Manafort Has His Deal. It's Big.

Paul Manafort has agreed to grass on Donald J. Trump. He will spill the beans. And he did not sell himself cheaply.

With eight felony convictions on the most minor indictments and a looming trial date next week on the serious indictments, Manafort and Mueller have struck a deal, one that will see the 'life behind bars' charges dropped.

Appearing in court for the special prosecutor was the legendary ball-buster the Trump campaign so fears, Andrew Weissman. The New York Times calls Weissman, "Mueller's Legal Pit Bull."

From The Washington Post:

“Manafort is effectively admitting to being an instrument of the Kremlin — something that didn’t stop when he was in charge of the Trump campaign,” says Max Bergmann, who heads the Moscow Project at the Center for American Progress. “This is what collusion looks like.” 

And once again, it reveals that the president’s assurance that no one from the campaign had Russian contacts was flat-out false.

Update:

The New York Times has published the entire plea agreement between the government and Manafort along with other court filings. Manafort is forfeiting several properties to the government including his apartment in Trump Tower, Soho and this modest getaway in Bridgehampton.

NBC adds this context to the Manafort plea deal.

After insisting that he would never flip — and earning praise from Trump as a stand-up guy — Manafort buckled under the weight of the legal burden facing him and cut a deal that requires him to cooperate fully and truthfully with Mueller’s team. 

He has to meet with investigators without a lawyer, turn over documents, testify in court, and delay his sentencing until Mueller is satisfied, court documents say. 

In exchange, he could end up with no prison sentence, instead of the decade or more he was facing, as long as Mueller tells the judge his cooperation was substantial. 

“They must know that he has something of value,” Goldman said of prosecutors.

Manafort was allowed to plead guilty to two charges — conspiracy against the United States and conspiracy to obstruct justice. But prosecutors filed a document that summed up all the allegations against Manafort in both Virginia and Washington, and Manafort admitted in court that all of it was true, including the charges on which a Virginia jury failed to convict him last month.

...The question now is what does Manafort know, and who, if anyone, he can incriminate.

What will he tell prosecutors, for example, about his relationship with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with close ties to President Vladimir Putin? Emails show Manafort was offering Deripaska private briefings about the Trump campaign, trying to make good on $10 million Deripaska had lent him — a loan that prosecutors say was never repaid.

...Prosecutors will also want to know about loans made to Manafort by Trump supporters after he left the campaign in 2016, including some from a Chicago banker Manafort recommended for a job in the Trump administration. 

And they will want to know about any conversations Manafort had with the Trump team about defending the Mueller investigation, or about a pardon. Manafort, experts say, could be a witness not only in the Russia conspiracy investigation, but in the probe into whether the president obstructed justice.

“I think that Manafort likely was sent signals about a pardon,” Figliuzzi said. “It echoes right back to the obstruction-of-justice case.”

Signs of the Times

C'mon, you know he's right.

Don't ya just wish?

How Canadian angels will pass the time come October 17th.

Don't Let America Drag Us Into Its Cesspool In the Name of Competitiveness

A disturbing report from Price Waterhouse Coopers prepared on behalf of the Business Council of Canada (the usual suspects) warns that the Trump tax cuts could put 635-thousand Canadian jobs at risk and cause a 4.9 per cent drop in Canada's GDP.

The dodgy narrative is that, unless Canada follows suit, cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy, it's economic Armageddon for Canada.

It's time to tell PwC and the Business Council to shove it straight up their fat arses. That vaunted tax cut they clearly want Canada to emulate is adding somewhere between 1 to 1.5-trillion dollars in deficit that working class Americans are going to have to shoulder.

If the only way to protect Canada's deeply integrated economy is by waging class warfare on the Canadian people as the United States has done then it's time we became less integrated and quickly. If we have to take a hit so be it but let's get something worthwhile out of it for the sacrifice starting with more independence and a whole lot less Trump toadyism.

It's time to see the big accounting houses, PwC, KPMG, etc. and their corporate clients for what they are - shake down artists.

A Eulogy for Rachel Notley

The Tyee's Mitchell Anderson has penned a farewell to "The Sad, Timid Failure of Rachel Notley," the soon to be ousted premier of Alberta.

Notley, writes Anderson, came to power promising to get tough with the oil giants, see that Alberta got its fair share of energy revenues, only to "morph into a fossil fuel sycophant," an avatar of the late Ralph Klein.

Albertans are entirely correct to believe they have been ripped off for decades on resource wealth. Since 1972 the province has produced over 17 billionbarrels of conventional crude oil worth almost $1 trillion, assuming a price of $40 USD per barrel. (Alberta sweet crude was at over $80 in 2014.) Where did the money go? 

Under our constitution this is Alberta’s oil, not Canada’s. For all the whining about western alienation, the fact is that successive Alberta governments have conjured the almost unimaginable alchemy of somehow converting $1 trillion in resource bounty (not even counting bitumen or natural gas) into $47 billion of provincial debt. 

Notley now plays the same dog-eared card used by so many premiers before her — that this is somehow all the fault of Ottawa and the rest of the country. The oil barons of Texas must be clinking glasses of bourbon in celebration of how easy it was to divide and dupe such Canadian bumpkins.

If the Wild Rose is the symbol of Alberta, taking massive revenue windfalls and "pissing it all away" is the provincial ethos. Coastal British Columbians keep that in mind when the governments in Ottawa and Edmonton angrily shout that keeping this dark farce going is a matter of "national interest." For this we're supposed to submit to their plans to put our pristine coast at serious risk of environmental catastrophe?

Jason Kenney will be in power soon enough and then the fight will worsen. It'll be Jason and Justin and their damned, bitumen-fueled Gotterdammerung.

Here Come da Judge

This is Bob Meadows, a circuit court judge from Florida. That won't matter much to you but listen to what he wrote:


Here is one American’s take on the growing trade war with the US and Canada.

"Have you ever stopped to consider how lucky we Americans are to have the neighbors we have? Look around the globe at who some folks have been stuck sharing a border with over the past half century:

North Korea / South Korea

West Germany / East Germany

Greece / Turkey

Iran / Iraq

Israel / Palestine

India / Pakistan

China / Russia

We’ve got Canada! Canada. About as inoffensive a neighbor as you could ever hope for. In spite of all our boasts of “American exceptionalism” and chants of “America first,” they just smile, do their thing and go about their business. They are on average more educated, have a higher standard of living, free health care, and almost no gun problems. They treat immigrants respectfully and already took in over 35,000 Syrians in the last two years.

They’re with us in NATO, they fought alongside us in World War I, World War II, Korea, the Gulf War, the Bosnian War, Afghanistan, the Kosovo War and came to our defense after 9/11. There was that one time when Canada took a pass on one of our wars: Vietnam. Turned out to be a good call.

They’ve been steady consumers of American imports, reliable exporters of metals and petroleum products (they are the biggest importer of U.S. products from 37 states), and partnered with NASA in our space missions.

During 911 many aircraft were diverted to Newfoundland, an island province off Canada's east coast where Americans were housed in people's homes for two weeks and treated like royalty. In return for their hospitality, this administration slapped a 20% tariff on the products of Newfoundland's only paper mill, thereby threatening it's survival.

And what do Canadians expect of us in return? To be respected for who and what they are: Canadians. That’s what I call a good neighbor.

But the King of Chaos couldn’t leave well enough alone. Based on his delusions of perpetual victimhood, out of the clear blue, he’s declared economic war on Canada. On CANADA! And he did it based on Canada being a national security risk to the US! For no good reason, other than the voices in his head that told him it was a war he could win. So why not do it, then?

Trump went ahead and imposed his tariffs on aluminum and steel even though we have a trade surplus with Canada on those products! Trudeau retaliated in kind. And now this morning, the White House is preparing a new wave of tariffs in retaliation for Trudeau’s retaliation. This time he threatens a tariff on automobiles even though 70% of their components originate in the U.S.! It’s just a temporary spat, right? Except for that smile on Vladimir’s face in the Kremlin, as the NATO pact unravels a little more with each passing day.

Again, we’re talking about Canada. Our closest ally, friend and neighbor.

On behalf of an embarrassed nation, people of Canada, I apologize for this idiotic and wholly unnecessary attack. Please leave the back channels open. We the People of progressive persuasion stand with you.

Trump's 30 Years of Red-Square Bashing

It seems that Donald Trump has been studying the Kremlin drill manual for about thirty years. Now, just in time for the mid-term elections, two exposes of Trump's lengthy ties to Russian gangsters are out.

One is a documentary, "Active Measures," that will be in theatrical release soon in Canada, perhaps, somewhere.



It's apparently available now on the American streaming service, Hulu, for those who have access to it.

Then there's journalist Craig Unger's new book, "House of Trump, House of Putin."

The book claims to unpack an “untold story,” but it’s not entirely clear how much of it is new. One of the hardest things to accept about the Trump-Russia saga is how transparent it is. So much of the evidence is hiding in plain sight, and somehow that has made it harder to accept. 

But make no mistake: Trump’s ties to shady Russian figures stretch back decades, and Unger diligently pieces them together in one place. Although Unger doesn’t provide any evidence that Trump gave the Russians anything concrete in return for their help, the case he makes for how much potential leverage the Russians had over Trump is pretty damning.

Unger maintains it's clear the Kremlin targeted and compromised Trump, largely through money laundering and bailing Trump out when he was effectively broke.

The key point I want to get across in the book is that the Russian mafia is different than the American mafia, and I think a lot of Americans don’t understand this. In Russia, the mafia is essentially a state actor. When I interviewed Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who is a former head of counterintelligence in the KGB and had been Vladimir Putin’s boss at one point, I asked him about the mafia. He said, “Oh, it’s part of the KGB. It’s part of the Russian government.” 

And that’s essential to the whole premise of the book. Trump was working with the Russian mafia for more than 30 years. He was profiting from them. They rescued him. They bailed him out. They took him from being $4 billion in debt to becoming a multibillionaire again, and they fueled his political ambitions, starting more than 30 years ago. This means Trump was in bed with the Kremlin as well, whether he knew it or not.

I can’t prove what was in Trump’s head, or what he knew or when he knew it. But I document something like 1,300 transactions ...with Russian mobsters. By that, I mean real estate transactions that were all cash purchases made by anonymous shell companies that were quite obviously fronts for criminal money-laundering operations. And this represents a huge chunk of Trump’s real estate activity in the United States, so it’s quite hard to argue that he had no idea what was going on.

...Russia had hundreds of agents and assets in the US, and Gen. Kalugin, the former head of KGB operations in Russia, told me that America was a paradise for Russian spies and that they had recruited roughly 300 assets and agents in the United States, and Trump was one of them.

But it’s not just the money laundering. There was a parallel effort to seduce Trump. Sometime in 1986, Russia’s ambassador to the US, Yuri Dubinin, visited Trump in Trump Tower and told him that his building was “fabulous” and that he should build one in Moscow, and they arranged for a trip to Moscow. 

According to Gen. Kalugin, that was likely the first step in the process to recruit and compromise Trump. Kalugin told me he would not be surprised in the least if the Russians have compromising materials on Trump’s activities in Moscow, something they were quite good at acquiring.

... One weird anecdote that jumped out to me was this story about Ivana Trump, whom Donald married in 1977. It turns out the Czech secret police were following her and her family, and there’s a fascinating file I quote in the book that says they started tracking her in the late 1980s, and one of the Czech secret police files says that Trump was being pressured to run for president. 

But what does that mean? Who was pressuring him? How were they applying the pressure, and why? And did it have anything to do with potentially compromising materials the Russians had on Trump from his 1987 trip to Russia? 

What we do know is that Trump returns from that first trip to Moscow and he takes out full-page ads in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Boston Globe — and it’s fascinating because the ads essentially pushed the same foreign policies that he’s pushing today. They were anti-European, anti-NATO — basically they were aligned with the Soviet plan to destroy the Western alliance. And Trump takes out full-page ads in major American newspapers affirming this view. Maybe that’s just what he always believed. In any case, it’s worth noting.

Unger chronicles how Russia operates openly in America today from Main Street to Wall Street.

One of the things I hope this book shows is that there’s a new kind of war going on. It’s a global war without bombs or bullets or boots on the ground, and the weapons are information and data and social media and financial institutions. The Russian mafia is one weapon in this global conflict, and they’ve been fighting it smartly since the fall of the Soviet Union. 

The Russians start businesses and front companies and commodities firms that appear legitimate but essentially work to advance the interests of the Russian state. They’re very good at getting people entangled financially and then using that as leverage to get what they want. This appears to be what they’ve done with Trump, and now he’s president of the United States.

...There’s an old saying that sometimes the worst part of the scandal is what’s legal, and the Russians, to their credit, studied our system and campaign finance laws and they exploited it masterfully. They’ve used pharmaceutical companies and energy companies and financial institutions to pour money into our politics, and we really have no idea the extent of their influence. 

One thing Vladimir Putin got right was his insistence that American democracy is also corrupt, and I think he’s showing us exactly how corrupt it is. Trump is just the most glaring example, but surely there are others, most of which we know nothing about.

From Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury," to Isikoff and Corn's "Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump," to Bob Woodward's "Fear, Trump in the White House" we're immersed in details about the most improbable president in American history, a man with deep ties to Russia and whose campaign and administration have been liberally salted with key officials who have their own histories with the Kremlin. Next up are Bryan's documentary, "Active Measures," and Unger's book, "House of Trump, House of Putin." If you somehow manage to wade through all that, Michael Moore's next documentary, "Fahrenheit 11/9" will be released on 21 September.



I've read "Fear and Fury" and "Russian Roulette" and I'm now halfway through "Fear." Pretty impressive stuff. I plan on watching "Active Measures" and "Fahrenheit 11/9" but I wonder if this is just going to overwhelm many Americans, numb them out. Even the inescapable signs that their president is not connected to reality may no longer be significant.



What keeps me digesting this stuff is the knowledge that what I'm reading is known to special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, and his cadre of investigators and federal and state prosecutors. I'm confident they know all of this and probably a great deal more. It's the very stuff of an investigation into Russian tampering with the 2016 election and it's almost inconceivable that this and plenty more won't be raised in Mueller's report.

North Carolina - the First Little Piggy. Now the Big, Bad Wolf Is At The Door.

Oh, well. It's not like they couldn't have seen it coming - if only they had bothered to open their eyes. North Carolina is about to receive what southerners like to call a big old can of whoopass in the form of Hurricane Florence.

Those North Carolinians think so little of climate change that they banned any mention of it in government policy.

In 2012, the state now in the path of Hurricane Florence reacted to a prediction by its Coastal Resources Commission that sea levels could rise by 39in over the next century by passing a law that banned policies based on such forecasts. 

The legislation drew ridicule, including a mocking segment by comedian Stephen Colbert, who said: “If your science gives you a result you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved.” 

North Carolina has a long, low-lying coastline and is considered one of the US areas most vulnerable to rising sea levels.

But dire predictions alarmed coastal developers and their allies, who said they did not believe the rise in sea level would be as bad as the worst models predicted and said such forecasts could unnecessarily hurt property values and drive up insurance costs. 

As a result, the state’s official policy, rather than adapting to the worst potential effects of climate change, has been to assume it simply won’t be that bad. Instead of forecasts, it has mandated predictions based on historical data on sea level rise.

...Orrin Pilkey, a retired Duke University coastal geologist, wrote in a recent op-ed in the News & Observer that the state has still failed to take the steps that communities in Virginia and New Jersey have taken, to prepare for rising sea levels. 

“Instead coastal development flourishes as more beachfront buildings, highways and bridges are built to ease access to our beautiful beaches,” he wrote. “Currently the unspoken plan is to wait until the situation is catastrophic and then respond.”

Another southerner, comedian Ron White, figured out North Carolina's problem years ago:

The Obscene President

That would be Trump, of course.

Now with Hurricane Florence barreling down on the Carolinas, Trump is patting himself on the back for his own government's lethal neglect across Puerto Rico in the wake Hurricane Maria.

The president cited his administration’s response to Hurricane Maria a year ago, which decimated Puerto Rico, as an “unsung success”. This despite the chorus of criticism at the time, accusing Trump of a slow and paltry responseto the devastation that ultimately is estimated to have cost almost 3,000 lives.

In terms of loss of American lives, Maria was almost as deadly as the 9/11 attacks of 2001. The state government now estimates just under 3,000 residents lost their lives. The worst part is many of those deaths could have been prevented had the Trump administration not washed its hands of the disaster.

Of course those were Puerto Ricans, America's own untermensch, hardly worth counting. Florence, however, is going to hit the Carolinas, slave states, the Republican heartland. This time it's white people, folks who matter, Trump voters.

Florence could hit the Carolinas harder than any hurricane since Hazel packed 130mph (209kph) winds in 1954 and killed 19 people in North Carolina. Since then, thousands of people have moved to the coast.

Ahead of Florence’s arrival, barrier islands were already seeing dangerous rip currents and seawater flowed over a state highway, the harbinger of a storm surge that could wipe out dunes and submerge entire communities. 

“The water could overtake some of these barrier islands and keep on going. All you have to do is look up at your ceiling, and think about 12ft [of water]. That, folks, is extremely life-threatening,” said Graham. 

Florence’s projected path includes half a dozen nuclear power plants, pits holding industrial waste, and numerous hog farms storing animal waste in open-air lagoons. Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods announced it will shut down the world’s largest slaughterhouse for pigs, which can kill 35,000 animals a day, in Tar Heel, North Carolina, during the storm.

It's Not the Science. It's the Sheer Enormity of It We Can't Handle.

Most of us get the idea that greenhouse gas emissions, the man-made stuff resulting from human activity, is the major driving force behind recent global warming.

We accept that reality but it's usually at the most superficial level where we can easily give it a nod, set it aside and move on to other things such as growing the economy and globalized trade. They really don't mesh well together. That's why you have to keep it all light and easy. 'I know, we'll introduce a carbon tax' sort of thing. That'll put a band-aid on our environmental boo-boo.

If you don't treat it superficially, that's when the whole business gets really dark and scary. The worst of it is that you don't have to delve very deep before you're compelled to see what we're doing in a much different light. That's when you find yourself putting on the long pants.

Lurking beneath the superficial level are the hard realities up to and including the prospect of another mass extinction event. There have been five of these in the 4.5 billion year history of Earth. Mankind emerged out of the regeneration from the last extinction event. the Cretaceous Paleogene extinction 65 million years ago.  They're billing the new one, the man-made extinction event as the Holocene extinction. How fitting.

Imagine that. Previous geological epochs have lasted many tens of millions of years at a stretch. Then the Earth comes up with the best of them all, this Holocene, with its gentle climate, just the thing to allow the human species to create civilization and, over barely a dozen thousand years, grow from almost nothing to nearly eight billion strong, if "strong" is an apt term. 12,000 years and we've done so well that we're snuffing it out. We've already entered a new geological epoch, one so of our own making that we've named it after ourselves, the Anthropocene. And there wasn't even an award ceremony. At least if there was no one sent me an invitation.

It's in this context, just below the superficial surface, that you can begin to see our hydrocarbon addiction a bit differently. A lot differently. It's sort of like a heroin junkie scrounging the alleys for discarded needles so he can shoot up. How do you think that ends?

For most of my life most of my contemporaries weren't particularly aware of this carbon business and climate change. 'Most' does not include the last twenty years. The threshold was actually in June, 1988, when NASA's James Hansen testified before the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources warning that: "The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now...We already reached the point where the greenhouse effect is important."

By the turn of the century the science corroborating Hansen's warning was coming in at a good clip. Good enough that there was really no excuse for ignoring it. No excuse for not acting. The fossil fuel industry and their political pawns (they're still running the show even today) were very successful at misdirecting the public, repeating the RJ Reynolds tobacco/lung cancer scam.

You could say that the last Canadian prime minister who sincerely cared about the environment was Brian Mulroney. Acid rain, the ozone layer, he did something to address the problems and his efforts were relatively successful. Since then we've had an outright climate denier, Stephen Harper, and a gaggle of Liberal prime ministers who paid lip service to climate change but steered well clear of doing anything about it. Not one of them, the current placeholder included, can shake the corrupting, nihilistic scourge of petro-politics. With the clock fast running out that, it seems, will be Canada's legacy.

Mr. Trudeau is fond of saying that nobody would leave a billion barrels of oil in the ground. That's sort of like saying that no junkie would stumble across a kilo of China White and not shoot it up his arm. What kind of thinking is that? Is this guy the best we can get?  Really?

Oh yeah, if you thought the Tar Sands is going to die a natural death, this will burst your bubble. But I digress.

We have known what we're facing at least for the past 20 years. Since then the evidence, across a broad range of scientific disciplines has rapidly built up, each report corroborating the central thesis of global warming, each adding to the urgency of the warning. No one in our political caste has any excuse any longer for fudging the issue of global warming and the hothouse effect of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. No one. Not Donald Trump. Not Justin Trudeau. None of them.

Last week, Tom Engelhardt wrote that Trump will be remembered above all else for his crimes against humanity.

On that score, the record is clear, in part because we are already beginning to live the very future that will remember Donald Trump in only one way. It’s a future that, at its core, has animated his presidency from its first days. Whatever else he thinks, says, tweets, or does, President Trump and his administration have been remarkably focused not just on denying that humanity faces a potential future of environmental ruin -- as in the term “climate-change denial” so regularly attached to a startling list of people in his administration -- but on aiding and abetting the disaster to come. 

As everyone knows, Donald Trump is taking the world’s historic number one (and presently number two) emitter of greenhouse gases out of the Paris climate agreement. He is also, not to put the matter too subtly, a fossil-fuel nut, nostalgic perhaps for the polluted but energized American world of his 1950s childhood. From his first moments in office, he was prepared to turn his administration’s future energy policy into what Michael Klare has called, “a wish list drawn up by the major fossil fuel companies.” He has been obsessed with ensuring that the U.S. dominate the global oil market (think: Saudi America), saving the dying coal-mining business in this country, building yet more pipelines, rolling back Obama-era fossil fuel economy standards for autos and other vehicles, and letting the big energy companies drill just about anywhere from previously out-of-bounds waters off America’s coasts to Alaska’s protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In other words, every act of his related to energy reveals the leader of the planet’s “last superpower” as a climate-change enabler of a sort that once would only have been the fantasy of some energy company CEO. 

This makes him and his administration criminals of a historic sort. After all, he and his cronies are aiming at what can only be thought of as terracide, the destruction of the environment of the planet that has sustained us for thousands of years. That would be a literal crime against humanity so vast that it has, until this moment, gone unnamed and, until relatively recently, almost unimagined.

Crimes against humanity indeed. We already have lethal levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases. By some estimations we've locked in three, perhaps four degrees Celsius of warming which is going to be not survivable for a significant portion of our global population, not to mention other species. And so, for the past 20 years we could have and should have done everything possible to shutter our fossil fuel industries as rapidly as we could transition to alternative clean energy. We've got this guy who sees a billion barrels of intensely high-carbon sludge he just has to get into the atmosphere, doing his own bit for terracide. Is that not a crime against humanity? You might think that is unfair. Fine. If it's not terracide, tell me what it is.

Bear this in mind. All that bitumen our governments have been so dedicated to transforming into atmospheric greenhouse gas is sort of the gift that keeps on giving. Atmospheric CO2 is a persistent gas. It has a lifespan of roughly 200 years but 20% of what we emit will last for thousands of years. Earth systems absorb a good bit of these emissions. The oceans have historically accounted for 75% of man-made emissions. Unfortunately the oceans are now getting kind of 'full' and absorption rates are falling even as the oceans acidify. Ocean acidification has itself been the cause of past mass extinctions. Oopsie.

It is estimated that, if we stopped all man-made emissions today, atmospheric CO2 loading could be back to pre-industrial levels within 50 years. If only. We had a chance but we didn't take it and a piddling carbon tax won't change that one bit.

Yesterday the UN Secretary General, Antonio Gutteres, spoke truth to the world's petro-powers. We have to be well on our way to ending our dependence on fossil fuels by 2020 if we're to have any chance of averting runaway global warming.

Guterres called the crisis urgent and decried the lack of global leadership to address global warming. 

“Climate change is moving faster than we are,” Guterres said on Monday. “We need to put the brake on deadly greenhouse gas emissions and drive climate action.” 

He said people everywhere are experiencing record-breaking temperatures and extreme heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods “are leaving a trail of death and devastation”.

...Guterres said scientists have been warning about global warming for decades, but “far too many leaders have refused to listen, far too few have acted with the vision the science demands”.

He spoke of the grand accord reached by the participants at the 2015 Paris climate summit where Trudeau and McKenna strolled onto the floor to announce that "Canada is back."

“These targets were the bare minimum to avoid the worst impacts of climate change,” Guterres said. “But scientists tell us that we are far off track.” 

“According to a UN study, the commitments made so far by parties to the Paris agreement represent just one-third of what is needed,” the secretary general said.

...“If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us,” Guterres warned. 

The alternative to moving to green energy, he said, “is a dark and dangerous future”. 

Guterres said that when he addresses world leaders at their annual general assembly gathering in two weeks, he will tell them “that climate change is the great challenge of our time” and what is missing is leadership and a sense of urgency to respond.

“Nothing less than our future and the fate of humankind depends on how we rise to the climate challenge,” Guterres said. “Keeping our planet’s warming to well below 2C is essential for global prosperity, people’s wellbeing and the security of nations.”

Unfortunately, when it comes to averting runaway global warming, 'leadership and a sense of urgency' are two attributes Canada does not have.

Hey, Trump. Here, Hold My Beer. Now, Watch This. Ford Invokes the Notwithstanding Clause.

Doug Ford, in a breathtaking abuse of power, plans to use the notwithstanding clause to circumvent a judicial ruling thwarting his plan to slash the size of Toronto city council.

The dramatic step would make Ford the first Ontario premier to ever use the clause, which allows government to create laws that operate in spite of certain charter rights that the laws appear to violate. He also threatened to use the clause again in the future, but didn't provide any specifics.

In an unprecedented and scathing decision, Justice Edward Belobaba ruled Monday that Ford's Progressive Conservative government "clearly crossed the line" with its Better Local Government Act, which aligns municipal ward boundaries with provincial ridings, cutting the potential number of councillors from 47 to 25 after the Oct. 22 election. 

"We're taking a stand," Ford said of the court decision. "The result is unacceptable."

Now, Ford says he will recall the Ontario legislature on Wednesday to reintroduce the Better Local Government Act and will invoke the notwithstanding clause — here's a CBC News backgrounder on what that means — at that point.

My two cents: if you people of Ontario let this thug get away with this, even this once, he will use it freely thereafter. The Charter means little to Doug Ford. To invoke the notwithstanding clause over something this minor is the act of a man never to be trusted.

In the Age of Bibi

“The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end, peace is made with the strong.”

Who said that? Hitler? Stalin? Genghis Khan? Pol Pot? Some other genocidal monster?  No, that came from the Canadian government's bestie and Palestinian concentration camp warden, Benjamin Netanyahu.

I'm pretty sure the weak he envisions slaughtering and erasing from history are those self-same Palestinians.

Remind me why Justin Trudeau, like Stephen Harper before him, has such a crush on this guy. Remind me why the Trudeau Liberals threw their support behind the Conservative motion to condemn the BDS or Boycott/Divest/Sanction movement and its supporters, smearing them as anti-Semites.

Vollman's Brutal Chronicle

This post concerns a book(s) that neither I nor you will probably ever read. It is William T. Vollman's two-volume opus, Carbon Ideologies.

Carbon Ideologies explores the climate-changed world we are bequeathing to our very own descendants, our grandkids and great grand children and their kids. Volume One is entitled, "No Immediate Danger." The second volume is "No Good Alternative." The titles alone should let you know where Vollman is taking his work.

Vollman imagines a future reader of his 1,268 page epic:

Vollmann imagines for himself ...a murderously hostile reader who sneers at his arguments, ridicules his feeblemindedness, scorns his pathetic attempts at ingratiation. Vollmann can’t blame this reader, whom he addresses regularly throughout Carbon Ideologies, because she lives in the future, under radically different circumstances—inhabiting a “hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet.” He envisions her turning the pages of his climate-change opus within the darkened recesses of an underground cave in which she has sought shelter from the unendurable heat; the plagues, droughts, and floods; the methane fireballs racing across boiling oceans. Because the soil is radioactive, she subsists on insects and recycled urine, and regards with implacable contempt her ancestors, who, as Vollmann tells her, “enjoyed the world we possessed, and deserved the world we left you.”

...Carbon Ideologies is about ...the violence inflicted by the production of coal, natural gas, oil, and nuclear energy. The victims of these carbon ideologies are not only the species of fauna and flora that are going extinct, the fragile ecosystems that will collapse, and the future generations of humans who will have to subsist on insects. The victims are us—we who are now living and who deny, to varying extents, the degree of damage we are inflicting upon ourselves. Carbon Ideologies is a chronicle of self-harm.

It is also an almanac of global energy use. The initial volume opens with a 200-page primer busy with tables, lists, and data (“I assure you that there will be no harm in skipping to page 217”) and concludes with 80 pages of definitions, units, and conversions (“Readers should feel free to skip this section”). It is a travelogue to natural landscapes riven by energy production, most prominently Fukushima (nuclear), West Virginia (coal), Colorado (natural gas), and the United Arab Emirates (oil). It is a work of oral history, containing dozens of interviews with laborers who toil in or live beside nuclear reactors, caves, and oil refineries, paired with Vollmann’s own snapshots. And it is a compassionate work of anthropology that tries to make sense of man’s inability to weigh future cataclysm against short-term comfort. Carbon Ideologies is most fascinating, however, for what it is not: a polemic.

Nearly every book about climate change that has been written for a general audience contains within it a message of hope, and often a prod toward action. Vollmann declares from the outset that he will not offer any solutions, because he does not believe any are possible: “Nothing can be done to save [the world as we know it]; therefore, nothing need be done.” This makes Carbon Ideologies, for all its merits and flaws, one of the most honest books yet written on climate change. Vollmann’s undertaking is in the vanguard of the coming second wave of climate literature, books written not to diagnose or solve the problem, but to grapple with its moral consequences.

It is also a deeply idiosyncratic project: Vollmann’s idiolect is obsessive, punctilious, twitchy, hyperobservational, and proudly amateurish. The data he presents are at times revelatory. A homeless person in America uses twice as much energy as the average global citizen; 61 percent of the energy generated in the United States in 2012 “accomplished no useful work whatsoever”; from 1980 to 2011, global energy use nearly tripled.

Vollman gives special attention to how government and industry officials dismiss charges of environmental menace.

In Fukushima, objects in the fallout zone are not radiated but “contaminated.” In West Virginia, mountains do not have their summits chopped off but are granted “removal of overburden.” Fracking “is safer and has less environmental impact than driving a car,” a marketing director from Shale Crescent USA claims, while coal miners, according to the president of the West Virginia Coal Association, “are the greatest practicing environmentalists in the world.” Vollmann records such inanities alongside observations from figures such as Buddha (“People are ignorant and selfish”), Edmund Spenser (“Worse is the danger hidden than descried”), and Loren Eiseley (“Just as instincts may fail an animal under some shift of environmental conditions, so man’s cultural beliefs may prove inadequate to meet a new situation”). Vollmann longs to prove Buddha, Spenser, and Eiseley wrong, and submits softball questions to every industry executive he encounters; but outside of Japan, almost nobody in a position of authority agrees to comment.

Vollmann ...takes special delight in quantifying, in painstaking detail, the energy he burns in such activities as writing a draft of Carbon Ideologies, walking around the corner from his Tokyo hotel to buy a tray of convenience-store tonkatsu, and making a milkshake for his daughter. These passages are as instructive as they are tedious. They dramatize not only the tenacity of our reliance on fossil fuels, but the impossibility of truly comprehending our own culpability in our planet’s fate. How often do you pause to think about the amount of coal burned every time you take an elevator, charge your phone, or operate your blender? Even extravagant acts of self-denial are powerless in the face of such profligate consumption. Vollmann likens our most ambitious energy-conservation efforts to “a dieter who keeps eating his daily fill of cheese, pastries and ice cream … despite the laudable fact that he put broccoli on his lunch plate last Thursday.”

The global hunger for pastries grows more ravenous each year. Whatever Good Samaritan savings we can make by improving infrastructure or bicycling to work will be dwarfed by the billions who will leap onto the grid in the coming decades. About a third of the human population cooks meals over biomass—wood, charcoal, farm scraps, and animal dung. Nearly 1 billion people have no access to electricity. It will not take all of India’s adopting “the American way of life” to trigger gargantuan increases in global emissions. India’s ascending to the Namibian way of life will be enough. 

The demand problem, the growth problem, the complexity problem, the cost-benefit problem, the industry problem, the political problem, the generational-delay problem, the denial problem—Vollmann scrupulously catalogs all the major unsolved problems that contribute to the colossus of climate change. “Whatever ‘solution’ I could have proposed in 2017,” he writes, “would have been found wanting before the oceans rose even one more inch!” (The title of a late chapter, “A Ray of Hope,” is to be read sarcastically.) Nor have his six years of traveling the world, tabulating data, and interviewing experts changed his mind about any major aspect of the issue. The reader who begins Carbon Ideologies hopeless will finish it hopeless. So will the hopeful reader.

But there exist other kinds of readers—those who do not read for advice or encouragement or comfort. Those who are sick of dishonesty crusading as optimism. Those who seek to understand human nature, and themselves. Because human nature is Vollmann’s true subject—as it must be. The story of climate change hangs on human behavior, not geophysics. Vollmann seeks to understand how “we could not only sustain, but accelerate the rise of atmospheric carbon levels, all the while expressing confusion, powerlessness and resentment.” Why did we take such insane risks? Could we have behaved any other way? Can we behave any other way? If not, what conclusions must we draw about our lives and our futures? Vollmann admits that even he has shied away from fully comprehending the damage we’ve done. “I had never loathed myself sufficiently to craft the punishment of full understanding,” he writes. “How could I? No one person could.” He’s right, though books like Carbon Ideologies will bring us closer.
The planet’s atmosphere will change but human nature won’t. Vollmann’s meager wish is for future readers to appreciate that they would have made the same mistakes we have. This might seem a humble ambition for a project of this scope, but only if you mistake Carbon Ideologies for a work of activism. Vollmann’s project is nothing so conventional. His “letter to the future” is a suicide note. He does not seek an intervention—only acceptance. If not forgiveness, then at least acceptance.

Progress

How Canada Got Screwed on NAFTA or Payback Is a Bitch

There's a feeling in Canada that the Mexicans threw us under the bus on NAFTA. Apparently the real story isn't that simple.

Yes, there was some back-stabbing that led to the US-Mexico free trade deal which left Canada on the outside looking in. Only it was Canada that first wielded the knife.

In mid-May, Canada thought it saw an opening for a quick NAFTA deal. 

With a key congressional deadline looming, Canadian officials offered the Trump administration two big prizes: new auto sector rules that would move jobs out of Mexico and more access to the protected Canadian dairy market for American farmers. In exchange, they asked that the United States take most of its other demands off the table. 

Mexican negotiators were blindsided. They were not ready to agree to the tougher auto rules. And they believed they had a handshake agreement with Canada going into the talks: Neither of the North American free-trade agreement’s junior partners would seek a separate peace with the United States.

Why Mexico then chose to cut its own deal with the Americans.

...Mexico, in effect, did to Canada what Canada had done to Mexico. 

“Canada swung for the fences in May with a skinny NAFTA deal. I think Mexico remembered that,” said Daniel Ujczo, an Ohio-based trade lawyer representing auto and steel companies that trade under NAFTA. “Any country in Canada’s position would have tried that, but it came with risks, and one of the risks manifested itself [last] week.”

...The Canada-Mexico relationship has long been complicated. The two countries made a secret pact before NAFTA talks started in August of 2017 that neither would cut a deal with the United States behind the other’s back, Canadian and Mexican sources said. 

But Canada refused to make such a commitment in public. While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland repeatedly affirmed that they wanted a trilateral NAFTA, they would not go the extra step of promising never to make a two-way deal with the U.S. 

When Mr. Trudeau visited Mexico City last fall, President Enrique Pena Nieto greeted him with a lavish banquet and invited him to address the Senate. But it was not enough to coax a public promise.

At a January round of NAFTA talks in Montreal, Canadian negotiators first proposed the idea of linking wages to automotive content. The idea was to get the United States to take one of its most protectionist demands – that all North American-made autos contain at least 50 per cent U.S. content – off the table. 

The U.S. embraced the idea and came up with a specific proposal to require up to 45 per cent of a vehicle to come from factories paying US$16 an hour. The Mexicans balked: Such a requirement would strip their country, with its much lower labour costs, of its ability to compete for auto investment. They presented a counterproposal that would have applied a wage requirement to just 20 per cent of auto content, said a source with knowledge of the negotiating position. 

Discussions continued through the spring. U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan set Friday, May 17, as the deadline for a deal that could be presented to the current Congress for approval. 

That was when Canada made its move, presenting a NAFTA accord that included the 40- to 45-per-cent content figure without further negotiation. As the clock ticked down, Mr. Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, and NAFTA czar Brian Clow scrambled to Washington to make a last-ditch pitch to Mr. Trump’s advisers. 

Mr. Trudeau himself hinted at the proposal in an event at the Economic Club of New York. 

“To be honest, we are down to a point where there is a good deal on the table,” he said. “It’s right down to the last conversations.”

The worm turns.

That afternoon, Mr. Guajardo fired a warning shot at the Prime Minister. 

“A clarification is necessary,” he tweeted at Mr. Trudeau. “Any renegotiated #NAFTA that implies losses of existing Mexican jobs is unacceptable.” 

Mario Maldonado, a prominent business journalist who has closely covered the negotiations for his column in Mexico’s El Universal newspaper, said Mexican negotiators were caught off-guard and initially upset with Canada’s play, but quickly recovered. 

...And it wasn’t long before the shoe was on the other foot.

In July, Mr. Lighthizer invited the Mexican team to keep negotiating without Canada in the room. American and Mexican officials reassured their Canadian counterparts that there was nothing to worry about: The U.S. and Mexico were simply working out their differences on the auto issue – which Canada had already agreed to – and other bilateral matters that did not concern Ottawa. Once these were finished, they said, Canada would be invited back to the table. Mexican officials repeated the same assurances publicly as talks dragged on through August. 

Yet, Canada had at least some inkling that discussions had gone further than mere bilateral issues. Two Canadian officials acknowledged in late August that the U.S. and Mexico had negotiated some trilateral matters, including dispute settlement and intellectual property. But they insisted any such discussions would have been preliminary in nature. 

When U.S.-Mexico talks ended Aug. 27, the charade was exposed: The two countries emerged with a complete deal to overhaul nearly every aspect of NAFTA. Despite the Canada-Mexico back-channel, Canadian officials were caught off-guard. Two sources said the Canadians didn't even have all the details on what the other two countries had agreed to for days after the announcement. 

Mexico joined the U.S. in warning that, if Canada did not accept the revamped pact, it would be cut out of NAFTA.

Update:

Former Mexico president, Vincente Fox, agrees that Canada forced Mexico to go it alone.

"Well, I remember, originally, Prime Minister Trudeau expressed it publicly," Fox said. "His position saying that he would always look after the interests of Canada no matter what would happen to Mexico, that he would even sacrifice having a joint position with Mexico in favor of Canada."

"Now in the very end, it resulted in the opposite," Fox said. "Mexico finally ended up coming to an agreement with the United States and Canada stayed out." 

Fox, who was Mexico's president from 2000 to 2006 and has been a fierce Trump critic, urged Trudeau to be open to negotiations with Trump and possibly give in on a few issues to keep the trilateral deal intact. 

"My suggestion to Prime Minister Trudeau is go ahead, stay in NAFTA. If you have to sacrifice a little bit, if you have to make some concessions, do it," Fox said. "Because NAFTA is so much more than just a few little things that can affect you."

I find this "every man for himself" dynamic troubling. Trump's approach was divide and conquer. First, one side capitulates, and then the other is punished for its impudence.

Did the Liberal government, Trudeau specifically, bungle the NAFTA negotiations by overplaying Canada's hand and intimating he would be willing to cut Mexico loose for the sake of a trade deal with Trump? It certainly sounds as though we're dealing with a made-in-Canada screw up of the most vital trade agreement Canada has.

However what is done is done and we must accept this new relationship, a strictly transactional relationship in which a former friend is now a predatory adversary, a schoolyard bully.

It seems entirely appropriate that we recalibrate the rest of our dealings according to this altered relationship that has, in fairness, been imposed on us. That could begin by withdrawing from our pointless participation in America's foreign legion.

The United States is no longer a stabilizing force globally. Trump courts our traditional adversaries while alienating America's and Canada's traditional allies. Has there ever been a better time to break from America's military and foreign policy to pursue a closer understanding with those same allies, one that is not Washington-centric.

Canada has done America's bidding, yeoman's service, from the Gulf War to Afghanistan and, most recently, the air war over Syria. While Canada has committed wealth and lives to America's overseas follies, the US has demonstrated - repeatedly - that All the King's Horses and All the King's Men no longer deliver anything approaching a meaningful victory. For this America has repaid us with hostility and bullying. It would be a hell of a world if we could not find more worthwhile alliances elsewhere.

Living in Interesting Times

World history is not the ground of happiness. The periods of happiness are empty pages in her.

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

We are living in interesting times. Interesting, to be sure, and also immensely dangerous times.

Our civilization, mankind itself, seems to have slipped its moorings. Somehow we left all the helmsmen ashore before we carelessly, indifferently, drifted out to sea.

Change is upon us - economic, social, political, environmental - each a "force multiplier" of the others. No one can say with any precision where we're headed or how quickly but there is some evidence that our course leads to an extinction event.

Politically we're witnessing the decline of liberal democracy and the ascendancy of the radical right. Turkey, Hungary and Poland are obvious examples, perhaps America also (we might know after the November mid-terms). But there are less obvious and equally worrisome nations where liberal democracy is under attack including France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, even the UK. Next up may be Brazil where the far right leader just survived a severe knife attack while campaigning for the presidency.

Since childhood I've wondered how the German people succumbed to virulent fascism and first empowered and then embraced a leader and a movement so vile as Hitler's Nazis. Could there be some pattern in post-WWI Germany that is mirrored in so many countries today?

I'm exploring this question through two notable books. The first is Sebastian Haffner's memoir, "Defying Hitler." Haffner was a Prussian schoolboy in WWI, the son to a mid-level bureaucrat.  His account of daily life in Germany in the 20s and 30s is engrossing and enlightening. Coming from a relatively well-off family he writes of how inflation had become so severe that his family had to spend his father's salary immediately it was received because it would be worthless in less than a week. The entire family, including the maid, was mobilized to fan out to the shops and buy whatever they could to see them through to the next payday. They got by, barely. Most were not so lucky.

The second is Milton Mayer's 1955 book, "They Thought They Were Free." Mayer was a German-American who, after the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, found the standard descriptions of the German volk unconvincing. And so he moved to Germany where he passed himself off as one of them, making friends with people who had shortly before been loyal followers of their Fuhrer.

I hope these books will furnish insight into what can possess good people to embrace monstrous leaders. Perhaps I may find parallels between the German people and those embracing the radical right today.

Another subject I want to explore is the decline of America as the world's dominant power, what is driving it and how America and the world will be impacted. I'm beginning this exercise with Kevin Phillips' 2005 book, "American Theocracy: the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century."

I had to buy Phillips' book - again - because I no longer have the copy I bought when it first came out.  I often loan books to friends and then lose track of them as in this case.

There are two aspects of the book I want to re-visit. The first is Phillip's excellent analysis of the pattern by which a succession of nations - Spain, Holland, Great Britain and, most recently, the United States by turns went from economic dominance to global hegemon to decline. He observes how each state went from an agricultural economy into an industrial or trading giant before abandoning the very activity that propelled their ascendancy to become a financialized economy, ultimately using that nation's own wealth to grow its successor's economy.

The second area to explore is the process of decline and the dynamic between the ascendant state and the nation it ousts. Here Phillips focuses heavily on the "hand-off" between Great Britain and the United States. That was a successful and peaceful transition between two countries that shared both a common language, political traditions, wartime alliances and the same postwar adversary, the Soviet Union. However war between the transitional powers is more frequent by a two-to-one margin.

Bear in mind that there has been no precedent of a transition in the circumstances that we face today - climate change, overpopulation, massively unsustainable consumption of natural resources, and, of course, terrorism and the nuclear Sword of Damocles. These factors really raise the stakes for transitional parties and there have been plenty of indications that some elements on both sides are spoiling for a fight.

I'm launching into this quest mainly because I'm curious. Morbidly curious perhaps but who doesn't want some glimpse into the world that awaits us? Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps we would rather not know.

Oh dear.

The BBC Comes Clean on Climate Change

It has been a long time coming. For years the British Broadcasting Corporation has mishandled reporting on climate change.  Climate stories routinely included interviews with climate change deniers such as the infamous Lord Nigel Lawson. This was supposedly done for "balance." 

The BBC has accepted it gets coverage of climate change “wrong too often” and told staff: “You do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate.” 

In a briefing note sent to all staff warning them to be aware of false balance, the corporation has offered a training course on how to report on global warming. The move follows a series of apologies and censures for failing to challenge climate sceptics during interviews, including Nigel Lawson. 

The briefing note, obtained by the website Carbon Brief, was sent on Thursday by Fran Unsworth, the BBC’s director of news and current affairs. It includes a statement of BBC editorial policy that begins: “Climate change has been a difficult subject for the BBC, and we get coverage of it wrong too often.”

It then states: “Manmade climate change exists: If the science proves it we should report it.” In the section warning on false balance it says: “To achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage, in the same way you would not have someone denying that Manchester United won 2-0 last Saturday. The referee has spoken.”

Better late than never, BEEBS. Welcome back to reality.

Justin, You Could Try Putting the Pin Back in that Grenade.

You know you're dealing with grifters when a logical, perfectly sound idea won't even be acknowledged much less discussed. Unfortunately that makes Justin Trudeau, Rachel Notley, Andrew Scheer, Jason Kenney and the rest of them a pack of grifters.

What's that logical, perfectly sound idea? It's the proposition that the Tar Sanders refine all the pet coke, acids, carcinogens, heavy metals and other contaminants out of their bitumen before shipping it to the B.C. coast. Those are the persistent, lethal contaminants that imperil our coast and our marine ecology. They are the major risk we're left to dutifully accept for the sake of the "national interest."

Trudeau, like another thug featured in the news on a daily basis, believes that his declaration of "national interest" is an end of the matter.  If the national interest comes with that price tag, one to be borne by our province and coastal British Columbia's ecology, then British Columbia's vital interest and Trudeau's laughable national interest are irreconcilable.

At the very least, Trudeau should tell us why the refineries to transform this toxic sludge into commercial grade synthetic crude haven't been built. There's been oodles of time to build them and get them up and running.

Surely Trudeau has some obligation to account for his decisions to what he glibly calls "stakeholders" which, in this case, is the population and government of British Columbia. Explain why these fossil fuel degenerates will not even hear of the idea.

And while he's coming clean on the obvious refining solution he can show us the science he repeatedly claims his government has done that mysteriously is nowhere to be found. Environment Canada doesn't have it. The Royal Society of Canada hasn't seen it. As far as those bodies are concerned it doesn't exist. Both say the science hasn't been done. Both, in effect, say our prime ministerial grifter is making this shit up.

We have a problem taking Trudeau at his word but that's because he has repeatedly shown his word is worthless.  Remember "social licence"? Remember his pledge to consult First Nations? Remember when he vowed to clean house at the hopelessly corrupt National Energy Board and start the review process afresh? So, where is "the science" he keeps referencing? Whatever comes out of this man's mouth might just as well be coming out of his arse.

Until Trudeau can make a persuasive case for why Athabasca bitumen cannot be refined on site in order to ameliorate the risk of catastrophe he wants to impose on British Columbia, then it's our obligation to fight his damned pipeline, fang and claw. And, until then, his declaration of "national interest" is nothing but empty words from a grifter.

A Modest Proposal

The case has been made out literally since the 2019 inauguration that established Donald Trump as the president of the United States. It was immediately obvious that this was not only a man with deep psychological infirmities but an almost non-existent connection to truth and reality.

If there was any doubt that was convincingly erased in January with the publication of Michael Wolff's insider tell all, "Fire and Fury." Quite the book and still well worth reading.

Within the week a lot of us will be reading Bob Woodward's "Fear: Trump in the White House." Early reviews indicate that it will be an indictment of the president's unfitness for office.

We got primed for the release of "Fear" by yesterday's anonymous op-ed in the New York Times, "I am part of the resistance within the Trump administration."

Trump obviously is unhinged. He's not mentally sound. Apparently that was not a fatal flaw to his real estate career or his reality TV show. The presidency, however, is neither a real estate concern nor a TV show.

Trump insists he's really smart and really sane despite the mountain of anecdotal evidence to the contrary. That matters because he's America's commander in chief, the guy who can theoretically plunge the world into nuclear Armageddon.

A suggestion, a modest proposal. The idea came to me when I saw a photo of a bunker housing B-61 free fall or "gravity" nuclear bombs. Nobody, not even the bunker janitor, gets near those weapons without intensive screening and clearance.

Individuals go through extensive testing to screen out all but those who are "emotionally stable, physically capable, and who have demonstrated reliability and professional competence."

Everyone is screened except, it appears, the president of the United States.

Isn't it time Congress changed that? Shouldn't every president-elect have to go through, pre-inauguration,  a week of battery tests, lengthy psychiatric interviews and extensive background checks? I went through it (almost half a century ago) and it's not difficult but it is intensive and will demonstrate if a person can be considered for training or subsequent handling of nukes.

They didn't get Trump before he was sworn in but the accumulated evidence demands that he be put under scrutiny now, right now.

A Fine Read for the Ecologically Inclined

It's not my habit to promote blogs. Every now and then, however, you stumble across one that stands out. Jason Hickel's blog is in that exclusive category.

Hickel is an anthropologist who has taught at LSE and currently teaches anthropology and cultural politics at University of London.

It's good stuff. Follow the link to his web site.

Monbiot - Let's Go to War

The Guardian's enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, argues it is time we went to war with the corporate sector or that part of it that enables today's throw-away consumerism.

Do you believe in miracles? If so, please form an orderly queue. Plenty of people imagine we can carry on as we are, as long as we substitute one material for another. Last month, a request to Starbucks and Costa to replace their plastic coffee cups with cups made from corn starch was retweeted 60,000 times, before it was deleted. 

Those who supported this call failed to ask themselves where the corn starch would come from, how much land would be needed to grow it, or how much food production it would displace. They overlooked the damage this cultivation would inflict: growing corn (maize) is notorious for causing soil erosion, and often requires heavy doses of pesticides and fertilisers. 

The problem is not just plastic: it is mass disposability. Or, to put it another way, the problem is pursuing, on the one planet known to harbour life, a four-planet lifestyle. Regardless of what we consume, the sheer volume of consumption is overwhelming the Earth’s living systems.

...But we cannot address our environmental crisis by swapping one overused resource for another. When I challenged that call, some people asked me, “So what should we use instead?” 

The right question is, “How should we live?” But systemic thinking is an endangered species.

Monbiot contends that too many well-intentioned people believe that a better form of consumerism can save the planet.

This perfectly represents the mistaken belief that a better form of consumerism will save the planet. The problems we face are structural: a political system captured by commercial interests, and an economic system that seeks endless growth. Of course we should try to minimise our own impacts, but we cannot confront these forces merely by “taking responsibility” for what we consume.

He argues that changing our consumption habits is a diversion. We must instead focus on political change.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the government massacred the Simple Lifers. This is generally unnecessary: today they can safely be marginalised, insulted and dismissed. The ideology of consumption is so prevalent that it has become invisible: it is the plastic soup in which we swim.

One-planet living means not only seeking to reduce our own consumption, but also mobilising against the system that promotes the great tide of junk. This means fighting corporate power, changing political outcomes and challenging the growth-based, world-consuming system we call capitalism. 

As last month’s Hothouse Earth paper, which warned of the danger of flipping the planet into a new, irreversible climatic state, concluded: “Incremental linear changes … are not enough to stabilise the Earth system. Widespread, rapid and fundamental transformations will likely be required to reduce the risk of crossing the threshold.” 

Disposable coffee cups made from new materials are not just a non-solution: they are a perpetuation of the problem. Defending the planet means changing the world.

What Monbiot champions, albeit obliquely, sounds a great deal like "steady state" economic theory. It is based on the notion that humankind and our global economy, now grown wildly beyond the carrying capacity of Earth's ecology, must be reined in and brought safely back inside. That, in turn, requires that we adopt steady state policies governing everything from our population to production and consumption.  It's not as dire as you may imagine but the alternative certainly is and that's where we're headed.

She Couldn't Help Herself. Wente Unleashes Her Inner Trump.

The Globe's Margaret Wente  has unveiled what derailed the Justin Trudeau Memorial TransMountain Pipeline - those damned "activist" judges on the Federal Court of Appeals.

It seems Maggie didn't need to digest the 263-page decision. You know, the whole law bit.  Nope. It was just another plot by activist judges, the same sort who keep thwarting his imperial Majesty down in Washington.

Laws. We don' need no steenkin' laws. 

Donald Trump's White House Nannies

Big day for the New York Times. Bad day for the paranoid and delusional president of the United States.

The Times has taken the unusual step of publishing an anonymous op-ed from what the paper maintains is a senior official within the Trump White House. The piece is entitled, "I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration."

The Nanny State appears to be alive and well within the White House where senior aides run about changing America's diapers as fast as the Mango Mussolini can soil them.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall. 

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them. 

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous. 

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

...In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic. 

From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back. 

“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.

The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful. 

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.  The result is a two-track presidency. 

Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations. 

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals. 

On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable. 

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state. 

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over. 

The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.

Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation. 

We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them. 

There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.

Coyne Takes Junior to the Woodshed

Even diehard Liberals should be able to admit Andrew Coyne has a couple of points in his retrospective of Trudeau's septum horribilis.

...the middle ground in politics can be as treacherous as it is inviting; the two extremes can as easily combine to devour any moderate interlopers as they can be separately marginalized. To hold that particularly dangerous piece of turf it is not sufficient to remind folks of your sunny benevolence, or repeat endless variations on “the economy and the environment go hand in hand.” You have to be both tactically smart and strategically wise. You have to think it through. 

This last is not, needless to say, the current generation of Liberals’ strong point. They are very good at the symbolic gesture, the leap of faith, the exuberant tossing of one’s hat over the wall. They are not so good at figuring out how to retrieve it. And so, on issues ranging from pipelines to carbon taxes to trade negotiations, the Liberals’ once-soaring pride has given way to a gathering awareness of the earth below. It turns out governing isn’t as simple as it appears, even for those seemingly born to it. 

The mishandling of each is by now familiar. On pipelines, the Liberals first allowed the options to dwindle to one; then signalled such desperation that the last option, the Trans Mountain extension, be built that they were obliged to pay its private-sector sponsor several billion dollars to take it off its hands; only to discover, thanks to this week’s Federal Court of Appeal ruling, that they had no lawful authority to build it, having failed to engage in the same meaningful consultation with Aboriginal groups they had demanded of the previous government, and had made such a show of promising themselves.

On carbon taxes, the Liberals had seemed, in the heady first months of office, to lure the provinces into the trap they had set for them, wherein the latter would impose the tax on their behalf, keeping the revenues in return. Alas, they failed to secure the acquiescence of the public, who would after all be the source of those revenues, mistaking popular support for the bromide that “something must be done” about the environment with the lesser-known “and I should be the one to pay for it.”

...Still, the Liberal balancing act is in serious jeopardy. With no pipeline, a carbon tax will be an even harder sell, and with no meaningful progress on climate change critics of the pipeline will be emboldened anew. 

Instead of doing both, the Liberals may be left with neither, alone and under fire on the no-man’s-land that was once the middle ground.

Coyne's rebuke is going to be a hard swallow for the more ardent fans of our boy band prime minister but he's not making this up. You can't pretend to fight climate change with gestural carbon taxes when you're committed to flooding world markets with the most toxic, highest-carbon petroleum sludge, bitumen. That's just illogical, counter-intuitive, hypocritical - okay, dishonest.

It has indeed been a horrible septum for Justin Trudeau. Let's hope he learns the lessons of his self-inflicted calamities.