The Mound of Sound

When I was born, the gobal population was about 2.4-billion, all in.

Today we’ve grown to over six billion and that’s expected to peak to over nine billion by 2050. Yet of today’s six billion, two out of five, 41% don’t have access to a latrine. That’s 2.6 billion people living their daily lives without sanitation, more than the entire population of the planet when I was born. In Toronto, that would mean upwards of 800,000 people going on the street or in alleys or subway stations or behind your house or beside your car. Try to imagine what that would be like.

Of course we don’t have to imagine that, we don’t have to think about it at all. This is Canada and pretty much everybody has a pot to… well you know.

It’s estimated that 1.5-million children die every year from lack of sanitation and associated hygiene threats. That’s a lot of kids, isn’t it?

Why am I bringing this up? Just to point out that, while problems like global warming and nuclear proliferation deserve our urgent attention, we can’t turn our backs on a host of additional problems just like this one.

Oh, by the way, this is the International Year of Sanitation. There’ll even be a World Toilet Summit held in Macao this November to find ways of meeting the goal of reducing by half the percentage of people without access to sanitation by 2015.

Phil Mathias, former “investigative” reporter for the National Spot, has come out swinging (or at least fanning the air) in defence of the guy he never wanted to investigate, Brian Mulroney.

A whole little PR sturm und drang has been unleashed just in time for the resumption of the Commons ethics committee investigation into the dealings between Brian Mulroney and his long time buddy, Karlheinz Schreiber.

One of Muldoon’s lawyers has sent a whining gripe note to committee chairman, Paul Szabo, complaining that the grand old bullshitter himself hasn’t been treated with kid gloves by the committee members. Lawyer Guy Pratte had a right proper hissie, claiming the committee had treated Mulroney unfairly and with disrespect. Oh dear me!

The whole thing seems to have erupted just as there’s talk the committee may subpoena Mulroney’s tax records to see if they will shed any light on the cash-stuffed envelopes that Schreiber passed to our former Conservative prime minister.

Then Phil Mathias waded in with an opinion piece condemning all and sundry for subjecting Mulroney to a witch hunt.

“… the campaign against Mr. Mulroney is what academics call a “mobbing,” a process that is most visible on politically correct university campuses. An unpopular member of faculty is targeted by an accusation and then subjected to an inquisition, which eventually leads to his expulsion in disgrace. Very often, the accusation is trivial or false, and the disciplinary process is abused. This is what has happened to Mr. Mulroney.”

“The grudge most Canadians hold against Mr. Mulroney is that he introduced the hated Goods and Services Tax in 1989, a measure that was nevertheless applauded by economists, and later by Liberals. His image suffered a serious blow in 1995, when publisher Seal Books (subsequently absorbed by Random House Canada) decided the best way to excite interest in a book by Stevie Cameron was to feature Mr. Mulroney on the cover dressed opulently in a tuxedo next to the words On the Take, even though the book contained no hard evidence that he has ever taken a bribe.”

“…During his libel action against the government, Mr. Mulroney was asked by government lawyers if he had ever had any dealings with Mr. Schreiber. In his answer, Mr. Mulroney failed to mention a $225,000-$300,000 deal he had made with Mr. Schreiber for work that he would do after he left office. (Mr. Mulroney and Mr. Schreiber disagree on the amount paid.) Mr. Mulroney’s political savvy probably told him that if he revealed the Schreiber deal, the roof would cave in on him, as it has since done. Mr. Mulroney is now condemned for not revealing this arrangement, even though it had nothing to do with the issue in the libel case.”

Hey Phil, if the question wasn’t relevant Mulroney, a lawyer accompanied by senior counsel, could have objected to answering it. He didn’t. Instead he went off on a detailed description of meeting Schreiber a few times for a cup of coffee. Sorry, Phil, but the guy’s under oath and he’s giving a deliberately misleading (ie “false”) answer. He was “savvy” enough to know that if he told the truth, “the roof would cave in on him?” I think that’s called perjury, Phil. He chose to answer the question, he was under oath, what you now think of the question itself is irrelevant, Phil.

“The ethics committee now wants to examine Mr. Mulroney’s tax records relating to the $225,000-$300,000 payment, even though Mr. Mulroney received most of the money while he was a private citizen for work that he would do as a private citizen. The Canada Revenue Agency has apparently accepted Mr. Mulroney’s submissions, so why are the tax records of this private citizen a matter of Parliamentary ethics? When a mobbing is in progress, such questions are put aside.”

You see, Phil, there you go again. He received “most” of the money while he was a private citizen. That’s like saying we don’t need to worry about the fact that this transaction was put into effect while BM was a key figure in the government of the day, the former prime minister. Sorry, you’ve got a few spots on your logic Phil and I think they’re grease.

“…By the time the ethics committee and the commission of inquiry have finished with Mr. Mulroney, their inquiries will have added another year or two to the 15 years that this witch hunt has already been going on. And whatever their ultimate findings, the mere process of investigation may destroy the last shreds of Mr. Mulroney’s reputation and make the disgrace of this former Canadian prime minister complete.”

Phil, Phil, Phil – If Mulroney’s reputation is destroyed and his disgrace complete, that’s his doing and no one else’s. If only we could get into GCI and Frank Moores and where that $20-million of Airbus money went and whether any of it found its way into Brian’s pockets but that’s a long shot and Mulroney knows it. CGI is long gone and, fortunately for Mulroney, so is Moores. That’s one thing the Commons committee has clarified. That money – that illicit money – didn’t go to Schreiber but to Frank Moores, the same guy Mulroney appointed to the board of Air Canada just in time for the Airbus deal.

For a supposed “investigative reporter”, Mathias has gone well out of his way for years to avoid investigating this one. Mathias broke the story of the RCMP letter of request, the publication of which created the basis for Mulroney’s defamation suit. It was during a Fifth Estate interview with Mathias in his office at the Spot that a CBC cameraman filmed a letter on his desk that turned out to be the English translation of the “smoking gun” letter. From the Fifth Estate web site:

“Mathias’ former colleague at the National Post, Andrew Coyne, says the leaking of the letter was the act which actually constituted the libel.

“What made it a libel was that it was printed in the Financial Post and everyone could read it there,” Andrew Coyne told the fifth estate. “Obviously Mr. Mulroney would be very concerned about his reputation … but for the police to be passing back and forth allegations to each other on its own it seems to me is not terribly blameworthy.”

Schreiber has long been suspected as source of the Letter of Request that wound up with Mathias. Those suspicions grew when it was revealed by CBC reporter Neil MacDonald that the document in Mathias’ possession was the same translation of the letter Mulroney’s lawyers had filed in court the day they launched their lawsuit.

Mathias had obtained a translation of the justice department letter prepared for Mulroney by Schreiber’s lawyers in Switzerland.

“So how could a private document prepared for Mulroney by his own lawyers find its way into the hands of the reporter who broke the story?”

Caught with the translation – not the actual RCMP letter but the translation prepared by Schreiber’s Swiss lawyers – investigative reporter Mathias refused to explain the obvious – how this wound up in his hands, the very reporter who “broke” the story? Was this whole thing – the letter, its publication in the Spot contrived? If so, there was no libel of Brian Mulroney, at least none for which the federal government could be help responsible. We deserve our two million back plus a whole pile of cash-stuffed envelopes in accrued interest.

I hope the committee issues one more subpoena – to Phil Mathias. He has a lot of questions to answer.

Australia’s “Smart Traveler” web site now lists Canada as a destination where visitors should “exercise caution.”

We’re listed as somewhat dangerous due to the risk of terrorism, snow and ice storms, avalanches in BC and forest fires that can supposedly erupt any time.

This assessment is coming from a country that is awash in lethal threats. Australia hosts 17 of the world’s deadliest snakes including the Inland Taipan; a gaggle of nasty bugs including the Funelweb Spider, the Box Jellyfish and Blue-Ringed Octopus, 165-species of sharks, saltwater and freshwater crocodiles, droughts, floods and wildfires.

I wonder if the Aussies are warning potential visitors to steer clear of their own country? It would make a lot of sense, wouldn’t it?

Poor Count Rudy, he can’t even get a break in his hometown.

America’s newspaper of record, The New York Times, has endorsed John McCain as the best Republican candidate for president. As for Rudy, the paper said it all in this:

“The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power.”

Not content with kicking Rudy to the curb, the paper went on:

“Mr. Giuliani’s arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking. When he claims fiscal prudence, we remember how he ran through surpluses without a thought to the inevitable downturn and bequeathed huge deficits to his successor. He fired Police Commissioner William Bratton, the architect of the drop in crime, because he couldn’t share the limelight. He later gave the job to Bernard Kerik, who has now been indicted on fraud and corruption charges.

The Rudolph Giuliani of 2008 first shamelessly turned the horror of 9/11 into a lucrative business, with a secret client list, then exploited his city’s and the country’s nightmare to promote his presidential campaign.”

We can hope that the Times review turns into Giuliani’s political epitaph when Repugs cast their votes in the Florida primary. America and the world will be better off without him.

Forget “trickle down/supply side” economics. That’s so 80’s, a means to get government off the backs of the most advantaged so they can really go to town. Sure it creates enormous debt and undermines social programmes but the rich don’t give a dump about their Medicare benefits or Social Security cheques, do they, and you can always pawn the debt off on the working classes by deftly tweaking the tax code to shift the burden off the rich, the investment class, the rentiers, by cutting tax from investment income and shifting that burden over onto wages, earned income. But you can only take that so far, or can you?

Here’s an idea! What about getting the taxpayers, i.e. the working folk, to bail out the investor classes? Take subprime mortgages. The investor class made a killing selling and shuffling bad paper. If it wasn’t legal (more or less) it’d be criminal. But all good things must end and, right now, those investors are scared to death of massive defaults on those dodgy mortgages they spent the Bush years flogging to everyone who could sign their name. So, what do you do?

How ’bout the Fed maybe coming up with a $20-billion relief package? Better yet, why doesn’t the White House and Congress come up with a $150-billion “stimulus” bill, sending tax rebates to the workers? Put a few hundred bucks in their pockets and hope that lets some of them pay their mortgages. The best part? It’s all done with borrowed money. We’ll pay the workers with money we borrowed on their behalf that they or their kids will wind up having to repay, with interest! We’ll just tell’em we’re giving them the money. They’ll never know the difference.

See, the idea isn’t “trickle down” any more. It’s bubble-up. The investor class has long since invested their tax cuts into Asia but the working guy, he has to spend that money, and so it bubbles up right back to the tax-haven accounts of the most deserving or, as I like to call’em, the “Haves and the Have-Mores.” Abe was wrong. You can fool all of the people all of the time.