…and a good thing it is, too. I speak of the U.S. Democratic Party, which has gone to great lengths to show that it is anything but democratic. If, indeed, Hillary is the nominee, should she invite Bernie to be her running mate? Should he accept a role in the campaign to elect Hillary? No, because the man isn’t what makes the difference. For the first time in a long time, there has been real and substantive discussion about ideas and policy, and many issues have come to the fore in this primary campaign that seem to have been totally lacking in most previous campaigns, both in the US, here in Canada, and farther afield. Would those issues be addressed more efficiently and thoroughly in a Clinton White House were Sanders part of “the Team”? I think not. The rôle of the Vice President has been famously ceremonial, and might be a convenient place to put Sanders so that he can orate endlessly and harmlessly while lending some credibility to an administration otherwise woefully bereft of credibility on anything other than Wall Street plunder and eternal and universal war. There was, I seem to recall, a quip from the old Soviet days in Russian affairs that one should keep one’s friends close, and one’s enemies even closer. Following that line of thinking, it seems logical that Sanders should be trussed up as part of the Clinton package to appease the Berners and effectively neutralize the Bern.
Remember Obama’s soaring rhetoric of 2008? Do we feel fulfilled, do we sense that there has been a major shift in US and Western policy? Is the US a significantly more empathic and egalitarian place than it was when our second Black president took office? It isn’t, and the wife of our First Black President would like to keep it that way, so snuffing out the first wisps of the smoke and fire of a real re-writing of how we do things is likely high on her list of events to manage. Sanders needs to stand back from the coming storm (unless he gets nominated) and keep his powder dry.
A couple of interesting reads at Common Dreams and DeSmog Canada stirred up the meninges this morning. The first outlines a choice that confronts shareholders at meetings of Exxon-Mobile and Chevron this coming Wednesday with regard to fossil fuels and climate disruption, the second outlines the somewhat disturbing message from Brad Wall’s recent Throne Speech in Saskatchewan as he undertakes another majority mandate.
It is sad that, following the application of major scientific resources to the question, including those of governments and fossil fuel companies, there are still legislators who can characterize climate change as “some misguided dogma that has no basis in reality.” The oil giants’ own documentation aligns closely with the reports of the IPCC, and given that these are the people who own so many governments, including, it would seem, that of Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C., who, even with the introduction of a possible carbon tax in Alberta, continue to push for the construction of major fossil fuel infrastructure, meaning that they intend to get the stuff out of the ground and sell it off as quickly as they can (or as their proponents in private business can).
The fossil fuel industry continues to justify its existence on the basis of the economic activity it generates without mentioning that, for all the dollars it has spent on financing sales of trucks, RVs, ATVs, McMansions, and extended holidays in remote and romantic locations, it has taken out more than it has left. Despite the bleatings about the heavy burden of taxation imposed on fossil fuels, the corporations involved, as well as their executive suites, have made out like bandits, and the least subscribed beneficiary has been the public weal as a succession of federal and provincial régimes has deferred taxes and subsidized both directly and indirectly, those corporations who make such large withdrawals from the common resource. This doesn’t count the costs of remediation of the devastated landscapes of the Athabaska region, oil installations in Saskatchewan, Northeast B.C., along with coal mines hither and thither across the Canadian landscape and the potential for offshore spills in Atlantic Canada. The only reason this economic activity hasn’t been replaced with reconstruction and refinement of public infrastructure and the transition to sustainable energy is the set of close links between business and our various governments, leaving said governments to protect the privileged economic and social position of Bay Street and its equivalents in Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary and elsewhere. It has become abundantly clear that those in the executive suite have known for decades how harmful their activities are and have pursued those activities in spite of the message that they are literally destroying the common living space in a headlong rush to amass wealth before the whole show goes up in smoke. They have essentially taken out a mortgage on the future of humanity (and much of the rest of life on Earth) without having the least hope of paying it back.
The rest of us bear much of the responsibility for allowing this to happen. Just as the rise of idiot candidates for high office in many jurisdictions shows a lack of education and the fortitude to call out the insanity that fuels the inane behaviour of the political and mercantile classes, we, as a society, have in large part drunk the Kool-Ade, taken out loans even when we know that we likely won’t be able to pay them back, accumulated material wealth and the trappings of wealth without consideration for the consequences. Perhaps we can excuse ourselves with the idea that everyone around us is doing it: it’s difficult to live frugally in a society that prides itself on freewheeling because there’s always more where that came from, where the cultural norms are modelled around a high level of consumption. Like Cassandra in Greek mythology, telling unpleasant truths brings either disbelief or an unwillingness to act on the consequences of our actions. Repeated warnings about the dire consequences of our inaction on our climate (along with social and economic inequality, water shortages, myriad sources of pollution, toxic diet, nuclear weapons, epidemic outbreaks, genetic roulette, and the headlong rush into technologies whose outcomes are utterly unknown) have met by ordinary citizens (taxpayers, consumers, and the like) with the same contempt, deflection and denial that comes from our elected and mercantile representatives, as well as a sizeable portion of our spiritual advisers.
Over the last four or five decades, we have built an economic system that is willing to pretend that growth can continue uninterrupted ad infinitum and that money can create money. This is particularly evident in the need for people to save money to buffer their economic well-being through times of uncertainty and to ensure that there will be some sort of retirement available when work is no longer feasible for desirable. Both savings and pensions rely on investment, especially where the generation of serious gains is most achievable. The result is that many pension funds and investment vehicles are loaded up with, you guessed it, fossil fuel stocks, as well as arms manufacturers, tobacco, pharmaceuticals and investments in the financial institutions that promote overconsumption, excessive borrowing, occult financial dealings and tax avoidance, and the suborning of the electoral process. The idea that someone might act in the interest of society as a whole is a quaint anachronism, it appears, while it is accepted that doing anything for profit is the new norm, even if that profit derives from cost analysis that excludes “externalities”, including the possibility that the downstream effects of the activity in question might be deleterious to multitudes and span decades. Our work at reprogramming the Universe holds grave risks where it might better suit our purposes to sit back and contemplate the ramifications before charging ahead with all the genetics and AI that might have disastrous results for life on the planet. The outlook is pretty bleak for those who take the time to connect the dots, and a lot of the bleakness stems from the willful ignorance of those who have taken the whole of humanity down the path toward an early exit from the rolls of the living.
(Don’t remember if I’ve used this before, but it seems apocalyptically appropriate)
Aerial view of Syncrude Aurora tar sands mine in the Boreal forest north of Fort McMurray.
Ok, so I just donated money to the Red Cross to help out victims of the current wild fires in and around Fort McMurray, but I do so with large reservations. First, there are parts of the Red Cross that have a track record for behaving badly with donated money, and I have a general distrust of large charities, given the level of funds that get plowed back into fund raising and administration, executive salaries being one of the most egregious fouls. I also find it difficult to conceive that our society is built upon such weak links that we have to appeal to people’s empathy to get us to pony up for emergency backstops when this should be a proud function of the common polity through our agent, the government. Sadly, we have too many governments that act as captured read pools for the privileged and who blithely spend money on destruction, administrative waste and subsidies to their sponsors, who even then manage to cook up little schemes such as those highlighted by the KPMG affair and the recent release of the Panama Papers to salt away large swaths of unearned wealth where the common polity can’t touch it and where it can do no good for the general citizenry, as would be the case where we had adequate (or better) resources to fight fires, and to ensure the safety of all those affected by disasters of this, or any, nature.
There is also some (guilty) delicious irony in the location and circumstances of these fires, though, particularly in the face of scientific probity and the more flagrant roadblock of denialism, to actually draw a causal link between the carbon generated by the mining of the Athabaskan Tar Sands and the record hot and dry weather currently contributing to the propagation of hellish levels of forest fire activity. It’s hard to fault those residents of Fort Mac who are the victims of the burn: who turns down the kind of remuneration that oil patchers have been making for the last however many years? But where is the reinvestment resulting from the wealth generated in Canada’s short stint and an Energy Superpower? Not in Canada, mostly, having been shipped out to Shanghai and Houston (Texas, not BC).
As usual, the people in question, in this case the residents of Fort Mac, along with the competent authorities, seem to have made a good job of getting all and sundry out of the place alive, and generally in good health and spirits, if we’re to believe reports in the media (another question entirely, and what else are they hiding under cover of the fire stories?). This speaks to preparation, calm, competence and cooperation, often the operating mode in disasters, per Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell. The conversation about mutual aid needs to be part of our everyday discourse, particularly when we consider how vulnerable we are to all manner of cataclysms, and any safety net structures we can put in place, along with the attitude adjustment that should accompany that building, will likely stand us in terribly good stead as we get further into a destabilized climate and into the destabilized society that has been occasioned by the plundering of the greedy over, in particular, the last forty years.
(I may have used this before, due to its Karmic implications. Sorry.)
First (in this round, anyway) it was KPMG setting up offshore accounts in the Isle of Man, and now 2.3 terabytes of material about people using shell corporations to hide funds in Panama. Does anyone think this is the last of these revelations? Un paradis fiscal, the French call it, and so it seems to be for those wealthy enough and with little enough sense of community to use these schemes to avoid paying for the privilege of living in a what was once a civilized society (or what at least had aspirations in that direction).
Part Deux: When was Wikileaks the big breakout story? Torture, cowboy justice, extrajudicial killings, cluster bombs, drone killings, massacres and a general attitude of we had to do it because they did it or because we are the good guys and it saves lives on our side and all manner of justifications for bad behaviour. Has anyone other than the few from Abu Graib gone to prison or otherwise atoned for the aforementioned bad behaviour? Not likely. Any consequences for bending and breaking the rules in the Crisis of 2007-09? Seems not. Any real penalties for the KPMG affair? Don’t see any on the horizon. Do you think RBC will be taken to task for the Panamanian Caper? Not holding my breath. You know, it’s just fiduciary duty to the client, maximizing returns.
Aside from the obvious tar-and-feather party, it seems only reasonable that anyone involved should be stripped of all assets, shipped off to Panama and forbidden to ever re-enter the country or to participate in any kind of business related to the jurisdiction they seemed so keen to short change. Still not holding my breath waiting for Real Change.
A little item on the news this morning, that Catherine McKenna has green-lighted the Woodfibre LNG plant, with a note at the end of the item that a contract for the engineering had been let to Houston-based KBR.
Sound familiar? It should, since KBR is associated with Halliburton, hence inextricably linked with the shenanigans of one Dick Cheney, who had a few energy-oriented adventures in Iraq not so long ago. KBR was also a supply and infrastructure contractor for U.S. forces in Iraq, doing work that would, in times past, have been done by the grunts, but, hey, the grunts can just fight and KBR can do all the background work for a not-so-small premium.
Never mind that McKenna’s approval sets in motion a process that essentially negates her whole mandate and Minister of the Environment and Climate Change (at least in the way that I thought she would be attending to climate change), wherein she will not only blow through any promises made at the Paris climate talks, but also, given the fracking process to extract the NG, because she will become one of the proximate causes of the trashing of the environment in large swaths of rural Canada, particularly in BC.
It’s a rather ironic picture of Real Change and those who voted Liberal should be experiencing extreme cases of buyers’ remorse.
…thanks to, amongst others, Dr. Dawg, who beat me to the punch writing about the doings and skullduggery over at CRA with regard to KPMG and its Isle of Man Easter Egg Hiding Scheme. I recall reading some about this a couple of years back when it came to light that KPMG was fighting to keep docs away from CRA’s eyeballs and thinking, in a most un-justiceable sort of a way, something to the effect of there being fire in the proximity of smoke, and lo! the taxmen stumbled onto an inferno. Nice, but they agreed to let the arsonists off easy and throw a blanket of ND silence over the whole thing, so I get to bleat about being one of the fleeced rather than one of the shearers, along with the rest of the chatterers. The thing is, does anyone believe that the Isle of Man is the only haven for refugee tax-free cash? Is KPMG the only wayward “accounting” firm (shares of Arthur Andersen, aka Accenture, perhaps a good place to scout, were CRA to be interested). Are the KPMG clients the only miscreants looking to avoid paying for the lavish lifestyle lived by the DTES crowd or all those oil patch layoffs going home to the various bailiwicks of unemployment and precarity? Interestingly enough, I saw a report on France 2 a week or so ago where the French Ministry of Finance and shepherded 21 billion euros worth of UBS client money back into compliance from illegal offshore (Swiss have a loose definition of “shore”) in the last year, and they expect to do about that much business in the coming year as they engage with some of the big tech companies who have been profiting handsomely from some loopholes that turned out to me more loop than hole.
By all means, people can be forgiven for not paying Canadian taxes, as long as they don’t live in Canada or do business in Canada. Anyone who lives and/or works in Canada, anyone who benefits from Canada should pay a fair proportion of the cost. All those involved at KPMG should be rewarded with a long stay in the GrayBar Hotel, and the wayward clients, having knowingly participated in the export of cash, should bring it back, pay the interest and penalties in full, and a premium for the research and court costs, upon conviction, of course.
In Libération this morning, a little item that the French government is readying a law that would decouple the link between polluters and players when it came to assessing penalties for environmental damage. Our provincial government may not have done this in legislation, but they have surely accomplished the same end without bother of recourse to the law, given what has transpired in the wake of the Mt. Polley tailings dam breach and subsequent run-off. There are many other instances where the law is twisted, flouted or simply ignored, and it wouldn’t surprise in the least to have the CC gang simply change the law in their favour. They seem to have captured the courts, a group where certain strata of the judicial corps seem not to have heard of SC decisions regarding treaty rights. But, what the hell, with CETA and the TPP, the law is pretty meaningless in any case, sort of a glass case through which citizens can witness the destruction of civil society as it is dismantled by secret tribunals in another room, behind the curtain,
Bill Gates has cast in his lot with the FBI in their spat with Apple with regard to opening a back door to an iPhone for the Department of Justice, according to ReCode. This is not surprising as we’ve seen the king of marketing cavort at Davos with the stuff that rises to the neck of the old milk bottle. Not a crowd I would choose, but they certainly wouldn’t choose me, so the feeling is mutual. Gates is also a big fan on GMO products and Monsanto, it would seem, so this is a minor black mark in the book I don’t keep on Bill.
He reminds me of a class of people like Wayne Gretzky who was happy enough to have the protection of the NHLPA as a player; he might have been against them all along, but he sure benefited from the groundwork they laid that allowed him to blossom as a player and a financial entity. The move to LA seemed to coincide with the adoption of the polo pony lifestyle and the attitude of floating above the vicissitudes that trouble the little folk. All just a personal reflection on what I’ve seen of Wayne since 1988, and I have to admit that he hasn’t occupied a great deal of intellectual, spiritual or emotional space in my own little world. He fits in well with other champions of the underclasses like Bono, Sepp Blatter, and any number of athletes who have drawn deeply from the chalice of public support in their quest to carve out a little niche in the pantheon of prolific pulchritude (see? Rex Murphy is paddling like hell to squeeze in!).
Much is made of Mr. Gates, mostly because he has so much money, the Foundation not withstanding, given how the funds seem to get doled out, to whom, and with what strings attached. This is a man who made a fortune of selling bugs as features, who has managed to make the blue screen of death into a daily phenomenon and who, along with Apple and a legion of lesser players, has turned a large segment of the populace into techno-zombies who are readying themselves to surrender their ability to drive, to communicate face-to-face, to distinguish data from wisdom and a host of other functions that link us to our historical selves, as well as any constructive evolutionary future selves. He’s the perfect P.T.Barnum stand-in and has managed to cash in big-time as the one-born-every-minute has accelerated into billions and billions served.
This phenomenon of rising to blend in with the forces of the most destructive reminds me of a song that I first heard on a Bonnie Raitt album in, I believe, 1974:
And I did follow it back to its N’awlins roots (RIP AT):
I had a little pass through the site of the Washington Post this evening. Very enlightening, though perhaps not in the intended message. I just find that I have to spend some time away from the echo chamber of my own building to see what’s out there and how it’s being presented to what seems to be an audience that is content to assume they’re getting the whole picture from mass media.
An article that scores right up there on my own interest scale is the hammering out of an agreement that David Cameron can use to bolster the idea that the UK should avoid a Brexit, a departure from the European Union. On the face of it, the agreement gives special status to the UK in terms of retaining its own currency and making decisions about immigration and border matters (among other items), and this permits Cameron to pursue his policies of disaster capitalism without interference from the European Parliament. It also highlights what the EU has become, that being a vast neoconservative project to bring together as many European nations in a vast trading bloc where competition and flexibility of labour standards trump considerations of equity and well-being, human rights and the process of building a peaceful continent. It really is wonderful that France and Germany haven’t blown each other up for over seven decades, something of a rarity in the course of recent history, but a different kind of warfare is at work with the auto/technocrats centered in Brussels and following the lead of Chancellor Merkel working to ensure that Greek, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Irish assets fall into the hands of banking cartels, and that the large bulk of wealth continues to trickle up to those already on the winning end of the economic scale. At the same time, EU nations who once ruled vast empires, continue to plunder as much abroad as possible to feed the Euro version of the new empire, based partly on the same brute force of old empires, partly on the thumbscrews of capital and market access.
Elsewhere, Christine Lagarde has been reappointed as president to the IMF for a second five-year term. She was finance minister of France for a while under President Nicolas Sarkozy, a willing participant in rolling back workers’ rights, gutting protections for ordinary citizens, working to privatize pretty much whatever she could get away with and dodging inquiries into her dealings with Bernard Tapie, a once wunderkind of French business (sounds weird, doesn’t it?). As far as I can tell, she’s brought the same flair to her work at the IMF, continuing to push loans on poorer countries for projects that will benefit the larger concerns in international construction and finance ensure that the peasants everywhere are loaded down with debts they have little chance of paying off.
We might also recall that she was pressed into service when Dominique Strauss-Kahn was embroiled in a sex scandal in a New York hotel room in the days leading up to the presidential election in France, and election in which he was favoured to win the nomination of the Socialist Party and to very possibly oust Sarkozy. There was speculation that DSK had to go because he was making noises about a major shift in IMF policy away from the model pursued by Lagarde and those of her ilk. Whatever it was, he certainly left himself open to opprobrium and prosecution as multiple incidents of sexual bad behaviour seemed to pop up out of the woodwork like termites exposed to light, and DSK has been effectively sidelined, his place taken by Lagarde, that paragon of social rectitude and financial solidity.
The Post might define these two events as proof that the world is unfolding as it should, but those of us who live outside the fairy tale land defined by the Washington Beltway (and its equivalent at No. 10 Downing, the EU HQ in Brussels and the Elysée Palace) might be more tempted to see said happenings as yet another shot across the bows of any meaningful undoing of the predations of the last forty years and a harbinger of yet more pillaging to come.
Meanwhile, here’s a little Pure Food and Drug Act from 1972 or thereabouts, Sugarcane Harris, Paul Lagos, Randy Resnick, Victor Conte and Harvey Mandel, something of an offshoot of John Mayall’s Blues Union outfit. Saw them do these tunes at the PNE Gardens about that time. The second half of the vid has the intended message.
They also did a kind of a modal moan with lots of improv, the main lyric of which was something on the order of “Why don’t you cut that joker loose and come fly with me to L.A.”, I’ve never been able to find a recording and would appreciate knowing if it exists.
Heard CBC announcing again that DeJong had done this or that in his fourth balanced budged, no caveats anywhere, no commentary, just a simple statement of faith. Anyone who puts a lot of faith in the pronouncements of DeJong or any of the current crop of BC Liberal ministers is on a bit of a fool’s errand, but these little gems of chickenshit-that-passes-for-journalism are what keeps the circus in town, and it’s everywhere in the newspapers, on the radio and on television. Some of it is perhaps because of time and budget constraints, but I suspect that there is much of it that lies in direction coming from the top levels of the executive suite. It’s ugly stuff, it’s lying by omission, it’s a crime of lèse-société, and it does real harm to real people.Sadly, there seem to be no consequences for either the (lack of) reporting, or the underlying damage done by the pols in question. Y’all have a nice day, now.
