thetorontobulletin.com Blog

High court approves police-state law

Let’s say you’re walking down Yonge Street with your backpack (or your briefcase or whatever) and a cop thinks (or claims to think) there’s a smell of pot coming from it.

The cop uses that superior sense of smell as probable cause to search your backpack. You can’t resist or you’ll find yourself in handcuffs, maybe Tasered, certainly brutalized to some degree and hauled off to 51 or 52 Division.

Inside the backpack the cop finds no pot, but does discover you’re carrying a box of small baggies you picked up at the dollar store. The backpack also contains your iPod, your laptop and thick pile of about $1,000 in small bills wrapped in a rubber band.

Plainly they’re the proceeds of crime. It’s clear to any official with a paranoid (or greedy) bone in his or her body that baggies are illegally used to package marijuana for sale and that the money, the electronics and any other luxury items you have in that backpack were acquired through the unlawful sale of pot.

Now you didn’t have any pot on you and, if after police search your residence—as they have a right to do under the probable-cause doctrine—they still don’t find any pot, you’re not out of the woods.

You won’t be charged with a crime because there’s no evidence that would hold up in court against you.

However, you can beat the rap but not the ride. They have a right to confiscate whatever they find that might have been bought with money from sales of pot that are inferred from the fact you have a box of baggies you planned to use to wrap your sandwiches.

They’ll grab and keep from your backpack that stack of bills that you’ve been saving for months in a box. You wrapped them in a rubber band because it was too thick to put in your wallet and you planned to deposit the cash in the bank that day.

Maybe they’ll find other things in your residence that should be taken from you as well because they could reasonably be inferred as the fruits of an illegal activity you haven’t even been charged with.

Baggies, cash, luxury items and a cop’s purported sensitive nose are all it takes for the police state to rob you of your belongings.

That’s been happening for years in the U.S., making it a police state in that sense even before the G.W. Bush regime cranked up the Orwellian-named Patriot Act after the Twin Towers catastrophe.

There it’s called Civil Forfeiture. It turns all levels of police into potential treasure hunters for their departments, which get a piece of the take, and their superior levels of government. Many police departments wallow in wealth funded by their money-grabbing civil forfeiture activities.

Just Google “abuses of civil forfeiture” to see the overwhelming numbers of atrocities it causes in the U.S.

Now the Supreme Court of Canada has given the provinces a green light to launch into these treasure hunts. It ruled that an Ontario law passed under the nasty regime of Mike Harris in 2001, the Civil Remedies Act (CRA), isn’t a bone-headed villain’s assault on the righteous concept of punishment only with proof of crime, but a great way to compensate all levels of government for their expenses in upholding the law.

It’s a tax on the guilty, the unlucky and the unpopular.

It’s a shame that Dalton McGuinty permitted the appeal of that CRA to continue. It’s clearly open to such horrid abuses as occur routinely in the U.S. Even though it’s deemed constitutional by Canada’s high court, it’s still evil and wrong.

Certainly no progressive (“liberal”) premier would permit such a law in Ontario. But McGuinty is a neocon. Likewise Stephen Harper, whose government recently called for stepped-up penalties against the Killer Weed, otherwise known as the largely harmless weed marijuana.

Neocons are lackeys of big business and enemies of the increasing poor class and of the diminishing middle class. Marijuana prohibition is the paragon of corporate abuse of the public good for selfish profit. Likewise alcohol.

Pot’s prohibition started with U.S. newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. He owned thousands of acres of pulpwood forests that couldn’t compete with hemp (marijuana’s other name) to make newsprint. Hemp is cheap, readily renewable and makes a superior paper product.

He funded the Reefer Madness furor in the federal government to outlaw hemp and fatten his bottom line. Newsprint sacrificed trees from then on.

Alcohol has a similar story. The culprit this time was J. D. Rockefeller, the U.S. oil mogul who saw Henry Ford making Model T automobiles that ran on alcohol. Alcohol is clean burning, has more octane than gasoline, doesn’t have to be refined in costly and polluting facilities, and doesn’t explode. But most threatening to a big-time oilman: Alcohol can be produced profitably and cheaply by many small operations. It’s a perfect fuel for cars.

Rocky gave what was then a monumental $4 million to the Women’s Christian Temperance League. The rest is Prohibition and the Roaring Twenties.

The marijuana prohibition continues to this day for several reasons, the least of which is its moderate to minimal effects on human health and psyche:

1. Marijuana is a profit-centre for governments strictly because it’s contraband. It’s a weed. If it weren’t illegal, it would be largely free. It accounts for the lion’s share of thieving civil forfeitures in the U.S. and was the test case that validated forfeiture in Canada.

2. Marijuana sales by government operatives fund covert activities by the U.S. The Iran-Contra scandal during the Ronald Reagan years is an example.

3. Some major corporations would suffer profit declines if hemp and pot were no longer prohibited. They gain by the pain prohibition causes almost everyone.

These are benefits created by decriminalizing marijuana:

1. Those with medical conditions that benefit from pot use would have better access to their palliative.

2. Harmful grow operations would no longer be profitable and would disappear.

3. Smuggling of pot would end and marijuana would cease to be a profit centre for organized crime.

4. Law enforcement would be freed to pursue more worthwhile duties.

The hazards of decriminalization are:

1. As with anything from booze to gambling, some will blow their brains out on pot and become problems to themselves and others.

2. Some will drive while under the influence. But they’re likely less of a hazard than drunk drivers.

3. As with alcohol, children will see that marijuana is socially sanctioned in certain situations and environments.

If a huge number of backyards, patios and sunny windows have marijuana plants growing, the commercial value of pot will be minimal. The novelty of forbidden fruit will have vanished, along with a fruitless prohibition that only enriches some huge corporations and bureaucrats. It will probably diminish the use of the Killer Weed.

Frank Touby

Destroy bird eggs to protect nature

While neither for or against the Toronto Island airport, I feel compelled to comment on a recent letter to the editor with respect to bird strikes and the Island airport.

I suggest that we look at the real problem and that is the birds themselves. The best solution would be to allow for the selective destruction of the birds eggs therefore limiting the numbers of cormorants, gulls and geese.

There are far too many of them already and they are primarily a nuisance. The cormorants annihilate the fish population in the areas where they congregate and their feces destroy the trees where they nest.

The gulls are not much better and as for the geese, just try to find a clear area on the grass anywhere in any of our waterfront parks.

They are not just a Toronto problem and the health risks posed by them are real concerns that affect more people and are much easier to deal with than an airport.

If you are against the airport that’s OK but don’t use the birds as an argument. The same can be said for the wind turbine issues that are currently on the table.

Writer’s name withheld by request

My Canadian quest for the American Dream

Like most immigrants, I came to Canada in search of the American Dream. The fact that I came from America to find it is purely incidental, because the America that I left had long been tossing in its troubled sleep.

Richard Nixon was trying his best to override the nation’s admirable principles and was simultaneously turning the dollar into a mere scrap of paper with no backing, controlled by some bankers instead of the U.S. Treasury.

His vice president, Baltimore mobster Spiro Agnew, was busily lining his pockets from influence sales, as was his wont.

They were amateurs compared to the recent Bush-Cheney characters, who perfected the now-fashionable Republican/Tory governing style of lying, cheating, scheming and thieving until they are driven from office by a swelling blister of victims.

Before Nixon, we had one of history’s most overrated nominal Democrats in the skirt-chasing persona of John Kennedy. He pulled frat-boy pranks like abandoning Cuban recruits to their deaths or capture in the midst of his plotted Bay of Pigs Invasion, appointed his kid brother Bobby who had no legal experience as Attorney General and started the Viet Nam War, which was eventually lost.

Fortunately for his legacy, he was assassinated and thus elevated to near sainthood by a stunned and grieving nation. His phatic inauguration speech line was widely quoted: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

As if people would eagerly do anything for a country that does nothing for them. Countries exist—in the American Dream—to do good for their citizens; then there is incentive for patriotism.

The Nixon regime was engaging in a war against the press (Agnew famously called us “nattering nabobs of negativism”) and the president was growing ever more threatening toward journalists.

So I sought the lofty American Dream in Canada. It’s based on the lately ignored U.S. Constitution which, when it’s adhered to, guarantees the right to life, liberty and “the pursuit of happiness.”

That’s a very broad brush. Canada doesn’t guarantee that in those words, but in spirit we do. And when the U.S. was weighted down by the totalitarian Bush regime, we retained our same spirit.

Using the 2001 attack against the World Trade Center as an excuse, the U.S. government violated its Constitution and abandoned its high ideals in what it falsely claimed were necessary atrocities to keep America safe. It created a police state.

It went to war in Iraq to satisfy the oil industry’s lust for illicit profits. It allowed itself to be ruled by monstrous corporations. When Bill Clinton deregulated the financial “industry,” the corporations set about lining their pockets and demolishing the U.S. economy with scams and toxic “assets.”

Flawed as he was, Jean Chrétien kept us out of the Iraq mess. And Paul Martin to his credit, refused to let the nation’s banks merge.

There’s absolutely no benefit to Canadians to have some colossal bank with a Canadian head office operating in foreign lands. National pride? Baloney. How about cutting the usurious rate on credit cards instead?

As for free trade, it’s a heartless swindle that serves the monster corporations with cheap labour. We lose jobs so foreigners can take them and CEOs can land multimillion-dollar bonuses. It’s no good for Canadians, only for the huge corporations. Sadly, they buy off many U.S. Democrats and Canadian Liberals as well their usual cabal of lackeys and lobbyists. So we lose our industries and livelihoods to “diversity.”

The American Dream, as most of us understand it, is a land where fair laws and fair play reign for all. Where you can become a billionaire, if you’re energetic, smart and provide true value.

Yet where billionaires can’t deprive others of equal opportunities through monopoly control or other unfair tactics.

We’re far from realizing the American Dream in Canada.

But for a long time we’ve been closer than America has been. Perhaps the Americans, with their new president and fewer NeoCons in Congress, will be able to renew that bright promise.

Perhaps, for a change, the Americans will light the way for us.

Frank Touby

Jury duty? Just shoot me

By James Dalziel
Maybe it sounds naïve, but I used to think being called up for jury duty was kind of an honour. Hey, it’s an opportunity to serve your community and the justice system.

Several years ago I sat on a jury-type “public institutions inspection panel” that got to drop in on places like the Don Jail and retirement homes – unannounced – and had amazingly free rein to check into how those places are run.

That was a worthwhile three-week effort that indicated, reassuringly, that those institutions were generally well run, without widespread abuse or waste. We told a judge exactly that in a detailed written report.

Sadly, my recent summons to show up for jury service at the provincial courthouse on University Avenue wasn’t nearly so beneficial to society or myself.

The experience was eye-opening in a very different way, as I sat around in a huge room with about 300 people for about four days – and didn’t get to hear a single case.

Quick at first

Starting on a Monday, things moved quickly enough at first. I was among the first half-dozen to get a chance to sit on a jury panel after names were drawn from a spinning drum.

But the defence lawyer in a cocaine-trafficking case declared “Challenge” and the Superior Court judge automatically sent me back into the big jury pool for future consideration.

One interesting wrinkle in my tryout was the initial selection of two jurors as “triers” – a concept I had never even heard of, though I’m told it has been around for years.

The triers first had a chance to give thumbs up or thumbs down, individually, on whether I and the others should sit on the jury panel. Not knowing me from Adam, they kindly gave me a free pass.

I was only asked whether I could treat the accused fairly, in consideration of his skin colour. I said something like, “Yes, I think so.”

The defence lawyer may have thought that was a lame answer. Or he didn’t like my looks. Or … who really knows? No reasons are required or given.

Now who’s prejudiced?

I suspect the lawyer and his client had a general idea of what sort of person they wanted on the jury from among the 20 initial prospects. Maybe it was even racial prejudice on their part. But I can only speculate.

Back in the pool, we had plenty of time to chat, read or stare at the wall.

I talked to one man who was accepted by the defence but rejected by his triers! Of course, his mind was racing, trying to figure out what the triers’ problem with him was.

Tuesday was a full day of reading books, old magazines and newspapers in the huge room. One group of about 70 potential jurors went through the hoops for another trial, and the rejectees dribbled back to the pool.

Wednesday and Thursday turned out to be half-day waiting sessions for everyone – again, just reading and chatting, some card-playing.

No TV, no free coffee or snacks for us 300 Spartans. No free lunch.

I began to think some prisoners were getting better treatment than we were.

Zero compensation

About a third of the jury pool had access to tables and carrels for their laptop computers. So they didn’t waste as much time as the rest of us.

Compensation? On a panel or not, jurors get nil for two weeks – not even bus fare. If you’re on a jury for 11 days, you start to receive all of $40 a day.

Someone has asked me if there are jury dodgers. Some of the courthouse staff people were like drill sergeants and they let us know early that failure to appear each day would result in an arrest warrant. Charming.

Still, they did seem open to hearing about severe hardship cases that would let some jurors defer service for a few months.

I really feel for those people who lost a lot of income during the week and had their private lives thrown out of whack. If the jury system is truly valued, I say we need to treat jury conscripts much better and more efficiently.

As it is now, it’s like having your name picked in a perverse kind of lottery. You lose!

Where’s the justice in that? If this system is so darned important, jurors should be compensated properly and be shown other forms of appreciation.

Tory thugs stack Island Airpork

Brutish John Baird, Stephen Harper’s transportation minister, has blessed a tobacco industry mouthpiece with a saddle on Toronto taxpayers’ backs as part of the disgraced Toronto Port Authority’s (TPA) board of directors.

Lobbyist Jeremy Adams, 36, a former insider in the disastrous Mike Harris provincial government, occupies a new seat Baird created to tilt the balance against Toronto taxpayers.

Adams was also campaign manager for Gentle Jim Flaherty, the ill-windbag from Oshawa, who’s hatred for this province was manifest when he was part of the Harris regime and given words when he told investors they’d be nuts to invest in Ontario.

Rightly dubbed the “Toronto Pork Authority,” the federal boondoggle passes out largesse to government insiders while holding down a key portion of our rightful parkland on Toronto Island and sucking the life out of Toronto’s struggling taxpayers.

It’s the only port authority in Canada that doesn’t cover its own expenses, contrary to federal law. It pays no city taxes and is tens of millions of dollars in arrears on paying its legitimate costs, according to city officials.

Started as a Liberal pork barrel by disgraced ex-MP Dennis Mills (dumped by voters in favour of Jack Layton), the TPA is an industrial mouse compared to the elephant-sized port authorities across Canada.

Mayor David Miller had early targeted it as ripe for takeover by the city to free taxpayers from the intrusion of first Liberal, now Tory, federal payouts to their loyalists and lackeys.

Baird merely responded by creating an extra board position to keep the pork flowing.

Bell hell: Phone company’s unsupportable support

While many Canadians are suffering from job losses and an uncertain economic future, homegrown Bell Canada is—some might say unpatriotically—exporting jobs to foreign lands. So unbeknownst to them, Canadians are unwillingly paying foreign aid by losing the chance to earn paycheques with a Canadian company in Canada.

You might more accurately think of it as Bell Philippines, or Bell India, because that’s where the jobs Canadians should be doing have been exported. And if they were doing a great job—better than Canadians could do—it might be understandable.

First of all, if you phone for help from Bell, you’ll discover thanks to a recorded message that there are an extraordinary number of folks needing help at this very instant and you’ll be next on a queue. You’ll be entertained by unwelcome orchestras, interspersed with gaily voiced commercials for Bell this or Bell that.

If you have a question about a bill, you’ll likely be sent to the Philippines where, also very likely, someone who speaks heavily accented approximations of English will take up an extraordinary amount of your time, not quite understand your question, and maybe not be able to explain Ma Bell’s mysteriously worded invoices.

If you get switched to another rep, as will probably happen, you’ll again have to go through the long dance of giving verification information to provide “security” you most likely don’t even care about.

If it’s a question about a charge to your credit card from Bell Credit Services, it could take the better part of an afternoon to get an answer—if at all. And if the Bell billing office rep happens to be in India, you also might hear rapid-fire explanations of various things you don’t ask about as if she/he is reading from a script. And you may be told there is no solution to your problem because you have failed to provide enough information, which of course is because you haven’t been provided with that.

Since Bell India-Philippines-Canada doesn’t know what any of its various tentacles are doing, you’ll find that Mobility has no idea about Sympatico and your phone service is oblivious to either of them.

If it’s technical support for Sympatico you seek, poor you, you’ll probably find yourself shunted off to India where another fast-speaker nicknamed Sidney or Elvis will gladly take up your time, explain things in strange terms and, if you’re lucky, NOT try and sell you some inappropriate additional service that you’ll have to spend another half-day trying to cancel and get removed from your bill.

Of course by that time, Sid or Elvis might have pocketed their commissions and moved on down the hall to another call centre on behalf on another hare-brained Canadian company that thinks cheap is all its customers deserve.

Are Canadians really this stupid?

Are Canadians really this stupid?

My blog is getting scores of replies from voters who claim their votes don’t count because a coalition is going to replace a minority Tory government.

That’s nuts. How dumb are these people?

If you voted for Stephen Harper or Jack Layton or that doofus Stephane Dion, your vote counted because all three are in Parliament. So what’s your gripe?

If you wanted Harper as PM—destructive though that is—you needed more help from other voters. He didn’t get a majority so he has no right to insist on keeping power and you have no right to claim he’s being robbed.

Have you forgotten that every player in this silly drama was put there by Canadian voters? Or are you just ideologues who slurp up every Tory lying point the cabal of Neocon villains dreams up?

Frank Touby

At last, an end to Harper and his gang

Editorial minds at National Post have adhered to the Neocon lying point that because the separatist Bloc Quebecois is backing the pending coalition government likely to replace the Tories, there’s something illegitimate about the pact.

That is pure baloney.

We are thankful that the Stephen Harper regime is being brought to an end and that the “democracy” the Tories claim is being violated by the coalition scheme is going to be better represented.

After all, despite another Tory lying point, most voters didn’t select Harper. More voters opted for a progressive government, not for the Bush-esque Harperites.

And so, if they can get it together, having a government that is sensitive to the needs of Canadians rather than the lusts of big corporations is a very appealing prospect.

Yes, it is ironic and a bit rattling that a boring and almost hallucinating loser like Stephane Dion would sit in the prime minister’s chair, even as a lame duck, but even that is better than the thugs and corporate slaves currently occupying the nation’s leadership.

So long as Dion keeps his word and gives up any leadership ambitions, we should be all right through May.

From my standpoint, it appears Bob Rae would be best in that chair because he has been a parliamentary chief, is an experienced leader, and his regime in Ontario wasn’t even close to as disastrous as some claim to remember. For one thing, he didn’t suck up to the unions, as you’d expect from a doctrinaire NDPer, and tackled a harsh economic climate.

However, so long as Dion keeps his own ego out of the fray and follows the advice of his party’s experts in choosing a cabinet, this should work.

At least it will work better than the alternative, which is more of the same Harper, Flaherty, Baird and company.

Frank Touby

Bellshit from your phone company

“System Access Fees are charged by all wireless companies to help pay for the network and the ongoing software, technology and other upgrades to that network. Generally, the higher the fee, the greater the opportunity to invest in network quality to enhance your experience. Just one more reason to choose Bell.”

Now doesn’t that make you GLAD to be ripped? The more you pay, the more you… what? Oh, well, it’s all to help the widows and orphans whose brokers have invested in the phone company.

That quote is from the Bell Canada website page describing Internet and Wireless gambles you can take. And don’t confuse this with a casino. With rate plans you guess how much you’ll be using and if you fall short, you’ll have to pay an outrageous fee for guessing wrong. Isn’t that a joy? The phone and Internet service providers make a casino for everyone to enjoy. Too bad they don’t pay back in cash when you guess right. You only get stung for less from your pocket that month.

Frank Touby

Business can’t regulate, so government must

There are only two ways in the civilized world that vital human services can be provided. And, yes, either way it means “regulation,” that voodoo word which creeps out Neocons and has been regarded by recent Canadian and American governments as the greatest evil since Karl Marx.

Yet this time, voters didn’t bite south of the 49th parallel border. And in Ottawa we’re seeing a slight change of heart (more likely a coming to senses) with new rules regulating meat packers in the wake of the Listeria scandal that resulted in deaths.

One would think that earlier Neocon Tories might have corrected that sort of nonsense after the tragedy of Walkerton, Ont., where deaths were caused by tainted water in the wake of deregulation under Premier Mike Harris.

Regulation is what civilization is all about. We hear the argument that you don’t want a bureaucrat telling you what kind of health care you can have, so you’ve got to privatize that.

Well, you certainly wouldn’t rather have an overpaid CEO telling you what you’re going to get, and how much you’ll pay him for it, would you?

It’s not as if there are great numbers of choices. Either you have a responsive and competent government regulating such things, or you are in the grip of people who have every incentive to give the least for the most.

When it comes to natural monopolies—created either by necessary huge economies of scale, or vital need—government must regulate. Servants of big business have no business in government.

That’s why such drones as lobbyists should be banished from government halls. They specialize in misleading politicians and civil servants on behalf of their clients rather than on what’s good for the public.

Regulation—effective, balanced and competent—is the job of government. Otherwise all it’s good for is raising armies because even the printing of money has been wrongly transferred over to the private sector, at least in the U.S.
Frank Touby

Empire-builders try to destroy Port Colborne hospital

Port Colborne is under threat of losing its hospital that residents largely paid for out of their own paycheques, essentially unaided by outside money, starting first with the loss of emergency services and culminating in the facility’s disappearance into a $1billion-mega hospital over 30 minutes away in St. Catherines, Ont.

It’s part of the theft that keeps stealing as a result of the Tory regime of Ontario ex-premier Mike Harris that ended in his disgrace as he walked away from the messes he and his handlers created.

Harris and his band of NeoCon villains included Niagara Tory Tim Hudak whose wife Deb Hutton was a Harris handler (Harris was a dumbbell polished up as a Tory figurehead to turn Ontario into a money watershed for special interests).

They merged the Port Colborne hospital into a Niagara Health System bureaucracy with grand designs of medical empire. To that end they propose a mega-hospital they quietly estimate at $300 million. Since you can triple any bureaucrat cost estimates to convert them into actual numbers, it amounts to a $1 billion facility.

Step one is to kill local emergency rooms, including Port Colborne’s despite a promise by the McGuinty government to keep them strong as shown in this press release published by the Liberals December 12, 2007:

PORT COLBORNE – The McGuinty government is improving access to emergency services in the Port Colborne area by approving a $400,000 renovation of the emergency department at Niagara Health System’s Port Colborne General Hospital site, Deputy Premier and Health and Long-Term Care Minister George Smitherman announced today.

“Our government is making sure that Port Colborne area residents have the best possible access to hospital emergency care,” said Kim Craitor, MPP for Niagara Falls.

It’s up to the McGuinty government now to take control of the situation and return the formerly self-sustaining Port Colborne hospital to the people who actually paid for it before it was merged into the NHS mess and saddled with a deficit not of Port Colborne’s making.

They would suffer deaths and serious injuries being shuttled to emergency facilities so far away in St. Catherines.

Frank Touby

Conservative used to mean something good

There was a time not too long ago when “conservative” stood for something honest and good. It described a political and social position that built North America. It meant honest labour was a high virtue, along with reasonable self reliance, concern for one’s fellow citizens, a sense of fairness for all and a proper reluctance to have government do for us what we could and should do for ourselves.

It demanded government effectively and honourably perform, produce or regulate services or products that only it should be responsible for; vital things that private sector operatives might use to unfairly penalize or exploit citizens. Such things as delivering mail, telecom and energy; raising an army; commissioning domestic police; schooling children; providing for the necessities of life.

“Conservative” meant something then. Something honourable and good and fair. That was before the NeoCons hijacked the term and perverted it to mean wrongly enriching the well connected and deluding the gullible into thinking they, too, can be connected if they string along.

Today it has taken on a sad veneer of provoking feelings of greed and jealousy against the unfortunate. “Conservative” has been appropriated by the warlords who control monster corporations. While it’s their royal prerogative to demand taxpayer bailout for their egregious blunders and outright evil greed, they obstruct public remediation of the condition the growing ranks of the unfortunate deserve: it is often those warlords who have created the misfortunes.

“Conservative” has become the label of Big Liars. They tell outrageous lies, repeatedly, expensively, stunning honest opponents into near silence; tricking voters into swallowing their bullshit. There’s a word for it now that came from the second stolen election for George W. Bush: Swiftboating. Look it up in Wikipedia. As a repeated, loud lie, it changed the story of a genuine Viet Nam war hero and made it seem as if he were an elite shirker. Like George W. Bush.

A group of super-wealthy reactionaries gathered up some Viet Nam vets, only one of whom served on Democrat candidate John Kerry’s boat, to accuse him of lying about his military service. No doubt some cash was involved for the old fellows to travel to political rallies and recall events the way they claimed. After all, it was sharks like T. Boone Pickens who were picking up the tab. All other vets who actually served with Kerry backed the official version of his heroic service.

Stunned into silence by such blatant, heavily financed lying, the Kerry campaign took the high road to nation-wrecking defeat: another four years for the “conservatives.”

In Canada, the Big Lie is a term like “accountable government” from the most secretive prime minister in decades. There are many more. The Big Lie is that private business is more efficient than properly run government activities and costs less.

The Big Lie is that Canada will continue to be an independent nation while giving away its living in free trade deals that only serve corporate warlords.

You get the idea. Lots of Big Lies, brashly and expensively proclaimed, that effectively go unchallenged. That’s what “conservative” has come to mean.

In Toronto, a Big Lie was that Amalgamation would be more cost effective than the existing government form. In Ontario, a Big Lie was that downloading provincial responsibilities onto municipalities would be “revenue neutral.”

The willful hallucination that big business and professions are the best watchdogs over themselves is another, deadly, Big Lie.

The Big Lie of all Big Lies that marks this perversion of the once-reputable term “Conservative” is that selfish private interests can best serve the tax-paying public. To that end, they do their utmost to make government fail, or appear to fail, so that a hapless citizenry will let the well connected rob them blind. In the U.S. it appears that their aim is to destroy the middle class and replace it with a quivering, fearful mass  obedient to the will of their elite betters. Thus they have privatized the armed forces with such as Blackwater, intend to use combat troops domestically, shipped the National Guard off to foreign wars and gutted the admirable U.S. Constitution that protects against an outlaw state.

The only chance for remediation is Barack Obama. We must pray he isn’t another David Miller-style dud.

FRANK TOUBY

NeoCons flop at the paddle

The NeoCons and the their competitors decided to engage in a boat race. Both teams practiced hard and long to reach their peak performance.

On the big day they felt ready. But their competitors won by a mile.

Afterward, the NeoCon team was discouraged by the loss.

Morale sagged. Corporate management decided that the reason for the crushing defeat had to be found, so a consulting firm was hired to investigate the problem and recommend corrective action.

The consultant’s finding: their competitors team had eight people rowing and one person steering; the NeoCon team had one person rowing and eight people steering.

After a year of study and millions spent analyzing the problem, the consultants concluded that too many people were steering and not enough were rowing on the NeoCon team. So as race day neared again the following year, the NeoCon team’s management structure was completely reorganized.

The new structure: four steering managers, three area steering managers, and a new performance review system for the person rowing the boat to provide work incentive.

The next year, their competitors won by two miles. Humiliated, the NeoCon honchos laid off the rower for poor performance.

And they gave the managers a bonus for discovering the problem.

Frank Touby

Will Canada croak on the ‘Frog Factor’?

Weep for the country. We have the unhappy choice between a French doofus and a yahoo-ized control freak who sides with George Bush to lead us.

The frog factor notwithstanding, Stéphane Dion attempts to tantalize voters with, wait for it, a brand new tax. Does it get any better than that, folks? If you’re a Tory or other fan of rule by big, unaccountable corporations, you’ve gotta be dancing right now.

The only thing between your hopes of wrecking Canada and gathering up the pieces for yourself and your pals is a guy who’s often shown with his arms askew in an “I don’t know” gesture which makes sense if you understand French culture but otherwise looks downright weird and incompetent.

Dion is likely as much a control freak as Harper. Otherwise his handlers would never let him get away with his weird vote-squelching plans, attitudes and gestures. He’s taking his own addled counsel and the only thing that might save the country is if Harper manages merely another minority and the Liberals can put Bob Rae in that spot Dion occupies so ineptly.

Frank Touby

King makes first-ever Toronto visit

Oboy! Oboy! Oboy! The King is coming to Toronto for the first time! Isn’t that absolutely fabulous!

I just learned this from Laura Creedon of a flacking outfit called Pilot PMR, which boasts, “…we generate results that stir people into action.”

See if this doesn’t stir you: The King is going to make his first Toronto appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival, accompanied by two pretty women.

And after that, The King will toss out the first pitch at a Blue Jays game.
How can you miss this?

The King, by the way, is someone with skinny white-stockinged legs wearing a porcelain head and royal robes with a Burger King medallion hanging from a gold chain around his/her neck.

Come one, come all. Who can miss this staggeringly innovative public relations ploy? Whoopie! The King is coming! The King is coming!
Frank Touby

Right-wingers recruit bozos

The Idiot Factor seems to be a hallmark of right-wing political strategists. They put a dimwit in a high office many storeys above his (mainly his) level of competence and let him twist in the wind while refuting commentators stating the obvious. But the dimmer the wit, the less pain that individual actually seems to feel.

Take Dan Quayle, for example. No doubt the Indiana blueblood reminded the senior George Bush of his own spastic, intellectually challenged youngest son when he picked the obviously mentally challenged Danny boy as vice president.

Among Quayle’s many, many howlers is: “…what a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful.” Or, “It’s time for the human race to enter the solar system.”

This from an American aristocrat who managed to land a law degree in the same manner, perhaps, as George W. Bush was graduated from Yale. One can only gawk in awe if either of these lowball characters could actually earn university degrees on their own unaided efforts.

In Canada we have the Tories’ dumb bunny in the form of Tony Clement, minister of health. Since they’re congenitally in favour of wrecking the public health system in order to parcel it off to corporations, he’s a perfect fit. While his country’s food supply was compromised by a deadly food-carried infection, Clement was glad-handing in Denver amongst the politicians and oilmen at the Democratic convention.

And of course we can’t forget the epitome of dopes the reactionaries like to place in high places: Mike Harris, ex-premier of Ontario. That buffoon came into power on the statement that he and his crew of villains “aren’t the government.” Just repairmen to “fix” the government.

He held on for 9 years until finally skipping off and leaving the mess to his deputy premier when it became too obvious that Ontario was a disaster thanks to Conservative Party neocon meddling.

Why are dumbos so handy for the right wing? Because they break things. Because they wreck things. Because they make government unworkable. Because they make it seem as if only the corporations can save us.

Frank Touby

Kevin, has Vista got your tongue?

Kevin Crull has an important offer for me. It’s got to be important because he’s a vice president of Bell in charge of residential services.

Because, as Kevin writes in his letter of August 14, he’s so happy that I essentially haven’t switched to Rogers or some other giant soulless corporation with a licence to print money granted by the Canadian Radio-Television Commission for my home phone service, that Kevin is making me a very special offer.

For one thing, I can go to any Starbucks still operating in Canada (650, according to Kevin) and connect my laptop, tablet computer or whatever to their Wi-Fi Internet for free instead of $8 a day if only I pay him $18 a month. I didn’t want to break the news that I can already do that at St. Lawrence Market, C’est What restaurant and a dozen other non-Starbucks coffee shops within a short walk of the heart of Downtown.

He mentions right off the bat that as a home phone customer I will get a special offer on the new enhanced wireless high-speed Internet. And he gives me a number 1 877 512-6704, where I can find out what this is all about.

Of course I already have this wireless high-speed Internet from Bell, but maybe it’s something better. I put on my USB headset, key the number into Skype, and after three tries and being hung up on twice, including one message that the 877 number I’m calling doesn’t exist, the guy answering the 877 number I called immediately asks for my B1 number. So he knows I’ve already got high-speed Internet from Bell.

Now I’m really curious. It’s gotta be something truly great if I already have the high-speed wireless Internet and am being offered a special deal on what I figure has got to be an even faster, surer, unencumbered Internet. And the offer includes “BONUS: Wireless Home Networking included ($79.95 value) [subject to 'Additional equipment required, including cables and adapters'] Free installation.”

But the guy on the phone doesn’t know what Kevin’s talking about. I figure Kevin’s got to know what he’s talking about, since he’s the guy who wrote the letter and he’s a vice-president, etc. The guy on the phone agrees. So he give me what he claims is Kevin’s number. He remarks that Kevin is a “really busy guy, so it could take some time to get him on the line” at 1 866 927-3656. But I’ve got a headset on, I’m calling on Skype, so I’m not tying up a phone line, and I can wait.

I do wait. First a female voice answers and tells me that all the lines are busy as they are helping other customers. But she sincerely assures me that my call is important. I’m convinced she means it. She really does sound sincere so when the line almost immediately starts to ring, I’m doubly sure. It rings 22 times before becoming a busy signal. I call back. Same thing happens.

I’m stymied. I don’t know what Internet glories I can get for a mere $18 a month ($17.95, but who’s counting?) that gives me a BONUS of $79.95 worth of Internet value. I hope Kevin reads this and gets back to me. He can call 416.929. 0011 Ext. 3. I’m waiting.

Of course another thought has crossed my mind and that is, I notice that Bell’s Sympatico Internet service is now Sympatico MSN. That means Microsoft. Is the curse of the much-hated Windows Vista visiting Bell?
Frank Touby

Human Wrongs Commissions assault Maclean’s magazine

When zombie-talking Barbara Hall was anointed commissioner of human rights for Ontario, it was to be expected she would do as she had done as mayor and botch things. Although she had the nerve to enter her name in the first post-conglomeration Toronto mayoral election—as did disgraced ex-councilor Tom Jakobek—she never had a chance to be returned to the job she did so poorly.

Sick at heart by the mess Mel Lastman had made in the wake of the Mike Harris curse of amalgamation against our city, Torontonians were not going to have another wingnut presiding.

Basically, Barbara doesn’t get most things. She is so bound up in political correctness that she sees only through a narrow slit. This has never been so evident as with her quixotic crusade against Maclean’s magazine for publishing a fair and thoughtful piece by Mark Steyn about Islam in Canada.Some Muslim students took unreasonable umbrage and demanded equal space in the newsmag to tout their own take on the issue. If that were the standard of “fairness” required of all publications, nobody would read them. They’d be full of equal-time,  equal-space rebuttals in a never-ending stream of protests and counter protests.

The remedy is and has always been to publish letters to the editor where objections and counter arguments can be aired. A few hundred well-selected words can state practically all arguments and certainly the objection the Muslim students had. Their complaint was the statement that Muslim immigrants have more children than others, that Muslim youth can be easily radicalized, that Islamists’ goal is to Islamicize the whole world and that violence isn’t out of the question for many Muslims in attempting that.

That can be denied or countered in very few words and it’s not necessary to devote a large part of a magazine to do so.

Into the fray jumps Barbara in her official capacity. Though she realizes she has no lawful authority to compel Maclean’s to do what the complainants demand, or even to rule on the matter, she nonetheless—and against all common decency which would have her keep her opinion to herself—broadcasts her predictable stance.

So the case has been moved to the Human Rights Commission in British Columbia, which does—wrongly—have the power to compel the media to perform according to the sometimes illicit demands of that sometimes hare-brained body.

Frank Touby

Sue an MP, stifle an MP

The hand-picked integrity official in dictator-in-waiting Steve Harper’s Ottawa has done him service in his quest to control or eliminate every snippet of information from or about his regime.

Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson was a product of the regime controlled by the Rightly Despised Brian Mulroney, who went down in flames after a decade of mismanaging the Canadian government.

Now there is suddenly the opportunity to serve both her old and new Tory benefactors, so the new conflict of interest and ethics commissioner has unintentionally rewarded both men.

Mulroney launched a lawsuit against Nova Scotia MP Robert Thibault for accusing him of taking money from weapons dealer Karlheinz Schreiber while Mulroney was still prime minister. He actually wasn’t the PM at the time Thibault mentioned, but merely an MP.

That scenario is of course embarrassing to Steve as well as Brian.

So the question quickly arose when Thibault, a member of the house ethics committee, tried to question Brian about this.

A Tory committee member objected that Thibault had a conflict of interest because he was being sued by Brian. So the matter went before Mary. Yes, the ethics commissioner proclaimed, Thibault—the bulldog questioner of Brian—would have to go back to the doghouse because he could possibly benefit personally in some manner because he was being sued.

What a beauty of a ruling! For Brian it shuts up a critical nuisance. For Steve, it further sets the principle that his vaunted promise of greater accountability is a cruel joke on the Canadian public. It permits the mere filing of a lawsuit to shut up an elected member of parliament.

Now in reality, Mary’s ruling was—how to say this gently—naïve. Her ruling was that the member, Thibault, had a possible personal gain from being able to question Brian, who was suing him, and therefore it would be unethical for him to speak.

Of course by that criterion any member who hoped to benefit his or her reelection by speaking out or asking a question would also be in conflict of interest. Since nearly all members seek to be reelected, nearly all members are in a near-perpetual state of conflict of interest.

Great work, Mary! You’ve clarified the issue magnificently.
Frank Touby

Aggravating Transit Union should be disbanded

For too many years Toronto residents have been abused by the Amalgamated Transit Union which rules over the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) with an iron fist.

These greedy, spoiled, overpaid drivers and mechanics of various sorts make outrageous demands and then hold the city’s residents to ransom by shutting down vital transit service and costing us all a fortune each time they go out.

Businesses suffer losses in the millions and riders also lose similar amounts.

This current outrage, a flash strike on a Friday night leaving many stranded Downtown, should be the fabled straw that breaks the union’s back. What’s most informative is that they had a sweetheart deal in this contract offer that ensured no similar transit agency in surrounding cities would be able to pay wokers more without these TTC bunch getting a boost even above that.

Toronto must get rid of these unionized scabs growing on the wounds they inflict on our city. It’s unconscionable that the provincial government hasn’t long ago declared transit workers a vital service and not entitled to strike.

One would have thought that a goofball like rightwing nutbar Mike Harris, when he was premier of Ontario for most of two terms, would have cracked down on such a union. But he was seemingly more interested in punishing Toronto than he was in doing us any good. So the net result is the Harris Tory years were a complete wash that hurt Toronto perhaps irreparably.

But for today, one must consider seriously what the culture of TTC workers has metastasized into. Perhaps most should be replaced with honourable workers and definitely with those not allied with a union and not permitted to wreck the city by going on strike.

Frank Touby

The benefits of being truthfully unethical

“I confess! I’ve had adulterous relationships with persons of both sexes, taken every illegal drug known to personkind, overindulged in booze, beaten my kids, been cruel to animals, discriminated against persons because of their race-gender-disability-creed-sexual orientation and I don’t do any of that stuff any more.”

That’s the new opening line to political victory speeches in the U.S. It’s a preemptive strike against predatory prosecutors out to make names for themselves by bringing down a politician. It’s the answer to muck-raking journalists out to aggrandize themselves and plump up their careers by siccing the dogs of prosecution on targets they designate.

It’s no longer enough to do as Bill Clinton did and admit in advance to taking a joint in his mouth without inhaling. And it’s no longer expected for one to deny dalliances, as did Bill when Monica Lewinsky took his joint in her mouth without swallowing. DNA on her frock from such a telltale sample trumped his denial.

Nowadays it’s political protocol to be human. To be stupid. To be flawed. To be George W. Bush. He’ll be so missed when he’s gone. His daddy George Sr. had a stand-in for Dubya in his own vice president: Dan Quayle. Dubya couldn’t find anyone dumber than he is, so he had to settle for a guy who’s really evil.

Can’t wait to hear the confessions and malapropisms of the new occupants in the White House. Will they confess that they are actually reptilian alien shape shifters, part of an Illuminati plot to stupefy humankind? Or will they just start another war to enrich their corporate masters?

Frank Touby

Fart-mouth Flaherty makes wind

Steve Harper’s typical type of choice for a finance minister, Jim Flaherty, is farting out his neocon solutions for the disaster heading Ontario’s way thanks to his own feckless mishandling of the federal budget. The miniature blowhard is criticizing Ontario’s new budget for not giving tax breaks to big business.

Having given federal tax breaks to his big business pals and taken surplus funds that should be aiding provinces in need and fixing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure—just to pay down debt at cheap interest rates—the diminutive buffoon is demanding that Ontario slash its revenue from business.

In Flaherty’s addled brain the less businesses pay in taxes, the more businesses will pay in taxes.

That’s because like other lackeys of big business, he promotes the big lie that the more corporations make, the more they’ll spend. And that will trickle down the economic ladder. They pee, we get to drink.

In reality, the more they make, the more Ontarians they’ll lay off so they can spend offshore where NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) sent Ontario’s jobs. And certainly the more they’ll pay their elite CEOs in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Like so many little creeps, Flaherty seems to suffer from the small-man syndrome: a bandy rooster always ready to battle better and bigger people. Some small persons are big men and women in all aspects of their lives.

Flaherty is a dangerous twerp. Neocons don’t accept taxes because they don’t care for the common good. It’s all about them: the virtue of selfishness. Everyone else can screw themselves.

Frank Touby

NAFTA is a disaster

It’s not hard to understand why the Toronto Star opines in an editorial that NAFTA (North America Free Trade Act) has been a good thing for Canada. The Star is a big business and it’s strictly for big business that NAFTA was invented.

For most of us, NAFTA is an unmitigated disaster. It has forced the loss of our manufacturing sector in Ontario to be off-loaded to Mexico and, inevitably, to China. Bill Clinton, when he was president, made sure China got the lion’s share of North American jobs. He was the one who gave China Most Favored Nations status with the U.S. (and thus, through NAFTA, with Canada).

The next imminent danger is that Canada will be forced to give up our precious water rights to multinational companies who can drain our lakes and destroy our resources.

That’s NAFTA. It’s wrong and should be abandoned.

Frank Touby

Glory-hound prosecutors disgrace justice

Eliot Spitzer was brought down by the same sort of scum he once was when he romped roughshod over people as a U.S. prosecutor. It’s the same sort of glory hound who persecuted bumptious Conrad Black, a poor rich boy who committed no offence aside from arrogance and is now in prison.

They’re the same sort of self-serving swine as those who framed O. J. Simpson and were defeated by a jury who saw through their contrivances. But O.J.’s fame-monger prosecutors ended up millionaires as authors and TV personalities, which took the sting off their rightful defeat in front of the jury. (That’s not to opine whether O.J. actually did the deed. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. The point is the prosecutors never had a case and knew damn well they had no case but knew they’d become celebrities for trying.)

Glory-seeking prosecutors are rife in North America, and that includes Mexico, which one might rightly argue is a band of warlords rather than a real nation with an honest legal system.

One might also argue that in large part there is no honourable system of justice in Canada or the U.S. After all, in Mexico even a peasant can avoid the excesses of the system with a simple bribe to bolster the wallet of an underpaid cop who is expected in that culture to use his franchise to extort enough to live on. It’s a kind of random tax.

Because theirs is a culture of family and connections, not laws, Mexicans have an innate understanding of such realities. (North Americans can’t get the same benefit unless they’re wealthy or well connected and tuned in to the mysteries of power.)

North Americans are led to believe in rule of law and that’s what we expect. Too often we don’t get that.

We get public officials bounty hunting celebrities or persons they dislike.

Spitzer, a bigheaded bozo, actually did that to prostitution rings of the very sort he patronized. Being a Democrat under the evil Republican regime that currently rules America, Spitzer should have kept it in his pants. He had to know they’d be hunting him down.

And of course the public would learn of his humiliation by the very slime who were prosecuting him and leaked the information to the media. Have they committed an offence? If so, they’ll never be punished for it in the American “system” of justice, which too often is neither systematic nor just.

For that matter, is anyone seriously thinking that disgraced and fired ex-RCMP boss Giuliano Zaccardelli will face criminal charges for disclosing during an election that an investigation was underway that might reflect badly on the Liberals and thus support the Tory regime of Canada’s dictator wannabe, Steve Harper? It’s axiomatic that those who don’t deserve to carry a badge eagerly support repressive measures and regimes. Surely a police official trying to influence an election is guilty of something more than being fired.

And surely prosecutors who pander to their own interests at the expense of persons wrongly accused are also guilty of something. But when does the law play a role?

Spitzer was brought down by another of his ilk in an unjust manner. That’s pretty close to the Mexican way of doing things. Too damn close for comfort.

Frank Touby

Drug ‘war’ funds covert operations

To fund its meddling in the internal affairs of other nations, the United States conducts the War on Drugs. The purpose is to enable American covert operatives to collect off-budget funds for those purposes.

After all, if you’re going to have, say, the CIA stick to its published budget, a foreign intelligence service would be able to guess from those figures what initiatives CIA might be taking at what prices. Clearly there have to be off-budget funds.

Making certain psychoactive and recreational drugs illegal is the most productive way to garner a dependable flow of narco-dollars into America’s covert-opps coffers.

We learned that from the Reagan Administration’s intrusions into Nicaragua that U.S. operatives cooperate with drug cartels.

Were it not for their being illegal, the majority of drugs would be practically worthless.

Marijuana, for instance, is a plant that can spread like the weed that it is. The only reason it costs money is that it’s illegal to grow or possess it.

So the War on Drugs is in place not to substantiate the sanctimonious moralizing its operatives pretend to believe, but to keep prices high so the government can break its own laws to fund secret operations.

Frank Touby

Black’s prosecutors are a disgrace

By Frank Touby

The only thing worse than the taxman is a U.S. prosecutor hot to make a name for him or herself.

That’s the case with showbizzy U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, persecutor of Conrad Black and his three co-accused in the case where no crime was committed.

Not to worry. Fitzgerald, who is making a name for himself by bringing down the super rich and CEOs, doesn’t require actual guilt in order to make a case stick.

Using the obscene powers of his office, along with taxpayers’ money, he and his band can trump up enough of a case to get a conviction from a jury on nearly anything he wants.

He did that in the case of Black, et al. He even went one farther with Black and got him wrongly convicted of obstruction of justice, which could put him away for 20 years…in essence, a life sentence.

Get a load of this presentation Fitzgerald and gang made before the sentencing judge to try and put Black away for life: “the relevant-conduct analysis should consider not only convicted conduct, but also acquitted and uncharged criminal conduct that is proved by a preponderance of evidence.”

What chutzpah! Just being acquitted isn’t enough of a signal to Fitzgerald that his case fell short. He wants to imprison Black for things he was acquitted of doing or wasn’t even charged with doing!

Unbelievable? Not in George W. Bush’s America.

Fitzgerald and crew have no discernable consciences and continue to rail at the judge to throw the book at Black and friends.

This is despite the fact that no crime was committed. The defendants sold their personal pledges not to compete with companies purchasing newspaper assets from the pubic company they headed, Hollinger International.

Nothing wrong with that. Hollinger shareholders aren’t entitled to revenue from such a transaction any more than they would be if Black and the others moonlighted with the purchasers for wages.

And the obstruction of justice? Utter bullshit. Black was nailed for removing documents the prosecution had already seen and copied. And that was in Canada. Further, he says hadn’t seen a fax sent to him that day by the U.S. prosecutors insisting he not remove the documents.

Prosecutors have the big advantage in the U.S. of being the last voice a jury hears before deliberating.

In this Chicago farce of a trial, the defense concluded on a Friday. That was a bad tactic because the prosecutors had all weekend for the jurors to forget much of what they were told. Thus, on the Monday, jurors got an earful all the long day from prosecutors.

On most of the charges, they found the defendants not guilty. But because the nice young people who were so intently proclaiming that crime had been committed seemed so sincere, the jurors did convict on some minor points.

No crime had been committed. Conrad Black has been persecuted because he’s often portrayed as a bombastic and arrogant rich guy.

Maybe he is. Maybe not. I don’t know him. But it’s not crime. Still, the poor bastard who has already been brought to the possible brink of bankruptcy is very likely going to be imprisoned.

Death penalty back on the table?

Only the lowest form of life would advocate a penalty imposed by flawed courts that can’t be reversed if it’s later discovered to have been wrongly imposed.

That’s all you need to know for any debate on the death penalty.

It is advocated by such murderous swine as George (Dubya) Bush and his deadly little brother Jeb. While nobody can accuse Dubya of being smart—mitigating perhaps some of his evil—it certainly doesn’t excuse smarter advocates of such legalized murder. The older Bush brother sent over 130 people to their deaths in redneck Texas during his five years as governor. A third of them had been represented by lawyers who were later disbarred or otherwise sanctioned. The law of averages would hold that some innocent people were wrongly killed by Dubya Bush.

The boneheaded creep even mocked a woman he put to death, pursing his lips in imitation and saying, “Please, don’t kill me.”

Brother Jeb in Florida merely killed 17 or so.

In Canada we have a man much smarter than Dubya—and thus more to be dreaded—who wants to bring back the death penalty which, like most civilized nations, Canada has abandoned.

That villain is Steve Harper. He refused to seek clemency for a Canadian on death row in the U.S., which traditionally is done by Canadian prime ministers to support our nation’s revulsion over the death penalty.

As author Arthur Weinreb writes in canadafreepress.com: “At a time when we can see, with a scientific certainty, that some convicted killers could not have done the crime, it is hard to believe that the death penalty will ever make a comeback.”

But Steve and his ideological bedfellows are quite comfortable, it seems, with killing innocent people as collateral damage.

The murder of Lord Black

By Frank Touby

It is said the lowest form of legal life is the ambulance-chasing lawyer. That’s certainly low. But there are lower forms and they set out to destroy people for their own aggrandizement. Nobody can be more evil than they are.

Many prosecutors fall into this category of low-life human beings with law degrees. Given the power and resources of the state, especially in the U.S., they can trump up charges by seducing a grand jury they control to indict, deny the accused access to his or her own money for legal defence, blackmail witnesses into testifying for the prosecution, then mislead a jury into convicting where no crime has been committed by the defendant.

We saw that in the trial of Conrad Black, et al, but Canadians are in some cases also victimized by grandstanding prosecutors looking for glory and conviction stars on their career report cards. You see that all the time in Canadian courts where bullyboy prosecutors refuse to review or retry cases of wrongly convicted defendants despite new and indisputable evidence that would reverse convictions.

Part of the problem is that prosecutors are litigation lawyers and to that breed of lawyers, winning is everything. Yet they are supposed to seek justice and defer to the rule of that blindfolded lady holding the scales. But tell that to a pugnacious street brawler with a law degree who sees his career highlighted by some high-profile successes against the wealthy.

Then show that prosecutor an arrogant, puffed-up (sorry Conrad) foreigner—a Thesaurus-sucking English lord thumbing his nose at the notion he could be guilty of wrongdoing—and he gets his hackles up. When that same lord of all but good manners insults the prosecutor’s own bailiwick, it’s killing time. To hell with justice. Convict the sexagenarian sonofabitch! Let him die in detention! Let him croak in confinement! Take away everything he owns and leave his wife penniless!

At the press conference after Black’s wrongful conviction, his main persecutor, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, told reporters this isn’t a “basketball game.” He didn’t want his team’s victory to be considered like a sporting event. But that’s exactly what it replicates, complete with statistics like 97% convictions, all reflecting on the great-but-humble Fitzgerald himself. In ancient Rome it might have been finished off in the coliseum with a cage full of lions and Fitzgerald and team wearing laurel wreaths.

Under American law, despite the much-ignored but heavily proclaimed doctrine of innocent until proven guilty, occasionally justice occurs. But the state, represented by prosecutors, has every instrument to insure justice is rarely achieved unless the state wins the case. The state gets the last word.

In Conrad’s trial, an entire court day was taken up after the weekend with the prosecution laying out the entire set of accusations. Two days had passed since jurors had heard from the defence and now the last long words they would hear would be from the prosecutors. It is blatantly unfair, but prosecutors are allowed final say because of the pretense of innocence before conviction.

To balance the scenario even more toward the state, anyone declared guilty suddenly becomes guilty and must act that way or at least pretend to. Punishment for not immediately assuming a contrite posture includes even harsher sentencing, black marks against early release and other tortures a legalistic bureaucracy can invent.

For a guy like Conrad whose reputation as a proponent of truth is on the line, that’s an impossible posture for him to assume. It means accepting that the state didn’t do wrong, which it so clearly did. He will be in the same pickle as other innocent convicts: officially viewed as unrepentant and thus not deserving of any breaks or sentence reductions unless he abandons his principles.

The prosecutors so befuddled the jurors with their sleight of hand and mouth to contrive crimes where none existed, jurors ended up convicting Mark Kipnis when, according to juror Monica Prince quoted in Toronto Star, they realized he was innocent. Yet they were so caught up in prosecutorial bullshit that they lumped him along with everyone else and made the man they called “Saint Mark” a felon along with the rest. (Kipnis refued to let the prosecutors extort a plea from him to turn coat and thus was lumped in among those who actually did receive millions of dollars in absolutely above-board transactions.) That’s U.S. justice? It’s not justice at all, since the very concept is perverted by such notions as “sending a message” to other potential violators in similar straits by draconian punishments that don’t fit the crime. Sending a message to others has nothing to do with the individual justice that is supposed to be meted out in each separate case.

Now those Conrad called his tormentors, the U.S. attorney’s office, a.k.a. Fitzpatrick, get to scream and shout that Conrad should never be released from prison alive and should forfeit every penny he has.

You’d think Conrad had insulted the Emir of Batashland or some other such third-world cesspool instead of attracting the ire of a Chicago prosecutor whose team of young turds managed to lose most of the charges they laid. Nine of the 13 charges were acquittals for Black and 10 were acquittals for his co-accused.

The average murder term served by U.S. killers is 8.5 years. Black’s prosecutors didn’t present a single victim in all those weeks of trial.

Port Authority’s spring frolics

By Frank Touby

It is an annual ritual that former Liberal MP Dennis Mills condemned city residents to endure each year when the perennial backbencher talked the Jean Chretien government into remaking the failed Toronto Harbour Commission into a federal port authority, against all common sense, common decency and, as it turns out, the law of the land. To add to his disgrace as a useless prime minister, Paul Martin failed to disband what has become the waterfront rogue known as the Toronto Port Authority, a money-losing agency that is by law supposed to earn its keep. It never has.

And, to add to his growing disgraces, Steve, the current PM, aided by his Transportation bozo Loose Larry Cannon, breathed entirely new life into the pork barrel agency with a consultant’s “study” that concluded all is well at TPA. So the agency that survives by funds from lawsuits against a formerly round-heeled city government, by avoiding paying for city services it uses, and from Paul Martin’s $32 million largesse, continues its seeming mission of passing out taxpayer money to contractors and consultants—the traditional role of a pork barrel.

The June 12 ritual was staged at the Royal York; a passion play set in a proscribed time period of not more than 90 minutes. It plays annually with virtually few changes. It’s called the Annual General Meeting of the Toronto Port Authority.

In attendance, beyond those employees and supplicants who have to be there, is an unappreciative audience of mainly Island and waterfront dwellers in various stages of outrage, fully committed to the demise of TPA and its noisy acolyte, Porter airline, which has as its logo another urban pest, the raccoon.

If the AGM were to go on all day, the dissenters would occupy the entire time asking questions TPA doesn’t want to answer and demanding it shut down and let the city run the laughably miniscule Port of Toronto.

So the TPA’s strategy is to take up as much time as possible with minutiae and diversions—and conducting it’s legitimate required AGM business—leaving only 45 minutes to endure the taunts and ridicule that accompany most questions.

First came 10 minutes of hearing from a microphone-bearing outsider acting as facilitator and laying out the ground rules. Then from the sole board member, Michele McCarthy, who is of course also the board chairwoman, we got lines like this: “Everything we do at the Toronto Port Authority is to protect and enhance the amazing resources and features of our waterfront for our children, and your children.” It was an inkling of the theme of TPA’s advertising and public relations campaign to come.

She then chugged along praising and listing the names and credentials of various superb-sounding persons associated with TPA. That all took a half hour off the clock.

Co-opting a Grade 6 class at Market Lane Public School on The Esplanade, whose presence also consumed some time, the six rows of seats directly in front of the TPA presenters were filled with the school kids front and centre and presented as TPA’s target audience to achieve local respectability, which its many local enemies say is totally lacking.

That also insulated rowdier members of the crowd who would otherwise be within spitting distance of the three main performers, plus it consumed precious minutes explaining how wonderful it was that the kids would be asked to participate in an essay writing contest aimed at somehow confusing TPA with waterfront revitalization.

TPA didn’t select kids from the Island school, no doubt because it would probably be difficult to find many who would participate in what the chronically money-losing federal agency hopes will whitewash TPA’s image and create a mythical constructive role for it as a contributor to waterfront excellence.

That initiative came as a result of top-dollar public relations consulting firm Pollara’s recommendations that the agency launch a PR campaign to have TPA viewed as part of waterfront regeneration, something a telephone poll of 500 Torontonians indicated the public has no idea is true. In fact, overwhelmingly, most don’t associate TPA with waterfront regeneration and seemingly most who reside on the waterfront swear it’s a lie, judging from their numbers raucously present during a workday in the hotel’s 18th-floor meeting room. TPA’s regular AGM business was handled during the 90 minutes.

It included a report that overall expenses declined while operating revenues rose in the year just ended. Left out of the literature package handed out beforehand was that the port authority lost a record amount of money during that same period.

The show stopped while the children left their seats, went to the rear for a photo op, then departed for their school.

Heading up the show is charming and smart Lisa Raitt, CEO of the nuisance, who dodges with all the good humour at her command the insults that spurt from the assemblage. She dekes hecklers with the skill of a stand-up comic, tutored perhaps by her husband who is one at Second City. Raitt is well into the 6-digit annual pay range and from TPA’s standpoint is probably a bargain at whatever she is paid. Raitt is marvelously adept at deflecting criticism and spinning reasonable excuses for seemingly inexcusable activities. She also has her port authority technical and regulatory facts down pat.

But before the chuckling throng got to assault Raitt in this annual spring comedy, they were tossed a tasty morsel in the form of a suit from Polara who was there with a pointer and a slide show to set up a skit that TPA is a waterfront revitalizer that deserves credit for the features people who visit the waterfront enjoy, and that is misunderstood by most Torontonians, but not badly thought of. Generally, the audience enjoyed his show and laughed a lot throughout, tossing out barbs as the quixotic statistics were presented.

Then came the pièce de résistance Ms. Raitt herself.

She took the pointer and whisked through a slide show, ticking some more time off the clock as she addressed a list of complaints and their resolutions.

But the crowd would still get their full dose of Lisa Raitt because despite the various time-consuming features, there were still about 50 minutes left. And Raitt was ready.

She endured outbursts, allegations and affronts with élan. She avoided rolling her eyes as in past performances and her rare facial response to a prolonged assault was confined to raising her eyes to the skies and a making brief twist of mouth.

A question about the fate of the Music Garden on the waterfront was skillfully deflected. It had to do with the racket produced by Porter air and other aircraft landing, taxiing and taking off at the Island airport. It could end the summer music programs, especially if TPA’s dream of a busy airport occurs.

Raitt said if Porter, as widely predicted bites the dust, TPA will seek out other carriers to keep the airport in operation.

She said TPA has “no plans” to exercise an unwise easement the Chretien and Martin regimes granted in Little Norway Park which would wipe out the Norwegian monument and the baseball field in the heavily used Bathurst Quay neighbourhood park.

But the city plans to narrow Lower Bathurst to two lanes to accommodate safe pedestrian access across the street, which interferes with port authority ambitions for a wide street with queuing lanes. The threat of exercising the easement could rob the community of the safe passage across the street that residents and their councilor Adam Vaughan desire.

Conrad Black is not guilty

As I watch the prosecutorial abuse of my fellow media mogul, Lord Black of Crossharbour, it is apparent how that stilted skit we call a justice system plays to the very stages we erect.

Lord Black, or Conrad as I know him, has been targeted by a showbiz prosecutor in the States and it’s interesting to observe the mechanics of this operation. Many prosecutors in the U.S. and Canada are theatrical players of one sort or another, seeking fame by afflicting the famous to enhance their own dour personages, or to exhibit the outgoing sides of their personalities in an action format where they’re in charge.

Of course there are prosecutors who have great integrity and who truly seek justice. One wonders if that’s the case with Conrad’s tormentors.

Though the trial is far from over and there are still testimonies to be heard, the just verdict seems already evident, if unpleasant to the eyes of those who like to see the mighty topple: Like O.J. Simpson, Conrad was framed.

True, there were no cops carrying blood samples to various crime scenes as in the O.J. debacle. No police-department “criminalists” were dozily contaminating the evidence so as to make it unusable in any fair court.

Conrad’s prosecutors merely went for the low-hanging fruit, threatening those celebrities who had been hired at huge prices to be the watchdogs over Conrad’s corporate affairs, and who fell asleep on the job.

Having heard a complaint from a shareholder that Conrad and his associate David Radler were scooping funds that should belong to shareholders, Chicago’s celebrity prosecutor pounced.

Imagine: the two main individuals responsible for creating a massive lucrative newspaper empire sold off their rights to do so again in competition with the party who had just purchased their holdings. As individuals, Conrad and David, had a perfect right to turn around and use their well-honed skills and connections to get back into the business and go head on against those who were purchasing Hollinger’s assets.

Why should Hollinger’s public shareholders be entitled to a stake in payments to prevent those two (commercially speaking) potentially dangerous individuals from personally starting up a business in competition with those purchasing Hollinger’s assets? They aren’t so entitled. It’s simple logic.

So that should be the end of the matter. But no. There are celebrities to roast and a bigger stage upon which to prance in promotion of currently fashionable good corporate governance.

And thus it was that David Radler was hauled up in front of a Chicago grand jury and threatened with centuries in America’s cruel prisons unless he could place the neck of a celebrity in the noose.

Who better than my fellow publisher, the obscenely rich, Thesaurus-spouting, pompous, anti-democratic aristocrat, too-damn-smart Conrad Black?

So Radler, or “Rattler” as he was unaffectionately known amongst the minions who slaved beneath him at the Chicago Sun-Times and other journals, was terrorized enough to sign up for a couple of years in the joint if he’d rat on Conrad. And rat he did. We’ll hear the echoes of this betrayal in coming weeks as David spins in the wind while Conrad’s prosecutors attempt to cloak their prize witness with credibility.

That’s a monumental task, considering they don’t have a case to begin with and their panicked star witness has no guaranteed deal and his eventual return to freedom is utterly dependent on his putting on a convincing show favouring the prosecution.

Then the prosecutors sought to scare the daylights out of Hollinger’s blue-ribbon audit committee and recruit them against Conrad. More celebrities to flash about. They were a target because the audit committee is responsible for ensuring a corporation’s business affairs and reporting relationships with government and its shareholders are above board.

If they were somehow lax in their performance of their auditing duties—a few hours a year for which these celebrities were each paid a plumber’s annual wage—they could at best be held civilly liable to Hollinger shareholders. At worst, they could be charged with criminal offences such as allegations of conspiracy.

They’d better have sided with the prosecutors and tell the tale they all told. The prosecutors still hold an axe over the heads of former U.S. Ambassador Richard Burt, famed economist Marie-Josée Kravis and ex-Illinois Gov. Big Jim Thompson, just as they have a noose around David Radler’s Adam’s apple.

The trio’s tales were identical: None of them saw or willingly signed off on the allegedly improper non-compete payments; none of them remembered much, but all remembered that Conrad and David were so tight together they practically finished each other’s sentences. Not that they had seen David and Conrad together outside the board room where the pair would have been expected to be together on the same page in front of the audit committee.

It was clear that all three board turncoats had been prompted by the prosecution as to what the story line is. That became crystal clear when, at the end of his addled testimony, Thompson reportedly walked over to the prosecution table, shook their hands and gave them the thumbs-up sign.

Prosecutors no doubt were counting on the envy factor to play a strong role in getting a working-class jury to punish the dickens out of these unbelievably rich people by hoisting up the yardarm an adjective-spouting historian with a lavish wife and a lifestyle only achievable in romance novels.

They also likely were counting on numbing jurors into coma with accounting technicalities in hopes it might cause them to throw up their hands and just believe the experts. It didn’t work with the O.J. jurors in those hours of boring DNA testimony and it won’t likely work here.

Before the prosecutors’ three hostages had testified jurors were already getting glazed eyefuls of how all the pertinent information about the alleged theft-by-non-compete deal violated this and that beancounting protocol.

But more to the point, they were getting the very accurate picture of how Conrad had hired top-of-the-line advisors from major law and accounting firms—and had put together a blue-ribbon board of directors.

At this point I have to confess that although we’re both publishing entrepreneurs at opposite ends of the spectrum, aside from my possessing a Thesaurus I know only fractionally and an admiration for the writing of his brilliant and seductive wife, Barbara Amiel, Conrad and I share little else in common. Oh, and we’re both Catholic.

Perhaps that latter point helps me understand why Conrad remains bullheaded in face of such daunting brute prosecutorial power. The temptation to do a Radler must be strong, though there is no one Conrad can pull the plug on except himself. We Catholics believe that one can only commit a sin through intent. An inadvertent or ignorant act isn’t a sin.

But is it a crime? Probably doesn’t matter in this case. I think the prosecutors are going to have to show Conrad as a sinner in this situation, not just an inadvertent criminal. The jury will likely demand a very strict construction of the theft scenario that the prosecution isn’t able to erect.

Conrad hired seemingly the best professional advice in the market and had every right to depend on it. Jurors can see that. They’ve probably been screwed over by more professionals in their lives than Conrad has. This poor rich guy can’t get treated any better than we are even with all his fancy trappings.

And here are these prosecutors who ought to know better, trying to make a federal case out of a guy whose consultants let him down and who merely sold what he had a perfect right to sell: his personal pledge not to compete against purchasers of some Hollinger properties the corporation sold.

The prosecutors look like shits.

Frank Touby

Loose Larry Cannon, the Great Porker

Loose Larry Cannon is Canada’s transport minister. So Canada is in big trouble.
Loose Larry, you see, is the top guy for nearly all that moves in this country and he thinks things are just fine.

For instance, in Larry’s airports there have been at least one gang of crooks on his payroll who’ve been arrested for allegedly stealing from passengers’ luggage both going in and out of Toronto’s Pearson Airport.

When you consider that, by his department’s admission, on any given day only about 2% of airport workers in this thieves paradise are given any security checks, you’ve got to wonder why Al Qaeda haven’t set up shop at this gateway to the Great Satan, as Ayatollah Khomeini once dubbed the United States.

Meanwhile the Great Porker, as Toronto waterfront advocates now dub Loose Larry, knows how to turn a Liberal pork barrel into a Tory pork barrel: just stage a “study,” then start slurping at the Toronto Port Authority trough like the Grits before you.

Yummie!

Frank Touby

Newspapers pimp like biker gangs

It is disillusioning how cruel and degrading some seemingly ethical media corporations will be to snag a buck. Like outlaw biker gangs, they will even stoop—for money—to enable slavery, torture and child prostitution.

Turn to the back pages of Now, or Toronto Star’s sister publication Eye, or Quebecor’s Toronto Sun, or some of the gay publications and you will see what whoremongers these unabashed corporations truly are. Their pages are rife with ads selling intimate sexual acts with girls and boys, women and men. These corporations are pimps by definition.

A pimp is someone who finds customers for prostitutes and is paid from revenue created by the human beings performing paid sex acts. Often a pimp is an enslaver of the prostitutes, using torture and death threats to extort compliance. Few human endeavours are as despicable. But colour ads in the back pages are very profitable and paid for up front with cash or credit cards.

Do the publications investigate each ad placement to ensure that a creep who captures runaway children and forces them into prostitution isn’t behind it?

Are the common ads offering paid sex with Russian, Latino, Asian or some other ethnicity enabling modern slavers to trick people in poor countries to come to Canada with broken promises of decent work, only to be compelled to prostitute themselves?

We know about these modern-day atrocities in our comparatively wealthy society from reading some of the very newspapers’ editorial content that is so insulated from the evils committed by their publishers for money. We read about youngsters who’ve run away from home being captured by pimps who enslave and degrade them.

Who do these corporations think are buying the expensive and lurid ads touting extreme eagerness to perform on anyone with the cash the degrading “services” advertised in their publications? It’s certainly not the kids who are being prostituted. It’s not the enslaved people tricked into coming to Canada. It’s their pimps—fellow travelers with the publishers who run their ads and the shareholders who control their corporations.

The abolition of human slavery, led by the British for moral as well as economic reasons, and enforced by their dominant navy in the 1800s, is a heartening inheritance of spirituality and ethics that underpins Western democracy.

How pitiful that corporations are undermining that inheritance.

Frank Touby

Mayor Miller’s broom under the carpet

Mayor Goldilocks must believe his broom is for sweeping controversy and embarrassment under the carpet at Toronto city hall.
David Miller has allowed a cover-your-butt bunch of bureaucrats to gut the Freedom of Information office and make them the final word on what information the public is allowed to know.
Continue reading Mayor Miller’s broom under the carpet…

Steve picks his pork and Toronto’s forked

You’d figure Steve Harper and his Harpies in Ottawa would pay the most attention to a pork barrel rather than the needs of the country.
That’s why Tory Steve stuffed the ridiculous board of the Toronto Port Authority—a notorious Liberal pork barrel with no redeeming value as an entity—with a gaggle of Tory pals. Continue reading Steve picks his pork and Toronto’s forked…

Grits must dump Doofus McG.

In an under-the-table deal Ontario Premier Doofus McGuinty has decided to curse Downtown Toronto by erecting a massive electricity generator right on the lakeshore the city is desperately trying to enhance. Details of the deal are kept secret from the public.
Continue reading Grits must dump Doofus McG….

Do you need the pretty Polka Dot Pill?

Do you think you might be helped by taking the pretty Polka Dot Pill? Ask your doctor whether the pretty Polka Dot Pill can help you.
Better yet, demand that your doctor prescribe the pretty Polka Dot Pill! You need the pretty Polka Dot Pill! Of course don’t take the pretty Polka Dot Pill if your feet hurt or you’ve had a headache in the past five years Continue reading Do you need the pretty Polka Dot Pill?…