TRUTH BE TOLD
WHEN LAWMAKERS FLOUT THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW
Image credit: JOY REAL from Unsplash.
By DR VICKI BISMILLA
At the risk of sounding as though I might be losing some marbles, I want to discuss a 2013 movie titled Elysium.
It is a science fiction story about the world’s rich and privileged who leave our overpopulated, polluted and resource-stressed earth and build a nirvana settlement just outside planet Earth in outer space. Their new homes and community centres are equipped with state-of-the-art technology and luxurious amenities for themselves and their families to enjoy. They have the most advanced medical technology that can heal serious illnesses, even cancer. They have developed laws and citizenship requirements that keep out Earth’s poor, disabled and sick. They shoot down any spaceships created by a few still smart but disadvantaged scientists on earth trying to enter their air space. They call them illegal migrants and give their border control agents power to shoot.
The more I processed this “new world” the more frightening the concept became knowing the reality of how the present world’s rich and privileged are behaving. Huge amounts of our tax dollars are being given to privileged folks whom the politicians favour. Our tax pools are being treated like their personal slush funds. Rules like conflict-of-interest regulations are being thrown out the window and greed is being flaunted as a personal privilege of the rich and powerful. Politicians who should know better claim ignorance of rules when they are caught and they offer impotent and cheeky “apologies”.
Thankfully, journalists are still exposing these charlatans.
I am aghast when Canadian politicians claim that they did not know or forgot the conflict-of-interest regulations. They are plainly lying. The very first thing that anyone who serves any level of government in Canada, in any capacity – even volunteers on committees – are told is that the conflict-of-interest rules are paramount and non-negotiable. It is drummed and hammered into them and agreements are signed. If any matter at all is being discussed and anyone at the table has a relative, friend, acquaintance, business partner, boss, colleague or anyone known to them involved in the matter, that conflict of interest must be declared and that member must recuse/excuse himself or herself from any and all discussions on the matter and not participate in any decisions made by the committee on that matter.
If these regulations are drummed into mere volunteer committee members, how can politicians, caucus members, lawmakers, members of any parliament, anyone in any leadership role claim that they did not know?
People, especially politicians, who have grown up privileged often think that our taxes are their money to spend however they wish. They seem to think that being elected gives them the keys to the country and most especially keys to the coffers to spend like there is no tomorrow. And there may be no tomorrow if they are allowed to greedily continue.
There are despotic politicians and their families, even in so-called western democracies, who flout the law repeatedly and blatantly and are seen advertising things like cans of beans made by companies who blindly support them. Many of these capricious politicians are uneducated, unethical, immoral, overfed and unrelenting in their greed for power and luxuries. Their money, as has been shown in the case of a leading western tycoon/politician, has often been accumulated by crushing poor workers, reneging on paying for contractual obligations and non-disclosure of unpaid taxes.
If we continue to allow businesses, corporations, industry, factories and multinational raiders to disregard ecological sustainability rules, to dump their toxic waste into lakes, rivers, oceans, waterways and landfills, to burn up the earth’s natural resources and to pollute the atmosphere, then we are hurtling toward the polluted, unliveable Earth about which forward thinking scientists constantly remind us.
There also appears to be a complete disregard for the lives of all those who are not rich and privileged. We are seeing in the United States the flagrant disregard for the safety of front line healthcare professionals as hospitals fill with Covid-19 cases. Thousands of frontline healthcare workers are immigrant and minority and they are referring to their workplaces as “war zones” (see Al Jazeera.com 101 East: Filipino Nurses New York’s Frontliners). Businesses are being allowed to open freely and anti-maskers are protesting and marching against protecting the vulnerable. The lives of factory and migrant workers, farming harvest workers, meat-packing industry workers, users of public transportation and poor communities who cannot afford testing or hospital care appear to be thrown into the path of the virus, reminiscent of the deliberate culling of populations.
This is being done in the name of business dollars by privileged politicians and corporations. This is a blatant thrust by the entitled, indulged and powerful ruling class. When the Covid-19 deaths in America are analyzed by race and ethnicity the data shows that the largest number of deaths are among Black and Indigenous Americans (see Covid-19 deaths by race and ethnicity in the US).
Can ordinary citizens be blamed for thinking that this is a deliberate manoeuvre to cast caution to the wind at the expense of the most vulnerable communities?
• Dr Vicki Bismilla is a retired Superintendent of Schools and retired college Vice-President, Academic, and Chief Learning Officer. She has authored two books.