A Brief Window

The New York Times is taking down its paywall - for three days. Happy World Press Freedom Day.

Would a Progressive Kill for Profit?

In today's NYT, columnist Paul Krugman writes "Donald Trump Is Trying to Kill You."

Krugman explores how Trump's de-regulation rampage is giving rise to threats that will accelerate premature deaths among Americans. It's a limited focus piece and I won't get into it.  However it did raise the question of whether many of our leaders have clean hands when it comes to policies that will spread death, misery and dislocation throughout the world.

In Canada, that's an accusation that can attach to most of our political caste of all persuasions. We're a growing petro-state at the very moment when the last thing the world needs is petro-states.

Many of us politically positioned to the left of the Conservative Party of Harper and Scheer fancy ourselves as "progressive." I've found that laurel used in the most vague and flimsy way. Those schooled in the progressive movement would not recognize much of their ideology in Canadian politics today. Perhaps we think of ourselves as progressive neoliberals, a true oxymoron.

Which invites the question, would a progressive kill for profit?

There are lots of ways to kill for profit. We used to be a major exporter of asbestos, continuing even as only the most unscrupulous governments would accept our lethal product. Harper had to be shamed into stopping the asbestos trade and he did not do that willingly.

Yet aren't we doing pretty much the same thing with our exports of thermal coal and bitumen, two huge sources of greenhouse gas emissions that, to put it bluntly, our planet and the species that inhabit it, can no longer bear?

It's not 1980 anymore. We're forty years past that. We know what we're doing. We know what it causes. We know what it portends for our young people and future generations.

For now the worst impacts, that will emerge with far more grotesque clarity during the coming decade, are mainly absorbed by the people of other, more equatorial countries. Little brown people from poor and vulnerable societies that cannot push back against us - for now. Eventually, perhaps sooner than we imagine, our young people and those that have followed them, will have to take their turn to endure what we are bequeathing them.

Tell me, what kind of progressive would knowingly do that? Please, explain to me what is the progressive justification for that? Perhaps it's just me. I never understood progressivism to be a death sentence for anyone. I'm not saying I can't be wrong but that's not my take on it. Is there a new, anthropogenic progressive ethic?

Enlighten me, if you can. But if you can't, please give up the whole conceit of being a progressive if you're going to support the very neoliberal petro-state of Canada and the leaders who drive it.

Progressivism in the early 21st century confronts a reality that didn't exist in the early 20th century. In the earlier days it was a weapon of reform and advancement. But there is much in it that can also serve as a weapon of conservation and protection in this far more dangerous time.

The Grey Lady Slams America's Top Judge

In its lead editorial today, the New York Times castigates the US Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts for betraying the American people:

"In the 1960s, Chief Justice Earl Warren presided over a Supreme Court that interpreted the Constitution in ways that protected the powerless — racial and religious minorities, consumers, students and criminal defendants. At the end of its first full term, Chief Justice John Roberts’s court is emerging as the Warren court’s mirror image. Time and again the court has ruled, almost always 5-4, in favor of corporations and powerful interests while slamming the courthouse door on individuals and ideals that truly need the court’s shelter.

"The Roberts court’s resulting sharp shift to the right began to be strongly felt in this term. It was on display, most prominently, in the school desegregation ruling last week. The Warren court, and even the Rehnquist court of two years ago, would have upheld the integration plans that Seattle and Louisville, Ky., voluntarily adopted. But the Roberts court, on a 5-4 vote, struck them down, choosing to see the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause — which was adopted for the express purpose of integrating blacks more fully into society — as a tool for protecting white students from integration.

"On campaign finance, the court handed a major victory to corporations and wealthy individuals — again by a 5-4 vote — striking down portions of the law that reined in the use of phony issue ads. The ruling will make it easier for corporations and lobbyists to buy the policies they want from Congress.

"Corporations also won repeatedly over consumers and small stockholders. The court overturned a jury’s award of $79.5 million in punitive damages against Philip Morris. The Oregon Supreme Court had upheld the award, calling Philip Morris’s 40 years of denying the connection between smoking and cancer “extraordinarily reprehensible.”

"In a ruling that will enrich companies at the expense of consumers, the court overturned — again by a 5-4 vote — a 96-year-old rule that manufacturers cannot impose minimum prices on retailers.

"The flip side of the court’s boundless solicitude for the powerful was its often contemptuous attitude toward common folks looking for justice. It ruled that an inmate who filed his appeal within the deadline set by a federal judge was out of luck, because the judge had given the wrong date — a shockingly unjust decision that overturned two court precedents on missed deadlines."

The Times accuses Roberts of wilfully lying his way through Senate confirmation hearings by claiming he believed in "judicial modesty" and wasn't ideologically bound. The paper gives Roberts a well-earned sharp stick in the eye for having claimed he wanted "to promote greater consensus" only to leave his court hopelessly riven with just about every major judgment a split, 5-4 decision.

"It has been decades since the most privileged members of society — corporations, the wealthy, white people who want to attend school with other whites — have had such a successful Supreme Court term. Society’s have-nots were not the only losers. The basic ideals of American justice lost as well."