Politics and Press

The Financial Crisis for Dummies

Okay, here is the scoop. Please pick it up and move on to serious matters, like how to end the wars that are obviously part of the financial crisis. The European Union, founded on the idea of a common border and common currency, is falling apart. There is something rotten in the state of Denmark, as it has reinstated border controls on both its German and Swedish borders. Though nowhere near as draconic as the heavily-armed US outposts along the Canadian frontier, where all those dangerous outlaws are trying to press south, they nevertheless irritate their neighbours mightily. Hungary currently contributes the presiding president to the EU council and also unnerves its fellow members by acting contrary to EU rules on the question of ethnic minorities. Greece is living so far beyond its means that Sugar Daddy Germany has made clear it has run out of patience with request for further bank transfers. Ditto Portugal and Ireland, and more menacingly Spain and Italy. Who’s next? Well, even France has noticed that its bellicose response to poor Libya’s problems is costing way more money than it thought it would (which war doesn’t?) while gaining it no new friends on its former colonial continent since military success is not on the horizon while civilian deaths mount. The UK staggers along with a new scandal (welcome aboard Rupert) each week. Can you name the Prime Minister? There are some economic successes that should be mentioned: Germany, cruising along because of the quality of its expensive products and its unwillingness to get into wars, Switzerland, cruising along because of it secret bank system, Poland, the country that has gained the most from EU membership, and, amazingly, Estonia, which has the best financial report of them all.
And then there is the United States, the most powerful one of them all still – pace China – whose elected representatives seem incapable of dealing with elementary money matters such as overwhelming debt, war expenses and looming bankruptcy. The last will presumably not be allowed to happen, but I’m afraid the analysis of that possibility goes beyond the scope of the title of this rare foray of my brother Doug into higher economics.

Canada – King of Asbestos

Virtually every one knows that asbestos is a very dangerous product that has to be handled with extreme care. At the very least, it has to be labelled as dangerous and in need of special handling – if not simply banned – because it will kill you if you breathe it in any kind of quantities. There was a time when this was not so clear, and mining communities around the world – especially in Quebec – made a decent if hard living mining it, until the workers began dying of lung congestion. Now, decades later, billions are being spent removing asbestos from buildings in Canada. It can only be done safely with great caution by workers dressed in protective clothing, and it must be done if any building with asbestos in it is torn down, renovated or if the asbestos has been stirred up in some way. It’s the law.
And now even the lumbering the United Nations bureaucracy has concluded that at the very least asbestos must be labelled as a dangerous material needing special handling, in particular when it is exported. But that decree did not pass, since the vote required unanimity, and, despite the fact that even a rising economic power like India unexpectedly decided to vote in favour and take the economic hit, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Canada turned it down. Yes, shamefully, Canada, which knows all too well how dangerous this material is, decided it would rather protect the jobs of the 500 asbestos miners still working in Quebec rather than act with any decency. It is a good question of what the newly elected conservative majority would not do for money, or votes. The leader of the opposition socialist party called this vote the height of hypocrisy. He was being too generous

Canada and the USA: Two Countries, Two Elections

Canada recently completed a national election campaign that lasted all of 6 weeks. While the results were disappointing to many and the campaign was as nasty as some of the U.S.’s, at least the pain was short-lived. Canada’s winner, incumbent Prime Minister Stephen Harper sat in the driver’s seat as Canadians tried to determine if Michael Ignatieff was “Canadian enough” (he wasn’t) and not an American in sealskin clothing (apparently he was – and lost very badly).

The U.S. faces a similar campaign in tone but not in length. Is Obama a real American? Is he a Muslim in Christian clothing? The campaign will focus in subtle ways on those issues but the real issues may well be his lackluster handling of the economy and his seeming willingness to give away the ranch to the Republicans without a fight. We shall see.

But the real point of all of this is to wonder why we need 20 months of increasingly idiotic campaigning for the American people to make a semi-informed judgment. At the end of the day many – perhaps most – people will vote based on minimal understanding of how we got to where we are and what is in the best interest of the country. Why not do it in six weeks rather than drive a portion of the country insane with a campaign based on moronic slogans, outright lies and subtle racism.

Canada did it in 6 weeks and retained a Prime Minister as mediocre as what we are likely to end up with after 20 months and literally billions of wasted dollars.

a southern and northern intellectual analyze the Stanley Cup

#1 – a southerner: Ok i propose 2 loonies pergame and a 5 loonie bonus for winning the series. I understand you might be nervous and not want to bet. That is ok. Let me know.

#2 – a northerner: I doubt that you can afford loonies, so I suspect a trick.  But nevertheless I accept. I’ll be travelling south for a couple of days to see how the other half lives, and spend some toonies in the banana belt.  Will be back on Wednesday in time to see the first loonie go my way.

#1Some trick… The loonie costs me $1.2. Damn. That harper guy must know his stuff.. Playoff hockey is unbelievable.

#2 – after game 1: Why not just pay me now and relax?  Even Obama is refusing to make a bet with  Harper – perhaps he never heard of hockey (or Harper), or perhaps he doesn’t want to fork over anything  to a functioning economy – but you can’t back out now just because this is so one-sided. Estimates here are 7-0 for the first gameif theAmurcan goalie didn’t have a good evening, of course not as good as the Canuck one, one but still.  But can’t you find a power play coach down there? How about double or nothing?  It won’t be a sweep however since we want a couple of more home games and have promised to donate the proceeds to Winnipeg.

#1Between the ref missing the very obvious offside on the goal and the canucks resorting to biting the opponents, it does not look good for the Boston men. I will pass on the double or nothing but note that by betting in loonies I have already given you an extra 2%. Generous to a fault, I am, in despair, almost.
I watched much of the game in a barroom where everyone was asking the same question you ask RE: what is with the power play? Where is it and why is it hiding?
Am i ever glad i cancelled the bet.

#2 That’s not funny.  A guy sticks a finger in your mouth and then they complain when you bite it!  What else can you do with it? My cat does the same thing and doesn’t get a penalty! And these guys and the coaches are all pure laine and it’s an old tradition in maple syrup country to stick your finger in trees and things without being spied upon.
As for off side, that was only off sides if you think that off sides happens when your skate blade doesn’t quite make it back over the blue line, even though you try your very best!  I don’t think so in this day and age. It’s not winning that counts. It’s giving it the old college try!!

#1 can your cat skate? does it know how to stay onside? is it a Canadian cat or an Amurcan cat? These are the relevant questions to ask.

Mr. Obama goes to Europe

President Obama has set aside 6 days for a foray into europe, a respectable amount of time, though less than what he spent in Asia last year. He’s visited Ireland with a somewhat dubious bit of the old Irish blarney, but, like Kennedy, Reagan and Mulroney before him, he seemed to genuinely enjoy a stop in a small-town pub that some ancestor had once frequented, at the same time demonstrating that an Amurcan of power receives a friendlier reception on the emerald island than does the queen of England.

But now comes the hard part for the president. A cheerleading speech before the British parliament could not really paper over the obvious cracks in the wall of NATO solidarity, once the proof of “western” superiority in the world. Economically that is obviously no longer the case as southern europe risks falling off into Mediterranean bankruptcy, held together only by the rapidly disintegrating good will of the sole european industrial society that continues to produce economically at previous levels – Germany. In fact German production has been dramatically successful since it came out of the recession, while Spain has 20% unemployment, Greece is hardly functioning at all and France and Italy stagger along with governments that can’t even control their own leaders’ personal behaviour. Soon this part of the world will only have 7% of the world’s population, and if it cannot act with a common cause, it is going to become increasingly sidetracked as a world power leaving only the nuclear-weapon countries and Germany to have some weight to throw around.
For his part, Obama is not stopping in germany, a snub the Germans have of course noted, and they think they know. Nobody will admit it, but it is because Germany, siding with Russia and China, declined to take part in the bombing of Ghaddafi’s Libya. Considered an act of betrayal by Germany’s NATO allies, led in bellicosity by the old colonial powers in the Arab world, the UK and France, many Germans also felt unease with Chancellor Merkel’s decision, though the stalemate that has developed certainly there makes that decision more defensible, and the US has also declined to play a a leading role in the military action. What this scenario does bring into focus is the fact that western Europe and North America ( the US and Canada have a similar relation to the Libyan campaign), no longer have a common policy to the rest of the world. These bases have become less important to each other and the rest of the world has become more important to them and vice verse. Canada, in particular, looks to Asia for its future economic and industrial connections, and, from the other side of the world, so does Germany. The common vote by China, Russia and Germany to not get involved in the Libyan campaign, may be more than just a surprising lapse in west European solidarity. It may be a sign of the future.

Chernobyl will not die

Exactly twenty-five years ago today a rather remote nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine – at that time still in the Soviet Union – exploded and sent a deadly dose of radioactivity into the atmosphere where it eventually spread out over the skies of neighbouring Belarus, in particular, but soon over much of northern and central Europe as well. At first the Soviet government denied that there was a serious problem and sent in men on suicide missions with shovels and fire hoses to supposedly cover up a potential danger which in fact was already completely out of the bottle. The results are now there for all to contemplate. One third (!) of the soil of Belarus is contaminated, a substantial zone around Chernobyl is uninhabitable and will remain so for centuries, and scores of thousands have died.
And now in far-of and technologically sophisticated Japan, something similar is going on. The government greatly understated the danger, courageous men were sent in, certainly better protected than the fireman of Chernobyl but still in mortal danger, but the evil genie was already out of the bottle, the ocean itself is contaminated and 80,000 people have been evacuated from their homes. There is no guarantee that they will ever be allowed to return. And this time there has been some reflection on what it means since it is very unlikely that the next catastrophe will need another twenty-five years. Germany has shut down, at least temporarily, its oldest reactors and is considering a future without nuclear power, with no easy solution once one has become addicted to it. But resource-poor France, and increasingly India and China, have made clear that they are putting all their energy bets on nuclear power and even poor Belarus is building its first nuclear reactor right on the Lithuanian, and EU, border. So much for learning from the past.

The Strange Disconnect of the Tea Party

Much of the attraction of the Tea Party to Americans has been its avowed commitment to downsizing the government and limiting government’s influence on our lives and the Republican Party has been pleased to play to this mythic tribute to the so-called stubborn independence of Americans.

Recently the woman who calls herself the leader of the Massachusetts Tea Party was on TV demanding the elimination of federal support for PBS because – and I could not make this up – Sesame Street was such a left leaning – possibly Communist show. Her immediate example was that first lady Michelle Obama had been on the show promoting more broccoli rather than cookies for the health of child followers of Cookie Monster. So here was an incidence in her mind of  an intrusive government forcing children to consider broccoli over cookies. (The irony that the Tea Party woman was quite fat and could have done with more broccoli and fewer cookies did not enter her limited mindscape.)

But while they claim to want freedom from government intrusion in their lives, Tea Partiers and their Republican soul mates are nonetheless committed to a strong and intrusive government role in limiting the rights of others, including gay Americans’ rights to serve in the military and to marry; women pregnant from rape or incest’s rights to choose abortion; artists’ rights to express non-conformist views of Christianity; Muslims’ rights to build cultural centers in their chosen locations; and American women’s right to ready access  to birth control information and resources.

The Tea Party is in reality a loose confederation of people intent on telling the rest of us what we can and cannot do in our personal lives and committed to a government bent on forcing their narrow-minded social agenda on the rest of us.

German elections – the nuclear power opponents win a surprising victory

The nuclear disaster in Japan will no doubt have a negative ripple effect on the popularity of the nuclear power industry throughout the world – at least one would hope so as the consequences of a nuclear meltdown begin to hit home – and the first plebiscites on the topic in regional elections in southwest Germany have delivered completely unexpected results. In Baden-Württemberg, where the Conservative CDU party has ruled for almost 60 years, the Green Party, which for 30 years has attacked nuclear power programmes from a gradually-growing minority position, will apparently deliver the next premier, as the Greens received, by a very slight margin over the social Democrats, the most votes with 24%. And in neighbouring Rheinland-Pfalz the Greens will have gained a crucial position to rule in coalition with the Social Democrats. There is no doubt that the impulse for this amazing result is German uneasiness with the proposed expansion of nuclear power plants in view of the catastrophe in technologically-proficient Japan.

There is also no doubt about who the big losers are in this. Angela Merkel’s ruling CDU/CSU government has been punished for waffling on the topic of nuclear energy, and its weak coalition party, the FDP, lost half its votes in the elections and fell below the 5% level, which gets you into parliament, in one of them. For the FDP, which traditionally supplies the Foreign Minister when in coalition, it could be a fatal blow. For the CDU/CSU it is a rude wake-up call as analysts have determined that many thousands of voters who normally vote conservative switched to the Greens as a protest on federal nuclear power policy. It seems that a stance that was once the home territory of an offbeat protest party finds a great deal of support among conservatively-minded Germans. After all, the potential spread of radiation in Japan pays no attention to political interests. It looks like it may make everybody’s land uninhabitable for a long time in a wide area around the crippled reactors.

State of Maine Union Blue

Yesterday’s NY Times reports that Maine governor Paul LePage has determined that a large mural in the state’s Labor Dept. Headquarters has too many depictions of workers – some of whom are – gasp – union workers.  A spokesperson for LePage claimed that the mural reminded him of “communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses,” and LePage has ordered the mural removed. Furthermore, the governor referenced anonymous complaints from business leaders that may or may not actually have been made to justify his action on the grounds that the Labor Dept. building needed to represent both employers and employees.

This is of course one more attempt to punish the middle class for the sins of the country’s investment banks, health insurers and outsourcing corporations. LePage is one more example – along with Governor Walker of Wisconsin  – of a small group of new right-wing, tea party-supported politicians intent on using unions as a whipping boy to cover up and shift responsibility for the country’s dire economic situation from the people whose greed is leading America towards becoming a banana republic oligarchy.

Maine’s reputation as a fair-minded, moderate state is at risk and its citizens are looking at a nasty, fruitless three and a half years of bombastic posturing by the man they elected on what must have been a very foggy day.

Mike Huckabee: Ignoramus of the Day

“I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough. And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, [is] very different than the average American…….if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”

Republican presidential candidate, Fox News analyst and former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee  on Steve Malzberg’s right-wing radio talk show.

There are three problems with Huckabee’s comments: 1) Obama was not raised in Kenya; 2) he made them on a national radio talk show; and 3) he has had no comment about them since having it brought to his attention that he was 100% wrong**.

I will add a fourth problem, that he is a likely candidate for President and we really do not need an ignoramus in that position. It would be more than troubling to think of him mistaking Kenya for – oh maybe Hawaii or Indonesia –the two places where Obama actually was raised. What is symptomatic in his comments and most reprehensible is the subtle racism. It is no secret to anyone who follows American politics that the fact that Obama is a black man drives some people nuts. Kind of the way Hillary Clinton’s gender drove them nuts. The fact that people are getting used to hearing this kind of nonsense is not a good sign.

**Huckabee’s spokesman Hogan Gidley did comment::“Governor Huckabee simply misspoke when he alluded to President Obama growing up in ‘Kenya.’ The Governor meant to say the President grew up in Indonesia.” Which does not explain how or why he then segued to discussing how Obama must have thought of the Mau Maus.