JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The best government money can buy.

America now has only the superficial appearance of democracy.

It is in fact a plutocracy.
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Campaign finance reform is almost impossible in the U.S.

And the main reason for that assertion is that the American Supreme Court has ruled: 1) that corporations are individuals under law; and 2) that giving money to campaigns is a form of free speech under the Bill of Rights.

How did that bizarre situation happen?

Year after year, appointments made to that court have moved it further and further to the extreme right.

Just think about the position Harper is in to reshape our Court, and you will have every reason to feel afraid for our future as a democratic nation.
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Harper’s long term strategy includes adopting something resembling the American system of finance.

That provides a subtle way of tipping our politics permanently towards the right wing, since money is so important to “getting a message out,” “defining an issue,” and creating “name-recognition” – among other manipulative concepts of political marketing.

He already eliminated government support for parties – unfairly characterizing an enlightened policy with pejorative words – and as we can all plainly see, he works tirelessly to serve special interests in a position to advance large sums.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED COMMENTS TO A COLUMN BY MARGARET WENTE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Margaret Wente is back with her favorite cheap-trick “analysis” of a serious matter.

She gets one person who has written a book or is known for his/her views on a topic and treats the person’s unproved notions as authoritative research, here that person is Jonathan Haidt.

She did the same thing in Iraq some years ago, quoting the infamously one-sided scholar on the Mideast, Bernard Lewis.

She did it in Vancouver where she was supposed to be studying free-injection sites and sourced a single prejudiced “authority.”

Her method represents hack journalism at its most developed. It just happens to be one of the basic techniques of propaganda too.

It’s all very much like the notorious legal practice of expert witnesses: a single expert witness is brought into the courtroom and paid for his/her one-sided opinion in hopes of influencing the jury when indeed the reality is that hundreds of experts disagree and only their full range of views offers the state of the truth.

Her “authority” in this case just doesn’t begin to get it right, offering a specious notion dressed up as an idea.

The political Right’s success anywhere is not owing to a better understanding of human nature. That’s actually rather a sophism and an indirect way of saying what would read as foolishness were it phrased more clearly: the Right is right.

The Right’s success is owing to a couple of extremely basic factors.

The first is money and lots of it.

We always and everywhere observe the Right pandering to special interests for campaign funds.

Money doesn’t buy a seat in a legislature, at least not yet, but it gives politicians the wherewithal to market and advertise and travel and put on an impressive show (everything from stages and backdrops and music and big flags and the ease to ship them around quickly like a travelling rock band) and just saturate the airwaves with their pancaked faces, fluffed hair, and bleached teeth.

And then there are constant polls to test the effect of statements day by day, sophisticated polls that are very costly to run.

We know marketing and advertising work: tens of billions are spent every year just to sell this versus that soda pop or burger or deodorant, and the companies spending those vast fortunes know they are not squandering their money.

It is no different in politics.

Human beings are highly susceptible to suggestions, only the suggestions must be cleverly phrased and they must be tailored to the needs of the individuals or groups – the job of marketing. It is very costly to create and tailor these suggestions across millions of people.

Genuine issues have long receded into obscurity in elections. Rather we get costly advertising pitches designed to just suggest a position on a matter of public importance, and we get swirling dust about non-issues like patriotism, religious views, families, or flags.

And just whom do you think it is that has the best access to money?

Second, there is what we might call the stupidity factor. It is an established fact that conservative views tend to be correlated with lower intelligence. Like all correlations in statistics this one does not hold in every individual case, but it very much does hold on average.

It doesn’t take a great effort to sell stupid people: just look at the millions who bought books and tickets supporting that total air-head, Sarah Palin.

When you direct your appeal to this group, it doesn’t take much imagination or hard work to come up with the right words.

Witness Rob Ford’s (relative) success: he’s actually convinced that if he asks people in general, people who have no idea of costs or finances or urban planning, about wanting subways, that he has earned a mandate to build them. But it is an illusion, one built on asking a simplistic question of lots of people with no background in the subject being asked. It much resembles asking a very young child whether she wants to be a princess or he a magician or armored knight.

Were the same question put, as it should be: here are the choices and briefly here are the costs and taxes and difficulties associated with each, the results would be quite different.

It is actually part of the approach of genuinely stupid politicians – the Sarah Palins, the Rob Fords, the George Bushes – to elicit public responses with the least possible thought or detail or accountability. That makes their jobs so much easier. And as any good advertising person knows, selling a complex idea is very difficult.
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“Liberal$ have lost the trust of Canadians. The need to learn some lessons about telling the truth from the Conservatives.”

A 39.6% majority represents lost trust in the other side? After all, this is not just about the Liberal Party, it is about liberal views.

This reader brings up, inadvertently, a major factor in our politics: our democratic system is broken.

There can be no mandate to do anything involving great change, change which affects everyone, when more than 60% of voters don’t want you in office.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY JOHN IBBITSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Speaking of being a “master of delivery,” consider Ignatieff’s ridiculous ad running over and over on CBC Radio, the one about his mother – yes, you heard right, his mother – and health care.

It is absolutely off-putting.

Instead of talking hard and seriously about a major issue, this so-called master of delivery talks about mom.

Who in his right mind is going to pay attention to that?

It’s a pathetic effort to play on emotions associated with motherhood to gain support. Yuck.

And it is clearly also a weak further attempt to cement the idea that he is, after all, a local boy.

Ignatieff has always been overrated as an intellectual, as a speaker, and as a man concerned with human rights.

Many people clearly see all this, and it’s why Ignatieff is falling on his face.

Again, what “master of delivery” plays Pa Kettle on a long cross-country bus trip and thinks he is doing anything worthwhile?

Playing Pa Kettle was already an admission of failure.

People aren’t listening because they know the Ignatieff Show is boring, and his season is about to be cancelled.

He will win only a bitter legacy of being responsible for Stephen Harper’s winning a five year term, free to tear apart the Canada so many of us love.

Ignatieff is the perfect example of hubris – a man of no political talents and not having the character to resist taking what was handed to him by some sorry backroom politicians.
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From another reader:

“Freedom of choice, Harper and, his Evangelical Christian Theo-Cons if successful at a Majority Government dream of a roll back of same-sex marriage laws plus enshrine fetal rights on the citizens of Canada”

Harper represents a far more pervasive threat than that, an act which would be next to impossible.

Harper will eliminate federal subsidies to parties, thus opening the gates to complete special-interest campaign contributions. You want to see what a set of disasters this can open up? Look at the United States where this is the way it’s done.

Supreme Court appointments represent the some kind of long-term danger as campaign-finance changes.

Harper will continue marching in lock-step with the United States on a huge range of issues, from purchasing the clunker F-35 which costs the GNP of a small nation to sending more Canadians on America’s now regular crusades against those with whom it disagrees and to a perimeter treaty and to giving the US a special place in our Arctic.

Of course, we will continue for years to hear intellectual trash about criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism. Maybe we’ll even get a law in that police-state direction.

He will build his new gulag of prisons, no matter what the cost.

The Foreign Service – Pearson’s beloved Foreign Service – will continue to be told that there are no such things as child soldiers.

Our reputation internationally goes from being another Sweden to being another Pinochet’s Chile.

Program cuts to end the deficit. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED COMMENTS ON A COLUMN BY RICK SALUTIN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

These truly nasty men of Harper’s are gradually destroying the entire fabric of Canada’s international reputation.

Our reputation included fairness and balance in the Middle East, as elsewhere.

Harper has said many provocative and unpleasant things to his own people, including suggesting that Canadians who criticize Israel are anti-Semites, a vile repetition of a favorite attack on critics by apologists for Israel’s bloody excesses.

Peter Kent has always been a second-rater, a man not particularly astute or even interesting to listen to, now a junior minister with a junior mind at best. Where does he dare suggest we are committed to going to war for Israel, or anyone else for that matter?

Where in God’s name does he think he receives that kind of authority?

Of course, it is from his bully boss, Stephen Harper, who tells everyone in his creepy little party what to say unless they want a chair hurled at them in caucus.

I truly cannot believe that the Alberta-derived bunch of Harper’s ministers and supporters – truly, mainly the classic WASP-types – are that attached to Israel.

And they cannot be seeking just votes with this inappropriate demonstration of loyalty to one small state, Israel: the Canadian Jewish community is in fact a fairly small one, I believe on the order of 1 to 2% of population.

So what motivates this foreign-policy obsession, for no other word is adequate?

I do recall Heather Reisman, who supported the Liberals, getting upset with them for not being enthusiastic enough about Israel. I believe they were only trying to be fair, but that is not how Ms Reisman saw it, and she was public in her criticism.

Ms Reisman is of course a successful and well-off business person, and Canada has produced several prominent Jewish families of great success and wealth.

Traditionally, many Jews supported liberal or progressive parties because of their own history of hardships and discrimination.

But the often ghastly human-rights behavior of the state of Israel now makes a terrible wedge issue for Canadians of Jewish descent, and politicians like Stephen Harper smell opportunity, opportunity for large campaign donations.

Effectively, Harper seems eager to trade the genuine long-term interests of Canada and all of its citizens, interests in maintaining a precious reputation for fairness and decency, for the short-term potential of substantial campaign contributions in the face of an ugly international situation.

Were I a Jewish Canadian concerned about Israel’s future, I would hardly be comforted by that kind of transaction in pretended loyalty.

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“As a country, we should stand against terrorism, not sit on the fence to placate barbarians.”

Yes, absolutely.

The only trouble is that the person making that comment, like so many others these days, equates barbarians with Muslims.

Pure and absolute prejudice.

Everyone with eyes and ears and a working brain regards Operation Cast Lead as the purest barbarism.

And so too Israel’s horrific attack on Southern Lebanon.

I do believe we have more to fear from an organized state sinking into barbarism than we do from malcontent individuals or even groups. Far more.

A state, moreover, armed with nuclear weapons and ugly stuff like nerve gas.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GARY MASON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Rise again?

You mean as in “The South will rise again”?

This is a silly piece.

First, no matter how badly hurt the US is, a place of that size and wealth is not disappearing. Will it be diminished? Yes, to a certainty.

Second, all of America’s problems are self-inflicted. The wars, the financial crisis, the healthcare mess.

The real problem in America is its inability to govern itself, and it is truly starting to show like elbows through a frayed jacket.

In this it is very much like a huge corporation. When times are good and the operations side of the business is healthy, management appears good and is full of praise for itself.

But when unexpected twists come, when technological leaps forward have made your operations obsolete, or when your main source of wealth is depleted (as oil), management generally is revealed for what it mostly is: a set of well-paid strutters upon a stage.

Despite the horrific fears of financial disaster, amazingly few steps have been taken by the American government to assure a smoother future. Contrast to its insane over-reactions to every hint of terror.

And there are tons of problems yet to resolved. The defaults on mortgages are still going on. The huge cash payout to the financial industry served only as a temporary fix. The very payments to the investment banks really only were a dose of more of the same, spend now and don’t worry about tomorrow.

Obama has waited too late to limit the big investment banks, a step he has just announced. He should have promptly gone after increased regulation when they were down and shamed.

Now they will fight him every step of the way with tens of millions of dollars in lobby money and advertising.

And just look at the Supreme Court decision the other day, rescinding the last campaign-finance reform. It’s back to the jungle.

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“Paraphrasing Lincoln, America is still mankind’s last great hope. What could replace it? Eurabia? China? Let’s have a dose of reality.”

Lincoln was a sentimentalist, or at least indulged in sentimentalism while he built a throbbing war machine and crushed the South’s right to self-determination.

No one, including Americans, regards the country in that way anymore. It is a giant imperial complex with a veneer of democracy. Lincoln was, if you will, the father of what we call the military-industrial complex.