The Antisocial Socialist

 I am having a shit start to the morning for a variety of reasons, so let's get angrier, why don't we?

You may have heard headlines about how our recently re-elected premier swallowed a bee during a presser. There's various viral videos of it floating around, including in that link, and of course the expected Canadian Heritage Moment meme, and yes, it is extremely funny.

But you know what's not funny?

The press conference was about privatizing Ontario's healthcare system.

Now, if you haven't heard, our healthcare system is in crisis due to long-term, intentional defunding by ideologues who believe that survival is a privilege that you should pay for. It was being starved well before Ford took office but was exponentially accelerated by his choices to destroy it. Against a background of chronic underfunding, he instituted Bill 124, which capped nurses' salaries. Given that his policies also ensured mass-scale covid infections, this essentially ensured that not only were they working obscene hours and risking their lives to clean up his shit, they were doing it for unliveable wages. So many of them quit for entirely understandable reasons. Now, emergency room wait times are upwards of 12 hours, surgeries are backlogged, and people are dying because they can't access medical care.

This is absolutely by design.

The right has a playbook for these things. Take an essential public service that would be extremely profitable if it were in private hands. Defund the service. Make the service unusable. Wait until the public is at a breaking point and then get your friends in the private sector to swoop in and save the day. We all know that private healthcare is less efficient, lower quality, and less equitable than public. The privatization of long-term care, which directly enriches former Tory premier Mike Harris, resulted in the mass murder of seniors and disabled people in conditions so atrocious that the army had to be called in to mop up these concentration camps for the medically vulnerable.

The Tories are selling a lie to the placid Ontario populace that privatization will relieve the health care crisis. The voters who re-elected this government with an absolute majority that makes them un-checked dictators for the next four years envision, I'm sure, a beautiful two-tiered system where the rich (they all envision themselves as rich) can get immediate care and the poors are taken care of somewhere they don't need to think about. But in reality, there are limited resources in our system. There are only so many nurses. So shifting some to the private sector doesn't magically increase the amount of nurses, it just puts aside some for care of the rich at the expense of both systems. 

Ford isn't good at math so I'll give you a math problem. Let's say your problem is that you have 100 nurses in a hospital, and you need 200. You solve this problem by throwing taxpayer money at a private, for-profit clinic to relieve the overcrowding at the hospital. 50 of the nurses leave to work at the private clinic. Let's say 25% of the patients are wealthy enough to go to the private clinic. Now you have half as many nurses at the public hospital serving 75% of patients and 50 at the private clinic. You have not increased the number of nurses, just the amount of overhead and administration, and what you have for it is an even more understaffed public hospital.

Now, in reality the scenario that people are picturing is all hella illegal anyway because we have the Canada Health Act.* So the feds can just withhold funding if a province decides to privatize healthcare and make people here pay for it directly like Americans do. What would actually happen is that the system remains single-payer but the service providers are private and bill the government. This already happens with a lot of things, like blood tests, which all of a sudden started having user fees. It's also bad because for-profit companies will charge the government, and thus taxpayers, more for health care. We still lose, but instead of in a face-to-face battle, we've lost in a shell game that allows the government's murderous choices to be hidden under layers of bureaucracy.

At this point in the pandemic, when nearly 100 people here died from covid this past week and we don't know how many are permanently disabled or dealing with life-altering illnesses because no one is counting, you should reach for your Molotov any time anyone says "get creative," because they're not Banksy, they're trying to roll you for all your stuff and leave you to die in a ditch. 

The Ontario Health Coalition is sounding the alarm. As Canadian Dimension reports, there is plenty of money available to fix the healthcare system and keep it public, but the Tories much prefer giving that money to their friends or sitting on it hoping it will hatch. So why don't they?

Here is a list of all the corporations that are lobbying for privatization.

Which brings me to the bee.

This is a convenient, cutesy distraction from the issue at hand, which is that Doug Ford, premier of Ontario, wants to kill a whole bunch more of us. He lives for these media moments. The bee grabbed headlines and conveniently downplayed the fact that the presser was about how he wants you to die on a filthy emergency room floor in your own piss. That should have been the headline. The bee—if it was a bee—tried to save us from this fate. But Doug Ford is media savvy and knows how to play these things, and the media is un-savvy enough to lap it up at his feet.

Ontarians as a whole are a deeply stupid people. They believe that democracy only comes about every four years and consists of checking off a box on a ballot. They believe you don't even need to know what the box you're checking off means—why bother reading a platform when there's a blustery, funny-looking populist type who seems like you could have a beer with him? In fact this is not true. This funny looking man wants to kill you and he has a publicly known address that you could visit with a vuvuzela any day of the week. All of these Tories go out to restaurants (without masks) and you can shout at them if you want. If Doug Ford had been allergic to bees, he would get to bypass the 12-hour wait in an emergency room. I think, personally, that someone like this should not be able to just go about his life like a normal, non-homicidal person, and not be spit on and screamed at constantly. I don't think he should get a nice manicured lawn in Etobicoke that doesn't have a protest sign or some campers on it.

Not when he's trying to murder people.

RIP Comrade Bee, you tried harder than anyone in this province to save us all.

* Of course Trudeau won't save us. Both because his government is weak but also because a small minority of Conservative Party members somehow decided for the entire country that a fascist was going to be our next PM, and Canadians are also stupid enough to go along with that.

I don't really know what to post about Ukraine. I am grieving. I'm worried. I'm creeping a friend's Facebook kind of regularly as she's in Kyiv. I don't have easy solutions, just anger, and there's nothing I can actually do about it.

But unlike so many tortured parts of the world where bad things are happening, I have a precise image in my head of the places under assault and threatened by Putin's thirst for power and control, of the deep subway tunnels where people are cowering from the bombs.

( not great photos that I found on my phone )

 While everyone is quite distracted with the terrorist assaults on Ottawa and border blockades, the War Measures Act Emergency Act, and the surrender of most governments to the aforementioned terrorists/covid, the Ford Regime went and stealthily announced that they would be privatizing health care. There are some complexities to it but if you read my blog, you know what this government is after, and that's enriching their cronies at the expense of the citizenry. This opens the door for American-style healthcare where if you're rich, you've got access, and if you're anyone else, you can just fuckin' die.

While we're on the topic of things that everyone in this cursed so-called country should be freaking out about, Keeseekoose First Nation discovered another 54 unmarked graves of children, and I have seen barely a headline about it.

Things are pretty apocalyptic in British Columbia right now. Maybe you've heard? Catastrophic flooding and mudslides, brought about by intentional decisions made by countries including Canada, have killed at least one person so far, flooded towns, submerged highways, and cut off BC from the rest of the country. Abbotsford almost disappeared. Stores are empty. More people are likely to die. People I care about are dealing with the potential loss of loved ones, not because they got caught in mudslides, but because necessary medical supplies can't get there and surgeries can't take place. I can't emphasize enough how devastating this is on a human and an environmental level.

This post is not about that.

This post is about how, despite the fact that we as a country can't get food and medical supplies to a huge part of the country, we were somehow able to get a charter plane full of RCMP onto Wet'suwet'en territory to conduct militarized raids against Indigenous land defenders.

The land defenders have been under siege for 54 days. The RCMP is blocking access to their Healing Centre and are blocking food, medicine, and people from accessing the camp. They threatened to arrest a driver bringing in medical supplies. This against the  United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). This is a war crime.

Think on this for a moment. Canada has prioritized committing a grotesque act of violence violence against Indigenous people, including Elders, media, and legal observers over the safety and lives of all people in the province. That is staggering. This lays bare the cruelty at the heart of the Canadian state.

As a reminder, the Wet'suwet'en are defending their unceded territory from oil and gas companies that are trying to build a pipeline through their land. This not only threatens their land and water, but it threatens all of us by contributing to the very climate chaos that is currently drowning BC. 

From Unist'ot'en Camp:

Call your representatives & tell them this is no way to treat Indigenous people.

For more information and live updates, you can also follow Gidimt’en Checkpoint.

 I'm never, as you might have guessed, big on Canada Day, or any performative act of patriotism. This year, I'll be spending it at a march to commemorate the children who died at residential schools and to honour the survivors of those schools.

Yesterday, the ʔaq̓am community of the Ktunaxa Nation found another 182 unmarked graves using ground-penetrating radar. As far as I know, it's the impoverished Indigenous communities themselves that are paying for these investigations—both the wealthy Canadian state and the wealthy churches that ran these death camps would be happy to let those kids lie buried and be forgotten altogether.

Anyway. Land Back. Decolonize. Tax the churches and make them pay. Put the surviving culprits on trial for their crimes against humanity. Bring the kids home. Truth first, then we can talk about reconciliation.

At the root of the problem is that most people think "it's illegal" means the same thing as "they can't do that." Those currently in power know the difference.

This isn't something I see very often, so I thought I'd share.


CN: Contains scenes of police brutality.

I met her at a party once. She seemed lovely.

I also really enjoyed Thought Slime's video on whether the CHAZ is a living heck.

I'm having Thoughts again. Not very well-organized Thoughts, but when are they ever?

It's remarkable to see how fast "defund/disband the police" has gone from fringe idea held by weirdo abolitionists like yours truly to something that is not only mainstream discourse, but something actively being considered by governments. Before I get too deep into an analysis of how and why this is happening, I want to say that I'm for defunding the police. I'm for disbanding the police. I'm for abolishing the institution of policing. Modern policing is very new and arose from slave patrols. It is a deeply corrupt racist institution. We lived without it once and we can live without it again.

What I find fascinating is why we're now suddenly allowed to talk about it. Yes yes freedom of speech, democracy, but we all know that freedom of speech has its limits. The graffiti artist, queer pornographer, and multinational company do not all have the same access to freedom of speech. Some speech is freer than others, and a wealth of interests—political, economic, and media—have worked tightly together to determine what is acceptable to say and what is not. For years, as the brutalization of racialized communities by a class of people endowed with military-grade weaponry and absolved of any crime they might commit with it has become more visible due to the ubiquity of smartphones, we civilians have been allowed to talk about peaceful protests, bodycams, sensitivity training, but never before to question the institution of policing itself or how much of our tax dollars it gets. In Toronto, that's over a billion dollars a year—far more than is spent on poverty reduction, transit, paramedics, or libraries, all of which benefit far more people. Certainly, far left radicals have brought this up as a problem, but that last link is to CBC. Here's one in Macleans! By Sandy Hudson, co-founder of Black Lives Matter-TO, no less.

Speaking of Hudson, she did a really excellent interview yesterday with Canadaland, and you should have a listen. Among the many interesting points she raises is that CBC's The Current was supposed to interview her, until they found out she wanted to talk about defunding the police, and then they suddenly dropped her. A few days later, the idea was everywhere. She and Jesse Brown both remarked on the speed at which the Overton Window had shifted.

There are some good reasons for that on all sides of the political spectrum. Obviously, there's the left-progressive, humanitarian argument. Money spent on policing is not being spent on a social safety net that would reduce crime and improve the lives of people. Money spent on policing is being spent to equip cops with ludicrous firepower, which they use on innocent people, mainly Black and, on Turtle Island, Indigenous. Cops are apparently becoming less accountable, not more. Time and time again, we've seen them get away with murder. There's also, shockingly, a right-wing argument. We don't get much for our money out of the policing budget. Quite a lot goes to cops hanging around construction sites, for which they get time and a half. When cops take a break from active policing, there's good evidence that crime actually goes down. So if you're interested in genuine fiscal conservatism (is anyone, these days), especially in the middle of a pandemic where people are barely leaving their homes if they don't need to, police budgets are a good place to make some austerity happen.

But there's another factor and I don't think anyone is talking about it. I don't want to denigrate the courage and hard work of the many activists who put their lives and health on the line to demonstrate in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Without them (and, to be quite honest, without the rioting that also happened), his killers wouldn't be held to account at all. But there have been widespread protests and movements before, and there have been riots before. Why have politicians, media, and woke corporations suddenly had a come to Jesus moment?

Spoiler: They haven't. For the most part, they want what they always have—the transfer of public funds from your services into private hands. 

A quarter of all labour in the US is guard labour.

This includes, of course, cops, military, and prison guards, but also private security. I think the reason why it is all of a sudden socially acceptable to talk about defunding the police is that the wealthy look at billion-dollar line items and see billions of dollars being paid to unionized positions, when if all they care about is their shops not being robbed and their condo developments not being burned to the ground, it's more fiscally efficient to spent a fraction of that money on minimum-wage private security guards. Or, for the more important functions of social control, whatever William Gibson-esque moniker Blackwater is going by these days.

While I generally am against privatizing public services, I still find it hard to look at this as a bad thing. The public eats the cost either way, by subsidizing corporations through tax breaks, or by funding the police directly. As someone slightly more likely than the average nice white lady to get her head bashed in by a riot cop, I prefer to not directly pay for my own concussions. There's also less job creep—part of the reason for so many police murders, especially in Canada where our cops by and large don't just randomly gun down people in the streets, is that cops are used in situations where cops have no business going, like people having mental health crises. You're not going to call a security guard to deal with your kid having a meltdown, security guards are mainly not armed anyway, and therefore the chance of a security guard defenestrating your kid is massively lower than if the only recourse was calling 911.

The trend towards privatized guard labour is, of course, a bad thing. But it is a bad thing that is currently opening a space for what is a very important discussion.

If there are two takeaways from my theorizing, they are:

1) Don't ever fall into the trap of thinking that power cedes without a fight. Corporations have not suddenly gotten woke; we are permitted to discuss this option because economic factors have shifted.
2) "Defund the police" is not a complete sentence; "defund the police and reinvest the money in Black and Indigenous communities" is.

 I made a comment to this effect on a friend's FB, but I think it bears repeating as I watch structural failure after structural failure. I'm fascinated by institutions, governments, and economies, and despite being entirely self-taught on these matters, my predictions have a decent track record.*

So here's my take on pandemic handling. You need three things, and you can probably get away with two of the things if the other two are well-developed:

1) A strong state
2) Transparency
3) A civic-minded population

I'll give the anarchists a moment to calm down and we'll continue. Good? Okay.

By "a strong state," I don't mean an authoritarian state. I mean decisiveness at the leadership level. You need this because under the types of political structures we have right now, you need someone to track the science, demand closures, and push money at people (not corporate or bank bailouts). This is the level at which Italy failed, Canada and the US are failing, but China, Taiwan, Denmark, and South Korea have been successful. Theoretically, if you were going to be anarchist about it, you could toss all of your #1 stats into #2 and #3, but we don't have a model of this right now, so decisiveness at the top is critical. Denmark stands out for commendation by compensating workers 75% of their salaries, which kept everyone calm and allowed for social distancing to happen early.

Transparency: This is where China initially failed and one of the places where America is failing even badly. People need to know what's going on and what to do. In our current situation, transparency is limited by testing, and this needs to be a major focus if we're ever going to go back to work and see our grandparents again. South Korea's strategies have been particularly outstanding in this regard in terms of creating apps and using tracking and mapping to show what was going on in real time.

A civic-minded population: I would argue that this is America's #1 point of failure. It's understandable because "fuck you, I got mine" is baked into the national consciousness. It's Canada's point of failure to a lesser degree, hence toilet-paper hoarding in the province that makes all the toilet paper. Decisiveness and transparency are needed at the state and media level, but civic-mindedness is required to actually implement it. People must be willing to help each other, to participate in social distancing, and not to hoard. Companies must be willing to take financial hits in order to keep workers employed. Landlords must forgive rent. A wartime attitude of "we're all in this together" is what actually makes the policies happen. "Fuck you, I got mine" doesn't work when someone who didn't get mine spreads it to you.

Ideally, we'd have a sensible economy and rational leaders who listened to science. Maybe we can emerge from this with some more robust institutions?



* It's not because I think I'm special or particularly smart. I'm at the mercy of just-in-time staffing, which led me to conclude that a just-in-time supply chain also had a predictable failure rate. Smarter people than I should have noticed this.

@dewline mentioned the Shock Doctrine. That, for anyone who hasn't read it, is Naomi Klein's excellent book about how right-wing governments and corporations use disasters to enforce their ideology on the rest of us. He suggested two can play that game.

This is why I'm only panicky some of the time. Because shit-scared as I am, I'm seeing it happen.

Let us review some ways to mitigate pandemics:

• Universal health care. The US is in a uniquely vulnerable position for a number of reasons, but chief among them is a refusal to test and treat COVID-19 patients for free. Their patchwork healthcare system is already becoming overwhelmed. 
• Universal Pharmacare, a.k.a. why we should have voted NDP in the last election. The fact that we don't have this is likely going to be a problem for us.
• Rethinking how we do education. The Ford government is going to attempt mandatory eLearning, and it's going to fail because they can't even design a license plate. But you know what's even worse? Cramming 40 kids in a classroom built for 25. A huge push in my board has been to shutter underutilized school buildings and move towards closing any school with less than 1000 students. In a small school with extra space, you can do social distancing. In a school at 90% capacity, you can't.
• Building redundancy into staffing. The problem isn't that the virus is going to kill us all. The problem is that the virus is going to overwhelm hospitals. But longer term, it's also going to overwhelm other key institutions when critical people fall ill and have to be quarantined. Just-in-time staffing, which is what most companies and now schools, hospitals, nursing homes, etc., do, makes us more vulnerable in a pandemic. We need to have extra nurses, extra caretakers, extra childcare workers, extra cooks, even if they're sitting around doing nothing some of the time, because redundancy allows the company or institution to maintain continuity of operations through a crisis.
• Housing for all. You can't quarantine if you don't have a home, and unhoused/transient populations spread a pandemic faster.
• Loan, debt, and rent forgiveness. Bailouts aren't just for banks. If we allow people to fall into poverty as a result of either getting sick or having their place of work shut down, we worsen the epidemic by having people unhoused or in transient situations.
• Paid sick leave. This goes without saying.
• Robust internet access. So we can work from home when we need to.
• Greater support for disabled, ill, and elderly people. They are the primary people who are at risk and we need to work together to ensure that resources are maximized to help them survive.
• Ending arbitrary detention. Prisons and concentration camps are disease vectors. We have to avoid imprisoning people to the greatest extent possible, especially vulnerable populations.
• Strong communities. More on that in a bit.

What do these things have in common? Oh, only the kind of stuff that the moderate left has been demanding, when it summons the courage.

And at the risk of silver linings, observe these maps of China and extrapolate to a worldwide pandemic. I'm not one of those silver lining types but we have learned that we can probably get away with producing less, driving less, and flying less, and maybe continuous exponential growth that primarily benefits a rich minority at the expense of growing inequality isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Here is the awesome thing, though. People are starting to get it, I think. A pandemic is a collective problem with collective solutions, and the super-rich hiding in their bunkers won't last forever if there's no one to clean their floors. Let's look at a few good news stories.

• Trudeau, who rarely does anything I agree with, is suggesting income supports, basically amounting to a temporary UBI scheme.
• OH LOOK it turns out that Toronto can house the homeless after all! Note that we could have done this any time.
• In Louisiana, a proposal to empty the jails of non-violent offenders.
• San Francisco is putting a moratorium on evictions during the crisis, as is New York.
• I'm not even going to watch this video of Italians singing out of their windows because I've cried enough for one day, thank you very much.

Here in Toronto, within hours of the closures beginning, a Facebook group started up to provide community support. People are making sure that elderly, sick, and disabled folks get the supplies they need, arranging food and childcare, posting where there's toilet paper and where there are shorter lineups, suggesting things to do to maintain sanity, and generally assessing people's needs and capacity to help. Friends have started Slack groups. I've felt moved to tears several times as I've had to reassure friends, students, and co-workers, and other friends have stepped up to try to reassure me.

When I went grocery shopping for some basic supplies, everyone was nice to each other. There weren't huge lineups or hoarding. Everyone is scared but everyone was also really friendly and putting on brave faces. My internet company, TekSavvy, just removed all data caps on everyone's account because they knew people would be relying on the internet more. I've seen a few folks in crisis but I haven't seen a solitary person being an asshole.

Now, this situation may change as we haven't really been hit with a crisis yet. But if we can maintain this level of social solidarity, we have a fighting chance against the crisis hitting.

It is true that there's a strong attempt to use the Shock Doctrine the way it's always been used. Thing is, it...isn't working so well this time. If China hadn't started out covering up the severity of the outbreak, it would have fared better. The US crisis will almost certainly be exacerbated by its tendencies towards secrecy and authoritarianism. If people realize it, this might lead to better political outcomes (I hope without widespread death.)

Thing is, people tend towards the cooperative in emergencies, contrary to every disaster movie and most post-apocalyptic literature. I want to leave you with the article that made me cry today, from the New York Times. It's about the Great Alaska Earthquake in 1964 and I think it says a lot about the resiliency of solidarity and community and how cooperation is the key to surviving horrible events.