Why I will NOT vote NDP in the next Election. . .

If the NDP was looking to create reasons for us not for vote for them then their past year has been a resounding success both provincially here in Ontario and Federally. If you want to know what is wrong with the contemporary NDP you need look no further than this weekend's Ontario NDP convention. Despite Andrea Horwath's miserable failure as NDP leader, yesterday at their convention she underwent an obligatory leadership review and received more support than she did last year. If you are having trouble letting that sink in, I will repeat it for you. She received more support than she did last year. Andrea Horwath is an embarrassment to the NDP that extends well beyond Ontario's borders and a poster-girl for hypocrisy. As you will recall, after supporting the minority Liberal Government for years, in their last budget round she suddenly decided to pull that support and force Ontario into an election. This election held serious problems beyond Ms. Horwath's crass and crude style. The plain truth is that the Liberal budget was arguably left of any budget that Horwath herself would have presented if she had been premier and at the very least if an NDP government had presented this budget Horwath would have been the first to champion it as a great leap forward. This is just hypocrisy. There is no other word for it.

But aside from this act of unabashed hypocrisy, it was the political style of the Horwath campaign that progressives should find most troubling. Whether or not Horwath has taken the party to the right is something many people have argued about. But regardless of the veracity of the claim, many traditional NDP supporters were concerned during the election and this concern prompted 34 NDP heavyweights to write an open letter to Horwath saying that they she was "rushing to the centre." The people who wrote this letter, like Judy Rebbick for example, surely did not take this step lightly and the very fact that it emerged demonstrated that there was a serious breach taking place in the Party's core. Did Horwath or her team take these issues seriously the way anyone committed to democracy should do? Of course not. Instead they accused thee NDP 34 of being "hacks" and "has-beens" and NDP strategist Kathleen Monk even went so far as to suggest that they were working for the another political party and intentionally sabotaging the Horwath campaign. That accusation in and of itself is reason enough to never vote NDP again.

This Karl Rove/Stephen Harper strategy-style has not only infected the Ontario NDP, it has become the stock-in-trade of the federal NDP under the leadership of Tom Mulcair. Let's take two important events in recent NDP history. First, the NDP's prevention of the nomination of Paul Manley. The NDP clearly blocked Mr. Manley's nomination because of his (and his father's) stance on Israel, particularly on the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza. Not only did the NDP deny that this was the reason for blocking Manley's nomination (a denial that is universally suspected to be false) but, more importantly they  adopted the Harper political strategy and proceeded to smear him publicly. Manley claims that in private the NDP admitted that Palestine was the reason that they denied him a nomination. The NDP denied that claim, but when Manley asked for a written reason for the blocking of his nomination, the NDP, in true UN-Democratic style flatly refused. But the wording of this refusal was deeply problematic. Andrew Mitrovica wrote about it on ipolitics in an article well-titled, "Is Mulcair just another Harper with a Beard?" Mitrovica wrote -

"To blunt the blowback, McGrath (The NDP's National Director) wrote concerned and outraged NDP supporters, telling them "I can assure you the issue being cited in stories and social media about Manely's rejected application is not accurate. The rejection is not related to the NDP's position on the Middle East." That just poured gasoline on an already out of control fire. Not surprisingly, Paul Manley saw this as a "smear" because it leaves open the possibility that he was guilty of some immoral, illegal, or unethical act."

Mr. Manley rightly pointed out that this was not a job application but was supposed to be part of a democratic process. It is one thing for a Party to block nominations, but to fail to give reasons for that is an entirely different matter and is blatantly untransparent and smells distinctly undemocratic. Mr. Manley is correct to see what Anne McGrath said as a blatant smear because the vocal refusal to explain the blocking of the nomination coupled with a denial that it is Manley's stance on Gaza suggests to anyone who is paying attention that the nomination prevention is rooted in something nefarious of which Mr. Manley is guilty.

But worse than their treatment of Paul Manley was the NDP's treatment of MP Sana Hassainia. Ms. Hassainia ostensibly quit the NDP over their overt support of Israel and their failure to defend the rights of Palestinians. Though the Party did attempt to defend its position in the days following Ms. Hassainia's resignation,  (a defence which in my opinion was sorely wanting) they quickly reverted to their Harperesque default position which was to attack and smear Mr. Hassainia. Party spokespersons quickly suggested that Ms. Hassainia had a terrible attendance record in the House and that she was too busy being a new mother to be an effective MP. The entire affair was nauseatingly reminiscent of  the Harper regime's attitude toward anyone who disagrees with them.

The fact is that there are many significant policy reasons for progressives to stop supporting the NDP. But increasingly there are also many other reasons to reject the poison politics of the NDP and the provincial and federal levels alike. There is no question that the Harper regime has poisoned Canadian politics. But the NDP can choose to follow the Harper example or to operate with integrity, transparency, and honesty. It is increasingly clear that they have rejected the path of good and opted for the path of poison.

Can we move beyond our culture of violence??

One only need reject a few of the prevailing beliefs of one’s society to be almost entirely alienated from vast majority of people. In Canada all you really have to do is dislike Hockey and you suddenly find yourself marginalized. But all marginalization should be not be regretted, because sometimes holding unpopular beliefs is the beginning of chance. Some marginalized beliefs can keep you outside the mainstream while giving you counter-culture credibility. The abolitionist movement in England was such a case. Over a period of one hundred years the abolitionists went from being marginalized to being a credible, and much admired, political force. However, certain core beliefs of a society are so widely accepted without question that to bring them into doubt not only sets you against the vast majority but also can make you appear downright unhinged by most people. If, for example, you were an Aztec and you suggested that the sun was not a god, your fellow citizens would simply think you were crazy.

According to the well-known German philosopher Jürgen Habermas this notion of unquestionable beliefs is what sets modern society apart from so-called more traditional ones. Habermas in his ground-breaking work The Theory of Communicative Action, claims that what sets “modern” societies apart is that its citizens can voice competing moral and normative claims and that those people can, if called upon, discursively redeem these claims. In simpler terms, this simply means that, according to Habermas, we can disagree about social and moral issues and we can discuss them and potentially defend them through some form of ‘rational’ discourse. When I read Habermas’ work in the early 1990s I was fairly dubious about this claim. The more I thought about it the more it seemed to me that, just like older societies, our own “modern” society contained certain beliefs that are simply not up for discussion. If, for example, you claim in our society that competition is a bad thing, ninety-five percent of people will simply think are crazy or stupid.

There are other, deeply held, beliefs that our society overwhelmingly accepts without question. Patriotism is one such belief. Try questioning the notion of patriotism in mixed company and watch the reaction. People will either have a strong (even violent) reaction, or they will just seem utterly confused and treat you as some kind of weird hippy or naive, mental incompetent. I know this because I have experienced such reaction to many of my beliefs all my life. And no belief has elicited a stronger reaction than my rejection of the military.

From the time I was a young kid, I was deeply disturbed and confused by society’s unquestioning and unconditional support for the military. (And I grew up in Vietnam-Era US, where there was much more doubt about the military than there is today.) My argument was, and continues to be, simple. The military is an institution whose sacred operational mechanism is blind obedience among its members to kill anyone that the state tells them to. Of course, as I became older I realized that like with so many things, the majority of people believe that their own nation’s military is somehow different from all the others in the world and throughout history, and that their military would only do good things. But regardless of what I believe is willful naivety on the part of most people, I think the issue is still very simple, and history demonstrates it remarkably well. Standing armies unquestionably obey any orders that they are given and killing is their stock and trade. Let me dispense, from the beginning with the obvious objections that will come, probably vociferously, to many people’s minds. Of course, killing isn’t the only thing that soldiers do. Professional Hockey players don’t only play hockey – their job involves lots of activities – but hockey is their institutional imperative. Putting aside whether this or that war is ‘necessary’ or morally justified, many good things might happen in the midst of an armed conflict. The real question here is the notion of what they used to call a ‘standing army,’ a fixed institution that relies on a set hierarchy and blind obedience within the ranks and, ultimately, to the state.

Part of my objection to the military grew gradually out of my experience with people’s reaction to armed conflict. Though practically everyone I met claimed that they thought war “is bad,” the claim more often than not seemed entirely hollow. The longer I live, the more I think that the slogans “war is bad” or “war is a necessary evil” are ideas that people feel the need to say but seldom actually believe. In fact, as Bertram Russell came to believe through his pacifist activism, I think many people are secretly thrilled by the idea of war. If they weren’t, I don’t think war movies and violent action films would be so overwhelmingly popular. The idea of military conflict makes people feel powerful and in many cases I would even contend that it gives many people (particularly many men) a psychosexual thrill. I have come to believe that this thrill has become central to our social and political systems. People continually pay lip-service to ‘peace’ and to anti-bullying campaigns, politicians tell us that violence is terrible and even cowardly, but bullying and violence are integral to their very operation.

The violence and machismo that is at the heart of our military, and people’s admiration of the military and unwillingness to question it, is part of a web of violence that permeates our society. There has been a great deal of talk recently about our ‘rape culture.’ But we will never eliminate our culture of rape while bullying and violence still permeate every part of our society. Albert Einstein said that “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” And he is right. To achieve peace, equality, and a life without violence means fundamentally changing the way we think about our most sacred institutions like the military, sports, education, and our political culture. It cannot happen overnight. We are all, to a great degree, products of our environment and we carry all sorts of difficult baggage into daily life. But until we are willing to at least question notions like “necessary war,” or cut-throat elections, or our hero-worshipping, our obsession with appearances, etc., then real social change will continue to be well beyond our reach.

Another Remembrance Day, And my Scepticism Lingers . . . .

Four years ago today I wrote a blogpost expressing my concerns with the modern manifestation of Remembrance Day. Even as recently as this week I received a positive comment on that post. I genuinely believe that more people would express concerns about Remembrance Day but they fear the reaction. This is unfortunate. When people in what is supposed to be a democratic society are hesitant to express rational and meaningful concerns about something, particularly about the dangers of nationalism, I get concerned. But since almost no one else is willing to talk about it, I will.

I grew up partly in Los Angeles California during the height of the War in Vietnam. It was a turbulent time and even as a child I had a sense of the turbulence, the violence, and the ideological rifts that were tearing apart the nation and the world. Though my parents weren’t activists, they were still vehemently against the war in Indo-China and the inhuman way violence that was being committed there. Though my maternal grandfather was a retired Master Sergeant in the USAF there was little sympathy for the war even in my grandparents’ household.

However, strangely enough what I knew about war and soldiers I was mostly learning from someone who was not in my family. Mr. Campbell was an old man who ran a little five and dime store in my neighborhood in Santa Monica. He as a grizzled, yet charming, old guy who never failed to be cheerful towards me when I came into his crowded little shop despite the obviously difficult life that he led. Mr. Campbell had fought in WWI and had been left nearly blind by gas. “The Germans did everything they could to kill me,” he would say will a crooked smile, “but I am still here.” Despite his injuries, he wasn’t bitter about the war and he didn’t seem to hold it against the Germans as many seemed to do. He even pointed out to me more than once that he had married a German woman despite the war. She had died years ago but whenever he spoke of her moisture came into his eyes and even as a kid I understood the unspoken sadness that overcame him.

I have a few vivid memories of Mr. Campbell, one of which occurred on Veteran’s Day, the US name for Remembrance Day. It must have been in 1973 because I remember it was a Sunday and I walked by Mr. Campbell’s shop and was surprised to see it open on Sunday. I went into the store and there was Mr. Campbell sitting as usual on a tall stool behind the counter reading one of those large print books for people who have severely impaired eyesight I knew it was Veteran’s Day because I had seen some kind of military celebration in Douglas Park on Wilshire Boulevard. I greeted Mr. Campbell and he smiled, as he always did, when he heard my voice. I asked him why he was open on a Sunday, and then mentioned that it was Veteran’s Day.

That was the first and only time that I saw Mr. Campbell look angry, and he spoke to me at length in a way that even now, forty years later, I still recall.

“I have never celebrated Veteran’s Day,” Mr. Campbell told me. “When I was gassed no one cared and they kicked me out of the army with almost nothing. They pinned a Purple Heart on my chest and then kicked me to the curb. And since then I have watched Veteran’s day celebrations with nothing but contempt. They act like they want people to remember but they don’t care. They just use the whole thing as a way to promote another war. They will always have another war for young kids to fight and it is all for making money for some jerk who sells weapons and bombs and acts like it is all noble. But it isn’t, it is just bull.”

I don’t know exactly why I remember these events but they stuck in my head. Perhaps it is because as Mr. Campbell told me these things the war in Vietnam still raged and young Americans were still coming home in boxes. And over the years I came to realize through my youthful friendship with Mr. Campbell that if Remembrance Day is to mean anything it should be a painful reminder that wars are an outward manifestation of our worst failures as a race, and a reminder of the terrible price that people pay for those failures. Meanwhile, blindly pro-war leaders like our own Prime Minister blatantly use Remembrance Day as a way of promoting patriotism and whipping up the very emotions that lead to these terrible human failures.

Perhaps the saddest part of all of this for my life is that Vietnam obviously failed to teach us is that our wars are almost always a machine for making wealth. But the skepticism that Vietnam brought to people didn’t last long and by the 1990s it was all but gone and once again Western Governments seem to be able to commit their nation’s to war with a minimum of critical thought on the part of the media or the people. One war comes on the tail of another and the only thing they have in common is that regular people suffer and the rich make billions of dollars from them.

Here in Canada one war stopped and the next one quickly began. Meanwhile, the many millions that the Government spent celebrating the War of 1812 (a war that was fought before we were even a Country), was spent while they are busy cutting services for the very veterans that they are supposed to be celebrating. It is perhaps the greatest act of hypocrisy from a government that has made a career of hypocrisy.

So I chose to remember Mr. Campbell and the terrible record of human failure that allow our leaders to take us into one war after another. And when people talk incessantly about the “fight for freedom,” I remember that it is not foreign countries that have been a threat to our freedoms. Just like today, the greatest threat to our freedoms are our own governments and the corporation who support them. Every freedom we enjoy from voters rights to gay marriage has been wrenched out of our governments by committed democratic and unions activists.

So while our leaders are ‘leading’ us once again into another ridiculous war remember that such violence almost always bespeaks a basic human failure  and that the real threat to your freedoms are the ones from your own leaders whose chest thumping and drum beating is just another diversion from their real intent.

War and Righteous Christian Warriors. . . . .

Stephen Harper's motivations to have Canada get involved in the new war in Iraq are essentially two fold. On the one hand Harper is a religious fanatic who has, for many years, hungered to demonstrate his Christian righteousness in war with the 'barbarian heathens.' Harper's other motivation is a last ditch effort to get himself reelected through a portrayal of himself as a Putin-like strong-man. Because of the nature of these two motivating factors, they probably are not subject to reversal. On the one hand Harper's religious fanaticism is, though never talked about by the mainstream media, very real. He would take any genuine opportunity to simplify the world into the "good" and the "bad" and put himself in the place of a Christian warrior wielding the sword of god in the name of righteousness. On the other hand, it is clear to almost everyone (and maybe even to himself) that if things kept going the way they were, Harper had no chance for reelection, so he is deeply committed to any kind of war as a path to another stint in power.

The strategy, however, is not without glaring pitfalls. For a war to be a path to reelection within the context of modern Western democracies it requires two basic principles - it must be short and it must be successful. However, I have heard no credible military strategist (even the ones who are in favour of this war) who say it can be short. And they uniformly admit that to stop ISIS with a military effort will require a great deal more than simple airstrikes. In fact, only a couple weeks into this war and we are already seeing analysts saying that these bombing efforts are not having their desired effects and may even be making the situation worse. Furthermore, anyone who is actually honest and familiar with recent events knows that Western military efforts in the Middle East have only increased instability. Therefore, we can fairly easily conclude that Harper's involvement in this war will leave him with a troubling dilemma. As it becomes clear that bombing ISIS will not bring about the desired effect, the West will either have to abandon the effort or increase and widen the war. If Western nations like the UK and the US start putting "boots on the ground," Harper will either have to commit Canada to a similar effort or demonstrate a troubling hypocrisy. He has made such efforts to tell us that this is a "noble" (read Holy) war, and that Canada doesn't sit on the sidelines, that if he doesn't commit ground-troops with other nations his publicity strategy will be exposed as a fraud. And as sheep-like as the Canadian public can be, I think a troop commitment in Iraq will be a career-ending move by any politician.

And these are by no means the most troubling issues for Harper where this war is concerned. What if, as history demonstrates, this war dramatically increases the instability in the region? What if it strengthens al-Assad's power in Syria? What if Turkey gets drawn into the war in a significant way, making Western nations obliged to be more actively involved? And perhaps most dauntingly, what if this effort makes Canada a target of a successful and significant terrorist attack on home soil? This will make Harper's military efforts toward righteousness a significant political liability.

What seems clear to me is that history teaches us that this war will do nothing to reduce instability in the Middle East. Western military efforts in the region have done nothing but make the situation worse. This is because the narrative that Western leaders continually tell us about the Middle East  is simply false. Militant, Anti-Western Islam doesn't exist simply because "they" hate our democracy and our decadence. Oh, of course there are always crazy people out there in all religions who do all sorts of terrible things. But to create large, unified forces you need something more than a twisted religious fervor. At the risk of committing "sociology," it should be clear to anyone with common sense and even a mild familiarity with the situation that it is generations of injustice that has fed the ranks of militant, anti-western Islamic organizations. If men like Harper really wanted to solve these problems they wouldn't be screaming out a call to war. The solutions are fairly simple, support a just and equitable solution to the Palestine problem, give them their land back and give them a proper state and make them stake-holders in prosperity and peace in the Middle-East. Stop supporting dictators in countries like Saudi Arabia and UAE, and compel those dictators to creating more democratic and equitable societies. Then take all the billions of dollars that you are spending on bombs and war planes and put it into development in the region (schools, hospitals etc.) These efforts will not solve all the problems immediately, but over time such solutions will rob the radical, violent groups of their constituency and give reasons to commit to a peaceful and just society rather than to a life and death in some kind of 'holy-war.'

Harper is surely betting on his war efforts to run fairly smoothly at least until the next election rolls along. Because Conservative strategists can't be stupid enough to think that they can register a huge an immediate military victory, they must be thinking that all that has to happen is that things don't go terribly wrong over the next 12 months and their leader will come out smelling like a rose while the opposition will look like terrorist enablers. And on the surface that must look like a good strategy. The so-called 'quagmire' problems that I have been talking about here could take a number of years to develop, and Harper only needs a relatively short window of renewed popularity to get reelected. However, once again there is a significant problem here. Everything running "smoothly" means the war not registering significantly in the public mind. The problem with that is that then the 'strongman' leader effect cannot play in the public mind. This means that the things that are leading to Harper's general unpopularity will still be there. Thus Harper's strategy runs the very real risk of being a zero sum game, and at worst (if things go horribly wrong) being a total political disaster for him.

Of course, with a man like Harper, most of this may not even register. His fanaticism might be trumping all these potential downfalls. Instead Harper may only be living in space in which he is a righteous Christian warrior doing God's work. We all know how well that worked for Tony Blair.

The War Cycle Continues. . .

Few things make my palms more sweaty than a political leader telling me that the war into which he wan't to lead us is "noble." They say that every war has its own excuse, but behind of every call to arms is some guy (usually a man in a suit nowadays) telling us that it is not only necessary but noble. If every act of war was as noble as the leaders tell us it is then we would be an awfully noble race. The problem is that there is something sick and twisted about the very idea that killing people can ever be a noble act. But that is the great lie that leaders must sell in order to rally people behind the flag.

There is one sense in which we can see war as a failure. Most wars seem to be a result of the failure of politicians and policy makers in one way or another. Many historians talk of WWII being a direct result of the shortcomings of the Treaties at Versailles. The past looms over us like a deathly shadow threatening to burst out again in another useless conflagration. Politicians beat the drums of the past to whip up the war-like sentiment of the people as the French leaders did at the beginning of WWI with Alsace-Lorraine. Or they use some supposed immanent threat which, upon examination, is actually the direct result of their own failings in the first place. This is the situation in which we now find ourselves. The existence of ISIS is a direct result of a century of outrageous, colonial-minded decisions on the part of the Western powers. More recently, it is the direct result of a series of unbelievable failures in Iraq and Syria. A long history of supporting dictatorships until it is no longer convenient and then completely ill-considered invasions with a dramatic lack of understanding of indigenous political issues. All this against the backdrop of a continually one-sided approach to the Palestine Question, an approach that is a never ending source of recruitment for radially anti-Western Islamic groups.

The West makes bad policy, supports dictators, sows discontent, and then through military adventurism it creates power vacuum that results in another threat or conflict. How many times are the leaders going to ask us to support another war that is the direct result of their failings?

But then there is another, perhaps more cynical (perhaps more accurate) view of these events. Perhaps these are not failures on the part of our leaders but successes. They might be viewed as such if one remembers the amount of profit that is made by large corporations each time another one of these military adventures comes along. Let us not forget that each time the US launches another Tomahawk Missile at ISIS, McDonnell Douglas makes another cool million. And let us also remember the trillions of dollars that was spent in the war in Iraq, some of it going to arms dealers and manufacturers, some to infrastructure builders, and a great deal of it now entirely untraceable. Perhaps behind their rhetoric of the nobility of war, the simple profit motive is the real success story here.

No, there is nothing noble in Harper's war, the war that he has been longing to get into for over a decade and the one that he hopes will get him reelected. None of us doubt that ISIS is a bunch of terrible people. But it is Western wars and militarism that brought them into a position of power in the first place. More war isn't going to solve the problem. It is less war and more peace and development that we need. This is just another white man in a suit who is diverting tax money to arms dealers in a never ending cycle of conflict while the real injustices that feed the conflict go unaddressed.

Harper and the Elections Rumours. . .

The rumour mill has been working overtime predicting that Harper might call an early election. These rumours went into overdrive this week when an April date was set for the Duffy trial. The speculation of many of my esteemed peers in the blogosphere, goes like this - Harper seems to have run out of his political cache (as so many leaders do as the years go by), Trudeau continues to be very popular in spite of (or, indeed, maybe because of)  continual Conservative attacks on him, Harper has lost a number of important Supreme Court rulings and has set himself to lose more (with the prostitution bill and the Union disclosure bill), and as all his scandals gradually chip away at the Conservative credibility in general, and Harper's credibility in particular, the Duffy trial could could be the last nail in Harper's political coffin, particularly coming, as it will right before the election.

All of these facts are clear. However, I don't believe that they point to an early election, for a number of reasons. The first reason is simple: Harper is a deeply deluded and power-hungry individual and he is probably oblivious of his growing unpopularity. Harper, like many politicians with a dissociative disorder, is detached from much of what is actually going on in his own country. Furthermore, like other such leaders, Harper has surrounded himself with grovelling yes-men who don't dare point out the stark political realities to him. Harper's growing isolation, coupled with the fact that he won't want to face potentially negative news, means that he probably isn't even aware of the possible need for an early election. Reason two is this - if Harper is aware of the dire situation then he must know that calling an election a short time before a potentially devastating court battle would be perceived by everyone, even his base, as blatantly self-serving and could have a fatal effect on the electorate who already perceive him as too sneaky and partisan. (He did call an early election last time, but remember he was in a minority situation and there was no impending scandal.) The third issue that few seem to be considering is the fact that Harper doesn't actually need to have an election until may of 2016. Therefore, a more likely scenario in my mind than an early election is a late election. If Harper can avoid testifying in the Duffy case (or at least have his testimony covered by a publication ban), he can ride things out for another year, thus distancing the election from the events of the trial.


 The biggest reason that I don't believe that Harper will call an early election is that his real strategy  is now becoming clear. Like Thatcher in the early 80s or Bush in the early 90s, it seems that Harper is hoping to use a war-footing to get reelected. Perhaps aware that the Conservative record in almost every field is in tatters (poor economic record, poor environmental record, poor labour record, poor job record, poor legal record, etc), Harper is hoping to pull Canada into war in the Middle East and near war in the Ukraine because he knows that most populations, even Canada's, have a tough time not wrapping themselves in the flag. He also knows that the opposition parties don't have enough backbone to oppose his war agenda, and he can therefore make the opposition look compliant at best, weak at worst. (This worked very effectively for years with the Liberal Party that essentially rubber-stamped everything that Harper did, making their vocal opposition to him seem slightly ridiculous). I simply believe that Harper is hoping to have enough time to implement his war-footing strategy and believes that it will override his perceived unpopularity and continual scandals. Think about it, everyday on the news all we hear about now is Harper's international dealing concerning the Ukraine and the Middle East. And let's not forget that elections have been postponed beyond the five year rule in times of war before.


Stephen Harper's reign has been a kind of national nightmare for Canada. He has gradually eroded much of the good that this country represented and as taken us into what some people are calling a "post-democratic" era. He has made it clear that he doesn't like the constitution and walked all over it in his pursuit of power and his rightwing agenda. He has hired an army of communications staffers whose sole job is to spin all events in a pro-Conservative light, and has more or less turned the government of Canada into an arm of the Conservative Party, the guiding principle of which is to make money for the oil companies. He routinely has government spooks spying on anyone who opposes his agenda, and is using various arms of the government to shut down groups or silence individuals who might speak against him and his interests. Harper has so entrenched his party in power and held that power with such unscrupulous negativity, that it is not even clear that the Conservative would ever leave power voluntarily, even if they loose the next election.

Harper will do anything, absolutely anything, to stay in power and the best way to achieve that goal appears to be not to call an early election but to postpone it as long as possible to give his war strategy time to work or even to use a war to postpone an election beyond the normal constitutional limit.

The Harper Tipping-point, Hope or Fear ?

I tend to agree with Heather Mallick in her recent interesting (and surprisingly forthright) article on why people like Trudeau over Harper. And I agree with what many commentators (and most of the polls) suggest, that we have finally reached the tipping point of Harper's political currency. Outside of conditions of extreme nationalism and social turmoil, it is very difficult for any politician to maintain power and popularity with a political persona of anger, hate, fear, and extreme secretiveness. Harper's zenith was inevitable and we now have a confluence of events which are dragging the Con's political machine ever downward. This confluence consists of typical voter weariness, growing evidence that economic and social inequality is drastically increasing, clear signs that Harper and his cabal are not simply strategic in their negative/secretive political style but that their nastiness is at the very core of their political identity, the rise of a very likeable opponent in the person of Trudeau (and let's face it, regardless of one's political stripes Trudeau is a likeable public persona), ominous signs that an over-emphasis on oil extraction is not only environmentally dangerous but economically short-sighted, and (perhaps most importantly) a slowly percolating mood in the country that we have been sleep-walking through a kind of collective nightmare of a government that is actually trying to destroy the positive aspects of democracy, good-will, hope, and peacefulness, that many once thought defined our country.

But even as we teeter at the tipping-point, there are stormy clouds ahead. For one thing it appears that, in the face of political disaster, Harper is intent of dragging this country further into the dark waters of hate, fear, and violence. Deep inside, I believe that Harper is desperately courting war in any arena, as a strategy to stay in power. In what we might call the Falkland Island gambit, Harper is increasingly ramping up his war rhetoric in every part of his foreign policy and, I believe, really hopes that the nationalism and rhetoric of a war will do for him what the Falkland Islands did for Thatcher.

Another disturbing political development is found in the fact that Harper has created a classic political vacuum around him. Harper has surrounded himself with yes-men, flunkies, and Ministers who he knows cannot pose any kind of national competition to his power. Men like Baird, Kenney, and James Moore, Oliver, and Fantino, are all (for different reasons) probably unelectable as party leaders. Not only is Harper's growing unpopularity potentially fatal political baggage for anyone who was part of his cabinet, I believe that Harper has consciously chosen ministers with their own kinds of political baggage so that they cannot challenge him in the way that, say, Martin did with Chretien. This kind of political vacuum may only be bad news for the Conservative Party, but such vacuums often create political chaos that can engulf entire nations. I would never put it past Harper and his flunkies attempting a coup in the face of an electoral defeat and with nothing but yes-men around him, people whose political careers essentially depend upon Harper himself, there may be no dissenting voices among his own.

Any kind of tipping point creates interesting events. But the curse of living in interesting times is a very real possibility now. The question is will the Harper years end with a bang or a whimper??

The "sociological phenomenon" of Herr Harper. . . .

Herr Harper's recent claim that the disappearance and murder of hundreds of Aboriginal women should not be viewed as a "sociological phenomenon" is an important reminder of what rightwing ideology is really all about. It has been central to rightwing ideology in the modern period to continually reduce society and human interactions to individual units. They see society only as individuals and are desperate to make others see it that way. There are a number of reasons for this act of reductionism but they all come down, in the end, to control. If you atomize society and isolate individuals they are significantly easier to control. Before the phrase 'civil society' took on the positive connotation that it has had in recent years, it was used by a number of sociologists and political thinkers to connote a war of all against all. And it is this war that the rightwing wants to promote. Cooperation among the general population is the death knell of rightwing ideology in the same way that when, say, Cape Buffalo in Africa stand united as a small herd the lions they can fend off attack.

To any vaguely rational person crime is, of course, always an individual and a sociological phenomenon at the same time. For example, African Americans in the US make up about 13 percent of the population, yet they make up somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the US prison population. This statistic presents a remarkable dilemma for the rightwinger. If, as Harper would have us do, we are to treat individual crimes as just that, individual events rather than sociological phenomena, then we are essentially forced to make the radically racist assumption that African Americans are simply criminally minded while white people are more law abiding. Now, while some rightwingers do, in fact, believe this, no politician in his/her right mind would publicly acknowledge such a belief. However, I believe that most people (even slow-witted rightwingers) know that such a statement is clearly untrue and that, despite the words of King Harper, crime is, in fact, a sociological phenomenon. But the rightwing is desperate to dissuade the public from such sociological thinking because such thinking takes us down the path of a more cooperative social outlook. To put it plainly, when we acknowledge that trends in crime are not just individual acts but also indicative of social trends, social beliefs, and socioeconomic demographics we are embracing the idea that society is not simply a bunch of individuals acting in isolation but that our actions are significantly connected to our environment and the society in which we live. This belief, in turn, will make us realize that generations of neglect and oppression of a group, like, say, the Indigenous people of Canada, will result in a myriad of social problems such as poverty, violence, substance and sexual abuse, etc. This fact means, much to the chagrin of rightwingers, that we are collectively responsible for these problems and we cannot, as they are wont to do, reduce them to the individual choices and actions of the people involved. And here is the rub; if we are to adopt this kind of 'sociological thinking,' then the problems of Capitalism must also be seen in a social light, and this is what the rightwing really fears. If crime is party a result of our place in society and our social problems and biases, then the problems of capitalism (such as spiralling income inequality, debt rates, under performance in education, increasing student debt, rises in homelessness and various health problems, etc) are not simply a result of a bunch of poor choices made by individuals but are structurally related to political mismanagement, or perish the thought, to fundamental problems in Capitalism itself.

Marx wrote that people make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. An easier way of looking at this idea is to say that people make choices that make sense to them in their particular time and place. But if they are raised in the midst of poverty, crime, violence, substance abuse, and in the middle of a society that continually gives them the message that they are worthless and will probably amount to nothing, then the choices that make sense to them will be very different from the ones that they might make if they are raised in a safe, nourishing environment of love and education. The problem is, of course, that people like Harper don't really want us to make good choices. A society with more cooperation, from unionized workplaces to better social healthcare, ultimately means less relative wealth and power for the five percent who control society and reap the benefits of skewed capitalism. And these are the people that Harper and the rightwing work for.

Harper will always resist calls for an inquiry into the murder and disappearance of aboriginal women for the simple reason that the results of such an inquiry will inevitably have sociological implications. It will remind people that certain groups of people in society are collectively seen as expendable, that generations of racism and legislative mismanagement result in violence and social oppression. It will help bring to the public eye the real conditions of aboriginal people in this country and the structural racism that infests our society. More importantly, it will remind people that there are social solutions to these problems, and if these problems are subject to social solutions then so are our other problems like economic and social inequality. And the rightwing doesn't want us to believe that. Rather, they want us to believe that our collective fate is in the hands of that bizarrely invisible phenomenon that they tell us so much about, a phenomenon that is nothing more than an aggregate of individual acts.

There is an ironic postscript to this story. Let us not forget that Harper was the first to embrace a sociological approach when it suited his purposes. In the wake of the so-called sponsorship scandal, Harper told us it was not a result of a few criminal individuals but was a direct result of a 'culture' of corruption which promoted such individual kinds of choices. Here, for all to see, is the smoking gun of Harper's hypocrisy.

The Moral Righteousness of the Harper Cabal. . . .

Understanding anyone's motivations is a notoriously complex matter. One must always deal with the question that sociologists would refer to as "dramaturgical sincerity." In other words, when someone talks about their actions, one can never be entirely sure to what degree the person is being honest about their motivations and to what degree they are simply "playing a role." This question becomes increasingly complex in the public sphere as people spin their actions for public consumption. Honesty and sincerity in politicians is a rare commodity and 'spin' is almost always a matter of course. However, if one is willing to be fairly non-partizan (another rare trait), much political spin is easy to see through. Much of the time one need merely ask the question cui bono to know what is really going on. But political spin becomes an even more murky business when the politicians in question live on the edge of significant mental disturbance. In recent North American history we need only to look back to the strange, sometime eerie, figure of Richard Nixon to see how bizarre and complex a mentally disturbed political leader can be. What drove a pathologically paranoid man like Nixon, for example, to undertake his remarkable diplomatic efforts in China, while at the same time, as we later found out, he was turning the White House into a nest of law-braking psychopaths who talked on tape about stringing people up with piano wire? These are deep waters that are by no means easy to plumb.

These questions bring us to our own paranoid PM and his little band of psychopaths, like John Baird and Jason Kenny. What really motives this groups of men in suits is often impossible to understand as they continually funnel their apparently narcissistic and dissociative disorders into various legislative channels. A great deal of speculation has been expended on, for example, the question of Harper's bizarre Millenrian-like, remarkably one-sided, support of Israel. Is he motivated by simple vote-grubbing, or by his evangelical beliefs, by a shockingly simplistic misunderstanding of historical events, or by a mentally disturbed desire to see complex issues in a completely black and white manner? Similar question revolve around Harper's reaction to the issue of the growing war in Ukraine. What, for example, leads a guy like Harper to cozy up to the Chinese regime, unquestionably one of the most brutal, human-rights violating, and dangerous governments in the world, while condemning the Russian government in such a simple, black and white way? I certainly believe that any explanation for this apparent dichotomy that appeals only to vote-hunting is totally inadequate.

One thing seems clear to me: Harper and his crew demonstrate their near psychopathic mind-set in dealing such as the Ukraine question. As Harper attempted, in what, on a world stage, looks like a rather sadly pathetic attempt, to wield the sword of Canadian power by enacting various sanctions on Russia, his mental simplicity and animal-like puffery has become increasingly apparent. But yesterday, the depth of Harper's instability became clear when Russia retaliated with sanctions of its own. As one listened to the words coming out of the Harper cabal, one got the distinct impression that they were genuinely surprised by Russia's retaliation. Their surprise is, perhaps, motivated by a child-like simplicity that expresses itself in the notion that when one is so sure that one is on the right side of an issue, one's opponents wouldn't dare retaliate. You can almost see Harper and his ministers thinking to themselves "how can Russia dare retaliate when they are so clearly in the wrong?" Like truly incompetent politicians, Harper and his henchmen seem to really believe that they simply have to wave their magic wand of moral righteousness and whatever problem is at hand will simply vanish in a puff of saintly rectitude. They revealed some of their simplicity and disingenuousness yesterday when they said that the Russian sanctions wouldn't hurt the Canadian economy and then, almost int he next breath, said that they can't only consider economic questions when making foreign policy.

The Harper regime's madness is of the kind that is notoriously dangerous when it comes to democracy. When people are suffering from a pathological narcissism and dissociative illness, they tend to go off the rails when the world fails to conform to their simplistic righteousness.  When things don't go their way, such people have a terrible time accepting that they interpreted things wrongly or that the people turned against them. Rather, like Nixon, they look for conspiracies and satanically-induced plots for their failure. This is the stuff that coups are made of. As the Veteran's Affairs Minister and the Employment Minister throw around wild accusations that de facto suggest that the leader of Liberal Party is knowingly consorting with Islamic "terrorists," one can really see the dangers of the unhinged cabal that is in control of our government. It is not an unreasonable jump from these actions to outright accusations of foreign influence in next October's elections. Given all that has occurred, it is easy to imagine a Harper regime so driven by their own sense of moral righteousness that they would attempt to avoid or overthrow an election loss through an action of martial law. If you don't believe such a thing is possible just listen carefully to how they speak and watch carefully how they act when the world doesn't conform to their simple black and white view of their own moral rectitude. It is ominous and speaks of deep-seated mental disturbance.

Indigenous People, Palestine, and History's Judgements Part II. . . .

The concept of the so-called “manifest destiny” is a complex one. On the one hand it is steeped in fairly explicit racism and a brutal advocacy of the notion that might makes right. It is, one might argue, a complicated perversion of Christian moralism which perverts the very notion of Christianity, much like Catholicism did, into a sense of entitlement and superiority which was blatantly used to exterminate and murder large numbers of people and entire cultures. But despite the inherent racism that ran through American society during its period of conquest (and, of course, still runs through it today), the notion of manifest destiny was not universally accepted.

 Journalist John O’Sullivan first used the phrase Manifest Destiny in 1845 in an article in the New York Morning News. O’Sullivan was arguing that the States had a sort of divine right to conquer the Oregon Territory because of “our [American’s] manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole of the continent which Providence was given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” O’Sullivan’s statement was not only aggressively expansionist but it relied on a nascent racism for its moral justification much like so-called idea of the “white-man’s burden” (a phrase that didn’t exist until another racist, Rudyard Kipling used it some fifty years later in connection with Anlgo-imperialism). The idea that the continent was “given to us for the development of the great experiment of liberty,” implies both that it did not really belong to the people that were there and that somehow our goals were noble (ie., liberatory) and, by extension, those who had had possession of the land lacked our noble, liberating spirit.

However, despite the fact that American society was deeply racist, some recognized the idea of the Manifest Destiny for what it was. Speaker of the House, Robert Winthrop was one of the few that recognized that the idea of Manifest Destiny was a simple justification for a self-interested and chauvinistic policy of expansion. But despite any Whig resistance to Manifest Destiny, the forces of capitalism and imperialism were irresistible to most whites who were either eager to use any justification to expand westward, no matter how specious, or they were straight-up racists who truly believed what they saw as their noble, god-governed cause.

Over the decades of westward expansion, any resistance that the settlers (ie., the conquerors) were faced with was slotted into the context of the racist and imperialist program of the manifest destiny. Thus Sitting Bull and his Lakota warriors at the Little Bighorn River could not be viewed as resistance fighters struggling for their land and the continued existence of their culture, but had to be seen as little more than “savages and killers” who had to be properly dealt with by “noble” men such as George Armstrong Custer. Similarly, Geronimo and his Apache force had to be portrayed as little more than cutthroats by military men such as General George Crook. In other words, rather than being seen as a brutal military expansion, the conquering of the West could be seen, through the eyes of the Manifest Destiny, as a moral and (importantly) a defensive operation.

Fast forward a century or so and the work of men like Custer and Crook is more or less complete. Genocide is, for all intents and purposes, finished and a matter of historical record. But the truths are fairly clear. In the midst of the Manifest Destiny and the Westward expansion, there were no real acts of defense on the part of the Cavalry. Of course individual soldiers shot at individual natives as each attempted to kill the other. However, while some battles might have been defensive, the war was not. When General Custer stood on Calhoun Hill on the ridge above the Little Bighorn River he was, at that point, shooting at Lakota warriors to save his own skin. But it was also an act of imperialism. And if we are to look back now, it is obviously absurd to say that Geronimo and his small band of Apaches were a threat to the existence of the United States. They were a threat, however, to US interests and to the program of the Manifest Destiny.

Obviously, those who are familiar with my blog know where I am going with this. I believe that in historical terms we can see the gradual theft of Palestinian land as genocide much like the conquering of the West. And political Zionism is not just a little like the principle of the Manifest Destiny. When David Ben-Gurion wrote to his son that “we must expel Arabs and take their places,” he was writing about his own notion of manifest destiny. And to call Israeli militarist expansion “defensive” is just as absurd as talking about Custard’s Seventh Cavalry a “defensive force.”

Today there are relatively small groups of Indigenous North Americans attempting to create a new culture for themselves out of the ashes of the past. With the exception of a handful of extremists, Native Americans don’t question the Right of the US or Canada, for example, to ‘exist.’ The argument is obviously absurd. Instead, they fight for justice as well as they can within a context of a sadly successful Manifest destiny. The battle for Israel’s Manifest Destiny goes on apace and each year the State of Israel takes a little bit more land and exterminates a few more Palestinians. When the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist in 1971, it made little difference, in the same way that it would have made little difference if Sitting Bull had recognized the US’s right to exist in, say, 1876 (the year of the Battle of the Little Bighorn). The settlement of the Montana Territory would have gone on either way. And the characterization of the Native Americans as “savage” continued to be the order of the day for generations to come. Today there are groups of Palestinians who, much like Sitting Bull or Geronimo, continue to fight back against a brutal and much better armed occupying force. To call them religious fanatics is, of course, a deeply misleading political tactic on the part of Israel and its supporters much like it was misleading to call Sitting Bull a heathen, anti-Christian, savage with no respect for life. When someone is taking your land and destroying your culture, their religion is really immaterial. Religion might be used as a convenient rallying cry but what is really at stake is your land and your culture.

General George Armstrong Custer was a graduate of West Point and undoubtedly a brutal and racist man. Crazy Horse, who drove Custer up the bluffs where he was massacred, was, I am sure, a frighteningly brutal man. Custer was a “Christian” and Crazy Horse followed his own Indigenous Religion. But as these men live now only in books and memory, these issues seem strangely irrelevant today to the larger question of the conquering of the West. What we see now is a group of white conquerors pushing ever westward against an ever-dwindling group of Natives who fought back, sometimes savagely, for their land and culture. But in the midst of that historical war, the “spin” was different as the Whites held on to their notion of being noble defenders of the cause of civilization and liberty.

History is repeating itself and the spin-doctors are as busy as ever.

Indigenous People, Palestine, and History's Judgments. . . .

             In 1840 the Comanche chief Buffalo Hump raised a huge party of warriors and began raiding towns in the Republic of Texas. During the raids they killed approximately 30 whites, nearly burned down the entire town of Linnville, stole hundreds of horses, and stole quiet a bit of bullion. The Great Raid of 1840, as it is now called, was one of the largest single raids by an organized ‘war party’ of  Native Americans in the history of Western “settlement.” And the killing and pillaging by the Comanche raiders was widely used as an illustration of Native “brutality” and “savagery” as the process of “settlement” went on through the rest of the 19^th century.

            However, as we know now, the people of the West commonly used such events to characterize the Native Americans as ‘savages,’ and ‘settler’s’ used the argument “we have a right to defend ourselves”” in their process of genocide. Very few people today, except the most racist, would ignore the fact that it was, in fact, the Native Americans who were defending themselves against an ongoing, concerted effort to take all their land and commit what amounted to genocide. We might look back and be saddened by the deaths of ‘average people’ who were just trying to live their lives at the hands Natives, but we are separated from the history enough to understand that what was really going on was genocide and that the relatively few numbers of whites that died in conflicts with the Natives, though sad for those people and their family members, amounted to the very small efforts that the Natives could go to in fighting against the theft of their land and the destruction of their culture. When Western “settlers” massacred Native communities with the claim of “defense” we know that such an argument could only be made by isolating  individual events from the backdrop of land theft and genocide. (Of course, racism against natives is still extremely wide spread and, sadly, even culturally accepted. However, eve those who have a racist, twisted, or radically misinformed view of North American Indigenous peoples, understand that it was, generally speaking, the Natives who were defending themselves, not the other way around.)

            But the realization of genocide and White atrocities has taken a long, long time. And we can, sadly, conclude that it was only once the theft of the land was assured that anyone began to listen to the idea that whites had acted atrociously and were, in fact, guilty of the worst kinds of human crimes. And this struggle continues even today as a case can be made that North American Governments continue to be guilty of ongoing crimes against humanity in their treatment of the Indigenous peoples.

            However, what I find saddest of all is that we have learned so little from our crimes against the Indigenous population of North America. Today in Palestine, the very same thing is going on. Almost all of the land of the Palestinians has now been taken with the exception of a few, very crowded and isolated areas. Like the Manifest Destiny of the Whites who came to North America, Israel seems bent on taking all the land of Palestine for itself and running the others off or killing them in the process. The Palestinians now live in a series of open-air prison camps and have very few resources at their disposal. Occasionally the Palestinians fight back with their meager resources against the most powerful, per-capita military in the world. And like the White “settlers” of the Old West, Israelis and their apologists claim that they are defending themselves against a “savage” enemy. But just as in the Old West, it is the Palestinians who are, in fact, defending themselves against a much more powerfully armed peoples who are hell-bent on taking all of their land until the Palestinians are little more than a handful of people with nothing to their name and subjugation becomes a really simple matter. It is another genocide, committed with a claim of moral righteousness, and it is no less savage or unjust than the committed against the Indigenous peoples of North America. They don’t want you to look at the “big picture.” They don’t want you to look at the historical facts. They don’t want you to see the maps which illustrated the gradual, but consistent swallowing up of Palestinian land against UN Directives and International Law. Like the White “settlers” of North American, Israel and its apologists want you to look at every effort by the Palestinians in complete isolation so they can mischaracterize it as savagery and characterize themselves as victims simply trying to “defend” themselves. All the while, they continue their illegal settlements, continue talking the land, and continue committing genocide while the West looks the other way.

            But if the human race is still here in a couple of hundred years, the destruction of Palestine will be seen as no less a crime than the destruction of the Indigenous cultures of North America. Perhaps more so. And the few of us who speak against it will be like those few Easterners who spoke against the brutal nature of Western Settlement, people on the right side of history at decidedly the wrong time.

Changing Winds. . . .

I have said for quite a while now that, unless something drastic happens between now and next October, I believe that the Liberal Party will form the next government. Events in recent by-elections further convinced me, and many others, that the political winds have changed in this country and that Brian Mulroney is probably correct in his assessment of Justin Trudeau as the so-called 'real-deal.' Olivia Chow had won her seat with an astounding twenty thousand votes, and under Trudeau the Liberal Party took it back with a comfortable 6500 hundred plus. This is a sure sign that Trudeau is appealing to NDP swing voters as well as disaffected Conservatives.

Harpers blistering, if tired and ineffective, attack on Trudeau this weekend at the Calgary Stampede, illustrates not only the desperation of the Conservatives regarding the clear change of wind, but also their startling inability to change their political strategy of smearing anyone who opposes their agenda. Harper's rather cringe-worthy attacks which included the old standby of "the Liberals will coddle the criminals," seems to generate an endless supply of sympathy for Trudeau and his followers. After nearly ten years of totally ineffective government under Harper and his Con-men, more and more Canadians seem to be increasingly alienated by the politics of anger and hate.

One of the strangest developments in recent months has been the apparent legal ineptitude of the HarperCons as they enact law after law that they seem to know violate the Constitution. Their 'damn the torpedoes' attitude regarding laws that they seem to know will be overturned is a grand illustration of their basic inability to responsibly govern Canada. More and more Canadians are seeing them for what they are - ideologues who are unconcerned with actual meaningful governance and are hell-bent on ramming through any ideologically motivated legislation even when it violates and the laws and the general values of the country as a whole.

The joke, of course, is that (as so often happens with radicals of any political stripes) the strategy could have worked if the Conservatives had taken a more inclusive, less combative approach to governing, one that respected the political system and traditions of the Westminster system of government. From what I am seeing, even more and more conservatives are seeing the Harper regime as not representing the values of Canada or conservativism. To say nothing of how the rest of the population feels.

I still contend that the moment the Conservative Party sealed its future failure was when Harper suddenly announced while on a trip overseas that he was upping the retirement age and beginning to de facto dismantle the federal pension system. But regardless of which hateful or incompetent debacle one points to as the moment of Conservative downturn, the winds have decidedly changed. In Ontario, the provincial Conservative Party was soundly defeated by appealing not only to negativity but to what is looking like an increasingly tired ideology of favouring corporations and the rich while real wages stagnate and average people are increasingly struggling.

Whether the Liberal Party would actually be any better for average people is a fairly open question. Either way, the winds really seem to have changed and the Conservative have demonstrated again and again that they have no intention (or ability) to change tack. The road to political failure is paved largely by those who were once successful but were unable to see the real sources of their success, and the real nature of their limitations.

Piketty, Capitalism, and the new fight. . .

I have never had much time for the so-called "neo-conservative" agenda. I am old enough to remember when Milton Friedman entered into mainstream culture and I always found the arguments ridiculous. I don't think it takes much brain-power to understand that eliminating taxes on the rich and on corporations is not going to create jobs or enrich the general population. And in a context of increasing globalization I actually think the argument is less convincing. But thanks to a gradual corporate strangle-hold on the media the voodoo economics of the new right gradually became the default position of most of the political spectrum. It has only been the drastic and obvious increase in social/economic/political inequality that has really woken up many people to the real results of the new-right agenda. Then with the global economic recession of 2008 and the massive increase in the wealth of the richest while the majority were suffering badly, the real economic issues began to enter into mainstream discourse.

Now we have a new economic poster-boy in the face of Thomas Piketty, author of the meticulously researched Capital in the Twenty-first Century.  I think Piketty is a game-changer and here's why. Economists and activists have been warning for decades of the dangers of the new-right agenda. Many thoughtful commentators have pointed out that trickle down doesn't work (and let's face it, in the final analysis that is all the new-right agenda amounts to; make sure that the rich and the corporations have lots of money and the rest of us will get some), and many have even used analysis and statistics to demonstrate that income inequality is growing, innovation is slowing, and capitalism and democracy are suffering as a result. But Piketty is the first major, post-recession high-level economist to demonstrate through meticulous research with analyses decades of capitalist development, that inequality is an inevitable result of new-right policies and that inequality will significantly and rapidly increase unless capitalism enacts certain necessary reforms. From what I understand, what Piketty's argument partly rests on is a fairly simple formula that can be expressed this way - capital returns increase faster than economic development. Therefore as returns on capital increase exponentially, the more capital someone has the more they make and the less able they are to spend it and the less incentive they have to use it for development. This is by no means a revolutionary idea and in fact Karl Marx himself understood this when he talked about the concept referred to as the "relative impoverishment of the workers." Marx observed the same phenomenon and said that one of the results would be that the majority would become increasingly impoverished in relation to those holding the capital. And it did happen for a long time. But Marx, understandably, did not anticipate progressive taxation and huge state investments in education, two of the primary methods of decreasing relative impoverishment (or in today's parlance - inequality). And for a long time, it looked as though, at least at a national level, the force or tendency toward relative impoverishment, or inequality, would be mitigative by these two primary processes of state intervention. Then the new-right changed all that, and as they took control of the media they began to espouse this low-taxation, pro-corporate agenda. And because inequality had receded so significantly, many people had essentially forgotten the lessons of the socialists and social democrats (and, of course Marx) and the rich were once again able to begin to construct an oligarchy around their wealth and power. The reason that Piketty might be a game changer is that he is the first economist to gain a high, international profile in the post-recession era who has once again outlined how this process of oligarchy building takes place and how it is the direct result of less-progressive taxation, and decreases in state investment in education and other benchmark measures of quality of life and equality.

One need not be a Marxist, by any means, to understand the process of relative impoverishment, and creeping inequality. In fact, an increasing number of Capitalists are taking the problems seriously, including people at the World Bank (hardly a bastion of left-wing ideology). Because just like those who built the New Deal in the US, many capitalist are smart enough to understand that the building of a new capitalist oligarchy is a threat to capitalism itself.

Because of globalization, capitalist reforms will be more difficult in our era than they were in the past. This is because of the very simple fact that the rich can move their wealth so easily and that corporations can play nations off each other in what becomes a race to the bottom. But realization and understanding of a problem is the first step toward its solution. And I would contend that if those in power don't want another era of revolution and/or fascism, they will begin to see the need for a change.

In the election that is going on in Ontario at the moment we can see a microcosm of the cultural debate that is swirling around us. And for the first time in as long as I can remember people across the political spectrum are questioning the rightwing orthodoxy. When the Conservatives say that they will gut the public service and lower taxes for the rich and for corporation and that wealth will just "naturally" trickle down to the rest of the people, fewer and fewer believe them. After all, we have been lowering corporate and wealth taxes for forty nearly forty years now and the good jobs have been disappearing at the same rate. The relative wealth of the majority has been sliding for decades and the rich have been getting shockingly richer. Meanwhile even supposedly rightwing economic advisory groups have been beginning to point out that infrastructure investment is becoming painfully necessary, state investment in jobs wields much greater returns than "tax breaks," and income inequality is becoming a serious problem.

Make no mistake, this fight will take a long time. But I believe that Piketty has helped to open up a new front on what sub-commander Marcos called the Fourth World War.

The Vile creatures of the New Right. . .

I haven't post here much lately because I have, as a matter of emotional survival, turned more toward the aesthetic, with my new website and new blog about art. But with new revelations appearing all the time about the government spying on us I thought I should write a political blogpost on principle in order to say (as my peer bloggers have) I won't be silenced.

I have never had any qualms about stating my opinions concerning the Harper regime. I have said that Harper (and many of his cronies) are narcissistic, pathological autocrats because they are. I have called them fascists because I believe them to be. They have created a petro-state in which corporations have more power than citizens, they have done everything in their power to undermine democracy and free speech, they have undermine the judicial and legislative branches of government. They are vindictive, mean, racist, evil people with an obsession with power and money and no concern for a good society.

Like their friends the Ford brothers, the Harperites are addicted to lying. They have no honour, and continually marginalize and attack anyone who disagrees with them. And, like the Ford Brothers, when it becomes clear that they are wrong and that their attacks are nothing more than a tasteless demonstration of crass, childish, ignorant, self-serving, mean-spirited rapaciousness, they never apologize or set the record strait. That is pure evil. And evil is all they know. Meanwhile they fly around in private jets and chauffeured limousines all the while condemning supposed elites - the very elites that they are working to make richer and more elite. And a certain class of the woefully ignorant mass lap it up while spending their time attacking real working people who are trying to keep their heads above water.

Will this change? Will Harper and his ugly orc-like minions sink back into the disgusting ooze from which they emerged?

Harper and some of his Cabinet

Will Ford, that Azog the defiler, get the drubbing he deserves and end his days in prison as justice would demand? 

Rob Ford as Azog

Or will these vile creatures drag us back into the dark ages?

I don't know but we won't go gentle into that horrible night.

Crimea, Ukraine, and Western Hypocrisy. . .

I am glad that I am not the only one who is weary of the hypocrisy of Western nations in their reactions to the situation in Ukraine. Yesterday and today one of my favourite bloggers, Montreal Simon, mentioned the pattern of hypocrisy in of his postings. (Here and here) Once again the West has managed to outdo itself in its remarkable ability to say one thing and do something different.

The hypocrisy began at the beginning. The West's reaction to what was clearly a coup by a diverse group of left and extreme-right activists. They overthrew an elected president and then portrayed the president as the villain. Now I am no big fan of Viktor Yanukovych but let's face it, he was the elected president, and he was elected, I should add, with a significantly larger majority than our own prime minister and his Con-men cabal. But Harper was quick to recognize the overthrow of a legitimate president. Does it make you wonder how the Conservatives would react if tens of thousands of activists showed up on Parliament Hill, many of them armed, and demanded that Harper resign. We all know the army would quickly be called out and if the crowds fought back against their removal from the hill the way the crowds fought back in Ukraine, they would be gunned down. And if you have any doubt about that, look at the only concerted effort on the part of protesters since Harper took office - those at the G20. Thousands were corralled, beaten, arrested on no charges or trumped-up charges. And those crowds weren't even a genuine threat to Harper's power. Any real threat from the streets to Harper's status as Prime Minister would be met with swift and brutal violence.

But the West's reaction to the coup was just the tip of the hypocrisy iceberg. Hypocrisy was stepped up into high gear when Russia began to act in Crimea. Now, there is no doubt that Russia had signed an agreement to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. And their unilateral actions were deeply problematic. However, the claims by the West to this effect, ring entirely hollow to anyone who has been paying attention to recent history. At least Russia had a long-standing interest in, if not partial claim on Crimea. The West, on the other hand, routinely engages in or supports unilateral, self-interested, military actions in foreign nations. The West's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were two of the most recent examples. Russia used the tired old line that they had to protect Russians in Crimea and that justified their actions. Well this is exactly the excuse the US once used to justify their invasion of Granada in 1983 and their invasion and carpet bombing of Panama in 1989. If a school-yard bully beats kids up in the playground every day, one surely treats with suspicion their moral indignation when another bully does the exact same thing.

Then there is the West's reaction to the recent referendum in Crimea. They tell us it is illegal and that any kind of vote taken during an occupation has no democratic or moral authority. However, the West did exactly this in both Iraq and Afghanistan (again just to mention two recent examples). Apparently, if we are to judge by their actions, the West thinks that voting during occupation is a perfectly suitable route to democratic decision making. So why the blatant double-standard? Well it is clear that men like Harper are not interested in democracy, legality, sovereignty or any other high-minded principle of justice. In fact, quite the contrary, while he is busy touting such principles in Ukraine with crocodile tears, he is busy undermining them here at home. As with all such politicians, Harper only likes democracy, or revolutions when they offer the results that he favours. Thus if the Ultra-right overthrows a President in Ukraine in favour of a more pro-Western government, then we hear heart-felt appeals to the people's cause. If a vote is taken in occupied Afghanistan it is a 'step toward' democracy. But if it is taken in Crimea under Putin's watchful eye, it is illegal.

The fact is clear to anyone who knows anything about Crimea, the largely Russian population would probably have voted for secession given the events in Kiev regardless of presence of Russian troops. But interestingly, the Ukraine constitution doesn't allow for the people of any one region to vote on separation. Rather, any such issue has to be approved by the entire nation. I wonder if Harper is going to be consistent and come back to Canada and enact a similar law to wave in the face of Pauline Marois? I doubt it.

Consistency has certainly never been a trait of politicians. And the power of hypocrisy has certainly been on dramatic display in recent weeks concerning events in Ukraine. The people of Ukraine overthrew a legitimately elected President. But far be it for me to question a revolutionary moment. Maybe he needed to be overthrown, I can't say, and not being Ukrainian it is not my place to say. However, when you play the game of realpolitik you can't complain too much when others play it too. And when you turn your back on a gangster like Putin don't be surprised if you get shot from behind. But let's not buy the moral indignation of Western nations who seldom (if ever) come to the defence of democracy for anything but self-interested reasons. If anyone is expert at condemning foreign invasions and oppressions while simultaneously undermining their own democracies it is men like Harper and Obama. For them, the Russian invasion of the Crimea is aggression while the Western invasion of Afghanistan is a humanitarian mission. Those of you who are old enough will remember what the codename for the US invasion of Panama was - "Operation Just Cause." If that is not a fine moment in political irony I don't know what is.  

Harper's war of attrition. . . .

I haven't blogged much lately because politics has become increasingly frustrating and difficult. Furthermore, there are people blogging with similar opinions to my own who can be more effective in inciting emotions or gathering useful political information. And as far as blogging on art and literature, I have been too busy with my own work to expend the intellectual energy necessary to write interesting material in this regard.

I appreciate bloggers like Montreal Simon who can continue to write biting and insightful material even in the face of our horrific government.

Speaking about it rationally is fairly simple. Good governance requires certain basic elements - commitment to the fundamental principles of democracy, the desire to foster dialogue, a basic commitment to an effective civil-service and the good programs that they need to deliver, a commitment to giving a voice to the voiceless and providing care and protection for society's most vulnerable, a strong commitment to the constitution, a respect for fairness and the democratic traditions of the House of Commons, a respect for the judicial arm of government and the necessary roll it plays, and a commitment to protecting the environment for future generations. Our government has no commitment to any of these. In fact, it actively undermines all of them. There is not a single element of good governance to which this government is committed.

At a rational level it is as simple as that.

But as with most forces of evil, there is something more at stake here - a gestalt of the Harper regime. With the introduction of the so-called "fair-elections act," it is clear that this government is not simply a bad government but a treasonous one. This act is nothing less than an effort to enshrine into law the ability to engage in electoral fraud and is in my mind a basic act of treason because it is an effort to actually undermine the principles of the constitution.

Such a treasonous act undertaken by the government itself is something that requires more than rarefied political discourse. People have to be woken up to the dangers of an encroaching fascism, to a government that is attempting to gradually replace our democratic system with an autocracy in which any democratic processes have been rendered exercises in futility, and where, by extension, the government serves a narrow corporate interest and a small percentage of wealthy patrons.

It is difficult to live in a society which is inching gradually toward autocracy as many of the citizens seem to blithely ignore the coming danger. There is a certain nonchalant attitude taken by many to the dangerous and insidious actions of a government that is falling into fascism. They have trouble believing that it "can happen here" or that our traditions can be subverted and perverted by a bunch of men dressed in suits. But not every coup is a violent one and sometimes what is best in a society is lost in a quite war of attrition.