Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- George Monbiot criticizes the UK Cons' latest effort to outlaw any form of individual action or expression which might intrude upon the corporate bubble:

The existing rules are bad enough. Introduced by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, antisocial behaviour orders (asbos) have criminalised an apparently endless range of activities, subjecting thousands – mostly young and poor – to bespoke laws. They have been used to enforce a kind of caste prohibition: personalised rules which prevent the untouchables from intruding into the lives of others.

You get an asbo for behaving in a manner deemed by a magistrate as likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to other people. Under this injunction, the proscribed behaviour becomes a criminal offence. Asbos have been granted which forbid the carrying of condoms by a prostitute, homeless alcoholics from possessing alcohol in a public place, a soup kitchen from giving food to the poor, a young man from walking down any road other than his own, children from playing football in the street. They were used to ban peaceful protests against the Olympic clearances.
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[A new] bill would permit injunctions against anyone of 10 or older who "has engaged or threatens to engage in conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person". It would replace asbos with ipnas (injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance), which would not only forbid certain forms of behaviour, but also force the recipient to discharge positive obligations. In other words, they can impose a kind of community service order on people who have committed no crime, which could, the law proposes, remain in force for the rest of their lives.
The bill also introduces public space protection orders, which can prevent either everybody or particular kinds of people from doing certain things in certain places. It creates new dispersal powers, which can be used by the police to exclude people from an area (there is no size limit), whether or not they have done anything wrong.
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The new injunctions and the new dispersal orders create a system in which the authorities can prevent anyone from doing more or less anything. But they won't be deployed against anyone. Advertisers, who cause plenty of nuisance and annoyance, have nothing to fear; nor do opera lovers hogging the pavements of Covent Garden. Annoyance and nuisance are what young people cause; they are inflicted by oddballs, the underclass, those who dispute the claims of power.

These laws will be used to stamp out plurality and difference, to douse the exuberance of youth, to pursue children for the crime of being young and together in a public place, to help turn this nation into a money-making monoculture, controlled, homogenised, lifeless, strifeless and bland. For a government which represents the old and the rich, that must sound like paradise.

- Michael Geist makes the case for an independent investigation into CSIS' surveillance of Canadians (frequently laundered through foreign spy services to avoid accountability). And in an entirely related story, James MacGregor worries that pipeline politics are harming Canadian democracy.

- Mark Weisbrot takes a look at how NAFTA has affected Mexico, and finds little reason to think that its place as North America's cheapest pool of labour has done much to benefit Mexican workers.

- Finally, Ian Welsh discusses how many personal and social choices are being made based on the "death bet" - that by the time problems fully manifest themselves, the people responsible will be dead anyway:

The men and women who lived through the Great Depression always planned for the (future). They built power plants which produced more power than needed, bridges which could handle more traffic, water purification plants which produced more water than needed. They made sure infrastructure would last for decades, and then built it so well it outlasted even their (specifications).

Their heirs, the Silents and the Boomers, thought this was absurd. Why not party now, and let the future take care of itself?

Call this the “death bet”. In it’s pure form, the death bet is just that, a bet that when the bill comes do, you’ll be dead. If you live a good life and die owing millions, well, what do you care?

But someone will pay that bill. Maybe it will be your creditors, who might even go out of business, unable to collect what they are owed. Perhaps it will be your heirs, if the millions adhere to property. Perhaps it will be someone you don’t even know.

But someone will pay. The good life, bought by debt, is always paid for.

The death bet is why we are not dealing with climate change, even though we know that it is coming and we know it will kill hundreds of millions and might even destroy our entire society. The death bet is why our governments make huge tax cuts today knowing that either taxes will have to be increased in the future or spending will have to be drastically cut because the spending is not used for investment. But in the meantime the government can borrow, or print money, so who cares? The politicians who make the tax cuts won’t be in power, and many of the people who receive the cuts will be dead, so what do they care?

Wednesday Morning Links

- I'm not sure that Alex Himelfarb doesn't contradict himself in saying there's no room for left-wing parties to promise more effective government while pointing out the layers of rules and control that makes it difficult to accomplish much in the civil service as it stands. But Alex Himelfarb's defence of public service is definitely worth a read:

An unrelenting and escalating assault on government is changing public attitudes. We rarely hear people talk anymore about politics and public service as a noble calling. We are more likely to hear derision. Even many of those in the private sector who now take such comfort and pride in the performance of our financial sector were not so long ago deriding politicians and bureaucrats for “not getting it” when they opposed bank mergers or the conglomerations of banks and insurance companies. We quickly lose sight of the fact that our regulatory system and the “bureaucrats” who uphold it were key to our performance. In this climate, politicians and private sector leaders instead too often compete in government bashing. When is the last time we heard a speech here in Canada on the importance of government and the value of our public service?

- Not shocking: the millions of litres of spills in Canada's Arctic which had previously gone unreported. Shocking: the fact that the news was actually allowed to see the light of day.

- After using the existence of developing states as an excuse to avoid action to slow down climate change, the Harper government is now being shown up even by its closest neighbour in that group. But needless to say, nobody among the Cons seems the least bit interesting in changing course as a result.

- Electoral reform still seems to be receiving short shrift even as it's become one of the centrepieces of the UK's coalition government. But at least Chantal Hebert has noticed that it's something the Libs should be looking to get in on.

- Finally, David Climenhaga duly slams Alberta's media for excluding left-wing voices.

On blame games

Shorter Stephen Harper:

Sure, it might look like my government imposed draconian visa rules on Mexico without warning, then pointed the finger at legislation which we've made no effort to change even knowing that the main opposition party will pass anything we put in front of them. But let me assure you that the entire country made us do it.