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We will need to fight against market fundamentalism and help our politicians remember that they exist to serve not only the economy, but the people of a country as well.
“As we have seen, cutting carbon with carbon pricing or regulation is not politically painless, so the main efforts from citizens should be directed at the political process by encouraging what Jaccard calls “climate-sincere” politicians. Since making real economic changes is politically difficult, politicians prefer ineffective window-dressing that does little except making voters think they are taking action.
“These might include funding for electric vehicle rechargers, a tax-break for wind power, training for electric car technicians, grants for biofuel producers, climate research, adaptation planning, an educational kit for schools … subsidies for home insulation … funding for urban transit feasibility studies…” writes Jaccard in a much longer list.
He calls such spending political sleight-of-hand to avoid real action and that merely demonstrates the politicians are not sincere at all. While Jaccard himself drives an electric car and heats his home with an electric heat pump, he says the most important place for concerned citizen to invest in stopping climate change is political action.
The trouble is changing your own personal behaviour by say, selling your car or refusing to fly, may make you feel like you are doing something useful, but the effect is tiny when all your neighbours drive SUVs and air travel continues to soar.
In fact, rather than trying to assuage your guilt at flying or driving by buying carbon offsets as many are now doing, Jaccard recommends taking the money and donating it to a pro-climate group that can identify and support climate-sincere politicians and point a finger at the majority of those who are “faking it.”
Because in the long run, getting carbon out of world’s atmosphere cannot be completed by a few individuals doing good, it must instead be a project of people using politics to transform regional and national rules about carbon. Jaccard says those regions and countries will then combine to put carbon tariffs on the world’s free riders, not a project for 2020.”
Let’s hope we can get most politicians on board before it is too late.
It would be nice if our current government would start taking responsibility for the mess that they are creating. Blaming the “Anti-Alberta Conspiracy” for the lacklustre economic performance of the economy reeks of desperation and deceit. Alberta’s Premier is busily talking out of both sides of his mouth when it comes to Moody’s Investor Service.
“When Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Alberta’s credit rating this week, Premier Jason Kenney reacted swiftly and decisively — to attack the messenger.He took aim at Moody’s for daring to include environmental risk in its report card. As Moody’s pointed out: “Alberta’s oil and gas sector is carbon intensive and Alberta’s greenhouse gas emissions are the highest among provinces. Alberta is also susceptible to natural disasters including wildfires and floods which could lead to significant mitigation costs by the province.”
Moody’s conclusion was understandable. In a time of climate change, credit rating agencies are taking environmental risk into account.
But Kenney refuses to accept that.
For him, this is just one more example of an anti-Alberta conspiracy. According to Kenney, financial institutions, including Moody’s, “are buying into the political agenda emanating from Europe, which is trying to stigmatize development of hydrocarbon energy. And I just think they are completely factually wrong.”
Kenney all but accused Moody’s of being part of the foreign-funded conspiracy he claims is out to landlock Alberta’s oil.”
Wait for it…
“The UCP, while in opposition, was happy to accept the conclusions of agencies, including Moody’s, whenever they downgraded the NDP government’s credit rating.
Consider this quote from UCP MLA Jason Nixon back in December of 2017 after the NDP government-of-the-day suffered yet another credit downgrade: “We have a government that is showing no signs of controlling their spending and clearly the credit agencies don’t trust them right now.”
However, as former-premier Ralph Klein was fond of saying, that was then, this is now.
According to the UCP back then, Moody’s was a purveyor of the truth.
According to the UCP now, Moody’s is “completely factually wrong.”
The Moody’s report, of course, put the UCP government in an awkward spot. This is a government that promised to turn the Alberta economy around with jobs and pipelines. Even though the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is forging ahead, significant job creation is stuck in neutral.”
Yeah. The bullshit is that thick here in Alberta. It would be nice, for once, to let the facts speak for themselves without the partisan glaze that has become the norm. The UCP has demonstrated a distinct lack of leadership when it comes to the promises made on the campaign trail – job losses, negative economic growth, and more taxes (user fees) for the people of Alberta. Nothing like ‘making Alberta open for business, and getting people back to work’.
Lessig speaks to the notion that the media divide in American culture lies near the root of many of the countries problems when it comes to their democratic process.
“What is the role of education in a democracy? Must the electorate be informed? What happens when we are operating with a different view of reality?
Obviously it’s incredibly important that people understand their democracy. They understand the facts about what’s going on in the world and they begin to use their values in light of the facts to press for one set of policies over another. So we need some level of education. But we have moved from a world where much of a public education about matters of public import was provided by broadcasting and into a world where we can’t rely on that anymore. People are going to be less reliably aware of important issues––at least in a way which is grounded on a common set of understandings or a common set of facts. So it’s going to be harder for us as a people to resolve certain questions when those questions require common judgment.
For example: the question of impeaching the president. If the Congress goes through with the impeachment, and the Senate goes through with trying the President, there will be a very significant proportion of Americans who cannot believe the results, and a significant proportion of Americans who take the results as completely obvious. And that’s true regardless of what the result is. And that’s because we built this world where people live in these separate tribal bubbles and they don’t have an understanding of facts held in common. That’s a product of the media environment.
We’re not going to solve that, in the sense that we’re going to get to a place where we all know the same stuff. We need to think about solving it without trying to get everybody to the right place. We need alternatives to everyone being in the right place. That’s why I talked about things like the civic juries that can help people decide issues. That would enable reflective and informed judgments of the people, as opposed to unreflective judgments of the people. Regularizing that dynamic would be a critical part of what we need to do.
Will the result of the Impeachment hearings also illustrate something about whether our democracy is representative?
The reality of today is that any impeachment is going to be conducted in an environment where politicians can see the people and the people can see the politicians––but the people don’t see a common set of facts that the politicians are supposed to be viewed against. That’s because a significant chunk of the people are going to view the facts through the lens of MSNBC and another are going to view the facts through Fox News, and those two realities are going to conflict. They don’t agree; they don’t see the world in the same way. So that conflict is really debilitating, because it’s going to lead to one side believing something deeply unjust has occurred. That kind of recognition or belief is really invidious, poisonous to democracy. It’s something we should recognize as new. When we’ve had impeachments before, either the public was invisible, like with Andrew Johnson, or the public came to a similar judgment, or was driven to a similar judgment, like in the context of Nixon. So this change is very significant.”
This scares me. Not sharing a common set of facts is essential to functioning society. What’s worse is that the same phenomena is happening in Canada. I hazard to guess that the majority of my fellow residents of Alberta do not take the time to reach outside their media bubble and sample the waters of the ‘other’ side. I hear it in the online debates and talking with my fellow citizens, a decided lack of common ground and lack of agreement on shared facts when it comes to the governance of the province of Alberta.
Talking across the divide is very difficult and often ends in insults and more pertinently no forward movement toward a nuanced understanding of the issues at hand. And as Lessig says, the lack of common reference, is toxic for democratic societies.
When the economy is down, and the money is tight, and a recession looms in the near future what would be the best course of action for the government of Alberta? Apparently, firing 6000 people from their jobs is the correct answer according to Jason Kenny and his merry band of right-wing ideologues. The raging boner the UCP has for austerity and the gutting of the public sector has never been more apparent.
“Nearly 6,000 Alberta public-sector jobs could be eliminated as the UCP government tries to cut costs and find efficiencies, the provincial government signalled to Alberta’s largest union in letters released late Friday afternoon.
The union received the letters in advance of bargaining for 2020 collective agreements. The letters are not formal notices of layoffs, but as required under the collective bargaining process, outline cuts the provincial government might make.
The potential cuts would impact 2,500 Government of Alberta positions across several ministries, as well as the following positions at Alberta Health Services:
- 1,000 to 2,000 housekeepers;
- 350 administrative support and medical transcription employees;
- 250 general support staff, such as maintenance employees;
- 235 laundry and linen operations staff;
- 200 auxiliary nursing employees, such as licensed practical nurses and health-care aides;
- 200 home care services staff;
- 165 foodservice employees.
“The [Government of Alberta] will continue to guarantee employment security until March 30, 2020, for permanent bargaining unit employees using attrition, vacancy management and redeployment to meet employer needs,” states a Thursday letter to the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees from Alberta Public Service Commissioner Tim Grant.”
Because having 6000 fewer breaking even, paying their bills without assistance, and supporting the floundering local economy isn’t sound economic policy.
The mass layoffs will put people who have to use our health care system at risk. Never fear though, these public employee’s may be partially replaced by private workers and companies who will charge more for the same job, while providing inferior service and products.
“If further contracting out initiatives are to be considered in future, we will advise as required,” the letter states.
“AHS will continue to consider all options available to meet our organizational needs including changes to staff mix, service redesign, including changes and repurposing of sites, relocating services, reducing or ceasing the provision of services,” it says.
Notley said it is clear the UCP government intends to further privatize public services.
“Albertans will pay the price for this. And again, it’s entirely unnecessary. This has gone from prudent fiscal management to an extreme ideological vendetta.”
The ‘fuck you, I’ve got mine’ crowd has been crowing about trimming the fat and reducing bloat in the public sector. They never seem to connect the idea that the people working these jobs: nurses, teachers and those who support them, are more likely that not, providing services that benefit the fat trimmers.
See also the standard neo-liberal ploy of hollowing out public institutions, then decrying said institutions for not being effective, and then turning to privatization as the magical panacea that will fix the systems they just sabotaged.
The problem is that this strategy never works for the benefit of the end users – the public – as they inevitably will be saddled with less efficient, more expensive private services. Who this benefits, of course, is the businesses and corporations who will make handsome profits while immiserating the populace.
Thank you UCP voters…
We have to dispel the notion that the US, UK, and Canada are on always on the side of justice and that we can do no wrong. If this was the case, we would happily welcome the scrutiny of the ICC in our wars and international affairs, as we would (in theory) have nothing to hide. Vijay Prashad writing for Counterpunch disagrees.
Clearly, this is not the case.
“The United States is not a party to the International Criminal Court (ICC). It had helped establish the Court, but then reversed course and refused to allow itself to be under the ICC’s jurisdiction. In 2002, the U.S. Congress passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which allows the U.S. government to “use all means” to protect its troops from the ICC prosecutors. Article 98 of the Rome Statute does not require states to turn over wanted personnel from a third party if these states had signed an immunity agreement with the third party; the U.S. government has therefore encouraged states to sign these “article 98 agreements” to give its troops immunity from prosecution.
The enormity of evidence of war crimes by U.S. troops and U.S.-affiliated troops in Afghanistan and Iraq weighed on the credibility of the ICC. In 2016, after a decade of investigation, the ICC released a report that offered hope to the Afghan people. The ICC said that there is “a reasonable basis” to pursue further investigation of war crimes by various forces inside Afghanistan—such as the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and the United States military forces alongside the Central Intelligence Agency. The next year, the ICC went forward with more detailed acknowledgment of the possibility of war crimes. Pressure on the ICC’s prosecutor mounted.
Pressure on the Court
This is where everything seemed to end. The Trump administration, via John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, made it clear to the ICC that if they pursued a case against the U.S., then the Trump administration would go after the ICC prosecutor and judges personally. An application for a U.S. visa by Fatou Bensouda, the ICC prosecutor, was denied; she had intended to come to the U.S. to appear before the United Nations. This was a shot across the bow of the Court. The U.S. was not going to play nice. Not long thereafter, in April 2019, the ICC said that it would not go ahead with a war crimes case against the United States, or indeed against any of the belligerents in Afghanistan. The Court said it would “not serve the interests of justice” to pursue this investigation.
Trump responded to this decision by calling the ICC “illegitimate” and—at the same time—that the ICC’s judgment was “a victory, not only for these patriots, but for the rule of law.”
Staff at the ICC were dismayed by the ICC’s decision. They were eager to challenge it, fearing that if they let the U.S. mafia tactics prevent their own procedures then the ICC would lose whatever shred of legitimacy remains. As it is, the ICC is seen as being deployed mainly against the enemies of the United States; there have been no serious investigations of any power that is closely aligned with the United States.”
We have one set of rules for the rest of the world and another version that we apply to ourselves. The exceptionalism that is portrayed in our media and repeated by our political classes needs to be dispelled. We should not be above the ICC’s reach, nor should we be impeding the investigations that it undertakes. Yet it is the reality we inhabit.
Most nations will act with a certain level of impunity when it comes to their interests at home and abroad. We in the West need to acknowledge that through our actions, are no better or worse then the countries we seek to censure through the ICC and the war crimes it prosecutes.
You would think that our dear UCP government wouldn’t be so brazen in their attempt scuttle the investigation into their dark little web of political hackery. Apparently not. Their solution to being investigated by the Electoral commissioner is well… fire the electoral commissioner.
*blinks*
“The Office of the Election Commissioner has been dissolved and transferred to the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Alberta said in a news release Friday.Bill 22, the Reform of Agencies, Boards and Commissions and Government Enterprises Act, came into effect on Friday, the agency said.On Thursday, the legislature passed the bill, which included the firing of election commissioner Lorne Gibson. Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley said Thursday the quick passage of the bill is the mark of a premier and government “consumed by power and unconcerned by the views of Albertans.” Gibson was leading the investigation into the so-called “kamikaze” campaign of UCP leadership candidate Jeff Callaway and had levied fines against 15 people totalling $207,223.
Callaway allegedly entered the race to discredit former Wildrose leader, and Kenney’s chief rival, Brian Jean, only to drop out and endorse Kenney weeks later. Kenney and Callaway deny they worked together to defeat Jean, but emails obtained by CBC News show high-ranking Kenney officials providing resources, including strategic political direction, media, and debate talking points, speeches, videos and attack advertisements, to the Callaway campaign.”
It should be readily apparent to both sides of the political spectrum that an investigation is warranted. We, as a populace, need to be able to trust our democratic institutions. It is bullshit like this that negates all the ‘get out the vote’ and ‘express your voice’ and ‘do your civic duty’ sentiment we are bombarded with before elections.
As a active citizenry we should be taking part in the political process the rest of the time, but that is another blog post.
“Edmonton-Manning MLA Heather Sweet, the NDP critic for democracy and ethics, sent a letter to Resler on Friday asking him to provide a report to the legislature on the steps he will take to preserve the material Gibson gathered during his investigation.
“Public confidence in the integrity of our democratic elections in Alberta has been significantly damaged,” Sweet wrote. “Any loss, misplacement or destruction of the evidence being gathered by Mr. Gibson in his investigations would lead to further irreparable damage to that confidence.”
This investigation is, rather ineptly, being swept under the carpet. Thankfully the NDP is doing what good oppositions do, and not letting the issue be buried.
Source: cbc.ca
Rob Urie takes a good run at explaining some of the problems with the United States polity. The infusion/revolving door of money and politics means that society is being run for the benefit of tiny minority of people. They have two ‘choices’ in the electoral sense, but it does nothing to halt this malformation of democracy and democratic values.
Even with the realization of late that money determines political outcomes, the distribution of income and wealth is considered economics while the use that these are put to in the political arena is considered politics. The unvirtuous circle of capitalism, where concentrated income and wealth are used to affect political outcomes so as to increase concentrated income and wealth, ties economics to politics through the incompatibility of capitalism with democracy.
Modern electoral politics replaces this relationship of economics to politics with color-coded branding— red or blue, where ‘our guy’ is what is good and true about America. The other party exists to pin ‘our guy’ into a corner that prevents him / her from acting on this goodness. Barack Obama was prevented from enacting his ‘true’ progressive agenda by Republican obstructionists. Donald Trump is being persecuted by deep-state, snowflake, socialists.
Left unaddressed and largely unconsidered has been the persistence of class relations. The rich continue to get richer, the rest of us, not so much. For all of the claims of political dysfunction, when it comes to bailouts and tax cuts, wars and weaponry and policing and surveillance, these opposition parties can be counted on to come together to overcome their differences. Likewise, when it comes to the public interest, partisan differences are put forward to explain why nothing is possible.
The unitary direction of this government response in favor of the rich may seem accidental, a byproduct of ‘our system’ of governance. In fact, the defining political ideology of the last half-century has been neoliberalism, defined here as imperialist, state-corporatism, controlled by oligarchs. And contrary to assertions that neoliberalism is a figment of the imagination of the left, its basic tenets were codified in the late 1980s under the term ‘Washington Consensus.’
What the Washington Consensus lays out is the support role that government plays for capitalism. Its tenets are short and highly readable. They provide a blueprint that ties Democratic to Republican political programs since the 1980s. They also tie neoliberalism to the Marxist / Leninist conception of the capitalist state as existing to promote the interests of connected capitalists. Left out, no doubt by accident (not), was / is a theory of class struggle.
When Donald Trump passed tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the rich and corporations, this was the Washington Consensus. When Barack Obama put ‘market mechanisms’ into Obamacare and promoted the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), this was the Washington Consensus. When Bill Clinton tried to privatize Social Security, this was the Washington Consensus. The alleged ‘opposition parties’ have been working together from a single blueprint for governance for four decades.
The intended beneficiary of this unified effort is ‘capitalism,’ conceived as multinational corporations operating with state support to promote a narrowly conceived national interest. An ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) clause was included in NAFTA when Bill Clinton promoted and signed it. An even more intrusive ISDS clause was included in the TPP when Barack Obama promoted it. The intent of these ISDS clauses is to give the prerogative of governance (sovereign power) to corporations.
It is no secret in Washington and outside of it that multinational corporations pay few, if any, taxes. The logic of this is two sided. On the one side, the neoliberal / Washington Consensus premise is that corporations can put the money to better use than government. The other is that the role of government is to support capitalism, not to constrain it. Barack Obama’s consequence-free bailouts of Wall Street, often at the expense of ordinary citizens, possessed an internal logic when considered through this frame.”
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