Wednesday, November 10, 2010
"Diary of a Madman": bush II's memoirs & stephen harper
Nothing really. I just wonder if upon hearing about bush II's publicity tour for his bound collection of used pieces of toilet paper, whether harper sighs longingly for the day when he can casually admit to complicity in torture too.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Peter Kormos on the G-20
I haven't watched this whole thing. I just thought that I'd post it here to spread it around.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Stay in Afghanistan Past 2011? Don't Even Think About it stevie Boy ...
Via Politics Re-Spun:
On the fly, during an election campaign, harper (who had previously said that we'd stay until the vaguely defined moment when "the job was done") said that we'd be out by 2011, regardless of conditions in Afghanistan. Now, he's back-pedalling. Ah! But this is not a combat role for Canadian troops! They'll be pretty much out of harm's way training Afghan boys to do defend their country (to paraphrase LBJ).
Except here's the thing: This is completely unacceptable. For one thing, it's often rumoured that the Afghans who sign-up for military training are from the insurgency who take their pay and their weapons and their training and leave to go back to fighting the occupiers. So Canadians will be training the dreaded Taliban (or the insurgency against a corrupt, thieving, rapist government). Another thing, if they're not insurgents, then they're working for that same corrupt, thieving, rapist government. So we'd be training the warlords' men to be more effective plunderers and rapists of the people of Afghanistan.
The whole thing stinks to high heaven and it's time to just call it quits. Our country has been disgraced enough.
Canada is considering NATO and allied requests to keep troops in Afghanistan past 2011 to conduct non-combat training missions, Defence Minister Peter MacKay said Sunday.Now, let's remember: Canada's participation in the Afghanistan occupation has seen us handing prisoners over to torturers. It's seen hundreds of Canadian soldiers killed and hundreds more grievously wounded and psychologically traumatized. It's had us spill treasure and blood to support an unpopular, corrupt, rapist government. It's damaged our democracy as harper has resorted to prorogation and provoked a constitutional crisis to withhold information from Parliament as to his conduct of the war.
On the fly, during an election campaign, harper (who had previously said that we'd stay until the vaguely defined moment when "the job was done") said that we'd be out by 2011, regardless of conditions in Afghanistan. Now, he's back-pedalling. Ah! But this is not a combat role for Canadian troops! They'll be pretty much out of harm's way training Afghan boys to do defend their country (to paraphrase LBJ).
Except here's the thing: This is completely unacceptable. For one thing, it's often rumoured that the Afghans who sign-up for military training are from the insurgency who take their pay and their weapons and their training and leave to go back to fighting the occupiers. So Canadians will be training the dreaded Taliban (or the insurgency against a corrupt, thieving, rapist government). Another thing, if they're not insurgents, then they're working for that same corrupt, thieving, rapist government. So we'd be training the warlords' men to be more effective plunderers and rapists of the people of Afghanistan.
The whole thing stinks to high heaven and it's time to just call it quits. Our country has been disgraced enough.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Jim Flaherty's Deficits
Now, one thing the left has got to do is to understand economic reality and then to speak so as to demonstrate this understanding.
Case in point is the blanket condemnation of Jim Flaherty's deficits, which, coming as a result of a stimulus program that was forced onto him by the opposition parties, must sound hypocritical and incoherent to people.
If Flaherty's deficits were slammed because they're a result of useless tax-cuts to the wealthiest and to corporations (tax-cuts that deprive the government of revenue but do practically nothing for society once those revenues go into the private sector), that would be one thing. But it's just "deficits bad!" "a burden of debt for our grandchildren!" and etc.,
When an economy is in free-fall (as ours might have been and may soon be) a government has no choice but to spend massively to reverse things. Deficits will result. So too, if a government wants to build something massive and important, like some infrastructure project that will pay significant dividends later, then a deficit will probably be required.
If a left-wing government is going to do things for the Canadian people, obviously it should tax people who have more money than they know what to do with, but occasionally it will have to incur some deficits and we all need to understand that debt-to-GDP ratios of sixty percent are entirely manageable (indeed that's a far lower debt level than your average Canadian household).
Case in point is the blanket condemnation of Jim Flaherty's deficits, which, coming as a result of a stimulus program that was forced onto him by the opposition parties, must sound hypocritical and incoherent to people.
If Flaherty's deficits were slammed because they're a result of useless tax-cuts to the wealthiest and to corporations (tax-cuts that deprive the government of revenue but do practically nothing for society once those revenues go into the private sector), that would be one thing. But it's just "deficits bad!" "a burden of debt for our grandchildren!" and etc.,
When an economy is in free-fall (as ours might have been and may soon be) a government has no choice but to spend massively to reverse things. Deficits will result. So too, if a government wants to build something massive and important, like some infrastructure project that will pay significant dividends later, then a deficit will probably be required.
If a left-wing government is going to do things for the Canadian people, obviously it should tax people who have more money than they know what to do with, but occasionally it will have to incur some deficits and we all need to understand that debt-to-GDP ratios of sixty percent are entirely manageable (indeed that's a far lower debt level than your average Canadian household).
Friday, November 5, 2010
US Election Reflection
I'm typing about the recent mid-term USA elections because I think that what happened there is relevant for what's happening to leftists everywhere, including here in Toronto where right-wing populist Rob Ford defeated cynical liberal opportunist George Smitherman.
Here's Cathie From Canada before the election with a list of the accomplishments of the Obama-led Democratic majority. The thing is, I've never heard of a lot of these bills, and that's probably because all the big stuff (pro-insurance industry health care reform, hideous assaults on human rights, escalation of the war in Afghanistan, abandoning pro-union legislation, sidelining Elizabeth Warren, failing to regulate Wall Street, failure to help US-Americans to stay in their homes, siding with BP against the Gulf Coast, extending "don't ask, don't tell,") has drowned out these piecemeal, minor actions.
The conclusions to draw from the right-wing "victory" is that it isn't really a victory for them at all. They won because the centre and most people left of it, stayed home, rather than become active participants in their own abuse. Furthermore, the extreme right-wing lost, and helped to split the vote to enable the Democrats to keep the Senate.
But the reality is that progressives won. I disagree with the Pollyanna mentality of that article (the author imagines that Obama will now be able to work with his more solidly progressive legislative colleagues to truly fight for ordinary US-Americans and blah, blah, blah) but I do think the facts at hand represent the main point: That progressive Democrats stayed strong, and Rahm Emmanuel's "Blue-Dogs" failed miserably.
The sad fact is that Obama appears to be taking this minor drubbing entirely the wrong way and intends to veer even further rightward to appease the Repug majority, and, more importantly, his Wall Street masters.
I'll have more to say as to why the genuine left needs a better narrative and needs to distance itself from the "Third Way" drivel that prevailed in the 1990s and lingers on today. We have to understand some simple truths that reinforce our policy strengths and which will resonate with voters so that they don't have merely the incoherent, contradictory bullshit that spews from the mouths of the likes of Rob Ford or Jim Flaherty. Because working-class voters want economic stability more than anything and the helluvit is that we can give them that and more if we only have faith in ourselves and ditch the propaganda of the hegemonic cheerleaders of torture, war, and financial chaos.
Here's Cathie From Canada before the election with a list of the accomplishments of the Obama-led Democratic majority. The thing is, I've never heard of a lot of these bills, and that's probably because all the big stuff (pro-insurance industry health care reform, hideous assaults on human rights, escalation of the war in Afghanistan, abandoning pro-union legislation, sidelining Elizabeth Warren, failing to regulate Wall Street, failure to help US-Americans to stay in their homes, siding with BP against the Gulf Coast, extending "don't ask, don't tell,") has drowned out these piecemeal, minor actions.
The conclusions to draw from the right-wing "victory" is that it isn't really a victory for them at all. They won because the centre and most people left of it, stayed home, rather than become active participants in their own abuse. Furthermore, the extreme right-wing lost, and helped to split the vote to enable the Democrats to keep the Senate.
But the reality is that progressives won. I disagree with the Pollyanna mentality of that article (the author imagines that Obama will now be able to work with his more solidly progressive legislative colleagues to truly fight for ordinary US-Americans and blah, blah, blah) but I do think the facts at hand represent the main point: That progressive Democrats stayed strong, and Rahm Emmanuel's "Blue-Dogs" failed miserably.
The sad fact is that Obama appears to be taking this minor drubbing entirely the wrong way and intends to veer even further rightward to appease the Repug majority, and, more importantly, his Wall Street masters.
I'll have more to say as to why the genuine left needs a better narrative and needs to distance itself from the "Third Way" drivel that prevailed in the 1990s and lingers on today. We have to understand some simple truths that reinforce our policy strengths and which will resonate with voters so that they don't have merely the incoherent, contradictory bullshit that spews from the mouths of the likes of Rob Ford or Jim Flaherty. Because working-class voters want economic stability more than anything and the helluvit is that we can give them that and more if we only have faith in ourselves and ditch the propaganda of the hegemonic cheerleaders of torture, war, and financial chaos.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
That Lion is Crazy
I've actually got a big post to respond to the important reality of the bankruptcy of corporate liberalism and how we have to work hard to ensure that right-wing populism isn't going to always be the default option, ... but all of real life's obligations get in the way.
So, here's a post to prove that this blog isn't dead. A link to a YouTube video of an old "Gumby" cartoon: "Lion Drive."
So, here's a post to prove that this blog isn't dead. A link to a YouTube video of an old "Gumby" cartoon: "Lion Drive."
Monday, November 1, 2010
Omar Khadr: Canada Has Lost Its Fucking Mind
I just don't recognize this country anymore. Really. Sure it's been ugly. Just ask any First Nations person. Ask the Japanese from the internment camps in World War II. Ask the unemployed young men beaten with clubs on their "On to Ottawa" trek. Ask all the victims of inequality, sexism and racism.
But there used to be a facade. Since 1900, the Liberals took pains to paint themselves as forward-thinking, pragmatic crafters of social justice and Canadian conservatism pointed to its "red tory" traditions of social responsibility. And both parties at least paid lip-service to the rule of law.
No more.
And Canada's media, like those of other liberal democracies, took pride in differentiating our society from the totalitarian nightmares of fascism and Stalinism with their torture regimes, their show-trials, their crude propaganda masquerading as truth.
No more.
How low we have sunk. How low. How low. A boy, born into a family headed by an Islamic terrorist, and caught up in the midst of his father's activities in Afghanistan from the age of 10, finds himself in a fire-fight between his father's men and the US and Afghan military. During the combat, a grenade is thrown and ... ah hell. I said it all before, here.
What's changed is that in return for not getting tortured forever, Khadr has copped a plea. In a kangaroo court designed purely to obtain convictions (like something out Stalin or Mao), where testimony obtained through torture is permissable, along with tampered evidence, Khadr has admitted being guilty to "murder" and to planting IEDs.
And Canada's media laps it up. They show themselves no better than the Stalinist propaganda rag PRAVDA. This is disgusting and I don't recognize this country.
But there used to be a facade. Since 1900, the Liberals took pains to paint themselves as forward-thinking, pragmatic crafters of social justice and Canadian conservatism pointed to its "red tory" traditions of social responsibility. And both parties at least paid lip-service to the rule of law.
No more.
And Canada's media, like those of other liberal democracies, took pride in differentiating our society from the totalitarian nightmares of fascism and Stalinism with their torture regimes, their show-trials, their crude propaganda masquerading as truth.
No more.
How low we have sunk. How low. How low. A boy, born into a family headed by an Islamic terrorist, and caught up in the midst of his father's activities in Afghanistan from the age of 10, finds himself in a fire-fight between his father's men and the US and Afghan military. During the combat, a grenade is thrown and ... ah hell. I said it all before, here.
What's changed is that in return for not getting tortured forever, Khadr has copped a plea. In a kangaroo court designed purely to obtain convictions (like something out Stalin or Mao), where testimony obtained through torture is permissable, along with tampered evidence, Khadr has admitted being guilty to "murder" and to planting IEDs.
And Canada's media laps it up. They show themselves no better than the Stalinist propaganda rag PRAVDA. This is disgusting and I don't recognize this country.
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