Poor Bashers Tend to Be Hypocrites

I’ve now received this thing for the third time this month. It makes me vomit. Why? Read on…

This was written by a construction worker in Fort MacMurray …he sure makes a lot of sense!

Read on…

I work, they pay me.

I pay my taxes and the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit.

In order to earn that pay cheque, I work on a rig site for a Fort Mac construction project. I am required to pass a random urine test, with which I have no problem.

What I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don’t have to pass a urine test.

Shouldn’t one have to pass a urine test to get a welfare cheque because I have to pass one to earn it for them?

Please understand – I have no problem with helping people get back on their feet. I do on the other hand have a problem with helping someone sit on their arse drinking beer and smoking dope.

Could you imagine how much money the provinces would save if people had to pass a urine test to get a public assistance cheque?

Jean Swanson is one of my heros. She works in Vancouver’s poorest neighbourhood and wrote Poor Bashing: The Politics of Exclusion, a book that challenges everyone’s assumptions about the poor, assumptions that usually justify why we won’t re-organize society to keep from continually kicking them.

The below response to the above depressingly common attitude is inspired by her exploration of the same issue in her book.

I’m just quite tired of the “don’t get me wrong, I really think we should help the poor, except if they…”

Another good [if not far better] point is that there are hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in tax cuts that go every year to people in the top 20-40% of income earners in our society who can afford and write off RRSPs, stocks, and capital investments.

We don’t ask them to present their urine or a blood sample or prove they aren’t wife/child beaters, embezzlers, speeders, j-walkers, theists, atheists, supporters of gun control or capital punishment, regular voters, hockey fans, cokeheads, neglectors of children, gamblers, pot smokers, contributors to political parties, beer/wine/spirits drinkers or various social miscreants.

We give value-free tax cuts to the well-off [like me] as long as they meet the legal requirements to get tax refunds.

I too can sure imagine how much we’d save if we did similar morality testing on those earning over $57k, double the Canadian average annual income.

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.

Child Sexual Abuse Treatment: BC Government Lies About Underfunding

Some lessons to heed from question period this week:

1. BC’s neoLiberal party abuses Freedom of Information requests to make themselves look good and justify leaving abused children vulnerable.

2. BC’s neoLiberal party has lied about the need for better funding for treating children who have suffered sexual abuse.

3. The installation of a Representative for Children and Youth last fall should be viewed in this new light.

4. The government should actually hold legislative sessions for public accountability.

5. Tom Christensen’s offices are just gorgeous [see above] with their new renovations using money that could have paid for child sexual abuse counsellors.

It was a sick, sick Halloween when in question period, Minister of Children and Family Development Tom Christensen tried to dance around being caught by the Times Colonist [see below] in redacting critical elements of a report, thus allowing the Ministry to deny providing poor service to child sexual abuse victims.

Christensen, with no sense of irony: “It’s unfortunate that the opposition is choosing to politicize this issue.”

Then NDP MLA Rob Flemming followed up the questioning, “Sadly, it isn’t the first time they’ve tried to cover up failings when it comes to protecting children. Last fall the opposition revealed an FOI which was sent inadvertently to the opposition, complete with handwritten sticky-notes. That FOI about child protection in the Coroner’s Service had a handwritten note from the Deputy Solicitor General asking for more severing because it ‘contradicts what we’ve said to this point.’ The FOI also showed the public affairs bureau has been given sign-off authority by this government.”

Christensen’s ass-covering reply: “I can tell you that the Ministry of Children and Family Development receives well over a thousand FOI requests each year. I have nothing to do with a single one of those, but in fact we have a piece of legislation that balances access to information with a number of other considerations.”

So much for ministerial responsibility. I know he doesn’t process FOI requests, but the minister is responsible for the ministry’s actions. Further, the FOI legislation isn’t designed for the government to sever information in FOIs that contradicts their public messaging to keep from appearing duplicitous.

Christensen, later: “I’m proud of what this government has accomplished for children and youth with mental health issues across this province — a child and youth mental health plan that is the envy of jurisdictions across Canada.”

I wonder if those jurisdictions envy the BC neoLiberals’ ability to redact documents to justify defunding child sexual abuse treatment programs.

And now I think back to last November when the government reluctantly decided to actually hold a legislative session to appoint a Representative for Children and Youth, a session that the NDP stretched out to a whopping 3 days. Knowing now that at that time the government was hiding the report that was critical of their funding of child sexual abuse treatment, maybe that helps explain why that Representative appointment was enough to justify actually holding a fall legislative session.

2006 report identified problems with B.C.’s child abuse programs
Lindsay Kines
Times Colonist
Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The B.C. government has known for 18 months that its program to help sexually abused children is in trouble and needs help, documents obtained by the Times Colonist show.

Long before stories broke last spring about children waiting months for counselling, a review by the Ministry of Children and Family Development uncovered extensive problems with its Sexual Abuse Intervention Program (SAIP).

The April 2006 review concluded that the 47 agencies and societies helping abused children felt neglected, isolated and short-changed by government.

“Providers were unanimous in their view that program funding is insufficient to meet the needs for SAIP services,” the 26-page review stated.

The report said the program was a “critical element” of services related to child and youth mental health and “deserving of a more explicit focus.”

“There is a pervasive view among providers that the program has been neglected by government decision-makers over the past several years,” the report stated

The ministry blanked out those comments from a copy of the review released under the province’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

But the TC has obtained an unedited version of the report that shows many of the agencies complained about a lack of money for training, poor wages for counsellors, an inability to travel to provide services in remote geographic areas, isolation from decision-makers and deteriorating relationships over the past 10 years.

“A more intensive focus on sexual-abuse intervention programming should yield greater satisfaction among providers and improved access and quality of services for clients, resulting in a more consistent standard of care across the province,” the report said.

The province’s sexual abuse program made headlines last spring when Victoria’s Mary Manning Centre was forced to issue layoff notices to three part-time therapists because of a lack of funding. The subsequent publicity prompted public donations totaling more than $130,000 that allowed the centre to re-hire therapists and eliminate a waitlist for sexually abused children.

A TC investigation at the time found that other agencies were also struggling, that sexually abused children were waiting up to six months for treatment in some regions, and that the program’s budget had been frozen at $3 million for 17 years.

Children’s Minister Tom Christensen expressed concern last May that the budget had been frozen for so long.

“I’m asking my staff questions about that to see if it’s something we need to be looking at more closely,” he said.

The ministry’s review a year earlier, however, had already identified key areas requiring attention, including “establishing appropriate funding.”

“Providers maintain that funding has not kept pace with population growth, particularly in high-growth geographic areas, or inflation,” the review said.

Christensen said in an interview this week that he did not know all the details of the review last spring, though he was aware his ministry had been looking at the sexual abuse program. The review was done about five months before he was appointed minister.

“Having said that, quite frankly my answers in the spring wouldn’t have been any different,” he said.

Christensen said it’s no surprise that when the ministry surveys agencies to see if they have a shortage of cash, “you get the answer, ‘Yes, there is.’”

He noted the review found little consistency among how agencies run sexual-abuse counselling programs across the province, and stressed the need to establish standards before dealing with money matters.

“That’s the work that’s been underway for the last number of months,” Christensen said. Draft standards are ready for review, and the ministry recently held a training session on trauma counselling, he said.

“We are moving forward in terms of trying to ensure that this is an effective program and that the public can be assured of quality services, regardless of where they may access them in the province, and that there’s some consistency of standards,” he said.

Once that’s done, he hinted at a possible budget boost for the program in the 2008-2009 fiscal year. “I didn’t make any secret of it in the spring that I was surprised that the funding had been frozen, and I certainly am of the view that when people have suffered sexual abuse and we have effective counselling that can help them to deal with that, then we need to be working hard to make it available.”

Note to TransLink: Your Riders Are Not Customers

I went to the TransLink website just now to search for the word “customer”. I found 376 references.

I also have noticed that in recent days a canned announcement pops onto Skytrains regularly asking “Skytrain customers” to not leave their lame faux-news free daily newspapers [Metro, 24] lying all over the trains cluttering them up and creating a slipping hazard for most everyone.

As part of the large trend to commodify all things public and common, riders are no longer riders, we are customers purchasing a service: mass transit. As customers we are told the class of our existence on what used to be public transit.

Now the new TransLink board is being appointed by a gang of mostly business-folk, a board not accountable to the token Council of Mayors who will be “consulted” on decisions. Public money spent by unaccountable directors appointed by mostly business interests.

If you resent being classed as a “public” transit customer instead of a co-owner of a commonly held public “public” transit system, you had better start paying more attention to the Campbell neoLiberal government’s agenda to sell us [and everything held in common] down the river.

And it would help to read Naomi Klein’s new book to get a primer on the last few decades of rationale behind the premier’s manifestation of neoliberal cancer. And if you don’t have time to read it all, you can get the 6 minute primer here.

And a few facts to make you wonder just what price we pay for a privatized, deregulated world.