And So It Begins

For those millions of Canadians who chafed under the information embargo by Stephen Trump, this will be all too familiar:

Donald Trump wants to be known as the president who tweets, but his administration is prohibiting government researchers from sharing their findings with the Americans who pay for their work.

The president signed executive orders Tuesday that cut off all new contracts and grants for the Environmental Protection Agency — and he also banned the agency’s employees from providing updates on social media or to journalists, the Associated Press reported.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture sent an email Monday morning, which was obtained by BuzzFeed News, prohibiting its employees from communicating with the public about their taxpayer-funded work.

Those “public-facing documents” include news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds and social media content, said Sharon Drumm, chief of staff of the Agricultural Research Service.

The U.S. Department of the Interior reportedly ordered employees to stop posting messages on government Twitter accounts after the National Park Service a post comparing the size of Trump’s inauguration with President Barack Obama’s in 2009.

Dark, dark days ahead, my friends. Very dark days.

Eerily Prescient

This is what former Supreme Court Justice David Souter said four years ago. I think you will quickly see the reason for the post's title:

A Hoax With Impact

Even though global temperature records are being set, it must be reassuring to many in Trumpland that climate change is but a Chinese hoax. Now, if only Mother Nature would read the memo:





And now, scenes from the apocalypse in California:

Facts Are Clearly Overrated

Thanks to my friend Jonathan for sending this along:

The Haves Certainly Have It

This from today's Letters To The Editor, to which I have nothing to add:

Re: Two richest men as wealthy as poorest 30 per cent, Jan. 16

It is telling that this news report was not a front-page headline in the Star.

As if the world needed any more data on the abject failure of capitalism and the neoliberal free market experiment, Oxfam has released yet another report once again documenting the egregious and unconscionable wealth of a minuscule number of individuals in Canada and around the world.

Report after report has documented the skyrocketing expansion of inequality around the globe and the inexorable march of wealth to the top of the social ladder. If capitalism were a new drug being developed to cure cancer and it failed in all but a few cases out of billions it would be abandoned immediately but we continue to prescribe the economic thalidomide of capitalism to the world’s population without remorse.

However, despite this overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence, the world media, economists and politicians seem blasé regarding its dismal and destabilizing failures and the deep and comprehensive reforms that are needed to ensure that global wealth is shared equitably. There are no front-page hue-and-cry headlines calling this an economic crisis or extended coverage of this issue on the news channels. This gross status quo inequality seems to be accepted and normalized as an inherent part of capitalism that cannot be changed.

In fact, with the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the American public has decided to firmly put on its rose-coloured glasses and double-down on the neoliberal nightmare of “cancer capitalism.”

Despite this political St. Vitas Dance, there is a desperate need for a government regulated, moderated and managed economic system that is actively structured to serve the needs of all in society as the historian and economist Karl Polanyi asserted. Such a system places clear limits on wealth accumulation and claws back excess wealth and profits through progressive taxation.

If we were smart enough to invent capitalism, we are smart enough to invent its replacement.

It is time to radically change our global economic system to serve the needs of humanity, not a few humans.

Robert Bahlieda, Newmarket

Do you find it amusing that we the public anxiously follow the media to be aware of the daily interaction between nations, cultures, religions, terrorists, politics and, oh yes, economies? Such a multitude of players in mankind’s unfolding history and future.

But perhaps there’s really only 16 – based upon the knowledge (and fact) that eight men own half the world’s wealth. Perhaps there are 16 players served by millions who accommodate them for reward while billions of others live in war and death and poverty and the rest of us are relegated to being blocks of pieces on an endless series of game boards that lead to millions of winners and billions of losers — just sayin’, perhaps.

But history says nations fade as empires rise. And our supposed representatives in governments are silenced by their parties who serve the players and their accommodators. Global democracy with globalization is sadly our “paradise lost” because globalization without global democracy is the globalization of poverty.

Ask yourself this. When it comes to big banks, big business, big oil, big money (non-pursuit of offshore accounts) and big talk, is Justin Trudeau really that much different than Stephen Harper?

Randy Gostlin, Oshawa

Another Perspective: A Guest Post By Pamela MacNeil

I received two very thoughtful reactions to my post the other day on the decision of the Gay Pride organizers to accede to the demand by Black Lives Matter to exclude the Toronto Police from future participation in the festivities. It is not a decision I agree with, as I outlined in the post.

Both Kirby Evans, one of our top-shelf bloggers, and Pamela MacNeil took issue with my position, and both provided me with alternative perspectives and much food for thought. Because Pamela does not have her own blog, I am taking the liberty, as I have in the past, of featuring her commentary today as a guest post. I think you will find it insightful:

Kirby brings up a really interesting point Lorne that white people like yourself and me have never been victims of racism, so we really can't understand how it affects those who are its victims.

This is an issue I have given a lot of thought to, but have not yet been able to fully answer. I do not really understand racism. I understand it intellectually and even at times emotionally, but I do not understand it as a personal experience.

This leaves me on the outside looking in when wanting to understand racism and those who are its victims. No matter how much I read, and I have read a lot on racism, including slavery, there is a part of me that feels out of the loop when I try to connect with the real victims of racism.

I asked a friend of mine over dinner one night what is it like to be a black man. He said to picture a world where everyday you are confronted mainly from whites, with the nuances of racism. He said this nuance can be from a look, a stereotype statement made about being black, a gesture like a woman holding her purse tighter when she passes a black man. He went on to say that because racism is not explicitly vocalized today, black men and woman have become experts at detecting nuanced racism.

He also said he is not sure about how the racism directed at him as a black man has affected his view of himself. He said he would like to think that it is he himself who defines his self-worth, but he wasn't completely sure that was the case.

I think, Lorne, we are living in a pre-civilization. The fact that racism is still a view that one race of people impose on another is indicative of humankind, for the most part, not intellectually, socially, psychologically, philosophically or spiritually advancing and becoming a civilization. We still have a long way to go.

Having said all that, I disagree with the gay community excluding the police at the behest of Black Lives Matter. I think when you isolate a group, you close the door on being able to communicate with them and communicating is the number one tool for change.

First Nations who have been subjected to past genocidal abuse and racism, which exists up to the present day, have always believed in inclusion. In fact, John Ralston Saul has said the root idea of our multicultural society comes from the First Nations belief in the Inclusive circle.

Inclusion is an important part of First Nations philosophy, and they have always practised it amongst different tribes to stop the warring between these tribes. They also welcomed the new settlers to Canada before confederation. They did this by welcoming these settlers into what they called the inclusive circle. They are still doing this inclusive circle with others in the present day.

It has and still does take enormous strength and courage to be inclusive with the very people who set out to obliterate or, at the very least, contain them. In the First Nations long road to reconciliation, they have understood the need for inclusion, even when the extent of abuse by white people, who were nothing short of barbarians, was at its most violent. It was the whites who tried to separate and isolate First Nations. It was First Nations who brought those same whites into their inclusive circle and as a result made reconciliation possible. There is still a long way to go in recognizing the sovereign rights of First Nations and maybe, just maybe, we will be sharing political power with them one day.

Black Lives Matter, But Bullying Is Still Bullying

Just back last evening from our Cuban sojourn, it will take a little while to get my blogging and political legs back up to speed, given that I was peacefully unconnected for a week. However, an item in today's paper caught my attention that I feel moved to comment on.

Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows that I take great exception to the abuse of power, whether political, economic, or social. However, none of that exempts victims from criticism, not as victims, of course, but as members of our larger society. It is in that spirit that I offer my criticism of what looks to be an affirmation of the decision to exclude the Toronto Police from future participation in the annual Gay Pride Parade.

First, some background:

Black Lives Matter brought the 2016 parade to a standstill for more than half an hour in July, refusing to move until Pride officials agreed to a list of nine demands.

The most contentious of those extortionate demands, in my view, was the total removal of all police floats/booths in all Pride marches/parades/community booths.

I always felt it was not Black Pride Toronto's call to make, and that they had in fact abused the invitation they had been given to join the parade; of course, ultimately that judgement and the decision on whether or not to honour the hastily-agreed upon deal by then-executive director Mathieu Chantelois to get the parade moving again had to be made by the membership. And according to the article referenced above, they have done so.

This strikes me as a huge mistake. No one would argue that the police have, historically, abused the gay population, the infamous bathhouse raids of 1981 being perhaps the most public and egregious example, when patrons were mocked, humiliated — and arrested by the hundreds. A brief video found here affords a glimpse of the mindset that pervaded the times.

But this is no longer 1981, and last July Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders made an historic apology for this flagrant abuse of authority, an apology that was an important repudiation of such repugnant tactics. I like to think that the intervening 36 years have seen some evolution in the authorities' attitudes.

Why jeopardize those advances and the understanding between the two communities that both the passage of time and the participation in the Gay Pride festivities have helped make possible? To shut off such an important line of communication between the gay community and police culture seems to be counterproductive at the very least, given that the cultivation of such positive ties can only serve to strengthen understanding and empathy.

As neither a black nor a gay man, by what right do I offer an opinion on this issue? To suggest that this is only a black issue or a gay issue overlooks a larger point. They are all part of something bigger, Canadian society as a whole, so my expressed view is as a member of that society. To assert that only gays or blacks have any right to opine here would be to ghettoize and, to some extent, dehumanize, them as occupying special categories of citizenship.

We surely do not want to return to such prejudicial thinking, I hope.