Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Rob Nixon's review of Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything nicely sums up why the book - and the fundamental clash it documents between corporate profit-seeking and the health of people and our planet - should be at the centre of our political conversation:

(N)eoliberalism — promotes a high-consumption, ­carbon-hungry system. Neoliberalism has encouraged mega-mergers, trade agreements hostile to environmental and labor regulations, and global hypermobility, enabling a corporation like Exxon to make, as McKibben has noted, “more money last year than any company in the history of money.” Their outsize power mangles the democratic process. Yet the carbon giants continue to reap $600 billion in annual subsidies from public coffers, not to speak of a greater subsidy: the right, in Klein’s words, to treat the atmosphere as a “waste dump.”

So much for the invisible hand. As the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson observed, when it comes to the environment, the invisible hand never picks up the check.

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In democracies driven by lobbyists, donors and plutocrats, the giant polluters are going to win while the rest of us, in various degrees of passivity and complicity, will watch the planet die. “Any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a much broader battle of worldviews,” Klein writes. “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.”

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To change economic norms and ethical perceptions in tandem is even more formidable than the technological battle to adapt to the heavy weather coming down the tubes. Yet “This Changes Everything” is, improbably, Klein’s most optimistic book. She braids together the science, psychology, geopolitics, economics, ethics and activism that shape the climate question. 

- Meanwhile, Karl Nerenberg writes that we should see Stephen Harper's gross failure to do anything about climate change as his greatest scandal. And Bob Weber reports that NAFTA's Commission on Environmental Cooperation is just the latest environmental watchdog to be put down by the Cons - highlighting both the ineffectiveness of trade agreements in serving any interests other than profit maximization, and Harper's own hostility toward the world around us.

- John Nichols sees the U.S. as a prime (and painful) example of what happens when politics are governed by money rather than by people. But Mary Hansen and Kayla Schultz note that on at least a few fronts, voters nonetheless voted against corporate money and power in the recent midterm elections.

- Of course, that positive takeaway depends on voters actually having the chance to express their views. And Bruce Johnstone writes that the Sask Party is determined to prevent both public opinion and empirical evidence from interfering with their drive to privatize liquor retailing.

- Finally, Dr. Dawg exposes the barbarism behind the Cons' treatment of refugees and other vulnerable immigrants. But we shouldn't pretend the problem of dehumanizing perceived outsiders is limited to that issue alone, as Tabatha Southey notes that the Cons are similarly bent on depriving sex workers of their humanity.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Katrina vanden Heuvel criticizes the U.S. Democrats' move away from discussing inequality by in favour of platitudes about opportunity for the middle class. And while Matthew Yglesias may be correct in responding that the messaging change hasn't resulted in much difference in Democratic policy proposals, it's certainly significant when a political party makes the choice to take poverty and inequality off the table as a vital part of the argument for its policy consensus.

- Meanwhile, Stephen Elliott-Buckley reminds us that the 1% tends to get its way in policy debates in no small part because it exhibits solidarity often missing among other groups:

For centuries, the 1% were the nobility, the aristocrats, the old money, the patriarchy. Then Adam Smith pitched capitalism in his 1776 book Wealth of Nations, and liberated the entrepreneurs to join the blue bloods. Today, every January, corporate and government leaders from around the world – the people who literally rule the world – meet in the winter-wonderland of Davos, Switzerland, to launch the annual World Economic Forum. There, they plan the global agenda. This year’s sexy new idea was advancing “social entrepreneurialism.” That sounds so kumbaya, just like public-private partnerships, but it’s just spin for privatizing social services.

The World Economic Forum is just one of the most recent venues where the global elite show their solidarity with each other, and plan how to maximize shareholder wealth and minimize global social, economic and political equality. Beyond Davos, our rulers have also created a roadmap for undermining the democracy of nations through secret trade agreements like NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and CETA (the Comprehensive and Economic Trade Agreement). These agreements are designed to give right-wing governments the excuse to deregulate industries, privatize public services, and elevate shareholders’ and investors’ “right” to profit above the needs of society.
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The member groups of progressive coalitions need to find ways of connecting their individual members to better support each other. And the coalitions themselves need to support each other. I believe such an effort at deepening and broadening solidarity has, so far, been lacking. Meanwhile, the 1% are deeply well-connected, from community chambers of commerce right up to the World Trade Organization. They’re all spouting the same spin and rhetoric on their members’ behalf, while we, the 99%, can often not get past “letterhead coalitions,” a term introduced to me by Amanda Tattersall, one of the founders of the Sydney Alliance in Australia. What good is it to have a coalition when the extent of union, or faith, or community organization activity is merely a letter of support?

- David Ball reports on this summer's Peoples' Social Forum - which looks like one promising effort to build connections and lay the foundation for ongoing activism.

- And in case there was much doubt there's still plenty to organize against, the CCCE lays bare its trade agenda - featuring its demand that the TPP be negotiated and implemented without public input in order to ensure closed-door "enforcement" of corporate priorities and at most "dialogue" for labour, the environment and anything else not profit-related.

- Finally, Jonathan Kay rightly criticizes the Cons' "punitive moral absolutism" when it comes to withholding needed health care from refugees. But as Emmett MacFarlane notes, the Cons always seem to find some way to sink even lower than their past precedents for callous inhumanity - and Robert Goguen did just that in lecturing a sex worker about her own gang rape.

#mtlqc13 - Day 2 Review

Aaron Wherry has been documenting the resolutions passed at the NDP's convention in Montreal - and so I haven't seen much need to comment on them in detail. But the most noteworthy development in today's policy debates came from a resolution which wasn't passed - but which nonetheless signalled the NDP's willingness to tackle difficult but important social issues based on members' input.

The following resolution was pushed up the priority list in the resolution panel, and came to the floor for debate this afternoon:

6-31-13
Resolution on Upholding Sex Workers’ Rights to Life, Liberty, Security, and Equality Submitted by Vancouver East
WHEREAS Canadian values include respect for human and labour rights of all persons, including the right to life, liberty, security, equality and freedom of expression and association as set out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms;
WHEREAS Canadian courts, the Parliamentary Subcommittee on Solicitation Laws and the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry concluded that criminalization of sex workers increases the violence perpetrated against them and decreases their access to police and other legal and social protections.
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT we, the NDP, support the repeal of sections 210, 211, 212(1), 212(3), and 213 of the Criminal Code of Canada in order to improve the health, safety, equality and social citizenship of sex workers.
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT we, the NDP, do not support the enactment of legislation that prohibits the purchase or sale of sexual services or sex workers’ ability to work with others.
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT while the prostitution laws remain in force, we, the NDP, call on all Canadian police departments to immediately halt enforcement of ss. 211, 212(1), 212(3), and 213 and, instead, ensure sex workers have equal access to police protection and the justice system when they are the victims of crime.

Now, the resolution didn't pass. But that wasn't a matter of it lacking support on the convention floor: instead, after one strong speech favouring the resolution, Libby Davies moved that it be referred to federal council with instructions that it return a formal policy later this year. And that motion, combined with the obvious support of the convention for the cause of ensuring that sex workers are recognized as citizens rather than stigmatized, looks to ensure that the NDP will present an unprecedentedly inclusive policy in the years to come.

The other major development today was Tom Mulcair's speech to members following a successful leadership evaluation. And while I raised some questions about his past speech-making in yesterday's review (based in large part on an address to Saskatchewan's leadership convention which was generally strong on content, but rushed and wordy), he hit the mark today - combining his characteristic intelligence with a far better connection to the audience than I've seen from him in the past. And both that and the review vote bode extremely well for his prospects in holding and building on the NDP's current coalition in the face of a new Liberal leader.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Some content to help fill your weekend...

- The Chronicle Herald tears into the Cons' continued refusal to listen to reason or anything else when it comes to the long form census:

The government has been advised by its statisticians, by provinces and municipalities and by hundreds of organizations that depend on accurate census data that a voluntary census will not produce reliable, usable results. Former Chief Statistician Munir Sheikh felt it necessary to resign in order to inform us that the government’s plan would degrade the data (and to correct Industry Minister Tony Clement’s misrepresentation that Mr. Sheikh supported the plan).

A government document filed as evidence in a lawsuit that is aimed at stopping the change also acknowledges that switching to a voluntary survey will mean some data "will not be usable for a range of objectives for which the census information would be needed."

To ignore all this and to proceed with killing the detailed census is grossly irresponsible. Real people will suffer when there is poorer information about where services are needed.
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But the government had the same response for this expression of Parliament’s will as it had for science, fact and commonsense. It doesn’t care and it isn’t budging.
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(O)n it goes in a parade of unbelievably silly, trivial and discredited arguments.

The Conservatives are debating and governing with their fingers in their ears. It makes no sense and it’s not a pretty sight.

- Stephen Maher notes that whatever one's view of ministerial responsibility, the reality is that the Cons' culture of information suppression starts at the top. And that may make for the most important rebuttal to any spin as to whether to blame individual ministers or their subordinates: the Cons have a concerted effort to keep facts away from Canadians in every department under their control, and the real problem is Stephen Harper.

- Meanwhile, Kady O'Malley has posted the definitive Sebastien Togneri document dump.

- Dan Gardner writes a scathing indictment of the lack of action to protect sex workers, and notes that if the judiciary has had to step in it's only because Lib and Con governments alike have chosen to do nothing:

Let me repeat: a judge concluded that the law is helping to butcher women. Sure, it’s fun to argue about the role of the judiciary. Important, even. But isn’t the judge’s conclusion about what the law is doing to women just a little more worrying than the possibility that a judge’s interpretation of her role is excessively expansive?

Place the two issues on a scale and weigh them. On one side: an overstepping judge. On the other: thousands of bruised and bleeding women. And several hundred corpses.

Which matters more?

Now, I want to emphasize that reasonable people can look at the evidence and come to a different conclusion that Justice Himel. But what no reasonable person can do is shrug. The mere possibility that the law is contributing to brutality inflicted on vulnerable women is horrifying. A reasonable person who hears this will want to know more. A reasonable person will demand further investigation. A reasonable person will insist on getting to the bottom of this, now.

- Finally, I'll have plenty to say later on. But for commentary on the Cons' decree that anybody having anything to do with a major Canadian Islamic organization is to be shunned, the posts by Dr. Dawg, Balbulican, pogge, Dave, Greg and Cliff are well worth a look.

(Edit: fixed label.)