Surfing the Wave of Change

The enormity of the changes underway is finally settling in.  We're coming to realize that the 21st century will not be a mere successor to the 18th, 19th and 20th.   The old economics, the old industrialism, the old geo-politics are heading for the dust bin without any good idea of what should replace them.  That's a conversation we've not yet been willing to have with ourselves.

We're changing but, unlike the progression of change over the past three centuries, this time we're having increasingly less control over the pace and direction of changes that are, well, overtaking us.  If you're fond of big surf, you'll know the feeling.

The environment is changing, moving surprisingly rapidly toward a new steady state, an epoch that has already been named the "anthropocene."   All we seem to do in response is bicker about 'drop in the bucket' proposals that never get off the ground.   Global warming isn't coming, it's here, and even if we could break our civilization's carbon addiction today, the warming would substantially worsen for another century.

And, even as the environment changes, the effects are compounded by overpopulation, over-consumption and over-contamination of our increasingly unstable biosphere, Earth.   More billions of people with ever-increasing consumption habits results in ever greater contamination or pollution of the soil, water and atmosphere.  It generates civil unrest and regional instability hallmarked by revolt, violent suppression, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and regional arms races now underway.

It's quite reasonable to expect that the magnitude of the environmental change coming our way will direct, even perhaps define, the political, military, economic, industrial and social structures and institutions of the 21st century.  "Adaptation" (a delightfully benign and non-threatening synonym for 'survival') will probably supplant the concept of growth in driving our decisions.

When you're on a ride like this, you have to think and act well ahead of events if you're not to be overtaken by them, if you're to retain the initiative to act, control.   The surfer analogy works again.  They have to sit and study the sea behind them.   They have to identify that one swell that will transform into the best wave to ride.   They have to anticipate its approach speed and then paddle to gain enough speed to catch it and then surf it.   The whole exercise is a culmination of a series of correct assessments and decisions.   Get it wrong and you're left with an entirely different slate of options, none of them particularly pleasant.

Of all the things the best surfers have that our political leadership lacks, vision is the most critical.  Our political class is myopic, a condition arising from perpetually gazing at its feet.  It doesn't look out to the horizon, it doesn't focus to infinity and, hence, it doesn't see or question or evaluate or anticipate or plan for what's coming.  Yet only our political leadership has the authority, resources and the powers to undertake a chore so Herculean.   I understand they're apprehensive of the consequences of shaking the boat but the boat is already rocking if only they could get past their denial.

I thought I should add the following insights from U Calgary, professor emeritus Phil Elder who sees centuries of human nature standing in the way of action:

The scariest thing is that this potential threat to civilization, created by the wealthiest countries, gets a big shrug from many sincere, well-meaning people who are living happily in a state of denial. Yet despair leads to self-defeating paralysis (which may account for young people’s abstention from politics). Disaster is not inevitable; with political will, we can prevent it.

Why are we so slow to respond decisively? Human nature? Our species, accidentally created in Africa by evolution’s dumb engine, has opposable thumbs, powerful brains, and self-consciousness. But, at the same time, our mammalian bodies house strong, embedded instincts, which could endanger our survival.

Originally small roving bands of omnivores, humans now live in mega-groups and have so overrun the planet that civilization may be endangered. True, our intellect and technological creativity have created an unprecedented standard of living for huge populations. But, as Roland Wright suggests in his book A Short History of Progress,

… to use a computer analogy, we are running 21st-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago ... . This human inability to see ... long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering.

For eons, change was so slow as to be imperceptible, except for decade-by-decade fluctuation of game resources. Therefore, long-term thinking had no survival value. When things got tight, bands moved on to more favourable territory in a limitless world, and, if other humans were already there, violence decided who would survive.  

In these circumstances, we developed strong, embedded, aggressive instincts; fight-or-flight adrenaline; “nature, red in tooth and claw”; a need for short-term survival, regardless of tomorrow. Yet this mindset is deeply unsuitable for the modern world, which needs long-term planning and co-operation.

We also became mistrustful of outsiders and fearful of change. Defence mechanisms like denial, rationalization, and magical thinking were helpful comforts. So were greed – for our extended family, if not just for ourselves – and a willingness to exploit others.

Addressing these challenges isn't Apocalyptic.  Ignoring them may well be.

For All Our Sakes, Get It Right This Time Jimbo

Federal FinMin Tiny Jim Flaherty seems to be breaking ranks with his American and European cousins and says that the federal government would consider another round of stimulus spending if Canada slips back into recession.   Give credit where it's due, Flaherty's announcement is a breath of fresh air.

Only if we are to have a second stimulus programme, let's hope the Harper government doesn't screw it up as badly as the first round.

A follow-up stimulus initiative should be money spent by the federal government itself.   The money should be invested, that is to say it should be used to purchase badly needed infrastructure that will pay for itself in the long run.   You want assets that will be producing a return for the public in the years ahead when that public will have to fork over taxes to repay the stimulus borrowings.

Harper couldn't handle the first round of stimulus spending.   He was willing to have the government borrow the money but he was too cowardly, too small a man to take responsibility for spending it.  Instead he doled it out to other levels of government and to taxpayers to hire someone to put a new deck on the cottage.   That did two things.   It allowed junior levels of government to avoid having to raise their own taxes and it enabled those with spare cash on hand to do a spruce up at home.  Neither of these generated long-term returns for the Canadian public.   Worse yet, the money wasn't distributed equitably.  It was like a Pinata - the kids at the front scooped up all the candy, the rest did without.  When it was all over we were simply left with a massive, long-term debt obligation for money squandered.

Let's hope they don't screw it up yet again.

Is Capitalism Self-Destructing? Was Karl Marx Right?

Even the Wall Street Journal is starting to toss around the idea that Marx might have been right - capitalism will destroy itself.  Economist Nouriel Roubini warns the self-destructive transfer of income from labour to capital could lead to an economic death spiral.





Roubini explains quite convincingly why Western leaders are placing our economies in great peril by leaping into austerity budgeting prematurely.  He's joined in this by other top economists, including Krugman and Stiglitz, who warn of further economic contraction in the wake of austerity measures.  So why isn't our supposed economist Ruler, Furious Leader Harper, ignoring their warnings? 

Roubini, Krugman and Stiglitz were the voices warning of the 2008 global meltdown years before it happened when the "smartest man in the room" Harper wasn't having any of it.   When the recession did hit Canada totally unprepared, Harper shrugged off his incompetence by claiming no one saw it coming.  Oh yes they did Steve.  Some, like Krugman, even wrote books about it.   But you weren't reading their books or their papers.   You weren't listening to their kind.   What you're trying to say, Harpo, is that no one you deigned to listen to saw it coming.   And now those same voices are telling you to go the austerity route and you're still listening.

The Ugly Smirking Face of Conservatism

British Conservative prime minister David Cameron made himself judge, jury and Lord High Executioner this week when he pronounced that anyone charged with rioting should be remanded in custody and anyone convicted should expect to go to jail.   Hey, who needs courts and laws and trials and all that sort of thing when you've got a right wing loudmouth like Cameron at the helm?

Well, according to a report in The Observer, it appears that Britain's magistrates got Cameron's "off to prison" memo.

Nicholas Robinson, 23, an electrical engineering student with no previous convictions, was jailed for the maximum permitted six months after pleading guilty to stealing bottles of water worth £3.50 from Lidl in Brixton.

...Youssuf Addow, 25, charged with burglary of Phones 4 U in Putney, south-west London, carrying "a mallet, a weight and umbrellas". Peter Morgan, 20, accused of stealing "four cans of spray paint, to the value of £28.92" from B&Q in Hornchurch, Essex. Kaine Thorpe, 24, appearing on a charge of handling stolen goods, "namely Footlocker trainers and a mobile phone".
Again and again, the judges repeated the refrain "jurisdiction is declined". They considered the maximum powers of sentencing available to magistrates – six months in prison, or a £5,000 fine – to be insufficient, and so referred the case to the crown courts, where the cases will be heard before a jury. Very few of the accused were granted bail. At least one solicitor outside court six expressed concern at some of the courts' decisions, on a day when David Cameron had vowed that anyone charged with rioting should be remanded in custody and anyone convicted should expect to go to jail.


Rajinder Claire, who was representing several alleged rioters, said defendants who would normally be released on bail were being routinely remanded in custody. "The decisions seem to be being taken in a routine manner without enough consideration for the distinct factors of each case," he told reporters, "It certainly seems to me that it is being motivated by political pressure."

...The mother of one convicted looter told the Guardian her son – who got 16 weeks for using "threatening or abusive language or behaviour" – had got a much harsher sentence because of the political climate. "If this wasn't the riot he wouldn't even have got a caution," she said. "It's all because of the riots."

Her son Ricky Gemmell had finished his shift at a Manchester call centre on Tuesday evening and gone home to change out of his suit before heading to the city centre; his family say to visit his girlfriend, with no intention of getting involved in trouble. He pleaded guilty, however, to telling officers during the riot: "I'd smash you if you took your uniform off" before being pinned to the ground and arrested.

Six months in prison for filching a few bottles of water?    Four months for mouthing off to cops?  David Cameron may be denying there was anything political to the rioting but he's sure as hell seen to it that there's everything political to the judicial aftermath.   And he thinks this is going to quell youth unrest in Britain?  Apparently the Brits have no shortage of "morans" of their own.

Get Out of Afghanistan. We've Seen This Movie Before

It's like a geo-political take on one of those slasher movies in a haunted house.  Danger lurks behind every door.

The haunted house is Pakistan.  Danger lurks everywhere - along its border with Afghanistan, in the disputed Kashmir region, along its border with China and in the Baloch territory in the south.

Not many of us Westerners like to watch more than one game at the same time.  It's not surprising then that we've become fixated on our war with the Pashtun home team, the Taliban, to the exclusion of all the other nationalist conflicts, insurgencies and uprisings in the neighbourhood.   One of these is the Baloch liberation movement that, until recently, had been simmering along in the most resource rich part of otherwise impoverished Pakistan.

Asia Times reports that the low-level insurgency in Balochistan has picked up and is turning into a civil war between the Baloch people and the Pakistan military sent to suppress them.

Balochistan has historically had a tense relationship with the central government, mainly due to the touchy issues of provincial autonomy, control of mineral resources and a consequent sense of deprivation.


A recently-released fact-finding report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) stated that "The Pakistani security services are brazenly disappearing, torturing and often killing people because of suspected ties to Baloch nationalist movement". Another fact-finding report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) observed, "In the cases of enforced disappearance of the Baloch men which were brought before the commission, there were credible allegations of the involvement of the state security forces." 

For the past few years, the number of missing persons in Balochistan has increased alarmingly. Tortured and bullet-riddled bodies of Baloch nationalists are often found dumped randomly. The victims are usually shot in the temple once. Known locally as "mutilated bodies", the signs of torture are often hard to determine because many of the bodies have already begun to decompose when discovered.

According to HRW's report:

The inability of the Pakistani law enforcement agencies and the criminal justice system to tackle the problem of disappearances is exacerbated by the continuing failure of the Pakistani authorities at the national and provincial level to exert political will to address the issue of disappearances in Balochistan. The authorities have failed so far to send a strong message to the security forces and intelligence agencies and to implement a set of concrete measures that would put an end to the practice of enforced disappearances.

This is exactly what the Baloch nationalists have been saying for years. No one is willing to take action against the security forces and the intelligence agencies for the abuses being carried out in the name of "national interest". 
...Almost prophetically, noted writer and scholar Abul Maali Syed, while writing on evolving scenarios for Pakistan almost 20 years ago, predicted in his book The Twin Era of Pakistan: Democracy and Dictatorship:

Who would have believed that Balochistan, once the least populated and poorest province of unified Pakistan, would become independent and the third richest oil-producing country after Saudi Arabia and Kuwait? ... Development in Balochistan was neglected and whenever a tribal chief spoke about the plight of their people, the Pakistan government shoved the barrel of a gun at him and silenced him. Today, having lost East Pakistan [now Bangladesh], Balochistan, Sindh and part of the Seraiki belt [in Punjab province], Pakistan is still entangled with Pashtun tribes on her northern border and is no more in a strong position to hold onto the Pashtun area much longer.

While this scenario is still far from realization, a cursory glance at the Balochistan of 2011 clearly shows that the situation in this strategically important largest province - by area, constituting approximately 44% of the total land mass of the country - of Pakistan is following an ominous path, with Baloch nationalist violence escalating into what is becoming a major insurgency. 

So, why should we get out of Afghanistan because of a nascent  civil war in Pakistan's southernmost province?   Because, as the locals have known for centuries, in this region unrest fuels further unrest in a weird type of symbiosis.  We can't win anything in Afghanistan without a stable Pakistan next door and that isn't going to happen when the country is wracked with its own tribal rivalries among Baloch, Sindh, Punjabis and Pashtun.   Some things are just too damned broken to fix.  South Asia is one of them.

autonomy, control of mineral resources and a consequent sense of deprivation.

The Century of Revolution, What the Right Can't See

To Conservative Brit prime minister, David Cameron, the masses of youth who took to Britain's streets this week for four consecutive nights of rioting are nothing more than common criminals.   Then again, the Right is conditioned to see these things in the simplest fashion that suits their narrative.

But the writing is on the wall.  Studies are finding that youth frustration is spreading as the gap between rich and poor widens.

Cameron's government has described the rioters as criminals looking to plunge the country into chaos, but that's only part of the truth. A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reveals another piece of the puzzle: Of all the European Union countries, only Portugal is home to greater wealth disparity than Great Britain.
These riots are a specifically English problem -- at least for now. But the divide between rich and poor is growing all across Europe, helped along by austerity measures, especially those implemented by the countries worst stricken in the debt crisis, including Greece, Spain and Italy. Not only are social services being slashed, but school budgets and health care services as well. And nearly every European city has its disadvantaged neighborhoods, places where opportunities for young people in particular are limited.

...The "Losers' Uprising," as German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung termed it, could spread beyond Britain in the future. Many EU countries already fear the development of what the German media are describing as "English-style conditions." The Continent could be in for an explosive autumn, a situation some have already called a crisis of European democracy.

This truly does beg the question of whether America is immune to a similar youth contagion.  The US is renowned for its wealth inequality gap, a condition that its "bought and paid for" Congress seems determined to expand at all costs.   Likewise, the collapse of the middle class has sealed the portals of social mobility that Americans once so prided themselves upon, their nation's very promise.   With the middle class being choked out it's becoming much, much harder to climb out of poverty much less enter the now politically and socially gated community of the wealthy.

Can't Find a God? Don't Worry, You're Just Fine

Non-believers are really nice people.   In fact, studies are finding that secularists are often better educated, more tolerant and more knowledgeable about God than supposed true believers.  This, according to Spiegel Online.


"Churches in the US are losing up to 1 million members every year. In Europe, secularization has advanced even further. The number of non-religious people, those who do not believe in God or any higher power, has reached approximately 40 percent in France and about 27 percent in Germany. 

... So what do these increasing numbers of non-believers believe in, if not God? Sociologist Phil Zuckerman, who hopes to start a secular studies major at California's Pitzer College, says that secularists tend to be more ethical than religious people. On average, they are more commonly opposed to the death penalty, war and discrimination. And they also have fewer objections to foreigners, homosexuals, oral sex and hashish.

The most surprising insight revealed by the new wave of secular research so far is that atheists know more about the God they don't believe in than the believers themselves. This is the conclusion suggested by a 2010 Pew Research Center survey of US citizens. Even when the higher education levels of the unreligious were factored out, they proved to be better informed in matters of faith, followed by Jewish and Mormon believers. 

 ...Boston University's Catherine Caldwell-Harris is researching the differences between the secular and religious minds. "Humans have two cognitive styles," the psychologist says. "One type finds deeper meaning in everything; even bad weather can be framed as fate. The other type is neurologically predisposed to be skeptical, and they don't put much weight in beliefs and agency detection."

Caldwell-Harris is currently testing her hypothesis through simple experiments. Test subjects watch a film in which triangles move about. One group experiences the film as a humanized drama, in which the larger triangles are attacking the smaller ones. The other group describes the scene mechanically, simply stating the manner in which the geometric shapes are moving. Those who do not anthropomorphize the triangles, she suspects, are unlikely to ascribe much importance to beliefs. 

"There have always been two cognitive comfort zones," she says, "but skeptics used to keep quiet in order to stay out of trouble."

Only a small portion of secularists are as radical as the "strong atheists" championed by British evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins. The majority are more likely to be indifferent to religion or mildly agnostic, according to Kosmin's analysis. There are also secular humanists, free thinkers and many other factions. "One problem of atheism research is that we simply can't agree on a unified terminology," notes [religious market researcher Barry] Kosmin. "Every researcher thinks he is Linnaeus and invents his own labels."

Somehow I don't think many of my fellow secularists will find any of this particularly surprising.  We grasp that religion, as prescribed by church hierarchies, often promotes intolerance and practices that seem astonishingly unethical to secularists.  If there is a God it must be driving her crazy to realize that many of the really nice people aren't filling the pews.

How to Fix Everything - At Least In My Opinion

How did it all get so scary that it became painful even to write about it?   How did it all go so wrong?

We're confronted by a bucketful of challenges today, some existential, the rest mere crises.   But it seems we're surrounded by them.   We've got the big one, global warming, the civilization ender.   And then we've got all the associated environmental scourges - deforestation, desertification, species extinction and migration, pest and disease migration, the fisheries collapse, the freshwater crisis (the second biggie) and the food crisis, air/soil/water contamination, and that other biggie, overpopulation.   Then we've got the non-environmental crises - the debt crisis, terrorism and other global security threats, nuclear proliferation and various regional arms races and the realignment of major powers and their spheres of influence.

I'm old enough, just barely, to remember the Cuban missile crisis.  Where I was brought up, we looked across the river at Detroit.   We all knew that the Soviets had Detroit in their nuclear crosshairs.  We got air raid siren drills every Saturday at noon.   We watched the Nike Hercules missiles pop out of the ground on their gantries, one by one, glistening white in the midday sun.   So, when the Cuban missile showdown came, even kids like me were under no illusions what it would mean if the crisis got out of control.

I also remember that, while we thought we were at serious risk of annihilation, we had confidence that John Kennedy would find a way to keep that from happening.   We had apprehension but we didn't live in utter terror.   And we knew that when we got through this one, things would get better - and so they did.

Ah the good old days when all you had to fear was nuclear Armageddon.  What I wouldn't give to feel that secure again.   The thing is today I sure don't.   I feel we're in far worse trouble than anything we faced in the 50's and 60's.   And I feel we've arrived at this point when we're all saddled with huge leadership deficits.  Obama has proven as useless as tits on a boar hog.   We've got Harper and he's completely out of his depth on any of this stuff.   The Euros don't seem to be doing much better and a deep rift is developing between the frugal northern states and their wastrel southern cousins.  Can't imagine how that's going to turn out.

China and India are arriving at the party only to find we've wolverined the cabin.  We gorged ourselves on everything we could possibly eat and then pissed on the rest.  It's hard to blame them for being a bit angry.  If we think we've got problems what lies in store for China and India is far worse.

Today there doesn't seem to be even one country with a leader capable of dealing with this cornucopia of challenges, all needing answers.   Not one grasps that the solutions to these problems are inter-related.   There are common threads that run through them all and it is in these that any solutions to be had will be found.   These threads are all tied to one core reality - that we're trying to live beyond the limits of a very finite biosphere.   Solving these troubles is going to require answers first and foremost configured to address that reality.

We're going to pay a horrible price if we don't see three forces at play in our crises - overpopulation, over-consumption and over-contamination.   There are too many of us, we eat too much and we don't clean up after ourselves.   Each of those prevents us from living in balance with our one and only source of life, our biosphere.  It's the only one we've got.   There aren't any others.  If we can't live in balance with it, the biosphere will become uninhabitable and it's nearing the brink of that right now.

These are the realities we have to accept if we're to have any hope of getting out of this mess more or less intact.   These realities have to be accepted as the guiding considerations on which solutions are to be devised.   All things that cannot be made to conform to these guiding considerations prevent us from finding balance within our biosphere and must, therefore, be abandoned and replaced.  We must do this because we have no other choice to save our civilization.

What that means, in part, is an end to the 18th century economics, 19th century industrialism and 20th century geopolitics that steered us straight into our perilous predicament.   Those were all shaped in times of much different circumstances when mankind hadn't yet overpopulated the biosphere, when our consumption was still within our planet's means and when our contamination was not yet existential.  It was a time when economic growth was the great elixir, a solution to our every social ill.   Those days are gone and they're not coming back.

Although the wealthiest parts of the planet have not truly sensed it yet, we're running out of stuff.  We have exceeded our biosphere's carrying capacity.   The evidence of this is tangible.   It is unquestionable in our collapsed global fisheries.   It is visible from space in vast tracts of deforestation and desertification, the disappearance of polar ice and the retreat of glaciers on every continent.

The Global Footprint Network evaluates "nature's supply in the form of biocapacity, the amount of resources the planet generates, and compares that to human demand: the amount it takes to produce all the living resources we consume and absorb our carbon dioxide emissions."   In 1976 mankind began exceeding our planet's biocapacity, falling into biocapacity deficit, eating our seedcorn.   At the dawn of this century, World Overshoot Day fell in early October, leaving us with a three month overconsumption of natural resources.   Last year that had advanced to August 21.   This year it will be earlier still.  It's a global conjuring act.   We're fouling our atmosphere, emptying our oceans, felling our forests and overworking once productive farmland, turning it into useless desert in our furious efforts to satisfy unsustainable consumption - and every year it gets that much worse than the year before.  Any guesses as to how this must end if we don't change course?

Overshoot itself demonstrates the fallacy of the self-regulating free market.  Unregulated free market capitalism pays no heed to excess.   It operates to maximize production and consumption and profits through constant growth.  It ignores the vital distinction between needs and wants.  It feeds off over-consumption, overpopulation and fuels over-contamination.   Free market capitalism offends every guiding consideration we need to accept to get out of this predicament.


When growth becomes impossible, then traditional growth-based economics must yield to allocation-based policy where needs prevail over wants.   People are willing to tolerate inequality and excess when growth is available to "lift all boats" but expect much more frugal and egalitarian outcomes when supply is allocation-based, that is to say rationed.

If we do not accept the principle of needs over wants we have no hope of regulating consumption back within our planet's renewable biological capacity.   And if we reject that choice then someone, a great many someones will have to die.   We either all eat small, measured portions from the same pie or the privileged get the pie and the remainder get none and die in any one of several resulting ways.  It really is as simple as that.   We have used clever conjuring acts, like the Green Revolution, to create the illusion of sufficiency but, in the process, used unsustainable quantities of groundwater for irrigation and ruinous amounts of fertilizer that exhaust the soil.   Today in India, for example, the soil has become so degraded that crops now require twice as much fertilizer as was needed two decades ago.  Pretending that the next grand solution is just around the corner is nihilistic denial.

We in the West, the earth's unrivaled consumers, will have to sacrifice most.  In part that would mean living within our means as defined by our national borders.   The GFN calculations show the United States currently consuming double its natural biocapacity.   By eliminating needless waste and rolling back excess, the American people could still live sustainably in a genuinely comfortable standard of living.

While we in the West indulge in the sin of gluttony, much of the emerging nations and the Third World need to atone for their destructive overpopulation.   Asia, south and east, comprise nearly half the world's population and their numbers are burgeoning with Africa now in pursuit.  We're already at 7-billion in 2011 and that number is predicted to reach 9 to 10-billion by mid-century and possibly up to 15-billion by 2100.   Those are civilization-destroying figures.  In a finite world, numbers matter and numerical inequality through profligate procreation is as cardinal a sin as the gluttony of the West.  These nations likewise need to live within the natural biocapacity of their national borders.  Their biocapacity must set the limit of their population, consumption and waste.

For assets that do not fall within our national boundaries, essential assets such as the atmosphere and the oceans we have to treat them as "commons."   No one owns them and, hence, everyone has an equal right to them.   The atmosphere's remaining CO2 carrying capacity has to be apportioned out on a per capita basis.   We in the industrialized West have no more right to the atmosphere than any other region, nation or individual.   The same holds true for our oceans.   We in the West have no natural right to claim the lion's share of our planet's fisheries.   Unless we accept the principle of equality, these essential assets will be utterly ruined.

Does this mean that capitalism is dead?  No, of course not.  It means, however, that capitalism's more predatory instincts will have to be curbed and it will have to be brought into support of our guiding considerations.   That may sound radical but there's nothing truly radical in necessity.

Can we do this?  Yes, of course.  We can because we must.  Plan B is too horrible to comprehend.  Will we do it?   Not until we recognize the absolutely essential need for it, accept the guiding considerations and use them to shape our future, and then persuade, cajole and coerce our species to implement a new order, one that answers to needs, not wants.  We have a great deal to do and a very limited amount of time in which to do it.

When Privilege Becomes Indefensible

Lately there has been a spate of reports about the rich flocking to high end shops and indulging in the sort of luxuries reminiscent of the days before the Great Recession.   Even as the working classes struggle to make ends meet and lines blur between the merely poor and the outright destitute, the richest of the rich seem oblivious and bent on flaunting their good fortune.   Let them eat cake, indeed.

There are some now questioning whether the ongoing riots spreading through British cities are more than simple criminality and perhaps are harbingers of  social upheaval, uprisings.   Plenty of governments today wield the lash of austerity yet its sting is felt mainly by those least able to bear it, the most vulnerable - the homeless, the unemployed and the working poor.   Many of these people realize that their government hasn't trimmed the sails for everyone.   A privileged class exists that is, by good fortune, investment strategy and benevolent government, exempt from austerity measures, safely removed from all that.

Britain's Conservative prime minister David Cameron is waging an austerity war and it can be fairly said he's fighting it on the backs of the poorest and weakest.   Yet, when the youth of this economically disenfranchised sector take to the streets to riot, Cameron dismisses it as nothing more than rank criminality.   Two centuries ago the Brits knew how to deal with these types.   They transported them to distant penal colonies, notably Australia.  I'm sure Cameron must yearn for those good old days.

But what of the United States, where "rags'n riches" has achieved a near religious quality?  America's "bought and paid for" Congress, particularly its radical right Republicans, seek to solve their nation's deficit and debt crisis on the backs of the wage earning public while protecting ruinous military spending and morally outrageous tax favouritism for the richest of the rich who now often pay effective tax rates well lower than that of low-income earners.  It is this madness that has seen luxury goods flying off the shelves even as the remnants of America's once vibrant middle class reels.

It does not seem that life for most Americans will get better any time soon.   Life for the few, however, will remain just dandy.  What if enough Americans come to see the entire working class as set upon? What if the American street has its own Marie Antoinette moment?

There is a certain elasticity to inequality.  In stable societies, inequality can expand but will then be brought back down by prudent government policy if by no other means.   But if inequality expands too far and is magnified by imprudent government policy, what then?   Is it unreasonable to expect the disadvantaged to angrily reject a rigged outcome that is engineered by the elite with the connivance of their governments?   Is there a point in modern society where privilege becomes simply indefensible?

On Barack Obama, Europe is Anxiously Underwhelmed.

It's not just moderates and progressives in the United States who are losing faith in Barack Obama.  So are the Europeans.  Spiegel Online claims that Obama's indecision and weakness are a serious threat to the global economy.

America's president, as the political scientist Richard Neustadt once noted, may be the most powerful man in the world, but he has only one real power: the power of persuasion.

That's why US presidents are so keen to get in front of the TV cameras and address the nation from what Americans refer to as the "presidential pulpit." Barack Obama was back at the pulpit on Monday afternoon, as the world's stock exchanges plummeted.  "No matter what some agency may say, we've always been and always will be a triple-A country," asserted the president. It had taken Obama three days to make a statement on Standard & Poor's decision to strip the United States of its top credit rating. 

But Obama convinced no one. Even while the president was speaking, the Dow fell below 11,000 for the first time in nine months.

 ...The debate is transforming Obama's problem into one for the entire US. "Can America still lead?" asks Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr..  Millions of people around the world had hoped in vain that Obama "would restore the United States to a position of responsible global leadership," Dionne writes. "America's friends overseas know that the debt crisis was instigated by Obama's opponents. Yet they worry now about how strong Obama is, whether he will draw lines and if he can seize back the initiative."

Indeed, the rest of the world is displaying its uncertainty in a relatively open manner. Christine Lagarde, the new head of the International Monetary Fund, has warned that the fundamental belief in America's economic strength could be permanently undermined. Others can't resist showing schadenfreude. In a strongly worded editorial, Xinhua, China's state-run news agency, advised American leaders to show "some sense of global responsibility." Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin went even further, publicly accusing the US of "living like parasites off the global economy."

In a more ominous article, Spiegel Online  ponders whether the world is going bankrupt.

Muddling through, postponing, playing down -- the motto of the crisis managers on both sides of the Atlantic has sent alarm bells ringing in stock markets. Britain's Economist magazine is warning of a double-dip recession in the US, a second downturn just three years after the last one. Many economists have been pointing out that last week's panic resembled the fear that swept financial markets after the collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008.

Then as now, banks stopped lending each money. Then as now, banks' cash deposits at the central bank doubled within days. The European Central Bank reacted by assuring banks of unlimited liquidity in the coming months. It was an emergency measure that led to short-term relief but sparked anxious questions among bankers and stock market players. How long can the central bank keep up its market-soothing liquidity operations before it finally loses its credibility, the most important asset of a central bank? Is the financial crisis about to escalate? And will the world then be bankrupt?

...The scale of new borrowing is less of a problem than the inability of governments to find a credible strategy for reducing their debts. In the US, the government and opposition have been locked in a dispute over whether the deficit should be removed through tax hikes or cuts in social spending. In Europe, the solvent governments of the northern countries are refusing to underwrite the debt of the struggling Mediterranean countries.

The West faces a dual crisis that has engulfed its most important political leaders. President Barack Obama has failed to mend a gaping rift in US society and to outmaneuver the conservative Tea Party rebels. In Europe, it has become more evident with each European Union summit that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, rather than being in control of the crisis, is being driven along by it.

The West hasn't been this weak since World War II, and never before has a crisis paralyzed Europe, America and Japan at the same time. The problems of the leading industrial nations aren't just sapping the political influence of the so-called Free World, they are also threatening the global economy.

China Now Wants a Military Presence in Pakistan Tribal Areas

In the wake of two terrorist bombings in Xinjiang province, China wants to hunt down Uyghur militants it claims are being trained in Pakistan's ungovernable tribal areas.

Since the blasts, which killed 18, Chinese officials have publicly claimed for the first time in recent years that the attackers were trained in explosives in camps run by the al-Qaeda-linked East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM).

Though the ETIM network on the AfPak border was significantly weakened in recent years in the wake of the deaths of many of its top leaders in United States drone attacks, hardcore Uyghur
militants are still shuttling between China and Pakistan since Xinjiang province shares a border with Pakistan.

The ETIM, which is run by natives of Xinjiang province, a Muslim-dominated region three times the size of France, is fighting against the settlement of China's majority Han ethnic group in the western province, describing its struggle as a freedom movement. 

In neighbouring, dysfunctional Afghanistan, more than a year after general elections there is still a dispute over who is legally entitled to sit in parliament.   A special tribunal created by Hamid Karzai has decided a quarter of the legislators should be removed.   Those opposed to Karzai claim the tribunal is illegal.   Is it any wonder the Taliban are having a field day?

English Riots Metastasize

England has sustained its third night of widespread rioting and looting.   What began as an isolated uprising over a police shooting in Tottenham has rapidly spread to other greater London buroughs including Enfield, Islington and Oxford Circus Monday night and to Peckham, Clapham, Lewisham, Bromley, Stratford, Croydon, East Ham, Bethnall Green,Woolich and even the Medway town of Gillingham last night.   What appear to be copycat riots also spread to Liverpool, Birmingham and Bristol.

David Cameron has cut short a holiday in Tuscany and is recalling Parliament to deal with the unrest.    Police officers are being drawn to the riot sites from across Britain and all leaves have been canceled. 

What began as a protest against one police shooting in one London burough seems to have triggered widespread fury, perhaps even anarchy.   Handling this and containing the further spread of these riots will be a major test of the Cameron government.   This could go very wrong, very quickly.

Russia Burns - Again

Last year a powerful heat wave triggered massive forest fires in Russia and led to the failure of Russia's wheat crop.   So far this year, 1-million hectares of Russian forests have been burned out, already breaking last year's record.

The far north of Russia is among the areas that have suffered the most. During the last week of July, Arkhangelsk   and the Komi republic had temperatures exceeding 35C. More than 80 fire outbreaks were reported.

The far east has suffered too. At the beginning of August about 50 fires were raging, especially around Khabarovsk, Yakutsk and the island of Sakhalin.   Southern Russia has not escaped: several villages have been evacuated around Rostov-on-Don and Volgograd, where temperatures rose above 40C in July.

Of course this has nothing to do with global warming which we all know is a hoax.  Greenpeace, meanwhile, says bad as the official figures are, the Russian government is understating the extent of these fires which, according to Greenpeace, is plain from satellite images.

What Michelle Bachmann Watched on Sunday

Oh those crazy foaming fundamentalist rightwingers and their homophobia.

On Sunday, Bachmann and her curious husband, attended a church service at which the pastor railed on, denouncing homosexuality as "unnatural" and "immoral."  At the end of the sermon the congregation got to watch this video of Adam Hood, a self-proclaimed "ex gay."



Think Progress reports that the marriage of religious fundamentalism and state corporatism got a boost at the recent ALEC conference in New Orleans.   State legislators attending the American Legislative Exchange Council, where Big Business hands compliant legislators draft legislation to take home and implement, were also given anti-LGBT literature in their handouts.   The pamphlets, produced by the Family Research Center, were entitled the “Top Ten Myths About Homosexuality” and the “Top Ten Harms Of Same-Sex ‘Marriage”.

Doing her furious fundamentalist best for the advancement of corporatism, Michelle Bachmann has pledged that, if only enough crazy people vote to put her in office, she'll lock the doors and turn out the lights at the Environmental Protection Agency which she slams as the greatest job killer in America.

The Real Enemy Isn't Debt, It's Globalization

Globalization has always been a scam.   It has always been a trade of something very valuable for a vague and quite unenforceable promise of enormous benefits for all.   What we traded away was sovereignty, our sovereign right to control access to our markets, our right to employ tariffs as an instrument of state policy.   And we surrendered that to just whom exactly?  Well to corporations, multi-national corporations that have such a terrific track record of honouring vague, unenforceable promises.  Now power has shifted, irretrievably, from nation state to corporation.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the United States with its "bought and paid for" Congress implementing corporatism at the expense of democracy.

An analysis published in The Guardian reveals that our leaders not only surrendered our sovereignty but abrogated their ongoing but unmentioned responsibility to maintain control of globalization.

After relying on it to deliver years of growth, lift millions from poverty, keep living standards rising and citizens happy, nation states look to have lost control of globalization.

In the short term, that leaves policymakers looking impotent in the face of fast-moving markets and other uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable systems -- undermining their authority and potentially helping fuel a wider backlash and social unrest.
..."In times of economic recession, countries tend to become isolationist and retrench from globalization," says Celina Realuyo, assistant professor of National Security affairs at the US National Defense University in Washington DC.

"Given the increased number of stakeholders on any issue -- climate change, the global financial system, cyber security -- it is unclear how traditional nation states can lead on any issue, let alone build consensus globally," she said.

The financial system, the Internet and even the supply chains for natural resources have quietly slipped beyond effective forms of state control.

These instruments of globalization have delivered huge wealth and kept economies moving with arguably greater efficiency, but can also swiftly turn on those in authority.
...It's unlikely that nations can genuinely pull back from globalised systems on which they have become reliant.


"The Net sees censorship as damage and routes around it," computer science guru John Gilmore said in 1993. In the modern, high-speed globalised system, one could say the same of attempts at financial and economic restrictions.


Many areas of the global economy have also become effectively "ungoverned space" into which a host of actors -- from criminals to international firms such as Google and Goldman Sachs to countless other individuals and groups -- have enthusiastically jumped.


International companies and rich individuals move money -- and even entire manufacturing operations -- from jurisdiction to jurisdiction to seek low wages, avoid tax, regulation and sometimes even detection. In many states, that helped fuel a growing wealth gap that is self producing new tensions.

..."For most of the last decade, growth and economic activity in many places has been driven by forces that were inherently unsustainable," says Simon Derrick, head of foreign exchange at Bank of New York Mellon.

"What's happening now is these... are coming under pressure and it's getting to the stage where that can no longer be ignored. But none of these issues are going to be politically easy to do anything about."


And yet we will struggle back against globalization and we will win if only because the result is essentially pre-ordained.  Global corporatism, let's call it what it truly is, functions on a construct of assumptions that are increasingly at odds with reality.  It is based on economic models well suited to the 19th and 20th centuries that are losing credence in the 21st.


During the 20th century mankind tripled in population but consumption increased six fold.  And in the first decade of the 21st century, the consumption footprint of the emerging economic superpowers has added enormously to this burden.   For globalization that would be great if only there was plenty to go around, more than enough resources to exploit.  But that's not the case.  We've run into a wall, actually a succession of walls.  In the process we will inevitably shift from growth-based economies into allocation-based societies.  Growth has been a powerful salve to soothe the less-desirable impacts of globalization but once we reach the growth limits of our inescapably finite planet, the balance shifts and globalization takes on the visage of a predatory scourge.


The way ahead for global corporations probably lies in global corporatism, the rise of the corporate state.  There are eerie signs that the lines are already being drawn with corporatism forging alliances with the political far right, the religious radical right and the emerging political militarism.  This has been well chronicled by the likes of Andrew Bacevich, Chalmers Johnson, Chomsky and others.  That presents the prospect of an intense struggle to preserve democracy that may be faced by our children and grandchildren even as they're being powerfully conditioned to embrace indifference, apathy and submissiveness.

The growth of state corporatism is rarely recognized for the actual threat to democracy it poses.  State corporatism, as in the case of America's "bought and paid for" Congress, seeks to implement, domestically, what globalization has achieved abroad such as low wages, tax exemptions, and gutted labour and environmental regulation.  That is precisely what organizations such as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, exist to achieve.  It is the vehicle by which corporatism obtains direct, political power.   The corporatist cabal is now actually writing bills for compliant legislators to enact.   Public interest is tossed out the window when corporate interest prevails.

When It Comes Right Down to It, It's Mainly a Con Game

Modern, consumer economies are essentially a confidence game.   When confidence is high, money flows; goods are produced, sold and bought; and we all (sort of) enjoy the boom.   When confidence is low, that all comes undone.   The public becomes fearful and stops buying; manufacturers stop producing and lay off workers and then we set up soup kitchens and bread lines.

Yet sometimes confidence isn't enough.   Sometimes economies can get so out of whack that illusions can't suffice to hide it.   And that's where the great ratings agencies - Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch Ratings - come in.   Investors look to them to gauge the credit risk of debt instruments, including government bonds or "treasuries."

The agencies are busy these days evaluating the credit worthiness of a lot of fiscally troubled nations such as Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Italy and even the United States.  S&P created quite a stir when it downgraded America's credit rating from AAA to AA+.   But just how safe are these agencies when they're dishing the dirty on powerful governments?

Governments can counterattack when they don't hear what they like from credit rating agencies.  The Obama administration fought back against S&P, even arguing that the agency used faulty math to reach skewed conclusions.  They specifically attacked Standard & Poor's 'credibility and integrity.'  S&P must have run their numbers again because they're sticking with their rating.

Yet in the land of all things Berlusconi, Italian police acting on orders from state prosecutors raided the offices of Moody's and Standard and Poor's.  The cops say they're investigating the role these agencies played in Italy's recent financial turmoil.  It's a pretty chilling message - "cross us and you can expect a criminal investigation."  Intimidation?  It sure as hell sounds like it.

It makes you wonder whether today's real con artists, those we most need to worry about, aren't rank and file swindlers but our governments.  It seems that ever since 9/11 they've become more secretive, less accountable and much less democratic.  That is quite true of our own authoritarian government and its autocratic Ruler.  When it comes to sleight of hand and bait and switch, Harper is a highly accomplished con artist. 

We used to hold that people shouldn't fear their government; their government should fear the people.  In some intangible ways and some very tangible ways I sense that's slipping away from us.

Showdown for America

It's crunch time for America.   China is getting tired of picking up America's bar tab and has put the US on notice that the days of cheap booze may soon be over.  No more bad cheques, thank you very much and absolutely no more rowdy brawls in Congress either.

The Bush years were a national piss up like no other.   Cheney said Reagan had shown that "deficits don't matter" and he meant it.  The Republicans, aided by a good many Democrats, went at it like mining camp whores on payday.  In just two terms in office, Bush almost tripled America's national debt.  al Qaeda only managed to bring down two office towers.   Bush Republicans brought down the entire country.  In the process they completed the greatest unearned transfer of wealth in their country's history by fleecing the blue and white collar working classes and facilitating the transfer of their wealth and the fruits of their productivity to the richest of the rich, leaving a near bottomless chasm of inequality in their wake.   But, remember, those were the good times.

Those good times are over.  Recklessness comes with a price and it's often pretty ugly.  We're only now getting the full measure of their fiscal perfidy.   Imagine taking the world's sole super military establishment and swelling that to the point of bloating.    Imagine waging two wars (and wars without end at that) against relatively backward states and running up a tab exceeding what you spent in WWII.   Imagine financing that massive military expansion and financing those wars with masses of money borrowed from foreign lenders. And then imagine slashing taxes for the richest of the rich, wealth you can only forgo by yet further borrowing from foreign lenders.  Imagine slashing taxes for anybody when you're already deeply in hock.  It's nothing short of breathtaking.

Recklessness was the gold standard of the Bush Republicans.  It was their stock in trade.  Having largely completed Reagan's work in divesting America of her manufacturing base, the Bush Republicans set about to deregulate their country's new economy, its utterly parasitic FIRE (finance/insurance/real estate) economy.  Henceforth wealth would be created not by actually producing goods but through inducing illusions.  Prosperity would be a perception crafted out of seemingly limitless amounts of money borrowed at ridiculously low interest rates.   These enabled asset values (illusion) to become detached from and race ahead of true worth (reality).  It felt the same.  Hell it felt good and it came with the promise that it was just going to go on and on and on forever.  The promises that flowed from America's political and corporate elite were about as reliable as promises from a crack dealer and they were very bit as destructive. 

Now the question is whether what's left of America's blue and white collar working class will be broken on the wheel in an orgy of deficit fighting.   The narrative of the upcoming campaign is already being framed.   Spending cuts are on the table.   Tax restoration for America's new aristocracy definitely is not.  This pain is not for those who can most easily bear it and, in all fairness, deserve it.   This pain is reserved for their underclasses.   Those who will wield the lash are the Congressional minions of the aristocracy, the elite's new House of Lords.

Congress will attack America's working classes by stripping them of their "entitlements."  Blue and White collar America will see their social safety net, their Social Security and Medicare benefits, rejigged to reduce eligibility and coverage.   That is where money will be found, in the very place it does not exist.

Working Americans funded their Social Security entitlements through their payroll taxes.   Those monies were to have been held "in trust" by their government.   The United States government became the fiduciary for every employee who remitted payroll taxes.   This is a very special type of debt.  We even have a specific word to describe the wrongful taking of trust money by a fiduciary, "defalcation."  We consider it so egregious that we provide in our bankruptcy laws that a debt arising out of defalcation shall not be expunged by a debtor's discharge from bankruptcy.   The debt survives even bankruptcy.  

But, it seems, when outright defalcation is committed by Congress it doesn't matter, perhaps because the federal government was stealing from, cheating every member of the working classes.  Now, having done that, they intend to compound the suffering inflicted on working Americans by preserving a tax dodge scheme implemented for the new aristocracy.  "Unmitigated gall" isn't remotely adequate to describe what is about to be visited on blue and white collar America and the tattered remnants of her once vibrant and robust middle class.

It's probably too late now to change any of this.   You won't get this sort of change from a "bought and paid for" Congress.   Early in the Bush years Karl Rove let slip that it was part of his neo-conservative dream that the American government should be de-funded.  That way, he opined, it would be forced to scrap the entire progressive legacy of Franklin Roosevelt.  And that dream has become today's reality.  The government is defunded, the middle class is a spent force, and the populace has been conditioned to recoil from its own best interests.   As Bill Maher puts it, they throw up their hands and yell, "Jesus, take the wheel."

About a decade ago I pondered whether China, had it sought to hasten America's decline and its own economic, political and military ascendancy, could have devised two better weapons than globalization and debt?   Sap America of its manufacturing base and use the wealth thereby generated to transform America into the world's greatest debtor state and China into America's major creditor.  Who needs missiles or bombs when your rival will so freely cooperate in its own decline even as it facilitates your own ascent?  I'm still far from convinced this was not China's intent from the outset.    At this point I suppose that no longer matters.  It is what it is.

I'm more than a little angry about this.   An impoverished America on our doorstep is something of a threat to our own social stability.   There are those in our country who would happily emulate cherry-picked elements of American policy.   This is going to be a very challenging century for every nation and, for many regions, it will be far more than merely challenging.   This is the time when we will need the strongest, most responsive democracies and institutions, capable of resisting the powerful temptations of authoritarianism and oligarchy.  Yet we seem to be heading in the exact opposite direction.

The "Good Old Days" Are Over - China Warns U.S.

America's biggest creditor isn't amused by that country's newly downgraded, AA+ rating.  Now China says the "good old days" are over for the U.S.

China has renewed its demand for a new reserve currency to replace the U.S. greenback.   America dreads the thought at having to borrow - and repay - money in another nation's currency.  All manner of advantages accrue to the United States so long as its dollar is accepted as the reserve currency.

"The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone," China's official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary.

In the Xinhua commentary, China scorned the United States for its "debt addiction" and "short sighted" political wrangling.


"China, the largest creditor of the world's sole superpower, has every right now to demand the United States address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety of China's dollar assets," it said. 

It urged the United States to cut military and social welfare expenditure. Further credit downgrades would very likely undermine the world economic recovery and trigger new rounds of financial turmoil, it said.

"International supervision over the issue of U.S. dollars should be introduced and a new, stable and secured global reserve currency may also be an option to avert a catastrophe caused by any single country," Xinhua said. 


 

Will Canada Destroy Civilization?

We have to choose - will it be the survival of mankind or will it be whatever wealth we can extract from the Athabasca Tar Sands?  It seems to be an "either-or" proposition, at least according to a leading voice on global warming, the NASA Goddard Space Laboratory director James Hansen.

Hansen's warning, in a letter he wrote in June, is about as stark as it gets:

...exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts. The tar sands are estimated (e.g., see IPCC AR4 WG3 report) to contain at least 400 GtC (equivalent to about 200 ppm CO2).

Easily available reserves of conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO2
well above 400 ppm. However, if emissions from coal are phased out over the next few decades
and if unconventional fossil fuels are left in the ground, it is conceivable to stabilize climate.
 
Phase out of emissions from coal is itself an enormous challenge. However, if the tar
sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over. There is no practical way to capture
the CO2 emitted while burning oil, which is used principally in vehicles.

Governments are acting as if they are oblivious to the fact that there is a limit on how
much fossil fuel carbon we can put into the air. Fossil fuel carbon injected into the atmosphere
will stay in surface reservoirs for millennia.

...prior government targets for limiting human-made global warming are now known to be
inadequate. Specifically, the target to limit global warming to 2°C, rather than being a safe
"guardrail", is actually a recipe for global climate disasters.

When will Bob Rae and whoever is leading the NDP next week stand up and say that Athabasca has to be stopped?   Yes, that would have significant impacts on Alberta's economy and the federal government's larder but that pales into irrelevance when contrasted with the toll that Tar Sands emissions will exact on the people of our planet, especially those who are already reeling from climate change effects caused by global warming.   Others pay for our windfall with their lives.  By what moral right can we demand they forfeit their future, their very lives?   Just what sort of creatures have we Canadians become?

Bill McKibbon asked that very question last month in The Globe & Mail.    How did Canadians allow themselves to become defined by the bitumen pits of Fort Mac?   Why have we chosen to become indifferent to the point of catatonic?   How did we come to turn our backs on our own future generations and mankind itself?

Corrupters' Coven Assembles Today in New Orleans

Bush Greeting ALEC, 2007

State legislators from every corner of America are flocking to New Orleans today, summoned to the Big Easy by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council.   ALEC is the clearing house for Big Business's legislative whims.   Elected officials show up for a closed door session, get their marching orders in the form of business-proposed legislation, collect their parting gifts and return to their respective assemblies to do as they're damned well told and bugger the voting public.

PR Watch reports industry giants such as Koch Industries, Bayer, Kraft, Coca-Cola, State farm, AT&T, WalMart and Philip Morris will be on hand to unveil their wish list legislation.

ALEC is little more than a bill factory for corporate-friendly legislation that often repeals people’s rights or fattens the corporate bottom line. We think citizens have a right to know that these Fortune 100 firms “have a voice and a vote” through ALEC on bills before they are introduced in state houses, cleansed of the fact that corporations already voted on them. ALEC’s hot bills lately have sought to require voter ID, promote tobacco products flavored to appeal to kids, privatize Medicare and Medicaid, privatize prisons and public schools, and legalize the harassment of immigrants.

ALEC’s arsenal includes bills to make it harder for people to band together to negotiate with employers through unions.  The ALEC “Public Employee Bargaining Transparency Act,” proposed by Rep. Anthony Ligi (as HB204), was rationalized on the claim that “Increased transparency in labor negotiation meetings and documents serves to provide all parties to the negotiations with an incentive to avoid any hint of corruption; Open sessions and increased oversight help ensure that government is using taxpayer money effectively.” Perhaps Ligi will sponsor a bill to open ALEC's task force meetings, where corporations and legislators vote, to similar sunshine and require disclosure of ALEC’s corporate donors “to avoid any hint of corruption,” especially since taxpayers pay many legislators’ ALEC dues.

Cash-strapped, as in all but bankrupt, Louisiana is forking out $50,000 for 31 legislators to attend the ALEC conference in - Louisiana.

Only in America, eh?