Oh Yeah, About that "Post-National" Business

Justin Trudeau has proclaimed Canada the "first post-national state."  We're not the first country to be smeared with that label. In fact we may be the last. Justin's world view is hopelessly outdated. From Foreign Policy:

...one of the paradoxes of globalization has been that, as cross-border travel, migration, and trade have increased, attachment to national identity has not weakened, but instead grown stronger. Since 1981 the European and World Values Surveys have asked respondents whether they feel “very proud,” “quite proud,” “not very proud,” or “not at all proud” of their national identity (see chart below). That recent decades have seen an upsurge in national attachment in authoritarian regimes such as Russia or China is unsurprising, yet less noted is a return of national pride in societies that were once thought of “post-national,” such as Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. This surge in national pride has been concurrent with the growth of “new right” political parties, such as the Sweden Democrats (SD), the Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands.

...Why have citizens across Western democracies become increasingly nationalistic, opposed to mass migration, and suspicious of international institutions? One answer is that this is a consequence of the financial crisis, which has left deep pockets of economic deprivation and underemployment. But that answer is clearly wrong, because these trends have been in place for the better part of 30 years. A more accurate answer would be that they reflect an inherent tension between national democratic sovereignty and elite-led efforts at global integration, and that this tension has now reached its breaking point.

As economies and societies around the globe become more and more interconnected and bound within transnational rules and institutions, the range of policy options available to domestic policymakers has declined. ...Thus, on issue after issue, from corporate taxation, to control over immigration, to fiscal and monetary policy, national elites frequently find themselves unable to deliver policies consistent with public preferences. Instead they have blamed international institutions for their inability to take actions that they privately do not condone. In this way, politics feel obliged, in the words of Hillary Clinton, to maintain “both a public and a private position.”

Yet the constraints on national sovereignty entailed by global markets and institutions has weakened the mechanisms that once translated popular views into public policy, leading to a “democratic deficit”’ that has left citizens increasingly frustrated with democratic politics, and increasingly with the democratic system itself. At the same time, the institutions of “global governance” have failed not only to provide avenues for popular participation, but also to deliver outcomes that such participation would be liable to generate, such as compensation for the losers from global trade, or protection of the identities and ways of life of local and national communities. In the words of Larry Summers, one of global integration’s advocates, it is a project “carried out by elites, for elites, with little consideration for the interests of ordinary people."

...As the differences between establishment parties on the left and right have dwindled in many countries, the only way for voters to effect a change in policy has been to rally to parties that reject many of the traditional rules of the democratic game. In this way, as politicians’ responsiveness to citizens has decreased, citizens have been encouraged to turn away from democracy.

Far from eroding the nation-state, the era of elite-led global integration in the years after 1989 has similarly failed to create legitimate transnational institutions, leaving national democratic communities as the primary source of identity, security, and loyalty for citizens. Now that the defenders of the traditional nation-state are regaining the power they have coveted for so long, the future of global governance rests in their hands. At stake is whether they succeed in finding a new balance between national sovereignty and transnational cooperation — or instead, return us to an era of mercantilism, inter-state competition, and great-power warfare.

Unfortunately, all of this reality passes straight over the head of our prime minister who remains hellbent on perpetuating the project "carried out by elites, for elites, with little consideration for the interests of ordinary people." It's sad, really. We deserve better, much better.

Global integration is an ideology, nothing more. It's founded on social science that's not evidence based but faith based. Stephen Harper was a true believer. Justin Trudeau is as devout a disciple as the man he displaced.

When Fake News Steers the Ship of State

Fake news isn't just the staple food of Gullibillies.

That much became brutally clear when, in Washington, the House Science Committee cited a wholly fallacious report from that repository of fake news, Breitbart, claiming that global temperatures are actually plunging.

Then there's Michael Flynn, retired general and wingnut conspiracy theorist extraordinaire who believes he has the power of will to transform utter nonsense into truth. He's been pegged to become Trump's national security advisor. Quick, hide the nukes.

Then, of course, there's the bloated bloviator, Trump himself, who likes to fashion reality out of snippets from tabloids.

Here's the thing. When you get that many people running around so literally detached from reality, you're in a lunatic asylum.

Trump's "Crackpot"

The idea of Donald Trump as president has a lot of people very nervous. Why not? Trump, after all, is a bloated bag of personality quirks and psychological issues that place his fitness for the Oval Office in question.

Then there's his pick of national security advisor, retired general Michael Flynn. Forget the blind leading the blind. Let's up that to the unhinged leading the unhinged.


There may be no more dangerous choice Trump has made so far than picking Michael Flynn to be his national security adviser. There are few more important positions in the White House, and few where the wrong choice could have consequences quite as catastrophic. If we contemplate how President Trump might handle an international crisis – which he will face, probably before long – we see just how troubling Flynn's appointment is.

...Early on, Flynn was one of the only former military leaders who endorsed Trump and campaigned with him. He quickly became Trump's closest adviser on national security.

But to put it plainly, Michael Flynn is a crackpot.

...Flynn, who was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was fired by President Barack Obama for a number of reasons, including mismanagement. His staff got so used to him believing things that were obviously false that they began referring to them as "Flynn Facts." Nevertheless, he had a complete certainty in his own rightness.

At one meeting, reports the New York Times, "Mr Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his." Furthermore, "Some also described him as a Captain Queeg-like character, paranoid that his staff members were undercutting him and credulous of conspiracy theories."

Like Trump, Flynn has a serious Twitter problem.

"Flynn, who has 106,000 Twitter followers, has used the platform to retweet accusations that Clinton is involved with child sex trafficking and has "secretly waged war" on the Catholic Church, as well as charges that Obama is a "jihadi" who "laundered" money for Muslim terrorists."

...We can debate how troubling the spread of fake news is, and what it says about our society that people are willing to believe that Hillary Clinton is connected to a paedophilia ring. What we can't debate is that no one who believes that kind of lunacy should be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office. But Michael Flynn does. He has retweeted links to insane stories like that one, and his son and chief of staff – who may or may not be part of the Trump transition team, depending on who's answering the question at a particular moment – has gone even farther down the rabbit hole.

Here's why this is so important. The national security adviser's job is to coordinate policy between the multiple agencies whose work touches on national security – the Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and others – and make sure that the president has the best, clearest, and most accurate information with which to make decisions. For a President Trump's unique combination of ignorance, inexperience and impulsiveness, it's particularly vital to have a national security adviser who can encourage calm and thoughtfulness, and not be distracted by what's irrelevant or downright false.

At some point early in his presidency, Trump is going to confront some kind of national security crisis. Every president does. Maybe it will be a terrorist attack, or a coup in a country in a volatile region, or an aggressive move by an adversary, or a conflict between two nations that the United States might get sucked into. He may have to make decisions quickly, with information that is partial and changing from hour to hour. He'll get advice from all those different people, and when it's over, Mike Flynn will be one of the last people in the room telling him what he should do. Trump trusts Flynn, and his words will carry particular weight – perhaps more than anyone else working on the crisis.

Pope Francis Calls Out the Media

The head of the Roman Catholic Church warns that the mass media has become scatalogical.


Media that focus on scandals and spread fake news to smear politicians risk becoming like people who have a morbid fascination with excrement, Pope Francis says.

Francis told the Belgian Catholic weekly Tertio that spreading disinformation was "probably the greatest damage that the media can do" and using communications for this rather than to educate the public amounted to a sin.

Using precise psychological terms, he said scandal-mongering media risked falling prey to coprophilia, or arousal from excrement, and consumers of these media risked coprophagia, or eating excrement.

I was going to make a snide remark about Ezra Levant and his Rebel Media but - oh wait, I just did.

When the Skies Open

Living in the rainiest part of Canada, the legendary "wet coast," one tends to understand rain as others sometimes might not.

Out here we are steeped in the high winds and heavy rains that blow in from the Pacific. But the situation has been changing in recent years. The rains have been getting heavier, the winds seemingly stronger. Rains that wake you up in the middle of the night from a dead sleep. Happens a lot lately. Winds so strong and turbulent that the rainfall switches direction before your eyes and sometimes seems almost horizontal.

A few years ago we received this Biblical deluge. It started as abruptly as it finished, no more than 18-minutes, like a tap turning on and off. No rain, rain, no rain. Yet, in that brief interval, we received so much rain that it produced this:



Here's the thing. This is early onset stuff. We're just getting started.

When the skies open up and deluge an area, the results can be catastrophic, with roads washed out and homes destroyed by the resulting flash floods. Such extreme downpours are already occurring more often across the US, but a new study finds that as global temperatures rise, storms could dump considerably more rain and skyrocket in frequency.

The study, in the journal Nature Climate Change, suggests that storms that now occur about once a season could happen five times a season by the century’s end, a 400% increase.

And when such storms do occur, they could produce up to 70% more rain. That means that an intense thunderstorm that would today drop about 5cm (2 inches) of rain would drop 9cm in the future.

How much worse will it get? That depends on a number of factors from how quickly we can decarbonize our societies and our economies to how well we manage upgrading and replacing essential infrastructure such as storm sewers and floodways. So far neither the United States nor Canada has got an effective, coherent plan to deal with this threat to our homes, our communications, and our agriculture.

Sorry If I'm Cynical, But Now They're Looking?

I guess they've been winging it so far. Kirsty Duncan has finally located her lost mandate letter, the one that instructs her to find a Chief Science Advisor for the Trudeau government. That would be the same letter she's apparently ignored throughout Year One when bitumen trafficking and pipelines were on the table.


Today, the search begins for the person who will be instrumental in furthering the Government's commitment to science-based decision making. The Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science, is delivering on her key mandate commitment by launching the search for a Chief Science Advisor for Canada. The announcement took place at the historic Library of the National Research Council in Ottawa.

The Chief Science Advisor will be responsible for providing scientific advice to the Prime Minister, the Minister of Science and members of Cabinet. This individual will also advise on how to ensure that government science is open to the public, that federal scientists are able to speak freely about their work, and that science is effectively communicated across government. The office will be supported by a team of scientists and policy experts.

The Anthropocene, Think of It This Way

Astrobiologist David Grinspoon describes the Anthropocene, Earth's new geological epoch this way: "We're at the controls of planet Earth, but we're not in control."

True enough. We, mankind, are in the driver's seat and we have the pedal to the metal only no one has taken the wheel.

Gazing over the countless transformations in Earth’s multibillion-year history, I am struck by the unique strangeness of the present moment. We suddenly find ourselves sort of running a planet — a role we never anticipated or sought — without knowing how it should be done. We’re at the controls, but we’re not in control.

The scientific community is now converging on the idea that we have entered a new phase, or epoch, of Earth history — one in which the net activity of humans has become a powerful agent of geological change, equal to the other great forces of nature that build mountains and shape continents and species. The proposed name for this new epoch is the "Anthropocene" or the age of humanity. Many species have changed the planet, like the cyanobacteria that long ago pumped oxygen — terribly poisonous for most life at the time — into the atmosphere. But there has never before been a geological force aware of its own influence. We are witnessing something unprecedented and still completely unpredictable: the advent of self-aware geological change.

It’s a challenging moment for human civilization. The great restless cleverness of our species has gotten us into a tough spot. Our collective actions threaten the well-being of many of our fellow humans, not to mention vast numbers of our more distant biological relatives. Our very survival may be threatened. Paradoxically this comes at a time, and even largely as a result, of unparalleled advancement in our scientific and technological prowess. But if we’re so great at figuring things out and inventing solutions to problems, how come we’re in this mess? Part of the reason we are, so far, stumbling through this transition is that we have not yet seen it clearly for what it is. Our fundamental Anthropocene dilemma is that we have achieved global impact but have no mechanisms for global self-control.

...Before we were modern humans we were hominids who were nearly wiped out by climate change but survived by constructing new material and social technologies and finding new ways to live. ...We’ve bounced back a few times from the edge of extinction, and ultimately thrived due to our abilities to communicate, work collectively, adapt creatively to changing environments, and solve problems through technological and social innovation.

Now we need to do so again.

...Our obligation now is to move beyond lamenting the job we’ve done as reluctant, clumsy, incompetent planet-shapers. We have to face the fact that we’ve become a planetary force, and figure out how to be a better one. A planetary view of the human journey suggests that we are not stuck, just disoriented, not evil, just confused, struggling to find our way in a world increasingly of our own making. We’ve been building an expanding, rapidly changing civilization on a finite world with no long-term plan. Our challenge is to acknowledge the predicament we’re in, and not to succumb to toxic fatalism. Our most valuable resources — creativity, communication, invention and reinvention — are in fact unlimited.

If we make it through the next few centuries it will be because we’ve honed our survival skills and adapted them to work on a planetary scale. Once we achieve that, we’ll have done much more than ensure our own persistence against shortsighted self-induced challenges. We will have unleashed the power of reason and foresight in permanent defense of Earth’s biosphere.

She's an Expert On Corruption in Foreign Lands. Now She Sees It Taking Hold In Her American Homeland

Sarah Chayes knows a thing or two about government corruption. The former award-winning NPR journalist, special advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, development worker in Afghanistan and now a fellow with the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has spent most of the past two decades in Europe and South Asia.

Returning to the United States, Chayes was struck by the degree to which corruption has spread through the US government.


For the past decade, I’ve worked on the issue of corruption around the world. In particular, I’ve spent a lot of time explaining that people who live in structurally corrupt political and economic systems are sometimes driven to extremes. I have always understood that the analysis was relevant in the United States — just maybe not how relevant.

In the past 10 years, populations have rejected “rigged systems” that had stood for decades. They have risen up in mass protests in Brazil, Guatemala, South Africa, and South Korea. They have overthrown their governments in open insurrections like the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Maidan. Or they have fallen in behind self-proclaimed Robin Hoods such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Occasionally, they have joined violent religious movements like the Islamic State or Boko Haram.

With Trump’s election, the United States just joined this list.

It might make his voters uncomfortable to hear that they’ve behaved much as my former neighbors in Kandahar, Afghanistan, who re-embraced the Taliban in their disgust at the corruption of Hamid Karzai’s government.

...Networks that weave together public officials and business magnates (think the food or energy industries, pharmaceuticals, or Wall Street) have rewritten our legislation to serve their own interests. Institutions that have retained some independence, such as oversight bodies and courts, have been deliberately disabled — starved of operating funds or left understaffed. Practices that, while perhaps not technically illegal, clearly cross the line to the unethical, the inappropriate, or the objectively corrupt have been defended by those who cast themselves as bulwarks of reason and integrity.

These are moral issues. And the very laws we depend on to enforce what should be bedrock standards have sometimes undermined them. Do we reject corruption? Of course we do — just as we refuse to countenance torture. But then come the legal definitions. What counts as torture? How bad does it have to hurt? What do you mean by corruption? The head of an Egyptian business association once told me: “That’s part of the brilliance of corruption in Egypt; they make it legal!” The United States is going down the same road: The laws we hold so dear have narrowed the definition of corruption almost to the point of irrelevance.

..like the people of Mosul in Iraq or northern Nigeria, who traded intolerably corrupt regimes for Islamist crusaders who were worse, Americans will wake up in January under a system that is more corrupt than the one that fueled their rebellion. That is the irony of resorting to a wrecking ball to bring down a corrupt regime. Too often, the kleptocratic networks prove resilient, while those who revolted end up with crushed heads.

Already, President-elect Trump’s questionable affiliations and potential conflicts of interest — as genteel vocabulary would have it — are making headlines. The issue is not one of technical legality or poor vetting. His actions and associations are deliberate. While tweeting out distractions to disguise the fact, he will unleash a feeding frenzy. Our laws and institutions will be bent to the purposes of personal enrichment. Industry lobbyists will draft the bills. He will negotiate business deals with foreign counterparts, confusing his personal interests for the good of the nation. Agencies that try to hold the line will see their budgets slashed, their officials belittled in public. Law enforcement will be even more selective than it is today. The labor of human beings, the land, and what’s on it or under it will be converted to cash as efficiently as possible. And what can’t be converted will be bulldozed out of the way.


...Will we further relax our standards, shrugging our shoulders and referring to the letter of ever-changing laws? Or will we reach for a definition of corruption that is in line with common sense and rebuild our foundations upon that bedrock?

Our answer to that challenge will determine whether this is a crisis the United States survives and from which it emerges renewed — or whether we lurch into some more violent and damaging cataclysm.

It's Monbiot Again. This Time He's On About Salvaging Democracy or Something Like That.

No matter how much Justin thinks it's great, neoliberal globalism is a failed experiment. It causes a lot more harm than good. Even the WTO and the IMF now acknowledge that globalism undermines and stagnates national economies and propels inequality to dangerous heights.

John Ralston Saul contends we're in a period of "interregnum." That's a term meaning an interval between one regime and its successor. JRS argues that we're wallowing in the globalism rut while our leaders try to find the vision to replace it. So far, by his count, that's been going on for more than a decade.

The idea of tearing up the free trade economic model is one thing. The bigger problem is what model you invoke next. In my view the safe bet is to go back to something resembling the economic model in use prior to the era of Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney only substantially revised to reflect the environmental realities that confront us today. Economic developments of a seismic magnitude from automation to advanced robotics could be socially devastating to any nation that has ceded too much authority to the commercial sector to harness these developments to the public good.  We urgently need a return of the true nation state with full national sovereignty, the sort of muscular sovereignty essential to help heal our divisions, restore confidence in our government and institutions and meet the challenges of this century.

George Monbiot has some interesting ideas along the same lines. He thinks that saving democracy starts with breaking the chokehold of transnational corporatism. He takes a look at a world in which liberal democracy is in retreat and posits the villain - McDonalds.


From all this I draw the following, peculiar conclusion: no country with a McDonald’s can remain a democracy.

...In using McDonald’s as shorthand for the forces tearing democracy apart, I am ...writing figuratively. I do not mean that the presence of the burger chain itself is the cause of the decline of open, democratic societies (though it has played its part in Britain, using our defamation laws against its critics). Nor do I mean that countries hosting McDonald’s will necessarily mutate into dictatorships.


What I mean is that, under the onslaught of the placeless, transnational capital that McDonald’s exemplifies, democracy as a living system withers and dies. The old forms and forums still exist – parliaments and congresses remain standing – but the power they once contained seeps away, re-emerging where we can no longer reach it.

The political power that should belong to us has flitted into confidential meetings with the lobbyists and donors who establish the limits of debate and action. It has slipped into the diktats of the IMF and the European Central Bank, which respond not to the people but to the financial sector. It has been transported, under armed guard, into the icy fastness of Davos... 

Above all, the power that should belong to the people is being crushed by international treaty. Contracts such as Nafta, Ceta the proposed TransPacific Partnership and Trade in Services Agreement and the failed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership are crafted behind closed doors in discussions dominated by corporate lobbyists. And those lobbyists are able to slip in clauses no informed electorate would ever approve of, such as the establishment of opaque offshore tribunals, through which corporations can bypass national courts, challenge national laws and demand compensation for the results of democratic decisions.

These treaties limit the scope of politics, prevent states changing social outcomes and drive down labour rights, consumer protection, financial regulation and the quality of neighbourhoods. They make a mockery of sovereignty. Anyone who forgets that striking them down was one of Donald Trump’s main promises will fail to understand why people were prepared to risk so much in electing him.

...In his book The Globalisation Paradox, the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik describes a political trilemma. Democracy, national sovereignty and hyperglobalisation, he argues, are incompatible. You cannot have all three at once. McDonaldisation crowds out domestic politics. Incoherent and dangerous as it often is, the global backlash against mainstream politicians is at heart an attempt to reassert national sovereignty against the forces of undemocratic globalisation.

...a similar choice was articulated by the great US jurist Louis Brandeis. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both,” he said.

...In 1938 President Roosevelt warned that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.” The Democrats saw concentrated corporate power as a form of dictatorship. They broke up giant banks and businesses and chained the chainstores. What Roosevelt, Brandeis and Patman knew has been forgotten by those in power, including powerful journalists. But not by the victims of this system.

And then there was the first President Roosevelt, Theodore, who in 1910 had this to add to today's debate.

In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. 

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

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

...Now, this means that our government, national and state, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. ...For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.
The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.

Teddy Roosevelt's stirring words sound positively leftist but that appearance is merely a reflection of how far we have drifted to the radical right during the era of neoliberalism over these past three plus decades.

What legendary jurist Louis Brandeis said, what Franklin Roosevelt said, what Theodore Roosevelt said are really principles that are foundational to progressive, liberal democracy. Their words are a powerful denunciation of today's "predator state" in which so much of our sovereignty has been negligently ceded to our "mighty commercial forces" that pursue their corporate interests at the direct and substantial cost to our nation and our people.

Elizabeth May Wins, I Guess.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see if the amended Green Party position on Israel and the Palestinians meets with Elizabeth May's scorn or approval.

The resolution, passed on the weekend, severs the formal ties between the GPC and the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement but reiterates some of the core policies.

The new resolution calls on both Israel and the Palestinian people to accord mutually recognized statehood, for Israel to abide by the United Nations’ Resolution 194, for Israel to accord the Arab-Palestinian population of Israel equal political and civil rights, and for Israel to end the illegal occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the Golan Heights and end the country’s siege in Gaza, it says.

It asks Canada to take “strong diplomatic action,” including but not limited to a importation ban on products “produced wholly or partly within or by illegal Israeli settlements, or by Israeli businesses directly benefiting from the illegal occupation,” among other forms of sanction.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) condemned the compromise text “as rife with historical distortions and places the Green Party at odds with the Canadian consensus that BDS is discriminatory and counter-productive to peace,” said CEO Shimon Fogel in a statement.

“The Green Party has been coopted by extreme activists who – in their obsessive campaign of prejudice against Israelis – threaten the party’s own credibility and relevance in Canadian politics,” said Fogel.

Alison at Creekside has been posting UN General Assembly voting records on resolutions pertaining to Palestine and the Palestinians. Just as in the Harper days, Trudeau's Canada continues to join with Israel, the United States and Israel's bought and paid for supporters, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau against 150 states including Britain and the entire EU. Wipe out the bought votes and that's Israel, the U.S. and Canada versus the world.

Liberal Democracy's Unstoppable Decline

Throughout the western world, the public embrace of liberal democracy is growing weaker, more distanced. Like many of these fractured paradigms today, there's a distinct generational aspect at play. Put simply, fewer young people today support liberal democracy. It's still a minority who discount liberal democracy but the number seems to be growing.

Stanford historian, Francis Fukuyama believes that the public is becoming detached from their failing democratic institutions.

The U.S. has been the paradigm example of a large democracy in the post-WWII world, but it shows signs of wear and decay—as with some other larger-scale democracies. Fukuyama complains of “vetocracy,” not only in the U.S., but also other countries such as Greece, India and Ukraine. The idea is that power in western democracies has been “captured by elites” who can veto anything which crosses their interests; and it will take some shock to the system to get needed reforms.

David Runciman of Cambridge University

Runciman emphasizes that the pace of technological change is throwing up problems more quickly than democratic politics can come to terms with them. I suspect that much the same could be said about the pace of change thrown up by globalization. Runicman claims that democracy is better than alternative systems in eventually dealing with major system-threatening problems, that it is better in self-correction. But what is happening now is that “the bad news doesn't reach us in time.” He warns against the temptation to by-pass politics through the use of technology. He sees it as problematic that in the last 25 years there has been a technological revolution but no related political crisis, as needed to make adjustments and institute reforms. In a political crisis, democracy will “kick the bums out,” and he emphasizes the importance of this sort of negative result of democratic political processes. The point is that the problems, say those generating economic inequality, come too fast to be dealt with by proper political processes. In some contrast Fukuyama complains that "identity politics” has substituted for traditional focus on economic issues on the left.

Last week The New York Times reported on Yascha Mounk's research suggesting that liberal democracies are becoming unstable.

Mr. Mounk, a lecturer in government at Harvard, has spent the past few years challenging one of the bedrock assumptions of Western politics: that once a country becomes a liberal democracy, it will stay that way.

His research suggests something quite different: that liberal democracies around the world may be at serious risk of decline.

Mounk began by looking at the spread of populism in Europe.

A populist backlash was rising. But was that just a new kind of politics, or a symptom of something deeper?

To answer that question, Mr. Mounk teamed up with Roberto Stefan Foa, a political scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. They have since gathered and crunched data on the strength of liberal democracies.

Their conclusion, to be published in the January issue of the Journal of Democracy, is that democracies are not as secure as people may think. Right now, Mr. Mounk said in an interview, “the warning signs are flashing red.”

...since 2005, Freedom House’s index has shown a decline in global freedom each year. Is that a statistical anomaly, a result of a few random events in a relatively short period of time? Or does it indicate a meaningful pattern?

Mr. Mounk and Mr. Foa developed a three-factor formula to answer that question. Mr. Mounk thinks of it as an early-warning system, and it works something like a medical test: a way to detect that a democracy is ill before it develops full-blown symptoms.

The first factor was public support: How important do citizens think it is for their country to remain democratic? The second was public openness to nondemocratic forms of government, such as military rule. And the third factor was whether “antisystem parties and movements” — political parties and other major players whose core message is that the current system is illegitimate — were gaining support.

If support for democracy was falling while the other two measures were rising, the researchers marked that country “deconsolidating.” And they found that deconsolidation was the political equivalent of a low-grade fever that arrives the day before a full-blown case of the flu.

Mounk and Foa looked at two countries that embraced liberal democracy initially but almost as quickly turned away, Venezuela and Poland.

According to the Mounk-Foa early-warning system, signs of democratic deconsolidation in the United States and many other liberal democracies are now similar to those in Venezuela before its crisis.

Across numerous countries, including Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States, the percentage of people who say it is “essential” to live in a democracy has plummeted, and it is especially low among younger generations.

It's apparent that we take liberal democracy in Canada for granted at our peril. I'm convinced that we need a democratic restoration in Canada, a return to truly progressive democracy, the sort that builds social cohesion and a robust and broad-based middle class.

This isn't going to happen when we're told we're a post-national state; not a country at all but some Balkanized gaggle of regions united by a matrix of stitched-together trade deals.

Part of it is our neoliberal rejection of posterity. I addressed this in 2009. 

...the genetic flaw in Western society, particularly North American society, the missing gene that pretty much dooms us all, is the absence of posterity in our planning.

Posterity doesn't fit into our economic model of production and consumption because it creates a fetter on both. We have lost our understanding of the importance of posterity to our society, to our country. We no longer plan today for generations to come far in the future. We no longer look much beyond the next electoral cycle.

Protecting posterity is an act of collective consciousness and will. It is acknowledging that we're entitled to our fair share and no more. We can't have it all without depriving future generations of their fair share.
To try to understand the idea of "fair share" imagine if our great, great, great grandparents had followed our path.

Imagine if our ancestors had two things - the ability to consume everything they could get their hands on and a blind indifference to the day when it was our turn to populate this country. Imagine if two or three generations had gone on a rapacious binge gobbling up the world's resources; going into serious deficit on renewables (emptying the oceans, logging off the forests, transforming farmland into desert) and fouling the environment. Then consider how their depredations might impact on your life today. I think that's beyond the imagination of all but the best science fiction writers but that's of no real matter. It's enough in any event to make the case for posterity and the concept of "fair share."

What is liberal democracy absent sovereignty, especially when national sovereignty is recklessly ceded to the corporate sector when inking free trade deals?

Our young people know all too well what our liberal democracy has bequeathed them - membership in the precariat, a future of "job churn" and the promise of a low-paying position in some service industry. They know that liberal democracy as we've practiced it has been a device for facilitating our maximum comfort and ease while preserving for them the shit end of the stick. We know and they know that they will never have it nearly as good as we've had it and they know that we liberal democrats aren't doing a damned thing to ease their plight.

Update:

From yesterday's Toronto Star, columnist Edward Keenan writes that Canadian politicians have no appetite for true democratic reform.

Maybe Chris Hedges Has a Better Name for It.

Our prime minister has proclaimed Canada the "first post-national state." Economist James Galbraith prefers the term "predator state." To Chris Hedges, it's the "mafia state."

Systems of governance that are seized by a tiny cabal become mafia states. The early years—Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton in the United States—are marked by promises that the pillage will benefit everyone. The later years—George W. Bush and Barack Obama—are marked by declarations that things are getting better even though they are getting worse. The final years—Donald Trump—see the lunatic trolls, hedge fund parasites, con artists, conspiracy theorists and criminals drop all pretense and carry out an orgy of looting and corruption.

Neoliberalism is state-sponsored extortion. It is a vast, nationally orchestrated Ponzi scheme. ...This fevered speculation [globalisation/free trade] and mounting inequality, made possible by the two ruling political parties, corroded and destroyed the mechanisms and institutions that permitted democratic participation and provided some protection for workers. Politicians, from Reagan on, were handsomely rewarded by their funders for delivering their credulous supporters to the corporate guillotine. The corporate coup created a mafia capitalism. This mafia capitalism, as economists such as Karl Polanyi and Joseph Stiglitz warned, gave birth to a mafia political system. Financial and political power in the hands of institutions such as Goldman Sachs and the Clinton Foundation becomes solely about personal gain. The Obamas in a few weeks will begin to give us a transparent lesson into how service to the corporate state translates into personal enrichment.

Adam Smith wrote that profits are often highest in nations on the verge of economic collapse. These profits are obtained, he wrote, by massively indebting the economy. A rentier class, composed of managers at hedge funds, banks, financial firms and other companies, makes money not by manufacturing products but from the control of economic rents.
To James Galbraith, today's rentiers are the "looter class."

“The great Roman historians Livy and Plutarch blamed the decline of the Roman Empire on the creditor class being predatory, and the latifundia,” [economist Michael] Hudson said. “The creditors took all the money, and would just buy more and more land, displacing the other people. The result in Rome was a dark age, and that can last a very long time. The dark age is what happens when the rentiers take over.

“If you look back in the 1930s, Leon Trotsky said that fascism was the inability of the socialist parties to come forth with an alternative,” Hudson said. “If the socialist parties and media don’t come forth with an alternative to this neofeudalism, you’re going to have a rollback to feudalism. But instead of the military taking over the land, as occurred with the Norman Conquest, you take over the land financially. Finance has become the new mode of warfare.

“You can achieve the takeover of land and the takeover of companies by corporate raids,” he said. “The Wall Street vocabulary is one of conquest and wiping out. You’re having a replay in the financial sphere of what feudalism was in the military sphere.”

Victory at Standing Rock?

The US Army Corps of Engineers has thrown in the towel. After months of determined protests, the Dakota Access Pipeline has been stopped in its tracks.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokeswoman Moria Kelley said in a news release Sunday that the administration will not allow the four-state, $3.8-billion pipeline to be built under Lake Oahe, a Missouri River reservoir where construction had been on hold.

Assistant Secretary for Civil Works Jo-Ellen Darcy said her decision was based on the need to "explore alternate routes" for the pipeline's crossing.

A Nation Without Vision

Little attention was paid when Justin Trudeau proclaimed Canada the world's "first post-national state." The New York Times reporter interviewing our prime minister found the remark "radical." It was, it is, and by all signs it will continue into our future under Trudeau.

How to make sense of it? What does it mean to be a Canadian in Trudeau's Canada? Well, how did it feel to be Canadian under Lester Pearson? How wonderful did it feel to be Canadian under Pierre Elliott Trudeau? Why does it feel so wretched to be a Canadian under Justin's premiership? Does it ever.

I remember when Pearson made us proud as he earned the Nobel Peace Prize for our nation's development of peacekeeping. We were doing good around the world. And then he gave us our distinct maple leaf flag, devoid of the symbols of another land.

Then came Pierre Trudeau, just in time for our Centennial, who made us prouder of our nation than we ever had been. He pursued Pearson's vision and strengthened it with his own. He fought back the separatists in Quebec. He patriated our constitution. Best of all, Pierre Trudeau bequeathed Canadians the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that has preserved our liberal democracy against the assaults on our democratic rights by subsequent prime ministers, most recently his own son.

Those were prime ministers of courage and vision and belief in Canada and her people. It is by them that we must measure those who follow them, including Justin Trudeau.

In many ways the Dauphin is a smiley-faced continuation of the guy he displaced. Harper had the personality of a cancerous lung. Justin is easier on the eyes, friendlier, nicer and always holding out a welcome promise of sunny ways and better times.

If we were to judge Justin Trudeau by his promises and his assurances he'd be an amazing prime minister but we should never hold those promises and comforting words at higher value than he himself does and that is not at all.

Justin has made a mockery of the Canada of Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. It began with his sale of $15 billion worth of armoured death wagons to the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East; the state that unleashed the most murderous, virulent strain of radical Sunni Islam that it continues to spread in madrassas around the world today; the nation directly responsible for so much suffering and death in Iraq, Syria and Yemen that remains ongoing today. That's not the Canada of Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. That's the Canada of Stephen Harper and, now, Justin.

I had thought Justin would be Canada's last, best chance to implement real action in the fight to contain climate change. He promised we would slash emissions. He promised to clean house at the industry captured National Energy Board. He promised no pipelines without First Nations support and "social licence" which he said could only come from communities. Yet in the span of his first year what has he done? Harper's rigged National Energy Board is now Justin's rigged National Energy Board. First Nations oppose the Kinder Morgan pipeline and we hope that their court action will prevail over Trudeau. As for social licence, the communities this pipeline will pass through and where it will terminate and those communities exposed to the risk of an ocean spill have spoken - loudly and clearly - and they stand opposed to it.

What of all those promises that Trudeau's most ardent followers seem to have quickly forgotten? Trudeau's word, so solemnly given, meant nothing. He lied and in lying he betrayed those who believed him and he degraded Canada.

We in British Columbia have had quite a year of Trudeau. From the Site C dam, to the disastrous Woodfibre LNG project, to the Kinder Morgan pipeline, Justin Trudeau and his clown car full of cabinet ministers have supported the environmental degradation of British Columbia. They are Stephen Harper's and Joe Oliver's wet dream. Sitting on our side of the Rockies it's easy to see the other side, Canada, as a predator.

I'm pretty sure that the pipeline secret police Harper created are still in business, that incestuous merger of private pipeline security and intelligence operatives and their federal bedfellows in the RCMP and CSIS. Pierre Trudeau fought to protect the privacy of Canadians. Justin continues Harper's work to eliminate those protections.

The assisted dying law, remember that? The Supreme Court of Canada, relying on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, was crystal clear in the Carter case. It was a per curiam decision, all nine judges speaking with one voice. And what did Justin do when it came time to embody that clear decision in legislation? He placed his government above the law. He put his government at odds with, outside the law. He decided that the rule of law only applies when he chooses to follow it.

Yes, we live in a post-national Canada. That much was made clear when Morneau announced that young Canadians should accept a future of "job churn" and life in the precariat. Why? Because that's the price inevitably demanded of neoliberalist globalization in its advanced stage. Any doubt about that was put to rest when the governor of the Bank of Canada said that the old jobs, the good jobs that built our once robust and broadbased middle class, are gone for good. Poloz said that Canada's future lies in the services sector competing with poverty wage India for outsourced IT work or filling vacancies as chambermaids, restaurant servers and tour guides for the tourism industry.

That isn't accidental. It's not inadvertent. It's the direct and perfectly foreseeable result of globalization that underlies Trudeau's post-national Canada.

I don't know if Justin has taken a good, hard look at the world around him, the world to which he wants to shackle Canada in his post-national nightmare. It's a world neck deep in social, political, economic and environmental turmoil and upheaval. Liberal democracy, in nations once beguiled into swallowing the same elixir that has taken hold in Justin, is in retreat.

Dark nationalism (as opposed to the positive, progressive nationalism we knew under our great prime ministers of the past), is taking hold from America to Europe to the Middle East and into Asia Pacific. One response to this is the wave of rearmament spreading through the Middle East and Asia.

Meanwhile dark winter heatwaves underway in the Arctic reveal that we may have crossed or stand on the verge of crossing no fewer than 19 climate tipping points that, collectively, may launch the world into unstoppable, runaway global warming.

Military commanders from around the world including groups within the United States itself are frantically warning of imminent climate crises that dramatically raise the risks of uncontainable warfare.

Even though we're having a hell of a time in the Arctic, Canada is one of just a handful of countries, all of them northern, that are uniquely advantaged to sustain what is coming. Yet Justin is oblivious to that and, instead, wants to bind us ever tighter to the world of turmoil and conflict.

That Justin Trudeau has shown his hand so blatantly, so quickly is remarkable. That too is a warning. Those who ignore it may come to regret it and sooner than they imagine.

Justin has no vision. Those who embrace globalisation and the post-national state eschew vision. Like cattle swept away by a raging river, they're resigned to go with the flow.

Many of us smugly dismissed Harper as an aberration. We were wrong.

Here's One You Might Not Have Heard Of - the "Technosphere"

Think of it as everything man has built on Earth that's still standing. That includes the pyramids and everything older provided it's still around.

Now I'm going to throw out a number that's pretty hard to digest - thirty - trillion - tons. That's the estimated weight of the stuff we've built. Those pyramids, sure, but also the Trump Tower, all our roads and houses and bridges and airports, your car, your kid's bike, everything manmade.

But how is one to make sense of 30 trillion tons. This might help. 30 trillion tons represents 50 kilograms of stuff for each square metre of the Earth's surface.

Technosphere is a new term and according to the study published in journal The Anthropocene Review, it comprises of all the human-made structures including houses, factories and farms to airplanes, rockets, computer systems, tablets, smartphones and CDs, to the waste in landfills and spoil heaps that have been built to keep humans alive.

Humans have been having a huge impact on the planet through their activities and that’s where the Anthropocene concept has its roots in. It is an epoch that highlights the impact humans have made to the planet and it provides an understanding of how we have greatly changed the planet ever since our species started dominating.

Technosphere has its roots in the biosphere, but over the years it has gained so much of ‘weight’ and development that it has become a phenomenon of its own. Further, it is having a parasitic effect on the biosphere – like all human activities have on our planet.

Professor Mark Williams at the University of Leicester says “Compared with the biosphere, though, it is remarkably poor at recycling its own materials, as our burgeoning landfill sites show. This might be a barrier to its further success — or halt it altogether.”

According to Wiki, the average human body weight is just over 80 kilos which adds an extra 600-billion kilos of insatiable, voracious consumers all on its own. Maybe Elon Musk is right. Maybe we should get ourselves a new planet.

Yeah, They Really Were "Gullibillies"

Krugman on Trump, "Millions of Americans have just been sucker punched. They just don't know it yet."

"The white working class is about to be betrayed," Krugman declares in no uncertain terms. "The evidence of that coming betrayal is obvious in the choice of an array of pro-corporate, anti-labor figures for key positions. In particular, the most important story of the week — seriously, people, stop focusing on Trump Twitter — was the selection of Tom Price, an ardent opponent of Obamacare and advocate of Medicare privatization, as secretary of health and human services. This choice probably means that the Affordable Care Act is doomed — and Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters will be among the biggest losers."

Trump famously promised to "drain the swamp," a phrase the Gullibillies took to mean whatever they wanted. To some it was jailing Hillary for imagined crimes. Others thought he would reform Congress or break up the incestuous relationship between Wall Street and Washington. Guess what? They were had.

So, you don't know my brother John? He lives in San Francisco, he's as smart as a whippet and when I called this week he had a question – "what do George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have in common?"

"Goldman Sachs," he answered his own question, with an implied baboom!

John's right. It seems that no recent aspiring or elected US president dares to broach the White House without their hand being held by someone who has done time at this obscenely rich, multinational corporate behemoth. Still building out his cabinet team, Donald Trump already has recruited three of them and there's speculation more are in the pipeline.

But far from yanking a plug to empty [the Swamp], Trump is happily doing bombshells in the murk, gathering in playmates whose corporate and political credentials, not to mention their multibillion- and multimillion-dollar fortunes, suggest little empathy with the "forgotten men and women" that Candidate Trump promised to protect from rich guys looking after rich guys and, as they go, demolishing the financial regulations that might have prevented the Great Recession – or which were reinstated in its aftermath, in the hope of preventing a repeat of the 2008 financial collapse from which the US is still recovering.

...Not only were they too pally with "crooked" Hillary Clinton, who he claimed was "under their total control", but according to one of Trump's TV ads, Goldman Sachs and its ilk comprised a "global power structure" that was "responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.

"Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people," Trump declared.

...Paul Waldman writes in The American Prospect: "So in order to take on that global power structure, Trump is hiring a bunch of billionaires and Wall Street tycoons, cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy, scaling back regulatory oversight of Wall Street, and offering an infrastructure plan that consists mostly of tax breaks to corporations to encourage them to build projects that they'll then charge the public tolls in order to use."

...America's estimated 500 billionaires might be unlikely candidates for a White House team that working-class Americans were promised would look out for them – at his last campaign rally in Michigan, Trump told supporters: "We're fighting for every citizen that believes that government should serve the people, not the donors and not the special interests."

But already Trump, the first billionaire President-elect, has appointed three more billionaires to a team that, even incomplete, is the richest administration in modern American history – prompting Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank to dub it "Trump's Team of Oligarchs".Trump got elected on the "stupid" vote and they were warned that he believed he could do anything, even grab them by the p##sy. They didn't have long to wait for their turn.

The Generals - Again - Sound the Warning Siren on Climate Change.

Climate change is on the mind of every professional military across the world. They know it impacts the threats they face and multiplies the challenge they must meet to defend their nations.

In the run up to the American election, two "commanders" groups, one made up of US generals and admirals,  the other made up of senior commanders of the US and other nations, warned of the threat climate change posed to world security.

Now, another military warning that, unless we act immediately to eliminate carbon emissions, we will experience mass migration on a scale most a decade ago would have thought unimaginable.

“Climate change is the greatest security threat of the 21st century,” said Maj Gen Munir Muniruzzaman, chairman of the Global Military Advisory Council on climate change and a former military adviser to the president of Bangladesh. He said one metre of sea level rise will flood 20% of his nation. “We’re going to see refugee problems on an unimaginable scale, potentially above 30 million people.”

He's talking 30 million migrants from Bangladesh alone. That's just a fraction of the global figure. A lot of those eyes will be looking for safe refuge, preferrably in some large, relatively unpopulated territory.

He'

Getting It Right - Sadly

He didn't say a word about changing into Harper.

Three years ago Damien Gillis of The Common Sense Canadian speculated that Justin Trudeau might be worse than Harper for Canada's environment. Now it turns out he was right. Three debacles, all of them in British Columbia, show that Trudeau is not the leader he pretended to be.

...barely a year into his reign Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is batting almost .1000 when it comes to approving controversial energy projects, from liquefied natural gas plants in Squamish and Prince Rupert to permits for the Site C dam — and now Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline and Enbridge’s Line 3.

In that 2013 editorial, my main concern about the new Liberal leader was that his energy and trade policies were nearly identical to those of former prime minister Stephen Harper — they just looked and sounded better coming from Canada’s prodigal son.

Moreover, I already had the sense Trudeau wasn’t guided by a clear set of values, making him vulnerable to persuasive political advisors and powerful lobbies. With Harper, I noted three years ago, at least we had “a sense that his zeal for expanding Canada’s fossil fuel industries through foreign ownership is something in which he believes on a deep, ideological level.” With Harper, you knew exactly what you were getting — he loathed environmentalists and didn’t care much for “radical” First Nations either.

...His first year in office was all about trying to have his cake and eat it, too.

In Paris, he committed Canada to serious climate action. “Canada is back, my friends,” he crowed.

More like right back to where we started. Since then, we’ve seen him default to Harper’s climate targets and approve pipeline and LNG projects which ensure it is impossible to meet even those low standards.

Trudeau campaigned on rebuilding Canada’s relationship with First Nations, but on respect for Indigenous title and rights, especially when it comes to energy projects, he’s all but forgotten them. His government pledged to support the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, then earned rebukes from leaders like Grand Chief Stewart Phillip when Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr dismissed one of its key principles: free, prior and informed consent to any development on traditional territories.

Finally, the contorted thesis of the Trudeau government appears to be that it’s possible — even necessary — to grow the fossil fuel economy in order to facilitate the transition to a green economy.

...Though he makes frequent mention of his “B.C. roots,” Trudeau clearly does not understand this place one lick, especially its wild coastline. No one who does believes for a second that it is possible to recover anything from a major spill, especially one involving bitumen.

...Trudeau has proven adept at running from the left and governing from the right.

Yet there is a reckoning headed his way — perhaps bigger than even his predecessor faced. Because while no one expected wine and roses from Harper, Trudeau gave them high hopes.

The disappointment is that much greater when it’s rooted in a deception — just ask former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell about the HST and BC Rail, or look back to the Liberal sponsorship scandal of the early 2000s. Trudeau’s cutesy tweets, shirtless photo-ops and million-dollar smiles will prove no match for this kind of outrage.

The approval of Kinder Morgan has awakened B.C., and there’s no end to the Vancouverites and other supporters ready to stand on the line.

Think Idle No More meets Standing Rock meets Occupy meets the War in the Woods meets Burnaby Mountain — all unfolding in a major urban centre, under the watchful eye of tens of thousands of camera phones, drones and social, grassroots and mainstream media.

At this point I would usually add a para or two of personal thoughts. Not this time. I'm too damned angry with that lying thug of a prime minister and his cheap threats.

An Impassioned Plea to Tear Down the Walls of Inequality from Stephen Hawking.

The neoliberals who have driven the western world into the ditch over the past three decades need to decide whether to rehabilitate liberal democracy or allow themselves to be erased from memory by generations of strongman rule.

Yeah, Justin - you too.

First up, theoretical physicist extraordinaire, Stephen Hawking. In an opinion piece in The Guardian, "This Is the Most Dangerous Time for our planet," Hawking warns, "We can’t go on ignoring inequality, because we have the means to destroy our world but not to escape it."

Referring to Brexit and the Trump victory, he writes it was, "the moment when the forgotten spoke, finding their voices to reject the advice and guidance of experts and the elite everywhere."

The concerns underlying these votes about the economic consequences of globalisation and accelerating technological change are absolutely understandable. The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.

...We need to put this alongside the financial crash, which brought home to people that a very few individuals working in the financial sector can accrue huge rewards and that the rest of us underwrite that success and pick up the bill when their greed leads us astray. So taken together we are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent.

...It is also the case that another unintended consequence of the global spread of the internet and social media is that the stark nature of these inequalities is far more apparent than it has been in the past. For me, the ability to use technology to communicate has been a liberating and positive experience. Without it, I would not have been able to continue working these many years past.

But it also means that the lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of the world are agonisingly visible to anyone, however poor, who has access to a phone. And since there are now more people with a telephone than access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa, this will shortly mean nearly everyone on our increasingly crowded planet will not be able to escape the inequality.

...For me, the really concerning aspect of this is that now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together. We face awesome environmental challenges: climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans.

Together, they are a reminder that we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity. We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it. Perhaps in a few hundred years, we will have established human colonies amid the stars, but right now we only have one planet, and we need to work together to protect it.

Be honest. Does it sound to you as though your government was on this course, resolved to save liberal democracy, humanity and the environment, or on another course fretting about spreading as much bitumen as conceivably possible to every Third World-grade power generation technology that demonstrates how completely oblivious they are to the reality setting in today, now.

And we and our governments should wake up to the decline of liberal democracy and what that may hold in store for us. Former London mayor and now the UK's foreign minister, Boris Johnson, writes of the defeat of democracy.

There is no doubt that the neoliberal order still fervently perpetuated by our "new" prime minister has driven a wedge between the populace and those they choose to govern on their behalf. It fails to adequately defend state sovereignty and, in the process, leaves the working classes, blue and white collar, in a state of precarity.  Until we do what the political caste will not - until we even the keel again - this will only worsen and become more intractable.

Nikiforuk - "Kinder Morgan Approval Insults Democracy, Science and Economic Logic"

 If there's anyone able to give prime minister Slick a boot in his petro-ass, it's The Tyee's columnist, Andrew Nikiforuk.

Alberta-born Nikiforuk is Canada's hands down best writer on the Tar Sands and the bitumen initiative. He's been delving into it for years.

Excerpting his analysis would only detract from it so follow this link to read it for yourself.

When you're done ask yourself what kind of a man we have in this prime minister who would do this to Canada, our young people and generations of Canadians to come.

In defending his decision to push bitumen to tidewater, Trudeau remarked that there's "not a country on Earth" that wouldn't exploit such a bitumen bounty. If he's right, he's just admitted there's not a hope in hell we'll arrest catastrophic, runaway climate change even though we've been warned, repeatedly warned, that's an extinction event.

Trudeau will go through the motions of revenue-neutral carbon pricing which, at this point, is simply pushing food around on a plate and then he'll say he's done something meaningful to fight climate change.

Harper saw to it that the pipeline process would be a stacked deck. He did that by allowing the fossil energy giants to capture the regulator, the National Energy Board. Trudeau promised voters he would clean house but the Harper National Energy Board remains industry captured as the Trudeau National Energy Board. Trudeau is as corrupt as Harper.

Free Trade, Okay. In What?

Ever since the FTA, the Free Trade Act between Canada and the United States, Canada has inked a succession of trade deals - NAFTA, separate deals with countries such as Panama (that worked out well, eh?), and most recently CETA, our trade deal with the European Union or what may remain of it in a few years.

We were sold on the idea by Mulroney who assured us that free trade meant more jobs and better wages all around. There would be prosperity for everyone, more than we could dare imagine.

So, where are all these wonderful, high-paid jobs today? It seems they haven't materialized. Yet, according to the Dauphin, the answer to that is more free trade, as much as we can sign on to.

Canada's multi-billion dollar monthly trade deficit suggests that we're importing a lot more than we're exporting. That can't be a good thing, can it? Buying more than you're selling is like spending more than you're earning. How does that end up?

However if you're a devout neoliberal, like prime minister Slick, globalism is sacrosanct even if it isn't working, even if it's blowing up in your face,  even if more open minds have proclaimed it a giant, failed experiment that damages economies and fuels inequality. If you're our prime minister, you'll keep driving the national bus into that ditch, again and again and again. Sort of like how they pitched the Trans Pacific Partnership by telling us we would be worse off if we didn't sign on. Now globalism has become a matter not of more jobs and better wages and ever greater prosperity. It's now about being slightly less worse off with it than without it.

Look, let's face it. He's not an intellectual. He's not his dad. The Greater Scheme of Things is more than a few notches above his pay grade. Think of him as Trudeau-Lite.

Now we've got to worry about the governor of the Bank of Canada, Stephen Poloz. It seems Steve has done undergone some sort of mental tide change about Canada's economy.

Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz’s story of the Canadian economy has been sent to rewrite. There are no sleeping beauties in the revised tale: if the factory in your community closed during the Great Recession, it is likely staying closed. (Although if it has exposed brick, some hipsters might come along and turn it into shared workspace.) If there was a Prince Charming who thought he could make money doing whatever that facility used to do, he probably would have shown up by now. It is time to move on.

...When he was appointed three years ago, Poloz assumed non-energy exports and business investment would take over from household spending and housing as drivers of economic growth. That hasn’t happened to the extent the central bank thought it would. Officials have spent a lot of time this year trying to understand why their assumptions were off. It appears Canada suffered from a lack of champions; companies and entrepreneurs with the combination of guts and capital to make it in a tougher global economy. But if Poloz is right, the wait may be over. Canada’s heroes have arrived.

Poloz said ...that if anyone is using a “sleeping-beauty model” to think about exports, then they are misguided. Many of Canada’s exporters already were struggling to keep up and the financial crisis finished them off. That event wiped out billions of dollars worth of manufacturing potential. (in his speech,Poloz put the figure at $30 billion.) Think of it this way: if Canada’s manufacturing industry was once a full-sized pickup, it now is a a compact SUV.

[Poloz said]  ...the central bank has identified a new Prince Charming. Poloz’s narrative now stars the services industry, and in particular information technology (IT) and tourism. The central bank surveyed a group of IT companies and found they were more confident than the average Canadian company, probably because most of them were reporting sales growth in the double digits. Tourism spending has been rising steadily for more than two years.)

The central bank governor reckons Canada has a comparative advantage in services. “We have the necessary ingredients: a highly educated labour force supported by strong universities and colleges; entrepreneurs with access to business incubators; a beautiful and interesting country that many would like to visit; a multicultural workforce that helps us to serve domestic and international markets,” he said in his speech. That advantage is enhanced by a depressed currency. The weaker dollar isn’t an unambiguous gain for a Canadian company that wants to make things. Modern manufacturing requires buying robots and other expensive equipment and building facilities overseas, so Canada’s exchange rate makes expansion harder for some companies. But for IT firms, consultancies, and tour guides, the exchange rate is a windfall. Said Poloz: “That comparative advantage has been strengthened by the decline in the Canadian dollar in the past couple of years—a symptom of falling resource prices, and a facilitator of the rotation of growth from resource production to other sectors.”

So the future lies with the IT guys, tour guides, chambermaids and the folks who man the counters in fast food joints (sorry, I forgot that last one has already gone to guest workers). To Poloz' credit, his outlook does sound like a pretty good prognosis of a smaller economy nation state in the grip of neoliberal globalism.

And, by the way Steve, how does Canada's weak dollar compare to that other country that provides bargain basement IT services - India? If you're going to grab a big chunk of the global IT market, it's India and countries like it you'll be bidding against. Oh well, there will still be a demand for tour guides and chambermaids. 

If This Is So Goddamned Important

If this "pipeline to tidewater" is so goddamned important, why do the beneficiaries have so little skin in the game?

Why isn't Alberta defusing the dilbit bomb by refining the toxins and the heavy metals and the carcinogens and the petcoke out of their crud on-site, in Alberta? It's one thing to subject the BC coast to a conventional oil catastrophe, a la the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound (that's still not cleaned up) but it's an order of magnitude worse to create the conditions of a dilbit disaster. Alberta can refine their vile shit at home but they would rather "externalize" that cost by massively increasing the risk to coastal British Columbia. And that petro-pimp Trudeau, in the most despicable betrayal of the province and people of British Columbia, is going along with it.

I don't know but if we're going to gamble with the marine ecology of coastal British Columbia for generations to come, shouldn't the players be putting some money on the table? Big money.

How about this? In the event of a spill, both Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ottawa will immediately transmit every and all royalties they receive from fossil energy to British Columbia until all contaminants are cleared, including from the seabed. Every last dime. Think of it as "polluter pays." We're all into that, surely.

And, to make sure they'll be serious about cleaning up their mess, why not have Alberta agree to cede to British Columbia all that area stretching from the foothills of the Rockies to the BC border including Jasper and Banff? If the spill isn't cleaned up within ten years that territory is permanently forfeit by Alberta.

Right now, Ottawa and Alberta and Saskatchewan have no skin in the game when it comes to the catastrophic risk they want British Columbia to endure. That's bullshit.

I Got Myself a Date

I'm almost giddy to announce that I've finally got myself a date. It wouldn't be gentlemanly to tell you who she is, not yet at least.

Where would you go for a first date? How about jail?

My friend and I have decided that our first date should be spent in the Greybar Hotel along with as many friends as we can muster to join in. It's all for a good cause - doing what we can to stop Trudeau's perfidious betrayal of our province in his quest to pimp bitumen to Asia.

A lot of people, especially those I know from back east, think this is about an "oil" pipeline. They've been fed that line for so long they believe it. Maybe they just don't want to know.

I've been a lifelong law-abiding citizen, more than 60-years. No charges, no convictions. Only now I have to contemplate being convicted for my convictions to do what's right for my community, my society and generations to come of British Columbians of the coast.

I thought long and hard about this during the Harper years. Who wants to run afoul of the law, especially if you're not looking to "get away with it"? Not me, certainly. That said, I know it's the right thing to do and it's the necessary thing to do. Besides, we've already got our song.