Leave It To Stephen

Bob Rae, the former premier of Ontario and now the Liberal Foreign Affairs critic, says that watching Prime Minister Harper operate in the House of Commons is like watching reruns of a 1950's television show -- a show he calls Harperville.

"Harperville is a land of conformity, not freedom or diversity," writes Rae. It is a land where "Daddy goes to work and Mommy stays home. There are good guys and bad guys. The bad guys get killed or go to jail. . . Daddy definitely knows best and his word is law. If you like Daddy you can talk to him or even have your picture taken with him. If Daddy doesn't like you, he will be very stern with you, and he won't even talk with you."

Looking in the rear view mirror, the Conservative Party has been playing and replaying the same theme throughout this election. It's called Leave It To Stephen. The problem, of course, is that the world Harper tries to personify never existed -- except on television. The world was never that simple and the lines were never that clearly drawn. But he and his party are betting that, surrounded by terrorism and economic uncertainty, Canadians will come around to the conviction that Stephen Knows Best.

However, one needs to ask the question, "What, exactly, does Stephen know?" For openers, it's worth remembering that when George W. Bush was looking for countries to join his Coalition of the Willing, Harper -- unlike Jean Chretien -- couldn't wait to join the parade. That show hasn't ended yet, even though Mr. Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" four years ago. And, on the subject of economic management, Harper has -- in less than three years -- spent money, reduced taxes, and left the cupboard bare -- even though he started with a $14 billion surplus. Over the last couple of weeks, world markets have reminded us how that show ends.

And what promises has Harper made during this election? Not many. But he has vowed that he will lock up fourteen year olds for life, if their crimes warrant it. And, on the subject of government support for the arts, he has declared that "when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming that their subsidies aren't high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up -- I'm not sure that's something that resonates with ordinary people."

And how does all of this mean spirited pettiness translate into policy? The result, writes Jeffrey Simpson in The Globe and Mail, is that "policy incoherence between Ottawa and the provinces reigns everywhere. The Harper preference for 'open federalism' means provinces can do what they want, enter international agreements, frustrate national coherence."

We have had twenty-five years of this kind of hokum. And, as we head to the polls, the consequences are all coming home. The central question of this election is the question Groucho Marx asked two generations ago: "Who are you going to believe? Mr. Harper or your own eyes?"

The Smart Money

"If all else fails," John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, " immortality can always be assured by spectacular error." From a Galbraithian perspective, the present Titans of Wall Street have achieved both immortality and infamy.

Their errors, wrote Robert S. Samuelson last week in The Washington Post, were essentially three: "First financial firms have moved beyond their traditional roles as advisers and intermediaries." Instead of counselling investors, they have become aggressive players in the market, placing their own bets on winners and losers. "Second, Wall Street's compensation is heavily skewed towards annual bonuses." That compensation system has encouraged a short term focus on the next quarter or, at most, the end of the year. The long range health of the institution the Titans serve has disappeared from the corporate radar screen. And "finally, investment banks rely heavily on borrowed money, called 'leverage' in financial lingo." In the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the "leverage ratio" exceeded 60:1.

Anyone who goes to the track and puts down a two dollar bet on a horse running 60 to 1 is a romantic. Someone who bets millions on the same horse is certifiable. But the movers and shakers at the big firms convinced themselves they had gamed the system and squeezed the risk out of it. By spreading that risk to hundreds of thousands of ordinary folks around the globe, they believed they had inoculated themselves against failure. What they did not count on was the horse coming up lame. And, as the Titans discovered that tens of thousands of people could no longer afford the houses they lived in, all those interest payments supporting their own house of cards dried up -- at the same time. When people cannot pay their debts, their lines of credit are cancelled.

What the American government now proposes is to take all those bad bets off the table and to revisit them at a more propitious time, or -- if that time is a long time coming -- to let American taxpayers cover them. Such a solution allows the high rollers to exit with the shirts on their backs. But the real question is, will the home owners also be covered? Will they keep the roofs over their heads?

In 1936 Franklin Roosevelt explained the crisis he faced this way: "Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise not free enterprise. Freedom," he declared,"is no half and half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the marketplace."

For the last three decades, "freedom" has been used as a synonym for "privilege." The rescue package which is currently on the drawing boards is necessary. But, unless ordinary citizens get the same kind of relief being offered the Brahmins of Wall Street, we will only succeed in freeing up credit so people can once again go deeply in debt. The essential illusion of supply side economics is that demand will keep pace with supply. If you increase the supply of goods, you will magically increase the demand for them. During the last thirty years we have let demand keep pace with supply by going more deeply into debt. But last week proved -- beyond a doubt -- that debt has its limits.

Besides taking bad debts off the table -- as Roosevelt did -- the government needs to put money into the hands of ordinary citizens and create essentially a new Works Progress Administration. This would be no mere make-work project. When the bridge across the Mississippi River collapsed two years ago, that tragedy underscored just how badly the nation needs to renew its infrastructure. The retired investment banker Felix Rohatyn -- who helped rescue New York City from bankruptcy thirty years ago -- has suggested that what the United States needs is a National Infrastructure Bank, whose task would be to rebuild the nation's rotting roads, bridges, electrical grid, etc. If they are left neglected, more than Wall Street's house of cards will fall. If they are attended to, lots of people will be able to stay in their homes. To pay for the new program, the government could begin by taxing back some of those executive bonuses. No one needs hundreds of millions of dollars a year to live comfortably.

Last week should have tolled the death knell for supply side economics. Despite all its statistical data and Laffer curves, it has essentially been an excuse for greed. As Galbraith also 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."

Palinmania

In the last two weeks, the Governor of Alaska has achieved pop star status -- and she has generated a great deal of controversy. I suspect that the controversy is intentional. For, in the final analysis, Sarah Palin is not a game changer. She is a diversion.

The problem for John McCain is that the wreckage of the policies he has championed -- whether they be his support for the Iraq War or his support for Freidmanesque economics -- is everywhere. That is particularly so today, when Lehman Brothers -- an investment bank which survived the Civil War and the Great Depression -- has filed for bankruptcy. With gas prices at record highs, with high paying manufacturing jobs disappearing in droves, and with people being evicted from their homes in record numbers, any politician who focuses on his or her record -- and the legislation which helped create this perfect storm -- is courting disaster.

So, instead, both Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain are focusing on the future. Both men have adopted "change" as their campaign theme. McCain has come late to that theme, having discovered that experience won't sell anymore. But there is a critical difference between each candidate's definition of change. Obama represents a cosmopolitan future -- his background symbolizes it. It is a future where -- unfortunately -- economic growth takes place in cities rather than small towns, and where progress -- economic and global -- requires interconnectedness between people, technology and governments.

McCain's definition of change is the one which got Ronald Reagan elected three decades ago. As Joe Klein wrote last week in Time, Reagan's "vision of the future was the past. . . .In his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Reagan talked about an America that existed 'when I was young and when this country didn't even know it had a racial problem.'" It was an America where most people grew up in small towns -- like Reagan's hometown of Tampico, Illinois or Palin's hometown of Wasilla, Alaska -- people who, Palin says, "run our factories . . . fight our wars . . . and are always proud" of their country. As Ms. Palin surely knows, there are very few factories left in small towns. And, as Frank Rich wrote in Sunday's New York Times, she neglects to mention that the source of her homage to just plain folks is Westbrook Pegler. When Pegler wrote the words Palin borrowed, Harry Truman was president. Pegler hated the president from the heartland -- just as he hated Eastern European Jews, who he thought were probably Communists. Indeed, Pegler believed that Senator Joseph McCarthy was his nation's saviour. I doubt Palin was aware of the source; she simply spoke the words she was given.

Unable to defend the present, and substituting the past for the future, the McCain campaign has instead decided to sell the American myth of the old frontier -- something which Palin is supposed to symbolize. She and McCain are the self reliant settlers who, in Huck Finn's words, "light out for the territory," and who -- good heartedly -- stand in opposition to a corrupt society. The problem is that "the territory" no longer exists, even as the corrupt society survives.

All of this says a great deal about McCain. The man who made his reputation as a straight talker is no longer rooted in the present. And Sarah Palin is McCain's desperate attempt to get voters to focus on something other than the present. Like Shelley's Ozymandias, he stands like a broken statue -- among the ruins.

The Cult of the Magician

Even before the Governor General dissolved Canada's 39th Parliament yesterday, the Conservatives were running campaign ads. On television we were treated to a warm and fuzzy Stephen Harper -- a family man -- who was trying to appeal to women voters, a demographic which -- to date -- he has not impressed. On radio, voters have been bombarded for sometime with ads trashing the Liberal Greenshift proposal -- and linking Stephane Dion's name to it at every replay. This ad is presumably aimed at the male population, who (supposedly) are hard headed and who hate taxes -- any taxes.

What both ads attempt to do is to frame the election in terms of personalities rather than programs. Harper is the strong but caring leader in uncertain times. Dion is the unrealistic egghead who is, Mr. Harper says, as radical as Pierre Trudeau.

It has been interesting to hear Harper conjure up Trudeau's ghost. It shows, first of all, that he has no appreciation of Canadian history -- perhaps because he was eleven years old during the October Crisis of 1970. But, more than that, Harper's resurrection of Trudeau reveals that he has fundamentally misunderstood the man and his importance to the country. Harper, unlike Joe Clark, does not have to face Trudeau in a debate. Those of us who remember can imagine what Trudeau's reaction to Harper's "Quebec, a nation within a nation" resolution would have been.

However, in one sense, Harper is like Trudeau. He is trying to don the cape of what Richard Gwyn called The Northern Magus -- the Canadian magician. By focusing on personalities rather than programs, Harper is using the time honoured magician's trick of creating a diversion. Better to focus on the man rather than on what the man has done -- and to create the illusion of prosperity.

And what has been done is much bigger than Harper himself. It is, indeed, ironic that the election was called on the day that the American government decided to bailout Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Not only is it the biggest bailout in American history. It also reveals the literal and figurative fraud behind neo-conservative economic theory. That theory has led to the concentration of wealth at the top of society, while the wages of the vast majority of North Americans have remained stagnant.

At the same time, the gurus of the theory claimed that they wanted to make home ownership affordable for all. Instead of raising wages as the cost of housing went up, these folks made it easier for the middle and lower classes to go into debt. In the United States that policy spawned the sub prime mortgage. In Canada it spawned the forty year mortgage. In both cases, when interest rates rose, homeowners were caught in the downdraft.

The rest of the Harper record is, likewise, a fraud. The man who promised transparency has consistently thumbed his nose at any type of parliamentary oversight. The man who promised to banish corruption from the capitol has not answered allegations about the "financial considerations" which were offered the late Chuck Cadman; or the allegations surrounding the financing of the last Conservative election campaign. Last, but certainly not least, the man who claimed to know a lot about economics has been a prodigal son. As with Fannie and Freddie, taxpayers have been left holding the bag -- and, having blown through a $12 billion surplus, that bag is getting heavier. By calling an election, the prime minster is trying to make all these troubles disappear.

Last week, at the Republican National Convention, Rick Davis -- John McCain's campaign manager -- claimed that the American election was going to be about personalities. Americans heard a great deal about McCain the war hero, while McCain himself announced that "change is coming." Now the Republicans are in the ludicrous position of running against themselves. It will take a real magician to keep the Republicans in power. But polls suggest they are making headway.

Just as polls suggest that Mr. Harper is in striking distance of a majority government here. However, as Barack Obama keeps reminding his audiences, the election is not about him. It's about them. Harper is desperately trying to make the Canadian election about him. But it's about -- in fact, in any democracy it's always about -- us. The task of separating illusion from reality is now in our hands.

A Few Words of Praise for Lyndon Johnson

As a young undergraduate, I had neither respect nor admiration for Lyndon Johnson. My opinion of him was colored by the Vietnam War. And when -- as a graduate student -- I entered The University of North Carolina the year after he left office, I was certain that history would judge him harshly.

History has not been kind to the man who escalated the war and did so under questionable circumstances. The same pattern has been repeated under another president from Texas. But, as Johnson's biographer Robert Caro -- who has written three volumes on Johnson and is working on a fourth -- reminded his readers last week, the ascent of Barack Obama would not have been possible if Lyndon Johnson had not used his considerable -- if sometimes dubious -- skills to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

"In March of 1965," Caro wrote, "black Americans in the 11 Southern states were still largely unable to vote. When they tried to register, they faced questions impossible to answer -- like the infamous "how many bubbles in a bar of soap?" -- but also the humiliation of trying to answer them in front of registrars who didn't bother to conceal their scorn. Out of six million blacks old enough to vote in those 11 states in 1965, only a small percentage -- 27 percent in Georgia, 19 percent in Alabama, 6 percent in Mississippi -- were registered."

When Johnson went before Congress in March of 1965 to argue for the Voting Rights Bill, there were protesters outside the White House. Their numbers would grow as the war continued. Johnson would go to bed at night, hearing the echoes of "Hey, Hey LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?" and knowing that he was the most hated man in America.

The war wrecked Johnson's presidency, because he insisted that he was not going to lose Southeast Asia the way Harry Truman had lost China. That dogged determination resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers. But it is one of American history's great ironies that it was that same stubbornness which gave African Americans the right to vote. For all his flaws, Johnson believed in the power of the franchise. "Just give Negroes the vote," he said, "and many of these problems will get better."

"Many of these problems" -- poverty, violence and hopelessness -- are still with us. But when Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party's nomination for president last week, the world changed. Win or lose, there will be no more humiliation as black Americans register to vote. There will be lots of unease among some white Americans. You can see it in those who try to define Obama as a foreigner or an alien.

Racism is not dead. The basic question this election will answer is, "How alive and well is it?" But if Obama wins, it will be because he has increased voter turnout in all of American society. And for that, he -- and people the world over -- have Lyndon Johnson to thank.

The Music Man

In Meredith Willson's perennially popular musical comedy, The Music Man, a slick con man -- who calls himself Professor Harold Hill -- travels the country selling musical instruments to simple, good hearted folks. He promises he will set up youth bands in every town he visits; but, of course, once the instruments arrive and he collects his money, he skips town -- leaving his victims in a cacophony of confusion, ignorance and noise. For, in truth, Professor Hill is a phony. His success rests in knowing when to leave before the storm hits.

Stephen Harper -- Toronto-born, but with his feet now firmly planted on the prairies -- can spot a snowstorm long before it hits. And, as his former colleague and nemesis Garth Turner has written in his blog, the coming storm is going to be a real blizzard: "There are fewer true barometers of how an economy is doing than jobs, houses or the stock market. . . . Last Friday came news that 55,000 jobs were lost last month, leading a senior economist at BMO to say the economy is 'flat on its back.' . . . .Monday came more bad news about real estate. . . . Not only are resale numbers crashing and the national housing price falling for the first time in 17 years, but the pace of new home construction is cooling fast. Annualized national starts, economists said, would be 210,000 in July. Instead they were 186,500." As for the stock market, "at just over 13,000, the TSX is off 2,000 points from its 52 week high -- and that was just one month ago."

But, unlike Harold Hill, Mr. Harper does not intend to leave town. In true Canadian fashion he wants to build an igloo, in the form of a majority government, and ride out the storm -- even as the less fortunate freeze along the fence lines. He is prepared to break his own pledge of having fixed election dates, if it will help him find shelter. Thus, he claims that Parliament has become "dysfunctional" and it is time to send it to oblivion.

But, as Lawrence Martin wrote in The Globe and Mail on August 16th, the Tories have long had a plan to make a shambles of government. "Last year," he wrote, "the governing Conservatives prepared a secret handbook on how to disrupt parliamentary committees and create chaos. No mere pamphlet, the book ran to 200 pages." The problem was the plan was supposed to stay within the confines of the Conservative caucus. Someone had the audacity to leak it. We have witnessed that plan in action recently, as Tory campaign strategist Doug Finlay showed up two days early before the House Ethics Committee, insisting he be heard on his own terms, only to be escorted by security gaurds -- while Finlay protested loudly -- out of the room. Next came reports that other government witnesses had been instructed not to appear before the committee.

As Thomas Frank makes clear in his new book, The Wrecking Crew, neo-conservatives have not arrived at this place by accident. "They have wrecked established federal operations," Frank writes, "because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job." Americans are facing the consequences of that debacle as they choose their next president. In Ontario, we faced those consequences six years ago when voters tossed out the Harris government -- a government which was populated by Harper's retreaded ministers Jim Flaherty, John Baird and Tony Clement.

Americans and Ontarians know how this story ends. And so does Preston Manning. In his book, Think Big, Manning writes of his souring relationship with his young protege. Harper consistently put his own interests ahead of his party -- and he left when he couldn't get his way. Harper was no man of the people: ". . . he had serious reservations about Reform's and my belief in the value of grassroots consultation and participation in key decisions." But Manning's most important insight into Harper's personality is contained on page 74 of that book: "Stephen had difficulty accepting that there might be a few other people (not many, perhaps, but a few) who were as smart as he was with respect to policy and strategy."

And, once again, frustrated that he can't get his way -- true democracy has been set up to frustrate the desires of those who insist that they are the smartest guys in the room -- Mr. Harper claims that it is his responsibility to save the country from the fools in the opposition parties. If Canadians give him his majority, they will experience what Americans and Ontarians have already experienced. In The Music Man, Harold Hill is saved by the ministrations of a good hearted librarian. Mr. Harper appears to be beyond redemption. An early member of the Reform Party, he has proved to be beyond Reform. One hopes the country can move beyond Mr. Harper.

Illusions of Grandeur

In two recent articles, Andrew Bacevich -- a graduate of West Point and Princeton, a retired US Army colonel and a veteran of Vietnam with a doctorate in American diplomatic history -- has focused on the illusions which spawned the War on Terror, and the illusions which persist in the rubble of its failure. "Valor does not offer the measure of an army's greatness," he writes in Illusions of Victory, "nor does fortitude or durability nor technological sophistication. A great army is one that accomplishes its assigned mission. Since George W. Bush inaugurated his Global War on Terror, the armed forces of the United States have failed to meet that standard."

Bacevich does not blame the soldiers on the ground. They have, he says, displayed more than their share of fortitude and durability. At the heart of America's failure lie three great illusions: the first is the misplaced belief that, in the 1980's and 90's, the United States reinvented military conflict. During this period, those in charge of the American military began to believe that, "by employing these new military techniques [like precision guided weapons] the United States could eliminate an obstreperous foreign leader and his cronies, while sparing the population over which that leader ruled." This confidence in new technology, says Bacevich in a second article, Is Perpetual War Our Future? Learning the Wrong Lessons from the Bush Era, trumped old truths -- particularly those of military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote two centuries ago that, "War is the realm of chance. No other human activity gives it greater scope: no other has such incessant and varied dealings with this intruder."

Bacevich says that the second great illusion was that both the officer corps -- and, more importantly, the civilian leadership of the armed forces -- had learned this lesson in Vietnam; and that it had found expression in the Powell-Weinberger Doctrine of overwhelming force: "Henceforth . . . the United States would fight only when genuinely vital interests were at stake. It would do so in pursuit of concrete and attainable objectives. It would mobilize the necessary resources -- political and moral as well as material -- to win promptly and decisively." But Mr. Rumsfeld, who had flown Navy jets in peace time, had no experience of the "realm of chance" which was the chief hallmark of military conflict. And his deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, had no military experience at all. Most tellingly and most tragically, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had both worked very hard to stay out of Vietnam. Cheney, in particular, had claimed in a Congressional hearing years ago that he had "other priorities" at the time.

The third and last illusion was that the division between the military and the American public -- which had been exposed so painfully during Vietnam -- had been healed by the new All Volunteer Force. By professionalizing the military and by getting rid of the citizen soldier, those who disagreed with American policy would be marginalized, not having a personal stake -- like a member of the family-- in it. The problem was that, while the All Volunteer Force may have dampened criticism of the war, it placed an unequal burden on the troops.

These illusions persist in the wake of America's failure in both Afghanistan and Iraq. And it is those illusions which Bacevich is at pains to dispel. What are the real lessons which we should learn from this monumental failure? The first hearkens back to Von Clausewitz: "War's essential nature is fixed, permanent, intractable, and irrepressible. War's constant companions are uncertainty and risk. . . . War remains today what it has always been -- elusive, untamed, costly, difficult to control, fraught with surprise, and sure to give rise to unexpected consequences. Only the truly demented will imagine otherwise."

The second lesson is that, "As has been the case throughout history, the utility of armed force remains finite. Even in the information age, to the extent that force 'works,' it does so with respect to a limited range of contingencies."

The third lesson is the futility of the so called Bush Doctrine of preventive war. "History has repeatedly demonstrated," writes Bacevich, "the irrationality of preventative war. . . . For principled guidance in determining when the use of force is appropriate, the country should conform to the Just War tradition -- not only because that tradition is consistent with our professed moral values, but also because its provisions provide an eminently useful guide for sound statecraft."

The fourth and final lesson, says Becevich, is not to confuse strategy with ideology. "The president's freedom agenda, which supposedly provided a blueprint for how to prosecute the Global War on Terror, expressed grandiose aspirations without serious effort to assess the means required to achieve them. . . . The political elite that ought to bear the chief responsibility for crafting grand strategy instead nursed fantasies of either achieving permanent global hegemony or remaking the world in America's image. Meanwhile, the military elite that could puncture those fantasies and help restore a modicum of realism to U.S. policy fixates on campaigns and battles with generalship largely a business of organizing and coordinating materiel."

To some, Bacevich may sound like a wild eyed radical. However, he defines himself as a "Catholic conservative;" and he has urged conservatives to vote for Barack Obama. What he brings to the argument is historical perspective and his experience in Vietnam. More than that, he brings the tragedy of a father's personal and private grief. A year ago, his son -- a 1st Lieutenant in the U.S. Army -- was killed in Iraq. Bacevich is a much wiser man than the man who currently sits in the Oval Office.

'Tis the Season

Summer is a time for family reunions. This is particularly true in Canada where, anytime from November to April, a snow storm can bring the major thoroughfares to a halt. For those of us who live on the shores of the Great Lakes -- where what we call "lake effect" can bury a town and leave the hamlet down the road untouched -- this phenomenon is a daily fact of life.

During the last two weeks, we attended two family reunions -- one for my wife's family, and one for mine. There are five of us: we have three children. But at the two events there were, at last count, fifty-six attendees. At one level, the turn-out served as an example of what economists call "exponential growth." At the very least, it served as testimony to the importance of procreation.


But the context was as important as the numbers. At the first event, we found ourselves caught in a deluge -- the summer rendition of lake effect. The organizers, however, had taken the trouble to rent a tent; and, somehow, there was room under it for all thirty-five of us. At the second event, we managed to cram twenty-one people -- grandparents, children, spouses, grandchildren and great grandchildren -- into one small apartment.

The logistics of getting all of these people under one roof were not easily accomplished. While most of us live in the triangle between Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto, both sides of the family have Western branches. My wife and I have relatives in Calgary; and my sister and her children live just outside Los Angeles. Add to that grown children who are on their own -- our son, for instance, has just returned from South Korea -- and, not to put too fine a point on it, getting everyone -- or almost everyone -- there was a considerable accomplishment.

For some, family is a thicket of dark motives and broken promises. But, in the end, every family represents the triumph of hope over experience. When an extended family overcomes the barriers of space, time and background to come together under the sky or someone's roof, the event reminds us all that, like it or not -- regardless of skin colour, religious affiliation or ethnicity -- we are all part of the family of man. That is the indissoluble bond which ties us together. When the weather gets nasty -- or when the planet gets crowded and the logistics get difficult -- the number of people who can gather under one roof is truly remarkable. And, as my Irish grandmother -- a widow who raised six kids in the midst of the Great Depression -- used to say, "There's always room for one more."

Taking Government Private

In a recent article, The Military-Industrial Complex: It's Much Later Than You Think, Chalmers Johnson hearkens back to Dwight Eisenhower's last speech as president. "We have been compelled," said Ike, "to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions . . . We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications . . . we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."

"Since 1961," writes Chalmers, "there has been too little study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military-industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight from members of Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our constitutional structure of checks and balances."

Chalmers then goes on to trace -- making reference to the work of Thomas Frank and Sheldon S. Wolin -- how modern neo conservatives have sought "to discredit 'big government,' while capturing for private interests the tremendous sums invested by the public sector in national defence." He gives particular attention to Wolin's analysis. "The privatization of public services and functions," Wolin argues, "manifests the steady evolution of corporate power into a political form, into an integral even dominant partner with the state." It turns our democratic institutions into "one[s] where the remaining democratic elements of the state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled."

This trend has been going on for some time now -- with both supposedly liberal and conservative governments hopping on the contracting bandwagon in the name of efficiency. But, as tales of how the Iraq War has been executed with the help of private contractors -- there are as many of them on the ground as there are soldiers; and, as the Harper government rebuilds the Canadian Armed Forces -- it is worth remembering that Harper's first Minister of Defense earned his living as a lobbyist for arms manufacturers before he entered government -- the need for careful and critical oversight becomes paramount.

Without such oversight, writes Chalmers, we "heighten the risks of war by accident, or by presidential whim." And any government which seeks to obstruct access to information is suspect. Mr. Bush and Mr. Harper have not been particularly cooperative with those constitutionally established bodies whose job it is to act as the people's eyes and ears. That, I suggest, is no accident.

A New Keynes

Last week, Dani Rodrik -- a political economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government -- wrote a column entitled, "Globalizers Lose Their Faith." To my mind, the most significant paragraph contained a litany of highly regarded economists who have become skeptical about the benefits of globalization.

"So we have Paul Samuelson," wrote Rodrik, "the author of the post war era's landmark economics textbook, reminding his fellow economists that China's gains in globalization may well come at the expense of the U.S; Paul Krugman, today's foremost international trade theorist, arguing that trade with low income countries is no longer too small to have an effect on inequality; Alan Blinder, a former U.S. Federal Reserve vice-chairman, worrying that international outsourcing will cause unprecedented dislocations for the U.S. labour force; Martin Wolf, the Financial Times columnist and one of the most articulate advocates of globalization, writing of his disappointment with how financial globalization has turned out; and Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury chief and the Clinton administration's "Mr. Globalization," musing about the dangers of a race to the bottom in national regulations and the need for international labour standards."

It is the lack of regulation, Krugman argues, which is at the heart of the current financial crisis. In his column in today's New York Times, he writes: "The back story to the current crisis is the way traditional banks -- banks with federally insured deposits, which are limited in the risks they are allowed to take and the amount of leverage they can take on -- have been pushed aside by unregulated financial players." These players essentially lent money on the value of assets -- not on the borrowers' ability to repay; and they assumed that the value of those assets would do nothing but grow. They then divested themselves of the loans they arranged, selling them off to pension funds and individual investors. The theory was that failure would always come in small pieces; and, in that event, no one would be badly burned.

What they forgot was the lesson of The Great Depression: there is such a thing as catastrophic asset failure -- something which world financial markets are now experiencing. To government's credit, it is acting faster than it did in the wake of Black Tuesday. But, as Krugman reminds his readers, much more must be done. "The moral of this story seems clear," he writes, ". . . financial regulation needs to be extended to cover a much wider range of institutions. Basically, the financial framework created in the 1930's, which brought generations of relative stability, needs to to be updated to 21st century conditions."

Unfortunately, for the last generation, governments -- taking their cue from Milton Friedman -- have operated on the principle that financial regulation is the root of all evil. And, hence, we find ourselves in a situation similar to 1928, on the eve of The Great Depression. Wealth is concentrated in a few hands; and there is not enough purchasing power at the bottom of the ladder to keep the economic engine going. If this story sounds familiar, it's because it is. The situation is more complicated than in 1929, because fixing the problem in the United States will not be enough to set the world right. It will take international cooperation and wise policy. In the 1930's, John Maynard Keynes provided the policy prescriptions which eventually set things right. "The world," Dani Rodrik wrote last week, "desperately awaits its new Keynes."

Where Do We Go from Here?

In 1976, Milton Friedman received the Nobel Prize for Economics. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of Britain. And in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. Thus began what Canadian political economist James Laxer has called, "the Age of Reaction." It has been a time, he writes, when "political ideas, cultural assumptions, the role of government, relations between the employed and their employees, and between the wealthy and the rest of the population have assumed a new shape."

In the United States in 2007, writes Laxer, "the relative income gap between the rich and the poor [was] wider than at anytime since 1928 (the eve of the Great Depression.) The lives of ordinary people have grown more uncertain. During the past quarter century, most people have been on an economic treadmill, precariously trying to make ends meet and to ward off the danger of crippling indebtedness."

And in a recent article entitled, "A Nation in Debt," -- in The American Interest -- Barbara Defoe Whitehead chronicles how, in this same period, "the institutions that encourage thrift have moved uptown, catering to upper income Americans with an ever expanding array of tax advantaged opportunities to invest and build wealth. The potential "small saver" has been left behind as prey to new highly profitable financial institutions: sub prime credit card issuers and mortgage brokers, rent to own merchants, payday lenders, auto title lenders, tax refund lenders, private student loan companies, franchise tax preparers, check cashing outlets and the state lottery. Once existing on society's margins, these institutions now constitute a large and aggressively expanding anti-thrift sector that is dragging hundreds of thousands of American consumers into profligacy and over indebtedness."

And the contagion is spreading to Europe and Canada -- as any recently cashiered auto worker (one out of seven jobs in Ontario is related to automobile production) can verify. The government of Stephen Harper has bet its and the country's future on Friedmanesque economic theory; and, like the Bush administration to the South, it has squandered the surpluses which it inherited.

Indeed, as Douglas Peters, the former chief economist at the Toronto Dominon Bank, wrote in The Toronto Star last week, "it appears that this was exactly what both the U.S. and Canadian conservative governments intended. The purpose of the tax cuts was to make it more difficult for governments to raise spending and introduce new programs." The people who bore a visceral hatred of government set out to make sure it would fail. Now the bill for this folly has come due. World markets -- which these folks raised to iconic status -- are teetering; and the future of the planet hangs in the balance -- as we fight wars in the Middle East, the largest repository of the stuff which is a major cause of our economic and planetary woes.

We are at a precarious moment. But, as Al Gore also reminded us last week, there is a common thread which runs through the multifaceted problems we face, "which is deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over reliance on carbon based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges -- the economic, environmental and national security crises. We're borrowing money from China," said Gore, "to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet."

Gore suggested that the way out of our morass is to rebuild our electricity grid and take advantage of renewable energy sources -- wind, solar and geothermal. It would be an expensive project. But oil at just under $150 a barrel is expensive; and it kills jobs, not to mention the lives which have been lost in the sands of the Gulf. Gore believes that we can do this in ten years -- the same critical path which President Kennedy set to put a man on the moon. It would mean abandoning Friedman's economic model; and it would mean taxing carbon, or as Gore put it, "we should tax what we burn, not what we earn."

That, coincidentally, is the policy on which Stephane Dion has staked his and his party's future. There will be an election in the United States in November. There will be an election in Canada shortly thereafter. During the Age of Reaction, Laxer writes, "in the developed countries . . . democracy has been in decline, increasingly replaced by a plutocracy in which money dictates political outcomes." No one should be foolish enough to believe that money can, or should, be banned from politics. But, if the Obama campaign has proved anything, it is that small donors have a voice. The question is, can the non-plutocrats once again grasp the levers of power? And do they care enough to fix the mess Mr. Friedman, Mrs. Thatcher, Mr. Reagan -- and their hundreds of thousands of acolytes -- have left us?

Standing Firm -- and Doing Nothing

Like the case of Maher Arar (see my post of September 29, 2006) the case of Omar Khadr is deeply troubling -- and Canada's two major political parties bear responsibility in both cases for violating the rule of law.

Khadr was fifteen years old when he was captured in Afghanistan and accused of killing a U.S. Army medic. His father had encouraged him to go fight for the Taliban; and the Canadian government clearly was uncomfortable with the elder Khadr's presence in the country. But Omar was a Canadian citizen -- he was born here -- and, thus, he should have been accorded the rights of any other Canadian citizen who found him or herself imprisoned in a foreign country. Having said that, there are some foreign countries which pay little attention to Canadian requests for humane treatment of its citizens. But, in this case, the country was the United States -- which officially holds that it is a nation of laws, not men.

When Canadian officials first met with Khadr, according to The Toronto Star, "he was lying in a military hospital bed in Afghanistan with two gaping holes in his chest -- the exit wounds of the bullets which were shot through his back before his capture by U.S. Special Forces."

Khadr was no innocent. He had been living with Taliban forces along the Pakistani border; and he well might have known about upcoming attacks. And, therefore, over the next two years, he was questioned more than forty times, in an effort to extract information from him. What is at issue, however, are the methods used in those interrogations, the acquiescence of the Canadian government in those methods, and the legitimacy of the legal process upon which Khadr -- now twenty-one years old -- is about to embark.

On July 10th, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs revealed that Khadr had been subjected to what the Americans called their "frequent flyer program," a regime of sleep deprivation -- where the prisoner was moved every three hours for a period of three weeks. This information would not have come to light had not the Supreme Court of Canada ordered the release of the report. Also mentioned in the report was Khadr's claim that he had been tortured.

Khadr's claim carries some weight, in light of the fact that one of his first interrogators at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan was convicted for his role in the death of an innocent Afghan taxi driver. Add to that the revelations about what went on at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, and three U.S. Supreme Court rulings which have rejected the process behind the tribunals under which Khadr is to be tried, and it is not difficult to see why many have concluded that Khadr is about to enter a kangaroo court.

In spite of all this evidence, Prime Minister Harper claims that Canada has no "real alternative" than to let the process at Guantanamo play itself out -- even though Britain, Australia and other nations have sought and received the right to remove their citizens from Guantanamo and subject them to the legal processes of their respective countries. The reason for Harper's position, says an editorial in The Globe and Mail, is clear: "What Canadian Court would accept any statements made by a 16 or 17 year old under such duress and without being allowed to see a lawyer? (He was denied a lawyer for the first 27 months of his incarceration.)" The prospect that a Canadian Court would set Khadr free is a prospect Mr. Harper would rather not face.

Some claim that Harper has replaced Tony Blair as Mr. Bush's poodle. The truth is that Mr. Harper, like Mr. Bush, is a true believer -- who holds that extraordinary circumstances put the leaders of democracies above the law. And, sometimes, being above the law simply means not responding to injustice. But, yesterday, the World Court charged Umar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir -- the president of Sudan and a sitting head of state -- with war crimes. In the aftermath of that event, there are those who suggest that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld should have grave reservations about travel abroad after January, 2009. Mr. Harper might also consider that advice. Mere private citizens could find themselves incarcerated for a long time.

Whose Partriotism?

Last week, the American election campaign was all about patriotism -- specifically, who was the better patriot, Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama. To answer that question, as David Greenberg pointed out in Slate, it's important to realize that McCain and Obama were arguing from different premises and definitions.

McCain's definition of patriotism, best articulated by Ronald Reagan, has been popular for the last twenty-five years. According to Greenberg, Reagan's patriotism "rested on a steadfast protectiveness of American values in the face of enemies -- proven through a muscular nationalistic military posture." It was "impatient with critical perspectives" and "advocate(d) an unhestitant participation in collective rituals like waving the flag, saying the Pledge of Allegience and even public prayer."

Obama's definition of patriotism was perhaps best articulated by Adlai Stevenson during his presidential campaign of 1952. Speaking at the height of Senator Joseph McCarthy's witchhunt, Stevenson told the American Legion, "True patriotism is based on tolerance and a large measure of humility." It, Greenberg wrote,"respect(ed) dissenting speech in the service of collective improvement."

The former definition lends itself to symbols like lapel pins and flags. The latter is diverse and not easily reducible to a symbol or a motto, like semper fidelis. It is not surprising, then, that Stevenson was soundly trounced by Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956.

The problem with Reagan's and McCain's definition of patriotism, however, is that it can -- and has -- been used to justify abridging the Constitution. It was generally accepted during the McCarthy period. And it reared its head again during the Watergate Crisis, when Richard Nixon declared, "When the president does it, it's not illegal." And, during the last eight years, it has been this definition which has been used to justify the prison at Guantanamo, warrantless wiretapping and the War in Iraq itself. It is no accident that the legislation which was passed after September 11th -- legislation which curtailed various civil liberties -- was labelled The USA Patriot Act. Anyone who questioned the legislation was attacked by the Bush Administration for his or her lack of patriotism.

But as public support for the war has gone south, so has the traditional Republican definition of patriotism -- so much so that members of the military, who typically accept it as doctrine, have begun to give voice to the other definition. In a recent opinion piece on truthout.org , Michael Winship quotes Air Force Reserve Maj. David J.R. Frakt -- a military lawyer -- who argued last month that his client, Mohammed Jawad -- an Afghan imprisoned at Guantanamo -- should be released, because the two weeks of sleep deprivation he had endured amounted to torture. "After six and a half years," Frakt said, "we know the truth about the detainees at Guantanamo: some of them are terrorists, some of them are foot soldiers, and some of them are just innocent people, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the detainees at Guantanamo have one thing in common -- with each other and with us -- they are all human beings and they are all worthy of humane treatment." Frakt was arguing for tolerance and humility.

Some will argue that, during a war, a nation can ill afford tolerance and humility. But a nation which proclaims "we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights" cannot afford the folly of the last eight years. If Mr. Obama wins the election, he will have convinced his countrymen to accept a different definition of patriotism.

Oh, Canada

Today this country marks its 141st anniversary. For a nation which was cobbled together out of a collection of dissimilar colonies -- one which has always considered itself a nation rather than a province -- the fact that the marriage has lasted for one hundred and forty-one years represents, indeed, the triumph of hope over experience.

We owe at least some of our longevity to luck. We have been blessed with an abundance of natural resources and space. Lately that has meant that, in a world gone wild for commodities, we have prospered. And all that space has given us room to blow off steam when we got on each others' nerves.

But we also have survived. We have done so in the darkest of winters; and we have done so despite geographical and cultural barriers -- by, more often than not, finding a way around them, instead of confronting them head on. It's not a particularly heroic way to solve problems; but it leaves behind less scar tissue. In the process we have built institutions -- first a railway, then a telecommunications system and, finally, a publicly financed health care system -- founded on the principle that survival requires sacrifice -- at times, unequal sacrifice.

That ethic of sacrifice has been under attack for a generation by those who have maintained that self interest is in the public interest. They have told us that such is the way of the newly globalized world -- and it is time we got with the program. But in a country which is (geographically) the second largest in the world and which is home to a surprisingly small population, self interest has always run up against the needs of the community. And, most of the time, the community has triumphed.

However, as James Travers points out in today's Toronto Star, we live in an era when our community is now the world. We can no longer afford, he writes, "to live in splendid northern isolation." Besides having obligations to our fellow citizens, we have an obligation to the planet and its citizens. This means we must work to establish trading systems which fairly distribute our own and others' resources; we must sell our oil and reduce the greenhouse gases it generates. Most of all,we must work to see that the grain and other foodstuffs, which have made us wealthy, feed an increasingly hungry planet.

The challenges are more than daunting. But they were just as daunting in 1867, when this seemingly impossible country looked like it would be the victim of American Manifest Destiny. We are not perfect. The Prime Minister's recent apology for the treatment of native children in residential schools should remind us of that. On the other hand, our belief in "peace, order and good government" -- as prosaic as they are -- have got us this far. Those values have built a considerable nation. They also have their place in the world of the 21st century.

Fasten Your Seat Belts

The upcoming federal election could be one of the most significant in Canadian history. That may seem like a risible claim, because neither Mr.Harper nor Mr. Dion are charismatic personalities. But, with the introduction of the Liberals' Greenshift platform, the next election will not only be about the environment, which the American scientist James Hansen says has reached a "tipping point." It will also be about the Canadian tax system -- and that has far reaching implications for public policy in this country.

The plan still needs work. As Carol Goar reported this week in The Toronto Star, if Dion's plan is adopted, it is not clear who will win and who will lose. "Putting a price on pollution would hurt some regions more than others," she wrote. "The impact would be particularly severe in the industrial heartland, which is already reeling from high energy prices and a sputtering economy; and the western oil sands, which spew huge amounts of greenhouses gases into the atmosphere." On the other hand, Goar pointed out that Dion's policy shift would "transfer wealth from the rich to the poor; from the oil patch to the rest of the country; from the coffers of big business to the pockets of low income Canadians." It would be the equivalent of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which shifted wealth down the economic ladder, instead of concentrating it at the top of the economic mountain.

Roosevelt faced bitter and howling opposition -- from those who accused him of being a traitor to his class -- and Dion should expect the same reaction. It started even before the program was announced. Last week, Mr. Harper -- the leader of a party which (according to columnist James Travers) is "an unsettling mix of defensiveness and aggression"-- called Dion's plan "crazy" and "insane" -- a policy which would "screw everybody."

So the debate has begun. Well, the potential debate has begun. The truth is that debate is not the Harper government's strong suit. Bob Rae has observed that, rather than rebutting proposals with facts, this government counters with accusations which are the equivalent of "you're fat and you're bald."

Roosevelt came to power in a moment of crisis, armed with superb communication skills. And country squire though he was, as the American journalist Bill Moyers wrote, people like his father -- who only had a grade six education -- always felt that they had a friend in the White House. What the "the quality" never understood was that there were a lot more people and a lot more votes in the elder Moyers' social circle.

Stephane Dion has not displayed strong communication skills. And it would be a mistake to underestimate the power and sophistication of the Conservative propaganda machine. But if Dion can convince Canadians of what Martin Luther King (and Barak Obama) have called "the fierce urgency of now" -- and the necessity of a Canadian New Deal -- voters may, indeed, buy his Greenshift.

Most elections are pedestrian affairs, about replacing a tired government with a new one -- or floating in a self satisfied stupor. But, occasionally, nations undergo profound changes. We used to make our living selling furs. Then we sold wheat and the resources under our feet. After World War II, we converted our defense plants into factories to meet consumer demand. Like it or not, the world changes. The next election could change our part of the world as we know it. However it turns out, it's bound to be a wild ride.

Reflections on Fatherhood

Last Sunday was Father's Day. Barak Obama used the occasion to speak on the subject of absent fathers -- a subject about which he knows something. Citing American statistics, he said, "Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; they're nine times more likely to drop out of schools, twenty times more likely to end up in prison."

As someone who taught high school for thirty-two years -- admittedly north of the American border -- I can verify anecdotally what Obama said statistically. I cannot count the number of times I have wished that a student had a stable, responsible father in the house. That father need not be the child's biological father; but his absence leaves a void that's hard to fill.

Sometimes that void is filled -- as seems to have happened in Obama's case -- by extended family. That happened in the case of my own father. He was the last of six children. His father died when he was two. His eldest brother quit school early and went to work during the Depression to help support the family. My uncle lacked a good formal education; but he possessed a native intelligence which my father relied on often. When my father returned from World War II and had the opportunity to go to university, it was my uncle who told him that there was a future for engineers. His advice put food on our table for nearly thirty-five years.

My dad must have picked up other tips from my uncle because, even though he never knew his father, Dad has done a masterful job with five children, eight grandchildren and two great grandchildren. I talked to him this weekend -- as I do every weekend; and I still seek his advice. He's almost ninety now. And, like Mark Twain, I am amazed at just how smart he has become over the years. It's more than being smart. It has everything to do with wisdom.

Unlike my father I have had -- and still have -- a template to work from. When I have been flummoxed about how to raise our three sons, I have sought his counsel. And perhaps that is why they have inherited his sense of humour. Our boys gave me a card this Father's Day which my wife particularly enjoyed. "On Father's Day," it read, "wear this button to show your position of authority in the family!" The button proclaims, "I am the boss!" However, when you open the card, it reads, "But don't forget to give it back to Mom tomorrow."

Which leads to the conclusion, I suppose, that the trick to being a good father is marrying the right woman. I know my Dad would say that, as do I. And, for all those kids who grow up without fathers -- and there seem to be more of them every year -- everyone of us should resolve to be what my uncle was to my father -- a wise and stable source of counsel in an unstable world.

Something's Rotten in the State of . . .

There is a distinct fragrance surrounding "Canada's New Government" -- and it's not the sweet smell of success. Perhaps it's simply because the government is no longer new. But the Party of Peace, Order and Righteousness is beginning to look sleazy. Even worse, it's beginning to look incompetent.

Perhaps that explains the new set of attack ads which the Tories launched this week against Stephane Dion. They come as no surprise. After all, the Conservatives rented a large bunker eighteen months ago to produce this kind of stuff. And, with no election in sight, there was a need for the operation to justify its existence.

What was surprising was the new venue -- the screens on gas pumps -- to catch the eyes of Southern Ontarians as they filled up their gas tanks. That new wrinkle speaks to the sophistication of the Conservative propaganda machine. This government may not be very good at governing; but it does know how to get out its message -- a message which is clearly meant to distract public attention from an accumulating series of failures.

The now-you-see-it-now you don't federal surplus, the Cadman Affair, the election funding investigation, the NAFTA leak during the Democratic presidential primary, the resignation of Maxime Bernier -- and the ever widening circle of government contacts which Julie Couillard cultivated -- have begun to take their toll.

In his book The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Frank Rich -- who writes a weekly column for The New York Times -- documents how the Bush administration sold the lie that Iraq was allied with Al Queda and about to use nuclear weapons against the United States. Every time someone from Washington's inner circle -- former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil, former terrorism czar Richard Clarke, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson -- cast doubt on the story, the White House did not attack the message. Instead, they attacked the messenger. Rich's analysis has recently been confirmed by former press secretary Scott McClellan.

The Harper government is operating from the same playbook. There is no election. In fact, Dion has not yet revealed the policy which is the target of the ads. But the ads themselves appear to be a further development of the message which Finance Minister Jim Flaherty brought to the Economic Club of Toronto three weeks ago: the Liberals are wide-eyed radicals who will once again plunge the country into deficit -- a strange message from a party which inherited several years of Liberal surpluses and managed to blow through them in two short years.

The playbook is not a new document. Its author was Joseph Goebels, who started from the premise that the truth of a message had nothing to do with whether or not the public bought it. Even the biggest of lies would sell -- if they were repeated often enough. Tyrannies and democracies have been operating on that principle ever since. Add to that tight control of government information, and you have what Toronto Star columnist Jim Travers calls a prime minister who is "building stone-wall defences around his own exposed flanks."

The Tory propaganda operation is impressive. But, eventually, the narrative falls apart. As Rich makes clear, that happened for the Bush administration in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Despite Bush's claim that "Brownie" was "doin' a heckuva job," the public -- says Rich -- remembered the old line from the Marx Brothers, "Who are you going to believe -- me or your own eyes?"

Despite the new ad campaign, recent poll numbers suggest that the public is beginning to believe its own eyes.

So Much for the Conventional Wisdom

Barak Obama is the Democratic nominee for president. His rise has been remarkable -- so remarkable that, in truth, I never expected to see what I saw last night. But the greatest gifts are the ones which seem impossible.

Almost forty years ago, I headed to the School of Education at the University of North Carolina. Early one Saturday morning, I was sitting at my desk (luckily, I had awakened early to study) when a key turned in my lock and in walked a black man -- mop in hand -- to clean my room. We were both surprised. I didn't expect janitorial service on Saturday; and he didn't expect a student in his room, since most students left their dorms to go home for the weekend. Because home for me was in Montreal, I spent my Saturday mornings -- before the library opened -- in my room.

It was on those Saturdays that I got to know Douglas McNeil. On that first Saturday, he called me "Mr. Gray" -- even though he was old enough to be my grandfather. And, what bothered me more, he couldn't look me in the eye. It had only been five years since the signs "Colored" and "White" had been removed from water fountains, restrooms and restaurants in the South. What I soon discovered was that the signs were still inside peoples' heads -- as they had been for generations.

Three months later -- as part of my training -- I began teaching at a high school in Greensboro. It had been fifteen years since the Supreme Court had ruled that school segregation was illegal. But the school I taught in had 2,200 students -- forty-eight of whom were black. Another high school, on the other side of town, had 1,600 students -- and there wasn't a white face among them. Still, when we needed a halfback for our football team, a transfer was easily arranged; and there was one less black face among the 1,600.

In fairness, efforts were being made to change things. The Greensboro schools were on the cusp of implementing a busing plan to achieve better racial balance; but opposition to the plan was building and becoming increasingly vocal. There was also an attempt to shift staff between schools -- at least for the purpose of professional development. I remember one lunch hour, when one of our teachers returned from the school on the other side of town, claiming that he had spent the morning "learning how to be a nigger."

There are times, even now, when I wonder if anything has changed. Watching newscasts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I had my doubts. And a month ago, on another BBC newscast, the correspondent interviewed a man from Georgia who was sporting a T-Shirt, the front of which displayed an image of a monkey eating a banana. He laughed and said, "I think his ears look just like Obama's." I keep hoping that people like him and my former faculty colleague are extinct. But, like some prehistoric fish from the ocean depths, they keep finding their way to the surface.

Be that as it may, what happened last night was not just historical. It gave one cause for optimism. Barack Obama has shattered the conventional wisdom -- and, whatever happens, the world will not be the same again.

Not that the rest will be easy. Some, like Gwynne Dyer, have concluded that "It is now a near certainty that Obama will be the next U.S. president." Maybe. But the really hard part is about to begin. As historical as last night was, history is not on Obama's side. And I fear that the architects of schlock are gearing up for a nasty and brutal campaign.

Time will tell the story of the upcoming presidential election. But this morning there is hope -- and I rejoice. And, somewhere, I know that Douglas McNeil is rejoicing, too.

A Case of Bait and Switch

The buzz in Ottawa this week has been all about how Maxime Bernier engineered his ignominious exit from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In fact, the ripples from the story spread beyond Ottawa: they made the hourly newscasts on National Public Radio in the United States. Bernier -- like Gordon O'Connor and Rona Ambrose before him -- was another minister whose lack of experience and judgment made him too small for his portfolio.

Amid all the sound and fury, it was easy to overlook a more important personnel change which the Prime Minister made last week. He announced that his chief of staff, Ian Brodie, was leaving the government -- and that he would be replaced by Guy Giorno, who used to do the same job for Mike Harris in Ontario. Giorno is more than competent. He will not let information slip out and become part of the American election campaign, as did Brodie. And he will not leave sensitive government documents on a lady's coffee table, as did Bernier.

But the appointment of Giorno signals the government's philosophical and policy direction more clearly than anything the prime minister might say. Giorno's job was to put Harris' Common Sense Revolution in place, by employing more or less the kind of shock therapy recommended by the professors in the Economics Department at the University of Chicago, and chronicled in tragic detail by Naomi Klein in her book, The Shock Doctrine.

However, long before Klein wrote her book, Dalton Camp was warning Canadians about what was to come. Back in 1999, in a column in The Toronto Star, Camp wrote that the country's two "conservative" superstars -- Alberta's Ralph Klein (no relation to Naomi) and Ontario's Mike Harris -- were not who they claimed to be. "We need to understand what the present rulers of Ontario and Alberta are all about, and it is not tax cuts. It is an effort to limit the role of the federal government, lessen public confidence in it, and destabilize Ottawa's existing relations with the provinces." But there was more. "The two premiers are wired to private interests and remain aloof from serious public interest issues and politics. The premier of Alberta would cheerfully privatize the provincial school system; both he and Harris would welcome the creation of a right-wing political party, subservient to corporate Canada (and America) and committed to their agendas."

Given what has happened since Camp's death in 2002, this all sounds pretty prescient. Two years before he died, in a lecture at The University of Waterloo, Camp returned to his argument that these so called "neo conservatives" were not conservatives at all. Citing Tom Wilson's book, No Ivory Tower, Camp argued that, as Wilson said, "The term neo-conservatism is a misnomer, unless we mean to turn away from the established meaning of conservatism," which is, "opposed to unbridled individualism, and stresses instead the beneficent and necessary functions of community." He then quoted Adam Smith, who Camp claimed neo conservatives have never read: "Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. . . . The affluence of the rich suppose(s) the indigence of the many." Great property and great inequality were the twin legacies of the Common Sense Revolution, which Giorno worked tirelessly to implement.

Klein and Harris are gone; but, under Harper, Giorno gets one more kick at the can. And what does Harper get? According to James Travers, in The Toronto Star, "More than a fresh face for a tiring party," Giorno is, "the wise guy Ontario strategist Harper needs to make wedge politics work in the province that decides federal elections."

Camp did not trust the new conservatives. "Until we survive the reign of Harris and Klein," he wrote, "the nation is in peril and no Canadian is safe." The Prime Minister's appointment of Guy Giorno should remind all Canadians of the sense of foreboding which Camp took with him to his grave. An old advertising man by profession, he knew what bait and switch was all about.

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

George W. Bush caused something of a political firestorm last week when, in an address before the Israeli Knesset, he rebuked those who would talk to Israel's and -- by extension -- his country's enemies. In a passage which many saw as a direct attack on Barack Obama, Bush said: "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared, 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

The ghost of Neville Chamberlain haunted the last century -- and it continues to haunt this one. And, while waving a piece of paper around and declaring "peace in our time," will not guarantee peace, the fact is that all conflicts end with a piece of paper -- after the belligerents have sat down and talked across a table. Often this occurs after particularly dreadful deeds. Such agreements -- like Roosevelt's and Churchill's alliance with Joseph Stalin -- are products of pure convenience. Sometimes they lead to a new relationship, which usually takes a great deal of time and patience. After all, while both sides like to claim a "special relationship," it is no exaggeration to say that, in 1776, contacts between the United States and Britain were more than a little strained.

Bush argues that talking to one's enemies is a sign of weakness. But the Secretary of State in the first Bush administration, James Baker, has declared flatly that it is necessary to talk to one's enemies. Bush's present Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, has said that it is necessary to talk to Iran. And high level negotiations are presently going on with the third member of what Mr. Bush called "the axis of evil," North Korea.

Recently a number of political ads have featured "the red phone" at the White House. Many may have forgotten that John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev agreed to set up a direct line of communication after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Both men saw that talking was preferable to fighting -- and neither saw talking as a sign of weakness.

How does one account for the change in perspective between then and now? In his book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Frank Rich reviewed the conditions which existed in the United States before September 11th, 2001. He focused particularly on the narcissism of the baby boom generation -- of which the last two presidents are charter members: "A decade of dreaming was coming to an end. The dream had been simple -- that Americans could have it all, without having to pay any price, and that national suffering of almost any kind could be domesticated into an experience of virtual terror akin to a theme park ride or a Hollywood blockbuster." Unlike their parents, these men had not known sacrifice: they were used to getting what they wanted. And refusing to talk to someone you didn't like was the childish reaction of someone who got his own way and who was impressed with his own reflection in a mirror.

Lest Canadians try to take some comfort in what they think is their own moral superiority, it is worth remembering that our present prime minister is used to getting his own way -- and his unwavering support of Israel translates into refusing to talk with Israel's enemies. This is a radical departure from traditional Canadian Mid-East policy. As Linda McQuaig pointed out this week in The Toronto Star, Canada's "attempt at even handedness has utterly disappeared under Stephen Harper, who lavishly celebrated Israel's 60th anniversary with promises of Canada's 'unshakable' support, while utterly ignoring the fact that this is also an anniversary -- although a very different one -- for Palestinians." She noted that, in 1948, Canada's Justice Minister, James Ilsely, expressed concern that the UN plan to partition Palestine "didn't sufficiently answer 'the very strong moral and political claims' of Palestine's Arab community."

And to those who claim that Canada should have no dealings with terrorists, it is also worth remembering that the late Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin proudly admitted being referred to by British newspapers and Members of Parliament as "Terrorist Number One." McQuaig concluded, "If Harper isn't willing to be a tiny bit even handed, it would be helpful if he'd at least stop trying to play a role in the Middle East tinderbox."

Obama's commitment to talk to Israel's enemies does not mean that we will have "peace in our time." But it's virtually certain that unless the next American President sits down with his country's adversaries -- as Reagan did with Gorbachev and Nixon did with the Chinese -- there will be no peace in anyone's time. The next president will have to stop looking at himself in the mirror and look outwards -- to what is increasingly an unstable world.