Is It Time to Mobilize Canada, the Canadian People, and Our Economy?

I know you don't want to hear this. I know you would rather bury your head in the sand. But you need to know that kind of thinking is about the very best way to seal your (our) fate.

In today's National Observer, retired professor (anthropology), Dennis Bartels, and Natasha Bartels (his daughter?), are calling for the federal government to mobilize the nation to ready Canada for the onslaught of climate change. (Dr. Bartels is no newcomer to this cause. A bit of searching turned up a paper that he wrote on this same subject in 2001.)

There have been numerous calls from scientists, news media and public figures to change our ways on a massive scale. These calls have not, however, provided a large-scale blueprint for sustained and organized change. This desperately needed blueprint for massive, effective and rapid social and economic transformation can be found in Canadian socio-economic mobilization for the Second World War.
...
The Second World War mobilization included wage and price controls, food rationing and establishment of Crown (government-owned) corporations to produce war materials and supplies the private sector was unable or unwilling to provide.
Taxation of the wealthy and private businesses was dramatically increased to support the war effort during the Second World War. Amounts in excess of government-imposed profit levels were taxed away.

... 

The components of Second World War mobilization which should be updated and adapted to meet the climate crisis are:

1. Planned resource management and development, created in partnership with Indigenous communities, aimed at reducing carbon emissions and repairing environmental damage.
2. Taxation of wealth to fund the restructuring of the economy.
3. Reorienting education and training toward development of green industry and technology.
4. Creation of new Crown corporations to meet industrial production needs and protect access to necessaries of life.
5. Building co-operative international relations to reduce carbon emissions and protect shared environmental resources.

Well, isn't that quite a 'wish list.' The Bartels go on to add another recommendation, naming the enemy.

During Second World War mobilization in Canada, Hitler’s Germany was the enemy of Canada and the other Allied countries. In the climate crisis, fossil-fuel corporations and related industries are the enemies of all countries because they have created the crisis we now face. It is clear they intend to continue their practices that now threaten the existence of human life on our shared planet.

Fossil-fuel companies are now claiming we are all responsible for the climate crisis because most of us use fossil fuels. This is a diversionary tactic by fossil-fuel companies to distract the general public from the basic fact that it is these companies who are to blame for what we now face. It has now been revealed that major oil companies such as Exxon knew for decades combustion of fossil fuels causes global warming. Instead of changing their industries, they funded climate-science denial on a massive scale. 

Every person currently alive was born into a fossil-fuel economy and infrastructure. We did not give our consent to be part of this destructive system, and numerous attempts by both scientists and ordinary people to change it have been aggressively suppressed and undermined by the economic giants of the fossil-fuel industry.

Trump's World Bank Turns Its Back On the World.

It has become an informal protocol that the White House gets to appoint the president of the World Bank while the EU gets to nominate the leadership of the International Monetary Fund. Think of it as another dubious artifact of the post-war world order.

One of the first things the most diabolical president in American history implemented was the appointment of David Malpass to head the World Bank. Ever since, Malpass has focused on taking the "world" out of the World Bank.

Hopes of using Davos to forge a new international consensus to tackle poverty and the climate crisis have been thwarted by the decision of the World Bank president, David Malpass, to boycott the event. 

To the surprise of the other multilateral institutions, Malpass turned down his invitation to attend despite being in Europe this week for the UK government’s Africa investment summit in London. 

One source said Malpass’s decision not to attend the World Economic Forum reflected the Bank’s go-it-alone approach under his presidency. “He has effectively declared UDI [unilateral declaration of independence],” the source said. “We saw it at last year’s G7 summit in France. President [Emmanuel] Macron wanted a collective statement from the international organisations but Malpass vetoed it. He wouldn’t have the word multilateralism in the statement.”

So who is this joker, Malpass? Wikipedia has a rich rundown on this character. Among the highlights are his six year stint as chief economist at Bear Stearns that appears to have ended with the firm's collapse. He's got a bit of the "Wrong-Way Corrigan" in him.

Malpass has been noted for his forecasts before the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and in the time period following the Great Recession. In 2007, before the housing market collapse, Malpass wrote for the Wall Street Journal that "Housing and debt markets are not that big a part of the U.S. economy, or of job creation...the housing- and debt-market corrections will probably add to the length of the U.S. economic expansion." He also called for the raising of interest rates in 2011 at a time when others believed this would be harmful to the economy. Bruce Bartlett cited Malpass's 2008 forecast of economic growth and his 2012 forecast of recession as specific examples of partisan bias in economic forecasts.

By all appearances the World Bank is now transformed into an in-house organ of the Trump White House. And we know what Trump thinks about the calamities now setting in around the world.

Okay, That's Not a Good Sign. The Doomsday Clock Gets a Second Hand.

The Doomsday Clock no longer marks our future in minutes. They're working in seconds now. And, as the venerable Union of Atomic Scientists now sees it, we're 100 seconds away from, well...

The risk of civil collapse from nuclear weapons and the climate crisis is at a record high, according to US scientists and former officials, calling the current environment “profoundly unstable”.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced its symbolic “doomsday clock” has moved forward to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest to catastrophe that the scientists have judged the world to be at any point since its creation in 1947, at the outset of the cold war. 

“The world needs to wake up. Our planet faces two simultaneous existential threats,” said Mary Robinson, chair of an independent group of global leaders called The Elders, and the former president of Ireland and former UN high commissioner of human rights. 

Robinson said that countries that don’t aim to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions heating the planet and instead exploit fossil fuels are issuing “a death sentence for humanity”. 

She said while public pressure presents a “sliver of hope” for the climate, there is no such pressure on leaders to avert nuclear threats.

Robert Rosner, chair of the Bulletin’s science and security board, said society has normalized a very dangerous world, and that “information warfare” is undermining “the public’s ability to sort out what’s true and what’s patently false”.

Yeah, well, there you go.

Do They Really Have to Ask? Big Fossil's "Dine and Dash"

Alberta wants to know how it got so screwed by abandoned oil and gas wells. 3,406 as of today and that may just be the tip of Alberta's hydrocarbon iceberg.

As Alberta struggles to clean up thousands of oil and gas wells left behind by bankrupt companies, the province's auditor general is set to investigate how the problem became so big and why the industry regulator's efforts to collect security deposits came up so short, CBC News has learned. 

Often referred to as orphan wells, there are currently 3,406 such wells scattered around the province, usually on the properties of rural landowners, where they lie untended. 

There are another 94,000 inactive wells in the province, with the worry that many of these may become orphaned as their owners struggle — and taxpayers could be left with the bill. 

The auditor general's office will look at whether the province is doing enough to prevent wells from becoming orphaned in the first place, and whether it is prepared for more to be added to the list due to ongoing pressure on Alberta's energy economy.

Alberta is the most fiscally reckless province in Canada. A land of "everday low taxes" and even lower fossil fuel royalties. A province that consigns its people to a perpetual boom and bust economy where the government is never short of whipping boys to blame for its own breathtaking incompetence.

These wells are great, at the outset, when they're big producers but eventually they fizzle. That's when their owners, knowing the provincial governments will turn a blind eye, quietly transfer the wells and all their environmental liabilities into shell companies, Potemkin businesses that have no assets and soon go bankrupt - stiffing the taxpayers for the clean up.

Just wait until those Athabasca tailing ponds get dumped in the taxpayers' laps. That's when they'll have to turn to a nationwide bailout. Do start putting aside your loonies now.

They're Shittier Than We Imagined. What About Us?

Since the election of DJ Trump to the presidency most of us have seen the American people in a different light. The US is no longer the land of Ozzie & Harriet, of Ward and June, Wally and Beaver Cleaver. It was as though the "wholesome goodness" had evaporated, displaced by Trump's "base" with its seemingly unlimited capacity to tolerate his increasingly cruel buffoonery.

NYT columnist, Thomas Edsall, writes that even his country's seasoned political analysts are surprised by the transformation of American society. The glue that once held the country together may be failing.

The election of Trump and his first three years in office have revealed a nation deeply ambivalent about immigration, race, equality, fairness — even about the ground rules of democracy itself. 

What if the belief systems used to justify anti-immigrant policies and to justify race prejudice, for that matter — hostility to outsiders, insularity, high sensitivity to external threat — are as deeply ingrained in the American body politic as belief systems sympathetic to immigration and to racial equality — openness, receptivity to new experiences, trust? 

Karen Stenner, a political psychologist and behavioral economist best known for “predicting the rise of Trump-like figures under the kinds of conditions we now confront,” responded to my emailed inquiries by noting the conflicting pressures at play:

"I don’t think I would agree that Trumpian conservative stands on immigration, race and homelessness are a more “natural” or “default” position. Communities with a good balance of people who seek out diversity, complexity, novelty, new and exciting experiences etc., and those who are disgusted by and averse to such things, avoid them, and tell others to do likewise, tend to thrive and prosper in human evolution." 

Finding the right balance, Stenner said, “is vital to both societal cohesion and human flourishing.” But, she warned, “we may have tipped the balance too far in favor of unconstrained diversity and complexity,” pushing the boundary beyond “many people’s capacity to tolerate it.”

Abraham Lincoln, falling back on scripture, warned that "a house divided against itself (over slavery) could not stand." Today America has succumbed to a degree of tribalism that, to me, at times seems to resemble a Lord of the Flies animus.

Many have observed that the American Left appears hapless, unable to push back against the radical right ascendancy.  Edsall offers an explanation:

Linda J. Skitka, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and four colleagues conducted an intriguing set of tests to determine the durability and strength of liberal and conservative beliefs on poverty in a 2002 paper, “Dispositions, Scripts, or Motivated Correction? Understanding Ideological Differences in Explanations for Social Problems.” 

They found that in troubled times, when competition for limited goods intensifies, liberals move to the right: 

"It is much easier to get a liberal to behave like a conservative than it is to get a conservative to behave like a liberal. Liberals act like conservatives when resources are scarce, cognitive load is high, and aid serves secondary rather than primary needs. Conservatives only act like liberals when they are asked to consider helping a person with internally controllable causes of need who has convincingly reformed."

Skitka and her fellow authors received strong support for their argument in a 2012 paper, “Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism,” by Scott Eidelman, a professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas, and three co-authors. 

Skitka and her colleagues conducted a series of tests comparing the answers of two groups to ideologically revealing questions. The first faced time pressure or were forced to answer with distracting background noises, in environments “taxing, limiting or otherwise disengaging effortful, deliberative thought.” The second group was asked the same questions with plenty of time to think and without noise or other distractions. 

In each case, those tested under favorable circumstances provided more liberal answers than those tested under more hostile conditions. The adverse conditions forced those participants to perform what the authors called “low-effort thinking,” and the results showed that “low-effort thinking promotes political conservatism.”

Then they added alcohol to the mix:

In one of their four experiments, the authors went to an unidentified bar in New England and persuaded 85 drinkers to take the test and have their alcohol levels measured. The results:

"Bar patrons reported more conservative attitudes as their level of alcohol intoxication increased. Because alcohol limits cognitive capacity and disrupts controlled responding, while leaving automatic thinking largely intact, these data are consistent with our claim that low-effort thinking promotes political conservatism."

...Why does all this matter? What difference does it make if liberals and Democrats are more ambivalent than conservatives and Republicans? 

For one thing, it means that in elections that are increasingly negative, ambivalent partisans — Democrats in this case — will be more vulnerable to attacks designed to generate conflict, to weaken enthusiasm and to increase the likelihood of nonvoting. President Trump and the proponents of the Republican Party he dominates are certain to do all they can to capitalize on this vulnerability. 

Most importantly, Democratic ambivalence, in a year when high turnout is mandatory, reflects the larger problem facing a political party that is now focused on its shared animosity to Trump. That animosity may or may not be enough to propel its presidential candidate to victory, but the inherent tension between different sectors of the center-left coalition over ideological, economic and social issues — not to mention glaring levels of intraparty income inequality — calls into question exactly what common ground holds the Democratic coalition together. How common is it?

The Last Resort - Eco-Extremism

Sooner or later it was bound to happen.

Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, writes that if those holding the reins of power choose to treat environmental activists as extremists then so be it.  I suppose we always knew it would come to a fight eventually. The only question was when.

First, the Guardian revealed that counter-terrorism police in south-east England have listed Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the youth climate strikes as forms of “ideological extremism”. Then teachers and officials around the country reported that they had been told, in briefings by the anti-radicalisation Prevent programme, to look out for people expressing support for XR and Greenpeace. 

Then the Guardian found a Counter Terrorism Policing guide to the signs and symbols used by various groups. Alongside terrorists and violent extremist organisations, the guide listed Greenpeace, XR, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, CND, the Socialist party, Stop the War and other peaceful green and left organisations. Then the newspaper discovered that City of London police had listed XR as a “key threat” in its counter-terrorism assessment. 

...The police have always protected established power against those who challenge it, regardless of the nature of that challenge. And they have long sought to criminalise peaceful dissent. Part of the reason is ideological: illiberal and undemocratic attitudes infest policing in this country. Part of it is empire-building: if police units can convince the government and the media of imminent threats that only they can contain, they can argue for more funding. 

...But there’s another reason, which is arguably even more dangerous: the nexus of state and corporate power. All over the world, corporate lobbyists seek to brand opponents of their industries as extremists and terrorists, and some governments and police forces are prepared to listen. A recent article in the Intercept seeks to discover why the US Justice Department and the FBI had put much more effort into chasing mythical “ecoterrorists” than pursuing real, far-right terrorism. A former official explained, “You don’t have a bunch of companies coming forward saying ‘I wish you’d do something about these rightwing extremists’.” By contrast, there is constant corporate pressure to “do something” about environmental campaigners and animal rights activists.

Think of the federal government's pipeline Stasi set up by Stephen Harper but now in service to the Trudeau government. It's a taxpayer funded secret police service that combines the RCMP, CSIS and private security interests to monitor, intimidate and even strongarm peaceful environmental activists. Even under the supposedly progressive Trudeau peaceful dissent is unacceptable.

It is hard to think of any successful campaign for democracy, justice or human rights that would not now be classed by police forces and the government as an extremist ideology. Without extremists such as Emmeline Pankhurst, who maintained that “the argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics”, Patel would not be an MP. Only men with a certain amount of property would be permitted to vote. There would be no access to justice, no rights for workers, no defence against hunger and destitution, no weekends. 

In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr, subjected to smears very similar to those now directed against XR and other environmental groups, noted: “The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?” 

Good citizens cannot meekly accept the death of the living planet. If seeking to defend life on Earth defines us as extremists, we have no choice but to own the label. We are extremists for the extension of justice and the perpetuation of life.

Eventually we all must decide which side we're on. With what we're seeing underway today, the petro-state is an abomination. It is, as some scholars contend, a crime against humanity. The choices are stark. You can acquiesce, you can support it or, on the other hand, you can oppose it.

The Wrecking Crew - We're All Part of It

While the world wrings its collective hands over how little we must do to thwart climate change, two other sinister threats lurk in the wings - overpopulation and our rapacious excessive consumption of very finite resources, renewable and non-renewable. Any one of those three, on its own, is more than enough to bring humanity crashing down. Let's talk about over-consumption, the existential threat standing in the corner that is usually overlooked entirely.

What better way to begin than to herald a new record. For the first time ever, humanity has consumed 100 Billion tonnes of materials in a single year. And the cherry on the sundae is that recycling rates are falling at the very same time.

The climate and wildlife emergencies are driven by the unsustainable extraction of fossil fuels, metals, building materials and trees. The report’s authors warn that treating the world’s resources as limitless is leading towards global disaster. 

The materials used by the global economy have quadrupled since 1970, far faster than the population, which has doubled. In the last two years, consumption has jumped by more than 8% but the reuse of resources has fallen from 9.1% to 8.6%.

You see, we're not only taking "our" share but we're now pillaging "their" share - the resources every other species needs to survive. That's why, whether it be marine or terrestrial, the overall numbers of our fellow creatures are in a lethal nosedive. In just 30 years we cut their total numbers by more than half, a number of species reduced to extinction. Yeah baby, that was us. We showed them a thing or two, eh?

What's our response to this? I know - veggie burgers. Hell, we'll eat insects if it comes to that. Anything to keep this bacchanal rolling.

Climate change, overpopulation, over-consumption - they're all tightly interwoven. So tightly, in fact, that you can't solve even one of them if you don't solve them all. And we can't even succeed at one - our current preoccupation, climate change.

Anyway, here's the report, released just in time for Davos. In typical form, it's jam packed with bollocks about how "we can still do this," ignoring all the squishiness inherent in our human nature, the "I've got mine buddy. You get yours the best way you know how." syndrome that has played such an instrumental role in the collapse of so many societies over the ages.

And, if you're thinking maybe we can clean this up by going back to "meatless Fridays," think again. Think the "Great Acceleration." Go ahead, open the link. Check it out. Watch the videos, look at the charts (about 49 of them). Then draw your own conclusions.

The Spirit of a Python

Director, author and Python, Terry Jones, has died, aged 77.

While he is and will remain best known for his work in comedy, especially Monty Python, I will remember him for his final film, "Boom, Bust, Boom," available on NetFlix.  Here's the trailer:

The New Oracles

We've got new oracles to advise the government how to get out of the current high-carbon death spiral with our asses more or less intact.

They're called the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices and the feds have funded them for five years to the tune of $20-million.

No one knows how quickly the world is going to cut carbon pollution, CEO Kathy Bardswick said in an interview, and Canada must make decisions that account for the uncertainty, rather than be paralyzed by it. 

In either a high-carbon or low-carbon future, “there’s a substantial impact on the country,” Bardswick said. “What we’re trying to say is, ‘Yes, we agree there’s uncertainty, and we agree that these scenarios can play out quite differently, and the implications can be quite dramatic. But that doesn’t mean that we wait and see — we’ve got to be able to plan within that context.’”

CICC opened with an 80-page report  that may or may not steer the petro-feds in the right direction. (Hint - let's see what Ottawa does with the proposed Teck mega-mine in the Athabasca Tar Sands. If they greenlight that this is probably a waste of $20-million on another silly gesture.)

Drawing on extensive economic and scientific research, the report sketches out two broad scenarios, with two possible outcomes in each one. 

In the first scenario, a massive economic metamorphosis has occurred. Nations around the world cut their pollution severely over the next 10 years, reaching the Paris Agreement goal. Global demand for fossil fuels has plummeted, and proven reserves are left in the ground. A majority of electricity comes from renewables like solar, wind and bioenergy, while nuclear capacity triples and heavy industry is largely decarbonized.

In the other scenario, carbon pollution continues to be pumped into the air unchecked, and the world fails to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal, leading to runaway climate change: collapse of ecosystems, accelerating global heating, coastlines that sink underwater, relentless extreme weather and mass societal unrest. 

Canada must be prepared for that world, too, the report says, or it will become “caught in a continual cycle of impact and recovery.” People will be injured or killed, or suffer poor air quality and contaminated water, as insurance skyrockets and companies lay off workers. Food and water shortages drive war, conflict and humanitarian disasters, which reach Canada’s shores.

As the saying goes, you can lead the feds to water but you can't make 'em drink.

And So It Begins. Wuhan Virus Crosses the Pacific.

The first case of the Wuhan coronavirus has been reported in Seattle.

A person in Washington State is infected with the Wuhan coronavirus, the first confirmed case in the United States of a mysterious respiratory infection that has killed at least six people and sickened hundreds more in Asia. 

The man is a resident of Snohomish County, Wash., who experienced symptoms after returning from a trip to the region around Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began. He was hospitalized with pneumonia last week, and infection with the coronavirus was confirmed on Monday afternoon. 

Local officials declined to identify the patient, who was said to be quite ill. 

News of the first case in the United States comes amid growing evidence that the virus spreads from person to person, although it is not clear how easily.

I intended to do a post asking whether Canadian health authorities were doing anything enough to screen the steady stream of arrivals that enter Canada daily from China, especially through Vancouver. Surely we haven't forgotten the experience Toronto endured with the SARS virus, a similar contagion.

At the Risk of Being Branded an Anti-Semite...

Israel's prime thug, Bibi Netanyahu, has again shown his perfectly fascist face. He's calling for sanctions against the International Criminal Court, its prosecutors and its judges for having the temerity to consider investigating Israeli war crimes (which, by the way, are legion).

“I think that everybody should rise up against this,” the Israeli prime minister said in an interview with Trinity Broadcasting Network, the world’s largest Christian television network. 

“The US government under President Trump has spoken forcefully against the ICC for this travesty, and I urge all your viewers to do the same. To ask for concrete actions, sanctions, against the international court – its officials, its prosecutors, everyone.” 

Netanyahu’s calls come months after Washington used a similar tactic to block a separate potential ICC investigation into its troops’ conduct in Afghanistan. It announced in March that it would deny entry to ICC officials, and later revoked a visa held by the ICC chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda.

The Blowhard-in-Chief Releases Another Bag of Gas at Davos

Is it just me or is this guy truly demonic? If it's a way to undermine the environment, usually by scrapping protective measures, Donald J. Trump doesn't hesitate to unleash his presidential powers. He has that familiar "I won't be around when it happens" attitude.

The Cheeto Benito stayed true to form today in Davos, Switzerland for the annual gathering of the knobs.

US President Donald Trump has decried climate "prophets of doom" in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where sustainability is the main theme. 

He called for a rejection of "predictions of the apocalypse" and said America would defend its economy. 

In his keynote speech, Mr Trump said that it was a time for optimism, not pessimism, in a speech that touted his administration's economic achievements and America's energy boom. 

Speaking of climate activists, he said: "These alarmists always demand the same thing - absolute power to dominate, transform and control every aspect of our lives." 

They were, he said, "the heirs of yesterday's foolish fortune tellers".

The speech must have been written by Trump's personal Renfield, Stephen Miller.

Trump Tells NYC - Try Mops and Buckets

When it comes to sea level rise, New York city, and Donald Trump, it's a 'perfect storm.' As far as the Mango Mussolini is concerned, the burghers of Manhattan can just take mops and buckets in hand the next time they're flooded. They're on their own.

He announced his position, naturally, in a tweet:

"A massive 200 Billion Dollar Sea Wall, built around New York to protect it from rare storms, is a costly, foolish & environmentally unfriendly idea that, when needed, probably won’t work anyway. It will also look terrible. Sorry, you’ll just have to get your mops & buckets ready!"

But, when it comes to his golf course in Ireland, Trump is singing a very different tune.

As Politico detailed during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump International Golf Links sought to build a seawall to protect a golf course he owns in Ireland from “global warming and its effects.” 

In a permit application for the wall, Trump International Golf Links cited scientific studies indicating that a rise in sea level could result in damaging erosion in a bay near the golf course. 

“If the predictions of an increase in sea level rise as a result of global warming prove correct ... it is likely that there will be a corresponding increase in coastal erosion rates not just in Doughmore Bay but around much of the coastline of Ireland,” the application says. “In our view, it could reasonably be expected that the rate of sea level rise might become twice of that presently occurring. ... As a result, we would expect the rate of dune recession to increase.”

NYT Endorses Two Candidates for President in 2020

For the first time, America's "Grey Lady" has endorsed two candidates for president in the 2020 elections. Not surprisingly, they're both Democrats. More surprisingly, they're both women.

This year the New York Times is co-endorsing Elizabeth Warren or Amy Klobuchar to become the next and first female president of the United States of America.

You Broke It, You Bought It - Climate Change and the Pottery Barn Rule

The United Nations has fired a rocket up the arse of the developed world by ruling that climate refugees cannot be sent back to their homelands.

Given that the developed world, the industrialized nations, are responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions fueling global warming that is rendering the poorest and most vulnerable nations increasingly uninhabitable, leaving their beleaguered people the grim choice of migrating or staying put to die, it does seem only fair that we don't add mortal insult to lethal injury for these folks, especially their little kids. (I don't think I've ever written a sentence so complex)

Don't worry. It's only the UN. We'll find some excuse, plenty of them in fact, to reject this ruling. We'll bundle them up as "terrorists" or a threat to our beloved economies, you know, the bounty that God bestowed on us but not them, that sort of thing. And, yes, we'll look like utter swine but isn't that what the lipstick is for?

Pompeo - Screw You, We're Not Leaving

Trump secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has served notice on the government of Iraq - 'we don't care what you say, we're staying.'

The State Department on Friday rebuffed the Iraqi government’s request to begin discussions on pulling out troops, saying that any American officials going to Baghdad during a state of heightened tensions would not discuss a “troop withdrawal,” as the Iraqi prime minister had requested. Instead, discussions would be about the “appropriate force posture in the Middle East.” 

The statement from Washington was a direct rebuttal to Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi of Iraq, and was certain to add to the friction between the two nations. 

The prime minister said earlier on Friday that he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to send a delegation from the United States to discuss steps for the withdrawal of the approximately 5,200 American troops from his country, in the aftermath of a deadly American military strike ordered by President Trump that many Iraqis say violated their country’s sovereignty.

So much for the illusion of Iraqi sovereignty. That was all a pretence. Iraq remains an occupied land, its government's wishes subject to American veto.

Krugman on a "World Gone Mad."

Paul Krugman writes that the wildfires savaging Australia are terrifying but they can't compare to Australia's leadership.

In a rational world, the burning of Australia would be a historical turning point. After all, it’s exactly the kind of catastrophe climate scientists long warned us to expect if we didn’t take action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, a 2008 report commissioned by the Australian government predicted that global warming would cause the nation’s fire seasons to begin earlier, end later, and be more intense — starting around 2020.

So this should be the moment when governments finally began urgent efforts to stave off climate catastrophe. 

But the world isn’t rational. In fact, Australia’s anti-environmentalist government seems utterly unmoved as the nightmares of environmentalists become reality. And the anti-environmentalist media, the Murdoch empire in particular, has gone all-out on disinformation, trying to place the blame on arsonists and “greenies” who won’t let fire services get rid of enough trees.

These political reactions are more terrifying than the fires themselves.

...You might be tempted to dismiss Australia as a special case, but the same deepening partisan division has long been underway in the United States. As late as the 1990s, Democrats and Republicans were almost equally likely to say that the effects of global warming had already begun. Since then, however, partisan views have diverged, with Democrats increasingly likely to see climate change happening (as indeed it is), while Republicans increasingly see and hear no climate evil.

Does this divergence reflect changing party composition? After all, highly educated voters have been moving toward the Democrats, less-educated voters toward the Republicans. So is it a matter of how well informed each party’s base is? 

Probably not. There’s substantial evidence that conservatives who are highly educated and well informed about politics are more likely than other conservatives to say things that aren’t true, probably because they are more likely to know what the conservative political elite wants them to believe. In particular, conservatives with high scientific literacy and numeracy are especially likely to be climate deniers. 

But if climate denial and opposition to action are immovable even in the face of obvious catastrophe, what hope is there for avoiding the apocalypse? Let’s be honest with ourselves: Things are looking pretty grim. However, giving up is not an option. What’s the path forward? 

The answer, pretty clearly, is that scientific persuasion is running into sharply diminishing returns. Very few of the people still denying the reality of climate change or at least opposing doing anything about it will be moved by further accumulation of evidence, or even by a proliferation of new disasters. Any action that does take place will have to do so in the face of intractable right-wing opposition. 

This means, in turn, that climate action will have to offer immediate benefits to large numbers of voters, because policies that seem to require widespread sacrifice — such as policies that rely mainly on carbon taxes — would be viable only with the kind of political consensus we clearly aren’t going to get.

"A Betrayal Against Life Itself"

They're not the first to call for it but the Greta Thunberg  contingent at Davos is demanding that world leaders end the fossil fuel madness.

“Anything less would be a betrayal against life itself,” said Thunberg and colleagues in an article in the Guardian. “Today’s business as usual is turning into a crime against humanity. We demand that you play your part in putting an end to this madness.” 

The burning of fossil fuels is the biggest driver of the climate emergency. Scientists predict catastrophic impacts unless deep cuts in emissions are made rapidly, but global emissions are still rising.

Their demands echo the warning from renowned climate scientist, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, at the 2015 Paris climate summit that our only chance of averting climate catastrophe depended on the "induced implosion" of the fossil fuel industry. It would be up to world governments to shut down the fossil fuel industry or else set the planet on fire. 

One by one the petro states have chosen the fire option. That includes Canada where a supremely hypocritical prime minister passed a declaration of climate emergency one day and, less than 24 hours later, greenlighted a massive, taxpayer funded, bitumen pipeline.  A betrayal against life itself, check. A crime against humanity, check. Putting an end to this madness? Hell no, we're cultivating madness.

From wildfires that burn hundreds of miles inside the Arctic Circle all the way to Australia in the southern hemisphere, we're running headlong into a wall - a wall of fire. And, despite their lofty pronouncements, that's not a matter of necessity. It's a choice they have chosen for us and everyone else on this planet.

John Ralston Saul Wrote of an "Interregnum." Could This Be What It Looks Like?

In his 2005 book, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, John Ralston Saul proclaimed the end of neoliberalism as just another failed political-economic ideology. He wrote that we were in an "interregnum." An interval between regimes in which we sort of drifted along awaiting the next great thing.

Apparently JRS spoke too soon. Neoliberalism and the insane quest for perpetual exponential growth are still here. This malignant creed still holds sway in congresses and parliaments from Washington to London, Ottawa to Canberra.

Fifteen years is a pretty wide miss but, for all that, I'm not sure that Ralston Saul was necessarily wrong. Perhaps he just failed to understand that the nature of the next interregnum would be like none other before it.  It would look like this:

Australia, today

Fort McMurray

Paradise, California

This is Ralston Saul's interregnum. This is the end of neoliberalism because it's either neoliberalism or us. At some point either we choose to change on our own terms or we will be changed regardless. Time is definitely not on our side.

What's your idea for the next great thing? Or would you prefer to just keep electing the same political hacks who have quite knowingly delivered us into this global hell?

Here's a YouTube pundit who calls himself Ozzy Man to introduce you to their leader, Scott Morrison.  This is definitely NSFW. There's plenty of coarse language. It's not for delicate ears.

George's Pancake - Our Salvation?

Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, thinks a team of scientists from Finland have come up with a solution to feeding mankind without destroying the environment. It's 'hello microbes, goodbye farming.'

Christians believe that Jesus turned water into wine when a wedding celebration suddenly ran out.  Monbiot says we may be able to replace crops and livestock by a bit of alchemy involving nothing more than microbes and water.  Beat that, Jesus.

In a commercial lab on the outskirts of Helsinki, I watched scientists turn water into food. Through a porthole in a metal tank, I could see a yellow froth churning. It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted on to heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour.

This flour is not yet licensed for sale. But the scientists, working for a company called Solar Foods, were allowed to give me some while filming our documentary Apocalypse Cow. I asked them to make me a pancake: I would be the first person on Earth, beyond the lab staff, to eat such a thing. They set up a frying pan in the lab, mixed the flour with oat milk, and I took my small step for man. It tasted … just like a pancake. 

But pancakes are not the intended product. Such flours are likely soon to become the feedstock for almost everything. In their raw state, they can replace the fillers now used in thousands of food products. When the bacteria are modified they will create the specific proteins needed for lab-grown meat, milk and eggs. Other tweaks will produce lauric acid – goodbye palm oil – and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids – hello lab-grown fish. The carbohydrates that remain when proteins and fats have been extracted could replace everything from pasta flour to potato crisps. The first commercial factory built by Solar Foods should be running next year. 

The hydrogen pathway used by Solar Foods is about 10 times as efficient as photosynthesis. But because only part of a plant can be eaten, while the bacterial flour is mangetout, you can multiply that efficiency several times. And because it will be brewed in giant vats the land efficiency, the company estimates, is roughly 20,000 times greater. Everyone on Earth could be handsomely fed, and using a tiny fraction of its surface. If, as the company intends, the water used in the process (which is much less than required by farming) is electrolysed with solar power, the best places to build these plants will be deserts. 

We are on the cusp of the biggest economic transformation, of any kind, for 200 years. While arguments rage about plant- versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant. Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life. After 12,000 years of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming: brewing microbes through precision fermentation. This means multiplying particular micro-organisms, to produce particular products, in factories.I know some people will be horrified by this prospect. I can see some drawbacks. But I believe it comes in the nick of time.

Water Wars - Coming Soon, Maybe This Year

A new early-warning system to identify regions susceptible to war focuses on H2O, water. 

The Dutch government-funded Water, Peace and Security (WPS) global early warning tool, which was presented to the UN security council before it was launched formally last month, combines environmental variables such as rainfall and crop failures with political, economic and social factors to predict the risk of violent water-related conflicts up to a year in advance. 

It is the first tool of its kind to consider environmental data, such as precipitation and drought, alongside socio-economical variables, a combination lacking in previous tools designed to predict water conflicts. It is available online for the public to use, but is aimed more specifically at raising awareness among policymakers, and people and parties in water-stressed regions. 

The tool has already predicted conflicts that are likely to happen in 2020 in Iraq, Iran, Mali, Nigeria, India and Pakistan*. Developers claim an 86% success rate in identifying conflict zones where at least 10 fatalities could occur. The tool currently focuses on hotspots across Africa, the Middle East and southeast Asia.

* India and Pakistan have much in common. They're enemies. They're water insecure. Both have nuclear arsenals. Worse yet, there's another player that factors into their water woes - China. It too is water insecure. It too has plenty of nukes. And all three are mortally dependent on access to Himalayan headwaters, most of which are now under the control of China. What could possibly go wrong?

Growing global demand for water is already creating tensions – among communities, between farmers and city dwellers, between people and governments. Tensions are expected to increase as water scarcity becomes a reality for more people. According to the UN, as many as 5 billion people could experience water shortages by 2050.

Recent statistics from the Pacific Institute thinktank in California show that water-linked violence has surged significantly in the past decade: recorded incidents have more than doubled in the past 10 years, compared with previous decades. 

“The machine learning model is ‘trained’ to identify patterns using historical data on violent conflict and political, social, economic, demographic, and water risk,” said Charles Iceland, senior water expert at the World Resources Institute, part of the WPS partnership.

Where's Auntie Maude now that we need her?

No, Warren. An Accident Is No "Act of War." The US Navy Says So.

When I heard about the 737 crash in Tehran overnight, my first reaction was "bring on the conspiracy theorists." It's not that I'm fond of coincidences - Trump assassinates Iran's top general; Iran retaliates with missile strikes on two US air bases in Iraq; a Boeing 737 (no, not a 'Max' but - whatever); a Ukrainian airline (isn't everything dodgy in Ukraine?); a crash hot on the heels of Iran's missile strikes; that's a lot of coincidences - maybe.  But maybe it's also worth getting a few facts before racing to conclusions.

Our friend posts about a question supposedly by the New York Times' Nicholas Kristoff as to whether the Boeing jet might have been accidentally shot down by an Iranian anti-aircraft missile battery.

Then the hook:

If that turns out to be the case, Iran has committed an act of war against Canada. The League of Nations, among others, define an act of war as an attack by a state’s land, naval or air forces, with or without a declaration of war, on the territory, vessels or aircraft of another state. So this would appear to qualify, if true.

That's a pretty good reach, especially for a self-proclaimed "law professor." Sorry chum but you're getting a bit too unprofessorial. An attack is deliberate, pre-meditated. It's not accidental. If this was an accidental shoot down then it wasn't an act of war.

Let's contrast our friend's theory with Iran Air flight 655 as that passenger jet transited the Persian Gulf on 3 July, 1988. As the aircraft approached the US guided-missile cruiser yet still within Iranian airspace, USS Vincennes, the warship fired a Standard surface to air missile, killing all 290 passengers and crew. The navy later said it was all a mistake. They thought the jetliner was an attacking jet fighter. Oopsie!

Now was that an "act of war"? The US Navy admitted that they deliberately fired on and shot down the target but claimed it wasn't an act of war even if they had an itchy launch finger.

But, if this is going to be settled by conspiracy theories, here's another. Cui Bono? Who benefits from a commercial airliner being shot down moments after it lifts off from Teheran's airport? Who benefits from shutting down air travel into and out of Iran? Iran? Not so much. Let's remember, a modern 'manpad' or shoulder-mounted surface to air missile, could take down a jet. With the right people and competent networks it should be possible to bring a few in. Is that what happened? How would I know?

Even the National Review Thinks Trump is Nuts.

There are few more reliable Republican magazines than the National Review. Which is why it was refreshing to read NR columnist, Michael Doherty's take on the Mango Mussolini's antics in Iraq.

...since the news of this assassination broke, the president has sounded out of his mind. 

He has returned to his idea of vandalism, blasphemy, and outrage as strategy. Contradicting his own secretary of state, Trump promised that the United States would respond to further Iranian provocation by deliberately bombing cultural sites in Iran. “They’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural sites,” he said. “It doesn’t work that way.” 

This disgusting threat is in many ways worse than his promises of “fire and fury” in North Korea. The punishment would fall not on the government, or on the military that tortures and maims, but on the whole Iranian people — and really all of humanity that has an interest in the preservation of great treasures of antiquity, of which there are many in Iran. These are jewels of ancient civilization that ought to outlast Iran’s current government, and that deserve a better custodian than the mullahs. That aside, the threat carries zero strategic value for us while offering infinite propaganda value for the Iranian regime.

Trump wasn’t done. “These Media Posts will serve as notification to the United States Congress that should Iran strike any U.S. person or target, the United States will quickly & fully strike back, & perhaps in a disproportionate manner,” the president tweeted. In this, he reveals he has heard about language of proportionality but doesn’t understand its place in just-war theory. Proportionality is not about returning an equal or ever-so-slightly more forceful slap to someone who slapped you. Proportionality is about using the appropriate amount of force to achieve the desired end.

This unhinged rhetoric is not just dangerous in itself, it’s unproductive. NATO members put out statements supporting America’s decision to strike at Soleimani, statements that read as if a stage director had scrawled the word “cringe” in the margins. They are tempered precisely because the publics of our various European allies find Trump’s rhetoric crazy, and unlike Americans, they are not inclined to lower their standards of sanity to accommodate his. They may also remember that the last two expansions of American hostilities in the Middle East created the refugee crisis and a wave of terrorism headed their way.

'Disgusting, unhinged rhetoric'. Sure. Trump sounding 'out of his mind.' Why not? That's the sort of thing you might expect from the mainstream media, or leftist outfits like MSNBC. Only this is the National Review. It's true of course, all of it. Trump has mentally deteriorated over the past two years. He's become a genuine nutjob. Captain Queeg of the Oval Office.  Even the National Review can't ignore the path their president is taking America down.

Has Trump Got His War? Tehran Retaliates.

Iran claims to have launched a missile strike on a US airbase in Iraq. Meanwhile, Reuters is reporting that six missiles hit the Ain Al-Asad air base. A Pentagon statement claims that two bases housing American military personnel were struck by a total of twelve missiles.

Recently the USAF has deployed six B-52 bombers with an aerial tanker contingent to Diego Garcia out of reach of Iran's ballistic missiles but within striking distance of Tehran. That's a 5,200 km. trip one way. The Royal Navy has sent a submarine armed with cruise missiles to Iran's backyard.

US-Led Coalition Announces "We're Outta Here."

Reuters reports of a letter delivered by the US-led coalition to the Iraqi army confirming they will be leaving Iraq.  No further details yet.

How to interpret this? Is this a decision of a unified coalition or are fractures emerging? Has Trump's impulsiveness and blundering scared off America's partners unwilling to leave the safety of their personnel at the whim of America's lunatic-in-chief?

The era of American-led coalitions may be over. What George H.W. Bush forged to throw Saddam's army out of Kuwait could be a thing of the past. If the dutiful followers lose trust in the putative leader things can fall apart pretty quickly.

On Sunday, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that Iraq will pay dearly if it throws out the coalition.

“We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there,” Mr. Trump said of Iraq. “It cost billions of dollars to build. Long before my time. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.” 

Mr. Trump then escalated his language, saying: “If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it in a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.” 

“If there’s any hostility, that they do anything we think is inappropriate, we are going to put sanctions on Iraq, very big sanctions on Iraq,” Mr. Trump added.

Update:  Pentagon officials say the letter, written by a Marine Corps brigadier general, gives a false impression about a troop withdrawal. The spokesman didn't go so far, however, as to say the various contingents of troops are staying either.

A Dust-Up, Sure. War? That's Iffy.

Could the assassination of Iran's general Suleiman trigger a war? Possibly but we're not there yet.

From America's perspective, what would war with Iran look like? A Ghadaffi-style bombing campaign maybe. Of course the Libyan air war was in support of forces rebelling against the Libyan dictator. A similar rebellion/insurgency in Iran seems highly unlikely. If anything Trump's blunder has drawn Iranian factions closer together, rallying to the flag sort of thing.

A land war, possibly in the form of a long-feared Sunni versus Shiite holy war for the heart of Islaam pitting Saudi and Egyptian forces against Iran and possibly Iraqi armies? The possibilities seem endless and uniformly bad.

Whatever Trump might do to Iran would have a ripple effect in neighbouring Iraq, itself a dominant Shiite population. The Iraqi parliament has already passed a resolution calling for US forces to be expelled from that country.

Such a war might also force Trump's hand in Syria where ISIS forces are said to be regrouping. Trump's veiled claim to Syria's oil could be smoked out. That would be interesting.

So far both Russia and China have been pretty reluctant to reveal their posture on Iran, in particular, and on the greater Middle East in the wake of the Suleiman assassination.

Trump has also mobilized America's national security brigades. Even John Bolton, Trump's short-lived former national security adviser, has announced he'll gladly testify before the Senate impeachment hearing if only he's issued an invitation subpoena. I expect Trump wasted no time calling his Senate impeachment coordinator, Mitch McConell, to scotch that idea.

War? Maybe but there's a way to go yet.

Then again the bulletin just released by Reuters that the US-led coalition in Iraq has informed the Iraqi military that they're pulling up stakes and getting out offers plenty of opportunities to cast bones and read entrails. Are they running for cover? Are they clearing the decks so Trump won't have to fret about them if he bombs Iran back to the stone age? Are they afraid of what America's lunatic-in-chief might pull next and simply don't want to hang around to find out. Christ, who knows?

It's a Matter of Perspective

When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions Canada is a global pariah. Whether it's per capita emissions or overall emissions we're among the real bad boys. On a per capita basis we come in third or fourth. According to the World Resources Institute we're first, as in "worst." On overall emissions Canada, with just 0.5 per cent of the world's population, is will within the top 10 and set to move up two, possibly three rungs if the Trudeau government permits the massive open-pit bitumen project in Athabasca.

With those stats in mind, I was dismayed to read a report on an Oxfam study that the average Briton's greenhouse gas emissions for two weeks equals the average per capita emissions of an African for an entire year. Given that the Brits' per capita figures are half a Canadian's, that means it takes just one week for Canada's GHG emissions, taken on a per capita scale, to equal the average African's GHG emissions for an entire year.

The irony, of course, is that these people whose GHG emissions are so negligible tend to reside in the poorest and most vulnerable regions that will be the first lands to become uninhabitable largely thanks to the developed world/major emitters and the indifference of their populations.

You won't find a Canadian prime minister of either sullied stripe acknowledging what Canada's "just go for it" energy policy aimed at flooding world markets with low-value/high-carbon bitumen will very soon mean for those folks in Africa or, much closer to home, the people already reeling from climate change in Central America.  When the conversation turns to our incredible fossil bounty you will never hear words such as 'dislocation', 'migration', or 'death.'

Do You Really Want to Know?

Many of us know that neoliberalism is here to stay. In 2005, Canadian intellectual John Ralston Saul brought us "The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World." The neoliberal era of globalism, he argued, was over, dead. The world was in an interregnum, a pause, a period of suspension while we awaited the arrival of the next great thing, the next economic paradigm. Yet here we are in 2020 and we remain as indentured to the neoliberal order as ever.

In The Collapse of Globalism, Saul chronicled how the world moved from one economic paradigm to another on a roughly 30-year cycle. These models are much like religions. They're faith based, belief structures that inevitably falter and make way for the next model, the next belief structure.

Only Saul seems to have got it very, very wrong. Yes, neoliberalism has failed us - all but the few, the new plutocrats - but it remains with us and, barring some global calamity or popular upheaval, it seems destined to maintain its choke hold on us.

It seems that neoliberalism, expressed in globalism and the manic pursuit of perpetual exponential growth, will not be superceded by the "next great thing." It is, however, nurturing both global calamity and popular upheaval. There are many who warn that one or the other or some combination of both will materialize over the next decade. The pressures are certainly building. Hang onto your hat.

But this post isn't about dire predictions. It is, instead, about understanding where everything went wrong. How did we get to where we are today? What forces drove this change that has done so much for us but even more to us?

The following, two-part documentary from Deutsche Welle targets 1979, a year that saw the end of the post-war boom, the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of radical religion as the Second Big Bang.







When Liberal finance minister, Bill Morneau, announced that Canadians would just have to accept a future of “job churn” in the “gig economy” I was stunned. Never before had I heard a government minister so casually break faith with the Canadian people.

It was our Liberal government’s “TINA” moment, a reference to when Britain’s Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, ushered in the neoliberal era with a curt “there is no alternative.”

Morneau might have been a bit less casual in his pronouncement had a gig economy been in the future for him and his own but, of course, that was out of the question. This consignment into a grim precarious future would not be for the Morneaus or the Trudeaus. They, after all, were what a former parliamentary scribe labeled “higher purpose persons.”

It was when Morneau dropped his privileged hammer on working class Canadians that I knew how right I had been to break with the Liberals after 40 at times difficult years. This was no longer the party of Laurier, St. Laurent, Pearson or Pierre Trudeau. That would be akin to today’s Republicans boasting of being the “Party of Lincoln.” No, this was a Liberal party that didn’t bridge divides but instead accommodated them. There would be no alternative.

The Guardian addressed the perils of the gig economy taking hold in the UK.

Across Britain, gig work – part of a casualised, precarious and on-call jobs market – is growing at a giddy rate. The sector has more than doubled in size since 2016 and now accounts for 4.7 million workers. In part this is due to new technology: people are using apps on their mobile phones to sell their labour. The core business model relies on near-instant recourse to a large pool of on-demand workers looking for their next gig. Uncertain work is becoming the norm, with the result that unemployment statistics look better than the way Britons feel. It is an environment of overwork, marked by intense bursts of exhaustion. One gig-economy firm even tried to market burnout as a lifestyle by claiming its workers were “doers” for whom “sleep deprivation is [their] drug of choice”. Nothing can disguise the fact that the gig economy’s rise has been accompanied by a fall in the fortunes of working households – which now comprise 58% of those below the official poverty line; the figure was 37% in 1995. In a seminal paper, Alex Wood and other researchers at Oxford University found that half of the gig work in the UK is in our streets, supplying food or couriering parcels or offering taxi rides.

The other half of gig work is remote – providing digital services, such as data entry and programming, on platforms such as Upwork, Freelancer and Fiverr, which act as auction houses for human labour, where people place a bid to do the work on offer. Those in richer nations can find themselves undercut by those in poorer places. In 2017 US freelancers using Upworknetted $27m – only a little more than those in India. Many of the world’s biggest firms use these apps to outsource work to lower costs. Microwork, where tasks are broken down, is dominated by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk division. Two-thirds of its US workers earn less than the federal minimum wage.

The office faces a future like that of the factory floor in the 1980s, when work was shipped abroad to save money and boost profits. In his book Humans as a Service, the Oxford academic Jeremias Prassl says the gig economy’s problems – for workers and markets – are driven by firms “presenting themselves as mere intermediaries rather than powerful service providers … [to] shift nearly all of their business risk and cost onto others”. The simplest illustration of this is Uber’s claim that its drivers are not employees – at a stroke this potentially avoids VAT liabilities of £1.5bn. That sort of cash could have been used to pay towards a health service dealing with the fallout from insecure jobs with unpredictable shifts. A landmark study tracking people who lost their jobs in the recession of 2010 found that those who ended up with poor-quality work – with low pay, low autonomy, and high insecurity – had higher chronic stress levels than those who had remained unemployed.

This gig economy guts labour and working class citizens who struggle to make ends meet. Teddy Roosevelt, in his 1910 "Square Deal" speech, held it is the job of government to balance the rights of labour against the rights of capital and he cited Abraham Lincoln for the proposition that, of the two, labour ought to be by far the more superior. That goes to the heart of progressivism and it puts the lie to claims that our Liberal government, the government steered by this prime minister and his finance minister, is genuinely progressive. It's not.

Will Australia Become a Warning for Climate Deniers in Politics?

The words that greeted Aussie prime minister, Scott Morrison, as he addressed a crowd of worried residents of fire-ravaged New South Wales were pretty blunt - "You're not welcome, you fuckwit."

From taking a break from the wildfires to holiday in smoke-free Hawaii to refusing to acknowledge the scale of Australia's wildfire crisis, many Australians are turning against their prime minister. Morrison's goose, as they say, may be cooked.

Standing in the crowd, Zoey Salucci McDermott, 20, eyed Scott Morrisoncoolly. She and her young daughter had lost her home in the fires, so when he extended his hand in greeting, she did not reciprocate. “I’ll only shake your hand if you give more funding to the RFS [Rural Fire Service],” McDermott said, holding back tears. “So many people here have lost their homes. We need more help.” The prime minister turned away. 

Days before, two separate firefronts had swept across much of southern NSW and eastern Victoria with unprecedented ferocity, wiping entire towns from the map. When the flames arrived in Cobargo, they tore through the main street, roaring like the ocean, incinerating lives and livelihoods. 

Robert Salway, 63, and his son Patrick, 29, died when they stayed behind to defend their property. Patrick’s wife, Renee, who is pregnant with the couple’s second child, found their bodies.

...Morrison has shrugged off criticism of his government’s climate change policies. Speaking at the UN in New York last September he insisted Australia would meet its emissions reductions targets “in a canter”. That same month, his government was being warned about the catastrophic fire risk presented by climate change.

Former New South Wales fire chief Greg Mullins and 22 other former emergency services chiefs wrote to Morrison outlining the potential crisis and asking for more specialised equipment to deal with hotter and longer bushfire periods. 

They were ignored. Emergency services have been asking for resources since 2016, when the National Aerial Firefighting Centre asked for a “national large air-tanker fleet” to support firefighting operations but were rebuffed. 

The consistent refusal to stump up the cash or even engage with a chorus of experts warning about a crisis has defined the conservative government’s policy since it took power under Tony Abbott in 2013.
Now, as the country faces one of the worst natural disasters in its history, a short-term, transactional austerity politics has collided with the long arc of climate change in a way that is clearly visible on the ground. 

Firefighters in some areas have been forced to crowdfund for basic equipment while until recently the federal government remained steadfast in its refusal to back-pay volunteers for their time, even as the prime minister praised their “spirit”.

Canada's petro-pols would do well to pay attention to what is playing out in Australia. It's going to become increasingly difficult - and risky - to keep pimping fossil fuels, especially the high-carbon, low value trash, in a world being swept by fires.  Conservative or Liberal, their day of reckoning could arrive sooner than they expect.

The Only Way This Ends Well

It was an easy-peasy take out.  A designated target travels to an airport. You have a drone overhead. The target gets into a car. Once clear of the terminal you take him out with a Hellfire missile. Easy-peasy. You've been doing this for years. You're the Pros from Dover.

The only thing that sets this apart from the run-of-the-mill drone strike was the target, Iran's top general, Qassem Suleimani. When you take out a guy of his stature that becomes in anyone's parlance an act of war.

Of course this was done at the command of America's barely sentient and wildly impulsive Commander-in-Chief, DJ Trump, the Mango Mussolini.

There are plenty who are already heralding this as a great thing. Suleimani was a bad actor, a devil, stirring up Shiite terrorists to attack Gringos, that sort of thing. He was a bad actor, no argument there. But that's not the point. There is no shortage of bad actors deserving to be bumped off in the Middle East - on both sides. Eliminating one is hardly a game changer.

Since George H.W. Bush threw Saddam out of Kuwait and then decided that his army should hang around a while, the United States has been tied down in the Middle East. That revitalized Sunni fundamentalists angry at the defilement of their Holy Land. It led to the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. That begat the unfinished invasion of Afghanistan, the troubled conquest of Iraq and, eventually, even dragged a reluctant Pentagon into the Syrian civil conflict.

Bear in mind that all of these events were the handiwork of the Sunnis - the Saudis, Kuwaitis, Yemenis, Afghans and Iraqis. al Qaeda, Boko Haram, al Shebaab, ISIS, all of them Sunni. All of this has been instigated or supported by the princes, emirs and sheiks of the Sunni persuasion. Not Iran. Then again, see one Arab, seen 'em all. See one Persian, seen 'em all.

Iran is a majority Shiite country. So too is Iraq. Syria is majority Sunni but controlled by the Alawite minority that cleaves to Shiite Islam. Likewise, Hezbollah is a Shiite terrorist group. The Houthis of Yemen are also backed by Iran.

So what are we to make of the assassination of Suleimani? Buggered if I know.  He was, but is no longer, the leader of Iran's elite Qud force. That means that someone will step up to replace him. Ismail Ghani. Whether that successor can fill Suleimani's shoes is another matter.

Iran can plainly consider this an act of war. It was the doing of a state actor, America, against another state, Iran. In the context of a war with the US, that makes most Americans in Iraq - diplomats, soldiers, contractors - legitimate military targets. Given that Iraq is majority Shiite the populace could turn resentful of an ongoing American presence in their country.  Baghdad has a limited number of options. Colluding with the US against Iran isn't one of them. Ordering American forces and personnel out is one of them.

America is running out of friends in the Middle East. Even the Saudis have been cozying up to Russia. Syria is allowing Russia to establish a naval base and hosts Russian ground and air forces.  Turkey, meanwhile, in defiance of American and NATO demands, is equipping its forces with Russia's S-400 surface-to-air missile batteries.  Russia made a show of refusing Iran the S-400, fearing it might destabilize the region but now, who knows?  China has a military base up and running in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. It's positioned right next to an American military installation.   A week ago China, Russia and Iran staged a joint naval exercise in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Oman.

The point is American hegemony in the Middle East/South Asia is not what it once was.  There are new players, regional challengers, and Trump's assassination of Suleimani  may eventually play into America's rival's hands.

China may be the big winner from this assassination. Today Trump ordered more American troops to Iraq. Another US war in the Middle East could derail the Pentagon's plans of shifting focus (and forces) to East Asia and Asia Pacific. Whatever ties them down in the Middle East buys time and opportunities for China.

There is one way that the killing of Suleimani could end well. That's if the Ayatollahs and Mullahs in Tehran throw in the towel, raise the white flag and seek terms of surrender. Do let me know when that happens.