joe posts

It’s that time of year again. The upside of being poor is that you get a nice refund from the government. Hopefully. It’s the rich that have to pay! Or is it?

In 1990, Canada’s overall tax system was more progressive, meaning families with higher income contributed relatively more through higher tax rates, to help pay for the things that benefit all of us: health care, education, roads, buses and subways.

Truth be told, things flattened out from the middle of the income distribution to the top – families at the top paid about the same share of their income in taxes as families in the middle.

But by 2005, the system has become far less progressive at the bottom of the distribution, and at the very top it has become regressive. Staggeringly, the top 1% pay total tax rates as much as six percentage points of income lower than families in the middle.

As a number of studies have found, the richest 1% of Canadians are getting the lion’s share of market income gains from a decade of remarkable economic growth. Yet, astonishingly, the richest 1% of families also now pay a lower tax rate than the poorest 10%. – Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

Something to think about next time the boss bitches about taxes, and drives home in his Porsche.

Ah, John Baird. You tried hard with this one:

“Our government believes that the cost should be borne by those who use the service, not by Canadian taxpayers.”

That’s our minister of transportation explaining how the fifty percent increase in security fees (which we need to buy X-ray specs) are definitely not taxes. So it’s not a tax, because taxpayers won’t be paying it, ergo, people who fly aren’t taxpayers. Simple logic. Or did I get that wrong? It might just be some slimy fake-logic to trick us into thinking Canada’s New Government™ hasn’t broken yet another election promise.

True, not everyone flies. But Canada is a huge country and it’s a popular way of getting around. I guess they could use this same reasoning to introduce non-tax fees for anything – health fees are only paid by sick people, not taxpayers! Road maintenance fees for anyone who leaves their home, not the taxpayers! Policing fees for anyone who expects police help, not taxpayers! Income tax filing fees are only paid by people who file income taxes, not taxpayers! The great thing about flat fees to neoconservatives is that they are inherently regressive.

Maybe if we wanted a safer country we could stop spending billions following Americans around on their crusade against Islam. The fact is we’re at war; we should have no expectation for security. We’re killing people in Afghanistan, our government supports the Iraq war. It doesn’t matter if we’re polite people who only accidentally kill civilians. People will still fight back. That’s just a reality of war.

I thought this was a refreshing article on the ongoing Vale Inco strike up in Sudbury.

Pathetic or powerful: Can politicians put an end to the Vale Inco strike?

excerpt:

[Professor David Leadbeater]  said he thinks major mining companies donate to the governing Liberals, which makes them hesitant to intervene.

“They basically agree with what the mining companies are doing. They think this is the way to have development. They think that communities and working people are a secondary consideration,” Leadbeater said.

“This has to be challenged. They have to take a position that’s more based on democratic needs of communities, of unions and the majority of the population. I don’t think it will happen, though, without a lot of protest.”

The province’s official line is that they are ready to intervene and that they have to be impartial – not favouring the striking workers or the foreign corporations demanding concessions – because of legislation that requires MPPs not take sides between employers and employees in labour disputes. Which makes government as useful as a wet paper machete when it comes to labour disputes. No matter what party is at fault, or how wrong they are, politicians can’t do or say anything about it. No wonder neither side wants their help, Bartolucci can barely say ‘boo’ about the scabs they’ve brought in to keep the mines running without real workers. The company benefits from provincial impartiality, and mediation would almost certainly mean significant concessions on the part of the workers – something they went on strike to avoid. Meanwhile the strike gets uglier and uglier.

I’m guessing Vale will win this one – nobody can stop them. They made over five billion in 2009, even with the strike and the global economic crisis. And they make money even though they’re spending more on running the mines now (scab and security costs) than if they had just kept the same old contract with the union. At this point it looks like they just don’t want the workers to come back without severe punishment.

A strike can’t stop Vale, because they can use scabs. Violence won’t stop the scabs, because anti-scab violence is hard to defend and the province and police will protect them. Vale’s HQ is on another continent, which makes it impossible to protest against, and the distance means the corporation has no reason to care about the people of Northern Ontario. The province brags to the world that it can’t do anything but mediate, meaning it will try to hammer out a centre position between a foreign company that doesn’t give a shit about Canadians and actual Canadians who depend on the work to keep them off of welfare rolls and out of food banks.

The Libs and Tories encouraged this kind of development through tax breaks, relaxed ownership rules, regressive taxation, cuts to government agencies and their hands-off approach to labour disputes. This dispute, I think, is just ‘globalization’ coming to Northern Ontario. And globalization is not about making it easier for people to live, it’s about making it easier for the wealthy to make money and it’s about making sure power is out of reach for the working class and the poor, because they’d probably do things differently. They might be more concerned with community.

“You can only push people so far. When you can’t feed your kids, you can’t put food on the table, you can’t put clothing on them, they come home from school and they can’t participate in what’s going on, you think that’s good for a community?” Steelworker Pat Digby

The Kids in the Hall’s “The Customer” skit, performed on an anon chan.

My solution to Fantastic Contraption’s “Unpossible” puzzle.

The key seems to be that tiny blue piece that I left in accidentally. It doesn’t work without it.

I’ve read about the huge prison industry in the United States, but I was surprised to hear that now the judges have gotten in on the action.

Two US judges charged with taking more than $2m (£1.4m) in kickbacks from a privately-run detention centre have pleaded guilty to fraud.

Prosecutors say Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took the money in return for giving young offenders long sentences to serve in the centre. – BBC

Fraud?! That’s just product promotion! This wise investor had a captive audience. Poor kids:

A spokeswoman for the non-profit Juvenile Law Center said 1,000-2,000 juveniles who came before the judge between 2003 and 2006 received excessively harsh sentences.

Many of the children were first-time offenders and had no lawyers to defend them.

Get Tough on Crime! Make Millions!

So I’m reading a news story about American hospitals and their struggles to retain nurses. It’s a struggle almost everywhere, for sure – to call it an extremely stressful job doesn’t really do it justice. And in Ontario, thanks to two decades of neoconservative and neoliberal leaders, things are imploding. Cutbacks in the hospitals in the 1990s meant a decline in quality of care and poor working environments for professionals, and cutbacks to education have raised tuition costs and have made it difficult to attract new people to the field. It costs at least $25,000 to study to be a nurse, and there’s about a 1/4 odds that your $25,000 degree will be useless a year after graduation and you’ll be working in a warehouse, self-medicating for job-related PTSD. ( But I digress!) Add the baby boomer retirement schedule… and you get the picture.

So I’m reading this article and I had to laugh because AMERICAN HOSPITALS can’t keep nurses! AMERICAN HOSPITALS! What they’re trying to do is introduce a residency-style program for new nurses. I have to say it makes sense. Emphasis mine!:

The Versant plan pairs new nurses with more experienced nurses and they share patients. At first, the veterans do the bulk of the work as the rookies watch; by the end of the 18-week training program, those roles are reversed.

The new nurses must complete a 60-item checklist. They must learn how to put in an IV line and urinary catheter; interpret different heart rhythms and know how to treat them; monitor patients on suicide watch and do hourly checkups on very critically ill patients; know how to do a head-to-toe physical assessment on a patient, as well as how to inform families about the condition of their loved one.

For Yaima Milian, who’s currently in the program at Baptist, this is markedly different from the preparation she got at her first hospital in New Jersey. She left after a six-week orientation because she didn’t feel ready to work solo. – AP

18 weeks. Four and a half months. And the nurse mentioned left after a six-week orientation program at a hospital in New Jersey. I can believe it. I would say two month minimum. A nurse might have the skills, but every floor is different and requires a whole lot of learning.

My orientation at the Sudbury Regional Hospital lasted three days. And they weren’t 12 hour days, they were 8 hour days, as I recall. At the end of the three days, I told them I was wholly unprepared, so they generously extended it for another six days or so. I quit after a few months – just couldn’t handle it.

Suddenly I feel less guilty about leaving the profession. No wonder I felt unprepared – it wasn’t even a cushy American hospital (I’m kidding about that America, don’t worry, I know your hospitals aren’t that cushy, unless they don’t allow poor people in). I think a residency-style program would work wonders for retention – unfortunately it’s that kind of creative thinking that our political parties despise. Sounds like it would cost tax-dollars, doesn’t it? That might make it hard to cut taxes and raise MP pay again.

Private healthcare, here we come.

I didn’t get Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! right away – The first few times I thought it sounded completely off. Then I remembered I felt that way about pretty much every Bad Seeds album. It was “Moonland,” “Night of the Lotus Eaters,” and then “We Call Upon The Author” that quickly turned me around – the lyrics in the latter are hilarious and awesome:

——-

We Call Upon The Author

What we once thought we had
We didn’t
And what we have now
Will never be that way again
So we call upon the author to explain

Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets
We’ve shunned them from the greasy-grind
The poor little things, they look so sad and old
As they mount us from behind
I ask them to desist and to refrain
And then we call upon the author to explain

Rosary clutched in his hand
He died with tubes up his nose
And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals
Chanted his name in code
We shook our fists at the punishing rain
And we call upon the author to explain

He said everything is messed up ’round here
Everything is banal and jejune
There is a planetary conspiracy
Against the likes of you and me
In this idiot constituency of the moon
Well he knew exactly who to blame
And we call upon the author to explain

Prolix! Prolix!

Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!

Well, I go guru-ing down the street
Young people gather ’round my feet
And they ask me things
But I don’t know where to start
They ignite the powder-trails
Straight to my father’s heart
And once again I call upon the author to explain

Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing
That mediocres my every thought?
I feel like a vacuum cleaner; a complete sucker
It’s fucked up and he is a fucker
But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain
I call upon the author to explain

Well rampant discrimination
Mass poverty
Third world debt
Infectious disease
Global inequality
And deepening socio-economic divisions
Well, it does in your brain
And we call upon the author to explain

Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window
“Hey Doug, how you been?”
[...]
Brings me back a book on Holocaust poetry
Complete with pictures
Then tells me to get ready for the rain
And we call upon the author to explain

I say prolix! Prolix!

Something a pair of scissors can fix!

Bukowski was a jerk
Berryman was best
He wrote like wet papier mache
Ah but he went the Hemingway
Weirdly on wings
And with maximum pain
We call upon the author to explain

Down in my bolthole I see they’ve published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish
“Well the waves, the waves, were soldiers moving.”
Well, thank you. Thank you! Thank you!
And again I call upon the author to explain
Yeah, we call upon the author to explain

Prolix! Prolix!

There’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!

————-

He’s a hero. They should put those shoes on display in an Iraqi museum. Unfortunately they were blown up by the bomb squad. Really. I guess they were worried the shoes might be thrown again and not blow up again. There’s nothing more dangerous than a non-exploded non-explosive.

It sounds silly to deify a shoe-thrower (seriously, who throws a shoe?!) but it certainly worked as an attention getter as he called Bush a bitch and reminded him of all the people he’s murdered with his neoliberal crusade to remake the Middle East. I hope this reporter lives a long and healthy life and gets to enjoy all the benefits of being ‘the guy who threw a shoe at Bush.’ But not before the goons torture him and we have the obligatory false confession – pretty much the regular War Against Terror Treatment:

He said he visited his brother Sunday and found him missing a tooth and with cigarette burns on his ears. He also said his brother told him that jailers also doused him with cold water while he was naked. – AP

So rest assured, America, that your pResident will not be harmed by this shoe-thrower ever again. If he survives American-sponsored torture and sexual assault and imprisonment he’ll certainly be traumatized and possibly very very angry at those who’ve ruined his country and his life.

And here’s exactly what he said, and why it matters. Who else has gotten away with ten seconds of truth with this pResident?:

Contrary to most media coverage, the 28-year-old TV reporter Muntadhar al-Zaidi made history not by merely throwing a pair of shoes, the highest expression of insult in Iraqi culture, at the US president, but by what he said while doing so and as he was smothered by US and Iraqi security men. He groaned as they dragged him out of the press conference. They succeeded in silencing him – and according to his brother he was beaten in custody – but he had already said enough to shake the occupation and Nouri al-Maliki’s Green Zone regime to their foundations.

Strip the words away, and his and the Iraqi people’s cry of deep pain, anger and defiance would amount to no more than a shoe-throwing insult. But the words were heard. “This is the farewell kiss, you dog,” he shouted as he threw the first shoe. The crucial line followed the second shoe: “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.” Once those words were heard, the impact of a pair of shoes became electrifying. A young journalist has put aside the demands of his profession, preferring to act as the loudest cry of his long-suffering people. If one considers the torture and killings in Iraqi and US jails that Muntadhar often mentioned in his reports for al-Baghdadia satellite TV station, he was certainly aware he risked being badly hurt. – The shoes we longed for

Here’s an odd Toronto story: An irate bus driver threatened to have me arrested because I didn’t know that I needed a $3.00 fare to get OFF the bus in York Region. The TTC has to pay that particular section of Toronto extra money to prop up Viva and the other bus service that operates there. Now that I know, I can see that they post a little note on the route maps to let us know that it’s a double fare, and sometimes those screens on the exterior of the bus flash a “double fare” message. But I wasn’t paying attention – when I mapped it out online it looked like I would still be in Toronto.

I was going to a job interview way the heck up Keele street, and the bus driver made an announcement saying it was $3.00 to exit the bus north of Steeles – but of course he makes the announcement as he leaves the stop at Steeles street, and I assumed the NEXT stop would, naturally, be the ‘last chance.’ I wasn’t carrying any cash, just tokens, so I wanted to jump off and just walk there. I tried the back door, but it was locked..

“You have to exit at the front of the bus.”

“Ok…”

“It’s $3.00.”

Rummaging. “… I only have $1.00.”

“Then I’m calling the police to have you arrested. I made an announcement. I HAVE WITNESSES!” (waving towards the other passengers)

He picked up his phone and started dialing.

Oh sure. Call the cops. I know mistake was mine, but it’s trivial, and I almost want to know what exactly the police would do about it. Slap handcuffs on me and take me to the station? Or just force me to ride the bus forever? Part of me really wanted to push it. Hell, if I’m going to get “arrested” over two measly bucks, I at least have to make my feelings known. So I opened my stupid mouth. “Look, you made the announcement north of Steeles, I thought this was the last…”

“WHAT????!”

I stopped myself from going down that dark road. Another strategy:

“Um, I’m really sorry – I must have misunderstood your announcement. Hold on. I only carry tokens.”

“Oh. Tokens are good. You can use tokens, but not passes.”

“Just one?”

“Yes.”

“Can I keep riding? I wanted to get to Langstaff.”

“No, get off the bus. Now. Before I call the police.”

“Thank You. Have A Great Day.” (I actually said it with capital letters)

“You’re the one who needs it, Buddy.”

I swear I did not make that up. Weird scene. I was tempted to vandalize a nearby Viva touch-screen ticket terminal, but someone had already messed it up. Oh well.

Anyways, this morning I woke up extra early because Viva has gone on strike. Something to do with management screwing them over. I can understand that and don’t hold it against the workers, even if they insist on picketing the passengers and not their managers (um?). But I have no use for Viva, and neither do a lot of other people, apparently. I arrived at Downsview full 10 minutes early (I had hit snooze like a dozen times) expecting to find a crush of Yorkians, cursing Viva under their breaths, clambering to get on the TTC’s 107. Nope. It was me and a dozen other people, just like most days. I figured we’d get a lot of people connecting to the bus at Finch and Steeles. But nothing. Apparently almost nobody uses it. The Toronto Star is running an article with the headline “Viva strike causes few delays.” If there’s ever a sign that a service is just slightly redundant… Yeeesh. I guess some people use it as an express route, but there are at least three bus companies running down the same roads. Seems kind of silly.

Meanwhile, part of the subway shuts down for emergency maintenance, and because the whole line is designed as a U instead of an O, and there’s no way to reroute any trains, thousands of people suddenly have a loooong walk.

Funny place to live, Toronto is.