Donald Trump: Can I Get a Big Amen?

From the theatre of the absurd comes Donald Trump's latest scam. He will be getting royalties from this special edition Bible. Truly, we are in The End Times.

A Kevin O'Leary Takedown

John Stewart - love the guy. Kevin O'Leary - detest the guy. Blowhards have always rubbed me the wrong way. Happily, the two diametrically opposed personages are together in the following video. Spoiler alert: John Stewart wins as he exposes O'Leary's venality and hypocrisy, traits that seem endemic amongst "his kind."

The History American Politicians Try To Keep Hidden

I have done a great deal of reading in the past couple of years on The Civil War, slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow laws that followed it,  Black Codes, and the mythology of The Lost Cause. An obvious and irrefutable conclusion to be drawn is that America is a racist country with a racist history, a history that many American states (most egregiously Florida) would deny both white and Black citizens access to.

Of course, not everyone has either the time or the inclination to study the atrocities that were the foundation of the American economy, atrocities that served well both the plantation owners and the industries in the North that utilized their chief crop, cotton. But as the saying goes, one picture is worth a thousand words, and a brief video many times that. The following offers an effective and moving depiction of the ugliness of racism.

If you would like to see an extended version of this report, please click here.

Mr. Mulroney's Legacy

Willy Loman - Death of A Salesman

Brian Mulroney - Late Canadian Salesman

In a previous post, I discussed what I considered to be one of the shortcomings of the late prime minister, Brian Mulroney: his essential shallowness. But it is the damage many say he did to this country thanks, in part, to his fawning admiration of America and American corporations, that he may be best remembered for.

Amidst the many encomiums that have followed Mulroney's demise, two columnists write critically about what his unseemly trait led to: the original free trade deal with our neighbours to the south. Our delusional Willy Loman surrogate, Brian Mulroney, thought of it as one of the highlights of his life, but those columnists beg to differ.

Reflecting on the praise heaped upon the late prime minister, Rick Salutin writes:

The result of his 1988 free trade deal with the U.S. was that good industrial jobs shifted to low wage nations while workers stayed put and rummaged for poorer jobs at home. As manufacturing ‘hollowed out,’ the economy got “financialized,” focusing on money manipulations like mergers among the wealthy players, while workers were marooned in areas like services, retail and eventually, precarious “gigging.” This in turn widened the gap between the rich and the rest, expanding poverty, while the middle classes diminished. The main source of wealth for the majority became their homes, not their jobs, a shakey situation that left the generation now entering the workforce with scant hope of even owning a home.

Mulroney initially opposed free trade when he ran for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party, but more powerful interests came to prevail:

The impetus came from corporate headquarters, mostly American, as conveyed through the Reagan administration. We were guinea pigs, as Mulroney went along enthusiastically. What’s strange is that we remain, almost alone, fervent free traders while most others, including the U.S., got off that train a while ago. 

Linda McQuaig has a similarly negative view of Mulroney's legacy, which compromised our values as a nation:

... Canada had a different (vis a vis the U.S.) political tradition, with government playing an important role advancing the public interest through crown corporations and universal social programs.

Canadian business leaders wanted that changed, even though they understood that most Canadians didn’t. In a paper released just before the 1984 election, the CEOs who made up the Business Council on National Issues acknowledged that Canada’s higher social spending reflected “the greater priority that Canadians put on social welfare.”

Canadians would just have to learn to make their social well-being less of a priority, the CEOs had decided.

They had the perfect stooge in Mulroney, the lover of all things American. 

.. Mulroney largely delivered for the business world, introducing far-reaching changes that transformed the Canadian political and economic landscape, partly through his free trade deal with the U.S. that weakened labour and enhanced the rights of business and investors.

Earlier Canadian governments had developed more than 60 crown corporations. Mulroney privatized or began privatizing some key ones, including a national railway, oil company and airline, and completed the privatization of Connaught Labs, a publicly-owned biomedical company that had become one of the world’s leading vaccine producers. 

Canada’s corporate world has thrived in recent decades, which explains much of the elite adulation for Brian Mulroney since his death last month. But the world he ushered in has left many Canadians feeling like the workers he left behind in the snowbanks.

In Death of A Salesman, protagonist Willy Loman preached the cult of personality, believing until almost the end that the man who is well-liked has the world as his oyster. I doubt that Brian Mulroney ever came to understand otherwise.

 

An Update On Stupidity

Just a brief post, but reading The Guardian today, I am reminded that Jesus said, "The poor will always be with you." He could just as easily have said the same about the stupid:

Trump pleads with supporters for cash to help pay soaring legal bills

Former president lashes out at New York attorney general in email urging loyalists to to ‘chip in and stop the witch-hunt’

Donald Trump on Thursday again asked loyal supporters for cash to help him meet mounting legal expenses and keep the “filthy hands” of the New York attorney general off Trump Tower and other properties.

Under the headline “Keep your filthy hands off Trump Tower!” a Trump fundraising email sent to supporters read: “Insane radical Democrat AG Letitia James wants to SEIZE my properties in New York. This includes the iconic Trump Tower.”

The twice-impeached Trump – currently the presumptive Republican presidential nominee – continued: “Democrats think that this will intimidate me. They think that if they take my cash to stifle my campaign, that I’ll GIVE UP!

“But worst of all? They think that YOU will abandon me, and that you will GIVE UP on our country. Here’s one thing they don’t know: WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER!”

On Thursday, on Truth Social, Trump also called Judge Arthur Engeron “crooked” and James, who is Black, “corrupt and racist”, alleging both were involved in “election interference”.

In his fundraising email lamenting the threat to Trump Tower, he said donations would help send “Biden’s corrupt regime … the message … that our patriotic movement CANNOT BE STOPPED!

“So before the day is over, I’m calling on ONE MILLION Pro-Trump patriots to chip in and say, STOP THE WITCH HUNT AGAINST PRESIDENT TRUMP!”

What stirring rhetoric. What an absolute buffoon. What idiots the MAGA cult members are if they swallow Trump's swill. 

Note To Mr. Weston

Please see my previous post for elaboration on Mr. Weston's dubious practices.

Is He In Hiding?

Given that he is never seen publicly anymore, I am beginning to wonder if Galen Weston Jr,  the president of Loblaw Companies Ltd., is in witness protection. If not, given the extortionate prices he has presided over in recent years, it might not be a bad idea. 

Not content with the record profits his company is accruing, he is helming a couple of more initiatives to squeeze even more money from his operations, while simultaneously inviting even more odium from both taxpayers and the consuming public.

The CBC reports one of theses avenues is via the Loblaw-owned Shoppers Drug Mart chain. Corporate pressure is being exerted to up profit-levels through medication reviews.

Medication reviews are meetings between a pharmacist and a patient to go over their prescriptions and ensure they're taking the right combination of medicines. Anyone who takes at least three medications for a chronic condition, is living in a licensed long-term care home, or is receiving treatment for diabetes is eligible for a medication review in Ontario under the province's MedsCheck program.

"The pressure was extremely intense," said Curtis, a pharmacist and former associate store owner whose franchise agreement was terminated in the last six months. 

"They were essentially monitoring performance records weekly and if you were not hitting your weekly billing numbers, you were requested to come up with business plans and somehow come through with those billing dollars at the end of the day."

Emails to pharmacists belie the denials issued by the company about this practice.

In a December 2023 email to associate owners in Ontario — where Shoppers has most of its stores — a vice president reiterated the company's ongoing plan to "accelerate the care we are providing" through medication reviews before the end of the year. The plan included adopting higher weekly targets (known internally as "run rates") to prepare owners to meet new targets set out for 2024. 

 "Over the next 48 hours, I will be reaching out to you directly to speak with you and understand your commitment to meeting this run rate and providing these services to your patient population, and what your plan is to meet the run rate by the end of this week," the email said.

Associate owners get a cut of the professional services billed by their pharmacies. Records show the company offered an incentive of 10 per cent on top of that cut for a period at the end of 2023 if owners exceeded their target plan. 

Is this a victimless 'crime'? Hardly, because here in Ontario, payment for the reviews would be through OHIP, meaning all taxpayers are on the hook for this abuse.

This February, Shoppers Drug Mart pharmacies across Ontario brought in a collective $1,869,300 in revenue for professional services in a single week, according to internal records. Medication reviews accounted for more than 75 per cent of that revenue — $1,423,900. 

This is not the only measure Loblaw is taking, however, as the following video explains. 

As my wife said, what if you only browse and don't buy anything? How do you get out of the store?

One can only suggest that Mr. Weston look to his own house before applying the label of "criminal suspect" to his customers.