Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Robbing the poor to pay the rich. Robbing the future to pay the present.
That's the way we like it and we're damned good at it.
Sure it's a one way street to the cliff edge. Sure, there's a day of reckoning. Still, that's the way we like it.
The most blatant example is Donald Trump, a pillaging grifter extraordinaire. Trump, president of the United States of America, is always in hot pursuit of the easy score, even if he often struggles for it and fails. His grand vision is the measure of his attention span which is, often, a single daily news cycle. He'll make some grand pronouncement today and then contradict that with another grand pronouncement tomorrow without even acknowledging that he's in a non-stop chase after his own tail.
The American economy is booming. Trump and his advisors tell us that at every opportunity. Everybody's rich to hear him tell it. Only it's a game of three card monte and the American people are placing sucker bets.
A report in today's New York Times warns that the Trump government, with America's bubbling economy, is looking at a new benchmark next year - a trillion dollar deficit. How can a government, presiding over a national economy that is so economically buoyant, rack up a trillion dollar deficit.
Even the Pharaohs knew that, when the Nile delivered a bumper harvest, part of the bounty should be set aside in granaries as a reserve for the bad years when there wouldn't be enough to go around. 20th century economist, John Milton Keynes, championed a more sophisticated version of the wisdom of the ancients. Government's job is to use its taxing power to fill the treasury in good times so that it has a reserve of cash to inject into the economy to prevent it from crashing in downturns.
The bloated orange Icarus will have none of that prudence nonsense. The rich need those tax cuts. Defunding the federal government is what keeps those Titans of Industry happy.
Recent talk of another major recession looming has the Mango Mussolini soiling his dainties. And so he ponders ways to prop up the economy with money he doesn't have.
The federal budget deficit is growing faster than expected, even as President Trump muses about more tax cuts and other ideas that would add to government debt.
The deficit will reach $960 billion for the 2019 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, and $1 trillion for the 2020 fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office said in updated forecasts released on Wednesday. Previously, it had projected an $896 billion deficit for 2019 and $892 billion for 2020. Those numbers would be even higher, if not for lower-than-expected interest rates, which are reducing the cost of servicing the national debt.
Rising deficit projections are the result of sluggish growth in federal revenue after Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts went into effect, and several bipartisan agreements to raise military and nondefense domestic discretionary spending, which Mr. Trump signed into law.
Typically, the budget deficit shrinks when unemployment is low. Mr. Trump’s administration has defied that trend.
About that signature attention span?
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he was not looking to push through a tax cut right now, a reversal from his comments on Tuesday, when he said he was looking at both a payroll tax cut and indexing capital gains for inflation.
A pre-election chill has descended over some environment charities after Elections Canada warned them that discussing the dangers of climate change during the coming federal campaign could be deemed partisan activity.
An Elections Canada official warned groups in a training session earlier this summer that because Maxime Bernier, the leader of the People’s Party of Canada, has expressed doubts about the legitimacy of climate change, any group that promotes it as real or an emergency could be considered partisan, said Tim Gray, executive director of the advocacy group Environmental Defence.
Any partisan activity – including advertising, surveys, or any kind of campaign costing at least $500 – would require a charity to register as a third party for the election, an onerous requirement that could jeopardize a group’s charitable tax status, Mr. Gray said.
So, if Maxime 'le Pen' Bernier, as fucked up a specimen of humanity as any we'll see this October, says the sky is green, it'll be partisan activity to say 'no, it's blue'. It's political now to recognize the overwhelming scientific consensus because that rancid buffoon disputes it. Maxime Bernier, or whatever he pulls out of his backside, sets the bar for what constitutes political thought in Canada.
“The main reason for climate change, it is not human activity,” Mr. Bernier said Sunday in Gatineau, where his party was holding its first convention.
“There is no climate change urgency in this country.” he said in a speech in June speech. He also disagrees that carbon dioxide, which experts say is responsible for three-quarters of greenhouse emissions globally, is bad.
“CO2 is not ‘pollution,’" he tweeted. “It’s what comes out of your mouth when you breathe and what nourishes plants.”
The United States is degenerating into a fascist nation. I always point out that for all the adherents of the radical right there are more decent Americans appalled at what is happening to their country. I'm no longer convinced that's more than just whistling past the graveyard.
How could fascism take hold in America when most of the populace finds it repugnant? Well, how did it take hold in Germany in the 30s?
Let's look at a passage from the memoirs of Sebastian Haffner, an upper middle class German who grew up during the Weimar Republic, began a legal career only to see the rise of the National Socialists. He watched as his society succumbed to fascism before he fled, with his Jewish-born wife and infant to Britain as war approached. On Haffner's death his son used those diaries to publish a memoir, "Defying Hitler."
Here is how Sebastian Haffner saw what happened as Hitler rose to power:
The Complacent Revolution
The Nazis celebrate the 30th of January as their day of revolution. They are wrong. There was no revolution on the 30th of January, 1933, just a change of government. Hitler became Chancellor, by no means the Fuhrer of a Nazi regime (the cabinet contained only two Nazis apart from him). The general opinion was that it was not the Nazis who had won, but the bourgeois parties of the Right, who had 'captured' the Nazis and held all the key positions in the Government. In constitutional terms, events had taken a much more conventional, un-revolutionary course than most of what had happened during the previous six months...
The morning headline was 'Hitler called to President'. That produced a certain nervous, impotent irritation. Hitler had been called to the President in August and November. He had been offered the vice-chancellorship and then the chancellorship. Both times he had set impossible conditions, and both times there had been solemn declarations 'Never again...' Each time, 'never again' had lasted exactly three months...
At midday the headline said: 'Hitler makes impossible demands'. We nodded, half reassured. It was only too credible. It would have gone against his nature to ask for less than too much.
At about five o'clock the evening papers arrived: 'Cabinet of National Unity formed - Hitler Reichschancellor'.
...That evening I discussed the prospects of the new Government with my father. We agreed that it had a good chance of doing a lot of damage, but not much chance of surviving very long; a deeply reactionary government with Hitler as its mouthpiece. ...Even with the Nazis it would not have a majority in the Reichstag. Of course that would always be dissolved, but the Government had a clear majority of the population against it, in particular the working class, which would probably go Communist, now that the Social Democrats had completely discredited themselves. One could prohibit the Communists, but that would only make them more dangerous. ...Besides, who were the people who had suddenly started voting Nazi in the last three years? Misguided ignoramuses for the most part, victims of propaganda, a fluctuating mass that would fall apart at the first disappointment. No, all things considered, this government was not a cause for alarm. The only question was what would come after it. It was possible that they would drive the country to civil war...
The next day this turned out to be the general opinion of the intelligent press. It is curious how plausible an argument it is, even today, when we know what came next. How could things turn out so completely differently? Perhaps it was just because we were all so certain that they could not do so - and relied on that with far too much confidence. So we neglected to consider that it might, if the worst came to the worst, be necessary to prevent the disaster from happening.
The Deadly Illusion of Normalcy
Through the whole of February 1933 everything that happened remained a matter of the press, in other words, it took place in an arena that would lose all reality for 99 per cent of the population the moment there were no newspapers. ...The Nazis no longer felt any restraint; with their gangs, they regularly broke up election meetings of other parties. They shot one or two political opponents every day. ...The new Prussian regional interior minister (a Nazi: a certain Captain Goring) promulgated an incredible decree. It ordered the police to intervene in any brawl on the side of the Nazis, without investigating the rights and wrongs of the matter, and furthermore to shoot at the other side without prior warning.
All this was still something one only read about in the press. There were brown SA uniforms on the streets, demonstrations, shouts of 'Heil', but otherwise it was 'business as usual'.
...I must admit that I was inclined to view the undisturbed functioning of the law, and indeed the continued normal course of daily life, as a triumph over the Nazis. They would behave as raucously and wildly as they wished. They could still only stir up the political surface. The depths of the ocean of life remained unaffected.
The March Revolution
The Nazi revolution of March 1933 was not a revolution. Everything went strictly 'by the book', using means that were permitted by the constitution. At first there were 'emergency decrees' by the President of the Reich, and later a bill was passed by a two-thirds majority of the Reichstag giving the Government unlimited legislative powers, perfectly in accordance with the rules for changing the constitution.
...From a simple common-sense point of view, one would say that the essential characteristic of a revolution is that people violently attack the established order and its representatives, police, army, etc., and overcome them. ...At all events, we expect revolutionaries to be on the attack, to show courage, risk their lives.
None of that was to be found in March, 1933. The events were a combination of the most disparate ingredients. What was completely absent was any act of courage or spirit by any of the participants. The month of March demonstrated that the Nazis had achieved an unassailable position of power: through terror, celebration and rhetoric, treachery and finally a collective breakdown - a million individuals suffered a nervous collapse. More bloodshed had accompanied the birth of many European states, but none came into being in a more loathsome way.
European history knows two forms of terror. The first is the uncontrollable explosion of bloodlust in a victorious mass uprising. The other is cold, calculated cruelty committed by a victorious state as a demonstration of power and intimidation. ...It was left to the Nazis to combine both forms of terror. ...The external picture was one of revolutionary terror: a wild unkempt mob breaking into homes at night and dragging defenceless victims to the torture chambers. The internal process was repressive terror: cold, calculated, official orders, directed by the state and carried out under the full protection of the police and armed forces.
The Last Election, a Cowed People Votes
These elections, the last that were ever held in pre-war Germany, brought the Nazis only 44 per cent of the votes... The majority was still against the Nazis. If you consider that terror was in full swing, that the parties of the Left had been prohibited from all public activity in the decisive final week before the elections, you have to admit that the German people as a whole had behaved quite decently. However it made no difference at all.
A week later Hindenburg abolished the Weimar national flag, which was replaced by theswastika banner and a black, white and red 'temporary national flag'. There were daily parades, mass meetings, declarations of gratitude for the liberation of the nation, military music from dawn to dusk, award ceremonies for heroes, the dedication of flags and, as a final climax, the tasteless display of the 'Day of Potsdam'.
...The weather in March, 1933 was glorious. Was it not wonderful to celebrate in the spring sunshine, in squares decked with flags? To merge with the festive crowds and listen to high-sounding patriotic speeches about freedom, and fatherland, and holy vows? (It was certainly better than having one's belly pumped up with a water hose in some hidden SA cellar).
People began to join in - at first mostly from fear. After they had participated, they no longer wanted to do so just from fear. That would have been mean and contemptible. so the necessary ideology was supplied. That was the spiritual basis of the National Socialist revolution.
True, something further was necessary to achieve all this. That was the cowardly treachery of all party and organizational leaders, to whom the 56 per cent of the population who voted against the Nazis on the 5th of March had entrusted themselves. ...Naturally the Nazis had no interest in drawing attention to it, since it would considerably devalue their 'victory', and as for the traitors themselves: well, of course, they did not want to draw attention to it. Nevertheless , it is finally only this betrayal that explains the almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight.
One by one, the opposition parties, Left to Right, abandoned the German people. Communist Party officials looked for the exit doors, emigrating to refuge. The Social Democrats capitulated:
In the month before they were finally dissolved, the Social Democratic faction in the Reichstag had unanimously expressed their confidence in Hitler and joined in the singing of the Horst Wessel Song, the Nazi anthem.
The great middle-class, Catholic party, Zentrum, hd already fallen in March. It was this party that supplied the votes necessary for the two-thirds majority that 'legalized' Hitler's dictatorship.
Finally, the German nationalists, the right-wing conservatives, who venerated 'honour' and 'heroism' as the central characteristics of their programme. Oh God, what an infinitely dishonourable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterwards! One might at least have expected that, once their claim in January proved illusory - that they had 'tamed' the Nazis and 'rendered them harmless' - they would act as a 'brake' and 'prevent the worst'. Not a bit of it. They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of the Jews, the persecution of Christians. They were not even bothered when their own party was prohibited, and their own members arrested.
...There was not one single example of energetic defence, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight and desertion. In March 1933 millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders. Some tried to join the Stahlhelm and the German nationalists, when it became clear that none of the others were going to fight. For a few weeks their membership numbers showed an exceptional rise, then the organization was disbanded - and it, too, capitulated without a fight.
...It was out of this treachery of its opponents, and the feeling of helplessness, weakness and disgust that it aroused that the Third Reich was born. In the elections of the 5th of March the Nazis had remained a minority. If there had been elections three weeks later, the German people would almost certainly have given them a true majority. This was not just the result of the terror, or intoxication resulting from the constant festivities. The decisive cause was the anger and disgust with the cowardly treachery of their own leadership. That had become for a moment stronger than the rage and hate against the real enemy. Hundreds of thousands, who had until then been opponents, joined the Nazi Party in March 1933.
I had been meaning to post these passages from Haffner's chilling memoir for some time now but the white nationalist, anti-fa rallies in liberal Portland this weekend and Trump's warning at his latest rally that his government might declare the anti-fa a terrorist movement and would be "keeping its eye" on Portland left me asking myself if not now, when.
Trump is no Hitler. Trump is stupid and lazy. He does, however, prove that you don't have to be as smart and tenacious as that German lunatic to be every bit as devious, ruthless and destructive of your own country. Complacency, among the opposition and within the population can be all the leg up any tyrant requires.
I'm not inclined to race to the defence of Justin Trudeau but, really, this nonsense has to stop.
Neither the prime minister, nor Butts, nor Wernick committed anything approaching a crime in trying to cajole Jody Wilson-Raybould to intervene on behalf of SNC-Lavalin.
It was unethical, a result made somewhat more apt by the merger of the offices of solicitor-general and attorney-general. Anne McLennan may think that's just dandy because that's how our 'founding fathers' saw fit to merge them but that founding fathers business is meaningless. Look what it's done to the States.
The CBC's Aaron Wheery has a helpful analysis that dispels the silliness of Kinsella and the opposition parties.
That the RCMP spoke with Jody Wilson-Raybould is not evidence of a crime — Wilson-Raybould herself has said that she does not believe a crime occurred during the SNC-Lavalin affair. It is not even necessarily evidence of an active or official investigation. In fact, there is reason to believe an investigation was not pursued.
But the news on Friday that the former minister of justice and attorney general spoke with someone from the national police force in the spring punctuates another difficult moment for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government.
And it stirs echoes of the events, nearly 14 years ago, that doomed the last Liberal government.
The fact that Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion proceeded with, and completed, his investigation would seem to suggest that the RCMP has not been actively pursuing the matter. The Conflict of Interest Act dictates that the commissioner "shall immediately suspend an examination" if it is discovered that the subject of his investigation is also the subject of a police investigation.
In 2014, for instance, the ethics commissioner suspended an investigation into the Mike Duffy affair once it became clear that the RCMP was investigating the same people and events.
Still the story is out there. JWR could have defused it but instead merely confirmed the cops spoke to her. That, to me, was unfair.
It's funny how these RCMP investigations are handled. I explored that in a previous post. That old saying is that the fish rots from the head down. That might be true.
Zaccardelli's intervention in the 2006 election campaign with the tall tale that Ralph Goodale was under active investigation probably did a lot to swing Harper's minority win.
Then there was the curious trial of Mike Duffy. They smothered the Cavendish Cottager with a staggering 31 charges. He was convicted of none, not one. The learned judge, Justice Vaillancourt, said the evidence clearly demonstrated that crimes had been committed, just not by Duffy.
The evidence did demonstrate that crimes had been committed. In my opinion, it's likely that parties inside the prime minister's office and within the Tory Senate leadership were culpable. Only the RCMP never took all the evidence it had amassed and investigated them. Obviously, if not Duffy, then whom? The evidence speaks for itself rather powerfully.
When you're batting zero for 31 that suggests a stacked deck, a political prosecution. When a highly respected judge hears all the evidence and concludes that, yes, crimes were committed but the criminals do not stand before me, you might think that someone would be grateful for a chance to fix their own mistakes. Nothing happened. Nothing.
Zaccardelli refused to answer MPs' questions about the Ralph Goodale/Paul Martin setup. He subsequently retired after the RCMP pension scandal. Nobody from the RCMP has ever been called to task for the Duffy investigation/prosecution.
I don't like the RCMP meddling in our politics. And I really don't like those who exploit it to spread innuendo.
It had John Bolton's fingerprints all over it and, if the Brits had fallen for it, they would have been America's accomplices in its cold war with Iran.
It was six weeks ago that Royal Marines boarded and seized the Iranian oil tanker, Grace I, for supposedly being in violation of EU sanctions. The Brits maintained the tanker was en route to deliver a cargo of oil to Syria.
The Iranians retaliated by seizing a British flagged tanker. Eventually a deal was worked out. The Iranian tanker, being held in Gibraltar, would be released to deliver its cargo to Greece, not Syria. Then the British vessel will likewise be free to go.
Getting word of the deal, Washington (Bolton) requested that US forces be allowed to seize the vessel, presumably from the Brits or the government of Gibraltar.
Can anybody say Huawei? Perhaps realizing how Canada got dragged into Trump's trade war with China by the device of an extradition request for a Huawei executive, the Brits chose not to fall for the same gambit.
Before anybody could say, "which way did they go?" the Grace I was released by Gibraltar to steam to Greece.
The chief minister of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo, said in a statement on Thursday that he had “received written assurance” from Iran the previous day that “if released, the destination of Grace 1 would not be an entity that is subject to European Union sanctions.”
“In light of the assurances we have received,” he added, “there are no longer any reasonable grounds for the continued legal detention of the Grace 1.”
When asked later in a CNN interview where the ship was headed, Mr. Picardo said, “That is not an issue for the authorities in Gibraltar.”
The oil trader in Iran said the tanker would sail to Greece and then to Italy, though it remained unclear who would buy Iranian oil in defiance of American sanctions. Iranian officials have insisted that the oil was always bound for Europe, not Syria.
The Iranian government said earlier this week that a deal for the release of the ship was near, which officials in Gibraltar and London would neither confirm nor deny at the time. British officials insisted that it was a matter for the Gibraltar authorities.
It went largely unnoticed yesterday when the RCMP announced their investigators were looking into the SNC-Lavalin/JWR/Trudeau affair. It's hard to imagine they're looking at anything other than possible obstruction of justice.
I expect they'll be focusing on s. 139(2) of the Criminal Code that reads:
(2) Every one who wilfully attempts in any manner other than a manner described in subsection (1) to obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years.
For starters, I don't believe that Justin Trudeau, either alone or in conjunction with Butts and Wernick, went so far as to commit obstruction, perversion or an attempt to defeat the course of justice. Even Jody said as much.
Yet if I'm wrong on 139(2), I have immense difficulty trusting the RCMP to investigate this.
The RCMP has a history of wrongful meddling in parliamentary matters, usually, it seems, to the benefit of the Tories.
Think back to then Commissioner Zaccardelli, who took the unusual step of announcing in the midst of a federal election campaign that Ralph Goodale (of all people, Goodale) was under active RCMP investigation. That was when Paul Martin was trying to get out from under the Chretien-era 'sponsorship scandal.' It was enough of a leg up for Harper to win a minority.
The telling part is that afterwards when Goodale was cleared and Zaccardelli was called before MPs to explain himself and his 'unusual' action in mid-campaign, he simply refused to answer their questions. Lawful questions and the top Mountie clammed up. Now you may have a different idea of 'benefit of the doubt' but I was left with very little doubt that Zac wanted to throw the election to the Conservatives.
On March 28, [2007] RCMP officials provided damning testimony to the public accounts committee, saying there were major accounting irregularities in the force's pension and insurance plans in 2002.
The officers said when they tried to report the wrongdoing, they were either stonewalled or punished by top officials in the force, including Zaccardelli.
Some of those same officials appeared as witnesses Monday, alongside Zaccardelli.
But Zaccardelli said none of them had ever been punished for reporting wrongdoing.
Zaccardelli denied that Chief Supt. Fraser Macaulay, who was sent to work at the Department of National Defence, was punished for reporting his concerns.
Somehow the whole scandal went nowhere and Zaccardelli resigned with his pension intact.
More recently there was the Duffy/Harper/Wright affair. Duffy refused to play ball about the housing allowance scandal (it's a long, convoluted saga). The RCMP, under then Commissioner Bob Paulson, was called in.
It was said that Harper's crew figured that they could launch a criminal pogrom that would either give Duffy a heart attack or bankrupt him in legal costs.
Sure enough the RCMP came up with a 'kitchen sink' list of charges, 31 charges. When was the last time you heard of somebody, anybody indicted on 31 charges that didn't involve massive drug trafficking or multiple murders? When was the last time you heard of someone indicted on 31 charges for padding the expense account? Then again, when was the last time you heard of anyone standing trial on 31 charges and winding up convicted on none, not one, the learned trial judge concluding that crimes were committed, just not by Duffy?
That was the proceeding that gave birth to the 'immaculate bribe' offence in which Duffy was supposedly guilty of taking a bribe for which no one was culpable of giving him that very bribe. It was the criminal law equivalent of the virgin birth.
Paulson's team of topnotch investigators went at length into some evidence while ignoring the smoking gun that created the entire scandal and became Harper's nightmare.
I was inadvertently involved in Duffy's defence when I pointed out to a member of his legal team that the truth was obvious from the Duffy email that someone sent to Bob Fife who then broke the story.
The email, written while the scheme was still very private, outlined the terms of the deal Duffy had been given by Wright and Harper. Duffy would do certain things. They would do certain things. He would be put into funds needed to pay off his Senate expenses tab. The most critical part of that initial email was that it was contemporaneous. It set out a series of events, each of which subsequently happened, before Bob Fife got his hands on it. Afterwards, only one person's evidence was consistent with that telltale email - Duffy's. Every one else's story was a flimsy contrivance and, at trial, that's precisely what Justice Vaillancourt found.
After Duffy was acquitted and on reading the Reasons for Judgment I was left with the powerful belief that this whole thing had been a set up and that the RCMP surely must have been party to that.
After all these shenanigans it is difficult for me to believe that the RCMP can be trusted in anything dealing with the Liberals, particularly Justin Trudeau and the SNC-Lavalin affair. That's especially true as we near another federal election campaign. We should not tolerate a Ralph Goodale II.
I have little sympathy for Justin Trudeau or Butts or Wernick. They went too far, crossed ethical lines, and that should have consequences. Would we have demanded anything less for Harper? I just don't believe that a criminal investigation with an election two months away is warranted, especially if it is in the hands of the RCMP.
Trust, once broken, is hard to restore. Trust, repeatedly broken, can be extremely hard to rebuild.
Once among the largest landholders in the oilsands, industrial conglomerate Koch Industries Inc. has sold off its upstream leases and abandoned licences in the heavy oil play, joining a stream of foreign companies exiting the bitumen-bearing formation.
Wichita, Kan.-based Koch Industries struck an agreement to sell thousands of hectares of land in the oilsands to Calgary-based Cavalier Energy Inc., a subsidiary of the Riddell family-controlled Paramount Resources Ltd., in a transaction that occurred in June, the Financial Post has confirmed.
Koch, one of the world’s largest private companies owned by American billionaires and Republican donors Charles and David Koch, has also abandoned the licences it did not sell in the transaction with Paramount and has been allowing its leases in the play to expire.
Did you get that last bit? What Koch Industries couldn't sell it has simply abandoned. Adios, Athabasca. No word yet on just how big a hit Koch had to take to extricate the company from the Tar Sands.
Hey Justin, how's that multi-billion dollar pipeline coming?
So he broke the law, so what? He won't apologize for standing up for Canadian jobs.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he accepts and takes full responsibility after Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion found he violated the Conflict of Interest Act by trying to influence then-justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould to overrule a decision to not grant a deferred prosecution agreement to Quebec-based engineering firm SNC-Lavalin.
"We recognize the way that this happened shouldn't have happened. I take responsibility for the mistakes that I made," Trudeau said.
Does that mean that Justin takes responsibility for turfing Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott from the Liberal caucus for standing up to him? Maybe, but probably not. That would be expecting too much of the Dauphin.
Then comes the "but" as in 'I take responsibility but not really.'
"My job as prime minister is to stand up for Canadians and defend their interests. Yes, it is essential that we do that in a way that defends our institutions and upholds prosecutorial independence but we need to talk about the impacts on Canadians right across the country of decisions being made," Trudeau said. "I can't apologize for standing up for Canadian jobs."
Trudeau casts the whole business as standing up for Canadian jobs. That's just more Trudeau horse shit.
The ethics commissioner said his review of the SNC-Lavalin affair turned up other "troubling tactics" and behaviour by some of the country's most senior public office-holders — including an inappropriate consideration of partisan political interests when discussing whether to proceed with a criminal trial.
Dion said discussions between Trudeau, former privy council clerk Michael Wernick, his senior staff and Wilson-Raybould about a political fallout in Quebec if the federal government did not reach a DPA with the company was "improper."
During a Sept. 17, 2018, meeting about the legal matter, Trudeau reminded Wilson-Raybould that he was "an MP in Quebec — the member for Papineau," a statement Dion interpreted as an attempt by the prime minister to remind his minister about the "larger political repercussions in Quebec, both for the federal and provincial orders of government."
He said further talk of the 2019 federal election was evidence that Wilson-Raybould felt considerable pressure from the prime minister to reach a conclusion favourable to the "governing party," the Liberal Party of Canada.
It's typical of this prime minister that he shows no genuine contrition for trying to meddle in a criminal prosecution to further his party and its political fortunes. That's Harper-grade shit and nothing less.
Until yesterday I had never heard of Taleeb Noormohamed, a 42 year old "tech entrepreneur" the Liberals have chosen to run against Jody Wilson-Raybould in the Vancouver Granville riding.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau violated the Conflict of Interest Act by trying to influence then-justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould to overrule a decision to not grant a deferred prosecution agreement to Quebec-based engineering firm SNC-Lavalin, Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion has found.
"The evidence showed there were many ways in which Mr. Trudeau, either directly or through the actions of those under his direction, sought to influence the Attorney General," Dion wrote, in his report released Wednesday.
"The Prime Minister, directly and through his senior officials, used various means to exert influence over Ms. Wilson‑Raybould. The authority of the Prime Minister and his office was used to circumvent, undermine and ultimately attempt to discredit the decision of the Director of Public Prosecutions as well as the authority of Ms. Wilson‑Raybould as the Crown's chief law officer," Dion said.
Dion found Trudeau contravened Section 9 of the Conflict of Interest Act through a series of "flagrant attempts to influence" Wilson‑Raybould to reach an agreement with SNC-Lavalin to avoid criminal prosecution. That section of the code prohibits any official responsible for high level decision-making in government from seeking to influence the decision of another person to "improperly further another person's private interests."
This must come as shocking news to Trudeau's fan club who have been dismissing the whole business as a 'fake scandal.' Apparently it's a very real scandal, not fake at all.
Let's hope the ethics commissioner's report also works in favour of former Liberal cabinet minister, Jane Philpott, who resigned from cabinet and was ingloriously turfed out of the Liberal caucus for standing with Wilson-Raybould.
In standing up to Trudeau, Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott did the right thing. Justin Trudeau and his underlings did the wrong thing and then made Wilson-Raybould and Philpott pay for it.
Since WWII, democracy is something totalitarian regimes use tanks to suppress. There was the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the Soviet/Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
When it comes to the White House the people of Hong Kong are on their own. Trump has shown little interest, commenting that it's just part of China. Today, US commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, has called the situation an "internal matter." Those are loaded words. They're the same message conveyed to Saddam Hussein by the then US ambassador to Iraq that Hussein took as greenlighting his invasion of Kuwait.
Republican congressman, Iowa's Steve King, thinks there are vestiges of rape and incest in all of us and, face it, we might not even be here today without it. To hear King tell it, rape and incest are getting a bad rap.
Explaining his opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest, the Iowa Republican told a local conservative group, “What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled out anyone who was a product of rape or incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?”
King added, “Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages that happened throughout all these different nations, I know that I can’t say that I was not a part of a product of that.”
The nine-term congressman was stripped of his committee assignments earlier this year after he told the New York Times that he didn’t understand how terms like “white nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization” had “become offensive.”
King also said it would be wrong to abort a fetus that was conceived through rape or incest because it would be punishing the baby for “the sin of the father, or of the mother.”
King also told the audience that he’s been happy that President Donald Trump has been one of the few Republicans who did not castigate him for racist comments he made earlier this year in which he wondered why “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” were offensive terms.
One of the side effects of following developments in climate change is having to pull your punches. There are things you don't want to talk about, especially not in conversation and even with those closest to you. It's as though there are things that are taboo, lines that must not be crossed.
For me, one of these is the issue of catastrophic or "runaway" global warming. That point, wherever it is, when natural mechanisms sometimes called "feedback loops" kick in, gradually eclipsing even man-made climate change.
Even the best climate scientists can only speculate on that point of departure where our last chance of averting catastrophic change has been foreclosed. After that you're just along for the ride. It's almost certain we, the great unwashed, won't know what has befallen us until well after it's too late. Certainly not with the political leadership of the current era, a.k.a. the wilfully blind.
The wildfires that have raced across the Arctic this year may be the harbinger of runaway climate change. That vast region contains massive amounts of greenhouse gases, primarily CO2 and methane. The loss of Arctic sea ice and the warming of the waters of the Arctic Ocean and associated seas adds a new source of water vapour to the atmosphere, itself a very potent greenhouse gas.
The state of the climate is still somewhat speculative. Don't count on your leaders to keep you informed. We've got a guy who will look audiences straight in the face and claim that flooding world markets with high-carbon, low-value bitumen is the key to a green future for Canada.
So, what's new? Just be glad you're not Chinese. The Peoples Republic is making strides in developing alternative clean energy but it's also expanding its coal-powered electrical system. Not good. A new report warns that China is facing another compounding threat - the jet stream.
The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) finds that Chinese smog will be compounded by 'stagnant air' that hovers in place for long periods. The jet stream we used to have (for most of my lifetime) moved like a gently undulating snake. It was great for agriculture among other things. Today's jet stream often looks more like this:
Today's jet stream is erratic. It can draw polar air deep into the south and warm air from the south high into the Arctic. The new jet can also stall out. It can "park" weather systems over the same place for extended periods. Remember the last Calgary floods? That's what happened. Go back a few years before that and you might remember a few days in February where Atlanta, Georgia was ice bound, while a village in northern Alaska logged 62 degrees Fahrenheit. Same deal.
In other climate news, the folks in Nepal are not happy with what they find awaits the glaciers of the Himalayas this century. A study concludes that even if mankind did limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (dream on) the glaciers would lose a third of their ice by 2100. That's the best case scenario. If we go along with the fossil fuelers, including our own, it's more likely to reduce those glaciers by two-thirds or more. The hook is that China, India and Pakistan are mortally reliant upon access to freshwater from the Himalayan headwaters which, conveniently for China, are largely found in Chinese-occupied Tibet. I suppose it doesn't help that the three countries vying for access to those waters are geopolitical rivals and they're all nuclear armed. What would go wrong?
Here's one for the pipeline builders. A new study concludes the world needs to start shutting down fossil energy infrastructure - now. Anything short of a government shutdown, what Schellnhuber described as an "induced implosion" of the fossil fuel industry, will defeat any chance we have of averting catastrophic climate change.
Now I hate to piss on the Dauphin's parade but high-carbon, low-value fossil fuels have to be left in the ground even if that does disrupt his political agenda. It's a pretty nihilistic political platform yet it's gospel to Liberal and Conservative alike.
What cheerful news from The Guardian today? Not much, sorry.
Scientists at Cornell University have found that fracked oil and gas wells are releasing far more methane gas than imagined. These 'fugitive emissions' have been climbing sharply since 2008.
Robert Howarth, the author of the paper published in the journal Biogeosciences, said the proportion of methane with a “carbon signature” linked to traditional fossil fuels was falling relative to the rise of methane with a slightly different carbon make-up.
Researchers had previously assumed the “non-traditional” methane was from biological sources such as cows and wetlands, but the latest research suggests unconventional oil and gas from fracking may be playing a significant part.
The theory would support a correlation in the rise of methane in the atmosphere and the boom in fracking across the US over the last decade.
“This recent increase in methane is massive,” Howarth said. “It’s globally significant. It’s contributed to some of the increase in global warming we’ve seen and shale gas is a major player.”
There's a new industry in Iceland making brass plaques to commemorate the demise of the island's glaciers.
They figure they'll be needing another 400 or so before long. Fortunately - and unfortunately - that's all the glaciers they've got. While Icelanders mourn with tasteful brass plaques, their neighbours in Greenland are losing their minds, succumbing to despair and depression. Can't be helped, I suppose.
The American Meteorological Society has released its 2018 State of the Climate Report, all 325 pages of it. The link will take you to all 325 of those pages. The 11 page Executive Summary is here. Cut to the chase - atmospheric greenhouse gas loading in 2018 were the highest on record - and those records reach back 800,000 years.
Greenhouse gases were at levels unseen in 60 years of modern measurements and 800,000 years of ice core data, the study found. The data used in the 325-page report was collected from more than 470 scientists in 60 countries.
The global annual average for carbon dioxide, which is elevated because of human activities such as driving cars and burning fuel, was 407.4 parts per million, 2.4 ppm higher than in 2017. The warming influence of CO2 and other gases in the atmosphere is now nearly 43% stronger than in 1990.
While the east coast has been sizzling this summer, the Post found that most regional increases were driven by warming winter temperatures, not summer heat waves. That’s means lakes can’t freeze (causing algae blooms, in some cases) and pests don’t die as per usual in certain historically cold regions. Less snow and ice also means those regions are less able to reflect solar radiation during winter, further feeding into the warming cycle.
The freezing point “is the most critical threshold among all temperatures,” David A. Robinson, New Jersey state climatologist and professor at Rutgers University’s department of geography, told the Post.
Scientists aren’t yet sure why the Northeast is warming so quickly. But experts say these 2-degree C hotspots are like little pieces of the future here in the present, showing us what’s coming.
A particularly vulnerable region is southern California. They're what you might call "screwed." Sorry, LA, sorry San Diego. Same, same for Florida.
Observer political columnist, Will Hutton, writes that we should not despair. Climate change and other forces will herald the end of the lousy governance of the neoliberal era. He claims that "these are the dying days of a rancid old order." You be the judge of that.
If you find yourself in need of a bit of cheering up, there's always Monty Python's Eric Idle.
The match is lightning. The gasoline is the rich, peat-like fuel we still call tundra even as it is thawing and drying out. Beneath the tundra lies permafrost that holds massive amounts of greenhouse gases, both CO2 and methane.
We're all familiar with lightning and thunderstorms. They're pretty common in our latitudes with our warm and humid atmosphere. What makes them common at our latitude is what has made them extremely rare in the northern latitudes of the Arctic. Until now.
The lightning at the North Pole was observed after climate experts have spent weeks recording higher-than-average temperatures in the Arctic. The warming globe is causing sea ice in the region to disappear at a higher rate than ever recorded, as Common Dreams reported last month. The melting ice in turn is contributing to a warmer Arctic.
As the Washington Post reported, the lighting denotes "that the atmosphere near the pole was unstable enough, with sufficient warm and moist air in the lower atmosphere, to give rise to thunderstorms."
"The probability of this kind of event occurring would increase as the sea ice extent retreats farther and farther north in the summertime," Alex Young, a meteorologist with the NWS in Fairbanks, told Wired.
Before the lightning was recorded, climate scientists were concerned about wildfires that have been burning in Greenland for more than a month.
"The lightning strikes near the North Pole come during one of the most extreme Arctic ice melt years on record," the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang tweeted, summarizing meteorologists' alarm over recent weather in the planet's far northern region. "There's currently no sea ice in Alaskan waters, and Arctic-wide sea ice is plummeting to one of the five lowest levels on record."
...UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain warned that lightning strikes in the Arctic could be part of a new pattern of climate changes as the planet's sea ice continue to melt.
"Scientists already knew the Arctic was going to change much more rapidly than the rest of the world, and yet we've still been surprised at the rate of change we've been observing," Swain told Wired. "I think there's potential for nasty surprises coming out of the Arctic."
This summer has also witnessed the spread of wildfires deep inside the Arctic Circle. A small amount of smoke from fires in Siberia reached British Columbia.
This would be a hectic time for progressives in government, if only there were any around.
If you don't know what a progressive is, here's just one telltale that can help you out. Progressives are long-range thinkers. They're all about vision of what can be and what should be. They're about making the country strong so that its people can make it an even better country for generations to come.
You can't build a country fit for progressive society if you don't look up. There's no place for progressive politics in governance meted out from one election cycle to the next election cycle. Progressivism is a long-range business aimed at improving society, making the nation a better home for its people.
Canada hasn't had progressive government for quite a while. In 2015 there were signs that our parliamentary drought might be over. There was no end of talk about social licence, First Nations reconciliation, climate change and, coming off a brutal decade of Harper's excesses, electoral reform to ensure that could never happen again.
Justin got elected to a hefty 'false majority' and then wasted little time in abandoning campaign promises - the progressive stuff. Neoliberal policy, thoroughly antithetical to progressivism, would prevail - and it did. There would be no grand vision, not great quest beyond perpetual exponential growth.
When are we going to bring Canada 2060 or Canada 2080 or Canada 2100 back into public policy and planning? When will we stop ignoring those generations and prepare for them a place at our cabinet table?
I realize it will be immensely difficult to accommodate the needs of future generations in today's planning after we have neglected them for so long. The past twenty or thirty years have been sterile ground for progressivism.
How does your government today stack up against the Iroquois?
...a principle called ‘Seventh Generation’ stewardship, defined by the leaders of the Native American Iroquois Confederacy many centuries ago. “Every decision they took had to keep in mind seven generations hence.”
Do you imagine a Conservative or a Liberal prime minister in Canada today would shape policies by the needs of Canadians seven generations hence? I wrote the following in 2009:
Posterity doesn't fit into our economic model of production and consumption because it creates a fetter on both. We have lost our understanding of the importance of posterity to our society, to our country. We no longer plan today for generations to come far in the future. We no longer look much beyond the next electoral cycle.
Protecting posterity is an act of collective consciousness and will. It is acknowledging that we're entitled to our fair share and no more. We can't have it all without depriving future generations of their fair share.
The Norse understand the fair share principle. That's why they put their North Sea oil wealth in a sovereign wealth fund in recognition that this money belongs as much to future generations as the current bunch. It's just the opposite of what we do in Canada.
The Precautionary Principle, is thoroughly progressive. It is also the law of Canada but you would never know it from a government that routinely ignores it.
The precautionary principle or precautionary approach states if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is [not] harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action. ...The principle implies that there is a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk. These protections can be relaxed only if further scientific findings emerge that provide sound evidence that no harm will result."
One of the many emails I look forward to on Monday mornings is the bulletin of the Union of Atomic Scientists, a body mainly known for maintaining the Doomsday Clock.
Full disclosure - I've been writing for some time that Canada's bitumen barons are tolerated, indeed supported, because, at the moment, climate change is predominantly a scourge for the little brown people, living in distant lands that are typically impoverished and exceedingly vulnerable. If the front ranks were full of white people of European heritage would we be quite so blase about bitumen and the toll it will exact? Try to be honest.
The white man charged with killing 22 people in El Paso on Saturday is believed to be the author of a racist “manifesto” posted shortly before the shooting rampage. The hate-filled screed described a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and warned that white Americans are being “replaced” by foreigners. The manifesto also sounded a growing theme in far-right rhetoric: that nonwhite people are responsible for environmental problems ranging from litter to climate change.
The forced marriage of white supremacy and environmentalism is not new (Adolf Hitler, for one, advocated both racial and environmental purity), but once again it is birthing ugly “solutions,” from shunning refugees to ethnic cleansing. Even those on the far right who don’t “believe” in climate change are happy to jump on the environmental bandwagon. As the far-right author and media pundit Ann Coulter tweeted last year, “I’m fine with pretending to believe in global warming if we can save our language, culture and borders.”
In an article about white nationalists discovering the environment, The Atlantic explains the manifesto writer’s mentality:
The American lifestyle is destroying the environment, the author declares. But the answer is not to ask native-born white Americans to change their ways. It is to rid the country of Latinos.
It is not brown-skinned immigrants who are primarily responsible for environmental degradation, though. In fact, climate change and other environmental crises are driving migration, not the other way around.
As The Atlantic reminds readers, “Large corporations and the wealthy consume the most environmental resources, not poor immigrants.”
Population growth is, of course, contributing to climate change, along with rising affluence and per-capita consumption. But rather than tackling any of these issues, the manifesto’s author proposes genocide: “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”
Writing in The Nation, Jeet Heer describes how eco-fascism may find a toehold in US politics:
This combination of a white nationalism with angst about the prospects for human survival is a perfect recipe for radicalizing young right-wingers and taking Trumpian themes to a new level of extremism. Instead of the merely restorationist day-dream of “making American great again,” the extreme right is using social media agitprop and the propaganda of the deed to harden young white Americans for a global race war fought over diminishing resources. The very real dangers of climate change provide race war fantasists the dystopian background they need to give urgency to their violent agenda.
While left-leaning environmentalists have become increasing tolerant of immigration, The Atlantic notes that “opposition to immigration plays an ever-greater role in defining the conservative movement.” Among registered Republican voters, immigration is viewed as the country’s most important problem. A growing number of young Republicans, however, view climate change as a top priority. Eco-fascists want to connect those dots.
I want to clarify that my past remarks were not to suggest that our governments' inexcusable support for the Bitumen Barons is grounded in racism. Our Parliament and legislatures are not out to cleanse the world for the white race. Their sin is to look the other way, to ignore the harm - the dislocation, the suffering, the death - that fossil fuels, especially the really dirty, high-carbon, low-value stuff - are inflicting and will continue to cause to people who just happen to be poor, vulnerable and almost invariably brown.
One of the most serious drawbacks of the neoliberal era has been the rise of technocrats in place of what we used to know as leaders. Today they're short-termers with rarely any vision of the future. And that may be our fatal flaw.
...millions of people alive today will be there as 2100 arrives, inheriting the century my generation will leave behind. All the decisions we make, for better and worse, will be theirs to live with. And these descendants will have their own families: hundreds of millions of people not yet born, most of whom you or I will never meet.
For many of us currently in adulthood, how often can we truly say we are thinking about the well-being of these future generations? How often do we contemplate the impact of our decisions as they ripple into the decades and centuries ahead?
Part of the problem is that the ‘now’ commands so much more attention. We are saturated with knowledge and standards of living have mostly never been higher – but today it is difficult to look beyond the next news cycle. If time can be sliced, it is only getting finer, with ever-shorter periods now shaping our world. To paraphrase the investor Esther Dyson: in politics the dominant time frame is a term of office, in fashion and culture it’s a season, for corporations it's a quarter, on the internet it's minutes, and on the financial markets mere milliseconds.
Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding once said. “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future,” she wrote in 1978. We can only guess her reaction to the relentless, Twitter-fuelled politics of 2019. No wonder wicked problems like climate change or inequality feel so hard to tackle right now.
That's why researchers, artists, technologists and philosophers are converging on the idea that short-termism may be the greatest threat our species is facing this century.
...What these thinkers from myriad fields share is a simple idea: that the longevity of civilisation depends on us extending our frame of reference in time – considering the world and our descendants through a much longer lens. What if we could be altruistic enough to care about people we might never live to see? And if so, what will it take to break out of our short-termist ways?
Are we 'colonizing' the future?
According to the social philosopher Roman Krznaric, failing to value the lives of all these descendants is akin to ‘colonising’ the future – essentially deciding that future generations have no ownership rights there, or any say over how it evolves. “We treat the future as a distant colonial outpost where we dump ecological degradation, nuclear waste, public debt and technological risk,” he told attendees at a recent event in London organised by The Long Time Inquiry, an initiative to encourage long-term thinking in the cultural sector.
...A few governments are, reassuringly, trying to change their ways. For example, Finland and Sweden have parliamentary advisory groups to foster longer-term planning, and Hungary has an ombudsman for future generations. There are also various organisations now lobbying politicians to consider future generations from a human rights perspective, particularly in relation to climate change.
Can you imagine any Canadian government, Liberal or Conservative, doing this?
Wales appointed Sophie Howe in 2016 – a former senior leader in the police – to be a “future generations commissioner”, charged with ensuring Welsh public bodies think about the long-term in their decisions. “This isn’t just through some aspirational policy document, it’s actually written into law through the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act,” Howe explained recently on BBC Radio 4. “All decisions taken by the public sector in Wales, including our government, must demonstrate how they are meeting today’s needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own.”
Our petro-economy is a profoundly stupid attempt at meeting today's needs to the impairment of future generations of Canadians to meet their own. The environmental havoc our bitumen production creates today won't be our problem but theirs and they will pay dearly for our indifference to the future. We know our descendants will not enjoy the ease and comfort we have known. We are not leaving Canada a better place than we found it.
The wisdom of the Iroquois guides some futurists:
...a principle called ‘Seventh Generation’ stewardship, defined by the leaders of the Native American Iroquois Confederacy many centuries ago. “Every decision they took had to keep in mind seven generations hence.”
...They propose that the prevalence of short-termism is entwined with our attitude to death. “We’ve got a hunch that our inability to deal with the future of the world beyond our lifespan is wrapped up with our inability to deal with the fact that our lives will end,” they write. “Our denial of our own mortality prevents us from engaging with the long-term future.”
I've been writing about posterity on this blog for more than a decade. Posterity once held a role in political planning and policy but fell into desuetude with the advent of the neoliberal order. I argued for the recognition of a doctrine of "fair share" in modern governance.
Posterity doesn't fit into our economic model of production and consumption because it creates a fetter on both. We have lost our understanding of the importance of posterity to our society, to our country. We no longer plan today for generations to come far in the future. We no longer look much beyond the next electoral cycle.
Protecting posterity is an act of collective consciousness and will. It is acknowledging that we're entitled to our fair share and no more. We can't have it all without depriving future generations of their fair share.
To understand the idea of "fair share" imagine if our great, great, great grandparents had followed our path.
Imagine if our ancestors had two things - the ability to consume everything they could get their hands on and a blind indifference to the day when it was our turn to populate this country. Imagine if two or three generations had gone on a rapacious binge gobbling up the world's resources; going into serious deficit on renewables (emptying the oceans, logging off the forests, transforming farmland into desert) and fouling the environment. Then consider how their depredations might impact on your life today. I think that's beyond the imagination of all but the best science fiction writers but that's of no real matter. It's enough in any event to make the case for posterity and the concept of "fair share."
In arguing for the restoration of posterity politics I have been inspired by Edmund Burke, Theodore Roosevelt, Bill Moyers and several others.
Burke, the 18th century political philosopher, wrote of posterity as the glue that connects future generations to the past but also the present:
All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust.
...one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers."
In Burke's view, each generation has a life estate in our land but no more and that life estate, bequeathed to us by our ancestors, is in the nature of a trust. We are trustees of the land for the generations that will follow us. I would like to think he had the current neoliberal contagion or something like it in mind when he writes of "floating fancies or fashions" that undermine the continuity of the commonwealth and prevent one generation from linking with the other.
Roosevelt wrote of "skinning the land."
"I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation."
I'm sure he was speaking plainly and pointedly when he spoke of one generation robbing future generations, skinning the land and leaving it worthless to those who will follow. I wonder how he might have phrased that in this, the age of climate change and the threat of mass extinction?
Justin Trudeau is blind to the future. He cares little about skinning the land or the damaged Canada his policies will bequeath to the future. He does not hold Canada in trust for those who will follow us. Scheer is worse but at least he's a little less hypocritical than the Liberal offering.
Every now and then you stumble across something that was hiding in plain sight. In my case it was the discovery of the BBC.com site, Future. There are some really good, thought-provoking essays to be had at BBC Future. Definitely worth a browse.
Both are long but fascinating reads. I'll just touch on a few highlights of Kemp's essay. I'll save Nuwer's for another day but you can read it for yourself at the above link.
Kemp works from research he has done at Cambridge.
Great civilisations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives.
...Our deep past is marked by recurring failure. As part of my research at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, I am attempting to find out why collapse occurs through a historical autopsy. What can the rise and fall of historic civilisations tell us about our own? What are the forces that precipitate or delay a collapse? And do we see similar patterns today?
Collapse can be defined as a rapid and enduring loss of population, identity and socio-economic complexity. Public services crumble and disorder ensues as government loses control of its monopoly on violence.
Virtually all past civilisations have faced this fate. Some recovered or transformed, such as the Chinese and Egyptian. Other collapses were permanent, as was the case of Easter Island. Sometimes the cities at the epicentre of collapse are revived, as was the case with Rome. In other cases, such as the Mayan ruins, they are left abandoned as a mausoleum for future tourists.
Kemp maintains that the lessons of earlier, agrarian empires are relevant to our modern industrial civilization. While we may view the idea of collapse as apocalyptic, Kemp and others argue that history reveals it's entirely normal.
Societies of the past and present are just complex systems composed of people and technology. The theory of “normal accidents” suggests that complex technological systems regularly give way to failure. So collapse may be a normal phenomenon for civilisations, regardless of their size and stage.
We may be more technologically advanced now. But this gives little ground to believe that we are immune to the threats that undid our ancestors. Our newfound technological abilities even bring new, unprecedented challenges to the mix.
And while our scale may now be global, collapse appears to happen to both sprawling empires and fledgling kingdoms alike. There is no reason to believe that greater size is armour against societal dissolution. Our tightly-coupled, globalised economic system is, if anything, more likely to make crisis spread.
What are the culprits, the usual suspects, behind civilization collapse. There are common threads. See if any of these sound familiar.
CLIMATIC CHANGE: When climatic stability changes, the results can be disastrous, resulting in crop failure, starvation and desertification. The collapse of the Anasazi, the Tiwanaku civilisation, the Akkadians, the Mayan, the Roman Empire, and many others have all coincided with abrupt climatic changes, usually droughts.
ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION: Collapse can occur when societies overshoot the carrying capacity of their environment. This ecological collapse theory, which has been the subject of bestselling books, points to excessive deforestation, water pollution, soil degradation and the loss of biodiversity as precipitating causes.
INEQUALITY AND OLIGARCHY: Wealth and political inequality can be central drivers of social disintegration, as can oligarchy and centralisation of power among leaders. This not only causes social distress, but handicaps a society’s ability to respond to ecological, social and economic problems.
COMPLEXITY: Collapse expert and historian Joseph Tainter has proposed that societies eventually collapse under the weight of their own accumulated complexity and bureaucracy. Societies are problem-solving collectives that grow in complexity in order to overcome new issues. However, the returns from complexity eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. After this point, collapse will eventually ensue.
EXTERNAL SHOCKS: In other words, the “four horsemen”: war, natural disasters, famine and plagues. The Aztec Empire, for example, was brought to an end by Spanish invaders. Most early agrarian states were fleeting due to deadly epidemics. The concentration of humans and cattle in walled settlements with poor hygiene made disease outbreaks unavoidable and catastrophic. Sometimes disasters combined, as was the case with the Spanish introducing salmonella to the Americas.
RANDOMNESS/BAD LUCK: Statistical analysis on empires suggests that collapse is random and independent of age. Evolutionary biologist and data scientist Indre Zliobaite and her colleagues have observed a similar pattern in the evolutionary record of species. A common explanation of this apparent randomness is the “Red Queen Effect”: if species are constantly fighting for survival in a changing environment with numerous competitors, extinction is a consistent possibility.
Let's go back to pictures. Kemp offers this graphic.
That's not looking very good, is it?
Offsetting these gloomy indicators, Kemp argues are a few good things we have going for us. He cites global economic diversity and innovation as enhancing the resilience of nations to weather the forces of collapse.
There are some reasons to be optimistic, thanks to our ability to innovate and diversify away from disaster. Yet the world is worsening in areas that have contributed to the collapse of previous societies. The climate is changing, the gap between the rich and poor is widening, the world is becoming increasingly complex, and our demands on the environment are outstripping planetary carrying capacity.
The author concludes that our fate, grim as it may appear, is in our hands. There is much we can change, perils we can avert, if only we have the stomach to save ourselves.
The collapse of our civilisation is not inevitable. History suggests it is likely, but we have the unique advantage of being able to learn from the wreckages of societies past.
We know what needs to be done: emissions can be reduced, inequalities levelled, environmental degradation reversed, innovation unleashed and economies diversified. The policy proposals are there. Only the political will is lacking. We can also invest in recovery. There are already well-developed ideas for improving the ability of food and knowledge systems to be recuperated after catastrophe. Avoiding the creation of dangerous and widely-accessible technologies is also critical. Such steps will lessen the chance of a future collapse becoming irreversible.
We will only march into collapse if we advance blindly. We are only doomed if we are unwilling to listen to the past.
Ask yourself where is the political will so critical to implementing the changes needed to stave off collapse? It certainly isn't to be found in the ranks of the Tory troglodytes. Unfortunately there's precious little political will for change among the Liberals either.
