Further from Peter Russell

This is just an incredible commentary on the state of our democracy by one of our truly great scholars:

Finally a Voice of Sanity

From constitutional expert Peter Russell. I cannot improve on or add to this:

When the House does meet and no party has a majority, there are basically three ways of forming a government. First, the Conservatives can simply carry on as a minority government hoping to win support, issue by issue, from opposition MPs. Second, either the Conservatives or the party that finishes second in seat numbers can form a legislative alliance with one or more other parties that would agree to support them on the basis of a shared legislative program. Such an agreement between David Peterson’s Liberals (who finished second to Frank Miller’s Conservatives) and Bob Rae’s NDP gave Ontario a stable minority after the 1985 provincial election. In this option, the parties supporting a Liberal or NDP government would not have cabinet positions. The third option is a coalition government in which two or more parties form a government and share cabinet posts.
All three options are constitutionally legitimate. Indeed, in the dozens of parliamentary democracies around the world, it’s highly unusual for any party to have a parliamentary majority. Governments in most of these countries are either coalitions or single-party minorities supported through alliances with opposition parties.
If the Conservatives don’t win a majority on Monday, Mr. Harper isn’t likely to try to form a coalition government or make a legislative alliance with any opposition party. So what would happen if his government fails to win the support of any opposition party when the House meets in late May or early June and is defeated on the Speech from the Throne?
At this point, constitutionally, Mr. Harper has two options. He could resign and advise the Governor-General to invite the leader of the party with the second-largest number of seats, either Michael Ignatieff or Jack Layton, to form a government. Or he could advise the Governor-General to dissolve Parliament and call another election.
It’s the second case that lands us in a “constitutional crisis” similar to the Byng-King affair of 1926. The principal that the Governor-General must be guided by in considering Mr. Harper’s request is that a prime minister’s advice (even if the prime minister has lost a confidence vote in the House) should be rejected only if doing so is necessary to protect the integrity of our parliamentary system. Calling an election, the fifth in seven years, just a few weeks after the last election when there’s a plausible alternative government that can command the confidence of the new Parliament may well be such a situation.
Of course, it all depends on whether Mr. Ignatieff or Mr. Layton can make a plausible case that a government one of them heads will be supported by a majority in the House. The Governor-General will need more than their good intentions to have the compelling case he needs to justify rejecting the Prime Minister’s advice.
If Monday’s election produces a House in which no party has a majority, let’s hope our political leaders have the good sense to work together to avoid a Byng-King constitutional crisis.

Into the Bunker

As the red hordes roll on toward Ottawa, bizarre speculation and a retreat to bunker mentality are beginning to become apparent. So this from our national paper of record:

Stephen Harper is refusing to say whether he would accept a decision by the Governor General to hand power to the opposition parties in wake of the May 2 election.

Mr. Harper is warning voters the next government will either be a Tory majority or a coalition government led by the New Democrats. He warns a Conservative minority would be short lived, defeated by a coalition.

But he declines to say whether he’d accept a decision by the Queen’s representative in Canada to give an opposition party the chance to govern - rather than, say, demanding the Governor General call another election instead.

With just days before a ballot, he says it’s a hypothetical question.
Mr. Harper however has spent the entire race since March 26 campaigning on a hypothesis: that his rivals would oust him from power should he fail to win a majority and instead form a coalition to take office.

The fall of the regime is never pretty.

There is neither inflation nor the risk of inflation

For two years now we have been bombarded with dire warnings about the risk of inflation. Never actual inflation, but the risk. The sky might fall. This is ideological rhetoric. The wealthy, having been bailed out by the state, now want to stick us with the bill. Sort of financial "dine and dash." This is particularly true of our neighbors, who are contemplating choking off the recovery in order to lavish more wealth on the rich. Here is a look at inflation in the U.S.:

This is much ado about nothing by people with an agenda.

From the Horse's Mouth

 This from one time Harper chief of staff and academic mentor Tom Flanagan on Harper's anti-democratic instincts:

The Conservative campaigning approach has been built around two realities: a low ceiling on the popularity of right-of-centre viewpoints in Canada, and a low-engagement political environment. That's governed pretty much everything this government does, in and out of campaigns.
Mr. Harper's proposed solution to this political conundrum was best seen in 2008. In that campaign, he parlayed to a near-majority by creating conditions where three quarters of a million Liberals stayed at home, rather than vote for the caricature that had been made of Mr. Dion. Mr. Harper made the Conservatives big by making the Liberal vote small. This year's campaign has sought a reprise of that success. But seeking to work around the low conservative-minded ceiling by working a low-engagement environment hasn't just pervaded the 2011 campaign. It's been the basic story of Mr. Harper's government, something I've argued in other posts (Ringside: March 29) and elsewhere.
The core strategy, using low engagement politics to equalize a low support ceiling, is mirrored not only in campaigns, but also in the government's public policy strategy. Lacking sufficient public support for a conservative shrinking of the federal government, Mr. Harper's administration has ducked debate on such matters, and instead has simply gone about quietly withdrawing Ottawa from several areas of national life. It has avoided a debate where the majority would prevail against it. Generally, the quiet deconstruction has worked. People, we've been told, just don't care. Well, sometimes. Other times, many of the government's most awkward moments have come when quiet burials -- prorogation, long-form census, Kairos funding -- suddenly drew unwelcome attention.
This brings me to the final pillar of the Harper Conservative strategy: populist centralism, which is my neologism for Mr. Harper's frequent nudges of our Westminster parliamentary system towards some de facto species of direct election of the prime minister. This populist centralism has not only accelerated the long-term, multi-party subordination of cabinet to the PMO; it has arguably resulted in the wholesale sidelining of the Legislature in favour of the Executive. That's something new.

The favoured tactics of Latin American autocrats. This government cannot go soon enough!

Canadian Complicity in Afghan Torture

From Truthdig, outlining Canada's complicity in the torture of Afghan detainees. Key passage:

For the European members of NATO - especially the British and Dutch - the political driver was the need to distance themselves from a U.S. detainee policy already tainted by accounts of U.S. torture.
The U.S. and Canada supported such transfers, however, in the belief that NDS interrogators could get better intelligence from the detainees.
The transfers to the NDS were a direct violation of the United Nations Convention against Torture, which forbids the transfer of any person by a State Party to "another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture."

Perhaps Prime Minister Layton will have a Parliamentary committee look into this, as both Ignatieff and Harper have made their agreement with such policies quite clear.

Our Very Own Facebook/Twitter Revolution

The NDP is closing in on first. And the push is coming from the young. In an election that was timed to discourage university students who would be in the process of heading home at the end of the term, it would appear that they simply voted in advance polls.

With four days of campaigning left, support could soften. But it would seem plausible that there will soon be two members of Parliament living in Stornoway, and perhaps soon after, at 24 Sussex.

If a majority of Canadians are seen next Tuesday to have voted for a progressive alternative to the Harperites, there is no reason why such a government should not be formed after a proforma defeat of the Conservative budget.

The Fearmongering Begins

With the socialist hordes just days away from capturing Stornoway and perhaps even forming a minority government following a second defeat of the Harper budget, the horror stories are beginning.

This morning, we learn from Adam Radwonski in the Globe and Mail that Layton's (and the NDP's) pandering to soft Quebec nationalism will bring on the separatist apocalypse. Yesterday, we were told that market jitters were the result of fears of NDP advances. I wonder if anyone has saved the billboard that was on Bay Street during the Rae years showing Rae with donkey ears and talking about the dangers of a hard left government.

So transfer your life savings to the Caymans and stock the basement with canned foods.

The Church in the Service of Power is Not the Church

From my friends at Jesus Radicals, this reminder of what Easter is and what the Church, as the presence of Christ in the world and not as an institution in service of power, is:

Jesus’ life was one of resistance to the civilized, religious world. Jesus’ life demonstrated a completely alternate way of living called “the Kingdom of Heaven” in which the poor, the oppressed, the forgotten, the neglected, the widow, the orphan, the child, the prostitute, the sick, the lame, the blind, and the dead were treated as kings, and the kings were treated as outcasts. The poor fisherman is royalty in this Kingdom, yet the rich man cannot get there any more than a camel can pass through the eye of a needle. This Kingdom mockingly tells us to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”, simultaneously rejecting the imperial currency system and reminding us all that “the Earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it” – what is left for Caesar anyway? This Kingdom lays claim to those who have been possessed by demons, who have been blind from birth, who have been spat on and walked over by the most pious religious leaders, and restores them to abundant life. This Kingdom preaches repentance and the forgiveness of sins, not by works or by following rules, but by the grace of the King. Jesus embodied and inaugurated this Kingdom; He preached this Kingdom; He brought disciples in to further this Kingdom.

What do you think the existing kingdom (the Roman empire, including its subservient rulers and citizens in Judea) thought of this alternate Kingdom? They thought of it as a threat. They thought of it as an affront to their “King”, their “Savior”, the man they called “the Son of God”. And they were right! Jesus’ Kingdom stands proudly and boldly in direct opposition to the kingdoms of this world. 

When in Doubt Screw the Workers

While waiting for markets to open this morning I came across this news from the U.S. Fed. Janet Yellen, one of Obama's oh so progressive Fed appointments, is assuring markets that inflation isn't much of a threat. Though commodity prices are rising and corporate profits are at all time highs, declining wages (and of course this means the lowest paid workers) will keep inflation in check.

Those workers at Walmart and McDonalds sure are wonderful. Not only do they work for next to nothing. But by giving up healthcare and education for their children they will help pay for all the money given to Wall Street billionaires. And now they are going to keep the world safe for expensive oil and middle-east adventurism. Oh, and of course it is their children who do the fighting and dying.

I sure hope that in all their pain, they remember to just say no to drugs. Because we wouldn't want the expense of putting them in jail in these inflationary times.

Prime Minister Jack Layton

The latest EKOS poll is showing the NDP as the official opposition in waiting. Though it almost certainly won't happen, and though it may give the odious Conservatives their coveted majority, a message has been sent.

If we are often cattle, sometimes we are not. When the banks screw the economy, stick us with the bill and then lecture us on financial probity because we went into debt paying it, we might get pissed. When our political masters would rather send the children of the poor to prison than university then we might ask about putting them in prisons for their very real crimes and vote for those who, at least in the misty past, described themselves as socialists.

Way to go, Jack!

Apparently the Truth is Whatever Rich People Want and are Willing to Pay For

Right-wing childrens' author and Sun TV's new Glen Beck wannabe, Theo Caldwell, has a new mantra for a new network:

In the marketplace of ideas, you need buyers and sellers – that’s how you find the price of the truth. 

How catchy. And as we are constantly reminded, Caldwell the Younger, with his British graduate credentials, is to be taken very seriously.  So let's think about what this means.

It certainly sounds deep. The first clause suggests that ideas are things bought and sold in a market. That would seem to suggest that those ideas that prosper are those that people are willing to spend the most on. So far, so good. And of course it follows (Theo clearly completed his logic and reasoning course) that the interaction of buyers and sellers will arrive at a price for these ideas -- what he refers to as a price for truth.

Truth, therefore, does not have intrinsic value, but rather a price. And since Mr. Caldwell is obviously a purveyor of such ideas (and hence a negotiable conception of truth) it follows that he is selling to a buyer. Presumably, this would be Sun Media, and of course, their advertisers. So Caldwell is willing to provide a negotiable truth to a buyer with sufficiently deep pockets, and vigorously defend that truth, for a price.

One can only conclude that when Theo tells you something is true, unless you are Sun Media or one of its advertisers, you may want to be somewhat sceptical. And even if you are Sun Media or one of its entourage, you might suspect that your public nakedness is being described as serious wardrobe savvy for purely commercial reasons.

Linking Insane Extremes

This telling comment from Andrew Sullivan this morning on post-modern insanity and identity politics on the left and the right and the complicity of the academy in this:

I, for one, do not find it odd that a party that can debate the idea that the earth is 6,000 years' old is also capable of believing that a birth certificate is not a birth certificate. The criterion is not empirical evidence but dogged, reactionary hostility to anything libruls believe. We have left the realm of reality and entered the world, previousy exclusively occupied by the pomo-left, of identity as truth. "We are right because we are white" is no different in logic than "we are right because we are black" which is perilously close to where the academic left went in the 1990s. 

What if the Election Results in a Better Government?

No doubt much will change in the next week and a half. But as things stand, the Liberals and NDP would have more seats together than the Conservatives. One can envision a Liberal government, following a Conservative defeat in the House, dependent on NDP support and thus tethered to a progressive agenda, recapturing the Pearsonian approach that saw the greatest period of progressive legislation in Canadian history.

What started out as a boring, predictable and unpopular election is quickly becoming something very different.

A Thundering Irrelevancy?

A new study by the Pew Center shows just how much trouble the U.S. (and more generally, western) Church is in. Former Catholics are now the 3rd largest denomination in the U.S.. Much more problematic, people are not leaving over doctrinal issues, either left or right, but because the Church no longer feels like home and no longer connects with them spiritually. As the National Catholic Reporter notes

There are many lessons that we can learn from the Pew data, but I will focus on only three.
First, those who are leaving the church for Protestant churches are more interested in spiritual nourishment than doctrinal issues. Tinkering with the wording of the creed at Mass is not going to help. No one except the Vatican and the bishops cares whether Jesus is “one in being” with the Father or “consubstantial” with the Father. That the hierarchy thinks this is important shows how out of it they are.
While the hierarchy worries about literal translations of the Latin text, people are longing for liturgies that touch the heart and emotions. More creativity with the liturgy is needed, and that means more flexibility must be allowed. If you build it, they will come; if you do not, they will find it elsewhere. The changes that will go into effect this Advent will make matters worse, not better.
Second, thanks to Pope Pius XII, Catholic scripture scholars have had decades to produce the best thinking on scripture in the world. That Catholics are leaving to join evangelical churches because of the church teaching on the Bible is a disgrace. Too few homilists explain the scriptures to their people. Few Catholics read the Bible.
The church needs a massive Bible education program. The church needs to acknowledge that understanding the Bible is more important than memorizing the catechism. If we could get Catholics to read the Sunday scripture readings each week before they come to Mass, it would be revolutionary. If you do not read and pray the scriptures, you are not an adult Christian. Catholics who become evangelicals understand this.
Finally, the Pew data shows that two-thirds of Catholics who become Protestants do so before they reach the age of 24. The church must make a preferential option for teenagers and young adults or it will continue to bleed. Programs and liturgies that cater to their needs must take precedence over the complaints of fuddy-duddies and rubrical purists.

What is most striking for the NCR is that the hierarchy just doesn't much seem to notice or care. They carry on as if losing a third of their membership is not a problem.

People Need to Go to Jail for This

The United States Senate's Permanent Investigation Committee has released a damning report documenting abuses and probably crimes by hedge fund manager Magnetar. ProPublic has the story today, it is a disturbing read. It is yet more evidence that vast amounts of toxic CDOs were created specifically to sell to unwary investors and then bet against. Much more than conflict of interest, this is surely fraud.

Long after they knew that the housing market was in trouble and that mortgages being written would never be repaid, this and other investment brokers continued to put together these deals. And I find it difficult to believe that the same wasn't happening here in Canada.

Do We Trust Markets or Ourselves?

Keynes biographer and economist Robert Skidelsky makes a convincing case that we do not have to follow the dictates of financial institutions in devastating the lives of the vulnerable in order to appease markets. Thus he notes

The tension between democracy and finance is at the root of today’s rising discontent in Europe. Popular anger at budget cuts imposed at the behest of speculators and bankers has toppled leaders in Ireland and Portugal, and is forcing the Spanish prime minister into retirement.

And I would suggest it is at the root of a resurgent NDP. People are fed up with a disgustingly wealthy financial sector telling us we must tighten our belts and toadying politicians working for them instead of us.

If we want our world back, we need to take it back.

Well Said

Living in Interesting Times

Who would have thought. With eleven days to go, this election is suddenly unlike any of the recent Tory dominated snorefests. Though their support seems soft as usual, the NDP is closing in on the Liberals. This could simply split the progressive vote and pave the way for a Tory majority. Or it could provide the "winning conditions" (who said that?) for a viable coalition following an early defeat of a lame Harper minority.

Far more important, claims of the death of the progressive left in Canada were somewhat exaggerated. And if the federal and provincial parties and their trade union and social movement allies can build on this (never a sure thing) then this could be a sign of a shift in Canadian politics.

The gun-toting, warmongering anti-everything including the poor lunacy south of the border looked to be making inroads here. We can only hope that it has been stopped in its tracks.

For I was Hungry and You Fed Me

Buried beneath all of the election news yesterday was the British medical journal The Lancet's publication of findings on Vancouver's Insite safe injection site's success. Drug overdose deaths in one of Canada's most troubled neighborhoods have been reduced by more than a third by a single program.

For anyone who has worked in this field or who has experienced the pain of addiction, this is simply phenomenal. And yet the Harper government has been unstinting in its efforts to close this program. It is apparently better that addicts die than that they not conform to a Tory/Christian fundamentalist ideal.

As the Globe & Mail notes this morning, the opposition is once again disturbingly silent on this. This is scarcely surprising for the hopelessly opportunistic liberals. But I have always been shocked by NDP's seeming belief that by the worst sort of pandering, they might make inroads into the Conservative base. Hence the capacity to overlook corporate tax cuts, gifts to banks and now attempts to undercut a program to serve some of our most vulnerable fellows.

We can do better than this.

Chris Hedges on the Gods of Finance

I cannot add anything to this

Why Aren't Afghan Allegations an Election Issue?

With the Harper Government actively trying to bury a report on Afghan prisoner abuses, one wonders why this isn't an election issue. Until one remembers that Prof. Ignatieff is in favor of torture. Oh, not the mean, nasty and messy kind. Only the nice kind. Maybe sort of like what was done to our citizens in Syria?

Some Wind in the Left's Sails?

While I still think der Fuhrer will win, likely with a slim majority, I am also seeing encouraging signs of a resurgent left. An Angus Reid poll from the past few days shows the NDP tied with the hapless Liberals at 25%. The bad news of course is that this could simply mean a more comfortable Tory majority, but at least it shows a left that is not completely dead.

Perhaps even more encouraging is the whole vote mob thing. The Tory strategy hinges on low voter turnout, especially among young and disaffected voters. If students show up in much greater numbers than normal, this could radically (pun intended) swing results.

Those Crazy Ratings Agencies

From Moody's and Standard and Poors come threats this morning to downgrade the U.S. Government's AAA bond rating. These, readers will recall, are the same agencies who gave the same AAA ratings to CDOs comprised of garbage mortgages that where a primary reason the U.S. government is in such sad shape now.

I am sure there is nothing political here. Aren't you? After all, we know these agencies never fudge their ratings.

If Corporations are Persons, Can We Put Them in Jail?

While school teachers and firefighters are under attack for their looting of the public treasury, Bernie Sanders, the only social United States senator (wish we had one of those!) brings us this news of unprosecuted corporate theft:

Come April 15, everybody ponies up their fair share, right? Not so much. Thanks to corporate tax cuts and loopholes, these big companies will be rollin’ in the green instead of paying Uncle Sam. Read Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) corporate freeloaders list now:Spread the word. Share this on Facebook today.

Tough on crime indeed!

some election fun (and needed perspective)

Shit Harper Did (no, really)

Stiglitz and Winner Take All Economics

Last week's Vanity Fair article by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz reminds us that while most of the world struggles to rebuild in the wake of the financial meltdown two years ago, things have never been better for the folks who brought us this clusterfuck. Channelling Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker's Winner Take All Politics,  he reminds us that the top .1% of U.S. households now command almost a quarter of all income, a staggering maldistribution of wealth not seen since the late 1920s.

And in case you thought this was just another uniquely American disaster, things are much the same in our peaceable kingdom, where almost all of the income growth of the past decades has accrued to the same .1% of the population. And as Stiglitz notes, this warps far more than economic outcomes, as

America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real.

 More important, in this Darwinian struggle where only those at the top prosper, our sense of solidarity forged in the the economic catastrophe of eighty years ago is utterly lost. We have a bit more materially, but we are so much less.

Bacevich on Libya and Futility

Once again, historian and former senior officer Andrew Bacevich grasps the obvious on the use of military power in the middle east, this time in Libya.

As with Iraq, he argues, the why of this misadventure will never be known, and in any coherent sense, probably does not exist. The important point is therefore how and the how that we keep grasping at is the use of force. As he argues

Perhaps Barack Obama found his political soul mate in Samantha Power, making her determination to alleviate evil around the world his own. Or perhaps he is just another calculating politician who speaks the language of ideals while pursuing less exalted purposes. In either case, the immediate relevance of the question is limited. The how rather than the why is determinant.
Whatever his motives, by conforming to a pre-existing American penchant for using force in the Greater Middle East, this president has chosen the wrong tool. In doing so, he condemns himself and the country to persisting in the folly of his predecessors. The failure is one of imagination, but also of courage. He promised, and we deserve something better.

Ten years on, Afghanistan is a sinkhole -- a kleptocracy whose only virtue is that it is our kleptocracy, though not so much and likely not for long. Iraq has, almost inconceivably, been left worse off than we found it. And Libya looks to be emerging as more of the same.