Showing posts with label thinkingmanneil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thinkingmanneil. Show all posts

Monday, August 3, 2015

Some Thoughts From ThinkingManNeil



In response to my morning post, ThinkingManNeil offered some passionate and very interesting comments. With his permission, I am featuring them as a separate post:

I was never really interested in politics until the mid-1990's. Up to then I felt like many that it was something that politicians, poli-sci majors, and pundits busied themselves with, and through glacially slow processes it worked its way into our everyday lives with little notice. I voted regularly - usually Liberal, though I did once vote for the PC's because Joe Clarke struck me as a decent man - but my votes were never party- or issue-driven.

Then, in mid-1996 after having had to stop working due to health issues, I decided to take a new tack in my life and I enrolled in college to study commercial photography with the idea of making a new career where I could work at my own pace while doing something I enjoyed immensely, thinking that both would contribute to my overall well being. It was during this time, after just having moved into new digs in the town where the college was that I heard then Ontario Minister for Social Services, David Tsubouchi, say in an interview that people on welfare who couldn't make ends meet should dicker with their local grocery store managers over the price of low-end tuna. When I heard that - something I'd never heard before in Ontario politics - I knew things had changed.

Of course, this was followed by other Mike Harris neo-con travesties and tragedies such as the Walkerton tainted water scandal, the fire sale of provincial assets such as the 407 highway, cancellation of rent controls. defunding of hospitals and the commensurate loss of doctors and nurses, cuts to education while corporations enjoyed grants and tax cuts, the OPP assault on OCAP protesters on the grounds of Queen's Park, and the murders of Dudley George and Kimberly Rogers.

It was during this period of the Harris regime that I finally realized that politics can, and does, have a very real - and sometimes devastating - impact on people's lives. I also realized I could not go on without paying closer attention.

Since then we've seen the horrors of the Bush-Cheney years, and that we now find ourselves in the midst of our own fascist nightmare with Stephen Ratfucking Harper, whose crimes against Canada, Canadians, and, by extension, the world are legion and so familiar to all of us here that they do not bear repeating.

I still fear, however, that the fix is already in for this "election". With a needlessly early call that will stretch it out weeks beyond normal, it's clear that Harper's dirty tricks are already at work, aiming to exhaust the opposition's funding and wear down the public. That and his Karl-Rove-ian gerrymandering of electoral ridings in predominantly Conservative districts shows that Shit Head's "take no prisoners" attitude is still very much alive and well. This bastard isn't going to let the inconvenience of such notions as elections and democracy undo all that he's worked to create (and destroy) in Canada since he came on the scene. The Canada Health Act, tattered as it is, has yet to have the life choked out it by a death of a thousand funding cuts, and the doors opened to a privatized, for-profit healthcare system. And there are still privatized super prisons for protesters, pot heads, and the indigent to be built and sabres to be rattled at ISIL and Putin.

I genuinely fear what what will be left of Canada if Harper takes the next election...or the next...or the next.

He did promise we wouldn't recognize our lovely home after he was finished with it, didn't he? We're already more than half way there...

N.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

A Guest Post From ThinkingManNeil



A frequent contributor of commentary, ThinkingManNeil, responding to my post earlier today, left an insightful and incisive analysis of Andrea Horwath. In order to provide wider readership than is usually the case with readers' comments, I am presenting it as a separate entry. As well, at the end I am providing a link to someone else who also has some interesting thoughts on the ambitious Andrea.

Not only do we of the poor and working classes not have electoral presence in the eyes of most ambitious pols, some of us can look kinda icky next to a designer togged prospective premier who may be earning $200K+ a year.

Oh, she'll most assuredly come a-courting us, kissing babies and showing up at run down schools in the Junction and trying to rally autoworkers and shut out Hamilton steelworkers for support, but then come the invites from the Granite Club, the Chamber of Commerce, and the CCCE to give hour long talks over expensive catered lunches on why the tax burden needs to be lifted from the (upper) middle class, Business, and those poor, downtrodden, misunderstood and under appreciated Job Creators.

She'll harken to the neo-liberal siren song of the Drummond Report (a report written by a wealthy, TD bank economist who drives a nice car and lives in a big, comfy, pricey house that tells poor and disabled people in Ontario how they should live on even less than they do now and be damned grateful they get anything, the lazy bums...), and go ahead with the evisceration of Ontario's social safety net, education, healthcare - Harris the Horrible's Common Sense Revolution with an orange NDP glow.

And when OCAP shows up on her Queen's Park doorstep, pleading for the lessers, she'll see to it that the black BDU'd OPP veterans of the G20 protests give them a respectful bum's rush off of her neatly manicured lawn.

Oh, Tommy, Ed, and Stephen, where are you when we need you?!?


And here is the link I promised.

Monday, August 12, 2013

Guest Commentary: Why Tim Hudak Has Failed To Catch Fire


Yesterday I wrote an entry offering my opinion on why Ontarians are not embracing Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak as the economic messiah he purports to be. Fellow blogger ThinkingManNeil offered a concise and insightful comment on Hudak's problem, which I am posting as a separate entry here:

I think that another reason that Ontarians are reluctant to give Hudak the reins of power is that most most people who remember the Harris regime really remember seeing no tangible benefits from it. Hospitals were closed, teachers and nurses were fired by the truckload, the deregulation free for all (free fall?) gave us Walkerton, the riots at Queen's Park and the execution of Dudley George, workfare that promised job training but was more like punitive community service (aka forced labour litter collection), and seeing valuable provincial assets sold off such as the cash cow 407 highway. And all the while the only beneficiaries of these changes seem to have been the Bay Street set. Now in Sparky McAusterity we see someone even more doctrinaire than Harris, and short of Ford Nation or the Harper Reich I think most folks a pretty leery of seeing a "Common Sense Revolution" on steroids...