We Are, Indeed, Living in Interesting Times

My parents lived through the Great Depression. They lived through World War II. They lived through the Cold War. They lived in "interesting times" fraught with peril and struggle and yet emerged to be called by Tom Brokaw, "the greatest generation."

It was really difficult for me to imagine I might ever live through times even more "interesting" than my parents' and their generation's. Yet I increasingly fear that to be the case.

My parents' era was one of great progressive advancement. Perhaps lulled into complacency by the relative ease and prosperity that befell the post war generations, we have at almost every turn failed to defend that progress that was delivered to us with no sacrifice of any consequence on our part. Easy come, easy go.

We ruled the world in hubris, without regard to what follows, nemesis. And so today we stand unprepared to withstand the several monstrous calamities that loom around us in all directions.

We chose to be guided by a new rule, "Because We Can." At every turn we did whatever we could, as much as we could, as fast as we could. We didn't leave ourselves time to reflect and even ask whether we should.

We even mastered the skill of taking not only what was our fair share but what the next generations might rightly deserve. We've robbed them of their future. We did it because we could.

The transition into what would be known as neo-liberalism was ushered in by three conservative stalwarts - Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney. All of them abdicated government responsibility to the commercial sector, surrendering critical aspects of national sovereignty along with the other powers given up in a totally one-sided deal. They freed commerce of the restraints of tariffs and trade regulation, endorsing the free movement of capital and, with it jobs and entire industrial sectors. They promised this would yield more and better jobs, higher wages. Environmental and labour laws were tossed on the block.

It would be unfair to blame this on Conservatism. Indeed what these leaders (and those that have followed them) did was antithetical to Conservatism, the political ideology. Just as Communism is rooted in the theories of Karl Marx, Conservatism finds its roots in the 18th century prescriptions of Edmund Burke.

Burke fully grasped the bond between Conservatism and conservation.

All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust.

...one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.

It's plain that in Burke's Conservatism, we are "temporary possessors and life-renters" of our world and our society. He enjoins us not to, "think it among (our) rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying it at (our) pleasure the whole original fabric of (our) society; hazarding to leave to those who come after (us) a ruin instead of an habitation - and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances as we had (ourselves) respected the institutions of (our) forefathers.

Some century and a half later, in Osawatomie, Kansas, Theodore Roosevelt said much the same thing:

Of conservation I shall speak more at length elsewhere. Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation. 

What we call "Conservative" today bears no connection to the conservation ethos of true conservatism. It simply exists to the far right of the dominant political spectrum that besets us today. 

Why should this matter? Because we cannot return to the society envisioned by Burke, Roosevelt and so many others until we break the yoke of neoliberalism that hangs around our necks today and "skins the land and leaves it worthless" to our children. How have we skinned the land? The evidence is everywhere. Climate change is one chilling example. The global freshwater crisis and the draining of our aquifers is another. Oceanic dead zones and the toxic algae blooms that now flourish in our lakes and rivers are others. We're consuming natural resources at 1.7 times Earth's carrying capacity, making up the excess by robbing future generations.

The hard truth is that we can't change this predation, we can't even our keel, until we're prepared to quit what we've been doing. Part of that entails restoring posterity to its rightful place in our government planning and policy. That means restraining our wants, abandoning our "because we can" mentality. It's going to be hard enough meeting our needs before long. Our wants that drive our growth-obsessed governments today will become a bad memory discarded of necessity.

We are indeed living in interesting times. How we come through this is up to us.                      

Harper is No Conservative. In His Black Soul, He's a Mangy Junkyard Dog Posing as a Conservative.

Richard Benyon, a Tory MP and former environment minister under David Cameron, writes that Tony Abbott is no Conservative.  By Mr. Benyon's standards, neither is Steve Harper.

Mr. Benyon wrote an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, in which he called out the Australian prime minister for rescinding the country's carbon tax, pulling government support for renewable energy and increasing his nation's exposure to climate risks.

Abbott's dismissal of climate science and his belief that Australia must choose between economic growth and tackling climate change speak to a distorted vision of what it means to be a conservative.

True conservative values include distaste for over-regulation and enthusiasm for entrepreneurialism. But they also include a respect for sound science and economics, a belief in protecting the natural world and a responsibility to do the best for the biggest possible number of one's citizens.

The first leader of any major nation to call for a United Nations treaty on climate change was Margaret Thatcher – Britain's greatest postwar Prime Minister and a standard bearer for the political right.

As a scientist she saw the threat posed by climate change. But she also believed in a vision of economic growth that went beyond the immediate interests of major corporations: "We must have continued economic growth in order to generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment. But it must be growth which does not plunder the planet today and leave our children to deal with the consequences tomorrow."

Benyon may have written that Abbott "distorted" what it means to be a conservative but I'm betting in the first draft he used "perverted."  For that's what our own Sideshow Steve has done.  He's perverted conservatism in Canada, raised his hind leg and pissed all over anything Edmund Burke would have recognized as conservative.

Top British Tories Slam Tony Abbott. Carol Goar Gnaws on Harper.

Who better to give Australian prime minister Tony Abbott a real hiding but a number of prominent Tories.  Real Tories, not what passes for conservative under the Harper regime.  Real Tories, as in the Brits.

The attitude of Prime Minister Tony Abbott to the global challenges of climate change is "eccentric", "baffling" and "flat earther", according to a group of senior British Conservatives.

The group, including Prime Minister David Cameron's Minister for Energy and a former Thatcher Minister and chairman of the Conservative Party, says Mr Abbot's position on climate change represents a betrayal of the fundamental ideals of Conservatism and those of his political heroine, Margaret Thatcher.

In a series of wide-ranging, separate interviews on UK climate change policy with The Age, they warn that Australia is taking enormous risks investing in coal and will come under increasing market and political pressure to play its part in the global battle against climate change. 

They could as easily be speaking of our own "flat earther" prime minister and all the other flat earthers who populate both sides of the aisle in the House of Commons.

A  former chairman of the British Conservative Party, Lord Deben said Mr Abbott has betrayed the fundamental tenets of conservatism itself.

 "I have no doubt that people like David Cameron will be saying to Tony Abbott 'look conservatives are supposed to conserve, they are supposed to hand on to the next generation something better than they received themselves'."

Tim Yeo, chairman of the UK's parliamentary select committee on energy and climate change and a former environment minister under John Major, likened those who question the existence and the science of climate change as "the flat earthers of the 16th century".

"Some of us are very perplexed. I was last in Australia at the beginning of last year, before the election and had conversations with people on both sides of the political divide. I was amazed at some of the views.

 "If I was Australian, I'd be concerned if my country's economic future and prosperity became dependent on continued coal export."  

Meanwhile, TorStar's Carol Goar observes that Stephen Harper is also fast running out of places to hide.

Harper still has a few allies. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott shares his view that it would be economic folly on impose “a job-killing carbon tax” on energy producers. He can make common cause with the remaining climate change holdouts: Libya, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran and Egypt.

But he has become increasingly isolated and Canada’s relations with its allies and trading partners are showing the strain. French President François Hollande made a vain plea to Harper to act on climate change during his visit to Ottawa last month. The 120 heads of state who attended September’s United Nations Climate Summit in New York noted his absence. His aggressive lobbying for the Keystone XL pipeline alienated Obama.

On his latest foreign trip, the prime minister paid lip service to the environment. When the U.S. and China announced their game-changing deal to slash greenhouse gas emissions, he grudgingly welcomed the breakthrough. “For some time we have been saying we favour an international agreement that would include all the major emitters,” he said. But he made no move to cut or cap Canada’s fossil fuel emissions. 

...Skeptics discount these vague promises. Harper will procrastinate, shift the focus, then move into election mode. His deft political footwork at last weekend’s G20 summit in Brisbane suggests they’re right. He succeeded in eclipsing Canada’s poor environmental record by boldly confronting Russian President Vladimir Putin over his incursions into Ukraine.  

...Harper is a master strategist. He knows how to get around obstacles, divide his opponents and silence his critics. He has navigated his way through trickier junctures than this.

But the moment Canadians decide they don’t want to be on the wrong side of the climate change issue, his last bulwark will buckle.

Has Conservatism Become a Death Cult?

Some day our grandchildren will ask "why?"

They'll want to know why their grandparents' generation failed to act against climate change while there was still time to prevent their own generation from getting the worst of it.

That's how they're going to judge us; not by how bad, how dangerous, how punishing the environment they have to live in but rather how much worse is it than it had to be.  And that's what we're doing now with our inaction on climate change.  We're determining how much worse things are going to be for our grandchildren due to us, our excessive emissions, our refusal to rein ourselves in.

In many ways we're already writing their future and we're writing it indelibly.

In this it's time we saw conservatives for what they have chosen to become, a death cult.  Like many cults it's hierarchical.  There's a priesthood.  People like Stephen Harper, Tony Abbott and James Inhofe are in its elevated ranks.  They're the visible faces.  The others, the leaders of Big Fossil and the great Bourses, are concealed by the cowl of their robes.

It's not that these people don't "get" climate change.  They do. What they also "get" are the solutions that climate change demands and it's these they cannot abide.  A new study from Duke University finds that conservatives (and neoliberals generally) exhibit "solution aversion."

The paper looks at the relationship between political ideology and rejection of scientific evidence.  The researchers look most closely at climate change and other environmental challenges, an area where those who identify as liberals ...mostly accept scientific conclusions while conservatives ...largely reject them. The researchers conclude that on climate and other important societal issues, this denial is "rooted not in a fear of the general problem, per se, but rather in fear of the specific solutions associated with that problem."

The authors blame this denial of climate science on what they deem "solution aversion," i.e. the proposed solutions are "more aversive and more threatening to individuals who hold an ideology that is incompatible with or even challenged by the solution." 

This sort of thing happens all the time to people of any ideological or political stripe but it's usually the sort of thing we indulge on relatively minor issues.  We set this sort of thinking aside when we discover the house is on fire. When that happens we all - left, right or centre -  man the hoses and ladders.  Just not this time.

Today we're on the verge of what some believe is the 6th great extinction event. We've already lost half the wild life on Earth over just the past 40-years (which coincides with our embrace of neoliberalism).  We've drained the aquifers and we've broken the hydrological cycle. We're now dependent, utterly dependent (let that sink in) on consuming the Earth's renewable resources, it's life-sustaining bounty, at 1.5 times the planet's replenishment rate.  We're melting the sea ice and raising sea levels.  We, mankind, have demolished  a geological epoch, the Holocene, and substituted one of our own making, the Anthropocene.

All of these things, and more, are happening yet the Death Cult simply doubles down.  It's a bad bet, deadly bad, but the worst part is that everyone's future hangs on the outcome.  They have brought us to the very edge of irreversible harm and yet they have no intention of stopping or being stopped.

As Murray Dobbin wrote last month in The Tyee, High Priest Harper has been deliberate in his manipulations.

Harper hoped to establish what Orwell referred to as "protective stupidity" -- a kind of mass denial of the obvious. Freud referred to it as "knowing with not knowing" and when it comes to most of Canada's military adventures, it is epidemic. 

In Afghanistan the war went for so long that the facts eventually broke through the protective stupidity, but only partially. Even with the total failure of the mission to accomplish a single worthwhile goal, it is likely that most Canadians still see it as having been a "good war."

As [Henry] Giroux puts it: "Neoliberal authoritarianism has changed the language of politics and everyday life through a poisonous public pedagogy that turns reason on its head and normalizes a culture of fear, war and exploitation."

It wouldn't be a Death Cult without a fear fetish, something the New York Times' Richard Cohen believes has taken hold even inside our very homes.

What has happened.  Why this shadow over the dinner table and such strange fears? It seems we have the remorse of Pandora. The empowering, all-opening, all-devouring technological spirit we have let slip from the box has turned into a monster giving the killers-for-a-caliphate new powers to recruit, the dictators new means to repress, the spies new means to listen in, the fear mongers new means to spread alarm, the rich new means to get richer at the expense of the middle class, the marketers new means to numb, the tax evaders new means to evade, viruses new means to spread, devices new means to obsess, the rising powers new means to block the war-weary risen, and anxiety new means to inhabit the psyche. 

Fear is the tool the High Priests of the Death Cult use to block the exit doors. Fear is employed to confuse. It is what they use to keep you confined in mind and body. It is how they take your power and, with it, your will to stand.

The neoliberals are ensnarled in fears of their own.  They fear change that might jeopardize their control and usher in a new order.  They fear dislocation.  They fear loss.  It's all a house of cards, sure enough, but it's their house and they will defend it to the death, theirs and yours if need be.

The question becomes whether we are going to live their fears, bend to them, incorporate them into our own lives and. by default, our children's.  If so, there's nothing to be done and that's precisely what they intend to do - nothing.  They're not going to give up the petro-state.  They're not going to even try to wean themselves off perpetual, exponential growth.  They're not going to adopt an economic model that makes the economy subordinate to the environment. They're not going to curb environmental degradation and the over-exploitation of our resources.  The Cult is not going to do any of those things and they won't stand by while you do it either.

The exit doors are blocked.  You can sweep them aside at the ballot box but you'll only discover that the new tenant has blocked those same doors again for the same reasons.

Make up your own mind but spare a thought for what you're going to tell the grandkids when they ask "why?"  

But They're Not Alone. U.S. Politicians Overestimate Their Constituents Conservatism

Republicans and even Democrats have been found to think their constituents much more conservative than they are in fact.  It's no surprise, therefore, that they govern according to false perception and at odds with the public they purport to serve.

Conducted by the University of California’s David Broockman and University of Michigan’s Christopher Skovron, the survey of nearly 2,000 legislators from across America documents politicians’ perceptions of their constituents’ views on hot-button issues like universal health care and same-sex marriage. It then compares those perceptions with constituents’ actual views.

The juxtaposition reveals a jarring truth: Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers hugely overestimate the conservatism of the very people they are supposed to represent. In all, the report finds that “conservative politicians systematically believe their constituents are more conservative than they actually are by over 20 percentage points, while liberal politicians also typically overestimate their constituents’ conservatism by several percentage points.” Ultimately, that has resulted in a political system inherently hostile to mainstream proposals and utterly unrepresentative of public opinion.

Citing “Richard Nixon’s pronouncement that a ‘silent majority’ of Americans backed his policies” and “Sarah Palin’s suggestion that a latent ‘real America’ supported her,” the researchers correctly note that there remains “a folk theory among conservative politicians that the American public is considerably more conservative than it seems at face value.”

There is also the fact that in the age of money-dominated politics, many professional lawmakers do not come from the ranks of the commoner—instead, more and more are wealthy upper-crusters whose cloistered upbringing inside gated communities leaves them wholly unfamiliar with their constituencies. 

Such isolation is then exacerbated during their time in office. Ensconced in a bubble of conservative-minded corporate lobbyists and mega-donors, they come to wrongly assume that what passes for a mainstream position in that bubble somehow represents a consensus position in the larger world.

The transformation of the Liberal Party to Conservative-Lite and the metamorphosis of the New Democrats into Latter-Day-Liberal centrists, all within the bubble of a wobbly petro-state, would seem to suggest a similar susceptibility to the myth of public conservatism.   Harper openly set out to drag Canada's political centre far to the right and, in achieving his prime objective, the Liberals and New Democrats have been his dutiful handmaidens.   Sadly, we may have to wait for a new post-Mulcair/post-Trudeau generation of leader before we will find anyone with the courage to even Canada's political keel.

 

New Studies Confirm Conservatives are Fear-Driven

Sideshow Steve Harper understands the power of fear to distract and manipulate his supporters.   He conjures up images of threats and dangers and watches  his Conservative flock recoil in shock and terror.

Two new studies confirm the brain differences between conservative and liberal minds.

First, in the American Journal of Political Science, a team of researchers including Peter Hatemi of Penn State and Rose McDermott of Brown University studied the relationship between our deep-seated tendencies to experience fear—tendencies which vary from person to person, partly for reasons that seem rooted in our genes--and our political beliefs. What they found is that people who have more fearful disposition also tend to be more politically conservative, and less tolerant of immigrants and people of races different from their own. As McDermott carefully emphasizes, that does not mean that every conservative has a high fear disposition. "It's not that conservative people are more fearful, it's that fearful people are more conservative," as she puts it.

I interviewed the paper's lead author, Peter Hatemi, about his research for my 2012 book The Republican Brain. Hatemi is both a political scientist and also a microbiologist, and as he stressed to me, "nothing is all genes, or all environment." These forces combine to make us who we are, in incredibly intricate ways.

Darren Schreiber, a political neuroscientist at the University of Exeter in the UK, first performed brain scans on 82 people participating in a risky gambling task, one in which holding out for more money increases your possible rewards, but also your possible losses. Later, cross-referencing the findings with the participants' publicly available political party registration information, Schreiber noticed something astonishing: Republicans, when they took the same gambling risk, were activating a different part of the brain than Democrats.

Republicans were using the right amygdala, the center of the brain's threat response system. Democrats, in contrast, were using the insula, involved in internal monitoring of one's feelings.  Amazingly, Schreiber and his colleagues write that this test predicted 82.9 percent of the study subjects' political party choices—considerably better, they note, than a simple model that predicts your political party affiliation based on the affiliation of your parents.

I also interviewed Schreiber for The Republican Brain. He's a scientist who was once quite cautious about the relevance of brain studies to people's politics. As he put it to me: "If you had called me four years ago and said, what is your view on whether Republicans and Democrats have different brains, I would have said no." Now, his own published research suggests otherwise.

One again, though, there's a critical nuance here. Schreiber thinks the current research suggests not only that having a particular brain influences your political views, but also that having a particular political view influences and changes your brain. The causal arrow seems likely to run in both directions—which would make sense in light of what we know about the plasticity of the brain. Simply by living our lives, we change our brains. Our political affiliations, and the lifestyles that go along with them, probably condition many such changes.

...It is hard not to infer that fear of outsiders or those different from you—along with greater fear dispositions in general—may be related to the role of amgydala, a brain structure that has been dubbed the "heart and soul of the fear system." The amygdala has been repeatedly implicated in politics. Indeed, Schreiber's research builds on prior brain studies: In a group of University College of London students, for instance, conservatives showed more gray matter in the right amygdala.

No, No, These Are Primaries, Not Primates

I just can't understand why Republican presidential candidates don't get evolution.  After all, they've mastered the ability to reverse it.

The Modern Right - Either They Get Toppled or We're All Going Down

It's time we stopped treating the chasm between the right and left as a legitimate difference of opinion.   It's not and that's very dangerous - for them and for us.

It seems counter-intuitive that, even as scientific research steadily pours in corroborating the theory of global warming,  the gap between believers and deniers has widened dangerously.

For a long time I've given the right the benefit of the doubt and assumed most of the rejectniks were the ill-educated, the ignorant.  That made me hopeful that, with just a little more education, better information, they would  understand and accept the scientific consensus.  Turns out I had it wrong.

Chris Mooney, author of "The Republican Brain - The Science of Why They Deny Science - and Reality" has made a case that is, and should be, disturbing - ignorance has nothing to do with the right's rejection of climate science.   Mooney explores a 2008 Pew Research report documenting the partisan divide over global warming.

Buried in the Pew report was a little chart showing the relationship between one’s political party affiliation, one’s acceptance that humans are causing global warming, and one’s level of education. And here’s the mind-blowing surprise: For Republicans, having a college degree didn’t appear to make one any more open to what scientists have to say. On the contrary, better-educated Republicans were more skeptical of modern climate science than their less educated brethren. Only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college-educated Republicans.

 For Democrats and Independents, the opposite was the case. More education correlated with being more accepting of climate science—among Democrats, dramatically so. The difference in acceptance between more and less educated Democrats was 23 percentage points.

This was my first encounter with what I now like to call the “smart idiots” effect: The fact that politically sophisticated or knowledgeable people are often more biased, and less persuadable, than the ignorant. It’s a reality that generates endless frustration for many scientists—and indeed, for many well-educated, reasonable people.

...liberals and progressives are absolutely outraged by partisan misinformation. Lies about “death panels.” People seriously thinking that President Obama is a Muslim, not born in the United States. Climate-change denial. Debt ceiling denial. These things drive us crazy, in large part because we can’t comprehend how such intellectual abominations could possibly exist.

And not only are we enraged by lies and misinformation; we want to refute them—to argue, argue, argue about why we’re right and Republicans are wrong. Indeed, we often act as though right-wing misinformation’s defeat is nigh, if we could only make people wiser and more educated (just like us) and get them the medicine that is correct information.

...the rapidly growing social scientific literature on the resistance to global warming (see for examples here and here) says so pretty unequivocally. Again and again, Republicans or conservatives who say they know more about the topic, or are more educated, are shown to be more in denial, and often more sure of themselves as well—and are confident they don’t need any more information on the issue.

But Mooney points to research that reveals liberals, for all our flaws, aren't particularly susceptible to the "smart idiot effect." 

...with liberals, there is something else going on. Liberals, to quote George Lakoff, subscribe to a view that might be dubbed “Old Enlightenment reason.” They really do seem to like facts; it seems to be part of who they are. And fascinatingly, in Kahan’s study liberals did not act like smart idiots when the question posed was about the safety of nuclear power.
 
Nuclear power is a classic test case for liberal biases—kind of the flipside of the global warming issue--for the following reason. It’s well known that liberals tend to start out distrustful of nuclear energy: There’s a long history of this on the left. But this impulse puts them at odds with the views of the scientific community on the matter (scientists tend to think nuclear power risks are overblown, especially in light of the dangers of other energy sources, like coal).

So are liberals “smart idiots” on nukes? Not in Kahan’s study. As members of the “egalitarian communitarian” group in the study—people with more liberal values--knew more science and math, they did not become more worried, overall, about the risks of nuclear power. Rather, they moved in the opposite direction from where these initial impulses would have taken them. They become less worried—and, I might add, closer to the opinion of the scientific community on the matter.

Mooney's conclusion is that trying to appeal to reason with conservative types on "hot button" issues like global warming is a waste of time and effort that ought to be directed elsewhere.  It doesn't make any difference how many facts you have, you're talking to a closed mind.   The more intelligent, the better educated the conservative, the more likely they are to have that mind tightly shut.

Canadian Conservatives Have Lost Their Way

This is a message for all Canadian conservatives, including those who now pass themselves off as Liberals.   In fact, it's a message to every rank Petro-pol, Oilhead and Tar Sander on Parliament Hill.

It's not my message.  No, I'm merely relaying a message from a Conservative, a true Conservative by the name of Paul Foote who explains why, if protecting the environment isn't your priority, you're not a decent conservative:

As the grandfather of modern conservative political thinking, Edmund Burke, put it: we are "  temporary possessors or life renters"  of this world and have a moral obligation not to squander our natural inheritance, lest we  ""leave to those who come after … a ruin instead of a habitation."   Respect for the past and responsibility to future generations creates a duty to conserve our resources and protect the environment.

The actions now required to protect the future also have more immediate benefits. It supports our national security. A shift to decentralised, renewable energy sources makes the UK less dependent on foreign countries and less susceptible to the changes in energy markets. It is a self-sufficiency that would undoubtedly appeal to the conservative.

A shift to greener energy sources also creates big opportunities for business. This year, for the first time, investment in renewable energy outstripped investment in conventional energy. Our economic competitiveness is bound to our ability to become leaders in green technologies. The green agenda is the growth agenda.

For centuries, political momentum has been primarily concerned with raising people's standard of living, which has focused overwhelmingly on material advantage. We have come to a point in history where we can no longer view the good life so narrowly. Protecting the environment is about protecting and improving the quality of people's lives. This task not only includes defending ourselves against global threats like climate change, it also means taking responsibility for more local environmental problems such as flood risk, graffiti and litter.

Everything Foote is saying you would have heard a century ago from another true conservative - Teddy Roosevelt.   But conservatism is no longer conservatism, it's corporatism and to corporatism environmentalism is an unwanted fetter on the bottom line.   As we've seen in America's bought and paid for Congress and in our own Parliament, the stooges of corporatism sit on both sides of the aisle.

Right-Wing Meltdown

True Conservatives worship at the altar of the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace. They believe if they just get government off the back of business, all will be well. Adam Smith told them as much in Book IV of his Wealth of Nations back in 1776.

The past century has shown that Smith's theory was about as realistic as Disney's castles. The economy does not function well when unregulated.

Brian Mulroney deregulated Canada's airline industry. That pitted two, reasonably good airlines against each other to the benefit of neither. They slashed themselves to ribbons, the winner being the one that bled out the slowest.

America has been hit with a succession of jolts since the Reagan era of deregulation: the Savings & Loan scandals (there were many in case you forgot); the "Dot.Com" bubble; the Enron/WorldCom et al meltdowns; and, now, the subprime mortgage/derivative fiasco that is already being felt around the world. In each of these disasters small investors got wiped out in droves and, in most, small taxpayers wound up saddled with the cleanup bills. In each case regulators looked the other way until it was too late. Their reliance on the Invisible Hand was misplaced.

The uber-right, including our own Furious Leader, often and loudly warn of "massive transfers of wealth" caused by the pernicious ways of those lefties. Where? When? The previous paragraph details four - count them, four - massive transfers of wealth that devastated the life savings and retirement funds of hundreds of thousands of little people - aided and abetted in each case by right-wing deregulation and lack of oversight.

Now, imagine what would have happened had George Bush succeeded in privatizing his nation's Social Security, funneling all those worker contributions into the very stock markets that are now in meltdown. Had he got his way this crisis could well have been both far deeper and more widespread.

The globalization hatched by Reagan/Thatcher/Mulroney has likewise effected an enormous transfer of wealth. Western wealth stopped being invested in growing our own economies and, instead, was diverted into growing the economies of places like China. We surrendered the factories and the jobs that went with them in order that the rentier class could temporarily maximize their investment returns abroad.

In his book, American Theocracy, Republican notable Kevin Phillips outlines the inevitable collapse of American economic domination by illustrating how the changes underway in America since Reagan directly parallel the changes that led to the end of the Dutch, Spanish and British empires.

In each case the dominant nation outsourced its manufacturing sector and moved, instead, toward financialization. In the United States, the financial sector has long been the dominant economic engine. But, in outsourcing, what happens is that the dominant nation's wealth is gradually invested in growing another nation's economy. The dominant nation steadily weakens itself even as it strengthens its successor. This is another side of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. Short term gain, long term pain.

Globalization has taken on such a degree of fiscal intractability that no one dare challenge it, especially none from the conservative ranks where it was hatched. It stands as the fatal contradiction in conservative ideology. Surely conservatism is about preserving the status quo above all else. Since the Nixon/Reagan era that foundation has been perverted to make growth the dominant and guiding force. The status quo is founded on sustainability. Growth, by contrast, is not bound by any such criteria. It looks, instead, to immediate and short-term rewards while diminishing the significance or even ignoring long-term consequences.

Here's something to chew on. When Ronald Reagan moved into the White House, America was the world's largest creditor nation. When he left, America had become the world's largest debtor nation. One president, two terms. Does that sound very conservative to you?

Since we've hitched our horse to America's wagon it would probably do us no harm to notice that all four wheels are beginning to fall off. These wheels are the four American deficits discussed by the United States Comptroller General, David Walker, in a 2007 speech given at the US Naval Academy. This is a bit long but it affects each of us directly and it's worth reading:

The truth is our country faces not one but four interrelated deficits. Together, these deficits have serious implications for our future role in the world, our future standard of living, our future domestic tranquility, and even our future national security.

The first is the federal budget deficit. Thanks to a combination of out-of-control federal spending, several major tax cuts, and expired budget controls, federal budget deficits have returned with a vengeance. Depending on which accounting method you use, the federal deficit last year ranged from $248 billion to $450 billion. The $248 billion number reflects the unified budget deficit—net of the Social Security surplus—which is the most commonly reported measure. This largely cash-based figure represents the difference between revenues and outlays for the government as a whole in a given year.

But it you look at the net operating cost of the federal government on an accrual basis, which is how companies report, you get a deficit of $450 billion. This number is more useful and, I would suggest, more realistic. Among other things, this number excludes the Social Security surpluses.

While these annual deficit numbers get a lot of press coverage, it’s the federal government’s mounting liabilities and unfunded commitments that pose the real threat. I’m talking about things like unfunded Social Security and Medicare benefits. In the last six years, the estimated total of these accumulating burdens has soared from about $20 trillion to about $50 trillion, primarily due to an increase in unfunded obligations associated with Medicare.

Fifty trillion dollars translates into an IOU of about $440,000 for every American household. Keep in mind that the median household income in this country is less than $50,000 a year. For the typical family, it’s like having a mortgage that’s 9½ times their annual income. And that mortgage doesn’t even come with a house! This burden is outpacing the net worth of most Americans and the growth rate of our economy.

The second deficit is our savings deficit. The savings rate among U.S. consumers has been falling for some time. In 2005, for the first time since 1933, the annual personal savings rate in this country reached negative territory. The savings deficit was even greater in 2006. We’ve returned to savings levels not seen since the depths of the Great Depression. In fact, America has among the lowest overall savings rates of any major industrialized nation.

Clearly, many Americans,like their federal government, are living beyond their means. This trend is particularly alarming in an aging society like ours. Obviously, those people who save more will live better in retirement. And given the problems plaguing our public and private retirement systems, personal investments will be even more critical to your retirement planning.

So if we aren’t saving here at home, who’s been underwriting our recent national spending spree? The answer is foreign players. And that brings me to America’s third deficit: our balance-of-payments deficit. America is simply spending more than it’s producing. As you’ve probably learned in economics classes here at the Academy, large government deficits translate into large trade deficits as well as a weakened dollar. So, it shouldn’t surprise you that in 2006, our trade deficit hit a record $763 billion and the value of the dollar has in fact declined.

While our own savings rates have plummeted, overseas savings rates have not. Overseas money has been pouring into the United States. Thanks to the high savings rates in China, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere, it’s been relatively cheap for Americans to borrow. But there’s a catch, and it’s a big one. Increasingly, we’re eating our seed corn and mortgaging our future. Furthermore, some of our leading lenders may not share our long-term national interests. Imagine what would happen to interest rates if some of these investors suddenly cut back on their appetite for U.S. Treasury notes.

Finally, there’s America’s leadership deficit, which is probably the most serious and sobering of all. At both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and on both sides of the political aisle, we need leaders who will face the facts, speak the truth, work together, and make tough choices.

http://www.gao.gov/cghome/d07600cg.pdf

Anyone who believes that the right is the party of sober, fiscal management would do well to review its record of the past four decades, both in the US and here in Canada. The record speaks for itself.

Mulroney, in his scant two terms, added 40% to Canada's national debt even though the economy was relatively strong during that period and his government had the added revenue stream of the Goods & Services Tax. The Canadian economy was left on the ropes and had to be turned around by Liberals John Chretien and Paul Martin. Common Sense Mike Harris left Ontario awash in deficit. Conservative Grant Devine left Saskatchewan on the verge of bankruptcy to be rescued by New Democrat Roy Romanow.

On both sides of the line the right-wing clown car keeps running around in the same circles and yet we keep buying the line that they're the ones who are responsible. And so we now find ourselves at the edge, staring down into the abyss of Right-Wing Meltdown. Oh when will we ever learn?

Conservatives Dissected and Explained

It took the government of the United States to do it but there's finally an explanation of just what makes Conservatives tick. From The Guardian:

A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".

As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.

All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality".

Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, received $1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.

"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes," the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.

And you thought conservatism wasn't a disease. It's not that they're bad, they just malfunction.