If assessed lower taxes do corporations create more jobs or just accumulate more wealth?  The first rule of corporate economics is that you do not use your own money for investment, you always borrow.  Profits are passed to corporate executives and shareholders.  Plant expansion, R & D, etc. (i.e. the stuff that creates jobs) is always financed with borrowed money.  Therefore the quick answer to whether the Tory corporate tax cuts will create jobs is no.

Will corporations flee to countries with lower tax rates?  If a corporation relocates to Mexico or to some other developing country is the tax rate the difference?  If it were then all corporations would flock to whichever country has the lowest taxes today.  Corporations would need to be constantly relocating until finally all states offered them full tax exclusion.  Our current corporate tax rate is half that of our southern neighbour.  Shouldn’t corporations should be flocking across the border as we speak.  And if corporate taxes existed nowhere, what then would tilt the scale to country A or country B?  The scenario is of course absurd.  Tax rates are a part of the equation but they are not the whole story.  Labour exploitation and increasingly weak or nonexistent environmental protection are more powerful incentives for at least manufacturing operations.

Okay, corporations are huge nasty bloodsuckers and no they probably don’t deserve a tax break but you and I do.  Right?  Why shouldn’t we be able to keep more of our paychecks.  Sometimes it seems that Ottawa and the provinces have their hands so deep in our pockets it may soon cross the line into something obscene.  If the government cut taxes I would have more money to spend.  Right?  Wrong!  If the government continues to cut taxes for you and I and the corporations you will have far less money to spend.

We pay taxes to the government for goods and services in return.  The Conservative plan is that we should pay less to the government for fewer services.  We cannot have it all.  The goods and services provided by the government cost money.  If government revenue declines then something has to go.  Health care?  Education?  Pensions?  What will it be?  The Conservative’s know this but say we can then purchase these services ourselves with the money we are no longer paying in taxes.  What they don’t tell you is that you will be paying more.  It is obvious if you just stop and think about it, which explains the Conservative gutting of education at both the provincial and federal level.  Wouldn’t want anybody out there with the capacity to think now would we.  I should maybe mention here that the Liberals are really Tories in red ties and have contributed almost equally to this overall misconception.  They may have less disdain for your intelligence than the Conservative party but they still work for corporate Canada, not you or I.

Let’s look at a practical metaphor.  I have to purchase a new toilet for my downstairs bathroom this year.  When I go to a plumbing supply store to buy one toilet I am going to pay full retail price.  I might get a small discount from one or another seller to entice me to purchase at his establishment rather than the one down the street.  But because I am only purchasing one unit the seller is limited in how much he can discount and still make a profit.  Profit is absolutely necessary for the seller to earn a living.  However, if one hundred of us got together because we all need a new toilet for our homes the seller’s latitude on price increases.  For a purchase of 100 units at the same time the discount can be much larger and the seller can still earn a living.  Everybody is happy.  As the number of purchasers increases, the price per unit can decrease.  This is basic economics.

Conservative policy wants us to each purchase what we need individually rather than collectively.  They say this is a saving.  In the case of policies like child care they actually tell us that this will lead to economic efficiencies.  What non sense.  Are the Conservatives just too simple to understand this basic principle of economics, the principle of economies of scale.  The Conservative party markets itself as the party of good business sense, the party of fiscal responsibility.  Either they are lying about this and they really are the party of business ineptitude or they are lying to the Canadian people that they are trying to save them money or as they put it keep more of your money in your pocket.  The opposite is the real truth.  Tory tax cuts will cut a deep swathe through not just your pockets but your savings and equity.

Political parties do not do things without reason and contrary to some popular opinion seldom do things out of sheer stupidity.  The Conservative party is not the party that will keep more of your hard earned money in your pocket.  Rather it is the party that will put more of your hard earned money into the pockets of their corporate friends.  Not only will corporations contribute less to the society and infrastructure upon which their profits depend but will receive a windfall in the extra profit from each of us lonely independent actors paying more for those services necessary to sustain our quality of life.  It is a win-win for corporations and a lose-lose for you.  Actually in recent years it has been a win-win-win for corporations — lower taxes, higher profits and a great big present of much of the money you gave to the government to buy services which they then never fully supplied because they diverted that money to their buddies on Bay Street.

But back to unemployment and the current financial situation.  Disasters like the current crisis should be learning tools.  They are opportunities to rethink a number of previous ideas and practices, from how we regulate financial markets to how we respond to citizens in crisis.  On the latter our system of assistance at all levels needs to be reviewed.  Our social safety net developed ad hoc, various programs appearing at various times as needs arose or ideas presented themselves.  It is time now to systematize their delivery. 

Every Canadian political party has at one time or another toyed with the concept of a guaranteed annual income.  The Conservative Party preferred to call it negative income taxing.  But all parties have considered this basic idea.   There are a number of draw backs which prevented implementation of the policy; start-up costs, bureaucratic reorganization and federal provincial relations.

Under a guaranteed annual income scheme the government would sent every citizen a flat monthly stipend.  Whatever a citizen earned over that would be taxable.  Therefore those who are not in need of the money would have it taxed back.  Our current Old Age Security program works in a similar way.  It is universal.  Those Canadians of wealth declare it as income and end up paying it all back to the government.  A guaranteed annual income would work differently in that it would not be taxable.  Only income earned over that amount would be taxed.  But there would be no personal deductions on your income tax including dependency deductions (because your dependents would be receiving their own guaranteed income).  Not only would personal income tax deductions disappear so would virtually every welfare program now in existence.  Old Age Security (mentioned above), provincial old age supplements where they exist, employment insurance (no need to worry about eligibility arguments), general welfare, disability pensions, family allowance, child tax benefit and the list goes on which shows the waste involved in the current delivery of our social safety net.  Not only would these be replaced by the guaranteed annual income but their bureaucracies would become redundant thus saving millions off the civil service payroll. 

The first year of a guaranteed annual income would be costly.  After the first year though the program would begin to pay back in savings more than it cost initially.  Within a few years governments would have the luxury of lowering taxes or investing the surpluses created.  Of course this idea of short term pain for long term gain would reverse the current philosophy of all Western governments who advocate long term pain for short term gain.  There would need to be a transition plan as the size of the civil service shrank substantially but this problem is not insurmountable.  One of the benefits of a guaranteed annual income is the stability it provides to the economy.  A secure and stable economy would create sustainable growth which would over time absorb the loss in government jobs.  Further, the ability to rely on a base income would encourage individuals to pursue ideas they might now forego for fear that basic family needs could not be met during start-up periods.  This also counters the argument that such a scheme would sap people’s initiative.  That criticism is based on the cynical myth that people only work because they have to.  Like all half-truths this myth has persisted.  The full truth is that people only work at jobs they hate and where they are abused because they have to.   Employers would certainly have to behave better than they currently do to keep valued employees.  A huge stumbling block here in Canada is the idiocy of our federal-provincial relationship.  But once the Canadian public was properly educated in what a guaranteed annual income would mean for them and the country, pity the ignorant government who tried to screw it up.  They might well face the kind of political assassination that happened to the Progressive Conservatives back in 1993.  The Canadian electorate is a fickle lot so piss them off at your peril. 

In the end a guaranteed annual income is the logical solution to our income supplement programs.  Citizens in most modern democracies expect their governments to play a supportive role in their lives.  Therefore, a guaranteed annual income is rational, cost effective, efficient and just plain the right thing to do.

There are many forms of psychological abuse against our children, some idiosyncratic and some social.  The young girl driven to suicide by a thoughtless adult who first raised her hope for love through creating a fictitious suitor on a social networking site and then cruelly dashed that hope in a warped attempt to assist her own daughter to bully the victim is an example of just how serious psychological abuse can be.  Social abuse differs only in method not impact.  We rail at the image of children brainwashed to strap explosives on their tiny bodies, becoming human weapons for the political, religious, social or just plain perverse agendas of groups like the Taliban or the Lord’s Resistance Army.  Such psychological abuse of innocents undermines any possible validity their philosophies could warrant.  No justification exists for inculcating hate in the minds of young people.  Brainwashing anyone to make them believe what some other wishes is always wrong.  In the case of youth it is also always criminal. 

I doubt there is a single reader that has disagreed with me so far.  I want to go a step further though.  What about brainwashing by omission.  If we agree with the above arguments should it not be a natural step to say that intentionally withholding knowledge from children for the purpose of manipulating them into believing what some other desires them to believe or to think is also wrong and criminal.  That is a natural corollary of my arguments above.  Al Qaeda does not say to a young suicide bomber, ‘read this treatise by Osama bin Laden and this pamphlet by Thomas Paine and then go kill the infidel because bin Laden is right and Paine is wrong.‘  My suspicion is that Al Qaeda training facilities do not have well stocked and balanced libraries.  The abuse is not in presenting the children with a biased idea, all ideas are by nature biased, it is in presenting the idea as the only idea.  Omitting information from children in order to inculcate any social agenda is abuse.  And therefore anyone who would perpetrate such abuse should be sanctioned by our society accordingly.  Presenting children with all perspectives but saying that we as Canadians, or in this community or this family believe that one or the other perspective is the correct one is different.  That is not necessarily abuse.  A child’s country, community and most particularly family will likely be more persuasive than an obscure author.  The child may therefore be guided by such authoritative opinion but they still are aware that other perspectives do exist.  It might cross the line into abuse if we were to present the other perspectives with derision or ridicule.  This is not an exact science and a judgement call must be made at what point abuse occurs.  But the case I have in mind at the moment clearly crosses that line. 

Currently there is a bill before the Alberta Legislature that would allow parents to withdraw their children from class if the curriculum includes anything which goes against their religious beliefs.  The premier is even trying to defend this abomination by saying that it is only religious questions.  Translation:  Religious brainwashing good; any other brainwashing bad.  I’d bet you hot cross buns to pancakes (the Anglicans should get that one) if I were to demand the right to remove my child from class to avoid having them exposed to capitalist ideals,  the same god-bothering twits behind this bill (wonder what’s in their libraries?) would be pushing to remove her from my home to save her from this twisted old socialist.  Every evangelical from Lethbridge to Fort Macleod would be burning my effigy in their state of the art tele-pulpit.  So why the muted response to this legislation.  A polite whimper from the CBC (okay what do we expect, they’re Canadian) is all the coverage I have seen so far.  Of course the CBC missed a number of child abuse / religion stories until it was too late just ask Catholic choir boys and our Aboriginal people.  Capitalism encourages behaviours and causes practices that I am convinced harm innocent human beings and are anathema to the basic cooperative nature of humanity.  In simple terms capitalism to me is a crime against humanity which should be prosecuted as we prosecuted Naziism at Nuremburg.  So I would be remiss in my responsibilities as a parent to allow some pro-capitalist school system to expose my child to such obscenity.  Right?  If I firmly believe this, and I do, I should shelter my child from it.  Wrong.  I would be abusing my child.  Ignorance weakens a human being and my job as a parent is to strengthen my child to survive in a world of conflict and contradiction.  To disarm that child from the start is the ultimate abuse. 

For those who want to argue that the two things are not the same tell me why.  If you can’t defend your argument, you don’t have one.  Premier Ed Stelmach, if you pass this bill you are a child abuser.  You are a pariah in our society and should be sanctioned accordingly.  To the RCMP (let’s pretend they might listen to reason and are not just the goon squad for sordid politicians), if child abuse is an abhorrent crime within our society you must focus all of your resources into bringing Mr. Stelmach and every member of the legislature in support of this bill before the bar of justice and seek out those who use the money of god to manipulate and control society.  Save our children now and we won’t need a parade of religious leaders apologizing later.

Nothing like a little town hall meeting to mark one hundred days in office.  A nice win one for the Gipper speech before a receptive audience to make everybody feel better in bad times.  Barack Obama is perhaps the best president since Ronald Reagan when it comes to being able to speak to the hearts of an audience.  And America needs it now.  Things are not good and everybody needs some reassurance that we can get through this crisis. 

Of course the problems of the American auto industry were front and center in his words today.  Bad decisions had led to the position we are in now and President Obama could not justify more bad decisions with taxpayer dollars.  He would demand of auto executives that they table workable plans for a sustainable recovery if they wished to dip into the pockets of ordinary American citizens.  He is absolutely correct.  Bad decisions did bring us to this point.  But much as I dislike corporate executives and believe me, they must shoulder a significant portion of the blame, they can’t be tagged for it all.  Those bad decisions were made in a social culture that demanded just the decisions that they made.  It is a social culture that still exists and was reinforced in the president’s speech. 

Obama spoke of a time when the American auto industry built the cars that people wanted but lost their market to foreign competitors due to poor corporate decisions.  There certainly was a period of complacency that resulted in poor quality design and manufacture processes.   The American auto industry was producing vehicles that were plagued by breakdowns and recalls.  They lost the trust of the North American consumer who sought out imports that sold themselves on quality and fuel efficiency.  The president is absolutely correct lazy and stupid are bad decisions.  But were they not still designing vehicles that people wanted?  The answer is yes they were.  A cursory look at Japanese automobiles (still the chief competitor) since they broke onto the North American market will show you that Detroit didn’t change, Tokyo did.  How do the 6 and 8 cylinder four door luxury sedans full of computerized crap that just means more to break down compare to the Toyota Corolla and Corona with their simple functional design and fuel efficiency.  Not too well.  It is not that GM, Ford and Chrysler were force feeding us larger vehicles, we demanded them.  Look at the highways today and you see them full of over-sized quasi-trucks.  Many of those with brand names like Toyota, Honda, Hyundai and Mitsubishi.  That is what the people want.  There lies the problem.  We cannot afford to give the

Photo by David Williams, Knoxville Tennesee. Retrieved from FUH2.com

people what they want.  Just like you shouldn’t let your kid go on that all sugar diet she wants, you can’t let the childish North American have his Hummer.  The Earth is mad as hell and is not going to take it anymore.  (I know that GM is currently in the process of dumping its Hummer line.  Actually it is hoping to sell off the brand.  Take my advice, sell the brand to an adult toy manufacturer and not to some idiot that will try to make another ugly-ass vehicle out of it causing carbon and visual pollution.)

But there is more.  I said that Obama was correct in saying that bad decisions led us to this point but more bad decisions are not going to bail us out.  Bailing out the current automobile industry is an error of Earth shattering proportions, pun intended.  Obama’s speech mentioned moving to fuel efficient, environmentally friendly, blah, blah, whatever cars.  Hybrids, green cars, bio-fuels are all pacifiers stuck into the mouths of whining little brats who can’t get it through their heads that the private automobile must go.  If the money used to bail out these dinosaurs of our adolescence was put toward creating a comprehensive public  transit system (which would be both faster and cheaper) and into technologies such as carbon recovery, passive housing, etc.  it would create more jobs, make the economy more sustainable and guarantee our children and their children a future. 

Oh but wait that would make sense.  Can’t do that then.  And we won’t.  We will poor good money into this bygone contraption and when the inevitable comes we can only hope their is enough money and time left to save the planet.  And hope is all we have given the short-sightedness we continually confront and the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, Eco-Catastrophe, breathing hard on our necks.  For now though we will all skip merrily over the cliff because no politician or community leader has the courage to just speak the truth.  But like the Earth I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore.  So to paraphrase Shakespeare I say ‘First let’s kill all the people who own Hummers and see where we get from there.’ 

I confess the whole thing has me a bit confused.  Global warming is a crisis and we need to deal with it.  The problem I have is that I hear a lot of talk but don’t see much action.  At least I don’t see a lot of improvement.  Sympathetic magic is a concept used by modern witches.  The theory is based on Like produces Like.  Well this looks like the environmental plan decided on by our social and political leaders.  If we talk about it long enough and wish for it hard enough then maybe the fairies of fate will grant our wish.  I can see the coven meetings in Ottawa now with Stephen Harper as High Priest complete with stag horns with John Baird his faithful familiar. 

The other problem is that each solution is being pitched as THE solution.  Whether it is the demon spawn of macho muscle cars with the little veggie car that could or a new coloured box weekly set out at the curb, do this and all will be well is the pitch.  Reality dictates that none of these really is THE answer and ALL of these are the answers.  We must comprehensively change the way we live and the way our societies are structured.  That is something none of our leaders want to talk about. 

Recycling helps and it is a good thing to do.  It is starting now to expand but more has to be done and fast.  One of the saddest facts of the recycling program is that most of our recyclables end up in landfill anyway, just not our local landfill.  Out of sight, out of mind.  (I believe most of my recyclables are land-filled around Hamilton, Ontario which should annoy some of my colleagues )That’s not going to get us anywhere.  There is not yet a strong enough market for the materials.  The way to change this is to not offer a choice between products from recycled materials and new materials.  If it can be made from recycled material, it MUST be made of recycled material.  If we want to be serious about this process that must be our mantra. 

The new energy efficient light bulbs being championed by David Suzuki solve one problem but create another.  No plan to dispose of the mercury contained in them is presented along with the songs of praise.  We cannot afford solutions that create problems elsewhere.  The global biosphere is an wholistic system.  The goal is to save it, not sweep the problems under a different leaf.  Suzuki and other proponents of these bulbs make two arguments in their defense.  Their long life means that the mercury is contained for perhaps a decade or more, there will be fewer light bulbs land-filled and therefore the impact will be minimal.  I forget.  How many billions in a minimal?  Their lifespan is impressive providing nothing goes wrong.  No incompetent handyman clips one with a ladder.  No child disobeys a parent and plays ball in the house.  No roof leaks.  You get the picture.  The second argument is that the amount of mercury is minimal.  (See my previous question concerning minimal)  We are told the mercury content is no more than that found in a watch battery.  That really isn’t very much but I have only owned about a dozen watches through my life.  Disregarding the ones that I had to wind that leaves three.  I am currently wearing one and the other two, sentimental mementos of times gone by, are resting sans batteries in my jewelry box to be taken out only in those private moments of tears and scotch.  I have only ever replaced the battery in one of them.  But light bulbs?  I got light bulbs coming out the ying yang.  I counted 35 in my little semi-detached.  Multiply that over the billion or so people in the industrialized first world and we are talking impact.  The other problem I have with Suzuki’s argument here is that it is dismissive.  He doesn’t argue that it is not a problem but that we shouldn’t worry about it.  That is straight from the playbook of the idiots that got us all into this mess in the first place so excuse me if I am not real receptive to it. 

As for the demon spawn mentioned above, hybrid cars, they show minimal carbon saving once all factors including manufacturing are considered.  Transportation is the toughest environmental nut to crack.  No one wants to give up their car.  Actually I do.  I can’t wait until I retire and go back to a car-less life.  Right now I would get rid of my vehicle if there were a viable public transportation option.  Currently we are spending billions, maybe trillions, of tax dollars to bail out an industry that must disappear if we want to spare this planet the horrors of an environmental holocaust.  The only answer is the disappearance of the private automobile.  Remove one or two lanes from the current multi-lane highways and dedicate them to public buses.  Move the terminals to major highway interchanges with local systems feeding them and voila public transit is faster and more convenient than private vehicles.  Eighty percent of the automobile traffic currently on the roads must be gone withing twenty years.  Let’s get over it and move on.  While there will be a transition of jobs with the change over, there need not be any net loss of jobs.  The naysayers seem to believe that if we eliminate the private automobile that the world will come to a stop as the people of this planet fall into a stunned silence, immobile for the rest of eternity. 

David Suzuki and others are supporting the creation of a carbon tax as a means to really get serious about the environment.  It does hold promise to reduce carbon emissions.  A carbon tax is a means of rationing by price.  That has been done successfully before .  However, in every case it has meant and will again this time that those at the bottom will shoulder the burden of lifting the world out of the crisis while those on top sail through their privileged lives with barely any inconvenience.  Heaven forbid that the people David socializes with, or he himself, pitch in.  Case in point, Suzuki was in the news this morning as part of a convention on Global Warming and winter sport I believe.  It really doesn’t  matter what the conference was about, it is the conference itself that was the problem.  Participants travelled many miles, most in airplanes to get to it.  Why?  Why couldn’t it have been done virtually given our current communications capabilities?  This would have made a gigantic carbon saving but Suzuki wouldn’t have the pleasure of staying at a luxury hotel and hobnobbing with his pals.  Before you start putting more pressure on the working class and those on fixed income to fight the good fight one more time, you should maybe enlist yourself and spend a little time at the front.

A better answer would be direct carbon rationing as suggested in George Monbiot’s book Heat(click on page on sidebar to see review).  Decide up front exactly how much carbon we can afford to expend each year and divide it up equally.  If I don’t use all of mine because I am careful and conserve I can sell the left over credit to some wasteful slob with money.  And trust me he will pay dear if he wants it.  (Actually let me thank George Monbiot for the alternative solutions he presented in his book which I have borrowed here.)  Publicly controlled rationing has also been done successfully in the past and it is fair and democratic.  But then I keep forgetting, most people don’t really believe in democracy, apparently including David Suzuki, the Verdant Prince.

The officer testified that Mr Dziekanski seemed to have an ‘intent to attack’, whatever the hell that means.  Mr. Dziekanski raised his hands over his head in a threatening manner while holding a stapler, apparently threatening to collate 4 strapping young officers.  I can certainly see why the Mounties would fear for their lives.  I work often with staplers and can attest to their status as a deadly weapon.  Offices across Canada lose dozens of employees yearly to stapler attacks.  It is no wonder that they felt compelled to kill the man.  It was kill or be killed.

The Mountie on the stand also testified that he considered the taser as a lesser level of force than the baton or pepper spray.  Two things are interesting here.  One is that force was the accepted solution to this situation.  There were other options available.  The taser was applied immediately after the officers arrived on scene.  Maybe they should have considered something other than force.  This is indicative of the problem of police in our society today of which more in a minute.  The second interesting aspect to this testimony is that when tasers were first issued to police in Canada the public was told that the device was a non-lethal alternative to the firearm.  That would suggest that tasers would only be used in those rare incidents where formerly police would have been forced to use their guns.  The Canadian public embraced their use on that basis.  While it was accepted that in some cases a taser might prove lethal it was only being used to avoid a weapon even more often lethal.  Under that assumption issuing tasers seemed prudent.  The number of times tasers have been used by officers since then clearly shows that either the initial justification was a lie or officers in the field were not properly instructed on when to use them. 

The hilarious sight of officers of our national police force squirming to rationalize and justify their behaviour in this incident aside, this is still a tragedy.  The Dziekanski family still has lost a loved one and likely questions the image of Canada that first drew them here.  What went wrong?  The problem is highlighted by the rush to force.  For centuries policing was done by the military.  When we created separate civilian police forces they retained that military culture.  Today in our more sophisticated and complex society such ham-fisted approaches are more part of the problem than the solution.  If the prevention and successful solution to crime is the goal of policing then a thorough re-evaluation of the training, education and necessary skill sets for police needs to be done. 

Police need to be more culturally aware and sensitive.  Canada is far more multicultural today than during my childhood.  With the richness immigrants bring to our country comes also their fears and understanding of a social order different from our own.  Mr. Dziekanski was alone, really alone.  Think of yourself after a very long flight to a foreign country.  You are tired and cranky after spending long hours packed in like a sardine.  Delays which are never explained to you keep  you only inches from your intended destination.  No one can or will even try to understand you.  You cannot communicate effectively with anyone.  You act out and slam a chair.  Suddenly you are confronted by four large, heavily armed uniformed males.  You come from a culture where the police are seldom your friend, even less often your friend than they are here in Canada if you can imagine that.  What do you do?  You raise your arms in defence, a bluff of bravado in hopes they will back off and not attack as you assume they will.  Instead the officers attack, just as you thought they would.  You struggle.  Weapons of great force are being applied to your body.  You muscles contort, you spasm as the electricity courses through you.  And for Mr. Dziekanski in the end you feel your life force slip away and you succumb to the embrace of death.  Could this have all been avoided?  Yes!  Were the officers properly trained and educated? No!  If they had been this would not have happened.  And if the police want to argue that they are trained to diffuse situations and deal with cultural differences, then they must charge these particular four officers with intentional homicide.  If they had the capacity to diffuse the situation and did not do so then they chose to attack Mr Dziekanski with the likely result (after multiple taser applications) that he would die.  That is murder and the four should spend 25 years in prison before being eligible for parole.  The police cannot have it both ways. 

Before a uniform and weapons are issued, a potential officer must be much better educated than is currently the case.  Psychology, sociology, multiculturalism, religion and ethics must be a large part of their curriculum.  No candidate should be accepted at the policy college until they have completed at least 4 years and preferably more of post-secondary education.  Each of the disciplines I have listed need to be taught in depth.  A cursory introduction to terms and concepts is not enough.  These individuals are going to walk the streets of our communities carrying the power of life and death on their hips.  Without the education I am calling for they are as much of a danger to all of us as the criminals they chase.  The entire paramilitary culture of policing needs to be retired and a new more open and less confrontation culture adopted.  A culture where force must be forced upon them.  If not we simply await the next Dziekanski and we probably won’t have long to wait.

The sweet sound of the familiar wafts out of the new Obama administration.  Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, in her recent trip to China states that human rights must not get in the way of dealing with the economic crisis.  Although President Obama will be closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, he has decided to continue to support the policy of extraordinary rendition which is the practice of having others do your torture for you.  I have more respect for the torturer than the sanctimonious hypocrite. 

But I guess change and a new approach don’t last as long as they used to.  A nation wept with joy and expectation as the first Black man was inaugurated as president of the United States, a country with a horrific history of civil and human  rights abuses.  The hope and the promise was that this would be a new dawning of the American dream; that all humans would be treated equally and with respect and dignity.  How could it be otherwise?  How could a Black man in the United States turn his back on civil and human rights?  How could he compare himself to Abraham Lincoln and use slavery as a backdrop for the significance of his presidency while blindly ignoring slavery in those countries he interacts with?  It seems absurd but few are questioning him on it.  Those who try are pushed to the side by the ‘mainstream Left’ who are gushing like schoolgirls in the glow of the new messiah. 

The masses that enjoy the opulence and relative ease of our society have no stomach for a debate on human rights.  I guess the condition is that rights are good as long as they don’t affect our lifestyle.  For years the United States and its industrialized friends have chided China for its human rights record at Hollywood fundraising events or at galas with other progressive groups while conducting business as usual in the corridors of power.  It is a metaphor for our time.  The ultimate Potemkin Village.  While we swim in the filth of reality we see only the crystal waters of our self-induced mirage.  So who can we really blame, the politicians that encourage our delusion or ourselves for knowingly embracing it?  What is the fear?  Could it be that we know that our society is as cold and uncaring towards us, its own members, as it is toward those who suffer the indignity every day of not being considered fully human? 

I wonder.

Anyone who has ever sat in on an Anglican Church Board of Management meeting will be familiar with the words, ‘We’ve never done it that way before’.  Change is a scary thing to most people.  So why should we change our electoral system.  We have elections.  Governments get created.  So what is wrong?  In the United States, which uses the same system, the answer is a simple nothing.  America has a very narrow political culture and this is reflected in their two party political system.  The United States lacks a genuine conservatism and an indigenous socialism.  All Americans are some shade of liberal, from the classical laissez-faire liberalism of a George Bush to the reform liberalism of a Ted Kennedy.  With only two parties in play the single seat plurality system works just fine because it mimics a majoritarian system.  Once the universe of ideas expands the system begins to break down and cause problems. 

Proponents argue that the single seat plurality system (SSP) or first-past-the-post is preferable because it can produce a majority government with a minority of the vote.  The underlying assumption here is that majority governments are better governments because they are more stable.  The evidence in Canada shows that SSP fails to deliver on this approximately half of the time.  Half of all elections since 1921 when Canada’s political landscape began to expand beyond the Conservatives and Liberals, have resulted in minority governments.  Most of those minority governments have lasted two years or more with the odd exception.  Some like Mackenzie King’s 1921 minority lasted a full four years.  Provincially in Ontario, the only province with a healthy multi-party system, the final Davis Conservative minority government lasted from 1981 to 1985.  It is difficult in the face of the evidence to argue that minority government is inherently unstable.  Minority governments have often shown themselves to be very legislatively active as well.  Many of our most favoured policies such as our current health care system were the product of minority governments.  So good policy gets passed and elections are not held every other day, so what is so terrible about minority governments?  Of course you have to know how to govern.  A minority government forces compromise, negotiation and cooperation among the parties.  If you are a simple minded ideologue who cannot fathom that other people might have ideas and you must always get your own way then yes a minority government would be a problem (Not to mention any names but we all know who we are talking about here).    But those sorts of people should be discouraged from public office anyway.  Look what happened to Germany when they elected someone like that in the 1930s. 

The most consistent problem facing Canada is unity.  At times it has reached crisis level as in 1995.  SSP contributes to and exacerbates this very problem.  Our current system rewards regional parties and punishes national parties.  Let’s look at the 1993 election results.  The Bloc Quebeςois received 13% of the national vote to win 54 seats in the House of Commons and become Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition (great irony); the Reform Party received 19% of the national vote to win 52 seats just behind the Bloc; the Conservatives received 16% of the national vote to win 2 seats.  Now you don’t have to be a mathematician or a political junkie to look at this and know that something is wrong.  The two regional parties (the Bloc in Quebec and Reform in the West) received 27  and 26 times respectively the number of seats in the House compared to the Conservatives with 3% less and 3% more respectively of the popular vote.  Therefore in our system it pays to focus on a regional agenda fanning the flames of distrust between the West and Central Canada and between English and French Canada.  If there ever was evidence of the absence of character of our elected representatives this is it.  Our electoral system is tearing our country apart and they refuse to change it because they receive petty personal benefits from it.  Any parliament can change the electoral system in a matter of days if they want to.  It requires only a simple majority vote in the House of Commons and Senate.  Shame on them that they have so little regard for the nation they purport to represent.  

The more obvious and general problem with SSP is its distortion of democracy.  Democracy is supposed to mean rule by the people or the mob depending on your view.  Aristotle, from whom I derived the name for this blog, saw democracy as the best of the worst systems of government.  It appears today that many who claim to defend it are really supporting what Aristotle called a Polity, rule by the many.  In reality we are actually an elected Oligarchy, rule by the wealthy and powerful.  SSP supports this system very well.  Proportional representation would weaken but not undermine it.  As you know from my previous post no electoral system meets my standard for democracy.  But proportional representation (PR) is a step in the right direction. 

The critics of PR say it leads to perpetual minorities but I have already established that minority government does not necessarily equate to bad government.  They argue, even in the face of the historical evidence in Canada that minority government in this country is relatively stable, that should PR be adopted this would break down and elections would be a constant fact of life.  The example of choice is invariably Italy.  Now it is true that at some times Italy changes prime ministers more often than I change my underwear.  There coalition governments have been known to be quite fragile.  But that is the result of Italian political culture and not proportional representation.  Anyone familiar with Italy knows that North Italy and Southern Italy are almost two different planets.  Critics never seem to want to talk about Sweden or Germany or The Netherlands, only Italy.  Governments are stable in stable political cultures and unstable in unstable political cultures.  So there is no reason to believe that Parliament Hill would become a grand national game of musical chairs because we adopt PR.

Does the tail wag the dog in PR systems?  This is another common argument.  Proportional representation gives too much power to small parties.  I have alluded to something of that difficulty in my previous article on the upcoming Israeli elections.  Yes smaller parties become necessary partners to form governments in this type of system.  This can be a problem in Israel particularly because it is a pure proportional system.  The entire country is one single constituency so that even a party with one or two percent of the vote can win a seat.  If we were to adopt PR here in Canada it would be absurd to attempt to make the entire country one large political constituency.  As now we would divide the country up in numerous constituencies, much larger than our current ridings.  For example we might take six of our current ridings and meld them together.  In that new riding the vote would be counted and six seats would be apportioned to the parties.  This is but one example.  We might divide Canada in any of a number of ways but divide we must.  If we take the six example I have used a party would need at least 10% of the vote in the enlarged riding to receive one of the six seats.  So in Canada we are not talking about parties with one or two percent seating members in the House.  Smaller parties would still have influence and a voice but would not wag the dog.  And as much as larger parties need the smaller parties to form governments the smaller need the larger to influence policy so it is in both interests to compromise, negotiate and cooperate. 

Proportional representation would benefit Canada by easing our regional tensions and expanding our democratic culture.  Liberals, Greens or NDPs in Alberta would finally be recognized and have MPs who sympathize with and share their views to appeal to as would Conservatives and NDPs in Quebec.  There is only one real argument against adopting this system:  The self-serving pettiness of the people who have the ability to make the change.

I have only one thing that I am asking for this year, a new system for choosing our representatives in Ottawa and Ontario and for that matter around the world.  There are many electoral systems out there to choose from, some of which I like and some of which I think are bad.  But what I really want is not a new electoral system but no electoral system.  When people are forced to vote for one or another candidate, no matter what the system used, it always favours those with money and power to begin with. 

Santa what I want is a lottery system.  If we want democracy as we always say we do then this is the only system that can deliver.  But I don’t believe most people when they say they want democracy.   Most people believe our society is stratified (the politically correct term for a class-based society in a classless society).  Some are born to lead and some are born to follow.  You and I know that that is bogus, Santa.  We know that any average normal human being given the same information can make good decisions.  Maybe sometimes bad decisions too but no one can tell me the jokers there now have never pulled a boner.  So why not give everyone a chance, Santa?  Maybe having a single parent on social assistance contribute to the debate on a national child care program would have some benefits.  For instance, getting one!

The biggest problem with our current governments is their disengagement from reality.  None of them interact effectively with ordinary folk.  Oh they come back and live in their ridings but mostly they socialize with the local elites.  My local representative has never sat down with his wife to a meal at my nephew’s house and shown an interest in their struggle.  My nephew works a low pay job in a service industry.  He works long and hard hours to try to make ends meet.  His wife has a chronic illness that limits how much she can contribute but she does what she can.  Truth is with the medical expenses (prescriptions and such) they would be better off on social assistance.  Maybe if my member of parliament could see and understand that first hand he might make a more rational contribution to debates on alleviating poverty in Canada rather than the ideological claptrap he spouts now.  If there ever was a stupid policy it is one that makes people fools for trying to help themselves.  But this is indicative of the kind of policy being produced by our governments all the time.  So maybe it would be better for my nephew or his wife to engage in the debates and decisions themselves because they understand the situation, they live it.  Few if any of our elected representatives grew up in poverty.  Oh money was tight in my home as well and I sure knew the meaning of the word ‘no’, but there were others who were truly bad off.  And truth to tell I have yet to meet an MP that didn’t come from higher up the economic food chain than I. 

Part of the disengagement problem is the lack of diversity among our current representatives.  In any of the provincial parliaments across Canada and in the federal parliament at any given time most, sometimes as much as 75% or more, of the members are lawyers.  No need to repeat here the litany of lawyer jokes, you have all heard them I am sure.  That aside, even if all of the lawyers in the legislatures are good and talented people (gag), how is that representative of our society.  Most people in our society are not lawyers.  Now someone out there is thinking, of course they are lawyers, lawyers are the only ones who can understand all that stuff.  True, because lawyers were the people who wrote it in the first place.  If non lawyers started making policy maybe it would make more sense.  In actuality our MPs don’t write the legislation the bureaucrats do.  Politicians decide policy, what we want to accomplish.  Bureaucrats figure out how to do it.  A lottery system would create a parliament that reflected our society.  A parliament that reflects society cannot help but set goals and accomplishments that reflect the needs and visions of that society.  In the end that is what democracy is supposed to be. 

Some will say that ordinary people are just not smart enough, they don’t know enough to be able to govern effectively in a complicated world.  The world is only as complicated as we make it.  It is not the technical questions which divide us and create the chronic suffering of humankind.  It is the ethical, the principle questions.  What does our society deem just in dealing with those who face challenges in their lives?  What is a just health, education, social or security system?  What world do we want to see?  Gandhi said “Be the change you want to see in the world.”  This would be our chance to do just that.   Each of us is capable of making good decisions as I said above; we just need the information. 

Here is how it would work.  The names of all eligible Canadians would go into the pool.  Individuals who for specific reasons such as physical or mental infirmity etc. could not serve, would be excluded.  Also there would be a process to apply for specific exemption.  This is exactly how our grand jury system works.  Individual names would be selected at random to fill the 308 seats currently in parliament.  Those individuals would be notified by registered mail that they will be serving in parliament for the next however many years we decide.  It could be four or we might opt for shorter tenures.  Their employers would be expected to guarantee a return to their jobs when they are finished.  (Don’t even go there if anyone is thinking that that is an onus on employers given how many jobs in our society today are contract anyway.  I spent 5 years on renewable four month contracts before I was hired full time by the college.)  The prime minister and cabinet would be elected from amongst the selected group just as jury foremen are selected now.

This does brings up why I don’t believe most people when they say they want democracy.  I have heard it many times whenever this concept is brought up.  ‘But I don’t want to serve in parliament.  What about my life.  That is too much to ask people to do.’  As Shakespeare said, “There’s the rub.”  In western industrialized societies we only want democracy if it doesn’t inconvenience us.  Hell almost half of the population can’t even be bothered to go out and vote and their major excuse; ‘I’m too lazy to find out what is going on so I don’t know enough to vote intelligently’.  I have news for you, you just aren’t intelligent.  People get the governments they deserve.  If you want to take the time and effort to browse through the specialty shops and research the product before you buy it, you most often get a quality product.  Or you can just go to WalMart because its convenient and get crap.  Take the Stephen Harper mannequin we have as prime minister today.  Now there’s an example of cheap plastic crap.  (before anyone gets in a tither, the options currently are Mr. Potato Head and a wind up rat).  I want them all gone and in a lottery system they would be. 

So Santa, you see, if we can trust ordinary citizens, chosen at random, to determine the fate of a defendant in a court of law, why can’t we trust the same people to make intelligent decisions for the whole country.  In each case they are acting on our behalf.  Perhaps we should ask the question in reverse.  If we don’t trust them to make political decisions, how can we, in good conscience, put the life of a human being in their hands?  Here in Canada we don’t have the death penalty but 25 years and sometimes more, even natural life, is an important decision I would think  And what about those societies like the United states that do have the death penalty.  I know that you and I Santa have commiserated many times over that industrialized despotism.  There this very system is trusted to decide whether the state, in the name of its citizens, can take the life of an individual.  Is there ever a more demanding decision than the decision of life or death?

I hope you can fit this in your sack tonight.  I know I have given you a tall order.  So if you can’t deliver I understand.  I want you to make sure all the little peoples around the world are taken care of first.  So if you can’t get me this maybe you could just remind people on your travels to have faith in the human spirit and each other and just maybe my gift will create itself. 

Merry Christmas Santa.  The milk and cookies will be on the Chinese bar next to the tree as usual this year. 

Michael

But, hey!  These are the guys who drive our economy right?  So we need to keep them in business, right?  Of course they are also the one’s that dug themselves into this hole.  But, okay, everyone makes mistakes.  I am sure these guys have learned their lesson and are putting all the public money to good use helping people renegotiate their mortgages and generally getting credit flowing again.  Well no.  Actually the first thing they did after the September package was through themselves a huge party to celebrate.  Since then they have been using the money to buy each out in an economic version of the game Risk seeing who can become the biggest empire and dominate the world.  The rest of the money they have just been hording.

Now we are going on to the auto industry.  It’s their turn to be massaged with our money.  General Motors, Ford and Chrysler can’t survive without help.  Those nasty Asians have deceptively undermined the U. S. automaker’s market by producing vehicles that work.  The fiends!  Of course the media emphasizes that the real problem is all those union contracts.  Those workers are just sucking the industry dry.  It couldn’t possibly be that the executives made some executive size mistakes in product development and marketing.  Or it couldn’t be their multi-million dollar salaries or all those bonuses.  And heaven forbid anyone bring up golden parachutes.  Executive jobs are the only ones I know of that reward you for screwing up.  If I screw up I am rewarded with a pink slip not a porsche and a condo in Hawaii. 

Every corporate executive that makes a decision that costs jobs should be forced to personally apologize to each laid-off employee and their families.  Maybe having to tell a seven year old why Santa won’t be visiting this year will instill some humanity into these spoiled brats. 

So where does it all end?  Maybe some of these corporate geniuses will come up with an answer at one of their company retreats but I doubt it.  Maybe it is time for all of us members of the great unwashed to pick up our pitchforks and torches and give them something to retreat from.  Capitalism doesn’t work.  Our current crisis is what happens whenever capitalism is left to its own devices, unregulated.  It happened 80 years ago and it is happening again.  We face the same choice they had in the 1930s.  Do we patch the old girl back together, put a new frock on her, some makeup and get her hair done?  Or do we move on to something new, something different?  In the Great Depression, after much tugging and pulling the powers that be chose the first solution.  Let’s be smarter this time.  Let’s learn from our mistakes.  I know, how about an economy that serves the people rather than forcing the people to serve the economy.  And those poor bankers and executives that would be left out in the cold by such a system, don’t worry, we can retrain them and make them work for a living instead.  It would do wonders for their self-esteem and bring a smile to these old lips to see them toiling in the salt mines.