Can I Believe the News Today?

It's hard times for the good old newspaper. Fewer and fewer people are picking them up off the stands, not enough for them to continue in old patterns without making up the money lost in cancelled subscriptions that aren't coming back. It's been ages since I, personally, read a physical daily newspaper--not since the Toronto Sun back in 2000, and that was only because its tabloid format fit conveniently on the counter behind the cash register of the gas station I worked in at the time. I would imagine that most people of my age group have a similar experience.

The march of the paywalls across the online mediascape has been slow but indefatigable. Yesterday, they took more ground when the Postmedia Network announced the raising of paywalls on four of its newspapers: the Vancouver Sun, the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, and the Province. Fairly straightforward, that. I don't read any of those newspapers on a regular basis, but only visit them from time to time, and they're welcome to institute this policy if they feel it's what's needed to keep them publishing. They do offer the whole "ten free articles per month" like the New York Times does, and really, that's fine.

What's not fine is what the raising of these paywalls served as a reminder of--namely, that the Vancouver Sun and the Province, the two largest daily newspapers in British Columbia, are both owned by the same company. I mean, it's not exactly as if it's a secret; hell, you'll find both of their head offices in the same skyscraper, even if that's not the sort of thing people dwell on. But it leaves towering implications for the established state of journalism in Vancouver.

I wonder if that band in the middle separates Province territory from Sun territory.

When I first moved here, what surprised me the most was that there was no equivalent of the Toronto Star, an unabashedly left-wing paper that looked at causes with a liberal bent; consider the stereotype of Vancouver as a bunch of granola-chewing, pot-smoking hippies if you have difficulty understanding why I'd expected to find something. Sure, there's the Georgia Straight, but as a free weekly dependent on advertising revenue, there's a limit to how much news it can tackle. In contrast, the Province and the Sun hit the streets every day.

That wouldn't be an issue if there was at least some independence. Back in Toronto, the land of four daily newspapers, each are owned by a different media conglomerate. The coverage of an event you find in the Star will differ markedly from what you'd find in the Toronto Sun; just look at any given story regarding Rob Ford for evidence of that. Instead, in Vancouver we have the Postmedia newspaper, and... the Postmedia newspaper. Sure, there are differences... the Sun is right-wing and the Province is even more right-wing. But it's not exactly the wide-open field that I'd imagined I would find here.

I'd ask who allowed this to happen, who permitted British Columbia's major print mediascape to become dominated by a single company, but that's a stupid question. This government doesn't care about those kinds of permissions. The concentration of journalistic outlets into fewer and fewer hands is no problem for them. Balanced, measured coverage based on multiple viewpoints? Who needs it! There's money to be made here, ladeez and germs.

White People Don't Understand

If there's one key truth about the modern world that many Westerners don't understand, it's this: white people do not understand racism. I know I don't! I know as much about racism as I do about what it's like to walk on the moon; I can read the accounts of people who know what it's like, but I have no personal experience with it. The problems come when white people, as white people are wont to do, assume that they are in tune with the world and its complexities.

First off: the $100 issue. There's been a flap across Canadian news outlets lately regarding the redesign of Canada's new $100 polymer bill. With its reverse bearing an image of a woman peering into a microscope, it's supposed to emphasize Canada's role in the sciences--after all, these designs were originally made back in 2009 or so, before certain recent events. However, the bill we're getting isn't the bill that was first designed. Originally the woman was depicted as Asian, but it seems that some focus groups thought an Asian scientist was "stereotypical" or that such an ethnicity "doesn't represent Canada."

So the Bank's designers redrew her, with the intention that it would not depict "a specific individual," and we end up with the bill we have today. A bill which, as the Bank of Canada's Mark Carney acknowledges, "appears to represent only one ethnic group."

I would theorize that it's because the woman does represent only one ethnic group. Specifically, the white ethnic group. I don't know who aside from the ultimate higher-ups at the Bank of Canada were responsible for approving it, but considering Canada's ethnic makeup I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I hypothesize that most of them were probably white. They may have been trying to go for something "non-ethnic," but that's a ridiculous mirage--there's no such thing as ethnic neutrality. What's more likely is that you perceive your own ethnicity as somehow "neutral," the same way a lot of North Americans insist that they don't have an accent or how people tend to perceive a stick figure as being of their own ethnicity in the absence of contradictory information.

Bears do not approve of people who think "non-ethnic" is a thing.

The other factor to this I just discovered today, but apparently it's been a thing for some time already. While Save the Pearls: Revealing Eden by Victoria Foyt dovetails with the whole "crapsack dystopia" thing that appears to be common in Young Adult novels lately, it takes a sharp turn away from the pack with the way it treats racism. See, Save the Pearls is set in a world where whites are the weak, oppressed lower class, known as "pearls," and society is dominated by black people, called "coals."

Are you beginning to see the issue already?

That doesn't even cover the use of blackface, references to black characters as "beastly," and so on. The book's reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly negative, and as of this writing it has a two-star review due mainly to a handful of higher reviews... including that of Marvin Kaye, editor of Weird Tales magazine, who calls it "a thoroughly non-racist book." I, for one, am relieved by the assurances of this aging white man that it's non-racist. I mean, if you can't trust a white man who grew up in the mid-20th century as the final arbiter of whether or not something is racist, who can you trust?

For the record, I don't think that Save the Pearls was written to be racist, or that the $100 bill was redesigned for that reason. Instead, it's more of a problem that's endemic to white authors tackling racism--they don't understand it, but they think they do anyway, and they are incapable of recognizing how the unspoken assumptions of their upbringing affect their work. They are taking something they don't understand and filtering it through their own lens, a lens that does not see things in quite the same way as other people do.

I, for one, understand that I don't understand it at all. Still, that puts me ahead of folks who not only don't recognize their lack of understanding, but charge ahead nevertheless.

How Not to Invade the United States

It's been with us since the beginning: a nagging fear that no matter what we've earned, no matter what we've achieved, there's a stranger out there in the darkness who is waiting for the opportunity to take it all away. It manifests in a thousand different ways, depending on culture and context, but it's always there in the background guiding the actions of everyone from individuals to international alliances. The invasion literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was one manifestation of this expectation that the other shoe had to drop sometime, and another is the modern remake of Red Dawn, at last removed from the vaults and scheduled for release in November.

The original Red Dawn was memorable; not only was it a rah-rah patriotic cornball action movie, but it was a high concept film that even now still doesn't have much in the way of spiritual competition. "The Russians invade the United States" isn't exactly a common movie plotline--the only thing similar to it I remember crossing the screens in the last ten years is Tomorrow, When the War Began, with the plot of "countries that are TOTALLY NOT Indonesia and/or China invade Australia." Nevertheless, those two movies are reflective of certain national fears. Australia has historically had a rather uncomfortable relationship with its neighbors, being a large and thinly populated country surrounded by potential rivals overflowing with people. In 1984, when the original Red Dawn came out, the Cold War was heating up again after the 1970s détente. Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" only a year before, and a significant chunk of the world was formally aligned against the democratic powers.

Red Dawn was hardly the only example of 1980s American invasion literature. There are plenty of lesser-known adventure stories and science fiction novels that depict America under the Soviet heel, enough that "post-cataclysmic rag-tag armies struggle to kick the Rooskies out of the good ol' US of A" is the very first entry in the Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Cliches. They were products of their time--sure, the Soviet Union was being pushed to the brink of collapse, but people didn't realize it at the time. The abrupt end of the Cold War in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later pulled the carpet out from under invasion literature quite neatly.

Now, though, times have changed. We're nervous again, especially in the United States. People have lost a lot of what they had and are afraid that they'll lose even more, and they're feeling compromised and vulnerable... in other words, people are in a receptive state of mind for invasion literature. How fortunate the new Red Dawn is there to come along. Here, have a trailer.


WOLVERIIIIIIIIIIINES

Lookit all those explosions of patriotism. Also a typo in the very first written thing we see. But I digress.

First off, keep in mind that the concept of Red Dawn is utterly ridiculous. Not only does it depict an invasion of the United States, which is hard enough to believe--the original movie began with a brief explanation of how NATO fractured and the United States became isolated just to help justify the premise--but it depicts an invasion of the United States by North Korea. Originally it was China, but there are the Chinese box office receipts to consider these days, and not many North Koreans go to the movies. The recent video game Homefront tried to do things this way too, making North Korea into a new evil empire by absorbing South Korea and Japan and bits of China and so on, but that didn't make it any less ridiculous. Just the opposite, in fact. The trailer implies that the invaders have some new weapon that enables them to turn off equipment, or something, but even something like that ignores the fact that a state like North Korea doesn't have the means to invade the United States even if it wanted to.

Logistics are important--an army without supply can't fight, and neither can it fight if you can't move it to where the war is. In the modern world of satellite surveillance and a dominant American military, the preparations to transport an army capable of putting a dent in the United States couldn't be overlooked. I suppose you could posit a world where things had changed, where the United States was isolated and unable or unwilling to respond until it was too late... except that world would not closely resemble our own. This is the sort of thing they did in the strategy game Red Alert 2, in which the United States remained quiescent as even Mexico joined the camp of its opponents... and even then, Red Alert 2 was a cornball strategy game with military dolphins and battle squid and combat zeppelins and psionic mind control and time machines built by Albert Einstein.

Because in this day and age, that's what it takes to invade the United States.

Works like Red Dawn are indeed telling; they illuminate aspects of the American psyche that aren't generally spoken about. They reveal America's fears. In Red Dawn, you don't see a country that spends five times more on its military than its closest competitor, and whose military budget is more than the rest of the top 15 countries put together. You see an idea of the United States of how it sees itself--a newcomer to the international stage, still convinced that everyone's gunning for it and trying to knock it off its perch. Maybe that's so. Still, attitudes like this reinforce uncomfortable memes. Spending $700 billion a year on defense isn't sustainable, not with the condition the US economy is in, but movies like this help to reinforce the notion that there are always enemies out there, and that the United States has to be armed to the teeth to keep them at bay.

The Price of Private Beer in BC

I never have to look very hard to find someone singing the praises of privatization. Taking something that's run by the government and turning it over to a private, for-profit business will, they say, result in more variety, lower prices, and an overall better experience for the customer, because when you're in it to make money you can't cut corners and have the government always propping you up. It'll be expressed differently from person to person, but generally, that's what the most common arguments of its proponents tend to boil down to--that it's usually in everyone's advantage for something to be privatized.

I've never put much faith in arguments like that, because they never quite seem to accord with reality. In my experience, privatization instead tends to see prices go up and service quality decline, especially when you're dealing with an effectively captive market like healthcare and electricity supply, because "inexpensive products" and "high-quality service" are often treated as barriers to the true goal of every for-profit company, namely "make as much money as possible." Look at the ongoing healthcare crisis in the United States, for example, to see what happens when the profit motive takes over a social necessity, and you run into issues like $10,000 yearly deductibles--making it easy to pay an private insurance company $750 a year in premiums, and still have to pay all your own medical expenses out-of-pocket--and people with certain conditions being unable to get their own coverage because they would cost the company too much, even if they're willing and able to pay.

Today, though, I'm not interested in health insurance; rather, something that requires plenty of people to have health insurance if they use it enough--beer. Beer and liquor are hard to define, in some respects; nowadays, while a lot of people might call them luxuries, when it comes to society as a whole they're effectively necessities. Civilizations have been lubricated by alcohol for thousands of years, way back to the days when beer was the only reliable way to get water that wouldn't sicken or kill you. North America's historical love-hate relationship with alcohol has left a patchwork of differing supply mechanisms from coast to coast. Some are public, some are private, and together they provide the possibility for interesting data points on whether privatization is good.

In British Columbia this is a major issue, though it seems to have been slipping beneath notice as of late--the besieged Liberal government has been taking fire for its recent moves to sell its liquor distribution system to the privately-owned company Exel Logistics, ostensibly out of a desire to balance the budget--because after all, why have a consistent inflow of cash when you could have one quick payday that won't come again and will leave future paydays even poorer? There's a lot of sketchy business in the background of this deal, and I for one have no doubt that the BC Liberals are getting ready to burn down the house before they're annihilated in next year's elections.

But I was curious--particularly in regard to claims I've heard from the government as well as privatization proponents that it would mean cheaper prices for British Columbians. Does that really stand up? I decided to go find out.

It's always good to be able to illustrate an abstract concept.

One thing I had to get used to upon moving here was that beer and liquor sales are not a government monopoly, as they are in Ontario through the LCBO. While we do have the BCL, the LCBO's government-run counterpart, there are also a wide variety of private liquor stores, many of them attached to bars. In downtown New Westminster, while there's only one BCL outlet--and it's practically as far west as you can go while still being in downtown New West--there are three private sellers on Columbia Street and another one in River Market, and those are only the ones I know about. This variety gave me the chance to do some direct price comparison: both within BC and without, because ever since I arrived it's seemed like beer is rather more expensive out here than it is in Ontario.

Recently I stopped in at one of my local private sellers and noted down the prices of some of their wares, craft brews and national brands. I then ran them against the BCL and LCBO websites. Here's what I found.

Product	BC Private Store Price	BCL Price	LCBO Price
Hopworks IPA	$8.00	Not available	Not available
Innis & Gunn Canadian Cask	$6.35	$4.99*	$4.95*
Driftwood Ale	$7.30	$5.00	Not available
Twilight Summer Ale (6-pack)	$19.95	$15.99	Not available
La Fin du Monde	$8.30	$6.50	$4.95
Sleeman Cream Ale (6-pack)	$15.15	$11.99	$10.95
Big Surf Laid Back Lager (6-pack)	$10.35	$7.79	Not available
Cariboo Honey Lager (6-pack)	$9.95	$7.99	Not available
Molson Canadian (6-pack)	$14.95	$11.69	$11.50
Chimay Blue Cap	$5.05	$3.99	$2.80**
Hobgoblin Ale	$4.45	$3.50	$3.45

*prices are based on listing for Innis & Gun Canada Day 2012 on BCL and LCBO websites
**price is based on Chimay White Cap, the only variety sold by the LCBO
All prices listed are before tax.

Admittedly, it's only one data point--but it's a data point that matches up with the general sense I've gathered over two years of buying beer in this province. I'm sure there are others. Although LCBO prices trend slightly lower than the BCL's, that may be chalked up to vagaries like differing tax rates. When it comes to the private store, though, everything is more expensive than it is at the BCL--maybe only a dollar or two more, but that sort of thing adds up over time.

Sure, there's the convenience factor as well--but it's convenient the way a convenience store is more convenient than a supermarket. It may be right there, but it doesn't necessarily have everything you need. While there are private stores in Metro Vancouver with a widely varied selection, carrying beers I can't find anywhere else--Firefly near Broadway and Cambie in Vancouver, and the Central City Liquor Store on the other side of the SkyBridge, are the two big ones I know of--most private sellers I've visited are small and with very limited selections, particularly when it comes to single bottles or cans.

Privatization of the existing liquor distribution system wouldn't only mean that that state of affairs would become the norm--prices would go up even further from what the private stores charge now, because Exel Logistics wants to extract as much money as possible from the drinkers of British Columbia.

Don't believe the story that the folks in Victoria are trying to sell you--it's all foam, no substance. Take a closer look for yourself, and ask yourself who really benefits when the profit motive is brought in.

Over the Waves and Far Away

Everyone has their own way of dealing with criticism. Some ignore it, some invite it, and some pay attention to what their critics say to improve themselves for the next time. Then there are the people who've let a modicum of power go to their heads, people who think that because they're in charge they therefore define reality. People like, say, Keith Ashfield, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and the minister responsible for the Canadian Coast Guard.

You may recall that among the multifarious provisions of the recent Conservative omnibus budget bill was the closure of CCGS Kitsilano, a Coast Guard base at the foot of the Burrard Bridge and adjacent to the heavily-used waters of False Creek and English Bay. Responsibility for ensuring the safety of Vancouver's waterways would therefore devolve to CCGS Sea Island, a hovercraft base adjacent to Vancouver International Airport. Time and again, when the issue came up in the media, this was the talking point that the government rallied around - that since there were two Coast Guard stations reasonably close to each other, one of them was therefore superfluous.

Following on from that, Minister Keith recently announced a funding boost of $100,000 to the Royal Marine Search and Rescue Auxiliary - an organization that I wasn't able to find anything out about, as the only hits for it on Google are for news articles talking about this funding boost. So what is the RMSRA? I have no idea, but Minister Keith obviously thinks that a thousand C-bills are enough to let it step into the spot the Coast Guard is vacating.

Minister Keith likewise has a message for his critics, here - namely, that claiming the impending closure of CCGS Kitsilano will put lives at risk is instead "propagating false information." I wish I could be that confident, that certain at times. It makes me wonder how Keith puts his pants on in the morning on account of the massive, hairy, swinging cojones he must have to make a statement like that with a straight face.

How long will it take them to get here, again?

Let's take a look at the numbers. Under the Conservatives' plan, the hovercraft of CCGS Sea Island will be the primary search-and-rescue vehicles for the entire Lower Mainland; in addition to their current area of responsibility in the Strait of Georgia and Fraser delta, they'll now also have to deal with people in distress on the waters in Burrard Inlet, False Creek, and English Bay. The Vancouver Sun reports that according to Minister Keith, "the closure of the station in no way endangers people using Vancouver-area waters" - but is that really the case?

The fact is this: the two stations are about eleven kilometers apart as the crow flies, but that's not much of a help, since those hovercraft are not exactly built to go roaring up Granville Street. By water, the rough distance is more like twenty-five kilometers, with potential straight-line paths complicated slightly by the breakwaters that keep Richmond from drowning. The two hovercraft stationed at Sea Island, CCGH Siyay and CCGH Penac, are faster than almost anything else on the water with maximum speeds of eighty-nine and eighty-three kilometers per hour.

At pedal-to-the-metal maximum speed, Siyay would need about seventeen minutes to cover the distance from CCGS Sea Island to CCGS Kitsilano; Penac would be only slightly slower, at eighteen minutes. In both cases, in case of trouble that's almost twenty minutes before any search and rescue activities can even begin, and since I doubt it's feasible for a hovercraft to be burning at maximum speed for the entirety of its run, it could well be even longer.

A lot can happen in twenty minutes, especially if what's already happened is serious enough that you've called the Coast Guard.

My own opinion on this is simple - it may not happen tomorrow, this year, or next year, but sooner or later someone will die on Vancouver's waters because, for whatever reason, the Coast Guard could not make it in time. On the water, seconds can count - and should that come to pass, it is this current government and Prime Minister Stephen Harper in particular who will bear responsibility for such death. We know, after all, where the buck stops in the Harper Government.

Serve the Private Profit Margin

You don't have to look hard on the internet these days to find someone going on about the prophetic nature of RoboCop. Maybe not when it comes to cybernetic police officers - not yet, anyway - but in terms of the ongoing decay of Detroit, Michigan and the growth of corporations seeking to take over parts of the public sphere for pure profit, sometimes it seems that every day brings us closer to a world of corrupt corporate executives and robots unable to climb stairs and privatized police forces.

You might expect that to all be happening in the United States; in that, you'd be wrong. Instead, the spectre of a police force that is accountable not to a government and citizens but to a board of directors and shareholders is emerging in the United Kingdom, where the local head of G4S - a private security company, probably the world's largest employer you've never heard of, and the official security provider for the upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics - has gone on record with his prediction that by 2017, much of what British police services do today will then be done by private agencies.

It's already begun, of course, with the United Kingdom battered by recession; earlier this year, the Surrey Police and West Midlands Police entertained bids for a seven-year, £1.5 billion privatization scheme. While supporters are mainly drawing attention to "middle and back office functions" that would be given over to private companies, a contract note made public by the Guardian indicated that some of the fields up for privatization included beat patrols, management of high-risk individuals, the investigation of crimes, suspect detention, case development... you know, the sort of things that are at the core of police work. Though the plans have been put on hold, and were unpopular with citizens and police officers alike, I can't help but think this is a juggernaut that's going to keep on rolling. The first stabs have been taken, there's blood in the water, and the corporate sharks are circling.

This badge was worn by my grandfather, Les Parkinson, in the Manchester City Police from 1939 to 1968. This news would probably make him turn in his grave if he hadn't been cremated.

They're already working to shape the discussion in their favor. David Taylor-Smith, G4S's head of UK operations, tried to cast aspersions on opponents of privatization, saying that "the thought that everyone in the private sector is primarily motivated by profit and that is why they come to work is just simply not accurate... they are primarily motivated by pretty much the same as would motivate someone in the public sector."

I don't think anyone's questioning the motives of the actual people on the line there, chief. Generally speaking, someone who works a job will want to do well at that job, if for no other reason than they'll be fired if they don't. This is not about the employees - this is about the bosses. Bosses that will cease to have even a theoretical responsibility to the actual citizens, because keep in mind that G4S is publicly traded on the stock exchanges in London and Oslo, and it is the duty of such companies under capitalism to make as much profit as they possibly can. In some circumstances this sort of setup is all right, but when these companies are providing necessary services - services like policing and criminal justice - "service" and "profit" are incompatible. One of them's gotta give, and I'm pretty sure which one it'd be.

It's ridiculous, that's what it is. Policing is one of the core responsibilities of a state. If things have got to the point where you think you can't afford it, where you're seriously considering farming out not just back-office stuff, but actual boots-on-the-ground, to entities that exist solely to make money, then that's it. You're done. You have failed as a state. Well done, dudes.

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie saw all this coming, of course.

Polygon, Oregon, Tax-e-gon

In the few days that have passed since I landed in Portland, I've found many familiar things: hipsters, the rain, urban greenery, the rain, the liberal proclivities of its people, the rain, the equally liberal flouting of posted transit arrival times, and of course the rain. What wasn't familiar was the tax - or, rather, the lack thereof. Oregon is one of the five American states that has no sales tax, and since there appear to be no federally-levied sales taxes like the GST in the United States, this results in the strange situation of posted prices being exactly what you pay.

I wasn't expecting to find this; I mean, everything is cheaper in the United States thanks to that national border no longer being a barrier, It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that something that cost $3.99 would not actually total out to four dollars and change. For me, this is excellent; not only do I have the opportunity to load up on things that just aren't available in British Columbia, like Wasatch Polygamy Porter (tag line: "why have just one"), I can do it with the least strain on my bank account. It's a good thing Washington State levies its own sales taxes, or they'd be backed up at the Peace Arch for hours with all the Vancouver shoppers streaming down south. I understand that this happens a lot in Vancouver, Washington, for example - you know, the other Vancouver - which sits across the Columbia River from Oregon.

At least, it's excellent as long as I don't think about it. I'm not just restricting my purchases here because I'll have to lug it all to Seattle, but because I honestly have to ask myself whether it's moral to do so. Yes, ladeez and germs, now you've seen it all - someone questioning whether the absence of taxation is immoral. I'm here all week, folks! Seriously, though - I think it's something that at least bears considering, especially given the degree to which state budgets have suffered in the five years since the economy cratered. Simply put, where is Oregon getting its money?

This is just one of the many, many, many "For Lease" or "For Sale" or "For Rent" signs I've seen around downtown Portland.

The "no sales tax" jurisdictions I'm more familiar with, like Alberta and Alaska, get away with it because they have an embarrassment of riches and make way more money then they need to run things without going to the people; hell, the Alaska government gives everyone thousands of dollars a year from its oil revenues. While Oregon may grow a hell of a lot of hops, unless there's some kind of crop plague that devastates hop production outside the Willamette Valley, Oregon's not going to be able to boast that kind of resource-based revenue - maybe not even then. I'm told that Oregon manages to get away with it because its tax burden falls even harder in other areas; not being an Oregon taxpayer, however, I'm at a loss as to what those areas are.

I know there are those who think sales taxes should be done away with, that it's a tax that falls disproportionately on the poor because while the more affluent can juggle and dance and slip through as many loopholes as they can, you can't really get out of paying sales tax. My answer to that is rebates, as they're done in Canada - when you file your taxes, depending on your income you get a few checks back from the government to even things out. Beyond that, it starts to go beyond sales taxes toward "you have serious systemic problems that you need to deal with first."

Still, though, why's it important? Because society doesn't pay for itself, at least not the sort of society that most of us (dare I say, almost all of us) would want to live in. I read in this week's Willamette Week that TriMet, the public transit operator for metropolitan Portland, is hemorrhaging money - partially due to retirement benefits coming due, among other liabilities, but again I can't help but wonder the benefit that an unused revenue stream would have when used to finance things that help society as a whole. Yet - I'll freely admit that I've waded into a completely unfamiliar situation here, and that I'm no doubt missing any of things. Oregonians, feel free to enlighten me.

Perhaps something could be done about all the rain. Like a giant dome over Portland, maybe.

The Business of the Five Rings

There's no denying it - the Olympics are big business. Every two years, billions of dollars change hands over that international spectacle of sport, from logos that resemble Lisa Simpson giving head to sponsorship agreements that cover entire cities; just ignore the fact that much of the money comes from the tax coffers of already strained governments, governments that hardly seem to hesitate at the prospect of building mountains of money when day-to-day services go unfunded. Don't think about that - look over there! Haven't you heard that the world is going to be watching?

I can remember, back in 2000, my irritation at the fact that Beijing won the 2008 Summer Olympic Games over Toronto, because dammit, I wanted the world to be watching - that, and perhaps it would have motivated the city government to start work on a desperately-needed transit expansion that is even more desperately needed twelve years later. Nevertheless, in retrospect I'm pretty sure that the IOC did T.O. a favor - even though people can get pretty worked up about the supposed "prestige" of their city hosting the Olympics. Here, let me repost this video I shot in Daley Plaza in 2009 when Chicago was defeated in its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.


For the past little while news of London's preparations for the 2012 Games have been filtering onto the internet, news like dedicated VIP lanes for Olympic officials or the widening of London's panopticon with face- and plate-recognizing CCTVs or a 5,000-volt electric fence separating the Olympic zone from the rest of London. It's practically an extended commercial for the high-tech security industry. For me, though, it was the news of the SAMs that did it. That's surface-to-air missiles, for the shooting-down of enemy - in this case, read "terrorist" - aircraft, and in order to ensure the security of the Games, surface-to-air missile batteries are being installed on top of apartment complexes surrounding the Olympics site.

Protecting the Olympics is, of course, not a new thing. I'm told the Canadian Forces had units around Vancouver in case someone tried to attack the Games back in 2010, and in London the centerpiece of the defensive efforts is going to take the form of an aircraft carrier positioned in the River Thames. It's just that for me at least, the whole "install missile batteries on top of residential buildings" factor pushed it into farce for me. Well, maybe not farce. It forces me to the conclusion, though, that there's something dreadfully wrong with how we conduct the Olympics today.

It's not about the sports anymore, if indeed it ever was. The Olympics are all about advertising. Sponsors advertising their products for the people in the stands and the ones watching at home. Security companies advertising their solutions to keeping vast public events safe. Cities advertising that they are safe. The sports are just window dressing, the stuff that gets the people in the door so that the money can change hands.

Can we break this cycle? Right now, it seems, there are a great deal of people who have a vested interest in the Olympics, and no shortage of cities falling over each other to beggar themselves by hosting a Games. What sort of solutions are there? A specially-designated Olympic Island, say, to which the games return time after time? A circuit of predetermined cities across the continents that pass off Games from one to the other? I don't know. It is, after all, big business - and big business doesn't change until it has to.

The Trouble With TransCanada

Think of it as the circulatory system of the Alberta tar sands. The Keystone Pipeline System, which presently connects the petroleum town of Hardisty, Alberta with refineries in Illinois, is one of the main ways by which all that synthetic crude oil is shipped out of Snow Texas. It's been in the news recently thanks to dickering over the Keystone XL. This extension of the pipeline, in the works for the last few years, would run south to the United States Gulf Coast, where the oil could be refined and loaded directly onto tankers - much like how the Canadian government wants to ram the Northern Gateway Pipeline through the British Columbia upcountry, to be loaded onto tankers in Kitimat for shipment to China. The difference between the two is that since Keystone XL passes through the United States, it's the United States government that decides whether or not to let it pass.

After what seemed like an eternity of back and forth, with people in town halls speaking out for it or against it, environmentalists trying to raise the word against and the oil industry attempting to stack the debate in its favor with things like the "ethical oil" claim, the State Department yesterday denied TransCanada the necessary Presidential Permit to build the Keystone XL. Among its opponents, cheers and celebration all around.

TransCanada, of course, was ready for this contingency, and didn't waste much time in shooting back - though in this case "shooting back" takes the form doing pretty much the same thing they already did, since they're just re-applying for the permit. What really got me about this is the memetic angle they're using in their pursuit of the Keystone - though, to be honest, it's not really surprising in light of the "ethical oil" angle. In fact, according to them the Keystone XL is the democratic choice, because otherwise American oil will come from "countries who do not share democratic values Canadians and Americans are privileged to have."

TransCanada CEO Russ Girling put it bluntly, saying that "the U.S. will continue to import millions of barrels of conflict oil from the Middle East and Venezuela" without the pipeline - wait, WHAT? Did he seriously just utter the words "conflict oil" with what was presumably a straight face? I know exactly what he's trying to do here, draw a line connecting oil from the Mideast and Venezuela - in other words, current American rivals - with the conflict diamonds of Africa, mined in war zones and sold to finance wars or revolutions or insurgencies.

I found the sheer cheek in that statement to be despicable - how dare he? Sure, Saudi Arabia isn't exactly a hotbed of democracy and Hugo Chavez has spent the last thirteen years steering Venezuela onto a course that doesn't simply parallel the United States. Neither country is currently involved in a war or experiencing an armed insurrection. They just aren't assured providers, the way Canada is. Venezuela and Saudi Arabia can always take their balls and go home. Canada, thanks to the decisions of the last twenty-five years, lacks that option. Canada is trapped in an American orbit with insufficient delta-v to achieve escape velocity.

I wouldn't be as irritated about this, I suspect, if it wasn't so transparent on TransCanada's part. A society-wide push for "ethical products" would, if done correctly, do a lot of good for worker's conditions and the health of the North American economy; I mean, is it even possible anymore to buy something that wasn't made in some Pearl River Delta factory sweatshop, the sort of place where workers are threatening suicide over the conditions? For some things, like consumer electronics, it pretty much is impossible. Focusing just on "ethical oil" is a particularly narrow view, where "ethical" does not mean "the right thing to do" so much as it means "the right thing to do for those with an economic stake in the tar sands." The way I see it, an honest appraisal of ethical oil would include strong actions to minimize the use of it and switch over to other sources of fuel, because isn't it ethical to minimize the environmental impact we're going to leave our successors? Isn't it ethical to ensure that future generations have access to the same resource we did, so that they can get good things out of it as well?

Unfortunately, that kind of thinking is vastly out of step with the modern world, "ethics" and all.

Popping the Hood, Checking the Bucks

Vancouver transit riders have been able to breathe easy for a while when it comes to fare hikes - after all, there haven't been any since 2010. It's a much preferable situation to the one which prevails in Toronto, where fares have gone up twice in the last two years, most recently from $3 to $3.10, because fare increases aren't irritating enough on their own without throwing dimes into the mix. Still, even though the fares have held pat, the costs of living and operating haven't, and so earlier this week TransLink applied to raise transit fares in Metro Vancouver in 2013, subject to approval. If approved, a one-zone fare will go from $2.50 to $2.75, while two- and three-zones would be increased to $4.25 and $5.50, respectively.

2013 is a ways away yet, but there's already grumbling in the comment threads. I noticed one person for whom this increase was the last straw, that thanks to TransLink they'd be putting their car back on the road and nuts to them. It's not an unexpected result. One thing Toronto papers repeat time and again as TTC fare increases loom is that each increase will drive a certain percentage of riders back to their cars. Fair enough; everyone has their breaking point, and some people only merely tolerate transit. I know that my view of it certainly isn't universal. Encountering comments like that, though, of people fulminating against a few more quarters every day, made me wonder about the economics of getting around with four wheels instead of on the train - whether a car would make economic sense for me, so that I can have a better understanding of the people who do use them.

For this hypothetical, my assumption is that one day I wake up and have decided to reinvent my life. The first priority is, of course, to buy a car since I currently have none. For this I consulted Craigslist, and found someone selling a 1997 Honda Accord for $2,700 - it's within what I would imagine to be my price range, so I'm using it here. For the purposes of figuring out the cost, I'll assume that it's bought outright.

One advantage of purely hypothetical car purchases off Craigslist is that you don't have to worry about ornery sellers or unwelcome surprises under the hood.

According to the US Department of Energy's Fuel Economy website, the '97 Accord gets 22 miles per gallon, which works out to 9.35 kilometers per liter. Not the greatest mileage, but not the worst either. From my apartment in New Westminster, it's about twenty kilometers to my workplace in downtown Vancouver by Google Maps - which interestingly enough quotes a travel time of thirty-three minutes, actually slightly longer than my SkyTrain commute; must be all that traffic on the Kingsway. Thus, my travels to each work shift would consume 4.27 liters of gasoline, which resolves to 21.35 liters per week and 85.4 liters per month. The '97 Accord has a 64.45 liter tank, so with that consumption pattern I would need to refuel once in the first month.

When I entered the job market back in 2000 I started out as a gas monkey, pumping fuel at a full service station along Highway 400 in south Barrie. Prices then, even for the premium fuel, were far lower than they are today, which may be another one of the reasons why so many people of my generation are re-evaluating the value of car ownership. According to VancouverGasPrices.com today's average gasoline price is $1.29/liter trending upwards. At this price, my fuel cost to get to and from work per day would be $5.50 - the cost of a one-way three-zone ticket in 2013 if TransLink's request goes through. This resolves to a monthly cost of $110.16, which is effectively equal to my $110 two-zone FareCard.

Looking at those numbers, some people might say that the car makes economic sense - I wouldn't have to cram myself into a train packed full of Canucks fans heading back to Surrey, for example - but that would be disingenuous. Fuel isn't the whole story here, no matter how much some people are tempted to read it as that. My car would have to exist somewhere while I was at work, after all - so I consulted three EasyPark lots in the downtown core. The cheapest, Lot 3 at 535 Richards, would cost me $15 per day with my shift, and the one under the Pacific Centre would be most expensive at $29 per day. Going with the least expensive option of these takes my effective daily transit cost to $20.50 - at that rate, I'd spend the cost of my FareCard in six days. Plus, at home there's costs to consider - my building charges $10/month, I believe, for the use of one of its spaces.

Then there's insurance. I can't put down an honest dollar figure here, as I have never held my own car insurance policy. I'll just have to leave that as a significant but undefined number. The same with maintenance - a fifteen-year-old car could just as easily purr like a kitten or need a $2000 cough suppressant.

With those numbers, then, my transit cost to work comes to $410/month - a significant portion of my pay; it would in fact work out to be my second-largest monthly expenditure after rent, though since the charges would come in ones and twos scattered throughout rather than in one lump sum, it would probably be easier to look past. Yet that's not the whole story, either. For the purposes of this hypothetical I replaced my commute only, trading my regular SkyTrain use for car use. I regularly use the SkyTrain and bus system on weekends or vacation days to get places around Metro Vancouver; I imagine it would be the same if I had a car, and that would just send the dollar amount ticking upward again.

So, for me at least, would a car make economic sense? It appears that the numbers reflect the conclusion I've held for along time, which is hell no!

Put the Used to Good Use

I was browsing around for a copy of Ace Combat 6 the other day when some guy breezed into the store and asked if they had a Wii. They didn't, considering that Christmas was only a couple of days ago, and it's unlikely that more than a handful of stores in Metro Vancouver had any up for sale, whether new or used. I could hear him grousing about the kind of person that would give something used as a gift - and really, I think that's one of the twentieth-century problems we desperately need to address in the twenty-first.

The twentieth century, it seems, had a mania for newness. On the face of it, it's not too suprising; it was the first century where the manufacturing sector had developed enough that anyone who wanted anything could get it fresh from the assembly line. Used goods, in that context, are castoffs - things that someone else has used until they can't use them anymore, or have gone beyond the need for them. I can understand why some people might see it as more like scavenging, or even picking trash up off the ground. But that doesn't mean it's right. The "used economy" has an important place today, and in the years to come I think it may become even more so - after all, you don't need to invest energy or resources in creating something that already exists.

Besides that, there's one big advantage used has over new - many used things, depending on how long someone else has had their name to them, just aren't available in the stores any more no matter where you look. This is especially true when it comes to the vintage clothing market.

I mean, really - would I be able to get an authentic '70s shirt this hideous in a store today?

The way I see it, there's nothing wrong with used - it has its own functional, low-energy niche. It has character, too, and can act as a reminder that there's more than just what's in the stores - that there's more to life than the present day. Right now, on my coffee table, there's a coaster from the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle that I picked up for ten bucks at a store in New Westminster's Antique Alley, and it's just got that sort of historic character that would be extremely difficult to find in a "new" store.

Plus, the thing is fifty years old and still in good shape - that speaks to how well it was made, even as a promotional item. Do you think the modern crap that gets shovelled out of Chinese factories today will last fifty years? A lot of it won't last five years - hell, some of it doesn't last five days without breaking or exposing some manufacturing fault.

Generally speaking, you don't find wrecked or broken things in a used market - you find things that people just don't have a use for anymore. There's plenty of utility left in them.

Beware of Greeks Gifting Bears

Just when I was beginning to hold out hope that the worst was behind us, that things might finally be on the road to recovery, that my appearing-eventually-in-On Spec story wouldn't be horribly dated by the time it comes out because it supposes the continued existence of the euro and the European Union in the late 21st century, this happens. This, in this case, is Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou's snap referendum call - you remember that agreement the Greek government hashed out with the other eurozone leaders a few days ago to keep old Hellas from collapsing into austerity and default and so on? Unless something changes, the birthplace of democracy will decide its future democratically, with the Greek people voting on whether or not they will remain in the eurozone and thereby accept the heavily austere conditions attached to the next EU rescue package... but without it, Greece will literally not have the money to pay its bills in the next few months.

What a way to start off November.

The changing of the guard in Syntagma Square, Athens - March 2000, before there was such a physical thing as a euro and before everything went pear-shaped.

Referenda aren't all that uncommon, granted, but for a situation such as this - they're extraordinary. Generally, in my experience, referenda surround relatively simple questions; the Quebec independence referendum, for a sufficiently broad definition of "simple" when you consider how the question was worded, or British Columbia's keep-the-HST referendum, which went down in flames because people thought it would be a fun time to punish the government without regard to the consequences. It's that, in particular, that concerns me about the idea of the referendum. Public opinion is prone to emotionalism, and all too often public opinion doesn't care about consequences.

This referendum plan the single most monumental example of governmental ass-covering I can think of. From the Prime Minister's perspective, it must be gravy; if the people vote in favor of the austerity - just like how British Columbians voted in a landslide to keep the HST, har har - then the government can abdicate all responsibility for creating this situation to begin with and just dump it in the people's collective lap. If it doesn't, well... to be honest, I'm not entirely certain what would happen then. I don't imagine Athens would ignore the will of the people after going out of its way to ask them, but despite the loathsome nature of the austerity demands themselves - such as the whole "sell your continually profitable assets to pay your creditors now and, incidentally, enrich some banks and corporations" thing - I've never seen any alternatives to this austerity offered in the media.

If it was just Greece, it wouldn't be an earthshaking problem. But it isn't just Greece; this is the reason why globalization was not all that good of an idea. What Greece does will echo across Earth, and do you really think that the rest of the world is just going to stand by while the Greek government aims its torpedoes at recovery because it doesn't want to own up to how much it and its predecessors fucked up? Governments have been forcibly toppled for less.

Of course, there's no assurances things will go even that far. PM Papandreou's government is holding on to power with a razor-thin majority, one that has been steadily weakened by a constant stream of defections. I'm writing this on Wednesday, so by the time it goes live on Thursday morning the situation may well have changed dramatically. That's how these things happen.

There are times when the threat of democracy can make things move... and there are times when the duty of a government is to take responsibility for its own actions. On the latter, Greece is failing rather stupendously.

The United States of Flat-Tax-Land

We've got barely more than a year until the keys to the White House are up for grabs again, and in my following of the news a peculiar meme has once again emerged among the vying Republican candidates. Not only emerged, but held aloft - the flat tax. I remember it primarily from the presidential campaigns of Steve Forbes, who kicked around the idea in 1996 and 2000 before being crushed into fine powder. Today its main standard bearers are Herman Cain, who first brought it to the table in a big way through his 9-9-9 plan, and Rick Perry, who seems to have a greater affinity for the number 20.

The flat tax represents a stark departure from the income tax codes in place throughout the Western world, commonly seen as byzantine mazes that are impossible for any one person to understand and which were purposefully designed to confuse people into paying as many taxes as possible. Personally, I use computer assistance programs to prepare my taxes, so I'm not too sure about that. By contrast, proponents of flat taxes like to say it would be simple enough "to fit on a postcard." So this weblog has more than enough room! Under a flat tax, filers pay one specific, particular rate - Rick Perry's optional flat tax, which is a weird as hell way to try going about implementing one, would be a firm 20%. That is, aside from a few specific, enumerated deductions, you pay 20% of your income in taxes and that is that, no matter how much you make. That's it at its core.

Today more than twenty countries around the world have flat taxes in place, though disproportionaly focused around the Eastern Bloc and concentrated in the former Soviet Union, with Russia leading more than half of the ex-Soviet states in the establishment of flat tax systems. Whether these taxes are responsible for economic growth is a difficult thing - after all, correlation doesn't equal causation, and a lot of the flat tax countries are only twenty years removed from communism. It's too bad there's no real laboratory for economic science.

Flat tax supporters make a lot of noise about how fair it is. But, the more I think about it, the more it becomes obvious that that's not really the case at all.

That tax wasn't flat, but the sign was pretty ragged.

If the concept of a flat tax is simple, let's run with it to the degree that my conception of the concept will allow. Take the example of... Examplevania, a small republic that has thrown out its old financial jargon and instituted a 20% flat tax code. For the purposes of this hypothetical, and to keep things simple - because, you know, simplicity is one of the reasons why everyone is so agog over the flat tax - Examplevania does not have any substantial deductions. Rick Perry's plan, by contrast, allows "$12,500 per person and mortgage interest, charitable donations, state and local taxes for those earning as much as $500,000 a year." Let us also assume, for the purposes of this hypothetical, that Examplevania has no sales taxes; presumably it's sitting on its own tar sands or something. Now let's look at five Examplevanians chosen purely for their annual income, from the high strata of society to the lowest.

Examplevanian #1 earns $304,000 per year. Taxes of 20% work out to $60,800.

Examplevanian #2 earns $152,000 per year. Taxes of 20% work out to $30,400.

Examplevanian #3 earns $76,000 per year. Taxes of 20% work out to $15,200.

Examplevanian #4 earns $38,000 per year, putting him or her squarely in the lower middle class or upper working class. Taxes of 20% work out to $7,600.

Finally, on the ground floor of this particular ladder, Examplevanian #5 earns $19,000 per year, most likely in some soul-crushing customer service job with a monolithic, uncaring company. Their taxes of 20% work out to $3,800 over the course of the year.

Now, on the face of it, you may be tempted to say that it's fair - isn't it? Everyone is paying the same percentage of their income, paying what they can toward the maintenance of the state and of civil society. This is where people can easily trip up; by focusing in on the rate of tax itself, rather than what's left after the taxman has gone off again.

So let's look back in on our Examplevanians. Once the return's in the envelope, Examplevanian #1 is out more than #4 and #5 combined make in a year, but is still left with $243,200. Examplevanian #2 has $121,600 for booze and exotic vacations, and Examplevanian #3 has $60,800 left over.

As for #4 and #5? #4 ends up with $30,400, and #5 is left with $15,200 to get them through the year.

The percentage is the same, but even the same percentage carries more weight on smaller numbers than it does larger. The difference between $200,000 and $300,000 of liquid capital boils down to differences in comfort - whether Examplevanians #1 and #2 will visit this or that gourmet restaurant, take this Caribbean cruise or that Alaskan one, and so on. It's a question of quality.

For Examplevanian #5, it's something quite different. Look again at that number, $15,200. For an entire year, that's it - and that works out to $1266.66 per month. I know cities where rent alone is more than that per month; hell, while I was pricing apartments in Toronto before moving out west, a $1000/month single-bedroom apartment was cheap - and living in rented basements will only scoop a couple of hundred dollars off the top of that. That doesn't even factor in food, transportation, or emergencies. What's more, this is only considering the Examplevanians as completely independent, responsible only for themselves - what happens when you bring family in? What happens when Examplevania's economy collapses, and Examplevanian #5's soul-crushing clerking job is the best they can find to support not only thesmelves, but others?

It's poverty any way you slice it, but what makes it worse is the idea that this is somehow more "fair." The more important thing, the thing to really consider, is how is this equal?

Now that the money's parcelled out, what happens? That depends a hell of a lot on the national character of Examplevania. If it's one that accepts a robust social safety net that includes good health coverage, unemployment assistance, inexpensive or free public transit, and other such programs - that recognizes the responsibility of citizens to contribute to the construction of an equal and harmonious society - Examplevanian #5 still isn't living the easy life, but at least is living easier. If it takes more after the "fuck you, got mine" ethos that appears to be dominant in the modern Republican Party, well... I suppose #5 could try to get a second job selling bootstraps.

The biggest problem we have to deal with today, I think, are the institutionalized, systemic inequalities that exist throughout the West in general and in the United States in particular. Chasing flat taxes isn't going to fix this; after all, many of the flat tax proponents have made it clear that it's just part of a goal to drastically draw down government spending as a whole. We need something better.

Prisms of the Occupation

The way you look at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, which started in New York City but have since spread to practically every major city across North America, is highly dependent on the political lens you bring to the show. Someone on the left side of the spectrum might look at it as a long-overdue action against the people who decimated the global economy and got away without punishment, as well as the governments that made that decimation possible, whereas someone on the right might see a bunch of communists or bongo-drumming protestors who need to wake up and realize it isn't the 1960s anymore. Those are, of course, lightly-sketched and pretty much stereotypical viewpoints - perspective varies from person to person, after all.

Nevertheless, I can't help but notice that sort of right-leaning view coming up again and again in media references or, more commonly, comment threads. A recent article in Gothamist quoted a post from a forum frequented by New York Police Department officers, which referred to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators as "trust-fund punks" and " trust fund bytches... [who] want to see us lose our jobs, our means for support to our families, they want to see our lives ruined..." It goes without saying that this "us vs. them" siege mentality is incredibly toxic - but that's not what I'm focused on. No, it's more the taken-for-granted assumption that OWS is shot through with rich mommy's boys and daddy's girls who Just Don't Know The Way Things Are, that they're disconnected from the Real People and are just doing this for fun.

I can admit that, for many people, it must be easy to scoff at them, to dismiss them as a lunatic fringe, to go on how they'd be better off putting all that energy into looking for a job. That might have been easier had not Wall Street wrecked the economy, created the steepest recession in eighty years, and put tens of millions of people out of work.

I was originally going to go with Toronto G20 graffiti that said "FUCK NEO-CONS," but I like the sentiment behind this sidewalk chalk on St. Clair West more.

Here's what I think - when some people dismiss the demonstrators with recourse to ideas such as that, they're doing it out of subconscious fear. After all, this isn't the way things were supposed to go. The whole basis of society was that you put your nose to the grindstone, work hard, be honest, and you will be rewarded; maybe you won't be rich, but you'll at least be comfortable. That assumption fueled American and Canadian societies through the prosperous times of the twentieth century.

But now it's under attack. Now it's groaning and buckling. Now it's seeming like people can work hard and be honest and try their best and the only reward they get is a pink slip and an underwater mortgage, while the traders and the hedge fund managers and the CEOs who risked the house on subprime mortgages and collateralized debt obligations are still in their shining towers raking in the megabucks... but if you don't look for it, it's easy to just see the skyscrapers instead.

I think that's part of it - a subconscious fear of what it would mean to agree with the demonstrators. To agree with them, to see the validity in what they're standing for, is to admit that the system is out of joint. That there are real problems, and that we need to confront them, and act to change the situation. That sort of change, that sort of uncertainty, is terrifying for many people. Far better to dismiss them as hippies and bored rich kids, put your nose back to the grindstone, and not think of anything aside from what's in front of you.

Not saying that everyone thinks that way, of course. But I wouldn't be surprised if such a thing was a significant part of it.

They Have A Strange Definition of "Internal"

It's times like these that make me glad that my family hasn't had anything to do with the United States since my ancestors left/were kicked out of (the history is not crystal clear) New York state after the Revolution. Over the past few months, news has been bubbling up in the broadsheets here regarding a tightening of loopholes in US tax law and the hardening of requirements for American citizens living abroad to file their taxes. August 31st marked the deadline for Americans in Canada to send their returns to the IRS.

That's right; if you're the holder of an American passport, you're legally obligated to file a tax return with the Internal Revenue Service every year, regardless of whether or not you live or work or make any money whatsoever in the United States. This stands in opposition to the tax practices of... well, every other country on Earth except Eritrea. If you're Canadian and living abroad, unless you have revenue coming in from Canadian sources, you have no obligation to pay income taxes.

This is a bit of a problem for the many, many dual citizens or expatriate Americans who are living in Canada - in 2006 there were over three hundred thousand American-Canadians reported, and estimates of American part-time residents and landed immigrants up here go as high as two million. For some of these "American-Canadians," American citizenship - which is acquired at birth if you're born in the United States or certain territories subject to its authority, or if your parents are citizens - is a legal quirk at best, something irrelevant to their daily lives.

There's more to citizenship than the legal aspects - citizenship is a state of mind. Is a "citizen" who carries another country's passport, has lived in that country for 99% or more of their life, and who has spent every working day in that country really a citizen in anything more than a legal term? Well, yes. That's why these legal issues crop up so often. That doesn't mean it's just, though. A recent opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times has something to say about that.

Now, some might say that this is their own fault - that American-Canadians like, say, Margaret Wente should have known that moving to Canada as a teenager and getting citizenship as a young adult doesn't nullify duties to the US. Some might say something like, "Ignorance is no excuse. It was their responsibility to know the laws that affected them and follow them. If they don't like it they can give up their American citizenship."

Yeah, about that...

Look at all these sweet, sweet United States dollars. The IRS wants these, oh yes they do. Good thing I have no obligation to them.

The process of renouncing United States citizenship is fairly simple, but the State Department website is specific that a citizen's renunciation "may have no effect whatsoever on his or her U.S. tax or military service obligations," so there are no guarantees that a renunciation would get the IRS off an ex-citizen's back. What makes that note even better is that it comes only two paragraphs after the explanation that anyone who renounces American citizenship can no longer enjoy any of the rights and privileges that come with that citizenship, "as this would be logically inconsistent with the concept of renunciation."

Yet the rabbit hole goes even deeper than that! In the right circumstances, you don't even have to be an American at all to have an obligation to the IRS. I pulled this straight from their website:

• A nonresident alien individual engaged or considered to be engaged in a trade or business in the United States during the year. You must file even if:
  
  • Your income did not come from a trade or business conducted in the United States,
    
  • You have no income from U.S. sources, or
    
  • Your income is exempt from income tax.

So even if you don't live in the United States, even if you're not a citizen of the United States, the IRS still reserves the authority to extract revenue from you despite your externality. Incredible, isn't it? This goes out the window if "U.S. source income is wages in an amount less than the personal exemption amount" - but in keeping with the byzantine nature of the IRS that I have absorbed osmotically through decades of exposure to American culture, I cannot actually determine what this amount is.

I understand the basic intent of the law - as well they should, the US government wants to stop wealthy Americans and corporations from hiding their income in tax havens and thus acting as financial parasites. But this is a long dragnet, and the people it's intended to catch will also have the most resources to escape it; it's people like everyday American-Canadians, the people it wasn't intended to catch, that will have to deal with the worst of it - all for a country they left behind. A lot of these people wouldn't even owe taxes to the IRS at all; the problem is more that they did not file tax returns.

To me, it's arrogance. People who do not live in a country, who do not personally profit from the services of that country, should not be responsible for paying the general costs of that country even if they're a citizen. I could understand if the US wanted to levy, say, a "consular tax" on their expatriate citizens, because such consular services are the only ones they would use; say, if they need to be evacuated from some kind of trouble spot. The only real niggle in this is the issue of expatriate voting - not something I'm going to address at the moment, though I recognize it is an issue. But responsibilities and privileges should go both ways.

A Tale of Two Taxes

What a difference a couple thousand miles of ocean can make.

Taxes have always been a delicate subject in the United States. If you're a rich person in the United States your taxes have been falling for a while, from a postwar high of 92% on the $250,001 bracket in 1952, the rates started falling precipitously under Reagan and Bush and now stand at 33%; not quite as low as the 1920s, but give them time. Now President Obama is preparing to announce a new "Buffett tax" tomorrow, and though only limited details have so far made their way to the wild, expectations are that it's going to be levied on those making more than a million dollars a year in order to help close the United States' staggering budget gap. Cuts and cuts and more cuts can only go so far without new revenue.

Predictably the Republicans, the party of all those "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," are already drawing their lines of battle against it. The first shot across the bow was the accusation that it's "class warfare" - because, really, asking those with extraordinary means to pay into the society that enabled them to realize those means is functionally identical to the proletariat laying siege to the gated communities of the bourgeoisie - followed up by claims from House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan that "it punishes job creation and those people who create jobs."

I can see it now, those wealthy job creators sitting in their offices, going over the numbers and coming to the sobering conclusion that they can't afford to install granite countertops in their vacation home in the Hamptons. Obviously there's only one rational response - create jobs in countries that don't "punish" job creation... just like they've been doing for decades. Obama's going to have a brutal fight on his hands to get a tax like this to his desk without it being so watered down you could wipe the ink off the bill with a sponge; but it seems that Republicans are committed to ensuring that the weight of taxes settle disproportionately on those who have the least resources.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg - junior partner in the ruling Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government - has been giving whatever assurances he can that the 50p tax rate - that is, a 50% tax rate on those bringing in more than £150,000, the wealthiest 300,000 out of the UK's twenty-nine million taxpayers. When it was introduced in 2010, it was expected to raise £2.4 billion in the first year; and with the Eurozone in peril, every quid matters. Though critics originally, and still, are concerned that the tax isn't effective - though we won't know one way or another until the spring, when the Treasury will release its results - Clegg has said that it wouldn't be "morally or economically right" to end the tax unless it's replaced by a different one that further reduces the weight of taxation on Britain's poorest.

So far as I know, nothing official has been heard thus far for what the Government will do if the 50p tax turns out to be a damp squib. Nevertheless, there's been speculation that it would be replaced by a 1% tax on homes valued in excess of £2 million, less tax relief on pensions, and so on. So, you know, alternatives.

This stands in stark contrast to the proposed solutions from the peanut gallery in Washington. Sometime I have to wonder if George Bush's "read my lips: no new taxes" was not a political statement but some kind of ritual ensorcellment that binds Republicans to that commitment unless the spell is broken.

In this case, the difference between the United Kingdom and the United States appears to be one of rationalism versus emotionalism. The senior partners in the present UK government are conservatives, but they're still willing to tax those who can afford it while working toward bettering the lot of society itself. In the United States, anyone who wants to raise taxes on the wealthy has to hack through a jungle of "fuck you, got mine," and society is left to fend for itself.