Politics and Press

World Economics 101

It is time to give a surprise quiz about the state of the national economies of the world. There may still be a general understanding that, despite all negative developments of the last decade, the US still packs a powerful economic punch. But President Obama has displayed a surprising and very disappointing isolationist, fortress-America position on economics. The front page of last week’s edition of the Canadian national news magazine MacLean’s dealt with a topic that is being considered in many countries: “Obama, Why He’s bad for Canada – His ambitions could cripple our economy”. US Buy America policies have been put through by his regime, with the predictable Canadian retaliation, despite long-standing Free Trade agreements. The very big question of the future markets of Canada’s immense energy reserves is now being discussed with regard to European and especially Asian markets, with far less dependence on US markets. The result could be a blow to the economies of both the increasingly antagonistic neighbours. Last week the US Homeland Security lads forced an Air Canada plane flying from Fredericton, New Brunswick to Montréal, Quebec to turn around in mid-flight, somewhere over Maine, because a Canadian citizen was on board whom they didn’t like crossing US air space. You can’t get much less neighbourly than that.

Perhaps these are problems that can be addressed, however, and the US still produces over 30% of the world’s economy. But what about China, which garners much of the journalistic interest in trade and economy these days? How dominant has it become in that sphere? Do you think that China will soon replace the US as leading economic power? Well, think again. The fact is that China’s economy is still only one tenth the size of Japan’s, and produces less than 10% of the world’s economy. Many economists feel that India, not China, is the real rising economic power in Asia, as it reacts more flexibly to the current economic crisis and deals with it through a banking system that is much more reliable.

Iran and Mucho Macho Americano

Whenever I forget how pitiful the American press has become I turn to PBS’s Lehrer Report knowing that Judy Woodruff is likely to remind me. While I largely avoided cable TV and network news talk shows during the Iran election fallout I had noted in the NY Times and Washington Post the comments of various Republican politicians to the effect that the president had not been “forceful” enough in his comments on the Iranian elections. (Much like foreign leaders had not been forceful enough in discussing the U.S. presidential election of 2000 when our Supreme Court handed the presidency to G. W. Bush, rather than bother to count the votes in Florida.) Comments came from the usual suspects, Senators McCain and Graham, Representatives Boehner and Kantor, Newt Gingrich, right-wing neocon columnists like George Will and Charles Krauthammer, and of course the usual blowhard media types on Fox TV and dumbbell radio.

Obama’s point – that it was strategically essential to avoid making the U.S. the outside force to be blamed for the demonstrations – was lost on these political hacks and we were treated to the predictable displays of American artificial testosterone. Virtually every credible Iran analyst supported Obama’s approach and assessed it as correct, as did Indiana Republican Senator Lugar – one of a diminishing number of Republican Senators with foreign policy bonafides.

Understanding a difficult, complex situation in Iran requires more effort than most Americans will give to it and unfortunately more effort than most of the American press will put into it. The attraction for simple-minded blowhards to spout meaningless slogans is too strong for a country that long ago decided to see all events through a strictly American prism. This is just the time for PBS to step up and provide the kind of background and intelligence needed to sort through the complexities. Lehrer and Woodruff gave us what they too often fall back on – an interview of two politicians (Senators Graham and Kerry) on opposite sides to argue about things that more often than not avoid any prospect of actually educating the viewer about anything other than where the two stand on whatever is defined as the issue. Woodruff’s interview served to carry the GOP’s water, asking in two or three different ways just why Obama did not speak out more strongly. Senator Graham was all over that while Senator Kerry did as well as could be expected to educate the viewers on some of the realities of the situation.

It is perhaps unfair to pick on Woodruff when so many of her colleagues in the press bow to the same gods of vacuity and simplicity (anyone who watched the Obama’s press conference can attest to that), but we used to expect more from PBS than mind-numbing, self-serving debates by politicians.

For anyone seeking an intelligent, instructional and nuanced view of the Iranian situation and Obama’s response to it, I recommend Terry Gross’s interview yesterday of Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Listen to it here.

where you want to live

The Economist has just published its annual ranking of 140 major cities for their livability. It’s no surprise that Vancouver, Canada’s urban showpiece on the Pacific with a matchless setting, is once again ranked first as a place to live, but it is the absence of cities – and countries – that would have been favourites not long ago which says something about how the judgment of quality of urban life has changed. Three of the first six cities are in Canada (#1 Vancouver, #4 Toronto, #6 Calgary) and 6 of the first ten are in Australia (Sidney, Melbourne and Perth) and Canada. The other four in the first ten are capital cities of middle-size European powers (#2 Vienna, Zurich, Helsinki) plus UN-centre Geneva.

Former stars like Paris (#17), Berlin (#22) or Rome (#51) no longer cut the mustard for quality of life. Countries without a history of military colonialization trump countries who came to prominence by invading neighbours and even far-off lands, and now have to live with the consequences. Countries with a current atmosphere of tolerance and with middle-power armed forces run a steadier, friendlier ship in the modern world than those with atomic weapons and nervously-guarded borders.

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The End of a German Legend

Remember that old joke about the poor woman who got involved four times in search of Mr Right and always came away disappointed after she took up with an English cook, an Italian politician, a French engineer, and a German lover. Well the English can still eat toad in a hole and spotted dick, the Italians are on their 52nd post-war government, the French can still design subs that run into other subs in the open ocean, and the (north) Germans still get low marks as romantic types. But on March 4, 2009 the Germans lost their right to make fun of anybody else’s engineering skills. For on that day the 8-story building housing the entire archive of the historic city of Köln collapsed into a devastated pancake as if it had been blown up by explosive experts.

But it hadn’t been. It had been undermined by the construction of a new subway line, despite numerous warnings from the building’s occupants that the building was being shaken into fundamental danger by the nearby construction. The warnings were ignored and the building collapsed so quickly that it was a miracle that all the occupants of the building managed to rush out before it pancaked. It turned out that the mayor was incompetent, the engineers were hopeless, the bureaucracy had not functioned and there’s nothing more to be said about the lovers. That leaves only the archivists and the restorers to pick up the pieces, and they still seem to be competent. But those pieces are proving very difficult to find in the crushed rubble that must be bottoming out in ground water that will not even be reached for many months. Experts are now predicting that this engineering fiasco has already resulted in the destruction of many irreplaceable pieces of history going back almost 2000 years and ultimately it will prove to be the biggest disaster for German history since the bombings of World War 2.

The Supreme Court as a Legion of Decency

The current U.S. Supreme Court has distinguished itself as an activist handmaiden of the Christian religious right. Two recent decisions illustrate the nuttiness that might have contributed to the retirement of Judge Souter and led many observers to wonder how in the devil we allowed such a takeover of one of our most important institutions. Both decisions relate to the efforts of the former chairman of the FCC to protect our tender eyes and ears from certain kinds of words and sights. One case involved the FCC’s policy to fine TV and radio stations for allowing “fleeting expletives” to go out on the airways. So if a sportscaster goes into a locker room and – shocking as it may seem – a professional athlete should refer to a loss as a “fuckin disaster” the broadcaster is liable to receive a sizable fine. Similarly, if a rock star wins a Grammy and accepts it in a live broadcast with the words, “fuckin awesome” the same holds. This FCC policy is apparently the brainchild of former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, an absolutist when it comes to the FCC’s right to determine what we can and cannot hear and see. The other case, of course, is the infamous half-second display of Janet Jackson’s left (or was it the right?) nipple during the Superbowl halftime extravaganza. The FCC fined CBS TV over $500,000 for that incident and surely the morals of American youth have not yet recovered. In any case the fine was overturned in a lower court and now the Supreme Court has sent it back to be reconsidered.

None of this would matter all that much if it were not emblematic of a right-wing activist court bent on controlling our lives in ways that are silly but nonetheless disturbing. Which brings us to the retirement of Justice Souter and the immediate response of Republican Senators that President Obama must not appoint anyone who might just possibly bring a modicum of sanity to a court populated with a majority of right-wingers who have done all possible to further the narrow ideology promoted by right-wing Christians. This before Obama has even mentioned possible names. What we are in for is a time wasting, grandstanding display of ignorance and hypocritical piety by Republican Senators who will carry the water of the likes of Pat Robertson and Pope Benedict. This in a country founded on the basis of separation of Church and State.

The complaints from the right will focus on what they contend are the evils of “activist” judges, (conveniently forgetting that the court has been – in their word, “activist,” for a number of years in the promotion of THEIR agenda), now defined as any judge who decides cases differently from what their religious beliefs would dictate. The political make-up of the Senate makes it likely that the Christian right will not prevail in the upcoming battle for the integrity of the Supreme Court but they will certainly make some of us scream for sanity.

The Coronation of Csar Michael

As predicted two years ago by my brother, Canada’s prodigal son, Michael Ignatieff, has returned from half a lifetime of exile in London (where he taught at Cambridge and Oxford) and Boston (where he headed an institute at Harvard) to become a politician in Toronto (where he taught at the University of Toronto) and is about to be crowned leader of the Liberal Party of Canada this weekend in Vancouver, (where he taught at the University of British Columbia).

The location of the coronation is yet another stroke of luck for the neophyte politician, as he will be far from his centre of power in still wintry Ontario, where he is already showing he can win back voters lost to Conservatives in the last election – a miserable loss for the Liberals – and instead can bask in the splendid atmosphere of the world’s most beautiful city, particularly in May as it suns itself before splendid deeply snow-covered mountains and ignores its social problems of homelessness and drug-addiction as its hockey team continues its march towards a potential Stanley Cup. My brother and I, driving home from Leonard Cohen’s recent towering performance at the hockey stadium, were stopped by a chap pushing a shopping cart full of assembled collected goods, who had no intention of drawing attention to his sad economic state compared to ours, as we assumed he had, but rather just wanted to give us the thumbs up sign as he noted the same Canuck flag hanging from our window as he had flapping from his cart. Here in Vancouver hockey is the great equalizer and when that’s going well and the weather has lost its winter bluster, then everything seems better.

And so it will be with the man who will be Prime Minister within a year. Many Canadians hope he will have the international clout to finally allow Canada to punch at or above its weight in crucial global matters, like water, energy, economics and also military interventions, where it has played a far bigger role than has been demonstrated under its long string of boring, anti-charismatic prime ministers since Pierre Trudeau. Armed with his 17 books – one deals with his father’s line, that included the last minister of education of csarist Russia, and the most recent with his mother’s, that included the man who plotted the trans-Canada railway – and with extensive experience and publications (and films) on conflicts like the war in ex-Yugoslavia, Ignatieff cannot be dismissed as yet another career politician of no particular note. He has strong opinions that even turn off some of his admirers, but there is no question that figures like Presidents Obama and Medvedev will have a different reaction when they meet the next Prime Minister of Canada than they did when they met any other since Trudeau.

Interview with The Homeland Security Secretary

As if poor President Obama doesn’t have enough to worry about, as he considers whether it is the chaps who ordered torture in the name of homeland security or the chaps who carried out the orders – or neither or both – who should be brought to trial. And then, as a side show, his choice for protector of that same border gives an interview on Canadian national television outlining her concerns. Coming as it did upon the conclusion of a Canuck hockey game and first round sweep, the talk with an unknown woman appeared to be a perhaps somewhat heavy-handed satire about the former guardians of the US side of the Canadian border. Here was a comedienne portraying a US diplomat who was announcing that the US-Canada border must be made more impenetrable – just like the Mexican one – because the 9/11 terrorists had entered the US that way and that the currently informal border controls would have to be made much more stringent so it didn’t happen again. Well, you could walk down the street and ask almost anyone and they would know that no 9/11 terrorists entered from Canada, so this part of this routine was too nutty to really be cutting satire. The four-hour waits at the border on the last long weekend also made the second part too obvious since it was just meant to show the supposed US diplomat hadn’t crossed that border in years, if ever.

And then her name flashed on screen – Janet Napolitano, apparently a Canadian comedienne my brother and I had never heard of, though we have great connections in that field. And then her title popped up – Homeland Security Secretary of the USA. Well, that was a good one, if a bit of a cheap shot, until it turned out to be true. This birdbrain – apparently the former governor of Arizona – is in charge of US border security, and is going to cost both countries billions of dollars in lost trade, more if she builds a wall like the one on the Mexican border in the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor, and she doesn’t know what country the guys came from who attacked New York. Sometimes satire just doesn’t pay.

The Song of Leonard Cohen

The ice has been scraped off the floor of the building, where just yesterday my brother and I witnessed (tickets from friends in high places) the relentless march of the Canucks to the inevitable series with Detroit for the real Stanley Cup (everyone picks the winner of the western division to roll over whoever wins in the anemic eastern division), and the stage is set for tonight’s performance by the most remarkable performer/author of the last half century. Fifty years ago, the young Leonard Cohen won Canada’s highest literary prize for the second of his only two novels, Beautiful Losers, which sold 3,000 copies, thus convincing Leonard to try another field, like poetry and singing.

And what a career that has been. He has also won the GG for poetry – Flowers for Hitler – and made (and lost) a fortune by setting many of his lyrics to music. The quality of his writing and his musical transcriptions is so high that a pure poet of the highest order, Germany’s greatest and most difficult contemporary writer and youngest winner of its highest literary prize, Durs Grünbein, once confided to my brother and me that Cohen was at the top of his list of colleagues worth admiring (and the only Canadian on it), a troubadour who had lived off the public performance of poetry for a lifetime. Durs wanted only one souvenir of his Canadian visit, not maple syrup or Yukon air, but Donald Brittain’s National Film Board documentary about the very young Leonard Cohen before he had even started to sing, not the easiest document to get ahold of at the time, though we managed to eventually get it delivered to Berlin. And now, at 74, Cohen is well into the most triumphant tour of his life, in March playing the 99th concert on the tour in his first performance in the United States (in New York) in 15 years. Though he’s from Montréal, he’ll be on home turf in Vancouver, just like the Canucks in the same building, and the long sold-out house is expecting a similar triumph.

TORTURED LOGIC

“Thus, although the subject may experience fear or panic associated with the feeling of drowning, the waterboard does not inflict physical pain. As we explained in Section 2340A Memorandum, “pain and suffering” as used in Section 2340 is best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of “pain” as distinguished from “suffering.”… Even if one were to parse the statute more finely to treat “suffering” as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering”….Jay Bybee, former Dept. of Justice Lawyer in the Bush Administration and current 9th Circuit Judge

Judge Bybee, a graduate of the University of Obfuscation Law School, might also have noted that chopping off a prisoner’s leg is allowable since he had two of them. He did not comment on what to do when you run out of legs but perhaps there are other body parts to consider– testicles, arms, kidneys etc. Reading the memoranda makes it clear that in this and other instances our Law Schools have helped create some monsters that would make Goebbels proud.

The release of four selected torture memoranda from the Bush Justice Department have raised two firestorms, each interesting in its own way. From the right we get the old familiar argument to screw the law and do anything we wish to anyone we think might want to hurt us, regardless of evidence and American values. A deep thinker from the Heritage Foundation reminded us on TV that in the white heat of post 9/11 it seemed clear that we needed to make sure we got the information needed to protect the country regardless of our laws or international law. He conveniently forgot that some of the memoranda were written as late as 2005 and that – in fact – we HAD the information that 9/11 was around the corner, that the information was given to Bush and National Security Advisor Rice – and ignored by both, and that there is little if any evidence that the subsequent use of torture ever improved the quality of information received.

It was not a huge surprise to see an op ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, criticizing the release of the information by former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey who were apparently upset that leaking the memos’ “…effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on September 11, 2001.” They must have missed the part – referred to above – where Rice and Bush were warned well before 9/11 – a warning based on intelligence gathered via more traditional – and legal – means. But then Hayden and Mukasey both have metaphorical blood on their hands in this matter so it’s not so surprising they take this view.

The blast from the left is criticism of Obama for deciding not to prosecute Intelligence operatives for torturing prisoners with the approval, even urging, of lawyers from Bush’s Department of Justice. (a piece in today’s NY Times details one such case) This is a quandary since to say “they were only following orders” has a 1940s reminiscent stink about it, but this was clearly a decision intended to protect intelligence operatives from the consequences of the folly of their masters and to avoid harming those agencies that – like it or not – we depend on for a degree of security. As for bringing the likes of Judge Bybee and others in leadership positions to justice, it seems unlikely until and unless Obama gets a much larger majority in the Congress. And even then, he would more likely argue for a kind of Commission on Reconciliation and Truth but when looking at the Bush administration and his cronies in Congress it is hard to imagine anything like truth or reconciliation being of any concern to them. And to be credible, such a Commission would need to be bipartisan.

In other news: President Obama welcomed Texas Governor Rick Perry’s suggestion that Texas secede from the Union and offered his assistance in facilitating the process. There is a strong rumor that George W. Bush would emerge from retirement to fill the Office of Texas Monarch, leaving Perry with even less of a job than he has currently.

The Sad Song of the South

On Wednesday and Friday nights, the Vancouver Canucks begin their playoff run for the Stanley Cup, and every seat has been sold out from the moment tickets went on sale, with lowest prices in the mid $100 range, no surprise since since the Canucks have sold out every game for the last 200 plus. You also are lucky to get tickets for Ottawa and Edmonton regular season games, you can’t get a ticket for the Calgary and Montreal playoff games, and Toronto tickets of any kind are passed on in wills, and the Maple Leafs only rarely even make the playoffs. Not so in many US venues, most dramatically in Detroit, home of the defending champions and one of the favourites once again (they have most of the Swedish national team, that may well win the Olympic tournament next year in Vancouver) where the crash of the auto industry has put much of the fan base out of pocket.

But Detroit, New York or Boston will survive bad times with good teams while many US expansion teams seem doomed – read all those south of St. Louis, maybe including St. Louis, the Canucks’ first round opponent. In Canada there is a sense of Schadenfreude in all this as sporting greed forced flourishing franchises out of Quebec City and Winnipeg, which were deemed to be too small for big sports money, and put in places like Phoenix, Atlanta, Columbus, Nashville and Florida, where some will certainly soon go belly-up, and kept out of places like Hamilton and London, where their success is virtually guaranteed. So up here everybody is hunkering down for the beginning of six weeks of matchless sports entertainment, knowing that the annoying phone calls from down south for the latest information will soon be pouring in from a sporting public stuck with nothing but steroid baseball to look at.