Despite continued evidence of rapidly rising income disparity (the rich are getting richer, the rest of us poorer), yesterday the Finance Minister floated the idea that we tax the rich too much (I can't believe it either!). Lower taxes for the richest 1% of Canadians, Flaherty claims, are needed to keep them in Canada. Canada's scions of wealth, the Bankers quickly supported the idea. All this while the price of basic goods and necessities is increasing, and the provision of public services such as transit, day care, and infrastructure is ignored by the Harper government.
Really how much more do top income earners need? If times are really so tough for them despite their rapidly rising income and wealth, I say let them leave. Let them chase opportunity. Let's start by giving Jim "give-the-rich-a-break" Flaherty and his corporate welfare buddies a one way-ticket to "fight the Pretenders in Spain," or "sell themselves to the Barbadoes" (see Swift below), or some other tax-free zone. If they can't stand Canada's attempt to kept some kind of income equity amongst Canadians, I say have a nice trip!
Alternatively, in the spirit of Jonathan Swift, may I make A (Reverse) Modest Proposal. Instead of eating the poor, as Swift's satire has suggested, we should eat the rich, and relieve the rest. Though as Swift noted, "I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavouring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country." Still, by eating the rich, we could do them all a favour, by stemming their inifnite greed, and save the country from their insatiable need for more money.
After all fat cats are the best eats, "a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout." Umm, roasted bankers....
samedi 24 novembre 2007
jeudi 22 novembre 2007
The Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets
“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
The recovery of the fragments of history, as WB, has told us can shed light on the dialectical promise and failure of the modern project. The Angel of History launches into the maelstrom of the past, relieves a object and in so removing it from its context gives it a new meaning. The recovered, like pearls or coral to be discovered, unveil an object in crystalized and fragmentary form. All this to highlight how one can "wrest thought fragments from the past... to pry loose the rich and strange, the pearls and corals in the depths and carry them to the surface" (HA, 1968: 51-52). Benjamin methodology gives us the form to see how decay is crystallization, and how fragments of history survive to be reformed.
The historians-turned-video-artists known as L’Atelier national du Manitoba attempted such a recovery with forgotten fragments of Winnipeg's collective loss. Upon hearing that video footage of the now-vanished Winnipeg Jets hockey team had been left in the CKY-TV dumpster and was destined for the scrap heap, these Angels of History went into action. The artistes–cum-dumpster divers rescued the debris from certain destruction and fashioned a 60-minute “video-collage-opera,” Death by Popcorn, thus recovering video footage to look back on the false promise.
The movie sold out every night at Winnipeg art-house theater, Cinémathèque, to glowing reviews. Yet, it’s own death was looming; its own success ephemeral. The makers of the film boasted of their dumpster-diving recovery and were soon pursued by the hounds of copyright infringement. They were asked to return the material, and to destroy their film. “It’s appropriate,” Rankin noted in 2005 “Our whole movie was about how corporate interests removed the Jets from Winnipeg. Now, corporate imperatives may remove our movie.” An appropriate recovery, only to be lost again, the moment of meeting its promise was once again fleeting.
The recovery of the fragments of history, as WB, has told us can shed light on the dialectical promise and failure of the modern project. The Angel of History launches into the maelstrom of the past, relieves a object and in so removing it from its context gives it a new meaning. The recovered, like pearls or coral to be discovered, unveil an object in crystalized and fragmentary form. All this to highlight how one can "wrest thought fragments from the past... to pry loose the rich and strange, the pearls and corals in the depths and carry them to the surface" (HA, 1968: 51-52). Benjamin methodology gives us the form to see how decay is crystallization, and how fragments of history survive to be reformed.
The historians-turned-video-artists known as L’Atelier national du Manitoba attempted such a recovery with forgotten fragments of Winnipeg's collective loss. Upon hearing that video footage of the now-vanished Winnipeg Jets hockey team had been left in the CKY-TV dumpster and was destined for the scrap heap, these Angels of History went into action. The artistes–cum-dumpster divers rescued the debris from certain destruction and fashioned a 60-minute “video-collage-opera,” Death by Popcorn, thus recovering video footage to look back on the false promise.
The movie sold out every night at Winnipeg art-house theater, Cinémathèque, to glowing reviews. Yet, it’s own death was looming; its own success ephemeral. The makers of the film boasted of their dumpster-diving recovery and were soon pursued by the hounds of copyright infringement. They were asked to return the material, and to destroy their film. “It’s appropriate,” Rankin noted in 2005 “Our whole movie was about how corporate interests removed the Jets from Winnipeg. Now, corporate imperatives may remove our movie.” An appropriate recovery, only to be lost again, the moment of meeting its promise was once again fleeting.
samedi 17 novembre 2007
The Old Imperial
The Imperial Theatre in Ottawa was built in 1914, and featured both a balcony seating over 200, and loges, or box seats, for over 100 patrons.
In 1938 the venue was popular enough to be fined twenty dollars for overcrowding and people standing in the aisles.
Ten years later, however, the theatre had to reduce the seating capacity to meet the requirements for a one-man projection booth, as they could no longer afford to employ two men. The theatre closed in 1955, and eventually became a concert hall, Barrymore’s.
vendredi 16 novembre 2007
The Shock Doctrine at City Hall
Ottawa’s recent draft budget report suggests closing 23 community centres, nine libraries, wading pools, reducing bus service, doubling the cost of ice arena rentals, eliminating web-casting of council meetings, cutting public health nurses etc, etc.
Larry o noted that his zero-for-zero campaign "is a war." Indeed, Larry O'Brien has hit it right on the head. His scorch earth policy is an emulation of the “Shock Doctrine:” a clean slate razing of the city and the services it provides. It goes like this. Render the citizens helpless into a state of shock through distortions, and flip-flops; use any tactic necessary to disorient them, unbalance them; bring them child-like state, and then, slowly, on that clean slate, rebuild the state, in your image, into a empty shell which has been completely gutted and outsourced (à la Calian). This tactic so wonderfully exposed in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism has become the new mantra of right-wing ideologues. Larry 0’s brainless blunder has brought the Doctrine to City Hall. O’Brien’s constant flip-flops and distortions, amount to tactics of psychological warfare used against Ottawa’s citizens to bypass and overcome the democratic process.
There is a second dimension to this. The Shock Doctrine is a democracy avoidance strategy premised on violence. Now, in the urb, violence does not necessarily equate troops with guns in the city. But violence can be more subtle: it can enacted through a disempowerment of rights. The health of cities is entirely dependant on quality services such as libraries, health clinics, housing, recreation. Without these basic services the city is an empty shell, and the marginalized get pushed further into the fringes of society. Meanwhile, the cities enforcers are getting a 9% increase in their already massive budget – no questions asked. You get the idea.
Any voices of reason in this insane debate? "In a real economic business sense, the cost of providing the services is cheaper than not providing the services," Rev. Brian Cornelius, the minister at First United Church said. "It's pay a little bit more now or a lot more later, and taxpayers should realize this."
Gutting the city for 52 cents a day? I say we need to overcome this shock by recovering our narrative. Thankfully the people at People for a Better Ottawa have started the reclamation.
Larry o noted that his zero-for-zero campaign "is a war." Indeed, Larry O'Brien has hit it right on the head. His scorch earth policy is an emulation of the “Shock Doctrine:” a clean slate razing of the city and the services it provides. It goes like this. Render the citizens helpless into a state of shock through distortions, and flip-flops; use any tactic necessary to disorient them, unbalance them; bring them child-like state, and then, slowly, on that clean slate, rebuild the state, in your image, into a empty shell which has been completely gutted and outsourced (à la Calian). This tactic so wonderfully exposed in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism has become the new mantra of right-wing ideologues. Larry 0’s brainless blunder has brought the Doctrine to City Hall. O’Brien’s constant flip-flops and distortions, amount to tactics of psychological warfare used against Ottawa’s citizens to bypass and overcome the democratic process.
There is a second dimension to this. The Shock Doctrine is a democracy avoidance strategy premised on violence. Now, in the urb, violence does not necessarily equate troops with guns in the city. But violence can be more subtle: it can enacted through a disempowerment of rights. The health of cities is entirely dependant on quality services such as libraries, health clinics, housing, recreation. Without these basic services the city is an empty shell, and the marginalized get pushed further into the fringes of society. Meanwhile, the cities enforcers are getting a 9% increase in their already massive budget – no questions asked. You get the idea.
Any voices of reason in this insane debate? "In a real economic business sense, the cost of providing the services is cheaper than not providing the services," Rev. Brian Cornelius, the minister at First United Church said. "It's pay a little bit more now or a lot more later, and taxpayers should realize this."
Gutting the city for 52 cents a day? I say we need to overcome this shock by recovering our narrative. Thankfully the people at People for a Better Ottawa have started the reclamation.
jeudi 15 novembre 2007
The Archaic
For WB, too often photography failed to record “the essence” of everyday life, such as factories, even as they ceased being the motor of the city. What remained of this past existence, was rapidly disappearing. The expressway was quickly became the new gateway into the city, replacing the railway station.
The speed of modernity increased, the present-day became more fluid, and the “circle of what can be photographed” narrower. Yet, even as photography lost optical command on the city to film, the snapshot could still confront the modern impulse with a memory of the archaic and provide photography’s uncanny ability to capture the new wish images and to confront the forgotten:
"For the closer we come to its present-day, fluid, functional existence, the narrower draws the circle of what can be photographed; it has to be rightly observed that photography records practically nothing of the essence of, for example, a modern factory. Such pictures can perhaps be compared to railway stations, which, in this age when railways are beginning to be out of date, are no longer generally speaking, the “true gateways” through which the city unrolls its outskirts as it does along the approach roads for motorists. A station gives the order, as it were, for a surprise attack, but it is an outdated maneuver that confronts us with the archaic, and the same is true of photography, even the snapshot. Only film commands optical approaches to the essence of the city such as conducting the motorist into the new center”
Walter Benjamin, Berlin Chronicle
The speed of modernity increased, the present-day became more fluid, and the “circle of what can be photographed” narrower. Yet, even as photography lost optical command on the city to film, the snapshot could still confront the modern impulse with a memory of the archaic and provide photography’s uncanny ability to capture the new wish images and to confront the forgotten:
"For the closer we come to its present-day, fluid, functional existence, the narrower draws the circle of what can be photographed; it has to be rightly observed that photography records practically nothing of the essence of, for example, a modern factory. Such pictures can perhaps be compared to railway stations, which, in this age when railways are beginning to be out of date, are no longer generally speaking, the “true gateways” through which the city unrolls its outskirts as it does along the approach roads for motorists. A station gives the order, as it were, for a surprise attack, but it is an outdated maneuver that confronts us with the archaic, and the same is true of photography, even the snapshot. Only film commands optical approaches to the essence of the city such as conducting the motorist into the new center”
Walter Benjamin, Berlin Chronicle
mardi 13 novembre 2007
Le maudit parking de Hull
"Le projet Hypothèses d’insertions consiste principalement à explorer et occuper temporairement le paysage urbain de Hull avec un élément ludique mobile : une table de ping-pong..."
dimanche 11 novembre 2007
Garbage-Eve
Having succumbed to an inadvertent bike ride, I found solace in the lost objects of garbage-eve. Found: cross-country skis (left downhill behind); a hockey stick (mint!); a phonograph (still to determine working condition); an unknown alley tucked behind a major commuting artery (silent on a Sunday night, though less silent than it would have been had it not escaped the purge of urban renewal); a hidden court (built alongside an old streetcar garage). Recovered fragments always bring so much more gratification - perhaps because the chain of reification is dented.
As AH has noted in reference to WB....
The mind can be nourished by an open-field of vision: capitalism is never a seemless entity. There are “always holes, always inconspicuous cracks” there is “a porosity in culture, in urbanism and architecture, in everyday life, that makes the economy leaky, subject to subversion, full of “unseen constellations.”
jeudi 8 novembre 2007
A Zero With No Plan
Ottawa's bumbling Mayor continues to bluster and bluff. Yesterday he pontificated to a group of business leaders and city councilors about his "plan" to be a total zero. Some reactions.
"We've seen over the last year that this is the mayor's style, all pomp and no substance. The mayor's answer seems always to be to privatize the whole of the city." Sean McKenny, president of the Ottawa and District Labour Council
“He has no vision, he has no plan” Gloucester-Southgate Councilor Diane Deans
Even the cantankerous Randall Denley of the Ottawa Citizen added his voice to the refrain:
“Mayor Larry O'Brien's "budget plan" is not much more than useless bluster. The secret in his secret plan was that there was really no plan at all.”
Larry 0 was once again bereft of any real ideas on how to meet his valley-boy osh-gaw commitment. Since it is clear Larry 0 has no clue on how to run a city, maybe it’s time we start giving him some help. Larry, free of charge, here is some starting advice.
0. Your zero means zero campaign is a zero idea. No councilor (who is not from the right-wing rural fringe) thinks this is possible. No city columnist thinks so either. This includes the Ottawa Sun (not exactly known for its progressive views). Almost none of you bureaucrats think so either.
1. You can’t eliminate city employees by waving your wand. Since you’ve only run a staff outsourcing outfit you might not know that it takes employees to provide services. Cities need employees to run services such as libraries, pools, arenas, and day care.
2. OK, I understand you have some primordial need to cut somewhere, anywhere. I’ll give you this one. Every year the police ask for a increase in their budget. Every year they get it. Why not start by denying the police a 9% budget increase (equal to a 1.5% increase in city taxes). Crime is at its lowest in 20 years. Why are we increasing the police budget?
3. Stop building expensive roads until we have a transit plan (um, did we not have one already?).
4. Pressure the province to provide more equitable funding. Even you mentor Sam Katz did this in Winnipeg.
Larry that is three more ideas that you provided yesterday (privitizing parking does not constitute an idea). I’ll hand you some later. Maybe others will have some ideas for you too! Perhaps you would learn if you spent more time listening and less time pontificating.
mercredi 7 novembre 2007
Red River Murk
Larry 0's recent desire to emulate Winnipeg’s privatization plans have made my own internal ruminations quite au courrant. For some weeks I’ve been thinking about the links between Ottawa Mayor Larry O’Brien and Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz. Both are political neophyte entrepreneurs who rose from nowhere to sit in the big chair at city hall, and both used their business credentials to launch their rise to power. Although themselves dependent on public funding to launch their enterprises, both Mayor’s came to power preaching property tax freezes. As I never cease to insist, both can credit the public sector with a great hand in making them successful. The tag "self-made millionaire" does little to reflect their actual career trajectory.
Katz’s most recent entrepreneurial success is running the popular minor league baseball team the Winnipeg Goldeyes. The Goldeyes popularity can in large part be attributed to his good fortune of playing in a marvellous waterfront ballpark. The stadium was built and financed through public infrastructure investments and multi-level funding, including access to prime city-land for parking privileges. As readers of this blog can deduce, this public funding kick-start for his entrepreneurial spirit is quite similar to Larry 0’s dependence on federal staffing contracts.
However, it is their links to murky dealings which make this comparison compelling. Both Larry 0 and Sam Katz have been on the hot-seat over court revelations of unscrupulous deals. Larry 0,* as has been discussed at length here, has been under investigation for bribing a fellow right-wing candidate to drop out of the recent municipal election. For his part, Katz, the one-time concert promoter and nightclub owner, is also under legal pressure.** Last month it was revealed in documents relating to divorce proceedings that Katz has yet to pay any interest on more than $434,000 owing to the public labour fund Crocus Investments. Yet Katz continues to draw $217,000 as majority owner of the Winnipeg Goldeyes (that is on TOP of his Mayoral Salary). I guess he can’t use that salary to pay his debts.
Since becoming Mayor, Katz has been vilified for participating in city business which involved his business friends and associates. The murk is as thick on the banks of the Red River as on the banks of the Rideau Canal. Dubious distinctions. All this makes me question what kind of business acumen these entrepreneurs are bringing to city hall.
*Oh, and yeah, that is not a typo, I’ve decided that Larry Zero (0) is much more appropriate than Larry Oh (O).
**To be fair to Sam, this is nothing new, he has long been involved in dubious business practices, especially as a concert promoter. The list of unpaid creditors, shoddy accounting, and special government favours, to those with longer memories, is long. Hey, this guy is a promoter at heart.
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