Saving the Endangered Red Herring

“To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.”  
-Theodore Roosevelt

Climate change is back big in the media in the last couple weeks and probably not in the way that the staunchest defenders of the theory would prefer. This is despite the news actually being good for the planet and the human race in general. It turns out that the increasing temperature of the world has hit a plateau, at least for the time being. The average global temperature has actually stayed constant for the last 15 years despite all of the models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) saying it should be increasing.

The Fifth Assessment Report by the IPCC that is coming out soon claims it is a temporary lull, that the earth is still warming, that it is almost definitely a result of human activity, and that it was just a lack of full understanding of the earth's processes that caused them to overestimate the speed at which it would warm. Essentially, they underestimated the way the ocean would absorb heat from the atmosphere. The report is basically claiming that the debate is over and the only thing still left to ponder is whether it makes more sense to spend resources trying to prevent climate change or whether they should be used to try to prepare the most vulnerable areas for the problems it will be causing.

Skeptics are using this as a chance to say that global warming is simply a big hoax to justify expensive green policies that centralize power and funds with the UN. The large number of scientists who support the theory are said to just be a prime example of herd-mentality and dogma trumping science. For example, James Delingpole at The Telegraph accusingly writes:

"The scientific reality – that global warming has paused for 15 years; that climate sensitivity appears to be far smaller than the scaremongering computer models predicted – cannot be allowed to derail all the expensive and intrusive programmes (from wind farms to green investment banks to hideous, flickery, dull low energy light bulbs) which have been introduced in order to "combat climate change."'

He rightly points out that the third, fourth, and fifth IPCC reports have been repeating a very gloomy tale of how we're all totally screwed by our C02 emissions even while the earth's temperature was straying from the predictions of the models by staying constant.

Also being pointed out is that The Associated Press received leaked documents stating that the US government and those of several European countries have been trying to pressure climate scientists into downplaying the lack of temperature increase in the newest report. The AP reported that “Germany called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted, saying a time span of 10-15 years was misleading in the context of climate change, which is measured over decades and centuries.”

Considering that there is an international agreement that there will actually be a meaningful international agreement regarding climate change set out by 2015, it's easy to understand why some people would want this fact ignored. However, that doesn't justify trying to pressure scientists to misrepresent the facts even if they agree that it's a temporary lull and shouldn't carry disproportional weight. Good on the scientists who worked on the report for not leaving out this Inconvenient Truth. Ha, see what I did there? Gore reference yo.

Anyway, I personally feel that our emissions likely are heating the earth to some degree. I have no real idea how much but the greenhouse theory seems to make sense and it's hard to imagine our constant polluting will have no negative consequences. It's clear that we're definitely responsible for increasing the amount of C02 in the atmosphere which has jumped from 280 parts per million during pre-industrial times to 400 ppm as of this year. To those people who like to use the argument that this is a good thing because carbon dioxide is plant food, I assume you will think it equally good when I drown you in ravioli because too much of a necessary can never be bad apparently.

Either way, these findings are definitely being touted as a victory over alarmist environmentalists and will provide political cover for simply continuing business as usual. Which is a problem even if turns out that climate change isn't.

Simply put, I feel that climate change is essentially a red herring and should not be the primary issue focused on by environmentalists. Whether or not the earth is heating by a tiny amount is hard to prove is happening, hard to prove actually matters, and simply does not cause most people to care in the same way other environmental issues do whose affects are more blatant. The fact is that we are living on a big rock that spins around a massive constantly-exploding nuclear reactor in space. The cycles of the sun will have a big affect on the planet's temperature regardless of what we do as will natural cycles of the earth. Using only the temperature of the planet as our benchmark for how we're doing in our stewardship of the planet is a bit ridiculous from this perspective. It seems that spending our energy trying to force through policies that we hope will reduce that number seems like it must hurt our efforts on other aspects that may be more important.

There are two main issues that I think we should be emphasizing instead if we want more public support for environmental legislation.

1. Loss of natural life and biodiversity: Humans have unfortunately become the sixth wave of mass extinction in the last half-billion years which puts us in direct competition with a massive chunk of space-rock that slammed into the earth and resulted in a dust cloud that blocked out the sun. The natural "background" rate of extinction is supposed to be roughly one to five species per year who die since they didn't evolve to meet changing circumstances. It's now estimated that we're losing 1,000 to 10,000 more species per year than would happen naturally with dozens disappearing daily.

Most of this is occurring due to habitat destruction and introducing foreign species into areas where they are not supposed to be and that cannot handle them. Due to the interconnectedness of players in ecological systems, a snowballing effect is likely as species who are food for other species disappear. Roughly 50% of our primate brethren are at risk of extinction and of the 12,914 species of plants that the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has been able to assess, about 68% of them are at risk of dying away. This is even more unfortunate than just forever losing cool types of life that took millions of years to evolve. It's important to remember that much of our medicine and consumer products come from these species and we have no idea what amazing biological chemistry is being lost. 

The loss of plant life is also a huge problem considering that photosynthesis is needed to transform the excess C02 from our burnt fossil fuels into breathable oxygen. Since the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago, the amount of forest coverage of the earth has been reduced from 45% of the earth's land area, or 6 billion hectares, to 31%, or 4 billion hectares. Although some of this loss was due to natural climate fluctuations, in the last 5,000 years, there has been a loss of about 1.8 billion hectares or an average of 360,000 per year. We've managed a slowdown on this front in the last decade as countries develop but we're still moving in the wrong direction. Remember, if we have enough plants going, we can basically dump as much C02 into the atmosphere as we want. It's kinda the equivalent of chowing down Big Macs between weightlifting sets. Still not pretty but can work.

Unfortunately, the oceans are doing equally poorly. We're eating on average 17 kg of fish per year per person, about 4 times what people ate in 1950. About 85% of global fish stocks are depleted, overly-exploited, or in the process of recovering from being overly exploited. Bottom trawling, the process of dragging heavy nets along the bottom of the ocean to avoid missing anything, have ripped up the ecosystems that support underwater life and has turned big areas of the Mediterranean and North Sea into lifeless deserts. Horribly enough, on average, 20 pounds of ocean life are caught, die in nets, and are then discarded for every pound of shrimp caught for consumption. That doesn't sound sustainable to me.

2. Ocean Acidification: Contributing to our sea problems is this next point, the acidification of our oceans via the absorption of C02. Personally, I find this to be a good rebuttal when discussing climate change and someone denies it is happening or will matter or that C02 is causing it. Simply put, it doesn't matter because ocean acidification is happening and will have serious consequences on its own.

Check out this site for a cool photographic comparison between coral growing normally and coral growing in an environment where C02 is overly-abundant due to leaks in the ocean floor. If you didn't click it, basically the C02-saturated ocean environment looks gross and unhealthy. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, ocean acidity has increased about 30%. This is because the burning of fossil fuels releases C02 into the atmosphere and about a quarter of that, roughly 8 pounds per person per day, is absorbed by the ocean. That's about 20 trillion pounds per year and means that the ocean will saturated with enough carbon dioxide to have all coral look like the unhealthy sample in 60 to 80 years.

The changing sea chemistry is happening much sooner than expected and the decreased pH level has already started causing problems. It has killed billions of oysters, mussels, and is softening clams and killing baby scallops. In addition, it is dissolving plankton which could have huge consequences since plankton is responsible for a large amount of the earths C02-to-oxygen converting. Basically anything that relies on having a shell is in trouble.

The weakening of calcium carbonate caused by acidification also results in coral bleaching and means that coral has trouble growing naturally or reforming after being damaged by bottom trawling. This results in less of the fish who rely on these coral reefs. In addition, acidification, increasing ocean temperatures, overfishing and destruction of predatory fish habitats have also had the weird and concerning effect of causing the Rise of the Jellyfish.

Jellyfish are problematic in that they are immune to acidification and can eat things much higher on the food-chain than themselves. When a species of them, Mnemiopsis leidyi, was accidentally released into the Black Sea in the 80s, it rapidly consumed almost everything and wound up being 95% of the biomass in the area. Problems with the booming jellyfish populations have already been noted:

"(In 2011), nuclear power plants in Scotland, Japan, Israel and Florida, and also a desalination plant in Israel, were forced to shutdown because jellyfish were clogging the water inlets. The entire Irish salmon industry was wiped out in 2007 after a plague of billions of mauve stingers – covering an area of 10 sq miles (26 sq km) and 35ft (11m) deep – attacked the fish cages. Two years later, a fish farm in Tunisia lost a year's production of sea bream and sea bass after jellyfish invasions. Perhaps the most extraordinary blooms have been those occurring in waters off Japan. There, refrigerator-sized gelatinous monsters called Nomuras, weighing 485lb (220 kg) and measuring 6.5ft (2m) in diameter, have swarmed the Japan Sea annually since 2002, clogging fishing nets, overturning trawlers and devastating coastal livelihoods. These assaults have cost the Japanese fisheries industry billions of yen in losses."
  
Nuclear jellyfish. Clearly a fairly serious problem. It's not pleasant to ponder that we may be returning to the Precambrian era when the oceans basically only had jellyfish in them.

Although there are certainly other environmental aspects that need looking at, I feel these two can be major rallying points since they are so clear-cut. On one hand, putting more money towards planting trees and preventing deforestation seems like something everyone can get behind since it will reduce atmospheric C02 in addition to generate beautiful habitats for animals. On the other hand, transitioning the argument away from being that C02 possibly causes the world's average temperature to rise to being that C02 definitely turns the ocean into an acidic, jellyfish-haunted wasteland seems like a smarter way to go about things.

And remember, none of this is to say that I don't believe the earth is getting warmer or that climate change is not a real thing that we're at least partially responsible for. Last year, 15,000 warmest temperature records were broken in the US in March alone. That sounds pretty severe to me.

All I'm suggesting is that the message used to get the point across to the masses move away from abstract and complicated climate temperature science towards more complete view of the earth's health as a whole with an emphasis on things we can see and that people can emotionally relate to. Trying to make necessary policies that need to be enacted ASAP based solely on a theory of rising temperatures during a period of non-rising temperatures is simply not gonna work.

The battle for people's opinions is a fickle one. When the red herring aren't biting, jellyfish may prove an easier catch.

AS

Free for Whom?

“The words “free trade agreement” should bring to mind the response attributed to Gandhi when he was asked what he thought about western civilization: “it might be a good idea.” Same with “free trade agreements.” Maybe they would be a good idea, maybe not, but the question scarcely arises in the real world. What are called “free trade agreements” have only a limited relation to free trade, or even trade at all, and are certainly not agreements, at least if the people of a country are regarded as its citizens."
-Noam Chomsky

Free trade really is an interesting concept that tends to get people hot and bothered one way or the other. Oxford dictionary describes it as "international trade left to its natural course without tariffs, quotas, or other restrictions."

It's fairly easy to see the appeal of free trade. It's quite excellent being able to freely move goods across borders so that consumers are able to choose to purchase at the lowest price. This should breed efficiency in production everywhere since domestic industries are not protected by government subsidies, tariff walls, or quotas limiting the amount of imports coming into the country. And if, for whatever reason, another country is simply too capable of undercutting your profits in one industry, the idea is that you would switch your emphasis to something you are more capable of being the most efficient at.                                       

This concept of specializing to produce efficiency was first noted by my namesake's predecessor, the economist Adam Smith, in his 1776 work, The Wealth of Nations. He notes that: "It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family, never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy.... If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in a way in which we have some advantage."

The economist David Ricardo, born in the late 18th century, would go further with this idea and develop it into the theory of comparative advantage in his 1817 work, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Essentially, he used an example where Portugal was able to produce both wine and cloth more efficiently than England. However, since Portugal was able to produce wine even more efficiently relative to England than it was able to produce cloth, it would benefit both countries for Portugal to focus solely on wine, trading its excess for English cloth. This theory has been hugely influential in world politics although it's worth noting that it has been shown to need certain prerequisites to work at all in real life and will still have problematic implications which I'll discuss later.

Actually enacting free trade has been considerably messier than these theories would imply. During Western Europe's period of mercantilism, roughly the 16th to late-18th century, protectionism was still the norm for the major powers in order to build trade surpluses of precious metals. The use of colonized nations made this much easier since they could be banned from trading with anyone else and be forced to buy your goods while providing resources unavailable at home.

Adam Smith and the classical economists would mark the move of the European powers towards supporting free trade as a global system. Of course, it's important to note that this was the equivalent of kicking out the ladder once you've personally climbed it. The major European powers had taken advantage of protectionist measures to build up their own industries, safe from being crushed early on by competition. After this, they enforced quite successfully and quite aggressively on the world a free-trade regime which meant other countries were not allowed to do the same. South America, Africa, and most of Asia have only relatively recently been able to emerge into the world economy as competitors in their own right and have generally only been able to do so via protectionist measures. The Four Asian Tigers - Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea - used protectionist measures to protect their industries and were able to rapidly industrialize from the 60s to the 90s. China has more recently started using this model to great success.

Latin American countries were forced into free-market policies by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in order to receive additional funds to service their debt during the Latin American debt crisis of the late 70s and 80s. These policies resulted in demonstrating a troubling aspect of David Ricardo's comparative advantage theory; this being that developing an advanced economy capable of producing advanced goods like electronics will necessarily require a 'weak' period where the industry must be protected from more advanced competitors. Thus, following this theory's prescription can only result in further entrenching the status quo of nations. The Asian Tigers refused the free trade argument, chose to place barriers to imports, and were able to develop advanced industries much sooner. Latin America was forced into free trade which resulted in many of the countries there being stuck selling primitive commodities that don't have a lot of value added while needing to import more profitable and technologically-savvy goods. This could be thought of as being stuck in a commodity ghetto as it reinforces itself and is hard to get out of.

Anywho, enough of this boring history lesson. The reason I am talking about free trade is that Canada is currently negotiating two major free-trade deals. These are the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), both major undertakings involving quite a few countries. It's important to note that free trade has changed a bit since its original conception. It doesn't just apply to creating barriers for imports or subsidizing your own exports. It also applies to flows of capital in the form of investment as well as corporations setting up branches or purchasing existing companies within foreign countries.

Few countries allow total free trade in this sense since giving up key or strategic industries to foreign control can be problematic. Canada has an Investment Canada Act which has a "net benefit to Canada" test included. The test is kinda poorly defined but it allows cover for refusing sales to foreign businesses that are politically indigestible. This was used in 2010 to prevent Australia's BHP Billiton Ltd. from a $38.6 billion hostile bid for Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan as it was considered strategically important.

The problem is that free-trade agreements are often undemocratic and tend to chip away at an elected government's ability to regulate business or enact legislation the people favor. They also tend to last quite a long time before any of the countries are allowed to unilaterally opt out of them meaning that a government can ram one though and leave the people stuck with it for quite a while. To get a sense of why this is a problem, it's useful to look back at the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), enacted in 1993 by the US, Canada, and Mexico.

NAFTA created laws that entrenched the relationship between businesses from any of the three countries and the government of the other country they are operating in. These laws supersede the domestic laws of the nations meaning that if a US company operating in Canada felt that the Canadian government didn't honor its obligations under NAFTA, they could request a review by the NAFTA Tribunal. The concerning part is that the Tribunal meets in secret, is not required to name its members for a case, and doesn't even have to fully disclose the decisions they reach or why. This extreme lack of transparency is rarely good for democracies where information is required for voters to make informed decisions. The point of NAFTA was to ensure that foreign companies and investors get treated as well by the foreign government as it would treat its own people. This confidentiality is the norm when companies are going to court but it is a huge problem when a company is going to court against a country's government and the result will have a huge impact on public policy.

There have been some quite troubling decisions made by the Tribunal and we never get the full story of how the decision was made. For instance, the Canadian government was forced to lift restrictions on the production and importation of a hazardous ethanol-based gasoline additive, MMT, because a US company said the ban hurt their business. Canada's right to disallow the poisonous substance within its boarders was overruled by a US company's right to profit. Another time Mexico had to pay a US company $16.7 million because local environmental laws that disallowed a toxic-waste-processing plant that they were constructing were seen as expropriating.

A very concerning situation was when United Parcel Service of America (UPS) tried to sue the Canadian government for $160 million. This was because they argued that Canada Post was being unfairly subsidized since its services draw on public infrastructure that UPS needs to provide on its own. This was essentially an attempt to force Canada out of providing a government service which the private-sector company wanted to provide. Fortunately the lawsuit failed but this would have set a terrible precedent. Could our public healthcare system become a liability that could result in Canada being sued since it's providing a service that US businesses could do? 

These laws are problematic since they essentially limit what our elected governments can do. Trying to set environmental laws will get us sued. Trying to have our government provide public services can get us sued. You can bet that these lawsuits will hugely alter what legislation we try to pass as a country. Currently, US pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly is suing Canada for $500 million for voiding two of its patents early because they failed to fulfill the promises given as reason for the patents. Essentially, Eli Lilly only ran a 22 patient study to prove the efficacy of its ADHD drug, Strattera, and Canada is saying that this tiny sample is totally insufficient to prove it is 'useful,' the requirement needed in Canada to hold a patent. In the US, an invention only needs to demonstrate a "scintilla" of usefulness, ie, a friggin' tiny amount. Canada, however, is allowed to define 'useful' however it wants and the limited data presented is not capable of showing that the drug is. Thus, Eli Lilly is trying to use Chapter 11 of NAFTA, the investor-protection part, to force Canada to change its laws. If it successfully sues us, we will certainly be open to a slew of lawsuits from other drug companies.

And just for good effect, let's do a quick analysis of how NAFTA played out because free-trade agreements tend to have winners and losers. Mexico was expecting a lot of new jobs due to their low wages. Mexico certainly received a lot of foreign direct investment which had increased 70% by 1994 and was up 435% by 2004. That's a lot of money coming in. A lot of it wound up in maquiladoras, US-owned Mexican factories along the US boarder there to take advantage of cheap labor. This was supposed to give rise to a decent Mexican middle-class but it failed to do so since productivity was not high enough even for these low wages. Much of the jobs would go to cheaper China eventually. The surge of workers to these labor-towns would also problematically result in slums with high-living costs while pulling men away from their families in the rest of Mexico. Roughly 2.3 million traditional Mexican farmers were also displaced and rendered unable to compete by the flood of mass-produced, subsidized US food when their own tariffs were removed.   

Canada did much better overall. We sold more beef, oil, agriculture, and wood to the US while receiving increased investment in our own automotive factories. The US did less well. A lot of manufacturing jobs went to Mexico which meant higher profits for business and their executives and much lower wages for US workers. The larger, multinational companies did the best by far since they were the most capable of taking advantage of the cheap foreign labor. An estimated 820,280 US jobs were lost to Canada and Mexico, mostly well-paying manufacturing ones. NAFTA really hurt their middle-class and the US trade deficit would rocket up 281% between 1993 and 2002. That's a jump from $30 billion to $85 billion per year added onto the national debt.

Anyway, enough about NAFTA. Even with the scary, secretive, undemocratic aspects of the NAFTA Tribunal arrangement, I'm willing to accept that it has likely been good for Canada. The Canada-EU free-trade agreement negotiations underway are also interesting but since it is being discussed with the European Union, not exactly a bastion of cheap, job-taking labor, let's ignore if for the time being. For now, let's focus on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The TPP is a trade agreement that has grown to involve Brunei, Chili, New Zealand, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Vietnam, Japan, Canada, and the US. It is also open for any other Pacific nation to join later. For the US, the goal of the TTP is two-fold. First, it will update the World Trade Organization's rules that haven't changed since 1994. Second, it will entrench US interests in an area of the world increasingly dominated by China's influence. The result is supposed to be an agreement that deepens trade, protects investors, addresses intellectual property protection, and deals with the conduct of state-owned businesses.

That all sounds fine but there are some legitimate complaints with the deal. Only 5 out of 29 of the chapters being discussed actually involve traditional trade. The rest cover a wide array of issues with far-reaching consequences. It is essentially an agreement on corporate rights that set out what governments are allowed to do to regulate business, what Crown corporations can do, patent and copyright terms, how the internet should be governed, when to compensate businesses for lost profits, and banking and taxation rules. Like NAFTA, these agreements will supersede our own laws and open us up to lawsuits should we hurt profits of foreign corporations.

There always tends to be a lot of protest regarding free-trade agreements. However, a lot of this one has been driven by its extremely secretive nature. It probably doesn't help that the Conservatives have been actually hiding the current drafts from the Official Opposition here in Canada. Conservative Trade Minister Ed Fast had a TPP meeting in Vancouver which he didn't disclose until the Peruvian media leaked it. Fast had also said that no corporate group got special access but then documents turned up showing his ministry had created a consultation group that included the Canadian Steel Producers Association and Bombardier, both of whom signed confidentiality agreements.

The desire to hide it likely comes from some of its troubling contents. Judging by a leaked draft of the TPP and the negotiations secretive nature, internet freedom advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation say that:

"The TPP is likely to export some of the worst features of U.S. copyright law to Pacific Rim countries: a broad ban on breaking digital locks on devices and creative works (even for legal purposes), a minimum copyright term of the lifetime of the creator plus seventy years (the current international norm is the lifetime plus fifty years), privatization of enforcement for copyright infringement, ruinous statutory damages with no proof of actual harm, and government seizures of computers and equipment involved in alleged infringement. Moreover, the TPP is worse than U.S. copyright rules: it does not export the many balances and exceptions that favor the public interest and act as safety valves in limiting rightsholders’ protection."

Also concerning is that the US has been pushing for more stringent intellectual property rights protection for drugs. This would result in higher profits for an already exceedingly profitable industry and in longer wait times before a drug becomes generic and affordable to the poor of the world who do die waiting and trying to save up for treatment. 

Fortunately, at least for the time being, it sounds like the differing countries will get to keep their food standard regimes and will not be forced to adopt international standards. However, the US has been pushing for simpler regulations which means in future talks, countries will likely be pressured to accept the international standard even if it means ingesting more pesticides and poisons in their dinner than they would like.

I gotta say, I'm fairly torn on all of this. NAFTA came out decently for Canada despite weakening our democracy's ability to make its own choices. It did result in a race to the bottom for wages between the US and Mexico though which is always a danger of free trade. It seems that if capital can flow freely where ever it wants without worrying about consequences then people should be able to as well. The ability to simply move to a different country that has lower wages or to just threaten to so your people accept less money is a common and problematic factor of globalization. In many cases, people and their cities spend their social and economic resources developing businesses from the ground-up only to have that business leave for cheaper-labored pastures once a brandname is established. This seems unfair and basically puts the rights of capital above the rights of humans.

Really, it sounds like the TPP is barely about trade and more about developing a corporate bill of rights that supersedes our own laws and forces us to accept a legal framework that our own governments could never successfully push through our Parliaments. Of course, there is a lot of hype on the subject online and I'm having trouble discerning what is credible or not. However, the extremely secretive nature that is being used to construct the agreement seems to be intentionally this way and our Conservatives in Canada are not helping by hiding it from the NDP who should be allowed to see, judge, and report their opinion to Canadians, even if they can't go into specifics.

Free trade should ultimately be a goal of humanity since in its perfected form, it means more freedom and increased efficiency. However, if it simply concentrates wealth and crushes the masses in a race to the bottom, it is doing quite the opposite of that. Like all trade agreements, this one will be profitable for multinational corporations who can go to the cheapest labour and will be given greater protection from the public of countries that join in the agreements. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing because as people point out, a lot of hard working people have their pensions and funds invested in these businesses so corporate profits don't only benefit the wealthy elite.

However, it's worth remembering that a lot of people simply do not have pensions. Only about 6 million Canadians do with more than half of those being in the public sector. The Canadian Pension Plan covers all workers but will provide for a pretty impoverished retirement on its own if contributions are not substantially expanded. What it is able to pay out will not cover the large numbers who simply will not be able to save up enough outside of it to retire.

In the US, only about half of private-sector workers have pensions. In both our countries, it is generally the people without pensions who live cheque to cheque and are unable to invest in the stock market. This means these corporate gains will not trickle down in dividends but the increased freedom for the businesses to move will reduce wages further. The same is happening all over Europe as western countries run massive deficits making our social security nets less able to support the increasing number of poor. In the US, between 2009 and 2010, the first year of the recovery, 93% of the gains were captured by the richest 1% of the population. Despite the fact that the number on the S.N.A.P food stamps program has jumped from 26 million in 2007 to 48 million now, the House of Representatives is voting to slash the program by $40 billion over the next decade while increasing subsidies to the agricultural industry which is already doing fine. I promise you that these 48 million who require stamps to eat don't have cash to be investing in booming stock-market corporations.

Capitalism requires buying power for the masses. If corporate profits don't turn into this buying power then it is not working and doing more to increase them won't help. Freedom for goods and capital cannot be considered more important than the freedom of people to live a decent life.

If this free-trade deal will be as good for everyone as its creators want us to believe, let's get it out in the open where it can be judged.

Democracy despises secrets.

AS

NDP Socialism is Not Done Properly

"In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of."
-Confucius

Canada isn't doing particularly well at the moment. We may have survived the financial crisis because we didn't deregulate our banks and allow them to over-leverage themselves into the nonsensical derivatives market that so brutally whacked Europe and the US. Still, despite that and having what is supposed to be an economically conservative government in power federally, we are running large deficits. The combined debt of the provinces and the federal government is about $1.2 trillion. The provinces account for about half of that and from 2012-13, only Saskatchewan managed to avoid a deficit.

For the point of this post, I'll focus on my home province of Manitoba as we are performing extremely poorly and don't really have an excuse. At least Ontario can blame a high dollar for hurting their manufacturing exports. As of July 30th and according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Manitoba's debt was increasing by 72 bucks a second or $6.25 million per day. Our total debt is estimated to be at around $30 billion by the end of 2013. Even if these numbers are being exaggerated to some degree, they are still scary figures for a province that only had an estimated 1,274,000 people at the start of this year. This equals out to about $23,548 owed per person.

You may argue that Manitoba faces some unique challenges which means we need a government that sometimes spends more than others. And you're right, we do. We have floods and harsh, snowy winters. We have some Northern Manitoba communities that need government assistance which is expensive to provide since they are scattered and remote. We have a perpetually impoverished North End filled with people having difficulty breaking out of Winnipeg's downtrodden underclass. A combination of isolated Northern communities, a ghettoized North End, and our infamously long and cold winters where people are often stuck lethargically inside means that our health care is going to cost more than in other provinces.

On the other hand, we have a fairly balanced economy consisting of agriculture, mining, tourism, finance, energy, and manufacturing which should buffer us from the commodity price fluctuations that occasionally hammer Alberta's oil fields and Saskatchewan's oil and potash industries. We already have the infrastructure in place to prevent the type of flood damage recently witnessed in Calgary. We have enough hydroelectricity from our dams to provide for our own needs quite cost effectively while being able to export the excess for a profit. Our housing market, although quite inflated like the rest of Canada, has not bubbled as outrageously as some of the bigger and less mosquito-infested cities. In addition, we're nicely in the center of the continent which should allow us to return to being the major transport hub we once were, especially as fuel prices rise and make flying less attractive.

These are some pretty decent perks and provide a stability which should allow our budgeting to be fairly predictable. This means we should be able to have balanced budgets by slashing spending when we know we won't be able to afford it. Remember folks, debt and its accumulated interest is stealing from your children unless it's being invested in a way that will provide greater returns. If you're just blindly hoping the returns will be better, that's the equivalent of gambling with Lil Jimmy's college fund which is still pretty crappy.

So why are we doing so badly? The NDP were able to continue their inherited balanced budget for a straight decade, from 1999 until 2009, under the leadership of Gary Doer. In 2008, the final year before Doer was replaced by Greg Selinger, we had a surplus of $451 million. That's pretty good and certainly helped the NDP brand-name. Doer did this while investing in education and health care and managed to keep taxes down so that they could be raised on a rainy day. Of course a lot of this came from raiding Manitoba Hydro's revenues but at least it was still balanced.

Selinger seemed to have just went nuts soon after coming into office though. His first year, the surplus immediately became a $183 million deficit. This was the period directly following the financial crisis so some economic slowdown was expected but “According to Statistics Canada, Manitoba was the only provincial economy not to experience a decline in real economic activity in 2009." This is coming from the NDP themselves (A2) in 2011 which means they are admitting they don't really have an excuse for ballooning deficits. The 2011 flood that was blamed for the almost $1 billion dollar deficit that year only accounted for about half that billion after the feds had pitched in. Then there was $583 million in deficit spending just last year and no flood to credit for that. 

The NDP's response was to raise taxes while not reducing spending, a response that could potentially work if done intelligently as it would allow the continued spending to work as stimulus. However, it was not. A lot of the funds went to a growing, unproductive bureaucracy. From 2006 to 2012, the number of provincial civil servants jumped by 1599, or 12%, well above population growth in this period. All of these except 364 of them were from 2009 onwards and so can be blamed on Selinger's administration. This number also doesn't include "nurses, hospital staff, teachers or any other public sector workers outside of provincial government departments." Some of these jobs were necessary but during deficit times, we should be doing our best to keep these numbers down and find places to make savings. The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority employs a large bureaucracy that includes 7 vice-presidents and 15 communications staff. Why would it need that many of either of those?

The Winnipeg School Division increased the wages for its bureaucrats by 20% over the last five years which is about twice the rate of inflation. Its top people received pay increases as high as 26% over the last two years. It employs sixteen consultants for some reason with ten of them making roughly $100k as of 2011. Those numbers seems insane. Even worse, we currently have the bizarre situation where the division's administration staff get the same wage increases (7.7) that are given to teachers. This means that the administrators have a cash-incentive to vote in favor of massive wage increases for the teachers which is obviously not something the taxpayers would want. Much thanks to Trustee Mike Babinksy for bringing this to light.

In addition, Babinsky mentioned that trustees and senior administrators enjoy expensive catered lunches on the public dime for their hour-long meetings at the same time school taxes are going up. These are the same people that vote in secret on little things like their $365 million budget and keep evaluations of how schools are actually doing hidden from the public because, as Chairwoman Rita Hildahl says, "I don't feel that a report card needs to be given on individual schools." Well Rita, that's unfortunate because I do. Otherwise how do I know who is doing their job poorly?
 
To go along with this spending spree, the NDP chose to raise taxes on anything they could think of, the increase of 1% to the Provincial Sales Tax, boosting it to 8%, being only the most recent. The extra $198.5 million raised by this one percent increase was supposed to go to infrastructure which everyone in Winnipeg knows could certainly use it. However, only about 40% of this money will actually do so. Infrastructure is generally a good investment as it creates jobs, involves purchasing goods from local producers which stimulates the economy, and needs to be done for the city to function efficiently. This means actually dumping all of that money into it would have been a smart idea. Considering that the Selinger government is already having the extra PST collected before passing Bill 20 to gut the Balanced Budget, Debt Repayment, and Taxpayer Protection Act which requires they have a voter referendum on tax increases, the fact that less than half of the money raised is going towards infrastructure is simply galling.

Other cheap shots for grabbing revenue to pay for out-of-control spending have included adding sales tax to items such as hair cuts, manicures, and salons; adding sales tax to house insurance because I guess we want people to have an incentive not to buy that; adding $35 bucks to vehicle registrations; increased user fees for birth certificates and child abuse registry checks; adding an additional 2.5-cent per litre gas tax and a 62 cent per litre tax on "popular beer brands."

They've also decided to allow more VLTs in Manitoba for the tax revenue meaning up to another 500 machines may be added. As anyone who has ever known a problem gambler is aware, these machines can destroy lives and make people's kids go hungry. I'm not saying we shouldn't have gambling establishments because all that means is that people would go South across the boarder to play and cost us money. Still, "VLTs are the crack-cocaine of gambling" according to former NDP cabinet minister Larry Desjardins. They have none of the enjoyable social aspect of gambling with other people and simply allowing even more of them around town will result in more problem gambling.

In addition, just to take an arbitrary shot at young people who may wish to move here, the NDP have decided that people over 65 shouldn't have to pay the education portion of their property taxes as of 2015. Because, umm, old people don't benefit from living in an educated society and old people didn't pay their own share when they were younger? This is clearly just vote buying from older folks who tend to vote more. The loss of revenue, estimated at $50 million, will need to be picked up by other people, some of whom will be worse off than many of the seniors now excluded since wealthy seniors will also be exempt.

Add all of this to the extremely troubling gamble already underway in the form of the Conawapa and Keeyask hydroelectric facilities in Northern Manitoba. They will cost about $20 billion to construct, although that is likely low-balling it since Manitoba Hydro has often been wrong on estimates in the past. It will also require the expensive cooperation of many First Nation's communities. Negotiations have already cost $224 million without having actually paid them yet.

The fact is that we are borrowing money with interest to fund these projects which won't start even potentially making revenue until 2025 and only will if energy demand rises. The US states that are near enough to buy the energy are also those with large reserves of cheap natural gas to be gained through fracking. Unless they put a moratorium on this practice due to environmental concerns, they likely won't be needing to purchase energy from us anytime soon which means the huge investments in the form of unprofitable dams could bankrupt us.

Then there is Bipole III, a major backup power-line linking the Northern Manitoban generating complex to the Southern Manitoban power-grid. The decision to build Bipole III down the West side of Lake Winnipeg will cost more than $3 billion, at least $1 billion more than it would have on the East side, and will be 50% longer resulting in increased energy losses during transmission. Bipole III alone will cause a domestic power rate increase of 30% so there is no telling what these dams may do to our previously cheap energy rates.

All of this combined means that Manitoba is losing lots of talent. Between 2011 and 2012, 5791 more people were born than died. However, these gains were almost wiped out by the net 4675 people who left for other provinces, mainly the other three western ones. We've actually ranked between eighth and last for inter-provincial migration. Those who leave tend to be young people with work ethics strong enough to dig up their roots and travel elsewhere for greater wages, often to provide for their families. We can cover this with influxes of immigrants from other countries but these new Canadians often need extensive training and socializing before they can become net contributors.    

Personally, I don't like the NDP and haven't voted for them either federally or provincially. People find this weird considering I tend to favor social-democratic policies like those enjoyed by the Scandinavian countries. However, the NDP's base seems to be unionized government employees and the poor who tend to benefit, at least in the short-term, from redistributive policies. I explained in a previous post why I don't care much for public-sector unions and while I do sympathize with the poor and believe that government assistance is often necessary for getting them out of perpetual poverty, I believe we go about it in a wrong-headed way that has proven itself here to be quite ineffective.

When reading newspaper comment sections, I notice that people accuse socialism of simply being a way for the lazy, non-working poor to redistribute wealth from the rich to themselves. They seem to forget that socialism was created for workers so that when they created wealth, they actually got to keep it. Karl Marx certainly had no love for lower-class people who didn't work or care about societal progress. Perpetual welfare bums he would have referred to as being part of the lumpenproletariat, coming from the term lumpenproletarier, literally translated as 'miscreant' and 'rag.' It seems to me that the Manitoba NDP have chosen to court unionized government workers and the lumpenproletariat at the expense of real productive workers who they were originally created to support. You know, the people who make stuff we sell to other countries which allows us to have some money to then buy stuff from them? An emphasis on big, non-productive government at the expense of workers can only be considered an extremely confused form of socialism.

Socialist concepts I admire and believe the NDP should actually pursue are more along the lines of Germany's co-determination laws. These laws require companies with 500-2000 employees to allow a third of their supervisory board of directors to be elected by the workers. For companies over 2000, this rises to almost half. The idea is that employees should have some say in the direction their company moves and should benefit when the company does well. This prevents job off-shoring and excessive concentration of wealth in the hands of owners while creating incentives for greater job satisfaction, productivity, and loyalty among employees. All of these things make for a stronger economy and less fractured society. Germany is basically preventing the collapse of the European Union all by itself so I doubt anyone can argue this.

As for having a strong social security net, we should be looking to the Scandinavian nations to figure out how to do it right. Like Confucius says, in a well-governed country, being poor makes you ashamed. That is, in a country where the government functions well and tries to boost you out of poverty through education and training instead of simply providing enough welfare to poorly live on, people will be ashamed if they don't make something of themselves and remain poor.

In a ranking of happiest countries, Norway rated first, Denmark second, Sweden third, and Finland seventh. Overall happiness seems like a pretty good indicator of how your country is doing and the Nordic model seems to work. The Swedish pay an average tax rate of 48.2%, second only to Denmark, but mostly don't mind it because they feel it is well-spent. Their safety net works but does not create a permanently unemployed underclass the way it has here and in the UK. Whether Canadians would be able to adopt such a model with our history and interconnectedness with the US is up for debate but it's worth remembering that some countries can make it work. It's probably also worth noting that these Nordic, social-democratic countries have much lower public debt relative to GDP than countries that have adopted low-taxation regimes like the US, UK, or Canada.

In conclusion, I guess all I can say to the NDP is that if you are going to adopt socialist measures in a capitalist world economy, choose the useful ones that have been proven to work elsewhere. Whatever you think about it, socialism was able to turn Russia from a backward agrarian society into a world power capable of fighting off the Nazis and competing with the US in about 40 years. It did this by elevating cooperation and sacrifice for the common good to the level of religion. Raising taxes and borrowing money from future generations because you're too lazy to tackle and cut the wasteful bloat out of the government's bureaucracy is neither socialism nor is it leadership. It is incompetence and it will cost you the next election and it should.

Well, it will if Brian Pallister can actually get it through people's heads that his provincial party of Progressive Conservatives are not actually connected to or attached with Harper's discredited federal Conservatives.

Never really thought I'd be voting for a conservative party but allowing the failure that is today's NDP to discredit cooperative forms of organizing society and production is not something I'll let myself be a part of.

AS

What is the Case for Syria?

"You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria."
-Henry A. Kissinger

Well, it seems that Egypt's making war fine all by itself and I'll be surprised if Syria finds peace anytime soon.

I'm not gonna lie, my personal experience with the Middle East is pretty limited. I've never actually been there. The closest I've ever been would be Kashmir and Rajasthan in India. I got to meet a lot of very cool Muslims but I can't say it gave me a huge amount of insight into the larger conflicts occurring between and within the countries there. But who am I to let my ignorance get in the way of me spouting opinions?

Essentially, I'm having difficulty figuring out why US President Obama is so gun-ho to throw some Tomahawk missiles at Syria from his destroyers in the Mediterranean. As Syria has not threatened or attacked the US or any of its allies, this attack would make Obama a war criminal by the Nuremberg Standard if the UN Security Council does not sanction it. Not to say that Assad's forces haven't done some terrible things. They have. At least 100,000 people have been killed since the civil war broke out in 2011, most of them killed by the Syrian military. At least two million have fled and another four million are internally displaced.  

The sarin gas attack that occurred in Damascus on August 21st and killed as many as 1429 people is horrible for sure. No one is doubting that. However, Obama's desired response of shooting some missiles to assist the rebels and 'send a message' is a worrying one considering that Russia and China are quite opposed to any attack that has not been sanctioned by the UN. China seems mostly against it due to the damage it would do the world's economy and since it would drive up the price of oil. Russia is more tightly linked with Syria as they do a lot of trade and the navel facility in Syria at Tartus is Russia's only Mediterranean port. Russia has threatened to send a missile shield into Syria if the US attacks without UN backing. It has also been made clear that Russia and China will veto any action from the UN Security Council. They learned from Libya that the West will not take their interests in the area seriously if allowed to militarily intervene.

Before attacking Syria and potentially starting a WWIII-style showdown with Russia and China becomes a viable option, it seems like two questions have to be answered. First, was it actually Assad's regime that was responsible for the gas attack? Second, is this an intelligent and effective response if it was?

For the first question, there are a few theories. One is that Assad, or rogue elements of his government, chose to use chemical weapons against a civilian location in the hopes of killing the opposing rebels hiding there. This is the main narrative being shouted by the US and agreed upon by the European Union even while they state that any aggression should wait for the United Nations inspectors report. The main problem with this one is motive. As Ed Husain of the Council of Foreign Relations had written, "Al Assad has no credible motivation to use these weapons at this stage, and in this phase of the conflict. He is not losing." It's hard to imagine why Assad would cross Obama's 'red line' regarding chemical weapons when he was winning, when UN inspectors were actually present in the country, and when doing so would involve the Americans.

The second theory is that it was the Syrian rebels. They certainly have the motive to use the weapons, blame Assad, and force the US to join on their side of the civil war. Like the Syrian government, the rebels have done some atrocious things in this fight as seen in the video of a rebel commander who cut out a dead Syrian soldier's heart and ate it. A large amount of the rebel opposition are Islamic extremist groups who oppose Syria's secular regime. The Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra are two of these with the later openly demanding that Syria become an Islamic state under Sharia law. It's hard to imagine wanting these groups to take over power in Syria either. Dale Gavlak, an independent journalist who has done work for Associated Press, has reported that rebels have said they had gotten the sarin gas from Saudi Arabia and then mishandled it, causing the accident. Saudi Arabia has made its desire to overthrow the Assad regime clear in the past. Neither Russia or Syria have provided any evidence that the rebels were responsible.

A third theory was put forward by retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin Powell during the Bush administration. He said the evidence that Assad used the chemical weapons was "flaky" and that it could have been the rebels or even Israel who used it in order to draw in the US. Certainly, Israel supports removing Assad due to his close relation with Iran and his material support of Hezbollah who were able to fight Israel out of Southern Lebanon in 2006. This is just idle speculation but something worth thinking about if only because there is an actual motive.

As to who it actually was, I'm having as much trouble figuring this out as everyone else it seems. Assad has said his regime is innocent. Obama and US Secretary of State John Kerry certainly believes it was him. White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough says a "common-sense test" dictates that it was him although also says they don't have "irrefutable, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt evidence." As of yet, however, it seems all of the evidence is circumstantial or classified. The US says they possess satellite imagery showing attack preparations and transcripts of Syrian forces detailing the attack plans but refuse to disclose any of them. Essentially all the the US is saying is that the attack was too big and coordinated to be the rebels. Even the actual estimate that Obama put forward of 1429 deaths in the attack is controversial. The Western-supported Syrian National Coalition was only able to provide a list of 395 deaths, many of them only mentioned by first name or as relative to another name.

Honestly, it's hard to imagine that the US has any evidence at all. Leading up to the Iraq War, evidence was at least created fraudulently and presented to get UN support. Now though, people are a little more wary of the country who cried WMD. The evidence would be closely examined so it seems safer for the Obama administration to simply say it has it rather than faking it. Obviously, any real evidence would have been presented already.

Now the second question, is limited missile strikes on Syrian forces an effective and logical response? Well, both the rebels and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have agreed that the missile strikes would do nothing. There might be a few civilian casualties and possibly a couple military personal dead but nothing would change. It's already been made clear that the weapons can't target chemical weapons sites since that would possibly release them. Not even mentioning that Tomahawk cruise missiles aren't free and thus should probably be used wisely.

Although Obama pushed heavily for military intervention in Syria immediately following the gas attack, a majority of American people are against any attack of Syria even if it turns out Assad was responsible. Obama, the constitutional scholar, was kind enough to remember the Constitution's separation of power and turn a vote to go to war over to Congress who is supposed to hold that authority. Considering the lack of support for attacking amongst the US public, it seems unlikely that Congress will go along with it, what with their entire House of Representatives and a third of their Senate up for reelection in 2014.

Really, few supporters of attacking can be found outside of the country either. The UK's parliament voted against supporting the US in any attack, much to the dismay of Prime Minister David Cameron who wanted in on the action. French President Francois Hollande had quickly planned to join the attack but as only 36% of his people support the idea, he's now wanting to wait for the UN inspectors report before doing anything. In Canada, Harper supports military intervention but acknowledges we can and will contribute nothing. Turkey's Tayyip Erdogan also supports action but considering his government's crackdown on peaceful protestors in recent days, he is hardly an ideal source of moral support. Saudi Arabia and Israel are really the only other supporters but they have been openly against Assad for too long to be considered unbiased in this case.

So why is Obama so desperate to get rid of Assad? Until this gas attack, the US had been happy just supporting and funding the rebels. The support to use the actual US military to attack isn't there and he should have known that before talking about 'red lines' and how 'Assad must go.' Why was Obama willing to gamble on this and hope he could force another Middle Eastern war on the American people who are getting pretty weary of them?

Retired General Wesley Clark puts forward one explanation. According to him, in December after 9/11, the decision was made in the pentagon to go to war with Iraq although he wasn't told why and no evidence linking them to Al-Qaeda had come up. Soon, the plan had expanded and he read a memo from the Secretary of Defense's office that said "we were gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and then finishing off, Iran." Considering Eisenhower warned the US about the excessive power of the "military-industrial complex," it seems possible that the pentagon may be bullying Obama into using his political capital to attack these oil rich, strategically important countries and ensure that they wind up with either puppet governments or fractured ones too weak to be sovereign.

Certainly an interesting idea that seems to make sense from what we've seen but is there any truth to it? Dr. Nafeez Ahmed over at The Guardian has done an excellent piece pulling apart the 2008 US Military-funded RAND report, Unfolding the Future of the Long War, which can be found here.

Due to laziness, I'll just steal a few choice quotes from Ahmed's piece:

"The economies of the industrialized states will continue to rely heavily on oil, thus making it a strategically important resource."

"The geographic area of proven oil reserves coincides with the power base of much of the Salafi-jihadist network. This creates a linkage between oil supplies and the long war that is not easily broken or simply characterized... For the foreseeable future, world oil production growth and total output will be dominated by Persian Gulf resources... The region will therefore remain a strategic priority, and this priority will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war."

"Divide and Rule focuses on exploiting fault lines between the various Salafi-jihadist groups to turn them against each other and dissipate their energy on internal conflicts. This strategy relies heavily on covert action, information operations (IO), unconventional warfare, and support to indigenous security forces... the United States and its local allies could use the nationalist jihadists to launch proxy IO campaigns to discredit the transnational jihadists in the eyes of the local populace... US leaders could also choose to capitalize on the 'Sustained Shia-Sunni Conflict' trajectory by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes against Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world.... possibly supporting authoritative Sunni governments against a continuingly hostile Iran."

Also interesting is that the British were preparing to attack Syria in 2009, two years before the civil war that erupted in 2011. French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas stated on French television that "I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain, not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria."

This seems like it may have been the result of a proposed oil pipeline to Europe that Assad refused in the same year. Qatar was hoping to run a pipeline from their North field through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and into Europe, purposefully skipping Russia. Syria rejected this to protect Russia's role as Europe's top supplier of natural gas. Instead, Assad negotiated a pipeline that would go from Iran into Iraq and Syria and then into Europe by ship. This would allow Iran and Iraq to supply the European market while bypassing Turkey which is likely the main reason Turkey vehemently supports regime change in Syria. This "Islamic Gas Pipeline" would be a very profitable enterprise for Iran which is probably a big part of why the Western powers are so anxious for Assad to be replaced. Isolating Iran has become the name of the game. Turkey is part of NATO and no ally of Iran meaning Europe and the US would prefer their money goes to Saudi Arabia and Qatar via Turkey instead of to Iran and Iraq via Syria.

Saudi Arabia also took this change of plans badly and Prince Bandar would meet with Vladimir Putin to try to get him to onto their side and to stop protecting Assad. Their leaked transcripts would have Prince Bandar trying to form an alliance between Russia and OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries). Prince Bandar also promised to protect Russia's naval base in Syria if Assad falls. However, if Putin refused to cooperate, Prince Bandar threatened Russia's Olympics with Chechen terrorist attacks while saying that there would be "no escape from the military option." Putin did refuse and it seems like Obama is hoping to fulfill Prince Bandar's promise.

So, in an anti-climatic turn of events, it seems likely that Western involvement in the Middle East is once again about oil instead of humanitarian reasons. Fortunately, since Obama's blustering on the issue has failed to raise a coalition of the willing at home or abroad, a diplomatic solution has been created that allows Obama to save face. John Kerry, replying to a question of whether an attack could be avoided, said “Sure, he could turn over every bit of his weapons to the international community within the next week, without delay. But he isn’t about to.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia was "willing to engage" with this idea and would try to get Syria to hand over the chemical weapons. The US had discussed this idea before but thought it was not possible as they felt they could not trust Assad to not simply hide weapons and use the disarmament time to further entrench. Apparently Kerry “still feels it is not possible” to arrange this transaction so it's possible the US is not intending to take this solution seriously and this talking is just the logical result of Kerry not wanting to seem too vicious by having said that there was nothing Syria could do to avoid being attacked. However, whether or not the US is serious on this, a potential escape hatch has opened that allows the US to claim a victory while not having to go through with a war that no one supported.

Of course, if the oil conflict theory is correct, it'll likely only be a temporary reprieve unless Assad stops supporting the pipeline from Iran and agrees to the one from Qatar.

Interesting to remember that the West's closest ally in the Middle East after Israel are Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia and Qatar consist of primarily orthodox Sunni Muslims with about 40% of those in Saudi Arabia being Salafiyya, derogatorily know as Wahhabi, the most intolerant sect of Islam which makes up the majority of radical Islamic fundamentalists. Iran on the other hand is almost entirely Shi'ite and leans towards the secular. Which country did fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers come from again?

An eventual peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians would have the added benefit of allowing the rift between Iran and the West to heal. This would allow us to start purchasing oil from Middle Eastern countries that don't have large Wahhabi movements that disproportionately produce West-hating radicals.

Oil makes for strange bedfellows.

AS

 

Some Unions More Equal than Others

"Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.""
-Franklin D. Roosevelt

When people hear my opinions that I so enjoy spouting, they tend to assume I'm left-leaning on the political spectrum. And I suppose they are correct.

I generally believe that government should not legislate morality and should instead focus on protecting individual rights that don't harm others. I believe in some government intervention in the economic sector to prevent excessive concentration of wealth that allows dynasty builders to unduly influence and corrupt the democratic process. I also believe that a welfare safety net does more good than harm overall and should not be undone just to punish a few cheats. Mind you, I don't agree with the leftist trend towards nanny-stating and the legalizing of political correctness but that's a topic for another day.

Most people in hearing my views would believe I also support unions and organized labor. And I do. Unions have been responsible for many of the social gains that resulted in North America having an enviable middle-class. In the 60s and 70s, they allied with the civil rights and anti-war movements which are both causes I feel are worth fighting for. Although the gains of unions in the past have made them partially redundant since these gains have been enshrined in laws that apply to all, having unions fight for a larger slice of the profits in those sectors that cannot be off-shored means that wealth is spread around, purchasing power is increased, and our economy is stronger.

Of course, not all unions are equal. Many of them are top-heavy and are more about enriching the leaders or allowing them to pursue pet causes the union as a whole doesn't care about than actually benefiting the workers. In many cases, they have also given up on the social progress aspect and are simply self-interested groups that try to get the best deals for their workers. Which is fair if not quite ideal. And due to the previous gains of unions, most workers today have not had to fight for what are now seen as basic workers rights. This makes their attachment to their unions less meaningful and the original reason for their existence less understood. But overall, I believe that unions remain a useful and necessary feature of society. Off-shoring jobs to countries with cheap labor has tremendously weakened them but that doesn't make them irrelevant. Organized labor remains the main check to organized capital which is essential considering that corporate profits are sky-high while developed nations where they sell their goods like Canada run large deficits.

Now to the meat of this post. Considering what I've said, you may find it surprising that I'm vehemently against a certain kind of union: Public-sector unions. The fact is, in Canada, 71% of government employees were unionized as of last year compared to only 16% of private-sector employees. Public employees also average out to be making 12% more than those in the private sector. Arguably, this is a result of their increased unionization rates since, across Canada, unionized employees make $4.97 more per hour. Traditionally, people in the public sector have made less than those in the private but enjoyed benefits like stronger pensions, better health benefits, more vacation time, and greater job security. Now the public sector still has those things and makes more money to boot. This is a problem because public-sector employees are paid for with tax money from the private sector. Of course, the public sector also pays taxes but that money comes from the private-sector's taxes first.

Let me lay out my main reasons I have a problem with public-sector unions. First, the government already tends to be generous with its employees even in countries where they are not unionized. They are the hands of government and their loyalty is necessary to running the country and being an effective government that is capable of getting stuff done and being re-elected. The higher-ups who set pay can't really give themselves more if they don't give it to all government employees without building problematic resentment. It's not like in the private-sector where money given to employees is money not enjoyed by the owners so wages are pushed to the floor. People in government who set employee wages don't personally get to keep money they don't give to their employees so they will tend to be a bit freer with it.

Second, there is no self-correcting mechanism for over-greedy unions like there is in the private sector. If pay and benefits are too much, it will be like what happened to the Big 3 US car companies and they will go under, costing the union their jobs. Of course they were saved by government funds in that case but that doesn't usually happen. Public-sector employees, on the other hand, can always demand more because the government can simply raise taxes and take more money from other areas to pay them. This can technically bankrupt the country but that is kinda the result we are hoping to avoid here and makes greedy public unions dangerous for everyone.

Third, unions and striking go hand-in-hand. Striking is the refusal to work en masse until demands are met. This generally isn't a problem in the private sector except where key services have been privatized. It doesn't matter if I can't go into Burger King because their employees are on strike. I'll go to a different food hole. However, like FDR says in the above quote, it is deadly serious when government employees go on strike, at least in some areas. If your kids can't go to school because teachers are on strike or your house burns down because firemen are on strike or you mail doesn't arrive because mailmen are on strike, these are serious issues that compromise the whole society's functioning. This makes their ability to strike both very dangerous and extremely effective since we need them. The economist Thomas DiLorenzo went as far as to say that "The enormous power of government-employee unions effectively transfers the power to tax from voters to the unions. Because government-employee unions can so easily force elected officials to raise taxes to meet their "demands," it is they, not the voters, who control the rate of taxation within a political jurisdiction."

Due to this, some government jobs have it written into collective bargaining agreements that they cannot strike but others do not. Striking sometimes occurs regardless.

In 2011, the British Columbia Teachers Federation's contract expired. For the new one, they demanded a 15% wage increase over 3 years (at a time of only 2.5% inflation), additional benefits, control over class sizes, additional leave, and more paid preparation time. Illegal strikes have been considered but not employed as of yet in order to get these. Their minimum pay was $48k and maximum was $74k, not including benefits and pensions. Although that pay is not astronomical since BC is expensive to live, it is worth remembering that teaching is an extremely desirable profession. You get the summers off and many consider it fulfilling to work with kids. Lots of people train for it and there are always more young grads looking for positions. This wage hike demand was also coming at a time when BC was trying to stop their deficit spending which had reached $2.5 billion in 2012. Deficits mean borrowed money. Borrowed money means paying interest which means the amount to be paid back is higher than the amount received. Which is stupid and should be avoided whenever possible.

Teaching unions generally also police their own members and firing teachers for being bad at their job is extremely difficult. This is a huge problem in teaching since they are molding young minds to either enjoy learning or hate school. A bad teacher early on can change the course of a life dramatically. Good teachers can do the same in a positive way. Being unable to fire the bad means not being able to hire the new, young, and still enthusiastic whom I often found to be the best teachers when I was growing up.

Currently, our Professional Service Association of Foreign Service Officers (PAFSO) are striking. They are the ones who provide visas to people coming to Canada including foreign students who spend lots of money here. The union's president Tim Edwards says that a failure to resolve the dispute will likely cost Canada's economy upwards of a billion dollars if not resolved by the fall and has likely already cost as much as $280 million. It has also damaged Canada's reputation as a place to try and send your kids to school in addition to inconveniencing huge numbers trying to enter the country. This is clearly a problem you can't have with private-sector unions.

As corporate profits remain high, many may say that we should not be reducing public-sector wages but increasing those of the private-sector to the same level. Agreed, we should. Scandinavian countries have shown that this model can work. However, that would take some major policy changes regarding free-trade, off-shoring, and acceptable rates of taxation. We don't really have time for that before our debt becomes a problem.

An immediate answer would be to tie public-sector wages to the private sector's so as to not become dangerously overwhelming. This would mean that our public servants would work harder to get people better wages in the private sector since that is how they themselves would get better wages. And if they got too greedy pushing up minimum wages and people lost jobs that moved away, that would need to be added into the calculation as well. Essentially a move to performance-based pay for the government as a whole so that spending on government services today can never be pushed onto future generations. At the moment, the irony is that those supporting public-sector unions are actually hurting private-sector unions since the former has caused resentment amongst the public to unions in general. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford basically rode this wave of resentment into office.

Of course there are other things Canada should be doing to cut our deficit and lower our debt. Having our provinces not compete with each other in a race to the bottom over resource extraction royalties would be a good start. When ex-Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach tried to raise royalty rates, oil companies complained and moved to Saskatchewan and BC who accepted less money for their fuel. This is nonsense within a single country that has transfer payments. A unified face and bargaining position would have gotten more money for less of our fossil fuels. A family store doesn't work if members are trying to undercut each other by selling the family's products for less and less just because they individually get to keep a slightly larger chunk of it. But that's a rant for another time and any policy change would be an extremely hard sell in any case, what with the West's lingering resentment of Pierre Elliot Trudeau's National Energy Policy and all.

Simply put, public-sector unions are not required like private-sector ones are and they are dangerous to a country's ability to function. Unions are supposed to get more of the profits to the workers who create them but government isn't about making profit, it's about spending it. Their dispute settlement mechanism that allows employees fair treatment can be kept but the collective bargaining aspect is bankrupting us. Canada's debt topped $1.2 trillion with $42 billion of it being added from 2012-13. That's up $350 billion from 2007-8. As a young person, I gotta say I'm not too impressed with you baby boomers who have left me such a hefty burden. We may be coming out of the recession and deficits are expected but we are also having trouble as our housing bubble becomes more blatant and our consumer debt-to-income ratio sits at an uncomfortable 161.8%. When the bubble bursts, we are going to be in trouble and the spending cuts need to happen yesterday. We're out of the recession state right now. If we're too deep in debt and our taxes are too high while things are going all right, how is our government going to cut taxes and provide stimulus funds to alleviate another recession? It's not raining right now which means it is time to fix our roof. Fixing it is much harder once it starts pouring.

We have a massive country with almost unimaginable resources.
We really should not be doing this poorly.

AS