Harper's Gradual but Spectacular Failure .. . .

It is becoming increasingly difficult for anyone to see the Prime Ministership of Stephen Harper and the history of the Conservative Government as anything but a spectacular failure at almost every level. Even judged by their own standards this government has really failed badly on almost all portfolios. The only area in which Harper can say to have succeeded is in the break down of democracy in general and the destruction of transparency, accountability, and due process in the Parliament in particular.

Some areas of Harper's failure have been rather pathetically predicable. Take Senate reform for example. Rank and file Conservatives (most of whom don't seem to understand the function and process of our government) were naive enough to believe that Harper could do something to reform the Senate. If one understands our system of government, however, one knows that any significant reforms to the Senate would (or will) be monumentally difficult and will probably require the agreement of all the provinces. And yet Harper vowed that he would never appoint anyone to the Senate and that he would reform that rather antiquated body. He has now appointed 58 Senators and all of those appointments have been wildly partizan. And while all appointments to the Senate are inherently acts of patronage, this fact should not preclude a PM from appointing competent individuals to that office. Harper, on the other hand seems to have no regard for any qualification other than the degree to which party hacks deserve rewards on the Senate gravy train. As a result of his disregard for vetting his candidates (and this failure applies to his appointments outside the Senate as well) and his lack of concern for qualifications, Harper has appointed a remarkable group of buffoons to the Upper Chamber.

One can only surmise that Harper is, in regard to the Senate, either a terrific failure or that he never had any intention of reform. Either way, Harper is enjoying bringing his friends to the Government trough and shamelessly continues to appoint Senators while talk of reform has disappeared from Government talking points.

In other areas of public policy Harper has similarly failed. Fiscally speaking, Harper blew significant government surpluses and is now head the most deficit ridden government in Canadian history. Of course, one might argue that this has been a conscious effort on Harper's part to bankrupt the government in the short term so that he can gut it long term. However, while Harper has begun the gutting of social services (something we always expected him to do) his reckless spending continues unabated. The problem is, of course, that regardless of one's political stripes, money, power, and spending are addictive, particularly for people like Harper whose real goal seems to be to find ways of diverting money from the middle and working-class to the offices of large corporations.

Harper's failure on the energy and environmental portfolios is probably the most spectacular of all. He has been gutting the environmental restrictions in an effort to promote runaway oil development but this effort is increasingly looking like it is going to fail. Thanks to gradually changing usages and new finds, the US will soon be oil self-sufficient. Meanwhile, because of the high costs of tar-sands extraction, Alberta's economy will soon once again experience one of its many dramatic busts (and this one could be the very worst they have ever experienced). Harper has attempted to create a third-world style extraction economy in Canada, an economy with very little manufacturing or innovation in which the middle-class disappears for the benefit of a small ultra-rich ruling class. However, it looks like in the long term even this rather nefarious effort will be a failure for Harper because soon our extraction economy will also fail and the wealth required for Harper's corrupt model simply won't be there. Instead, Canada will eventually look like the worst kind of Banana republic. More ominously, Canada could follow the road of countries like Spain in which the ruling class exported all their wealth to other countries and ended up undermining their own development.

Over all, Harper has surrounded himself with criminals and incompetents (men like Flaherty who seems to be genetically incapable of balancing budgets even in times of wealth). As things get worse for Harper he, like so many petty, secretive losers with persecution complexes, is receding increasingly into the shadows. Harper has never once since being Prime Minister ever faced the press or the people in an honest, unvetted, straightforward situation. But as his agenda begins to break down, as it becomes more and more evident that his time as Prime Minister is not only drawing to a close but is doing so under a growing cloud of incompetence, Mr. Harper is beginning to recede behind the wall of his office and his security staff like a Soviet-Era dictator. Harper long ago lost any moral authority that he might have had to govern. Now that it is becoming clear that his government is not only immoral, steeped in a growing list of shocking scandals, but is hopelessly incompetent as well, Harper is turning into a Stalin-like figure before our very eyes - a shadowy, bizarre figure who seems increasingly uncomfortable in the public eye and whose obvious narcissistic disorders are destroying him and his government.

When Will the CON-Job End?

It seems to me that a growing number of Canadians are finally waking up to the fiscal incompetence of the Harper cabal. It doesn't take the Economic education of Jim Stanford to understand that despite the CON-Artists continually self-congratulatory attitudes to their own supposed economic prowess, these guys really have no idea what they are doing. The ruthless pursuit of a bitumen-exporting economy already seems to be a doomed effort even from its own point of view now that the price of oil is edging downward and the Americans look to be energy self-sufficient in a few years. But from any normal point of view the CON-Artists economic strategies seem to be not only doomed to failure but downright idiotic. Not only did the Harper CON-Artists blow the economic surpluses they inherited with stupid GST and Corporate tax cuts, but they have taken Canada into a structural deficit situation (despite their supposed opposition to deficit spending at any time). Now to compound their basic economic stupidity, the Harper cabal is failing utterly to shape the Canadian economy for the future. Instead of shaping Canada's economy as an exporter of refined resources, alternative energy technologies, and education driven new ideas, the Harper-cons are looking to make Canada a banana republic that has no equality, no democracy, no generalized prosperity, and no real future.


Tell me again how these buffoons are able to trade on an image as economic competence and responsibility??

The Right has Lost the Debate . . . And Soon They Will Lose the Battle . . .

Though the right is, in many places, still riding high in the actual political struggle, if we talk about it honestly the right has, in fact, already lost the political debate at almost every level.

At the social level, the right has consistently, albeit gradually, lost throughout history. But in the resurgence of the right since the eighties when they began their concerted efforts to push back many of the 20th century gains, it is now clear that they have lost that skirmish. From Gay rights to abortion rights, from pay equity to feminism, the right has been lossing ground and support everywhere. Though the right has, in many cases, been able to attack certain institutions that aid in socially progressive issues, the right knows that they have lost the actual debate and that most people support such things as gay marriage, abortion rights, and women's rights in general.

At the environmental level, the right has again, maintained the a great deal of power, but they have clearly lost the debate. No credible person doubts the reality of global warning and even if there is still some degree of debate about the cause, we all know that we need to stop pouring crap into the air and find alternatives to carbon fuels. Even the once great bastions of rightwing ideology, the World Bank and the IMF, have, to a degree, come on side with the demands of the environmental movement.

At an economic level, the rightwing has lost the debate in quite spectacular fashion. The theory that Ronald Reagan once had the gall to call "trickle-down economics," has proved disastrous. Low taxes for the rich and for corporations has not created wealth for anyone but the rich and everyone now knows that it has created economic inequities. Not only does the 'neo-liberal' approach lead to considerably less relative prosperity for the vast majority, it actually destroys the very economies that it is supposed to help. A growing cohort of economics have now abandoned the 'neo-liberal' economic theory and are asserting more reasonable theories as if people mattered.

Now, I can hear you thinking "if the rightwing has lost the debate on all of these issues, why does it seem that they are winning so much?" Well, the sad truth is that those who win the debate don't necessarily consistently win the political struggle, and the rightwing has two significant advantages, to wit: ownership of the media, and a creeping control of the judiciary that has come from many years of growing corporate power. The rightwing lies about almost everything and they can depend on their media lapdogs to repeat these lies in a ubiquitous fashion. So even where they have lost the debate among those who know and understand these things, many people look out and see another reality being presented to them constantly in the media and this cognitive dissonance is difficult for many to overcome. And when you couple this media power with the gall of men like Harper to actually muzzle the fact finding factions of government, the rightwing is maintain some degree of an upper-hand on a sad technicality.

Meanwhile, these technicalities are being mirrored in the judicial system where the right has appointed a huge cohort of supporters to the bench and where money all too often buys victories. So a chronic criminal like Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto can keep winning on technicalities and avoid ouster and stay out of jail (where he really should be). The rightwing trolls even play the Reagan card regarding Mayor Ford and begins to blame the "left" for his trouble. These fools shout out such things as 'Witch Hunt" as though the Mayors constant criminal activity is not to blame but rather those who hope to bring him to justice are somehow at fault.

And because our political system is so badly antiquated we can have a government that essentially operates outside of the spirit of the law (if not the letter) and can move blithly forward manipulating the system to its own advantage. When we update our political institutions men like Harper will be in jail where they belong.

So the rightwing has lost the debate at every level but maintains a degree of power with the help of corporate media and antiquated institutions. But losing the debate is the first step to losing the entire battle and lose they will. If history has taught us anything it is that those with money and power cannot hold back the tide of change and that we shall overcome.

Who Cares if Kathleen Wynne is Gay?

In the wake of Kathleen Wynne's victory in the race to become the new leader of the Ontario Liberal Party, the inevitable, perennial questions are being asked; the "are the voters ready" questions that the media asks every time a potential leader who is not a Christian, white-man in a suit is facing the public.  Kathleen Wynne is now the first openly gay premier in Canada, a perfect talking point for a media machine that thrives on short-lived, usually meaningless issues that generation paper sales, tv viewership, and hits on websites. So everyone ponders aloud in a cacophony of media noise - "Can an openly gay premier win an election in Canada?"

But as it is in most cases the question is fairly meaningless. Kathleen Wynne will probably lose the next election and fail to become the first openly gay person to actually become "elected" to the office of premier. The provincial Liberal Party is deeply unpopular in Ontario for reasons that have nothing to do with Ms Wynne's sexual preferences. Despite all the back-patting that was bestowed upon Former Premier Dalton McGuinty at this weekend's Liberal convention, he was a shockingly incompetent premier. Besides being a lapdog of the growing corporate ideology that has so badly infected the federal and provincial Liberal parties in Canada, Mr McGuinty has deeply damaged the Liberal brand in Ontario with his continual partizan motivations. Like so many political party leaders (including our Fuhrer Harper) it is the blatant, undisguised partizan efforts that destroyed McGuinty. The final straw for McGuinty was, of course, the imposition of an outrageously illegal bill to take away basic democratic rights from teachers. In a blatant effort to win two fall bi-elections McGuinty bit the very hand that arguably first brought him to office. And after guaranteeing that the Liberal Party cannot be reelected McGuinty high-tailed it out of town and, a-la Mulroney, he left a woman to clean up his mess.

But I digress.

The point is that because of the vagaries of politics, we probably won't know if, under ideal conditions, Ontario voters are ready to elect an openly gay woman to the office of the Premier. However, the fact that such an outcome seems in no way beyond the pale, demonstrates at least one thing - as long as you are ready to tow the anti-union, corporate, establishment line, you can probably get elected no matter what your sexual preferences might be. Here is the real rub. Scott Brison, earswhile Tory, now Liberal MP for the riding of King-Hants in Nova Scotia, spoke on CBC's The Current this morning, saying that he once thought that when he came out as gay he would be precluded from entering political service in this country. However, it turned out that as long as Mr Brison maintained the corporate line, which he has done very effectively for many years, he could sleep with whoever he wanted.

All of this is not so say that the political offices in this country will tolerate NO dissent to the corporate ideology. Though corporate media has effectively precluded, say, an openly socialist person from gaining any real political power, there is still some, however small, variation of political ideas in Canadian politics. But, in political terms, the room for manoeuvre is increasingly small in our legislative houses, as it is everywhere.

And despite the fact that the social/sexual restrictions have seen significant liberalization in recent years, there are still many such limits to power. For example I would be surprised if you could find a single MP (or even MPP) in Canada who is openly Atheist. And even if you could find a few, it is clear that someone who professes to have no theistic beliefs at all would have NO chance of holding significant political office. And the fact that I think that Hockey is irretrievably stupid and that competitive sports in general are not only silly but actually bad for people and society, would mean that I would have no chance of gaining public office.

The fact is that more and more sexual orientation means less and less to people. The corporate, hierarchical structure of our society can use gay people as effectively as it uses straight ones. Gay, straight? Who cares, as long as you are willing to tow the capitalist/competitive line. What voters really aren't ready for today is not the Kathleen Wynnes of the world, but  people who are willing to question the basic structures of competitive, corporate, hierarchical ideology that maintains our systems of power.

My Painting process. . . .

For the couple of people that expressed an interest in my painting process I thought I would post a little description with a few sequential photos to demonstrate how I do it.


Below is a shot of my current shadow-box in process. As you can see it is much larger than any other one I have tried which presents a number of challenges but also offers interesting possibilities.

What you see here is the front of the box covered with the underpainting. I under-paint most of my work and my favoured color for the underpainting is Burnt Sienna. Burnt Sienna is a relatively new color (first used in painting in the 19th century) and because it is an iron oxide based pigment it offers excellent coverage and remarkable stability. It is also an excellent underpainting color because it is dark enough to serve as a linear base where necessary but not so dark that it deadens the overcoats or makes them hard to paint.

-A note on underpainting - I first became interested in an undertone for painting when I was in my teens and discovered the work of the 19th century English watercolour painter David Cox. Cox was an excellent painter (though not as fine as his contemporary Thomas Girtin) who often painted on rag paper or packing paper which had a brown tone. A number of paper makers have produced papers which are homages to Cox and in the 70s and early 80s there was a very interesting rag paper that was a fairly dark and absorbent that I used a number of times. I don't know who produced it but the production run ended and so I looked for substitutes and began to soak my watercolour paper in coffee to get an undertone. Because coffee essentially dies the paper it offers little interference with the watercolour that you lay on top of it. I eventually realized that underpainting has always been a common technique which many of my favorite painters employ. Even Bonnard (an often neglected painter) used undertone. Anyway, in the early 90s when I began to paint with acrylics (and sometimes oil) I experimented with various undertones until I began to favor burnt sienna. Underpainting provides depth and solidity to a painting that is difficult to achieve without some undertone.


Below you see a detail from the front of the above shadow-box. It is a sequence of photos which offers a brief insight into the process.

You can just see the drawing on top of the burnt sienna. The upper rectangle is painted in Naples Yellow which is one of my favorite colours (easily made with Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Orange, and White) The rays of the sun are straight cadmium yellow.

Cadmiums are great colours but they offer poor coverage. Thus to reach a solid colour with a cadmium such as the rays of the sun above one is required to make up to five coats of paint. The black here is Mars Black which is highly recommended when painting over an undertone. Mars black is another iron oxide colour and therefore offers better coverage than Ivory Black. Though you cannot see it in these photos, I often coat my blacks (which I don't use very often) with light coat of Ultramarine Blue. This technique creates greater depth and a slightly translucent effect like the black feathers of a Magpie. 

You can only see a bit of detail here but I have begun to add a little more depth to the colours with a cadmium orange at the tips of the rays and a lightened mix at the bases. (The addition of white is often a favorable advantage for the creation of coverage over an undertone) 

Below the face is formed and I am putting the decorations in. Above the face I laid down a streak of cadmium red (made in several coats) and then painted the words (written backwards) with cadmium yellow. 

Below the words are finished with small streaks of lightened ultramarine blue in the joints of the letters and a green (created with a number of colours) in between the letters, leaving just a small amount of the red visible. 

And here I have gone through the same process in the yellow segment and connected the two sections. 

The detail is now, more or less, complete and will later be integrated into the other sections of the painting. 

I hope this has been interesting to someone, and if you have any questions feel free to ask. 

White People are Just too Corrupt. . . . .

You know, I began to look into it and discovered, much to my surprise, that apparently economic malfeasance is quite common in this country. Have you heard about this? In the 1990s the Federal Liberal Party, then in Government, shuffled tens of millions of dollars through government coffers into the hands of their friends in the advertising and promotions field, skimming off millions for themselves. They also spent billions of dollars setting up a gun registry that should have cost almost nothing. I found out that in the 1980s fourteen Conservative members of the legislature in Saskatchewan were convicted of fraud for making phoney expense claims. Our present Conservative government spend a billion of dollars on one weekend meeting, building fake-lakes and diverting funds to the ridings of their MPs for unrelated projects while at the same time rounding people up in the streets and illegally putting them in detention centres.

Did you know about this stuff?

Then I began to look into it and found that these kinds of scandals go back into our history since the beginning. Even members of the government of the much loved John A. Macdonald were accused of being involved in bribery! And then I found out about the King-Byng Affair. Imagine my surprise.

Well after much reflection and thought, I have come to a painful conclusion. It seems clear that White Canadians are simply not capable of taking care of their own financial affairs. Corruption obviously is far to imbedded in their culture and they are just too immature to take care of themselves without inevitably falling into a spiral of corruption. It is sad but we just have to face the facts. Their economic and political leaders have an undue share of the social wealth while some of their people have fallen into poverty. White culture is a sea of corruption and inequality and yet they pretend to be adhere to democratic principles.

And now I find out that they are doing all of this while at the same time raping the environment, selling out their future to foreign interests, and leaving a legacy that will so damage our future that their children and grandchildren will suffer terribly from their neglect and malfeasance. They take, take, take, without thought of themselves or their future. Their culture is obviously disgustingly degraded and corrupted. They treat their women horribly (allowing them only token participation in government and business), their internet is full of pornography and crime is rife in their financial institutions. Meanwhile a handful of white people have hoarded almost all the wealth and the majority of them purport to think that this is a "natural" order of things. Their religious organizations are hopelessly degraded and sexual misconduct is inherent in the system.

White Canadians are obviously racially incapable at this time in history of acting responsibly with their money or their environment. It is time to change all that. Another nation needs to come in and take control of their money and government for their own good. We need to take their children away from them and put them in schools where they can be pulled into a more mature future. Here we can outlaw their language and separate them from their history of barbarism.

It is all very sad but it must be done now before it is too late.

Same old Hypocrisy. . . .

The Sixth Estate does a great job today in exposing the hypocrisy nascent in the ongoing attitude toward Chief Spence in particular and the Native Governments in general. It amazes me how corrupt our present government is and yet it continues to have the gall to attempt to marginalize others with accusations of financial malfeasance.

But hypocrisy seems to be the order of the week as the Ontario Premier has the gall to accuse teachers of attempting to undertake an illegal strike while his whole government is in a continued state of illegality with its Bill 115. The Premier knows full-well that this bill is illegal and that he will loose a Supreme Court challenge. This fact is evident from the Government of BC vs The Hospital Employees' Union decision which made it clear that governments cannot impose contracts. And the fact that the Premier knows his bill is illegal is evidenced in the fact that he has said he will rescind it as soon as the contracts are imposed and the labour unrest ends. This intent to rescind the bill is motivated on his hope that the Teachers' Union will not drag him to the SCofC where not only will he be humiliated and his legacy destroyed, but because he knows that his government's loss in court will end up costing the province more than it would have to settle with the teachers in the first place. Either way, the proposed one-day strike by teachers tomorrow is not illegal because Bill 115 is illegal in the first place then post facto the strike cannot be illegal because no legal contract prevails and therefore the teachers are in fact in a legal strike position.

If this week has carried any political lessons it is that governments have little or no shame. Harper and his supporters don't mind calling anyone fiscally irresponsible regardless of how evident the conservative government''s corruption becomes. And McGuinty doesn't mind enacting legislation that he knows full-well is illegal and then pretending to be on the legal and moral high-ground by throwing accusations against teachers whose rights he has attempted to destroy.