Tag Archives: HiMY SYed

The Weather Up There

Posted on by
2

I spent the last few days trying to pull numbers from my ass. It’s not nearly as easy as it looks but it wasn’t entirely a waste of time either. I did find a couple mismatched socks that I’d long ago written off as hostages taken by my cantankerous dryer.

What really baffles me however is just how easily and often conservative politicians, pundits and thinkers pull off this feat. They are perpetually pulling numbers from their ass and using them as ‘proof positive’ of their various arguments and pet peeves. Why, just last week the mayor went deep and came up with a threatened 35% property tax increase if we don’t get down to some serious slashing and burning of city services and assets. Where’d he get that number? He didn’t pass along any footnotes or references, so we can only assume it came from where the sun don’t shine. Just like the 80% labour costs he tells us that that make up our annual operating budget. Or the 6% attrition rate of city staff that occurs every year. (Actual numbers point to less than 3%.)

Mystical, magical numbers that suit whatever situation the mayor’s railing against, thrown up against the wall to see how long they stick. That one’s done. That’s done. Oh. That one may need a little more cooking.

To be fair to the mayor, the 35% property tax increase number probably didn’t originate from up his ass. It seems to be a figure pulled out from the keister of one Matthew McGuire of the Toronto Taxpayers Coalition. 34% + 1 for good measure. Always round up when looking to scare people. Round down if you need to mitigate the increase to the police salaries you just agreed to.

Where did Mr. McGuire come up with his numbers? Well, I don’t have an MBA from the Rotman School of Business but it looks to me as if he just took the already arbitrary figure of $774 million Team Ford has been using to bludgeon us into submission and calculated what hike in property taxes would be needed to cover that cost. If we did nothing else. As happened every year David Miller was in power. Spend more money. Raise property taxes. Repeat. Years 2003-2010.

(Hey. I just pulled that from my ass. Maybe I am getting the hang of it.)

McGuire floated that number a week or so ago and it was immediately picked up by CityTV news and the receptacle of all things pulled from right wingers asses, talk radio. Stop the presses! Somebody just said something really loopy. Get that man a microphone! City council is a haven for communists? Print it!

Of course, it’s mostly a one-way street on that account. If I were to float something equally as questionable, chances are the press wouldn’t be knocking down my door unless maybe the mayor flipped me off or if I issued death threats. But in terms of policy like, say, Matt Elliott did about budget alternatives. I’m not sure our local mainstream media would be as a quick to set up an interview. Have you been interviewed yet, Matt, on your budget thoughts?

Right wingers float whatever ideas that emanate from their gut and the press is all ears. Nothing is ever too crazy or cracked to pass by unnoticed. It’s just put out there as a starting point for future discussion. Of course a 34 or 35% property tax increase would never happen under any administration but especially our current one. It’s just where the goal posts are planted. Negotiations begin from there. Don’t want a 35% property tax increase? Fine.

Where do we start cutting? Libraries? Grants? Sidewalk snow removal? No wait. That one’s off the table.

In our Matlovian manner, we then desperately search for the middle ground, playing on the field where the lines have just been redrawn. No, no, no. Nobody wants a 35% property tax increase. So let’s settle on the rate of inflation and begin cutting from there. Maybe we can sell off some of our assets instead? The mayor’s heavy lifting has been done for him and all he needed to do was negotiate in bad faith, using dubious numbers he pulled from his ass.

Why don’t we call his bluff? No, no, no. A 35% property tax increase is out of the question. We’re happy with 30%. Of course, the response will inevitably be, are you nuts? To which we respond, are you? You suggested a 35% increase. What? You mean you weren’t serious?

All of which takes me to the clip I’ve been watching over and over again since I first saw it on the season ender of Real Time with Bill Maher. New Rules. The Donner Party. In short, we who don’t adhere to radical right wing ideology need to start bringing the crazy. By playing nice and trying to be reasonable and always searching to find the ‘truth’ somewhere in the mushy middle, we’ve already given up the game. If you try fighting crazy fire with the coolness of logic, you succeed only in moving closer to the crazy not coming to a logical compromise.

HiMY SYeD had it right in his deputation to the Executive Committee last month. Rather than settle for cuts to some libraries, he demanded that we double the number of branches in the city. Why? Mr. SYeD claims libraries increase property values and increased property values increases revenue to the city. Libraries are a creative city’s DNA and engine driving innovation. (A sidenote: The book Mr. SYeD holds up for Councillor Kelly is The Warhol Economy.) Of course, if he were really playing by the crazy rules, Mr. SYeD wouldn’t have offered up any plausible explanations for his reasoning other than, just because or I pulled the number from my ass.

From that starting point, I can envision the conversation going something like: We can’t afford more libraries. Yes but, we can’t afford fewer libraries. That would be the start of some meaningful negotiations.

So let’s all start putting on our crazy dresses and Mr. Peanut tophats and make our demands heard loud and clear. Let’s stop reaching out to find a compromise with half-baked notions and patently false assertions. Let’s be ‘… a dog that can bark at a pine cone for 9 days and not get tired.’

— insanely submitted by Cityslikr

The Naked Untruth

Posted on by
9

I’m not going to lie to you, folks. It’s really and truly getting damn near impossible to come up with new and exciting ways to have this discussion. Concerns over kicking a dead horse, jumping the shark and all that. The trouble is, it just needs to keep being said. Over and over again in the hopes that finally somebody clicks and gets a big, bright idea. The proverbial lightbulb. A sudden gush of much needed and long awaited wisdom.

It always starts with the same question.

What is it with fucking right wingers and their refusal to deal with the truth? I’m not necessarily talking about outright lies although that plays an integral part of their everyday discourse. It’s the half truths and distortions of facts and figures that really do the trick. Dissembling, prevarication, misdirection and misleading statements. Their reliance on what Stephen Colbert dubbed ‘truthiness’. If it looks like the truth and quacks like the truth etc., etc.

Witness the Twitter exchange for the last couple days over the plan to remove bike lanes on Jarvis Street. On one side are those against the move. The other comes from Mayor Ford’s side of the fence offered up by Mark Towhey, the mayor’s director of policy and strategic planning.

From Towhey’s twitter feed (@towhey):

  • Actually, wrong. Staff report shows travel times are up by 1/3, ie 130% on average #justthefacts
  • Wrong, actually. Report says 2-3 mins is average over 8 hour survey period. Peak delay is much, much higher #justthefacts
  • But your argument was about environmental impact, not social activism. Even the lefties say you’re, in a word: wrong #sosad
  • Pembina Institute says Ford plan reduces more GHG and takes more cars off road compared to Transit City #topoli
  • When did TEA stop being about the environment and start being an NDP front group? Was it always?
  •  #justthefacts 94% of Jarvis commuters use cars not bikes. Commute times for cars have increased; 33% Gridlock costs T.O. $billions each year

It’s hard to know where to start. There are so many distortions, cherry picking of facts and misuse of statistics at work here that it reads like a lesson plan on How to Win an Unwinnable Argument. Mr. Towhey obviously isn’t interested in having a debate but, instead, wants to print off bumper sticker slogans.

The Pembina Institute report he makes reference to does indeed suggest that the mayor’s transit ‘plan’ would take more cars off the road and reduce more greenhouse gas emissions than Transit City. That is, once the Sheppard subway is built. You know, the mystical, magical subway that the mayor believes will appear if he claps hard enough. Otherwise, the plan such as it is now is simply Transit City with more of the Eglinton LRT buried underground minus the Sheppard and Finch LRTs which, according to the Pembina Institute will take fewer cars off the road and won’t reduce more greenhouse gas emissions than Transit City (not to mention serve less riders.)

Towhey also attempts to conflate the very real problem of congestion in the GTA with the bike lines on Jarvis. He does this by taking reports that traffic times along Jarvis Street during peak rush times have risen by 1 or 2 minutes since the bike lanes were installed and blowing them up to eye-popping but meaningless numbers. 33%! 130%!! The power of Big Numbers and False Analogies. Congestion is costing us money. Jarvis bike lanes are causing congestion. Therefore, bike lanes equal money lost.

He does all this with such condescending assuredness (“Wrong, actually.” “Actually, wrong.”), utilizing dismissive Twitter hashtags like #justthefacts, #wrongwayonJarvis and #neverwasaplan that any reasonable person would conclude that he couldn’t possibly be bullshitting. Only someone absolutely certain would state things so emphatically. But remember what the master of modern propaganda told us. It would never come into their heads [the people] to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

For the Twitter uninitiated, you might be thinking that serious debate cannot occur in 140 characters. That’s true, but imagine Twitter as a delivery system for abstracts. Here’s a thought. Here’s a link. Let’s have a discussion.

Note how in none of Towhey’s tweets does he link to any of the data he’s citing. It’s all about flooding the social media with empty talking points that supporters can run with. Unlike someone like, say, Matt Elliott at Ford For Toronto. He tweets and links to reports and articles that explore issues fully, thereby making a deeper discussion possible. Read through just a couple of his takes on the Jarvis bike lane issues (here and here) and then let the debate begin.

But that’s the nub of the matter. Right wingers don’t won’t a serious debate. Why? My instinct tells me that, again citing Stephen Colbert, ‘reality has a liberal bias’. They can’t win on facts and figures. Their politics are based purely on ideology not reason or logic. So they must do what they do best. Fudge facts. Disfigure figures. Misstate. Misrepresent. Dissemble. Prevaricate.

So we charge into next weeks’ city council debate on the fate of the Jarvis Street bikelanes. An item that arose in stealth near the end of the last Public Works and Infrastructure Committee meeting when another lackey of the mayor’s, Councillor John Parker, sandbagged his colleague, Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam whose ward the bike lanes are in, with the removal motion after the deputations about the wider bike plan had finished. No debate. No discussion. No transparency.

Mayor Ford said on the campaign trail last year, “It would be a waste of money to remove it if it’s already there, that is unless there was a huge public outcry in the area.” So, where’s the ‘huge public outcry’? Funny you should ask. Just this week the mayor stated that 70% of the phone calls he’s received have been in favour of removing the bike lanes. But as HiMY SYeD tweeted today, when he called to register his pro-bike lane view a staffer for the mayor informed him they weren’t keeping track of who called or their position on the matter. Where’s the mayor’s information coming from then?

Bringing us back full circle here. How do fight a phantom? If the old saying is true that ‘a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes’ (and that was pre-internet), how do we rein it back in? Do we start hitting back below the belt, fight fire with fire, and heap on layers and layers of bullshit? It seems counter-productive and, more disheartening, takes us further and further from the truth.

After all, that is what we’re trying to achieve, isn’t it. Arriving at the truth. At least, that’s what I was raised to believe.

— reasonably submitted by Cityslikr

Mayoral Endorsement III

Posted on by
8

My Endorsement For Mayor: HiMY SYeD.

He calls himself The Peoples’ Mayor. It is not empty campaign rhetoric. As Mr. SYeD correctly points out, this race has been all about things. Tax cuts, subways and gravy trains. Where are the people?

Semantics, you say? A little, perhaps. But our front running candidates have all been talking about what they are going to do for people, to people. HiMY SYeD talks about what he’ll do with people. Civic engagement sits at the very core of his campaign. While Mr. Smitherman has attempted to buttress his left flank by rolling out the likes of John Sewell and David Crombie as his emissaries on the local democracy front, HiMY SYeD represents the very essence of it. Inclusion isn’t something he’ll seek to do as mayor, a single plank in his policy platform. Inclusion is the engine that drives his candidacy.

The sad irony of that is just how excluded Mr. SYeD has been during the course of this campaign. No bigger travesty manifested itself over the last 10 months than how independent voices – not just HiMY SYeD – were so summarily and systematically shut out. Well into the proceedings, with a majority of Torontonians expressing immense discontent with the gang of 6, then 5, then 4, then 3 candidates on offer to them, no one with the power to do so thought to address those concerns. Not anyone in the mainstream media who could’ve simply said (after a quick look at Mr. SYeD’s campaign material), what the hell, let’s try this one on for size. Instead they held onto the term ‘fringe’ right to the bitter end. Not any of the front running candidates who could’ve flashed a sign of selflessness to the electorate by demanding a seat at their debate table for HiMY SYeD. Choosing their self-interest above the interests of the general public, and letting us know in a not very subtle manner exactly the kind of mayor they will be.

Mario Cuomo, a leading candidate of ours in the Best President of the United States Who Never Was race, said “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” Well, HiMY SYeD was our bard in campaign 2010. In a wave of turgid, uninspiring, squalid, vacuous words, he spoke to us, no… dare I say it? Fan by brow. I do declare we find ourselves becoming a little flushed… sang to us in beautiful, elevated language, with his vision of empowerment and hope.

Because of HiMY SYeD I now know about a place called Curitiba, Brazil and its former mayor, Jaime Lerner. Curitiba was a city facing much more dire problems than Toronto is (or will even come close to having to face regardless of Monday’s election outcome) with much fewer resources to deal with them. But with the guiding hand of Jaime Lerner the city transformed itself into a modern urban centre, brimming with innovative ideas on public transit and sustainability.

Because of HiMY SYeD I now know about a man named Jeb Brugmann and his book, Welcome to the Urban Revolution. I now know how little I really do know about how cities function, develop and grow (and somewhat depressingly, I realize just how little many of our candidates running for municipal government know about new urban ideas as well). But I also now know that there are many smart and original thinkers and activists, contributing mightily to the public discourse. HiMY SYeD is one of those people.

Most importantly, because of HiMY SYeD I have not grown disenchanted or disillusioned about the political process or prospects here in Toronto despite overwhelming proof and evidence that I have every right to be one or both of those things. Witnessing his resilient spirit and indefatigable sense of civic duty in the face of shameful inattention and even hostile disregard on the part of serious opinion makers, buoys me with hope and resolve. In this campaign, the battle for the heart, soul and mind of Toronto has been rancorous, divisive and not a little disheartening. Unless the unexpected happens on election day, it certainly doesn’t promise to be any less so as we settle back down into trying to build a better city.

I want to be part of that because I know HiMY SYeD will continue to soldier on and contribute to the ever evolving urban fabric of Toronto regardless of the outcome on Monday.

The lunatic ravings of a cock-eyed optimist, blind to the realities on the ground? Nope. I’ve thought long and hard about this and am fully cognizant of the repercussions of my decision. While I always vote in the hopes of casting my ballot for the winning candidate, that urge must be tempered with the fundamental reason we participate in the democratic process in the first place. To publicly declare what kind of city (province, country) we want to live in. Let it to be known here and now that the kind of Toronto I want to be part of is one where HiMY SYeD is mayor.

My heart tells me it’s a vote for 2010 but my head says 2014 and the future. But the future will actually come much sooner than that. October 26th, to be precise. When we wake up to see what we’ve created and a majority of us won’t be at all pleased. The work to make it right will begin immediately. HiMY SYeD will be there, on the frontlines to battle back those forces who will be bent upon, will believe they have a mandate to pull apart everything that has been accomplished over the last 7 years.

That’s a fight I want to be a part of and which is why I, Cityslikr, am endorsing HiMY SYeD for mayor of Toronto.

—endorsingly submitted by Cityslikr