Silent Hypocrisy

At John McCain's funeral on Saturday, Americans displayed -- for a brief moment -- the better angels of their nature. But, David Leonhardt writes in The New York Times,  for Republicans the display was an act of silent hypocrisy:

It was an act for Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. It was an act for Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House. It was an act, most jarringly, for Lindsey Graham, McCain’s dear friend and the senior senator from South Carolina. It was an act for Orrin Hatch, Rob Portman and nearly all of the other Republican members of Congress who attended the service.

It was an act because they have not kept faith with the principles that McCain held dear — and that he himself organized his memorial service to celebrate, as a clear rebuke to Trump and Trumpism. McConnell, Ryan, Graham and the others have instead done the very opposite of keeping faith. They have made possible Trump’s hateful, petty, law-defying politics.

Their record, under Trump, speaks for itself:

They have refused to defend America’s national security in the face of Russian attacks. They have refused to defend the rule of law against Trump’s attacks. They have refused to defend the F.B.I., the Justice Department and the First Amendment. They have refused to defend the basic civil rights that Trump seeks to deny to dark-skinned American citizens, including the right to vote and the right to hold a passport.

George W. Bush's praise of McCain was a rebuke to them:

“He was honorable, always recognizing that his opponents were still patriots and human beings. He loved freedom, with the passion of a man who knew its absence. He respected the dignity inherent in every life, a dignity that does not stop at borders and cannot be erased by dictators. Perhaps above all, John detested the abuse of power. He could not abide bigots and swaggering despots.”

And Meghan McCain's anger was aimed directly at them:

“The America of John McCain is generous and welcoming and bold. She is resourceful and confident and secure. She meets her responsibilities. She speaks quietly because she is strong. America does not boast because she has no need to. The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.”

They should have sat in shame. But they didn't. Their hypocrisy will be in full display this week as they rush through Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court, and refuse to release 100,000 pages of the paper trail Kavanaugh created.

McCain knew who they were. One hopes most Americans know, too.


Image: The New York Times

Barbarians In the Boardrooms

When policies fail over and over again, Jacob Bacharach writes, it's because their real intent is succeeding. And, for the past forty years, capitalism's real intent has been on a tear:

It’s not that “Capitalism isn’t working,” as Noah Smith recently argued in Bloomberg. It’s that it’s working all too well.

Real wage growth has been nonexistent in the United States for more than 30 years. But as America enters the 10th year of the recovery—and the longest bull market in modern history—there are nervous murmurs, even among capitalism’s most reliable defenders, that some of its most basic mechanisms might be broken. The gains of the recovery have accrued absurdly, extravagantly to a tiny sliver of the world’s superrich. A small portion of that has trickled down to the professional classes—the lawyers and money managers, art buyers and decorators, consultants and “starchitects”—who work for them. For the declining middle and the growing bottom: nothing.

This is not how the economists told us it was supposed to work. Productivity is at record highs; profits are good; the unemployment rate is nearing a meager 4 percent. There are widely reported labor shortages in key industries. Recent tax cuts infused even more cash into corporate coffers. Individually and collectively, these factors are supposed to exert upward pressure on wages. It should be a workers’ market.

But it isn't -- not by a long shot:

Wages remain flat, and companies have used their latest bounty for stock buybacks, a transparent form of market manipulation that was illegal until the Reagan-era SEC began to chip away at the edifice of New Deal market reforms. The power of labor continues to wane; the Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME decision, while ostensibly limited to public sector unions, signaled in certain terms the willingness of the court’s conservative majority—five guys who have never held a real job—to effectively overturn the entire National Labor Relations Act if given the opportunity. The justices, who imagine working at Wendy’s is like getting hired as an associate at Hogan & Hartson after a couple of federal clerkships, reason that every employee can simply negotiate for the best possible deal with every employer.

Franklin Roosevelt saved capitalism by building in safeguards to keep it from going off the rails. Employment Insurance gave workers the ability to endure economic downturns. The National Labor Relations Board restored the balance between capital and labor. And, during major disruptions  -- like the Great Depression -- when large segments of the population were out of work, the Works Progress Administration put them back to work on public projects. Neo-liberalism has systematically removed Roosevelt's safeguards. And, capitalism, once again, has run amok.


Now, for people at the top, things are going gangbusters. Bacharach warns that those who fear that the barbarians are at the gate have been asleep. They are, he writes, in the boardrooms.

Image: Truthdig

Amigos No More

The days of The Three Amigos Summits, Susan Delacourt writes, are gone:

The last one was held in Canada in the summer of 2016. No “Three Amigos” summit has been held since Donald Trump became president later that year. And chances of a reunion seem even more remote today, especially if this week has helped set a new standard in the every-nation-for-itself approach to continental relations.

Trump isn’t just averse to summits, he’s clearly not big on the whole idea of multilateralism. The president didn’t enjoy himself at the G7 Summit in Charlevoix, Quebec last June — to put it mildly — and no matter what else has happened this week, he has turned what should have been multilateral trade negotiations into two bilateral sets of talks.

Sarah Goldfeder, a principal with the Earnscliffe Strategy Group in Ottawa, is a former U.S. diplomat who has worked for two American ambassadors to Canada and also in Mexico as a foreign service officer.

She’s been keeping a close eye on how the North American trade relationship has been evolving and says that things between Canada and Mexico were already somewhat shaky before this week.

Last year’s negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade arrangement, for instance, saw some tension between Mexico and Canada when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t show up at a negotiating session in Vietnam. “When Canada didn’t show up, Mexico kind of had to cover,” Goldfeder said. Nor has Canada appreciated the depth or complexity of Mexico’s economic ties to the U.S., she said. “These are all strains on the relationship.”

Trump's "off the record" remarks about Canada yesterday didn't help:

Canadian officials, speaking off the record, insist that negotiations with the United States ended Friday on a good note, despite the comments from Trump, and that no one in Trudeau’s government is interested in picking a fight with Mexico over how everything unfolded this week.

But even if Trump doesn’t end up getting everything that the U.S. wants in whatever new trade deal is reached, he has succeeded in making Canada and Mexico fall into his isolationist, anti-multilateral way of looking at trade relations.

As Peter Wehner wrote in The New York Times last week, "Everyone and everything he touches rots."

Image: CBC

Not A Good Day

Yesterday was not a good day for the Trudeau government. The Federal Court of Appeal shut down the Trans Mountain Pipeline Project. And word out of Washington is that the Trumpian Trade Talks are souring. On the subject of Trans Mountain, Tim Harper writes:

In a stunning confluence of events, the court overturned the National Energy Board and cabinet approval of the Trudeau pipeline expansion on the same day that shareholders with Kinder Morgan, no doubt with huge grins on their face, washed their hands of the project and gave it — lock, stock and legal headache — to the prime minister and Canadian taxpayers.

Even if it only delays the project, the court decision will mean a bigger price tag for the taxpayer, and raise another red flag to foreign investors looking at Canada as a place to do business.

[Rachel] Notley remains landlocked, and that figure in her rearview mirror is the anti-carbon-tax Jason Kenney.

It also must pain a government that has hung so much of its credibility on Indigenous reconciliation to be told by a court that its consultation with Indigenous communities concerned about this expansion amounted to little more than note-taking.

“The government of Canada was required to engage in a considered, meaningful two-way dialogue,’’ the court said in its decision. “However, for the most part, Canada’s representatives limited their mandate to listening to and recording the concerns of the Indigenous applicants and then transmitting those concerns to the decision-makers.”

Trudeau's rhetoric has met the road. In fairness, Canadian Federalism has several moving parts, and getting them to all move in the same direction is no mean feat.

Besides Trans Mountain, Trudeau has been trying to do business with the Orange Ignoramus south of the border, who former Canadian trade negotiator Gordon Ritchie has called "an appallingly ignorant man."

Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland may leave Washington without a deal. And without a pipeline, Justin will face a storm of criticism -- from all sides.

Image: DADCAMP

Under The Banner Of Populism

Doug Ford claims he's a populist. But, Linda McQuaig writes, he spouting hogwash:

While the word “populist” is bandied about to describe plain-talkin’, right-wing politicians, that description tarnishes the reputation of real 19th-century populists in the U.S. (and Canada) who actually championed the interests of ordinary folk over the wealthy elite. Pressure from populist ranks helped put in place the U.S. income tax in 1913, as a way to tax the rich.

Doug Ford is no more a populist than my grandmother was a stage-coach. Like Donald Trump, Ford got his start by inheriting wealth, and his policies favour the rich, not the poor.

In fact, Ford is walking in the footsteps of his predecessor, Mike Harris -- who waged class warfare:

The new premier has already signalled he’s gearing up to revive the nasty class war against the poor waged by former Conservative premier Mike Harris.

What makes this revival particularly insidious is that Ford didn’t campaign on it; he refused to reveal where he’d wield the knife to produce $6 billion in spending cuts, and specifically denied he would end the Basic Income Pilot Project.

But one of his first acts was to cut off that pilot project, ignoring promises of extra income that had been made to 4,000 poor people, many of whom went back to school excited by the dream of improving their difficult lives.

Another clear signal of the Ford government’s class-war intentions was its decision last month to cut in half the scheduled increase in benefits for social assistance recipients, including those with disabilities.

The people who are in Ford's sites are an army of a million poor people. But they are voiceless and powerless:

Their powerlessness is illustrated by the fact that, after Mike Harris slashed their benefits by a whopping 21.6 per cent in 1995, they never managed to recover. Twenty-three years later, their benefits are actually slightly lower today, having been whittled away further through inflation.

Just before the June election, the Liberals pledged to increase those welfare benefits by 3 per cent, which would have raised them roughly to the level where Harris had left them.

But Ford quickly jumped in, quashing any budding hopes among the deprived that there might be a tiny bit of progress — for the first time in 23 years! Instead, the Ford government cut the planned increase from 3 to 1.5 per cent, thereby snatching $150 million from the poorest citizens in the province — and then having the impudence to call its action “compassionate.”

This is likely just a foretaste of the assault on the poor that’s coming. The Ford administration is conducting a 100-day review of social assistance, which will probably lead, among other things, to a clampdown on welfare fraud, even though the province could collect far more revenue by clamping down on the tax fraud routinely committed by lawyers and businesspeople deducting sports tickets as “business entertainment.”

Ford's brother Rob used to show up drunk at Leafs games, make an ass of himself, and claim he was never there. It's clear Doug has as much acquaintance with the truth as his dead brother.

Things are going to get rough -- under the banner of populism.

Image: CBC

Actions And Rhetoric

Donald Trump has given Canada an ultimatum: Sign the new trade deal by Friday, or you're out in the cold. Tom Walkom writes:

Canada has been had. The Mexicans and Americans have agreed behind Canada’s back to cut a bilateral deal that would replace the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has been told it can join in, but only if it capitulates to all of Donald Trump’s demands.

Some of what's in the new deal is good for Canada:

Not everything in the Mexico-U.S. deal would be bad for Canada. Indeed, some parts would be positive.

The original NAFTA allowed companies, particularly big auto manufacturers, to relocate their operations from Canada and the U.S. to low-wage Mexico.

To his credit, Trump recognized that this was a job killer for his country. The new Mexico-U.S. deal specifies that at least 40 to 45 per cent of automotive content must come from factories where workers make at least $16 (U.S.) per hour.

The new pact would also tighten so-called rules of origin to ensure that at least 75 per cent of the content in autos sold duty-free under the deal comes from a country that is signatory to the agreement.

That too would benefit Canadian auto workers if Ottawa signed on.

As well, Mexico agreed to another useful Trump demand — the weakening of a NAFTA provision allowing foreign investors to overturn government laws and regulations that interfere with their profitability.

This so-called Chapter 11 provision has been used mainly against Canada. Yet for reasons that it has never fully explained, Ottawa resisted Trump’s efforts to eliminate it.

The Mexico-U.S. deal doesn’t get rid of Chapter 11. But it would limit its scope to firms operating in specific areas such as energy.

But there are some big poison pills:

In particular, the agreement reached by the Mexicans and Americans appears not to include an independent dispute-resolution system for sorting out trade conflicts among the signatories.

Canada has long insisted that this is a must. NAFTA’s precursor, the original 1989 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, was almost scuppered by Ottawa over U.S. resistance to this demand.

The Mexico-U.S. deal also includes a so-called sunset clause, a date by which the agreement, unless specifically extended, will automatically expire. According to Trudeau, that too is an absolute no-no for Canada.

True, the time frame has been extended from the original American proposal of five years to 16. But the essential problem with the sunset clause — that placing an arbitrary deadline on a trade deal leads to investment uncertainty — remains.

So it's crunch time. Five of Trump's associates have either pled guilty or been found guilty of crimes. There will be more convictions. It's clear that doing business with Trump is bad business.

Justin has proclaimed that Canada will not be pushed around. Will his actions match his rhetoric?

Image: The Cut

No One Should Believe Him

Yesterday, Donald Trump announced that he had reached a trade deal with Mexico. Like so much that comes from Trump's mouth these days, that simply wasn't true. Lawrence Herman writes:

Telling the Mexican President that the United States might want to pursue a separate trade deal with them seems to have taken the Mexicans aback, Mexico never contemplating having to go up alone against the United States. It’s clear by now that Mr. Trump and his team don’t like dealing with Canada. That’s reflected in Canada being sidelined for weeks while the other two governments held high-level meetings behind closed doors – a disgracefully bad-faith tactic on the part of the Americans. Regardless of claims that the auto issues in the North American free-trade agreement were exclusively a U.S.-Mexico concern, Canadian companies have invested heavily in Mexican operations, and Canada had every right to be at the table while the other two governments hammered things out.

Trump wants to name his "achievement" the U.S.- Mexican Trade Deal. But NAFTA is still in effect:

As to talk of a fully revised NAFTA being concluded in the next few weeks, there seems little possibility of that. At last count, 10 of the 30 chapters of this enormously complex agreement, containing some of the most contentious issues, remain unresolved.

Added to these timing difficulties is that U.S. law requires the President to give Congress 90 days advance notice of his intention to sign the agreement, meaning a final treaty, not just an understanding or statement of principles. And after being signed by the President, Congress has a further 90 sitting days to consider it. It can be approved or rejected during that period.

With U.S. mid-term elections in November, it’s impossible for the current Congress, even under the so-called lame-duck period before year-end, to be presented with a new NAFTA and to examine it within 90 sitting days as mandated by statute.

In his telephone call, Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto kept repeating the mantra "NAFTA," making it clear that he was involved in a three way negotiation. But Trump lives in his own world. He thinks he has a bilateral trade deal with Mexico. In reality, all he has is a shiny object which he can use after the legal pommelling he took last week, and after he was upstaged by John McCain's death.

One only needs to remember that Trump claims to have reached an agreement with Kim Jong Un to get rid of North Korea's nuclear weapons. But North Korea doesn't see things that way.

Will there be a deal? Who knows? But when Trump says he's negotiated such a deal, no one should believe him.

Image: The Independent

The Pecker In The Woodshed

Canadians would probably be surprised to learn that David Pecker is on the board of Postmedia. The owner of The National Enquirer -- which pumped up Donald Trump's campaign and buried stories which could have sunk that campaign -- has profited from the arrangement. Alan Freeman writes:

While not negotiating hush-money deals with porn stars, Pecker has found the time to be an assiduous member of the Postmedia board, attending nine board meetings in 2017 and being paid C$117,500 for his trouble. He also advised the board on executive compensation, for which I’m sure Godfrey remains eternally grateful.

And, while Postmedia is shutting down newspapers, its executives -- particularly Paul Godfrey -- are doing very well:

You have to give it to Godfrey. He’s got plenty of chutzpah. Asked to justify his $1.7-million compensation package in 2017, as the company continued its record of repeated losses and disappearing revenues, he told Toronto Life, “The board knew my track record and my asking price. Plus, there are not many people in Canada who can run a newspaper chain. . . . The job is hard and full of heartache.”

For that heartache, he took a $900,000 bonus, ostensibly for finding Chatham Asset Management, the New Jersey hedge fund as a last-ditch investor in Postmedia. It’s Chatham, which also owns a majority of American Media, that put Pecker on Postmedia’s board.

And Godfrey, clearly aiming to emulate a third-world dictator, has convinced Pecker and other members of the board to keep him on as Postmedia’s CEO until the end of 2020 at a base salary of $1.2 million a year, when Godfrey will be a sprightly 81. While Godfrey will likely still be around, Postmedia may not.

A look at The Enquirer's headlines makes it clear that Pecker is the real purveyor of fake news. So what does his presence say about Postmedia?

I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

Update: (August 28th) The Canadian Press reports that Pecker has resigned from the board of Postmedia. In this country, Trumpian associations are toxic.

Image: ipolitics.ca

Conservatives On Immigration

Doug Ford showed up at the Conservative convention last week and didn't say anything about immigration. But, Martin Regg Cohn writes, that doesn't mean he hasn't made himself known on the subject:

While Ford had the decency to avoid diversity on this occasion, our premier still makes no apologies for stirring things up. On the same day Justin Trudeau made his first courtesy call at Queen’s Park last month, Ford issued a statement blaming and berating Ottawa for a “crisis” of “illegal border crossers.”

“This mess was 100 per cent the result of the federal government,” according to the premier’s office — a crisis triggered by a Trudeau tweet, the Tories claimed. Notwithstanding Ford’s troll-like taunts, I’m not aware of anyone encouraging anyone to make unauthorized crossings anywhere. While Ford recites his lines, and incites his followers, he ignores the facts.

And the facts are more complicated than what we're told:

After an accidental encounter with a Colombian family of refugee claimants this month along the Vermont border, I learned from Canadian and U.S. officials that the current surge isn’t about tweets, but timing. In fact, the flow of migrants is a two-way traffic jam: The Americans told me their border patrols regularly intercept Mexicans trying to enter the U.S. via Canada, after first flying here (visa-free tourism was restored in 2016), then circling back south. Meanwhile, the patrols regularly intercept Latin Americans going in the opposite direction, having already made it into the U.S. from the Mexican border — before heading for Canada (they often tip off their Canadian counterparts, allowing the RCMP to intercept asylum claimants across the border for legal processing).

The point is that despite the president’s Twitter-trashing, Mexicans still sneak into America via Canada. U.S. border guards tell me it was American media coverage of Trump’s tweets that had spooked Latin Americans into heading for Canada, not an unnoticed Trudeau tweet about Canadian values.

Facts, however, don't matter to the Conservatives. They like to stir the pot -- and they're good at dog whistle politics:

In truth, we can’t generalize about the motivations of any individual migrant. The only certainty is that by pressing people’s buttons, resorting to dog whistles, or blaring into political megaphones, our premier is giving people ammunition and permission to think the worst of migrants.

It doesn’t take much to stir things up. Ford knows, and Lord knows, that Canadians and Ontarians are no better than anyone else. Polling data consistently shows we are perfectly capable of prejudice and hostility against refugees and recent immigrants when prodded.

By now we should know who these people are. They're Stephen Harper's people. And they haven't changed.


Image: Haas Institute UC Berkeley

Like Quicksand

Donald Trump's world is falling apart. Now that David Pecker has turned on him, more nasty stuff is emerging. CNN reports:

A former Trump World Tower doorman who says he has knowledge of an alleged affair President Donald Trump had with an ex-housekeeper, which resulted in a child, is now able to talk about a contract he entered with American Media Inc. that had prohibited him from discussing the matter with anyone, according to his attorney.

On Friday, Marc Held -- the attorney for Dino Sajudin, the former doorman -- said his client had been released from his contract with AMI, the parent company of the National Enquirer, "recently" after back-and-forth discussions with AMI.

CNN has exclusively obtained a copy of the "source agreement" between Sajudin and AMI, which is owned by David Pecker.

The contract appears to have been signed on Nov. 15, 2015, and states that AMI has exclusive rights to Sajudin's story but does not mention the details of the story itself beyond saying, "Source shall provide AMI with information regarding Donald Trump's illegitimate child..."

The contract states that "AMI will not owe Source any compensation if AMI does not publish the Exclusive..." and the top of the agreement shows that Sajudin could receive a sum of $30,000 "payable upon publication as set forth below."

But the third page of the agreement shows that about a month later, the parties signed an amendment that states that Sajudin would be paid $30,000 within five days of receiving the amendment. It says the "exclusivity period" laid out in the agreement "is extended in perpetuity and shall not expire."

The amendment also establishes a $1 million payment that Sajudin would be responsible for making to AMI "in the event Source breaches this provision."

No other sources have confirmed Sajudin's story. But one thing is clear. Trump never drained the swamp. He just dumped more crud into it. And, like quicksand, it's dragging him under.

Image: Epic Wildlife

The Same Malcontents

The Conservatives are probably feeling pretty good this morning. A thorn has been removed from their side. Maxime Bernier was a sore loser. Gary Mason writes:

The reality is, Mr. Bernier never ever accepted Mr. Scheer’s razor-thin victory over him in last year’s leadership vote, one in which the ballots were immediately destroyed, denying anyone the chance of reviewing them for irregularities. There is also the fact that for all Mr. Scheer’s good points – including an amiable, open disposition that is the exact opposite of his predecessor, Stephen Harper – he does not enjoy unfettered loyalty. He certainly never received it from Mr. Bernier.

And it would appear that, for the time being, no other members of the caucus are following Bernier to the exits. But that doesn't mean that the party's troubles are over:

This is the first true crisis of Mr. Scheer’s leadership and how he handles it will be revealing. The hope inside Tory circles is that it will toughen him up, help gird him for what’s expected to be a nasty campaign against a formidable, battle-tested foe in Justin Trudeau. What Mr. Bernier has done is give Mr. Scheer a very public shove. Now, people are waiting to see the manner in which Mr. Scheer shoves back.

The Conservatives seemed to be making hay on immigration:

A new poll by Angus Reid shows that for the first time in decades, a majority would like to see immigration levels decreased, not raised. Whether this marks a trend, or moment-in-time phenomenon driven by recent debate is hard to say. But it’s clearly an issue there to be exploited by a political party.

Bernier gave that message a racist undertone. And there are plenty of racist undertones left over from the Harper years:

Given the Conservatives’ unhappy relationship with identity politics (see: public backlash over barbaric cultural practices initiative, call to ban hijabs, former Tory MP Kellie Leitch’s Canadian values test) fronting a policy that could call for less immigration might seem like an enormous gamble. 

Bernier's message is that -- despite the change in faces -- the Conservatives are still the nasty malcontents they were under Harper.

Ford's Mafia

Doug Ford has already made Toronto City Council an offer it can't refuse. His bill to reduce the council from 47 to 25 seats was passed without any middle step -- committee discussion. Now Ford is making Ontario's teachers the same offer. Isabelle Teotonio reports in The Toronto Star:

The Ontario government is creating what critics are calling a “snitch line” for parents to report teachers who refuse to stop using the repealed 2015 sexual education curriculum.

And Doug Ford warned that educators caught breaking the rules will face consequences.

We will not tolerate anybody using our children as pawns for grandstanding and political games,” the premier said Wednesday. “Make no mistake, if we find somebody failing to do their job, we will act.”

The warning was issued during Ford’s announcement that public consultations on a new sexual education curriculum, and other key issues, will start next month. Elementary school teachers are to abandon the curriculum introduced in 2015, which has been largely supported by educators and health groups, and revert back to old lesson plans.

Ford's plan was met with noisy pushback:

NDP leader Andrea Horwath tweeted, “Our schools need real investments — not Doug Ford’s ‘snitch line.’”

Also on Twitter, Sam Hammond, president of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, which represents 83,000 public school teachers, wrote, “Doug Ford & the Minister of Ed calling on parents to file complaints against Teachers. Unprecedented, outrageous, and shameful! This is a blatant attack on the professionalism ... of teachers.”

Teachers, education professionals and principals have regular communication and relationships with parents and students that have worked well,” he said. “Having a Ministry of Education ‘snitch line’ that bypasses the systems already in place to deal with issues at the school level will prohibit parents and educators from addressing classroom concerns constructively. As we’ve seen from social media, anonymous portals and comment threads are toxic and counter-productive to improving any situation, in this case school culture.”

His comments were echoed, in part, by Cathy Abraham, president of the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association and Beverley Eckensweiler, president of Ontario Catholic School Trustees’ Association. Both say there is already a good process in place for parents to make complaints. First they speak with the teacher, then the school principal and then a school board official. And if the issue hasn’t been addressed, then complaints go to the college.

Harvey Bischof, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, which represents 60,000 public high school teachers and support staff from junior kindergarten to university, said it’s “unprecedented” to release a curriculum with an “overt threat of disciplinary action if the curriculum isn’t followed.”

“It isn’t a very productive way of moving forward,” he told the Star, noting the creation of a “snitch line” is also “absolutely unprecedented.”

Not exactly unprecedented. The move smacks of the Harper government's snitch line on "barbaric practices." It's clear that, when Ford hired Stephen Harper's former advisor Jenni Byrnne, she brought some of his baggage with her.

The Fords have always been part of a Mafia culture. The will make offers they believe can't be refused because they know the people. And they'll give the people what they need  -- whether they want it or not.

Image: Amazon.ca

Rudi, Rudi, Rudi . . .

The story of Rudi Giuliani's evolution -- devolution is a better word -- reflects the madness of today's politics. Lawrence Martin writes:

Rudy Giuliani’s hero was once Bobby Kennedy. The Giuliani of back then, a young man who got three Vietnam War draft deferments, voted for lefty George McGovern in 1972.

As a lawyer, he became a big-time corruption fighter, taking on the likes of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky. He moved cautiously to the right in the Ronald Reagan years, but still held moderate views. His home was New York, after all, one of the great liberal bastions in the country.

He worked for the Justice Department's Southern District of New York, which yesterday convicted Michael Cohen and implied that Donald Trump was an un-indicted co-conspirator. But now he's spinning for Trump and the law has gone out the window:

Say it ain’t so, Rudy. Say as you did in an interview with Chuck Todd that “the truth isn’t truth.” For many, that batty observation, an attempt to rescue himself from a flurry of contradictions in respect to Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, spectacularly encapsulated politics in the Trump era.

The debasement and descent of Captain America, Rudy Giuliani, can be seen as a mirror on the madness. With all he had going for him, how could he devolve into becoming Nero’s lackey? Even New Yorkers have turned on him. For his 74th birthday a few months ago, he went to a Yankees’ game. They booed him lustily.

After almost every TV appearance, it seems poor Rudy has to come out to try to correct himself. One fine example was when he blatantly contradicted his boss in saying that Mr. Trump had repaid lawyer Michael Cohen US$130,000 for Mr. Cohen’s hush-money payment to adult-film star Stormy Daniels.

What happened? The Greeks understood what it was all about:

The Greeks invented the word hubris for men like Rudy Giuliani. He’s a vivid example of the corrosive impact politics has on so many of its practitioners. It takes them, country in tow, to low places.

They knew that it was easy -- really easy -- to corrupt the incorruptible.

Image: Newsweek

We've Been Here Before

E.J. Dionne writes that the United States is slouching toward autocracy. We like to think that autocracy arrives will a military coup.  However,

in their book, “How Democracies Die,” political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write: “How do elected authoritarians shatter the democratic institutions that are supposed to constrain them? Some do it in one fell swoop. But more often, the assault on democracy begins slowly. … The erosion of democracy takes place piecemeal, often in baby steps.”

The baby steps began quite awhile ago:

Long before Trump ran for office, Republicans were eager to change the rules of the game when doing so served their purposes, as Michael Tomasky argued last week in the Daily Beast. Consider just their aggressive voter-suppression efforts and their willingness to block even a hearing for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Scalia.

The list of ominous signs goes on and on: Trump invoking Stalin’s phrase “enemies of the people” to describe a free press; the firing, one after another, of public servants who moved to expose potential wrongdoing, starting with former FBI director James Comey; Trump’s willingness, even eagerness, to lie; his effusive praise of foreign despots; his extravagantly abusive (and often racially charged) language against opponents; and his refusal to abide by traditional practices about disclosing his own potential conflicts of interest and those of his family.

This not business as usual. Yet our politics proceeds as if it is. Slowly, Trump has accustomed us to behavior that, at any other recent time and with just about any other politician, would in all probability have been career ending.

On the eve of the Second World War, William Butler Yeats warned of the "rough beast" which was "[slouching] toward Bethlehem to be born." And he lamented the fact that while "the best [lacked] all conviction, the worst [were] filled with passionate intensity."

We've been here before.

Image: The Irish Times

The Greening Of Canada?

Michael Harris is making predictions this morning -- and they're really quite intriguing. Last time around, he writes, the Liberals won because they ran against Stephen Harper. Harper won't be there next time. And the Conservatives and Dippers have their problems:

The CPC is no longer led by a man Canadians didn’t trust and didn’t like. Instead, Andrew Scheer is a lightweight, B-list politician who inspires neither fear nor loathing.

Scheer is like a boring relative who won’t leave. You don’t go out of your way to diss him, but you try not to sit beside him at family gatherings. Scheer is no one’s default choice, except for the Kool-Aid drinkers who went down with Harper.

Jagmeet Sing has returned to the Dippers' socialist roots. But Rachel Notley is an anchor around his neck:

She is killing the NDP brand. The premier of Alberta is NDP in name only. It is bad enough that she has abandoned her progressive roots to flog the development of dirty oil, but Notley has also stamped her foot like a petulant child and attacked others publicly who don’t agree with her on the proliferation of pipelines.

It was one thing to skip Singh’s first national convention as leader, but by personally attacking Singh, Notley has created real anxiety about what the NDP actually stands for.

So, looking into the future, what does Harris see?

Scheer losing another election for the Conservatives, but closing the gap with the ruling Liberals, and setting the table for his replacement. Defeating Trudeau has always been a two-step operation for the Tories, and Scheer is merely the placeholder. Peter MacKay is the real contender in due time.

With no Harper to tilt against, no NDP strategic votes to pick up and the increasingly heavy baggage of a term of governing, it is unlikely that Trudeau will gain seats — as some of his more enthusiastic supporters believe.

The more likely outcome is a Liberal minority government, perhaps even a razor-thin one. That is exactly what happened to Trudeau senior and the massive majority government he won in 1968. After one term in office, the Liberals lost a whopping 46 seats and were reduced to a two-seat minority in the 1972 election.

Which leaves room for the Green Party to fill the void:

After years of being a voice in the wilderness, May and the Green Party are well-positioned to make big gains relative to the party’s current parliamentary status. Remember, one extra seat represents a 100 per cent improvement.

But Harris does throw in a caveat:

The left in Canada remains divided. The hard right is making steady progress at the provincial level. And Trump may throw a spanner into Canadian politics at any moment, causing the kind of economic chaos that breeds radical change.

Without electoral reform, it is just a matter of time before the Cons waiting game pays off, and they are at the country’s throat once more.

Your thoughts?

Image: Unpublished Ottawa

Vichy Republicans

The real story behind Donald Trump's Rise is the collapse of the Republican Party. Republicans have become venal and spineless. Paul Krugman writes:

The real news of the past few weeks isn’t that Trump is a wannabe Mussolini who can’t even make the trains run on time. It’s the absence of any meaningful pushback from Congressional Republicans. Indeed, not only are they acquiescing in Trump’s corruption, his incitements to violence, and his abuse of power, up to and including using the power of office to punish critics, they’re increasingly vocal in cheering him on.

Make no mistake: if Republicans hold both houses of Congress this November, Trump will go full authoritarian, abusing institutions like the I.R.S., trying to jail opponents and journalists on, er, trumped-up charges, and more — and he’ll do it with full support from his party.

If Trump is to fail, the Republican Party must fail with him:

The point is that once you’ve made excuses for and come to the aid of a bad leader, it gets ever harder to say no to the next outrage. Republicans who defended Trump over the Muslim ban, his early attacks on the press, the initial evidence of collusion with Russia, have in effect burned their bridges. It would be deeply embarrassing to admit that the elitist liberals they mocked were right when they were wrong; also, nobody who doesn’t support Trump will ever trust their judgment or patriotism again.

So the path of least resistance is always to sign on for the next stage of degradation. “No evidence of collusion” becomes “collusion is no big deal” becomes “collusion is awesome — and let’s send John Brennan to jail.”

The collapse of the party has been a long time coming:

There are some special aspects of the modern GOP that make it especially vulnerable to this kind of slide into leader-worship. The party has long been in the habit of rejecting awkward facts and attributing them to conspiracies: it’s not a big jump from claiming that climate change is a giant hoax perpetrated by the entire scientific community to asserting that Trump is the blameless target of a vast deep state conspiracy.

And modern Republican politicians are, with few exceptions, apparatchiks: they are creatures of a monolithic movement that doesn’t allow dissent but protects the loyal from risk. Even if they should happen to lose a race in their gerrymandered districts, as long as they toed the line they can count on “wing nut welfare” — commentator slots on Fox News, appointments at think tanks, and so on.

The rot runs deep and goes far beyond Trump. And, if the Republicans win in November, American democracy will be finished.

Image: The New York Times

A Clear And Present Danger -- To The World

It's now painfully obvious, Jonathan Freedland writes, that Donald Trump sees himself as a mafia don:

More than 18 months into his presidency, Donald Trump’s modus operandi – and the danger it represents – is clear. His working method is that of the mafia boss and gangland chieftain, daily wielding his power to settle scores, teach lessons and crush dissent. Anyone who’s seen The Sopranos will know the routine: the casual intimidation, the obsession with loyalty, the brutal ostracism meted out to those who dare defy the man at the top.

The most recent example of Trump's modus operandi is John Brennan. And Trump's treatment of Brennan has revealed that, like Richard Nixon, he has a enemies list:

To be fair, the US is not wholly a stranger to such behaviour. When Sanders named eight other former public servants now similarly threatened with losing their security clearance – all of them connected with the Russia probe, funnily enough – she evoked memories of Richard Nixon’s notorious “enemies list”, a place on which fast became a badge of honour. The parallel is not fatuous: Nixon’s great offence was abuse of power, and this is becoming Trump’s hallmark.

He has not been able to do what he has done without his enablers in Congress and a fair degree of public support:

The US system of government, cherished and nurtured over two centuries, is being eroded by a president who tramples over every convention and custom that ensures its survival – and, crucially, by his Republican enablers in Congress who could stop him but won’t. (In a chorus, they supported his act of revenge against Brennan.)

Americans need to guard against an authoritarian impulse whose existence in their body politic is now demonstrably real. A survey this month found that 43% of Republicans were willing to give Trump the power to close down media organisations, while a separate poll a year ago found 52% would support “postponing” the 2020 election if Trump proposed it. Among all Americans, support for rule by the army – as opposed to elected politicians – is unusually high, with nearly one in five in favour.

Mr. Trump is a clear and present danger to his own country. But the danger is not confined to the borders of the United States:

Every time he steps over a once taboo boundary, thereby erasing it, Trump acts to normalise autocracy in the US and beyond. Rulers in Budapest and Warsaw, as well as Ankara and Moscow, see what Trump gets away with and they take note and take heart. He is a role model for the international strongman set. Which is why all those who care about global democracy should be praying for Trump’s Republicans to take a thorough beating in November’s midterm elections. As any mafia boss will tell you, the surest way to defeat a would-be strongman is to make him look weak.

One can only hope that Americans will reduce the Republican Party to an ineffective rump. The party certainly will not change its ways until it becomes a national embarrassment.

Image: Bubble Of Delusions

The Party Of the Furious

Maxime Bernier has been erupting on Twitter lately. But he's not the only member of the Conservative caucus who has been stirring up controversy. Tim Harper writes:

To be sure, Shannon Stubbs, Blaine Calkins and Denise Batters have none of the power or cachet of Bernier, so they were more able to fly under the radar.

Last week, Stubbs criticized Justin Trudeau’s appointment of counterterrorism and constitutional law expert John Norris as a Federal Court judge because Norris defended Omar Khadr, who she called “a confessed murderer and terrorist.”

“This is an utter embarrassment for Canada and the Canadian judicial system,” the Alberta MP tweeted.

Never mind that Norris that was appointed last February and Stubbs was summoning outrage six months later; her comments also showed a complete disregard for the role of defence counsel in this country.

Batters, a Conservative senator, had to apologize to Liberal MP Omar Alghabra, parliamentary secretary to Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, after she tweeted that the birthplace of the Saudi-born Alghabra was influencing his judgment in defending his government in the Ottawa-Riyadh diplomatic spat.

Calkins went one better, sharing a screen grab of a discredited 13-year-old blog accusing Alghabra of celebrating his nomination victory in Mississauga as a win for Islamic power spreading to Canada.

Calkins also apologized, saying he had cited a “poor source” and “was unsure about what I was reading.”

For good measure, Michelle Rempel, the party’s immigration critic, used a day when newspapers across the world fought back against Donald Trump’s portrayal of media as “the enemy of the people” to launch an unsubstantiated attack on the media.

It's pretty clear why Stephen Harper kept his caucus on a short leash. All these eruptions should remind Canadians of the general nastiness of Harper's government:

A summer of social media dog whistles makes it too easy for the Liberals to tie the party back to its odious snitch-line, anti-niqab stance of the dying days of the Stephen Harper government.

Trudeau took the opportunity to do just that Thursday, declaring that this all means the Conservative party hasn’t changed since the Harper days.

If we are hearing the honest views of Conservatives who see Islamists and terrorist-backing judges in their midst, then Scheer has a deep problem on his hands.

Scheer does, indeed, have problems on his hands. Winning the leadership of the Party of the Furious was no gift.

Image: depositphotos

Hogwash

Yesterday, Donald Trump revoked John Brennan's security clearance. In this morning's New York Times, Brennan fires back:

Before, during and after its now infamous meddling in our last presidential election, Russia practiced the art of shaping political events abroad through its well-honed active measures program, which employs an array of technical capabilities, information operations and old-fashioned human intelligence spycraft. Electoral politics in Western democracies presents an especially inviting target, as a variety of politicians, political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly and unwittingly, or even bought outright by Russian intelligence operatives. The very freedoms and liberties that liberal Western democracies cherish and that autocracies fear have been exploited by Russian intelligence services not only to collect sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and disinformation, increasingly via the growing number of social media platforms.

This kind of activity has been going on for a long time. But Trump threw gasoline on the fire:

The already challenging work of the American intelligence and law enforcement communities was made more difficult in late July 2016, however, when Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, publicly called upon Russia to find the missing emails of Mrs. Clinton. By issuing such a statement, Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen, but also openly authorizing his followers to work with our primary global adversary against his political opponent.

If Trump did that kind of thing in public, Brennan wonders what he did in private:

Such a public clarion call certainly makes one wonder what Mr. Trump privately encouraged his advisers to do — and what they actually did — to win the election. While I had deep insight into Russian activities during the 2016 election, I now am aware — thanks to the reporting of an open and free press — of many more of the highly suspicious dalliances of some American citizens with people affiliated with the Russian intelligence services.

Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash.

We await the Mueller Report -- and the verdict in the first of Paul Manafort's trials.

Image: Bloomberg

The Dispute With Saudi Arabia

John Baird was on Saudi television yesterday, slamming the Trudeau government for its treatment of Saudi Arabia:

"For Canada to treat a friend and ally this way has been incredibly unhelpful,” Baird told the English-language arm of Al Arabiya, the Saudi-owned equivalent of Al Jazeera.

Baird added that the best way to resolve the crisis would be for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to fly to Riyadh to apologize in person to the Saudi royal family.

Baird was a blow-hard when he was foreign affairs minister and it's clear that he's still the same bag of wind that he used to be.

Oonagh Fitzgerald asks in today's Toronto Star, "Has Canada Mishandled It's Relationship with Saudi Arabia?"

There have been occasional flare ups between Canada and Saudi Arabia related to human rights issues in the past, and while the countries are not particularly close, diplomatic relations have not been effected — likely to allow discussions on difficult issues to continue.

Foreign Affairs Minister Chyrstia Freeland expressed concern last week that Saudi Arabia had expelled Canada’s ambassador, but emphasized that our embassy in Riyadh will continue its regular operations and specifically invited diplomatic dialogue on human rights.

It's worth remembering that, when Baird was our Foreign Affairs Minister, the Harper government closed its embassy in Iran. In doing so, Canada chose sides in the battle between the two countries. The Harper government was not interested in being an honest broker in the region. Neither is the United States under Donald Trump -- who praises Saudi Arabia but has backed out of the Iran Nuclear Deal.

Stephen Harper has cheered Trump's abandonment of that deal. Baird reminds us of what side the Conservatives are on.

Something to remember during the next election.

Image: twitter