HOW 'CIVILIZED' ARE WE?

My first reaction to the trampling death of a Wal-mart employee on "Black Friday" was one of disgust. Not just disgust with the people who mindlessly trampled someone to death, but with Wal-mart and their policies of low pay, small benefits. As Peter S. Goodman wrote in the New York Times describing the victim: "the unfortunate man who found himself working at the Valley Stream Wal-Mart at 5:00 A.M. Friday, a temp at the company emblematic of low wages and weak benefit earning his dollars by trying to police an unruly crowd worried about missing out."

Wal-Mart must pay for this death. I hope that an inquest will be far-reaching enough to examine Wal-Mart hiring practices. Of course, while you can't blame Wal-Mart, or any other retailer, for the voracious, shark-like predatory mobs for whom a bargain is worth killing - literally. But the inquest will have to determine among other things, how prepared Wal-Mart was for such a disaster. Did they hire eno0ugh employees for the occasion? Did they put extra security measures in place? Or are they in a way like the Third World construction companies that build shoddy schools that collapse and kill children? Do they skimp wherever they can? Do they "sweat" employees to keep labour costs down? And perhaps more than anything, do they market based on the reality that the consumer will let nothing stand in the way of his/her bottom feeding for the lowest prices, even if those prices are lowered on the backs of overworked, underpaid employees.

As I read the Goodman story I was struck by one notion: things like trampling people do death don't happen in America or Canada. We are just too civilized. People get trampled to death when a bridge gets overloaded in India, or when tens of thousands of people try to rush through a small opening in Mecca during Hadj. The idea that less developed countries are where things like that happen, where overloaded buses driven by incompetents fall off a cliff in Peru.

In our own special smugness we believe that we are "better."

Turns out we are not. Turns out that nothing appeals more than a bargain. We have everyday honest factory workers (many of whom are no longer employed) who have bargained for higher wages and benefits, flocking to a chain that lowers prices using lower benefits and lower wages and when there is a threat of unionizing, will close the store citing "poor performance" as an excuse.

We have a lot of choices. The poor guy who didn't know he going to die didn't have.

BUSH'S FOLLY

An important part of "Looking Ahead" is that instead of wallowing in nostalgia, you stay current and critical. In my youth I used to be told that as I got older I would become less radical. There is a Churchill quote about that. I won't bore you.

Readfing more about Obama's Treasury appointments, I find more comment about how protectionism won't work. I find it interesting that Obama, more in vote-gathering mode than reality mode, suggested that the Free Trade agreements would have to be re-examined. Was he hinting at trade barriers to protect American workers? Such action would replicate precisely what countries did when the crash of 1929 happened. It stifled trade. It choked off what faint hope remained for economic recovery.

I do believe, and this was part of John Kerry's (remember him?) presidential campaign, that companies should not be given tax deductions for salaries paid to workers outside the country. If companies want to be bottom feeders and go for the lowest possible labour costs, let them do it, but don;t have the government be complicit by allowing those salaries to be expensed out.

You are wondering why I titled this posting Bush's Folly when his entire eight years have been "folly." In one of his recent speeches he warned America about protectionism. He was right. He was also being his usual duplicitous self. Maybe he is not in touch with the protectionist moves that have characterized his administration. Maybe he doesn't remember the soft wood lumber embargo. Maybe he forgets that America "protected" farmers against the inroads of Canadian pork products.
Maybe he forgot how he promoted the wasteful use of fertile farmland to grow food crops, not for food, but for ethanol. Maybe he forgeot how he protected them against foreign competition by putting a heavy tax (if I remember correctly it was something like 58 cents a gallon) on ethanol made from abundant sugar in Brazil. By the way, ethanol from sugar costs a fraction of the price to extract compared to the cost of extraction from corn. And cars in Brazil operate on ehanol, not gasoline.

So far-sighted President Obama - will you usher in a new age of independence from petroleum by using the most inexpensive ethanol you can buy? How about a trade move to enrich your poorest neighbours in the Caribbean by putting their abundance of sugar to better use? Will you begin moving toward the removal of the embargos against Cuba, where so much sugar comes from.

World trade, true world trade, not domination by the great industrtial and agricultural powers, will bring economic stability. And with more billions to Citibank, we need imagination.

RUST BELT ROMANCE

Whenever I tell anyone that I'm off to Cleveland, the reponse is "Cleveland??? Why on earth would you go to a place like Cleveland?"

I discovered Cleveland only because I have a dear friend who has lived most of his life there. Through him I see amd hear the best this forgotten city has to offer.

Yes, most people know that it has the I.M. Pei designed Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Most people know it has a great ball park once named Jacob's Field but now sporting a corporate name. A few people know that Cleveland also has the Frank Gehry designed Weatherhead School of Business, a rippling, flowing extravaganza of stainless steel.

But I go to Cleveland because it is a culture centre. (At this point most people wrinkle their noses and raise their eybrowws in a display of disbelief.)

Today I found one more reason to respect and admire what Cleveland does for the Arts. You do know, I hope, that Cleveland has always had one of the world's great symphony orchestras p0laying in what may be the most beautifil and acoustically perfect auditorium: Severance Hall. I was there today to hear the Clevleland Youth Orehstra whose members are from 12 to 18 and who play with a zest that one rarely hears, even from "adult" performers. Their playing is clear, clean, and tonally perfect.

They played the romantic and tear-inducing Brahms Symphony #3. Then they launched into four of Dvorak's Slavonic Dances, the first of which they played with no conductor. They closed the program with the loud, demanding, cacaphonous Scythian Suite of Prokofief.

It doesn't really matter what they played. What does matter to me is that as I try to kepep "Looking Ahead" I am often confronted with despair as in"things fall apart," (you'll have to check thre literary refence for yourself,) I am redeemed from my pessimism by an experience like the Cleveland Youth Orchesatra. More than a hundred "chuldren", guided by their schools, their teachers, members of the Cleveland Symphony, and the love and care of decvoted parents, make me feel better about tomorrow.

Becuase if the title of what I write is "Looking Ahead" it is this visit to Cleveland that gives me hope.

REAL CHANGE

Obama, and the people who voted for him, were all about "change." Does that mean real change? "Sea-change? Or does it just mean a little careful tweaking so that you'd hardly notice?

The auto execs flew in to Washington. As several pundits put it, coming by private jet and carrying a tin cup. So far, there is no real sign of change. Yet the Democrats, let by house speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Senate chief Harry Reid, have told the Big Three to go back to the drawing board and come up with some specifics.

They won't. I am confident of that. It is their infernal refusal to recognize change going on around them. Yes, they ca blame the economic meltdown which would not have come at a worse time for them. They were unprepared for real change in the product they manufacture.

But they can do it. They must. Even the cipher in the White House, tottering to the end of his administration. knows that change is possible. Possible that is, if you see the depth of the emergency.

They did it before. When America entered the war they turned their industrial power into arms production. They became the world's arsenal. The huge Ford plant at Willow Run (taken over after the war by Henry Kaiser to build his cars) switched to turning out B24 Liberator bombers. Their production capacity was enormous.

The auto makers responded to the call to arms with change. Of course there were prodigious profits to be made, but that is almost beside the point.

The point is that when a national emergency was thrust upon them they responded.
The government did not seem to mind throwing billions of dollars in war contracts at them. But again - that is not the point.

America has shown that it can change.

It may not be 1941 with the shadow of Pearl Harbour hanging over their consciosness, but it is a shattering crisis nonetheless.

I do believe that American industry can rally. I do believe that there is a war to be won.

Can they do it?

LOOKING AHEAD???

Sometimes, according to the sages, in order to find out where you're going you have to look back and see where you've been. That's my excuse for dredging up the past in a fit of what can only be called self-indulgence. Go ahead. Indulge!

My "blog" is not setting the world on fire. There isn't even any smoke! To continue writing is a compulsion, an imperative. Does it matter than I get very little response or that when you Google my name my blog is not even mentioned.
Alas, more self-pity and I will nauseate myself. Here goes:

A few weeks ago, and I have to be careful that I don't give clues that let you identify the person, I had a conversation with a friend. The friend reminded me that she did not share my "left" views, but was in fact, a Tory, of the slightly red variety.

I consider that political bent more of a moral defect than a political opinion - but that would be intolerant of me - wouldn't it?

I tried, in a lavishly nostalgic piece to explain why I went left and stayed left. It is, I will comment, especially germane in an age when the unthinkable has happened: the neo-cons in Washington have put government to work.

Here then with a few edits, is the email I sent:
I have a problem with the marketplace orthodoxy that guys like Bush keep yammering about. He, and many of his neo-con comrades are confused. They think that capitalism and democracy always go together. The Saudi Arabians are capitalists. Would you call Saudi Arabia a democracy?

I had a great deal of time for some of the the truly pragmatic Tories we have had. Bill Davis who, and with 20/20 hind sight it was a good idea - bought a piece of Suncor. Bill Davis also put together a transportation experiment in Kingston that would have revolutionized the way we get from place to place by rail.

Peter Lougheed was another. Alberta was overflowing with oil and he set up the Heritage Fund financed by oil royalties. He used it to try to diversify the cattle/oil Alberta economy. Like Davis he was too soon with a great idea. Remember his oil seed refinery business? He got into it just at the time when there was a glut of oil seed products. The project collapsed in a sea of debt. But just think today of biofuels.

When I think of Tories I tend to think of the blue-ribbon Anglicans I grew up with. They were anti-Semitic (it was an inherent characteristic) and they were exclusionary. They also excluded Roman Catholics, along with anyone who didn't look like them.(See Country Club, Yacht Clubs, Golf Club, Resort Hotels, apartment houses on Eglinton avenue and most of Leaside etc etc.)

Perhaps a great deal of what used to be Jewish radicalism stemmed not only from social injustice, but from the marginalization of our people. That has all changed today and the Americans especially are up to their armpits in neo-con Jews. See William Kristol in the New York Times.

I suppose I clung to my radicalism for far too long. I realized, after I had run unsuccessfully in the provincial election, that the left was in an ideological straight-jacket. There is no room for pragmatism.

I is pragmatism that brings us to the present state of affairs: a Republican government holding its nose and buying shares in banks.

We shall see what affect the deeply ingrained conservatism on America has on Obama. Will he buck the hard right? Will he defy the people who vote in a close-minded bloc against stem cell research, elimination of prayer in schools, same sex marriage, and the right of a woman to choose.

My leftiness still goes back a long way. I remember Harry Truman's Taft Hartley Act which effectively put an end to growth of the union movement. I remember the so- called right-to-work legislation that really was the right-to-fire-without cause legislation. I remember things like enlightened capitalism which moved the textile industry from New England to the right-to-work southern states. Then they discovered, in a bottom feeding frenzy, that they could get it done more cheaply in Mexico. Even that was not enough. They moved to an even cheaper labour source - poor bedraggled El Salvador. Even the Salvadoreans couldn't compete because it moved again - to Honduras.

I believe that the Right has no sense of social justice and that profits always trump humanity.

Aaah - now I feel better.

LOOKING AHEAD WITHOUT HOPE

One of my staples is the complaint about not living long enough to see what wonderful things are going to happen in the next 20 years. "Looking Ahead" has chronological limits. No one lives forever, but as a cousin of mine always says: "I'm going to be the first."

So it is with a combination of exultation and regret that I read about the opportunity that lies ahead in the creation of new "people-mover" systems. The writer, quoting Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall (from the 70s) wrote about how we can truly "rescue" the car makers - rescue them from themselves that is.

It has been one of my chronic beefs that when we talk about infrastructure or capital spending or job creation, we usually talk about the infrastructure we already know, highways, bridges etc.

In this blog just a week or so ago I summoned the President-0elect to think about real "change." Partner with the car companies in new technologies to build high speed trains and local transit. Partner with the struggling airlines to put them in the new age of transportation by building train stations at airports. Partner with the trucking companies to get them using "intermodal" transport - i.e. the placing of long-haul trailers on flat bed rail cars.

I read with delight that several states have voted for propositions that make sense. In California the voters have authorized the government to build a high speed "jet train?" to travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

I want to take a page from the innovation of the Interstate Highways system put in place by President Eisenhower. He did not simply widen existing roads, which only adds to sprawl and congestion. He built new roads over virgin territory. Unfortunately, it became what is known as the "paving of American," and included slashing cities in half with interstate routes.

But the new rail system, the building of which will supply millions of jobs, and add a new dimension to the failing car business, will go through virgin territory, or as the recent article said, down the media strips of existing interstate highways.

I know that Mr. Harper, who believes in less government, (?) doesn't think we should run a deficit. But now that the G20 has somehow given licence to him, and other countries, to run a deficit in order for the world economy to survive, maybe he will take dramatic action.

The talk about a high speed train between Windsor and Quebec drones on. It is unimaginative. It uses the existing right-of-way.

My suggestion is that we build a completely new system that links Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal in a high speed triangle.

Anyway, I probably won't be here to see it happen - or not happen - as the case will probably be.

WHAT KIND OF THEISM?

A friend of mine recently declared to me that he had gone from being an atheist to an anti-theist. He has transcended merely not believing, and has progressed to being intolerant of religion and all who embrace it. Any religion- he is an equal opportunity cynic.

I’m on his side.

If I weren’t before, then surely the claim by that nationally famous nincompoop from Alaska has pushed me over the edge. Imagine – this woman – who made it to state governor actually believes she has a shot at the Republican presidential nomination for 2012. Only, that is, if her Maker opens a door for her, a door of opportunity, which she will cheerfully and obediently (after all – her Lord proclaimed it) walk through it.

But it is all too easy to sever whatever flimsy link there was to the Divine has been broken by a nitwit.

I cringe every time I see people praying for something – a candlelight vigil – as if somehow there is a Diving Being who will grant them their wish, The wishes are often about finding a lost loved one, who usually turns up dead in some forest, or a terminal cancer patient who drifts inevitably toward death in spite of fervent praying by the family, plus every total stranger who hears about the dying person, and grief junkies to the end, fall on their knees in supplication for her to live.
She dies. But their faith is undimmed.

Recently, one of my dearest friends died. She was too beautiful to die. She was too smiling and lovely to die. She was too talented to die. I commented to someone, who I knew was a “believer” that it makes you wonder how the Divine could let it happen. He responded: “But we do not know what’s on the other side.”

I guess that’s at the heart of it. The notion that, in our own preposterously self-denying way, we can’t believe that we will actually die, turn to dust, and just plain disappear. The only trace of our presence will be what we have left behind – children, a great book, a musical composition.

When I listen to a Mozart symphony I don’t think it is foolish Wolfgang speaking to me from beyond the grave. All I know is that he wrote it down and we still have it. It is what he left for us. It is not divine or spectrally scary – it is dots on a page.

I went to see Bill Maher’s Religulous, hoping for a defining moment for all atheists. What I got was a man who couldn’t decide between being profound and being funny, A man, who obviously has abandoned his Catholic beliefs, but who still atavistically, clings to the possibility that there is something out there. His fallback was always “I don’t know.”

Well I know. There does not have to be a God for me to sit here and write. There does not have to be a God for me to want to play the piano. There does not have to be a God who I can blame for the stock market crash.

One of Toronto’s most listened-to broadcaster/writers, Gordon Sinclair, almost daily reminded us of his scorn for religion and any notion of an all-caring, all-seeing God. His public laughed and thought of him as a “character.” I found that when I said the same things I was branded a dangerous fool.

For me, there does not have to be God. The stuff about “no atheists in foxholes” is pure rubbish. Even if it were true, someone with death staring them in the face is not likely to be mentally competent.

I say: get up off your knees and start making your life what you can make it. But we will not. Like the poor devils in Alcoholics Anonymous, who have given themselves over to a higher power, they have abdicated personal responsi8bility for who they are and what they are.

And we think suicide bombers are demented!

HOW MUCH CHANGE?

The fatal flaw in Barack Obama’s promise of “change” lies in the mindset of most Americans that the marketplace, like Adam Smith’s:”invisible hand” will make everything right. Unless Obama can change the deeply ingrained mindset in “the world’s greatest democracy,” his best-intentioned “change” will be thwarted.

Why the stubbornness? Even the sub-prime mortgage crisis did not change the basics of the American view of life and reality. Sure, it has scared millions into a state where they no longer are buying clothes or cars or houses. A cataclysmic event seems to throttles their initiative. The utter panic that followed 9/11 with enemies lurking around every corner and terrorists were hiding Under every bed – all but paralyzed commerce. Airplanes stopped flying and airline companies headed for bankruptcy protection.

It is no wonder then, that the current financial chaos has throttled them – and us!
It has even choked the banks. The federal money they are getting, which was supposed to return calm to the credit markets, has been used, not to lend to people to buy cars or houses, but to improve the balance sheets of the bank. So far, the government, even as part-owners of major banks, seems powerless to make them release the capital into the lending stream.

So what “change” has amounted to – so far – is, as the old metaphor expresses, like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
It seems to me that ideology rules supreme. It seems to me that “change” is always kept within the parameters of the market economy and as they love to call it – capitalist democracy. In the case of the recent economic catastrophe, the definition is something of an oxymoron, since there was nothing “democratic” about the way the greedy gorged themselves at the table of sub prime mortgages and obscene bonuses.

Obama is talking fiscal stimulus. To the Bushies, that meant an extra thousand dollars to every American to go out and spend. That was pump-priming of the worst kind.

If America is to return to basics they must, and so must we all, recognize that when Adam Smith preached wealth creation, he did not mean that overnight your house doubled in value. That’s not new wealth.

Obama is talking “fiscal stimulus.” He seems to mean spending money on infrastructure to put people back to work, not unlike the public works projects of Roosevelt’s New Deal. (But it will have to be much broader to work. Even Roosevelt could not restore the economy. It took a war to do that.)

Start with the Obama promise to subsidize the creation of new automobile technology, and less dependence on oil by using newer technologies: wind, solar, biomass, clean coal, and yes – nuclear. The impediment to that is that in a profit-sensitive economy, the high cost of alternative power will only be acceptable as long as conventional fuel prices remain high. Now that the oil price has plummeted, it will be back in favour. Profit trumps good intentions.

Obama hints at “infrastructure” investments. To me that means public money will be spent on things that private capital does not do: transit systems, bridges, water works, and the environment.

The fact has never been clearer: government must do what private capital will not: invest in the future whether or not it is conventionally bottom-line profitable. We do not nor should we, operate solely for short-term profit at the expense of the environment, and as we have seen, economic stability..

Will America stumble, believing as they do, that the marketplace is still king and that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” will make everything right? It will be difficult for Obama to tell America that their insurance-run, profit-based health care system is obsolete. Even he, with his ideas about change, will not dare offend America by taking health care out of the hands of insurance companies. His promise is to provide virtual universal health care but to use the existing framework of private capital insurance companies.

There is iron determination in the belief that only private does it right and that government is good at nothing – with the possible exception of making war.I’m beating the horse that died with the $700 billion dollar bailout and the socialization of major banks.

Can the new president move to “save” the car industry? Yes – he must. But at the same time he must ask for a piece of the action. Americans will have to get used to the idea that Washington is a partner in making Chevrolets. If he does give them the money to stay afloat, can he also demand even more than new technology to create gas-less cars? Can he perhaps put GM and Ford and Chrysler into the business of creating a mass transit system to run America’s new high speed railway system – a significant public works initiative that will put millions to work, reduce dependency on the infernal combustion engine and finally bring American transportation into the 21st century. And the new high speed trains will run on electricity.

He can partner with airline companies to bring them into the transit business. He can build, as they have in major European airports, train stations at air terminals.
With revived railroad, he can, with tax incentives, promote an intermodal system that takes heavy long-haul transport trucks off the highways and puts them on railway flat cars. It is already being done, but not enough to make a significant difference.

Remember too, and there are economic models to prove the point: building highways is far more expensive and less labour intensive than building railways.

For America this could be the dawning of a new reality. Out of chaos comes change. Out of desperation comes sanity. That’s nothing new. We have long believed that “necessity is the Mother of Invention.”
Can Obama be the great innovator – the inventor the country needs?

WEIGHING IN ON RACISM

This will not be about the presidential election. It will be about a totally unvarnished look at the innate bigotry of people who profess to know better but still make judgments based on some kind of racial notion. It is the old I-told-you-so school of bigotry, in which a professed tolerator shows his/her true colours – in spite of themselves.

With Obama clearly in my mind (isn’t it in everyone’s?) I engaged in a dinner table conversation with two older and we hope, wiser physicians. People of character, but sadly for me, like many- if not most – members of that profession starkly right-wing. Not that there are not thousands of that group who give of themselves in causes for social and medical justice – I apologize to them for what seems to be a generalization.

We all remember the outflux (is there such a word) of angry doctors from England during the time of the NHS. We all remember the strike by doctors in Saskatchewan when Tommy Douglas created what would become a national treasure – our own national health act.

But about racism: a civilized discussion about the virtues and failures of the American health system. Liberals like me always comment on stuff like – infant mortality – the U.S. is something like 17th on a world list. My dinner-table friends commented, not without truth, that if you factored our black Americans, the number would be closer to the top.

In Canada we have our own “factor-out” statistics. Crime heads the list. People suggest that if you factored out young Jamaican men from crime statistics, we would appear to be a lot safer. In the Prairies, if you factor out the aboriginals the prison population gores down dramatically.

All of these statistical gymnastics are true. What is also true is that we repeat what we have always done: we marginalize the unfortunate. We also criticize the poor for being poor. We criticize single mothers for being single. We arrange the arithmetic of society in such a way that we can find convenient scapegoats for our own failures.
“It’s not us – it’s them.” That may be true unless you just happen to believe that a humane society is judged by how it treats the least of us.

To all the libertarian supporters of Ayn Rand’s grotesque Objectivism – I wish you luck and success. By the way, if things do get really tough and you have no more scapegoats to blame, a friendly government will pick up the tab. My goodness – didn’t they just do that??