CANADIAN ELECTIONS AND THE WASHINGTON CONSENSUS

As a new chapter in Canadian history approaches with tomorrow’s election results, the various debates and policy discussions will end with either the status quo or a change. Various issues have been discussed the last 78 days – foreign policy, security, economic prosperity, TPP, taxes, spending, the niqab and so on. One issue that has not been mentioned is the shadow of the great superpower to the south, and what is called the ‘Washington Consensus’ (WC). No one reasonably in touch with the major events of the last few decades can be unaware of the major stride inequality has made in most societies where the WC’s power or influence is exercised. No accident – this is the result of deliberate policies political and economic designed to achieve precisely the status quo. Also called ‘ neo-liberalism’ – the policies have essentially been to enrich the 1% at the expense of the rest. The super-rich has virtually doubled its share of national wealth in many if not most countries certainly of the West but not just the West. Buttressed by US Supreme Court decisions like McCutcheon and Citizens United (both v. FEC) the result has been the ‘corporate takeover of the political system’ and the inexorable replacement of democracy by plutocracy, the replacement of ‘vote’ by ‘note’ ($). These policies are of course cloaked in Orwellian jargon, which makes it difficult for the general public to keep track of what is being done. With this lens in mind it is possible to make some comments about the issues that were discussed in the campaign: 1. Taxes and spending and trade agreements. One of the recurring themes of the past few decades was that taxes had to be cut for the super-rich, which would then result in investment by them, which would create jobs. Associated with this was the idea that ‘free trade’ was good and would also create jobs. Warnings when NAFTA was being put in place about ‘a giant sucking sound’ did not stop either NAFTA or globalization. The result is known to most people.: a major dismantling of manufacturing industry and its shipment to places where labor was dirt-cheap. All the clever planning of Wall Street's investment banks and consulting firms amounted to old-fashioned ‘arbitrage’. The US destroyed tens of millions of jobs so that a tiny fraction of 1% would become even more obscenely rich. And spending for the 99% was cut, while the major economic program that drove American innovation and investment – the so-called ‘defense’ industry kept on expanding, because it is essential to enforcement of the WC. People seem to have forgotten about the MAI which was justly hated and defeated as its policies to enforce corporate rights against those of nations and populations were a thinly disguised assault on the sovereignty of nation-states. But the Corpo-Rat lawyers and lobbyists who were defeated then don’t give up easily. Isn’t the TPP (and its European counterpart the TAP) simply a resurrection of the MAI?. Isn’t that why its text has been kept secret from the voters everywhere, not just in Canada.? The Liberal and NDP leaders acted rightly in refusing to attend a Privy Council briefing on TPP absent a public knowledge of the text. 2. National security, the jihadist threat, ISIS, niqab etc. The ‘Clinton doctrine’ openly declared the US’s unilateral right to use force to ‘access markets, energy supplies and resources’. Never mind that those markets, supplies and resources are located all over the planet and belong to the populations of the 190+ countries in it. Behind its talk of security, democracy-promotion, and so on (which major Western allies are pressured to agree with and to join in the actions that follow, as well as benefiting from them) is the reality of the rape and plunder of those countries and the devastation of those who resist, with pretexts invented as needed. Whether it was coups in Iran, Guatemala or Chile, or the killing of millions in South East Asia to prevent ‘dominoes’ from falling, or later actions financed by the grotesquely ‘exorbitant privilege’ accorded by the Petro-dollar (which replaced the constraints of Bretton Woods with virtually unlimited capability to the US to continue to spend half the planet’s expenditure on WMD) the global hegemon has been able to do whatever it wants. 3. Should countries like Canada connive in or resist the WC? It is easy to join a Western gang-up and tell the Russian President to get out of Ukraine. No one seems capable of telling the US to get out of Ukraine, Central Asia, the Middle East, or any of the 134 countries in which (according to TomDispatch.com) it is conducting secret, bloody and illegal wars, The WC and the ‘unbridled capitalism’ that motivates it now adds (for the planet) the unprecedented risk of environmental catastrophe with increasingly extreme and bizarre weather events (like the California mudslide) to the decades old nuclear one. The Nobel Peace Prize winning incumbent of the White House has maximized fracking and authorized a trillion dollars of upgrades to the US’s nuclear weapons, which already can blow up the planet several times over. Dr. Strangelove still is here, and the underground bunkers in which the masters of mankind might live would only have to be modified for climate change. 4. Our media often fails to tell the truth, even resorting to brazen lies about what is going on. When a Malaysian airliner was mistakenly shot down, Maclean’s and Economist magazines had covers screaming Putin the Murderer. No one bothered to ask what motive he might have, or mentioned that some decades earlier a US warship had shot down an Iranian airliner and its captain been given a medal. Was Clinton called a murderer for sacrificing a half-million Iraqi children through sanctions, a price his Secretary of State called ‘worth paying’. Or Bush W for the price Iraq paid for the democracy (ISIS) they were force-fed? One has to search hard to find stories that recount the true origins of jihad – US-UK sales of WMD to Iran, Iraq and all the countries of the region…….wars in which ‘unpeople’ die are tremendously good business for the West….. or that it was Kissinger who introduced the nuclear program to Iran – or Reagan who recruited the most fanatic jihadists to dislodge the Soviets from Afghanistan, having first apparently manipulated them to invade….. to give them their own ‘quagmire’. 5. The Drone papers – on Obama’s personal authorization of the assassination of some 80,000 people (an International Herald Tribune estimate from April this year) have just been released. No doubt our magazines will be screaming….

TSUNAMI OF LIES - THE UNREPORTED NEWS

The upcoming Canadian election and debates as well as pronouncements by world leaders at the UN have brought the issues of ISIS, Ukraine, Iran's nuclear deal, and others to the forefront of the news.The rhetoric and news coverage focusses on the standard viewpoints of Western governments: ISIS is evil, the n-bomb that Iran may build is a threat to world peace and to Israel's existence, Russian President Putin is responsible for the Ukraine crisis, and so on. Views questioning this narrative are hard to find. No one mentions that ISIS was created by the American destruction of Iraq, aided and abetted by its pit-bull allies in the UK and Australia, and others 'bribed and bullied'; much as the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s rose from the ashes of genocidal bombing of Cambodia by the US. ISIS's crimes are dastardly, but do they compare to what the West did in Iraq? Hundreds of thousands killed, millions turned into refugees.... Not too many people want to connect the dots. On Iran, the hysteria continues on the bomb it may build. Not a word about the hundreds of nuclear bombs already in the Mideast - in Israel's possession. The Iranian President's speech at the UN mentioning resolutions asking for a nuclear-free zone in the region received the usual derisory contempt. As for the US Republican party's reaction to the deal negotiated with Iran, it is not new. Republicans have made jokes about bombing Iran for years. With the deal, jokes have become open threats. Dr. Chomsky pointed out recently that the main difference between 2 GOP candidates who led the race until recently (Jeb Bush and another) was that one promised to bomb Iran immediately on taking office, and the other - to wait until the first Cabinet meeting. No one asks: what did Iran do to the US, and what have the US and its allies done to Iran? The toppling of democracy in Iran in 1953 and the installation of the Shah who ruled as terrrorist/dictator until 1979, and after his ouster the supply of arms to Saddam Hussein to prosecute an 8-year war which killed hundreds of thousands on either side are among the major crimes against Iran. While the 'King of Kings' (Pahlavi) was in charge however, Kissinger was happy not only to make him the US's largest buyer of weapons, but to pressure US universities like MIT to accept Iranian students into nuclear engineering studies - they have been running the.Iranian nuclear program. But all this is unreported in the major news media. Salon.com has just published a superlative article on the history of Kissinger's crimes in the Middle East and Western Asia including Afghanistan and South Asia including the unreserved backing of West Pakistan's genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). But try to find that information in the New York Times or the Washington Post. On Ukraine, the hysteria is equally misleading. John Pilger - an Australian born award-winning journalist living in Britain who became a pariah after exposing the West's complicity in the East Timorean genocide - reports on his website that the entire crisis has been 'inverted'. It is US-driven NATO that has aggressively expanded all the way to Ukraine, renewing a century-old theme of 'encirclement' of Russia by the West, and mocking Reagan's (false) promise to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand 'an inch to the East'. President Putin moved to take over the Crimean port only to prevent NATO from establishing its own naval base there, and Eastern Ukraine is the last remaining 'buffer' between Russia and NATO. In short, he was (and is) acting defensively. Russia's economy is roughly one-eighth the size of the US's. At the height of the Cold War, the USSR's economy was a quarter of the US's. It had lost some 30 million people in WW2, versus less than 1 million by the US. But these facts were not generally reported, as they contradicted the narrative of the 'Red Menace', needed to justify the 'permanent war-economy'. People like Thomas Friedman of the NY Times, who called Putin a 'thug' are the same ones who advocated the invasion of Iraq as a 'threat' to the US, then effortlessly changed the pretext to 'installing democracy' when no WMD were found. To call them 'slugs' would be to insult slugs. They are today's 'Julius Streicher(s)', inciters of war-crimes. Russia of course is no Iraq, being a major nuclear power. But the rot runs deeper. It was Oxford-educated Niall Ferguson who propagated the 'Armageddon' myth about Iran's n-bomb. Closer to home, Canada's own Margaret MacMillan, now a rector at Oxford, finished an op-ed published in the Globe and Mail just before the Scottish referendum with the counsel that Scots ought to remain in the comparative safety of the UK, since the world had 'become a dangerous place with ISIS and the Russian aggression in Ukraine'. There was no mention of earlier events such as the Vietnam war or invasions of Iraq or the destruction of democracy in dozens of countries by the West. One is to infer they made the world safer. When Ukrainian rebels mistakenly shot down a Malaysian airliner, Maclean's magazine in Canada and the Economist in Britain both had magazine covers screaming "Putin the murderer'. No one bothered to question what possible motive the Russian President would have in downing a Malaysian airliner. No one bothered to report what had happened some decades ago when a US warship intentionally shot down an Iranian airliner with roughly the same casualties - the 'murderer' was given a medal by the US government. Did any of these magazines call Clinton or Bush Jr. a murderer for the crimes committed by these Presidents in Iraq? Sanctions which killed 500,000 infants were described by Madeleine Albright as a 'price worth paying'. The casualties from Dubya's war-crimes remain as estimates - since the news reported from that region was controlled by the US army. Estimates start at minimum in the hundreds of thousands and run upto 2 million deaths. Did Maclean's or the Economist publish covers with Bush Jr. as a mass-murderer?

NOTES FROM TIFF 2015

Notes from a couple of films from TIFF 2015. 3000 Nights shows a young Palestinian bride arrested for giving a youth a ride in her car, jailed for 8 years, giving birth in an Israeli prison for women with her hands and feet cuffed, amidst other scenes of torture and abuse. That was a Palestinian film. Rabin, The Last Day, made by Israeli (and Jewish) Amos Gitai, shows the mentality of the far right within Israel, which resulted in the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yithzak Rabin, for the crime of negotiating a peace accord (Oslo) with the Palestinians. It is standard fare in the West, to depict Muslims as 'crazy' or 'terrorists' to the point where US Presidential candidate Trump answered questions about what the US would do to deal with the (Muslim) problem. Not too many people ask about the root of the problem, for example, whether ISIS would exist today without the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or the refugee crisis without Western interventions in Syria. Mr. Gitai, in the post-screening Q&A, said he made this film to open people's eyes about the fanaticism and hate within the right in Israel. Claiming it is based entirely on documentary records, he shows Israeli mobs chanting 'Death to Rabin', (mobs often including a much younger Netanyahu), an Israeli psychiatrist raving about the 'schizophrenia' and 'schizoid personality' of Rabin, similar to that of Hitler. Rabin is also described as a Satanic figure, and right-wing rabbis chant curses at him, which without subtitles might appear as prayers.. The youth who kills him shows no remorse, citing the Torah as authorizing the assassination, on the basis that if someone attacks you, you can kill him. The attack? Rabin's attempt to make peace with the Palestinians which would have stopped the advancement of settlements into Palestinian lands. Stopping the theft is therefore an attack on the settlers' ambitions, justifying murder. One of the questions post-screening was whether the director thought the right-wing in Israel would never allow peace to happen in Palestine.. the director's reply was 'you may be right'.

Kathleen Wynne on Jian Ghomeshi

LETTER TO TORONTO STAR, NOV. 4, 2014 Jian Ghomeshi's public firing and associated allegations against him are generating a lot of public interest, to the point that the Ontario Premier Ms. Wynne has made public statements about sexual harassment in the workplace. That is interesting. Mr.Ghomeshi's firing came about (so far as I can determine) because of allegations by women of assaults during sex, which he characterized as 'rough sex'. These surely did not involve women at his 'workplace'. Or did it? Since then however some of his co-workers have made allegations of workplace harassment, which gave Ms. Wynne the excuse to take the action she did. It is astonishing that allegations against one man have provoked what would appear to be a public inquiry into generalized workplace sexual harassment. Unspoken of course is that the inquiry is to focus on male harassment of females. This is so apparently obvious that it does not need to be said. Workplace harassment, including sexual, however, is not simply a male problem. Plenty of women also harass. Their mechanisms however are typically different from those of males. Women harass through passive-aggression, spreading rumours and innuendo (though men can also do this) or simply by fabricating allegations for a variety of reasons which may include 'jilting' or outright female paranoia. The anti-male feminist ideology our society has swallowed whole, treats men as guilty merely on accusation, and throws evidence of female misconduct under the rug. Will Ms. Wynne's inquiry also be looking into these problems which affect men? Or is the inquiry simply an excuse to create more 'feminazi' rules to hurt, injure or destroy men? There is nothing in law, or nature, which conclusively says, or can say, that predators, perpetrators or criminals are only from one gender. Guilt or innocence is a matter of evidence, not gender, ideology, or suspicion. There is plenty that is 'disturbing' about female perpetrators, which our society appears to pretend do not exist.

All nations are equal but some are more equal than others

It will soon be a half-century to the day that a world-renowned 'leftist' wrote 'The Responsibility of Intellectuals', exhorting them to expose lies and tell the truth. And when much of the intelligentsia and leadership in the 'West' - the USA and its allies - cautions and warns the Russian Federation its incursion in and anticipated annexation of Crimea - is a violation of the UN Charter - they are certainly not lying. It is. But these voices were strangely silent when similar or worse actions were committed by the US and its allies.. No one called the 'war' in Vietnam - during which some 3-4 million people were killed in 3 countries by some of the most brutal and barbaric bombings in history (daisy-cutters, napalm, Kissinger's order to use 'anything that flies on anything that moves') a violation of international law. And of course the Korean War (so-called) in which a similar devastation was carried out in North Korea - actually had UN approval, as Stalin ordered his UN ambassador to abstain from vetoing the UN resolution. More recently the West supported dictators like Iran's Shah, Saddam Hussein till 1990, and Indonesia's Suharto ('our kind of guy' being Bill Clinton's assessment) who killed perhaps a million in his own country and some 200,000 in East Timor (with the gleeful supply of weapons by Western nations including Canada) who replaced Sukarno who had to be evicted for the crime of throwing out the IMF (though technically that was not a violation of the UN Charter). The more recent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (casualties of locals unknown, and conservatively estimated at minimum in the hundreds of thousands plus devastation of countries and displacement of millions) were preceded not only with boasts about the 'shock and awe' of such carpet bombings, but declarations that the West would act with or without the consent of the UN. Likewise the continued theft of Palestinian land and resources (specially water) supported by the US and dismissed as the (minor) settlements problem. In Animal Farm, Orwell mocked the USSR, as a place where 'all animals were equal, but some were more equal than others'. In the post-communist world, it seems that all nations may be equal under the UN Charter, but some nations are more equal than others. It does not matter that Crimea and the Ukraine are in Russia's backyard, like Latin and South America (subject of the Monroe 'doctrine') are in the US's. The sole global hegemon and its allies are not bound by the rules of institutions they are bigger than; institutions that could not exist without US support. Those outside the club need to remember that. P. S. And if 'sovereign' nations feel harassed or threatened by the hundreds of armed bases the US maintains around the globe to advance its 'interests' (free trade, 'democracy' and 'freedom'}, that is surely not the US' fault. Sovereign nations need to grow up and take responsibility for their own feelings.

ZERO TERRIFYING DARK THIRTY

The Auschwitz Oven assassinates the kettle black...... The overwhelming sensation on seeing this film was of fear, then outrage for the great Predator nation which goes anywhere, and does anything it wants, without regard for international law. In fact cloaking its crimes as 'justice'. Kathryn Bigelow won Oscars for her earlier effort 'The Hurt Locker', which seems pretentious and shallow in comparison to what she has accomplished here. The Hurt locker focused on the trials of US soldiers in Iraq, glossing over the Hurt of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (men women and children) who had been murdered by the US invasion and occupation, or that of the 5-6 million who had become refugees fleeing from the catastrophic devastation wreaked on their nation on fabricated pretences of WMD by the Predator Nation - itself the greatest producer, user and merchandiser of WMD on this planet. Last week a Toronto Sun article said the reason Bigelow was snubbed by the Academy this time was that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats liked this picture. The article theorized this was because the picture appears to glorify torture, which eventually resulted in the assassination of "UBL'. But that is not the reason - other films including 'Rendition' exposed the lie that 'the United States does not torture'. The reason this movie is disliked by the American powers-that-be is that it provides probably the most honest, cold, brutal portrayal of America is it really is, and as it is seen in the real world, as opposed to the world of propaganda that is North American society. It shows why 'they' hate the 'US', the Great Pretender which in dozens of countries has destroyed democracy and installed or supported friendly and obedient dictators. Even Coppola's famed 'Apocalypse Now' did not dare indict the US as openly, nakedly as this 'movie' does. In response to criticisms about inaccuracies, Ms. Bigelow recently said this was only a 'movie'. But this is really an 'unmovie'. It is scarier, more dark, more honest, than any documentary. The music for instance, is sombre, chilling, and completely devoid of jingoism or machismo, as it accompanies the stealth penetration of Pakistani territory by Navy Seals as they coldly, cunningly, professionally, ruthlessly carry out their dirty task, described by an Arab newspaper at the time as a 'settlement of accounts between killers'. The movie does not show the dumping of UBL's body into the ocean, designed to frustrate any investigation into the matter. If the Mafia could operate as efficiently to dispose of inconvenient evidence......... None of the CIA characters who drone on about the 'slaughter' of '3000 innocent Americans' says a word about the 'slaughter' of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. But this only emphasizes their insignificance to the Auschwitz Oven. One contrast to this unmovie is the movie 'Skyfall', whose highlights include a disgruntled MI-6 operative blowing up MI-6 headquarters and killing off the Queen of Pomposity Judi Dench as 'M'. Could something like that happen in the CIA?

ARGO SURPRISINGLY 'UNAMERICAN'

I entered this movie expecting it to be rabidly pro-American propaganda, showing CIA heroics (a la Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone) in rescuing some of the American embassy employees trapped after the 1979 revolution. I was surprised to see it portray a remarkably balanced view of events. The film starts with news clips showing the 1950 democratic election of Mossadegh who went on to 'nationalise' the British controlled oil company which extracted Iranian oil at predatory prices (in the reverse sense - at prices which essentially robbed Iran), and which led in turn to the 1953 CIA/MI-6 initiated coup which installed the Shah who the film does not hesitate to show carried out torture, executions and imprisonment of thousands of Iranian citizens who resisted his dictatorial control of Iran and de facto neo-colonial enslavement of Iran to American and British interests. While the film moves on to show a daring and desperate plan in which 6 US embassy employees who escaped to the Canadian ambassador's residence in Teheran are extracted, it maintains an objective perspective, showing for instance an Iranian mention the US and CIA as the leading terrorists on the planet, language which is rarely seen outside of Chomsky's writings. It is not pro-Iranian either, depicting Iran as a repressive regime where torture continued under the Ayatollah. The hostage crisis and takeover of the US embassy was done by Iranian citizens outraged by the US' granting asylum to the cancer-stricken Shah, and they consequently demanded his return to Iran for prosecution or torture. After 911, the US demanded Afghanistan 'hand over' Osama Bin Laden who was believed to be hiding in that country; the Taliban refused, asking for evidence that Osama had been responsible for 911. The US then invaded Afghanistan and remains there to this day, continuing the devastation inflicted on that country by foreign invaders including the Soviets. Iran in 1979 could not (nor can any country today) invade the US as retribution for not 'handing over' the Shah, so it took over the US embassy and some 50 hostages, a crisis that lasted 444 days, deeply embarrassing the Carter administration and contributing to Ronald Reagan's victory in the next election. The US then exacted terrible vengeance from Iran. Reagan provided billions in arms to Saddam Hussein to prosecute a decade long war against Iran with nearly a million casualties on both sides. The US-Israeli invective against Iran continues to this day.