Our taunting PM.....

I find Harper's reaction to the robo-con scandal remarkable. He expressed no real concern, no hint that something is really wrong, and simply taunts and excoriates the opposition saying "Prove it!" He claims that conservatives weren't behind the calls, even though it would be absurd for anyone else to have been behind the calls.

Now, while many might give the PMO the benefit of the doubt concerning the calls, there is obviously no question that conservatives where behind the calls. It was a large organized effort that could only have benefited the CPC so based upon the simple principle of que bono, obviously some conservatives  somewhere were behind it.

And since we know the CPC to have violated election laws before on more than one occasion, and since they have demonstrated a systematic effort in this regard, it is unreasonable to suggest that Conservatives were not behind the calls.

But what disturbs me most is the continual "prove it" mentality of the PM and his claims that the opposition is undertaking a so-called smear campaign. While in criminal matters we obviously adhere to a innocent until proven guilty principles - we should surely be holding our government to a very high standard. There is something unseemly about a government that has systematically broken and ignored the laws in the past as well as used all of its power to smear and discredit any opposition to taunt the citizens of the country by saying "na-na-na boo-boo" you can't prove anything, so there." Based upon a the preponderance of evidence that is the past, we have every reason to believe that a large national undertaking designed to benefit the Conservative Party of Canada in an election was undertaken by them. In fact, I think at this point if you don't think they were behind it, then you are hopelessly naive.

Harper sounds more like this everyday. 

It is indeed unseemly for the de facto head of state to be mired in a scandal that goes to the heart of our very democracy to be taunting us. Instead he should be concerned and be desperate to not only clear his, and his party's, image but to renew people's faith in democracy. The fact that he is not concerned and that he is taunting the nation, is pretty much all the proof you need that the CPC is at the heart of these illegal and imoral acts.

Why I think Mr. Kinsella is Wrong. . . . (and So is Vic Toews). .

In his blog today Warren Kinsella has been bemoaning the revelations concerning the private life of Vic Toews. He tells us that what separates other parties (his beloved Liberals in particular) from the Conservatives is that they have boundaries. The logic goes like this - the rather uncomfortable issues of Vic Toews' divorce have nothing to do with the the terrible legislation that Toews was introducing and nothing to do with his politics in general and the issues should therefore be off limits.

The problem with Mr. Kinsella's logic is that it is flagrantly wrong. The two issues are intimately and inseparably connected. At a general level this government has made a very big show about ethics and morality, using any opponent's supposed short-comings in this area as evidence of their unfitness for governing or anything else. It is not unlike Prime Minister John Major's moral crusade which he undertook at the very time that he was having an ongoing extramarital affair or Newt Gingrich's incessant attacks on Bill Clinton as being moral unfit to be president while he was also having an affair. If Toews and his government had never attempted to take the moral high-ground, if they didn't claim to be better than everyone else, and if they didn't claim that everyone else was ethically unfit to govern, then Mr. Kinsella would have an argument. However, as it stands now, Kinsella has nothing like an argument. Far from the Vic Toews revelations having nothing to do with his political agenda, they have everything to do with his political agenda.

Mr. Kinsella's argument is made even weaker by the fact that the particular legislation that Vic Toews has introduced is about personal privacy and it demonstrates the total and utter disregard that the Harpercons have for privacy. The Conservatives claim (like so many conservatives) that "if you have nothing to hide, you don't need any privacy," and this is precisely the philosophy that the Bill in question puts into action. Well the revelations concerning Vic Toews is simply the application of his own political philosophy to himself, and he came up wanting. For this reason Mr. Kinsella is more than wrong, his opinion is the very reason that the Liberal Party has been a failure - it hasn't understood that being principled isn't simply about applying one standard to everything, rather it is about applying the appropriate standard. While, Mr. Kinsella is correct in believing that there may be some things that are never appropriate, in general terms, the appropriateness of actions often changes with changing circumstances. For example a politician may say that one principle he would never break is obedience to the law, but if that same person found herself in the Syrian opposition today, that principle would not necessarily apply. Martin Luther King understood this when he said that it is as much a duty to oppose unjust laws as it is to obey just ones.

Having said that, I certainly don't think that the Toews case is such an extreme one. If Vic Toews was concerned with people's privacy, if he was not (like most of the Harpercons) a moralistic blowhard who pretends to be ethically superior to anyone who opposes him, if didn't claim that anyone who opposes him is a child-pornographer, then yes, his personal life would be off limits. He should have learned from the sad example of Gary Hart - if you make a show of being ethically pure and you invite journalists to follow you around to demonstrate how morally pure you are, then you, yourself, have removed the barrier of privacy. You cannot hide behind a principle of personal privacy if you have demonstrated that you don't believe in such a principle and you cannot make the ethics of personal lives a major political issue and then cry foul when people expose your own ethical failures in your personal life.

I think the lesson here is that, while I appreciate Mr. Kinsella's desire to avoid the proverbial laying down with dogs and getting up with fleas, we must also understand that if you have a political opponent that is willing to break any law or principle to maintain power, then the boundaries of political appropriateness have a priori changed and if you don't react to those changes you are bound to fail. This is not to suggest that the Vic Toews case is an extreme one and therefore 'the ends must justify the means.' Rather, the Toews case if very simple, the only really meaningful demonstration of the bankruptcy of Vic Toews' political philosophy in this regard is if the standards applied in his Bill and in his political strategy in general are publicly applied to him.

In other word, the Conservatives have demonstrated that they have no regard for law or principle and if we do not apply appropriate standards to them today, we will be in the position of the Syrian opposition later and none of this debate will matter.

The Reagan Legacy, The GOP and Harper. . . .

I very seldom comment on politics in the US. I grew up there and left in 1990 because I just saw no future in the country. It is a dying neo-colonial power that I thought would, like most colonial powers, fail to cope with its decline in a constructive way. Time has, I believed, proved me correct and I have watched the US tailspin into a decline largely of its own making as it actively destroyed its own manufacturing base, destroyed the unions that actually kept the nation strong, and pushed greater amounts of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

Amid the nation's decline we have watched the Republican party go into hyper-decline as it is more and more the voice of the fringe elements of religious extremists and know-nothing Tea Party wackos. But a great deal is being written in both the blogosphere and the mainstream media about how today's Republican party is a new animal and not the party of the past. People are particularly quick to say that the Republican Party has abandoned the example of Reagan.

However, I came out of my US slumber to say that much of the noise concerning the Republican Party is just nonsense. The GOP of today is exactly the inheritor of the Reagan legacy in both style and content. Ronald Reagan was really the beginning of the modern extremely divisive, nasty partisanship of today's politics. But more importantly Ronald Reagan's philosophy is exactly what the GOP represents today - a party that claims to be about a strong nation, a good business approach, individual liberty, and small government, but is actually anathema to all of these things. In Reagan's acceptance speech he famously said "government is the problem not the solution," but he (and almost no republicans after him) ever actually acted as though they believed this. They only believed that the problem of government was it tried to create more equality instead of less. Thus the Republican Party built bigger government with more power and less individual liberty. But unlike the traditional democrats who thought government could be a large institution which helped average people, the Republicans stood for big government that wants to help corporations (and not necessarily American corporations, just any large corporation). And this political approach not only had no interest in keeping the government out of people's bedrooms (a place where republicans continually want to go) it systematically bankrupted the US by actively promoting the movement of capital and manufacturing out of the country without any interest in replacing traditional manufacturing with a modern, smart, hightech economy (as many European countries have attempted to do). Even the so-called Tea Party supporters who talk about smaller government with more individual liberty have no real interest in such approach to government. Instead they are just hyper-Reaganists who want to impose their sexual and religious morals on everyone else while continuing to promote a big government that acts in the interest in a global corporate elite.

Thus I think it is perfectly reasonable to say that, though the rhetoric today is more extreme and more religious, the Republican Party today is just a natural extension of the Reagan Republicans of the 1980s. The only reason that people think it is different is because they are foolish enough to believe the totally disingenuous spin of the Reagan Republicanism.

And the reason that it is important for us in Canada to think about is that a great deal of what the Republicans represent are the core impetuous of the Conservatives here. Though the religious rhetoric of the Harpercons is milder thanks to very different histories of the two countries, Harper, and many of his strongest supporters are Born Again Christian Dispensationalists just like Bush and his ilk. But, perhaps more importantly, the present Conservative Government has no interest in small government or personal liberty (though they will use this front whenever necessary) their only real interest is in creating a government that furthers the global corporate agenda much the same way Reagan did.

Corruption is Great! (As long as it is our corruption that is). . . .

We are now at the point where political bloggers could just write about the continual scandals and abuses of power courtesy of the Conservative Party. Today we have another one that, if the Liberals had done it, people all over the country would be up in arms about.

Taking a look at the Conservative Blogs in the past couple of weeks (or years for that matter), one can reasonably draw only one conclusion; Conservative have never really cared about all the corruption and power abuse that they compulsively complained about under the Liberal government - corruption and abuse of power is fine with Conservatives as long as it is their own party that is guilty of the crimes, no problem. In fact, we can go even further than that - we can conclude that Conservatives are actually actively in favor of Big Government, wasting federal funds, being outrageously fiscally irresponsible, abusing power, having no accountability in government, abusing power, making the military an arm of the party, illegally suppressing the vote. Conservatives are in favor of all of these things - as long as it is their own party is the one doing these things.

Well, all I can say is enjoy it while you can conservatives, because it will end your government the same way it has ended other governments. And then we can look forward to ruthless indignation on the part of the conservatives as the next government does all the things that Harper as taught them to do so effectively.

The only idea the Left needs is how to shut up the Right. . .

Warren Kinsella cited the ever pontificating Fancis Fukuyama today claiming that he was confused concerning the failure of the left to take advantage of the obvious failures of capitalism in recent years. Only, like all rightwingers, Fukuyama (and it seems Kinsella) is confused about what is really going on. Kinsella writes that "chief" among the left's failures have been a "failure of ideas," and that the so-called "old formulas" don't work anymore because (and here's the clincher) "we can't afford them."

All of these points are, of course, complete nonsense. The left has not, in anyway suffered from a deficit of ideas. Rather, the right has such momentous control of the media and the economic discourse that they can simply convince everyone that nothing can work except rightwing solutions. Look at the recent Liberal Party. Even most Liberals tout the nonsense that lowering corporate taxes is a good thing. Besides being flatly counterfactual, it is part of a discourse of globalization that has been a concerted effort to lower standards everywhere and create a war of all against all.

Furthermore, characterizing traditional 'leftwing' ideas as old ideas that have failed is also flatly wrong. The ideas of the left didn't fail, rather, the right's control of economic discourse through globalization and media power took advantage of an ignorant population to de facto brain wash a huge portion of the population.

And lastly, of course, is the rightwing myth that we "can't afford" pensions and social programs. This is the greatest nonsense of all.  There has never been more wealth in history than there is today. Not only can we afford the traditional solutions to poverty and economic inequality, we can afford them better than we ever have. The problem is not the amount of wealth but where the wealth actually is. If you have a society in which the majority of wealth is in the hands of a few people, then of course you won't be able to afford social solutions to your problems. Over the past forty years or so the right (and that includes Liberals in Canada) have fundamentally shifted the wealth and power structure toward large corporate bodies that function in the absence of meaningful control, transparency, and social responsibility. This is the problem, not the the lack of leftist ideas or lack of resources.

The ideas of the left are better, more rational, and more ethical, than any of the ideas on the right, and if we were actually debating these ideas in a meaningful way the left would win every time. The problem is people like Fukuyama, and Mr. Kinsella, who propagate ideas based on certain defunct rightwing ideological nonsense, and frankly are incapable of a meaningful economic and social analysis because they are far too steeped in the global rightwing discourse. Mr. Kinsella's article ironically (or maybe intentionally) further obfuscates the problem and maintains the myth that the left is out of ideas, while the real solution is very simple, and always has been. It is the same solution that has always been meaningful in a context of extreme economic inequality - shift resources and power away from corporations and rich corporate masters and back into the hands of the population in general. It is an idea as old as economics and the only one that has any meaning or would ever work. We don't need new economic ideas - we just need to figure out how to expose people like Fukuyama and Kinsella for what they really are - pedlars of an unethical ideology hiding behind media respectability.

Where do We Go from here?

So two more scandals hit a government that is now so mired in scandal and abuse they make previous Liberal Governments look like a bunch of nuns. It seems that Peter MacKay has established the Canadian Military as an arm of the Conservative Party and the CPC has undermined the very structure of our democracy in a way that suggests that Canada's future is now in serious trouble. However, I have little doubt that the Conservative Cabal will simply ignore these scandals like they have ignored all others until the media gets tired and moves on. I am beginning to believe that we could find out that Harper is a child molesting agent for the CIA and the media would make some noise for a few days and then forget about it.

This leaves us with a serious question; what do we do when we realize that our system doesn't work? What do we do when a national Party can gerrymander the system, illegally fund themselves, actively suppress votes, and still get elected with a majority and function as a virtual dictatorship, all with the active support of the nation's media? This is a serious dilemma for anyone, conservative or liberal, who actually cares about our future because this is not about policies any more. The Conservative Party has a number of really bad policies, but these are small potatoes compared with their deliberate assault on democracy and the active and tacit support that they have received in that effort from the media.

The recent scandals are not just typical political scandals, they demonstrate that we now have a rogue government that is gradually colonizing the military and attempting to make the institutions of democracy dysfunctional like a thirdworld dictatorship. As a nation we will soon have to determine if we are willing to give up our country  or not.

Robogate and lackey Scapegoats. . . .

Saint Stephen on Robogate

Yesterday Pat Martin said on CBC that the Conservatives were "laying the foundation for throwing some kid under the bus," as a result of the massive conspiracy that is Robogate. Well, it didn't take long did it? Look here to see the scapegoat that the Conservatives have targeted to take the fall. I mean, I am pretty cynical but even I was surprised by the speed at which they found some foolish Conservative lackey on which to attempt to put the blame. I really have to wonder how many times the CPC can attempt to do blame some pion before the majority of people actually start to catch on.

This one surely won't wash with anyone who is not blindly partisan or has some commonsense. Robogate took a great deal of effort and organization from many ridings to be effective. Since only known Liberal and NDP supporters received phone calls in a wide variety of ridings, there had to have been a central organizing group that got these lists in order to make the calls. It is simply inconceivable that any one person made this happen, particularly a lackey like the one that they have targeted. It is now clear that on more than one occasion the CPC has engaged in large-scale organized efforts to undermine the democratic process. Meanwhile, as a commentator on my last post pointed out, Conservative bloggers, faced with their party being a criminal, anti-democratic organization, are desperately trying to suggest that the Liberals or NDP must be behind this conspiracy because Saint Stephen can do no wrong. 

How long will the centre hold?