Tax our Morning "Joe"....here's one vote in favour!

Think about this: a 50-cent surcharge to every drive-thru order, whether it’s a coffee shop, bank or dry cleaner. And the revenue (50 cents times millions of users every day — you do the math!) would go toward all those transportation improvements the province so desperately needs.

 (John LeBlanc, wheels.ca, and Toronto Star, Friday, July 9, 2010, also on his blog: John LeBlanc's Crank)
There are at least two conflicting dynamics in play in our obsession with our cars, including our use of them for super-convenience, at drive-thru's, and our machines' coughing up billions of tonnes of carbox dioxide.
LeBlanc's idea to put a 50-cent tax on each cup of coffee,(plus dry-cleaning order pick-up and bank drive thru) on most days, would provoke me to park the damn car and go into the coffee shop to get my double-double. On those days when I am late, or the weather is lousy, or I'm on my way out of town to visit family in Montreal, I would say, "Hell, it's all part of the trip," and drive thru and pay the tax.
I support the proposition that on an item like coffee, now an indispensable part of every Canadian's workday, the drop in coffee sales would be minimal. We are, after all, addicted to the caffeine fix, and another 50-cents will only demonstrate the depth of our "conviction," "addiction," "obsession," or even "wardrobe." If we are not wearing one of those 'tim mugs' as part of our daily "suit" then we are not really ready for work, are we?
And isn't it interesting that the mug goes with any attire, from the roughest construction boots and the holiest denims, and the sleeveless 'T's', with the dancing tattoo ink on the flexed muscles, to the casual shirt and slacks, with loafers or walking shoes, and even to the formal business suit with dress "Clarke's."
This idea of "taxing" our morning "joe" could be so good that revenues could enjoy "steroid" development, and governments everywhere could actually see it as one "step-up" from gambling, their current cash grab. At least they could say, there is no "chance" involved in the transaction, and the roads and bridges and comfort stops, and transportation infrastructure generally could experience a cash infusion, not to mention the jobs such a tax would generate.
We must, as a caution, however, insist, that the money generated NOT go into general revenue, but remain strictly for roads, rapid transit, and all things "transportational."

Apocalypse/Rapture...thinking of end times!

Pestilence, war, famine, and death...the four horsemen of the Apocalypse!
I have never had much 'faith' in the notion of a real, (as in empirical), apocalypse, until recently. I always thought that writers used such visions as warnings of our demise, IF!....On the other side, writers also had the option of a utopia..IF ONLY!

As Northrop Frye reminds us in The Educated Imagination, the works of the imagination tend toward "wish fulfilment or avoidance dreams". And, for all those christian literalists, who really knows about absolute beginnings (of the universe) and absolute endings (of same)?
Yet, speculation runs rampant, and has since words have been spoken, and then written and now digitized.
We could, (no doubt someone probably will try to) line up all people on one side of the river of time or the other...on one side, those who fancy a wonderful 'rapture' and on the other side, those who see the 'hell' of those four horsemen and their apocalypse.
Extreme visions, tempered by the clock, calendar and mortality, tend to focus the mind! While the wish fulfilment dream seems a little unreachable, (as it must in empirical terms) so too does the avoidance dream, (as it should again in empirical terms).  Yet they were never intended "in empirical terms".
Nevertheless, the imagination never stops imagining! It can't and wont! Thank God! It is that energy and that creativity and that impulse from which all great art is born.
But, today, when The Empirical is King, Queen, God and also Satan, it is the reduction of the fruits of the imagination in schools and their budgets, for example, that speaks about them as "only playthings", that dominates our mind-set, unless and until one piece (play, poem, song, canvas, dance, film) catches an important critic's eye.
While it is true that no concerto ever provided food for a starving child in Sudan, it is also true of that same concerto that it fed the mind/heart/spirit of millions who fully entered its space, when the opportunity presented. And it has "value" only if and when the manuscript is "found" in the attic of some house and auctioned to the highest bidder. To the philistines my finger is raised!
To the artist, it gave existential meaning to his/her life, while it dragged every ounce of sweat, energy and pain out of its creator. It had to!
And for all those number-crunching, self-appointed royals, those in the current ascendency of hierarchies, nothing you can or will do can reduce the value of that concerto to one of your numbers even if the manuscript is never discovered!
Now, for fun, try to put a value on those four horsemen...and their import!
And on their demise!
p.s. Oh, you don't have a number for that? Pity!
Could it be that your numbers are the symptoms and symbols of the PESTILENCE?

Bosh leaves Toronto, after Halliday, Sundin, and many others....hmmmm?

It’s been grim in Toronto before — this is a city that lived through Harold Ballard’s maniacal illogic — but you can argue it has never been grimmer. Witness the latest edition of ESPN’s Ultimate Standings, in which the U.S. sports-media giant ranks franchises, not only on their ability to build a winner, but on the priority they put on providing fans with affordable tickets and a pleasant stadium experience. The Blue Jays, class of the shallow local talent pool, came in 92nd of the 122 major North American sports franchises. The Raptors ranked 113th — or, to spin it positively, first among the bottom 10. The Leafs? They placed 121st out of 122, ahead of only the woefully mismanaged Los Angeles Clippers. (Dave Feschuk, Toronto Star, July 7, 2010)

Feschuk's column mourns the departure of Chris Bosh, ex-star of the Toronto Raptors, along with Mats Sundin, ex-captain of  the Maple Leafs, and Roy Halliday, ex-star pitcher of the Toronto Blue Jays.
And with Feschuk, as a life-long Toronto Maple Leaf fan, and more recently also a Blue Jay and a Raptor fan, I too have watched the slight flicker of hope with the arrival of a few better-than-average players in all teams, but not since the World Series of 1992 and 1993, and the Maple Leaf run at the cup in '93 has the Toronto sports scene been worth cheering about.
Obviously, at least to this non-professional observer, no team can win consistently without a group of players, above average at least, and willing to put it all on the line to win, as were Gilmour and company for Pat Burns, and as were the Blue Jays for Cito Gaston, now the re-tread manager of the somewhat woeful team.
But, as a re-reading of Roch Carrier's The Hockey Sweater will demonstrate, there is a culture in Montreal that supports the "team" and every kid growing up in that province knows what it means to watch, support and swim in the melieu of Les Habitants. And it is not about money!
It is about history, and about tradition and the generating of a culture that holds the picture in the frame.
Someone tried to emulate the Carrier book in Toronto, and ended up re-telling the story of Daryl Sittler's ten points in a single game. And the little boy was indeed happy to have the sweater...but comparisons with the Carrier hymn, and it is a kind of hymn, make it seem like black and white snapshot, compared to the Habs 'Kodachrome' movie that spans generations.
And there is pride, and dignity and honour and deep humility among the Montreal team community, from top to bottom, whereas in Toronto, the 'star' mentality, and the absolute conviction that people will pay to continue the sell-outs for the Maple Leafs until Hell freezes over, dominate.
And, George Steinbruner to the contrary, good teams need a healthy balance sheet but they also need a healthy balance of creativity, humility, pride, honour, tradition, culture and community of commitment from top to bottom, and the individuals, including Ballard and others have changed the culture from that of Hap Day, and Ted Kennedy, and profit is all that matters.
No manager can succeed with that formula, because it is simply a formula, and the team(s) need more than a strategic formula. They need poetry, and drama, and imagination and even meditation and a sense of their own signature history...on which to build...and that will never happen in the current culture in Toronto sports.
I wonder if Ken Dryden would quietly agree, having toiled in both Montreal as star goalie and in Toronto as President of the Maple Leafs.

Ignatieff: clouded in nuances...sadly

It is perhaps important that we take appropriate measures to safeguard our freshwater from large-scale diversions before we endorse water as a human right officially, but that should not inhibit our ability to act on the spirit of the principle. In developing nations all over the world, Canada can assist by sharing our water management practices, by sharing technology and building infrastructure, and by helping local populations gain access to and preserve local water resources. (Michael Ignatieff, Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, in an e-mail letter to concerned citizens, July 6, 2010.)


Mr. Ignatieff is a deeply complex and interesting human being. He seems to want to say the right thing in supporting the principle of water as a human right. However, he couches his support in such perhaps reasonable conditions so as to leave himself "wiggle" room should he fail to keep his commitments.
Sir:

1. Is water part of the Free Trade Agreement or not? If we do not know, how do we find out?
2. Why can Canada not "officially declare water a human right" while assisting others in their water management practices? Would the official declaration not enhance our credibility and authenticity in our initiative to find collaborators to join the effort to make water a "human right"?
3. Why is it necessary to safeguard our water reserves "before" we endorse water officially as a human right? Are they not complementary and mutually both congruent and necessary? Why create an unnecessary diversion of both your and our attention from the core issue, declaring water a human right?

With respect, Sir, this is a political party you are leading, not a graduate seminar at Harvard. Canada needs your party to regain the confidence of the national electorate, and a letter like the one I received from your office today is certainly not a good step along that path. In fact, it feeds your critics with so much ammunition as to cloud your reputation and your party's potential for growth in a kind of intellectual "bafflegab" which is not germane to your success.
Please have your staff re-draft the letter after instructing them to remove all the intellectual codicils; this is not a will they are writing; or are you especially clairvoyant, knowing in advance the likely outcome of continuing along this path of circumlocution?

Leadership: incompetent or willfully failing?

Carol Off, from CBC hosted a panel on "Leadership" as part of TVO's series, Big Ideas recently. Two of the participants expressed views about the current state of leadership in North America. John Ralston Saul commented that the elites are simply incompetent, whereas Naomi Klein expressed the view that the elites have failed us.
 Listening to the 'rationale' behind the culture at Enron as espoused by Jim Skilling, of accounting that enabled future sales to be included in current revenue, with no requirement to prove the reliability of such "estimates" one has to wonder what kind of "products" are emerging from the business schools like Harvard where the platinum plated grads are trained.
However, whether or not the elites have failed because they are incompetent or intentionally misleading, while nuanced, seems important. If they are incompetent, for example, because they argue that any issue is too complicated for fixing, as Saul indicates about homelessness, that's one thing. But if they are failing to address homelessness because they don't care, and wish to turn a blind eye to such desperation because they view such social tumours as indecent and beneath their concern, because the issue results more from a failure on the part of those living on the streets to take responsibility for themselves, that is quite different.
In North America, we are witnessing. and have been for nearly twenty years, a virtual cult of neo-conservative bullishness verging on the "survival of the fittest" as practiced at Enron, where teams of workers voted on their team members' performance grading them from 1-5, with the bottom 1's being dismissed each year. Profit for the corporation has become a mantra for business and for government, much of which seems to have been "bought" by the big business interests, through campaign financing.
That is not a benign accident of incompetence. It is a willful "neopotism" of the elites sleeping with the elites. Real finance reform could easily be passed, if the legislators were willing to accept "all levels of society" into the inner sanctum of government. However, the poor cannot even knock on the door, unless they secure the "backing" of the monied class. And given the choice between a poor person, regardless of education, background or competence and an educated and "successful" candidate, naturally the corporate suits will put their money on someone who is likely to 'win' the votes so that they can benefit from the legislation their economic sector needs to stay profitable.
Ingratiation is the cornerstone of leadership; if one wants to be successful politically, and provide leadership to a struggling society, one has to ingratiate oneself to "big" interests with money. And that, structurally, requires remedy. So long as that structure exists, we can conclude that both sides are willing to perpetuate the game.*
And that means that the political aspirants have given in to the rules as set by the rich, and that means that knowingly they have surrendered their power before they begin. And that has to be done consciously, with eyes fully open, as everyone can see. And that acceptance of inequality and inequity and power imbalance is a clear indication that "them that has gets and them that doesn't have loses" will continue to plague our "leadership". And that cannot be seen as mere incompetence, but as willful neglect.
So, while I have great respect for much of Saul's thinking and his many arguments about the 'three-legged stool' of Canadian society (including aboriginal peoples as the third leg), I believe that our elites are failing themselves, first by accepting the conditions of the leadership/political game, and second they are also failing the rest of us, because "our" view which may not concur with "the pursuit of profit" as the holy grail, or with "the survival of the fittest" as the inevitable outcome of the process of leadership and governance, is not represented at the tables of power in either the U.S. or Canada. And we will continue to suffer unless and until we change the rules. And only WE can change the rules because "they" find them quite comfortable.
* There is a federal government contribution to federal election expenses in Canada. However, in order to make the playing field completely level, all expenses need to come from the public purse both those to the candidates and to the national parties, monitored and sanctioned by the Auditor General, so that "ability to pay" (or ability to generate funds from big contributors) is not the criterion by which we judge our political candidates, but the value of their party's policy and their individual character.
In the U.S., candidates are expected to "fund-raise" every weekend throughout their terms, making them completely dependent on the "beneficience" (completely self-serving though it is) of their donors, even though the specific amount from each individual donor is capped. And in spite of this cap, both unions and corporations, and any other groups are "free to spend" as much as they like, given a very recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, based on "freedom of speech".

Chris Hedges: Empire of Illusions

Chris Hedges' new book, Empire of Illusions, strikes out at many basic aspects of American culture: the 'star' culture; the addiction to war; the (positive) psychologists who make a good living from teaching and propagating the illusion of happiness, to a world that has lost its opportunity for work; the transformation of the culture into just another "brand" including the president; the corporate culture that marginalizes any talk of negativity from the "up-beat"presentations of corporate retreats; the government contracts (including Pentagon contracts) that guarantee all cost over-runs.

Hedges was interviewed by Allan Gregg on TVO earlier this evening.
His book is one I can't wait to read since it brings together many of the experiences I witnessed first hand during four years working in the U.S.
Even the churches have fallen victim to the culture of "corporate growth" as their template for judging the effectiveness of clergy. The more money that was being collected and the more bottoms sitting in the pews, obviously the more successful was the person "responsible" for the congregational transformation so went the thinking of the vacuuous church leadership.
It was a pragmatic and completely rational method of evaluation. In fact, I was once offered a church in a town adjacent to the ministry of a husband and wife team that had been so effective they had "drawn" all the parishoners from the church in the town where I was being advised to work. It was as if their success had now destroyed the parish, and some fool was needed to repair the damages. Yet, the budget of the duet ministers had grown from $25,000 to $175,000 and there were now two services each Sunday morning where they used to be only one barely attended.
The American culture has been transformed into a corporatist one where individuals are no longer people; they are merely consumers looking for another product, service including another emotional fix like the one I just witnessed on CTV with the Dali Lama in Vancouver attended by well-meaning people from a variety of walks of life all seeking inspiration, motivation and resources for enhancing their level of compassion in their work and in their lives.
Teachers wanted, through courses in positive psychology, to develop compassion and empathy in their elementary students; drug and community workers wanted to sustain their own efforts in the face of many tragic and seemingly inevitable stories that laid their hearts waste to the devastation of, for example, a man lying twitching in a public park where there were hundreds of people, yet no one did anything, and unfortunately he died later the same day. Even a corporate executive wanted to "broaden" his efforts at compassion and ended by recommending to his family that, in cooperation with Free the Children, they go to a third world country and help build a school.
It is not that these individual efforts are not commendable; they are! It is rather that the notion of compassion, like the notion of leadership, can be taught, by external people whose example "inspires" others to do some good.
Surely we have all experienced a level of disappointment, discouragement, even injustice in our lives that moves us in the direction of empathy and compassion for others since we do not wish them to have to go through what we have endured.
I wonder if the Canadian culture of non-engagement, non-involvement in the lives of others, for fear of being considered "invasive" or intrusive or meddling, isn't partly responsible for the low energy level of compassion and empathy in our towns and cities, unless there is a crisis which seems to free us of our repressions and give us permission to take action.
Maybe we need some conferences on liberating Canadians from their cultural isolation and "silo" lives so that the expression of compassion, not in the abstract for a nameless and faceless third world person, but for the hungry and the lonely and the desperate in our own towns and cities can and will be released and create healthy social policy and more than 50% voter turn-out at elections.

Chris Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City.[7] He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, where he was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years.

In 2002, Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He also received in 2002 the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently writes a column for Truthdig and is married to actress Eunice Wong. They have one son together and Hedges has two children from a previous marriage.

Bombing of Trois Riviers Canadian Forces Recruiting Centre, Friday, July 2, 2010

Memo to: Initiative de la résistance internationaliste
So you are opposed to the "corporate oligarchy" and to the war in Afghanistan, and you wrap these objects of your anger around your opposition to the monarchy to whom you believe the soldiers owe their allegiance ("they are not our soldiers, they belong to the one to whom they swear allegiance") and then twenty minutes before you are about to set off an explosion, at 3:00 a.m. on July 2, 2010, in the Canadian Forces Recruiting Centre in Trois Riviers, you phone the police, in an "honourable" gesture to prevent injuries.
Your tactics are nothing short of despicable!
Your political act of terrorism is a cowardly reflection both on your individual persons and on your tiny band of terrorists. We (the rest of Canada) had to put up with this sort of belligerence in the 70's, when James Cross was kidnapped, and Pierre LaPorte was murdered because some Quebecers wanted to separate. And, since then, we have "bent over backwards" to make your province and its citizens feel welcome in this country! A Bloc of Members of Parliament numbering some fifty-odd formed to break the country apart are sitting in the House of Commons with full party status, full member salary and benefits and full member pension benefits! Parliament passed the bill giving Quebec "nation" status; Quebec now attends international francophone conferences as an autonomous "state"; more money has flowed to Quebec from Ottawa, per capita, than to any other province; most provinces have French immersion education for their students; Quebec has been permitted to opt out of federal programs, at a rate faster and more comprehensive than many of the citizens of the country would wish; Canadian soldiers are fighting in Kandahar province as part of a national Canadian initiative supported by the federal government, and at least one opposition party.
And you have the arrogance, the sheer stupidity and the utter gall to bomb what I consider "my" Canadian Forces Recruiting Centre. And there are millions of Canadians who feel similarly to the way I feel! How dare you!
Many of us recognize the "oligarchic" nature of corporations, and the ambiguity of the conflict in Afghanistan, and even the ambiguity of many Canadians to the monarchy. Yet, when you resort to violence to make a political point, you have reduced yourselves to the level of Al Qaeda, and the Islamic jihadists who are holding much of the western world hostage to their vicious "destructive" intentions.
Grow up and look around you for the many opportunities you have to make your political points in a peaceful and far more effective manner! You serve no one but your myopic, selfish and immature interests through acts such as this.
Perhaps Canada has been far too accommodating for far too long!