Mediaboss Marketing

Its a Cottage Life government in a Brady Bunch Parliament.

It is something of a curiously unasked question why the prime minister has continued his near-total self-isolation for over two months now, and exercises his function as leader from the bottom step of his residence. I have no problem believing there are serious reasons behind it. We are in a pandemic. One prime minister, Boris Johnson, was actually hit by the COVID-19 virus, and set Britain somewhat a-tremble for a couple of weeks. In Trudeaus case it could and likely is his idea that setting an example, being a role model as he put it several weeks back, is behind his own practice of making his announcements from the cottage and largely eschewing travel anywhere else.

Yet the combination of a leader mostly removed from the country, and a Parliament that steps away from its supreme function during the greatest crisis in 50 years, strikes me at least as unnerving. The isolation of the leader, and the removal of parliamentary debate and scrutiny, simultaneously leave a great void in the flow of necessary information we used to call it accountability during a most anxious time, with previously unthinkable expenditures being made every day on the fly with little or no detail about the amounts being sent out and the various groups to receive them.

We know so little of what is being decided

We know so little of what is being decided, the protocols under which massive expenditures are being decided on, why X group receives money and Y group does not, why $9 billion for students and $2.5 billion for seniors. There should be questions and answers for every amount.

All we really do know is that the deficit is inflating at a prodigious rate and that the resources for keeping track of it all are thin to woeful.

One headline from the National Post tells of the auditor general lamenting that his office simply does not have the resources to execute its essential duties. Let me cite it: House committee unanimous in petitioning Morneau to cover auditor generals funding shortfall. In the jargon of the noble trade, the sub-head gives the alarming information that he told the committee in May that his office had no choice but to cut five planned audits for the current year. This is worrisome stuff. The one parliamentary office set to watch over the public treasury is being forced to amputate the offices oversight. There is a further lament: Government expenditures are increasing, which amplifies the challenges we are facing. Ill say.

However. It might add a touch of piquancy to know that this is not a story or report from this year. Its from last year. And at that time, when audits were being shelved or cut the AG was asking then for a $10.8-million addition to his budget. An amount, which in comparison to the billions upon billions that are gushing out of Cottage Life is a trinket, a smudge, a jot and a tittle, a whispering breeze in a howling hurricane.

If the AG was weeping in 2019, when times were good, people were out and about, when hundreds of thousands were not forced into idleness, when businesses by the tens of thousands were not closing or closed, and the economy doing well if he was weeping and having difficulty keeping track of the public purse, in what state of lamentation must the poor AG be in the 2020 of today?

There has been much chatter about what is or is not an essential service. Shall we not all agree that not since the invention of the pencil has there been a more essential service in the context of todays Canadian non-parliamentary governance than that of the public accountant. There has not been a budget. There has not been a fiscal update. And of course there has been stalling and non-response to this years request from the AG to supplement the ability to get some independent measure of the tidal flow of daily spending.

Not since the invention of the pencil has there been a more essential service than that of the public accountant

It is almost comedic to watch the various clips of Pierre Poilievre, who is the leader of the opposition (de facto) in our Brady Bunch Parliament, trying to get Finance Minister Bill Morneau to answer, with any specifics, when there will be updates, whether fraudulent claims for benefits are being made, whether prisoners are receiving some of the CERB payments, and finally whether he will grant the requested supplements to the auditor generals office.

Morneaus shameless and bland non-answers, his tranquil recital of the talking-points of the day, almost equal Trudeaus sublime ability in the same department. Poilievre asks. Morneau does not answer.

Where has accountability gone is the question of the day.

But there is no reason, on this end of the holiday weekend, not to offer a little diversion. I think one of the best headlines in recent days, when so much is sombre and tense, was this one, also from the Post: Canadas road to UN Security Council seat runs through Fiji.

This is geopolitics as it is played by the masters. Do we have Fiji on our side?

We do know that despite the great demands of governing during a crisis, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has spoken with 28 world leaders since the pandemic crisis began in early March as he continues to pursue a temporary seat on the UN Security Council.

Come to think of it, this may explain the self-isolation mystery. It could just be simple embarrassment.

See the rest here:
Rex Murphy on the COVID-19 crisis: The opposition asks. The Liberals do not answer - National Post

A Liberal government will reduce the deficit. We will implement new programs only if they can be funded within existing expenditures. We will exercise unwavering discipline in controlling federal spending . Expenditure reductions will be achieved by cancelling unnecessary programs, streamlining processes and eliminating duplication.

Its hard to imagine the Liberals making such a promise in this day and age, but that is what they pledged to do in their 1993 Red Book. Contrast that to the 2015 election, when the party campaigned on the idea of running $10-billion deficits for three years, for a total of $30 billion a limit they blew through (and it wasnt even close). Or the 2019 election, when it gave up on balancing the books altogether and introduced a plan to run yearly deficits of $20 billion over its four-year mandate.

The coronavirus, however, changes everything. Those deficits now seem like chump change in the face of the Parliamentary Budget Officers (PBO) April 30 forecast of a $252.1-billion deficit in 2020-21 a number that, given the spate of spending announcements since then, he now says is likely to prove very optimistic.

As a percentage of the economy, even the optimistic number would be the highest on record. And that doesnt include the provinces, which have also seen their expenditures balloon. All told, a National Bank Financial report this week estimated that combined federal and provincial deficits could reach a staggering $350 billion, which represents about 20 per cent of gross domestic product.

If theres any good news, its that the massive increase in government spending that weve witnessed since the start of this pandemic will (hopefully) be temporary. Yes, COVID-19 has exposed critical holes in our health-care system, long-term care facilities and supply of critical goods that will require long-term expenditures in order to address. But the vast majority of the spending the financial support for workers who have lost their jobs and companies that have lost their revenue streams can easily come to an end once the health threat subsides.

Thats not to say that it is inevitable, though. We have already heard calls for the government to transform the Canada Emergency Response Benefit into a universal basic income program, for the state to use this crisis as an opportunity to replace fossil fuels with green energy pick your pet cause and chances are that someone is using the coronavirus as an excuse to push it.

But the Liberals must resist these calls, because the fact is that we will not be able to afford any of it. We wont even be able to afford any of the programs, like universal pharmacare, that Parliament was considering at the beginning of the year.

The Liberals justified their deficit spending before the pandemic by citing Canadas relatively good debt-to-GDP ratio, the amount of government debt relative to the size of the economy. Yet the PBO estimates that the national debt will hit $962 billion this year, up from $685 billion in 2018, and could easily top $1 trillion thats a one with 12 zeroes the year after.

Meanwhile, Statistics Canada released a flash estimate last month, which suggested that real GDP shrank nine per cent in March. The PBOs scenario estimates that real GDP will decline by 12 per cent this year, which would be four times worse than the worst year since we started keeping records in 1961.

Divide those two numbers and we could be looking at a debt-to-GDP ratio of nearly 50 per cent by the end of the year. This, however, would not be unprecedented: it stood at a whopping 66.6 per cent in 1995.

That was when Prime Minister Jean Chrtien and Finance Minister Paul Martin launched an aggressive effort to balance the budget that still makes conservatives jealous. They did so not by massively increasing taxes, but by cutting federal spending by 14 per cent between 1995 and 1998. Thanks to these austerity measures, the economy prospered, growing between four and five per cent a year between 1997 and 2000. Accordingly, our debt-to-GDP ratio dropped to 29 per cent by 2009.

Barring a sudden end to their minority government, when the current crisis abates, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau will face a similar situation. It has always seemed somewhat paradoxical that Chrtien and his American counterpart, President Bill Clinton, were able to balance their budgets in the 90s, while their conservative successors watched them balloon once again. Yet centre-left governments often find it easier to drastically reduce spending, because people tend to believe that they are doing it out of necessity, rather than ideology, and therefore are more inclined to give them a pass.

Will this current crop of Liberals follow in the footsteps of their predecessors and do what needs to be done to stabilize this countrys finances, retaining the prosperity that sustains our way of life and preserving it for future generations? We certainly hope so, but their own recent history is cause for concern.

Read more:
NP View: Will these Liberals be willing to do what Chrtien and Martin did? - National Post

Opposition transport spokeswoman Libby Mettam said the Liberal Party was still committed to Roe 8 and the Perth Freight Link.

Loading

If necessary it is a decision we would most certainly reverse and we are comfortable fighting the government on this issue given it has the support of the community of the southern suburbs, she said.

Ms Mettam said WA needed big ticket infrastructure projects to help the state recover from the coronavirus pandemic and with $1.2 billion in federal funding still on the table, now was the time to get it started.

Were finding it is quite extraordinary that 62,000 people have lost their jobs in the past four weeks and the McGowan government would come out with a plan to block Roe 8, she said.

The Perth Freight Link was envisioned to connect Fremantle Port with Perths southern suburbs but it was scrapped after the Labor party won the 2017 election in a landslide with stopping the road as a headline commitment.

The Liberal Party maintains the road would reduce congestion and remove trucks from Leach Highway while future proofing the Fremantle port.

Ms Saffioti said the McGowan government had been given a clear mandate to stop the freight link.

It was a deeply flawed, controversial project that I am pleased has now been laid to rest, she said.

Environment Minister Stephen Dawson said the land that was cleared to make way for the freight link was already being rehabilitated which would ensure the Beeliar Wetlands and its conservation values would remain for future generations.

Visit link:
Liberals vow to resurrect Roe 8 if elected next year - WAtoday

The US Capitol Building in Washington, DC. Photo: Reuters / Jim Bourg.

This years Yom HaShoah was observed months before the US presidential election, and just after another Israeli election.

As spring turns to summer, there is little doubt that the already elevated temperatures and tensions of political discourse will soon begin to rise. Policies will be debated, disagreements will be had, and the relatively minor fault lines that separate us will be accentuated by the fervor of the days ahead.

It is not my place to despair about the political fracturing that exists in the United States or the unresolved tensions within Israel. But in the spirit of collective confinement, I offer a challenge to all of us to engage in a bit of introspection, to understand that the words we use in the coming days will shape the debates we have and ultimately the political reality that follows.

It has somehow become predictable in the marketplace of political ideas to hear of individuals or their associated groups being referred to as Nazis, communists, or antisemites. If one seeks to provide free medical care for ones countrymen, that person must be a communist. If one disagrees with Israeli territorial claims, one must be an antisemite. These ad hominem attacks are usually factually incorrect and poor bargaining tactics. And in the broader picture, they injure both the reputation of the recipient and the objective of the proponent.

April 24, 2020 12:04 pm

When we label individuals as ideologies, we run the risk of conflating entire groups with ideologies they simply do not hold.

While it might seem appealing to relegate the arguments of all Democrats to the category of communist propaganda, or the proposals of all Republicans to the category of religious extremism, doing so suggests that we are only willing, or able, to exclusively hear the arguments of the fringe.

If it is only the extreme argument that we are willing to debate, then that is the debate we will get, rather than the debate that we need. We will deafen our opponents, ignore any of their persuasive points, and risk losing the greatest gift provided by any discussion: the opportunity to change our own minds.

The right to speak is coupled with a responsibility to listen and to engage. We are nations of people, not pundits.

I am not Jewish. Unlike that which is the case for so many members of the Jewish faith, my family has no historical memory of fleeing oppression or having our right to exist challenged anywhere, much less in the place we call home. But every generation of my family as far back as we can recall has supplied men who fought to protect and liberate the victims of oppression and to promote the freedom of expression that all peaceful peoples deserve.

I have traveled to many parts of the world. I have studied at predominantly conservative institutions and at liberal institutions. I have debated policy with Democrats, Republicans, Likud and Avoda. I have friends and colleagues that span the political spectrum; from the radical left to the reactionary right. Even within that experience, never have I known an avowed communist nor met a Nazi. Despite what popular media circles would have you believe, the radical left and right are not the majority.

To be clear, Nazis exist. If the internet has done anything for us, it has highlighted the existence of otherwise obscure groups that seek to foment nothing but hate and discontent or violent opposition to our democratic institutions. The cult of Nazism persists in the United States and abroad, as do more subtle forms of antisemitic rhetoric. These individuals and their messages of hate should be challenged at every opportunity. But we who stand against these forces of evil should be wary of the type of misguided zeal that inadvertently creates more of the enemies we seek to overcome.

At the end of every election, there is a winner and there is a loser, and everyone will have a favorite. The person whom you debated across the table or at whom you yelled across the police line may be the person who approves your next stimulus check. Regardless of what they may do for you, at the end of the election cycle, they shall inhabit this world the same world as you inhabit. They are entitled to the same dignity you are afforded. Their vote will still count, whether you value it or not.

It is in that vein that we would all do well, in the spirit of Yom HaShoah and the coming elections, to take stock of the words we use. Avoid vilifying the other side of an argument as an ideological pariah. One should have conviction in ones beliefs, not chip away at the identity of ones opponents.

This election season, lets not call people Nazis or communists; unless thats what they are. Failing to rise to such a challenge is akin to becoming the proverbial one-tool carpenter, he who has only a hammer and sees every problem as a nail. Our problems are more complex than that. They are deserving of a more substantive debate.

The author is a publishingAdjunct at The MirYam Institute, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, and a veteran of three tours as an officer in the US Navy.

The MirYam Institute is the leading international forum for Israel focused discussion, dialogue, and debate, focused on campus presentations, engagement with international legislators, and gold-standard trips to the State of Israel. Follow their work atwww.MirYamInstitute.org.

Originally posted here:
We Must Stop Demonizing Liberals and Conservatives, and Distorting Facts - Algemeiner

The white US liberal intelligentsia has been constantly frustrated since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016.

The more attacks the white and corporate-controlled liberal US media outlets launch against the business-supported Trump, the more popular he becomes.

As white liberals feign concern over Trumps continued dismantlement of the welfare state and restoration of an unapologetic white supremacist system, his many supporters celebrate these achievements and demand more.

What is it that makes Trump so much more persuasive to so many Americans than the liberal media and its pundits?

To comprehend how US political culture understands the welfare state and the dismantlement of institutional white supremacy, we must go back and understand how they came about in the first place.

When amid the Great Depression, then US President Franklin Roosevelt opted for the New Deal to transform the country into a welfare state beginning in the 1930s (expanded by his successors through the 1960s), he did so to save US capitalism from the impending communist threat while maintaining white supremacy, and not because of any socialist leanings.

US liberal journalism, mortgaged to big corporations and their crusade against communism, celebrated these transformations

The Russian Revolution was institutionalising itself by the mid-1920s as an example for the world to follow, and by the 1930s the US Communist Party's influence on American workers became a veritable threat to the capitalist order.

Indeed, with the major triumph of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany, the threat of communism had become so great by the end of WWII that the white capitalist powers opted to stop their competition and unite against the communist threat.

Anti-Soviet propaganda began in earnest after the war, as the Americans launched a religious war against the Soviets, condemning them as secular and Godless atheists. Former President Dwight Eisenhower decided to get baptised in office and brought the fanatical reverendBilly Graham in as a spiritual adviser to the White House.

Eisenhower began the tradition of the National Prayer Breakfast and started his cabinet meetings with a moment of silent prayer. The Pledge of Allegiance was transformed in 1954 by Eisenhower from I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, to pledging allegiance to one nation under God.

In 1956, Congress enacted a law signed by Eisenhower that introduced the phrase In God We Trust to be printed on American paper currency, replacing the erstwhile phrase E pluribus unum (out of many, one), in use since 1776.

Two years later, Congress enacted a law introducing the phrase In God We Trust as the national motto of the US.

US liberal journalism, mortgaged to big corporations and their crusade against communism, celebrated these transformations. It was the Eisenhower administration that enlisted religion and invented anti-communist Islamist jihadism as a weapon against Soviet communism and Third World socialism, with Saudi Arabia subcontracted for the role soon after.

As a result of Eisenhowers Protestant Christian institutionalisation, the proportion of religious Americans rose from 49 percent in 1940 to 69 percent in 1960.

How coronavirus is fuelling American hate

These transformations took place when the US South was run by a white supremacist, racial segregationist system, while racist institutions and structures dominated the north and the federal government.

Federal laws created white-only towns called the suburbs, enforced by racially restrictive covenants for home ownership, while the 1944 GI bill made benefits in housing and education available only to white people.

In the context of an institutionally white supremacist US, American journalists and intellectuals sang the glories of US democracy against Godless communism.

But if the welfare state was able to pull the rug out from under the communists, white supremacy made the US vulnerable to anti-racists, communist or otherwise, around the world. This was especially grave for US imperialism, as recently decolonised countries around the world,who had just rid themselves of the European colonial racist yoke,looked to the Soviets as an anti-racist, socialist example with which to ally, rather than the white supremacist US.

Just as the welfare state put a human face on capitalism, there was a need for a human face to be placed on US white supremacy. The 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown v Board of Education began the dismantling of the racist apartheid educational system. This was mainly done not as a concession to African Americans, but as part of the imperialist strategy to attract Third World countries repulsed by US white supremacy.

But the momentum of the black struggle to end white supremacy within the US could not be stopped, and it proceeded apace in the 1960s, with increasing white liberal concessions from the state and its judicial system - especially as the dismantlement of formal white supremacist structures seemed to beautify the ugly reality of US white supremacy.

US liberal journalism and the liberal white intelligentsia again celebrated the states achievements - while simultaneously targeting black radical civil libertarians with racist propaganda campaigns - as proof of the glories of US democracy against totalitarian communism.

This, however, did not appeal to the massive white racist political culture, especially as racist depictions of non-whites in US culture continued on liberal white-dominated television screens and in the culture at large.

Horrified by these concessions that weakened formal white supremacy, the new right, emboldened by white liberal anti-communism, racism, and Eisenhowers institutionalised religion, began to organise in the late 1960s, demanding the reinstatement of white supremacy and the dismantling of the welfare state.

The New Jim Crow system was instituted in the 1970s and has intensified since the 1980s to keep African Americans in their place, while former President Ronald Reagan and his successors heeded corporate demands to get rid of the Soviets once and for allso that the New Deal could be safely dismantled.

Once the Soviets were gone, presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama intensified the destruction of the welfare state, while putting a lovable human face on US neoliberalism and white supremacy. This is why Obama, especially, was and remains the best thing that ever happened to white liberals.

With the fall of the communist threat, the liberal discourse of US democracy deployed since the 1960s lost its efficacy. Liberal notions of multiculturalism and diversity, which had not improved the lives of the majority of blacks, Latinos or Native Americans, whose poverty and oppression persist, as is the case with poor whites (and the majority of the poor in the US are indeed white), were quickly understood as neoliberal and liberal ruses of white supremacist racial tokenism.

The liberal US corporate media never laid blame for the poverty of Americans on the white owners of big business, having itself been part of the white supremacist corporate attacks on the welfare state since the 1970s as a system of privilege for lazy non-white Americans at the expense of hard-working white Americans.

As a result, the majority of the white poor became ingrained with the idea that their real and only identity was white, not poor, and that their enemy was not the white owners of the corporations that impoverished them, but the victimised poor non-whites and immigrants.

When Trump arrived on the scene, he did not tell poor white Americans anything that they had not been taught by US culture, media, and evangelical Protestantism

When Trump arrived on the scene, he did not tell poor white Americans anything that they had not been taught by US culture, media, and evangelical Protestantism since Billy Graham.

Trumps strategy, like that of the white supremacist right of which he is a part, was to tell the white poor that as white people, he was on their side, and that their enemy was not only what remains of the US welfare state, but also (the pretend) US multicultural democracy that white liberalism has used to cover up US white supremacy since the 1970s.

Yetwhat Trump promises poor white Americans who lack white and class privilege - and whom white liberals, such as Hillary Clinton, find deplorable - is a restoration of formal white supremacy, which they mistake for an amelioration of their poverty.

As there is no longer a communist threat, and Third World neoliberal elites have been converted since the 1970s into the biggest fans of the US (now that they can be inducted into the one percent through diversity and multiculturalism programmes), conservative US white supremacists correctly realised that they could come out of the closet and demand the reversal of all the concessions the liberal white supremacists had instituted during the communist threat years.

Trump's vision of what makes America great: Hegemonic state violence

Trump represents these corporate aspirations, which have been pushed by the US liberal media and culture for decades. Indeed, Trump is a creation of white American liberalisms own trajectory, not a contradiction to it.

This is why when hypocritical US liberal journalists and pundits question Trump during press conferences - most evident during the recent coronavirus crisis - or debate his appeal on liberal television networks, he shows them up easily for the hypocrites they are.

What accounts for this achievement is Trumps sincere commitment to the restoration of an unabashed, unapologetic US white supremacy and runaway capitalism that easily withstandsthe wishy-washiness of white US liberalism and its continued commitment to white supremacy with a human face,whether a white one or in blackface.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Read more:
Liberalism is the human face of white supremacy - Middle East Eye