These Pictures Reflect The Peril Of Our Times

Click here to find out what has them so worried.

Harper's Reign Of Terror - A Closer Examination

While Stephen Harper's attacks on charities have been followed here and elsewhere, the Star presents a good overview of how the offices of the CRA have been subverted by a vindictive regime that brooks no opposition to its neoliberal agenda.

The article begins with the egregious case of CoDevelopment Canada, a small Vancouver charity that works with its Latin American partners in helping to fund programs that assist the poor. Apparently, if that assistance threatens to upset the corporate status quo, a crime has been committed in Harperland.

One of CoDev's Latin American partners is the Maria Elena Cuadra Movement for Working and Unemployed Women (MEC), which is based in Nicaragua. MEC’s goals include helping to modernize labour relations in Nicaragua’s free-trade zones by promoting the notion that human, labour and gender rights for workers must be upheld.

In 2013-14, CoDev and its Canadian partners sent MEC nearly $38,000. The money was used for causes such as MEC’s legal clinic, which that year handled 2,000 cases — 1,600 involving women — pertaining to issues such as labour-rights violations and gender-based violence.

Previously, the charity vigorously opposed Ottawa’s decision to sign a free-trade agreement with Colombia, a country [Barbara] Wood [CoDev’s former executive director,] describes as having “massive displacement and violence.’’

Wood muses about whether CoDev’s criticism of the government played a role in putting it on CRA’s radar.

Consider the tale of CoDev's two audits. Their first, in 2009, was a relatively innocuous affair:

The auditor came for about four days to the group’s small second-floor office in east Vancouver on June 10, 2009. A few glitches were spotted. For example, CoDev had been reporting some of its money in the wrong boxes on its tax returns, and filing cabinets in the charity’s office containing donor information weren’t being locked.

Case closed, right? Not quite. In 2012, 'Uncle' Joe Oliver, then Natural Resources Minister, in an open letter warned that environmental and other "radical groups" are trying to block trade and undermine Canada's economy.

It wasn't long after this that nonprofits critical of aspects of government policy suddenly found themselves the centre of the CRA's attention. The David Suzuki Foundation, of course, was one of them.

In mid-October, a new audit wass ordered of CoDev, one that began in January of 2013, this one involving three investigators, an auditor and two others whose area of specialty was program funding. They ultimately imposed onerous stipulations on the four-person office, including the translation of all Spanish documents into English. More specific details outlining the Harper-directed CRA vindictiveness can be found here.

Most reasonable people will draw the conclusion that these audits are far from innocent. In the simplistic and bifurcated world of Stephen Harper, you are either with the government or you are with its 'enemies'. If you fall into the latter category, beware the consequences.

Oh, The Horror!

Words fail me:

Finding Vivian Maier: A Documentary Recommendation

I feel like taking a break from writing about politics today, so I will briefly turn to another of my favorite topics, documentaries, two posts about which I have written in the past.

Like politics, documentaries at their best deal with nature - either the nature that we are part of, or human nature. Today's recommendation deals with the latter, exploring both the life and the work of amateur photographer Vivian Maier, whose prodigious output was discovered only after her death.

Although there remains much to be digitized, many of her pictures can be viewed here. In my mind, her eye is reminiscent of legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson's; both are able to capture those telling moments in life that say so much about us in often subtle, understated ways.

TVO recently showed the documentary Finding Vivian Maier. Here is its introduction:

This fascinating documentary shuttles from New York to France to Chicago as it traces the life story of the late Vivian Maier, a career nanny whose previously unknown cache of 100,000 photographs has earned her a posthumous reputation as one of America's most accomplished and insightful street photographers. When Vivian Maier died in 2009 at age eighty-three, she left behind more than 100,000 negatives of her street photography -images that she'd scarcely shared with anyone. She had spent most of her adult life as a nanny with no spouse, no children of her own and no close ties. Her photographs and belongings were hidden in storage, until the rent came overdue and the facility auctioned them off. They might have vanished into obscurity were it not for the intervention of John Maloof, a twenty six- year-old amateur historian in Chicago, who purchased a box of her unidentified photographs and became obsessed by what he discovered.

You can watch the film by clicking here. If your computer has an hdmi output, I would recommend watching it on your television.

Explaining Justin Trudeau

No matter what the Liberal leader says or does, his popularity ranks at a consistently high level. While part of the explanation for his standings in the polls surely lies in the Canadian people's weariness with the Harper regime, a regime that has shown itself, through its practices of division, neoliberal politics and fear/hate-mongering, to be unworthy of public office, there must be more to it than that.

Rick Salutin, writing in The Star, offers up an interesting perspective in a piece entitled Paradoxical public art of seeming human. His thesis is that the more a person appears like one of us, i.e., flawed and fallible, the more we will identify with him or her.

He uses as an example the televised debate between Kathleen Wynne, Tim Hudak and Andrea Horwath. Young Tim pretended to be just an ordinary, folksy kind of guy:

“Look, I’m not gonna be the best actor on the stage. I’m not gonna get up here and give a great performance.” It was a rehearsed shtick, a shucks/shtick. He did it with the rictus grin that others — NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, U.S. neo-con Bill Kristol — paste on, presumably because experts tell them they look too stern.

Contrasting that studied 'ordinariness' was Kathleen Wynne, who

sounded bad and looked flustered answering questions on corruption in that debate, but flustered is human, so she also made ground, by contrast with the “human” effects well-prepped by her opponents.

Salutin then examines Trudeau, pere et fils:

Human is human. There’s no formula. Pierre Trudeau looked human by not seeming to give a crap whether anyone cared if he looked human. It was effective.

Now Justin is pulling off the same thing though not in his dad’s way, which would be fatal. He’s warm, ebullient, spontaneous. It seems real, which is as much as we’ll ever know. When he apparently improvised a new anti-abortion policy at a scrum, he looked befuddled by the questions. “Uh, that is an issue that, uh” — then he takes a really long pause as if lost in thought, remembers the press are there, tries again: “I’ve committed in my . . . ” Then cheerily gives up: “Well, it is a tough one.” Says he’ll give it more thought.

While this apparent ineptitude should be reflected in poll results, it is not. Salutin's explanation?

Faced with candidates none of whom is discernibly human, voters will look for something to judge on: sunniness, mellifluousness, square jaw. What the candidates say is never enough since it’s all obviously calculated. But faced with one candidate who’s discernibly human, they’ll tilt in that direction for, well, human reasons. It’s like spying a fellow creature in the wilderness. It may not suffice but it’s a sizable advantage.

The adorable thing about that abortion clip is it could appear in Conservative or Liberal ads: as proof the guy’s in over his head or that he’s a certifiable human.

While electoral behaviour, like all human behaviour, will likely never give up all of its mysteries, Rick Salutin has perhaps provided us with one more tool by which to analyse it.

Wouldn't A Taser Have Been More Appropriate?

I have often thought that had the video evidence not been so strong and graphic in the shooting of Sammy Yatim, the 'official' police story would have been that the disturbed 18-year-old had lunged at officers and thus had to be killed. What the video apparently showed, however, was what many would describe as the execution of a kid who posed no threat to anyone.

Similar video has arisen in the recent shooting of St Louis resident Kajieme Powell, an obviously disturbed man carrying a knife by his side. According to St. Louis Metro Police Chief Sam Dotson, the officers used deadly force due to the suspect with a knife coming within three of four feet of the officers, which would be considered within lethal range.

While perhaps not as definitive as the Yatim video, the following does cast doubt on the official story. Have a look and make up your own mind:

In Which Pat Robertson Makes Even Less Sense Than Usual

I'm completely stumped by this one from my favorite crazed evangelical: