A Cabinet And Other Shuffles

Justin Trudeau was working from Mackenzie King's playbook when he appeared before the Finance Committee last week. The general consensus seems to be that he emerged (relatively) unscathed. But his problems are not over. Finance Minister Bill Morneau has not come through all of this as well as Trudeau has. Susan Delacourt writes that a cabinet shuffle may be in the offing:

A cabinet shuffle is looking increasingly likely too, sooner rather than later. As my colleague Heather Scoffield has written, Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s shelf life may be limited in the wake of WE, given how his involvement with the charity has repeatedly put the government into awkward spots.

The shuffle may have been in the works for a while, but WE has turned it into a potentially disciplinary one as well. That means we are about to head into another few weeks (some say days) of Liberals sitting by their phone, waiting to get the good or bad news about cabinet. By happy coincidence for the PMO, that atmosphere tends to keep MPs in line, which may mute some of the grumbling that has been coming from caucus during the WE saga.

And there will probably be changes coming in the PMO:

There has been talk of [Katie]Telford needing to go — just as principal secretary Gerald Butts departed during the SNC-Lavalin drama of 2019 — but the chief of staff was talking very much in the future tense about her job during Thursday’s testimony, which likely means that she will remain. What may occur, though, is that the PMO will be out looking for some reinforcements to the team, to provide that “extra level of scrutiny” within the office.

There is always the possibility that more information will emerge. But, even if that doesn't happen, Justin will have to make changes. He'll have to shuffle the cards in his deck.

Image: pinterest

That Will Not Change

Donald Trump lied about the virus. Now he's lying about the economy. Robert Reich writes:

The recovery has been very strong,” Donald Trump said on Monday. Then the commerce department reported the US economy contracted between April and June at the fastest pace in nearly three-quarters of a century, which is as long as economists have been keeping track. The drop wiped out five years of economic growth.

The comeback “won’t take very long”, he reassured Americans on Thursday. But every indicator shows that after a small uptick in June, the US economy is tanking again. Restaurant reservations are down, traffic at retail stores is dwindling, more small businesses are closing, the small rebound in air travel is reversing.

What’s Trump’s plan to revive the economy? The same one he’s been pushing for months: just “reopen” it.

He wants the public to believe the shutdown orders that began in March caused the economy to tank in the first place, so reversing them will bring the economy back.

Decades ago, one New York City official famously said, "I wouldn't believe a word he says -- even if his tongue were notarized." And, if there is one thing that remains consistent about Trump, it's that you can't believe a word he says. Reich continues:

The sequence of cause-and-effect is clear. The virus has surged most in states that were among the first to reopen, such as Florida, South Carolina, Texas and much of the rest of the sun belt.

Because of this resurgence, many states are pausing plans to reopen and some are reimposing restrictions. But these restrictions are not the reason the economy is slowing. They are the necessary consequence of allowing the pandemic to get out of control.

Even the White House’s own coronavirus taskforce concludes that 21 states have outbreaks serious enough to justify more restrictions.

And things are getting worse. Two days ago, the $600 a week payment to unemployed workers ended:

The White House argues that the extra unemployment payments have discouraged workers from seeking jobs because some are receiving more money in benefits than they would earn by working.

“We don’t want to create disincentives to work,” says Trump adviser Larry Kudlow.

More rubbish. A study by Yale economists finds “no evidence” that people who have lost their jobs are choosing to stay unemployed because of the extra federal aid. In fact, “workers facing larger [unemployment] expansions generally appear to be quicker to return to work than others, not slower.”

People can’t go back to work because there is very little work for them to do. Fourteen million more people are unemployed than there are jobs.

Trump has spent his whole life lying.  That will not change.

Image: The New York Times

The Boss From Hell

Paul Krugman writes that Donald Trump is every worker's nightmare -- the boss from hell:

Such bosses have the reverse Midas touch — everything they handle turns to crud — but they’ll pull out every stop, violate every norm, to stay in that corner office. And they damage, sometimes destroy, the institutions they’re supposed to lead.

Donald Trump is, of course, one of those bosses. Unfortunately, he’s not just a bad business executive. He is, God help us, the president. And the institution he may destroy is the United States of America.

The evidence of Trump's failure is wide and deep:

He rejected the advice of health experts and pushed for a rapid economic reopening, hoping for a boom leading into the election. He ridiculed and belittled measures that would have helped slow the spread of the coronavirus, including wearing face masks and practicing social distancing, turning what should have been common sense into a front in the culture war.

And the result has been a disaster -- both epidemiological and economic.

Over the past week the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 averaged more than 1,000 people a day, compared with just four — four! — per day in Germany. Vice President Mike Pence’s mid-June declaration that “There isn’t a coronavirus ‘second wave’” felt like whistling in the dark even at the time; now it feels like a sick joke.

And that evidence is put into stark contrast when the United States is compared to Germany:

America’s economic contraction in the first half of 2020 was almost identical to the contraction in Germany, despite our far higher death toll. And while life in Germany has in many ways returned to normal, a variety of indicators suggest that after two months of rapid job growth, the U.S. recovery is stalling in the face of a resurgent pandemic.

Still, things keep getting worse:

Because the Trump team insisted that a roaring recovery was coming, and refused to notice that it wasn’t happening, we’ve now stumbled into a completely gratuitous economic crisis.

Thanks to Republican inaction, millions of unemployed workers have seen their last checks from the Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program, which was meant to sustain them through a coronavirus-ravaged economy; the virus is still raging, but their life support has been cut off.

So Trump has completely botched his job, bringing unnecessary pain to millions of Americans and unnecessary death to thousands. 

Donald Trump claimed he was a businessman. But he never had to face a board of directors. It's long past time that The Board -- the citizens of the United States -- fired him.

Image: Productivity Hub

More Like Mackenzie King?

Michael Harris believes that Justin Trudeau has -- in Joni Mitchell's words -- "skated away" down the river:

Rather than skewering the PM with these serious accusations, the finance committee merely gave him a chance to stick pins in the flotation devices bouying this political brouhaha. And stick pins he did.

First, and most important, Trudeau testified that he never spoke to representatives of WE, and only learned of the charity’s involvement in the massive volunteer grant program on May 8. That was the date cabinet received the recommendation from the public service that WE was the only organization able to administer the volunteer grant program.

Trudeau also flatly denied being friends of the charity’s founders, Craig and Marc Kielburger. Trudeau said he never had dinner with them, never socialized with them, and didn’t consider them friends. Just people he knew.

When it came to members of Trudeau’s family, that not-so-grand inquisitor, Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre, tried repeatedly to get the PM to state how much money his mother, brother and wife had been paid by WE.

Trudeau refused, claiming that he did not know the numbers. It was his weakest moment of the day. It is already on the public record that his mother Margaret, his brother Alexandre and his wife Sophie had received more than half a million dollars from WE.

In the case of his mother and brother, the PM noted that both of them were “professionals” in their own right, with a history of being paid for delivering speeches. He didn’t monitor their earnings. In his mother’s case, she had been a champion of removing the stigma from mental illness for years — and written two books about the subject.

So it was natural that she would be sought out by groups like WE to give public speeches on that and other subjects. Besides, the conflict of interest legislation defines “family” as spouse and immediate family — a point even the prickly Poilievre admitted.

But it was Trudeau’s explanation of his wife’s involvement with WE that let the air out of the charge that benefits to his family had affected the government’s choice to select WE to administer the volunteer grant program. When pressed on how much money his wife had received from WE, Trudeau instead pointed out two crucially important things.

The first was that Sophie’s work for WE was unpaid, although she had been reimbursed for expenses. And before that happened, Trudeau testified that his wife’s pro bono work for WE was approved by no less a person than Canada’s ethics commissioner.

Justin claims that Wilfred Laurier is his "second favourite" prime minister. He never mentions William Lyon Mackenzie King. But it appears that he has studied King's career closely.

Image: HamiltonNews.com

Lewis' Last Words

In an earlier post, I expressed my admiration for John Lewis. Today, The New York Times published his last address to his nation, written a couple of days before he died. It will be read and re-read in future decades. Lewis wrote:

While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.

Lewis reminded his readers that he was familiar with state-sanctioned violence:

Though I was surrounded by two loving parents, plenty of brothers, sisters and cousins, their love could not protect me from the unholy oppression waiting just outside that family circle. Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare.

His response to that violence was inspired by Martin Luther King:

I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

King is remembered for a simple declarative sentence, "I have a dream." Years from now, Lewis will also be remembered for two straightforward assertive sentences: "Democracy is not a state. It is an act."

As I have written before: May he rest in peace.

Image: Vox.com

The Collective Power Of Science

Jacob Berkowitz writes that, when most of us graduate from school, we have a pretty fuzzy idea of what science is:

Most of us leave high school, and any study of science, with a fundamentally skewed vision of science’s nature. We tend to think of science as a noun, as facts in textbooks, but not also as a verb, as the doing of research. This is a crucial difference.

But it's wise to consider the etymology of the word:

The word “science” comes from a Latin root for “to know.” Yet on the way to knowing, science is ultimately about the right, responsibility and challenge of living with doubt. As Albert Einstein quipped, “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research.”

The reason we call the period in Europe around 1600 the Scientific Revolution is exactly because it was an intellectual rebellion against the primacy of received knowledge from the church or the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers such as Aristotle. The first scientists, such as Galileo, were fundamentally heretics (from the Greek, “to choose”) because they asserted that the nature of reality could be perceived by individuals in the present through careful experimentation and observation.

In recent years, there's been an effort to turn knowledge into dogma -- and effort which is fundamentally unscientific. People fear uncertainty. And they fear the notion that our knowledge is incomplete. So when scientists change their advice on wearing masks they are called untrustworthy. All they are doing is what scientists have always done -- working collectively:

What gives science its power as a way of knowing is that it’s collective knowing – it’s the facts that we can collectively agree on through repeated experimentation and observation. It’s why Britain’s Royal Society (the world’s oldest science club) has the motto Nullius in verba, Latin for “take nobody’s word for it.” This isn’t about being bull-headed and arrogant, it’s because scientists know that while the truth is out there, it is more often than not incredibly difficult to figure out.

This is not a  time for simple answers. But it is a time to pay attention to collectively gathered evidence -- and to act accordingly.

Image: Google Sites

Scoring On His Own Goal

Justin Trudeau has a talent for shooting himself in the foot. Back in 2017, the two people who are at the centre of Trudeau's problems now were also front and centre then. Susan Delacourt writes:

The presence of [Bill] Morneau and [Julie] Payette in this summer’s political headlines speaks not just to recurring characters, but to recurring themes for Trudeau, and quite possibly some lessons unlearned from three years ago.

It’s striking, in retrospect, how two announcements within one week in July 2017 have retained the power to send ripples through this very strange year in Canadian politics.

On July 13 three years ago, the news emerged that former astronaut Payette was being named by Trudeau as the next governor-general. Five days later, on July 18, Canada’s finance minister unveiled a proposal to close tax loopholes for self-employed people working as private corporations.

Both of these decisions would come back to haunt the Trudeau government — even now, in the summer of 2020.

In 2017, Morneau and Payette were in hot water:

Within days of the Payette [appointment] announcement, journalists began to unearth incidents from her past that cast doubts on her suitability for such a high office — a dismissed assault charge and involvement in a fatal collision when she lived in the United States.

Questions, good ones, were raised about how Payette cleared the vetting process, and why the Trudeau government had not put her appointment through the selection panel that had been established for her predecessor, David Johnston, when he was appointed by Stephen Harper.

Meanwhile, the Morneau announcement was also starting to look more ill-considered with each passing day of that long hot summer. Small-business owners of all kinds were girding for all-out revolt against the tax changes, calling them an attack on entrepreneurs and hard-working Canadians.

By the time fall rolled around, Liberal MPs were feeling the political damage; Morneau would eventually soften the proposal to ease its impact on small businesses.

Obviously, there's a pattern here. And the cause behind that pattern is pretty clear:

The connecting thread between those two controversies was lack of political forethought and a certain tone-deafness among members of Team Trudeau. So convinced were they of their own correctness in the two announcements that due diligence went out the window — proper vetting in Payette’s case, potential political impact in the tax issue.

There was one more connecting theme — it wasn’t just opposition critics who were the most outraged, but Liberals themselves. The worst political wounds are always the self-inflicted ones.

This isn't the first time Justin has scored on his own goal.

Image: Pressform

The Plot To Sink Biden

Yesterday, I wrote that there seems to be a plan among the Trumpers to declare Joe Biden's victory illegitimate. In this morning's Guardian, Lawrence Douglas fleshes out another nasty scenario:

Consider the following scenario: it’s 3 November, 2020, election day. By midnight, it’s clear that former Vice-President Biden enjoys a substantial lead in the national popular vote but the electoral college vote remains tight. With the races in 47 states and the District of Columbia called, Biden leads Trump in the electoral college vote 252 to 240, but neither candidate has secured the 270 votes necessary for victory. All eyes remain on Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and their 46 electoral college votes.

In each of these three states, Trump enjoys a slim lead, but the election-day returns do not include a huge number of mail-in ballots. Some states, such as Colorado, have been counting their mail-in votes from the day they arrived, but not Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. These states do not allow elections officials to begin the task of counting the mail-ins until election day itself. It will take days, even weeks, for the key swing states to finish their count. The election hangs in the balance.

Only not for Trump. Based on his November 3 leads, Trump has already declared himself re-elected. His reliable megaphones in the right-wing media repeat and amplify his declaration, and urge Biden to concede. Biden says he will do no such thing. Biden knows that the bulk of the mail-in ballots have been cast in heavily populated urban areas, where voters were unwilling to expose themselves to the health risks of in-person voting. And he is keenly aware that urban voters vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, this phenomenon, in which mail-in and provisional ballots typically break Democratic, has been dubbed “blue shift” by election law experts.

It's going to take time to count those mail-in ballots. And Trump has spent the entire campaign railing against them:

The count of the mail-in ballots in the three swing states is plagued by delays. Overworked election officials, slowed by the need to maintain social distance, struggle to process the huge volume of votes. Trump’s lawyers, aided by the Department of Justice, bring multiple suits insisting that tens of thousands of votes must be tossed out for having failed to arrive by the date specified by statute. All the same, as the count creeps forward, a clear pattern emerges. President Trump’s lead is shrinking – and then vanishes altogether. By the time the three states complete their canvass of votes nearly a month after the election, the nation faces an astonishing result. Biden now leads in all three. It appears he has been elected our next president.

Only Trump tweets bloody murder. All his most dire predictions have come to pass. The mail-in ballots are infected with fraud. The radical Democrats are trying to steal his victory. The election has been rigged, he says.

But things could get worse. Consider what might happen:

Now things take an ominous turn. Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania all share the same political profile: all three states are controlled by Republican legislatures faithful to Trump. And so Republican lawmakers in Lansing, Madison and Harrisburg take up the fight to declare Trump victorious in their state. Citing irregularities and unconscionable delays in the counting of the mail-in ballots, state Republicans award Trump their states’ electoral college votes.

Yet all three of our crucial swing states also have Democratic governors. Outraged by the actions of Republican lawmakers, the Democratic governors of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania announce that they will recognize Biden as having carried their state. They certify Biden as the winner, and send the certificate cast by his electors on to Congress.

Not since the Civil War has the Republic been in such peril.

Image: Esquire Classic

Defiling And Destroying

Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner argues that Donald Trump and William Barr have declared war on China because they know Trump is going to lose. They will claim that China has interfered with the American election, and attempt to negate Joe Biden's election victory. Whether that's the real reason for their hostility to China or not, Ezra Vogel writes it's a huge mistake -- because it pits not just China but a good portion of Asia against the United States:

U.S. officials are now attacking the Chinese Communist Party — and reportedly weighing a sweeping travel ban against members — without realizing its complexity and diversity. It is no longer the party that exemplifies the communist goals of Stalin or Mao. After Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, the party was transformed into an organization to represent the nation. The Party includes people who have been pro-American, including business people, scientists and intellectuals. But when Americans attack the Communist Party as a whole, members — particularly those who would like to see more democratic procedures — rally to support the Party and, by extension, the nation.

In the half century since I became a professor of East Asian studies at Harvard, I have had the pleasure of teaching many Chinese students, some of whom stayed in the United States and others who returned to China. I have also come to know many Chinese students and faculty who studied at Harvard but were not my students. I have visited China at least once a year over the past four decades and have often met those students and scholars who returned home to China.

Many were excellent students in the United States. They were open to new ideas and enjoyed the intellectual freedom. In the past several years, as U.S.-China relations have become more polarized, returnees have faced new constraints on their freedom in China. Many find creative ways to stretch their freedom while staying out of trouble. They want to be loyal to China while remaining friends of the United States. But when they read of Americans attacking China with accusations that are not true — such as saying that the coronavirus was purposely engineered in a Wuhan laboratory — this strengthens their patriotism and willingness to support the Chinese government against Washington.

Many returnees have advanced important policies, such as establishing rules that required payments to American firms for intellectual property or standards applied by institutions such as the United Nations. Former premier Zhu Rongji fought to gain membership in the World Trade Organization so that China would be forced to make internal changes that meshed with those of international organizations. China chose as the head of its new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) someone who had served in both the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank and who wanted to make the AIIB one that followed world standards. 

Our Americans sent to China by the Fulbright program have done a marvelous job of establishing academic relationships and making important connections. Now the United States has said that it would be suspended. Americans who took part in the program and Chinese friends who responded positively now feel abandoned by the country that once sought their friendship.

Just as Trump threw out Barack Obama's infrastructure to deal with pandemics, he's now burning the bridges the United States built with China. It should be patently obvious: Trump defiles and destroys everything he touches.

Image: You Tube

Right In Front Of Our Noses

All of us, Andrew Nikiforuk writes, should be wearing masks. That's what Nassim Taleb, a Lebanese born mathematician, told us back in January:

Taleb warned in late January that this pandemic required a rapid reduction in global mobility including lockdowns and social distancing to prevent exponential growth.

But the functionaries ignored Taleb, because they didn’t understand that a pandemic is a dynamic whirlwind of complexity.

In June Taleb wrote about the masks masquerade and the incompetence of some medical professionals. He noted that bureaucrats (and he calls them imbeciles) wouldn’t appreciate the power of masks because linear thinkers don’t like simple solutions.

The bureaucrats reasoned that one person wearing a mask wouldn’t cut down infection rates by much, and demanded more evidence. What they missed was the compounding effects of two or more people wearing masks.

Wearing a mask, of course, protects others from contagious droplets that can, without a mouth covering, travel eight to 12 feet. (Yes, our social distance requirements are a bit short.)

But as Taleb argued, two people wearing masks changes the scale of the story. A masked duo can reduce any exposure to each others’ viral load by 75 per cent. That matters because this coronavirus gets more contagious the more of it you take into your throat and lungs. So by reducing the viral load by three-quarters, Taleb pointed out, the duo actually will “reduce the probability of infection by 95 per cent or more!”

Instead, we have been distracted by a virulent discussion about human rights -- while the evidence around the world is clear:

When this coronavirus came along, it encountered cultures in Japan, China, South Korea and Taiwan where people don’t wait “for statistical data to find comfort in an easily adopted prophylactic device.”

Hong Kong’s low death and infection rates from the coronavirus owe much to the ubiquity of masks (99 per cent) and their compounding effects.

Crowded Hong Kong boasts a population similar to Quebec. But unmasked and spacious Quebec suffered more than 5,600 deaths while Hong Kong recorded eight deaths. Why?

The benefits of wearing masks scales up as more people don them, and protect the commons.

Sometimes the answer is right in front of our noses -- and we don't see it.

Image: The Tyee

The Gods Got Even

Yesterday, Donald Trump sent out a tweet that showed the world in which he lives. Accompanied by a picture of a rambling suburban house, the tweet read, "The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!"

The word "housewife" became a term of derision back in the late 1950's. Jennifer Rubin writes:

"Housewife” may have been a popular term in the 1950s (which, it seems, is approximately when Trump imagines America was at its greatest — pre-civil rights, pre-women’s rights, pre-globalization) — but, for decades, it has been a condescending term that denigrates women who choose not to leave the house for work. (I’m old enough to remember when Republicans used to claim Democrats did not respect women who did not work outside the home.)

Trump’s screeching tone comically attempts to scare women, imagining they are easily frightened and susceptible to crude political manipulation and racist dog whistles (“destroy neighborhoods” is code for bringing the “wrong people” into the neighborhood).

Nothing in Trump’s appeal remotely addresses what does alarm women: the unchecked spread of coronavirus; an economic collapse; Trump bullying them to send kids back to school during a pandemic; Trump-directed clashes between police and demonstrators; and Trump’s constant attempts to inflame racial animosity. It is not former vice president Joe Biden who inspires fear and dread; it is Trump who raises their blood pressure and creates havoc in their lives.

It's what comes out of Trump's mouth and his cell phone that repeatedly reveals who -- and just how mentally ill -- he is. And one and the same time, he lives in a world that no longer exists and that never existed. The only reason he has been able to do so is because his inherited wealth has protected him from the consequences of his pronouncements and his behaviour.

If the ancient Greeks were writing this scenario, Trump would contact COVID and leave the stage, destroyed by the virus which has destroyed so many lives. In Greece, the gods always got even.

Image Twitter

Where Do We Go From Here?

The time immediately after World War II was a time of tremendous transition. The American billionaire, Rick Dallio claims that we are at another such inflection point. Will we transition, or will we sink into our same old ways? Glen Pearson writes that, after the war, Canada followed the lead of Franklin Roosevelt:

To deal with the gaps, or holes, in Canadian society, they followed the lead set by Franklin Roosevelt years earlier and invested in Canadians themselves just as much as the country’s natural resources.  They shifted policies and shaped taxes to create a more advanced, and prosperous, citizenship.  They invested in companies that invested in workers.  Leave a gap untended long enough and you’ll have revolution on your hands.  The likes of Louis St. Laurent, Lester Pearson and John Diefenbaker, with help from the likes of Tommy Douglas, understood that possibility and set about to put the country on a different, more equitable, course.  They understood that the old paths had ultimately led to dysfunction and disaster and sought to forge a new path of shared prosperity.

A much different man than Roosevelt now sits in the White House. He's Roosevelt's polar opposite. Following Donald Trump's example will lead to oblivion:

If Ray Dalio is right, most countries in the world will make a fundamental mistake should they follow normal procedure afer every recession – downsizing, austerity, cutbacks.  They must see it as post-World War Two leaders perceived it:  a time of transition planning, not recession paring.  Canada’s debt-to-GDP ratio in the mid-1990s was 63.8%.  Today, even in the midst of a crippling pandemic, it is 53.8%, but rising.  Canada entered the Covid-19 crisis with the lowest central government debt-to-GDP ratio of the Group of Seven economies.  In the 1990s, we were sixth.

The opportunity is now present, where the Canadian economy can be regenerated from the ground up, in a fashion that empowers Canadians instead of isolating them.  We have done it before in worse conditions.  It’s this distinction between recession thinking and transition planning that will determine this country’s future in a more troubled world.

The choice is ours. The question is: Are we smart enough to make the right choice?

Image:  wwwbigchoicebrewing.com

No Moral Imagination

Our political leaders keep saying that we're getting back to normal. But, George Monbiot writes, we don't want to go there:

Of course, we would all like to leave the pandemic behind, with its devastating impacts on physical and mental health, its exacerbation of loneliness, the lack of schooling and the collapse in employment. But this doesn’t mean that we want to return to the bizarre and frightening world the government defines as normal. Ours was no land of lost content, but a place in which lethal crises were gathering long before the pandemic struck. Alongside our many political and economic dysfunctions, normality meant accelerating the strangest and deepest predicament humankind has ever confronted: the collapse of our life-support systems.

The evidence of that dysfunction is everywhere:

Last month, confined to our homes, we watched columns of smoke rising from the Arctic, where temperatures reached a highly abnormal 38C. Such apocalyptic imagery is becoming the backdrop to our lives. We scroll past images of fire consuming Australia, California, Brazil, Indonesia, inadvertently normalising them. In a brilliant essay at the beginning of this year, the author Mark O’Connell described this process as “the slow atrophying of our moral imaginations”. We are acclimatising ourselves to our existential crisis.

This month we learned that $10bn-worth of precious metals, such as gold and platinum, are dumped in landfill every year, embedded in tens of millions of tonnes of lesser materials, in the form of electronic waste. The world’s production of e-waste is rising by 4% a year. It is driven by another outlandish norm: planned obsolescence. Our appliances are designed to break down, they are deliberately engineered not to be repaired. This is one of the reasons why the average smartphone, containing precious materials extracted at great environmental cost, lasts for between two and three years, while the average desktop printer prints for a total of five hours and four minutes before it is discarded.

The living world, and the people it supports, cannot sustain this level of consumption, but normal life depends on it. The compound, cascading effects of dysbiosis push us towards what some scientists warn could be global systemic collapse.

And, while ordinary citizens get it, our leaders don't:

 A YouGov survey suggests that eight out of 10 people want the government to prioritise health and wellbeing above economic growth during the pandemic, and six out of 10 would like it to stay that way when (or if) the virus abates. A survey by Ipsos produced a similar result: 58% of British people want a green economic recovery, while 31% disagree. As in all such polls, Britain sits close to the bottom of the range. By and large, the poorer the nation, the greater the weight its people give to environmental issues. In China, in the same survey, the proportions are 80% and 16%, and in India, 81% and 13%. The more we consume, the more our moral imagination atrophies.

And that is precisely the problem: Our leaders lack moral imagination.

Image: You Tube

Knowledge Is Power

Donald Trump has spent the last few weeks trying to stop the publication of books that reveal who he is. But he's also worked very hard to conceal data on the pandemic which is devastating the United States. Paul Krugman writes:

Nobody should be surprised that the Trump team is trying to suppress bad news about the pandemic. This was completely predictable given the Law of Obama Projection: Every right-wing conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama was an indication of what Republicans wanted to do themselves, and would do once they had the power.

The Trump administration recently ordered hospitals to stop reporting Covid-19 data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sending it to a private contractor instead. As a result, hospitalization data, a key pandemic indicator, disappeared from the C.D.C. website before being reinstated after a widespread outcry.

And some Republican-controlled states, notably Georgia, have for months been massaging coronavirus data, presenting it in misleading ways that understate the problem.

Trump keeps insisting, falsely, that the only reason we’re seeing so many cases is too much testing, so his aides are trying to mollify him by holding testing down.

Donald Trump doesn't know much. But he does know that knowledge is power. And that knowledge can -- and will -- be used against him.

Image: flickr.com

Destroying The System

We now have a western separatist movement on the prairies. Don Lenihan writes that it's part of the populist wave that has swept the world. It's important to understand how populism -- particularly right-wing populism -- works:

Typically, populists allege that some group, such as a professional elite or a political party, has gained control of the policy process and is using it to advance their own interests. The process, they say, is biased and can’t be trusted.

Thus, the western alienation narrative accuses Central Canada of using its majority in Parliament to exploit the west. Brexiters tells a similar story about how Britain’s power has shifted from London to Brussels. Donald Trump railed about the need to “Drain the Swamp” by driving the corrupt elites out of Washington.

Populists are not interested in working things through. They do not believe in what used to be called "brokerage politics."  However, the Canadian political system was set up for brokerage politics:

Looking back, governments of the past seemed more able to take on difficult tasks than those today. Think of bilingualism or the national healthcare system. Cabinet may have made the decisions, but ministers relied on a network of people – including the caucus, party, riding associations and, ultimately, the community – to help identify issues and “broker” solutions.

Unfortunately, we live in an age of polarization -- and the polarizing debates it engenders. Populists

are interested in marketing, not problem-solving. Their narrative is designed to polarize debate and force people in the middle to choose a side. Except, now the issue is about more than policy. It is about the fairness of the system itself, and that raises the stakes.

And, amid all the fire and fury, we risk destroying the system itself.

Image:  cbc.ca

The Cuts Don't Match The Rhetoric

In Ontario, health care is a mess. Bob Hepburn writes:

As he launches a major campaign-style road show this week that will see him travel nearly 5,000 kilometres across the province this summer, Premier Doug Ford will be thanking beleaguered health-care workers for their dedication and hard work during the pandemic.

The truth is that Ford has made the lives of health care workers much more difficult:

Ford’s actions — all made with the clear goal of cutting costs — have produced few, if any positive results, with no money saved, no end to “hallway medicine” and no sign of better days ahead for patients.

And while the bandages Ford has hurriedly thrown at health care since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in February have helped a bit by momentarily easing the bleeding, they have failed to stop the pain inflicted by Ford since his election victory in June, 2018.

There is lots of blood on the floor:

Here are a few of the measures Ford has imposed over the past year that negatively impact health care:

Destabilized public health units by cutting their budgets by $200 million a year, then reversing the cuts without clarity on funding levels beyond the first year;

Set real-dollar budget cuts, with funding for daily hands-on care increased at barely one per cent, below the inflation rate.

Cancelled mandatory annual inspections of long-term-care facilities.

Passed Bill 124, giving health-care workers and other government employees pay raises of just one per cent a year, which is below the inflation rate. This comes after most health-care professionals didn’t get a pay hike in the last 10 years.

Rejected proposals to increase the number of nurses despite being shown the province has the lowest nurse-to-population ratio in Canada.

Passed Bill 175, restructuring the home-care sector in which for-profit private delivery of home care will increase, but with no commitment to increase the number of patients receiving home care or increase the number of visits a patient can receive.

Rejected pleas to increase rehabilitation services for thousands of patients now paying for such needed services out of their own pockets.

Ford's response to COVID has been better than I expected. On the other hand, he has deeply damaged our health care system at precisely the moment when it needed much more support.

Image: The Toronto Star

John Lewis

I was 12 years old in 1960. On a Friday night, I stayed up late to watch the Pierre Berton Show. His guest that night was John Howard Griffin, the author of Black Like Me. From my perch north of the border, I became interested in the American Civil Rights movement. I read Griffin's book. I read Martin Luther King's book, Why We Can't Wait. I read James Baldwin's book, The Fire Next Time. And, nine years later, I found myself, a student-teacher, in the public schools of North Carolina -- where kids were being bused from school to school in an effort to achieve some kind of racial balance. The community boiled.

It was during this time that I encountered the work and the passion of John Lewis. He was young, and a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He marched. He was beaten. And he spoke -- again and again. The Editorial Board of The New York Times writes this morning:

Representative John Lewis, who died Friday at age 80, will be remembered as a principal hero of the blood-drenched era not so long ago when Black people in the South were being shot, blown up or driven from their homes for seeking basic human rights. The moral authority Mr. Lewis exercised in the House of Representatives — while representing Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District for more than 30 years — found its headwaters in the aggressive yet self-sacrificial style of protests that he and his compatriots in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee deployed in the early 1960s as part of the campaign that overthrew Southern apartheid.

These young demonstrators chose to underscore the barbaric nature of racism by placing themselves at risk of being shot, gassed or clubbed to death during protests that challenged the Southern practice of shutting Black people out of the polls and “white only” restaurants, and confining them to “colored only” seating on public conveyances. When arrested, S.N.C.C. members sometimes refused bail, dramatizing injustice and withholding financial support from a racist criminal justice system.

In his final years, Lewis saw a raging bigot make it to the White House -- the very opposite of what he had fought for. But he did not stop fighting.

May he rest in peace. His truth goes marching on.

Image: The New York Times

Follow The Money

Rona Ambrose has joined the board of JUUL. Michael Harris writes:

What message does it send when a former federal health minister joins the board of an e-cigarette company, the way Rona Ambrose did?

The practise of public officeholders who make big salaries in government moving on to even bigger salaries as lobbyists, consultants, or corporate board members, based largely on their insider knowledge is growing.

Still, members of the public health community were startled by Ambrose’s decision.

E-cigarettes are not a solution to the problem of youth smoking:

A big problem it is. According to the CDC, in 2019 about 30 per cent of U.S. high school students used tobacco products. For every one that smoked cigarettes, about five used e-cigarettes. This after cigarette smoking had declined steeply. In the early 1960s, 42 per cent of U.S. adults smoked cigarettes. Today, it’s 14 per cent. But vaping, concluded the American Medical Association, is creating “a new generation of nicotine addicts.”

In Canada, as in the U.S., teen vaping is on the rise. Twenty per cent of high school students reported using e-cigarettes in the previous month according to the 2018-2019 Canadian Student Tobacco, Alcohol and Drugs Survey. This was double the rate reported in the 2016-2017 report.

And Ambrose is on the record about e-cigarettes:

“These new technologies will not succeed in eradicating cigarettes unless businesses and regulators work together to successfully fight the problem of underage use.”

Why the change in Ambrose's perspective? I suggest that -- as is the case so often these days -- we follow the money.


Image: The Tyee

Doing Their Damnedest

All over the world, the Right has gone to war against masks. Consider what has happened in Britain. Owen Jones writes in The Guardian:

“A monstrous imposition!” is how our modern-day Boudicca, the Tory backbencher Sir Desmond Swayne, decried the new law compelling customers to cover their faces before entering a shop. Sir Desmond does not have a blanket objection to covering his visage, you understand: he has previously described blackface as an “entirely acceptable bit of fun” after boasting of dressing up as the late soul singer James Brown. But while Sir Desmond may believe that all freeborn Englishmen have a sacred right to racist fancy dress, measures to stop the spread of a pandemic that has killed one in every 1,000 of his fellow citizens represent objectionable tyranny.

 The American Right also sees the mask as an assault on liberty:

In Texas, anti-mask activists believe such an imposition belongs in a “communist country”, while the Oklahoma city of Stillwater backed off from imposing a compulsory mask order after threats of violence. On one level, this is just another expression of dog-eat-dog individualism: to hell with the common good if it requires sacrifice on my part, however minor. But it is entirely in keeping with another phenomenon: of the modern right’s embrace of victimhood.

That is what is at the core of all of this: the Right revels in its victimhood:

Here in Britain, we are ruled by a Tory government with an 80-seat majority; most of the press swear editorial allegiance to it, with the two dominant newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Sun, appointing themselves the protectors of the nation’s moral code. In the US, Trump is supported by nearly every Republican officeholder and has his own cable TV propaganda channel in Fox News. You would think that triumphalism alone would reign, but on both sides of the Atlantic, it is mixed with profound insecurity. The populist right fears that the ground it has conquered in the so-called “culture wars” and in the corridors of power could be lost, and abruptly so, with its progressive opponents using the first opportunity in power to go further than ever in asserting the rights of minorities and women.

Rightwingers’ insecurity is twofold. They point to what is described as the “long march through the institutions”, a concept inspired by the work of the late Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: that the left has secured cultural hegemony, not least in universities. The BBC, in this narrative, is a primary antagonist, regarded as institutionally hardwired against the right’s aspirations, despite its flagship interviewer, Andrew Neil, chairing the rightwing magazine the Spectator, and the corporation having played a pivotal role in bolstering the careers of rightwing demagogues from Nigel Farage to Katie Hopkins. That the right can boast a network of lavishly funded and well-connected thinktanks is ignored, too, because it is inconvenient to a myth of victimhood.

The other is a straightforward fear of the younger generation, among whom progressive values are hegemonic. On issues ranging from LGBTQ and women’s rights to anti-racism and immigration, younger people are attempting to communicate their moral values on social media to the older generation who dominate the commanding heights of the nation’s media. This is at the root of the “culture war” or “cancel culture”: rising demands that the values of the nation’s institutions are aligned with the worldview of the under-40s have provoked a moral panic. Black Lives Matter is just one flashpoint in that struggle: another is trans rights, an article of faith among much of the country’s youth.

The old guard can see who will replace them. And they're doing their damnedest to stop them.

Image: CP24

A Little Due Diligence

Jacques Leger writes that, at the moment, we are in a nasty place:

It did not take long for the controversy to blow up. The opposition parties and the media began building a case. Demands for ethics probes and to refer the case to police multiplied as more information came out about sole sourcing and close ties between the PM and his family with WE.  The PM admitted not recusing himself, nor did the Finance Minister and both have since apologized. The PM and his spouse have been frequent and highly visible supporters of the charity. The PM’s mother and brother were both paid thousands of dollars per appearance to speak at WE Charity events. Finance Minister Morneau’s daughter works at the Charity. All that was presented as bad “optics” and potential conflicts of interest.

The upshot was that political opponents were asking the public to condemn the PM even though a valuable charity would be sideswiped in the process. Then, it came out that this charity is such that many prominent people, including members of all political tribes, had wanted to associate with it for years. Former Conservative PMs and Ministers, current and former Premiers, Conservative leadership candidates, their spouses and children have participated in their programs, addressed them, funded them, sung their praises, traveled abroad with them and wanted to be seen with them.

What was initially described as a $1B sole source contract eventually was shown to be worth less than $20M to manage $900M of grants to young people. A 2% fee is a low administration charge compared to what the Red Cross, United Way and other charities are paid to administer programs for disasters and the elderly, contracts also granted without bids!

In the end, this is all about optics:

There was so much reported that significant false information became “common knowledge”: the PM’s mother was paid with taxpayer funds; WE was given $1 billion and was going to make a big profit; and the PM was lying about having received a recommendation from the civil service.

The optics are the result of plain sloppiness. A little due diligence would have made a world of difference,

Image: Inc.com