Politics beyond CNN

The Flame is Green (1971) - RA LAFFERTY wrote:
Things are set up as contraries that are not even in the same category. Listen to me:

the opposite of radical is superficial,
the opposite of liberal is stingy;
the opposite of conservative is destructive.

Thus I will describe myself as a radical conservative liberal.

Micheal Hudson wrote:

On Canada's economic model

I think 40 years ago when I was a financial adviser to the Canadian government, there was talk of the western provinces withdrawing from Canada because the whole of Canada is really being run by Ontario, and Ontario is being run by the banks. All this was taking place in World War II.

The problem is the role of the provinces generally in Canada.  Canadian provinces, are pretty much looted by the federal government. When you had the World War II industrialization and the Canadian politics centered on C.D. Howe federal government they deprived the provinces of really much say at all in their environmental laws, their tax laws or what they’re doing.

Canada is a malstructured. You could almost call it a failed economy, except that its natural resources are so rich that everybody can get wealthy off making holes in the ground and digging up the oil and polluting the environment. The whole history of Canada is essentially making money by emptying out the earth and creating holes in the ground and getting rich on it, and then going on to the next hole in the ground or forest to be carved down.

On Trudeau Jr.

The Liberal federal government is very right wing. Justin Trudeau’s father was Tony Blair before there was a Tony Blair, and the present Justin Trudeau is sort of a cross between Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton, but a little bit more to the right.  In the past people have called Canada’s Prime Minister a puppet of the Americans, but certainly Trudeau is not Trump’s puppet. If anything, he’s Hillary’s puppet.

On Canadian politics & the Green party

The NDP was pretty pessimistic before the election because the politics in Canada are pretty backward.

You would think that the Green Party’s platform that they go to the people would be the same platform, in terms of the environment, as the NDP. Except the liberals are saying, “Wait a minute. If you vote for us, the anti-environment party, we will classify you, the Greens, as a national party, so you’ll get a huge amount of funding. We can really give you a lot of money if you vote for us. Who are you going to vote for: money or your ideals?”

Well, being Canadians, they’re probably going to vote for the money.

If the Greens back the Liberals in this, that finishes them off. They will lose all credibility in British Colombia.  There’s also a precedent for this in the United Kingdom. Obviously a different culture, different system to some degree, but nonetheless the Liberal Democrats there were eviscerated after either a close relationship in parliament with the Conservatives so there is some precedent for this outside of the country, in another parliament.

Vancouver Real-Estate Boom

That means that Vancouver people will almost as screwed in natural resources as they’ve been screwed in the real estate boom they’ve had.

In the last 10 years, real estate prices have tripled in Vancouver. There’s not a single house in Vancouver – they drove me around a month ago to see for myself – that sells for less than a million dollars. So you can imagine, if you’re in Vancouver and you have to work at a real job, you have to borrow enough money from the bank to carry the mortgage on a million-dollar house. The Vancouverites are being forced out of their own city to the suburbs. So the city is now saying, well let’s build public transportation. But the transportation is to be funded by a tax on consumers and an income tax on workers instead of on the real estate developers that are going to end up the beneficiaries.

On forestry corruption

Trump’s levy of a soft wood tariff on Canada, saying that Canada has an unfair advantage against American soft wood producers. And its advantage is the degree of corruption that you have in the giveaway of natural resources in Canada. I’m told that they’ve given it to the forestry for cutting down. BC’s forests are only a half cent per per acre or something like that. It’s so trivial that Trump is absolutely correct in saying that the degree of corruption in Canada, in the federal party, in the give away of wood gives Canada an advantage over American soft woods.

Energy = Finance

Behind the power producers are the banks. 'Energy' really means finance. There’s a symbiosis between the banks, the bond holders and the energy industry. The bondholders and the banks want whatever is very expensive, and nothing is more expensive than a $12 billion dollar dam or a big hydro project. The ideal of the banks and the hydro project is not to give anything at all to the government. Almost any hydro project or energy project in Canada is going to screw the domestic province that it’s in.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/15/why-are-british-columbians-voting-liberal-against-their-own-interest/

Guardian.com wrote:
“If you want to register a ship for transport, you go to Liberia; if you want to play the stock market in a very aggressive manner, you go to the Cayman Islands. If you aim to create a mining company, you go to Canada” - Montreal-based author and researcher Alain Deneault.  

Unbeknown to most of its residents, Toronto is a city built on mining.

From Yonge Street to University, and from Queen to Front with some periphery around it, you have the world’s largest mining companies, lawyers, consultancies, all together in one area. All the banks are there, too. Nearly 75% of all global mining companies are headquartered in Canada and almost 60% are listed on the TSX. In 2015, more than half of all capital investment in the mining business traveled through the exchange. In fact, few, if any, other capital markets around the world are as specialised in a single industry as Toronto is in mining.

Toronto has obtained its unique position by offering major concessions to the industry. He points out that the Canadian government supports mining companies through various means, including structural biases in the courts, a regulatory framework that permits major speculation, tax incentives and diplomatic assistance. “Canada was shaped in order to support the mining industry,” says Deneault.

In 1861, the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) was formally incorporated, by the turn of the century Toronto had become the “focus for speculative trading in mining stocks, not only by Ontarians and other Canadians but by the British and Americans as well,” historian Ian Drummond writes in Progress Without Planning.

And from the 1860s onward, the provincial government attempted to tax the mining industry, but faced staunch resistance from its wealthy leaders...

“Mining men,” writes historian Henry Nelles in Politics of Development, “were the leading advocates of non-partisan political leadership to reduce government spending, pare the public debt and debt-producing social services, and restore public confidence ... Above all, men such as these resented government, likening it to a great leech which sucked at the vitals of business with its taxes and burdened initiative with a crushing mass of regulations.”

In 1906, Ontario's new Conservative government passed the Mines Act – an open-entry legislation that remains on the books today. This act allows mining companies to lay claim to minerals sitting under virtually all public land, some private land, and First Nations reserves. This is still the act governing mining in 2017.

As Toronto has consolidated its position at the centre of the mining industry, questions have arisen about Canada’s willingness and ability to regulate the behaviour of transnational companies that have in many cases caused environmental devastation, and criminal acts of violence. [Hobb - which ranges from the use of the OPP riot-squads against striking Ontario miners in the 1920s to deals with CIA-installed governments in the 1950s who used death-squads against their opposition to the current use of private security force to rape and kill indigenous environmental activists.]

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/03/toronto-hidden-history-how-city-built-mining

rabble.ca wrote: When Canadian early childhood education and care (ECEC) was reviewed as part of a 20-nation study (2001-2006) and UNICEF's 25 nation report card (2008) showed Canada to be at the bottom that it became apparent that Canada is one of the worst of the world's ECEC laggards.

UNICEF's 2008 country rankings in The Child Care Transition showed how the 25 nations measured up on 10 key benchmarks of ECEC quality and access. Close to the bottom -- three or fewer checkmarks -- were most of what are termed liberal democratic countries (U.S.A., Ireland, Australia, Canada). At the top -- receiving eight to ten checkmarks were the social democratic states (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland).
anada, tied with Ireland, was at the very bottom, meeting only one benchmark. This picture illustrates that political ideas are critical in shaping social programs and help explain why ECEC in Canada is the way it is.

Danish sociologist Gösta Esbing-Andersen described three types of countries. Three worlds of welfare capitalism (1990), a key writing about differences in how advanced capitalist states (developed countries) provide social welfare programs. Canada's privatized childcare, with its stingy public funding and limited government role, fits neatly into the liberal democratic category while the Nordic countries make up the social democratic cluster.

Countries like Canada are described as emphasizing "the privacy of the family and the primacy of the market"; liberal democratic welfare regimes are characterized by low provision of social services and low-income eligibility testing rather than the universal entitlements for a broad citizenry used by the social-democratic (and other) countries. Heavy reliance on parent fees, targeted, not universal services, fragmentation of care and education, and enthusiasm for unregulated and for-profit childcare are all liberal-democratic hallmarks. And -- as the UNICEF and OECD studies and other research and analysis show -- this means ECEC provision that offers poor access and too-often poor or mediocre quality.

There is a second key political characteristic that also helps explain why Canada's childcare is the way it is -- one that helps us understand why federal governments have often tended to stay away from ECEC, and why ECEC is such a hodge-podge of access and quality across Canada; Canada is a federation (like the USA, Australia, Switzerland, Germany), not a unitary state like Sweden (France, Denmark, Britain).

This means that in Canada, power and authority are divided between the federal government and the provinces/territories. Federations vary from each other in various ways such as how centralized or decentralized they are; Canada is considered to be quite decentralized among federations, meaning that provinces have considerable responsibility. When Canada was established in 1867, some powers -- taxation, defense, criminal code -- became a federal responsibility while education, health and social programs, especially services, became provincial responsibilities.

http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/child-care-canada-now/2017/05/two-reasons-canada-cant-become-sweden-when-it-comes

The First Signs Of A National Mobilization For War Are Appearing wrote:

The First Signs Of A National Mobilization For War Are Appearing

The Trump Administration has begun to employ a 'national security' standard in its considerations of critical trade issues. The White House ordered the commerce department to investigate whether low-price steel imports are compromising U.S. national security. A battle is brewing over the attempts by two U.S. businessmen to buy the only U.S. mine capable of producing rare earths, minerals critical to the production of many high-end electronic systems. China now produces 95 percent of all rare earths. Unfortunately, one of the two businessmen represents a Chinese company and the other a Russian one. Look for this to be an important case for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

The Trump Administration has proposed increasing the size of the U.S. Navy from its current total of some 278 ships to over 350. This is just part of a general call emanating from Capitol Hill, defense experts, and, not surprisingly, the Pentagon to rebuild, resize, and modernize the U.S. military.

For the Army, this means moving forward with near-term modernization and improvements to its existing fleets of tanks, fighting vehicles, artillery, rotorcraft, and rockets. For the Air Force, it is reaching an economic rate of F-35 production as soon as possible. For the Navy, it is all about the numbers of Virginia-class SSNs, Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, Ford-class aircraft carriers, LX(R) amphibious warfare ships, and small combatants (Littoral Combat Ship or new Small Surface Combatant).

Without question, a military buildup will require lots of dollars for defense.

What we are seeing could be the first signs of national industrial mobilization. To an extent, what is happening in the United States today mirrors the early 1930s as the international security environment fractured and a number of hostile powers in Europe and the Far East rose to prominence.

http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/05/12/the_first_signs_of_a_national_mobilization_for_war_are_appearing_111371.html

sss wrote:President Trump's senior adviser, son-in-law and Orthodox Jew, Jared Kushner personally called the CEO of Lockheed Martin during a meeting with a Saudi delegation earlier this month to ask her to cut the price of a missile defense system, The New York Times reported Thursday.

The call was part of Kushner's effort to secure a roughly $110 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia before Trump's scheduled trip to the kingdom on Friday.