Wheat from the Chaff

My goodness! Canwest is suddenly interested in private energy production!

Though I avoid Canwest newspapers like the plague, I occasionally read The Province and The Sun when time permits. Today's issue of The Province is a travesty. After largely ignoring run-of-the-river hydro projects during the recent election (when I did follow the two Vancouver dailies), the newspaper has finally decided to run a series of articles on the subject. Now. After the election. Thanks for contributing to the public sphere, guys. As Rafe Mair opined in his electoral post mortem, "the news media of B.C. utterly failed in its duty to inform the voters about critical environmental issues." The rather belated interest in these issues from The Province, especially IPP's (independent power producers), can't help but make one cynical.

In typical fashion for The Province, it underdelivers on its reportage. In the main article, the serious issues of environmental damage are alluded to, but no specifics are given, and the high contract costs being shouldered by BC Hydro are only mentioned briefly at the end (where few readers venture). The second article, the one about "party lines" and IPP's, is very short and vague, and it only paraphrases the (apparent) NDP position. No quotes from NDP leaders are given. Things get more interesting in the third article, which lists many of the Liberal and BC Hydro insiders who have jumped to IPP corporate positions, though the denial of conflict of interest from BC minister of energy Blair Lekstrom goes unchallenged.

However, if there is any doubt about the IPP's in the minds of readers, Michael Smyth, The Province's main columnist, comes to the rescue. His column follows the two page spread, and it attempts to attack the NDP and their apparent "hypocrisy" over the issue.

Smyth's column is a laugher, one in a long line of snide, one-sided collections of bumper-sticker arguments.

He starts with a defence of the run-of-the-river project that will finally give clean energy to the In-SHUCK-ch First Nation on Harrison Lake. He contends the following: "But the critics won't care. Comfortably ensconced in their own air-conditioned condos, watching their power-sucking big-screen TVs, they will condemn the First Nation and the private company it has partnered with." Really? Will they? Exactly who has condemned this? When? Smyth provides no evidence for his prediction. Having lived near Harrison Lake for years, I have never heard such criticism of the In-SHUCK-ch project. [Ok... a week after I first published this I read some negative words from certain environmental groups... but nothing from the NDP.] Indeed, if there ever was an IPP project that the NDP would support, this would be the one. Moreover, the In-SHUCK-ch First Nation should have been hooked up to the power lines years ago - that is, to the power lines that are already there. The IPP that's being proposed is not primarily for the aboriginals; it's coming because power line infrastructure is easily accessed. It's interesting that Smyth totally ignores the very controversial Bute Inlet project proposed by Plutonic Power. That company is rife with BC Liberal insiders and faces serious opposition from locals and environmentalists alike.

Smyth also says the "New Democratic Party now wants to shut these same projects down." A typical exaggeration. A "moratorium" means that the whole IPP process will be temporarily halted and reviewed, and the stringent environmental processes that have hitherto been lacking (but which even Smyth acknowledges are important) will be put into place. Smyth surely knows what a moratorium means and what the NDP have said about the issue. To say that they will kill the whole thing is a blatant lie.

I suppose Smyth's role is to mitigate any negativity from the other stories (making Dennis Skulsky and Gordon Campbell very happy), even though the other articles are pretty mild.

With Canwest columnists like Smyth, no wonder I usually read the The Globe and Mail, The Tyee and The Georgia Straight for my BC news.

Language Reveals Power

I've always been a fan of George Carlin. He was one of the first mainstream comedians to use humour against power, and there aren't many comedians who have forced the US Supreme Court to consider laws on speech and obscenity. He was, in my mind, the great link from Lenny Bruce to present-day commentators like Jon Stewart. And Carlin was one of the few celebrities who never seemed to sell his soul... at least not explicitly. (I admit, Shining Time Station was not a highpoint of Carlin's career.) In any case, you have to respect the wisdom of a guy who says, “If God had intended us not to masturbate, he would've made our arms shorter”. A modern day sage, I say.

On the other hand, I recently came across a passage from Carlin where he argues that “by and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth”. I've heard this kind of argument before, and I'm not so sure I can agree.

Is it language that conceals truth? Or is it the forces - economic, political, demographic - that encourage certain speech/text to be produced and venerated, and other speech/text to be censored, ridiculed or ignored? I believe it's the latter. I'm not saying that language is neutral or inert, as if it's a simple mirror that perfectly represents a physical reality. I just believe that language finds it difficult to hide its speaker's or author's intentions. Language just can't help itself. If you know where and how you look, language will eventually reveal its relationship to power - be it domination or submission or defiance. Language is like that friend who just can't keep a secret.

Case in point: the unions versus the bondholders in the ongoing GM debacle.

Have you ever noticed that the corporate press and their followers always couch union activities in moral terms? Thus, if a union like the CAW moves to defend its members' pensions, the language of moral condemnation comes out with clarity and predictability. A good example (though a rather muted one, considering the source) comes from The National Post, Canada's newspaper equivalent to Fox News. In a typical puff piece, the NP recently let Garth Whyte, the executive vice-president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, write his own story. Read the article carefully. Whyte tries to be understated, but he just can't seem to help himself. The union's pension is ultimately a "luxury". Whyte, of course, is against any bailout, because it's "overly generous". He taps into the private sector envy of public-sector pensions, and a bailout package that appears to be equivalent, and seems to think that if his RRSP has gone down, so should everyone else's. [This seems to be the favoured sentiment amongst most of the union-haters who have posted on this topic in The National Post and The Globe and Mail.] In other words, union efforts are based on greed. Workers and their representatives are almost always cast as lazy, venal and undeserving. If they cause a company to collapse, it's considered a moral failure. Damn those unions!

The bondholders are another story. These are the investors, by the way, who until recently would not agree to a settlement with GM (unlike the supplicating unions). In many ways, it is the bondholders who are responsible for GM's current move into bankruptcy protection. But no matter. There is no greed here. At worst, their rational self-interest has been a matter of miscalculation. That is, it's not moral at all; it's a matter of business. Moreover, if their efforts are cast in moral terms, it's with a different set of values than the one used against the unions. Rather than a list of vices drawn from the seven deadly sins, the morality of the bondholders is a matter of "conviction" as they struggle against the grasping unions and their government henchmen. So the NP portrays the bondholders as the victims of this tragedy, and reports (without a challenge) the following:

"The latest GM 'offer' sends a chilling message to all individual bondholders, not just those, like us, holding GM bonds: Contracts in America are no longer worth the paper they are written on," said GM Bondholders Unite, a grass-roots group representing individual GM bondholders across the United States.

"The 'offer' to individual GM bond investors is ridiculously lopsided because it arbitrarily favors other groups, at the expense of the legal rights, under the U. S. Constitution, of hundreds of thousands of individual GM bond investors.... We aren't asking for a bailout or a handout, just a fair deal. So we have no plans to back down."

Elections Do Not Equal Governments

My brother made a great point in a recent letter to the Georgia Straight. Though we may vote on the basis of party leader, we don't actually vote for a premier or a prime minister. On election night, we vote for a local representative who will ostensibly represent our riding's interests in parliament or the legislature. In an important sense, election night is really about 308 simultaneous elections federally, and 85 provincially. When those different elections are tallied, the party leader with the most support from the elected members takes the seat as the head of government. That is the essence of parliamentary democracy. In other words, there is a fusion of the executive and the legislative, insofar as control of the legislative branch (usually the lower house) gives you power over the bureaucracy. If you want to vote for your head of government directly, you'll have to move to the United States.

Unfortunately, "legions of politically illiterate British Columbians" (and Canadians in general) were incensed when, in 2008, the Liberals and NDP proposed a coalition to take over from Harper's minority Conservative government. Anti-coalition types, mostly Conservative, argued that they didn't vote for Stephane Dion, the leader of the Liberals. (They also said relying on the BQ was treasonous, forgetting that the Conservatives under Harper had proposed such an arm's length alliance with the BQ in 2004.) The argument against Dion, however, showed that many Canadians were under the mistaken belief that, since they didn't vote for Dion, he couldn't become PM. Actually... nobody voted for Dion, except for a majority of voters in the riding of Saint-Laurent/Cartierville. Moreover, not a single person voted for him (or Harper) qua prime minister.

So of course Dion could have become PM. It's not up to voters, whether we like it or not. In our indirect democracy, it's up to the members of parliament, whose support is required for a government to stand. That's why our parliamentary system is a "system of confidence". Even in Canada, in the early 1920's, the Liberal Mackenzie King was our prime minister even though the Conservatives had more seats. King had the support - the confidence - of the Progressives, and that's all that mattered.

Another distinction that helps clarify the situation is to understand the difference between government and election. The two are not necessarily symmetrical in a parliamentary system. This is the logical outcome of a confidence system. You can have more governments than elections, because you might have different coalitions - based on the results of one election - as confidence shifts and changes. Here's a case in point: since World War Two, Canada has had more elections than Israel or Italy, though many fewer governments. Canada has had 20 elections (starting in 1949), Israel has had 18, and Italy has had 17. The difference is our electoral system. We use the first-past-the-post election system, which tends to create artificial majorities (or limited coalition options) and therefore more stable levels of confidence. Israel and Italy use various types of proportional elections, which tend to elect more and smaller parties, and therefore less stable government coalitions. But the system of confidence remains in all three parliaments, because that's what we mean by parliamentary democracy. If Canada isn't used to a lot of coalitions, it's because of our election system. But that does not affect the reality that confidence from the sitting members remains central to who becomes prime minister.

The Mining Industry Gets Its Comeuppance

One of the most ideologically strident industries in Canada, and certainly its whiniest, is the mining industry. It recently suffered a well-deserved loss in Canada's Federal Court, which ordered the industry, and its pals in the federal government, to fully disclose the industry's pollution output. Canada's mining industry did not have to report "the pollutants present in the tailings and waste rock" in the national survey on pollution (the NPRI). Amazingly, the federal government fought the full disclosure, apparently at the behest of its mining friends. Read the full story at cbc.ca:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/04/24/court-mining-pollution865.html

The Red Cross Torture Report

Mark Danner is well known journalist and professor of journalism at Berkeley. He has written dozens of articles for the New York Review of Books, and has, in my mind, provided the definitive reportage on the Serbian massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica.

His latest article is a thorough yet blistering summary of the "ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen 'High Value Detainees' in CIA Custody", otherwise known as the "Red Cross Torture Report". We may be tired of the issue, as it's been a focal point for criticism of the Bush administration since 2001. However, Danner may have written the definitive summary again, and I think the question of torture will continue to haunt American politics for many years to come. The current debate over the release of the Bush torture memos, a possible South African-style truth and reconciliation commission, and possible war crime charges against Bush-era politicians, will ensure the past continues to inform (and deform) the present. Plus, the descriptions of torture, especially the waterboarding and beatings against plywood sheets, is too gripping to ignore. After reading Danner's article, it's almost impossible to believe that America hasn't crossed some irreversible, unrepairable moral divide. The rank hypocrisy of American foreign policy has never been more exposed.

Here are some excerpts from his review:

... An awareness of this history makes reading the International Committee of the Red Cross report a strange exercise in climbing back through the looking glass. For in interviewing the fourteen "high-value detainees," who had been imprisoned secretly in the "black sites" anywhere from "16 months to almost four and a half years," the Red Cross experts were listening to descriptions of techniques applied to them that had been originally designed to be illegal "under the rules listed in the 1949 Geneva Conventions." And then the Red Cross investigators, as members of the body designated by the Geneva Conventions to supervise treatment of prisoners of war and to judge that treatment's legality, were called on to pronounce whether or not the techniques conformed to the conventions in the first place. In this judgment, they are, not surprisingly, unequivocal:

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel and inhuman or degrading treatment....

... One fact, seemingly incontrovertible, after the descriptions contained and the judgments made in the ICRC report, is that officials of the United States, in interrogating prisoners in the "War on Terror," have tortured and done so systematically. From many other sources, including the former president himself, we know that the decision to do so was taken at the highest level of the American government and carried out with the full knowledge and support of its most senior officials....

...Mr. Abu Zubaydah commented that when the collar was first used on him in his third place of detention, he was slammed directly against a hard concrete wall. He was then placed in a tall box for several hours (see Section 1.3.5, Confinement in boxes). After he was taken out of the box he noticed that a sheet of plywood had been placed against the wall. The collar was then used to slam him against the plywood sheet. He thought that the plywood was in order to absorb some of the impact so as to avoid the risk of physical injury....

... Torture has undermined the United States' reputation for respecting and following the law and thus has crippled its political influence. By torturing, the United States has wounded itself and helped its enemies in what is in the end an inherently political war—a war, that is, in which the critical target to be conquered is the allegiances and attitudes of young Muslims. And by torturing prisoners, many of whom were implicated in committing great crimes against Americans, the United States has made it impossible to render justice on those criminals [because torture=inadmissable evidence], instead sentencing them—and the country itself—to an endless limbo of injustice. That limbo stands as a kind of worldwide advertisement for the costs of the US reversion to torture, whose power President Obama has tried to reduce by announcing that he will close Guantánamo....

... The only way to defuse the political volatility of torture and to remove it from the center of the "politics of fear" is to replace its lingering mystique, owed mostly to secrecy, with authoritative and convincing information about how it was really used and what it really achieved. That this has not yet happened is the reason why, despite the innumerable reports and studies and revelations that have given us a rich and vivid picture of the Bush administration's policies of torture, we as a society have barely advanced along this path. We have not so far managed, despite all the investigations, to produce a bipartisan, broadly credible, and politically decisive effort, and pronounce authoritatively on whether or not these activities accomplished anything at all in their stated and still asserted purpose: to protect the security interests of the country....

The full article can be found at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22614. Here is a video of Mark Danner talking with Bill Moyers: