Last night, starting hour 2. More Stirling than me, though as I was sick last night, I was even more straightforward than usual. A lot of talk about political and cultural dysfunction.
One of the pathologies of American, and to a lesser extent, Western society, which really stands out yet is rarely remarked on, is the absolute epidemic of chronic diseases we suffer from. From historically apocalyptic rates of cancer to asthma, to heart and stroke disease, we’re one sick bunch. We walk around, not dead yet, but chronically sick.
This is a direct result of our economic arrangements. We dump huge amounts of carcinogens into the air, water and the food chain. We pollute the air in so many ways they’re uncountable. We build our residential areas to actively discourage exercise. We subsidize food that is bad for us, especially corn derived foods, and we eat so much sugar it’s surprising we aren’t all crazed. We dump such massive amounts of hormones into the water and food chain that our children are experiencing record early puberty. And this is the short list.
All of these are what economists call “negative externalities”, which is to say, the cost of someone’s profits is paid in illness and chronic bad health, which also has a monetary cost. But, y’know, forget the monetary cost for a moment. If you or someone you know has a chronic health condition, let alone cancer, do you care how many rich people the US has? If you’re one of the few doing well out of this system, does it matter to you when someone you love is suffering from cancer or chemo, or has diabetes, or struggles to breathe?
A society which makes itself sick and unhealthy the way we do can’t be said to be a good society to live in. Human welfare is about how enjoyable it is to be alive, and there’s nothing enjoyable about illness, or watching someone you love puking from chemotherapy.
So next time someone talks about pollution, or additives, or “negative externalities”, remember, what they’re talking about is making you or someone you care about unhealthy or downright sick. Your suffering, or the pain of your fatther, mother, lover, son, or daughter is what makes other people rich and enables the “lifestyle” of various other folks. The poorer you are, the sicker you are, as a rule, because all you can afford is the highly subsidized crap food, but even if you’re rich and you eat straight organic, hire a trainer, and so on, you can’t avoid all the water, air and food pollution. You or someone you know is still likely to wind up sick, who shouldn’t have.
The suffering of sickness and ill health is one of the prices of what passes, less and less, for prosperity.
So, apparently EU finance ministers are encouraging Greece to speed up privatization. Which is to say, let themselves be looted faster, and transfer public goods into private hands at firesale prices. Meanwhile, the Greeks themselves continue to riot in all the wrong places. Folks, if you’re going to riot, go riot where the politicians and bankers are. March on their mansions, and have your fights with the cops there. As long as it’s you fighting the cops someplace else, they don’t care. Your master class, who refuse to pay their taxes or to tax each other, will not get serious about anything else other than paying themselves and their foreign friends by looting your country until something more important than money is on the line.
In governmental terms, yes, Greece should restructure. Roll it all over into 100 year bonds at 1%, and refloat your own currency. If investors don’t like that, tell them they can have that or nothing. Slap on capital controls and let everyone know that you will hunt to the ends of the earth any of your rich who try and take capital out of the country. Start actually taxing the rich. If they can’t take it, they can leave, without their capital.
So, Osama is dead. Which is to say, he’s a martyr. Of the many gifts the US gave him in his life, and they were many, this may be the last one. Some say he didn’t want to be martyred, at least not right this moment, and no doubt that’s true. But the difference between seeking martyrdom and not minding that much exists. He didn’t really go that far out of his way to avoid death. He could have shaved the beard, had some plastic surgery and disappeared into Indonesia. He would never have been found. His compound was not heavily guarded. Bin Laden need never have been in the line of fire.
And remember, unlike most recent American presidents, Bin Laden did lead troops from the front line. He didn’t dodge combat.
Westerners and global elites tend to think that everyone is like them. They aren’t. Leaders of organizations like al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah and Hamas (and I conflate them only in the sense that they are all subject to assassination campaigns by their enemies, not because they are the same type of organization or desire the same things) know that the job comes with a good chance of getting very dead.
Until westerners get this through their soft heads, they will continue to make major strategic errors. The assassination program against the Taliban may be something they hate, may be something they fear, but it has not stopped them. The assassination programs run by Israel have as often made their situation worse as better.
In healthy organizations leadership is far less important than western leaders think it is. Western leaders think they’re indispensable. They aren’t, and neither is the enemy leadership in most cases. There are some exceptions, but they are rare in properly operating organizations. The death of the previous leader makes him a martyr, and the next man in line steps up. The dead leader, rather than one more reason to quit fighting is one more reason to keep fighting. The basic policies continue, and the assassination is more likely to make the organization stronger ideologically than to weaken it.
Shorter post: just because for most Western elites nothing is worth dying for, and any price is acceptable to live, doesn’t mean everyone thinks the same way.
60% is certainly better than 87%, but it doesn’t change the fundamental argument. Go to it.
Click on the image for full size and more legible.
Apparently 86% of Americans think that shooting an unarmed bin Laden was ok.
Yeah. Once up on a time, a different country in a different time, put on trial men who had been complicit, not just in killing a few thousand people, but millions. They gave those people, known as Nazis, a trial. But that was a different country, and a different time, when America still at least tried to do the right thing, and when Americans thought doing the right thing was, well, the right thing.
Back then over 50% of Americans didn’t approve of torture, either. They understood that people who torture are evil. Period.
Osama bin Laden and the prisoners at Guantanmo are either:
- Prisoners of war, in which chase they should receive full Geneva convention rights, or;
- Common Criminals, in which case they have the right to a speedy trial, to face their accusers and to see the evidence against them.
A majority, possibly a vast majority, of Americans, are now morally depraved as a people. This wasn’t quite true even four years ago. A slight majority of Americans, at that time, were against torture. Now they are for it.
End of the line.
This is paralleled by something I see in fiction all the time. The rise of the cult of the family. The idea is that anything you do for your family is morally ok. The first time I noticed that this was out of hand was the movie Patriot. In that move Mel Gibson refuses for fight for the rebels against England until his family is harmed.
That may be many things, but it is not patriotic. The deaths of Iraqis killed by the American war criminal George Bush are not less real than Bin Laden’s, they do not matter less, and they are far far more numerous.
The rest of the West is marching down this route of moral depravity as well. In country after country, recession caused by the outright fraudulent and illegal actions of the rich is responded to by cutting services to the poor, who had nothing to do with it in any way, shape, or form, while billions to trillions are spent making sure the rich are bailed out. And, say what you will, but populations keep voting these governments in. Sure, they aren’t as depraved as Americans, but they’re working on it.
We live in a depraved time. Yes, our elites are evil. Virtually to a man or woman they are monsters. But we are complicit in this. Whether in pluralities or outright majorities or in our own depraved indifference we enable them.
And with a fairly decent margin. The collapse of the Liberals in Ontario, and the choice of BC to go largely Conservative seem to have been the key. Looking closely at the results, I don’t think the robocalls were the deciding factor in enough ridings to have changed the overall result. Hopefully the courts will show their independence and investigate this question aggressively, but with a majority government, Harper will be in a position to shut down such investigations and has show in the past that he has no qualms using such power.
Southern Ontario, outside the city cores, went hard Conservative, in most cases over 50% (call them Alberta South). This continues the trend of Ontario suburbs thinking that the man who has presided over the destruction of Canadian manufacturing is going to save them by keeping their housing values high and driving Toronto into the ground, because suburbs don’t need healthy cities. This bet on the part of Canadian suburbanites will work out as well for them as it has for American suburbanites.
Going forward this is probably good for the NDP. Their job now is to be a good opposition, and to make the case that everything Harper does is wrong, destructive and will be rolled back by an NDP government. As for the Liberals, job 1 is to ditch Ignatieff, job 2 is to make the case to Ontario that they are the party that can actually run government properly, and make the economy work again. “You had it pretty good in the 90s, didn’t you?” should be their mantra. Especially as it looks to me like Canada is about to go into recession, certainly it’s in danger of doing so. Of course, Harper has 4 to 5 years to try and ride it out, but I’m going to say that now that he has full power, he will screw it up. He’s that sort of guy.
For Canada? Not so good. But, under the rules as they exist (minus the robocalls), the Conservatives won. Even if Harper did cheat (and I would be highly surprised if the Conservatives weren’t behind the robocalls), it’s highly unlikely that the Courts will call him to account, since he will be in a position to shut down police investigations. Still, there is nothing he can do that can’t be undone by another majority government, and apparently Canadians need to learn what happens when you let someone like Harper have a majority. That learning will be unpleasant, but I guess it’s necessary. In particular for Ontarians, who have voted against their own self interest. It’s one thing for the Prairies to vote for “loot now, worry about the hangover later”, it’s another for Ontario to vote “make Dutch disease permanent and destroy our industrial base.”
Photo by Joe Sullivan
Ok, on to what actually matters, today’s Canadian election. This is going to be a nail biter, and will almost certainly come down to BC. Over the weekend the Liberals collapsed in Ontario. Oddly that gives the Conservatives an outside chance at their majority, since it may actually mean that some Conservatives win who otherwise wouldn’t have been viable. The Liberals are going to be squished back into their safe seats and nothing else.
However this goes, credit to the Quebecois for turning the election upside-down. Their rush to the NDP, making them front runners in Quebec made everyone else take the NDP seriously.
In America the establishment does everything it can to make what you’re about to witness not happen, by making sure there is no one viable to vote for who is actually left wing.
In the meantime, I am comforted to know that no matter what happens, Michal Ignatieff, the torture apologizing putz who has led Canada’s ruling party to absolute disaster, will soon be out of a job. The possible outcomes here are so variable, from coalitions to minority governments, to majority governments of either the left or the right that it’s hard to say much about what should be done after the election, till after the election. I will only note that I hope the NDP has transition teams in place already, because the other parties are going to be waiting for them to stumble.
I doubt I’ll live blog the results, but feel free to use this post during the results countdown, and I may pop in to say a thing or two. The places to watch are Ontario and BC. Ontario because the extent of the collapse there means Ontario will determine the very outside possibility of a majority for the Cons or NDP, BC because that’s where it’s going to come down to.
Update: Note that it is illegal to report election results before the close of the last polls, which is 9:30 Pacific time. This is a law I agree with, and I’m Canadian, so I won’t be posting results before then (and I may be asleep by then.) Many people on Twitter have said they’ll break the law but I won’t be one of them.
Update 2: Automated phone calls are going out with false statements that residents polling stations have changed. These calls are happening in Ontario and BC. Could be Liberal, but I’m betting it’s Conservative as they’ve been big into voter suppression ever since elcted. It’s a pity that doing this isn’t an offense with a life sentence. I would suggest that if/when the NDP gets in, they make it so. These sort of American tactics are not acceptable in Canadian elections. I’d even consider making it a capital offense, and yes, I’ll be part of the firing squad.
Update 3: In violation of the elections Act, Stephen Harper asked for votes today. The ridings where the false information is going out seem to be ridings where the Conservatives are in danger of losing the seat. The Canada Elections Act gives the following as the penalties:
If a judge finds a person guilty of an offence, the person may receive a fine or a period of imprisonment, or both. Under section 501 of the Act, the Court may also impose additional penalties, such as:
- performing community service
- performing the obligation that gave rise to the offence
- compensating for damages, or any other reasonable measure the Court considers appropriate
- a fine of up to five times the election advertising expenses limit exceeded by a third party
- with respect to certain offences, the deregistration of a party and liquidation of its assets, and the liquidation of the assets of the party’s registered associations
I’m rather more interested in the Canadian election, which is also rather more important than Bin Laden’s death, but let’s run through this. First, however, insert obligatory “he’s a mass murderer who deserved death” statement here. OBL was an evil man and I’m not sorry he’s dead. I’m even kind of glad they killed him rather than capturing him, if only for the purely selfish reason that I didn’t really want to have to defend OBL when they tortured him, as, of course, they would.
Bin Laden still won: Yeah, sorry, but Bin Laden’s goal was to push the US into imperial overreach, causing economic collapse. He succeeded, with a lot of help from Bush and Obama’s stupidity, and there was nothing in Obama’s little speech that indicated he intended to seize this opportunity to pull out of Iraq, Afghanistan and end the security state. If anything, the security state will go into even further overdrive. Enjoy being groped.
No Drawdown, No End to Destruction of Civil Liberties And yeah, if Bin Laden hated America because of America’s freedoms (he didn’t) well he still won. The 4th amendment is dead, the 1st is on life support, and the TSA freely humiliates you or denies you freedom to travel at their whim.
No, it doesn’t mean Obama has won in 2012 The election isn’t going to be about national security, per se, it’s going to be about the economy. Hating Osama is great’n’all, but it doesn’t put a chicken in a pot, give you a place to live, or a job. It doesn’t reduce the price of gasoline one cent. The election is still well out, this euphoria will fade. That doesn’t mean Obama will lose 2012 either. It just means it isn’t as big a factor as most people seem to think it is.
Terror Networks: Doubt it makes all that much difference here, either, honestly. Most al-Q’aeda groups are essentially franchises, and the main one isn’t that important. I’m sure CIA agents stationed in Afghanistan in charge of drone attacks are breathing a sigh of relief, however. More to the point, it’s not clear to me that Osama is less dangerous as a martyr than as a living old man attached to a dialysis machine.
Bin Laden deserved to die, but when the euphoria dies down, his death doesn’t change much, if anything. He still accomplished his goal, a goal he was willing to die for. The Muslim world, Afghanistan and Iraq (and I’m sure, to his dying day, Bin Laden thought the Iraq invasion was a gift from Allah), are still going to be the graveyard of empire, this time the US empire. Oh, it’s not dead yet, but historians will look back to the invasion of Iraq and the continued occupation of Afghanistan as massive contributing factors.
So, whatever. Celebrate and have a good time, but the wars will go on, the 4th amendment is still a dead letter, the 1st amendment is on life support, the economy is in the toilet, gas is over$4 a gallon, Democrats and Republicans are still negotiating how fast to cut your SS and Medicare, unions are still being gutted, schools are still being turned into profit centers, and TSA agents will still touch your junk.
So, amidst the standard gloomy news of austerity, autocratic elites who don’t give a damn about anything but themselves and populations who keep voting for the wrong people, some actual good news arises: the New Democratic Party (NDP) in Canada has surged into second place in the polls.
The NDP are the leftmost party in Canada with the exception of the Bloc Quebecois, the Quebec separatist party who runs candidates only in Quebec. They are strongly union associated. They have been the third party in federal politics basically forever. Provincially they do run some provinces. Their birthplace was the prairies, but in the last few decades they’ve been strongest in Canada’s Pacific coast province, British Columbia (BC), though that does fluctuate. I’d argue that the NDP are BC’s natural ruling party and has been for about 30 to 40 years. The other parties, to defeat them, have generally had to agree that only one of them seriously run against them.
The NDP is most famous for having created Canadian Medicare, provincially under Tommy Douglas, who many Canadians consider the greatest Canadian to have ever lived. The Feds adopted the plan after he pushed it through at the provincial level.
The scourge of the NDP has been the perception that they can’t win Federally. As a result, in most Federal elections vote switching has often cost them at least 5% of their vote, and I’d argue up to 10%. Canadians would vote Liberal in an attempt to keep the Conservative party out.
As a result, parties that range from Center to Left (the Liberals, NDP and Bloc) have regularly pulled in about 60% of the vote, and yet the Conservatives have had minority governments for much of the last decade. This is also due to the fact that, like the US system, ours is first past the post, winner take all. Geographical concentration counts big, and the Conservative’s hard support in the prairies and Alberta in particular has translated well into seats.
So the NDP being second in the polls is a really good sign, because it means that core NDP voters now have no reason to switch, and Liberal voters whose first priority is making sure the Conservatives don’t get a majority government may switch to the NDP, instead of the other way around.
The NDP surge is particularly impressive in Quebec, where they are now clearly in the lead. The Bloc Quebecois has collapsed. Why this has happened, exactly, isn’t something I’m entirely clear on, Quebec politics are somewhat opaque to me, but I will note that it is particularly in Quebec’s interest to make sure that Harper (the Conservative leader) doesn’t get a majority.
You may have noticed the emphasis on “majority”. In a parliamentary system like Canada’s, with extraordinarily strong party discipline, a prime minister with a majority is pretty close to an elected dictator. If he wants to pass a law, it gets passed. If he wants to do something administratively, it happens. God only wishes he had as much power as a Canadian Prime Minister.
Harper is run by energy interests from out West. Essentially they want to pump oil and exploit the oil sands, and they want to keep all the money from their windfall profits. Quebec’s economy, in export/import terms is also an energy economy. Quebec, essentially, is a hydro-power farm for New York State. That money allows Quebec to run their economy the way they want—lots of farm subsidies, lots of good food, a generally fairly relaxed lifestyle. Quebec isn’t France, but it’s as close as you get in North America. It’s a pleasant place to live in many respects.
If Harper gets his majority, the energy interests he is beholden to may cast their eyes on getting control of Quebec’s energy. That would be the end of Quebec’s pleasant little economy. I doubt most Quebecois are explicitly aware of this, but I think they may feel it in their guts.
And other than in terms of independence, the NDP and BQ aren’t very far apart on policy. If anything the BQ is slightly to the left of the NDP. (In American terms, they’re practically communists, not that they are in reality. But they definitely are socialists.)
There are other factors. Ignatieff, the Liberal leader, is a sleazeball who apologized for torture. Most Canadians don’t really care about the torture apologetics, but Ignatieff comes across as a sleazeball with no actual convictions. So when the Liberals went on the offensive against the Conservatives, claiming Conservatives couldn’t be trusted with Medicare (which in Canada means universal single payer health care), I suspect that many Canadians thought “well, that’s true. But I don’t think I can’t trust you with it either.” On the other hand, the idea that the NDP would ever harm Medicare if in power is ludicrous. Whatever one thinks of the NDP, even its detractors know that the NDP loves universal healthcare.
Jack Layton, the NDP leader, is someone I’ve always liked. He used to be a Toronto city councilor. Back in the early 2000’s I went and watched city council during budget deliberations. As it happened, it was a session when ordinary citizens were giving depositions. They were limited to 5 minutes each, and there were plenty of them. In essence, many of them were begging for money to whatever they cared about to keep coming, or for tax changes, and so on. It was obvious that for most of them, whatever their issue was, it was extraordinarily important. I remember one guy, admittedly a bit of a crank, with 5 boxes of documents.
Most of the councilors clearly weren’t paying any attention. They were talking amongst each other, laughing, walking in and out of the room, in some cases clearly mocking the people ostensibly speaking to them. Now I get this, it was the end of a long day, and really, most of these people were asking for money they obviously weren’t going to get, or that they obviously were going to get. The councilors had already made up their minds.
But the people giving depositions, they cared. Some of them were desperate, all of them had put a lot of work into it. Ignoring them, laughing while they talked, or even mocking them, was extraordinarily cruel and disrespectful.
There were only three councilors who at least appeared to be paying attention to what the citizens were saying. They may not have been, they may have been off in space, but they at least had the common decency or basic political cops to pretend to give a shit. Jack Layton was one of them, his wife, Olivia Chow (now a Federal MP as well, and my MP, as it happens) was another. There was a third female councilor whose name I forget as well. Every other one was a complete jackass, being cruel to desperate people who had put a lot of work into the speeches they were giving.
So ever since then I’ve had a soft spot for Jack Layton. I don’t know if he’d make a good PM, but at least he isn’t an asshole to constituents in public. And at least he showed he could handle the basic blocking and tackling.
So, what’s outcome of this election going to be? Damned if I know. The polls are all over the place. The most likely outcome remains a Conservative minority government. The second most likely outcome seems to be that the NDP and Liberals, together, get more seats than the Conservatives, in which case they could form a coalition government, probably with the NDP as the senior coalition member (at which point I will spend a few minutes rolling on the floor laughing hysterically.)
If the Conservatives get a minority government, odds are the NDP will be the official opposition party. Layton will be a far more effective opposition leader than Ignatieff. And Ignatieff’s days as Liberal leader will soon be over, the Liberals will turf him, as being third party is a complete and absolute disaster for them. The Liberals and Conservatives have traded being the government of Canada back and forth for as long as Canada has existed.
If Layton does do a good job, he might be able to cement the NDP as the second party in Canada, and if he does that, eventually the NDP will be the government. That’s a big deal, because the Liberals are essentially centrists. They campaign slightly left, rule slightly right, and are certainly neo-liberal friendly. I say this as someone who actually has a lot of respect for the government of Chretien and Paul Martin. They did a good job overall and managed a period when Canada had to kiss America’s ass very well. Chretien, in particular, is due a lot of credit for telling Bush to fuck off when Bush tried to coerce Canada into joining the Iraq war, as that took a lot of guts from a Canadian PM, and was clearly the right thing to do.
What does this mean for the rest of the world? Canada was one of the first nations to go to a right wing government. Through the 2000’s there has been a wave of right wing governments in the West. The NDP doing this well might be a sign that things are beginning to turn. Again, the NDP aren’t the wimpy left, they are actually socialists, not a party like Labor in Britain, which is clearly right wing, just not as right wing as the nutbar Conservatives.
How good a government Layton would run I don’t know. I don’t have a good feel for the wonks behind him, or for how strong a leader he’d be. Nonetheless I am confident that of the possibilities, he’s the best man for the job. Ignatieff is a weasel, and no one who has apologized for torture should be in charge of anything, anywhere, while Harper is a conservative ideologue who thinks that Canada should be more like the US, as well as being an autocrat who spits over Canada’s democratic and parliamentary traditions. The sooner he retires, the better.
The outcome is still uncertain. Heck, it’s even possible the Liberals could come back into second place, or that the Conservatives could surge. The polls are all over the place, as noted, and this has been a very volatile election. Someone could put their foot in it. But still, for the first time in a long time, I am actually seeing some hope for the future. Canada, amongst countries in the world, is uniquely positioned to ride out the next couple decades. We have everything we need to do really well, to be one of the most prosperous and free nations in the world. But doing so requires a course change that will never happen under the Conservatives and is unlikely to happen under the Liberals. The NDP are the best chance, not a sure thing, but a decent chance. So here’s praying they keep surging.
More Details for those who care
Ontario. The largest population province in Canada is Ontario, and the Conservatives are doing gangbusters here. This really bad for the Liberals, whose heartland Ontario is. One of the most depressing political results of the last year was in Toronto, where Rob Ford, a conservative whose first act was to tell the unions he was canceling their contracts, was elected on the strength of the suburbs deciding that they didn’t want to pay taxes to keep the goose that lays the golden eggs healthy. Ontario, as with much of Canada, is in a mild housing bubble, a bubble which has been deliberately kept inflated by the Conservatives. The actual cities (not the burbs) vote Liberal or NDP, but the suburbs have been going Conservative. Southern Ontario’s employment has been devastated by the decline in the US auto industry, and the Conservatives have really done nothing about that, but what they have done is make sure housing prices stay high. So people who, in essence, have nothing else, are voting for them.
Alberta: Ah, Alberta. Think of Alberta as Canada’s Texas, except that Alberta still has lots of oil, even if most of it is in the form of the oil sands. Alberta votes Conservative both out of old resentments against central Canada (somewhat justified, though the most legitimate complaints are getting to be decades old, and I say this as someone who grew up out West) and for cold hard cash reasons: exploiting the oil sands is brutally environmentally degrading, and the Albertans want to do it dirty so they make more money. They also don’t want their windfall oil profits taxed, nor do they want to be forced to sell oil to other Canadians (ie. they don’t want a pipeline to Central Canada). Since all of these policies make sense if you think of Canada first, and Alberta second (ie. if you’re looking out for all of Canada) and some of them make sense even if you think of Alberta first (the oil economy will end, and if they’ve fucked up their groundwater, Alberta will be in a world of hurt, plus they aren’t reinvesting properly),well, Alberta doesn’t want a leftish party in charge of Ottawa. What should be done is windfall profit taxes on the oil, and policies which make it necessary to reinvest in Canada (and not in real estate. It should be made very hard or impossible to invest these profits in real-estate.)
There’s still a ton of stupidity and greed in Canada. The five big banks have never forgiven the Liberals for not letting them merge, there is a housing bubble, there is insufficient investment in our industrial base, which is collapsing, and no one is really thinking properly about the future. Even brain dead simple obvious things, like expanding Halifax’s harbor to make it into the major northern east coast container port or like making a pipeline from west to east for oil so that we can credibly threaten to withhold oil from the US when the US fucks with us, are not being done. How much of even the brain dead obvious stuff Layton will do, I don’t know. But I know there’s at least a chance with him, and no chance with Harper of Ignatieff.
