The Fierce Urgency of Now

Yesterday, the forty-second anniversary of Martin Luther King's death, various commentators focused on one of his lesser known speeches. That speech was delivered at the Riverside Church in New York City; and it made him a pariah among the movers and shakers of his time. In the speech, King voiced his opposition to the War in Vietnam. His reasons were many. But, taken together, they added up to the fact that the war was an affront to justice. Admitting that truth, however, was not easy. "Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth," King said,

men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

The war was also an affront to King's faith in non-violence. But, more than that, it was "devastating the hopes of the poor at home" by transferring the resources that were originally targeted for the "war on poverty" to the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Citing a recently released report, "State of the Dream 2010: Drained," from the group United for a Fair Economy, Bill Moyers on Friday drew his viewers' attention to this sentence: "The Great Recession has pulled the plug on communities of color, draining jobs and homes at alarming rates while exacerbating persistent inequalities of wealth and income." Despite the election of Barack Obama, not much has changed for the people whose concerns King championed. "We are at a perilous moment," Moyers said:

The individualist, greed driven free market ideology that both our major parties have pursued is at odds with what most Americans really care about. Popular support for either party has struck bottom, as more and more agree that growing inequality is bad for the country, that corporations have too much power, that money in politics has corrupted our system, and that working families and poor communities need and deserve help because the free market has failed to generate shared prosperity -- its famous unseen hand has become a closed fist.

A year to the day after King delivered his Riverside speech, he was assassinated. He knew that anger was brewing in the ghettos of the country. It erupted after that rifle bullet ended his life. That was why he warned his audience that "tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now." That was also why Americans had to choose wisely. "The choice is ours," he said, "and, though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment in history."

The Vietnam War has come and gone; and it is now generally acknowledged to have been a colossal mistake. Like the financial meltdown, from which we are now emerging, it was the consequence of monumental arrogance and stupidity. But the plight of the poor and the disenfranchised remains the same -- in the United States and around the world. Once again we live at a crucial moment in history. King was a man for all seasons. Forty-two years after his death, he still asks us to choose justice.

In the Kingdom of the Unhinged

From North of the 49th Parallel, watching the opposition to President Obama's health care legislation has been like watching a play from the Theatre of the Absurd. Those of us who have lived with a more radical version of health care -- single payer -- know that medicare does not put insurance companies out of business; and there are no "death panels."


But as congressmen and women entered the Capitol last Sunday to cast their votes, it was particularly disturbing to hear the slurs which were directed at some of them. And last week, when the bill was reconciled and signed into law by the president, the rhetoric turned even uglier. As rocks were thrown at windows, and the bombastic Rush Limbaugh and the less than brilliant Sarah Palin announced that it was time to get rid of "these bastards," others were suggesting that every Democrat who voted for health care was about to face "Armageddon."


A Baptist minister in Orange County asked his flock to pray for the deaths of the apostates. Choosing Psalm 109 as his text -- "May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership. May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow" -- the Rev. Wiley Drake assured his followers that justice would flow down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. It did, indeed, appear that a significant portion of the population -- and all the elected representatives of the Republican Party -- had lost their minds.


It was Frank Rich, in yesterday's New York Times who -- as he does so often -- helped make sense of the nonsensical. "To find a prototype to the overheated reaction to the health care bill," he wrote, "you would have to look a year before Medicare to the Civil Rights Act of 1964."  That bill "signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance."


The election of Barack Obama was a similar moment. It served as a sign that American politics had caught up with the rest of the world. No longer were white men in charge. When Tea Partiers shout, "Take our country back!"  they are -- like William F. Buckley -- standing "athwart history yelling STOP." That was Buckley's prime directive; and it led him to support racial segregation -- a position he later admitted was wrong. Those who were spitting on black legislators last weekend have never undergone Buckley's epiphany. But, Rich pointed out, demographics are against them:

The week before the health care vote, the Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non Hispanic white births will be in a minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven't had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three since 1935.

It's worth remembering that the first Republican president signed the Emancipation Proclamation, established the land grant colleges and signed the Homestead Act --  all  of which looked forward to the future and the 20th Century. 


The March Backward began when Richard Nixon conceived his Southern Strategy -- which was a cynical attempt to capitalize on the anger white southerners felt after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. It continued when Ronald Reagan began his campaign for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi -- where three Civil Rights workers were killed shortly before the act became law. From then on, Republicans began talking in code. Anyone who knew anything about the South understood the code.


The remnants of the Republican Party are those unhinged voters who Nixon courted -- and they have stopped talking in code. The United States has moved on. But a significant number of people, trapped inside their own paranoia, refuse to recognize that fact.

The Clock Is Ticking

Now that the opposition parties have rejected the Prime Minister's proposal to let former Justice Frank Iacobucci recommend which documents in the Afghan prisoner file should be made public, the ball is in the Prime Minister's court. The man has a talent for avoiding the consequences of his actions. But, in this case, he's in a box. It appears that he has three options. 

The first is to continue to stonewall.The problem with this strategy is that there are people outside the government, such as Amir Attaran, who know what is in the file. If Mr. Harper continues to ignore the House's order to see the uncensored documents, they will be leaked. Mr. Harper is smart enough to know this. 


That leaves the prime minister with two other options: he can either broaden Mr. Iacobucci's mandate and ask him to conduct a public inquiry; or he can call an election and argue that it is time to put the opposition in its place.


Having seen -- and having taken advantage of -- the political damage which the Gomery inquiry did to Paul Martin's government, Mr. Harper might reject this option. On the other hand, a public inquiry would buy the government time -- as the recent padlocking of Parliament was meant to do; and, if the  public has a short attention span, Mr. Harper might be able to change the channel and send the whole issue down the memory hole. 

However, if Mr. Iacobucci does his job, the revelations from the inquiry would force some departures; and it could eventually lead to the government's defeat in the next election.

Which leads to Mr. Harper's third option -- to call an election.   The advantage of an election is that it might bury the issue. The Conservatives could attempt to turn the discussion to the economy and the "government's action plan." Moreover, an  improving economy might shift public opinion in the government's favour. But elections -- like wars -- seldom go as planned. And the prisoner abuse scandal might sink the Harperites.


Which option will the prime minister choose?  The best option for all parties would be a public inquiry. It is a time honoured parliamentary tradition. But Mr. Harper has already shown that he has little respect for parliamentary traditions. And he clearly takes pleasure in sticking it to his opponents. At present, polls suggest that none of the parties would win a majority. But, if he could talk himself into it, Harper might roll the dice. 

If -- when all was said and done -- the Conservatives found themselves in opposition, Harper would probably return in a sulk to Alberta. If the government again won a minority , the knives would come out. So he might make one last attempt to seize the brass ring. If he succeeds, we are all in deep trouble.


Whichever option the prime minister chooses, the clock is ticking. We are headed for a showdown.

Thirteen Days

Last week, my wife picked up a DVD with this title. Apparently, the film bombed at the box office. She found it in a bin at one of our local stores -- the equivalent of the remainder shelf at your local bookstore.

As I watched the film this weekend, I was taken back to my days  as an elementary school student, when I ducked under my desk in the absurd hope that, in the event of a nuclear attack, I would be spared. And I remembered the day when, as a fledgling high school student, I left for school -- not knowing if I would make it home that night. 


It was October 24, 1962. The United States Navy had built a blockade around Cuba. The whole world knew we were on the edge of Armageddon. I remember being in class when the intercom came on with a live radio report that the Russian freighters had turned back. I got on the bus and returned to my parents' home in Montreal.

I did not understand at the time that the crisis would go on for several more days. And I did not read until years later that it ended with the United States removing missiles from Turkey, while Russia removed its missiles from Cuba. 

The film documented the meetings and heated discussions between President Kennedy and his advisors, as they struggled to arrive at a solution to the crisis. At one point, Kennedy told some of them that he had recently read Barbara Tuchman's book, The Guns of August, a history of the events leading up to World War I.  

I was reminded of Tuchman's definition of  wooden-headedness, which she offered in a subsequent book,  The March of Folly. Wooden-headedness, wrote Tuchman, "consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing onself to be deflected by the facts."

Most of Kennedy's advisors, including the joint chiefs and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, favoured an invasion of Cuba. Kennedy and his brother Robert were not convinced that invasion was the best course of action. But they lived in the shadow of their father, who had advocated appeasing Hitler. They risked looking weak. 

Most members of the Kennedy administration, however, had served as front line soldiers and officers during World War II; and they were aware by experience, if not by acquaintance, of what Karl von Clausewitz had written in On War: that war is "politics by other means;" and, that  it "increases the uncertainty of every circumstance and deranges the course of events."

The proof of war's unpredictability occurred off Cuba, when a Russian submarine came between the freighters which were carrying  the disputed armaments and the American armada. When the Russian ships refused to change course, Kennedy gave the order to blow the submarine out of the water. Suddenly, however, the freighters slowed down. Kennedy quickly countermanded his order and -- luckily for all of us -- the communication was received in time. Kennedy understood just how close the world had come to "mutually assured destruction;" and, unencumbered by wooden-headedness, he began to work on a nuclear test ban treaty.


Not everything worked out so positively in the Kennedy administration. There was, of course, the matter of Vietnam -- although recently released documents suggest that, before he was assassinated, the president had decided to remove all American troops from Vietnam by 1964. We will never know what would have happened.


But, as I watched the film, I could not help but think of the second Bush administration and the run up to the invasion of Iraq. The caution the Kennedys displayed was nowhere in evidence. Instead, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney served as prime examples of wooden-headedness. It would appear that Bush's and Cheney's lack of battlefield experience -- which both men worked very hard to avoid -- had something to do with the "preconceived fixed notions" with which they faced the world after September 11th.


Beyond that, the Cuban missile crisis proved that history is not an uncontrollable series of events. Character -- and intelligence -- make a difference. And, despite his personal flaws -- flaws which George W. Bush evidently does not possess -- the world can be grateful that Joseph P Kennedy's son was in office in 1962, instead of George H.W. Bush's son.

The American Battle for Health Care

Barbara O'Brien -- who blogs at Mahablog, and who occasionally writes for Crooks and Liars and Alternet -- reflects the frustration many Americans feel as they watch President Obama attempt to steer a health care bill through Congress. 

We tend to forget that Tommy Douglas faced many of the same frustrations and distortions in his battle to bring public health care to Saskatchewan. It was his drive and his courage which made Medicare a reality for all Canadians. Like Senator Kennedy, Douglas left a legacy which has long outlived him.

The benefits of public health care are myriad. In this guest post, Ms. O'Brien touches on just a few:


Would Health Care Reform Help You?

Many obstacles and stumbling blocks remain in the way of health care reform. The House and Senate bills will have to be merged, and then the House and Senate both will vote on the final bill. We don’t yet know what will be in the final bill, or if the final bill will be passed into law. Passage will be especially difficult in the Senate, where it will need 60 votes to pass. It is still possible that after all this angst, just one grandstanding senator could kill the whole thing.

But just for fun, let’s look at what conventional wisdom says will be in the final bill and see if there is anything in it that will be an immediate benefit to people with mesothelioma and other asbestos-related disease.

It is likely that the final bill will provide additional funding for state high-risk insurance pools. Currently more than 30 states run such pools, which are nonprofit, state-sponsored health insurance plans for people who can’t buy insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The biggest problem with such pools is that, often, the insurance they offer is too expensive for many who might need it. Both the Senate and House bills provide $5 billion in subsidies for state high-risk pools to make the insurance more affordable.

Under the Senate bill, beginning in 2014, private companies would no longer be able to deny coverage to adults with pre-existing conditions, nor could they charge higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions. Until then, the state high-risk pools could provide some help.

Closing the Medicare Part D coverage gap — also called the “doughnut hole” — is another potential provision that could help some patients with asbestos-related disease. The “doughnut hole” is the gap between the coverage for yearly out-of-pocket expenses provided by Medicare Part D and Medicare’s “catastrophic coverage” threshold.

For example, in 2009 Medicare Part D paid at least 75 percent of what patients paid for prescription drugs up to $2,700. After that, patients must pay for all of their prescription medications until what they have paid exceeds $6,154. At that point, the catastrophic coverage takes over, and Medicare pays for all but 5 percent of the patient’s drug bills. The final health care reform bill probably will provide for paying at least 50 percent of out-of-pocket costs in the doughnut hole.

You may have heard the bills include budget cuts to the Medicare program, and this has been a big concern to many people. Proponents of the bill insist that savings can be found to pay for the cuts, and that people who depend on Medicare won’t face reduced services. But this is a complex issue that I want to address in a later post.

The long-term provisions probably will include many other provisions that would benefit patients with asbestos-related disease, including increased funding for medical research. Although there are many complaints about the bill coming from all parts of the political spectrum, on the whole it would be a huge benefit to many people.
— Barbara O’Brien
March 9, 2010

A Justification for Selfishness

The Conservatives' proposed budget -- which was the highlight of last week's return of Parliament  -- was a remarkable document, for several reasons. But it was most remarkable for its optimistic projections of economic growth. 

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty claimed that the economists he consulted assured him that Canada would experience "moderate growth" for the next five years. But one should remember that, the last time he consulted economists, none of them (according to Mr Flaherty) forecast the recession -- which arrived, full blown, shortly after the Conservatives were elected.





As the above clip demonstrates, Mr. Flaherty has a talent for denial -- as does his boss, the Prime Minister. After all, it was Mr. Harper who claimed during the election campaign that "The country will not go into recession next year and will lead the G7 countries." And it was Mr. Flaherty who promised that "We will not run a deficit." Yet, this week, the Finance Minister boldly asserted that -- while the country is now in hock to the tune of $55.9 billion -- it is not facing a structural deficit, despite what Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page claims; and, therefore, there is no need to raise taxes.


Except the budget does raise taxes -- by increasing Employment Insurance premiums an additional fifteen cents on every $100 of insurable earnings. This tax increase is broad based. It hits everyone who brings home a pay cheque. But, as he raised taxes on every working Canadian, Mr. Flaherty reduced taxes on corporations yet again. When the Conservatives came to power, the corporate tax rate was 22.12%; they reduced it to 19.5% two years ago, then to 18% last year. The government plans to further reduce the rate to 15% by 2012. "We are staying the course," Mr. Flaherty bragged,  "to having the lowest corporate income tax rate in the G7 (group of nations) by 2012."


We are just beginning to emerge from the wreckage of the economic policies of the last thirty years. Those policies brought us to the edge of another Great Depression; and this government continues to believe that more of the same is the way to prosperity. Girded with that certitude, the Finance Minister boarded a government jet and flew off to southwestern Ontario to sell his plan. The cost of the flight was just under $9000. It would have cost just over $800 to fly commercially; but we were told that Mr. Flaherty's schedule required that he fly on government aircraft.


The latest budget lays bare this government's priorities. And it proves that John Kenneth Galbraith was right when he wrote, "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

When "Freedom" Means "Privilege"

In Saturday's Toronto Star, Tom Walkom noted that, over the last fifteen years in this country, we have seen reverse class resentment. "Class resentment used to be the preserve of the left," he wrote. "Indeed, the entire post welfare state was designed to better the conditions of the poor, thereby ensuring that these class resentments didn't get out of hand."


But things have changed. These days "class resentments have been turned on their head. The focus of anger is not the silk hatted capitalist, but his unionized workers, with their job protection guarantees, their pension plans and their good wages."


The Harper government has signaled that its unionized work force is now under the gun. Their argument is that, if private sector benefits have been pared back because of the financial meltdown, then it is only fair that public employees share the same pain as their brothers and sisters on the shop floor. On the surface, it sounds like a matter of simple justice.


But, as Walkom points out, that argument ignores the causes of the recession and the damage neoclassical economics has done to those folks on the shop floor. For thirty years, the ideologues of the right have tried to dismantle the progressive income tax system. They have  argued, as has our prime minister, that there is no such thing as a good tax; and that,  if taxes are a necessary evil, then the best tax is a simple tax -- a flat tax -- on both the rich and the poor. And in their search for tax simplicity, they have maintained that corporate taxes are redundant, because corporations are owned by people; and, therefore, people who own corporate shares are taxed twice -- on income and dividends.


They ignore the fact that some people start life with more advantages than others -- claiming that just because some are born with silver spoons in their mouths, there is no reason why they should  pay more than anyone else. "Freedom," they say, means freedom from progressive taxes. Outcomes might be unequal; but that is the result of honest toil, not the result of privilege. And, therefore, it is necessary to demonize those on welfare who, although they were not born to privilege, have the audacity to demand privileged outcomes. That was Mike Harris' argument when he came to power in 1995.


And when he appointed John Snobelen -- a high school dropout -- as Ontario's Minister of Education, Harris argued that the management expertise Snobelen had acquired at the helm of his own waste management company made him the ideal candidate for the job. He neglected to mention that Snobelen had inherited the company from his father. Applying the principles of waste management to education, Snobelen created a mess which he left to others to clean up.


George W. Bush -- a man who former Texas governor Ann Richards liked to say was "born with a silver foot in his mouth" -- followed the same philosophy as the Harris government; and he left catastrophe in his wake -- whether it was the aftermath of Katrina or the aftermath of the Wall Street Meltdown.


Now, in the upcoming budget, the Harper government -- which contains three charter members of the Harris government --  Minister of Finance Jim Flahlerty,  Minister of Industry Tony Clement and Minister of Transportation John Baird -- plans to follow the same playbook. "For the Harper Conservatives," Walkom wrote:

all this is useful. First, it removes the focus from the country's real pension problems: Most Canadians don't have workplace pensions; those who do have found their plans savaged by this recession. British Columbia and Alberta have suggested ways of dealing with this, as have the federal New Democrats and the Liberals. The Harper government has done nothing. Second, and more important, an attack on public sector pensions refocuses class resentment along lines more amenable to the Conservative government.

As was the case with prorogation, this is an attempt to create a diversion. The best way to do nothing -- and to get away with it -- is to have the public look away. And the effect of doing nothing is to further entrench the privileges of the wealthy. If someone from that class, like TD president Ed Clark, suggests that people like him should pay more taxes, the Harperites immediately demonize him as an enemy of the little man. Clark, they say, wants to raise the taxes of ordinary folks. However, even people like Michael Bliss -- a steadfast defender of the government in recent months -- have suggested that the government should demand more from the wealthy.


The question is, how long can Mr. Harper and his confreres maintain this fantasy? They are betting that the public is too stupid to figure out what is going on. My bet is that they are wrong. Ordinary folks have a visceral understanding of the difference between freedom and privilege.

Ignorance Is Strength

There was a time when the Republican Party was a big tent. But, after the election of Ronald Reagan, the party marched further and further to the right -- until it now resembles The Party in George Orwell's novel, 1984. Orwell imagined a world in which -- twice a day -- the clocks struck thirteen; and in which -- once a day -- everyone dropped whatever they were doing to participate in The Two Minutes Hate. He left a vivid picture of that exercise:

Within thirty seconds, any pretense was unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

After reading accounts of last week's Conservative Party Action Conference, which was keynoted by Glenn Beck  -- a man with a history of drug abuse and mental instability -- one is left with the impression that something very much like that is afoot in the United States. The same kind of paranoia was on display at the Tea Party Convention two weeks ago, where Sarah Palin was the featured attraction. It does not take much imagination to conjure up a vision of the assembled multitudes shouting,"Love is Hate!" and "Freedom is Slavery!" instead of exhorting the former vice president to "Run, Dick, Run!"

What is even more distressing is the tendency of Republicans to throw the history of the past decade down the memory hole. This is most evident in their collective screed against government spending and deficits. In an article in last Wednesday's Toronto Star, David Olive challenged the notion that Democrats are the party of fiscal irresponsibility:

The biggest increases in national debt relative to GDP since the end of World War II have occurred during the tenures of Ronald Reagan (+18.5%),  George W. Bush (+11.9%) and George H. W. Bush (+11.2%). As for all important job growth, Democrats have occupied the White House for just one-third of the years since 1977, when Carter took office, but have accounted for roughly two-thirds of the job growth over that 32-year span.

As the accompany graph makes abundantly clear, the Republicans have been smoking something funny. Their claims are simply at odds with the facts. But facts -- and logical consistency -- seem to have no bearing on what is happening these days. 

Three weeks ago, President Obama  put forward legislation to establish a commission whose mandate would have been to study government finances and make recommendations for the future. It would have been modeled after the commission which reviewed Pentagon commitments and recommended closing military bases at the end of the Cold War -- and it was an idea which Republicans had touted. But, when push came to shove, seven Republicans -- who had co-sponsored the legislation -- voted against it, saying they would consider spending cuts but not tax increases.

When Obama set up such a commission by executive order last week, former Republican Senator Alan Simpson -- a  man whose use of barnyard humour causes some to mistake his brilliance -- declared that he wasn't "smokin' that same pipe;" and he expected "Rush Baby" to make him a target. Mr. Limbaugh should be forewarned: if he chooses to mock the former Senator, Mr. Simpson will make chicken feed of him.

In fact, the entire Republican program can't pass the barnyard test. John Kenneth Galbraith -- the Canadian  economist, whose father was a local politician in Ontario -- loved to tell a story of accompanying his father around the hustings when he was a child. Once, at a meeting of local farmers, the elder Galbraith -- finding  no stage upon which to stand -- mounted a manure pile and apologized to his audience for addressing them from his opponent's platform.


It's time the Democrats confronted Republican arguments head on. For, like The Party in Orwell's  novel, the Republican rallying cry is, "Ignorance is Strength!"

What the Rest of the World Knows

Three weeks ago, Stephen Harper went to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. With his characteristic self satisfaction, he advised the participants that the nations of the world should follow a policy of "enlightened self interest." According to Don Tapscott, the movers and shakers were "underwhelmed." The international community took the measure of Mr. Harper some time ago; and The Economist expressed its collective opinion, when it declared that he is a man who acts out of "naked self interest."

That judgment was reinforced last week, with the release of a new international poll, indicating that Canada's standing in the world has fallen significantly since Mr. Harper's ascension. In China, the perception that Canada has a positive influence on world affairs has fallen from 75% in 2008 to 54% last year. In the United States, during the same period, Canada's positive image has fallen from 82% to 67%. And in Britain, which we used to call "the mother country," the numbers show a similar precipitous decline, from 74% to 62%.

Certainly, the government's disregard for environmental policy has a lot to do with those numbers. But I'm willing to bet that, when Mr. Harper touts Canadian financial institutions, the rest of the world knows that the stability of our banks has nothing to do with him. They remember that it was Paul Martin who put this country on a sound financial footing -- and who first floated the idea that the G8 should be expanded to the G 20. It was The Economist which eventually defined Mr. Martin as "Mr. Dithers." But it was also willing to give him his due. The magazine does not give Mr. Harper the same benefit. In Europe, at least, the prime minister is seen as a poseur, who takes credit where it is not due, and who shifts blame when it is due.

Mr. Harper's shell game was on full display at home last week, when the Prime Minister's Office launched an attack on the CEO of the Toronto Dominion Bank. Speaking to another economic conference in Florida, Ed Clark told his audience about a pre-budget conference which he and several others attended with the prime minister. "We had a meeting two weeks ago," he told his audience,"and almost every single person said raise my taxes. Get this deficit down." Unfortunately, Mr Clark said, Harper "doesn't listen, but you get to chat with him."

A day later, the PMO distributed an email, claiming that, "another member of Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff's so called 'economic brain trust,' Bay Street Banker Ed Clark, lectured Canadians from sunny Florida on our need to pay higher taxes." -- as if the bankers in Florida were somehow a cut above the hoi polloi in Switzerland. And, as if the policies which Mr. Martin and Mr. Chretien put in place back in 1993 had nothing to do with Canada's financial health.

The rest of the world knows that the Emperor has no clothes. So do the country's bankers. And the polls suggest that ordinary citizens are beginning to see what the Prime Minister looks like under that blue sweater.

Two Kinds of Revolt

This is a winter of discontent. But, North and South, the winds of revolt are blowing from opposite directions. This past weekend, Sarah Palin addressed the Tea Party Convention in Nashville. "How's that hope-y change-y stuff workin' out for ya?" she asked the angry crowd. Calling for a revolution, she proclaimed that what her country needed was "a commander-in chief, not a professor of law." It was precisely what the Know Nothing Party wanted to hear.

In The Great White North, the anger comes from the opposite direction. It isn't proroguing Parliament that feeds the public discontent, Rex Murphy declared from his new perch at The National Post. It is the Prime Minister himself. "As long as there is an 'edge' to Stephen Harper," Murphy wrote, "as long as a good swathe of the electorate has this visceral distrust with where he may want to lead the country, and he by tactic or tone feeds it, his ability -- even in this period of weak and uncertain Liberal fortunes -- to gain a true majority is greatly circumscribed."

If there is a common thread which ties Palin's Tea Partiers to Harper's Conservatives, it is that both parties know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. The Palinites don't see universal health care as an investment which will pay dividends down the road. And the Harperites see attempts to slow climate change as a cost to the petroleum industry.

That is why Michael Ignatieff's announcement last week that the Liberals will resurrect their daycare program -- which the Harper government replaced with piddling monthly cheques -- is an important marker. The deficit, Ignatieff declared, should not be used as an excuse to "shut down discussion in this country about social justice." The Conservatives may favour stay-at home-childcare, but it can't be done on $100 a month.

And Ignatieff's focus on the young is critical. It is true, as Jeffrey Simpson wrote last week, that few politicians are giving much thought to the social costs of aging. But it is equally true that government policy has been tilted -- for decades -- towards the needs of baby boomers. It is not enough to fulminate about the debt we are leaving our children. The real question is whether that debt is consumptive debt or invested debt. If we invest in the young, it will pay dividends in the future. Perhaps the single most significant thing the Tories did was to reduce the GST. They signaled that they were hellbent on consumption. And their attack on Stephane Dion's carbon tax was the same song with the same refrain.

Sarah Palin and Stephen Harper -- as well as their acolytes -- are lost in the past. They may huff and puff as much as they choose. But it's only hot air.

The Wrecking Crew

Last October, Michael Bliss speculated that Stephen Harper was on the verge of becoming this country's next Mackenzie King: "The government's policies are broadly acceptable to Canadians," he wrote, "it continues to inch upward in the polls, and it would very likely eke out a majority in a general election today."

On Friday, he appeared again in the pages of The Globe and Mail, proclaiming that the public outrage at Mr. Harper's decision to prorogue Parliament was "a tempest in a teapot and the opposition parties are trying to keep it boiling." Instead, Bliss advised, the Opposition should "take a golden opportunity to rest, reconsider and recuperate." For Bliss, it's all a blip on the radar screen. He appears to favour the government's agenda; and the means of achieving that agenda is not an issue.

Because Mr. Harper and the recently retired American president have so obviously drunk from the same well, Mr. Bliss's opinions should be considered alongside those of Thomas Frank, whose book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, is a fascinating chronicle of the second Bush administration and its discontents. Frank says that neo-conservatives, like Bush and Harper, champion four key objectives once in office. First, they oppose bringing top notch talent into government service. Second, they wreck "established federal operations," because they disagree with them. Third, they make a cult of outsourcing and privatizing. And, finally, they pile up "an Everest of debt" in order to force government into crisis. The results are cataclysmic. "The ruination they have wrought has been thorough;" Frank writes, "it has been a professional job. Repairing it will take years of political action."

When one considers what the present government has done in office, the parallels are stark. The way it has treated Linda Keen, Paul Kennedy and Richard Colvin speaks volumes about its ability to attract and keep good talent. Its handbook advising caucus members on ways to obstruct government is a cynical attempt to shift blame. And Mr. Flaherty's last fiscal update mimics his colleague, former Ontario Education Minister John Snobelen, whose prescription for forcing change was to "create a crisis." The debris Mr.Snobelen left behind still clutters the province's schools.

Professor Bliss would have us believe that all it would take to change things would be for the opposition to have the courage of its convictions and force an election. But, as Mr. Frank makes clear, democracy is not just about elections. It's about what governments do between elections. And, the truth is that -- while Mr. Bush and Mr. Harper have no trouble with government -- they have a visceral hatred of responsible government. The issue is, how do citizens hold a government accountable between elections? Professor Bliss is unconcerned with that conundrum.

Joseph Campbell once remarked that the road to a full and a fulfilling life lay in "following your bliss." If, in the present circumstances, Canadians were to follow the good professor's advice, they would be collaborators in catastrophe.

Corporate Shills

Last week, the United States Supreme Court gutted campaign finance legislation with a decision rooted in the legal fiction that corporations are people. In abolishing the distinction between the two, the court effectively gave corporations much more political leverage; and it declared that corporatism was a sacred cow in a country which likes to call itself "the world's greatest democracy."

In that same week, voters in Massachusetts voted for a candidate who is the antithesis of the man who held the seat for 46 years. Bob Herbert, in The New York Times, claimed that the vote did not represent a vote for corporatism: "In 2008," he wrote, "a startling 91.6 million people -- more than 30 percent of the entire U.S. population -- fell below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, which is a meager $21,834 for a family of four." This, while the barons of Wall Street were taking home six and seven figure salaries. The result in Massachusetts was an angry rejection of the notion that corporations are people.

And in Canada this weekend, Canadians took to the streets to protest the proroguing of Parliament by a Prime Minister who claims that things run more smoothly -- at least for the markets -- when Parliament is closed. When the people's representatives return, he said, "there will be votes of confidence and election speculation for every single week after that for the rest of the year. That's the kind of instability I think that markets are actually worried about."

The statement is stunning in its utter disregard for the public good. Government's primary task is to insure market stability. This from an angry man and an angry party who lust for a majority government, and who -- time and time again -- manage to trip over themselves. In his book, The Unconcious Civilization, John Ralston Saul saw through the ruse:

The neo-conservatives, who are closely linked to the neo-corporatists, are rather different. They claim to be conservatives, when everything they stand for is a rejection of conservatism. They claim to present an alternate social model, when they are little more than courtiers of the corporatist movement. Their agitation is filled with the bitterness and cynicism typical of courtiers who scramble for the crumbs at the banquet tables of real power but are always denied a proper chair.

It has begun to dawn on a growing segment of the population that North America's elites -- legal and political -- are little more than corporate shills. The Supreme Court and Mr. Harper have each had their Marie Antoinette moments, notifying the public that they can eat cake. It would be in their own self interest to remember the lady's fate.

Micawber's Progeny

Last week, Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page released a report, estimating that the Conservative government of Stephen Harper -- a man who prides himself on his economic expertise -- faced a structural deficit of $18.9 billion. "The decline in the government's structural balance relative to potential income over this period," Page wrote, "is largely due to lower revenues."

Others have noted that the Harper government's two point reduction in the GST accounts for $12 billion of that negative number. Add to that the government's reduction of the corporate income tax rate from 22.12% to 15%, and the reason for the hole in the government's finances becomes pretty clear, The Great Recession notwithstanding.

The Finance Minister was unimpressed by Page's report. "I see speculation. I don't see a lot of evidence." he said. "I'm comfortable with the fact that if we have reasonable economic growth and we, if necessary, restrain the rate of economic growth of government program spending, then we will get to a balanced budget in the medium term."

Conservatives like to talk restraint. But they never seem to practise it. The across the board tax cuts which Mr. Harper and Mr. Flaherty initiated were followed by unparallelled growth in government spending. They are Wilkins Micawber's progeny. Some of the most famous words Dickens wrote came from the mouth of Micawber: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." The man became a literary joke simply because he did not practise what he preached.

The truth is that Mr. Harper and Mr. Flaherty have been mesmerised by what has become an economic joke, the appropriately titled Laffer Curve. In the 1970's, the American economist, Arthur Laffer, floated the theory that the tax rate that maximized government revenue was a rate that (at the time) was much lower than previously believed. Or, as Mr. Flaherty puts it, "Tax reductions are stimulus. The more money we leave in the hands of Canadian individuals and families, the more they have available to spend and help the economy expand and create jobs." That idea has become standard conservative boilerplate.

But, as economist James Tobin wrote, "the 'Laffer Curve' idea that tax cuts would actually increase tax revenues turned out to deserve the ridicule with which sober economists had greeted it in 1981." Despite that experience, the second Bush administration made the Laffer Curve the cornerstone of its economic policy, just as Mr. Harper and Mr. Flaherty have made it the cornerstone of their economic policy.

It's not as though Mr. Harper and Mr. Flaherty have no track record. Fifteen months ago, they insisted that Canada was going to skirt the recession and even run a small surplus. And those of us in Ontario remember the $5.5 billion deficit Mr. Flaherty bequeathed to those who succeeded him.

Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. The patients are in charge of the asylum.

Playing for Time

Jeffrey Simpson claimed, in last Saturday's Globe and Mail, that the Prime Minister's suspension of Parliament would not loosen his grip on that body. "Canadians didn't make him suffer the last two times he adjusted the parliamentary timetable to suit his partisan purposes." Simpson wrote. "Why would they respond any differently now?"

And, earlier in the same week, Tom Flanagan -- Harper's original eminence gris -- offered an analysis which was as remarkably straightforward as it was cynical. Harper's political success, Flanagan claimed, was based on a mixture of "polarization, ad hoc alliances" and the "fear of an election."

This prime minister plays for time. From a year ago, when he almost sabotaged his newly elected government with his clumsy attempt to hamstring his opponents, to this year's attempt to avoid accountability for what is happening -- or, more precisely, what is not happening in Afghanistan and the environment -- Mr. Harper has retreated to what he claims should be any prime minister's fall back position, prorogation.

His hope is that Canadians, bored with the processes of government, will overlook the fact that nothing is happening. And, if they do begin to notice, he can blame the situation on the opposition parties. He fought the last election on the notion that parliament was dysfunctional, neglecting to mention that each of his party's MP's had been given a manual on how to make sure that it didn't function. He claimed that Canada was going to skirt a recession. When that rosy prediction proved to be completely at odds with the facts, he said he needed time to recalibrate. When Canadian automobile manufacturers were heading into oblivion, he said that he needed time for the Americans to figure out what they were going to do before he acted. He uses the same argument when it comes to environmental policy. Until the Americans come up with one, Mr. Harper asserts, we can only bide our time. If the government had taken that position in the 1960's, we would still be waiting for medicare.

On the other hand, the prime minister has given the opposition parties the gift of time. "Harper's Given Them Two Free Months of Target Practice," was the headline to Lawrence Martin's column in The Globe. Perhaps. But -- while the break gives the opposition plenty of time to keep the prime minister in their cross hairs, and they will find lots of ammunition in his past statements -- if that's all they do, they will prove Mr. Simpson right. They should use this time to fill the policy vacuum which Mr. Harper has left in his wake. What should Canadian policy be on the environment? What, as we face at least two years of anemic economic growth, should Canadian policy be on unemployment? What should Canadian policy be on the detention of Afghan prisoners? And what happens when our troops leave that country?

For, the simple truth is that Mr. Harper is prime minister by default. He came to politics as an angry young man, who had a much better idea of what he was against than what he was for. Rocked in the cradle of Western alienation, he came to Ottawa to get even. And that's the reason he is still there. A party which knows more about what it is against than what it is for will never achieve a majority. Paul Martin tried the same tactic; and he, too, presided over a minority parliament.

The opposition parties -- particularly Mr. Ignatieff -- need to give Canadians policies to vote for. Their job is not to make Parliament work. Mr. Harper has devoted a lot of energy to ensuring that it doesn't. Now is the time for both Mr. Ignatieff and Mr. Layton to tell us what they stand for.

The Northern Magus?

We have reached one of those standoffs and somebody has to blink. The opposition has asserted the supremacy of Parliament, by demanding uncensored copies of documents in the Afghan detainee file. The Prime Minister has refused to cooperate. Instead, he has declared that Parliament sits at his convenience; and he can make it go away when he chooses.

When commentators on the right -- like Andrew Coyne -- declare that, "What the government has done is not illegal. It is merely wrong: an abuse of process, an insult to Parliament, another step on Parliament's long slide into irrelevance," it should be obvious that this is no minor bump in the road. Mr. Harper's gambit should come as no surprise. When the Conservatives threatened to go over Michaelle Jean's head a year ago -- if they did not get the answer they wanted -- the stage was set for what has now happened.

The problem is that there is a general perception -- at least among some members of the press and the public -- which has no basis in fact. Tim Powers declared in The Globe and Mail last week that "what few appreciate is that the guy likes to govern and arguably does it well." When 32 of the government's 60 odd bills die on the order paper, that's not governing. This standoff is not about governing; it is about control. A democracy --a real democracy -- spreads control around. For Mr. Harper, democracy is a constant annoyance.

Perhaps when he was in high school, the Prime Minister read Richard Gwyn's book on Pierre Trudeau, The Northern Magus. Gwyn concluded that Trudeau was an excellent showman, but not really a magician. The image of the prime minister as a magician would have appealed to a bright, awkward kid who felt his talents were unappreciated. Whatever the source of Harper's hunger for power, the fact is that magicians don't really make things disappear. It's all about sleight of hand and distraction.

That is why the opposition can't blink. They must not disappear. They must continue to meet -- in another place, as Mr. Coyne suggests. They should continue their investigation into prisoner abuse; and, as Mr. Harper seeks to pack the senate, they should repeat all the nasty things he has said in the past about that chamber being a resting place for party hacks. In fact, there is a great deal of damning evidence to be found in the Prime Minister's own words.

If necessary, the opposition should continue to meet during the Olympics. It would be a national embarrassment. But Mr. Harper has already been a national embarrassment in Copenhagen, where -- in an attempt to be seen as a magus -- he made himself disappear. In the end, the voters will have to show him to the stage door.

Petulant Children

In a recent column, Andrew Sullivan distinguished between two types of conservatives: "There are conservatives who are always girded for war or suspect all peace as some kind of hidden war; and those who are happy at peace, greatful for its blessings and hopeful that it will last. There are those who always see Hobbes and those who see Hobbes but are greatful for Locke."

Modern conservatives are fascinated with Hobbes. The past year has made their fascination with the man -- who held that life was, unfortunately, "nasty, brutish and short" -- abundantly clear. In the United States, the Republican Party has become a party of no policy; indeed, it is now just a party of "no." New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently referred to a study, by political scientist Barbara Sinclair, which plotted the use of the senatorial filibuster -- a technique which for nearly 200 years was used effectively but sparingly: "In the 1960's, she finds, 'extended-debate-related problems' -- threatened or actual filibusters -- affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980's that had risen to 27 percent. But, after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006, and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent."

In this country, the Harper conservatives have followed the same trajectory. As James Travers wrote in the Toronto Star:

Little now stands in the Prime Minister's way. Parliament's independent watchdogs are mostly mute, their collars drawn tight and leashes shortened. Parliament's committees, including the one investigating torture allegations, are rendered impotent by a confidential manual instructing partisan sabotage. Elected representatives sent here to safeguard the national treasury and restrain ruling party excesses are no longer able to fulfill those defining duties.

For years these folks whined about injustice, claiming that modern republican and parliamentary democracy had rigged the game against them. Now that they have been elected, even tenuously -- as were George W. Bush and Stephen Harper -- they have sought to dismantle those democracies, afraid that their time will never come again. They have operated on the Hobbesian principle that power can only be won and maintained by vanquishing one's enemies; that the world has always been a nasty place; and that the fundamental principle in any democracy -- that the best solutions are the products of debate, cooperation and compromise -- is idealistic hogwash.

They are, in truth, petulant children -- intent on getting their way. And, like the little boys in Golding's Lord of the Flies, they are quite content to burn down the island in their manic quest to rid themselves and their countries of contrary thinking.

A Father Remembered

My father died last week. He lived a long life -- long enough to see his children grow up and have children of their own. In fact, he lived to see and enjoy two great grandchildren.

A year and a half ago, I marvelled in this space about how a man who grew up without a father managed to become such a good one himself. And I was immodestly pleased when he responded to that post publicly.

We no longer live in Montreal, where my wife and I grew up. But I try to call my parents every weekend; and my father always gave me his take on each Monday morning's post. You should understand that my father's political opinions -- on most subjects -- were far different than my own. Even though I bear his name, he was never out to convert me to his worldview.

In fact, one of the many lessons he taught me was that we could disagree -- profoundly -- but we did not have to fight. Perhaps he came to that conclusion as a World War II veteran. He certainly had no patience for war stories. He valued his friendships with other veterans; but he took no pride in someone else's total surrender. He refused to keep a gun in the house; and when -- as a kid -- I asked him why, he simply said, "I had enough of that during the war."

To say I will miss him doesn't capture the way I feel. But I am confident that he has earned his reward.

A Study in Hypocrisy

On Friday, Security Minister Stockwell Day articulated the reasons why the Harper government had refused to release uncensored documents to the Parliamentary Committee investigating Afghan prisoner abuse. "We are not going to make information available just readily," he said, "about friend and foe alike, about specific items, about a security operation that could imperil our own troops and imperil the citizens."

It's interesting to compare Day's statement to one that Stephen Harper made as he assumed office three years ago: "Restoring accountability will be one of the major priorities of our new government. Accountability is what ordinary Canadians, working Canadians, those people who pay their bills, pay their taxes, expect from their political leaders."

And then there was this trope on how a minority parliament should operate, from the then Leader of the Opposition: "And I think that the real problem we're facing already is that the government doesn't accept that it got a minority."

What the prisoner abuse scandal illustrates is what these statements illustrate: what the government says and what the government does are oxymoronic. Peter McKay says that there is "no absolute proof" of prisoner abuse. General Natynczyk says there is. Richard Colvin says the government knew of the problem in 2006; but it only attempted to fix it a year later, despite the fact that our allies, the British and the Dutch, had acted on the problem much earlier.

More importantly, there is the principle of the supremacy of Parliament. It is the fundamental check against a government's abuse of power. The simple truth is that we are dealing with two kinds of abuse here: abuse of prisoners and abuse of Parliament.

As Jeffrey Simpson pointed out in Saturday's Globe and Mail, there was a fairly straight forward way out of this mess. Harper inherited the war and the problem of what to do with prisoners from Paul Martin. The government could have made the following statement:

We heard Mr. Colvin's warnings and those from other sources. He was a fine public servant, but he had only one angle on the challenges he faced. We listened to his information and sought to cooberrate it because, after all, we were working in another country for which we had to show certain respect. When we gathered more information, we acted to upgrade our agreement with Afghan authorities.

Instead, the Harperites turned their guns on Mr. Colvin, as they had on Linda Keen before him. Then they brought out the generals to discredit Colvin -- until Natynczyk discredited the generals. Mr. Harper's government, like Richard Nixon's government, has taken on the personality of the man at the top. It displays a deep and bitter sense of paranoia.

Hamlet was wrong. Conscience doesn't make cowards of us all. But paranoia does. And, if Mr. Harper succeeds in withholding those uncensored documents from Parliament, he will make cowards of us all.

When the Economists Are in Charge

In October, the British historian Tony Judt delivered a lecture with the sobering title, What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy. Speaking at New York University, where he is currently a professor of European history, Judt said, "We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?"

Judt's question is particularly pertinent today, as the Copenhagen Summit on the Environment begins. The reason for our lack of vision, Judt claimed, is because, for quite awhile now, we have been "resort[ing] to 'economism', the invocation of economics in all discussions of public affairs."

For the last three decades he maintained, "we have not asked is it good or bad? Instead we inquire: "Is it efficient? Is it productive? Would it benefit gross domestic product? Will it contribute to growth? This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to restrict ourselves to issues of profit and loss -- economic questions in the narrowest sense -- is not an instinctive human condition. It is an acquired taste."

We now see everything through the prism of economics -- particularly Neo Classical Economics. And viewed through that prism, there is no such thing as the collective. Or, as Margaret Thatcher put it, "there is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women and families."

But Copenhagen is all about the collective -- the global collective. It's about state and international solutions. However, in the wake of World War II, and beginning with the Neo Classical economists -- like Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter -- there arose, among those who set policy, a deep suspicion of the state. It is significant that a number of the economists who eventually became associated with the "Chicago School" were refugees from Austria. Their mistrust of government grew out of their experience between the wars. And, as the British and American welfare states struggled under the forces of globalization, their ideas gained currency. It is these ideas which the prime minister and his party have adopted as unalterable truths.

That baggage -- at least in part -- explains why Mr. Harper lacks any real vision. His mission is to propagate Hayek's and Schumpeter's mistrust of the state. That mistrust has led to greater economic inequality and greater social instability. It has also led to a planet at its tipping point.

Mr. Harper did not intend to put in an appearance at Copenhagen. He changed his mind when he discovered that Barack Obama was going to attend. Moreover, he has no policy on the environment. Worse still, he called the Kyoto Accord, -- the last attempt at a coordinated plan to save the planet -- "essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth producing nations."

The last two years have given us some insight into the consequences of the Chicago School's doctrines. Applying those ideas on a global basis would be an unmitigated disaster. That realization does not appear to have dawned on Mr. Harper. Perhaps that's because he fancies himself an economist.

Nixon's Ghost

A few weeks ago, historian Michael Bliss wrote that Stephen Harper was beginning to look like another Mackenzie King. I wrote at the time that the analogy was pretty specious. While Harper's principles are as elastic as King's, this prime Minister is more mean spirited and paranoid than King.

When Richard Colvin testified three weeks ago that he had sent repeated warnings to Ottawa expressing his -- and The Red Cross's -- concerns about what was happening to the prisoners our soldiers had transferred to Afghan authorities, Mr. Harper and his acolytes first tried to shoot the messenger. Last week, former head of Canadian Forces, Rick Hillier, along with retired lieutenant general Michel Gauthier and major general David Fraser sought to discredit Colvin. Hillier called Colvin's claims "ludicrous;" and he told the committee investigating the matter that there was "nothing" in Colvin's memos which merited his attention.

Hillier affirmed that he had read the memos before he testified in front of the committee. David Mulroney -- no relation to Brian, and currently Canada's ambassador to China -- was the man to whom Colvin reported. He, too, reviewed the memos before testifying. He told the committee that, while the government was aware of allegations of torture, "there was no mention specifically of Canadian-transferred prisoners." There were echoes here of Bill Clinton's response to the Monica Lewinsky allegations: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

But the crux of the problem is that, while the generals and Mr. Mulroney were given access to Colvin's memos, the government will not allow members of the committee the same privilege. They argue that "national security" trumps the committee's right to know what the government knows. That claim sounds a lot like Richard Nixon's claim of "executive privilege" -- his justification for keeping the White House tapes away from members of Congress. For awhile -- particularly in 1972 -- Nixon looked invincible. He used government agencies, like the FBI and the IRS, to discredit and destroy those on his "enemies" list.

Nixon was an introvert in national politics. He trusted few people, even those closest to him. In the end, his campaign of dirty tricks -- and his own paranoia -- did him in. Mr. Harper is an intelligent introvert who has risen to the highest office in the land. His circle of trust does not extend far. And the attack machine he has assembled has its own team of dirty tricksters.
His attempt to deny Parliament access to the Colvin memos is tantamount to Nixon's refusal to release the tapes.

We do not know whether -- like Mackenzie King -- Mr. Harper keeps a crystal ball stashed somewhere in the basement at 24 Sussex Drive. If he has such a device, I doubt that he is trying to converse with King's dead mother. However, I am beginning to wonder if he as been communing with the ghost of Richard Nixon.

Whatever It Takes

Just when the Harper government starts moving up in the polls, it always manages to reveal the mean spiritedness at its core. Richard Colvin, a career diplomat, testified last week before a Parliamentary subcommittee. He claimed that, while he was posted to Afghanistan, he sent reports to 76 people in various government departments, detailing his suspicions that prisoners captured by Canadian Forces were turned over to Afghan authorities and tortured.

He also claimed that his reports were, for the most part, ignored. When they were brought to someone's attention, he was told that the information he sent was too sensitive to be put in writing. His reports could be delivered orally; but he was to leave no paper trail. He was also told that if he brought his information to the Military Police Complaints Commission -- a government agency specifically established to deal with these issues -- legal action would be taken against him

The next day, the government rose in righteous indignation, claiming that the man it had promoted to a senior post in Washington was not to be believed. Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay said that Colvin's testimony was full of "holes" -- and that he (MacKay) had never seen any reports of suspected torture.

But, as Chantal Hebert noted in The Toronto Star, the government's claims of ignorance ring hallow: "Colvin, among others, was supposed to be their eyes and ears in Afghanistan." And, given the fallout from the Gomery inquiry, it is hard to imagine that the civil service would "keep its Conservative masters out of the loop."

The problem is not new. It has bedevilled the government before. Former Defense Minister Gordon O'Connor was removed from his post in part because he bungled earlier reports that our troops had handed over prisoners to Afghan torturers. The issue is no mere scruple. If Canadian soldiers are found to have cooperated in torture, they can be convicted -- under international law -- of war crimes.

Any claim of government ignorance begins to sound like the Cheney-Rumsfeld version of what happened at Abu Ghraib: It was a few bad apples who were responsible for the outrage. Time -- and good journalism -- have revealed that the directions for "enhanced interrogation techniques" came directly from the vice president's office.

Mr. Colvin knows that his testimony is not improving his career prospects. And the government's reaction is part of a pattern. When the RCMP suggested that the gun registry was a useful tool, the government trained its rhetorical guns on the Mounties. When the opposition formed a coalition last November, the Harperites fulminated about how the other parties were in league with "the separatists" -- the same tactic they had used to try and topple the government of Paul Martin. And, of course, there were the ads picturing puffins pooping on Stephane Dion, and the ad hominem attacks on Michael Ignatieff. And that is the point: the only way Mr. Harper and company know of dealing with criticism is to launch ad hominem attacks on those who criticize them. They will do whatever it takes to destroy those who will not tow the line.

Handing a majority government to these folks would be the equivalent of handing the cars keys to a fourteen year old. It would be an act of parental neglect.

Barbarians at the Gate

Glenn Beck, who is one of the emerging faces and voices in the Republican Party, made news last week when he claimed that Barack Obama has "a deep seated hatred for white people or the white culture." It is very sad, indeed, that Obama's mother and grandparents are no longer able to respond to Beck. The patent absurdity of what he says would be easily dismissible, if not for the fact that people like Beck are nothing new in American political life.

As Richard Hofstadter has noted, Beck's virulent paranoia has a long history. Its "sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy" first raised its head with the early fear of Masonry -- even though several of the founding fathers were Masons. And it was revived in the anti-Catholic movements of the 19th and early 20th century, when Catholics and their secret agents, the Jesuits, were said to be "prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery."

Then, a little more than sixty years ago, Joseph McCarthy saw a communist around every corner. One of his acolytes, Robert H. Welsh Jr., claimed that President Eisenhower's brother Milton was "actually [the president's] superior and boss within the Communist Party," and that Eisenhower himself, was "a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy." It was in the midst of this insanity that William F. Buckley founded National Review, in staunch support of McCarthy and his vision. The enemy, Buckley claimed, was Liberalism -- which had established a "gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy." But what really bothered Buckley was the people he thought were the barbarians at the gate.

If Liberalism has stood for anything over the last two hundred years, it has been for broadening the franchise. The first American voters were white, male property owners. Then those men who did not own property were given the right to vote; then the slaves were freed and given that right; then women were allowed to walk into polling booths. All of those who were deemed unworthy at the nation's founding were eventually allowed within the walls; and, for Buckley, that spelled disaster.

Thus, when the Supreme Court declared school segregation illegal in 1954, Buckley wrote that the question was "whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically. The sobering answer is Yes -- the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race."

And that, in a nutshell, is what is at the heart of what Hofstadter calls "the paranoid style" in American politics. All of the bromides about democracy can be thrown out when those who see themselves as members of "the advanced race" feel threatened. The basic rule of one person one vote does not apply. "Universal suffrage," Buckley concluded, "is not the beginning of wisdom or the beginning of freedom."

After the school desegregation decision, the next logical step was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- which put an end to all segregation and lynching in the South -- and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Once those two laws were passed, it was inevitable that one day a black man would be elected president -- as inevitable as a Catholic being elected to that office or appointed to the Supreme Court. It is interesting to note that -- at present -- five of the nine justices are, at least nominally, Catholics.

In his inaugural editorial, Buckley wrote that the mission of his magazine was to "stand athwart history yelling Stop." Buckley is gone. But Beck and Rush Limbaugh have picked up his mantle. They are convinced that there are uncivilized hordes standing outside the gate; and that Obama -- a card carrying member of the unworthy -- is ready to let them inside. The same complaint was raised against Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Mr. Obama is in good company.

The Wounds of War

This Wednesday there will be another parade from the Canadian Legion to the Cenotaph, which -- appropriately enough -- is on Main Street, in the geographical centre of town. Each year there are fewer veterans who march to the Cenotaph; and they march there more haltingly.

I live in small town Ontario -- in a place whose existence was officially recognized 170 years ago. The town was founded by United Empire Loyalists, people who thought Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson were rabble rousers. Their allegiance was always to Britain; and so, when the mother country entered two wars in the last century, this town's sons -- ready, aye, ready -- lined up to defend the mother country. The names of the residents who died in those causes are engraved on that monument at the centre of town.

One of our veterans died last spring. On D-Day he was on Juno Beach, where he was wounded. He returned here with a limp and the click of a leg brace, to teach where I taught high school. He himself taught history; and every year, on November 11th, he took it upon himself to organize -- even long after he retired -- the school's Remembrance Day ceremonies. His roots were Loyalist. And, even though there were many who did not agree with his politics, his personal integrity was beyond reproach. He loved his family; he loved his country; he loved his town. And, for him, public service was the highest calling.

I think of him this week. I think of the gunman and his victims in Texas. And I think of this generation's dead soldiers who are flown from Afghanistan to Trenton, not far from here. I think of all the wounded, who have returned home, forever changed. When I was young, I was foolish enough to think that we could banish war the way we had banished polio -- forgetting that the Book of Ecclesiastes warned us long ago that war was cyclical and seasonal. There is something unbearably sad in that realization. And that is precisely why we must remember those who have died, and those who were wounded, this Wednesday.

We, who were fortunate enough to not bear their burdens, enjoy the fruits of their labours.