Open letter to Trump voters:

Voting for Donald Trump was an act of contempt for the people he will hurt.

"I was just voting against Clinton!" Fuck you, there's no box on the ballot that says 'Against Clinton'.

You voted for a narcissistic sociopath, and you did it because he promised to stick it to brown people.

You bought him, you own him.

Demographics will swing things back, no matter how much gerrymandering and voter suppression a Republican Supreme Court lets the GOP get away with, short of physically blocking non whites from the polls this wire thin win cannot overcome the reality that the electorate is 2% less white, every election.

Your kids will be sent to war again. The people around Trump know he's a one term president who will massively damage the Republican brand and will be looking for a 'bad guy' to distract you with. Probably not Russia though, since the White House is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Putin oligarchy.

There were credible reports before the election that Trump was honey trapped and compromised during a visit to Moscow. Considering some of the accusations against him (Guess that child rape trial is off now) we probably don't want to see the photos spread across Putin's desk right now.

But we will, it's inevitable.

In four years half the people who voted Trump last night will be pretending they never heard of him.

The rest of the world will neither forgive, nor forget

What to expect

To the rest of Canada, sometime Tuesday afternoon you will hear a ruptured steam-whistle wail with upper register notes of castrated steer coming from the vicinity of Alberta.

Do not be alarmed.

This will merely be the inevitable, carefully rehearsed reaction of the Wildrose, Ezra Levant and the Sun News chain and the owners of the Post Media editorial board to the contents of Alberta's first NDP provincial budget.

Those contents will be uncontroversial, commonsense changes to the tax code, many very similar to the stated plans of the former Progressive Conservative government but with a greater emphasis on shared responsibility and contribution. There will be nods to the stimulant effects of deficit spending on much needed infrastructure projects, a central place for environmental stewardship and support for front line services rather than neglect as they are needed most.

It won't be the communist manifesto. Rachel Notley will not be calling for nationalization, confiscation or declare a worker's paradise. CEOs and oil company executives will not be brought in for public show trials.

Simply a pragmatic progressive budget with pro-growth policies and common sense solutions.

And of course, that's what the shriekers are more afraid of than anything else.

The economy is the most important consideration. Except when it isn't.

It's interesting, how all conservatives, such as Alberta's governing PCs,  firmly oppose higher corporate taxes because of nebulous, highly debatable and entirely theoretical negative economic impacts. 

But anti-gay laws with real, unambiguous, no doubt about it, BIG MONEY negative economic consequences? Well hey, who cares if Salesforce, a company that invested 2 and a half BILLION dollars in Indiana last year says they are now firmly cutting ties with the state over its anti-gay legislation? Who cares if GenCon, the largest gaming convention in North America is making plans to move their annual convention out of Indiana to the tune over 50 million dollars being pulled out of the state's economy EVERY YEAR? So what if the NCAA is seriously re-evaluating any plans to host future events in the state which could add up to hundreds of millions of dollars in economic impact.

Add in potential losses in the millions from the tourist industry, jobs from the tech industry and the huge economic loss caused by an exodus of Gay Indianans and the only question remaining is just how many billions of dollars this new law will cost the state of Indiana's economy.

The entirely theoretical risk to jobs and economic growth cited as a reason to never even consider making corporations pay a fairer share of the tax burden is turned on its head with the argument that treating gays like shit is more important than the devastating effect it will have on the state's economy. 

It's almost as if it was never a good faith argument and Republican Governor Pence is happily abandoning it until the next time someone suggests 'Hey maybe our budget problems could be helped by making corporations pay a higher share?' at which point it will be swiftly resurrected.

Anti-TFW But Pro-Immigration

It's important I think, in the mounting fervor against the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to remember that the workers in it are not the enemy.  These are people who are following the rules they were given in an effort to improve their families lives.  They have travelled thousands of miles to work hard and live frugally so they can send money home or save it up to someday bring their own families here.

It's all part of the same immigrant tradition as the family histories of most Canadians. 

I don't object in the slightest to competing for jobs against fellow citizens; workers who aren't afraid to stand up for themselves or change jobs or organize.  But migrant workers too afraid of being deported to do any of those things?  Workers who will put up with any abuse, tolerate any working conditions, be unwilling to even take sick days all because they are afraid of failing their families by being sent home?

Creating a class of workers that vulnerable and desperate and exploitable is bad for everybody.

Canada needs more people.  All the boomers will retire in waves and to afford the social safety net we want Canada will need more taxpayers than we will create with births alone.  We should increase immigration and make it faster and easier.

What we shouldn't do is create a permanently exploitable underclass.

"Yes, they are disenfranchised. Some of them don’t work for us anymore. But in the scheme of things, it doesn’t matter." - McDonald's Canada CEO John Betts

Betts spends much of the conference call railing against the CBC's coverage of the controversy — but admits there is truth to the stories.
"Here’s the kicker. The kicker is there’s an element of truth in each of these stories," Betts said.

"What we’ve got to do is fix what we have in the restaurants concerning the temporary foreign workers.
"But what we’ve also learned is that we have other opportunities in the people area that we also need to take care of. Violations of labour law. And those are the kind of things that suddenly become compounded because we have another issue over here, that’s very emotional in Canada."
With regard to the company's decision to halt its Temporary Foreign Worker Program, Betts told concerned franchisees that, "In dealing with the government, the smartest move was to pre-empt their move in terms of suspending us."
"I think the relationship we build with the minister here is a politically astute one to be taking. Because they're feeling the heat big time before this story broke and now it's bigger and bigger," he went on.
"They need to see us as partners in this as a brand that can help them make some progress on this and at the same time give us an opportunity to clean ourselves up."
At no point during the recording does the CEO mention hiring Canadians instead of temporary foreign workers or go over the rules of the federal Temporary Foreign Worker Program.

The plan is to wait till the heat dies down and get right back to business as usual. If the TFW doesn't get a stake in the heart from the Canadian public here and now it will come roaring back to life as soon as the public isn't looking. And suspending it just for the food sector doesn't help miners, IT staff, oil riggers. 

This government is Corporate Canada's eager servant and they are committed to wage suppression as an over-riding ideology before any other priority.

Nice Day for it

When Conservatives get in trouble due to their scummy worst instincts, whether it be covering up the deaths of scores of foster children in Alberta or being caught being pigs in the trough in the Senate they look for an enemy to burn at the stake or hang from the tallest tree to distract their nutter base.

The Auto-da-fé target du jour both provincially and federally is working Canadians who commit the horrific sin of banding together to defend and promote their interests, those evil thugs who believe employers owe their employees the opportunity to have a decent middle class lifestyle. The barking mad Conservative base is never happier than when someone half-baked libertarianism and sheer seething hatred for anyone who thinks differently than they do is getting it in the neck and the politician's corporate honchos are happy with the ongoing plan to turn Canada into a low wage economy in a mad race to the bottom with the slave labour economies of the developing world.

Middle Class Canadians watch their middle class lifestyles recede in the rear view mirror but maybe enough will say 'fuck you Jack, at least I've got MINE' to give the Conservatives another one of those razor thin margins of 30% or 35% of the population they laughingly refer to as a mandate.

"Oh well its a nice day for it, bring the kiddies - Oooh look at his feet kick!"

"Public Sector unions are a blight on society"

 ...says convicted felon and well known douchebag.

Jesus was pretty clear about conservatives...

“‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

If a Neo-Liberal tells you that there is no alternative...

... and you are being profoundly un-serious to even try to find one - they are plainly and simply lying to you.

Iceland proves that to recover economically you should listen carefully to what the wise, consensus neo-liberal gray eminences sternly tell you about how you must make the poorest pay for the excesses of the richest if you don't want to face complete disaster... and then do the exact opposite.

Iceland was the only European country that dared to default on the bankers. In February 2011 Iceland’s President Olafur R. Grimsson refused to sign a $5B bailout bill and told the bankers he was going to put the bill to a referendum. Although 44 of the 63 members of Parliament had passed the bill, Grimsson said he was responding to a popular demand for a plebiscite after more than 42K of Iceland’s 318K inhabitants signed a petition asking him to block it.

Icelanders absorbed some of the costs itself but forced foreign investors to take the biggest hit. Not deterred by horror stories about an “unthinkable economic demise” that have prevented countries like Greece and Portugal from defaulting, Iceland has proved that default was the best thing it could have done. As a result, not only has the economy not collapsed since last year, but its gross domestic product is expected to increase by 2.6% this year. Much of that growth is based on increased production, mainly in tourism and the fishing industry. In contrast, most other European economies are either stagnant or in decline. Even the Times article admitted that many economists say Iceland’s recovery was aided by the collapse of the banks.

"Are you now, or have you ever been, an Environmentalist?"

In yet another display of contempt for democracy, the environment and the Canadian people the Harper government has rejected calls from the Opposition to break up the budget bill into separate bills so that the unprecedented erosion of environmental protections and vindictive witch-hunting of environmentalists enshrined in it can receive the scrutiny and debate they deserve. 

The Stephen Harper 'Enemies List' is about to become the law of the land.

I've started to have a repetitive nightmare.

The light in the hearing room is bright, hot and pointed right at me. The heat is suffocating, and I am visibly sweaty, the senator leans over, taps his microphone and begins to read questions from a typed sheet.

"Mr. Fenton, Have you ever donated to or been a member of the Sierra Club of Canada?"

"Do you own a book or books written by Dr. David Suzuki?"

"Did you or did you not write blog posts that were critical of the oilsands?"
That's usually about the time I wake up, but instead of relief that my nightmare is over, I make the mistake of turning on the radio or picking up the paper to find my speculative fiction becoming more and more real.

The Real Question

The question isn't why Quebec students are fighting back so fiercely against education being incrementally turned into a tiny gated community for the wealthy and the imposition of lifelong crippling debt for the rest of the population, the question is why aren't the rest of us?

UPDATE: And lest anyone forget, it is a proven, established fact that the Quebec police engage in agent provocateur violence to justify a harsh response. We KNOW they do this, its not an accusation, its a fact.

Alison Redford owes me an apology

Me and the millions of other Canadians and Albertans who care about the environment for suggesting that she has the right to go to Washington and lobby for the Keystone Pipeline but those who oppose the project shouldn't have the same right.

OTTAWA — Premier Alison Redford found herself Thursday embroiled in war of words with the federal NDP as she joined her federal Conservative counterparts slamming official Opposition MPs for travelling to Washington to speak to U.S. lawmakers against the Keystone XL pipeline.

In Ottawa, Redford made the comments the same day she sat down with Prime Minister Stephen Harper in their first official meeting to discuss federal-provincial relations.

The two Calgary politicians, who’ve known each other for almost three decades, spoke about issues such as health-care funding, immigration and a new Canadian energy strategy.

The premier, who arrived back in Alberta late Thursday night, had just returned from her own mission to New York and Washington earlier this week to promote Alberta and the province’s energy interests in the United States.

While the contentious issue of the proposed Keystone oil pipeline came up when she met with U.S. lawmakers, Redford said she did not actively lobby regarding it — unlike federal NDP environment critic Megan Leslie and natural resources critic Claude Gravelle.

“It is not appropriate for us to be providing advice to American decision-makers in that context and to be political activists,” Redford said about the NDP trip this week. “So I am not at all supportive of that and I’m disappointed about it.”

Redford maintained her role is clearly different from that of a federal MP, saying a provincial premier “has a certain set of economic interests, social interests and environmental interests.”

“Whereas what we see going on right now is members of Parliament who certainly represent their constituencies, but that’s the extent of their representation in terms of the Canadian perspective on this issue.”

Linda Duncan, the lone NDP member of Parliament from Alberta, said she was stunned the premier would say that elected officials travelling to Washington is inappropriate.

“I find that absolutely reprehensible,” Duncan said. “How dare they suggest that we don’t have a right to interact with officials from other trading nations. Absolutely appalling.”

How dare you Premier Redford?  How dare you?

Arguing that Canadians who have science on their side - both the science of climate and the science of economics - don't have the right to have their point of view represented while making an insultingly specious and lamely hypocritical argument that the rules are somehow different for her is so contemptuously despicable its frankly breathtaking.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The Price

Republicans hate Keynesianism - unless its military Keynesianism sustaining southern and gunbelt constituencies with Military industrial complex jobs that require a constant state of fear mongering and international belligerence to sustain. 

The rest of the American population subsidizes these jobs by forgoing the kind of basic social safety net every other industrialized nation takes for granted and the rest of the world subsidizes them by living with a constant state of war or threat of war.

We are constantly told that America 'keeps the peace'.  In fact the USA may be the most profoundly destabilizing force on the planet, and this is why.

The Occupied Agenda

Ok MSM, you sneer that you can't get a coherant specific answer as to what the Occupy Wall Street crowds are protesting.  Here you go guys:

Freedom for capital, not people

Neil Reynolds today demonstrates the traditional fondness of right wing libertarians for dictatorial authoritarian regimes with a column expressing almost unalloyed admiration for Singapore, a country even Reynolds is forced to admit is severely authoritarian.

Some may be surprised at how a self professed libertarian could seem so enthusiastic about a borderline totalitarian state with pervasive, constant surveillance, barbaric criminal law and a rigidly authoritarian state apparatus.  Silly rabbit, right wing libertarians don't want liberty for people, people sometimes use liberty to band together against the depredations of capital, and capital is the only thing Reynolds and his ilk want liberty for.  Capital and those who have it.

That's why right wing libertarians still profess misty eyed admiration for the murderous regime of General Pinochet in Chile, who came to power through a violent coup of an elected government and then used that power to decimate civil society ruthlessly suppressing unions, leftists and any and all opposition to his 'libertarian' economic agenda through torture, death squads and 'disappearences'.

So-called 'Free Markets' are the only freedom Reynolds gets passionate about, free people can become obstructive to that freedom through quaint concerns about the environment or workers rights or a decent social safety net and that's a freedom he seems to believe should be discouraged

"There is nobody who got rich on his own."

Elizabeth Warren utterly shreds moronic 'class war' rhetoric:

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” Warren said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Life by the drop

Treasury Board President Tony Clement, who arranged for $50 million dollars in 'G8 infrastructure funds' to be funneled to his own Ontario riding, promises the Harper governments proposed $4 billion dollars in spending cuts 'will not endanger the health and safety of Canadians'.

OTTAWA — Treasury Board President Tony Clement has pledged the Harper government will not endanger the health and safety of Canadians once it decides where to slash $4 billion in annual spending from the federal budget.


In an interview Wednesday with Postmedia News, Clement spoke candidly about the approach he will take to the job as he leads a government wide review of 67 departments and agencies.

Of course an ideologically driven austerity budget that strangles the fragile economic recovery in its crib is rather the definition of endangering the health and safety of Canadians, and while spending is being cut in most areas there still seems to be billions to waste on expensive military hardware and unnecessary new prisons as crime rates continue to drop. 

Like the $50 million available for his own riding (including border security funds for a riding that isn't on the border), Clement seems to be able to find the funding for Conservative ideological pet projects and constituencies if not for basic government services already slashed to the bone by both Conservative and Liberal past governments.

Canadians, If you believe already starved public services can absorb another $4 billion dollars in cuts with no ill effects I have an ideology driven right wing political party to sell you - oh wait, you already bought it.

War of Words

The Republican Party is trying to censor people who call the Republican plan to end Medicare a Republican plan to end Medicare.

Attention, people, this is important: The battle over whether it’s true that the Republican plan would “end Medicare” is about to play out in a critical way in New Hampshire.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, which oversees House races for the GOP, has written a sharply-worded letter demanding that a New Hampshire TV station yank an ad making that claim. Whether the ad gets taken down could help set a precedent for whether other stations will air Dem TV ads making this argument, which is expected to be a central message for Dems in the 2012 elections.

The TV station has thankfully declined:

The liberal Progressive Change Campaign Committee has won a round against the National Republican Congressional Committee -- with the liberal group turning back an effort to get an ad targeting Republican proposals on Medicare pulled from broadcast.

Replacing a program of direct government payments to senior's doctors with a voucher program to get seniors to buy their  own - more expensive - private health insurance unambiguously ends the current Medicare program and replaces it with something that is neither THE Medicare program or even A Medicare program.  That's a government market support program for the private insurance industry. An industry that coincidentally has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the Republican Party and Republican candidates.

If a political party ever gets to dictate what is allowed to be said based on whether it conflicts with their own deceptive rhetoric that means giving them control over defining consensus reality itself.

The coming Prison Industrial Complex

For those still baffled by the Harper government's insistence on spending untold billions on new prisons with no big increase in crime to justify them, there are specific policy and political goals this pledge satisfies.

In the US the Prison Industrial Complex serves the very specific constituencies and interests of the Republican Party and its regional supporters. The phantom crime wave explanation by the Harperites is purely a cover for a massive subsidy to rural and exurban constituencies.  One could almost applaud the Conservative embrace of a massive Kensyian public works program if it was only butter instead of bars.

Three decades after the war on crime began, the United States has developed a prison-industrial complex -- a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the actual need. The prison-industrial complex is not a conspiracy, guiding the nation's criminal-justice policy behind closed doors. It is a confluence of special interests that has given prison construction in the United States a seemingly unstoppable momentum. It is composed of politicians, both liberal and conservative, who have used the fear of crime to gain votes; impoverished rural areas where prisons have become a cornerstone of economic development; private companies that regard the roughly $35 billion spent each year on corrections not as a burden on American taxpayers but as a lucrative market; and government officials whose fiefdoms have expanded along with the inmate population. Since 1991 the rate of violent crime in the United States has fallen by about 20 percent, while the number of people in prison or jail has risen by 50 percent. The prison boom has its own inexorable logic. Steven R. Donziger, a young attorney who headed the National Criminal Justice Commission in 1996, explains the thinking: "If crime is going up, then we need to build more prisons; and if crime is going down, it's because we built more prisons -- and building even more prisons will therefore drive crime down even lower."

Of course justifying such a massive spending increase in cells requires an equally massive increase in incarceration - a 'tough on crime' agenda and large scale contraction of the social safety net to help pay for dungeon construction should start ramping up those numbers nicely.

No, YOU knock it off

Now that several realistic drilled down looks at the polling numbers by regions makes it clear that all the majority talk was smoke and mirrors and Harper is headed for another minority and probably a smaller one at that, can we call a moratorium on the frankly hysterical fulminating by those who once again profess to be shocked and dismayed that the NDP is actually being so gauche as to fight to win?

Some bloggers whose posts I usually respect and enjoy have been posting some truly ridiculous and condescending nonsense displaying the perennial and familiar displeasure that the NDP doesn't do what they think we should... and put the best interests of the Liberal Party first.

Once again for those who haven't been paying attention:  We aren't just liberals in a hurry, we don't actually believe that a Liberal minority would be a real and marked improvement over a Conservative one,  yeah, we're going to try to win everywhere and no, we aren't going to apologize.

To the casual observer, or the observer deliberately avoiding the details - liberals and social democrats may seem to have more in common than liberals and conservatives - but have you noticed that in provinces where the NDP is a legitimate, even default governing option that the provincial 'liberals' and 'conservatives' have long since merged into default chamber of commerce conservative parties?  Have you noticed that in the UK the two parties that felt their policies were most aligned to form a coalition were the 'liberals' and the 'conservatives'?  You don't think the same thing would happen in Canada in a heartbeat if it ever looked like the NDP was becoming a viable governing option?

When we say 'Liberal/Tory, same old story' that isn't just a slogan, we New Democrats really do believe that on the really important issues particularly on economics and social spending there is no real daylight between Liberal and Tory policy books.

So pardon us if we look for an alternative to either the 'liberal' or 'conservative' wings of the single corporatist Bay Street Party presented to us as our only options.  Pardon us if we fight for every seat where we have a chance - usually because the local progressives are tired of being wooed in an election and then pimped out as soon as the vaguely more progressive sounding corporatists who call themselves 'liberals' beat the vaguely 'conservative' sounding corporatists they agree more than disagree with.  Or don't.   fiercely resent every seat the NDP win with a repellent aura of thwarted entitlement and self righteous spleen if you prefer. 

We aren't going to apologize for fighting to win.