Why There Is No Left, Left (and Francis Fukuyama)

((Perhaps like Francis, I bit off more than I could chew. I started this post and set it aside for a while, but still I decided to finish and post.  Whatever you may think of anything I say, at least I try to offer some points.  Francis, given the opportunity in numerous powerful fora across the world, took only the opportunity to say that things were “highly puzzling and complex,” and added very little else. (Yes, we all write books—a basic function of anyone who wants to write a book is to provide a précis or an abstract; if you really want to, or just plain have to, then you just have to and you will.  If you have a point to make, you will make it, so it is no valid criticism to say Francis also had a book but made puzzlingly little effort to précis it in any meaningful way.  .  .he could have and didn’t.  At least I tried.))

 Under the title of “America’s Plutocracy,” one-time darling of the right Francis Fukuyama has now written a querulous op-ed about why poor Americans always support the most right-wing candidates who do them the most damage and exploit them the most.  (You can read the whole book, or failing that read excerpts everywhere, like here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/money-power-and-class-in-america/article4666223/)  His insights, perhaps predictably from his eyrie, are bleary.

 Fukuyama seems ready to assert a plutocracy, but he’s lean, lean, lean on details as to how this came about.  Take this excerpt:

 

It has come as a surprise to many on the left that Mr. Romney – the “sneering plutocrat,” in the words of New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait – has pulled alongside or even ahead of Mr. Obama in some polls. They shouldn’t be so shocked. Money, power and class continue to play out in American politics in highly complex and puzzling ways. Plutocracy has kept the system going despite the enormous policy failures it has generated, not to exclude the recent crisis. And it just might push one of its prime beneficiaries, Mitt Romney, to a victory at the polls next month.

 

First of all, it isn’t a surprise to people on the left.  It stopped being that a long time ago, arguably decades ago.  Shocked?  From where he sits, I doubt that is a verb Fukuyama can even estimate the meaning of, unless he visited himself as a wild-eyed Republican radical gameboy a quarter of a century ago.  “Money, power, and class. . .play out. . . in highly complex and puzzling ways.”  Good one, Francis.  Thanks for your insight.  Now have another drink. 

 This, this is what Fukuyama has come to, chiding people for not realizing they’re being ripped off and their country, and western, success and mores are being sunk because it’s “highly puzzling and complex”?  Good of him to be so highlily and puzzlingly “complex.”  Next time I’m trying to solve a puzzle, I’ll call you, Francis.  Four letters, meaning unaccustomed to insight, lacking oppressive wit, or just being a patronizing gasbag. . .hm.

Well, since so few others are willing to take a shot, but since it is (or I hope is at least starting to be) on a lot of people’s minds, let’s have a go. Let’s try to answer the question of why the people (coal miners, autoworkers, cashiers, etc.) who can least benefit from, or afford to support right-wing candidates, have become their greatest supporters.  Let’s try to answer that question, of why the poorest people support the most right-wing candidates, just like in good ol’-Mussolini days (by the way, did he really make the trains run on time, or did he just run them over you if you didn’t support him?  Anyone with knowledge, feel free to remark.)

 Anything I will suggest will naturally blend into, bleed into other ideas you or I might have, but to try to prevent the kaleidoscope from crushing into a maroon-black centre, I will try to separate them out (a bit). 

1)  Let’s go back to the beginning.  Reagan wins, Gorbachev acquiesces, capitalism wins, communism loses.  Ok.  But look at things now.  Rampant communist-capitalist country (China) wins, capitalist-oligarch system returns with a bang (Russia), and former “socialist” satellites like Poland and Slovenia and Slovakia and the Czech Republic rocket ahead.  Turns out these last countries kind of like things they grew accustomed to under communism, like health-care, transit, and so on.  Throughout most of the United States, “transit” is a word you could only encounter in a Latin class at Harvard, but in Europe, it’s used to increase efficiency and productivity and enhance capitalist goals.  A person can travel at night in Romania, but in Tennessee?  Get serious. And that’s a problem, if you want to have an economy, much less a community or a country.

2)  Let’s take on the obvious, the so-called demise of unions.  Well, union voters never were or are left-wing voters or Democrats.  Statistically, that can be proven.  Most union voters admired the boss and wanted to be like him, even if capitalist state structures made it virtually impossible they ever could be.  What unions do, and what the right knows, is something far more insidious—they create, as the right knows, that one thing most anathema to the right—community.  People get together.  They talk.  (Family, amongst the right, doesn’t mean “family values”—it means “my family, right or wrong.”) They share insights and family goals and gossip and information.  They have BBQs, play softball.  They realize they’re all in this together, and have a mutual stake in making their lives better.  If you look at the media, it’s all about wages and strikes, but if you look to the strategists of the right, you know what they’re trying to undermine.  Why did American slave-buyers make an explicit point of separating families, mothers and fathers from children?  Why did American slave-buyers make sure no slaves came from the same West African village?  Because if they did, they could _communicate_.  And if you’re in the top 1%, the last thing in the world you want is for the bottom 99 to be able to communicate.

So yes, unions, in the formal sense, have been withering, but it isn’t because of strikes or agitation for higher wages—it’s because the increasingly powerful 1% has determined that working people must not be allowed to communicate.  A 2% or a 4% wage increase is irrelevant; an engaged, informed, interested workplace is sheer terror for the right.

3) So tiresome it’s not even worth bringing up, but here we go.  Only an American could think this, but an American I know pointed out that, sure, a lot of people in America were toothless and dirt-poor, and would never, ever eat anything more than raccoon, but they were embodied (embalmed, drunk?) with the idea that, if they ever did discover oil on their land, or somewhere, they sure didn’t want anybody else taxing them.  If they won the lottery, or a distant uncle left them oil shares in a will, then no G-man was ever gonna take it away. Call it anticipatory or pre-emptive selfishness. It’s the American dream, a fantasy the nightmare of which so many Americans end up living out, especially if they get sick and lose everything because of medical bills.  The idea that someday you’ll just somehow get rich, like on TV.  Lord knows how long most Americans carry this dream into their middle and old ages, but many do.  They really think one day they’re going to get rich, and when they don’t, they want to make sure that no-one tries to make their Cokes cost .01 to .02 more.  It is to weep.

4) But that feeds into education.  Education rates have been embarrassingly low in the US forever, and they have been getting lower for a long time in Canada owing to the ongoing separation of classes and increasing inaccessibility of higher education.  If you can keep people stupid, you can keep them thinking that, somehow, with their toothless grins, they, too, will turn out to be Romneys.  Say nothing of girls in Afghanistan or Pakistan; there are probably countless black girls in Texas, or native girls in northern Canada, who’d take a bullet in the head if they could get an education and escape the cycle of hopelessness they’ve been born to.  When was the last time a U.S. politician’s son or daughter was harmed in an American war?  That’s now left to poor people who will sign up to take a bullet because it may be the only shot at grappling out of poverty that they can imagine.  Keep the people in a nasty, brutish, and mean state of fear and aggressiveness, and they will not think about making common cause with others.

5) And then there is technology and how that affects interaction.  Facebook and so on, blah, blah, it seems too tiresome even to discuss.  But people increasingly see themselves as private islands and VIPs.  Even in despair, on notecards, teens take to the web to express their individual hopelessnesses and have them magnified a thousand times over.  Young people could never imagine actually joining a political party and sitting through meetings and consulting with others and trying to make a positive difference.  No, that’d take too long.  Thus, NGOs and eco-tourism and the like are much more popular.  Students I’ve known shave their heads for cancer and think that’s resume material, that they should get a special commendation for it.  I imagine I’ve known over 10 000 post-secondary students, but I’d be hard-pressed to think of more than about 3 who could actually give a care about politics.  But volunteer at a food bank?  Oh sure, because that gives instant feelgood gratification and can go on your resume.  Try to do something about why we’d even need food banks in some of the very richest places on the entire planet?  No, that wouldn’t be cool, wouldn’t give that immediate sense of being a great person.  You can shave your head and go on facebook, but going to a meeting and eating old donuts and drinking lousy coffee in somebody’s apartment does not, not cut it on facebook.  If the only way you can imagine expressing yourself is on strictly individual terms, then you’re either right-wing, or, yeah, you’ll spend a few months in Ghana building a water pump that will break down when you’re on the plane home and then get a job with a bank.  Sure, people are disaffected with politics, for countless reasons—when have they never not been?  But I hold to my point—that a technologically enabled sense of the person as island has contributed to an increasing unwillingness to engage in grassroots change-positive action.  Signed a petition on facebook lately?  Good for you.  Might as well put “brushed my teeth” on your resume.

6) This last does come to the democratic deficit.  It used to be that just about any party would urge people to “get out and vote!” because that was kind of an obvious, universally sanctioned thing to say, like “take care!” or “don’t drink and drive.”  But, of course, in the age of robo-calling and voter suppression and attack ads and the like, the mantra is more like “please slip on the ice and have to go to the hospital on voting day.”  Harper has imbibed all the tactics steeped in experience by his Republican mentors, and he knows that, if he can just slice and dice the electorate finely enough, the base and 5% is all he needs.  Ergo, yes, disaffect everyone you possibly can, and turn them off politics as much as you possibly can, through sleazy tactics, illegal campaign donations winked at by meaningless bodies like Elections Canada and bystander courts, proroguing, and so on and on.  Keep the people out, and you will keep the left out, too.  The closer you can get to 1% doing all the voting, the closer you get to Atlas shrugging at the wimps on the beach he commands.

7a) And this suggests the fourth estate, a concept one can only find in old dictionaries now.  Time was, the media had a role in informing people about what was going on, but, with the mainstream media being univocally right and increasingly concentrated, what few progressive voices are heard in local papers or on public stations are like whispered prayers in a stadium full of vuvzelas.  Now more than ever, journalists fear losing their jobs for not supporting right-wing causes, and/or desire above all to emulate their masters, so that, like a, say, Mike Duffy, they can eat soft donuts in a plush leather chair all day if they want.  Many know this one, with the “journalist” gushing over the criminal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtRkZ3i1ERQ

7b) But oh we do have lots of media, that 24-hr news cycle that turns a major issue into a one-minute hit, like a 400-page omnibus bill supplants a past process which would have seen legislation studied and mulled.  That 24-hr news cycle breeds contempt for politicians we are familiar with, and like our general computer world, makes us fatigued at the notion of having to spend more than 140 characters thinking about anything.  It was funny trying to watch relatively sober organs like the New York Times Magazine dutifully trying to come up with serious features, week after week, about cartoonish, inane Republican candidates like Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain and Rick Perry who were the 24-hr news cycle’s flavours of the week.  There simply was no there, there.  Back in the day, people like that wouldn’t even have made the first cut of media attention.  But 24-hr news makes us insatiable for Palins and their spinoff shows and the spinoff shows of the offspring, and so on.  Politicians themselves simply can’t be, or become, or afford to be reflective.  They’ve got to propose the simplest solutions to the most complex problems, the father of which in recent Canadian history is Presto Manning.

8) Related to some if not most of the above, is a loss of secular belief, a faith in ourselves that we all could actually do something positive that would benefit us all.  We can now only see ourselves on facebook (with lots of friends), or, if we’re lucky, tv.  In the 1990s, Ontario’s Mike Harris government, keen for right-wing cred, helped a private consortium to just go ahead and build a private toll highway, the 407.  The public sector could have built that, and the public could have reaped the gains.  Everyone knows Ontario is in a hard place right now, so why can’t anybody fathom why it is perverse that the millions upon millions of dollars that *could* have flowed right back to Ontario citizens are now flowing into a few private clutches?  Casino billionaire (a man who takes jobs from others) Sheldon Adelson spent, at a very modest estimation, 53 million to try to elect first Gingrich, then Romney (http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2012/11/08/why-sheldon-adelsons-election-donations-were-millions-well-spent/).  How many jobs could $53M create, in America or anywhere?  53 million.  Think about it.  Shelley could have built a factory to employ disaffected Republicans for decades and kept 100s of them in work until they were pensioned off.  They could have made. . .bumper stickers, or license plates.

9) Penultimate closing thought.  It was interesting to see some of Ken Burns’ documentary about the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the dirty 30s lately, and to read in the New York Times magazine lately about the basketball franchise there.  Singly or doubly, these media emanations offered intriguing data.  OK always was a Republican state, but during the dust bowl, FDR did his best, and told it like it was, that no president could control the weather.  The government offered employment and did what it could, and OK went Democrat for a time (cf. the essentially duly reviled fleeing Brit R. B. Bennett in Canada, whose austerity buggies were but the wry name representing real sacrifice of people more stoic than prineer anywhere).  Despite the incredible privations, the suicides and so forth, it doesn’t look like anyone just up and starved. That didn’t seem to happen.  There was a government.  It wasn’t like New Orleans lately. Then OK went back Republican and is now.  But after it was bombed by a white-supremacist far-right looney tune, OKC began to rebuild.  And rebuild how?  Well, duh, by beginning to work together on things, and actually *accepting* things like penny-fraction civic taxes so that roads and galleries and monuments and parks and so forth could get built.  So it just goes to show that you don’t need to be far-right anti-tax in order to progress; you can be a Republican, and have a park.  Incredible.  If only the Canadian government could go on a fact-finding mission to Oklahoma.

10)  A closing thought.  So much has been written about how the Republicans are so out of touch with the changing demographics of America that they will have a hard time getting re-elected again without moderating their policies.  Probably that’s an overstatement, but there’s much to it, still and all—if Republicans can’t appeal to more than just the old white men, paraphrasing the much criticized but not so inaccurate words of candidate Obama, who cling to their guns (and Bibles they can’t read much less comprehend), then the Republicans are in trouble.  But things change.  I am more worried about the demographics in Canada.  I’m not eager to see a coalition of the NDP and the Liberals, but there is much to be said for MP Pat Martin’s point that, given our non-representative political system, Harper can be Prime Minister until he gets bored just by getting 1/3 of voters to vote for him.  That is a democracy?  And the PM has wasted no time while he’s been PM trying to shut down voters—robocalling false voting stations, using lying attack ads, sucking up taxpayer money on government propaganda ads that Putin studies with envy—even wasting your money and mine—close to a million of it—to find out how much the ethnic vote (read: Asians and Indians) likes him.  This is *your* government, spending *your* money to promote itself and self-strategize (http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1287450--immigration-ministry-paid-for-media-monitoring-of-minister-jason-kenney-s-image), but apparently it’s of little consequence to Canadians.  Funner to shave one’s head to fight cancer, instead.  Pity no-one can find a link between shaving heads and creating accountable systems that maximize results.  Want to crowdsource?  Try not shaving your head.  Try supporting your dying buddy by having a meeting to get together people to try to come up with a way to figure out how we can maximize health care dollars and affect or create government towards providing the best cures for the greatest number of people, including your buddy/mom/friend, etc.  No?  Not cool enough?  Sorry.

Sorry.

zr

Obama's New Girlfriend: (her name is Sandy)

I am growing so, so, so weary of pundits saying that Sandy was a blessing for Obama because it gave him a chance to “look presidential.”  He wasn’t looking presidential.  He was the President.

It wasn’t about “looking” anything.  In times of crisis, you look to your president, your leader.  There was Katrina, there was Bush.

To listen to pundits, it’s as if New Yorkers and New Jerseyians called down wrath upon themselves so that Fox/CNN could blame them for Republican shortcomings.

 Most leaders (reality check) are going to have to deal with problems; if the issue becomes how they “look,” then we’re really in trouble.  Say Romney wins—will he call the national weather service not to find out what hurricanes are coming but how he will “look”?

-zr

And another thing!, he stormed uselessly and thunderously.  This whole "look presidential" and "photo-ops" crap mostly comes from the tv media itself.  So you're a journalist, so you've been subjected to a "photo-op"--whatcha gonna do about it?  Call it a photo-op, or act like a journalist and talk about what actually happened?  What Jane Doe or John Doe sitting in his/ her living room in Oklahoma really ponders the issue of "looks presidential"?  Journalists have been sucked in and are trying to report on themselves before they report on the story at hand. 

First, there has to be a crisis.  Then, there has to be a leader.  Then, there has to be a leader seen dealing with it.  You don't leap out of the gate with: "here's a chance to look presidential!!!"  TV journalists are so infected and indissociable from their own medium than they can't sift anything for reporting or analytical purposes.

Where was the journalist who said: "er, this storm is causing damage.  The president said "blah."  He is taking "blah" measures."  Oh no, it was all about journalists getting to speculate on whether or not whatever candidate "looked" presidential.  How messed up is this, completely.  Say a journalist's mother gets breast cancer.  Does a journalist's mother stand by eagerly and say: "yes, yes, she's looking like a warrior.  She looks like she's ready to fight it.  For those who counted her out, here she is saying, defiantly, that she's in this race until the finish."  The media offering me nil in the way of moral compass, as usual I'm going to have to make up my own, on which I'll report later, I guess.

CHLPA  Self-Interested Rogers Sportsnet Media Goes All Out to Mock Potential Canadian Hockey League Players Association (but it’s probably an idea whose time has come, and eventually will come)

TV and radio media have lately been heaping scorn on the notion of a CHLPA, which bubbled up briefly but then appeared to burst, and this post addresses why the media may be doing it and why a CHLPA should not necessarily be dismissed just because of self-interested media concerns.

(Disclosure: Dan Zorg is not a member of a union, or a lawyer.)

Various sources suggest that CHL players make about $50/week.  Of course, they are billeted and no doubt have living and meal allowances and equipment covered and so on.  But they work very hard for an uncertain future and they aren’t paid anything even approaching minimum wage, which is what at least one would-be CHLPA lawyer or another was saying they should get.  Minimum wage?  What is wrong with that?  What’s in it for the media, the Rogers representatives from Peter Maher to Bob McCown, who lampoon people who think that, hey, maybe players should get paid minimum wage?  Well, keeping their jobs and making sure they make money while players don’t.

After all, it’s not like there isn’t a lot of money in CHL hockey.  The proportion of CHL franchises doing better than NHL franchises is obviously higher.  Why else would the CHL keep expanding?  Why else would a Western CHL team play 72 games a year, or 88% of an NHL schedule, and every bit as gruelling and inane a playoff schedule with seven-game series’?  Why else would teams like the NHL Flames also want to own teams like the CHL Hitmen?  Why else would Rogers Sportsnet enter into partnership with the CHL to broadcast dozens of games per year? 

But CHL players can’t make minimum wage?  And people like Peter Maher and Eric Francis and Bob McCown, who make infinite amounts more than junior players, the vast majority of whom will never make the NHL, think it’s really neat to make fun of a potential CHLPA?  What is in it for them?  Have they been instructed by their employers to mock the idea of a CHLPA?

Have a look at that schedule again.  The CHL is at minimum one, and more normally two or three rungs below the NHL.  But CHL players still play 68-72 games and the huge playoff schedule.  The schedules look wonky, with intense concentrations of games followed by several days off, and bus travel schedules seemingly designed by aliens.  It is not uncommon for teams to play, say, 5 nights in 7, or 3 in 4, with long bus trips in between.  Take just any old example—near the beginning of February 2013, the Prince Albert Raiders will play 4 games in 5 nights.  The first is at home, then they visit Saskatoon, Lethbridge, and Swift Current before returning home, having travelled 1400k in that time.  By WHL scheduling standards, that looks very geographically reasonable.  Still, hockey isn’t like baseball, where you stand around in a field.  Hockey is an intense, physical, aggressive game, and if you’re going to get to the pros, you better be on your game.  Anyone reading this play hockey, or just exercise?  What if I said to you that you’d play four games in 5 nights and ride the buses in between and get to hotels/motels at 2, 3, 4 a.m., etc.?  Is that how an athlete practises, refines, and perfects his/her abilities?  Is that healthy?  Is that how athletes, seeking optimal performance, would actually train?  No, it’s idiotic, and invites injuries, but someone makes a lot of money off of this, and it obviously isn’t the players who provide the entertainment in the first place for $50 a week.

Much has been made of the CHL’s education program—basically, if a player plays a year in the CHL, that player gets a year of tuition at a university.  Good.  But most degrees take four years or more.  How many players actually play four full years in the CHL?  (Anybody ever get injured?)  Would the CHL release those stats, instead of just bragging about how much it “invests” in players (how noble!—not like the league gets anything out of those players), or offering bland aggregates saying the CHL has awarded x 1000 “scholarships”?  And besides, the CHL education program is use it or lose it—don’t go to school within 18 months, and you don’t get those vaunted “scholarships.”  Say you actually did play 3-4 years in the CHL.  Odds are, you’d like to keep the dream of a pro career alive.  After all, hockey is all you’ve known, and it’s unlikely that your schedule and those bus trips have prepared you very well for academics, anyway.  So you might try the ECHL, AHL, Europe, whatever.  But spend barely more than a full season doing it, and poof, that “education program” is gone.  So yes, the CHL’s education program is a good thing—it didn’t used to exist, and it’s a good start.  But only a CHL flack could call it generous, and when one looks at the strings attached to it, it’s hard not to think that the program is designed for PR purposes, if not explicitly to minimize the CHL’s actual educational commitment.  

Elsewhere on this blog, one can find a post I made about the Graham James re-arrest/re-trial.  I certainly didn’t expect to gain anything but flamers out of that one, but I was trying to get at systemic queries, and what one tries to do with things/situations like that of James.  Suppose there had been a CHLPA when James was coaching in the Western CHL? Now, am I saying that the presence of a CHLPA might have stopped a Graham James?  No, I’m not saying something that simplistic.  But think about it.  If a vulnerable young player who knows he can’t go to an abusive, pedophilic, corrupt, immoral etc. coach, or team brass, or who doesn’t have or doesn’t feel he can talk to an agent or recruiter—who in any case want him to get, or to get him to the pros and make money and NOT hear anything bad--or who may have a bit of a messed-up background, etc.—IF that young player knows that at least there’s something like a union representative who can be approached in confidence and can assist in legal matters and so forth, then maybe that young player can get some help.  And what if a would-be predator knows there’s yet that one more level of social/professional/legal observance he’s going to have to get around?  What happened to all the media people who wanted to be tough on crime? It is fairly amazing to me that those who easily revile Graham James (at least when they’re no longer able to vote him coach of the year anymore) are also those most eager to ensure that junior players get zero workplace assistance or representation (such as many even in the private media enjoy).  That is a toughie, that one.  Just what makes the media such anti-union cheerleaders, eager to heap scorn on an idea that could work to players’ benefits in many ways?  Well, look no further than the team owners and networks that drive the media’s every utterance.  What a sad, sad state of affairs.

Media badgerers like Bob McCown made a big deal out of how the nascent CHLPA couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say how many it had signed up and where.  He and his cohorts sympathized deeply with poor David Branch, CHL Commissioner, who really did cast himself as just about the most befuddled and put upon man in the land.  Undeniably, it does look like the CHLPA effort was mishandled and poorly organized, but then again, trying to organize and certify a union of any kind, against media and management pressure, is incredibly difficult.  Trying to organize a union of teenaged kids competing amongst themselves and dreaming of the big time and lottery money is doubly improbable, no matter how much money they’re making for others (and how much, much more ~relatively~ speaking, any potential union executives or lawyers could make out of the deal).  Where’s the media to speak on behalf of the union, or rather, players?  It doesn’t exist, because if such media appeared, that media would be fired by the league and owners and the media broadcasters who pay the owners and the league.  Talk about a closed loop.  According to the Windsor Star, Branch “said that just because there is not a union does not mean the players' concerns will be ignored. ‘We don't think a third party can do it better than us.’”

[Read more: http://www.windsorstar.com/Branch+breathes+easier+union+move+collapses/7493382/story.html#ixzz2BEPm5dvF]

Nope, no conflict of interest there.  Only the league that sells and profits from the players, trades them, releases them, etc.—only the league can really look after them.  What if a member of the Calgary Hitmen wanted to join a potential union—the Calgary Flames, broadcast regionally by Rogers Sportsnet, also own the Heat, the Hitmen, the Roughnecks, and the Stampeders.  Talk about a company store.  Can you imagine how fast you’d end up in Siberia if you indicated a willingness to be represented by anyone but the cartel that owns you?

*IF* the CHL was doing such a wonderful job helping its players “voluntarily” (well, that’s big of them, to help their players “voluntarily”—one only wonders what “involuntary” looks like-- http://www.chl.ca/article/statement-from-the-canadian-hockey-league), then why hasn’t the league splattered all over its websites and affiliates’ websites 100s of success stories about the game and what all the amazing scholarship winners they’ve anointed have gone on to do? 

Who could really provide employment assistance, training, legal advice, abuse counsel, etc.?  A players association could.

Eric Francis of Hockey Night in Canada was another who scoffed at the union idea.  He thought it was a big joke, and chipped in on the FAN590 that he didn’t think Georges Laraque was “very smart.”  Based on what I’ve seen of Eric Francis, I can’t imagine what his qualifications are for assessing the intelligence of others.  Based on what I’ve seen of Georges Laraque, he strikes me as a thoughtful guy, willing to step up and support good causes and his community, willing to get involved in public or political situations, and generally use his minor celebrity both to advance progressive things and, I imagine, also himself (though given the money he made in the NHL, more than many of us will make in a lifetime, it seems to me to be a cheap shot to say that he’s in it for the money or fame when he could just be golfing like many other retired players, instead of hanging out in Haiti doing relief work, say).  (And it is also a fact well-known to any hockey fan that, just as there’s a disproportionate number of catchers who go on to be managers, there’s an unusual amount of tough guys like Laraque who end up being the most articulate and philosophical and reflective about the game they took a small but highly visible part in—the Sheehys, the Grimsons, the Cherrys and Kypreoses—it’s striking how often it is the tough guys who end up being agents and lawyers and coaches and pitchmen and commentators and so on.)  For what it’s worth, Eric Francis is also a big backer of Lance Armstrong, who he still supports because Armstrong has done so much to raise money in the fight against cancer.  So Armstrong, who, like many other athlete/steroid-chemical users who experience long-term or premature life-ending consequences as a result of their drug habits, may well have even gotten cancer partly as a result of the huge amount of cheating and doping he did, he gets a free pass from Francis.  It’s true that cycling’s a dirty sport, but as the voluminous USADA report shows, Armstrong was amongst the dirtiest and most vicious in that sport; he was not only fairly casual (such a prima donna was he) about letting those close to him see him dope, but also a ruthless ringleader (don’t use juice to support Team Lance?  You don’t have a job with Team Lance).  When those who had evidence against him accused him, he sued them, all the while knowing he was cheating, and that other people knew it and had seen it. That, in view of all the counter-lawsuits he’s going to get now, that was smart?  So lessee, we’ve got Laraque, an athlete who maintains a public profile and does good works, and we’ve got Armstrong, a cheating athlete who maintains a public profile and does good works and sues those who know he’s cheating.  In Eric Francis’s view, Armstrong’s still a fine exemplar, but Laraque “isn’t very smart.”  Well, you draw your own conclusions about what makes Eric Francis draw the conclusions he does, whoever’s paying him.

Bottom line: The CHL is big, big money—for owners, for the league, for media rights holders.  Sooner or later, the CHL is not going to be able to get away with paying its employees/junior players on the order of $50/wk (despite magnanimous gestures like feeding them).  Media talking heads, especially those who are themselves owned by private networks, will fight the players they feast off as much as they can, but one day the players will have to get a sop.  What if the World Junior Team asked for a 1% cut of TSN’s revenues?  Can you imagine the storm over that one?  Even if lawyers take .99% of that 1%, the players, and the game and society, would be better for it.  Some of the players who don’t make the NHL might even become lawyers.

--zr

 

 

 

 

The Lougheed Legacy: Christy Clark, and a Divided and Uncompetitive Nation

The Lougheed Legacy: Christy Clark, and a Divided and Uncompetitive Nation

 You will note that I did not make this post at the time of Peter Lougheed’s death and the celebrations of his life.  People who knew him seemed to feel he was a good man.  I’m hardly here to dispute that—never met the man.  However, he was in a responsible public position for a long time, so it’s fair to take a clear-eyed view of elements of his record, rather than resorting to the self-congratulatory hagiography of most commentators.

 The process of decentralizing Canada, the acceleration of “executive federalism” in Canada after WWII, is well known.  As we know, while America began with a constitution designed to limit federal powers, Canada began with a constitution designed to ensure a strong national government.  As history has played out, America has seen more power gravitate to Washington, and Canada has seen power diffuse into the provinces. 

In terms of the diffusion, or rather, dissolution of federal powers in Canada, Lougheed played a key role.  We don’t really have to revisit the controversies of the National Energy Program (NEP—or do we, I would read what anyone has to say), but it’s fair to say that Pierre Trudeau, as a national leader, wanted to have national programs.  That meant that if Canada had resource wealth, Canada should benefit from it first.  Lougheed, with an eye on his own electorate, wanted to ensure that he was seen as a defender of Alberta against Ottawa, even if it meant selling out to Houston first.  Thus the “blue-eyed sheikh.”

Today, Christy Clark has been arguing that, if Alberta wants to build a pipeline, then British Columbia better get a huge share of any economic benefits that flow from the oil flowing from an Alberta pipeline.  Alberta premier Alison Redford more or less scoffed at such a notion, saying that that was not how Canada worked, that the constitution of the country would have to be rewritten before Clark’s demands could be entertained.  Who have we to thank for this?  Peter Lougheed.  For the balkanized confederation we now inhabit, Peter Lougheed bears striking responsibility.  Grandstanding against the feds became a key, if not the sole, way that premiers could justify themselves to their own electorates.  So we had Clyde Wells sinking Meech Lake, which might have brought Quebec into the confederation in a definitive way, Danny Williams, a hard-right hockey lover like Stephen Harper, lowering the Canadian flag at public buildings.  And Christy Clark essentially saying ‘no pipeline unless we get a huge chunk of the revenues.’  Peter Lougheed’s chickens have come home to roost.  Stephen Harper, who advocated a “firewall around Alberta” in a past life, won’t even meet with the premiers anymore.  Clark wants to cut a deal that, she generously allows, would involve British Columbia, Alberta, and the federal government in negotiations.  No mention of several territories and eight other provinces and what they might think about affairs of the “nation.”

And besides, has anyone who might read this ever actually been to a place such as Edmonton (no, no, not the Lougheed mansion in downtown Calgary--and also, anywhere else in the world—that, I’m sure you have)?  For all the wealth that has streamed out of Alberta (and Canada—many did say Peter Lougheed was a “great Canadian,” but I couldn’t gauge the level of irony), to the United States and China and Japan and innumerable countries, has anyone ever actually seen Edmonton?  The streets of Edmonton should be paved with gold.  Not just in theory, but in practice, Edmonton should be home to the grandest opera houses, the most immaculate churches, the most stunning public edifices, the most tended parks—basically that the world knows.    

Not very long ago at all, the West Texas Intermediate wallowed around $15/barrel; now it’s $90+.  And oil companies, and Alberta, still can’t find a way to profit enough?  I think there is an answer to that: the oil companies have.  But they don’t live in Alberta, and they sure don’t live in Canada.

 We keep hearing the boasts about how much oil Alberta has relative to other countries, but at least Arabs can build a skyscraper, and impoverished countries with 1/1000^th of Alberta’s budget can be magnets for people from all around the world because they have found a way to develop and maintain their legacies and emblems thereof.  Edmonton?  Oh dear, oh dear.  Coming back to the theory/practice theme, I won’t even go there.  (Unless I want to find a pawn shop or payday loan franchise or liquor store within 20 sq. ft. on virtually any point of the compass that I should choose to stand and look out from.)

Pipelines happen.  They exist.  They’ll keep existing.  Interestingly, a few voices, even Conservative ones, have recently suggested that building a pipeline to eastern Canada might not be such a bad idea.  You know, jobs, access to eastern seaports, oil refining in central Canada, etc.  Hm.  Turns out Trudeau wasn’t such a wild-eyed communist after all.  For those really, really way out there, there have actually been businesspeople who’ve suggested doing oil refining right on the west coast, and keeping jobs and upgrading revenues right here in Canada (!!).  Predictably, such notions were quickly shot down by Conservative politicians, who argued that other nations had so much refining capacity, and that refining capacity costs so much to get going in the first place, and returns on it are so small, that we should never ever consider such a scheme in the first place.  Rather, just get that dirty crude on tankers and off our shores as fast possible, like cattle through an XL plant.  So much for secondary industry.  So much for Canadian companies.  So much for “knowledge jobs”—jobs that would attract people from around the world and Canada’s own university graduates to stay here and make Canada an energy world leader.  For short-term gain and long-term pain, best just to sell out to China.  Who knows what the next 10, 20, 30 years will bring—but who cares—let’s rip and run with the tar sands while we’ve got them, and when the Americans and Chinese and Norwegians and Japanese and French and British and who knows who else intriguing in the tar pits have gone, we can look up at them with teary dirty faces and ask if they can’t give us a crust.  This, this is the Lougheed legacy.  If Canadians can’t refine oil in Canada—which was ultimately what Lougheed was saying by pre-paraphrasing Ralph Klein saying let the “eastern bums and creeps” freeze in the dark—then how come other countries could and can?  Mini-minds like John Ibbitson have recently swooned before Tory handlers who told him that Canada has to stand back and pause and figure out how to deal with “state capitalism” such as that of Indonesia.  Er, Virginia, anyone?  Does anyone really think that, when deciding who to source rivets and panels for a U.S. Navy ship from, the U.S. actually thinks, ‘well, gee, we better get the Chinese to do that’?  No, Americans have a country, and they do it themselves.

In most advanced countries, it’s a knock-down dead-straight self-evident no-brainer that you take care of your own country first.  You build up and from within.  Yes, Norway again—can you imagine Norwegians, whose version of the Heritage Fund dwarfs that of Alberta by multiples even theoretical mathematicians can barely glimpse (again, the Lougheed legacy) saying “oh, well, we can’t possibly refine or develop anything—we just have to sell it off as fast as possible to everyone else so that we can maintain an illusion of fiscal solvency while we stupidly cut taxes like the GST”? Even the Conservatives, when they want to buy 35-billion-dollar jets, at least insist that a sop has to go to Canadian companies to build, what, fabric seats for the jets?  Why do we not think this way when it comes to our “natural resources”?

So.  The Lougheed legacy.  A country so divided that its national leader won’t even speak with its provincial leaders (the U.S. looks like Woodstock, by comparison), premiers increasingly and really quite astonishingly trying to set up their own countries-within-a- country in order to stay elected, and a primitive, uncompetitive nation incapable of engaging in a world economy.  That’s the Lougheed legacy.

zr

An All-Sports Radio Station in Canada! The time has come. Or gone. Or was here but went. Or is never going to happen. Pity.

Still, it would be a nice idea, sometime.

 

Precis/Abstract: Sports radio in Canada had a unique, unfulfilled opportunity to cover the spectrum of sports.  With media concentration, the unfulfilled opportunity hardened into shill shows for owned properties.  The concentration and hardening of sports radio talk has emphasized a disinterest in amateur sport and sport in general, leading to a less sportive, less healthy, and less internationally competitive country, one that can only take an interest in American sports from a couch perspective.

 

Well, what with the NHL lockout upon us for some time now, it becomes increasingly evident that there is nothing to talk about on “sports radio.”

 I remember those days in the mid-90s when the FAN (what is now) 590 first came on the air in Toronto.  I was excited!  I mean, I like sports!

 Yeah, well, only took me a couple of weeks before I was disabused of any notion that the FAN590 would actually ever cover anything relating to most sports.  Less than two months in, I knew that, with a couple of buddies and a couple of phone lines, a lot less education and bombastically hidden knowledge, I, too, could be the FAN590.

 Remarkable to think that the same still obtains today, and if anything, the situation has gotten worse, with no-sports alleged “sports” stations fanning out across the country to shill for Rogers properties or team owners.  Back in the day, stations did actually promote the idea that they were “all sports” radio stations.  But, coming clean a bit, they have mostly dropped pretense to that, opting for generic and interchangeable names such as “The Team” or the aforesaid “FAN”, etc.  They know they don’t cover sports—just the properties their owners own, and that’s it.

It’s important that we realize that how the media covers sports in our country affects our success as a sporting nation, and, in a remotely tangential but still definite sense, our national health.

I guess I’ll set aside print media for now, but, full disclosure, it is still the one I follow the most. 

Oh for those days when a youth could pore over stats forever. 

No more. 

 As for TV, the highlight shows have become mockeries of themselves, because, in the splintered sports universe now, they only cover what they own.  Thus, don’t look for CFL coverage on Rogers.  Don’t look for curling coverage on Rogers.  Don’t look for baseball coverage on TSN.  And so on.  A sports fan would have to watch 50 hi-lite shows in a row to figure out what really happened during that day’s sports.  So TSN, Rogers, etc., have descended simply to showing fly balls (aka home runs—not actual interesting sporting plays) and endless fluff, as in their “top 10” lists—top ten sports moves done with a spoon, etc.  And I’d watch those, maybe, but of course the kid with the remote at TSN or Rogers has the memory of an amoeba and can’t even unearth the most obvious top 10 most obvious top 10 moments, 99 times out of a 100.  In a way, my sense is that the good ol’ local news-weather-sports broadcast is making an interesting comeback, because at least it’s there that sports fans can actually get a quick rundown of the day’s events, even if the only video shown is from the station owners.  And in any case one can never look to TV for any kind of context or depth or anything anyway, so it is foolish to mention it on this post.  The bottom line is, though, that concentration hurts sports fans, because sports fans can’t find out about sports quickly; they have to filter sports properties.  Is it any wonder they must go to the computer.  TV shoots itself in the foot.

So we come back to the alleged “sports radio.”  Yes, when the FAN590 (or 1430) came on, I really thought there’d be talk about sports.  At the time, that station didn’t have the Argos or the Leafs, but I think it did have the Blue Jays.  So there was lots of Blue Jays.  But other sports?  Nothing.  Zero.  Zip. Nada.  Gerbil-mouthed American Bob McCown interviewed Bert Sugar from time to time about the corrupt sport of boxing, a couple of good ol’ boys had a ½ hr slot somewhere about cars you and me will never drive turning left at high speeds for a couple hours.  But that’s all.  No actual sports.  There could have been interviews or talk about, oh, I don’t know, golf, tennis, horse-racing, amateur or Olympic sports, university sports, jai alai—I don’t know.  I’m a sports fan.  I would have been interested in any of it.  Around the time the FAN first came on, Canada’s Jonathon Power was perennially ranked as the No. 1 or 2 squash player in the world.  How many Canadians have ever done that?  I’m not a squash player, but I know it’s an incredibly popular sport—I would have listened to him, or something about him, with great interest.  But no, we only get to hear about the sports properties owned by the host network.

An infinitely worse situation obtains in outports such as Calgary, where there is a four-man (1?  ¼?) outfit called the FAN960, a former country station.  14 hours out of every 24—get that, 14 hours—(that is, for those of you doing the math, about 60%) it is piped-in utterly irrelevant American crap about Alabama Hoosiers against San Quentin Triple-threats, or whatever.  (And if anyone wants to say, “oh, you’re just being anti-American, well, I will just ask how many Oklahoma Sounding Dogs routinely tune in to Calgary Wildheads broadcasts, or how many Calgarians really, really care about the fate of the New Mexico Hogbenders.)  (Another hour goes to aforesaid McCown with that appealing squinchy gerbil face he makes as he tries to get his shades up over his nose and beneath his sprayed-on 70s Journey rhythm-guitarist hairdo way above his 2-buttons-undone cool-and-mellow-like-Manilow, baby, shirt.  How his make-up artists get that haze of unshaven finely drifting snow onto his not-ready-for-TV receding chin each day preoccupies me more than the show itself.)  So there’s 8 hours of local broadcasting to talk about. . .the Flames just signed Blake Comeau to a one-year contract!!!!!  Take it and ride, boys, take it and ride.  The FAN960’s intrepid team doesn’t know anything about any sports, and they’ve got to talk about Flames, so that’s the end of it.  Empty talk, and American talk, 24 hours out of 24.  When we *could* be talking about sports in our own communities, provinces, country.  And I can’t believe that Canadians wouldn’t be interested in it.  Why wouldn’t I want to hear from Christine Sinclair, or one of the greatest athletes this country has ever, ever known, like Clara Hughes?  Why not?  I am a sports fan.  Why wouldn’t I want to hear about Milos Raonic, who looks like being Canada’s greatest male tennis player sometime soon?  How come I even had to go hunting all over the web just to find out what happened to Rebecca Marino, who looked fit to join Milos as the most exciting male-female pair of tennis players this country has ever known?  Why wouldn’t I want to know about what it was like for Canadian rugby players down in NZ recently, or our cricket players, or ethnic sports I don’t even know about (they buy cars and eat wings, too, I assure you).  Anyone who likes sports, as I do, could fill in infinite blanks here.

But, on sports radio, sports radio such as the FAN960, we will never, ever get to hear it.  Now, this does raise the issue of exclusivity contracts.  When the FAN960 starts getting owned by Rogers, well, then, obviously, its staff of 2-year tech. college grads has to talk about what dead Ted has told them to talk about.  So they can’t actually address sports, and in this way, they contribute to the lack of sporting success in this country, and also help to ensure that Canada becomes a nation of couch-potato spectators who go to wing nights for Monday Night Football, like them.  The FAN960 helps to ensure that sports, and sporting success, is less and less a goal on Canada’s radar.  And again, exclusivity; no-one at the FAN960 can ever criticize the Flames, or he (there are no on-air she’s) loses his job instantly.  Who knows what Rogers’ contract, and the Flames’ contract, is with the FAN960, but, since they’re certainly not going to fess up with any documents, it’s fair to say that unfavourable discussion of any Rogers or Flames properties a vast majority of the time is going to have them pulled right off the air, according to the contract terms.  So we can’t have sports.  We can’t promote them, we can’t talk about them, we can’t celebrate great athletes, we can’t introduce young people, or old people, to other sports and great sporting individuals—it’s the total sports shutdown, as if we all have to be Pat Steinbergs in his parents’ basement playing UFC with a game controller.  Sad.

 [Now, let me argue against myself.  We know, based on past history, that we can count on an NHL lockout/labour stoppage on average every five years.  This is a fact.  In the past, the FAN960 would go with the Blake Comeaus, the Flames 3^rd-rounder playing for the Brussels Squirrels, etc., for the whole afternoon.  This time, it’s different.  Despite the fact that *Rogers does not even own* Calgary Stampeders rights, the FAN960 has, actually, given a bit more coverage to the CFL.  Now that the FAN960 is owned by Rogers, it *has* to cover some baseball, and this is, from a listener’s standpoint, really funny.  Just about anywhere across the country, you can/could follow baseball, but never in Calgary.  The FAN960’s 2-man crew was always smirky and smarmy and dismissive and jocular about a sport that they never knew anything about but then, uh, uh, oh, new boss, new owner, looks like we gotta know about baseball.  Hilarious to hear the FAN960 suddenly not hate baseball and stop joking about it; sadder still to think that Rogers is such a bloated and moribund top-heavy organization that it couldn’t even find anyone who knew anything about or liked baseball enough to staff the stations it suddenly took over.  Call in Nikita Kruschev as a manager.  But I forget--no problem; there’s always that piped-in Corndogs drama.  Draws me in every time.  I done hear tell they’re 14^th in the pork-10 conference.  This isn’t just alien to me.  It is alien to pretty much everyone in the civilized world.  If you want to think that affiliation with the North-central donegone Doogies marks you out as a sophisticated person, get, as Elliotte Friedman would eloquently say, a f**************************ing plane ticket to anywhere in the world.  Sorry Elliotte I ran out of ***s.]

Am I sounding too Elliotte Friedman about his contractors here?  Surely not.  Elliotte dropped 11 f-bombs, and on this entire blog, you will not encounter even the mildest of obscenities that you can hear on the FAN every day.  And despite what I say/do re-admit below, the government has advanced more funding for amateur sport, and I support this.  Politics is priorities, and, despite how difficult it is to allot tax dollars, I support greater funding for amateur sport.  If the government gave to billionaire Daryl Katz what it gave to impoverished athletes, we’d beat China by a 100 medals.  Actually, someone should start that chart-o-meter—what we give billionaire Daryl Katz, vs. what we give our amateur athletes….]

 The point is, we *could* use this lockout to highlight other sports, and get people interested in sports and following them and making us a more healthy nation.  But no, we’d rather talk about the lockout.  In the Glib ‘n Stale a couple weeks ago, Lawrence Martin suggested that we *could* take more of an interest in amateur sports (http://m.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/amateur-yes-but-well-worth-watching/article4490594/?service=mobile).  I suppose the mere phrase “amateur sports” sounds like cancer, but it sure isn’t, if you’re an actual sports fan and are interested in sports.    

No, I’m not Pollyanna about this; I realize any athlete needs sponsorship and cash—look no further than Lance Armstrong for that, the purest example of the purest athlete who was the purest crook in the history of his sport.  I’d listen to any great athlete, but I don’t need to know that Dirk Lancestrong signed with the BB affiliate of the Hometown Weasels of the WCWLHL.  What about talking to great athletes from around the world, to find out what makes them great?  Beats the hell out of Mikael Backlund signs a one-year contract any day.  (But then, I forgot, I am a sports fan.  And I actually engage in sports.  Silly me.)

 Also, I anticipate those people who say, well, look, we’re a hockey country, so that’s what we do.  No.  No.  That isn’t the legacy of Bobbie Rosenfeld or Tom Longboat or Fergie Jenkins.  Not at all.  Canada WAS a great sporting country.  We ARE not just hockey.  Maybe Stephen Harper wants you to believe that, and you buy in because you are weak, but Canada is a strong sporting country that never had to rely on hockey as the only thing that made it relevant in sporting terms. Sure, in other countries they have their key sports.  In Australia, they love Aussie rules.  But they’re also great at rugby and swimming and tennis and so on.  Look at how the Netherlands perform in just about anything.  Take Slovenia, and how they compete in water events and ski events _and_ World Cup soccer, for crying out loud.  The entire population of Slovenia is almost half of the greater Toronto area, but they made the World Cup and did well.  Comparatively, this would be like me and ten of my buddies going to play against Germany.  Think about it.  Other countries can do great things, so why can’t we, and where is our media, and, through their support of media cartels, our government? 

Lastly, let’s remember where any coverage of any Canadian sport ever came from—it came from a public broadcaster that would cover things like track and field.  The government is doing everything it can to ensure that there are only one or two media cartels in the entire country—meaning that those cartels will only cover the sports properties they own the rights to.  In other words, your government is, despite waving the flag with your tax dollars on tv commercials on said networks, doing everything it can to shut down exposure for great amateur athletes, and to prevent exposure to great athletes from around the world that could inspire Canada to be a greater, healthier, more sporting nation; the government works hand-in-glove with private networks to ensure greater and greater concentrations of media power that lead to. . . more and more Pat Steinbergs, and fewer and fewer and fewer Clara Hughes’.  Say I’m Pat Steinberg sitting on a couch, and I’ve got a daughter, but I’ve got my gameboy and my cheesies and I know I’ve got to go to work on Monday, and my daughter looks up at me and says “daddy, how come you don’t like kayaking”?  Pat’s got one answer.  “Because nobody, little one, wants to hear about kayaking.  It’s bedtime now, honey.”  He told his daughter, and an unflattering number of people he has never even imagined, a lie.  But it made the cheesies go down good.  And Pat wouldn’t work again, so he thinks, if he tried to talk about Adam van Koeverden.  Flames told him he couldn’t.  It satisfies Pat to think that, well, in his way, he has helped to ensure that his daughter, too, would be a big cheesie-eater, just like him, never knowing anything about sports or participating in it, but rather just enjoying the cut and thrust of really important things like “contract talks” and “lockouts.”

We should take greater interest in sports, and our media are letting us down incredibly, and our government will only exacerbate the situation by supporting media concentration.  The government *has* provided more funding for amateur sports than in the past.  Now our media has to get on board by showing us fewer corndogs and more treesappers.  Do we not want to know anything about our athletes, or those we have to compete against across the world?  I’m Canadian; I’m a citizen of the world; I’m game.

zr

CTV.ca throttles down online content to support advertisers

Canada’s CTV network, whose employees constitute a notable source of funding for the federal Conservative party, has now begun throttling back its shows that are shown online in order to increase advertising revenue.

Online advertising, of course, is increasing. General computer users, who may infrequently experience any kind of slowdown when using youtube or other kinds of social networking sites, will now find themselves repeatedly shut down by CTV. Attempts to watch CTV content are now greeted by curious shutdowns that have one end: pages must be reloaded so more advertising must be watched.

CTV programming—(admittedly, sometimes depending on what its political aims are) is more throttled down than ever, resulting in more reboots and (CTV hopes) advertising hits that add to the CTV bottom line. Viewers are screwed, but so far CTV lawyers have not been pressed into service.

A unique feature of the CTV.ca website that CTV lawyers will be working hard to address is how CTV advertising is never throttled, but programming is. Expressing themselves uniquely, CTV lawyers will point out that high-decibel advertising can not be throttled down, but programming can, and this is a good and just thing. Trampling the rights of the polity to have access to uncommercialized information is just wrong. Parents, if you've got kids, make sure they end up being CTV lawyers.  But then, for CTV, it isn’t information—none of it is, ever; it is all, always, only advertising.

Advertisers are pleased: CTV advertising routinely touts unhealthy products no medical doctor, and certainly not Lloyd Robertson, would give to his kids, such as Red Bull.

Still, no compromise is too great. We've come a long way, from D-Day to today, and no compromise is ever too great in order to make sure we drink Red Bull.

There is a coda to this.  CTV, and its gullible advertisers, evidently still believe that people can be held hostage in the hopes of receiving a few dribs of content.  They just don’t get that the world is swimming in a sea of content, and they and their 50s crew of pocket-protected staff and advertisers just don’t get it.  They think they can play whack-a-mole with every new technological development that occurs, and use the profits of their mutual enrichment society to make their friends in government create laws to defeat content access.  They will try until they are as old as Lloyd.  And then they’ll die. If they ever just thought, “well, we can get in some advertising and not destroy our content,” they maybe wouldn’t have to keep playing whack-a-mole endlessly, and could keep some eyeballs.  If there is something I want to see/hear/read, there are still just too many ways, and I won’t put up with CTV.ca’s ham-fisted Neanderthal ways.  I’ll pay, I’ll accept delays, and I’ll go elsewhere, but I won’t have any more to do any longer with CTV.ca’s puerile and pathetic attempts to destroy content so as to provide a few more ads.

zr

The Alberta Disadvantage – Alberta Reinforces Socialist Liquor Monopoly

The Alberta Disadvantage – Alberta Reinforces Socialist Liquor Monopoly

 (For many; ok just some like me, but in actuality for all since monopoly inception.) Those who read this blog (me) know that I have reflected on wine once or twice.  I like the mild, drinkable Central European reds, as well as the fine whites that emanate from this region and that compete with just about anything anywhere, in a good year.

Now I see Alberta’s government monopoly has once again appeared to de-list yet another two of the only wines I really liked, from Croatia (and more specifically, Dalmatia).  Oh, sure, you can still get gallons of Australian motor-oil plonk for gallons to the penny (how I hope that, from Sydney to Perth, from Adelaide to Darwin, Australians are buying boxes of Manitoba wine in 4L boxes for $4.99), but choice has once again been reduced by the Alberta government monopoly, liquorconnect.com, or Connect Logistics. 

This continues an ongoing eradication of consumer choice in Alberta, going back to the alleged “privatization” of Alberta liquor stores in the Klein years of the early 90s.  (Perhaps no accident on that one, as Ralph was known to show up half-cocked at 2 a.m. at homeless shelters and throw coins at people and tell them to get jobs while his taxpayer-funded chauffeurs looked on.)   A constantly declining selection has been the hallmark of Alberta's "privatization." I feel like I'm in wine wonderland when I go to other, less corrupt jurisdictions in Canada or the U.S.

Privatization, of course, was a myth, but it is striking how enduring this myth has been.  When Alberta “privatized,” the government kept its complete monopoly by dictating that all liquor sellers had to sell from the government monopoly seller, Connect Logistics.  Connect Logistics got the exclusive monopoly; the government got all the same revenues it always did--but government property could be sold off, at a profit, normally to those with the best Progressive Conservative party connections, as so many at the time observed.  I wonder if party membership and store ownership would be considered just a “coincidence?” Hm. Anyway, in true “privatization” capitalist monopoly totalitarian actuality, this means that there is one book, and one book, alone, that any alcohol seller in Alberta can sell from.  It looks like a big book when a seller shares it with you, but what it doesn’t show is that surely virtually no seller in Alberta would use it all, its contents are incredibly restricted, compared to what other provinces, such as Ontario, can get, and obviously few sellers would even try to stock much of it, anyway, because they’re in the business of small, mom & pops, Biff n’ Jack $4.99 6-pack hole-in-the-wall outlets.  Sellers will tell you frankly that there’s no way they’re bringing in many things that *are* available, even from Connect Logistics, just because you want it, because it is much better business to sell $4.99 6-packs to beggars from behind a steel grate than it is actually to stock a wine someone might *choose.*  It’s supply and demand, and if Big Bear 10% is what sells where the hookers and the schoolkids waiting for the bus stand, that’s what gets ordered.

In provinces like Ontario, of course, you can make your own wine at private shops—you’d sure never find that in Socialist Alberta.  Independent store-owners, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople are prevented by the government from owning such operations because the government couldn’t get their monopoly revenues.  And besides, small business owners??  Pffft.  I remember talking to one guy who ran a tidy, enthusiast wine shop in Calgary (now gone), and he told me how his Progressive Conservative MLA told him, flat-out, no way are we gonna let you make wine on your premises—“your golf tournaments aren’t as good.”  A little Putinesque candor, Alberta-style.

 In Ontario, say, you get stores that are clean and well marked, with professional staff.  The selection is much larger than in Alberta, the vast, vast majority of the time.  The prices are what the prices are—there is none of the constant confusion endemic to Alberta, where much of the store might not even have prices, or price tags.  Staff in Ontario ask for ID, and are even monitored to do so, something I have never, ever, once seen in Alberta.  Not once.  Ever.  That kid who just killed your daughter on the roads tonight?  That’s what’s called “the Alberta advantage.”  Ralph Klein brought it in. The prices are all but the same.  Sometimes, in Ontario, they’re cheaper.  Yes, the provincial sales tax will usually bump prices up, but sometimes not even enough to cover the Alberta disadvantage.  It’s true that, in Alberta, store by store, particular brands will pitch to particular stores, so that you can, say, get some barrel-reject Peller consumers’ blend plonk for $4.99, or Jim-Bob’s All-American Brew for $4.99 a 6-pack, but is that what you wanted, when all your money is going back to the government, just as it always did, anyway?  Now and then, in Ontario, a boutique beer will go a bit on sale.  You’ll think it’s funny what a small sale it is, until you reflect that you will never, ever, as long as you live, see a sale like that in Alberta.

 There are 3 kinds of liquor stores in Alberta—the boutique high-end ones with limited stock for “real” housewives; the mid-range ones—all 7-11-type chains where the owners could buy up massive numbers of locations and set up oligopolies--with decent selection and predictable loss-leaders of atrocious plonk, Australian urine for $7.99, etc.; and hole-in-the-wall 6-pack sellers with bikini posters open through 2 a.m. that are blights on their neighourhoods and crime magnets.  In one of these several years ago, I surveyed the cameras and grates and so on and jokingly asked the taciturn English guy at the till if he’d really ever been robbed before, and he said deadpan: “three times this month.” 

 And the great thing about Alberta is that all *3* varieties of stores can typically be found all on just about every single city block.  Endless choice, without choice.  I think this is what it was like in Soviet Russia.  You could get a bottle of vodka just about anytime, anywhere, depending on your connections.  You maybe couldn’t get what you wanted, but you could get something.  And this is Alberta now.  Choice, without choice, at uncompetitive prices, alongside a studied effort to shut down business, initiative, and entrepreneurship to serve ruling party interests.

 zr