We're All Neoliberals Now. Let's Change That.

One thing that struck home during our extended election campaign was how our mainstream political parties have become deeply invested in neoliberalism. While it has several descriptions, reflective of its insidious vagueness, neoliberalism is the merger of political and economic ideology most often called "free market fundamentalism." It is a sort of merger of political and commercial/corporate powers usually born out of the surrender of incidents of political sovereignty through multi-national financial and trade agreements.

It's a process akin to the tactics of a boa constrictor whose victims often fail to realize the severity of their predicament until its too late. That's an apt analogy for how we have, for decades, been conditioned to our role as prey.

Neoliberals have been very successful in conditioning a large segment of the electorate to see themselves as 'taxpayers' rather than 'citizens,' a feat that isolates them from public debate beyond how government impacts their wallets and readies them to accept 'transactional democracy,' where money dictates policy for the powerful often at the expense of everyone else.

Nobel laureate economist, Joe Stiglitz, explores legislated inequality in his book, "The Price of Inequality." Modern inequality, he explains, is neither market nor merit-based to any significant degree. It is legislated and comes in a plethora of forms from tax treatment (exemptions, reductions, deferrals), to grants and subsidies, to the transfer of public resources at far less than market value. The 'taxpayer' public is particularly blind to these government giveaway programmes having been groomed to venerate the rich as the "job creators" whose success "trickles down" to the masses. In reality cooperative lawmakers ensure that the nation's wealth actually "trickles up" to those who least deserve it. It is a malignancy known as "rent-seeking."

Another triumph of neoliberalism has been in conditioning working class Canadians, white and blue collar, to support capital over labour and acquiesce to the decline of unionism. For all the legitimate criticisms of the union movement, it has been freely demonized by the neoliberals and their political minions as regressive and an economic scourge. We've lost sight of the role unions play as the cornerstone of a healthy, robust middle class, the ladder of social mobility, and a vehicle to maintain the balance between labour and capital without which inequality flourishes.

We have been conditioned, groomed, to be submissive to neoliberalism, powerless, incapable even of rallying to our own defence. Harnessed to the myths and scourges of neoliberal ideology, we are clearing the path for increasing inequality and the corrosion of social cohesion and it's a road that leads to illiberal democracy and a gradual rise of economic feudalism.

The legacy of Stephen Harper will be how well he moved us down this path during his decade in power. It's a legacy he shared with his collaborators, Layton, Mulcair and Ignatieff.

It's time we charted a new path while that option is still open to us.



I strongly urge you to watch this Days of Revolt interview.

Canada's Next Tyro?

Either Tom Mulcair doesn't know his ass from his elbow or, as some of us suspect, he's a pandering huckster with a loose tongue who, like Harper, sees riches in trawling for bottom votes. Either way, he's not the sort of leader any Canadian should want to re-open our constitution.

Yet if Mulcair becomes our next prime minister, a real possibility, and if he should actually follow through with his outlandish promises, a far more remote possibility, we're in for a constitutional donnybrook that could make America's fiasco in Iraq look quick and tidy.

Abolition/castration of the Senate - constitutional amendment. Quebec separation (50% + 1) - constitutional amendment. Electoral reform (abolition of "one voter/one vote") - constitutional amendment.

The irony is that Mulcair will have to do battle with the clear pronouncements of the Supreme Court of Canada, the very institution that has, alone, defended Canada from the darkest instincts and worst excesses of the Harper regime.

We hear from some New Dems that much of this can be done without constitutional amendment, a position that eerily echoes Harper's own in recent years. Harper/Mulcair - Mulcair/Harper? It has that wafting stench of an imperial premiership, the very thing we've been living under for the past decade.

These same New Dems foam at the mouth at the mere suggestion that their boy, like his rivals, is truly neoliberal. They point to baubles such as corporate taxes, day care and carbon pricing as if that somehow proves their point. Nonsense. I'll now recycle a passage from a comment I wrote this morning in the previous post:

One way or the other power will be in the hands of a neoliberal. None of the prospects is capable of breaking the neoliberal/corporatist/free market fundamentalist stranglehold on Canada. Some believe that promises of a small hike in corporate tax rates and carbon pricing show Mulcair and Trudeau are not neoliberal but that's the sort of loose talk you get from people who have no understanding of neoliberalism and its companion afflictions.

Like it or not there is a world government and it's corporate, wielding incredible powers that once resided as elements of national sovereignty now freely surrendered. Ever since the Thatcher/Reagan/Mulroney era we've given away the shop and our democracy, our society and our economy have been degraded accordingly.

As I see it, the first step to free ourselves of the yoke of neoliberalism is to smash the corporate media cartel. Strict regulations controlling concentration of ownership and media cross-ownership are essential if Canadians are ever to have access to the fullest possible range of information and opinion across the broadest political spectrum. When the national media have fallen under the control of corporatist forces the public is inevitably fed a corporatist message. You can tell when that has occurred. It's manifest when the media are transformed from the watchdog of government (on the side of the public) into the government's lap dog (a powerfully symbiotic relationship) which is what we've seen for a very long time.

Do you think you're going to get that sort of bold action from a Tom Mulcair or a Justin Trudeau? Not unless you're lying to yourself.

Fact is I don't trust Tom Mulcair, not one bit. He can't deliver on his endless promises without plunging Canada into similarly endless constitutional chaos that will inevitably leave the country divided, region pitted against region, our already grievously divided people ever further divided.

If I had to pick between the two (and thank Odin I don't), I'd vote for Trudeau if only because he's far more level headed than Mulcair and, in the result, more benign.

Post-Harper, Canada badly needs to regroup. It doesn't need a hot head promising to embark on constitutional Crusades.

Paul Martin Gives Tommy Angry Beard a Well-Deserved Kick in the Ass.

Paul Martin was the finance minister who plucked the federal government from the brink of fiscal chaos. It was a tough time for all including the provinces, even the Canadian Forces, but he balanced the budget and paid down $90 billion of our national debt. He kept the bankers in line and when he handed the reins to Harper he bequeathed a full treasury ready to absorb the brunt of the great collapse of 2008.

Put simply, Martin pulled our fat (yours and mine) out of the fire. Which is why he deserves to be heard on the mess we're in yet again and where we're headed.


The public has grown used to the Harper government’s mantra on deficits, but should be startled by what they hear from New Democrats, he said.

“That Tom Mulcair is now a student of Stephen Harper’s economy makes absolutely no sense,” said Martin.

“Where is the conscience of those who belong in the NDP? How can the NDP party — those who’ve worked it for all these years — stand for the fact that the party is now holding hands with the Conservatives and saying that our goal in the next mandate is to do absolutely nothing?”

“The current Conservative government has ground the economy down so far, trapping our most vulnerable of citizens in the process, that the next government has to act and that the NDP doesn’t understand that boggles the mind. Conservative obsession with eliminating the deficit down to the final decimal point is more than short-sighted. It’s yesterday’s war.”

Further evidence of how Mulcair and Harper are on the wrong page with their babble about balancing budgets comes from a new poll that finds Canadians believe their country is in a recession and support the federal government running a deficit to stimulate the economy.

Anyone who reads this blog knows I've been pretty tough on young Trudeau but I will give him credit for his commitment to a major, 3-year infrastructure programme. Sure he'll run a deficit but that's not the point. It's like bad cholesterol and good cholesterol. Harper's "throw a deck on the cottage" stimulus budget of 2009 was bad cholesterol. It was money squandered, gifted away, with no lasting return. Infrastructure spending, of the sort Harper didn't have the vision or courage to implement, is good cholesterol. It's money invested in public assets - highways, bridges, overpasses, power grids - that bolster the economy and reap returns for decades.

Of course, with this latest poll, the bearded chameleon may change his colours as effortlessly as he has on other situations in the past.

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.

Shoot to Kill - Anyone, Everyone

Israeli soldiers willfully targeted civilians in last year's war on Gaza.

Testimonies provided by more than 60 Israeli soldiers who fought in last summer’s war in Gaza have raised serious questions over whether Israel’s tactics breached its obligations under international law to distinguish and protect civilians.

The claims – collected by the human rights group Breaking the Silence – are contained in dozens of interviews with Israeli combatants, as well as with soldiers who served in command centres and attack rooms, a quarter of them officers up to the rank of major.

They include allegations that Israeli ground troops were briefed to regard everything inside Gaza as a “threat” and they should “not spare ammo”, and that tanks fired randomly or for revenge on buildings without knowing whether they were legitimate military targets or contained civilians.

..Post-conflict briefings to soldiers suggest that the high death toll and destruction were treated as “achievements” by officers who judged the attrition would keep Gaza “quiet for five years”.

The Israeli campaign itself was one giant war crime.  It featured the now-standard Israeli tactic of Dahiyeh, the deliberate targeting of essential civilian infrastructure - water plants, sewage treatment plants, power utilities before moving on to hospitals, schools and finally residential neighbourhoods.  This is outrageously contrary to the laws of war and international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions.  

Yet the Liberal Party supports these atrocities, masking it under the guise of "self defence."  Let's not forget that Mulcair also was on side with this at first until he sensed that the wind had shifted and conveniently reversed himself.  

Are You Supporting Politics of Nihilism?

2030.  You do realize that's just 15-years away.  Do you realize that 15-years is a heartbeat when it comes to making fundamental change?

So, what's so important about 2030?  Plenty.  By then we'll be experiencing climate change impacts that are disruptive and difficult to bear.  Take your head out of the sand, look around you - all around, and you'll see many of these impacts are already here and they're growing.

We're coping, more or less, at least most of us.  There's a certain leeway, call it resilience.  We've got resilience, so far.  However, as the challenges grow and worsen, our resilience, our ability to absorb them, wanes.

We think those of us in temperate zones can adapt to warming of 2C by 2100. No one is under any illusions we can equally cope with 4C of warming.  2C is a game changer.  4C is game over.

Yet 4C is now a distinct possibility and, if we want to avoid 4C, we have to choose to avoid it.  We have to do the things necessary to achieve that outcome. We have to make the choices and do the necessary things and we have to 'choose and do' within the remarkably limited time still available to us.

Top world experts at Germany's Potsdam Institute use the example of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) to make their point.  CCS as a viable, mature technology is still about 10-years off.  2025.  But developing CCS is one thing, implementing it is quite another.  To get CCS up and running on any meaningful scale will take another two decades, possibly three.  That would be 2045 to 2055.

The thing about CCS is that it's used as a sop to justify continuing our extraction and consumption of fossil fuels.  It's a "don't worry, be happy" parlour trick.  It's a way to obstruct us from making the choices and doing the necessary things to avoid 4C and it will contribute greatly to our prospects of getting to 4C or worse. Not for nothing have the fossil fuelers seduced us with grand promises of CCS for so many years.

The scientific community has reached a strong consensus view that, if we're to have any reasonable chance of salvaging a 2C world, we have to leave at least 80% of already known fossil fuel reserves in the ground, unburned.  There's a choice.  It's pretty straightforward.

So, how do we restructure our economies and our societies so that we can leave 80% of known fossil fuel reserves untouched, safely in the ground?  What must we do?  How are we going to go about this?  How much time do we have to choose, how much time to plan, how long will it take to implement our choices? Hint:  it's going to take a while.  Hint:  it's not an open-ended option.  Time is not on our side.

As far as Canada's political parties are concerned, none of the leaders vying to run the country wants to make this fundamental, potentially existential choice lest, in making the choice, they risk political consequences.  Look, we've seen it before.  When Dion proposed the Green Shift initiative, the great Layton every bit as freely as Harper, used it as a cudgel to beat Dion senseless.   Layton showed how low the bar of Canadian political leadership has fallen and it's nauseatingly low. Mulcair is even more opportunistic.

I get a lot of this, "we've got to vote (liberal/ndp) because we've got to get rid of Harper."  Really, why?  If all three parties are inherently nihilistic, it's my obligation to reject them all.  No, sorry.  My vote, I get to set the bar and I will not vote for anyone below it - which includes Messrs. Harper, Mulcair and Trudeau.

ISIS?  You have to be kidding.  The assault on Canada is already underway and it has nothing to do with Islam.  If anything it's more affected by Christian fundamentalism and political partisanship.

The bottom line - if your party doesn't openly endorse the need to leave high-carbon fossil fuels, especially coal and bitumen, in the ground, then you're supporting and empowering the politics of nihilism.  There is no fence-sitting on this one.

We're Responsible for Letting Them Off the Hook.

When it comes to Canada and climate change, who can fault the Americans for seeing us as almost schizoid.  We acknowledge the reality and danger of climate change, we worry about it, and yet we tolerate, even support, politicians who will do nothing about it.  From Bloomberg View:

Last week's announcement that Canada won't match U.S. emission-reduction targets offers a fresh look at Canadians' enduring bipolarity on climate change: They're far more likely than Americans to say the problem is real, yet keep voting for a government that does nothing about it. Therein lies a cautionary tale for the rest of the world.

In a narrow sense, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's statement marks a reversal. He has long used the absence of a U.S. climate policy to justify his government's failure to introduce oil and gas regulations he first promised almost a decade ago, on the logic that the two countries are too economically integrated to pursue different approaches. Now that U.S. President Barack Obama has set an official target -- a 26 percent to 28 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2025 -- Harper is saying the American policy is too aggressive to match.

But the Canadian decision is really the culmination of years of hostility toward the idea of fighting climate change. Harper's government pulled out of the Kyoto protocol in 2011, dismissed environmental groups as foreign pawns and gave its version of the Internal Revenue Service a new mandate and extra funding to target them. It closed climate research programs, laid off scientists and prohibited those who remain from speaking to the news media. And the latest data show that unless something changes, the country won't come close to its 2009 Copenhagen pledge to cut emissions 17 percent by 2020.

Here's what makes the Conservative government's resistance to climate policy puzzling: In poll after poll, Canadians say they support such a policy. Eighty-one percent say there is "solid evidence" of global warming, compared with just 61 percent of Americans. (Even among Conservative Party supporters, 68 percent agree -- roughly the same share as Democrats in the U.S.) And 54 percent say their country "can and should do more to reduce emissions," compared with 29 percent who favor the status quo and just 5 percent who say Canada is doing more than it should. More than two-thirds said they support "a financial incentive" to cut emissions, including 56 percent of Conservatives. Almost 2 in 3 support using taxes to do so.

That's a level of support U.S. climate advocates can only dream of. So why haven't Canadians' views translated into federal policy? The answer is that climate action is drowned out by other issues: Just 18 percent of Canadians ranked the environment among their top three priorities in a survey last week, according to David Coletto, chief executive officer of Abacus Data, an Ottawa polling firm.

That's down from 23 percent in a similar survey last year - - behind health care, job creation, taxes, debts/deficits, and "accountability and trust," and tied with middle-class incomes and retirement security. In both surveys, just 5 percent of respondents ranked the environment their top concern.

"Canadian public support for climate change action has been stable, but it is not an election issue at any level," Keith Neuman, executive director of the Toronto-based Environics Institute for Survey Research, told me in an e-mail. "So most parties can get away with saying it is important without committing to any policies." 

...A corollary of the importance of individual leaders is that progress on climate isn't teleological: The endpoint isn't assured, and there are no grounds for assuming that countries will keep getting better, because voter support isn't sticky enough to hold their successors to the same policies -- something Australia's repeal of its carbon tax last year demonstrated.

The lesson from Canada will only bring more anxiety to environmentalists: Beating climate change (or, at this point, averting its most devastating effects) depends to an uncomfortable degree on whether national leaders want to. That arrangement may have the trappings of responsive government. Underneath, it looks a lot more like luck.

In other words there is no answer for Canada, no answer for our children and theirs, in continuing to back mainstream Canadian politics - Conservative, Liberal or New Democrat.  They're all neoliberal and none of them has the sand to deal with this.  If there's going to be an answer it'll depend on the prospects of a Green revolution.  

So, know this.  A vote for Trudeau or a vote for Mulcair is a vote against Canada and our kids' future.  With these mainstream parties there'll be no meaningful, effective action until something cataclysmic happens and, by then, it'll be too late.  I am repulsed by Andean Fatalism and its rejection of posterity. It's why I finally walked out on the Liberal Party.

To me, this is not political leadership I can support.  What's your excuse?

Of Leaders and Eunuchs

One of these three has balls:  Tommy Boy, Junior, or Hillary.  And the winner is - Hillary!

Even though her duel at the ballot box isn't until November of next year, Democratic presidential frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, has wasted no time in serving notice that the fight against climate change will be front and center in her campaign.

In fact, Hillary's is the first ever presidential campaign to make combating climate change a core issue.

Our boys, Mulcair and Trudeau, get to strut their stuff this year and, like the wee geldings they are, climate change seems to be something they're not too keen to talk about.  Oh Canada, indeed.

The Gamble - High Stakes for Harper, Trudeau and Mulcair

The collapse of world oil prices is reverberating through Canada's petro-provinces; Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador; and the fallout should yet might not be a major issue when Canadians go to the polls for a dominant fragment of eligible voters to decide who will govern our flagging petro-state, Canada.

Watch for Stephen Harper to try to control the election narrative as never before. In previous elections against Dion and Ignatieff, Harper's pitch was "there's nobody better to handle the economy and, besides, look at this dork."  He defeated the Dion Liberals for a Conservative minority and, quite predictably, the Ignatieff Liberals for a Conservative majority.

This time the Harper narrative will shift.  Just as Afghanistan lost its political lustre when everything Harper had said he would accomplish turned to dust, this time we won't hear much about the economy.  Harper won't want to run on the state of the Canadian economy and no one would.  What's called for is a bit of electoral bait and switch. This time it will be all about the dreaded terrorists and that dork, Trudeau.  It's a contest in which Harper already has Trudeau partially disarmed.

By supporting Bill C-51, Trudeau and Company have given themselves two choices.  They can agree with Harper that C-51 is somehow needed, even at the expense of our democracy and civil liberties.  Or the Trudeau Libs can allow themselves to be seen as willing to sacrifice our democracy and civil liberties in a cynical effort to retain their edge over Harper.

The trouble with C-51 - for starters - is that it presupposes that our existing criminal and state security powers aren't adequate to meet the terrorist threat. That's never been demonstrated.  Where's the proof?  There is none, none at all.

It's telling that we haven't explored what, if anything, went wrong with our homebrew terrorist attacks or what we can do within the existing system to shore up our vulnerabilities.  We have pretty clear laws.  We have lots of personnel and we can hire more if needed.  We have some pretty solid intelligence resources. No one has made the case for C-51 and, here's the important part, Conservative or Liberal they're not even trying.

There's been no attempt to balance the often conflicting objectives of freedom and security.  Ben Franklin warned that those who sacrifice freedom for the sake of security deserve (and usually get) neither.

C-51, for so long as its odious provisions remain on the books, alters the relationship between the Canadian people and their government.  Our freedoms are diminished while the government's powers over us are increased.  Dissent can be criminalized.  The state security apparatus can be invoked to intimidate us. An American energy company snaps its fingers and the Stasi RCMP are on your doorstep demanding explanations.  Tell them to "go to Hell" and see what happens, what lists your name is entered on.  In the eyes (and ears, and surveillance labyrinth) of the state, you've gone from being a nobody to a duly noted suspect.  That's the mutated status of your citizenship.

Taken on its own, C-51 is bad enough.  Add it to the multi-layered cloak of neoliberalism that has infested all three of our major parties and it becomes something else again.

Harper is steaming ahead with C-51 precisely because he knows the Trudeau Libs will crater just as they're doing.  He knows that Trudeau fears (yes, that's the word "fear" and it comes with an inescapable stench) that standing up for Canadians by opposing C-51 could cost the Liberals votes in October.  What Trudeau doesn't realize is that his capitulation to Harper's will can only further divide and weaken Harper's opposition.  Harper gets to play to his base.  Trudeau gets to fracture his support. Meanwhile the undecided are increasingly less able to distinguish the Conservatives from the Liberals by what they each stand for and, worse, what they both stand for.

You know what else Harper sees in Trudeau's boot-licking?  It's the perfect set up for yet another electoral Donnybrook between the NDP and LPC.  It's a gift to Tom Mulcair and to Stephen Harper and there's little doubt that Mulcair will use Trudeau's perfidy as a club to beat the Liberal leader to a pulp.  If Ignatieff hadn't been enough to drive me out of the Liberal ranks, I expect this would have.  Sap the NDP's uncertain strength, focus its energies mainly on Trudeau, while compelling Trudeau to defend the Liberals from attacks on both fronts and the ultimate winner is - Stephen Harper.  Mulcair can't resist a second term as leader of the official opposition.  It's just too good to pass up and he won't.

At the end of the day the real losers will be you, me, and Canada.

Harper's Ace in the Hole for Election Victory in 2015? - Thomas Mulcair

Coming from anyone but Murray Dobbin, this might have New Democrats up in arms, howling with indignation.  The decidedly progressive journalist, contributor to The Tyee and Rabble, diagnoses just what the Mulcair NDP could be about to inflict on Canada - the end of our progressive hopes.

Unless something changes, come election time there will be two battles: the Harper Conservatives will be running to win, and the NDP and Liberals will be fighting their own private war. It is a recipe for disaster for the country.

The conversations that lead the NDP to this apparent abandonment of the country's best interests clearly take place strictly within the confines of the party bureaucracy. Because if the party's brainiacs actually talked to its supporters, members and progressive Canadians in general, it would know just how terrified people are of the prospect of another Harper majority.

The divide between the NDP leadership's thinking and the political sentiment of its potential supporters has never been greater. This disturbing disconnect suggests that unlike the majority of Canadians who are almost paralyzed by fear and loathing regarding the future of their country, those who run the NDP simply aren't driven by the same fear. Effectively, they care more about their party than they do about their country. It begs the question of whether a progressive party can even make a legitimate claim to the title if the people who run it actually care less about their country than the average citizen does.

Of course the same and worse can be said of the Liberals but nothing more can be expected of them. They are a party of big business, committed to the (ever-worsening) status quo with a long history of appealing to Canadians progressive instincts during elections while dutifully serving the interests of the economic elite.

...These are decidedly not normal times. For the first time in our history we actually have a government that is committed to dismantling the best aspects of our country.

That cries out for an extraordinary response. And if the NDP can't propose an accord of some kind based on principle (let's see if the Liberals have the jam to refuse) then why not do it based on opportunism? It would hardly be a departure given its myriad compromises over the years (and its opportunistic defeat of the Liberals in 2006, handing Harper power). Oddly, the NDP claims to want power yet demonstrates with its intransigence on co-operation with the Liberals that it is not actually serious.

It is obvious to all progressive Canadians that if either the Liberals or the Conservatives win a majority the country is in deep trouble. The Liberals will not commit themselves to reversing all the damage done by Harper. They are interested in power for the sake of it and would happily administer the status quo inherited from the Conservatives.

Dobbin's remarks raise an important, albeit tangential question.  Is there any room for progressives within the Liberal tent as it stands today?  If there is, I can't see it.  In my view, Liberal progressivism is a hollow affectation.  That Liberal Party is a thing of the past and there's neither the interest or will to resurrect it.  Today's Liberal Party under Justin is not the Liberal Party of Pierre. It's a diminished thing, dried up and technocratic.

What I'd like to see is a Liberal-NDP coalition just strong enough to bring in some form of proportional representation.  One term, that's all we would need. After that they can go at each other hammer and tong while the rest of us can bring the Green Party to a position of effective influence.

The Danger of the Lone Wolf

Canada's had its share of lone wolf terrorism.  In fact, most of the worst incidents have been the work of lone wolf terrorists.  They're loners, often unhinged and looking for whatever "cause" they can latch onto.  Then they grab a gun or a car and make headlines for opportunistic politicians like our prime minister to exploit, aided and abetted by a spineless opposition.

Matthew Harwood, writing for TomDispatch, warns that, when it comes to the lone wolf, the cure can be worse than the disease.

There’s only one problem with the rising crescendo of alarm about lone wolves: most of it simply isn’t true. There’s nothing new about the “threat” and the concept is notoriously unreliable, as well as selectively used. (These days, “lone wolf” has largely become a stand-in for “Islamic terrorist,” though the category itself is not bound to any specific ideological type.) Worst of all, its recent highlighting paves the way for the heightening of abusive and counterproductive police and national security practices, including the infiltration of minority and activist communities and elaborate sting operations that ensnare the vulnerable. In addition, the categorization of such solitary individuals as terrorists supposedly driven by ideology -- left or right, secular or religious -- often obscures multiple other factors that may actually cause them to engage in violence.

Like all violent crime, individual terrorism represents a genuine risk, just an exceedingly rare and minimal one. It’s not the sort of thing that the government should be able to build whole new, intrusive surveillance programs on or use as an excuse for sending in agents to infiltrate communities. National programs now being set up to combat lone-wolf terrorism have a way of wildly exaggerating its prevalence and dangers -- and in the end are only likely to exacerbate the problem. For Americans to concede more of their civil liberties in return for “security” against lone wolves wouldn’t be a trade; it would be fraud.

...In the media and in recent academic studies, what separates the lone-wolf terrorist from the phenomenon in general is the perpetrator. Lone wolves are, by definition, solitary individuals, almost always men, often with mental health problems, who lash out violently against civilian targets. At least in some fashion, they are spurred on by belief. Researcher Michael Beckerdefines it this way: “Ideologically driven violence, or attempted violence, perpetrated by an individual who plans and executes an attack in the absence of collaboration with other individuals or groups.” Although you wouldn’t know it at the moment in America, the motivation for such attacks can run the gamut from religiously inspired anti-abortion beliefs to white supremacism, from animal rights to an al-Qaeda-inspired worldview.

According to the literature, lone wolves are unique in the annals of terrorism because of the solitariness with which they plan and carry out their acts. They lack peer or group pressure and their crimes are conceived and executed without assistance. In this way, they bear a strong resemblance to the individual school shooters and rampage killers that Americans are already so used to.

...the methods that the police and national security state seem to be exploring to deal with the issue -- like trying to determine what kinds of individuals will join terrorist groups or profiling lone wolves -- won’t work. The reasons individuals join terrorist groups are notoriously complex, and the same holds true for politically violent people who act alone. After reviewing those 119 lone-wolf cases, for example, the researchers concluded, “There was no uniform profile of lone-actor terrorists.” Even if a “profile” were to emerge, they added, it would be essentially worthless: “[T]he use of such a profile would be unwarranted because many more people who do not engage in lone-actor terrorism would share these characteristics, while others might not but would still engage in lone-actor terrorism.”

As a group, such solitary terrorists differ from society at large in one crucial way: almost one out of three had been diagnosed with a mental illness or personality disorder before engaging in political violence. Another studyconcentrating on 98 U.S. perpetrators found that approximately 40% had recognizable mental health problems. The comparable figure for the general population: 1.5%.

...Because such individuals don’t have a larger network of financing and training, and may be disturbed as well, they are likely to have a far less sophisticated skill set when it comes to arming themselves or planning attacks. Terrorism researcher Ramon Spaaij of Australia’s Victoria University created a database of 88 identified lone wolves who perpetrated attacks between 1968 and 2010 in 15 countries. What he found should dispel some of the fear now being associated with lone-wolf terrorism and so the increasingly elaborate and overzealous government planning around it.

Spaaij identified 198 total attacks by those 88 solo actors -- just 1.8% of the 11,235 recorded terrorist incidents worldwide. Since lone wolves generally don’t have the know-how to construct bombs (as the Unabomber did), they usually rely on firearms and attack soft, populated targets, which law enforcement responds to quickly. Therefore, Spaaij found that the average lethality rate was .062 deaths per attack while group-based terrorists averaged 1.6 people per attack.

...As an American, the chance that you’ll die in any kind of terrorist violence is infinitesimal to begin with. In fact, you’re four more times likely to die from being struck by lightning. If anything, the present elevation of the lone-wolf terrorist to existential threat status in Washington creates the kind of fear and government overreach that the perpetrators of such attacks want to provoke.

If individual terrorists are the “new nightmare,” it’s only because we allow them to be.

Harper is on a roll with this.  It may be his best bet of winning the next election. What's sad is our lickspittle NDP and Liberal opposition.  There's a huge leadership vacuum here.  We need leaders who restore our confidence and courage, who bring us together, who put this minuscule 'threat' into clear perspective.  Instead we're beset by Liberal loudmouths who, perhaps intentionally, defend Harper's national security excesses and accuse those who don't of being soft on terrorism.

We need a new type of leadership, the sort on offer only in Elizabeth May.

They've Already Shown You Their True Colours. And You'll Vote for Them, Why?

My party has only one voice in Parliament but it's a voice against which all the rest are to be measured and, when you do that, you get to see them clearly for what they are, their true colours.

In today's Toronto Star, columnist Tom Walkom calls out Mulcair and Trudeau for what they are - spineless opportunists for whom serving themselves will always trump serving Canada.


So far, the only opposition MP with enough guts to critique the content of the Conservative government’s new anti-terror bill is Green Party Leader Elizabeth May.

She said Monday in the Commons that it would turn CSIS into a “secret police force.”

She also asked if the bill’s remarkably broad definition of crimes against the security of Canada included anti-pipeline protests (and got no answer).

Now that experts have had a chance to plow through the omnibus bill, other critics are surfacing.

In a statement released Monday, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association asked the most trenchant question: Why are these extraordinary new security powers needed?

“There are still no answers as to why our existing laws and powers didn’t work — or if they didn’t work,” CCLA executive director Sukanya Pillay wrote.

She also pointed out that criminalizing something as vague as the advocacy of terrorism could have a chilling effect on academics and journalists.

The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association has gone even further, saying that Bill C-51 would create “an unprecedented expansion of powers that will harm innocent Canadians and not increase public safety.”

In a release, it said it is alarmed by proposals that would expand the amount of time a terror suspect can be jailed without charge and that would allow judges to impose stringent conditions — including house arrest — on people who have not been convicted of any crime.

Stripping a person’s liberty where no crime is committed or suspected runs counter to our “most basic principles of fundamental justice,” the B.C. association wrote.

But none of this stopped the Liberals or New Democrats from supporting Harper's odious bill.  Walkom cuts to the chase.

Why are Canada’s usually obstreperous opposition parties so meek? Alas, they are afraid — afraid that if they criticize the substance of Bill C-51, Harper will paint them as soft on terror.

Yes, they're afraid.  Mulcair and Trudeau had to choose whether to stand up for Canada and oppose this egregious assault on our democratic freedom or buckle to Harper's will out of fear.  If they're this spineless in opposition you can be certain they'll be worms if they ever get power.

It was precisely this political malignancy that The Guardian's George Monbiot wrote of just a few days ago.


We are told at every election to hold our noses, forget the deficiencies and betrayals and vote Labour yet again, for fear of something worse. And there will, of course, always be something worse. So at what point should we vote for what we want rather than keep choosing between two versions of market fundamentalism? Sometime this century? Or in the next?

Perhaps there was a time when this counsel of despair made sense. No longer. The lamps are coming on all over Europe. As in South America, political shifts that seemed impossible a few years earlier are now shaking the continent. We knew that another world was possible. Now, it seems, another world is here: the sudden death of the neoliberal consensus. Any party that claims to belong to the left but does not grasp this is finished.

Trudeau and Mulcair just wiped their boots on you.  This country has no need of their kind or their parties.

h/t Lorne, Politics and its Discontents

Okay you Liberal Bastards, What Now?

Trudeau the Lesser's Liberals did backflips to support Israel's brutal outrage against Gaza's civilian population this summer.  It was as though no one had ever heard the Israeli military's term, Dahiyeh.  Of course you didn't need any fancy terms to see that Israel was brutally - and quite illegally - targeting Gaza's Palestinian population completely in flagrant violation of human rights laws and the laws of war.  That much is obvious when the side with strike jets takes down the public's water and sewage plants and then moves on to hit schools and hospitals, even clearly designated UN refuge sites.  I was never so disgusted with the Liberal Party, not even under Ignatieff.

The Dippers worked off the same page until Mulcair woke up and realized he was bound to piss off some old school progressives in the NDP ranks.  Then he hemmed and hawed and - waffled.

Well now your boy - and he is your boy - Benny Netanyahu has let his other fascist shoe drop.  This time it's not Palestinians under Israeli occupation but Arab and Christian Israelis who are Netanyahu's target.  The Israeli prime minister and his cabinet by a 2-1 margin have passed a bill that defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Critics, including cabinet opponents, say the new law reserved "national rights" for Jews only and also delisted Arabic as Israel's second official language.

So Justin - and Tommy - now you're backing a country that's both fascist and racist.  Is there any principle you won't compromise in your bootlicking pursuit of votes?

London Has Denounced It. So Has Washington. Why the Complicit Silence from Canada?

Israel has just taken another massive bite out of the Palestinian West Bank homeland.  Britain has condemned the land grab, so has Washington.

As for Canada, "what land grab?"  As Harper reminds us, we don't practice sociology.  It took Mulcair and Trudeau to demonstrate that we don't do integrity either, not when we're suckholing for votes.

Restoring the Vox Populi

Some thoughts for this, Labour Day.

The voice of the people.  Oh, how long has it been since that really meant anything?  In Canada and many other advanced countries, polls show that people are being governed without much if any regard to their views, their concerns.

It's sort of like standing, waiting at the civic bus stop for a bus that just keeps passing you by.

Canadians want action on climate change.  Are they going to get it?  No. Canadians want action on inequality.  Are they going to get it?  Don't be ridiculous.

The American people utterly loathe their federal government, their Congress. Does it matter?  Hell no!  The vox populi has been discounted to the point of near total irrelevance.

Governments don't do what we want them to do.  Governments don't deal with things we want dealt with, the things that cause us worry and insecurity.

There used to be a notion that at the heart of democracy lay the consent of the people to be governed.  To the extent that ever meant something it has been superceded by the ascent of neoliberalism and the corporatist state.

You get to vote and that's about all you get.  There is no longer much of a role for the vox populi.  There's still a vox, a voice alright and it is reaching the ear of the political or ruling classes only it's not your voice.  It's the voice of energy and commerce and high finance that has the ear of those you supposedly elect to office.

Think I'm kidding?  Go back four years to the reign of Ignatieff.  Do you remember when he summoned a "thinkers' conference" to map out a new strategy for a Liberal Canada?  The speakers list spoke volumes for it was massively dominated with CEOs and "management consultants."  Ignatieff wasn't there to formulate policies that would resonate with the voting public, solutions to their needs and concerns.  His focus was Bay Street, not Main Street.  As the Ignatieff Liberals turned their backs on ordinary Canadians, so did ordinary Canadians turn their backs in the next election sending the Liberals from Sussex Drive to Stornoway to Motel 6 out on the Gloucester highway.

The simple fact is that you can't consent to be governed without a reasonable understanding of how you're to be governed.  Without that understanding, there's no informed consent to be governed. You're simply consenting to be ruled.  And even that hollow consent is being coerced out of you through the application of misinformation, outright deceit and fear-mongering.

Your vote used to mean something back when parties offered up a real spectrum of vision and policy.  You knew what made one party distinct from the others and they worked to champion policies that might suit the voting public.

Today our body politic lies on the life support of neoliberalism.  Iron lungs all around.  Even the NDP has embraced neoliberalism.  There's a term for what's happening.  It's called "depoliticization."  Politics is being shut down, its place taken over by grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard.  Administrators, not leaders. Mere technocrats, doing sums.  The public, quite conveniently for the corporate state, is disengaging, tuning out. Why bother if no one will speak to your concerns?  Why bother if no one hears your voice?  Even before you begin to tune out you're already out of the loop.

How then do we reverse this?  How do we get their ear?  How are we to get our voices heard by those we elect, those who are duty bound to serve us?  How do we make them responsive to our concerns, our needs?

How indeed?  I don't know.  I do know that we need to get these people we elect to listen to us and that means they need to stop listening like attentive lap dogs to those who do not elect them.  We need to drum into their heads the prescient words spoken by Teddy Roosevelt more than a century ago.  These words:

...our government, national and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests.  Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit.  We must drive the special interests out of politics.

...every special interest is entitled to justice but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office.  The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good, but it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.

...The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. 

We no longer "effectively control the mighty commercial forces that we have called into being."  Those mighty commercial forces too often have the ear of those we elect to represent us.

Wresting political control away from these commercial forces may be the key to reclaiming our democratic freedoms.  The thing is I just cannot see that happening under either Trudeau or Mulcair or any other Liberal or New Democrat.  Like others I'm coming to accept that if we cannot rehabilitate the Liberal and New Democratic parties, we need to stop wasting our efforts and put them into building a new party, a genuinely political party, one that speaks for Canadians and speaks to their concerns.  It's pointless to seek solutions in neoliberalism.

It's Not That We Disagree, It's That I Despise Your Ideas

When ever I read another article and view another series of photographs of the carnage Israel has inflicted on the civilian population of Gaza and then think of the Netanyahu apologists, Trudeau and Mulcair, I despise them and any party that would tolerate much less follow their views.  That these two greasy opportunists haven't been tossed to the street for their blatant pandering tells me all I need to know about the Liberal Party and the New Democrats. 

Our general election is less than a year away, possibly much sooner if Harper sees a window of opportunity in which to catch the opposition off balance.  Trudeau is said to be the odds-on favourite and the ranks of non-Conservatives fairly swoon at the idea of someone "less worse" to replace Harper in ruining Canada.

We have, for years, been ruled by a despotic, manipulative, chronically secretive and dishonest, bully boy. Stephen Harper set out to dislocate Canada's political centre far and permanently to the right.  Fulsomely aided and abetted by the parliamentary lap dogs we still call Liberals and New Democrats, Stephen Harper has succeeded.  With the shameless collaboration of the so-called "opposition" parties, Canada is now firmly in the grasp of neoliberalism.  It's all free market capitalism from here on in and democracy and social justice be buggered. 

It is the fundamental duty of the Liberal and New Democrat leaders to campaign to restore Canada's political centre to its natural place.  Polls and studies show that, despite occasional claims to the contrary, the public remains slightly centre-left.  The Canadian people have been abandoned not just by the Conservatives but also the Liberals and New Dems.

"Less worse" is not an acceptable standard on which to support anyone and certainly not for the sake of replacing Harper with a Harper-lite.  That's merely substituting a coward for a fiend.  At the end of the day it may be a difference devoid of much distinction.

I understand all the arguments about how it is unwise for opposition parties to unveil policy in advance of an election campaign.  What puts the lie to that is the Green Party whose clear and sensible platform is available for all to see on its web site.  That platform sets a useful standard by which to measure both Liberals and New Democrats in the election that draws ever closer.  Prepare to be abjectly disappointed.

The 2015 election is not one that I look forward to if only because I expect disappointment on a grand scale from Harper's rivals. 

They'll make vague promises about electoral reform and call for more studies and position papers but the reform they can and should make if we're foolish enough to hand them the keys is voting reform in the Commons.  Anything that's not a confidence vote should be a free vote.  Whipped votes should be a last resort.

They'll probably support the already unviable bitumen mining industry with energy policies that are inconsistent, contradictory and unrealistic.  Mulcair says "no tankers" but I don't believe him for a minute.  If Canada is to make a meaningful effort to mitigate the impacts of climate change we will have to make hard decisions about the very future of Athabasca. 

They will ignore that other grave threat to Canada's democratic freedom - our corporate media cartel.  Only the Greens are honest enough to recognize this threat and call for a break up of the cartel through divestiture, the only effective way to undo toxic concentration of ownership and monopolistic cross-ownership of media outlets.  The Canadian people need the greatest diversity of voices expressing opinions of the widest range across the entire political spectrum.  That's how ideas and information are conveyed to nurture a genuinely informed public capable of exercising their political franchise. 

Inequality, that wrecking-ball of the middle class that corrodes social cohesion leaving the many vulnerable to the few, is getting scant attention from Trudeau or Mulcair.  I've not heard either of them acknowledge that most inequality has very little to do with merit or market-forces but is a largely legislated outcome arising from tax policy, subsidies and deferrals of all sorts, and the surrender of natural resources, the property of all Canadians, either free or at far-below market value.

I have yet to hear Mulcair or Trudeau acknowledge that fighting the scourge of inequality entails more than narrowing gaps in wealth and income but, even more, depends on bolstering equality of opportunity that requires rehabilitating our public education and healthcare systems.  If we want productive young people, we must ensure that they are able to access advanced education that is affordable.  We have to see funding health care and education not as a cost but as an investment.

They will avoid mentioning the urgent need to restore the balance between labour and capital so fundamental to the maintenance of social cohesion and prosperity.  Labour didn't abandon Andrea Horwath because it preferred Wynne's table manners.

They will not commit to the sort of national works programme Canada so badly needs to construct essential infrastructure capable of withstanding climate change impacts throughout this century.  We are struggling with infrastructure designed and built to cope with the climate we enjoyed in the 19th and 20th centuries.  The Halocene is over.  The Anthropocene is here to stay.  Even 'early onset' climate change is already visiting us with severe storm events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration.  We have to invest an enormous sum of money into this because, if we don't, the costs and losses will be even greater.

We need a foreign policy more akin to what we had in the post-WWII decades, not the 'muscular' foreign policy so admired by Ignatieff and Harper.  The world is awash in guns and soldiers to wield them. It doesn't need Canada's paltry warfighting ability.  We can do far more good furnishing what has become so scarce today - superlative peacekeeping forces and global, "honest-broker" mediation.  We've gone the "All the King's horses and all the King's men" route.  We did it in Libya and Afghanistan.  Just marvel in awe at our grand successes.

These are all matters that speak to the future of Canada and the wellbeing of our people, both today and for generations to come.  These are matters beyond the myopia of neoliberalism.  We have lost invaluable time during Harper's machinations.  We don't have the luxury of squandering even more time on those who are in line to succeed him.

Another Indictment of Neoliberalism, This Time from Monbiot

Neoliberalism, sometimes known as "market fundamentalism", is the scourge of our age.  It infests our federal politics.  Stephen Harper is a disciple.  Mulcair and Trudeau may be somewhat less neoliberal but it's a matter of degree and it ain't much.

Neoliberalism is a path littered with flawed assumptions and empty promises.  It is a cancer that eats away at social cohesion, that drives inequality that itself arises mainly out of privilege and unjust government largesse from tax favouritism to outright gifting of public property.  It is the engine of economic feudalism.

Guardian columnist, George Monbiot, has additional insights into the scam of neoliberalism:

Even at the beginning of the process, when markets are first deregulated, we do not start with equal opportunities. Some people are a long way down the track before the starting gun is fired. This is how the Russian oligarchs managed to acquire such wealth when the Soviet Union broke up. They weren’t, on the whole, the most talented, hardworking or innovative people, but those with the fewest scruples, the most thugs, and the best contacts – often in the KGB.

Even when outcomes are based on talent and hard work, they don’t stay that way for long. Once the first generation of liberated entrepreneurs has made its money, the initial meritocracy is replaced by a new elite, which insulates its children from competition by inheritance and the best education money can buy. Where market fundamentalism has been most fiercely applied – in countries like the US and UK – social mobility has greatly declined.

If neoliberalism was anything other than a self-serving con, whose gurus and thinktanks were financed from the beginning by some of the world’s richest people (the US multimillionaires Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and others), its apostles would have demanded, as a precondition for a society based on merit, that no one should start life with the unfair advantage of inherited wealth or economically determined education. But they never believed in their own doctrine. Enterprise, as a result, quickly gave way to rent.

All this is ignored, and success or failure in the market economy are ascribed solely to the efforts of the individual. The rich are the new righteous; the poor are the new deviants, who have failed both economically and morally and are now classified as social parasites.

The market was meant to emancipate us, offering autonomy and freedom. Instead it has delivered atomisation and loneliness.

Free market capitalism, market fundamentalism, neoliberalism - call it what you like - relentlessly moves to clear-cut social democracy to sweep away the last obstacles to the ascent of oligarchy.  It is a corruption of both capitalism and democracy.  It is the conquest of human dignity.  It is very much Kapitalism as foreseen by Karl Marx.  

It is a devilish thing that neoliberalism is becoming so entrenched at the very time that our world is struggling with the early onset impacts of climate change. Neoliberalism, the ethos of modern political classes, can only hasten and deepen our decline.  It is our societal thumbscrew.

Monbiot adds that pernicious neoliberalism silences the vox populi, and renders public will irrelevant.

We find ourselves technically free but powerless. Whether in work or out of work, we must live by the same rules or perish. All the major political parties promote them, so we have no political power either. In the name of autonomy and freedom we have ended up controlled by a grinding, faceless bureaucracy.  

Exactly.   

Israel & Palestine - It's All a Game of Who Controls the Narrative

And it's a game in which Israel and its collaborators abroad consistently win.  The side with the loudest, most professional voice - Israel, of course - gets the all important advantage of fixing the beginning of the conflict.  Israel decides what started it and exactly when.  What happened before that carefully selected start point is conveniently omitted by people like Harper & Co, and his associates, J. Trudeau and T. Mulcair.  Le Monde captures this reality:

...inspiring pity is not an effective political weapon; it is better to control the account of what has happened. For decades, we have been told that Israel is “responding” or “retaliating”. The story is always that of a peaceful little state, poorly protected, without a single powerful ally, which manages to win through, sometimes without a scratch. And the confrontation always starts at the precise moment when Israel appears as the victim, shocked by misfortune — an abduction, an attack, an act of aggression, an assassination. A commentator will express indignation that rockets are being fired at civilians; then another will argue that the Israeli “response” was much more murderous. Score, one all, ball still in play.

And everything else, everything that matters, is forgotten: the military occupation of the West Bank, the economic blockade of Gaza, the colonisation of the land (1). News channels never take the time to go into details... 

Israel's "cut and paste" reality is instrumental to its control of the narrative that, in turn, allows its overseas sops to support its butchery as the mere exercise of the right of self-defence.

Dog in the Manger Mulcair Won't Back Federalists in Quebec Election

He claims to be the leader of the official opposition for Canada but Tom Mulcair says he'll stay neutral in the Quebec provincial election.  Why won't he support the federalist side?  Does he think the federal parties should steer clear on some principle?  No, it's because he's "waiting for the day there is an NDP in Quebec."

So, Canada be buggered, no provincial NDP, no assistance from the official opposition.  Good on ya, Tommy.  Now we see your true colours.  Party over country, Tom.  I always suspected as much.

Update - it didn't take long for some Dipper to claim I 'smeared' Mulcair.  This fellow maintained that Mulcair is a fierce federalist.   Well, I'm going to go by Mulcair's own words.  He stated, quite clearly, that he'll be remaining "neutral" in this election and he said he was going to stay neutral because there's no Quebec NDP in this election.  Presumably if the NDP was running candidates in the Quebec election, Mulcair would be federalist in a heartbeat.   That's certainly what he indicated.

I know on Planet Dipper any criticism of Tom Mulcair has to be a cheap smear but this is Canada, planet Earth.

New Democrats, Take the Hint, We Need You to Go Home.

Hard as it's been to watch the Liberals morph into Conservative-Lite, it was vastly harder to witness the NDP slip its moorings on the left and migrate to the centre to become Latter Day Liberals.

Under Layton and Mulcair, the NDP abandoned the flank in a shameless bid for power  and Canada is much the worse for it.   Just when we needed the balancing force of the Left more than at any time in the past half century it stands deserted.

If Canadians are to weather the challenges of the 21st century, the overwhelming majority of Canadians and not merely the top 5 per cent, we absolutely must have a strong Left presence in our politics.  Without that presence we will have a devilish time dealing with forces that will sap our social cohesion - inequality, climate change, globalization, the assault on organized labour and collective bargaining, corporatism, our dysfunctional electoral system and other grave threats to our democracy.

Canada doesn't need another liberal party.  The voters said as much just days ago in four by-elections.

Canada needs a party of the Left.   Marginally a tad left of the other guys doesn't cut it when they've all headed off to the Right.   Canada needs a party willing to unapologetically stand for lofty principles to both inspire and guide the public and to keep the other parties at least a little more honest.

If the New Democrats are really done with the Left, then they should pack up and clear out and make way for a new party of principle, a new "conscience of Parliament."  That's what Canada is lacking and what the country needs now more than ever.