Even as Bitumen Pimps, We're a Fiscal Failure

Are Canadian governments giving away the country's fossil energy resources? It seems our energy producers, always ready with political cash to throw around (remember Christy Clark?), are getting something of a free ride.

Not only are Canadian governments lavishing billions in direct and indirect subsidies on these largely foreign fossil energy giants, these same energy giants are giving us a small fraction of what they remit per barrel to other countries, places such as Indonesia or Nigeria or the Ivory Coast or even Britain.


The low rate that oil companies pay in Canada represents billions of dollars in potential revenue lost, which an industry expert who looked at the data says is a worrying sign that the country may be “a kind of tax haven for our own companies.” 

“I think it will come as a surprise to most Canadians, including a lot of politicians, that Canada is giving oil companies a cut-rate deal relative to other countries,” said Keith Stewart, an energy analyst with Greenpeace.

Companies like Chevron Canada paid almost three times as much to Nigeria and almost seven times as much to Indonesia as it did to Canadian, provincial and municipal governments.

Chevron used to run its Nigeria and Indonesia projects out of the U.S., but after allegations that they evaded billions in taxes, their operations were moved to Canada.

According to data collected by the Guardian, Suncor also paid six times more taxes to the UK, and Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL) paid almost four times more to Ivory Coast.

To rub salt into our wounds, in 2016 the IMF calculated that Canada's direct and indirect subsidies to the fossil energy giants were a staggering 46 billion dollars a year.

To be clear, the IMF is including all untaxed externalized costs of energy use under their definition of subsidies. The figures flagged for Canada still include $1.4 billion in direct "pre-tax" subsidies -- the kind of direct public giveaways that Trudeau campaigned to eliminate. The remaining $44.6 billion is in the form of externalized costs to society from dirty and dangerous fossil fuels -- things like air pollution, traffic congestion and climate change.

Trudeau has, of course, promised to eliminate direct subsidies (the 1.4 billion figure) by 2025 which, naturally, will be long after he's gone.

A House Divided

In 1858 Abraham Lincoln was fighting for his state's Republican nomination for the US Senate. Some believe that Lincoln foretold the calamity that awaited America, its most bloody war ever, just three years hence.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.

America today is again a house divided against itself. It's said the rift dividing left from right is wider and deeper than it has been since Lincoln uttered those words.  The American people are being herded into rival camps and fed a diet rich in fear, anger, distrust, even paranoia. What better way to keep a population weakened and ineffective.

How divided are the American people today? That's the subject of a new, major study by Pew Research that explores America's political typology and finds not only deep divisions between the two sides but deep divisions within them.  The report, based on lengthy interviews with 5,000 subjects concludes that Americans fall into nine categories:

In effect, both sides are fractured and there are political struggles underway in each camp.

Nearly a year after Donald Trump was elected president, the Republican coalition is deeply divided on such major issues as immigration, America’s role in the world and the fundamental fairness of the U.S. economic system.

The Democratic coalition is largely united in staunch opposition to President Trump. Yet, while Trump’s election has triggered a wave of political activism within the party’s sizable liberal bloc, the liberals’ sky-high political energy is not nearly as evident among other segments in the Democratic base. And Democrats also are internally divided over U.S. global involvement, as well as some religious and social issues.

Another Pew study found that American society is becoming more polarized.  Fewer Americans now hold a mix of Liberal and Conservative views.

Overall, 32% of Americans now take a roughly equal number of conservative and liberal positions on a scale based on 10 questions asked together in seven surveys since 1994. As recently as 2015, 38% had this mix of values – and 49% did so in 1994 and 2004.

Reflecting growing partisan gaps across most of the individual questions in the scale – even those where both parties have shifted in the same direction – Republicans and Democrats are now further apart ideologically than at any point in more than two decades.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that the Empire is about to strike back. Establishment Republicans, headed by Mitch McConnell, are going after Trump's favourite insurgent, Steve Bannon.

More than a year ahead of the 2018 congressional contests, a ­super PAC aligned with McConnell (R-Ky.) revealed plans to attack Bannon personally as it works to protect GOP incumbents facing uphill primary fights. The effort reflects the growing concern of Republican lawmakers over the rise of anti-establishment forces and comes amid escalating frustration over President Trump’s conduct, which has prompted a handful of lawmakers to publicly criticize the president.

Yet the retaliatory crusade does not aim to target Trump, whose popularity remains high among Republican voters. Instead, the McConnell-allied Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) will highlight Bannon’s hard-line populism and attempt to link him to white nationalism to discredit him and the candidates he will support. It will also boost candidates with traditional GOP profiles and excoriate those tied to Bannon, with plans to spend millions and launch a heavy social media presence in some states.

May the Swamp be with you.

Get 'Em While They're Still Not Entirely Obsolete.

If this thing works, they won't have to fire a round to deal a severe blow to Western military forces.

Russia says it will begin testing a new photonic radar system next year that will detect any aircraft, stealthy or not, at ranges perhaps up to 400 miles.

It's the "next generation" of radar technology, one that it's believed conventional stealth technology cannot defeat. The system is built around laser pulses in lieu of standard electro-magnetic radiation. The prototype technology was produced by a team of researchers in Italy a few years ago. Some have labelled it "quantum radar."

The Russians, it seems, picked up on the early research and ran with it.  Russia claims its own next generation fighter (Gen 6) will bristle with stealth defeating, very long range technologies including photonics and a new generation of optical sensors.

These systems, if they prove practical, may leave the West with all of its hyper-expensive eggs in one rapidly fraying basket.  For what is the F-35 when stripped of its cloak of invisibility? It could be very pricey dead meat.

There's a one-two punch in this, the development of VLRAAM, very long range air to air missiles. Both Russia and China are developing air launched, long range missiles designed to take down the F-35's essential support aircraft - aerial refueling tankers and long-range radar platforms (AWACS) which are big, slow, cumbersome and easily detectable at great distances.  Take those down and the F-35 could be, at best, a one-mission warplane.

That's the Achilles' Heel of a system that takes 20 years to develop, test, fix, and deploy. It gives the other side all sorts of time to analyze your technology, steal your secrets and develop their own, often much less costly, counter-technologies.

Since primitive men first picked up sticks, there has never been a weapon that wasn't neutralized or rendered obsolete in due course.  For some reason we imagined that didn't apply to the porcine F-35.

Toasted, Roasted and Grilled. - Lagarde

IMF chief Christine Legard has added her voice to the call for urgent action on climate change - and growing inequality.

"As I've said before, if we don't do anything about climate change now, in 50 years' time we will be toasted, roasted and grilled."

Both climate change and inequality were "two key issues" that would drive us to either utopia or dystopia, Lagarde stated. "If we don't address those two issues — of climate change and growing inequalities — we will be moving towards a dark 50 years from now," she said.

Legard chose a conference on future investment held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to deliver her remarks. She was somewhat countered by Amin Nasser, CEO of Saudi Aramco, who observed, perhaps ironically, that oil isn't going anywhere anytime soon. 

"Alternatives, electric cars and renewables, are definitely gaining market share, making a lot of progress and we are witnessing that," he said. "However, it will be decades before they take a major share of the global energy supply."

Updated Agenda for the Council of Canadians

I like to think of the Council of Canadians as a political party in its own right although I understand why it is not and must never be a party.  That said, as a force for good it's vastly better than the Conservatives, the Liberals or the New Dems.

C of C members were recently polled on their preferred priorities. 14,172 of us responded and today Maude Barlow announced the C of C's new platform.  Campaigns will be organized around the following priorities:

• Protect our lakes and rivers. We will step up our efforts this fall to directly lobby MPs across the country in face-to-face meetings to urge their support for federal water protections to be fully and completely restored.

• Challenge Nestlé’s water grabs. We will challenge the bottled water giant head-on – Nestlé has drawn almost 1 billion litres of water from Ontario on an expired permit – and push provincial governments to phase out bottled water takings altogether.

• Push for NAFTA to be fixed, or Canada must walk away. With NAFTA possibly on the brink of collapse, we will mobilize MP lobby actions and run public engagement campaigns to keep the pressure on the Canadian government to either fix NAFTA so it better protects workers, farmers, the environment and our democracy – or walk away from it.

• Say no to pipelines and yes to the green economy. We will boost our capacity to take immediate action to stop the Kinder Morgan pipeline while at the same time advocate for governments to commit to investment in green jobs and the green economy.

• Advocate for national pharmacare. We will amplify the call for the Canadian government to seize the opportunity before it right now to enact a national pharmacare program, which would save Canada up to $14 billion and improve health outcomes for millions of us.

And From the Dissolving Planet File

Don't usually associate the University of Calgary with climate change research but...

A new study led by U of C's Cryosphere Climate Research Group finds that Arctic sea ice is disappearing about 25 per cent faster than we had thought.

The salt content of snow covering the ice has tricked the European Space Agency satellite CryoSat-2 into concluding that ice is thicker than it actually is, and this likely means the first ice-free Arctic summer will come years earlier than once thought, said U of C geography professor John Yackel.

“We were a little bit surprised by that number — we knew the effect was there but in our minds it was maybe five to 10 per cent,” he said.

There’s no question the ice’s retreat is a result of human-induced climate change, with the CyroSat-2 calculating a 17 per cent reduction in Arctic ice thickness per decade since 1979. That’s considered a rapid retreat, but “it’s probably a little bit higher than that,” said Yackel.

So, yet again, our understanding of climate change, its early-onset impacts and the progress of natural feedback loops (shh - runaway global warming) has been shown unduly optimistic.

So, what have we learned over the last week or two.  Well, Britain's Tory government has announced that much of the UK's farmland is just 30 to 40 years away from "the fundamental eradication of soil fertility."

“We have encouraged a type of farming which has damaged the earth,” [Michael] Gove told the parliamentary launch of the Sustainable Soils Alliance (SSA). “Countries can withstand coups d’état, wars and conflict, even leaving the EU, but no country can withstand the loss of its soil and fertility.

Okay, what else?  On Monday there was a new report on the troubling pace of ocean acidification. It's already messing up marine life. Scientists predict Atlantic cod in the Baltic and Barents sea could be a quarter of their current size by 2100.

Ocean acidification is another effect of pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as the gas dissolves in seawater to produce weak carbonic acid. Since the industrial revolution, the average pH of the ocean has been found to have fallen from 8.2 to 8.1, which may seem small but corresponds to an increase in acidity of about 26%. Measures to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere can help to slow down this process, but only measures that actively remove carbon already in the atmosphere will halt it, because of the huge stock of carbon already in the air from the burning of fossil fuels.

So, we've got faster disappearing sea ice, the approaching loss of farmland even in the UK, ocean acidification, what else? Oh yeah, a German report on a massive and rapid decline in flying insect populations.  A 75 per cent decline over the past 25 years.  That seems even faster than the global depopulation of animal life, terrestrial and aquatic.

That sort of wraps up the big environmental developments of the past two weeks. The research that once trickled in now resembles if not a tsunami at least a storm surge. The research shows this is coming on from all directions and we're still understating the pace, degree and severity of the changes underway.  Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

How Long Is This Guy Planning to Live?

That's a tall order, Mohammed, even for a crown prince. A lot of people won't want you to live to see the day.

Mohammed bin Sultan, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, vows to return his country to "moderate Islam" once he gets his turn at the wheel.

In an interview with the Guardian, the powerful heir to the Saudi throne said the ultra-conservative state had been “not normal” for the past 30 years, blaming rigid doctrines that have governed society in a reaction to the Iranian revolution, which successive leaders “didn’t know how to deal with”.

“What happened in the last 30 years is not Saudi Arabia. What happened in the region in the last 30 years is not the Middle East. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, people wanted to copy this model in different countries, one of them is Saudi Arabia. We didn’t know how to deal with it. And the problem spread all over the world. Now is the time to get rid of it.”

Earlier Prince Mohammed had said: “We are simply reverting to what we followed – a moderate Islam open to the world and all religions. 70% of the Saudis are younger than 30, honestly we won’t waste 30 years of our life combating extremist thoughts, we will destroy them now and immediately.”

...

Central to the reforms has been the breaking of an alliance between hardline clerics who have long defined the national character and the House of Saud, which has run affairs of state. The changes have tackled head-on societal taboos such as the recently rescinded ban on women driving, as well as scaling back guardianship laws that restrict women’s roles and establishing an Islamic centre tasked with certifying the sayings of the prophet Muhammed.

At this point can Saudi Arabia really break from Wahhabism, the radical Sunni sect that has driven Islamist terrorist groups from al Qaeda to ISIS, al Nusra and Boko Haram?  Can this prince really purge radical Islam from his fellow princes, emirs and sheikhs of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States? Or will he end up like Anwar Sadat, gunned down by extremist assassins?

Brexit or Trump. Whose Voters Were the Stupidest?

Ask Michael Bloomberg

Free Market Capitalism on Trial

Neoliberal, free market capitalism, has had a good run since it was ushered in by Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney. There's been plenty of time to watch it in action and, now, there's plenty of evidence to gauge just how well it has served us.

Ngaire Woods, dean of Oxford's  Blavatnik School of  Government, says the case against free market capitalism is strong.

...some politicians are no longer defending free-market capitalism in terms of economic growth or the gains from globalization. Instead, they focus on individual opportunity. May, for example, has credited the system with reducing infant mortality, increasing life expectancy, driving down absolute poverty, boosting disposable incomes, expanding access to education, and slashing illiteracy rates.

But these claims aren’t in line with the facts. Start with maternal mortality. Much of the world has made great strides in making childbirth safer. From 1990 to 2015, Albania reduced its maternal deaths per 100,000 live births from 29.3 to 9.6. China, the poster child for state-led growth, reduced its rate from 114.2 to 17.7.

Meanwhile, the trend in the United States, the paragon of free-market democracy, has gone in the opposite direction, with maternal deaths per 100,000 live births actually rising, from 16.9 in 1990 to 26.4 in 2015. Equally shocking, the morbidity and mortality of white (non-Hispanic) middle-aged men and women in the US increased between 1999 and 2013.

The claim that free-market policies “slash illiteracy” is also misleading. In England, some 15% of adults (5.1 million people) are still “functionally illiterate,” meaning that they have literacy levels at or below those expected of an 11-year-old. Scotland’s most recent survey showed a decline in literacy, with less than half of the country’s 13- and 14-year-olds now performing well in writing. In fact, if you Google “successful literacy campaign,” the country with astonishing literacy gains that fills your screen is Cuba – hardly a free-market system.

The conservative case, eloquently articulated by May, is that a free-market economy, operating under the right rules and regulations, is the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created. If that claim is true, the only logical conclusion is that we are doing it wrong.

So what measures are needed to get it right? The practical solutions on offer seem to be fairly consistent across the political spectrum. Indeed, for all their furious positioning, the differences between left and right seem to have collapsed in this regard.

In the UK, the first suggestion is to ensure economy-wide investment and growth, which will require government intervention. Corbyn proposes a National Investment Bank and Transformation Fund to mobilize public investment and create wealth and good jobs. May, for her part, suggests an industrial strategy to promote “growth across the whole country,” helping to “turn local areas of excellence into national export champions.”

Second, private-sector leadership must change, in order to prevent short-term thinking, tax avoidance, and other forms of opportunism and personal enrichment. Here, Corbyn focuses on accountability in corporate boardrooms, while May calls for giving workers and shareholders a stronger voice in firms’ decision-making and ensuring that the largest companies have incentives to think long term.

A third corrective is to improve employees’ pay and working conditions. In Britain, even as the economy has grown, wages have been dropping – by 10% from 2007 to 2014. Corbyn promises to take action to stop employers from driving down pay and working conditions. For May, “all work should be fair and decent, with scope for development and fulfillment.” Both make the case for improving vocational training and technical education.

Fourth, in Britain, the government must address the public-housing crisis. In the 1950s and 1960s, an average of some 300,000 houses were being built every year; that figure has now dropped to less than half. Corbyn proposes a review of social housing, rent control, and regeneration for the people. May has announced the creation of a £2 billion ($2.62 billion) fund for building more council housing.

Finally, Britain needs more effective rules and regulations to ensure that privatized utilities deliver cheaper, more sustainable services. Corbyn accuses companies of handing out large dividends to shareholders, while infrastructure crumbles, service deteriorates, and companies pay far too little in taxes. May promises to end “rip-off energy prices.”

The orthodoxy established by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s – to roll back the state, after a decade of profligate and bloated government – is guilty as charged. A new consensus is emerging that more active and effective government is required to boost growth and expand opportunity. The jury is still out, however, on whether governments will be given the tools and support they need to rehabilitate the defendant.

The neoliberal era has been embraced by our political caste as an excuse to take them off the hook of governance. They freely offloaded much of their political responsibilities to the "markets" whatever that meant in any given situation. They chose to become petit fonctionnaires, technocrats, administrators, grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard. For them that meant all the trappings and privileges of power with only half of the responsibility, just not the half that mattered most to our nation and our people. That responsibility, the hard stuff, they shirked.

A Succinct Analysis of the Failure of Neoliberal Politics

Most of us know that neoliberalism, ushered in 40 years ago by Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney, has run its course. If you bump into him, please let Justin in on that reality.

So what happened? How did neoliberal politics fail us? And how is Trump the inevitable leftover of the neoliberal failure?

Jacobin Magazine's Corey Robin offers a thoughtful explanation.

In his classic article “The Nature of the Firm” — which I wish would be put on the list of required reading for political theorists; it really should be in the canon — the economist R. H. Coase divides the economic world into two modes of action: deal-making, which happens between firms, and giving orders, which happens within firms. Coase doesn’t say this, but it’s a plausible extrapolation that making deals and giving orders are, basically, the two things business people know how to do.

In the last year, it’s occurred to me, on more than one occasion, that Trump is a Coasian grotesque. Making deals and giving orders: that’s all he knows how to do. Except that he doesn’t. As we’re seeing, he’s really bad at both.

Regardless of whether he’s good or bad at the ways and means of the firm, what Trump definitely doesn’t know is politics. Authority, legitimacy, persuasion, leadership: these are arts that Trump is completely unpracticed at, and it shows. When it comes to wielding power in the political sphere — I’m not talking about executive orders, of which Trump has issued many, and which are a sign of his weakness, not his strength; I’m talking about exercising power that requires the assent and cooperation of other political actors — he’s completely out of his league.

There’s a reason for that: the conception of power he has — such as it is and however bad he is at it — is drawn from the Coasian world of the firm. To that extent, we can read Trump’s failure not simply as a referendum on Trump, not simply as a referendum on the Republican Party, but more largely and more importantly, as a verdict on forty years of politics in the United States.

For what neoliberalism has meant, among other things, is not simply the rise of markets and money and all the rest; it has also meant, as Wendy Brown has argued so compellingly, the rise of economic modes of reason and their insertion into politics. Not just their insertion, but their domination. Such that our entire conception of political leadership is drawn from the world of the firm (that’s not Brown’s argument; it’s my tangent to her argument).

This is not a story of the rise of Reagan or the Republican Party. It’s a completely bipartisan story. It was Jimmy Carter, in 1975, who helped begin the story, when he launched his presidential campaign with the claim: “I ran the Georgia government as well as almost any corporate structure in this country is run.” Four decades later, managing a firm no longer provides a standard of leadership. It is the substance of leadership.

A substance, as we are now seeing, that is increasingly irrelevant to the challenges of our age. Trump’s problem is not that he’s bad at making deals or giving commands. Even if he were good at that, it’d not be sufficient to manage the crises of his coalition. A different sort of art is called for, one that is not drawn from the firm.

If we had a real political opposition, if we had a real left, they’d be using Trump not as an example of right-wing lunacy or Republican perfidy; he’d be Exhibit A of Forty Years of the Firm.

Corey Robin is right. Trying to subordinate the political realm into a business or "firm" mentality probably explains why our political caste, regardless of party, is doing such a lousy job of governing. This firm mentality is at least partly responsible for politicians routinely placing the interests of their party, their firm, ahead of the interests of the nation and the public and that is true for both parties in government and their rivals in opposition. It's all about holding on to or gaining political power, not serving the public. They may swear their oath of allegiance to the country but that oath is about as worthless as their campaign promises.

Warnings, Warnings, Warnings

It was possibly one of the biggest yawners in recent years when the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned that, globally, mankind had about 60 years of soil fertility remaining. 60 years and most of the productive farmland on our planet would be useless, infertile, incapable of producing crops. And what happened? Sweet Fanny Adams, that's what happened. Within a week the warning was straight down the memory hole.

Let's try that again. This time the warning is coming from Britain's Tory government, environment minister Michael Gove to be exact. He's warning the UK is just thirty to forty years away from "the fundamental eradication of soil fertility" in its farming regions.

“We have encouraged a type of farming which has damaged the earth,” Gove told the parliamentary launch of the Sustainable Soils Alliance (SSA). “Countries can withstand coups d’état, wars and conflict, even leaving the EU, but no country can withstand the loss of its soil and fertility.

“If you have heavy machines churning the soil and impacting it, if you drench it in chemicals that improve yields but in the long term undercut the future fertility of that soil, you can increase yields year on year but ultimately you really are cutting the ground away from beneath your own feet. Farmers know that.”

Of course in Canada we don't discuss such things. Wouldn't be polite. The environment, climate change and all that, why that's for other people.

Maybe you imagine we're not drenching our fields in agri-chemicals - fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides - that cut the ground away from beneath our own feet.  The smoking gun is seen in the algae blooms that beset Lake Winnipeg and Lake Erie and the dead zones along our coasts.

The collapse of farmland is a crisis and it's global. However to frame it as a crisis on its own is to miss the point, a very important point that we fail to comprehend at our certain peril. This is a crisis but it's also a symptom of a far greater problem. We are pushing our planet beyond its limits. We are pushing our planet to its breaking point.

Only yesterday I posted about the existential threat of ocean acidification now underway and nearing the point of no return.  Consider the steadily degrading state of our essential renewable resources: air, water and biomass.  Close to 800 million people lack access to clean water. 2.5 billion don't have access to basic sanitation, toilets.  The air Londoners breathe can now rival that of Beijing's.  We've killed off half of the animal life on Earth, terrestrial and aquatic, in just 40-years.  Insect populations are collapsing.

We turn to on our planet's basic stocks. We fell our forests. We collapse our fisheries. We drain our aquifers. We exhaust our farmland, transforming it into sterile desert. We've put the Earth store into a giant "going out of business" sale. You know it's true. It's visible to the naked eye from space. And, as stocks of so many things run low, we respond with new technologies and systems to make our depredations even more efficient, ever more rapacious.

We know that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to humanity as great as opioids to an addict and yet we continue to extract and burn fossil fuels when alternatives exist. In Canada we pimp the world's highest-carbon, toxin-laced ersatz petroleum and we do it with pride.

Visit your legislature or, better yet, our parliament. Look down from the visitors' gallery during Question Period and all you will see are legislators dedicated to pushing our planet beyond its limits because they can't envision anything else.  They don't know that beside that gas pedal is a brake or that they can turn that steering wheel. And they're taking you for a ride.

Putin Hints at Russia's Next Super Weapon, Worse Than Nuclear Bombs.

Vlad Putin claims the world is on the brink of developming of a new super weapon.

Vladimir Putin warned a crowd of young students that scientists in Russia will soon break the genetic code and create something "worse than a nuclear bomb".

In a shocking speech yesterday, the Russian leader suggested that his world could soon seen sci-fi super-human soldiers who cannot feel pain or fear.

President Putin said that science is moving at such a fast pace that the world is running out of the time to develop regulation around these eerie advances.

Genetically Modified Humans.

The Russian leader revealed that the possibility of "creating a human with predesigned characteristics" was already around the corner.

"A man has the opportunity to get into the genetic code created by either nature, or as religious people would say, by the God.

"All kinds of practical consequences may follow. One may imagine that a man can create a man not only theoretically but also practically.

"He can be a genius mathematician, a brilliant musician or a soldier, a man who can fight without fear, compassion, regret or pain.

"As you understand, humanity can enter, and most likely it will in the near future, a very difficult and very responsible period of its existence.

"What I have just described might be worse than a nuclear bomb."

War studies experts have written at length about this dynamic, the urge to develop an unwanted weapon out of fear that otherwise you adversary might get it first and use it against you.

In Other Cold War News...

Hide and Seek is back. US Navy surface units in the Mediterranean were caught unaware last May when a new Russian sub launched a salvo of cruise missiles at targets in Syria.  The USS George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier and its battle group had no clue the Russian boat was in the vicinity until those missiles started flying.

For weeks the Bush, it's surface fleet, helicopters and P-8 anti-submarine aircraft tried to track the Krasnodar and repeatedly it eluded its trackers.

The Krasnodar is wrapped in echo-absorbing skin to evade sonar; its propulsion system is mounted on noise-cutting dampers; rechargeable batteries drive it in near silence, leaving little for sub hunters to hear. “The Black Hole,” U.S. allies call it.

The problem isn't so much tracking the sub down, it's having no idea that it's around until it reveals its presence. What that means is that it could have just as easily attacked and sunk the American carrier as stealthily as it did getting into position to launch a volley of cruise missiles.

The US Navy got a taste of this in the South China Sea some time ago when a Chinese sub popped up behind a carrier inside the battle group formation. It too was in a perfect kill shot position.

The U.S. Navy, which for years trained its sub-hunting teams through naval exercises and computer simulations, is again tracking Russian submarines in the Baltic, North Atlantic and Mediterranean seas. The challenge extends beyond Russia, which has sold subs to China, India and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in a return to the Dr. Strangelove era, the US Air Force is reported to be planning to put America's venerable B-52 bomber force back on 24-hour nuclear alert. That was stopped in 1991.

The Deviant-in-Chief. This Week's Episode.

We're nearing this year's global climate summit in Bonn, Germany. What a fitting time for Trump to fill the White House environmental advisory post.

And the nomination goes to - Kathleen Hartnett-White!!!

So just who is the diminutive Ms. Hartnett-White and what are her credentials?  Well she has degrees,  a bachelor's and a master's degree, and from Stanford. They were both in humanities and religion. From there she was admitted to doctoral studies at Princeton, again in religion. Oh yeah and she finished one year of law school in Texas. In a nutshell, she's a theology grad.

But there's one thing she does know and that's carbon dioxide, good old CO2. She's called it "the gas of life."  I won't recite the rest. Read it for yourself here and here.

Why That's Certainly Slimming

Only not, perhaps, in a good way. We, mankind, us, you, me - have so f#@ked up our oceans that the creatures who call them home are in a world of woe. That translates into real change. By the end of the century scientists warn that Atlantic Cod in the Barents and Baltic sea could be just one quarter of their current size. The culprit this time? Acidification, the aquatic scourge of our greenhouse gas emissions.

We're doing a lot to redecorate the marine habitat. Plastics, we all know about that. An ocean of plastics. Marine pollution, the toxic runoff of man-made chemicals into coastal waters now triggering oceanic dead zones where fish swim in and don't swim out. Add over-fishing and seabed mining and deepwater oil drilling. And then there's the warming, our heating waters that are driving marine migrations and killing off creatures that can't migrate such as coral. All of that stuff is really lousy but it doesn't hold a candle to ocean acidification which, just in case you're interested, may kill off marine life but, eventually, it will kill us too.

Climate change denialists like to argue about temperatures and such but, like vampires and the noonday sun, they crawl back into their crypts when the conversation gets around to our oceans. That's because the marine science - oceanography, hydrology, marine biology, chemistry and physics - well they're as brilliant as the noonday sun and as hard as concrete. And one of the facts not up for debate is how rapidly our oceans are turning acidic from absorbing atmospheric CO2.

Ocean acidification is progressing rapidly around the world, new research has found, and its combination with the other threats to marine life is proving deadly. Many organisms that could withstand a certain amount of acidification are at risk of losing this adaptive ability owing to pollution from plastics, and the extra stress from global warming.

The conclusions come from an eight-year study into the effects of ocean acidification which found our increasingly acid seas – a byproduct of burning fossil fuels – are becoming more hostile to vital marine life. 

...

Peter Thomson, UN ambassador for the oceans and a diplomat from Fiji, which is hosting this year’s UN climate change conference in Bonn, urged people to think of the oceans in the same terms as they do the climate. “We are all aware of climate change, but we need to talk more about ocean change, and the effects of acidification, warming, plastic pollution, dead zones and so on,” he said. “The world must know that we have a plan to save the ocean. What is required over the next three years is concerted action.”

...

Ocean acidification is another effect of pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as the gas dissolves in seawater to produce weak carbonic acid. Since the industrial revolution, the average pH of the ocean has been found to have fallen from 8.2 to 8.1, which may seem small but corresponds to an increase in acidity of about 26%. Measures to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere can help to slow down this process, but only measures that actively remove carbon already in the atmosphere will halt it, because of the huge stock of carbon already in the air from the burning of fossil fuels.

Worse still, the effects of acidification can intensify the effects of global warming, in a dangerous feedback loop. The researchers pointed to a form of planktonic alga known as Emiliania huxleyi, which in laboratory experiments was able to adapt to some extent to counter the negative effects acidification had upon it. But in a field experiment, the results were quite different as the extra stresses present at sea meant it was not able to form the extensive blooms it naturally develops. As these blooms help to transport carbon dioxide from the surface to the deep ocean, and produce the gas dimethyl sulfide that can help suppress global warming, a downturn in this species “will therefore severely feed back on the climate system”.

I know, here's an idea. How about we launch an armada of supertankers just full of the highest-carbon ersatz oil that the world should absolutely not be burning at this point? Oh geez, I just slipped out of cognitive dissonance mode again. Okay, that's not such a good idea. It's a really, really terrible idea. 

And here's one other thing you should keep in mind. Ocean acidification is a mass extinction tipping point. Once that tipping point is crossed, nature takes over and it finishes the job. Here's how paleontologist, Peter Ward, sums it up in his book, "Under a Green Sky."

First, the world warms over short intervals of time because of a sudden increase of carbon dioxide and methane... The warmer world affects the ocean circulation systems and disrupts the position of the conveyor currents. Bottom waters begin to have warm, low-oxygen water dumped into them. Warming continues, and the decrease of equator-to-pole temperature differences reduces ocean winds and surface currents to a near standstill. Mixing of oxygenated surface waters with the deeper, and volumetrically increasing, low-oxygen bottom waters decreases, causing ever-shallower water to change from oxygenated to anoxic. Finally, the bottom water is at depths were light can penetrate, the combination of low oxygen and light allows green sulfur bacteria to expand in numbers and fill the low-oxygen shallows. They live amid other bacteria that produce toxic amounts of hydrogen sulfide, and the flux of this gas into the atmosphere is as much as 2,000 times what it is today. The gas rises into the high atmosphere, where it breaks down the ozone layer, and the subsequent increase in ultraviolet radiation from the sun kills much of the photosynthetic green plant phytoplankton. On its way up into the sky, the hydrogen sulfide also kills some plant and animal life, and the combination of high heat and hydrogen sulfide creates a mass extinction on land. These are the greenhouse extinctions.

The Imperative of Electoral Reform

It's not just a nice idea. It's more than some feel good proposition. It, electoral reform, may be our society's last best chance of restoring representative democracy.

Justin Trudeau teased us with the promise that 2015 would be the last time Canadians would vote under the first past the post electoral system that has seen a succession of governments that 60 per cent of Canadians didn't support rule us with a majority. Two out of five or something even less than that constitutes a majority.  That's how we would up with Harper. That's how we wound up with Trudeau. Whoever can maintain the most convincing lies until the polls close wins.

I like the way George Monbiot sums up our predicament.


You lost, suck it up: this is how our politics works. If the party you voted for lost the election, you have no meaningful democratic voice for the next five years. You can go through life, in this “representative democracy”, unrepresented in government, while not permitted to represent yourself.

Even if your party is elected, it washes its hands of you when you leave the polling booth. Governments assert a mandate for any policy they can push through parliament. While elections tend to hinge on one or two issues, parties will use their win to claim support for all the positions in their manifestos, and for anything else they decide to do during their term in office.

If you raise objections to their policies, you’re often told, “if you don’t like it, stand for election”. This response is revealing: it suggests that only 650 people out of 66 million have a valid role in national politics, beyond voting once every five years. Political control under this system is so coarse and diffuse that democracy loses all but its crudest meaning.

It is astonishing that we put up with this. The idea that any government could meet the needs of a complex, modern nation by ruling without constant feedback, and actual rather than notional consent, is preposterous.

Electoral reform is perhaps our only remaining way to get ourselves out from under the neoliberal order that forms our political orthodoxy. For that reason alone it is imperative we ditch FPTP and the parties that defend it.

Monbiot argues for periodic referenda along the lines of the Swiss model.

There, the people vote in about ten or a dozen referendums a year, clustered into three or four polling days, challenging federal laws or proposing constitutional amendments. The referendums are triggered when someone can gather enough signatures. These plebiscites foster a strong sense of political ownership: people perceive that government belongs to them. This might explain why, in its survey of 40 nations, the OECD discovered that the Swiss had the highest levels of trust in government. Far from causing voter fatigue, the process stimulates a rich culture of engagement, debate and persuasion. Across the year, around 80% of the electorate vote in referendums.

When I mention the Swiss system, people tend to react with horror. What if, as they often do in Switzerland, people make conservative choices? Well, they are entitled to their conservatism. A true democracy reveals the character of a nation: in Switzerland it is generally conservative. And if you don’t like it, you have the opportunity, through the debates surrounding these plebiscites, to change people’s minds. (There is, however, an argument for preserving some constitutional norms, to prevent majorities from oppressing minorities).

Canada, with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, already affords minority protections. I certainly wouldn't mind turning out to the polls three or four times a year to have a say on how I'm governed.

Is Trump Gearing Up for War?

An executive order signed by Trump late Friday may indicate that the Mango Mussolini has war on his mind.

The order allows Trump, among other things, to press into active duty a thousand retired military pilots.


President Trump signed an executive order Friday allowing the Air Force to recall as many as 1,000 retired pilots to active duty to address a shortage in combat fliers, the White House and Pentagon announced.

By law, only 25 retired officers can be brought back to serve in any one branch. Trump's order removes those caps by expanding a state of national emergency declared by President George W. Bush after 9/11, signaling what could be a significant escalation in the 16-year-old global war on terror.

"We anticipate that the Secretary of Defense will delegate the authority to the Secretary of the Air Force to recall up to 1,000 retired pilots for up to three years," Navy Cdr. Gary Ross, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement.

This is serious stuff. Those retired pilots have entered the civilian economy, usually in important positions.  Taking them out of airline cockpits and putting them back in uniform for three years may wreck their civilian careers and cause widespread disruption across the private sector.

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and a member of Armed Services Committee, said that the fight against Islamic State and al-Qaeda linked terrorists will be expanding. He spoke to reporters while speaking about the four U.S. soldiers killed Oct. 4 in Niger.

Counter-terrorism rules under President Obama had been too restrictive and ineffective, Graham said.

“The war is morphing," Graham said. "You’re going to see more actions in Africa, not less. You’re going to see more aggression by the United States toward our enemies, not less. You’re going to have decisions made not in the White House but out in the field. And I support that entire construct.”

Last month, President Trump became the third president to renew the post-9/11 state of national emergency, which allows the president to call up the national guard, hire and fire officers and delay retirements.

Those extraordinary powers were supposed to be temporary. But even after 16 years, there's been no congressional oversight of the emergency.

Salon's Keith Spencer describes the emergency decree as a "micro-draft."

It allows the military to recall retired officers to active duty. A USA Today article about this executive order (or rather, this amendment to an existing executive order) noted that the Air Force has been particularly crucial in military operations against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Moreover, the Air Force has had a pilot shortage brewing for over a decade. In September 2017, military leaders interviewed by United Press International (UPI) that the military was in a crisis. “We're 1,500 pilots short, and if we don't find a way to turn this around, our ability to defend the nation is compromised,” Gen. David L. Goldfein, Air Force Chief of Staff, told UPI. Likewise, a report by the RAND corporation, a think tank, stated that the shortage was partially because “employment opportunities are excellent in the private sector.”

There has been little media coverage of the executive order as of Friday evening, beyond the aforementioned USA Today piece. Around the internet, some social media users were alarmed at the nonspecific nature of the term “national emergency,” which seemed to hint at executive overreach. In the /r/Military subreddit, a nonpartisan US military forum with many veterans and enlisted officers, debate raged over the ramifications of the order. “Can someone convince me this isn’t a prelude to war in Korea,” wrote one user with the handle "NotARandomNumber." Others were less conspiratorial. “My guess is that this is the most deficit neutral way to maintain Air Force staffing in the face of upcoming tax cuts. At least that's what I hope,” wrote user "TheBigRedSD4."

If We Don't Get This Right, We May Pay Dearly For Failing

Like most people I had a weak grasp of neoliberalism when ushered in by Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney as our new default governmental operating system.  It's not easy to pin down which is why it's been so hard to challenge.

We tend to recognize neoliberalism by its components, each of us focusing on the aspects we most dislike.  For some it may be globalization, the global economy, the free trade regime. For others it is the surrender of facets of national sovereignty and the weakening of the nation state. Others resent the intrusion of the invisible hand of the marketplace into our democratic fabric. Many associate neoliberalism with the withering of a once robust and broad based middle class and the choking off of social mobility.  Some recognize it as the engine of inequality and social disparity. Others see it as an alien force that insinuates itself between the voting public and those they elect to high office.

The fact is all of those criticisms are demonstrably true. Even the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have broken ranks with neoliberalism. They see it as a socially destructive force, a plague on government. Public intellectuals such as John Ralston Saul have denounced it for what it really is, just another faith-based ideology akin to nothing so much as a religion albeit with a 30-year useful shelf life.  Before his death even Milt Friedman, the high priest of neoliberalism, declared it a failed experiment.

Yet this horribly flawed and malignant political-economic model was embraced not just by the Right but also by the Center and even the Left across the developed economies. First embraced it quickly became deeply embedded in western democracy. It still lives in our political caste today and no matter how flawed and how contradictory or how destructive, it's all they know and none has the courage to chart another course. And, yes, that does include Canada and the current Liberal government.

Is neoliberalism really that bad?  Yes, it is that bad. Here's an example. A major part of the neoliberal theology is the pursuit of perpetual, exponential GDP growth. That is the yardstick by which neoliberals measure success. They persist in this horrible orthodoxy even today despite the clear and abundant evidence that we have already exceeded the limits of growth on this very finite planet, an ecological red line we first crossed in the early 70s.

We're exploiting the Earth's resources at somewhat over 1.7 times the planet's resource carrying capacity. We're doing this by "eating our seed corn," rapidly depleting the planet's reserves. Groundwater is a perfect example. Around the world we've maintained this Green Revolution (that  enabled us to expand our human population by threefold in just one lifetime) by rapaciously depleting our groundwater reserves, our ancient aquifers. We have become mortally dependent on pillaging a limited resource that cannot be replenished at anything beyond a small fraction of our demand. And now many of those critical aquifers are nearing the point of exhaustion. Water is becoming harder to find, in some places impossible, even as the need for it steadily expands.

There is an abundance of examples of the folly of perpetual, exponential growth. You can find them all over this blog but that is not the point of this essay. Time to move on.

As I came to recognize neoliberalist globalism as a genuine threat to our civilization and most non-human life on Earth, I began to explore alternatives we might pursue. As neoliberalism is the ultimate dead end road I decided to head back to see what once existed before we turned this treacherous corner.

I think (I'm not sure but I think) I hit the mother lode when I got to the bedrock of progressivism.

A preliminary matter. You may imagine yourself progressive. You may think the party you support is progressive. We've come to perceive that simply being somewhat to the left of the guy on the right qualifies as progressive. It doesn't.

Progressivism, as I have written repeatedly elsewhere and at length, is a philosophy and a series of principles to guide the relationship between a people and their government for the improvement of the general public rather than the narrow special interest, especially the corporatist element that today holds so much power sapping our democracy. Progressivism is a contradiction of the policies of today's Conservatives, Liberals and even, regrettably, the New Democrats.

When I started this blog more than a decade ago, I wrote, "Dedicated to the restoration of progressive democracy." At the time I was thinking of Pierre Trudeau/Lloyd Axworthy liberalism as I had experienced it as a young man. That's what I wanted to bring back. Then came Dion, Ignatieff and J. Trudeau and I realized liberalism as I once saw it had been extinguished.  Some, especially from the NDP, will disagree with that, obviously, but they would do better to examine how their party abandoned the left and drifted to the center under Layton and Mulcair. They have their own atoning to keep themselves plenty busy.

I believe more fervently today than ever before in the need for a progressive restoration. I no longer believe that can be accomplished within either the Liberal or New Dem parties.

Why do I believe we need to change course so abruptly? Because progressivism is our last hope of rebuilding social cohesion among the Canadian public. We, but especially the generations that will follow mine, will need that cohesion, that common bond of will and purpose, to meet the looming challenges that will confront them over the course of this century. These are challenges that are unprecedented in man's history. They'll run the gamut of natural and man-made catastrophes from climate change (severe weather events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration; heatwaves and flash droughts; cyclical and severe flooding; disease and pest migration; sea level rise and more) to crop failures, mass migrations, the destabilization and spread of failed states, and, yes, war.  A people divided, distrustful and hostile will be wiped out. The divisions that neoliberalism engenders are already undermining us.

When it comes to social cohesion, hyper-partisanship is enormously destructive. It pulls us apart and tears us down. It says we're good and they're bad. They must be bad for us to be good. The badder we can make them out to be the better we must be. Both sides can play this rancid game constantly widening the rift by sowing distrust, hostility even paranoia.  And what good comes of this? Nothing. It diminishes us and obstructs reconciliation, dismissing that as an impossibility, a moral lapse. The self-righteousness of these types is nauseating.

Two of my best and oldest friends are devout Conservatives. One of them has done particularly great things in public service as counsel, on the bench, and in elected office.  That particular friend knows that I will always be of the Left as I know he will always be of the Right but that has no bearing on our friendship or our ability to discuss the pressing political issues of the day. I think what keeps our friendship vital over these past three decades is how much common ground we can find between us.

I'll give you a quick example. My opposition to the trafficking in bitumen is pretty obvious. My Conservative friend supports the oil export initiative. He challenged my opposition and I explained the dangerous qualities of bitumen and dilbit. His response? He asked why don't they just refine that stuff on site in Alberta? That was the first time I'd heard a Conservative say that. It showed that there's enough goodwill, enough common ground that we can compromise.  (By the way, I think he just might have voted for Trudeau in 2015, not that he would ever admit it.)

Progressivism, like human decency and goodwill, isn't a function of which party one identifies with. Progressivism was supported by Abraham Lincoln who proclaimed labour to be far the superior of capital. Later it was championed by Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, and then by Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor.  Progressivism rightly spans both sides of the aisle. There is absolutely no reason that Conservatives cannot accept it.  You can trace progressivism straight into the writings of the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke. We can't have 40 per cent of the population on the wrong side of these things.

We have hyper-partisans in our ranks too, brimming with self-righteous indignation and always ready to lash out at those they don't find sufficiently partisan. They always paint the other side as ghastly and vile and horrid as though they were aliens, beyond redemption, no common ground to be found. Just like their spitball throwing colleagues on the other side, they obstruct reconciliation and the restoration of social cohesion. Without a sufficient degree of social cohesion, there will be no progressive restoration and the narrow special interests that the neoliberal order serves will prevail.

There is so much rebuilding to do and time is not on our side.

Even Trump Can Do the Right Thing Occasionally

It's a small thing but it's still important to some Americans. Donald Trump says he won't block the release of the government's remaining tranche of documents about the Kennedy assassination when the embargo expires on October 26.

It's believed that about 3,000 documents remain under seal, embargoed by Congress 25 years ago.


The files are scheduled to be opened by the US National Archives on 26 October, but the president is entitled to extend their classified status.

Kennedy was shot dead by a sniper in November 1963 in Dallas, Texas.

The National Archives has already released most documents related to the assassination, but a final batch remains under lock and key.

"Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened," Trump said in a tweet.

Congress ruled in 1992 that all JFK documents be released within 25 years, unless the president decides the release would harm national security.

The archive contains more than 3,000 previously unreleased documents, and more than 30,000 that have been released before but with redactions.

Well, That Didn't Take Long

The political two-step over Quebec's law that would deny public services to those wearing face coverings is triggering the expected greasy responses from the NDP, the Tories, and the prime minister.

The new leader of the party recently burned over the hijab issue, the NDP's Jagmeet Singh, offered this obscure statement.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was quick to condemn the bill upon its passing.

"I'm completely opposed to the bill, but I am completely confident in the existing protections that are in place in Quebec that will protect human rights," Singh said, adding he believes the law violates human rights.

Way to duck and cover, Jagmeet. He's completely opposed to the law and just as completely confident there's no real problem.  Nice one, Jagmeet.

The Tories also stopped well short of demanding the federal government intervene.

"Ultimately, it's up to Quebecers to pass judgment on this legislation. The Conservative Party believes every Canadian has the right to express themselves and practice their religion, not just in private but in public too," said Jake Enwright, director of communications for Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer.

Which brings us to the prevaricator in chief, our prime minister. Yesterday Mr. Trudeau seemed unwilling to get dragged into the fray saying that it's not up to the federal government to challenge the Quebec law.  In the same breath Mr. Trudeau said that he believes fundamentally in human rights and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and will always defend that - somehow, maybe, eventually.

Today Mr. Trudeau seemed to react to the overnight criticism by saying that his government is looking into the implications of Quebec's bill 62.

"I will always stand up for the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It's what Canadians expect of me." 

He's right. Canadians do expect him to stand up for the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, especially when he has a crystal-clear, per curiam, unanimous interpretation of Charter rights as the Supreme Court of Canada delivered in the Carter assisted death case. Nine to nothing, "one voice," slam dunk ruling only he didn't like it and so, instead of 'always' standing for the Charter and the rule of law, he came up with his own interpretation that is genuinely afoul of the law, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Now it's obvious that the opposition parties are hoping that the niqab/hajib controversy will gore Trudeau as it did Mulcair in the last election and it's just as obvious that Trudeau is terrified at the prospect of this blowing up in his face as it did Mulcair's.

This is not an age of courage and principle. That is long past. This is an age of expedience in the pursuit of personal interest and little else. And so the jackals gnaw on each others' legs, hoping that one of them will be brought down.