Absolutely Appalled

Deeply concerned about the vulnerability of the biosphere, the erosion of our democratic federal institutions, and the frightening power of corporations Posting primarily on Canadian and International Politics; Economic issues, especially Neoliberalism; and Climate Change and Global Warming.

[appalledbc]

The Death of the American Myth

Naturalized by Americans themselves and by so many around the world, the American myth has now been shattered into tiny little pieces and can never be repaired, for the whole world now sees clearly what has always lay beneath the facade. More than just authoritarianism is at work here. Every single aspect of the Constitution has gaping sores. And we see it vividly in Stage 1 of a civil war, a war already affecting the entire world both politically and economically. But, no matter how that war might end, there will be no redemption, for every American's life will now be compromised one way or another whether he or she knows it.

Meanwhile Global Warming and Climate Change have reached the turning point, and mitigation remains the only tool left to combat their shortly arriving devastation that will make the world barely habitable. Neither governments nor those directly responsible for emissions seem willing to act forcefully to work against this coming assault, which we already see playing itself out with each passing year.

They say history repeats itself, but this is clearly an unprecedented moment in history with two such extraordinary dilemmas in conjunction.

[appalledbc]

MY DOCTOR IS NOW USING AI DURING SOCALLED CLINIC VISITS. With each new "convenient" technology, we become increasingly alienated from "human contact." You could argue it began with the telegraph followed soon after by the horseless carriage and then the telephone. We email and text almost as much as we phone (more on cells than landlines), and, of course, we "zoom" or "meet." All of these forms of communication alienate us from real human contact, as does, I would argue, working from home on a computer. The office has always been more than a work space. It's also people who see and talk with each other in the flesh. 😏

[appalledbc]

SMITH'S DILEMMA

What Smith and her Alberta supporters need to realize is that the only solution to conflict with the federal government is a fusion of pragmatism and virtue.

 Both the production of oil and the use of the product itself contribute to Global Warming and Climate Change - thus to the loss of lives and environmental inhabitability worldwide. That is clearly a moral issue.

 But we can't wean ourselves off oil cold turkey. Hence the mitigating need for a  production cap accompanied by the concomitant development of green technology.

And finally, to make Smith feel fuzzy and warm all over, a multipurpose corridor and pipeline to the North and a fully-functional Transcontinental Pipeline to the Pacific would facilitate getting product to market.

[appalledbc]

My Short Take on the 2019 Federal Election Results

Canada as a whole remains fully left of centre with 63% of the popular vote -  a progressive plurality which, hopefully, will continue the momentum to finally deal with climate change and global warming in some meaningful fashion no matter how compromised because of two provinces clinging desperately to fossil fuel business-as-usual values. If the Trans Mountain pipeline does get built, it will increase our total CO2 emissions dramatically because of the carbon intensity of the Alberta oil sands,* emissions that will remain in our atmosphere for centuries, thereby increasing the global temperature and making the world less habitable; exacerbate the urgent necessity to transition off fossil fuels onto green energy; and, most damaging of all, will continue our false belief in the illusion of a functioning economy in Canada based on fossil fuel infrastructure. Given the politics of the situation, it looks like the only way forward but one, alas, that will punish all future generations. 

*”Absolute emissions, it is important to note, will still rise, due to ramped up extraction, at a time when Canada has committed to substantial reduction.” - Jason Markusoff, MacLeans, November 2019.

[appalledbc]

“Our House is on Fire,” and Carbon Taxes Are Not Enough to Save Us

In 2008, British Columbia implemented North America's first broad-based carbon tax. Between 2007 and 2016, provincial real GDP grew by 19%, while net emissions were reduced by 3.7%. Although GDP growth over nine years is impressive, the meagre 3.7% reduction in emissions over such an extensive period is, to say the least, dismal. Add another year, the results look even worse: in 2007, BC emitted 64.76 tons of Greenhouse Gas emissions; in 2017, 64.46 tons - a  mere .30 ton drop in emissions or 0.46%, less than one-half a percent, over ten years. And these recent figures do not take into account all the carbon emitting forest fires in BC over these years - a situation, one could easily surmise, that would add significantly to the total amount of emissions recorded over this ten year period.

Nonetheless BC’s initiative continues to be frequently looked to as a model strategy for carbon emissions reduction. But, in our current context of a climate emergency, it is not really, I would argue, an effective enough method for reducing emissions as aggressively as we must in order to have a truly habitable world.  It is instead a good example of market based economics that has been successfully sold politically, especially by neoliberal economists, and that is why it continues to be pushed in at least 50 jurisdictions around the globe as a relatively comfortable method for dealing with emissions by those in particular who have a stake in the business-as-usual game that serves their economic interests.

It is this sort of strategy, that is, putting a price on carbon, that our current federal government has adopted as its main strategy in its Greenhouse Gas Pollution Act of 2018 and, with variations, some of the major federal parties advocate - specifically a fee-rebate structure - but it, like the BC initiative, is also woefully ineffective. We don’t have a recent report, but as of 2017 emissions in Canada (716 million tons of carbon dioxide) have been reduced by a mere 2% since 2005 levels, we are 79 mega-tonnes short of the Paris Agreement targets, and emissions in 2018 have risen 7% since 1997, the year we signed the Kyoto Agreement. It’s doubtful they dropped significantly in 2019.

The fee/tax is supposed to provide an incentive to change one’s carbon behaviour. What works against such an incentive, however, is a politically motivated tax credit payable to just about everyone to use as they wish - except the big industrial polluters who have a different market based scheme based on industry sector thresholds that is also inadequate. Such compensation, in effect, undermines any real incentive to change one’s carbon behaviour. Unless one is a committed environmentalist, why should one change one's carbon behaviour when there’s little or no pain? And in what way are such fees an incentive, say, to drive less when one has no other choice but to do so, as many do, for example, in rural Canada, where there is no public transportation to speak of, or to opt for a green vehicle or home energy source when one cannot afford the capital outlay even with government subsidies, now only available from the federal government in Ontario? Not to mention  that, despite the tax credit, any fee or tax on fossil fuels disproportionately wounds those with lower incomes who cannot afford to absorb increases even with a dividend.

Even if the fee were higher, as some have suggested it should be for the process to work effectively, is anyone who isn't in the 10% going to stop driving a fossil fuel car? Is any medium size business suddenly going to switch its energy sources and green its infrastructure without significant subsidization? We're all deeply locked into fossil fuel capital investments and inscribed in the global infrastructure of fossil fuels - our houses, our cars, our businesses - and because we've naturalized that situation so deeply, we won't abandon them completely until we absolutely have to do so in order to survive. 

That day may be coming: a report synthesizing all the recent research by the Science Advisory Group of the UN Climate Action Summit to coincide with the UN Summit on climate change reveals that 2014-2019 is on track to be the hottest six year period on record and that emissions reductions should really be three times what the Paris Accord recommends. Issued just two days later, the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report co-written by 100 scientists synthesizing 700 recent scientific studies indicating that conditions are even worse than they anticipated in their 2018 report underscores once again the monumental crisis we're facing without aggressive action.

Yet carbon tax strategies remain attractive to governments and political parties, and it would seem many climate conscious environmental organizations also think they are a good strategy. Why? Because they are more politically palatable and would seem to balance some effort against climate change with a business-as-usual economy.  But it is, alas, no longer business-as-usual:  there are no jobs on an uninhabitable planet.

There is of course considerable resistance, propagandistic and otherwise, from the vested interests of fossil fuel production corporations, their financial backers, and their friends in media and government to any efforts to wean us off fossil fuels and to shift us exclusively towards sustainable green energy sources. Ask yourself who benefits from political inertia? Who benefits from climate inaction? We have a considerable number of those especially in the Western world who indulge in classic whataboutism too: what about China? What about the recalcitrance of Brazil, Turkey, and Russia? What about all the developing countries still burning coal? 

And there is also what has now become a desperate resistance from climate change deniers who, when they behave with a degree of civility on social media and elsewhere, masquerade as philosophical skeptics with a veneer of reason and dance around the massive amount of globally coordinated scientific evidence on the existential reality of global warming and climate change. (Check out the hashtag #climatebrawl.) Their goal is essentially to keep the issue in doubt and a contested state. Recent cooperative research from the University of Montreal and the University of California at Santa Barbara, however, reveals that the majority of people in every single federal riding in Canada with the exception of three accept the fact of climate change and suggest that some sort of action should be taken. Indeed, with the exception of the three all say their province has experienced climate change.

No wonder they say that. The planet’s average surface temperature in 2018 was the fourth highest since 1880, when record keeping began. Nine of the ten warmest years in recorded history have occurred since 2005 - soon to be ten of the eleven warmest. This past June, the month ER visits in Ontario uncharacteristically but perhaps not coincidentally spiked, was the hottest June ever recorded, while July was the hottest month in human history, the four-hundred and fifteenth straight month of temperatures higher than the twentieth-century average. We also learned recently that September 2019 was the hottest September in recorded history. But, worse news of all, we have increased C02 emissions globally by 20% since 2015, in  mere 3 and 3/4 years. 20%!!

The simple fact is that Canada is the ninth biggest emitter in the world, that Canada has the highest per capita carbon footprint of any country in the G20 (16 tonnes), that we are the tenth biggest emitter in the world if emissions are counted from 1900, that Canada’s North is warming at three times the global average, and that Canada in general is warming at twice the global rate, among the major effects the devastation in the North about which we learned this spring and summer - melting ice and refreezing ice slabs, eroding permafrost, raging fires, warming oceans - and several sustained dome-like heat waves in the South. 

And the effects of carbon emissions will be with us forever: the temperature we experience at the Earth’s surface will not decrease if/when we actually manage to stop carbon emissions. It will remain at whatever level it is at the precise moment when we fully stop emissions. That's why net zero* strategies are ineffective: they still allow for the continuous production of CO2 emissions, and seldom do the offsets actually balance that output. Recent research on the significant carbon debt incurred between old forests and new forests of four decades to 100 years are a good example of that failure. In other words, biomass/biofuels (whose carbon debts are misleadingly not budgeted accurately in national carbon ledgers) as well as reforestation are not quite the salvation we might think they are as raging forest fires spewing carbon around the world continue.**

Our carbon dioxide*** emissions are 415 parts per million and accelerating. We burn two-thirds more fossil fuels today than in 1990, and one-half of all fossil fuels burned in human history have been burned since 1990. Another way of saying that: emissions have gone up by 46% in the last 300 years, half that amount in the last 30 years! They will be with us for thousands of years. In other words, the longer we wait to get the process of aggressive decarbonization going, the hotter it will be and the more the economic fallout even if we finally do manage to stop emissions completely.

Much, much more than a carbon tax is required. We'll find out soon enough that only binding government legislated regulations with legal consequences will actually work to reduce emissions and mitigate their effects with the dramatic intensity we need. We will learn that we need to shift the focus to the larger perspective of systemic change - no easy task given that the entire global economy is driven by fossil fuels. Carbon taxes can play a supporting role,**** to be sure, but the sooner all our political parties stop flirting with a price on carbon and market based solutions in general as their main climate change policies, the sooner we can get on with the job that needs to be done right now.

That job is five-fold: 1)  Recognize fully at every level of government the scale of the challenge and that we all have a moral responsibility to work against the undeniable harm being inflicted on our world. Global warming even now affects every single aspect of our lives. Its effects are economic, social, and psychological; and it is already emerging as the number one health issue in the world as conditions worsen. 2) Reduce carbon emissions radically now through legally binding regulations. 3) Aggressively mitigate through whatever methods available the effects of carbon emissions already present in the atmosphere. 4) As politically difficult as this might be, shut down through legislation the production of any and all fossil fuel infrastructure (no more pipelines no more new extraction, no more subsidies). And 5) develop adaptation and survival strategies in all our communities big and small. Why this last? Because we long ago reached the point of no return and  there is no going back.

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*Net zero emissions or emissions neutrality means that the amount of emissions generated is no more than the amount taken out, a theoretical complete offset. But the new emissions generated in this process nevertheless remain in the atmosphere, thus extending the presence of those emissions in the atmosphere for decades to come. This is an inadequate form of mitigation in my judgment simply because we’re still burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon. What we need to get to is a state of carbon emissions negativity whereby our carbon footprint is less than neutral by reabsorbing the carbon emissions already in the atmosphere. That job is undermined with net zero strategies. As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels at our current rate, that will not happen and matters will only get worse.

**See Eddy Isaccs in his recent report from The School of Public Policy (https://tinyurl.com/y3vdfc5m): “This is because of the time lag between the instantaneous CO2 release from combustion of wood and the decades of regrowth required“ - 44 to 100 years.

***Why Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is a Problem

Two conditions are always in play with respect to Earth’s atmosphere: the amount of sunlight (solar radiation) that reaches the Earth’s surface through the electromagnetic spectrum and the amount of greenhouse gasses in the air.

Greenhouse gas levels control the amount of heat (infrared radiation) absorbed into the atmosphere as it radiates up from the Earth.

Nitrogen and oxygen make up 99% of the atmosphere, but they really don’t have an effect on the Earth’s temperature because they do not absorb heat (infrared radiation).  Carbon dioxide does indeed absorb heat, a process that prevents CO2 escaping from the atmosphere into space. Thus the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the hotter the Earth’s surface temperature.  Fossil fuel emissions are the biggest source of C02 emissions, and C02 can last in the atmosphere for thousands of years.

****I agree with Eddy Isaccs in his recent report from The School of Public Policy (https://tinyurl.com/y3vdfc5m) that revenue from pricing carbon emissions should focus not on recycling that income for whatever reason, political or otherwise, but on investments in solar and wind infrastructure that can actually contribute directly to the reduction or mitigation of emissions.

[appalledbc]

New Slogan for the #PCPO: We are the Party of Deception and Discrepancies. Vote for Us if You Like ‘Truthiness.”

https://goo.gl/cJ5xPx #onpoli #ontpoli https://goo.gl/bt2RNr Simulating a real media interview is a form of deception. It's a manipulative strategy designed to produce some sort of aura of objective authenticity for Ford's remarks, and there are several reasons for this illusionist tactic. Among them are Ford's inability to confront legitimate media for real questions and the desire of his Harper handlers to protect him since he can't be trusted. We had earlier evidence of this of course with the decision to travel without a regular media bus announced earlier.

Once again we get a window opened upon the moral ground on which Ford, his Harper handlers, and the #PCPOitself operate. Is this the party that provides a so-called meaningful alternative to the current government?

[appalledbc]

What Resentments Ground the Populist Movement in Ontario?

https://goo.gl/pVG3kQ   The growing resentful populist constituency of older nostalgic* people, mostly males, who feel that they have been victimized may want to be heard, but what exactly is it they wish to say?

  That somehow you left us behind with the financialization of the economy in the early seventies? 

That the liberal class betrayed us long ago when they privileged the investor-class and its institutions inscribing us deeply into neoliberalism and its global trade ideology? 

That we no longer have a genuine economy based primarily on production, that there are no longer any jobs that can sustain less than university/college educated working people in the middle-class, and that even those who are well-educated are part of the precariat? 

What disgruntled millennials have to say may also be grounded in resentment, but what they have to say is much less nostalgic since so many are members of the aforementioned precariat with all its insecurities.

Which party can lead Ontarians out of this economic and class wilderness?

__________________________________

* Nostalgia here is for an apocryphal past - one that never was, though the feeling is real, nostalgia as a sentimental construction born of a desire for recognition and a sense of worthiness - and therefore a sense of class. Not something forthcoming from the "elites," as far as this cohort is concerned. Much of what I suggest here is also true for the populist movement in the U.S. under Trump, an ideological cousin of Ford’s of course.

[appalledbc]

In 2016 the Federal Court of Appeal overturned the Harper government’s approval of the Northern Gateway pipeline. Pipeline history may be about to repeat itself. Back then, the court found Harper’s consultation was rushed and hid important impacts. Most critically, Harper didn’t fulfill his duty to consult with Indigenous communities who hold key treaty and constitutional rights on land the pipeline would have crossed. The court quashed Harper’s approval. Now, in 2018, and for the same reasons, Trudeau’s Trans Mountain plan may also be sunk. Like Northern Gateway, it would run across land on which Indigenous rights apply — and so adequate consultation is required. Remember, Trudeau promised to avoid Harper’s failure by advancing reconciliation, consulting and respecting land rights. But now, as with Harper, Trudeau’s approval is subject to a court appeal. And again the issue is consultation. The decision is pending. And there is  strong reason to believe Trudeau, like Harper, did fail in his duty to consult and the decision will go against him. Last Wednesday, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh challenged Trudeau to let Canadians see internal government documents from the months prior to December 1, 2016, when the Trudeau Cabinet approved Trans Mountain. Singh accused the government of “rigging” the approval while running “window dressing” consultations. Singh’s accusations came after media reports, first published in the Vancouver-based National Observer, revealed Trudeau sped up consultations following intense lobbying by Kinder Morgan and despite public service memos warning a Minister the consultations were “paternalistic,” “unrealistic” and “inadequate.” If the court quashes Trudeau’s approval, it would be exactly because Trudeau didn’t live up to his promise to be better than Harper. But there are at least two other reasons to think Trans Mountain may already be sunk.

https://goo.gl/Hn3Dyk

[thejusticethatissocial]

Bill Cosby Found Guilty In Sexual Assault Retrial

Bill Cosby has been convicted of drugging and molesting a woman in a retrial.

The panel of seven men and five women had been deliberating about 14 hours at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa.

The 80-year-old comedian was accused of drugging and violating a woman at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004.

He was charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault.

Cosby will face up to 30 years in prison. 

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Relevance to Canada:

Bill Cosby convicted of drugging and molesting Toronto woman

[theweekmagazine]

The coming Trump faceplant on North Korea

One thing Trump doesn’t see as a prerequisite to negotiation is understanding the person on the other side of the table: What they want, what motivates them, what they might be willing to give up, and how far they’ll go. We saw that with negotiations over his attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, where he never bothered to learn about the issue and didn’t grasp the incentives and risks influencing members of Congress from his own party.

So do you think Trump will spend weeks reading briefing books about North Korea and Kim Jong Un? Or will he say, “Don’t worry fellas, I can handle this pipsqueak”?

[appalledbc]

In this Corner the AG of Ontario and in this Corner The Liberal Party of Ontario

I want to try to offer a bit of a clarification on the implications of the Auditor General of Ontario’s recent report.

1) A couple of years ago, the AG decided that she would no longer accept an accounting practice that had been used since the Harris days: what she more or less declared was that accumulated surpluses in the two major public-sector pension plans to which the government contributes could no longer be entered on the government’s books as budgetary assets, as they had been for many years. Here's the dispute on this issue in a nutshell then: the Wynne government is arguing that just as pension shortfalls count as a liability on the balance sheet, a pension surplus should count as an asset. There is nothing illegal with either position, with either the AG's or with the Wynne government's. You decide. But I suspect any government in power after June 7 will choose to treat pension surpluses as assets.

2) When the Wynne government in 2015 reduced the Hydro rates for taxpayers - who have been clambering for a break - by 25%, they shifted the cost of that debt onto a new financing arm of Ontario Power Generation (OPG), a crown corporation, not Hydro One. That accounting shift is called “rate-regulated” accounting — where utilities count on regulated rates that guarantee reliable cash flows. This is a very common accounting practices for utilities in many jurisdictions, especially in the U.S., but the AG didn't like it despite the obvious guarantee of cash flows. In my judgment, she's never given an answer to why she doesn't like it other than she just hasn't seen it in Ontario before. But, as we all know, there will always be cash flows for electricity in this province, won't there? And aren't we all pretty sure rates will continue to go up no matter who's in power? Again, I suspect even a Ford government will retain this accounting practice, which is totally legal even if unpatable to the AG.

Of course one has to suspect the timing of this report from the AG yesterday just prior to the beginning of the Ontario election campaign.

[appalledbc]

Childcare, Mental Health and the Ontario Economy

https://goo.gl/bvtqqw

I had an interesting chat last night with a friend who works with LGBTQ refugees (women in particular) from the Middle East and also in the mental health area. What she told me was that there are countless mental health issues for women at the lower end of the economic scale in Ontario with respect to the absence of significant childcare: the stress in families is monumental, she says, for the entire family, but particularly women. This is something one does not hear too much about, but it's not hard to imagine. And so she, like so many of us, would welcome a substantial child care program, the benefits of which would not only be more stable productive families contributing to the economy but also better mental health for those feeling the pressure - in particular women.  Since so much of the mental health strain is at the bottom of the economic scale, she obviously also welcomes the minimum wage. As we know, women in particular have been exploited far more than men by both large corporations and small business with respect to wages.

So bottom line: childcare support plus minimum wage = increased productive working families contributing to the Ontario economy plus much improved mental health for families plus specific help for women who want to work.

[politico]

Church of The Donald

Never mind Fox. Trump’s most reliable media mouthpiece is now Christian TV. By RUTH GRAHAM

HENDERSONVILLE, Tenn. — The Music City campus of the Trinity Broadcasting Network is about a half-hour drive from Music City itself, in a placid Nashville suburb on a bend in the Cumberland River where the main road through town is called the Johnny Cash Parkway. TBN, America’s largest Christian television network, acquired the complex in 1994 after the death of country singer Conway Twitty, who had operated it as a sprawling tourist attraction he called Twitty City. Last year, TBN renovated Twitty’s personal auditorium, leveling the floor, adding large neon signs and a faux-brick backdrop under the original Corinthian columns. The resulting TV set looks like an urban streetscape framed by a Greek temple.

On a February night, in his large office just above the auditorium, the network’s biggest star is making last-minute plans for what’s shaping up to be a busy evening. First, Mike Huckabee fields some logistics for dinner at his nearby condo, where he will host three couples who won the privilege in a charity auction. He takes a call from the actor Jon Voight, who tells Huckabee he is free to do an interview about Israel. (Huckabee leaves the next day for Jerusalem, where TBN opened another studio a few years ago.) He checks with one of his producers about an old “Laugh-In” clip Huckabee had requested. “We aren’t paying $6,500 for it, good gosh!” he laughs when he hears the cost of the snippet. “Did they point a gun at your head and wear a ski mask when you asked that?” (They decide not to use it.)

Two hours later, Huckabee walks onto a stage in front of more than 200 people and kicks off a taping of his hourlong cable show. For nearly all of its 45-year history, Trinity’s programming had been strictly religious, a mix of evangelical preachers, gospel music and a flagship talk show called “Praise the Lord” (now just “Praise”). But Huckabee’s show is saturated with politics. The former two-term governor of Arkansas and one-time Iowa caucus winner opens with a disquisition on the Fourth Amendment (“Our system is designed to make sure the government is your servant”) leading into a pre-taped interview with Senator Rand Paul. It’s followed by an appearance by Kayleigh McEnany, the Republican National Committee spokeswoman and a frequent campaign surrogate for Donald Trump. The crowd roars with laughter when Huckabee promises he won’t go on for as long as Nancy Pelosi, a reference to her recent filibuster-style speech on the House floor. “Can you imagine Nancy Pelosi for eight hours?” he asks, chuckling. “NO!” the audience shouts back.

Read more here

[appalledbc]

Doug Ford’s Populist Campaign Strategy [Revised]

A clear strategic pattern is emerging in the Ford campaign: drop a morsel of rhetorical outrage here or there with murky facts and details inscribed in “truthiness” to come later if ever - a particularly effective strategy for Trump-like rallies with so many committed supporters.  Surprising to some of Ford’s critics, those supporters don’t really care about the facts and details. For Ford’s appeal is to emotion, exploiting a mythic longing for a past when you were respected for your hard work and an even deeper manipulation of  your sense of victimhood and resentment no matter what your demographic. 

After 15 years of uneven rule, the Liberal Party of Ontario and Wynne in particular, through many ad hominem assaults, have been very convenient cathectic targets. 

The challenge obviously for the other parties: how to combat rhetorically and otherwise an appeal to what some would call the irrational.

See Bob Hepburn’s comments on the “I-don’t-care” attitude below.

“Indeed, this “I-don’t-care” attitude toward Ford by his loyalists is hauntingly similar to the attitude toward Trump by his fans while he was campaigning for the U.S. presidency. It was so pronounced that Trump famously declared at a rally in Iowa that his supporters were so loyal they’d stick with him even if he were to shoot someone in downtown New York. It’s the same phenomenon with Ford supporters. Here are some examples: Ford was reported by the Globe and Mail to have been a drug dealer for a number of years in the 1980s. Ford denied the allegations, but never sued the paper for libel or challenged them in court, later suggesting a lawsuit would be “a waste of time.” But Ford fans don’t care. 

He accused the father of an autistic boy of waging a “jihad” and told him to “go to hell.” But Ford fans don’t care. In 2016, Ford was found by Toronto’s integrity commissioner to have broken the city‘s code of conduct when he was a councillor by improperly using his influence in municipal matters pertaining to two firms that were clients of his Deco Labels, his family-owned company. But Ford fans don’t care. 

While a councillor, he urged the city to consider an expensive, laughable plan to develop the Toronto Port Lands area with a monorail, a boat-in hotel and the world’s biggest Ferris wheel. Ford fans still don’t care. After attacking the leadership of his own party about how they ran the central party operations, Ford took the unprecedented step last weekend of appointing 11 Tory candidates, including the son of former premier Mike Harris, who had lost a nomination contest in a nearby riding, to run in the June election. But Ford fans don’t care.

 He has said he wants to fire the head of Hydro One because of his big salary, even though he has no authority to do that. He’s vowed to cut $6 billion in spending, although he had no plan to do so. He’s vowed to slash Ontario’s corporate tax rate although it already is the lowest in Canada. He has yet to unveil his campaign platform. But Ford fans don’t care. 

He’s called a Toronto Star reporter a “little bitch,” told a Globe and Mail reporter to get “off her lazy ass,” and called journalists “a bunch of pricks.” But Ford’s fans don’t care. 

With attitudes like that, it seems Ford supporters will stay with him regardless of what happens in the official campaign period. If that happens, defeat is certain for Wynne.” - Bob Hepburn, Toronto Star 26.04.2018 https://goo.gl/8LDYQt

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A footnote to to the remarks above:  https://goo.gl/t1L7Dm We may naively think that Ford's endorsement if not enabling of Tanya Granic Allen’s agenda might work against him, but he and his “I-don't-care “supporters, though they may not say so openly, probably share her appalling values. Harris 2.0 is in the making.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Famed War Reporter Reaches Syrian 'Chemical Attack' Site, Concludes "They Were Not Gassed"

Robert Fisk's bombshell first-hand account runs contrary to nearly every claim circulating in major international press concerning Syria.

Submitting this for discussion. Thanks!

–

Submitted by @mattykinsel

[appalledbc]

Wow! This will surely shift the dynamic. Trump may be able to position it as #fakenews but France and the UK will have a harder time.

[appalledbc]

We’ve always suspected it of course, but the SUN newspaper chain is an outright propaganda machine, it would seem. This  photo appears to be their strategy  for the Ontario Election. There would seem to be no arms length between the so-called newspaper chain and the #PCPO, for we’ve already seen the rollout of #4 from the Ford team in the past week. Perhaps, after all, we shouldn’t be all that surprised since the current chief editor for the Toronto Sun was Rob Ford’s Director of Communications in 2010. See the transcript and commentary here:

https://goo.gl/LHzPiA

[appalledbc]

Beware the Ford False Dichotomies

Doug Ford, as is the wont of the Right everywhere, has been consistently setting up a binary opposition between government and the private sector. This is of course a false dichotomy - a well-worn trope the Conservatives have been peddling for years and one, we notice, both Trump as well as Ford uses often. It's akin to continuously positioning the government as some sort of enemy trying to steal every last dime you worked so hard for through taxes. But, as as we know, the minute you take away the existing services government provides through taxes, the same people who complain about taxes start yelling and screaming.

This is not to say governments shouldn't spend money judiciously. They should if it benefits everyone in Ontario and not just the few. That's why voters should take the time to evaluate policy, for in the end it is policy that actually changes your day-to-day life in Ontario. 

Would that we could have an opportunity to evaluate Ford and Company's policies, for, who knows, there might be something of value there for us to consider - but not likely.