Choice, No Choice

Posted on 2014/01/30 by danneau

As a teen, I got dragged off to Europe, by my parents, for a number of reasons. Some of it was, I think, tied to the idea that the California way of living at the time (1966) was a bit of a gilded cage, and that the offspring could use a little perspective. This was not done lightly, and may have had a note of seeking refuge from the American commercial juggernaut. Whatever it was, there was a particularly interesting interlude of about a month when we crossed the border at Trieste into a (drumroll and dire music) Communist country, the Yugoslavia of the day. Tito’s Yugoslavia was something of a renegade in that there was some leeway for personal and community initiative and where parts of the country were more of a transitional zone between communist and capitalist parts of the world. There was a lot of tourist infrastructure, particularly along the Dalmatian Coast, with evidence that more was in the offing. By Western standards, it was insanely cheap, somewhat frugal, but the beauty of the place and the general warmth of the welcome lent some magic to pretty much the entirety of the month-long sojourn.

Most of our travel was in Croatia, with forays into Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia. We never got into Serbia at all, but these divisions appeared less political and more ethnic and culture at the time, particularly to an outsider who didn’t speak any of the local languages. Encounters with locals rarely veered into the realm of politics or government: it was clear that people were not encouraged to debate the merits of Tito’s rule.

Mostar, when I was there, looked something like this:

Mostar, in the midst of the post-Tito dismantling, looked something like this:

Tank Cannon Remodelling

The horrors of the struggles in Bosnia, in Croatia and, eventually in Serbia are well-documented and a bit of a cautionary tale on what a combination of history, religion and ideology can unleash on entire populations. this was clearly a conflict where insanity prevailed and where there were no good choices, or at least the good choices never made it to the decision-making process.

It has often occurred to me over the last years, particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring, that it is often the case that what might be better choices are often not considered, and this fits in well with a current of thought stating that it would be mistaken to think that those who govern do so in the broader interest of the governed. Egypt seems torn between two utterly blind alleys, Libya is a total basket case and a cauldron of conflict, and Syrians, either wittingly or otherwise, have put themselves into the jaws of a vise where neither side presents anything other than repression and misery. The addition of meddling by Iran, by the Saudi clique, and by the Western clique only exacerbates the problem, prolonging the conflict and muddying the possibilities for resolution. Almost all the principals in these struggles are bad actors, often representing monied interests who are more interested in a dominant business model than in the resolution of a bloody and terrifying conflict. Assad is a bad actor, Morsi is a bad actor, Al-Sisi is a bad actor, Obama and the House of Saud are bad actors, as are the Mullahs in Iran and a host of other smaller fractious players working at the destruction of civilization.

Such also appears to be the case in the Ukraine, where factions aspiring to EU membership are in barely restrained warfare with other factions cleaving to old connections with Russia. No one speaks of a possible other course, favouring neither one not the other. The EU is a monster bureaucracy and an instrument of global capital. Russia is a bastion of corrupt dictatorship with some of the trappings of democracy: neither seems like a model that any sane person would want to emulate or with whom one would want to form close ties, and there may be good reason why the choice to not align never gets heard. As was the case with the original Orange Revolution (also the Rose Revolution in Georgia), there have been serious incursions of outside influence. Isn’t it stunning to hear Stephen Harper decry the lack of democracy in the Ukraine while he works actively to subvert and destroy what little is left of our representative parliamentary system here at home?

In an article published yesterday at CounterPunch (thanks to Murray Dobbin for circulating it), Eric Draitser puts the current situation in the Ukraine into perspective, enumerating the moves to co-opt a peaceful protest and escalate to violence and possible civil war. The Timoshenko/Ianukovich cleavage is well documented and, while presented as a battle of ideologies, it often looks more like a war of factions looking for dominant privilege. The only question left should be as to how to limit the damage done by both outside influences and by those in thrall to those influences, and then the consideration of whether, rather than choosing between Russia and EU, it might be of greater benefit in the long run to remain unaligned, where the best choice, given what’s on the table, is no choice at all.

Draitser’s article is well worth a read, both for what it says about Ukraine’s struggles, those of the Arab World, Greece, Italy, the EU, but also for lessons to be extracted in relation to governance slower to home.

Lest this:

…become this:

Inappropriate Time and Motion

Posted on 2014/01/24 by danneau

Another piece cropped on the front page (Web) of the Globe and Mail yesterday about how teachers should be paid for performance rather than on seniority: I guess it had been too long since the Globe had taken a shot at teachers and at the public school system. Much of this grousing stems from the lack of desire on the part of those most endowed by out current economic system to pay for the enlightenment that should be the outcome of a thorough education for all, rather than just those students whose parents can afford to send them to Upper Canada College or Jean Brébeuf. It can also be the eagle stirring her nest, so that her young ones don’t get no rest (h/t Maria Muldaur for a 1974 recording of an old spiritual), meaning that we can’t let those fat-cat teachers get too comfortable.

Back in the early part of the last century, Frederick Winslow Taylor engaged in studies of industrial production, using time and motion studies as a way to building efficiency into the process of industrial production and refining the idea of measurable outcomes. It has become frequent practice to try to subject schools to the same process, usually by those who represent industrial output and who would like to defund the school system, or at least minimize it and bend it into a factory for productive labour. There are some flaws in the idea, and it’s interesting that the best debunking of the idea came from none other than Peter Senge at a conference in Victoria a dozen or so years ago. Senge was a business consultant and author whose ideas about changing business models found some favour in the late Ninties and early Oughts, but in this address to senior district administrators and ministry personnel, he had some choice thoughts for the gathering.

He compared schools to industrial concerns in terms of both input and output. In many production facilities, there are strict controls over the material on which the process is based, and material that doesn’t meet spec doesn’t get into the chain of production. All else is rejected. This, of course, doesn’t work well in a system of universal education, in which society undertakes to educate everyone’s children as opposed to selecting only the brightest and the best, or the most compliant, or the strongest, fastest, most adept.

Along the chain of industrial production, an enterprise will control as many factors as possible in the run-up to output so as to minimize deviation from spec and guarantee consistency of product at the end of the process. This is difficult for schools, given that the level of parenting will vary considerably, the presence of constructive/destructive influences outside the school system will vary widely, and the school system has call on the clientèle for only part of the day. During the other part, students are bombarded with images and messages as an incitement to consume and often actively encouraged by influences in the wider community to refrain from any exercise for their intellect. Unless there is serious intervention by the family or another agency, it is easy for any real education to stop at the school room door (the converse can also be true, where the dead air can happen in the classroom and where the student avails himself of opportunities outside of class to engage his faculties and pursue constructive interests, a necessary phenomenon when curriculum and delivery are dumbed down and strictly controlled within the school system). Again, in the industrial framework, any unit that doesn’t measure up along the production chain is simply flushed out of the system and ceases to be part of the responsibility of the organization. This is more difficult in the case of schools where the utmost effort must be made to retain all students in some part of the educational framework, lest they become part of the remediation/incarceration network.

Measurement of outcomes is difficult for schools. In the immediate aftermath of public schooling, there are measures of how quickly students enter the job market or post-secondary education (and, eventually, the job market), as well as success at exit exams. These exams measure only a very limited and often mischosen set of outcomes and in a way that often means little or nothing. In the current economic climate, employment statistics are likely not going to be very good because of a dearth of real employment, particularly the jobs worthy of a career and where an exiting student might perceive the ability to build a life on the work on offer.

In addition, there is a serious quandary (not in some minds, I’m sure) about who determines whether a teacher is successful, about which teachers would deserve to be rewarded with merit pay and which teachers should be working for reduced salary because of shortcomings. A great deal of personal preference and the arbitrary would be difficult to avoid. Fairness and justice in the distribution of benefit doesn’t seem to be one of society’s strong points, and the same can be said for a lot of individuals who have risen to positions of authority for reasons other than simple and demonstrated competence.

Finally, there is the matter of pay. Teachers will generally have spent five or six years learning their craft at university at their own expense. They will then spend eight to twelve years climbing up the salary scale until they reach their maximum. I would say that, by all means, we should remove the “seniority” clause: pay teachers the top salary from Day One. Teachers who are not competent need to be flushed out of the system if they can’t, given the opportunity, develop a series of processes and strategies that will result in success as an educator. But let’s also do the same with doctors, dentists, lawyers, judges, politicians, nurses, burger flippers, insurance sales people and the rest of the folks who toil on behalf of the general population. Teachers should do more of their training in the actual schools and should be paid to do that work, much as we do with apprentices in the trades and should access real salaries as soon as they get a position following successful completion of their training.

It is unfortunate that society has become so much a reflection of its industrial/consumer underpinnings: as a society, we are becoming increasingly unfit to judge the appropriateness of our institutions and incapable of bring the change to the institutions (as well as the creation of new or repurposed institutions) that the same society needs to thrive in the future. In the process of rebuilding our processes of education, a good first step might be the reform of the press and the cheap-shot journalism that produces screeds such as the article that set off this whole rant.

Diplomacy

Posted on 2014/01/20 by danneau

Our Dear Leader is off in Israel on a junket with dozens of people at taxpayers expense, off to once again swear undying allegiance to our favourite bullies. As a point of clarification, it bears stating that the part of Palestinian processes that involves suicide bombings and rocket barrages is wrong. However, the charade of Israel calling itself a victim as it continues to displace Palestinians, and the cynicism of holding the announcement of thousands of new settlement homes until after the departure of the American Secretary of State as well as the imbalance of military force in the region indicate that Israel is not, perhaps, the ideal state to hold up as a beacon of enlightenment and freedom as so often happens in the discourse of Harper, Baird and that lot. That Harper would offer the Palestinian Authority money to calm the waters speaks of either ignorance or goading as the gesture completely misses the point of a Palestinian state. It is likely, as is often seemingly the case, that the funds would be doled out by Israeli institutions, meaning that the bribe is also blackmail. If the Dear Leader wanted to be a real friend to the Israeli people, he might consider abandoning the blind loyalty to the current régime and support a viable peace process that would benefit both the Palestinians and the people of Israel.I seem to recall that a plan for such existed under the name Oslo Accords, but the process fell apart when Israel just kept on building settlements in land that was allocated to the Palestinians. That all happened twenty years ago, and the region looks no more peaceful now than it did in the run-up to the negotiations in Oslo.

CETA and the Home Gardener

Posted on 2014/01/09 by danneau

Recent reports show that the European Union is considering legislation that would require all seeds for sale or trade to be of certified varieties only, with costs to certify being between $4 000 and $5 000 per variety. From my standpoint, this is another move to give corporate seedsmen, mostly owned by large chemical concerns, complete control over what gets planted and by whom. It fits right in with the philosophy of relegating environmental concerns to the background and letting wild fish stocks dwindle to the point where fish farms will control the seafood supply, and it fits in with the de facto privatization of water and power, as well as state policy around here that supports the fossil fuel incumbency. Should we be worried about what the EU is doing with seeds? Damn right, given that Canada, under the leadership of one Stephen Harper, has recently signed a free-trade treaty with the EU which would likely include provision for harmonization of agricultural policies of this nature. Measures of this nature would preclude organizations like Seeds of Diversity and the U.S. Seed Savers’ Exchange from doing what they have been doing to protect diversity in both production and gene plasm. It would likely pull the rug out from under small, independent seed houses, some of whom raise their own seed stock and many of whom rely on networks of small independent seed producers: none of these people would be able to afford the costs in both time and money to get their material homologated under the proposed regulations. Ho hum, just another turn of the CPC screw on the people whose interests the government of Canada is supposed to protect.

Innovasion

Posted on 2014/01/07 by danneau

CES has rolled around again. There is more new stuff over which to salivate in anticipation of your wallet being thoroughly hoovered, if such is your bent. In our house, we’ve managed to dodge the craze for mobile telephony and the constant contact of the tablet revolution. But the darling of the current geek set seems to be the drone: everyone wants to have some sort of flying contraption that totes a camera and either records or streams what gets captured by the lens. Who knows what else these things could tote around, but I had this sense when Joshua and I were out playing hockey in the driveway over the holidays, and when the neighbour’s new whirligig flew past, that we were witnessing another stake in the heart of the private self.

There is considerable space in the course of public discourse for the expression of what people consider important, and the fact that so much of what we choose to share is of such a trivial nature speaks to the debasement of human intelligence in and by a culture centred on mass consumption and entertainment. The problem is compounded when we get our hands on gadgets that allow us to intrude beyond the point of voluntary sharing.

Further, that HD television you bought last year is now obsolete and must be upgraded to a 4k screen, and soon your drone will need to be a new model that will sync with your Google Glasses for direction by eye movement. This means that there will be new slag heaps of electronic junk that was always of dubious utility, but that now no longer functions either because it is no longer in fashion, or because there is little or no backwards compatibility built into any of it, and the underlying infrastructure or software no longer exists.

Isn’t this fun?

The Dark Ages

Posted on 2014/01/05 by danneau

As a tadpole, I was taught that the period from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance was a time of ignorance occasioned by the loss of classical knowledge and a lack of inquiring spirit. It may not have been entirely so, but the very name of Dark Ages could occasion intellectual and emotional shivers, particularly in the context of the enlightened times in which we were living.

As I have looked progressively deeper into the wheels and levers that drive and direct our society, I am struck by the sheer volume of knowledge that we have developed in recent decades, as well as by a dearth of the wisdom to channel the use of said knowledge. In particular, recent developments at both the Federal and Provincial levels of administration lead me to believe that we have come to value ignorance and to reward avidity to the point of self-destruction. There is much talk out there about Harper’s war on knowledge and on those who seem able to draw coherent conclusions from the mounds of data.

The Galloping Beaver has this to say…

The House of Infamy opines…

Owen Gray at Northern Reflections muses…

And now there’s this business of Chuck Strahl moving out of the oversight of our security organizations directly into lobbying for Enbridge:

Laila…

RossK, the Gazetteer…

This move by Strahl is simply an admission of his advocacy all along, that he’s been working for Enbridge and not for the Canadian public, but using publicly-funded organizational framework for the benefit of a major corporation that, contrary to anything that the Environmental Review Panel may have said in this instance, does nothing in the public interest.

Honesty? Good management? Transparency? None of that from any political party that I can see (with the possible exception of the now-doubled Green caucus).

And, just for good measure, and because I like this stuff:

(The irony of the header image is that it’s title relates to the results of good government. Ha!)

Now The Fun Begins…

Posted on 2013/12/21 by danneau

… and you’ll pay each of the teams for a ticket (at least if you’re wise).

(A big shout out to Dan Murphy, once of the Vancouver Province, now with Deep Rogue Ram, likely at least in part because his genius wasn’t welcome: it stated obvious and unpleasant truths.)

An item in the Globe and Mail from last night and this morning outlines how Ottawa (that is to say, our government) is preparing for the fight over the now-NEB-endorsed Northern Gateway pipeline. Those who have an inkling of the potential impact of this project, and others of the same ilk, as well as the drain it represents on the Canadian economy in favour of the international fossil fuel clique, will want to step up and throw something n the pot to ensure that it isn’t for lack of a dollar or two that we all get subjected to the degradation of the environment, the body politic, the real economy and the spirit that this project will represent.The sad part is that we will sure as hell be funding he Enbridge end of the fight, and, barring an election and a serious change of direction as well a government, we, the citizens of this once-fair land, will have no say in how deeply the government and its legions of lawyers and lobbyists will dip their oily hands in our collective pocket. Many of us have suspected since long before current revelations about CSEC doing industrial espionage in our name for the benefit of predatory mining and oil interests, that our elected government was very much in thrall to certain well-monied interest groups, but the current spate of moves on their behalf is so brazen as to defy any notion of conflict of interest. Not only to we pay exorbitant energy prices, we pay subsidies to entities that make huge profits and that are actively working to exacerbate the conditions that are likely to make our one planet uninhabitable. Makes great sense, does it not? When the long and largely abortive Treaty Process was at its height, there were many complaints about the money that taxpayers were furnishing to fight both sides of the case. In the true spirit of Catch-22, that user manual for modern society, we should expect that First Nations could have access to the same bottomless pit of legal tender offered to Enbridge, Kinder Morgan and the rest of their crew.

Lawlessness Via The Law

Posted on 2013/12/20 by danneau

Any number of organizations may start out with noble goals but morph into entities that exist solely for their own self-perpeutation, rarely to the benefit of anyone outside the organization. A Mexican proverb states:

All revolutions degenerate into governments.

Governments are, by nature, regulatory, regulating in the interest of those who put them in a position to dictate the rules. In the interest of self-perpetuation, governments will do whatever they can to curtail behaviour that runs contrary to the interests of the ruling clique.

This form of rule can have nasty consequences for those who don’t subscribe to the MO and goals of the people in the governing seat, especially when they follow the dictates of the law, as all good citizens are bound to do. We have seen a flood of laws passed with the sole purpose of squelching dissent, allowing unimpeded progress toward the fulfilment of the government’s purpose. The most recent case of this is Bill 45 in the Alberta Legislature that imposes heavy fines on unions who express support for any illegal strike action. These penalties are for saying or writing anything, not even for engaging in the strike action. Leaving aside that this is part of a concerted effort to stamp out any ability of people who work for wages to coalesce in an effort to improve their lot, the bill clearly violates the rights of one group to free speech. There are many examples of governments using legislation to end union action and imposing hefty penalties for both unions and individuals who don’t immediately comply. Here we have an act that criminalizes the expression of thought that the legislation to curtail labour action. How long before the thought itself, or the suspicion of harbouring such thought, will also be criminalized, and no matter that prosecution would possibly be difficult, given that prosecution itself can be used as a form of persecution. What this hides is bad behaviour that belies the idea of democracy and the well-being of the entire population in what is purported to be a democratic system of government, what we call a parliamentary democracy. In Alberta’s case, it is the destruction of vast swaths of the landscape in the interest of extraction of fossil fuels for the benefit of a narrow segment of society, that which controls wealth and, through that wealth, power. It can only accomplish this through anti-democratic and heavy-handed legislation, backed up by enforcement by paramilitary-style policing, as we have seen at a succession of international conferences from which Canadians were excluded and kept outside wide perimeters, subject to arrest and detention and eventual prosecution for the expression of dissent.

An aside: it is interesting to note that Allison Redford recently attended the celebration of Nelson Mandela’s life, having worked as part of a Canadian legal team sent to help Mandela in his struggle against apartheid. I have to wonder what her role was in this caper, how much the Canadian contingent contributed to Mandela’s liberation and triumph in presidential elections. It seems more likely that they might have had a hand in ensuring that South Africa would remain a staunch defender of the kind of crony capitalism promoted by Mulroney and his pal Saint Ronald Reagan. Certainly her subsequent actions would indicate that our delegation was much more interested in perpetuating economic disparity than any actual substantive freedom.

Governments have successfully co-adapted and adopted one of the central tenets of most religions, that of life getting better, but mostly in some undefined future. Religions get to promise us a better afterlife, where governments must generally limit themselves to promises that usually are slated to come to fruition just before the next election, at which point they are deferred until just after the next election. Governments are built on promises, including openness and transparency, and largely on some version of “fair“. The are words that are no longer attached to a concept of action, as they have beed so widely spread without consequence that they have become essentially meaningless, another reason that Ms. Redford is nominated, along with Stephen Harper, Christy Clark, Gordon Campbell and the whole lot of like-minded politicos and their handlers and puppetmasters for inclusion in the special place in hell (oh, crap! there’s that muddy future again) reserved for people who misrepresent themselves in aid of plunder.

…in support of which, I submit the following video, in which Luc deal Rochellière sings:

Mon Dieu, promets-moi que l’enfer existe!

Dear God, promise me that hell exists!

The Rainbow Revolutions Continue

Posted on 2013/12/16 by danneau

This is a screen snap from Libération, a Paris daily that is supposed to be on the leftish side of the political spectrum, about in the same way the Vancouver Sun might be, or somewhere between the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. The quote stems from a visit by Senator John McCain to the faction of the Ukrainian population demonstrating in favour of building closer ties with the European Union and moving farther from the Russian fold.

Now Here’s Some Good News!

It’s very sad that McCain rates anything like the attention he’s getting here, a son of Western privilege looking to fight the wars of the U.S. neocons on other peoples’ turf, after the fashion of Syria. His intent is to complete the Orange Revolution of 2004 and move the Ukraine definitively out of the Russian sphere of influence. McCain has been playing at this since his days flying for the US Navy over Vietnam, and it seems likely that part of the virulence of his campaign relates to having spent a stretch in the Hanoi Hilton when his aircraft was shot down in 1967. As with myriad US figures, he seems to operate on the premise that people care for his opinion. People who embrace John McCain’s dicta do so at their own peril unless they are wealthy American conservatives: anyone who can stand on the same stage as Sarah Palin with a straight face needs psychiatric help rather than an endorsement on policy.

In another situation where life for many of its citizens is difficult and where political circumstances can be troubling, Ukrainians find themselves caught between factions pulling in opposite geographic directions, but where neither choice is likely to provide better living and working conditions for the average citizen. Putin’s Russia has, under one leader or another, had many opportunities to build a thriving national economy and a society where debate and dialogue might be the norm. They didn’t, and there is ample discontent to attest to that lack of constructive action. Behind Door Number Two, Ukrainians can opt for closer ties to the European Union, where, on the face of it, there is freedom of expression, mobility, jobs, subsidies, the German economy and a perception that life will be considerably better than it is presently. Any reasonably astute observer will note that a good part of the EU is living a story of economic decay, of domination by the EU bureaucracy in Brussels, largely directed by large financial institutions and where neo-liberal economic theory, particularly austerity, is the rule. It could be that the right choice is neither Russia, nor the EU, but no one seems ready to propose this option which, admittedly, ensures at least short-term pain, but which gives a shot at real independence and freedom from the soul sucking ideologies of both other options. The very fact of the American involvement on one side of this conflict, and Russian on the other just might indicate the pawn status that should rightly be assigned to this, and other, revolutions with a colour assigned to them in the popular mythology.

Proxy wars are, of course, nothing new, and the Spanish Civil War is about as good a case study as any, wherein the forces of Fascism and Communism clash in someone else’s back yard as a prelude to more open and general conflict leading to the general devastation of large parts of Europe and other parts of the planet using the methods pioneered at the expense of the Spaniards. Did anything of real significance come out of the Arab Spring? See saw battles for power in Egypt, Libya under the rule of doctrinaire Islamist thugs, Tunisia rid of one dictator, quickly replaced by another oppressive régime, and Syria looking increasingly like the testing ground for a three-way tug-of-war between the US and its EU friends, Russia, and the Wahabist Saudi régime. No one is winning, but the Syrians are losing. There are attempts to make this conflict out, like so many others, to be a battle of good against evil, of the welfare of the population against either the invading hordes or the oppression of a dictator, and there is some justification in both cases, but the underlying notion of the conflict, and the reason it seems to have such staying power, lies in that same pawn status that the Syrians share with the Ukrainians, a status shared to some extent by all of us, on whatever side of whatever current divide we might live.

Update: Here is a video with some added perspective from The Real News network out of Toronto and Baltimore:

Isn’t it a little bizarre that we are putting rovers on the moon and on Mars, fighting shooting wars all over the world and preparing to square off over what’s left of the planet’s resources while we seem to need the intervention of charitable organizations to look after the most basic needs of a good part of the Earth’s population? Merry Christmas.

Then, there’s this gem from Dan Hicks going back to the days of the Charlatans and the Hot Licks, specially dedicated to John McCain:

Let There Be No Doubt

Posted on 2013/12/13 by danneau

(Quick Addendum: this was over at Pacific Gazetteer’s place:

http://pacificgazette.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-high-flyer-bruce-hyera-victory-for.html)

Thought you were living in a democracy? So we’ve been told. You remember the old refrain you probably tried out on your parents: “It’s a free country!”? Did it ever get you an extension on your bed time or permission to go out with that dodgy new friend? Likely not, but we liked to live with the idea that we would grow up to be autonomous be adults who would really have a say in how our free country was run. Too bad, so sad.

Yes, you do get to vote for who will represent your views. Tough choice: it usually comes down to a holding of the nose and choosing the least of several evils, from those of commission who willingly tear apart the fabric of society and leave individuals to fend for themselves, to those of omission who simply neglect to nurture the public interest, and where the outcomes are similar to, if somewhat attenuated or delayed, those achieved with the first group.

What seems to be happening of late, with its roots in the Reagan-Mulroney loveliest that gave us the FTA, is a complete abdication of the public trust where treaties are negotiated between sovereign nations that essential raise private companies to equal status in dealing with legislation and its enforcement, where even the potential profits, dreamed up by private concerns, get preferential consideration and override concerns of public welfare or environmental well-being. It extends to all official dealings the doctrine that business must be done solely to produce a return to shareholders, and that no social or environmental restraints should impede the pursuit of shareholder return. Once this becomes the theme of government, there is no further restraint on the corporate cavalcade and those not in the investor class must simply take their lumps because, hey! it’s the law of the land.

In the U.S., there is an additional mechanism for the abdication of responsibility to true citizens (as opposed to corporations and lobbyists) known as fast track authority, wherein the House of Representatives provides the negotiating team, through the President, I believe, the mandate to negotiate whatever they wish. In Canada, we call this a majority government in a parliament where MPs are much more beholden to the party through the whip than they are to the people who elected them (not to mention those who happen to live in the riding who may not have voted for that particular candidate), but who are nonetheless constituents and entitled to consideration in the deliberations of the Chamber.

This is all supposed to be a boon to the economy, but we need to keep asking ourselves which economy we want to promote. Our current slate of leaders all subscribe to the Chicago School/Washington Consensus model which places money at the centre of the universe and has everything else subservient. This is particularly convenient for those who have wads of money and especially for those who have converted cash into political clout who are able to absolve themselves of any responsibility with the idea that the market decides what works and what doesn’t. Strangely enough, this market phenomenon is also a human construct and, like the legal fiction that is a corporation, it masks activity that is all too human, primarily greed, rapacity and the fulfilment of grandiose ego. The market vacillations are the product of human action, and the beneficiaries of this system are keen to ensure that the economic playing field is tilted so that the preponderance of wealth ends up under their control. Bad behaviour seems always to be laid at the feet of the market, or, failing that, of a few bad-apple corporations, entities that seem immune to any sort of indemnisation for misdeeds and completely devoid of any moral sense. Even the officers of the corporation skate on piles of sins, even when it’s clear that there is no victimless crime, particularly when economic pain is as deep and broad as that inflicted on all of us in the last five years. The irony of the freemarket freebooters is that they were more than willing to have the government interfere with huge infusions of taxpayer cash and managed to do with it what they wanted rather than perhaps inject it into the small-to-medium sized sector of the business economy in the form of loans. On top of that, much of the money was to be had a little or no interest, but would be either sent out as loans at a vast profit, or used to create more risky derivative investment vehicles that look a lot like the junk that brought the economy to a grinding halt in 2008-09 and has lead to depleted pension funds and bankrupt community organizations and cities who took it on faith of financiers and ratings agencies that this junk was really AAA-quality investment.

It rather makes your puny little vote look even less significant than you thought, particularly when the ballot often resembles one of those telephone surveys where they keep asking you questions that miss the point and offering only answers that represent something other than what you really want to express. These thoughts apply not only here in the frozen North, but I’ve thought that the poor folks in the Ukraine must be feeling a little deprived when it comes to having their say: they get either Timochenko or Yanukovich, European Union or Russia, neoliberal bureaucracy or autocratic oligarchy. There is another way, but it never seems to come to the fore, in part because there are forces at work behind the scenes from both sides trying to push the country one way or another, partly because the other options all require stepping back from both options which will create some dislocation and economic pain. The EU and Russian options will also produce dislocation and pain, and for whatever future is foreseeable in the way that Greece has fallen into the clutches of the EU vultures, but a non-aligned and self-directed economy might well produce better results in the long run than either of the other options. We won’t likely get to find out as Ukranians are little more in control of their fate than we are. The consolation for them is that they are at least aware that they have a crisis on their hands and are willing to get together to try and influence the outcome. In that there is a lesson for Canadians.

So, since this is my post, I get to add a little directed entertainment at the end in the form of another musical social commentator, Georges Brassens ( to go with a couple of Tom Lehrer vids that got appended to other posts). I first ran across GB in 1971, but he had been a figure in the French music scene since the Forties, I believe. My stepson endeared himself to me forever when he brought back a CD boxed set of GB’s complete works in 1991, an item that I had been vainly trying to purchase out here on the Wet Coast for several years. He pokes fun at a lot of folks, including himself, though he would likely have been the least deserving of his targets, from what I can say. Here’s a tune, just to get the flavour of it:

Here’s a version with sketchy, but essentially correct, subtitles and where you actually get to see Brassens play and sing:

Rub Eyes, Shake Head

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