It is mathematical, after all.
Neither U.S. Democratic primary candidate Hillary Clinton with now 2,200, nor challenger Bernie Sanders, with just over 1,800, can reach the required 2,384 delegate votes before 712 super delegates vote during the last week of July.
Which is long ways off in politics. Currently, Clinton is favoured by 580 and Sanders by 50 of those appointed 712, give or take a few.
Republican and Democratic party executives long have had a contract to operate as one party when it comes to crushing popular nonconformists like Dennis Kucinich in 2008, or now Sanders.
The powerful bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, with its mandate and arsenal of undemocratic manipulation tools to sideline popular candidates, is only one of their instruments.
Presumed Republican candidate Donald Trump who, like other sitting or aspiring dictators, already talks about the presidency in terms of a one-branch government, without acknowledging democratic institutions like Congress, the Senate, the U.S. Supreme Court, future elections or state governments, is a game changer.
He might yet put the fear of God into the elitists in the Democratic Party, such as the appointed super delegates. They typically prefer a Republican president over a populist one of their own.
However, the FBI’s criminal investigation of Clinton may also take her down in a heartbeat.
This is what the premature or fake nomination of Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate by The Associated Press in collaboration (leaked) with the Clinton campaign was all about. On the eve of the California primary, it was timed for a massive vote suppression and distortion.
Ordinary folks and especially young Sanders supporters tend to sacrifice more for the effort than wealthier Clinton supporters in the lengthy, time-consuming primary lineups.
The lie that it was all over made some stay at work or home, and unfairly gave extra percentages to Clinton.
Cautiously put, Clinton is one of the most negatively viewed public figures across the U.S.
Unappreciated by political experts’ tunnel vision inside the Washington Beltway fish tank, in the general public she loses against the straight-shooting Sanders.
And, importantly, she does much less well than Senator Sanders against Trump.
Polling her against the unpredictable conman Trump is a close thing at this point.
But when the chips are down, her disingenuous air and double-talking track record might come up short. That’s especially when debating this so far very intuitive and successful knife-fighter, who only bloodied 17 Republican primary contenders.
The danger for a national and international stage that the Philadelphia Democratic Party convention will have to deal with is a clear-cut one.
All the oxygen of the entire 2016 presidential primaries consists of breathing anti-establishment sentiment.
It was sowed in decades by neoliberal promoters, for Wall Street crime, militarism, stopping access to health care or education and for fracking the climate, like hawkish Hillary Clinton.
Testimony in 2004 by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, from an interview with veteran journalist Bill Moyers, has recently gone viral.
It concerned Clinton, who flip-flopped on the forever returning bankruptcy bill. It starves and milks poor people by forbidding them bankruptcy, which, as First Lady, she had opposed.
Warren: “This is a bill that is like a vampire; it will not die. There is a lot of money behind it.”
Moyers: “Bill [Clinton], her husband had vetoed it.”
Warren: “Her husband had vetoed it very much at her urging.”
Moyers: “And?”
Warren: “She voted in favour of it ... she has taken money from the [bank] groups and, more to the point, she worries about them as a constituency.”
Warren closeup saw Clinton’s lack of moral fibre as she had face-to-face, comprehensively as law professor, briefed the law-educated First Lady on the consumer credit industry.
The big banks attack freedom with a version of debt bondage by astronomic interest rates on payday loans that are even more extreme than in Canada, for example.
Senator Warren’s June 9 endorsement for primary candidate Clinton gave pause to reflect on deeply corrupted mentalities.
Warren’s up to that point untarnished record is recognized as founder of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and as a long-time political ally of Sanders.
Jill Stein, the Green Party presumptive presidential candidate, knows upholding integrity and accountability is a long game.
On June 9, interviewed on Democracy Now, she cut to the bone of the Democratic Party’s dilemma: “We are rushing towards war with Hillary Clinton, who has a track record."
“And on climate, H.C. established an office to promote fracking around the world, while Secretary of State. So the terrible things that we expect from Donald Trump, we’ve actually already seen from H.C.”
“The lesser evil very much makes inevitable the greater evil, because people don’t come out to vote for a politician that is throwing them under the bus ... they need you to be afraid of them, because they are not for you.”
Self-appointed town crier and false populist Trump quite possibly cannot lose if the only anti-establishment candidate of both parties, Senator Sanders, is pushed out by continued fraudulent manipulation.
Vote suppression as in California and New York, vote counting fraud like in Iowa, biased super delegates and unbalanced sleaze journalism are running rampant since the Democratic Party primaries started converging toward a Trumpastrophy.
Preventing totalitarian disaster could turn out to be the patriotic and legal obligation super delegates will eventually have to answer for.
Their vote for Sanders further will offer them opportunity to correct and atone for already orchestrated election fraud.
Calling to heel a rising populist movement with deep American roots is useless.
It will work no more than a newborn will go back into the mother’s womb in case its behaviour is not pleasing to everyone.
Once Clinton would be finally anointed, irretrievable chaos will have started.
Sanders supporters, except for a few, will not vote for Trump, but experience shows that insulted and backstabbed people are electorally demobilized and stay home.
It’s a fact that elections are decided not by winning over votes but by turning out the support base.
Bernie Sanders has no problem there, as Clinton supporters are left of Clinton on many accounts: militarism, her Honduras or Libya regime changes as well as a renewed cold war encircling of China and Russia, medicare suppression, financialization, undemocratic free trade deals and unprecedented anti-Mexican deportations that legitimize Trump’s racism.
History bears out that standing on principle improves a people’s practical survival chances often more than shortsighted tactical betrayals.
President John F. Kennedy, who set a high standard for presidents to come, learned and understood that.
With the Trump/Clinton symbiosis, we may be rapidly entering into a dynamic of history JFK once had wisely warned against.
The realization that militarist and imperialist advisors had gulled him to escalate aggression against Cuba and Vietnam made him more mindful and inspired him to initiate the international Alliance for Progress.
On its first anniversary in March 1962, JFK poignantly highlighted social justice and democratic rights: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Peter Becker is Whitehorse energy consultant.
By Peter Becker
A highly unusual defector document from free trade religion with the title Neoliberalism: Oversold? was released by three of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’S) senior figures. http://goo.gl/KUhMHz
This break is significant after decades of media and academic lockdown during which economic critiques on incoherent elitism was verboten or pigeonholed as loony.
The explosive news item hit the wire during the last days of May, conveying a sense of urgency as it is dated June 2016. It appears to be part of a wider historical adjustment process that asserts itself in many ways.
Neoliberalism equals colonialism disguised behind market talk.
The IMF paper is not worded quite as succinctly as my own teardown.
No matter; it is a purely face-saving moderation at this point.
American journalist and financial analyst Yves Smith commented: “In some ways, the fact that this article was written at all, and that it is apparently fomenting debate in policy circles, is more important than the details of its argument.”
It just got harder for the political, education and media mainstream, in Yukon as everywhere else, to continue to eradicate from the dictionary the mention and meaning of neoliberal decay.
Bad news also for the future of carbon-boosting derivative speculation, better known as carbon (tax/trade) pricing, and undemocratic deals like TPP.
Free trade is not about trade, but to shift legislative powers to multinationals.
Without naming the actual web of so-called free trade agreements, their toxic provisions enforcing economic warfare against people are in detail rejected in the IMF paper.
Never before were shots taken at Milton Friedman, the late free trade guru, by an international financial regulator.
Astounding for the conservatively-poised IMF is the choice of its Chile example and thread to lead criticism and rethinking.
First sentence: “Milton Friedman in 1982 hailed [Pinochet’s fascist] Chile as an ‘economic miracle’. Nearly a decade earlier, Chile had turned to politics that have since been widely emulated across the globe.”
Likely, this release happened with the consent and even initiative of IMF head Christine Lagarde.
Until its continued criticism of namely the German and French governments’ bankster profiteering in the Greece crisis, the IMF had been a cheer leader.
Stanley Fischer, formerly of the IMF now with the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, is quoted:
“What useful purpose is served by short-term international capital flows?”
Finance figureheads are suave diplomats of the highest order when admitting they were wrong, and one has to be able to carve out the subtext with precision.
What Fisher is really saying to me sounds a little more straightforward: Inflated currency and derivative speculation siphons off productive investments and disrupts growth of honest businesses.
The very last sentence in the document hits free traders and other neoliberal enforcers hard:
“Policy makers, and institutions like the IMF that advise them [countries], must be guided not by faith, but by evidence of what has worked.”
Evidence-based thinking was kind of my point in the Star column I wrote “Climate survival equals renewable industry growth”, but gladly shared.
Altogether not bad for the muggles from the IMF that they offer a breath of fresh air following 40 years of mental deep freeze and free market mantra singing.
It is appropriate, since they had ushered in unprecedented protectionism with subsidies for price-fixing cartels like Big Oil.
In the meantime, false populist Donald Trump vultures are feeding on the rage of IMF’s victims of busted labour rights spiralling out of control into Dickensian poverty.
The lost ground and consequences of the IMF’s, World Bank’s, Fraser Institute’s, Clinton’s and Chretien’s actions are with us here today.
On the other end of the spectrum, Fort McMurray’s Iron & Earth oil sands workers, retraining to renewable energy, have beaten the IMF to the punch in sending a signal to restore wealth and growth.
The 500 strong and growing Iron & Earth membership knows that rebuilding economic strength, from the rustbelt in central Canada to the oil patch in the West, comes from installing and manufacturing of a renewable energy infrastructure.
They are getting ready – and are ready.
In his letter published Monday, Gerald Haase, invoking the Seychelles, was stuck like a broken record, ignoring the fact the B.C. carbon tax is not revenue-neutral, a verified fact that has been pointed out to him.
Judy Deutsch wrote for the magazine Canadian Dimension, winter 2016 issue, under her title: “Willful blindness kills hope for climate change reversal”:
“Much is left out about carbon taxes. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) found that the B.C. carbon tax is a regressive tax, disproportionately benefitting the rich, and that it did not reduce emissions.”
Actually, the senior economist for the CCPA, Marc Lee, tallied up in detail B.C. greenhouse gases emissions, which are sharply increasing and not decreasing, as Premier Christy Clark claims.
Ms. Deutsch had summed up very well some of the fact findings of the B.C. Auditor General in his 2013 special report: An Audit of Carbon Neutral Government.
However, the report goes even further in detailing systemic carbon accounting fraud as part of the carbon price scheme that excludes emissions from Encana frack gas installations.
Some frack gas operations even receive a double whammy of cash rewards, out of the carbon tax returns and on top of that carbon off-set payments.
“The carbon pricing lobby sucked all the air out of the room,” leading Canadian energy economist Mark Jaccard told DeSmog Canada (describing a first ministers’ meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from March).
“What we should be doing is looking at those jurisdictions that have made progress and learn from them instead of closing our eyes, saying ‘I want a carbon price, and don’t bother me with the evidence.’”
Premier Darrell Pasloski goes into the election with the carbon price advantage, despite being halfway onboard anyways, because Gerald Haase and others hand it to him.
We are getting the fracking idea of a Yukon carbon tax.
Photo by Photo Submitted
OBJECTING TO CARBON PRICING – Banners are shown at a Unist’ot’en First Nation pipeline blockade, situated roughly halfway on a line between Prince George and Prince Rupert, 60 km south of Houston B.C. Photo courtesy YES! Magazine photo by Stephen Miller
1) Following compelling statements, on page five, carbon pricing as “a progressive carbon tax” lets down climate survival, forgetting oil and gas expansion is driven through the carbon price frame.
A deal breaker, but it can be corrected, and here is why.
In jurisdictions from B.C. to the U.K., the carbon tax is a flat tax blaming ordinary people who have not made the bad energy infrastructure decisions.
It is never revenue-neutral, not progressive and not carbon-neutral. But it is used aggressively in leveraging and capitalizing carbon derivative speculation.
The carbon price scheme is rounded out with a demand for cap and trade using NDP Leader Tom Mulcair’s slogan “polluter pays” nothing.
By rewarding corporate polluters like Encana in B.C. with cash, cap and trade always distorts energy markets and caps renewables.
Cap and trade as an offset scheme caps emission reductions but not emissions.
It is also a facilitator for carbon accounting fraud, which is evidenced in the B.C. Auditor General’s special 2013 report An Audit of Carbon Neutral Government. Major emitters are excluded by deceptive design of policy itself, not imperfection.
The 2014 IPCC report recognizes conventional fuel taxes, contrary to the carbon tax, have worked and can work to generate and leverage renewable infrastructure investment.
So what is in a name?
Why is the carbon price terminology pushed forward so rigidly purified, so romantically and dogmatically when practical solutions are energy price and energy framework as well as agriculture-related?
The abstract carbon pricing language triggers ownership and policy control by Big Oil and Wall Street cartels, who like to dress in a supposedly market-responsive, friendly corner store image.
Carbon emissions range from cattles’ methane farts, corn-fed, not grass-fed, to air travel to petroleum resources burned in the manufacture of wind turbines. That is, until there are enough of them to make new ones with clean energy and hopefully soon enough.
The Policy Research Group of the University of Sussex released a peer-reviewed economics study on phasing out fossil fuels “within 10 years.”
Climate and other environmental factors along with economics of employment, profitability and conversion efficiencies, lessons learned from other industrial transitions, suggested a war economy pace has the best feasibility. And no mention of carbon pricing.
In fact, a unified carbon product to attach a price to does not exist anywhere – no more than camel’s milk and potato beetles could function as single agricultural market item outside of Wall Street’s creative criminal schemes.
A vacuity of meaninglessness serves to fill in optical illusions that hide and expand the prohibitively high carbon pricing we cannot afford as it is.
As one example, electric vehicles run a lot more cheaply than oil-fired ones.
Lack of fast-charge stations is obviously not a case for retail market signals but represents an infrastructure distortion.
Twisted neoliberal economics, with their carbon price talking points, hide and prolong facts like these.
It’s similar to how Big Tobacco did it; for Big Oil, the stakes are just too high to tolerate truly independent science and evidence. The false flag of the carbon price allows them to play both sides and control the environmental presence in the room.
Likewise, corrupting carbon price talk with its outflow of regulating/permitting crime and not banning fracking obviously played a role in co-opting the Yukon NDP caucus, Yukoners Concerned About Oil and Gas Exploration/Development and the Yukon Conservation Society.
Step by step, they assist and sell the Yukon government’s frack program, in its legal implementation.
This includes Oil and Gas Act amendments that have removed the oil and gas veto right of the Kaska people, amongst removing other obstacles to fracking. At face value, the mentioned entities oppose fracking, of course.
By 2030, Alberta will replace coal plants with, over life cycles, even dirtier frack gas-powered ones.
Like in B.C., frack gas is climate solution number one, digging the carbon hole deeper and far into the future (Oregon fully replaces coal with wind by 2030).
Dimming down awareness is one more carbon pricing strategy that favours such deceptive climate solutions.
It is the idea, sometimes explicit, sometimes subliminal, that CO2 is the only problem of burning fossil resources as an energy source. A single-issue regulatory sausage maker comes in handy for tar and frack recruiters.
This is comforting to all super-polluters in carbon and uranium-based energy sectors that carbon price language hides seven-fold prohibitive impacts.
Fossil/nuclear cartels generate harm against climate, clean water/air/land, democracy, peace, industrial resource preservation, energy/food security as well as energy affordability.
In its preface of the study Carbon Trading – How it Works and Why it Fails, the widely respected Swedish Dag Hammarskjold Foundation speaks for all scientists and economists, I am aware of, who have actually examined climate and energy policies:
“At a time when carbon trading is still being promoted as the central solution to climate change, we continue that it is, instead, part of the problem.”
And, under the headline Taxation:
“As a means for altering behaviour, carbon taxes have many of the same problems as carbon (off-set) trading.”
Amy Miller’s book and movie Carbon Rush add to comprehensive community education on cynical carbon pricing mechanisms that accelerate and incentivize greenhouse gas emission increases.
So did Judy Deutsch for the magazine Canadian Dimension, winter 2016 issue, with the title: “Willful blindness kills hope for climate change reversal”, who wrote:
“Much is left out about carbon taxes. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (senior economist Marc Lee) found that the B.C. carbon tax is a regressive tax, disproportionately benefitting the rich, and that it did not reduce emissions.
“In Australia and B.C., it deflects attention from coal mining, natural gas, outsourcing heavy industry, Kyoto-exempt shipping.”
The Mining Association of Canada rolled out a big media release in claqueur style lobbying for a carbon tax, fully detached from evidence and critical reasoning.
NDP Leader Liz Hanson and Liberal leader Sandy Silver picked it up right away as opportunity to get in on the carbon pricing talk.
Hanson flip-flopped on a previous statement by MLA Kate White on behalf of the Yukon NDP that there is no plan for a carbon tax.
Premiers Darrell Pasloski and Brad Wall of Saskatchewan, similarly to White, had stated a carbon tax is currently neither affordable nor needed.
However, they concurred it is supposedly more or less positive.
On that basis, everybody can get into the “Carbon Pricing Club” tomorrow morning if they feel nobody is watching.
A World Bank internal strategy paper with the Carbon Pricing Club subtitle, to advance elite finance interests, was leaked recently.
The April 2011 membership resolution for the Yukon NDP to “… in government, or opposition, engage in a dynamic exploration and development of a comprehensive Yukon Green Energy Act” continues to be stonewalled by the NDP caucus.
The father of renewable energy source legislation, late Hermann Scheer, provided accounts in Energy Autonomy of how the carbon price routine consistently serves to stop green energy acts and by talking renewables down to cosmetic levels.
Carbon pricing is and was meant to be a tool to build new pipelines, not to stop them.
Mulcair and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley clearly won out on that account of their overall wrong-headed argument against the LEAP Manifesto at this month’s Edmonton NDP convention.
The second part of this two-part commentary, to be published Thursday, suggests renewable energy source legislation as a proven tool to address the climate crisis, why specifically so-called free trade is undemocratic, highlights international solidarity and respects that oil and gas are vital as a petrochemical manufacturing resource.
Part one of this two-part commentary, published Wednesday, looked at why the carbon price needs to come out of the manifesto.
2) Green energy legislative frameworks unfortunately are not mentioned in the LEAP Manifesto.
The 2014 IPCC report does point out that the carbon price has no successful track record to lower emissions as opposed to green energy legislative frameworks.
And yes, the Ontario Green Energy Act works great also in democratizing energy industries and with cheap electrons for people.
Examples are regions with independent utilities such as Sault Ste. Marie that are less sabotaged by Ontario Hydro and the carbon pricing of Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government.
3) It would be more clear to not say “trade deal” when antidemocratic agreements such as the TPP with (il)legal protectionism for multinationals are the issue.
This way, discussing the upstream root cause of free trade harms is encouraged, including of Chapter 11 Investment in NAFTA and Chapter 9 Investment in the TPP.
Free trade is not about trade but about transferring legislative powers from parliaments to multinationals.
Former Canadian prime minister John Turner pointed out that trade issues without an undemocratic agenda are added on to GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs).
He was clear: free trade deals are not trade agreements.
Turner famously remarked his advantage over former prime minister Brian Mulroney was to have actually read NAFTA. Sometimes I wish I was not the only Yukoner with the Turner edge.
Obviously, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair can make no such claim.
During the 2015 election, he tried to block awareness on the TPP by limiting concerns to supply management details. Mulcair’s characterizations of free trade are false.
Contrary to his understanding, renewable energy, as well as environmental legislation in Quebec and Ontario, have recently been attacked under NAFTA Chapter 11.
It is not as proactive as reading one’s homework assignments. Nevertheless, Mulcair is being taught hard knock lessons.
Canadian voters, convention delegates, Turner, potential U.S. presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and, embarrassingly, Donald Trump, all talk plainly about false free trade. There are lessons also for the LEAP Manifesto.
4) International solidarity as a Canadian value is slim in the manifesto. Getting the carbon price out of it would improve that.
Carbon pricing is a flag of colonial economic warfare today.
Under it, many social democrats, liberals and environmentalists join in the corporate attack on their sisters and brothers, especially in the Global South.
That is a difficult truth that can be understood better when put in the context of another betrayal at the top of great magnitude that still echoes today.
It does so for some who want an international architecture for peace aside to prayers.
Before the guns of August 1914, the world had hung in the balance for decades.
The counter point to a chaos of military alliances was an iron-clad determination for peace of the Socialist International, as most functional diplomatic agreement of its day.
A monstrous war and industrialized killing were to be shut down before getting fully started with political general strikes from Great Britain to France to Russia and other places.
The Social Democratic Party of Germany, representing the largest socialist and labour movement on Earth, played a lead role.
“All wheels are standing still, If a strong arm so will “ are remembered today as once powerful fighting words for peace (Alle Räder stehen still wenn dein starker Arm es will, a line of a labour union song by Georg Herwegh).
However, between 1896 and 1898. Eduard Bernstein released a series of articles under the title Probleme des Sozialismus.
It became the catalyst for a reorientation from socialism to liberalism, namely in the party’s leadership.
As an unintended consequence, international friendship was weakened and the political general strike for peace promise was hollowed out. Ironically, as MP in the Reichstag alongside Karl Liebknecht, Bernstein came to vote against most war bills and bonds.
Perhaps the most sensitive of socialist organizers and writers as well as a critic of militarism, Rosa Luxemburg picked up on the dangerous developments immediately.
Luxemburg was already known as a visionary scholar and humanist who, as another first, had developed a solid grasp of industrial resource colonialism.
Some are familiar with her quote: “Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters.”
Through 1898/99 in the Neue Leibziger Zeitung, she published instalments of Reform or Revolution, a landmark book that is read and is relevant today.
I believe Rosa Luxemburg has a warning for modern environmentalists not to become a historical footnote of global injustice.
The carbon price message in essence meets halfway the Fox News climate deniers in attacking climate science and justice.
Climate science involves a proven understanding of an accumulative greenhouse gas impact through decades and centuries of human-induced industrial emissions.
Carbon pricing mechanisms only refer to current emission levels as relevant and therefore are not science-based, contrary to what is invoked by the manifesto.
The G-77 countries have explicitly and to the best of their powers opposed carbon pricing in Copenhagen, Lima and Paris also by insisting on “common but differentiated responsibilities.”
The non-Western focus is on leapfrogging toward renewables, protest marches against carbon pricing are common. The carbon price becomes part of so-called structural adjustments of International Monetary Foundation and World Bank that are starving the poor countries.
It does so by shackling them to oil imports for which alone around 50 countries expend more than their entire foreign currency reserves.
“We stand behind the differentiation, we stand behind common but differentiated responsibilities, these are issues we hold very strong and these are definite red lines.” said Antonio Marcondes, Brazil’s representative at the 2014 Lima climate conference.
5) The manifesto fails to recognize the long-term relevance of oil and gas. Particularly conventional oil and gas are vitally important and need preserving as a petrochemical manufacturing resource for renewable economies through seven and likely many more generations.
People understand that burning things is different from building things.
Big Oil’s subsidy hunger disagrees, especially in fracking and tar steam extraction which have no useful net energy output.
The Pembina Institute is among those who have failed Albertans badly in not drawing such an important line in the tar sand.
We pay close attention since Pembina fronted for the Yukon government’s frack agenda, in a 2013 hearing in Whitehorse.
Being unclear on the fundamentals creates divisions needlessly by alienating far too many people on all sides, such as during this month’s convention of Canada’s New Democrats in Edmonton.
Let’s talk.
I encourage the LEAP Manifesto to remain short or become more brief by being more specific where it matters and by naming names of acupuncture points on problems.
Misunderstandings, such as wanting to do away with the oil and gas industry immediately, are already thrown at the manifesto and may be avoided.
Clean and succinct language matter so that finance and oil PR firms with their divisive platitudes, who by 1985 had invented the carbon price, have less power over people.
Nnimmo Bassey of Health of Mother Earth Foundation shows how it’s done:
“The Paris Agreement locks in fossil fuels and, to underscore corporate capture of the negotiations, the word ‘fossil’ is not as much as mentioned in the document.”
So does Gwynne Dyer in his latest climate update, “Ponder a non-linear climate emergency”.
We are in cascading feedback loops already, and the assumptions of Paris are obsolete.
But most worrisome, in donkey’s years of writing books and columns, Mr. Dyer, possibly for the first time, has lost his trademark subtle irony and sarcasm.
