Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading:

- Ross Douthat (!) discusses the distinction between actual cosmopolitanism, and the global elitism that's instead come to dominate international power relations:

Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s own. It takes its cue from a Roman playwright’s line that “nothing human is alien to me,” and goes outward ready to be transformed by what it finds.

The people who consider themselves “cosmopolitan” in today’s West, by contrast, are part of a meritocratic order that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call “global citizens.”

This species is racially diverse (within limits) and eager to assimilate the fun-seeming bits of foreign cultures — food, a touch of exotic spirituality. But no less than Brexit-voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens think and act as members of a tribe.

...

(I)t’s a problem that our tribe of self-styled cosmopolitans doesn’t see itself clearly as a tribe: because that means our leaders can’t see themselves the way the Brexiteers and Trumpistas and Marine Le Pen voters see them.

They can’t see that what feels diverse on the inside can still seem like an aristocracy to the excluded, who look at cities like London and see, as Peter Mandler wrote for Dissent after the Brexit vote, “a nearly hereditary professional caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored by multinational corporations.”

They can’t see that paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders Londoners who love Afghan restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or American liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of majority-minority schools.

They can’t see that their vision of history’s arc bending inexorably away from tribe and creed and nation-state looks to outsiders like something familiar from eras past: A powerful caste’s self-serving explanation for why it alone deserves to rule the world.

- Meanwhile, the Economist also recognizes the reasons for anger at a neoliberal economic model which has left far too many people worse off.

- Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel highlight the connection between denial of race and gender discrimination, and the belief that inclusive language doesn't matter.

- Mike Soron comments on the need to fight back against "climate conservatism" which pays lip service to protecting our planet from man-made pollution while denying the possibility of actually doing anything. And Steven Poole points out how zombie ideas manage to continue spreading long after they've been disproven - with the pecuniary interests of people who profit from their acceptance looming as one of the most obvious explanations.

- Dean Beeby reports that contrary to their campaign promises, the Libs are encouraging the Canada Revenue Agency to continue pursuing charities politically targeted by the Cons for daring to pursue social justice.

- Finally, Shane Bauer offers a long-form look at a private prison from the perspective of a newly-hired correctional officer.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Paul Krugman calls out the U.S.' deficit scolds for continuing to invent a crisis to distract from the real problems with middling growth and high unemployment. And Bruce Johnstone singles out a few of the Cons' talking points which have somehow become conventional wisdom without having an iota of truth to them. But in case there was any doubt why the Cons aren't being exposed to their own patent wrongness, William Watson's (hardly people-friendly) column explains why - as Jack Mintz manages to qualify as the least corporate-biased member of a hand-picked budget advisory group.

- David Cay Johnston discusses how California is thoroughly disproving the claim that high-end tax increases have any negative impact on growth, as the state is actually thriving after passing significant tax increases through a referendum. And David Climenhaga points to the astroturf groups lobbying for increased exploitation of temporary foreign workers as a prime example of how zombie lies are kept undead:

(I)t cannot be mere coincidence that in almost every case the main groups calling for more TFWs turn out to have a long history of anti-union advocacy. In some cases, before the TFW issue came along, their sole purpose was attacking the right of working people to bargain collectively.

This web of anti-union advocacy groups includes the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, Restaurants Canada, the Workplace Democracy Institute of Canada, the Merit Contractors Association, “Working Canadians,” and the Canadian Labour Watch Association.

Even the mysterious National Citizens Coalition, the granddaddy of all Canadian far-right AstroTurf groups, once headed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, puts in a cameo appearance in this convoluted tale!

Each of these groups is not forthcoming about its finances and, it is reasonable to conclude given their purported mandates to represent to represent a different segment of the Canadian economy from “taxpayers,” to restaurant owners, to ordinary working stiffs who just want a little “freedom” in their workplace, is deceptive about its true objectives.
...
The links among this well-established network of anti-union agitators have been obvious for many years.

That the same players who hold the most virulently anti-union views and the most offensive opinions about the supposed shortcomings of Canadian workers should turn out to be the loudest advocates, and in some places the only advocates, for the TFW Program suggests the true agenda behind the vociferous TFW lobby.

It is quite apparent the goals of the Canadian Taxpayers Association, the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses, and the various trade associations involved are to weaken the bargaining power of Canadian families (including many of their own naïve members), keep wages low, keep all workers vulnerable and re-elect the Harper Government.

- Meanwhile, Bill Tieleman discusses how the B.C. Liberals are using their latest deliberately-provoked confrontation with teachers to try to push a for-profit education model.

- Abrahm Lustgarten reports that after being told that there are no risks whatsoever to fracking, U.S. residents are learning otherwise the hard way:

Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation's geology as an invisible dumping ground.

No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.

There are growing signs they were mistaken.
....
The boom in oil and natural gas drilling is deepening the uncertainties, geologists acknowledge. Drilling produces copious amounts of waste, burdening regulators and demanding hundreds of additional disposal wells. Those wells — more holes punched in the ground — are changing the earth's geology, adding man-made fractures that allow water and waste to flow more freely.
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A ProPublica review of well records, case histories and government summaries of more than 220,000 well inspections found that structural failures inside injection wells are routine. From late 2007 to late 2010, one well integrity violation was issued for every six deep injection wells examined — more than 17,000 violations nationally. More than 7,000 wells showed signs that their walls were leaking. Records also show wells are frequently operated in violation of safety regulations and under conditions that greatly increase the risk of fluid leakage and the threat of water contamination.

Structurally, a disposal well is the same as an oil or gas well. Tubes of concrete and steel extend anywhere from a few hundred feet to two miles into the earth. At the bottom, the well opens into a natural rock formation. There is no container. Waste simply seeps out, filling tiny spaces left between the grains in the rock like the gaps between stacked marbles.

- Finally, USA Today rightly questions why we allow big pharma to name its price for needed medications (even as we set up byzantine legal structures to protect the resulting profits).

Monday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- With prorogation looking like it's bound to be back on the table fairly shortly, Lori Turnbull offers a worthwhile suggestion to end the Cons' abuses:

The 2012 prorogation would be substantively different. First, there is no obvious political land mine to avoid. Second, the Conservatives have demonstrated how majority status confers an immunity of sorts from even the most scathing criticism from the opposition benches. These factors make a potential upcoming prorogation less necessary from a political standpoint, but the fact remains: We live in a country where a prime minister can shut down the House, the pre-eminent institution of our parliamentary democracy, on a whim, for no particular reason.

In our new book, Democratizing the Constitution: Reforming Responsible Government, we argue that prorogations should occur only with the consent of a two-thirds majority of the House. This would place the balance of power in the hands of elected representatives, where it belongs. The House would have to consent to turning the lights off. If we allow the prime minister to unilaterally decide whether and when the House can perform its scrutiny function, we reverse the basic logic of responsible government, which dictates that the government must be accountable to the House. The two-thirds majority threshold is high enough to nearly always necessitate multiparty support.

A simple majority, as suggested by the Liberals and the NDP, would still allow a majority government prime minister to get his way just by whipping the votes of his own caucus. We argue that where prorogation is routine, the supermajority threshold should be reached easily. But, if adopted, our proposal would enable the House of Commons to protect itself against a prime minister who is motivated to avoid it. We seem to be living in an era where elected representatives have to stand up for their right to do their jobs; this reform would change that.

- Meanwhile, it shouldn't come as much surprise that the Cons plan to formally declare that they see no problem tearing up international climate change agreements. But the more remarkable part of Roger Smith's revelation that they plan to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol is that the Cons' plan was to wait until after the next major round of negotiations - at a point when global reaction will likely determine whether it's possible to make progress despite the Cons' constant obstruction on behalf of the tar sands - to repudiate the work that's been done in the past.

- And the Cons' spirit of openness and honesty can also be found in their systematic deception about the cost of renovating the Nortel campus for the Department of Defence.

- Finally, pogge chronicles the birth of a zombie lie (which we can expect to hear repeated ad nauseum as the Cons attempt to distract from the appalling conditions facing Canada's First Nations by attacking their leaders).

Long Weekend Zombie Lie Hunt

A couple of notes that desperately need correction in otherwise reasonable columns...

First, Bronwyn Eyre's column on the HST is much less cheerleaderish about the HST than the Star-Phoenix' usual offering on the subject.

But she does maintain the paper's habit of painting the issue as a false choice between "Canadians' ability to pay for the basics -- food, rent, utilities, transportation -- let alone the things that improve quality of life" and "(government) expenditures for infrastructure, education, health care...pensions and social programs". So let's offer up a reminder: the HST is bad for both, increasing both individual costs of living and government deficits for the benefit of the corporate sector.

Meanwhile, James Travers may be right to rein in the Libs' sense of entitlement. But his acceptance of a "self-evident" statement that Canada is closer to a Con majority than an alternative government depends on exactly the mistake I pointed out here.

In reality, of course, the real issue isn't which leader commands a plurality of seats following the next election, but which party (or combination thereof) can win the confidence of the House of Commons - making for far more favourable terrain than a simple Con vs. Lib seat count. And while the Libs seem to think it's in their interest to buy into Stephen Harper's flat-out lies as to what makes a government legitimate, the real lesson from Travers' column should be that anybody who wants to get rid of the Harper government should be pushing the Libs to stop using such a counterproductive message.

Saturday Morning Zombie Lie Hunt

I suppose it was inevitable that the corporatist right would eventually start trying to spin social-science research into supporting a free-markets-above-all worldview, and that right-wing pundits would further twist the outcomes. But of course it's highly dangerous to let that type of assault on reality go unchallenged lest it come to be taken as conventional wisdom - so let's take some time to point out the glaring flaws in the National Post's effort to push both yesterday.

Let's start with the article on the work of Joe Henrich. Naturally, the article itself is absolutely loaded with spin - but at base, here's what it's talking about:

The 13 researchers on Mr. Henrich's international team spent time -- and played clever psychological games -- with more than 2,000 people in 15 different societies.

One researcher trekked to Bolivia to play the games with the Tsimane people who hunt and forage for food in the rain forest. Another anthropologist introduced the games to the Hadza living in small nomadic groups on the savannah in Tanzania. At the other end of the human spectrum, the researchers studied wage earners in Accra, Ghana and Missouri, in the American Midwest.

In each of the 15 societies, they recruited volunteers to play Dictator, Ultimatum and Third-Party Punishment - games widely used by researchers to gauge people's willingness to share with strangers, and punish people who make unfair allocations.

The study found that the likelihood that people "played fair" with strangers increased with the degree people were integrated into markets and participated in a world religion. Participants in the larger-scale societies were also more likely to punish players who did not play fair.

Eliminate the obviously slanted language about markets, and there are plenty of grounds for distinction between the groups of people considered. Rather than simply consisting of "non-market" vs. "market", they can equally easily be framed as "tribal" vs. "non-tribal", which would seem to reflect reason for suspicion about the right's constant efforts to foment a war of civilizations. Or "interconnected to the broader world" vs. "not interconnected to the broader world", which would seem to fit particularly well with the findings related to "world religion". Or even as "not subject to stable democratic government which regulates social relations" vs. "subject to stable democratic government which regulates social relations", as evidence that democratic regulation is in fact the basis for good human behaviour.

Now, I'm not going to say that any one of the above is necessarily right. But the researchers look to have deliberately ignored obvious and important differences between the groups studied in order to pretend that capitalism is the fount of all that is right and good.

Naturally, that already-misleading message gets turned into such ever-less-plausible assertions as "markets have been a force for good over the last 10,000 years" and "people trust and play fair with strangers because (of) markets and religion". And all this in what's supposed to be a news report rather than a Fraser Institute polemic.

But it takes Tasha Kheiriddin to turn the study into proof of the divine wisdom of the prophet Gekko.

Keep in mind that the "market" societies studies in fact differ from the "non-market" ones in having both more capitalism as generally understood, and more government regulation. (Indeed, one could hardly imagine a type of individual more free of government interference in a true libertarian sense than somebody who has the opportunity every day to wander off and live off the land according to his or her own ability to survive.)

Notwithstanding the fact that the study as reported - even on its own biased terms - doesn't pretend to say anything about the effect of regulation on individual behaviour, Kheiriddin manages to emit this stunner:

(I)f governments act to curtail market forces, are they actually curbing our civilizing impulses as well? In other words, will a bigger welfare state take us back to our ruder, cruder nature?

Certainly, receiving a state entitlement demands less of the recipient than a voluntary transaction would. Getting a government cheque or benefit is not an exchange; it is a one-way transaction, and often faceless at that. If our sense of fair play depends on our integration into a larger commercial society, then it follows that the more we are taken care of by government, the less practice we will have with exercising these impulses.

In other words, access to health care is exactly the same as isolation in a remote rain forest with no contact with the outside world. And because of that common effect, if we just eliminate the government that makes an interconnected society possible and instead allow corporate monoliths to sell lead paint chips as children's snacks subject only to punishment in the "market", we'll all be able to better fulfill our true potential for human goodness.

Suffice it to say that anybody paying even a modicum of attention should know better than to take either the slanted research or the upside-down opinion linked to it as having anything useful to say. And the more the likes of Kheiriddin try to grasp at such broken straws in an effort to support their justification for crass me-firstism, the more obvious it should be that their beliefs don't hold up in reality.

A zombie lie is born

Yesterday, I noted one problem with the CCPA's report on the HST. But as has consistently been the case when it comes to the HST, the most-repeated talking point is one that's based on ripping two words out of context: in this case "revenue neutral". So let's make absolutely clear what the CCPA's analysis does - and doesn't - say about the effect of harmonization.

There are two key assumptions which explain where the phrase comes from in the CCPA's report. First, as I noted yesterday, there's the fact that the HST is being compared to unrelated tax measures applied to individuals. While the "revenue neutral" declaration applies only if one compares the price hike resulting from the expansion of sales taxes on individuals to the credits being offered through other tax channels, there's no reason to actually assume that one is inextricably linked to the other. And if one looks at the HST alone (which can easily be done at page 8 of the CCPA's report), the result is a tax hike on families averaging approximately $500 each year.

More importantly, the CCPA's global conclusions are based on the effect of the HST and other tax measures on individuals only, and don't take into account the loss in public revenue resulting from corporate exemptions. Which is where the growing zombie lie comes in.

The next wave of pro-HST spin seems to involve pretending that the CCPA's study somehow shows that the HST scheme as a whole would be revenue neutral for the provincial government. But in reality, the corporate exemptions which are explicitly excluded from the CCPA's study will cut provincial revenue by $4.5 billion per year (the same number as the oft-trumpeted amount of eliminated "embedded sales taxes").

So no matter how desperately its proponents try to rip phrases out of context, the HST isn't revenue-neutral by a long shot - whether one looks at its impact on individuals (where it imposes real costs), or on the government as a whole (where it substantially reduces the public resources available for the provincial government). And as with the "591,000 jobs!!!" declaration that's previously been debunked, anybody claiming the HST to be "revenue neutral" based on the CCPA study can safely be dismissed as arguing in bad faith.

Edit: fixed wording.

Shill baby shill

We're probably not far from broken record territory here. But as long as Andrew Steele and his ilk want to keep repeating zombie lies, I suppose someone has to give them their due rebuttal. So for those who missed it the first time:

Even leaving aside problems with his assumptions, Jack Mintz' much-bandied-about "591,000 jobs" number incorporates other tax changes along with the HST. On this ground alone, anybody saying "the HST will create 591,000 jobs" can be dismissed as either not knowing what they're talking about or lying through their teeth.