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Time to Repair Our ‘Damaged’ Democracy: Stephane Dion
Time to Repair Our ‘Damaged’ Democracy: Stephane Dion
New foreign affairs minister, a long-time vote reform advocate, dishes on fixing our system.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s choice to represent Canada on the world stage, Stephane Dion, will have his work cut out for him promoting the Liberals’ brand of democracy as foreign affairs minister.
The former party leader and 19-year veteran MP said protecting democracy at home continues to worry him, too.
“We have been elected to change the policies of the country,” the Saint-Laurent MP said in an interview with The Tyee yesterday, “but also to change the way these policies are decided — the process by which we may improve our democratic practices in Canada, our Parliamentary democracy and our democracy in general… a democracy that has been damaged over the last 10 years.”
Today, Dion was handed the high-profile foreign affairs portfolio at a swearing-in ceremony in Ottawa.
Maryam Monsef, an Afghan refugee who at 30 became one of Canada’s youngest-ever MPs* after winning jailed Conservative Dean Del Mastro’s seat, became the country’s first Minister of Democratic Institutions.
But as the federal Liberals’ long-time critic for democratic reform, Dion will likely be sought out for advice and remain connected at least behind-the-scenes to the electoral reform file.
He has extensively studied alternative voting systems used around the world, most prominently various types of proportional representation that attempt to align popular vote with the number of seats in Parliament. But which alternative to choose has long divided electoral change advocates, and that’s the task ahead for Trudeau’s promised parliamentary committee tasked with recommending reforms.
In fact, Dion has invented his own personal voting system he’s dubbed “P3” — proportional-preferential-personalized vote. In a nutshell, rather than one MP per riding, he proposed there be five in much larger ridings than today. Voters would rank parties in order of preference; then rank the five candidates put forward by their chosen party.
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Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism
Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism
Sheldon Wolin discusses his ideas with Chris Hedges in this still from Hedges’ interview with Wolin for The Real News Network. (TRNN via YouTube)
Sheldon Wolin, our most important contemporary political theorist, died Oct. 21 at the age of 93. In his books “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism” and “Politics and Vision,” a massive survey of Western political thought that his former student Cornel West calls “magisterial,” Wolin lays bare the realities of our bankrupt democracy, the causes behind the decline of American empire and the rise of a new and terrifying configuration of corporate power he calls “inverted totalitarianism.”
Wendy Brown, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and another former student of Wolin’s, said in an email to me: “Resisting the monopolies on left theory by Marxism and on democratic theory by liberalism, Wolin developed a distinctive—even distinctively American—analysis of the political present and of radical democratic possibilities. He was especially prescient in theorizing the heavy statism forging what we now call neoliberalism, and in revealing the novel fusions of economic with political power that he took to be poisoning democracy at its root.”
Wolin throughout his scholarship charted the devolution of American democracy and in his last book, “Democracy Incorporated,” details our peculiar form of corporate totalitarianism. “One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic,” he writes in that book, “surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.”
Inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state.
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A New Biography Traces the Pathology of Allen Dulles and His Appalling Cabal
A New Biography Traces the Pathology of Allen Dulles and His Appalling Cabal
AS I READ The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, a new book by Salon founder David Talbot, I couldn’t help thinking of an obscure corner of 1970s history: the Safari Club.
Dulles — the Princeton man and white shoe corporate lawyer who served as CIA director from 1953 to 1961, still the longest tenure in agency history — died in 1969 before the Safari Club was conceived. And nothing about it appears in The Devil’s Chessboard. But to understand the Safari Club is to understand Allen Dulles and his milieu.
Any normal person would likely hear the Safari Club saga as a frightening story of totally unaccountable power. But if there’s one thing to take away from The Devil’s Chessboard, it’s this: Allen Dulles would have seen it differently — as an inspiring tale of hope and redemption.
Because what the Safari Club demonstrates is that Dulles’ entire spooky world is beyond the reach of American democracy. Even the most energetic post-World War II attempt to rein it in was in the end as effective as trying to lasso mist. And today we’ve largely returned to the balance of power Dulles set up in the 1950s. As Jay Rockefeller said in 2007 when he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, “Don’t you understand the way intelligence works? Do you think that because I’m chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say ‘I want it, give it to me’? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time.”
In February 2002, Saudi Prince Turki Al Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence from 1977 until September 1, 2001, traveled to Washington, D.C.
While there, Turki, who’d graduated from Georgetown University in the same class as Bill Clinton, delivered a speech at his alma mater that included an unexpected history lesson:
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Let’s Help Canada’s Newspapers Stop Embarrassing Themselves
Let’s Help Canada’s Newspapers Stop Embarrassing Themselves
In this post-Harper era, our democratic institutions must be fixed. Start with media.
Observing the cathartic effect of the end the Harper regime reveals just how traumatized millions of Canadians were by nearly 10 years of rule by this vindictive prime minister. The analogies and metaphors keep coming: like getting out of jail, like waking up from a nightmare, like the end of an occupation.
This election will provide students, pundits and authors with career-building opportunities to dissect the results. Part of that analysis will, of course, examine the unprecedented assault on democracy carried about the Conservatives. As it should, because undoing the damage must be the litmus test for the new Liberal government and Parliament.
However, while it is critical to track these efforts, the other democratic institution which needs renewed attention is the media and in particular the newspapers in this country. Regrettably, we have adapted to the outrageous concentration of newspaper ownership in Canada, greater than in any other developed Western nation.
But the newspapers perhaps did us a favour in the last week of the campaign with their inane endorsement of the Harper autocracy for yet another four-year term. Postmedia and the Globe and Mail actually managed to write editorials justifying the re-election of a man turfed from office by a tsunami of voter revulsion.
The Globe and Mail and the National Post editorials both declared their support because of Harper’s economic record — but ignored all the actual evidence. The Globe declared: “The key issue of the election should have been the economy and the financial health of Canadians. On that score, the Conservative Party has a solid record.” And the National Post: “Harper’s commendable record in office cannot be dismissed. Our economy is in good shape…”
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Attacks On the Press Escalate Ahead of Turkish Elections
Attacks On the Press Escalate Ahead of Turkish Elections
ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, Turkish riot police stormed the offices of Koza Ipek Holding, a media group in Istanbul housing the Bugun TV channel and the Bugun and Millet newspapers.
“Dear viewers,” a Bugun TV anchor casually announced during the early morning broadcast, “do not be surprised if you see police in our studio in the upcoming minutes.” Outside, police were leading journalists away in handcuffs, while citizens — many of them journalists who worked in the building — protested the dawn raid as police attempted to disperse the growing crowd with tear gas and water cannons.
Scenes of riot police suddenly and forcefully storming media outlets perceived to be critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have become increasingly common in Turkey. In June the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) won 13 percent of the vote in the Parliamentary election, thereby surpassing the 10 percent electoral threshold needed for Parliamentary representation and taking away seats from President Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Crackdown Ahead of Elections
As the November 1 elections approach — a “snap” election called by the AKP in hopes of regaining a Parliamentary majority — press freedom advocates are concerned that the increasing raids on media outlets and attacks on journalists represent a dire threat to Turkish democracy.
“This pressure and attacks have significantly impacted journalists’ ability to report on matters of public interest freely and independently,” said Muzaffar Suleymanov, a researcher for the Committee to Protect Journalists Europe and Central Asia Program, at a recent press conference hosted by an emergency press freedom mission to Turkey. “In a practical sense, attacks on journalists compromise their work and affect the public’s ability to make an informed decision to vote.”
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Democracy and Monarchy
Democracy and Monarchy
Regarding the country as their own private property, the monarchist-aristocratic class will wish to preserve the capital-value and thus will promote the mechanisms that allow for wealth accumulation.
Democratic interests, on the other hand, are by nature populist and short-term thinking. The masses have never been rational, nor has the monarchist-aristocratic class ever been truly responsible to all private-property owners.
This is what makes the Canadian system – theoretically — superior to the American Republic. The Canadian system preserves this monarchical element to ensure democratic interests don’t undermine the long-term interests of the country.
Neither Canada nor the United States are strictly democracies, but rather, constitutional governments bound by certain democratic elements, more so in the American system. Both systems fail to live up to their theories, because, as Professor Hoppe has keenly demonstrated, the theory of democracy is fundamentally flawed.
Yet while ratifying the constitution in the provincial legislatures, George-Étienne Cartier commented on the lessons that should be learned from the American experience of an overbearing democracy:
“We were not now discussing the great problem presented to our consideration in order to propagate democratic principles. Our attempt was for the purpose of forming a federation with a view of perpetuating the monarchical element. The distinction therefore between ourselves and our neighbours was just this: in our federation the monarchical principle would form the leading feature, while on the other side of the lines, judging by the past history and present condition of the country, the ruling power was the will of the mob, the rule of the populace.”
“They [the Americans] had founded a federation for the purpose of carrying out and perpetuating democracy on this continent; but we, who had the benefit of being able to contemplate republicanism in action during a period of eighty years, saw its effects, and felt convinced that purely democratic institutions could not be conducive to the peace and prosperity of nations.”
Indeed, it’s never a bad time for Canadians to restore their distrust in democracy.
Food Sovereignty: This is What Anarchy Looks Like
Food Sovereignty: This is What Anarchy Looks Like
“This is what democracy looks like” goes the popular protest chant. However, it’s not democracy that captures the imagination, provides answers, and drives today’s resistance movement. Something much more interesting has been taking place during protests, forums and intentional communities. In his book The New Left the anthropologist David Graeber states that anarchy has become the logical and probably last hope of the international resistance to capitalism. Mondeggi, an agricultural squat in the Tuscan countryside celebrating its first year this summer demonstrates how that might just be the case.
Anarchy is completely misunderstood amongst the larger public. The word in modern vocabulary has come to mean chaos. This is ironically the opposite of Anarchy, which could be described as organic order of horizontal self-governance. The misunderstanding comes partly due to political theory ignorance, propaganda from the right, and due to some of the “violent” acts of some historical anarchists such as blowing up bridges and factories in the context of oppressive monarchies, world wars, and Fascist regimes. These extreme strategies are ironically much less drastic that the systematic widespread organized violence of the various state regimes through history.
Chomsky argues that Anarchism is based on the assumption that any structure of authority and domination has to justify itself. All such structures have a burden of proof to bear and if they can’t bear that burden they’re illegitimate. If they are illegitimate they should be dismantled and replaced by alternative structures which are free and participatory and are not based on authoritarian systems.
Democracy allows for the exploitation and destruction of the environment that is taking place today because of the financial interests of a few organizing the nations states according to the bottom line of international profit. Direct democracy does allow for taking some of the responsibility and control of affairs yet it still maintains the existence of the state.
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Neil Macdonald: Government sensitivity over you hearing about ‘sensitive’ information
Deputy minister calls in the RCMP after media leaks at her department
Canadian democracy has, we are told, been maliciously undermined at Citizenship and Immigration, and the department’s top public servant is determined to set things right, on behalf of the Canadian people.
Deputy Minister Anita Biguzs has declared herself “deeply concerned.” What has happened, she says, is an ethical erosion of the very cornerstone of the trust and democratic function of government.
- Citizenship Department leaks to media probed by RCMP
- New passport processing system suspended after glitches, security gaps revealed
- Syrian refugee crisis makes unexpected return as campaign issue
- Poll Tracker: Follow the latest numbers
Now, before you go leaping to conclusions, Biguzs was not talking about the prime minister’s political staff overriding the professionals in her department who were choosing which Syrian refugees will be lucky enough to end up in Canada.
Anita Biguzs, deputy minister of citizenship and immigration, has called in the RCMP to investigate leaks from her department to the media. (Citizenship and Immigration Canada)
Nor is she talking about the near-total absence of public transparency in her department, which has made it nearly impossible for a member of the public to reach anything other than a voice mail message. (“If we started taking public calls, we’d never get any work done,” a departmental spokeswoman told me a few weeks ago, with no evident irony.)
No, what has provoked Bigusz’s anger, and determination for a reckoning, is that someone under her command apparently had the gall to tell a journalist — and thereby the Canadian public — about the PMO overriding the professionals in her department.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Reflections on Modern Democracy
Reflections on Modern Democracy
Democracy – but only when it goes your way!
Over the years of watching the democratic process I’ve noticed something important. People tend to reject democracy, indeed, fight it tooth and nail, when it doesn’t go their way. But when it does, well, it is the tops.
Consider the case of California’s Proposition 187. Then governor Gray Davis of California was maneuvering to essentially gut this referendum, one that won with over 60% of the votes. So let us recognize that the leader of the Democratic Party in California has no problem rejecting what the majority of the people want when he and his friends believe that the people are wrong.
Former California governor Gray Davis, a typical representative of the cronyism prevalent in the US merchant State. What eventually tripped him up wasn’t his attempt to gut prop. 187 by legal maneuvering, but his perceived poor performance during California’s energy crisis. Many of his energy advisors were the very speculators who benefited the most from the crisis. It was one affront too many. Davis was the first member of California’s ruling caste to fall prey to a recall, after 117 previous recall attempts throughout California’s history had failed, and only the 2nd politician in US history to suffer this ignominious fate. During the boom of the 1990s, Davis had greatly expanded government spending, landing California with a near $35 bn. deficit when the bust inevitably struck.
Photo credit: Patrick Fallon/Bloomberg
Now if you believe in democracy regarding the handling of certain problems in society, whether people actually have signed up for that process, you will go along with the verdict regardless of whether you like the outcome. That is a principled defense of democracy.
During all the health (Obama) care reform debates it is liberal Democrats who said, repeatedly, that their demand for a government supervised health care system merely expresses the will of the public and thus has ample legitimacy behind it.
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Venezuela isn’t looking too hot
Venezuela isn’t looking too hot
If anarcho-capitalists should move to Somalia, then socialists – especially, “social democrats” — should move to Venezuela. The country is a complete disaster. But don’t take my word for it, read what a Caracas homemaker said after she tried to buy three cans of sardines and was ordered to put one back due to food rationing: “This is a disaster.”
Food shortages, rising prices, inflation, corrupted incentives, and rampant crime are all symptoms of a primordial problem: socialism. Just because the Socialist Party was democratically elected does not mean that the economic calculation problem has been solved. It’s as if the gods needed one more example to shove down the throats of Western leftists. Economic chaos, food rationing and a complete break down of the social order aren’t lessons of a misguided dictatorship of the proletariat, but a fundamental reality of socialism, whether democratic or not.
Democracy is just an insidious form of communism and the Venezuelan December 6th legislative elections won’t likely loosen the power the Socialists hold over the judiciary and government watchdog agencies. But since street protests led to more state violence, the Venezuelan people have retreated to a electoral solution.
Like Canada, where government workers prefer to vote for the party that offers more tax-funded goods, it’s assumed that in Venezuela, the government-controlled TV and radio stations will convince enough people to vote for the Socialists.
Pollster Luis Vicente Leon said that over 16 years in power, first Chavez and now [President Nicolas] Maduro have mastered the electoral arts. “They fiercely control the institutions and the money which allow them to become stronger through electoral engineering even when their support is flagging,” Leon wrote in the Caracas daily El Universal.
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The Curse of Totalitarianism and the Challenge of an Insurrectional Pedagogy
The Curse of Totalitarianism and the Challenge of an Insurrectional Pedagogy
Introduction
The forces of free-market fundamentalism are on the march ushering in a terrifying horizon of what Hannah Arendt once called “dark times.” Across the globe, the tension between democratic values and market fundamentalism has reached a breaking point. [1] The social contract is under assault, neo-Nazism is on the rise, right wing populism is propelling extremist political candidates and social movements into the forefront of political life, anti-immigrant sentiment is now wrapped in the poisonous logic of nationalism and exceptionalism, racism has become a mark of celebrated audacity, and a politics of disposability comes dangerously close to its endgame of extermination for those considered excess. Under such circumstances, it becomes frightfully clear that the conditions for totalitarianism and state violence are still with us smothering critical thought, social responsibility, the ethical imagination, and politics itself. As Bill Dixon observes:
[T]he totalitarian form is still with us because the all too protean origins of totalitarianism are still with us: loneliness as the normal register of social life, the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude, mass poverty and mass homelessness, the routine use of terror as a political instrument, and the ever growing speeds and scales of media, economics, and warfare. [2]
In the United States, the extreme right in both political parties no longer needs the comfort of a counterfeit ideology in which appeals are made to the common good, human decency, and democratic values. On the contrary, power is now concentrated in the hands of relatively few people and corporations while power is global and free from the limited politics of the democratic state. In fact, the state for all intent and purposes has become the corporate state. Dominant power is now all too visible and the policies, practices, and wrecking ball it has imposed on society appear to be largely unchecked.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
You Can’t Separate Empire, the State, Financialization and Crony Capitalism: It’s One Indivisible System
You Can’t Separate Empire, the State, Financialization and Crony Capitalism: It’s One Indivisible System
The great irony is what’s unsustainable melts into thin air no matter how many people want it to keep going.
Disagreement is part of discourse, and pursuing differing views of the best way forward is the heart of democracy. Disagreement is abundant, democracy is scarce, despite claims to the contrary.
If you think you can surgically extract Empire from the American System, force the State to serve the working/middle classes, end the stripmining of financialization, limit crony capitalism/regulatory capture and get Big Money out of politics–go ahead and do so. I’m not standing in your way–go for it.
But while you pursue your good governance, populist, Left/ Right /Socialist/ Libertarian, etc. reforms, please understand the system is indivisible: the Deep State, the Imperial Project (hegemony and power projection), the State, finance in all its tenacled control mechanisms (greetings, debt-serfs and student-loan-serfs), crony capitalism /regulatory capture, money buying political influence, media propaganda passing as “news”, and the evisceration of democracy (something untoward could happen if the serfs could overthrow the Power Elite at the ballot box–can’t let that happen)–it’s all one system.
Should any one organ be ripped from the body, the entire body dies. The entire system defends each subsystem as integral as a matter of survival. As a result, the naive notion that big money can be excised with only positive consequences is false: restoring democracy places the entire system at risk of implosion.
No more bread and circuses, no more Social Security checks, no more state employee pensions–it all melts into air if any subsystem stops doing its job.
The system is interdependent. Each subsystem needs the others to function. I drew up a chart of the major components (but by no means all) of the system:
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Democracy Has Departed The West
Democracy Has Departed The West
Before the West spreads democracy abroad maybe it could get some for itself. The US is an oligarchy in which government is answerable to six powerful private interest groups. In Europe governments are answerable to the EU, Washington, and private bankers and not to their peoples. In the UK the military brass has declared its hold on the reins of power.
Jeremy Corbyn is the first Labourite to lead the Labour Party in a long time. Considering the stupidity and immorality of the Tories, Corbyn could become prime minister of Britain. Should this occur, Corbyn would shift the budget priorities away from supporting Washington’s wars toward refurbishing the social welfare state that made life for ordinary Britishers more secure and less stressful.
A senior serving general of the British army said that the army would not allow the people to “put a maverick in charge of the country’s security. The Army just wouldn’t stand for it and would use whatever means possible, fair or foul, to prevent that.”
In other words, a democratic outcome unacceptable to the English military will be overthrown. Just like in Egypt.
Here we have the incongruity of Washington and London bringing democracy to others through what Vladimir Putin calls “airstrike democracy,” while tolerating a democracy deficit themselves. The safest conclusion is that democracy is a cloak for an aggressive agenda, not a value in itself to the US and UK elites, who rule and who intend to continue to rule these countries for their personal benefit.
Jonathan Cook reports that the use of “whatever means possible, fair or foul,” against Labour prime ministers who actually stood for the people rather than for the elites is not unique to Corbyn.
Labour Prime Minister Harald Wilson faced similar pressure and resigned. http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2015-09-20/army-plots-against-british-pms-are-not-new/
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“Representation” … and “Consent”
“Representation” … and “Consent”
Democracy is an incredibly successful long con. It works because of theillusion of consent. People actually believe they are “represented.”
And so, they accept impositions that would otherwise be intolerable, if imposed on them by a king or afuhrer or generalissimo.
But when the “people” have decided… .
Except of course, they’ve done no such thing. It is all an illusion, a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that deftly hides the reality that it is not the “people” who decideanything but rather a small handful of individuals who wield vast – almost unlimited – power by claiming to act on their behalf.
Which is a fine-sounding literary device but as a political actuality it is an atrocity.
Have you ever consented to anything the government does to you? Been offered the free choice to accept – or decline? And not subject to violent repercussions in the event you do decide to decline? What sort of contract is it that you’re never actually been presented with but which you’re presumed to have signed – and which you are bound by whether you’ve signed – or not?
It is very odd.
The courts have ruled that by dint of having applied for permission to travel – that is, having applied for a driver’s license – you gave given your implied consent to, well, pretty much anything the state decides to do to you. Even when in flagrant abuse of your alleged rights, as enumerated in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.
Yet few, if any of us, have actually consented to this abrogation of our rights.
We are simply told that we have, since we submitted (under duress) to the necessity of obtaining a driver’s license, so as to be able to travel semi-freely, under certain terms and conditions.
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VIDEO: Chris Hedges on the Big Lie of Neoliberalism and the Very Real Threat of a President Trump
VIDEO: Chris Hedges on the Big Lie of Neoliberalism and the Very Real Threat of a President Trump
Chris Hedges doesn’t spare Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton or even Bernie Sanders in this wide-ranging take on the big swindle of neoliberalism and his warning for the future in the hands of a “rapacious oligarchic elite.”
Hedges made his statements during a speech he gave in Toronto on Sept. 3, drawing from his newest book, “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt,” as well as from his Aug. 30 Truthdig column, “The Great Unraveling.”
Some particularly good lines from Hedges’ speech include these well-taken points: “Every promise made by the proponents of neoliberalism is a lie,” “The left is still alive … barely,” and “Democracy, especially in the U.S., is a farce, vomiting up right-wing demagogues such as Donald Trump, who has a serious chance to become the Republican presidential nominee—and perhaps even president.”
Find out how Hedges views our country’s current predicament, as well as Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, in the video below (via YouTube):
