"The trough is a busy place, these days" - May 09, 2007 -

Reading The Vancouver Sun's series of [news] articles on Ken Dobell's extensive grazing activities around the public purse, I can't help but wonder whether he is one among thousands who engage in such gambits. "Nothing wrong with that, of course," all the pious political commentators avow. I am not at all sure they are right.

Ken Dobell is a former city manager in Vancouver, who became a cabinet level civil servant and consultant and lobbyist when his old bud, Gordon Campbell became premier. Campbell and Dobell worked together, if that is the right verb, in Vancouver a generation ago when Campbell was mayor and Dobell enjoyed head honchodom as Vancouver highest paid public employee.

I also can't help but connect the dots surrounding this particular civic savant's public purse mining efforts and the looming financial embarrassments that will inevitably follow the RAV train project and its sister, the Olympics. Will these projects go over budget because there are too many consulting snouts in the public trough? I think so. In fact, I will put serious money on it.

One more dot worth connecting: Ken Dobell was the main push for putting RAV down Cambie Street, now a eight kilometer ditch, rather than along the Arbutus Line, a ditch looking for a rail line in vain. Perhaps the Sun's intrepid reporters would like to chase that chain of decision-making for fun and profit. Of course, chamber of commerce newsletters tend to balk at offending advertisers and political masters, don't they?

Subject:  The Fearless Ten New Year's Predictions for 2007

1.  Saddam Hussein will meet his 72 white raisins ("virgins?" sorry guys, bad translation) and will be disappointed to find he's just dead. But the word won't get back. By this we mean that religious dimensions to the "warr on terra" will continue, so long as evangelical Americans and their simpleton leaders view criminal trash and political dregs through the prism of primitive religion (excuse the redundancy). Meanwhile, out on the suicide bombing circuit, more boobs will die, just because natural selection works that way. So religion will be hot again in 2007, and so therefore will be death, violence, intolerance and malignant analysis of world events and science.

2.  Britany Spears will come out with a triple threat of new products: depilatory cream especially formulated for vaginas, bar stools with training wheels, and a maternity line with a distinctly "ho mama" look and allure. The celebrity-loving drones will flock to the stores, and the collective IQ of Western culture will lose a few more points.

3.  Canada will elect a Conservative Prime Minister in a general election, Stephen Harper winning because he will unashamedly pander to Quebec, tax like a Liberal and pray to Jesus for governmental guidance. His prayers will be answered, and western Canada will discover that Joe Clark has channeled his way back to power. "Er, what is the totality of your income trusts?"

4.  Newspapers will continue to fail, in spite of their last-ditch efforts to climb into the ditch with religion, celebrity worship, pop culture, political correctness. None of these attempts at finding new readers will work, as those who read dailies will gravitate to the big brands in London and New York for intelligent editorial analysis and get the rest of their news and culture elsewhere, namely from the net and magazines such the Economist or Atlantic. As for the stupid, and potentially new dailies readers, they will watch TV, play games and plow through the odd supermarket tabloid until their lips tire. Ergo, the local daily will take an unsteady few steps closer to the gallows in 2007. Vancouver Sun, Province and National Post in Canada, take note.

5.  The stock market will fall hard in the spring, and spring back with a vengeance in the fall, thereby reversing the very thrust and essence of the words to describe these events. This will create confusion in stock analysis metaphor circles. The commodity boom will falter and then strengthen with Middle East political news, and the American tech and blue chip stocks will do especially well as Europe and Japan recover from the doldrums. India and China will sail deeper into prosperous waters, but China especially will start to feel the political kicks from a new political class that will eventually topple the corrupt and evil communist dynasty there. But not this year. Chinese people don't crave freedom much. But it is a taste that politically illiterate acquire with wealth. Slowly, in this case.

6.  Europe will endure its first brush with the bird flu, and we will watch in cynical wonder as all the class, race and ethnic prejudice flames up as only those little monsters can in Europe. No doubt Islamists will come in for heavy criticism, particularly since the Chinese-origined path of this contagion cuts across the underbelly of the old Soviet Union and the eastern Caspian region dominated by corrupt and inept tyrannies doomed to rot by the vestiges of the old communist creed interlarded with the equally fatuous traditions of Islam. An Islamic communist doesn't have much defence against disease or any other powerful force. Europeans will blame these failed states for dropping the prevention ball. Meanwhile, back in Europe, Britain's health care system will suffer the worst, because it is the lousiest in the European Community. Of course, a good many French intellectuals will decide that the bird flu came from labs in Israel, and that bird bugs spread through American aegis, thereby creating a modernized version of the Protocols of Zion. Maybe the Protoplasm of Zion?

7.  Sports will continue to provide dramatic new developments. Jocks will benefit from new drugs to enhance performance. Bucking the trend, Kobe Bryant will score 125 points in a professional basketball game, drugged by his own sense of cool self-importance. Steve Nash will help his team will a NBA championship, then retire to fight poverty and campaign for world peace. Canada will worry excessively about its place in the hockey universe while everyone else save a handful of obscure European countries' citizens will yawn and not give a rat's behind what happens in "ice hockey." Mike Tyson will fight a giant squid for $2 million, and he will lose on a foul. Soccer will continue to fascinate much of the world except North America. In this, North America will show rational good sense.

8.  Australia will continue to congratulate itself on its utter dominance of Britain in sports such as cricket and rugby. Witness recent meetings in which Australians apparently hauled the English side's ashes in some perverted sense. The Australian's capacity to define themselves by their non-Englishness will once again look lame, just as Canadians' attempts to define themselves by their non-Americanness. In fact, Aussies and Canucks love to ape their Brit and Yank betters, and full their popular culture with news and breathless adoration of celebrities from the U.S. and Great Britain. In 2007, the Aussie licked spittle will flow as fiercely as ever, in spite to their modest sports triumphs. Canada's behavior in this arena will be similar, but more restrained and self-effacing.

9.  South America will continue to not miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity to become prosperous and democratic. So too will Palestinian Arabs, the original inspiration for the previous sentence's bon mot. In fact, in 2007, Palestine will cement closer political and economic relations with South America, led by the overtures of Venesuela's el Presidente, Chavez. Meanwhile Brazil, a basket case where a bread basket should be, will demonstrate the capacity of tradition and inertia to inhibit progress. Someday, their democratic prince will come. But not soon. And certainly not in 2007.

10. .... [work in progress] Those who expect to survive 2007, please stand up. You there, not so fast....

Cheers, Brian Buchanan, Vancovuer, BC

e-mail publisher@fracas.com
January 2007

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Brian Buchanan, Vancouver BC,
Fracas.com
publisher and contributing writer
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