My Log 695 Feb 6 2019: Chronicles from my Tenth Decade:129 Good news for anti-capitalist agitators (of whom I have met a few); careless arrest of travellers in transit can have economic impacts; and oil companies that abandon worn-out wells, get an expensive reminder from the Supreme Court

While reading the newspaper this morning I came across several pieces of what I thought were good news. Only later did I occur to me that to many people, what appears as good news to me, must look like bad news to many others, since to me good news is when the capitalist system is showing signs of tension or difficulty.

A couple of the items that caught my eye this morning were:

1.                That ships full of Canadian canola (which used to be called rapeseed, until the gender fanatics got to work on it) are lining up at Chinese ports because of delays in clearing them by customs officials.

(Back story: this has been happening since the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the executive of the Chinese electronics giant Huawei, at Vancouver on December 1 while she was in transit, an arrest known about in advance by our “happy days” PM, and his increasingly dysfunctional (for confirmation  of this adjective examine the disarray of our foreign policy, with its recent manifold screw-ups) sidekick Ms. Freeland, an arrest carried out at the command of the Trump administration.

Of course, one must feel sorry for canola farmers who are being deprived of their incomes, a result that  the two responsible persons for the arrest apparently did not foresee, or think about.)

2.                Alberta fears being up a creek because of the recent court

decision that in the event of bankruptcies by oil companies, a priority in repayment must be given to the cleaning up of oil wells abandoned by the company, in advance of payments to creditors.

(Back story: Our western lands are littered with abandoned oil wells, thousands of them, tens of thousands of them, when they are all counted  --- some are called abandoned, others, orphaned, and so on --- which have risen to a figure like 155,000 leaking wells--- this is so huge as to sound hardly credible, but there you go, capitalist companies are allowed to get away with murder, even in beautiful Alberta.  The bill for the province could be as high as $8 billion. All these are wells that have been either closed for one reason or another or simply abandoned when they have run dry, but for whatever reason, they are still leaking oil, and are left to the farmer on whose land the well sits, to pay for what is euphemistically called “remediation.”). 

This reminds me of the dreadful examples of tailings left behind by various mining enterprises that I have reported on in the long-forgotten past: such as a huge pond full of radio-active mine tailings in Elliot Lake, Ontario, once the home of Canada’s first uranium mines; and an even bigger tailings lake in Jamaica, left behind by the Canadian aluminum multinational Alcan, as a gentle reminder to the impoverished people of that island of all the benefits they have had bestowed upon them by the visitors from overseas. In places where workers have been routinely poisoned by companies, one usually runs into widows’ committees, full of grieving women who watched their  husbands shrink to nothing, and then die. Hundreds and hundreds of such women. It’s not much wonder that Canadian companies are so sensitive when they spot anyone approaching their factory gates with a camera. They usually have a lot to hide.

The reason I like this story from Alberta is that it shows the true face of capitalism: heartless, irresponsible, believing itself to be above the law that governs everyone else --- and of course this is grist to a guy like me who is always looking out for information that might change people’s minds about our dominant ideology.

Great stuff, right?  Wot the hell!

My Log 694 Feb 5 2019: Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 128 Yesterday I forgot to recommend the book Memory of Fire; I now seriously urge all readers to find that book and enjoy a unique account of what has happened, and is happening, in Latin America.

In my last effort written yesterday, I forgot to include an essential piece of information. The reason for that, which has to do with my lack of computer skills, I will explain later. But first, the missing information.

When I came to the point in my narrative of the Venezuelan imbroglio where I thought I needed an exegesis dealing with the history of United States imperialism in the southern continent (and of European as well, of course), I thought an easy way out would be instead of writing my own feeble account,  to recommend any readers who might have stayed the course thus far to read a book. Not just any book, but a really marvelous book, one of the best books it has ever been my pleasure to read, a three-volume work called Memory of Fire written by the late great Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano.

This deals with the history of Latin America, but it is like no other history book I have ever read. It is comprised of hundreds of 500-word essays, each one accompanied by a number that refers to a particular source listed in the back of the book. Galeano  has not reproduced anything from these source books, but has simply used something found therein  as the trigger for his own essay on a variety of subjects so broad as to suggest that no aspect of Latin American life has been neglected. These essays are by turns hilariously funny, seeringly brutal, philosophical in places, poetic and inspired elsewhere.  The totality is that you feel you have been almost living in Latin America as you have read on. Of the cascade of deliriously positive reviews I have read, I like this tribute by John Berger, the radical English critic: “To publish Eduardo Galeano is to publish the enemy: the enemy of lies, indifference, above all, of forgetfulness. Thanks to him, our crimes will be remembered. His tenderness is devastating, his truthfulness furious.”

The book is an easy read, and is just one of several excellent works by this author, who went into exile for more than a decade during the military takeover of his country. One of his first books was called The Open Veins of Latin America, a book written in a white-heat anger, a copy of which was handed to Barack Obama by Hugo Chavaz the Venezuelan President, during a speech he was making at the United Nations in New York, an event that lead to an immediate  huge increase in the book’s sales all over the continent.

I think this is relevant to the Venezuelan situation because most thoughtful observers today believe the American position is directed not just to overthrowing Maduro, but to consolidating the comeback of American hegemony over the entire continent after the retreat during the so-called “red tide”, which at one time saw mildly leftist governments in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. Many observers have warned that these years during which Latin American governments have begun to exercise relative freedom from  American domination, have not been forgotten, and that large sectors of the populations in each of these countries are no longer ready to be pushed around.

In these circumstances it seems kind of sad that our Liberal government has established the so-called Lima group along with the right-wing countries of the continent, ostensibly in an effort to establish a Canadian policy independent of American policy. Yet, whatever their aim might have been, their weekend meeting came to the same conclusion as that of the Americans, that the Venezuelan military should be encouraged to support the pretender to power, rather than the duly elected president. Plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose. I suppose, when you choose allies like the daft new President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, nothing better is to be expected.

Now, as to why I forgot to mention this book Memory of Fire yesterday, I have a sorry tale to tell.  I started to write a piece yesterday, and had to feel my way slowly before coming to a conclusion, for I don’t have any particular reason to support Maduro, and was just trying to get a sense of what seemed to really be happening, although I have always been sympathetic to Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution, and against American imperialism.   I worked it over for several hours, crouched over my computer, sitting in my chair, occasionally going to sleep as inspiration fled. Eventually I had it ready to post on the web site. But I fell victim to a fault I am quite aware of but tend to forget from time to time --- I had not saved the piece under a heading for storage.  Recently my Microsoft Word has adopted a strange habit, instead of just going in an orderly fashion into its place on the desk top, a piece will shoot out full blown on to the screen, in as many as twenty or sometimes thirty copies, one sitting on top of the other. This is a royal pain in the ass, and in closing them down --- throwing them away, in other words  --- I have to be careful that I am keeping a finished version somewhere or other. Yesterday I omitted to do that, got into a rhythm of cancellations, and accidentally cancelled the whole thing I had spent so long slaving over.

Then I spent two or more hours searching for it somewhere in my computer, but it seems not to be there, so I just decided to forget it: in any case, I could scarcely remember anything I had written.  I turned on some show or other on Netflix, watched it for a while, turned it off, and with the loss of my hard-won piece nagging at me, I sort of remembered the opening sentence, and began to re-write it as closely as I could manage.

It was this re-written version that I put up on my site at the end of the day, and it was this version in which I forgot to include the recommendation to read Memory of Fire, that I had originally included in my first piece.

Ah, well, wot the hell, wot the hell, toujours gai, toujours gai!, as the great man said.

My Log 293; Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 126; Dangerous times in Venezuela; it makes me wonder whether our own little Justin and Chrissie are way out of their depth

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You have to take your hat off to the lads who run capitalism. Once they hear of some upstart who is questioning their doctrine or their god-given duty to propagate and run it, they zero in on him or her without mercy.

         Such is the fate of the ill-starred president of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, inheritor of the Bolivarian revolution, which was initiated by his predecessor, the remarkable Hugo Chavez. Senor Chavez earned the enmity of the capitalist managers because he devoted a part of the profits earned by his country’s oil sales to social programmes such as relieving poverty, improving education for the poor, and building housing for them.  These are all terrible sins in the eyes of the capitalists.  They decided to teach Chavez the lesson that money is for one sole purpose, which is to make more money, and is no business of the poor. So they initiated their own  coup d’etat in 2002 to depose Chavez. They succeeded, too, for a day or two, but the people who had profited from his programmes poured out of their houses  and insisted that he return.

Seventeen years on, and they are determined to bring this whole thing to a halt, once and for all.  The money bosses have their own guy in power in the United States --- mind you, that is always true, regardless of the individual occupant of the office ---  and he has had a team working on this objective for at least a year and a half, according to the best reports, a team headed by the all-but-insane John Bolton, now enshrined as the top man in handling America’s National Security.

It is reported ---- not in our mainstream media, of course, but elsewhere, and I am indebted to the US programme Democracy Now! For this information --- that a meeting was held in Puerto Rico  eighteen months ago at which Venezuelan opposition members discussed the possibility of a coup to get rid of Maduro. Their conclusion was approved by Bolton, and the coup was scheduled for between January 10 and 15, but was delayed somewhat by their indecision as to who should be the leader.

Alejandro Velasco, a New York University professor who is in close touch with these events, and has written a book on the subject, said on  TV on Democracy Now! that the timing of the recent announcement by Juan Guaido, as he declared himself to be the interim President of Venezuela, “would lead me to believe there was not much spontaneity about this announcement.”   First, he noted, President Trump announced the U.S. would probably support an alternative for President, then within minutes Juan Guaido stood before a Caracas crowd with his dramatic challenge, and a few minutes later came the support of the U.S., the OAS, and the European Union in quick succession.

Professor Velasco said that for the last two years, during which the opposition has been boycotting elections, anyone who suggested sitting down and talking to the government, or voting in an  election would be denounced as “a traitor.” 

”That’s the language they used, and to me it signalled the subject has been transferred from the domestic to the international dimension,” he said.

It is worth recalling that in Canada, our own little Justin and Chrissie (as we all affectionately call Chrystia),  have never been far behind their master in the White House. Indeed, they are now taking credit for having created the so-called Lima group, which is comprised of Canada and the right-wing regimes of Latin America, all except Uruguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba and Mexico, the latter of which was the sole member of the Lima group to hold out from the rush to judgment.

The noise of his Venezuelan bug being mercilessly crushed as I wanders across the beautiful tiled floor of the capitalist palace, has been almost drowned out by the protestations of the war party (as one might call Trump’s followers, since he keeps on insisting that war is one of his options) as to their love of democracy, their concern for freedom, their insistence that only they follow the rule of law, and so on.  One might wonder why such law lovers should be so solidly behind the urban elite of Venezuela that over several decades has been noted as one of the most politically irresponsible to be found anywhere.

As to the sacredness of the electoral process:  since Chavez was elected in 1998, Venezuela has held five presidential elections and 25 asssembly or gubernatorial elections.   All of these have been observed by foreign election observers who have found them free and fair, so declared for example, by the Carter Centre, which has made something of a specialty of examining election processes. 

Caracas, October 16, 2017 (venezuelanalysis.com) – The Latin American Council of Electoral Experts (CEELA) has confirmed that Sunday’s vote in Venezuelan gubernatorial elections was clean and transparent.

“The vote took place peacefully and without problems… the vote reflects the will of [Venezuelan] citizens,” declared CEELA President Nicanor Moscoso during a press conference Monday morning.

The CEELA delegation was comprised of 1300 international observers, including former Colombian Electoral Court President Guillermo Reyes, ex-president of the Honduran Supreme Electoral Court, Augusto Aguilar, and former Peruvian electoral magistrate Gastón Soto.

According to the body’s report, the vote was held under conditions of “total normality” and the right to a secret ballot was “guaranteed”.

Sunday’s elections pitted President Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela against the right-wing MUD coalition, with the former scoring a surprise win in 17 of the nation’s 23 states.

The last election was boycotted by the opposition.

Venezuela’s election board put turnout at just 46.1%, way down from the 80% registered at the last presidential vote in 2013, due to a boycott by Venezuela’s mainstream opposition. 

Tibisay Lucena, the head of Venezuela’s electoral commission, told reporters Maduro had received more than 5.8m votes compared to the 1.8m of his nearest rival, Henri Falcon.

Since thy are so well schooled in elections, they must be feeling they don’t need lessons from our sweethearts,  little Justin and Chrissie, on how to run them. It was kind of sad to hear Justin talking about how brutal this dictatorship is as he welcomed the Lima group to Ottawa this weekend, especially since, in the research I have done for this article, almost everyone who has visited Venezuela regularly and knows something about what is happening there, has an entirely different slant on events.

None of this is to express much admiration for Maduro, who is clearly not a patch on his predecessor and inspiration, Senor Chavez.

But just as a final little twist of the knife, as it were, here is Donald Trump on the issue as he sees it, and as he clearly explained it  in a recent interview:

We would end up taking over the country eventually, but the people will appreciate it, better than if we hadn’t gone because of the lives we saved. They should pay us back. We have to go in on a humanitarian basis, knock out this guy very quickly, very surgically, very efficiently  and then we should go to the protesters who will be running the country and we should then say, by the way from all of your oil we want reimbursement. We should have said we will help you but we want 50 per cent of your oil. We could have had anything we wanted. They would have said okay 100 pc or 75.  In the old days when you had a war, to the victor belongs the spoils. When they came to us we should have said, we are going to help you, we want 50 pc of your oil, instead we help,  we get nothing.

It’s odd the kind of thing you can end up supporting if you follow the “happy days” philosophy to its logical, vacuous conclusion.

My Log 692 Feb 1 2019; Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 126; An excellent Polish film mixes private passions with public policies to good effect; and revives in me a lot of memories of past concerts, and Cold Wartime contacts with Soviet bloc personalities

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Yesterday I went to see a Polish-language movie called Cold War  that has already won numerous accolades across Europe, for its acting, direction and cinematography, that apparently was financed by a mixture of some 17 companies from several countries, and that, in my opinion, skilfully blended the story of an aching personal love affair with the political situation throughout Europe in the years between the movie’s first scene  in 1949, and its last scene in the late 1960s.

This blending of the personal with the political is not so easy to do, but it has been triumphantly achieved by the director Pawel Pawlikowski. But to me the film will probably be memorable --- that in itself is a big challenge, for I usually forget almost everything I have seen or read by the following day, a lapse that can be overcome once I find a trigger, a scene, or some indication, of what the film or book was about --- because it brought to mind very vividly an era in which folk dance troupes from the Soviet bloc regularly toured western theatres, playing to wildly appreciative audiences everywhere.

The film opens with a beautiful young blonde woman, Zula, played by the riveting Joanna Kulig, recently released from jail, being auditioned by a rather severe somewhat older  couple, for membership in an about-to-be-formed song and dance troupe.  The man, Wiktor, played by Tomasz Kot, says to his companion that that girl has something, and they should look at her again. The woman is rather reluctant, but the girl is chosen, proves to have a good voice, excellent discipline, and fits easily into the highly structured folk dance troupe without any problem. There are indications that she becomes the lover of this man, Wiktor, who is the musical director of the troupe, but things are moved quickly on to the troupe’s first visit to Berlin, as if their relationship means very little, especially compared with  the propaganda value of the troupe as it is emphasized in Berlin, as well as by the relevant Polish authorities.

 Soon the two lovers are seen lying in a field, Zula saying she will never leave him, but later she announces, “I am ratting on you.” She thus confesses she is answering questions by the authorities as to his background, his objectives, his habits, whether he has dollars, and so on.

He arranges for them to leave for Paris, but she doesn’t turn up. He is settled in Paris, making a living as a musician, when she finally arrives. She has married meantime, but neither  doubts that they belong together. As the film proceeds, she does reach the artistic freedom of the west, but this is given a rather ironic twist when her favourite folk song, sung with lusty pride in Poland, is sung --- beautifully, mind you --- as a cabaret torch song in Paris. She dances to Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock and is seen later performing as a fake Mexican in a fake mariachi band. “Can you get me out of this?” she pleads. Within a short time she has left to return to Poland., and he has been arrested for illegally crossing borders. Naturally, they finish together after all their vicissitudes, but their ending is left as rather anomalous.

What stirred my memory are the shots of the troupe in action, the heavy, circular, energetic  dances of Eastern European folk lore, their stamping feet, their harmonic, heavy singing of their folk tunes, their remarkable acrobatic manoeuves:  I must have attended quite a few such concerts, it all came flooding back to me so strongly.

 I especially remember meeting as they got off the train at Montreal’s Windsor station the famed Moiseyev dance troupe from Moscow. I tried to interview their charismatic director, a man basking in accolades from throughout the western world, who seemed vastly amused to be the centre of such attention.

He had  a young interpreter, on assignment from his job as a reporter for a Moscow trades union paper, whom I invited to my house for an evening, which he accepted. We exchanged the usual platitudes in these circumstances without getting much closer than just expressions of goodwill. He suggested I should write an article for his newspaper about Canada and its relationship to the United States.

I did as he suggested, and eventually  when he visited again as interpreter for the famous violinist, Leonid Kogan, I saw the article that had been published in the Russian language with my by-line. I had it translated by one of our staffers whose family came from that part of the world, and to say the least, the translation of my carefully guarded expressions of friendship was loose. I always expected to hear from the RCMP admonishing me for my boldness in having my name featured in a Moscow newspaper but if they ever heard about it they evidently decided its impact was so minimal as to be beneath concern.

Contacts in those days between us and any citizens of the Soviet bloc were always dominated by our built-in suspicion that they had in mind only propaganda, and might be expected to try to  recruit you as a spy --- a ludicrous idea, when you come to think of it, but one that was freely bandied about at the time.

I remember as a reporter whose assignment was to cover the hotel beat, that I was told a Soviet agricultural delegation was staying in the Laurentien hotel. They gave me the room number, so I went up, knocked on their door, and when I announced that I was from the local press, was welcomed in enthusiastically by a robust, genial elderly man who seemed delighted to have run up against an ordinary resident of Canada. He had a bottle of vodka sitting on top of the room’s  TV set, hidden behind a newspaper folded in front, but only minutes after I arrived in his room he had whipped the newspaper aside, opened the bottle and was pouring generous drinks all around. It was not yet 10 o’clock in the morning, rather early to engage in a heavy round of alcoholic drinks, but I  figured the honour of the nation was at stake, and I manfully undertook to match them glass for glass. An hour and a half later I staggered back to the office, where I wrote an eloquent tribute to the need for our two sparring nations to set our differences aside in the name of peace in the world.

My name must have gotten into someone’s data base in Moscow, because on another occasion, when I was out of town, a small group of actors, headed by an elderly man who was said to be one of the great men of the Soviet theatre, turned up at my house with their young interpreter. My wife, who was charmed to the back teeth by this old man, had an evening with them that she never forgot, but unfortunately she forgot the name of the elderly actor, so I never did discover which great star of the  Moscow stage we had entertained.

Later, in London, I considered it part of my professional duty --- although it really wasn’t --- to maintain some contacts with operatives from the Eastern bloc, partly because I really always did believe the cold war was unnecessary rubbish, but also because for the most part they were always amiable and friendly, although the odd one could be boring as hell.

I used to meet them once a year, in addition, at the annual conferences of the Labour Party, where it was always my pleasure to spend the evenings drinking with old-time British trades unionists, along with the occasional Eastern diplomat. One chap in particular was especially amiable, John Mrazek, a diplomat with the Czechoslovakian embassy. He was a real hail-fellow-well-met type of guy who had worked hard to be accepted by the leaders of British society, and had succeeded in receiving many invitations to the homes of the nobs.  A few years later I was called in by MI5, the British secret police service and questioned about my contacts; I had expected them to concentrate on a young Russian whose name I have forgotten, but whose behaviour seemed the closest I had struck that might be interpreted as that of a  spy. But no, their interest was in John Mrazek, who they told me was an operative of his country’s secret service, but had never been anything but proper towards me.

Years later I read a book by a man who had defected from the Czech service, who told an interesting story about Mrazek, who he  said was a man who loved to dream up extravagant plots. One of these concerned Edward  Heath. at the time Leader of the Opposition to the government of Harold Wilson, He was known to be a skilled organist, and was suspected in some circles of being gay. It appears the Czech operatives had discovered that one of the world’s great organs was in a church in Prague, that Heath longed to play it, and so John Mrazek set up for him to meet a leading Czech organist who would invite him to his city for that purpose. While he was there he was to be photographed in a compromising situation of some kind, and threatened with exposure if he did not co-operate.  It appears Heath had gone so far as to accept the kind invitation of the Czech musician, and was  all ready to go when MI5 stepped in to warn him of the dangers, so that he cancelled the visit. That was probably John Mrazek’s  last, foiled, plot.