… sort of seems to be.  I mean not the CBC per se (although they’re BFFs) —just “public broadcasters.”

The pro-socialism-reliant and state-owned CBC “watchdog” group called the “Friends of Canadian Broadcasting”, which nonetheless bills itself as an “independent watchdog for Canadian programming and is not affiliated with any broadcaster,” has sent out another “urgent” dispatch to followers.  They beckon all followers to immediately go and sign their latest online petition, thereby defending the state-owned media and saving it from, well, a “killing” by the nefarious tentacles of the dangerous neocons.  That’ll show ‘em, see?!

Offering to actually stand up and pay for their CBC division won’t show nuttin’, but signing a petition demanding that the government continue to force all taxpayers to continue to pay for that tendentious tripe will.  That’s progressive.  Or fascist.  Whatever.  No time to think.  Just sign.

As you read parts of the urgent dispatch you may be tempted to efface my crown as King of Superlatives.  Well I have a very extremely, urgent, secret news item for you then, concerning the Conservatives and “Stephen Harper” (who ironically doesn’t have any official descriptive “position” in this country):  you’re desperately wrong and possibly calamitous in an urgent fashion, and you may in fact have a dangerous, and hidden agenda, one which is secret but yet one which we’ve known about forever, and it is not to my liking and my result in killing me (at least income or job-wise).  Did I say urgent? 

It’s fairly alarming.  Nay it’s very alarming.  (And yet we knew all along, so you know, not so much).  By golly it’s urgent.  Let’s share.  I mean if you truly know how to “Love” (with a capital L) a government entity, you’ll find this shocking.

SUBJECT: If you Love CBC, Stand and be Counted
DATE: 12/14/10

Dear friend,

Something very alarming has come to my attention which I want to share with you on an urgent basis.

Stephen Harper’s secret plan for the CBC was revealed on November 23rd when the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage mused publicly about killing our public broadcaster!

Dean Del Mastro floated an extremely dangerous trial balloon at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage meeting by asking whether the government should “get out of the broadcasting business”.

As shocking as it may seem, a senior member of the Conservative caucus blurted out that the government is considering cutting ALL funding to the CBC!  …

Sounds like the “watchdog” has rabies. 

But after all, “killing” the state-owned, socialism-reliant media would leave the media, and I quote (but I can’t possibly replicate what I imagine is the underlying angst), “entirely in the hands of the private broadcasters”!  What?  Leave it in the hands of citizens?  And no government competing against its own citizens?  That ain’t socialist!  Or fascist!  For shame! 

The urgent missive is, as are almost all of the reflexive appeals to Canadians from the doctrinal far left and intolerant set, whenever they demand that we as a nation (but of course by way of another official government decree or action) snuff out any airing of conservative ideas as expressed (just willy nilly!) on the likes of Fox News Channel, or anything like them, scatterbrained, at best.  For example, Ian Morrison, spokesman for the (independent and unaffiliated!) “Friends of Canadian Broadcasting,” breathlessly resurrects the old anti-Conservative — or what we might call the Conservative-hater’s — canard about the “hidden agenda” and claims, at one point:

…help to stop Stephen Harper from implementing his long-held, but until now hidden agenda to eliminate the CBC. …

Then a few sentences later, claims he’s known about the agenda for years, and it’s been painfully obvious to him and all:

Stephen Harper has had a long and simmering death wish for the CBC which Friends has tracked for many years. …

Just how “independent” is an organization that is unequivocally politically progressive and anti-Conservative?  Not very, as I see it, and I have good eyes.

It eventually ends with a sad-sack quote from a guy who just loves — Loves! — relies on — the state-owned media.  ”…David Suzuki and the Nature of Things teaches me responsibility,…”

So…

… Please sign the petition today.  The future of the CBC hangs in the balance.

Yours sincerely,

      Ian Morrison
      Spokesperson
      FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting

This urgent emergency appeal has been brought to you by Joel Johannesen, hidden but yet well-exposed spokesman and FRIEND of Freedom and Democracy (and Cap’n Spokesman of PTBC — which has been entirely in the hands of a (evil!) private citizen for years!). 

And now I’m off to an eye appointment with a private — private, I tell you! — Optometrist, whom I will pay with my own after-tax cash.  God help me and my eyes, for this can’t possibly turn out good, it all being in private hands, and all. 

Here’s what’s actually urgent:  State-owned and state-run media should be banned in Canada, and that notion enshrined in the constitution. 

URGENT RATINGS EMERGENCY AGENDA:

As is always the case, the state-owned media, which has received and consumed countless tens of BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars, is nearly non-existent in the top-30 list of what Canadians choose to watch.  Nearly every show in the list is American.  I think this is because Canadians don’t like crap.  And crap is what you get when the government funds it, rather than writers and producers having to compete for it in the marketplace.  The usual exception in the list, for the CBC, is hockey, and a show called Dragons’ Den (a Japanese-created and owned show via the U.K. — only marginally “Canadian”).  Apparently CBC and David Suzuki’s agenda to teach Canadians “responsibility” has, like the CBC itself, failed. 

Actual TV ratings from BBM, November 29 – December 5, 2010

1 AMAZING RACE 17— CTV

2 GLEE— Global

3 GREY’S ANATOMY— CTV

4 BIG BANG THEORY— CTV

5 SURVIVOR:NICARAGUA— Global

6 C.S.I. MIAMI— CTV

7 H.N.I.C. GAME #1— CBC

8 DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES— CTV

9 DRAGONS’ DEN— CBC

10 THE MENTALIST— CTV

11 BLUE BLOODS— CTV

12 C.S.I. NEW YORK— CTV

13 BONES— Global

14 CTV EVENING NEWS— CTV

15 LAW AND ORDER:SVU— CTV

16 NCIS— Global

17 CRIMINAL MINDS— CTV

18 TWO AND A HALF MEN— CTV

19 UNDERCOVER BOSS— CTV

20 $#*! MY DAD SAYS— CTV

21 LAW AND ORDER: LA— CTV

22 BIG BANG THEORY— CTV

23 MIKE & MOLLY— CTV

24 LIE TO ME— Global

25 CTV NATIONAL NEWS— CTV

26 VICTORIA’S SECRET— Global

27 HUMAN TARGET— CTV

28 SIMPSONS— Global

29 CTV EVENING NEWS WKD— CTV

30 CASTLE— CTV

UPDATED at 3:45 PM PST to get the name of the “Friends” more accurate —it’s not “Friends of the CBC” — it’s “Friends of Canadian Broadcasting”. 

HAVE A CREEPY, PROGRESSIVE, KIND OF ORWELLIAN, STATE LOGO, um, “HOLIDAY!”

I say the you’ve got to be kidding party (and not merely a few Liberals), wherein they consistently refuse to use the word “socialism” to describe how they plan to fundamentally transform Canada — simply represents socialism with a happy face. 

But you’ve also heard people say a picture is worth a thousand words.

Here’s one of the state-owned, socialism-reliant state media CBC’s “holiday” offerings.  It’s red.  Features the state-owned “corporation’s” logo with a smiley-happy-face right there in the middle.  It’s for the kids:

“CBC Kids’ Red Gem t-shirt”
Description:  “Kids CBC Red t-shirt with the Kids CBC Logo on the front.”

If that happy face on the state-owned, socialism-reliant media T-shirt for babies doesn’t creep you out, you just might be a socialist. 

The funny thing is, as a capitalist, I refuse to wear, for free, shirts or hats with real, actual corporate logos on them, as all socialists would also of course refuse to do.  I certainly wouldn’t purchase a shirt or hat with a corporate logo on it.  Socialists go further and hate that McDonald’s sells Happy Meals to kids and “gets them addicted” (it’s not any addiction to the food, necessarily, that they worry about since they all eat it — it’s the potential addiction to what they call the nefarious “corporate culture” that so concerns them); and they detest other companies marketing anything to their impressionable children.  But they apparently have no problem with their children wearing a shirt emblazoned with a state-owned, socialism-reliant CBC “corporate” logo.  With a children’s smiley face on it, yet.  In red.  And pay for it.  On the state-owned web site. 

This is the CREEPY PROGRESSIVE GIFT OF THE “HOLIDAY” (as the CBC calls it) SEASON, so far.

Even as I was writing my blog entry last week about the state-owned, socialism-reliant CBC’s abysmally biased, tendentious reporting when it comes to their reporting of political news out of their beloved Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, I was waiting with bated breath for their next report which involved the Fraser Institute, so I could show you once again, for the 8,000^th time, how they glibly propagandize Canadians. 

I didn’t have to wait long! 

(Go and read that blog entry.  It spells it all out for you:  why the CBC does this, how they do it, and so on.  I think it’s important to know.  You do want to “know more, and know now”, as the CBC purports that you should do and can do thanks only to them and their great benevolence and honesty, don’t you?)

To be precise, the state news and political opinion broadcaster said this, just last week.  It was in the online version of their TV news channel story, in describing the far-left Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, around whose latest report about the “rich” not paying their fair share of taxes (yaddah), the CBC built a huge news story: 

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is an independent, non-partisan research group focused on issues of social and economic justice.

Of course the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives is where the “Alternative” is socialism.  The socialism-reliant state broadcaster failed to mention the word “socialism” once, either on air or online. 

But yesterday, in reporting about the Fraser Institute’s latest report about our “healthcare” system’s increasing wait times, they were sure to call the Fraser Institute a “conservative” think-tank. 

Of course the good Fraser Institute is not “conservative” as much as it is “normal Canadian,” but more to the point, the CBC chose to politically label the normal Canadian Fraser Institute, and chose to not attach any political label to a socialist group — in fact going so far as to inform Canadians that they’re “independent” and “non-partisan,” which is to me a risible attempt at a head-fake, at best.  It’s an outright lie at worst, in its omission of pertinent facts and in its inconsistency in providing political labels and details, which you should indeed “know”, and “know now.” 

Instead of trying to fake-out Canadians, they should have identified the socialists as, say, “socialists”, or more accurately, “radical fringe leftists”, or some such thing. 

But then the CBC gets away with calling itself a “corporation,” and although it’s 100% state-owned and it’s taxpayer-funded, competes against citizens in the otherwise free market in business for profits, and for attention and audience, and in the forum of ideas and politics.  And what kind of government does that?  A “conservative” one?  Of course not.

The vital, core-government concern, the essential state-owned CBC news (channel 502 on my dial which goes to 1750), just informed Canadians that a man who turned down a six billion dollar offer from Google for his company Groupon —would have become an instant billionaire, if he had accepted it. 

How DO they figure out complex mathematical equations like that?

Well they brought in their state-owned, socialism-reliant CBC “business” specialist (‘scuse the oxymoron!), Jeannie Lee, to explain some of the high finance.  See, if you accept six billion, you’d be a billionaire.  Over to you, Nancy.

The CBC.  Know more.  Know now.

I can’t figure out why the Suzuki-employing, finger-pointing greenies at the CBC, who (through Suzuki but more as a general matter) are constantly badgering us about the “man-made global warming” eviro-crisis/emergency — would provide car allowances and parking fees for their executives.  And why they’d be paid for by taxpayers.  Or anybody. 

I suggest we buy them donkeys. No I take that back.  I suggest we provide them with a brochure about acquiring their very own donkey with their own after-tax cash which we paid them. That is until we stop paying them at all, which would be retroactive to last Tuesday if I were in charge.

Go to Cnews.canoe.com and read reporter Brian Lilley’s article today about the state-owned, taxpayer-funded CBC’s executive perks.  These are perks paid to the government’s media operation Vice Presidents and other executives of the (quote/unquote) “corporation”.  The VPs are paid between $173,000 and $375,000. There are eight CBC vice presidents.  Once again, that’s eight Vice Presidents.  Who knows how many other “executives” there are. 

By way of reminder, the United States of America has one Vice President. And he is paid $227,300.  Less than CBC Vice Presidents.

CBC bosses take in top line perks
By BRIAN LILLEY, Parliamentary Bureau

OTTAWA – CBC’s top executives are eligible for perks that include having their day care expenses paid, the cost of a home security system covered and having taxpayers pick-up the membership tab at exclusive clubs.

An access to information request asking for records on membership in health, social or private clubs paid for by CBC for their senior executives returned a confusing document with very little detail.

[...]

…perks are a monthly car allowance, club memberships, security system/maintenance, child/elder care, health care spending account, registered education savings plan, flexible component of the CBC pension, financial planning and parking.

[...]

In response to a question about club memberships paid for by taxpayers, a list of 13 names from the executive ranks was released with the cost of the membership and the type of membership stripped out.

State-owned media is not a core function of government in free, non-communist/socialist countries.  State-owned media should be banned in this country, and that notion enshrined in our constitution.

It’s weird.  I don’t remember seeing this on the state-owned, taxpayer-funded CBC’s news reporting today.  Or ever.  Nor on their web site. 

Oh they were sure to report on the bonuses paid to myriad real corporate execs (money not paid by taxpayers but by shareholders).  They, the CBC, were a loud part of the chorus —the symphony — the drumbeat of anti-corporate liberal media outrage perpetuated by the liberal media since well before the recession began.  But they left out this bit among other bits:

Surprise: CBC asked for cash, while laying off workers
Bosses took big bonuses as recession deepened

By Brian Lilley, Parliamentary Bureau
Last Updated: December 3, 2010 5:09pm

OTTAWA

The far-left, state-owned CBC news channel just got through promoting — no, not merely “reporting” — I do mean promoting — yet another one of the left-wing advocacy reports from the far-left Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, this morning.  Their reporting on this is being repeated ad nauseam throughout the day.  At your expense. 

The state-owned, socialism-reliant CBC once again uncritically reports, verbatim, a quote from a very far-left socialist group (though the CBC doesn’t indicate its extreme left position on the political spectrum), and its socialist propaganda.  And they’re doing it using visual devices like this for emphasis.  Note that according to the “report,” reducing taxes is bad; and “all Canadians depend” on government social services.

  That organization, the CCPA, is, as most of us at this web site know by now thanks only to me and not the CBC, which refuses to tell you the whole truth, a very far-left group.  As I always tell you and the CBC doesn’t, the “Alternative” that they refer to in their name is actually socialism.  This is the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing if ever there was one. It’s Fabian socialism, is what it is. It’s not a mere coincidence that the “logo” for the Fabian socialists is, in fact, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Their collective effort (and I do use the word “collective” advisedly) is, I think, to try to help make the far-left socialists and socialism, writ large, seem totally mainstream and unremarkable.  As a perfectly normal and politically unremarkable state of affairs.  Which of course it is not.  It actually represents the far left fringe in free democracies like Canada which were (as those of us who weren’t taught in today’s public schools all know) founded on capitalist, free market principles and free enterprise; and a great deal of personal and family responsibility and reliance; and faith and Judeo-Christian values; instead of a near total reliance on government and its social-engineering, as the progressives advocate. 

Now unless you’re one of those who think that socialism isn’t the extreme far-left of politics in this country or any other (I mean say you’re a Stalinist or a Marxist or Maoist or some other brand of murderous, totalitarian, authoritarian, militarist communism, and so socialism is a normal state of affairs or a part of the transition to the ultimate, inevitable goal), socialism is by any standard “the far left”.  It’s the furthest left, really. 

If I’m wrong, please inform me.  Comment using your real, full name, and location, any time. 

So it’s worth pointing all of that out to the folks, especially on what, if I’m being very generous, is a supposedly “mainstream” newscast, on a state-owned media news channel.  Right?  I mean when your whole lengthy story is entirely based on regurgitating exactly what the socialists have put out, it’s worth mentioning something about their being a far-left (extremest, really, but they reserve that word for tea party grandmothers) socialist organization.  Right?  It’s the source of your whole report! 

If I’m wrong, once again let me know. 

Well I’m wrong according to the state-owned CBC. 

Once again, as they always do, the CBC anchors and reporters, in positively and uncritically discussing this latest propaganda coming out of the far-left CCPA, refer to this left-wing organization only as …. the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, assigning it absolutely no political or economic label whatsoever.  Ever.  Not once in the multiple times they’ve repeated this story, using different anchors and reporters, so far today.  Not once have they said the word “socialist”.  Not once. 

So this is not news.  This is left-wing propaganda.  On the state-owned media, which you’re paying for.  Right now.

At best, when the CBC does attach a political label to that group (in, for example, its online articles), the state-owned media allows the CCPA to define itself (which it does by calling itself a “progressive” organization, of course, as any Fabian socialist wolf would).  However when the CBC mentions the Fraser Institute, which it does as infrequently as it can, they are very careful to warn — and I do read it as a warning by them to Canadians — that the Fraser Institute is a “right-wing” (or some such) organization.  They might even repeat that a couple or more times to ensure that you, the viewer or reader, take whatever the Institute is touting (which is only normal freedom and free markets and free enterprise, and yes, that’s perfectly normal), with a huge grain of salt. 

The effort in that case is to marginalize them as the outcasts and as the fringe, in juxtaposition to the socialists, whom they would like you to view as normal and mainstream. 

It’s a bare minimal journalistic requirement to properly inform readers and viewers that your entire report, which is wholly based on that far-left-wing group’s report, is rooted in their far-left socialist thinking and advocacy.  Don’t you think Canadians deserve to know that?  Wouldn’t that be “Knowing More,” as the state-owned CBC news advertises itself?

Let me know.  And oh hey, maybe let them know.  They apparently don’t know that yet.  They’re all about the knowing more. 

So it’s another co-op Fabian socialist effort between the 100% state-owned, taxpayer-funded, socialism-reliant CBC, and a left-wing advocacy group which advocates for socialism.  What are you going to do about it?  I’ve done my bit. 

You still sitting there?  Not even a comment about it? 

Fantastic.  It’s working then.  Congratulate them on the way out.

State-owned media should be banned in this country, and that notion enshrined in our constitution.  There should be a constitutional distinction made to ensure a separation of media and state.  There is nothing more dangerous than the confluence of media and state.