Toronto City Life » Do you really want this?

Do you really want this?

Posted on April 26th, 2014 –

If you read about the shit that Rob Ford’s buddy Gene Jones did, and allowed to happen, it’s no wonder Rob Ford is up his ass with every inch of his taxpayer-respecting love — they’re both cut from the same cloth:

An executive assistant for one of the City Councillors was looking for a
new job and approached a recruitment firm for assistance. The firm
contacted the CEO and informed him that the EA was looking for new
opportunities. She had previously met the CEO during the course of her
work.

With no job competition or posting of the job opportunity, the CEO
created and gave her a new manager position.

While he acknowledged that TCH “absolutely” required that all open
positions had to be advertised, the CEO stated he did not advertise for
this position because, “[I]t’s my prerogative when I want to give that
position to the best person with experience, internally or externally …”

The CEO promoted the manager less than six months later and
appointed her to be a senior director with a raise of $30,000.

Ford thinks this guy’s a straight shooter and we should all be sucking on his dick. No doubt, Ford conducts himself the same way — and what’s wrong with that?

Now consider that in 2014 Toronto, Jones walks away with whatever “executive pay” he’s dolled out to himself and his friends, and of course a healthy and well-deserved severance payment of $200,000, on top of $1.6 million in severance for all of the people he fired without cause; and then there’s Rob Ford (personally responsible for getting Jones his job), who’s openly admitted to buying and doing hard drugs, is connected to gangs and murders, has broken every rule and many laws out there, yet still hasn’t even been given even a lousy traffic ticket, and is in fact running for mayor again.

Oh, and Crean, the woman who detailed the latest Ford-linked shitpile in one-hundred and eleven pages is the actual waste according to Ford, who’s practically choked up by the fact that corrupt assholes like Jones and Lisi aren’t being thrown honorific parades.

My issue isn’t so much that people like this exist — I think that that must reasonably be expected in any society. What concerns me deeply is the fact that this is now systemic: we have a system that welcomes corruption and criminality (as far as I know, Ford & co. still have full access to City Hall, etc.), and has been shown to attack only those who expose it.

Take, for example, the fact that no one has been able to show very much harm done by Edward Snowden’s revelations (do you suppose most governments already knew?) yet he’s public enemy #1 at the moment in the US. The most obvious harm done was to the government’s claim of “authority”, honesty, trustworthiness, etc., and its image wasn’t great to begin with.

That politics are tied to money is no revelation. And law+enforcement collude with politics to make for a perfect trifecta of “do as we say … or else”. It’s good old-fashioned gangsterism.

How else do you explain the fact that the Supreme Court unanimously allowed the government to defraud all Canadians to the tune of $57 billion over a period of three years? (strange how there seems to be no web history dating back to 2008 for this story — almost like they didn’t want people to know)

Oh, okay, they didn’t use the “defraud” word, they said (did I mention that it was unanimous?) that the government “illegally” seized $57 billion in Employment Insurance from Canadians in 2002, 2003, 2005.

You call it “illegal”, I call it “fraud”.

But the Supreme Court didn’t order a refund or an apology. Instead they simply said that the EI system had to be changed to make sure this never happened again.

It took ’em a few years but they finally did something.

The government completely gutted the system and “appropriated” the money elsewhere (part of the original complaint), steeply hiked up the amount that all Canadians would have to pay into the suddenly poor EI system, and have profited from it and made their own lives cushy and comfortable while trying real hard to ensure no one else benefits – especially not the people paying into the thing.

If you’re working “legally” in Canada, you are literally paying (and more now than ever) for the “illegally” seized funds that the government took from you under false authority years ago. And this is all based on the unanimous assessment and continuing consent of Canada’s Supreme Court.

Rob Ford, as much of an asshole as he is, is merely the symptom of a very sick system.