Dementors

Christine Elliott was once a respected and highly regarded public servant, appointed to this position by the Liberals in 2015. 

“Christine Elliott’s advocacy for vulnerable people, extensive knowledge of the health care system, and commitment to the betterment of this province make her the perfect choice for Ontario’s first patient ombudsman,” Hoskins said in a statement.

“I am delighted that she agreed to put her name forward for this critical role as we work to put patients first by improving both the quality of our health care system and the patient experience,” he said.

After Ford was declared winner of the Ontario PC leadership race in 2018, Elliott identified numerous procedural irregularities that she demanded be investigated. She ultimately dropped her complaint. Was she or her family threatened with harm, by someone in Premier Drug Lord's criminal entourage? Possibly but more likely, Elliott leveraged her claim that his win was illegal. Her need for power and money allowed her to embrace the Fraud Nation's "Open for Business" imperative that ensures Ontario's public resources are fully exploited and sucked dry by foreign corporations. 

Here's a quote from a 2017 interview with Kellyanne Conway that I find evocative.  

When asked why she accepted her White House job as counsel to Trump she said: “It wasn’t an easy decision” to take the job, Conway told me. “I was staring at a goldmine and I really had to avert my eyes."

Reminder that Elliott has set the stage for savage, no-rules privatization of public healthcare in Ontario. 

In recent public appearances, Elliott and Conway appear to have morphed into pastel-robed Dementors (inhumane creatures who extract life from people) whilst Premier Drug Lord's gargantuan appetites transform him into the demonic spawn of Godzilla and Pillsbury Dough Boy, spewing self-serving glurge and prevarication. 

Death and destruction are profitable for those who lodge at the top of the capitalism pyramid.

VERMIN.

Nothing that's been exposed by the MSM so far about Premier Drug Lord's squalid, corrupt pandemic malfeasance comes as a shock.

Everything that is known about Ford, his crime profiteering past and present in the public realm, as well as in the shadows -- points to a familial, connected network and political reign, rife with prevarication, grift, venality and quid pro quo.

Nothing illustrates this better than his Fraud Nation government hiring McKinsey to do its dirty work.

Facts about the consultants started tumbling out.

Ontarians respond to public money being pissed away down the grifters' abyss, aka Doug's gravy train.

What the hell is McKinsey? Oh. This explains why it is intrinsically anti-union, and how its brand supports union-smashing.

These guys who claim they only accept contracts congruent with their values. Okay then.

McKinsey's wet work. Its global record is quite horrifying, yet characteristic of private sector courtiers who enable and facilitate rapacious, predatory capitalism in the name of neoliberalism.

 

"To those convinced that a secretive cabal controls the world, the usual suspects are Illuminati, Lizard People, or “globalists.” They are wrong, naturally. There is no secret society shaping every major decision and determining the direction of human history. There is, however, McKinsey & Company.

The biggest, oldest, most influential, and most prestigious of the “Big Three” management consulting firms, McKinsey has played an outsized role in creating the world we occupy today."

Consulting firms are the true beneficiaries of the spurious *trickle-down effect* by scoring multi-million $$$ contracts -- with corporations that harvest billion$, to help them extract more billion$ -- or with murderous political regimes.

Recently.. McKinsey did not face criminal charges alongside Purdue executives for aiding and abetting this extremely profitable mass carnage. Did it turn in state evidence to avoid prosecution?

Ma$$ carnage. Just culling the human herd for fun and profit$.

How many more Ontarians will Fraud Nation's CONjob malfeasance kill?

Premier Drug Lord and his Minister for Disease and Death, Christine Elliott are guilty. Hundreds of Ontarians died and many more are chronically ill and physically impaired. Fraud Nation government's crass and venal incompetence in handling the public health challenges of the Covid19 pandemic is clearly exposed.

Yesterday I wrote this about Dr Williams, Ford's Chief Bullshitter for Public Health.

Today: 

There's more, much more.

Here are trenchant highlights from the Auditor General's report. It SLAMS Fraud Nation's mismanagement which veers into criminal negligence and malfeasance. Oh, and about those much-touted Covid19 *command tables*..

Where are the BILLION$$$ the federal government gave Ford, Elliott and Lecce for the purpose of containing the pandemic with judicious, scientifically recommended ressources, and keeping healthcare professionals, essential / frontline workers + ALL Ontarians safe and healthy? The AG couldn't find evidence of that money being used efficiently. 

Are Doug's donor buddies, criminal cronies and Republican associates riding Fraud Nation's gravy train entitled to get $$$ that was intended to be used to benefit ordinary Ontarians?

Some last observations regarding Fraud Nation's deliberate and malevolent damage to the public good, to the detriment of we, the 99% who are not wealthy and powerful.

Make Williams apologize for his disastrous Covid19 response and remove him from public health.

In August 2020 the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario DEMANDED David Williams' resignation, and an apology for his fallacious and unscientific claims about front line health care workers. He stayed, praised by Premier Drug Lord and Dementor Christine Elliott, minister for the facilitation of Disease and Death.

From here: 

Williams [..] said that public health investigations often find that when health-care workers contract COVID-19, they contracted it in the community. He then offered examples of people becoming “casual” in their personal life, by not wearing a mask, socially distancing, or travelling to areas with higher rates of the virus.

Grinspun said the response made her “furious” because health-care workers lost their lives — 10, so far eight of them personal support workers in the long-term care system — and thousands of others have become ill.

She said the evidence shows Williams' assertion is "absurd," particularly when the it shows health-care workers have acquired COVID-19 at a rate at least three to six times higher than the general population. She also noted the families of some of the personal support workers who died told the media that their loved one didn't have access to proper personal protective equipment at work — and Grinspun lays the blame for the lack of PPE in the long-term care system early in the pandemic at Williams' feet.

She cited a litany of mistakes the province made with the long-term care sector — including not having universal masking in long-term care and failing to do surveillance testing early in the pandemic — as reasons more than 1,800 residents died and Williams should resign.

Grinspun went on to criticize his “wishy-washy” guidance on the reopening of schools and questioned why he had the “gall” to blame health-care workers for contracting COVID-19 when he had been asked about the safety of teachers.

“Is this because now he wants to say if a teacher contracts a virus, it's their fault too?" she said. "It's very upsetting — very, very, very upsetting and inappropriate and not characteristic of a person that should be playing a leadership role. It's the opposite of a person that should be playing a leadership role, blaming those that gave their life, or contracted the disease and put their families and themselves at risk.” 

On November 23, Fraud Nation government extended his contract.

“I don’t think he’s useless,” said one highly respected member of the medical community, who requested anonymity because of connections to the provincial response. “He’s dangerous. He’s dangerous because he can’t communicate, and he doesn’t advocate for sound public health measures. If you flipped a coin you’d get it right more often than David.”

IMHO, Doug appointed Dave Chief Medical Officer of Health and keeps him around because the latter is a CONjob incompetent like him. Williams' annual salary is $413,776. 

Consider how much PPE that amount could have purchased, and how many lives would have been saved had the $$$ been used thus, instead of paying this lazy, uninformed, incompetent prevaricator.

okay BOOMERang..

This is horrifically EPIC though I may be understating the scope of this MASSIVE Con job exercise in predatory capitalism. 

First, Linda McQuaig states the facts and sets the context: 

"..regardless of what industry spokespeople say, a private company in the nursing home business is focused on maximizing profits, as its board of directors demands.

And it will typically do this by scrimping on staff costs — hiring fewer workers and paying them rock-bottom wages with no benefits. This generally results in high turnover and worse conditions for the residents, as well as the workers.

Certainly, Ontario’s three big private nursing home chains, which receive government funding under the same formula as not-for-profit homes, have been good at maximizing profits.

Over the past decade, the three chains paid out $1.5 billion in dividends to shareholders and $138 million in executive pay.." 

I have seen the lack of resources and actual avariciously-geared services: shoddy cleaning, food preparation and meals, support for personal hygiene, space allocation -- some residents are literally stacked 3 to a room -- in private long term care residences. 

Next, a startling yet not unexpected disclosure, given how pension funds are managed.

Add to the cauldron The Great Barrington Declaration. Wait, perhaps the latter *is* the cauldron or more likely, the crucible — an instrument routinely used by savage profiteers or scammers along with a strategically-purposed alembic for transforming base materials into gold or a reasonable enough facsimile thereof that it might spark a stock market buying frenzy.

The death of millions of boomers and of members of the generation born before 1945 would materially free up Billion$ currently disbursed as pension benefits. Economists employed by the 1% wealthy are salivating at the thought of assets, including valuable real estate, being liquidated and harvested to their clients' benefit. Prosperity gospel reigns, right!?

Culling the herd under the guise of advocating for herd immunity presents considerably profitable, windfall opportunities. Another triumph for the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) and its rightwing extremist funders and associates. Cleaves perfectly to the rules of Disaster Capitalism as Naomi Klein periodically reminds us. A critique with regard to the sacrifice of the elderly, the poor and the precariously employed being happenstance sacrificed to a crass economic imperative. More here, and here.

And who can forget how that venal, opportunistic, self-righteous Trump shill R. R. Reno blathered on about the economic imperative for older and feeble folks to take one for the team, early in the pandemic? Such contemptible pseudo-moral and theological doctrine he deployed in support of his basic yet cleverly cloaked argument: Greed is Go(o)d. 

Blither on, ye disciples of Mammon! What comes around, goes around.

Deux poids, deux mesures

Some who followed my Twitter _deBeauxOs1_ account may have noticed my prolonged, unsolicited absence from that social media platform.

Yes, kittens. My account was suspended and Twitter has provided no answers to my questions, no grounds for justification to my appeals. It may be restored. But no worry, if you miss my daily injection of bons mots, droll thoughts and vivid excoriation of venal CONjob politicians — do check in here, at DJ!

Sanitary Panels is a political cartoonist who neatly captures the double standard that Facebook and Twitter apply to complaints with regard to content providers who allegedly flout their sacrosanct _Terms of Service_.

Or, as ASaintL and others put it:

Indeed. Why is that?

Infuriating, but I'm not the only person punished according to Zuckerberg's and Jack's pro-Toxic Masculinity and gynophobic, double standards.

Hyperbolic

Here at DAMMIT JANET! we use two distinctive modes of expression. We ridicule the venal, the greedy, the corrupt and the hypocritical -- our targets are mostly ideological extremism in religion and politics. To that effect, we use humour and hyperbole, viz. _The Incarnating Game_.

Or we approach a topic with rigour, reason and the research it requires, e.g. Fernhill's series on the indirect public funding of anti-choice groups and thus, the awarding of taxpayers' $$$ to groups fundamentally opposed to women's reproductive rights, engraved in Canadian jurisprudence.

We try to navigate this fine line carefully and usually signal to our readers which mode we are deploying. 

Not everyone holds themselves to such standards.

Obtuse self-indulgent mansplainers lack a sense of irony and self-awareness that might alert them to such faux-pas. 

Thus Hugo Vickers blathers and blithers, clucks and scolds -- his reaction to the manner in which the relationship between Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Thatcher is portrayed in _The Crown_. His remarks are laden with the very hyperbolic fervour which he denounces.

“That's what's so disgraceful, because people always believe it's true, because The Crown is very well put together," said Vickers. "It's lavishly produced. It's beautifully acted. It's a well-written script. So, of course, you can't just dismiss it as tabloid rubbish.”

“People will now go around believing that the Queen hated Margaret Thatcher and wanted the world to know this, which is absolutely untrue.”

 

One expects a work of fiction to hyper-dramatize some historical facts and even heighten them with hyper-realistic depiction. One hopes that an historian might keep a grip on reality, avoid self-projection and not describe a work of entertainment in histrionic, florid and untruthful terms, alas.

Viewers who watched that episode might have a different take than the one espoused by the testerical Vickers as he virtually and verbally trips on the flowers woven into the Turkish rugs of Buckingham Palace.

Bracing!

Now there's a word I love.

Bracing.

Picture yourself on the bridge of a ship. No, not the Titanic. 

A Canadian Navy frigate. The wind slams you, its icy gusts laden with frozen droplets of fog.

Political humour here at DJ! is caustic, sharp and bracing.

Let my new favourite comic Tony Baker describe another form of *bracing*.

Oui. It's just a different take on the brilliant Molly Ivins' view of how to weaponize humour. In her words:

"There are two kinds of humor. One kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule — that's what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful."

Twelve years ago on this day, Fernhill and I gave birth. DAMMIT JANET! sprang forth, as Athena did. What joy and naughty merriment she has brought.

Ontario: Open For Bizness

Something old and something new..

My fancy way to announce that DJ! will be juxtaposing vintage blogposts to a new one.

Let's start with Tim Hudak, shall we? The last time I recall hearing that smarmy worm mentioned was when my co-blogger Fernhill's heavy lifting exposed his support for antichoice groups and their gynophobic agenda.

Her persistent scrutiny of Hudak was so juicy and comprehensive that it was stolen then claimed as his own by an unmentionable big muck-amuck political operative.

Well lookee here and take note of where Hudak happens to be, now. How CONvenient and expedient, ri-i-ight?

Here's a cogent overview of how the criminal element might be using real estate and property development deals to launder $$$ in Ontario.

More recently: "An internal report from Canada’s anti-money laundering watchdog found nearly half of the real estate companies audited weren’t complying with key areas of the country’s anti-money laundering regime and experts warn these “serious gaps” can hurt criminal investigations. The report prepared by the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FinTRAC) for Finance Minister Bill Morneau included an audit of 172 real estate companies, brokers and developers in 2017-18."

Has any serious investigative journalism scrutinized the connections between Premier Drug Lord's criminal past, his mob cronies, his developer donors, lobbyists and his Fraud Nation government's predilection for meddling in business ventures that favour real estate, property development and gambling?

Oops.. the last time I posted links in my tweets about DF's hash dealing antecedents, I was suspended from Twitter. Better not push my luck again. Friends of the F*rd are paid big bucks to survey social media.

Old, white, privileged and mediocre men.

There's a tweet floating around from some Democrat flunky naming his "Dream Team" players for the POTUS 46 cabinet posts. It includes David Petraeus as Director of National Intelligence and Larry Summers for the Treasury.

Right-o. Petraeus with his messy and rather unintelligent choices.

Bruce Carson -- Stephen Harper's *influence peddler* aka fixer -- did once observe:

And Summers? Not only is he Jeffrey-Epstein-adjacent to put it mildly but Larry is also a slick shill for the fossil fuel industry and for predatory neoliberalism, basically.

Seems rather obvious why these two Clinton-legacy creeps could still garner the admiration of some Democrat men. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The Democrat boys' club is just as sleazy as the Republican one.

Patriarchy is a circle jerk, or in Economic terms: the *invisible hand* that lubes and turns the crank of capitalism.

Vomitrocious

As Drug Lord yaps and gibbers away, mute the BS that the malignant narcissist is spewing.

Then watch Christine Elliott's face carefully. I swear that at least twice, she vomits up in her mouth.. then swallows. A useful and required skill for anyone to perfect, working in the Fraud Nation government.

Here's the link.

Remember the lies Drug Lord proclaimed, just over a month ago?

And Norm Wilner accurately nails Premier Fraud Nation's factless, neverending CONjob, scamming the rubes, full-tilt tirade of fabrications that slither from his mouth like snakes and centipedes.

Like a ba-a-ad penny..

..yeah, I'm back. Did anyone miss me? My first knock at the door was for naught. As far as DAMMIT JANET! is concerned, I'm only some schmuck cruising through. She wouldn't acknowledge me as her co-parent. I abandoned her years ago and now, now.. I'm charred catbread. It appears sheer stubborn perseverence (and the support of my co-blogger Fernhill) pays off, though. Who knew? Whoa. MASSIVE learning curve here, kittens. Will write sumtin *serious* soon to confirm that my microphone still works. Also, it's never too late to gloat about the Greedy Orange Ogre being the biggest LOSER.