Category: Politics

Comments on recent political activities and developments primarily in the U.S. and Canada.

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Mike Harris Spanks the Teachers

Let’s see now if we can get history right.

A long time ago, parents in every region of Ontario created schools for our children.

They hired teachers to teach the classes.

The specified that the teachers had to teach from 9:00 to 3:00, math, history, English, music, Latin, whatever… They knew that the teachers actually had to work several hours more than that every day, marking and preparing lessons, and chopping wood for the stove in the winter. Fair enough.

Some teachers, impassioned, perhaps, for the arts or athletics, told the children: if you want to play baseball or put on a play, stay after school and we will help you. The teachers stayed at school, voluntarily, because they loved sports or music or drama, or, heavens! because they loved their students and wanted them to experience the good things in life.

Mike Harris is elected première of the province of Ontario. He calls the teachers names. In his first session of parliament, he said, “you teachers are a bunch of scumbags and if you don’t smarten up my dad’s gonna get you.” The teachers replied, “you’re not the boss of me.”

Mike Harris said, we are paying you too much. Teachers? What a bunch of worthless scoundrels. You don’t sell anything. You don’t manufacture plastic trinkets. You don’t scam people into paying too much for credit. You get to stand in front of a bunch of kids and yak yak yak all day. You call that work? I’ll show you. You deserve to be paid three peanuts an hour, like the monkeys in the zoo.

The teachers said, if you keep calling us names, we’re not going to stay after school to volunteer for sports or dramas anymore. Harris said, “nyah nyah nyah nyah—woo woo woo woo”. And so we will have a strike next fall.

I was beginning to lose sympathy for the teachers a while ago, until Mike Harris tried to grab their extracurricular activities and make them unpaid job requirements.

You know, even if you agree with Mike Harris– that teachers are over-paid scoundrels who have taken the public to the cleaners with their excessive salary demands and luxurious pensions– I say, even if you agree with Mike Harris, you have to acknowledge that any employer who used this approach on his employees would be an idiot. What is the goal here? Every employer knows that the goal is to make your employees happy and loyal and productive. And the best way to do that, right, is cut their wages, make them work longer, and insult them. This is sure to built up loyalty and trust. This is sure to pay reams of dividends the next round of salary negotiations. This is sure to instill in your employees a devotion to their tasks.

The most contemptible part of it all is that Mike Harris himself spends about 2/3 of his time on vacation. And he has lately been talking about giving himself a big fat raise.

Oh the rank hypocrisy.

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Elian – Call Home

Well, well. Isn’t it reassuring– if you’re a Democrat– to know that Al Gore is quite capable of getting down and dirty when necessary to win votes. Makes you feel all fuzzy and warm about his prospects for the November presidential election.

Al Gore, don’t you know, would like to win the state of Florida in November. The state of Florida consists largely of crime-ridden urban vacuum Miami and Disneyland. With George Bush Jr. as the Republican nominee, Disneyland is sewn up, but, hey, Miami is still up for grabs. And Miami is populated with ex-Cubans still seething with hatred for Fidel Castro, forty years after he nationalized the casinos and bordellos of Havana.

Enter Elian Gonzalez and his mom. Elian’s parents were divorced, and his father had custody of Elian. His mom, ever the responsible parent, and a non-swimmer, decided to abduct him– that’s what we call it when a dad does the same thing– and hop into a flimsy home-made aluminum boat and defect to America. The boat departed at night, over-loaded by two with a couple of last-minute adventurers, and almost sank shortly after it left the beach. Elian, terrified, didn’t want to go when they tried again a few days later.

He had more sense than the rest of them: out in open water, the boat sank. Elian stayed afloat on an inner tube and saw his mother and almost all of the others drown.

Elian drifted for several days until he was picked up by a fisherman and brought to Miami. He was placed in the custody of some distant relatives of rather distinctive all-American enthusiasms. They decided that rather than send Elian to live with his own father in Cuba, they would make Elian a symbol of their festering obsessive compulsive hatred of Castro. They would Americanize him.

A whole cartload of conservative Republicans supports this disgraceful effort to remove a child from the custody of his father. They support this brazen and cynical attempt to exploit the child for craven political ends.  The party, supposedly, of family values, wants to exploit a child.

How low can you sink?

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Little Piggies

At the end of the celebrated novel Animal Farm by George Orwell, the farm animals look from their revolutionary leaders, the pigs, to their former oppressors, the farmers, and begin to see that they are both essentially alike. Orwell’s point was eloquently made: under the enticing delusion of liberation, the animals replaced one set of thugs with another.

Orwell has been widely interpreted as inferring that capitalism is okay, because he so obviously illustrates how communism betrayed humanity. Most people miss a very important point: the farmers (capitalists) are as bad as the pigs.

George Orwell died in 1950. The CIA’s Howard Hunt (who later helped burgle the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee on behalf of Richard Nixon’s Re-election Committee) dispatched some agents to Britain to buy the film rights of the book from Orwell’s widow. In the subsequent animated version of the movie, the farmer-capitalists in the conclusion were deleted.

And here, of course, the wonderful incidence of enemies ending up behaving like each other.  The U.S. government lied to encourage Americans to believe that the Communists are liars.

[When you think about it, that’s quite an admission. It’s as if the CIA was admitting that the “good” capitalists it was defending were intent upon slaughtering and eating the “workers”. But that was okay, because the Communists were going to do the same thing anyway. 2011-03-04]

The Animal Farm revisionism was only part of a concerted campaign by the CIA to try to discredit communism by sponsoring a steady stream of propaganda against it through cultural agencies, exhibitions, writers, and academics.

Obviously, the very means by which the CIA tried to prove that the capitalist west was “free” powerfully undermined the very notion that the U.S. and it’s allies were substantively more honest, truthful, or ethical than their communist enemies.

Among those who were compromised by this campaign: Nicholas Nabokov (the writer’s cousin), Stephen Spender, Isaiah Berlin, Encounter Magazine, James Mitchener, and Mary McCarthy.

I recall a piece in Reader’s Digest by James Mitchener in which he essentially argued that the students at Kent State deserved to be shot by the National Guard because some of the female protestors used obscenities, and this was an extreme provocation to the National Guardsmen who were largely effete southern gentlemen who were shocked that ladies would use obscenities. I wonder if that particular piece was subsidized. Perhaps it should have been.

These and other gems are recounted in a book by British writer Frances Stonor Saunders, in “The Cultural Cold War: The C.I.A. and the World of Arts and Letters”

Trust no one.

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McCaine Mutiny

There is a lot to be learned about the Republican Party from the failed candidacy of John McCain.

First of all, there is the bizarre logic of the primary process. The object of the primaries is to nominate a candidate who can represent the values of the Republican Party and win an election against the nominee from the Democrats. But you wouldn’t know it from this primary.

There is a certain percentage of the electorate who will vote upon party lines regardless of who the nominee is. But in order to win the election, you must appeal to more of the undecided, moderate voters than your opponent does. It was rather hysterical, in this context, to hear George Bush Jr. complain bitterly about John McCain appealing to Democrats and independents in order to win the Michigan primary. In other words, the outrageous John McCain actually positioned himself well to win the general election. Is that the kind of candidate you want??? Well… it is, sort of.

But the larger lesson is that the Republican Party really is, baldly and absolutely, the party of Big Money. Bush and McCain did not disagree on any major policy issue except what to do with the budget surplus (Bush wants to give it to the rich in the form of a tax break, while McCain wants to use it to pay down the debt and fortify Medicare) and campaign finance reform. McCain wants to eliminate the notorious “soft money” from election campaigns; Bush doesn’t.

The fundamental difference between the two men is that George Bush Jr. understands and likes the symbiotic relationship between the wealthy and Republican politics, and McCain does not. Bush understands that, in exchange for the millions of dollars in campaign financing he has received, he will enact certain policies and agendas that will generously benefit his rich sponsors, including, especially, his mammoth proposed tax break for the rich. McCain sees that relationship as something that essentially corrupts the political process. Instead of making decisions based on what is best for all Americans, Bush Jr. will be making decisions based on the best interests of his generous buddies.

The Republicans would have you believe that the Democrats do the same thing. But even the Republicans admit that the special interests that the Democrats are generally beholden to are groups, like the labor unions and the NAACP and teachers’ associations and so on. So at least the Democrats are beholden to large numbers of people, instead of a small minority of wealthy capitalists.

Gore has smartly positioned himself right behind McCain. He has offered to forego the use of all “soft” money if Bush Jr. also agrees.

Fat chance, and Gore knows it, and Bush knows it.

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Self-Regulation and Snitch Lines

I just heard that Mike Harris is going to get rid of all those snitch-lines and allow people on welfare to determine for themselves just how much they need and how long they need it for.

You think he’s crazy? You think that people would actually lie about how much money they need from the province to take care of their children and put food on the table, and to pay for those rapidly escalating rents on those de-controlled apartments? Do you really think someone might just quit his job out of sheer, perverse laziness, and collect welfare instead? How can you think that about people?

Just kidding, of course. Everyone knows that most people are fundamentally dishonest and, given half a chance, will cheat, lie, and steal at every opportunity.

Except…

Well, you see, Mikey Harris wants to do precisely the above…. except, he doesn’t want to rely on the honesty and integrity of the poor. He wants to rely on the honesty and integrity of the rich, the owners and managers of big industrial concerns that might– just might– cut corners by dumping toxic wastes into the environment or polluting the air.

I’m not making this up. He wants to rely more on “self-regulation” and get rid of those unpleasant, annoying pollution inspectors and officials.

Was there ever a more toxic illustration of the real philosophy of the conservatives: two sets of laws and principles– one for the rich, and one for the poor.

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Survivor: Fake TV

Well, Survivor II is in full swing now. In case you missed it, a group of individuals are placed in a primitive, uncivilized location and forced to fend for themselves for three months or so while relying strictly on their wits, skills, and courage– and the generosity of the camera crew– to survive. Once a week, they have a “tribal council” meeting and vote one member out of the club. The last remaining member wins $1 million.

The movie is called “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” based on a novel by Horace McCoy (1935) and filmed by Sydney Pollack in 1969 (starring Gig Young, Bruce Dern, Bonnie Bedelia, Michael Sarrazin and Jane Fonda).

What? How can that be?

The movie is about a dance marathon. During The Great Depression, various organizations, including radio stations, would host these crazy dance marathons to attract an audience, and, I suppose, to distract people from their problems. Couples or individuals would sign up and dance and dance and dance, non-stop, until only one couple was left on the floor. That couple won some money. The prize was never really very big, but it was the depression. People were desperate.

Gig Young, in one of the great roles of American cinema, plays the MC of this particular dance. His performance is dazzling. He is a mixture of Dick Clark, Billy Graham, and Satan, cajoling the dancers onwards, promising them extravagant rewards and fame, ruthlessly weeding out the half-hearted, the weak, and the indifferent. When a beautiful young girl offers to have sex with him on the understanding that he will help her win, he smiles slightly, takes the sex, but delivers nothing. The girl mistakenly believed some kind of obligation would exist, when she knew full well that she had no power to compel it.

Some medical care is provided for the dancers, but they are generally brutalized, ruthlessly weeded out, and cruelly disposed of when they give up.

When it becomes clear that not enough dancers are falling fast enough, they hold “sprints”. The dancers race around in a big circle, and the last couple is eliminated. During one of these sprints, a sailor (Red Buttons) has a heart attack and dies. His girl continues dragging him along and over the finish line ahead of one other couple. As medical personnel attend to him, Gig Young orders the band to play to distract the crowd– the party goes on. And now a word from our sponsor.

The similarities between “They Shoot Horses Don’t They” and “Survivor” are uncanny. Except that Jeff Probst is to Gig Young what Dean Jones was to Laurence Olivier. But the message is the same. Survivor is about our system, our society, and what makes you a winner or loser in the general scheme of things by which most of us live. As such, it is a remarkably amoral scheme. There are no rewards for virtue, honesty, or integrity.

The scheme of Survivor is sold to us as a contest in which the most talented and strongest are the likely winners. But it soon became clear that the most talented and strongest were the first to be voted off the island, and the most devious and manipulative dominated the proceedings. It is a tribute to the endless resourcefulness of our culture that this state of affairs was readily absorbed and adapted. Richard Hatch, the cleverest and most cunning of the contestants, quickly became a celebrity.

It is interesting that, while selling us the program as a test of survivor skills (even the name…), the producers didn’t have the guts to stay with the original concept for very long. First of all, emergency medical help was always readily available. Secondly, food had to be flown into the island on a regular basis in order to keep the contestant’s alive. Thirdly, scenes were regularly staged or re-enacted to improve on camera angles.

But most importantly, contestants were routinely manipulated in order to provide more conflict– and better television.  Left to their own devices, they were quite likely to have cooperated, something that could only be allowed in the worst nightmares of the sponsors.

But the most important element of phoniness in the whole thing is the rather bizarre ritual of voting someone off the island at the end of every episode, as if this process is analogous to some indispensable element of human society. Think of the possible alternative ways of determining a winner. A simple vote by all the contestants at the end of three months. A vote by the audience. A skills contest. Or they could even have split up the million among anyone who could survive one year without any outside help.

What might have happened is that the group would have pulled together, built a society that works for them, and learned the value of cooperation and sharing. But hey, even Sesame Street has advertising nowadays.

On the other hand, they might have broken down into competing factions, started bickering, and ended up killing each other.

What is clear in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” is that the entire contest is rigged. The participants are urged to believe that, “in this great country of ours”, the rules are fair, the rewards are just, and anyone can win. The belief in this system is what propels people to join the marathons, and what provides the owners of the marathons with their wealth. The climax of the story is when the contestants find out that the cost of all of their “expenses” (food, water, bedding) are deducted from their winnings. Not only are they exploited and cheated– they are obliged to finance the very means by which they are exploited and cheated!

In the same way the Capital Gains Deduction takes money out of the revenue stream and hands it over to the rich, so that middle-class taxpayers– who can’t afford personal accountants, and can’t make the huge investments that are eligible for capital gains exemptions– are essentially funding the very system by which they are cheated.

The weekly tribal council idea is propaganda for the right wing. There are only so many goodies to go around, and the best way to distribute things is to have a system that rewards the greediest and most ruthless among us, and punishes the nice. It’s George Bush Jr.’s tax cut in the flesh.

But I’ll bet the producers of Survivor didn’t consciously think that they were providing the right wing with free advertising. I’ll bet they just thought that a bunch of people cooperating and helping each other would be pretty boring to most viewers. And as much as I despise them, they got the viewers, and the headlines, and the talk shows, and the book deals.

They are the real survivors.

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Bush League

Facts you need to know about George Walker Bush Jr., the next president of the United States.

Mr. Bush is a member of the Republican Party, which advocates strong families, personal responsibility, free enterprise, and a strong military.

He has raised $58 million so far for the 2000 presidential campaign. His only serious opponent at the moment is Senator John McCain, a likable war-hero whose key platform is campaign finance reform. Well, I suppose you could consider Mr. Forbes as a candidate too. Like Mr. Bush, he has lots of money, but he doesn’t have very much charisma. I don’t think he has much of a chance.

McCain has raised about 1/10th of what George W. Bush has raised. The story is that he cannot win, no matter how much people like him, because you just can’t beat $58 million dollars. If this is true, then we are essentially admitting that the Republican nomination for president is almost entirely about money. That’s not completely bad– you have to have some measurable prospect of success in order to raise money. And the candidates that have lots of their own money to spend, like Ross Perot and Forbes, haven’t actually done very well. Still, it makes you wonder.

George W. Bush has raised his $58 million from people who don’t expect any special favours in return. Nothing at all. Right.

Former Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl, is in big, big trouble right now because he accepted about $1 million from unidentified donors. The German people are outraged and the Christian Democratic Party is at its lowest point in the polls in fifty years. They think he might have pedaled some influence in exchange for that $1 million.

How can they possibly be so cynical and suspicious?

In 1979, George W. Bush– he of the “self-reliance” principle– created Arbusto Energy all by himself, with money from family and friends in high places, including Lewis Lehrman, the Rite-Aid drugstores chairman, and William Draper III who was later appointed by President Reagan to the Export Import Bank, and, the famous and slick James Baker III. George W. Bush, by then a seasoned pro, then ran for Congress, and lost badly to a Democrat. Then his business nearly went bankrupt, but a good friend of the family helped arrange a $1 million investment from Philip Uzielli.

Bush smartly merged his company with a partnership called Spectrum 7, thanks to a couple of old Yale buddies. This venture also collapsed. Then a company called Harken Energy Corporation bought Spectrum 7 and gave Bush a seat on the board and $120,000 a year as a “consultant”.

Then Bush moved to Washington to help manage his father’s successful campaign against Michael Dukakis. He got to meet a lot of rich, influential people. Very nice for him.

In 1989, Bush was invited to join a partnership that was purchasing the Texas Rangers baseball team. Though he owned a measly 2% of the team, Bush was the most visible of the owners, attending every home game. The reported purchase price of the team was $86 million, but nobody seems to be able to explain how they arrived at that figure, since the total amount paid by the new owners is no where near it.

While Bush was attending ball games (and his father was president), Harken Energy continued to flounder and lost $40 million. Just when it was ready to die, the Emirate of Bahrain came to the rescue with big bucks.

The Emirate of Bahrain. I guess he just happened to be passing through Texas that day and spotted a great investment opportunity, right?

Why would some Arab oil Emirate half a world away come and rescue a tiny little Texas drilling company? Well, did it help that the U.S. State Department and the American ambassador to Bahrain (one of those big party donors who gets rewarded with a plum post, Charles Hostler) were good friends of George Bush Sr., President of the United States of America?

After making a good dollar on his investment in Harken, Bush sold his shares, by coincidence, just before Iraq invaded Kuwait (driving down the share values of every oil company dealing in the Gulf). Amazing good luck there, George. The Securities and Exchange Commission thought the timing was a little too fortuitous and investigated.

If you own shares of a company and you are also one of the executives of that company, as George W. Bush Jr. was, then it is very illegal to sell off your shares on the basis of information you have received which is not generally available to the other stockholders. You have essentially cheated the other shareholders by dumping the consequential losses entirely on their shoulders.

Now, do you honestly think they might have found a case of “insider trading” involving the President’s own son? Do you?

Then, in 1990, Mr. Bush decided that his team needed a new ballpark. Following standard procedure in the U.S. (but not, apparently, in Canada), he threatened to move the team to a different town, unless the city of Dallas built him a stadium for almost nothing and turned over 270 acres of valuable real estate. Hm. Do I hear the phrase “self-reliance” echoing in the distance? Surely Mr. Bush was not, like some indolent welfare cheat, prospering through government largesse?

The mayor said, “yes, sir, Mr. Son of the President” and forked over the taxpayer’s dough. He even had a recalcitrant owner’s property condemned by the city so the baseball team could pay less than half it’s assessed value. The family sued and were awarded $4 million. Harper’s Magazine described the jury as “outraged”. But, hell, come election time, that’s only 12 votes.

As governor, Bush appointed a gentleman named Tom Hicks, an investment broker, to the Board of Regents of the University of Texas. This gave Hicks access to the University’s endowment fund which was worth about $13 billion. Isn’t that amazing? That’s a lot of money for a university to have. This money was generated by oil found on property that had been donated to the University many, many years ago. It belonged to the taxpayers of the State of Texas. Mr. Bush wanted to make sure that those taxpayers got good value out of their investments, I guess. But Mr. Bush and Mr. Hicks didn’t seem to like the fact that the fund was administered in such a way that the public could actually check up on what the administrators were doing with it. Very inconvenient. So what Governor Bush did was pass legislation transferring control of a lot of that money to a body called UTIMCO, which, unlike the Board of Regents, was shielded from public accountability by different rules and regulations. In addition, Honest George appointed other generous donors to the Republican party to the Board of Regents. It was all quite cozy and “legal”.

Hicks used his position with UTIMCO to obtain information about companies that were interested in obtaining investments from the Regents’ fund. The same information, you should know, is very, very useful to a company like Hicks, Muse, which manages leveraged buy-outs for a percentage. Very, very useful. Suddenly, University money began pouring into companies managed or controlled by Hicks, and by Republican loyalists, former White House staffers under Nixon and Reagan, and friends of George Bush Jr. By a coincidence, Hicks, Muse began to also do a lot of business with many of these companies.

Meanwhile, George’s dad, George senior, got himself a posh post-presidential job with a company called Carlyle, which pays him large sums of money, usually in the form of stock, for making speeches at events sponsored by itself.

Finally, Mr. Hicks decided that he too was a baseball fan. He bought the Texas Rangers for three times the price that Bush and his partners had paid for it. Three times! And, surprise, surprise, George W. must have bought some more shares: he now had a 12% stake. But wait– he didn’t actually “buy” those shares. What? With his own money? Are you kidding?! His partners in the team gave him the shares. For nothing! Boy, these are generous people! Of course, they might have been expressing gratitude for all the hard work George did, persuading the Mayor of Dallas and the governor, Ann Richards, to build the team a stadium under terms that do kindness to the word “sweetheart”. Or maybe it was in gratitude for his encouragement and support of Mr. Hicks’ activities at the University of Texas. Who knows?

This is the man who wants to “restore” integrity and decency to the White House. Reminds me of Nixon’s oft-quoted promise to get crime off the streets of America.

The odd thing about Bush is how utterly brazen he is. His entire life has been about nothing other than using other people’s money to accumulate personal wealth. Even so, he never hit the big time until he finally got his hands on the public purse.

He didn’t do anything useful as governor (just as his father never did anything particularly useful as president). He has no vision, no great plan, no interesting policies. He doesn’t even pretend to, really. He merely dispatches correct slogans and party mantras and grooves on the adoration.

Nixon was equally “conservative”, in that bizarre credentialist sort of way that provides the currency of political debate in the U.S. But, ironically, he was far more interested in political issues and policy and strategy than George Jr. is. By gosh, you could even say that Nixon had a twisted way of holding the welfare of the nation dear to his heart. You can’t say the same thing about Bush. It just doesn’t show.

Bush Jr. is about as calculating and cynical as they come. I can’t figure out why he’s running. I think he just wants to add “president of the United States” to his resume, and then get on with the post-presidential jackpot of honorary chairmanships and board appointments.

McCain, like Nixon, has some kind of vision about things. He’s a bit of a pragmatist, and a bit foolish at times. I like him more than Bush because at least he has some idea of the real purpose of a politician.

Bush is constantly touted by the media as being from an old “patrician” family, a phrase that nicely implies respectability and dignity. Let’s consider the family:

  • George Sr. was the most undistinguished president of the century, with the possible exception of Gerald Ford, who, at least, was never elected.
  • Prescott Bush, George Sr.’s brother, was an advisor to a very shady Tokyo investment firm that may have been involved in money-laundering.
  • Neil Bush, George Jr.’s brother, was a director of the Silverado Savings and Loan, which failed, and which involved him in a conflict of interest for which he was fined by SEC.
  • Jeb Bush, governor of Florida, was allegedly involved in the arrangements for a bad loan that caused another Savings and Loan company to fail.

Prediction: if elected, Bush’s administration will be the most corrupt since Taft. Bush will bring in a staff that will make Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson look like boy scouts. These guys will know that their time is limited, so they will make the best of their 15 minutes of fame: there will be graft and pillaging on a grand scale. The George W. Bush administration will collapse after three years in scandal and disarray. The next administration after that will finally introduce substantial changes to the campaign finance rules.

[notes: 2011-12 — I forgot one thing– it’s only corruption if it isn’t normal operating procedure; what Bush did was make corruption (eg. Cheney’s secret meetings with the oil industry, outsourcing military supplies and operations, deregulation, tax cuts for the rich) routine government procedure, which meant there was no entity to “scandalize” this behaviour.

And, of course, nobody foresaw 9/11, which contributed mightily to Bush’s re-election in 2004.

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The So-Called Left Wing Media

Where is the Liberal Media?

I was discussing the long dead Clinton scandal the other day with someone. When she insisted that he really did deserve impeachment, I pointed out that the vast majority of Americans didn’t agree with her. She said, “Oh well, that’s the liberal media…”

The liberal media? What liberal media?

I didn’t want to embarrass this person, but I wanted to ask her to identify a single specific example of “liberal media”. Who can she possibly mean? The New York Times? The Wall Street Journal? The Washington Post? The Chicago Tribune? Who? CBS news? ABC news? CNN? U.S. News and World Report? The New Republic? Who?

The media represent one point of view: profit. The media are, almost without exception, owned by corporations, and most of the owners of these corporations are extremely conservative. (The only exceptions, really, are the CBC in Canada and, to a limited extent, PBS in the U.S. However, PBS has lately adopted a far more conservative slant thanks to threats from the Republican majority in Congress, who constantly whine about the mythical “liberal” bias of the network. Look at how often Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak get their ugly mugs onto the air.)

The objective of most news organizations nowadays is very simple: get as many readers/viewers/listeners as possible in order to generate as much advertising revenue as possible. Most of the media thus merely reflect popular opinion. Right now, it is quite trendy, in the U.S., to give harsh sentences to petty criminals. Can you name a single media outlet, newspaper, or television editorialist in the U.S. that advocates the contrary?

How many news outlets in the U.S., editorially or through the selective rendering of news stories, advocate the following:

  • legalization of marijuana
  • cuts to the defense budget
  • the passing of an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, for women
  • more sex education in public schools
  • more spending on welfare or other programs that help the poor
  • forgiveness of those debilitating loans which impoverish the third world
  • elimination of capital punishment
  • more regulation of the chemical industry
  • liberalization of the copyright laws

Where is this so-called liberal media?

If there was a liberal media, why didn’t it come out in force during the Clinton impeachment hearings and denounce the scurrilous allegations made by Henry Hyde and his fellow hale hypocrites? Where were the stalwart defenders of Clinton’s wildly progressive, activist government?

You must realize that the bias of the media is reflected primarily in the decision of which story to report and how to report it, rather than in overt editorial content. Thus, when Dan Rather, with his monumental ego, raced back from Cuba and the papal visit–the first to that communist country ever–to report on the semen-stained dress, a momentous indicator of media bias was at hand: the important story is a scandal with elements of lurid sex. Why? Because sex sells. That is the “media” bias. And this bias dominated all branches of U.S. media, from radio talk shows to the Washington Post to the New York Times and CNN. All of them made the scandal their headline stories. You could make an excellent case for the argument that the media was exceedingly biased in favor of the conservative point of view on the scandal, except that the truth is that the media simply wanted to sell advertising dollars.

Even so, after watching CNN on a regular basis for a few weeks, I found it astonishing that most Americans continued to resist this overwhelming drive to convince them that Clinton’s “monstrous” act of consensual groping should result in impeachment.

What is even more preposterous is the idea that a defender of Bill Clinton would be a “liberal” because Bill Clinton is a liberal. Bill Clinton is pro-capital punishment, pro-free enterprise, pro-GTO, and his idea of “reforming” welfare consists of booting people off it. This is a “liberal”? Could someone please point out to me a single “liberal” policy of the Clinton administration? Well, he balanced the budget. Judging from the performances of Bush and Reagan, I guess you would now have to regard balanced budgets as a “liberal” value.

Still, it must be confessed, that real liberals generally thought the whole Lewinsky scandal was a cynical plot by the Republicans to oust a president they never believed was legitimately elected in the first place. But they certainly didn’t get any comfort from a “liberal” media (whom the Republicans also blame for Clinton’s election in the first place).

In Canada, I suppose you could argue that, in addition to the CBC, the Toronto Star is “liberal”. That leaves the Globe and Mail and the Post, in Toronto as bastions of conservatism. As for every other major community in Ontario…The London Free Press? The Hamilton Spectator? The Niagara Falls Review? The St. Catharines Standard? Read their editorials. All of them are fundamentally conservative.

Most newspapers in Ontario are owned by Southam, which is owned by Conrad Black (the owner of the Post), an arch-conservative who wants to be a British Peer when he isn’t busy clearing up editorial space for his wife, Buffy. The Post is rather extreme, even for Conrad Black. Every story is selectively presented to emphasize a conservative axiom. Every headline invites reactionary scorn for Liberal policy. Editorials hammer at our decadently tolerant society.

The Globe and Mail is reliably conservative, but with good taste. It respects some diversity in point of view. To paraphrase the man who finally stood up to Joseph McCarthy, it has some “decency”.

The CBC certainly leans to the left, but hands the pulpit over to reactionaries on a regular basis, if for no other reason than to prove they are tolerant of all points of view—a bedrock liberal value. In television, that leaves Global and CTV and everyone else—all conservative (especially CTV).

So why, if there really isn’t a liberal media, do conservatives persist in blaming it for Clinton’s success? Well, because, to believe otherwise, is to admit that your arguments have been fairly presented and argued before the public and were not convincing to large numbers of people. Better to argue that they were tricked and deceived than that they believe you were wrong.

Or that the circulation of “The Nation” is a lot bigger than is widely believed.

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Hospitals

The President of the University of Western Ontario was recently on the radio, explaining why his institution needs more money. He said that classrooms were filled to overflowing, and the residences were over-crowded– some students even had to sleep at professor’s houses. What an outrage! Mr. Harris better fork over some more money right now!

Then the reporter asked him a simple question– if you don’t have room for these students, why did you accept them? The president floundered briefly, then tried to explain that the University of Western Ontario believed so strongly in the rights of all students in Ontario to a post-secondary education, that it just had to squeeze them in, though they didn’t have enough room to accommodate them.

Hmmm.

Well, well. It’s nice to know that the University of Western Ontario is motivated by such lofty sentiments. One wonders how many homeless people they took in this week, or emergency medical cases.

I found this interview disturbing. I don’t happen to like Mike Harris, but I have some respect for the political process. It disturbs me that colleges and universities in Ontario might have so little regard for the rights of their students that they would use them, crassly, as pawns, in a little political game of showmanship. It looks wonderful in the news when the University of Western Ontario reports that they are over-crowded. The public is outraged, possibly. Possibly, they will demand that Mike Harris increase funding.

Possibly, they might ask themselves why colleges and universities continue to hike their tuition costs, year after year after year, in spite of the fact that average earnings for the average person have not increased at all over the past twenty years. The professors at the University of Waterloo are demanding a 20% increase in their wages. When asked who would pay for it, they insisted that students would not. Oh no– we would never force the students to assume that burden. They say they think the private sector should contribute.

Hmmmm.

And today it was reported that most hospitals in Toronto– 30 out of 32– are refusing to accept emergency patients. Most even refuse to accept critically ill emergency patients. We’re over-crowded! We have no beds! We have no monitors! We don’t have enough money or staff!

Mike, fork over the bucks.

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The Slippery Slope

I can’t tell you how many times someone has told me that this or that particular development in our society has put us all on the “slippery slope” to who knows where– damnation, probably.

It’s a long slippery slope. It started when Clark Gable uttered those immortal words, “Frankly, I don’t give a damn”, in Gone With the Wind. Or it began when Pierre Trudeau announced that the state had no business in the bedrooms of the nation. Or it began with Roe vs. Wade. Or it began with Elvis. Or the Beatles. Or Harvey Milk. Or Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Or Watergate. Or the Internet. Or Mad Magazine. Whatever.

Most people don’t realize that “slippery slope” is a derogatory term. Yes, it is. If you take logics in college– something you are usually required to do for a philosophy degree– you will learn very quickly that “slippery slope” arguments are almost always invalid. Why?

The essence of a “slippery slope” argument is this: this particular development, while not in and of itself evil, will lead to other developments that are really bad. Therefore, we should stop it all right now and take action against this particular development.

It’s appealing– isn’t it? If we allow sex education, we encourage promiscuity, and if we have promiscuity, we will have abortions, and then pretty soon we’ll allow voluntary euthanasia, and then involuntary euthanasia, and then we’ll be Nazis.

But imagine you were in court and a the crown attorney argued thusly: “Yes, picking pockets is not a very serious crime, but many pick-pockets go on to become murderers, so we ask to the court to sentence the defendant, who has been found guilty of picking pockets, to 30 years in prison.”

The judge, of course, would laugh at this logic, and sentence the defendant to 30 days (except in the U.S. where he would, in fact, be sentenced to 30 years). You can’t convict a man of a crime he might eventually commit. It offends our fundamental principles of justice. In the same way, you can’t argue for capital punishment on the reasoning that it will prevent murderers for murdering again. Many people don’t understand this– you can’t punish someone for a crime he has not committed. It’s against our most fundamental principles of justice. Many people don’t care. You should read that again– many people don’t care.

“Slippery slope” arguments should always be rejected as feeble and specious and absurd. If homosexuality is evil, let it be evil, and let’s oppose it. Let’s throw all the homosexuals in jail. If it is not, in itself, an evil thing, then permit it. If there are other things that you think are evil but they haven’t happened yet, by all means, let’s be ready to deal with them when they come.

You see, that’s another problem with slippery slope arguments– if you follow the logic consistently, you would never permit anything, for there is nothing that does not come before something else. It is obvious that abortion is the result of feminist activism. And feminist activism is only possible because women have the vote. And the vote is only possible for women because a court ruled that women were “persons”. So, to prevent abortion, we should never have decided that women were “persons”.

So where do you stop your slide down the slippery slope? Logically, you should stop the courts from defining women as persons. But everybody knows that is absurd. So you pick and choose. Many people choose abortion. Some choose birth control. It’s entirely arbitrary. And that, again, is why slippery slope arguments are so weak.

It is so elegant, so beautiful, and so reasonable to simply say that we will decide whether any particular act is right or wrong and respond accordingly. It works well. It is at the heart of all that is good about our system of justice.