Some Canadians are snoozing while Harper continues his destructive crusade through democracy, the environment, and the Canadian economy; but not all

As Susan Riley suggests in the Citizen today, most Canadians are snoozing through President Harper's vicious assault on democracy, the environment, and - more noticeably recently - the Canadians economy.  If you've read any of my other posts here about the Harper Regime's extraordinary misspending and misguided attempts to manage the economy - which are the real reasons we have a deficit - you'll know how deeply audacious, arrogant, and hypocritical it was for Harper to chastise  the European community at Davos for not getting its house in order. Of course his address wasn't really about the world economy. It was a political opportunity to prepare us for the spring Canadian budget, which, when released, will probably make us all puke.  Journalists, bring your barf bag to the press conference. Seniors, start making your placards.


Those of us who are acutely awake through this travail of destruction sometime wonder whether all the little subversive and critical things we do are making a difference.  I think they are but not in terms of swaying the fundamentally ignorant Harper base, which would seem to just let all this moral corruption slip by, or even the non-committed or indifferent, who are the majority of snoozers; but of bonding our progressive movement of concern here in Canada and around the world wherever neoliberalism has sunk its greedy, self-serving teeth in, or - to use a phrase of Max Keiser's - where, through banksters and "the markets," neoliberalism has been "strip mining" the economy. There's a never before seen powerful force slowly growing in this  global resistance capable of effecting real transformational change in our socio-economic structures.


And, let me remind you, the occupy movement is not dead:  it's hibernating to be waken in the spring with a ferocious roar. In the meantime, we must keep up our small and large actions here and everywhere because they are incrementally creating an expanding awareness of just how mean, nasty, and corrupt the Harper Regime and its policies really are - nowhere better illustrated than in the example of Keystone XL and now Gateway, in the latter of which, as Nathan Cullen suggests, Harper may have overplayed his hand despite his usual wedge politics. Hang in there.

Big Media's Search for the Meaning of the Occupy Phenomenon

#BigMedia 's search for coherence, for  an articulated purpose or clearly enunciated demand -  for the  "real meaning" of the #occupy movement - is  amusing if not characteristic.  ("What do they want?"  "What are their demands?" "Who are the leaders?" "Who are the spokespeople?"  "It seems so incoherent." "They're not proposing solutions.")  If we can centre it, if we can reduce it to this one thing, if we can structure it, we can understand it and then either control or, through  binary oppositions, confront it.  And the media, especially TV, if it loves anything, it loves binary oppositions - black and white, wealthy and poor - and its ever faithful sidekick, reductionism, which involves depleting the complexity out of an issue. 


The most common reduction strategies we've seen since the beginning of #occupywallstreet  include the following:  it's about fixing abuses in the banking system (Mark Carney's take), it's about economic or income inequality, it's about corporate greed,  or it's about the failure of governments.  All of these presuppose, as Carney does, that all that is required is some sort of fix  of the current system, be it banking or government.  But it's not about fixing. It's about changing, transforming, the system completely - maybe even creating a new one - and in order to begin that public conversation we need all the disparate social and economic elements to mass in one giant incoherent mess, as they are now, across the globe both in physical and virtual space.


Critics of the movement are saying it will fail since it appears to lack coherence and a so-called goal, but the absence of these protest conventions are the very things that give the movement a heretofore unseen and unusual power. Demand implies negotiation, as Naomi Klein has said, but this is not a negotiation. This is not a protest. It's  a self-enabling distribution of power - a dispersal of power if you will.  It's a magnificent sloppy movement in which everybody is talking to everybody about everything.