Unpublished letter submitted to The Toronto Star

Re: The Goldilocks MAYOR, December 7, 2019.

Mayor John Tory’s realization that the conservative pipe dream of low taxes while the population grows, inflation eats away at our value and transit, affordable housing costs, infrastructure and social costs are beckoning constantly is only that. His tax proposal makes sense but it does not go far enough to create equity between the private sector and the tax-paying public with the corporate sector getting off Scot-free. It is an ongoing source of frustration for taxpayers that they are the  only target of tax increases and service cuts by eager government and municipal employees while corporations like BMO that recently made just over a billion dollars in their recent quarter and cut 300 jobs are allowed a free pass. The anger is not about paying taxes, it is the blatant inequity between the private sector taxation rate and the tax-paying public’s. The former are responsible for collecting huge profits while leaving the social costs for the public to deal with.

This revelation by Mayor Tory should be accompanied by a similar one on the need to re-inflate corporate taxes. Corporate tax cuts are a dismal failure. The real wealth is in the private sector and Tory should tax it. There should be a 10% Social Safety Surtax placed on all corporations annually for the building of infrastructure, affordable housing, transit, healthcare and policing all of which they benefit from greatly. For most large corporations this is a pittance compared to their after-tax profits per year. We should all remember that corporations depend on all these public services to get their employees to and from their jobs safely and easily and they should be expected to share the cost with the tax-paying public whom they serve.

The public is sick and tired of hearing that the wolves are at the door for corporations and the wealthy when the banks alone all make billions each year in after-tax profits while paying negligible property taxes on their glass and steel towers. Faceless shareholders hidden in obscurity do not build social wealth or social welfare. Big corporations create their minimum wage McJobs and nothing more. Taxation is the only way to balance the scale.

In this dystopian one-way universe we of capitalist democracy everything is wonderful but in a terms of a real democracy there is little evidence that this is actually true. Governments have become the handmaidens of the private sector not the servants of the people. In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto STar

Re: Clock is ticking for a new NAFTA deal. October 31, 2019.

The new NAFTA is a great deal for Canadians and Canadian workers according to the Justin Trudeau. Workers should be very wary of what is inside this Trojan Horse.  NAFTA was originally heralded as a breakthrough for free trade in North America with Canada, Mexico and the U.S. participating but the reality turned out to be a cruel joke. People expected it to equalize prices and promote employment. As we came to find out it was nothing more than a great deal for U.S. business and a terrible deal for Canadian and Mexican workers. The bulk of Canadian auto jobs went to Mexico because of significantly cheaper labour. It was the first of many similar experiences with globalization. The latter meant much cheaper labour costs at the cost of North American jobs.

In the last thirty years since NAFTA’s inception Canadians have seen the retail landscape remain exactly the same with a significant divide in prices at the border despite a significant lowering of costs. Canadians pay much more for everything than their U.S. counterparts from gas to tires, beef, housing and automobiles. We are saddled with a Third World dollar pegged at 75 cents out of deference to the U.S. that places a 25% tax on all U.S. goods bought by Canadians so that a few Canadian businesses can compete with U.S. firms. In Mexico the country is still a poverty-stricken backwater economy governed by corruption, elitism and drug lords and the population continues to toil for peasant wages in U.S. owned factories. Even in the U.S., the main beneficiary of the original NAFTA agreement, the general population has seen little impact on their lives or jobs despite the lowest unemployment rate in fifty years. The upturn in the economy has simply put millions more McJobs into the system not improved people’s lives significantly. The only people doing extremely well are the multi-national corporations who are making stupendous profits from NAFTA while constantly crying poor. The wealth and poverty gaps around the world are staggering.

So Justin Trudeau can spare Canadians his political carny show talk about the benefits of the new NAFTA being better for workers. The new NAFTA is the same as the old NAFTA – a private sector agreement to enrich corporations, CEOs and shareholders and impoverish workers who slave away in the democratic gulag.

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re: Jane Philpott on losing re-election and being ‘disappointed’ at the message voters sent Trudeau on the SNC-Lavalin affair, October 25, 2019

Canadians have once again decided to elect the status quo. Responding to the fear of a Conservative government that would be even more right-wing than the Liberals, the electorate opted for Justin Trudeau’s scandal plagued party in the time-honoured tradition of the two-party, elitist, British first-past-the-post system of electoral politics. With 40% of the people in Canada not voting, this means that a scathing 20% of Canadians elected this majority government – and no one seems to care. No government has shown any interest in surveying non-voters to find out why they don’t vote and to change it. Jagmeet Singh, who should clearly have been the PM in waiting based on his leadership style and his party’s policies was left out in the cold again and has been abandoned by his traditional labour allies and even immigrants. His party needs to be torn down and rebuilt as a real left alternative or merged with the Liberals to eradicate the Conservative right if they ever hope to be more than also-rans.

So hard-working, blue-collar Canadians voted willingly for their own oppression – more corporate criminality, corruption, welfare and control of government, more token tax cuts for the wealthy and business all of which increases the burden on everyday people.  It’s like living in Alice in Wonderland. The declining fortunes for the middle class and those below them (the other 99%) who over the past thirty years have willingly given away their pensions, healthcare, job security and wages to exist in a globalized contracted-out wasteland of short-term money-for-work at minimum wage and not much else while massively profitable corporations cry poor. We have voted for more platitudes about indigenous reconciliation and climate change but little action. We passively accept having a Third-World dollar that is a 25% direct tax on every Canadian so a few rich businesses can be more competitive and we allow credit card companies to extraordinarily over-charge for interest rates. Cutting interest rates on credit cards and allowng the dollar to return to parity with the U.S. would immediately save Canadians thousands of dollars instead of hundreds. We have endorsed no oversight of the private sector by government. Their only concern is Mcjobs. They can do what they please when they please otherwise.  It is inexplicable that we have all let this happen while doing nothing to change governmental practice or electoral politics for the better. We have elected government for the private sector, not for the Canadian public.  We are slaves in the gulag.

Canadians are left with a tenuous minority propped up by the NDP and a divided country with the resurgence of the Bloc. They cannot seem to free themselves from their attachment to the corrupt two-party system of Liberals and Conservatives no matter have bad it is. We have been socialized to hate socialists and socially democratic parties by the greedy capitalists despite the fact that the democratic socialists have excellent ideas much like the Scandinavian countries who are some of the most successful and progressive societies in the world.

All so that Canadians can go on living in their twisted little dream of living in a capitalist democracy.

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re: It’s time to end  mistreatment of sled dogs. July 28, 2019.

On a road trip about five years ago looking for a cottage property we chanced upon a dog-sled gualag just outside Sunridge, Ontario. We were shocked and disgusted by what we saw. The property was surrounded by a tall wire fence and the gates were locked. There was apparently no one there other than about fifty emaciated dogs each hooked to about a six foot chain outside an orange barrel laid on its side with the end cut out for a door. Each barrel was elevated with three steps up. We could see water dishes, many that had been kicked over and in the 30 degree heat many of the animals were suffering. As we walked up to the gate a clamour started as all th dogs began to bark and become excited at possible human contact.

The dogs were obviously starved during the summer months and then fattened up for the winter racing season. We assumed the dogs were chained throughout the summer. What really surprised and saddened me was that when I called the animal control officer he did not seem too concerned and informed us was that sled dogs were exempt from animal cruelty legislation. There was little he could do.

The way we treat our sled dogs is a metaphor for how we treat humanity in a capitalist society. Plenty of surface show and token attention but beneath this thin veneer of civility is hidden an ugly underbelly of mistreatment, exploitation and marginalization for profits that is presented as necessary to be successful for the private sector and that governments generally ignore. Its all a big ruse. Everything for profit, nothing for society. The sled dogs know it – when will we get on to the game.

Re: What a time of aspiration. Editorial, July 13, 2019.

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Am I the only person who views it as complete and utter lunacy to go to the moon (or into space) when there are so many pressing human problems here on earth.  Obscene expenditures on the military, the space program and arms manufacturing to name only a few are irresponsible and unconscionable but not surprising in a heavily patriarchal capitalist society. It is an utter waste of money just as it was when Apollo 11 completed its highly controversial mission fifty years ago amidst the same kind of social turmoil noted in the Star’s editorial. Continue reading →