Saturday, March 31, 2012

The Globe & Mail and the CBC

So yesterday I'm walking past a Globe & Mail newspaper box and there's a headline: "Harper's Modest Revolution" (or something like) that and I thought: "I'm completely uninterested."

The only commentary that really interests me about stephen harper is debate about how long his prison sentence will be. I don't care about anything else about him. He is not my prime minister. He has no authority over me. He has eviscerated the traditions that he now claims to base his authority on. He is a small-minded, petty, untalented shill for corporate thieves. Nothing more. The only question is the tactically-best way to remove him. Because he is going to be removed. He is going to be hauled before a judge and he is going to be judged and then he is going to prison.

And, that having been said, his propaganda-media enabler, the Glib n' Stale, the Grope n' Flail, "Canada's National Disgrace" which endorsed harper despite his blatant contempt for Parliament, and which continues to treat him as a legitimate prime minister despite his party's massive electoral fraud campaign, has revealed itself as both morally and intellectually bankrupt.

You know, "liberals," "conservatives," and even some "libertarians" like to accuse us leftists of being inherent stalinists or nazis. Socialism or communism is like a religion to us, and no crime on this earth is beneath us if it means ushering in the promised land blah, blah, blah, ... collectivist madness blah, blah, blah, .... weak this or that, blah-fucking-blah.

So these defenders of liberal democracy and all that other stuff, what about them? They have no credibility. Democratic dissent is crushed (see G20 or Occupy Wall Street). Wars based on lies are tolerated (see invasion of Iraq). Wars without democratic debate at all are allowed (see assault on Libya). The torture and illegal imprisonment of Canadian citizens is permitted (see Maher Arar, Omar Khadr). War crimes and their official cover-up are allowed, even if the suppression means temporarily shutting-down Parliament. And now, the USA is leading the way in the killing of its own citizens (see the Harvard constitutional scholar President Barack Obama's assassination program). Whistle-blowers are unjustly imprisoned and tortured (see Bradley Manning).

All of these massive crimes are enabled by CORPORATE media, because the capitalist system is decaying and it cannot buy-off its critics or it sees no need to. Capitalism puts profit above human life. Capitalism cannot see that the survival of human society or the natural environment are more important than profit. Capitalism cannot even grasp that society and the environment are necessary for the existence of capitalist profit.

The Globe & Mail's regard for Canadian Parliamentary Democracy is exposed as non-existent with its endorsing of harper in the 2011 election and its subsequent self-interested minimization of harper's blatant electoral fraud as some sort of "scandal du jour." This electoral fraud was a targeted assault on the core of representative democracy. If you cannot grasp that Globe & Mail publishers and editors and columnists, then your opinion on Canadian politics is worth exactly shit. You have nothing of value to say and there is precisely zero importance for your opinions or criticisms of anything. You have just voluntarily removed yourself from the discussion.

Good-bye.

Which brings me to the CBC and its 10% budget cut at the hands of the gibbering gnome, Finance Minister Jimbo Flaherty. As an institution created by the Liberal Mackenzie-King government and persisting with different appointments and managers across several decades under one of the two main liberal-capitalist parties, you are obviously a part of the system. You might reflect some of the other competing trends in this country as a result of the official mandate that serves as a fig-leaf to cover corporate rule in this country, but you are definitely wedded to the Canadian-capitalist power structure, hence your celebration of our brave troops in Afghanistan and your inability to identify class warfare when it is obvious.

But know this CBC: You were created at a time when the state was relatively much more important to capitalist development than is presently the case. The massive level of wealth inequality in North America has given the capitalist class gigantic resources which they can use for propaganda purposes (as well as police-military suppression of democracy purposes, financial sector manipulation purposes, and etc.,). The main point is that the class of people for whom someone like Ezra Levant is a tolerable mouthpiece, thinks that you're both irrelevant and intolerable.

You need to realize that as an institution you have to fight back and as individuals you have to fight back. Canada is a cultural colony of the USA. There aren't that many jobs in this country and if the CBC is destroyed, as individuals a lot of you will be out of work.

The world is changing CBC. The postwar compromise (and much else besides) has been destroyed. Are you going to adapt or are you going to cower and cringe as more and more is taken from you until it is too late?

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