Apologies to Recent Commentors

I don't get that many comments so it's a sign that I'm particularly busy that I haven't replied to all of them. My apologies.

Chris Hedges on the emptiness of Obama's Re-Election

Not so much emptiness, I suppose, as a different moral travesty from what a Mitt Romney victory would have been:

Liberals, by voting for Barack Obama, betrayed the core values they use to define themselves—the rule of law, the safeguarding of civil liberties, the protection of unions, the preservation of social welfare programs, environmental accords, financial regulation, a defiance of unjust war and torture, and the abolition of drone wars. The liberal class clung desperately during the long nightmare of this political campaign to one or two issues, such as protecting a woman’s right to choose and gender equality, to justify its complicity in a monstrous evil. This moral fragmentation—using an isolated act of justice to define one’s self while ignoring the vast corporate assault on the nation and the ecosystem along with the pre-emptive violence of the imperial state—is moral and political capitulation. It fails to confront the evil we have become.  

It never ceases to amaze me how people haven't been able to process what an irredeemable monster Barack Obama is. Shoveling trillions of dollars to Wall Street banksters while ordinary US Americans are rendered homeless by their crimes. Shoveling trillions to Wall Street while pretending that Social Security is unsustainable. Torturing Bradley Manning for exposing the USA's crimes against humanity. Firing drone strikes at Yemenis and Afghans and Pakistanis, civilians all. Claiming the right to arrest, detain indefinitely, torture and kill anybody, including US citizens, at will.

Seriously, if you've been taken in by this slick public relations frankenstein's monster, and his crocodile tears when he looks at the young people whose values he's exploiting and betraying, give your head a fucking shake.

Seriously. GIVE YOUR HEAD A SHAKE.

Readings

Running around like the chicken with the head cut off these days.

Here's what I'm reading on the GO Bus and the subway:

The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China by Jay Taylor. It's fairly recent (2009) and makes use of a lot of recently released archival material to construct a sympathetic portrait of China's KMT leader during the mid-20th Century. It encompasses his entire life, so there'll be a lot of stuff about Taiwan which will be brand new to me.

Chiang Kai-shek is generally not well treated by history. He was seen as a ruthless, colourless autocrat who spent more time fighting and killing Mao's CCP than he did fighting the Japanese and reforming his thoroughly corrupt KMT party. This book argues that Chiang has been done wrong by such accounts. While he was ruthless and no democrat, Chiang was a genuine nationalist and Chinese patriot. Mao and the CCP were at least as duplicitous and murderous. Nobody has been able to argue that Chiang himself was corrupt or how, given how tenuous his hold on power often was, he could have controlled the powerful elites whose support he relied on. Finally, contrary to both the US military and government personnel and most histories, it seems Chiang fought the Japanese invaders with as much aggressiveness as was possible given the disparities in the military machines of the two nations.

I'm not sure that I agree 100% with Taylor's revision, but it's at least persuasive.

I'm also looking at Alan Riding's And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris. I don't often choose to read about painful things. But this book just sort of jumped off the library shelf at me. I'm only at chapter two but it's already done a fine job of summarizing the national crisis of confidence that prevailed in inter-war France. Conservatives, liberals and radicals argued over society. Militarists and pacifists argued about the real significance of the First World War. Anti-Semites argued with non-stupid people. Hitler bludgeoned the German people into submission. I wouldn't argue that France needed its own Hitler. I don't know what I'm saying. I'm tired. I think it's made real to me the anti-democratic stupor that North America (and most of the world) is in. The disarray and the confusion.

Finally, I picked up two books by long-time blogging nemesis Scott Neigh.

Talking Radical: Canadian History Through the Stories of Activists. There's Gender and Sexuality and Resisting the State. Haven't started 'em yet. Bought them during his Toronto stop for his book tour to support the cause.

CIDA Aid For Canadian Mining Companies Abroad

The shameless pandering to corporate interests so typical of right-wing scum:

Mining critics are calling yesterday’s parliamentary committee report on the use of Canadian aid money to support mining companies’ interests in developing countries “a wholesale handover of CIDA to the private sector.”

The report, by the Conservative majority House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, proposes to reconfigure CIDA to better serve Canadian corporations as they go abroad, starting with the mining sector.
Oh yes. There's going to be a reckoning. And these corporate criminals and financial sector parasites, ... all of them,  are going to know a new era has dawned.

We have given these people everything they wanted and it's turned everything to shit. Now, their political cats paws are forced to steal elections to maintain control. To hell with them. They've disgraced themselves beyond redemption.

Facing Up to Reality

Today's blog post deals with accepting the significance of the situation. It seems that it's only in politics that we acquiesce to the most blatant cheating and criminality. We put up with all sorts of bullshit because we can't fathom doing what is necessary to respond appropriately.

Let's be clear: Even if harper didn't steal his majority (and he did) he's on record as showing he has nothing but contempt for the institution of Parliament. His [stolen] domination of the majority of seats in Parliament is the source of his authority but he didn't respect it when he had a majority. As I said in the aftermath of the 2011 federal election, his electoral supporters either didn't care about this (showing their own contempt for Parliament) or they were ignorant of this. (And who would trust their future to an ignoramus?)

The longer we tolerate this, the less right we have to declare ourselves a democratic people.

Let's be clear: stephen harper has no claims on our obedience. His omnibus legislation has no legitimacy. Once we have toppled him from power they must be declared null and void.

Let's be clear: Even if stephen harper wasn't down on paper as being contemptuous of Parliament, he stole his majority. 6,000 votes, scattered across the country while at the same time people were sent to fake addresses for polling stations to discourage them from voting. Conservative party goons disrupted polling stations to discourage voters. And, for reasons of innocent incompetence on the part of Elections Canada, or Conservative Party sabotage, we have at least one sitting harpercon MP who owes his seat to voters who nobody can account for.

Elections Canada has proven itself to be dithering, dilatory and useless institution. Captured and beholden to the very man it is supposed to be investigating.

The Supreme Court of Canada has shown itself willing to disgrace itself to protect stephen harper.

These institutional safeguards, and others like the RCMP, are corrupt and useless. Our institutions are failed. We are tolerating an illegitimate regime.

People condemned Omar Khadr for not having rejected his father and his father's teachings. But here we are, continuing to obey corrupt law-makers who are abusers of democracy.

Get it through your heads that rebellion is the only democratic response to these outrages.

Veterans' Frustrations

"Support the TROOOOOPS!!!"

Why are right-wing militarists so disgustingly hypocritical? Why do so many military personnel and military families vote for these turds? All I know is that when Peter MacKay tries to look somber and martial I laugh out loud.

Two Columns

This comparison is posted without comment for your edification.

"Mitt Romney can teach Stephen Harper much about sleazy politics"

At its worst, it was an organized multi-year campaign to rig the U.S. election, with charges of Republican-organized voter suppression, intimidation and fraud.
The tactics included fake robocalls telling voters of changes in poll locations, stiff new voter ID laws, closing advance polls early or holding them on a single day, strict voter registration lists, questionable purging of voter lists and voting-day polling station intimidation.
It’s a lineup that must make Harper and his attack-dog Conservative campaign managers salivate.
For decades, Harper has been a keen student of U.S. elections, especially when it comes to what his counterparts in the Republican party were plotting.
And throughout his political career, Harper has adopted many of the tactics first employed by Republicans, from robocalls and year-round attack ads to calls for tighter voting rules.
Until the 2011 federal election, most of these crude efforts to disenfranchise voters in Canada were often hidden or overlooked. But they were in plain sight in 2011.

"Republicans need to look to Canada to see how conservatives can win"

Compare this with the Canadian election of 2011. The Conservative coalition in one respect mirrored its Republican counterpart: It was rooted in white male voters in the conservative heartland – in Canada’s case, the Prairies, plus the rural parts of British Columbia and Ontario.
But the Conservatives also did well among immigrant voters. In fact, middle-class immigrant voters who dominate the suburban ridings surrounding Toronto and, to a lesser extent, Vancouver were key to the Conservative victory.
Of course, the Tories only took 40 per cent of the vote in the last election, so one conclusion the Republicans might draw is that they should encourage a third party that would split progressive support.

The first is by Bob Hepburn in the Toronto Star. The latter is by the stupid hack John Ibbitson of the Globe & Mail.