The Left got organized to get trusted comrades elected to two vacant positions on the Board of Directors of the Carnegie Center this evening. That’s the same Board that homeless Bill Simpson was elected to in June 2007, only to be banished two weeks later to the sidewalk by the City of Vancouver, denied access to Board meetings as punishment for exercising his right to freedom of expression.
Jean Swanson, author of "Poor-Bashing: The Politics of Exclusion" and an organizer with the Carnegie Center Action Project [CCAP] to end homelessness, sent an email about the election to volunteers on the CCAP mailing list. Swanson, an American ex-pat who spoke to a UN representative about the issue of homelessness in Vancouver but apparently found no time to speak up about the "exclusion" of homeless Bill Simpson from the Center from which she organizes, gave recipients of her email not so subtle hints about who to vote for:
”Hey CCAP folks. A Carnegie board election is coming up, for 2 people, and our very own CCAPer, Rolf Auer, the famous letter to the editor and article writer, is running.”
Rolf Auer wrote in "The Long Haul", the now defunct newspaper published by End Legislated Poverty, a Vancouver organization Swanson helped found, and he knows her well. He continues to write letters to the editor of the Carnegie Newsletter, cookie-cutter left-wing letters. It’s doubtful that Auer can be counted on to protect the right of Bill Simpson and other Carnegie members to freedom of expression. Last summer, the Carnegie Newsletter published a letter of support Auer had written for Paul Taylor after a campaign was launched by Carnegie members to curb Taylor's power as editor of the Newsletter when he admitted libeling Bill Simpson. Taylor had written a column claiming that Simpson had written blog material that was “sadistic” and had relied on fraud to get elected to the Board -- the libel was written after Simpson supporters began agitating about his barring from Carnegie for freedom of expression.
Swanson continued in her e-mail:
“Sandra Pronteau is also running. She is active in Raise the Rates and is going to be part of the Poverty Olympics on Feb. 3.”
Pronteau is part of the group of activists Swanson is involved with, activists who have been publicly agitating for higher welfare rates.
At tonight's meeting, Pronteau, an aboriginal woman with long dark hair, in her thirties, with four children, said she wanted to see the "ongoing trafficking" of drugs outside the building addressed. She closed by saying, "Poverty is another issue that I totally support, and homelessness."
Auer, a tall, bald, middle aged caucasion, was nominated by Paul Taylor. In his brief election speech, Auer said he had been an "anti-poverty activist" for over 10 years. He expressed concern about gentrification on the Downtown Eastside: "I want to see the neighborhood saved and do everything in my power to see that that happens."
Neither Auer or Pronteau mentioned the elephant on the table: the barring of duly elected Board member Bill Simpson from the Carnegie building for daring to operate a website which "features links" to the Downtown Eastside Enquirer blog which has criticized Carnegie.
Both Auer and Pronteau were elected to the Board.
See related article, "CBC Interviews Bill Simpson", at:
http://downtowneastsideenquirer.blogspot.com/2008/01/cbc-radio-interviews-bill-simpson.html
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There seems to be no end to the hatred of the people expressed by the likes of the Jean Swansons of the Western world. Today at Covenant Zone there is a post on the current problems faced by a publisher who now faces the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal for printing the so-called Danish Cartoons. A radical Muslim is suing for hate-speech compensation; and this day continues with Lionheart in Lutton, England, still facing arrest for exposing Pakistani drug-dealers in his neighbourhood, a case of hate-speech, seemingly; there is the on-going case of Maclean's Magazine and Mark Steyn, brought by a radical Mulsim, for-- hate-speech. And there sits Simpson on the sidewalk, banned from the Carnegie Center for linking to a blog the povertarians don't like.
It's different in America: there they simply erase comments that defy the editorial position of the paper and continue to call their readers and commentators racists and hate-mongers, as we see today in the Chronicle.
It's slowly coming to an end, this Left dhimmi fascism. Slowly there are people waking up to the fact that the fascists of the Left have over-stepped the bounds of acceptable behaviour and they must be stopped before this gets worse than it is already.
I'll be at McDonald's on Sunday afternoon to sit and discuss how we as a community of free-thinking people might make this city more open to the allowance of free speech. The Simpson case is simply too obviously a case of abuse of power by a clique of bureaucrats who wish for nothing more than quiet and conformity to the Left norm, to be celebrated for their moralisms, and to be given awards by each other for each other's edification. That's not acceptable. To crush under the jackboots of povertarians people like Simpson who object to it is an outrage we must all put a stop to.
So Sunday at noon is coffee time at McDonald's. Main and Terminal. See you there.
There were so many rules broken to do this election, it was really a farce.
1. Members were locked out of the meeting for much of it, on orders from the President, Margaret Prevost, and enforced by Matthew Matthew, our new secretary. Even when I was made aware of this, by a member standing outside motioning me over through the glass doors, I helped her in, and they admitted that was not per the rules, strangely, they still didn't unlock the door. I went out and got Mike on security to unlock it. I asked him if he was going to come in, he said "Oh no, we aren't supposed to get involved in there" I expressed surprise, and told him that John Dunnings, another security guard, had come in and made a big speech in favor of Paul Taylor, the Carnegie Newsletter editor, continuing to have complete and sole control over that publication. Mike was shocked.
2. The usual procedure is that the president of the board gives the first 15 memberships of the new year to the board. When Margaret handed me mine some weeks ago, I was of course concerned that there might be something about this card that would prevent me from voting. Sure enough, I found that my card was entirely undated, and unregistered on the lists, so there was no way to prove that I had been a member for long enough to vote.
HMMMMM. It was looking like I would be unable to vote for a while, but then as the other board members filed in, it was discovered that their membership cards were stamped with dates that invalidated them from voting too, because of an oversight by Ethel and Margaret, and so now they had to break the rules in order to allow the whole board to vote, and since they were already breaking the rules for the rest of the board, they had to go ahead and allow me to vote too, or it would have looked just too insanely discriminatory.
I would also like to mention that in that meeting, it was voted on that Ethel's new opera, the theme of which was handed straight to us from Community Services at City Hall, but in a very sideways, secret, and not community driven manner, would be given the left over money from the first mounting of the Carnegie Opera "Condemned".
What made that action so reprehensible, was that the money was considered to be the province of the cast, and at the last Post Mortem of that production we talked about doing different things with it ourselves, such as giving it all to the only homeless woman in the cast, or using it to put on a free out door show for the people. Instead, Ethel, without consultation with any of the cast, put it toward her new opera, an idea which certainly never came up at the earlier meeting.
Too bad, the homeless woman in the cast of Condemned could have really used that $500, I'm sure.
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