J. E. Hoover Trailer

Probably Leo's best performance ever and perhaps Eastwood's best work too. DeCaprio is the best actor of his generation and is only going to get better as he ages. He, like Daniel Day Lewis and Johnny Depp, has extraordinary screen presence, but, unlike these two, DeCaprio's will become even more powerful, I predict, with age. (Who watched Bogey in his 30s? We adored him in his 40s and 50s.) ) Lewis is second to Leo in intensity, and Depp is second in range. Pitt, Clooney, Norton, and all the Ryans, etc. are all second tier compared to these three. So sayeth a former film producer.

Alberta Has More Than one Reason to Feel Guility

But apparently doesn't, according to the Globe's Time to Lead Piece of September 12.2011:

"Alberta is the land of coal production and consumption. It’s also Canada’s dirtiest province for greenhouse gases, producing a third of the country’s emissions with a tenth of its population. The single-largest culprit isn’t from the province’s booming oil and gas sector, however. It’s a coal power plant that generates more emissions than any oil-sands facility.

Coal provides just over 70 per cent of Alberta’s power. It’s cheap (existing plants can keep running at about a third of the cost per kilowatt hour of building new nuclear, for instance) but dirty. It’s why a day of air conditioning an Alberta home can produce an entire ton of carbon pollution, and the average home’s washer, dryer and flatscreen TV often produce as much GHG as a family car. Buying an electric car in Alberta makes little difference – a Chevy Volt is just 25 per cent better than an internal combustion engine when plugged into Alberta’s coal-fired power grid."

Deconstructing Hudak's Weak Ploy

Any affirmative action initiaitve always draws forth twisted logic from its detractors. We've seen this response with language, race, and gender affirmative programs many times before. That Hudak's advisors are using the old binary opposition ploy again assumes not that they are intellectully weak, but that their target for the pitch is. They might just be right.

Setting up binary oppositions such as hardworking "Ontario" workers, on the one hand, and privileged "foreign" workers, on the other, is a common propagandistic strategy - the good guys on one side; the boogeyman on the other stealing your job - but one easy to deconstruct since the so-called foreign workers are in fact, as every journalist who questioned Hudak knew, Ontario workers.

But, as it turns out, these are vulnerable workers who need a boost and whose contribution to Ontario's economy could be significant with that help. With this policy the Liberals are of course being every bit as political as the Conservatives, but the policy is nevertheless a worthy one since there are indeed a significant number of recent immigrant professionals in Ontario who cannot practice their profession because of accreditation challenges. This has been a longstanding issue requiring some sort of feasible solution, and so the tax credit incentive to hire these people is a good one.

Hudak would appear to prefer Ontario chain gang workers cleaning up Ontarians' trash than Ontario's immigrants working and contributing in established professions. Which of these two group is going to contribute more both socially and economically to Ontario?

System Change: Naomi Klein from Council of Canadians

Nothing Exposes the Failures of Our Economic System More than Climate Change, which is not merely an isolated, separate environmental issue, for the effects of climate change are in fact the direct result of our market based model of economic growth and all its various capitalist strategies for profit and exploitation including the most damaging - because transportation generates such massive CO2 emissions - global trade. One could say, as Prince Charles has recently (Humans at Risk of Extinction), capitalism as we know it is destroying the planet.

LabourDay's May Yet Come Again

I'm always shocked when I hear people - frequently working class and rural Canadians but many middle-class business types - rail against unions and, because they're unionized, public servants as if they were fat cats. They never seem to remember in their rant that they might not be making even the meagre wages they are had it not been for the union movement's elevation of working stardards in general. Would there be such a thing as minimum wage standards without the union and civil rights movements of the 20th century? Historical amnesia or, more likely, ignorance.

Of course, unconsciously if not consciously, they want to bring the fat cats down to their common level rather than find a collective way to rise to the better working conditions of union members - which ought to be the stardard to which all workers, whether in the private or public sector, aspire. They also fail to recognize that the core principle of capitalism - and hyperbolically so with corporate capitalism - is exploitation in the name of profit, a process in which real people are merely one of several production components, but the category most ripe for compromise if not deep exploitation in these recessionary times.

Not to mention the appalling increases in CEO's salaries and bonuses on the backs of these culled and compromised workers and the shrinking real value of their wages over the past 30 years or so. What is startling to me is how readily the middle managing underlings under these CEOs do their bidding, failing to recognize that they too are part of the great capitalist exploitation wheel. There is absolutely no point in arguing with the anti-union perspective of business types, be they corporate or small-business, who obviously see unions as a threat to both their power and profit.

Yes, unions can be abusive, dictatorial, misguided, and tenacious; but, in general, despite their failings, they remain the last guard against further exploitation of real people in their effort to maintain humane working conditions, sensible hours of work, reasonable wages, and half-decent pensions and benefits.

Many argue that in our gobalized economy and the resulting massive shift in North America away from manufacturing towards service industries, unions will wane even further. Perhaps. But perhaps, too, unions will make a comeback in this age of significantly increasing "unemployed, under-employed, and anxiously employed." Barbara Ehrenreich, quoted by Jim Coyle in his Toronto Star piece on 04.09.11)

Labour's Day may yet come again.

Doer Shills for Tarsands and Sells out Environment

"Gary Doer sells oil sands from coast to U.S. coast" Yeah, and in the process is selling out the environment and, eventually, the planet. How sad to see Gary Doer shilling for Big Oil. And where is the environmental protesters' take on the pipeline in Yakabuski's unbalanced piece? They certainly don't have access to the corridors of power that Doer has, and why praise him for merely possessing political power that the protesters lack and, in the process, contributing to the destruction of the planet unless one is a little biased? One thing is clear, however: we now know unequivocally why Harper appointed this man, who, sad to say, used to believe in the collective good.

A Response to Christie Blatchford

Layton’s death turns into a thoroughly public spectacle

Yes, the sexist tweetstream against Blatchford is "horrid," as Don Gardner, purveyor of all things empirically true, tweeted last night, and, yes, it is surprising that anyone reads her columns at all. But couldn't she have waited respectfully at least until after the funeral to do her Christie thing? Inappropriate timing is not a strong enough phrase to characterize the publication of this column.

And is anyone really surprised that Layton was helped to write his final letter and that it was - I'm so shocked - political in character? After all, he was dying, for Christ's sake, and he was - duh! - a politician.

And why is Blatchford surprised by the media's reaction to Layton's death and to the public response? They're merely doing what they always do and what she herself is doing - exploiting the hell out of this newsworthy moment.

And why shouldn't people take an occasion like this to mourn, as we do when one of Blatchford's beloved and fetishized military die? Gawd knows we have a right to mourn collectively in this country with our tarsands helping to destroy the planet, Harper in perverse power, and overtly ideologically driven media outlets like Sun TV and The Post in play. Much of the lamentation is indeed for Layton the man no doubt and deservedly so, but I suspect much more is for what he represents.

Public Invested in What Layton Represents