I've been wondering lately how Trump, Graham and others get away with simply refusing to testify when they've been called to, calling on friendly judges to help them, and then when caught in the headlights, plead the 5th. It's more and more difficult to be outraged when corruption becomes more and more normal. I can't say I'm detecting widespread citizen anger at this. Maybe everyone thinks it's ok to corrupt the rule of law if you can get away with it. We used to think this only happened in "third-world" shit hole countries. And yet we still criticize China and Iran, not that we shouldn't, but it is a bit rich.
Recently here in Ontario, premier Ford has been trying to squirm out of testifying at a inquest wrt last January's "freedom convoy" here in Ottawa. At the time, it was pretty obvious to me and everyone that I know, that the province was pretty derelict is sending provincial police backup to the city of Ottawa force, who were obviously failing in their duty. It was also obvious that the Conservative Ford was enjoying watching the federal Liberal government problems. Ford is now hiding behind some point of privilege and will probably get away with it.
The one thing that strikes is how easily white collar criminals get away with things, especially if they have some political power. Nothing new, but still irritating to be hit in the face with it. Things are so far gone though that his supporters probably don't have a problem with this. Which brings me to my point. The notion that we, as a culture, care about the rule of law is a f**king joke. Having "your" side win is much more important to most people. That's my conclusion.
Years ago, another provincial conservative government under Mike Harris downloaded a bunch of services to townships and countries, and they congratulated themselves for decreasing provincial taxes and fools applauded. All a bad joke, of course, none of those costs went away, and besides, I don't recall seeing my taxes drop by much anyway. A lot of fat infrastructure contracts made a few people wealthy though. So now the current provincial government is running roughshod over the rights of those same counties and municipalities by overriding their right to determine how to zone their lands and therefore make it easier to developers to build new housing, bypassing the rules of regs of those townships and municipalities. This at a time when more and more evidence accumulates that suburban sprawl is a mistake, it is not financially self-sustaining anywhere, the only beneficiaries are the developers who donate money to their favourite politicians. All done in plain view wiht precious few investigative journalists to even point it out, because, you know, the press is bad and they lie. What a pathetic culture we have turned into.
