Taxpayer vs Citizen | Responding to Right Wing Propaganda

May 28, 2019#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Canada, Decision Canada 2019, News, Politics, Thought for the DayRaymond Tomlin

Taxes

The suffering hero of our times is, we are told, the tormented taxpayer.

Conservative politicians mount campaigns to protect the taxpayer, editorial writers evaluate politicians and their policies on whether they will increase or decrease the “burden” to taxpayers, and some self-described taxpayers have formed faux, corporate-funded organizations to plead their cause & lament their plight. Thus, you have the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Nobel prize winning author Toni Morrison, in her New York apartment. Photo | Tim Knox

At a speaking engagement, a few years back, at a New Yorker festival, Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University, Toni Morrison, offered insightful commentary on topics about race, gender, writing, and other issues. One particular observation made by Ms. Morrison was quite memorable …

The complexity of the so-called individual that’s been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the ‘me’. When I was a young girl we were called citizens — American citizens. We were second-class citizens, but that was the word. In the 50s and 60s they started calling us consumers. So we did — consume. Now they don’t use those words any more — it’s the American taxpayer, and those are different attitudes.

The phrase “taxpayer’s money” is almost always propaganda — that must be rejected and resisted by all of us who support progressive politics.A better phrase is “public money”.

So, why do so few in the news media, if any at all in these times of corporate-owned media, refuse to use the term public money, replacing it instead with the far from benign word taxpayer?

Public money is the property of the entire public, not of taxpayers.

Taxes are a way to pool our resources and develop common infrastructure that can have a positive impact on us all. They build our roads and bridges, pay for our police and firefighters, our system of justice, offer support for raising children and contribute to reducing child poverty, provide income security and housing for people who are in need, contribute to foreign aid, and help to ensure our environment is clean and safe. All of these things are much cheaper and effective when we pay for them collectively.

The taxes paid by previous generations benefits us today, and the taxes we pay hopefully act to benefit the generations of tomorrow.

David Brooks. Toronto-born American centre-right, self-described “moderate centrist” political pundit and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times

In 2016, New York Times columnist and PBS political commentator David Brooks wrote about the difference between taxpayers and citizens …

You can be a taxpayer or you can be a citizen. If you’re a taxpayer your role in the country is defined by your economic and legal status. Your primary identity is individual. You’re perfectly within your rights to do everything you legally can to look after your self-interest.The problem with the taxpayer mentality is that you end up serving your individual interest short term but soiling the nest you need to be happy in over the long term.

A healthy nation isn’t just an atomized mass of individual economic and legal units. A nation is a web of giving and getting. You give to your job, and your employer gives to you. You give to your neighbourhood, and your neighbourhood gives to you. You give to your government, and your government gives to you.

If you orient everything around individual self-interest, you end up ripping the web of giving and receiving. Neighbours can’t trust neighbours. Individuals can’t trust their institutions, and they certainly can’t trust their government. Everything that is not explicitly prohibited is permissible. Everybody winds up suspicious and defensive and competitive. You wind up alone at 3 a.m. miserably tweeting out at your enemies.

And this is exactly the atomized mentality that is corroding North America.

Years ago, David Foster Wallace put it more gently …

“It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We’ve changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries — we’re actually conscious of our rights as citizens and our nation’s responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie.”

This is where the Canadian Taxpayers Federation comes in, a shady, secretly-funded (who are, in fact, funded by right wing elements within Canada’s corporate culture), unrepresentative organization that sells itself as a populist “citizens advocacy group” looking to cut waste and ensure accountability in government, when such couldn’t be further from the truth.

Larry Haiven, a professor in the faculty of management at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, says most of CTF’s stances on issues — and particularly their relentless calls to lower taxes — are …

“the most simplistic garbage. It assumes that nothing that is purchased with our taxes is of any use for us. Despite CTF’s anti-tax, spending-is-out-of-control rhetoric, taxes are lower now than they’ve been in decades, leaving governments struggling to provide essential services.

Provinces and the federal government have been cutting taxes frenetically, frantically, for the past 25 years. Governments across Canada are taking in about $250 billion less than they did 15 years ago. You have to weigh that against everything the Taxpayers Federation says.”

Yet night in, night out the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is given a platform on the corporate-owned and operated evening news, with folks on Shaw-owned Global TV, anchors like Chris Gailus and Sophie Liu, and Bell Media CTV Vancouver hosts Scott Roberts and Mi-Jung Lee fulfilling their supplicant role as handmaidens to their corporate bosses & not on our side.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation media presence is truly remarkable when you consider it has a membership of five people.

You read that correctly: five.

Writes Dougald Lamont for CBC News Manitoba …

This might come as a surprise, but the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is not now, nor has it ever been, a grassroots, member-based organization where anyone can pay $10 to sign up (or sign up free) and have a say in how the organization is run.

Instead, it has supporters — about 90,000 of them, who, like followers on Facebook, can like, comment, answer surveys and make donations, but they have no actual say in how the organization is run.

While the CTF’s mandate is to hold elected officials to account, who holds the CTF’s five members to account? Each other. Who decides who else can become a member? They do. It should be no surprise that the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has, as a result, faced accusations of being an Astroturf organization — a fake grassroots organization.

Writing in The Tyee, journalist David J. Climenhaga says the following …

Right-wing billionaires Charles and David Koch are among the funders of the international Atlas Network, a Canadian Taxpayers Federation partner. Photo credit: DonkeyHotey.

“The Canadian Taxpayers Federation,” writes Climenhaga, “a self-described non-partisan tax watchdog and taxpayer advocacy group once headed by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, has always been tight-lipped about the sources of its own funding and support. This may be mildly ironic, given its vocal demands for transparency in government policy.”

Since the 1980’s and the rise of the Koch brothers in the U.S. and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation in Canada, there has been a deliberate effort to reframe citizens as “taxpayers” and public spending as “taxpayers’ money,” as if taxpayers are shareholders. CBC’s Dougald Lamont writes …

Journalists and politicians in every political party routinely use these terms without considering that this framing is anti-democratic. That is because politicians are elected by citizens, not just taxpayers. The word “taxpayer” is not in the constitution; the word “citizen” is.

All citizens are equal. Taxpayers are not.

It is self-evident that you can contribute to the economy and society without paying taxes. Many citizens don’t pay income taxes, notably children, the working poor and a few millionaires and billionaires. Charities, churches and places of faith are all tax-exempt.

Defining taxpayers as the only people who matter has real and serious consequences for policy. It is not a politically neutral position: it is a radical right-wing ideology that drives inequality by making the rich richer while neglecting the poor.

That is why the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s real membership of five people matters, as does its ideology. We don’t have to care what they think, but we should be clear on just where they are coming from.

So the next time you hear British Columbia’s new wicked witch of the west, CTF spokesperson Kris Sims, blathering on your TV about how your “taxpayer dollars” are being wasted, remember: Kris Sims and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation could give a damn about you as a citizen of the province of British Columbia, and could care even less about what our provincial government is doing to alleviate child poverty, build urgent care centres to serve the 780,000 British Columbians without a family doctor, build truly affordable housing for seniors and working people across the vast expanse of our province, create affordable $10-a-day child care for working families, while funding our public safety and justice, education, transportation and infrastructure, agriculture and fisheries, climate action and environment, social development and poverty reduction, indigenous relations and reconciliation, and jobs, training, trade and technology ministries of government to better serve your interests, and the interests of your family, your neighbours, your co-workers, and your friends.

And while you’re at it, ignore Kris Sims when you see her next on your TV!

Disinhibition, Coarseness & Social Cantagion In The Age of Trump

May 27, 2019#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Decision Canada 2019, News, Politics, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Two centuries ago, a wave of suicides swept across Europe as if the very act of suicide was somehow infectious.
Shortly before their untimely deaths, many of the suicide victims had come into contact with Johann von Goethe’s tragic tale The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which the hero, Werther, himself commits suicide. In an attempt to stem what was seen as a rising tide of imitative suicides, anxious authorities banned the book in several regions across Europe.
During the two hundred years that have followed the publication and subsequent censorship of Goethe’s novel, social scientific research has largely confirmed the thesis that affect, attitudes, beliefs and behaviour can indeed spread through populations as if they were somehow infectious.
Simple exposure sometimes appears to be a sufficient condition for social transmission to occur. This is social contagion theory; that sociocultural phenomena can spread through and leap between people like outbreaks of measles or chicken pox rather than through a process of rational choice.
The online disinhibition effect is a term used to describe the lowering of psychological restraints, a seeming inability to regulate our behaviors in an online social environment leading to reduced behavioural inhibitions online, and a negating of normative behavioural boundaries while in cyberspace, resulting in destructive interpersonal behaviors while using social media.
Welcome to the Age of Trump, the age of unreason and disinformation, of Russian bots and the spreading of racial hatred, the targeting of minority populations as “the other”, the rise of anti-Semitism, rampant cynicism, misplaced anger, isolation and the breakdown of contemporary society.

Germany to fight anti-Semitism. Children learn about Holocaust at Berlin Jewish school.

On Saturday, May 25th, Felix Klein, the German government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, told the Funke media group …

“I cannot advise Jews to wear the kippah everywhere in Germany. Jews should think twice before wearing the traditional kippah skullcap in public arising from a recent and sustained rise in attacks against Jews.

Anti-Semitism has always existed in Germany, but in this new era of social dysfunction, brought on in some measure by the odious conduct of the U.S. President, anti-Semitism is now showing its ugly face more openly.

There is no question that the rise in social disinhibition and coarseness has played a role in the worsening situation we’re currently experiencing in Europe. The internet and social media have also strongly contributed to this — and also to the continuous attacks on our culture of remembrance.

The word Jew as an insult was not common in my time when I went to school. Now, in the early part of the 21st century, it is and it’s even an insult at schools where there are no Jews, where there are no Jewish students. So that is a growing concern and of course we have to develop strategies to counter that, in Germany and across Europe.”

Toxic disinhibition, an empathy deficit, the absence of restraint — and online, anonymity, invisibility and intermittent, unfledged asynchronous communication are far from benign in their impacts, not only on social discourse, but at the ballot box and in each and every one of our lives, where increasingly otherwise good people live without conscience, informed social awareness, and their role in the social collective we call Canada.

The 2016 American election was one of the ugliest elections in the history of the United States. Hillary Clinton was continually subject to unwarranted attacks, and daily demonized online. Not a day went by in the lead up to the November 8, 2016 U.S. election when I didn’t find myself outraged at the “sharing” — by a broad range of people on the left with whom I had worked over many years — of Russian bot disinformation, and misogynist commentary about the “war-mongering” U.S. Senator & Secretary of State.
Speaking at a Liberal fundraiser in Toronto last October, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told those who were gathered at the Danforth Music Hall the upcoming federal election would be the ugliest election in Canadian history.

“We are now looking at perhaps what will be the most divisive and negative and nasty political campaign in Canada’s history,” Trudeau said. “I can tell you, we will do the same thing we did in 2015: No personal attacks, strong differentiation on issues of policy. I will not engage in personal attacks and none of our team will either.

A positive, compelling message that brings people together, that refuses the politics of personal attacks, that refuses the politics of division of scare tactics — whether it’s snitch lines or hijab attacks — that kind of approach that Stephen Harper tried does not work.

Once you’ve gone and divided and angered people in order to get elected it becomes very difficult afterward to pull them together in a way that actually allows us to solve the challenges that we need to solve. To run on division and fear and easy populism makes it harder to do the good things that must be the central purpose of why we run for office.”

Make no mistake, with $65 million in corporate funds already in the kitty for the federal Conservative party to wage their 2019 electoral campaign, with a lesser $41 million available to the Trudeau Liberals, and a paltry $5 million and $3 million, respectively, for Jagmeet Singh’s New Democratic Party of Canada and Elizabeth May’s Green Party of Canada, Andrew Scheer’s far right-of-centre social Conservative party is ready to wage that nasty, ugly campaign Justin Trudeau has talked about to crowds across Canada who have gathered to hear our Prime Minister.

Fight to Defeat Coarseness, Social Contagion, Disinhibition & Isolation
As Canadians, we can do our part by keeping our online discourse respectful, sticking to the facts, not sharing or retweeting the disinformation that will surely be provided by the Russian bots invading our social media, by joining the Greens, the New Democrats or the federal Liberal party, to donate time and money, to work on the campaigns of the socially progressive candidates we support, to staff the candidates’ offices, to go door knocking, gather with others in burmashaves in neighbourhoods, across our city and in Metro Vancouver — and make a difference, fight for inclusion & have a positive impact on the outcome of the election, in order that diversity, climate action, transit, infrastructure, affordable housing, continued subsidy funding of housing co-ops, preservation of our coasts, and preservation of the Canada Child Benefit introduced by the Trudeau government in 2016 that has served to reduce child poverty in Canada by 40%, or 300,000 children, since its introduction only three short years ago, will remain atop the political agenda in Canadian federal governance.

Music Sundays | Regret | Blue Nile

May 26, 2019fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Music, Stories of a Life, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

In the early 1970s, I attended Simon Fraser University. Early on in my student career, I met the head of Medical Services at SFU, Dr. Ed Lipinski, one of the most impressive men I’ve ever met. He asked if we might meet from time to time, that given my various political involvements of the day, he said he found me “fascinating”, and would like to get to know me better.
Now, as it happens, Dr. Lipinski was a psychiatrist, a dedicated and gifted therapist, for a long period of time the head of the World Psychiatric Association, and someone that every person of influence, in administration and among the student body at SFU, saw on a regular basis.
Ed made things happen.
For me, that meant bursaries and scholarships, and paving the way for whatever I needed. In addition, as a journalist / editor at the student newspaper, The Peak, Ed Lipinski ensured that I had access to senior administration officials, who almost inevitably became “unnamed sources” for a series of provocative articles I wrote over the years.
Had Ed not died in a car accident along the Algarve in Portugal in 1981, my life would have been much different. Ed was 100% on my side, he had influence with the Courts, and in the political, banking, and corporate worlds — apart from being a first-rate psychiatrist, Dr. Ed Lipinski, British Columbia’s first forensic psychiatrist knew how to connect influential people to get things done. Dr. Lipinski was, then, our province’s trusted figure.
In 1972, as was occurring more frequently, Cathy and I were experiencing one of several episodes of turbulence in our marriage — I was giving serious thought to leaving her, calling it quits. Here’s what Ed said to me …

“Raymond, imagine that you’re 63 years of age, it’s 3 a.m. on a chilly winter’s morning, and you’re lying in bed all on your own. You’ve been on your own for awhile now. No marriage. No relationships with women who you love. No one to share your life with, just you taking responsibility for yourself. Ask yourself, ‘Do I want to be alone as I approach the latter third of my life, or do I want to share my life with a woman I love?’ Raymond, should you leave Cathy, is that a decision that you will regret? Do you honestly want to face the prospect of lying their at 3 a.m. alone, with no one to turn to, and no one with whom you can share your life?”

The impact at the time of Ed asking me those questions was to return home to Cathy, and make a renewed effort to preserve our marriage.
Now, of course, I am just shy of 69 years of age, and alone. But not lonely.
Would I prefer to be in a relationship with a woman I love? Yes, I would — and you only have to know me to know that for me, hope reigns eternal. I am an optimist about love, as I am about my political involvement, and almost every aspect of my life. When I reflect on my life now, I believe I am, overall, satisfied with my life.
Still & all, when I’m lying in bed at 3 a.m., I think back to that conversation with Ed Lipinski in 1972, and reflect on the fact that I am alone.
In respect of the matter of regret, up until 1997 I was, every moment of the day, as I had been for years, filled with regret and, as it happens, self-loathing. There was so much that I regretted about my life, things I wished I had done differently. Fortunately, I had another gifted therapist, Max, in my life who was able to present to me a logically consistent argument as to why I should look forward and not back, that the decisions I had taken in the past that I had come to regret were things I could do nothing about.
What I could do was each and every day work towards becoming a better, more sensitive and thoughtful, more whole and more generous person.

Glaswegian Paul Buchanan, lead singer and founder of the Scottish trio, Blue Nile.

Still and all, I do reflect from time to time on the regrets of my life, and the better decisions I might have made. As such, the music of Glaswegian Paul Buchanan and his two band mates in the 90s Scottish trio, The Blue Nile, speaks to me in the early hours of the morning, and when I am feeling in a melancholic mood, the song Regret speaks to the deepest part of my soul.

Stories of a Life | 1988 | Fitness in a Time of Despair | VCC, Pt. 3

May 25, 2019Food & Health, Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

1987 was a terrible year for me, one of the worst in the past five decades.
Cathy and I were still embroiled in an ugly, seemingly never-ending custody battle, when my two partners pulled out of our successful business the business was so prejudiced that I was forced to close it, displacing a dozen workers, after which over the course of the year I lost two professional jobs through no fault of my own, and the housing co-op where I had lived for the previous three years had moved to evict me because, “you’re gay, you have AIDS, you’re gonna kill us all, and we want you gone!” — by the time 1988 rolled around, I was experiencing an ever deepening despair, gripped by a black depression that had me almost catatonic, and without hope.
I was also in the worst shape, physically, that I’d ever found myself in —eating poorly, and weighing in at an unhealthy 225 pounds.
When in February 1988 I was offered a teaching job at Vancouver Community College, I wasn’t sure I had the stamina to stand in front of a class 15 hours a week to teach courses in English Literature, and writing.
Linda, a friend who lived nearby (in the picture above), one day when I was over at her home, who was aware of my various travails, turned to me on that chill, overcast mid-winter afternoon, and said to me …

“I want you over at my house at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning with your best pair of runners, and dressed warmly. We’re going to turn your life around, get you fit, deal with Cathy and your children, and those assholes in your co-op. You’re starting a new job in two and a half months, you have EI coming in so you’re not hurting for money, and you’ve got the time to get yourself into shape — beginning at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning, sharp.”

The next morning at 9 a.m. sharp, I arrived at her home on West 2nd Avenue on the north side of the street just east of Waterloo Street. Linda put some coffee on, and we smoked a joint (“it’ll help you focus on your body, and what needs to be done”) and by 9:30 a.m. we were off, walking towards Jericho Beach, on the first leg of our walk along Spanish Banks.

I was so out of shape that by the time we reached Jericho Beach, I needed a 15-minute break, to sit down and catch my breath before continuing on the walk Linda had planned for us, to the end of Spanish Banks, just east of the forests of Pacific Spirit Park, and the University of British Columbia.
That first morning, I had to stop seven times on the way to the end of Spanish Banks, and seven times on the way back. A walk that should have taken us an hour or an hour and a half, instead took three hours — and I was wiped out. Upon arriving back at Linda’s house, she made us both a warming cup of coffee, and afterwards sent me home, saying, “I want you back here in two hours. We’re going to do the same thing again this afternoon, and every morning and afternoon until you’re in shape.”
I returned at 2:30 p.m. that afternoon and we were off again. This time we stopped only five times on the way to the end of the beach, and four times on the way back. It was raining outside, the skies dark and overcast. “Rain or shine, we’re going to be out here every day. Get your head around it!”
Linda was like a drill sergeant, “Head up, look over at the mountains, this is an exercise as much for your eyes and for your head as it is for your body. No looking down, ever.” By the end of the first week, I could walk to the end of the beach without stopping, the same on the way back. We would rest at the far west end of the Spanish Banks beach for 10 – 15 minutes before heading back, taking in the beauty of the nature around us.

During our walks we talked about everything.
Linda knew Cathy from our days living in the Interior — the first time they met one another, each took an immediate, visceral dislike to the other, which was odd given how similar their respective backgrounds were, and what strong, take charge personalities both possessed. Linda knew my children; she had a son the same age as my son, Jude, and had met Megan many times (Megan didn’t like Linda — again, a clash of personalities and will). Linda and I continued our walks and hikes, twice a day every day.
By the beginning of the second week of our walks, we were not only walking along the full length of Spanish Banks twice a day, Linda had added a twice daily hike through Pacific Spirit Park. The third week had us making a foray into Stanley Park, walking through the woods, and up the 45 degree embankment leading to Prospect Point. By mid-March, one month into our twice daily walking and hiking regimen, I had dropped 40 pounds, while consuming a satisfyingly substantial amount of healthy foods.
Linda had also added yoga as a feature of our walks, involving a great many stretching exercises. Between the twice daily walks, the hikes, the yoga, and my new healthy diet, by mid-April, I had lost 75 pounds and was down to a fit 150 pounds — I felt like Superman, stronger and healthier than I’d been since I was in high school twenty years previous. My depression? Gone. My ability to stand up for myself, and not allow myself to get pushed around, by circumstance or by some of the malcontents in my life (those who meant me ill), and ready to do battle with Cathy in the Courts? I was back. By mid-year, the custody battle was resolved, as was the battle with my co-op (the latter, which I’ll write about another day).

Photo, Broadway campus, Vancouver Community College, taken from Chinacreek Park

By the time classes at Vancouver Community College began at the beginning of May, I was me again — tough, strong-minded, confident, fit and healthy, and ready for whatever was coming my way … which, as I wrote two weeks ago, was love. In May, as the classes I taught were scheduled in the evening, Linda and I continued our walks during the day, with Lori and I walking in the late afternoon, once we were living together.
For the next three years, I continued my daily walks from my home to Jericho Beach and along Spanish Banks, leaving the hikes through Pacific Spirit and / or Stanley parks for the weekend. In two and a half months in 1988, Linda had trained my body such that it was as easy for me to power walk and hike 7 miles, as it is for most people to cross the street.
In 2017, after walking well over 400 miles in service of both Morgane Oger’s NDP campaign in Vancouver False Creek and David Eby’s campaign in Vancouver Point Grey, that summer — arising from a case of plantar fasciitis — for the first time in 29 years I did not keep up with my regimen of walking along the beach and through the woods of Pacific Spirit Park.
Still, I will never forget, and will always be grateful for, the gift Linda gave me of health and not just just the ability and willingness to leave my home to get out into the elements, but the pure joy I experience when walking along Spanish Banks or through Pacific Spirit Park, riding my bike, or otherwise engaging in healthy activity, a regimen that prevails to this day.