Stupid/Smart politics. Hudak vs. McGuinty

Dalton McGuinty will raise taxes, Dalton McGuinty will raise taxes, Dalton McGuinty will raise taxes. Let me hear all my conservatives repeat it one more time, Dalton McGuinty will raise taxes!

If Tim Hudak had repeated this 5 word mantra in every press conference, town hall meeting, annoying doorknob flier, and in every ethnic community he pandered for votes he would have guaranteed an election victory. No other words should have escaped his mouth in the last 6 weeks. He should have legally changed his first name too “Dalton”, middle name to “Will”, and last name to “Raisetaxes”.

Politics might be a messy and unsavoury line of work, but it definitely is not that complicated. You stick to a few main talking points that you dumb down for the general electorate, and pound down those points threw mostly negative attacks on your opponent, which you spin into positive points as to how your party will do the opposite. This could not be any easier then while dealing with a government that came out of a recession, and by default is seen as fiscally irresponsible and the reason for higher taxes. I’ll leave the debate to actual party supporters as to why Dalton Mcguinty continually raised taxes, but the fact remains he said he would not raise them, and then blatantly lied to the public and increased taxes on numerous occasions. This should have been Tim Hudak’s main talking point, with the sky rocketing Ontario debt the appetizer, and maybe a sprinkle of the G8 mess and a few other issues on the side. If his campaign managers were a bunch of drunken monkeys on typewriters they could have came up with a similar strategy.

But what does Mr. Hudak do? He opens his mouth and lets his conservative ideology possibly spoil an easy election victory. The moment he began aggressively campaigning against the ‘foreign workers’ tax credit of 10,000 put on the table by the liberals his poll numbers began to drown like an unsupervised 3 yr old at a swimming pool. The fact that he deliberately attempted to misguide the public by claiming it to be a tax credit for ‘foreign workers’ was only the 5th thing wrong with how he approached the situation. The tax credit itself gives a 10,000 tax incentive to companies to hire new Ontario residents (Canadian citizens) of 1 to 5 years, and was limited to a few industries. In total it would cost 12 million. It was a clear attempt by the liberals to salvage the vote of ethnic communities and new comers, who surprisingly voted blue/orange during the federal election. Tim Hudak quickly began a public onslaught on what he called an unfair tax credit, which gave ‘foreign workers’ an advantage over the white man (in not so many words). Hudak tried to reason his opposition to the credit by saying new comers do not want handouts and want to be on an even playing field with Ontarians. (He fails to realize that playing field is an ice rink, and new comers usually don’t know how to skate) But no matter how he cut it, it was bad politics and his immediate hostility towards the credit offended minority voters all across the GTA. He spent a solid week straying away from Dalton McGuinty’s tax record, and Ontario’s sky rocketing debt (which grows in millions of dollars everyday just in interest). And in the process he lost a significant amount of support in Toronto.

An election that was given to the conservatives on a silver platter is now a dog fight because Hudak did not stick to a simple and effective message. In general conservatives have followed this simple strategy in both American and Canadian politics over the last few years, and have come out on top of issues they had no business being in. They have proven to be politically smarter then their liberal counterparts, and have noticeably better posture because of that steal backbone they must have had implanted. As opposed to liberal parties, who bend to opposition like the Eagles offensive line.
But surprisingly in this provincial election the liberals have done a masterful job in out politicking the cons. It was no coincidence that Dalton Mcguinty put forward this tax credit. He was using it as bait to garner a response, and the conservatives bit, and they bit hard. A few days after Hudak began his tirade against the tax credit the liberals laid low and let Hudak’s mouth bring them back into the race. For 3-4 days they did not even bother to explain that claims the credit was for ‘foreign workers’ was inaccurate. Then when the time was right to get on the offensive, they did a great job to blow up the issue and brush Hudak as a borderline racist, demanding that he apologize for referring to new Ontarians as foreign workers. Then to throw salt on the wound they pointed out that Hudak had proposed a similar credit last year. Quickly the conservative party backed down from the attack, changed the language on their website and tried to brush it under the proverbial rug. But like anybody in a relationship knows, once you say something it is very hard to take back.

Edit: It should be noted that Hudak has took my advice. His last attack ad on McGuinty simply says this: MCGUINTY: HIGHER TAXES, LESS JOBS. HUDAK: LOWER TAXES, NEW JOBS. I'm Starting to wonder if politicians think the general public all have blonde hair.

                      

Post 9/11 World

I spent the majority of my September 10^th evening immersed in 9/11 documentaries recalling the grief and heroic tales of sacrifice on that day. There were firefighters who continued up the second tower to save lives, knowing full well it would collapse. Employees who refused to leave each other behind as they descended 70 stories. I wrote most of the following article that same night, but left it for September 13th to post. (you'll see why)
50,000 employees worked at both WTC buildings. That is 10 times more than any skyscraper in downtown Toronto. Five years ago while walking down Bay St. in Toronto I looked up at the RBC building, and pictured the carnage of a jumbo jet flying into it’s 70^th floor. Walking down Bay St. with a turban and staring up at skyscrapers in a ‘post 9/11’ world is not the best idea, so I quickly looked down. Then I quickly looked straight, because after the London subway attacks looking to the ground might arise some suspicion too. I spent the rest of that 10 min walk to Union Station staring straight ahead, with no sudden head movements. 

Amidst the sympathy I felt for the innocent lives lost, I could not help reflect on how the last 10 years have unfolded.  The world had definitely changed, but this term ‘post 9/11 world’ bothered me.  It wasn't necessarily a reflection of reality, rather a depiction of western bias to how we have come to view history, and how it would be penned down for future generations. The events of Sept 11 had become a lens through which we see the world today.  The term itself divides history so that certain types of grief are marginalized while others are privileged.  As a result, this simple term has become an escape goat for atrocities committed across the globe, and victimizing other groups in the name of this perceived new ‘age’ becomes justified. Families living in war torn areas effected by this new era likely view history in an entirely different light, whether it is written or not. For them the last 10 years has seen casualties far surpassing those of the events on 9/11, and they become collateral damage in the ‘global war on terrorism’ which would not have had any life if not for the ‘post 9/11 world.’

The slope tends to get much more slippery once this ‘living in a new era’ narrative becomes the norm. Very quickly personal liberties are taken away, moral compasses don’t know the difference between north and south, and decisions are made on gut reaction without much concern for future consequences. This was clearly the case when a once morally reprehensible act such as torture becomes accepted by the mainstream and the political elite. The U.S. was publicly becoming the terrorists they had been attacked by. (As opposed to in secret, which they had established through years of oppressive covert operations)  Eventually this term led to the justification for lengthy wars, which are fought to the point where nobody can remember what they are fighting for. Wars that were entirely based on "truthiness" -  is a "truth" that a person claims to know intuitively "from the gut" in that it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. In fact, the term truthiness coined by Stephen Colbert is a direct result of the post 9/11 era, because nobody would believe truthiness unless it was rooted in this era.
 One week after 9/11, war was declared before the guilt of the perpetrators had been determined. But it was the beginning of a new post 9/11 era for the United States, one in which proving reasonable doubt took a back seat to retribution. It is hard to lay full blame on the trigger happy Neo-Cons in the White House at the time, the most powerful nation in the world was brought to it’s knees and it’s citizens demanded revenge. And it was a great opportunity to secure global dominance with impunity. It was basic human instinct on display at a political level.

But the fear mongering associated with the ‘post 9/11 world’ gave the war effort an unstoppable momentum. Think of Barkley in his prime driving the paint. Feet planted or not he was going to run right through you. But unlike basketball, the rules of war didn’t call offensive fouls. Next was Iraq, which was largely conjured up on false claims of WMD’s. 8 years later and there is still no justification for leaving a generation of Iraqi’s in war. But there was no going back now, and the sheer momentum of the war effort left no option to turn back. When the East and West of Baltimore battled it out in a drug war on “The Wire” Slim Charles summed it up best, “if it’s a lie, then we fight on that lie”.  (for anyone who hasn’t seem ‘the Wire’, best show ever!)

One of the worst precedents set by the U.S.A in this new era was the breaking of international law which govern the rules of war across the globe. In the case of Osama Bin Laden, The American government committed a blatant assassination, with no trial, no medical examination and was a direct violation of international law. It was a dangerous precedent to be set for countries who brutally suppress opposition. How can the U.S government criticize the killing of prisoners with no trial, or Mid East dictators for killing leaders of dissent? Amanda Watson, a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa makes a good point when discussing the anniversary memorials of 9/11. She argues that the events of 9/11 seem to be depoliticized in public commemoration and presented as neutral for the purposes of grieving. “The political context of the attacks and U.S. foreign policy is washed away in favour of more sentiment,” she said, which itself obscures, silences and erases other kinds of associated grief that do not fit so well into the “mainstream master narrative.”

Consequently this type of grief fosters a dangerous nationalistic rhetoric that leads to xenophobia and feeds the  the war machine like Kevin Spacey fed the obese guy to death in "Seven".  

Ironically, the original 9/11 occurred on September 11, 1973, when the U.S. succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile with a military coup that placed General Pinochet’s brutal regime in office. It was one of many attempts at propping up pro American regimes in Latin America, and in the process supporting the murder of thousands of innocent civilians. But was there a post 9/11 era for the people of Chile?

September 11^th was a horrible tragedy, and the lives of those 2,578 people will never be forgotten. But almost just as tragic is what Jon Stewart denoted as September 13/2011: “Remembering the Day We Forgot the Lessons of the Day We Had Sworn We Would Always Remember.”

Poor As F*ck in America

This guy F*ck must really be poor. He is the unofficial benchmark to which all poverty is measured. But how poor is F*ck? Is he homeless? Does he rent or own a place in the city? Is he on food stamps? Does he come from a single parent family?

Now more then ever income inequality (or equality) is at the forefront of an ideological debate between conservatives and liberals. In the US the debate boiled over during the debt crisis, conservatives asking to reduce the deficit entirely of spending cuts, and liberals asking to reduce the deficit with a mix of tax increases on the rich as well as spending cuts. The two battled it out like a pair of Darwinian monkeys in a cage. If only they had that secret formula from “Rise of the Apes” that made them super smart. But movies rarely translate to reality, so the two idiot monkeys exchanged blows, putting a band aid on the original conflict, while embarrassing themselves in the process.

Currently the United States is ranked 126^th in terms of income equality, by far the worst among developed nations. They fall behind countries like Iran, Cote D’Ivoire, Kenya and of course Canada (brap, brap) The top 1 percentile of households took home 23.5 percent of income in 2007, the largest share since 1928. With a work hard, get rich formula deeply embedded in the American psyche, Americans have generally tolerated inequality. On the other end of the poverty spectrum, a staggering 14.3%, or 43.6 million Americans were deemed to be below the poverty level in 2009. Some adjusted estimates put it at 20%. These people are just as poor as F*ck, or more so.

 Does this mean that the success of the American empire is masked by an underbelly of rampant poverty, hardship and discriminatory economic policy? Or is income inequality in America over stated, and do the poor in America live on par with the middle class of other developed nations?

 In the United States of America the poverty threshold for a family of four is US$22,350.  So we finally determined F’ck’s salary, assuming he is living up to his name and has 2 children. This seems like an amount that would leave the majority of people struggling to make ends meet.  So where does F*ck live and how big is his house? There is a 46% chance that he owns his own home. Also, the average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. What does he use for transportation? Three quarters of poor households own a car and 30 percent own two or more cars. I heard F*ck is overweight, is that true? According to the USDA, on a typical day, less than one American in 200 will experience hunger due to a lack of money to buy food. The largest nutrition problem for the poor in the U.S is overnurishment (spell check tells me I made that word up) and obesity issues. It’s starting to seem like F*ck’s life isn’t as bad as I thought. Ok, but those were basic necessities; he probably doesn’t have a TV and listens to his nagging wife and kids all day. That is also false; ninety seven percent of poor households have a color television and over half own two or more color televisions.  So what the F*ck is he complaining about?

Despite all these relative facts and figures something is missing from the equation. F*ck lives in the self proclaimed land of opportunity; the US of A. Capitalism promotes an opitimal and efficient use of resources to reach maximum potential. If this is the case, the United States should be immediately raising the bar to reach that potential, providing economic opportunity to all portions of society. Making relative comparisons of poverty is not adjusted for the maximum potential that the U.S has to provide a comfortable lifestyle for a large majority of it's citizens. Currently, the USA is like the under performing human brain, which only uses 10% of its maximum potential.  A family of four making $22,350 leaves little breathing room, and the land of opportunity eventually becomes the land of despair.  With only 4% of Bachelor Degree grads living in poverty, the correlation between education and poverty levels is undeniable. This is a basic necessity needed to escape the clutches of poverty. However, thepoor of America end up in vicious cycles of limited to no education, and generations of families living to simply make ends meet. 

While the poor in America generally enjoy a standard of living higher then the poor of other nations, the vast wealth in the USA is ample enough to provide more economic opportunity for the poor while continuing to increase the wealth of the middle class. Economic policies should not favour the rich, but at the very least be on par with the poor. The hyper capitalist methodology has led to a portion of the population stuck in it’s own grave of poverty, while the rich continue to poor the dirt on top. For years propaganda machines have convinced the general public that the large income gap is a sign of progress, lower class of America is lazy and there are ample government programs to assist the poor. This is a complete myth, as there is a 2/3 chance that our poor friend F*ck is working almost 2 jobs (1.7 if averaged out). Also the average welfare check for one parent with two children is $478 a month, one of the lowest in the developed world.  Immediately, extremist neo-cons will label attempts to redistribute wealth as an attempt to place USA into a socialist state. Making claims that distributing wealth does not promote personal accountability and encourages the abuse of tax payer money. Recently billionaire Warren Buffet chimed into the debate, and declared that the rich in America has been coddled long enough, and taxes should be raised on the highest earners. The conservative media went as far as labeling the billionaire a socialist. Warren Buffet a socialist? These people really have no idea what the word means. It is akin to saying, “check out that George Clooney guy, banging all those girls, what a queer!”.The US is bound to Capitalism like a baby cub to its mothers teat, but there is definitely an optimal balance that will benefit all portions of society. One that will further exploit the hard work and innovation that the American capitalist market has fostered, while at the same time not leaving behind those stuck in cycles of poverty resulting from discriminatory economic policies.  .

In addition to economic policy, social issues cannot be overlooked. Single parent families are the largest cause of poverty. Among single parent families, 26.6% lived in poverty. A staggering 24.7% of all African Americans live in poverty, with 20% of the black population in U.S on food stamps. The epidemic of single parent families amongst African Americans is a definite cause for concern, with only 30% of African American children being born into a stable married household. These systemic issues should be studied, funded and a cultural change needs to occur in order to help reduce poverty levels resulting from social issues.

The poor in America live relatively better then the majority of the world, but in the self proclaimed land of opportunity the bar should be immediately raised. Taxes on top earners are the lowest in three generations. Yet their complaints about the prospect of an increase to a level that is still awfully low by recent historical standards is remarkable. And for those who ultimately want to escape the sad reality of cyclical poverty in the United States, I say Fuck it, move to Canada.