These 3 youtubes cover the ground on ecological economics very well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d05jEprJxtE “CRASH COURSE” in Ecological Economics (Jon Erickson)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhHH5meSLZI Nate Hagens // From Wall St. to Ecological Economics // Part 1 ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxfGcwfYlAg Interview, William Rees – The Dangerous Disconnect Between Economics and Ecology. Institute for New Economic Thinking
There is a Must Watch video at the URL:
Survivors of CIA torture are suing the contractor psychologists who designed one of the most infamous programs of the post-9/11 era. Salim, one of the three ex-detainees in the suit, is a Tanzanian fisherman who says flashbacks from his ordeal in CIA custody are a permanent part of his life.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/13/cia-torture-survivors-sue-psychologists-aclu
TEXT of the article, for back-up purposes:
Survivors of CIA torture have sued the contractor psychologists who designed one of the most infamous programs of the post-9/11 era.
In an extraordinary step, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen now face a federal lawsuit for their role in convincing the CIA to subject terror suspects to mock drowning, painful bodily contortions, sleep and dietary deprivation and other methods long rejected by much of the world as torture.
In practice, CIA torture meant disappearances, mock executions, anal penetration performed under cover of “rehydration” and at least one man who froze to death, according to a landmark Senate report last year. Versions of the techniques migrated from the CIA’s undocumented prisons, known as black sites, to US military usage at Guantánamo Bay, Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
On behalf of torture survivors Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, as well as a representative of the estate of Gul Rahman – who froze to death in a CIA black site in Afghanistan – the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed the suit against Mitchell and Jessen on Tuesday in a federal court in Washington state, where the two currently reside. They seek compensatory damages of at least $75,000.
The suit calls the torture program a “joint criminal enterprise” and a “war crime” in which the CIA, Mitchell and Jessen colluded and from which Mitchell and Jessen financially profited.
Although numerous US government investigations have pierced the veneer of secrecy around the torture program, the program’s government architects have faced no legal reprisal. A Justice Department inquiry ended in 2012 without prosecutions. The new lawsuit, aimed not at government officials but the contractors Mitchell and Jessen, aims to break the trend.
“This case is about ensuring that the people behind the torture program are held accountable so history doesn’t repeat itself,” Steven Watt, one of the ACLU attorneys representing the three ex-detainees, told the Guardian.
“Impunity for torture sends the dangerous message to US and foreign officials that there will be no consequences for future abuses.
“This lawsuit is different from past ones because public government documents now provide exhaustive details on the CIA torture program, and they identify the people who were tortured and how it happened. The government has long abused the ‘state secrets’ privilege to prevent accountability for torture but at this stage, any claim that the torture of our clients is a state secret would be absurd.”
One of the litigants reacted to his torture by attempting to kill himself. Another was kept naked for “more than a month”, the suit alleges, and was subjected to “a form of waterboarding”.
Salim, a Tanzanian fisherman, said in a video published by the Guardian that flashbacks from his ordeal in CIA custody are a permanent part of his life. After five years in CIA and then US military custody, Salim’s captors released him unceremoniously from Bagram in August 2008, presenting him with a memo stating that the US determined him not to pose a threat to the US.
“You can’t sleep, you can’t eat, you can’t smell,” said Salim, who says his CIA captors chained his arms and legs to a metal hoop in his cell that forced him into a squatting position so uncomfortable it prevented him from sleeping. Like other detainees, Salim was doused in ice-cold water and then wrapped in a freezing plastic sheet. According to the lawsuit, Salim hid painkillers he was given in order to hoard a dose strong enough for an ultimately unsuccessful suicide attempt.
“Flashbacks come anytime, so much they make you crazy,” Salim said in the video.
Ben Soud, who now lives in his native Libya, was taken to a CIA black site in Afghanistan, and for extended periods permitted “sleep only for minutes at a time because of painful stress positions, constant blaring music, and guards banging loudly on the door of his cell every hour or so”, the suit claims. Guards paraded him naked around the black site for “15 minutes every half hour through the night and into the morning”, according to the Senate report.
Although the CIA only acknowledges waterboarding three detainees – Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abdul al-Rahim al-Nashiri – the lawsuit claims the agency subjected Ben Soud to a “form of waterboarding”.
“He was strapped to a wooden board that could spin around 360 degrees,” the suit claims.
“His interrogators spun him around on this board with a hood over his head covering his nose and mouth. While strapped to the board with his head lower than his feet, his interrogators poured buckets of cold water him. While they did not pour water directly over his mouth and nose, they threatened to do so if he didn’t cooperate.”
Ben Soud was also treated with the same frigid-water dousing and plastic-sheet coating that Salim received, only Ben Soud reported the freezing water being treated with a gel-like substance, causing it to stick to his body.
Famously, Jessen and Mitchell, former instructors in the military’s Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) program to counter torture, revised torture techniques from the SERE training and proposed to use them on CIA detainees.
They faced their first test case in the spring of 2002, after the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah, then thought to be a senior member of al-Qaida, and took him to Thailand. Although Zubaydah spoke openly with his FBI interrogators who sought to establish a rapport with him, Mitchell cabled the CIA’s Counterrorism Center “nearly every day” for permission to torture him.
CIA personnel, with Mitchell overseeing, waterboarded Zubaydah 83 times in the span of a month. Eventually, according to the Senate intelligence committee’s report – which gives Mitchell and Jessen the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar – Zubaydah would submit to torture after hearing his captors snap their fingers twice. They forced him into “confinement boxes”, one the size of a coffin and the other just two and a half feet square and 21 inches deep.
Now missing an eye, Zubaydah is still detained at Guantánamo Bay, although the CIA no longer believes he is a member of al-Qaida. The Senate intelligence committee concluded the torture techniques did not produce any useful intelligence; the CIA’s official position as of 2014 is that the question is unanswerable. But the 2002 test case convinced the CIA, supported by the Bush White House, of the value of torture.
The torture of Abu Zubaydah, who is not a party to the lawsuit, began weeks before the US Justice Department provided its August 2002 legal blessing, since withdrawn, to the CIA torture program. An adviser to Condoleezza Rice would later inform the Bush-era secretary of state that use of the techniques Mitchell and Jessen implemented amounted to a “felony war crime”.
A Spokane-based company the two founded, Mitchell and Jessen Associates, would secure $75m from the CIA in contracts, in addition to a further $6.1m from the agency for legal expenses in the event of criminal or civil action stemming from the contract. Although Barack Obama banned CIA torture by executive order on the second day of his presidency, the CIA continued to cover the company’s legal bills until 2012. Mitchell and Jessen themselves each received more than $1m from their contracts.
The suit does not claim that Mitchell and Jessen were present during the torture of Salim, Ben Soud and Rahman. But it derives their culpability through the application of the torture techniques – prolonged sleep deprivation, nudity, “stress positions”, cramped confinement – that the two psychologists provided to the CIA, which implemented the techniques.
“Defendants are directly liable,” the suit charges, “because they designed, developed, and implemented a program for the CIA intended to inflict physical and mental pain and suffering on Plaintiffs, and because Plaintiffs were tortured and subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment as a consequence of their inclusion in that program.”
The Meridian Dam proposal has been halted in its tracks. The issue has been:
Note:
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A philosophical word first:
1) Step back and look at us, as eyes from the future will see us.
Running through our land we have this River which delivers water to the residents of Calgary, Medicine Hat, and Saskatoon. We have diversion schemes to take the water to many, many communities, some such as Regina and Humboldt a long way from the River. We drink the River’s water from our taps, we use it to wash our clothes, water our gardens and lawns, to water our livestock and to grow our crops. It is used to generate the electrical power for our stoves, refrigerators, and air conditioning. The gifts of the River are more than I can tell you here.
But which one of us has today given thanks for that River? What one of us has ever kneeled down on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River in humbleness and gratitude? Have you ever taken the time to REFLECT, to ACKNOWLEDGE what the River is to us? Imagine your life without the gift of water.
There are many societies that have understood their dependence. The things upon which the society is dependent are sacred. It is not superstition, it is Good Common Sense. You cherish the things upon which your life is dependent. Your grandchildren will be as dependent as you. You protect the gift so they, too, may enjoy the abundance you enjoy.
Outsiders do and will look at our Society in amazement: how is it that these people did not understand their relationship to the River? Can you imagine that they never expressed gratitude? Maybe that was why they could abuse their water supplies.
We display ignorance.
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2) The Meridian Dam is one of the first such projects in Canada where environmental factors entered the process at the beginning. That is significant. Until the Meridian it has been acceptable that environmental factors be considered at a “later stage”.
The Meridian lays to rest (hopefully) another tradition: decision-making based on local impact. The Meridian decision was based on information about impacts on the WHOLE riverbasin, upstream and downstream. That is a significant and welcome departure.
The Meridian Dam is probably the first in Alberta and maybe in Canada to have reasonable cost estimates at the pre-feasibility stage (not grossly under-stated costs).
How did the changes come about? The answer is that citizens assumed responsibility for the outcome of the process, from the very beginning, from when inadequate Terms of Reference were on the books. People did not request permission to monitor and direct the process. They just DID it. The events are in #4 below.
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3) The Meridian Dam was about the power and control of INFORMATION and PROCESS. If you have control of information and process you have the ability to dictate outcome. Those opposed to the Dam won the battle by:
– having better information than those who wanted to build the Dam
– by creating a large body of well-informed people
– by assuming responsibility for the direction of process.
As much as anything, the battle was to change a “system”, to cause it to deliver good decisions based on an investigation of the WHOLE picture, not just convenient fragments.
If the ammunition was information,
the weapon for firing the ammunition was email.
Believing in the power of information, it was sent to those inside as well as outside Government. We were not secretive but gave up control of the information, thus offering the best chance for the truth to prevail. In the beginning we were sometimes worried about whether “they” might obtain the intelligence we gathered. But that attitude is bred of an adversarial attitude, reflected even in the words I use like “battle”, “ammunition”. Democracy should be a co-operative process.
The battle is my own and your own. The only reason it’s necessary is because, over time, I have handed over responsibility for my community to someone else, to Governments that have centralized power and control. I have ALLOWED them to take control. Democracy was never intended to be that way. Indeed life was never intended to be that way. I can never hand off responsibility for my life and the things that affect it, and my children, to someone else. I can’t PAY other people to fulfill my responsibilities for me. The Meridian has been a battle to take back control, and we have done it, as detailed below.
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4) WHAT HAPPENED
– The Alberta Dept of Environment and Saskatchewan Government decided to conduct a “preliminary feasibility study” for a proposed Meridian Dam. May 2001.
You can have great influence over the outcome of a study through the questions you require the study to answer. The original Terms of Reference intended by the Government were simple, antiquated and of the kind that predisposes the study to a decision to proceed to the next stage. A knowledgeable member of the public was alert and wrote up reasonable Terms of Reference. These Terms were extensively circulated. The inadequacy of the original Terms were so obvious when contrasted with the proposed Terms that the original were quietly abandoned. The first victory was getting reasonable Terms of Reference in place.
– Alberta Environment originally decided there was no need for any public consultation. The networking public decided there WAS a need for public consultation. They lobbied and the Governments agreed there should be consultation.
– The published Tender for the Meridian Dam Prefeasibility Study specified that the Consultants would consult with the people in the locale that would be the assumed beneficiaries of the Dam. The networking public said, “No, the project will impact on the entire length of the Riverbasin, and on the people in the provinces who will be required to pay for the project. They will be heard, too.” Intensive lobbying brought agreement that there would be public meetings in Calgary, Saskatoon and Lethbridge, in addition to local meetings.
– The Tender specified that the Consultants would obtain input from specified Government Departments. Again, the networking public said, “No, there is a lot of information outside Government Departments, and many knowledgeable people outside Government. ALL relevant information will be brought to bear.” The network assembled information and asked people to submit information. The public assumed they had a responsibility to do this. It was not necessary to obtain permission from anyone to do so.
– In specifying who WOULD be consulted (again, see the Tender), the Governments omitted CFB Suffield that lives right in the area that would be flooded. They also omitted the oil and gas industry that has millions of dollars invested in the area. The networking public decided these people would have valuable input, and that they SHOULD be consulted, right from the beginning. The network simply assumed responsibility for seeing that so far as it was able, all the parties that SHOULD know about the proposal, were aware of what was going on. People were contacted and information forwarded.
– The Governments said that the information could be sent to them, for them to convey to the Consultants. The networking public said, “No, we are capable and equal adults. We do not require someone else to communicate our work for us. We will make our submissions directly to the Consultants, the same as you are doing.” We did not ask permission. We just DID it. We ensured that people knew to whom to send the information.
– some Government people said, “Environmental considerations enter the process at a later stage”. We pushed, we asked, “By what logic? Why shouldn’t it be economic considerations that enter the process at a later stage?” There were people in Government that agreed with us. The Consultants received environmental information, excellent environmental information.
– We published historical information on the figures used to justify dam construction in the past: feasibility studies have always under-stated costs many times over. Several years after the dam is built, the benefits used as justification have not materialized. We let it be known that a repeat performance would not be acceptable.
– Local people knew there was a highway that would have to be re-routed, a bridge that carried twin pipelines, etc. Other people knew about a study related to irrigation, a publication, etc. We tracked down the far-removed people responsible for highways and bridges to confirm, “Are you planning to submit cost estimates to the Consultants?”. Too many times in the past there have been costly oversights. We let the Consultants know that they should expect to receive such-and-such information from such-and-such a person.
– The Governments held public meetings, very poorly publicized with little advance notice. The networking public assumed responsibility for getting the word to as many people as possible.
– The network gathered local, regional, national and international information related to the issue of rivers and dams. People learned about what was happening in neighbouring American states where over-diversion of water has led to a situation where various users are in sharp competition with each other, creating tensions in the society. The network knows about the pumping out of underground aquifers. By assembling and sharing information, a little bit from this person, a little bit from that person, a large body of aware and knowledgeable people was created. Information is empowering.
– It seems reasonable to conclude that the network reclaimed the responsibility of citizens in a democracy to determine the path that will be trod. They took back power and control by acquiring power and control over information and the decision-making process.
– What was accomplished was made possible by the ability of email to communicate large amounts of information quickly and inexpensively to large numbers of people. An informed public is a great incentive to arrive at the right conclusions.
LESSON: institutions are losing authority. Think of churches. It happens when there are abuses of power and failure to carry out assigned responsibilities. Through the Meridian exercise the Government has lost authority – some of the authority delegated to the Department of Environment has been taken back by citizens.
I invite all of you to join me in cyber-space tonight for a very large celebration. We will dance and sing and be joyful. We will be thankful for the River, for good decisions, and I think the River smiles on each of you.
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Cheers!
Sandra Finley
The ACLU has filed a lawsuit, on behalf of Wikipedia and other organizations, challenging the constitutionality of the NSA’s mass interception and searching of Americans’ international communications. (Image: Available logos/with overlay)
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia and one of the most highly-trafficked websites in the world, announced Tuesday that it—alongside a host of civil liberty advocates, news outlets, and privacy rights organizations—has filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency for violating the constitutional rights of its users by performing bulk surveillance and searching, without specific cause or warrant, the international Internet communications of all Americans including emails, web-browsing content, and search-engine queries.
The lawsuit, named as Wikimedia v. NSA, was filed by the ACLU on Tuesday. In addition to the Wikimedia Foundation (of which Wikipedia is a part), the other plaintiffs include: the conservative Rutherford Institute, The Nation magazine, Amnesty International USA, PEN American Center, Human Rights Watch, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Global Fund for Women, and Washington Office on Latin America.
Filed in federal court in Maryland where the NSA is headquartered, the lawsuit (pdf) argues that the NSA is violating the plaintiffs’ privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment and infringing on their First Amendment rights. The complaint also argues that what is called “upstream surveillance”—mass surveillance on all communications that pass through certain “backbone” structures of the network—exceeds the authority granted by Congress under the FISA Amendments Act.
The complaint reads, in part:
This lawsuit challenges the suspicionless seizure and searching of internet traffic by the National Security Agency (“NSA”) on U.S. soil. The NSA conducts this surveillance, called “Upstream” surveillance, by tapping directly into the internet backbone inside the United States — the network of high-capacity cables, switches, and routers that today carry vast numbers of Americans’ communications with each other and with the rest of the world. In the course of this surveillance, the NSA is seizing Americans’ communications en masse while they are in transit , and it is searching the contents of substantially all international text-based communications — and many domestic communications as well — for tens of thousands of search terms.
“By tapping the backbone of the Internet, the NSA is straining the backbone of democracy,” said Lila Tretikov, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “Wikipedia is founded on the freedoms of expression, inquiry, and information. By violating our users’ privacy, the NSA is threatening the intellectual freedom that is a central to people’s ability to create and understand knowledge.”
Largely exposed to the general public through internal NSA documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden and a steady stream of investigative reporting based on his disclosures, the groups object to how the NSA copies and combs through vast amounts of Internet traffic, which it intercepts inside the United States with the help of major telecommunications companies. According to the ACLU, the surveillance involves the NSA’s warrantless review of the emails and Internet activities of millions of ordinary Americans.
“This kind of dragnet surveillance constitutes a massive invasion of privacy, and it undermines the freedoms of expression and inquiry as well,” said ACLU staff attorney Patrick Toomey. “Ordinary Americans shouldn’t have to worry that the government is looking over their shoulders when they use the Internet.”
In an op-ed in the New York Times published Tuesday to coincide with the announcement of the lawsuit, Tretikov and Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, explain the reasoning behind the legal challenge. “Our lawsuit,” they write, “says that the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance of Internet traffic on American soil—often called ‘upstream’ surveillance—violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects the right to privacy, as well as the First Amendment, which protects the freedoms of expression and association. We also argue that this agency activity exceeds the authority granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that Congress amended in 2008.”
Because Wikipedia and other online services provided by the larger Foundation are viewable to the public “anonymously”—that is, without the need to create a user account or log in—and because many of the volunteers who maintain entries on the site do so with a distinct desire not to be monitored, Wales and Tretikov argue those people should “be able to do their work without having to worry that the United States government is monitoring” the content they’re accessing or their related online behavior.
“Unfortunately,” write Wales and Tretikov, the anonymity of Wikipedia users “is far from certain because, using upstream surveillance, the N.S.A. intercepts and searches virtually all of the international text-based traffic that flows across the Internet ‘backbone’ inside the United States.”
According to the ACLU:
The lawsuit is in some ways a successor to a previous ACLU lawsuit challenging the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, Clapper v. Amnesty. The Supreme Court dismissed that case in February 2013 in a 5-4 vote on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not prove that they had been spied on. Edward Snowden has said that the ruling contributed to his decision to expose certain aspects of the NSA’s surveillance activities a few months later.
Among the Snowden disclosures were documents relating to upstream surveillance, which has since been confirmed by the government. Unlike the surveillance considered by the Supreme Court in Clapper, upstream surveillance is not limited to the communications of NSA targets. Instead, as we have since learned, the NSA is searching the content of nearly all text-based Internet traffic entering or leaving the country – as well as many domestic communications – looking for thousands of keywords such as email addresses or phone numbers.
One of the NSA documents revealed by Snowden included a slide that named Wikipedia, among other major websites, as a good surveillance target for monitoring what people do on the Internet.
As Toomey wrote in a blog post about the lawsuit on Tuesday, “Upstream surveillance flips the Constitution on its head. It allows the government to search everything first and ask questions later, making us all less free in the process. Our suit aims to stop this kind of surveillance.”
With thanks to Allison, through my facebook feed, in response to 2015-10-08 Calls for Electronic Voting. Election fraud. Canadians beware. Response to CBC.
National Post Staff
OTTAWA — A massive cyber attack involving more than 10,000 computers was behind the online voting chaos during Saturday’s NDP leadership vote, it was revealed today.
According to Scytl Canada, the company contracted by the party to conduct the vote, a deliberate large scale “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attempted to deny NDP members access to the online balloting system.
WHAT IS A DDoS ATTACK?
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack attempts to crash or greatly slow down websites by inundating Internet servers with bogus external communications requests that deny legitimate users access.
Governments, banks, credit card companies and high-profile political or organisational websites are common targets of DDoS attacks, often launched as protests by the organization’s political or economic opponents.
“We deeply regret the inconvenience to NDP voters caused by this malicious, massive, orchestrated attempt to thwart democracy,” Susan Crutchlow, General Manager of Scytl said.
A forensic investigation is ongoing to locate the source of the attack, but the company said it has identified more than 10,000 “malevolent” IP addresses behind the “hundreds of thousands of false voting requests to the system.”
“The required organization and the demonstrated orchestration of the attack indicates that this was a deliberate effort to disrupt or negate the election by a knowledgeable person or group,” the company added.
The NDP first blamed the severe delays in the online voting on Saturday on a high volume of ballots, but later admitted it had become victim of a well orchestrated cyber attack.
While the attack temporarily slowed down the voting process, Scytl claimed its security system wasn’t penetrated. An onsite independent audit by Price Waterhouse Coopers confirmed that no ballots cast by credentialed NDP members were added, subtracted or changed.
The deadline to vote between first and second ballots was extended twice after the online system experienced slowdowns and crashes. The problems were repeated between the second and third ballots.
The end result of the technical glitches: a process that was supposed to see the second-ballot vote finished shortly after 12 ET instead saw the third-ballot voting not closed until almost 6 ET.
Party spokesman Brad Lavigne said on Saturday that the system had been hampered by an apparent cyber attack, but he said the votes had not been compromised and that the attack had only served to delay the process. NDP staff said all candidates had been aware of the voting problems and all had pledged to accept the result.
Voting for the fourth ballot was later extended by yet another hour, after complaints that members could not access the online system. Final results were not announced until after 9 ET. Party staff said the website that bit hit by a second denial-of-service attack, but it did not yet know who was behind them.
Crutchlow added that the voting system managed to repel the attack and the NDP responded appropriately: “When we diagnosed the problem and explained what we needed to do to respond, they were calm and cooperative and extended the voting time to ensure the integrity of the process, even in the face of media criticism and groundless speculation.”
65,108 members voted in the first ballot, an unexpectedly low number that meant fewer than 10,000 votes were cast once the convention opened on Friday. The total number of votes dropped further from the first to second ballot.
Thomas Mulcair eventually took 57% of the vote on the fourth and final ballot. Long-time organizer Brian Topp, a senior advisor to Mr. Layton, had 42% support.
With files from the National Post and Postmedia News
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/10/07/Leap-Manifesto/
(LINKS to related articles can be found at the URL. The text is captured below – – sometimes internet articles become inaccessible later.)
It’s ambitious, but not capitalism’s end as mainstream columnists fret.
By Seth Klein, TheTyee.ca
The Leap Manifesto: A Call for Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another was launched by a group of prominent Canadians on Sept. 15. So far, over 25,000 Canadians have added their names to the declaration. In the face of the ho-hum party platforms on offer, many see the manifesto as a way to give expression to their desire for bold climate action and social justice.
Many mainstream media commentators, however, promptly set their hair on fire.
The Globe and Mail claimed the document calls for “upending of [the] capitalist system.”
An editorial appearing in the Vancouver Sun asserted the manifesto was released by “some of this country’s most left-wing and radical forces,” and alarmingly described it as “a chilling document that suggests pushing Canada farther to the left than has ever been imagined for this country. It is ultimately a plan to completely reject capitalism for something kinder and gentler.”
In the National Post, the Leap prompted none other than Conrad Black to write an entire op-ed of extended, albeit very creative insults.
You get the gist. But it’s all nonsense.
For the most part, the Leap is merely a pronouncement that policy and politics should align with climate science (even former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney is saying so), that we should honour the treaties signed with First Nations, and that we should seek to seriously address inequality — hardly far-left field propositions.
True, the Leap is ambitious, but it only seems radical in comparison to the platforms of the major parties. And that’s only because the bandwidth of what is deemed politically acceptable has become so narrow. (Even the Green Party, whose climate plan is mildly more ambitious than the three main parties, has a platform that I’d call more of a hop than a leap.)
But that shouldn’t surprise us. As the Pope writes of the climate crisis in his recent Encyclical:
“It is remarkable how weak international political responses have been…. There are too many special interests, and economic interests easily end up trumping the common good and manipulating information so that their own plans will not be affected…. Consequently the most one can expect is superficial rhetoric, sporadic acts of philanthropy and perfunctory expressions of concern for the environment, whereas any genuine attempt by groups within society to introduce change is viewed as a nuisance based on romantic illusions or an obstacle to be circumvented.”
Nailed it.
It’s all about infrastructure
In fact, what the Leap calls for is reasonable, affordable and doable.
Much of what the Leap envisions is a bold infrastructure plan (transit, high speed rail, renewable energy, zero-carbon buildings, etc.). Infrastructure is rightly understood as an investment, and thus it makes sense to amortize the cost over many years.
Moreover, it is already the case that our governments spend billions of dollars a year on infrastructure, but these dollars go towards traditional projects (roads, bridges, and port and energy infrastructure) with the aim of accommodating cars and facilitating the extraction and export of fossil fuels. British Columbia, for example, is slated to spend billions replacing the Massey Tunnel with a new bridge, in part to accommodate more vehicle traffic, but the biggest beneficiaries will likely be industrial users wanting ocean-going ships to be able to get further up the Fraser River to export U.S. thermal coal. What is needed instead is to shift these expenditures from old-economy infrastructure to the green infrastructure we now need.
Let us imagine, however, an ambitious infrastructure and social program plan that sought to boost federal government spending by $50-60 billion a year. That sounds like a lot of money, and indeed it would allow for an exciting set of initiatives that, by any measure, would constitute a “leap” into a new and more caring economy.
But to put that into perspective: in an economy such as Canada’s, with an annual GDP of over $2 trillion, a bold spending and investment plan of $50-60 billion represents about 2.5 per cent of GDP. Put another way, it would mean increasing federal spending from 12.8 per cent of GDP today to about 15.5 per cent. Hardly sounds like “pushing Canada farther to the left than has ever been imagined,” as the Vancouver Sun opines. Exciting, but not a revolution.
And consider this: if one tallies up federal tax cuts over the last 15 years (disproportionately benefiting the wealthy), one finds that these have coincidentally depleted the federal treasury’s capacity to spend and invest by, you guessed it, about $50 billion a year; meaning, if the federal government collected taxes at the same rates that existed in the year 2000, we would have $50 billion more per year to spend on programs to meet our most pressing social and environmental needs (and provincial tax cuts over 20 years have had a similar effect).
What parties propose
None of the main parties are proposing climate and infrastructure plans on the order envisioned by the Leap.
The NDP has committed to very ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets, seeking to cut Canada’s emissions 34 per cent below 1990 levels by 2025 (Canada’s emissions are currently about 20 per cent higher than 1990 levels). But details on the “cap-and-trade” plan it intends to employ to reach those targets remain vague. The NDP’s fiscal framework is very modest, and thus includes minimalist infrastructure plans (of a little over $3 billion a year). However, its cap-and-trade plan would make industry pay for the greenhouse gases they produce, and the money raised would go to the provinces to be spent on climate action investments and green infrastructure. That could amount to quite a lot, but for now, we just don’t know (as we don’t know how that regime will raise funds or what the carbon fee would be).
The Liberals have a slightly more ambitious infrastructure plan than the NDP (given their willingness to run modest deficits), amounting to $5 billion for the next two years, before dropping down to about $3.5 billion. The Liberals have not proposed a specific carbon pricing plan, but rather say they will work with the provinces to establish national emission-reduction targets and “ensure that the provinces and territories have adequate tools to design their own policies to meet these commitments, including their own carbon pricing policies.”
The Conservatives have no clear green infrastructure plan (they have not released a platform document, nor a fiscal plan different from the federal budget tabled last April). They have rejected carbon pricing outright, stating instead a preference for a regulatory approach. But thus far, as CCPA economist Marc Lee notes in this recent post, the government’s success using this method leaves much to be desired. While greenhouse gas emissions fell during the economic downturn in 2008 and 2009, they have increased every year since (going up to 2013, the last year for which we have data). And after years of promises, the government has yet to propose a greenhouse gas regulatory regime for Canada’s oil and gas sector.
The Green Party proposes green infrastructure investments of about $10 billion a year. However, its “carbon fee and dividend” plan — the centrepiece of the party’s climate plans — is unlikely to have a significant impact, for reasons I’ve outlined in another piece on the strengths and weaknesses of the Green Party’s platform. Their proposed carbon fee (a carbon tax by another name) is a mere $30/tonne, equivalent to B.C.’s current carbon tax, and none of the money raised is used to fund climate action investments. That said, the Greens have taken other climate positions that are much less equivocal than the more modest stances of the NDP and the Liberals. For example, they would halt tarsands expansion, would not approve any new bitumen pipelines in any direction, and they would not allow thermal coal exports through Canadian ports.
Raising new revenues
Infrastructure investment is key to fighting climate change. Not only is a bold green infrastructure plan reasonable, there are compelling economic reasons why now would be a very good time to undertake such a program. If $50-60 billion a year were newly raised and then spent on a Leap program, it would undoubtedly represent a net boost to the economy and employment.
As economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz notes: “There is a long-standing, strong argument for what is called a balanced budget multiplier — if the government increases taxes at the very top and increases spending on infrastructure, education, technology [by the same amount], it stimulates the economy.”
How could new revenues be raised? The options are many. In a background document prepared for the Leap’s release, I and some CCPA colleagues listed a few, including resource royalties, financial transaction taxes, higher upper-income and corporate taxes, and perhaps most advisedly, a national escalating carbon tax. But whatever options we choose, the simple truth is that in a country as wealthy as Canada, we can afford to leap.
Seth Klein is the British Columbia director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and co-author of a background document for the Leap Manifesto. Those wishing to add their names to the Leap Manifesto can do so here.
YES! to new voters and others, ELECTRONIC VOTING would be perfectly logical.
Please help inform fellow citizens: it is NOT a good idea!
E-voting is a sure way to watch democracy disappear into the sewer because of the KNOWN CORRUPTION in e-voting.
There are LINKS at bottom to support this and other statements made below:
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The combination of
Public awareness of the amount of fraud already associated with electronic voting is needed. We also need to understand the cross-border pollination between Canada and the U.S.
We should not succumb to what are mere utilitarian arguments in favor of electronic voting.
WHICH companies supply electronic voting systems to the Canadian municipalities that have adopted electronic voting? . . . Not everyone knows the story of Diebold Election Systems which morphed into Global Election Systems and is now called Premier Election Solutions. The answer to the question is Premier Election Solutions supplies election software to Canadian municipalities. And I see a new entity, Intelivote Internet and telephone voting systems.
BUT WHY do corporations change their names? . . to avoid linkage to bad deeds. Diebold (Premier Election Solutions) is at the heart of election fraud through electronic voting in the U.S. Who knows? It may be a response to citizen input to Elections Canada warning against partnering with Diebold or its pseudonyms that has opened the door to another entity, Intelivote. And who is that? I leave it to your listeners to find out.
In 2011, an email from Elections Canada,
Attached, please find a letter from Mr. Mario Lavoie, Assistant Director (Partnerships) of Alternative Voting Methods, in response to your e-mail, dated September 3, 2011, regarding the status of the Internet voting pilot project.
caused me to inquire: which companies are the “partners” of Elections Canada in the internet voting project? I did not receive a reply and did not pursue the question, although it is an important one.
/Sandra Finley
LINKS:
2011-09-03 Election fraud in the U.S., “Murder, Spies & Voting Lies”. E-voting in Canada.
(With thanks to Allison, ADDED): 2012-03-27 Cyber attack on NDP leadership vote involved more than 10,000 computers
2012-03-24 Letter to Chief Electoral Officer, Follow-up on Project on Electronic Voting in Canada
Electronic voting, “Hacking Democracy” documentary. Plus Michael Geist.
2012-11 How to rig an election, Harper’s Magazine, Victoria Collier
2012-11-05 Electronic voting, U.S. Election, use of software patches in key swing state
2011-09-07 E-voting: Letter to Elections Canada and reply
E-voting in Canada: Online Voting and Hostile Deployment Environments by Christopher Parsons
E-voting in Canada: Material from Michael Geist’s blog
2003-10-24 Diebold Memos Disclose Florida 2000 E-Voting Fraud
2013-04-30 Irregularities widespread in Canadian elections, report finds
This month, the University of Victoria is launching a very exclusive MBA program — it’s only open to Telus employees.
The program will be taught primarily by UVic faculty, but it’s being paid for by Telus. The company also played a role in its design.
Dan Pontefract is Chief Envisioner with the Telus Transformation Office, the office responsible for setting up this program. He sees it as an innovative way to give Telus employees the education that’s most relevant to their company.
I don’t think the higher education institution is in need of being dismantled, I think it needs to be updated. – Dan Pontefract, Telus Transformation Office
E. Wayne Ross is a professor of education at the University of British Columbia. He says this program is the next step in the corporatization of higher education.
I think one of the demises of education… has been its susceptibility to adopting business practices. They have always been antithetical to the life of the mind.– E. Wayne Ross, University of British Columbia
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WAYNE ROSS, prof at UBC, provides more details:
http://blogs.ubc.ca/ross/2015/10/do-private-programs-belong-at-public-universities/
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AND ME:
Economics is central to an MBA. WHICH economics is taught is central to the well-being and survival of human beings.
Coincidentally, I am just returned from the CANUSSEE Conference on this subject. A group of mostly academics who are dedicated to finding ways to change the teaching of economics to include, for example, Ecology. Two words, “Climate change”, lend urgency to their work .
Mainstream economic thinking cannot be rationally defended.
2007-11-03 The Need for Helpful Economic Indicators
2014-07-02 Economic indicators: email to CBC, Fisheries illustrate the faults
2011-04 The University: Are We Living in a Brave New Academy? The Conditioning Centre.
Faulty thinking reinforced by non-critical media, is taking us over the edge.
HOWEVER! The good news. There are significant movements underway to CHANGE the indefensible. The Canadian and U.S. Societies for Ecological Economics are just one.
2012-12-07 I am just back from Bhutan (Gross Happiness Index)! (economic indicators)
2015-05-26 The power of transparency, By Elisa Birnbaum, Financial Post Tells of new software developed to include the perspectives that GDP and conventional economics ignore (at our peril).
It is unbelievable that a University would partner with a large corporation in the establishment of an MBA programme for “Telus employees only”.
I SENT THIS MESSAGE TO A FEW CONFERENCE ATTENDEES:
Ecological Economists will be marginalized if the MBA at U of Victoria for employees of Telus Only is allowed to stand.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see what it will do to ecological-economics, let alone our knowledge bases in general. The same will be at other Universities.
Action needs to come. Swift and strong response. Forwarding the info is helpful. On-line Comments (CBC) are helpful.
Others will aid mobilization directed at the Administration of U of Vic through connections, organizations and social media.
ADDITION, OCT 11: THE “UNHOLY ALLIANCES” BETWEEN PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS AND INDUSTRY. IMPORTANT.
Thinkers of the Day on the Unholy Alliances between Government (public institutions) and Industry
UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA, CONTACT INFO:
President Jamie Cassels Tel: 250-721-7002
Fax: 250-721-8654
Email: pres@uvic.ca
Office of The Provost, Valerie Kuehne: 250-721-7013
http://www.uvic.ca/current-faculty-staff/index.php
University of Victoria 3800 Finnerty Road Victoria BC V8P 5C2 Canada
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MY INPUT submitted to CBC (Anna Maria Tremonti):
Women and men must rise and drive society to find solutions to cyberbullying. You are right on the mark when you identify it as an issue of free speech.
I would like women to remember that with cyberbullying they are in a struggle being fought all the time. People go as far as putting their lives on the line when they understand that tyranny is enabled or defeated through their individual decision to defend or capitulate to bullies who use intimidation and violence to cower others.
Salman Rushdie’s memoir fell into my hands at a critical time. He and his family were under the threat of murder (“fatwa”) for 9 years, accused of being against Islam because of a novel he wrote.
As I see it, Rushdie made a decision that the right to speak freely was a higher necessity to society than his right to his own life. Imagine the implications of his decision for his family and the additional personal trial that created for him. Your family might die along with you, because you choose to defend the democratic right to free speech.
It takes a deeper understanding, the ability to see that if we individually bow to violence, we collectively condemn our children to a more violent future. You don’t save them by avoiding or failing to deal with the issue. Quite the opposite.
My resolve to stay the course against a cyberbully was cemented by the realization that it is an issue of free speech.
The cost of shutting down the perpetrator is horrendous. It involves a court case; our system of justice is not evolved to handle cyberbullying. It argues against even trying. You will be bankrupted which is what the perpetrator knows. It enables him to continue with almost impunity.
In the search for help to deal with this cyberbully I also found the last chapter of Paula Todd’s book Extreme Mean to be a good statement of the challenge that society has to address with this rapidly-developed internet technology and its empowerment of destructive forces.
Thank you for bringing it up on The Current.
Tim Minor is in Thermo King Minneapolis office, in charge of dealer relations. As agreed, I sent him the offending, racist hate email. He will deal with the situation of dealer John Yewchuk, Edmonton Thermo King dealer.
Note: when I say that the information is “boxed”, it is something you can see in the HTML view of the text. It is not visible in “rich text” view which this is. The point is that I cannot change what’s in the box – – someone else didn’t put John Yewchuk’s name on the hate email.
The email thread is from the bottom up.
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From: Sandra Finley Sent: September 29, 2015 11:33 AM To: tim_minor AT irco.com Subject: FW: Fw: What Really Died in Auschwitz
Dear Tim,
The structure behind the offending email is boxed content. The bottom box contains this (scroll down, you will see it). Because of the boxing, I think Yewchuk’s role is clear.
John Yewchuk, CEO Thermo King Western Inc.
Office | 780.447.9501 Cell | 780.918.0174
Winter phone | 760.346.0050 Summer phone | 250.769.0050
Before phoning Thermo King’s Regional Office, I left my name and phone number on John Yewshuk’s office phone, with a request that he phone me. I wished to confirm his role. So far, there is no reply. (Update, John phoned. I told him that I got in contact because I wished to confirm that he sent the email. To my interpretation, he did not deny having done so.)
I mentioned to you the possibility of forwarding Yewchuk’s email to the RCMP. Maybe Edmonton City Police would be better. I lived in Edmonton in the early nineties and was impressed by the efforts they made to bring ethnic groups of long-standing enmity together, in community discussions. They taught those people a different way of being in their relationships. As I understood it, the purpose was to clear people’s minds of hatred that only fuels violence. (In my experience, positive people make positive contributions.)
I am not a lawyer, but I can find information. This may be helpful to you.
Hate law in Canada falls within the Criminal Code:
I appreciate your attention to this matter.
In these troubling times we all have to pitch in to maintain some sanity. The hate and war mongers have to be challenged.
Best wishes,
Sandra Finley
(The email I sent to Yewchuk is basically the same, removed for brevity)
To: (person who forwarded the email to me)
From: Sandra Finley Sent: September 28, 2015 2:04 PM Subject: RE: Fw: What Really Died in Auschwitz
The situation (What Really Died in Auschwitz) is so much more complex than this.
When I read this simplistic, ignorant view I believe human kind will destroy the life support systems for homo sapiens on this lovely little planet.
We will just bomb the hell out of everywhere.
Canada is now openly helping to arm the Saudis – – we sent them billions of dollars. That should be good for creating millions more refugees (a large proportion Muslim).
If the American military (well, let’s be clear. If Lockheed Martin Corporation and Blackwater and Bush and Cheney, their henchmen and profiteers) did to my City what they did to Iraqi cities, I would hate the Americans.
Thank goodness Prime Minister Chretien kept us out of that war.
Now we have this Conservative ideologue Harper jumping in the lap of the war mongers and haters.
It doesn’t take any brains or morality to drop bombs. Sitting at the table and working out solutions does.
But then, real democracy with justice and fairness is anathema to those who appropriate the resources of others.
/S
| Sent: September 28, 2015 1:58 PM To: undisclosed-recipients: Subject: Fwd: Fw: What Really Died in AuschwitzSubject: Fwd: What Really Died in AuschwitzThis is a very interesting point of view on the Holocaust. Good read and I definitely agree with it and am passing it on. Please take a moment to read and understand, then pass it on.
— John Yewchuk, CEO Thermo King Western Inc. Office | 780.447.9501 Cell | 780.918.0174 Winter phone | 760.346.0050 Summer phone | 250.769.0050 |
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