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Jeff Halperin

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Tag Archives: doug ford

Long-Term Don’t Care: a Doug Ford Crisis

21 Saturday May 2022

Posted by jdhalperin in Uncategorized

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doug ford, Ontario Election 2022

Photo Credit: Vlada Karpovich via Pexels

Canada had a relatively low COVID mortality rate compared to other OECD countries, but residents in Long-Term Care (LTC) died in disproportionately high numbers. To be clear, it’s not that COVID killed LTC residents in greater numbers here than it did young people because older people were more susceptible. It’s that LTC residents in Canada died in vastly higher percentages than LTC residents in other OECD countries.

Canada’s long-term care problems extend beyond Ontario, but our country was uniquely dangerous for seniors in LTC compared to other similar nations, and Ontario was and is a particularly dangerous province. In Ontario, seniors in for-profit LTCs were substantially more lethal.

Doug Ford’s ministers didn’t do much for LTCs when the virus hit in 2020. The Ministry of Health and Ministry of Long-Term Care submitted their reports, memos, and briefing notes concerning COVID-19 and long-term care to the CBC, which determined it sat back and was ill-prepared.

By May of 2021, 70% of all COVID deaths in Ontario were in LTC settings. This number has only gone up.

Doug Ford promised an “iron ring” around LTCs on March 30, 2020. He did not create one. A 2021 report by the Canadian Armed Forces led to widespread outcry as a picture emerged of seniors dying preventable deaths in “horrifying” conditions. Think cockroaches, dehydration, patients with ulcers neglected in beds, staff wearing contaminated gear. The backlash was so intense even Doug Ford promised an investigation and accountability. He had said the investigation was already underway, when in reality it had never begun and would never begin.

Instead, Doug Ford rushed to create a law protecting privately-owned LTCs from lawsuits. He claimed the law would protect all businesses from unnecessary lawsuits that could bankrupt them. That explanation seems a little convenient given the conservative connections to privately-owned LTCs.

For example, the former Conservative Party leader Mike Harris has sat on Chartwell’s board since 2004, and has made great piles of cash by reducing regulations and oversight. IE, cuts made prior to COVID resulted in LTCs being so deadly when the pandemic struck.

For-profit LTCs hire lobbyists with conservative ties. Current MPP Melissa Lantsman was a registered lobbyists for Extendicare. The list goes on. The revolving door between the conservative party and for-profit LTCs is such that the LTC’s failures are Ford’s failures, too.

The Liberals also deserve blame for overseeing the privatization of LTC for 15 years. This isn’t all on Doug Ford, but this is a story about governments deliberately sacrificing elderly Canadians’ quality of life for shareholder profits, a pattern that Doug Ford repeats so often, it’s about the only approach he knows.

Abandoning seniors was just the first stroke.

The federal government donated COVID tests to Ontario that somehow people never received unless they were students in private schools, and instead, for months, people paid Shoppers Drug Mart and other pharmacies $30 or $40 for a rapid test countries like the UK, US, and Germany made free or inexpensive (say, $4). (Ontario Pharmacies only began handing out boxes of free rapid tests weeks before the provincial election.)

By approaching the pandemic as a money-making opportunity for government insiders instead of treating it primarily as a public health crisis to solve, the Doug Ford government ended up relaying COVID tests to the very communities least likely to get COVID, and neglected communities that needed support the most.

This is a mutually reinforcing cycle: COVID initially spread in poorer, non-white communities because people there were more likely to work in-person jobs that couldn’t be done remotely. Existing systemic injustices made “frontlines heroes” more susceptible to getting the disease. But because Doug Ford governs primarily for the wealthy, poor people had to fend for themselves, which inevitably resulted in them getting COVID in higher rates while getting no to little government support.

Doug Ford refused to give working people paid-time-off, which experts said was required so workers with COVID symptoms could stay home rather than risk spreading the disease because they couldn’t afford to not work for a day. Ontario workers had more paid-time-off before the pandemic than during it.

Vaccination rates were initially lowest in communities where spread was highest. This pattern repeats itself and has done so throughout the pandemic.

It may sound like a cliché or oversimplification to say Doug Ford repeatedly put profits above people’s lives. I am confident that the more you read about his failings, the truer it will seem. This, despite his platitudes about representing ordinary people.

The idea that “frontlines heroes” were so actively neglected by this government, left to fend for themselves while the premier essentially handed over control to lobbyists and tycoons…it’s heartbreaking and unconscionable.

I half-joke that the media backlash was fiercer when a few young people tweeted “OK, boomer” in 2019 than when seniors died in appalling conditions under Doug Ford, who reacted by changing nothing except to further cement the dangerous conditions. We need to reckon with the underlying lethal economics behind our lethal long-term care centres. Indeed, conservative ministers were buying stocks in for-profit long-term care centres during the pandemic, while Doug Ford handed out millions of tax dollars to upgrade for-profit LTCs and changed laws to let LTCs increase their rates for rooms and charge extra for private ones.

The profiteers are already inside the government; they must be voted out in June.

War, Convoys, and the Point of it All

03 Thursday Mar 2022

Posted by jdhalperin in Uncategorized

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canadian politics, doug ford, ontario politics, Pandemic

I’m sure everyone thought a lot about life during the pandemic, the point of it all. If we were going to make it to the other side, what would we do once we got there? What is the point of life, society?

Being privileged as fuck, I was situated about as nicely as somebody can possibly be in a pandemic, and it was a fucking misery on all sides. The choice was doom-scroll or feel guilt and powerlessness at being unable to prevent what felt like society’s collapse.

I thought I was a cynical bastard, but it never occurred to me that people would oppose public health measures during a pandemic by invoking “Freedom.” The so-called “truck convoy,” which never represented the majority of Canadian truckers let alone Canadians, was fake-ass right-wing theatre from top to bottom.

Like all elements of cheap partisan political theatre, it needed some very real people to get swept up in it to give the appearance of legitimacy, and there were, but it was organized and coordinated by political extremists and violent crooks, including ex-military and ex-police. You can tell from the support it got from the alt-right shitbag pundit community that this was not a grassroots movement.

If it was actually a working-class protest, conservatives would have opposed it with every fibre of their being. The province’s conservatives have gouged workers and fought to undermine labour rights for the last 24 months of a pandemic, refusing not just what union reps said would be decent compensation but what doctors said was necessary to combat the pandemic–ie, paid sick days. Not even a global pandemic could shake the conscience of doug ford. The conservative support for the convoy was all the proof a person could want that the convoy was in no way working-class. Elon Musk, perhaps the world’s richest person, vocally supported it too.

The alt-right were deliberately conflating the right to protest with the right to park enormous trucks in very tight public places. Just like “50,000 truckers” became maybe hundreds at the pinnacle of that fake-ass protest, the presence of trucks made the size of the protest seem a lot bigger than it was. The physicality of the trucks compensated for the relatively low number of people.

All of this felt foreboding at the time. I saw a picture of a maga militia member (three-percenter) in camo fatigues and patches standing at University and College. The flags with swastikas, confederate flags, and other hate symbols in Ottawa have been well-documented.

But it feels small now that war has broken out in a major European city. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is horrifying for reasons too obvious to state. Seeing trucker carlson of faux news go from promoting the convoy to defending vladimir putin after the invasion…

Alt-right ratfuckery is all connected. I’ve seen rabid social media support from the same accounts for the so-called truck convoy, putin’s invasion, modi’s hindutva pogroms, the January 6 insurrection on the US capital…they’re all inter-linked.

Condemning the war is inevitable, but what else is there to say?

Despite everything, the crushing hopelessness gives way sometimes to optimism based on my belief that normal people are doing amazing things behind closed doors, in their private lives, things which will never be reported. Little things to cheer up those around them, support people. From community solidarity, people helping strangers and kin.

I’m not saying that these good and great private deeds will be enough to overcome war, the inherent violence of alt-right politics, end the pandemic, or fix the climate crisis. It’s just that people genuinely give me a good feeling. Being cynical about politics is reasonable right now, too utterly reasonably, but that’s not the same thing as misanthropy. I love people and always will.

I’ve had spiritual musical-revelations lately involving Parliament Funkadelic and somehow, not to be flippant, but this to me feels like the kind of thing that can fill in society’s hollowness. I’m not sure what the point of North American society is. It feels wasteful and dangerous in a stupid, vulgar sense.

The things people commonly point to as the crown achievements of civilization feel to me not just bad but anti-civilized. A legal code is an achievement compared to what you find in the jungle, but ours enshrine and protect racism as basically its central premise. Our technology is advanced, but it only exists for advertising, which in turn only exists to sell things probably unsustainably-produced things made by horrifically exploited people, if not outright slaves. Phones make people miserable, they’re expensive, and wasteful. Cars are sophisticated machines that can be beautiful and convenient, but they waste resources to a shocking degree, are the sole source of murder-inducing traffic jams, and they injure or kill people every day. Gas is rising in costs and our corrupt premier does everything possible to lock-in cars for the future in a way that disfigures the natural world, solves 0 problems, causes new many problems and exacerbates old ones, wastes billions of dollars, and benefits nobody except his oligarch donors and pandemic profiteers like galen weston (ford nixed public charging stations and is now putting them at en routes which galen weston owns; ford received COVID tests from the federal government, which mysteriously never got distributed, while galen weston sold COVID tests for $40).

During the pandemic my apartment got broken into while my girlfriend and I were asleep and her car was stolen and totalled, I developed shingles from stress, our place had roaches and neighbours who made my gf uncomfortable, we had to finally move apartments and after a year of not seeing anyone got COVID from the movers pre-vaccination Dec 2020, my GF broke her collar bone in a bike accident…still, I feel fortunate, humbled, grateful to be alive.

I can’t be the only one who has wondered, am I depressed, or is this merely a reasonable reaction to this moment?

We are governed by culturally impoverished aristocrats who don’t give a fuck. John tory, ford, and trudeau are all spoiled sheltered nepotism hires. If a private equity firm could take human form, it would take basically these human forms.

I’m from Forest Hill, I grew up anything but a radical leftist. Indeed, if anything, my upbringing only helps me to recognize a tycoon politician on sight. Toronto is lopsided as hell, and deliberately so. The mayor of a city where housing costs rose 28% in one year claims to be fighting for affordability? Our leaders aren’t failing to do what’s right, they’re successfully doing wrong.

So long as we continue to elect slum landlords as our representatives, who cancel public service under the guise of “savings,” homelessness will only grow and increase in severity and life will get harder and more brutal. I also feel like upper class people are miserable here, too. Depression is everywhere. What is the point of this city?

Either you need to rent a home to people to gouge them (ie, be a landlord) or be gouged yourself. Fuck or be fucked. Housing should be a human right, not a retirement strategy. If this is a wealthy society, what is the point of being wealthy if people need to either live on the street or stress about a mortgage their entire life?

Is it better to be a hammer than a nail? Maybe, but that’s a false choice, and the hammer is stressing over failing to live up to inflated, vulgar, unrealistic class expectations and feeling like shit because at heart it knows to “make it” in this society may involve causing harm to oneself or others or both.

I’m glad organized religion has lost its central position in society, but this is a society that doesn’t value human life or culture properly or at all. A spiritual crisis underlies our political ones. I encourage everyone to be outrageously nice to each other, read novelists like Roberto Bolano or Tolstoy or actual political writers and academics not the disgraceful postmedia blowhard class, and listen to deep funk and spiritual jazz very loudly on the best speakers you can access. Pamper your own soul, because we’re all going to die some day and you owe it to yourself. The point of life has to involve loving other people, friends and family and neighbours, but love for the species means spreading the work of our best artists and contributing to the life of the soul.

People need to come together now, at whatever stage of the pandemic this is, and that means privileged people with power need to condemn the racist violent barbaric tycoon politics being conducted in our name and exchange it for something genuinely peaceful, civilized, and cultured.

Tax Evasion vs TTC Fare Evasion: Selective Enforcement

01 Tuesday Sep 2020

Posted by jdhalperin in Politics

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

doug ford, john tory, justin trudeau, tax evasion, ttc fare evasion

Society ignores tax haven criminals dealing in many millions of dollars but hounds poor people over pennies. This is one example of an infinitely-recurring pattern, where the ultra wealthy essentially rig society in their favour at the expense of society’s poorest people.

Let’s see one manifestation of this dynamic in action.

Canada loses $4 billion a year to tax evasion, because Canada’s wealthiest have more than $200 billion in offshore accounts, and these funds don’t get taxed. $4 billion.

The general public is not demanding blood. In fact, nothing is happening!

In Canada, over the past few years, the CRA has been financially hobbled in just such a way that it can’t really pursue the tax returns of society’s wealthiest people, who necessarily have the most complex, unwieldy paperwork. As a result, apparently it is more efficient for the agency to invest in assessing small- and medium-level tax returns…

How convenient!

Effectively, tax evasion is legal for the very wealthiest people in society.

Compare this lax treatment against how everyday TTC riders are grilled.

TTC riders face TTC Fare Enforcers, a subsection of police there specifically to ensure “the integrity” of $3.25 fares. All this, though more than 97% of TTC riders pay a fare, and the 2.7% who don’t includes people who can’t because a Presto machine was broken.

So, “fare evasion” is a rarity, what evasion there is is tiny, and “fare evasion” isn’t one person greedily draining the broader society of wealth, it’s just them traveling around their city, which is what the TTC exists to do. If the TTC received 5 times the amount or revenue supposedly lost to “fare evasion” annually, it’d still be critically underfunded! “Fare Evasion” is not the root cause of the TTC’s problem.

Still, we send patrols out because the idea of a poor person getting away with anything is cannot be tolerated.

The TTC is basically broke because unlike any other North American city this size, about 80% of its funding comes from the till box–ie, riders pay for it mostly, not government. Yet the TTC found the money to take out ads to shame and humiliate their own riders and plastered them on TTC vehicles!

Screen Shot 2020-06-09 at 1.46.33 AM

Similar ads were on the insides of buses and subways, and the outsides of streetcars.

The outrageous fine for “evading” an outrageously high $3.25 TTC fee is $425 or criminal charges. The smaller the crime, the more it is enforced and the higher the penalty.

When considering this backwards enforcement, is it really coincidence that John Tory, Doug Ford, and Justin Trudeau are more likely to have personal and professional connections with tax evaders than TTC fare evaders?

Look how they chase poor people.

Toronto’s mayor proudly sent fare enforcers on public transit into a global pandemic in March! Imagine paying $3+ to take a shitty public transportation system to a minimum-wage job during a deadly pandemic, hoping nobody is on your bus so you don’t get COVID, and still seeing Fare Enforcers circulate through the system. Public schools are crumbling, hopefully we have enough PPE for frontline healthcare workers, but this we have money for? This is our society?

Our indifference to poor people is evident from the TTC’s “plan” at the time for social distancing, which was this: Fare Enforcers exit the vehicle once 50 people are on board. Can you imagine society risking the lives of wealthy people to ensure financial accountability over any sum of money, never mind $3.25?

Unsurprisingly, a system built on a foundation of violence against poor people is also racist.

Statistically, Fare Enforcers issue tickets disproportionately to Black people. Fare Enforcers assaulted an unarmed Black teenager on a streetcar just down the street from my apartment. The enforcers were found to have committed no wrongdoing, which is not an exoneration of their conduct but a total indictment of the entire system.

Can you even imagine one scenario where an authority would ever physically tackle a tax-evading investment banker, and upon formal review it’d be deemed acceptable?

This charade of enforcement-theatre which lets mega criminality operate freely in broad daylight while violently hounding poor people out of a fake concern for Law and Order is grotesque, yet very typical. Indeed, if you look carefully, you’ll see this underlying dynamic repeated ad infinitum with only minor variations.

If TTC riders face humiliating ad campaigns suggesting they’re criminals and a dedicated team of armed enforcers over $3 fares, what would it look like to see proportionate enforcement against people stealing many, many millions of dollars?

The tax haven class would be cavity searched upon leaving their home in the morning. Growling bloodhounds would bark after them in the street. Billboards targeting the super rich would proclaim, “You unpatriotic dogs think you can swindle Canada? Think again!” and the super rich would be billed for these undermining billboards.

The TTC is a public good that only exists to affordably get people around the city. People have jobs and appointments to get to: The TTC is not there to generate profit, nor should it be!

Comparing the relative treatment of Class Haven Criminals versus TTC riders illustrates clearly that poor people are the ones paying for collective society, that “trickle-down-economics” is BS because in reality the money trickles down to Switzerland or Panama to be privately hoarded.

If our politicians were actually concerned with enforcing the laws on the books evenly and sensibly, rather than waging a war on the poor to benefit their friends and donors, they’d immediately send TTC Fare Enforcers away from public transit and into the Board Rooms, where all the real criminals and “evaders” are.

 

 

 

 

Thoughts On Toronto’s Homelessness Crisis

25 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by jdhalperin in Politics, Statements

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

doug ford, Homelessness in Toronto, India slums, Jeff Halperin, Nicholas Hune-Brown, poverty, Toronto Life

My first time reporting on Toronto City Hall in early 2013, Rob Ford’s council debated on whether to fund more emergency beds for people experiencing homelessness. Unsurprisingly, council put it off, saying more studies needed to be done, etc. Politicians invoke the word “studies” when they don’t want to fund things for poor people, but don’t want to appear heartless.

Immediately after the vote activists rose in the chamber, unfurled a banner and denounced the council for having “blood on [their] hands.” If that sounds dramatic, know the previous day they had attended the funeral of a friend who died on the streets of Toronto. They shouted lucid and undeniable arguments, a silence really did hang in the room, then security escorted them out.

That was six years ago, and Toronto’s problem has grown.

Since this time I lived for over a year in India. For most of it, I lived in a posh sector just outside Delhi, in Uttar Pradesh, near my office in a company guest house, among retired judges and lawyers and military people. In January 2017 I moved to Lajpat Nagar II, where my neighbours included Afghan refugees.

Honestly, I didn’t see many expats in Lajpat II, (when immigrants are white they’re called “expats”), but I had an Italian friend in Lajpat IV. My real estate agent (finding an apartment requires one) lived in an apartment down the street from me with his family, but I regularly saw merchants sleeping on the streets next to their stalls, on charpoys, cots of woven rope. They slept among the homesless dogs.

There was a Gurdwara near me, a Sikh temple of worship that helps feed people. Honestly, I didn’t learn enough Hindi to talk with the poor people around me, and even if I did, I couldn’t have come even close to understanding their world. I grew up in Forest Hill: I can’t understand the life of a homeless person in Toronto, never mind there. One time I gave a legless beggar, wheeling himself on a wooden platform, 100 rupees ($2) and he cried and said nobody has ever given him so much. (My friend translated).

But here? In Toronto? I’ve seen people arrive to downtown Toronto straight from India, and they are appalled by the homelessness. Amid such wealth, in such a clean city? It’s unconscionable. The sight of people dying in slow motion on the street amid such robust prosperity shakes them.

India is notorious for its poverty, for its slums. India used to be the richest country on Earth, and it was plundered, and now amid a booming middle class, as Western Businesses compete for their share of this new money, Indians don’t believe they’re a poor country anymore. This may stun people in Canada, for whom India is synonymous with poverty, but many there don’t.

I was in an editorial meeting the day Snapchat’s CEO reportedly said he didn’t want to invest in poor countries, such as Spain and India. This remark didn’t go over well in India. But wasn’t it…true? Sudhir Chaudhary wondered how the man could say such a thing! And the room agreed. There like here, journalists come from wealthier backgrounds—nobody else could afford to rise in an industry that often pays in “exposure.” (Believe that this affects coverage of money, homelessness, power…)

Anyway, so how exactly does a country measure its wealth?

Forget India for now. Here, things are not OK. According to the 2016 census (the most recent available), the average 2015 income for a Toronto male over 15 was $33,456. If a one-bedroom is $1,500 a month (no roommate, but that’s a good price), subtract $19,200 from that. Toronto has a higher share of high-income earners than the rest of Canada and Ontario, and a higher share of low-income earners in both. People here are generally very rich or very poor.

Anecdotally, the oldish but spacious two-bedroom, two-storey apartment I rented in late 2010 by Trinity Bellwoods cost $1600, plus hydro. Today, the landlord wanted to charge $3,000. We all know this story.

How best to crunch the numbers, which stats are most useful in representing Toronto’s wealth, is interesting to consider and it’s important for framing policy, but the fact is Toronto has slums and people are dying and nobody is talking about it.

Consider all the media attention gun violence is currently getting. In 2018, an especially violent year, we had 95 homicides. This is a crisis too! But over 100 homeless people die each year in Toronto. Contrast the silence in the media regarding the deaths of people experiencing homelessness with that of gun violence. Again, obviously gun violence is a major issue, but more people die in Toronto from…from what? From being poor. Or depressed, or having no support.

As Toronto-born Robbie Robertson wrote: “I’ve just spent 60 days in the jail house, for the crime of having no dough, now here I am back out on the street, for the crime of having nowhere to go.”

This is a time of supposedly divisive politics, but doesn’t everybody care about this? Can anybody hear these stories neglect, of needless human suffering on a shocking scale amid such wealth, of death, and shrug? Does anybody think that Free Markets determine the cost of things, so people should just…die? Do people think this?

Nicholas Hune-Brown wrote an absolutely must-read article in Toronto Life about homelessness in this city. He spoke to people living under the Gardiner Expressway and in Rosedale, he drew up the most relevant stats, and really, the article was as fantastic at capturing the different dimensions of this crisis as the crisis is depressing.

Citing stats, he says the line up to receive subsidized housing in Toronto is 98,000 people long, roughly two full Sky Domes. Toronto builds 500 units of affordable housing each year. There are about 8,000 people experiencing homelessness in Toronto, currently. This number is growing steadily. The article points out that housing a person with mental health needs in Toronto’s housing system costs $59,000, whereas subsidized housing costs $21,089—roughly a third of the cost.

I’m sure there’s a policy solution to this, but whatever it is it’ll takes years and lots more people will die. I don’t know what should be done.

The activists I saw in 2013 were 100% correct. Rob Ford’s council had blood on its hands. So does Tory’s. Rob’s brother Doug is gutting social programs left right and centre and transferring this money, rebranded as “efficiencies,” to Toronto’s wealthiest people. I think our political class are essentially slum landlords.

But again, nobody enjoys the fact that people are homeless, starving, freezing, and dying. Right? I talk with Conservative voters, and right-leaning people who feel politically abandoned because Ford is an obvious illiterate maniac but they don’t like Trudeau, and (through media conditioning, I think) in their bones cannot stomach the thought of voting NDP. Everyone agrees homelessness matters though.

But nobody wants to pay for it. Not really. They say they would, but it never happens.  This is about power, but it’s also about the psychological gulf between wealthy people who just never, never actually have meaningful interactions with these people. It’s out of sight out of mind. “Ohhhhh, you don’t know the shape I’m in.”

Devote tax dollars to this. Please!

During a flash-freeze last year I walked around giving people I saw on the street some gloves and toques and some money. In India, this is a type of jugaad—the Hindi word for a MaGyver, basically—an improvised solution with whatever is at hand. I have an Indian buddy who recently visited Russia, and he made some videos wherein he described to someone that in India, for many people, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is upside, where spiritual needs are addressed first and foremost, then they move towards food and shelter.

Frankly, in Toronto I see a lot of overpriced yuppie ice cream and tacos, Uber Eats charging $35 for a small dinner that arrives cold (delivered by a “driver partner” not an employee, so the US company is conveniently exempt from the Employee Standards Act), people either in despair over the cost of renting and buying a house and ready to seriously leave Toronto, or they’re excited about the cute back splash in their new kitchen…

There’s either a lot of money in this city, or none. But I don’t expect homelessness to get addressed in a meaningful way when this same city is full of people livid at the thought of workers, workers, earning literally only $1 more an hour.

Again, I hope I’m wrong! I do think everyone cares on a basic level about this. But this isn’t quite about morals…everyone feels bad, it’s about money. Hopefully Hune-Brown’s article will galvanize public opinion and politicians will believe there’s actually a will to fuel change. It was just published and is getting air time.

But if the life and death of 100 people a year truly depends on good Samaritans, Toronto is a sad place to live.

Only a couple weeks ago, a woman at Bloor and Dovercourt was trying to get clothes from a donation box. She got stuck inside and died. Days later, a man sleeping on the streets in the Financial District was run over by a garbage truck. He died too. The driver didn’t see him. Stop for a minute: consider the symbolism and visualize the reality of the Financial District’s stupendous wealth, as a human being lies on the street one morning in an alley, and suddenly his life over, run over by a garbage truck.

Please, I hope we can all agree we need comprehensive and well-funded policy right away so people don’t die on our streets. Be mad. Whatever our political differences I refuse to believe people in my city are OK with this.

Am I in the echo chamber, or are you?

06 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by jdhalperin in Statements

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

doug ford, echo chamber, trump

This will sound sarcastic, but honestly I never got accused of being influenced by an “echo chamber” until after I moved to India to work as a journalist, and after making a deliberate effort to read non-white and non-male writers.

To review, an “echo chamber” is the phenomenon where a person only exposes themselves to views they already have, and the more online they are the more they deeply entrench their own beliefs/biases.

Whatever people think of my views, objectively speaking, I’m not a product of an echo chamber. The accusation is laughable.

I read Conservative media. I used to be conservative. For years I kept tabs on the heart of Conservative Canada by reading the FB updates of my cousin’s husband, a former speech writer for Harper who is currently strategic director of communications for Doug Ford.

This guy has defended Trump, Breitbart, rejoiced when NFL planned to shut out Colin Kaepernick, Betsy Devos, and more. He once accused me of being in a social media echo chamber, and has since defriended me from FB. I cannot help listen to Ford without being deeply aware that he hired a man with these views to communicate for him.

I read the National Post for years–I know the work of Rex Murphy, Blatchford, the Kays, Conrad Black, Robyn Urback, Lorne Gunter, and the rest. I used to see the Sun’s Sue Ann Levy at city hall when I wrote about that circus, and ran into Tarek Fatah in an elevator in Film City. I read (hate-read) Wente at the Globe.

I can’t read Ezra Levant on Twitter because he blocked me, but I’ve seen this former National Post editor’s Rebel segments and read enough of his writing, from his early days at Maclean’s. I read Barbara Amiel, Conrad Black’s wife and the former wife of George Jonas, a small-C conservative voice I read fondly in the National Post for years.

I worked for Zee Media, basically India’s Fox News. Sudhir Chaudhary was my editor in chief (I was on Web and he was TV, and mostly does Hindi news, but still, I sat in story meetings and am acquainted with his thought). I have read/watched enough Jordan Petersen and have talked with him before.

I had to read US Conservative media in the summer of 2016 when researching for a TV show I was writing about Trump. I don’t read it all the time now because it’s exhausting and time-consuming, but I know the work of Ben Shapiro, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Bari Weiss at the NYT, Sam Harris. I used to read Krauthammer, and still read former Bush speech writer David Frum.

I was in the belly of the beast of India’s Conservative news machine. When demonetization was announced, we got an order not to write anything critical about it.

The BJP announced Demonetization on literally on the night of the US election, and like everyone I was consumed by Trump news. While I had reservations about demonetization right away I thought my fellow Indians on the desk were better suited to pronounce on it than me. Maybe this is me rationalizing a moment where I should have quit on principle, out of disgust for the flagrant conflict of interest–the owner of my station is an independent member from Haryana of the BJP, the ruling national party.

But the point is, I’ve seen first-hand how money influences/determines coverage of economic policies. Even without telling this story, my station ran a disgraceful commercial that promoted not WION, but the government policy! Imagine CBC running a commercial promoting Trudeau–that’s what my station did.

When people claim that Postmedia is affiliated with the conservative party here in Canada, it means they informally do what in India is done formally. It’s not an accident that Tarek Fatah writes for the Sun here and appears on Zee TV.

What become undeniably clear to me during my time in journalism is the extent to which economic reports are deliberately and shockingly cooked, both by ostensibly neutral economic institutions like the IMF and by journalists covering the industry.

I had a good talk with John Perkins, the author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, who for 10 years negotiated in backrooms with the leaders of Central American countries, unofficially but decidedly on behalf of American business interests. Perkins was recruited by the NSA, and his book outlines the basic process:

  1. Corruption: Offer leaders money and perks if they give major contracts to American businesses
  2. Propaganda: Tell the leaders, we will cook the books/stats so that your citizens believe (wrongly) you will benefit the country.
  3. Threaten: Cooperate, otherwise, see examples where national leaders were removed by coup, to be replaced by cooperative leaders.
  4. Threaten more: Cooperate, because if you don’t play ball and a coup doesn’t work, the US will simply assassinate you or take power by force

People in Toronto seem to have no awareness that Free Market ideology is an ideology. It’s assumed that the current stage of consumerism/capitalism arises here naturally, like lakes do, that the Free Market’s global success is do to its innately superior properties, and not to external pressure applied by wealthy people.

They think the Market is a non-human entity, an omniscient force that somehow distributes the right money and jobs to the right people based on a complex but merit-based algorithm. That it somehow weighs people’s personality, skills, responsibilities, and other criteria and allots to them the salary they deserve.

I believed something like this. But it’s total horseshit. Of course the control of money has human fingerprints all over it. It’s incredibly naive to believe that ultra rich people simply entrust their fortunes to fate.

Really, they acquire and guard it ferociously–there are entire industries that exist so that people with immense wealth can use either legal, quasi-legal or illegal means to shelter their fortunes from tax authorities in offshore accounts. Money buys politicians or media influence. People know this–every pseudo-sophisticated political observation is based on the wonderful quip “An honest politician is one who when he’s bought, stays bought.” But I suspect most people downplay how much this of a role this plays in politics.

I had a fascinating conversation with a longtime Canadian journalist who mentored me, who said that the Globe and Mail is basically a money-losing entity that only exists so the owners can frame the national discussion. Obviously they’d rather make money than lose it, but even if it bleeds money, it’s a very worthwhile investment, and anyway it’s only a small part of the owner’s portfolio. The Globe’s target audience, according to internal documents from the Globe, is people who make over $100,000 annually.

The Sun and National Post–2 of 4 of Canada’s major daily newspapers–are the Conservative Party’s low brow and high brow blogs, respectively. But even the Globe is not there to expose white collar crime or anything that seriously undermines how the Free Market.

These newspapers work on the assumption that the grotesque and ever-growing income inequality is by definition justified because the market dictates it, and to interfere with the market is akin to sticking a wrench in Nature.

While social conservatism is often berated in public and in media, when it comes to money journalism in Canada and really everywhere has a right wing bias. Look at a newspaper: there are entire sections devoted to Cars/Driving, Travel, Movies, Sports, and now Cannabis–these papers will neglect some life-and-death issues (jailing, housing crises, police brutality) while reporting on subjects that might be interesting but are only only important because money is concentrated there.

These are complicated topics, oversimplified here for my purposes. It’s impossible to talk fully about the Market and how money works without talking about race and gender, and that’s also beyond the scope of this little article.

I have an acute sense that my FB friends despise my political posts (I do too! I swear, politics is miserable and depressing). But my views are in the minority in the broader community, too: Toronto elected Tory and Ontario elected Doug Fucking Ford.

So, if my views are unpopular, doesn’t that suggest my views were arrived at despite the echo chamber?

Isn’t it possible that the people and media institutions with long histories of promoting the status quo are the creators of the echo chamber?

There’s a concept called “Vertical Integration” coined by an old sociology professor of mine. The idea is this: If a theory is incompatible with other types of accepted explanations of the world, it is likely bogus–it’s not enough that the Bible says that the Bible is true, because it’s contradicted by so many interdependent branches of science. This is begging the question 101. The more a theory tallies with different kinds of thought, the more buttressed it is and the more likely it is to be true.

The Bible is a self-contained echo chamber. I put it that conservative politics is drifting further and further into the same kind of realm.

Trump calls any credible media report that doesn’t flatter him “Fake News”, and a hostile country flooded social media with fake accounts (“bots”) that pathologically promote Trump, who has created an entirely alternate reality for his followers to believe in because his views are so incompatible with the actual world: Isn’t it possible that *this* is the echo chamber?

The left is frequently entreated to watch 4 hours of Jordan Petersen videos to see that his latest misogynist quote was deliberately misquoted to smear him. I’d like to ask those on the right to do a type of mental back flip, a very hard thing to do and no small ask, but really, ask yourself: “am I the one in the echo chamber?”

PS: I am happy to discuss any of these broad topics with more nuanced with anybody, privately or in the comments or whatever. I do think it’s important to be approachable: Sometimes my writing comes off snarky because the truth is I can be a little shit, but I do get bored talking to basic liberals and find these and other conversations very fascinating.

To my conservative friends…

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by jdhalperin in Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

conservatives, doug ford, Jeff Halperin, Racist, Rob Ford, White supremacy

Many conservative voters object to overt, extreme forms of racism, then have a hard time reconciling how leftists can accuse them of being racist. They don’t feel racist. They get defensive and accuse the liberal in turn of being over-sensitive, or using “racist” as a smear to dismiss without cause anyone they disagree with. Everyone and everything is racist, these days.

I posted an article to Facebook shortly before the 2018 Ontario election about a white supremacist podcaster hoping Doug Ford would win. There was nothing contentious or up for dispute in the article: the white supremacist was a self-declared white supremacist, cheering on Doug Ford because, in his opinion, Ford was the only candidate who would implement white supremacy.

“Ronny Cameron, a white nationalist blogger who has recently published several pro-Ford posts, suggested that when Ford declared ‘we gotta take of our own before we take care of anybody else,’ every single white nationalist said to themselves: ‘we know what you’re sayin’, Dougie.’”

I didn’t sabotage Ford’s character by connecting him to something odious where there was no real connection. I would never do that. Rather, I sabotaged his character by highlighting a very real connection he has to something odious.

Here is how I introduced the article on FB on June 3: “self-declared white supremacists have a crystal clear favourite in this upcoming Ontario election and if your vote aligns with theirs, have a talk with yourself.

Don’t let trumpism rat fuckery come here, for the love of all that’s holy.”

I said nothing inaccurate, or even contentious. An interesting thing happened next though.

A Conservative insider who worked for Doug Ford’s provincial campaign and once wrote speeches for Stephen Harper, commented: “I’m voting for Ford. Are you calling me racist?”

The conservative’s must have a PR handbook for deflecting attention away from conservative racism. Such a handbook could read, “when a liberal draws attention to our racism, respond with attack by implying that the accusation itself is a grave insult—but, and this is key, never address the actual racism they were correct to highlight, it’s bad branding. Make racism about you, not them.”

A motto for conservatives could be, “Are you the victim of racism, ie did someone call you ‘racist’? Vote conservative!” Conservatives love it when liberals accuse them of racism. They feed off anger, it unites them. That people called “racist” are currently drawn to one party, well, what does that say?

Conservatives, I say to you: racism isn’t a feeling. Whether a person feels racist only matters to that person, but racism happens (at least one form…) when non-white communities receive second- or third-class treatment.

There are reasons a person may vote for Ford that have nothing to do with race, but none of them change the fact that a vote for Ford is a vote for a certified racist.

Ford was elected premier only a couple months ago, and here is a partial list of what he has already done so far:

–Ford cancelled a promised $500,000 grant for at-risk youth to receive musical instruments and instruction.

–Ford pledged to increase police presence in at-risk neighbourhoods, bringing back the cancelled TAVIS, against the wishes of community leaders and experts

–Ford wants to bring back “carding,” a practice the Liberals cancelled because it stigmatizes and hassles racialized people and has absolutely no proven benefit in fighting crime. (Police have been asked repeatedly to provide proof carding helps them fight crime, and have never provided any.) It’s also unclear how the personal data on private and innocent citizens, dubiously acquired by police, is stored and used.

–After a shooting near Jane and Finch, Ford was pictured with three local residents and the anti-racism minister, Michael Tibollo, who wore a bullet proof vest and described the area as, essentially, a war zone. (In contrast, after the Danforth mass shooting local politicians were (correctly!) destigmatizing the Danforth, promoting it as safe family-oriented place, and encouraging Toronto residents to visit, mourn and patronize businesses. While a police spokesperson said Tibollo’s bulletproof vest was given “to err on the side of caution”…it is impossible to imagine this photo op happening in a white neighbourhood. Note, Ford didn’t wear a bullet proof vest.)

If you examine the quotes and gestures in isolation and one at a time it may appear like simple nitpicking from oversensitive libtards keen for another hammer to attack Conservatives with. But if you connect the words and images with where and how Conservatives are choosing to spend money, a picture emerges. Is it really a coincidence that Ford and his people say allegedly racist things, then do in fact de-fund these communities and send in more weaponized police with pre-emptive permission to hassle residents? It’s only been two months.

If Ford and Tibollo and other Conservative politicians merely said but did not do racist things, it’d be less of an actual problem. But make no mistake, the words are followed up with action. People said trump was just all talk, that his racism was for ratings. No, no, no. The Conservatives will harm at-risk communities in real and tangible ways. Lives will be damaged. People may even die in ways that don’t immediately appear directly linked to Ford’s cuts and policy, but are.

Not to be too dramatic, but it’s true. The point isn’t that Doug Ford (or other Conservatives labeled “racist”) is a cartoon embodiment of a racist: I doubt he is restraining an urge to wear KKK sheets or lynch minorities. Racism can be very damaging when it’s more subtle. It often takes the form of white men in suits making policies which favour white communities at the expense of non-white communities. It’s economics. Whether the cancelled investment in Jane/Finch was driven by active hate or “taking care of our own before we take care of anyone else,” it’s racist. It is a distinction without a difference.

I know people who grew up on Talib, Tribe and De La, who today oppose their politics. Conscious hip hoppers were always social justice warriors. The Right Wing Culture War machine would have you believe that SJWs are “virtue signaling” about minorities to be retweeted, or sticking up for women’s rights merely as a tactic to fuck them. They disparage the alleged motive, and do not address the argument itself. Trump and his people like to paint critics as just humourless PC babies…sure, like Eminem and Borat.

I’m sure there are many good and conscientious wealthy Conservative voters who would be appalled if they saw what their vote contributed to up close. But they won’t see this. They may see lower taxes, but never what paid for the reduction, so they’ll never really come to understand the harm Conservatives inflict.

They don’t live in these communities, and have no contact with the people there whatsoever. Like me, they don’t go to Jane and Finch. I “taught” at Emery for one brief and disastrous month. But I grew up in Forest Hill. The closest people there get to Jane/Finch is Oakdale Country Club. To get a sense of how sheltered conservative thinking can be, consider that Federal Conservatives are pitching the idea that the people in crisis in the “Refugee Crisis” are the people safe in their homes inside Canada, not the stateless and traumatized refugees fleeing war and death. I doubt Conservatives actively want to harm non-white communities, they’re just indifferent to them, and this leads to harm. In any case, malice in the motive isn’t required for harm to occur.

In 2010 Rob Ford cancelled the planned LRT that was going to finally connect Jane and Finch with the rest of the city via rapid transit. Doug will continue making cuts, there and elsewhere. I didn’t feel racist when I voted for Rob Ford, but eight years later I still wrestle with the fact that before I was politically formed, I voted for an international disgrace in a mere municipal election.

I felt and feel extremely stupid and ashamed of this. There’s more I can say, but my feelings then and even now are irrelevant. I didn’t feel racist, but I voted for one. Today, my conservative friends, your feelings do not matter. What happens in the world does.

 

Addendum:

I’d like to describe briefly how and why I have come to believe what I do, because the general public probably has a Right Wing Media conception of “social justice warrior,” so people may read things I wrote above through that lens.

Like all smart-ass young writers I was enthusiastic to reject all teams and labels, etc. I still do, but with less of a hard edge, and some laughter. People will call me a leftist, and my views tend to fall that way, but I’m not associated with any organization, I don’t get paid to express certain views, I don’t represent any group—it’s just how I feel is all, and underlying it is:

The god of organized religion doesn’t exist; we’re all going to die one day and there’s no purpose to any of this shit apart from what we make of it; race is a social construct that is in one sense completely arbitrary and made up, but try saying race doesn’t exist, or that oblivious phrase “I don’t see race,” to the descendants of slaves.

The individual’s ability to love people and things and produce fascinating, sublime, beautiful works of art is what’s truly worth the reverence religion receives.

I hear things from conservatives like, “I support equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome,” which is a naïve but surface-smart sounding way of saying, effectively, “It’s OK if generations suffer harmful yet predictable outcomes in life based on their race, gender and class, so long as these social evils are arrived at naturally, not by state coercion.”

You’ll notice, conservatives often criticize “SJWs” for allegedly having some filthy ulterior motive, but they never consider the possibility that, actually, things like fiscal conservatism, often described in lofty universal philosophical terms, nearly always results in whatever benefits that person’s self interest the most.

The theorists who reduce humans to animals are half right—we are animals, obvs, but they often take it one step further, saying we ought to continue our existence in the jungle conditions of other animals. No! The whole point of civilization is to use our intelligence to impose and shape order on our natural impulses for the betterment of society. The notion that it’s wrong to correct for our inherent flaws, such as our innate tendency to break into tribes and then war against neighbouring tribes, opposes the very idea of civilization influencing our civilization.

“Equality of opportunity” is a super important thing to have enshrined in law, and can’t be taken for granted. We need it, it must be celebrated. But we know that in practice things like generational wealth, gender and race undermines the living shit out of “equality of opportunity.” The people dealt the best hand say, “sorry, such are the cards!” And the people dealt the bad hand say, “this isn’t a fucking game, this is life.”

I understand that the ancient Greeks distinguished between two kinds of knowledge. First is understanding a concept abstractly, then there’s first-hand knowledge from experience. You know someone must feel extremely sad when somebody they love dies, but you don’t know the feeling until your loved one is dead. There’s knowing and there’s knowing. 

There’s a kind of argument I see a lot of online that’s so pedantic and theoretical and unconcerned in how life actually is–it’s based on this first kind of knowledge only. I’ll never know what it’s like to grow up poor, black, female, Native. I just won’t. No social discourse can be complete without this second kind of knowledge. Various people must give input, or life is only described in two dimensions, not three, and the world is three dimensional.

It’s in this sense that I’ve learned a lot from listening to people from a wide range of backgrounds, from reading and traveling, but really from listening to people. You don’t know what you don’t know. I’ve been humbled, I‘m more convinced I don’t know a fucking thing on this earth, that the more confident someone sounds the more likely they’re faking it, they’re simply wrong or paid to lie.

So, anyway, to my conservative friends: Zuckerberg and co benefit from people freaking out. The internet is murder. Unwind, unplug. Give it all a think. Listen to different kinds of people. I’m the same pretty chilled dude I always was, but I will definitely write some more angry shit on my facebook about trump, ford or whatever right wing shitlord you voted for. They’re disgusting, and I reserve that right. If you disagree with something I write, feel free to respond in the comment section. I’ll be nice! It’s good to have a group airing. Or DM me. This will avoid that performative urge to appear better informed or too pithy that sometimes comes when private chats are conducted in public. You won’t be piled on or dragged by my ruthless FB friends, either.

Love,

J

Uninspired: thoughts about TO’s mayoral race

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by jdhalperin in Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

doug ford, john tory, olivia chow, smarttrack, toronto mayoral race 2014

October 27, election night, is under two weeks away. So, some thoughts:

After dealing with that barbaric pig of a mayor it was distressing that the bar for political discourse was so low, barely a shade above Fordian levels. This is as profoundly unsurprising as it is pathetic. If there was widespread apathy about municipal politics before Ford, there was a mild hope that not only would political engagement increase, but the level of conversation would become more sophisticated given the new prominence of local politics in newspapers and in general chatter. To put it lightly, John Tory has made sure this hasn’t happened.

His campaign assumed the population at large was ignorant and unwilling to look at anything beyond a headline, and it appears this estimation was correct. Tory’s paltry arguments wouldn’t stand up in a real debate against a single person who knew what they were talking about, but when he’s up against Olivia Chow in a mayoral “debate” he uses a cocky dismissive tone and repeats trite/winning slogans, burying data and, that thing he and other Conservatives feel they have a patent on, common sense.

It’s ironic what a hypocrite he and the business community are on the transit file and on taxes in general: they generally accuse the left of being platitudinous, but actually it’s Tory who is running on repeating fancy sentences and no data, and who plans on squandering billions of dollars in unaccounted for money on transit that doesn’t meet the stated objectives experts say are needed (doesn’t relieve existing transit lines, or provide areas that need transit the most–Malvern, Jane and Finch, Rexdale– with transit).

If Olivia Chow had Tory’s ideas, the right would correctly lambaste her for being the archetypal lefty, not just a tax-and-spend, but a tax-and-spend concealing intent. Who in the business community believes something can be purchased without money? Or that there’s no important distinction between capital and operating budgets because “money is money.” Tory unrepentantly says this! If a woman uttered these ridiculous things she’d be publicly humiliated, but Tory still has credibility in people’s eyes. They don’t hear or weigh what he’s saying, they just see a tall old white man with decent hair, and a mellifluous radio voice. But he’s a total and utter fraud, as pandering and pathetically empty as they come. Ford with bourgeois decorum. This makes him less uncouth but no better, and more dangerous. His ideas and agenda are the same, and anyone who can’t see this is naïve, not paying attention, or unwilling.

I do sympathize with the person who wants to believe Tory is acceptable. Many perceive Chow through a nightmare lens, as if when she becomes mayor everyone must instantly forfeit the password to their online banking, so she can conveniently pocket your money when she is running low, or feels like it. It is as if the substance of the candidate’s platforms have no existence, only the perception of these people influences people’s vote.

In case you think substance does matter, her transit plan corresponds more with what experts recommend, the funding plan is comparably reasonable and secure. Never mind that she actually has experience pertaining to the job, time in Toronto and Ottawa. Tory has never won an election. He’s a seasoned loser.

But the average voter in Toronto isn’t sophisticated politically whatsoever. This is reasonable, maybe even commendable. While a knowledgeable and engaged body of citizens is essential to a functional democracy, politics is a sordid depressing world that doesn’t really reward the time spent thinking and talking about it. But people hear “taxes” and their mind is made up. Tory seems to view forming a platform as a meaningless task. Can you say he’s wrong, when people do only vote based on whose ad is better? That’s why Tory avoids calling his phantom dollars a tax or debt. Chow says the city needs money if it wants to make purchases, an undeniable truth the other candidates devote their platforms to denying.

I have never been in the Chow camp, and if my new hatred for Tory is seen as an endorsement for her, take that for what it is, an endorsement by default. I was a Soknacki supporter, and I miss David dearly, and hope he is on a well-deserved tropical vacation away from this squalid city that stupidly didn’t embrace him. I wish Toronto well, I have a profound love this my home city, but I also hope it goes down the toilet, only so Soknacki can feel validated. He deserves the I-Told-You-So.

From the outset I was neutral, maybe even hopeful, about Tory, but am surprised what a pure charlatan and simpleton he has proved himself to be. It’s not just bad for the city, though it is that, but his brazen duplicity is highly offensive to me personally. I hate it and I hate him. The sight of him makes my stomach sick. Do I need to write here about why his transit “plan” is a scam? No, it’s been written about over and over and over again, and if you haven’t read it it’s because of your apathy.

(Fine, a brief word: by definition Tory isn’t proposing “rapid transit,” the trains come every fifteen minutes. He touts the 22 stations, as if their location is irrelevant, but it doesn’t go where planners say transit is needed. One is in fucking Ajax, outside his purview. It’s hugely expensive, his estimate is $8-billion, $2.7-billion for the city, but no politician cites the actual cost and it’ll surely grow by billions, and that depends on getting funding from other levels of government which they have explicitly stated we can’t depend on. He said tunneling was unnecessary, then it was pointed out that he’d have to, and he agreed, and it costs $300-million a kilometer. His faults are truly this stupid on the surface, that’s why people with any loyalty to Toronto and intelligence have been lining up to blast him.)

I have just enough respect for Tory to debunk him, a courtesy I won’t extend to Doug, who of course is a fraudulent boor and a disgusting man by every meausre.

PS: in case any reader thinks I’m overstating things, I dare you: look at the three paltry pages of text Tory devotes to describing SmartTrack [sic], the centrepiece of his “platform,” and tell me I’m wrong.

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