A "Must Read" for the Liberal Right

Canadian liberalism seems to have lost its way in the Liberal Party's quiet drift to the right under Michael Ignatieff. The Liberal leader is unquestionably well-educated yet he regularly demonstrates the limited value of intellect alone.

Michael's Gumby-like character that seems capable of stretching in any direction on any issue at any moment should be enough to give all Liberals real cause for concern. It points to a serious character flaw, the sort of failing that allows a person to endorse illegal war of conquest before repudiating it or to condone torture before rejecting it or to pre-absolve Israel for its war crimes in Gaza. A person who vacillates so easily, so repeatedly and to such extremes is mere chaff blowing in the wind. You cannot find vision in beliefs anchored to the briefest moments in time.

I don't think the Liberals have much hope of regaining their former prominence until the party returns to the centre-left. And, until it does, I think Canada will be much the worse for it. We will pay a real price, in the medium and long-term, if we don't even our own keel. One point demanding Liberal intervention is the growing wealth gap between rich and poor in Canada.

To those on the right end of the Liberal spectrum I invite you to read "The Spirit Level" by two prominent British epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. In Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett bring the scientific approach of epidemiology to bear on the issue of income inequality, the gap between rich and poor, and its effects on modern Western society.

The authors digest half a century of data from the industrialized democracies of Europe, North America and Asia and similar data from each of the United States. The nations and the states are ranked from least to most-inequal and against that are charted their respective performance on everything from mental health, drug use, physical health and life expectancy, obesity, educational performance, teen births, violence, imprisonment and punishment and social mobility. Whether it's a comparison of individual states or of various nations, the results are consistent. Societies with the greatest income inequality always have the poorest performance records. As wealth gap narrows, performance improves. As it widens, conditions worsen.

What's most impressive about Spirit Level is the depth of the research and the manner in which the authors foresee and pre-empt rebuttals about causation, ethnicity and historical influences. They examine and dispose of each of these at length relying not on professional opinion as much as half a century of observation and study.

The lesson of this book is that income inequality results in societal dysfunction. The authors show that this isn't merely a blight on society's poor but also has profoundly negative impacts on all social stratas save for the narrowest at the top. The likewise show that measures to curb income inequality benefit almost all social segments proportionally.

Why I feel it urgent that Liberals open their eyes to the realities of Spirit Level is that it reveals we are closely and perhaps inseparably intertwined with the most dysfunctional society in the developed world, the United States of America. Despite Barack Obama's grand promise of change, the U.S. continues to trend very negatively on income equality and the social ills that it spawns.

A dysfunctional society is a weak society. It is a vulnerable society. Weak or failing societies and enormous social upheaval are expected to be the hallmarks of the 21st century. Even the Pentagon and the CIA have warned this is our future whether we acknowledge it or not. Canada needs a strong, healthy and resilient society even if the United States sees the situation differently. Liberals need to embrace these lessons and realize that Canada and Canadian society may pay dearly for acquiescing to the current drift to the right. Getting back to an even keel isn't going to be easy. It's going to take a leader with resolve and vision and principle.

NYT Calls Obama Health Bill an Attack on Wealth Inequality

According to the New York Times, the Obama health bill is the first significant measure to reverse the wealth gap between America's rich and poor that has been steadily expanding since 1970.

Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor.

Nearly every major aspect of the health bill pushes in the other direction. This fact helps explain why Mr. Obama was willing to spend so much political capital on the issue, even though it did not appear to be his top priority as a presidential candidate. Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan.

The "Age of Reagan"? Might as well call it the "Age of Ruin." When Ronald Reagan entered the
White House, America was the world's largest creditor nation. In the breathtakingly short span of but eight years Reagan transformed the U.S. into the world's largest debtor nation. Reagan and Bush I and II were the only presidents since the end of WWII not to reduce America's debt as a function of GDP. Under them it skyrocketed to the near ruinous state inherited by Obama.

The Age of Reagan saw Americans become utterly stupid, willing to believe fantastic ideas such as their ability to live in wealth due to the endlessly increasing value of their homes. It wasn't just "casino capitalism" that brought America down, it was also "casino consumerism."

There were two types of wealth in America - real wealth and mirage wealth. Real wealth was what accumulated at the top among America's wealthy elites. Mirage wealth was the illusion of prosperity conjured out of cheap foreign borrowing and a bubble economy. It was scam wealth although it bought all the trappings of genuine affluence - while it lasted.

The Age of Reagan ruined the country and ruined an awful lot of Americans' lives. It allowed Washington, Wall Street and the American people to dig a horribly deep hole to the point where, today, their only salvation in the short to medium-term is another economic bubble. That's like a junkie relying on the next fix to keep the throes of withdrawal at bay.

For Obama and the United States, measures to arrest and narrow the wealth gap can help heal the damage done to the country and its people. On March 13th I addressed the sinister side effects of wealth inequality in a post, "A 'Must Read' for the Liberal Right." That post covered the book "The Spirit Level" in which two prominent British epidemiologists looked at the relationship between income inequality on half a century of data covering everything from mental health, drug use, physical health and life expectancy, obesity, educational performance, teen births, violence, imprisonment and punishment and social mobility.

Spirit Level compared every Western, industrialized democracy and also put America under a spotlight on a state by state comparison. What they found, and linked most persuasively, is that all of these blights on society worsen markedly (and predictably) as income or wealth inequality worsened. As income inequality diminished so too did these troubles. The authors also showed this wasn't just about the poor. Everyone but the very wealthiest suffered the scourges resulting from income inequality.

There's little question that America's rabid social Darwinism leaks across the border and into weak minds like that of our current boss, Harper. You might recall that, prior to his recent transformation, Harper subscribed to every bit of this made-in-America nonsense and even rebuked Canadians for our backward ways, the same ways that kept Canada from falling into the fiscal abyss created by the Americans.

I hope the New York Times has this one right and, if so, I hope Obama succeeds beyond his dreams. There are some who believe healthcare reform will be the spark that ignites social change in the United States. Among their ranks lie many hardcore congressional Republicans now struggling furiously to find a way to douse that very spark before it can catch hold.

Death by Poverty

They're from an area that is a core of Trump support - Appalachia. And, while their Giant Orange Bloat promises them a future of milk and honey, they're dying in droves - of poverty.

Of course you won't find "poverty" listed on their death certificates. There's always some other, more proximate cause such as opiod overdose. But the real Grim Reaper is inequality and poverty.


Appalachians are dying faster than other Americans.

According to a new study, people in rural Appalachia suffer from rising infant mortality rates and falling life expectancy rates. As The Washington Post writes:

The country made gains on those health measures over the next two decades, but progress in Appalachia stalled. Between 2009 and 2013, the infant-mortality rate was 16 percent higher in Appalachia than in the rest of the country. People could expect to live 2.4 years less than their counterparts in the rest of the United States.

This is partly because of the opioid epidemic, and partly because many states in the Appalachian region refused to expand Medicaid. But Appalachia’s problems do not exist in isolation. Americans die because they’re poor.

None of this should come as any surprise. It's explored convincingly by two British epidemiologists, Kate Picket and Richard Wilkinson in their 2009 book, "The Spirit Level." Here's an excerpt from a review I wrote about their book in 2010:

The authors digest half a century of data from the industrialized democracies of Europe, North America and Asia and similar data from each of the United States. The nations and the states are ranked from least to most-unequal and against that are charted their respective performance on everything from mental health, drug use, physical health and life expectancy, obesity, educational performance, teen births, violence, imprisonment and punishment and social mobility. Whether it's a comparison of individual states or of various nations, the results are consistent. Societies with the greatest income inequality always have the poorest performance records. As wealth gap narrows, performance improves. As it widens, conditions worsen.

What's most impressive about Spirit Level is the depth of the research and the manner in which the authors foresee and pre-empt rebuttals about causation, ethnicity and historical influences. They examine and dispose of each of these at length relying not on professional opinion as much as half a century of observation and study.

The lesson of this book is that income inequality results in societal dysfunction. The authors show that this isn't merely a blight on society's poor but also has profoundly negative impacts on all social stratas save for the narrowest at the top. The likewise show that measures to curb income inequality benefit almost all social segments proportionally.

2017 - The Year of The Great Unraveling?

If nothing else, we're getting much closer. With Trump just three weeks away from the presidency it's a safe bet that 2017 will be tumultuous. Whether it will be the year of humanity's "tipping point" remains to be seen.

For more than a decade, great intellectuals, including Canada's John Ralston Saul and Thomas Homer Dixon, have prophesied the demise of the neoliberal order and its economic panzer division, globalism. If you haven't read them there's no time like the present to get caught up with Ralston Saul's, "The End of Globalism," and Homer-Dixon's "The Upside of Down."

In more recent years others, such as economist Nouriel Roubini, have been proclaiming that neoliberal capitalism is in a death spiral. Then came Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." "The book's central thesis is that when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability."

The social and economic instability inflicted by neoliberal inequality was documented by two British epidemiologists, Wilkinson and Pickett, in their book "The Spirit Level." The lesson is that rampant inequality of the type spawned by neoliberalism creates widespread and deep-seated social dysfunction from which everyone, rich and poor alike, suffers.

The neoliberal era, ushered in by Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney, was utter madness from the start.  Like any new ideology, this entirely faith-based model, took years to implement, especially its economic spearhead, globalism. Like most religions (except for your own of course) it was based on a garbled web of half-truths and outright lies which is why it needed such high-level political muscle to take hold.

I hope you have a NetFlix account. If you don't, find someone who does. Then watch former Python Terry Jones' excellent documentary, "Boom Bust Boom." It dissects the mental illness known as neoclassical economics that manifests in the pathology known as free market fundamentalism that in its late or advanced phase leads to globalism, inequality, austerity and other ills. As you watch the video you'll understand how a Born Again like Stephen Harper could so unquestioningly embrace neoclassical economics which left him absolutely incapable of seeing the crash of 2007-2008 coming. To him, and the many like him, the Great Recession was an impossibility. The most important thing is that you may see that our current leader, while not a highly-trained economist like the guy he replaced, is nonetheless still in its thrall.

In a nutshell, we're still in the neoliberal death spiral but now the cold, hard ground draws ever nearer. How can you tell? That much is obvious when the Titans of Davos along with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank suddenly hit the panic button. They know it has failed and, like wildfire, it's drawing near to their gated community. They know it will take us all down if our leaders don't change course.

Only our leaders aren't about to change course. We've become accustomed to accepting leaders of astonishingly small intellectual stature. We accept people who are guided by faith even when it conflicts with evidence and knowledge - people like Harper or George w. Bush, the Neoconservative cabal, America's "bought and paid for" Congress and even our own political parties. This is a category of people who are simply bereft of vision; people who can't see the "EXIT" sign much less find the way forward. They cannot see the iceberg emerging from the fog and so, to them, it doesn't exist.

In Trump we'll have a "leader of the Free World" who is a devout adherent to the neoliberal firmament. If there was the slightest doubt that is conclusively erased by his chosen cabinet nominees.

Since 2013, Chris Hedges has proclaimed America to be in the unshakeable grip of a "pre-revolutionary state."

"...what you have in a pre-revolutionary society, which I think we're in, is a kind of invisible revolution, whereby the state, the ideology of the state, in this case capitalism, the fiction of American democracy, larger and larger numbers of people--and I think we are also seeing this across the political spectrum--wake up and understand the hollowness of the language that's used to describe their own economic, political, and social reality.

"...what happens in moments of breakdown is that people not only turn against an ineffectual liberal elite that is not able--that in essence--that has presided over political and economic paralysis, or certainly political paralysis, but they also jettison the values that elite purports to defend. And that's what's dangerous. And we're certainly barreling towards that kind of a crisis. I worry that we are not only weakened but unprepared."

Since Hedges wrote those words we have seen nationalist populism sweep across Europe - Hungary, Poland, Turkey, even Britain and France - and now the United States of America. It's easy to argue this is the outcome of visionless leadership unable to chart a new course to relieve the neoliberal strains on their societies which then succumb to opportunists eager and ready to exploit discontent.

Earlier this year Hedges wrote of how the western world is becoming "Mexicanized."

Constitutions are rewritten by judicial fiat in a mockery of democracy. Laws and regulations that impede corporate exploitation are abolished. Corporations orchestrate legally sanctioned tax boycotts. Free-trade deals destroy small farmers and businesses along with labor unions and government agencies designed to protect the public from contaminated air, water and food and from usurious creditors and lenders. The press is transformed into an echo chamber for the corporate elites. Wages stagnate or decline. Unemployment and underemployment soar. Social services are curtailed or abolished in the name of austerity. The political system becomes a charade. Dissent is criminalized. The ecocide by the fossil fuel industry accelerates. State enterprises and utilities are sold to corporations. The educational system mutates into vocational training. Culture and the arts are replaced by sexual commodification, banal entertainment and graphic depictions of violence. Infrastructures crumble.

...The corporate looting is impervious to regulation or reform. It will continue until there is nothing left to exploit or is halted by popular revolt. It is creating frustrated and enraged populations that are being seduced in the United States, Europe and elsewhere by demagogues and protofascists. “Fascism, like socialism,” the economist Karl Polanyi wrote, “was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” Left unchecked, the present system will usher in a dystopia ruled by criminal power structures, including Wall Street, and inflict tremendous suffering and poverty on societies rent apart by global warming as well as internecine and nihilistic violence. Mexico is not an anomaly. Mexico is the future.

While the roots of revolt date back to the Reagan era, Donald Trump and his cabinet cadre have a better than average chance of being the final catalyst of upheaval. 2017 may in the not distant future be recognized as The Year of the Great Unraveling. Hold onto your hat.

Inequality at 30-Year High

Inequality in wealth quickly metastasizes into other afflictions including inequality in income and inequality in opportunity.  It chokes off social mobility and nurtures the ascendancy of an oligarchy in which political and economic power is siphoned away, particularly from the middle classes, to a new ruling order.

Now the OECD reports that inequality among its membership, the developed nations, has reached a 30-year high.  Across the OECD, the richest 10% enjoys incomes nine times that of the poorest 10%.  That gap is 14-1 in the US, Turkey and Israel and, in America at least, it's growing rapidly.

As clearly shown in Wilkinson's and Pickett's, The Spirit Level, this sort of inequality rapidly undermines societies and manifests in a host of social ills including  mental health, drug use, physical health and life expectancy, obesity, educational performance, teen births, violence, imprisonment and punishment and social mobility.  It lowers the quality of life for all sectors, including the wealthy, except for the very wealthiest, what is referred to today as the 1%.   It lowers the nation, the society, the individual.  Yet for some reason, presumably anchored in ignorance, the Right persists in advancing policies that promote inequality.

Whether it's America's bought and paid for Congress or Harper's Conservative regime, the Right today is a devoutly corporatist movement.   Their interests are so at odds with the welfare of the public, including most of those who vote them in, that they must rely on a powerful corporate media to mislead, confuse and misdirect them.   The grand masters of this are the denizens of FOX News, the subject of recent studies that chillingly show that FOX viewers are more poorly informed on events than those who get no news at all.   In other words, FOX exists solely as a corporatist propaganda agency to manipulate voters through misinformation and misdirection.  To get a sickening look into the political perversion that is FOX News, just visit mediamatters.org.

This incestuous marriage of corporatist politics and corporatist media is the very outcome foreseen by those who championed in the 60s and 70s regulations to thwart concentration of ownership and cross-ownership in the media.   For a while we seemed to understand the obvious, that broad and diverse media ownership was the key to ensuring an informed voting public that was nurtured by ready access to the full range of political thought.   And that is why the key to breaking down this diabolical corporatist union and de-corporatizing our political institutions is to utterly dismember the media cartels, something the opposition is curiously leery of advocating.

Which leads to the next woe - the utter absence of opposition to the Harper regime.   Neither the Official Opposition NDP nor the Liberals are earning their parliamentary pay and Harper is grateful for their flaccid performance.  The three out of five voters who didn't support Harper are blatantly unrepresented in this Parliament.   And with that lack of representation, Parliament has lost its credibility, even its legitimacy.   Harper simply could not have bought a better opposition than the lame excuse that faces him across the aisle today.

The type of government Canada endures today - the secretive, manipulative, duplicitous and authoritarian regime in power riding herd over a gaggle of petro-pols on both sides of the aisle - should be rejected out of hand.   If we want our interests respected relying on Ottawa is counter-intuitive and self-defeating.   A perfect example is the Northern Gateway pipeline.

In late November, the Pembina Institute, the Living Oceans Society and the National Resources Defense Council released a damning report on the proposal to ship Athabasca bitumen across British Columbia for supertanker transport to Asia.   The report, in PDF format, is accessible by following the earlier link.  The 32-page report exposes Harper's scam in sickening detail.  The high point of the report is reference to a survey conducted in April, 2011 that found 80% of British Columbians solidly opposed to tanker traffic in our coastal waters.   That is why I believe if they proceed with this they will see a wave of civil disobedience previously unknown to Canada the scope of which is unforeseeable.

Any doubts about the Right's corporatist embrace are dispelled by their stated intention of fast-tracking this pipeline/tanker port project over the will of 80% of the people in the area affected.  That's about as undemocratic as it gets.  It is precisely the sort of authoritarianism that legitimizes mass civil disobedience.

We have to start dismantling  Stephen Harper's Canada limb by limb.  

The Century of Revolution

A few months back I came across an interesting treatise that predicted the 21st will be a century of revolution, true global upheaval. It's an arresting prospect and it's very much on the mind of some political and a great many military elites of the developed world.

Put simply, there's just too much inequality whether it's on a hemispheric, regional, or national level to support the type of stability we aspire to achieve. The great north-south divide that troubled Trudeau in his latter years in office has never healed. We've tried to maintain the economic vestiges of 19th century colonialism but the days when that was meekly accepted have ushered in an era of questing for independence from us that's often tinged with bitter resentment.

While we've been distracted by the shiny things - Iraq and Afghanistan - much of South America has been quietly shifting out from under Washington's once powerful, sometimes suffocating, influence. The land of Bolivar has seen a distancing evident in the ascendancy of left wing governments looking east and west - and south - rather than constantly gazing north as in the past.

Africa remains a wild card in so many ways. The influence of the West is in decline as the emerging economic superpower, China, spreads through the region. Resources (and governments) we once treated as ours for the plucking now have better options.

South and East Asia are also on the march. This is where superpower rivalries, economic and military, are played out. This is China and India's gateway to the Middle East oilfields, the Caspian Basin gas fields and the mineral riches of the 'Stans (including Afghanistan). It's curious that Canadians so rarely consider the intractable geo-political struggles that shackle this region even while our soldiers serve and die babysitting an unresolved civil war.

Around the globe the post-war stability we never truly appreciated while it existed ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For those four plus decades while the world went to sleep every night with the ever real possibility of nuclear holocaust, the world was neatly parcelled into the Western bloc, the Soviet bloc and the generally powerless and complacent non-aligned bloc. Washington and Moscow were global class monitors keeping the kids in line and slapping them about when necessary or using them to wage proxy wars when that was seen desirable.

Perhaps because we saw the Cold War world as one-dimensional we lost sight of the not always intended benefits it bestowed. We took the good stuff for granted which is probably why, in the wake of the end of the Cold War, we did so little to preserve and reinforce a truly stable, new world order. Washington came to believe that the demise of its superpower hegemon rival was a de facto licence to extend its unipower hegemony. It was a brief moment of utter madness and inevitable hubris that spawned bizarre covens like The Project for the New American Century that openly advocated the United States use its unrivalled military superiority to cement its global economic and military supremacy, to impose its order on the world on a plain "or else" basis.

America lost sight of the fact that its real enemy, the one that most threatened to undermine American stability and strength, was itself. An Age of Ruin set in beginning with Ronald Reagan that saw the industrial powerhouse transition from a culture of production to a culture of consumption. When Reagan took office, America was the world's largest creditor nation. When he left it had become the world's largest debtor nation. Whereas all of his postwar predecessors, Democrat and Republican alike, had steadily (even during the enormously expensive Vietnam War) whittled down America's debt to GDP ratio, that was all washed away by Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and now by Obama who has inherited the debris of their mental illness.

Corporate America forged the era of globalization which so richly served the oligarchs, the rentier classes, while transferring wealth out of the middle and working classes where, despite productivity leaps, wages stagnated even as the country's manufacturing base, the beating heart of a stable middle class, was shipped offshore. The scourge of inequality, fought back from the days of Roosevelt to Carter, returned with a vengeance. (That inequality dooms America to a future lashed to bubble economics is the subject of a Robert Reich piece posted here yesterday).

Globalization, as many warned unsuccessfully at the outset, has installed a political and economic force that now rivals, even endangers, democracy in our countries - corporatism. The advent of globalization - the free flow of capital (i.e. offshore manufacturing) and the enforced abandonment of trade and tariff regulation - effected a direct transfer of sovereign power from the nation state to the multinational corporate state. It was an enormously one-way deal. As Kevin Phillips writes in American Theocracy, his United States blundered into the trap that brought down so many earlier economic superpowers - the Dutch, the Spanish, the Brits. In search of quick and big returns, America used its wealth to grow its own successors' economies.

During the Cold War much more attention was paid to military developments. Since then we've found other distractions in the inescapable world of infotainment and immediate gratification. Yet there are indeed a number of major arms races underway that mirror the greater economic and political upheaval inevitable in an era of ascending and declining powers. India and China are rearming at great speed which is particularly concerting given that both are rivals for Middle East oil and both share a border region that holds the glacial watershed of their major and already stressed rivers. China, long a Soviet/Russian customer, is now engineering its own advanced weaponry from submarines and "blue water" surface ships to missiles to combat aircraft. India is following suit expanding its own blue water navy and deploying its first indigenous, nuclear submarines. The relationship between these growing economic and military rivals bears the hallmarks of containment and overlapping spheres of interest.

Before the second decade of the Century of Revolution is out we'll know whether we've lost the fight to beat back nuclear weapon proliferation. At the moment it's not looking good. During the Cold War we had the US, USSR, Britain, France and China in the "nuclear club" and it earned each a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Then Israel, India and Pakistan followed more recently by North Korea and soon, apparently, Iran too. Syria and Libya have already tinkered with developing their own nukes and many Middle Eastern countries are eyeing Iran and Israel and nervously wondering if they too need a nuclear deterrent. Meanwhile Brazil is rumoured to be a candidate for introducing nuclear weaponry to South America.

We have had centuries to witness nations ascend and decline but the process in the Century of Revolution is markedly different. We've run out of stuff. We've already hit the wall. They can't become us, because there's not enough stuff to make that possible. Sometime in the late 1980's mankind's consumption reached our planet's annual production of renewables - water, trees, fish and so on. We got away with it for decades thanks to sleight of hand, eating into our reserves, and outright conjuring tricks such as the Green Revolution, but the hens always come home to roost. By living beyond our biospheric means we've collapsed our fisheries, turned arable land into deserts and savaged our forests. We have relentlessly pursued and allowed ourselves to become utterly dependent upon unsustainable supplies of freshwater, water that nature cannot replace quickly enough for our needs.

Global warming is already whipsawing global precipitation patterns. As the atmosphere warms it accelerates evaporation while increasing the amount of stored water vapor, itself a powerful greenhouse gas. Some already pressed areas see a future of protracted drought while others are battered by successive cycles of drought and flood. Some wealthy countries can try technical fixes such as desalination but that too is a conjuring trick with devastating side effects.

So, we're out of good stuff. Now what to do? Well power traditionally translates into access. Those who have power expect to be first in the queue. But they can't get a power-size share of an already allocated pie without somebody else taking a much smaller than usual slice. The question becomes who gives up how much and why? That's something we'll be struggling with for quite a while and it may cause us to revisit some of our fanciful notions of free-market capitalism - again the Century of Revolution.

Can we avoid a reversion to 19th century colonialism? Will ascending economic superpowers be willing to accept anything less than tightly controlled economic and political domination of increasingly scarce resource producers? It's not as though India with its tradition of castes or China with its one-party rule can be expected to be generous to the democratic and economic

aspirations of the states they will colonize. But can they achieve the security of supply they will need without the sort of coercion we imposed in our turn?

A Century of Revolution, probably entailing a lot of violent revolution, seems inescapable in a century in which all nations will struggle with existential threats, naturally occurring and in many respects man made. Our options for seeing mankind through this century are rather stark - and obvious. 18th century free-market capitalism superheated by the forces of corporatism is over, finished. That model is growth-driven and that is so 1980's. Growth is over. We've hit the wall. We've run out of stuff. It's no longer growth but allocation and distribution that will determine the fates of nations and peoples.

We will come back into balance with the finite limits of our biosphere because we have no other choice. We will have to order ourselves in ways we will find difficult to accept because it is we who must adapt to fit our planet. It can't be done the other way around, not any longer. That comfortable option is foreclosed.

When planning is based not on growth but on allocation it shifts the focus from opportunity to inequality. People look for a lot more equality in sacrifice than in prosperity. We can become very egalitarian when we perceive that to be vital to our self-interest. If we aren't to be stampeded off the cliff we will have to pull back and that promises to be a struggle of truly revolutionary dimensions. The forces of the status quo will not go peacefully into the night. We need only look at the extraordinary efforts of the Fossil Fuelers in maintaining their dominance at mankind's considerable expense to understand that corporatism is tenacious and, as needed, ruthless.

An allocation based society is inherently far more communal than most of us have ever experienced. It is an order that confounds free market capitalism, tames it, and dismembers corporatism - not because of some grandiose ideology but of sheer necessity. Religious nutjobs aside, man no longer exercises absolute dominion over our planet and that is one struggle we cannot win.

Be very clear about one thing. The scrapping (let's call it wholesale reformation) of 18th century economic, social and political models isn't optional. Indeed it's the only avenue for a peaceful transformation of the world order. There are alternatives. We can let the planet go into runaway meltdown and purge itself of all but a few dozen millions of us. We can take our struggle for dominance into the one remaining arena, the military zone, and thereby also purge the planet of much of its population. I think I'd prefer the reformation route if you don't mind.

----

By the way before leaving the topic of inequality, I'd really like you to read my post A Must-Read for the Liberal Right in which I review The Spirit Level. Check it out and you may find it worthwhile to get your hands on a copy of that book.

Robert Reich's Rational Plan to End the Great Recession

Reich is right.  The fundamental economic disorder so miserably afflicting America's (and the developed world's) economy is inequality.  Income inequality to be precise.  The bottomless wealth chasm that has opened up between the richest of the rich and the now distant and reeling middle class.

In today's New York Times, Reich explains how America blundered into the Great Recession and the only way it can dig itself out.  The path to ruin:

This crisis began decades ago when a new wave of technology — things like satellite communications, container ships, computers and eventually the Internet — made it cheaper for American employers to use low-wage labor abroad or labor-replacing software here at home than to continue paying the typical worker a middle-class wage. Even though the American economy kept growing, hourly wages flattened. The median male worker earns less today, adjusted for inflation, than he did 30 years ago.



But for years American families kept spending as if their incomes were keeping pace with overall economic growth. And their spending fueled continued growth. How did families manage this trick? First, women streamed into the paid work force. By the late 1990s, more than 60 percent of mothers with young children worked outside the home (in 1966, only 24 percent did).


Second, everyone put in more hours. What families didn’t receive in wage increases they made up for in work increases. By the mid-2000s, the typical male worker was putting in roughly 100 hours more each year than two decades before, and the typical female worker about 200 hours more.


When American families couldn’t squeeze any more income out of these two coping mechanisms, they embarked on a third: going ever deeper into debt. This seemed painless — as long as home prices were soaring. From 2002 to 2007, American households extracted $2.3 trillion from their homes.


Eventually, of course, the debt bubble burst — and with it, the last coping mechanism. Now we’re left to deal with the underlying problem that we’ve avoided for decades. Even if nearly everyone was employed, the vast middle class still wouldn’t have enough money to buy what the economy is capable of producing.


Where have all the economic gains gone? Mostly to the top. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income.

...The rich spend a much smaller proportion of their incomes than the rest of us. So when they get a disproportionate share of total income, the economy is robbed of the demand it needs to keep growing and creating jobs.

What’s more, the rich don’t necessarily invest their earnings and savings in the American economy; they send them anywhere around the globe where they’ll summon the highest returns — sometimes that’s here, but often it’s the Cayman Islands, China or elsewhere. The rich also put their money into assets most likely to attract other big investors (commodities, stocks, dot-coms or real estate), which can become wildly inflated as a result.

This is precisely what author and Republican, Kevin Phillips, described in his 2005 book, American Theocracy.  Phillips chronicled how every Western superpower over the centuries has caused its own downfall by outsourcing manufacturing in a quest for cheap-labour driven profits, thereby using its wealth to grow its successor's economy.
 
How can America, caught in this bind, dig itself out?  Not by eating the rich, not really:
 
"...THE Great Depression and its aftermath demonstrate that there is only one way back to full recovery: through more widely shared prosperity. In the 1930s, the American economy was completely restructured. New Deal measures — Social Security, a 40-hour work week with time-and-a-half overtime, unemployment insurance, the right to form unions and bargain collectively, the minimum wage — leveled the playing field.



In the decades after World War II, legislation like the G.I. Bill, a vast expansion of public higher education and civil rights and voting rights laws further reduced economic inequality. Much of this was paid for with a 70 percent to 90 percent marginal income tax on the highest incomes. And as America’s middle class shared more of the economy’s gains, it was able to buy more of the goods and services the economy could provide. The result: rapid growth and more jobs.


By contrast, little has been done since 2008 to widen the circle of prosperity. Health-care reform is an important step forward but it’s not nearly enough.

...Policies that generate more widely shared prosperity lead to stronger and more sustainable economic growth — and that’s good for everyone. The rich are better off with a smaller percentage of a fast-growing economy than a larger share of an economy that’s barely moving. That’s the Labor Day lesson we learned decades ago; until we remember it again, we’ll be stuck in the Great Recession."
 
Reich's evaluation of the American problems and solutions should resonate with Canadians also.   Thanks only to an economy more heavily weighted on resources that manufacturing (at least compared to the U.S.), Canadians benefitted from having a greater hunk of our economy that couldn't be shipped overseas.  That said, we have also allowed a potentially debilitating wealth gap to grow in Canada.   As demonstrated in the book The Spirit Level, income inequality is a scourge to every country, every society - at least those within the developed world.
 
Curiously, however, income inequality, the widening gap between rich and poor, is an issue that never passes the lips of Stephen Harper or Michael Ignatieff.   For Harper that's predictable.   For Ignatieff it's worrying.

James Lovelock's Brave New World

Did I say "brave"? Okay, leave that out - James Lovelock's New World.

Jim turned the big One Oh Oh on Friday. Happy Birthday, James.

Chances are you know Lovelock for his renowned "Gaia theory" that postulates Earth behaving just like a living creature, an organism. It was controversial at first - why, the idea that an inanimate ball of magma and water could act in fairly predictable ways that mirrored a living creature - but it's pretty much accepted today.

BTW - we credit Lovelock as the creator of the Gaia hypothesis but it seems a small gaggle of Russkies were on to something similar way before our freshly minted centenarian. But I digress.

It looks like we're now up to our alligators in Gaia. We're making Earth sick. Earth gets a fever. Wipes us out and then, cleansed, starts all over again.

But wait, there's more.

The newest bundle of Lovelock happiness comes in his theory that mankind is about to be enslaved by the very technology we created. What do we want? NOT This. When do we want it? NEVER! You get the idea.

His new book Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence proposes that the 300,000-year Anthropocene era of Earth’s human domination is ending. Novacene is a new age where our species is doomed to a worse fate than clinging on for dear life at the north pole as previously imagined. Instead we will become lackeys of cyborgs able to think 10,000 times faster than humans. We will be kept on to ensure there are habitable temperatures for these superior intelligences. 

Novacene’s thesis is a straight-line extrapolation of Dr Lovelock’s breakthrough idea which he began to develop while a consultant at Nasa in the 1970s; the thought that the planet was a superorganism. In 1974, he and biologist Lynn Margulis proposed the Gaia hypothesis, which holds that Earth is in some way alive. The paper suggested our planet metabolises and responds to changes in its environment to survive. In bestselling books such as The Revenge of Gaia, Dr Lovelock argued that humans have exploited Earth and the “old lady” would eliminate us unless we treated her with greater reverence. That is why the Novacene will start, he now reasons: because a superintelligence will recognise that all living tissue will be consumed by climate crisis and will act with Gaia to keep the life going.

The Financial Times adds further insight into Lovelock's Novacene.  Apparently the robots won't get rid of us. They'll need us just as rich folks in Los Angeles hire undocumented Mexicans to tend their lawns.

His vision begins firmly in the spirit of our times: the machines of the future “will have designed and built themselves from the artificial intelligence systems we have already constructed. These will soon become thousands, then millions of times more intelligent than us.” But rather than see this as the apocalypse, “we should not be afraid”, Lovelock tells us. He suggests two reasons for this that do not sit easily with each other.

The first is that the machines will need us. They too will be threatened by global warming: “by remarkable chance, it happens that the upper temperature for both organic and electronic life on the ocean planet Earth are almost identical and close to 50C”.

The only stable way of ensuring a cool planet is to ensure it is replete with life, Lovelock argues, drawing on his Gaia theory. The machines will therefore join us in undoing the damage we have done, bringing fresh smarts to this task, and imagining new ways of re-engineering the planet back to a happy equilibrium.

The other reason he gives for welcoming AI is even more double-edged. Like some other scientists whose business is to understand the universe, he claims that understanding the universe is the very purpose of life. The Earth has given rise to us humans as the first step on this route to enlightenment, but it is our vastly smarter machine progeny “that will lead the cosmos to self-knowledge”. 

This brings to mind a CBC news report from June about AI, artificial intelligence, discovered learning things it hasn't been taught.

In the last few years, researchers around the world have made remarkable strides with AI learning algorithms by training them to do particular tasks, like recognizing certain kinds of images or patterns in data. But while these systems have become extremely proficient at the tasks they are trained on, they can't do anything else. 

"The surprising result was that this network, even even though we never trained it to discriminate the number of objects, later was also able to tell us the number of objects in a visual scene," said Andreas Nieder, the senior author on the study and professor of animal physiology at the University of Tübingen, Germany.

But, it's the weekend so relax, chill out. If it isn't Gaia, climate change, that gets you, and you somehow manage to elude servitude to those robots, George Monbiot reminds us that the oligarchs are lining up to take us down.

...everywhere the killer clowns are taking over. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison, Rodrigo Duterte, Matteo Salvini, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán and a host of other ludicrous strongmen – or weakmen, as they so often turn out to be – dominate nations that would once have laughed them off stage. The question is why? Why are the technocrats who held sway almost everywhere a few years ago giving way to extravagant buffoons?

...Why are the ultra-rich, who until recently used their money and newspapers to promote charisma-free politicians, now funding this circus? Why would capital wish to be represented by middle managers one moment and jesters the next?

...The policies that were supposed to promote enterprise – slashing taxes for the rich, ripping down public protections, destroying trade unions – instead stimulated a powerful spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation. The largest fortunes are now made not through entrepreneurial brilliance but through inheritance, monopoly and rent-seeking: securing exclusive control of crucial assets such as land and buildings privatised utilities and intellectual property, and assembling service monopolies such as trading hubs, software and social media platforms, then charging user fees far higher than the costs of production and delivery. In Russia, people who enrich themselves this way are called oligarchs. But this is a global phenomenon. Today corporate power is overlain by – and mutating into – oligarchic power.

...Chaos is the profit multiplier for the disaster capitalism on which the new billionaires thrive. Every rupture is used to seize more of the assets on which our lives depend. The chaos of an undeliverable Brexit, the repeated meltdowns and shutdowns of government under Trump: these are the kind of deconstructions Bannon foresaw. As institutions, rules and democratic oversight implode, the oligarchs extend their wealth and power at our expense. 

The killer clowns offer the oligarchs something else too: distraction and deflection. While the kleptocrats fleece us, we are urged to look elsewhere. We are mesmerised by buffoons who encourage us to channel the anger that should be reserved for billionaires towards immigrants, women, Jews, Muslims, people of colour and other imaginary enemies and customary scapegoats. Just as it was in the 1930s, the new demagoguery is a con, a revolt against the impacts of capital, financed by capitalists.

Monbiot's solution? Tax the oligarchs until their eyeballs bleed.

Defending ourselves from oligarchy means taxing it to oblivion. It’s easy to get hooked up on discussions about what tax level maximises the generation of revenue. There are endless arguments about the Laffer curve, which purports to show where this level lies. But these discussions overlook something crucial: raising revenue is only one of the purposes of tax. Another is breaking the spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation. 

Breaking this spiral is a democratic necessity: otherwise the oligarchs, as we have seen, come to dominate national and international life. The spiral does not stop by itself: only government action can do it. This is one of the reasons why, during the 1940s, the top rate of income tax in the US rose to 94%, and in the UK to 98%. A fair society requires periodic corrections on this scale. But these days the steepest taxes would be better aimed at accumulated unearned wealth.

Somehow I don't think that remedy is going to be welcome by the likes of Justin or his FinMin, Morneau. They aren't "of us" even if they do like to roll up their shirt sleeves and unbutton their collars.

If this sounds too radical, let's channel the spirit of that great American president, Theodore Roosevelt.

The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.  ...This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary. 

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered — not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means.  

So, there you have it. If Gaia, climate change doesn't get you, the robots may wind up calling the shots especially if the oligarchs get control. So, let's take the advice of Teddy Roosevelt and George Monbiot - eat the rich in the only way we still can - tax them until they bleed.

Robert Reich Dissects America's New Great Recession. The Real Culprit? Inequality.

In a piece written for The Nation, Robert Reich argues that the structural reason for today's Great Recession is America's surging inequality:

Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation's total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America's total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928—with 23.5 percent of the total.

Each of America's two biggest economic crashes occurred in the year immediately following these twin peaks—in 1929 and 2008. This is no mere coincidence. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don't have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. America's median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class can boost its purchasing power is to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs. But such borrowing has its limits. When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn't pay their bills, and banks couldn't collect.

...A second parallel links 1929 with 2008: when earnings accumulate at the top, people at the top invest their wealth in whatever assets seem most likely to attract other big investors. This causes the prices of certain assets—commodities, stocks, dot-coms or real estate—to become wildly inflated. Such speculative bubbles eventually burst, leaving behind mountains of near-worthless collateral.

The crash of 2008 didn't turn into another Great Depression because the government learned the importance of flooding the market with cash, thereby temporarily rescuing some stranded consumers and most big bankers. But the financial rescue didn't change the economy's underlying structure. Median wages are continuing their downward slide, and those at the top continue to rake in the lion's share of income. That's why the middle class still doesn't have the purchasing power it needs to reboot the economy, and why the so-called recovery will be so tepid—maybe even leading to a double dip. It's also why America will be vulnerable to even larger speculative booms and deeper busts in the years to come.

The horrible and far reaching fallout of income inequality is thoroughly examined and extremely well documented in The Spirit Level, Why Equality is Better for Everybody, by British epidemiologists Wilkinson and Pickett. It's one of the most illuminating, fascinating books I've read all year. Get your hands on a copy. It's an eye-opener that harnesses the power of scientific research to a very serious social malaise that's damaging us all - rich, poor and everyone in between.



Reich served as Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton. He's been a professor at Harvard and currently is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, Berkley.

Charting the Moral Bankrutpcy of the Rich

It's becoming dirtier and more dangerous to be rich in Britain.  At least that's the conclusion in Bankrupt Britain, An Atlas of Social Change, due to be released soon.

Levels of crime, pollution and antisocial behaviour are rising more sharply in London's  three richest neighbourhoods than anywhere else in Britain, according to an atlas which maps the changing social geography of Britain for the first time.

A comprehensive analysis of nationwide data for 2007-08 and 2008-09 concludes that the quality of   "local environmental conditions  " in the capital's boroughs of City of London, Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea plummeted over that period.

In contrast, the constituencies whose scores improved most were almost all in the north of England, with the three biggest improvements in Sedgefield in County Durham, north Lincolnshire and Blaenau Gwent.

 "Our maps reveal the extent of Britain's bankruptcy in financial, residential, political, moral, emotional and environmental aspects of life across Britain ," said the atlas's co-author, Prof Danny Dorling, from Sheffield University.

..."What is most interesting is how these rankings are changing ," said Dorling. "The bigger picture shows that, when it comes to environmental sustainability and sociability in Britain, some of the richest areas are suffering while some of the poorest areas are winning out ."

...Prof Kate Pickett, co-founder of the Equality Trust [and co-author of the book, "The Spirit Level "], said the atlas revealed   "the damage caused to the vast majority of us by the moral bankruptcy of the rich and powerful" .

...This may turn out to be the last time such comprehensive research can be presented, thanks to the government's cuts.   "It will not be possible to produce an update of all the topics included here in the future, due to the effect of government cuts on data collection and dissemination ," Dorling said.   "Many of the surveys we have relied on to plot out the current status of Britain have recently been cancelled ."
The last paragraph above made me think of Stephen Harper, his obsessive secrecy and the demise of the longform census.   I wonder if Steve wants to shutter any windows we might have to look at our society and ourselves while he completes his radical rightwing transformation of Canada.  Cutting "data collection and dissemination" is an effective means to blind the public, to keep them unaware of the degradation of their society.  I don't think it's unfair to say that the less we know, the better Steve likes it.

Noam Chomsky, Occupy = A Decent Future

Noam Chomsky delivered this year's Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture to Occupy Boston.  He stressed that the Occupy movement may be our last, best hope for a decent future and that it's vital the movement grow within the United States and around the world.   He contrasted America today with the situation in the Great Depression.


"...although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that we're going to get out of it, even among unemployed people. It'll get better. There was a militant labor movement organizing, CIO was organizing. It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are very frightening to the business world.

...It’s quite different now. Now there’s kind of a pervasive sense of hopeless, or, I think, despair. I think it’s quite new in American history and it has an objective basis. In the 1930s unemployed “working people” could anticipate realistically that the jobs are going to come back. If you’re a worker in manufacturing today -- and the unemployment level in manufacturing today is approximately like the Depression -- if current tendencies persist, then those jobs aren’t going to come back.

America radically transformed beginning in the 70's.  "We turned to a process of deindustrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued, but overseas (it’s very profitable, but no good for the workforce). Along with that came a significant shift of the economy from productive enterprise, producing things people need, to financial manipulation.

 The 1970s set off a kind of a vicious cycle that led to a concentration of wealth increasingly in the hands of the financial sector, which doesn’t benefit the economy. Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power, which, in turn, arrives to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle. The physical policies such as tax changes, rules of corporate governance, deregulation were essentially bipartisan. Alongside of this began a very sharp rise in the costs of elections, which drives the political parties even deeper than before into the pockets of the corporate sector.

A couple years later started a different process. The parties dissolved, essentially. [Does that sound familiar?] It used to be if you were a person in Congress and hoped for a position of committee chair or a position of responsibility, you got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, you started to have to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector and increasingly the financial sector--a tremendous concentration of wealth, mainly in the literally top 1/10th of 1 percent of the population.

Meanwhile, for the general population it began an open period of pretty much stagnation, or decline for the majority. People got by through pretty artificial means -- like borrowing, so a lot of debt. Longer working hours for many. There was a period of stagnation and a higher concentration of wealth. The political system began to dissolve. There’s always been a gap between public policy and the public will, but it just grew kind of astronomically. You can see it right now, in fact.

Take a look at what’s happening right now. The big topic in Washington that everyone concentrates on is the deficit. For the public, correctly, the deficit is not much of an issue. The issue is joblessness, not a deficit. Now there’s a deficit commission but no joblessness commission.

...For the general population -- the 99 percent in the imagery of the Occupy movement --it’s really harsh and it could get worse. This could be a period of irreversible decline. For the 1 percent, or furthermore 1/10th of 1 percent, it’s just fine. They’re at the top, richer and more powerful than ever in controlling the political system and disregarding the public, and if it can continue, then sure why not?

...A couple of years ago [Citibank] came out with a brochure for investors. They urged investors to put their money in what they call the “plutonomy index.” The world is dividing into a plutonomy, the rich and so on. That’s where the action is. They said their plutonomy index is way outperforming the stock market, so put your money into it. And as for the rest? We set them adrift. We don’t really care about them and we don’t need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state to protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but they essentially have no function. It’s sometimes called these days the “precariat,” people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. It’s not the periphery anymore...

...when Alan Greenspan was still “St. Alan,” hailed by the economics profession as one of the greatest economists of all time (this is before the crash for which he is substantially responsible for), he was testifying to Congress in the Clinton years explaining the wonders of the great economy. He said much of this economy was based on what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If working people are insecure, if they’re “precariat” and living precarious existences, then they’re not going to make demands, they won’t make wages, they won’t get benefits and we can kick them out if we don’t like them, and that’s good for the health of the economy.

...Well, now the world is indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat, again in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1 percent and the 99 percent. The plutonomy is where the action is. It could continue like this, and if it does, then this historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. The Occupy movements are the first major popular reaction which could avert this. It’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to go on and form structures that will be sustained through hard times and can win major victories.

...There are very dangerous developments in the international arena, including two of them which are kind of a shadow that hangs over almost everything we discuss. There are, for the first time to human history, real threats to peace and survival of the species. One has been hanging around since 1945 and it’s kind of a miracle we’ve escaped it and that’s the threat of nuclear weapons. That’s a threat that’s being escalated by the administration and its allies. Something has to be done about that or we’re in real trouble. The other, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Every country in the world is taking at least halting steps toward trying to do something about it. The US is also taking steps, namely to accelerate the threat. The US is now the only country that’s not only not doing something constructive…it’s not climbing on the train. It’s pulling it backwards.

Congress is right now reversing legislation instituted by the Nixon administration. (Nixon was really the last liberal president of the United States, and literally, this shows you what’s been going on!) They’re dismantling the limited measures the Nixon administration took to try to do something about

what’s a growing and emerging catastrophe. This is connected with a huge propaganda system, perfectly openly declared by the business world, that it’s all just a liberal hoax. Why pay attention to these scientists? We’re really regressing back to the Medieval period. It’s not a joke. If that’s happening to the most powerful and richest country in history then this crisis is not going to be averted and all of this we’re talking about won’t matter in a generation or two. All of that’s going on right now and something has to be done about it very soon and in a dedicated and sustained way. It’s not going to be easy to succeed. There are going to be barriers, hardships and failures along the way. Unless the process that’s taking place here and around the world, unless that continues to grow and kind of becomes a major social force in the world, the chances for a decent future are not very high. 

Chomsky makes a convincing argument for the expansion of the Occupy Movement everywhere, including Canada.  It's easy to watch a couple of very selective clips on a corporate news station and dismiss it as so much street theatre staged by whiny kids looking for handouts.  That's exactly what the rich and powerful, who now pretty much have a complete lock on the mass media, want you to think.

Sure, some of these young protesters may come from relatively affluent homes but that's irrelevant.  What matters is what lies ahead for them in the future, a promise that's rapidly collapsing.  At least they're turning out to demand an end to inequality - of wealth, incomes and opportunity.

Chomsky said  it, twice, politics is dissolving.  That process extends to Canada.  Ignatieff steered the Liberals to the right, transforming the party into a Conservative-Lite travesty.  Parliament itself has devolved into a gaggle of petro-pols on both sides of the aisle quite happy to see Canada turned into a hapless, corrupt petro-state.  Here's a hint - they can't work for you and be indentured servants of Big Oil.  The gap between public policy and public will is widening rapidly under Harper.  This has to be stopped and the Liberals and any other party can go to Hell if they won't stand up for Canada.

The European Union Backstory. Greece Is the Least of Its Problems.

We may be on the verge of witnessing a ground shaking, dangerous and scary spectacle - the dismemberment of the European Union.  The recent events in Greece may have set some wheels in motion but Harvard professor of international relations, Stephen Walt, says the collapse of European unification traces much further back to five triggering events. He writes that no Western nation will emerge unscathed if it all falls apart.

As an economic unit, the EU has a combined GNP larger than that of the United States, considerable wealth, advanced industries, and significant military potential. The United States is formally allied with most of its members and has long benefited from cooperation with its fellow democracies there. Europe’s future course is therefore of considerable interest to the United States.

...Unfortunately, it is hard to be optimistic about the EU’s prospects today, especially its stated goal of an “ever closer union.” Despite its past achievements, the EU now suffers from growing tensions and several self-inflicted wounds. The EU is likely to experience repeated crises and internal divisions, and one cannot rule out a gradual and irreversible decline in its cohesion and influence. Because a prosperous and tranquil Europe is in America’s interest, this is not good news for the United States.

Today, the EU faces five fundamental challenges. None of them will be easy to overcome.

Problem No. 1: Overexpansion


The EU today is a victim of its past success. What began as a limited arrangement among six countries to coordinate coal and steel production has become an elaborate supranational organization of 28 members governed by a bewildering array of institutions and subsidiary agencies and hamstrung by the need to reach consensus before taking important decisions. At the same time, its members are still independent nation-states with their own governments and their own complicated internal political arrangements. America’s complex federal system is a model of simplicity by comparison.

Moreover, as the EU has expanded, its membership has become increasingly heterogeneous. Germany’s GDP is more than 300 times larger than Malta’s, and Luxembourg’s per capita income is nearly seven times higher than Latvia’s and five times higher than Greece’s. The geographic size, population, and economic resources of the member states are vastly different, and their respective cultures and national histories have become less similar as the EU has grown. Not surprisingly, expansion has made the EU more cumbersome, more divided, and less popular. In 2014, more than 70 percent of EU citizens surveyed believed their voices do not count in EU decision-making, and nearly two-thirds declared that the EU does not understand the needs of its citizens.

Gee, it sounds like the European Union fell victim to the same expansionist insanity that befell NATO.  Go figure.

Problem No. 2: The collapse of the Soviet empire

Although the disappearance of the Soviet Union was a welcome development, it removed one of the main motivations for European unity. The EU is often seen as a purely economic and political project, but security concerns were a key part of its rationale from the start. That rationale faded as NATO grew stronger, and it disappeared when the Warsaw Pact collapsed. The absence of an external danger encouraged European leaders to focus more on selfish national concerns and to see the EU as a way to limit and constrain German dominance. (That last goal, needless to say, has not worked out quite as well as they hoped.) Since the early 1990s, EU members have repeatedly pledged to develop a “common foreign and security policy,” but they have never succeeded in doing so. Today, the incoherent European response to events in Ukraine highlights the lack of consensus on basic security issues.

Problem No. 3: The euro crisis

The third problem facing the EU today, of course, is the euro crisis.

It is now clear that the decision to create the euro was an enormous blunder, as skeptics warned at the time. It was done for political rather than economic reasons: to renew momentum for unity, to bind a reunified Germany more tightly inside European institutions, and to put Europe on a more equal footing with the United States.

But as the euro’s critics emphasized early on, the EU lacked the political and institutional mechanisms needed to make a currency union work. Instead, the euro’s proponents simply assumed the common-currency members would never let themselves get into serious financial trouble, and if this happened anyway (as, of course, it did), they further assumed that it would be easy to create the institutions that the eurozone lacked.

...Even worse, the crisis has sown deeper divisions within the continent, with debtors and creditors exhibiting a level of resentment and hostility not seen for many years. Instead of demonstrating a powerful commitment to European unity, EU member states now try to get what they want by threatening to blow up the entire enterprise. Greece used the threat of Grexit to try to win concessions from its creditors, and France used much the same threat to force Germany to soften its demands (however slightly).

Next up: British Prime Minster David Cameron will use the threat of a referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership in the EU to extract some special deals from the other members. When different states keep threatening to exit in order to blackmail their supposed partners, it hardly conveys the “one for all, all for one” spirit that is supposed to inspire and justify the broader European project. Needless to say, this situation is not what the euro’s creators had in mind when they took that fateful step.

Problem No. 4: A deteriorating regional environment


The EU now faces serious turmoil on its periphery, with direct consequences for Europe itself. State failures in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and sub-Saharan Africa have produced a flood of refugees seeking to get in, while the emergence of al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other extremist movements has had worrisome repercussions among some of Europe’s Muslim populations. The danger of homegrown or lone-wolf terrorism is often exaggerated, but it is not zero. And some Europeans now want to roll back the open internal borders that were a key achievement of the 1986 Single European Act. Meanwhile, the conflict in Ukraine raises new concerns about the security of the EU’s eastern frontier. The EU has been unable to agree on new measures to address any of these challenges, however, further underscoring its dysfunctional decision-making process.

Problem No. 5: The persistence of nationalism

The EU’s final challenge is the stubborn hold that nationalism exerts on the populations of the individual member states. The elites who launched the original European project hoped it would transcend existing national loyalties, but nationalism remains alive and well throughout the continent. Britain may vote to leave the EU next year (though I believe this is unlikely), Scottish nationalism may lead it to exit the United Kingdom, and nationalist sentiments continue to simmer in Catalonia and elsewhere.

Economic stagnation, high youth unemployment, and concerns about immigration have also fueled a resurgence of Euroskeptic nationalist parties that reject the core principles on which the EU is built. Add to this mix Europe’s unfavorable demography — its overall population is declining and the median age is rising rapidly — and you have a recipe for slow economic growth and growing dissatisfaction with mainstream parties and existing political institutions. If these trends eventually allow groups like the National Front in France to gain real power, support for an “ever closer union” will erode even further.

Professor Walt foresees just three possible outcomes to Europe's woes.  It could find a path to resolve these five threats but he doesn't think they've got the leadership to do it.

There are no European leaders today with the vision and stature of an Adenauer, de Gaulle, or Thatcher, and it would take years for serious reforms to work their way through the EU’s elaborate consensus-based governing machinery.

Instead of an “ever closer union,” therefore, the EU is more likely to simply muddle through. It will keep applying Band-Aids to contain the euro crisis and will hope that trade deals with the United States and China will provide an economic boost. In this scenario — which I regard as the most likely — the EU will stay in business, but robust growth will remain elusive, support for the union will decline, and Europe’s global influence will continue to wane.

But there is a third possibility: The EU experiment could start to unravel. A Greek exit from the eurozone would set a dangerous precedent, nationalist resentments could deepen, leaders with more authoritarian inclinations could come to power (as has already occurred in Hungary), and Greece could dissolve into widespread social unrest (or worse). Some European states might even look to Moscow for help (though they are unlikely to get much). If disintegration begins, the only question will be: How far and how fast will it go?

...To sum up: Since the end of World War II, stability and prosperity in Europe have been of enormous benefit to the United States. The European Union has been a key ingredient in a world order that has been highly favorable for America. If the EU’s best days are behind it, Americans will have to prepare for a world that is less stable, secure, and prosperous than the one to which they have become accustomed. We should hope this is not the case, but it is the most likely outcome given where Europe is today.

I Don't Have a Problem with Crazy People

It's radical conservatives, people who act crazy to exploit others, that infuriate me.

You know they're acting crazy when they ramble on about "death panels" and socialism, "job creators" and endless tax cuts, supply-side or "trickle down" economics.   Only the truly crazy among them actually believe that crap but what's important isn't whether they believe but whether they can get you to believe it.

These radical conservatives are the altar boys of legislated inequality.   Nobel laureate economist Joe Stiglitz, writing in The Price of Inequality, issues scathing indictments against these elected handmaidens of the rich who so freely and persistently sacrifice the health and wealth of their country for the exclusive betterment of their patrons, the richest of the rich.  It's not al-Qaeda that the American people need fear, it's their Congressional Republicans (and a number of right-leaning Dems to boot).

Wilkinson and Pickett in their work, The Spirit Level, chronicle the social costs attendant on societies that embrace inequality - everything from crime and imprisonment rates to illiteracy, teen pregnancy, venereal disease, divorce, obesity and reduced longevity.   Wilkinson and Pickett are prominent British epidemiologists which accounts for why they explored inequality in the context of a societal disease.   Stiglitz, naturally, approaches inequality from an economic perspective to reveal the enormous and potentially lethal costs inequality inflicts on the state, the economy and democracy itself.

The radical (now mainstream, fringe no longer) right denounces those who attack them on inequality as socialist extremists when, in fact, they act in defence of democracy.  Movement conservatism is plainly undemocratic.  It recoils at the notion of government of the people, by the people, for the people.   Yet its purposes require that it presents itself as the defender, the very saviour of democracy and the American way.

The greatest problem is that there is no good ending to this scenario.   All that results from it is a transfer of inordinate economic and political power to the oligarchs that leaves the blue and white collar working classes impoverished, effectively disenfranchised and crushingly divided.   Just as social mobility is choked off, so are the traditional avenues for social and political reform.   And all this comes at the start of an era of climate change impacts that can only be effectively met by societies that are healthy, strong and cohesive.  It's small wonder that some observers are proclaiming this the Century of Revolution.   They would, they're not crazy people.

Macron Realizes You Can Only Squeeze the Public So Far

They didn't quite storm the Bastille but the riots that hammered Paris over the Macron government's proposal to hike carbon taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel may have been a wake up call for the French president. Macron seems to have realized that, if you can't squeeze more out of the plebs, there's always the rich.

The French government will consider reintroducing taxes on the most wealthy in what is seen as a further measure to appease the gilets jaunesprotesters threatening to destabilise Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. 

Lifting part of the impôt de solidarité sur la fortune (ISF, solidarity tax on wealth) was a pillar of Macron’s election campaign and one of the first fiscal measures he implemented on taking power in May 2017, leading to his nickname “president of the rich”. 

On Wednesday, as gilets jaunes (yellow vests) vowed to continue protests that have seen parts of Paris in flames and violent clashes with police, the government’s spokesman Benjamin Griveaux admitted ISF could be reimposed. 

“If the measure we have taken doesn’t work, we’re not idiots, we’ll change it. But first we will have to evaluate it,” Griveaux told RTL radio, adding that the evaluation would happen next year. 

Reintroducing the wealth tax has been one of the demands of parts of the gilets jaunes movement that grew out of anger at rising taxes on petrol and diesel.

...Easing the ISF for the wealthy was described by one political commentator as Macron’s “original sin” and has been regarded as being socially divisive at a time when French workers have felt increasingly squeezed financially.

Catering to the whims and threats of the affluent has been a longstanding game in the developed world in this era of "everyday low taxes." It has resulted in corrosive inequality and austerity governance. It has severely undermined social cohesion.

Back in 2011, the OECD (rich countries' club) reported inequality among its member states had reached a 30-year high. It's gotten worse since then.  The damage inequality inflicts on a nation and its people was graphically chronicled by two British epidemiologists, Picket and Wilson, in their 2009 book, "The Spirit Level." Neoliberal governments have been so focused on expanding investment capital to relentlessly grow their economies that they ignored the cost it was exacting on their human capital. It has facilitated the deep divisions that current afflict our societies.

Enough.