US Elections: Theater with Deadly Consequences

A great interview with Lawrence Wilkerson, which essentially, supports what I have been saying, in my blogs here, for a while, now, that real democracy does not exist in the world. Everyone likes to talk about it but the general public does not know what real democracy is or how or what should it be? Should it be like what happens in the Western countries; America, Canada, UK, Australia etc.?

Problem is that the general public falsely thinks that as long as the elections are free & fair (that's an assumption in itself), & as long as the general public is getting out to vote & elect the person that they think is the right person to lead them and their country on the international stage, then it must be democracy. That's NOT Democracy.

Democracy is when makes every decision, or at least, major decisions, with the approval of the general public. After all, the general public is the real guardian of the country. It is akin to shareholders being the real owners of public corporation, & the directors of the company calling emergency meetings or the shareholders to vote on the major issues that company is facing. For instance, a country like, America, would've chosen to ask the citizens about invading their privacy before actually doing it, but as we all know, that's not how that issue played out in real life.

As Larry Wilkerson & Paul Jay discussed in the interview, that the democracy has become a charade in North America & other countries as well. The people in politics are all one & the same. Their political issues do not differ too much from each other. Only the faces change every few years but the major issues of the country never change or get resolved. This in turn has turned off the general public from taking part in electing their leaders, & only less than half of the general population actually votes.

Media, of course, has dumbed down the general public even further. It has played its hand in destroying the democracy very beautifully & to its full advantage. However, I will blame the public, here. Media is a business & will always provide what is in demand, & stupidity is in high demand. Public does not want to see or hear anything which would make them think critically. Of course, that just makes the corrupt politicians of the world do whatever they want to do. Hence, the drama of democracy keeps playing out where the victims don't know that they are the victims, the powerful keeps becoming powerful, & everyone thinks they they are living in a democratic country.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uh2vmEM4uc

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: ... I think American electoral politics and much electoral politics in many countries is much like that. It's mostly theater. There's a war of rhetoric, a war of election campaign ads, and the media treats the theater as if it's real. And it's not just the campaigning. It's while Congress and others are governing. The reality of power, the real interest beneath the politics, is rarely revealed in the media, and the media loves the partisan theater. Why? Because they make money out of it. 80% of campaign donations apparently are going to buy television ads, so it's not in television's interest to pierce the veil of this theater.

... it's very much the same thing in politics. It's got nothing to do [with] whether you know anything or not about the issues. Can you make the crowd pop? Can you make people vote for you?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: I think your metaphor, Paul, is absolutely spot on. It is theater. The real manipulation of power, the real abuse of power, the real use of power takes place behind this charade that is the--you might call it the charade of democracy. That's essentially what we've made it. Elections, of course, are the least important aspect of democracy. The institutions, the culture, the society, the people, they're the important aspects of democracy. But elections are something that we hype all the time, whether it's in this country or other countries. We send observers and so forth. But I agree with that overall metaphor, that it's mostly theater. And in this country, we do Shakespearean theater, if you will, because it's true theater in this country.

JAY: So, while what's being said in the campaigns are mostly just messaging and trying to come up with little catchy phrases and pick some wedge issue that will get people excited, I mean, very little to do with public policy and what real solutions are, that being said, it's not that it's theater without consequences. It does have some consequence who happens to win. So let's get a bit into that. I mean, assuming the Republicans do take the Senate--and as we do the interview, it looks like they're going to--does it matter?

WILKERSON: It's a part of our system. ...

JAY: If you go back to when President Obama was elected and the real disgrace of the Bush-Cheney administration in every level, from foreign policy to economics, I mean, foreign policy leaving a complete disaster of the Iraq War, and on economics, certainly playing a big part in the crash of '07 and '08--of course, Bill Clinton helped contribute to that, but it was a total runaway train in terms of what elites in banking and so on could get away with with Bush-Cheney. Does it somewhat shock you, if you put your mind back then, that we're in a place where the Republicans could actually control both houses?

WILKERSON: It does, because, as Gore Vidal said very eloquently at one point in his life, we're the United States of amnesia. We don't have any memory. We don't have any retrospective look. Very few of us do, anyway. Most people do what they do, whether it's vote or go to work or whatever, based on a very immediate, local set of circumstances. And going back to--.

JAY: But a lot of that has to do with the media. The media has to have a lot to do with that.

WILKERSON: Well, a lot of it does have to do with the media. It does have to do with the media. And when you have a media that is captured, basically, by the corporate interests in this country, then that media is not going to tell you much except that which keeps you in your somnolent state. And that's really what our media does. It keeps us in an apathetic, somnolent state. The media has no interest in sparking real issues, in debating those issues, in discussing those issues, in parsing those issues so that you can see the meat and the blood and the bones of those issues. They don't want to do that. My god, that might excite someone to actually become smart.

JAY: Yeah. It's also like you take, like, the NBA or any of the professional sports leagues, where they do what they can to kind of even out the teams, because if the teams aren't competitive, who wants to go pay money to go see basketball or football? I mean, the media has the same interest. If they don't keep the Republicans and Democrats competitive, then who needs to spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on television advertising? So it's in their interest to rehabilitate a party and not let it collapse completely.

WILKERSON: Absolutely. You just put your finger on the heart of things, too. One of my students asked me the other day: do you really think there's that much difference in foreign-policy formulation between the Republicans and the Democrats? And, of course, my answer was no, there's not. There's hardly any distance between them. Oh, you can pick an issue here and an issue there ... but you're not going to find that big a divergence between either party. And I would even submit you're not going to find that big a divergence with regard to what corporate interests dictate those politicians do between either party either. You're going to find that there's just as much responsibility, as you just pointed out, for the current economic problems in this country belonging to the Democrats ... who engineered the disassembling of FDR's protections during the Great Depression and afterwards, as there is amongst the Republicans, who were so explicit, if you will, in the way they fought war at the same time they didn't raise any taxes and things like that. But they're both complicit in the same kind of maneuvers, in the same kind of abuse of power for their own interest, for their very parochial, narrow individual interest, and for the larger and grander interests of the corporate interests whom they represent--big pharmacy, big food, big energy, and so forth.
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Criminal Minds, S1E20 (Quote 1)

There are some people who only talk to hide their true intentions, esp. politicians. They talk a lot but their beautiful words hide their true intentions of deceits & lies.

A real nation would not let this happen

A great opinion piece from last year when election campaign in Canada was all the noise (& news) in the media.

We Canadians like to think that we are all one nation & we care for each other. Non-Canadians come to visit Canada & see the urban, down-town real estate developments & enjoy the urban amenities, & consider Canada a great place to be. Canadian cities are regularly rated to be great place to live & work by international organizations.

But all that happens because nobody takes a peek behind the curtain to see how Canadian Aboriginals are faring on the forgotten reserves & even in the urban areas. Nobody, including politicians, wants to hear / see their plight. That's the same case everywhere around the world. Be it Aboriginals of US or Australia, or even poorest of the poor people, forgotten in the back country, of countries on African, Asian, & European continents.

Although, blaming the developing countries for forgetting the poorest of the poor might not be justifiable, since their urban (so-called, "middle-class") populations also struggle to make ends meet, but it is inexcusable when developed countries put millions, if not billions, in the outstretched hands of the rich suburbanites because they are a few dollars short for their new home renovations, new electronics, vacation trips, night life shenanigans etc.

The author is correct to say that although we think we are one nation; be it Canadians in Canada, Americans in America, Australians in Australia, Pakistanis in Pakistan, Indians in India, South Africans in South Africa & so on & so forth, when it comes down to our selfish interests, it is me against everyone else. We always want more. We always have less. Why?

Because we forget to look at people who are below us in our society. Perhaps, then, we can satisfy our constant hunger for more. We forget that, as a democratic nation, it is the responsibility of the general populace to reject the latest handout in the elections & annual budgets, & compel our politicians to take care of the least unfortunate & needy among us. After taking care of the humanity on the national level, all of us, as humans, are obligated to tell our politicians & international organizations to take care of the least unfortunate among us on an international level. Heck, a lot of animals (wolves & lots of grazing animals, for instance) take care of the whole herd, instead of taking care of their own little family. Are we humans worse than animals?

Michael Moore, the documentary film maker, said in one of his documentaries (if I may recall correctly, it was on the American healthcare system) that a nation is judged by how it takes care of the sick, old & needy.

Perhaps, we are eligible to call ourselves humans, only when, we take care of the whole humanity; be it in our own backyards, on our streets, in our cities, in our provinces / states, in our countries, on our continents, & in the world.

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http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/a-real-nation-would-not-let-this-happen/

If it’s a typical eight weeks in Canada, then 1,425 Aboriginal kids dropped out of school, a rate three times the national average. Since the campaign began, 45 Aboriginal children died in infancy; they would have lived longer if they’d been born in Sri Lanka. As Canadian politicians bickered on the evening news, 1,074 Aboriginal children & 6,265 Aboriginal women were sexually assaulted. Since the writ dropped, 33,534 Aboriginals were violently victimized. Another 182 committed suicide, roughly eight times the national rate. And, if the last two months were anything like the last decade, 11 were murdered, at a rate almost seven times higher than the national average.
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Politicians are pushing each other out of the way as they scramble to give the hard-pressed suburban middle class the help they need. Meanwhile, other Canadians living on reserves & in the inner city are disappearing, assaulting & killing each other & themselves, at a rate typically only seen in countries that have been torn apart by war.
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The party leaders build their campaigns on ... isolated, focused announcements. Small promises for small men & women, them & us—because this strategy only works if we respond. And we do.

We respond because we are nothing more than a collection of special interest groups. We are dairy farmers or oil workers, urban or rural, francophone or anglophone, Manitobans or Nova Scotians. But we are not a people, not a nation, not really. If we were, we would not be able to ignore each other, ignore other Canadians, the way we ignore the Aboriginal community. We would not allow our politicians to reduce us to Pavlovian demographics, salivating at the sight of a specially crafted handout. We would be unleashing a full-throated cry of anger & dismay, that so many fellow Canadians are growing up alone & lost, that so many of us are living in abject poverty & then dying miserably.

We would shout down every stump speech about the “struggling” middle class & demand more for the least fortunate among us. We would scream in frustration as yet another young Aboriginal is found hanging, unnamed & unmourned.

But we don’t. We just stand there, heads down, hands out.

I don’t know who to be more ashamed of, our politicians or us.

Who Makes US Foreign Policy? - Lawrence Wilkerson on Reality Asserts Itself

Couple points to highlight from this interview of Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell):

1. As I always blog that there's no such thing as "democracy" in this world. Many countries, & billions of people either say that "they are living in a democratic country" or "they are fighting for democracy", but everyone of them think "democracy" is merely voting in "free & fair elections". That's not democracy. Democracy is not merely about voting in elections, but it's much more. Democracy is when the voice of the majority of a nation are heard on major internal & external issues; issues which are affecting a country.

But, as this interview proves once again, that the wealthy people of United States, for instance, are controlling the government, & hence, all the major decisions American government makes; regardless of it's domestic or foreign matters. As Larry Wilkerson says, that "the oligarchs ... buy the president and thus buy American foreign policy." He also gives example of this is similar to what happens in Putin's Russia. I completely agree with it. Many Americans will of course disagree with it, but it's the bitter truth. There's no "democracy" in US, since it doesn't matter what the general public needs or wants, it's the rich elites who get what they want.

2. Another point I frequently make in my blogs is that arms sales around the world, ironically, by the permanent members of UN "Security" Council, create more chaos & deaths around the world than brutal dictatorships.

Such international arms manufacturing companies as Lockheed & Raytheon vigorously lobby politicians in US, UK, Canada, France etc. to allow them to sell international arms & weaponry to such countries as Saudi Arabia, China, Israel, Nigeria, UAE, Bahrain etc. Then, these countries have to find any excuse whatsoever to use that stockpile, & hence, wars start. Poor people die in large numbers in neighbouring countries like Palestine, Yemen, Syria etc.

But who benefits from all these arms & weapons transactions? Definitely not Saudi Arabia, UAE, or Nigeria. These countries are importing these arms & hence, they are indebted to their Western counterparts. But companies like Lockheed & Boeing, & of course, those politicians who pushed their countries' foreign policies towards more belligerence & wars, benefit tremendously. As Larry Wilkerson says in regards to the re-emergence of another potential Cold War era between US & Russia that "this group alarms me probably more than any other in the world, and particularly my own country--that is interested in a constant state of war, or as near a constant state as possible, because they sit behind all the belligerents and make money."

So does the majority of American or Russian public want their countries at each other's throats? Or how about the new Asian pivot of America? Does the majority of Americans want US & its Asian allies (Philippines, Japan etc.) banding together against China? I don't think so. But do they have any say in this matter? Of course not. So is this "democracy" when the general public suffers because their tax dollars, which they are paying just so they can get better public infrastructure, education, healthcare etc., are actually being used towards military hardware & a perpetual war against the world?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZW8T4NA3Is

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Larry, you were right at the center of the State Department. Back when you were there, and then sort of extrapolating to today, who runs U.S. foreign policy? 'Cause there's this sort of feeling there's this grand design and, grand machinations and chessboard-playing and all of that. Where are the centers of power for making U.S. foreign policy? 'Cause it seems to me it's not just the president.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: I think you're right. And part of what I teach--and I teach post-World War II policy more than anything else, but we have to go back into the past to understand that policy. Part of what I teach is how since World War II and the acquisition of this enormous power by what in essence is the new Rome in the world, the United States, part of the shift that takes place in manipulating and managing that new power is a centralization of foreign policy away from the old cabinet places where it used to take place, most prominently through the Foreign Service and through the secretary of state, to the White House and to the creation of the 1947 National Security Act, the National Security Council. So if you ask me pro forma where does it exist today, it exists more in the National Security Council and its staff than it does anywhere else, certainly anywhere else in the cabinet. So what I'm saying is it's centralized in the White House.

But what does that mean in terms of, I think, your real question, who's behind the White House, and who's therefore behind U.S. foreign policy, more or less? I think the answer today is the oligarchs, which would be the same answer, incidentally, ironically, if you will, for Putin in Russia, the people who own the wealth, the people who therefore have the power and who more or less ... buy the president and thus buy American foreign policy. ...

JAY: There seems to also be centers or circles of power. For example, Lindsey Graham and John McCain seem to represent an alignment of forces. It seems that the fossil fuel industry, military-industrial complex--and certainly not that they are exclusively backing McCain and Graham. They have their hooks into both parties and to--they're kind of a hidden hand throughout much of American politics. But it seems to be a somewhat distinct center. And then Wall Street seems to have even--although it's not monolithic, it's a distinct center of power. What's the actual dynamic? Like, how do they influence National Security Council decisions? How do these processes take place? Where do the discussions take place?

WILKERSON: I think it's probably less fundamental and less precise, and therefore less in the interest, often, of the United States than you might think or that the American people might think. Because of what you've just suggested, that there are many poles in American foreign-policy, from the Congress to even the Supreme Court, to the White House, to the State Department, the Foreign Service, and so forth, it's a very complex mix, and it's rarely ever articulated in a way or manifests itself in a way that good leadership can control it, handle it, and manage it toward a real strategic objective. That's part of our problem in the world today.

But I would submit to you that certain oligarchs, anyway, big food, big pharmacy, big energy, oil, real estate, things like that, they like it this way because then they can flow into the void in the particular region or function or both that they want to control, that they want to manipulate, and do so effectively, whether it's subsidies from the federal government for oil companies or whether it's massive efforts by the government, clandestinely or otherwise, to influence someone like Monsanto being able to operate in Latin America and do the things that it does. So it's incredibly complex, difficult to analyze from a strictly governmental standpoint.

But when you start probing and you start analyzing, you begin to discover that there are centers in this mess, if you will, that are getting what they want. And what they want is basically wealth and power. And they then turn that wealth and power back into political contributions, which now almost have no limits, no constraints on them, and they influence people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham and Bob Menendez and Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank when he was in there and so influential with the banking committee, and they get what they want in terms of legislation that oftentimes I'm convinced the legislatures do not even realize they're doing. They don't understand that they're fulfilling this objective of a particular oligarch or conglomeration of oligarchs. And yet they're doing it, and they're doing it because they are well paid for doing it, in the sense that their PACs are flush and full and they get reelected.

Is John McCain motivated entirely by this? Is Bob Menendez motivated entirely by this? Of course not. They're not intellectual giants, and they don't spend lots of time analyzing this situation in the complex ways that we do. So they think they're actually fulfilling their principles and bending over a little bit to accept the money and the cash necessary to do that. So that's how the system works. That's not even half the explanation, but that's how the system works. And, incidentally, it has worked that way for a very long time, I would say probably since about Andrew Jackson coming into the White House after we'd really established ourselves.

JAY: I think it's a really interesting point, because those of us that sit back doing this geopolitical analysis--and we look at what are the objective interests of the powers and what are the objective interests of the different parts of these powers, and then we kind of think there's people making policy the same way, but they kind of ... what's the crisis that I'm going to deal with today? How am I going to make money out of this tomorrow? It seems to me that with the odd exception of ... the Brzezinskis and these type of people that seem to think in a broader way--most of it seems to be what is in it for me today, the hell with tomorrow, & not so conscious of the forces. I mean, one of the things that always hits me is when you look at the predictions of who would win World War II. Most of what I've seen is by 1940, '41, it was pretty clear Hitler's going to lose. Now, if you're in the German monopoly capitalist class doing analysis, you'll say, well, this is not leading to anything good for us; why aren't we bailing? But the forces of refusing to accept the reality of it were far too strong.

WILKERSON: Well, that's a good point. I would say--and I don't subscribe to conspiracy theory normally, but I would say there were forces behind that shadow, if you will, who were doing quite well, Swiss, German, American, and others who were more or less feeding off the conflict and got very wealthy feeding off the conflict, just as they did off World War I, even more dominantly with respect to the United States in particular, German reparations and so forth. We made a ton of money off of World War I, and we really didn't contribute a whole lot, if you'll remember. We were only really there substantially for a very short period of time, roughly April 1917 to Armistice Day. So there is a group that's interested in this kind of thing--and this group alarms me probably more than any other in the world, and particularly my own country--that is interested in a constant state of war, or as near a constant state as possible, because they sit behind all the belligerents and make money.

JAY: And there seems to be sectors of the economy that profit from volatility, brinksmanship, geopolitically, which leads to massive arms sales. And I've mentioned before on air that I was at this dinner of this organization that does military advice and policymaking to Middle Eastern countries, mostly about arms purchases, and of course who backs the organization's advice is Lockheed Martin and Boeing and, all the military manufacturers. So the brinkmanship sells weapons. And then, of course, Wall Street also does great in volatility, 'cause--especially if you're one step ahead, which the insiders are. But then there's other parts of the economy. ... if you're trying to sell stuff to the American public, massive volatility is not particularly good for you.

WILKERSON: No, it's not. The real economy in this country, though, has shrunken so dramatically since World War II--I show the stats to my students, and I usually use the CIA stats. I can't remember them precisely right now, but I can give you general idea. In 1945, we were about 25% or so services and about 60% or so what was called heavy, medium, or light industry, manufacturing mostly. It's completely the opposite today. It's about 11% to 12% manufacturing, and the latest stat--and this is a precise number from the CIA--76% services. So you don't have the same real economy, if you will, and you don't have the same GDP reflective of that real economy. And that's a very different economy to wage war under than the one we had when we entered World War II, for example. Very different. And you could say in some respects this shadow behind the power that makes money off war, period, no matter who's the belligerent, makes money off that volatility now, especially with computers that are able to assist them in doing so, like currency manipulation, for example, or just general speculation. With computers you can do it at lightning speed and you can do it in a nanosecond, and you can make billions in that nanosecond, and you don't care about what you're doing to the real economy, because you're raking in the dough.

JAY: Has the American elite, including that section which profits on near war and profits on actual war--but in general has there come to a conclusion now that ... if you want a really good Cold War, a really good arms race, then Russia's the right one to do it with?

WILKERSON: That's an interesting speculation. ... I think what's happening is people are beginning--people, these people I'm talking about, who really understand the dynamics in the world--and some of those are in the White House, no question about it. Some of them are people bearing the burden of public policy. No question about it. ... what's happening ... with Ukraine and with Russia, of course, is what you just said: hey, ... we yearn for the solidity and the stability of the Cold War, and my God, Putin's giving it back to us. Let's accept the offer.
...

JAY: ... Is this coming from the Obama administration? Or is it coming from--and this is where I get to who makes U.S. foreign-policy--how many lines of this kind of policy exist that kind of circumvent the White House and the National Security Council?

WILKERSON: I don't think they necessarily circumvent it. I think they are at times in tension within it, but I don't think they necessarily circumvent it, like, for example, Dick Cheney did in the Bush administration. I think what you have is you have people like Samantha Power and Susan Rice who are right-to-protect-people. This is very traditional. This is messianic Christianity manifesting itself in a secular way. This is we have to bear the brown person's burden, we have to go fix these problems in the world. So this is not something new. It's just got a more sophisticated manifestation in 2014.

And it makes a difference. It made a difference in Somalia when Madeleine Albright and Boutros Boutros-Ghali were pushing for state building in Somalia, when any anyone with a brain could have seen impossible task, you're going to fail, and you're going to have to leave ignominiously, which is exactly what Bill Clinton had to do. It manifested itself in the Balkans and in Kosovo. Two days of bombing and Milosević will cave. 78 days later and the threat of ground forces and Milosević finally caves.

So there's that strain, a messianic strain that's always been there.

Then there is a strain of real power, realpolitik. And that's people who are actually trying to achieve American interests, whatever they may be, and the way they think they should be achieved. I would put President Obama in that category.

And then you've got people who are closet neoconservatives, who really do feel that America has to assert itself periodically at a minimum in order to teach the rest of the world that it can't climb the hill on which America is the king.

JAY: But Ukraine is setting up we have to teach Putin a lesson, except you helped create the conditions where you have to teach Putin a lesson ... and more or less play into Putin's hands.

WILKERSON: Well, this is a chess game, to a certain extent, played on multiple levels simultaneously. And when you have a person like Putin with the capabilities that Putin has--I would suggest to you that the KGB and the GRU or NKVD, whenever you want to talk about, were probably the best intelligence people in the world for a long time. When you've got those kind of capabilities, you can do things, and particularly when you're operating on interior lines.

I'll take you into a military jargon here. Interior lines means I've got a border with you and I can move my tank 15 feet and kill you. But I am the person going to contest that tank, and I'm 10,000 miles away, and I've got to fly my tanks into your country before I can even take you on. The advantage of operating on those interior lines is really, really huge. It'd be like us doing something in Mexico and Russia trying to object or us doing something in Cuba and Russia trying to object. It's really difficult. You can do it, but it's really difficult.

So there are a lot of things operating with respect to Crimea, Ukraine, Odessa, and so forth, Georgia, right now that play into what some of these people, like ... John McCain, Lindsey Graham, would love to see happen, and that is the development of a new Cold War, a new Cold War with old antagonists.
...

WILKERSON: ... When Jim Baker and George H. W. Bush really accomplished what I think was one of the real diplomatic feats of the end of the 20th century, the reunification of Germany, whether we agree with that or not, they did it, and they did it without a shot being fired. It was wonderful to watch H. W. Bush do that, and Jim Baker. But one of the reasons they could do it was because they assured Gorbachev, and later Yeltsin, that NATO would be quiescent, it wouldn't move, it wouldn't threaten Russia. In fact, I was there when we told the Russians that we were going to make them a member -- observer first and then a member and so forth.

Well, that fell apart on the fact that they perceived right quickly that we weren't really serious. And then we start, under pressure from Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and others, to sell weapons to Poland and weapons to Georgia and weapons to Romania and everybody else we could bring into the fold. Under those pressures and others, we started to expand NATO and stuck both our fingers in the Russian eye, so to speak, immediately. It's clear to me why Putin responded in Georgia and why he's now responding to Crimea in Ukraine. This is what great powers do when they get concerned about their so-called near abroad.
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"Education Cuts" by David Fitzsimmons

 "Education Cuts" - David Fitzsimmons, Arizona Star, Phoenix, Arizona, US

Stephen Harper: Master Manipulator

A very long read but definitely a very interesting one. If it doesn't mention "Stephen Harper" or "Canada," then one might easily confuse the article with an article about a dictator from an African country or one from the Middle East or even a country from Asia (China) or South Asia (Pakistan). And this guy has been the face of Canada for almost 10 years, & he may yet win again on October 19th, 2015, for another 4 years.

I liked the article even more so because it showed how much "democracy" there really is in Canada. As I always say in my blog posts that there is no such thing as democracy anywhere in this world (maybe, in Iceland, but then it's a very small homogenic society). The only difference between Western "democracy" & Eastern "democracy" (in other words, democracy of the developing world) is that one democracy is all smoke-&-mirrors & the other one actually shows outright that there is no such thing as democracy.

On top of that, this article specifically mentions that a large section of the Canadian public is clueless about the government & ministers (20% of Quebecers don't even know which political party is the ruling party of Canada). Funny thing is that this statement reaffirms what I already say in my blog posts that Canadian public is far more busy with sports, food, beer & where my next paycheque is coming from. It doesn't have time to analyze & think how the government is screwing it around.

Since, the article is quite long in itself, I'll leave you to read it. But before I do that I'll copy & paste one paragraph which, very nicely, summarizes the whole article, & in essence, the actions of the ruling political party of Canada for the past decade:

"In the 11 years since he became leader of the country’s Conservatives, the party has been fined for breaking electoral rules, & various members of Team Harper have been caught misleading parliament, gagging civil servants, subverting parliamentary committees, gagging scientists, harassing the supreme court, gagging diplomats, lying to the public, concealing evidence of potential crime, spying on opponents, bullying & smearing. Harper personally has earned himself the rare rebuke of being found to be in contempt of his parliament."
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/15/stephen-harper-master-manipulator

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As Harper tries for a fourth term in office at the Canadian federal election ..., he is trailed by an extraordinarily long list of allegations. ... In Canada, some of the prime minister’s men & women have been accused not simply of cheating to win elections but of conspiring to jam the machinery of democratic government.

Some of these allegations have been proved. In the 11 years since he became leader of the country’s Conservatives, the party has been fined for breaking electoral rules, & various members of Team Harper have been caught misleading parliament, gagging civil servants, subverting parliamentary committees, gagging scientists, harassing the supreme court, gagging diplomats, lying to the public, concealing evidence of potential crime, spying on opponents, bullying & smearing. Harper personally has earned himself the rare rebuke of being found to be in contempt of his parliament.

... Yet this deeply unpopular politician has won 3 elections in the last 9 years. Although the Liberals are showing a late lead in the polls, Harper’s emphasis on his record on security & the economy may yet put a fourth in his trophy cabinet next week. That is what makes Harper’s politics interesting, that he has perfected the tactics of taking & holding power – in spite of the demands of democracy.

His people have been caught out more often than most. That may be because they are more brazen than most ... . But, at heart, Harper’s team are not that different from politicians across the developed world who have discovered that democracy is a pretty sweet theory but that, in reality, if you want to get hold of power & use it, there are all kinds of devious moves available that have very little to do with that antique idea.
* * *

Start with the business of winning an election. During Harper’s first successful run, back in January 2006, his party bumped up against the limit that it was allowed to spend in its national campaign – $18.3 million Canadian dollars ($9.15m). But it still had money in the bank, & the race was very tight. So it channelled more than $1 million down to 67 local candidates who had their own budgets & who then paid for a blitz of TV advertising during the final fortnight of the campaign. Harper squeaked home with 21 more seats than the liberals, & managed to form a minority government with 36% of the vote. Some of the local Conservatives were worried that this was illegal, but Harper’s national director dismissed them with contempt. “What a bunch of turds,” he emailed.

The national officials evidently had persuaded themselves that they had the law on their side. Elections Canada, the official body that enforces polling law, disagreed. As one of its investigators put it: “You could argue that they stole the election.” Team Harper duly suffered the indignity of police raiding their headquarters in Ottawa, seizing their computers & paperwork, & the further embarrassment of having 4 senior officials charged with criminal offences. The Conservatives fought Elections Canada to the last ditch, repeatedly challenging it in the courts. Finally, the prosecution accepted a plea bargain. The charges against the 4 officials were dropped, while the party as an organisation pleaded guilty to illegal campaign spending & paid $282,000 in fines & restitution. That was in March 2012, more than 6 years after the offence, by which time this particular scandal had cobwebs on it, & Harper had won 2 more elections, in November 2008 & May 2011.

If the path to electoral crime is rarely trodden, there is a close alternative, what Nixon’s people called “ratfucking” – acts of sabotage to damage an opponent. Not exactly criminal. Not always. So, for example, when the current Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau (son of the former prime minister, Pierre) held an open-air press conference in Ottawa, he found himself being heckled by a group of young protesters waving placards. They were later revealed by the Huffington Post to be interns working for the Prime Minister’s Office.

In the fortnight before polling day in 2011, Liberal supporters started receiving nuisance calls from people who claimed to be Liberal party workers – calling Jewish voters on the sabbath, waking up others in the middle of the night. Liberals said this was Conservatives trying to alienate their support. Then, in the final 3 days before the vote, Elections Canada received a series of complaints about “robocalls” – recorded messages sent by automatic dialling – that told voters quite falsely that their polling station had been moved. By election day, anxiety was rising among officials, as internal emails recorded: “It seems that Conservative candidates are pretending that Elections Canada or returning officers have changed the polling stations … They have actually disrupted the voting process … It’s right across the country except Saskatchewan … It appears it is getting worse.” This looked like a national campaign to suppress the Liberal vote by scattering it away from the polling booths.

Some of those voters told the Guardian that they had first received a call from the Conservatives asking how they planned to vote. Sandra McEwing, a stage manager from Winnipeg, said: “My answer was unequivocal, like, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ I hung up after that.” Others say they gave similar replies. All then say they received robocalls or live calls, sending them to a polling station that did not exist or to a distant one where they had no right to vote. Some of these voters were in ridings, or electoral districts, where the eventual margin of victory was tiny. Bill Hagborn, president of the Liberal association in a riding in Ontario, told of a bus full of aboriginal voters, who were very unlikely to vote Conservative, & who were misdirected by calls & ended up not voting at all. That riding – Nipissing-Timiskaming – went to the Conservatives with a majority of only 18.

With Team Harper back in power, a group of voters from 6 ridings went to federal court to challenge the results of the election. After a seven-day hearing, the trial judge, Mr. Justice Mosley, issued a devastating verdict: “I am satisfied that it has been established that misleading calls about the locations of polling stations were made to electors in ridings across the country & that the purpose of those calls was to suppress the votes of electors who had indicated their preference in response to earlier voter-identification calls.”

The judge declined to order new elections – the evidence did not reveal whether the calls had actually swung the result – but the declaration of national fraud was powerful stuff. And perhaps even more serious, he found that “the most likely source” of the phone numbers that had been used was the Conservative party’s central database, the Constituent Information Management System (Cims), which is believed to hold the names & addresses of every voter in Canada, together with profiling information that has been gathered by party workers or bought from commercial data-gatherers.

The judge specifically avoided identifying the Conservative party as a whole, or its candidates, as having organised the fraud. However, he went on to complain that it had “engaged in trench warfare in an effort to prevent this case from coming to a hearing on the merits”, which had included “transparent attempts to derail this case”.

Meanwhile, Elections Canada had been investigating. Spurred on by news coverage, voters from 261 of the 308 ridings filed complaints about calls that either caused nuisance or misled them about their polling station. The investigators struggled. When they tried to get records of phone numbers that had called the complainants, they failed in 92.5% of cases. With the 7.5% where they succeeded, they then failed to find the owners of 40% of the phone numbers they had identified, including many that were registered across the border in the US. “We were running into brick walls all over the place,” as one investigator put it. With one startling exception.

In relation to the riding of Guelph in Ontario, the Conservatives who had engaged in “trench warfare” to impede the civil court, handed Elections Canada a group of witnesses who identified an ambitious young party worker, Michael Sona, as a culprit, adding crucially that he had acted without authority, as a “rogue activist”. Sona’s name was rapidly leaked to newspapers. Investigators were able to follow a trail of electronic footprints from the local Conservative office, where Sona worked, to a telemarketing company that had sent out a robocall to more than 7,000 Liberal households, diverting them from their polling stations. Sona was arrested, prosecuted & jailed for 9 months for interfering with an election. He says that he is innocent, a decoy thrown out to protect the real culprits. Others say he is a maverick who set up his own relatively clumsy scheme without the blessing of his party.

But what about all the other ridings? Elections Canada in April 2014 published a report in which it acknowledged the difficulties it had encountered, & reported that – with the exception of Guelph – that it had been unable to find any concrete evidence of dubious activity. This left open the possibility that voters in these ridings had been victims of something far more sophisticated than the clumsy operation for which Michael Sona had been blamed. In Ottawa today, political insiders claim to have heard Conservative workers boasting of using call centres in the US, India or the Philippines.

However, they can prove nothing, & Elections Canada not only found no such clues but enraged Harper’s opponents by concluding that its inability to find evidence of activity outside Guelph amounted to positive evidence that there had been no such activity. This contradicted the finding of Mr. Justice Mosley & implied that all of the complainants from outside Guelph had been tainted by confusion, delusion or dishonesty. No culprit other than Michael Sona has been brought to book.

Effectively cleared of responsibility, the Conservatives pushed back hard. When Elections Canada asked for more powers to help it investigate future fraud claims, the House of Commons backed them. The Harper government, however, denied the body the powers it wanted & removed its entire investigations branch, transferring it to the office of the public prosecutor, where it is no longer answerable to parliament. Meanwhile, the Conservative MP who had acted as Harper’s spokesman on the robocalls affair – his parliamentary secretary, Dean Del Mastro – was jailed for breaking spending limits in his own riding & submitting false records. The sentencing judge told him that he had indulged in “the antithesis of democracy”.
* * *

...
Harper is a master tactician. Knowing that there is a block of rightwing voters who have nowhere else to go, he has been willing to defy them in search of wider support: adopting liberal positions on abortion & gay marriage; veering leftwards to pump public money into the economy to avoid recession in 2008; reaching out to the migrants who now fill the suburbs of traditionally Liberal cities such as Toronto. He studies the stats. He makes the numbers add up. Harper has his roots in the same ideological soil as Thatcher & Reagan: cutting tax & rolling back the state; tough on crime & even tougher on the unions; boosting families & national pride; a solid economy that rewards those who work hard.

And then there were the tactics that were to attract such notoriety. They reflected the man’s character – clever and harsh – moves that turned a democratic election into a mere sequence of manoeuvres. ...
...

It meant money – millions in private donations to fund the campaign, & millions more in state giveaways in order to encourage the voters. ... Harper gave his electorate a high-profile gift when he first took power in 2006, by cutting the Canadian sales tax, GST. It cost the exchequer some $12 billion, but it purchased popularity. At times, it meant descending into old-fashioned, US-style pork-barrel politics, pouring public money into ridings that were politically important. An investigation by the Globe and Mail this year found that 83% of the Harper government’s new infrastructure projects had gone to the 52% of ridings that were in Conservative hands.

And it meant investing heavily in the politically profitable new science of microtargeting. This was the original reason for the Conservatives creating the Cims database, in which was stored every conceivable item of intelligence about voters. Other parties have since caught up, but at that time it allowed the Conservative party to target the “market segments” it needed for victory – not just with policy, but with favours. A $500 tax break for children to do ballet or hockey in the 2006 budget was good for a middle-class segment (this was doubled in 2014). A break for tradespeople’s tools could buy another. The Canadian writer Susan Delacourt, who tracked this in her book, Shopping For Votes, told of the finding in the Cims database that people who owned snowmobiles were potential Conservative voters. The Harper government has pledged $35 million to create new trails for snowmobiles.

These tactics have proved particularly effective in a world in which people are becoming alienated from politics itself. In Canada, nearly 40% of the electorate did not bother to vote at the 2011 election. Among voters under 24, more than 60% stayed away (compared with 35.3% in 2006). A poll in Quebec province two months ago found that as the federal election campaign was launched, 20% of respondents could not name the political party that was running the country. Delacourt cites one of Harper’s political marketers, Patrick Muttart, saying that much of Conservative activity was aimed at voters who paid no attention to politics & who needed messages that were “brutally simple”.

In power as in elections, Harper’s rule has been to keep winning, whatever it takes. Even parliament – the embodiment of the popular will – is merely an obstacle to be dealt with. Soon after the November 2008 election, as he began his second minority government, Harper launched an “omnibus bill”, which contained so many provocative proposals that he united the previously divided opposition parties, which decided not just to vote against the bill but to form a coalition that could replace his government. Harper didn’t want that. So he prorogued parliament. He needed the consent of the Queen’s representative, the governor general, to do so. He got it. And so the parliament that threatened him was simply suspended until the political storm passed.

A year later, Harper was in deep trouble again, over press reports that Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan had handed over Taliban prisoners to local security forces, who had then tortured them. Harper’s government had denied the claims, which amounted to allegations of war crime, but it was caught out badly in November 2009 when a Canadian diplomat & a general separately went public with evidence that parts of the government had known about this for more than 3 years. When the opposition united once more to demand the release of paperwork on the subject, Harper refused … & then persuaded the governor general to prorogue parliament again. There was a chorus of protest, led by professors of law & politics, but Harper scorned them. The elected representatives of the people were simply locked out for 3 months.

The following year, Harper clashed again with the rights of parliament. In July 2010, he announced that his government would buy 65 F-35 fighter jets, costing a total of $15 billion – the most expensive military purchase in Canadian history. The new Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, reckoned the real price would be even higher & accused Harper of deliberately understating it. Harper refused to hand over the paperwork that would disclose the truth about the F-35s & about the cost of a clutch of other policies. In March 2011, the speaker of the House of Commons ruled that this was a contempt of parliament, & the House then passed a vote of no confidence in Harper’s government. There was an election (involving the robocalls), which Harper won. Ignatieff quit. And 11 months later, it emerged that the true cost of the F-35s was nearly twice what Harper had claimed. In 2007, his second year in office, the National Post disclosed that Team Harper had drawn up a guidebook for the Conservative chairs of parliamentary committees, advising them how to use delays, obstruction & confusion to block difficult inquiries. In opposition, Harper said he would reform the Senate, so that its members would be elected. In office, he changed his mind, kept the power to select them himself & appointed 59 new senators so that he had a built-in majority in the upper house. The House of Commons found itself being swamped with omnibus bills, which included dozens of contentious proposals that could not be properly debated in the time available. At the daily Question Period, when ministers traditionally provide information, Harper’s parliamentary secretary, Paul Calandra, gave answers so obstructive that, after a volley of complaint, he ended up apologising to the house, in tears.

Harper clamped down hard on senior officials whose job was to monitor the behaviour of the state. A report by the auditor general found that defence officials had misled ministers & parliament, & whitewashed cost overruns & delays in a determined effort to ensure Canada purchased the F-35 jet. Kevin Page, parliamentary budget officer, reported experiencing “significant amounts of intimidation” & that his office budget was cut by 30%. Linda Keen, head of Canada’s Nuclear Safety Commission, challenged Harper over the safety of the Chalk River nuclear site: she was denounced & sacked. Peter Tinsley, chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission, attempted to investigate the torture of Taliban prisoners who had been detained by Canadian forces: he lost his job. Beverley McLachlin, chief justice of the supreme court, blocked Harper’s choice for a new high court judge: she was denounced in terms which caused a wave of complaint that Harper was interfering in the independence of the judiciary.
* * *

As Harper launched his election campaign 10 weeks ago, he faced the tricky coincidence that one of his closest allies, Senator Mike Duffy, was sitting in court in Ottawa, charged with fraud. The trial is not yet finished, & Duffy has pleaded not guilty, but, whatever the outcome, the case has exposed in embarrassing detail the behaviour of the core of Team Harper – the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), which has been described eloquently by the Globe and Mail as “a 90-person juggernaut of political strategists, ‘issues managers’ & party enforcers who exercise strict control over cabinet, the houses of parliament & the bureaucracy.”

Duffy has been an Ottawa character for years, famous as a TV journalist & notorious for his Conservative bent, which paid off in January 2009 when Harper appointed him as a senator for the small eastern province of Prince Edward Island.

It was nearly 4 years later, in December 2012, when a diligent journalist, Glen McGregor of the Ottawa Citizen, reported that Duffy had told Senate authorities that his cottage in Prince Edward Island was his real home & had been claiming public money for the expense of living in Ottawa. The Senate’s internal economy committee hired a firm of auditors, Deloitte, to check the housing claims of all senators, including Duffy. When the PMO realised that Duffy might be tempted to talk to his old friends in the press, it aimed – as an internal email put it – “to prevent him from going squirrely in a bunch of weekend panel shows.”

Harper’s then chief of staff, Nigel Wright, persuaded the Conservative Party Fund, which is partly funded by the taxpayer, to stump up $32,000 to pay off Duffy’s debt for him, although the troubled senator would be allowed to pretend that he was repaying the money himself. Since, as his own emails disclosed, Wright thought it was “morally wrong” that the senator had taken the money, this looked rather like an attempt to use taxpayers’ money to repay money that had been taken from the taxpayer. In the event, it turned out that Duffy owed much more. With Duffy pleading poverty, Wright quietly paid the $90,100 himself. (He had made millions in the world of finance before joining Team Harper.)

Duffy managed to keep his seat until a second diligent journalist, Robert Fife of CTV, disclosed that it was Wright who had paid Duffy’s debt & that the Senate’s report had been “sanitised”. In an avalanche of embarrassment, Mike Duffy was dumped by the Conservatives & charged by the police; Wright resigned, & Stephen Harper denied knowing anything about the cover-up. At the end of May, an Ipsos-Reid poll suggested that only 13% of Canadians believed him.

Harper’s leadership style is all about control – of information & of people. In 2010, Harper provoked fury by cancelling the national census & then scrapping a series of long-term surveys, thus effectively concealing the facts about significant trends in Canadian society, including poverty, inequality, housing need & health. In a report in March, the information commissioner, Suzanne Legault, complained that Canada’s Access to Information law “is applied to encourage a culture of delay … to deny disclosure. It acts as a shield against disclosure. The interests of the government trump the interests of the public.”
* * *

The Harper government’s obsession with control may look simply like a means to maintain power. But it can achieve something more important, to reverse the flow of influence: instead of government responding to people, the electorate become passive recipients of state decisions. Consider the case of climate change.

Harper has never made any secret of his support for the oil industry. Emerging from his formative years in Alberta, he was a founder member of the neoconservative Reform party, which was baptised with a $100,000 cheque from the head of Gold Standard Oils. Soon after taking power in 2006, Harper started to clamp down on research into global warming. He got rid of his own science adviser & killed the climate-change section of the Department of Foreign Affairs. He shut down the official website on climate change & tried to cut funding for the Polar Environment Atmosphere Research Laboratory, which had been at the forefront of monitoring deterioration in the ozone layer as well as climate change.

But he opened his door to the other side of the argument. The Polaris Institute thinktank reported in December 2012 that 45 oil lobbyists had been allowed to work inside Harper’s government & that during the previous four & a half years, officials & ministers had held some 2,700 meetings with the oil lobby. By contrast, the Climate Action Network had managed just six.

Having changed the flow of information into government, he then dramatically changed the direction outwards to his electorate. A new protocol required all government scientists to ask for clearance from the PMO before speaking publicly. As a result, important research has been buried, stalled or misrepresented, including an analysis of changes in snowfall, an inquiry into the loss of ozone over the Arctic, & research on the impact of a 2C rise in global temperature. Meanwhile, the government department that oversees the oil & gas industries increased its advertising budget from less than $250,000 in 2010 to a massive $40 million only two years later.

Activists, too, felt the rough hand of government. Harper set aside $8 million to check the activity of charities, including environmental groups, to stop them campaigning politically. David Suzuki, the Gandalf-like founding father of the Canadian green movement, stepped down from his own charitable foundation so that he could speak freely without the organisation being attacked. In British Columbia, a green group called Dogwood Initiative, reported that material that it had obtained under the Access to Information law revealed that it had been under “illegal surveillance” by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

Having distorted the flow of information, Harper then moulded the policy to fit. Ever since he first took power in February 2006, he has been promising action on climate change, particularly in relation to the carbon that is released from Canada’s huge reserve of tar sands, now the third-biggest reservoir of oil on the planet.

After a false start in 2006 with a bill that was killed by parliament for being too weak, he launched a sleek new vehicle – “Turning the Corner” – in March 2007, with new emissions targets for each sector of the economy, crucially including oil and gas. It could all come in to force as early as 2010, he said. But the sleek new vehicle was soon diverted into the oil lobby’s bog, where it stalled & stuck in endless negotiation. At one point, in February 2013, Harper’s environment secretary, Peter Kent, said the rules were “very close” to being finalised. Four months later, Kent was out of the job, later reflecting ruefully that perhaps he had been “pushing too hard”. To this day, Canada still has no emissions rules for its oil & gas sector.

In the background, Harper’s government announced a “cap & trade” system to cut emissions in 2008, then dropped the plan in 2011. It failed to hit the targets that it had agreed at the Copenhagen summit in 2009, scrapped a raft of environmental rules, &, in 2011, became the first government to back out of the Kyoto protocol, which the Liberals had ratified in 2002. When the Centre for Global Development, in 2013, ranked 27 developed nations according to their handling of the environment, it placed Canada at number 27.
* * *

Canada’s current election campaign has followed a path that is now familiar. The Conservatives have more money. Harper has stopped public funding for political parties, which yields a financial advantage to his own party, with its Cims database full of potential private donors. In a neat symbol of its purchasing power, the Conservative party has been accused of buying likes on Facebook (it declined to comment, saying it was an “internal party matter”). His team have restricted the flow of information to voters: the prime minister makes speeches & holds photocalls but avoids questions from the press. With few exceptions, Conservative candidates have been told not to take part in public debates. Big issues are raised, but it is the small issues that dominate. Canada’s most idolised hockey player, Wayne Gretzky, may not be a political thinker, but his endorsement of Harper made big headlines. The collapse in the price of oil may have driven the Canadian economy into recession, but Harper is microtargeting market segments by offering a new tax break for home renovations & for those who belong to organisations such as the Rotary Club.

At a point when the party was slipping backwards in the polls, Harper’s team came up with a brilliantly successful wedge issue, insisting that no Muslim woman should be allowed to take the oath of Canadian citizenship while wearing a niqab. In the past 4 years, the number of women who wanted to wear the niqab while taking the oath has reached a grand total of two. But this became a big issue as it split off two sections of voters in Harper’s favour: the “old stock” Canadians, who fear Muslim migrants as intruders, & liberal feminists, to whom one of Harper’s ministers appealed by describing the niqab as “a medieval tribal custom that treats women as property rather than people”. For speaking up in favour of a Muslim woman’s right to choose what she wears, the leader of the centre-left New Democratic party, Tom Mulcair, was punished with a disastrous collapse in his poll ratings, while Harper surged upwards.

Harper has the natural advantage of an opposition which is divided between Mulcair’s NDP & Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. He also has the advantage of what looks like a form of voter suppression which, unlike robocalls, is legal – a requirement that voters produce an official document in addition to their voter card to prove that they have a home in the riding. Harry Neufeld, who has been running elections in Canada since 1982, said he estimated that at least 250,000 qualified electors would be denied a vote. These are likely to be people who would not vote Conservative – students, the poor, aboriginal people. “I believe the legal changes amount to systematic manipulation,” he said. “It saddens me to see this happening in Canada. It reduces the perceived integrity of our national elections. And it damages our reputation as a country with deep democratic values.”


Nick Davies is the bestselling author of Flat Earth News, on falsehood & distortion in the media, & a former Journalist of the Year. His latest book, Hack Attack, is out now in paperback.