Imagine yourself in this dilemma - You regularly go to a certain chess club and often play with one of the primary players of the group. Only this player has a tendency to do all sorts of things to break your concentration and diverting your attention away from the game. You find this frustrating but the ref says that the player is not technically breaking any rules so there is nothing that he can do. Then you find out that this player actually is getting help from a computer (dare we say "robot") in the fashion of prompts for difficult moves in a hidden earpiece. When you bring this to the ref's attention the player hides the earpiece and indignantly calls you out, daring you to prove his wrong-doing to fellow club members. The dishonest player continues on this way year in and year out, breaking both the spirit and the letter of the rules, but he goes merrily on.
So what do you do? Well, a chess club is no big deal really. Convinced that the player is essentially dishonest and a cheater, you just don't play there anymore and you find a new club for your recreation.
Now transpose this rather obvious analogy to our electoral system. Here is the dilemma - you can't simply find another place to go. The Harpercons are cheaters, in both the technical and spiritual sense of the word, and yet they go merrily on. But in this case it seems that crime pays and the cheaters go merrily on.
My contention is this - once the NDP has chosen a new leader I propose he/she have a large public press conference with Bob Rae, as well as Elizabeth May and Daniel Paillé, and tell Canada and the world that they are withdrawing from the Parliament because it has become a sham. To my knowledge such a drastic move has never been done in modern Western democracies and it would be world-wide news. I suggest that the Opposition say that they cannot sit in the House in the presence of an illegitimate government and that they will not return to the House until the government convenes a Royal Commission on voter fraud and implements significant electoral reforms which include a stop to all robocalls, clearer outlines of what constitutes voter fraud, significant restrictions on party spending during campaigns as well as a total ban on spending outside of campaigns, clearer House rules about maintaining proper debate and committee works, and fixed responsibilities concerning press conferences on the part of the Prime Minister. Think about it for a minute. Imagine if all opposition parties refused to sit in the House and refused to take part in an election like they are compelled to do in some third-world dictatorships.
You see, the opposition parties have more or less been carrying on as though, despite the Harpercons malfeasance, it is business as usual. These actions lend continual credibility to a government that not only lacks credibility but which is systematically dismantling the democratic institutions of the nation. Something radical must be done to change the public mind about the gravity of the situation. If not now, when?
Friday, March 16, 2012
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Some thoughts on War, Tyranny, and Voter Fraud. . . .
Like many children during the Second World War, my father was evacuated into the countryside for much of the war. But he returned to London during the last couple of years of conflict and had many stories to tell about what he saw. One of the stories he told was of an occasion in which he and his mother went together to the market. While they walked there was a massive explosion a couple of streets away. The impact was tremendous and they felt its intensity even from a few hundred yards off. The explosion had been caused by a V2 rocket, many of which had been raining down on London for weeks. The government had attempted to deny the existence of the V2 because they were afraid of wide-spread panic. The V2s came in faster than the speed of sound so unlike the V1, or so-called 'flying-bombs,' you couldn't hear them coming. Instead, you would just be sitting there and suddenly you and your whole street were more or less vaporized. The government tried to tell the story that the explosions from the V2s were nothing but gas-line eruptions but rumours of a new, more dangerous, weapon, spread quickly. My dad's father had actually seen a V2 come down and thus he knew that the government was lying about what was going on.
Anyway, my dad watched the smoke rise from the explosion and he knew that people had just died and there were probably many laying about badly injured. But his mother, after taking a few moments to compose herself, took his hand tightly and they continued on their way. Even as a kid my father was struck at that moment how even amid apparent chaos, life continued on more or less normally. He and his mother went into the market and she bought fruits and vegetables and talked with other women about the high price of bread, the inconveniences of rationing, and the latest film at the cinema. My dad sometimes felt kind of bad about his childlike attitude during much of the war. For him, not having lost anyone close to him, the war seemed somewhat exciting much of the time. It broke up routines and made life seem more interesting. He loved to see the dog-fights over London which he watched a number of times from the roof of his apartment building, and he knew all the different planes on sight, even the ones that were bombing and killing his fellow citizens. But at the moment of that explosion things changed for him. Life suddenly seemed out of joint as he realized that there was real killing and dying going on while other people just went about their business.
Thinking about this story reminded me of the time I lived in El Salvador. During my time there rumours of a military coup were rife and for a while there they seemed credible. A friend of mine who worked as a health-care worker in the countryside had actually seen large numbers of troops massing on the Honduran border and he had been on a bus that was stopped by soldiers. The bus's riders were taken out and forced to lay face-down on the road and he really thought they were going to be shot execution-style. One day during the height of the rumours I was sitting on the porch of the house were I was living and a jet fighter came roaring over the house only a couple hundred feet in the air. Anyone who has experienced this knows how frightening and intimidating this can be. Those planes are unbelievably loud and can shake the very ground underneath you. The plane headed straight for the Presidential Palace as though it were going to bomb the place. During those few moments a lot went through my mind. I wondered how I would get out of the country in the midst of a coup or whether events would deteriorate into civil war. Then I thought about my friends who had been in the war which had only ended a year or so previous to my arrival there. My good friend Guillermo Iglesias who was only twenty-one had been compelled into the war when his village was so terrorized by the government troops that he felt he had nothing to loose. He had been shot more than once and had watched many friends die. Yet despite these events, he seemed remarkably 'normal' and was just a young man with the same hopes and fears that we all have.
The jet fighter didn't bomb the Palace. It just flew very near it a number of times in what was obviously a show of intimidation toward the government. The President went on TV that night and claimed that it was all part of a military exercise etc. The next day my partner and I went on a trip to the Gulf of Fonseca. We had planned it a week before and people told us to go despite the rumours because it was a relatively safe road and not generally a dangerous part of the country. As we drove along I watched the people of El Salvador working in their fields, playing with their children, eating at roadside restaurants, and all the other stuff that people do. And I thought that even at the height of the brutal civil war all these same people were doing many of the same things.
Cut to today as I drove down a freeway in Ottawa to pick up one of my daughter's playmates who is here for the weekend. It occurred to me how even as it becomes apparent that our present government has been actively exercising voter fraud, we as Canadians go about our business. This government has shown itself to be willing to do anything to get and maintain power and not only has it broken many laws, if one has listened carefully over the years it has hinted more than once that it would be willing to keep the government by force if necessary. And yet, like the citizens of London during the War, or the people of El Salvador, people in Canada go merrily on with life. Until someone you love dies, war feels much like peace, only noisier. Countries often slip into tyranny slowly and if you ever wondered what it is like to live in a dictatorship, you already know, it feels the same as a democracy until you fall victim to the power that you have ignored.
Anyway, my dad watched the smoke rise from the explosion and he knew that people had just died and there were probably many laying about badly injured. But his mother, after taking a few moments to compose herself, took his hand tightly and they continued on their way. Even as a kid my father was struck at that moment how even amid apparent chaos, life continued on more or less normally. He and his mother went into the market and she bought fruits and vegetables and talked with other women about the high price of bread, the inconveniences of rationing, and the latest film at the cinema. My dad sometimes felt kind of bad about his childlike attitude during much of the war. For him, not having lost anyone close to him, the war seemed somewhat exciting much of the time. It broke up routines and made life seem more interesting. He loved to see the dog-fights over London which he watched a number of times from the roof of his apartment building, and he knew all the different planes on sight, even the ones that were bombing and killing his fellow citizens. But at the moment of that explosion things changed for him. Life suddenly seemed out of joint as he realized that there was real killing and dying going on while other people just went about their business.
Thinking about this story reminded me of the time I lived in El Salvador. During my time there rumours of a military coup were rife and for a while there they seemed credible. A friend of mine who worked as a health-care worker in the countryside had actually seen large numbers of troops massing on the Honduran border and he had been on a bus that was stopped by soldiers. The bus's riders were taken out and forced to lay face-down on the road and he really thought they were going to be shot execution-style. One day during the height of the rumours I was sitting on the porch of the house were I was living and a jet fighter came roaring over the house only a couple hundred feet in the air. Anyone who has experienced this knows how frightening and intimidating this can be. Those planes are unbelievably loud and can shake the very ground underneath you. The plane headed straight for the Presidential Palace as though it were going to bomb the place. During those few moments a lot went through my mind. I wondered how I would get out of the country in the midst of a coup or whether events would deteriorate into civil war. Then I thought about my friends who had been in the war which had only ended a year or so previous to my arrival there. My good friend Guillermo Iglesias who was only twenty-one had been compelled into the war when his village was so terrorized by the government troops that he felt he had nothing to loose. He had been shot more than once and had watched many friends die. Yet despite these events, he seemed remarkably 'normal' and was just a young man with the same hopes and fears that we all have.
The jet fighter didn't bomb the Palace. It just flew very near it a number of times in what was obviously a show of intimidation toward the government. The President went on TV that night and claimed that it was all part of a military exercise etc. The next day my partner and I went on a trip to the Gulf of Fonseca. We had planned it a week before and people told us to go despite the rumours because it was a relatively safe road and not generally a dangerous part of the country. As we drove along I watched the people of El Salvador working in their fields, playing with their children, eating at roadside restaurants, and all the other stuff that people do. And I thought that even at the height of the brutal civil war all these same people were doing many of the same things.
Cut to today as I drove down a freeway in Ottawa to pick up one of my daughter's playmates who is here for the weekend. It occurred to me how even as it becomes apparent that our present government has been actively exercising voter fraud, we as Canadians go about our business. This government has shown itself to be willing to do anything to get and maintain power and not only has it broken many laws, if one has listened carefully over the years it has hinted more than once that it would be willing to keep the government by force if necessary. And yet, like the citizens of London during the War, or the people of El Salvador, people in Canada go merrily on with life. Until someone you love dies, war feels much like peace, only noisier. Countries often slip into tyranny slowly and if you ever wondered what it is like to live in a dictatorship, you already know, it feels the same as a democracy until you fall victim to the power that you have ignored.
Friday, March 9, 2012
Is it Ignorance??
It seems to me that it is not at all difficult to understand what has been going on in Canada for the past five or six years, politically speaking. The scale and depth of the poisoning of the political system orchestrated by Harper and his party is remarkably clear. Even some rightwing pundits in this country don't deny the stark reality Harper's blatant anti-democratic tendencies, his attacks on accountability, freedom of information, House procedures, freedom of speech among the public service, and now on the voting system itself.
And on top of the rather frightening extent of Harper's malfeasance, his supposed strong suit - fiscal responsibility - has been little to brag about. His denial (or lack of anticipation) of an economic crisis that we all saw coming was almost comical. And though the deficits that his government has run have been partly a result of an international crisis, they were significantly inflated by his overspending in the period prior to the downturn. And, perhaps more importantly, most of the factors that insulated the Canadian economy were Liberal policies that Harper vehemently opposed during his time in opposition, and Harper always maintained that deficits should be illegal in the first place.
Given the magnitude and obviousness of Harper's shortcomings, we are left with troubling questions. Under most circumstances one would expect not just unpopularity for Harper but near insurrection. There is little doubt that among his large number of detractors, Harper is surely the most vehemently despised leader in recent memory, if not of all of Canadian history. However, the failure of a large minority to appropriately react to his malfeasance begs the question - is there just a huge number of people who are completely ignorant of how our political system works, or is supposed to work? Very bad people have been elected in the past. Nixon was reelected even after the Watergate scandal had begun to break. Lestor Maddox was elected governor of Georgia on a staunch segregationist policy and let us not forget that the Nazis were elected with about 44 percent of the vote in 1933. There is no doubt that democracy sometimes favours the very worst kinds of people. But the more I see in contemporary Canada, the more it seems to me that a huge swath of people are just so uninformed and many are so apathetic that it really doesn't matter how criminal or Machiavellian Harper becomes, the only thing that will defeat him is the inevitable boredom of the electorate.
However, any way one looks at it, the tolerance of Harper's misconduct and political corruption is deeply disturbing and demonstrates not only the ignorance of many Canadians but bodes very badly for the future of this nation as a solid democracy.
And on top of the rather frightening extent of Harper's malfeasance, his supposed strong suit - fiscal responsibility - has been little to brag about. His denial (or lack of anticipation) of an economic crisis that we all saw coming was almost comical. And though the deficits that his government has run have been partly a result of an international crisis, they were significantly inflated by his overspending in the period prior to the downturn. And, perhaps more importantly, most of the factors that insulated the Canadian economy were Liberal policies that Harper vehemently opposed during his time in opposition, and Harper always maintained that deficits should be illegal in the first place.
Given the magnitude and obviousness of Harper's shortcomings, we are left with troubling questions. Under most circumstances one would expect not just unpopularity for Harper but near insurrection. There is little doubt that among his large number of detractors, Harper is surely the most vehemently despised leader in recent memory, if not of all of Canadian history. However, the failure of a large minority to appropriately react to his malfeasance begs the question - is there just a huge number of people who are completely ignorant of how our political system works, or is supposed to work? Very bad people have been elected in the past. Nixon was reelected even after the Watergate scandal had begun to break. Lestor Maddox was elected governor of Georgia on a staunch segregationist policy and let us not forget that the Nazis were elected with about 44 percent of the vote in 1933. There is no doubt that democracy sometimes favours the very worst kinds of people. But the more I see in contemporary Canada, the more it seems to me that a huge swath of people are just so uninformed and many are so apathetic that it really doesn't matter how criminal or Machiavellian Harper becomes, the only thing that will defeat him is the inevitable boredom of the electorate.
However, any way one looks at it, the tolerance of Harper's misconduct and political corruption is deeply disturbing and demonstrates not only the ignorance of many Canadians but bodes very badly for the future of this nation as a solid democracy.
Evil, Stephen Harper, and Catharsis. . . . .
It is getting increasingly redundant to write about the Harpercons, it is like continually writing that evil is bad - yes, it is, but how many times can you say it before one just gets tired? But i guess some bloggers, like myself, write in part as an act of catharsis - it relieves some of the built up frustration when you put it in writing.
But all of what we sane bloggers have been writing lately can be summed up pretty easily -
-Harper and many of his cronies are psychopathically power hungry and should be committed to the care of psychiatrists
-Harper and his government lacks majority support but govern like a dictatorship
-Harper has broken law after law in his pursuit of power and should be arrested and incarcerated
-Harper's prorogation was illegal because it was specifically made to avoid a confidence vote and therefore the government lacked legitimacy and he should never have been permitted to run for office again
- Harper and his government are guilty of hundreds of incidences of voter fraud and the present government should be liquidated forthwith
-Harper has destroyed the Constitution and is now no more than a criminal
-Harper is a mentally ill individual who will, if there is any justice, go down in Canadian history as a treasonous maniac
However,
-a huge number of Canadians are so ignorant and themselves such fascists that Harper could molest collies on prime time television and they would still hail him (this is much like the cult of personality that followed people like Stalin - but at least Stalin was a patriot)
-When faced with difficult and challenging times Canadians . . . well, fold like a cheap suit.
-Criminal governments usually effectively control the judiciary and the other institutions of accountability and that is how they stay in power
-The media is overwhelmingly pro-Tory (Rightwingers can no longer rationally deny this because every newspaper in the country except one endorsed the Tories)
-Many people, particularly rightwingers, like being ignorant.
-Power is self-replicating and that is why dictatorships are difficult to eliminate
-It probably doesn't matter what we do because if there was any serious threat to Harper's power (even a democratic one) he would impose martial law and refuse to give up power
Thus,
-We bloggers will continue yelling into the wilderness, but to little avail
-It really doesn't matter anyway
Funny quotes of the day -
"What I have crossed out I didn't like. What I haven't crossed out, I am dissatisfied with."
-Cecil B. DeMille
"I must have killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille."
-Gene Wilder as the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles.
But all of what we sane bloggers have been writing lately can be summed up pretty easily -
-Harper and many of his cronies are psychopathically power hungry and should be committed to the care of psychiatrists
-Harper and his government lacks majority support but govern like a dictatorship
-Harper has broken law after law in his pursuit of power and should be arrested and incarcerated
-Harper's prorogation was illegal because it was specifically made to avoid a confidence vote and therefore the government lacked legitimacy and he should never have been permitted to run for office again
- Harper and his government are guilty of hundreds of incidences of voter fraud and the present government should be liquidated forthwith
-Harper has destroyed the Constitution and is now no more than a criminal
-Harper is a mentally ill individual who will, if there is any justice, go down in Canadian history as a treasonous maniac
However,
-a huge number of Canadians are so ignorant and themselves such fascists that Harper could molest collies on prime time television and they would still hail him (this is much like the cult of personality that followed people like Stalin - but at least Stalin was a patriot)
-When faced with difficult and challenging times Canadians . . . well, fold like a cheap suit.
-Criminal governments usually effectively control the judiciary and the other institutions of accountability and that is how they stay in power
-The media is overwhelmingly pro-Tory (Rightwingers can no longer rationally deny this because every newspaper in the country except one endorsed the Tories)
-Many people, particularly rightwingers, like being ignorant.
-Power is self-replicating and that is why dictatorships are difficult to eliminate
-It probably doesn't matter what we do because if there was any serious threat to Harper's power (even a democratic one) he would impose martial law and refuse to give up power
Thus,
-We bloggers will continue yelling into the wilderness, but to little avail
-It really doesn't matter anyway
Funny quotes of the day -
"What I have crossed out I didn't like. What I haven't crossed out, I am dissatisfied with."
-Cecil B. DeMille
"I must have killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille."
-Gene Wilder as the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
What is Capitalism?
The late, great Ernest Mandel who was banned from entering the US for much of his life, wrote what is probably the very best introduction to Marx’s Capital ever written. Though trained as an economist, Mandel had a knack for explaining things in a simple, straightforward way that most people could understand. His long book on Marxist economic theory is really a remarkable achievement and demonstrates that even though Marx, like any important thinker, had flaws, he was also remarkably brilliant. One can use Mandel’s work to understand the ways that Marx outlined the complex ways in which capitalism functions and, amazingly, the ways that it continues to develop in ways that Marx’s ideas suggest it would.
One of the most interesting passages in Mandel’s introduction to Capital is found on page 82 of the Vintage paperback edition (1977) and concerns the definition of Capitalism. Now, defining an economic order is an immensely difficult conceptual task for many reasons. In the age of post-structuralist thought, so-called “meta-theories” are usually considered more than a little dodgy and maintaining a strict definition of an economic or social order is bound to not only find detractors but also to incite conceptual resistance. I fully understand, and often sympathize with this resistance, but I also understand the need for practical thought that helps to focus and encourage political and social activism. With this in mind, I give you Mandel’s outline for the conditions that define a capitalist order.
“(1)the fact that the mass of producers are not owners of the means of production in the economic sense of the word, but have to sell their labor power to the owners. (2)The fact that these owners are organized into separate firms which compete with each other for shares of the market on which commodities are sold, for profitable fields of investment for capital, for sources of raw material, etc. (that is the institution of private property in the economic sense of the word); (3) the fact that these same owners of the means of production (different firms) are therefore, compelled to extort the maximum surplus-value from the producers, in order to accumulate more and more capital – which leads, under conditions of generalized commodity production and generalized alienation, to constantly growing mechanization of labor, concentration and centralization of capital, growing organic composition of capital, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and recurrent crises of over-production.”
Now, with a few addendums, I find this to be a remarkably cogent statement of explanation which, though written forty years ago, is still relevant today. Keeping this definition in mind also helps us understand certain apparently contrary elements in our modern capitalism. One thing that Mandel’s outline helps us remember is that even though large modern governments contain many social-democratic elements, they still function largely to grease the wheels of an increasingly globalizing capitalist order. In fact, putting aside the various socially-minded programs instituted in the last couple of generations (and these, though now being lost, are still very important), government increasingly exists to maintain the power and dominance of a relatively few very large corporations that actually dominate the economic production and distribution at a global level. In recent years we have seen a much greater concentration of wealth which is a direct result of the capitalist order as outlined by Mandel, and this concentration is integral to the nature of the capitalist order in general, and attempts during the 20th century to mitigate it were quickly overridden by a more or less open conspiracy between big-capital and government.
Another thing that Mandel’s outline reminds us of is that modern forms of “command-capitalism” such as fascism or that which we see in the modern Chinese state are the exact opposite of socialism. Despite the fact that deeply ignorant people imagine that because the NAZI party had the word “socialist” in its name, fascism had (and continues to have) nothing to do with socialism and is in fact a form of command-capitalism. Hitler’s use of the word “socialist” was purely strategic and his party in fact functioned to maintain the very order that Mandel has outlined above. (Let us not forget that Fortune Magazine once said that Fascism was the future of Capitalism) Similarly, though the Chinese government which calls itself ‘Communist’ (never underestimate the Chinese wit), it oversees a system that is distinctly capitalist in nature.
I encourage everyone to read Mandel’s work to aid in the understanding of our modern capitalist order, a system that is increasingly lopsided at a social and economic level. Though modern technological gadgetry convinces people that they are prosperous even when they are not, economic exploitation and monetary inequality are leading to political inequality and an increasing misunderstanding of the economic order in which we live.
Who said it is a free country – your rent is due.
Remember the Women in Your Life. . . .
In honor of International Women's Day I pay tribute to all the women who have struggled tirelessly, and continue to struggle, for the rights and equality of Women, and thereby for all of us. Even today women are abused, imprisoned, and even die in this effort and let us not forget them. Let us also remember all of those who, even if they are not active in battle for women's rights, pay the price of gender inequality and male brutality.
I also honor my spouse Sylvia who has worked all of her life not only for the rights of women but for the rights of all people, particularly those most vulnerable and with no voice in the system of power. And I honor my daughters Veronique and Cairo who will continue the struggle into the future. We have a lot more work to do and they will make their contribution to a collective future.
And since I have been working on a biography of her for nearly two years, I honor the nineteenth century writer Mary Russell Mitford. Though she was not an "activist" in the struggle for gender equality, she carved out her own literary career in an age when women in the arts were seldom taken seriously. The example that she and her peers set by simply refusing to sit on the sidelines of life is invaluable.
The struggle continues - let's not be idle!
I also honor my spouse Sylvia who has worked all of her life not only for the rights of women but for the rights of all people, particularly those most vulnerable and with no voice in the system of power. And I honor my daughters Veronique and Cairo who will continue the struggle into the future. We have a lot more work to do and they will make their contribution to a collective future.
And since I have been working on a biography of her for nearly two years, I honor the nineteenth century writer Mary Russell Mitford. Though she was not an "activist" in the struggle for gender equality, she carved out her own literary career in an age when women in the arts were seldom taken seriously. The example that she and her peers set by simply refusing to sit on the sidelines of life is invaluable.
The struggle continues - let's not be idle!
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
A short Update. . .
A short update on the post earlier today. Harpercon has claimed that he will relent on the issue of Elections Canada's new proposed auditing power. No doubt the heat got too much and the Tory leadership realized that amid the growing scandal the optics of this were just too potentially damaging.
However, don't take this reversal too seriously. Stephen Hapless is surely hoping that the entire scandal will blow over and that when the time comes he will be able to rescind his support for these new Elections Canada powers in a quiet way that no one will notice.
The issue still stands and Canadians deserve at the very least a full judicial inquiry.
However, don't take this reversal too seriously. Stephen Hapless is surely hoping that the entire scandal will blow over and that when the time comes he will be able to rescind his support for these new Elections Canada powers in a quiet way that no one will notice.
The issue still stands and Canadians deserve at the very least a full judicial inquiry.
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