And my thought is ‘when has Margaret Wente ever mustered sympathy for anyone but herself?’

When I think about it, Wente is the perfect champion for people of her age and class.  Her writing never escapes those two limitations.

Wente grew up in Chicago, went to university in Michigan then moved to Toronto, all around the same time I grew up in Victoria.  Tuition was cheap then and she got two Arts degrees before moving on to a well paid career in journalism.

Let’s be clear.  Compared to the average student today, Wente’s been on easy street her entire life.  She benefited from a period when both the economy and social change made it easier for a person like her to succeed.

That’s no longer true.  Power has shifted.  The world has changed.  Class lines are more firmly drawn and its harder to cross them.  The state is shrinking, help is diminishing and those who have are grabbing more of what wealth is produced.

Wente writes as if this has just happened.  And students should just shut up and deal.

“They’re the sociology, anthropology, philosophy, arts and victim studies students, whose degrees are increasingly worthless in a world that increasingly demands hard skills,” says the holder of two English degrees.

“The world will not be kind to them.  They’re the baristas of tomorrow and they don’t even know it, because the adults in their lives have sheltered them and encouraged their mass flight from reality.”

But Wente has an agenda too.  The flight she’s encouraging is away from any thought of change.

The economy just is.  The trends towards greater and greater inequality just are.  The fact that Wente and her buddies happen to be amongst the few who enjoy the benefits can’t be changed.

Wente and privileged people like her have good jobs, rising incomes, excellent and secure pensions and a better life than their parents.  Wente, like too many of her generation and class, are fighting tooth and nail to keep it all, to keep all the gains they’ve made in the last thirty years at the expense of the majority.

She argues that this is just the way it is.  But that’s not true.  Decisions were made, governments elected and policy changed.  The new world of inequality was made through deliberate choices.

And Wente’s writing has consistently provided support for those choices.

It matters nothing to her that her generation and class has left behind an economic, social and ecological mess that the students she attacks will have to deal with.  Wente and her ilk have, for the first time in a long time, made our country worse for generations to come.

“The kids are on another planet” Wente says.

What she means is ‘I’m on another planet and I’m damn well not going to share it with you’.

Better Stupid

Last night I had a short twitter exchange – I could not have written that a year ago – with a diehard BC Liberal supporter.  The gist of it was he called BC voters stupid for their refusal to accept the government’s gift of the HST.

 And I egged him on.

How stupid are British Columbians, I asked (more or less).  Really stupid, he replied (more or less).  Make that really, really stupid.

And that is why the BC Liberals are 27% behind the BC NDP.

Three years later they still don’t get why British Columbians don’t trust a government that tells them one thing and does another:  That snows them in an election, hits them with a new tax day one of the third term and tells them that a $2 billion transfer from consumers to business is a good deal for them.

And when they reject all the lies and misinformation their first reaction is to call voters stupid.

Yesterday, the Finance minister introduced legislation to fulfill the referendum result.  Leading off he made a semi joke, referring to the reintroduced PST as a piece of… whatever.

We all know what he meant.

He went on to call the PST a stupid tax that they’ve made into “better stupid”   In the process he demeaned the significant majority who voted to reinstate the “stupid, piece of whatever”  tax.

Obviously, the rumours are true.  Falcon has checked out.  He doesn’t care what voters think of him or his government.  He’s not helping the Premier.  He’s not helping his party, whatever name it ends up with.  He’s telling voters exactly what he thinks of them.

The BC Liberal backer on twitter mirrored Falcon in his tweets.  “STUPID! Dumb! Ignorance is Bliss! greatest argument against democracy is a 5 min conversation with the average (you) voter” tweeted the Liberal.  And then he  told Bill Tieleman basically the same thing.

Everything the BC Liberal government does seems to have the same animus.  Krueger and Coleman’s legislative attacks.  The poorly executed smear campaign produced by both the BC Liberal Party and their surrogates.  The fake public processes.  The giveaways to their donors.

All it appears to be doing is driving up the NDP’s numbers.  So they react some more.

This is a government that refuses to look at itself to find the problem.  That more than anything tells me why they need to be defeated.  Not until then will they confront the fact that they are the author of their own misfortunes.

But that’s a year away.  What I worry about most right now is how this disdain for voters and what they think will manifest in government decisions.

You don’t want privatization that benefits our friends?  Screw you.  You don’t want a continued and protracted war with teachers?  Who cares what you think.  You don’t want a complete resource giveaway at the expense of the environment?  We’ve got a Lake you can jump in.

With a year to go there is still a lot of rape and pillage to do.  Scary.

The BC Liberals are toast.

Maybe this is what accounts for the desperation moves of Kevin “not good enough for cabinet or anything else” Krueger last week.

Like Forum, Angus Reid has found that support for the NDP continues to climb following the by-election victories three weeks ago.

(BTW did anyone notice the excellent coverage of the swearing in ceremonies for the new MLAs?  Me neither.  Maybe because there wasn’t any).

In the on-line Reid survey of 802 BCers the NDP cracks the 50% barrier with exactly 50% support, up 7% from March.  Like the Forum survey Reid tracked the BC Liberals at 23% and the Conservatives at 19%, down 4.

With numbers like that is it any wonder that Clark is skipping town and avoiding the HST death debate.  Makes me wonder what’s in the 120 plus page bill.

The NDP leads in all four regions – the Island, the GVRD, the North and the Interior.  The Interior is very interesting – although the low sample makes the finding fluid.  There the BC Conservatives are running second to the NDP with the Liberals trailing.

That kind of vote split can affect traditionally safe seats, reducing overall seat totals in a landslide type victory.

The gender chasm is also growing with the NDP taking an almost 40% lead over the BC Liberals.  The gender gap is moving from chasm to tectonic shift territory.

Paling in comparisom is the NDP advantage amongst men – a paltry 17%.  Having been involved for over two decades in NDP polling I can tell you that in a normal year that result in itself would be astonishing.

These results are the worst ever for the BC Liberals, surpassing the disastrous fall 2010 polling results for the Liberals under Gordon Campbell.

The Reid poll also tested a merged Conservative/BC Liberal “coalition”.  The results show a coalition gaining between 21 and 17% with the NDP steady at 33 or 32%.  Undecideds in this scenario would be in the mid to high 30′s.

Two things about this:  Given that undecideds always track in the teens and twenties in BC, an election would likely still show a 15 to 17 per cent gap.  Or in other words a landslide win for the NDP.

Secondly, there won’t be this hypothetical scenario.  The BC Conservatives have ruled out a merger.  The best the BC Libs can hope for is a new name, same old faces and a PR slam claiming to be the new right wing coalition.

Thin gruel that won’t do nearly the trick called for.

One other thing that shows the problem the BC Liberals face as they go forward and try and reasemble their coalition.  30% of their 2009 voters are going Conservative, but another 20% are going NDP.  20% of the Liberal 2009 vote equals 9% and change.  They’re the folks who are pushing the NDP towards 50%.

Tacking right has helped the NDP demolish the BC Liberals.  But tacking left risks growing the Conservatives.  One front wars, good.  Two front wars, bad.  Very bad.

And why not?  Austerity isn’t working.  In fact, it’s harming the recovery.

Two weeks ago economists made it official.  The Cameron Tories in Britain have led Great Britain  into a double dip recession, with the accompanying unemployment, closed shops and falling businesses because there is no demand.  Anywhere.

Shortly after in this year’s round of local elections, Ed Miliband’s Labour party, far outperforming expectations, crushed both the Tories and their moribund coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats.  Labour took more than 800 Tory and Liberal Democrat seats, when they had been expected to take somewhere between 5 and 7 hundred.

Using the local election results, analysts concluded a national election would produce a healthy Labour majority.  Austerity, high income tax breaks and low income tax increases were constant themes in the campaign.

Shortly after the Tory rout, Francois Hollande finished first in both the first and second round of the French presidential election becoming the first Socialist president in over two decades.

Hollande’s campaign was explicitly anti-austerity focusing on rising unemployment and growing disenchantment with the right’s economic policies.

The same weekend, anti austerity forces decimated the pro-austerity side in the Greek elections, and in an unreported harbinger of things to come the anti-austerity SPD beat out Angela Merkel’s pro-austerity party in a state election in Germany.

This weekend, along with massive Spanish protests, we see the crushing defeat of Angela Merkel’s party in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s largest state.  The campaign was seen as a referendum on Merkel’s policy of austerity.

Tomorrow Hollande and Merkel meet for the first time since the French election.  Hollande will begin a discussion about a measured end to the European wide austerity program in favour of a pro-growth strategy.

What does this all mean?  First the traditional right wing solutions are not working.  They are making the economy worse for everyone but the wealthiest.  They are removing demand when it needs to be stimulated and they are making people poorer now and into the future.

Secondly, the same seems to be true here in Canada.  Demand is lacklustre. According to the Parliamentary Budget Office “restraint and reductions in government spending on programs in Canada will act as a drag on economic growth and job creation, pushing the economy further away from its potential (gross domestic product) and delaying the economic recovery,”.

Still the Harper government carries on, deliberately harming recovery.  So the goal can’t be economic recovery.  But then, what is the goal?

God, he made me angry with his vicious personal attacks.  And I wrote the angry column below in response.  I’ll leave it up because it would be wrong to try and scrub it away.

But I was wrong to post something so angry without being thoughtful.

I don’t believe in just saying positive things when so many negative things are happening in our province.  I believe there is a responsibility to document political mistakes of both process and content.

This week alone has seen so many:  A class A park cannibalized, the war against teachers escalated, the HST continued because the government says it can’t get it’s act together, end of session legislation dumps that prevent real scrutiny and of course more non-answers on the corrupt BC Rail trial.  And the week is only half over.

This government is governing badly every time it acts.

Worse, they are covering with personal attacks of the most vicious kind.  It is pathetic and that story needs to be told.  But not angrily.

That the BC Christy Clark Liberals are reduced to using Kevin “Sack of Hammers” Krueger as their hit man tells you just about everything you need to know about the state of the governing party.  Pathetic.

But in case you have an inkling to listen to a man as stupid, gutless and unbound by any moral compass as Krueger consider this:  he straight out lies.

This morning Krueger called into the Bill Good show and repeated his run of the mouth screed against John van Dongen and the NDP.  In amongst the bile spilling from his craw was an allegation that Adrian Dix conspired with supporter Mable Elmore to fix the NDP leadership race.

Here’s the problem with that.  It an out and out lie.  Mable organized.  She’s a great organizer and she signed up members.  But that’s what you do in leadership campaigns. It’s what every single person running for the Liberal leadership did, including Krueger’s leader, Christy Clark.

Surprise, Mable is still signing up members to the NDP.  It gets easier all the time because more and more British Columbians are sick to death of the BC Liberal style of politics.

Krueger had a lot to say about van Dongen as well.  Dredging up his personal relationship and alleging a “conflict of interest”.  Pretty low coming from the guy who takes lobbyist phone calls prior to cabinet decisions affecting the lobbyist’s company.

Krueger’s dirty political lies don’t surprise me.  Clark’s continued tolerance for them does, if only because it’s bad politics at this stage of the game.  If all she has left is lying about the opposition then her Liberal Party is earning it’s slow and tortuous death.

Coastal North Carolina is supposed to be beautiful and was on my ‘visit sometime list’.  Was.  Tonight I learned too much of the state is downright ugly.  Strike another state off my list.

Today’s help comes in two forms – the worst headline ever that obscures the intent of Vaughn Palmer’s otherwise interesting column on John van Dongen’s pursuit of the truth, and…

An editorial that shifts the focus from the truth to the process.

The headline is such an obvious ploy.  Palmer writes a good column about Mr. van Dongen’s dogged pursuit of a real answer about the deal that ended the BC Rail trial.  And what does the headline writer focus on?  That van Dongen’s paying his own bills.

“Finally, a Request that’s not Costly” blares the incisive headline.  Talk about not cutting to the chase.  It’s like flagging a ‘man bites dog’ story with a headline about flossing.

Still the column’s a good recap.

But the editorial.  There are a couple of pages that routinely would be better if the editors left them blank.

Today, the editorial writer takes on the loophole that the government concocted to accomplish the $6 million payout, maybe illegally.

Note to Sun: it’s not the loophole that’s the problem.

If this loophole was closed the BC Liberals would have found another.  That’s because THEY WERE DESPERATE TO HALT THE TRIAL.

Sorry for yelling.  But someone has to say it.  The real issue, the one the Sun is trying to sweep away, is not how, but why?

Still, they even get the backstory on the how wrong.  It wasn’t the defence that drove up the bill, it was – as Judge Bennett ruled in 2007 – the government and prosecution that was delaying the trial and racking up the bills by not providing full disclosure.

But the big error, the big issue with the editorial is it’s focus on the loophole, a focus that obscures the real questions at stake.

Why the desperate resort to a flimsy loophole?  Why expose the government to the charge of inducing a plea?  Why the awesome rush to complete the deal before the plea?  Why, why, why?

Here’s where the focus should be:  Why did the BC Liberals want to shut the trial down?  What were they so afraid of that they would compromise the civil service, the administration of justice and maybe even the law to keep it out of the public eye?

What, in other words, were they covering up?

PAYMENT OF LEGAL FEES
IN B.C. RAIL COURT CASE

L. Krog: In an e-mail to the Vancouver Sun over the weekend the Ministry of Justice said that the order to forgive the $6 million in legal fees for the B.C. Rail corruption trial was made before political insiders Basi and Virk pled guilty and thus was never actually a debt. This suggests there was a deal to modify the indemnity prior to that guilty plea.

Can the Minister of Justice explain to B.C. taxpayers exactly how this arrangement came together prior to the guilty plea and tell us who brought the two sides together to broker this deal?

Hon. S. Bond: At the risk of repeating the same answer, which I know may not be attractive to some, the fact of the matter is we have canvassed this extensively. We need to be very clear. As I have said on numerous occasions in this House, the Deputy Attorney General and the deputy of Finance made the decision to vary the indemnity. That’s exactly what happened. That statement was made public on October 20 by the then Deputy Attorney General. Those are the facts, and they’ve been clearly laid out.

Mr. Speaker: The member has a supplemental.

L. Krog: The Liberals wrote off $6 million in legal fees for Basi and Virk contrary to the government’s own policy — policy that should have prevented the payout. Now the Ministry of Justice is saying that the agreement to remove the repayment conditions was made before Basi and Virk pled guilty. This raises serious questions around how the government handled this deal.

To the minister: if the sign-off on the decision to forgo the $6 million in legal fees was made before the guilty plea was entered, wasn’t that in fact an inducement to plead guilty?

[1430]

Hon. S. Bond: Let’s take it from the top of the member opposite’s comments. In fact, it was not the B.C. Liberals that made the decision. That is incorrect. The member is wrong. I will repeat once again: in a public statement made by the Deputy Attorney General member opposite’s comments. In fact, it was not the B.C. Liberals that made the decision. That is incorrect. The member is wrong. I will repeat once again. In a public statement made by the Deputy Attorney General, he made it perfectly clear — perfectly clear — that “no one outside the legal services branch, myself and the Deputy Minister of Finance had any knowledge of this or any involvement.”

The member is wrong. The facts have clearly been laid out by the Deputy Attorney General, and I have repeated them on numerous occasions in this House, because that is the story.

B. Ralston: There used to be a radio host who used to talk about “the rest of the story,” and I think that’s what the people of British Columbia are waiting for. The former Liberal Attorney General, Geoff Plant, claimed recently that there was no inducement in the B.C. Rail deal because the two deals, the plea bargain and the indemnity variation, were not connected in law. He said: “The waiver of recovery of fees was not and could not be an inducement to plead guilty.”

To the minister. We know clearly a decision was made to forgive Basi and Virk’s legal fees prior to their guilty pleas being entered in court. If the minister agrees with Mr. Plant, will she explain why?

Hon. S. Bond: Mr. Speaker, the case was considered by the Deputy Attorney General. The decision to make the variance to the indemnity…. The advice was then provided to the Deputy of Finance. The Deputy Attorney General advised the Deputy of Finance, and the decision was made. It is clearly outlined in the statement of facts from the Deputy Attorney General that there were a number of things considered. The legal services branch referred the matter to me, and it is quoted in his statement, and to the Deputy Minister of Finance. A number of factors were considered. The decision was made on the advice of the Deputy Attorney General.

Mr. Speaker: The member has a supplemental.

B. Ralston: No one believes that the accused agreed to plead guilty before they were certain they weren’t going to be stuck with $6 million in legal fees. Does the minister agree that Mr. Plant is wrong? Clearly, the waiver of the recovery of the $6 million induced the guilty pleas.

Hon. S. Bond: As we speak, the Auditor General of British Columbia is reviewing all of the information, all of the documents, and will in due course outline his view of what occurred during this particular set of circumstances.

I can simply repeat that the Deputy Attorney General considered all of the factors that were presented by legal services and made the decision to advise the Deputy of Finance about varying the indemnity. That information has been laid out in his statement. In fact, the Auditor General is currently doing the review, and that information and his perspective will be made public when that work is done.

Paragraph 21 of Mr. van Dongen’s application raises questions relating to the possibility of an inducement to plead guilty.