Chagal4's Blog

O.K. I’m not anti-poverty, I’m anti-wealth. Saying it up front like that should give you the chance to stop reading now. I don’t know if I was always anti-wealth…it was radical chic to be “anti -poverty” for decades or at least to say that you were. But see, the thing is that in spite of almost every-one I knew and loved being anti-poverty and millions more besides…the levels of poverty never seemed to get any less. With all of these people being opposed to poverty you’d think that over time there would be, should be, less. Yet everywhere I look there seems to be more…and it appears to be worse. Now, it’s possible that I just wasn’t looking closely enough before…Maybe it’s always been about the same or even more…before. Maybe because media have expanded so much in the past two or three decades I’m just seeing more of what was already there. And I can’t deny that some places in the world where great poverty was endemic now appear to have improved significantly. But then there are places like Flint, Michigan, Sheffield in England, the great American rust belt, and there are rumours starting about a new dust bowl somewhere in the mid-west. These are places that once enjoyed prosperity only to have it snatched away by caprice…like a fresh baked pie off granny’s window sill. And there are whole countries in Africa that are redefining misery.

You’d have to be blind not to know that the gap between the obscenely wealthy and the too-damned-poor has grown outrageously. And yet like slum dog millionaires we are still seduced by the possibility that in a society that produces fabulous wealth, a poor wage slave with a bright idea can hoist his tired body out of poverty purgatory and cruise the mean streets in his very own Maybach…and it happens …just ask any rap music mogul. I was amazed to discover that there were poor people in the United States opposed to a public health care system…because it was going to cost more taxes, I suppose. It is to be presumed that most of these people don’t expect to be sick. And of course the wealthy don’t need a public health care system and wouldn’t participate if there was one…so who does that leave? Sick people with no money…or sick people from the middle class who will soon have no money if they get seriously sick. It’s a bitch to have to mortgage your house for heart surgery and get out of the hospital and have nowhere to live. Never-mind…you’re still alive….if you hadn’t had a house to sell…you could be dead. It’s the dawning thought of this reality that is striking people who look at Wall Street and say…”O.K. that’s enough” I look at the people who “occupy” and think…jesus …they’re so polite.

So what’s happening here? Well, the biggest baby boom generation in history has reached the edge of old age and they realize that the chances of winning the opportunity lottery and leaping the poverty/prosperity gap into the big home in Malibu are damn near nil. Having believed and supported the wealth system all their lives with that vague hope that they or their off spring could join the monied class…they’ll be lucky to drive that five year old Chevvy toward the sunset (and with the price of gas…)not all the way. Yet these people are light years removed from the people who are truly poor in the world. Personally I think the global poor  never really knew just how poor they were until the modern age of high technology. Oh, they knew they were poor…but just HOW poor is hard to know unless you have some comparison. If you’re only looking down the street…or at the next village…well, some are a little better off…most are about the same. But if you can get access to computers, to cell phones, to the internet, six month old magazines…then you can look at a much bigger world for comparison…on a full time basis. That “full time basis” is important because it means that you can always know how abysmal you are and also where the money went. And when people got to see what Wall Street and the big banks around the world did with the money and the collusion that governments fell into with the bankers…it was like watching the future curl at the edges and go up in smoke.

We have always been the victims of propaganda and our own self delusions. Big business in the developed world has argued, still argues, that they are the spinners of productivity, prosperity, jobs,wealth etc. and that they therefore deserve special status. Tax incentives, freedom from “excessive” regulation, no scrutiny of compensation packages, protection from whiners and whistleblowers, government assistance to invade other countries, to enforce and impose tariff protections, favourable loan structures, access to intelligence. And if…especially if, the general public might object…government should assist in keeping them uninformed and quiet. Back in the day…”big sugar” and “big fruit” even got their governments to invade foreign countries that didn’t want to play ball. How ironic that now some of the best baseball players come from those countries.  What about here and now? Well,I think that the “occupiers” are right. The bullshit about “too big to fail” and “the engines of prosperity” wont sell any more. Yes, business and corporations have created jobs and prosperity. Yes, without them we’d probably be rubbing sticks together for heat. Yes, there are businesses that behave ethically, share the wealth…relate to their communities, listen to the music. Maybe they are the majority. I’d like to think so, but if so it looks more and more like a slim majority because the gap between the rich and poor is growing so fast and the tiny percentage at the top are accumulating so much that they might as well be on another planet.

Business and corporations in the name of progress have all but but wiped out family farms. They  had to, according to them, because the family farms had become too inefficient to feed our populations…but agri-corps can do it and make enough profit to grow huge crops in foreign countries, export the product to more profitable markets and watch the local people starve. Ethical? Corporations call North American workers unproductive and move their factories off shore…where the pay rates are ten percent of North American rates…and then sell their products back to north Americans . The oil companies punch a hole in the Gulf of Mexico and two years later the president of the U.S. gives them back their toys and says “play nice this time”. Think he had a choice?  The oil companies want a pipeline from Canada to the Texas refineries. Did the Canadian government ask Canadians if they thought this was a good idea? Did you know that Canada is one the world’s biggest oil producers and yet we pay more for our gas than Americans do?  Corporations have essentially taken tax breaks…(as good as revenue to the accountants) and used the money to lobby government for grants, subsidies and incentives to move profit centres off shore where even less tax is charged. In effect, many corporations have become nation states whose “citizens” are shareholders, whose governments are board members, whose presidents and vice-presidents are managers and whose budgets are often greater than the national treasuries of small countries. To imagine that these “nations” are not political is delusional. They don’t need diplomatic status at the United Nations, they have lobbyists and they can and do buy and install politicians to do their bidding. They have the best educated strategists and legal experts, they plan ahead, they are global. The question is…if they’re so fucking good at what they do, why are we in the mess we’re in….and why is the poverty gap growing so fast? And the answer is ridiculous. It’s because they’re so fucking good at what they do. And what they’re so good at is amassing wealth and power for their “citizens” at the expense of the rest of us who have absolutely no real access to that process. And the terrible dilemma we face is that there are actually good and ethical and moral people in these corporations and they don’t have the faintest idea of how to stop this process. Recently we’ve seen billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and others having some kind of epiphany…turning out their bank accounts to “give something back”. Good? Yes the money will do some good things, maybe great things…Fundamentally good? No. It’s frightening. It means that these billionaires at the top of the corporate world have no idea how to keep the machine they created, or built, or inherited, from pouring more and more wealth into their pockets and those of their “citizens” and the only way they can compensate is to reach out to the greater society with their own purse. Does this redistribute wealth or reduce the poverty gap? Not even close.

Stay tuned…I need to think some more about this..So should you.

A trial opened here the other day for three people charged with murdering four other people. If you only read or heard that much…you might think this was a biker gang shoot out  or a bad Saturday night in China-town. You could reasonably conclude that drugs or money were involved. You’d be wrong. On trial were a husband, a wife (the second) and a son. The victims were three daughters of this family and the first wife…who may or may not have had the momentary joy of divorce. If there is a heaven for those who have been so violated…she may have the eternal joy of never seeing this family again. This was a so-called “honour killing” although one could be forgiven for seeing it as an “honour slaughter”. The women were found in a car submerged in a lock on the Rideau Canal near Kingston, drowned. It happened during the night. According to the father/husband they were asleep at a motel…the women in a separate room…and as far as he knew the former wife decided at 2:00 A.M. to have driving lesson …so she “took” the keys to one of two vehicles and  loaded up the three teenaged daughters and eventually drove them all into the lock . End of story? Not quite. Somebody witnessed a second vehicle driving away at speed… It was an S.U.V. and it appeared to have pushed the other car into the lock. Of course the witness didn’t appear until later. Meanwhile no one…not even the cops could imagine that this was anything but a tragic accident…although it would have taken some seriously tricky driving skills for  a beginner to run into the canal at precisely this spot in the middle of the night in a strange town. Pity they didn’t look at the front end of daddy’s S.U.V.

O.K. so the not very apparently bereaved family heads off home to Montreal and the polis proceed to investigate. A surprising and alarming number of small ahahs appear in the situation. The rear bumper of the car in the canal is dented…at least three of the victims (the daughters) appeared to have made no attempt to escape from the submerged car although there was one window through which they might have. So, were they dozing off at the time or drugged? The former wife seemed to have been moving after the car sank. Back in Montreal the good son smacks the S.U.V. into a post and heads off to the body shop for explainable repairs to the front end. Everything goes quiet around the miserable household and the mystery in Kingston begins to grind its gears toward the unthinkable conclusion. Questioning of the family reveals a few details.

The family had gone to Niagara Falls to celebrate the nuptials of one of the late daughters, hmmm, minus the daughter’s husband or husband to be or husband recently annulled (these things suffer from translation don’t they?)…They decided they didn’t like the place so they left Niagara Falls for the long drive back to Montreal in two vehicles…the car and the S.U.V. .  Dad was driving the S.U.V. and the good son was driving the car…not clear how the passengers were distributed through the vehicles. They got tired of driving and stopped beside the highway to talk it over…the son was dispatched to find a motel. They were right beside Kingston. So far so good. They check in. The next morning they find the girls and the former wife missing with the car. Oh dear! When the Polis got around to sharing the bad news…the words “canal? what canal?” glowed unconvincingly in dull grey neon across the foreheads of father and son. Mom’s mind was visiting outer space one presumably and no neon appeared on her forehead. At this point the input from the surviving family members got extremely limited and no amount of translation from native tongue would help. Eventually interviews of other family members…neighbours, friends of the dead girls began to surface. The family was relatively well off, The father had bought a small strip mall in Montreal for $2 million. This greatly facilitated and fast tracked his immigration. It was a strict home…father was very upset about the daughters transition to loose north american culture. One dared to marry without dad’s blessing…rage was called in to sort things out. The former wife was part of the household although it’s not clear what part exactly…Dad thought she was encouraging the daughters to bring shame upon his noble head. Rage left town and something cold and dark arrived.

What was once unthinkable back in Kingston was suddenly very thinkable….and once thought there was only one ultimate conclusion. From that moment…a trial was merely a formality whose purpose was to decide whether all three of the remaining family were in on it. For the legally minded the question is whether the prosecution can prove who did what…and how. For most people on the street that question is trivial.

It isn’t amazing at all that our minds have learned to leap beyond the hideous details of this case to assume that this was an honour killing. Forty or fifty years ago…maybe even thirty years ago virtually no one in North America would recognize the term or what it meant. Now we’ve been exposed to a culture clash that makes the term all too recognizeable. This isn’t the first case to happen in Canada and it won’t be the last. It is by far the worst and it’s likely to remain the worst. In the court of public opinion the family and by extension their culture have already been convicted. One of the dismal consequences of this business is the fact that people are condemning the culture; are less tolerant of people who come from other cultures.

Our culture has lost its frame of reference for this outrage but it wasn’t so very long ago that families here in North America were ostracizing daughters who got pregnant out of wed-lock…who went off with the “wrong” boy. We saw young men disinherited for “bringing shame to the family name”. Along with these things there were young women locked up by their families, brutalities and beatings, forced abortions and a whole slew of greater and lesser evils. Is it possible a hundred a fifty years ago our culture had “honour killings”?  Sure it is. Our culture was still lynching people less than fifty years ago.

Knowing any or all of that does nothing to make what happened in Kingston anything less than monstrous and a ghastly perversion of any notion of humanity. I don’t know what sort of justice will emerge from this trial…maybe none. but if there is any justice at all it should include an unmistakable message to any who are here, who come from here or who come from elsewhere that women are not chattel…that there is no honour in this…that this behaviour goes so far beyond dishonour that it needs to be extirpated from all societies like the cancer it is.