes away from the principle of non-conditionality; that a BI is provided without condition. But Standing thinks it could be made conditional without being made compulsory.
How is this? A conscientious objector from citizenship? Maybe some Libertarians will go for that.
Another thing that puzzles me about Standing is that he says there is no progressive agenda around. I thought the people of Venezuela and Brazil were putting together a fairly compelling one. The publi cin North America are not hearing about it.
Finally, about neo-Fascism. It is 'neo' because instead of a strong state, it wants a weak state. Of course, Wall street is funding these neo-fascist, Libertarian, tea bagger groups in the states. So, localism, which could and should be a basis for democracy, instead becomes a vehicle for these ying-yangs.
Standing says that globalization ended in 2008 with a global transformational crisis; a "functional income distribution" crisis.
I have been having a lot of trouble getting off my coke addiction. I have it whipped for awhile and then I fall off the wagon. So I was sitting in the side door steps to my apartment building gurgling down my latest fix and watching the rain come down.
Out comes Farshad and his entourage. I have written something about him already. He is the Iranian communist party member who claims to live in this building. He might be co-leasing or just living with somebody. I did not see him around for awhile, now he is in evidence again. And he is clearly waiting for the chick with the car to pick him up.
According to the housing company's posters, he is now one of two candidates in this "youth election" they are putting on. If it is two delegates per building, then he is acclaimed. I think that having some idiot who wants to play 'revolutionary hero' becoming the delegate would be even worse than having a company toadie.
I asked him when his next meeting is happening. He mentioned a couple he was planning, but had not put out posters for yet.
The chick with the wheels rolled out of the laneway, where she had been turning around. She yelled out the window at him not to start lighting a cigarette now, she wants to get going. He puts the cancer stick out and gets in the car. We both have our unhealthy addictions.
One black kid is left behind, one of these nervous, posing types. He tries to start up a conversation with me. I am cautious about revealing too much about myself. I have to make clear that I am not interested in starting up a debate about revolutionary theory, and I do not care which 'international' he thinks he is with.
He seems aware that I am more inclined toward Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and his idea of a 'fifth international'. I have concerns about people who want to appoint themselves as 'the revolutionary party'. They are the best enemies capitalism could have. They make a true mobilization of the public very hard because they are always trying to hijack every popular cause.
He circled around in the patch of dry bricks formed by the archway over the lane, spitting at every pass in the discussion. I mentioned that I was involved with OCAP for awhile. I started suggesting that what they were doing was not going anywhere, they could not just keep playing cat and mouse with the cops, and their great leader, John Clarke, seems to have something majorly wrong between the ears. I got the usual treatment given out to people who start doing that. I got called a police informer and drummed out.
Actually, 'police informer' did not stick well on me, because I had spent some time in jail on bogus charges. They brought in some piece of shit from the legal clinic mafia who had been spreading some sort of slander around about me. I have never heard the exact accusations. The Oh, Crap crowd did not allow me to hear what I was being accused of either. But this also caused some old time commies who liked things to be done by process, to drop out of OCAP or drop their funding and support.
But my friend with the very moist mouth did not approve of OCAP. He said they were all anarchists. This is strange, because among the OCAPers the biggest insult being thrown around was 'anarchist'. People who wanted to have discussions about anarchism were silenced. But some maniac who wanted to defend Stalin was given a hearing. Yeah, he was a pretty rough guy but he was up against all this reactionary opposition. That is the justification of every totalitarian.
He asked if I was a 'reformist'. I told him I did not like that sort of terminology. These Marxists throw it around like an epithet. The word 'reform' by itself means nothing. The question is, what exactly is getting reformed? The problem with the Marxists is that they think it is all going to happen in one big bang, and then everything will be fine. No, the transition to a socialist society is going to be a very protracted affair. It will probably still be going on when this twit is a senior citizen.
But his own ride arrived then. He decided he should shake my hand. Okay, shake a paw. Maybe I have sown some seeds of doubt in his mind, about the wisdom of taking orders from 'red commanders'.
If these people want to thrown 'reformer' at me I will throw 'vanguardist' back at them. There are plenty of terms for categorizing people. I do not like people who think they are part of the 'revolutionary vanguard'; they are smarter and tougher than everybody else and they are going to lead in overthrowing capitalism and then tell us all how to live.
That did not come to a good end in Russia after 1917. I have mentioned the people who think that Stalin was great and 1917 was a great year, and so let's relive it. Mister spittie at least was not one of these. But more will say, "well, a lot of things don't work the first time you try them." Actually, it has been tried quite a few times in history. It keeps turning out the same way.
And I am puzzled by the focus on the Russian revolution when another, even more instructive revolution happened at the same time; the Spartacist revolution in Germany. The German soldiers and workers threw out the Kaiser and then threw out the allied troops who came to occupy the country. Then they did not have a clue what to do next. They developed the Weimar republic with an unworkable constitution. They paid the war reparations that were intended to cripple their economy. They drifted into totalitarianism under the Nazi brand.
The only way to have a successful revolution is to have something to replace the existing order which most people agree with. It is this process that is now well along, especially in Latin America. But like every advance in the human condition, it will come late to Canada and then everyone will think we invented it.
At the core of the new order is participatory democracy; democratic government right down at the community level. The powers that be in Canada are already working to preempt that; this is what Toronto Housing's tenant participation plan is about, now with its 'youth caucus'. It is a caricature of participatory democratic government.
So, I am a Marxist. But I have no time for the nonsense that is called 'Marxism' these days. Old Karl would be disappointed with it, too. It is what he called 'vulgar socialism'; if we just seize power then everything will be fine.
One of these days I should write up a history of all these ideas, so that people understand before they get wrapped up in it. But not today.
The rain has stopped and the sun has come out. I step around all the spit and put the empty carbonated chemicals container in the garbage container, and go for a walk to enjoy the rain washed air and spring warmth.
In the park they have dumped the annual pile of leaf compost and people are already carrying it away to fertilize their gardens. This year they mixed a little manure in it and it is smelly and smoking. This is an annual project of city councilor Miss Pammy. It is in addition to all the other shit she lays on us.
Later that afternoon I helped Dan bring several wheel barrows full of the stuff to the flower gardens around the building. We also dropped it on the community garden where Dan and friends planted flowers in an abandoned strip of land.
Dan wants to do something about the strip of land in the front of the building that has been detracting from the appearance of the building since it opened. It seems the contractors just dumped some cheap back fill instead of soil and over the years it has set as hard as concrete. Nothing but weeds grow on it. Dan wants to get a rototiller to break it up and mix the compost into it. Then maybe the people in the units behind it will decide to take ownership and plants some petunias or potatoes or something.
There are plenty of empty or underused pieces of ground around here, but it is hard to get permission to use any of it for gardening. Dan is the man with the plan to create a garden in the park behind the building. The land is owned by TCHC, but for some reason the condo next door has a voice in what TCHC does with its property and the few mondo condo types who actually have a view of the park want to not want to see tomatoes and such growing there. This will be a circular layout which will look very artistic but will allow for individual plots. The exact configuration is still a secret, but Dan says that Miss Pammy loves it.
There will be no need to build fencing, which TCHC for some reason has this phobia about, but we can put a brick border around it. We may be able to get bricks when they tear up Sherbourne street, including the old paving bricks under the asphalt.
We have the solution for raccoons and other critters getting into the garden at night. There is a motion detector that sets off a hooter if it detects a motion going toward the children's garden back there. It scares raccoons. It also scares the drug dealer types who have tried to operate back there. It occasionally disturbs people's sleep but is an improvement over what I had to listen to all night at the previous TCHC building I lived in.
It looks fairly idyllic around my place, but it is still the inner city, with inner city shit going down. While me and Dan looked at where the garden would be, there was somebody rummaging in the dumpsters for tin cans. Dan wonders that these people always look so rough, and means rough in a dangerous sense. I do not think they usually started out looking that way. If they were really mean, they would just mug people. Considering all the inequality in this society, it amazes me that there is so little real violence.
We went and looked at where we might be able to create a wall garden next year. You just hook planters into the wall and you can go up twelve feet. You have to bring a ladder to do your gardening. Back behind the day care building it is angled perfectly to catch the sun.
All this has taken Dan years to get approved. It is almost impossible to get anything done unless the local councillor goes along with it. I said that this is why I work with Fair Vote to bring about a change to the whole ward heeler system in this country; at all levels of government. It is not until you try to do some simple thing like get a garden in, that you realize the destructiveness and futility of the present system.
I am unused to this physical work. I need to take a long soak in the tub and go to sleep. Good night.
tr
The Montreal gathering of BIEN Canada and U.S. Basic Income Guarantee has come and gone. We are now waiting for the tabled reports to be published, and for participant's impressions of the event.
Some of the titles of these reports give us cause for concern. The eternal problem with advocating a guaranteed income is all the fringe groups who want to tag onto it all these ideas they cannot sell, because they do not make sense, and which really have nothing to do with guaranteed incomes, but they keep on trying. In the process they discredit the concept of income guarantees. It might be a good time to start banging together some papers rebutting these ideas.
For example, what on earth is "The Alaska Model"? If they are talking about the Alaska Permanent Fund, what ever that is a model for, it is never going to be a model for income guarantees. You never want to base anything on revenues from resource extraction, because the markets for resources are always unstable. More importantly, have these people ever heard of the environment? We need to minimize exploitation of natural resources, not insure maximization by turning their use into revenue streams.
The crank tax schemes are generally based on the delusion that government and social programs can somehow be funded by some magical revenue source, without society having to take on the privileged and force them to pay taxes. I suspect that a large number of these idiots are being paid by wealthy interests to promote these ideas in every possible venue, to draw focus away from the real cause of revenue insufficiency; that the rich do not pay their taxes.
But there is one tax scheme being advocated for lately which is different. This is the Tobin tax, or Financial Transactions Tax (FTT), or as it is being hyped, "the Robin Hood Tax". The Robin Hood trope is definitely framing people's thinking in the right direction.
The idea of a tax on financial transfers was first proposed by the late professor James Tobin, who was also an early proponent of a guaranteed income. Anyone can see, by the kind of problems we have had lately with the 'hot money' boys doing their thing, the need for such a tax. It will not discourage legitimate financial transactions, such as somebody taking a loan or buying stocks, but it will make 'hot money' trading, especially through computer programs, unprofitable.
This will be a big step toward ending the rule of financial capitalism. That the political power of the financial capitalists is weakening is shown by the willingness of governments in economically developed countries to stand up to the financial interests. They really have no choice; it is either curb the bankers or face economic collapse. The Chinese, whose central bank is in control of the government instead of vice versa, are about to flatten the western economies unless the latter start putting money back into their real economy, meaning their productive capacity.
The governments of France and Germany especially are driving FTT. Other European governments are starting to come along. The European commission, the unelected appointees of the state governments of Europe, is normally a very conservative group, but it is being pushed toward FTT. The Japanese are in favor. The U.S. administration is starting to talk back to its banksters and is talking about the transfer tax. The Canadian Prime Minister disgraces our country by his fanatical resistance to the idea.
The main item on the agenda of the 'G-20' group will be the FTT. It will be meeting in Toronto in June, and the anarchist idiots are gearing up to throw things and break stuff, but they have no clue what goes on at these meetings. Prime Minister Harper will be the host of the event, but he is likely to be pushed into the corner as a consensus blocker.
How sad that we cannot have creative demonstrations in favor of the Tobin tax, like those mentioned in the previous issue of this newsletter at the European Commission's meeting. It is made impossible by the presence of idiots who have no idea of what a Tobin tax is, and couldn't care less. They just see it as another opportunity to get a mindless riot going.
So, people who would like to support the Tobin Tax are left with doing one of these electronic petitions or letter writing campaigns. You can go to http://atthetable2010.org/,NOT A LINK. However, as usual with anything in Canada, the poverty pimps have grabbed control over the issue, and will try to use it as a lead in to issues that have little interest for proponents of poverty elimination or financial reform. In other words, sign up for messages, but stay off Facebook, and avoid attempts to draw you into things which do not interest you.
Now, here is the upside and the downside of the Tobin tax. The people pushing it are saying it could raise a large amount of revenue for social purposes. Some are talking about 600 Billion U.S. dollars. There are various groups out there who would love to have a pool of cash like that to pay the salaries of their entourages.
I doubt that such a tax would raise such an amount of money. I suspect this is based on the current rate of financial flow, rather than what the rate would be with the tax in effect. I suspect that the rate of flow of financial transactions would drop very sharply, which is the real purpose of the FTT.
If it did raise some money, it should be given directly to the world's poorest, not to the poverty pimps behind entities like "make poverty history". However, administering something like that would require some kind of democratically controlled world government apparatus. The world's governments are not going to do that. What will happen to the revenues is that the individual states would pocket it and probably use it to pay down their debts.
The Robin Hood tax takes from the rich but whether it will get to the poor has yet to be seen. Too many merry men might want a cut of it. But it is a progressive tax, which is something very important. The rich pay it in much greater proportion to the middle-incomed and poor. Its purpose is to discourage an activity, not create a reason to keep it going.
Robin Hood will not fund a guaranteed income. None of the crank tax ideas like a tax on land or the air waves or a flat tax will either. A progressive tax on income will. A progressive tax on net wealth will work even better. But Robin's basic principle, that the rich pay, is critical. That is the only way an income guarantee will be funded.
At the last meeting of the St. Lawrence neighborhood association, I ran into one of the people who had been at the last meeting of the local 'cop watch' group. She had not heard anything more from them either, and said she was suspending judgment about them until she "had more information".
She also said that she did not think a "confrontational approach" was going to be useful, because the police are a "bureaucracy" and if you demand anything it is just going to "get their backs up". I said nothing back, it is usually useless to explain reality to such people. They think they are being sophisticated when they talk this way.
Police and other people in a bureaucracy, in other words those with positions of responsibility, should be expected to be adults. If they are the kind of people who become hostile when something that should not be going on is brought to their attention for action, then it is time their asses were booted out and their positions filled by responsible adults.
One other acquaintance of mine who was there did not think much of Toronto police, calling them "school yard bullies in uniform". But he said the St. Lawrence Neighborhood association did not have the police problems on their radar and did not think that day would be a good day to bring it up. They were electing some new executives that day and passing some by-law amendments, so it was a fairly boring time.
Two things about that. One is that I think "school Yard Bullies" is a bit trite for these jokers. No doubt most of them started out as play ground fuhrers. But there are solutions for those kinds, if people get over thinking that it is somehow their fault if they are victimized. When I was in high school I learned to just walk out of the class or out of the school until the school authorities insured that I was left alone.
It is not so easy to deal with police that way. Besides, they have guns and asps and other toys to play with now. But they are basically sub human. They are incapable of any useful work. In a free society they would be totally inadequate and would spend their lives in the margins or inside institutions. They thrive because they are in a dysfunctional society where narcissistic behavior confers survival advantage. They find ready employment as the enforcer arm of the psychopathocracy.
But the police harassment issue is not on SLNA's radar, despite the poster blitzes. This is not because they support the police. They have not been inviting people from dear old 51 division to their meetings for awhile. The last time I saw cops there it was Charlie Stern and some creepy female sergeant, just after he was supposedly rehabilitated and returned to 51 division.
They were not welcome, after the attack sow tried explaining to them how it was necessary to kick the shit out of people lying on the ground in order to insure that they were "subdued". "Well, look, you don't know if they might seem to be going along peacefully, but then start fighting with us. In a fight, like, there is a risk of injury to the cop. I might get my finger broken and be off work for six months at full pay."
I happened across Stern last summer when I was about some other business near the international traveller's hostel. When I passed in there were a couple of typical back pack tourists sitting on the sidewalk in front of the door, waiting for it to open. When I returned, Stern and two of his unter goons had them jacked up. I stood down the street and watched. These two were plenty bewildered about what they had done. They were getting written up for something. It does wonders for the tourism business, doesn't it?
But as for the 'cop watch', this all began a few weeks prior, when posters started popping up all over The Esplanade announcing a community meeting on police harassment. It featured a huge, hulking cop menacing a small, cringing figure.
It turned out that this was being organized by the Iranian communist who seems to live in my building. He was much in evidence during this time but I have not seen him lately. I learned that his name is Farhad. He has black, curly hair and tries to make himself look like a 'colored' person.
I spoke to him once. He is a typical indoctrinated true believer Trotskyite; a fast, trite, totally irrelevant answer to just about anything you could say about the philosophy of communism and current events. For example, Hugo Chavez is an example of how a revolution can be made through an electoral system, by getting the people onside first.
"Chavez paid the oil companies for the refineries he nationalized." The end.
"Okay, he paid them. So what?"
"The oil companies owe the Venezuelan people billions of dollars for ..." Etc, etc.
"Has somebody actually been keeping track of everything the U.S. owes Venezuela?"
"There should be no compromise with imperialism..." blah, blah.
"How about not giving them any excuse to attack?"
"The world wide resistance to imperialism is growing..." Zip, zoom! Off on another tack again. Soon I just walked away. I began ignoring him whenever I ran into him in the hall.
He makes me a bit uneasy, because I would prefer that some of these extremist networks not know where I live. From my experiences with OCAP, I have a very dim view of red commander types who want play revolutionary by getting other people into trouble. Usually, there are not there to help the people they get into trouble. Sometimes they express the idea that it is better if people sit in jail for months getting screwed around by the legal system, so that they learn how the system really works. But they always have some leftie lawyer to represent them, and some one to bail them out.
So, at this meeting about establishing a cop watch, I met one person Farhad may have gotten into trouble. Or more trouble than he was in already. It seems this kid was going down the stairwell in his building when he ran into some cops who demanded I.D. He said he did not have to give them anything, it is his building. They beat him fairly severely. He laid a complaint with the police. The cops started following him around, warning him to shut up about it.
What I told him was that the best deterrence to police harassment is to sue them. You have to learn how to do your own cases, because generally lawyers are useless. I told him how a few years ago I was a target of some serious harassment by some creeps, who had the police on their side, who were trying to force me out of Toronto or to suicide. The cops stopped bothering me after I forced a settlement of a couple of cases.
Of course, I did not tell him that after I won those two cases the word went out that the small claims courts were a gap in the cops protection system against law suits. The next two cases I brought against the police were met with so much obstruction that I decided to just leave them standing for awhile. I am about to restart them. I am now feeling much more energetic than I did a few years ago.
But the police have left me alone since then. I also pointed out that a couple of the assholes who have been slandering me were sitting in the room trying to pose as allies of people under police attack. They were Cathy Crowe and Beric German, two of the bigger hypocrites around.
I recall Beric was annoyed at me when I folded up a previous group, some years ago, which had been talking about creating something like a cop watch. I cancelled further meetings because it was obvious that it was just going to be a wailing wall to make people feel better. Nobody was interested in doing anything that could lead to the cops coming after them.
I recall Charlie Stern being specifically mentioned. In those Fantino days Stern was openly taking bribes from the local home owners to beat the shit out of the hookers along Sherbourne north from Dundas. Beric was very vocal that he did not want someone like Stern coming after him. Yet he was okay with getting other people to risk have Charlie Stern-like personages coming at them.
Farhad showed us a short movie about some neighborhood cop watches in the U.S. There, even some of the police support it. What he does not understand is that Canada has much fewer civil rights than the U.S. The U.S. was founded on a revolution against abusive colonial bureaucracy. Canada was founded by the abusive bureaucracy that got thrown out of the U.S.
The legal system of Canada is essentially a colonial garrison state system. Criminal trials have traditionally been like military drum heads; guilty because we say so and if you argue about it we are going to get you even harder. There is still great resistance to modernization from the remnants of the old Orange order and family compact.
In Toronto there is an elite which still rabidly holds onto the idea of government by police. Police should be able to do whatever they want. They are not there to keep order; in fact they are often quite hostile to the philosophy of policing that is applied in other countries, and which many Canadians think we have here, or wish we had here. Toronto cops are about "surveillance and control" of the population and have little interest in keeping the peace.
For example, two members of the inferior classes can get in a fight and kill each other and the cops are not interested. They will come along later and have the corpse hauled away. They only see a problem when a large group of people assemble, even if it is to play soccer in the park. Or, when someone steals something from somebody who matters.
The cops will not tolerate anyone interfering with them or challenging them in any way. That includes their nominal bosses, the police brass, most of the time. The Toronto police are full of factions, all having connections to factions within the old money establishment in Toronto. To get into the police, you need connections, not qualifications.
The only thing all these factions agree on is that they should have total impunity. They never accept any restriction on their power and keep looking for ways around it. For example, they have never accepted the courts telling them they cannot decide who gets held in jail until trial.
In Canada, I think there is a cop watch in Victoria, which is about as liberal as it gets in Canada. Even there they have some trouble although the courts have consistently backed up the cop watchers. They have posted some web videos of police behaviors there. But there will almost certainly be a very violent reaction if anyone tried to do that with Toronto cops.
So, the next meeting of the Esplanade cop watch was scheduled for two weeks, location to be announced. That first meeting was at the community center, but the cops quickly put the squeeze on the management to refuse to book rooms any more. So the next meeting was in one of the coops.
The big topic of meeting number two was what to do about this denial of meeting space. Some people wanted to just forget about it, others were adamant that the matter be pursued. I think it is important to pursue it, because that community center is built and run by the public wealth, and must be available to all the public, not just who the cops and other power tripping assholes approve of.
The kid who got beat up in the stairwell is still being bothered. He has found himself a legal aid lawyer now. I am dubious about lawyers. The problem is that they cannot confront a judge over his blatant bias the way someone can who is representing his or her self. It would be better if they just explained how to conduct a defense or suit, but instead they seem to want to take over the case completely. Every time I have been represented by a lawyer he or she has screwed me around.
The cops are following him, and approaching him whenever he leaves his own neighborhood. He has started carrying a recorder with him, but they tried to snatch it away from him. He is aware that it is not the police command that is the problem, but the police union.
There was discussion of what should be done about the police, whether complaining to the brass at 51 div. would do any good. The red commanders, of course, did not approve of that. Usually they think trying to sue the cops is "bourgeoisie" but these people were a bit more open minded than some of the OCAP people I recalled. They are under some harassment themselves.
I told the kid that police are super cowards, as soon as they encounter serious resistance they back right off. This was misunderstood because some people there were talking about getting a large gang together and confronting the cops. The kid did not agree with the idea of engaging the cops in combat, which was not my point. I do not think that was quite the point of the people with the "walk with a bigger crew" idea either.
Resistance has to be intelligent; meaning, don't take a knife to a gun fight. The point is, in Toronto the idea of a cop watch is beyond the resources of any neighborhood. It will take some serious organization. You would effectively need to create a paramilitary force just to protect the public from its 'protectors'. It would require a substantial investment in training and equipment. It would require a vetting of membership and weeding out of loose cannon, such as people who want to get somebody killed so the revolution has a martyr.
I know some instances where a mobilized citizenry has cleared out an abusive police service, but that requires grown ups. It requires people who know how to be free people. You will not find this in Toronto, except perhaps among some of the immigrant groups. This is a big reason why the Toronto police have been allowed to become so arrogant; this mentality hammered into the population by the education system, the media and generations of cultural conditioning that it is somehow improper to stand up for yourself or for others.
However, I have a funny feeling that now the leftie lawyers have got hold of it, we are never going to hear any more about Saint Lawrence cop watch. In a year or two there will be a settlement with a gag clause, and the police punks will go on doing their thing. Maybe Farhad the Iranian communist will disappear as well.
The Montreal forum on Basic Income Guarantee in North America is coming up fast. We hope some Toronto people can make it up there and give us a report about it. I know one person so far who is going.
I would love to have made it up there just to hear people like Karl Widerquist, Guy Standing, and Brazilian Senator Suplicy. But reality is that if I am going to keep on working I need to get my computer system modernized and get some money to get some stuff published. One of these years there will be a major Basic Income meeting in Toronto.
That would be good for Toronto, because it might convince more people here that the Basic Income idea is a real goal to aim for. Everybody in Toronto is so wrapped up in wheedling trivial concessions from the provincial government that they have no mind space left over for considering other approaches.
They cannot grasp that the social agencies are not allies of those concerned about impoverishment; you do not expect leadership in opposing government from entities which get their funding from that government. They are paid to assume leadership of opposition to punitive social policies, to oppose in ineffective ways.
But BIEN Canada steering committee will use the conference to hold its third meeting, after Dublin and Calgary, and on the agenda will be "BIEN Canada's plans for future meetings, publications, website development, organizational structure, and investigation of funding sources."
The critical point for BIENCA will be when it gets some serious funding and can employ some staff. I worry whether the present steering committee has the capacity to deal with the opportunists and operatives who will turn up.
But BIENCA is partly bullet proofed against cooptation by having a specific goal. The model to follow is Fair Vote Canada, which steadily gains ground against great efforts to bury the idea of voting reform, because it knows where it is going. The aim of a guaranteed income is also clearly defined.
The 'anti-poverty' movement has never gotten anywhere in Canada because it is too vague. Everybody is against poverty. Everyone from across the political spectrum will sign on to declarations against poverty, because they are meaningless. You have to be for something, not against.
The natural allies of the movement for a citizen's income are;
As for the enemies of such a movement, there are the obvious ones; those who benefit from poverty. But the enemy that anti-poverty crusaders never seem to see are the social agencies. This is counter intuitive to people who have no experience of poverty themselves, but if you ask people who live in poverty, the thing they hate most are social workers. Mostly, these are the social police; their job is to make sure that the poor never get a chance to manage their own lives.
The aim of Citizen's Income is implicit in its name; to allow every one to be a citizen, to have control over his or her own life. The social workers cannot tolerate that; the poor are deficient people who need to be acted on in various ways to 'improve' their condition.
What groups like CIT need to keep working on is try pry more people away from the "reduce poverty" types of false flags. Part of my efforts in that regard is the poster on the opposite page. It explains the issue with the present 'anti-poverty' movement very well. They are assuming to speak for other people, in effect being poverty pimps, creating a job for themselves out of other people's miserable condition.
There can be no 'voice of poverty'. The point of poverty is to keep people voiceless. Poverty cannot be accepted as a normal or natural condition. People who are in it must be freed form it by the advocacy of people who do not want be at risk of poverty themselves, because once they are in that situation they are basically gone. Once there they can only try to escape and escape is getting harder all the time.
A right is an absolute, and these assholes presuming to mediate with government for the relief of poverty are in effect presuming to negotiate away other people's rights. Imagine how someone in poverty feels about the "lets set a goal of reducing poverty by 25% in 5 years" crowd.
If they were not too busy trying to cope a day at a time they would tell these people exactly where to go. They want their rights, nothing less than their rights, right now!
I am preparing a small web page in response to all the idiots who want to be my 'facebook friend'. You know the old saying, better a wise enemy than a foolish friend, and a facebook friend is the worst kind of fool. I have enemies, too. If you look at some of my web pages, you will know why.
But I started working on this after hearing the experience of a friend of mine, I mean a real world friend, and his Facebook page connected to his own web site. I cannot say too much about it without violating his privacy and giving aid and comfort to his enemies. He is being targeted for cyber bullying.
Well, I advised him against setting up the facebook that way. They could see who all his 'friends' are and began contacting them to spread slander. A real friend in my circle of friends is someone, who on hearing this sort of garbage, will immediately inform the target of the slander of the identity of the slanderer and the substance of the slander, and stand ready to cooperate in any court case or police investigation. In these sordid times there are not many people like that.
So my circle of friends is small and I prefer it that way. We communicate by e-mail and telephone. If you are a real citizen activist and not a narcissist or codependant, your circle of friends is small and your circle of enemies is large. This is why facebook will not be a conduit for any real political activism or organizing. It is for the narcissists and the social police.
Flakebook is something cooked up by U.S. intelligence agencies as an easier way of maintaining surveillance over the general population. As a sideline, they can sell all this info to favored businesses. It does not make social networking any easier at all. But everybody thinks they have to be on it because everybody else is; all the cool people are there.
Flakebook is part of a campaign to break up the threat of an 'internet commons' by getting everyone to take their net functions off their own private servers and put it on a server somewhere else. Even businesses are putting all their documents and accounts into the 'cloud'; allowing net firms to do their record keeping and accounting for them.
It is not difficult to maintain control over your own web site. People ten years ago knew how to do this. Now for some reason a generation of teenagers haven't got a clue. They all have their e-mail addresses on Yahoo or Google. They do not know how to set up their own web site, domain, and e-mail address.
You can see what I have done using basic HTML code. It costs maybe ten dollars a month for a good web host, who should be able to provide you with a domain, your own e-mail accounts, a hundred of them if you want, and the software to set up a blog or even a discussion board.
Facebook does nothing that is not available in any such web hosting package. They only require a little time and energy to set up. You can download software that does all the coding for you if you don't want to learn the tricks of web spinning.
In fact, if you want the world to know more about your wonderful self, blogging software has developed to a point where you can use it as a complete personal web site. It does everything Flakebook does.
I am not an expert on using face book. About all I know is that even if I have only had it a few minutes, it is impossible to get rid of the facebook page. It keeps coming back to haunt you. There is a complicated procedure to follow to get out of the facebook entanglement, though if you can master that I don't know why you could not set up a blog or even a chat group. Then you have to wait thirty days, without looking at any other facebook page, before it finally leaves you alone. But then you have to specially request the information already up there be deleted.
So it is a good thing I set up a largely fake facebook. I recommend creating a new e-mail address in order to open a fakebook, which you can discard along with the fakebook. If you have a domain name, you can set up hundreds of web identities for yourself, as many targets of abuse have discovered.
As I said, facebook does not make social networking or political mobilization easier at all. People are marvelling at the speed with which the 'No to Prorogation' group built up on facebook. But I have not heard much of them lately. Their facebook face never really said much about what would happen after parliament came back. It never had much information about anything.
Almost two years ago the "yes to coalition government" group flashed up as suddenly and dissapeared as suddenly. Before that were the 'strategic voting' sites. They were based on simple web sites, not facebook. I think the people who developed a new interest in politics through those endeavors, went into the voting reform movement.
Yes, facebook is free, but it comes at a cost. People who build a 'cause' web site often run out of bandwidth and have to raise some money. But if you have 10 000 people visiting your site and subbed into your e-mail list serve, you should be able to glean a little spare change to pay the service provider. That facebook makes it so easy is part of its invidiousness.
The big problem with organizing anything political on face book is that everyone finds out exactly who is involved. As my friend found out, it can be a very powerful platform for disruption and for isolating people; relational bullying, in other words. If you think 'big brother ' is not watching and taking notes, you are the kind of fool who would start nattering about 'conspiracy theories' in response to what I just said.
There is nothing theoretical about it. Readily available on the net are leaked documents from high in the American government, describing the techniques of disorganizing the opposition using the internet and facebook. The technical term is "cognitive infiltration". A more vulgar term for cognitive infiltrators is 'trolls'.
Do you think all these assholes are just people with nothing better to do with their time? It is well documented that various well funded right wing groups employ people to spend their days monitoring internet groups of all kinds, and often intervening in them with various aims. Facebook is made for this kind of activity.
This is because, as I said at the beginning, facebook was made by the American Intelligence system. Here is a link to a very good web site with a lot of good information, including some about facebook. Paste it to your browser, I do not do links that I do not know I will be able to monitor closely. All links eventually go dead. I cannot check 1000 links every week. I cannot yet afford the software that does this automatically. It is; http://brasschecktv.com/page/603.html
Subscribe to brasscheck's mail list.
The video traces out the DNA of face book. It should not be surprising to any reasonably intelligent and prudent person. The story is that a group of egghead students at Harvard university invented it for other students of Harvard to keep in touch with each other. But this sounds more like a test marketing of something that was already under development.
Suddenly these people got bought up by Peter Theil, who also started PayPal, another internet business I dearly love, and who is connected to right wing establishment think tanks. Then he got $12 million in venture funding from a group called Accel, which is a Branch of In-Q-tel, which is funded by the C.I.A. to provide startup capital for businesses the spooks want to incubate.
The head of Accel, James Breyer, also works with BBN technologies, which is concerned with developing "data mining" technologies for the U.S. department of defense. BBN has been around for awhile and played a major role in the development of the internet. It also works with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, (DARPA). A branch of DARPA is the "Information Awareness Office" which was exposed in 2002 as having a plan "to gather as much information as possible on everyone in a central location for perusal by the U.S. government". There is a Dr. Anita Jones who oversaw DARPA while working for the Department of defense, then worked at In-Q-tel, and then at BBN.
The conclusion of this video is that facebook should be made to adopt a rule that "what is on the facebook stays on the facebook". This is the old demand that "what is on the internet stays on the internet." There is no way to enforce this rule except to turn the whole internet into a public utility.
Some people will immediately chime in that this would make government surveillance over the net even harder to control. How could it be any more out of control than it is now, in the hands of the military-industrial-intelligence complex? This is libertarian thinking, which is not a hostility to government, but to democracy.
The way to net democracy is to have a real democracy first. It is not going to be the other way around.
So, if you have any net group that does anything political, take measures to keep the membership as confidential as possible. Do not confide over the net with anyone you have not met in person. Do not give out your portrait over the net. Do not let your bank information go over the net except to and from your own bank. And..., anyone brainless enough to put their home address on their facebook, I really don't know.....
When confronted with any new kind of software, hardware, networking service, or whatever, ask yourself if it is something you can do anyway, without either having to buy something new or give up your privacy.
To conclude; the power of the net as an organizing tool for a true democracy is in its anonymity. That is what facebook was invented to try to break down.
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I have run into Auntie the panhandler a couple of times lately, in her usual spot. I had not seen her for awhile and I thought she had either found someplace better to live or something bad had happened to her. No, she just preferred to work outside all summer. She went back inside the subway station when it got cold.
I could not chat long but it seems the people who were harassing her last year have found something better to do. She still has a room but no cooking facilities. She has to eat out. So she has to pan handle. They keep trying to move her out into 905 country and she is resisting that.
There are about the same number of pan handlers around, it seems. You would think there would be many more since the economic slowdown. The people at the Woodbine food bank say that business is down considerably and they do not know why. They suspect that people are just moving out of the neighborhood or out of Toronto when they lose their jobs.
Mayor Miller's idea of finding homes for the homeless is futile in many ways. Anything you do for the homeless except deal with the real causes will increase the problem. This is mostly because it lets the people causing the problem of the hook. It is people in provincial and federal governments who will not insure everyone an adequate income, and keep cutting people off or denying E.I. and social assistance. And refusing to get serious about building housing.
No, the latter is part of the city's fault, too. You still have a housing department that for some reason hates the idea of cooperatives, or any non profit housing society. They want to control all housing and when they control it it is guaranteed to be really bad housing.
That reminds me, I ran into some old acquaintances from Regent Park when I was walking down Parliament the other day. She is still living there. They have not torn her place down yet but it seems they will soon.
She does not think much will really improve in Regent. There is now market rent housing mixed with rent geared to income housing, but they are in separate buildings. She thinks there are going to be two classes. We do not know yet, because the first market rent people have not moved in.
But I think we have seen this played out before in Toronto, with St. Jamestown. It was supposed to be a mixed community but the well to do gradually abandoned the place. Some say that the housing social engineering fanatics deliberately drove them out with "block busting" tactics in order to get all the units for social agency "clients".
I do not believe that the yuppies are going to coexist with the desperately poor for long. Even in the building I am in, there are getting to be fewer middle class people. We at least have a functioning tenant representation system down here, but it still takes enormous pressure to get rid of anti-social tenants.
Many of the people here now came from Regent park. Most eventually adjusted to life here, and want to stay. The rest left. But crime has been increasing around here gradually. Unless people first of all have the means to live decently, no kind of housing is going to work.
My friend told me that a lot of people who lived in other TCHC buildings, like mine, while construction was happening still want to move back to Regent park.
I attended the shortest meeting I have ever seen a couple of weeks ago. The public part of it lasted three minutes. It was the latest Tenant Defense Fund Subcommittee, alias the fund FMTA committee. It is only meeting twice a year and there has been a long running campaign to keep me from hearing about when they are taking place.
The chair of this nonsense is councillor Perruzza. Last year he tried to get the city security to eject me when I made loud and clear that I wanted to be informed of these meetings. Some other councillors convinced him that it would not be a good idea.
The last meeting was in the fall and I did not hear about that either. I had to hear of this one from a compadre of mine. Before the meeting I gave the new secretary for this committee a good going over about this. She took my contact information and swore that she would send me advance notice of all meetings. I hope I made a sufficient impression on her.
The chair of the meeting, old Mr. P., well known as one of the crazier councillors on council, which is saying a lot, failed to put in an appearance. The hapless secretary had to hoof it down the hallway to find another committee member and get her in the room so they could have a quorum.
All they had to decide was to hold an in camera session about some top secret matter. I wonder if it had something to do with the missing half a million smackers over the past ten years. Consult the www.torontotenants.ca site about that. Paste it to your browser. I do not use links on these pages.
It is interesting that there has been a big surge in traffic to that site during March. It seems that there has been some interest in FMTA on the landlord's discussion boards. These are the small landlords. The large slumlords are, of course, sanguine about FMTA. They set it up as their watch dog against political activity by the renter class in Toronto.
With serious change in government in Toronto looming, it might be that FMTA's time is up. We really need some budget cutters in Toronto, to cut out all the nonsense. We have some running in the mayoral elections.
I do not believe that so called "progressives" are of any help to impoverished people at all. These are the authoritarian left, the paternalists, exemplified by the NDP and the social agencies. We need government services to be delivered by government again, and overseen by a community level of government.
I am going to restart my law suit with FMT fairly soonly. I am considering the idea of making the city a defendant in the law suit. That will be fun. I can start it at small claims court, but it is a certainty that it will get to divisional court. I am getting good at filing divisional court stuff.
But I think this will be the last meeting of the TDSC for this council term.
Phil Brown has suddenly become more respectful of me. He is the head of the city housing department which is closely in league with the Toronto Community Housing mafia. He always attends these meetings. In the past, when I have talked to him he has stared past me. This time he actually listened to what I was asking him outside the committee room. It might have something to do with his being up on my now much visited web site about all this crap, with his picture in the "rogues gallery".
I asked him why it is that I hear anyone trying to set up a new housing coop is being promised a very hard time from the city housing department. He insisted that he has no objection at all to people creating new housing cooperatives or cohousing projects. I asked him why all these independent groups are having so much trouble getting new housing projects going, even with all this federal money available. He slid off that. He insisted he just adores all kinds of new housing initiatives.
And that was it for hanging around city hall, for the day. I do not have much other reason to go there. Maybe duck in to take a piss on my way from Osgoode hall to the subway at Eaton center.
What the city really needs badly is a reform based civic political party. That is a topic for another blogging. I have to get busy now on my university essay and finals. I won't be blogging any more for about a month.
I am interested in Venezuela these days. Last week I went to one of these forums put on by earnest leftie student types and tagged onto by some cynical super lefts to take part of the credit and justify their continued funding. The subject was the "Bolivarian" revolution in Venezuela.
Hugo Chavez has been running Venezuela for eleven years now, surviving everything the final empire can do to get rid of him. What interests me in particular is the system of local councils he is setting up as an application of direct democracy. What frustrated me was that there was not more information in this event about how these councils worked.
I also know something about the participatory budgeting system of Porto Allegre, Brazil. I had this question for a Porto Allegran who happened through Toronto a couple of years back; how do these councils operate without every bullshit political or criminal network trying to hijack it for their own purposes. His answer was; "It doesn't happen"
I could not believe that. Every time I have seen a meeting of concerned citizens about some planning issue, especially the need of the city to get out from under the Ontario Municipal Board OMB, somebody from the developer lobby is there trying to neutralize it. Usually he or she is a very good looking, well spoken individual who tries very hard to be likeable, and to make anybody who challenges he/she/it into the bad guys. But there are always has some rather large and thuggish individuals in the back ground.
The only Toronto group I have seen which seems able to see these kind of operators off is the St. Lawrence community association. But the developers seem to be getting good at getting around them.
Any time anyone in Toronto tries to set up any sort of political action group for any social cause, the super left anarchist or other networks are right in there trying to take it over. Very oddly, they often seem to have the overly sympathetic ear of the police if someone tried to heave their ass out of the venue. Most people just fold up whenever these types turn up, and the few who try to stand up to them end up isolated and defeated, and made to look like the bad guys.
The big exception I know of to this has been the anti racist action group, although I have not heard much of them lately. The super lefts packed one of their board meetings and pushed them out of their own organization, grabbing their bank account. So the real ARA people just went off and held their own meeting, and reinitialized ARA. They told the super commies to go fuck themselves. It seems the supercommies were astounded by this. So they just gave up and found some other group to raid.
When they got into a work shop session about the local councils, I got to ask somebody from Venezuela and somebody who had been living there for the last year, how these councils were able to function. It seems there is really a lot of trouble with various opportunistic groups trying to take over the local councils.
They admit that Venezuela has traditionally been a very paternal and clientelistic society, and some people on these councils try to recreate these clientelistic relations. Sometimes the local tough guy or criminal gang takes over. But if there is somebody willing to stand up to these sorts of people, he is not left hanging in the wind. There is support from the Bolivarian movement to back him. Or her.
One problem has been that the right wing opposition to Chavezism sets up their own neighborhood councils in their swanky little enclaves and makes them centers of opposition. They demand the same subsidies that the councils in poor neighborhoods get.
Another problem they talked about a lot was orthodox lefties. What is going on is completely against the old "third international" orthodoxy, that "The Party" comes into power after an armed struggle and imposes socialism from above. That a revolutionary party can take power through an election by getting the support of the proletariat just does not happen. The proles are not supposed to know what is good for them, they are supposed to be molded into perfect little socialists by the party and its teachings after the revolution.
So, Chavez and his "Bolivariansim" is the wrong model and it has to be shut down. The super commies will even make alliances with reactionaries and imperial agents to bring down the "reformers". They are doing this in Venezuela and they have done it elsewhere, notably in Nicaragua during the first Sandinista government. I have heard that these local planning councils in Brazil, and local councils in places like Argentina, have a lot of trouble with super lefts trying to take them over or disrupt them.
What my Venezuelans had to say about the difficulty with any kind of local community organization in Canada is that the people have to care. If they just do not give a damn, or think someone else should take care of it for them, it will not work.
So, the next question is, why are Venezuelans so keen and Canadians so apathetic? Is it something to do with the climate? Are Canadians less worthy people? I did not have the time to get into a more detailed discussion with them. That would have been worth a workshop in itself. I have my own ideas about it.
The thing is, the Venezuelan revolution has given people some space in which to be active. This seems like a "chicken or the egg" kind of thing. Or as Orwell put it, until people become conscious they cannot rebel, and until they rebel they cannot become conscious.
It seems that what Chavez did was to make people conscious, but how did he survive long enough to do it? And will he eventually get out of the way and let the people start to take things on for themselves when they are ready?
I do not think that in Toronto it is that people do not care. First, they are kept too busy trying to survive to do more than that. Second, they are not mentally equipped to be able to act. The thing that wrecks people more than anything else is the idea that they are responsible for everybody else's feelings. Oh, dear, somebody does not like what I am doing. It is like they think they have to have permission to even breathe.
People from other countries do not have that timorousness. They tend to be the leaders of political groupings in Toronto. But the next generation, who have been educated in Canada, also have this timorousness. I think I do not have it because I was so ill as a kid that education and acculturation was largely lost on me.
I really do think that a lot of the Canadian so called-apathy is just the way people are educated and acculturated. If there is a problem it is your fault, your responsibility. People let themselves be lead into such guilt trips. Somehow this is not absorbed to the same degree by people educated in other cultures. It really is something to do with Canada.
What is it about the history of Canada that leads to this kind of culture? There is the often cited fact that there was a government here before there were any people. The country was formed, especially here at the center, by British military bureaucrats who thought the American revolution happened because the colonies were given too much control over their own affairs. They were determined that it would not happen in Canada. The ruts they set have never been broken out of.
But the real question is how to break that kind of mentality? I do not see how until somebody with the right understanding can achieve power and set out to empower the population. That is probably easier to do in Venezuela than in Canada. There the people know that there are class systems to societies and they know where they fit into it. They know what a democracy is and that they do not have one.
In Canada, people tend to believe the brain block rammed into their heads. Thus they think the increasing social evils around them are an anomaly and all that is needed is to get rid of some bad people, vote them out, and return to some ideal state that was supposed to exist from just before they came along.
The worst thing of all, is Canadians tend to be rationalists. They think that there is 'reason'. All problems will be solved if people can just 'be reasonable'. The question, of course, is reasonable according to whose reasons? The 'reasonable' people are ones who can be lead into just about anything, you just have to decide what is 'reasonable' for them. The Venezuelans are solving their problems by deciding to be unreasonable. Instead they are sensible, meaning that they use sense. Not 'common sense' but good sense. They do not let anyone sell them anything.
But to sum up, it has to be more complicated than just 'caring', as the Venezuelans said to me. The social control was less intense to begin with in Venezuela than in Canada. The Venezuelan elite grew accustomed to control by the gun and bothered much less with the socio-psychological controls that are so developed in Canada. The Canadian cult of 'reasonableness' is a very powerful mechanism of social control and disempowerment.
Almost every advance in the human condition has come to Canada one or two generations after it has occurred in other wealthy countries. The left in many other countries are starting to clue into what is going on in Venezuela. It is starting to imitated. People in many localities are demanding more local and direct democracy. Eventually, this will filter through the brain fog of rationalism into Canada. It will take awhile.
However, locally based direct democracy is not without its problems. Sometimes the local councils are not so good at carrying things out. One presenter gave the example of a community that decided to do something about trash disposal. So they created a big concrete enclosed space where everybody was to take their garbage. However, they never figured out how the trash was supposed to be taken from the trash space to wherever trash ultimately gets taken to in Caracas. It got pretty smelly. No doubt this will eventually inspire them to some sort of solution.
I was at a forum last week where voting reform was discussed. This is a slightly different kind of politics forum from what I usually attend. This was on the forty somethingth floor of a downtown office tower. I somehow got into this because I could show I was a part time University student, otherwise they would have charged me fifty bucks. Larry Gordon was there from Fair Vote and surprised to see me there.
This was The Suits getting together to discuss politics. It was some business group that normally gets together weekly to discuss Canadians foreign policy, presumably as it effects their overseas business operations. But this night they wanted to know how developing a proportional representation voting system might improve Canada's ability to develop coherent foreign policies.
Well, I could answer that pretty well. It would make Canada's foreign policy more consistent and less aligned to the Americans. We would not have conservatives getting into office and pissing on everything liberals have done and trying to be yankier than the yankees. We would not have Liberals who are eager to sell out Canada's economic interests in exchange for political leverage with foreign countries.
The thing that stuck out for me was Don Newman arguing for runoff voting like in France. Newman used to be a talking head at some broadcasting company, back when I owned a TV. He is the typical Liberal establishmentarian. He ran out the usual arguments in favor of the present system first, leads to political instability, Israel and Italy, etc.
I got up and told him that it was time the establishment came up with some new arguments against Proportional Presentation, the old ones are getting a bit stale. Italy has gone away from PR (1993), tried single member constituencies for awhile, found that corruption and instability increased further, and returned to PR (2005).
As for Israel's parliament, well; have you ever heard the old joke, often told by the jews themselves, about how you get two jews arguing and you will end up with three opinions?
But the killer argument for PR remains; why does the whole world use it? Almost every country on earth, outside the English speaking world, and a couple within it, use some form of PR. Countries that emerge from tyranny and set up democratic constitutions almost invariably adopt PR. Countries that have a PR system rarely revert back to single member constituencies.
But Newman floated the idea of France and its runoff system. In this system there is a primary election, then if no candidate has a majority, there is a runoff between the top two candidates. I hear that some nimbuses in the Liberal party want to establish a runoff system. This is a way to guarantee perpetual Liberal majorities and will never be tolerated by the other parties. It shows how out of touch the Liberal establishment is with reality.
I did a little thought experiment a while back. I looked at fifty randomly chosen results from the last federal election, and asked what the result would have been if they had been held under a runoff system. I assumed that a Conservative would vote for Liberals as a second choice but never for the NDP. I assumed that a Deeper would vote for a Liberal as second choice, but never a conservative. The Liberal would almost always be the second place in the primary vote. This means that unless the Conservative or NDP candidate won an outright majority, the Liberal has to win.
But now, to the case of France. Prior to 1958, France had a PR system for a long time. They acquired it gradually during the third republic, which began in 1870. The power of the French legislative was still balanced by the Presidency. The third republic fell to the Nazi invasion of 1940. After the liberation of France in 1944, General DeGaulle tried to impose a strong presidential system but the public swept that aside and established the fourth republic with a strong PR based legislature and a president with very limited authority.
The criticism of this was that it was unstable and indecisive. Yet it managed to accomplish a lot in the short time it was in existence. It oversaw the reconstruction of France after the war, it laid the foundations for the common market which became the European Community, and it produced a better social system and a better system of economic regulation than had existed.
It was said that it did not deal decisively with the colonial wars France got into after the occupation, in Algeria and Indochina. This meant it did not deal with them in a way the military and economic elites liked. There was an army revolt in Algeria in 1958 over the idea of giving some civil rights to the native Algerians. DeGaulle used this to stage a cunning kind of coup in which he posed as the person who could get the military back under control.
He used the fear of the army rebels to convince the public to approve a constitution he had designed, in a referendum. It included a strong president with control over the army and foreign affairs, and a legislature using a runoff system. There was a Senate which was chosen by an electoral college appointed by local governments, which tend to be very conservative in France. All in all, a very undemocratic system.
After ten years, that was not enough for DeGaulle and he held another referendum to increase the power of the Presidency further. The public finally stood up to him, he lost, and he had to resign.
In 1986 public pressure forced the adoption of PR in legislative elections again. The right wing won the subsequent elections but their control collapsed in 1988, requiring a new election, which the socialists won. The socialists decided that PR favored the right wing, and changed the system back to runoffs over considerable public opposition.
There is still great public pressure for a change away from runoffs in France. There is a malaise in France similar to that in Canada, where the public is alienated from a political elite which is out of touch. There is increasing unrest among immigrants from France's former colonies who are unable to integrate into French society. Fewer people vote all the time and fringe parties are gaining in strength.
A serious flaw in the runoff system is becoming apparent. If there are many candidates in the primary elections, an extremist or crook could get into the runoff with as little as 17% of the vote. That is what happened in 1995, when many French were disgusted with having to choose between a "crook and a fascist" in the runoff. The crook won.
I hung around for a little while after this forum and snagged some hors d'oeuvres at this reception. They made me thirsty. I asked the bartender for water. He handed me something that tasted salty and awful. I asked him what it was and he said "Perrier water". I suggested tap water might be a better idea. I do not know how people can drink that Perrier stuff; it makes you even thirstier.
There was quite a view from the top of this building. I could see right down almost to my apartment. But I decided I should head back there; from the brief attempts at small talk, it was clear these were not my kind of people.
Now, here are my predictions; Iggy and Jack Flash are going to have to force an election this year. They will face revolts in their parties if they do not; their membership is fed up with them letting Harper win. The voting results will be about the same as before. But afterwards, the knives will be out for Iggy. He either makes an alliance with the deepers or else Bob Rae and friends will muscle him out of the way just as Stephan Dion was pushed aside.
Then they will go on for awhile like that. Iggy is really almost as right wing as Harper on most issues, and that will soon became obvious. He will not be able to cooperate with the deepers or the left wing of his party for long. The coalition will collapse or else Bob Rae will be Liberal leader. If there is a collapse there will be another election and Bob Rae will soon after be leader of the Liberals. The voting will again have the same effective result. One way or another, Rae days will arrive. Then things will start getting interesting.
Eventually they are going to figure out that they are going to have a permanent coalition whether they want it or not. They can forget about ever having majority power again. The only way they can make their coalition work is if they have a PR system and can be reasonably sure of the result of the next election. They can stop maneuvering for advantage in the next vote.
But once they get that problem solved they will run into the problem the French had with the fourth republic. You really do need a presidential type figure with enough power to order an election or to force parties to cooperate. This figure cannot be appointed by the parliament he or she is supposed to be regulating.
We need to replace the governor general with an elected president. But this will require a constitutional amendment which is supposed to be impossible in Canada; you cannot get the provinces to agree. But is it not strange that in France and almost everywhere else, constitutional changes are decided by referendae?
Here is the underlying problem with Canada, a constitutional system without a mechanism for amendment. This is the real problem that voting reform people need to be focussed on. I do not think that changing the voting system by itself will solve much. The principle of constitutional amendment by citizen assembly and referendum is what needs to be established.
I do not think the people at this forum would like that idea much. Change is supposed to be decided in office towers high above the streets. That could be why the discussion never got around to processes for changing the voting system.
What is really important is the process, more than the final result.
Well, I have a few events to tell you about. A theme underlying all these accounts is the stupidity of people who want to "do something" about social issues such as poverty and lack of democracy, but have no idea of the realities of "doing something".
I really cannot figure it out, but it is a quite effective means of social control. Everyone just lets the assholes take control, and keep trying to "work with them" when there is nothing there to work with. If you are ever going to achieve anything, first you have to be prepared to repulse the assholes, or else go away from them and work with people who can be worked with.
Of course it is very hard for people of some quality to get together because the assholes always have the bases covered. They always seem to "get there" first and make the rules, and decide who can be "in". Everyone lets them get away with it and then they cannot understand why nothing ever goes anywhere.
A couple of weeks ago I was at a meeting set up by the social planning council to talk about the upcoming city budget. Anne Fitzpatrick and Judy Rebick were the main speakers. Judy has been a fan of the "Porto Allegre movement" for awhile. She has been to all the social forums. But I have never seen Astroturf Annie get into this stuff before.
The Porto Allegre movement is a spreading world wide movement for participatory local government, based on a model worked out in Porto Allegre Brazil, during the 1990s. It has worked so well that even when conservatives got back into power in that city, they did not dare to dismantle it.
What it is about is the public actually having control over the city budget. There are meetings in every ward of the city, delegations are selected to several "theme" committees, such as schools, roads, etc., and to a central council. The key is that everybody participates who wants to. About 5% of the population gets involved, a rate similar to the community councils in Cuba or Venezuela, or in the old Yugoslavia.
Then they draw up the city's budgets. They decide priorities based on compromise between different community interests. They do not have professional politicians trying to create conflicts between different geographic areas and population groups. Everything I read or hear about this system, now in use in several cities around the world, emphasizes how well it works. I can scarcely believe it. Don't they have endless trouble with people trying to take over the committees; vested interests trying to stack them, political groups trying to infiltrate them?
I have come to believe that this problem with Canadians, especially in Toronto, is largely a cultural thing. People in Toronto, which tends to sets the tone of the rest of the country, are terrified of taking a stand, terrified that somebody might not like them. There is a horrible phobia about conflict, which creates a paradise for bullies. Everybody has bought into the lie of the narcissists, that they are responsible for everyone else's feelings. "If there is a problem, it is your fault".
But back to the budget get together. Judy came up to me and said hello. Normally she is very cool towards me. I asked why she was suddenly more friendly. She said something like, she could be less friendly in future. Yep. Fine. I have not put her into the cause pimps registry, as some people have advised, but I do not trust her.
A bit later, she said something implying that her job as a professor at Ryerson may be in jeopardy.
Anne Fitzpatrick makes me puke. It is not that she was instrumental in getting me railroaded, falsely arrested, and jailed for five weeks which we were both on the board of FMTA. She was illegally on the board because she was a home owner. I have heard so much crap about her.
Basically she is the godmother of the man hating lesbian network that is so helpful to group participation in Toronto. She does not like "underclass people". As a social worker around Regent park for the Children's Aid Society she was feared as the "child snatcher". She is responsible for many children being seized for no good reason, just that their parents were poor.
Now she wants to be part of the "lets have participatory budgeting" crowd, along with Judy Rebick. They did have some of the right things to say, like that there is something wrong with the whole process of forming budgets. The public is excluded form the process, except as another lobby group along with corporations. The public should be the process; that is what a democracy is.
But they are promoting this idea to the social agency types. Why? The only thing these people are ever interested in is getting their funding for another year. That is the first reason why I decided not to bother attending the meeting of the more mainstream faction of the social planning council, explaining the budget for this year. If you want to create a movement for a public, participatory budget process you talk to the public. You do not talk to the jokers with an interest in the status quo, or an interest in not rocking the boat and jeopardizing their funding. You try to reach the people who are turned off by the bullshit but would rally to a cause like this if they had the opportunity.
Participating in a participatory democracy movement. Just as long as they follow Judy and Annie, they can participate. That is what these two do not seem to get; it is the same problem as with the old fight against amalgamation of the city a decade ago. You can't talk about fighting for democracy and then tell everyone that we own the program and everybody must follow us. That is what I told them when they offered a "line up at the mike and make a 'question'".
I said that I am fully aware of the participatory democracy concept, in fact from even before the amalgamation fight. I have observed attempts by the public to regain some control over the city and the same thing keeps happening. You have obnoxious people of the kind who make participation disagreeable and dangerous, take control, and it goes nowhere. So, what is to be done to make participation safe?
As soon as I finished, I immediately turned and sat down. I knew I was not going to get an answer. Most of the dopes present had no idea what I was talking about. But I am quite sure Annie knew exactly who I was talking about. And probably Judy did too.
I got myself registered for the event a few days later where the social planning council, the umbrella group for local social agencies, would dissect the budget in detail, but I lost interest when the city suddenly announced that the budget was balanced. They suddenly found $100 million from someplace. It seems like the public was not buying the usual panic that the city is going broke, and might start demanding spending cuts in the wrong places, like politicians pet projects. So the whole show was cancelled and they just announced the budget, with no real public input. And I slept in on social planning council's budget ballyhoo day.
But the whole thing gives further support to the idea of participatory democracy. There once was a libertarian economist called Niskanen who came up with a theory about bureaucracies. Heads of bureaucracies would maximize the delivery of public services at the limit of the public capacity to pay for the services. Only the key bureaucrats know the real cost of delivering the services, so they can set aside hidden funds to give themselves and their allies secret rewards and to give themselves flexibility when faced with uncooperative politicians who might want to curb or control their activities.
What Niskanen can't seem to get is that the real question is why this is preferable to having a private bureaucracy doing essentially the same thing. We can see the behavior of military contractors who took over parts of the American army under the Bush and Cheney privatization push. The boondoggles are ten times what they were before. But the real solution for bureaucracy is participatory government; where free citizens have the time to directly scrutinize the behaviors of bureaucrats. That is why the Porto Allegre system has been so efficient. That is why cooperatives and direct democracies, once they have a chance to work, are always so efficient.
About a week later, I ran into Astroturf Annie again, and a few more of the usual loathsome characters, when I went to a meeting of this 'recession relief coalition'.
Somebody had been sending me e-mails, bugging me to attend meetings of this group. It is just another alphabet soup artifact of the social agencies, put together to give an appearance of a real citizen's group. This is one of the ways these social agencies justify their funding; they make it look like there is an organized opposition to planned poverty in the country. But they go about it in deliberately ineffectual ways, and disrupt any group which tries to find effective ways of mobilizing. They generally feel a need to attract a few real "poor people' into their groups, but usually they can only find the usual small crew of hangers on who like to go to these meetings for free chow or ego gratification or because they like causing trouble. More about that shortly.
Besides me there were thirteen people there. Five of them, I know to be flat out dangerous. I have already mentioned Annie Fitspastic. Beric German was there. He is a strange one; probably a police stooge. He used to be with OCAP. I do not know if he still is. He used to work for the city hostel system, I do not know if he still is. He has also been involved with the Cathy Crowe, Shapcott, "disaster relief coalition" bunch and has often acted as an "enforcer" against people who start asking too many questions.
Michael Rosenberg was there. He is the guy who goes to all these things to preach his totally whacked out idea that all the ills of humanity are caused by technology. He can't ever seem to explain what he thinks we should do; go back to the neolithic age? He is the chief neo-Luddite for Toronto. But he also has some very right wing ideas, too. The market will solve everything. He cannot see the contradiction between these two ideas.
And he gets very upset if people tell him they really do not want to hear this garbage. He is very scary when he gets upset. He is too scrawny to be physically threatening to me, but he seems like the kind of person who just might follow you home and boil your cat. I was at a meeting once where I had to get another copy of a document that was being handed out because he kept taking mine when I was not looking.
Bonnie Briggs was there. She is a loudmouth who goes to these meetings mostly to get something to eat and gets very upset if she does not get it. And in a few venues she has harassed me; sat beside me and got up and sat by me again when I moved somewhere else. Kept interrupting everything I was saying and then hollered that she was "just trying to help". She never contributes anything to these meetings; just heckles and harasses people she does not like. She did not bother me on this occasion.
Rick Davies was there. Once when I agreed to help OCAP a bit with putting up posters, he did not want me to cover the posters for a previous event which was long past. He thought there was something so great about them that they should stay up until they wore away. But there was often no other prominent place to put the new posters. He started following me around tearing off the posters as I put them up. I resigned as poster paster and went home.
On a couple of other occasions I just about got into a fracas with Davies at OCAP meetings, I think because some other sleazeballs were engineering it. He was the kind of person you really did not want at demonstrations, trying to pick a fight with any authority figure around, cop or security type, and endangering everyone else.
He got a camera from somewhere and started following all the OCAP chicks around, trying to take pictures of their breasts. Eventually they drummed him out of OCAP. They had a difficult time, I am told, because so many people were afraid of all the trouble it caused OCAP when they hounded me out. I am amused, because they had to deal with exactly the kind of person they were trying to paint me as being.
So, in my "seven Cs" system of categorization of people who should be avoided, which you can find at the causepimps site, here is how they fall out. Fitzpatrick is the cadre type, keeps an eye on all this stuff for the poverty pimp network. She is also a "community worker" who thinks she is going to improve her inferiors, although I think she is getting over that idea. She indicated she did not really want to be at this meeting.
Beric German; "community worker" or maybe "Cop".
Rosenberg and Davies; "crazies"
Briggs; "creep" who likes to disrupt and make trouble, and also rather "crazy".
Now, the main topic of the day was the meeting they had had the week before with some parliamentarians, which sounded like a complete mess. This "Kevin" character, the guy who ran for mayor, was homeless for years, and has a very loud mouth, completely disrupted it. It seems a few others of the "crazies" and "creeps" species were also there.
I hope that does not put Tony Martin off doing what he is doing, although I think it is about time we finally saw the legislation he has been cooking up. Tony is the NDP MP who wants to introduce a private members bill about poverty reduction. This meeting was mostly so he could get feedback about what should be in the bill. I did not make it to this event.
Finally somebody asked me what I was there for. I explained what a Citizen's Income is about as briefly as I could, for fear of being interrupted. I am sure many of them still had no idea what I was talking about. I laid the offer down to come and do my presentation at their next meeting and got no reply. A couple of people asked for more information and I gave them my card. One e-mailed me and expressed interest in hearing my presentation.
I have not heard anything from the committee chair or from the person who invited me there. The latter is a relief, because I was getting something almost every day. This guy is getting a lot of people pissed off at him by e-mailing them several times a day even when they tell him they do not want it. It seems he tells them, no, you need to know this.
But I left this meeting early. It was held in a big office tower and sponsored by some business types who I think want to do something to ease their consciences. The Recession Relief Coalition was endowed with $3000 from somewhere. It still has $1400 left. What a waste! If you want to do something about poverty, forget about the idea that poor people will be able to organize themselves. People have to get organized and fight poverty before they get into it. What you donate money to is people promoting solutions to poverty that are based on an understanding of why there is poverty.
But I should talk about waste. I had $3000 handed to me and I promptly gave half of it to a crook. I have spent two years trying to get it back.
But how to reach people? I don't know. I left the meeting early and shook the shit off my shoes. I stopped in the lobby of this big law firm to look at the magnificent view from the 46th floor out over the harbor.
Hi R;
Usually, to get your own "custom" e-mail address you have to own your own domain. That is not difficult; it costs ten or twenty $ a year to register a domain. You have to have a web space to put it on. Most internet service providers give you some web host space for free, but you usually have to have their name in your e-mail address.
To use a web host company is about $30 to $50 a year. Usually the web hoster is also a domain registrar. Registrars are a bit of a racket. They get licenses from a domain authority and can charge money to register the domains. Nobody can register a domain directly with the domain authority.
For instance, I am on the major domain .ca. That means Canada. The authority for that is CIRA; Canadian Internet registration Authority. They are easier to work with and more secure than most other domain registers. There can be a lot of corruption around domains. Some are worth some money and people can get the domain stolen out from under them.
So, you decide on a minor domain eg. zabdab.ca and you get a registrar to register it for you. You then have to go through a complex rigmarole to set up passwords at CIRA so no one can steal it.
Now you need a web host to provide some web space. I use easyDNS for my domains but I have a web hoster in Hong Kong, because of my security needs. easyDNS also does web hosting. I have been dealing with them for awhile and have had no trouble with them.
Now, you need to put something in the space. It is not that hard to write your own web pages. Just learn the HTML code. There are software programs which make the drudge work of coding easier. I have a MAC and like page spinner just fine.
Then you must have an FTP, file transfer protocol. This is the software that enables you to put your complete pages up on the web space. I use Fetch for MAC. Cyberduck is a shareware program that does the same job for small sites.
The web hoster will have some sort of interface which allows you to manage the web site. Cpanel is common. That is what I get with my hoster.
You can set up a considerable number of e-mail accounts and give them any name you want, such as FRYXL@zabdab.ca. Most will also allow you to set up a blog or a discussion board. They should have some web stats packages too, so you can see how many people are coming to your site.
The reason I created my own blog is so I have full control over it. The whole thing does not die if I have to move it to another hoster. It is easy to change hosters if you already have the web site set up. The site is on your computer.
One thing which concerns me about the net is that people do not trouble to learn basic HTML or set up a blog on their own web space, or make their own. They are dependent on something that is on another web site. All these services like facebook and twitter have major security and privacy problems. They are open to abuse by government or corporations.
I think everybody should have their own personal web site. We need some sort of software that makes it easier for people to create their own "facebook" type of web site that sits on their own hard drive. They can add or change it as they wish using FTP.
All this takes a little time to master. With HMTL you have to learn colors, how to make tables, how to make the various types of links. It is starting to get more complicated; you have XML which makes snazzier pages, and some programs now let you do .pdf pages with links. I think html will gradually fade away. PDF will become the easiest way of doing web pages and if you want to get fancy you can use XML.
My philosophy about doing web sites is to keep things as simple as possible so there is less to go wrong, and the site is easy to maintain. That is important when you have several sites, like me. I try to use the minimum number of links, and I use PDF pages a lot.
That is in conflict with a prevailing doctrine about web pages, which comes from Google. Google wants pages to have a lot of links to other sites, and within the site. It does not like PDF pages. Many of these rules are silly, but people are obsessed about them; if they do not do it like Google wants, they will not get ranked high enough on the "search engine".
I do not worry so much about Google. With my biggest site only a quarter of my traffic comes from google.
But all you wanted to know was how to get a custom e-mail address. As far as I know, you have to have some sort of simple web site first. But maybe now there are services which will do this. But I wish people would create personal web sites instead of using Face book.
tr
I have not written up the Toronto center provincial by-election yet. I got some employment out of it; the first time I have worked an Ontario election. I am getting pretty good at counting ballots. I have worked many federal campaigns, provincial elections in Alberta, and a Toronto city election. Ontario seems to be better organized than the others. It all went very smoothly. No nonsense of having to haul the box back to the election office and line up for two hours to get it cleared.
I also did some volunteer work for the Greens; delivering some leaflets in my area. Without me the Greens would have had no presence at all in the St. Lawrence area. I am limited in doing this anymore by my feet. But I am getting to know all the buildings in this area. It s a good place to do flyering; there are plenty of very large buildings around here. If you want to go outside, there are some row houses that you usually do not have to climb steps to get to. There are still a few rooming houses around here that most people would miss if they did not know them.
There was a big flyering war between the Libs and the Deepers. Some people were putting signs on their door saying things like "leave me alone. I've already voted." I told a couple of people that this is the only leaflet they will get from the Greens, we do not have unlimited funds like the others do.
I am dissapointed with the Greens. They should contest every election like they are trying to win. The vote total was far lower this time than the last federal byelection, when the Greens ran a credible candidate and did better than the conservatives.
The trouble with mister Green is that he thought because the gay ghetto is located here, then "gay" plays throughout the riding. At the 519 Church candidates debate, he got into this "I'm gayer than you" contest with Glen Murray. It did not play well even with that audience. He was an overly emotional orator as well and that does not usually play in Toronto. But he is "from the neighborhood", went to school at Jarvis collegiate. Glen Murray is a "parachute" candidate.
It was a forgone conclusion from the start that Murray would win, but I like him. I like what he has done for urban government, as mayor of Winnipeg and as head of the federation of municipalities. He was a guest lecturer when I was doing one of my urban studies courses.
Murray said that politics is not a job, it is a life style. You are in office 24/7. From there he moved into a criticism of attack politics, which several of the other candidates engaged in, including the NDP. Greens had the sense to not do that. The Conservative candidate stayed above it, but some jokers claiming conservative allegiance showed up with misinformation about Glen's million dollar toilet in Winnipeg. It does not go down well in any of the "all candidates" I attended, but especially in Regent park.
I had a slight run-in at Regent with one of the obnoxious tres libertarian candidates who were in the race. I made the mistake of telling him I was going to ask a question about electoral reform and he pounced on he. I soon told him to stop hanging over me and to move away.
He gave the usual "I know best for everybody" libertarian thing and ended with the good old Bible Billy Aberhart credo. That is, "if you are not suffering enough yet, you are free to suffer some more". His name is Turmel. When I was counting ballots I made a Freudian slip and called him something else. He got one vote at my poll.
Dan, one of the tenant reps in my building arrived to vote and asked if Turmel had arrived. No, he never showed up, but apparently he often goes around to all the polling stations and annoys people. Dan went to school with him. He was a total asshole then, too. He wonders if Turmoil has anything to do with his life than run in elections.
Back to Regent. I put FVC leaflets on everyone's chair. I asked about voting reform. Then I sat down, my job done. I left it to the audience to get after those candidates who failed to answer, in that inimitable Regent park style. Mainly this was Cathy Crowe. Before she was cut off she started on how people in Regent could get fair representation by getting an NDP candidate elected. The NDP is the authoritarian left, the paternalist mentality which antagonizes the people they claim to represent.
Mr. Green correctly explained the Green platform on electoral reform. Murray told the audience how he had been part of the "Yes" campaign in the by-election; the best of all answers.
One problem wth all candidates and with local politics is that it is a wierdo magnet. At the Cabbagetown one there was this guy holding up a bottle of water and ranting that all our energy problems could be solved by using water as fuel. He demanded to know why he was not being listened to.
Nobody answered him. This idea of water as fuel has been around the net for a little while. There are people who want to sell you a "conversion kit" that allows you to turn water into hydrogen fuel to run your car. How this is going to run a gasoline engine car is not clear. Or, where the power will come from to run the "converter."
Earlier, at the 519, I had put on my Citizen's Income hat and asked about guaranteed incomes. None of them seemed to understand what I was talking about. So, that is the job to be done, by a CI/BI/GLI group in Toronto if one ever gets going.
Now Smitherman is gone. He has been my MPP for ten years. When I tried getting help from his office about my trouble with the MTHCL, as the housing authority was then called, I was treated in a very hostile way by his staff. Then a couple of years ago he came up and shook my hand at a Christmas thing in the neighborhood. He was surprised I still lived in the riding. I told him briefly about my troubles with TCHC, and how they got me arrested and how it back fired on them and they had to move me to St. lawrence.
I have run into him a couple of times since then. I have been to his office on a matter and they were much more cooperative. But I am leery of Smitherman. I do not like arrogant people at all. He has so much reputation for being abusive to his staff, but the turnover at his office seemed to slow down in recent years.
He wants to be mayor? If I were looking at it from pure self interest, I would say he would be good as mayor because he would aggressively clean out the corruption going on at city hall. Especially, he would shut down the FMTA and he environmental fund. I know that he seriously does not like these people. He has had a big rivalry going on with Shapcott and the Wellesley institute bunch.
So, it would be good if I could finally get some people together to go as a delegation to his campaign office and get some answers from him. What is he going to do about the poisonous atmosphere in central Toronto regarding anything that is affordable housing, poverty elimination, or homelessness? The personal attacks must stop.
But he has some other ideas which concern me. He wants to eliminate the vehicle tax? I do not like regressive taxation; an old jalopy paying the same toll as a beamer. I am much in favor of positive incentives, such as making public transit so convenient that people do not need their cars anymore. But eliminating taxes like that send a wrong message. He needs to explain how he will replace the revenue.
I think I will have a much better relationship with Glen Murray and staff. The ultimate nightmare for me would be to have The Crow as an MPP. I could write on and on about her misbehaviors, but not here. She is the archetypal of the poverty pimp.
I could breifly say that the way she ran her campaign in my neighborhood was offensive. They plastered the area with posters advertising their rally portraying it like it was an all candidates forum, but the other parties were not invited. And when we showed up to work the election, her people had plasterd the area around the polling station, a strict no no. The head supervising DRO went out and removed them without destoying them and carefully stored them away as per the manual. I hope elections Ontario has some words with the deepers about that.
The party she ran for should disappear. I think when we get Proportional representation so that smaller parties can establish themselves, it will start to disappear. I do not think the repugnant political networks it has created will disappear as fast. The mentality is; everything left/progressive is us, and you can not go off and do anything outside of our control.
Typical of their mentality was the way they tried to mob Murray about the Grace hospital phony issue. They are worse than the conservatives in that regard. Murray handled himself well.
There was never any danger of the Grace closing, although one of the biggest problems with our health system is the focus on hospitals instead of community clinics. We have more hospitals than we need.
The Conservative flapdoodle about a million dollar toilet in Winnipeg when Murray was mayor there also flopped. It was a million dollar toilet because it had to be build on a bridge in the Winnipeg climate, with elaborate insulating measures. It was built there because there could not be retail spaces there without a public toilet. Putting it there revitalized the area and the cost benefit made perfect sense.
Winner take all, attack dog politics. Bring on proportional representation.
tr
I find the strangest topics to get interested in. I cannot spend all my time on politics stuff. I need to amuse myself in other ways sometimes. The net is such a sea of things to get fascinated by.
I have spent the last couple of evenings looking into the topic of female matadors. How politically incorrect is that? Actually, it is matadora in correct Spanish. You know, bull fighting; hispanic lads who get into tight pants and prance around in front of bulls with a cape and a sword, before killing it. It is one of the sports that get the animal rights people perturbed.
I actually wrote an article not too long ago about animal rights. I might write one in future about veganism/vegetarianism. Basically, I find animal rights and herbivorous types a bunch of tiresome hypocrites. You can read it here. http://www.poverty-activist-toronto.ca/racoon/09-08-31.html
Here is the critical paragraph.
But the existence of humans inevitably harms animals. To say we have no right to do so is to say we have no right to exist; that we are a rogue species. People are not all going to say "sorry critters, we were a mistake" and jump in the sea. So, the extreme vegan view, that we must avoid harming animals in any way, goes nowhere.
The conclusion was that for better or worse, we humans are lords of nature. Sometimes our reign is terrible to animals, and sometimes it is better than how they would have lived in the wild.
Since writing this, I have moved more to the vegan point of view, because of some other internet videos I have been watching. Humans are not really omnivores; we have never evolved our digestive system for eating meat. With some vitamin D in the north latitudes, we could get by just fine without it.
But I think most good ideas around get taken to an irrational extreme which only discredits them. There is nothing wrong with eating animal products now and then as a treat. It is devouring critters every day that is the problem. We will still need animal products for leather and chemicals and even soap, for which there are no good natural substitutes.
Using animals as entertainment? That is something that must be scrutinized closely. We know about the sadistic training methods of some animal trainers. Animal rightists are disturbed by rodeos and horse racing. But in bull fighting the bull gets killed.
But most bulls get killed anyway. Bulls bred for bull fighting are not castrated and reared in factory farms. They are raised on special farms where they can run around until they are a few years old and grow big and strong. When you look at the way they get killed in the bullring and the way bulls raised for food live, and how they often die, and usually before living a year, I do not think fighting bulls have such a bad life. It is also probably better than a wild bull would have.
If you have seen some video of what goes on in a modern slaughterhouse, you will know what I mean about how food animals get killed. Anything run on a factory basis is going to be a bad place to die in, and a bad place to get food from. Animals are usually not humanely killed in these places. In fact, generally they are not even killed. It would take too much time and reduce profits. It might require hiring people with I.Q.s above 70 and training them to handle animals properly. Generally, they are just stunned before being lowered head first, while still breathing, into boiling water. Some are still alive to experience being sawed in two back to front while hanging upside down.
Now consider how prey species tend to die in the wild. They usually do not dare show this on nature shows. Sometimes they black it out, but narrate what is going on. Predators like wolves or hyenas genarlly do not bother witth killing their prey. When a bunch of them have a moose or a wildebeest pinned, they just start eating. At some point the prey becomes dead.
It may be a disturbing thing for most people to consider, but very few humans or animals are lucky enough to die quickly and painlessly. Death is usually unpleasant. So, I am not impressed by the dishonest, strident hysterics of the "ban blood sports" people, some of which I also viewed in my inquiries. The tone reminds me of the anti-abortion campaigners.
Now, to turn to the travails of Eva Florencia and Mari Paz Vega as they try to establish themselves in yet another fiercely defended bastion of machismo. All the poor girls want to do is stab some bulls to death and look good doing it. And I suspect, to make lots of money off the celebrity thus created.
Someone made a documentary about Eva and Mari Paz. It was on BBC late last year. I do not know where it will be seen again. But the trailer and accompanying article tell me that Mari Paz is currently the most experienced matadora around with plenty of bull's ears and gore scars to her credit. She is mentor to Eva, who is from Italy but for some reason got the idea as a teenager that she wanted to fight bulls. She ran away from home and made her way to Spain to be a bull fighter.
They are having a difficult time rising up through the bull fighting hierarchy, which is dominated by a tight clique of business people, especially in Spain, who really do not accept the idea of female bullfighters. The male bullfighters do not like them much. Most will not perform in the same arena with them, though a few have come around after seeing the girls show their stuff.
Sometimes it works to the matadora's advantage; when the matadors refused to perform in the same rink as one matadora, she got to kill all the bulls herself. But a really vicious trick was played on one matadora; they put her in with a bull that had already fought and was wise to the cape trick and thus extremely dangerous, and they did not tell her.
This is much like professional athletics everywhere. It is business and the business people and a few superstar athletes make money. There is always a mind set that does not accept women as pro athletes. Yet where women have been able to break in, they have often nearly taken over a sport. Pro tennis is the first example. Women's hockey is a more recent example; they are still fighting for ice time.
But resistance is most fierce in the really dangerous sports, the blood sports. Being a jockey is actually quite dangerous. I recall some years ago there was intense resistance from male jockeys to the first women jockeys, now there are plenty of them all over the world. There are now plenty of women race car drivers and mountain climbers. So women bullfighters is a logical progression.
The entry of women into previously all male professions is considered a sign that a society is becoming more open and tolerant. That is slightly paradoxic considering the reputation of bull fighting. It is also odd that women bull fighters are more accepted in Latin America than in wealthier and supposedly more advanced Spain. However, Latin Americans are said to cheer for the bull rather than the matador.
As well, there is really nothing new about women fighting bulls. Recall the famous wall freizes in the Minoan palaces dated to over 3500 years ago; the ones showing girls vaulting over charging bulls. Various sorts of games with bulls are as old as human kind and go back to when humans had to get their meat by taking on large and dangerous animals with stabbing weapons, working in groups to corner the beasts. The notable thing about neandertal skeletons is the number of healed injuries. A study of these injuries showed they are most consistent with injuries suffered by rodeo cowboys among modern people. The neandertal women were built very powerfully and also had numerous injuries of these types.
The Roman legionnaires are said to have been fond of sporting activities involving bulls. Bull fights were common in medieval Europe. In thirteenth century Spain certain convents were chastised by the church hierarchy for holding bullfights. It seems some of the nuns joined the fighting.
The modern Spanish bullfight is said to have emerged in the early 1700s. Ever since, women have been trying to break into the game. They are usually very popular with audiences, but not with bullfighting 'critics' and the authorities. In 1776, Goya did a famous painting of Nicolasa Escamilla, who fought bulls in Madrid. Around 1900, "La Reverte" achieved great success.
In 1908 Spain passed a law against women fighting bulls on foot. They could still do the job from horseback. But this cramped La Reverte's style. She tried getting around it by claiming she was really a man. It didn't work.
The matadoras kept it up in Latin America. Several American women achieved some success. Conchita Cintron's mother was American. She was torturing bulls during the 1940's. She was once seriously gored and carried to an infirmary. She got up of the table and went back into the ring, where she finished off the bull and then collapsed.
Cintron could not fight on foot in Spain but got around it by holding private demonstrations. Once she fought a bull on foot, then at the "moment of truth" threw the sword away, stabbed the bull with her finger, and left the ring. She still got arrested but the public made such an uproar that charges were dropped.
This was when the fascists ruled Spain. This regime promoted bullfighting as an expression of Spanish culture and nationalism and true manhood and blah-dee-blah. Women were strongly discouraged from even fighting on horseback. Some expected bullfighting to disappear when fascism fell in Spain, but it is retaining its popularity.
In the 1950s, two other American women, Patricia McCormick and Bette Ford, made careers out of battling the bovines. The former was once gored so badly she was not expected to live, but she survived and resumed bull fighting. The latter went on to be a Hollywood star and is still acting.
After 1975 the laws restricting female matadors were repealed in Spain. The Ladies of Spain were slow to take advantage of the new opportunity. Eventually a French woman, Marie Sara, had some success as a bull fighter, but stayed on her horse most of the time.
In the 1990's Christina Sanchez converted plenty of bulls into beef, but finally quit in disgust because of her inability to get into the larger and higher paid competitions. A few other matadoras have moved to Latin America because they can get more fights there. More and more women seem to be taking up this activity, but their biggest battles are with the bull heads who control it.
There is an evident campaign to denigrate women bullfighters. Someone in a history of bullfighting recently described the "activities of the little ladies" as a "caricature" of real bull fighting. Actually, if you watch some matadoras perform, and then look at some matadors, it is the latter who look phony.
I then start to understand the revulsion many people have for bull fighting. Some of these jokers act like they have a personal grudge with the bull. They are a bit like bar room bullies or bad cops; narcissists who can only bring themselves up by driving something else down. They make me root for the bull; "Hey, Toro, get that asshole! Give him an extra asshole!"
The women bullfighters, and I think the better male fighters, just go out there and perform. They make themselves look good by making the bull look good. They are better fighters because they do not have as much strength; they must rely more on skill.
But to make women bullfighters look bad, there are a couple of particularly sickening items in the Youtube-o-sphere, bullfighting division. One is of some woman with short, misshapen legs trying to fight a bull. She got knocked over and the bull laid down on her and seemed to try to grind her into the dirt with its chest. If you had a really dirty mind you would say it looked like it was trying to fuck her. There are some dirty minds out there who made that association and considered it proof that women should not bullfight. Physically stunted people should not fight bulls and mentally stunted people should not comment on it.
The other disgusting video was of this woman having a lot of trouble finishing off a bull. This is supposed to prove that you "do not send a woman to do a man's job." There is some back story to this that is not shown. She had been on horseback; she was wearing protective chaps. Some one handed her a cape and a sword and she seemed a bit dubious about taking them; like she was thrown into this unexpectedly. The bull was already in bad shape and seemed to have decided it had not come there to fight. It was cowering against the wall.
The trouble was, the brave senorita did not seem to know where to shove the sword; poke, poke, poke. Various official looking men were shouting at her from behind the safety of the fence. The audience was in tumult. It seemed that El Presidente of whatever country this happened in was in attendance. These videos usually cut out the really gruesome parts, so it was not clear how this was resolved. It seemed that she got the job done somehow and called it a day.
More young women are taking up this sport, and yes it is a sport, and many are from outside the hispanic world. A French woman, Marie Barcelo, is a rising star. She is the one really scary matadora I have seen; in the ring she looks like she wants to rip the bull's head off and shit on it. Yet in an interview she seemed very shy but intellectual.
Another American, Kate Leffner, has bull fighting ambitions. She is an artist from San Francisco who says she started out wanting to paint bullfights and then decided she had to do some bullfighting in order to understand it.
If there was one question I could ask all these bull fighting babes it would be; why do you all have long noses? Come to think of it, all the male bullfighters seem to have big schnozzes too. But they are not nearly as fascinating to watch. The matadoras are usually not pretty, but they are all well built and fit. They look better in tight pants than the matadors. Yes, I am getting very straight in my old age.
They have much to say about the bullfighting business. They generally can not understand the fuss about killing a bull; don't people understand that the bull is trying to kill them too? Portuguese and French style bull fighting, where the bull is not killed in the ring, is just as dangerous to the human participants as Spanish bull fighting. And the bull still gets killed out of public view.
Bulls are fairly smart critters. Bull fights cannot go on very long because the bull starts catching on that the red thing floating in front of them is not the cause of their discomfort, but the two legged figure which always seems to be behind or beside it. Then said two legged figure better look out.
There are plenty of clips of matadoras getting flipped head over heels by the bull, often more than once in a fight. They can also get pinned by the bull. No female bullfighter has ever been killed, as far as I can discover. But getting gored is part of the business. Most of these gals who have been at it for awhile have collected some gore scars and broken bones. As one matadora put it; you are not really a bull fighter until you have been hurt.
Modern medicine has made getting hurt by a bull much more survivable. Antibiotics are the bullfighters big friend. Prior to their invention the big cause of death among bullfighters was infection from the horns. As well, physical training of bull fighters is much improved; they know how to take a fall and to deflect the force of a blow.
So bull fighting is not something for amateurs. If you do not know what you are doing, and are not in top physical condition, you are likely to be seriously injured or killed. Some of these matadoras started training as children; bothering the bovines as young as six.
There are three parts to a Spanish bull fight. First, the bull fighter and her assistants run at the bull with bandoleras, with the object of jamming them into the bulls neck. When enough of these have been fixed on the bull, he can no longer raise his head above his shoulders.
Next, the bull is played with the large cape, to tire him out. Finally, the bull fighter takes a small cape and a sword, and gets the bull into position for the kill, the "moment of truth". I am not sure what the truth is in this moment but it is the moment of maximum danger for the matador. The bull must be lined up right, with its head level, feet together and its shoulder blades apart, so the matadora can dive over its head and drive her sword through the gap between its shoulder blades and into its heart.
One matadora advises us that it is best not to look at the head and horns, but at the spot where you are going to drive the sword in. If you do it right, you get one of the bull's ears. If you do a really good job, you get two ears. If you were a truly exemplary bull torturer, you get its tail, too. I think I would rather have some nice steaks for my trouble. Let the vegans howl about that.
But when asked what she really wants after a bull fight, one matadora replied; "a bath".
The rise of the female bull fighter may prolong the existence of the 'medieval relic' despite the opposition of sanctimonious animal rights people. Recent polls in Spain show that only about 20% of the population are interested in bullfighting, 20% are opposed, and 60% are uninterested. Opposition seems based more on its associations with fascism, feudalism, and ignorant machismo than on concerns about cruelty. Thus, female bull fighters are a cagey response to this opposition.
There is a lot of debate over whether bullfighting is expanding or dying out. It seems to be growing in those parts of Latin America where it is legal, and establishing itself in new territory, like China, where it is something exotic.
One thing which could kill it is commercialism and greed. There is one matador in Spain who wants to put a product logo on his cape, much to the horror of purists. Of course, this is what wrecks professional sports everywhere.
One thing I really cannot accept about bull fighting is the Mexican trend of putting very young bull fighters in the ring. Ten year olds have been performing in exhibition matches and a fourteen year old was badly gored lately.
Contests between individuals of the genus homo and the genus bos are such a deep part of the culture of the former that they are unlikely to be ever fully eliminated. The are forms of bull fighting in South India and parts of Indonesia. In North America we have our rodeos, complete with bull riding and bull dogging. Your survival odds may be better as a bull fighter than as a bull rider.
But what is it about humans, that they have this need to pit themselves, if only vicariously, against a very aggressive animal ten times our size? The different explanations people come up with seem to explain more about their own minds than about the object in question. There are two contradictory general trends in explaining what the bull symbolizes.
First, the noble beast. The bull fight is a kind of Greek tragedy in which the bull is the hero brought down by his own nobility. Yes, Greek tragedies go that way; the hero is too perfect for an imperfect world. This is the psychology of the underdog and may explain the Latin American tendency to cheer for the bull.
But there is nothing noble or admirable about an impulse to charge at whatever stands up within one's sight. It is dysfunctional behavior anywhere outside the bull's natural habitat. To identify with the bull would seem to imply that you think you have a natural right to dominate, and to be cut down for trying is an injustice.
The second is the bull as evil violator. The bull was probably the most dangerous creature faced by stone aged man; ready to charge at anything with no provocation. The ancient minotaur was the symbol of men of violent nature, not the violent nature of man, because the human species is not naturally violent. There are a few people among us with heads like a bull and who most other people have great difficulty coping with. We spend our lives wandering in the labyrinth trying to avoid the minotaur and looking for the escape route. The devil is usually portrayed as having a bull's horns and tail.
These two metaphoric narratives often get mixed up in people's minds, just as people mix reality up. In some cases bull worship was about worshipping strength and power, and a desire to get on the 'side' of the dominator; the sycophant mentality. In others the desire was to magically take on the power of the bull by killing it. Linked to this is the bull as rebel against the correct order of nature, with man at the top.
These last tropes seem to influence the behavior of some bull fighting performers and fans. They may explain the bizarre promotional literature for some bullfighting, talking about 'punishing' the bull for some unspecified transgression.
To me the most appealing trope is the one of rejection and rebellion against others of violent nature. I think that is what has been appealing to me at a subconscious level when I watch videos of female bullfighters. It is; you may be an immensely powerful, mindless killing machine but you will not prevail. I suspect this is what is working in these girls minds when they decide they want to be bull fighters.
Humans are complicated creatures with infinite reasons for doing what they do, both consciously and subconsciously. Some people like bullfighting. Some people hate it. Some people are ambivalent, like me. However, I find no justification for banning it.
Neither humans nor bovines are innately good or evil. The bull's nature is to charge whatever challenges it. It is the nature of humans to need some degree of risk and challenge in their lives. Some people have a greater need for excitement than others, the fear threshold is set very high in them, and they will talk about feeling most alive when they are "closest to death". So they fight bulls, climb mountains, drive racing cars, and so on.
I hope that this little world within a world that is 'girl bullfighters' has a chance to grow and perhaps 'liberalize' the somewhat larger world of bull fighting. Spanish society is said to veer between liberalism and conservatism and female bullfighters appear during liberal phases. Bull fighting is considered a manifestation of conservatism or what is meant by conservatism in Spain, while freedom of women is a 'liberal' tendency. A liberal should want to liberalize anything conservative.
There is nothing 'liberal' about political correctness in the classic sense of the term liberal. It is about assuming the right to tell everyone else what to do. If people are adults and know what they are doing, and they are not harming anyone else, and no real harm to civility and social order results from it, they should be left to do it.
But I am sure the bull heads of the ban bullfighting crowd will keep charging at whatever contradicts their warped sense of right.
To wind this up; I have concluded that Hilda Tenorio is my favorite matadora. She has such a cheery, optimistic way about her. I like the way she bounces up and down in delight every time she successful sticks it to El Toro, which she is very good at. The bulls, the bull fighting patriarchy, and the animal rights fanatics may all wish they could stomp her out, but I think she is a sweetie.
Now, back to the other internet tasks I need to get done. Adios.
February 12
Here is another e-mail I did, responding to someone on the Fair Vote list who wondered why the organisers of the "no Prorogue movemetn were not engaging with the votting reform crowd. Other people on the list who are more familiar with the workings of that group say that they in fact are working closely.
By the way, the January 23rd rally was great. I wish I could have stayed for all of it. I sold off the last of the CDs, the ones with the political satires on them. If you can connect with the right market, you can sell something like that, but it really is not worth the trouble by itself.
It was great to be part of a march of real people instead of the usual leftie trouble maker crowd. They were not much in evidence here. And it was the biggest crowd I had seen in a long time; I think since the "days of action". This was almost as big as the labor day parades, which have been getting smaller in recent years.
Listen to the nation, no to prorogation.
The Fair Vote message;
Why? Well, one problem is that there is a lot more to it than just voting reform, as necessary as it is. The constitutional system of Canada is severely flawed. The problems are systemic, meaning that the system will not fix itself. The only thing that will fix it is the public. The public has to finally rise up and compel systemic reform.
We are getting in the Harper government a great demonstration of the systems inadequacies. It is not just about voting systems, but the excessive concentration of power in the PMs office, which arises from the absence of a well thought out system of "checks and balances". The prime minister can pack the senate and supreme court, and appoint his yes person to the governor-generalship.
The underlying problem is the lack of a system for amending the country's constitution. This is because the colonial authorities who set this system up in the first place assumed that they were going to keep control over it. Then later they just walked out and left us for the Americans, without tying up some loose ends. So we are stuck with a deadlock.
We are not going to reform the system by getting the provinces to agree. All they will ever agree to do is give themselves more power at the expense of the national interest. So, the public has to enforce on the politicians a system of constitutional reform by citizen's assembly and referendum. That is the standard which seems to be developing in Canada and in other countries.
So, I am in no rush to get the "no prorogue" people into the electoral reform camp. They will figure it out eventually. My concern is that they have enough sense to not get themselves coopted into one of the opposition parties, or taken out by professional informers/disrupters.
I think right now the role of the governor general needs to be focussed on more than voting systems. tr
Here is a slight modification of a message sent by me to somebody who wants to invite me to the homeless memorial empty ritual at the trinity square church. Then to the next steering "committee" of this recession relief coalition. It seems like a new one of these phony groups comes up every year. But read my reply.
Well, the last time I was at one of these homeless memorial things, a few years ago now, I got swarmed on by some of these filthy poverty pimp types. The obvious intent was to try to provoke me into something so they could get me arrested. They could not, but that does not deter these people, they just made up some sort of story about it to feed into the slander machine. I had this guy in a really tacky shirt dancing in front of me, to try and make like I was pushing him. He apparently worked for the Anglican church.
I made a complaint to the Anglican church, but got no reply. A couple of times since then I have attended functions being held at that church and been given a hard time, though lately they seem to have forgotten about me. However, the people behind that "homeless memorial", the Cathy Crowe and Shapcott people, still are pursuing a vendetta against me. I wonder if you have ever checked out www.causepimps.ca?
Now, if I attended this February 17th meeting am I going to have protection from harassment? I do not like these people. They are the quango operators operating the quango system of social control in Toronto. The term Quango seems more common in the U.K., Australia, etc than in North America. It means "Quasi-Autonomous Non Governmental Organization".
The Quango strategy is to set up a lot of these agencies which are answerable to no one but are neutralized from serous political challenges to the establishment by dependance on government and business funding. What they do is perform government functions which should be delivered by government directly from higher levels, or through a community level of government. In other words, part of their function is to coopt and prevent a local, participatory government. Another big part is to coopt and misdirect dissent about government legislated poverty.
So you see why I do not like these people and they do not like me much. But it is good to keep track of what they are up to. I have no patience for this 25 in 5 nonsense and with attempts to simulate actual political dissent. Every year the same group of people are creating a new phony political group. I have even less patience when they try coopting real attempts to organize dissent.
The solution for poverty is to give everybody enough money so they are not poor. Period. This is the thing to be fought for. Anything else is misdirection and paternalism.
You keep sending me messages trying to get me involved in this sort of stuff. I am not much interested in working with you until you get real and move away from these political cause pimps. tr
He says he is trying to build a group of serious anti-poverty activists away from the agancy cone heads. I am dubious; every one I know including me who has tried to operate outside the control of the poverty pimps has been subject to a "relational bullying" campaign, among other forms of harassment. This has been true in two provinces.
I will see what he is up to and I guarantee there will be a report back in this venue about it. It seems almost too good to be true that after all these years there is a group coming together that wants to get serious about it, and has the brains to understand who is and who is not their enemy.
Begun on Jan 13, 2010.
Well, I just came back from the last of the LeSage hearings, at Senator Croll again. I do not know why these places always have to be so hot. I could not find a chair because I arrived later and I did not want to climb over ten people to get to one of the few chairs. So I stood for two hours and my feet are now hurting very muchly.
As usual with TCHC type dos, they threw on some food. They underestimated the number of people who would show up. So the chow was cleaned out by time I got there. Later they brought in some pizzas and chips and cookies for us late comers. I hung around that table and nibbled chips and other junk out of boredom rather than hunger, and to take my mind off my feet.
When the stuff was brought in, it was quite a hog out. I used aerial tactics to grab a couple of slices of pizza. One advantage of being tall. But what got me was not the shoving but the donkeys who would get something and then stand right at the table making small talk. Then they made out all indignant when they were jostled aside. With some people, they seem to need a permanent drama about how bad everybody is and how above everybody they are.
That is housing people for you. They have been hammered down to a cro magnon level, sometimes for generations. It is as I said in my report to LeSage, you cannot remove from people all control over their lives and expect to have any good result. I handed it to him just after he stopped talking and the mike rage started.
By the way, my report is up on the www.ourhomes.ca site as soon as I finish writing and coding this. He gave me a thumbs up as he took it from my hand. So, there is some hope it will get read and considered.
A few people had good things to say, and got people cheering. But most of it was the same old same old. The best speaker summed it up. He pointed out how LeSage was hearing the same thing over and over; people are afraid. They are afraid to put their names down for fear of retaliation. What does this tell you, LeSage?
I already said it in the last go around at Wellesley center; TCHC works like a police state. They run housing badly because they are not interested in effective management. In fact there is a contempt for basic principles of rental housing management. It is all about controlling the tenants. Attempting to do anything about it is like going up against the KGB.
LeSage kept reassuring us that he was independent, that no housing employees were in the room. And who was the master of ceremonies, handing out the mike and grabbing it back when she alone decided someone had talked enough? Effie Vlachoyannacos. She is a principle in this private firm that contracts with CCHC for various jobs. I recall the name as "Public Interest Consulting", something like that. They helped beat down tenant objections to what got done at Regent Park; the end result of the redevelopment there was in fact a reduction in total RGI units, despite the promises made to the tenants.
She also created for TCHC this astroturf group "Save Our Structures", which was to get tenants lobbying for more provincial money in order to fix up TCHC buildings. Not to make them more habitable, but to increase electrical and fuel efficiencies in order to save TCHC money. Giving TCHC $200 million to fix up their "repair back log" will be futile. In five years they will have a repair back log again.
Cliff Martin also came up and whispered sweet nothings in my ear. He said Sean Meagher had been around these meetings, although I did not see him. He is the founder of this "public interest" so and so. His latest gig with TCHC was to form the "MAG"; the "Media Action Group" which recruited some of these tenant toadies to lobby media outlets to suppress "negative" reporting about TCHC. They especially want to get rid of Joe Fiorito from the Star.
A few tenants blathered adoringly about Saint Joseph of the Star, but I am not impressed by him. He is too close to FMTA, which has been trying to muscle in on the TCHC. It has a long standing dream of getting a contract to be the "representatives" of TCHC tenants, and collecting $1 a month per door from us.
One other woman in a wheelchair pointed out to me that the woman sitting next to the Judge and taking notes was also a TCHC stooge, paid for by Evelyn Murialdo. I could see no other reason for her to be there, because the guy on the other side of him was identified as a student of his law firm taking notes.
This was the second of these meetings that I attended. At that one, some of the FMTA shit was there too, especially MacIntyre. I wonder why he was not at Croll. This one was at the Wellesley community center, meaning that the St. Jamestown crowd was there. Something about the St. Jamestown makes its residents particularly bossy and boorish. Give them a little authority, like a pencil to hold, and they go crazy with it.
I had a hard time getting the asshole sitting in the front row right beside the mike to shut up while I talked. She thought I was supposed to turn around and face the crowd. I made clear that I was there to talk to the Judge, not the crowd. Some of them did not like that. Plus I was very tired and had not prepared anything. But I heard enough there to know what to say in my report.
There was a different MC controlling the mike that day. I dod not know her but she was also a bit officious. She started crowding me to take the mike back before I was finished and I spend less time talking than most other people. I think LeSage talked to her and she seemed to get a better understanding of her role. She told the loudmouth in the front row to refrain from advising people; "can't hear you", "turn around", "stop talking back there" and so on. The asshole even tried to shut the language interpreters up.
The really creepy "Everett" character was there, too. He is this huge fat slob with a really menacing manner like he would like to kill half the world. At any meetings in this area, he comes in and tries to look like he is in charge. I had trouble with him once when he prevented me from handing out leaflets at a meeting. I talked to the organizers of that and I think I got him banned from the school at St. Jamestown. It is puzzling why the cops have not banned this guy from attending public meetings because several times I have seen him act like he is in control and attack people who challenged him. Cliff Martin knows about him but has no idea what to do. Everett has been seen at meetings in St. Lawrence. What this guy really needs is a good going over from somebody who is of a good size and in good shape. Alas, I am not in very good health.
But back to my actual speech. I told LeSage that I was very tired, I had just come from Scarborough where I had spent the day in Landlord and Tenant court trying to prevent Sharon Gawtry from getting evicted. She had tried to start a tenant association in her building and they have been going after her ever since. There is something about tenants trying to self organize that drives TCHC completely rabid.
I told the Judge then that I looked at solutions, I did not complain about the problem. The problem is a flawed model of tenant management that must be discarded. A study of how social housing is done in more advanced countries must be done. Most of these countries have discovered that mass, administered housing just does not work and the only efficient way to administer social housing is through tenant self management. I talked a little about the long and unfinished fight in the U.K. to move away from social engineers and authoritarian local councils, before I got cut off.
At the Croll meeting tonight, I did not even expect to speak. For some reason Effie put my name on the list anyway. I thought quickly. Well, quickly for me. I just said that I was not expecting to speak, I can only re emphasize what I put in the report I handed to you, that a survey of the history and practice of social housing in more progressive countries must be done. What it will find is that everywhere, it is eventually learned that letting the tenants run their own housing is the only thing that works. I finished with a flourish before the flunky sneaking up behind me to grab the mike could get me. Ar!
This brought some applause from this audience. A couple of people actually wanted to talk to me about it afterwards. I told them, get on google and hit "tenant management".
One other thing I should say before I leave this subject; at just about every tenant meeting there is somebody who comes in with this "blame the tenants" nonsense. So it was at senator Croll on Wednesday. His theme twas that the whole Al Gosling thing could have ben prevented if one of his neighbors had intervened. A room full of people had spent two hours explaining that TCHC is very hostile to the idea of tenants advocating for other tenants, and most people do not want to become the target themselves. The piece of shit is an example of the "side with the power no matter what" mentality. Might is right.
Now, to talk a bit more about Sharon Gawtry, after some sleep. Good morning. I had Sharon e-mailing me late the night before frantically trying to get me to come to her hearing the next day. I decided I might as well go and see hat this was about now. She had been sending me e-mails which were not too coherant, about her latest problems. She was convinced they must be blocking her e-mail again, because nobody was answering her. So I trundled all the way out to Scarborough L&T on the Trans-Scarberian express in a snow storm.
It was quite an afternoon sitting in Scarborough L&T office watching all these cases being handled. This "member" as they call these adjudicators, was "reasonable", meaning, not an outright asshole. He manages to speak to people civilly so that makes him a "good" adjudicator by Toronto standards.
Most of what I saw did not involve a landlord tenant dispute, but a room mate dispute. There was one really nasty three way shootout between room mate, ex room mate, and landlord. Yes, if you are sharing the rent with some one and someone moves out, you are stuck with the whole rent. However, you can go after ex roomie for half a month for not giving notice. Makes for interesting times down at the old L&T.
I think I have already blogged about the case I saw at small claims court, where TCHC destroyed everything this guy owned, broke up his furniture, smashed his computer, while spraying for bed bugs. He won.
Finally Sharon's case came up. I talked with her a little about it. Alas, she seemed just as determined to lose as before. I told her that if the landlord is taking action against you in reprisal for asserting your rights, what you have to do is file a form T something. She gives me the old excuse that she is too busy. I told her she will be even busier if she gets evicted.
The trouble is that, while the housing mugs are definitely trying to harass her out of her home by nasty means, she also definitely has some paranoid and masochistic personality problems. That they have not managed to evict her despite her senseless management of her own defense, says much about their stupidity.
They got an eviction order from a previous judi. This judge was hearing her appeal. He told Sharon flat out that she does not believe what she wrote in her deposition. I can not find out from Sharon exactly what she wrote. But the judi did find a problem with the original hearing, which Sharon had completely missed.
There is a six months rule. If they are claiming she is harassing them, they can get an order to make her stop. If she violates the order within six months, they can claim that a "pattern of behavior" is established. I agree with the prosecution and the judi that it is a stupid rule. But it is the rule. The housing management were too incompetent to file the supposed harassing incident for several weeks after it supposedly occured, thus running afoul of the six month rule.
This is one of these odd housing properties that is theoretically managed by TCHC although it is not part of their official stock. I think they took it over because of some tax default. But TCHC hires one of these management companies to run it for them. The housing social workers cannot intervene to move her somewhere else because they say it is not in their mandate. It seems like no new tenants are coming into the building anyway; the place has to be taken down because of structural problems.
But these managers had an idiot lawyer who wanted to argue very agressively with the judi. He took a break and went next door to consult with one of his "collegues" about the rule. He came back in and told the lawyer to take it to division court if he did not agree.
So next they claim that she had sent some abusive e-mails to them within the six months. Okay, where were the e-mails? They did not have them. They forgot to bring them. The judi tells them to come back on the 14th, now past, and bring these e-mails. Otherwise, he made it clear he is reversing this decision and keeping Gawtry in her home.
I wonder if dough-head Sharon will manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of this victory? I should e-mail her and ask how it went.
There are plenty of disturbing aspects to this case. Part of the evidence used against her was this sign she is supposed to have put up, saying "the tenants association will not be intimidated". Sharon says she did not make that sign and I believe it. Even she is not that absurd.
One of the things they are claiming to be harassment against them is that when her car was vandalized, she put a sign on it saying it could not be moved and for the managers to please not move it. This was on the advice of her insurance agent. They moved it anyway, then accused her of harassment for putting the sign up.
What is so exasperating is that she seems to have, or had, plenty of evidence with which to prove malice on the landlord's part. Put she makes no effort to try to prove it and instead keeps making ridiculous accusations, like that they are bugging her computer somehow.
So, given the stupidity of the housing goons going after her, she may, in spite of herself, stay at that place until it falls down on her head or until she finally gets Connections Housing to find her a new place. It seems they are refusing to place her anywhere else because she would "cause trouble" there, too.
But what I have learned in some years of fighting TCHC and helping others fight them, if they can be helped, is that they are not invincible. Sociopaths are always idiots. That is the rule about sociopaths; their power is the cowardice and stupidity of others. If somebody has enough brain and back bone to stand up to them, they back off.
This is the problem with getting anything going about creating a housing alternative. People are desperately afraid of being targets, and usually they are not very bright. My problem in fighting TCHC over some years is that I have been ill much of the time. I just did not have the energy to really go at them. As well, they are good at isolating people. I could not find any allies. When I did, they would find some way to coopt him or her. That is their response when they are up against somebody with a minimum of brains and character; they buy him or her off. That is why I am now living at one of their best buildings.
The advice to stand up to these scum bum housing bureaucrats is good for an individual. It is not the best news for somebody who wants to create a TCHC tenant association or a new cooperative from one of its buildings. If they cannot crack the group, they will buy them off one by one.
Now it is Saturday, and I have finally had time to finish this. I have been busy with so many other things in between, some of it to do with researching how to get a new housing coop going. These days I am feeling a lot better and getting much more done. With the new drugs I am getting, I can sit up and type for much longer. One of my next blogs should be about the health care industry and my own experiences.
But that is it for now. tr
Well, how does everybody like my new front page layout? I am back writing for the net again, after a hiatus while I reorganized my entire web project. I recoded pages so that I do not have to recode them again every time I change domains. It looks like I might need to change more frequently because of the misbehavior of google.
I am getting to be a big advocate of search engine neutrality. In fact, of making the whole damned internet a government utility like the postal system. There is no other solution for the problems of the internet.
I have an ally who is a big expert on search engine optimization. He has a site that pulls in some astronomical number of visitors per month. He wants to turn it into a business and learn how to sell advertising. He does not think much of some aspects of my site. There are all sorts of things I could be doing to improve my google ranking. But it would require a lot of extra effort.
I am more focussed on simplicity and ease of maintenance. I am trying to use as few links as possible, and eliminate outside links except to web head pages. All links eventually go dead and I do not want to be constantly checking for dead links.
I do not see the sense to putting in return links when all web browsers have a back button. Yes, google thinks it is better to have a link to the home page, and most people do not know how to navigate from a page they found through google to the rest of the site. But actually, my webalyser tells me I do not get that much traffic through google.
Webalyser; if you have a web site space from a web space provider, it probably comes with some sort of search engine stats package. the one I have is pretty good; I can find out how many people are visiting each of my domains and sub domains. It is not hits that are important, or visits, but "unique visits". For example, my calendar page gets about 200 visits a month, but 50 unique visits. So about 50 people are using it and they use it about four times a month.
I think people are way too worried about what google thinks. The style recommended by google does not make much sense. For example, google does not like PDFs and ranks them lower. But as PDF gets better and it is easier to put internal links on them, I think HTML will start to become obsolete and google had better start adapting.
Fuck google.
I decided to do my blog this way because I want better control over it than I would get from a standard program, word press or something, that comes with my ISP package. I could change ISPs in a flash now. Just download the files and get going again. I could have the same web site on three or four servers if I wanted to.
This is also why I am so leery of facebook. Isn't it a secret policeman's wet dream? Who could have thought of a better way of keeping track of all political activity. I have not created my own face book page because I have better things to do than deal with idiots who want to be my face book friend. And I do not like talking about my self over much. And there is not that much to say about what I think and what I am doing.
But Twitter? Good god, there are people who walk around all day typing into their cell phone; "I am here doing this, now I am going there, now I stopped to take a shit at that;..." I hear Michael Shapcott is the biggest Twittering Twit around. That is to be expected.
Facebook can have some uses if it is used as a discussion board. But again, the person creating it does not have real control over it. Someone set up a basic income discussion on Facebook. Of course, the libertarian morons crashed it almost at once. This guy wants to turn it into a discussion about how we can eliminate taxation once and for all. Yes, we can all drop dead or else return to the neolithic age, jackass. It is encouraging that nobody has responded to him.
I do not do demos much any more, but I have been in attendance at three late last year. There was the OCAP thing where they wanted people to get on the bus free, in order to protest transit hikes. There was the one to stop the olympic torch from going through Toronto. And there was the thing organized by the Jewish women's "we do not think Israel is nice anymore" thing to support the people trying to crash the border into or out of Gaza.
In the first case, they gave out these slips of paper which were supposed to be free buss passes. People were encouraged to get on the Queen street car without paying, but proffering the free passes instead. I watched a couple of street car boardings. The drivers were completely indifferent and let them get on, as they usually do.
This is how out of touch OCAP is. As any poor person in Toronto knows by now, most TTC drivers are not interested in enforcing fare collections. Maybe one in five are pricks about it. I have a month pass, and I rarely show it to the driver or collector any more; only if they ask.
But if OCAP brings attention to this in this way, it could result in a crack down. And the Transit union might not like their members being hassled in this way and rethink their position about supporting their members who do not want to get in harms way by enforcing fare collection.
The torch relay blocking actually had a point to it; to demonstrate that this whole olympic pile of crap is not supported by the whole population. It is really a very corrupt organization, run by a lot of elitists. No, it did not become corrupt. There is no true olympic ideal to return to. The olympics were started in the first place by racist aristocrats and millionaires who supported eugenics and fascism, and so on. What is the symbolism behind the gold, silver, and bronze medals? It comes from the philosophers Socrates and Plato, who detested the democracy of ancient Athens and became the role models for elitists for the rest of history. They thought an elite should be educated to rule; the gold. A class of enforcers should be nurtured to enforce this oligarchy, wage the wars, etc. And the bronze should be brought up to be good little worker bees.
Anyway, I still get out in the cold for a good cause. It was a pretty cold night just before Christmas when I was part of the evil mob of crazed radicals who forced the olympic torch relay to divert. I think the aim is to force it to alter its route in every community it goes through.
We formed up at Queens park sub way station by the fireman's memorial and started going down College street. The cops kept blocking the streets and we just filtered around them. The Toronto Keystone Kops are a bit curbed in these days; they are forced to wear name plates and form lines. I have been at a few demonstrations and seen some ridiculous things done by these scum. I think the worst was when they walked up to this guy in a clown suit on stilts and ripped the stilts from under him.
We kept gaining block after block until we got to Yonge. At one point we all ran up an alley and through a parkade. I had a hard time keeping up. There must have been 500 people out for this. Then we just stood at the corner of Yonge and Maitland and waited. We saw this big brilliantly lit float way up at Bloor, stop and then turn left. We had forced them to divert. Mission accomplished.
However, right then the organizers had some trouble. There was a tussle for the big boom box speaker that this small woman had been ludicrously packing all through the march. I guess they do not weight much. I could not see exactly what was going on.
But I met one of the organizers next week at the Viva Gaza thing. He said some red neck types who were pissed off that they would not see the torch go by, tried to grab it. So they found a megaphone and announced the end of the demo on it. We all cheered and then went home. We were all getting cold by that time.
I was living in Calgary when it had the 88 winter olympics. I got a few days of work out of it but otherwise it had no effect on my life. The crooked real estate developers who ran the olympic committee made hundreds of millions off it and they could not even organize the ceremonies properly. The olympics should be scrapped.
Of course the usual crew of super left idiots wanted to stay until the cops forced them off the street. They tried to get people going up Maitland to try and intercept the float but the organizers stopped it. They were saying that the demonstration should not be over until the cops have left. What are they going to do, stand there all night staring at the cops?
I had one slight problem just as I was leaving. There was an idiot cop who would not move over a bit to accomodate the crowds leaving. I pushed by him and he gave me a shove. I told him not to touch me. I looked at his name plate. "Mohr" he said, " go ahead."
I said; "Rourke. Go ahead." Let them run that through their data base; find out what it cost them the last time. And they still do not know the final cost. Scum.
If there is one thing I really do not like about Toronto, it is the police. They cannot get over the idea that they run the city and can do whatever they want. It is this old family compact/orange order thing that really needs to be cleared out for good.
Next week there was a demo in front of the Israeli consulate on Bloor. It was another pointless exercise where an odd collection of people stood behind a barricade and made speeches from assorted vaguely left view points. On the other side of the barricaded enclosure were a bunch of mooks waving Israeli flags. They were more subdued than they usually are. I have seen them get quite belligerent.
Yes, what is happening to the Gazans is a crime. But they are over there, and all these people are over here. We are ten thousand kilometers away from the nearest bloody minded Israeli soldier. We are not fighting Israel at all. The people going to Gaza and the west bank to try to break over the Egypt border or stand between Israeli settlers/landgrabbers and Palestinian farmers, they are fighting Israel.
But when Jewish people have had it with Israel, you know the Zionists are finished. It is a matter of time. That is not much comfort to the average Gazan who needs to stay alive until liberation comes.
Below is something I wrote as part of a kind of New Years card to all my acquantances. I do not send Christmas cards because I know so many people who do not subscribe to Christianity. Including me. I think it is worth keeping. January 4.
Actually, I find saying "Happy New Year" to be a bit ironic. Nobody is happy most of the time except certain types of mentally ill. What people generally mean when they wish each other a happy New Year is that they wish for others that things go well for them in the coming year; they achieve what they are striving for, meet with no serious setbacks or disasters. Maybe we should say; "Good New Year".
A Happy New Year is also about getting together with acquaintances and having a little party and doing the count down thing; maybe watch fireworks out of doors. Those without social connections or who are not party people may relax at home and reflect on the past year and the coming year.
Most people will reflect, even briefly, on the symbolism of the new born child and the old man with the hourglass. Some will find it uncomfortable to reflect on, in fact find all reflection uncomfortable. Some who have not been fortunate in life will find the symbolism melancholy to reflect on.
Christmas will already be past, with the birth symbolism, the child in the manger. The winter solstice has passed and in the pre-christian spirit the world is regenerating. What the New Year more likely brings to mind is the image of the old man watching the sand flow out. It is more so the further we are away from the newborn and the closer to the time when the sand is run out and the scythe comes down.
The whole society slows down a bit between Christmas and New Year, giving a much needed opportunity to catch up on things we have been trying to finish all year. It also offers time, for those so inclined, to reflect backwards and forwards. Back, to things have gone in the last year, or perhaps how things have gone in life to that point. Forward, to what you would like to achieve in the coming year, or to what is still possible in life.
It can be a signal that time is passing, especially as you get older. It focusses you on what you have missed in life, what is still possible, what you really want to do with the limited time, energy, and chances available. I wonder what would be the more melancholy thing to reflect on, for someone growing old. One, that you have spent your life in an ultimately futile pursuit of happy-ness and never really achieved you potential, never left anything behind. Or two, to have never achieved your potential due to adverse circumstances in life. Whichever, it can cause you to rethink ideas from when you were younger, about what would be a good and full life, according to a mature appreciation of the realities of existence; the circumstances you were born into, drawn into, stuck into. You can think about what you would like to do with what is left to you, so you can say in the end that you have lived. Maybe that is achieving something not yet done, or experiencing something you have not had a chance at yet. The New Year can focus your mind on what is really important in life.
The thoughts which the New Year brings up can induce a change in the flow of an individual's life. When a whole society has some time to stop and think about what matters in life, the flow of history, of time, can change. You have to be incredibly narcissistic to think that time ends when you do. We end, time goes on. We can achieve a kind of immortality , or just a satisfaction in life, by doing just a little to alter the flow of time in a good way. I am not talking about some "butterfly effect" where my acts alone could multiply into some great reaction. I mean more like a critical mass, many people starting to go in another direction and gradually moving the flow that way, too, once enough of them make the same decisions. There are plenty of examples in history where people of a nation, a location, a civilization, maybe even the whole world, decide they want something different in their lifetimes. People talk about the 1960s, especially the year 1968, as a critical year, when something indefinable changed, the flow time/history changed.
One wonders what people are thinking as they reflect back on the first decade of the millenium. Years, decades, centuries, are how we have divided up time, and the rite of New Year involves summing up these intervals in various ways. There is plenty of buzz that people generally are not happy with the way their lives are, and do not think things are the way they ought to be, although they do not know what they want or ought to want. When enough people figure it out, I guess there will be another change in the flow, another age will start. I mean, people in future will look back and say that such and such year is when something such changed. It is often said, especially by people who want to shut down particular thought paths, that people have to live in the present. But it is also said that if you do not know where you came from and where you are going, you are lost. You do not live very well when lost in the present.
So, I pause at the New Year to consider what other people may be thinking as they reflect on another year gone by, and compare past expectations with present reality. The pollsters are saying that people are generally less happy than they were ten, twenty, fifty years ago. However, I am more satisfied with my life now than in the past. I have hopes that it will improve even further and that there are possibilities still for me, before my sand runs out. I have a pretty good idea of how I would like the future to be. I do not think most people yet understand what can or should be in future. As the slogan has it:"another world is possible". Okay, so what is this other world?
I think I can be very satisfied in working to make people aware of another possibility. I am not one of these obnoxious egomaniacs who have an unrealistic utopia that everyone else must agree with, but which occurs to no one but themselves and their little circle of true believers, or sometimes to themselves alone. Through this internet, which can link together the best minds of the world like nothing ever has, a genuine consensus is developing. It is a great thing to be connected with, even if I live in a very backward society that is always a generation behind everywhere else.
Working for the other world that is possible makes you a bit of an outcast, but I have grown accustomed to being an outcast. A rather dour thing to say, but true. When I look back at where I have come from, I can take satisfaction from what I have been able to overcome, but it is a sad kind of satisfaction. With it comes great rage about the waste of my life, which will never diminish and should never. To put it bluntly, I have had enough bullshit; I have no time for any more of it. My health, energy, and focus have vastly improved in recent years. I have gained security. I have moved up the Maslow scale. I think I can easily skip "acceptance" if I cannot have it on my terms. What I do crave is self fulfillment. I look into the future and see some time and scope or that.
So what is my New Year's resolution? A number of things are going to start happening in the New Year. Some of them are fairly personal. Others would require a lot of explaining. Basically I am starting to assert myself a bit, after a life time of being marginalized by illness and the ignorance of other people. Possibilities are opening up for me. The resolution is; to get more out of survival mode and to continue to habituate myself to being reasonably well and able to do things. There will be no magical sudden awakening story, just a continuation of the present trend.
And what are my predictions for the next year? Now that the penny has dropped for me about this "global warming" thing, I expect to see this big bag of hot air start to deflate. I am watching international affairs very closely and I am more aware than most people of the danger of a third world war in the next few years. A huge effort needs to be made to convince every possible sector of the American polity that if they do not get the war mongers out of power, they are going to have a world war, which they will lose very, very badly. This creates a risk of a nuclear exchange and we would not want that, would we?
How fares the Dominion of Canada for the next year? My crystal ball says, another economic drop in 2010, we are going to start having them almost yearly now, which will start getting through to people that the economic disturbance are not temporary but the start of a permanent change. Harper's ratings will drop again. There will be a federal election sometime in 2010, with about the same result as the last one. Prince Iggy will go. Bob Rae will lead the Liberals, and we will finally have a chance at the left - of - the - extreme - right coalition we could have had last year.
Here is how the world stands as of New Year 2010; people have figured out that the world is broken, there is no choice but to fix it, but they still do not know what exactly is wrong. They are still afraid of taking on those who benefit from things as they are. The latter are still able to throw up an incredible dust storm of misinformation and confusion in order to protect themselves. We are now in the process of working through all this confusion.
People need to learn how to think. It is really not that hard if you try. But I am sounding cynical and arrogant now. They are easy habits to fall into. When you have been put down so much in life it is hard to regain a balance. I do not want to devolve into a bitter, sarcastic old man.
I have been around now quite a while. The year 2010 sounds like something out of science fiction. I expect to be around in 2020. I wonder how things will look then. Things are going better for me now than they were in 2000, and I expect they will be better in ten years. I think the world, if it gets past the next ten years, will be in a golden age. I will be around for the beginning of it. So will most of the people who read this.
Good New Year, everybody!
The most interesting thing about the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) controversy is the egg laid by the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives. The previous month another CCPA writer asked if Canada was capable yet of having an adult conversation about taxes. We are still not sure about Canada but the CCPA itself still has some problems discussing taxes sensibly.
Ernie Lightman and Andy Mitchell came out the latest month with a defense of the McGuinty Government's Harmonized Sales Tax. They assured us that the HST was not a tax grab after all. Then somebody from the Manitoba office of CCPA, one Lynne Fernandez, wrote another article refuting this. Both articles have suddenly and mysteriously vanished from the CCPA site. Some right wing organizations have been gleefully citing it.
The HST in and of itself might not be too bad for impoverished people in Ontario. At least it is no worse than what we already have. But any good Guaranteed Income/eliminate poverty for real person should understand that no regressive tax is good. The people with the lowest income will always end up paying a higher proportion of their income in taxes. That is why they are so popular with people who have high incomes. Sales taxes are the worst kind of taxes because they are regressive, and because they are complicated to administer and open to all sorts of corruption. Small businesses must become tax collectors for the government at their own time and expense.
There is not much point in talking further to someone who cannot see something fundamentally wrong with someone with $10 000 a year and someone with $100 000 a year each paying 15% tax. Worse, such turkeys usually think that an exemption for basic items like bread or shoes makes it all right.
But as Lynne and various bright nimbusses have been pointing out all over the net, it is the total tax package that is the problem. The McGuinty government is reducing its revenues over-all by its tax plan. They already have a huge deficit and no option but to increase taxes if they are going to pay for needed social services.
They have been talking about selling off government assets, meaning assets the public paid for through their taxes, like roads, utilities, the Liquor Board, even the lotteries commission. This has already created a storm of protest. So Dalton Dimwit is stuck; he made all these tax cuts to get support, and now he does not have the money to run services he is legally required to provide. He is caught by the economic downturn which sharply reduced his revenues.
Many commentators have compared this fiscal plan to a fool selling off the family silver in order to meet day to day expenses, while doing nothing to deal with the underlying problem except to postpone it. Maybe he thinks he will be out of office by time the consequences of this hit home and does not care about the situation he will leave behind. Because of the just mentioned economic crisis, he will get very little for all these very valuable assets.
To reiterate, the province is in this mess because they had not the brains or backbone to shut up the "cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes" type of ying-yangs. The other province which has dug itself into a similar hole, B.C., is also taking the bribe the federal right wing extremist government is offering; some extra federal money for a few years if they will go along with the harmonization with the federal GST. No other provinces have been so utterly stupid.
In B.C. too, some fake left commentators thought the HST was not a bad idea. One thought the B.C. Liberal government's version of it was bad, but the Ontario version was okay and B.C. should imitate it. They also quickly backed off when they realized that their real attitudes were showing.
The federal bribe involves reducing corporate taxes. This is stupid, because our taxes are lower than the United States. We have a lot of industries in Ontario which operate on both sides of the border. Therefore our lower taxes end up being captured by the American governments. As well, American businesses can take advantage of our infrastructure and services, pay little for them, and sent the profits south.
So, the HST will not hit low income Ontarians right away, unless they do not file income taxes and cannot get the rebate. Many homeless or mentally challenged people do not. Some people just do not want the government to know where they are. They will still be paying the HST. It will start to hit in a couple of years, or sooner if there is another big economic crash, and there will be. Then the Ontario government's revenue collapse will force cuts in programs that poor people depend on.
It should not be difficult to raise the revenues needed to provide the services needed by Ontarians, especially poor Ontarians. For starters, they could stop giving away natural resources for almost nothing. Raise corporate taxes to American levels. Raise income taxes on the wealthier, which will be a little complicated because income taxes are tied into the federal tax system. The point is to get the taxes off the lower income people and onto the wealthy. Some kind of financial transactions tax would be great. Creating a Swiss style wealth tax would be great, but difficult; the Federal government has control of direct taxes.
However, it looks like HST is going to get rammed through. Us poor folks might as well grab our rebates while we can. Then we work to throw out the present federal and provincial government, replacing them with relatively progressive alternatives; assuming we can find them.
Cleaning up TCHC administration is necessary. Privatizing is not an option. March 12, 2011
a belated happy Valentine's day
Feb 26, 2011.
review of Sewell's "Policing in Canada" Jan 12 2011
Considering social networking options and a review of "Just Give Money to the Poor" (Jan 11, 2011)
Fuck Facebook Nov 27