Chavez, Corporatism, and the Continuing Struggle. . .

The life of Hugo Chavez reminds us of many of the difficulties facing the world in our generation.  Chavez was a man who saw that capitalism had led in Latin America to structural poverty for a large swarth of the population and though there was, in the latter half of the 20th century, a degree of development in most Latin American Countries, this development showed no sign of raising this consistently poor class above the level of wretched poverty.

The latter part of the 20th century saw a significant structural shift in the international capitalist structure. The process of globalized corporate capitalism, though still in development, has imposed important changes in politics everywhere and has been significant for both 'conservatives' and 'liberals.' Globalizing corporate capitalism has actually put paid to much traditional conservative ideology. Because the model of capitalism changed and the transnational corporation has become the central model of wealth and power, so-called conservatives abandoned their traditional fiscal conservatism and instead their political efforts have become concentrated on increasing the wealth and power of large corporations. This effort demanded a policy effort which seeks to shift huge amounts of money away from the general population and into the hands of a small group of corporations and ultra-rich. Thus supposedly conservative governments from the late-seventies onward have actually abandoned their supposed fiscal responsibility and today we have a Conservative government in Canada which is the most deficit ridden in the country's history. For more liberally minded people, the model shift in capitalist development has meant attempting to protect the social structure and rights that were gradually gained in the first parts of capitalist development. However, so far this has been a sadly losing effort and the radical increases in economic and political power over the last thirty years has demonstrated our losses.

Of course, the damaging effects of globalizing capitalism has not gone unanswered and Hugo Chavez was part of a new generation of what one might call 'semi-socialists' who are looking to mitigate the effects of corporate power and structural inequalities to which it is leading. But the life of Chavez demonstrates just how difficult this struggle is, and will continue to be.

Changing a prevailing power structure is certainly never easy. To paraphrase Marx, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling. In a system in which big money controls most of the conduits of ideas and ideology, it is very difficult to make people understand the nature of the power structures that surround them. It was this way in feudal Europe where a shocking percentage of the population actively supported their own oppression, and convinced that it was divinely derived and the best of all possible worlds. Fighting the structure of modern corporate capitalism is similarly difficult. Corporations and the rich can effectively limit and control political discourse and in many cases specifically control electoral outcomes. These challenges have led to such efforts as the occupy movement in the 'first' world and to more radical and powerful efforts in the developing world. Chavez was part of this radical movement. Regular democracy means little in circumstances in which a rich and powerful elite control the discourse and the structures of the state and the economy. In countries like Venezuela these challenges are made even more problematic by an absence of generalized education and the ideological structures of elitism steeped in generations of inequality.

The rich and powerful of the world, those that represent the corporatist ideology fear men like Hugo Chavez more than anything else. Just as the feudal lords feared agricultural reformist leaders like Gerrard Winstanley and the 19th century capitalists feared men like Feargus O'Connor, the corporate capitalists of the 21st century fear men like Hugo Chavez because they are not content to let the system of inequality keep going unchallenged.

If the leaders of Western nations learn anything from Hugo Chavez it should be that people will not let inequality go unchallenged indefinitely. Over the past thirty or forty years Western Democracies have seen more and more inequality and one might say that we are witnessing the creation of a structural underclass and new ruling class. But where there are inequalities there are people willing to fight against them. And if the rules of the game is stacked against them, they start to break the rules. People can fuss and whine all they want against such struggles, they can attempt to marginalize leaders like Chavez, but the struggle will continue none the less.

Lies, Damn Lies and Political Lessons. . . .

Among the interesting political events of the week is the leak of the BC Liberal Memo which outlines their very crass and opportunistic plan to win quick votes through the wooing of the so-called "ethnic vote." What I find interesting about this event is similar to the sudden release by the Ontario Liberals of thousands of formerly unknown documents concerning the controversial cancellation of two energy plants.

We can truly say that other parties in Canada are not learning from the dangers of forthrightness displayed by Former Prime Minister Paul Martin when he announced an independent investigation into the so-called Sponsorship Scandal. Nor have they learned from the past six years of obsessive secretiveness of the current Conservative Government.

If the BC and Ontario Liberals had properly learned their contemporary political lessons they would never have acted the way they did. Instead of releasing the mysterious documents concerning the cancelled energy plants, the new Premier of Ontario would have had them quietly destroyed. Then refused to talk about in or out of the Legislature. And if the BC Liberals had just called their federal hero, Stephen Harper, for advice they would have quickly blamed some hired lackey for writing the memo, fired him/her, and then said to the media that there is no story here because it was all the fault of this peon who had already been fired. Again, end of story. If the government of Harper has demonstrated any political truth it is simply that the media cycle is shockingly short, it is easy to blame someone else, and that if you just keep quiet for a few days the media will quickly lose interest. The scandals of the current Conservative Government make the previous Liberal Government look like a bunch of honest guys. Yet Harper still retains power for the simple reason that a policy of blame and ignore in today's media milieu is remarkably effective.

Now for the real question - should be we glad that other governments or parties are not learning this simple lesson, encouraged that the simplistic but effective strategy of Harper's dishonesty has not taken hold? Or should we be concerned that this means that since Harper is the only one willing to undertake this horrendous strategy, we will never see the end of him?

Harper's time has finally come. . . .

Something has happened to the Harper government over the past few weeks and it must be deeply upsetting to those few caucus members who are not infected with the blind sense of self divinity that affects Harper and ministers. You can feel it in the subtle shift in the discorse in the blogosphere and other media. It is a change that will be felt more and more over time.

Despite being deeply unpopular with a large portion of the population, Harper has managed to eek out election victories by gaining just enough voters above his conservative core support. He has mostly done this thanks to a significantly divided opposition and by creating the illusion (through governing by stealth) that he is in fact occupying the political middle ground. But this political shift that we are seeing is going to rob Harper and his cabal of that little extra that has kept them in power.

The shift that I am talking about is that moment in so many longterm governments in which there grows a general perception that they have become nothing more than swine feeding at the government, pork-barrel trough. Once this perception is generalized among voters it is very difficult, if not impossible to shake loose. With the "scandal" in the Senate concerning a Prime Minister who said he would never appoint a Senator, we have, I believe, reached this point. To see the once "Reform Party" type Stephen Harper, who one authored an article entitled "Our Benign Dictatorship" which suggested that the only reason that the Liberal Party was in power was because of a dysfunctional political system, stand up in Parliament and, without blushing, defend his patronage appointments, was truly a moment to behold. It was the moment of full-circle, monumental irony. For years Harper has taken advantage of our "dysfunctional" political system to enact his every whim. Now he has become the essence of what he and his supporters have always claimed to despise - a patronage loving, pork-barrel Prime Minister whose partisan corruption has now, finally, become part of our accepted political discourse.

It is ironic, of course. Because for those of use who really understand what is going on, it is the terrible anti-democratic, pro-war, ultra-secretive, fiscally irresponsible, system-destroying tendencies of this government that has made them unfit to govern. But the sad truth is that if the past seven years have taught us anything it is that a significant swath of Canadian voters don't actually understand their own political system or pay attention to what their government is doing. It is only when the government tips over the point of pork-barrel perception that that important swing group of lazy voters finally abandon a government.

The Senate has always been an overpriced do-nothing organization that costs us many millions of dollars. Oh yea, Harper has made some of the worst, most blindly partizan appointments to that body. But even if Senator Duffy is (sorry about this) the ideal poster boy for pork barrel, there is really nothing new here. This story is as old as the Senate. But all that doesn't matter because what really matters is that without even realizing it, Haper has tipped that balance and has reached that moment when he has gone from being a "maligned but committed" Prime Minister to just another pig waddling up to the trough.

Watch it, the centre has now spun out of control.

Flanagan, Harper and Keeping Things on the DL. . .

Like most people, I don't feel sorry for Tom Flanagan. He was the author of his own demise and given his ego and big mouth, the only surprise is how long it took him to self-destruct.

Flanagan's self-destruction seems to me to be a microcosm of how the current generation of rightwingers in Canada are gradually cutting their own throats. As usually happens, these politicos have been riding a wave for too long now and if scandal or incompetence doesn't get them then they get themselves as a result of typical arrogance and over-confidence.

But while over-confidence of some politicos seem to grow out of the the comfort of power, the current cohort of Canadian conservatives are prone to self-destruction because they are inherently convinced of their own rightness and wisdom. While my experience is that the left has, if anything, been too self-reflective over the years, and "liberals" are, because they inherently occupy the centre of the political spectrum, always waffling back and forth within an admittedly narrow spectrum, the modern conservatives are dangerously convinced that they can do no wrong.  And when circumstance proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are, indeed, wrong, they simply lie about it or blame someone else. [It sort of reminds me of that old academic story of an idea's development (I can't remember off-hand who originally said it), that a new ideas goes through three stages - first people attack it as being beyond the pale, then the critics admit that it is true but is prosaic and self-evident anyway, then the critics admit that it is true and that they thought of it first.]

Anyway, I have been familiar with Tom Flanagan for a long time and I even audited a few of his classes at the U of C back in the early 90s. I have always found him to be an arrogant wing-nut, a man who is often wrong but never in doubt. He is a racist blowhard whose political theories verge on laughable (if they weren't so dangerous) and he has never been reluctant to share his opinions. These elements of his personality made Flanagan's fall inevitable. Anyone who is that foolish but convinced of his own wisdom that has regular access to an audience, is going to eventually over-reach himself. And by addressing what is, arguably, the most sensitive issue in society, Flanagan was bound to orchestrate his own demise. Ironically, it was, typically, not really the issue that brought him down but his inability to speak about the subtleties of an issue that destroyed him. Having sat in classes with Flanagan when he was twenty years younger and surprisingly a little more cautious about how he said things, my experience suggests that, if one were being generous, we might suspect that what he really wanted to say was probably lost in his typically rightwing glibness. At the heart of Flanagan's discourse was, perhaps, the legal question of the efficacy, expedience, and import of prosecuting people who consume illegal material verses those who are actually involved in the production of illegality. One might argue that it is not unlike the question of dealing with those who consume an illegal product like, say, heroin versus dealing with those who produce it an distribute it. Now, no matter how sensitive an issue is one might need to address this basic legal question, particularly in circumstances of limited legal resources. But it would be impossible for someone as glib and impertinent as Flanagan to actually discuss such an issue. Rather, Flanagan always has a knee-jerk, extremist reaction to any issue. Flanagan never actually wants to discuss an issue, rather he just wants to pontificat as loud as he can to anyone who will listen.

In other words Flanagan doesn't know when to properly tailor his discorse or just keep his mouth shut. And in the end this is why Flanagan split with Harper. If Harper learned anything during his time in public life it is to say as little as possible and even if one has controversial  (some might say offensive) opinions, keep them on the DL. And this is why Harper has always jettisoned political alies who he can't control, and also why his government is a grand exercise in keeping everyone around him quiet. And even those close to Harper who are regularly in the media spotlight are continually coached and controlled concerning government message.

Flanagan fell from grace because he is a man full of deeply offensive opinions who is convinced his is a scholar and a genius. It was inevitable that he would shoot his mouth off in a way that would undermine any authority he may have had. Other Harper allies like Brazeau and Duffy are similarly obsessed with their own perceived wisdom and authority. Meanwhile, other allies are just headed to jail.

If Harper has learned how to keep quiet himself, the offensiveness of his opinions and the opinions of his alies eventually slips through the cracks with catastrophic results. Today Tom Flanagan is rightly suffering from an appropriate backlash to a lifetime of offensive opinions. And as the screws come gradually looser on Harper's political machine, it won't be long until the whole generation of modern Canadian conservatives is similarly in the public dog-house.

Harper's Gradual but Spectacular Failure .. . .

It is becoming increasingly difficult for anyone to see the Prime Ministership of Stephen Harper and the history of the Conservative Government as anything but a spectacular failure at almost every level. Even judged by their own standards this government has really failed badly on almost all portfolios. The only area in which Harper can say to have succeeded is in the break down of democracy in general and the destruction of transparency, accountability, and due process in the Parliament in particular.

Some areas of Harper's failure have been rather pathetically predicable. Take Senate reform for example. Rank and file Conservatives (most of whom don't seem to understand the function and process of our government) were naive enough to believe that Harper could do something to reform the Senate. If one understands our system of government, however, one knows that any significant reforms to the Senate would (or will) be monumentally difficult and will probably require the agreement of all the provinces. And yet Harper vowed that he would never appoint anyone to the Senate and that he would reform that rather antiquated body. He has now appointed 58 Senators and all of those appointments have been wildly partizan. And while all appointments to the Senate are inherently acts of patronage, this fact should not preclude a PM from appointing competent individuals to that office. Harper, on the other hand seems to have no regard for any qualification other than the degree to which party hacks deserve rewards on the Senate gravy train. As a result of his disregard for vetting his candidates (and this failure applies to his appointments outside the Senate as well) and his lack of concern for qualifications, Harper has appointed a remarkable group of buffoons to the Upper Chamber.

One can only surmise that Harper is, in regard to the Senate, either a terrific failure or that he never had any intention of reform. Either way, Harper is enjoying bringing his friends to the Government trough and shamelessly continues to appoint Senators while talk of reform has disappeared from Government talking points.

In other areas of public policy Harper has similarly failed. Fiscally speaking, Harper blew significant government surpluses and is now head the most deficit ridden government in Canadian history. Of course, one might argue that this has been a conscious effort on Harper's part to bankrupt the government in the short term so that he can gut it long term. However, while Harper has begun the gutting of social services (something we always expected him to do) his reckless spending continues unabated. The problem is, of course, that regardless of one's political stripes, money, power, and spending are addictive, particularly for people like Harper whose real goal seems to be to find ways of diverting money from the middle and working-class to the offices of large corporations.

Harper's failure on the energy and environmental portfolios is probably the most spectacular of all. He has been gutting the environmental restrictions in an effort to promote runaway oil development but this effort is increasingly looking like it is going to fail. Thanks to gradually changing usages and new finds, the US will soon be oil self-sufficient. Meanwhile, because of the high costs of tar-sands extraction, Alberta's economy will soon once again experience one of its many dramatic busts (and this one could be the very worst they have ever experienced). Harper has attempted to create a third-world style extraction economy in Canada, an economy with very little manufacturing or innovation in which the middle-class disappears for the benefit of a small ultra-rich ruling class. However, it looks like in the long term even this rather nefarious effort will be a failure for Harper because soon our extraction economy will also fail and the wealth required for Harper's corrupt model simply won't be there. Instead, Canada will eventually look like the worst kind of Banana republic. More ominously, Canada could follow the road of countries like Spain in which the ruling class exported all their wealth to other countries and ended up undermining their own development.

Over all, Harper has surrounded himself with criminals and incompetents (men like Flaherty who seems to be genetically incapable of balancing budgets even in times of wealth). As things get worse for Harper he, like so many petty, secretive losers with persecution complexes, is receding increasingly into the shadows. Harper has never once since being Prime Minister ever faced the press or the people in an honest, unvetted, straightforward situation. But as his agenda begins to break down, as it becomes more and more evident that his time as Prime Minister is not only drawing to a close but is doing so under a growing cloud of incompetence, Mr. Harper is beginning to recede behind the wall of his office and his security staff like a Soviet-Era dictator. Harper long ago lost any moral authority that he might have had to govern. Now that it is becoming clear that his government is not only immoral, steeped in a growing list of shocking scandals, but is hopelessly incompetent as well, Harper is turning into a Stalin-like figure before our very eyes - a shadowy, bizarre figure who seems increasingly uncomfortable in the public eye and whose obvious narcissistic disorders are destroying him and his government.

When Will the CON-Job End?

It seems to me that a growing number of Canadians are finally waking up to the fiscal incompetence of the Harper cabal. It doesn't take the Economic education of Jim Stanford to understand that despite the CON-Artists continually self-congratulatory attitudes to their own supposed economic prowess, these guys really have no idea what they are doing. The ruthless pursuit of a bitumen-exporting economy already seems to be a doomed effort even from its own point of view now that the price of oil is edging downward and the Americans look to be energy self-sufficient in a few years. But from any normal point of view the CON-Artists economic strategies seem to be not only doomed to failure but downright idiotic. Not only did the Harper CON-Artists blow the economic surpluses they inherited with stupid GST and Corporate tax cuts, but they have taken Canada into a structural deficit situation (despite their supposed opposition to deficit spending at any time). Now to compound their basic economic stupidity, the Harper cabal is failing utterly to shape the Canadian economy for the future. Instead of shaping Canada's economy as an exporter of refined resources, alternative energy technologies, and education driven new ideas, the Harper-cons are looking to make Canada a banana republic that has no equality, no democracy, no generalized prosperity, and no real future.


Tell me again how these buffoons are able to trade on an image as economic competence and responsibility??

The Right has Lost the Debate . . . And Soon They Will Lose the Battle . . .

Though the right is, in many places, still riding high in the actual political struggle, if we talk about it honestly the right has, in fact, already lost the political debate at almost every level.

At the social level, the right has consistently, albeit gradually, lost throughout history. But in the resurgence of the right since the eighties when they began their concerted efforts to push back many of the 20th century gains, it is now clear that they have lost that skirmish. From Gay rights to abortion rights, from pay equity to feminism, the right has been lossing ground and support everywhere. Though the right has, in many cases, been able to attack certain institutions that aid in socially progressive issues, the right knows that they have lost the actual debate and that most people support such things as gay marriage, abortion rights, and women's rights in general.

At the environmental level, the right has again, maintained the a great deal of power, but they have clearly lost the debate. No credible person doubts the reality of global warning and even if there is still some degree of debate about the cause, we all know that we need to stop pouring crap into the air and find alternatives to carbon fuels. Even the once great bastions of rightwing ideology, the World Bank and the IMF, have, to a degree, come on side with the demands of the environmental movement.

At an economic level, the rightwing has lost the debate in quite spectacular fashion. The theory that Ronald Reagan once had the gall to call "trickle-down economics," has proved disastrous. Low taxes for the rich and for corporations has not created wealth for anyone but the rich and everyone now knows that it has created economic inequities. Not only does the 'neo-liberal' approach lead to considerably less relative prosperity for the vast majority, it actually destroys the very economies that it is supposed to help. A growing cohort of economics have now abandoned the 'neo-liberal' economic theory and are asserting more reasonable theories as if people mattered.

Now, I can hear you thinking "if the rightwing has lost the debate on all of these issues, why does it seem that they are winning so much?" Well, the sad truth is that those who win the debate don't necessarily consistently win the political struggle, and the rightwing has two significant advantages, to wit: ownership of the media, and a creeping control of the judiciary that has come from many years of growing corporate power. The rightwing lies about almost everything and they can depend on their media lapdogs to repeat these lies in a ubiquitous fashion. So even where they have lost the debate among those who know and understand these things, many people look out and see another reality being presented to them constantly in the media and this cognitive dissonance is difficult for many to overcome. And when you couple this media power with the gall of men like Harper to actually muzzle the fact finding factions of government, the rightwing is maintain some degree of an upper-hand on a sad technicality.

Meanwhile, these technicalities are being mirrored in the judicial system where the right has appointed a huge cohort of supporters to the bench and where money all too often buys victories. So a chronic criminal like Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto can keep winning on technicalities and avoid ouster and stay out of jail (where he really should be). The rightwing trolls even play the Reagan card regarding Mayor Ford and begins to blame the "left" for his trouble. These fools shout out such things as 'Witch Hunt" as though the Mayors constant criminal activity is not to blame but rather those who hope to bring him to justice are somehow at fault.

And because our political system is so badly antiquated we can have a government that essentially operates outside of the spirit of the law (if not the letter) and can move blithly forward manipulating the system to its own advantage. When we update our political institutions men like Harper will be in jail where they belong.

So the rightwing has lost the debate at every level but maintains a degree of power with the help of corporate media and antiquated institutions. But losing the debate is the first step to losing the entire battle and lose they will. If history has taught us anything it is that those with money and power cannot hold back the tide of change and that we shall overcome.