I Heart Rob Ford

Well, well, well, it’s been quite a week or two. Rob Ford supposedly smoking crack on video. Doug Ford’s past as a supposed hash dealer exposed – along with the drug related charges and violence connected with his other siblings. This follows and endless string of scandals, foibles and general foolishness on the part of the mayor of Toronto. What fun!

 There has been lots of handwringing about Ford embarrassing our great city on the world stage. We need a better mayor, they say. Nonsense, I say. Of course, we could use better political leadership. But that wasn’t what was on offer in the last election. We had the choice between Ford and Smitherman. And Smitherman is a right wing liberal who just happens to be a) gay and b) a very smooth operator. If Smitherman had been elected he would have been just as much of an austerity mongering hatchet man as Rob Ford. The difference would have been that he would have been effective. The incompetence of Rob Ford has ensured that his wacky agenda has been derailed at every turn – even by this largely spineless council (remember the unanimous vote to commend the police for their handling of the G8 fiasco?). Fools give confidence to the weak. Sad but true.

The other element that is heartening is that, ignoring Rosie DiManno’s jibes about Ford’s supporters being mindless dupes, working class people have not been that impressed by the scandal-mongering of the media. Doug Ford, scumbag that he is, is partly right that the media are going after the Ford brothers because they can’t touch their politics. The media by and large don’t disagree with their austerity agenda. They hate them because they have the kinds of personal “flaws” that plague many working class families. We all have relatives who struggle with substance abuse, mental health issues, etc. etc. So, when the media attack Ford for these things people feel like the elite are snobbishly attacking them – and they are. Remember all the brouhaha about Bill Clinton screwing around with Monica Lewinsky? Nobody cared. It had no impact on his popularity. The left shouldn’t fall into the trap of this kind of moralistic snobbery, which does little to build the left or opposition to the right. Stick to principles.

And, most deliciously perhaps, is that Rob Ford’s incompetence has helped deepen that growing crisis of the right. The expenses scandal that is engulfing the Harper Tories and the meltdown of the Ford mayoralty could be the tipping point that devastates the right wing in Canada in the way that the sponsorship scandal unwound the Liberals. The only real obstacle is the tepid opposition of the NDP, which has waged their usual race to the middle in order to appear respectable enough to govern. That worked really well in the BC election where a double-digit lead was thrown away. But the NDP are like the embodiment of that old definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get a different result. If the left actually stood up and fought the right they would galvanize people to join them. By refusing to be any different the NDP merely ensures that they will fail endlessly. Let’s hope that someone talented steps into the breach, at least in Toronto, and wipes out Ford Nation. My biggest fear is that the left will all fall in behind Karen Stintz and her centre-right agenda. Stintz might win but we’ll hardly be better off (transit aside) and we’ll have far less entertainment.

After Jack: Three Bad Ideas & One Good One For The NDP

The weeklong outpouring of mourning, love and solidarity after the passing of NDP Leader Jack Layton has now subsided. The sense of optimism that Jack insisted upon and the hunger for change that he not only represented but fanned to flame with the funeral that he planned for himself was an awesome thing to see. As Stephen Lewis spoke and argued forcefully for "a resolve to honour Jack by bringing the politics of respect for all, respect for the Earth, and respect for principle and generosity back to life." That could be a powerful call in the coming months as we face some important battles, not least here in Toronto where Mayor Ford is looking to slash the social fabric of our city and where a fight against him is brewing for the fall against.

That's why what happens now to the NDP matters. Jack was no radical but he was progressive, and principled and he supported movements outside of Parliament - whether it was the anti-war movement, struggles for LGBT rights, or providing Parliamentary opposition to the Tories' discriminatory back-to-work legislation against the Postal Workers. There is a danger that his legacy could be lost and now is the time to raise the call to not go backwards. To that end, I'd like to suggest that there are three immediately bad ideas and one good one for the future of the NDP and of the left in this country.

The first idea is the most terrible. To put it most starkly, it is to follow Bob Rae into the Liberals. In other words to merge the NDP and the Liberals into a "Liberal Democratic Party" as Denis Coderre has suggested. Just to make it clear, Bob Rae joined the Liberals explicitly because he had moved to the right since he took the Ontario NDP down the path of its greatest historic disaster by... moving it to the right. To join with the rump of the Liberals at the moment when the NDP has experience its greatest triumph is to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. That's not to say that there aren't Liberal voters who the NDP should - and did - win over at election times. It's not to say that the NDP shouldn't try to win those unions that continue to support the Liberal Party into the real party of labour - instead of just being junior partners in a coalition with big business. But to join with the Liberals would mean that the NDP would no longer be the independent party of the labour movement. It would in reality be just another liberal party. Forget negotiations or musings about mergers and focus on building the strength of the NDP - merge with the Liberals by winning over their base.

Merger with the rump Liberals? Bad idea.

The second and third bad ideas are Thomas Mulcair and Brian Topp. There is much musing - and lots of ink in the Globe & Mail for Topp - that these guys will run for the NDP. Just to be clear, these guys are on the right of the party. Topp, a former senior advisor to Roy Romanow - former Saskatchewan Premier - is a Globe & Mail columnist and is an avid supporter of the massive program of austerity in Greece

And the root causes of all of this madness (debt) needs to be addressed in the style Prime Minister Papandreou is using to address the crisis here in Greece, against overwhelming odds – calmly, thoughtfully, and with determination.

I'm sure that the Greek working class and youth, who struck and marched in their hundreds of thousands have a different view of the devastation of their lives that Papandreou hath wrought. His two austerity packages have decimated the economy, driving it into recession and doubling unemployment. If that is social democracy, who needs a Tory party?

As for Thomas Mulcair, he is a former Liberal cabinet minister in the Quebec government of Jean Charest and was a Liberal MNA for thirteen years up till 2007. Afterwards, he flirted briefly with joining the Tories before deciding on the NDP. Good for him that he joined the NDP and helped it win the major breakthrough that it did this year but he has no particular ties to the left and has not indicated a major political break from his past as a Liberal. Certainly his views on Palestinian rights put him to the right of the NDP and when Libby Davies came out in support of a policy of boycott, divestment and sanctions against the State of Israel, Mulcair had a bird.

"We take decisions together, parties formulate policies together, and to say that you're personally in favor of boycott, divestment and sanctions for the only democracy in the Middle East is, as far as I'm concerned, grossly unacceptable.''
Members replied that what is actually unacceptable was for an NDP party leader to form a coalition with Bob Rae and Stephen Harper against own senior party members such as Libby Davies. They added that an Apartheid State can never be a democracy.
Mulcair responded by telling the members and constituents of his riding who were raising these concerns to "shut up".

Thomas Mulcair or Brian Topp as NDP Leader? Bad idea.

The one good idea is for the possibility of Libby Davies as Leader of the NDP. She has been on the left and supported progressive struggles for decades. She is a profoundly principled woman, widely popular and deeply committed. She is in favour of drug decriminalization and for a national plan to combat homelessness. Her political roots lie in anti-poverty organizing with the Downtown Eastside Residents' Association in Vancouver. And she's a strong supporter of LGBT rights. She represents the progressive vision of a different, better society that formed the core of Stephen Lewis' eulogy. There is no one else on the left of the party, as far as I can tell, with the profile, popularity and experience to be a serious contender for the leadership. My personal feeling is that you should drop her a line at libby.davies@parl.gc.ca and let her know that you want her to run for NDP leader.


PS - I'm not a member of the NDP but they are the only party that I've ever voted for. Sober - the only party I've ever voted for sober.

Talk of NDP-Liberal merger grows after Layton funeral - The Globe and Mail

Are There Pics Of Bin Laden? Who Cares

I'm more and more of the mind that the primary job of the news media is to find stupid, insignificant shit and make it into a big deal. Because it's totally irrelevant and worthy of being ignored, it puts them in good stead to be the first to "break" an important story. They can thus market themselves as "cutting edge" or some other bullshit as a way to sell advertising space and subscriptions.

Take this story in all the major Canadian dailies that NDP deputy leader Thomas Mulcair mused that, since Obama hasn't produced any photos of bin Laden's body, they probably don't exist. Now, tell me, in the scheme of conspiracy theories - that 9/11 was an inside job, that the US military has UFOs at area 51, that Obama wasn't born in the US and is a secret African socialist Islamic agent bent on destroying the Christian and free enterprise character of the United States of America - does this rate even a mention? Seriously, this is the kind of thing you say when you're out with your buddies having a beer or sitting with your family at a holiday dinner:

Uncle Barry: "If he had the photos, they'd be all over CNN. Come on, they blasted pics of Saddam Hussein's bullet-ridden bodies all over the place."

Aunt Sue: "He doesn't want to get people even more riled up by suggesting disrespect for the dead. You don't want to give terrorists another excuse to blow things up."

Uncle Barry: "Hmmm. Maybe. Pass the gravy?"

And that would be the end of that.

The real issue, I'm convinced is the deeper point that he makes: did the US break international law by going into a private home in a non-belligerent country with the intention to shoot-to-kill bin Laden regardless of whether he was armed or not. Did they kill an unarmed man? Frankly, the NDP's official response that "we are happy the U.S. tracked down Osama bin Laden” is worse than pathetic. How about - hey, the USA and its allies, including Stephen Warpig Harper have used bin Laden for the last ten years as an excuse to justify killing hundreds of thousands of people in several countries stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Chinese border. How about, Harper - and before him the Liberals - have used the war on terror to justify taking away our civil rights and spending tens of billions of dollars on a war in Afghanistan that has done nothing but kill innocents and prop up warlords and heroin kingpin and now they're about to spend tens of billions of dollars on stupid, over-priced fighter jets. After all that blood and treasure wasted to stop the evil Osama bin Laden why isn't it unreasonable to ask when the wars and defense spending justified by the hunt against bin Laden and the - mostly disrupted and demoralized - al Qaeda will be ended. Why isn't it reasonable to expect the country supposedly fighting to defend international law and respect for human rights, the USA, actually follow international law and not abrogate the most basic law that permits one the right to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial? Or is that right only reserved for westerners who agree with the likes of Bush, Obama and Harper? It is deeply disappointing that the NDP lacks the spine to take on something so basic, obvious and cost-free - Canadians are morons, we can figure out hypocrisy and double-standards.

Conspiracy theory: NDP deputy leader Mulcair doubts U.S. has bin Laden photos - thestar.com