Ethnic Cleansing, Divine Opposition to Student Strikes, and Other Media Myths
I have avoided weighing in on the Quebec student strike until now, mostly because I don’t live in that province and I didn’t really feel I had anything substantial to contribute to the discussion. So this is my mea culpa: I stood idly by. I apologize for that. And with Lisa Corbella of the Calgary Herald (who is apparently an Alliance Christian, just like His Grace, Stephen Harper) now upping the ante by claiming that God opposes student tuition protests, I’ve had enough.
So here’s my actual opinion. If you’re attending a government university and paying a tuition fee, then by definition, you are paying a tax to the government. When the government discusses raising tuition fees, what they are actually describing is raising taxes on students. And the vast majority of national pundits not only support this tax increase, they think that the students who oppose it are spoiled brats who are just throwing a childish tantrum. Well. At least we found a tax increase that the national media support, for a change.
Which, you have to admit, is hypocrisy of the highest order. Watch these greedy, self-interested, short-sighted pricks scream and stamp their feet like spoiled children if the government ever proposes a similar tax hike on them. The moment that happens, they’ll start screeching endlessly about how if you raise their taxes, their fragile will to work hard and be productive will go up in a puff of self-interested smoke, the good people will all flee to sanctuary in countries that still respect free wallets, and Canada will follow Greece and Italy into socialist hell. Greece and Italy, those well-known bastions of the Scandinavian tax-and-spend welfare state.
Recent events offer an illustration. According to Corbella, McGill’s current tuition is $2168; for McGill students, therefore, a $325 tuition boost therefore amounts to a 15% tax hike. Now, when the Ontario Liberals were brokering the survival of their government by agreeing with the NDP to introduce a temporary 17% increase in the highest tax rate in that province (from 11% to 13%), one offended Bay Street banker promptly denounced their scheming as “ethnic cleansing.” Pressed for an apology, he instead offered a new comparison: this catastrophe was like the sacking of ancient Rome by the Visigoths, and the NDP were like the ancient barbarians, “wandering down the Via Aurelia into Rome.”
I must tell you, it appears that Mr. Banker has earned his degree from the Harper School of History. So far as I am aware, the Visigoths actually entered Rome not by the Aurelian road to the west, but by the Via Salaria, to the north. Moreover, I’m not totally convinced that he helps his case by comparing his own situation as an affluent Canadian facing a modest tax increase to a brutal totalitarian dictatorship finally facing the music after centuries of rape, plunder, and slavery. Although on behalf of the 99%, let me just say that it is an entirely appropriate analogy.
It would be a small start — a very small start — but I think our country would move one noticeable step towards a better future if our financial community didn’t think Roman slave-owners were good role models, and if our Albertan newspaper columnists (and Prime Ministers) stopped attending churches which preach that we must respect as the “inerrant” word of a supernatural overlord a motley collection of ancient superstitions, bundled up together as a “Bible,” which claims that the Earth is flat, that gay people should be summarily executed, and that God made women inferior to men.
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kootcoot
I want to thank Lisa Corbella of the Calgary (I hate typing that word, because it makes me think of his grace, Harper) Herald for motivating you to express your views on the tuition issue………they really hit the spot.
I’m an old fart who was lucky to enough to attend the then excellent University of California, entering before Ronnie Raygun became governor and began his attack on all things public, first statewide and then nationally and then globally.
Aside from the general “privatization” ideology that all public education finds itself under attack from, I feel there is another less visible motive behind this drive to saddle graduates of post secondary education (other than the spawn of the “chosen silver spoon suckers”) with massive debt. How much less likely is said graduate, in any field from social sciences to law to hard science to be able to even consider seeking employment in a field where public service rather than mainly financial rewards is part of the equation – I would suggest very much less likely!
Even St. Barry Obama may have thought twice about working as a “community organizer” if he left Harvard Law with the debt anyone not a son of Mittens Romney would be carrying today. The likelihood of practicing law directed towards social justice is today only the option of someone with the background of Robert Kennedy Jr. or a person willing to either be homeless, not raise a family or default on their student debt!
Likewise anyone coming out with a degree in a hard science would have to think twice or more before not feeling compelled to work for Big Oil or Big Pharma if they have the opportunity and then be duty bound to scientifically try to support the views that support the greed based goals of their employer, and therefore punt environmental responsibility down the road to future generations, assuming there are any.
Sixth Estate
Interesting points.
Given the degree of resentment of high student loans, this is an area where it would not be overly difficult to create substantial pressure on the government. Of course, it would require even more determination and coordination from English Canadian university graduates than we’ve seen from French Canadian students. So that’s not going to happen.
Sam Gunsch
…very glad you’ve written this and brought Corbella’s goofiness to our attention.
Seems to the me the tarsands/oilpatch industry regarding royalties and taxes has an enormous sense of entitlement, such that it arguably casts the largest shadow over democracy, as per the various writers on ‘petro-tyrannies’.
Albertans who have avoided hypnosis from decades of propaganda such as the current industry ‘Alberta is Energy’, have noticed how the petro-plutocrats enforce their market-based control on citizens with just a little bit more impact on democracy than broken windows and marches.
… dare to raise royalties to world standards…Alberta gets called Albertistan, they stop funding the offending political party despite decades of joint-venture running Alberta and convince said party to provide cement boots as necessary (Stemach), and they fund replacements as necessary (Dani-rose).
It’s guaranteed to offend a petro-plutocrat class whenever the citizens dare imagine they have democratic control and thus elect representatives who either dare to attempt to get an owner’s share in royalties, or who dare to point out costs that industry has put onto the citizenry in AB and across Canada re environmental, social, fiscal costs (Mulcair).
You’ve never seen entitlement outrage until you’ve seen the 1% CEO’s/Calgary’s executive class screaming in the pages of Corbella’s Herald, or their Sun newsletter, the self-appointed leaders of Alberta who appear to operating in an alternative reality where they put that damn oil under Alberta in the first place.
Sam Gunsch
Klingwell’s piece I’ve excerpted below is among the best writing I have found on the value of education, especially with respect to revealing the market-bias of typical arguments put forward by the crowd Corbella represents…
excerpt: “The entailed benefit is that these citizens are ones who will challenge the reduction of all consideration to the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
http://www.academicmatters.ca/2011/05/intellectuals-
Intellectuals and Democracy
by Mark Kingwell
excerpt:
Second, though, we actually need graduates more than ever precisely because democracy depends on a population of engaged, critical thinkers who have general humane knowledge of history, politics, culture, economics, and science, who are citizens and not consumers and who can see that there exist shared interests beyond their own desires. Once the link between higher education and work has been broken, the value of the humanities and non-applied sciences become clear. Education is not there to be converted into market value; it is there to make us better and more engaged citizens, maybe even better and more virtuous people. There, I said it!
The entailed benefit is that these citizens are ones who will challenge the reduction of all consideration to the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Aristotle again: usefulness is not virtue. He meant to ask us each to consider how and why we come to value things, to consider them relevant, to think them worth doing. “What are you going to do with that?” asks the concerned fellow diner or transit passenger.
Sam Gunsch
one Quebecer’s view re entitlements vs enlightenment…
excerpt: “There is a richness, a depth to Quebec that is evidence of not a culture of entitlement, but rather enlightenment. … and, yes, a long history of social protest. All of these entities are elements of a people who make demands of their government and state, not for the Quebec they believe they deserve, but rather for the Canada we need.
Instead of condemning the students for wanting their tuition to remain reasonable, why doesn’t the rest of the country stand up and demand the same thing?…
The simple answer, the answer that lacks ambition or ingenuity, is that it’s an impossibility. That we live in a world where social programs are the first to be cut, because they’re the least essential.
Because someone making $150K-a-year in Calgary, doesn’t give a damn about someone making $30K in Montreal. And frankly, that’s straight up bullshit. And it’s lazy.
Canada was built on ambitious notions, on the steadfast belief that a country could be all things. Waving our collective finger in the nose of the Quebec students, the Quebec people, and telling them they can’t have their “entitlements” because the rest of Canada is afraid to ask for them, makes Canada the petulant child.
http://mikespry.org/2012/05/08/quebec-is-the-canada-we-should-want/
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I shared this excerpt because I think this blogger has a more insightful take on Alberta’s reigning political ethos than he may be aware… (no endorsement of the rest of the blog post implied)
Of course, it’s an ethos which is active in the rest of Canada but my reading of its political history is that my province’s executive and political class contributed much of the venture capital.
Oil and American imports ensured Alberta can take much credit for legitimating the ideology of market fundamentalism/government is oppressive toward free enterprise, which is the source of all that is right and good that has ruled my province’s politics since the 1980′s from the office towers and media outlets in my province’s Houston north…
Again…an ethos which has spread across the land, much catalyzed by Presto-Reform’s prairie snake-oil false populism, taking advantage of the political alienation his propaganda fostered.
Ok, I concede…bit of repetitious rant… but I swear, I’ve seen the secret Civitas memos: it’s our fault.
And yes, I am moving on past diagnosis; mulling over some ‘what to do’ stuff.
Sixth Estate
Interestingly, the National Post is currently encouraging its readers to debate whether it’s time Quebec was simply kicked out of Canada altogether.
Not one year ago, separatism was considered treason by the conservative movement. Now, it’s considered the height of Canadian national pride. Is there any meaningful point on which conservatives can actually be consistent?
kootcoot
“Is there any meaningful point on which conservatives can actually be consistent?”
Consistently stupid, consistently resistant to actual evidence and increasingly consistently corrupt.
The Sixth Estate » New Media Spin: Right-wing Tax Increases Good. NDP Tax Increases Very, Very Bad.
[...] all hell broke loose. One business group leader claimed that small increases in income tax were morally equivalent to ethnic cleansing. If we let the NDP influence taxation policy, he claimed, it would be like watching Rome get sacked [...]
Taxes are bad — unless, of course, they’re good : Canada's online magazine: Politics, entertainment, technology, media, arts, books: backofthebook.ca
[...] all hell broke loose. One business group leader claimed that small increases in income tax were morally equivalent to ethnic cleansing. If we let the NDP influence taxation policy, he claimed, it would be like watching Rome get sacked [...]