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Sometimes, it seems, my fellow Albertans can be quite the confused lot. Actually no, that is wrong; we are not confused, just bi-polar. In Alberta have this curious duality the runs the course of our electoral politics. We want to be rugged, independent, self-made individuals with no interference from any level of government – private industry and unchecked capitalism is how we roll.
In the boom times…
The other identity like we like to periodically break out (and inflict on the rest of Canada) is the simple, hardworking Albertan who just can’t make ends meet and if the Government only understood our hardship and not alienate us with its ivory tower elitist policies and just HELP us (‘help’ is usually bailing out Big Business at the bottom of the business cycle). We also have to feel persecuted and neglected at this time as the response from the people we’ve just been telling to f*ck off and leave us alone (during the boom years) are not jumping up and saving us as quickly as we’d like.
“Here it’s a very partisan response to a specific government that western conservatives really, really don’t like.” Smith said.”
[…]
“Smith said the movement in Canada targets the federal Liberal party and its actions toward the oil industry.
“No matter what they do in that sector, the Liberals seem to be criticized for not doing enough,” he said.
“It’s a pretty big stretch to suggest that a government that just bought a pipeline and is now passing over a billion dollars in support for oil or the oil sector is somehow anti-oil, but that’s the rhetoric that comes out of the conservative protests in Canada.”
So, we have these rugged small government loving individualists protesting to get more government intervention into the economy, not on their own behalf, but on the behalf of the oil companies. The very same oil comapanies that continue to make generous profits and pay substantial dividends to shareholders:
“Lead author Ian Hussey said Suncor, CNRL, Cenovus, Imperial and Husky have remained “incredibly profitable corporations,” banking and paying out to shareholders $13.5 billion last year.
“There’s no question that the price crash had a major impact on the industry in Alberta, most importantly on the almost 20,000 workers who lost their jobs in 2015, but the Big Five are doing just fine,” Hussey said.
“As highly integrated multinationals — all with significant assets in the U.S. — they’ve been able to shift their operations in response to market conditions to ensure they remain profitable despite the issues that have been dominating the headlines in recent months.”
So, as usual, false populism renews its roots in Western Canada. As our ruggedly bold individualist trek eastward to demand more government intervention favourable to the business elite in our society.
Of course no false populist movement is complete without xenophobia and racism.
“People who attended the rally in Regina on Saturday said they were against Trudeau, the carbon tax and Canada’s plan to endorse the United Nations’ migration pact — which outlines objectives for treating global migrants humanely and efficiently.
Victor Teece, a self-identified nationalist against globalization, said the migration agreement is “destructive to Canada as a nation.” Teece said he believes Canada’s identity is centred around European, Judeo-Christian values.
Smith said there is a concerning, “very loud” and “very disturbing message around anti-immigration” emerging within the Canadian rallies.”
Yeah. If you didn’t know it, Canada has a huge immigration problem. According to these people, not enough of the ‘right’ types of people are moving to Canada. Quite disgusted with the whole rhetorical judeo-christian bullshit narrative. The cultural mosaic that is Canada thrives on the diversity that people bring with them from across the world.
We are a multicultural nation. The embarrassment that is this ‘Convoy Movement’ is a gift that inspires the nativist-nationalist right to creep out from the woodwork. Given the example of the untrammelled false populism down south, this is a direction Canada should definitely avoid.
The system is in trouble claims Jeff Cohen writing for Counterpunch. I can see where he is coming from as it would seem like our leaders often listen to the elites more than the people who have elected them. The current system is start to reach the limits of which it can tamp down popular discontent and anger with the system. Trickle down economics is bullshit and the people know its bullshit because they cannot support their families with both parents working anymore. The working poor is an ever widening class as more wealth and opportunity continue to be funnelled upwards in society.
Class warfare is on the horizon and may be with us sooner than we think as disasters driven by climate change may provide the impetus for tipping into mass protests and civil unrest.
“Neoliberalism – whereby politicians first and foremost serve corporate interests (with crumbs hopefully “trickling down” to the masses) – went into high gear 40 years ago. It was called “Thatcherism” in the UK and “Reaganomics” in the US. And neoliberalism has been the driving economic ideology ever since, with wealth and income flowing unrelentingly upward even after “the opposition” took power. In the US, we had corporate-friendly “New Democrat” Bill Clinton (NAFTA, Wall Street deregulation, welfare “reform,” mass incarceration); in the UK, they had Tony Blair and “New Labour” (so pro-corporate that Rupert Murdoch endorsed him).
Unlike past governing crises, today’s are not mere factional fights among elites, with the masses watching from the sidelines. Nowadays, the governing factions have to answer to voting blocs that are increasingly angry, intransigent and demanding. All this makes gridlock even more stubborn.
Since naked service to corporate elites and “trickle-down” promises don’t sell anymore to an insecure middle class, right-wing leaders like Trump (and Europeans being cultivated by Steve Bannon) are now “populist” and “anti-elites” – openly tapping into racism while scapegoating immigrants for society’s problems. Instead of “the magic of the free market,” they sell the magic of steel slats.
Meanwhile, usually pliable Democratic leaders in the US must contend with a younger, more multi-racial, increasingly progressive and uncompromising base. Leadership seeks to appease with rhetoric and symbolic gestures, while resisting the base’s demands for far-reaching economic and environmental reforms that conflict with the wishes of the party’s donor class.
So Republicans and Democrats go to war over wall-funding, while quietly coalescing on bigger issues such as the perilous, anti-democratic power of Wall Street and the diversion of mostfederal discretionary spending to the unaccountable military-industrial complex.
And the U.S. political system avoids the biggest issue of all – the calamity that gives new reality to the old rhetoric about “capitalism’s final crisis”: human-made, profit-driven climate change that keeps burning hotter while liberal and conservative politicians fiddle. Republicans deny the science; Democratic leaders deny and delay the transformative solutions that are needed – like a “Green New Deal” that would undercut certain corporate balance sheets.”
We humans are really bad at responding to the necessity of long term change. It doesn’t help that we also happen to be locked into political systems that strongly bias short term thinking and solutions. I’m thinking when most of Florida is underwater and New York City looks more like Venice the powers that be *might* acknowledge that we have a bit of climate situation on our hands.
Canada is not much better, Andrew Scheer leader of the Conservative party during a Town Hall:
“He promised tax reform and reiterated his opposition to the Trudeau government’s carbon tax, which he called “a cash grab, not an environmental plan.”
“Scheer had to get out of his vehicle and walk to the venue in Nisku, Alta., because of a 22-kilometre convoy of truckers protesting Trudeau’s carbon tax and environmental policies. Scheer sought to reassure people by promising to scrap the prime minister’s carbon levy designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
Awesome. Because the weak half measures started by Trudeau and the Liberal Government definitely need to go. Why is it that when it comes to climate change conservative types all of suddenly need to compete to see how can fiddle the fastest while the world burns?
In Counterpunch John Davis writes this on our climate situation:
“Naomi Klein optimistically wrote, way back in 2014, in This Changes Everything, “There are ways of preventing this grim future….but the catch is these will involve changing everything….it involves changing how we live, how our economies function, even the stories we tell about our place on earth”.
Five years later, it is no longer a matter of preventing a grim future. The careless extension of what the American Sci-Fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson calls ‘The Dithering’ – those decades when we understood the atmospheric CO2problem but totally failed to address it – guarantees its imminent arrival. The catch now is that the climate is changing everything for us. We have already liberated enough carbon in the atmosphere to put the weather on disaster auto-pilot for the next millennium. We can but batten down the hatches, stockpile provisions and close the fire-doors. The weather is the effective change-agent, not we nor our politicians. The pretense that humans are in charge has finally to be abandoned. We await our fate possessing only crude materials of resistance and, thus far, almost no political will to emplace them.
The most salient function of government is the protection of its people – our allegiance to the Republic depends on its successful manifestation. The present regime appears totally committed to the denial of our climate reality and its power to inflict terrifyingly real damage on our underfunded and aging infrastructure and to the people that that infrastructure supports. Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Maria, Harvey, Thomas, and Michael, should each have been a wake-up call, a weather 9/11. Instead, they have proven to be opportunities for official prevarication, dissembling and hand-washing. From George Bush’s, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”, to Trump’s notorious paper towel toss (in post-Maria Puerto Rico) there is a through-line that speaks of the government’s dismissal of the seriousness of these amplified weather events and their wider implications. The validity of the updated death toll in Puerto Rico of almost 3,000 was, predictably, denied by the president – while estimates of the toll continue to rise. A Harvard study now puts the number of Maria-related fatalities at over 4,500, as of year’s end. The climate has far exceeded the lethality of 9/11. Its death toll, in fire, flood, drought and wind is ever rising, as each season’s disasters inexorably add bodies to the statistical burial mound.”
The weather gives exactly zero fucks about borders and national security, and ‘rogue’ nations. Every nation is going to have to work together to survive the coming up climactic upheavals. I certainly hope our unerring dedication to fossil fuel industry will be worth it.
“The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us. It is only the cheerful light of confidence and security which keeps this evil genius down… If confidence and security were to disappear, don’t think that he would not be waiting to take their place. “
-George Kennan (1947).
As an atheist it is sometime easy to become hyper focused on what those people over there are doing wrong and how they need to fix their views and join the 21st century. Sheldon Wolin takes this view and compares it to what we have going on right now in society, rightly criticizing the capitalist-consumption aesthetic that, by any other name, is doing exactly what religion does.
“There was , he [Max Weber] contended, no room any longer for occult forces, supernatural deities, or divinely revealed truth. In a world dominated by scientifically established facts and with no privileged or sacrosanct areas, myth would seemingly have a difficult time retaining a foothold. Not only did Weber underestimate the staying power of credulity; he could not foresee that the great triumphs of modern science would themselves provide the basis for technological achievements which, far from banishing the mythical, would unwittingly inspire it.
The mythical is also nourished from another source, one seemingly more incongruous that the scientific-technological culture, Consider the imaginary world continuously being created and re-created by contemporary advertising and rendered virtually escape-proof by the enveloping culture of the modern media. Equally important, the culture produced by modern advertising, which seems at first glance to be resolutely secular and materialistic, the antithesis of religious and evangelical teachings, actually reinforces the dynamic. Almost every product promises to change your life: it will make you more beautiful, cleaner, more sexually alluring, and more successful. Born again, as it were. The messages contain promises about the future, unfailingly optimistic, exaggerating, miracle-promising – the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face. The virtual reality of the advertiser and the “good news” of the evangelist complement each other, a match made in heaven. Their zeal to transcend the ordinary and their bottomless optimism both feed the hubris of Superpower. Each colludes with the other. The evangelist looks forward to the “last days”, while the corporate executive systematically exhausts the world’s scare resources.”
Sheldon Wolin. Democracy Incorporated, pp. 12-13.
So, I think it is time to work on our own epistemology. I’d like to be able to square our expectations of others with those we place on ourselves.
“A poll that surveyed nearly 1,000 Albertans earlier this month found the United Conservative Party have a large lead over the NDP and would win if an election was held today.
The Mainstreet Research poll has the UCP with 56 per cent support among decided and leaning voters, which translates to a 28-point lead over the governing NDP (27 per cent).
Related“The UCP, led by Jason Kenney, has a substantial lead over the governing NDP and interestingly enough, they also lead among every single demographic that’s out there, which was a surprise,” Mainstreet Research vice president Joseph Angolano said.
The lead largely comes from Calgary (30 points) and the rest of Alberta (46 points) while Edmonton remains competitive for both parties.”
You would think that 40 years of Conservative rule would be enough of a reminder that maybe, just maybe, corporatism isn’t the way to go? Naaah. The people of Alberta currently seem to think that cutting services and giving more breaks to corporations is the way of the future.
Please take a look down south to see exactly what that get the average voter.
If the UCP (united conservative party) takes the next election, will the average Albertan celebrate the lack of access to public service? Thank their lucky stars that the oil companies can continue to line their pockets with our resource revenue? Like what?
These people want the party that walked out of the legislature on an abortion bubble zone vote to represent them? Because preventing a bozo-eruption from the religious fringe that inhabits your party is more important that representing the people that elected you? But hey, it was just an crucial vote affecting the female half of the population, so no big deal because in the UCP, females ain’t shit.
I’m unimpressed with the UCP and the mewing stampede back into the hell that is conservatism here in Alberta. :/
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