As for the Toronto Star’s endorsement of Freeland, no jolt either. The Star often prefers Liberals. In this case, however, embracing the former senior editor of the Financial Times (lately managing news director at Thomson Reuters) meant that the paper had to turn its back on one of its own.
Freeland rival Linda McQuaig had been one of the Star’s most enduring and highly regarded opinion columnists. The editorial board evidently decided that although they were losing a columnist, they were not gaining a candidate in McQuaig. They exercised this professional privilege while fulfilling their ethical obligation by featuring both candidates in individual interviews.
Oh, perhaps the Star was a trifle more generous with photos of Freeland in personably smiling mode. Then, on the final-push weekend before the Monday by-election, the Saturday Star published a strange snub of the McQuaig campaign by veteran business and current affairs columnist David Olive on page 2 of the business section.
Under the headline Bring On The Billionaires And Their Largesse, Olive writes: “I’m not here to defend plutocrats, exactly,” as if something were making him squirm about just coming out with a defence of Freeland and the reasoning in her book Plutocrats: The Rise Of The New Global Super-Rich And The Fall Of Everyone Else.
Perhaps the something that makes him sound so uncomfortable is that Freeland doesn’t identify rising inequality as a problem, presenting it as part of the “creative destruction of capitalism” which “inevitably brings an overall improvement in everyone’s living standard.”
Perhaps it’s the energy required to maintain his pretense of total obliviousness to McQuaig’s (and co-author Neil Brooks’s) counter-argument in The Trouble With Billionaires. (In particular, see chapter 10: Why Billionaires Are Bad For Democracy.)
Does Olive mention either of the candidates’ names or either of these book titles? Not in so many words.
But he doesn’t need so many words. All he needs are the key words he repeats throughout his column like a persistent drumbeat: “plutocrats... plutocrats... plutocrats... super-rich... plutocrats...” to emphasize his “hope [that] the annual ranking of the country’s hundred richest people, conducted by Canadian Business Magazine… will not add to ill feelings directed at the ultra-rich,” for they are the kind of “benefactor” the rest of us “need” in these times of reduced government social spending, don’t you know?
One almost expects Olive to wax nostalgic for the days when common folk could look to benefactors like the Medici of 15th-century Florence, who had such great taste in Michelangelo sculptures. And indeed, if Olive had simply stuck to his paean to arts supporters (consider, for example, the Siminovitch family, who made possible this year’s award to Chris Abraham, director of Crow’s Theatre), his message might have seemed merely narrow instead of shocking.
The shock is Olive’s conclusion that “the reason they’re rich isn’t the reason so many of the 99 per cent of us are struggling. That abomination owes chiefly to insensitive governments.” After that, Olive offers what he considers the ultimate in helpful advice: “The plutocrats have not raised their voices in outrage over that dangerous inequality. This is where the richest among us can make their greatest contribution.”
This was a fine thing (not!) to be serving up to the Toronto Star’s Rosedale readership two days before a by-election, especially in these times when, in McQuaig’s words, the “capacity of the rich to undermine democracy – so obvious and yet so strangely invisible – is surely the most serious negative effect of extreme inequality.”
In the November 23 Star, that wasn’t all that was “strangely invisible.” So was any acknowledgement that NDP candidate McQuaig had anatomized “that dangerous inequality” and pointed the way toward its redress.
Original Article
Source: NOW
Author: Roselyn Loren
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