Friday, December 08, 2006

A Whimper

Not with a bang but a whimper....

Drowned out by the blare of Dions Dual Citizenship, Same Sex Marriage, the Arar Affair and RCMP Comissioner Zaccardelli's resignation. And oh yes a full fledged PMO PR announcement, with ministers in tow, calling for a ban on toxic chemicals.

The accountability act passed in the house today, after a side deal between Liberal and Conservative House Leaders to pass it expeditiously.

— The House of Commons unanimously accepted an amended accountability act Friday with some 90 changes.

The Conservative government’s showpiece legislation passed through the House without a recorded vote and is now set to get royal assent and pass into law early next week.

The bill received all-party support.

“This is an accomplishment we can be quite proud of,” New Democrat MP Pat Martin said in a release.


NDP hails passing of Accountability Act


Average Canadians can expect more ethical government after today's passage of the Federal Accountability Act. While the final bill is not perfect, NDP MPs worked tirelessly and achieved key improvements in areas such as stopping patronage, protecting whistleblowers and reining in powerful lobbyists.


So now will John Baird tone down the Scream Queen routine in the house since he will no longer have the Accountability Act to refer to when he bitches out the Liberals. And my goodness after all his attacks on the 'Liberal Senate' for delaying his bill well now he is signing a different tune. He sheepishly admits to being proud of the Senate amendments.

In fact since he is so fond of using newspaper quotes in his Ministerial responses in Question Period here is one
I look forward to him quoting.

Treasury Board President John Baird did not dispute that the bill is improved as a result of the Senate examination, which involved dozens of witnesses commenting over weeks of hearings this autumn. Baird said outside the Commons, "this bill is a heck of a lot stronger than it was when we introduced it on April 11. If anything, it's tougher — so we're proud of that.


So the NDP and the Senate have as much to be proud of as the Harpocrites. Probably more so because all their amendments passed.

Imagine that.

Probably the reason the Harpocrites underplayed the fact it was up for the vote today. And why they had no 'formal' comment on it, aside from Baird being scrummed, while the NDP issued a press release. Out manuvered by the NDP on their numero uno election promise.



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Marxism and Religion


From Monthly Review Press an excerpt from their new book;Marxism and Religion

Prometheus played a crucial role in Marxs original thesis on philosophy and religion.

Prometheus as I have discussed here also relates to Lucifer.

Uh oh I can see those right wing Christian conspiracy nutbars figuring that this means Marxism=Satanism. Oh wait they already do.

I think they may be confusing Marx with Bakunin who also embraced Prometheus as the ideal of human liberation as he did Satan.

"But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first free-thinker and emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge." [God and the State]

Of course the right wing Christian zealots hate the Englightenment and thus all enlightenment thinkers, who are classical liberals. Which is why it is hard to understand how right thinking libertarians can have anything to do with them.

The Enlgightenment is the creation of a Satanic/Luciferian cult according to Christian conspiracy nuts. Which cult, why Freemasonry of course. The Brotherhood of Man is not the Brotherhood of God. It is the begining of the liberation of man from God.

It is this liberation that Marx and Bakunin both embraced Prometheus as an icon; not as a god but as a liberator of men from the gods. In that Marxism and Anarchism are logical extensions of classical liberalism, as is modern libertarianism.




Marxism and Religion

The Prometheus of Marx's doctoral thesis appears profoundly Feuerbachian, as does the fuzziness of the boundary drawn there between human and divine. Well versed though he was in Greek mythology -- knowing that Prometheus, born of gods and titans, had to be a god -- Marx nonetheless assigned him human status: "noblest of saints and martyrs in the calendar of philosophy." Whence came this divine aspiration attributed to the human species? Was it inherent in the cosmos? Had Feuerbach simply substituted a Spinozean pantheism for Christianity's orthodox theism? And did Marx and Engels concur? They soon distanced themselves from Feuerbach, yet they would not hesitate to impose on proletarians the god-like tasks of Prometheus.

Despite these ambivalences of concept and explanation, Marx and Engels remained nonbelievers and foes of institutionalized religion. This heritage from the Left Enlightenment they powerfully transmitted to their followers thus helping to ensure that through the next century and a half Marxist parties would serve as prime targets for religion's multitudinous defenders. At the same time -- more than any other nineteenth-century tendency of radical anti-capitalism -- Marxism remained open to labor unionism and working-class politics. Marxist activists proved influential leaders in both these enterprises. It may not be irrelevant, therefore, to ask how successful they were in pursuing the party line on religion and whether it proved an asset or hindrance in organizing workers, nor to inquire why Marx and Engels themselves had chosen to make criticism of religion the "premise" for their project in revolutionary political economy. Such questions may seem more pertinent to our own times than to those in which Marx and Engels actually lived. Any investigation of their stance toward religion must begin by noting that their careers fell within the opening century of the Age of Secularism. Nonbelief, for the first time in more than fifteen hundred years was becoming intellectually -- even to some extent socially -- tolerable.

Orthodox religionists, Protestant or Catholic, still controlled most major institutions such as city and state governments and universities throughout western Europe, yet they faced increasingly articulate resistance from educated opponents among the upper classes. Thus, for example, when John Stuart Mill in England declared that the "whole of the prevalent metaphysics of the present century" constitutes a "tissue of suborned evidence in favor of religion," he was saying approximately what Marx and Engels were saying, and targeting the same German idealist metaphysics they were rebelling against. While for Mill the main enemy was Kant, it was of course Hegel for Marx and Engels. Different though the systems of these philosophers were, it would not be inaccurate to describe both as idealist constructions designed to protect religion. To protect it against what? Against the oncoming Era of Secularism: against the rise of skeptical rationalism; against cumulative disillusionments attached to the memory of religious wars that had raged across Europe for almost two hundred years; against the encroachments of empirical science into orthodox belief. Marx and Engels in all these controversial areas stood on solid ground to the extent that their peers in class status and education were likely to remain tolerant toward criticisms of religion that many of them already shared. Yet obviously no such immunity would attach to radical criticisms of class hierarchy.

From Feuerbach to the Manifesto

The Hegelian dialectic in a broad sense had idealized the cosmos as an ongoing spiritual process. More narrowly, that portion of it that paralleled human history could be analogized to Christian doctrine. God's decision to create a world populated by creatures (including humans) established the antithesis. Conflict stemmed from the willed act of human creatures to use their God-given liberty for rebellion against the creator. Resolution, after many turns of the dialectic, must await the advent of Christ, begotten out of mortal flesh by divine spirit, and thus providing the synthesis within which the opposites -- mortal and divine, creator and created -- will at last be rejoined. According to the famous legend, Marx had arrived at his class interpretation of human history by an intellectual tour de force, that is, by translating Hegel's idealist dialectic into a materialist one. Thus, instead of pushing the narrative through a sequence of metaphysical abstractions, the dialectic would now be made to convey human class struggles in the language of historical realism.

A full-dress presentation of the materialist dialectic occurs in the Communist Manifesto (1848). There are some baffling conceptual problems about this transformation, of which I will mention (at this point) only one. If history comprises a series of struggles in which exploited (therefore antithetical) classes overpower one another to establish each in turn its own dominance, there would seem no possible escape from this repetition unless a class formation occurred that somehow had the power (or lack of power!) to break out of the circle. Recalling the original model -- that is, the Hegelian dialectic that symbolically enacted the Christian story -- it is obvious the crucial role belonged to Christ, who by his sacrificial death terminates the long chain of contradictions between creator and created. Yet when the idealist dialectic is turned upside down and all the actors become "real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces," what sort of class formation could be expected to play a comparable role? "The idea --fundamental for Marx from then on," writes the Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, "that the proletariat was a class which could not liberate itself without thereby liberating society as a whole, first appears as 'a philosophical deduction rather than a product of observation.' . . . [Thus] 'the proletariat makes its first appearance in Marx's writings as the social force needed to realize the aims of German philosophy.'" Needed, that is, to materialize the idealized figure of Prometheus.



Also see:

Judas the Obscure

For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing

New Age Libertarian Manifesto

Another Prehistoric Woman

My Favorite Muslim

Antinominalist Anarchism



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Fourth Quarter Boom

Well unlike Wall Street it looks like my blog boomed in the fourth Quarter, and it ain't even over yet.













This is good news for my
Blogshares

http://blogshares.com/newgraph.php?type=price&large=true&blog=http://plawiuk.blogspot.com/

See

Blogs



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Harpers Legacy

Is not a good one so far, says Toronto Sun columnist Chantal Hébert

Still, Harper has earned a place in the history books for his efforts this week. Harper became the first post-war Prime Minister to ask the Commons to consider taking away the rights of a Canadian minority.That he failed to garner sufficient support to press on with the plan does not mitigate the fact that he was willing to ask.

But in asking he was only fullfilling his Election committment. One he should never have made, but had too. And after breaking at least two he had to keep this one. As Don Martin points out;

One contrast is worth noting. Harper, who went on for 7,500 words to defend traditional marriage to the exclusion of gay/lesbian couplings in February, 2005, didn't bother to debate yesterday.

His views are already known, shrugged an aide. Given that his pre-election views on income- trust taxes and Quebec's nationhood were also well known, perhaps a confirmation was in order.

But the fight has gone out of Harper. He's an ideologue with a pragmatic streak. He knows when to fight and when to surrender. This was time to wave the white flag. In the Prime Minister's place, Nicholson could muster only bland excuses for the resurrection of the divisive debate. It was an election promise. It deserved a free vote. Let's move along.

See

Harper

SSM

Same Sex Marriage


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Good Advice

A Blogging Tory has some good advice for the social conservatives who doggedly will not let go of the the bone of abortion or same sex marriage. And another tells them the issue is over. But are they listening. Nope. Even after the Boss tells them to drop it; Same-sex marriage issue put to rest: PM

Of course the social conservatives will push, push, push, themselves out of the party. Ah well there is always the Christian Heritage Party for them. Since their alliance withSikhs, Hindus, Muslims and Jews was only a marriage of conviniance over the issue of heterosexual marriage.

See
Answering the Social Conservatives

Feminism


SSM

Same Sex Marriage


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Hewers of Wood


Rights do evolve....

Natives must be allowed to harvest timber on Crown land for personal use, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled Thursday. "The right to harvest wood for the construction of temporary shelters must be allowed to evolve into a right to harvest wood by modern means to be used in the construction of a modern dwelling," the judgment read."Any other conclusion would freeze the right in its pre-(European) contact form."

I will expect the non-aboriginal Canadians to begin screaming discrimination any time now....waiting....waiting....should happen soon....always does...it is inevitable...

See

Aboriginal





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Populism and Producerism


With the recent debate on the Wheat Board there has been a focus in Federal politics on Western Farmers. The farmers movement in Western Canada influenced politics in Canada both left and right for the past ninty years and still is.

It is the politics of producerism. It's populism is deeply political, and its producerism is the source of its critique of the capitlaist monopoly marketplace.

When it is used by the right wing such as the Reform party, it is used as an attack on state monopolies. When used by Social Credit it was the monopoly of the banks.
When used by the left such as the CCF it was an attack on monopoly captialism and its state.

The Prairie Roots of Canada's Political 'Third Parties'

Farmers' organizations were also thinking seriously about new political departures. When the "Union Government" from 1917-1920 failed to make significant changes to the tariff structure, many farmers decided to give up on the old parties.

Some political activists on the prairies believed that political parties were inherently undemocratic, and that they should be replaced by non-partisan political organizations. Even if not solidly "anti-party," many western political activists were determined to break the mold of previous party practice.

As grain farmers made up the largest single occupational group on the prairies, provincial grain grower associations and co-operatives made up the major interest groups who dealt with provincial and federal governments. So when organized farmers in Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan followed the United Farmers of Ontario by "going political" between 1920 and 1922, potent political forces ready to replace old party government were suddenly on the scene.

Farmers' parties were able to mobilize citizen opinion concerning public ownership of banks and resources, re-design of political institutions, and other reform measures. Under pressure from the "Non-Partisan League," the United Farmers of Alberta organization (UFA) developed the most radical and distinctive critique of old-party politics, and a new theory for political representation. Farmers' organizations of other western provinces were less innovative but nonetheless succeeded in laying the foundations for third party politics.

Prairie farmers regularly attacked the National Policy, especially the protective tariff. In 1921, the Canadian Council of Agriculture's "Farmers' Platform" observed that the tariff was "a chief corrupting influence in our national life because the protected interests, in order to maintain their unjust privileges, have contributed lavishly to political and campaign funds, thus encouraging both parties to look to them for support, thereby lowering the standard of public morality."



The originators of this Western Populism and Producerism were William Irvine who would co found the CCF and Henry Wise Wood the ideolouge behind the United Farmers of Alberta movement.



Farmers not only reinforced, but they also criticized the rural socio-economic order, as they often expounded a radical, "populist" discourse that exposed the material inequalities inherent in monopoly capitalism. Drawing on populist traditions of castigating corporate, political, and social privilege, this particular strain of radical agrarianism at once embraced and critiqued the concept of producerism, or the labour theory of value. This vision of society held that the producing class, made up of farmers and skilled workers, needed to band together to defeat monopoly and corporate power to retain the fruits of their labour for themselves. Even though this socio-economic outlook encountered many adherents in both the Grange and Patrons of Husbandry, it tended to exhibit a more negative view of other classes in the larger community. Dividing society into either useful producers or slothful and parasitical non-producers, some members of the Dominion Grange and the Patrons of Industry fostered adversarial sentiments within the less prosperous members of the agricultural population, focusing on issues of their material, political, and even social exclusion. However, what is noteworthy regarding this antagonistic class rhetoric of agrarian protest is that farmers advocating the continuance of market agriculture and those supporting the co-operative system could both maintain hostile relations with those individuals deemed non-producers. "Severing the Connections in a Complex Community": The Grange, the Patrons of Industry and the Construction/Contestation of a Late 19th-Century Agrarian Identity in Ontario


While monopoly especially by banks and railroads were the main focus of producerist outrage its populism could easily become the hatred of the 'other' as much as critique of the capitalist banker, landlord, railbaron. That other was the loafer. And thus the rural revolt in Western Canada, the source of our 'alienation' as a colony of Ontario and the Railroads, was as much against the metropole as it was against colonialism by "lazy-faire capitialists".

"The Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary; or,
a Labor History of the Nonproducing

Classes"

In fact, the age abounded in loafers. There were literary loafers, Yankee loafers,
French loafers, genteel loafers, common loafers, and country loafers, among others, the
latter observed by Nathaniel Hawthorne at the Brighton Cattle Fair “wait[ing] for some
friend to invite them to drink.” Nevertheless, loaferism was most essentially a metropolitan
phenomenon, haunting the city’s sidewalks, wharves, museums, and parks, and serving as a
ready epithet for anyone needing to hurl an insult. The young New York conservative
George Templeton Strong thus ascribed the worst tendencies of democracy, “so called,” to
the loafer, while the Southern Literary Messenger accused him of no less than advocating
“the sublime doctrine of social equality.” Loafers were known for cursing without shame
and for smoking cigars. They cared little for the law and exhibited a marked disregard for
public life in general. They were eccentric, if not impudent, in their personal habits. They
had a weakness for billiards and bar-rooms and were maddeningly self-satisfied, if not
philosophically reclusive. And they wore stand up collars that were, more often than not,
covered in stains.

The producerist/populist ideology of Prairie farmers, is a contiental North America phenomena.

A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF POPULISM ACROSS TIME AND SPACE:



Fertile fields, indeed, for social movements of the type that Tilly described: modern, organized, and sustained efforts on behalf of people who consider themselves powerless to shape their own future, movements that are political in intent but not confined to political parties. What we have seen emerging since the 1970s are cross-class movements, for the most part, tending to be centered in the lower middle class, but still comprised of people who consider themselves to be “producers” (though now their self-identity may include equal parts of “consumer”), and possessing as a birthright sufficient cultural resources to organize themselves for action. For a variety of reasons most have come to view government as the principal threat to their liberty and economic well-being and to express that feeling with as much intensity as “my” populists ever did against the monopolists.
I believe that Tilly points us toward the kind of framework needed to analyze “populist” movements of the past quarter century as a class of collective behavior, not merely a language or generalized sense of resentment. Modern day movements of this type are organized and sustained activities that bring forward programs of “reform” on behalf of “the people.” They make use of cultural resources at hand, even while harboring deep suspicion of dominant cultural institutions. They connect, in some way, to constitutional and democratic processes. While they often have strong leaders they cannot be understood solely in terms of the leader’s ability to sway the impressionable masses.
In this way of looking at the phenomenon in America, groups that are “off the grid”


When producerists support a market place alternative to cooperatives like the Wheat Pools and the Wheat Board, though the later is state sanctioned, it is not the current capitalist marketplace they long for. It is the idealized 'free market'.


"Raising Less Corn, More Hell"

In the course of three decades as a newspaper writer, Pyle went from feeling that the "farm beat" was like covering the progress of a glacier to understanding that the real story of agriculture in America is quite dramatic. In Pyle's view, our farming culture is based on one big bad idea and one big fat lie.

"The bad idea," he writes, "is the increasing concentration -- economic, political, and genetic -- of the ways in which our food is produced." The lie behind it is that "the world is either short of food or risks being short of food in the near future." With the help of an editorial writers' fellowship, and later as the director of the Prairie Writers Circle at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, Pyle took time away from his daily deadlines to research a book on the American farm economy.

"Raising Less Corn, More Hell" is dedicated to the memory of his father, who was raised on a Kansas farm, but Pyle is no sentimentalist when it comes to the fate of family farms. What the agricultural economy needs, he argues, is a truly free market -- not one kept afloat by federal subsidies and unaccounted environmental damage. The root cause of hunger, he claims, is usually a lack of money. Yet the fear of not having enough food has driven the rise of chemical fertilizers, massive machinery, genetically modified seed, and whatever else will help squeeze greater yields out of every acre.

Meanwhile, the true costs of the industrial system -- eroded soil and depleted aquifers, polluted water and air, desperate and indebted farmers, rundown main streets, unhealthy diets, and a food supply at risk - are not factored into the price of food.

Even as we push to grow more, the government subsidizes farmers for growing less. The subsidies continually fail to keep up with gains in production, leading to a surplus of food that costs less than it should. This gets shipped abroad and cripples the efforts of third-world countries to develop their own agricultural base. And so the system fails even on its promise to feed the world.

It was perhaps inevitable that a producerist ideology would find itself supplanted by the distributionist ideology advocated by Social Credit. The later is more urban the former rural. Within a decade the producerist populism of the UFA would divide itself into two political streams the prairie socialism of the CCF and the distributionist poltical economy of Social Credit.

The latter is a post WWI modernist movement that attempted to create a catholic socialism. It is the theories of Hilaire Belloc transformed by the English journal New Age publishers of Major Douglas the founder of Social Credit. Distributionism places the producer and consumer as equals while railing against monopoly, banking monopolies in particular .The unfortunate downfall of all such economic monotheisms that they fall into consipracy theories around the origins of Banking and the Jews.

If producerism is the populist economics of agrarian revolt, Distributionism is its equivalent for those living in towns and cities outside the major port metropoles of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Halifax. The common enemy of producerism and distributionism is the banks, which are an icon for the Eastern Power Establishment in both Canadian and American political geography.

Thus years later the Reform Party of Canada was able to launch itself on the basis of a prairie populism which had once been a movement of radical reform that had become established as a prairie identity, despite the changes and evolution of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and B.C. into modern urban cultures. The conservative ideology has always been to look backward, and in this case in looking backwards they embraced agrarian protest politics and purged it of any of its socialist roots.

The Eastern establishment, a much more sophisticated political class saw this as bumpkinism. They laughed off the Reform party, and its funny looking leader as irrelevant in this day and age. They forgot two important things, the deep seated roots of prairie populism regardless of party political alignment and that economic and thus political power was moving west.

If the Reform/Alliance/Conservative party gained credence and support from its shameless exploitation of genuine prairie populism, the newly minted Green Party may be able do the same with its embracing of a fiscal conservative economics merged with Distributionism which is the ideology of new Leader Elizabeth May .


See:

A History of Canadian Wealth, 1914.

Happy Canada Day/Jour heureux du Canada

Historical Memory on the Eve of the Election


Calgary Herald Remembers RB Bennet


Canada's First Internment Camps


Social Credit And Western Canadian Radicalism

Rebel Yell

Social Credit

Western Canadian Populism


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Canada's Wealthy, Still


Dems dat's got gets. Dem that don't doesn't.
In terms of distribution, the (Stats Canda) report finds a worsening situation with regard to wealth inequality. By quintiles, the largest gains in net worth accrue to the top quintile (up 43% from 1999) and things scale down from there; the bottom quintile had a 70% decline in net worth. In the supplementary tables, it is notable that there are now over one million households with over a million dollars in net worth. These households, 8.2% of families, hold 46.5% of the total net worth. Overall, the top 20% had 69.2% of total net worth, while the bottom 20% had 2.4% and the bottom 60% had 10.8%.

Which is why I say the working class should pay no taxes.


See

Productivity


Taxes

Wealth


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Triskaidekaphobia

Triskaidekaphobia is a fear of the number 13.

MPs defeat bid to reopen same-sex marriage debate
Motion tabled by Tories falls 175-123


13 Liberals voted For Reopening Debate On Same Sex Marriage


13 Conservatives,including 6 Cabinet Ministers, voted against Reopening Debate on SSM.

Tie. The votes cancel each other out. But it still leaves a resounding majority saying no. 162 - 110, ouch, spanked. Whipped or not.

What is interesting is; the who, that voted how.

Like the Liberals who opposed and voted against SSM last year, including a former Cabinet Minister who refused to be whipped voted against this motion.

Or Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay who 'came out' against reopening debate. His vote canceled out his partner, in founding the new Conservative party, the RH Stephen Harper.



See

SSM

Same Sex Marriage


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Book Review


I guess he really didn't like this book.




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