In case you missed it, Trump just tried to turn the UN General Assembly into a congregation of whores. Faced with world-wide opposition to his Jerusalem decision, Trump reverted to Goodfellas rules: If other countries dared to denounce him over a foreign policy decision that shattered the peace process and upended fifty years of global diplomacy (much of it forged by the United States), then their rebuke would come at a price.
The ‘price’ had to do with the fact that Trump seems to believe that since the United States accounts for 22 per cent of the UN’s operating budget, the General Assembly’s votes are, in effect, bought and paid for by Washington.
Trump laid his contempt for international law, global opinion and the UN on the table for all to see with his Jerusalem call. He warned those nations voting against the rogue U.S. position — a policy that violates both international law and existing UN resolutions — that he’d be taking down names, and not for his Christmas card list.
The payback was swiftly delivered by Trump’s robot at the United Nations, Ambassador Nikki Haley. Fittingly, the news was delivered over the Christmas holidays, shortly after the U.S. was humiliated by a General Assembly vote of 128 to 9 on a motion denouncing the embassy move. Sadly, when the world was expressing its disdain of Trump’s bullying tactics, Canada was hiding under its desk.
The American mission subsequently announced that the UN’s budget would be cut by $285 million, or 5 per cent of the total. The cuts came along with threats of “further action” the U.S. might take, including cuts to foreign aid to certain disobedient countries, and further reductions in American support for the UN’s overall management and operations.
In embracing democracy, as the historian James Kloppenberg has written, we are standing up for three contested principles: popular sovereignty, autonomy and equality. We are also embracing three premises: deliberation, pluralism and reciprocity.
A devotion to democracy thus ought to affect how we treat others. We often have to deal with hierarchies, but we should never internalize them. Those at the bottom of formal authority structures see things and know things that cannot be seen from on high. We should, as Pope Francis has said, seek the wisdom available only on the peripheries. We learn from experience — and from the news — that the distributions of virtue, compassion and judgment are not correlated with the distributions of power and wealth.
Democracy, finally, is rooted in two intuitions, about our aspirations to transcendence, which allow us to imagine a better world, and about our proclivities to sin and failure, which require limits on the power any of us can wield. Thus Reinhold Niebuhr’s aphorism: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
There are commitments that involve more or less risk, and more or less genuine impact. Often, when a country acts clearly and decisively in a way that underlines its own values, that is when its impact is greatest. There would be no greater practical example of Canadian engagement as a member of the United Nations, a member of the Organization of American States and a founding member of la Francophonie, than a decision now to reach out and welcome Haitians who face deportation by the United States.
We have a robust, active, productive, economically and culturally dynamic Haitian community in Quebec, and elsewhere. A distinguished Canadian of Haitian birth, Michaëlle Jean, became our Governor-General and now heads la Francophonie in Paris. The Haitian community is a credit to Canada in so many ways and has produced business, cultural, political and journalistic leadership that has immensely strengthened and enriched us all. It has the depth and capacity to sponsor and welcome new arrivals, along with other Canadians who would be delighted to help.
Finance capitalism now drives politics, governance and policy in unprecedented ways. And it’s more than willing to sacrifice the future of young people for short-term political and economic gains, if not democracy itself.
In an apparent war on children, the Trump administration provides a disturbing index of a society in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis — not the least of which was the president’s support and defence of an accused serial pedophile, Roy Moore, in his unsuccessful attempt to win an Alabama Senate seat.
As U.S. children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman points out, such actions are particularly alarming and cruel at a time when “millions of America’s children today are suffering from hunger, homelessness and hopelessness.”
She adds: “Nearly 13.2 million children are poor — almost one in five. About 70 per cent of them are children of colour, who will be a majority of our children by 2020. More than 1.2 million are homeless. About 14.8 million children struggle against hunger in food insecure households.”
Too many young people today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era in which it is difficult either to imagine a life beyond the tenets of a savage form of casino capitalism or to transcend the fear that any attempt to do so can only result in a more dreadful nightmare.
Youth today are not only plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of the present, they are, as the late Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has argued, “the first post-war generation facing the prospect of downward mobility [in which the] plight of the outcast stretches to embrace a generation as a whole.”
American youth, especially those marginalized by race and class, are subject to the dictates of the punishing state. Not only is their behaviour being criminalized in schools and on the streets, they are also subject to repressive forms of legislation.
Many of us began 2017 with the consoling thought that the Donald Trump presidency couldn’t possibly be as bad as we feared. It turned out to be worse.
Did you ever think you would hear a president use the words “very fine people” to describe participants in a torchlit rally organized by white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan? Did you ever think you would hear a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations thuggishly threaten that she would be “taking names” of countries that did not vote on a General Assembly resolution the way she wanted? Did you ever think the government of the world’s biggest military and economic power would reject not just science but empiricism itself, preferring to use made-up “alternative facts” as the basis for major decisions?
Since its founding, the nation has treasured civilian control of the military as a restraint on adventurism. Now we must rely on three generals — Trump’s chief of staff, his national security adviser and his secretary of defense — to keep this rash and erratic president from careening off the rails.
The president’s Republican allies in Congress, who have the power to restrain an out-of-control executive, have rolled over in passive submission. Many see clearly Trump’s unfitness but continue to support him because they fear the wrath of his hard-core base and see the chance to enact a conservative agenda. History will remember this craven opportunism and judge it harshly.
The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—
who brought gifts to the newborn Christ-child. They were the first to
give Christmas gifts. Being wise, their gifts were doubtless wise ones.
And here I have told you the story of two children who were not wise.
Each sold the most valuable thing he owned in order to buy a gift for
the other. But let me speak a last word to the wise of these days: Of all
who give gifts, these two were the most wise. Of all who give and receive
gifts, such as they are the most wise. Everywhere they are the wise ones.
They are the magi.
Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are justified by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. Clinton, when he signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, promised “NAFTA means jobs, American jobs and good-paying American jobs.” George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. But Clinton did not continue to pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found.
The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of “fake news.” They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted to them with the revoking of net neutrality. The iron refusal by those who engage in the permanent lie to acknowledge reality, no matter how transparent reality becomes, creates a collective psychosis.
The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. Donald Trump, who lies about the size of his inauguration crowd despite photographic evidence, insists that in regard to his personal finances he is “going to get killed” by a tax bill that actually will save him and his heirs over $1 billion. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he has a report that proves that the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not increase the deficit—only there never was a report. Sen. John Cornyn assures us, countering all factual evidence, that “this is not a bill that is designed primarily to benefit the wealthy and the large businesses.”
Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true on the Christian right, which is filling the ideological vacuum of the Trump administration, as it is for the corporatists that preach neoliberalism and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.
This is a government and prime minister who rode to power two years ago on the type of inspirational message of hope and a new dawn that propelled Barack Obama to the White House in 2008.
This was a government that was going to do everything differently than the Stephen Harper government, yet continually plays to a sense of entitlement, of playing by different rules than other Canadians.
Trudeau and family and Liberal friends made two trips to the island in the Bahamas — Sophie Grégoire Trudeau also took her family there without her husband — at a time when the Aga Khan Foundation, which Dawson said has received $330 million from Canadian governments since 1981, was registered to lobby Trudeau’s office.
This particular document appears to reflect the foreign affairs logic of one wing of the Republican Party. But it doesn’t always reflect the stated views of Trump.
Whether it ends up guiding the foreign affairs policy of the U.S. administration remains an open question.
The strategy begins with Trump’s dystopian view of America as a nation that has fallen behind. The reason (and again this is pure Trump) is that feckless U.S. presidents, such as Barack Obama and George W. Bush, allowed other nations to take advantage of Washington.
The document suggests that Russia and China pose a greater threat to the U.S. than even terrorism. But all are involved in “fundamental contests between those who value human dignity and freedom and those who oppress individuals and enforce unanimity.”
This is language reminiscent of the Cold War. It is also language that Trump does not usually apply to Russia and China.
Indeed, at times Trump has actively praised both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. His beef with China is more economic than political. And while Trump’s ministers routinely decry Russian intentions in Eastern Europe, he himself usually does not.
In fact, the security strategy says that the dog-eat-dog nature of foreign relations requires America to be willing to confront China and Russia everywhere.
The federal Indigenous services minister has ambitious plans when it comes to ending water quality advisories in First Nations communities, closing the gap on Indigenous child welfare spending and reducing what she calls an “abhorrent” number of Indigenous children living in foster care.
One thing not on her list for the coming year is hearing the word “no” from anyone in her department’s bureaucracy.
As we spoke this week, Philpott sat at a desk with six multi-colour-coded spread sheets in front of her, detailing all 68 long-term drinking water advisories in communities directly funded by her department, with the dates the order went into effect, timelines for ending them and potential barriers in the way.
There are a total of 100 such advisories in First Nations communities including privately operated systems.
She has called the rate of Indigenous child apprehension a humanitarian disaster. Indigenous children 14 and under make up 7.7 per cent of all children in this country, according to the 2016 census. But they represent 52 per cent of children in foster care.
In Manitoba the rate can be as high as 90 per cent, but the rate is anywhere from 60 to 80 per cent across western Canada.
“It is positively abhorrent. There is clearly something very wrong,’’ Philpott told me.
A push to have First Nations control First Nations education is showing promise.
But it is also up to Philpott to light a spark in a bureaucracy that has for years worked to thwart Indigenous progress, launching court challenges and slowing programs in the name of protecting the taxpayer.
Bureaucracies are not monolithic, as Philpott points out. They are composed of people who care and understand 150 years of injustices.
They smile, she says, when they are told to find a way to deliver a “yes,” instead of falling back on an automatic “no.”
Think about it: a bill that will affect EVERY SECTOR of the American economy is put together in secret in the House and the Senate. Both bills pass, using legislative tricks like ‘budget reconciliation’ to sidestep normal process, holds no hearings, allows no input from or information TO the opposition party, engages in backdoor trading, all-but-bribery and all-but-extortion in secret, then passes both versions and “reconciles” the final bill again in secret, again behind closed doors in formerly smoke-filled rooms, as every single Republican senator is carrot-and-sticked into voting for the final bill, which was only released on Friday in the afternoon.
The tax bill itself is almost entirely a separate subject, and its particulars ought not be adjudicated here, but we need to understand that a fundamental principle of our form of governance, already on life support, has died.
A majority of Americans are opposed to it, but that matters little to the GOPs of today — or should I say “toady”?
83 percent were opposed to striking down Net Neutrality, but the chairman of the FCC, a “free market” GOP does not extend that freedom to the franchise. Ayn Rand, you know. The virtue of selfishness, or as the Republicans actually behave: we expect greed (the most toxic of human drives) to miraculously solve all human problems.
By that perspective, just as the first Civil War was the last gasp of slavery, this second is very likely the last gasp of aging white Americans — their full-throated death rattle against an America that they detest for having changed so dramatically the traditions and power structures by which those whites had lived. Regressions are often like that. They are an angry attempt to prevent a threatening future from arriving. Republicans had long preyed upon these discontents, but did so tepidly — a wink-and-nod approach. Trump voiced them and validated them, making racism, nativism and sexism acceptable. It will be his primary legacy.
One of the most important shifts in our culture has been the transformation of politics into a kind of civic religion. Religion has always provided a sense of identity — hence the tribalism — but it provided something else, too; something even more fundamental. In what historian Karen Armstrong describes as the Axial Age, from which modern religions grew, it pointed the way to a meaningful life with spiritual values. That was for nurturing the soul. And it provided a cosmology, a systematic way of thinking about and explaining the world and our place in it. That was for the mind.
Modern conservatism, like debased religion, has an explanation for everything, and there is nothing mysterious or spiritual about it. Trump understood the desire for some all-encompassing answer, as demagogues always do. Demagogues assume the proportions of religious leaders, but without the moral instruction. Through a process of simplification, they purport to tell their followers what happened and who is responsible. In short, they provide cosmology, not for the purpose of enlightenment, but for the opposite — benightedness.
As religious observance has declined in America, as faith has declined and the religious cosmologies have weakened, political passions and political cosmologies have risen, and those old religious/conservative affinities have strengthened as religion tries to save itself by piggybacking on politics, rather than as some believe, the other way around. Roy Moore, the Republican senatorial candidate in Alabama, is the perfect example of religion’s surrender to politics. Many evangelicals embrace him despite credible allegations of child molestation, showing how morality has become so politicized that it no longer even makes sense. That is because politics is the new religion of America.
Keen and those supporting him (full disclosure: I was one of them) were making a simple point as he used Blu Tack to stick their 33 theses to one of the world’s leading universities: economics needs its own Reformation just as the Catholic church did 500 years ago. Like the medieval church, orthodox economics thinks it has all the answers. Complex mathematics is used to mystify economics, just as congregations in Luther’s time were deliberately left in the dark by services conducted in Latin. Neoclassical economics has become an unquestioned belief system and treats anybody who challenges the creed of self-righting markets and rational consumers as dangerous heretics.
Firstly, listen to consumers, because it is pretty obvious that they are unimpressed with what they are getting. The failure of the economics establishment to predict the crisis and its insistence that austerity is the right response to the events of a decade ago has meant the profession has rarely been less trusted.
Secondly, we should stop treating economics as a science because it is nothing of the sort. A proper science involves testing a hypothesis against the available evidence. If the evidence doesn’t support the theory, a physicist or a biologist will discard the theory and try to come up one that does work empirically.
Thirdly, economics needs to be prepared to learn from other disciplines because when it does the results are worthwhile. One example is the way in which auto-enrolment has increased pension coverage. If humans were truly economically rational, it would make no difference whether their employers automatically enrolled them into pension schemes: they would decide whether to join schemes on the basis of whether they deemed it worth deferring consumption until they had retired. Yet, basic psychology says this is not the way people actually act. They are far less likely to opt out of something than they are to opt into something.
Fourthly, economics needs to be demystified. One of the big battles between Catholics and Protestants in mid-16th century England was over whether the bible should be in Latin or English, a recognition that language matters. The easy part of an economic Reformation is to attack the current establishment; the difficult part is to present a compelling story without resorting to jargon. Control of the narrative – as George Osborne realised when he criticised Labour for failing to mend the roof while the sun was shining – is crucial.
Rarely does public life bring you into intimate contact with people for whom you instantly feel great personal affinity. And in my case, a sharing of a generation's strivings in the second wave of feminism. It's not easy to be a woman in public life in Canada. Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and I, having been governor-general, have shared different kinds of travails, but we know what sharing means and we know what sisterhood means. Yes, I use that rather dated and old-fashioned word because I think it is really what I have found with her.
This Chief Justice understands that law is an organic entity, or, "the living tree," which grows and evolves with the evolution of societal views. This Chief Justice knows that courts can justify the making of substantial changes to the law if in doing so they reflect clear changes in social values.
I am sure that she is the only Chief Justice we have ever had who knows how to deliver a calf. I don't think there is anything more revealing than going to Pincher Creek – which I have done – and seeing that beautiful little town nestled in the foothills of Alberta and to enter through the roadway that is now called Bev McLachlin Drive. I think that Bev McLachlin Drive really says a lot. It says that she comes from there. It says that she is known to everyone there. And it says that she is one of us.
Instead of allowing the prosecution to try their client on the evidence, Johnnie Cochran and company managed to put LAPD investigators on trial. It was the judicial world’s equivalent of a Hail Mary pass.
In the face of Cochran’s relentless attack on the police, buttressed by full courtroom theatrics, prosecutor Marsha Clark’s mountain of evidence against Simpson was obscured behind all the legal smoke.
Given Strzok’s role in the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, they are now demanding that the Justice Department appoint a second special counsel to investigate Mueller.
Their position is at once absurd and another example of obstruction of justice by the Republicans. For one thing, Strzok’s texts were discovered by an internal investigation conducted by the Inspector General’s Office of the DOJ. When Mueller learned of them, Strzok was removed from the investigation. Does that sound like Mueller has it in for the president? Isn’t it proof of the exact opposite — that the former FBI director wouldn’t tolerate even the appearance of bias on his team?
Secondly, if the premise of Congressional Republicans’ argument is that Strzok’s political leanings mean that he is unfit to conduct a fair investigation, then what about others who have clearly expressed their political preferences?
Robert Mueller himself is a lifelong Republican. Does that make him unfit to lead the investigation? At the time of his appointment, Senator Lindsey Graham and Republican kingpin Newt Gingrich raved about his stellar credentials. Now they say he’s “corrupt”?
It is all about obscuring the clearly visible mountain range of lies told by Trump and his people about their Russian connections. It’s all about the serial instances of Donald Trump trying to obstruct justice, from lying about the Russia connection to pressuring James Comey to let the case against Michael Flynn go.
Today’s Republicans are apparatchiks, who have spent their whole lives inside an intellectual bubble in which cutting taxes on corporations and the rich is always objective #1. Their party used to know that it won elections despite its economic program, not because of it – that the whole game was to win by playing on social issues, national security, and above all on racial antagonism, then use the win to push fundamentally unpopular economic policies. But over the years the party has seemed increasingly out of touch with that reality, imagining that if only it preaches the gospel of supply-side economics loudly enough voters will be won over.
I’m taking the phrase from Rahm Emanuel, who believed that Obama could gain electoral capital simply by racking up legislative victories. The idea is that voters are impressed by your record of wins, or conversely that they’ll turn away if you don’t win enough.
The truth is that this strategy didn’t work at all for Obama, who won a lot of stuff in his first two years then got shellacked in the midterms. And think about the things that have been going wrong for Republicans in special elections: desertions by highly educated suburban voters, massive African-American turnout, weak turnout by rural whites. Which of these is likely to be improved by a massive, unpopular corporate tax cut? Still, the idea that you have to win something seems to have a grip on the GOP, and of course especially on our childlike president.
Donald Trump and Steve Bannon are politically impotent.
The president and his former grand strategist threw considerable weight behind Roy Moore, the polarizing Republican Senate candidate in Alabama. For the second time this year, the state that gave Mr. Trump crucial early support during the presidential campaign — and his first senatorial endorsement — has rejected the candidate Mr. Trump endorsed for the Senate.
Extraordinarily high turnout among African-American voters pulled the Democratic nominee, Doug Jones, a former United States attorney, to a narrow victory. Mr. Moore was held back by a significant resort to write-in ballots (some 1.7 percent of the total, a fact on which Mr. Trump quickly fixated) that presumably came from voters who ordinarily lean Republican — suburban professionals, especially women — along with tens of thousands fewer suburban Republicans voting at all. For example, in Shelby County, neighboring Birmingham, Mr. Trump earned 73,000 votes and a 51,000-vote margin, but it appears that Mr. Moore won 36,000 votes and a 9,000-vote margin.
The trouble begins where everything begins: with soil. The UN’s famous projection that, at current rates of soil loss, the world has 60 years of harvests left, appears to be supported by a new set of figures. Partly as a result of soil degradation, yields are already declining on 20% of the world’s croplands.
Now consider water loss. In places such as the North China Plain, the central United States, California and north-western India – among the world’s critical growing regions – levels of the groundwater used to irrigate crops are already reaching crisis point. Water in the Upper Ganges aquifer, for example, is being withdrawn at 50 times its recharge rate. But, to keep pace with food demand, farmers in south Asia expect to use between 80 and 200% more water by the year 2050. Where will it come from?
The next constraint is temperature. One study suggests that, all else being equal, with each degree celsius of warming the global yield of rice drops by 3%, wheat by 6% and maize by 7%. These predictions could be optimistic. Research published in the journal Agricultural & Environmental Letters finds that 4C of warming in the US corn belt could reduce maize yields by between 84 and 100%.
The greater the number of people, the greater the hunger meat eating will cause. From a baseline of 2010, the UN expects meat consumption to rise by 70% by 2030 (this is three times the rate of human population growth). Partly as a result, the global demand for crops could double (from the 2005 baseline) by 2050. The land required to grow them does not exist.
Critics on the right charge that Mueller’s investigation is politically biased or worse. Some of the attacks are particularly vitriolic. Sean Hannity has called Mueller a “disgrace to the American justice system” and said his investigation is “corrupt” and abusive. Newt Gingrich, who effusively praised Mueller when he was appointed, now says Mueller’s probe is corrupt, dishonest and a “partisan hit.”
Such criticisms betray a profound misunderstanding of the way professional prosecutors and FBI agents do their jobs. Prosecutors and agents are human. They are allowed to have political views, belong to political parties and support political candidates. It is not a conflict of interest if a prosecutor who belongs to one political party is involved in an investigation of a politician from another party. We’ve never had a system where Republicans could be investigated only by partisan Republicans or vice versa.
We live in a hypercharged environment, where almost every move is seen through a partisan political lens. Many people don’t believe that a prosecutor such as Mueller could simply follow the facts and the law. But that’s exactly what happens. Prosecutors and agents set aside their personal politics when they work on investigations, and it’s essential that they do so. In this country, we don’t use criminal prosecutions to attack political enemies. That’s the stuff of despots and dictators, not the American justice system. For good prosecutors and agents, this principle is part of their DNA.
On Thursday the scandal-plagued federal agency ruled that Kinder Morgan, a U.S. pipeline company that’s the spawn of Enron (remember that tale of corporate corruption) doesn’t have to comply with City of Burnaby bylaws.
The board effectively ruled that there are two classes in Burnaby: those who have to follow the rules and a U.S. pipeline company that doesn’t.
With Trumpian flare the NEB added that it will explain this injustice when it feels like it.
Burnaby has been dragging its feet on the Trans Mountain pipeline because its citizens have opposed a project they feel will irrevocably change their community and the province.
The city would be the unfortunate terminus for the $7.4-billion project to triple the capacity of the existing 63-year-old oil pipeline from Alberta.
The NEB heightened public discontent with a string of injustices during public hearings on the pipeline.
The dysfunctional agency did not consider the pipeline’s full impacts on climate change through offshore and upstream emissions.
It failed to examine the full impact of diluted bitumen spills on B.C.’s coast, although the pipeline would bring a sevenfold increase in tanker traffic.
It failed to assess the full economic need for the project.
It failed to even analyze the impact of stress corrosion cracking and its causes and consequences on an aging pipeline.
And it restricted the narrow review to “applied capacity” of 540,000 barrels a day as opposed to “designed capacity” of 780,000 barrels and failed to access the full costs and benefits of the project in a volatile global oil market.
In so doing Trudeau broke election promises and once again ignored the impacts on climate change and First Nations.
Why? To please the totalitarian Chinese government.
The Chinese told Trudeau that they won’t consider a new free trade deal without the removal of investment restrictions and the construction of a bitumen pipeline to the coast.
Canada has become the rarest of democracies: one willing to surrender its sovereignty for a pipeline ferrying a junk crude.
Issuing timorous platitudes in response to Donald Trump’s disastrous decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is not leadership. It’s abdication.
Everyone understands the need for expediency, diplomacy and practicality in geopolitics. No government sticks its nose into another country’s affairs on a whim.
But for his government to offer nothing more on Trump’s catastrophic political decision than a promise that our embassy is staying put — along with an anodyne statement that the Israelis and Palestinians are our friends — is decaffeinated politics at best and, at worst, a disgraceful cop-out.
President Trump reversed seventy years of U.S. foreign policy after consulting his belly-button and Steve Bannon. According to CNN, American evangelicals were informed of this reckless and self-interested political move before the State Department.
In the end, Trudeau will gain nothing by molifying Trump. The shear number of people who have left his employ during the last year should make that clear. And those who stay on -- like Jeff Sessions and Rex Tillerson -- merely serve as punching bags fro Trump. In the end, Trump must be confronted -- certainly not a pleasant experience.
First, he asked the party to swallow the idea of a narcissistic sexual harasser and a routine liar as its party leader. Then he asked the party to accept his comprehensive ignorance and his politics of racial division. Now he asks the party to give up its reputation for fiscal conservatism. At the same time he asks the party to become the party of Roy Moore, the party of bigotry, alleged sexual harassment and child assault.
There is no end to what Trump will ask of his party. He is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom. And apparently there is no end to what regular Republicans are willing to give him. Trump may soon ask them to accept his firing of Robert Mueller, and yes, after some sighing, they will accept that, too.
That’s the way these corrupt bargains always work. You think you’re only giving your tormentor a little piece of yourself, but he keeps asking and asking, and before long he owns your entire soul.
You don’t help your cause by wrapping your arms around an alleged sexual predator and a patriarchic bigot. You don’t help your cause by putting the pursuit of power above character, by worshiping at the feet of some loutish man or another, by claiming the ends justify any means. You don’t successfully rationalize your own tawdriness by claiming your opponents are satanic. You don’t save Christianity by betraying its message.
“What shall it profit a man,” Jesus asked, “if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?” The current Republican Party seems to not understand that question. Donald Trump seems to have made gaining the world at the cost of his soul his entire life’s motto.
Global corporations have become the greatest threat to the planet. The deliberate starvation of government, climate change, grotesque inequality, Dickensian working conditions, environmental degradation, dwindling biodiversity, the slow (or not so slow) death of the oceans and the creation of the security state on corporations' behalf threaten not only the natural world but our capacity to democratically govern ourselves while maintaining some semblance of civilization.
A recent study by Canadians for Tax Fairness (disclosure: I am on their board) revealed that the 60 largest public companies in Canada have 1,021 subsidiaries in a string of tax havens. Four had none; Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Sun Life Financial have over 50 each. According to the study, "Canadian foreign direct investment (FDI) in tax havens grew from $2.1 billion in 1994 to $284 billion in 2016."
By now most people know how these "profit-shifting" schemes work. Companies assign profits made elsewhere to tax haven subsidiaries in countries with low or no income taxes. They half-heartedly claim they actually do business in these countries, but the numbers say otherwise. The study shows subsidiaries in non-tax haven countries employ between 1,244 to 2,760 employees per billion in assets; for tax-haven users the ratio is one to 250. In 2014, Canadian corporations held almost $31 billion in assets in Bermuda; their subsidiaries employed a total of 35 employees.
Governments are the only institutions that can seriously challenge the power and reach of transnational corporations: they made them and they could unmake them. Only governments can curb their predatory nature, constrain their contempt for their workers, communities and the environment, and genuinely punish them when they openly break the law as part of their fiduciary "duty" to their shareholders.
Of course, it's difficult to imagine current governments in any role other than the unindicted co-conspirator which have played for decades. The implementation over 30 years of neoliberal policies by governments of virtually every stripe has liberated corporations, increasingly removing constraints designed to make them accountable to the broader society.
“Theresa@theresamay, don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom,” the US president tweeted on Wednesday evening. “We are doing just fine!”
The “@theresamay” Twitter handle that Trump targeted does not belong to the British prime minister, but to a woman called Theresa Scrivener. Minutes later Trump deleted and reposted the tweet, this time with the correct handle: @Theresa_May.
There are many layers of humiliation here for May to get her head around over breakfast. Not only is it personally demeaning, it is also politically toxic.
The prospect of a successful or at least survivable Brexit is posited on a strong relationship with Washington. In that regard, May’s successful rush to Washington in January to become the first foreign leader received at the Trump White House was presented as a coup.
This is an administration run by and for financial engineers. The president’s policies have sought to gut what remains of the Dodd-Frank Act and other legislation that protects consumers from financial wrongdoing, most recently in his assault on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Mr. Trump’s administration rewards what we might call an “extraction economy.” Rather than adding value, financial engineers often extract as much as they can — from operating companies that they buy, strip and sell as well as from consumers, borrowers, workers and other taxpayers.
Private equity epitomizes financial engineering. The very term “private equity” is a sly rebranding of what used to be called “hostile takeovers” or “leveraged buyouts.”
In 2002, Mr. Ross bought several steel factories that had been closed; he reopened them after persuading the steelworkers union to take major cuts. When he cashed out three years later, he made 14 times his original investment of $90 million. According to the economists Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt, “his three-year investment netted him $4.5 billion — just equal to what retirees lost in their health and pension plans.”
Canada has always based its trade policy on the needs of business. John A. Macdonald’s 19th century National Policy of protective tariffs was instituted to meet businessmen’s demands for what they called a “living profit.
In the 1970s, when Canadian businesses persuaded Ottawa that they were being overwhelmed by American corporate takeovers, Canada dabbled briefly with economic nationalism and foreign investment controls.
But by the 1980s, big business wanted something different. It told a royal commission studying the Canadian economy that it needed access to the big U.S. market.
Last week, the Business Council of Canada, which is made up of the CEOs of 150 of the country’s largest firms, scolded the government for dragging its feet on the TPP.
Council head John Manley, a former Liberal cabinet minister, said Trudeau’s delay in agreeing to the TPP put at risk Canada’s participation in the scheme.
Manly, just back from a trip to Tokyo, said that there are already hints that the other 10 countries — Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand — might go ahead without Canada.
The corporate keenness to foist riskier pensions on their workers is not driven by necessity. Corporate profits have risen significantly in recent years, even as companies have switched to the stingier pensions that transfer all risk to employees.
Even fabulously rich corporations are adopting the new pensions — not because they can’t afford to pay workers fixed pension benefits like they used to, but because they’d rather not be obliged to do so.
Take the Royal Bank — with staggering profits of $10.5 billion last year. In 2011, RBC adopted the new-style pensions for all new employees.
But CEO Gordon Nixon didn’t feel the need to convert his own pension to the riskier model.
He retired in 2014, at the age of 57, with an old-fashioned, risk-free pension guaranteeing him $1.68 million a year. And when he turns 65 — no matter what happens in the markets — he can count on receiving an even more comfortable $2 million a year (more than $5,000 a day) for the rest of his life.
Wilmot Collins, an African who became an American, is the first Black and the first African to be elected mayor of this small city. When he had recently arrived and spoke out against racism, his house was smeared: “Go back to Africa, KKK.” He called the police. When they arrived, his neighbours were already washing the painted threat away.
LaToya Cantrell was just elected mayor of New Orleans — the first woman and the first Black woman. She is a transplanted Californian who came to prominence through her post-Katrina rebuilding efforts, defeating a field of 18, including several from prominent Louisiana families.
The triumphs of Collins and Cantrell are a powerful reminder of why American democracy has survived slavery, civil war and rampant political corruption. American voters can and do push back when offered a better choice of leader. And, increasingly, those leaders are younger, more progressive, non-white, women and men.
The Democratic sweep in Virginia was not altogether surprising, but the background of many of the candidates was: the first Asian woman, the first two Latina women, the first trans woman, and the first African-American woman. Across the country, the pattern was repeated: newcomers, especially women and non-white men, successfully challenged establishment candidates.
Today, aging white men open their devices with dread, preparing for the shock of the latest stupid man caught behaving stupidly. As revolting as Roy Moore et al are, we must thank Donald Trump for having launched this dramatic sea change in what is acceptable. The silent complicity that greeted Bill Clinton’s transgressions came to a sudden stop, and the trigger for the building roar of anger from newly empowered victims today, was when we saw the infamous Trump Access Hollywood video. So, thank you, Donald.
NDP Premier Rachel Notley has done a better job of promoting new pipelines than any Conservative premier before her.
In fact, it is hard to see how a Premier Jason Kenney could out-perform Notley at cheerleading for fossil fuels and the tar sands — or at completely obfuscating the mortal threat of climate change.
British Columbia represents another danger to Singh which is not his fault but might end up as his problem — the Site C dam dilemma.
This obvious boondoggle from the Christy Clark era was given approval and permits by the Trudeau Liberals. Opponents of the $9 billion dam have been fighting a pitched battle to stop the project, which is already over-budget, behind schedule and, in the opinion of many experts, completely unnecessary.
On the merits, the Site C decision should be a no-brainer. Even a former president of B.C. Hydro, Marc Eliesen, thinks the true cost of the project will be 30 per cent higher than the utility’s $9 billion estimate. A similar cost overrun in Newfoundland’s Muskrat Falls hydro dam could end up costing Newfoundland ratepayers a staggering $1,800 more per year on their hydro bills.
Construction on Site C is behind schedule and will only fall further behind now that two “cracks” have appeared in the banks of the Peace River. These “geotechnical problems,” as B.C. Hydro’s president Chris O’Reilly called them, will delay work for another year.
With other energy alternatives available (geothermal, wind and solar) and no immediate customer or provincial need for Site C’s power, one would think that pulling the plug $2 billion into a nightmare in the making would not be a hard call to make.
