Recipe for Assassinating the CBC

1. Start with an ideology that opposes communitarianism and public ownership and worships the market’s capacity to create “the good” even if the market is far from freely competitive. The federal Liberals and Conservatives have well demonstrated this.
2. Choke its funding.
3. Appoint corporate leaders who wouldn’t dare come up with an original idea to guide CBC as a core part of the ever morphing Canadian culture.
4. Fail several years ago to come up with the cash necessary to secure continued rights from the NHL to broadcast Hockey Night in Canada, the core brand of MotherCorp and the closest thing we have to a central icon of Canadiana.
5. Cancel shows like This is Wonderland just as they receive a plethora of award nominations.
6. Murder the CBC orchestra.
7. Intentionally bungle securing the rights to the theme song to Hockey Night in Canada.
8. Let bake for several years at 43,500 degrees.
9. Don’t turn off the oven so that the whole concoction burns to a crisp: strangled of cash, free of its flagship show and cultural icons.
10. Turn off the oven after it’s too late, take out the burnt carcass and say it can’t compete with CTV, TSN, Global and the Americans; put a bullet in its head.
11. Toss it in the garbage and instead of auctioning, give away at fire sale prices the broadcast frequencies that MotherCorp held for generations to the strongest of corporations in a bizarre corporate welfare pitch in an arena where Big Media wants to take away a nation-wide network of frequencies that up until a few years from now were owned by the (fucking) people.
12. Pretend you don’t know what oligopoly means.
13. Worship Rupert Murdoch and Leonard Asper.

Society’s Celebrity Bloodlust Complex and Britney Spears: Part 2

In Part 1 I compared society’s fascination with Britney Spears to the new movie Untraceable where people visit a website to accelerate the murder of a prone victim. Now that she’s out of the psych ward, there seems to be a new level of intimacy between Britney and the “journalists” out to get the best shots of her. It’s almost as if whatever pretense there had recently been about not literally swarming and stalking her has evaporated.

These two stills from CNN video are courtesy of a media helicopter that followed her car away from the hospital. It was stopped at least twice on the road for the swarmings.

It’s hard to imagine how much of this a person can take. If she “snaps” we would get to say, “yeah, that figures” but how much of a chance does this woman have to be able to regain mental health.

It reminds me of a tunnel in Paris in the late 1990s, except this time it’s not taking place in one evening of speeding drivers, but stretched out slow motion over weeks and months, almost as if someone is storyboarding it for maximum extraction of images during her whole descent into madness.

On one level she has merely drifted from one entertainment sector to another: pop music to tabloid spectacle. Once a Disney prop, she’s now a media character. I wonder if she’s ever had much time to be a self-contained individual.

Society’s Celebrity Bloodlust Complex and Britney Spears

Last Saturday, I sadly missed a special presentation of something called “The Fall of Britney Spears” or something like that on E! Channel, a sad commentary on our society that used to be Vancouver Island’s TV station.

I don’t like Britney Spears’ music or PR thing very much at all, but we are both parents of two children so suddenly I have a good degree of empathy for her. I’ve also always been rather concerned about celebrity microscope effect, long before the death of Princess Diana.

But this show on E! Channel was about reviewing recent events detailing Britney’s “fall.”

Though I missed the show, I thought about it every time I saw the trailer for the film Untraceable. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but it seems that one of the plot elements of the movie is that some killer fellow has set up some sort of murder machine that will kill someone at some point, a point which accelerates closer when a greater number of people visit some website. So people’s participation in the spectacle makes them complicit in a murder.

You can even try out http://www.killwithme.com and take part in the movie/murder/complicity spectacle on your own in an ironic, self-reflexive nod to the plot device.

It seems to me that everyone who watched that Britney Spears show on E! Channel last week [and every other act of celebrity obsession] is complicit in the struggles she is now enduring. And while we can callously wipe it all away by saying she voluntarily chose to become a celebrity, that is insufficient to excuse what truly appears to be a celebrity bloodlust complex. We like to build up people to be larger than life, but at the same time we are always looking for excuses to bring them back down to earth to make sure they aren’t better than us.

I expect sociologists have much more to say on this, and those who have seen Untraceable will be able to confirm how much this observer complicity is significant in the movie, but in the end, the movie may be a strong metaphor for our role in Britney Spears’ tribulations.

COPE’s Ideas Conference and Re-Inspiring a Robust Democracy

In our society citizens are rapidly being re-framed as consumers. We need to seriously question just what democracy means to us. Politics is not an event that a bunch of us take part in every few years at an election. It is something that happens every day. If we choose to ignore politics except during elections, that itself is a political decision.

So on Saturday, December 1, Vancouver’s Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) held their 2007 Ideas Conference, “A Vancouver for Everyone.” With panelists and discussions focussing on our increasingly disastrous symbiotic relationship with our environment, transportation and transit, safety and housing, several dozen members and non-members addressed the issues with a focus on defeating the highly neoliberal and fully partisan Non-Partisan Association (NPA) in Vancouver next November.

The NPA wants to think of us all as consumers. Their neoliberal agenda presumes we are individuals and as their goddess, Margaret Thatcher, has often proclaimed, “there is no such thing as society.” For as individuals, we act in our own self-interest so the market can provide all we need.

Contrasting with that (literally) anti-social philosophy are the recently famous Antarctic emperor penguins where patriarchy oddly does not rule and more importantly, daddies shelter their eggs over the winter by huddling together with all the other daddies, cycling from the centre to the periphery of the huddle to keep warm during the -60 degree Antarctic winters.

Humans, however, are more like the emperor penguins than Adam Smith’s vision of entrepreneurial man (and Mrs. Thatcher).

So COPE, not the party of corporate funding, has explored the reality of community, society and populist politics. Citizens should not view politics as they do a movie in a theatre: we cannot be passive consumers. We must be involved. We don’t all have to run for office, but we do all need to realize that our democracy needs us to engage. That can be attending the Ideas Conference or attending a friend’s living room some Friday evening for coffee to talk about a new car-free festival in the community next summer, or what the new #1 Kingsway community centre should provide in programs for pre-teens.

Highlights from the Ideas Conference can be fodder for any civic discussion among neighbours or friends: a do-it-yourself political meeting that takes no real effort beyond the desire to be a part of our floundering democracy.

Ecologically, Vancouver, is embracing the 19th century model of social planning. We have not yet even conducted a study on the impact on Vancouver of a 1, 2 or 3 metre rise in the sea level. We could become like Venice unless we quickly and drastically reduce our contributions to global warming and mitigate the effects that are already in the pipeline.

Mitigation? How about increasing the height of the dykes that protect our large cities and vulnerable small communities from sea level rises. How about all the dump trucks clogging up Main Street with the fill from underneath Cambie Street in the privatized SNC-Lavalin Line (I’ve just stopped calling it the Canada Line altogether)? Those trucks are dumping the fill into the sea. Did we think ahead to shore up the dykes? No.

In the 19th century, progress was god, just like in Gordon Campbell’s BC where we’ve got a hopelessly inadequate climate change plan and TransLink being turned over to corporate appointees to build more bridges and highways for cars and trucks and the NAFTA Supercorridor’s local network: our Gateway project. We need a transportation agenda for people and the environment.

Our worship of the car shows up with a subsidy from public funds of over $5,000 per year per car while each transit ride is subsidized by $5. A transit commuter’s subsidy, then, is worth only $2,500 per year.

The wildly popular car-free festivals on Commercial Drive over the last 3 summers will take place in 5 Vancouver neighbourhoods next summer. If 5 more neighbourhoods in 2009 join in, we could shut down much of the city to cars on these days by the end of the decade. On the Drive, at the end of the car-free days, people felt displaced and annoyed by the presence of cars again, stealing their space.

And throughout the Ideas Conference we were signing a petition to turn the defunct and squandered Storyeum into a shelter. But prime space like that and other boarded up blocks in the downtown east side are instead being lined up for gentrification by Concord Pacific and other groups.

And in the era when the South False Creek lands no longer have any guaranteed social housing, when the NPA is using creative arithmetic to claim up to 2,000 more social housing units when it’s far less than 1,000, we need to ramp up agitation.

There are 2,300 homeless people in Vancouver, up from 1,200 in 2005 and 600 in 2003. There are 10,500 in BC, up from 5,000 in 2005. Last year the provincial government had a $4.1 billion budget surplus. Next year’s provincial budget will largely pay off the debt and cut personal and corporate taxes, including removing enormous taxes on the big banks, who we all know are highly vulnerable to their net income dipping below $1 billion each quarter next year.

If you didn’t know this, you might be able to blame the most highly corporate-concentrated media in North America for paying more attention to their government, not their role as a free press in a democracy.

And as Jean Swanson and others have recently asked the UN for foreign aid for our housing crisis, officials in the UN say we actually qualify because of this issue, despite our nation’s wealth. Groups in Vancouver are planning on asking other OECD countries for aid for social housing.

If all this doesn’t pressure the anti-social NPA into recognizing we are more like emperor penguins than emperors in training, we all need to get political and work for the next 11 months to vote them out so those of us who actually believe in society can run it, instead of giving it away in cynical corporate welfare programs.

Racist Survey Questions on a Survey about Multi-Culturalism

OK. Click on this image. I dare you. I’ll go into how offended I am by it below. If you find the questions fine, you can stop reading now and go here.

I’m starting to become far more than mildly concerned about Innovative Research Group. I’ve already written about the creative nature of interpreting reality that goes on at Robbins SCE Research. Now I can’t help but wonder about the validity of IRG’s polling.

Among whatever else they do, they conduct monthly polls in an online format. They ask about political support and current events.

Their online polling methodology is questionable. To sign up for their Canada 20/20 polls, you must provide an incredibly personal dossier on yourself, which they can use to pre-determine who gets to answer each month’s poll. Maybe they request participation randomly. If so, why bother with all the up-front data-mining? I suppose we should just trust them on this. Here are your views and information they ask about [a poll in itself] before you can participate in their polls:

1. federal party support
2. our presence in Afghanistan
3. Medicare and prescription drugs
4. gender
5. birthdate
6. postal code
7. citizenship
8. residency
9. whether you work in media or polling
10. whether and who you voted for in the last federal election
11. whether Quebec is a distinct society
12. federal party affiliation
13. your registered and non-registered investments
14. your personal financial asset wealth
15. your charitable giving habits
16. the role of newspapers, tv and the internet in your news gathering, and which media outlets
17. whether you rent or own your home
18. employment status, sector, job category and authority position
19. formal education
20. union membership
21. religion!
22. language at home
23. and of course the money shot, household income [which you can decline to answer, as with some but not all other questions]
24. the country where you and your parents were born
25. whether you wish to be in a focus group

Aside from the poll not being a random sample of British Columbians [the homeless and others on the wrong side of the digital divide don't always check their email promptly enough], their August poll asked “473 British Columbians” from around the province to comment on Vancouver’s strike. Asking people far from Vancouver what they think of Vancouver’s strike is questionable. This might explain how on page 10 of their August poll report, we find that 62% of those polled found the strike to not have affected them at all while 18% were affected “not much.” Perhaps they don’t live in Vancouver? Their heading on page 10 is “Most feel no impact from strike.” Really.

They do break down the 17% of 473 people [or 80] who reported being affected and 96% of them [77 people] ]live in Vancouver or the lower mainland. I am not thrilled by that sample size. Good thing the Vancouver Sun reported on the poll that includes merely 77 of the over 2 million living in the lower mainland [that's .00386% of the population].

In all, they conclude that poll participants think the union had been more unreasonable than the city. Presumably this includes people from the rest of BC who may have virtually no knowledge of the machinations of the strike itself. In the end it doesn’t matter because the percentages blaming each side were within the margin of error. So no one really loses. They interpret this to mean a pox on both your houses. Perhaps the conclusion is lack of information due to living in Fort St. John or Cranbrook.

So I’ve been wary of IRG’s methodology for some time now. But this evening I participated in one of their polls. Why not? I have a chance to win $500.

After many reasonable questions in the monthly online survey, many having to do with general views of federal and provincial politics and multi-cultural acceptance [perhaps having to do with Bruce Allen and his idiocy], I encountered a series of questions asking how I felt about living in a society with so many cultures.

I was even asked to reflect on the idea that after all, our nation is a land of immigrants. [I agreed.]

Then I clicked on the next page button and saw this piece of garbage above.

I thought I had learned to stuff down the bile in my throat after Gordon Campbell’s BC neoLiberal party has gone all in favour of treaty negotiations after their racist First Nations treaty referendum, but now we have a “major” polling group asking these ridiculous questions.

Below is the letter I sent to their support@canada2020.com. Feel free to share with them how you feel about asking these ridiculous questions. And pop back here to see any updates. I expect a response from them. If I don’t get one, I’ll comment on that as well.

Attached is a screenshot of a question in your current web survey [the same image as above].

It is irresponsible, inflammatory and impossible to answer by anyone but the ignorant or at best highly uninformed.

It can provide no meaningful information.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

While most of the other questions were highly or mostly answerable without having to over-simplify thought, this entire page is an affront. I await your apology and a public apology to all who have answered this survey.

I will be tracking how you disseminate the results of this survey. If you demonstrate that you have included information from this question, I will publicly be demanding a public apology.

Stephen Elliott-Buckley