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.

Instead of Whinging About Boomers, Explain Yourself.

Millennials and Gen-Xers are fond of blaming the Boomer generation for their woes. Cheap talk from people who vote for parties that keep the Canadian petro-state locked into fossil fuels. That means young-ish Conservative supporters, and young-ish Liberal supporters, their NDP counterparts to boot.

Don't complain about your condition, don't blame others, if you wish to support those who have delivered your fate.  The Liberals we Boomers supported are not the wet cardboard Liberals of today. We supported the Liberal Party of Laurier, St. Laurent, Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, not this sham of a party that now holds power.

So many of this new bunch like to brand themselves "progressives" but there's nothing remotely progressive in supporting those parties, not with the looming danger of plunging the world into catastrophic climate change just 12 years off.

What is progressive in a leader who lavishes solemn promises to win votes only to discard them, one by one, after he has succeeded in duping a hopeful public?

A broken promise is bad enough in private life. It is worse in the field of politics. No man is worth his salt in public life who makes on the stump a pledge which he does not keep after election; and, if he makes such a pledge and does not keep it, hunt him out of public life.

If there is one overarching progressive principle it is to improve the well being of the people, now and in the future. Wrapped up in that is the duty to leave the country a better place than you found it. Even Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, espoused that much. So did this guy:

- 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.

Of that generation of men to whom we owe so much, the man to whom we owe most is, of course, Lincoln. Part of our debt to him is because he forecast our present struggle and saw the way out. He said:"I hold that while man exists it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind."

It is inevitable in neoliberalism that the loyalty the elected owe those who put them in office, the voting public, is instead to various degrees given to others, powerful interests, special interests, the corporate sector - firms such as KPMG, SNC-Lavalin, any of the fossil fuel giants of Athabasca.

- For 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 protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.

- The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows.

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. 

"Job Churn" - carrying the burden of the special privileges of another beggars us all.  Morneau, the prime minister's very affluent finance minister, has the audacity to tell our people that we, and especially our children, will just have to accept a future of job churn, lifetime membership in the new precariat. Wealth for the few, insecurity and worse for most. That the man was brazen enough to say that and not be rebuked or contradicted by this man Trudeau, speaks volumes for this government's supposed progressive nature.

Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable. No man who carries the burden of the special privileges of another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled.

- No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered-not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means.

- The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted. Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth, directly in the interest of the common good. The fundamental thing to do for every man is to give him a chance to reach a place in which he will make the greatest possible contribution to the public welfare.  ...No man can be a good citizen unless he has a wage more than sufficient to cover the bare cost of living, and hours of labor short enough so after his day’s work is done he will have time and energy to bear his share in the management of the community, to help in carrying the general load.

These passages capture the spirit of progressivism. This is not some Communist Manifesto. It is, instead, taken from a speech given by Teddy Roosevelt to a farmer's gathering in Osawatomie, Kansas in 1910. In this speech, Roosevelt drew heavily from the words of Abraham Lincoln.

The object of government is the welfare of the people. The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so long as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens. Just in proportion as the average man and woman are honest, capable of sound judgment and high ideals, active in public affairs,-but, first of all, sound in their home, and the father and mother of healthy children whom they bring up well,-just so far, and no farther, we may count our civilization a success. 

These passages are not an exhaustive compendium of progressive thought. They simply convey the focus and spirit of progressivism, once powerful influences that have long been purged from this modern politic and, by its absence, the decline of liberal democracy.

Simply being somewhat to the left of the Conservatives doesn't earn you the laurel of progressive. Being a progressive is about the relationship between government and the public, government and the individual, government and the corporate sector and other special interests. It is not compatible with the neoliberal order embraced on both sides of the aisle in our House of Commons.

The Liberal Party may be slightly, very slightly progressive socially but not to the extent that pries loose the grip of neoliberalism that pervades the party.

Don't sing the praises of those young people around the world striking for action on climate change if you intend to support the very politics they march against. You can't be on their side and work against them at the same time.

An Excellent Introduction to Neoliberalism. How Our Political Caste Came to Serve the Special Interest Over the Public Interest.

The first thing you need to know about neoliberalism is that it's made up. It's an economic ideology, one of a succession of belief-based theories that have come and gone on a 30 to 40-year cycle for the past two centuries. It is a belief-based construct, similar to other philosophies or faith-based religions. Neoliberalism has, for a number of very bad reasons, become deeply embedded and remarkably hard to shake off even though it failed and has triggered a variety of destructive social outcomes including inequality, the accumulation of economic and political power in the hands of a few and the weakening of liberal democracy. It isn't finished wreaking havoc on our society and our politicians do not even raise a finger to stop it.

A lot of us see neoliberalism, manifested in the rise of market power and the spread of globalism, as a plague on society. It is a plague on democratic society. That purpose was forged almost a century ago in Austria as it emerged from the ashes of WWI.

With the end of the war, Austria became a democratic republic, and socialist candidates won repeated victories in its cosmopolitan capital, Vienna. From 1918 to 1934, “Red” Vienna became a model city for democratic socialism, with social housing and expanded schooling for children and adults, all protected by a militant labor movement. The city inspired one resident, Karl Polanyi, to a lifelong defense of social democracy. Red Vienna, he wrote, caused “a moral and intellectual rise in the condition of a highly developed industrial working class,” which “achieved a level never reached before by the masses of the people in any industrial society.”

...Ludwig von Mises, an economist in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, wanted to restore free trade and the sanctity of property. The prewar version of the Austro-Hungarian empire became a point of reference for Mises and those who joined the study circle he organized: It had been a multi-ethnic empire that lowered barriers to trade while not insisting on cultural homogeneity. A relatively small, landlocked place like Austria, they reasoned, could never be economically self-sufficient in the industrial age. It had to be open to the world market, and to succeed there it would have to be competitive.

The labor movement, then, was a further obstacle to the realization of Mises’s project. The same forces that inspired Polanyi, Mises found oppressive. Labor unions marched in the streets, demanding higher-than-market wages and lower-than-market housing. The city kept budgets balanced with high and progressive taxes, and businesses fared about as well as elsewhere in Austria. But social housing undermined the position of landlords, and the bourgeoisie felt targeted by taxes on conspicuous consumption. For a time, there was even a dog tax that scaled upward with the breed and pedigree of the dog. Mises saw Red Vienna as a standoff between the power of labor and the power of capital. He was pleased when an anti-fascist uprising was violently suppressed in 1927—leaving dozens dead and more than a thousand injured—since it broke the power of the social democratic masses to mobilize. 

Democracy, for Mises, was not an absolute value to be respected at all times. It was a good system insofar as it made peaceful, gradual change possible. Democracy’s “function is to make peace,” he wrote, “to avoid violent revolutions.” When it failed in that task, Mises thought that enforcing order by other means was preferable to letting democracy destroy the economic foundations of prosperity, as he understood them. Although it is frequently said that neoliberals want a weak state, in which the market can be left to do most of the work, that is not quite correct. Against the enemies of the market—economic nationalism and democratic demands—the state has to play a role, mostly by creating a system of laws that protects property and by representing enough force to deter challenges. 

The neoliberals sought to “encase” markets, not to liberate them. Their project was not anarchy: It was a global system that sufficiently ordered the world so that capitalism would be safe from certain forms of political interference. Friedrich Hayek, who had worked under Mises, imagined an organization independent of any one country that would set the rules of the market. Hayek envisioned separate cultural and economic governments: The former would satisfy the demand for mass participation, while the latter would make sure that democratic enthusiasms did not interfere with the functioning of markets across the world. The neoliberal world, “is not a borderless market without states but a doubled world kept safe from mass demands for social justice and redistributive equality by the guardians of the economic constitution.” Neoliberalism places property, in other words, beyond the reach of democracy.

In the wake of the next world war, the leading neoliberals formed the Mont Pelerin Society.  The neoliberal world view became clear from their approach to the apartheid regime of South Africa and the rise of Pinochet in Chile.

Hayek himself called apartheid “both an injustice and an error.” The system interfered, after all, with the allocation of resources, by keeping black Africans from participating in free markets and preventing them from the most efficient application of their talents and labor. Yet granting black South Africans suffrage rights would inevitably lead to a reordering of property relations, since the black majority would favor reclaiming land that had been taken by white settlers. This was unacceptable in Hayek’s view. 

Within the Mont Pelerin Society, the problem of how to end colonialism without destroying property rights was much debated. The English economist William Hutt imagined that voting power in postapartheid South Africa could be made proportional to economic weight. Milton Friedman agreed that one man, one vote would be terrible for South Africa, and Hayek worried that putting sanctions on South Africa would upset the global order. They didn’t favor apartheid, but they were against almost anything that might bring it to an end. 

The story is a similar one in Chile. Hayek visited Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship twice and met with Pinochet once. During his second visit, Hayek told a Chilean newspaper that it was possible for a “dictator to govern in a liberal way,” and that he preferred a “liberal dictator to a democratic government lacking liberalism.” Given the widespread use of torture by Pinochet’s government, this has often been seen by critics of neoliberalism as a link between the intellectual architect of neoliberalism and authoritarian repression, while Hayek’s defenders have seen it as an aberration. In fact, it was simply consistent with the way that he saw the world: The socialism of Salvador Allende, whom Pinochet had overthrown, was democracy gone wrong. Restoring a market economy took priority over human rights and social justice. A dictatorship was not desirable, but he objected more to those who protested its abuses.

Neoliberalism in the 21st century.

The current rules all but ensure that governments act in the interests of capital, since, if businesses do not like a certain country’s policies (say, a proposal that corporations pay their fair share of taxes), they can disrupt the economy by abruptly withdrawing from that country. Preserving the rights of capital is the goal, even when that means sacrificing democratic demands. That is why our world is a more neoliberal one than it once was, and why it matters. However fractious and internally contradictory neoliberal thought may be, and however overused it can be as a term, it is describing something real. 

It is the nature of ideologies to see some things clearly and place other things out of view—to serve up a combination of useful concepts and to conceal self-interest. Sets of ideas that become influential can usually do a great deal of the latter. The point is surely not that neoliberalism is wrong about everything: It makes sense to seek to avoid hyperinflation, for example, and it is reasonable to note that price fluctuations in market economies provide information to consumers and business owners about how to behave—if apples become scarce, and their price goes up, consumers can substitute, say, cheaper oranges.

...But the things that neoliberalism has trouble seeing are, at the present, far more consequential: deep inequalities, accompanied by a sense of powerlessness, of being left behind by a global system that operates with no regard for the interests or voice of the majority.  ...The rise of the far right in the United States and Europe cannot be explained solely as a reaction against neoliberal globalization (not least because many of its supporters are thriving economically), but the financial crisis of 2008—caused by inadequate regulation—did give the far right its opportunity to grow. 

Furthermore, the primacy of capital in neoliberalism means that crises will be resolved on the backs of the poor, with cuts to the welfare state and public services, though it is not the poor who cause them. Even the International Monetary Fund, which demanded austerity as a response to debt crises in the 1980s, now acknowledges that some neoliberal ideas have been oversold, concluding that increased inequality hurts “the level and sustainability of growth.” Similarly, much of the economics profession has moved on from neoliberalism, recognizing that there are many ways to operate a healthy economy. Dani Rodrik* points out that rich countries have public sectors ranging in size from 33 percent to nearly 60 percent of gross domestic product. A large state sector is not the antithesis of personal liberty: Indeed, it can sustain it.

What neoliberalism misses or ignores is that a world of apparently neutral rules is still a world of power inequalities. When capital has more freedom than people, serious democratic deficits are guaranteed. Voters may prefer a strong welfare state, but they may get austerity instead. In many nations, including the United States, the power of money in politics gives concentrated wealth a sword to hold over democracy’s neck.

It's important to realize that neoliberalism, despite its grip on the developed nations, is merely an ideology. Like any of the thousands of religions man has devised over the millennia, neoliberalism is a faith-based construct. It is not etched in stone. It did not come down from the mountains inscribed on tablets.

Neoliberalism is belief-based. Before his death, even America's leading neoliberal, Milton Friedman, admitted that neoliberalism was a failed experiment. It was an ideology, one that ascended to a cult-like status as it conquered the political arena. Friedman was telling the truth, it was deeply flawed and it has failed. Our political caste, however, are maintaining the status quo, keeping neoliberalism on life support despite the deep social injuries it inflicts. It's as though they can't imagine what follows and are waiting for the next ideological messiah to arrive. That day may never come.

In my view the antithesis of neoliberalism is progressivism, the belief in popular democracy espoused by Abraham Lincoln and the Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin. It is progressivism that places labour ahead of capital. It is progressivism that holds capital and capitalism must advance the wellbeing of the state and its people. It is progressivism that does not shy away from wealth redistribution as championed by Theodore Roosevelt who said:

One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. 

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.

I've looked around but I still can find nothing remotely as promising as a return to progressivism to heal the wounds inflicted on our society, our nation, by the neoliberals.

*It was Harvard economist Dani Rodrick who warned of what he called "the inescapable trilemma of the world economy":

“democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three but never have all three simultaneously and in full”

"...Historically, the rise of capitalism and the pressure for an ever-broader suffrage went together. This is why the richest countries are liberal democracies with, more or less, capitalist economies. Widely shared increases in real incomes played a vital part in legitimising capitalism and stabilising democracy. Today, however, capitalism is finding it far more difficult to generate such improvements in prosperity. On the contrary, the evidence is of growing inequality and slowing productivity growth. This poisonous brew makes democracy intolerant and capitalism illegitimate. 

"...Consider the disappointing recent performance of global capitalism, not least the shock of the financial crisis and its devastating effect on trust in the elites in charge of our political and economic arrangements. Given all this, confidence in an enduring marriage between liberal democracy and global capitalism seems unwarranted. 

"So what might take its place? One possibility would be the rise of a global plutocracy and so in effect the end of national democracies. As in the Roman empire, the forms of republics might endure but the reality would be gone. (Was it not Trudeau who declared Canada a "post national" country?)

"An opposite alternative would be the rise of illiberal democracies or outright plebiscitary dictatorships, in which the elected ruler exercises control over both the state and capitalists. This is happening in Russia and Turkey. Controlled national capitalism would then replace global capitalism. Something rather like that happened in the 1930s. It is not hard to identify western politicians who would love to go in exactly this direction. 

"...Meanwhile, those of us who wish to preserve both liberal democracy and global capitalism must confront serious questions. One is whether it makes sense to promote further international agreements that tightly constrain national regulatory discretion in the interests of existing corporations. My view increasingly echoes that of Prof Lawrence Summers of Harvard, who has argued that “international agreements [should] be judged not by how much is harmonised or by how many barriers are torn down but whether citizens are empowered”. Trade brings gains but cannot be pursued at all costs."

More recently, professor Rodrik, discussed populism. He distinguished negative from positive populism. Negative nationalism, the variety favoured by authoritarian and illiberal states, is a blend of paranoia and xenophobia. It posits the "other" as a threat. Positive nationalism is internal and focuses on what is right and good within one's nation and what can be done to make it better. Negative nationalism perceives the nation as awash in threats and perils. Positive nationalism works to improve.

If our economic rules empower corporations and financial interests excessively, then the correct response is to rewrite those rules — at home as well as abroad. If trade agreements serve mainly to reshuffle income to capital and corporations, the answer is to rebalance them to make them friendlier to labor and society at large. If governments feel themselves powerless to institute the tax policies and regulations needed to address the dislocations caused by economic and technological shocks, the solution is not just to seek more national autonomy but also to deploy it toward such reforms. 

A populism of this kind can seem like a frontal attack on the economic sacred cows of the day — just as earlier waves of American populism were. But it is an honest populism that stands a chance of achieving its stated objectives, without harming fundamental democratic norms of tolerance and equal citizenship.

Free Market Capitalism on Trial

Neoliberal, free market capitalism, has had a good run since it was ushered in by Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney. There's been plenty of time to watch it in action and, now, there's plenty of evidence to gauge just how well it has served us.

Ngaire Woods, dean of Oxford's  Blavatnik School of  Government, says the case against free market capitalism is strong.

...some politicians are no longer defending free-market capitalism in terms of economic growth or the gains from globalization. Instead, they focus on individual opportunity. May, for example, has credited the system with reducing infant mortality, increasing life expectancy, driving down absolute poverty, boosting disposable incomes, expanding access to education, and slashing illiteracy rates.

But these claims aren’t in line with the facts. Start with maternal mortality. Much of the world has made great strides in making childbirth safer. From 1990 to 2015, Albania reduced its maternal deaths per 100,000 live births from 29.3 to 9.6. China, the poster child for state-led growth, reduced its rate from 114.2 to 17.7.

Meanwhile, the trend in the United States, the paragon of free-market democracy, has gone in the opposite direction, with maternal deaths per 100,000 live births actually rising, from 16.9 in 1990 to 26.4 in 2015. Equally shocking, the morbidity and mortality of white (non-Hispanic) middle-aged men and women in the US increased between 1999 and 2013.

The claim that free-market policies “slash illiteracy” is also misleading. In England, some 15% of adults (5.1 million people) are still “functionally illiterate,” meaning that they have literacy levels at or below those expected of an 11-year-old. Scotland’s most recent survey showed a decline in literacy, with less than half of the country’s 13- and 14-year-olds now performing well in writing. In fact, if you Google “successful literacy campaign,” the country with astonishing literacy gains that fills your screen is Cuba – hardly a free-market system.

The conservative case, eloquently articulated by May, is that a free-market economy, operating under the right rules and regulations, is the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created. If that claim is true, the only logical conclusion is that we are doing it wrong.

So what measures are needed to get it right? The practical solutions on offer seem to be fairly consistent across the political spectrum. Indeed, for all their furious positioning, the differences between left and right seem to have collapsed in this regard.

In the UK, the first suggestion is to ensure economy-wide investment and growth, which will require government intervention. Corbyn proposes a National Investment Bank and Transformation Fund to mobilize public investment and create wealth and good jobs. May, for her part, suggests an industrial strategy to promote “growth across the whole country,” helping to “turn local areas of excellence into national export champions.”

Second, private-sector leadership must change, in order to prevent short-term thinking, tax avoidance, and other forms of opportunism and personal enrichment. Here, Corbyn focuses on accountability in corporate boardrooms, while May calls for giving workers and shareholders a stronger voice in firms’ decision-making and ensuring that the largest companies have incentives to think long term.

A third corrective is to improve employees’ pay and working conditions. In Britain, even as the economy has grown, wages have been dropping – by 10% from 2007 to 2014. Corbyn promises to take action to stop employers from driving down pay and working conditions. For May, “all work should be fair and decent, with scope for development and fulfillment.” Both make the case for improving vocational training and technical education.

Fourth, in Britain, the government must address the public-housing crisis. In the 1950s and 1960s, an average of some 300,000 houses were being built every year; that figure has now dropped to less than half. Corbyn proposes a review of social housing, rent control, and regeneration for the people. May has announced the creation of a £2 billion ($2.62 billion) fund for building more council housing.

Finally, Britain needs more effective rules and regulations to ensure that privatized utilities deliver cheaper, more sustainable services. Corbyn accuses companies of handing out large dividends to shareholders, while infrastructure crumbles, service deteriorates, and companies pay far too little in taxes. May promises to end “rip-off energy prices.”

The orthodoxy established by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s – to roll back the state, after a decade of profligate and bloated government – is guilty as charged. A new consensus is emerging that more active and effective government is required to boost growth and expand opportunity. The jury is still out, however, on whether governments will be given the tools and support they need to rehabilitate the defendant.

The neoliberal era has been embraced by our political caste as an excuse to take them off the hook of governance. They freely offloaded much of their political responsibilities to the "markets" whatever that meant in any given situation. They chose to become petit fonctionnaires, technocrats, administrators, grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard. For them that meant all the trappings and privileges of power with only half of the responsibility, just not the half that mattered most to our nation and our people. That responsibility, the hard stuff, they shirked.

Robert Reich Calls For a What? A "New Democratic Party" Whatever That Is.

During the campaign, Robert Reich urged American progressives to hold their noses and vote for Hillary. He also said that, the day after the election, they should mobilize, perhaps around Bernie Sanders, to create a new progressive movement, one that could challenge both the Republicans and the Democrats in 2020. Well that day has arrived, albeit not with the anticipated outcome, and Robert Reich is still calling for a new progressive movement, something called a "New Democratic Party."


The Democratic Party as it is now constituted has become a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests. This must change. The election of 2016 has repudiated it. We need a people’s party — a party capable of organizing and mobilizing Americans in opposition to Donald Trump’s Republican Party, which is about to take over all three branches of the US government. We need a New Democratic Party that will fight against intolerance and widening inequality.

Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and they blame the establishment for it.

The Democratic Party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper-middle-class households in “swing” suburbs.

...They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class — failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate them, or help workers form unions with simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify — with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising result of this combination — more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration — has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump’s authoritarian demagoguery, and his presidency.

...The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn’t wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump.

There are valuable lessons in Reich's warnings for our own sitting government. The Liberals have followed in the footsteps of the Democrats. Do you think Trudeau more progressive than Obama? I don't. With just one year under his belt and three more in which to change course, Trudeau has been given an invaluable lesson in what could await him in 2019. 

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.                      

New Contest. Spot the Progressive!

I'll bet you've got inside yourself some sense of progress, progressive, progressivism.  Even bad people have a little.

The question today is whether progressivism remains a real construct in Canadian politics.  Have our political parties become so neoliberal as to eradicate progressivism?

Let's take a look at some of the major problems of the day.  You think of how a progressive would respond.  Then compare that of any of the three main parties seeking power today.

What about an easy one, Palestine?  How would a progressive respond to that volatile and worsening problem?  How would Harper, Trudeau and Mulcair respond?  Short of condemning Israel for its half century of enslavement of a people, how would a progressive respond?

See what I'm getting at?  Take a problem.  Here's a partial list:  climate change, health care, education, inequality, bitumen trafficking, Arctic Canada, democratic deficit, free and fair elections, freedom of information, press freedom, corporatism... you could easily spend half a day tacking items onto this list.  Just pick a couple or a few and try to envision what would be a progressive approach to them.  Then "contrast and compare" that with the thin gruel being offered up by our major political parties.

Who knows, maybe you'll be able to Spot the Progressive.  Somehow I doubt it.

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.

"In America truth is offensive, If you tell the truth, you are offensive."

So writes former U.S. deputy treasury secretary, Paul Craig Roberts, in his column for CounterPunch, America, Land of the Lost. 

Roberts recently published the e-book, The Failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism, reviewed on this blog three weeks ago.   Plenty of offensive truth-telling there.   Now, Roberts confronts the shrill unacceptability of being both honest and open in modern Western culture.

Throughout history truth tellers have suffered and court historians have prospered.  It is the same today.

 If you tell readers what is really going on, they want to know why you can’t be positive. Why are you telling us that there are bad happenings that can’t be remedied?  Don’t you know that God gave Americans the power to fix all wrongs?  What are you?  Some kind of idiot, an anti-American, a pinko-liberal-commie?  If you hate America so much, why don’t you move to Cuba, Iran or China (or to wherever the current bogyman is located)?

Roberts notes the irony in the treatment of Julian Assange by the U.K. and the U.S. when contrasted by China's treatment of its own truth-telling dissident.

In contrast with “freedom and democracy” US and UK, the “authoritarian,” “communist,” “oppressive” Chinese government when confronted with Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng’s defection to the US embassy in Beijing, let him go.

It is an upside down world when America and the British refuse to obey international law, but the Chinese communists uphold international law.

Insouciant Americans are undisturbed that alleged terrorists are tortured, held indefinitely in prison without due process, and executed on the whim of some executive branch official without due process of law.

Most Americans go along with unaccountable murder, torture, and detention without evidence, which proclaims their gullibility to the entire world. There has never in history been a population as unaware as Americans. The world is amazed that an insouciant people became, if only for a short time, a superpower.

The world needs intelligence and leadership in order to avoid catastrophe, but America can provide neither intelligence nor leadership. America is a lost land where nuclear weapons are in the hands of those who are concerned only with their own power. Washington is the enemy of the entire world and encompasses the largest concentration of evil on the planet.

Where is the good to rise up against the evil?

There are those of us who persist in telling the truth even when it is unwelcome and who are standing by ready to rise up to confront the poison that has spread throughout our own government.  Yet there are not many.   Indeed there are far, far more who style themselves progressive who would readily embrace complacency and submission.  Far more.  Ask yourself what side of the line are you on?

To All My Progressive Friends, You Dwindling Few

Progressivism is now pretty thoroughly scrubbed out of the Liberal Party and it's in a state of respiratory distress even in today's Tony Blairified NDP.   Fortunately there are still progressive voices and progressive minds.  If you're one of them I'd like to introduce you to a wonderful offshore newspaper, Island Tides. 

It's been publishing every second Thursday for 21 years and is circulated along the east coast of Vancouver Island and throughout Saltspring, Gabriola, Pender, Galiano, Mayne, Saturna, Denman, Hornby, Quadra, Cortes, Texada, and Read Islands.

There's some terrific journalism to be found in its pages and you can access the latest edition and the paper's archives free of charge at the link above.   If you're one of those affluent mainland bastards you can even subscribe.

In today's edition there's a fascinating discussion about the "Honour of the Crown" and whether the Harper government has shirked its obligation, clarified in the 2004 decision in Haida v. British Columbia, to consult with First Nations impacted by changes to environmental review procedures, the Fisheries Act, and navigable waters legislation.  Most important is whether Harper had the authority to implement the FIPA treaty without First Nations' consent.

There's also in print the transcript of remarks made by Sid Jorna to the environmental review panel into the Northern Gateway pipeline proposal.

First of all, thank you for hearing these submissions. My name
is Sid Jorna. I’m a retired commander of the Royal Canadian
Navy with a bridge watchkeeping certificate, so I’ve had
experience at sea. With a Master’s degree in engineering, I’ve
had a second career as a Director of Engineering, General
Dynamics Canada, overseeing the development of naval sonar
equipment.
 
Knowing something of the marine environment, I will
therefore confine my comments to the issue of bulk oil carrier
vessels in the Dixon Entrance, the Hecate Strait and the Douglas
Channels.
 
In my opinion, bulk oil carriers in these waters pose an
unacceptable risk of a significant oil spill with extreme
consequences to the environment. I believe that a major tanker
accident in this confined sea is inevitable over time due to the
nature of the tankers and the nature of the sea and climate of
this region.
 
The very large crude carriers, or the ultra large crude carriers,
are huge, ponderous ships of 366 metres or more, 25 metres of
draft, and carrying some 2 million barrels of crude oil or more.
They have the capacity to spill roughly 10 times the oil that was
spilled by the Exxon Valdez.
 
By comparison, the Exxon Valdezwas a double-hulled crude
oil carrier with a capacity of approximately 1.2 million barrels
of oil. It spilled roughly 10% of that, causing all that
environmental damage in Prince William Sound.
 
Consider the destructive potential of a modern bulk oil
carrier. Bulk oil carriers are not very manoeuvrable. In the very
nimble destroyers of the Navy, we considered that the point at
which collision cannot be avoided by the action of one ship alone
is reached at approximately three kilometres owing to the huge
momentum and limited ability to manoeuvre of the bulk oil
carriers.
 
Another measure of the vessel’s huge momentum was its
stopping ability, needing at least 8 to 10 kilometres to stop.
 
These vessels are so large that they must constantly alter course
to the waves to avoid setting up harmonic oscillations which
could tear the vessel apart.
 
Douglas Channel from Kitimat to the Hecate Strait consists
of 140 kilometres of narrow, winding passages with multiple
islands, rock outcroppings and steep cliff banks. The narrowest
point is approximately 1.2 kilometres across between 90-metre high cliffs.
 
This is not a safe passage for such a large, ponderous ship.
Even in the best of conditions, with tugs in attendance,
conditions are not often the best. A ship would not be able to
ride out a tsunami in the Douglas Channel where the wave
would be magnified greatly by the funneling effect of the
Channel.
 
Hecate Strait is notorious for hurricane force winds and
gargantuan waves. An excellent description of possible
conditions here can be found in Chapter 10 of The Golden
Spruce [2005] by John Vaillant. I’ll paraphrase a few.
 
Hecate Strait is arguably the most dangerous body of
water on the west coast of British Columbia. On a regular
basis, its unique combination of wind, tide, shoals and
shallows produce a kind of destructive synergy. Katabatic
winds generated in the mountains funnel wind tunnel
style through the many fjords, like Douglas Channel.
Winter storms manifest as southerlies along the
coast. It is because of these winds that waves of over 30
metres—30 metres—have been recorded at the weather
buoy at the southern end of the Hecate Strait.
 
The Straits are so dangerous because these weather
westerly sea storm, blowing at 80 to 160 knots per hour,
collides head on with a north-easterly katabatic wind of
similar strength, the result is a kind of an atmospheric
hammer and anvil effect.
 
Tides that can run up to seven metres are another
ingredient. The transfer of such volumes of water in the
confined spaces like the Douglas Channel and the Hecate
Strait form the effect of a giant thumb pressed over the
end of an even larger garden hose.
 
The third ingredient is called an overfall which occurs
when wind and tide are moving rapidly in opposite
directions. Overfalls are steep, closely packed,
unpredictable waves capable of rolling a fishing boat and
driving it into the sea bottom. The overfalls can show up
anywhere but are intensified by sandbars and shoals like
those that extend for 30 kilometres off the end of Rose
Spit between Masset and Prince Rupert.
 
Large enough waves will expose the sea floor of the
Hecate Strait. The result is one of the most diabolically
hostile environments that wind, sea and land are capable
of conjuring up.

That’s the description in that particular book. My own worst
experience of the sea’s fury was in the aircraft carrier HMCS
Bonaventure. Off Halifax, the seas were so monumental that
the captain diverted 700 kilometres to avoid turning the vessel
sideways to the seas. This is a large vessel. It was impossible to
stand upright on the bridge. The captain ended up in the bottom
of a heap. We were lucky because this storm occurred when we
were in open waters with room to manoeuvre and not in a
confined space such as the Hecate Strait.
 
This description of frequent conditions in the Hecate Strait
does not instil confidence in the ability to manage with
technology. In these conditions the huge tankers may be
rendered helpless, their attending tugboats pathetic and no
match for the fury of the wind and the sea.
 
It is a form of hubris to believe that a combination of risk
reduction measures in these conditions will prevent a
catastrophic event. Risk reduction measures did not prevent the
sinking of Arrowin 1970, the sinking of Ocean Ranger in 1982,
the sinking of Exxon Valdez in 1989, the sinking of the Northern
Explorer ferry in 2007, and the Deep Water Horizon spill in
the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, and the pipeline spills of the
Kalamazoo River of 2011…
 

During the time of writing this submission there has been
one grounding in the approaches to Prince Rupert and an
Alaska oil rig has to be evacuated and is adrift in the Arctic
waters. On the east coast, a naval vessel has just parted its
towline and sustained damage. A 7.5 Magnitude earthquake
occurred 160 kilometres northwest of Haida Gwaii less than 48
hours ago.

In the case of Dixon Entrance, Hecate Strait and Douglas
Channel, a tanker disaster is a predictable certainty over time
and an unrecoverable ecological disaster for everyone.
Please drop this very bad idea and reinstate the moratorium
on tanker traffic in northern BC waters that have protected our
northern coasts for 40 years. Thank you.

Once you have read Commander Jorna's compelling submission ask yourself what the Liberal Party of Canada is doing dancing around the Northern Gateway business.   What is that goddamned miserable remnant of a once great party doing even entertaining a Pipeline Queen like Hall-Findlay as a leadership candidate?

Fighting the Northern Gateway isn't British Columbia's fight.  It's Canada's fight.  We've already got the camel's nose under the tent.  That's Kinder Morgan.

It's time for Liberals of conscience to demand the reinstatement of progressivism in their party.   Trudeau, Garneau, Hall-Findlay; they're all taking the LPC even further down it's rightwing path.

Meanwhile, Just Below the Surface, Canadian Discontent Builds

Canadians are quietly simmering.   A poll finds a majority of Canadians now support grassroots protests as a vehicle to force political action.

The majority of respondents said they supported grassroots protests, including the Occupy movement and the British Columbia referendum against the harmonized sales tax. People are looking at other methods of political participation beyond conventional parties, said Environics pollster Keith Neuman, in an interview discussing the poll on Canadian values conducted jointly with the University of Alberta.

Also, when it comes to taxes, the poll suggests politicians are out of touch with Canadian values, adds U of A’s Harvey Krahn, a sociologist who assisted with the poll. It was conducted from Oct. 2 to 14 with a sample size of 2,001 people.

Keeping taxes as low as possible ranked last on the list of 12 shared values identified by Canadians, yet politicians, including Alberta Premier Alison Redford last week, staunchly rule out increasing taxes even when the province faces a serious deficit, said Krahn.

“There’s a disconnect between Canadians’ values and politicians on this issue,” said Krahn.

The poll also identified 12 basic values supported by more than 50 per cent of Canadians. At the top of the list, with more than 90-per-cent support was “having a political system that encourages average Canadians to let politicians know what they think” — a value that speaks to support for Occupy and other citizen movements, said Neuman.

When asked if Canada should be a country that supports gender equality, more than 90 per cent said yes. Also garnering more than 90-per-cent support were public health care and respect for all religions.

In the middle tier of values, 92 per cent said Canada should be a country with a social safety net, 90 per cent supported strict laws on crime, 88 per cent supported protecting the environment, “even if this slows down economic development,” and 85 per cent said all citizens should speak French or English.

If this poll is accurate it would seem to suggest that the opposition parties' shift to the right has been a monumental blunder.   Harper has certainly taken the country there but, unlike the Liberals and the NDP who compliantly followed, the Canadian people, it seems, have stayed put which could plausibly explain the public disconnect with federal politics and the growing support for dissent and protest.

This should be a lesson, especially to the Liberals now looking for their next leader.   With Trudeau,  Garneau and Hall Findlay parked so comfortably up Harper's bitumen backside, it's time the LPC came to its senses and finally embraced a good measure of progressivism.

Is Canadian Progressivism a Farce?

The topic came up recently in a discussion I had with a prolific and thoroughly progressive blogger who will go unnamed.   He lamented that he had become fed up with Canadian prog bloggers who seemed not terribly interested in progressivism at all and, by contrast, far less interesting than their truly progressive American counterparts.

I think his criticism is fair and accurate.   Many of us, I suspect, consider ourselves progressive by virtue of an affiliation with a particular party that once, in times now past, had been more or less actually progressive.   For them, progressivism was a default setting, anything to the left of the Conservatives.   If you were a follower of one of the other parties you were, by definition, a progressive.   Yet surely one doesn't follow from the other.

American progressivism operates outside of the country's governing parties.   That's because the Democrats are only slightly less distant from progressivism than the Republicans who, at times, act as though they would like to see progressives tried and burned at a stake.

What would a progressive Canadian political party look like today?  Among other things it would be championing causes like dismantling corporatism, scrapping the petro-state we have so foolishly become, and busting up the corporate media cartel to restore press freedom in Canada.   All three of these things are like malignant tumors metastasizing in Canada's body politic, eating away at our once cherished democracy.  A progressive party would be promising to redress inequality and not just inequality of income and wealth but, more importantly, inequality of opportunity - the real scourge that threatens the future for our kids and grandkids.  That means restoring and bolstering health care and public education, the very cornerstones to rebuilding a vibrant, robust middle class.  A progressive would be committed to restoring collective bargaining rights to our economy.  A progressive would release the ties that bind us to America's dead-end militarism.

I'm beginning to think I sound like David Lewis or Ed Broadbent yet I've always considered myself centre-left on social issues and decidedly centrist on everything else.   I don't think I've changed.  To confirm that I have gone back to read  Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and FDR, two Republicans and a Democrat, all of them exceptional American presidents who served at critical moments in their country's history.  Were they a gang of closet Socialists?  I think not yet we would have to move our non-Conservative parties of today well to the left to bring them into line with Abe and Teddy and Franklin.

As a progressive it seems obvious that we need a reformation in Canadian politics.  We need to even the keel.  That can't be achieved by Tony Blaired New Democrats transforming into Latter Day Liberals or by Liberals continuing to morph into Conservative-Lite.   That only keeps Canada listing to the right and there's no good for our young and future generations that can possibly come from this.

The Right Will Howl Tonight

Income inequality seems to have sprung up as a hot issue in the American elections.    With a consummate rent-seeker, Mitt Romney, carrying the Republican banner, America's crippling inequality - income, wealth and opportunity -  was bound to bubble to the surface.

Today's American Right (no, they're not conservatives) has reacted like junkyard dogs at the mention of inequality.  It sends them howling about "class warfare" and "unearned wealth."  We can expect to hear plenty of their growling tonight and for days to come.

Americans are taught to honour their flag, not to spit in church and to recoil in dread and panic at the utterance of the words "class warfare."  They're brought up to believe that class warfare = socialism = communism = totalitarianism and the destruction of private property.

But it's helpful to remember that it isn't Mitt's 47% or the entire 99% that are fueling class warfare.   In fact they've been on the receiving end of a powerful, divisive and destructive class war launched under Ronald Reagan that continues today.  Two years before Barack Obama was elected President, billionaire investor Warren Buffet got to the bottom of it:

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

And that may just be what this election will be all about - whether Class Warriors like Romney manage to cement the work begun by Ronald Reagan.  That's not to say that Obama would make everything right again, he won't.   And, if he tried, America's "bought and paid for" Congress in both camps would thwart his efforts.

No, just as the neo-cons knew they needed a seismic event (9/ll) to springboard their perverted supremacist ideology, progressivism may need a similar scale, economic event to coalesce  blue and white collar workers in opposition to America's rentier class and the Congress that is in their service.  It's really just a matter of when.

Need a Progressive Break?

Try Molleindustria a web site that hosts a gaggle of free and generally amusing progressive computer games.  Among the offerings are:

Leaky World, a playable theory, described as an interactive interpretation of the essay "Conspiracy as Governance" by Julian Assange.   The games challenges players to "connect the global ruling class and suppress the leakage of information."

Every Day the Same Dream, you are late for work, a short, existential game about alienation and the refusal of work.

Other titles include Oilagarchy, the slickest business game; Faith Fighter, religious hate has never been so much fun; Operation: PedoPriest; and eight other titles.

Molleindustria is described as an Italian radical artists' collective.

Forget Boycotts, Who Are The Good Guys?

Much as I like the notion of punishing right wing outfits I realized there's probably more impact to be had in figuring out what firms and individuals are actually on the progressive side.   Worrying about which firms not to deal with, what places not to frequent is kind of meaningless if you just take your business to another place with the same leanings.   Besides, it's easier to remember the names of the good guys than to have to also memorize the names of the bad guys.

So, what are the top progressive businesses in Canada?   Who should we all be supporting?   We all have to find our own way a bit on this.   Many of the good guys are local businesses and surely they deserve priority.   Others may be regional or national.   But we need to know.

So, how about listing businesses that support progressivism in Canada?  Let's start putting together a list.