Critical Perspectives and Reflections

BILL LEE July 15, 2020 There is much concern being expressed, and ink being spilled, on the revelations of the former financial connections of Prime Minister Trudeau and the WE Charity. There are two issues that strike one in all this: first the nature of the WE charity and second the way this kerfuffle is, or should be, highlighting the issue of the connections between corporations and our governments. It has a name, Elite Accommodation. WE and We to Me: Charity and Business First the WE. The WE entity is, notwithstanding its status as an NGO and the fawning praise the Keilbergers, Craig and Mark, receive by the media, part of a capitalist enterprise. The WE charity is closely connected to, indeed intertwined with, the Me to We organization which is a business enterprise. The cosy relationship between the for-profit organization and the charity is one where money flows back and forth with tax breaks for Me to We, for giving money to WE and the buying of services by W...

BILL LEE  June 14, 2020 I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the language that is being used to describe the situation that has evolved between Canadians of Euro-Canadian ancestry and Indigenous people.1 One of the terms that bothers me is reconciliation which suggests we have begun to make up for the many past wrongs done to Indigenous people by our ancestors. I do not think we are nearly in that situation but have written on this in the past.2 The second term that I find problematic is "settler" and this will form the majority of the article to follow. I will end by suggesting that unless we face up to the reality of our colonial status, we can never begin to engage in a strategy to end it.  I suggest that in identifying and discussing the state of Canadian relationships with Indigenous people the term "Colonial class" makes much more sense than that of "settler". True it is a word that is much in vogue and is...

Bill Lee June, 8, 2020 The president of the USA, D.J. Trump, has been twittering (some would say blithering) on about members of Antifa and the "Radical Left" instigating the recent riots that have emerged out of the well organized and quite orderly demonstrations against Police violence against racialized people. He has even suggested he will label Antifa as a "terrorist organization [1] ". As usual with the twaddle that the man brays forth it is a completely unsubstantiated charge. Indeed, Trump is, as usual, misinformed, or lying (it may be that he is no longer, or maybe never was, able to discern the difference between the two). As for the “Radical Left”, Trump's words amount to the usual vague, unsubstantiated diversionary codswallop that he has been spewing, and so the same arguments apply.   Antifa is intent on confronting the Fascist Right and did not organize any protests on, or infiltrations of, this issue that I’ve heard of. I’m not a fan ...

BILL LEE June 1, 2020 I’m getting tired and frustrated with the growing number of stories of white people who attempt to practice their racism, to get some sort of punitive action taken by authorities, to chastise or discipline Black or Indigenous. I suspect that I am hardly alone in this. There are many examples, unfortunately, in both Canada and the USA but two recent examples from the USA are pretty representative of what seems to be a growth in this unsavoury practice.1 The first is a Whitestream2 woman in Central Park in New York with her dog. She called the coppers on a Black man, watching birds of all things, because he had asked her to leash her dog, hardly unreasonable given that they were in a dog leash area. Another was a white man who confronted five Black men he encountered using the building's athletic facilities in which he, and they, unbeknownst to him, had leased office space.  He felt it hard to believe that Black individuals could actually be occupying the s...

BILL LEE  May 18, 2007  Trump's Criminal Behaviour  There has been shock and dismay in the USA but also in other parts of the world at the brazen action of the American Attorney General, Bill Barr, in the dropping of the DOJ's quite solid case against Lieutenant-General Michael Flynn1, the disgraced former national security adviser to Donald Trump. The general feeling is that this action makes a mockery of the justice system and justice in general in the USA. But none of this should be surprising. The presidency of Donald J. Trump has, from the day he falsely claimed his inauguration crowd was the biggest in history, been littered with evidence of various acts of criminality, from his campaign's fraternizing with Russian oligarchs to the utilization of his fake foundation and his fake university. He has also managed to block, with the help of a supine GOP, pretty much any reforms being enacted or the addressing of serious issues facing t...

by Michael Laxer May 7th 2020 People need to differentiate between two things...the needs of the capitalist economy versus what could be done collectively in countries like Canada with our social wealth. It is absolutely true that with the system as designed now people are desperate to get back to work as they face destitution, homelessness and bankruptcy. It is also true that the capitalists want everything open and want us all back at work tomorrow. Damn the torpedoes full speed ahead is their mantra and so it would be. They could not care less about the lives of workers and especially about the lives of those workers most likely to die...women, racialized workers, marginalized workers. That those workers are far more likely to die is a FACT. That is already how it is playing out. Calls to rapidly reopen are INHERENTLY racist and misogynist, classist and colonialist. If you don't like that fact, I don't really care. People are entitled to their o...

BILL LEE April. 8, 2020 There was a disturbing story recently about Right-wing groups disgorging all manner of insults and making death threats against Dr. Anthony Fauci the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the USA. (Groth, 2020). But he has also become a public target for conservative pundits and bloggers who say he is undermining the administration. 'One article in the right-wing outlet, American Thinker, called him a “Deep-State Hillary Clinton-loving stooge.'" (Drury, 2002) His offence was, and is, that he has been forced to correct various pieces of misinformation, and often downright inanities, uttered by President Trump about the Covid-19 pandemic, how it works, what its effects are or what should be done about it. The fact that he requires protection is disturbing, to say the least, but the lashing out by right-wing zealots has been a growing and very unhealthy tendency, of the North American Right, and...