joe posts

Here’s an article in Slate that caught my eye. Discusses the differences between the super-rich and the poor – the poor nowadays being too many of us! Check this BBC piece out too – the housing crisis in the USA is approaching Grapes of Wrath levels.

Rich Men Behaving Badly

excerpt:

In his book The Age of Abundance, libertarian author Brink Lindsey boils down the difference between the desperately poor and the blissfully rich to an ability to focus on the long term. “Members of the underclass operate within such narrow time horizons and circles of trust that their lives are plagued by chronic chaos and dysfunction,” he says. By contrast, elites are well-organized long-term thinkers. Riiiiight. “Modern Wall Street is a system,” says Charles Morris—a former Chase banker and author of The Trillion Dollar Meltdown—”that rewards crazy risk-taking in the short term without regard for the long-term consequences.”

Critics point to a pervasive sense of victimhood in the underclass. But listen to what Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz told the troops after his firm succumbed to wounds that were almost entirely self-inflicted. “We here are a collective victim of violence,” he said. Yep, just another case of the Man keeping the Man down.

Conservative critics constantly carp that the culture of poverty has encouraged a sense of dependency on Washington. Of course, in recent months, the bureaucracy—the Federal Reserve, the Federal Housing Authority, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac—has generally ignored the struggles of poor homeowners. Yet it vaulted into action to save the bankers from their own disastrous bets. When Bear Stearns, the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank, approached insolvency, the Feds orchestrated JPMorgan’s acquisition of it.

You have the right,
Not to be killed.
Murder is a CRIME!
Unless it was done,
By a Policeman,
Or aristocrat!
Know your rights.

-The Clash

Here’s an article that would be shocking if it was about an isolated incident. Usually, though, it’s the “drug dealer” who is executed at the scene.

Another Drug Raid Nightmare

excerpt:

Imagine you’re home alone.

It’s 8 p.m. You work an early shift and need to be out the door before sunrise, so you’re already in bed. Your nerves are a bit frazzled, because earlier in the week someone broke into your home. Oddly, they didn’t take anything; they just rifled through your belongings.

But the violation weighs on your mind. At about the time you drift off, you’re awakened by fierce barking from your two large dogs. You hear someone crashing into your front door, as if he’s trying to separate it from its hinges. You grab the gun you keep for home defense and leave your room to investigate.

This past January that scenario played out at the Chesapeake, Virginia, home of 28-year-old Ryan Frederick, a slight man of little more than 100 pounds. According to interviews since the incident, Frederick says when he looked toward his front door, he saw an intruder trying to enter through one of the lower door panels. So Frederick fired his gun.

The intruders were from the Chesapeake Police Department. They had come to serve a drug warrant. Frederick’s bullet struck Detective Jarrod Shivers in the side, killing him. Frederick was arrested and has spent the last six weeks in a Chesapeake jail.

He has been charged with first degree murder. Paul Ebert, the special prosecutor assigned to the case, has indicated he may elevate the charge to capital murder, which would enable the state to seek the death penalty.

Now you might be thinking, “Well, hey now, the cops know what they’re doing. He was a drug dealer, and drugs are bad. What do you expect from a drug dealer?” But…

Friends and neighbors describe Frederick as shy, self-effacing, non-confrontational, and hard-working. He had no prior criminal record. Frederick and his friends have conceded he smoked marijuana recreationally. But all—including his neighbors—insist there’s no evidence he was growing or distributing the drug.

According to the search warrant, the police raided Frederick’s home after a confidential informant told them he saw evidence of marijuana growing in a garage behind the home. The warrant says the informant saw several marijuana plants, plus lights, irrigation equipment and other gardening supplies.

After the raid, the police found the gardening supplies, but no plants. They also found a small amount of marijuana, but not much—only enough to charge Frederick with misdemeanor drug possession.

I wonder if anyone thinks it’s worth a life to charge someone with misdemeanor drug possession. With a clean record he might not have faced any jail time at all, but now he’s looking at the death penalty. And there’s more.. remember how he was skittish because someone had broken in earlier in the week?

More disturbingly, the search warrant says the confidential informant was inside Frederick’s house three days before the raid—about the same time Frederick says someone broke into his home. Frederick’s supporters have told me that Frederick and his attorney now know the identity of the informant, and that it was the police informant who broke into Frederick’s home.

If they had already searched the place and found nothing, why bust down the door to raid the house?

Maybe this is all just a messy mistake and not an example of how lopsided and paranoid our justice system is becoming.  If the situation were reversed, and someone went to answer the door and was shot on the spot by the police for no reason, one would expect the officer who fired the fatal shot to face the same kind of penalty, right?

The raid in Chesapeake bears a striking resemblance to another that ended in a fatality. Last week, New Hanover County, N.C., agreed to pay $4.25 million to the parents of college student Peyton Strickland, who was killed when a deputy participating in a raid mistook the sound of a SWAT battering ram for a gunshot, and fired through the door as Strickland came to answer it.

In the case where a citizen mistakenly (and allegedly) shot through his door at a raiding police officer, the citizen is facing a murder charge; in the case where a raiding police officer mistakenly shot through a door and killed a citizen, there were no criminal charges.

The Clash was right.

Isn’t it just insane to send people to their deaths because someone might be smoking weed? Even harder drugs don’t deserve this much attention – we’ve spent billions and people get murdered all the time and we’re not any closer to attaining this absurd Utopian vision of a “drug-free” society.  Cokeheads still get coke, potheads still get pot, heroin is more available than ever thanks to our war efforts in Afghanistan. Any taxpayer who thinks we should get actual results for the money we spend should be up in arms over the War on Drugs, because it’s just a complete boondoggle that does nothing but erode civil liberties and enrich the businessmen that run prisons and sell shit to cops.

Even by conservative estimates, the War on Drugs now costs the United States $50 billion each year and has overcrowded prisons to the breaking point – all with little discernible impact on the drug trade. A report by the Government Accountability Office released at the end of September estimated that ninety percent of the cocaine moving into the United States now arrives through Mexico, up from sixty-six percent in 2000. Even Walters acknowledges that for all of the efforts the Bush administration has devoted to overseas drug enforcement, the price of cocaine has dropped while its purity has risen. More than forty percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana, yet the government continues to target pot smokers. In October, the administration announced it was planning a new military offensive, dubbed Plan Mexico, with a price tag of $1.4 billion. Things look so bleak that Walters was recently moved to describe a momentary upward blip in drug prices as “historic progress.” – Rolling Stone (emphasis mine)

Do they know how much it will cost?

No.

Do they know how many of our troops will have to stay?

No.

Do they know what country will be providing the 1000 troops necessary to “fix” the country?

No.

Does anyone know what the odds of success are?

No.

But don’t worry, because we’ll be there for another three years, regardless.

MPs vote to extend Afghan mission to 2011

Just read a great blog over at GNN. It cheered me right up. I’m a ‘night manager’ of sorts and I was a little miffed tonight. My boss basically took half the pay from this shift because I accidentally shorted a $7000 restaurant deposit earlier in the week by about $13. Management said it was $40. Boourns. C’est la vie in the service industry. But since I sell my labour, and I’m not being paid even though I’m at work, I can blog – guilt-free. Whee!

I’ve been a fan of BlackPacker since he started blogging at GNN, where I used to (sorta) keep a blog. He’s a solid writer!

 

Donuts and Coffee

“I don’t give a fuck. Do you realize how inconsequential all of this is?”

Those were my words to the assistant warehouse manager at the feed and seed where I work two days a week. It was in the middle of a motivational talk I was giving him. Truth is, I’m an ideal employee, motivated, courteous, smart and motivated. I’m a natural leader and get along well with all my coworkers. But I see work as the selling of labor. I think my labor is way to valuable to sell in most cases, and keep it for myself. Today, that assistant warehouse manager took off early again, the second week in a row, the second time in his career, to go dirt bike racing. The thing he loves. He walked around all day like he got laid last night, he was so happy. He still gives a fuck, but he’s got the right idea.

Read the rest!

When you can’t answer questions… sue!

“Mr. Speaker, for the past couple of weeks, both inside and outside of Parliament, the Liberal Party and its agents have been making allegations against me of a criminal nature that are absolutely false, that are despicable … Today my representatives have filed a statement of claim in a court of law, and I look forward to seeing the leader of the opposition actually let this go to trial so he can hear the whole truth and admit his own role in it.” – Steve Harper (MacLeans – link mine)

Obviously political parties can’t go around accusing other politicians of crimes. That’s why Harpy and his Canada’s New Government™ has taken this fresh new approach to quashing questions and allegations that don’t favour their PR image. They’re the first ever party in power to sue the opposition party. Good thing the Tories have a squeaky-clean record when it comes to making criminal allegations – they’d never stoop that low…

…Well, ok, unless it could hurt the Liberal Party:

Opposition Leader Stephen Harper accused the prime minister Tuesday of being directly involved in the federal sponsorship scandal, saying he believes Paul Martin personally called the office of the former public works minister to inquire about a grant.

Last week, the Gomery inquiry into the sponsorship scandal was told of an incident back in 1999 that suggested Martin might know more than he has claimed about how the controversial office was run. – CBC

And accusing opposition MPs of serious crimes such as high treason is still all good. In some countries you’d be executed for acting against your troops. I wonder if the Tories will bring that back. Pete Van Loan called a Liberal MP a Taliban agent when he asked about the treatment of the Prisoners of War we’ve captured during our occupation of Afghanistan:

The question from Liberal MP Mark Holland was both obvious and necessary: Will Canadians be informed when and if Canada’s military resumes handing over prisoners to the Afghan authorities? The answer from Conservative House Leader Peter Van Loan: “What we will not do is what the agent for the Taliban intelligence agency wants us to do over there, which is to release to them information on detailed operations in the field.”

The answer was doubly juvenile and undemocratic because, on the weekend, Defence Minister Peter MacKay answered the very same question in a straightforward manner (the answer was yes) on CTV’s Question Period.  – Globe and Mail (emphasis mine)

Your tax dollars at work. The party in power sues over murky bribery allegations but gets carte blanche to libel anyone they want, anytime they want, simply because they’d rather not answer questions of any type.

This is the party that was elected on a platform of restoring credibility, accountability and transparency.

Truly a “New” era in Canadian politicking. We’re governed by a permanent opposition party that uses a phalanx of libel lawyers to stifle serious questions.

I apologize for the title. It’s very late.

UPDATE: Forgot about the child-porn accusations back when Martin was PM. Rabble.ca has a story on the libel suit, here’s an excerpt:

Should this libel action go to court, the prime minister will be called to testify on the record about what he knew and how he knew it, with respect to financial considerations being offered to Cadman. In short he will be asked in court to deny he is a criminal by lawyers for the Liberal Party.

This is a more serious matter than being accused of wrong doing in parliament. As well, the prime minister will have to claim that Chuck Cadman lied to his family when the MP talked about receiving, and refusing, an offer to pay premiums on a life insurance policy worth one million dollars. And Harper had better hope the case is not heard in British Columbia, where Cadman is known to be an honest man.

And then there is the testy question of who has been doing the defaming since Harper became the leader of the Conservative party. Maybe the prime minister thinks Canadians have were not paying attention when the Conservatives claimed then Prime Minister Paul Martin was a supporter of child pornography. And how about the Conservative party ads that have been rolled out regularly at a cost of millions of dollars claiming that Liberal leader Stéphane Dion has mislead Canadians, acted in a cowardly fashion, and showed himself incapable of leadership? – rabble.ca (emphasis mine)

According to the Ontario Hospital Association, almost half of Ontario’s hospitals will be running illegal deficits this year. In 2005, when a similar situation arose, McGuinty handed hospitals billions of dollars to keep them in the black. But not this time!

Dire predictions that half of Ontario’s hospitals are facing illegal deficits were dismissed by the province today as a pre-budget plea for cash, but Heath Minister George Smitherman wouldn’t rule out cuts at cash-strapped hospitals as they scramble to avoid the red ink.

“What is a cut?” Smitherman said after announcing a $100-million plan to add a new prescription drug to the province’s publicly funded list.

“If a hospital alters its administration and some people are exited from that environment, is that a cut? No, I don’t think so.” – Toronto Star

According to the Star story, Smitherman doesn’t really believe that half of Ontario’s hospitals are in financial difficulty – rather, he thinks they’re just whining so they can get higher budgets. He may be right, but it’s worrisome that our leaders think it’s cool to play ‘chicken’ when it comes to health care. It could go either way – next year we could see cuts if Smitherman is wrong and he sits on his hands. Cuts, especially staffing cuts in today’s healthcare environment, can mean major hardships for patients and their families, but it seems like that’s where we’re heading.

“I wouldn’t be announcing the budget today,” Smitherman said.

“But let’s just say that in every year, there are these dire predictions made about hospitals being in deficit circumstances and usually, that storyline doesn’t carry through the year.” – Toronto Star

Is it all a scam? The OHA would have a lot to answer for if that’s the case.

… you can only have an “honest debate” by shutting out the voters.

House Democratic leaders agreed Thursday to a rare closed-door session – the first in 25 years – to debate surveillance legislation. Republicans requested privacy for what they termed “an honest debate” on the new Democratic eavesdropping bill that is opposed by the White House and most Republicans in Congress.

…

The last private session in the House was in 1983 on U.S. support for paramilitary operations in Nicaragua. Only five closed sessions have taken place in the House since 1825. – My Way News

That’s right. “Everybody get out! We’re going to be honest!”

They probably lied their asses off.

For a serious look at this bill and the implications of giving telecom companies retroactive immunity for illegal wiretapping, check out Glenn Greenwald’s blog.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the Department of Homeland Security’s ‘terrorist watch lists’ have grown to contain nearly a million names. Is your name on the list? You probably won’t know until you try to board an airplane, because it’s all a big secret, you see. And it’s apparently nearly impossible to clear your name if it’s on the list – even well-recognized US politicians have to spend weeks straightening things out with the authorities to be able to fly without interference.

From the ACLU:

With the size of U.S. terrorist watch lists growing to absurd proportions – now in excess of 900,000 names – the American Civil Liberties Union today unveiled a new “ACLU Watch List Counter” intended to make vivid just how bloated and dysfunctional those lists have become.

“At the current rate of growth, the U.S. watch lists will contain a million records by July. If there were a million terrorists in this country, our cities would be in ruins” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program. “The absurd bloating of the terrorist watch lists is yet another example of how incompetence by our security apparatus threatens our rights without offering any real security.”

The new counter features a rolling, odometer-style display with a real-time readout showing how many individuals are on the list at a given moment. The figures are extrapolated from a September 2007 report by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, which reported that the Terrorist Screening Center had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007, and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month.As of today, the list stands at approximately 917,000 names.

“Homeland Security’s handling of the watch lists is typical of this administration’s blundering approach to the war on terror” said ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel Tim Sparapani. “Create sprawling new systems for sifting through the population, throw an indiscriminately broad range of names into the mix, fairly or not, and treat the rights of innocent people as an afterthought.”

continued…

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the different levels of government that rule over us are either completely dysfunctional or just greedy and stupid (or some combination of the three):

PM’s message for Ontario: Cut corporate taxes, expect no bailouts

excerpt:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper went to the centre of Ontario’s financial district yesterday to deliver a stern message to the province: Cut corporate taxes to spur growth because there will be no further economic bailouts from Ottawa.

Some politicians “suggest that every problem demands an immediate response, an immediate short-term, high-cost intervention of subsidization,” Mr. Harper said in a speech designed to stick Ontario with the responsibility for its own economic woes.

Wowie.. such nonsensical rhetoric. First up there’s a straw-man – I’m not sure exactly who’s proposing short-term, high-cost subsidization as a solution to our economic woes, but I’m sure the federal government wants to make people believe the federal and provincial Liberals have been asking for exactly that. If Harper could back it up with anything, it might be a little more believable. But they don’t, because it’s just politics, and lying to the public is necessary in these cases.

Then there’s this entrenched idea that tax cuts will help the economy. Will they? Harper and his pals don’t offer any explanation or evidence. They just proclaim it as truth. King Harper wants you to Cut Taxes for Good of The Economy! REAALLL convincing, let me tell ya. Especially looking down south where for decades, governments have done little else but cut taxes and deregulate industries. Gee, their economy is roaring along … and taking us with it!

And of course there’s the irony of a finance minister telling businesspeople NOT to invest in the province with the biggest economy in the country. I would say that’s a bad idea. Some economists would seem to agree.

AND – ultimately these tax-cuts ARE short-term, high-cost interventions. How many millions of dollars will we lose by giving the richest people a “break”? How long will they stick around until some other province or country lures their businesses away with promises of lower taxes, lower wages and lowered worker protections. How long until Ontario has to bend over for them again? Harper won’t say, but he is more than happy to take Ontario’s tax dollars and spend them in other provinces. We get back a mere 25% of what we give to the feds.

The tendency to treat tax cuts as a panacea for socioeconomic problems isn’t isolated to the Conservative/Reform crowd. We’ve had decades of tax-cutting Liberals and tax-cutting Conservatives. Thanks to Mulroney, Chretien, Martin and Harper we now we actually have a regressive tax system, with “the top 1 percent of families in 2005 [paying] a lower total tax rate than the bottom 10 percent of families.” How quaint.

The federal government promotes tax-free savings accounts – the ‘opposition’ moves to cut taxes on education accounts. Both plans only benefit those with high incomes and lots of money to save. Meanwhile tuition goes up, many students graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and the only jobs they can get barely pay them enough to make rent in some housing markets.

Here’s a brilliant idea for our government – help make Ontario a province you’d want to live in. No matter how low our taxes are, a business deciding to invest here just because of low labour and tax costs hardly means their bosses have an interest in taking care of the place. When Harper starts stuffing money into the pockets of bankers and foreign companies, are they going to step up and help solve the problems Ontarians are dealing with? Hell no – they’re going to fatten their bottom line at our expense and push for even more laws that serve their interests. Unlike the rest of us, these transient companies Harper is dead set on foisting on us can just pack up and leave once it’s realized what a fucked up place Ontario has become, or just whenever they find some other province or country with lower taxes and weaker workplace protection policies.

Harper, zombie-like in his ideological rigidity, just gurgles out “TAX CUTS” whenever faced with problems that run deeper than a predictable economic slowdown.

Our roads are disintegrating, and our sewage, water and power infrastructures are strained. Our environment is poisoned. Well-paying, long-term union jobs are being eliminated in favour of poorly-paying, non-union, part-time, short-term service-sector work. These workers regularly make less than the poverty line even if they’re working full-time, and the richest just keep getting richer. Worker protection rules are so weak many will never qualify for Employment Insurance if they end up unemployed, even though we all pay for it. Rules about work-hours, breaks and overtime/vacation pay are routinely ignored as we become a province of apathetic service-sector and temp workers. How will the brain-eater-in-chief help us? “ARGGG.. CUT CORRRPORRATE TAAAXES…”

Tuition keeps going up even though there seems to be a labour shortage in just about every science or high-tech field. A bachelor degree is as useful as a high-school diploma was 30 years ago, Boomers keep retiring or dying on us, but our governments just keep making it harder and harder for new students to get the education they need to fill the labour gap. The solution??? Zombie Harper moans…. “TAAAX CUUUUTS!”

Then there’s health care. Been to a hospital recently? We have old folks with fairly minor ambulatory problems taking up space in hospitals because there’s simply nowhere else for them to go. They can’t go home – the provincial Tories practically eliminated home-care during the 1990s with short contracts that favoured for-profit health care corporations. Harris and Flaherty used these contracts to punish and demoralize health-care workers, which lead to labour shortages and reduced care. Turns out it costs a lot more to have fairly independent people in the hospital. Whoops. There are few new retirement homes being built and many existing ones are understaffed. Retaining and attracting health care workers has never been more difficult – with budget cuts the work has become unmanageable at some health care facilities. The solution…? “Grrawww….TAX CUTS!!!”

It seems to me we would benefit from cutting or even eliminating tuition in health-care related fields to encourage enrollment, boost the pay of health-care workers to retain them, build new and better facilities to deal with the completely predictable crush of new patients as the boomer generation ages … but that could take up tax money, which we won’t have, because we’ve GOT to give it to our corporate saviours.

Harper says so.

Boosting military spending by billions is ok though. After all, we’ve got a war to lose!

I wonder what will happen. Will all these socioeconomic problems will be left to fester until they can no longer be ignored? Then the good taxpayers will get stuck without help from their essentially bankrupt provincial and federal governments. Flaherty is constantly reminding us how close our budget is to the edge because of all the tax cuts – what’s going to happen when we tax-cut our way over that edge? More service cuts? Maybe we could get rid of roads, children and the elderly.

I bet we’ll tax-cut our way out of that problem too, replacing government services with private enterprise. Then we’ll watch as good businesses flock to countries that have their shit together, even if it means paying higher taxes to get things like free health care and quality education. If the employment situation in Ontario doesn’t improve soon the service sector could drown itself as workers become unable to afford most of the services they provide – prices for nearly everything are going up, but wages have been stagnant since the 1990s. If that continues we’ll be left with something similar to America’s current economic situation; massive personal and government debt – but a kick-ass military! – with no way of recouping the money because the rich and the corporations barely pay taxes; few government provided services for those who need them; education for the rich, conformity lessons for the rest; health-care for the rich, a trip to Cuba for the rest; a nation of poorly-paid and unproductive waiters, washers and clerks; a divided country of greedy conservatives and naive liberals who believed the only two magic words in politics: Tax Cuts.

“I still feel don’t feel guilty because I still feel it was the best thing to do.” – Robert Latimer

And I still feel he should be in jail.

Pushing for his parole/release/pardon seems to be a cause célèbre among a certain segment of the Canadian population. And it’s not just the dummies who support him – I’ve gotten into heated arguments with well-rounded intelligent people (some of whom are dedicated health care workers) over this one. And I readily admit that I have some sympathy for the man, even if I think he deserves to be in jail. There’s no question caring for the disabled can be extremely stressful. I just think there are a lot of misconceptions about the case.

To his supporters, the story goes something like this – Robert Latimer, devoted and loving father of a severely disabled 12 year old could no longer stand to see his daughter suffer at the hands of surgeons and doctors and physiotherapists. He was convinced her pain was unmanageable, was convinced surgery was hopeless and he took her life to spare her any more suffering. Therefore what he did was not murder in the strictest sense of the word – it was a ‘compassionate homicide’ because Latimer’s motive was seen as altruistic. And since people outside his family can honestly have no idea what Robert and his wife were going through, there’s apparently no way we can judge what he did. The fact that he received the minimum jail sentence for his crime proved to his supporters that the law was incapable of dealing with this kind of situation.

But I’ve always questioned his motive. After Robert killed Tracy by poisoning her with exhaust fumes, he pulled her lifeless body from his vehicle, brought her to the house and tucked her into bed. Then he told his wife and the authorities that she had died naturally (¶ 10-16) in her sleep. It was only after the autopsy that Latimer confessed to killing his daughter. His sister has said that Robert wouldn’t lie his way out of prison, but he did lie to try to avoid the consequences of his crime. To me this always stuck out. He maintains he did nothing wrong and that he’s innocent of murder, but his first reaction was to try to cover it up to keep authorities off his back. If the autopsy hadn’t revealed that she had been poisoned, would he have ever admitted to killing his daughter? Would he just continue on with his life and let his family and friends think his daughter slipped away peacefully in her sleep instead of confessing that he had gassed her to death in his truck as he watched from the house? Was he feeling guilty for committing this crime?

Latimer’s supporters claim Tracy’s suffering was continuous and permanent and that there was no way she would ever find relief, so premeditated murder was the best option. But from what I’ve read, it is not quite so black-and-white. Witnesses called to trial testified that she would laugh and smile and didn’t show signs of unremitting agony. The multiple operations and constant care were stressful and painful for Tracy and her family, but that’s nothing unique to this case – ask just about anyone who’s worked with or cared for people with serious disabilities. Tracy had four operations and was due for a fifth. This isn’t unusual for someone with severe CP. The Latimers were more fortunate than some; they had care for their child outside the home (¶ 8). Shortly before Latimer killed his kid he was offered a chance to have Tracy placed in a group home (¶ 9). He declined that offer, claiming that her condition didn’t make that necessary. Almost two weeks before committing the crime, he already had a plan to kill Tracy.

The suffering she experienced was comparable to the suffering experienced by thousands of people with severe CP and other medical problems, and this is where I have issues with condoning Robert’s decision. Since his actions were supposedly merciful, can the parents of living children with severe disabilities be considered cruel for letting their children live? Robert Latimer maintains that killing Tracy was “the right thing to do” – does it not follow that letting a child with a severe and painful disability live is the wrong thing to do?

It’s not a fallacious ’slippery slope’ argument. I’m well aware that accepting Robert’s reasons and arguing that he should not have been punished does not mean every parent of every disabled child has the right to murder their kid. Obviously if a child is in pain and suffering but can verbally express a desire to live, the parents would be considered monsters if they used the child’s suffering to justify murdering the child. But in this case simply because the child couldn’t express a desire to live, some see it as acceptable or moral. Perhaps this idea has taken root in Canada; according to a well-known advocate for the disabled there’s been a significant increase in filicide in Canada since the Latimer trial.

There are enough people that I’ve seen in similar circumstances to Tracy – nonverbal but able to cry out to communicate discomfort and pain – that I wonder why we don’t see the same level of support (and 15 years of protests) when other parents kill their severely disabled children.

Recently a woman named Xuan Peng was convicted of killing her autistic daughter by drowning her in a bathtub. Like Latimer (prior to the autopsy findings), Peng denied being responsible. She still maintains that the child drowned in their bathtub accidentally. Peng’s husband has had said nothing but nice things about his wife – she was apparently a devoted mother and dedicated caregiver, and he maintains that she is innocent. Like CP, autism is thought to be incurable and children with autism do experience pain, both physical and emotional. Often they spend their whole lives cut off from the rest of society, communicating (if at all) with difficulty and often isolated from their peers. Programs and therapy can only go so far, and may not have helped at all. Medication is ineffective. Xuan Peng could have been trying to spare her child the pain of being autistic, much like Latimer tried to spare his child the pain of having Cerebral Palsy. Certainly nobody can understand what the Peng family was going through – perhaps this was as “justifiable” as Tracy’s death. Half of parents who murder their child genuinely believe it was for the child’s own good. So why isn’t anyone stepping up for Peng?

Ultimately there’s the question of whether death can be better than life. How can people say she’s better off dead? Nobody knows what happens when we die! There’s two basic possibilities: afterlife or oblivion, and neither of those possibilities can promise ‘relief.’

All we can know is that Robert Latimer deliberately took the life of someone with no concept of death and no way of communicating a preference. Now he says he did it because there was no magic pill to make her stop crying.

One of the biggest battles Mr. Latimer will wage is to identify the “pain medication” proposed by the government as an alternative to killing Tracy.

During Mr. Latimer’s trials, the prosecution said he could have controlled his daughter’s pain by giving her stronger pain medication instead of killing her. However, no such medication was ever identified, and a doctor testified that Tracy was already taking medication to reduce her seizures, and that mixing that with strong pain medication could have killed her.

Mr. Latimer said he believes the pain medication claims were outright fabrications. – Globe and Mail

What kind of excuse is that?

I wouldn’t wish Tracy’s life on anyone. I may prefer death if trapped in similar circumstances. But I’m not Tracy, neither are you, neither was Robert Latimer. So how can anybody act like this was an act of mercy when the person who was killed couldn’t express an opinion either way? Tracy had her own understanding of what life is – every living creature does – so comparing her life to my childhood and saying “Well, I’d rather be dead than have a life like that” is disingenuous to the extreme. But that’s what I hear in the media and ‘on the street’, so to speak.

We have a lying murderer’s word against a dead child’s silence, and I’m bothered by the fact that people accept Robert Latimer’s word.

As long as he conveniently believes he did the right thing, he should be in prison. Some proclaim that he’s not going to re-offend. I don’t agree that that’s the best way to determine the length of a prison sentence but putting that aside, what are people basing that assumption on? He doesn’t feel guilty – he did what he thought was morally right. Why wouldn’t he do it again, given the chance? As a condition of his parole, he’s not allowed to care for people with disabilities. I’m curious to see if his supporters take the next logical step and try to get that restriction rescinded. After all, he did the right thing, and he doesn’t feel remorseful.

And why should he feel remorse? Canadians have given him the support he needs to avoid confronting the fact that he murdered an innocent child. He can live in denial for the rest of his life.