JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFERY SIMPSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Muscularity?

Is that what you call the killing of thousands of innocent people – often women and children – by buzz-cut thugs at the controls of computer games with real missiles?

Is that what you call having “kill lists” of American citizens?

Is that what you call the horrors secretly initiated in Syria?

Or the fact that the CIA’s torture gulag was never dealt with?

Well, muscularity has definitely been the image sought by some governments. Posters of Mussolini typically featured that quality.

For Canadians and most of the rest of the world, it really does not matter which of these sociopaths is elected.

Romney has always been an unattractive, nasty-minded figure, and Obama has thrown off virtually every quality that made him once attractive and a source of hope.

The only issue that makes any difference for the future of world affairs between these two is their degree of subservience to Israel.

Romney literally grovels to the madmen now running Israel.

Obama, while not setting the standards of toughness towards Israel required for genuine peace, has at least not quite grovelled.

And he has so earned the hatred of Netanyahu that that lunatic is busy interfering in an American election with ads made for Florida, a criminal act by the way under American law.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

I think you may be right, Mr. Simpson, as you so often are, being the country’s most astute political commentator after the late Jim Travers.

But the Liberals’ great strategic blunder, pre-dating this insipid election effort, was appointing Ignatieff as their leader.

The insiders responsible for this did our country a grave disservice, as will become painfully evident if Harper gets even the slimmest of majorities.

Ignatieff has almost no political skill and appears to be a poor strategic thinker.

More than that, I think it remarkable that a man with the reputation of “intellectual” shows almost no original or innovative thought. I have heard nothing from him that makes me say to myself, well, that’s right.

And, for a guy who supposedly was such a human-rights figure, his voice is never heard on the great human-rights issues of our day, but then I knew his genuine record – not the puff – before he opportunistically made his return to Canada.

Now while there are virtually no good qualities in Harper – poor ethics, poor democratic values, pandering to groups, a poor record of appointments, and a shabby record of dismissing those he doesn’t want to hear from – you must grant him a great strategic grasp of our electoral process. He is a one-man show of extraordinary dark political skills.

A political anti-Christ, I think it fair to say. Not a leader, not an idea man, not a man of principle, but a calculating machine to achieve dominance – a very dangerous man indeed.

Some choice we are given.

No wonder people in Quebec are turning to Layton, who like Elizabeth May, actually stands for some principles, whether they are ones you agree with or not.

But that too is go-nowhere development.

Layton’s replacing some of Duceppe ‘s seats does not really change the dangerous political calculus that may see Canada damaged seriously over the next five years.

What a great irony that Ignatieff, the very man who literally sneered at Dion’s coalition, should be attacked by Harper for intending “to steal the election” with a coalition.

What a great disappointment that so many Canadians are revealed to be so poorly educated that they believe Harper’s school-yard name-calling.

So long as we have the situation we have in Quebec – where Conservatives and Liberals are not contenders – the only way to stop a minority tyrant-bully like Harper is through a coalition.

And coalition is both legal and entirely proper in a parliamentary democracy.

Dion understood that. The pathetic Ignatieff has not.
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“Promising to TAX more? Mr Simpson, I’m pretty sure that even Mr. Ignatieff isn’t that silly.”

Here again is the kind of stuff which painfully reveals lack of education in a good deal of our voting populace, and ignorant democracy is dangerous.

How does anyone like that think Harper will make his vast deficits disappear?

And, at the same time, pay for gigantic and unnecessary commitments like buying that costly clunker of a fighter plane and building a new gulag of prisons?

Of course, the simplistic answer is cuts, and I, as a retired professional economist, am not against judicious cuts.

But you cannot spend the way Harper spends and have a deficit like those Harper has created, and cut your way to a balanced budget.

People like the commenter do not understand that some of our program spending is actually a competitive advantage for Canada, health care being a chief one.

We spend about 2/3 per capita to what Americans spend on health care, and – the statistics speak loudly – we get better overall outcomes by measures such as population longevity and infant mortality.

It is largely because of our health care that traditionally American corporations such as the big auto companies have viewed Canada as an efficient place in which to invest.

Not because our workers work harder, not because they are better educated, but because they start on the job by the companies not having to buy the horribly costly and inefficient private health insurance they must buy in America.

And just so for other of our national programs.
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The single greatest cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is, and has long been, heath-care costs.

It is nothing to envy.

Anyway, readers, I think it quite possible that all the political sound and fury will be for nothing.

Despite Harper and his flaks’ constant blubbering about his economic management, when the other shoe falls in the United States, all bets are off.

People are still walking away from their mortgages there in huge numbers, and the country is spending money it does not have with wars on multiple fronts. It is also running unbelievable deficits in every account you care to mention, from the national budget to current accounts and to personal debt.

A gigantic economic tsunami is approaching the United States, and despite Harper’s childish bragging, it will not spare Canada.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Oh, yes, true words indeed.

But I fear they are good seed cast on barren ground.

The United States has demonstrated, time and again, that it is only capable of adjusting its governance after smashing its head into a wall, often after several times.

Its political system is a creaking wreck, a kind of man-made monster lumbering along, force-feed by special interest campaign contributions and marching to the drumbeat of outdated assumptions and truly ignorant superstitions.

Despite decades of declining real income, the American middle class remains moved by silly slogans like “the American Dream” and “America First,” much resembling the flock of some religious cult who even after being fleeced by its leaders insists the religion is true.

The United States is a plutocracy, perhaps as corrupt as France in 1788, and it is an overstretched world imperial power serving the narrow interests of its plutocrats, but always it is mouthing slogans about democracy and freedom and justice, largely dead and empty language, to its ordinary inhabitants.

People insulated from the effects of wars and bad times – the plutocrats and ruling establishment in Washington – just do not feel the impact of such terrible turns of event.

Elections only matter in the most nominal way in the United States, they are part of keeping the myths going, as we’ve seen so clearly in the case of Obama.

This bright, optimistic, and charming man took the world’s attention by storm after eight years of the rancid and hated George Bush.

But in two years what has he achieved? Almost nothing of consequence.

The wars go on. Indeed, they are now killing civilians weekly in Pakistan.

The Pentagon and the American intelligence apparatus have swollen into great wallowing beasts, consuming vast resources to no good purpose.

After a terrible financial catastrophe, what has been changed? Nothing, just countless billions given away to stimulate a temporary respite, paying for which threatens the very security and international position of the American dollar.

We see no meaningful legislation to regulate future financial excesses.

We hear not one voice speak about the painful sacrifices required to pay for all the ghastly excess of war and financial anarchy.

Do we see even one meaningful political change in the way elections are conducted and financed, something that might promise future reform? We do not.

Has anything changed, despite Obama’s early suggestion of a new policy direction, with America’s client state Israel and its terrible seemingly-endless abuse of millions?

Obama’s one big act, his health-care legislation, is an abomination, disliked by liberals and conservatives alike, an ugly ineffective costly compromise.

Has anything happened with the paranoid, democratically destructive legislation around American security, virtual police-state stuff which is unbelievably costly by every possible measure?

Nothing has changed. The election of 2008 might just as well not have taken place.

No individual, however bright and enthusiastic, can move the American establishment from its firm position of ignorance and selfishness and power.

And we all know what Lord Acton said about power.

His words apply to all power, no matter how established, even democratically-camouflaged power.
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If you want some interesting insight into the assumptions and attitudes of the American middle class, watch a few American real-estate, cable-channel television shows.

People often want three-car garages. They want granite counter tops. The want four bedrooms. They want three bathrooms. They want central air-conditioning.

They have saved no money. They are looking to finance on the basis of 100% mortgages.

And, perhaps worst of all, they are looking at subdivisions in the middle of nowhere, in Colorado or Texas or Arizona. Places which require cars for everyone and every single errand. Places which require twenty-four-hour-a-day air conditioning for major parts of the year. Places often with no long-term, dependable water resources, often genuine deserts.

Some of these shows actually deal with the results of the earlier excesses, people whose home prices have cratered, who owe huge amounts on their mortgages, people who are trying to sell ugly behemoths they can’t afford, and people who feel entitled.

Americans are entitled to walk away from homes and the loans which financed them when the value of the mortgage exceeds the value of the property, a fact not often appreciated in Canada where we honor contracts. They just hand the keys to the bank and go.

In buying homes, Americans often walk away from contracts too. That’s why in most places the signs in front of homes say they are “under contract” rather than “sold” during the interim between signing and closing. Realtors often keep showing homes “under contract” just in case. In America, for sure you do not know you have a valid sale until the little closing ceremony when money and keys are exchanged.

Another fact not always appreciated in Canada is that American home owners have long had the privilege of deducting the interest on their mortgages from their federal income tax. Yet even with this financial boost, still they cannot make a go of it, and for the simple reason that the deductibility has only encouraged still larger purchases and likely inflated prices.

Such shows tell us a great deal, exhibiting like educational films the results of America’s inability to govern itself sensibly. We see the grassroots reality of loose and chaotic government.

But when I say loose and chaotic government, I always exclude the intelligence monstrosity, the Pentagon, and America’s many and brutal police forces. Nothing loose there – just a quasi-police state taken for granted.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

FURTHER POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFERY SIMPSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

I do think in Harper’s late and reluctant statement, following the great events which riveted the world’s attention, say something profound, and not very pleasant, about the man.

He eloquently quoted the platitude about not being able to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Toothpaste?

Great God, how did those words fit this historic and rather magnificent moment?

Eighty million people toppling a dictator after thirty years of abuse, and our prime minister expresses regrets about not being able to put toothpaste back into a tube, not being able to return to the status quo ante?

What in God’s name do his mean and cringing words have to do with Canada’s historic reputation for love of freedom and justice?

Absolutely nothing.

The sense of these words only highlights what I wrote earlier.

Harper’s only focus has been on Israel’s paranoid and anti-democratic views of the matter, its desperate desire to keep a neighboring tyranny going, a tyranny that has served its narrowly-defined interests and convenience in the exercise of brutality for three decades.

Never mind what such a giant step forward in human freedom and decency means for Egypt and the world.

Harper’s statement also documents, in an excruciatingly public way, something of his rather bleak and ethically-ambiguous character.

There really is no other way to look at it.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Did Ottawa drag its feet on Mubarak?

Of course it did.

Why?

Well, hasn’t our thirty-percent prime minister declared himself one of the world’s chief defenders of Israeli interests and entered the lists as a crusader against anti-Semitism, regardless of how chimerical it may be?

And never mind all the other nasty forms of prejudice and oppression in this world: that one is special and requires his personal attention.

One only has to read the articles coming from Israel and from the Israeli apologists elsewhere during the brave demonstrations in Cairo to perceive an emotional crisis over the possible disappearance of a dictator Israel has depended on closely for thirty years.

Some of the pieces are remarkably revealing in their total self-interest and even paranoia and all of them lack regard for the larger principles of human rights and democracy.

That set of facts completely explains Harper’s silence.

Harper is a highly selective advocate of human rights and democratic values.

And his behavior through a genuinely historic crisis marks another sad act in the busy work of dismantling Canada’s international reputation for fairness and decency.
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From another reader:

“Stupid title from an uneducated twit.”

Now, surely, there’s the mark of an educated man, using language like that.

I do think someone who throws names around the way this anonymous person suits them far better than Jeffery Simpson, who, in general, is one of Canada’s most perceptive and astute columnists.

We haven’t seen democracy in Egypt yet?

Well, part of the reason is Israel’s support and dependence upon a dictator like Mubarak. Its constant efforts, day and night, to prop him up and use him.

Often unsaid, but nevertheless true, is the fact that Israel has been a major drag on the flowering of democracy in the Arab world.

Everything which happens within a thousand miles of Israel must be viewed through the lens of Israel’s narrow and often paranoid interests.

Iraq, previously the most advanced country in the Arab world, was unquestionably one with its previously growing middle class on the way to developing democracy after Hussein (who just happened to be a good buddy of the same United States Israel leans on until he took a turn against American policy).

Now it remains a hopeless wreck: a million dead, countless injured, treasures destroyed, and an economy in depression for a generation. And just who is it that insisted on attacking Hussein and whose narrowly-defined interests did that assault serve?

Only Israel and its apologists in the United States.

God, look at Gaza. A genuine free election, cleaner than the election of George Bush, and what does Israel do?

Arrests members of the government, threatens the leader with assassination – no idle threat coming from Murder Incorporated – refuses to even talk, breaks innumerable international laws by breaking off mail and funds to Gaza, imposes a brutal blockade designed to starve people out, pressures its friend Mubarak to build walls, and kills unarmed humanitarians on the high seas.

My, there’s a set of responses which certainly demonstrate great respect for democracy and human rights.

The entire tone of this person’s comment, as well as its almost complete lack of logic, demonstrates exactly what I addressed in my previous comment. Israel’s apologists know almost no bounds in their demands and pleadings for Israel’s self-defined interests.

Israel can only be a normal country if it behaves like one, and it is difficult to see one act or policy which in sixty years reflects normal national behavior, including respect for neighbors, respect for laws, respect for international obligations, and respect for democratic values and human rights – this last particularly involving anyone outside the borders of Israel’s own peculiar democracy, defined, as it is, to serve only one ethnic/religious group.
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To another reader:

How can things get worse in Egypt?

They cannot.

And you repeat the historical fallacy of comparing today’s Egypt to 1978’s Iran.

For a dozen reasons, too long to list, that is completely inaccurate.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Well said, Jeffery Simpson.

I believe there is an important contemporary political phenomenon with conservatives few have carefully observed.

As you say, fiscal conservatism has been dead for decades.

Both Reagan and Bush were big, big – truly reckless – spenders.

Yet they always were reluctant to pay the bills for their spending, typically cutting taxes again and again.

Not paying your bills is a fundamental violation of traditional conservative views and ethics, the one part of conservative philosophy I have always regarded well.

So what is a contemporary conservative?

A politician who tries to buy votes with tax cuts. Long ago, conservatives would say that liberal politician tried to buy votes with big, new programs. The conservatives finally hit upon a counter strategy of buying votes with tax cuts.

Tax cuts had the additional advantages of crippling the government’s ability to grow and creating a temporary Keynesian stimulus to the economy.

It has been an effective cheap trick, especially in the United States where hatred of the “fed’rah” government is bred in the bone.

And again, as you say, the one area where there are never cuts, only increases, is in so-called defense (so-called because just ask yourself, when was the last time the United States launched a war to defend itself?). This part of conservatism has applied primarily to the United States, a nation that regards itself as democratic yet continually behaves as a rather arrogant world imperial power.

Indeed, many Americans through a long and complex process of indoctrination Mussolini would have admired – in everything from marching bands, pledges, football homecomings, flags on porches, speeches, songs, social pressures of every description, plus the presence of the military everywhere including recruiters in every campus and high school – almost regard the very meaning of their country as a grotesquely-enlarged cartoon eagle, with its talons out, ready to strike.

And for so many young Americans of humble origin and limited prospects, the military is the key to a paid education, their part of the cheap political slogan, the “American Dream.” Plus a sense of worth, unavailable in McJobs, in a place which so exalts uniforms.

The only way you keep that whole thing rolling forward is with more spending and, truly, more wars – completely against the attitudes of most of the Founding Fathers who were generally traditional conservatives and afraid of standing armies.

So mindless support of the military-industrial complex – thank you, President Eisenhower, the last right-thinking Republican – has become a fundamental part of American conservatism.

Only recently, with the intense influence of the United States in Alberta and thereby on Stephen Harper do we see a bit of this poisonous philosophy coming to Canada.

Of course, the great game American conservatives have devised has within it the seeds of its own destruction.

Much as the former Soviet Union always contained the seeds of its own destruction – immense inefficiencies and endless spending on the unproductive military and security establishment.

The United States is unquestionably stuck on a downward path towards losing its imperial status with vast economic and fiscal inefficiencies and unbelievable spending on a military which never creates anything but waste and destruction.

While the United States remains frozen, much like the proverbial deer in the headlights, countries like China, India, Brazil, and even Russia are making genuine progress as efficient competitors on a grand scale.
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“And this is why there’s a Tea Party movement spreading across North America. Less taxes, less government spending.”

Sorry, the Tea Party is nothing but more of the same old, same old.

There is nothing new in it, whatsoever.

There have been many versions of the same thing, including the “contract with America” of that pudgy old phony, Newt Gingrich.

Just look at the party’s hooking up with Sarah Palin, truly a pitifully ignorant person who understands nothing of economics or, indeed, much of anything else.

The Party is a vehicle – paid for by some wealthy people – to harness the discontent of so very many Americans who really do not understand what has happened to them.

And so many Americans are virtually trained to look for quick and easy answers, trained to respond to celebrities like Palin, and trained not to question the fundamental assumptions of their society.

America’s middle class is in an unavoidable spiral of decline. Real wages have fallen for many years. Its efforts to maintain its situation – through two people working per family and moving out to distant suburbs for cheap land – is about played out.

The world of suburban sprawl and two large cars is coming to an end with oil prices which are only going to go up long-term. And America’s lack of competitiveness in many fields only grows vis-à-vis up-and-coming states. So does its debt of every description. And so do the foolish expenses of its military-security complex.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

In fact, Peter Kent is the perfect appointment as Environment Minister.

“Environment” is a dirty word in Harperland, the ministry little more than a plaque on a door, and the minister little more than the name on the plaque.

And dear Mr. Kent has already demonstrated what nonentity he is, truly a pathetic figure, unqualified to be a decent department head at a Wal-Mart store.

So, Harper’s appointment is a marriage made in heaven.

Soviet citizens used to grumble, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

Canadians now can say, Harper will pretend to assign work on the environment, and Peter will pretend he’s doing it.
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“Harper likes to have around him people who don’t question him…”

Always the way with bullies, and this prime minister is a true bully.

What a sad sack lot he has had for ministers!

The current health minister won’t even go on radio news shows to be questioned about anything. She has done some ridiculous things, and likely is too stupid to understand what an embarrassment she is.

There’s that wonderful man with the biker-gang girlfriend who left secret papers at her house for weeks.

And the wonderful gal who had to be escorted out of an airport by police after blowing a fit, who never opened her mouth without sounding like a recording tape from the Betsy Wetsy doll, and whose husband was abusing substances, the justice system, and every regulation there is for lobbying.

The new environment minister, as junior minister of nothing, practically declared Canada at war for Israel. What was he smoking? Is he competent enough to answer a doorbell?

And how else do you explain Peter MacKay?
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A note to those who regard the focus of an environment ministry as only the subject of climate change.

We have fish in the Athabasca River which resemble atomic mutants from a 1950s science fiction film.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

 

Obama’s trouble in Washington is pretty much the same thing we are experiencing with Harper.

Harper’s model is the Republican Right: offer no cooperation, take extreme measures, and endlessly insult the opposition.

Actually, “Republican Right” is a misnomer: the entire Republican party behaves this way, and this has been the pattern for our adult lifetimes.

It actually is the domestic political equivalent of Israel’s “iron wall” towards its neighbors.

No talents around conciliation will help in the least when your opponent is dedicated to be stubborn, unreasoning, and ruthless.

I’m glad Obama tried, but his breath is wasted.
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“Hope = Dope”

Surely the writer of that pathetic comment must recognize that Obama is an exceptionally intelligent person.

But in a country where Sarah Palin can command $100,000 for yelping a few times and where a certified moron like Bush can be president for two terms, bullsh-t baffles brains.

American national politics have become debased to an extraordinary extent, and it is solely the work of the Right which has settled into a philosophy of hooting and calling names and quoting God.

Our trouble, of course, is that that pernicious influence is flooding into our politics through Harper’s behaviors, much as BP’s oil is flooding the Gulf of Mexico.
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“Like Abraham Lincoln, right?

“And those heroic Democrats that were the originators of the KKK (look it up)? Defenders of the common man, right?”

 

 

That is a prime example of how a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Neither the Republican party nor the Democratic party are at all the same things they were in the early 1860s.

Only the names remain.

Indeed, in some ways, their roles have reversed.

Lincoln believed in strong central government, which was what the Civil War was truly all about.

Lincoln’s view is anathema to a Republican today.

The Democrats lost the South in the 1960s precisely because of the Civil Rights Voting act.

The Republicans today in many Southern states work hard and subtly to prevent blacks from voting. We saw this clearly in Florida.