Something positive for once.

I just passed King and James on my way home for lunch, and witnessed something truly beautiful. There was a Latin American band playing in front of the mall, and the corner was bustling. I've seen them around in past summers, too, they're a sign of nice weather, for sure.

Nothing quite beats a little music to perk up an otherwise drab concrete landscape. We need a lot more of this kind of thing.

For the last few weeks we've been seeing stories about the C. Difficile crisis at Joe Brant Hospital and elsewhere on the front page of the spectator virtually daily. The press is making this into a rather impressive scandal, and while I agree something should have been done long before it got to this point, I can't help but feel that nobody is really touching on the heart of the issue.

Use too many antibiotics, and they will stop working. Just like pesticides or cocaine. For decades experts have been howling about over-use, predicting frightening outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant bacteria which we'll be next to helpless to fight. Well, here we are.

We cry for penicillin whenever we get a cough. We stop taking the pills whenever the symptoms go away, not until the prescribed dose is finished. We even lock hundreds, thousands or more animals together in tightly packed factory farm cages and give them daily, lifelong doses of antibiotics because it helps them grow larger. And now we're facing antibiotic-resistant superbugs?

I wonder why.

Whilst looking for some background noise for bikework, I came across this. It's a speech by the famed anarchist author Murry Bookchin, originator of such ideas as Social Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism. Though it was recorded in 1990, it's frightening how much of it still applies today.

And yes, he's always that loud.

More Swearing Fun Downtown

Mark Nimigan is now publicly crediting Rudy Giuliani as inspiration for his anti-swearing vendetta. Rudy Giuliani's policies, as can be viewed here, bring to mind a certain F-word, and I don't mean fuck. He launched an all-out war on homelessness, including shutting down services, limiting stays in homeless shelters and arresting people attempting to sleep in parks. His administration seriously strained race relations in the city, and his legendary police crackdown including the shooting deaths of black men like Amadou Diallo and in-custody sodomy and torture of Abner Louima by a police officer. He ran a policy of excessive privatisation, slashed school funding (while promising to "fix" them) and even campaigned hard to maintain a ban on ferrets, comparing them to pythons or lions. As one wikipedia article puts it,

"Litigants filed several civil liberties violations lawsuits against the mayor or the city. Giuliani's administration lost 22 of 26 cases. [83]

Some of the court cases which found the Giuliani administration to have violated First Amendment rights included actions barring public events from their previous location at the City Hall steps, not allowing taxi drivers to assemble for a protest, not allowing city workers to speak to the press without permission, barring church members from delivering an AIDS education program in a park, denying a permit for a march to object to police brutality, issuing summons and seizing literature of three workers collecting signatures to get a candidate on the presidential ballot, imposing strict licensing restrictions on sidewalk artists that were struck down by a court of appeals as a violation of artists' rights, using a 1926 cabaret law to ban dancing in bars and clubs, imposing an excessive daily fee on street musicians, imposing varying city fees for newsstand owners based on the content they sold..."

Luckily, not everybody is as easily convinced as Mark Nimigan. A Spectator Editorial is showing a fair bit of sense. Still, this raises a lot of terrifying questions about the willingness of certain civic leaders to go along with policies which seek to demographically cleanse the city core. "Foul language" is far more common as one climbs downward on the class ladder, which is plainly showed by the spectator's comparison of swearing between Gore Park and Limeridge, demonstrating how targetted this kind of policing is. This definitely wouldn't be the first time such things have been attempted, I remember back when I was younger police would arrest my punk-rock friends on prohibited weapons charges (what you get if you're caught with a switchblade or a sawed-off-shotgun) for having spiked leather wristbands, which they bought at nearby downtown shops. Marginalized people downtown have hundreds of stories like these, and it all comes back to the idea that a downtown free of underprivliged people would be more inviting to overpriviliged people with strong class-based prejudices.

There are ways to clean up the downtown. We could deal with crack by starting more addiction treatment centres. We could deal with mental illness by restoring years of cut funding to psychiatric programs in the city (as well as taking a deep look at the effectiveness of some of those programs). We could deal with homelessness by providing more social housing, something this country has virtually abandoned in the last decade or so, and we could lower panhandling rates by increasing welfare rates to significantly above their 1995 levels, around which they still hover. Those changes are neither as cheap nor easy as police harrasment of dirty people downtown, but they might just result in real changes.

Apparantly, it is now going to be illegal to swear downtown

Never mind the crumbling buildings which occasionally collapse. The heat is now off developers and speculators who buy buildings and leave them rotting for years until "the market is right" for some high-priced redevelopment. Never mind the ongoing march toward new office space in the core, in the Lister Block, or Eaton's Centre, despite floors upon floors of office buildings which stand empty. Never mind the decades of "urban renewal" which replaced functional mixed-use space for small businesses and housing with now-inadequate civic buildings like city hall, architectural novelties of their time which now display how much shoddy workmanship and lack of foresight went into them. Never mind the slum landlords, the ever-rising price of the HSR (which has its main transit hub downtown), or the truly horrendous amount of land devoted to nothing but parking lots.

Downtown's image problem is clearly an issue of people swearing. What people you ask? The poor, young, homeless, "freaky-looking", troubled, mentally ill or disabled people who congregate downtown because there's nowhere else to go. They are clearly the problem.

I've traveled. I've traveled a lot. And I've seen "great cities" like London and Paris (perhaps the worldwide capital of people swearing on streetcorners), as well as most of Canada's. Strangely enough, regardless of what kind of shape their downtown is in economically, they all have down-and-out people, drugs, graffiti, and worthless kids hanging out causing trouble. Those are some of the many aspects which characterize life in cities, and no matter how many police-state tactics we employ, they won't go away.

http://www.thespec.com/article/365906

Last week in London a Tim Hortons employee was actually fired for giving away a timbit to a child. She is a mother of four, and had been working at the outlet for three years. After getting home she called the newspaper, evoking a flurry of bad press, and she has since been offered an apology and a job at another outlet under the same management. She makes $9.05 and hour, pays $750/month in rent and $120 for transportation for her kids to subsidized day care. This is all on top of groceries, clothes, utilities and taxes.

This is how a very large chunk of Hamilton lives. The luxury and convenience of being able to buy a dirt-cheap coffee at a drive-thru window at hundreds of identical locations within an hour's drive comes with a high human cost. And Tim Hortons is far from the only employer that works this way. Powerless, low-waged, uniformed, tightly controlled and subject to firing on the slightest whim, these workers drive our city. If this were an isolated incident, or simply the result of past quarrels with her boss, it would be easy to dismiss, but it isn't. People are fired every day for similar reasons. I have friends who've been fired for giving free burgers to family members (and keep in mind, these fast-food joints throw out mountains of food at the end of the day), pregnant women six months along who've been fired for "sitting down on the job", closing early in deserted food courts, or even chains which simply fire the whole staff of the lowest-preforming stores in the region yearly as a warning to others. I know workers in food service who've been forced to work unpaid after hours, been subject to threats of firing or outlet closure if they attempt to unionize, constantly sexually harassed by employers and customers, and had to pay out of their own meager cheques for stolen merchandise or the meals of customers who've walked out without paying. Yes, much of this is illegal, but talk with any low-waged employees and you'll quickly learn that most are too scared or ignorant of laws to ever attempt to contact the authorities.

$1.31 for a coffee. $12 for a pair of shoes. $6 for a shirt. $3.50 for a burger and fries. Those kind of prices need to be made up for somewhere else, and it comes in low-quality products and exploited workers. And that single-mother or laid-off garment worker serving you that coffee is only the tip of the iceberg - the coffee plantations where the stuff is grown more often than not are worked by real-life slaves. A few pennies a cup could lift thousands of people out of poverty, but strangely enough, we never see that happeneing (even when more than a few pennies are going to inflated management salaries, advertising budgets and investors).

Best of all, the more you exploit workers this way, the more people exist who cannot afford to shop anywhere with decent paycheques and benefits.

In these jobs, you are not a person. Free expression, job security, input into workplace decisions or a living wage - these things just don't exist for the people on the other side of that counter. Their work is boring, repetitive, and teaches few if any skills that might help them go on to bigger and better things. You are disposable, you are replacable and your needs as a person come second to the company's need to make profits. You are just like any other daily cost - coffee, cream or sugar - a cost to be minimized. Yes, some bosses are far nicer to work for than others - they make allowances and take employees' suggestions seriously out of the goodwill of their hearts. This, though, is a product of humanity entering these establishments, and certainly isn't reflected in the rules and systems themselves.

It's easy to paint these jobs as a transitional stage - somewhere to work while you're in school, or looking for something better. And for many people, they are. But for many more, they aren't. Often when I visit fast food restaurants (which isn't often, for these reasons and others), the entire staff looks old enough for grandchildren. And even if every one of them scrimped and saved enough to afford the college classes to get a "real job", someone else would have to step up to take their place - as long as someone's standing in the line-up waiting for a coffee, there's going to be someone on the other side being exploited.

A worker who slaves for years at a counter has every bit as much invested in that establishment as whoever "owns" the location. In many cases, much more. They make it run, from day to day, they prepare the food, interact with the customers and sweep the floor at the end of the day.

They deserve better.