Didier Drogba (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 My Log 306 May 19 2012

These babies, the soccer players with their histrionics and warped view of life’s priorities

I have just watched the whole of only the second soccer game I have seen since 1970, when I avidly followed the wonderful Brazilian team led by Pele and various other players almost as good, as their ferocious but controlled aggression swept them to the World Cup (I think it was being held in Mexico. I watched it from a hotel room in London, England, and the final in the bar of a Stockholm hotel).).

This game today was the final of the European  club championship between Chelsea and Bayern Munich, won by Chelsea. I heard someone say on TV a week or so ago that they should erect a statue to Didier Drogba for all he had done for the club. I have no idea what he has done, but when I saw him he seemed so much a template for the African sportsman, he looks so beautifully athletic, that I said, Drogba will win it for them. And what do you know, he did.

My customary criticism of soccer is that you have to watch it for 1,000 hours before anything happens. Of course, that is a cartoonish comment, and can be easily disproved by an aficionado.

But I have other criticisms: for example: the behaviour of the teams at the end of this game was just appalling. A player called Schweinsteiger, who missed a penalty kick, was prostrate on the ground, and acting as if his Granny had been killed in a car accident, blaming himself for the loss. At the same time, or shortly before, the Chelsea players had collapsed into a huge heap on top of the player who brought their penalty count up to equal with that of their opponents, exhibiting symptoms of excessive joy which indicated that World War III had just been brought to a glorious conclusion. They are not taking part in a war, or in a matter of life and death; and surely it is part of the training of any soccer player to know that in every team match, there is a winner and a loser. How to lose gracefully should be as much part of the playing of any game as how to win gracefully.

But it seems that soccer players have never heard of such ideas. They act as if soccer is the only thing on earth that means anything, which is probably why it has attracted the most disgraceful hooligan type fans, so brutal in their bearing that they have been known to be banned from even attending a game. And in today’s game--- it may have been my imagination --- there seemed an awful lot of incidents where the teams, particularly the German team, exaggerated their injuries with the intention of getting penalties or some other advantage. Rank bad sportsmanship.

For all the chuntering the soccer people do about “the beautiful game”, I find there is nothing beautiful about their attitude towards the game at all. The only acceptable thing I saw in the after-game behaviour was when Drogba, of the winning team, went up to Schweinsteiger and hugged him, presumably to assure him, “Okay, sonny, it’s just a game: your life will go on tomorrow. Go home and let your mummy tuck you into bed for a good night’s sleep.”

I am an enthusiast for Rugby Union, and for cricket. I know these are not perfect games, they do have their moments of degeneration, but at this level, they tend still to be run  on a concept of sportsmanship, certainly in comparison with the childish behaviour of the soccer players. Indeed, cricket has given its name to the very idea of doing things right, as in the expression, “that’s not cricket, to behave like that….”

In summary, my future viewing of soccer will be limited. I will stick to the excitement of the Indian Premier League of cricket, with its constant movement, wondrous skills, and intense good humour (okay, I know some cricketers have been reported to have engaged in corruption, which no one can condone.)

I am talking about the messages given to youngsters who oplay games.  Hockey, for example, gives the message that violence and fighting is just okay: if you are losing, you can always bash your opponent over the head. I remember being appalled by the brutality of Canada’s famous matches againstthe So;viet Union in1972.
Wasn’t that the series where a Canadian player went out on to the ice with thedelib erate intention of breaking the arm of one of the more successful of his adversaries, and he broke it?  One of Canada’s fondest sporting memories.

I have one other thing against hockey --- which I regard as one of the world’s greatest games, if only one can ever see it played free of it' thuggishness --- and it is something I heard for the  first time when I came to North America. It is the concept that was common here, and apparently still is, that a kid couldn’t make the team.  I never heard of such a thing in a New Zealand school, where I played most of my games. If there were more kids wanting to play than were needed for a team, another team was formed..No such thing as a kid standing on the sidelines, wishing he could be playing.

The result was that when I first arrived here, almost straight from a boyhood passed among the sports of New Zealand, I had the impression that Canada’s sports culture was very feeble, if it existed at all. And as for sportsmanship --- the game above the prize was the motto I always respected --- in Canada  with its concentration on the result,  sportsmanship as I understood it seemed to be virtually non-existent.

It may be different now. I know there is a vast network of opportunities for youngsters to play, but there is still the concengtration on the result: all sports is measured in terms of medals won, which is not exactly what sports should be about.

Okay, I’m an immigrant, and bring to this country for better or worse the values I grew up with.  

Electric cars (Photo credit: Argonne National Laboratory)

My Log 305 MAY 18 2012 IN THE REALM OF THE POSSIBLE….

IS IT NOT AMAZING THE THINGS THAT HUMAN BEINGS SPEND THEIR MONEY ON?  A CLASSIC EXAMPLE IS GIVEN IN A LETTER ON READER SUPPORTED NEWS BY SOMEONE WHO SIGNS HIMSELF  “HEAVYRUNNER.” THE LETTER IS SELF-EXPLANATORY, AND LEAVES ME WISHING HUMANS WERE MORE RATIONAL ABOUT THE CHOICES THEY MAKE. AND THAT INC.LUDES OUR PRESENT  IDIOTIC GOVEFRNMENT WITHOUT DOUBT.

“Please do everything you can to cause the $1.5 trillion the Defense Depart proposes spending on F-35 warplanes be spent instead on solar power and electric vehicles.

“I am in the process of having an $11,000 solar system installed on the roof of my home office. It will generate enough electricity to meet all my household needs and will also have enough surplus capacity to charge a 24 kwh electric car battery daily, which is the size battery in the Leaf or Focus or Volt.

“$1.5 trillion is enough to purchase 75 million such solar systems, installed and grid tied. There are about 75 million single family homes in the United States. After purchasing and installing 75 million rooftop solar systems, there will be enough money left over from the $1.5 trillion proposed to be spent purchasing 2,400 F-35 warplanes to offer 25 million $27,000 electric car rebates.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/game-over-for-the-climate.html?_r=2

NASA Scientist James Hansen Arrested, August 29, 2011 Photo Credit: Ben Powless (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 Link of the Day: James Hansen directorof the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says that if Canada continuesto develop the tar sands “it is game over for the climate.” Read hishard-hitting, pitiless piece in the New York Times of two days ago, telling ushow drastic the situation is, and how impossible it will become unless we canfind he leadership and the will to act NOW.

A photo of a match between Chennai SuperKings and Kolkata Knightriders during the DLF IPL T20 tournament (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My Log 305

A cricket tournament that is taking place in the unimaginable heat of the Indian plains --- I can sympathize, having experienced it once myself

For the last several weeks I have been mesmerized by the IPL (Indian Premier League), the 20/20 cricket league that has transformed the world’s greatest game from a sleepy, often-resultless enterprise into one of the most exciting sporting occasions on earth.

I expected to deplore this development, because of all its dressing up in multi-colored uniforms, the presence of dancing girls, the use of media technology to have the players talk about the game while out in the field --- all these innovations in a game that had always been beyond such fol-de-rols.

In the event, I have discovered it to be completely enthralling as it has offered play distinguished by the most amazing skills one could ever hope to see.

In fact, this new form of the international game, in which each side has only twenty overs (six balls to the over) to make its runs, turns out to be the game that most of us who have played cricket have always played. Most cricketers go out on Saturday afternoon around 1 o’clock, bat until the team is out, and then put the opponents in to bat and try to score more runs. The only thing missing from our version of the game that I played at high school was the limitation to 20 overs. Otherwise, it was almost identical in form.

But marvellous though these games have been --- one only  has to remember that the bowlers are among the best in the world, and they are really, really trying to get those batsmen --- also among the world’s best --- out, which is easier than in the most standard versions of the game because the batsmen, whether they like it or not, have to force the pace of scoring if they are not to be stuck with some easily-beatable low total of runs scored --- it is not the values of this new form of cricket that I want to write about today. It is the pre-monsoonal Indian heat that has caught my attention, as the players remark about how hot it is out there, and visibly begin the wilt in these tough conditions.

I once experienced this heat myself, when I visited India in 1951, straight from the moderate climate of New Zealand, and took up residence in an little adobe house in a refugee colony that had been erected 85 miles north of New Delhi.

I have no idea what the temperature was during this season, but I can tell you  it was  unimaginably hot, and beat anything I have ever experienced before or since.

As the days, weeks and months passed, the heat steadily grew, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, and there was almost no relief from it, the only slackening in its intensity during the day arriving each morning for maybe half an hour at about 5.30 am just before the sun rose. When this happened at 6 am, one was immediately plunged back into the full fiery intensity of the Indian summer. And that intensity during the day reached its peak in the early afternoon, a time at which every sane person who could do so retired into his or her house behind windows that were painted blue in an effort to reject the sun’s rays. One began to understand how it was that the British Raj retired at this time of year to the hill stations that have become legendary in accounts of British India --- places like Simla, which my wife and I visited for a few days, Poona, (now called Pune), where we were briefly before the onset of this heat, Pondicherry, and various other towns whose names now escape me. But even the Indians themselves could not deal with this heat, although they had to endure it year after year as their colonial masters frolicked in the cool of the mountains.

The intense heat continued  until the moment the sun went down in the early evening: but somehow there was no relief even then, because the moment the sun’s direct rays disappeared, everything seemed to become hotter. At that moment, one could place one’s hand against the wall of one’s house, and it felt like you were in an oven.

I will never forget one moment when it rained briefly, and everyone in the village stood outside in the rain, arms flung towards heaven, yelling and laughing with the relief. But it was soon gone, and we were back into the furnace.

This is the kind of heat that has been assailing the cricketers as they play this tournament, and I am able to sympathize with how they feel.

Personally --- of course I wasn’t eating very well during these months --- I quickly developed a severe case of diarrhea which only disappeared after I moved in mid-summer to the gloriously beautiful, and since tragically destroyed Vale of Kashmir. Both of us, my wife and I, managed to recover while there. But by the time we returned to mainland India in September, the monsoon had actually arrived, and the very moment we hit the plain our diarrhea returned in full force.

Maybe on some other occasion I could write something about the delights of having such a disease in the Bombay of those days --- a horror show if ever I was subject to one.

And I have noticed in the cricket fraternity that many of the visiting cricketers from other countries can fall suddenly and mysteriously ill with that sickness known in Mexico as Montezuma’s Revenge.  That they are able to play such wonderful cricket in these circumstances says much for their tenaciousness and guts. I take off my hat to them (or would if I wore a hat)

My Log 303 April 28 2012

Oh, yes, those were the days, all right, when you could buy an ice cream scoop, and a big one, for 25 cents

For many years I used to irritate my wife when, as I was adding a tip of  $10, $15 and sometimes even more to a restaurant bill, I would say, “Do you remember when we could buy a five-course meal in Montreal for $1.75?”

The fact that it was true, that the meal was cooked by a well-known French chef who previously had run a restaurant in Paris, and that my wife remembered it just as well as I did, did not absolve me from being tabbed a tiresome complainer. This was one of those complaints that one could classify under the sub-heading,  “those were the days”, the sort of complaint that old-timers like me are somewhat prone to indulge themselves in.

I still have such a tendency, and was reminded of it this week when some visiting friends, having taken for out for dinner, decided to finish their evening by going into a new-fangled ice cream shop. I looked over the board of offerings, and almost collapsed. The basic ice cream, than which nothing cheaper was on sale, came in at $4.95. Four dollars and ninety five cents for an ice cream scoop? Was I dreaming? In fact, not only was I not dreaming, but I was at the end of a lineup of mostly young people who were buying up these ice creams with abandon. Many of them were buying  special cones (another 99 cents); additional toppings (they actually called them by the invented name “mixins” whose lack of a final g also irritated me); and various other additional elements which could have taken the price up to $10 and possibly even more.

To the sales methods one had become accustomed to in Baskin-Robbins, Tom and Jerry’s or Haagen-Daz shops, this one had added a new twist: each scoop was taken to the back counter and weighed, as if it were a slab of meat or  fish. Talk about useless technology!

It made me think of the days when we would travel each weekend from Montreal to a cottage we had on a small lake 40 miles north of Montreal, not far from Shawbridge. On the way through the small city of St. Jerome, it became a ritual for us to stop at a local ice cream shop, that made its own product, and buy everyone a delicious and gigantic ice cream for 25 cents each. As we stood in the queue the other night I told one of my friends this, and he looked slightly askance at me, and said, “Of course, that was quite a time ago, I suppose.”

Well, not so long, it was in the early 1970s, although come to think of it, that was  40 years ago. Forty years may be four decades, getting on for half a century, and yet, I can’t really think of 1971 as being that long ago:  it was the year I quit my job as a staff journalist on a daily paper (after doing such work for 26 years), a change in my life that feels like it occurred the day before yesterday.  That was the year the Quebec government launched its James Bay hydro scheme in the hunting grounds of the Cree people, and the unjust  and harsh way they went about it still sticks in my craw; it was the year I got into making documentary films, more or less by accident. That came about as a result of a gesture of remarkable generosity by Tony Ianzelo and Colin Low, two employees of the National Film Board, and the thought of it still warms my heart, as if it happened yesterday. All these things are all still so lively in my mind that I am constantly surprised to find people believe 40 years is a long time ago.

Of course, I understand that the value of money changes, but still, $4.95 cents for a scoop of ice cream is a discombobulating increase. But then, how about weekend hotel specials for the unimaginably special low rate of  $350 a night? I noticed the other day a special price of $150 a night in a Montreal hotel whose cheapest room, when it opened was $9 a night. (I was on the hotel beat, and knew about these things, but I never dreamed a moment that any hotel room would cost $100). 
This is an industry that seems to make its own rules. I remember staying in a posh New York hotel once for $140 a night, a price that, said the accountant back in the home office, would have choked him. (I also remember moving into a $26 a night room in a waterfront hotel in Vancouver, and thinking, “My God, this is expensive. The office will never go for this. I better get a cheaper room,” so I went down and changed to a cheaper room.)

One of my sons argues when I complain about being ripped off by certain expensive restaurants. “Remember, they have to pay the rent for their premises, they have had to equip their whole restaurant with extremely expensive stuff, they have to maintain a large staff, they have to buy a great deal of food of the best quality, much of which, if they have a slow evening, will go to waste. They are providing you with excellent value.”

Still, admitting all that, I have never heard a convincing rationale for the recent sharp increase in the cost of restaurant meals, which allows some restaurants to charge $16 and sometimes even more for a hamburger. It is not long since we could buy a gourmet dish in a good restaurant for $10.

My wife and I used to enjoy going out for lunch, and we always managed it for something around $30 or $35 for both of us, which provided us with plenty of good food and drink. That same meal today would cost us $50 or $60. And I am only now getting used to going into a pub and being confronted with their usually poorly cooked food for prices like $15 to $22 a dish, A damned cheek they’ve got, if you ask me.

What’s wrong with me? It’s just that the monetary system seems to be deliberately skewed in such a way as to squeeze the average guy for the benefit of the monied classes. I defy anybody to prove otherwise.

Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, with Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Link of the day:

April 21 2012

Let’s face it, the prophesied brutal global attack on the working class and unions (refer to previous items on David Harvey) is under way, and Canada is part of it, as James Cairns explains in an article  Democracy in the Age of Austerity: Beyond the Robocall Scandal published in SocialistProject • E-Bulletin No. 620. Gird your lions, readers, these Tory governments andthe wealth-owners who dominate them, are after their pound of flesh, and partof their attack is an onslaught on our civil liberties from which we may neverrecover. 

(“The aim of the robo-Conservative black-op was to obstruct anti-Tory voters from casting ballots. But it was also part of the broader agenda of Stephen Harper, Dalton McGuinty, and governments around the world, which is about a full frontal assault on popular power in all areas of life….In the age of austerity, governments around the world say they have no choice but to cut social assistance, pensions, public sector jobs, minimum wages and environmental

assessment programs. We're told that the masses are greedy and lazy and have been living beyond their means for too long. Now it's time to get real about what's affordable.

(“…politicians who serve the austerity agenda don't like even the limited version of capitalist democracy that exists today. It's why they're working hard to bring in new ways of ruling that allow them to erode the minimal democracy that's left within the official political system while leaving the official institutions in place. That's why in Greece, for example, the prime minister was forced to resign in late 2011 after merely raising the idea that unprecedented austerity policies be put to a national referendum. He was replaced by a non-elected technocratic leader who was given the freedom to impose the demands of European ruling classes without even the formal trappings of public accountability ….”)

Jean-luc MELENCHON (Photo credit: Parti socialiste)

Link of the Day April 17 2012

Jean-Luc Mélenchon? Never heard of him? He is the routinely denigrated (by the media commentariat) socialist candidate for president of France, who is putting forward, as this article from The Guardian newspaper shows, a programme of real socialist reform, and is winning support. Read this, and ponder the comparable, feeble policies of our own social democratic parties.

My Log 302 : Chasing Madoff: a film to shake anyone’s faith in the honesty of the capitalist system

Chasing Madoff (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I saw a remarkable film last night, recommended to me by my son Thom, who gets most of his films through a web site called 1channel.

The film is called Chasing Madoff, and has been made by Jeff Prosserman about a Wall street employee called Harry Markopolos, and, in my humble opinion (or as the kids say nowadays IMHO) if you watch this movie and Ferguson’s Inside Job, which won an Academy Award last year, any faith you may have had in the capitalist system should be lying tattered in the gutter.

Of course, I don’t have any faith in it from the beginning, so that conclusion is easily reached for me. Others may be of greater faith.

The story is based on Markopolos and the reaction he had in 1991 when he first saw the figures produced by Bernie Madoff, who, as everyone now knows, conducted probably the biggest fraud in history, involving something like $30 billion of other people’s money.

“It took me five minutes to realize this was a fraud, it couldn’t be anything else, it was all there in the figures,” says Markopolos. “Five minutes.”

Of course, he could have just accepted it and stayed quiet, but, as he explains, he is not built like that. When he discovers a fraud, he wants to do something about it.

So, having consulted three friends within Wall street, who agreed with him, he painstakingly began to gather the evidence he would need to expose this fraud to the authorities.

To make a long story short, he gathered the evidence and sent it to the Securities and Exchange Commission of the US federal government, one of whose jobs is to protect the public from this kind of fraud. He waited for something to happen, but nothing happened.

At first Markopolos and his friends thought only $2.3 billion was involved; only gradually did they begin to realize the immense scope of Madoff’s ponzi scheme, in which he was always borrowing to pay off earlier borrowings, thus giving people the impression he was a safe, legitimate place to put their money. Investors were usually paid six to 10 per cent, but the problem with this kind of scheme is that eventually he is owing so much, and has to pay so much that the whole edifice comes crashing to the ground.

The guts of this story, however, is how successful Madoff was able to be, not just in North America, but as the searchers began to discover, all over Europe: in fact, he seemed to them to be bigger in Europe than in North America. And it was a notable fact that even when he was managing billions of other people’s money, he never showed up on the Wall Street radar as a recognized money manager. He worked away, but somehow or other remained more or less anonymous for many years.

Harry scurried around to identify investors who were being taken by this guy, but Madoff was such a pleasant fellow that none of them would believe he could do such a thing --- and after all, they were being paid all the time, so how could these guys be right?

In May 2001 they enlisted the support of a Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote a great article, and again they waited for something to happen. They waited one week, two, three, four, and now they were realizing that some $20 billion were involved in the scheme. They talked to investors as many as they could find, to banks, to charities, all of whom had dealings with Madoff ---- the film quotes one bank in Paris as saying, “Madoff is a safe place for our money, we never lose any money with Madoff.”

By this time Markopolos’s activities against Madoff were becoming well-known, and with the example of a whistleblower who had been rubbed out by the Mafia before him, he began to get really nervous. “Madoff was running money for offshore banks, which were also involved in organizing money-laundering and like activities for organized crime, but Harry’s gang of four, as one might call them, began to realize they were on their own. Funds that are known as “feeder funds” were making so much out of Madoff that they did not want to know, although, says Markopolos in the film, eventually many people in Wall street began to realize Madoff was running a fraud, but they simply shrugged and walked away. Some of these feeder firms agreed that if the SEC would call them, they would talk, and Harry handed this information on to the SEC. “But those calls were never made.”

At a point at which 29 red flags warning about Madoff had been identified, Harry managed to persuade another Wall Sreet Journal writer, one of the top investigative journalists in the country, about what was happening. He hesitated, wanting to be sure of his facts, but eventually he wrote the story, and Harry and his boys sat back and waited for the exposé. The article never appeared. “Someone higher up in the Wall Street Journal stopped that story cold.”

Markopolos says: “I began to wonder is there someone higher up in the government stopping this? By 2001 I came very close to giving it all up.”

In 2008 came the global financial crisis, and Bernie Madoff ran out of money. Finally it was the market that brought him down. He was arrested, and the government now admitted they had known all the facts for more than a decade. What had happened to the regulatory agencies, established specifically to see that this sort of thing doesn’t ever happen?

“You guys fell down on your job,” shouted a Senator at a line of chastened Wall street types during a congressional hearing.

In the end Madoff pleaded guilty, and went down without talking, facing a 150 year prison sentence. Harry Markopolos was honoured for his sterling work in tracking Madoff by a national organization of fraud examiners. He was described as a hero. “I’m no hero,” he said, “I don’t like it when people say that. I was just doing what I was supposed to do.”

Some 300 firms have since admitted having been involved with Madoff, but only 12 people have been arrested, while hundreds, perhaps even thousands of individuals were totally ruined, not to mention charities that Madoff also targetted.

Markopolos’s conclusion on the SEC: “It roars like a mouse, and fights like a flea.”

This whole story makes me think of a book I read a few years ago by a British writer called Gangster Capitalism. The author's thesis was that all this publicity about organized crime and its misdemeanours is encouraged by the corporate world to draw attention away from the far greater crimes of corporations, that are being perpetrated every day of the year, and going largely unpunished.

My Log 301:BC First Nations chiefs warn Harper: the days when we could be ignored are long gone

Prime Minister Harper has been reminded by a coalition of important British Columbia First Nations chiefs that Canada has constitutional responsibility to consult and accommodate First Nations people even in the making of vital economic and environmental decisions.
This letter should be regarded by Harper as a first shot across his bows as his government pushes on with a policy that, on the surface, seems likely to try to ignore First Nations protests against major directional changes by his government.
This letter reminds me forcefully of the moment in 1972 when the Cree people entered the Montreal courtroom to fight the proposal of the Quebec government to build the huge hydro project in their traditional lands in James Bay area. The lawyers for the Quebec government really did not believe they had a case to answer, an arrogance that was knocked out of them by the persistent six-month case presented by the Cree lawyer James O’Reilly, and by other lawyers representing the Inuit of northern Quebec.
The days when governments could simply ignore the wishes of First Nations are long over, as Harper and his gang are likely to discover to their cost in the next few months.
“We remind you that the Crown cannot legislate itself out of its duties to consult and accommodate First Nations,” the BC chiefs write to Harper in an open letter, commenting on the government’s decision to proceed with changes to the Fisheries Act, and weakening environmental regulations without any reference to First Nations whose lands lie in the path of the so-called Gateway pipeline that the government hopes will carry oil sands oil to the British Columbia coast for export.
The chiefs add: “Removing or weakening environmental reviews for projects will only result in greater uncertainty and conflict. We urge you to reconsider your position and work with First Nations to strengthen habitat protection for the continued survival of fish stocks and for the benefit of our future generations.
“We are similarly concerned with the changes we understand may be included in the Budget to environmental assessment legislation, and other environmental protection laws. These environmental laws and the processes established under them are a central part of the Crown’s relationship with First Nations. Changes to these laws, as with the Fisheries Act, should only be undertaken in meaningful consultation with First Nations, and to the extent these protections are changed they should be improved rather than weakened.
“A recent report by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination further emphasized the need for Canada to include Indigenous peoples in decision making, recommending that Canada ‘Implement in good faith the right to consultation and to free, prior and informed consent of Aboriginal peoples whenever their rights may be affected by projects carried out on their lands, as set forth in international standards and the State party’s legislation.’
“Further, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples sets out in Article 26(1) that ‘Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied, or otherwise used or acquired.’
“We ask Canada to uphold its commitment to this important international doctrine. We also point out that Canada must uphold its commitments in existing treaties to protect fisheries under those treaties.
“Although your government is moving forward with potential economic development projects, this cannot be at the risk of the surrounding environment. We remind you that the Crown cannot legislate itself out of its duties to consult and accommodate First Nations…..”
The letter is sent in the name of the FIRST NATIONS LEADERSHIP COUNCIL, and is signed on behalf of the FIRST NATIONS SUMMIT by Grand Chief Edward John,
Chief Douglas White III Kwulasultun and Dan Smith;
on behalf of the UNION OF BC INDIAN CHIEFS, signed by
Grand Chief Stewart Phillip,Chief Bob Chamberlin, and
Chief Marilyn Baptiste; on behalf of the BC ASSEMBLY OF FIRST NATIONS, signed by Regional Chief Jody Wilson-Raybould.

My Log 300: Keep eyes skinned for ALEC or his brothers --- a corporate entity deisgned to write our laws for us

American Legislative Exchange Council (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Many years ago when I was freelancing around the National Film Board, a little film ran through my hands that dealt with the movement in the United States devoted to destroying the union movement. The footage for this film had been shot by a young leftist couple, earnest but seemingly incompetent, who had produced some incomprehensible mishmash that I was asked to try to make some sense of. The conclusion of myself and my editor was that the young couple should get a day job, forget films. Famous last words: since then, this man has become one of the most successful producers of privately sponsored films and film series in Canada!

However, all this came back to mind with an interesting article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times on March 25 about something called ALEC --- the American Legislative Exchange Council --- which, he said provides template legislation to state and other legislators across the country of a right-wing nature. Specifically, Krugman says ALEC provided the template for Florida’s ridiculous Stand Your Ground law, under which anyone can shoot anyone else who he or she thinks might be threatening him or her, the law under which this black youth Trayvon Martin was recently murdered.

Similarly, Krugman says, ALEC has provided more than 50 bills that have passed into law in the State of Virginia, wholly written, in essence, by this corporate-funded and controlled agency dedicated to preserving and enhancing the private, anti-government bias in American society.

ALEC, says Krugman, is funded by such corporations as EXXON and the Koch Brothers, but has managed to keep a low profile, and was only recently exposed by some good investigative work by the Centre for Media and Democracy. Let’s hope no one in Canada is trying to emulate this success, although, with the encouragement of the Harper government, it would surprise me if we are to remain aloof from this kind of thing.

Not too subtly put, ALEC seems to be interested in making sure that dissenters end up in jail, that the prospect of getting them into jail is made easier for the network of Correctional Officers, lawyers and right-wing legislators who are always at work, burrowing away among the cherished, constitutionally-protected rights of American citizens.

The film we finally got out at the NFB is called Who Needs Unions? It is based on one particular lawyer who takes assignments from companies around the nation and lectures them on how to ensure that their workers never flirt with unionization, and, if they are already unionized, instructs the bosses on how to get rid of the unions. We’ve seen the results of this sort of thing when companies have quit Canada to take up work in places like Indiana or Virginia that don’t allow their workers to unionize.

It is an awesome thing to realize that in these countries that we consider to be free for most activities, the Wealth Owners --- as I insist on calling the people who run everything --- are always at work specifically trying to undermine and abolish the freedoms we take for granted.

We need to be on watch for something like ALEC popping up in
Canada. Tom Flanagan and his boys from the right-wing Western think-tanks are surely preparing the ground for something like this. After all, we know that a global attack on unions and the working class is already underway, and we see the results of it with every strike that is forbidden or ordered back to work, and we see it in the huge propaganda offensive being waged in the newspapers and other media against the rights of workers. Instead of shrinking from workers and the unions that protect them, this is a time we should be rallying around them and their right to organize as a matter of freedom of association, one of the supposed cherished qualities of our way of life.

BEIJING, CHINA - MARCH 09: China's Chongqing Municipality Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai (Right) makes an obeisance to a delegate after the third plenary meeting of the National People's Congress (NPC) at The Great Hall Of The People on March 9, 2012 in Beijing, China. China's Chongqing Municipality Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai said he was surprised to learn that his ex-police chief had run off to a US consulate during the the National People's Congress Chongqing group meeting today. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)Bo Xilai (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

. Link of the Day (2): March 27 2012: The estimable Pepe Escobar tells us what’s behind the sacking of Bo Xilai from the nine-member committee that runs China. He had been running the world’s biggest conurbation, with 31 million people, Chongqing in Sichuan province, and had a Mao-inspired programme for more equality. Nix on that, says the ruling oligarchy. Another revealing commentary from Al Jazeera.

. (“….cohesion, consensus and stability had to be the unified message, as China's fragilities are increasingly exposed: how to lift tens of millions more Chinese from an agrarian dead end, how to get decent healthcare for

. these tens of millions, how to fight multiple instances of party corruption. There's no question that Deng-inspired, modernised China has hurled a

. massive strategic, ideological and political challenge at a still-dazed and confused West.

. (“China is home to an immensely sophisticated, ancient civilisation. It harbours an ocean of humanity, and it has been modernising for only three decades (which is only a minute by Chinese standards). The Bo episode was

. just a minor detail. We will only have a clear picture where China will be in 2020 after next autumn, or by the spring of 2013. But make no mistake: stability, as Buddhism tells us, is an illusion. China's leaders are now riders on the storm.”)

New Haven, Connecticut viewed from an airplane en route to Bradley International Airport (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Link of the day: March 27 2012: A US editor and lecturer gives some pointed lessons about the land of the free: John Stoehr of New Haven reflects on the militarization of the US state, and the crushing of dissent, on Al Jazeera.

My Log 299: A weekend subject to the CBC’s (right-wing) commentariat: why are we subjected to this?

9Français : Thomas Mulcair le 23 avril 2011 à Montréal lors de la campagne électorale fédérale (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I spent the weekend watching the NDP leadership convention, and marveling at the implacably right-wing tone of the CBC’s elected commentariat.

As I said in an earlier post, I voted for Peggy Nash, on the grounds she was the most left-wing of the candidates, with a local second for Paul Dewar, a nice fellow, and Thomas Mulcair third. So, apparently, by the third ballot, my vote was cast for Mulcair, and I was hoping he would win it. I watched half of it on CPAC, anchored by the plodding Peter Van Dusen, and the CBC, for the first day under command of Evan Solomon, and for the Saturday orchestrated by the CBC pillar of the establishment Peter Mansbridge.

One thing I noticed immediately about Mansbridge that many others may not have noticed was that he was allowing himself many jokes, sardonic in tone for the most part, about the whole enterprise, as if the NDP was not really something to which so notable a figure as Mansbridge should lend his authority. I never remember ever hearing this tone from him before, certainly not in the many leadership contests for the Liberals and Tories that I have heard him performing.

So that was a slightly jarring element, not noticeably compensated for by the fact that every hour or two he seemed to feel the need to straighten up and fly right, as it were, pulling himself up and trying, as he put it, “to see things in perspective.” At these moments he tried to give an objective overall account of what we had been watching, whose seriousness made its absence in his previous behavior all the more striking.

Mansbridge was presiding over the full range of what I can only call the CBC’s Commentariat, that phalanx of mostly conservative commentators that they push at us night after night, week after week, month after month. The only one missing was the hapless Kevin O’Leary, the uber-conservative millionaire entrepreneur with whom the CBC apparently has been conducting a passionate love affair ever since they heard him pronounce over and over on Dragon’s Den that nothing matters but money, only the money counts, where is the money, and how can I make money out of this?
So entranced were they by the revelation of this constricted view of life that O’Leary began to crop up on all sorts of programmes, such as the Lang and O’Leary Exchange, others whose names I have forgotten, and the peculiar exercise in colonialism, Redemption, Inc, in which he decided to pick half a dozen ex-convicts, and give them a second chance, as the programme put it, by offering $100,000 (“of his OWN money,”) to whichever of them could convince him they had the royal jelly of entrepreneurship. Each week, the culminating sequence was surely one of the most peculiar ever screened by the CBC --- a sequence in which, having chosen his failure, O’Leary shuts himself in a room with the guy (or gal) and lectures him or her like a district commissioner in the old colonial empire days.

Well, thank heaven, O’Leary didn’t appear at rhe NDP convention. But all of Mansbridge’s other pals did: the so-called Issues panel, with its relentlessly establishmentarian bias; the Insiders, some political operatives who purported to tell us the unvarnished facts about real politique; and then some of Evan Solomon’s pals from the Power and Politics sessions on the late afternoons of every day. As this paragraph might suggest, palsmanship is the prevailing mode of CBC political broadcasting.

These latter were particularly objectionable in the circumstances, especially one called Ian Capstick, a baby-faced political operative, formerly employed by the NDP apparently, whose fatuous opinions about the quality and value of various speeches was forced down our throats for reasons that remain obscure to me still. Why the hell were these people constantly telling us what they thought? Are we idiots that we cannot be trusted to watch proceedings, judge them, and make up our own minds?

Particularly egregious were the comments on Thomas Mulcair’s final speech: quite misleading in their emphasis, and judged according to some standard imposed by these commentators that probably no one else shared.

On CPAC Van Dusen and his colleagues kept taking phone calls from people watching the programmes, many of whom commented on how refreshing it was to have the proceedings straight, without the intermediary of this horde of doubtful commentators provided by the CBC, and subtly designed, as almost all political programming on the CBC is, to denigrate anyone left of centre.

( I should add here a word of praise for an excellent production on

CPAC by Peter Van Dusen of a history of the NDP, screened just after the result was announced, with particular reference to the work of Jack Layton, a documentary in which he leaned heavily on the well-informed and particularly interesting comments of James Laxer, who might have introduced a note of realism into the CBC’s coverage, if he had been asked).

Anyway, we came through it all. Some people stood out heroically, notably Charlie Angus, the NDP who has been such an effective defender of the people of Attawapiskat. And there were some memorable moments: while the commentariat droned on about how tough it was going to be for Mulcair to repair the damage caused by the election, Mulcair himself was embracing Libby Davies, deputy-leader of the caucus, and announcing she would remain in the same position, even though she supported one of the other candidates. Thank heaven for that: Libby is one of the ornaments of the House of Commons, a great lady and an effective MP.

Now, all I am hoping for is that Mulcair will chew up and spit out Stephen Harper over the next three years, and sweep into power in the next election. Don’t bet against it.

My Log 298: History tells us Broadbent is talking nonsense: Mulcair could be the man to take on and get rid of Harper

Thomas Mulcair, who seems to have the old leaders of the NDP shitting their pants, came to Ottawa the other night to meet supporters in a pub. He arrived to applause from the faithful, made his way around the room, shaking hands, and eventually came to the table where I was sitting beside the wall, having withdrawn to the least noticeable spot available. He shoved out his hand towards me, which I had to shake, and asked me my name. I told him. He said, “Were you a journalist?” I admitted to the heinous crime. “I was delivering the Montreal Star when you were writing in it,” he said. And moved on.

So at least I know he has a prodigious memory.

The ridiculous statement made recently by Ed Broadbent, attacking Mulcair with what might be called some viciousness, in this context, seems to confirm that he is the front-runner in the race. He is obviously a very smart guy, he has presence, gravitas, and seems to be the kind of guy who could take on Harper and beat him. What more would we need in a leader?

Well, there is the old, troubling problem that always faces social democratic parties, which is, faced with the implacable hostility of the media and the Wealth Owners, do they turn themselves into their political enemies in an effort to get elected? The history in the English-speaking world is clear enough: without doing that, social democratic parties have seldom had the popularity to get elected.

The great triumph of the British Labour Party in 1945 was one such occasion. But the fact was that this party, founded in 1905 by the trades union movement with the purpose of defending the rights of workers, had in its forty years of existence fallen under the control of a group of university-educated nobs who tended to lack the iron in their souls that a really revolutionary political leadership really needs to get things done.

Here, a brief history lesson might be of advantage in helping to judge Mulcair. The British Labour Party always had a radical left-wing made up of the solid core of the more radical workers and their representatives, and of left-leaning intellectuals. In a country like England, the so-called “embrace of the duchesses” was never far away, always a potential menace, and Ramsay Macdonald, when he had the opportunity in 1931, showed that he had fallen for it, betrayed the movement, and besmirched the name of democratic socialism for a generation.

Brave souls laboured on in the run-up to the war, and when Labour swept all before it in the aftermath of the war --- which most Englishmen thought was fought for social democracy --- the government they formed under Clement Atlee contained quite a number of people who had already quit the Labour Party at least once, formed themselves into a coherent left-wing group, and HAD BEEN READMITTED to the party. So, their most effective minister, Aneurin Bevan, a Welsh miner, pushed through their national health service against overwhelming odds and in 1960 died as a genuine working-class hero, a man of remarkable gifts; their chancellor of he exchequer was Stafford Cripps; others, such as Harold Wilson, later a Prime Minister, were in prominent positions.

In Canada the history has been somewhat different. Canada, even those sections of Canadian society with progressive prejudices, never has had the advantage of a huge working class of politically active people. The CCF was a rural protest movement. (I am not denigrating that: many years later, when I was on a book tour across the country and taking phone in messages from listeners, I can testify that the most intelligent bunch of callers I ran across were in Regina, whose farmers were still fully aware of global politics, and knew what they were talking about, a legacy of the CCF movement’s success.)

When the CCF sensibly merged with the union movement to form the NDP in the 1960s, the imperatives of democratic socialist parties that had shown up in other countries (the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand all had exhibited the same characteristics) became evident in Canada. The Lewis family followed Tommy Douglas in establishing a dominant position in the party, and one of the bad effects of this was that when a group of brilliant intellectuals and leftists rose in the party to challenge them, the son, Stephen Lewis, at that time head of the Ontario DNP, drummed them out of the party. AND THEY WERE NEVER ALLOWED BACK IN.

Thus, Canada’s NDP, from the point of view of the left, was emasculated at a fairly early stage.

I mention all this because of the hand-wringing that the left --- myself included --- is engaging in over the possibility that this former Liberal, Thomas Mulcair, might ruin the leftist credentials of the NDP. From my point of view, they already lie in tatters. It hardly seems worth it, to agonize over the possibility that he might change the party and drag it to the right. He could scarcely drag it further to the right than such leaders as Harcourt in BC, Blakeney and Romanow in Saskatchewan, Schreyer and Doer in Manitoba have already done.

Even so, they were, and are, better than the other parties.

So my message is that we should accept Mulcair if he is elected, and work with him to get rid of Harper, come what may, and, as they say, the devil take the hindmost.

The essential thing is to change this government. A Mulcair-led government would be so much better than this Harper mob that the mouth positively waters at the prospect.

I have some worries about him myself. For example, he is said to be likely to follow a sort of Harper-Obama line in abasing himself to Israel, although to any modern progressive it is undeniable that the once-admired state of Israel has turned into a harsh apartheid state that is cruelly oppressing its subject peoples. No doubt where we should belong in such a confrontation.

Even so, I will shed no tears if Mulcair wins the race and emerges as our new leader. At least he is someone we can rally round in our effort to change the government.