It is no secret that I have been in political coventry for a while now. I realize I stepped out of so-called mainstream conservative politics mainly because I was sensing such a disconnect between those who pretended to represent the interests of conservatives in society and those who really were 'conservative'.
There was so little thought given to who and what the maddening political conservative crowd rallied around - or the dire implications for Western society and the concept of nation state. Conservative/progressive politics has been reduced to some kind of major league football game where every one picks teams/sides rather than choosing the side that uses their principles as a guide to create policy which would benefit every Canadian.
American Conservative magazine has published one of the most dangerous and potentially game changing article by Mike Lofgren. This is the beginning of the next big change in conservative political thinking.
It was 1993, during congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican congressmen who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. To this day, I remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens.” That was only the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy, and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness, so at the time it seemed like a striking and novel statement.
There is just so much here that it is hard to link to a single paragraph - so onward with the linky goodness.
I do not mean secession by physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens from time to time—for example, Erik Prince, who was born into a fortune, is related to the even bigger Amway fortune, and made yet another fortune as CEO of the mercenary-for-hire firm Blackwater, moved his company (renamed Xe) to the United Arab Emirates in 2011. What I mean by secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot.
Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare? Being in the country but not of it is what gives the contemporary American super-rich their quality of being abstracted and clueless.
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To some degree the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity towards public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than $500 billion dollars in annual federal, state, and local education funding into private hands—meaning themselves and their friends. What Halliburton did for U.S. Army logistics, school privatizers will do for public education. A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.
In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an army pack. Now the military is for suckers from the laboring classes whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to get Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. The sentiment among the super-rich towards the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse.
While Lofgren's article focuses on the "American" the same process is actively at work in Canada. The Harperites are cut from the same bolt of fabric as the alleged 'republican/conservative' class that Lofgren is warning us of. This is corporate cronyism in action with nary a thought or care given to the lives of the citizenry.
Politically, I am homeless. There is not a political party in this country where I can hang my hat. Although, I am conservative by nature, I am not a Harperite and believe the current Conservative Party of Canada has lost all trace of its roots and has morphed into the party of small thinkers and two-bit political hacks, who all too frequently, think nothing of selling out the entire country to keep their corporate cronies well feed at the expense of ordinary Canadians.
While I am not an ecological ideologue, I am conservative by nature; I prefer to conserve and practice good husbandry towards all resources – both fiscal and natural. The Green party, while being more fiscally conservative than one would imagine, the actual membership bares the distinct smell of fringe, which often leaves one gasping for air.
The NDP (aka as the party of Jack_____)well….the problem is there are far too many members who are to the left of Jack_____ and while the Green party has ‘fringe’, the Dippers have more than their fair share of angry wing-nuts - certainly much more than any mainstream political party deserves. That being said, there have been a number of very bright, dedicated dippers who have worked long and hard to improve the quality of life for their fellow Canadians.
All of which brings me to the Liberal Party. Currently, the Liberal party is facing political Armageddon in Canada. The Liberals were a party of talent, with big and bold visions (even if they had to poach some of those ideas from other parties, they at least made those big ideas workable). The Liberal party was once fiscally conservative and socially responsible - much like most of the citizenry. While not all the Liberal ideas were bright ones, at least they could lay claim to creative thinking and intellectual talent. Now, the best the party can hope for, is that there is a 1968 Trudeaumania redux, so the party can score points with the Canadian electorate for recycling the next generation of 'Trudeau' since outsourcing the leadership didn’t connect with Canadian voters.
Once, I had a passing thought about joining the Liberals, with an eye to helping the party move to the right, but then, these things happen and I am reminded why the Liberal party had to go into political purgatory. The Toronto Star
OTTAWA—A Liberal senator was still at work — casting her vote along party lines a dozen times — four months after a geriatric psychiatrist declared her legally incompetent due to her worsening struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.
Liberal Senator Joyce Fairbairn, 72, has been receiving round-the-clock care for a year and a half due to her declining health from dementia and will not return to Ottawa for the time being, according to a letter her niece, Patricia McCullagh, sent to Senate officials earlier this month.
The letter, dated Aug. 13, says that a geriatric psychiatrist signed a declaration of incompetence for Fairbairn sometime in February and that in April, McCullagh and Leonard Kuchar, chief of staff to Liberal Senate Leader James Cowan, co-signed a power of care that made them agents acting on her behalf.
Senate attendance records show that Fairbairn regularly attended sittings in the Upper Chamber after being declared incompetent, missing seven sitting days between February and the end of session in June.
We can all make cheap quips about the so-called sanity of our political class but very few meet the bar by being legally declared mentally incompetent.Senator Fairbairn met and passed that bar, through no fault of her own. There was only one honourable course of action available to the Liberal Senate leadership once it learned the status of Senator Fairbairn’s mental health. Instead, the Liberal Senate leadership chose the most despicable and morally bankrupt course of action available by choosing to ignore and exploit the Senator's condition. Thereby, turning our system of governance into merely a game of partisan one-upmanship. These liberals sent a big 'fuck-you' to even single Canadian in the country.
We hear so many horror stories about Canadian hospital health care that getting ill or needing emergency assistance is enough to induce an off the wall anxiety attack. I know because I had one last Friday night. I had a small Shabbat dinner and as I was walking my friend to his car my knee locked and I suddenly went crashing down on my right ankle. I didn't hear the 'crunch' but when I could get up immediately I knew I was facing, at least, a very bad sprain.
Being a former ballet dancer means that I am not a stranger to either to pain or sprained ankles. Gabriel carried me to chair and packed my foot with ice. He wanted to take me to the hospital and being an Israeli, he has yet to feel or understand the dread the very idea of visiting a hospital induces in Canadians. I insisted I would be fine. I showed him I could wiggle my toes which goes to prove that old adage of it not being a fracture bone if one can still wiggle one's extremities is false. The truth is, I have extremely strong toes, toes stronger enough - even to this day - that I can pick up all kinds of unnatural things with my toes, if I so choose. Very reluctantly he left me.
By 2:00p.m. Saturday afternoon, I knew I would have to go to the hospital and face the inevitable. I was still hoping for a very bad sprain but the pain was very different from any sprain I had experienced in my career. My son carried me out the door and into a cab. I live in the midst of at least 4 major hospitals and raising three children means I have had experiences at all of the them. I chose Mount Sinai, only because, I was so impressed with the treatment both my son and daughter have received there in the past. Need a CAT scan or an MRI? Mount Sinai has it arranged in hours or within in three days at the most.
We arrived at in the emergency room at 3:00p.m., and seen right away. After the initial nurse triage examine and paper work filled out, I was sent to the waiting room. A brief stay in the waiting room and then I was wheeled into an examining room. Maybe it took 10 minutes - tops. Five minutes after I in the examining room, I was being wheeled into the x-rays room – and attended to immediately. By the time I was wheeled back into the examining room, my x-rays were up on the examining room screens. Ten minutes later I was examined by a resident. Ten minutes later, the resident was conferring with the attending doctor. A fiber-glass air cast was fitted ten minutes later. I was fully discharged and loaded with instructions. The longest single wait I experienced was waiting for a cab to arrive at the emergency entrance to take me home. I was back home and fully kitted out with crutches, cast and drugs by 4:30pm.
Now, maybe I was lucky, and it would be foolish not to see an element of luck in the timing working for me, but this is my 4th experience at Mount Sinai. And each time, I am amazed at the speed and quality of care. I suspect that a great deal of those Canadian hospital horror stories happen due to dysfunctional management policies of individual hospital administrations rather than signs of a 'broken' health care system. If this is indeed the case, maybe it's time to take a long hard look at how and who is running our hospitals.
Last year’s deadly Gaza flotilla was a clear win for the Palestinians in their long conflict with Israel. This year’s version is shaping up as another. Ostensibly, the flotillas are about breaking Israel’s blockade of Gaza and bringing needed aid to the 1.5 million people there. In reality they are about political pressure and public opinion.
As such, they are David and Goliath contests that Israel cannot easily win. For in the flotilla sagas, Israel is by definition Goliath. If it forcibly stops ships bearing aid, as it did last year at a cost of nine dead protesters, it risks being painted a bully.
The problem with Wolkam’s worldview is that it is not rooted in the reality. Last year’s flotilla was not a resounding political success for the Palestinians.
The images of Israeli marines boarding the ships armed with paintball guns and being senseless bludgeoned by armed thugs peace activists was not a win-win for the Palestinians or their public relation efforts. In fact, I am still humming Latma’s break out You Tube hit, ‘We Con the World’ by the Flotilla Choir.
The Israelis, for all their alleged ruthlessness, could not have staged a better photo-op than the reality - which was of armed peace activists running amuck with weapons. Of course, it does tend to tarnish your peace ‘creds’ when you harbour a convicted terrorist hijacker among your ranks. This is probably why this year’s flotilla stuck to a bona fide Hamas member instead.
The danger of asking questions is how easily one question can easily spawn other equally uncomfortable questions. For example, someone might just resurrect this relatively current Jerusalem Post’s article and point out; if the Red Cross preventatives in the Gaza Strip do not believe there is a humanitarian crisis why does The Toronto Star and the flotilla organizers insist there is a need for humanitarian supplies….
Of course, Walkom – not being one to get bogged down by reality continues thus,
Israel says its Gaza blockade is meant to forestall rocket attacks. Palestinians call it collective punishment.
Now there are two possibilities why Walkom writes that the Israel blockade is ‘meant to forestall rocket attacks’. Either he doesn’t really know why the Israelis began the blockage or he is deliberately attempting to mislead the readership of the Toronto Star.
Simply put, the Israelis instituted the blockage of the Gaza Strip not because of rocket attacks launched by the Hamas government exclusively against Israeli civilians or even for the raid across the Israeli border by PRC members to abduct an Israeli solider in order to extort and blackmail the Israeli government into releasing duly convicted Palestinian terrorists. These acts alone are considered enough of a 'casus belli' for war among any normal nations; although, neither of these reasons are the cause of the Israeli blockage against the Gaza Strip.
The Israelis instituted the blockade against the Gaza Strip once Hamas successfully staged a violent bloody coup and overthrew the democratically elected leadership of the Palestinian Authority. Hamas has no legal democratically elected authority to legislate or govern the Gaza Strip and the blockade was instituted by the Israeli government because Hamas, as a political entity remains committed to the use of terrorism to achieve its political aim and the destruction of the Israeli state.
Meanwhile, Gaza’s economy has been virtually destroyed. The blockade has stifled exports, effectively killing what had been a flourishing fruit and vegetable sector. It has decimated the fishing industry.
When the Israeli blockade was instituted in June 2007; the agricultural industry of the Gaza Strip was already decimated. The Israelis had disengaged from the Gaza Strip in August 2005 and handed over to the Palestinian Authority a multi-million dollar agricultural industry with complete functioning infrastructure.
Instead of practicing good husbandry skills, the Palestinian Authority allowed the greenhouses of the Gaza Strip to be destroyed and looted. The Israelis had literally made the desert bloom but you cannot do so without the green houses and a complex irrigation system. I can’t speak with any authority on the fishing industry but I wouldn’t be surprised that to learn the Palestinians have mishandled their fishing industry much like they have mishandled and abused their own agricultural industry.
And finally,
As the Star’s Jim Rankin has reported, those aboard the Canadian ship, Tahrir, are by and large middle-aged pacifists. One may disagree with their politics. But they hardly seem dangerous.
If the flotilla membership was seriously concerned with the welfare of ordinary Palestinians of the Gaza Strip; they should be protesting and demanding Hamas give up military control of the Gaza Strip. Of course, no fun would be had - since there would be no Jews Israelis to bully, malign or demonize.
What is more disturbing to me, is the fact that the editors of the Toronto Star should know all these same facts, and yet, they still published Wolkam's dribble anyway.
I was reading Sarah Honig's latest column on the coming 'tsunami' at the UN with Palestinians. While I have very little to quibble with Honig's column, I was struck by one incredible and existential 'why'. Let me quote Honig at length to set up the existential 'why'.
The 1947 UN partition plan earmarked a status of corpus separatum (separate entity) for Jerusalem, to be overseen by international administrators. Since the Arabs had already violently rejected the Partition Resolution, besieged Jerusalem, conquered and occupied parts of it, expelled all Jews from the Old City and demolished sacred Jewish sites, Ben- Gurion saw no logic in unilateral Israeli adherence to impotent UN proclamations.
On December 5, 1949, five days before the UN General Assembly was to reiterate the internationalization of Jerusalem (and kick off preparations to take control), Ben- Gurion defiantly declared Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Without trepidation he told the Knesset: “We consider it inconceivable that the UN would attempt to sever Jerusalem from the State of Israel or infringe upon Israel’s sovereignty in its eternal capital…
“Jewish Jerusalem will never accept alien rule after thousands of its youths liberated their historic homeland for the third time, redeeming Jerusalem from destruction and vandalism.
“We do not judge the UN, which did nothing when member-nations of the UN declared war on its resolution of 29 November 1947, trying to prevent the establishment of Israel by force, to annihilate the Jewish population in the Holy Land and to destroy Jerusalem, the holiest city of the Jewish people.
“Had we not been able to withstand the aggressors who rebelled against the UN, Jewish Jerusalem would have been wiped off the face of the earth, the Jewish population would have been eradicated and the State of Israel would not have arisen.
“Thus, we are no longer morally bound by the UN resolution of November 29, since the UN was unable to implement it.
“…The attempt to sever Jewish Jerusalem from the State of Israel will not advance the cause of peace in the Mideast or in Jerusalem itself. Israelis will give their lives to hold onto Jerusalem, just as the British would for London, the Russians for Moscow and the Americans for Washington.”
The UN remained impervious. On December 10, 1949, its General Assembly voted by a whopping majority (38-14, with seven abstentions) to uphold its 1947 resolution and place Jerusalem under the auspices of a UN Trusteeship Council, to be governed by the council’s own appointees.
That was the tsunami of 1949. It threatened to engulf fledgling Israel. But Ben-Gurion didn’t lose his cool. Instead of bowing to pressure, he mounted the Knesset podium yet again to repeat what he had enunciated a mere few days earlier: “We cannot assist in the forcible separation of Jerusalem, which would unnecessarily and unjustifiably violate the historical and natural rights of the Jewish people.”
He assertively stressed that “the State of Israel has had, and will always have, only one capital – eternal Jerusalem. This was so 3,000 years ago and so it will be, we believe, to the end of time.”
Ben-Gurion then put to the plenum’s vote his proposal to transfer the Knesset and the government from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It was approved.
There is probably not one city more contentiously claimed than Jerusalem, the historical capital of the Jews and the heart of Judaism. There were periods when Christians claimed exclusive domain of Jerusalem and expelled the Jewish presence from Zion. In an act, now of historical irony, the Jews were only allowed to return when the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem from the Christians was complete. It was only the magnanimity of Muslim rule which allowed the Jews to dwell once more within Zion's walls. Of course, if the Jews were not despised by the Christians would the Muslim forces been so magnanimous? I think not.
No one, who claims to be a supporter of the so-called two-state solution, is suggesting that Jerusalem should be internationalized, but rather, divided between two states. The western half would remain in Israel's control and capital while the eastern half would come under Palestinian control to be their capital. What I find most curious is that there is a general international consensus that no government will recognize even western Jerusalem as Israel's capital. But these same states, are willing to recognize western Jerusalem as Israel's capital providing the Israelis allow the Palestinians to destroy the unity of the eternal capital of the Jewish people.
While I agree with Honig, that all Israelis and Jews need to do is to stand firm in the face of international perfidy and intransigence, I am struck by this singular fact. Only are the Jewish people are denied the right to determine their own capital. Only the Jewish people are told they must divide and share their ancient capital with a people who never existed as a separate distinct group until the re-establishment of the ancient Jewish state.
So the 'why' becomes simply this; why is it that only the Jewish nation is not allowed to determine their own capital?
While most of the so-called pro-Israeli political bloggers are busy writing about the Palestinians, Iran, Syria or the Jew baiting among the faux flotilla human rights activists; the Israeli body politic is in the midst of a greater public protest and push back against the rise of cottage cheese prices. This week, the protests have reached the Knesset and even the Prime Minister has waded in.
The first time I had Israeli cottage cheese was this winter and I have to admit it was completely unlike any of the Canadian (foul stuff) cottages cheeses that are widely available for sale here. In fact, I thought it was yogurt originally as it doesn't have texture or flavour as Canadian cottage cheese.
I wish the Israelis must success in their protests and can only wish that Canadian consumers would feel half as enraged over our own outrageous prices for dairy products.
The most amazing part of this story is that the government of Israel actually had to make a formal request to Apple to remove an 'app' whose purpose is to advance a third intifada against the state of Israel.
I would have thought that anything inciting violence against a country and a people would be a common sense red line that no Western company of Apple's size and prestige would willingly cross. Apparently, not. It will be interesting to see how Apple intends to react to this request.
