You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Politics’ tag.
Could this be a method to work within the system to change the system? This snippet from a Counterpunch article by Rob Urie is interesting because its hard to argue against the notion that sharing economic power *wouldn’t* be a benefit for a democratic society. Push-back for lightyears from those who currently hold the levers of power, but what could they say directly to the notion? The masses are too ignorant and don’t know what is good for them? The current standard of living is so amazing right now that it would be foolish to address and change the current (im)balance of economic power?
This notion, I think, is a should be a genuine concern to the establishment parties in the US, because both parties are defenders of a system that is essentially “make the 1% greater even more, no matter what the economic and social cost”. One can’t reasonably defend that notion.
I hope that AOC and her ‘squad’ continue to stay the course and force a new narrative into the poltical sphere in the US. It is probably the only way America will go forward successfully in the future.
“The subtext of these establishment machinations is that the American political system exists to provide cover for rule by capital. The posture of the political center as the locus of reason is belied by the willingness of establishment forces to risk killing everyone on the planet with nuclear weapons, environmental decline, genocidal wars and dysfunctional economics. It is this political center that is extreme, willing to risk everything to maintain control.
While it may be simplistic to posit a singularity of capitalist interests, is it also true that the manufacture of nuclear weapons is a business, that environmental decline is a by-product of capitalist production, that wars are undertaken both to control resources and to use up military inventory and that the level of economic dysfunction is proportional to the concentration of income and wealth amongst the oligarchs.
One could grant— improbably, that the collective ‘we’ were brought to this place in history honestly, that the world is complicated and that through genocide, slavery and wars too numerous to count, we did the best we could. But this wouldn’t have one iota of relevance to where we take it from here. In this sense, ‘the squad’ exists amongst the potential heroes of this moment.
Possibly of value here is Noam Chomsky’s functional definition of class as who it is that gets to decide. Capitalism has always been ‘authoritarian,’ with owners and bosses doing the deciding. Ironically, from the bourgeois perspective, politics finds these same authoritarians determining public policy through their surrogates in the political realm. Donald Trump’s existence is an argument against concentrated power, not who wields it.
An argument could be made that ‘the squad’ was elected on precisely this point. Policies that promote economic democracy are the best way to achieve political democracy. Conversely, the greatest threat to political democracy is concentrated economic power. The Federal government spent at least a few trillion dollars on gratuitous wars in recent years, and several trillion more on bailing out financial interests. The money has always been there to meet social needs.”
“The last time globalization transformed the world so thoroughly, in the early twentieth century, the ensuing backlash led to liberalism’s first catastrophic fail. In those years, liberals consistently failed to understand that the ground had shifted under them. In Russia, Bolsheviks took power from the weak crew of potential democratic reformers that had overthrown the tsar, inspiring a handful of movements in Europe that attempted something similar. In Germany, illiberal politicians took aim at the cosmopolitan values of the Weimar Republic. In Italy and Spain, leaders adopted virulent nationalism, challenging incipient global institutions like the League of Nations. In the wake of the Great Depression, Japanese ultra-militarists easily dispatched the weak Taisho democracy. Meanwhile, in the United States, right-wing demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin built large followings by railing on the radio against communists, Wall Street, and “the international money-changers in the temple,” though they failed to take power in the era of a charismatic liberal president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Where liberalism survived, it did so largely by absorbing some of the strategies of the illiberal communists and fascists, namely relying on the state to keep the economy afloat, as Roosevelt did with his New Deal policies. This lesson carried over into the post-World War II-era in which American liberals continued to embrace New Deal principles that would culminate in President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and European liberals embraced the compromises that would eventually produce the European Union. At the global level, nations of various ideological dispositions came together to create a set of institutions — the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund — meant to ensure some degree of permanent stability. Economic globalization resumed, but this time in a regulatory environment that, initially, seemed to spread the benefits more equally.
That all changed in the 1970s when, in one country after another, a new generation of liberals and conservatives began to dismantle those very regulations in hopes that an unfettered market would jump-start growth globally. However, only after China embraced capitalism and the Soviet Union collapsed did economic globalization take a quantum leap to true globalization. With it the world returned to Gilded Age levels of concentrated wealth and inequality. No surprise, then, that the instability and intolerance of that long-gone era has returned as well.
Leaders like Putin, Erdogan, and Trump aren’t just politically savvy, nor have they simply been lucky or unusually ruthless. Instead, they sensed the changing mood of a moment and were able to capitalize on a profound discontent with the status quo that liberals had built, a discontent that won’t disappear simply because right-wing populists are exposed as frauds, incompetents, or cheats. Worse, crafty operators with even more ambitious agendas stand ready to destroy the liberal status quo once and for all.”
The potential danger the populist right poses to the political system we have, cannot be underestimated.
Getting elected is one thing, being effective in government is quite another. Thanks for the info ipolitics:
“Trouble is, while Kenney’s frothy campaign bluster successfully fanned Alberta’s collective outrage, very little of it bore any resemblance to reality. Notley, far from being “complacent on pipelines” as Kenney accused a few weeks ago, has tried harder than most of her conservative brethren, Saint Ralph Klein included, to get one into the ground.
Proof positive of her bona fides: she defied the anti-oil types within both the national NDP and British Columbia’s NDP government next door. She earned the ire of her former ally and oil patch critic Kevin Taft. Greenpeace even labelled Notley “pro-pipeline” — something she probably should have put on a campaign sign, come to think of it.
The reason why an oil pipeline has been so elusive has nothing to do with partisan politics but an enduring political reality: it is manifestly more difficult to get pipelines into the ground today than when Ralph Klein roamed the earth.”
[…]
“Another conceit peddled by Jason Kenney over the last two years: that the dampening demand for Alberta-born bitumen, and the resulting deep discount at which it is sold, is strictly an infrastructure problem. This has allowed him to fashion a very passable boogeyman out of various anti-pipeline organizations, which served him well throughout the election campaign.
There more than a kernel of truth to Kenney’s assertions. Alberta’s oil sands production increased by nearly 50 per cent since 2014; its ability to transport all this bounty by rail and pipeline has remained virtually unchanged.
Yet there is an inconvenient a truth behind Alberta’s deeply discounted oil: exploding U.S. oil production. Virtually all of Canada’s crude — 99 per cent — goes to the U.S. Yet America has become increasingly adept at slaking its own demand. A fracking boom has prompted an increase of nearly 90 per cent in the U.S. between 2007 and 2018.
U.S.-fracked oil is cheaper to produce and requires less refining than the stuff north of the border. By virtue of spouting from American soil, it is by nature a Trump-approved nationalist bulwark against all things foreign-owned. It’s another fact of life, one utterly divorced from Kenney’s scorched earth politics: the U.S., Alberta’s biggest client, has increasingly become a competitor.
A few days ago, Kenney blamed all of Alberta’s woes on the allegedly socialist overindulgences of Rachel Notley. But reality, pain that it is, will quickly reveal the obvious: Kenney, having demonized Notley for the last two years, has only inherited her problems.”
Hey folks,
The fascists are once again in power here in Alberta. They will soon be deconstructing all the careful people centric legislation that our provincial NDP has enacted the last years.
“The UCP has made no secret it will scrap the carbon tax, but it would also kill (and spend taxpayer dollars to review) the NDP government’s entire Climate Leadership Plan.”
Future generations, go frak yourselves. We need money and jobs in the short term and our political thinking is a reflection of our shortsighted nature.
“The current large emitter tax would be replaced with a new Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) program. The first $100 million of TIER would fund new technologies to reduce carbon emissions (the party cited improved oilsands extraction technology and carbon capture as examples) and $20 million would go to the energy “war room.” The rest will fall into general revenue. That change would likely sound a death knell for both Energy Efficiency Alberta, which oversees projects solely funded by the carbon tax, and Emissions Reduction Alberta, an arms-length agency established in 2007 and a recognized world-leader funding research technology with carbon tax dollars.
Getting rid of effective human habitation preserving programs is the order of the day.
“Under an Open For Business Act, the UCP would introduce a $13/hour youth minimum wage, publish economic data on the NDP’s minimum wage increase, allow banked hours to be paid at regular instead of time-and-a-half pay, and restore mandatory secret ballots for union certification.”
Because youth who have the agency to work should not be rewarded with a quasi-livable minimum wage. Overtime? Get bent workiers. Oh, and let’s make it harder to unionize, because nothing says ‘open for business’ like an exploited working class.
“It would reduce the business general income tax rate from 12 to 8 per cent over four years in the hopes of creating jobs, “
Because trickle down economics has been shown to fail in almost every jurisdiction that it has been implemented in. It does not stimulate economic growth, nor does it create jobs. It creates bigger dividends for shareholders and more profit for the wealthy elite. I’m so happy the working class has voted overwhelmingly to enrich the business class.
“and replace farm safety Bill 6 with a Farm Freedom and Safety Act. However, the party would maintain some employment law changes made under the NDP, including provisions around long-term, bereavement, domestic violence and child illness leave.”
Farm workers obviously don’t need rights. They need to be as vulnerable and exploitable as possible. Remember folks, work through your injuries or we can replace you with another desperate person.
“The party pledged to develop a 10-year tourism strategy focusing on jobs, “reorient” the mandate of Travel Alberta towards public-private partnerships, and make the department the responsibility of the Economic Development Minister.”
Ineffective private/public partnerships serve only to enrich the private sector and are inefficient ways to get public works done. But let’s make it a priority because efficient public works are for dirty socialists.
“The Alberta Energy Regulator’s board of directors would be fired by a UCP government”
Let’s change the Energy REGULATOR because they hold a balanced view toward the environment. We need someone to make Alberta great again and burn some coal and deregulate all the things so we can screw the public, raid the treasury, and make the business class even richer than before.
I for one am totally pumped to embrace the upward transfer of wealth in our society. I can hardly contain myself as I consider the upcoming gutting of the public and social services. Tickled pink (or perhaps I should say UCP blue), am I.
The psychological need for security is important. The people who formulate our politic know that can can often use our natural tendencies to gain our acceptance of polices that make little sense, from a strictly rational point of view. Border walls and the many issues that surround them occupy this idealized territory as the amount of actual security provided is quite limited, but the psychological return on investment is huge. Eric Schewe writing at The JSTOR daily site looks into this feature of the walls we build, ostensibly to protect ourselves:
In this column, I’ve explored the idea that security ideology creates a mirror version of the world around us. Beyond any specific technology or procedure, security “works” when it makes us believe that it solves an identified problem. This is not to deny the real risks of death or injury as a result of terrorism—but only to point out that satisfying beliefs is security’s highest priority. This is why we have spent billions of dollars and uncountable hours on security theater although terrorists have killed only sixty-five Americans per year since 2002. Terrorism receives a disproportionate amount of news coverage compared to say, car accidents, which kill tens of thousands of Americans every year.
The American political system is now seized by conflict over the symbolic threat of illegal immigration. President Trump has proposed an equally symbolic solution—building a bigger border wall. Interestingly, while vilifying illegal immigrants to his supporters as violent criminals, he has not penalized the industries that rely on their labor. After settling the budget standoff that shuttered the federal government for a month, he declared a national emergency to fund wall construction, although he immediately admitted there was no emergency—that he “didn’t need to do this.”
[..]
Every border wall has a particular historical context behind its creation. Yet they all announce the same message to the world: Our diplomatic and economic relationships with our neighbors have failed, and we are unwilling to repair them.
I’m in agreement with Eric’s conclusion. Wall are indeed a testament to our failures.
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.
It’s a near cyclical event. Disaffected folks in the West periodically need to grumble about how shitty it is living in a safe secure nation state. Nothing more than flashes in the pan when Westerners are feeling like they need someone to blame instead of themselves – because the ethic of bootstrapping yourself up into prosperity only applies to people who happen to be more poor that you…
In the coffee shops and meeting rooms throughout Saskatchewan these days, there’s more and more talk about the breakup of Canada. But it’s not Quebec at issue, it’s western separatism.
After years of falling incomes and an apparent lack of action from Ottawa, many Prairie people are now debating the pros and cons of splitting the West from the rest of Canada.”
A Okanagan political group is spearheading a campaign to have B.C. and Alberta separate from the rest of Canada.
The group, calling itself 110 West, plans to organize public consultations in the two provinces. It’s running advertisements in local newspapers, and has set up a Web page.”
On a sunny Sunday in Calgary, Alberta’s separatists are on the move, pounding the pavement at the city’s popular Lilac Festival on the hunt for signatures.
Larry Smith is working the crowd, looking for support for his fledgling political movement, the Western Independence Party of Alberta (WIPA).
Truth is, WIPA isn’t quite a political party just yet. Before that can happen in Alberta, it needs signatures — and lots of them.
To be registered as a political party in the province, you need 7,868 electors — or about one-third of one per cent of eligible voters — to sign on the dotted line.”
So really, when the latest “Western Alienation” story happens to crop up – remind yourself it has the all the significance of this:
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…