Right Now, It's a Spectator Sport. Before Long It Could Become a Blood Sport.

Trump has people in Canada, Mexico, Japan and Europe a bit worried about how we'll fare in a trade war with the United States. We're told we could be heading toward a recession, a drop in GDP of perhaps 2 per cent.

Trump's abuse of America's traditional allies is small potatoes. The Big Show is the Clash of the Titans, Washington versus Beijing. There's the one to watch because it's possible that could end in fireworks.

It would be much less worrisome if America had a mentally sound president. It doesn't. It has Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is in the White House and the reasonable people, the boys in the long pants, are pretty much gone. Trump has now surrounded himself with some pretty sketchy types like Pompeo, Bolton, Navarro and Haspel. They're the sort who can play on Trump's worst instincts, his deranged sense of grievance, his fears and every base instinct - they are legion. Trump embodies a malignant narcissism. He's extremely sociopathic, utterly lacking in empathy. He's impulsive and more than a little sadistic. These are the foundational attributes that Donald Trump has consistently exhibited his entire life. They're also America's Achilles Heel.

Trump may be attempting to restore America's dominance in the world. He can't. America's days as the world's industrial powerhouse are over. Trump blames that on foreign predators. Not hardly. It was America's industrial giants that, unleashed by globalism, offshored their manufacturing operations to low-wage, minimal-regulation regimes abroad. The United States quite deliberately transitioned to a "fire" economy - finance/insurance/real estate.

A few years ago I read a fascinating analysis by an American labour economist about the state of industrialism in his homeland and why so much of it was gone for good. He pointed out that manufacturing generates stable albeit modest returns on investment. Typically it's something in the range of 3 per cent. At the same time, the fire economy, Wall Street, was generating returns of 9 to 12 per cent. To encourage financial investment the feds began cutting capital gains taxes. The Triumph of the Rentier Class. Trump has no appetite for undoing that.

Do we imagine Chairman-for-Life Xi hasn't taken the measure of Trump and the box he's in? Do we think only Trump will ruthlessly exploit every opportunity, every vulnerability?

Could Trump's trade war be the very opportunity Xi has been looking for? This could be China's opportunity to cement its ascdendancy. History tells us that most of these superpower transitions lead to warfare. That was predictable when ships were made of oak, cannon were cast iron and fired grape shot. This transition will be the first we've seen in the Nuclear Age.

I would bet that Xi has a critical advantage. He can probably weather the domestic reaction to a recessionary trade war much better than Trump. Trump's base will be hit. The Gullibillies are quite vulnerable. But it will be the Kochs, the Coors and the Adelson's who will be gunning for him if they see he's launched a ruinous trade war without much chance of success. They're already incensed with Trump's trade wars. They'll be unforgiving if Trump loses his war with China or winds up groveling for terms. And let's remember who owns America's "bought and paid for" Congress.

Trump is no Simon Bolivar but he may wind up as America's Don Quixote. He cannot endure humiliation and he's now surrounded with people like Bolton, Pompeo, Navarro and Haspel. With those people steering Trump, it's Xi's advantages that I find truly worrisome.

Remember, America is flying solo this time. It has viciously turned on its allies.

Let's hope this doesn't get out of control.

I've Got an Idea to Rescue Justin From His Slump

Unfair or not, Justin Trudeau has taken a hit in the public's mind over his pretty clumsy trip to India. With JT et famille sporting an elaborate wardrobe of Bollywood's best fashions, the Indian press took the piss out of him pretty relentlessly. The local scribblers piled on.

Now Trudeau's approval numbers have dropped to within spitting distance of Tory leader, Andrew Scheer's. That's Andrew "Chuckles" Scheer people, a guy with all the charisma of a recycled catheter.

Maybe JT should consider upping his game. He could start by reversing himself and honouring a major campaign promise - electoral reform. I would like it even better if he went for electoral reform and pipelines but that's probably too much to ask. 

Trudeau promised that 2015 would be our last first-past-the-post election. In short order he reneged on that committment but his "can't" sounded more like "won't."  His claim that it wouldn't work here, even though it works elsewhere, was utterly unconvincing. We would even accept the preferential ballot option if he insisted. Just do it.

Or maybe Justin can change course. Maybe he should transform himself from just another free trade mule into a Renaissance Man befitting of his legendary father. (full disclosure. what follows is taken from an email I wrote to a fellow blogger this morning)

I have long argued that Canada needs some serious redecorating. Ever since George H.W. Bush started this “coalition of the willing” business, America has treated certain allies, Canada included, as its de facto Foreign Legion.  Desert Storm was, arguably, a good cause – driving Iraq out of Kuwait. Kosovo – meh. Afghanistan, well we all lost our minds at the 9/11 attacks streamed live into our livingrooms. We even bent the rules around Article 5 in that, 1) – the US never attacked by Afghanistan, and 2) – at the time the US invoked Article 5 it was not truly “under attack.” Picky, picky.

Where we lost the plot was when Bush/Cheney decided America should turn to invading Iraq rather than finishing what it had begun in Afghanistan. We knew from Hans Blix and his team of UN inspectors that Saddam wasn’t hiding a mountain of WMDs. It was pretty obvious that Washington thought it could roll in and basically grab the oil for US energy giants. Why was the only Iraqi ministry US forces secured the oil ministry?

The US decided to offload much of the Afghan mission to free up troops for Iraq and wanted a Foreign Legion. Rick “Big Cod” Hillier talked Paul Martin into taking the combat gig in Kandahar with a laughably token force of just 2,000 personnel, no more than half combat ready, to a province whose area and population mandated a combat force of between 20 to 30,000.  Martin didn’t know any better. Hillier probably did know, definitely should have known , but obviously didn’t tell his prime minister. It’s right there in the US Army/Marine Corps field manual, FM-3/24.

We lost our war in Afghanistan, the first military defeat in Canadian history. We lost badly. War is a state of armed conflict used to achieve a political outcome. That sought outcome was defined by Stephen Harper. We were there to stay. We would never cut and run. We would stay until the Taliban had been vanquished, effectively eradicated. We would make Afghanistan safe for democracy and a restoration of human rights (as they had once enjoyed under the country’s last king). We did none of those things. The Talibs are resurgent. The government is a hopelessly corrupt amalgamation of warlords from five main ethnic groups. Little boys’ bums are all the rage again and the struggle for women’s rights languishes. Meanwhile we definitely chose to cut and run.

Then along came Libya, a not so tidy war that Obama basically offloaded on Europe. Harper staged a victory fly past over Parliament Hill for that one even as Libya itself descended into an intractable, second phase civil war, this one substituting Islamist radicals for Gadhafi.

Syria? ISIS has been driven out, more or less, for now. It has been reduced from a rebellion to an insurgency to what is today essentially a terrorist movement. That’s the thing with these guys. They can morph from one state to another, often rather effortlessly, and that enables them to be flexible, mobile. They’ll be back, probably in another guise.

I have gone on at some length on these events because the world has become no safer for all of our post 9/11 misadventures. If anything we’ve demonstrated, repeatedly, that all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men are no longer a sure path to a meaningful, lasting victory. We have all the watches but the bad guys have all the time.

We are returning to a more challenging era, one akin to the last Cold War, another win that we utterly failed to consolidate as we allowed triumphalism to get the better of us. That Doomsday Clock is now closer to midnight than it has been since the Cuban missile crisis. Around the world but particularly in Europe, Eurasia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the greater Asia Pacific region all the way to Australia, Russia and China, everyone is madly rearming.

America is being overtaken, economically, by China which is fast making inroads into the Middle East, Africa and even South America (whatever happened to the Monroe Doctrine anyway?). We have seen a number of these major power transitions over the centuries. At various times in the modern period the dominant spot belonged alternately to the Spanish, the French, the Dutch, the Brits and now the Americans. Before that came the Greeks, the Romans, the Mongols, etc.

Here’s the thing. History tells us that these transitions tend to be difficult. Two-thirds of them result in war. Is war in the offing between the U.S. and China? From what I’ve read over the past ten years, China’s military leadership is quietly bellicose.  At some level they want to exact revenge for China’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of us white folks – Opium Wars, etc.?  That thought came to mind when I found an essay in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute wherin an acting service officer complained bitterly that China was overtaking the United States “without a fight” as though that was unthinkable.

It would be tempting to dismiss that view as the work of a hothead only his sentiments go deeper in that, all the way back to the Project for a New American Century, the neo-cons (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Perle, Wolfowitz, Libby et al)  developed an “over my dead body” policy prescription that was subsequently embodied in the Bush Doctrine. That doctrine provided that America reserved the right to institute pre-emptive war against any nation or group of nations that challenged America’s economic and military domination.  Seriously, look it up.

The backbone of American airpower today and into the future are its stealth warplanes, the F-22 and F-35. Those are not dual purpose aircraft. They’re not defence oriented. There are simply too few F-22s to handle the job and the F-35 has a series of deficiencies that make it marginal in the air defence role. They are primarily offensive weapons designed to “take the fight to the enemy” and not just any garden variety enemy either.  They are purpose built to operate in heavily defended, hostile airspace.  One American general called the F-35 his “kick in the front door” weapon. Do you remember that the Japanese ran a dress rehearsal of their Pearl Harbour attack to test their shallow-draught Long Lance torpedoes in an appropriate anchorage? The USAF staged a similar “proof of concept” exercise called Operation Chimichanga that simulated a stealth first strike attack on China. Do you the Chinese maybe didn’t hear about that?

Whether it’s North Korea or the South China Sea or maybe just two countries getting into each other’s faces, this is not a very placid time. For Canada, however, it may be a time to begin loosening the ties that bind us to American foreign and military policy, perhaps by aligning Canadian  policy more directly with our western European allies. It doesn’t mean we won’t pick up the phone when Washington calls but maybe just not on the first or even the twenty-first ring.

If you follow this global rearmament business as I do you’re drawn to the conclusion that the world has absolutely no shortage of state of the art weaponry. State of the art everything. Hell even the city state of Singapore has six modern and very capable submarines.

How about we zig where everyone else chooses to zag by decoupling ourselves from Washington and restoring our credibility as an honest broker nation? Communications between rival nations (at all levels) are apt to become more strained in this overheated and armed-to-the-teeth milieu that has become our new reality. The need for a trustworthy intermediary may be greater now than ever before in Canadian history. It's a job suitable for the nation that gave the world the concept of peacekeeping, an initiative that earned Mike Pearson the Nobel Peace Prize.

Young Europeans Find Democracy Unconvincing

When Europeans lose their taste for democracy, bad things have been known to happen.

Whether it's Hungary or Poland, both of which have authoritarian, illiberal governments, or the rise of authoritarian movements in the Netherlands, France and Britain, good old liberal democracy is taking something of a beating in Europe.

Now Deutsche Welle reports that just half of young Europeans, 16 to 26, still believe that democracy is the best form of government.

The results of the YouGov study, commissioned by the TUI Foundation and released Thursday, show that respondents from Germany and Greece were most in favor of democracy (62 and 66 percent), while France, Italy and Poland were the least convinced of its effectiveness (42, 45 and 42 percent).

The study noted that the latter three countries had experienced a growth in populist movements. France sees a runoff vote this weekend to decide if Marine Le Pen, a far-right candidate claiming she will protect France's national identity, will be its next president. However, polls predict Emmanuel Macron, a centrist candidate, is likely to claim victory.

The YouGov study, which was conducted between February 16 and March 3, surveyed 6,000 people aged 16-26 from Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, and Spain.

If you doubt that neo-nationalism is sweeping Europe, especially in the east, check out the photo-essay at the bottom of the page.

How the Leader of the Free World Became the Leader of the Global Right Wing.

AmeriKa's president, Donald Trump, will not be the leader of the free world. He will, however, be the leader of the global right wing. Across Europe, the radical right is embracing the next US leader as one of their own. Donald Trump validates their ugly bigotry, racism and xenophobia. He is one of them. It's no accident that he's also warmly received by the radical right Netanyahu government in Israel.

In the Middle East, the strongman thugs who rule with iron fists in the post-Arab Spring era couldn't be happier.

He will be a bit of both but radically different, too, predicts Theodore Karasik, a senior adviser with the Washington-based Gulf State Analytics, who has discussed the future of the region with Trump’s advisers in recent months. Trump’s chief priority, he said, will be to fight the Islamic State, while outsourcing the rest of the region’s security to Russia and to Arab states.

Words like “moderate” and “democracy” won’t feature in a Trump administration’s Middle East vocabulary, he added. “We are now engaged in realpolitik.”

For the region’s strongmen, most of whom had fraught relations with the Obama administration, that is welcome news. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyep Erdogan and Egypt’s President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi have hailed Trump’s election as a chance to reset their badly frayed relationships with Washington.

Hold onto your hats. With ideology this rancid driving AmeriKa's foreign and military policy, we could be in for a very sharp and wild ride.

How's This For a Script? Warning - It's a Tough Read.

Young men and women, conscripts, manning the ramparts at Festung (fortress) Europa as legions of desperate migrants approach seeking safety. As the steely commander shouts the order the young defenders reluctantly open fire on the horde knowing they have no other choice - the migrants carry among them a highly infectious strain of cholera.

Sounds like utter dystopia, doesn't it? Well, relax, there is no Festung Europa yet and no infectious horde is marching on Europe yet, but... an outbreak of cholera is now sweeping Iran and experts warn that the impacts of war, climate change and this year's powerful El Nino, create ideal conditions for it and other infectious diseases associated with extreme, mass suffering to spread rapidly and far. From Foreign Policy:

Although the scope of the current outbreak is moderate so far, with fewer than 11,000 illnesses confirmed, it has already spread across an expanse far larger than the 1997 epidemic, taken a greater toll in the Middle East, and still threatens to travel with refugee populations to a even wider geographic area. Moreover, there is ample reason to believe the official tally is grossly undercounted.

At least 2,000 people in Iraq have contracted cholera since mid-September, and Vibriobacteria have contaminated the Euphrates River, possibly the Tigris, as well. The epidemic is thriving amid a perfect storm of failed-state capacity in Baghdad, even worse “state” failures in Anbar province and other regions controlled by the self-declared Islamic State, encampments of millions of Syrian refugees and other homeless displaced people, and harsh downpours slamming parts of Africa and the Middle East thanks to one of the worstPacific El Niño climate events in recorded history.

On Oct. 26, the Syrian American Medical Society, a nongovernmental organization providing aid inside the war-torn country, said it was “very likely” a child living outside of Aleppo died from cholera, possibly due to a widespread contagion in the area. Since January, UNICEF has reported more than 105,000 cases of acute diarrheal disease in Syrian children inside the country, though no laboratories there are available to determine the infectious cause of most of the illnesses. Some, perhaps many, could be due to cholera.

And there’s reason to fear the epidemic could spread further afield, too. Turkish officials have assured their people that no cases of cholera have been confirmed among Syrian refugees living in that country. In Lebanon, where millions of refugees reside and government chaos is responsible for a nearly four-month cessation of garbage collection,doctors warn that conditions are ripe for an explosive spread of the disease. On Oct. 2,Greek health officials placed a Dutch tourist in treatment in Athens after the individual developed acute diarrhea on the island of Kos, a landing point for thousands of Syrian refugees. Although cholera was feared, it was never confirmed. Nevertheless, there isgrowing concern in Europe that with the refugees will come the Vibrio cholerae.

But this year’s cholera crisis already goes far beyond the borders of Iraq or even the lengths of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers.

...Cholera bacteria can travel from one place to another via two ways: through water systems or through infected people. When contaminated human waste is dumped into a river, cholera is carried downstream. Food that is irrigated with contaminated water, and then shipped to another region or country, may carry the disease to new areas if the produce is eaten raw and unwashed. In 1979, I was in a cholera epidemic in Tanzania that spread far and wide on cashew nuts that were packaged by the unwashed hands of people who were infected. International travelers may unknowingly carry cholera and pass it with their waste, spreading Vibrio bacteria from one country to another.

The El-Nino Conveyor.

Climate and weather play a key role. In the 1997-1998 epidemic, the disease’s spread was hastened by torrential downpours and mudslides from a periodic climate swing that occurs when transpacific winds change, for reasons unknown, pushing ocean currents out of their normal patterns. This weather pattern is called El Niño.

...By mid-October, the El Niño drama was clearly unfolding. The weather system was blamed for holding toxic air in a stagnant dome over Singapore, sending killer typhoons across the Philippines and Southeast Asia, causing a drought in usually drenched parts of West Africa, and showering parts of East Africa with sporadic rains of such force that mudslides and floods resulted. Changes in the hunting patterns of King Penguins have been blamed on El Niño, along with an overall East African drought so dire that the United Nations warns thatsevere food insecurity may loom. And on Oct. 25, an atmospheric scientist from Colorado State University credited El Niño with feeding Hurricane Patricia, which had record-breaking winds as high as 200 miles per hour.

El Niño’s impact on the Middle East, coupled with climate change, has been two-fold: First, temperatures from southern Iraq all the way into Turkey reached record highs this summer, topping more than 122 degrees Fahrenheit. The entire region is now locked in a severe drought, worse than the one some have credited with spawning the Syrian uprisings of 2011 that led to the Assad regime’s crackdown and current civil war.

Climate change, meanwhile, has hit the South Asia/Middle East region with severe drought causing some major rivers such as the Tigris and Euphrates to be dammed by the countries they pass through. This slows or halts the flow of the rivers increasing the growth of cholera bacteria. Getting ISIS to open the Ramadi dam they control will not be easy. Meanwhile the river water and produce grown with that water become increasingly dangerous.

The Good News

So far the cholera that has spread from the Middle East into Africa is just one strain, Inaba, that is relatively easily treated and for which an effective and inexpensive vaccine is available but there are inadequate stocks of it. The World Health Organization (WHO) has a million doses but it intends to use half of that to vaccinate 250,000 displaced people in government-controlled regions of Iraq.

The Future

More than 10 million Iraqis, Syrians, and Kurds are now living in squalor, displaced within their own countries or in refugee settlements in the region. Among refugees over the last four years have been outbreaks of measles (1,000 cases currently inside Iraq), typhoid fever, hepatitis A, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and even polio, which was once all but eradicated from the Middle East. Conditions are ripe for a cholera epidemic that might take hold for a very long time.

Epidemiologists have been warning us for years that mass-migrations of the sort foreseen for much of this century will trigger and spread highly lethal epidemics. We live in a world in which more than one in three has no access to basic sanitation. In the Third World more people have cell phones than the number with toilets. Putting these people to flight from any cause - war, famine, water shortages, sea level rise, whatever - magnifies the risk of rapidly spreading, lethal epidemics.

This cholera epidemic is the world's wake-up call. Will we even hear it?

It is  

Banging the War Drum - Washington Post

It was earlier this month that the German financial newspaper, Handelsblatt, warned of the dangerous spread of war fever throughout Europe.  The paper found that Europeans were being "mentally mobilized" for war.

Something eerily similar is happening in America.  In today's Washington Post, columnist Anne Applebaum questions whether the European people today are all that different from the complacent, care free Polish population in the summer of 1939.

Instead of celebrating weddings, they [the Poles] should have dropped everything, mobilized, prepared for total war while it was still possible. And now I have to ask: Should Ukrainians, in the summer of 2014, do the same? Should central Europeans join them?

I realize that this question sounds hysterical, and foolishly apocalyptic, to U.S. or Western European readers. But hear me out, if only because this is a conversation many people in the eastern half of Europe are having right now. In the past few days, Russian troops bearing the flag of a previously unknown country, Novorossiya, have marched across the border of southeastern Ukraine. The Russian Academy of Sciences recently announced it will publish a history of Novorossiya this autumn, presumably tracing its origins back to Catherine the Great. Various maps of Novorossiya are said to be circulating in Moscow. Some include Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, cities that are still hundreds of miles away from the fighting. Some place Novorossiya along the coast, so that it connects Russia to Crimea and eventually to Transnistria, the Russian-occupied province of Moldova. Even if it starts out as an unrecognized rump state — Abkhazia and South Ossetia, “states” that Russia carved out of Georgia, are the models here — Novorossiya can grow larger over time.

Applebaum foresees not merely a Russian invasion and conquest of Ukraine but outright genocide of the sort visited on Jews by the Nazis.

Russian soldiers will have to create this state — how many of them depends upon how hard Ukraine fights, and who helps them — but eventually Russia will need more than soldiers to hold this territory. Novorossiya will not be stable as long as it is inhabited by Ukrainians who want it to stay Ukrainian. There is a familiar solution to this, too. A few days ago, Alexander Dugin, an extreme nationalist whose views have helped shape those of the Russian president, issued an extraordinarystatement. “Ukraine must be cleansed of idiots,” he wrote — and then called for the “genocide” of the “race of bastards.”

Applebaum even warns of a sinister plot whereby Putin will rain nuclear weapons on Eastern Europe.

...the dissident Russian analyst Andrei Piontkovsky, has recently published an article arguing, along lines that echo Zhirinovsky’s threats, that Putin really is weighing the possibility of limited nuclear strikes — perhaps against one of the Baltic capitals, perhaps a Polish city — to prove that NATO is a hollow, meaningless entity that won’t dare strike back for fear of a greater catastrophe. Indeed, in military exercises in 2009 and 2013, the Russian army openly “practiced” a nuclear attack on Warsaw.

Is all of this nothing more than the raving of lunatics? Maybe. And maybe Putin is too weak to do any of this, and maybe it’s just scare tactics, and maybe his oligarchs will stop him. But “Mein Kampf” also seemed hysterical to Western and German audiences in 1933. Stalin’s orders to “liquidate” whole classes and social groups within the Soviet Union would have seemed equally insane to us at the time, if we had been able to hear them.

But Stalin kept to his word and carried out the threats, not because he was crazy but because he followed his own logic to its ultimate conclusions with such intense dedication — and because nobody stopped him. Right now, nobody is able to stop Putin, either. So is it hysterical to prepare for total war? Or is it naive not to do so?

Wow from conquest to genocide to nuclear war, Applebaum beats that war drum to death.  Hers is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Euros Strongly Back Assisted Suicide Laws

A poll of 12-European countries conducted for the Swiss Medical Lawyers Association found very strong majorities in all but one country in support of legalizing assisted suicide.

In almost all the 12 countries polled, three-quarters or more of those responding to questions posed by the Swiss Medical Lawyers Association (SMLA) said people should be able to decide when and how they die.

Two-thirds to three-quarters of them said they could imagine opting for assisted suicide themselves if they suffered from an incurable illness, serious disability or uncontrollable pain.


Germans were most open to letting people decide when and how they die, with 87 percent supporting the idea, and results slowly descended to Denmark's 71 percent in 11th place.

Greece was the only exception to this strong support, with only 52 percent backing the idea of allowing assisted suicide.

Spaniards were the most willing to consider asking for help to die, with 78 percent support, followed closely by Germans (77 percent) and the French (75 percent).

In Britain, 71 percent said they might seek assisted suicide while Greece was again the most reluctant with 56 percent saying they might do so.

More than three-quarters of those polled in all countries said only doctors or trained practitioners should perform assisted suicides.

A majority of all respondents said doctors should not lose their licenses if they help a patient die. Results ranged from 84 percent in Britain to 58 percent in Greece.

A Gallup poll in Britain found basically the same thing.   in Britain=of respondents opposed prosecution of physicians who assist patients to die.   82% actively supported euthanasia.

Physician-assisted suicide is currently legal in four Euro nations - Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg and Switzerland.   In the United States it has spread from Oregon to Washington and Montana.

What? Another Dire Report on Global Warming?

We used to get climate change reports once, perhaps twice a week.   Now they're flooding in daily.   That's not surprising given that scientific research papers on various aspects of anthropogenic global warming are now coming in at roughly five a day.

Today I'll pick the European Environment Agency.   A report by the EEA confirms that Europe is already reeling from the impacts of global warming and they're only going to get worse.

"...the agency says the past decade in Europe has been the warmest on record.

"It adds that the cost of damage caused by extreme weather events is rising, and the continent is set to become more vulnerable in the future. 

"'Every indicator we have in terms of giving us an early warning of climate change and increasing vulnerability is giving us a very strong signal," observed EEA executive director Jacqueline McGlade.

"'It is across the board, it is not just global temperatures," she told BBC News.

"'It is in human health aspects, in forests, sea levels, agriculture, biodiversity - the signals are coming in from right across the environment.'"

The report finds that climate change in Europe will "deepen socio-economic imbalances" among EU countries.   Some observers have speculated that global warming could drive a wedge between warming-ravaged southern Europe and the relatively advantaged northern European states including Scandinavia, the U.K., France, Germany, Holland, the Baltics and the Benelux countries.

As these reports flood in they place the cognitive dissonance of our petro-Parliamentarians in a glaring light.   Harper, Mulcair, Trudeau - they'll all admit they know the dangers global warming poses to our country and our people and then they'll all stand up on their hind legs and speak glowingly of the bright future of our insanely high-carbon oil substitute.   That's a sign of deep-seated, political/mental dysfunction, the sort of thing that should disqualify anybody from leading a political party.

Krugman Puts Europe on Suicide Watch

Princeton economist, New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wonders if Europe's political leadership has a death wish.

"The question then was whether this brave and effective action [of the European Central Bank] would be the start of a broader rethink, whether European leaders would use the breathing space the bank had created to reconsider the policies that brought matters to a head in the first place.

"But they didn’t. Instead, they doubled down on their failed policies and ideas. And it’s getting harder and harder to believe that anything will get them to change course. 

"Consider the state of affairs in Spain,  which is now the epicenter of the crisis. Never mind talk of recession; Spain is in full-on depression, with the overall unemployment rate at 23.6 percent, comparable to America at the depths of the Great Depression,  and the youth unemployment rate over 50 percent. This can’t go on — and the realization that it can’t go on is what is sending Spanish borrowing costs ever higher. 

 "...Nonetheless, the prescription coming from Berlin and Frankfurt is, you guessed it, even more fiscal austerity.

"This is, not to mince words, just insane. Europe has had several years of experience with harsh austerity programs, and the results are exactly what students of history told you would happen: such programs push depressed economies even deeper into depression. And because investors look at the state of a nation’s economy when assessing its ability to repay debt, austerity programs haven’t even worked as a way to reduce borrowing costs."

Krugman argues that if European leaders are to prevent continental economic suicide they have two choices - either scrap the Euro and restore the old national currencies, or keep the Euro bolstered by expansionary monetary policies accepting inevitable inflation and many years of agonizingly slow recovery.

"What we’re actually seeing, however, is complete inflexibility. In March, European leaders signed a fiscal pact that in effect locks in fiscal austerity as the response to any and all problems. Meanwhile, key officials at the central bank are making a point of emphasizing the bank’s willingness to raise rates at the slightest hint of higher inflation.

"So it’s hard to avoid a sense of despair. Rather than admit that they’ve been wrong, European leaders seem determined to drive their economy — and their society — off a cliff. And the whole world will pay the price."

European Youth Reeling

We're flooded with stories about Greece and the Euro and the European Union leaders and their deals.  Blah, blah, blah.  What these stories almost always overlook are the real victims, Europe's young people.   They are on the verge of truly becoming a "lost generation."

A report in The Guardian reveals staggering levels of youth unemployment - 28% among Italians 16-24; Spain 51%, Greece 43%.  In the Great Depression, America's unemployment rate briefly spiked at 25%.   Worse yet, some sectors of the European economy aren't expected to recover for at least a decade.

The article reports an exodus of Europe's "best and brightest" young people similar to what befell Ireland after its collapse.

As subpar Euro leaders like Britain's Cameron remain fixated on austerity campaigns that can only worsen conditions for their youth the question becomes for how long they can possibly suppress widespread unrest and what awaits their countries when that dam breaks.

Put It On the Kids' Tab - A Cautionary Tale

We got used to it after WWII, governments borrowing money to be repaid by taxpayers in the future.  In an era of foreseeable, sustained growth that wasn't so bad.   The next generation of taxpayers would be much better off and quite capable of handling the government debt they inherited.

The problem today is that our political classes are still playing the long-term debt game even though it's becoming abundantly clear that the next generation of taxpayers not only will be less well off but will also be saddled with the social burden of a rapidly aging society.   With a deal like this - not of their making, not of their choosing - what choice do they have but to revolt, to take to the streets?

Ulrich Beck, who teaches sociology at the London School of Economics and at Harvard, says it's high time for young people to get very, very angry.

...For the first time, Europe's young people are experiencing their own "European fate." Better educated than ever and possessing high expectations, they are confronting a decline in the labor markets triggered by the threat of national bankruptcies and the economic crisis. Today one in five Europeans under 25 is unemployed.
 
In those places where they have set up their tent cities and raised their voices, they are demanding social justice. In Spain and Portugal, as well as in Tunisia, Egypt and Israel, they are voicing their demands in a way as nonviolent as it is powerful. Europe and its youth are united in their rage over politicians who are willing to spend unimaginable sums of money to rescue banks, even as they gamble away the futures of their countries' youth.

The headlines have been interchangeable for some time: Insecurity Over the Future of the Global Economy, EU Bailout Fund in Jeopardy, Merkel Attends Crisis Meeting with Sarkozy, Rating Agency Announces Downgrade of US Debt. Does the global financial crisis signal the deterioration of the old center? Ironically, it is authoritarian China that is playing the moral apostle on the financial front, with its sharp criticism of both democratic America and the EU.

There is one thing the financial crisis has undoubtedly achieved: Everyone (experts and politicians included) has been catapulted into a world that no one understands anymore. As far as the political reactions are concerned, there are two extreme scenarios that can be juxtaposed. The first is a Hegelian scenario, in which, given the threats that global risk capitalism engenders, the "ruse of reason" is afforded an historic opportunity. This is the cosmopolitan imperative: cooperate or fail, succeed together or fail individually.

At the same time, the inability to control financial risks (along with climate change and migration movements) presents a Carl Schmitt scenario, a strategic power game, which opens the door to ethnic and nationalist policy.

Ulrich Beck's article is presented in the context of challenges facing the European Union and, granted, the youth uprisings he mentions have broken out on the streets of Greece, Italy and Spain and not yet in North America, but pledging the kids' credit is not (unfortunately) limited to Europe by any means.  The United States clearly leads the pack on that one even as its hopelessly corrupt government and institutions cater to the well being of the richest of the rich at the expense of the worsening fate of the wage-earning, tax paying middle classes.   American youth haven't taken to the streets en masse - not yet anyway.   Yet theirs is a candle very much burning fiercely from both ends.

Welcome, again, to the Century of Revolution.

Now They're Coming Through Greece

African migrants, alright let's be honest - 'climate migrants', are now seeking the safety of Europe by travelling through Turkey into Greece.   The European Union responded to Greek's plight this week by sending special EU border teams to help Greek authorities stem the influx of migrants.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

 
It is the first time that a rapid-intervention border team has been deployed to an EU member state since the Frontex teams were created in 2007.

Frontex agreed to send the team of 175 officials last month after Greece asked the EU agency for help because of the increasing number of refugees - mainly from Africa and Afghanistan - attempting to cross the border to find their way into the EU.
  Personnel and equipment from Germany, Romania, Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and Denmark will be deployed along the border. The mission is expected to last for two months and efforts will focus on policing a previously unguarded 12-kilometre river border between the towns of Nea Vyssa and Orestiada.

The Greek daily Kathimerini said more than 30,000 migrants had entered the EU across the narrow stretch of river. Frontex recorded a sixfold increase there in the number of immigrants trying to enter Greece in the second quarter of this year.

More people are trying to cross via Turkey because a previously used route from Libya to Italy was closed last year by a controversial bilateral agreement which allows Italian vessels to turn back migrants' boats caught at sea.

Europe has a long-running problem of migrants from west Africa who have fled north, many of them because rapacious European fishing fleets have collapsed the fish stocks in their local waters.

"We have all been surprised. He is so . . . American!"

Robert Kagan has an interesting article in today's WaPo describing Europe's uncomfortable embrace of Barack Obama:

...Europeans want to be left in peace. They experienced enough turmoil in the 20th century to last a millennium: the two world wars that devastated the continent and took tens of millions of lives; the Holocaust, which still inspires deep guilt, and not only in Germany; the rampant inflations and depressions of the 1920s and 1930s; the wild political swings from romantic and belligerent nationalism to fascism to socialism to flirtations with communism to democracy; the Cold War that divided the continent, not only along the Iron Curtain but also within and between the nations of Western Europe. Just beneath the skin, all of Europe remains deeply scarred.

So how surprising is it that what Europeans yearn for in their self-contained world is stability and predictability, a little peace and quiet? They don't want more excitement. The most revolutionary innovation in the history of geopolitics, the European Union, was paradoxically brought to fruition not by a desire for revolution but by a deep conservatism -- a mortal fear of the turmoil that can be caused by unconstrained ambitions, both national and individual. The German people, for whom and by whom the European Union was consecrated, want to be constrained. The E.U.'s economic strictures, which now act as a barrier to Keynesian deficit spending, were put there by the Germans, for whom memories of inflation, not depression, are the great nightmare. The Germans and French prefer welfare payments to government stimulus spending, for they are part of the passive system of social safety nets on which their citizens have grown so comfortably dependent. The creative destruction of the business-oriented political economies of the Anglo-Americans is too violent and unstable, too brutal and unpredictable. Better to regulate more tightly the international capitalists who can cause havoc through their inventiveness. Better to be less rich than less secure.

... It is into this Europe that President Obama has flown, with what Europeans regard as some radical and frightening plans for the economy; with a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan that is far more aggressive, militaristic and success-oriented than they would prefer; with ideas about Iran that are welcome (the promise to talk) but also unnerving (the threat to impose more sanctions). As one savvy French journalist told me, "We have all been surprised. He is so . . . American!"

Americans are creators of turmoil. Europeans see them the way the ancient Greeks saw the Athenians, as "incapable of either living a quiet life themselves or of allowing anyone else to do so."

...Europeans love Obama, but European leaders have been fretting ever since his election. George W. Bush did the Europeans a huge favor by giving them the best excuse for inaction in transatlantic history. Now comes Obama, so much more compelling and yet, still, American.

Read more here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/01/AR2009040103060.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter

Europe Stands Up to Israel

Washington has given Israel a blank cheque to do as it likes with Muslims they don't like. To listen to the abject silence coming from the government and the leader of the Liberal Party, we're doing the same. At least Harper and Ignatieff could grow a pair and say they approve of the Israeli assault.

The Europeans, however, have had enough and they've broken with America on the latest assault on Gaza. From AFP:

France spearheaded alarmed reaction from European nations as Israeli tanks and troops pushed into the Gaza Strip, revealing a sharp difference in tone from the official line in Washington.
At least 460 Palestinians have been killed and thousands wounded in an eight-day bombing campaign, according to Gaza medics, as Israeli tanks clashed overnight with Hamas fighters who fired back with mortars and rockets.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said the decision to send ground forces into Gaza after a week of air strikes was a "dangerous military escalation", while Britain called for an immediate ceasefire.

The European Union's new Czech presidency said Israel did not have the right to take military actions "which largely affect civilians," though its launching of land operations in the Gaza Strip was no surprise.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon "called for an immediate end to the ground operation, and asked that Israel do all possible to ensure the protection of civilians and that humanitarian assistance is able to reach those in need," his office said in a statement.

The secretary general spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and "conveyed his extreme concern and disappointment," said the statement.
"He is convinced and alarmed that this escalation will inevitably increase the already heavy suffering of the affected civilian populations."

At the same time, Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg said: "Even the indisputable right of the state to defend itself does not allow actions which largely affect civilians."

France, which held the rotating EU presidency until December 31, 2008, went further, with Kouchner saying his country "condemns the Israeli ground offensive against Gaza just as it condemns the continuing firing of rockets".

Too bad we don't have leaders of that calibre in Canada.

Rot At The Top - Eight Years of Awful Leadership

Well, we did it again. Washington wanted to play hardball with Moscow and succeeded only in exposing the weakness of the NATO alliance. As a symbol of Western solidarity, NATO has been left bloated, battered and bruised, largely by American bullheadedness since September, 2001.

NATO's Secretary-General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, has been a total dud. He's great at making grandiose pronouncements that are best quickly forgotten if only to avoid embarrassing the Alliance and Scheffer himself. He failed to rally the member states to make a meaningful commitment to the mission in Afghanistan. Those nations that have shouldered the burden - Canada, Britain, the Netherlands, France and Germany - have pretty much acted on their own rather than as a NATO force. That is reflected in the way each fights (or doesn't) by its own rules on its own turf. That's five out of twenty-seven member nations (how many can you name?). Doesn't sound very impressive, does it? Scheffer, a rotten leader.

There was Tony Blair, Washington's lap dog, its poodle. Blair's career can be summed up with the epitaph, "He went along to get along." He not only vouchsafed Washington's outrageous lies on Iraq, he tossed in his own for good measure. A rotten leader but a good judge of when it was time to get out with his hide intact.

Then, of course, there's the Wrecking Crew. No, I didn't lift that reference from the just released book. I coined it for a photo album I posted on this very blog on 21 September, 2007. If you want an amusing stroll down Memory Lane, check it out. http://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.com/search?q=%22Wrecking+Crew%22

Ah yes, the Wrecking Crew. Leadership at its very worst. Consistently rotten to the point of perversion. They've squandered their nation's strength and its wealth, harming many to abet the already privileged few. Abroad they took their nation's prestige and goodwill and sold it cheap in pursuit of a radical ideology fomented from a viral hubris. It was a twenty-first century adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes played on a global stage. Applied delusion on a mass scale. Like all such folly it wasn't long before it collapsed under its own weight.

Bush, aided by the sycophant Scheffer, treated NATO as a child might treat a balloon - constantly blowing it up and squeezing it. With no effort to rationalize the Alliance or clarify and redefine its role in a post-Cold War era, Bush just kept on trying to toss in one Eastern European nation after another, a protracted campaign of passive-aggression against Moscow.

History has shown that alliances work best when there exist strong bonds, shared interests and common purpose. In Cold War NATO those elements were obvious and strongly-shared. It was actually a very large alliance, as these things go, and, despite that, it functioned quite well. Post Cold-War NATO is a bloated, clumsy thing progressively expanded through Central and Eastern Europe. There is nothing "North Atlantic" about the ex-Warsaw Pact states now relabelled as our own and very little that could pass for strong bonds, shared interests and common purpose, something evident in all the "no shows" in Afghanistan.

What are the strong bonds and shared interests between Canadians and Romanians or Slovenians? The question answers itself. Are we really willing to send our young men and women to fight over them? Of course we're not and our adversaries, real or potential, know it.

NATO has come to exist more as an extension of American foreign policy than anything else. This may be the undoing of NATO itself for it conflicts with the whole notion of shared interests and common purpose needed to maintain a healthy alliance. It represents the clash of Washington unilaterialism with a supposedly multilateral coalition.

Afghanistan may have marked the beginning of the end for NATO for it demonstrated the Alliance to be a square peg that couldn't be made to fit the round hole. With NATO members shirking "the mission" on a ratio of four to one, it's hard to depict this as a NATO venture at all.

Throughout the Bush years the West has consistently overplayed its hand. Bush overplayed his hand by going into Iraq unnecessarily with entirely predictable and yet, for the supposed leader of the free world, wilfully unforeseen consequences. American military power was never greater than before the first American tanks rolled across the Iraqi border. The occupation of Iraq showed little states that once dreaded America's military prowess that they had less to fear than they had imagined. By using force needlessly, Bush allowed the rise of Iran and the Shiites as the dominant regional force in the Middle East.

Now we have Georgia. Any guesses why Putin and Medvedev are dragging their feet on withdrawing their forces from Georgia? It's because we, once again, have overplayed our hand. Putin has been given a no-risk opportunity to see just what resolve NATO can truly muster when Condi Rice shows up in Brussels to crack the whip on the Alliance underlings. He has so much to gain and so very little to lose by delay and we've played right into his hand. Summer is almost over and Europe is anticipating an urestricted supply of Russian gas to heat its homes this winter. You do the math.

This game isn't over and we can't wish it away. If NATO is to be salvaged it will have to be rationalized with clearly defined purposes and equally clear commitments from its members. There is already talk of a two-tier Alliance - NATO Classic and NATO Lite if you like - which makes more sense as the days, and failures, go by. Organize the member states by commonality of interests and you will inevitably get back to a North Atlantic group (old NATO) and a Central and Eastern European group (new NATO) acting cooperatively but not in lockstep. That, at least, might restore some credibility to Article 5 of the Charter.

Make no mistake about it, the West needs NATO or some similar alliance, to confront the threats and challenges looming this century. There's plenty of trouble coming, everything from resource wars to climate-driven mass migration - enough that we don't have to provoke needless conflicts. We need to take an inventory of what we're about to face and craft a new understanding of what we'll need in an alliance for this cetury.

Our world is undergoing upheaval - environmentally, economically, and geo-politically - that will call out for new leadership. The ideologues have shown themselves unfit to navigate these shoals. We have an urgent need for new leadership with a clearer vision, steadier hand and a lighter touch.

Without NATO, America's Global Standing Plummets

The United States has been ranting lately about the very future of the NATO alliance hinging on the willingness of its European members to send more troops to fight America's castoff war in Afghanistan.

Washington may have been trying to shake up the European states but it's a policy that carries potential risks to the US that may be even more threatening.

America posits itself as "Leader of the Free World," a fairly grandiose but shallow, even tenuous claim. What is the Free World if not the Western world?

Since the end of WWII, America's prestige has been framed as the leader of the developed world. It was Washington's ability to lead Europe and harness their combined industrial engines and military might that elevated it to leadership globally.

Without a NATO to lead, America is reduced to a powerhouse dependent on ad hoc coalitions of states that typically need to be bribed or cajoled into joining and that flit in and out as it suits their interests. Bush, himself, on trying to gather a meaningful alliance to legitimize his conquest of Iraq spoke of the future as one to be shaped by "coalitions of the willing."

These coalitions, however convenient, lack precisely what America needs most - permanence and constancy. They're "one off" affairs that can rapidly turn into embarrassments as once true blue underlings get bored or are driven out in elections at home. That ain't no way to lead the world.

Without NATO, what remains save for the United Nations, a body increasingly hostile and suspicious of the United States? The UN is also the place where America cannot avoid looking into the faces of its future economic rivals - China and India, Russia and Brazil - and their demands for recognition and power sharing.

The European Union itself has emerged to rival the United States in population and combined GDP but NATO isn't structured as a US/EU partnership. Within NATO, America remains very much first among notional equals. Within NATO America can still leverage its considerable strengths.

It is no fluke that the United States appears much more worried about the potential demise of NATO than its European partners. Their 21st century reality is much different than the past, more divergent from America's.

In America's heyday, Europe was delineated by a concrete wall and barbed wire. To the East lay nothing but threats. The Soviet Union and its vast thousands of tanks stood poised to smash through the Fulga Gap and swallow the West. The wall is finally gone and the barbed wire and tanks are gone too. Europe has swelled to Russia itself and now has become dependent upon Russia for essentials such as natural gas.

Europe sees itself today more connected to Russia than at any time since the First World War and Old Europe finds itself increasingly at odds with New Europe and the United States over how it will deal with Russia. Washington is intent on driving NATO straight to the Russian borders by inducting Georgia and the Ukraine even as it negotiates to plant anti-missile batteries in Poland and the Czech Republic, virtually on Russia's doorstep.

American belligerence is fueling an arms race with Russia that is directly contrary, even harmful to Europe's interests. European leaders are more or less playing nice at the moment, hoping that November will bring a level of maturity and vision to the White House not seen since 2000.

NATO still has an important role to play in the futures of both the US and Europe but the next American president will have some real fence-mending to do. That'll mean toning down American unilateralism and exceptionalism, giving Europe a greater say in the leadership of the Alliance and no longer treating NATO as America's Foreign Legion.

The stresses that threaten the Alliance are more American than European. And, if NATO does fall apart, America stands to lose more than anyone else.

Too Hot for Sun Worshipers

China is deluged by rainstorms and floods. So are parts of Britain. What could be worse? Maybe it would be to be in sunny Greece, Italy or Southern France. Europe's Mediterranean nations are facing the unthinkable - weather so hot it kills their tourism industry.

In Greece, temperatures have reached 43 C. in the shade, the hottest weather in over a century.

'The Mediterranean climate of this country no longer exists. It is changing, perhaps even faster than we expected,' said Michalis Petrakis, director of Greece's Institute of Environmental Research at the National Observatory in Athens.

It's the same story throughout most of the eastern Med. Forest fires are spreading throughout the region, wildlife is simply dying off.