Awash In Morons

 

The gloves are off between Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci. Venay Menon writes:

To be America’s top infectious disease specialist right now must be maddening. This pandemic is like an overflowing sink. But instead of trying to turn off the valves, Donald Trump insists water isn’t real as he sprays the rest of the kitchen with a firehose.

That’s the deranged part. Not only has Trump overseen the most catastrophic public health failure in American history, he’s actively made it worse. A study from Stanford University published Friday analyzed the community impact of 18 Trump rallies. Researchers concluded his Election Infection Tour has resulted in more than 30,000 cases and 700 deaths.

It’s bananas. If this election were six months away, Trump wouldn’t get a single vote because all of his supporters would be dead. I will never get how or why he thought he could shrug off a PANDEMIC. It’s as if he refuses to look up while standing in the darkening shadow of an incoming asteroid.

Fauci has stopped being diplomatic:

"We’re in for a whole lot of hurt,” he told the Washington Post, in a candid interview published on Saturday that felt like a declaration of war against the Trump administration. “It’s not a good situation. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”

Yesterday, Trump told one of his rallies that he would fire Fauci after the election. The Mob cheered. The United States is awash in morons.

Image: jksl.com

For All Of Us

The pandemic has provided us with several lessons and even -- Robin Sears writes -- at least one gift:

The first lesson of this pandemic is that we must never be caught so flat-footed again. Canada will not soon let its public health infrastructure get this weak and under-funded. Grumbling about influence and delays by competing countries notwithstanding, the success and commitment of the UN, the WHO, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and many other national entities both public and private must not end. These organizations have done an admirable job coordinating research, testing and funding.

The second lesson is more painful: some social cultures are positively dangerous in public health terms. Those obsessed with individual rights and “liberty” over solidarity have lost badly. Those graced with courageous leaders and a tradition of trust in their institutions have mostly won.

The most painful lessons of all are the inequities and injustices COVID has revealed:

The most painful cracks in our society have been revealed by COVID: how we treat our parents and grandparents; how blind we are to the cost of homelessness and racism; how many children go to bed hungry. Please let us accept this painful “gift of COVID” with a serious and unshakeable commitment to close some of these cracks. If not out of a humane ethical response, then do get it because the cracks make us all more vulnerable.

But we have also been given a gift:

We began this year on the verge of perhaps the deepest divisions the country has seen since the Quebec referendums. COVID-19 united Canadians in a common struggle. One that I hope we be will able to look back and say, ”We defeated this together as a nation.” If there’s anything positive about the virus, this is it. 

If we take the lessons and the gift to heart, we can make Canada a better place for all of us.

Image: Amazon

It's A Sequence

COVID numbers are spiking around the world. They offer a grim lesson: Opening up too soon is a fool's errand. Yesterday, Doug Ford told his daily news conference:

“I want the health officials to come up with a plan that lets business operate safely, because we don’t know how long this virus will be with us, but my friends, what we do know is together, we’re going to get through this.”

But, Bruce Arthur writes, Ontario is in a tight spot:

Does Ford want to emulate Alberta, which has stuck with many voluntary restrictions as their cases rise, or Manitoba, which waited too long to act and is now in crisis? This sounds like the talk of a province that didn’t invest enough in public health or epidemic response — whose testing system crashed, and where contact tracing has been half-abandoned in Toronto and Ottawa, among other places feeling the strain.

Ford could emulate Donald Trump and claim that he has defeated the virus. But Trump is clearly mad  -- something Doug Ford is not. There is a simple truth about COVID:

The pandemic isn’t a balance beam so much as it’s a sequence: public health, then the economy. 

And, until we truly understand that simple assertive sentence, we'll simply get things wrong. And the numbers will continue to rise.

Image: You Tube

On The Edge

Everyone knows that Donald Trump lies. But lately, Paul Krugman writes, Trump's lies are qualitatively different:

On Tuesday the White House science office went beyond Trump’s now-standard claims that we’re “rounding the corner” on the coronavirus and declared that one of the administration’s major achievements was “ending the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Who was that supposed to convince, when almost everyone is aware not only that the pandemic continues, but that coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are surging? All it did was make Trump look even more out of touch.

In last week’s debate, Trump declared that New York is a “ghost town.” Eight million people can see with their naked eyes that it isn’t.

On Monday, campaigning in Pennsylvania, Trump repeatedly claimed that thanks to the state’s Democratic governor, “You can’t go to church.” Thousands of churchgoing Pennsylvanians know that this simply isn’t true.

On Wednesday, campaigning in Arizona, Trump went on a rant about California, where “you have a special mask. You cannot under any circumstances take it off. You have to eat through the mask. Right, right, Charlie? It’s a very complex mechanism.” As 39 million California residents can tell you, nothing remotely like that exists.

What Trump says these days is more and more absurd. And it raises the question:

Who is this supposed to convince? It’s hard to see any political upside to such ludicrous confabulations, which demand that people reject their own direct experience. All they do — I hate to say this, but it’s obvious — is raise questions about the president’s stability.

So what’s going on? Trump wouldn’t be the first politician to lash out wildly in the face of electoral defeat. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” Remember, also, that Roy Moore, defeated in Alabama’s 2017 special Senate election, never conceded.

In fact, almost everyone expects the mother of all temper tantrums, quite possibly including calls for violence, if Trump does, in fact, lose next week. To some extent he may just be getting an early start.

There is an analog. Krugman points to George Orwell:

After those bizarre claims about California masks, I reread George Orwell’s classic essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War.” Observing Spain’s fascists and their fellow travelers — including many in the British press! — Orwell worried that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” He feared a future in which, if the Leader “says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five.”

The point is that for Trump and many of his supporters, that future has already arrived. Does he believe that there’s any truth behind his bizarre claims that Californians are being forced to eat through complicated masks? That’s a bad question, because he doesn’t accept that there is such a thing as objective truth. There are things he wants to believe, and so he does; there are other things he doesn’t want to believe, so he doesn’t.

What’s scary about all this isn’t just the possibility that Trump may yet win — or steal — a second term. It’s the fact that almost his entire party, and tens of millions of voters, seem perfectly willing to follow him into the abyss.

The United States is truly on the edge of the abyss.

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I Have My Doubts

 Max Boot writes that it's time to destroy the Republican Party:

I have watched with incredulity the GOP’s descent into collective madness. Many Republicans I know began by holding their noses and voting for Trump because of judges and taxes and their hatred of Hillary Clinton. Now the whole Republican Party seems to inhabit the Fox News Cinematic Universe, an alternative reality where President Barack Obama spied on Trump and Joe Biden is a socialist who will let “anarchists” and “arsonists” run riot.

The madness knows no bounds:

The party has even become infected by the lunatic QAnon cult, whose followers believe Trump’s opponents are blood-drinking, Satan-worshipping pedophiles. In one recent poll, half of Trump supporters said top Democrats are involved in child sex trafficking. Georgia’s Senate primary offers a disturbing snapshot of the state of the party: Rep. Douglas A. Collins promotes his endorsement from two convicted felons (former Trump advisers Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos) while Sen. Kelly Loeffler touts her support from Marjorie Taylor Greene, a soon-to-be House member who questioned whether the Pentagon was really attacked on 9/11.

The same trickle-down craziness is evident in Republican mishandling of the coronavirus. Trump has given up trying to control the pandemic, mocks masks and promotes conspiracy theories such as his claim that death counts are inflated because “doctors get more money and hospitals get more money” if they say people died of covid-19. This specious allegation is faithfully echoed by Republicans such as Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa. Red states are paying a devastating price for pandemic denialism: North Dakota has the lowest rate of mask-wearing in the country and the highest covid-19 death rate per capita in the world.

Trump has given permission for Republican bigots to come out into the open — to replace dog whistles with wolf whistles. Sen. David Perdue (R.-Ga.) mocked Sen. Kamala Harris’s Indian first name. Madison Cawthorn, a House nominee in North Carolina, proudly visited Hitler’s lair and created a website attacking a journalist for having worked “for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.” Laura Loomer, a Republican candidate for a House seat from Florida, calls herself “a proud Islamophobe” and cheered the deaths of 2,000 refugees crossing the Mediterranean (“Good. 👏 Here’s to 2,000 more.")

So, this year, Boot is voting for Biden. But he's going even further:

That’s why, even though I’m not a Democrat, I’m voting straight-ticket Democratic on Nov. 3 — and for as long as necessary to make Republicans come to their senses. The GOP needs to be detoxified and de-Trumpified.

He hopes the party can be rebuilt. I have my doubts.

Image: You Tube

Ford's Continued War On Education

Doug Ford's image -- thanks to the pandemic -- has undergone a makeover. But, Linda McQuaig writes, when it comes to education, there's been no make over:

It may seem like a lifetime ago -- that carefree day in pre-pandemic times when two million Ontarians crowded into downtown Toronto to celebrate the victorious Raptors -- but Premier Ford is unlikely to ever forget the unmistakable jeering that followed his introduction.

One of the key things that had made him so wildly unpopular on that day back in June 2019 was his move toward defunding -- no, not police -- but something more precious to Ontarians: public education.

There had been widespread anger over the government's announcement a few months earlier that it planned to increase class sizes throughout the province (enlarging high school classes from 22 to 28 students and eliminating 3,500 teachers) and to force students to take online courses.

These moves, designed to cut $850 million out of provincial education spending, weren't mentioned during the election campaign and were clearly seen as putting the interests of students behind business demands for deficit-reduction.

A leaked internal document confirms that, on the education file, nothing for Ford has changed:

COVID aside, smaller classes, by allowing teachers to devote more individual attention to students, have long been seen as a bedrock principle of good education.

But the Ford government has never seemed particularly interested in such bedrock principles, according to a secret internal document obtained last January by Star reporters Rob Ferguson and Kristin Rushowy.

Rather than demonstrating a commitment to "do absolutely everything, everything" to support our public schools, the document reveals a profit-oriented approach to education that sounds straight out of a corporate boardroom.

Along with plans to cut funding to school boards, the document expressed dissatisfaction that "the [public school] system does not generate any revenue for the province."

The document suggests developing "a business model" for producing online courses that could be marketed to other jurisdictions so "maximum revenue generation may be realized."

Since when is public education about "maximum revenue generation" -- rather than about educating our children, instilling in them civic values and respect for others, and helping them develop into adults who can fully participate in our economy and our democracy? Why is this government so keen to turn the crucial institution of public education into a profit-making centre?

For modern conservatives, profit should be behind everything. If you can't make a profit, you're a parasite.

Image: strategiccfo.com

Get Us Through The Pandemic

There were two byelections in Toronto yesterday. When you combine those results with the results in New Brunswick, B.C., and Saskatchewan, there is a consistent message: We don't want to change horses in the midst of a pandemic. Susan Delacourt writes:

Trudeau wasn’t out to gain more power with the Toronto by-elections but chances are that the Monday results will muddy speculation over whether Trudeau has everything to gain by trying for a full do-over of the 2019 results anytime soon. His fight in “safe” Liberal ridings was arguably tougher in 2020, like everything else this year.

The prime minister is being accused daily in Ottawa of trying to light the fuse on a federal election, with opposition parties saying he’s trying to capitalize on the COVID crisis to turn his minority into a majority. Last week, in a close brush with the collapse of Trudeau’s government, New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh said he was refusing to topple the Liberals out of spite — to deny Trudeau exactly what he wanted.

Monday’s by-election results, though more tightly fought, taken with provincial elections in New Brunswick, British Columbia and Saskatchewan, would seem to indicate that voters prefer to stay with the leadership they know during this crazy year. New Brunswick’s government went from minority to majority, so will B.C’s government, it’s expected, after all the results are counted in the next few weeks. Saskatchewan’s Premier Scott Moe was due to keep his hand on government too after Monday’s elections in that province.

The message seems pretty clear: Get us through the pandemic. Then we'll consider other issues.

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Stealing An Election

Robin Sears writes it's hard to steal an election in Canada because

we maintain a paper record of every ballot, plus the ballots themselves, electronically counted or not. We have national systems and regulations which are rigorously followed by a centrally trained set of election officers. We also gave up long ago on any role for the parties in local electoral administration.

South of the border, it's a different story:

The foundational weakness in the American system is that electoral administration remains in partisan control at the local and state levels. In some cases, it is a contested structure with the GOP in control at the state level, and Democrats locally. Needless to say, games are played in close races. George W. Bush became president as a result of GOP operatives in Florida being able to convince a local judge to halt an unfinished recount, and then submit those incomplete results that still favoured Bush to the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority declared him the winner.

Currently, polls suggest that Joe Biden is leading. But that doesn't mean he will win:

The Biden and Trump campaigns have retained armies of lawyers to launch similar efforts in dozens of jurisdictions if required, where the ballot count is close and a small shift in votes will flip the electoral college in that state. Add to this, the prospect of the Trump forces trying once again to block vote-counting after a few days, and then those bitter contests being referred to Trump-packed local federal courts, and then to the newly Trump-packed Supreme Court. One may only pray that voters follow Barack Obama’s powerful admonition this week that they turn out and deliver a decisive victory for change.

In this country we have our problems -- God knows, we have problems. But the good news is we don't live south of the border.

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Rotten To Its Core

Max Boot used to be a Republican cheerleader. He's not cheering now. Things, he writes, have changed:

I’m old enough to remember when the Republican Party was known as the “party of ideas.” That was in the 1980s. Since then it has become the party of pseudo-scandals.

The change began with Newt Gingrich:

The change occurred, as the Princeton historian Julian Zelizer documents in his book “Burning Down the House,” because of the efforts of Newt Gingrich, then a Republican backbencher, to bring down House Speaker Jim Wright in the late 1980s. Casting about for dirt he could use, Gingrich focused attention on the fact that the speaker had published a book that was bought in bulk by lobbyists. While the book deal looked bad, it was not against the law or House rules. But it didn’t matter: Gingrich thundered that Wright was “the most corrupt speaker in the 20th century” and compared him to Mussolini. Wright was pressured into resigning, Gingrich soon became speaker himself, and the GOP was off to the races.

Since Gingrich's ascension, it's been all downhill:

Since then, the Republican Party, in cahoots with media partners such as Fox “News” and Rush Limbaugh, has manufactured one pseudo-scandal after another: Vince Foster’s suicide, Whitewater, Mena airport, John Kerry’s Swift Boat service, Barack Obama’s birth certificate, the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s emails, among others.

The party has become thoroughly focused on pseudo scandals. And, under Donald Trump, that focus has been turbocharged:

The process has been turbocharged under President Trump, who is even more ruthless and unscrupulous than Gingrich. The former reality-TV star won the 2016 election by defaming a former secretary of state and first lady as “Crooked Hillary” and demanding that she be locked up for unspecified offenses. Now he is trying to run the same playbook on Joe Biden.

Trump got himself impeached by trying to blackmail Ukrainian officials into accusing Biden and his son Hunter of wrongdoing. That didn’t stop Trump’s attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, from working with shady Ukrainian contacts — including a lawmaker described as a Russian agent by Trump’s own Treasury Department — to produce dirt on Biden. Until recently, this had resulted in a few audiotapes of interest only to One America News Network.

Then Giuliani turned over to the New York Post the supposed contents of a laptop supposedly belonging to Hunter. The alleged emails have never been authenticated, and the New York Times revealed that the New York Post’s own journalists had so little faith in the story that the lead reporter refused to put his name on an article he had written. The Washington Post reported that Trump’s own national security adviser told him that “any information Giuliani brought back from Ukraine should be considered contaminated by Russia,” and more than 50 former intelligence officers warned that the emails have “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” (Trump’s director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, denies that the laptop is part of a Russian operation, but he has scant credibility.)

The second non-scandal is the claim that Joe Biden was part of a 2017 deal with Hunter Biden involving a Chinese oil company. Even if true, this also wouldn’t be wrong, because Joe Biden was a private citizen then. But it’s not true. The Wall Street Journal reports that the venture “never received proposed funds from the Chinese company or completed any deals” and that “corporate records … show no role for Joe Biden.” So this was a deal that never occurred and that Joe Biden wasn’t involved in. Some scandal.

As if that weren’t bad enough, right-wing rumormongers have been spreading even more vile accusations against Hunter Biden that are straight out of QAnon. Donald Trump Jr. claimed to Fox News, with no evidence, that Hunter is linked to “human trafficking and prostitution rings.” How low can you go?

Trump knows no bottom. Nor does the Republican Party. It's rotten to its core.

The Decline Of Common Purpose

At the end of World War II, the American historian Arthur Schlesinger  wrote: 

Voluntary institutions have provided people with their greatest school of self-government.  Rubbing minds as well as elbows, they have been trained from youth to take common counsel, choose leaders, harmonize differences, and obey the express wishes of the populace.  In mastering the associative way, they have mastered the democratic way.

During the present election -- more than ever -- that notion is being put to the test. Glen Pearson writes that "the associative way" is also being put to the test in Canada:

People have confused politics with democracy, and as they have turned away from its endless partisanship, they have left the heart of their nation to political masters, not empowered citizens.  Citizenship is hard to quantify and even qualify for modern media, who have chosen instead to latch on to the endless drama streaming out of political capitals.  Citizens, on the other hand, including millions of Canadians, have opted to jump into the stream of social media and cable news to stay informed or to confirm their opinions.  The difficulty is that they can do so fully separate from others.  It’s democracy in a box, which one can open at home, scrutinize for a time, then put it back in the closet.

The trend has been going on for a long while. But COVID has offered a chance to change that trend:

Then came COVID – a precarious time when those institutions once rejected were at the forefront of ensuring the essentials of life for Americans and their families, just as in Canada and other nations.  That experience gradually sidelined the president’s rantings and ravings against those depositories of American democracy that the people were suddenly finding essential.  The more he criticized front line workers, medical experts, bureaucrats charged with protecting the country, equality movements,  hospitals, military veterans, the nation’s open-door policy, and, naturally, the Democratic party itself, the harder it became for him to retain supporters other than his loyal base.

In other words, people in democracies around the world are looking to the same institutions they were in the process of rejecting just months earlier.  People aren’t as interested in political shenanigans as their own pain.  They wish to recapture prosperity, not the petty politics that characterized their governments before COVID arrived.

At first, it looked like we might see a rebirth of the associative way. However,

The new patterns are increasingly reflecting the old ones.  Polarization is normal.  Political dysfunction is normal.  The loss of democracy’s allure is normal.  And the lack of ability to build a new and more inclusive nation is normal.

We really can't afford to go back to the old ways. Our public health -- and the health of the planet -- are at stake.

Image: pinterest.com

An Empty Head

Jennifer Rubin is a former Republican who saw through Trump from the very beginning. This morning, she writes a six-point column which slices and dices Trump's performance in last night's presidential debate:

First, Trump appeared subdued at the onset. Deprived of the opportunity to interrupt by the mute button, he rambled and repeated self-congratulations during his time allotments. He insisted he could raise as much money as Biden has (claiming incorrectly that Biden’s had received the bulk of his money from Wall Street), but chose not to. Trump is plainly sensitive that he was clobbered in the money race. He has never learned what matters to voters. 

Second, Trump still has not come up with a realistic plan to fight covid-19. He has yet to develop any sense of compassion, and he remains unable to take responsibility for the crisis. “I take full responsibility," he said during the debate, before adding: “It’s not my fault that [the virus] came here.” Most galling, he insisted we are “learning to live with” the pandemic. Biden pounced to reiterate that more than 220,000 Americans have died from the disease. Once more, Trump was illogical and nonsensical: “We have the best testing in the world by far — that’s why we have so many cases!"

Third, Trump was so intent on spinning strange and convoluted conspiracy theories that it is doubtful anyone outside the loony-tunes world of right-wing media understood what he was talking about. (At one point, Trump said something about Biden selling pillows and sheets.)

Fourth, Biden was strongest on health care, reminding us that Trump has no plan and has never had one. He reiterated his support for a public option, not for Medicare-for-all. His best line may have been: "Ten million people now have pre-existing conditions because of the president’s handling of covid. What are they going to do?” As Trump insisted Biden wanted to destroy private health insurance, Biden responded, "He’s a very confused guy. He thinks he’s running against someone else. He’s running against me, Joe Biden.”

Fifth, Biden made hay of his focus on working- and middle-class Americans, pointing out that Trump’s measure of success is the stock market. "Where I come from in Scranton and Claymont, the people don’t live off the stock market,” Biden said. His emphatic support for a $15 minimum wage was likely a winner in critical swing states. When Trump started trashing “Democrat cities,” Biden shot back that he would be the president for all of Americans.

Sixth, Trump’s utter lack of decency came when he insisted conditions for kids at the border were just swell. ("They are so well taken care of. They are in facilities that were so clean,” Trump said.) Biden emotionally hit back, “Separating children from their parents violates every value we hold as a nation.” 

Trump doesn't have a problem with what in radio is called "dead air." He fills the air with words. But, unfortunately, there are no ideas behind the words. He's an empty suit with an empty head.

Any Bets?

Justin Trudeau's government survived yesterday. But the Conservatives are already serving up another motion. Susan Delacourt writes:

The first wave of COVID-19 may have bridged some differences between the parties in the minority Parliament, but the second wave is hardening them.

Normally, political parties can ride out public anger about an unnecessary election, which tends to fade after a few days into the campaign. The stakes in 2020 are higher, and the anger might well have become an undercurrent right up to voting day, making results as unpredictable as the coronavirus.

On the face of it, Trudeau might well have the most to gain from an election before this year is out. Successive elections, at home and abroad, have shown that votes held during the pandemic tend to favour the government in charge and even offer the real prospect of gains.

But, when voters are angry -- really angry -- all bets are off:

The second wave of COVID-19 is basically an endurance test, and this is essentially the climate in which politics is now being conducted at the federal level. Just as we learned how many Canadians were living paycheque to paycheque in the first wave, Canada’s minority Parliament is lurching from one breaking point to another as 2020 draws to a close.

Is anyone taking bets on how long the present government can survive?

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An Election?

By this evening, we'll know whether we're headed into a federal election. Bruce Anderson and David Coletto at Abacus Data have surveyed Canadians on the prospect of an election:

About a third of those surveyed say they have been following this situation very or pretty closely. One in five Canadians (20%) hadn’t heard of it. The rest had only a vague recollection. Compared to our norms this indicates a relatively low level of public engagement so far.

Conservative supporters are slightly more likely to be following the events closely, but about a third of all four major party supporters say they are following the events at least pretty closely.

A majority (55%) of those surveyed would prefer to see the vote to create the committee passed and an election triggered. Just under half (45%) would prefer MPs act to prevent an election.

Conservative voters are broadly in favour (76%) of triggering the election, although 1 in 4 (24%) of them do not want this outcome.

Just over a third of Liberal supporters prefer to see an election, but 62% would prefer to avoid one at this time. For NDP leader Jagmeet Singh his voters are roughly evenly split with 55% preferring to avoid an election while 45% willing to go to the polls.

It appears that Singh has his ear to the ground and will vote against the Conservative motion. The motion itself should come as no surprise. The Conservatives have been itching to bring Trudeau down since he became prime minister. M. Blanchet also has been itching for an election.

I suspect that the NDP's coffers need some time to be replenished. Political self-interest is driving the decision.

We await the future.

Image: Port Credit BIA

The Same Old Crew

Erin O'Toole is trying to give the Conservative Party a facelift. But they're still the same old crew. Consider Pierre Poilievre's recent attack on the Bank of Canada. Andrew Jackson writes:

On October 15, Poilievre accused the Bank of Canada of being “an ATM for Trudeau’s insatiable spending appetites” and alleged that monetary policy was becoming ideological and “more and more political.”

It is fair game for parliamentarians and all Canadians to debate the merits of current monetary policy. But the opposition finance critic provided not a shred of evidence that the Bank of Canada is driven by motives of political partisanship or has been instructed to act in a particular way by the federal Liberal government.

Poilievre failed to note Conservative support for Trudeau government policies:

Mr. Poilievre failed to even note that the Conservatives have supported the major spending measures to support businesses and workers legislated to date by the federal Liberal government in response to the pandemic. If it were not for a major change in monetary policy, the cost of these measures and the deficit today would be even greater since the government would not have had access to ultra cheap money.

Currently, the federal government is financing the deficit by selling long term bonds with a very low interest rate, 0.5% for a ten year bond. Most conservative commentators, such as former Bank of Canada Governors, argue that the monetary policy response has been appropriate and that there is no short-term problem given that inflation is very low and the economy is operating well below capacity.

Mr. Poilievre says it is “insane” to think that “governments can just print money to pay their bills.” It would be even more crazy to let the economy fall into a deep depression by not responding through aggressive monetary and fiscal policy.

Context means nothing to Poilievre. He's repeating classical Conservative economic rhetoric. Good economists pay attention to context:

It is true that some concerns have been raised by economists as to how long very loose monetary policy can last. But inflation is not a threat, and the Bank of Canada does not need to change course until it deems necessary.

The Conservatives remain so devoted to orthodox finance and balanced budgets that they are afraid to act even in times of dire emergency.

O'Toole looks different than Stephen Harper or Andrew Scheer. But the Conservatives still smell the same.

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Incompetent and Obtuse

Assuming that Donald Trump loses the election, the people who work for him will soon be looking for employment. Jennifer Rubin writes that they might have trouble finding their next jobs:

First, members of this administration probably acquired bad habits (ignoring gross misconduct, lying for their boss, etc.), practiced a great deal of willful ignorance and rationalized unethical conduct. The administration, aside from its corruption and moral rot, was also grossly incompetent in its day-to-day operations. Staffers coming out of Trump’s orbit would likely have to unlearn misconceptions about how functional workplaces operate.

Second, those seen as ethically obtuse and tolerant of racism pose a business risk. Clients and customers might not want to be associated with a firm that features someone who just months ago promoted their boss’s ludicrous lies or remained silent as he winked at QAnon conspiracy theories. Alumni of the Trump administration do not suffer from a political association but rather from their willingness to enable someone who betrayed his country’s highest ideals.

In other words, these ex-Trump figures do not bring desirable skills or valuable experience; they come more as a potential liability.

Human Resources professionals operate under one basic assumption: Past performance is the best predictor of future performance. There are exceptions. But it's not wise to bet on an exception.

If the Trump alumni are seeking jobs, you might think they'd spend a little time in rehabilitation:

These Trump alumni might seek to make up for perpetuating racism and xenophobia, for their attacks on democratic institutions and norms, and for their efforts to sow division and undermine objective reality. They might consider community service. They might donate time or money to groups fighting racism, helping immigrants, defending press freedoms and teaching good citizenship.

But don't bet on that either. Because -- like their boss -- they're both incompetent and obtuse.

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Repairing the Damage

Robin Sears is positive -- almost positive -- that Donald Trump will lose the election. Then, he writes, there will be a flurry of activity:

The impact this vile man had on partisanship, turning senators into quislings and too many voters toward violence, has been sad to watch. But his outrageousness gave many Democrats the courage to try on creative and even radical new ideas. Trump’s attacks opened a new policy dialogue and helped elect an impressive next generation of politicians. Democrats flirtation with Wall Street and neo-liberalism, and most revoltingly their cowardice in the face of the gun makers, will not soon return.

The GOP will face an ideological fork in the road, as well. Will they end their 50 year flirtation with racism, pushed from a dog whistle in Nixon’s day to loud racist rhetoric from Trump and his creepy children? Will they follow the path of the Lincoln Project, that impressive group of political consultants, former candidates and donors who launched a hilarious and undermining ad campaign against Trump. As one of its leaders recently said with a chuckle, he never would have thought it was shady political operatives who would light the path back to ethical conservatism.

The first order of business should be protecting the electoral system:

America’s electoral system has always been the weakest, most fragmented, and too often used to suppress voters access, than in any other G7 nation. It continues to be shockingly vulnerable to foreign intervention, local skulduggery, and even technical incompetence. Now there will be a rising demand to clean it up and strengthen it.

Trump, even in defeat, will not go away. But he has always been about the show:

It has always been about attention and money, more than power. Trump’s fascination with and expertise in manipulative TV programming may have another attraction: to help him defend himself against an array of criminal charges and angry creditors.

That said, he's done an horrendous amount of damage. And the damage has to be repaired. But for all this to happen, Trump must lose -- decisively.

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Easy Marks

Donald Trump's supporters believe that he is there to help them. But the evidence belies that notion. Helaine Olen writes:

Trump and Republicans have played a neat trick these past four years, claiming to act on behalf of the economically and politically disenfranchised, and then getting them to turn a blind eye to the fact that their own actions in office are designed to line the pockets of elite supporters. But as the coronavirus pandemic continues to claim victims and disrupt lives, the evidence of Trump’s perfidy is harder than ever to ignore. Little wonder some turn to outlandish conspiracies such as QAnon to justify their continued belief in Trump. As crazy as it is, it’s less embarrassing than admitting you are just another patsy in Trump’s lifelong con.

The New York Times came up with the receipts this week. First, there was yet another installment in its series on Trump and his taxes, this one centered more on his activities in the White House — or, as the Times put it, “the swamp that Trump built.” It quickly became known among lobbyists and those seeking favor from the administration that joining Mar-a-Lago, (where the initiation fee doubled shortly after Trump was elected president, and is now $250,000) buying drinks at the Trump International Hotel in D.C., and hosting meetings and conventions at family-owned properties was a way to make a favorable impression.

Many people, including The Post’s David A. Fahrenthold, have made these point again and again, so much so that Norm Eisen, co-founder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, told me in 2018, “The president is essentially holding out a tin cup and shaking it.” But the Times put the pieces together in a devastating way. Somehow the deep state so desperate to stop Trump couldn’t put an end to that epic money-making spree.

Con men succeed because they can spot easy marks. And there is truly a remarkable number of Americans who are easy marks.

Image: You Tube

Eyes On The Prize

COVID exposed the inequalities in our system. Now it is exacerbating them. Frances Ryan writes in The Guardian:

There are times in which it feels as if we are running two worlds in parallel. Billionaires have seen their fortunes hit record highs during the pandemic, seeing their wealth climb by 27%. Meanwhile, living standards have plunged for some of the UK’s poorest families. Research by Save the Children shows those already struggling are financially even worse off since lockdown: 60% have had to cut down on meals, and more than a third have turned to charity for food and clothes.

It is a longstanding feature of a rigged system: while the poorest suffer in a crisis, the wealthiest profit from it. This was highlighted in the aftermath of the financial crash, and is all the more relevant as coronavirus spreads. And yet the truth of inequality in the UK does not necessarily cut through to the public. Recent research by Tax Justice found that while 72% of Labour voters felt that billionaires shouldn’t exist alongside foodbanks, just 52% of the public as a whole agreed. It’s not that people don’t support higher taxes on wealth – they overwhelmingly do, and this has only increased during the pandemic – but that many feel alienated by “divisive” anti-wealth language and see the accumulation of money as a moral positive in providing security.

This is where the language we use becomes seminal:

The language we use is going to be vital in this. Faced with upsetting social problems, the left instinctively provides details of them – I’ve done this many times myself – but this can often be counterproductive. Research by the Frameworks Institute shows framing problems in terms of a crisis feeds a sense of fatalism. Far from a wake-up call to inspire action, this sort of language is more likely to dampen engagement. This doesn’t mean we should stop talking about social ills. As child poverty rockets across the Midlands and the north of England, explaining the scope – and causes – of the damage we see is vital. But we have to balance highlighting the problems with proposing solutions to them.

I’ve often said that the greatest challenge the left has is convincing people that better things are possible. Cynicism, as much as rightwing ideology, is what blocks change. One very simple thing that progressive groups are encouraging critics of the Tories to do is to say “this government” rather than “the government”, when they issue attack lines. With trust in politicians low, such strategies help keep open the possibility that a better government can change lives.

During the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, African Americans kept repeating, "Keep your eyes on the prize." In this very difficult moment, we should do the same.

Image: PictureQuotes.com

The Government You Buy

 

Doug Ford says he can't be bought. But his behaviour suggests otherwise. Martin Regg Cohn writes:

Ahead of the last election, after a series of investigative columns in this newspaper exposing the Wild West of Ontario politics under the last Liberal government, all parties came together to support the cleanup (because all parties were part of the problem). Ontario’s legislature banned contributions from business and labour unions in 2016, so that vested interests wouldn’t trump voter interests.

To compensate for the millions of dollars that all major parties were forsaking, the province followed the old federal model of public funding based on per-vote allocations. Every vote would count, not just at the ballot box but in annual remittances to the parties based on their performance in the last election — initially set at $2.71 per ballot cast.

(Based on the results of the 2018 election, the victorious Tories were in line to receive $6.3 million annually while the NDP would get $5.2 million, the Liberals about $3 million, and the Greens around $700,000.)

But then Ford won the election — not only overthrowing the Liberals, but also overruling his own Progressive Conservatives to overturn the all-party consensus on public funding. Lashing out at the idea of “subsidies” to political parties, as if they are somehow unethical and antithetical to democracy, he ordered them phased out by the end of next year.

Forget Ford's rhetoric. Cohn believes politics is operating as it has for decades -- for the benefit of the wealthy:

Democracy is based on laws and level playing fields. Not trust in tilted gameboards behind closed doors.

By defending subsidies for the well off, and demonizing “per-vote” allocations for everyone else, Ford is playing favourites — and playing footsie with our democracy.

Ford’s old campaign sloganeering against “subsidies” was based on a flawed assumption wrapped in a glaring contradiction. Upon taking power, he set back campaign finance without thinking ahead.

Today, the premier gets that in a pandemic, it’s not politics as usual. Why then should it be business as usual — as before — for big donors, at the expense of the rest of us?

Plus ca change.

Image: democracywatch.ca

Second Place

COVID numbers are rising sharply in Ontario. Which raises the question, "Who is directing the province's response to the pandemic?" Bruce Arthur writes:

As the pandemic has progressed in Ontario, Doug Ford has made a show of deferring to his medical advisers, and two above all. Dr. David Williams, the much-criticized chief medical officer of health, and the health command table. Those are far from his only medical advisers; they are, however, the ones he mentions most.

Ford loves to mention his health command table, but the province refuses to name the participants, and Ford has, too, when asked. Unlike the public health advice in all 34 public health units in the province, no provincial-level public health advice — from Public Health Ontario, the health table, the health measures table, or the other advisory tables that feed into the health table — is ever made public.

Which means the health table acquired a sort of mythic quality. But while the premier might cite it as a reason to do or not do things, multiple sources insist it is not pulling the strings, or pushing things forward. It is primarily made up of government officials from a wide range of ministries and sources, and a few outside advisers.

As is the case south of the border, politics are calling the shots:

One source familiar with the process says the table primarily gets recommendations from the ministry, and discusses them, but “you can’t really have a decision-making body with 80 people on a phone call when you don’t know who’s there.”

But the decision on moving Toronto, Peel and Ottawa back into Stage 2 last week was driven more by the health measures table, which consists of seven current and former medical officers of health. One source familiar with the process was asked who is really directing Ontario’s epidemic response. They said: “Doug Ford.” 

Which, on the face of it, isn't surprising. But, when push comes to shove, I suspect that science and medicine take second place in Ford's calculations.

Image: Huffington Post