LETTERS TO THE EDITOR - by Tom Macdonald

Tom Macdonald

The following were printed in the Globe and Mail's Letters to the Editor Section:

Bombardier

Bombardier, Bombardier,
How can your bosses get such pay ?
Your C-series required a bail-out;
You can't get your Toronto rail out;
You sent your workers out on lay-offs
While begging governmental pay-offs.
You're living off the public purse
And now to make it even worse
The Beaudoins and the Bellemares
Get more champagne and faster cars.
And when I hear "It's private sector",
I just get vexed and even vexter.
But then I'm middle class, you know;
It must be different with True Dough.

Reflections on Trumpian “Greatness”

What is Greatness? In the US party conventions. we saw The Donald rant about making America great again, while Democrats hyperbolized about how America is already the greatest country on earth. But surely greatness must consist of more than mindless chants of “USA, USA” and the military capacity to destroy the world. It should be measured by how a country delivers for its citizens. Lifestyle’s latest listing of the best places to live put the US only 24th out of 30 countries. The WHO ranks the US health system 37th in the world. The OECD puts the US education system at 29th. The US has a dismal record of income distribution (34th out of 35 countries in a 2012 UNICEF survey on child poverty, ahead of only Romania). The US does lead in gun deaths, with three times the per capita level of any other developed country. The Donald will not make America great by doubling down on guns and military spending. But neither will self-congratulatory cheerleading and complacency by Hilary. I recall a 1938 short story by Graham Greene, “Across the Bridge”, which contrasted a squalid Mexican border-town with the perception by locals that a shining city must exist on the other side. Looking at poverty rates approaching 50% in Detroit, 35% in Buffalo and 30 % in Bellingham, I am very glad to live on the other side of American “greatness”.

Russian Election Interference

CIA Duplicity: While no one can condone Putin's wide-ranging misbehaviour, there is inescapable irony in the current US blustering about Russian electoral "interference". These revelations are brought to you by the CIA, an organization that, during the Cold War, engineered the overthrow of democratically-elected governments in places like Chile, the Dominican Republic and Guatemala. And we all know about the US funding and advisers that went sent in to help Boris Yeltsin win re-election in 1996 against the Communist Party. Not to mention the strong US support given, with good reason, to anti-Putin resistance groups. The CIA protests remind one of Claude Rains in the movie Casablanca when he says "I am shocked, shocked to find gambling going on here".

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