Roundup

Great article: "Soaring inequality is at the root of our polarized politics, which made us unable to act together in the face of crisis. And because rising incomes at the top have also brought rising power to the wealthiest, our nation’s intellectual life has been warped, with too many economists co-opted into defending economic doctrines that were convenient for the wealthy despite being indefensible on logical and empirical grounds."
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The west's lazy reporting in Africa: "Bad stuff, obviously, happens in Africa just like everywhere else – and no one is denying that those issues should be reported, but their coverage would be greatly improved if it were led by journalists whose mentality were not shaped by the Hugh Trevor-Ropers of this world. Africa is not, as the New York Review of Books reported recently, "plagued by countless nasty little wars". Nor can aviation within the continent, as Condé Nast Traveller recently suggested, be summarised by a "combination of political corruption, civil wars, numerous rogue carriers, airplanes at the end of their life cycles"."

Note to self

A few people I should spend more time reading:

Joseph Stiglitz
Thomas Frank
David Graeber
Matt Taibbi
Chris Hedges
Paul Krugman

Incredibly illuminating piece by Thomas Frank: "And as we serve money, we find that money wants the same thing from us: to push everyone it beguiles in the same direction. Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells. You can have a shot at being part of the 1 percent, money tells us, only if you are first committed to making the 1 percent stronger, to defending their piles in some new and imaginative way, to rationalizing and burnishing their glory, to exempting them from regulation or taxation, to bowing down as they pass, and to believing in your heart that their touch will heal scrofula."
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Good review of Thomas Frank's book, Pity the Billionaire: "The reason Obama does not explain things – and Frank captures this vividly – is the cult of expertise. He assumes everything has already been explained and the answers are known to the people at the heart of business, insurance, banking, and the flourishing industries, people he has come to know personally. As he said once when a reporter brought up the names of Jamie Dimon (CEO of JPMorgan Chase) and Lloyd Blankfein (CEO of Goldman Sachs): "I know both those guys, they are very savvy businessmen." An artless moment, but not without a message. The cult of expertise is a form of elite pride, and the populace have sniffed it out in the president."

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." (April 23, 1910, Citizenship In A Republic speech) Theodore Roosevelt

Roundup

Matthew Yglesias untangles the confusing threads of Obama's economic proposals.
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The 10 most racist moments from the Republican candidates - so far.
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Bill Gates does the right thing and calls for higher taxes on the rich.
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Apparently politicians with competent looking faces - "masculine but approachable, with a square jaw, high cheekbones, and large eyes" - fair better come election time.
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Obama's State of the Union speech was written at an 8th grade level - and that's a good thing.
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After the Great Depression, there was a pronounced backlash against right-wing economic policies. In the midst of our current Great Recession, however, there seems to be a growing embrace of the very policies which have brought us here, argues Thomas Frank in his new book, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right.

Roundup

Very good article about why the Republican candidates won't say too much about unemployment and why America might be experiencing the worst of both worlds of cyclical and structural economic disaster.
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"There will be riots on the streets of America," says George Soros.
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What to do about the proliferation of reckless conspiracy theories on the internet? "The second—and not necessarily mutually exclusive—option is to nudge search engines to take more responsibility for their index and exercise a heavier curatorial control in presenting search results for issues like "global warming" or "vaccination." Google already has a list of search queries that send most traffic to sites that trade in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories; why not treat them differently than normal queries? Thus, whenever users are presented with search results that are likely to send them to sites run by pseudoscientists or conspiracy theorists, Google may simply display a huge red banner asking users to exercise caution and check a previously generated list of authoritative resources before making up their minds."
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This is a very well-written article on the petro-state of...Canada.
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Seven billion people and growing food shortage. What to do? Eat insects, artificial meat, develop algae farms and "green super rice".

Roundup

I think Chris Hedges is one of the most important voices today. His critique of American corporatism is trenchant and deeply insightful. His column from yesterday is very good.
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On the American prison-industrial complex: “[A] growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.”
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“Vancouver is the world’s second-least affordable major city to buy a house, according to an annual survey of global housing markets.”
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Monbiot advocates an absolute cap on executive pay. “The UK government imposes a minimum wage, and even the neoliberal coalition appears to accept that this is a necessary intervention in the market. So why should it not impose a maximum wage?”
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The food emergency in Niger is incredible: "At the best of times this vast landlocked country – whose estimated 14.7 million people mostly live along a narrow strip of arable land on its southern border – has trouble feeding itself. Even in "non-crisis" years, 300,000 children are treated for malnutrition – 15% of the world total. This year threatens to be particularly severe.

Humanitarian organisations estimate that 1.3 million people are suffering from acute malnutrition across the Sahel, a belt of countries from Mauritania and Senegal on the Atlantic to Chad in central Africa, taking in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. These countries suffer from chronic food insecurity – families without enough money to meet their food needs – and 300,000 children die in a normal year from malnutrition or its related causes."
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"President Rafael Correa of Ecuador is leading a relentless campaign against free speech, harassing his critics, forcing independent broadcasters off the air and hijacking the nation’s courts in his bid to bankrupt the country’s largest newspaper."
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Interesting: "Researchers have invented a kind of soap that can be magnetically corralled to help clean up toxic spills. The feat is accomplished by infusing more mundane suds with tiny iron particles that join together and react to magnets."

Here's something I wrote for the Toronto Star about Bob Rae.

My article about climate change and its effect on global security.

Climate change adaptation is now something we should take very seriously. We've reached a point where no matter what we do, we will see some (if not disastrous) changes in the climate. Which leaves us with the task of adapting to this shift.

The World Bank is taking some action.

Poverty reduction bill introduced in BC. Hopefully the province can make some headway here.

Here's my article about Eritrea.

Canadian Youth Delegation to Cancun

In Cancun, Mexico, global leaders met to discuss climate change and to propose solutions. A collection of youths gathered there as well to offer their views on the discussions. Here's my short report for CJSF 90.1 on their work: http://www.sendspace.com/file/4cc9ff

You can read more about their work at: http://canadianyouthdelegation.wordpress.com/

Haiti: Radio show

I hosted a show for CJSF 90.1 on Haiti and the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake. You can listen to it here: http://previous.ncra.ca/exchange/dspProgramDetail.cfm?programID=107004

Here's my review of Immigrants and the Right to Stay by Joseph H. Carens.

Here's something I wrote for the Georgia Straight about the international food crisis.

Winston Churchill

Here's an article I wrote for the Toronto Star.

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A freedom fighter, but not for all; Winston Churchill favoured restricting justice and liberty to white people: Author

Daniel Tseghay Special to the Star
1092 words
4 September 2010
The Toronto Star
TOR
ONT
IN3
English
Copyright (c) 2010 The Toronto Star

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On the southwest corner of Nathan Phillips Square stands a statue of Winston Churchill, arms akimbo, his bulldog face in a defiant scowl.

At the base of the statue, a plaque quotes from one of his most famous speeches - the June 4, 1940, address to the House of Commons in which he called on England to defend its territory against Hitler when many in his party still supported negotiations. "Whatever the cost may be," he said, in his distinctive slur, "we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." And they never did.

When the skies of Europe's future seemed bleakest, it was Churchill who stood firm and fashioned the words that would galvanize a just resistance to one of the greatest existential threats.

Another plaque at the statue's base, however, makes a more contentious statement about Churchill: "His faith and leadership inspired free men to fight in every quarter of the globe for the triumph of Justice and Liberty."

Although he undeniably fought for the triumph of justice and liberty, it was not waged in every quarter of the globe, for he "wanted to restrict it quite heavily to white people," says Richard Toye, a professor at the University of Exeter and author of the new book Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made.

Born in 1874, at the height of the British Empire, Churchill unabashedly believed that Britain's duty was to civilize and preside over the affairs of the global south, particularly the peoples of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. It was a belief he shared with many in his generation; yet few had the opportunity to give voice to it at such high levels of public office.

He did as he believed. In the face of growing agitation for independence among the members of the British Empire's dominion, Churchill proved a stalwart defender of the empire. "We mean to hold our own," he said in 1942. "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire."

The story of the two Churchills - the man who fought tyranny in the form of Hitler and the man who would withhold the freedom of many others - is finally being told in Churchill's Empire. It's a story that will come as a revelation to many of us, since it does not fit our image of him - "a skewed view of Churchill which is based on 1940," according to Toye.

The book details the ways in which he lent his considerable gifts for a phrase (he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953) to the project of disparaging various races. Upon being elected to parliament in 1900, he said "the Aryan stock is bound to triumph." In 1942, only five years before India would gain formal independence from Britain, he said, to Leo Amery, secretary of state for India: "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."

As much as this may clash with Churchill's established public image, it is a long-recognized depiction in many places. "As far as people living in Kenya or Sri Lanka or India," notes Toye, "they will be much less surprised about this side of Churchill than Westerners will."

And the same may go for many people in Iran, according to Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Long before the Gulf oil spill, British Petroleum (BP), when it was called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, was the cause of great destruction and eventual animosity, and Churchill's role proved substantial.

Britain and its Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had, during most of the first half of the 20th century, complete access to Iran's huge oil reserves and were unwilling to give an equitable share of the profits to their host. The resentment this caused led Iran's Majlis, or parliament, to elect as prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a reformist who took office in 1951 to nationalize and gain complete control of the country's oil.

As prime minister of Britain at the time, Churchill recognized what a threat this would be to their access to oil, or to what he once described as their "prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams." And he did not take it in stride. "The idea that leaders of poor countries would stand up and claim control of their own resources was something Churchill could never grasp or sympathize with," says Kinzer. "The mere fact that some valuable resource was sitting under the soil of another country instead of British soil did not mean that Britain shouldn't have it."

And so Churchill pushed to have Mossadegh deposed. After failing to convince Harry Truman, the president of the United States, to help overthrow the leader, he found success with Dwight Eisenhower after he took office in 1953. The coup took place that year and the Anglo-American forces subsequently installed the Shah, who ruled with an increasing repression "that produced the uprising of the late-'70s, the Islamic Revolution," says Kinzer. "Had we allowed politics in Iran to unfold on its own, democracy might well have survived there and it's hard to imagine how different the Middle East might be had that been the case."

Churchill's efforts to protect "British interests around the world regardless of the costs" certainly "caused horrific suffering to huge numbers of peoples over generations," says Kinzer. Paradoxically, however, he might ultimately have played a role in undoing the empire he held so dear.

"The important things he said about freedom were sufficiently powerful that they could take root elsewhere," says Toye, "and that was why a considerable number of people felt able to be critical of his racial attitudes but also feel affection towards him and respect for him when he retired and after his death."

My article in The Georgia Straight about the wrong-headed austerity measures.

I finished reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Purple Hibiscus last night. It's really a great story. It's almost like a follow up to a couple of Chinua Achebe's novels. Achebe told the story - in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God - of how colonialism shaped the experiences of the people we now call Nigeria. In his stories, we saw the first generation that learned the West's ways - their religion, their language, their forms of social organization. In Adichie's novel, we read about the children of a Nigerian man who extols the virtues of Westerners and maintains an almost fanatical adherence to Christianity. His children follow his lead - at least until they visit their aunt and learn, for the first time, about their ancestors. The novel never explicitly discusses colonialism, but it's there, in the background. It does a wonderful job of showing the ebb and flow of attitudes towards one's traditions. One generation has it forcibly wiped away, the next accepts this act of cultural genocide, and the one after that attempts a re-integration with the past.

I'm looking forward to reading her latest novel, Half of a Yellow Sun.

Walter Mosley on redemption and other things: