I wonder what the Chinese and the Russians must be making of our current obsession with stealth warplanes? My guess is that they view our focus on stealth as a terrific strategic advantage - for themselves.
Here's what I'm thinking they're thinking.
1. They know the F-35 is insanely expensive and that America and its minion states will be shelling out enormous amounts to equip their air forces with the stealth light bomber.
2. They know we'll be in so deep when we buy the F-35 that we'll be stuck with it for at least three decades, maybe half a century.
3. They know, hell everyone knows, that, stealth aside, the F-35 is a very mediocre warplane with very limited range and payload that can't outrun, out climb or out turn even existing Russian fighters.
4. They know that, once stripped of its supposed invisibility, the F-35 is aerial dead meat.
5. They know that the F-35's stealth is a very brittle technology that embodies its own serious vulnerabilities and can probably be defeated which renders the entire aircraft obsolete.
Overall, I can't think of a single reason why Russia and China and their proxies wouldn't want us saddled with a warplane like the F-35. It plays straight into their hands. They've already got some quite feasible counter-measures and, with the stealth secrets they'll be gleaning from the Lockheed RQ-170 stealth drone Iran captured just before Christmas, they'll have a dandy window into the latest and greatest advances in stealth design, materials and electronics - free of charge.
The F-35 may be the greatest military acquisition blunder in Canadian history. And I'm guessing the Russians and Chinese couldn't be happier.
Friday, July 20, 2012
Zimmerman Blames God for Shooting Trayvon Martin
Hell, he was only fulfilling "God's plan" when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin. And, because it was God's will, what's not to like?
IMF Calls Bullshit on Brit Tory Austerity Farce
David Cameron's boneheaded austerity fetish isn't working. Even the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, says that much is plain. The Guardian's Jonathan Portes has this take on the IMF report.
A non-technical summary of Thursday's International Monetary Fund report on the UK economy would be that we are up the creek – "recovery has stalled" – and that we should use any available paddle to head as fast as possible in the opposite direction. "Demand support is needed. Additional monetary stimulus … credit easing measures … increased government spending on public investment." Stop pretending we're on track, and throw the kitchen sink at the economy.
There are, however, two much more interesting parts to the IMF report. The first is its demolition of the government's argument that this pain was necessary and the alternative would have been worse – that, as George Osborne says, without accelerated fiscal consolidation we would have had higher interest rates and maybe even a debt crisis. This is nonsense: low interest rates reflect not economic confidence but its opposite, and the IMF says so: "Bond yields have been driven more by growth expectations than fears of a sovereign crisis."
But even more important is the IMF's analysis of the consequences of this policy failure: not just low growth now (they estimate fiscal consolidation has so far knocked about 2.5% off output) but permanent economic and social damage. This is primarily because unemployment – especially long-term and youth unemployment – has "scarring" effects; someone who is unemployed now because of recession is more likely to be out of work later in life, even after economic recovery.
...the basic point is spot on. In other words, what the government is offering is not pain today for a better economic future tomorrow. It's pain today for more pain tomorrow. As many of us have long argued, the reason for changing course is not because of the short-term boost to growth, but because of the longer-term impacts.
A non-technical summary of Thursday's International Monetary Fund report on the UK economy would be that we are up the creek – "recovery has stalled" – and that we should use any available paddle to head as fast as possible in the opposite direction. "Demand support is needed. Additional monetary stimulus … credit easing measures … increased government spending on public investment." Stop pretending we're on track, and throw the kitchen sink at the economy.
There are, however, two much more interesting parts to the IMF report. The first is its demolition of the government's argument that this pain was necessary and the alternative would have been worse – that, as George Osborne says, without accelerated fiscal consolidation we would have had higher interest rates and maybe even a debt crisis. This is nonsense: low interest rates reflect not economic confidence but its opposite, and the IMF says so: "Bond yields have been driven more by growth expectations than fears of a sovereign crisis."
But even more important is the IMF's analysis of the consequences of this policy failure: not just low growth now (they estimate fiscal consolidation has so far knocked about 2.5% off output) but permanent economic and social damage. This is primarily because unemployment – especially long-term and youth unemployment – has "scarring" effects; someone who is unemployed now because of recession is more likely to be out of work later in life, even after economic recovery.
...the basic point is spot on. In other words, what the government is offering is not pain today for a better economic future tomorrow. It's pain today for more pain tomorrow. As many of us have long argued, the reason for changing course is not because of the short-term boost to growth, but because of the longer-term impacts.
A Brit Rallies Support for Canadian Science
Harper's war on science is the subject of an op-ed piece in today's Guardian calling for international support for Canadian scientists and warning Harper's funding cuts could have global impacts.
[Protesting Canadian scientists] were sticking up for the right to ask difficult questions and provide uncomfortable knowledge, in particular when it comes to the Arctic. They were sticking up for the things they research as well as the right to keep doing their research. They were sticking up for the planet.
...In May, many were shocked to hear the Canadian government had cancelled its funding for the Experimental Lakes Area, a laboratory complex over 58 remote lakes in north-west Ontario that has been running since the 1960s. As one scientist told Nature magazine, it's like turning off the world's best telescope.
...Canada's natural resources minister might complain about foreign campaigners and "jet-setting celebrities" trying to hijack their country with their opposition to local environmental policy, but there are reasons why there was international outcry about the Experimental Lakes Area. Scientists from all over the world studied there for generations: it's where the first evidence for acid rain came from. There are also reasons Canada won Fossil of the Year at the Durban talks last December, why the Daily Mail mentions Canadian people appealing to the Queen over Alberta oil sands and why, despite having passed an austerity budget in April, the Canadian government still found money to invest in Arctic drones. We can't pretend Canadian science is simply a Canadian matter any more than we can pretend we can separate the natural world from our political decisions.
...It's easy to see scientists as dogmatic, passing on rarefied expertise from on high. Some are. But at its best, scientific evidence can play a liberating role in political discourse and is worth standing up for. Yesterday's message of "No science, no truth, no evidence, no democracy" is an idealistic view of science in society, but if it really is said in thoughtful co-operation with the public at large, it's a beautiful thing to behold.
[Protesting Canadian scientists] were sticking up for the right to ask difficult questions and provide uncomfortable knowledge, in particular when it comes to the Arctic. They were sticking up for the things they research as well as the right to keep doing their research. They were sticking up for the planet.
...In May, many were shocked to hear the Canadian government had cancelled its funding for the Experimental Lakes Area, a laboratory complex over 58 remote lakes in north-west Ontario that has been running since the 1960s. As one scientist told Nature magazine, it's like turning off the world's best telescope.
...Canada's natural resources minister might complain about foreign campaigners and "jet-setting celebrities" trying to hijack their country with their opposition to local environmental policy, but there are reasons why there was international outcry about the Experimental Lakes Area. Scientists from all over the world studied there for generations: it's where the first evidence for acid rain came from. There are also reasons Canada won Fossil of the Year at the Durban talks last December, why the Daily Mail mentions Canadian people appealing to the Queen over Alberta oil sands and why, despite having passed an austerity budget in April, the Canadian government still found money to invest in Arctic drones. We can't pretend Canadian science is simply a Canadian matter any more than we can pretend we can separate the natural world from our political decisions.
...It's easy to see scientists as dogmatic, passing on rarefied expertise from on high. Some are. But at its best, scientific evidence can play a liberating role in political discourse and is worth standing up for. Yesterday's message of "No science, no truth, no evidence, no democracy" is an idealistic view of science in society, but if it really is said in thoughtful co-operation with the public at large, it's a beautiful thing to behold.
Not Now, Not Yet
Canada's military brass seem intent on blundering their way, make that their soldiers' way, back into combat without first explaining what went so wrong with their performance in Afghanistan.
Make no mistake about this. The miserable performance we achieved in Kandahar wasn't the fault of the rank and file troops Canada deployed. They did a terrific job only the odds were stacked against them from the start by incompetent political and military leadership at home. And it's those same incompetents who now are so keen to simply turn the page and jump into the next shooting war.
We wasted a lot of lives in Afghanistan, far too many for what little we accomplished. Lives lost, lives broken, in Afghanistan and across Canada. Yet not one Canadian general, not one cabinet minister nor, it goes without saying, our formerly gung-ho prime minister has answered for this debacle. They engineered the fiasco and, by all indications, they're keen as hell to engineer the next one too. Not now, not yet.
As the linked articlewarns reveals, our cowboys at National Defence headquarters have been busy these past two years establishing a network of forward bases from the Caribbean to East Africa, Europe and even Southeast Asia.
Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Walter Natynczyk authorized the establishment of the operational support hubs in up to seven locations around the world on May 13, 2010.
A directive signed by Natynczyk and obtained by Postmedia News says the initiative was launched to improve the Canadian Forces' "ability to project combat power/security assistance and Canadian influence rapidly and flexibly anywhere in the world."
It adds that the ability to deploy and sustain combat forces is not only contingent on strong logistical networks, but is also "an essential instrument of national power and should continue to be exploited to attain national objectives."
Excuse me but since when does Canada need "to project combat power ...rapidly and flexibly anywhere in the world"? How does this help us "attain national objectives"? For Christ's sake, Walt, what national objectives do we have in Southeast Asia or East Africa? And how will you, of all people, do the job?
Remember, General Walt, we had "national objectives" for your combat gig in Kandahar. They were clearly, boisterously stated, proclaimed even, shouted from the ramparts at the outset. Need to refresh your memory, Walt? You were to crush the Taliban and establish a Western democracy that would ensure civil and human rights for the Afghan people, especially Afghan women. Those were the national objectives you were given and said you would accomplish. And on those scores you failed, miserably.
For a host of what should have been obvious reasons, you and your peckerheaded political boss failed - your country, your soldiers and Afghanistan. And so you began to water down your objectives to cloak your failure and, aided by a naive and complicit media, proclaimed success where no such thing existed.
Jesus, Walt. You and your predecessor Hillier took on the responsibility for a major counter-insurgency campaign in the nastiest province in Afghanistan, Kandahar. On most days you were barely able to keep between 600 and 800 combat troops in the field even though counterinsurgency doctrine prescribes anywhere between 15,000 to 25,000 for that job in a territory with the population of Kandahar (over 900,000). The Americans were shocked to discover that you weren't even securing the provincial capital, Kandahar city. And you want to claim success and talk about deploying Canadian combat forces "anywhere in the world"? By the way, Walt, you're not fooling the Americans or the Brits. Your Big Brothers have your numbers and they're giving you a D minus at best.
Besides, Walt, if Canadian soldiers are getting into a shooting war anywhere it will be as a contingent in America's Foreign Legion. It's Washington's "national objectives" that will matter, not ours. Your actual combat capability, as demonstrated in Afghanistan, is so goddamned miniscule that you can't operate independently any distance from home. You can't "project combat power" anywhere without first getting your marching orders from Washington. It's the Pentagon that projects combat power, not Ottawa, not NDHQ.
This shit has gone to your head, Walt. You've got a bad case of megalomania. As a parting gift I'd like to pass along a bit of wisdom from a commander long departed, one who knew the difference between victory in battle and defeat, Oliver Cromwell, who said, “you have been sat to long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, i say, and let us have done with you. In the name of god, go!.”
Make no mistake about this. The miserable performance we achieved in Kandahar wasn't the fault of the rank and file troops Canada deployed. They did a terrific job only the odds were stacked against them from the start by incompetent political and military leadership at home. And it's those same incompetents who now are so keen to simply turn the page and jump into the next shooting war.
We wasted a lot of lives in Afghanistan, far too many for what little we accomplished. Lives lost, lives broken, in Afghanistan and across Canada. Yet not one Canadian general, not one cabinet minister nor, it goes without saying, our formerly gung-ho prime minister has answered for this debacle. They engineered the fiasco and, by all indications, they're keen as hell to engineer the next one too. Not now, not yet.
As the linked article
Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Walter Natynczyk authorized the establishment of the operational support hubs in up to seven locations around the world on May 13, 2010.
A directive signed by Natynczyk and obtained by Postmedia News says the initiative was launched to improve the Canadian Forces' "ability to project combat power/security assistance and Canadian influence rapidly and flexibly anywhere in the world."
It adds that the ability to deploy and sustain combat forces is not only contingent on strong logistical networks, but is also "an essential instrument of national power and should continue to be exploited to attain national objectives."
Excuse me but since when does Canada need "to project combat power ...rapidly and flexibly anywhere in the world"? How does this help us "attain national objectives"? For Christ's sake, Walt, what national objectives do we have in Southeast Asia or East Africa? And how will you, of all people, do the job?
Remember, General Walt, we had "national objectives" for your combat gig in Kandahar. They were clearly, boisterously stated, proclaimed even, shouted from the ramparts at the outset. Need to refresh your memory, Walt? You were to crush the Taliban and establish a Western democracy that would ensure civil and human rights for the Afghan people, especially Afghan women. Those were the national objectives you were given and said you would accomplish. And on those scores you failed, miserably.
For a host of what should have been obvious reasons, you and your peckerheaded political boss failed - your country, your soldiers and Afghanistan. And so you began to water down your objectives to cloak your failure and, aided by a naive and complicit media, proclaimed success where no such thing existed.
Jesus, Walt. You and your predecessor Hillier took on the responsibility for a major counter-insurgency campaign in the nastiest province in Afghanistan, Kandahar. On most days you were barely able to keep between 600 and 800 combat troops in the field even though counterinsurgency doctrine prescribes anywhere between 15,000 to 25,000 for that job in a territory with the population of Kandahar (over 900,000). The Americans were shocked to discover that you weren't even securing the provincial capital, Kandahar city. And you want to claim success and talk about deploying Canadian combat forces "anywhere in the world"? By the way, Walt, you're not fooling the Americans or the Brits. Your Big Brothers have your numbers and they're giving you a D minus at best.
Besides, Walt, if Canadian soldiers are getting into a shooting war anywhere it will be as a contingent in America's Foreign Legion. It's Washington's "national objectives" that will matter, not ours. Your actual combat capability, as demonstrated in Afghanistan, is so goddamned miniscule that you can't operate independently any distance from home. You can't "project combat power" anywhere without first getting your marching orders from Washington. It's the Pentagon that projects combat power, not Ottawa, not NDHQ.
This shit has gone to your head, Walt. You've got a bad case of megalomania. As a parting gift I'd like to pass along a bit of wisdom from a commander long departed, one who knew the difference between victory in battle and defeat, Oliver Cromwell, who said, “you have been sat to long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, i say, and let us have done with you. In the name of god, go!.”
Thursday, July 19, 2012
US Report Says as Much About Harper as Enbridge
The American Transportation Safety Board report that slammed Enbridge over the 2010 Kalamazoo River bitumen spill disaster in Michigan actually tells us as much about Harper and his EnviroShill Peter Kent as it does about Enbridge's miserable lack of fitness as a pipeline operator.
Kent has come to the defence of Enbridge and says the report will not change the Harper government's support for Enbridge and the Northern Pipeline. Of course it won't. Kent delivered his opinion while admitting he hasn't read the report. Reports don't matter in Harperland. They're just full of investigations and facts and findings which might be relevant to a reality-based world but, as we've seen repeatedly in the past, not to Harperland.
To Kent, the Michigan pipeline and the proposed Northern Gateway are apples and oranges. "It is an older pipeline; it is a different set of geographic and technological realities from some of the new major projects being proposed."
Yes, Pete, it is different and, on balance, the differences are worse - far, far worse. Michigan is relatively flat, open country. It's fairly heavily populated with a dandy road system. And it's seismically stable. There's nothing flat about northern British Columbia. It has a lot of mountainous territory. It's sparsely populated and the road system is very limited. And, unlike Michigan, northern B.C. is seismically active. Even in the best of conditions pipelines can rupture and cause catastrophic spills. Enbridge has a rich history to bear that out. But the Northern Gateway is anything but the best of conditions. Seismic events, particularly quakes and slides, can rip out entire tracts of pipeline in locations where it will be difficult to detect much less get emergency crews on site, especially in winter.
Peter Kent is an abomination, a disgrace to the country he has sworn to serve. Then again, it's not Canada he serves. No, Peter Kent serves one master, the Prince of Darkness himself.
Kent has come to the defence of Enbridge and says the report will not change the Harper government's support for Enbridge and the Northern Pipeline. Of course it won't. Kent delivered his opinion while admitting he hasn't read the report. Reports don't matter in Harperland. They're just full of investigations and facts and findings which might be relevant to a reality-based world but, as we've seen repeatedly in the past, not to Harperland.
To Kent, the Michigan pipeline and the proposed Northern Gateway are apples and oranges. "It is an older pipeline; it is a different set of geographic and technological realities from some of the new major projects being proposed."
Yes, Pete, it is different and, on balance, the differences are worse - far, far worse. Michigan is relatively flat, open country. It's fairly heavily populated with a dandy road system. And it's seismically stable. There's nothing flat about northern British Columbia. It has a lot of mountainous territory. It's sparsely populated and the road system is very limited. And, unlike Michigan, northern B.C. is seismically active. Even in the best of conditions pipelines can rupture and cause catastrophic spills. Enbridge has a rich history to bear that out. But the Northern Gateway is anything but the best of conditions. Seismic events, particularly quakes and slides, can rip out entire tracts of pipeline in locations where it will be difficult to detect much less get emergency crews on site, especially in winter.
Peter Kent is an abomination, a disgrace to the country he has sworn to serve. Then again, it's not Canada he serves. No, Peter Kent serves one master, the Prince of Darkness himself.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Will Generation X Face Revolt?
If Generation X, the class of '61 to '81, is truly disengaged, disinterested, disbelieving of global warming and its impacts, what does that hold for the future?
As the Boomers retire and fade in both economic and political influence, it is the X'ers who inherit the reins of power or whatever is left of it in our steadily metastasizing corporatist society. It will be on their watch that global warming will be engaged no matter how much they would rather it not.
Face it. The conditions you're enduring this summer will worsen, become more severe, more frequent. And this spread of meteorological extremism will come with a price. Already this year's drought has sent corn prices skyrocketing between 30 to 50 per cent. That price increase is going to emerge at your end, the consumer's, in a variety of ways from outright shortages to significant price hikes.
And what of the cornucopia of other threats and challenges - global, hemispheric, regional - that will fall into the laps of the X'ers? Oh they're going to have an awful lot on their plates, especially for a generation that would rather not be bothered. If they can't or prefer not to come to grips,even intellectually, with the simple fact of global warming, how will they begin to manage issues such as the looming freshwater crisis; overpopulation and population migration; species extinction and migration; disease and pest migration; severe storm events of increasing frequency and intensity; sea level rise and ocean acidification; cyclical and protracted floods and droughts; resource depletion and exhaustion; food insecurity; international power realignments and spreading terrorism and nuclear proliferation?
Oh my goodness but isn't that a powerful recipe for revolution? The seminal work on the subject remains Crane Brinton's 1934 book, The Anatomy of Revolution, which you really should read.
Here's an excerpt from Wiki:
The revolutions begin with problems in the pre-revolutionary regime. These include problems functioning — "government deficits, more than usual complaints over taxation, conspicuous governmental favoring of one set of economic interests over another, administrative entanglements and confusions". There are also social problems, such as the feeling by some that careers are not "open to talents", and economic power is separated from political power and social distinction. There is a "loss of self-confidence among many members of the ruling class," the "conversion of many members of that class to the belief that their privileges are unjust or harmful to society." "Intellectuals" switch their allegiance away from the government. In short, "the ruling class becomes politically inept."
It's hot hard to conclude that Canada, like many other Western nations, is heading down a pre-revolutionary path, one that we Boomers will watch from the sidelines. The adversaries will be the X'ers, in authority, and the following generation, the Millennials, rising against them and demanding a new order, a new deal. Perhaps the Occupy movement is just a glimpse into a greater, potentially more radical movement to come in the not distant future.
For all of the challenges listed above will eventually demand some response. Something will be done because something will have to be done. Stephen Harper is the exemplar of a ruling class become politically inept. Yet, in many ways, what passes today for an opposition is only marginally better and shows itself far from competent to meet the Herculean challenges of the day.
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Tuesday, July 17, 2012
About that Dry Spell
Last week it was the worst drought since the 80's. Now it's deemed the worst drought since 1956. And, with at least two more weeks of hot, dry conditions forecast for America's west and mid-west, it's expected to impact upwards of 80% of the continental United States.
Corn prices were up 30% last week on poor yields. Now prices are up 50% from just last month.
The L.A. Times reports that this year's drought loss claims are expected to exceed the previous record for weather related crop losses, the record set last year.
The drought gripping the Midwest and about 80% of the country is the most widespread since 1956, stoking massive wildfires and decimating the nation's breadbasket crops, according to a report released Monday by the National Drought Mitigation Center. Drought conditions led the Department of Agriculture recently to declare natural disasters in more than 1,000 counties in 26 states.
Last year, crop insurers paid record claims of about $11 billion for weather-related losses, including major losses in corn and soybeans, said David Graves of the Washington-based American Assn. of Crop Insurers.
This year's losses could surpass that "easily, given that the drought is developing in corn-growing regions" including Illinois and Indiana, he said.
Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have vowed to push back hard against any efforts to link the megadrought to climate change.
Corn prices were up 30% last week on poor yields. Now prices are up 50% from just last month.
The L.A. Times reports that this year's drought loss claims are expected to exceed the previous record for weather related crop losses, the record set last year.
The drought gripping the Midwest and about 80% of the country is the most widespread since 1956, stoking massive wildfires and decimating the nation's breadbasket crops, according to a report released Monday by the National Drought Mitigation Center. Drought conditions led the Department of Agriculture recently to declare natural disasters in more than 1,000 counties in 26 states.
Last year, crop insurers paid record claims of about $11 billion for weather-related losses, including major losses in corn and soybeans, said David Graves of the Washington-based American Assn. of Crop Insurers.
This year's losses could surpass that "easily, given that the drought is developing in corn-growing regions" including Illinois and Indiana, he said.
Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have vowed to push back hard against any efforts to link the megadrought to climate change.
Inherit the Earth
Generation X may be squarely in the crosshairs of global warming but a great many of them just don't care. A survey conducted by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research found just 5% of American Gen X'ers, born 1961 to 1981, claimed to be "alarmed" over global warming. 66% of respondents said they weren't sure global warming was even happening. Another 10% don't believe it at all. Overall, just less than a quarter said they were alarmed or concerned.
“Most Generation Xers are surprisingly disengaged, dismissive or doubtful about whether global climate change is happening and they don’t spend much time worrying about it,” said Jon D. Miller, author of “The Generation X Report.” (Read and download the full report.)
“We found a small but statistically significant decline between 2009 and 2011 in the level of attention and concern Generation X adults expressed about climate change,” Miller said. “In 2009, about 22 percent said they followed the issue of climate change very or moderately closely. In 2011, only 16 percent said they did so.”
The study certainly conforms to my own experience of Canadian Gen X'ers. Even young professionals often seem "disengaged, dismissive or doubtful" about global warming and disinclined to learn about climate change even when that information is at their fingertips.
They don't care, for now. They will, soon enough.
“Most Generation Xers are surprisingly disengaged, dismissive or doubtful about whether global climate change is happening and they don’t spend much time worrying about it,” said Jon D. Miller, author of “The Generation X Report.” (Read and download the full report.)
“We found a small but statistically significant decline between 2009 and 2011 in the level of attention and concern Generation X adults expressed about climate change,” Miller said. “In 2009, about 22 percent said they followed the issue of climate change very or moderately closely. In 2011, only 16 percent said they did so.”
The study certainly conforms to my own experience of Canadian Gen X'ers. Even young professionals often seem "disengaged, dismissive or doubtful" about global warming and disinclined to learn about climate change even when that information is at their fingertips.
They don't care, for now. They will, soon enough.
Monday, July 16, 2012
Coastal Chaos
Living on coastal B.C. we get used to seeing a lot of marine life. But this video, recorded in Hyacinthe Bay on Quadra Island, is breathtaking. Watch a pod of transient orcas hunt a large school of white side dolphin.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Harper Moves to Reinstate Fear & Helplessness For Terminally Ill Canadians
That sounds like hyperbole. It's not. The Harper government is appealing a B.C. Supreme Court decision upholding the right of the terminally ill to physician-assisted suicide. Harper wants to restore dreadful fear and hopelessness to the dying.
What's really at stake is not about death, not really. It is about the quality of life during the dying process we all inevitably face. It is about relieving the terminally ill of fear of having to endure a protracted, agonizing death. It is about allowing them to control their final days.
Harper's grotesque appeal won't prevent anyone's death. It won't "save" anyone, not one. No one will be somehow rescued. This is about the terminally ill, those on the brink of death. These are people on the very verge of death.
This isn't about fearful people making rash decisions. From my experience, the terminally ill tend to be remarkably rational. The prospect of near-term death focuses the mind. It is, after all, their death and their pain. There are no other "stakeholders" in this process.
Oregon's Death With Dignity Act, dispels all the nonsense about death panels and the vulnerable being pressured into offing themselves. The Act prescribes an elaborate application, qualification and assessment procedure that specifically address all the inflated criticisms of assisted suicide. The applicant must be in an advanced state of terminal illness without hope of remission. The patient must undergo interviews and assessments and then, twice, meet with review panels. Only when all the qualifications are met and the extensive safeguards satisfied, the patient may be permitted a prescription for lethal medications.
The important part is this. A great many of those who qualify never fill their prescriptions. Of those that do, a great many die naturally without using the drugs. The process merely means that these patients can go through the dying process without fear of having to endure a protracted death of unendurable pain. And that is relief the Harper government is determined they must be denied. And that is monstrous.
What's really at stake is not about death, not really. It is about the quality of life during the dying process we all inevitably face. It is about relieving the terminally ill of fear of having to endure a protracted, agonizing death. It is about allowing them to control their final days.
Harper's grotesque appeal won't prevent anyone's death. It won't "save" anyone, not one. No one will be somehow rescued. This is about the terminally ill, those on the brink of death. These are people on the very verge of death.
This isn't about fearful people making rash decisions. From my experience, the terminally ill tend to be remarkably rational. The prospect of near-term death focuses the mind. It is, after all, their death and their pain. There are no other "stakeholders" in this process.
Oregon's Death With Dignity Act, dispels all the nonsense about death panels and the vulnerable being pressured into offing themselves. The Act prescribes an elaborate application, qualification and assessment procedure that specifically address all the inflated criticisms of assisted suicide. The applicant must be in an advanced state of terminal illness without hope of remission. The patient must undergo interviews and assessments and then, twice, meet with review panels. Only when all the qualifications are met and the extensive safeguards satisfied, the patient may be permitted a prescription for lethal medications.
The important part is this. A great many of those who qualify never fill their prescriptions. Of those that do, a great many die naturally without using the drugs. The process merely means that these patients can go through the dying process without fear of having to endure a protracted death of unendurable pain. And that is relief the Harper government is determined they must be denied. And that is monstrous.
Canadian Farmers Hard Hit by Climate Change
Farmers in far more than half of the United States are now busily filling out forms for emergency drought relief. This year's corn crop is said to be particularly devastated, sending prices up some 30%. But it's not just America's bread basket that's being hit by early-stage climate change impacts. Central and Eastern Canada are likewise being hard hit by record temperatures and low rainfall.
“It’s devastating,” said Stan Szatrowski, a farmer in Simcoe, Ont. “It’s the worst it’s ever been. The yield will be half of what it normally should be.”
But Szatrowski added that as farmers like him feel the pain, so will consumers.
“Chances are prices will go up for the consumer, but there's nothing we can do about it,” he said. “With the price of fuel and the crop, that's just kind of the way it goes. We're not making any more money. We're losing money."
Evan Fraser, who studies the social impacts of agriculture at the University of Guelph, said the price of corn has already gone up about 30 per cent over the past few weeks.
“The weather of the next two weeks will be absolutely critical in determining how our corn farmers fare, in terms of this year’s harvest,” Fraser said.
“It’s devastating,” said Stan Szatrowski, a farmer in Simcoe, Ont. “It’s the worst it’s ever been. The yield will be half of what it normally should be.”
But Szatrowski added that as farmers like him feel the pain, so will consumers.
“Chances are prices will go up for the consumer, but there's nothing we can do about it,” he said. “With the price of fuel and the crop, that's just kind of the way it goes. We're not making any more money. We're losing money."
Evan Fraser, who studies the social impacts of agriculture at the University of Guelph, said the price of corn has already gone up about 30 per cent over the past few weeks.
“The weather of the next two weeks will be absolutely critical in determining how our corn farmers fare, in terms of this year’s harvest,” Fraser said.
Time to Give the Armed Forces a Reality Check
It's time to hit the "reset" button on Canada's military, or at least its top ranks. That much was plain from reading the jingoistic remarks of General Walt Natynczyk from a Canadian Press interview. While I won't quote broadly from the interview it's apparent that Natynczyk feels he's presiding over a military that, having had a taste of warfighting, needs ever more.
"We have some men and women who have had two, three and four tours and what they're telling me is 'Sir, we've got that bumper sticker. Can we go somewhere else now?'" Natynczyk said in an exclusive interview with The Canadian Press in Calgary.
"You also have the young sailors, soldiers, airmen and women who have just finished basic training and they want to go somewhere and in their minds it was going to be Afghanistan. So if not Afghanistan, where's it going to be? They all want to serve."
"We've got that bumper sticker." The war in Afghanistan? A merit badge? "Can we go somewhere else now?" Another war? Some other place to shoot up stuff and people? Any other place to shoot up stuff and people?
Someone needs to get Walt and people who think like him in check. Their ideas of war as sport or adventure are out of line.
Let's be honest, they've never really experienced war. Not real war. Not like the wars our fathers and grandfathers fought. Not like Farley Mowat's "Hasty P's" that suffered so many casualties that their roster was replaced - twice - in less than a year. Our entire fatality list from 11-years in Afghanistan would represent just one bad night for Bomber Command.
Those who have truly experienced war don't crave more of it. Just the opposite.
And before we give the nod to Walt or the next Walt and his kids, we need Walt to sit down and give us an accounting. We need a post mortem on Afghanistan, where it went so wrong and why we failed to achieve the goals we proclaimed so boastfully at the outset.
We need explanations. What did Walt & Company actually achieve? Canada obviously didn't get the most we could out of our military forces by setting them to warfighting in Kandahar. What can they do? What are their strengths and their weaknesses? How can they best serve Canada? What do we need to do to ensure we have a lot fewer cowboys and a few more capable generals at the helm in our armed forces?
"We have some men and women who have had two, three and four tours and what they're telling me is 'Sir, we've got that bumper sticker. Can we go somewhere else now?'" Natynczyk said in an exclusive interview with The Canadian Press in Calgary.
"You also have the young sailors, soldiers, airmen and women who have just finished basic training and they want to go somewhere and in their minds it was going to be Afghanistan. So if not Afghanistan, where's it going to be? They all want to serve."
"We've got that bumper sticker." The war in Afghanistan? A merit badge? "Can we go somewhere else now?" Another war? Some other place to shoot up stuff and people? Any other place to shoot up stuff and people?
Someone needs to get Walt and people who think like him in check. Their ideas of war as sport or adventure are out of line.
Let's be honest, they've never really experienced war. Not real war. Not like the wars our fathers and grandfathers fought. Not like Farley Mowat's "Hasty P's" that suffered so many casualties that their roster was replaced - twice - in less than a year. Our entire fatality list from 11-years in Afghanistan would represent just one bad night for Bomber Command.
Those who have truly experienced war don't crave more of it. Just the opposite.
And before we give the nod to Walt or the next Walt and his kids, we need Walt to sit down and give us an accounting. We need a post mortem on Afghanistan, where it went so wrong and why we failed to achieve the goals we proclaimed so boastfully at the outset.
We need explanations. What did Walt & Company actually achieve? Canada obviously didn't get the most we could out of our military forces by setting them to warfighting in Kandahar. What can they do? What are their strengths and their weaknesses? How can they best serve Canada? What do we need to do to ensure we have a lot fewer cowboys and a few more capable generals at the helm in our armed forces?
In Our Allies' Eyes, Canada Failed in Kandahar
For many years I have argued that Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were betrayed by dismal political and military leadership in Ottawa and a mass media too inept to recognize the chronic failures at the top. According to the CBC's Brian Stewart, others, outside Canada, held the same opinions.
Increasingly, foreign military and diplomatic assessments of the war are appearing in print, and what is surfacing is not a comforting picture as far as Canada is concerned.
At the very least, one finds little support in these assessments for Ottawa's boast that the Kandahar campaign won Canada much-needed new military prestige throughout NATO, especially with key allies such as Britain and the U.S.
Rather, the impression given is of a Canadian military mission that was deeply out of its depth and politically too hesitant to ask for significant outside help.
In one book just out, Little America: The War within the War for Afghanistan by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a highly respected Washington Post writer, Canada's Kandahar mission is even branded as one of the worst NATO failures of the entire almost 10-year campaign.
The courage and resilience of Canada's soldiers are never questioned (not mentioned much either, but at least not disputed). But the view now is of an overly optimistic Canadian military and civilian leadership eagerly volunteering to manage what was arguably the most critical and dangerous province in the whole war — home to the Taliban and linchpin to the Afghan south — while notably lacking the resources necessary for the task.
...Chandrasekaran writes that when a U.S. reassessment team visited southern Afghanistan in 2009 its members were shocked by the disparity of Western forces on the ground.
Only 2,800 or so Canadian soldiers were tasked with holding on to the sprawling Kandahar province, while 9,000 British personnel were based in the smaller, far less strategically important province of Helmand, next door.
The hopelessness of the Canadian effort was made even more evident as most of our troops were involved in support and headquarters' roles inside the main camp, which left only 600-800 on most occasions to patrol hostile territory "outside the wire."
The U.S. team members were appalled to find the Canadians not even holding Kandahar city, the country's second largest, against growing Taliban infiltration.
...Gen. David Richards, now chief of the U.K. defence staff and the man who commanded all NATO/ISAF forces in southern Afghanistan in 2006-07, was apparently convinced Canada should never have been given the Kandahar mission in the first place.
...The general told [British correspondent Sandy] Gall he complained to his political masters that the British should take on Kandahar because Canadians "as we knew, would never have the resources and the manpower to do that as well as we thought it should be done."
Not a word of this should come as a surprise. Then again you wouldn't have discovered even a glimmer of it from reading the jingoistic crap spewed out by miserable scribes like Blatchford, DiManno and Matt Fisher. Nor would you have heard about it on the floor of the House of Commons where even cowed opposition ranks stood mute for the last five years while this travesty played out in Kandahar province.
We sent about a thousand fighting soldiers (600-800 in Stewart's assessment) to do a job that required somewhere between 15 to 25,000. Our fighting soldiers did all anyone could expect of such a miniscule force. This fiasco is the work of their superiors - a woefully incompetent, disingenuous prime minister and his cabinet and a gaggle of swaggering uniformed bureaucrats who found themselves at the top ranks of our armed forces, far beyond their meagre talents and abilities.
Increasingly, foreign military and diplomatic assessments of the war are appearing in print, and what is surfacing is not a comforting picture as far as Canada is concerned.
At the very least, one finds little support in these assessments for Ottawa's boast that the Kandahar campaign won Canada much-needed new military prestige throughout NATO, especially with key allies such as Britain and the U.S.
Rather, the impression given is of a Canadian military mission that was deeply out of its depth and politically too hesitant to ask for significant outside help.
In one book just out, Little America: The War within the War for Afghanistan by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a highly respected Washington Post writer, Canada's Kandahar mission is even branded as one of the worst NATO failures of the entire almost 10-year campaign.
The courage and resilience of Canada's soldiers are never questioned (not mentioned much either, but at least not disputed). But the view now is of an overly optimistic Canadian military and civilian leadership eagerly volunteering to manage what was arguably the most critical and dangerous province in the whole war — home to the Taliban and linchpin to the Afghan south — while notably lacking the resources necessary for the task.
...Chandrasekaran writes that when a U.S. reassessment team visited southern Afghanistan in 2009 its members were shocked by the disparity of Western forces on the ground.
Only 2,800 or so Canadian soldiers were tasked with holding on to the sprawling Kandahar province, while 9,000 British personnel were based in the smaller, far less strategically important province of Helmand, next door.
The hopelessness of the Canadian effort was made even more evident as most of our troops were involved in support and headquarters' roles inside the main camp, which left only 600-800 on most occasions to patrol hostile territory "outside the wire."
The U.S. team members were appalled to find the Canadians not even holding Kandahar city, the country's second largest, against growing Taliban infiltration.
...Gen. David Richards, now chief of the U.K. defence staff and the man who commanded all NATO/ISAF forces in southern Afghanistan in 2006-07, was apparently convinced Canada should never have been given the Kandahar mission in the first place.
...The general told [British correspondent Sandy] Gall he complained to his political masters that the British should take on Kandahar because Canadians "as we knew, would never have the resources and the manpower to do that as well as we thought it should be done."
Not a word of this should come as a surprise. Then again you wouldn't have discovered even a glimmer of it from reading the jingoistic crap spewed out by miserable scribes like Blatchford, DiManno and Matt Fisher. Nor would you have heard about it on the floor of the House of Commons where even cowed opposition ranks stood mute for the last five years while this travesty played out in Kandahar province.
We sent about a thousand fighting soldiers (600-800 in Stewart's assessment) to do a job that required somewhere between 15 to 25,000. Our fighting soldiers did all anyone could expect of such a miniscule force. This fiasco is the work of their superiors - a woefully incompetent, disingenuous prime minister and his cabinet and a gaggle of swaggering uniformed bureaucrats who found themselves at the top ranks of our armed forces, far beyond their meagre talents and abilities.
Britain's Conservative Deluge
Conservatives have become a one-trick pony. They're all about austerity; code for cutting spending and lowering taxes (for some). And Conservatives are very, very good at distancing their austerity campaigns from the usually undesirable consequences that result.
Britain's Cameron Conservative government has been gung-ho on austerity, especially austerity for the poor and working classes. The government has also taken an axe to infrastructure programmes. Among the programmes defunded in the name of austerity were some 300-flood defence projects shelved over the past year.
Now the British people are paying the price of David Cameron's piper as flood waters inundate great swathes of the countryside.
Thousands of homes have flooded in recent weeks, causing hundreds of millions of pounds of damage. But in some of places overwhelmed by the deluge, flood defences that might have protected against rising waters and were in line for funding in 2010 were never begun, including at Croston in Lancashire and Kendal in Cumbria.
"The government is wringing its hands while the waters rise," said Charles Tucker, chairman of the National Flood Forum, which represents 150 community flood action groups. "The fact is that spending has decreased while flooding has increased."
Britain's Cameron Conservative government has been gung-ho on austerity, especially austerity for the poor and working classes. The government has also taken an axe to infrastructure programmes. Among the programmes defunded in the name of austerity were some 300-flood defence projects shelved over the past year.
Now the British people are paying the price of David Cameron's piper as flood waters inundate great swathes of the countryside.
Thousands of homes have flooded in recent weeks, causing hundreds of millions of pounds of damage. But in some of places overwhelmed by the deluge, flood defences that might have protected against rising waters and were in line for funding in 2010 were never begun, including at Croston in Lancashire and Kendal in Cumbria.
"The government is wringing its hands while the waters rise," said Charles Tucker, chairman of the National Flood Forum, which represents 150 community flood action groups. "The fact is that spending has decreased while flooding has increased."
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Canada's First Failed War
The generals who conned our political leaders into signing on to an unwinnable war talk of "success" in Afghanistan but they're blowing smoke, trying to cover the stench of the defeat they and their fellow generals engineered.
The story of our collective Western failure in Afghanistan is neatly told by an Afghan television producer, Abdul Nasir, in the July 9 issue of The New Yorker.
Nasir celebrated the American invasion in 2001, and, in the decade that followed, he prospered, and fathered six children. But now, with the United States planning its withdrawal by the end of 2014, Nasir blames the Americans for a string of catastrophic errors. “The Americans have failed to build a single sustainable institution here,” he said. “All they have done is make a small group of people very rich. And now they are getting ready to go.”
These days, Nasir said, the nineties are very much on his mind. The announced departure of American and NATO combat troops has convinced him and his friends that the civil war, suspended but never settled, is on the verge of resuming. “Everyone is preparing,” he said. “It will be bloodier and longer than before, street to street. This time, everyone has more guns, more to lose. It will be the same groups, the same commanders.” Hezb-e-Wahdat and Jamiat-e-Islami and Hezb-e-Islami and Junbish—all now political parties—are rearming. The Afghan Army is unlikely to be able to restore order as it did in the time of Najibullah. “It’s a joke,” Nasir said. “I’ve worked with the Afghan Army. They get tired making TV commercials!”
A few weeks ago, Nasir returned to Deh Afghanan. The Taliban were back, practically ignored by U.S. forces in the area. “The Americans have a big base there, and they never go out,” he said. “And, only four kilometres from the front gate, the Taliban control everything. You can see them carrying their weapons.” On a drive to Jalrez, a town a little farther west, Nasir was stopped at ten Taliban checkpoints. “How can you expect me to be optimistic?” he said. “Everyone is getting ready for 2014.”
Journalist Dexter Filkins decided to go and have a look for himself in the pprovince of Kunduz where he found the civil war already stirring.
The militias established or tolerated by the Afghan and American governments constitute a reversal of the efforts made in the early years of the war to disarm such groups, which were blamed for destroying the country during the civil war. At the time, American officials wanted to insure that the government in Kabul had a monopoly on the use of force.
Kunduz Province is divided into fiefdoms, each controlled by one of the new militias. In Khanabad district alone, I counted nine armed groups. Omar’s is among the biggest; another is led by a rival, on the northern bank of the Khanabad River, named Mir Alam. Like Omar, Alam was a commander during the civil war. He was a member of Jamiat-e-Islami. Alam and his men, who declined to speak to me, are said to be paid by the Afghan government.
As in the nineties, the militias around Kunduz have begun fighting each other for territory. They also steal, tax, and rape. “I have to give ten per cent of my crops to Mir Alam’s men,” a villager named Mohammad Omar said. (He is unrelated to the militia commander.) “That is the only tax I pay. The government is not strong enough to collect taxes.” When I accompanied the warlord Omar to Jannat Bagh, one of the villages under his control, his fighters told me that Mir Alam’s men were just a few hundred yards away. “We fight them whenever they try to move into our village,” one of Omar’s men said.
...Many Afghans fear that NATO has lost the will to control the militias, and that the warlords are reëmerging as formidable local forces. Nashir, the Khanabad governor, who is the scion of a prominent family, said that the rise of the warlords was just the latest in a series of ominous developments in a country where government officials exercise virtually no independent authority. “These people do not change, they are the same bandits,” he said. “Everything here, when the Americans leave, will be looted.”
Nashir grew increasingly vehement. “Mark my words, the moment the Americans leave, the civil war will begin,” he said. “This country will be divided into twenty-five or thirty fiefdoms, each with its own government.” Nashir rattled off the names of some of the country’s best-known leaders—some of them warlords—and the areas they come from: “Mir Alam will take Kunduz. Atta will take Mazar-e-Sharif. Dostum will take Sheberghan. The Karzais will take Kandahar. The Haqqanis will take Paktika. If these things don’t happen, you can burn my bones when I die.”
And as for that load of nonsense our commanders parrot about getting the Taliban to join the national government? Well, it's nonsense.
Afghan and American officials believe that some precipitating event could prompt the country’s ethnic minorities to fall back into their enclaves in northern Afghanistan, taking large chunks of the Army and police forces with them. Another concern is that Jamiat officers within the Afghan Army could indeed try to mount a coup against Karzai or a successor. The most likely trigger for a coup, these officials say, would be a peace deal with the Taliban that would bring them into the government or even into the Army itself. Tajiks and other ethnic minorities would find this intolerable. Another scenario would most likely unfold after 2014: a series of dramatic military advances by the Taliban after the American pullout.
“A coup is one of the big possibilities—a coup or civil war,” a former American official who was based in Kabul and has since left the country told me. “It’s clear that the main factions assume that civil war is a possibility and they are hedging their bets. And, of course, once people assume that civil war is going to happen then that can sometimes be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
And these realities beg the question of whether Canada's forces actually "succeeded" in Afghanistan or whether our Afghan war was a failure. How does one measure success in war? By the achievement of stated goals? Our goals, something our military and political leaders scrupulously avoid talking about today, were to drive the Talibs out and to establish a modern, liberal democracy in the country that would provide security and human rights to the people. On that score, our war was a total failure. Maybe we should judge our success by whether we were ever defeated? Well, given that we always have had our adversaries outnumbered and that our side alone had all the attack helicopters, jet strike fighters, tanks, artillery, drones and so on wielded by hihgly-trained professionals and their side made do with Korean-war vintage assault rifles, RPGs and IEDs in the hands of illiterate farmers, that doesn't sound much like success either. In fact, it's hard to come up with any measure by which our war could be claimed a success.
Does it even matter whether the longest war in Canada's history actually succeeded or not? You're damned right it does. Because we've thrown our hat into the ring with a genuine warfare state, the United States of America, and as America's modern Foreign Legion, we can expect Washington to call us up again when and as they perceive the need to arise.
We need to understand that we failed in Afghanistan in large part because we were tied into an American war that Washington never sought to win. The Americans dragged us into a war they were never willing to commit to win. Because of Washington's betrayal of its allies, we all leave the field draped in the American mantle of defeat. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld sold Afghanistan down the river when they buggered off to Iraq. Our leaders, political and military, sold Canada's soldiers down the river when they ignored America's duplicity and agreed to consign our young people to a war we couldn't win, a war without end.
And if you need any reason to demand Canada reject the F-35, just look to Afghanistan. The F-35 stealth light attack bomber will be Canada's admission ticket into America's foreign legion for the coming decades. It's time to say "no" to this whole rotten business.
The story of our collective Western failure in Afghanistan is neatly told by an Afghan television producer, Abdul Nasir, in the July 9 issue of The New Yorker.
Nasir celebrated the American invasion in 2001, and, in the decade that followed, he prospered, and fathered six children. But now, with the United States planning its withdrawal by the end of 2014, Nasir blames the Americans for a string of catastrophic errors. “The Americans have failed to build a single sustainable institution here,” he said. “All they have done is make a small group of people very rich. And now they are getting ready to go.”
These days, Nasir said, the nineties are very much on his mind. The announced departure of American and NATO combat troops has convinced him and his friends that the civil war, suspended but never settled, is on the verge of resuming. “Everyone is preparing,” he said. “It will be bloodier and longer than before, street to street. This time, everyone has more guns, more to lose. It will be the same groups, the same commanders.” Hezb-e-Wahdat and Jamiat-e-Islami and Hezb-e-Islami and Junbish—all now political parties—are rearming. The Afghan Army is unlikely to be able to restore order as it did in the time of Najibullah. “It’s a joke,” Nasir said. “I’ve worked with the Afghan Army. They get tired making TV commercials!”
A few weeks ago, Nasir returned to Deh Afghanan. The Taliban were back, practically ignored by U.S. forces in the area. “The Americans have a big base there, and they never go out,” he said. “And, only four kilometres from the front gate, the Taliban control everything. You can see them carrying their weapons.” On a drive to Jalrez, a town a little farther west, Nasir was stopped at ten Taliban checkpoints. “How can you expect me to be optimistic?” he said. “Everyone is getting ready for 2014.”
Journalist Dexter Filkins decided to go and have a look for himself in the pprovince of Kunduz where he found the civil war already stirring.
The militias established or tolerated by the Afghan and American governments constitute a reversal of the efforts made in the early years of the war to disarm such groups, which were blamed for destroying the country during the civil war. At the time, American officials wanted to insure that the government in Kabul had a monopoly on the use of force.
Kunduz Province is divided into fiefdoms, each controlled by one of the new militias. In Khanabad district alone, I counted nine armed groups. Omar’s is among the biggest; another is led by a rival, on the northern bank of the Khanabad River, named Mir Alam. Like Omar, Alam was a commander during the civil war. He was a member of Jamiat-e-Islami. Alam and his men, who declined to speak to me, are said to be paid by the Afghan government.
As in the nineties, the militias around Kunduz have begun fighting each other for territory. They also steal, tax, and rape. “I have to give ten per cent of my crops to Mir Alam’s men,” a villager named Mohammad Omar said. (He is unrelated to the militia commander.) “That is the only tax I pay. The government is not strong enough to collect taxes.” When I accompanied the warlord Omar to Jannat Bagh, one of the villages under his control, his fighters told me that Mir Alam’s men were just a few hundred yards away. “We fight them whenever they try to move into our village,” one of Omar’s men said.
...Many Afghans fear that NATO has lost the will to control the militias, and that the warlords are reëmerging as formidable local forces. Nashir, the Khanabad governor, who is the scion of a prominent family, said that the rise of the warlords was just the latest in a series of ominous developments in a country where government officials exercise virtually no independent authority. “These people do not change, they are the same bandits,” he said. “Everything here, when the Americans leave, will be looted.”
Nashir grew increasingly vehement. “Mark my words, the moment the Americans leave, the civil war will begin,” he said. “This country will be divided into twenty-five or thirty fiefdoms, each with its own government.” Nashir rattled off the names of some of the country’s best-known leaders—some of them warlords—and the areas they come from: “Mir Alam will take Kunduz. Atta will take Mazar-e-Sharif. Dostum will take Sheberghan. The Karzais will take Kandahar. The Haqqanis will take Paktika. If these things don’t happen, you can burn my bones when I die.”
And as for that load of nonsense our commanders parrot about getting the Taliban to join the national government? Well, it's nonsense.
Afghan and American officials believe that some precipitating event could prompt the country’s ethnic minorities to fall back into their enclaves in northern Afghanistan, taking large chunks of the Army and police forces with them. Another concern is that Jamiat officers within the Afghan Army could indeed try to mount a coup against Karzai or a successor. The most likely trigger for a coup, these officials say, would be a peace deal with the Taliban that would bring them into the government or even into the Army itself. Tajiks and other ethnic minorities would find this intolerable. Another scenario would most likely unfold after 2014: a series of dramatic military advances by the Taliban after the American pullout.
“A coup is one of the big possibilities—a coup or civil war,” a former American official who was based in Kabul and has since left the country told me. “It’s clear that the main factions assume that civil war is a possibility and they are hedging their bets. And, of course, once people assume that civil war is going to happen then that can sometimes be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
And these realities beg the question of whether Canada's forces actually "succeeded" in Afghanistan or whether our Afghan war was a failure. How does one measure success in war? By the achievement of stated goals? Our goals, something our military and political leaders scrupulously avoid talking about today, were to drive the Talibs out and to establish a modern, liberal democracy in the country that would provide security and human rights to the people. On that score, our war was a total failure. Maybe we should judge our success by whether we were ever defeated? Well, given that we always have had our adversaries outnumbered and that our side alone had all the attack helicopters, jet strike fighters, tanks, artillery, drones and so on wielded by hihgly-trained professionals and their side made do with Korean-war vintage assault rifles, RPGs and IEDs in the hands of illiterate farmers, that doesn't sound much like success either. In fact, it's hard to come up with any measure by which our war could be claimed a success.
Does it even matter whether the longest war in Canada's history actually succeeded or not? You're damned right it does. Because we've thrown our hat into the ring with a genuine warfare state, the United States of America, and as America's modern Foreign Legion, we can expect Washington to call us up again when and as they perceive the need to arise.
We need to understand that we failed in Afghanistan in large part because we were tied into an American war that Washington never sought to win. The Americans dragged us into a war they were never willing to commit to win. Because of Washington's betrayal of its allies, we all leave the field draped in the American mantle of defeat. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld sold Afghanistan down the river when they buggered off to Iraq. Our leaders, political and military, sold Canada's soldiers down the river when they ignored America's duplicity and agreed to consign our young people to a war we couldn't win, a war without end.
And if you need any reason to demand Canada reject the F-35, just look to Afghanistan. The F-35 stealth light attack bomber will be Canada's admission ticket into America's foreign legion for the coming decades. It's time to say "no" to this whole rotten business.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Dutch Bail on F-35
It was close - 77 to 71 - but it was enough for the Dutch parliament to cancel their planned purchase of 80 F-35 stealth light attack bombers.
Lockheed is trying to put the best face on the setback, saying the Dutch could always change their minds - and votes - and hop back into the multinational programme. The vote has also sent shockwaves through Finmeccanica, whose Rome-based Aeromacchi plant was supposed to build the F-35 for the Italian and Dutch air forces.
Lockheed is trying to put the best face on the setback, saying the Dutch could always change their minds - and votes - and hop back into the multinational programme. The vote has also sent shockwaves through Finmeccanica, whose Rome-based Aeromacchi plant was supposed to build the F-35 for the Italian and Dutch air forces.
Unlike Sarah Palin, I Really Can See Russia From My Backyard
Well I can see something of Russia anyway. I can see smoke from Russian wildfires creating a haze over local mountains. At first I thought it was just water vapour from our recent warm spell but, no, it's smoke carried by high altitude wind currents across the Pacific.
While I've got your attention, check out this post from Diablogue. It's about a lecture given by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer who disposes of the myths that those like him, the richest of the rich, are "job creators."
Hanauer exposes the ultra-rich as essentially predatory and an obstacle to a sound economy and a healthy society.
While I've got your attention, check out this post from Diablogue. It's about a lecture given by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer who disposes of the myths that those like him, the richest of the rich, are "job creators."
Hanauer exposes the ultra-rich as essentially predatory and an obstacle to a sound economy and a healthy society.
Wear This, Enbridge
"Trust Us." That's the theme behind Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline PR campaign. The company is desperate to get the public convinced they're trustworthy. They're pros, they know what they're doing, they can handle any pipeline problems that come their way. Bollocks.
At some point Enbridge is going to have to wear its own record and that is pretty dismal. A good deal of attention has been focused on the company's bitumen spill in a river near Kalamazoo, Michigan. Did Enbridge react quickly enough? Did it effectively clean up the mess it created?
A new report from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has reset the whole Kalamazoo issue. The NTSB has found that Enbridge knew, five years in advance, that its pipeline was beset with corrosion and cracking problems. FIVE YEARS. Enbridge had half a decade to deal with known problems and it didn't. And that was in Michigan, not many hundreds of miles of rocky wilderness across northern Alberta and northern British Columbia, the Northern Gateway route.
Yes, Enbridge knows what they're doing. That's the problem.
At some point Enbridge is going to have to wear its own record and that is pretty dismal. A good deal of attention has been focused on the company's bitumen spill in a river near Kalamazoo, Michigan. Did Enbridge react quickly enough? Did it effectively clean up the mess it created?
A new report from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has reset the whole Kalamazoo issue. The NTSB has found that Enbridge knew, five years in advance, that its pipeline was beset with corrosion and cracking problems. FIVE YEARS. Enbridge had half a decade to deal with known problems and it didn't. And that was in Michigan, not many hundreds of miles of rocky wilderness across northern Alberta and northern British Columbia, the Northern Gateway route.
Yes, Enbridge knows what they're doing. That's the problem.
HELP, We're Trapped Beneath a Dead Prime Minister and We Can't Get Up
Sometimes it can feel like Stephen Harper is a giant dead body that's fallen on top of Canada. He's not really dead but you can look at him a good long time and not spot any signs of life either. And that's a technique he's brought to the prime minister's office.
Steve is heavily into lube. He's all about everything bitumen - getting it out of the ground, pumping it through pipelines and into the bellies of supertankers and selling the stuff to foreigners. That's the Harper government in a nutshell, if only it could be in fact jammed into a nutshell.
But government is about so much more than a single resource. Just not for Steve and his government. When it comes to all those other things, Harper has two approaches - screw with it or ignore it. He likes to screw with things whether it's slapping his own picture up all over the PMO, or indulging his prison fetish, or seeing just how easy it is to defund the federal government. He'd love to screw with capital punishment and criminalize abortion but that might just start a ruckus that could mess up his bitumen agenda. A man, after all, can only do so much.
And for the stuff he's not screwing with, that's where ignoring stuff comes in. Screwing with stuff is actually easier than ignoring stuff. That's why Steve has found that he's better off to make the stuff he wants to ignore disappear all together. This is especially true when confronted with information and knowledge and, gee willickers, science! So he gets rid of information about poverty and inequality and other social ills by ditching the census and defunding NGOs and other pesky agencies. And Steve absolutely gags those damned scientists. He can't just chuck them all into a gulag, not in today's Canada, not yet, but he can censor their contact with the outside world and make sure when they do venture outside they're at the end of a short leash firmly held by trained minders. And, better yet, Steve can shut down their programmes and simply lay them off. Who'll notice?
And that's how you wind up with a stale, moribund government led by a seemingly lifeless prime minister that suffocates the country and its people. But there is hope. Help is on the way. Canadian scientists, the bain of Harper's iron-fist existence, are fighting back. Today they'll march through Ottawa in a protest against Harperian war on science.
"In my view there are a lot of attempts in this country, and other countries too, to push through resource-based economies," said Prof John Smol, a freshwater lake biologist at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. "People working at ELA are constantly finding reasons why you can't just put a pipeline here, or an industry there, because there are going to be environmental costs."
Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, was even more pointed. "It's not about saving money. It's about imposing ideology," he said. "What's happening here is that the government has an ideological agenda to develop the Canadian economy based on the extraction of oil out of the Alberta tar sands as quickly as possible and sell it as fast as it can, come hell and high water, and eliminate any barriers that stand in their way."
"The Harper government is the most environmentally hostile one we have ever had in Canada. Harper pulled Canada out of the Kyoto protocol, gutted the Fisheries Act (our strongest freshwater protection law), and hollowed out our environmental assessment legislation, making it easier for extractive industries to get licences to exploit," said Maude Barlow, a former UN advisor on water and chair of the Council of Canadians. "It is heartlessly shutting down a programme that costs very little to run given the incredible benefits it brings, in order to silence the voices who speak for water."
Steve is heavily into lube. He's all about everything bitumen - getting it out of the ground, pumping it through pipelines and into the bellies of supertankers and selling the stuff to foreigners. That's the Harper government in a nutshell, if only it could be in fact jammed into a nutshell.
But government is about so much more than a single resource. Just not for Steve and his government. When it comes to all those other things, Harper has two approaches - screw with it or ignore it. He likes to screw with things whether it's slapping his own picture up all over the PMO, or indulging his prison fetish, or seeing just how easy it is to defund the federal government. He'd love to screw with capital punishment and criminalize abortion but that might just start a ruckus that could mess up his bitumen agenda. A man, after all, can only do so much.
And for the stuff he's not screwing with, that's where ignoring stuff comes in. Screwing with stuff is actually easier than ignoring stuff. That's why Steve has found that he's better off to make the stuff he wants to ignore disappear all together. This is especially true when confronted with information and knowledge and, gee willickers, science! So he gets rid of information about poverty and inequality and other social ills by ditching the census and defunding NGOs and other pesky agencies. And Steve absolutely gags those damned scientists. He can't just chuck them all into a gulag, not in today's Canada, not yet, but he can censor their contact with the outside world and make sure when they do venture outside they're at the end of a short leash firmly held by trained minders. And, better yet, Steve can shut down their programmes and simply lay them off. Who'll notice?
And that's how you wind up with a stale, moribund government led by a seemingly lifeless prime minister that suffocates the country and its people. But there is hope. Help is on the way. Canadian scientists, the bain of Harper's iron-fist existence, are fighting back. Today they'll march through Ottawa in a protest against Harperian war on science.
"In my view there are a lot of attempts in this country, and other countries too, to push through resource-based economies," said Prof John Smol, a freshwater lake biologist at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. "People working at ELA are constantly finding reasons why you can't just put a pipeline here, or an industry there, because there are going to be environmental costs."
Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, was even more pointed. "It's not about saving money. It's about imposing ideology," he said. "What's happening here is that the government has an ideological agenda to develop the Canadian economy based on the extraction of oil out of the Alberta tar sands as quickly as possible and sell it as fast as it can, come hell and high water, and eliminate any barriers that stand in their way."
"The Harper government is the most environmentally hostile one we have ever had in Canada. Harper pulled Canada out of the Kyoto protocol, gutted the Fisheries Act (our strongest freshwater protection law), and hollowed out our environmental assessment legislation, making it easier for extractive industries to get licences to exploit," said Maude Barlow, a former UN advisor on water and chair of the Council of Canadians. "It is heartlessly shutting down a programme that costs very little to run given the incredible benefits it brings, in order to silence the voices who speak for water."
Monday, July 09, 2012
Boiling Frogs
Ours will not be the first civilization to foresee its own demise yet do nothing to prevent it.
It's sometimes called the "boiling frog" syndrome. Place a frog in a pot of hot water and it will leap straight back out. Put it in a pot of cold water atop a stove and gradually heat the water and the frog will stay put until it's boiled.
It's the disconnect that gets us every time. We become acclimated, accustomed to change and eventually we accept it as "normal." Jared Diamond gives the example of what he calls "landscape amnesia." He writes of driving past a beautiful valley vista. Then a shopping mall is constructed, blocking the valley view to passing motorists. Eventually commuters simply become accustomed to what they at first found jarring. Then they accept that as normal and gradually forget about the beautiful vista they previously enjoyed.
If you could compare a newspaper today to a copy of the same paper from 15 or 20-years ago, you might find the difference alarming. In the past, extreme weather events were a rarity on the front page. Today they're so commonplace as to be positively dull, numbing. Yes, yes, yes - Britain is suffering prolonged drought. Yes, yes, yes - Britain is experiencing widespread flooding. So what, that's normal these days isn't it?
As John Vidal writes in The Guardian, freak weather just isn't very freaky any more.
There's always been freak weather, but climatologists increasingly think these events are becoming less unusual. Instead of taking place every 10 or 20 years, they are happening every two or three. This, they are beginning to say, is the new normal, a taste of the future as the planet warms.
Last year was the 35th consecutive year since 1976 that the yearly global temperature was above average. Since 2000 we have had 11 of the 13 warmest years in 132 years and the patterns of global warming that scientists warned about – such as more droughts, sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires, volatile heat, violent storms and more frequent heatwaves – are all here now. This, say the scientists with increasing conviction, is what the early stages of global warming looks like.
So how much more extreme weather does it take for governments and individuals to act, or for the oil companies to withdraw from the Arctic, or the media to link global warming with the events now being witnessed around the world? Must the sea boil, the Seine run dry, New York flood and the London Olympics be consumed by fire before countries are shocked into taking concerted action? The reality is that even as the world experiences increasing numbers of weather-related disasters and extreme events, climate change has dropped off the rich countries' political and media agendas, and public concern is said to be waning – to the cheers of the sceptics and industry.
ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson recently caused a ruckus when he admitted that global warming is real but dismissed it as no big deal arguing we'll simply adapt, we always adapt. Of course Tillerson is a fossil fuel snake oil salesman a lot like our prime minister. His bromide was notable for what it left out - that the most hard hit parts of the world will be the least able to afford adaptation; that, while the best off will have some adaptation strategies, they'll be of limited effectiveness and very costly; and that history is rich with examples showing that we do not "always adapt" as Tillerson claims.
The very first civilization, the Mesopotamians, didn't adapt. The Easter Islanders didn't adapt, nor did the Mayans. Societies and civilizations that don't live sustainably don't - well, they don't sustain. They end and they usually end both fairly rapidly and quite badly.
We are living unsustainably today not just regionally but, for the first time, globally. Yet our leaders' approach is to treat unsustainable as normal and to quest for ever greater unsustainability while selling the plebs snake oil about "sustainable growth."
Right now you're sitting in a still quite comfortable pot of lukewarm water but the burner beneath you is on "high" not that you're likely to figure that out in time.
Would You Like Fries With That?
Steve Harper really should find a way to globally franchise Steve Harper.
The world's woes, claims Harper, would be solved if only other nations could be just like
"New economic powers continue to rise and older ones, ones very much like our own country, continue to struggle. They’re weighed down by debts they can’t control, by entitlements you can no longer afford and growth that shows no signs of returning,” he said.
“Under our conservative government, Canada will not slip back the way so many other developed countries are slipping back,” he said. “To succeed what the world must become in the future is what Canada is today.”
Of course Canada, and Canadians, are "slipping back." Growing inequality - in wealth, in incomes, in opportunity - speaks for itself and for Harper's mutant vision. Allowing foreign oil companies to import low-wage guest workers demonstrates ordinary Canadians are indeed "slipping back." The Canadian environment, neglected by a government utterly hostile to environmentalism and in denialism to the point of dysfunction on climate change, is "slipping back." The Canada we are preparing to bequeath to our kids and grandchildren is, on most fronts, "slipping back." But Canada isn't Harperland and Steve can't tell the difference.
Sunday, July 08, 2012
The Loaded Dice of Climate Change
Trying to attribute specific weather events to global warming is impossible. Long before man got the notion to industrialize there were hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts and floods. They happened before, it's to be expected they'll continue to happen.
But where do we see the face of global warming? It's there, in the roll of the dice.
But where do we see the face of global warming? It's there, in the roll of the dice.
“It’s OK to talk about events when you discuss them in a proper scientific context,” says Michael Mann, director of the Earth Science Center at Penn State and creator of the famous “hockey stick” graph. “The climate models have predicted what we’ve now seen, which is a doubling in the rate at which we break all-time warmth records in the U.S. We’re breaking those records, over the past decade, at a rate of almost twice what we would expect from chance alone.”
In fact, more than 2,000 U.S. heat records were broken just in the past week. Climatologists argue that while there’s certainly nothing unexpected in periodic record-breaking temperatures, the rate at which these records are being broken year after year can’t be explained away by coincidence.
“There’s a randomness to weather, but what we’re seeing is loading of the weather dice to the point where sixes are coming up 10 times more often,” says Mann. “If you were gambling and you saw sixes coming up 10 times more often you’d start to notice. We are seeing climate change now in the statistical loading of these dice.”
Don't Get Uppity. Remember Your Place.
These are hard times for the honest man and they may get a lot harder yet.
There's a societal sort of continental drift underway. Our once cohesive, strong society is ever so slowly but nonetheless steadily being divided, separating. This is apparent, in part, from the growing gap between rich and poor. It is manifested in the decline in equality - of wealth, of income and, most importantly, of opportunity, the latter evidenced by such things as the weakening of our healthcare and public education systems. The ladders of social mobility are being withdrawn.
What is emerging in their place? A nominal, two-tier society made up of the Plutonomy and the Precariat and the chances are very, very good you're in the Precariat even if you don't recognize it.
Noam Chomsky was inspired by a CitiGroup brochure circulated in 2005 heralding the arrival of the Plutonomy and by then Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan's remarks concerning the Precariat.
"In 2005, Citigroup came out with a brochure for investors called “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances.” It urged investors to put money into a “plutonomy index.” The brochure says, “The World is dividing into two blocs -- the Plutonomy and the rest.”
"Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that’s where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way outperforming the stock market. As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don’t really care about them. We don’t really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but other than that they essentially have no function. These days they’re sometimes called the “precariat” -- people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Only it’s not the periphery anymore. It’s becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing.
"So, for example, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, at the time when he was still “Saint Alan” -- hailed by the economics profession as one of the greatest economists of all time (this was before the crash for which he was substantially responsible) -- was testifying to Congress in the Clinton years, and he explained the wonders of the great economy that he was supervising. He said a lot of its success was based substantially on what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If working people are insecure, if they’re part of the precariat, living precarious existences, they’re not going to make demands, they’re not going to try to get better wages, they won’t get improved benefits. We can kick ’em out, if we don’t need ’em. And that’s what’s called a “healthy” economy, technically speaking. And he was highly praised for this, greatly admired."
Take your pick - Stiglitz, Krugman, Robert Reich, Wilkinson & Pickett, the list goes on and on. Any of them will explain to you the utter scourge that inequality inflicts on our societies. The bottom line is that there is underway an enormous transfer of wealth and, with it, political power from the great many to the very, very few or, as the Occupy movement puts it, from the 99% to the 1%. And the most important thing to remember is that this is a continuing process. It's not over yet. You can't breathe a sigh of relief and assure yourself that you're okay, you made it.
Think Chesley Sullenberger, the U.S. Airways pilot who brought his crew and passengers to a safe forced landing on the Hudson River. Think he's not of the Precariat? Think again. Before he left U.S. Airways in 2010, his salary had been cut a massive 40% and his pension was lost, forfeited in an airline restructuring. So much for the American Dream. Today's fledgling airline pilots may work for less than a Starbuck's barrista's takehome pay and put in ridiculous, potentially hazardous hours to boot.
Although Canada trails well behind the United States on the inequality index we are trending in the same direction and we, all of us, face similar outcomes especially for our kids and grandchildren. Indeed, one of the reasons we're still getting by fairly comfortably today, is because we're acquiescing in the looting of our kids' and grandchildren's future. We're piling up mountains of debt in various species for them to pay down - fiscal, environmental, even societal. Yet we're also undermining their future ability to meet the burdens we bequeath them.
We have to fight back and that begins by reversing the last three decades of inequality. We have to collect what's due from the rich. We have to recover that wealth and invest it in rebuilding our nation for today's young and the generations to come. The free ride has to be over not just for the rich and the multinationals but for the rest of us too. We can't have it all, nobody can, because that won't leave anything but a crappy deal for those who follow us.
I doubt it was accident that saw the oligarchs divide the middle class, taking the upper middle class into their camp. After all, with a gaping chasm dividing the "haves" from the "have nots" who wouldn't want to be safely on the side of the "haves"? Did I say "safely"? There's the thing.
Inequality is fueled by illusion. It requires a lot of people of some means thinking they're far better off than they are, believing their prospects are far grander than they are. The elite, the 1%, need the next 20% to support them in order to extend the advantages they derive from inequality. Yet we know that 20% is misled. Stiglitz will tell you, so will Reich. Wilkinson and Pickett will show you their empirical evidence, their science. Inequality serves only the 1%. Everyone else, including the top quartile, do better in more equal societies. That's right, equality benefits the wealthy just as it does the middle and the poor. That's because it's the middle - the middle class - that is the engine of our economies, not the rentier class, the 1%.
We have to rebuild healthy levels of equality - in income, in wealth and in opportunity - the lifeblood of a healthy, vibrant, robust and expansive middle class. Without that, we're sunk and so is Canada. The 21st century will be extremely challenging to every country. Canada is blessed with many advantages common to just a handful of countries but they're easily squandered without a determined, cohesive society and we won't have that without restoring our middle class.
So remember your place and remember that your place is in the middle class.
And, as an aside to you Liberals, understand that your party has been instrumental in allowing the spread of inequality in our country. Yes, Harper is worse but so what? You are about to select a new leader. Make sure you choose someone with real vision, someone who will resolutely commit to fighting inequality and the other neglected challenges facing Canada. No more celebrity leaders. Remember, in Canadian politics today, you're on the outside looking in. If you want back in, you'll have to earn it.
There's a societal sort of continental drift underway. Our once cohesive, strong society is ever so slowly but nonetheless steadily being divided, separating. This is apparent, in part, from the growing gap between rich and poor. It is manifested in the decline in equality - of wealth, of income and, most importantly, of opportunity, the latter evidenced by such things as the weakening of our healthcare and public education systems. The ladders of social mobility are being withdrawn.
What is emerging in their place? A nominal, two-tier society made up of the Plutonomy and the Precariat and the chances are very, very good you're in the Precariat even if you don't recognize it.
Noam Chomsky was inspired by a CitiGroup brochure circulated in 2005 heralding the arrival of the Plutonomy and by then Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan's remarks concerning the Precariat.
"In 2005, Citigroup came out with a brochure for investors called “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances.” It urged investors to put money into a “plutonomy index.” The brochure says, “The World is dividing into two blocs -- the Plutonomy and the rest.”
"Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that’s where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way outperforming the stock market. As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don’t really care about them. We don’t really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but other than that they essentially have no function. These days they’re sometimes called the “precariat” -- people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Only it’s not the periphery anymore. It’s becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing.
"So, for example, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, at the time when he was still “Saint Alan” -- hailed by the economics profession as one of the greatest economists of all time (this was before the crash for which he was substantially responsible) -- was testifying to Congress in the Clinton years, and he explained the wonders of the great economy that he was supervising. He said a lot of its success was based substantially on what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If working people are insecure, if they’re part of the precariat, living precarious existences, they’re not going to make demands, they’re not going to try to get better wages, they won’t get improved benefits. We can kick ’em out, if we don’t need ’em. And that’s what’s called a “healthy” economy, technically speaking. And he was highly praised for this, greatly admired."
Take your pick - Stiglitz, Krugman, Robert Reich, Wilkinson & Pickett, the list goes on and on. Any of them will explain to you the utter scourge that inequality inflicts on our societies. The bottom line is that there is underway an enormous transfer of wealth and, with it, political power from the great many to the very, very few or, as the Occupy movement puts it, from the 99% to the 1%. And the most important thing to remember is that this is a continuing process. It's not over yet. You can't breathe a sigh of relief and assure yourself that you're okay, you made it.
Think Chesley Sullenberger, the U.S. Airways pilot who brought his crew and passengers to a safe forced landing on the Hudson River. Think he's not of the Precariat? Think again. Before he left U.S. Airways in 2010, his salary had been cut a massive 40% and his pension was lost, forfeited in an airline restructuring. So much for the American Dream. Today's fledgling airline pilots may work for less than a Starbuck's barrista's takehome pay and put in ridiculous, potentially hazardous hours to boot.
Although Canada trails well behind the United States on the inequality index we are trending in the same direction and we, all of us, face similar outcomes especially for our kids and grandchildren. Indeed, one of the reasons we're still getting by fairly comfortably today, is because we're acquiescing in the looting of our kids' and grandchildren's future. We're piling up mountains of debt in various species for them to pay down - fiscal, environmental, even societal. Yet we're also undermining their future ability to meet the burdens we bequeath them.
We have to fight back and that begins by reversing the last three decades of inequality. We have to collect what's due from the rich. We have to recover that wealth and invest it in rebuilding our nation for today's young and the generations to come. The free ride has to be over not just for the rich and the multinationals but for the rest of us too. We can't have it all, nobody can, because that won't leave anything but a crappy deal for those who follow us.
I doubt it was accident that saw the oligarchs divide the middle class, taking the upper middle class into their camp. After all, with a gaping chasm dividing the "haves" from the "have nots" who wouldn't want to be safely on the side of the "haves"? Did I say "safely"? There's the thing.
Inequality is fueled by illusion. It requires a lot of people of some means thinking they're far better off than they are, believing their prospects are far grander than they are. The elite, the 1%, need the next 20% to support them in order to extend the advantages they derive from inequality. Yet we know that 20% is misled. Stiglitz will tell you, so will Reich. Wilkinson and Pickett will show you their empirical evidence, their science. Inequality serves only the 1%. Everyone else, including the top quartile, do better in more equal societies. That's right, equality benefits the wealthy just as it does the middle and the poor. That's because it's the middle - the middle class - that is the engine of our economies, not the rentier class, the 1%.
We have to rebuild healthy levels of equality - in income, in wealth and in opportunity - the lifeblood of a healthy, vibrant, robust and expansive middle class. Without that, we're sunk and so is Canada. The 21st century will be extremely challenging to every country. Canada is blessed with many advantages common to just a handful of countries but they're easily squandered without a determined, cohesive society and we won't have that without restoring our middle class.
So remember your place and remember that your place is in the middle class.
And, as an aside to you Liberals, understand that your party has been instrumental in allowing the spread of inequality in our country. Yes, Harper is worse but so what? You are about to select a new leader. Make sure you choose someone with real vision, someone who will resolutely commit to fighting inequality and the other neglected challenges facing Canada. No more celebrity leaders. Remember, in Canadian politics today, you're on the outside looking in. If you want back in, you'll have to earn it.
Saturday, July 07, 2012
The Proof of the Pudding
Americans are catching on to the concept of anthropogenic global warming, finally. That's mainly because from the Colorado wildfires to the sustained drought across the southwest to the flooding of the midwest and the extended heatwave of the eastern seaboard to "pre-season" tornadoes, they're up to their eyeballs in climate change reality.
Many Americans had previously seen climate change as a "nebulous concept" removed from them in time and geography, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco.
"Many people around the world are beginning to appreciate that climate change is under way, that it's having consequences that are playing out in real time and, in the United States at least, we are seeing more and more examples of extreme weather and extreme climate-related events," Lubchenco told a university forum in the Australian capital of Canberra.
"People's perceptions in the United States at least are in many cases beginning to change as they experience something first-hand that they at least think is directly attributable to climate change," she said.
She said her agency was experiencing "skyrocketing" demand for climate change data and projections from individuals, businesses, communities and planners across the United States.
CBS News reports that more than half of the United States is now experiencing moderate to extreme drought.
Just under 56 percent of the contiguous United States is in drought conditions, the most extensive area in the 12-year history of the U.S. Drought Monitor. The previous drought records occurred on Aug. 26, 2003, when 54.79 percent of the lower 48 were in drought and on Sept 10, 2002, when drought extended across 54.63 percent of this area.
The New York Daily News reports that the ongoing heatwave and drought are wreaking havoc across the United States.
Fueled by a record-breaking heat wave and unusually low rainfall, drought is wreaking havoc on people’s lives all over the U.S. In small towns, roads are buckling from the heat. In farm country, corn growers are getting worried about their crops. In the Western states, wildfires have been blazing for weeks. And in cities, people could face drinking water shortages as reservoirs dry up, experts say.
While our typically mild summer is just arriving here out on the west coast, the east is enduring its own heatwave conditions with 11-high temperature records set in Ontario yesterday. The biggest change, however, the one reflecting climate change, is the narrowing of the dirunal spread between the daily high and overnight low temperatures. Night time temperatures are staying ever closer to daytime highs which means more retained heat to start the following day.
In the Montreal region, lake and river levels are at 10-year lows, the result of an unusually warm Spring.
“What’s happening right now is we’re paying the price for the abnormally warm weather we saw towards the end of March,” said Marc Beauchemin, a climatologist with Environment Canada.
“The rapid snow melt we saw put our seasons into fast forward and the water levels we’re seeing right now are the kind we would typically see in mid August.
"What’s slightly more dramatic is that we’re not expecting much rain in the coming weeks, which means the water levels will keep sinking.”
Meanwhile Britain is bracing for more severe flooding with the Met Office calling for one-day rainfall equivalent to normal monthly accumulations across much of England and Scotland. Brits are being warned today could be the wettest day of the summer.
78 are reported dead from floods and mudslides in the Black Sea region of Russia. Once again, a month's worth of rain fell in a few hours. Northeast India is enduring the worst monsoon flooding in a decade with 105 dead already reported. China, the eastern party of which is experiencing heat wave conditions similar to America's, is also being hit by widespread flooding.
Welcome to the new reality. Call it what you like, that doesn't matter, but it's time we had a national, grown-up conversation about this.
Many Americans had previously seen climate change as a "nebulous concept" removed from them in time and geography, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco.
"Many people around the world are beginning to appreciate that climate change is under way, that it's having consequences that are playing out in real time and, in the United States at least, we are seeing more and more examples of extreme weather and extreme climate-related events," Lubchenco told a university forum in the Australian capital of Canberra.
"People's perceptions in the United States at least are in many cases beginning to change as they experience something first-hand that they at least think is directly attributable to climate change," she said.
She said her agency was experiencing "skyrocketing" demand for climate change data and projections from individuals, businesses, communities and planners across the United States.
CBS News reports that more than half of the United States is now experiencing moderate to extreme drought.
Just under 56 percent of the contiguous United States is in drought conditions, the most extensive area in the 12-year history of the U.S. Drought Monitor. The previous drought records occurred on Aug. 26, 2003, when 54.79 percent of the lower 48 were in drought and on Sept 10, 2002, when drought extended across 54.63 percent of this area.
The New York Daily News reports that the ongoing heatwave and drought are wreaking havoc across the United States.
Fueled by a record-breaking heat wave and unusually low rainfall, drought is wreaking havoc on people’s lives all over the U.S. In small towns, roads are buckling from the heat. In farm country, corn growers are getting worried about their crops. In the Western states, wildfires have been blazing for weeks. And in cities, people could face drinking water shortages as reservoirs dry up, experts say.
While our typically mild summer is just arriving here out on the west coast, the east is enduring its own heatwave conditions with 11-high temperature records set in Ontario yesterday. The biggest change, however, the one reflecting climate change, is the narrowing of the dirunal spread between the daily high and overnight low temperatures. Night time temperatures are staying ever closer to daytime highs which means more retained heat to start the following day.
In the Montreal region, lake and river levels are at 10-year lows, the result of an unusually warm Spring.
“What’s happening right now is we’re paying the price for the abnormally warm weather we saw towards the end of March,” said Marc Beauchemin, a climatologist with Environment Canada.
“The rapid snow melt we saw put our seasons into fast forward and the water levels we’re seeing right now are the kind we would typically see in mid August.
"What’s slightly more dramatic is that we’re not expecting much rain in the coming weeks, which means the water levels will keep sinking.”
Meanwhile Britain is bracing for more severe flooding with the Met Office calling for one-day rainfall equivalent to normal monthly accumulations across much of England and Scotland. Brits are being warned today could be the wettest day of the summer.
78 are reported dead from floods and mudslides in the Black Sea region of Russia. Once again, a month's worth of rain fell in a few hours. Northeast India is enduring the worst monsoon flooding in a decade with 105 dead already reported. China, the eastern party of which is experiencing heat wave conditions similar to America's, is also being hit by widespread flooding.
Welcome to the new reality. Call it what you like, that doesn't matter, but it's time we had a national, grown-up conversation about this.
Wednesday, July 04, 2012
Is Syria Cold War II's First Proxy War?
Another sign that we may have entered a new Cold War is the alignment of major powers behind rival forces in Syria. The Russians and Chinese tentatively back Assad. The Americans and their minions (that includes us) oppose Assad and demand his ouster. And, according to Asia Times, our side is into this war deeper than we imagine.
"US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently said that the US has been working to unify the heterogeneous groups making up the opposition: "We're also working very hard to try to prop up and better organize the opposition. We've spent a lot of time on that."
"In the meantime, US officials have admitted that they have been providing covert military training and assistance for some time now. Large quantities of US automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons are being smuggled across the Turkish border by intermediaries including Syria's Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
"In this context it is likely that US satellite and drone surveillance has been providing intelligence on Syrian troop movements. The US has also provided between 10-20 classified technologies that may include a mobile phone "panic button" and an "Internet suitcase" to override government communications control. Training in the use of these technologies has also likely been provided.
"Almost from the beginning of the conflict, Saudi Arabia has, with the knowledge of the US government, been making full use of its wealth and local knowledge to pour material and military assistance into Syria. The Saudis are alarmed at the recent re-emergence, thanks to US ineptitude, of Shi'ite predominance in Iraq, which has created a regional "Shi'ite crescent" including Iran and Syria."
Not coincidentally a similar alignment is shaping up over Iran. Just as George w. Bush belligerently drove NATO to expand to the borders of Russia, the Chinese and Russians now see Iran as a country on which they can expand their own sphere of influence and thereby also pry the fossil fuel and mineral riches of the Caucasus and South Asia out of America's grasp. Wheels spinning within wheels, the perfect milieu for nurturing a new Cold War.
"US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently said that the US has been working to unify the heterogeneous groups making up the opposition: "We're also working very hard to try to prop up and better organize the opposition. We've spent a lot of time on that."
"In the meantime, US officials have admitted that they have been providing covert military training and assistance for some time now. Large quantities of US automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons are being smuggled across the Turkish border by intermediaries including Syria's Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
"In this context it is likely that US satellite and drone surveillance has been providing intelligence on Syrian troop movements. The US has also provided between 10-20 classified technologies that may include a mobile phone "panic button" and an "Internet suitcase" to override government communications control. Training in the use of these technologies has also likely been provided.
"Almost from the beginning of the conflict, Saudi Arabia has, with the knowledge of the US government, been making full use of its wealth and local knowledge to pour material and military assistance into Syria. The Saudis are alarmed at the recent re-emergence, thanks to US ineptitude, of Shi'ite predominance in Iraq, which has created a regional "Shi'ite crescent" including Iran and Syria."
Not coincidentally a similar alignment is shaping up over Iran. Just as George w. Bush belligerently drove NATO to expand to the borders of Russia, the Chinese and Russians now see Iran as a country on which they can expand their own sphere of influence and thereby also pry the fossil fuel and mineral riches of the Caucasus and South Asia out of America's grasp. Wheels spinning within wheels, the perfect milieu for nurturing a new Cold War.
Welcome to the New Planet Earth
A lot of Americans will be spending this 4th of July indoors, at home. At least those who still have electricity and air conditioning perhaps.
Reuters reports that scorching heat and extreme dry conditions are causing plenty of cities and towns across the U.S. to cancel 4th of July fireworks displays.
In places from Montana to Tennessee, communities have canceled or restricted fireworks celebrations. Others have banned pyrotechnics or advised residents to exercise caution with everything from sparklers to barbecue grills because of the soaring temperatures and dry conditions.
"All it would take is one spark from a shell to get away, and it could go everywhere," said Bruce Jones, the mayor of Douglas, Wyoming, where the annual fireworks display has been called off for the first time in memory. "It's the better part of valor not to do it."
And it seems the heat waves, wildfires and freak storms have finally emboldened climate scientists to proclaim that, yes, these are the effects of global warming, they're here to stay and there's plenty more to come.
"...the run of extreme weather offers real-time proof of the consequences of climate change, said Kevin Trenberth, who heads climate research at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado – itself the scene of devastating wildfires.
"'We are certainly seeing climate change in action,' he said. 'This year has been exceptionally unusual throughout the United States.'
Jeff Masters director of meteorology at the Weather Underground website, told Democracy Now: 'What we're seeing now is the future. We're going to be seeing a lot more weather like this, a lot more impacts like we're seeing from this series of heat waves, fires and storms.'
He added: 'This is just the beginning.'
"...Since the start of the year, the United States set more than 40,000 hot temperature records and fewer than 6,000 cold temperature records, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"Ordinarily, scientists would expect those numbers to be about the same [a roughly equal number of high to low-temperature records], but the hot temperature records were falling at a ratio of about 7-1."
It will be fascinating to watch now long the U.S. Congress, bought and paid for minions of Big Fossil, can hold out and continue to reject any linkage between these extreme weather events and global warming. Climate change is imposing great stresses on large parts of the United States and they're somewhat cumulative. These stresses are being compounded by America's overall excessive ecological footprint. This chart shows the environmental footprint of the average American measured against the country's biocapacity. Climate change impacts such as extended droughts and floods are reducing America's biocapacity. Something has to give.
Tuesday, July 03, 2012
God Damn, But He Might Be Right
It might not be just the climate that's at risk this century. We might be on the brink of a much larger sea change sweeping through our political, economic and social structures.
Democracy, which after all is political egalitarianism, may be on its way out. The United States, with its "bought and paid for" Congress, seems to have quietly discarded democracy in favour of a corporatist oligarchy. The reality of this was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in its Citizens United decision that upheld powerful political rights for non-voting interests. Money talks. Big Money talks loudly enough to drown out everyone else.
Money, today, is political power as we've never experienced in our lifetimes. That is manifested in rapidly growing inequality - in incomes, in wealth and in opportunity. Skilfully nurtured inequality is the precursor to the social fracturing that underlies real oligarchy.
A bellwether for what is happening is the rise of "internships." My daughter and her American beau recently settled in Vancouver. He graduated a year earlier and found work in his field but only in the form of three internships. At any given time he had two on the go because his earnings were so low he could only aspire to penury.
I first saw these arrangements when, as a young man, I lived in England. I met a couple of fellows starting their careers in banking. It turned out both of them were upper-middle class. They had to be because their career path depended on their parents supporting them for the first few working years. The idea was to keep out the riff-raff. Those who lacked adequate, alternate means of support could not afford to pursue the careers that, once the ordeal was over, paid handsomely. And so the "right" jobs were preserved for the "right" people. It was outrageous but I wrote it off as just another incident of Britain's powerful and rigid class structure. Now, like a contagion, it has jumped the Atlantic.
As Andrew Bacevich warned in The Limits of Power, a complacent American public has allowed their democracy to be stolen:
"Yet if presidents have accrued too much power, if the Congress is feckless, if the national security bureaucracy is irretrievably broken, the American people have only themselves to blame. They have allowed their democracy to be hijacked. The hijackers will not voluntarily return what they have stolen.
"One result of that hijacking has been to raise up a new political elite whose members have a vested interest in perpetuating the crises that provide the source of their power. These are the people who under the guise of seeking peace or advancing the cause of liberty devise policies that promote war or the prospect of war, producing something akin to chaos."
Damn, he just might be right. What Bacevich wrote, as a lament for his America, should stand as a warning for what could lie in store for our Canada, our democracy, our people.
The theory of global warming has made us aware of the concept of "tipping points" but I wonder whether the demise of democracy embodies its own tipping points. In my unsophisticated, okay naive, understanding of democracy I fervently believed that universal suffrage, the vote, would always save the day, would remedy any excess, every omission. The vote, after all, vested ultimate power in the citizenry. The vote ensured our political classes would always do right by us.
Abe Lincoln is known for his quip that you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Now I understand the retort to that is, "so what?" All that matters is that you can fool enough of the people enough of the time on the stuff that really matters and you have effectively thwarted democracy. The vote isn't enough to ensure the political leadership will do right by us when others with competing interests are more capable of demanding their attention.
A concentrated, corporatist media is a powerful instrument for perverting democracy. A viable democracy is dependent upon an informed electorate. Confuse the electorate, mislead the electorate, inculcate them with fear and it's easy to create a misinformed electorate. A plain and powerful example of that came in late 2008 when Harper and his minions, shamelessly aided and abbeted by Canada's corporatist media, spread the outright lie about the opposition plotting an unconstitutional coup d'etat to seize power from the Conservatives. An honest, free media would have skewered Harper for that, denounced his lies, exposed his manipulations, revealed the truth and fulfilled their mandate as watchdog of government. None of that happened and the "coup" smear took hold among the fearful and ignorant.
The events of late 2008 might have been a tipping point in the demise of Canadian democracy. There have been others, among them the steadfast refusal of the Liberals and Conservatives to pledge meaningful action to fight back the surge of inequality in our own country. Inequality of income, inequality of wealth, inequality of opportunity... the pillars of a vibrant, robust middle class that is, of itself, the very foundation of healthy, strong democracy. The object lesson is that while it's a given we cannot trust the corporatist Conservatives to do right by us, we have no reason to give the Liberals the benefit of the doubt on that score either. The NDP? That remains to be seen and it still has much to prove.
Who will pledge to fight back inequality? Who will commit to dismembering our corporatist mass media? Who will formulate a viable plan to tackle climate change? Who will restore posterity to its rightful place in government policy and planning? Whatever party does all those things - the lot - is the party that can be entrusted with our democracy, the party that we should bank on doing right by us, the Canadian people.
Democracy, which after all is political egalitarianism, may be on its way out. The United States, with its "bought and paid for" Congress, seems to have quietly discarded democracy in favour of a corporatist oligarchy. The reality of this was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in its Citizens United decision that upheld powerful political rights for non-voting interests. Money talks. Big Money talks loudly enough to drown out everyone else.
Money, today, is political power as we've never experienced in our lifetimes. That is manifested in rapidly growing inequality - in incomes, in wealth and in opportunity. Skilfully nurtured inequality is the precursor to the social fracturing that underlies real oligarchy.
A bellwether for what is happening is the rise of "internships." My daughter and her American beau recently settled in Vancouver. He graduated a year earlier and found work in his field but only in the form of three internships. At any given time he had two on the go because his earnings were so low he could only aspire to penury.
I first saw these arrangements when, as a young man, I lived in England. I met a couple of fellows starting their careers in banking. It turned out both of them were upper-middle class. They had to be because their career path depended on their parents supporting them for the first few working years. The idea was to keep out the riff-raff. Those who lacked adequate, alternate means of support could not afford to pursue the careers that, once the ordeal was over, paid handsomely. And so the "right" jobs were preserved for the "right" people. It was outrageous but I wrote it off as just another incident of Britain's powerful and rigid class structure. Now, like a contagion, it has jumped the Atlantic.
As Andrew Bacevich warned in The Limits of Power, a complacent American public has allowed their democracy to be stolen:
"Yet if presidents have accrued too much power, if the Congress is feckless, if the national security bureaucracy is irretrievably broken, the American people have only themselves to blame. They have allowed their democracy to be hijacked. The hijackers will not voluntarily return what they have stolen.
"One result of that hijacking has been to raise up a new political elite whose members have a vested interest in perpetuating the crises that provide the source of their power. These are the people who under the guise of seeking peace or advancing the cause of liberty devise policies that promote war or the prospect of war, producing something akin to chaos."
Damn, he just might be right. What Bacevich wrote, as a lament for his America, should stand as a warning for what could lie in store for our Canada, our democracy, our people.
The theory of global warming has made us aware of the concept of "tipping points" but I wonder whether the demise of democracy embodies its own tipping points. In my unsophisticated, okay naive, understanding of democracy I fervently believed that universal suffrage, the vote, would always save the day, would remedy any excess, every omission. The vote, after all, vested ultimate power in the citizenry. The vote ensured our political classes would always do right by us.
Abe Lincoln is known for his quip that you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Now I understand the retort to that is, "so what?" All that matters is that you can fool enough of the people enough of the time on the stuff that really matters and you have effectively thwarted democracy. The vote isn't enough to ensure the political leadership will do right by us when others with competing interests are more capable of demanding their attention.
A concentrated, corporatist media is a powerful instrument for perverting democracy. A viable democracy is dependent upon an informed electorate. Confuse the electorate, mislead the electorate, inculcate them with fear and it's easy to create a misinformed electorate. A plain and powerful example of that came in late 2008 when Harper and his minions, shamelessly aided and abbeted by Canada's corporatist media, spread the outright lie about the opposition plotting an unconstitutional coup d'etat to seize power from the Conservatives. An honest, free media would have skewered Harper for that, denounced his lies, exposed his manipulations, revealed the truth and fulfilled their mandate as watchdog of government. None of that happened and the "coup" smear took hold among the fearful and ignorant.
The events of late 2008 might have been a tipping point in the demise of Canadian democracy. There have been others, among them the steadfast refusal of the Liberals and Conservatives to pledge meaningful action to fight back the surge of inequality in our own country. Inequality of income, inequality of wealth, inequality of opportunity... the pillars of a vibrant, robust middle class that is, of itself, the very foundation of healthy, strong democracy. The object lesson is that while it's a given we cannot trust the corporatist Conservatives to do right by us, we have no reason to give the Liberals the benefit of the doubt on that score either. The NDP? That remains to be seen and it still has much to prove.
Who will pledge to fight back inequality? Who will commit to dismembering our corporatist mass media? Who will formulate a viable plan to tackle climate change? Who will restore posterity to its rightful place in government policy and planning? Whatever party does all those things - the lot - is the party that can be entrusted with our democracy, the party that we should bank on doing right by us, the Canadian people.
Monday, July 02, 2012
200 Year Old Triumphalism a Bit Stale
Stephen Harper obviously likes wars. His type, the kind who are never actually around for the killing and the dying, often do. Perhaps because he so royally screwed up his own war, the one he made his own, Canada's war in Afghanistan, Steve is so desperate for some, any measure of triumphalism that he's become a latter-day booster of the War of 1812.
I was somewhat saddened today to learn that our Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill had been given a War of 1812 theme. Why, what for?
I'm something of an amateur aficionado of the War of 1812. My family, at the time, lived a short distance from Fort Malden where Isaac Brock commanded the 49th Regiment of Foot. It was from that wooden and earthwork palisade that Brock, defying orders, sallied into America to capture Detroit, destabilize the American invasion plans and essentially win the war by denying the Americans the victory that should have been theirs, hands down, in that first year.
On the wall behind me as I type this are various memorabilia, some real, some reproductions, of the War of 1812. The "real" include a collection of regimental buttons dug from the battlefields of Lundy's Lane, Crysler's Farm, Queenston Heights, Snake Hill and elsewhere from the 49th (Foot), the 41st (Foot), the King's 8th (Foot), the Royal Artillery, the Royal Marines and the Canadian militia.
I have no problem with the War of 1812. It did preserve the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada to permit them, half a century hence, to unite with the Maritime provinces to forge Canada. But to make it a theme for a festive event like Canada Day seems eerily American-like. We're Canadians. We don't revel in wars past. We mark them annually in solemn remembrance and gratitude for sacrifice and loss.
Harper's triumphalism seems, well, a bit greasy.
I was somewhat saddened today to learn that our Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill had been given a War of 1812 theme. Why, what for?
I'm something of an amateur aficionado of the War of 1812. My family, at the time, lived a short distance from Fort Malden where Isaac Brock commanded the 49th Regiment of Foot. It was from that wooden and earthwork palisade that Brock, defying orders, sallied into America to capture Detroit, destabilize the American invasion plans and essentially win the war by denying the Americans the victory that should have been theirs, hands down, in that first year.
On the wall behind me as I type this are various memorabilia, some real, some reproductions, of the War of 1812. The "real" include a collection of regimental buttons dug from the battlefields of Lundy's Lane, Crysler's Farm, Queenston Heights, Snake Hill and elsewhere from the 49th (Foot), the 41st (Foot), the King's 8th (Foot), the Royal Artillery, the Royal Marines and the Canadian militia.
I have no problem with the War of 1812. It did preserve the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada to permit them, half a century hence, to unite with the Maritime provinces to forge Canada. But to make it a theme for a festive event like Canada Day seems eerily American-like. We're Canadians. We don't revel in wars past. We mark them annually in solemn remembrance and gratitude for sacrifice and loss.
Harper's triumphalism seems, well, a bit greasy.
We Need To Resist the Lure of American Exceptionalism
American exceptionalism is an intriguing, occasionally lethal, notion. Americans, it seems, are brought up to believe the United States is exceptional, the best, "number one." From Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue there's this rich messianic broth that sets Americans apart, above all others.
But what is American exceptionalism absent a world community that is willing to believe? Is it just the sound of one hand clapping? Surely notions of superiority, to be meaningful, need to be indulged by those content to deem themselves inferior. You can't be Number One unless the rest of us are numbers other than one. You can't be the winner unless the great unwashed are the losers.
On this Canada Day, let me state that America is indeed exceptional but not necessarily in many good ways. It has the most expensive healthcare system in the world. Americans are unquestionably Number One in terms of per capita healthcare spending. Yet they're far, far off the mark when it comes to what matters - healthcare outcomes. Money, they say, can't buy happiness. Well America proves that money spent unwisely can't buy much health either.
America has the mightiest military in the world, at least in terms of firepower and lethality. Definitely Numero Uno on that score. The United States spends more on its armed forces than the next twenty-five big military spenders combined, some say more than the rest of the world combined. America which, in effect, plunges deeper in debt by the day to pay for its military, now finds it the preferred instrument of its foreign policy.
Yet all the King's horses and all the King's men repeatedly have shown themselves unable to deliver meaningful victories in combat. In Iraq, Iran has emerged the winner and it didn't even have to fight American forces although that might change soon. In Afghanistan, a greatly outnumbered band of farmers equipped with Korean-vintage assault rifles, light machine guns and RPGs, has fought to a standstill a far larger force of highly-trained Western forces armed with the latest in high-tech, ultra-lethal small arms, artillery, tanks, drones, attack helicopters, strike fighter jets, even strategic bombers. They have stripped America of its perceived military invincibility, a cornerstone of its myth of exceptionalism.
Just don't expect American hyper-militarism to end anytime soon. Washington, seemingly indifferent to restoring American "can do" dynamism, is perversely attached to its perceived military prowess like a bodybuilder flexing his gigantic biceps in hope that no one in the crowd notices his steroid-shriveled testicles.
Andrew J. Bacevich, in one of his early books, American Empire, Harvard University Press 2002 at the very beginning of the Bush/Cheney "War on Terror" discussed the American addiction to military force and focused on our air campaign over Kosovo:
"...if Americans sensed vaguely that Kosovo had been a defining event, few placed it in its larger context. In fact U.S. involvement in a war for the Balkans marked the culmination of decade-long process in which U.S. foreign policy became increasingly militarized. As Madeleine Albright noted, it was incumbent upon 'the indispensable nation to see what we can do to make the world safer for our children and grandchildren, and for those people around the world who follow the rules.' Making a safe world required the use of force to ensure adherence to those rules. In pursuit of this requirement, actual U.S. military practice diverged ever further from published U.S. national security strategy and official U.S. military doctrine. Kosovo showed how wide the gap between policy and practice had become.
"The contradictions that enabled tiny Yugoslavia to frustrate the world's only superpower and its allies for so many weeks are rooted in changing American views about the role of military power. Contrary to the expectations expressed by George Bush following the Persian Gulf War, Bush's successor hesitated only briefly before concluding that mere possession of superior military power would not suffice to advance the cause of global openness. As a result, not force held in abeyance but force expended became a hallmark of U.S. policy in the 1990s. The two terms of President Bill Clinton produced an unprecedented level of military activism. A blue-ribbon commission appointed to assess future national security policy reported in 1999 that 'since the end of the Cold War, the United States has embarked upon nearly four dozen military interventions ...as opposed to only 16 during the entire period of the Cold War.'"
It's time we re-assessed our addictive notions of American exceptionalism to see it clearly in its stripped-down militarist context of the 21st century. America is no longer socially exceptional. In terms of societal outcomes - longevity, mental health, teen pregnancy, education, crime and incarceration, etc. - it's well down the list of superior countries.
It is no longer economically exceptional. While still the second-largest economy in the world, in terms of economic outcomes measured by balance of trade deficits, balance of payment deficits, public and private-sector debt, the loss of manufacturing base and the devastation of its once vibrant middle class plus its resulting dependence on foreign lenders, America is no longer economically exceptional.
But why should this matter to Canada? Because America has become something of a one-trick pony. It resorts to military force as its preferred instrument of foreign policy and it expects its traditional allies to sign on to its adventures. The F-35 stealth light bomber is an integral part of this thinking. It is how America's Foreign Legion will participate in America's future wars.
Today's America has become what Mark Twain warned of when he wrote, "To the man with only a hammer, everything looks like a nail." We would do well to heed his advice.
But what is American exceptionalism absent a world community that is willing to believe? Is it just the sound of one hand clapping? Surely notions of superiority, to be meaningful, need to be indulged by those content to deem themselves inferior. You can't be Number One unless the rest of us are numbers other than one. You can't be the winner unless the great unwashed are the losers.
On this Canada Day, let me state that America is indeed exceptional but not necessarily in many good ways. It has the most expensive healthcare system in the world. Americans are unquestionably Number One in terms of per capita healthcare spending. Yet they're far, far off the mark when it comes to what matters - healthcare outcomes. Money, they say, can't buy happiness. Well America proves that money spent unwisely can't buy much health either.
America has the mightiest military in the world, at least in terms of firepower and lethality. Definitely Numero Uno on that score. The United States spends more on its armed forces than the next twenty-five big military spenders combined, some say more than the rest of the world combined. America which, in effect, plunges deeper in debt by the day to pay for its military, now finds it the preferred instrument of its foreign policy.
Yet all the King's horses and all the King's men repeatedly have shown themselves unable to deliver meaningful victories in combat. In Iraq, Iran has emerged the winner and it didn't even have to fight American forces although that might change soon. In Afghanistan, a greatly outnumbered band of farmers equipped with Korean-vintage assault rifles, light machine guns and RPGs, has fought to a standstill a far larger force of highly-trained Western forces armed with the latest in high-tech, ultra-lethal small arms, artillery, tanks, drones, attack helicopters, strike fighter jets, even strategic bombers. They have stripped America of its perceived military invincibility, a cornerstone of its myth of exceptionalism.
Just don't expect American hyper-militarism to end anytime soon. Washington, seemingly indifferent to restoring American "can do" dynamism, is perversely attached to its perceived military prowess like a bodybuilder flexing his gigantic biceps in hope that no one in the crowd notices his steroid-shriveled testicles.
Andrew J. Bacevich, in one of his early books, American Empire, Harvard University Press 2002 at the very beginning of the Bush/Cheney "War on Terror" discussed the American addiction to military force and focused on our air campaign over Kosovo:
"...if Americans sensed vaguely that Kosovo had been a defining event, few placed it in its larger context. In fact U.S. involvement in a war for the Balkans marked the culmination of decade-long process in which U.S. foreign policy became increasingly militarized. As Madeleine Albright noted, it was incumbent upon 'the indispensable nation to see what we can do to make the world safer for our children and grandchildren, and for those people around the world who follow the rules.' Making a safe world required the use of force to ensure adherence to those rules. In pursuit of this requirement, actual U.S. military practice diverged ever further from published U.S. national security strategy and official U.S. military doctrine. Kosovo showed how wide the gap between policy and practice had become.
"The contradictions that enabled tiny Yugoslavia to frustrate the world's only superpower and its allies for so many weeks are rooted in changing American views about the role of military power. Contrary to the expectations expressed by George Bush following the Persian Gulf War, Bush's successor hesitated only briefly before concluding that mere possession of superior military power would not suffice to advance the cause of global openness. As a result, not force held in abeyance but force expended became a hallmark of U.S. policy in the 1990s. The two terms of President Bill Clinton produced an unprecedented level of military activism. A blue-ribbon commission appointed to assess future national security policy reported in 1999 that 'since the end of the Cold War, the United States has embarked upon nearly four dozen military interventions ...as opposed to only 16 during the entire period of the Cold War.'"
It's time we re-assessed our addictive notions of American exceptionalism to see it clearly in its stripped-down militarist context of the 21st century. America is no longer socially exceptional. In terms of societal outcomes - longevity, mental health, teen pregnancy, education, crime and incarceration, etc. - it's well down the list of superior countries.
It is no longer economically exceptional. While still the second-largest economy in the world, in terms of economic outcomes measured by balance of trade deficits, balance of payment deficits, public and private-sector debt, the loss of manufacturing base and the devastation of its once vibrant middle class plus its resulting dependence on foreign lenders, America is no longer economically exceptional.
But why should this matter to Canada? Because America has become something of a one-trick pony. It resorts to military force as its preferred instrument of foreign policy and it expects its traditional allies to sign on to its adventures. The F-35 stealth light bomber is an integral part of this thinking. It is how America's Foreign Legion will participate in America's future wars.
Today's America has become what Mark Twain warned of when he wrote, "To the man with only a hammer, everything looks like a nail." We would do well to heed his advice.
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