This World is Going to Hell...How to Stop It

That hoary old cliché, “the world is going to hell in a handbasket”, seems truer every day. Wake up this morning and you can read about the ongoing worst environmental disaster in human history, a gushing torrent of crude oil destroying not only one of the world’s most diverse wildlife preserves, but the economy and way of life for millions of Gulf state residents. You can read about Sergeant James Patrick Macneil, 28, the latest Canadian soldier to die in our pointless imperial war in Afghanistan. Closer to home, we see that the federal government is getting its money’s worth out of the $1 billion it squandered on security for the G20 summit in Toronto. Pepper spray, LRAD sonic weaponry, plastic bullets, and now, we get word that they will indeed be breaking out the water cannons. Yes, free speech is alive and well in the Great White North, as you can tell by the ominous police presence that surrounds any hint of spontaneity or protest. But it’s not just here that speaking out about injustice can get you tossed in a jail cell. The Supreme Court of the United States just voted 6-3 to severely restrict First Amendment rights by declaring that verbal support for non-violent, lawful activity is equivalent to giving material aid to terrorists. Jimmy Carter better be careful the next time he monitors elections in Lebanon. Finally, I just looked up at the TV to see that Canada has placed additional sanctions on Iran, the pariah state that absorbs all the collective wrath of the wealthiest nations on earth on behalf of oil companies and the military-industrial complex. I’ve said what I wanted to say about the ongoing propaganda campaign to depict this weak nation - which has fully complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, unlike other countries which refused to even sign it - as some kind of sinister threat to world peace. Unfortunately, the Money Boyz control the flow of information and they are fixated on regime change in Iran. Which, of course, has nothing to do with oil.


It’s bad enough to read all this bad news. But what’s far, far worse is watching the media trot out, day after day, the same people who are responsible for these disasters and injustices, who profit from them, who keep them going, to defend the actions of the elite, block any positive changes, and shower blame on the victims of their criminal policies. Of course, it’s hard to beat the American media elite for sheer tone deafness. Jabba the Hutt lashed out at the poor again on his radio show the other day, literally ridiculing children who go hungry and depend on school lunches to obtain sufficient nutrients. Fat man Rush, who likely hasn’t seen his toes since his last Vietnam deferment, suggested they could just look in the fridge for ding-dongs, and if not, there's always the dumpster. There is literally no difference, save a couple centuries, between his despicable "advice" and Marie Antoninette suggesting that the solution for starving French peasants is to “let them eat cake.”

Then there is the ever-more extreme backwaters of the American far right, which gets nuttier by the day to the corporate media’s delight. Sharron Angle brought out an old Republican standby – denigrating the poor and unemployed as “deadbeats” determined to stay on welfare. The meme was echoed by Fox News talking heads, who rubbed salt in the wounds of the 1.2 million Americans whose unemployment benefits just ran out by declaring that they spend most of the money on junk food, beer, cable TV and comic books anyway. Also, Tea Party favourite Dr. Rand Paul insisted that the unemployed are just afraid to get their hands dirty and need to start doing lousy jobs, but that didn’t stop him from defending high pay for medical practitioners. Doctors, he declared, “deserve to earn a comfortable living.” As Digby declared, isn’t it funny how those advocating “tough love” austerity policies are never in danger of being affected either way?

I despair for humanity. The only real solution for the problems that plague the world today, from foreign wars to ecological disaster to extreme inequality, is socialism, the democratic control of society’s resources and the means of production on behalf of the working class. But such a proposal is unthinkable to the corporate overlords that control our society and the information that reaches the masses. They actively fight it through their politicians and their media, but there’s only so much they can do to control an enraged population faced with long-term unemployment and governments they correctly feel do not represent them. More dangerous is when they take that legitimate rage and deploy it against powerless targets like unions, the poor and minorities, through the help of bought-and-paid for demagogues like Glenn Beck or whoever his Canadian equivalent will be on the just-announced Sun TV News Channel. And the scariest part is that it seems to work.

No matter how bad things get, the broad masses appear equally unable to imagine alternatives to the status quo, despite their much-hyped exasperation with it. Elections across the world have repeatedly returned to power the same bourgeois political parties, all with the same deranged, nonsensical neo-Hooverist prescriptions for the global economy: austerity, cutting spending, and reining in the deficit, because what matters is continued profits for banks, not the devastation which prolonged unemployment continues to wreak on working people. And yet the people just keep voting them back in. Britain elects Conservative David Cameron. Germany throws in its lot with Angela Merkel and the free market-worshipping Free Democratic Party. No matter how much bad press Stephen Harper gets, Canadians remain enslaved to the Conservative-Liberal big business duopoly while the NDP runs from any thoughts of socialism. American primary voters backed corporate whores like Blue Dog “Democrat” Blanche Lincoln (D-AK), the senator from Wal-Mart, simply because Obama endorsed her. They also rejected progressive voices like Marcy Winograd in California. It seems there’s only one direction for working-class politics in America to go – further and further right.

Part of the problem is that there is no strong, organized working class movement in any of these countries that can find representation in government. Traditional social-democratic parties are a joke, having been completely enslaved to neoliberal dogma years ago. All will embrace the austerity policies that make the working class pay for the banksters’ crimes (see: France’s Socialist Party, the British Labour Party). The decades-long demonization of Marxist ideas during the Cold War has ensured that the most powerful theoretical tool for understanding the current economic crisis goes ignored by the masses that would most benefit from that knowledge.


The Canadian citizen who wishes to take a Marxist approach to the political struggle has a range of choices, none of them all that appealing. The Communist Party of Canada is the second-oldest political party in the country after the Liberals, yet its historical associations with Stalinism have left it on the political fringe. The party membership has aged to the point where it cannot represent an active, youthful political movement. As good as the People’s Voice newspaper is, its writers retain a 1930s view of the working class and revel in archaic terminology. Whatever the party’s policies, its unwillingness to confront the legacy of Stalinism or adopt the internationalist approach of Leon Trotsky means it will remain glued to the Soviet past. To take a coldly realistic view of the situation, it is highly unlikely that any party with the word “Communist” in its name will be able to avoid the totalitarian connotations of historical Communist parties led by Stalin and Mao, with their gross crimes against humanity. That fact also condemns the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), which ran out of steam around the time it fixated on Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha as its anti-revisionist model.

The Socialist Equality Party (Canada), which I’ve written about before, seems to have by far the best platform of any leftist party. Its policies are Trotskyist in nature and internationalist in scope, which in my mind points the way forward for the proletariat: the unity of workers across borders against their exploiters in the parasitic corporate-financial class. Unfortunately, my early enthusiasm for the SEP has waned somewhat after discovering how little infrastructure the party has in Canada – in my experience, basically none. The SEP’s Canadian office does not even have a phone number or e-mail address, and there’s little realistic hope for a party with such a laughable lack of organization. Short of spreading the word through social media and registering the SEP as an official political party, it remains very much a movement in theory only.

That leaves the New Democratic Party. I was made aware via Facebook that there is in fact an NDP Socialist Caucus. I completely agree with the Caucus’ policies and their general direction, i.e. the only way the NDP can survive as a relevant party is by moving to the left. Canada already has a centre-left bourgeois party: the Liberals. The NDP need to reclaim the ideological high ground by drawing on their roots with Tommy Douglas and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which declared its intention to work until capitalism was eradicated. While the NDP leadership is considerably to the right of its rank and file, its existence as a major political party with representatives in Parliament gives it a clout that no other Canadian party to the left of the Liberals can boast. For now, with the SEP little more than a publishing organization, there seems to be little alternative to pushing for the adoption of socialist principles within the NDP. Ontario party leader Andrea Horwath has indicated her openness to this approach, suggesting an NDP where members need not “check their socialism at the door.”

The political element is an important part of the class struggle, but any real progress is years away and will not affect the underlying dynamic of Canadian politics today, nor the subservience of our politicians to the interests of transnational capital. For the moment, the only course of action is mass organization, demonstrating on the streets in defiance of our government’s corporatist polices. I call for this tactic regularly, but too often it remains purely abstract and theoretical, with no real-world lynchpin.

Well, the opportunity arrives this weekend as the G20 congregates in Toronto. The Harper government’s monstrous waste of $1 billion for security, not to mention the overall tone of media reports promoting new weapons the police seem keen to use, indicate that the state is fully prepared to use violence as a means of crushing dissent. That fact in itself is not surprising, but the media’s approach suggests they will pin any blame on protesters. The use of police provocateurs to justify a crackdown is not out of the question. The decisive factor is, will the citizenry allow itself to be intimidated? Or will it make its presence and concerns known to a nationwide, nay, worldwide audience? Will it refuse to submit to the bludgeoning force of the modern police state?

I’ll be in Toronto this weekend to answer in the affirmative. So should you. Make your voice heard!

Worst Comparison Ever

Democratic Congressman Charlie Rangel declared that Hamas is today's Soviet Union. Just in terms of geography alone, that comparison is ludicrous. But it was par for the course at a Times Square press conference held the other day by Democrats who demanded that survivors of Israel's flotilla attack be prevented from entering the United States, calling them "terrorists" for good measure. Former progressive hero Anthony Weiner also went out of his way to illustrate the appropriateness of his last name by continuing his bid to become AIPAC's new golden boy. I guess there really is no crime Israel can commit without its Congressional servants falling over each other to justify it. Sad.

Squeezing Iran

More news on the continued demonization of Iran emerged yesterday, as the UN Security Council voted to impose yet another round of sanctions against Tehran for its alleged “refusal to bring its nuclear program into compliance with international inspection”, as The Globe and Mail put it. The Globe reported on the sanctions with all the asterisk-plagued “objectivity” you would expect from the voice of Bay Street, even as Washington (interesting, that) bureau writer Paul Koring was unable to mask the massive hypocrisy viz a viz the United States and Israel:

“There is no double standard at play here,” Mr. Obama said, although he did not directly address critics who argue Washington turns a blind eye to Israeli’s clandestine nuclear arsenal while attempting to prevent Tehran from building one.

Clearly, no double standard at all. But wait...there’s more!

The sanctions will likely worsen the already grim state of Iranian-American relations and could be the death knell of Mr. Obama’s as yet unrequited offer to extend the hand of friendship to the regime in Tehran. Mr. Obama nevertheless voiced hope that relations with Tehran could still improve.

“These sanctions do not close the door on diplomacy,” he said. “We would like nothing more than to reach the day when the Iranian government fulfills its international obligations – a day when these sanctions are lifted, previous sanctions are lifted, and the Iranian people can finally fulfill the greatness of the Iranian nation."

In other words, regime change. So let me get this straight: the same president who spent his first 18 months in office fellating AIPAC by maintaining the American elite’s single-minded focus on escalating tensions with Iran, relentlessly criticizing that country at every conceivable opportunity, insisting that “all options” are still “on the table”, and finally, refusing an arrangement brokered by Turkey and Brazil that would have shipped Iran’s enriched uranium abroad for reprocessing – in essence, an agreement made in good faith with Iran that would have solved the nuclear dispute and satisfied declared American demands – and we’re supposed to believe that Obama extended a hand of friendship to Tehran? An offer which remains “unrequited”?

The stench of political cynicism here is unbearable. It’s clear that the United States never had any real interest in negotiations with Iran. Don’t be fooled by Obama’s gentler rhetorical approach compared to Bush/Cheney, his occasional references to the greatness of the Iran people, etc. Nothing has changed. The goal of Western elites has been and always will be regime change, creating a more pliable Iranian government that will open the country up to foreign investment – if necessary by suppressing its native population in the manner of the Shah prior to the 1979 revolution.

In that manner, Obama never seriously considered Iranian diplomatic overtures, nor has he ceased the relentless manner in which the U.S. aims to bludgeon that country into submission, either through diplomatic sanctions or military force. That capitulation to elite interests has been there from the very start of his presidency, and his so-called offers of negotiation have always been insincere, his compliments always backhanded. In his inauguration speech, Obama declared:

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

No single sentence better illustrates the hypocritical, cynical policy of the United States towards Iran. First, we have denunciations of corruption and the heavy-handed silencing of dissent – as if the American government has not fully tolerated and even propped up such regimes when it serves their own interests, as if dissent from Beltway conventional wisdom is not rigorously silenced (ask Helen Thomas). It’s all there – the faux democratic posturing, the laughable implication that American politicians do not “cling to power through corruption”, and finally, the projecting of American aggression onto that of its targeted enemy nation. Iran has repeatedly extended its diplomatic hand to America over the past decade – witness its 2003 overture to the U.S. after the invasion of Iraq, which would have satisfied American demands, but which the Bush administration arrogantly slapped away. Likewise, this year's deal with Turkey and Brazil would have satisfied the supposed demands of the “international community” regarding Iran’s nuclear program. But that agreement was never seriously entertained by the U.S. government, which has one goal and one goal only: regime change.

It is the United States, not Iran, which refuses to unclench its fist. The latest round of UN sanctions are merely the latest evidence of its characteristic imperial aggression.

Propaganda, Inc.: The Dawn of "Fox News North"

The Globe and Mail is reporting that Quebec billionaire Pierre Karl Péladeau has plans to create a new, right-leaning 24-hour cable news channel in Canada modeled on the success of Fox News south of the border. I shouldn’t have to explain how serious this is, or how dangerous. But it’s my blog, so I will.

Canadian media today is more concentrated than it’s ever been, with a handful of corporate monopolies controlling virtually everything we see, read or hear. CanWest Global controls Global Television as well as such conservative-leaning national newspapers as the Vancouver Sun, the National Post, and the Ottawa Citizen (essentially Canada’s version of the Washington Post, that paper employs odious chickenhawk David Warren as a regular columnist). The CBC reported in 2004 that CanWest papers had been ordered to change the words in Associated Press stories from “insurgents” and “militants” to “terrorists”, a perfect example of its propensity to embrace conservative memes.

Next up is CTVglobemedia, which includes both the CTV television division and the leading national daily, The Globe and Mail. Broadly “centrist” in their political orientation, these sources offer a fairly conventional pro-business viewpoint.

Finally, there is Quebecor, the communications empire that controls Sun Media, which publishes national tabloids in Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Montreal, etc., as well as local papers like Fort McMurray Today and the London Free Press. It also bought out Osprey Media, which owns the Kingston Whig-Standard, my hometown paper where I briefly worked as an intern in 2009.

Prior to today’s announcement, I knew little of Péladeau’s political leanings, although as the head of a major corporation I could assume that they were broadly conservative. Now that I know this billionaire CEO plans to establish a conservative cable news network in Canada, that fact – as well as Quebecor being the nation’s preeminent tabloid publisher – establishes once and for all his true status: Pierre Karl Péladeau is the Rupert Murdoch of Canada.

The precedent established by Murdoch’s vast media holdings is well-established. Trashy conservative dailies like the New York Post are now a mere sideshow compared to Murdoch’s main contribution in the Slow Death of American Journalism: Fox News, the right-wing propaganda network that has had a devastating effect on public discourse in the United States. The effect of Fox News on the collective American intelligence are well-known by now and the statistics speak for themselves. Substantial numbers of American citizens still believe Saddam Hussein played a role in 9/11, yet the numbers among Fox News viewers are even higher.

Where American media had previously served elite interests primarily by omitting certain stories and playing up others (check Noam Chomsky’s Thought Control in Democratic Societies for an illustration of this phenomenon in the case of Nicaragua during the 1980s), Fox News represented a crossing of the right-wing Rubicon. Despite the ingenious pretense of objectivity via its “fair and balanced” slogan – "How could this be propaganda? They just said they’re fair and balanced! – Fox set a new low for the corporate American press corps, which slavishly followed in its footsteps. The network trafficked in blatant lies, demonization of opponents, skewering of the facts to fit a predetermined narrative, and mindless partisan hackery that, following the election of Barack Obama, rapidly began to descend into subtle and not-so-subtle racism, alarmist pandering to right-wing militia movements, and, in general, the most well-managed, effective, outright dangerous propaganda since the heyday of Joseph Goebbels.

Alongside the deliberate disinformation and fact-challenged demagogues like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, the network also embraced the most shallow elements of standard corporate news and cranked them up to 11. Fox provides a non-stop flow of pneumatic blonde “news babes”, delights in stories centred around sex while its anchors feign outrage, and more than any of its competitors, revels in making itself the story: Bill O’Reilly and Beck regularly document their ongoing controversies with other public figures and replay clips from their own shows. It never occurs to them to ask the question: what about the actual news?

This is not what we need to see in Canada. A conservative cable news channel will only skew public discourse further on terms favourable to wealthy Canadian elites. The intelligence of the public at large will only decline, and it’ll be much harder for us to look down on misinformed Americans when we have our own source of disinformation. Canadian media is already corporate-friendly and “centrist” enough as it is. The CBC, while government-owned, rarely airs controversial stories about the war in Afghanistan. Like CTV or Global, unless faced with an unavoidably tragic story such as the death of a Canadian soldier (always justified as part of our neverending struggle to bring freedom and democracy to the people of Afghanistan), they prefer feel-good stories such as the opening of a Tim Horton’s in Kandahar. A conservative Canadian news channel will only amplify this unfortunate tendency.

The prospect of “Fox News North” is horrifying and underscores the need for greater funding of independent media that will offer Canadian citizens more direct and representative control over our national conversation.

Israel: International Outlaw

I’ve been meaning to write about the Gaza flotilla incident for the past couple of weeks, but I’ve been busy getting into my new job. Suffice it to say, the storming of the flotilla was essentially an act of piracy condoned by Canada and the United States. Benjamin Netanyahu was in Ottawa visiting Stephen Harper on the day of the massacre, and Canadian government’s solidarity with Israel was unsurprising, given Harper and Michael Ignatieff’s previously-stated beliefs. The American position was even less defensible, given that one of the dead, Furkan Dogan, was an American citizen. But he was raised in Turkey and has a Turkish-sounding name, so no worries; he’s not a “real” American.

As Dave Lindorff pointed out, five of the nine dead civilians on the flotilla were shot from behind, which narrows their deaths down to two possibilities: either they were shot from behind as they attempted to flee, or an Israeli shot them from the front and then fired into their backs to finish them off. Both are war crimes. But you won’t find any of that information in corporate American (and much Canadian) media, which largely replayed the heavily-edited Israeli tape of the incident showing civilians attacking Israeli commandos with knives and clubs. Detainees released by Israel in the days afterward claimed the soldiers were shooting at them before they even came on the ship. If Israel’s version of events were correct, wouldn’t they want as much facts as possible to be known in this case? Instead, they detained all journalists onboard the flotilla and confiscated their film and cameras. The fact that Israeli authorities refuse to release the raw footage suggests they have something to hide.

Never fear, though: our brave leaders courageously pushed for a full investigation into these events – led by Israel, of course. Break out the whitewash.

Israel has become a rogue state whose aggressive inclinations dangerously threaten the stability of the Middle East. Unfortunately, Canadian and American politicians are largely bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. Independent media needs to make sure the continued suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza does not go ignored. Those brave activists who sign on to defy the Israeli blockade and attempt to deliver humanitarian aid to the impoverished Gazan population are heroes all and deserve our respect.