More than just "Locker Room Talk"

It caused jaws to drop when, just before the 2016 presidential election, an audio tape was released in which the Republican candidate bragged to a TV host named Bush that being a celebrity meant he could just kiss women and "grab them by the pussy."

Trump was quick to deny he'd ever done anything of the sort, dismissing it as "locker room talk." Christo-fascist evangelical preachers uttered a sigh of relief heard across the American  south.

Now there's a new book out - "All the President's Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator." The book, it is said, chronicles 43 instances of Trump being Trump and women being left with bruised nether regions.

The except doesn’t dig into all of those allegations, but it does detail a story by Karen Johnson, a woman who says she attended a New Year’s Eve party at Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida club. At the time of the New Year’s Eve party, Trump was reportedly dating Melania Knauss, who he would later marry, and engaging in what the book called “a wave of allegedly unwanted touching.” 

After midnight, Johnson said she was preparing to return home with her ailing husband and a relative. She went to the bathroom, and as she walked out, she said that Trump pulled her behind a tapestry.

“I’m a tall girl and I had six-inch heels on, and I still remember looking up at him. And he’s strong, and he just kissed me,” she told the authors of the book, Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy. “I was so scared because of who he was... I don’t even know where it came from. I didn’t have a say in the matter.”

After the alleged incident, Trump repeatedly called Johnson, offering to fly her to New York for the day. She kept turning him down, and eventually, the calls stopped. Johnson told her relative about the incident, as well as a friend; the authors of the book corroborated Johnson’s account with her friend.

She was afraid to tell anybody what had happened, for fear of being told that she must have “asked for it” in some way. But when she heard the “Access Hollywood tape,” Johnson said she was shocked.
“When he says that thing, ‘Grab them in the pussy,’ that hits me hard because when he grabbed me and pulled me into the tapestry, that’s where he grabbed me — he grabbed me there in my front and pulled me in,” she said.

Trudeau's Trade Fetish

One line from Vice news sums it up perfectly, "Justin Trudeau is one of the few world leaders still trumpeting the pre-2016 dream that everything will be hunky dory in the mad world of global politics if we can strike up a few more free trade deals."

Vice columnist Drew Brown skips the debate over whether Trudeau is wise or an utter fool to think he can or should entangle Canada in a trade pact with China. Instead he focuses on Trudeau's claim that a Canada-China free trade deal with help defuze the reactionary populist politics spreading around the world.

It is a talking point that Trudeau and his neoliberal fellow travellers have invoked before. While there may have been some structural discomfort involved in the opening of domestic markets to foreign capital (and vice versa), overall the outcome of liberal trade is an inevitable win for everyone involved. Goods and services cross borders more easily (and cheaply) and freer migration fosters a deeper appreciation for human diversity. Corporate greed might make things look a little lopsided, but it’s nothing that modest state redistribution of the quintessentially Canadian variety can’t sort out.

It is a very nice story but, as we now know, it leaves out a few loose ends. Whenever newly unfettered capital starts freely crossing borders, it is usually accompanied by a cast of somewhat less savory characters: community dislocation, deindustrialization, declining environmental and labour regulations, degraded national sovereignty, and the occasional financial meltdown. (For what it’s worth, Trudeau deserves credit for making more progressive environmental, labour, and gender regulations a sticking point in negotiations.)

Free trade might be a win-win on paper for the countries involved, but within those countries themselves it’s very often a win-lose arrangement for the rich and the non-rich, respectively. In other words, it tends to create its own problems, one of which appears to be right-wing, nationalist reaction. (It’s a convention to just call this ‘populism’, which is sort of true, but also sort of not true, and something we should probably talk about later.)

In the case of Chinese-Canadian trade in particular, there are reasons to suspect that even a successful bilateral free trade agreement might do more to inflame reactionary populism at home than put it out. Wells observes that Canadian access to the Chinese market also entails China’s further access to the Canadian market. This risks further inflating urban real estate values (particularly on the west coast), as well as hollowing out communities based around agriculture and manufacturing. And as a general rule, people who lose a good job and/or get priced out of their home tend to become rather politically agitated.

It’s not clear whether or not the prime minister and his team genuinely believe more free trade will fix the problems it simultaneously causes, or if this is just a reflexive talking point he threw to the media after a long day of trade talks that amounted to fruitlessly banging his head against a wall in Beijing.

My take is that the school marm is still the school marm, short on both the experience and intellectual depth to tackle a hydra such as free trade with China. He can't even make any serious inroads on climate change, the gravest threat facing the Canadian people. That's something that will take a truly Herculean effort over many years, perhaps decades, and Trudeau won't even get near the starting blocks. In difficult and dangerous times it takes more than posing for selfies and making apologies, no matter how deserved, to lead a country. Going by his track record from his first two years in power, this son of Margaret does not seem to pass muster on leadership.

There's No Selfie to Fix This One

When Justin Trudeau or one of his drones pimp pipelines they're sure to claim they're "following the science." Oh yeah, the science is on their side. Science says dilbit pipelines are safe. Science says so.

Question: who is this guy, Mr. Science? Maybe there's an Archibald Science or a Jean Luc Science, perhaps a Mary Francis Science? Because there's no actual science-science supporting Trudeau and Company's constant claims that bitumen is safe. None anybody can find. None that the Trudeau gang has been willing to produce.

The problem is that some scientists say the evidence flies in the face of what Trudeau called a safe project, the west-coast Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion. In fact, they say there is very little published evidence in the scientific literature about bitumen to back up the prime minister’s claims.

And one of the most glaring gaps of evidence, the scientists say, is the absence of any significant research on the effects of spills of bitumen — the heavy oil from Alberta’s oilsands industry that is expected to flow in the new pipelines — into the oceans.

A group of scientists from Canadian and American universities reached these conclusions after a comprehensive review of thousands of scientific papers on oil and the environment. They found literature on impacts of oil spills, but very little published research about how bitumen affects marine organisms, as well as how spill response would affect these organisms. Their findings were peer-reviewed and are scheduled to be published later this month in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

In an interview with National Observer, three of the scientists said they gave advance copies of their findings to Trudeau’s office and others in his cabinet on Nov. 21, but it’s not clear what the government did with that evidence.

“It’s hard to imagine that the federal government decision (to approve new pipelines) could be based on science, just when we’ve found that in many cases, there’s very little science to base those decisions upon,” said Wendy Palen, an associate professor of biological sciences at Simon Fraser University in B.C., and one of the authors of the paper.

But there's plenty of evidence that Trudeau is pulling a fast one. There's even a smoking gun. It was the Trudeau government's (not Harper's, Trudeau's) quiet decision to approve the truly hideous, thalidomide-grade chemical, Corexit, to be used if and when - or, when and when - there's a catastrophic dillbit spill on the West Coast. In case you haven't read my posts on Corexit over the past couple of years you can check them out here or here.

Or, you can watch this Vice News look into the impact of Corexit in the Gulf of Mexico.



Or this from Australia's 60 Minutes:



Keep in mind that the spills discussed by Vice and 60 Minutes Australia are just ordinary crude oil. Exxon Valdez grade stuff (by the way, Prince William Sound? still not clean). Bitumen is a different creature altogether. It's a heavier than water sludge that's chock full of acids, heavy metals, carcinogens, abrasives and other junk such as petcoke,  Once the diluent evaporates out, it slowly sinks to the bottom where all those nasties leach out presumably for generations devastating the marine ecology.  That "bottom" out here can be 600 feet down - or worse.

The last honest statement I can recall hearing out of Ottawa was from the Harper days. A reporter caught then enviromin Peter Kent off guard. Simple question - does the government have a way to clean up a dilbit spill. I can remember minister Kent's reply, verbatim - "Not yet but we're working on it." Those experiments must not have panned out very well if the Trudeau government has fallen back on Corexit 9500A.

And so Trudeau is going to take one ecological catastrophe, a major bitumen spill, and make it vastly worse by throwing Corexit 9500A on it, poisoning not just the marine life but any human unfortunate enough to get exposed to it, like all those folks on the American Gulf coast.