A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR THE TAR BABY

A LEFT WING OIL SANDS DEVELOPMENT PLAN

When push comes to shove there are differences between environmental activists visions of the future and those of its allies in the union movement and on the left.

This is especially true when it comes to two controversial topics, oil sands development and nuclear power.  We will look at the oil sands in this essay and the former in a separate essay.

Oil sands or tar sands are bitumen oil sites, these are some of the most ancient of types of oil man has used. It was often the easiest oil to find, as it pooled up to the surface from cracks and was accessible. It is actually asphalt, except instead of being baked and hardened like your roads or sidewalks, it's a gunky, fluid,  semisolid tar. In ancient societies they knew of it and called it pitch, using it for lamps and as a form of waterproofing for building. 

There are two countries that have extensive oil sands holdings, Canada and Venezuela.  There are other deposits but these two are the biggest. Canada's are in Alberta and have been underdevelopment since the 1960's while Venezula's await development.

And herein lies the essence of our tale, for the past decade  there has been a serious campaign against Oil Sands development and production in Alberta by Greenpeace in particular and other environmentalists as well as by unions and the broad left in Canada and in the United States.

And yet there has been no discussion of the fact that the Belle of The Left, the Home of the Socialist Boliviarian Revolution; Venezuela will have to develop its oil sands eventually as it runs out of conventional oil to meet China's needs as well as America's.

A split already exists when we see the lack of criticism of the BRIC countries by Greenpeace, and Venezuela and Cuba in particular, though not part of the BRIC's perse they are existing regimes that still call themselves socialist as does China.

In Cuba the spilt is based on US foreign policy, which is the embargo of Cuba, which even capitalists in Canada ignore, taking advantage of the lack of American competition to make their own deals with Cuba.

In particular there is one Canadian company involved in Cuban coal, oil, nickel production that has never faced protests from the left or unions or the environmental movement, but has faced 

harsh criticisms and penalties from US Senators and Congressmen who support the Cuban embargo.

That company is Alberta based Sherrit International. And even though it is situated  in the oil refining heartland of central Alberta, there have been Greenpeace banners unfuraled, or picket lines set up. Why? Well they are unionized, they have a good economic deal with Cuba that sees them share 50/50 in development costs and profits. They work closely with the unions in Cuba meeting their demands for infrastructure spending in villages.

But they are miners, they are mining coal, nickel and now they are exploring for oil off the coast of Cuba. While having a model for development economics their model for mining is no different than used anywhere, including in Fort McMurray, since all oil sands production is mining.

So if mining is bad and oil development is bad why is Sherrit OK but not Transcanada or CNRL.

Because it's Cuba a darling of the Canadian left. Heck we take vacations there, sitting on the white sand beaches, not getting mugged, smoking real Cuban cigars, drinking authentic Cuban rum (not Bacardi), dance to hot Cuban Jazz and drink dark organic 
coffee for desert.

It was Canadians and Germans who invested in Cuba after the embargo, Albertan's set up some of the first vacation get away's, Air Canada flies to Havana, and Alberta ranchers have provided Raul Castro with Grade AAA Bull Semen for his experiments in cattle production. It's not just the Left and the Friends of Cuba but businessmen in Alberta who saw an opportunity.
I personally know of two groups of Edmonton area German businessmen who invested in Cuba already in  the Seventies building vacation getaway motels for Canadians and Europeans.

The left wing resurgence in Latin America in the last decade with the election of socialist governments in Brazil, Peru, Educador, Bolivia, Venezula, Argentina, and with the collapse of Argentina under the dead weight of capitalist debt, another way forward was embraced.
And most of the these countries like Canada are resource producers, hewers of wood drawers of water for US Imperialism, where they had once been for their European masters.

China the new imperial power on the block, a now ascending super power, politically, economically and militarily able to compete with America, is investing in Latin American resources as she is in Canadian resources, she would in America too but her corporations have been rebuffed.

So here we have the Left of Capitalism, China, the Latin Americas,  and the opposition to the West, non aligned nations like Iran, all doing what monopoly British American capitalism does.
It is two different forms of post WW II state capitalism, it is the organic growth of capitalism into a centralizing global force.

Because the rest of the world is not America, I will deal with what we all have in common sans the Americans. At various levels regardless of ideologies, we are all liberal capitalist economies that have social democratic values.

We are mixed economies as Ed Broadbent would tell anyone who would care to listen, he would insist we are not American capitalism, nor are we socialism, we are in between, we are social democratic economies, mixed state and private investment.  

The dialectic of late capitalism in the post war economies of last century was that the century began and ended with revolutions, that threatened to overthrow capitalism, but did not and in failing allowed capitalism to ameliorate its worst aspects, increasing its ability to transform itself from being dark satanic mills of production to air condition malls of consumption.

Even the United States as President Eisenhower pointed out in 1960; was transformed into 
 a state capitalist economy, he called it the Military Industrial Complex (MIC)

So capitalism having reformed itself in order to avoid further revolutions, depression and war, 
became the vision of Kautsky and  Bernstein and the followers of the Second International like Ed Broadbent and the NDP Despite Lenin;s scathing criticism of them Kautsky and Bernstein were correct in predicting the adaptability of capitalism but also that this would eventually lead to social democracy, and then socialism.

After the end of WWII the world was recreated in that image with the UN, the ILO charter, the international Charter of Human Rights, the Bretton Woods agreement, the IMF and the Marshall Plan for Europe, and the American reconstruction of Japan. Canada was central in the creation of the ILO, Human Rights charters and found statement of the UN. Not the USA, who maintains to this day a conservative conspiracy view that is really an attempt at one world government. Even our own neo republican right wing believes that as Harper has shown with his disdain.

So today there are two opposing views of society, a left and a right. But that does not make them socialist. And in fact I was about to write anti-capitalist but that too is simply another aspect of the left wing of capitalism.

No I mean good old fashioned, learned on yer grandmothers knee, yes sirree with a capital S Socialism, the peoples control of the means of production and distribution and consumption.

CLARENCE THOMAS AND THE RIGHT WING REVISIONIST HISTORY OF EUGENICS
For over 100 years reactionary men in America have assaulted left wing eugenics; birth control by any other name. 

First using the postal act then other acts around obscenity, and moral turpitude, to halt information about and products used as birth control, linking it in the popular mind with other tawdry things the post office busted such as drugs and solicitation for prostitution 

And again another fight led by the ACLU formed to fight for free speech, labour rights, womens rights and birth control rights as it is today against anti abortion laws in Alabama and other Red Republican states where like that state 25 white men decided for several millions of women, who make up 52% of the state

As we see here from silent Tom he is speaking out on his wife's favorite topic, eugenics and Margret Sanger, who along with Emma Goldman and Havelock Ellis fought for the right to birth control and birth control information.

The right have used abortion as a trigger word like they used and still use eugenics falling to differentiate between liberal eugenics of birth control and women's reproductive freedom and RIGHT WING eugenics used by the state.

Such as Alberta did under right wing Social Credit govt when it forcibly sterilized people like their right wing counterparts in Nazi Germany did in Alberta’s case the social credit party was led by two Christian radio evangelists of their day Bill Aberhart and Ernest Manning  whose son Preston now leads a section of the Canadian right wing from the family homestead in Calgary the largest American city north of the 49th parallel.





Clarence Thomas Pens Screed Comparing Women Who Obtain Abortions to Eugenicists

Justice Clarence Thomas wasn’t willing to let Indiana’s nondiscrimination rule die a quiet death.

But Justice Clarence Thomas wasn’t willing to let Indiana’s nondiscrimination rule die a quiet death. Instead, he wrote an astonishing 20-page concurring opinion declaring that the rule is clearly constitutional—and, in the process, condemning many women who obtain abortions as willing participants in eugenicide. (Because Thomas says he wanted to “allow further percolation” of this issue in the lower courts before settling it, he joined his colleagues in refusing to review the case.)

Thomas began by insisting that the “foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th-century birth-control movement,” which “developed alongside the American eugenics movement.” That’s not actually true: Abortion was legal at the founding, and states only began criminalizing abortion around the 1860s. Thomas is pushing a pro-life narrative that seeks to intertwine abortion and eugenics while ignoring history. To that end, he added that “Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger recognized the eugenic potential of her cause. She emphasized and embraced the notion that birth control ‘opens the way to the eugenist.’ ”
Justice Clarence Thomas wasn’t willing to let Indiana’s nondiscrimination rule die a quiet death.

The justice then embarked on a lengthy excursion into the sordid history of the eugenics movement, which was, indeed, a dark period in American history. But he repeatedly elides the fact that most eugenicists promoted contraception, not abortion, as a vital tool of “population control.” To conflate the two, Thomas simply proclaimed that “the eugenic arguments that [Sanger] made in support of birth control apply with even greater force to abortion.” In effect, the justice condemned all reproductive rights—not just abortion, but all forms of contraception—as byproducts of the eugenics movement and scorned them as morally reprehensible. (Bizarrely, he also tossed in an off-the-wall footnote comparing disparate impact liability, which limits ostensibly neutral practices that disproportionately burden minorities, with eugenics.)

These wild tangents are a prelude to the meat of Thomas’ opinion: his belief that women who terminate their pregnancies due to a fetus’ “unwanted characteristics” are callous and monstrous child-killers who should be forced by the state to carry these fetuses to term. Abortion, he wrote, “is an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation.” Thanks to “today’s prenatal screening tests and other technologies, abortion can easily be used to eliminate children” due to some trait or abnormality. Indeed, Thomas wrote, abortion is a “disturbingly effective tool for implementing the discriminatory preferences that undergird eugenics.” He cited the high abortion rate for fetuses with Down syndrome and the “widespread sex-selective abortions” in Asia as evidence. And he noted that the nationwide abortion rate “among black women is nearly 3.5 times the ratio for white women.”

Notably, Thomas does not claim that women are being tricked into obtaining discriminatory abortions by sex partners or preyed upon by unethical doctors. Instead, his opinion is a rhetorical assault against women who terminate their pregnancies due to a fetal abnormality. (There is virtually no evidence that American women get abortions on the basis of a fetus’ race or sex; that part of the law seems designed to troll liberals.) He accuses these women of seeking “eugenic abortions,” of wishing to “eliminate” an “unborn child” for “discriminatory” reasons. There is none of the usual patronizing pro-life hand-waving here about how women are really the victims of abortion. To Thomas, women who undergo abortions are villains who must be stopped by the state.

The justice closed his opinion by urging the court, in a future case, to rule that states may criminalize abortions on the basis of a fetal characteristics. Anything less, he wrote, “would constitutionalize the views of the 20th-century eugenics movement.”

It may not be a coincidence that Thomas dropped the façade of disgust solely with abortion providers, and not women themselves, just as a state prepares to prosecute women who undergo abortions. A new Georgia law permits the imprisonment of women who terminate their pregnancies, elevating fetuses to full personhood. Any pretense of protecting women has vanished; the law now expressly elevates the interests of the fetus over the interest of the woman. Now that Roe is in mortal danger, abortion foes in state legislatures and federal courts alike can unleash their ire at women themselves. They no longer need to appease Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Clarence Thomas makes it clear: The right is coming for birth control next

By attacking Margaret Sanger's legacy, Justice Thomas isn't going after abortion — this is about contraception Clarence Thomas makes it clear: The right is coming for birth control next

AMANDA MARCOTTE MAY 29, 2019 

There is no doubt, as Thomas makes abundantly clear in this opinion, that Sanger was an advocate of the noxious early-20th-century pseudoscience of eugenics, which suggested that the human race could be "bettered" by manipulating breeding to improve human "stock." But it's historically inaccurate to imply, as Thomas and the anti-choice activists he's cribbing from do, that Sanger started the birth control movement because of her belief in eugenics. The historical record is clear on this: Sanger began advocating for birth control to empower women and then latched onto the eugenics movement as a way to increase interest in the issue.

Sanger advocate for some highly distasteful eugenics ideas at times. But it's flat-out false to imply, as Thomas does, that she supported forced sterilization or that she was trying to get rid of black people. In her writings, she insisted that birth control must be "autonomous, self-directive, and not imposed from without" and that no one should "be endowed with the authority to order anyone to be sterilized."

More importantly, Thomas is being disingenuous in his suggestion that Sanger was targeting black people for eugenics purposes when she teamed up with activists like W.E.B. Du Bois to open clinics geared towards helping black women obtain contraception. As Imani Gandy wrote at Rewire in 2015, this project was literally the opposite of a racist attack on black people. It was an explicit effort to make services available to black people that only whites previously had access to. Sanger believed that birth control helped people exert more control over their lives and help themselves economically, and this project was explicitly meant to help people in the black community empower themselves.

"Due to segregation policies in the South, the birth control clinics that opened in the 1930s were for white women only. Sanger wanted to change that," Gandy explained.

As Gandy notes, Sanger explicitly rejected the idea of racial eugenics, saying she had encountered a man who tried to give her money if she would "cut down" on the number of black people.

"That is, of course, not our idea. I turned him down," Sanger said. "But that is an example of how vicious some people can be about this thing." She added that her purpose was to reduce "sufferings for all groups."

Despite his protestations to the contrary, Thomas's opinion is clearly meant to bolster the growing efforts of the religious right to expand the war on reproductive rights past attacks on abortion, onward to reducing access to contraception.

Demonizing Margaret Sanger is clearly meant to stigmatize her legacy. But her legacy is not abortion — which, again, she opposed — but birth control. It was Sanger who coined the term "birth control." It was Sanger who went to jail repeatedly for teaching women how to prevent pregnancy. And it was Sanger who envisioned the concept of the birth control pill, eventually securing the funding that allowed it to be developed. So when anti-choicers seek to turn her into a villain, their goal is to taint contraception by association and create a moral case for restricting access.

There's no small amount of hypocrisy in play here. Clarence Thomas sits on a court that was literally created by slave-holders, including George Washington, who signed the act that created the Supreme Court. And Thomas adheres to an "originalist" judicial philosophy which claims that the beliefs of the nation's founders — who were, whatever their better qualities, a bunch of racists who literally wrote legal slavery into the founding documents — should matter more in jurisprudence than current, more progressive social mores. Thomas presumably doesn't believe that the U.S. Constitution or the Supreme Court is permanently tainted by these racist associations. But when it comes to restricting women's rights, he is happy to advance a much shakier case of guilt by association.

The good news is that there's not much that's legally binding in this rant from Thomas. His opinion was tied to a court decision that actually throws out Indiana's law banning abortions done on the basis of race, sex or disability. (To be clear, there is no evidence that the first two kinds of abortions even happen. Those seem to be figments of anti-choice activists' collective racist imagination.) For now, the claim that reproductive rights must be restricted on the basis of some imaginary eugenics threat against people of color has no legal importance.

The bad news, however, is that by elevating right-wing conspiracy theories about Margaret Sanger, Thomas has given the blessing of a Supreme Court justice to the escalating war on birth control. The pretense that the right's campaign against reproductive rights is about "life" is fast fading away. Instead, Thomas bluntly suggests that women can't be trusted to make their own decisions about when to give birth because they will use that power for unsavory or even racist purposes. That kind of argument isn't just about abortion. It's about the idea that society must control or restrict any method women employ to control childbirth.