Before we explore how the BC Liberals are going to spin their extended lie about not having the HST on their radar before the 2009 election, based on FOI records released Wednesday, let’s first take a look at how the National Post bungled its BC reporting today.

In this piece, they pick up the Jordan Bateman story, where Minister Coleman’s riding president wrote a blog piece calling for Hansen’s resignation.

That part they got right.

Then they decided to not follow the story, for like an hour, when it became a much bigger story as Bateman retracted his piece and apologized to the minister after a personal phone call. But the National Post stopped caring and let that part of the story go. Maybe it’s because they are run from 3 time zones away.

The minister is Colin Hansen, who is not the person in the picture.

Finally, lacking insight, information, context and background, the Post decided the precipitating event of Bateman’s call for Hansen’s resignation was the $780k wasted on the HST pamphlet, not the FOI release the day before proving that the Liberals had been lying for 14 months.

Fail. Monstrous fail. But not surprising.

So now, on to the Liberals’ spin factory, the point of which is to let everyone know that if we let this blow over by September 13, it’s our fault for being our part in a bigger failure.

1. The minister personally phoned a bunch of reporters on Wednesday. I don’t expect that made them feel special, but the personal touch is touching.
2. There was a 4pm embargo of the release of the FOI story on Wednesday. If the media who issued the FOI request arranged that, that’s their business. If Hansen orchestrated the 4pm time, that’s some hefty spin.
3. Does the premier’s office interfere with the timing of FOI records release? If so, releasing the information on a Wednesday before Labour Day has some advantages.
   1. That leaves one day for media juice. Fridays are dead in the news cycle; doubly so for Fridays before long weekends [Note the millions who aren't reading this post this afternoon!]. If the government set up the 4pm embargo [doubtful], they eradicate most of Wednesday for blowback.
   2. A long weekend happens and everyone’s brains reset. Last year they released a budget before Labour Day when billions of British Columbians were still at the cabin.
   3. Next week is school. The media will be obsessed with full-day kindergarten and other traditional fluff and not-so fluff back to school stories.
4. Then when Bateman went rogue and lit a fire, he got a call from the minister. Bateman was converted and born again to the righteousness of the minister, apologized to him on the phone and in a blog piece, and he took down his rogue blog piece. Was Bateman threatened? Was he rationally convinced in a way that he chose not to explain in his apology blog piece, which has no explanation as to why he felt the FOI release was irrelevant to Hansen’s integrity? Will Bateman become a Liberal candidate at some point?

All this means that if we still care about the HST lies by Monday, September 13, 2010 and the media decides to continue caring and the BC Recall campaigners can stoke the embers, the Liberals will have failed at spinning the FOI evidence into oblivion.

If we don’t, it’s our own fault for letting the media let the government bury this.

For those people on your Christmas list who think you’re full of hot air when you complain that there has been a concerted attack on workers in the last few decades, here are a few examples of demonizing rhetoric to introduce them to, courtesy of Adrian MacNair: We don’t need no stinkin’ unions | National Post

Dalton McGuinty’s current plan to freeze public sector wages has delivered to him the same experience of previous governments that tried to cut their deficits by freezing pay. The game is playing out in much the same way, too, with the unions threatening to use extortion in order to get their raises.

Notice how 1.5 centuries of worker-fought rights to collective bargaining, the right to withhold labour in the form of a strike, is now considered to be extortion, a criminal activity.

The simple fact of the matter is that public sector union workers in Ontario are grossly overpaid as it is. It isn’t as if the government is asking to lay people off, cut salaries, or axe positions permanently. No, they’re doing none of the things that private sector workers have suffered through during the recession. All they’re asking the union to do is to hold the line on salaries for two years.

Many public sector workers are paid what is considered to be a living wage, which is higher than the serf class abundant in service sectors. They aren’t overpaid, the serfs are miserably exploited.

The solution for the abuse of private sector workers is not to make public sector unionized workers suffer, but to improve the working lives of those under the thumb of oppressive employers.

Holding the line on salaries is a pay cut if there is inflation. So when MacNair claims the government isn’t cutting salaries, they actually are with a zero raise, unless of course inflation disappears: not likely.

How about we cut 2% of the public sector every single year? And we keep cutting it until we have a $19.3 billion surplus? I think that would send the right message to the unions. Public sector salaries eat up 55% of the province’s program spending. Which means that less than half of what you spend on services are actually services.

What a clever solution: eternal pay cuts! What message would that send to union members? That they are worth less than what they are paid now. Are they really?

The salaries of a highly trained lab technician, long-term care facility practical nurse, kindergarten teacher, teen crisis counsellor, water treatment centre technician, or cardiac stent purchaser may consume 55% of program spending, but if we fire them all, the service provided is not left for us on their workstation consuming the other 45% of service costs. It is foolish to imagine that what a person brings to a service is not actually part of the service.

Simply, two things. Let’s make sure our public school system recognizes two things:

1. Our children are priceless individuals with immense capacity to excel, not standardized, interchangeable commodities who can be warehoused in assembly line learning factories.
2. Thinking matters, not just filling up heads with data.

A week before the new school year starts is a key time to think about some priorities.

I quit my 12 year teaching career because I could no longer contend with the increasing assault on those two things. I shifted to politics to address the political agenda that robbed me of a great teaching career by eroding the system.

Teaching and learning is mostly an art because people are different. It’s that simple.

High stakes tests like highly standardized final exams and the Foundation Skill Assessment tests rarely cover the breadth of human experience in learning. Standardized tests, often marked by scanning bubble sheets, allow only certain kinds of questions to be asked. Students cannot possibly demonstrate the breadth of their experience in such testing environments.

The system has ended up valuing only what can be tested in these ways; the rest is demeaned. This is good for the Fraser Institute’s privatization agenda and various traditional learning advocacy groups, like what turned up in the National Post yesterday:

Romantic progressivists also are given to touchy-feely edu-speak, like “learning to learn” and “higher order thinking” and “meaning-making in a context-rich environment,” imprecise terms representing theories supported by very weak–or no–scientific evidence.

via Learning the old-fashioned way.

I hear these types of criticisms a lot. But I’ve never before actually heard higher order thinking lumped into the mix. Impugning a model of education that empowers actual thinking attacks the idea that while lower order thinking is important, like remember and comprehension, higher order skills are useful in really contributing in life: applying knowledge, analyzing it, evaluating it, and creating new approaches or ideas.

Anyone who talks of promoting a knowledge economy connects with higher order thinking integrally.

But now the traditional learning folks are actually admitting that they think higher order thinking is bad. This is no surprise because people well-versed in such thinking can see the socio-economic agenda inherent in some of these education policies: creating an underclass of subservient, productive, obedient, not overly capable, but non-threatening workers and consumers.

There is no need for higher order thinking if schools are designed to warehouse children, toss them on content assembly lines, ignore individuality and pump out interchangeable worker bees in a just-in-time, mainly service sector workforce.

Asking if we’d like fries with that requires really only rote learning. As does reading the book profiled in that article without investing the time to really understand complex issues to the point where we could evaluate, analyze and draw conclusions:

No. It’s not supposed to be ironic.

Now the Fraser Institute is advocating that to improve schools by running them more like businesses, we need to

start thinking of children as commodities….

Ontario’s plan to invest in full-day schooling for four-and five-year-olds “delivers an immediate return of $2.02 [in GDP] for every $1 invested in operations and $1.47 for every $1 invested in capital infrastructure.”

via Run schools like businesses, researcher says.

This is just terrifying. If we eradicate higher order thinking and human individuality in lieu of developing children’s minds and spirits as a value-added commodity, like turning a tree into a table, we will cease to have an education system for our society.

And if we follow the money, we can ask who benefits:

• politicians who would like to arrest hundreds of peaceful demonstrators and bystanders during a political summit, preferably without civil outcry, all in a context of diminishing voter turnout [does this sound familiar?]
• corporations who need semi-skilled workers who don’t need pesky hobbies or critical thinking to impede their ever-increasing productivity
• think tanks that are well-funded to push policies that serve the two masters above.

On Canada Day this year, I attended a celebration at a Vancouver community centre. The ever-glum BC minister of education showed up and skulked around putting in her face time. I watched her for a few minutes observe children at play with studied disengagement. Maybe as a doctor she wanted a different ministry. Maybe she was having a bad day.

But she and her government are doing their best to enrich the rich, privatize public assets and institutions, exercise shock doctrine tactics to create crisis for easy dismantling of social systems, and generally defund government so communal approaches in society become so crippled that only their beloved market can save us all. Adam Smith’s invisible hand, is of course, God!

But even this minister of education, though, was quoted yesterday spouting the kind of policy that the Fraser Institute would cringe upon hearing:

“Research shows play-based learning…for kindergarten students makes a big difference to them.”

via Full-day kindergarten for B.C. kids starts next week.

She sounds like a romantic progressivist! So when a minister of a government that normally riffs on Fraser Institute pseudo-wisdom speaks in opposition to the think tank Kool-Aid, we know there’s a good deal of spin in the air.

When Labour Day passes next week into a new school year, we all need to be vigilant to ensure our school system does not get eroded to a point where it is of no use to society. We’re already heading there. The National Post is pushing the agenda strongly with the Fraser Institute and many other groups who have a stake in killing the social good.

Whether each of us has children in the system or not, if we care about having a new generation of intellectually capable and well-rounded human beings graduate from high school, we need to push back on this anti-social agenda.

If we don’t, our next generations will not even be self-aware enough to know they lack the aspirations necessary for ensuring the future of our community, nation and world is sustainable and worth living in.

Trade has occurred for thousands of years, not just in the capitalist context of the last few hundred years, and not just in the current neoliberal, free trade context of the last 30 years.

For over five years I have been tracking Latin America’s ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, as an alternative model to the FTAA and other unregulated, pro-corporate, anti-human trade liberalization agreements.

The Canadian government, not shockingly, has no position on trade that is “geared toward fighting poverty and social exclusion” and considers social welfare and mutual economic aid as more noble than deregulation for corporate privateers.

ALBA started in December 2004 with Venezuela and Cuba. Since then it has encompassed Bolivian, Nicaragua, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Equador, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Honduras, though the latter left the trade regime after its coup last year. Grenada, Haiti, Paraguay and Uruguay are observer nations. More on Haiti later.

ALBA is all about trade for human development: trading oil, natural gas, doctors, cows, beans for member nations to pursue social objectives, not transnational corporations cash-cropping nations into starvation.

But Harper’s government has no interest in engaging with this progressive trade regime as a whole.

When asked what is Canada’s official position regarding our trade relationship with the nations involved in and promoting the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, particularly Haiti, which is an observer nation in that trade regime while being a key economic interest of Canada, a Department of International Trade spokesperson said, “from an International Trade perspective, we treat each of these countries – including Haiti – as an individual market, and commercial activities would occur on a bilateral basis.”

What does this mean?

A bilateral trade relationship means that Harper has no intention of recognizing, thereby legitimizing, ALBA’s principles and will instead engage with each of its member nations as if ALBA doesn’t exist.

While this is not surprising, it is disappointing that while we have a real alternative to neoliberalism in our own hemisphere, our current government is impeding its growth.

Also not surprising is that Haiti, which would have surely benefited from ALBA’s human-centred trade system, is not a member. Since Canada is co-owner of its own banana republic in Haiti, I doubt our governments–Conservative, Liberal, or our current Con-Lib coalition–would allow Haiti to experience trade that actually enriches social systems. We did, after all, take part in the 2004 kidnapping of Haiti’s president.

A progressive Canada would use its relatively massive trade muscle to engage or even join with ALBA nations, explore our mutual human and socio-economic needs and establish trade patterns that would enrich people’s lives.

Instead, Harper’s International Trade Minister Peter Van Loan just spent a week touring Latin America on a trade mission. Where did he go? He skipped the ALBA nations, instead visiting Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Costa Rica. This summer the federal Con-Lib coalition rammed through Harper’s free trade agreement with Colombia, which murders trade unionists.

But ALBA is going beyond just creating a group of trading nations with a common pursuit of social good. The group is also creating its own trade currency, in part to reduce dependence on the US dollar.

But what are Canada’s views of the Sucre, the new trade currency being devised among various Latin American states involved in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas? Does the Canadian government support, recognize or oppose the use of this currency that may undermine the breadth of use of the US dollar in the hemisphere and the stability of our dollar in relation to any decline in the demand for the US dollar?

What do obsessive coverage of terrorism and a joke about how to beat children have in common?

As it turns out, it’s today’s National Post.

Firstly, everything in the first 5 pages was devoted to the terror suspect arrests, except for one article stoking the idea of staying in Afghanistan, so that’s related.

5 pages.

Everything.

Obsess much, National Post? Yes, is the answer, in case you didn’t know.

Secondly, this Twitter “cleverness” on page B2:

@NPsteve: Never strike a child! Wait patiently until they’re 18 and then give them the beating of their life.

Once upon a time, an insensitive relative forwarded to me one of those annoying chain emails that longed for the good old days. It was full of cliches and goofy things as well as some bits from the past that lots of people have happily not carried forward.

Some memories in that email were benign:

Remember “when a quarter was a decent allowance?” and “laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes and towels hidden inside the box?”

Some things were to leave in the past:

Remember when “All your male teachers wore neckties and female teachers had their hair done every day and wore high heels?”

Then it continued:

When being sent to the principal’s office was nothing compared to the fate that awaited the student at home?

Then it had an iconic 1950s photo of a dad spanking his son spread over his knees.

Basically we were in fear for our lives, but it wasn’t because of drive-by shootings, drugs, gangs, etc. Our parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat!

Nice.

But we survived because their love was greater than the threat.

Whatever that means.

Didn’t that feel good, just to go back and say, ‘Yeah, I remember that’?

Not really, no.

So then today we got to read Steve Murray’s Twitter post included in the print edition of the National Post about not beating children, I suppose because maybe that’s bad?, but waiting until they’re adults so you can give them the beating of their lives.

I have a really good sense of humour. Honestly. But what kind of person finds that funny?

I see that there is “humour” in that, but it is not acceptable humour. The legions of children who grew up with mild to severe beatings probably don’t find that funny. But maybe their parents do, which is maybe why it’s in the paper.

But really, it’s right down there with “Did you hear the one about the female circumcision patient?”

But one thing I learned is that the people who run the National Post believe their readership will find that joke funny. They might be right or wrong about that. Who knows.

But if they’re right, I’m not happy about it.

And now that the CanWest papers are now Postmedia, I’m looking for examples of corporate branding and marketing posture that make the new owners different from the Aspers’ biases and idiosyncrasies.

So far, the National Post continues to be sad.

And the pattern of 5 front pages on terrorism with a “joke” later on about how to beat kids seems to fit a disturbing pattern.

It was a bittersweet day yesterday in the fight against neoliberal globalization. Bjork is helping fight green energy privatization in Iceland while Canada supports global neoliberal resource rape.

Prime Minister Harper is sending $130m of our money to AbitibiBowater after Newfoundland and Labrador premier Danny Williams nationalized their assets after the company threatened to bail on the province, contravening a generations-old agreement.

Williams is happy that Ottawa will reimburse AbitibiBowater for the assets, and why wouldn’t he? It’s an indirect wealth transfer of $130m from Canada to Newfoundland and Labrador.

Harper’s justification? “This approach reaffirms the Government of Canada’s commitment to maintaining a rules-based business environment that facilitates free trade and encourages investment.”

What does this mean? This means that a corporation can abandon its decades-old agreement with a province regarding resource management with impunity and with compensation.

“A rules-based business environment” is code for free trade trumping domestic sovereignty and autonomy. The rules that matter now are international neoliberal, pro-corporate rights agreements that encourage transnational corporations to buy and sell public assets without impediment.

Harper’s justification continues: “The Government of Canada is moving forward on an ambitious free trade and investment agenda—a cornerstone of Canada’s strong economic position and future growth. The government will continue to stand up for Canadian businesses at home and abroad by securing greater access to the North American marketplace.”

It certainly is an ambitious free trade agenda in which our government supports Canadian businesses taking over foreign public assets by stoking the reciprocity of allowing foreign corporations to take over our public assets; that’s the “securing greater access” part.

It also demonstrates the Canadian Con-Lib coalition’s love of economic growth, a paradigm that is direct opposition to averting climate breakdown.

Meanwhile yesterday, across the Atlantic and up a bit, it turns out that Bjork doesn’t like privatizing parts Iceland’s almost completely green power grid, a move to protect measures to avert climate breakdown.

Good for her. And we should help her out. Read how at the end.

A Vancouver company called Magma Energy is close to finishing its purchase of a geothermal generator. 17,000 Icelanders have signed a petition calling for a referendum on the sale that would inject some cash into the country after it was decimated by its lost investments in the sub-prime mortgage crash in the United States.

But it’s just another Shock Doctrine tactic.

Bjork writes that 85% “would like to regain the rights to their energy source.” That is a bold and insulting opinion to hold in this era of global neoliberalism where the Magmas and AbitibiBowaters of the world feel they should be able to buy what they want without those pesky citizens getting in the way claiming they have rights over the heat in the ground. Such nerve!

We learn that, “Iceland’s Chamber of Commerce says the move will scare off foreign investors, harm the island’s business climate and hamper any recovery from its 2008 financial collapse.”

It should scare off foreign investors; they’re a core part of the problem and most of the reason why Iceland, as a foreign investor in US sub-prime mortgages, is in financial difficulties.

The business climate to be harmed by not selling the heat under Iceland to a Vancouver company is the neoliberal climate that would allow our homegrown folks to extract whatever profit they wish from their energy provision instead of allowing those who live in Iceland to continue having cheap energy that they sit on, something that BC has enjoyed for half a century before Gordon Campbell’s relentless assault on BC Hydro.

But when it comes to recovery from Iceland’s 2008 financial collapse, since Iceland’s energy is almost all green, ensuring that remains public and green is the most responsible way they could try to recover their financial stability.

Further, I find this political scientist’s sense of referenda interesting: “‘A referendum on a particular private contract isn’t good politics,’ said Gunnar Helgi Kristinsson, a professor of political science at the University of Iceland. ‘If the government wants to hold a referendum, it would have to pose a general question to the public, such as whether energy companies should be privately or publicly held.’”

Considering the polling in favour of retaining public power, Bjork et al should push the government to have a broad policy referendum on public energy so the people can widely reject the Shock Doctrine model.

The best argument for Bjork and the public’s anti-privatization agenda comes from the head economist of Iceland’s Chamber of Commerce:

“Blocking foreign ownership of natural resources will hurt foreign investment in one of Iceland’s most attractive industries, said Bjorn Thor Arnarson, head economist with the Chamber of Commerce. Iceland is ‘trailing far behind other countries’ in luring foreign investors, who may back away in coming years ‘because they are scared politicians will meddle,’ he said in an interview.”

Hurting foreign investment seems like a good way for Iceland to protect its almost completely green power grid. Good for them!

And if Iceland is trailing behind in luring foreign investors, we should congratulate them.

But what is most galling is to characterize as meddling the mechanics of democracy. The implication is that the natural law of the universe is the free market and interventions by the government or the people to retain public ownership are compromises. I think it’s the other way around. Democracy should trump corporate interests.

Finally, let’s let Bjork inject some common sense into what ought to be the natural priorities:

“Icelanders have ‘a unique relationship with geothermal energy–all houses in Reykjavik are heated this way,’ Bjork said. ‘It is cheap and has always been public property.’”

Now, what kind of public servant politician would sell out a good system for citizens in favour of global corporate interests? Shock Doctrine privateers.

Iceland had enough of them to get into their economic mess. They still have enough now to potentially cripple themselves further. And Canada? We’ve been card-carrying global neoliberal privateers for almost 30 years.

We suck and our politicians will continue to sell out our public assets and infrastructure at fire sale prices until we stop them.

And if you don’t like the prime minister giving $130m of our money to AbitibiBowater and you support Bjork and the citizens of Iceland who want to keep their green grid public, and you want the prime minister to stop Vancouver’s Magma from trying to steal some of Iceland’s power, you may want to email the blue sweater vest. His email address is pm@pm.gc.ca.

And tell him that citizens and democracy matter more than global corporate profitability in an era when green energy is a core element in the fight against climate breakdown.

“This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.” – T.S. Eliot

An Apocalyptical Cliché

Large swaths of Pakistan are in ruins. The same is still true of Haiti, to say nothing of the long-standing devastation in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. Closer to home, tent cities and shanty towns have begun appearing all over California and the one-time crown jewel of American industrialism, Detroit, is in a state of rapid collapse.

The phrase has become a cliché, but I believe there is great informative potential in it nonetheless: “the new normal.”

Hollywood science fiction blockbusters would have us believe that the end of the world will arrive through a slew of dramatic means—comets, asteroids, nuclear war, zombies, sea monsters, Muslims? Few, however, wrestle with the potential (reality?) of “the new normal.”

Vancouver City Hall, 2013?

It has become common place to speak of “the economy” in a pejorative, hushed sense. Stories about growing unemployment, evictions and general social malaise have become frequent. Yet only a few, short years ago, the stock market was the only entity in the known universe defying all laws of physics, thermodynamics and logic: growing, always growing! I have written previously about the self-evident idiocy of this belief but it has/had persisted nonetheless.

Yet, despite all the doom and gloom, earnest commentators have continued to hold that “we” will recover. The global economy shall shake off its cobwebs, reverse the trends of decline and stagnation, and we shall return to the halcyon days of…the early 2000s? You know, when the only danger facing the global economy was the collapse of some of the world’s largest companies as a result of endemic fraud and corruption. When the mass of people being laid off, being left destitute on a monthly basis was merely thousands—not millions! At least, in this part of the world; never mind the rest of the world, they’ve been screwed for a while now.

The golden 2000s—and before them still, the booming 90s! Notice that over the course of the past three or four decades, things that had been previously thought unimaginable have slowly become very, very real. Ten-percent “official” unemployment, the complete and utter slashing of the social and public welfare net, the introduction of private security firms on a massive scale, major terrorist attacks on first-world cities from desperate, colonized populations, a frightening rate of unchecked nuclear proliferation, the slow but increasingly visible and destructive manifestation of global climate change…and so on and so on.

The Broken Faucet

But forty years is a long time, hell, in a society where obesity is a bigger and bigger problem (no pun intended) forty years is pretty much a lifetime. Forty years is long enough for these changes to essentially have gone unnoticed by large swathes of the population—or at least to have been accepted as simply incremental, normal changes, in no way indicative of a broader, more problematic trend.

Just another day down at the class warfare plant.

Think back to Pakistan, Haiti, Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. Out of sight out of mind, right? Those places have always been in ruins—granted they may have once been the very cradle of civilization, the very earth in which genuine ideas of freedom and liberty where born but that was so long ago. That was centuries ago! But California and Detroit? One of the largest economies in the world and the one-time industrial nerve center of the US, respectively? The decline (collapse?) of these places is more difficult to explain away.

We can understand explosions ruining cities—but can we understand socio-political trends destroying civilizations, indeed, planets? It seems increasingly likely that the terrible vision of the future which awaits us is not that of a spectacular, sudden burst of violent energy. It is rather the agonizingly slow downward drip, drip, drop of a society that has begun to embrace the visible signs of the rotting of its social fabric as “the new normal.” From Babylon’s Hanging Gardens to the broken faucet of finance capitalism in a few short millennia.

It is thus more important than ever to understand that these trends are human-made and are reversible. While we have shown an incredible capacity to destroy nature, the social, political and economic system(s) which have allowed us to do this are anything but natural. We have the capacity to organize differently—and millions around the globe have begun to do just this. [Note: Link is but one example of many.]

The New Normal

But you don’t know this, you don’t see this, it doesn’t affect you. The marvellous longevity of the current system has been its capacity to obscure the obvious. California isn’t here. Detroit isn’t here. And as long as it isn’t here and it isn’t immediately happening to me or someone I know, it might as well not exist. And if “it” should happen—well it won’t. Because you’re different, your situation is different. You don’t really have anything in common with those people in LA or Detroit or Port-au-Prince or Gaza. You’re different. You’re not sure how but you are…right?

Meanwhile, even in your city, your town, your neighbourhood, things have gotten a little rougher than they were before. Even a bit rougher than they were a year or two ago. A dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to and maybe you’ve had to cut back on what you once had or what you once thought you would have. Well, that’s just normal, that’s just the new normal.

And that’s exactly the problem: the new normal, the new, creeping, crawling, cancerous collapse of our civilization(s).

There will not be a single morning when you wake up to find everything you had once known gone. There will not be a dramatic shift from freedom to slavery. There will be a form filled out, one you file yourself, that will relegate your from Status 2B to Status 4H(c) on the Tax Re-assignment Registrar (Section 4.4). And odds are, that one night when you really start to wonder what the hell went wrong with your life, as you notice that the police sirens have become increasingly more frequent over the past few weeks, the game will still be on TV that same evening. Best check your email too, maybe someone commented on your new Profile Picture!

It’s time to respin the National Post.

So much so, that I’ve signed up for their 90-day free trial subscription. Mainly, I’m looking to get a stack of newsprint for lining our garden this fall for next spring.

And it’s not just because the CanWest zombie has rebranded itself as PostMedia [whatever they intend that to mean].

So last Tuesday, the editorial board of the National Post released this heap of rhetoric; it cannot stand. Here are some excerpts.

Canada has to act quickly to ensure that our valid interest in protecting genuine refugees who face real persecution at home does not leave us open to boatload upon boatload of economic migrants who should be using normal immigration channels to try to enter the country.

The assertion here is that the Tamils are economic migrants posing as actual refugees. The editorial board is free to assert this if they have some evidence and if they can answer [at the very least] all of these questions so they can demonstrate why they think the 490 are just looking for a better job. There is no evidence to support that presumption.

To this end, it’s smart that Ottawa has pledged to put more pressure on foreign governments to avoid displacing persons and creating refugees in the first place.

This is a great idea if refugee generation was a small industry with sporadic output. The UNHCR esitmates 175 million international refugees and asylum seekers, plus 25 million internally displaced people. The naivety of this tactic is like if Harper could phone up Sri Lanka and ask them to not put out the trash can in front of our driveway so we can get our car out in the morning. And through some easy tweaks the refugees would go away and simply not be our problem.

Stop displacing people? Stop creating refugees? A great idea, but no amount of pressure from Stephen Harper alone will enable that to happen.

Really, though, we’re talking about international NIMBYism. Enough of that, now.

But the truly significant changes will have to come through thorough reform of the refugee and immigration system.

Once the regular immigration channels were working in a timely manner, there would be less incentive for economic migrants (and other would-be Candians not facing persecution at home) to abuse the refugee process.

quickly and efficiently sort out the those truly in need of asylum from those merely jumping their rightful place in the immigration line.

“If you kill one person, you’re prosecuted. If you kill ten people, you’re a celebrity; if you kill a quarter-of-a-million people, you’re invited to a peace conference.” – Haris Silajdžić

Patient readers will bear with me as I sink into the quagmire of Balkan and, specifically, post-Yugoslav politics to make a broader point about states and the nature of politics in a state-dominated world.

The Kosovo Precedent?

Recently, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on the legality of the unilateral declaration of independence of the Republic of Kosovo from the Republic of Serbia. Putting all obscurantist legal jargon aside, the Court found it impossible to negate what has been apparent since at least 1776: a declaration of independence cannot, by definition, be “illegal” because its entire raison d’être is premised on the negation of laws which would hold as much. That is, after all, the entire purpose of a declaration of independence. It is not to ask for permission for independence from former masters or oppressors (and they were certainly the latter in the case of Serbia’s relationship with Kosovo) but rather to announce it as an objective (de facto) reality or a stated goal.

This much is obvious, of course. Serbia, in bringing this case to the Court, could not possibly have expected any other outcome. It was, in truth, merely the latest attempt by the new, ostensibly democratic regime in Belgrade to appease its nationalist base by continuing the failed, genocidal and irredentist politics of the 90s. Much has been made of the supposed implications of the case, and the leader of the Serbian entity within in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Milorad Dodik, has seized on the opportunity to make the case that if Kosovo is “allowed” to secede then by any objective, moral, judical standard, surely, the Republika Srpska ought to be allowed to do the same. Unfortunately for Mr. Dodik, his supporters, and all those sharing this perspective on the implications of this case, have all either completely missed its true lesson or are willingly ignoring it. I suspect the latter, as we shall see.

Living by the Sword: The Yugoslav Experience

Max Weber, the famed German Sociologist, is credited with having coined the term the “monopoly over the legitimate use of violence,” which he characterized as being the defining feature of the state form. While Weber was a strong proponent of state power, his definition illustrates the chief problem, at least for anarchists, with the state perfectly. In short, it is an institution inherently founded and based in violence and despite any veneer or actual functioning representative or democratic machinery it remains defined by the monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. Whether republic or theocracy, the state remains based in and defined by violence.

"In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first." - Ambrose Bierce

This is crucial point to remember when considering any debate about sovereignty, independence or any of the other proverbial pissing contests that define international relations in the modern world. The simple fact of the matter is that despite the many layers of international and humanitarian bureaucracy that exist presently to define some sort of “order,” the very nature of statecraft makes this a fleeting, quaint notion, at best.

The present world order of politics is defined by power. Kosovo, for example, managed to gain independence from Serbia because it won this, in essence, through a military conflict in which it was supported, actively, by NATO. In contrast, the Serbs in Bosnia were essentially rewarded for having successfully waged a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Bosniaks and Croats by the US and their allies who had committed themselves to the establishment of a partitioned, apartheid-like Bosnian post-war state. One should note that despite their best efforts, the then Serbian government was in large part unsuccessful in ethnically cleansing Kosovo of its ethnic Albanian majority. Largely due to the fact that said majority composed upwards of 90% of the population. This demographic skew is based in the simple reality, ignored by Serbian nationalists and mythologists, that contrary to their claims of Kosovo as being the “spiritual and political heartland of Serbia” in all its history, Kosovo been under the direct administration of Belgrade or the Serbian state for barely 50 years.

In any case, in contrast to the experience in Kosovo, by the end of 1995, when the Bosnian and Croatian militaries had managed to finally to reverse the losses of years prior to the by now increasingly undermanned but still superiorly armed Serbs, US diplomats stressed that the liberation of Bosnian territory would only be allowed to proceed to a certain point. Richard Holbrooke, arguably the chief American diplomat involved in the forming of the subsequent Dayton Peace Accords, has even gone on the record stating that:

“We asked them not to take Banja Luka [the capital of the self-declared Serbian republic within Bosnia], but we did not give the Croatians and the Bosnians any other ‘red lights.’ On the contrary, our team made no effort to discourage them from taking Prijedor and Sanski Most and other terrain that is theirs on the Contact Group map.” (Apartheid cartography: the political anthropology and spatial effects of international diplomacy in Bosnia, David Campbell, Political Geography 18 (1999), pg. 415)

As Marko Attila Hoare illustrates in his excellent study of the military aspects of the war in Bosnia (How Bosnia Armed, Hoare, pg. 121-127), Holbrooke’s claims of leniency may not be entirely true. In fact, the evidence strongly suggests that by the end of the war, as the tide had turned against the Serbs, the Americans threatened the Bosnian government with air strikes if they continued with the liberation of their country. Why? Because as Holbrooke stated above, the Americans had decided that “peace” in Bosnia would mean a 51-49% division of territory between the Bosniaks and Croats (51%) on one side, and the Serbs (49%) on the other. They had the power to enforce this, this was their ambition, and so this was the nature of the subsequent Bosnian peace agreement.

"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." - Albert Einstein

The ability to dictate the terms and scale of violent repercussions when opposing parties fail to acquiesce (read: might makes right) is the defining feature of international politics in the world of states. Thus, during the actual war in Bosnia, the stated and practiced aims of the Bosnian Serb government, the so-called Republika Srpska (currently headed by Mr. Dodik), had been accomplished through incredible violence without any regard to international law or moral indignation. Of the six stated strategic goals of this government, number one had been the “separation from the other two national communities [Bosniaks and Croats]—separation of state”; in other words, the creation of an “ethnically pure” Serbian state, carved out of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The other five merely expanded on this chief goal by elucidating the actual, detailed, process through which this would be accomplished. (Prosecution Submission of an Expert Reporter of Dr. Robert J. Donia to Rule 94bis, Robert J. Donia, The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: Case. No. IT-02-54-T, August 1^st, 2003, pg. 3)

The Serbian government, the same government currently so outraged by the internationally recognized independence of Kosovo, has continued to remain steadfast in their support of the nationalist, racist, genocidal and xenophobic political establishment of their brethren in Bosnia—which it had been actively involved in establishing in the first place. With their ability to wage war effectively destroyed, all that has been left to these pretenders of nationalist empires no more has been recourse to a tired chorus of moral indignation. When the Serbian political establishment, however, was in possession one of the largest military arsenals in Europe, during the 90s, it had few qualms about ignoring international law and moral outrage as it went to war in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and finally Kosovo. Such, after all, is the way of the sword. One lives and dies by it.

The Double-Standard Banner Waving High!

Ironically, in opposition to Kosovo’s independence, Russia, one of Serbia’s long-time allies, which had up until then likewise been harping on about the need to respect international law, sent its military to support the secession of  South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Why? It wanted to, and more importantly, it could. The Serbian government remained dutifully silent on the matter.

Meanwhile, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs and accomplished genocide-revisionist, Milorad Dodik, has paid a visit to another prominent international purveyor of unilateral violence, Israel, and pledged his support and sympathy. Dodik’s belief in international law, it seems, does not extend to either the genocidal entity he heads or the State of Israel, currently in violation of nearly all of the 225 UN Security Council Resolutions passed against it.

Like Israel, like Russia and like Serbia illustrate, the general position of any state regarding violence, war and international law can be summed up rather neatly: we are for it when we are in charge, we are against it when we are not. International resolutions are all good and well so long as we are dictating the terms or free to ignore them as we please. Once this is no longer the case, then cry havoc! Cry bloody murder! Cry propaganda films exposing the supposed “true story” of our nationally exclusive suffering!

While this fact provides one with no want of mind boggling examples of blatant hypocrisy, it is, in truth, an entirely expected, indeed, necessary function on the international, state-based political order. As states are based, founded and propagated through violence it is inevitable that any notion of “international law” will, in reality, have to simply be based in the old dictum of might makes right. After all, that is why the make-up of the UN Security Council is composed of states such as the US, Russia and China and not Switzerland, Lesotho and Nepal.

A legitimate and morally consistent international judicial order would have to first tackle (and abolish) this reality of the nature of the state form. Until then, what we will continue to have is a global regime in which might will, ultimately, determine practical, if not, moral “right.” Combined with the imperatives of the global capitalist system, what we are left with is a world order in which “humanitarian intervention” will be reserved for economically viable and exploitable polities, while secondary concerns (such as Rwanda, for instance) will be left to their “own” devices, until such time as when their colonial masters see fit to return to their historical domination.

A deviation from this tendency must be premised on a rejection of all state power and not merely the state power of some “other” nationalist, religious, political or ethnic collective. The state is violence, it is misery, it is war. True peace lies outside of its borders.

There is no environmental crisis, and global warming is just “a socialist plot” – at least according to Prime Minister Harper, when he was denouncing the Kyoto Accord.

But while Harper’s many sins are serious – ignoring child poverty, sending Canadians to fight in Afghanistan, attacking women’s rights – the worst one is his minority government’s efforts to block any meaningful action to protect nature from the ravages of capitalist greed.

Not only have the Conservatives done everything in their power to block environmental action in Canada, but they have also put up roadblocks against all international efforts to protect the earth.  Their actions at the Bali conference and at last year’s summit in Copenhagen, for instance, were so obstructionist that Canada “won” several Fossil of the Day Awards, announced by Climate Action Network International, a group that includes more than 400 non-governmental organizations.

Prominent Canadian climate scientist Andrew Weaver (UVIC) stated that these Conservative anti-environmental actions were even worse than that of the Bush regime.

George Monbiot agreed, writing that Canada was, “the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement.”

While the Copenhagen talks failed, no one knows if there is enough time to transform the global economy into one that is democratic, just, and sustainable.  But as Noam Chomsky has noted, while we can’t be sure that our efforts will prevent disaster, we can be sure that inaction will guarantee a nightmarish future.

Even if there is enough time, this window will not last long.  Both Lester Brown and James Hansen, for instance, argue that, we only have months, not years, to save civilization from climate change.

In such a dire situation, what we do in the immediate future could make all the difference.  We must develop strategies that will have the greatest impact as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that citizens in Canada or around the world will rise up and take their future in their own hands, creating truly democratic societies that are based on ecological economics.  Susan George put it this way:

I do not see how even the most convinced, most determined people could replace, much less overthrow capitalism fast enough to carry out the necessary systemic change before a runaway climate effect takes hold.

It seems more likely, given the power of the corporate class and their influence in government and the mass media, that it will take a major catastrophe (or several) before any meaningful progress becomes possible – if it’s not already too late by then.

There is a third possibility, however –  a growing environmental movement that puts pressure on governments by using a multitude of tactics – including the ballot box – to demand an immediate Second World War-type mobilization to deal with the systemic crises.

Working within global capitalism is the option that is (probably) most likely to buy enough time now to allow for more significant actions later.  This “ecological Keynesianism” – massive government programs to protect the natural world – would create employment in sustainable industries and promote a plethora of ecological initiatives (local food production, public transportation, energy conservation, green technology, and so on).

Much of the funding for these initiatives could come from reductions in harmful government spending, like the disastrous occupation of Afghanistan, subsidies to oil companies, the purchase of F-35 fighter jets, and the US-style “war on drugs.”

Such changes will not take place unless Canadians demand it.

However, even people who understand the seriousness of our dilemma often do nothing about it.  This is partly due to distractions (“Keep you doped with religion, sex and TV” – John Lennon), the demands of busy lives, a sense of confusion, or feeling hopeless.

Above all, the corporate media, like most political “leaders” (Harper), give the impression that there is no crisis and that life-styles in North America can continue in more or less the same fashion.  It will be “business-as-usual”.  Don’t worry, be happy.  Above all, keep consuming more stuff!

But all the talk about the need to get the economy growing again is exactly the wrong approach to take.

A major challenge, then, is to get people to understand that life as we have known it in the last century is over; it is unsustainable, and one way or another, our societies and our way of living will have to change dramatically.

We must appeal to parents and grandparents to think about the kind of lives that their children will have in the decades to come.

It is crucial to explain that creating a democratic and ecological society will not only let us avoid a horrific future, but that life can actually be much more satisfying than what we have experienced.

Given how few people are politically active, however, it is vital to make democratic participation both more attractive as well as easier.

For most citizens, the easiest action is voting.

Just because Canada and British Columbia have a very limited form of “democracy” (think “HST”), it doesn’t mean that elections are irrelevant.  For instance, the fear of electoral defeat was a major factor in the refusal of the Liberal government to participate in both the invasion of Iraq and the U.S. “Star Wars” program.  Even the militaristic Tories have said that Canadian troops will not fight in Afghanistan after next year, primarily because they would certainly lose the next election if Canada did not end its combat role.

The lesson is clear.  Politicians who continue to ignore the threat of global warming should be made to understand that their irresponsibility will not be tolerated.

As Bill McKibben recently wrote:

We need to be able to explain to them that continuing in their ways will end something that they care about: their careers.  And because we’ll never have the cash to compete with Exxon, we better work in the currencies we can muster: bodies, spirit, passion.

Electing people who are actually serious about protecting the environment is, of course, even better than having to constantly pressure political opportunists.

But even those already on side will need lots of support to counter the power of the oil industry and other corporations which benefit from lax environmental regulations.  That is why other forms of action – organizing, letters to the editor, demonstrations, media reform, and above all, public education – must continue and even intensify.  Still, none of these tactics provide such a direct – and easy – route to those in power as voting does.

In many ridings, even a small increase in “environmental” voters would be enough to throw out many of the deniers and other dinosaurs.

When it comes to political parties and the environment, it is clear to me that the New Democrats are clearly the most progressive in English Canada, even “greener” than the Green Party.  That’s one reason why I ran twice as an NDP candidate.

For those who say that the NDP is not green enough, one approach would be to join the party and work within it to make the New Democrats an even stronger advocate for an ecological economy.

As sincere and intelligent as Elizabeth May is, her Green party has no chance of playing a significant role in government.  Worse, the more people who vote Green, the more the environmental vote will be split, and the easier it will be for Harper to form a majority government.

As for the federal Liberals, they sometimes talk the talk, but their environmental record, from Chretien to Martin to Ignatieff, has been mostly rhetoric.

Here in British Columbia, the situation is somewhat different.  The Campbell government has taken a few environmental measures, but they are completely inadequate.

For its part, the NDP in B.C. must provide real leadership by coming up with a very dynamic, fair, and visionary platform to make the province a leader in North America and around the world.  New Democrats must make strong alliances with environmental groups, progressive businesses, and the trade unions to ensure that the transformation will be grounded in democratic processes.

The most important thing that Canadians can do is to work, both inside and outside of the political system, to make all parties realize that they have to be serious about showing leadership on the environment and protecting the public if they want to have any chance of winning elections.

To those who reject all “bourgeois” elections, consider Chomsky’s discussion about the need to balance ideals and reality:

Even…anarchists who regard the state as totally illegitimate, as I do…realize that it is necessary to protect the public arena, which means state power. The reason is, when you eliminate the public arena and the one institutional structure in which people can, to some extent, participate, namely the state, you’re just handing over power to unaccountable private tyrannies that are much worse. So you protect the public arena, recognizing that it’s illegitimate in its current form, and that you ultimately want to eliminate it.

When I interviewed Murray Bookchin in 2001, I asked the founder of Social Ecology if participation in elections might be justified if it made a vital difference, e.g. had Al Gore been President, Iraq would not have been invaded – and perhaps a million people would not have been killed.

Bookchin’s response to this question, regarding a system that he once called, “the cesspool of bourgeois parliamentarianism” was simple and undogmatic: “You do what you have to do.”

Again, it is important to stress that the present crisis is also a great opportunity, and that life in an ecological society would actually be much better than it is now.

As Bookchin understood back as the 1960s, we already have enough wealth, knowledge, and technology to solve the environmental crises, create a more humane society, end war, and to eliminate global poverty once and for all – IF we decide to take democracy seriously, get organized and take control of our own lives.

It is therefore essential to also present realistic reasons for hope and practical actions that one can take, individually and in groups, in order to prevent people from feeling helpless and overwhelmed by the severe and immediate challenges that we face.

Obviously, voting is not enough.  The key to a successful ecological movement is Bookchin’s concept of “unity in diversity”.  In this moment of extreme peril, people need to organize movements that focus on common values and work together in principled ways if we are to have any chance of avoiding ecological apocalypse.

As Miriam Palacios of Oxfam succinctly put it: “We must fight on all fronts.”

Elites never “gave” people the right to vote.  Because voting has the potential to empower citizens, it had to be fought for.  So whatever else you do to prevent environmental catastrophe, don’t forget the power of your vote.

After all, that’s what Harper would like you to do.

***********

Peter G. Prontzos teaches Political Science at Langara College in Vancouver.  He has three children. A version of this piece appeared in the Georgia Straight on August 13, 2010.

Last night it was Imtiaz Popat and I on “The Rational” talking about the HST, HST petition oddities, recall of MLAs, a fall legislative session, the BC Conservatives and the NDP on the HST, a new BC Liberal leader, Kim Campbell and Rita Johnson, a fall federal election, direct democracy, Vic Toews being an immigrant and his messaging, the Tamil ship and hidden and blatant racism, the philosophy of asylum, SFU Political Science department has worked hard to get rid of all full-time female tenured professors, university tenure versus a just-in-time workforce, re-victimizing Haiti, engaging in controversial politics to air out our dirty racist laundry in public, Vancouver and Toronto Pride Parades and queers and Palestine, Wyclef Jean as the Schwarzenegger privatization presidential candidate for Haiti, the increase of reactionary politics in Canada, faith-based policy formation versus the long-form census, G20 charges that don’t really exist and laws that don’t exist, a federal Liberal-NDP coalition, Ignatieff as a political leader rather than an economic leader, bloggers in Haitian camps blogging about their lives.

The video podcast of the conversation lives at Vista Video.

You can watch it in Miro, the best new open source multimedia viewing software: http://www.miroguide.com/feeds/8832

or…

You can watch it in iTunes: itpc://dgivista.org/pod/Vista_Podcasts.xml

or…

The podcast file is at http://dgivista.org/pod/COOP.Radio.8.16.10.mov

Enjoy!

This morning I wrote about how we and the French are continuing to rip off Haiti 7 months after their earthquake.

Today I read about one woman’s experiences. She sounds so much like us. Getting to the human level during these kind of existential events, we always see that “they” are just like “us”. I wonder if we can think of our new Tamil visitors that way?

Beyond some poignant quotes below, she finishes here piece this this, which seems like a futile hope from where we stand:

We have a lot of work to do. We need to have dialogue so we can tell the international organizations what we need, what problems we have. I’d hope that the Haitian authorities and the international community can collaborate, can have good relations to develop really useful solutions for those who have problems.

Some other disturbing elements of her piece:

Young women suffer sexual aggression because they have to bathe in public.

…

There’s a lot of theft, you have to watch what you have very carefully. …Anyone can just frequent the camp, whether they live there or not

…

You have to work hard not to get sick. You see children who were normal before January 12 and now you see their color has changed, they’re skinnier, they have bumps all over their skin.

…

You can’t be walking around all day with all your belongings under your arms. You have to be able to say, “That is my place, that’s where my possessions are, that’s where I sleep, that’s where my home is.”

via t r u t h o u t | Amid Haitian Housing Crisis, Student Calls for Dialogue.

It was so nice to see so many billions pledged to help Haiti after its earthquake where the planet kicked the country after it was down from centuries of racist, imperial and neoliberal exploitation.

But how much money pledged has shown up?

And worse, did you know that Haiti spent more than a century paying off France reparations money for their own freedom? Imagine what the country would have been like if it didn’t pay that odious debt.

Let’s explore all the odious exploitation of Haiti for the last 206 years, with special focus on the last seven months. Read more

I think one of the key issues in all my questions about the Tamil ship the other day is what kind of Canada do we want. Are we really open to visitors, immigrants, refugees? If there is a federal election this fall, the G20, the long-form census and how we ought to treat “visitors” like the Tamils should define our debates.

What kind of people do we want to join our country? Read more

Yes.

There are only 1.5 tenured women who work full-time in SFU’s Political Science Department out of 21 profs. Soon there will be 0.5. What century is this?

Behold the list of faculty in the department:

1. Of the 21 people on that list, only 6 are women. Whoops, that’s pretty low to start with.
2. Of the 6 women, 2 are actually retired or retiring very soon; they both had tenure. Whoops, time to update the faculty list webpage.
3. Of the remaining 4, only one has tenure and she works in another department as well. The other 3 don’t have tenure and only 2 of them work fully in the political science department.
4. This all means that of the 6 women in the department, the only 2 who work full-time in political science don’t have tenure.

That’s just embarrassing. After picking up a couple degrees there this decade, I’ve seen the tail end of a problem that has existed for many years to get to the point today where women are so ridiculously outnumbered.

Gender and cultural equity matter. Diverse voices matter. A reasonable number of non white men would be good, but now a large majority of the department’s professors are white men.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are some extraordinary, intriguing professors in the department, as well as maybe a normal proportion of horrible/demeaning/arrogant teachers. This applies to tenured and non-tenured professors of whatever gender and cultural background.

But the bureaucratic and interpersonal dysfunctions in the department are my best explanations for why the department was put under administration by the dean’s office, why faculty are leaving, why grad students are dismissively neglected, why undergrads seek other majors and different schools for graduate studies, and why when I go to academic conferences people ask me if it’s really as bad at SFU as they’ve heard.

And the worst part is that the leadership of the university has known about these problems for years. I have no idea the extent they have gone to address the problems, but whatever they’ve tried, it’s failing.

Suddenly now we have the horrible statistic of almost no full-time tenured women in the department. And judging by the problems that led to this dire situation, I can’t see how the department is capable of or interested in fixing this situation.

Nous sommes prets. We are ready. That’s SFU’s motto.

A recent slogan is “Thinking of the World.”

It’s time to walk the talk.