https://www.tvo.org/video/documentaries/call-of-the-forest-the-forgotten-wisdom-of-trees
If the Liberals hit the ball out of the park in 2015, things will be a lot tougher this time around. But here’s an idea that not only Liberals, but all progressives should rally around: Canadians need a progressive model of cabinet government – and the 2015 Liberal platform points us in the right direction. Before getting to how and why, let me start with some historical context.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, Canadian progressives focused on reducing poverty, providing healthcare, and promoting public education. This was our version of the welfare state.
By the 1980s values were shifting and progressives got deeply involved in equality rights, especially around gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. As Neil Nevitte shows in his seminal study, The Decline of Deference, it was the start of a major realignment in our politics.
Until then, authority figures – clergymen, business leaders, politicians, and others – occupied a privileged place in Canadian society. Canadians trusted them and deferred to them on important matters, including policy and politics. Political parties needed them to help broker deals on major issues and to bring the public along.
Nevitte shows how the new interest in equality rights clashed with the old culture of elitism. As a result, Canadians’ deference to these authority figures declined rapidly through the 1980s, and the brokerage system got pulled down with it.
But change was already underway. A new generation of politicos was dabbling in public opinion research and, as the old system dissolved, political parties got keenly interested in the new and emerging field of consumer marketing.
Susan Delacourt’s Shopping for Votes provides a rich and insightful account of how “political marketing” transformed Canadian politics through the ‘80s and ‘90s. While the old brokerage system relied on elites to identify and balance needs, the new approach was all about buy-in. And the way to get it was not through dialogue and debate, but by surveying people to find out what they want, packaging it the right way, and giving it back to them as policy.
By the early 21st century, concepts like “market-testing,” “buy-in,” “products” and “brands” dominated our politics. Delacourt neatly sums up the new approach in the term consumer politics.
In hindsight, however, there was a fly in the ointment. Consumer politics does a great job of reaching out to ordinary people to find out what they want or get their reaction to an issue, but it provides no reliable and authoritative way to distinguish between wants and needs or to make trade-offs between them when they conflict. Ultimately, this is left to cabinet – and that is a problem.
Imagine a debate over whether to allow logging in an ecologically sensitive area. When the cabinet meets to deliberate, it will have to grapple with very different viewpoints, weigh different kinds of arguments, and make trade-offs between competing values and interests.
As we’ve seen, it can no longer assume the public will defer to its authority and decisions. Those days are gone. On the contrary, making big trade-offs behind closed doors is usually met with suspicion and can become the launchpad for resistance.
Governments do have a tool to avoid such conflicts. It’s called consultation. In theory, giving people a chance to have their say before the decisions are made should build public buy-in for the process. In fact, it often does the reverse.
On issues like logging or climate change, consultation exposes the divisions between people, but it does nothing to resolve them. Instead, public jousting between different sides often raises the stakes and pushes them to extremes.
Once the consultation is over, cabinet is left with all the same hard trade-offs as before – except now views are polarized, expectations have been raised, and emotions are often raw.
Despite the growing list of such debacles – the pipeline debates leap to mind – our governments continue to insist the cabinet system works; and that it can solve tough issues like these. It doesn’t – and the situation is getting worse.
Our policy process was designed for a different era – one that was more elite-driven and supported by deference. The old brokerage system worked because it engaged community leaders in a dialogue that built mutual respect and understanding. It created cohesion and trust among citizens and with governments. Unfortunately, it was also elitist.
Consumer politics gives us important tools for policy-making, but no reliable way to sort through competing wants. Ultimately, it turns policy-making into a marketing contest, where the one with the most buy-in wins – and that divides rather than unites people. So, what is the answer?
Canadians need a new kind of brokerage system, one that fits with our commitment to a more open, equal, and inclusive society – we need a progressive model of brokerage politics.
In fact, lots of work is being done on this. Public Deliberation includes a wide range of processes that give stakeholders and/or citizens a meaningful role in different kinds of decision-making, but in a disciplined and methodical way. Basically, people work through the issues together. As they do, they learn from one another and gain a greater understanding of the issues.
Critics who say this turns decision-making over to the mob or leads to paralysis are simply misinformed. Engaging this way creates a sense of personal responsibility for the success of the process and of ownership for the decisions that result from it. Deliberation often leads to innovative solutions that build trust and cohesion. Nor is it meant to replace cabinet decision-making; rather, it supports it – much in the way consultation is supposed to do now.
Perhaps Canadians didn’t realize it at the time, but Liberals’ 2015 agenda was an important step toward this solution. The commitment to a new era of dialogue, engagement, and collaboration, combined with the commitment to restore cabinet government, was shifting attention onto the deeper problems with consumer politics and centralization in the PMO.
If Liberals had pursued this further, I believe their discussions would have converged on public deliberation as the only viable way to deliver on these promises.
It’s a difficult time for Liberals to be talking about engagement, dialogue, and cabinet government, but they mustn’t lose their resolve now. The policy process is broken and badly needs to be fixed. There are ways to repackage the ideas for 2019 and, done right, this is an idea that Canadians might find very attractive – Liberals might even hit another one out of the ballpark.
Amid new consternation sparked by Mueller report, Congresswoman from New York says key national conversation must go deeper than what becomes of the Republican president
“This is the REAL conversation we need to have as a country,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Sunday. “As horrific as this president is, he is a symptom of much deeper problems.” (Photo: 60 Minutes/CBS News)
Amid widespread speculation over the weekend stirred by the submission of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to the Department of Justice—and the 4-page summary of it released on Sunday—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says the most important dialogue at this point should not be about what happens next to President Donald Trump, but one focused on the “root causes” that made it possible for such a person to ascend to the White House in the first place.
“As horrific as this president is, he is a symptom of much deeper problems.” —Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)“This is the REAL conversation we need to have as a country,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Sunday. “As horrific as this president is, he is a symptom of much deeper problems.”
Ocasio-Cortez was responding to actor and activist George Takei, who in a tweet on Saturday stated: “Let’s say Trump goes down in disgrace from Mueller or the SDNY or Congressional investigations. We’re left with a big question: How did a guy like that get elected? Why do so many still support him? We can’t just say ‘Fox News’ or ‘Russians.’ We have serious issues to sort out.”
The Twitter thread on Sunday afternoon arrived just prior to news that U.S. Attorney General William Barr had delivered his summary of the Mueller report to members of Congress. According to the Associated Press‘ initial reporting on the summary, Mueller “did not exonerate President Donald Trump of obstruction of justice,” but neither did it “find that he committed a crime.”
With numerous outlets earlier reporting that Mueller’s office will seek no further indictments based on its exhuastive nearly two-year investigation, many legal analysts and political observers have shifted to the idea that President Trump, as well as his family members and other associates, could still face jeopardy from congressional oversight, criminal probes underway by the Southern District of New York, or possible action from other jurisdictions.
However, as Ocasio-Cortez, argued in a follow-up tweet, the focus on Trump’s potential criminal problems or impeachment by the Democratic-controlled Congress misses the larger point when it comes to solving the nation’s deeper crisis.
“He can stay, he can go. He can be impeached, or voted out in 2020,” she tweeted. “But removing Trump will not remove the infrastructure of an entire party that embraced him; the dark money that funded him; the online radicalization that drummed his army; nor the racism he amplified+reanimated.”
“In order for us to heal as a nation,” she concluded, “we ALL must pursue the hard work of addressing these root causes. It’s not as easy as voting. It means having uncomfortable moments convos w/ loved ones, w/ media, w/ those we disagree, and yes – within our own party, too. It’s on all of us.”
The Courage Foundation nominates Julian Assange for the
2019 Galizia Prize for Journalists, Whistleblowers & Defenders of the Right to Information.
Julian Assange merits this award on the following grounds:
Julian Assange is the only publisher and journalist in the EU formally found to be arbitrarily detained by the UN Human Rights System, which has repeatedly called for his release, most recently on 21 December 2018. He is in dire circumstances, faces imminent termination of his asylum, extradition and life in a US prison for publishing the truth about US wars, and has been gagged and isolated since March 28, 2018. He has been kept in the UK from his young family in France for eight years (where he lived before being arbitrarily detained in the UK), has not seen the sun for almost seven years, and has been found by the United Nations to be subjected to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”.
If given to Julian Assange, this award will immediately act as a force to push against his gagging and isolation and help him to resist US determination to extradite him from the UK for publishing the truth.
As Daphne Caruana Galizia herself wrote:
“If America could burn Julian Assange at the stake, it would do so. That is the real sadness of what this situation has revealed: that when it comes down to shutting up those who inconvenience us, we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin. It is just a matter of degree. China jails Liu Xiaobo and the United States tries to do the same to Julian Assange.”
The political persecution of Julian Assange resulted in his formal recognition as a refugee under the 1951 Refugee Convention in 2012, but he has been prevented from enjoying his asylum status because the UK has unlawfully kept him in a situation of arbitrary detention, according two formal findings by the United Nations.
Mounting US pressure and a new government in Ecuador mean that he is at imminent risk of losing his internationally protected status. The Trump administration has sharply intensified its efforts to silence WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.
The New York Times and the Washington Post have confirmed that secret charges have been brought against Julian Assange over his publications on the US government. This week, Chelsea Manning announced she would refuse to cooperate with US authorities which have called her to testify before the WikiLeaks Grand Jury, and she is likely once again be imprisoned as a result. This development introduces a dangerous situation: it introduces the extraordinary precedent of a source being compelled to testify against a journalist for publishing true information about the government.
News broke in January that Ecuador colluded this year with the US government to have the US officials interrogate nearly a dozen Ecuadorian diplomats in London about Julian Assange. Meanwhile, all the diplomats at the Embassy have been replaced and his asylum has transformed into a highly surveilled form of imprisonment.
The New York Times has reported that Ecuador’s new President proposed to the US immediately on taking office an exchange in which Ecuador would hand over Julian Assange to secure US debt relief. Ecuador secured $4.2 billion in US backed IMF debt relief on 21 February. Medical practitioners who have seen Julian Assange during this time have denounced his deteriorating health situation and called for him to be able to access appropriate health facilities.
The increased intensity of the persecution against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange has prompted numerous members of the human rights community to denounce the actions being taken against him. Dinah PoKempner, Legal Counsel of Human Rights Watch, tweeted in April that
“Whether it agrees or not with what Julian Assange says, Ecuador’s denying him access to the Internet as well as to visitors is incompatible with its grant of asylum. His refuge in the embassy looks more and more like solitary confinement.”
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Maguire, who Ecuador prevented from visiting Assange, stated that
“I know of no other country where an asylee is held with no sunlight, no exercise, no visitors, no computer, no phone calls, yet all this is happening in the heart of London in the Ecuadorian Embassy, to an innocent man, Julian Assange, now in his 8th year of illegal and arbitrary detention by the United Kingdom Government”.
There is consensus in the international human rights community that the US extradition of Julian Assange should be opposed. The future of the free press hangs in the balance while the UK’s role in trapping Mr. Assange, without charge, over the past nine years, while ignoring UN findings and repeated calls for his release, augurs badly for Mr. Assange’s ability to win a future extradition battle in the UK.
In the context of Ecuador’s shifting geopolitical alliances and improper cooperation with the US government’s prosecution of its asylee, an independent recognition of his persecuted status through this award will make a material difference to Julian Assange’s legal and political ability to resist his extradition to the US.
Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States would carry serious consequences for press freedom in Europe generally, given the extraterritorial dimension of the US prosecution. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that Julian Assange can be prosecuted because he is not protected by the US Constitution, given that he is a foreigner whose work occurred outside US territory. The publications over which the US seeks to prosecute Mr. Assange (allegedly provided by Chelsea Manning) were published from Europe, in collaboration with European media organisations, while Julian Assange was in Europe.
The US seeks to apply its laws to European journalists and publishers and at the same time strip them of all US constitutional protections, effectively turning Europe into a legal “Guantanamo bay”, where US criminal law is asserted, but US rights are withheld. If the US succeeds in prosecuting Julian Assange, a non-US publisher and journalist, for revealing information the US says is secret, this would open the flood gates to an extremely dangerous precedent: his co-publishers at Der Spiegel, Le Monde, La Repubblica, Espresso, the Guardian, Telegraph, Independent and Channel 4, among others, all risk extradition to the US, and it will have a chilling effect on the press and national security reporting.
When news broke of Assange’s indictment in November 2018, the Director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, observed that it is
“[d]eeply troubling if the Trump administration, which has shown little regard for media freedom, would charge Assange for receiving from a government official and publishing classified information–exactly what journalists do all the time.”
The New York Times has stated:
“An indictment centering on the publication of information of public interest… would create a precedent with profound implications for press freedoms”.
James Goodale, who was the lawyer representing the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, put it succinctly:
“the prosecution of Assange goes a step further. He’s not a source, he is a publisher who received information from sources. The danger to journalists can’t be overstated.”
David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, has stated:
“Prosecuting Assange would be dangerously problematic from the perspective of press freedom… and should be strongly opposed.”
Julian Assange applied his skills as an investigative journalist and cryptographer to protect journalistic sources, by inventing secure online dropboxes to anonymise sources. Even if one views his contribution to whistleblower protection from this prism alone, Julian Assange has done more to protect whistleblowers than any other individual person. But this effort to protect whistleblowers also permeates Mr. Assange’s work with WikiLeaks.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden stated on WikiLeaks:
“They are absolutely fearless in putting principles above politics… their efforts to build a transnational culture of transparency and source protection are extraordinary – they run towards the risks everyone else runs away from – and in a time when government control of information can be ruthless, I think that represents a vital example of how to preserve old freedoms in a new age”.
Julian Assange himself advocated for two decades for the institutional recognition of the persecution faced by journalists and their sources, and has argued that this recognition makes a material difference to the fate of the persecuted. By contrast, silencing and imprisonment deters others who are weighing up whether to take the courageous step to blow the whistle. Julian Assange has played a pivotal role in protecting whistleblowers and promoting free access to information by being the founding member of the Courage Foundation (he resigned in 2015 due to his circumstances). He also played a crucial role in the establishment of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Icelandic Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, personally drafting model legislation to protect whistleblowers in journalists. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have also advised on policies to protect sources and whistleblowers, including through submissions to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Speech (see below).
Julian Assange directed the 2013 rescue of whistleblower Edward Snowden from US extradition from Hong Kong, managed his successful asylum process and deployed and funded WikiLeaks’ Investigations Editor Sarah Harrison to personally guide Snowden through the entire process. Harrison’s courage was recognised through the award of the SPD’s International Willy Brandt prize ‘For Special Political Courage’ in 2015.
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have won numerous major journalism prizes, including Australia’s highest journalistic honour (equivalent to the Pulitzer), the Walkley prize for “The Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism”, The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (UK), the Index on Censorship and The Economist’s New Media Award, the Amnesty International New Media Award, and has been nominated for the UN Mandela Prize (2015) and the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize (nominated by Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire). Wikileaks journalists, including Julian Assange, are long standing members of their respective national journalist unions and WikiLeaks has been repeatedly found by courts to be a media organization.
The WikiLeaks model, which preserves the integrity of the original archive, has ushered in a golden era of in-depth journalistic investigations. WikiLeaks receives censored and restricted documents anonymously after Julian Assange invented the first anonymous secure online submission system for documents from journalistic sources. For years it was the only such system of its kind, but secure anonymous dropboxes are now seen as essential for many major news and human rights organisations.
WikiLeaks publications have been cited in tens of thousands of articles and academic papers and have been used in numerous court cases promoting human rights and human rights defenders. For example, documents published by WikiLeaks were successfully used this month in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the UK’s illegal depopulation of the Chagos Islands, which where cleared to make way for a giant US military base at the largest Island, Diego Garcia. The Islanders have been fighting for decades for recognition.
Julian Assange pioneered large international collaborations to secure maximum spread and contextual analysis of large whistleblower leaks. For “Cablegate”, WikiLeaks entered into partnerships with 110 different media organisations and continues to establish partnerships in its publications. This model has since been replicated in other international media collaborations with significant successes, such as the Panama Papers.
The WikiLeaks model, which preserves the integrity of the original archive, has also broken new ground the preservation of subjugated history. For example, documents published by Julian Assange have been used by petitioners to prove that they were subjected to extraordinary rendition by the CIA from Macedonia before the European Court of Human Rights (German citizen El-Masri v Macedonia; Assange’s publications were cited six times in the successful judgement), to free persons falsely accused of terrorism in Pakistan, as well as before the International Court of Justice in the recent Advisory Opinion in relation to the Chagos Islands case. The UK Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that Assange’s publications of US diplomatic cables are admissable as evidence in UK courts.
His contribution to bringing serious wrongdoing to light and empowering human rights victims has led to Julian Assange being recognised as a Human Rights Defender. On 21 December 2018, UN Special Rapporter for the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, Michel Forst, called for his immediate release: “It is time that Mr. Assange, who has already paid a high price for peacefully exercising his rights to freedom of opinion, expression and information, and to promote the right to truth in the public interest, recovers his freedom.“
Julian Assange’s work in exposing war crimes and the cost of war has earned his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in consecutive years. In February 2019, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Maguire announced that she had nominated him for this year’s Peace Prize.
Julian Assange has published over 10 million documents with a perfect verification record. One of his first major releases was the a copy of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp’s 2003 Standard Operating Procedures for the US Army. WikiLeaks soon released allegations of illegality by the Swiss Bank Julius Baer, Sarah Palin’s Yahoo emails, the secret bibles of Scientology and the membership list of the far-right British National Party. In 2010, WikiLeaks came to global attention by publishing tens of thousands of classified documents from the United States, from the US Army’s suppressed video evidence of helicopter gunners in ‘Collateral Murder’ who killed a Reuters photojournalist and his driver, to the Afghan War Diaries and the Iraq War Logs, which documented more than 100,000 occupation related civilian killings, to “Cablegate”, the State Department diplomatic cables. This was followed in 2011 by the “Gitmo Files” – documents on 767 of the 779 prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.
WikiLeaks has published the “Global Intelligence Files” (5 million emails from intelligence contractor Stratfor), “Spy Files: Russia”, two million files from Syrian political elites, the “Saudi Cables” (hundreds of thousands of files from the Saudi Foreign Ministry) as well the key draft leaks and analysis of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade (TPP) and the Trade in Service Agreement (TISA). In 2016, WikiLeaks published over 57,000 documents from Turkey’s Minister of Energy, who is President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law, revealing extensive corruption and leading to WikiLeaks being officially banned in Turkey. WikiLeaks publications have revealed extensive information on the the disasterous war on Libya and proof of US knowledge of Saudi and Quatari govenrment backing of ISIS and Al Nusra in Syria. One of WikiLeaks most recent investigations, in collaboration with major European media, revealed a corrupt arms deal between French state-owned company and the United Arab Emirates.
In the European context, Julian Assange notably revealed that the US’s National Security Agency and the CIA targeted:
He also published original US intercepts from French senior officials concerning:
Selected Books and Articles by Julian Assange
Washington Post, ‘WikiLeaks has the same mission as The Post and the Times‘ by Julian Assange, 11 April 2017
WikiLeaks, ‘Assange Statement on the Eve of the US Election‘ 8 October 2016
‘The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to the US Empire‘, Verso, 2016
‘Introduction – The Wikileaks Files: The World According to the US Empire‘ by Julian Assange’, Verso, 26 August 2015
Libération, ‘WikiLeaks: les toits des ambassades américaines ont des oreilles, la preuve‘ Par Pierre Alonso, Jean-Marc Manach et Julian Assange, 3 Juillet 2015
‘Submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Exopression’s study on the protection of sources and whistleblowers’, by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, 22 June 2015
‘When Google Met WikiLeaks’, OR Books, 2014
Newsweek, ‘Google is not what it seems‘, by Julian Assange, 23 October 2014
New York Times, ‘The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’ by Julian Assange, 1 June 2013
‘Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet‘, OR Books, 2012
WikiLeaks, ‘Assange Statement on the First Day of Manning Trial‘, 3 June 2013
Edward Snowden stated on WikiLeaks’ contribution to journalism:
“Their mere existence has stiffened the spines of institutions in many countries, because editors know if they shy away from an important but controversial story, they could be scooped by the global alternative to the national press.”
Julian Assange’s undisputed role in transforming the informational space over the past ten years has made him a primary target of information warfare, intelligence actions and US prosecution.
The United Nations stated in December:
“It is time that Mr. Assange, who has already paid a high price for peacefully exercising his rights to freedom of opinion, expression and information, and to promote the right to truth in the public interest, recovers his freedom”
Julian Assange has already paid too high price for his work. Without substantial European institutional recognition of the severity of his persecution he is highly likely to be extradited to the United States given the increasingly close nature of the US-UK relationship and the accelerating diminution of respect for legal rights and due process in both of these two states.
This is the last year that Julian Assange is eligible for the award, given the UK’s imminent exit from the European Union, which exposes him to additional uncertainty and jeopardy. The Courage Foundation urges the jury to give this year’s award to Julian Assange, which will armour him against a difficult battle ahead against the forces that seek to silence him, and with him, all that this award stands for.
Revision — From the April 2019 issue
More Than a Data Dump
Last fall, a court filing in the Eastern District of Virginia inadvertently suggested that the Justice Department had indicted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other outlets reported soon after that Assange had likely been secretly indicted for conspiring with his sources to publish classified government material and hacked documents belonging to the Democratic National Committee, among other things.
As a veteran of major free-press legal battles, I waited, throughout the days that followed, for journalists to come to Assange’s defense. A few reliable advocates, such as the ACLU and the Knight First Amendment Institute, did sound the alarm, but the editorial boards of the Times and the Washington Post remained silent.
The Columbia Journalism Review allowed that Assange’s prosecution “could be a slippery slope that would threaten traditional journalists and publishers,” but it was quick to note that WikiLeaks was a “shadowy organization” and “not officially a journalistic one.” (Of course, there is no body, not even the CJR, that determines what is “officially” a journalistic outfit.)
Overall, the same mainstream journalists who have treated Donald Trump’s disparaging tweets about them as unprecedented threats to their freedom handled Assange’s indictment as a political story, another piece of the ongoing Trump–Russia saga.
In fact, the Trump Administration’s prosecution of Assange represents a greater threat to the free press than all of the president’s nasty tweets combined. If the prosecution succeeds, investigative reporting based on classified information will be given a near death blow.
Julian Assange started WikiLeaks in 2006 with the stated purpose of providing a place for newsworthy information to be released on a confidential basis. The site came to widespread international notice a few years later, when Assange obtained thousands of classified documents relating to the Iraq War from US Army soldier Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning. Assange in turn shared these documents with Le Monde, El País, Der Spiegel, the Guardian, and the Times, each of which separately edited and published what they’d received.
Amid the furor surrounding this publication, politicians from across the political spectrum—Senators Dianne Feinstein and Joseph Lieberman among them—called for Assange’s prosecution. Barack Obama’s Justice Department seriously considered indicting Assange under the Espionage Act and convened a grand jury for that purpose. The legal theory behind such a prosecution involves charging Assange with conspiring with Manning to release classified materials. Using this “conspiracy” theory, the Espionage Act would be made to apply to a reporter—not directly but indirectly—by using the reporter’s relationship with sources. In other words, the reporter would be made responsible for the actions of his sources. (Manning was eventually convicted under the Espionage Act for leaking to Assange.)
The Justice Department has been enamored of this conspiracy approach since the time of the Pentagon Papers. In that case, Richard Nixon’s DOJ attempted to enjoin the New York Times and, later, the Washington Post from publishing a forty-seven-volume Defense Department study of the history of US relations with Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, which had been classified top secret. I led the team of lawyers who defended the Times in that case. I had advised the Times that the government would attempt to enjoin publication and thereafter would attempt to prosecute the Times criminally. I also advised the Times that it would win any case brought against it in the Supreme Court, on First Amendment grounds.
In June 1971, the Times published three installments of the papers and was enjoined from further publication, as I had predicted. The Washington Post then picked up where the Times left off, and both papers ended up in the Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor. The court’s decision is now widely considered a legal landmark, since it effectively determined that no injunction could be brought to stop publication of classified material.
The ruling did not, however, determine that newspapers or their reporters were immune from prosecution after the fact. Following the Supreme Court’s decision, attorney general John H. Mitchell convened a grand jury in Boston to determine whether there was a conspiracy among Times reporter Neil Sheehan and others with respect to the publication of the Pentagon Papers. After a year and a half, the Justice Department gave up and dissolved the grand jury.
Since Assange has already published the leaks in question, he obviously cannot be stopped from publishing them now; all the government can do is prosecute him criminally for obtaining or publishing the leaks in the first place. To date, there never has been a criminal prosecution for this type of behavior. Obama’s Justice Department ultimately concluded that a prosecution of Assange would damage the First Amendment. Their decision effectively meant that Assange was entitled to the same constitutional protections given reporters. (A Washington Post story about this decision quoted Obama officials who referred to the “New York Times problem”—i.e., the fact that any precedent set with respect to Assange could be applied to traditional journalistic entities.)
Trump’s Justice Department has reversed course on this decision. When Jeff Sessions first came into office as attorney general, he said that one of his top priorities would be going after Assange. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—then the director of the CIA—said, “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state, hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”
While no one knows what’s in the DOJ’s indictment, it is highly probable that it names Assange as a co-conspirator not only in connection with the Manning leaks but also in connection with the leaks of emails stolen from the DNC and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta, as well as the leaks of classified information detailing the CIA’s ability to perform electronic surveillance (the so-called Vault 7 matter).
With respect to the DNC/Podesta leaks, Assange is in the crosshairs of special prosecutor Robert Mueller, who apparently believes that he may have conspired with Russian intelligence and perhaps additionally with members of the Trump campaign to leak the emails. Assange denies both that he received the emails from Russian intelligence and that he provided information to the Trump campaign.
Mueller’s January indictment of the former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone alleges that Stone tried to communicate with Assange through two intermediaries: radio host Randy Credico and political commentator Jerome Corsi. After laying out these allegations, Mueller indicted Stone for lying about his contacts with Credico and Corsi, and for attempting to get Credico to lie before Congress about their conversations. In a later filing, Mueller contended that he had executed search warrants on accounts that contained communication between Stone and “Organization 1,” understood to be WikiLeaks. (Stone has pleaded not guilty to all charges.)
Not all of the facts about the DNC leaks have come out yet, so it is hard to know exactly what Assange did. If he explicitly agreed to act as a Russian agent, he should lose his First Amendment protection. On the other hand, if he did no more than what he did with Manning—receive the documents and publish them—he should have that protection. The same is true with respect to the Vault 7 matter: the facts concerning these leaks are not known, but the application of the conspiracy theory to these leaks is presumably the same as in the DNC hack.*
* Assange may also be indicted for assisting Edward Snowden’s flight to Russia, since Sarah Harrison, an Assange adviser, accompanied Snowden on that flight. It has yet to be proved that Assange directed her to do that. Regardless of how this charge plays out, it should not disturb Assange’s First Amendment protection for his other actions. Additionally, Assange was arrested on Swedish rape charges in 2010; his current asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London began after the UK attempted to extradite him on those charges in 2012. In May 2017, Sweden dropped the charges.
Should Trump’s Justice Department succeed in prosecuting Assange, the only safe course of action for a reporter would be to receive information from a leaker passively. As soon as a reporter actively sought the information or cooperated with the source, the reporter would be subject to prosecution. National security reporting, however, is not done by receiving information over the transom. It is naïve to think that reporters can sit around waiting for leaks to fall into their laps. In a recent interview, the longtime investigative reporter Seymour Hersh told me that he obtains classified information through a process of “seduction” in which he spends time trying to induce the source into giving up the information. If he isn’t allowed to do that, he says, “It’s the end of national security reporting.”
It’s clear that the Justice Department believes such “seduction” creates a conspiracy between the leaker and the reporter. In its prosecution of the State Department employee Stephen Jin-Woo Kim for leaking classified information about North Korea to a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, the DOJ stated, in a sealed affidavit, that it considered Rosen a “co-conspirator.” The DOJ filed the affidavit with the D.C. District Court in 2010 to gain access to Rosen’s email, which showed him persuading Kim, asking for the leak time and time again until Kim finally relented. The affidavit was unsealed three years later, to the shock of Rosen and many other journalists. When Fox News angrily protested that Rosen’s First Amendment rights prevented him from being a co-conspirator, the Obama Justice Department assured Fox that it would not prosecute him. If this type of conspiracy theory were to be applied in a criminal trial, a court would end up examining every effort by a reporter to obtain information. It would criminalize the reporting process. Reporters and their publishers would argue that the First Amendment protected news-gathering efforts such as Rosen’s, but the result would be in doubt in every case.
If reporters can be indicted for talking to their sources, it will mean that the government has created the equivalent of a UK Official Secrets Act—through judicial fiat, without any legislative action.
Given the threat the Justice Department’s actions against Assange pose to the First Amendment, why haven’t more journalists, press organizations, and editorial boards jumped in to support him? Principally it is because journalists dislike what he is doing; they don’t believe he is a “real” journalist and therefore do not see him as entitled to the same protections they enjoy.
Writing in U.S. News and World Report, for example, Susan Milligan says, “[Journalism] requires research, balance and most of all judgment. . . . Dumping documents—some of them classified—onto a website does not make anyone a journalist.” Add to this my own experience of when I was attacked several years ago by a howling mob of A-list journalists led by the late Morley Safer at a party (for my own book) where I said Assange, as a reporter, was entitled to First Amendment rights. “He is just a data dumper,” I was told—and most everyone there agreed.
But he’s not just a data dumper. He edited the Manning leaks initially, holding back some material. He may have done the same thing with his other leaks, including the Vault 7 releases. For better or for worse he seeks out information to be published on his website the way other journalists do for their publications. He is a publisher and is entitled to the same First Amendment protections as any other. Nonetheless, in the eyes of establishment journalists he remains a dumper, as well as a rapist, a liar, a thief, and a Russian agent.
One wonders whether the real reason journalists will not support Assange is that they simply don’t get it. They don’t understand how a successful prosecution of Assange would threaten their ability to report. I would suggest that the focus of the mainstream press should not be on whether Assange meets the usual definition of a journalist or whether they approve of what he does. That’s not the point. The point is that he carries out the functions of a journalist, has First Amendment protections (as they do), and should not be prosecuted for what he does. If he is, we are all worse off for it.
In all the press coverage of the “the SNC-Lavalin affair,” not enough attention has been paid to the company’s involvement in Site C – the contentious $11 billion dam being constructed in B.C.’s Peace River valley.
The Liberals say that any pressure they put on Jody Wilson-Raybould to rubber-stamp a “deferred prosecution agreement” for SNC-Lavalin was to protect jobs at the company. But the pressure may have been to protect something much bigger: the Liberals’ vision for Canada’s future. Site C epitomises that vision.
The “Many Lives” of Site C
Birthed in 1959 on the drawing boards of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and BC Electric (then owned by Montreal-based Power Corp), the Site C dam has been declared dead, then alive, then dead again several times over the next five decades until 2010, when BC Premier Gordon Campbell announced that Site C would proceed. [1]
Tracking SNC-Lavalin’s involvement in Site C during recent years has been difficult, but Charlie Smith, editor of The Georgia Straight, has filled in some of the missing information.
Site C dam (Source: CC BY-SA 3.0)
Sometime in 2007, the Site C dam project was quietly moved to Stage 2 of a five-stage process. Smith wrote,
“SNC-Lavalin and Klohn Crippen Berger were prime consultants for Stage 2 of the Site C project. This had to occur before the project could proceed to Stage 3 in the five-stage planning process. The decision to advance to Stage 3 was based on a prediction in the Stage 2 report that demand for B.C. electricity will increase 20 to 40 percent over the next 20 years. ‘As extensive as BC Hydro’s hydroelectric assets are, they will not be enough to provide future British Columbians with electricity self-sufficiency if demand continues to grow as projected,’ the Stage 2 report [Fall, 2009] declared. Bingo. This gave the pro-Site C politicians in the B.C. Liberal party … all the justification they needed.” [2]
On April 19, 2010 Premier Campbell announced that Site C would proceed. At the time, Chief Roland Willson of the West Moberly First Nation called the entire five-stage process a “’farce,’ and said the government hadn’t finished the second stage of the development process, so he doesn’t know how it can go ahead to the third. Willson said First Nations in the area haven’t seen studies on land use, wildlife, the fishery or the cultural significance of the region, and the process can’t move on to environmental assessments [Stage 3] without that work.” [3]
Nevertheless, the process did move on, and SNC-Lavalin may have been involved in the next stage of the planning process, as well. The Dogwood Institute recently reported that SNC Lavalin was “an environmental consultant for Site C.” [4]
In 2011, SNC-Lavalin Chair Gwyn Morgan (image on the right) became an advisor to BC Liberal leadership winner Christy Clark during her transition to the premiership. Morgan had joined the SNC-Lavalin board in 2005 and was chair of the company from 2007 until 2013. As The Tyee reported in 2014,
“Morgan retired in May 2013, the month after SNC-Lavalin agreed to a 10-year corruption-related ban from the World Bank related to a power project in Cambodia and a bridge in Bangladesh. Among the SNC-Lavalin companies on the World Bank [corruption] blacklist are divisions involved in publicly funded B.C. projects like the Bill Bennett Bridge, Canada Line and Evergreen Line.” [5]
Going Forward
At the time of Gwyn Morgan’s 2013 retirement from the SNC-Lavalin Chairmanship, the company was being investigated in at least ten countries, including: Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, India, Kazakhstan, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia. [6]
While we have no way of knowing whether Gwyn Morgan, as an advisor to Christy Clark as of 2011, in any way lobbied on behalf of SNC-Lavalin, we do know that “Morgan’s personal, family and corporate donations to the BC Liberals totalled more than $1.5 million.” [7]
At the same time, in 2011 SNC-Lavalin had won the engineering, procurement and construction management (EPCM) contract for the Muskrat Falls hydro project in Newfoundland. But the company was apparently so “distracted” by corruption charges internationally that eventually crown utility Nalcor had to take over the project, which went way over budget and is now the subject of an inquiry. [8]
That didn’t dissuade the B.C. Premier from going forward. On December 16, 2014, the Christy Clark provincial government gave approval for Site C, despite recommendations by the Joint Review Panel (JRP), which had concluded two months previous that Site C’s hydropower was not needed in the time-frame that BC Hydro was arguing. (Recall that the Stage 2 report had claimed a 20-40% increase in demand over the next 20 years.) JRP member Harry Swain had concluded that demand for electricity in B.C. has been flat dating back to 2005.
While the newly elected B.C. NDP government in 2017 debated the cancellation or suspension of Site C, the Financial Post reported that Montreal’s SNC-Lavalin is “part of the lead design team for the [Site C] project.” [9] That little-known contract may have been signed much earlier.
On February 21, 2018 the Journal of Commerce reported on the progress being made by Site C’s lead design team, comprised of SNC-Lavalin and Klohn Crippen Berger and involving “approximately 40-plus engineers, nine modellers and 15 drafters”. [10] SNC-Lavalin Building Information Modeling (BIM) Manager Rodrigo Freig told the Journal that,
“In three years and 43 models later, we only had two model crashes, related to slow server speeds.” [11]
That comment would suggest that the lead design contract had quietly been issued to SNC-Lavalin and Klohn Crippen Berger sometime in 2015.
A few days ago (March 7), the Canadian Press reported:
“SNC-Lavalin is working on the five biggest infrastructure projects in Canada, according to trade magazine ReNew Canada. Those contracts alone amount of $52.8 billion, and include projects for Bruce Power and the Darlington nuclear plant in Ontario as well as the Site C dam in B.C.” [12]
While the exact amount of the Site C lead design contract is not known, it is likely at least $1 billion in B.C. taxpayer dollars. If the lead design contract was indeed issued in 2015, this would fit with Christy Clark’s effort to push the project past “the point of no return.”
Help From Trudeau
In February 2015, under the Harper government, federal fraud and corruption charges were filed against three of SNC-Lavalin’s legal entities over its dealings in Libya. But after the Trudeau Liberals were elected in Fall 2015, the company “signed a deal with Ottawa that will allow the engineering and construction company to continue bidding on federal contracts until criminal charges it faces are resolved.” [13]
As we know now, SNC-Lavalin also began lobbying extensively for a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) that would effectively free the company of charges without forcing it to admit wrongdoing. In exchange, the company would pay a fine and prove that it has changed its practices to prevent a repeat of any wrongdoing. The Trudeau government quietly inserted changes to the criminal code allowing for DPAs in its 2018 Budget. According to recent report by the Buffalo Chronicle (March 11), SNC-Lavalin’s in-house attorney Frank Iacobucci “was instrumental in persuading” Trudeau to insert that new legal provision into the budget bill. [14]
The Buffalo Chronicle also notes that in October 2018, Trudeau asked Iacobucci to lead the government’s negotiations with indigenous communities in B.C. regarding the TransMountain Pipeline expansion project – a project that SNC-Lavalin hopes to construct. Quoting an unnamed source, the Chronicle states:
“Iacobucci, who was already angry that [Jody] Wilson-Raybould was refusing to allow his client [SNC-Lavalin] to negotiate a deferred prosecution agreement, feared that his consultations in British Columbia could be construed as improper. He would only agree to take the role on the condition that Trudeau replaced her with a ‘more doting’ Member of Parliament.” [15]
The full story of Iacobucci’s role in the SNC-Lavalin scandal has yet to emerge, but it’s clear that the Trudeau government has been exceedingly accommodating to the company’s wishes.
The Georgia Straight’s Charlie Smith has further spelled out the Trudeau government’s help:
“Keep in mind that Trudeau helped SNC-Lavalin with its World Bank problem by endorsing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. This entity was created by China as a rival to the U.S.-led World Bank on infrastructure financing. SNC-Lavalin might be debarred from World Bank financings, but it can bid on AIIB-backed projects. Trudeau also helped SNC-Lavalin and other companies involved in huge public projects by creating the Canada Infrastructure Bank. And the Trudeau government accelerated construction of the Site C dam by awarding federal permits over the opposition of First Nations in the area.” [16]
Bulk Water Export
In two slightly different chapters within two recent books, I have argued that the Site C dam on the Peace River is perfectly placed to facilitate bulk water export east of the Rockies and into the American Southwest. Readers can consult my Chapter 10, “Water Export: The Site C End-Game” in editor Wendy Holm’s Damming the Peace: The Hidden Costs of the Site C Dam (Lorimer 2018), and the chapter entitled “Site C and NAWAPA: Continental Water Sharing” in my latest book Bypassing Dystopia: Hope-filled Challenges to Corporate Rule (Watershed Sentinel Books 2018).
SNC-Lavalin’s involvement in Site C has been so well-hidden that the company name does not appear anywhere in Damming the Peace. But by the time I was writing the water-chapter for my own book, SNC-Lavalin’s connections to Site C were becoming clear enough for me to state that the company “is intricately involved in Site C”. Only now are we learning just how involved they are.
SNC-Lavalin has had its eye on continental water-sharing for at least three decades. Back in the 1980s the SNC Group (as it was called at the time) was part of a consortium called Grandco, which was promoting a continental water-sharing plan entitled the Grand Canal Project. Grandco’s other consortium members included the UMA Group of Calgary, Underwood McLellan Ltd. of Saskatoon, Rousseau, Sauve & Warren Inc. of Montreal, and Bechtel Canada Ltd. (son of U.S. Bechtel, the world’s largest engineering firm).
Grandco’s head lobbyist was Canadian financier Simon Reisman (uncle of current Bilderberg member Heather Reisman). After Simon Reisman publicly advocated for Canadian water export, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (himself an advocate for large-scale water exports) appointed him as Chief Negotiator for the 1988 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the predecessor to NAFTA, signed by Jean Chretien in 1994. Both the FTA and NAFTA essentially strip Canada’s sovereign right to protect our water resources and make Canada vulnerable to massive water export.
While Site C may provide energy and water for fracking in B.C. and potentially for tar sands mining in Alberta, in the long term the “end-game” of Site C, according to Wendy Holm, is water export because that freshwater water “will have a far higher value” than oil and gas. The vast 83-kilometres-long reservoir needed for the Site C dam will submerge 78 First Nations heritage sites (including burial grounds) and flood about 3,816 hectares (9,430 acres) of prime agricultural land in the Peace River Valley
A similar scenario is being played out in Quebec with Hydro-Quebec’s massive $5 billion Romaine Complex, which is damming the River Romaine and flooding 100 square miles of land; in Newfoundland where the Muskrat Falls mega-dam project “boondoggle” is now the subject of a public inquiry; in Manitoba where several mega-dam projects are poised to flood First Nations land.
Now, thanks to the Trudeau government’s Mid-Century Long-term Strategy, that same scenario is poised to repeat itself many times in the coming years.
Long-Term Strategy
In 2017, the Trudeau government released its Mid-Century Long-Term Strategy (MCS) intended to reduce emissions of greenhouse gas (GHG) at rates to comply with its Paris Climate commitments.
Scientist David Schindler has summarized the MCS:
“In brief, Canada has agreed to reduce its GHG emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, using 2005 emissions as a baseline. This sounds wonderful, until one reads how this is to be done, as described in the report. All the scenarios used to achieve the miraculous carbon reduction goals rely on replacing fossil fuels by generating massive amounts of hydroelectric power, which is assumed to emit no GHG. … The required hydro development would require the equivalent of building over one hundred Site C dams in the next thirty-two years, an extraordinary plan…” [17]
Once all that water has been impounded behind the dams, it is subject to NAFTA treatment (including in the rewritten USMCA agreement) as a tradable “good” or commodity. Chrystia Freeland and the negotiators for the USMCA did not secure an explicit exemption for water under the goods, services, and investment provisions of the deal. According to Bill C-6 (which became law in 2001), as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Freeland has water-export licensing authority and can issue permits for water export.
As I explain in some detail in Damming the Peaceand Bypassing Dystopia, massive drought and over-use of freshwater in the Colorado River region and in the U.S. Southwest have prompted big investors like the Blackstone Group (with Brian Mulroney on its board) to look north for water-investment opportunities. The Blackstone Group has been involved in water issues for years, and in 2014 it announced a new portfolio company called Global Water Development Partners to “identify, develop, finance, construct, and operate large-scale independent water development projects.”
The Blackstone Group is just one of many investment firms eyeing Canada’s freshwater resources. The Bank of America Merrill Lynch – which designed the Canada Infrastructure Bank – has predicted a global water market worth $1 trillion by 2020.
Obviously, SNC-Lavalin wants to be in on all that MCS hydroelectric development and other projects to be financed by Trudeau’s Canada Infrastructure Bank in the coming years. But if they have to face prosecution, the company risks being barred from federal contracts for ten years.
The Trudeau government says it is attempting to protect SNC-Lavalin jobs. That may be true, but it is also likely that the Trudeau government is attempting to protect its long-term vision for Canada: a vision that jettisons “reconciliation” and the environment in favour of damming the country and then draining it.
Freshwater has been turned into a commodity and it will be worth far more than oil or gold in the near future. Follow the money. That’s what SNC-Lavalin is doing.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Joyce Nelson is the author of seven books, including Beyond Banksters and its sequel Bypassing Dystopia. She can be reached via www.joycenelson.ca
Notes
[1] “The Site C Dam: a Timeline,” The Narwhal, December 12, 2017.
[2] Charlie Smith, “Does Andrew Weaver’s response to Site C justify his removal as head of the B.C. Greens?” The Georgia Straight, December 15, 2017.
[3] Quoted in “Site C dam project moving forward on Peace River,” The Canadian Press, April 19, 2010.
[4] Lisa Sammartino, “SNC-Lavalin tentacles reach deep into B.C.,” dogwoodbc.ca, February 25, 2019.
[5] Bob Mackin, “Ex-Head of Troubled SNC-Lavalin Named Chair of BC Crown Corp,” The Tyee, May 5, 2014.
[6] “Public Risks, Private Profits: Profiles of Canada’s Public-Private Partnership Industry,” Polaris Institute & CUPE, June 2013.
[7] Sammartino, op. cit.
[8] Andrew Nikiforuk, “Redeemable? SNC-Lavalin’s Criminal Record,” The Tyee, February 22, 2019.
[9] Jesse Snyder, “’It’s going to cost a fortune’: Cancellation of $8.8B Site C dam would scrap billions of dollars in contract work,” The Financial Post, June 2, 2017.
[10] Warren Frey, “UPDATED: Site C’s virtual construction a complicated endeavour,” Journal of Commerce, February 21, 2018.
[11] Quoted in ibid.
[12] Christopher Reynolds, The Canadian Press, “Here’s what a 10-year ban on federal contract bids would mean for SNC-Lavalin,” Toronto Star, March 7, 2019.
[13] Ross Marowits, “SNC-Lavalin Gets OK From Ottawa To Bid on Contracts, Despite Criminal Charges,” The Canadian Press, December 10, 2015.
[14] “’Political grandmaster’ Frank Iacobucci is at the center of SNC Lavalin, Kinder Morgan scandals,” The Buffalo Chronicle, March 11, 2019.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Smith, op. cit.
[17] David Schindler, “Will Canada’s Future Be Dammed? Site C Could Be the Tip of the Iceberg,” chapter in Wendy Holm, editor, Damming the Peace: The Hidden Costs of the Site C Dam, Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 2018.
Featured image is from HuffPost Canada
The last email I sent out was:
2019-03-13 The Ombudsman will fail. They have a problem with “Trust” but fail to identify that the problems are INHERENT in the system. “Extractive Sector Corporate Responsibility“. SNC Lavalin, and who comes next? http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=24156
Does this mean, as is so often concluded, that we can be “good” only in our private lives and that moral behavior must bend or break when we participate in the world’s work?
No, that demoralizing notion is nonsense. . . .
2019-03-15 B.C. SUPREME COURT JUDGE SAYS WATER IS A COMMODITY
http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=24177
“there is nothing untoward about the City, who is a seller, setting a purchase price for its commodity.”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Ouch! Maybe the Judge is timely – – at a time when we’re gearing up over Agri-Food Canada – International Trade’s program to fund and support businesses that will expand the export of water from Canada.
NEW, might be helpful to those looking for more detail: Index.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
JOIN US IN A CELEBRATION OF TREES (A film you might like to know about, wherever you live.)
“Call of the Forest”.
The film by Jeff McKay is based on the work of Scientist Diana Beresford-Kroeger.
Sunday March 24 at 2:00 at the Parksville Civic Centre.
A panel discussion follows the film.
Admission is by Donation.
Will be a lively time with many community groups tabling.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
2019-03-22 Yale Press Conference and “Science of Vaccine Forum” Features Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=24175
(God! I want to weep every time I see more of the documentation regarding vaccine damage. It is so tragic. I can’t imagine what future generations will conclude about our intelligence. There is lots of bona fide science with which to challenge the schtick c0ming through the media. Robert F. Kennedy is once again very good in the above video.
There are also lots of obviously-genuine videos of real life experience. Yet another is this by a surgeon and his wife. I can’t imagine how these people must feel – – they’ve failed their children – – with terrible, life-long consequences. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoIoERWVHgg Please fight hard to at least maintain CHOICE whether to vaccinate or not.)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
2019-03-22 How the media let malicious idiots take over, The Guardian, George Monbiot
http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=24188
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=24171
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=24192
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=24173
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
I THINK I SENT THESE TO YOU EARLIER:
2013-07-12 Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, documentary
http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=24149
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
2019-03-12 Court documents reveal Monsanto’s efforts to fight glyphosate’s ‘severe stigma’, CBC
http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=24145
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=24141
/s3.amazonaws.com/arc-authors/tgam/6d18784d-53a9-484f-9164-e998d6ac64d9.JPG)
As events in the Western United States have proven in the past few years, fresh water is an increasingly precious natural resource. That reality has been driven home here in British Columbia this summer, with strict watering bans now in place in response to ever-diminishing reservoirs.
It’s against this backdrop that a full-fledged revolt has begun over the provincial government’s decision to give our fresh water away to corporations effectively for nothing. It is a policy that urgently needs to be reviewed.
Under regulations in an otherwise commendable piece of new legislation – the Water Sustainability Act – the B.C. government will begin charging companies a small fee to access the province’s groundwater. (Now it is free.) One of the biggest corporate users of that groundwater is the Swiss multinational Nestlé SA, which does business in this country.
Starting in 2016, the government will begin charging Nestlé Waters Canada (and other industrial users) a fee of $2.25 per million litres of water. Yes, you read that correctly. Nestlé can withdraw a million litres of some of the finest drinking water anywhere in the world for the price of one of their chocolate bars. It takes about 265 million litres of the liquid gold every year for the outrageous sum of $596.25 – or the cost of a backyard barbecue.
Then it turns around, packages it in clear plastic bottles and sells it as “pure natural spring water” – and makes millions doing it.
One doesn’t have to stare too long at this picture to conclude there is something dreadfully wrong. Tens of thousands have come to the same conclusion, signing an online petition that has now reached 160,000. Campaign director Liz McDowell says she will present it to Environment Minister Mary Polak once it has reached 200,000 – which, given the growing public anger over this matter, shouldn’t be much longer.
The minister’s position on the issue has been: We don’t sell our water here in B.C. (which sets up the obvious punch line: No, we just give it away). While it may be true that the public has always believed water should be free, I don’t think it has ever said corporations should be allowed to suck the increasingly precious resource out of the ground for peanuts so they can turn around and make a fortune.
Why should water be any different than oil or natural gas? We don’t give those away for nothing. You could fairly argue water is a far more important resource than either oil or natural gas, even if right now it may feel like we have far more of the former. That’s what California thought once upon a time too. Now it’s tapping into groundwater to survive arguably the worst drought in its history.
If the government is determined to let corporations access our freshwater reserves, at least let them pay something resembling a meaningful price for it. The $2.25 it plans on charging in 2016 compares to the $70 per million litres that Quebec assesses its industrial users and the $140 per million litres that Nova Scotia charges. Personally, I think even those rates are too low.
What’s additionally perplexing is that B.C.’s new pricing policy has been set by the same government that is constantly complaining about how little money it has for the incessant demands being made in health care and education, among other areas. Yet here it is giving away one of the planet’s most precious commodities for essentially nothing.
Under the Water Sustainability Act, the meagre fees and rental prices the government is charging companies are intended to cover the cost of administering the new legislation. However, some academics have already publicly expressed skepticism that the fees will be sufficient to cover the $8-million it’s estimated to cost to oversee the new regulations.
The whole thing seems like madness to me, especially in the ever-changing climate environment in which we live.
Maybe once upon a time the public didn’t care if the government gave water away. I think it does now. And I’m confident the minister will soon see the names of at least 200,000 people who disagree with her on this issue. I’m equally sure those names represent but a fraction of those who think it’s time to reconsider this unconscionable corporate giveaway.
If our politics is becoming less rational, crueller and more divisive, this rule of public life is partly to blame: the more disgracefully you behave, the bigger the platform the media will give you. If you are caught lying, cheating, boasting or behaving like an idiot, you’ll be flooded with invitations to appear on current affairs programmes. If you play straight, don’t expect the phone to ring.
In an age of 24-hour news, declining ratings and intense competition, the commodity in greatest demand is noise. Never mind the content, never mind the facts: all that now counts is impact. A loudmouthed buffoon, already the object of public outrage, is a far more bankable asset than someone who knows what they’re talking about. So the biggest platforms are populated by blusterers and braggarts. The media is the mirror in which we see ourselves. With every glance, our self-image subtly changes.
When the BBC launched its new Scotland channel recently, someone had the bright idea of asking Mark Meechan – who calls himself Count Dankula – to appear on two of its discussion programmes. His sole claim to fame is being fined for circulating a video showing how he had trained his girlfriend’s dog to raise its paw in a Nazi salute when he shouted: “Sieg heil!” and “Gas the Jews”. The episodes had to be ditched after a storm of complaints. This could be seen as an embarrassment for the BBC. Or it could be seen as a triumph, as the channel attracted massive publicity a few days after its launch.
The best thing to have happened to the career of William Sitwell, the then-editor of Waitrose magazine, was the scandal he caused when he sent a highly unprofessional, juvenile email to a freelance journalist, Selene Nelson, who was pitching an article on vegan food. “How about a series on killing vegans, one by one. Ways to trap them? How to interrogate them properly? Expose their hypocrisy? Force-feed them meat,” he asked her. He was obliged to resign. As a result of the furore, he was snapped up by the Telegraph as its new food critic, with a front-page launch and expensive publicity shoot.
Last June, the scandal merchant Isabel Oakeshott was exposed for withholding a cache of emails detailing Leave.EU co-founder Arron Banks’ multiple meetings with Russian officials, which might have been of interest to the Electoral Commission’s investigation into the financing of the Brexit campaign. During the following days she was invited on to Question Time and other outlets, platforms she used to extol the virtues of Brexit. By contrast, the journalist who exposed her, Carole Cadwalladr, has been largely frozen out by the BBC.
This is not the first time Oakeshott appears to have been rewarded for questionable behaviour. Following the outrage caused by her unevidenced (and almost certainly untrue) story that David Cameron put his penis in a dead pig’s mouth, Paul Dacre, the then editor of the Daily Mail, promoted her to political editor-at-large.
The Conservative MP Mark Francois became hot media property the moment he made a complete ass of himself on BBC News. He ripped up a letter from the German-born head of Airbus that warned about the consequences of Brexit, while announcing: “My father, Reginald Francois, was a D-Day veteran. He never submitted to bullying by any German, and neither will his son.” Now he’s all over the BBC.
In the US, the phenomenon is more advanced. G Gordon Liddy served 51 months in prison as a result of his role in the Watergate conspiracy, organising the burglary of the Democratic National committee headquarters. When he was released, he used his notoriety to launch a lucrative career. He became the host of a radio show syndicated to 160 stations, and a regular guest on current affairs programmes. Oliver North, who came to public attention for his leading role in the Iran-Contra scandal, also landed a syndicated radio programme, as well as a newspaper column, and was employed by Fox as a television show host and regular commentator. Similarly, Darren Grimes, in the UK, is widely known only for the £20,000 fine he received for his activities during the Brexit campaign. Now he’s being used by Sky as a pundit.
The most revolting bigots, such as Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, built their public profiles on the media platforms they were given by attacking women, people of colour and vulnerable minorities. Trump leveraged his notoriety all the way to the White House. Boris Johnson is taking the same track, using carefully calibrated outrage to keep himself in the public eye.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the unscrupulous, duplicitous and preposterous are brought to the fore, as programme-makers seek to generate noise. Malicious clowns are invited to discuss issues of the utmost complexity. Ludicrous twerps are sought out and lionised. The BBC used its current affairs programmes to turn Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg into reality TV stars, and now they have the nation in their hands.
My hope is that eventually the tide will turn. People will become so sick of the charlatans and exhibitionists who crowd the airwaves that the BBC and other media will be forced to reconsider. But while we wait for a resurgence of sense in public life, the buffoons who have become the voices of the nation drive us towards a no-deal Brexit and a host of other disasters.
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist