It Couldn't Be Clearer but Nobody in Ottawa is Listening - Running Out the Clock

Okay, I agree - the science isn't in.

Not all of it anyway.  There's more coming in almost daily - research, studies, experiments, observations and analyses, projections - there's a continually growing mountain of information and knowledge.

The thing is - while there's more to come, it would be beyond foolish to expect anything else in a world caught in a state of flux.  The important thing is that this new science pouring in affirms, corroborates, supports and reinforces the scientific consensus on anthropogenic or man-made global warming.

Sure the Earth has always changed in the past only not like this and never in the history of our species or most other species for that matter.  Science is also exploring our resilience to warming and it finds that, overall, life can evolve or adapt to about one degree Celsius per millennium.   That's the rate of warming we can be expected to sustain without significant die off.  Can you spot the problem there?

Our leaders have come up with this magical, 2C target.  In other words, we need to limit warming to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That's their notion of the limit within which we can have a reasonable chance of avoiding truly catastrophic, runaway global warming.  Keep in mind this one thing - they're approaching this the way a bookie does the World Cup.  They're gambling on bookie odds.  Only the wager isn't a paycheque, it's the survival of our civilization, the future of our kids and grandkids.

Speaking of bookies, something of which I will admit to no knowledge myself, you might be aware of what they call the "betting line."  These are the odds. They're not fixed in stone.  The line tends to move as the big game nears.  Maybe a team's roster changes, a star player is lost to injury here or the opposing team gets a favourable trade there, the sort of thing that can influence the outcome of the game.  Risks are assessed, odds adjusted and the line changes accordingly.

Our betting line on climate change, however, is fixed in stone at 2C.  It's been 2C for ages and it hasn't budged even as the science flooded in demonstrating that our optimism was unfounded.  It's like discovering the Patriot's entire offensive line has been lost in a plane crash and still sticking to the old betting line.  That's insane.  Yet "insane" has become the lingua franca of global discourse in the 21st century.

Know what else is insane?  The attitude of our leaders that this is a problem we can tackle in 2030 or 2040 or eventually, just not now.  We have an economy to grow and grow and grow.  We need to find ever more cheap, fossil energy to fuel perpetual, exponential growth.  We take it, purely on faith, that growth is a matter of life or death to our society.  That's insane and like every other delusion it's completely without substance or foundation.

Climate change campaigner, Bill McKibben, of 350.org, contends that, in the next ten years, just ten, we will decide the fate of the world for thousands of years.

It could, if we set our minds to it, be the decade when the planet's use of fossil fuels peaks and then rapidly declines. We've built a movement that, for the moment, is starting to tie down the fossil fuel industry: from the tarsands of Alberta to the (as yet unbuilt) giant new mines of Australia's Galilee Basin, the big players in coal, gas, and oil are bothered and even bewildered by a new strain of activist. They're losing on the image front: when the Rockefeller family, the Church of England, and Prince Charles have begun divesting their fossil fuel stocks, you know the tide has turned.

And with it comes the sudden chance to replace that fossil fuel, fast and relatively easily. Out of nowhere the price of solar panels has fallen like an anvil from a skyscraper, dropping 75 percent in the last six years. Renewable energy is suddenly as cheap or cheaper than the bad stuff, even before you figure in the insane monetary cost of global warming. So in Bangladesh they're solarizing 60,000 huts a month; the whole country may be panelled by 2020.



That rapid change wouldn't be enough to stop global warming -- we're already seeing drastic changes, as anyone living through California's drought can attest. We'll continue to see record-breaking years (like 2014. And like 2015 so far). We'll have to deal with record flooding. The ocean will grow more acidic. But maybe, if we really ratchet up the transition we'll avoid a challenge of civilization-scale.

Or, of course, we could change slowly, the way the Koch Brothers would like. (And for that matter, most political leaders). We could do nothing out of the ordinary, and wait three or four decades for solar power to replace fossil fuel. It would rattle the fewest cages in the short run.

And in the long run it would, by most of the computer models, condemn us to four or five degrees Celsius of global warming -- enough to take the world utterly out of the rhythms of the Holocene, enough to call into question our ability to grow sufficient food or find sufficient water.

It may be tempting to dismiss McKibben as an alarmist.  He's nothing of the sort. The top scientists in the myriad disciplines that directly or tangentially deal with climate change might even find him unduly optimistic.

My take is that we haven't much hope unless we find a way to release the choke hold that neoliberalism, market fundamentalism, has on our political classes. Their "political capture" by Big Fossil and pocket-liners like the Koch brothers was no accident and sets them up as a powerful force to block the change so badly needed.  Harper, Trudeau, even Mulcair - they've got to go, the lot of them, if our kids are to have a chance.  Ten years and the clock is running.

What Neoliberalism Has in Store For You

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From Le Monde, a timely explanation of how disastrous neoliberalism continues to thrive despite an endless string of economic disasters and what it holds in store for you even as you continue to vote for those who inflict it.  Hint. Neoliberalism is class warfare and it's being waged in our own Parliament against us.

Even neoliberal proponents recognize that it is a crisis-ridden system. In his popular book Why Globalisation Works, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf writes: “Between 1945 and 1971, in what might be called the “age of financial repression”, there had been only thirty-eight crises in all.... Then, between 1973 and 1997, there were 139 crises. The age of financial liberation has, in short, been an age of financial crisis” (3).

Neoliberal policies have been implemented from 1973 in Pinochet’s Chile, in the UK and US under Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s and then across increasing swathes of the world. These policies include, privatization, the de-regulation of the financial sector, increasing openness to foreign trade and investment, and cuts to public welfare spending. Supporters of neoliberal policies argue that these will increase economic efficiency as state regulation of the economy is replaced by more accurate ‘market signals’. These are held to be better at encouraging and allocating investment, which in turn leads to higher economic growth and greater benefits for the economy and population as a whole.

So why do so many Western governments, including your own, embrace neoliberal, market-fundamentalist policies?  That's because it's actually successful only not in promoting a healthy economy to benefit all.  Its success lies in the quiet transfer of economic and political power out of your pocket and into the pocket of those it's actually intended to benefit.

Can it be said that neoliberalism is a success? And why are crises and austerity policies part of this success? One clue was provided by Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, in a speech in early October 2014 where he noted how real wages in the UK are around 10% lower than in 2007.

In his film Inequality for All, Robert Reich, who was Bill Clinton’s labour secretary between 1993 and 1997, documents the collapse of US wages over the last four decades. In the late 1970s the typical male US worker was earning $48,000 a year (inflation adjusted). By 2010, the average wage had fallen to $33,000 a year. Over the same period the average annual income of someone in the top 1% of US society rose from $390,000 to $1,100,000.

Neoliberal policies aim to reduce wages to the bare minimum and to maximize the returns to capital and management. They also aim to demobilise workers’ organisations and reduce workers to carriers of labour power — a commodity to be bought and sold on the market for its lowest price. Neoliberalism is about re-shaping society so that there is no input by workers’ organisations into democratic or economic decision-making. Crises and austerity may not be intentionally sought by most state leaders and central bank governors, but they do contribute significantly towards pursuing such ends. Consequently, these politicians and leaders of the economy do not strive to put in place new structures or policies that will reduce the recurrence of crisis.

...The rising levels of inequality associated with neoliberal policies are often decried by critics as weakening social ties and generating social conflict. But this is exactly what neoliberal policies are designed to do — to break apart social organisations such as trade unions, transform worker’s into individuals at the mercy of firms’ hiring and firing strategies, and transfer resources from workers to owners and managers of capital. In this regard neoliberalism uses crisis and austerity to great effect.

There is one downside for proponents of neoliberal policies however. Because they generate socio-economic crisis they erode public confidence in politics and economic policy. It is here that progressive political organisations can highlight the class basis of neoliberalism and propose a realistic alternative that favours the majority of the world’s population, not the minority.

It's hard to imagine that today's 'permanent warfare state' could ever have arisen absent neoliberalism and the commodification of state violence into for-profit warfare.  Likewise disaster capitalism is utterly dependent on the life support of neoliberalism.  What you need to understand is that, until we throw these people out of Parliament - the lot of them - this is only going to get worse, not just for you but even more so for your children and theirs.

It's Time Science Deniers Were Driven Out of Office

The Harper government is full of them and, judging by their policies, the other parties have their share too.   They're science deniers, those who find it politically expedient to either deny scientific opinion or simply ignore it in the quest for political advancement.

The simple fact is this type of political complacency is putting us in peril - you, me, everyone.  It's inexcusable and it represents political corruption or political cowardice and nothing else.

McClatchey Newspapers offers an eye-opener, "Who Needs Science", that looks at how narrow interests from the tobacco to the fossil fuel industries, even the sun tanning salon association, get the political classes to do their bidding and ignore science despite the harm they inflict on the public.

The dispute between the sun-tanning industry and science has a depressingly familiar ring. How long did Big Tobacco persist in denying that smoking caused cancer?

By pressuring lawmakers to disregard evidence that children who spend a lot of time in tanning beds are more likely to develop skin cancer, the industry hopes to buy time. Sure, some kids will get melanoma, but that potentially fatal affliction may not show up until adulthood. In the meantime, 14,000 tanning salons continue to exploit their tan-infatuated customers.

Audacious denial of scientific fact has become so much a part of our world that we hardly blink when an industry takes issue with health experts about the harmful effects of its products.

A recent cover story in The New York Times Magazine describes how the processed food industry not only downplays the health risks of its products, but also that Big Food employs scientists to make the salt- and sugar-laden junk they sell even more addictive.
If we thought bringing Big Tobacco to justice was a long, hard slog, imagine the fight Big Food can muster. Coca Cola, Kraft Foods and their ilk aren’t about to let a bunch of pointy-headed scientists tell Americans what they shouldn’t eat.

It’s bad enough that science scofflaws hold the upper hand in the market place. It’s inexcusable when they are able to keep the public from learning about threats to their wellbeing, which appears to be the case in South Carolina.

The State newspaper had reported that for more than a year the S.C. Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has been sitting on a report by a team of scientists that outlines the possible effects of climate change on the Palmetto State.

...South Carolinians don’t need a biology degree to appreciate how such changes could cost the state untold millions in damages. 

Unfortunately, they aren’t able to read the 102-page report because the DNR board has blocked its release.

Why? Because the report says global warming is a reality and recommends the DNR should help educate the public about climate change.

“The board only wanted to make certain that the effort was not to produce an advocacy document that pointed to the reasons for climate change, which remain under scientific debate,” DNR Board Chairman John Evans told The State.

Suppression or indifference to science, particularly where the wellbeing of the public, today and in future generations, is imperilled should be a political career-killer.   Yet the blame rests with us as much as anyone named Harper, Kent, Oliver, Mulcair, Trudeau or Hall-Findlay.   We set the bar for these clowns and we haven't just lowered it, we've dropped it to the ground.   If they're not busy jumping for us they're instinctively drawn to jump for someone else.


The 21st century is going to be tough enough for our kids and grandkids to get through without making their lives even more miserable by tolerating science deniers in our political ranks.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/09/184770/commentary-who-needs-science-anyway.html##storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/09/184770/commentary-who-needs-science-anyway.html##storylink=cpy

Why the Fear?

Why do the Liberals and NDP still act as though there was something remotely controversial about anthropogenic global warming or the threat to our society from growing inequality of incomes, wealth and opportunity?

These are two enormous threats to the Canadian people, today and for generations to come, and both require progressive solutions.

As a major, per capita emitter, Canada is among the handful of nations under the greatest moral duty to act to arrest climate change.   We are full members in a select club of major emitters who have an obligation to lead the world in decarbonizing our economies and our societies.   Yet there doesn't appear to be even one of those currently in party leadership positions or vying for a leadership spot who will stand on the principle of what Canada, already a well-deserved pariah state, must do.

And then there's the social cancer that threatens to consume our middle class, inequality.   It seems to be conventional political wisdom that Canada's economy is so integrated with America's that attacking inequality is too dangerous, fraught with enormous consequences for the Canadian economy. 

Are we really doomed to fly wingman to America as it spins out of control?   In several respects America is on its way down and on its way out.   It has become the corporatist state sans pareil, the most powerful permanent warfare state perhaps since Rome and a boiling cauldron of spreading inequality and ascendant oligarchy.   Must we tie ourselves to that?   Can we not imagine something better for our people than what they would inflict on theirs?   Are we really that fearful of a better future?

There was a time when the New Democrats would be demanding these very things for the Canadian people.   There was a time when they would be standing and loudly shaming the government of the day for this sort of thing.   Now they stand mute, silenced, seeking to become what they for so long reviled.   The duct tape across their mouths is their own.

One Simple Truth that Reveals All Others

We need to accept one simple truth.   To avoid runaway climate change we can burn just one-fifth of already discovered reserves of fossil fuels.   One fifth, no more.

Fossil fuels have, for the survival of mankind, become sub-prime assets.   The higher-carbon the fossil fuel the more worthless it is.   That begins with coal and extends to unconventional fuels such as tar sand bitumen.   Within the context of salvaging civilization for our kids and grandkids, these fuels have no value, no worth.

Steve Harper, with his piggy little eyes focused greedily on vast stores of oil and gas on the Arctic seabed, is about as far away as you can get from accepting this one simple truth.  He wants to rapidly maximize Canada's fossil fuel production from wherever it can be found, however it can be extracted.   Stephen Harper is the arch-nemesis of mankind.  But, then again, so are many of the fossil fuelers that hold sway on both sides of the floor of our House of Commons and dominate our legislatures from coast to coast to coast.

These types won't refute that one simple truth.   They won't even acknowledge it.   Best, for their purposes, to ignore it altogether.  Pretend it doesn't exist.

If they were to accept this one simple truth so many other truths they instinctively circumvent, deny or ignore would begin, by themselves, slamming some doors shut and opening others.   Governments forged out of 18th century economics, 19th century industrialism and 20th century geopolitics would find these anchors no longer hold, their institutions having lost far too much of their utility to be helpful in guiding us through the 21st century.

We're still moving although not we're not moving forward as we have for so many generations.   We're instead ricocheting off walls at increasingly unpredictable velocities and angles, repeatedly reaching the limits of our very finite biosphere.   We try so hard to make it all bigger and, hence, better and we can indeed defy ecological gravity - for a while.   But it's a matter of eating our seed corn.   This takes many forms including draining our aquifers; collapsing global fisheries; overworking farmland to exhaustion, transforming it into useless desert, relentlessly contaminating our air, water and even our soil..   This is a global, 4-pack a day habit.

Whether it's Tom Mulcair or a future Liberal leader, you'll be quite easibly able to tell whether they're bent.   That will be when they get the courage to speak that one simple truth, the one that reveals all the others.

And now, this.  It's a video released this morning by WBGU, Angela Merkel's climate change advisory panel.  It contains highlights of speakers' comments at last May's symposium in Berlin on alternative energy prosperity.

I'm Pretty Sure

I'm pretty sure, not betting sure but close, that I'm still going to make it out of here before this place of mine gets heavily hit by climate change.

"Not betting sure" because there doesn't seem to be a solid floor of any kind underneath the global warming right now.   Just a few years ago we were warned of what was to come by the end of this century.   A few weeks ago we were warned of what might occur by the end of the next decade, 2020.

Now we're told that what we once welcomingly accepted as "end of the century" and uncomfortably squirmed with the idea that would more likely be two decades hence, is but four years distant.

Four years.   If a millennial turned somehow into a generational problem, just how do you make sense of that; how do you explain how we got it so wrong?

If we don't figure out very soon just how we got it so wrong, the sacrifice and effort in trying to fix the problem may be seen by a great many people across the political spectrum, as excessive and hence undesirable - even unacceptable.

There, I've said it.   I no longer believe my country and my fellow Canadians, even fellow Liberals or the NDP truly put the welfare of the world and the welfare of our own next generation ahead of immediate interests, their own. Those qualities, now forfeit, stand far behind and inferior to expedience and opportunity.  

Won't just one leading Opposition party finally take it up?  I'm pretty sure I won't be holding my breath.

The Sin of Political Despair

In some people's holy book, despair is a sin.   I always figured that idea came from somebody who wasn't quite done with you yet.

Is Stephen Harper the Prime Minister of Despair?  Is that his secret agenda, to get Canadians so despairing of their government that they become alienated, detached from the political process and, thereby, no threat to the one guy nobody really likes, Steve Harper?

That's not to say Steve is the sole instigator of this vexing misfortune.  It sometimes feels like Steve is playing the disaffected Canadian voters with his left hand at the bottom of the keyboard, while his right hand is busy playing the opposition in the higher octaves.

The future of Canada, to me at least, looks mighty grim if we don't even quest to restore the political centre to its pre-Harper position.   Without defending the Canadian left, what remains - the centre, the centre-right and the hard-right?   Win, lose or draw that makes Canada a conservative country something with ominous overtones to an emerging petro-state.

I worry that a Canada without a firmly anchored commitment to social democracy will devolve into a country with great inequality and divisive regionalism in which the nation and people are left permanently weakened and vulnerable to powerful interests.  This is the Canada that Stephen Harper envisions as ideal.

This is shaping up to be the most challenging and dangerous century in the history of mankind's civilization.   It will be a century in which social cohesiveness will be of immense importance to nations and societies.  Harper's approach is a body blow to that essential cohesiveness.   Why then is the opposition following him in trail?  Is the left now truly indefensible?  Has it become devoid of utility and meaning?   Was it ever valid?  I despair of discovering the answer.

Ah, Jack, Here's a Thought

Assuming the NDP rally translates into the harvest of seats predicted by some, I hope Jack will be smart enough to make peace with the Libs and forge some viable cooperative relationship.  When you've got an ego as oversized as Layton's somehow stuffed into such a diminutive frame that won't be easy but it will be a fair measure of his fitness to lead.

Where to begin?  Well there's going to have to be some sort of interim budget of course.  But beyond that?  Well, here's an idea of something badly needed and on which NDP and Liberals alike should be able to agree - the state of press freedom in Canada.

We need to scrutinize the corporatism rampant in  Canada's media outlets.  It's a core principle of press freedom that a healthy democracy depends on the public having access to the greatest diversity of opinion.  Democracy is crippled when the public is left to but a handful of voices all reading from the same page of self-interest and shared advantage with the powers that be.

What is needed are powerful curbs on both concentration of media ownership and media cross-ownership.  No one "voice" should be able to control all the newspapers or television or radio in any market nor should any one corporation dominate the gamut of media in a defined market.  Say, for example, in a particular province publisher "A" can own not more than a fixed percentage of the major dailies or the regional weeklies.  Whichever owns the big city paper may not also own a television or radio station within that same market.   Split them up.  Force divestiture.

This won't be easy to accomplish.   It will require some pretty favourable tax treatments, perhaps even start-up grants.  Yet it will be the best thing that's ever happened to Canadian journalism.   Newsrooms, long gutted of staff and nearly shuttered, will re-open.  Journalism may again be competitive, independent, lively instead of the moribund sham we find soaking up ink in today's papers.

Just an idea but I think it's a great way for the Libs and NDP to forge a working relationship that will be sorely needed if we're to reverse Harper's abuses and excesses.

Shades of Grey

I'm wrestling with how to vote on Monday and I probably will be even as I take pencil in hand in the booth.  It's unfortunate they don't have a specific  "none of the above" option because that's the way I'm feeling right now.

A good deal of my problem is that I'm coming to see the NDP, Liberal and Conservative leadership as something of a gelatinous mass.  I suppose it's the predictable result of the Liberal leadership/policy vacuum that left the centre ground up for grabs.   Harper moved to the left, Layton to the right and Iggy fought for air between them.

Travis Fast, over at Relentlessly Progressive Political Economy, illustrates the point:

...The NDP has long since jettisoned, something Stephen celebrates and I lament, any commitment to the types policies that would restore the governments capacity to unwind the inordinate amount of power the corporate sector wields over the public. Without such “radical” options in their public policy arsenal they will be more or less forced to make the same type of trade-off’s. 

The fix is in.  Just as America fell to a corporatist Congress, Canada has been overtaken by a corporatist Parliament.   Nobody, including Jack, seems willing to accept that 18th century capitalism, 19th century industrialism  and 20th century geopolitics have run their course, have lost much of their former utility.  Layton, Ignatieff and Harper all seem committed to governing as though we were still in the 80's.  They're all stuck in the "growth and jobs" paradigm, a mechanical frame of mind that all but rules out vision at the very moment when we most need vision from our political leadership.

It's becoming increasingly harder to shove our heads in the sand.  Globally we're already well into what has been called the "Century of Revolution."  The evidence of the unrest that has already broken out or is quietly building through the developing economies and Third World is everywhere.  Yet the reality of this is not even on the radar screens of our leadership.   Are we to assume that, even if Canada remains stable, we'll be immune to the upheaval elsewhere?  The indifference of our amorphous political leadership appears to assume just that.

Our civilization is beginning to slam into a wall that limits what is a genuinely finite world.  Many resources remain in abundance but others, including some essential to a stable world, are becoming depleted or critically scarce.  When demand (as in the sum of both want and need) exceeds supply, want loses its currency while need persists and grows in importance.   This is where we either shift from a growth-based consumption model into an equity-based allocation model or else accept some seriously brutal alternatives.  Again our amorphous political leadership appears oblivious.

Anthropogenic or man-made global warming is here and spawning climate change effects.   Some of the best and brightest warn that we have a limited time left to break our carbon addiction or risk triggering unstoppable feedback mechanisms, runaway global warming that will move earth into a new climate mode that will render most of our planet inhospitable to most life.  Yet again our amorphous political leadership mumbles vague promises about cap and trade measures that experience shows they have no intention of implementing on any effective basis.  It's all greenwash and nothing more unless it is harnessed to a powerful break in our carbon addiction.

Even if we were willing and able to end our carbon addiction tomorrow and managed to do just that on a global scale, existing carbon emissions will continue the heating process for at least another century.  We're in for a century of sea level rise; severe storm events of increasing frequency and intensity; precipitation pattern changes leading to extended drought and flood cycles impacting on our food security; species migration and extinction (and the resulting spread of pests and disease) - and this is just for starters. 

We're not alone.  Every corner of the planet is in for this.  We are, however, unique.  We're one of just a handful of countries that, by virtue of their geographical placement, stand to be the last and least affected.  We also enjoy certain demographic and resource advantages necessary to meet these challenges.  Yet most of this bounty, these advantages, won't be realized on their own unless they're harnessed to our service in a timely and effective manner.  Again we're met with a deafening silence from our amorphous political leadership.  They alone have the power and resources absolutely essential to initiating the information, evaluation, planning and implementation processes of climate change adaptation but they show absolutely no willingness to act.

I suspect the reason that Layton, Ignatieff and Harper seem so amorphous, so gelatinous is because none of them has any real vision and I'm pretty sure the reason they're all so devoid of vision is because each is working so hard to avoid acknowledging the great and pressing challenges facing our country.  They have no vision because they're all looking backward, imagining they're still in the 80's.  None of them has the courage to look forward and tell us what they see.

Why Won't Our Politicians Discuss What Really Matters?

Is it really any wonder that so many eligible Canadian voters are so disengaged from federal politics?   What's happening is the entirely foreseeable result of the degenerated form of politics being practised by every major party today.  It's hapless, pathetic even and it simply doesn't connect with the electorate.

A couple of weeks back I came up with the term "mercantile politics"   to describe what seemed to be the use of a mishmash of policies, disjointed and sometimes incoherent, that seem to be clutched out of a bag and tossed out in the hope of getting traction with the public.   It's like fishing for votes, trying out this lure and then the next in search of whatever will get the voter to bite. 

To me, today's political scene is like going into a store for particular items and finding the shelves stocked with everything except the stuff you came in to buy.   You turn on your heel and walk out.

The Tyee's Murray Dobbins voices a somewhat similar complaint:

In trying to anticipate what a federal election campaign will look like ...it is striking that the biggest issues facing humankind are not even on the radar, yet alone being framed as planks in any party's campaign platform.

This amounts to whistling past the graveyard with potentially fatal consequences. In our conventional political universe we are talking about jet fighters, corporate tax cuts, growing the economy and abolishing the Senate -- and if we are lucky some mention of climate change, poverty and the dire financial straits of seniors.

But the other universe is virtually invisible despite the fact that it is very real and well known. That parallel road that no one in authority wants to acknowledge is one which is taking us over a cliff. That universe tells us that we are rapidly reaching the planet's limits to growth, that we are well past the start of a global fresh water crisis, that we have already reached peak oil, that climate change will have ever-increasing planet-changing impacts and that rapidly rising food prices will lead to mass starvation in the developing world.


Why can't we talk about what really matters?

...It is as if we need a whole new set of institutions from civil society to the formal political level in order to even sensibly begin the conversation. The ones we have simply cannot cope with the looming human catastrophe because, in its totality, it tells us that everything we are doing now and are planning to do, and how we now think and talk about the present and the future are simply irrelevant.

Read the rest of Dobbin's column here.

I'm at that point in life where I should be set in my ways, seeking the assuring comfort of the familiar.   Yet reality has set in to show me that "my ways" were largely illusions, conveniences of a time that floated on untenable precepts.  We have become riveted to values that can do us no good.

I watched one of Steve Harper's nauseating promo ads, the one in which he steals a play from The Gipper.   Remember when Reagan trashed Calvinist Carter by promising his voters that America's best days were still to come?  Harper is using that same sideshow pitch today.   Yet it was bullshit when Reagan conned his people with it and it's bullshit when Harper uses it on us today.  It's the sort of fable that depends on the outright lie of infinite expansion.

Many Americans are waking up to the reality that they've been brutally conned by Reagan and his Age of Ruin.  They now begin to grasp the greatest transfer of wealth in American history -  wealth that has been siphoned from America's once robust middle class, the beating heart of their country's former greatness, into the pockets of the ultra-rich who have played such a dominant role in America's decline.   Income inequality, the enormous gap between rich and poor, has corroded America, undermined its society, sapped it of its strength and vitality.  Yet this too no one will discuss.

Canada is following in America's trail.   We, too, have seen an unhealthy growth in the wealth gap.

There's a huge difference between wanting to govern a country and simply wanting to control its political process.  Unfortunately, the latter seems to have eclipsed the former on today's political agenda.  Governing the country appears just too hard for the digestive tracts of Conservatives, Liberals or New Democrats.  They don't want to tackle the Herculean job of governing, managing.  They simply want to rule.

I have always winced when I read people rattling on about how the "important thing" is to get rid of Harper.  What matters is restoring the Liberals to power.  Who says?  Why?  I don't want a change of rulers, I want a leader who isn't so self-serving, dishonest even that he can't bring himself to address the enormous, looming problems confronting this country and that will plague my children's and grandchildren's future.   I'm sorry, Liberal supporters, but you haven't put that guy forward.  The guy you have on offer believes our country's future is tied to becoming a filthy fossil fuel superpower.  How bent do you have to be to believe we ought to support that?  No thanks.

Epitaph for an Ambitious but Lacking Man

"...there was no other way. Let's not pretend this is an elegant departure of his own volition in the interests of the country. [The man] lost an election that might have been won outright had he only departed sooner. No good grace now can erase the catastrophic mistake the man has made in so over-reaching his political skills and talents. Should there be pity and generosity for him now in his leaving? For all those years he plotted, planned, schemed and wrought havoc on his party in his single-minded determination to seize the crown he was not equipped to wear – though he had gifts and virtues too. But there will be time enough on many a long winter evening to ponder the dark and strange character of [the Man] when he is gone."

Polly Toynbee wrote this passage of the soon to retire Labour leader, prime minister Gordon Brown. As her words sunk in I had a moment to wonder if Canadians are not just one election away from the moment when we might well say these same things about another man, one closer to home?

Dead From the Neck Up

Tory, Liberal or NDP - take your pick. All three have something in common, leaders who don't really connect with the Canadian public.

Layton was to have used the Harper ascendancy to move the New Democrats into something approaching second place. That's why he's attacked both the Harper government and the Libs at every turn. Unfortunately when you break out to move up through the pack there's a price you pay for it. You lose your opportunity to influence policy, to make a difference, because you're seen for what you are, just an opponent.

Finally, when an election does arrive, there's the risk you'll be seen as having run out of steam. Your positions are old and, frankly, boring. It's that "oh, not again" syndrome. The effect on the New Democrats is already being seen in the polls where, recently, public support has been found as low as 12 and 13%.

I won't go on about Dion, if only because I'd like to take a break from that for a day.

SHarper, however, is proving to be the best thing the Tories have done for the Libs or the NDP. Canadians don't trust him, at least not enough to give him a majority government. He's the one at the cocktail party you keep an eye on to make sure he's not pocketing the good silver. He's ultra-secretive and a known control freak. Best of all, there's nothing remotely charming about the guy. He's a stiff. A mere circulatory system away from being a corpse.

We may be headed for an election but it'll be one where all three parties seem dead from the neck up.