When Trudeau tries to squirm off the hook for making a farce of his solemn promises about cleaning up the National Energy Board, full consultation with First Nations and, the real kicker, "social licence," he goes straight for the double-talk by which you know he's lying right into your face - again.
It's bad enough that he's a liar but he's not even good at it. He's not convincing, not if you really listen to his horseshit.
He came out to Nanaimo where the crowd wasn't particularly pleased with his pipeline decision on the Kinder Morgan line. He said there were unhappy people on both sides and he had to reach a "compromise." Then he launched into the really greasy horseshit, the stuff about how Canada's green future depended on exporting as much Black Death bitumen as conceivably possible.
But, wait. What's this voice of reason "compromise" he keeps touting? What is a compromise but some form of quid pro quo, give and take. So, let's see. Alberta gets something, the goddamned pipeline, and British Columbia gets what, oh yeah, the shit end of the stick.
I think what Justin is really getting at is carbon pricing. We know all about that here in B.C. We've had it for years. We did it because, given the way the climate is going, it was the right thing to do. Not nearly enough, mind you, but a start. We're going to have to do far better than that before long but we sort of broke the ice.
So that must be Justin's vaunted compromise. It was a compromise between Ottawa and Alberta, a Justin-Rachel deal. She would stop breaking Justin's balls over carbon pricing and he would throw B.C. into the ditch, the one they're digging for that new pipeline.
In other words, Justin is rewarding Rachel for doing nothing more than the right thing, eventually, maybe, and belatedly at that. So just what does B.C. get out of this compromise? Let's see.
We get a bigger, perhaps three times bigger, pipeline system crossing our seismically active territory. A mega-pipeline operated by an American outfit with a lengthy and lousy pipeline safety record. Plus we get a new armada of heavily laden supertankers plying our, at times, very treacherous waters.
Been following the oil tanker disasters of recent months? In January the Sanchi went down carrying 136,000 tons of oil. Some of it is already washing up on the Japanese shoreline. The good news is that was light crude oil. It was at the other end of the scale from Trudeau-Notley's heavy crude bitumen laced with abrasives, acids, heavy metals, carcinogens and other crap.
Sorry, Canada, but your prime minister took my province and hung us out to dry. It's sort of like Justin's way of saying, "You play ball with me, or else, and then I'll stick the bat straight up your ass." Not the sort of thing that inspires a lot of patriotism.
Update:
To see what an unmitigated scam Trudeau and Notley intend to perpetrate on British Columbians, read Emma Gilchrist's excellent analysis of Ottawa and Alberta's bitumen scheme and everything (warning, there's a lot) they're not telling anyone. Sure there's a conspiracy here and the conspirators are Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau.
It's telling what has Notley's knickers in a bunch. British Columbia has said it wants no "additional" bitumen flowing into the province until the safety of a bitumen spill and the adequacy of the government's vaunted "world class" oil spill response can be assessed. Trudeau has never wasted an opportunity to proclaim that this has all been done, the science is in. Well, Justin, where the f#@k is it then? Why haven't you circulated this, high and low, to every newsroom in B.C. and every mailbox of every British Columbian?
Notley isn't losing her shit over a bitumen embargo because there isn't one, nor has one been threatened. She has gone ballistic over the prospect that British Columbia wants to assess the risks of dilbit spills, ashore and at sea, and this supposedly wonderful oil spill response apparatus. That's what she's out to thwart, trying to depict it, quite falsely, as a wrongful embargo on dilbit by a petulant British Columbia.
You might have heard of it, the Carbon Budget. That is the amount, in tonnes, of the greenhouse gas, CO2, that we can still add to the atmosphere and yet supposedly have a snowball's chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.
Big news from America where Washington's Energy Department has released a report projecting that there'll be no reduction in US emissions from now until 2050, probably even some increase. If that's accurate it means that the United States of America, representing some 4.4 per cent of global population, will gobble up the entire carbon quota for the other 95.6 per cent.
Burn Baby, Burn.
Perhaps inspired by the Energy Department's report, a few days ago Exxon released its own report to shareholders saying the petro-market is sound into the indefinite future and it'll have no problem flogging all of its proven reserves and should continue exploring for new oil fields.
Well kids, there goes the neighbourhood. As Exxon Mobil goes, so goes Aramco, Sinopec, Petro China, Shell, BP, Total - the lot of them. And that means that Trudeau and Notley are in on it too. It's Mardi Gras for carbon energy. Carbon taxes, are you kidding?
Since the heady days of the Paris Climate Summit in December, 2015, I've been banging the drum for the warning the Potsdam Institute's climate wizard, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, issued to the conference delegates. He said that averting climate catastrophe might be possible provided the world governments acted in concert to effect an "induced implosion" of the fossil energy industry.
Schellnhuber knew what, inside ourselves, most of us know. This massive industry, said to represent some 27 trillion dollars of subscribed wealth on the stock markets and bourses around the world wouldn't let go. It would have to be put down. That is the "induced" part of Schellnhuber's warning.
Without the political will to put down the fossil fuelers, we're gonna burn. It's only a matter of physics - and geology, environmental geography, chemistry, atmospherics, glaciology, biology and botany, marine biology, oceanography and hydrology, meteorology, epidemiology, medicine, climatology, agronomy, seismology, paleontology - every discipline that had tested and corroborated the central thesis of climate change.
Twenty seven trillion dollars and growing. Money talks, science walks. You and me? We're just along for the ride.
Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has suggested that global warming may be beneficial to humans, in his latest departure from mainstream climate science.
Pruitt, who has previously erred by denying that carbon dioxide is a key driver of climate change, has again caused consternation among scientists by suggesting that warming temperatures could benefit civilization.
The EPA administrator said that humans are contributing to climate “to a certain degree”, but added: “We know humans have most flourished during times of warming trends. There are assumptions made that because the climate is warming that necessarily is a bad thing.
What's the difference between all-out nuclear war and catastrophic climate change? So far we haven't been stupid enough to resort to all-out nuclear war.
Both of them can end civilization, indeed most life on Earth. The way we're going it's unclear which will get the job done first.
Canada, of course, doesn't field a nuclear arsenal but it sure as hell is doing its bit on the other threat, runaway global warming. We have huge proven reserves of the filthiest, most dangerous, high-carbon ersatz oil on the planet, Athabasca bitumen. And we've got two provinces and a succession of federal governments hell bent on getting as much of that deadly crap as conceivably possible to foreign markets.
When challenged on this, our prime minister pops a fuze and says the only thing he can come up with. Here's what he told an angry crowd yesterday in Nanaimo: "We wanted a national carbon reduction plan, a national emissions plan that is going to allow us to reach our climate goals, to reach our Paris commitments but in order to do that, part of moving forward is approving the Kinder Morgan pipeline. It is something many people feel very strongly about on either side, but that is the nature of the compromise we had to make in the best interests of Canada."
That's some ripe horseshit to be sure. Flogging Black Death is "part of moving forward." It's "in the nature of the compromise" that the Liberal government "had to make in the best interests of Canada."
If that's "moving forward," in what direction exactly is Canada heading? Well, given that Trudeau's climate goals were set by Stephen Harper and we're not on track to even meet those, you can probably figure out where Justin is taking us.
One of America's top climate scientists and advocates, James Hansen, had this to say five years ago about the Tar Sands.
"To avoid passing tipping points, such as initiation of the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, we need to limit the climate forcing severely. It's still possible to do that, if we phase down carbon emissions rapidly, but that means moving expeditiously to clean energies of the future. Moving to tar sands, one of the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fuels on the planet, is a step in exactly the opposite direction, indicating either that governments don't understand the situation or that they just don't give a damn."
Hansen isn't alone. Climate science backs him up. When Justin Trudeau and his environment minister burst onto the floor of the Paris Climate Summit in 2015, they scored big by urging that the old target for maximum global warming, then at 2 degrees Celsius, be cut to a humanity-saving 1.5C. McKenna and Trudeau didn't hear, nor heed, the warning of another top world climate scientist at the Paris Summit, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber's warning that any hope of holding global warming to 1.5 C would depend on an "induced implosion" of the fossil energy industry.
Schellnhuber said if we want to do this we can if the petro-states move quickly to shut down their fossil fuel resources and rapidly transition to alternative energy. It doesn't sound like Hans had Trudeau's let 'er rip energy policy in mind.
Here's the thing. Trudeau, Notley and their Oil Patch patrons, frame this as a purely economic issue. Schellnhuber argues it goes way beyond economics.
“In the end it is a moral decision. Do you want to be part of the generation that screwed up the planet for the next 1,000 years? I don’t think we should make that decision.”
Oil field experts say that these new pipelines are 30-year investments. Barring some collapse of markets, those investing the hundreds of billions of dollars into these pipelines have confidence that they'll reap their rewards. And, so long as the Oil Patch has reliable and indulgent governments like Harper's and Trudeau's, they're probably taking a safe bet.
Trudeau sees calls for real action to fight climate change as "sanctimonious crap." Ask David Suzuki:
Trudeau called him personally June 28, 2015, to talk about the Liberal platform on climate change that was to be revealed the next day. “I didn’t call Justin, he called me,” Suzuki said. “He wanted an endorsement and he wanted to tell me exactly what his program was.”
The program includes support for the Keystone XL pipeline, a rejection of the Northern Gateway pipeline and a commitment to work with the provinces to establish a cap-and-trade system.
“I said, ‘Justin, stop it, you’re just being political, you just want to make headway in Alberta,’” Suzuki says he told Trudeau. “You’re for the development of the tar sands, you’re for the Keystone pipeline, but you’re against the Northern Gateway, you’re all over the damn map!”
Suzuki went on to advise Trudeau that taking the target of a two-degree rise in temperature seriously means 80 per cent of the oil sands has to stay in the ground. Suzuki believes stopping oil sands development will mean “no debate about pipelines or expanding railways or shipping stuff offshore—none of that comes into it.”
Suzuki says this is when the exchange turned nasty. “He said, ‘I don’t have to listen to this sanctimonious crap.’ I proceeded to call him a twerp.”
Mr. Trudeau obviously won't be talking about this but if you want to know how Athabasca bitumen impacts humanity's chances of averting climate catastrophe, a good place to start is this 2012 U. Vic. paper by Neil Swart and Andrew Weaver. I suppose, in Trudeau's mind, that's just more sanctimonious crap.
Hansen, Schellnhuber, Suzuki, and Weaver, there are plenty more voices backing them up. You can't reconcile their science with Mr. Trudeau's political bafflegab.
Schellnhuber is right. This is a moral issue. It's a deadly serious moral issue. Deadly as in lethal. Remember how we used to export asbestos to sketchy markets offshore even though we knew it would condemn people in the Third World to a horribly painful end? Well, we're doing something along those same lines with bitumen.
Climate change is already claiming innocent lives, predominantly in the poorest, most vulnerable corners of the world. They're dying from heatwaves, drought, flooding, severe storm events, sea level rise, crop failures and more. We've now got a new phenomenon, climate wars - wars that are triggered in whole or in part by the devastation of climate change. The civil war in Syria began as the result of famine caused by crop failure. And this is just the early onset stuff. There's a lot more coming their way. These people are collateral damage to our economic imperative.
I'm one of a growing number of British Columbians steadfastly opposed to the machinations of Harper-Trudeau, Klein-Notley, the Tar Sanders and their very sketchy dilbit pipeline operators with their horrible accident track record. They've shown us what these pipelines do to the territories they cross. Ask the people of Kalamazoo, Michigan. That, of course, was Enbridge. But what do you know about the current contender, Kinder-Morgan? Let's put it this way. If they were operating school buses instead of pipelines you would probably wind up home-schooling your kids.
And when it comes to an armada of lumbering, dilbit-laden supertankers navigating British Columbia's very challenging and dangerous coastal waters, there are many problems. The odds aren't on our side. We've had Coast Guard and RCN officers, merchant mariners, all advise Trudeau's National Energy Board that a supertanker calamity isn't a matter of if but when and how often.
It was March 24, 1989, nearly 30 years ago, that the Exxon Valdez came to grief in Alaska's Prince William Sound. Ten million gallons were spilled. But that wasn't dilbit. It was conventional crude oil, kid's stuff. That spill covered 1,300 miles of coastline, 11,000 square miles of ocean. More than a quarter of a century later the oil still isn't cleaned up.
On March 24, 2014, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the spill, NOAA scientists reported that some species seem to have recovered, with the sea otter the latest creature to return to pre-spill numbers. Scientists who have monitored the spill area for the last 25 years report that concern remains for one of two pods of local orca whales, with fears that one pod may eventually die out.[33] Federal scientists estimate that between 16,000 and 21,000 US gallons (61 to 79 m3) of oil remains on beaches in Prince William Sound and up to 450 miles (725 km) away. Some of the oil does not appear to have biodegraded at all. A USGS scientist who analyses the remaining oil along the coastline states that it remains among rocks and between tide marks. "The oil mixes with seawater and forms an emulsion...Left out, the surface crusts over but the inside still has the consistency of mayonnaise – or mousse."[34] Alaska state senator Berta Gardner is urging Alaskan politicians to demand that the US government force ExxonMobil to pay the final $92 million (£57 million) still owed from the court settlement. The major part of the money would be spent to finish cleaning up oiled beaches and attempting to restore the crippled herring population.
The Exxon Valdez spilled conventional crude oil and yet Trudeau and Notley want to put us to that very risk only with something vastly worse, dilbit, diluted-bitumen. Bitumen, a persistent sludge laced with acids, abrasives, toxins, heavy metals and carcinogens, that will head right for the sea bed where it will remain for decades contaminating the coastal waters, devastating the marine ecology. To borrow Hansen's words, "they just don't give a damn."
The Trudeau government put the lie to its vaunted "world class oil spill clean up" preparations when Dame Cathy's environment ministry was caught having approved an incredibly dangerous chemical, Corexit, for use in BC waters as an oil dispersant. We know a lot about Corexit from its use during the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon oil spills.
If you don't know about this chemical that our federal government has cleared for use in British Columbia's coastal waters, watch this.
If you've got the stomach for it and want to watch the entire Vice expose on Corexit, you can watch it here.
This is the reality of what Justin Trudeau wants to do to our coast, intends to do to our coast, tells us he is going to do to our coast.
Pushing ever more bitumen onto world markets is morally reprehensible. Worse yet, it's a betrayal of our own kids and grandkids. Shipping it in the most lethal possible form, dilbit, rather than requiring that it be refined on site, in Athabasca, to remove the most odious components - the acids, the abrasives, the heavy metals, the carcinogens, the pet coke, and the sludge - is equally reprehensible. To even imagine using Corexit in British Columbia's coastal waters is fiendishly reckless. And they're doing it all just to put a few extra bucks in Rachel Notley's and her Oil Patch patrons' pockets.
"We wanted a national carbon reduction plan, a national emissions plan that is going to allow us to reach our climate goals, to reach our Paris commitments but in order to do that, part of moving forward is approving the Kinder Morgan pipeline. It is something many people feel very strongly about on either side, but that is the nature of the compromise we had to make in the best interests of Canada."
That's Trump-grade bullshit to be sure. We can't have a national emissions plan, we can't meet our commitments under the Paris Climate accord, unless we rapidly expand our extraction and export of the world's highest-cost/highest-carbon ersatz petroleum.
The Dauphin doesn't grasp the concept of cognitive dissonance but the crowd in his Nanaimo townhall audience could smell the reek of it on him. Well I suppose it's comforting in a way that we're not the only country with a leader who will, at the drop of a hat, stand there and lie right to your face.
Yes, kids, the way to get speeding under control is for us to drive 90 mph through school zones.
You want a "compromise" Justin? There is a compromise to be had. Simply refine the bitumen on site in Athabasca. Refine out the heavy metals. Refine out the acids and toxins. Refine out the carcinogens. Refine out the pet-coke. Refine out the sludge. Leave those components, the chemicals that create the greatest and lasting threat to British Columbia and our coastal waters, where they belong, right where they came from.
You want a pipeline that respects British Columbia? Come back to us with a proposal to transport fully refined, synthetic crude. With all the dilbit garbage removed - the diluent and the dangerous by-products - you won't need nearly as many tankers. Fewer tankers = lessened risk of marine accidents. And, when you do have a catastrophic accident - and the Coast Guard, RCN officers and merchant mariners have all testified it's only a matter of when and how often - well then the worst we'll have to deal with is a conventional oil spill.
Diplomats strive to be invisible, but the once pick for US ambassador to South Korea turned out to be anything but invisible and that should have us all very worried.
One top U.S. official said embassy staff learned through news reports that their embassy would remain without a top envoy, raising concern that the critical strategic post will remain empty for the foreseeable future.
Now, as the U.S. and its allies look to ramp up pressure against Pyongyang while avoiding military conflict, the prolonged — and now indefinite — vacancy of the job of ambassador to Seoul is raising concern that any hope for a diplomatic solution to the standoff with North Korea is diminishing. ...
A senior administration official confirmed to NBC News that Cha withdrew from consideration after disagreeing with the administration about its approach to the North Korean crisis. A second senior administration official and a third person close to the decision tells NBC News that South Korea’s government had been informed that Cha was to be nominated as ambassador and he had received his clearances — but then some of his policy positions upset the White House.
A senior White House official confirmed that Cha had withdrawn from consideration and wished him well, but said the policy disagreements have been mischaracterized in the media. The official did not elaborate.
Cha, a professor at Georgetown University, penned an editorial for The Washington Post, which first reported that he had withdrawn from consideration. In it, he said that with regard to confronting North Korea, "the answer is not, as some Trump administration officials have suggested, a preventive military strike."
"To be clear," Cha continued, "(t)he president would be putting at risk an American population the size of a medium-size U.S. city — Pittsburgh, say, or Cincinnati — on the assumption that a crazy and undeterrable dictator will be rationally cowed by a demonstration of U.S. kinetic power."
Did you get that? There's such a cabal within the White House clamoring for a preventive military "first strike" that he withdrew himself from nomination so that he could be free to warn the American people, via The Washington Post, of what is really going on within Trump's Oval Office. This makes Dr. Strangelove look a bit like Shirley Temple, only that was fiction, this is fact. Oh dear.
Adios, People's Republic. Hello the Chinese Republic of Haves and Have-Nots.
For decades following its post-war creation, the People's Republic of China preached the virtues of a classless society. Of course it wasn't really true. Some fared well, most didn't. Some peoples' kids got educated, most didn't. Yet everyone was expected to pay lip service to the egalitarian idea.
That was then. This is now. China has had nearly two decades of its "economic miracle" but, while that has benefited Chinese society it was also left it divided especially along urban-rural lines.
A while back I read a paper written by three leading Chinese economists that explored how their country would likely develop in the 21st century. It dealt with areas such as food security, population growth, the emerging entrepreneurial/consumer class. It also touched on China's growing class divide.
The paper argued that Chinese society would, of necessity, fracture. Everyone would aspire to a much higher standard of living, in some cases a Western standard of living: bigger houses, more cars, better food, luxuries of every description. It made the argument that a class of individuals were so vital to China's advancement that that they had to be treated differently, better than the masses. A metaphor was used: an island of privilege floating on a sea of relative poverty. There simply weren't nearly enough resources on the planet to float all Chinese junks. They predicted that India would face the same predicament, only worse.
The fact that China’s urban middle classes are doing pretty well says little about whether China has anything like a true middle-class society. Income inequality is a problem throughout the world, but in China, inequalities run much deeper than in the West. Hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese are still excluded from full participation in the country’s rapidly developing urban economy. And that exclusion is in danger of ossifying into something resembling a permanent caste system.
China’s economic growth is legendary, and China really has come a long way since Deng Xiaoping declared China open for business 40 years ago. The three big urban agglomerations of eastern China — the areas centered on Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong — have already converged in GDP per capita with developed Asian countries like Taiwan and South Korea, at least in purchasing power parity terms. And even poor, inland cities like Chengdu are doing well compared to secondary cities in other middle-income countries.
But rural China still lags far behind. That’s not surprising; rural areas all over the world tend to be poorer than cities
Even in the United States, rural households are on average 4 percent poorer than urban households.
But in China, the rural income deficit averages 63 percent nationwide, and that’s in a country with a lot of very poor urban areas that outsiders rarely hear about.
...
Today, China has started to declare its rich eastern cities to be “full.” The Chinese government intends to cap Beijing’s population at 23 million, just 1 million above its current level. Shanghai’s population is to be capped at 25 million by 2040, a goal that may prove difficult considering that its population already exceeds 24 million. While these limits are certain to be breached, China’s repressive party-state does have the capacity to coerce would-be city-dwellers to move elsewhere.
It’s not just glamorous megacities like Beijing and Shanghai that are closing their doors. Even second-tier cities and provincial capitals like Chengdu are increasingly pushing out the poor. Forcible slum clearance in China often involves the destruction of so-called urban villages: densely populated but often chaotically planned former villages that have been swallowed up by the growth of nearby metropolises.
...
China’s President and Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has staked his reputation on a promise to turn China into a moderately prosperous society by 2020. It’s not much of a gamble. China already is a “moderately” prosperous society. The real challenge is to grow China into a fully prosperous society , and that can only be done by raising the rest of the country to something like the income levels that prevail in the eastern coastal cities — or at least those of second-tier inland cities like Chengdu.
That means expanding the middle class, not just by getting a few more people over an arbitrary income line, but by expanding economic opportunities and fighting social exclusion. Here, the politics get more difficult. In a distinctively Chinese form of discrimination, the natives of cities like Beijing and Shanghai often look down on their country cousins from places like Sichuan. China may not be a democracy, but articulate middle-class professionals do have the ability to influence policy, especially in their own cities. Increasingly, the policy they want is exclusion.
Around the world but especially in North America, governments have adapted to the neoliberal order, globalism, by focusing on short-term growth even while imperiling our future generations.
More voices in recent years have joined the chorus calling for the revival of posterity. Now it's the World Economic Forum, the Billionaire Boys' Club of Davos, joining the ranks.
Davos, the place where the man boy in polka dot socks goes to preen. The World Economic Forum has released a damning report warning young people that their governments' focus on short term growth is failing their generation and those to follow.
The global obsession with short-term growth has led to historically high levels of income inequality and a growing gap between old and young people, according to a damning new report by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
In a surprisingly stark warning about the impact of short-termism, the WEF calls for a new way of assessing national accomplishment beyond gross domestic product (GDP), a measure it says fuels increasing income and wealth inequality.
Based on an analysis of its annual Inclusive Development Index (IDI) that focused on 11 measures of economic progress (in addition to GDP) for 29 developed countries, the WEF report warns that both rich and poor countries are failing to protect future generations – highlighting high levels of public debt and economic drivers that depend on a high rate of carbon dioxide emissions as two key factors.
Even in countries with the strongest economic growth in terms of GDP, such as the US, the report found evidence of “inclusion” (where increased wealth and opportunity is being shared more widely) to be lacking.
Out of the 30 nations in Canada's group we placed a thoroughly mediocre 15th. Our report card is here.
As I wrote this post it reminded me of a passage from James K. (son of John K.) Galbraith's book, The Predator State, that speaks to posterity and planning and the pitfalls of prostrating our societies to "the market."
A country that does not have a public planning system simply turns this function over to a network of private enterprise - domestic or foreign - which then becomes the true seat of economic power. And that is why the struggle over planning is, and remains, such a sensitive issue: it is a struggle over power. It is a struggle not between democracy and the corporation, but between those - scientists, engineers, some economists, and public intellectuals - who attempt to represent the common and future interest and those - banks, companies, lobbyists, and the economists whom they employ - that represent only the tribal and current interest. It is an uneven struggle. It is a struggle in which, outside of wartime and the zone of permanent planning called the Pentagon, the planners have prevailed only on rare occasions, notably during the Great Depression. But it is an inescapable struggle. If the future is to be provided for, you must have a community of planners, and some way must be found to support them, to permit them to develop their plans and resolve their differences, and to give them access to the levers of power. To walk away from this problem with a shrug about "markets" is to disenfranchise the future. To enable planning guarantees nothing. But to "rely on the market" is to guarantee that the interests of the future will never be provided for.
The World Justice Project's latest Rule of Law Report is out. It's not terrible but it's far from good either and it's getting worse.
“The WJP’s findings provide worrying confirmation that we live in very dangerous times for the rule of law and human rights,” said Murray Hunt, director of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law.
“The worldwide resurgence of populism, authoritarian nationalism and the general retreat from international legal obligations are trends which, if not checked, pose an existential threat to the rule of law. Preventing violations of the rule of law and human rights is always better than curing them after the event,” Hunt said.
Since the publication of the last WJP Rule of Law Index in October 2016, a majority of countries worldwide saw their scores decline in the areas of human rights, checks on government powers, and civil and criminal justice. The greatest decline was seen in Factor 4, Fundamental Rights (71 countries dropped out of 113), which measures absence of discrimination, right to life and security, due process, freedom of expression and religion, right to privacy, freedom of association, and labor rights.
The second greatest decline was seen in Factor 1, Constraints on Government Powers (64 countries dropped out of 113), which measures the extent to which those who govern are bound by law. In addition, more countries’ overall rule of law score declined (34%) than improved (29%) as compared to their 2016 Index scores—a troubling trend. Thirty-seven percent of countries’ overall rule of law score remained the same.
Who can forget the heady days of 2015 when a newly minted prime minister and his enviromin stormed the Paris Climate Summit to promote a new global warming limit of just 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, sweeping aside the old target of 2C by 2100,
So, how is that working out? Well, Canada is well off target for meeting its greenhouse gas emissions reductions. And we're still sticking with Stephen Harper's pathetic targets. In other words, they were just f#@king with ya.
The fact is, it seems we're already out of time for that 1.5 C nonsense. Britain's Met Office warns that we're going to break through that 1.5 C ceiling in the next five years.
“It is now possible that continued warming from greenhouse gases along with natural variability could combine so we temporarily exceed 1.5C in the next five years,” said Stephen Belcher, the chief scientist at the Met Office.
Global temperatures have been steadily rising over the past 20 years, and in each of the last three years averages have topped the 1C threshold. Last year was the second hottest on record, and the hottest not to have been given an additional boost by the El Niño effect.
The 1.5C threshold was set at Paris as an ambitious target because scientists fear that a world warmer than that would be susceptible to ever wilder climactic events that in turn would precipitate greater drought, habitat loss, food insecurity and mass migration.
The thing to bear in mind is that we've already "locked in" centuries of warming. The greenhouse gas, CO2, lasts for centuries. How many centuries we still don't know. Methane, by contrast, is 104 times more powerful than CO2 over the first 20 years but falls off quickly after that so, by the end of a hundred years, its warming factor is only 28 times more powerful than CO2. A mere 28 times. It's like the burner on the stove that you can't turn off.
And every tanker that sails from a Canadian port with a gutload of high-carbon bitumen makes an already nightmarish situation far worse. Trudeau knows that. Notley knows that. They don't give a f#@k what happens to your grandkids. They've got bitumen to flog, as much and as fast as possible.
And here's another thing to bear in mind. These figures are based on man-made emissions - methane from agriculture, CO2 from internal combustion engines, that sort of thing. Only now we're not alone. We've awoken the sleeping giant, nature itself. As we've thawed the Arctic nature is releasing increasing volumes of seabed methane, clathrates, and methane no longer safely sequestered within the melting tundra and permafrost.
Toynbee blames much of the toxic pollution that now befouls London as the inevitable side effect of privatization of utilities, transportation and even the mail service.
As with most of the gravest problems facing Britain, the solutions are relatively easy to find: the problem, as ever, in this fractured and fractious country, is summoning up the collective political will to take action.
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Take the explosion of van deliveries as the Amazon I–want-it-now impulse is followed by every company that wants to stay in business. Be it Argos or John Lewis, everyone delivers it to your doorstep fast, multiple vans criss-crossing each other and knocking on the same doors over and over. Van traffic has grown faster than any other vehicle type since 2005.
Why? Royal Mail visits every household once a day, these days delivering mostly junk mail at ever-rising stamp prices for lack of volume business. As predicted, private companies cherrypick easy deliveries, leaving Royal Mail to take single letters to every remote farm.
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After Carillion and the shock suggestion Capita and others might be wobbling, the reality of the destruction caused by privatisation is beginning to dawn even on true believers, such as the infamous Barnet council. Labour is right to plan taking back control of utilities, mail and transport, though they have yet to make that case sound not just ideological but pressingly practical. They need to spell out the daily reality of the harm privatisation and illusory “choice” has done over the last decades, not least in the poisoned air we breathe.
The relatives of some of the thousands of Nazi victims who were tortured and murdered in the Hamburg headquarters of the Gestapo have accused authorities and property developers of insulting their memory following the transformation of the building into a luxury complex with scant reference to its past.
The Stadthöfe (city courts) in the centre of the German port city, has been marketed under the title Hommage to Life by its owners, Quantum Immobilien.
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“Nobody who was brought here for interrogation came out unhurt,” said Detlef Baade, whose father was tortured by Hamburg’s Gestapo in 1933. “We have a societal obligation to do this. We owe it to the dead,” he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Protesting under the slogan “Commerce instead of Commemoration? Never!” the demonstrators also brought attention to the wrought-iron greeting over the entrance to the Stadthöfe, which they say is chillingly reminiscent of the Arbeit Macht Frei slogan at Auschwitz and should be removed. The greeting reads: “Bienvenue (welcome) /Moin moin (a colloquial phrase for hello)/ Stadthof”.
Political cowardice is something we're getting used to from our federal Liberal government. Justin Trudeau may have a lovely smile but very, very weak knees. When it comes to taking bold steps demanded of true vision, he's usually a no-show. Can you say "electoral reform"? I know Justin cannot.
Then there's the problem of Canada's decaying, sometimes derelict infrastructure. That's everything from the electrical grid to sewer and water lines, roads and highways, air and sea ports, railway lines. Those are essential services. Without them our society would probably collapse within a week after the grocery store shelves fell empty.
We're now at that point where successive governments, federal and provincial, have kicked the problem down the road so long and so far that we've run out of road. Governments have to dig deep to come up with the money to fix what can no longer be ignored but this is the age of "Everyday Low Taxes." Absent real leadership, tax increases can destroy political futures.
I recall Richard Nixon telling David Frost that the true test of political leadership was the ability of a leader to persuade the public to support a measure that was either painful or unpleasant. If you can't get them to swallow the bitter medicine, you're shite as a leader. Which brings us back to Trudeau, the Liberal government and our major infrastructure problem. That problem, in four words, is "somebody has to pay."
The Trudeau government, in an act that marries cowardice with betrayal, has decided to let the public sector take over the government's own responsibilities. They call it PPP or Public-Private Participation. The private contractor builds, and essentially owns, the highway recovering its costs and a hefty profit directly from the public.
One of the grand lies that's endlessly told by the politicians perpetrating this cowardly dodge is that the private sector carries all the risk. That's why they get to lard their pockets with that extra profit. It's a nice story but history, especially recent history, reminds us that it's bullshit.
By recent history I mean last month's failure of British construction giant, Carillion. The Tories had done all sorts of PPP deals with Carillion - roads, hospitals, schools, prisons, you name it. It was all great until it wasn't. When Carillion went down, all that risk bounced straight back into the laps of the public - and the public purse. After all, someone has to pick up where the outsourcing contractor left off.
The recent collapse of Carillion, which had contracts with the government to provide services such as NHS cleaning, school dinners and prison maintenance, has intensified the spotlight on the sector.
Days after Carillion plunged into liquidation, the government was forced to deny that rival outsourcer Interserve was on the same path to oblivion, after it had been reported that it was on a watchlist of troubled companies.
Serco, one of the largest outsourcing players, has been struggling to regain its financial stability since a 2013 scandal when it overcharged the Home Office for electronic tagging of criminals.
Now Capita has become the latest in the sector to suffer a major setback as its new chief executive, Jon Lewis, “kitchen-sinked” an array of bad news by releasing it all at the same time. Shares in the firm tumbled 47.5% to a 15-year low after Lewis slashed profit forecasts, announced plans to tap the market for £700m of investment and suspended a dividend that was worth more than £200m to shareholders last year.
Some industry observers saw the writing on the wall for the outsourcing sector long ago. Tim Wainwright, an expert on outsourcing at global accountancy firm EY, said outsourcers have been squeezed by the need to provide services ever more cheaply, even as their costs have risen.
So now prime minister What, Me Worry? and his finance minister Bill Churn Baby, Churn Morneau want to drag Canada - and the Canadian public - down the same road traveled by Carillion, Interserve, Serco and Capita. There you go, problem solved.
Bill Morneau, our federal finance minister, tells us the government's dodgy-sounding scheme to let private investors build and manage public infrastructure is a "win-win-win," as though such a thing exists. ...
Anyway, he must feel a bit of a fool. He's from Bay Street, and must know that in business, somebody usually gets the better end of a deal, and generally, the great white sharks of the business world — the huge institutional investors he's hoping will relieve the government of a traditional responsibility — eat very well indeed.
Trudeau is even promising the private sector zero or little risk.
According to information in documents obtained by the Canadian Press, the government is promising a healthy, guaranteed "revenue stream" for years. The exact return is not specified, but such investors tend to demand between 10 and 20 per cent – "equity-like return and bond-like risk," as the Wall Street aphorism so neatly puts it.
Best of all for the investors, according to the documents, the government is suggesting it might even chip in some extra cash to pad investors' returns. It's a path to heaven with no alternate route to hell.
And guess who will pay for all this? The cheery fog exhaled by Morneau and his fellow cabinet ministers isn't very specific about that, but there is ultimately only one bill-payer, and we all know who he, or she, is.
Shooting blindfolded. Not a real confidence builder.
Government documents suggest that the goal is to raise about $240 billion from investors over the next 12 years, for a total of $300 billion in spending.
But how the government arrived at that figure is a mystery. There has been no methodical assessment of what we need. Other countries have done that sort of homework. We haven't.
The government's own Economic Advisory Council complained about this lack of data, and finally just resorted to citing estimates between $150 billion and $1 trillion. That's quite a margin. Another authoritative study, the McKinsey Report, has said there's no need at all for additional infrastructure spending in Canada.
"Meaning we don't have a clue," says an assessment by Azfar Ali Khan and Randall Bartlett, economists at the University of Ottawa's Institute for Fiscal Studies and Democracy. "We don't even know what and where the investment needs are."
In any case, there are precisely no projects under way. At least none that we know of. So far, apparently, it's been a confidential, informal courtship of big-money investors — a dance with tightfisted, powerful people, all looking for the sweetest deal possible.
So, kids, prepare yourselves and your own kids and their kids for a potential multi-generational ass raping. Sort of like British Columbia's Fast Cat ferry fiasco only times a gazillion.
The Economist Intelligence Unit released on Wednesday its 2017 Democracy Index, which ranks 167 countries on a 0 to 10 scale. Only countries with scores above 8 are categorised as "full" democracies.
The study has five criteria: Whether elections are free and fair ("electoral process and pluralism"), governments have checks and balances ("functioning of government"), and whether citizens are included in politics ("political participation"), support their government ("political culture"), and enjoy freedom of expression ("civil liberties").
Norway comes in at first with a score of 9.87 out of a possible 10. Iceland comes in 2nd followed by Sweden, New Zealand and Denmark. Canada comes in 6th (tied with Ireland) with a score of 9.15. America is denied a podium finish, coming in, tied with Italy, at 21st with 7.98.
If you ask me, someone was very generous with the U.S. score. Meanwhile, an article today in The Atlantic reminds us that America was never intended to be a democracy. It's a lengthy article I've attempted to excerpt below.
Across a range of issues, public policy does not reflect the preferences of the majority of Americans. If it did, the country would look radically different: Marijuana would be legal and campaign contributions more tightly regulated; paid parental leave would be the law of the land and public colleges free; the minimum wage would be higher and gun control much stricter; abortions would be more accessible in the early stages of pregnancy and illegal in the third trimester.
The subversion of the people’s preferences in our supposedly democratic system was explored in a 2014 study by the political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern. Four broad theories have long sought to answer a fundamental question about our government: Who rules? One theory, the one we teach our children in civics classes, holds that the views of average people are decisive. Another theory suggests that mass-based interest groups such as the AARP have the power. A third theory predicts that business groups such as the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America and the National Beer Wholesalers Association carry the day. A fourth theory holds that policy reflects the views of the economic elite.
Gilens and Page tested those theories by tracking how well the preferences of various groups predicted the way that Congress and the executive branch would act on 1,779 policy issues over a span of two decades. The results were shocking. Economic elites and narrow interest groups were very influential: They succeeded in getting their favored policies adopted about half of the time, and in stopping legislation to which they were opposed nearly all of the time. Mass-based interest groups, meanwhile, had little effect on public policy. As for the views of ordinary citizens, they had virtually no independent effect at all.
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To some degree, of course, the unresponsiveness of America’s political system is by design. The United States was founded as a republic, not a democracy. As Alexander Hamilton and James Madison made clear in the Federalist Papers, the essence of this republic would consist—their emphasis—“IN THE TOTAL EXCLUSION OF THE PEOPLE, IN THEIR COLLECTIVE CAPACITY, from any share” in the government. Instead, popular views would be translated into public policy through the election of representatives “whose wisdom may,” in Madison’s words, “best discern the true interest of their country.” That this radically curtailed the degree to which the people could directly influence the government was no accident.
Only over the course of the 19th century did a set of entrepreneurial thinkers begin to dress an ideologically self-conscious republic up in the unaccustomed robes of a democracy. Throughout America, the old social hierarchies were being upended by rapid industrialization, mass immigration, westward expansion, and civil war. Egalitarian sentiment was rising. The idea that the people should rule came to seem appealing and even natural. The same institutions that had once been designed to exclude the people from government were now commended for facilitating government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
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That basis is now crumbling, and the people have taken notice. In no small part that’s because the long era during which average Americans grew more wealthy has come to a sputtering stop. People who are asked how well they are doing economically frequently compare their own standard of living with that of their parents. Until recently, this comparison was heartening. At the age of 30, more than nine in 10 Americans born in 1940 were earning more than their parents had at the same stage of their lives. But according to eye-popping research led by the economist Raj Chetty and his co-authors, many Millennials do not share in this age-old American experience of improving fortunes. Among those Americans born in the early 1980s, only half earn more than their parents did at a similar age.
Americans have never loved their politicians or thought of Washington as a repository of moral virtue. But so long as the system worked for them—so long as they were wealthier than their parents had been and could expect that their kids would be better off than them—people trusted that politicians were ultimately on their side. Not anymore.
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Donald Trump won the presidency for many reasons, including racial animus, concerns over immigration, and a widening divide between urban and rural areas. But public-opinion data suggest that a deep feeling of powerlessness among voters was also important. I analyzed 2016 data from the American National Election Studies. Those who voted for Trump in the Republican primaries, more than those who supported his competition, said that they “don’t have any say about what the government does,” that “public officials don’t care much what people like me think,” and that “most politicians care only about the interests of the rich and powerful.”
Trump has no real intention of devolving power back to the people. He’s filled his administration with members of the same elite he disparaged on the campaign trail. His biggest legislative success, the tax bill, has handed gifts to corporations and the donor class. A little more than a year after America rebelled against political elites by electing a self-proclaimed champion of the people, its government is more deeply in the pockets of lobbyists and billionaires than ever before.
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Donald trump is the first president in the history of the United States to have served in no public capacity before entering to the White House. He belittles experts, seems to lack the most basic grasp of public policy, and loves to indulge the worst whims of his supporters. In all things, personal and political, Plato’s disdainful description of the “democratic man” fits the 45th president like a glove: Given to “false and braggart words and opinions,” he considers “insolence ‘good breeding,’ license ‘liberty,’ prodigality ‘magnificence,’ and shamelessness ‘manly spirit.’ ”
It is little wonder, then, that Plato’s haughty complaint about democracy—its primary ill, he claimed, consists in “assigning a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike”—has made a remarkable comeback. As early as 2003, the journalist Fareed Zakaria argued, “There can be such a thing as too much democracy.” In the years since, many scholars have built this case: The political scientist Larry Bartels painstakingly demonstrated just how irrational ordinary voters are; the political philosopher Jason Brennan turned the premise that irrational or partisan voters are terrible decision makers into a book titled Against Democracy; and Parag Khanna, an inveterate defender of globalization, argued for a technocracy in which many decisions are made by “committees of accountable experts.” Writing near the end of the 2016 primary season, when Trump’s ascent to the Republican nomination already looked unstoppable, Andrew Sullivan offered the most forceful distillation of this line of antidemocratic laments: “Democracies end when they are too democratic,” the headline of his essay announced. “And right now, America is a breeding ground for tyranny.”
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Real change will also require an ambitious reform of campaign finance. Because of Citizens United, this is going to be extremely difficult. But the Supreme Court has had a change of heart in the past. As evidence that the current system threatens American democracy keeps piling up, the Court might finally recognize that stricter limits on campaign spending are desperately needed.
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It is true that to recover its citizens’ loyalty, our democracy needs to curb the power of unelected elites who seek only to pad their influence and line their pockets. But it is also true that to protect its citizens’ lives and promote their prosperity, our democracy needs institutions that are, by their nature, deeply elitist. This, to my mind, is the great dilemma that the United States—and other democracies around the world—will have to resolve if they wish to survive in the coming decades.
We don’t need to abolish all technocratic institutions or merely save the ones that exist. We need to build a new set of political institutions that are both more responsive to the views and interests of ordinary people, and better able to solve the immense problems that our society will face in the decades to come.
For several years the United States and Russia have been in a nuclear arms race, each side racing to develop new warheads and ever better delivery systems.
China must strengthen its nuclear deterrence and counter-strike capabilities to keep pace with the developing nuclear strategies of the United States and Russia, the official paper of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) said on Tuesday.
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration may be pursuing the development of new nuclear weaponry and could explicitly leave open the possibility of nuclear retaliation for major non-nuclear attacks, according to a draft of a pending Nuclear Posture Review leaked by the Huffington Post.
This "unprecedented" move by the United States, combined with continuous quality improvements of nuclear arsenals in both the U.S. and Russia, means that both countries place greater importance on deterrence and real combat usability, the commentary in the PLA Daily said.
"In the roiling unpredictability of today's world, to upgrade the capability of our country's deterrence strategy, to support our great power position... we must strengthen the reliability and trustworthiness of our nuclear deterrence and nuclear counterstrike capabilities," it said.
Meanwhile, its engagement in the Syrian/ISIS conflict enabled Russia to gain experience with 215 new weapons systems. Nothing like a little live fire to let you discover what works and what needs fixing.
“The rout of the well-equipped terrorist groups in Syria demonstrated the power of our Army and Navy, and the course of the operation demonstrated the tradition of reliability and effectiveness of Russian weapons,” Putin said in aspeech.
Putin noted that Russian forces used some 215 new types of advanced weapons systems in Syria. Moreover, the Kremlin demonstrated its new long-range precision guided conventional strike capability under operational conditions in Syria–less a necessity in fighting insurgents in the Middle East than a shot across NATO’s bow.
“The first experience of the combat use of long-range air- and sea-based systems proved to be positive,” Putin said. “These were primarily the Kalibr missile and the X-101 missiles that are less known to the public. Strategic aircraft were also used in combat conditions for the first time.”
"The Big Five need to start publicly disclosing their emissions modelling for the sake of transparency and accountability," reads the report, released Wednesday by the Parkland Institute, an Alberta public policy research network based at the University of Alberta.
It says Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL), Suncor Energy, Cenovus Energy, Imperial Oil and Husky Energy have not fully disclosed how much carbon pollution they expect to create out of their own assets. This pollution now has a hefty price tag since governments around the world have committed under the 2015 Paris Agreement to slash greenhouse gases in order to prevent dangerous changes to the climate.
“Governments can’t properly regulate corporations when they don’t have all the facts at hand,” the report’s co-author, Ian Hussey, said in an interview.
“Those are disclosures that we’re not seeing yet, but we believe these companies are already making these calculations.”
The report says the carbon liabilities — that is, the social cost of the carbon pollution that will come from developing their fossil fuel reserves — of the “big five” firms, based on a conservative estimate of $50 per tonne, is $320 billion, outweighing the whole of Alberta’s GDP, which it pegs at $309 billion.
In a scenario where polluters were paying $200 per tonne of carbon emissions, that liability would add up to $1.99 trillion based on their proven and probable reserves of oil and gas, according to the study.
Once again we're left to grapple with spotty accounting from the Oil Patch where environmental costs are frequently treated as "externalities" that are kept off the books, allowing the economic case for the Tar Sands to appear viable.
The oil wars that pit Victoria against Edmonton and Ottawa are heating up. The crud that Alberta and the feds insist on pumping/leaking across British Columbia and our coast is just that, crud. It's full of heavy metals, acids, carcinogens and other toxins that are incredibly persistent and damaging. The Americans gave us a free demonstration of that from the Enbridge spill in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Yet Rachel and Justin and all their subordinate sphincters think pumping that same lethal crud across British Columbia's mountainous and seismically active territory is just dandy.
And when - not 'if' but when - one of those tankers runs up on the rocks and pours a planetary gutload of that crud into our coastal waters, the Trudeau government has approved the use of Corexit as an oil spill "dispersent." Corexit doesn't disperse anything. It buries the evidence, sending it to the seabed, out of sight/out of mind, where, in the case of a product as noxious and persistent as Tar Sands dilbit, it can contaminate the marine ecology for decades, generations. The Americans have given us another demonstration of that. Corexit was used with disastrous consequences in the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, which, decades later is still not cleaned up, and to bury the evidence from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Thanks, Justin, for adding insult to injury or, perhaps, disaster to injury.
The BC government's latest, unpatriotic impertinence has been to restrict the amount of dilbit that can be transported across our province until "the behaviour of spilled bitumen can be better understood."
Now you would have thought, with so much at stake, that the feds and their counterparts in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and the big energy producers would have long ago tested how dilbit behaves when spilled into both fresh and salt water. Oh wait, the freshwater testing has already been done in Kalamazoo. That's not good. But there's still the critical saltwater testing. We haven't seen anything on that although when the government resorts to approving Corexit that's an indication that they have probably run their tests and don't want to talk about it. Besides they - the feds, Alberta and the Tar Sanders - would much prefer to offload that risk on the people of coastal British Columbia.
Rachel managed to drop a shitload of righteous indignation on British Columbia for its audacity.
“Having run out of tools in the toolbox, the Government of British Columbia is now grasping at straws,” said Alberta Premier Rachel Notley in a statement. “The B.C. government has every right to consult on whatever it pleases with its citizens. It does not have the right to rewrite our Constitution and assume powers for itself that it does not have. If it did, our Confederation would be meaningless. Therefore, the action announced today by the B.C. government can only be seen for what it is: political game-playing.”
Of course there's one thing Notley, like her Conservative predecessors, does not want to discuss - why they think it's okay to ship that crud in the first place. Why not refine it on site? Why not keep those heavy metals, acids, carcinogens and myriad toxins right where they found them, in Athabasca? At least minimize the environmental risks to British Columbia. Build a refinery or three, hire a bunch of Canadians to work the plants and ship full refined synthetic crude oil. There's a plan.
It's a plan but it costs money. And the Tar Sands can only pretend to be economically viable if actual costs are minimized, buried, or offloaded on someone else, free of charge.
“I have every expectation that they will continue to try and do that but I’m confident that America will be able to have a free and fair election [and] that we will push back in a way that is sufficiently robust that the impact they have on our election won’t be great,” Pompeo said.
Much has been made of how Russia manipulated American voters in 2016 through social media - Facebook, YouTube, etc. In the result some social media sites have taken steps to deter a similar attack.
Two huge mistakes. We have centuries of history of countries that prepared to fight the last war and so were unprepared to fight the next war. America is preparing, to the extent it is preparing at all, to resist a repeat of the 2016 Russian meddling.
Mistake two - leaving the drawbridge down and unattended. Social media was merely a means to exploit America's critical vulnerability, the collapse of democratic knowledge.
In America, more than in most other Western countries, there is a basic failure of democratic knowledge. In a well-functioning democracy, citizens agree broadly on facts and have some trust in the democratic system, allowing democracy to harness different perspectives and put them to good use. In America, in contrast, distrust and profound disagreements over facts have led to a kind of crisis of democratic knowledge that leaves democracy open to outside manipulation.
Over the last two decades, the common knowledge of American democracy has been undermined. As Alexis de Tocqueville warned could happen, the structures of shared knowledge are being weakened by democratic politics itself. Politicians — especially on the right — have cast doubt on sources of authority such as science and government, telling their supporters that they shouldn’t trust experts. Finally, the public itself, on its own initiative, has become less trusting of traditional institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church as they have revealed their feet of clay.
As a result, those who were disengaged from politics have become more so, while those who are engaged have become ever more partisan. The result is that most people don’t care about politics, and those who do are likely to have radically different understandings of the challenges faced by America.
Disaffection can be healthy up to a point. Many traditional institutions have failed badly and do not deserve people’s trust. ...Yet when people with different perspectives stop sharing a common basis of knowledge, democracy is liable to pull itself apart. Parties become enemies rather than competitors. When people stop trusting any institutions, they are likely instead to start thinking that the democratic process is rigged, and to pin their hopes instead on cranks and conspiracy mongers.
How can you stop the Russians from doing what Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh and their class of reprobates do every day? They've grown fat and rich preying on the ignorance, the fears and the basest instincts of their followers, their human fois gras. Undermining basic democratic knowledge, the glue of democracy, is their stock in trade.
Mike Pompeo's CIA isn't addressing this vulnerability. Congress isn't. Trump certainly isn't. The Mango Mussolini relies on the same tactics the Russians use to keep his base in line.
It wasn't Macron who defeated Russian meddling in France nor Merkel in Germany. It was the French people and the German people and their hold on democratic knowledge. The American public, or a significant part of it, has become enfeebled. They've been conditioned, groomed, into a state of near imbecility. There was nothing accidental about it. Those responsible knew exactly what they were doing and what could be had from it.
Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan plan to tag team America's healthcare insurance industry.
Three corporate giants are teaming up to combat what billionaire Warren Buffett calls a “hungry tapeworm” feasting on the U.S. economy: health care.
Amazon.com Inc., Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. said they plan to collaborate on a way to offer health-care services to their U.S. employees more transparently and at a lower cost. The three companies plan to set up a new independent company “that is free from profit-making incentives and constraints,” according to a short statement on Tuesday.
The move sent shares of health-care stocks falling in early trading. Express Scripts Holding Co. and CVS Health Corp., which manage pharmacy benefits, slumped 6.7 percent and 5.5 percent, respectively. Health insurers Cigna Corp. and Anthem Inc. also dropped.
