Changing Oil

The oil industry is changing. as it is dragged --  kicking and screaming -- into the future. Tom Friedman writes: 

Since the 1990s, the wisest oil-producing countries and companies have regularly reminded themselves of the oil patch adage that the Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones; it ended because we invented bronze tools. When we did, stone tools became worthless — even though there were still plenty on the ground.

And so it will be with oil: The petroleum age will end because we invent superior technology that coexists harmoniously with nature. When we do, there will be plenty of oil left in the ground.

So be careful, wise producers tell themselves, don’t bet the vitality of your company, community or country on the assumption that oil will be like Maxwell House Coffee — “Good to the last drop” — and pumped from every last well. Remember Kodak? It underestimated the speed at which digital photography would make film obsolete. It didn’t go well for Kodak or Kodachrome.

The world's largest oil company -- Exxon-Mobil -- didn't get that memo:

Today, it is no longer the biggest. As a result of its head-in-the-oil-sands-drill-baby-drill-we-are-still-not-at-peak-oil business model, Exxon lost over $20 billion last year, suffered a credit rating downgrade, might have to borrow billions just to pay its dividend, has seen its share price over the last decade produce a minus-30 percent return and was booted from the Dow Jones industrial average.

Last week, green activists finally got through to the corporate board room:

A little hedge fund called Engine No. 1 delivered an unprecedented master class in mean green using the tools of democratic capitalism. A plucky, purpose-driven investment fund, Engine No. 1 set out to force Exxon to improve its financial returns by getting much more serious about gradually transitioning — through innovation and acquisitions — into being an energy company, not just an oil and gas company.

At Exxon’s annual meeting, Engine No. 1 offered up a slate for four new members of Exxon’s 12-member board. The four represent deep energy expertise and climate solutions. The slate committed to push the oil giant to a net-zero emissions strategy by 2050, more investments in clean energy systems and more transparency about Exxon’s energy transition, with metrics and milestones, as well as disclosure of its lobbying payments and partners, suspected of undermining the science around climate change.

And darn if half the slate — Gregory Goff and Kaisa Hietala — wasn’t immediately elected by wide margins, and at least one other member might be as well when ExxonMobil finishes counting the votes from its very, very bad day.

Engine No. 1 was successful because it got three of the four biggest pension funds in America — fed up with Exxon’s relentless value destruction — to vote for its nominees. We’re talking about the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System and the New York State Common Retirement Fund. Also, three of the world’s biggest fund managers, Vanguard, State Street and Black Rock, which together own more than one-fifth of all Exxon stock, each voted for part of the dissident slate.

Oil hasn't left the building yet. But it's on the way out. Have Justin Trudeau and Jason Kenney got the memo?

Image: imgflip.com

Kamloops

The discovery of the remains of native children in Kamloops has shocked the nation. Perhaps, Susan Delacourt writes, things will change:

Three days after the horrifying discovery of children’s remains outside a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., the country feels on the verge of an important moment — one that could punch through complacency in a way that reports, inquiries and “calls for action” have not.

In Canada’s long conversation over Indigenous truth and reconciliation, the discovery of these children’s bodies inscribes a brutal, indelible entry in the “truth” part of the ledger.

We have been forced to confront what has been truly ugly in our history:

In Ottawa, for one unofficial memorial day at least, it was being treated as such on Monday, marked best perhaps by the tearful public breakdown of NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.

Silent, struggling for words for nearly one long minute, Singh was only able to say he would pursue “justice” for these children before ending his news conference. It was an affecting display of what Singh had arrived to say: that words are not going to fix this.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cast the Kamloops discovery as the painful, unavoidable truth for those who have been trying to avert their eyes from the history of residential schools.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Trudeau at least twice directed his comments at this constituency, arguing that the grisly find makes it impossible any longer to be casually unaware of what happened at residential schools.

“This is a moment in time,” Trudeau said. “Non-Indigenous Canadians may not have understood the depth of the trauma for those families … These are the things that Canada is waking up to this weekend. It’s a difficult and hard awakening.”

It is, indeed, a hard awakening. Now we must confront a harder question: How are we going to fix this?

Image: The Toronto Star

King Coal In Alberta

The Grassy Narrows Project is a proposal to establish open-pit coal mining in the southern Canadian Rockies. A panel will soon decide whether or not to approve the proposal. Andrew Nikiforuk writes:

If the panel gives the contentious metallurgical coal mine a green light, the doors could open for other existing proposals that could industrialize nearly 1,000 square kilometres of the Rockies and threaten the region’s scarce water supplies.

Much hinges on the panel’s report and recommendations that will be submitted to federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change Jonathan Wilkinson next month.

Unsurprisingly, Jason Kenney is a full-throated supporter of the project:

For starters, the Alberta government of Jason Kenney has strongly championed Australian metallurgical coal developers as an important new source of jobs and revenue that could replace shrinking oilsands developments in the province.

All the steel-making coal would be shipped to Vancouver-area terminals for export to China or India.

In addition, the province and the Coal Association of Canada, directed by former Alberta Tory environment minister Colin Campbell, have tried to sell open-pit coal mining as a form of “reconciliation” that can enrich First Nations.

Meanwhile, the Kenney government hopes the Grassy Mountain Coal Project, owned by right-wing political activist and Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart, will be the first of eight proposed mines in the watershed of the Oldman River which, in turn, feeds the South Saskatchewan River.

As the market for Alberta oil dries up, Kenney is betting that Asia will buy up huge chunks of Alberta carbon.

Keep your eye on this one.

Image: People's World

O'Toole And Bojo

Susan Delacourt writes that the Conservative Party of Canada has hired the social media firm that helped Boris Johnson rise to power:

As my Star colleagues Stephanie Levitz and Alex Boutilier have reported, O’Toole’s team has hired not one, but two consultancy firms with ties to Johnson’s victories: Topham Guerin for social media and Stack Data Strategies for political analytics.

We can divine two conclusions from these contracts: the Conservatives are serious about the looming data war with the Liberals and they don’t intend to play nice.

How not-nice? Well, let’s put it this way: I had to consult the Star’s taste and language policies to write about Topham Guerin’s claims to fame. It is OK, I learned, to use raw language if it’s in quotation marks, so here is a little snippet from an article on how Topham Guerin wages the social-media war.

“One of the tactics that Topham Guerin has become especially known for are ‘shitposts’ — a meme of obvious and usually ironic bad quality to troll its reader,” according to an interview with the firm’s founders, which appeared last year in an online New Zealand magazine called The Spinoff.

So be prepared. The next election is going to be very nasty:

Here’s Ben Guerin himself in that Spinoff interview: “Instead of having a big bonfire in a campaign, you have lots of little fires.”

There’s your preview of the next election campaign on social media: “lots of little fires.” Well, and don’t forget, s—posts too. (Please note the taste-sensitive spelling.)

This news comes on reports this week about what life is like on HMS Bojo:

Dominic Cummings was unable to vouch for Johnson’s judgment in picking advisers. “It’s just completely crackers that someone like me should have been in there,” said the man who was called Johnson’s Svengali; the second-most-powerful man in Britain.

All of this is deeply unsettling news.

Image: POLITICO. Europe

It's A Hard Rain That's Gonna Fall

The Republican Senate has killed a bipartisan committee to investigate the assault on the American Capitol on January 6th. Karen Tumulty writes:

You’ve got to at least give Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) some credit for candor.

In pressing Senate Republicans to kill the idea of an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump, McConnell did not bother to disguise the fact that he was making a cravenly political calculation.

So, yes, it's all about politics. But, if you look a little deeper, what's really going on is truly disturbing:

The more dangerous truth is that a not-insignificant portion of the GOP’s Trumpian base actually appears to believe that the violent mob was justified in its effort to disrupt Congress as it conducted its pro forma tally of the electoral votes that made Joe Biden the 46th president.

These are the people who have bought into Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and who share at least some of the unhinged theories that fuel the QAnon movement.

A new poll released by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core shows that these dangerous and conspiratorial beliefs are not confined to the country’s dank backwaters.

Fully 20 percent of more than 5,500 adults questioned in all 50 states — and 28 percent of Republicans among them — said they agreed with the statement that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.”

Even more worrisome were the 15 percent overall — and, again, 28 percent of Republicans — who were of the opinion that because “things have gotten so off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

As Bob Dylan wrote decades ago, "it's a hard, hard rain that's gonna fall."

Image: Ready.gov

Chill Out

The doomsayers are out in full force. The economy will overheat, they say. Inflation will run wild. It will be the 1970s all over again! Paul Krugman's advice is to take a deep breath and exhale -- slowly:

Chill out, everyone. Mostly we’re just experiencing the economic equivalent of a moment of wheelspin.

OK, there are some real issues involving current events that need discussing — and some of the continuing discussions, shockingly, involve serious debates among serious people. How much are closed schools and lack of child care keeping mothers out of the paid labor force? Are enhanced unemployment benefits making workers reluctant to take low-paying jobs?

And there are genuine questions about where we’ll be next year. Might the economy start to overheat, forcing the Fed to tap on the brakes to head off longer-term inflation? I don’t think that’s the most likely outcome, but it’s certainly a possibility.

Most of the scare headlines right now, however, reflect what you’d expect to see in an economy that’s trying to go from 0 to 60 in seconds flat.

Krugman cautions his readers to remember where we've been:

At the beginning of this year, the United States was still very much in the depths of the pandemic. Daily deaths were higher than ever, with Covid-19 taking more than 3,500 lives in the country every day. Parts of the economy that depend on close physical contact were largely frozen: According to the restaurant booking service OpenTable.com, there were about 60 percent fewer seated diners than there had been during the comparable period prepandemic.

Then came an extraordinarily successful vaccination campaign. Deaths have plunged more than 85 percent and are still dropping. As fear recedes, the economy is surging, in what may end up being the fastest recovery ever. For example, restaurant bookings are already almost back to normal.

Why would anyone imagine us able to achieve that kind of sudden acceleration without leaving a few skid marks, and maybe even burning some rubber?

Mainly, however, we’re just seeing the problems you’d expect when the economy tries to roar ahead from a standing start, which means that we’re calling on suppliers to ramp up production incredibly fast and expecting employers to quickly attract a large number of new workers. These problems are real, but they’ll mostly resolve themselves in a few months.

Yes, labor supply issues may have held back April’s job growth, although more recent data suggest a possible rebound. April inflation surprised on the upside, largely because of used car prices. None of this tells you anything at all about how much we should worry about overheating, let alone how much more we should be spending on infrastructure and family support (answer: a lot) or how we should pay for these initiatives (answer: tax corporations and the rich).

What's the bottom line? "The virus is losing, and the economy is winning."

Image: USA Today

Ford's Bad Debt

Charles McVety is not getting his university. Martin Regg Cohn writes:

Canada Christian College will not be granted coveted university status, as it hoped and prayed, despite the premier’s best efforts to lay the groundwork. Praise the Lord, not Ford.

Thanks to a panel of outside experts, CCC president “Dr.” Charles McVety has just been denied the political payoff that would have perverted our post-secondary schools. Yet the stench that still wafts over the premier and the preacher cannot so easily be waved off.

Ford tried hard to give McVety his university:

Last October, with the province preoccupied by life and death questions over COVID-19, Ford’s Tories snuck in little-noticed legislation to upgrade McVety’s fledgling bible college into a full-fledged university. But accrediting it to confer B.A. and BSc. degrees would only have discredited, devalued and downgraded our entire post-secondary system.

Nothing could dissuade Ford’s Tories from using their majority to pass the legislation, except for the independent Post-secondary Education Quality Assessment Board. Its expert panel rarely steps in, but it saw through the mirage of McVety’s posturing — pedagogical and theological, ideological and political — and put its foot down last week.

Its full report has not been released, but enough is now known about McVety and his Canada Christian College to render the rejection inevitable: his personal notoriety (public homophobia and Islamophobia); questionable propriety (six-figure seemingly unsecured loans to McVety and his son); and dubious academic credibility (its degrees challenged by a provincial regulator).

Much has been written about Ford seeing the light last year when COVID-19 struck, rising from the political dead and rallying his government to do its best, for better or for worse. But its cynical manoeuvres on CCC last October brought out the worst in the premier, who would sell his soul — and sell out the province — to make good on a bad debt.

Ford owes much of his political success to McVety. McVety's evangelical fold followed him into Ford's tent. But things are not yet finished:

Now that the application has finally been rejected, it must be rescinded from the law books — and not allowed to live on lest it be enacted by cabinet fiat in future. If the government refuses, if it does nothing to correct this legislative limbo, it will be an accomplice to McVety’s future plotting.

And McVety is threatening repercussions:

His public reaction to the rejection was to threaten a lawsuit, demonizing PEQAB’s experts for doing the devil’s work and accusing them of “political corruptness.” Now, the preacher speaks darkly of litigation in lieu of transfiguration — religious and academic.

“I will defend myself now, over time, because I love gay people and I love Muslims,” he protested to the Star’s Kristin Rushowy last week.

In fact, this personal friend of the premier has publicly claimed that, “according to Jesus Christ, we have to love Muslims, but we don’t have to love Islam;” he warns that “Islam is not just a religion, it’s a … mandate for a hostile takeover;” he describes same-sex marriage as “a dagger in the heart of man;” he decries sex education as a “militant homosexual agenda;” and he preaches that “homosexuals prey on children.”

The story continues. . .

Image: Press Progress

Who Will Drive Social Change?

Duncan Cameron writes that, historically, the working class has driven social change. But that trend has been reversed:

Today while the world faces growing inequalities, environmental destruction, and rapid climate change, members of the working class, abandoned by their representatives and attacked by governments, have joined the right-wing populist insurrection in alarming numbers.

Without the working class where are the agents of progressive social change? In his latest work, French economist Thomas Piketty points out that support for parties of the left now comes from the more educated strata of society.

How to organize and mobilize the highly educated seems less than obvious.

Within the context of corporate control over the political process, the women's movement has been the most powerful social force operating outside the mainstream, and could be expected to be a source of support for an alternative agenda.

The reality is that political parties of the left have to re-invent themselves as anti-capitalist formations. Issues of inequality, environmental degradation and rapid climate can all be traced back to how we produce goods and services and exploit resources.

We have been living with a corporate agenda for a long time now. And the consequences are everywhere. The most obvious consequences have been on the planet itself. Cameron believes that left-wing parties must focus on the future of the planet:

Left political parties have to reinvent themselves. Ideas for change need to be central to what they do. There is no point in waiting for an election to campaign on the issues that matter to people. Large numbers of engaged members are needed if left parties are to become agents of change.

A message of hope -- we can organize ourselves differently -- needs widespread attention from the public.

Food for thought.

Image: The American Prospect

More Lessons From COVID

COVID should have taught us many lessons. Andrew Nikiforuk has enumerated 10 of them. Robert Reich has added another 8. Here are three of the most important:

1. Workers are always essential.

We couldn't have survived without millions of warehouse, delivery, grocery, and hospital workers literally risking their lives. Yet most of these workers are paid squat. Amazon touts its $15 minimum wage but it totals only about $30,000 a year. Most essential workers still don't have health insurance or paid leave. Many of their employers (including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, to take but two examples) didn't give them the personal protective equipment they needed.

2. Healthcare is a basic right.

You know how you got your vaccine without paying a dime? That's how all health care could be. Yet too many Americans who contracted COVID-19 got walloped with humongous hospital bills. By mid-2020, about 3.3 million people had lost employer-sponsored coverage, and the number of uninsured increased by 1.9 million. Research by the Urban Institute found that people with chronic disease, Black Americans, and low-income children were most likely to have delayed or forgone care during the pandemic.

3. Billionaires aren't the answer.

The combined wealth of America's 657 billionaires grew by $1.3 trillion—or 44.6 percent—during the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, with $183.9 billion, became the richest man in the U.S. and the world. Larry Page, cofounder of Google, added $11.8 billion to his $94.3 billion fortune, and Sergey Brin, Google's other cofounder, added $11.4 billion. Yet billionaire's taxes are lower than ever. Wealthy Americans today pay one-sixth the rate of taxes their counterparts paid in 1953.

These are the kind of lessons that should come as a slap across the face. We'll see if that's what happens.

Image: Alamy

A Political Animal

Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy is a political animal -- a totally political animal. Michelle Cottle writes:

Last week, he set heads shaking by announcing his opposition to the bill establishing a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 sacking of the U.S. Capitol. The legislative negotiations had been led on the Republican side, reportedly at Mr. McCarthy’s explicit request, by Representative John Katko of New York. But Mr. McCarthy and his leadership team urged members to reject the deal, leaving Mr. Katko twisting in the wind. The plan passed on Wednesday. Thirty-five Republicans supported it, in what was viewed as a rebuke of Mr. McCarthy.

But one shouldn't be too quick to write McCarthy off:

What he really, really wants now is the speaker’s gavel, which hovers just a few precious seats beyond his grasp. If Mitch McConnell, the ruthless, calculating Senate Republican leader, is a shark, Mr. McCarthy is a jellyfish, carried spinelessly along by the political currents.

These days, such inchoate non-leadership is the best that House Republicans can hope for. In fact, that’s what they demand. In a conference increasingly dominated by Trumpian trolls (See: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Madison Cawthorn, Lauren Boebert, Louie Gohmert, Paul Gosar, Mo Brooks…), maintaining serious order is out of the question. Forestalling total anarchy requires a leader with an extraordinary gift for abject appeasement. It’s equal parts feeding the base the unhinged grievance it craves, while still keeping members from less Trumpy districts on board.

Mr. McCarthy has shown himself to be that leader, and he deserves recognition for rising — or rather sinking — to meet the moment.

Sometimes being a jellyfish will get you what you want.

Image: vanityfair.com

No Longer A World Leader

There was a time -- not long ago -- when Britain was a world leader in international aid. Simon Rawnsley writes:

It was at a meeting of the rich democracies’ club in Scotland in 2005 that Tony Blair cajoled the other leaders to commit to big increases in international aid. The signatories included George W Bush, a Republican US president, Jacques Chirac, a Gaullist French one, and Silvio Berlusconi, the bunga-bunga prime minister of Italy. This was not an act of charity, but of self-interested altruism. The pledge recognised that it is in the long-term interests of the affluent democracies for developing countries to be less exposed to poverty, disease, instability, conflict and extremism.

Gordon Brown stuck to the commitment even after the great crash of 2008 triggered the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. David Cameron enshrined in law the undertaking to meet the UN target of spending 0.7% of national income on aid. He did so even as his government imposed austerity at home. When rightwing Tories complained, their then leader riposted that it would be morally reprehensible for a wealthy country such as Britain to try to balance its books on the backs of the world’s poor. The commitment continued under Theresa May and made it into the 2019 Tory manifesto signed by Boris Johnson.

Johnson has not honoured his signature:

The pledge was cast aside last year, the Covid-induced “domestic fiscal emergency” being deployed by Rishi Sunak as the justification for inflicting devastating reductions in the support for some of the world’s most marginalised people. No other major western government has thought it sensible or ethical to cut international aid in the middle of a pandemic. A prime minister not as impervious to embarrassment as Mr Johnson might squirm at the thought of hosting the G7 when its other members are responding to the crisis by sustaining or boosting their aid budgets.

The cuts have come in two waves. There was a first last year in response to the expected contraction in the economy and a decision to switch aid spending to dealing with the pandemic. The second wave, the consequence of breaking what is supposed to be a legally binding commitment to the UN target, has been happening since the beginning of this year. The overall effect is to take out about a third of the aid budget over just two years. That would be extremely painful even if it were done carefully and with a view to protecting the most fragile countries. The evidence suggests that the cuts are being executed with a slapdash crudity that magnifies the damage and inflicts the worst of them on the most vulnerable. The government’s own commission on aid impact has just released a withering report into the first wave of cuts last summer. Civil servants were given no more than seven working days to decide where the axe should fall, among those cuts a £730m reduction in bilateral aid based on economic forecasts that proved to be too gloomy. Ministers spent just seven hours discussing £2.9bn of cuts, which were then predominantly imposed on the world’s poorest countries, the opposite of what they said would happen.

For those who have followed Mr. Johnson's career, none of this is surprising.

Image: bbc.com

A Bad Moon Rising

Michael Gerson writes that American politics is now being conducted under the threat of violence:

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who has a talent for constructive bluntness, describes a political atmosphere within the GOP heavy with fear. “If you look at the vote to impeach,” she said recently, “there were members who told me that they were afraid for their own security — afraid, in some instances, for their lives.” The events of Jan. 6 have only intensified the alarm. When Donald Trump insists he is “still the rightful president,” Cheney wrote in an op-ed for The Post, he “repeats these words now with full knowledge that exactly this type of language provoked violence on Jan. 6.”

Violence is at Donald Trump's core:

Trump has made a point of encouraging violence against protesters at his rallies (“knock the crap out of them”), excusing violence by his supporters (people "with tremendous passion and love for their country”) and generally acting like a two-bit mob boss. He publicly supported Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager charged with homicide in the killing of two people in Kenosha, Wis. (Rittenhouse has pleaded not guilty.) He embraced Mark and Patricia McCloskey for brandishing guns at peaceful marchers in St. Louis. He deployed federal security forces to break heads in Lafayette Square.

That violence exploded on January 6th. Now, Republicans who were targets of that violence are trying to bury an investigation into it. And they are desperately seeking to change the rules around elections to ensure their rule -- even though that rule is supported by a clear minority. The signs are not good:

Compared with the utter chaos of previous efforts, this time there seems to be a strategy at work. First, undermine Republican confidence in the electoral system and stoke the party’s sense of grievance. Second, modify state election laws to try to discourage Democratic (and particularly minority) turnout. Third, replace or intimidate state election officials who show any hints of independence or integrity.

The first goal has been achieved: In a recent poll, more than two-thirds of Republicans denied the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election as president. Results on the second goal (so far) have been mixed. Republican “reforms” have made the system marginally less fair than the status quo, but not quite as bad as some feared.

The third goal is where the threat of violence has mattered most. Officials who held the line against electoral corruption in 2020 have been worn down by threats. Some have retired or been forced out of office. State legislators who didn’t act as reliable partisans have been targeted and intimidated. All who resist Trump’s will know they will be singled out by name. They will be exposed to political jeopardy and physical peril, particularly from activists who view the right to bear arms as the right to make armed threats.

The signs don't look good. There's a bad moon rising.

Image: The Arts Fuse

COVID Speaks

Andrew Nikiforuk, in The Tyee, gives COVID a voice. It's a must-read piece. The virus offers ten lessons. I'll only deal with three of those lessons. 

The first involves eternal growth:

Do you think your kind can just keep growing forever? Not even bacteria live such a fiction.

Maybe you should have listened to that German economist who said, “Man makes his own history but not always as he pleases.” Well, that’s me, a cultivator of displeasure.

Your overshoot is of another dangerous nature. Your future is no longer a reflection of your past, because you do not understand the dynamics of complexity in your own networked universe, let alone mine.

Since my last truly memorable visit in 1918 with my Spanish Flu (and it wasn’t Spanish, but no matter), you have made the world more connected and more complex with your machines and systems. You never bothered to calculate how steam ships could transform influenza from a regional delight to a global scourge, did you? Let me thank you again for that splendid innovation.

Every day you multiply this hazard. Every time you add another airplane route to a finite planet you accelerate the speed of my viral servants. All seems stable until your complexity brings down the house with a well-transported contagion on every doorstep.

Growth does not raise all boats. And the virus simply sinks many of them. 

The second lesson is inequity:

Show me a pandemic that equally afflicted the rich and the poor? I know. I have not made one. Your kind underestimates my unprogressive nature, which holds but a mirror to the flaws of your social relations.

My coronavirus has struck down the usual victims: the poor; immigrants who must work of a living; people of colour burdened with disease because they have no access to health care. People incarcerated in buildings like cattle in feedlots. It never ceases to amaze me how you concentrate people and animals in the name of efficiency, heedless of the inevitable biological price to pay.

The reality is this. Pandemics like myself don’t create inequalities. We merely exploit them and play with the opportunities.

The third lesson is all about hubris:

Your vulnerability is a product of your hubris. Think of me, this fine pandemic, as a Mongolian cavalry probing the defenses of an overconfident Chinese city. Even after SARS and Ebola (you can’t say I didn’t provide a fair warning), I marveled at your porous defenses. All about my feet I found a global tableau of disbelief, denial and timidity.

Almost everywhere I ventured, I found the powerful unprepared and inattentive. I moved through open borders and took advantage of overextended supply chains. I found politicians who minimized me as another “flu.” Your leaders actually believed that they could muddle through an extreme event with impunity.

Everywhere I probed, I discovered familiar vulnerabilities. I found a stubborn resistance to act quickly and a denial of the exponential function. I found the precautionary principle abandoned like an orphan on the Silk Road. I found an expert class reluctant to don masks or to consider the dominance of aerosol transmission. I found democracies who stupidly elected to fight a viral fire in their hospitals instead of in their communities or at their borders.

In sum, I found inept bureaucracies incapable of managing catastrophic risk led by a callous political elite that prized money more than workers. What a marvelous and entirely predictable reception!

A few lessons to ponder over this holiday weekend.

Image: Failwise

Confronting The Problem Head On

Language and Quebec's identity are once again front and centre. Francois Legault claims that Quebec has the right to amend the constitution. At issue is Quebec's Bill 96, which would amend section 90 of the BNA Act to read:

“FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF QUEBEC

“90Q.1. Quebecers form a nation.

“90Q.2. French shall be the only official language of Quebec. It is also the common language of the Quebec nation.”

The problem is the notion of "the Quebec Nation." Andre Pratte writes in The Montreal Gazette:

Do Quebecers form a nation? There is no doubt in my mind, and in the minds of the vast majority of experts who have studied the issue, that they do. Fifteen years ago, the House of Commons even passed a motion to that effect.

However, recognition of the Quebec nation (or distinct society) has not been enshrined in the country’s Constitution, because a majority of English Canadians are opposed to it. They fear that such recognition would lead to the granting of special rights to Quebecers, a situation they cannot accept. While I do not share this view, it is certainly a legitimate one. The only way to change the minds of our fellow citizens is to convince them, not to “shove the idea down their throats,” as the politicians in the National Assembly like to characterize the process that led to the 1982 Constitution.

He has a point. In French, the word pays means more than "province." It means home. But, for Francophone Quebecers, it means much more than that. It means homeland. It's not easy to negotiate the meaning of words between two different languages.

Justin Trudeau wants to ignore that negotiation. His father would have confronted the problem head-on.

Image: The Hill Times

It Was Just Tourists

Of all the absurd claims about the riot at the American Capitol, the most absurd is the notion that it was a "visit by tourists." How has it come to this? Thomas Edsall writes:

Immediately after the riot, support for President Donald Trump fell sharply among Republicans, according to surveys conducted by Kevin Arceneaux of Sciences Po Paris and Rory Truex of Princeton.

The drop signaled that Republicans would have to pay a price for the Trump-inspired insurrection, the violent spirit of which was captured vividly by Peter Baker and Sabrina Tavernise of The Times:

The pure savagery of the mob that rampaged through the Capitol that day was breathtaking, as cataloged by the injuries inflicted on those who tried to guard the nation’s elected lawmakers. One police officer lost an eye, another the tip of his finger. Still another was shocked so many times with a Taser gun that he had a heart attack. They suffered cracked ribs, two smashed spinal disks and multiple concussions. At least 81 members of the Capitol force and 65 members of the Metropolitan Police Department were injured.

Yet, within a week, Republican politicians changed their tune:

Arceneaux and Truex, in their paper “Donald Trump and the Lie,” point out that Republican voter identification with Trump had “rebounded to pre-election levels” by Jan. 13. The authors measured identification with Trump by responses to two questions: “When people criticize Donald Trump, it feels like a personal insult,” and “When people praise Donald Trump, it makes me feel good.

The same pattern emerged in the Republican Party’s favorability ratings, which dropped by 13 points between the beginning and the end of January, but gained 11 points back by April, according to surveys by the NBC/Wall Street Journal.

Elected Republicans have simply followed the mob. And the mob will follow Trump to the gates of hell and beyond. They believe their shared brotherhood represents paradise itself -- because he and they hate the same things. From their perspective, January was just another visit by tourists.

They are, simply put, damned.

Image: Reuters

Their Best Ally

The rise of Donald Trump underscores the failure of the American public education system. Dana Milbank writes:

Only a quarter of U.S. students are proficient in civics, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And apparently, the right wants to keep it that way.

Civics education used to part of the American curriculum. Now, two Republican senators -- John Cornyn of Texas and Tom Cole of Oklahoma -- are sponsoring a bill that would authorize one billion dollars a year to improve civics education in the United States. The Right has erupted:

The Post’s Laura Meckler reported over the weekend, “Conservative media and activists are pelting the Republicans who support the bill to abandon it. They call the grant program a ‘Trojan horse’ that would allow the Biden administration to push a liberal agenda.”

Conservative writer Stanley Kurtz told Breitbart News that the bill would promote a “woke education” and a “Marxist-based philosophy” in which “teachers are forced to indoctrinate students with ideas like ‘systemic racism,’ ‘white privilege,’ and ‘gender fluidity.’ ” Kurtz wrote in National Review that the civics bill will promote a curriculum “built around radical Critical Race Theory.”

In reality, the civics bill does no such thing. The “Civics Secures Democracy Act” specifically states that it doesn’t “authorize the Secretary of Education to prescribe a civics and history curriculum.” That’s up to state and local leaders.

But the plain text of the bill didn’t stop Kurtz and his allies from spinning a conspiracy theory, based on their objections to another, unrelated grant program. (For that program, the Biden administration cited the New York Times’s “1619 Project” in touting the importance of teaching about the consequences of slavery.) So, now, it’s a safe bet that congressional Republicans will in large numbers oppose a bill promoting nothing more nefarious than civil discourse, voting, jury duty and volunteering.

Ignorance is the Right's best ally. And they will do everything they can to support that alliance.

One further note: I have recently readjusted the settings at Blogger and added an extra level of virus protection to this blog. If you continue to receive messages that this site is  unsafe, please let me know.

Image: Omia's Personal Blog

Who's Most Maladroit?

Justin Trudeau's government has made several mistakes during the pandemic. But the other guys have not been able to take him down -- because they themselves have been particularly maladroit. Michael Harris writes:

In the early days, few countries appreciated the dire threat of COVID-19. By the time they did, they were in a desperate fight against the pandemic without the necessary tools. Slowness off the mark in vaccine procurement is Ottawa’s principal sin in this matter. One day, as this country prepares itself for the Next One, a lot of things will need to be examined.

Why didn’t Canada have the capability to make vaccine domestically, in view of previous battles with the H1N1 and other viruses? As the auditor general reported to Parliament, the Public Health Agency of Canada was unprepared for the pandemic, despite 20 years of warnings, planning and spending for that inevitability.

Why didn’t the federal government take full control of the rollout of the vaccination program by declaring COVID-19 to be a national emergency?

And what about the availability of PPE, and the timing and availability of testing and rapid tests?

These are pretty glaring inadequacies. But the Conservatives -- both federally and provincially -- have not been able to capitalize on them:

The Conservative leader would do better to put his shoulder to the wheel of fighting the third wave, and worry about the court-martial of those responsible later. Poking a stick in the spokes while the battle rages is smallminded, unhelpful and transparently opportunistic.

And it is worse than that.

O’Toole’s comments that PM Trudeau was “playing” with people’s lives, “leaving people behind” and running “social experiments” during a pandemic are patently absurd. The recent budget, which O’Toole rejected, was all about making sure that as many people as possible get through this disastrous disease, both from a public health and an economic point of view.

Then there are Ontario and Alberta:

With almost 500,000 cases and 8,300 now dead from COVID-19 in Ontario, Premier Doug Ford is deservedly on the hot seat. That’s why he too is trying to deflect blame from his government’s handling of the pandemic to Trudeau.

Ontario is a hot mess, and Ford is a big part of the reason. Demanding that Ottawa tighten the border and impose travel restrictions is merely the premier’s latest ruse to have people forget his abysmal record as a COVID-19 fighter.

It was Premier Ford who recently approved the arrival of 30,000 foreign students in Ontario. How’s that for travel restrictions? It was Doug Ford who ignored advice on asymptomatic testing. And it is the Ford government that is responsible for Ontario’s shameful record of deaths in the province’s long-term care facilities, some of them due to hideous neglect.

In Alberta, the wheels are coming off Jason Kenney's bus:

Then there is Premier Jason Kenney, who once accused Ottawa of forbidding Apple and Google from working directly with Alberta to improve its COVID-19 tracing app. This from the same premier who emulated Dr. Donald Trump more than Dr. Anthony Fauci in the critical early days of the pandemic. Like Trump, Kenney compared COVID-19 to the flu. Like Trump, he downplayed the deadly threat. And Kenney scoffed at other province’s restrictions aimed at containing the virus.

The result? A misinformed public. Hundreds of maskless revelers recently attended an anti-lockdown rodeo in Alberta to protest COVID-19 restrictions. Though it is true that Kenney rebuked them, it was Kenney who originally led them to believe that “Yeehaw” was a policy statement. Not in a pandemic it isn’t.

And where has Kenney’s hapless conservative populism landed him? Eighteen members of his own caucus have dissed their leader publicly, the provincial legislature is in pandemic-related lockdown, and Alberta sports the highest per capita COVID-19 infection rate in North America. “All hat and no cattle,” is the traditional Texas put-down. “No hat and no cattle, and soon, perhaps, no horse” better sums up this feckless refugee from the former Harper government.

What do citizens think of all this? We'll find out in the next election -- which, I suspect, will be not too far into the distant future.

Image: Toronto Sun

Our Unequal Future

The average price of a house in Toronto is now over a million dollars. Even in our rural community in Eastern Ontario, house prices are soaring. Robin Sears writes:

My parents bought a house in the early 1960s for less than $25,000. They sold it a quarter-century later for more than 30 times that amount. Compounded interest in any long-term investment would have been hard pressed to deliver that enormous increase. We bought a house in the 1980s for $250,000. It was recently sold by new owners for over $2 million, an eightfold increase. Two deep recessions later made its return much less impressive.

Now another real estate rocket has taken off. Today’s stats, soaring higher daily, are unhelpful in assessing future damage — as is discounting for inflation retroactively, as it has pushed mortgages from 18 per cent to less than four per cent. Two anecdotes may provide a hint about the risks. A country neighbour has watched a property they bid on double in value in just two years. There are estimated to be more than 27,000 empty homes in Canada today, snapped up by foreign investors, many of them regularly flipped to future non-residents.

We sold our house four years ago and moved into a condo. All three of our children are working, but two of them don't have pension plans. We're hoping that the profit from our house will provide for them in the future. But, when it comes to the Canadian population in general, things look much bleaker:

We are on the edge of a much larger compounding threat to social stability: inheritance. Thomas Piketty, the radical French political historian, was among the first to remind us that until the 19th century, the only certain way to get rich was not innovation, trade or even larceny. It was to marry money or to inherit it yourself. That rigid social immobility won’t return, but millions of citizens inheriting large sums will deepen and widen the wealth gap.

My generation will pass many trillions of dollars to our children. Estimates vary widely, between $50 and $80 trillion dollars, in Canada and the U.S. Generation X and millennials make up somewhere from eight to 10 million Canadians, depending on how you count. The arithmetic thus becomes astonishing. Taking the midpoint of both ranges means that many of them will be handed more than half a million dollars over the next two decades.

Many of the millennials among them — by far Canada’s poorest generation — will become overnight millionaires. Those without property-owning parents will remain among the poorest. Many factors can nudge these sums up or down: recessions, pandemics, inflation. But if today’s real estate boom continues for only a few more years, all these estimates will be far below reality and the real inequality impact. We know who the likely beneficiaries and the losers are, however. If you are a white university grad and living in a big city, you are much more likely to be a winner. If you’re not…

In addition, we are soon to emerge from the greatest wealth destruction event for low-income Canadians: the pandemic. As Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem said this week, “We are in the sharpest and most unequal economic cycle of our lifetime.” A raft of connected policy initiatives are needed: serious financial disincentives to non-resident home buyers and on those holding vacant homes; measures to cool housing prices including mortgage restraint, higher transaction fees and greatly increased affordable housing; inheritance taxes and taxes on capital gains that are less inequitable to wage earners.

The future looks very unequal.

Image: Giving Compass

 

Coming Apart

Things are falling apart for Jason Kenney. David Climenhaga writes:

Todd Loewen, United Conservative Party MLA for the northwestern Alberta riding of Central Peace-Notley, broke party ranks Thursday morning and called for the resignation of Premier Jason Kenney.

Damning the Kenney government as “out of touch and arrogant,” Loewen also quit as chair of the party caucus. “I feel it is best to resign this position to be able to speak freely.”

Loewen is one of the COVID 18, who have objected to Kenney's lockdown measures:

It’s important not to valourize Loewen. He is, after all, part of a group of mostly rural MLAs whose principal objection to Kenney is that the premier is imposing COVID-19 mitigation measures that, while still insufficient, are too strict for their taste. In other words, they’re significant contributors to the problems harming the province and causing the UCP to unravel.

That said, it’s a blistering and articulate letter that sounds as if Loewen spent hours getting the wording just right. The letter was posted just before midnight last night on Loewen’s Facebook account.

The former Wildrose MLA assails Kenney’s arrogant style of one-man government, complaining of arbitrarily cancelled meetings, big decisions made without notice to members and input from members barely considered.

He extends the list of complaints beyond pandemic response to the government’s war on doctors, its coal development policy on the eastern slopes of the Rockies, which he said “did not align with the expectations and values of Albertans,” and its dealings with “a hostile federal government.”

“The caucus dysfunction we are experiencing is a direct result of your leadership,” he told the premier. “Messaging from your government has been contradictory, confusing, and needlessly inflammatory,” he went on, skillfully wielding an Oxford comma.

“The people of Alberta have lost trust in this government because you have not brought needed balance and reason to the discussion,” he continued. “These folks have not abandoned the principles and values of the UCP, but they have abandoned you specifically.”

One of life's inescapable axioms is that what goes around comes around.

Image: cbc.ca

Remembering Recent History

Inflation in the United States is rising. Paul Krugman is circumspect:

It’s true that while almost everyone was expecting a spike in consumer prices, the actual spike was bigger than expected. The one-year inflation rate went above 4 percent, surpassing its previous recent peak, in 2011.

It’s not silly to ask whether unexpectedly high inflation means that the economy has less room to run than both the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve have been assuming; that could be true, and if it were, Biden’s spending plans might be excessive and the Fed might need to consider raising interest rates sooner rather than later.

However, Krugman argues, the inflation numbers are driven by bottlenecks in the economy, not overall inflation:

Sure enough, those April price numbers were driven to a large extent by peculiar factors obviously related to the economy’s restart. When people talk about underlying inflation, they rarely have the price of used cars in mind; yet a 10 percent monthly rise in used car prices — partly because people are ready to travel again, partly because a shortage of computer chips is crimping new-car production — accounted for a third of April’s inflation. There was also a 7.6 percent rise in the price of “lodging away from home,” as Americans resumed going places amid a waning pandemic.

The same thing happened in 2011:

And inflation hawks went wild. Representative Paul Ryan (remember him?) grilled Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, over his easy-money policies, intoning, “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens than debase its currency.”

Bernanke wasn't rattled:

The Fed stayed focused on “core” inflation, a measure that excludes volatile food and energy prices and that it (rightly) considers a better gauge of underlying inflation than the headline number. And the Fed’s cool head was vindicated: Inflation quickly subsided, and the dollar was not debased.

Things calmed down. What lessons can we draw from this?

First, you shouldn’t have a hair-trigger reaction to short-term fluctuations in inflation. Second, when you do see a bump in prices, look at the details: Does it look like a rise in underlying inflation, or does it look like a blip driven by temporary factors?

As inflation numbers rise here, we should keep that recent history in mind.

Image: chase.com