By David Farrell

I’m mad and want to point a finger: my government lies and cheats and hides behind a wall of secrecy, tossing pennies into ponds to quell hunger, and the worst part is they call this democracy.

Recently I gave my cell phone number to a government agency set up to create a ‘do not call’ list, and what does it do with this information? It hands it out to telemarketers, and now I have pukes calling me from across the US, ringing up charges at my end to sell me crap using voice-activated drones.

Do you know that Vale Inco is now owned by a Brazilian firm? The acquisition was approved by the Canadian government, by a department that must know that a Canadian firm cannot acquire a similar industry in Brazil because there steel is protected as a national interest.

Do you know that thousands of acres of arable land in Canada are being acquired by  numbered companies that can be traced back to China? The companies are paying above book value for the land, and  in 50 years or so we will be going to our local markets to purchase food and find it is all being shipped abroad to feed foreign nationals.

The world is in an economic meltdown and today the Globe & Mail is running no less than three stories about the Oscars. The Oscars are yesterday’s news, and were by Monday noon. Flagging stale news on the front page is a recipe for disaster. Besides, glam stories are passe. We want realism mixed with humour, and compelling stories that can shape our lives.

CTV is awash in red carpet events, its vapid talking heads carrying on as if they were courtiers at the Palace of Versailles and the revolution hadn’t yet hatched. Does CTV’s brass actually think Ben Mulroney is a ratings catcher? He needs to spend a month in Somalia, and then two months in Chechnya. His shoes might take a beating, but his smile might actually fit his face on his return.

Radio stations across this country became businesses because they were built from the ground up by owners who knew the names of their staff, hired them, coached them, and fired them when necessary.

Today we have conglomerates run by men that have been made mugs of by  fancy boys who sold them a bill of goods cooked up using smug numbers. Then left them high and dry with the company shareholders seething with outrage and once loyal audiences bored silly by the mindless programmed canned spam they push out. Does someone in Houston or wherever actually have an inkling about the local colour in Calgary, Edmonton or Kenora? I think not. But the canned programming is cheap, like starch, rat poison…and the office Christmas party.

Do I really give a toss if Madge is so desperate she has to gob slobber some 20-something Latin pretty boy in front of the paparazzi to get front billing in the tabloid press? Who really thinks this shite will stick?

This is a time for finger pointing. This is a time when shareholders and redundant workers should have the power to call the villains that enriched themselves, and created this mess, to be called on the mat and made to eat their words behind bars; but, at the end of the day, it is governments that have allowed this madness to unravel.

Governments that have long had cosseted relationships with lobbyists and lawyers, shills and by the book crooks. And it is governments that have allowed conglomerates to own multiple newspapers and electronic media in a single city in the vain name of the public good, in the double-speak that has, apparently, created diversity of choice.

It is governments that have bought into the global madhouse that sends Canadian Atlantic salmon to China for processing, to Toronto to be packaged and given a mandated bilingual label, and sent back to the Maritimes and sold in Sobey’s  for Maritimers to purchase this by now trans-national fish. Maritimers who once had jobs in fish processing plants.  Maritimers who were once self-sufficient as fishermen and asked little of anyone to put food on the table and clothes on the backs of their families.

So next time you get mad, realize there is no way to get even. Democracy has failed us. The men in the blue suits may wear different coloured ties, but the money that put them to the front of the line is the same old money that has its hand out for handouts today, fleecing us of our entitlement and stealing our kid’s kids’ ‘futures and tomorrows.

Imagine shelling out $1-billion to cover off security to host the winter Olympics, which is what the tab is going to end up costing Candian taxpayers, which is  before a single athlete has hit the starting line. Before the cost of the buildings, the Olympic village, setting up the whatevers for the whomevers. The Olympic organizing committee is as brazen as Cheney’s Halliburton and the National Rifle Association combined. Just what does it cost us to have someone slip on a set of skis and point down a hill?

Jerry Del Colliano, Bob Lefsetz and David Suzuki may be shaking the bushes from different angles, but at the end of the day the hunger, the pain, the humiliation and the war dead continue on as if it were all just another cumulus cloud in the sky, and all the committees and conferences and summits in the world won’t change a thing. As I said at the top, I’m mad and that turd from California just called for the fifth time today on my cell phone. Can anyone help me? Does anybody care?