Category Archives: Environment

British Columbia, Conservative Party of Canada, Democracy, Economics, Environment, Family, Media, Neoliberal Economics

BC’s Throne Speech: Already a Huge Disappointment

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The BC government is in a self-orchestrated bind. Later today they release their throne speech for this legislative session, 6 days late.

In a fit of transparent and predictable governing, which turned out to be only a veneer, the government committed to fixed election dates, throne speeches and budgets. Circumstances, however, can really cramp such a plan.

Campbell is just like Harper. The federal Conservatives couldn’t even abide by their own October 2009 fixed election date legislation, for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the growing likelihood of an Obama presidential victory in the United States and the reality that Harper wouldn’t even have been able to hold onto a minority government with such a left-ward swing there.

Squishy rationales have forced the same event in BC with the delayed throne speech, which is supposed to establish the tone and priorities for the legislative session.

Past throne speeches and budgets in BC have focussed on improving the state of children or the environment with little or nothing positive in those areas: more veneer and PR.

Last Tuesday’s throne speech, if it were honest, would have had to talk about the lack of a solid excuse to cut short the spring legislative session since a regular length would have presented far too many question periods before the May election, for Campbell to be have to avoid.

His virtually non-existent public profile is still a result of his drunk driving episode in Maui 6 years ago.

An honest throne speech would have had to explain the necessity that on Friday the 13th, the election gag law came into effect, stifling the free political speech of hundreds of groups critical of the government [and maybe 6 groups who support them] all to prevent truth-based ads showing how much Campbell’s mean-spirited, market-worshiping cuts and policies have hurt vulnerable British Columbians.

And if you do some calendar arithmetic, you’ll see that reading a throne speech 3 days before the gag law comes in means 3 days of the worst press and multi-million dollar advertising spending imaginable.

Another reason to delay the throne speech is merely to cut down on the amount time the media can focus on it until the next big event, the budget tomorrow.

But the biggest reason to delay the throne speech is because it will have to introduce a package of economic policies that will make the neoLiberal MLAs vomit in their sugar-coated breakfast cereal on Wednesday morning: a deficit budget.

Like the Harperites, The neoLiberals are so ideologically opposed to deficits, effective social spending, communitarian economic policies or an economy that exists for citizens instead of for pimping workers for global corporate hyper-profit, that they’ve spent weeks now pre-emptively providing excuses for why they will have to go into deficit to mitigate the effects of the global economic meltdown on BC.

But none of this dream throne speech will come forth today. Instead it will be a superficial ramble full of platitudes about strong leadership in an economic crisis, looking out for the economically vulnerable and why the NDP will make you lose your job if they get elected.

The sad truth, though, is that in the government’s attempts to justify breaking its own balanced budget legislation, a few weeks ago the finance minister released a sexy slide show tracking how bad the economy has been in the last 6 months.

But in their zeal to show how awesome their surplus budgets have been recently, they produced a graph that showed the last 2 NDP surplus budgets before they lost government.

This will hurt them in the end because Campbell spent his entire first term in office whining about how they inherited an NDP deficit when we know that massive neoLiberal tax cuts for the rich created the funding crisis that made a mess of BC’s social fabric.

No throne speech today will help them when facts like these are swimming around. They’ll need heaps of luck to keep government on May 12th.

Activism, Canada, Class War, Conservative Party of Canada, Democracy, Economics, Environment, Executive Overdrive, Liberal Party of Canada, NDP, Neoliberal Economics, Society

Prime Minister Layton and Proportional Representation

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Since during the federal election campaign over the last 3 months I’ve talked with friends about the outside chance of Jack Layton becoming prime minister. It’s still an outside chance, but it improved when Flaherty said an unsurprising bunch of nothing useful last night.

I’ve been impressed with the social movement that swept Obama to the presidency and spilled into Canada to send the federal NDP to a place where they raised more money from more people than the Liberal party.

Now with renewed talk of crashing the arrogant Harper government, Layton has a chance to become prime minister. Here’s how.

Election Financing as the Trigger

Harper is on record as wanting to destroy the Liberal party, not just defeat them. So one of the first things he does in this new parliament, while not seriously addressing meaningful interventions on behalf of working Canadians in this economic meltdown, is to remove the per-vote funding for political parties. His is well funded, the Liberals are always 8 minutes from bankruptcy and the NDP and Bloc are populist parties with solid and growing funding machinery.

So changing the financing rules to push the Liberals into financial purgatory seemed like a solid Harper bully move. The Liberals have been a party of corporate entitlement, so they do not have a populist funding regime. Maybe now after a few failed elections in this decade they will seriously work on building one.

Harper incorrectly stated today in the House foyer, typically without taking questions, that Dion [or anyone] cannot become prime minister without electoral support. Nice campaign rhetoric, but really, no one was elected to a majority so anyone who can come up with 155 votes has a legal shot at governing.

Coalition Dynamics

Judy Rebick wrote a piece in the Globe and Mail a few weeks ago on a 3 party coalition that can orbit a few key policy similarities and box out Harper. Canadians for a Progressive Coalition are working well coordinating the advocacy for an anti-Harper, progressive alternative and email campaigns to all opposition MPs from people all across the country, which returned a few emails from Liberal lackeys condemning the move as bad policy. Typical Liberal birthright arrogance about not wanting to share.

So today we learned that Ed Broadbent and Jean Chretien have been trying to broker a coalition with Bloc voting support to keep Harper from ramping up his attacks on all things not radically right wing.

Prime Minister Layton

So who gets to be prime minister in a limited coalition? Dion is a lame duck as he announced he’s stepping down at a convention. Some kind of new leader for the Liberals established over the next few days is unlikely and potentially illegitimate to party members or caucus.

The Bloc can quite easily stay out of a formal coalition with just a pledge to support votes. So Duceppe will not be prime minister. But there is something else to the Bloc. Plenty of people who are not separatists have been voting Bloc for some time now. Why? Because the Bloc gets things done for the province and the party’s social and economic policies are on the whole enviable, especially to progressives. And people vote Bloc to keep majority governments from the Conservatives or the Liberals because they are bad for Quebec since a majority federal government shifts the power too centrally and blocks provinces’ relative power.

So that leaves Prime Minister Layton, and not because his campaign rhetoric was that he wanted Harper’s job. With the lame duck Dion or fresh new Liberal leader being questionable prime ministers, and Duceppe being a separatist, the only compromise that isn’t a deal breaker could be Layton.

Proportional Representation

My agenda all decade has been to advocate for the end to majority governments in Canada and our 19th century electoral system which best serves a two party system, which Canada is far from today. Each minority government that gets elected puts a larger spotlight on the elephant in the room: that the electorate is too split or regionalized for simply two national motherhood parties. This means majority governments will become mathematically unlikely.

So if the opposition can crash Harper’s bully government, we will have a system more like proportional representation than first-past-the-post, but with the Conservatives on the outs. This event can be a springboard to electoral reform.

Changing to a PR system will ensure entrenched Quebec advocacy for the Bloc without need for referendum threats. It will mean millions more votes for the NDP as so many won’t need to vote strategically anymore. It will also mean the Green Party getting dozens of seats to support a green agenda, except to the extent that their platform isn’t progressive enough to address the hyper-consumerism that is aggravating the climate crisis.

And the Liberal party, though they will bleed votes to the NDP, Greens and Bloc, will have a chance to survive. And the Conservatives? Who cares. Let their solid base do its work and elect the dozens of MPs that reflect their crazy right wing ideals.

So at least the three non-Conservative parties may leap towards PR to improve their future access to parliament, and the Conservatives may have to join in just to keep from being wildly marginalized forever because they too are no longer a national party that can get things done.

And this all bodes well for the BC election on May 12, 2009 when we will try again to pass a PR referendum that would have passed last time if the 57% didn’t fall short of the suddenly new 60% threshold for referenda.

So the goal isn’t so much to get Layton in as PM, but to stop Harper from continuing his socially conservative and economically neoliberal, anti-social agenda. And out of it we may end up getting a far more fair electoral system.

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Contact Stephen Elliott-Buckley at Vista at dgiVista.org.

Class War, Corporations, Democracy, Economics, Environment, Imperialism, Neoliberal Economics, Poverty, USA, Vancouver, Voluntary Simplicity

Capitalism as Extortion: 700,000,000,000 Ways

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Over the last 7 days, I’ve been watching the repulsive song and dance in the USA to bail out some of the wealthiest corporations in the world. Congress finally passed bailout legislation today.

But instead of reforming the system that allowed the kind of greed and manipulation we’ve seen, we see capitalist extortion at work. The price is $700,000,000,000 from US taxpayers, their children, their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren…most of whom aren’t yet born so they have no political rights in this situation.

In this bailout, we see an arbitrarily derived number, $700,000,000,000, borrowed from non-US banks and added to the US debt. The money is essentially a gift to maintain the solvency of the financial firms at risk of tanking. Despite all the free market competition rhetoric from the neoliberal, neo-conservative Democratic and Republican White Houses for the last 3 decades, the government has chosen to intervene in the market to avoid the socio-economic ramifications of the collapse of so many firms. Surely, their collapse would be devastating to the US economy and the rest of the world, but the nature of this bailout says a great deal about options not embraced.

The Cause

This is perhaps debatable, but the sub-prime mortgage collapse last year is the likely trigger of this mass insolvency.

The US economy has been in trouble for a long time. Right after 9/11 Bush’s initial advice to Americans was to go shopping. Their economy is so dependent on consumer purchasing that if it were to stall, their trade imbalances and currency stability would crash, leading to a domestic and likely global depression. Canada is not much better. Such is the desperation of those running the US economy that they have supported a massive culture of consumer debt to underwrite increasing spending. This cannot go on forever.

Part of this consumer debt cycle is the sub-prime mortgage. Financial institutions lured desperate people who are reasonably unable to buy homes or expensive homes, to purchase them beyond their means with interest rates temporarily below the prime rate. Just like pyramid schemes, the system was profitable…for a while. Then it becomes untenable. Last summer, the sub-prime mortgage market crashed.

A humourous and accurate portrayal of this crisis is this short cartoon, well worth watching and spreading around: http://www.businesspundit.com/sub-prime/

The sub-prime crisis was a warning that went unheeded. It indicated that consumers were overextended and financial institutions were overextended in their lending. That left both citizens and institutions vulnerable to slight problems that could push them over the edge.

Options

There are several options available to the US government in recent weeks. They include the following:

  1. Let the corporations collapse
  2. Pay off their debts
  3. Nationalize them

1. Let the corporations collapse

Capitalism is all about risk and reward. Even though Canada and the USA do not allow people to drop their student loan debt when declaring bankruptcy, corporations can drop all their debt if they orchestrate their collapse effectively enough. Bankruptcy is designed to stimulate entrepreneurship. The problem comes when corporations get so large and powerful that their collapse has devastating ripples throughout society: job loss, pension fund collapse, currency devaluation, increased trade imbalances, recession, depression, increased working class and middle class bankruptcy and homelessness.

Governments that espouse free market principles, deregulate and undermine their own ability to intervene in markets are faced with a painful choice: live up to their free market ideals and let insolvent corporations collapse and allow their society to suffer, or pretend it’s OK to intervene sometimes and dodge criticisms of pulling a socialist tactic to save the economy.

Clearly, letting corporations collapse is painful medicine. CEOs have gambled that the government will not let them crash. Thus they have a get out of jail free card allowing them to behave irresponsibly knowing that the taxpayers will bail them out. Sounds like extortion to me. Ah, if only the taxpayers had bailed out Enron and Worldcom there wouldn’t be such hardship! Maybe.

2. Pay off their debts

Any kind of bailout package that shores up the insolvency of these financial institutions will allow them to survive another day, minimize some or most of the negative ripples they’ve instigated and keep the economy from tipping too far over the cliff overlooking depression. The US government today has guaranteed that these firms will survive another day, at least until the next crisis. But the US citizen has no true accountability from the financial sector or the government. While a future White House is required to prepare and monitor a payback plan, there is nothing actually requiring the $700,000,000,000 to be repaid to the consumers/taxpayers who have been lured into over-consumption in the first place.

3. Nationalize them

As the UK has done, instead of taking citizens’ and future citizens’ wealth to give to the irresponsible extortionists in their troubled financial firms, the government has nationalized some of the firms. This means the government, on behalf of current and future citizens, has taken actual ownership of the firms. Sure, they intend to sell them off again, but at least Joe and Margaret Citizen get an asset for their forced investment of wealth.

Fear-Mongering and Inducing Panic

So how is the USA coping with this crisis? The other night on Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN, queen of hysteria Suze Orman shared her thoughts. Her personal opinion is that the current crisis will not recover until the middle of the next decade. She continued by advising people who expect to retire in the next 10 years to get their money out of the market.

This is a fascinating and dangerous piece of advice. The first of the baby boomers are in their early 60s right now. In 10 years, most of the boomers will be in retirement age. Orman, has thus advised the largest portion of the biggest demographic blip of the last century to extract their wealth from the market.

Granted, the market is over-inflated. The bubble needs a correction. This explains some or most of the trillions of dollars of air leaking out of global markets in recent weeks. But when Orman says you can recover what you’re losing now after 10 years, boomers who can’t wait a decade to retire will be pulling out their cash, risking a run on the market.

Hysteria and fear-based withdrawal of wealth from a market tends to accelerate into a run as the desire to sell outpaces the desire to buy, causing stock prices to fall, potentially even below book value of companies themselves. At the same time, there is predatory buying, as we’re seeing now as behemoth corporations are buying up simply gigantic companies leading to less competition and more oligopolistic collusion.

The 1994 Mexican Peso Crisis

This kind of bailout is not completely new. In 1994, the Mexican peso crisis led to the USA orchestrating a $50 billion loan guarantee. Canada coughed up a hefty $1 billion, significant for a population of less than 30 million people then. The crisis came from the convergence of a number of incidents including the new Mexican government devaluing their currency, an act that was aggravated by a run by investors to dump the peso, thus compounding the tailspin.

US motivations for bailing out the weakening peso orbited around protecting US banks from bad loans. Does that sound familiar? So using taxpayer dollars to extend loans to support a foreign currency to keep domestic banks from suffering is a transfer of wealth from the mostly unborn future generations of Americans [and Canadians] indirectly to US banks that were greedy and stupid enough to extend such loans in the first place. But then, is it greed and stupidity when you behave like an extortionist and the system lets and encourages you?

The 1979 Chrysler Bailout

Another example of this capitalist extortion-based bailout involved Chrysler 30 years ago. In 1979 the US government spent $1.5 billion on loan guarantees for the virtually bankrupt Chrysler corporation. As one of the big 3 car makers in the USA, a bankrupt Chrysler would have meant a significant blow to the USA’s industrial capacity. The free market dictates that entrepreneurialism has rewards and risks. The fact that capitalist societies shelter capitalist activity with benefits like limited shareholder liability and bankruptcy protection seems to not be enough. When Chrysler was in dire need of assistance, the government intervened with taxpayer dollars to interfere with the hallowed free market of capitalists to protect the national economy from a body blow.

With these bailouts, what incentive do CEOs and entrepreneurs have to avoid running their corporations into the ground. If you owe the bank $300,000 for your mortgage, you work for the bank. If you owe the bank $300,000,000, the bank works for you because if you default on your loan, it goes out of business. This is the extortionist principle that has worked the last several weeks. Not so surprisingly, the threat of a massive foreign debt default by developing countries has never materialized despite its potential to reform the global trade and currency regime. So not everyone can pull of that kind of threat.

What the Bailout Doesn’t Do for Suffering People

By the time the House eventually voted for the amended bailout package today, some “members of the Congressional Black Caucus…said they changed course after securing commitments from presidential candidate Barack Obama that he would back legislation to help struggling consumers and homeowners facing foreclosures if he wins the White House.”

This is a nice sentiment, but when the bailout package is initially designed to help obscenely rich corporations instead of actual human beings suffering in this crisis, we see the clear priorities of the bailout’s supporters. We heard it too on CNN last weekend as announcers kept referring to the importance of helping “the financial firms that are suffering.”

Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine

The themes of Naomi Klein’s latest book on disaster capitalism fit well with the last few weeks. Extortionist capitalists have overextended their institutions past solvency. Since their existence is parasitically symbiotic with the bone marrow of the US society, letting them die would threaten the existence of the host. When the public purse comes to the rescue, we see a massive transfer of wealth from humans to the corporations (and their rich investors) that have contributed to their insolvency. The neoliberal agenda is advanced and the tens of millions of dollars the finance executives have been making in recent years looks like a good investment to shareholders since they can run the corporate profits up with unsustainable business practices and then get the people of the land to reimburse them for their irresponsibility.

Any time we see a fiscally conservative government cut taxes to the rich while increasing them to lower income groups, it is a wealth transfer from the poor and middle income groups to the rich. This is pure theft. What we’ve seen in recent weeks is the same pattern, all through the lens of a dire financial crisis.

Solutions

So what would really work to improve the situation we are in?

Firstly, the rapacious, over-consumptive social norm is unsustainable in any economic, social or ecological sense. Watch The Story of Stuff now if you haven’t yet!

Secondly, deregulated neoliberal capitalism allows a psychotic parasite to imprison us all. Society has the right to regulate its market activities. We need to enhance our regulatory capacity in many ways, including invoking our right to revoke the state-bestowed charters of corporations that are destructive in their behaviour.

Thirdly, we need to seriously re-think the notion of limited liability for shareholders. Allowing most of us in society to indirectly and ignorantly own stakes in dozens of corporations without having to worry about their destructive activities creates a culture of irresponsibility. Enacting investor liability will force us all to pay some attention to what our investments reap. It may throw a wet blanket on rampant, “innovative” entrepreneurialism, but I think we’ve seen enough of the horrible consequences of such innovation in recent generations that a little responsibility is necessary now. And in the end, the profit-maximizing corporate model is inherently unsustainable in a world of finite resources. Removing limited liability for investors will encourage most of us to explore more sustainable market models like co-operatives.

Fourth, we need to pull out the sledgehammers and destroy the crumbling vestiges of the economically imperialistic global trade and finance regime: the WTO, IMF and World Bank. That triumvirate of exploitation is being undermined monthly by countries and movements that reject the free trade cult in favour of trade and development plans that put people, social and physical infrastructure and the environment first.

Fifth, read what progressives are saying about the bailout, what problems will still exist, and alternative ways of addressing these toxic problems. Alternet.org is a good start. So is spending a minute and a half watching Dennis Kucinich explain a better focus than the bailout.

Some Common Sense

In the end, this crisis was inevitable. The overinflated market needed a correction. Housing bubbles in Vancouver and many other cities need to be corrected. Markets respond to positive and negative hysteria to create and deflate bubbles. And along the way regular people lose their life savings, homes and economic freedom. The collateral damage is simply intolerable. That is why the US House of Representatives initially voted down the bailout: they have to get re-elected every 2 years. The bailout saves Wall Street, not the citizens.

Without a fundamental rejection of market-based greed and over-consumption, this crisis will be far from the last one. As long as we neglect systemic changes, we will continue to suffer. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, our continental and global economic system is insane and so are we if we think it will fix itself while we ignore its systemic flaws. Shame on us if we let that happen.

9/11, Afghanistan, Colonialism, Corporations, Democracy, Economics, Environment, Executive Overdrive, Imperialism, International Relations, Iran, Iraq, Neo-Conservatism, Neoliberal Economics, Society, Soft Fascism, USA, Venezuela

How Many More Wars Do You Want, Anyway?

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Pick a number, then vote McCain:

Some context:

Sarah Palin said two things which can be pegs for an attack ad of this kind:

1. War with Russia could happen over the Georgia conflict

2. Soldiers going to Iraq are fighting the people who killed thousands of Americans on Sept. 11.

Activism, Canada, Canada22, Class War, Corporations, Economics, Environment, Neoliberal Economics

Our Precarious Neoliberal World

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Canada22’s 2008 Canada Day message spoke of $140 barrels of oil and $1.50 litres of gas. This week we have seen more evidence of our precarious economy making us think about how growth-based capitalism is fundamentally toxic and cancerous to our planet and our society.

On Tuesday this week we saw Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist and now serious critic of the World Bank, write about the moral and economic collapse of neoliberalism.

Yesterday we learn that the federal government, staunch neoliberals, have the capacity to break from neoliberal, laissez-faire, hands-off economic non-regulation to stop the victimization of our economy by the American sub-prime mortgage implosion by no longer supporting 40-year mortgages and no money down mortgages. Whew! 🙂

This might actually start deflating the bubble of insane housing prices in Vancouver and to a lesser degree, in most other places in Canada. Vancouver homes cost 3 times what I feel they’re worth. If Garth Turner is right and Vancouver prices drop 30%, that’s half way to where they should be for the majority of citizens to be able to afford a home. 60 year old homes in my neighbourhood are assessed this year at $1.2 million. The cheapest houses in Vancouver are typically listed in the high $500,000s.

But now we need to start thinking about addressing neoliberalism and growth economics. Business schools teach us that the economy is like a corkscrew generally pointing up. There are cycles of growth and decline in a general uphill direction. But constant growth is about constant extraction and exploitation of our human and natural resources.

A no growth model is cyclical, more like the seasons. It is also more sustainable. Tom Walker of the Work Less Party spoke about this at Canada22’s founding workshop on Earth Day 2006.

But how do we switch off growth?

Kevin Potvin explores that idea in a few recent pieces in The Republic.

In “There’s Always Revolution, You Know” he examines why revolution is and isn’t possible in Canada today. The piece doesn’t go into much about how to make that revolution happen, though. Canada22 is all about exploring that, though.

In “No one right or left will say what needs to be said” he examines how addressing our criminal negligence and abuse of our ecological symbiotic relationship may force us to reject growth-based economics.

Finally, he examines how capitalism and speculation are synonymous in “Did Saudi Arabia suddenly go anti-capitalist?”. So we should not be surprised that oil speculators are involved in the rise in the price of oil to over $140/barrel.

So, what are the lessons from all this?

Global neoliberalism undermines social, economic and political stability and cohesion.

In Canada22, we’re working up a vision of a post-neoliberal world, nation, region and community. We’re figuring out how to get there from here. And we’re looking for all the people and groups fighting for social and economic justice to come together to coordinate our confrontation with neoliberalism.

That’s all. 🙂

And with your dedication to justice and community building we’ll develop our vision, path and network…all while building the hope and optimism we need to face the crises on the horizon.

British Columbia, Democracy, Economics, Environment, Neoliberal Economics, Privatization, Transit, Unions, Vancouver

Sam Sullivan’s Latest Re-Election Schemes, 54 Weeks[!] Before the Election

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Today’s fresh new email from Mayor Sam Sullivan [see below] graced my email inbox with an upfront expression of his concern for the recent shootings in Vancouver. After the debacle of his attempt at union-breaking strike management he now wants to assure us he’s out to protect our lives.

Start the email with fear and the calming words of a leader out to protect us all. Boo. Truly scary is during the civic strike he spoke in similarly glowing terms of municipal employees. His walk did not match his talk there. Further, invoking Stockwell Day shows how much Sam is out of touch with the kind of figures who resonate with Vancouverites.

Then Sam moves on to his personal, unscientific, but sure to be quoted for the next 54 weeks of the municipal election campaign [and even longer] survey of citizens on the necessity of extending Skytrain to UBC.

The context of this is important. In order to force the TransLink leadership [democratically elected, pesky as that was] to commit to the Canada Line privateer-megaproject for the Olympics, after failed votes, eventually northeast suburb politicians were bribed with the Evergreen Line to Coquitlam Centre in exchange for voting for the Canada Line.

Democracy is an inconvenient truth in BC. The BC neoLiberal government is currently in the legislature ramming through a bill that will remove all democracy from TransLink and put the board directly in the hands of corporate appointees.

I seem to remember something before our time about the American revolution being about taxation without representation. Now in the 21st century we are embracing it in BC, legislatively so. Shame.

Back to Sam, though. His personal, unscientific, qualitative survey is all about justifying a future bid to supplant the Evergreen Line timeline to get the next Skytrain leg out West Broadway to UBC. Maybe this isn’t his plan, but since it may be a decade before this extension is supposed to occur, after the northeast sector, what is Sam’s rush to meet with West Broadway businesses now and embark on this poll on his personal website?

The pdf on his site on why we should complete the Millenium Line [to UBC] has some sound arguments. As a fan of transit, I think they’re great. But they’re second in line behind the Evergreen Line. The day Sam starts squawking about why the northeast sector should wait–again–is the day I look back to his website survey with complete cynicism.


Message from Mayor Sullivan regarding recent shootings

Like all residents, I am very concerned about the recent shootings that have taken place. We are taking this situation very seriously.

Late this afternoon I held a meeting with Chief Constable Jim Chu to discuss the issue of gang violence in our city. Yesterday I met with federal Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, and Chief Chu and I will be meeting with the federal Justice Minister tomorrow. In addition, I have written to the provincial government and will be meeting with mayors from Metro Vancouver next week to discuss ways to coordinate our efforts and attack organized crime.

I want to reassure residents that the men and women of the Vancouver Police Department are among the best in the world. They are working with our partners in the region to solve these crimes and bring these criminals to justice.

The solution to addressing these problems requires a coordinated and intelligent response. We will deliver that for our citizens.

– Mayor Sam Sullivan

Mayor’s Millennium Line Survey – Have Your Say

Mayor Sam Sullivan invites residents, businesses and community organizations to provide their views about plans to complete the Millennium Rapid Transit Line from VCC Station to Central Broadway – and ultimately UBC.

Disclaimer: this is a qualitative survey of website visitors. Results are not considered as scientific.

Class War, Environment, Media, Psychology

Canadians: Far More Than Global Warming Victims

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“A much anticipated and some say definitive report on global warming is due to come out of Paris tomorrow. What could this mean for our country, our province, our future?”

This is what I heard tonight, February 1, 2007, on CTV promoting the 600pm news on February 2nd. They are refering to the UN’s release of nearly conclusive evidence that humans are a significant source of global warming.

“Some say” suggests a large number of people, but “some” is less than “many”. And “some” suggests less than half. “Most” would be more than half.

Since the science is supported by a virtual consensus of scientists not funded by the fossil fuel industries, I’d say that is more than “some”.

What could this mean for our country, province and future? I think the whole problem with how most of “us” deal with “some” who think the report is definitive is that it’s all about us. Bangladesh will likely largely go under water like much of many Oceania countries. Or would that be “some” of Bangladesh…

The focus on us is the problem: Canadians, OECD-world folks, us inhabitants of the industrialized rich world, and the comprador rich of the majority world. We can afford to move somewhere if our bioregion changes too much. Most people [not some] will be victims of global warming without the means to easily find a healthier climate.

And since “we” are by far more responsible for global warming than the majority world, I get a little tired of “us” talking about how this all may affect “us.” it’s time to wake up to the rest of the world and see how we’re abusing it all. Then we need to admit [to ourselves and the rest of the world] our complicity and guilt and scrub the whole Gateway Program…just as a start. If we think we really need to twin the Port Mann Bridge for more auto traffic, our worship of personal liberties is becoming homocidal. Getting rid of your car will help too. It’s going to take far more than just putting on a sweater, Mr. Gore.

And in watching the news since the Paris release, watching the person-on-the-street interviews, we have a long way to go. My favorite idea to help the environment was that someone said they recycle. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycle is the residual LAST thing to do after we reduce our consumption [especially resource hogs in the industrialized world like us] and reuse far more than we do. And when I was writing about it being in our own best interest to not embrace a drastic reduction in standard of living to make up for our [the industriazlied world] great responsibility for global warming, to avoid a significant critique of our own system, we say that we recycle.

How completely inadequate.

The truth is not inconvenient for us. It is utterly damning and when CTV news continues to say “some” think this is a definitive report, we have still a long way to go.

Environment, Holocaust, Media

The Thing about Deniers: Holocaust and Global Warming

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My daughter, who is a toddler and loves to dance, is addicted to the Weather Channel, particularly the local forecast because the music they play is fantastic to dance to. So while we do not quite have the TV on as wallpaper, often it’s on for her to dance.

This morning I saw on that channel yet another chat with David Suzuki talking about global warming. This time he was talking about how the media does a poor job of covering global warming. He says that as a member of the media we always try to be balanced and provide both sides of a story. That can be a problem.

His view, the correct view [and I know the risk in saying that, but keep reading], is that humans are contributing to global warming. He talked about thousands of academic studies that support that the planet is on a warming trend and we are part of it. Never before in human history have we had the power to influence the planet’s operation. And he talked about 980 recent studies that ALL agree that we are part of global warming. Further, many scientists who do not agree with the vast majority of those who recognize the truth of global warming are not climatologists and many of them are funded by fossil fuel industries, so they are possibly [or almost certainly] biased. I would add that many of the global warming deniers also have a stake in the status quo and don’t want to give up our lifestyle that direly exploits and abuses the planet [and the 4 billion or so of the poorest serf humans we keep impoverished with our global political economic system].

George Monbiot’s book Heat is considered to do a much better job than Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth in addressing far more than the ridiculously cosmetic solutions Gore argues for, in part I think because Gore falls into the category of being concerned, but not enough to recognize that Americans and the OECD world are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the sources of global warming so it is our responsibility to absorb a disproportionate amount of the lifestyle change to stop the problem. But Gore can’t argue that because doing so means telling Americans and the rest of the OECD world that our birthright is based on economically enslaving billions of humans and critically wounding our planet.

But back to the deniers. In its attempts to be balanced the media [which also has a stake in the status quo and is funded/owned by global corporations that even though they aren’t always in the fossil fuel sector depend on their products for the operation of the global feudal economy and their profit] spends far too much time presenting the skeptics’ side. Just by sheer numbers, the vast majority of scientists are recognizing the truth, which is far more than inconvenient, so you would think the media would reflect this. Not so much. The deniers and the politicians and celebrities who base their arguments on them get a ridiculously large share of air time.

And then I remembered Dan’s post about the Holocaust conference in Iran. If the media gave as much air time to the biased, often anti-Semitic, self-serving Holocaust deniers as they do global warming skeptics, the FCC and CRTC would not be able to answer all the phones or ever open their email ever again. The uproar would destroy media empires.

And when I said before that Suzuki’s view is the correct one, I mean that with all the sincerity of someone who says that the Holocaust did exist while there are some who for self-serving motives argue that it is something else entirely.

I now have a new level of disdain for global warming deniers. I just lump them in with Holocaust deniers and act accordingly.