Forbissima chalcious mishigas

Well here is something new, Israel is invading and terrorizing Palestinians because they attacked a military outpost and kidnapped some civilians. There seems to be some strife in the middle east, when did this happen? Ok seriously. I find coverage to be, as usual, very lop sided. The attack on the Israel military checkpoint, as constant source of intimidation and aggravation for the Palestinians, was portrayed as the first act of aggression between the two parties in years…decades. AND it is true that the Palestinian government has refrained from attacks on Israel for a long time. But the Israel government has been bombing Gaza and the West Bank right up until the present. Most times they, I want to believe, try and avoid civilians but it is true that they have not done a good job of avoiding them and many hundreds have been killed as collateral damage. In fact it was less than 2 weeks ago that the Israelis killed an innocent family on a Gaza beach, with the only comment it that we were after legitimate targets, sucks to be them. This is seen as the provocation for the strike on the military target, the boarder check point.
The response to this by the Israelis is to commit what must be called war crimes. I do not mean the actual invasion, with tanks and troops; I do not mean the arrest of Hamas leaders, many have openly stated their involvement in attacks on Israel; no I am referring to the destruction of civilian faculties: the power station and the water supply. Because of the provocation I can rationalize, although no agree with, the arrests and tanks, but the attack on civilian services, which has lead to severe water shortages in Gaza and the loss of electricity in the middle of the hottest season, has turned the Gaza into a concentration camp. This collective punishment being inflicted on the Palestinians by the Israel’s is against international law. Coupled with the buzzing of civilian areas with jet fighters, with their loud and unnerving sonic booms which is seen as psychological torture, Israel has lost any moral high ground and should, as a measure of reparations, with draw from Gaza AND the West Bank.
Why the West Bank? I heard the father of the Israelis soldier being held by the Palestinians say he saw that the Israel pulling out of Gaza did nothing to placate the Palestinians. He said it as though when Israel withdrew from Gaza, the people of Gaza should revert to a humble and peaceable state, with neutral or positive attitude to Israel. This of course assumes the Gaza people are dissociative and will somehow forget the Israelis are still in the West Bank with an eye to keep the majority of it. The withdrawal of troops of Gaza was not an olive branch to the Palestinians; it was an effort to reduce governmental expenses. To the people of Gaza and the Palestinians as a whole, do not think they owe Israel anything; the Israelis are still the aggressors, the invaders who must be repelled. As long as Israel insists on enlarging itself beyond the 1967 boundary, there will be no peace for them, the Palestinians or the Middle East.
That being said, it is not an Israeli problem; it is not a Palestinian problem; it is not a Middle East problem; it is all of this. Having kicked on the Israelis, I will next leave Monday open to kick on the Palestinians and if there is anything left to say, will take on the rest of the players in a third instalment.

Foundations of all totalitarianism...

"The President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment."
Sound like something Gonzales would write; something Rove would have arranged; something Bush lives. But this claim was not made by the current Republican administration; no it was made by a much more infamous, though in retrospect less deserving of that derision than the current incumbent, Richard Milhous Nixon. This line was lifted from the opening arguments of Nixon’s legal council, James D. St. Clair, at the Supreme Court trying to defend Nixon’s attempt to extend executive privilege. At the time the Supreme Court held to the foundational premise that no one was above the law; that although it was important to defend the nations, defending it from internal threats, threats that grind away at the very foundation of open and free democracy, were more important. And yet those of the Bush administration would put forward the argument:

“…because the Constitution makes the President the 'Commander-in-Chief,’ no law can restrict the actions he may take in pursuit of war. On this reasoning, the President would be entitled by the Constitution to resort to genocide if he wished." John Yoo (as summarised by David Cole)

It might be argued that if the nations leader had the support of, by that I mean people believe he is doing an excellent job (I think for this point, a good job would not be good enough), the vast majority of the nation. And when I use the term “vast’ I do not mean it in a Bush-tax-cut way, meaning less than 1%, but by the acceptable definition of much greater than a majority, lets just say I mean greater than 75%. If they had the support of the vast majority of the nation, they could then claim to have the authority to act in an unrestrictive way. But the current administration does not have that kind of support, and it is acting in the antithesis of a larger and larger segment of that nation’s population. The Bush administration is running the government as though it was the absolute ruler as a totalitarian state, and henchmen like Fox news it is effectively doing this. Winston Churchill was talking about Hitler and Stalin, but one can not help but think that somehow he would be saying the same thing today about the leader of the most powerful and dangerous nation on the planet.
“You might however consider whether you should not unfold as a background the great privilege of habeas corpus and trial by jury, which are the supreme protection invented by the English people for ordinary individuals against the state. The power of the Executive to cast a man in prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government, whether Nazi or Communist.“ (21 November 1943)

The times they are a-changing…

Can you feel it on the wind? In the US right now we are seeing a shift not so much a shift to the right, although there has been, but a shift to the authoritarian… It is striking that the US is now involved in a war with no end, much like that found in 1984. It is striking that those in power feel immune to rewrite history (or their part in it, remember the claims for the war) like they perfected in 1984. It is striking that the act of criticising the powers that be, the dogma of the day is the crime, is seen as the important question and not he truth uncovered. Last week President Bush criticized one of the few organs of freedom and openness for telling the citizens of the nation of illegal activities performed by its own government. It should be noted that this is not the first time that the Bush administration has saw fit to “re-intrepid” laws or the US Constitution and Bill of Rights to justify its activities, lest we forget rendition, torture, Phone tapping…
The shift is not in the fact that the Republican revolution has done the things it has done, although they are distributing in their own right, it is how they defend them or should I say they don’t defend them. They have shifted from trying to justify their actions to attacking all those who criticise or show a difference of opinion as traitors to the nations, dangerous to the safety of the people and, worst of all, hide behind the veil of war to defend and justify these attracts and their actions. I know you will say I just said they did not defend their actions but attacked, and then I said they defended their action by being at war, this is not a contradiction but amplification. It is amplification because they do not defend the war, not anymore; they do not defend their performance of the war, except to state there are no other alternative ways (although there are those who said there are). The war is an amplification because they use it, a war that could have not end, has no solid enemy, has not chance of ultimate success, but it does provide an excuse to duck and criticism about execution of the war, about the grab for power in the name of war, and the overt attempt at crushing all descent in the name of the war.
No times they are a changing and you can hear in the wind, of CNN, Fox and the other media prostitutes as they bend over and take one for the nation. As a student of history it has provided an interesting contrast to the totalitarian states created in the last century in Germany and Russia. The US government has not use overt violence yet, well at lest on its own nationals but perhaps this has changed as those arrested in Florida may be a sign or a warning to those that even if you are American, in the name of war, you may be treated like the show trials of other requiems, can the black shirts be far behind (let us not forget the Minuteman Project a so called Citizen Border Guard). I am thankful that I am north of this meltdown and hope we can avoid the loss of freedom I see happening in the US, and then again I am fearful because, thanks to our vast reserves of oil, gas and water, I am beginning to understand what it was like to live in Poland during the rise of National Socialism in its neighbour.

Poking the whale - Aboriginal Racism

Well this may one blog that will come back and bite me in the future, it’s not very PC and I must admit its more working out ideas then firm opinions. For disclosure I must point out at the start that I am a white male born and breed in a small city on the prairies. I grew up in a culture of passive racism, and have a constant struggle to deal with this brain washing. On this last item, I believe I have, for the most part, identified and ignored the effects of this heritage. Now just because I have this history does not negate my opinion; no more than it would for some one who has prejudicial feeling because they have been the subject of racism. So this being said let us begin….
Let me stop here to make something clear. I, as most sensible people, believe that many people thought out the ages have been gravely wronged by others. This happened to the Jews of Europe, the Tibetans of China, and the Negros of the Southern US. That those wrongs must be addressed and redress made. In this particular context previous governments of Canada (and mostly the people they represented) were grievously prejudicial to our aboriginal population. Beyond making personal reparations to individuals who suffered specific abuse as a result of these actions; it is the responsibility of this nation to ensure the culture of this special part of Canada is preserved and promoted. They are we, and we all have the right to be protected by (and occasionally from) the nation.
That being said, I find it both offensive and disturbing that some of those in the aboriginal community are segregationalist, racist and separatists. I say they are segregationalist because there is an attempt to isolate these communities on isolated and insular reserves. I accept that it was the imperialist that created these “homelands” but I find it a curious fact that those who suffered the most from these attempts at isolation have now taken it on as their own and see it as a way to promote there own culture. I am stunned by this because this method, again tried in the negative for generations, has worked so well in the past and why they think it will suddenly work now reminds me of the generals in WWI who thought one more rush of the lines would win the war, it cost them millions of young soldiers and I fear these native segregationalist will cost thousands of young native futures.
Beyond segregationalist there is also, and more offensively, a strong vein of racists in the aboriginal community. This has two forms, one and the less defendable, is the outright belief that aboriginals are better, smarter and more intone with nature than white people. I read something in the local weekly, the Georgia Straight. The article was titled “urban planners need indigenous thinking”. In it a Kamala Todd is stated as arguing, at “At the indigenous City, a public World Urban Forum”, that “aboriginal advice is essential in helping cities transform ecologically”. On the surface this may be taken as a sense of cooperation.
It think it hard to honestly say modern aboriginals have any greater inherent tie to the land than anyone else but because of the fight to regain their cultural identity some have educated them selves more so in ecology than perhaps those who did not have this background. But things often get darker once one moves away from the surface. Later Todd is quoted as saying that with out an aboriginal world-view in planning it is “just more western experts reasserting their control”. Here we see the racism, that western experts (is this all white people or just those in Canada? And what about an Asian view?) are only motivated or capable of domination, that it is the white people (and that is what was meant) who are incapable of ecological sensibility, that we somehow need the paternalistic efforts of the great and wise elders of the aboriginal ‘nation’.
The comment above by Todd shows, perhaps latent or subtle, racism that hold the world view that somehow all white people are evil, imperial and impure; that our only motivation can only be for power or money. That the only pure people, those in touch with the earth, are the aboriginal and that if we could only return to the natural. This is a form of fundamentalism and as such must be identified and countered. This does not mean I think the aboriginal community should not be a part of the planning, they should, as should everyone, equally. This racism coupled with the segregationalist leads to the growing separatist movement among “first nation” peoples.
Unlike the other issues, which with time will fade, the separatist, like those of Quebec, can be the source of great unrest, problems and destruction in the future. Unlike Quebec, the aboriginal lands as spread out, sparsely populated and to dependent of their neighbours. These means that there is a danger that if they push to hard, their may be a backlash against them. The case in Caledonia, where the aboriginal community actively demonstrated their dislike for a legal ruling over land and their claims on them and I am not speaking about the validity of that, I will assume it was valid for the sake of this discussion. They chose to extend their civil disobedience to their neighbours, who were offended by our double standard. In the past, and I am will to concede to a degree today, there has been a legal and political bias against natives. Because of our collective guilt over this disgraceful past; we have inverted our political bias and now allow crimes to be committed by natives that would not be tolerated if the perpetrators were white, or any other ethnicity for that matter. This immunity to civil law, come the shouts for self-government. Now each community should have the right to govern itself in the larger context of region, province and nation but aboriginal self-government is a racial one; one defined not by community but by race, and as such is offensive to ever developing sense of multiculturalism in Canada.
There is a limit to our collective guilt and Caledonia showed that this limit is approaching. We, as a nation, are more than willing to support, help and protect members of our community, cultural patches on our national quilt. But if you are not, or do not wish to be, part of our nation, that makes you them, something that is in competition with Canada, something dangerous and poisonous. If the aboriginal community allows itself to be dragged along this path there will come a day where the people of Canada will stay no, and our quilt may turn to rage. The reason those in our past were able to do the things they did is because the aboriginal community was sparse and isolated. Today’s communities suffers this plus a dependence on the nation that totally surround them. Radical native terrorist have lived under the false belief that their gains have been made due to the strength of their position, were in reality it has been “gifted” to them (granted with much effort and education) by the more populous majority. When the day comes, and it could be sooner than they think (what if native activism gets painted with the brush of international terrorism, some small group contacts Al Qaeda, where will the aboriginal community be then?); when the multicultural whale will swamp the aboriginal community and eat it alive, and at that point the smaller will be gone and the other irrevocable diminished.

Shopping to feed the beast...

When we think back to the “good old days” of the 50’s and 60’s we think about the birth of the automobile, prosperity and a better future. It was the combination of wanting to improve your life (a need created by consumerism), the ability to pay for it (thanks to a rising standard of living), and increased opportunity brought by the increased mobility of the automobile. Stores, most notably the food drive-ins, seeing this reliance on the automobile realised that if they made accommodation for it, people were more likely to visit there stores over other, thus leading to an abandonment of the downtown, with its limited parking, for the wide open parking lots of the suburbs. The birth of a mobile society addicted to the car, and its bloated parking lots, lead, inevitably to a powerful yet simple idea. Get together several stores onto a single location that could share a common parking lot would have several befits. They could share the costs of construction (for the common lot). They would also create a ready clientele for each other because as a person went to one of the stores for a need, it would be simple for them to stop and the other stores because they were so convenient. It was at this time that we saw the birth of the strip mall.
In the early days of the malls, stores would band together to stimulate sales. This effect could be amplified by enclosing the mall and the strip mall turned into the mega mall. There was no need to compete directly with each other (unless you were selling the same products) because the standard of living was rising so people would “always” have more money tomorrow to spend, there was plenty for all. To increase this money pump malls expanded to include more than stores and services but entertainment facilities became both a means to drive more people into the malls and to ensure they left with yet lighter wallets. This was possible, achieving an increase in sales each year, because prosperity was shared, thanks to some degree to unions, and progress was every onward this model worked, but this changed in the 70’s when this was no longer the case.
As capitalism reached it peak and corporatism because to replace it, people were not getting the rise in income as they did before. Corporatism changed the ethos to an "all for the head and nothing to the hands"; this coupled with the beginning of the destruction of the union movement meant an end to the prosperity of the west. Coincidently the rising independence of the “third world” mean that there was no longed a limitless pool to create more wealth as those people were no longer willing to ship the benefits offshore and demanded more for themselves, thus progress was no longer a moment up but of spreading out that which already existed. So now we still had the mobile society but the era of prosperity and progress was gone, but the stores remained and now need to rethink their business as their customers began to reduce their spending.
The first response to this crisis was not to change the business model to accommodate this more stable environment, no; the insatiable appetite of corporatism forced the business to find new ways to feed off the consumer. The invention of credit, well the credit card and financing, allowed the consumer to spend beyond their means, to artificial experience a rising standard of living at the expense of their long term economic health. Businesses created a new culture of buy to day and pay tomorrow, and if done right there would be no tomorrow as revolving credit meant you would always be able to charge as long as you were willing to sign over your pay cheque, all you cheques to the credit company. Those business people, who thought about it, could believe that people would use credit as a tool, and not as a drug but if we learned anything about the birth of the automobile, western cultures love addiction and soon we were addicted to credit.
By the 80’s we had a consumer society that saw credit the same as most see food, both a necessity of life and a status symbol but then the recession hit which showed the less fortunate that credit would not always be there and some entrepreneurs saw the writing on the wall when the credit flood would crest. This is why in the 90’s we saw the introduction of the box store. This took the basic idea of the shopping mall but reduced the number of stake-holders, thus profit takers, to one. The mall was failing because as money and credit dried up stored were competing for an ever shrinking pool of money. It was no longer the consideration of where will I buy my stereo, it was do I buy a stereo, cloths or food, this new competition made the enclosed space of the mall a liability because people who were going to your store to buy something could be lured away and spend there money else were. But people expected one stop shopping, there was no going back to the small independent, so the big box store provided the perfect, well for them, answer to this problem. By providing a complete line of goods people would still be driven to your store, but because you were the one selling everything, there was no risk of loosing sales because there were all yours. There was also another side effect that made this more profitable than first hopped, by locating these big box stored in isolated areas, you could buy land cheap, get concessions for local governments, prevent people from wandering to competitors or worse price comparing and finally you could afford to loose money on some items because you could make it back on others. Once you had them in your store they would buy, so you created the lost leader, an item sold below cost to people out of your competitors store and into yours. If you were lucky and were the first big box in town you could use this strategy no only to get customers but kill the competitions because the smaller stores did not have the depth of products to make up for the losses of the lost leader, so they could not compete as the mindless consumer were to the cheapest appearing price. Eventually the other local stores close and now the big box could make it highest profits because there was no need to have the lost leader, there were no other stored to buy from so they could dictate pricing. But it does not end there, because they have become, thanks to their predatory pricing, the biggest employer in town, they can dictate to local government, and they are the only ones with enough capital to buy the not-so-local politicians.
Thus the big box has removed its competitions, enslaved its consumer base and bought the tools of civil control, government. There is one show in town and you let it happen, when you go to Wal-Mart, or its many imitators, you save money now, but at the expense of your future. Don’t let it happen in your neighbourhood, protest and block any plans to build them in you community. If they already have a foothold in you life, cut them off, you have the choice to buy from them or not, so don’t. Frequent that local shop, even if it does cost a few more pennies, think of it as investing in your future, the future of the generations to come. Evil only need good people to sit back and do nothing to triumph, do not let you shopping habits feed the beast.

The Blind and the Deaf

There are those out there who hold to the claim that those unemployed are lazy; that if they “got off their asses they could get a job”. These are the kind of people who think they are, we all are, islands adrift in an ocean of isolation.
When they look at their life they suddenly seem to developed a blindness for all that they take for granted: good parents, socio-economic position and stability, ethos of hope, health (both physical and mental), and most of all a community that gave them opportunity. This does not mean that they all came from wealthy background, but most did; this does not mean they had stable family lives, but most did; this does not mean they had the opportunity and received a good education, but most of them did; this does not mean they were blessed with health, but most of them did; this does not mean they had all of these, but most of them did…what it does mean is that they all had some of these and unfortunately we live in a world, largely created by them, that permits people to be brought into this world with none of these.
But blindness to their own good fortune is not their only affliction; a deafness to the pain of others, for those who have suffered by no fault of their own, except by the accident of their birth. They can not hear the pain of the child sexually abused, but most of us have; they can not hear the rubble of an empty belly; but most of us have; they can not hear the anguish of prejudice, despair and hopelessness of systemic poverty of ghettos of fear, but most of us have; they can not hear the crying of those physically and/or mentally abused by parent, spouse, relative, or neighbour, but most of us have; they can not hear the suffering of those who have not, those that opportunity has passed up or passed by, those that society has deemed expendable, unworthy or unimportant, but most of us have. This does not mean we have felt all of these but we know of these and live in a world were the sounds of inequality and disparity are muffled by the complacency of them, we are not them…we are many they are few, the present may be there but the future shall be ours…