Downtime: El Almacen

This is the second in a series of my favourite downtime places which I haunt in my R&R hours away from the Fortress of Solitude. This one is a small Yerba Mate Café called El Amacen (= “general store”sp.) which is located on Queen Street West section of downtown Toronto just west of the Little Tibet neighbourhood, West Parkdale and that I discovered on one of my nocturnal walks. I was in the mood best described by the person in Oscar Ruben's lyrics, "Lejos de Buenos Aires."

Con la mueca del pesar,
viejo, triste y sin valor,
lento el paso al caminar
voy cargando mi dolor.
Lejos de la gran ciudad
que me ha visto florecer,
en las calles más extrañas
siento el alma oscurecer.
Nadie observa mi final,
ni le importa mi dolor,
nadie quiere mi amistad,
sólo estoy con mi amargor.
Y así vago sin cesar
desde el día que llegué
cuando en pos de un sueño loco todo,
todo abandoné.

Y andando sin destino de pronto reaccioné
al escuchar de un disco el tango aquel:
“Mozo traiga otra copa,”
que lo cantaba Carlos Gardel.
Y al escucharlo recordé todo el pasado,
los años mozos tan felices que pasé:
mi viejecita, la barra amiga,
la noviecita que abandoné.
Tango, ¡que trae recuerdos!
Mi Buenos Aires, ¡quiero llorar!

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In the last ten years, over three thousand Tibetans have moved to Toronto and over half have settled in this area. They have their own temples, stores and even Saturday morning radio show, Radio Tibet on 101.3 FM so it’s strange to find an Argentinean café outpost in this area of Tibetan prayer wheels and orange clad monks but the Argentine community in Toronto is very diffuse so this became a meeting place after a FIFA world cup series brought various members of the community together and now a visitor can hear the sounds of Castellano, an Italian-accented version of Spanish spoken in the café.

The establishment was named after a Tango dinner theatre in Buenos Aires called Viejo Almacen and every other Saturday they have a Tango and Tea time where you can dance and flirt with Argentinean ladies over mate. There is  a secret code among the clientele during the tango time -  if you offer a sweetened mate, it means you’re interested; a mate with cinnamon means “I’ll wait for you" and a mate with an orange peel means “I’m thinking of you.”

The counter has jars of biscotti and alfajores, soft biscuits laced with jam. Argentine born owner, Silvio Rodriquez and his wife Silvio own the café which specializes in yerba mate, plain or with mint or lemon verbena although they also offer tea and cortado coffee from the silver Elektra espresso machine.

The mate is drunk through a bombilla which is a filter tipped metal straw from a wooden gourd or . They also sell an Argentinian empanadas filled with onions, chile pepper, chopped egg and minced beef which is the way they are prepared in the province of Mendoza where Silvio was born in the town of Godoy Cruz. Yerbe mate (“herb” sp.) is a shrub which is a member of the holly family and is grown in sub tropical South America.  One of the secrets is to not stir the bombilla since it will cause the straw to plug. You can see the gourd below along with a jar of extra mate as well as sugar to sweeten the brew.

The server is called a “cebador” and drinks the first brew which is called the “mate del zonzo” or mate of the fool since it is the strongest and most bitter. The mate is drunk until it’s “lavado” or flat.

Restaurant Review: Café Creperie

I went down last weekend to visit my 93 year old mother who was recently moved to a nursing home in Fergus, Ontario and decided to dine at a restaurant called the Café Creperie in the small, former mill town of Elora which is about three miles east of Fergus and one hundred kilometres North West of Toronto in the county of Wellington. On previous trips to the town, I had noticed the place but had always dined in one of the other establishments.

The restaurant is on the main street of Elora and backs onto the Grand River just before the river plunges into the spectacular Elora Gorge. The Old Mill Inn which was the main attraction in the town is under renovation and will hopefully open in 2015. I’ve spent many an enjoyable stay at the inn in the past.

All of the food is prepared at the front of the restaurant and the service is prompt although the dishes sometimes take time to make.

For the main course, I had the Scandinavian which had smoked salmon, cream cheese, onions, capers and lemon juice for ingredients. The dish was well prepared but I felt that there could be more filling for the price point. I realise that crepes have smaller portions of higher quality ingredients than their poor cousins, the wraps but an increase in quantity would be nice.

For desert, I had the chef’s special which consisted of chocolate mousse, pears, peaches, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries wrapped in a crepe. Again, considering that its berry season and fruit is relatively inexpensive, I would have preferred to see more filling.  The plating was well done as you can see from the photos.

 Chef Jacques Dion, who comes from France, is very friendly and welcomes you to dine on such traditional French dishes such as Gateau Basque.

Elora Old Mill Inn

All in all, an excellent meal but leaves you hoping for more given the price although the ambience of the restaurant is great.

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Favourite Stores: A taste of Quebec

One of my favourite stores in the distillery district of Toronto, the former Gooderham and Worts Distillery which is the largest and best preserved site of Victorian Industrial architecture in North America, is the A Taste of Quebec. The store which is in the Cooperage building on Gristmill Lane carries the best artisan cheeses and terrior products from the belle province as well as an art gallery section which has recently expanded but the food products are still available on the patio during the summer.

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Location of store is marked on the map above.

A custom cheese plate I ate that was prepared specifically for me and which includes a variety of hard and soft artisan cheeses from Quebec that I chose from a large selection.

Patrons eating in the former dining area in the art gallery section of the establishment.

A selection of Quebec micro brewed beers and artisan ciders (above) is available for consumption with the food, all made with ingredients from Quebec, in the picture below.

The Le 1608 Charlevoix cheese shown below is a semi-firm, washed rind cheese from the Canadienne cattle, an indigenous Quebec Charlevoix region breed that was brought from France between 1608 and 1670. The cheese, aged between two and six months, from the Labbé family farm has an interior fruity flavour but tastes nutty at the rind.

The Cendré des prés cheese below is an artisanal cheese which is made of cow milk and possesses a bloomy rind. In the middle of the camembert style cheese is a line of maple wood ash that lends this cheese a particular flavour of farm fresh butter.

Grey Owl cheese is prepared at Fromagerie Le Détour in Notre-Dame-du-Lac, Quebec by Ginette Bégin and Mario Quirion and the milk comes from a Swiss breed called Saanen. The colour of the thin cheese rind comes from an edible ash in which it’s rolled.

And here are some pictures of other cheeses available.

Downtime: The Communist’s Daughter

Sign in bar window

You might wonder what the Gaijin does in his downtime away from the Fortress of Solitude so I thought that I would share some of my favourite stress relief places. The first is a little downtown bar named the Communist’s Daughter which is located in a part of Toronto called little Portugal where, as the name implies, a good portion of the city’s Portuguese community resides but is also adjacent to the arty Queen Street West section of the city where up and coming artists of various genre have their studios.




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The name of the bar doesn’t come from the portrait of an anonymous young blonde girl prominently displayed on the bar back wall nor the 2006 novel by Dennis Block of a series of fictional letters from the famous and historically real Norman Bethune residing with Mao on the long march in China to his supposed daughter in Canada but a song from the Aeroplane Over the Sea album by the early nineties Neutral Milk Hotel indie band with lead vocalist, Jeff Mangum.

Around the corner from the bar

The owner is Michael Lewis Johnson who is an actor, musician and writer as well as the bartender and genial host to all us lost souls who patronize his little known establishment.  Every Saturday afternoon between 4pm and 7pm, he performs in the bar’s Gypsy Jazz show with his band, the Red Rhythm. To settle down, I like a retro ambience and the bar has it in spades – fifties Formica tables, the retro lunch counter, an old working jukebox and those vinyl chairs which were popular in my youth but vanished in the seventies. Sometimes he’ll have a glass of Cobblestone stout beer from the local microbrewery, Mill Street, with you and tell a funny story or interesting anecdote. The food is inexpensive and the menu always has the C. D.’s famous pickled eggs. It’s always interesting to talk to the eclectic clientele who tend to be struggling artists or cultural observers like me and a world away from the gentrified Yorkville where the nouveau riche prefer to hang out.

The video below features Michael entertaining in his Gypsy Jazz show.

Plantation Nation: Schema

“Back during slavery there were two kinds of Negros. There was that old house Negro and the field Negro. And the house Negro always looked out for his master. When the field Negros got too much out of line, he held them in check. He put them back on the plantation.”

Malcolm X

Many progressives have compared Obama to the old house Negro in his actions or lack of action.  On June 28, 2012, Sara Robinson, MS, APF wrote the following article entitled, “Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America” on Alternet. I don’t usually like overarching schema since they often act in the manner of an intellectual procrustean bed but this seems to explain a lot of things which I’ve noticed lately so I’m reproducing it in its entity with permission.

Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America

America didn't used to be run like an old Southern slave plantation, but we're headed that way now. How did that happen?

It's been said that the rich are different than you and me. What most Americans don't know is that they're also quite different from each other, and that which faction is currently running the show ultimately makes a vast difference in the kind of country we are.

Right now, a lot of our problems stem directly from the fact that the wrong sort has finally gotten the upper hand; a particularly brutal and anti-democratic strain of American aristocrat that the other elites have mostly managed to keep away from the levers of power since the Revolution. Worse: this bunch has set a very ugly tone that's corrupted how people with power and money behave in every corner of our culture. Here's what happened, and how it happened, and what it means for America now.

North versus South: Two Definitions of Liberty

Michael Lind first called out the existence of this conflict in his 2006 book, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. He argued that much of American history has been characterized by a struggle between two historical factions among the American elite -- and that the election of George W. Bush was a definitive sign that the wrong side was winning.

For most of our history, American economics, culture and politics have been dominated by a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values, educated at the Ivies and marinated in an ethic of noblesse oblige (the conviction that those who possess wealth and power are morally bound to use it for the betterment of society). While they've done their share of damage to the notion of democracy in the name of profit (as all financial elites inevitably do), this group has, for the most part, tempered its predatory instincts with a code that valued mass education and human rights; held up public service as both a duty and an honor; and imbued them with the belief that once you made your nut, you had a moral duty to do something positive with it for the betterment of mankind. Your own legacy depended on this.

Among the presidents, this strain gave us both Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Poppy Bush -- nerdy, wonky intellectuals who, for all their faults, at least took the business of good government seriously. Among financial elites, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet still both partake strongly of this traditional view of wealth as power to be used for good. Even if we don't like their specific choices, the core impulse to improve the world is a good one -- and one that's been conspicuously absent in other aristocratic cultures.

Which brings us to that other great historical American nobility -- the plantation aristocracy of the lowland South, which has been notable throughout its 400-year history for its utter lack of civic interest, its hostility to the very ideas of democracy and human rights, its love of hierarchy, its fear of technology and progress, its reliance on brutality and violence to maintain “order,” and its outright celebration of inequality as an order divinely ordained by God.

As described by Colin Woodard in American Nations: The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, the elites of the Deep South are descended mainly from the owners of sugar, rum and cotton plantations from Barbados -- the younger sons of the British nobility who'd farmed up the Caribbean islands, and then came ashore to the southern coasts seeking more land. Woodward described the culture they created in the crescent stretching from Charleston, SC around to New Orleans this way:

It was a near-carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place notorious even then for its inhumanity....From the outset, Deep Southern culture was based on radical disparities in wealth and power, with a tiny elite commanding total obedience and enforcing it with state-sponsored terror. Its expansionist ambitions would put it on a collision course with its Yankee rivals, triggering military, social, and political conflicts that continue to plague the United States to this day.

David Hackett Fischer, whose Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America informs both Lind's and Woodard's work, described just how deeply undemocratic the Southern aristocracy was, and still is. He documents how these elites have always feared and opposed universal literacy, public schools and libraries, and a free press. (Lind adds that they have historically been profoundly anti-technology as well, far preferring solutions that involve finding more serfs and throwing them at a problem whenever possible. Why buy a bulldozer when 150 convicts on a chain gang can grade your road instead?) Unlike the Puritan elites, who wore their wealth modestly and dedicated themselves to the common good, Southern elites sank their money into ostentatious homes and clothing and the pursuit of pleasure -- including lavish parties, games of fortune, predatory sexual conquests, and blood sports involving ritualized animal abuse spectacles.

But perhaps the most destructive piece of the Southern elites' worldview is the extremely anti-democratic way it defined the very idea of liberty. In Yankee Puritan culture, both liberty and authority resided mostly with the community, and not so much with individuals. Communities had both the freedom and the duty to govern themselves as they wished (through town meetings and so on), to invest in their collective good, and to favor or punish individuals whose behavior enhanced or threatened the whole (historically, through community rewards such as elevation to positions of public authority and trust; or community punishments like shaming, shunning or banishing).

Individuals were expected to balance their personal needs and desires against the greater good of the collective -- and, occasionally, to make sacrifices for the betterment of everyone. (This is why the Puritan wealthy tended to dutifully pay their taxes, tithe in their churches and donate generously to create hospitals, parks and universities.) In return, the community had a solemn and inescapable moral duty to care for its sick, educate its young and provide for its needy -- the kind of support that maximizes each person's liberty to live in dignity and achieve his or her potential. A Yankee community that failed to provide such support brought shame upon itself. To this day, our progressive politics are deeply informed by this Puritan view of ordered liberty.

In the old South, on the other hand, the degree of liberty you enjoyed was a direct function of your God-given place in the social hierarchy. The higher your status, the more authority you had, and the more "liberty" you could exercise -- which meant, in practical terms, that you had the right to take more "liberties" with the lives, rights and property of other people. Like an English lord unfettered from the Magna Carta, nobody had the authority to tell a Southern gentleman what to do with resources under his control. In this model, that's what liberty is. If you don't have the freedom to rape, beat, torture, kill, enslave, or exploit your underlings (including your wife and children) with impunity -- or abuse the land, or enforce rules on others that you will never have to answer to yourself -- then you can't really call yourself a free man.

When a Southern conservative talks about "losing his liberty," the loss of this absolute domination over the people and property under his control -- and, worse, the loss of status and the resulting risk of being held accountable for laws that he was once exempt from -- is what he's really talking about. In this view, freedom is a zero-sum game. Anything that gives more freedom and rights to lower-status people can't help but put serious limits on the freedom of the upper classes to use those people as they please. It cannot be any other way. So they find Yankee-style rights expansions absolutely intolerable, to the point where they're willing to fight and die to preserve their divine right to rule.

Once we understand the two different definitions of "liberty" at work here, a lot of other things suddenly make much more sense. We can understand the traditional Southern antipathy to education, progress, public investment, unionization, equal opportunity, and civil rights. The fervent belief among these elites that they should completely escape any legal or social accountability for any harm they cause. Their obsessive attention to where they fall in the status hierarchies. And, most of all -- the unremitting and unapologetic brutality with which they've defended these "liberties" across the length of their history.

When Southerners quote Patrick Henry -- "Give me liberty or give me death" -- what they're really demanding is the unquestioned, unrestrained right to turn their fellow citizens into supplicants and subjects. The Yankee elites have always known this -- and feared what would happen if that kind of aristocracy took control of the country. And that tension between these two very different views of what it means to be "elite" has inflected our history for over 400 years.

The Battle Between the Elites

Since shortly after the Revolution, the Yankee elites have worked hard to keep the upper hand on America's culture, economy and politics -- and much of our success as a nation rests on their success at keeping plantation culture sequestered in the South, and its scions largely away from the levers of power. If we have to have an elite -- and there's never been a society as complex as ours that didn't have some kind of upper class maintaining social order -- we're far better off in the hands of one that's essentially meritocratic, civic-minded and generally believes that it will do better when everybody else does better, too.

The Civil War was, at its core, a military battle between these two elites for the soul of the country. It pitted the more communalist, democratic and industrialized Northern vision of the American future against the hierarchical, aristocratic, agrarian Southern one. Though the Union won the war, the fundamental conflict at its root still hasn't been resolved to this day. (The current conservative culture war is the Civil War still being re-fought by other means.) After the war, the rise of Northern industrialists and the dominance of Northern universities and media ensured that subsequent generations of the American power elite continued to subscribe to the Northern worldview -- even when the individual leaders came from other parts of the country.

Ironically, though: it was that old Yankee commitment to national betterment that ultimately gave the Southern aristocracy its big chance to break out and go national. According to Lind, it was easy for the Northeast to hold onto cultural, political and economic power as long as all the country's major banks, businesses, universities, and industries were headquartered there. But the New Deal -- and, especially, the post-war interstate highways, dams, power grids, and other infrastructure investments that gave rise to the Sun Belt -- fatally loosened the Yankees' stranglehold on national power. The gleaming new cities of the South and West shifted the American population centers westward, unleashing new political and economic forces with real power to challenge the Yankee consensus. And because a vast number of these westward migrants came out of the South, the elites that rose along with these cities tended to hew to the old Southern code, and either tacitly or openly resist the moral imperatives of the Yankee canon. The soaring postwar fortunes of cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta fed that ancient Barbadian slaveholder model of power with plenty of room and resources to launch a fresh and unexpected 20th-century revival.

According to historian Darren Dochuk, the author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, these post-war Southerners and Westerners drew their power from the new wealth provided by the defense, energy, real estate, and other economic booms in their regions. They also had a profound evangelical conviction, brought with them out of the South, that God wanted them to take America back from the Yankee liberals -- a conviction that expressed itself simultaneously in both the formation of the vast post-war evangelical churches (which were major disseminators of Southern culture around the country); and in their takeover of the GOP, starting with Barry Goldwater's campaign in 1964 and culminating with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980.

They countered Yankee hegemony by building their own universities, grooming their own leaders and creating their own media. By the 1990s, they were staging the RINO hunts that drove the last Republican moderates (almost all of them Yankees, by either geography or cultural background) and the meritocratic order they represented to total extinction within the GOP. A decade later, the Tea Party became the voice of the unleashed id of the old Southern order, bringing it forward into the 21st century with its full measure of selfishness, racism, superstition, and brutality intact.

Plantation America

From its origins in the fever swamps of the lowland south, the worldview of the old Southern aristocracy can now be found nationwide. Buttressed by the arguments of Ayn Rand -- who updated the ancient slaveholder ethic for the modern age -- it has been exported to every corner of the culture, infected most of our other elite communities and killed off all but the very last vestiges of noblesse oblige.

It's not an overstatement to say that we're now living in Plantation America. As Lind points out: to the horror of his Yankee father, George W. Bush proceeded to run the country exactly like Woodard's description of a Barbadian slavelord. And Barack Obama has done almost nothing to roll this victory back. We're now living in an America where rampant inequality is accepted, and even celebrated.

Torture and extrajudicial killing have been reinstated, with no due process required.

The wealthy and powerful are free to abuse employees, break laws, destroy the commons, and crash the economy -- without ever being held to account.

The rich flaunt their ostentatious wealth without even the pretense of humility, modesty, generosity, or gratitude.

The military -- always a Southern-dominated institution -- sucks down 60% of our federal discretionary spending, and is undergoing a rapid evangelical takeover as well.

Our police are being given paramilitary training and powers that are completely out of line with their duty to serve and protect, but much more in keeping with a mission to subdue and suppress. Even liberal cities like Seattle are now home to the kind of local justice that used to be the hallmark of small-town Alabama sheriffs.

Segregation is increasing everywhere. The rights of women and people of color are under assault. Violence against leaders who agitate for progressive change is up. Racist organizations are undergoing a renaissance nationwide.

We are withdrawing government investments in public education, libraries, infrastructure, health care, and technological innovation -- in many areas, to the point where we are falling behind the standards that prevail in every other developed country.

Elites who dare to argue for increased investment in the common good, and believe that we should lay the groundwork for a better future, are regarded as not just silly and soft-headed, but also inviting underclass revolt. The Yankees thought that government's job was to better the lot of the lower classes. The Southern aristocrats know that its real purpose is to deprive them of all possible means of rising up against their betters.

The rich are different now because the elites who spent four centuries sucking the South dry and turning it into an economic and political backwater have now vanquished the more forward-thinking, democratic Northern elites. Their attitudes towards freedom, authority, community, government, and the social contract aren't just confined to the country clubs of the Gulf Coast; they can now be found on the ground from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Wall Street. And because of that quiet coup, the entire US is now turning into the global equivalent of a Deep South state.

As long as America runs according to the rules of Southern politics, economics and culture, we're no longer free citizens exercising our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as we've always understood them. Instead, we're being treated like serfs on Massa's plantation -- and increasingly, we're being granted our liberties only at Massa's pleasure. Welcome to Plantation America. [end]

I’ve noticed in my recent scans of the news that quite a few slavery memes have been floating around lately and I wonder if the fore mentioned article explains some of it. A good example is the JS Roundhouse Mid from Adidas, a running shoe featuring an orange plastic cuff, which is reminiscent of a chain gang ankle bracelet in the South. The shoe which would cost $350 was promoted with the adage, “Got a sneaker game so hot you lock your kicks to your ankles?” This was to be promoted to inner city youth but was cancelled after many protests.

Another example is a teacher at the Beaver Ridge Elementary School in suburban Atlanta, Georgia who assigned math questions based on slavery. Some examples are “Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?”, “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?” and “A plantation owner in the south has 100 slaves. If three – fifths are to be counted for representation then how many slaves will be counted?” The school demographics demonstrate nearly 60 per cent are Hispanic, 28 per cent are black, 5.3 per cent are Asian and 4 per cent are white.

Just to show that this isn’t just a southern phenomena, a teacher at the Strong Middle School in Melvindale, Michigan gave social studies assignment to sixth grade students in a predominantly black school which stated, “Pretend that you are a slave in the southern United States. Write a journal/diary memoir about your life.” Some of the questions on the written part of the assignment were describing the owner and his family, imaging the slave area, discussing their friends or family on the plantation, the forms of plantation activities and any unusual events in their imagined lives. Of course there are the infamous replicated slave auctions in a variety of schools about which I posted last year. One case involved a fourth grade teacher at the Sewells Point Elementary School in Norfolk, Virginia who divided her class into coloured and white student groups. The white students proceeded to give bids on the purchase of the coloured students in a mock slave auction. The class demographics were 40% black and 40% white.

Nikko Burton, 10  Mock Slave Auction victim

Taken individually, each of these events could be considered just an isolated example of poor judgement on the behalf of the teachers but collectively and given the volume of incidents, this says to me that we are observing a persistent cultural meme which is currently being propagated across American society. I didn’t understand the mechanism of mediation or the source until I read the article by Sarah Robinson. The main reason for the lack of insight is reframing of issues by the mass media. Elite confiscation of wealth becomes greedy geezers versus lazy youth. Supreme Court justices are limited government conservatives or bleeding heart liberals rather than plantation positive jurists or plantation neutral judges (there are no plantation negatives). One could also see the latest popular novel, 50 Shades of Gray, as an updated version of a plantation novel where the beautiful octoroon peeping out from behind a lace covered window in the Old South mansion is replaced by almost graduated English Classics major from Washington State University, a contractual slave like a sexual sharecropper, seeking to serve her master who wishes to dominate solely because he can. It’s scary to think of the States as a larger version of the South where locals whose eyes are full of inchoate rage process through Cracker America’s Holy Trinity – the Casino, the Jail and the Church- with intermediate stops at fast food restaurants and pay day loan offices like penitents doing stations of the Cross.

Magical Thinking

"Governor Walker has demonstrated over the past year what sound fiscal policies can do to turn an economy around, and I believe that in November voters across the country will demonstrate that they want the same in Washington, D.C. ... Tonight voters said ‘no’ to the tired, liberal ideas of yesterday, and ‘yes’ to fiscal responsibility and a new direction," Gov. Romney said last night after the Wisconsin recall election in which the incumbent won. "I look forward to working with Governor Walker to help build a better, brighter future for all Americans."

   Last night was a victory for big money, the conservative right in America and those who rely on the gullibility of low information voters who are the central actors in the politics of the States today. The incumbent Gov. Walker won 53% to the democratic contender’s 46% while four of the five GOP senators won their recall elections and the fifth race was close enough to have a recount giving the lie to a reported close race so this counts as a serious win for the Republicans and their Wall Street supporters in a traditionally democratic and union state. This doesn’t auger well for President Obama in the November presidential elections with this result in the swing state of Wisconsin that he handily won in the last election. The recall election campaign was the swan song for organized labor and will have broad social implications for the future of the working class including some unexpected ones as I will discuss in this post.  The major effect will be a legitimization of the Republican legislatures’ rollback of women’s rights, elimination of collective bargaining for public workers and the privatization of state assets which will be a reward for the financial efforts of the Koch brothers. Walker also got 47% of women’s votes in spite of his repeal of the 2009 equal pay for women’s act, elimination of sex education in Wisconsin schools and banning of abortion coverage in insurance policies so this is a good example of the low information voter syndrome that seems to be in effect everywhere in American politics.  Another bill, SB 507, currently in the pipeline which was sponsored by Republican Senator Grothman on February 14, 2012 makes non martial parents of children guilty of a felony conviction for child abuse as a contributing factor solely on the grounds that they are single parents or LGBT parents so thirty percent of Wisconsin parents would be liable to jail time of up to one year based on this one act.

The people of the state of Wisconsin, represented in senate and assembly, do enact as follows:

Section1. 48.982(2)(g)2.of the statutes is amended to read:

48.982 (2) (g) 2. Promote statewide educational and public awareness campaigns and materials for the purpose of developing public awareness of the problems of child abuse and neglect. In promoting those campaigns and materials, the board shall emphasize nonmarital parenthood as a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.

   This fits in neatly with the prison privatization bill that Walker introduced in the Wisconsin legislature in 1999 but failed to pass during the democratically controlled assembly. Now that he is still in charge ,he will be able to fill future private prisons with all the inmates that he wants.

 A similar scenario played out in the “common sense revolution” of the Ontario conservative victory of Mike Harris in the late nineties and the effects are still being felt today.

  The video above is a 35 minute overview of the Walkerton tragedy that took place in the rural community of Walkerton, Ontario starting on May 15, 2000 in which out of a total population of approximately 5000, over 2300 residents became sick and seven died from E. coli 0157:H7 bacteria contaminated drinking water. The town well (#5) was drilled in fractured bedrock and was shallow which made its water susceptible to surface contamination and this occurred after heavy rains beginning on May 8, 2000 washed fecal material containing E. coli and Campylobacter jejuna from an adjacent dairy farm. Cattle manure is a well known source of these contaminants. Although the proximal cause was criminal diligence including  false lab result entries on documentation, mislabelling of water samples for analysis and lack of appropriate action  after receiving adverse results on the part of the town public works employees, Ministry of the Environment budget cuts during  a prior recession, privatization of water analysis laboratories  without proper regulatory reporting regimes for adverse results and the deregulatory enthusiasm  of the Mike Harris, conservative government were contributing factors.  An inquiry lasting two years by the Honourable Dennis O’Connor was published and it can be read here.

 This is a perfect example of neo-liberals in their search for ideological perfection who are oblivious to larger societal risks especially when it doesn’t affect the economic elites who stand to benefit from financial rewards associated with privatization of public goods.  Laureen Snider, a Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario wrote a paper entitled “Captured by Neo-Liberalism: Regulation and Risk in Walkerton, Ontario” with the following abstract:

This paper examines E coli contamination of the public water supply in Walkerton, Ontario, which caused 2300 illnesses and seven deaths in 2000. This disaster was made possible, if not inevitable, by the downsizing and deregulation agenda undertaken by the Province of Ontario. Having described the events at Walkerton and how the risk management program of the Ontario government and the Ministry of the Environment failed, the paper asks why it failed, highlighting the decline of the power and inclination of nation-states to oversee and control the private sector. The case study shows how, in a quest to cut costs, downsize government and eliminate regulation, dramatic new risks to human health and safety were generated.

  After a total cost of about $150 million for the entire post crisis clean up and compensation to victims, one would think that the neo liberals would have learned their lesson but conservatives have short memories when it comes to implementing their pet theories so it came as no surprise when I read on June 2, 2012 that in the scientific journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, a paper  was recently published showing a strong correlation between the titer of drinking water viruses and human illness in a variety of locations in the State of Wisconsin. Last year and wasting no time since their installation the new Republican controlled legislature in the state with their appetite for universal deregulation rescinded a previous act requiring the treatment of all municipal drinking water and this year over sixty Wisconsin municipalities have stopped water treatment in order to save money and balance their budgets which were partly placed into deficit positions by cuts in state transfer payments to the local authorities. Eight democratic legislators have asked the federal EPA to act but the body has decided to make compliance with safe water statues voluntary. The EPA is a favorite target for Republican budget cuts and there is a bill on the floor of the house (H.R. 2018) to make water quality regimes purely a state function and restrict the right of the federal EPA to intervene even in extreme circumstances. The really big worry is the E. coli 0157:H7 bacteria which was implicated in the Walkerton event and has cow manure as its primary source. Don’t forget all the dairy farms in Wisconsin. They call themselves cheese heads for a reason. I did a little research and sure enough on September 14, 2011 there was an E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak in Greene County, Wisconsin where eight people became sick and one died from hemolytic uremic syndrome which is an infrequent but fatal complication of this bacterial infection. 

  The source of the bacterial outbreak was not stated and the story soon forgotten but it’s only a matter of time before a Walkerton level event occurs in the state. The moral of the story is that neo liberals are limited in their cognitive functions and legislative actions to implementing the catechism of revealed truths – all deregulation is good and the market is the final arbiter of the public good, ever smaller government and the shift from public to private sourcing for common needs, endless tax cuts -without considering the real world consequences of provision realignment. Some of these are unexpected. The British government in the second half of the nineteenth century implemented a series of public health acts to improve the health and welfare of its poorest citizens because they discovered during the Crimean War that the laissez-faire capitalism of the industrial revolution debilitated the male working class of England to the point where the military recruiting officers couldn’t find enough fit males among the people to serve in the army and maintain the force at the level required by the conflict. The American conservatives want a strong and robust military but only a quarter of the potential recruits from the inner cities met the minimum requirements for physical fitness and half of those failed the minimum educational requirements so they had a problem meeting their recruitment goals in spite of the recession which reduced employment opportunities in the civilian sector. Magical thinking requires a cognitive dissonance between cause and effect as well as the idea that a symbol has an effect on the real world and that by invoking the name of the symbol we can bypass known realities and ignore expected consequences.

Republicans in election mode   (Kris Kuksi)

  Interestingly enough when it comes to election campaigns, the right certainly doesn’t rely on Magical Thinking. While the left considers elections to be politics, the right understands the campaigns to be war and the left is puzzled when it loses after bringing a knife to a gun fight. A good example is the use of voter suppression techniques by the conservatives. In the Canadian federal election of 2011, conservative party workers used “robocalls”, automated voice mail,  to misdirect probable liberal supporting voters which had been identified during their canvassing, to incorrect locations for voting booths in Guelph, Ontario in order to suppress illegally the opposition vote and this is a violation of the Elections Act. The same story in Wisconsin yesterday as anonymous “robocalls” from republican friends of the incumbent were sent to self identified anti Walker voters explaining falsely that if they signed the recall petition then their vote had already been recorded so they didn’t have to vote. The Walker campaign committee has so far denied any complicity or awareness of the suppression technique but Prime Minister Harper also denied any involvement by the Conservative party election apparatus in the event until it was proven later through phone records that the phone calls originated with one of his party`s workers.

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Club Sandwich Generation

Convocation at UBC on May 24, 2012

   I didn’t post last month because of family issues which all seemed to come up at the same time. Strangely, the number of hits on my blog reached an all time high which makes me wonder about the inverse relationship between the amount of blogging that I do and the degree of interest in the blog. I try to write posts that have “legs” and stand the test of time rather than immediate reaction to transient events in the news.  Some of the largest hit rates came on my rather banal and short postings while my analytic posts which I consider my best work and on which I laboured for a significant amount of time don’t seem to attract viewers to the same extent. Anyway, at the beginning of last month my 93 year old mother had a stroke and was admitted to hospital where she is residing until they find a long term care facility for her and my oldest daughter graduated at the end of the month with a Master’s degree in Archeology from the University of British Columbia so I spent eight days in Vancouver with her and my two other daughters exploring the area and being present at her convocation on the UBC campus. My bed ridden mother seems to have lost her short term memory and needs 24/7 care while none of my four adult children has had a job that pays enough on which to live so I’m officially part of the sandwich generation or more specifically the “club sandwich” generation coined by Carol Abaya.

  Carol Abaya is a former journalist who writes a syndicated column for newspapers entitled “The Sandwich Generation.” She got involved in this area when her two aging parents became infirm and needed extensive personal care. The “club sandwich” generation are older baby boomers, boomers being those born between 1946 and 1965, who have infirm parents and adult dependent children. With the ongoing effects of the recession on the employment of younger people and the medical advances which have kept seniors alive for longer periods to the extent that the fastest growing demographic in North America is octogenarians, my generation - the baby boomers – never prepared for the possibility of supporting both our parents and our children at this stage in our lives which was suppose to be freedom fifty five and playing golf in warmer climes. At this point in our parent`s generation, the grandparents stayed at a condo near a golf course in Florida while the parents lived in the large suburban home in which they raised their children and the children had full time jobs, a car, and an apartment in the more trendy part of downtown.

My eldest daughter (by 11 minutes)

  I think that part of the cause is longer education for my generation or in the case of my Ex going back to post secondary school for a second degree. Because of this we had children later in life and so they were still in the process of getting established not to mention that they also had more education so the generational timing is out of sync with the traditional life stages and my parent’s generation is at a stage in life where they would be expected to require more care but we were still focussed on our children’s situation. Most of us were running so hard with the day to day issues taking precedence over long term considerations and especially when you had four children like me that we didn’t have time to reflect on future issues until they were upon us. In this situation the period of saving for retirement doesn`t exist although I was lucky enough to have a defined benefit pension plan which most people at present don`t have at their places of employment.

My three daughters on the UBC campus

  Fortunately in Canada, we have a single payer universal healthcare system so the ongoing health costs are borne by the state but it doesn`t pay for long term care if the patient has an income above a fairly low level so it’s a constant drain on family resources and especially if your adult children live at home because the salary levels at most of the jobs available to them regardless of their educational qualifications don`t allow them to live independently. They also have a high degree on entitlement due to the standard of living that they have been use to their whole lives such as the live-in board certified nanny from Scotland when they were young or the best schools and summer camps. We tried to give them a quality of life superior to our youth but one of the consequences is a level of entitlement and a disregard of the effects of debt. They all max out their credit cards and pay the minimum installment even though I explain that they are paying an extra twenty percent for the privilege of immediate gratification. My parents lived through the depression and World War two so they always saved for a rainy day and wouldn’t buy items unless they could pay cash although I found their delayed gratification a bit much at times. My generation saved less but tried to provide a balance and I think that the only area in which I spent to excess was on my children. My children`s generation has accept debt as normal and expected so they don`t ever plan to have savings or even a buffer of cash in the bank for the unexpected event. In the long run, the current family budget is unsustainable but I don`t see any solution unless the current economic climate changes and people are paid more for their efforts. The 2008 recession and the ongoing reduction in real wages with deficit financing by households and individuals has really changed the whole game. If government austerity comes into force next year a lot of families will go down the tube since the financial instruments that most people use are set up like a house of cards with cascading penalties and consequences if even one area doesn’t mesh or you miss a payment. In the States, household financial collapse will become more frequent as the government redistributive programs such as food stamps and Medicare go on the block and this will happen regardless of who wins the election. Certainly the general electorate in America isn’t aware of the coming economic tsunami since the leading proxy for anticipated household wellbeing, the average cost of a wedding, is still twenty six thousand dollars which is the same as the median annual individual income last year. If folks are willing to spend a year`s salary on one day`s festivities then they aren`t facing reality.

Post convocation party at the Nuba restaurant

  The chart below is from an article published in Statcan in 2002. Since this paper was presented, the situation has become much worse and especially with the current employment situation for young adults since the economic downturn which is reflected more in the underemployment with its concomitant lower wages and reduced hours rather than the unemployment rate which is still high for this age group.

  I hope that you don’t take this as a rant on the unfairness of life but I’m not alone as you can see from the infograph below.

by Mint.com. Browse more Economy infographics.