Deep thought

If there's any more important qualification for a Harper Con cabinet member than being described as "incredibly stupid" with a "colossal lack of judgment", it's a willingess to mislead the public.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Gerald Caplan laments the difficulty in trying to comment reasonably on the actions of a government whose attitude toward reason ranges from overt hostility to wilful blindness:

Stephen Harper has just declared that the greatest security threat to Canada is something he called “Islamicism.” I’ve seen no sensible dissection of this remarkable comment because no one can make sense of it. It goes without saying that vigilance against any potential terrorist attack is vital. Has some new peril now been discovered that no one else knows about? Are Canadians in imminent danger? Might we not be fretful about a nice homegrown Christian version of Norway’s notorious Anders Breivik as well as extremist Muslims? Why does our leader choose to feed into the bigotry of those who are determined to smear all Muslims as terrorists?

In terms of what really menaces Canadians, is “Islamicism” really scarier than global warming? What is it about these conservatives that make them care so little about their kids’ future? What about water scarcity, a looming crisis? Or the fragility of the global economic system? Youth unemployment? What about the bottomless need everywhere in Canada for new or repaired or upgraded infrastructure? Who’s going to protect us from exploding road rage on our gridlocked roads? What about glaring, growing inequality and our declining quality of life?

- Meanwhile, Don Martin points out the latest absurdity in the form of Stephen Harper's utter unwillingness to concede that Bob Dechert's close relationship with a Xinhua reporter can even be questioned:

It’s been a full week since news broke about affectionate emails from a Conservative MP to a Chinese state agency reporter.

Shrugged off by the Harper government as a “ridiculous” non-story, the ongoing revelations prove this is a legitimate story given the long legs by this government’s ridiculous non-reaction.
...
A probe would actually do Mr. Dechert a big favour. Until he gets the all-clear from a proper investigation, the mild-mannered Mr. Dechert will stand accused of having taken his oath of loyalty too casually and his foreign affairs job too literally.

- Lest there be any doubt: yes, inequality is bad for business. Austerity is bad for the economy. And still the Cons and their counterparts around the globe continue to fight for both.

- Finally, Bruce Johnstone contrasts the Cons' reluctant acceptance of the results of the Canadian Wheat Board's director elections with their new insistence that the votes and views of CWB members don't matter.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- As I'd suspected, the Cons are making clear that the kind of behaviour that would get any mere civil servant fired on the spot will be treated as entirely unobjectionable in a parliamentary secretary like Bob Dechert.

- Meanwhile, it shouldn't come as much surprise that the massive cost of losing access to Camp Mirage was obvious long before the story reached the public. Nor that the Cons will keep pretending they never could have foreseen the result no matter how clear the paper trail to the contrary.

- Frances Woolley points out the moral hazards involved in pension funding - while also recognizing that the dangers are lower in publicly-administered plans than in schemes which count on individuals to monitor exactly the advisers they've hired for their greater expertise.

- Finally, as BigCityLib points out, both Karen Kleiss and Geoff Dembicki have started to dig into the Ethical Oil Institute. But I'd think the most interesting part of the astroturfing effort is the belief that it can be turned into something more:

Velshi has since staunchly maintained his independence, telling the Globe and Mail he "won't take money from any foreign corporations, any governments." (Though he did admit in the same interview he wouldn't refuse money from a Canadian company).

At the same time, he's pleaded with ordinary Canadians to donate to his cause.

"We rely on small donors like you to sustain our grassroots advocacy," reads the EthicalOil.org website. "Please consider making a $5, $10, or $15 donation."

That's right: well-connected political insiders are asking for grassroots donations to fund PR for an industry that's already making billions on its own. Which figures to be at most a drop in the bucket for the money that will be spent promoting the tar sands - but figures to be more useful to getting donors to think they've done something socially useful while actually helping the same multinationals who profit from exactly the same human rights abuses presented by the Cons' allies as demanding action.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- David Olive points out the growing consensus that those who have benefited most from free-market economics and bailouts alike should be expected to contribute more to the price of civilization - and the unsustainability of the system that's led to growing inequality:

“My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress,” wrote Buffett, whose tax rate last year was just 17 per cent, compared with an average of 36 per cent for his colleagues at his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. head office in Omaha. “It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.”

Buffett no doubt braced for a backlash from the affluent. And Conrad Black, for one, has fretted that Buffett is exhorting lawmakers into a “tokenistic fiscal persecution of the most affluent” – a demographic to which the disgraced former press baron remains loyal, though his membership has lapsed.

But the real story here is the scarcity of objections to Buffett’s call for a level playing field, in which all income groups are able to participate fully in society.
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The salient backdrop for the current distemper is a 30-year stagnation in middle class incomes, while prices for fuel, shelter, tuition and even food have been soaring.

The gap between rich and poor has widened markedly in Canada, where the top 1 per cent of income earners accounts for almost 40 per cent of total national income. That same top 1 per cent collected one-third of growth in national income between 1998 and 2007. In the 1950s and 1960s, that figure was a mere 8 per cent.
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The Conference Board usefully calls for a discussion on the efficacy of the 189 tax loopholes in current legislation, and the attractive alternative of a higher basic exemption. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives would add an examination of the deleterious effects of EI and welfare programs grown miserly in the past decade, and the impact on income inequality caused by our own tax-policy changes favouring the affluent.

We can have that discussion peaceably in school auditoriums across the country. Or we can have it in the streets. But there will be a reckoning, because the status quo is untenable.

- But then, Gerald Caplan notes that there are still plenty of forces working toward even more glaring inequality - even if they're becoming more reluctant to make the case directly and publicly:

Ten years after the trauma of 9/11, the richest 1 per cent of American households earn as much as the bottom 60 per cent and have as much wealth as the bottom 90 per cent. But you ain’t seen nothing yet. Combine low taxes with tax credits, tax havens and tax loopholes, and you’ll come upon a capitalist nirvana where many of the largest corporations pay no taxes at all and where, according to estimates by the Tax Justice Network, trillions of corporate dollars are hidden away, costing perhaps a quarter of a trillion dollars in foregone taxes. No prizes for guessing where it goes instead of to the public good.

There are more filthy rich folks now than at any other moment in history and they’re leveraging their astounding wealth to make sure they get filthier at the expense of the rest of us, still of course the vast majority. What is true of America is equally true of Britain and increasingly true of Canada. While the middle class shrinks, the working class slips backwards and social mobility erodes, the rich buy themselves politicians, lobbyists, legal beagles, slick accountants, “trained economists,” television networks, “think” tanks and whatever other apparatus is needed to make them even richer. Their success surpasses even the most piggish of expectations.

Osama bin Laden inflicted a terrible crime on the American people. America’s elites and their allies have done the rest.

- Bruce Johnstone raises an important point in making the case as to why a vote on the Canadian Wheat Board should matter. But I'd argue his examples of other areas where votes matter serve more as the next frontier of attacks on the collective good rather than entirely safe examples of institutions immune from similar individual-choice language (for the identical purpose of turning them into corporate cash cows):

The reality is that no right is absolute. We infringe on people's right to choose when we have single-payer public auto insurance or health-care systems. But we accept this infringement of our rights as reasonable, given the advantages of the single-payer system (universal coverage, low cost, greater efficiency, etc.).

The CWB's single desk is not unlike our health-care and public auto insurance systems. Would you want those systems taken away without at least a vote on the matter? Shouldn't farmers have the same rights as the rest of us?

- Finally, I have every suspicion that one of the Cons' goals early in their majority is to make sure that there's no scandal so avoidable or important that their base won't eagerly fall in line to minimize it. And Bob Dechert looks to have taken an important step in that effort.

On setups

Pogge deals with one of the bizarre parts of the Cons' spin on the Afghan torture cover-up committee. But there's another piece of Bob Dechert's talking points that looks even more damaging:

"I haven't heard anything about that at all, I'm surprised, to be frank," Mr. Dechert told The Hill Times. "I think they came to the conclusion that Canadians weren't interested, and they dropped it and just moved on, but I don't know anything specific about the review. There's obviously no smoking gun or they would have said something about it by now."

Of course, it's precisely because the Cons' inevitable talking point was so easily foreseeable that some of us have warned against any structure which provided for limited opposition access to information while prohibiting any public disclosure. But apparently the Libs and Bloc are just realizing the obvious.

And so here they are now: sworn to secrecy as to the contents of the documents being reviewed, having no say as to which (if any) will ever be disclosed - and facing the talking point that the sworn silence that they so foolishly agreed to serves as proof that the Cons were right all along. And we can still rest assured that if there are indeed smoking guns in the documents, the Cons will claim that the Libs and Bloc now share equally in the responsibility for their remaining hidden.

All of which means that instead of enforcing the ruling requiring the Cons to produce the demanded documentation without costly strings attached, the Libs and Bloc have ultimately ensured that the public pays millions of dollars to grant the Cons political cover. And nobody can say they weren't warned.