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As I watched a storm sweeping in over Toronto this evening, I couldn't help thinking about how Rob Ford is planning to turn the city I have come to love into a dirtier, uglier, place.
It turns out that municipal fat includes new affordable housing initiatives, subsidized child-care spaces, a hardship fund helping low-income people with crushing medical needs, Community Environment Days, current levels of street cleaning, current levels of snow plowing, and a Christmas Bureau that partners with donors (including the Star’s Santa Claus Fund) to distribute holiday gifts to poor children.
I couldn't help thinking how this crass, vulgar, millionaire is going after the most vulnerable.
Every resident is likely feel some impact, but the heaviest blow is poised to fall on those who depend on city services the most: children, the sick, the destitute, those in need of shelter, and the working poor.
In a city full of poor and homeless people...
And of course how he lied about EVERYTHING.
And then I couldn't help thinking about how easily he fooled the mouth breathing cretins of the so-called Ford Nation. Because if this city is turned into an urban jungle, they must be held accountable for voting for the porky teabagger.
How I wondered could anyone with an I.Q. higher than a house plant believe his ridiculous promises? But sadly the answer is obvious. They're ignorant. They're greedy. Like a lot of Canadians they want good services, but they don't want to pay for them.
So Ford, like all Cons, promised them what they wanted. Because Cons will say anything to get elected, he's so ignorant he doesn't know what he's doing. And they believed him because they're too dumb to know better.
And he played what they wanted to hear...
And now we're ALL screwed. MOOOOOOOOOO.
The administration has already signaled that Torontonians will also confront soaring user fees for 2012, and likely a significant tax hike. In other words, residents can expect to shell out more money to get a lot less service. That’s the price of Ford’s mismanagement. That’s the cost of believing in non-existent gravy.
Oh boy. That's enough to depress even me eh? And make me regret the dark day I decided to move to this city, the place my friends in Montreal called Hogtown.
But then something awesome happened.
The storm clouds suddenly cleared.
And the sky turned orange...
You know...the colour of hope. And Toronto never looked more beautiful, or more worth fighting for.
Yes, I know. I'm easily impressed eh? And in Canada it's still cool to be cynical. Or just bitter and hopeless. But this is what I thought as I pedalled off to the ferry dock to meet Sébastien.
Now is not the time to despair or give up. Now is the time to take to the streets by the thousands, let Ford know what we think of him, and do all we can to derail his reactionary agenda. First we'll take him on, and then we'll take on the Harper Cons. Because we need the practice, and enough is ENOUGH.
The depressed left can stop feeling sorry for itself and actually do something about it. The Moron Nation can go
We will take back Toronto.
And the Fordzilla will be STOPPED...
Good article. One word of criticism: your talk of stopping the "Cons" implies replacing them with somebody else. Who is this somebody else?
ReplyDeleteIt seems that this place would be filled with either the Liberals or the NDP, who may be less cynical but no better in spite their utopian idealism which leads them to think they can create a "capitalism with a human face". This may have been true in the days of post-war growth, but no more in the days of austerity and imperialism. Hoping the libs or ndp will solve the problem is deluded at best and counts as peddling mystification at worst. Being slave to the same logic of cost-cutting which is capitalism's recourse in times of crisis, the most our so-called left will do is introduce more slowly these attacks on our living standards. Now neither the libs nor the cons (or any parliamentary party for that matter) has the perspective to create the change we want to see or to even understand the nature of the problem, at the root of which is a system of social relations based on exploitation and expropriation of the many and ever-expanding accumulation of capital in the hands of the few.
We must recognize that it is us, the masses of exploited and marginalized who create the social wealth, who must make the change we want to see. We need to recognize that we live in a class society with irreconcilable social antagonisms between "the people" (the working class, the poor, the destitute) and the "enemies of the people" (Rob Ford and his parasitic breed of capitalists, bureaucrats, militarists, industrialists, slumlords, financiers and speculators) and take this insight to the end to its only logical conclusion: the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with the exploited and marginalized organized as the ruling class; in short the expropriation of the expropriators.