British Columbia: The BC Rail Scandal. Crime in High Places. Part Two: BC Rail in the pattern of Gordon Campbell government breach of trust.
Breach of trust is total; falsehood a trademark. Illegitimate secrecy is a consistent pattern. Collaboration of press and media is unbroken. The RCMP is incompetent or bought. The higher courts – incompetent or bought. Political opposition (the NDP) does almost nothing in the face of growing social breakdown … in fact … collaborates. The unions … are nowhere.
Why? Why?
The Gordon Campbell government’s active, open, naked breaches of trust can be itemized easily. Press and media failure can be traced daily. The B.C. throne speech is delivered, for instance. Next day (Aug 26 09 A1 A10) The Vancouver Sun trumpets budgetary panic, fiscal breakdown, and an empty public treasury. The Sun provides no honest analysis or reasons.
It leads with the cry of coming “public sector freezes and possible layoffs [and on] to significant reviews of health authorities, boards of education and Crown corporations”. No honest explanation.
The sun warmly greets “the welcome announcement of a freeze on public sector wages”, a “shorter leash” coming “for Crown corporations, school boards and health authorities and other independent agencies”. [“Independent agencies” like the B.C. Utilities Commission which just found the Campbell government, in fact, in ugly, manipulative, falsification of B.C. energy facts?]
The Globe and Mail, the next day, (Aug 27) editorializes in precisely the same way as The Vancouver Sun : collaboration in repressing key facts?
Why? Why do media, RCMP, the court, NDP (opposition) – even union hierarchy – cooperate with the planned, fraudulently produced destitution of British Columbians and the destruction of their reasonably fair and just social order?
Why, when the wealth is “in the ground”, the population well-educated, and a balanced structure assuring reasonable profit, reasonable return to public coffers, and the potential for increased manufacture in the province – why do the “managing” forces of the province all give themselves to the on-going destruction and falsehood?
Not without intention. Not without intention does the Gordon Campbell throne speech point to “a new economic framework”. New it may be for B.C., but it is a very old one in the hemisphere. It’s the framework of a Banana Republic – a framework purposefully constructed to strip the population of their shared wealth, to strip them of social protections, and to deliver all wealth making power into private hands…elsewhere. That program – so far – has all the people on board who should be in bitter opposition.
Why here? Why now?
The answer is at least partly global.
To the middle 1970s the post Second World War social “advances” provided moderate public security, real profit to corporations, and moderate public ownership in the "democratic” West. (Those social achievements are now propaganda-branded by the Right as “socialist theft”.)
The reactionary Right grew more confident, more greedy, more organized, more determined and more lawless - and it was let loose. At the same time the formerly “backward” huge nations (China, India) began to move, independently. South American countries (the U.S. “back yard”) began to wrest real independence for the first time in a hundred years, led by Cuba. The Middle East became permanently unstable. Iran threw off the U.S. yoke to become – the Iran of today.
Afghanistan – passed from a failing Russia to the U.S.A. – sitting on a major energy, geo-political, military cross-road – refuses to be re-colonized. The West, therefore, engages in permanent war in order “to educate young girls and free them from the Burkha in Afghanistan”.
Since a 1952 Senate Report at least, the U.S. has anchored many of its major raw material and energy needs in … Canada. Since 1952 Canada has fallen more and more into U.S. hands (NORAD, the re-write of NATO, Free Trade Agreements, Security “partnerships”, etc.) Apparent harmony with China only masks U.S. determination to secure its Western-controlled wealth and “partnerships” that assure its paramount power.
In Canada, however, “integration” with the U.S. wars daily with the need of the USA to maintain its global domination and wealth by impoverishing whole populations, using them to gather low-cost raw materials and using their countries as the source of cheap, off-shore manufactured goods. Making, in short, what we call Banana Republics.
Venezuela and Iran are major “demons” in U.S. policy. Both (whatever else) have slipped from U.S. control, repatriated oil ownership, and both have used much of the “new” wealth to provide health and security to formerly impoverished parts of their populations. The recent (U.S. involved) coup in Honduras will keep that country out of the South American free trade group and will guarantee that North American “slave economy” industries will continue to operate “in peace” there. Still very sharp, Fidel Castro just wrote, wittily, that Hiliary Clinton should get the Nobel Prize for appearing to disapprove of the illegal coup while making sure it succeeded.
Iraq is a time-bomb, ready to explode again. But its oil is being divided among Western powers through their “global” oil companies.
Pressure to maintain U.S. domination of land-connected suppliers grows. They provide special security. Overseas and South American oil is always at risk. Canada’s oil is, apparently, not. And Canadian (British Columbia’s) water-powered energy reserves are invaluable to the U.S.A., worth, as time passes, trillions of dollars.
Enter Gordon Campbell and his group intent upon destroying B.C. wealth by repeated actions of breach of trust, by handing all to “private” corporations – in fact, to U.S. “private” ownership and control. (How much is this a plan hatched on one of his many, many (Opposition-ignored) trips to New York?)
British Columbia had a golden guarantee of energy, and of transportation,. to be used for the maintenance of standards of living for the population while providing secure energy resources and fair transport costs to industrial activity in the province – far, far into the future.
B.C. Gas, B.C. Hydro, B.C. Rail assured hauling and passenger service cut to B.C. needs – at the same time contributing richly to ‘general revenues’ (for healthcare, housing, senior-care, police, courts, families, etc) “forever”.
B.C. Hydro assured careful water-driven power development into perpetuity – with the same social rewards amassing to the whole B.C. community.
B.C. Gas, seen, perhaps, as smaller but filling B.C. needs adequately served B.C. and now should be the prime controller/developer of the huge, newly discovered natural gas reserves being tabbed in Northern B.C. All, instead, are being flogged for peanuts to private corporations (that are owned by or supply the U.S.) by the Gordon Campbell group.
In a spate of misinformation and deception (and probably criminal breach of trust) the Gordon Campbell group has destroyed BC Rail. The only (visible) profit and advantage from the off-load has gone to (Texas head-quartered) CN Rail. (It is recently charged with telling employees not to call it “Canadian National” but “CN Rail”!)
The BC Rail Scandal drags through a myopic and delusionary B.C. Supreme Court in which is daily exposed the reality of Gordon Campbell government breach of trust employed to fake almost all aspects of the BC Rail “sale”.
Promising to preserve B.C. Hydro, Gordon Campbell – in dramatic actions of breach of trust – has split Hydro into three pieces, in effect privatizing two parts – placing all control of future energy development in U.S. hands. One part has been passed to Accenture (of Enron Disaster fame), the deal still wrapped in secret agreements kept from the “owners” of B.C. Hydro – the people of British Columbia.
The one-third piece of B.C. Hydro that, apparently, remains in the hands of British Columbians has been, in fact, destroyed by the Gordon Campbell forces. B.C. Hydro is forbidden (A) to generate another watt of electricity. It is forced (B) to buy from Campbell-created “private corporate” suppliers at prices it cannot break-even on when selling it to British Columbians!! It MUST, by legislation, lose money. It must, too, keep pushing up costs of energy to B.C. users, public and private.
That psychopathic torture-death is forced upon B.C. Hydro by Gordon Campbell. The whole mad-house structure is created to place all B.C. water-energy wealth in U.S. hands. The B.C. Utilities Commission has just caught the Gordon Campbell forces in fact lying about B.C. energy resources in a developing private corporate system clothed in secrecy. The major press yawns and says Campbell will have to discipline “independent” agencies.
B.C. Gas is less talked about. That is because it was earlier set apart from B.C. Hydro. Then B.C. Gas was permitted to be privately-owned and headquartered in the province. The Gordon Campbell group flushed it out of B.C. and into U.S. ownership.
As it originally existed, it had every ability to move into growing natural gas development for the good of the province and its population – and to provide richly to “general revenues” for government expenditures
The chief anchors of public wealth in British Columbia, efficiently operated and returning importantly to the province’s ‘general revenues’, have been purposefully and by gigantic breaches of public trust taken from the people of the province and handed, almost free, to (largely foreign) private ownership and control.
And while that happens the forests are tragically neglected (becoming fire-bombs) and “private enterprise” (privately-owned and therefore sacred) fish farms decimate natural fish stocks.
Editors of the Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail apparently refuse to report why B.C. is in budgetary panic, fiscal breakdown, and facing an empty public treasury. The Gordon Campbell group has stripped the province of wealth, given it to private corporations, freed them of serious tax burden, and is in the process of loading the province’s major tax load onto ordinary British Columbians.
At the same time, the Campbell group is pauperizing British Columbians and hammering them into a Banana Republic structure that will assure the destruction of present social insurances and levels of the security of persons.
But more….
All over the world reactionary, (disguised) totalitarian and anti-democratic argument is trumpetted from almost every gilt-edged, corporate-based, private capitalist platform in order to assure that the world’s wealth will reside in the hands of a very few who are, in fact, the faces of present Western imperial domination.
Police forces tend to be “obedient” to Rightest power – and want a share of it. So they support. The military supports. Look at the soldier-eating, innocent-victim eating machines called Iraq and Afghanistan. The courts which usually support repressive regimes…support them now. (Look closely at the B.C. Supreme and Appeal courts.) Press and media owners are not called “barons” for nothing. They support the lurch to anti-democratic structures – pretending they don’t understand. (The Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun actively, today, misrepresent the B.C. financial condition.)
The political opposition around the world is repressed, coerced, bribed, wooed, seduced, married. Wanting desperately to belong to the Top Dog Club, opposition forces join it as Associate Members or – like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown of England’s “New Labour”, they plunge into the “rape, kill, and loot” Club, rapturous to be accepted.
Gordon Campbell is, I think, too gross, too power and greed driven to fit into anything like a club of (however evil) sophisticated people. Cunning, devious – fully willing to live by outrageous breaches of trust – he seems to fit the characteristics of a nakedly grasping psychopath. For such a one – if that is his condition – nothing has meaning but lust and power, betrayal and domination.
The great pity for British Columbians is that Gordon Campbell finds all his satisfaction in flattering, fawning upon, and delivering British Columbia’s wealth to foreign, private interests – and in the sell-out and betrayal of his own people. That is the hallmark of leadership in a Banana Republic. His mania fits perfectly with U.S. imperial designs.
Did Gordon Campbell’s life as the child of an alcoholic father make him determined to wreak vengeance on all British Columbians forever? Whatever, the sickness of Gordon Campbell (and his highly cooperative friends) is rendering the Lotus Land of British Columbia into a diseased and destitute garden.
Only the strongest replacement government can hope to re-claim the losses. Or, perhaps, history will reveal once again that debased and determined evil can only be displaced by armed insurrection. Time alone will tell.
The BC Rail Scandal has been stripped of its propaganda and now stands as a major operation in betrayal and breach of trust. But it is only one part of a carefully planned program of breach of trust by the Gordon Campbell forces. When will British Columbians wake up? When they discover the huge breaches of trust they have been subjected to, what will they do?
Stumble It!