Contempt Of The Electorate - Part 2

As I continue to ponder the question my friend Tom posed about why discredited economic theories are not vigorously opposed and exposed as such by political parties and media, two articles perhaps offer some helpful contextual information.

The first is by John Barber in today's Star, entitled Hudak’s discredited doctrine a lucky break for Wynne. In it, he remarks on the good fortune that Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne is enjoying by having an ideologue, Tim Hudak, helming the party of her chief opposition, The Progressive Conservatives of Ontario:

Hudak has presented her a chance once again to make righteous war on Mike Harris’s amply discredited Common Sense Revolution.

Barber speculates that embracing such an extreme austerity program that will see the elimination of 100,000 public service jobs in order to balance the books a year or two earlier than Wynne intends suggests one of two motives: either it is a strategy to gain a majority government by mobilizing true believers more likely to turn out in an election than others, or Hudak and his brain trust are mad, an explanation Barber favours, given that it reflects a worldwide trend of neoconservatives:

The boldness of the policy is the product of assumptions so ingrained the zealots see no need to explain them. Fixated by their own mechanistic ideology, they blandly expect voters to understand intuitively — or religiously, as they seem to do — that destroying jobs will create jobs and that cutting taxes will increase revenue. It’s all so clear to them. Don’t you see, Ontario?

Barber then provides a link to a recent column by Paul Krugman, entitled Points of No Return. In it, the economist writes about how facts, reason and informed cerebration seem to be losing out to crazed ideology and contempt for science and others sources of empirical data, bringing us to the point where the process of intellectual devolution seems to have reached a point of no return.

It, too, is a piece well-worth reading, as Krugman examines the Republican Party and its wholesale embrace of an ideology that reveres patently false economic ideas (austerity would be one such example), and offers reflexive rejection of inconvenient scientific truth (the notion of human-caused climate would be an example). The more obvious the falsity of the outlook, the more adherents become

more, not less, extreme in their dogma, which will make it even harder for them ever to admit that they, and the political movement they serve, have been wrong all along.

Strikingly like a certain domestic federal regime I could also name, no?

Admittedly, this does not offer a direct answer to Tom's question. But is it possible that those politicians who oppose such flawed doctrines are afraid of enraging those voters who do, a reaction that might strengthen their already motivated resolve to be a present en masse at the ballot box?

I would more than welcome input on this perplexing issue.

A Mound Of Sound Guest Post: Libya - We Screwed Up Good, Real Good

Libya, remember that place? That's where NATO waged a bombing campaign against the forces of the late dictator, Muamar Gaddafi. When Gaddafi was ousted we figured we'd done real good.

If you judge our warfighting prowess by the outcomes, Libya ranks right up there with Afghanistan. The country has become ungovernable, plagued by militias and Islamist terrorists. Foreign consulates have closed down in Benghazi and even Arab embassies are clearing out.

The Libyan military, fed up with the government's refusal to move against Islamist militias, has mutinied. General Kalifa Hafter, supposedly with the backing of Egypt's military government, is waging a campaign to clean the Islamists out of eastern Libya. Whether he has much chance of succeeding is far from clear. Militias are tough to take out. Like guerrillas, they can dissolve, melt away and return as insurgents.

Sad to say but I saw this coming back in February, 2011 when I wrote that the only effective way to deal with Gaddafi was for Egypt's army and air force to take him out. Gwynne Dyer came to the same conclusion a month later. This became especially urgent when al Qaeda announced they intended to use the Libyan civil war to get a toehold in north Africa that they missed during the Egyptian uprising that toppled Mubarak. And that, as our bombing campaign dragged on for week after week, was exactly what al Qaeda did. Even before Gaddafi was toppled, Islamist fighters assassinated the rebels’ top general.

Now, three lost years later, the Egyptian military wants a say in how Libya should be run. Now Islamist radicals are well entrenched across north Africa. Now we see plainly how little NATO really accomplished in Libya.

Embarrassing as this rightly is for NATO, it's far worse for Washington. Both sides, Hafter and the Islamist militias, blame the United States for the bloodbath now taking place in Libya.

Contempt Of The Electorate?

Tom, a friend of mine, posted the following on Facebook yesterday:

Kind of tired of all the polemical posturing in the latest election. However, can anyone provide one instance in history -- at least, since the advent of the Industrial Revolution -- where, corporate or business tax cuts, the basis of trickle down economic policy, have been primarily responsible for an upsurge in hiring or the oxymoronic fictional concept of job creation.

I replied:

Tom, you are asking a question that the media refuse to ask. Considering who owns most of the media in this country, this is perhaps not so surprising.

To which Tom replied:

I think that's partially true, Lorne. However, how come politicians and supporters of those on the other side [of the] argument don't keep asking the question and insist upon an answer. I've been looking for such an historical antecedent and can't find anything.

I wrote back:

A good question. Perhaps it reflects their belief that the attention span of the average citizen is short, and boring them with facts is counter productive? Sound bites do seem to rule the day.

Tom makes an excellent point about the dearth of questions asked about the right's underlying premises. Indeed, the Liberals have only gone so far as to ridicule the accuracy of the job-creation numbers Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak claims will ensue from both his gutting of public service jobs and reduction in corporate tax rates. Nowhere is his philosophical foundation questioned.

Kim Campbell, in her short career as Canada's first woman prime minister, once infamously observed that political campaigns are not the time to discuss policy. She was much pilloried for that comment, but perhaps it was simply an oblique expression of disdain for the very people whose support politicians seek on their road to power. That contempt seems to be more and more the default position of those who lead us or aspire to.

In his column this morning, Martin Regg Cohn laments the fact that Tim Hudak will not be taking part in the Ontario leaders' debate in Thunder Bay, attributing crass political calculation to his boycott, and not the 'scheduling conflict' Team Hudak claims.

Cohn calls his decision a disrespect for democracy, and yet I have long given up on such debates, reflecting, as they do, the very contempt that is the subject of this post. Far too frequently, instead of engaging in the thrust and parry a real debate entails, politicos are all too content either to simply rework their stump speeches into their responses or answer the questions they wished had been asked, rather than the actual queries. Avoidance and obfuscation seem to rule the day, and the journalists moderating the panels rarely seem to hold them to account.

How we arrived at this sad state is not an easy question to answer, but undoubtedly the pernicious influence of the Harper regime and its worship of ignorance is a factor.

Two brief letters in today's Star make this point:

Gutting Statistics Canada is a pound-foolish strategy, Opinion May 19

Anyone with brains could see that gutting Statistics Canada would be a disaster for future governing of this country. To me, it represented one of the first major steps of Stephen Harper’s “secret agenda” of remaking this country into his little fiefdom of conservative domination into the future ruled by ideology not evidence-backed policies.

It will be the ruination of this once small but proud country.

Ann Goodin, Burlington

I don’t think money is the main motivator behind gutting StatsCan, although it’s a great excuse. It’s been obvious for years that the Conservatives don’t like pesky facts getting in the way of their ideology.

They’ve also figured out how to data mine us so they have info we’ll never see (those pesky facts again).

Ellen Bates, Toronto

That is not to see that any of us gets a free pass when it comes to embracing ignorance. Far too many have stopped taking the political process seriously, seeing it more as a source of soap-operish entertainment than as fundamental to the health of our country. Anyone who doubts that need only refer to the antics of a Rob Ford and the tenor of so many reactions to them. Or ask yourself this: What comes to mind when you think of Maxime Bernier and the misplaced government documents?

I will end what has been perhaps a bit of a meandering post with one final letter from today's Star. During this Ontario election campaign, both Mr. Hudak and Ms. Horwath have made much about our hydro rates. It is taken as undeniable that we pay some of the world's highest rates thanks to Liberal incompetence and corruption. Here are the facts:

Business shifts election focus to power prices, May 15

Most people realise that just because a politician (or party rep) says something, it doesn’t mean it’s true. The latest scuttlebutt is the “sky-high” prices we pay for electricity in Ontario making us uncompetitive and putting a strain on working families.

Let’s face it: nobody wants to pay more for anything, but before voting for political parties who are promising to lower your hydro rates, consider the fact that electricity prices in Ontario are actually not high at all.

Hydro Quebec routinely surveys electricity rates for consumers/small business and large industrial customers across North America. In 2013 it may surprise many people to know that at a kw/h price of $0.1248, Toronto has lower hydro rates than Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Halifax, Charlottetown, and St John’s. In addition, it has much lower rates than Boston (0.165), Detroit (0.1554), New York (0.2175), and San Francisco (0.2294).

If one looks further abroad, a 2011 comparison of electricity rates (all in U.S. dollars per kw/h) world wide indicates that after adjusting for relative purchasing power, Canada has the lowest rates in the entire world. Not adjusting for purchasing power, we have the fourth lowest rates in the world at $0.10, just above India and China at $0.08 each and tied with Mexico and South Africa.

The average price in the U.S. in 2011 was actually $0.12, more than we pay in Toronto. The top five? Denmark: $0.41, Germany: $0.35, Spain: $0.30, Australia: $0.29, and Italy: $0.28. Even Brazil has higher rates at $0.17.

Ontario has a massive electricity grid to maintain relative to its population. Part of this cost is offset by relatively cheap hydro electric power and the artificially low cost we pay for nuclear power, but maintenance on a system this large requires substantial and on-going investment.

Before voting for a party promising to cut prices, ask yourself this question: Who is going to pay for them?

Rob Graham, Toronto

An F-35 Update From The Mound Of Sound

The Mound of Sound sent along this note, followed by his guest post on the F-35:

I thought an update on the F-35 would be appropriate after reading Bill Sweetman’s latest piece in Aviation Week. He writes that this warplane’s Canadian backers are desperate to convince us that we don’t need to put the F-35 through an actual competition.

Canadian supporters of the F-35 marginally stealthy, light attack bomber are so convinced that the F-35 would trounce its rivals in an actual, head-to-head competition that they argue fiercely we should have no such competition.

Aviation Week says we're being conned.

F-35 backers point to various foreign orders as proof that the Lockheed bomber is a world-beater but the truth is that the Joint Strike Fighter has never flown against the other aircraft on the market. Why not? Partly because the problem-plagued warplane is so far behind schedule. Partly because it can't out-turn, out-climb, outrun or out-distance its opposition. What paltry advantage it may eke out in stealth is more than offset by its lack of the Holy Grail of aerial combat, Supercruise - the range-extending ability to achieve sustained, supersonic speeds without fuel-guzzling afterburner.

Aviation Week's Bill Sweetman discussed the F-35's mythical stealth in an article entitled, "Smoke and Mirrors":

To suggest that the F-35 is VHF-stealthy is like arguing that the sky is not blue - literally, because both involve the same phenomenon. The late-Victorian physicist Lord Rayleigh gave his name to the way that electromagnetic radiation is scattered by objects that are smaller than its wavelength. This applies to the particles in the air that scatter sunlight, and aircraft stabilizers and wingtips that are about the same meter-class size as VHF waves.

The counter-stealth attributes of VHF ...were known at the dawn of stealth, in 1983, when MIT's Lincoln Laboratory ordered a 150-ft.-wide radar to emulate Russia's P-14 Oborona VHF early warning system. Lockheed Martin's Fort Worth division should know about that radar - they built it.

VHF-stealth starts with removing the target's tails, as on the B-2, but we did not know how to do that on a supersonic, agile airplane, when the (F-35) specifications were written.

Sweetman adds that the threats of the mid-90s that the F-35 was designed to thwart are, like the F-35 itself, a thing of the past.

The threats of the late 2010s will be qualitatively different. Old VHF radars could be dealt with by breaking the kill chain between detection and tracking: They did not provide good enough cueing to put analog, mechanically scanned tracking radars on to the target. Active, electronically scanned array (AESA), high-power VHF radars and decimeter- and centimeter-wave trackers are more tenacious foes.

We would do well to remember that America did not invent stealth technology. The mathematical formulae for angles and ratios were the brainchild of a Russian mathematician. American defence experts had the paper translated and they were off to the stealth races. The point is that stealth is not some magical technology as we're often given to believe. There are no 'invisible' airplanes and never will be. What that means is that, in evaluating warplanes, stealth should be given its due but no more, and we cannot overlook sacrifices it requires in cost and performance. When it comes to the F-35, you're shelling out a lot and giving up a lot for the sake of a far less than invincible technology.

UPDATED: Gerald Caplan's Lament

The NDP exists for a reason: to express certain principles and to represent certain voters. Today it is not easy to say what the Ontario party’s principles are or for whom it speaks.

This lament, which Gerald Caplan places near the beginning of his open letter to Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath, expresses both the sadness and the frustration I suspect many feel. For those of us who still believe that government can be a force for positive social change, Andrea Horwath's direction and leadership as it is emerging during the Ontario campaign has been a profound disappointment. No vision. Just what many call populist policies or 'chequebook issues' that promise a modicum of relief from a few financial burdens, while leaving the fundamental underlying issues untouched and unspoken.

Her rejection of a progressive Liberal budget in the hope, presumably, of pursuing political gain, disappointed many, as Caplan makes plain:

Here was a win-win for the party: Many of those in need – the NDP’s people – would have directly benefited, and the NDP could have taken the credit. It would’ve been an entirely plausible claim, since it was true. The Liberals crafted it expecting your support. I expected it too, as did many others. Our disappointment was compounded when you could offer no sensible rationale for doing the opposite.

Pointedly, he chides her for what is missing in the current incarnation of the NDP:

No coherent theme, no memorable policies, nothing to deal with the great concerns of New Democrats everywhere: increasing inequality, the precarious lives of so many working people, reduced public services, global warming.

Instead, here is where her sights seem to be set:

...your real target seems to be business people large and small. Yes, they have their needs too, some of them legitimate. But they also have their parties who cater to those needs. If business want a sympathetic party to support – and they do – you can be sure they don’t need and won’t buy the NDP.

There are, of course, those die-hard NDP politicos who will be outraged by Caplan's letter. A circling of the wagons seems a natural reaction when attacked by one of your own. But what they need to remember is that he speaks for many who have grown disaffected with a party apparently more interested in pandering than in adhering to principles that provide a voice for those who have none.

For me, he speaks a sad but undeniable truth: the NDP has lost its way.

UPDATE: The discontent expressed by Gerald Caplan is spreading:

You may also like to check out these links here, here and here.

The Harper Enemies List: A Prominent Member

Yesterday I wrote about a fund-raising plea that the Harper machine has sent out to its true believers with deep pockets; the missive stressed the need for big dollars to get out the truth to Canadians about what a fine job the regime is doing, a message that is, according to the neocons, being impeded by a leftist media apparently in the thrall of Justin Trudeau.

While that letter places the media in general on the Harper Enemies List, an individual who occupies a prominent place in that august pantheon surely is Linda McQuaig, a journalist I have long admired for her piercing insights and refusal to tow the corporate line.

McQuaig's latest piece for iPolitics, entitled For Big Oil, Harper’s door is always wide open, makes for some interesting reading tying, as it does, Harper, Nigel Wright, and disgraced lobbyist Bruce Carson together in a shameless pandering for oil interests. I shall say no more, since Owen wrote about it yesterday on his blog, which, along with McQuaig's article, is will worth reading.

Prognosis: Grim

Kevin Farmer, the lead letter-writer in today's Star, captures nicely, I think, the irrational nature of humanity that does not bode well for our collective future:

Re: Antarctic melt greatest in 1,000 years, May 16

As humanity continues to avoid meaningful action on climate change, an unavoidable future of climate catastrophe continues to take shape. In that regard, it has been morbidly fascinating to watch people simultaneously over- and under-react to reports that the West Antarctic ice sheet is destined to collapse, committing spaceship Earth and all of its passengers to a rise in sea levels of up to four meters from this impact alone.

Some people are receiving this news as proof of the urgency of climate change. Others are dismissing it as an unstoppable phenomenon the impacts of which will be felt only over a long period of time. They are resigned to climate change that is out of our hands and a problem for future generations. Ironically, it is the former who are under-reacting and the latter who are over-reacting.

The collapse of this ice sheet was set in motion years ago, perhaps decades. This event is not an indication of how urgent climate change is today, but rather how urgent climate change was before the collapse was triggered. To “take the temperature” of the climate crisis today according to this particular news is to under-react to the implications of this event.

We are setting future climate catastrophes in motion today. The urgency of climate change today is properly measured against those outcomes. To consign future generations to the consequences of inaction in the present, because we are already consigned to the consequences of inaction in the past, is to over-react to the implications of this event.

As long as we wait for catastrophes to inform our environmental awareness, these catastrophes will likely be permanent features of a new normal. By all credible accounts, the future impacts of climate change will continuously accelerate and worsen.

The collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is part of the new normal. What else are we waiting for? Whatever it is, do we really want it?

Kevin Farmer, Toronto