Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star
Re: Court’s ruling on niqabs just plain wrong. September 19, 2015.
Congratulations to Rosie Di Manno and her intelligent, accurate and insightful critique of the court’s ruling on the wearing of the niqab. Clearly, it is in itself a polarizing issue reflecting the dilemmas of an evolving democracy within a global culture. Continue reading →
Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star
Re: It’s a new Canada, Headline, October 20, 2015.
In the euphoria and after-glow of the massive and much needed election victory of the Liberal Party and Justin Trudeau Canadians should be reminded that in reality little has changed and little will change despite even the well-meaning and naive intentions of Mr. Trudeau and his party. Continue reading →
Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star
Re: Public must be warned, Editorial, October 28, 2015.
The revelation by The Star that yet another charity has been revealed to be fraudulent should come as a surprise to no one. What is surprising is how feeble the laws are governing this and other charitable enterprises. Continue reading →
Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to the Toronto Star
“Swear words, sexually charged and blasphemous words: Unless they are in direct quotations, they should rarely be used. In publishing obscenities, we use short dashes following the first letter, except in rare cases, determined by senior editors, where spelling out the word in full is considered central to understanding the context of the news.”
I was aghast to read the Journalistic Standards of Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. which under the category TASTE directs journalists and editors to be very careful with “swear words, sexually charged and blasphemous words” that should only be used rarely and after consultation with senior editors. Continue reading →
Re: ‘We are the voice of the voiceless’, Headline, October 31, 2015.
Regrettably, in our modern world we are forced to prioritize misery. Despite the desperate state of the Syrian refugees, the Canadian government and its citizens cannot save the world from itself and must take care of their own problems before lending assistance to other war-torn nations – most urgently that of the plight of our 1st Nations peoples. Continue reading →
Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to the Toronto Star
While the banks, oil and pharma companies, arms manufacturers, investment dealers, stock traders, massive tech firms, food conglomerates and other big businesses all over the globe make astronomical profits for their elite shareholders and wealthy owners, the working public are told we are in a period of austerity, low growth and economic uncertainty. We are asked to survive on precarious subsistence wages and basic living standards while the rich live large and the gap between the rich and the poor widens dramatically. We are treated to reports of the lavish and grotesque over-indulgence of the wealthy daily in the media while people around the world starve while billions of tons of perfectly good food is thrown out rather than being given away. It is implied that this is normal and random rather than repulsive and coordinated. It is portrayed as something we should all aspire to. Within all this modernist Orwellian debauchery we are told by the corporate owned media that governments are a roadblock to individual freedom and taxes are a pox on society when the exact opposite is true.
The reasons for this are multi-faceted. First, it is not just taxes that are the problem it is the accumulative effect of both taxes and most significantly profits on working people that is the unacknowledged dilemma. Increasing profits have dramatically raised the cost of living to the working public while wages have remained stagnant for decades. Shifting the taxes burden from the corporate to the public sector has doubled down on this reality. Since the end of the Second World War the Keynesian welfare state that gave us the things we cherish as Canadians and an era of unprecedented growth and prosperity has been slowly but surely dismantled. Taxes that have provided excellent value for money we unfortunately have often take for granted. Our healthcare and Canada Pension Plan systems are only two examples.
It has been said that taxes are what we pay to live in a civilized society with social programs, infrastructure, public transit, security and stability but over the last several decades personal taxes have increased while corporate taxes have plummeted with no discernable improvement in the Canadian economy. Corporate taxes are the lifeblood of society and for the past fifty years we have been applying a tourniquet to them. Taxes that were intended to spread the cost of government across all of society making services affordable and shared have been concentrated in the public sphere. Over the last half century the private sector has succeeded in convincing governments and the public that corporations pay too much tax leading to a precipitous reduction in corporate rates around the world to stimulate the economy in a race to the bottom fuelled by globalization and ultimately a shifting of the overall tax burden from the private sector to the public. At the same time, the private sector has progressively withdrawn from social responsibility in society. Curiously with a current federal corporate tax rate of 15%, one of the lowest in the world – business is not flocking to the Canadian economy as predicted and as Joseph Stiglitz, the former chair of the World Bank unequivocally stated. There is no empirical evidence that reducing corporate taxes either stimulates the economy or creates jobs despite the opposite being repeated ad nauseum by right-wing acolytes. The sharp reduction in corporate tax rates has left governments strapped for much needed revenues to provide social services and repair infrastructure that are desperately needed in today’s precarious work world. The majorit of our cities’ infrastructure was built fifty years ago when tax money was plentiful. Not a penny has been spent since. With the ddrop in interest rates the public is hurting. Charities have become corrupt big business. This is the primary reason governments everywhere are struggling to fund government and the services it provides. While the private sector always supports infrastructure investments by governments, they do little to fund them. That is why they don’t want money spent on social infrastructure – it takes money away from their profits.
Secondly, companies have driven down wages through contract and other part-time work while shipping jobs to overseas sweatshops where people work for pennies an hour to produce consumer goods for developed nations. Similarly, they have shed legacy costs of pensions and benefits like healthcare for western workers, while eliminating stable full-time work, leaving the majority in society with little discretionary income with which to stimulate the economy after basic subsistence living expenses like food, shelter, clothing and transportation are paid for and while struggling under increasingly high personal debt loads. Add into that the low Canadian dollar that is driving up the price on everything for working people and it is a perfect storm of economic problems that only the 0.01% will fare. The working public are caught in a Catch-22. We are being told to stimulate the economy by spending but being provided with no increased income with which to do it. Is it little wonder that the economy is flagging while profits are soaring?
Generally, the private sector chants the mantra that taxes are regressive and should be reduced, eliminated, or controlled while unregulated, unexamined profits are a progressive necessity to provide incentives to entrepreneurs. In reality, the unspoken truth is that profits are simply another form of egregious private sector tax levied on the consuming and working public – the only difference is that they are generally outrageous and we have no control over how much that tax is or why it is being levied. Nor do we have any control over where that money is spent once it is earned like we do with public government taxes. It is not governments that are gouging the public and ruining the economy, it is the relentless private sector and its irresponsible greed that has been out of control since deregulation under Reganomics in the 1990s. So, while modest increases in government taxes are decried by economists, right-wing think tanks and the business community, staggering profit margins that have little relation to costs but reflect the unquenchable and often inhumane greed of the private sector are blandly ignored or accepted by governments and the public.
Profits and greed are the real problem in society and the real drag on the economy. Profits and taxes are directly related to the wealth curve. Higher taxes means a higher standard of living for all, lower taxes means a higher standard of living for the rich. Massive amounts of cash are being parked on the sidelines around the world that should be used to stimulate the economy. This is earned income that is withdrawn from global commerce and piled up on balance sheets like those of Apple and other conglomerates or shipped to off-shore tax havens that the CRA and IRA generally ignore. Profits are private and well-guarded secrets. In contrast, government taxes are public and open to scrutiny and are used for socially supportive purposes. It is time for us to all shine a bright light on the murky world of profit and loss and take a hard look at whether it is taxes or profits that provide more value-added to the lives of Canadians and begin to realize that it is profits, not government taxes that are the real problem. Most profits are based on astronomical undisclosed mark-ups on the cost of the material needed to produce them. While we regulate everything else in our society we turn a blind eye to profits and their negative effects on us all. It is time to shatter the old shibboleth of free enterprise that only the prospect of unlimited return will motivate entrepreneurs to invest while workers are expected to tolerate status quo returns for their labour while costs, profits and wealth soars. This has been the mantra of capitalism for 200 years and it has never delivered even a marginally better life for all. There is no reason why society shouldn’t determine what a reasonable profit is and how it should be monitored and taxed in the same way as we do for wages and everything else in society. It is time to begin to demand to know how much profit is made on each item sold so government, consumers and the public can decide how much profit is being made on an item and if that is reasonable. All consumer goods being sold in Canada should be required to have a sticker on them much like the nutritional stickers on food that breaks down the amount of materials cost, labour costs and profit built in to every item. In this way every consumer will know how much they are being gouged. Our entire modern economy is based on exacting as much money from consumers as possible for as little cost as possible while accepting no social responsibility for the impacts of that process on society. Unregulated profit is for more regressive than taxation. That is the hidden secret of the modern economy. In our brave new neoliberal world this equation has become so grotesquely distorted that the profits being made are staggering while workers’ wages stagnate. Capitalism has become a carney shell-game in which the working public are the marks. There should be far louder grumbling about profits than taxes.
Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star
Re: Canadian-led thinking filters through at Davos index launch, Business, January 23, 2016.
Jennifer Wells offers an incisive critique of short-term, short-sighted “quarterly capitalism” – as coined by Canadian economist Dominic Barton in her article while presenting some crucial changes that must take place to produce a socially responsible and just economic system in the future. Don’t hold your breath. There is little to no appetite for simply critiquing capitalism let alone altering its fundamentally destructive dynamics. The fact that 10% of the world’s adult population owns a staggering 88% of the world’s assets according the Credit Suisse Policy Institute’s 2015 Global Wealth Report receives only a passing notice in financial and public news media. We have long ago accepted gross inequality as the hallmark of capitalist economics. As long as unbridled greed drives free enterprise nothing will change. As Barton notes the deep reform required is to change how we view business’s value and its role in society. Currently, the private sector perceives their role as creating individual not social wealth. This is done by publicly socializing risk and privatizing wealth.
Wells provides an example of this methodology in her description of Chainsaw Al and his deceptive, corrupt and fraudulent leadership practices that left investors, employees and public taxpayers holding the bag for his incompetence and mismanagement. Regrettably, this not unique to free enterprise and is in fact all too common. It is a cautionary tale for those who laud such leaders as change agents and assertive decision makers rather than assertive disaster makers. Canadian tech darling Nortel is another case in point. Wall Street high-flyers were viewed in the same light until they blew up the financial system in 2008. Some may still remember the Bre-X mining fraud. Not a single individual has ever been prosecuted or convicted of a crime for their roles in the financial disaster that brought the world to its knees and from which we still have not recovered. Highly touted current CEOs like Hunter Harrison of CP Rail continue to practice Al’s slash and burn management ethos of cut costs, cut staff and then cut out. Harrison has chopped 7,000 jobs since becoming CEO of CP in an ongoing blood-letting of the company’s staff in the name of “efficiencies.” These job cuts are solely intended to boost the share price of CP that has risen dramatically since he was appointed. The most recent job cuts announced come as the company reports record profits. This is a common strategy of CEOs today whose performance bonuses are directly tied to stock options. The CEO of Blackberry, John Chen is yet another example who makes a salary of just under $350K but banked $89.7 million in 2015 based on stock options as reported by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Hugh McKenzie despite the flagging fortunes of his company and massive job cuts to the former RIM. Unfortunately, in too many cases the company subsequently falters from this brain drain and the CEOs conveniently cut out with hefty severance packages leaving the organizations they once ran in ruins. In the case of Hunter Harrison, CP will soon be left an empty shell to be picked over at some point in the future by vulture hedge funds in bankruptcy courts much like Sunbeam. The Lac Megantic disaster was the result of similar mismanagement style of the company responsible. As Wells and Barton point out, CEOs are rewarded whether they succeed or fail instead of having their salaries linked to innovation and efficiency and with clear penalties for failure. The new S&P Long-Term Value Creation Global Index to track long-term growth of companies is a promising initiative.
This is the real and ugly face of modern corporate capitalism where value is not built by organic growth but by ‘controlled destruction.’ It is a predatory and parasitic process that is destabilizing the world’s economy on a massive scale driven by amoral greed and by “management without conscience.” We need a system of “fair market” economics that structures the role of business as one of collective socially responsible value-creation for all in society through wealth distribution and progressive taxation, economic mutuality and non-authoritarianism based on fairness and freedom for all. We need to abandon the view that leaders make companies succeed when in reality it is every employee who does and all deserve a share of the rewards. It the company fails – all should suffer equally – including the CEO and shareholders. A level playing field will lead to a levelling of the playing field for everybody.
Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star
Re: Romney: Trump a ‘phoney, a fraud’
Donald Trump’s unfiltered brand of brash neoconservatism has U.S. old-guard Republicans apoplectic – but not because of his right-wing extremist views and values but because he has the temerity to express them openly and without reservation. Republicanism is premised on the ‘great lie’ where soothing, beneficial outcomes are mouthed by business-savvy Republicans while doing the things that Trump talks openly about. What is further perplexing to them is that American Republicans are responding in droves to his carny pitch. We live in the age of reality TV and politics is not immune to the phenomenon. Trump’s popularity however, is a serious lesson in the deep racial, religious and economic divides that polarize America and indeed the world.
Trump has provided an unscripted, revealing window into the ugly reality of neoconservatism that most Americans rarely see, by pulling back the veil of carefully crafted political rhetoric employed by the traditional right to mask their underlying agenda and make their politics more palatable to the undiscerning public. Trump has broken the cardinal rule of the right – never tell the truth or let the public know what you really think and believe. Say one thing and do another or do nothing until you are in power and then do whatever you want. This shell-game politics of deception and polarization that has taken hold in America is what lies at the root of the groundswell of opposition being reflected in the Trump candidacy as well as the populist social democratic campaign of Bernie Sanders. The 99% are fed up with traditional corrupt two-party politics and politicians with their meaningless platitudes and do-nothing governing styles. They want fundamental, deep-seated change in the structure of democracies and the economics they are subject to.
Trump has revealed the ugly underbelly of rich, white, male, racist, sexist, homophobic, openly biased, boorish, aggressive, arbitrary and domination-based core of neoconservatism floated on a bed of economic neoliberalism and self-righteous right-wing evangelical Christianity. It is an ideology of selfish individualism, rabid exclusionism and extremism. It is the core of modern Regan/Thatcher conservatism taken to its ultimate extension and has become more and more unstable and unrestrained as the years have gone by. It was present in Canada in the politics of disdain practiced by Stephen Harper towards the Canadian public, aboriginal people, women and military veterans for a decade while in government; the economic myopia of the Trump pretender Doug Ford who wants to return to the unregulated Wild-West of the Robber Barons if elected as the leader of the Conservative party in Ontario. This followed the debacle of extreme right-wing leader Patrick Brown who similarly hijacked the Ontario Conservative party by appealing to traditionalist far-right factions in Ontario after Tim Hudak’s provincial election loss. What is truly frightening is the number of people in the U.S., in Canada, and around the world who ascribe to these views or sympathize with them. Extremism has not only come to the fore in ISIL but in global politics and local culture everywhere including the U.S. and Canada.
Trump is openly whipping up extremist hatred of minorities. The economic conditions of most Americans (and Canadians) are similarly distressed after the financial crisis of 2008 making them highly suggestible to the rantings of a billionaire megalomaniac in democratic clothing. America is ripe for dictatorship. While its form may not conform to those of the despots of history – it is dictatorship nonetheless. The last two years of his ‘business presidency’ has been a farce with those in the business community coming and going like shoppers at a mall. Trump is a presidency of one. The world should be afraid – be very afraid.
Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star
Re: Is arming S. Korea the best way to contain Kim? October 2, 2017.
Thomas Walkom’s column lamenting the paucity of ideas around the globe related to the nuclear sabre rattling of North Korea and the U.S. adds little air to the vacuum. The real problem is how males handle conflict of all kinds employing the tunnel vision of confrontational adversarialism as their primary problem solving approach. Without this they seem lost for ideas. History is littered with examples of their misguided bloody, destructive and often lengthy misadventures that regularly decimated nations and civilizations around the world. Despite this we continue to draw our water from the same well.
Our modern dilemma resulting from this mindset is that the geopolitics that led to the First and Second World Wars never ended. Since the cessation of hostilities countries around the world have existed in a constant and growing state of war readiness and tension fuelled by various proxy wars and belief systems generating a global paranoia willingly encouraged by a now gargantuan military industrial complex that has made conflict a highly profitable business and a sizable part of global economies. The opiod addiction crisis pales in comparison to the military one. Despite this the world seems almost blasé and diffident about the immediate and real threat of nuclear war, demonstrating little urgency in their quest for a solution to this most recent looming disaster.The only real answer to conflict everywhere and for all time is one that is rarely pursued with any vigour by contemporary leaders is to employ comprehensive non-confrontational approaches and decisions of rational dialogue and consensus focussed on the full nuclear disarmament of all nations, the immediate destruction of weapons of all kinds, the use of stringent and not selective arms embargos and controls and taking immediate steps to dismantle the arms industry around the world. This strong passive leadership would be real leadership that the world desperately needs. We must beat our weapons into ploughshares and begin to demand leaders who will do this while sharing the peace dividend that ensues with the people of the world. Only these dramatic and pressing measures will avoid nuclear Armageddon and turn back the doomsday clock which is about to strike twelve.
Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Srar
Re: Peel wants province to cancel EQAO tests, October 12, 2017.
The request by the Peel District School Board to cancel the EQAO testing is highly ironic to those who worked in education during the “accountability” heydays of the 1990s when standardized testing was touted as the panacea for improve educational outcomes and those opposed to it (teachers and principals) were labelled obstructionist or worse and their professional concerns dismissed. Standardized testing was eagerly rammed down the throats of educators by then Premier Mike Harris as a political tool to drive votes by attacking teachers. Parents, the media and others like the right-wing think tank The Fraser Institute were given an elegant weapon with which to bash educators using information that had no proven direct research link to student performance or teacher quality and inflicted enormous collateral damage in achieving its noble aims. Essentially teachers were being held accountable over issues which they often had little control. Ignored were cultural and socio-economic factors, social mobility, ESL issues and parenting factors in the obsession with ‘results.’ Student performance was initially low and so rather than add funding to education to improve outcomes the province decided to manipulate the testing by making it shorter and less rigorous until results began to climb to meet political targets. The entire exercise was a shell game intended to create the illusion of public accountability when the reality was that finding the cure for ignorance is as difficult as finding a cure for cancer.
Province-wide testing was yet another in a long list of educational bandwagons that various governments of all stripes have leaped on to further their political aspirations. Unlike other professions like law and medicine that are allowed to independently determine what will be done in particular cases and charge hefty fees for doing so, education has always been controlled by political forces and that is its Achilles heel. This leads to endless failed reforms and ongoing hostility between the consuming public and educators who are often required to implement strategies that they know don’t work. After twenty years of wasted tax-payers money proving nothing the province is once again ready to toss in the towel on standardized testing and move on to the next panacea in waiting not because standardized testing doesn’t work but because it has outlived its usefulness to politicians.
In hindsight it seems that the minority critics of the 1990s have been proven roght. Until we allow educators and not politicians to independently and professionally make educational decisions after consultation we will never have an effective education system.
