The Edge Columns

A Valentine for the big hotel on the hill

2012-02-14T08:41:00.000-08:00

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That big hotel on the hill can be a tourist town’s best friend. And so it’s been with the Algonquin Hotel in St. Andrews by-the-Sea. When the Fairmont chain pulled out last fall, a pall fell over the community. What would become of the town if its hotel failed to open?

This concern, of course, is predicated on whether you think tourism is a sustainable industry, which in a fossil fuel-scarce future it may not be. But for now tourism keeps many economies vibrant, from Jaipur to Jamaica*. Even so, depending on tourism as the only source of income makes for a fragile economy.

Fortunately for the tiny seaside community where I live, someone, make that several someones seem to be ready to rescue our grand old hotel. With a letter of intent in the hands of the current owner (the Province of New Brunswick), the potential new owners are Southwest Properties, New Castle Hotels & Resorts and the famous Marriott hotel chain. And we’ll know in 45 days whether the deal will move ahead.

What about the companies? The Marriott is easy; it’s a world-class brand. And coincidentally, the Marriott already brands a very famous Algonquin Hotel in the heart of Manhattan. I wrote “brands” rather than “owns”, because the Marriott chain, like many other large hotel chains, doesn’t own properties.

The actual owner of that other Algonquin is HEI Hotels & Resorts, a company based in Norwalk, Connecticut, which owns and operates over 30 luxury hotels for brands such as Hilton, Sheraton, Westin, Embassy Suites, and yes, Marriott. Did I just write that HEI “operates” these properties? Yes.

So what does the Marriott do? It manages the marketing and branding standards for hotels. The actual ownership and operating of the properties is done by companies such as HEI and others.

Two of these others are Southwest Properties and New Castle. Southwest is based in Halifax. New Castle is based in Shelton, Connecticut, coincidentally just 30 kilometers away from HEI’s headquarters. Together Southwest and New Castle have already built and now operate the Marriott hotel in Moncton, so they have a running start at hotel development in the province.

From what I can gather New Castle is the operations outfit, the one that hires staff and manages the day-to-day operations. Southwest is the property development company, the one that handles the renovations and maintenance of the physical plant.

If this seems to be a rather complicated business arrangement, it is. But there are benefits, at least to the companies. First, the hotel can be sold to new owners without affecting the main brand, in this case the Marriott. Second, each company can specialize and grow in its own area of expertise without having to invest in other, unrelated aspects of growth. Third, all companies can share the profits and reduce the liabilities by distributing the risks and responsibilities. Lawsuits, for example, might be more difficult with three companies involved rather than just one. Finally, the companies each have less exposure to the vagaries of local environments such as politics or public opinion.

Is this a good thing? On the local front I’d have to say that this seems to be a wonderful development for St. Andrews and its economy. With a renewed hotel and the power of the Marriott brand marketing it, the town’s tourism should be on an upswing. That means more visitors, more new businesses and a brighter local real estate market for years to come, barring an economic downturn.

There might even be some new development opportunities around the old hotel, a new indoor pool perhaps, or a portion of the hotel converted to condos, or even a waterfront townhouse development on the golf course. Time will tell.

But it’s the complexity thing that gives me pause. Not for the Algonquin development, but for the slightly disturbing notion of complexity as a growing feature of modern organizations. As it happens I just encountered a thinker exploring just such a thing. His name is Joseph Tainter, the author of The Collapse of Complex Societies written way back in 1988.

Tainter, an anthropologist and historian, theorizes that societies solve problems by developing complex solutions. As societies themselves become complex, they use more resources and energy to less effect, and reap diminishing returns. As everything becomes evermore complicated resources eventually become depleted, systems stagnate, decision-making becomes more cumbersome and even innovation slows to a trickle. Sound familiar?

Finally complex societies are faced with only three choices: a) successfully create even more complicated solutions, b) simplify or c) collapse. Of the three Tainter believes simplifying is the most difficult but ultimately the most successful approach.

I don’t exactly know how our old hotel on the hill could simplify its operations. The days of single individuals buying and operating hotels seem to be long gone. It will either collapse as a business or operate under a more complex system, hopefully successfully.

Today this is the best Valentine gift this town or this region is likely to get.

*Jamaica, almost entirely dependent on tourism for its economic health, has enduring poverty and one of the highest homicide rates in the world.

New Brunswick, my favourite fish and chip joint

2012-02-06T12:53:00.000-08:00

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Our forests are under attack again, I see. Or more accurately, New Brunswick’s toilet paper industry has fallen under the watchdog eye of CBC’s Marketplace. Their question: what do the eco-logos on the toilet paper packages actually mean?

To find out, Marketplace rounded up the usual suspects: a member of the Irving family, several forest management types and the head of one of the ego-logo branding outfits. They all met in somewhere in one of the province’s “managed” forests, which is essentially a farm of maturing spruce trees. The company foresters point to the forest as a model of success, the critics argue that it is an ecological tragedy, an industrial monoculture destroying our original mixed forest.

According to the Falls Brook ecological centre, the government of New Brunswick now subsidizes the forest companies to the tune of $11.12 per cubic meter of harvested wood, which amounts to an annual gift of $76 million from us, the taxpayers, to the private corporations. So, we’re all into a public-private sector partnership when it comes to harvesting our forests for wood chips.

And then there’s the other New Brunswick chip business, which depends on another agricultural monoculture: potatoes. Most of the province’s intensive farming is done on the upper reaches of the Saint John River. According to Agriculture Canada “the area of lowest soil cover in New Brunswick occurs in the potato region,” which the report identifies as “negative.”

Since 1981 there’s been a 79 percent decline in organic matter in soils across about 70 percent of our agricultural lands, which indicates that the general health of the soil is in serious decline.

Also since 1981 there’s been a dramatic increase in the contamination of our fresh water by the nitrogen in fertilizers. The amount of land in the high-risk category has gone from 2 percent to 96 percent. As to other contaminants, the report is a bit evasive about pesticides in the water, but notes that areas of low risk are shrinking while areas of high risk are expanding. Translation: New Brunswick farmers are using a lot more pesticides than their predecessors did 30 years ago.

So, like our forestry, our agriculture is increasingly dependent on the large-scale industrial model.

What about another side of our economic table on the fish plate?

Recent figures put New Brunswick’s fish and seafood exports at about $795 million. Combined with the domestic market, the total production is nearly $1 billion a year. The entire seafood industry provides jobs for more than 12,000 New Brunswickers, primarily in harvesting and seafood processing, and indirectly supports thousands more in transportation, manufacturing and other industries.

And yes, both traditional fishing and aquaculture are industrial-scale activities that can often have profound consequences on the eco-system. Over-fishing and other human activities have resulted in the collapse of some fin-fish stocks such as cod. And aquaculture methods, including the choice of species, salmon, have had their ecological impacts on the health of the oceans.

It’s important to note with all of these resource activities that only 5 percent or less is actually consumed by New Brunswickers. The remaining 95 percent is exported either to the rest of Canada or abroad. In short, all of these activities are tied to global markets, so New Brunswick’s economy (not to mention its ecosystem) is only as sustainable as the global industrial model itself. And that, pardon the pun, is food for thought.

And there’s the emerging aspect of this story: the shale gas development in the southeastern corner of the province. Natural gas fracking is a highly controversial industrial mining method, and if you don’t believe it, check out the Academy Award-nominated American documentary, “Gasland,” which will give you some idea of the horrors befalling the people who live near these operations. Have you even seen your household tapwater on fire? That kind of thing.

Our current provincial government seems to be in a backpedalling defensive mode when it comes to fracking. Their website shows an increasing focus on raising the regulatory bar on natural gas development and a commitment to “managing” the industry. On the positive side, there is gas in that there shale. On the negative side there’s a very high risk of severe environmental damage from the fracking process to the water tables in the region, very few local jobs created, and extremely low provincial revenues relative to the impacts, for example just $600,000 in royalties in 2010. But thanks to the Emera pipeline, our fracked gas will have an easy route to US markets.

All of this makes my head hurt. It all comes down to slowly, or sometimes rapidly, strip-mining our provincial natural resources for export. In return we get a lot of jobs, which are only as good as last week’s paycheques, as we’ve seen from recent mill shutdowns, and some bargain-basement royalties paid by the companies.

Tell me this isn’t our model for future sustainable development, is it? And if it isn’t, what is?

Gambling, philanthropy, sucker punching the poor

2012-01-30T13:55:00.000-08:00

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While I was visiting family in Ontario a few weeks ago I heard that a couple had won $50 million on the Ontario Lotto Max. That’s a lot of money. I remember thinking, what would I do with $50 million? That kind of cash can buy a lot of dreams. And I suppose that’s why lotteries are so seductive.

I don’t buy lottery tickets. It’s complicated. I don’t think I deserve money for nothing. Personally, I don’t get any thrill playing the lottery. I’m pretty sure the odds aren’t in my favour. And I don’t think my government should be in the lottery business—which is simply a voluntary tax on the poor.

But lotteries are big businesses for governments. So, you might ask, why did our governments get into the gambling business? Well, how about…because they were running short on cash. Since the 1970s governments around the world were lowering income tax rates for upper income earners, cutting back on estate and capital gains taxes (also to the benefit of the wealthy) and slashing corporate taxes (again for the wealthy), so the money had to come from somewhere.

And that somewhere was from us. Luxury taxes hit booze and cigarettes. HST hit pretty much everything we bought. There’s tax on gasoline. Import duties. Licensing taxes. Land and property taxes. All in all, the average middle-income Canadian family pays out 43.9 percent of its total earnings in taxes.

But even at that rate, it’s still not enough to support our government spending (what with all those tax claw-backs for the rich) on, say, new prisons, fighter jets and warships. So what about gambling? It’s fun. There’s always a big winner to get the suckers, er, players excited. And it literally prints cash for the government. Hell, even the conservative Fraser Institute supports it! Here’s a quote from their online paper, “Gambling with Our Future?”

“Those who participate in gambling activities do so voluntarily and, in return, receive intrinsic benefits from their consumption. If consumers are gambling for entertainment purposes, they are purchasing gambling just as they would purchase cinema or symphony tickets.”

What a humanitarian view. Except that the house is always rigged and the suckers, er, citizens always lose. And lotteries are a growth industry, expanding profits by an unhealthy 15 percent a year.

Meanwhile, the wealthy have no desire to play the lottery. They have money of their own. So they “voluntarily” don’t play. Instead, they invest what they’ve gained from their lower tax rates in other things. Such as off-shore bank accounts. Or investments that earn them even more money as “capital gains” which are, of course, taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary workers’ paycheques. Or charitable foundations.

A charitable foundation is the gift that keeps on giving. It gives the founding donor an income tax exemption for the organization (thus protecting the initial gift), and it gives the organization tax deductions for contributions to the organization (usually benefiting the contributing donor and family).

There are other benefits. The donor (not the government through taxes), gets to choose which social projects will get funding. The donor can also influence recipients in any number of ways, which at its basest level provides free PR for the donor family name. But this influence can also deliver political influence as well as community respect. And I haven’t touched on corporations that get into the philanthropic game, which coincidentally tends to be good for their bottom lines.

Big deal, so what? Well, ‘so what’ is important. Both lottery corporations and philanthropic organizations turn the rest of us into beggars. For example, of the individual grants given out by charitable corporations more than 80 percent are less than $5000, this in a multi-billion dollar philanthropic industry in Canada. That’s a whole lot of scrambling for scraps off the tables of the wealthy.

There are the big donations, too, of course, that are sought by swarms of professional fundraisers. Unsurprisingly, disproportionate numbers of big grants go to big name organizations in Canadian urban centres, especially Ontario, while regions like Atlantic Canada only account for 1.1 percent of total gifts. Perhaps things like hospitals, research centres and theatres in big cities bring more cache to their donors.

This is not to say that lotteries and philanthropies don’t to good work. But at the end of the day the best we could say is they’re a distortion of the social contract. Rather than building a progressive tax system that works to redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom, and to keep generational wealth to acceptable levels, we’ve allowed wealthy dynasties to re-jig our democratic financial system to their benefit.

There is any number of targets to blame, from wealthy lawyers who become politicians to corporate lobbying and old boy networks to maintain a system in which the rich get richer.

But the real blame is ours. If we keep allowing ourselves to be treated like suckers, that’s what we’ll be. The first step is boycotting the government lottery system. The second is electing politicians who aren’t intimidated by the wealthy or afraid to tax their money. Good luck on both counts, I say.

This is your world on crisis management mode

2012-01-23T09:32:00.000-08:00

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It’s been suggested that, if I’m so eager for good development, I should run for mayor of our small town. As the joke goes, “I already gave at the office.” In other words, I’ve already tried putting together a free town development function, which met with less than marginal cooperation.

But I still think about sustainable development. The town in which I live needs 3.2 million calories of food a day to keep its population fed. To do that we use 32 million kilocalories of fossil fuel every day, or over 360,000 gallons of fuel a year to produce and deliver our food.

We all know that two things are happening. One: burning fossil fuel is leading to dangerous climate change. Two: we’re beginning to run out of fossil fuel, especially light crude oil, the easiest stuff to extract and burn. Which leads to the third: we won’t be leaving our children the same opportunities we inherited.

So why aren’t we innovating as if the world is on fire? (Because it clearly is.) Why aren’t we passing legislation to restrict the use of fossil fuel and developing energy alternatives as rapidly as we can?

Because “we” are no longer a production economy. We’re a service sector economy. Over the past four decades we’ve handed off real production to “developing” nations in Asia and South America. Our country is primarily a management and consumer society. We’re maintenance people, not producers. For the most part we run distribution systems.

Our modern global economy runs on three principals: centralization, management and risk aversion. All three of these driving forces are based on a shift away from national policies and toward maximizing risk-free international profits. And this has created a fourth dynamic: finance-as-industry, which is now seen as its own independent economic force.

Where finance was once a mechanism for transactions, it’s now a profit generator…independent of production. Over the past 30 years new financial “instruments” such as derivatives have been invented to create cash. What, in fact, has been happening (although most of us don’t seem capable of understanding this) is that monetary wealth is being created directly from concept. Financial institutions have become magical entities that create digital cash out of thin air and then loan and trade this digital cash for even more cash. If it seems crazy, it is.

And our schools are filling up with business students who plainly see where the future lies. Science and innovation are for nerds and losers. Besides, if the nerds do come up with something, the new generation of managers will simply buy it and put it to work. In theory, anyway.

But clearly the system is not working. Unemployment in North America is at an all time high. Canadian manufacturing businesses are struggling to keep ahead of the high Canadian dollar, which is making their products less competitive internationally. Meanwhile, the Canadian resource sector, most notably the Canadian tar sands, is booming; in effect turning us back into a nation of hewers of wood and haulers of oil. This is not exactly the path to innovation.

In fact, since the 1970s the world’s economy has been operating in crisis management mode as corporations and governments strain to maintain the fossil fuel economy. It’s been recession following recession as bubbles form and burst. There was the OPEC oil embargo followed by the inflationary bubble followed by the Japanese asset bubble, followed by the Asian financial crisis followed by the dot.com bubble followed by the sub-prime lending bubble which finally led to the current financial collapse.

I won’t even touch on the military interventions over the past 50 years, most of which have direct connections to either nationalized central banking systems, nationalized oil reserves or other nationalized resources which, coincidentally, Western-based corporations seek to control. Now that Libya is done, it looks like Iran will be next.

But was has this got to do with our little town in our little corner of the province? Well, everything as it turns out. All of our food and manufactured goods come from somewhere else. We are totally dependent on a very complex global system that is becoming increasingly unstable and unsustainable. We are, all of us, operating without an insurance policy. We don’t produce enough of our own energy locally. We can’t grow enough of our own food locally. And at every level our governments are in “management” mode, rather than innovation mode.

If ever there were a time to reevaluate our governments, now’s the time. For starters, I’d suggest that New Brunswick set a new direction for itself: as the leading model for sustainability, both environmental and economic.

But first one would have to ask: “where’s the leadership?” We certainly seem to have a lot of managers but very few visionaries. Well, we’re not about to find them. Why? Trust me on this. The last thing risk-adverse managers want are creative, risk-taking innovators.

It seems we’d rather go on managing crises than envisioning a bright new future.

Addendum:

By "visionaries, leadership and innovators" I don't mean to suggest that we look toward heroes. As John Ralston Saul correctly points out, the rush to heroic leadership is an error equal to or exceeding technical management as an ultimate solution.

Visionary leadership lies somewhere between the hero and the technocrat, or in actual fact outside those two frames altogether. Visionary leadership embraces the actual situation of ordinary citizens, consults with them and others on what the present situation may mean for the future, and builds both a vision and a consensus on what should be done.

Where Barack Obama represents a manifestation of the hero and technocrat combined, examples of Canadian visionaries would include Lester Pearson who correctly interpreted the Canadian sensibility and envisioned Canada as one of the world's true peace-keepers, or C.D. Howe who envisioned a Canada united through public works such as the St. Lawrence Seaway. Both Jefferson and FDR in the States also characterized visionary leadership noticeably devoid of heroic ego or self-serving behaviour.

These are the kind of leaders who seem to be in such short supply in an ever more managerial-technocratic power structure. Yet this is a time in which we need visionary leadership more than ever.

“Leave it to professionals...” what professionals?

2012-01-16T13:39:00.000-08:00

(A local look at development: ultimately all development is local.)

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Like Elvis, the Atlanticade motorcycle event has finally left the building, well, the region at any rate. No doubt pub owners here are shedding a tear, as are local motorcycle enthusiasts. As for the rest of us, we’re probably split into two camps: those who wouldn’t like the region to miss out on the estimated $3 million in annual revenue, and those who won’t miss the sound of those bikes at all.

But one has to wonder, how did we actually get Atlanticade in the first place? I mean, there wasn’t any prior public consultation. And it wasn’t a planned part of any tourism strategy as far as I can tell. It was more or less opportunistic for both parties: the Atlanticade organizers who’d recently left Moncton and the Town of St. Andrews administrators who were looking for more tourism business.

A significant reason for hosting the event here was the financial support of the Flemer family and their Kingsbrae Garden operation. Without that commitment Atlanticade would never have happened here. But this year there was no money to be had to advance-fund the event (for whatever reasons; we haven’t been told by our civic leaders), so Atlanticade departed for the greener pastures of Prince Edward Island.

This issue brings up, once again, the whole idea of coordinated regional tourism and economic development planning. Or lack thereof.

I read in last week’s paper that former mayor Chris Flemming (1998–2001) is running again in St. Andrews. And he is clearly on a mission. “Council needs to encourage development in an organized way,” Flemming said. He also suggested that the town needed to “allow the professionals who work for the community to do so without being slowed or hindered in their work.”

That, to me, translates into having economic development professionals leading the way for town development. That might work except for the fact that the town has no economic development professionals on payroll. Nor does it have an affiliated development board like the one in St. Stephen.

Flemming goes on to invite others to run for council, especially “people who would offer without a set agenda…willing to listen to a wide variety of opinion and understand the need to operate in an environment of good governance.”

This is Flemming’s take on leadership: good governance. But governance, while excellent for control (and making sure staff shows up on time, potholes are filled and bills paid), is no substitute for community vision. And economic development is all about the citizens’ collective view on their own future.

So what is it about Flemming and his fixation on governance and professional services? One might point out that Flemming is an employee of Kingsbrae Garden and the Flemers. And the Flemers are big financial contributors to the community. They and their management team have a great deal of influence on the development focus of the town, much more so than the average citizen. So how much of Flemming’s agenda of governance and professionalism are related to his day job? One wonders.

In short, Flemming has his equations backwards. Governance has never been in short supply in stuffy, hidebound St. Andrews. But vision certainly has been. One would argue that development has never been fully embraced as a collective public activity here. Most development in St. Andrews has been done through the auspices of philanthropy or individual business people. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But if St. Andrews, or any other town, seriously wants to develop, it needs to have a council that understands its own culture and what that culture can accept. It would need a real commitment to development that would include hiring a full-time development person, creating a development budget and building a community development plan with the community and not only with its pushiest citizens.

Such a development plan would include a hard look at global trends and economics, including the future of trade, energy and fossil fuel, as well as local-regional options such as coordinating and building on key, core strengths: in St. Andrews’ case, its existing knowledge-based economy which includes the government biological station, marine science centre, salmon federation office, botany garden, visual arts centre and community college. These building blocks, and fine old railway hotel, are already in place. What needs to happen is a development plan based on integration of these pieces.

And something more inspiring.

Passamaquoddy Bay is the reason these communities in Charlotte County exist. First the fishery and later tourism and aquaculture defined the economy here. Whales are now a prime tourist attraction. So I will say it again. The region would be well-served by the idea of an international marine park here to build an international focus on marine science, our knowledge-based economy and ecotourism.

Instead, what we’ve had is local infighting, cross-community blame, opportunism (such as Atlanticade), lack of coordinated investment and now good governance. And the visionaries among us? Punished, ostracized, slandered and shunned. Just ask Art Mackay.

As for Atlanticade and the professionals operating it, has anyone else connected it to the front page story about Hell’s Angels locating in nearby St. George? In development, the culture you attract is the culture you get to keep.

What is this view from the edge?

2012-01-02T20:47:00.000-08:00

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It’s real winter here. There’s a foot or more of snow on the ground. It’s cold, not a damp, coastal cold that lasts for a few days; it’s a dry, mid-continental cold with a frozen wind that sets for weeks and cuts through every layer of clothing.

I’m back in central Canada for my dad’s 90th birthday. The plane touched down at the stroke of midnight on the New Year as the snow blew horizontally across the runway. The planeload of tired strangers made a half-hearted attempt at a “Happy New Year” cheer as we waited to get off the plane. I was ready to reunite with family but not ready to reconnect with the climate I’d left behind years ago.

Thunder Bay is defined by its edges. It’s on the edge of Lake Superior’s north shore, on the edge of the boreal wilderness, the edge of the Canadian Shield, the edge of the U.S. border, the edge of civilization.

I write this column from another edge. Southwestern New Brunswick, where I live now, is on the edge of the East Coast, also on the edge of the U.S. border. My neighbours and I are not at the centre of the modern passion play where the big decisions are made, where the dramatic events happen, where the great art and culture is made and played.

So I don’t write about local events as much as I write about how the world looks from here, about the large features on the distant horizon that will affect us all.

Though I’m sick of writing about it, I realize there’s only one thing on the horizon that matters and that’s our addiction to fossil fuel. Everything we’ve done over the past 150 years is attached to it, everything.

I write about it because I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to change my own habits or anyone else’s. I write about it because I know that we still don’t understand the enormity of our situation. I write about it because I believe that our view from the edge of things gives us, somehow, a clearer perspective than those who are so embedded into the fossil fuel-driven system they don’t have the time to see where they’re at.

After we got off the plane I walked through the empty terminal and outside into the cold and hitched a ride to a hotel in a courtesy van, checked into the hotel and went down to the bar for New Year’s nightcap. I was alone at the bar except for an old woman in a sparkly dress and her husband dressed like Arnold Palmer. We struck up a conversation. They thought I was “from away” and set out to tell me about the city, its new medical commerce industry and new hospital.

The man told me he was a Conservative. We talked politics and finally I asked him if he knew why we were in Afghanistan. He told be it was because “it’s the right thing to do.” I asked if he knew about the new TAPI pipeline plan to bypass the Russian and Iranian stranglehold on natural gas. He didn’t want to know. In fact he got upset. His parting shot was, “if you ever want to go into politics you’ve got to learn how to lie.” And that was it.

I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to say that we’re in Afghanistan for humanitarian reasons, or anti-terrorist reasons, both of which are in fact getting worse since we arrived. Since the 1960s that country, then a modern and progressive state, has been devastated by war, its civilization bombed back to the Middle Ages.

I don’t want to tell you that biodiesel is the answer to replacing oil. It’s not. Neither chopping down tropical rainforests to grow vast plantations of palm trees nor converting huge North American agricultural areas to corn for biofuel does anything to solve the oil crisis.

I don’t want to tell you that our governments are working hard at migrating to new energy technologies, especially here in New Brunswick, because they’re not. Our Canadian government is hard at work promoting one of the most environmentally damaging projects on Earth, the tar sands, while here at home in New Brunswick we seem to have handed over the entire energy policy to Irving Oil, with the exception of maybe the controversial and ill-advised refurbishing of the Point Lepreau nuclear plant, another potential ecological disaster of epic proportions in waiting.

I don’t want to lie about the hidden corporate influence over our democratic processes, or condone the loss of civil rights like, for example, Obama’s new National Defense Authorization Act that “allows” the U.S. to go into any country and seize any citizen suspected of wrongful activities.

If the refusal to join the mainstream and draw curtains of lies over the rush for the last reserves of fossil fuel means that I’m on the edge, so be it. Unless we acknowledge our actual political situation and remove the veils of deception, any hope of transitioning to viable alternative forms of power is a hollow exercise destined to fail.

I’m going outside now. Damn. I wish I had a warmer coat.

2012: time to drop the heavy mood, dude?

2011-12-28T09:22:00.000-08:00

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My problem is I feel compelled to do something about the stuff I read. This holiday season I finished off Jared Diamond’s 2005 bestseller, Collapse, How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail.

For those who haven’t read the wildly popular book (almost kidding), the ironically named Diamond takes us on an historical mining operation, uncovering the buried cultures of the Easter Islanders, Anasazi of the U.S. Southwest, Mayans, Norse Greenlanders and, of course, probing our modern trading nations.

There’s a pattern to his findings: cultures flourish, create complex vertical trading societies in which the wealth generated by the many is harnessed by an elite few who exploit the resources of the commons, over-tax their land and their people, and eventually fail, leaving the land barren and their societies in ruins. One of his key conclusions is that failing societies underestimate natural ecosystems, instead, tying themselves to traditions that limit new ways of thinking and innovation.

Diamond shows us that failing cultures are those most blinkered by their own paradigms or mindsets. He lists a few paradigms of our own at the end of his book. These include, “technology will solve our problems,” “if we exhaust one resource we can always switch to another” and “past gloom-and-doom predictions…have proved wrong. Why should we believe them now?”

I think we can recognize along with Diamond the false thinking in these views. A look at the environmental degradation and mass extinction of life over the past 50 years tells the actual tale of our “progress.” And the most real and present danger is putting economic progress ahead of protecting the natural environment from our own industriousness.

The biggest problem we face is the depletion of fossil fuels, which power everything we do, from production to reproduction. By 2040 or so, we will have run out of the easiest sources. To that point we’re already chasing the hard-to-get stuff right here in New Brunswick with natural gas fracking (which earned us a whopping $606,000 in royalties last year) and vastly more environmentally destructive tar sands in Alberta.

Canadians are also currently fighting a war in Afghanistan, not for democracy, but to secure the route for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline, which will provide an alternative to the existing Russian-owned pipeline and bypass troublesome Iran. The objective is to prevent either Russia or Iran from holding the West hostage to their energy routes. And that’s why our Canadian soldiers are dying, and why American soldiers have been dying in Iraq since 1991.

In other words, the paradigm is to take control of and exploit the last remaining fossil fuel reserves on the planet. The investment in this effort dwarfs by far any investment in developing alternative energy systems. Meanwhile, the petro-energy companies doing the work are among the most profitable ventures that have ever existed.

Our global economy requires 80 million barrels of oil a day to feed. This non-renewable resource allows us to enjoy a complex, interdependent trade economy that, despite its powerful output, also happens to be very fragile, as we saw in the 1973-74 OPEC oil embargo that brought the world economy to its knees.

Today, we are entirely dependent on global trade to feed, clothe and support ourselves. Just 60 years ago we could have survived, albeit painfully, without world trade since much of what we needed we could still produce locally. Not any more.

The 1970s oil embargo is a prequel to what we’ll increasingly face over the next three to four decades and beyond. Meanwhile, we’ll also be dealing with the other side of our obsession with fossil fuel: the massive waste, over-consumption, chemical pollution on a global scale and, yes, climate change.

One would think a change in paradigm would be in order, perhaps something more in tune with natural ecological functions. But no. We’re still chasing the technological-innovation dream that leads us to this year’s biggest disaster (and one that’s not going away, except in the media), Fukushima.

So what’s the underlying problem and possible solutions? It’s simply the fact that we are merely another opportunistic species that has succeeded too well. We know how to invent tools to exploit the environment and our fellow creatures (including other humans) to produce offspring (7 billion and growing), wealth and social status. We’re just genetically hardwired to do it.

Can we change in the face of the looming collapse of our global civilization? Yes, I think so. But to survive, we are going to have to radically rethink what we’re doing.

First, we need a new ethical paradigm that puts environment above consumption. Second, we’re going to have to desktop, or re-localize, our economies. Third, we need to invest in and build alternative, non-polluting energy sources now. Fourth, we’re going to have to move from a 4-year political view to a 40-year political view, which would require abolishing both party-style partisan politics and corporately-dominated politics from our political systems. Those are not easy steps.

Can we do it? Can we redirect this Titanic fast enough?

Yes, I can hear it now. “Geez, man. It’s the New Year. Can’t you just lighten up a little?”

I guess I could. I'd just rather not have my grandkids singing "Auld Lang Syne" for civilization 50 years from now.

How one woman’s sense of entitlement changed the world

2011-12-12T10:15:00.000-08:00

•••

I made the mistake of reading the comment section under a National Post editorial. The piece was knocking Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty for his alternative energy program (which I happen to support). But some of the comments had me wondering about the mental capacity of Canadians, such as this:

“Leftist policies cause disaster because they aren't capable of thinking things thru, in any area. Millions died in Cambodia because of an incompetent vision for society. About 8 million Ukrainians starved. Rethink things like garbage and recycling policies. Climate change policies would cause a world of harm for no intelligent reason.”

I admit the comment does have a certain irrational poetic appeal. But its wildly gyrating scope is astonishing. Apparently “leftist policies” (not people) are responsible for the worst human atrocities including harmful climate change policies—and dealing with garbage and recycling. Uh, well OK. One can’t help but admire how the commenter brings new meaning to the phrase, “no intelligent reason.”

Online experiences like these are about as pleasant as wandering into a thicket of burdocks.

Other than the Internet exposing the illiterate, illogical thinking of ordinary Canadians, one wonders how these lines of thinking got started? How did this rapidly reactionary seed get planted? Well…

Ayn Rand was a Russian immigrant who moved to Hollywood to write screenplays and novels. After two unsuccessful novels she hit pay-dirt with “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” in which she laid out her philosophy: that ego, talent and hard work trump ethical altruism, and that the rewards should go to those superior beings who most deserve them. The books are an unbridled defense of laissez-faire capitalism vs. evil collectivism, the individual vs. the state, and promote material ambition as the motive force of humanity.

Rand's ideas found resonance in a generation of leaders that included Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, economists Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman, and of course our own Stephen Harper, and shaped the basic framework for both neo-conservative and libertarian ideologies.

Just in case you’re not up on your ideologies, neo-cons and libertarians favour deregulating business and lowering taxes on the wealthy. They believe everyone has the opportunity to work hard and achieve wealth. Those who don’t work hard enough deserve to remain poor and suffer the consequences. According to Rand and her followers, the wealthy and successful should not bear the burden of supporting the idle masses.

I admit the Randian philosophy of constructive greed has a certain appeal if one already has wealth and privilege. But somehow I don’t think it’s been working out too well for the poor, who are already burdened with significant disadvantages from birth.

But, wonder of wonders, the very group of people—the poor—who should be most incensed by Rand’s philosophy are often its biggest supporters. A lot has been written about this, the general consensus being that the American (Canadian) Dream is predicated on the notion that everyone has the opportunity to become a billionaire in our “free” society.

Sure. So, the six heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune will be dividing up $69 billion, which is equal to the net worth of the entire bottom 30 percent of income earners in the US. It’s hardly surprising to note that the Walton family has been lobbying aggressively to cut estate taxes. And the effort is working. The same sort of pressure from wealthy families is happening here in Canada.

So what are the chances of the poor becoming the wealthy? The odds are against it. Whereas incomes for the top one percent of income earners grew by 275 percent, they only grew 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent between 1979 and 2007. And from 2000 to 2007 the incomes of the middle and lower income groups have actually declined. In the words of Rand, "What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?"

Meanwhile, instead being educated, the so-called masses are fed a steady diet of Fox and Sun disinformation by elite-serving Randophiles like Sean Hannity and Ezra Levant.

And where has 40 years of Rand-informed politics taken us? To Thatcherism and Reaganomics and deregulation of business that inevitably led to the financial meltdown in 2008. To Iraq, Afghanistan and other points in the Middle East for other people’s oil. To a senseless War on Terror, the erosion of civil liberties and the steady expansion of police state powers. To the widening gap between the rich and poor. And the dismissal of real collective dangers such as climate change.

In a twisted bit of irony, Rand’s early recoiling from Russian collectivism and subsequent proselytizing for free market capitalism has led to the equal and opposite reality: totalitarian capitalism. Her theories have led to corporate-run collectivism rather than the state-run variety. Yes, Rand has managed to change the world. Now it’s run by a different set of power-hungry bastards.

Why should Ayn Rand matter to you and me? Simply because we’re still being directed by the invisible hand of her philosophy as we speak.

Christmas shopping viewed from the other aisle

2011-12-05T14:36:00.000-08:00

•••

It was a really eerie moment. I was shopping in a nearly empty Wal-Mart store a couple of days ago, and I got the strange feeling I was walking around inside a church. I was overcome by a sense of complete peace, surrounded by every consumer good one could ever need sprawling out in front of me.

But all I needed was a few rolls of paper towels, and as I checked out I noticed that most of the employees were people I’d never hire. Many were older, a few had big tattoos, some of the men had long hair tied back in ponytails. A few of them seemed to have handicaps. All of them were just plain folks.

So, I wondered, what could possibly be wrong with any of this picture? There I was, surrounded by super-affordable, reasonably high quality stuff served by people who otherwise couldn’t find jobs. It seemed like the most democratic setup going. Needless to say, the epiphany was quite different from my usual reflex, which is to dislike everything about Wal-Mart. So why was this trip so different?

Well, I somehow managed to change my point of view from being some kind of social critic to simply being a person who was grateful for everything available to me. And with so much of it around I felt no desire whatsoever to purchase anything at all.

In fact, the effortless abundance helped me appreciate the stuff I already owned, some of which I’ve kept for decades. Occasionally I remember that there’s a sanctity to objects that transcends the physical, like the spirit of a carpenter’s favourite hammer or a beautifully functioning chrome toaster that might work flawlessly for a quarter of a century or more with minimal care.

That evening we were sitting around after dinner and the phone rang. It was a “customer service” call from one of our banking companies. The service rep, a rather bright and assertive woman, was, from her accent, actually a telemarketer based in India, who was trying to sell me our bank’s new life insurance product. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, except we’re on the Canadian no-call list—our bank gets around this as we’re customers—and it was supper time.

What did bother me was the outsourcing of Canadian jobs by my Canadian bank. Couldn’t we Canadians do the same (annoying) work and keep the wages here? I asked myself. And of course we all know the answer: it’s cheaper to hire these workers overseas. And in a global economy, it’s all fair game, at least according to the big companies.

But what would we think if our Crown corporations such as NB Power started doing the same thing? What if they began hiring Chinese contract engineers to redesign Point Lepreau? Or contracted out to an Indian firm to operate the plant? Sure, we New Brunswickers would probably pay less for their services and be able to buy power more cheaply. But we’d all know that we’d be building a false economy.

So why is it OK for our Canadian banks and other commercial entities to do the same thing?

It was then I reconnected to my earlier Wal-Mart experience. It’s not the Wal-Mart commercial outlets or its marketing model that bothers me; it’s the offshoring of all the production that bothers me. And that’s not all Wal-Mart’s doing, it’s the producers: the television and electronics manufacturers, all the clothing and toy companies, all the makers of trinkets and housewares and tools and just about everything we buy except maybe food. And even a lot of that is imported.

Meanwhile, Peter Kent, our Canadian Minister of the Environment, just informed the media that Canada would not be renewing its commitment to the Kyoto Protocol to minimalize climate change because, and here’s the sticky detail, the developing countries such as China would get a temporary free ride while we’d have to clean up our emissions first. So, I guess he’d rather have no agreement at all, at least for the time being. Meanwhile Canada will provide $300 million in aid to help nations develop cleaner and more efficient energy technologies with a matching amount in loans to trigger private sector development. Well, it’s better than 30 pieces of silver, I suppose. But not much.

On the other hand, I doubt it’s escaped anyone that we are the ones consuming all those products produced in the “developing” countries. So, if China is completing a new coal-fired generating station every four days as is popularly noted, who’s funding them? We are, directly, every time we purchase a Made In China product. And China now uses, according to the New York Times, more coal than the United States, Europe and Japan combined, making it the world’s largest emitter of gases that are warming the planet.

So all of us, and Peter Kent too, have offloaded our climate-saving responsibilities on that nasty China, while we continue to gobble up everything the Chinese can mass-produce for us. How nice. And just in time for another Christmas.

And if you’re reading this, you’re welcome, Wal-Mart managers. But you might try buying a hell of a lot more at home.

The serpent inside the consumer cycle

2011-11-28T10:24:00.000-08:00

•••

It’s been getting harder to organize our kids’ rooms so we decided to do a bit of deep cleaning. We rearranged beds, emptied out dressers and edited the books and toys they’d amassed.

Frankly, we were astonished by the sheer volume of expensive stuff that had piled up over a decade of Christmases. But somehow, I don’t think we’re alone in this, at least if Black Friday is any indication.

When it comes to shopping we Canadians are bad, but sometimes I just don’t understand Americans. Who would have thought a crowd of Black Friday shoppers would have a wrestling match over waffle makers? Or a woman would pepper spray 20 other shoppers to get a discounted X-Box? Or a man would get shot—in front of his family—in a California parking lot for his purchases? Or a grandfather would get knocked unconscious by police while still inside the store? It’s crazy.

This isn’t new, of course. Who could forget the creepy Tickle-Me Elmo, Beany Baby and Cabbage Patch Kids fights of seasons past?

Marketers dream about these happy collisions at the intersection of consumer culture and the crowd. But what makes us do it? Turns out that there’s not much scientific data about mass behaviour.

Psychologists theorize that there are three kinds of collective outbreaks: panics, crazes and riots. These directly correspond to the individual emotions of fear, joy and anger, so crowds behave like super-organisms that amplify our emotions.

Though there’s not a lot of data, there’s been a lot of social engineering around these phenomena. It began by recognizing the power of ‘conformity.’ Human beings, as social creatures, are hardwired to conform. Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, got it and went on to develop both propaganda and public relations—which led to the creation of modern marketing. Today it’s an industry that not only includes advertising, marketing psychology and strategy, but also advocacy, fundraising and political lobbying.

This means that the business of shaping behaviour is now as prevalent at the top of the decision-making pyramid as it is on the bottom. In other words, our government representatives and civic leaders are now as much targets of manipulation as are the rest of us.

But who’s driving all this? It’s pretty simple, those who have the most to gain: people running corporations with products and services to sell—which pretty much encompasses the entire economy. So everybody’s in on this mass mind-shaping game. Now we even manage to do it ourselves with “social media.” We’re now growing online networks to promote our own versions of reality to others around the world—the same way business leaders created think tanks to promote their world views.

Not that any of this is bad. It’s just the way society and economics have evolved. But the result is a tightly integrated cycle of consumerism. It reminds me of the ancient symbol of the snake eating its own tail: the Ourorboros.

Here’s what Carl Jung had to say. “The Ouroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow self. This feedback process is at the same time a symbol of immortality, since it is said of the Ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life again…”

So what is this “shadow self” that we’re assimilating in our mass consumer society? Or, what is this hidden thing we endlessly crave? To repeat Jung, in a word it’s “immortality.”

Immortality is the forbidden fruit of existence, and we’ll do anything to compensate for the lack of it. We divert ourselves with status-seeking and consumption, the accumulation of wealth and power, with creative activities and family, legacy projects to leave for “future generations,” pleasure-seeking diversions, with religion, and most of all with work.

Where we get hung up is when we occasionally realize the meaninglessness of all this false activity. And the market even has a solution for that, too: the search for meaning is now an industry in its own right.

Our calendars are filled with the endlessly looping cycle of consumer-focused validation of meaning. There’s Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, personal anniversaries and birthdays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the granddaddy of all, Christmas, followed by the final spasm of consumption for the cycle, Boxing Week. And, in a kind of horror-show fashion, it begins all over again with the new year.

Meanwhile, we’re degrading our natural environment at an ever-accelerating pace. We’re not the Ouroboros infinitely feeding on itself; we’re a collective parasite destroying our host planet. And for what, closets-full of broken toys and out-of-date clothes?

Sure, we can join the Occupy movement and protest the greed and corruption at the top. But they are us, and we are them. We’re all in this together. The time has come to put away the credit cards and start focusing on what really matters.

But, unless we’ve recently cleaned out our closets, I’m not sure we can even recognize what that is any more.

“So long and thanks for all the fish” is not an option

2011-11-21T10:31:00.000-08:00

•••

My head hurts. I have a sinus cold with a cough and my back is aching (from an old injury) which hurts a lot every time I sneeze. I probably could use some extra Vitamins C and D and some omega-3 in my diet.

Omega-3 is important because we humans can’t produce our own (as with Vitamin D) but need it for healthy growth, brain, eye and nerve functioning, and to reduce inflammation. And of course the primary source of omega-3 is fish—which brings us to ocean resources.

Our oceans are under assault. Climate change is contributing to ocean acidification, which dissolves the shells on shellfish. Rising ocean temperatures are affecting fish migration patterns. Overfishing has reduced finfish stocks to extinction levels, most notably cod and Atlantic salmon, once among the most abundant species on the planet. Pollution, including the stuff dropping out the bottoms of aquaculture cages, chemical runoff from agriculture and urban waste of all kinds, is destroying the world’s ocean habitat.

Meanwhile, here at home the owner and two managers of Atlantic Canada’s largest aquaculture company, Cooke Aquaculture, are being criminally charged on 11 counts relating to the deliberate poisoning of the Bay of Fundy a couple of years ago. To kill off infestations of sea lice, the company allegedly doused their salmon stocks with the pesticide cypermethrin, which kills off not only sea lice but also their fellow crustaceans, lobsters. The case goes before the courts on December 13, and it goes without saying that, since the lobster fishery is also big business out here, this is serious business.

We all know bad things are happening, but why? Don’t we (Canadians) have at least three federal agencies—the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and the Department of the Environment—to supervise these things? Yes. Well, sort of.

One of the biggest problems is DFO’s multiple role. The department is the historic regulator of Canada’s fisheries, yet under its watch Canada’s finfish stocks have collapsed from Atlantic to Pacific over the past 100 years. DFO is also the regulator of the aquaculture industry, which, as currently operated, is a direct threat to the wild fishery, for example using Atlantic salmon in Pacific aquaculture, which potentially endangers indigenous salmon. In addition, DFO has been the lead research agency for applied fish science, and some of this research should be regarded as controversial, given that it’s being done to support a flawed (open sea cage) technology. And finally, DFO is one of Canada’s key promoters of the aquaculture industry. With such conflicting mandates, who then regulates the regulator when conflicts arise? Apparently no agency other than the courts.

The second big problem is the corporate practice of “externalizing” costs. In other words, offloading costs on others. One of the most pernicious forms of externalizing is polluting and degrading “the commons,” our mutually owned environment. Overfishing is one example of degrading. An example of pollution is open cage aquaculture that dumps out tonnes of fish food and excrement onto the ocean floor every year. Other forms of externalizing include offloading the cost of research and development on the government, or simply not upgrading to new, more environmentally friendly technology because the old stuff prints easy cash.

But, more than technology, it’s the intersection of the economy and the environment that’s particularly difficult to navigate politically. When times get financially tough, people start caring more about putting food on the table than leaving it in the ocean. Simply put, profits come first—especially in an internationally competitive global economy in which every country is scrambling for cash.

What brings it all to a head is the need to feed the expanding world population, which will rise to 8 billion in just 15 short years just as fossil fuel required to power the world’s farming and fish-producing industries becomes increasingly depleted and more expensive. Since we haven’t invented solar powered boats and tractors yet, the odds are that we’ll be looking to biofuels to top up the tank, which will put a further strain on food production. Not to mention the fact that over 50 percent of the world’s population now lives in cities and thus is completely reliant on corporately produced food.

OK, my head still hurts. Clearly, the problem is people. Too many of us. Or too many of us doing the wrong things (beyond whether Cooke’s management is guilty or not). So what can we do?

Barring dropping a smart weapon that painlessly eliminates 6 billion or so people from the planet instantaneously without damaging infrastructure (just kidding… I hope), we need to get politically smart about industry and job creation.

Jobs are not what we think they are. Jobs are simply the exchange of time for valuable services. And what could be more valuable than building an environmentally sustainable human society? But as every Occupy Wall Street protester knows, there are a few people at the top who stand between us and creating environmentally sustainable jobs.

Instead of worrying about dramatically reducing population, there’s sufficient evidence to show that we need to begin surgically separating the current corporate-state alliance and politically neutralizing the 0.1 percent who currently run the show. In fact, our very survival seems to depend on it.

Solutions for an aging society

2011-11-14T09:50:00.000-08:00

(or how to avoid the crisis)
•••

I live in a retirement town, so I don’t need to be told that New Brunswick is heading off a demographic cliff. But don’t take my word for it, our politicians and civic leaders have been aware of it for years.

Not only is our population in a holding pattern (growing at just a half a percent), it’s aging faster than most other provinces. Our most educated youth are still leaving for greener pastures.

Immigration doesn’t seem to be keeping pace with our need for skilled workers, either. New Brunswick attracts less than half the national average, and well over 30 percent of our immigrants leave after 5 years.

And by next year the birth rate will be exactly level with the death rate, so there’ll be no extra help from the province’s bedrooms.

Of course aging populations are dramatically more expensive to support, which is not good news for New Brunswick’s overloaded provincial budget, since seniors contribute fewer tax dollars but require more service support and health care dollars.

There are other important downsides. With Canada’s population growth rate outstripping New Brunswick’s, we have less representation in Ottawa. And with our lower tax revenues, we’re increasingly dependent on federal transfer payments—covering 40 percent of provincial expenditures—which are now jeopardized by our diminishing political clout.

And there’s one other looming problem. Rising fuel costs are going to impact New Brunswick’s rural and small town residents who rely on commuting to larger centres for jobs and supplies.

So. Do we need some kind of 12-step population program? Yes? Well, let’s get started.

One: location.
The province needs to accelerate its rural development plans, allowing some communities to die, increasing economic development for others, offering more support to larger centres, and working more closely with the other Atlantic provinces to build on regional strengths. The question becomes, does the province encourage retirees to move closer to centralized services or leave them to retire in harder-to-service rural locations?

Two: energy.
New Brunswick needs to bring its energy policies into the 21st Century. It needs to partner with Newfoundland and Nova Scotia on the Churchill Falls tie-line, and, with federal support, begin to provide incentives for U.S.-exportable green power (wind, tidal and solar). We need to start investing in creating tomorrow’s energy industry jobs today, not tomorrow.

Three: innovation.
Our seniors provide two valuable assets: a great store of skills and knowledge and a test sample of a huge worldwide market. The province should begin an innovation incubation program aimed at developing and manufacturing new products and services for the seniors market. These include new world travel services, mobility and security devices, on-line seniors’ learning, architecturally-designed modular retirement homes, in-home products for the handicapped, even seniors’ active-wear.

Four: housing.
Forget one-size-fits-all. Ideally, early to mid-retirement housing is affordable, efficient, retains its value and offers great access to amenities and natural aesthetics. Coastal New Brunswick is ideal for this market. Aging seniors, on the other hand, need more assistance. They need smaller units in group communities located close to hospitals, care workers, urban amenities and quiet green spaces, which the province’s three major cities can easily develop with some careful planning. And what to do with all the old legacy housing vacated by seniors? This is a real immigration marketing opportunity for the province—provided it works on the entire economic development equation.

Five: knowledge transfer.
As more seniors leave the workforce, the province will face knowledge gaps that these same seniors can fill. We can integrate them into the community college system as mentors and create private companies to market their services as both part-time instructors and workers. Once organized these skills also become exportable.

Six: staged retirement.
We need to encourage younger seniors to work with older seniors (and vice versa) in all vocational and social aspects of the community to provide retirement advice and support for the province’s aging citizens, including succession planning, knowledge transfer, diet, fitness, health care and more.

Seven: health, fitness and nutrition.
Here’s a major youth-seniors partnership opportunity. From organic market gardening to in-home fitness and life-extension programs, this is the leading edge of an “aging with grace” growth industry.

Eight: sports, recreation and the arts.
New Brunswick already does this quite well, but would benefit by taking it to the next level: as a marketable, exportable industry. Genius, creativity and skill don’t quit at age 60 (though markets far too often do).

Nine: increase immigration.
The province must push for increased immigration that includes entrepreneurial seniors as a part of family immigration, especially in southern and eastern Europe, and build multicultural welcoming systems to retain new immigrants in-province.

Ten: promotion.
It’s time for the province to develop two national campaigns: “Come back to New Brunswick, rediscover your eastern frontier,” and “Enjoy lifelong work and the thrill being alive in New Brunswick,” both under the umbrella concept of “New Brunswick: it’s a new country.”

Eleven: create a forum.
It’s not difficult or expensive to build and promote a new website in which relocation opportunities in New Brunswick can be explored. This would include discussion blogs, listings of businesses for sale, links to job opportunities and real estate and overviews of New Brunswick communities, cultures and activities—and what newcomers might expect to find here.

Twelve: one-time stimulus funding.
In an Atlantic provinces joint venture, appeal to the federal government to set up an “Atlantic Population Growth Fund” to encourage innovators, youth and new immigrants to take advantage of all the East has to offer.

Don’t care for my twelve steps? Why not create your own—and encourage your provincial government to do the same. The more of us working on the future, the brighter it will be.

The rise of conservatism and its stranglehold on the future

2011-11-07T13:31:00.000-08:00

•••

One of the things people don’t mention at a dinner party is how they vote, although they almost always drop enough clues to give you a fair idea. In my limited social dining experience here, I’d say our region is quite conservative—a trait that I would also apply to a lot of folks here who may vote Liberal, NDP or Green.

But what is conservatism? Why should I care? Conservatism, by definition, is a preference for traditional values, policies and practices. In other words, it’s a preference to maintain the status quo.

Three major movements play into Canada’s conservatism: the original British Loyalist contingent best represented by someone like Nova Scotia’s Bob Stanfield, the neo-liberal, free trade/free market conservatives characterized by Brian Mulroney and finally the Western Canadian Christian fundamentalist faction of which Stephen Harper is the recent successor. All three of these share common traits and display unique differences.

The eastern Loyalist contingent was/is simply a traditionalist group (both fiscally and socially) which supports the Westminster parliamentary system and its attachment to the monarchy. The paradoxically categorized neo-liberal conservatives have more in common with the “libertarian” movement in the U.S. and the neo-liberal policies of former British Labour Party Prime Minister, Tony Blair, with the main emphasis on free trade, lower corporate taxes and reduced government regulation of business.

The current ruling strain of Canadian conservatism is the Western variety. It’s roots are deeply embedded in Preston Manning’s now defunct Reform Party, which itself evolved in a straight line from Preston’s father, Alberta’s former Social Credit Premier, Ernest Manning. Today’s conservative focus is on fiscal restraint, the further deregulation of business, increase in military and crime-control spending, privatizing the economy and ongoing reduction of taxes. Environmental oversight now takes a back seat to the development of natural resources for export.

So much for the history lesson. But why should we care? Because politics in the rest of the ‘developed’ world are headed in the same direction. Given that humanity is at an environmental crossroads one might reasonably question why we're supporting political policies that directly work against solving our growing environmental crises. The answer lies precisely in these environmental challenges.

As resources dwindle, such as fossil fuel, uranium, fresh water, wild fish stocks and arable soil, humanity’s game of musical chairs is becoming increasingly more restricted. Without available new frontiers to exploit humanity has two choices: develop new strategies and technologies to collectively allow us to live with less...or race each other to build the best and safest exits from the game before the entire system collapses.

Of course few of us consciously thinks about these options. We simply react to the general mood of the times. And in a world in which the population is noticeably aging and resources of all kinds—including our personal finances—are shrinking, a safety-first strategy feels like the best bet. And of all the political platforms out there, conservatism is the one that fits the bill and promises to reduce our personal risk.

But there’s a backside to this approach. Conservatism is like driving a car through the rearview mirror. It’s good to check your mirror but the future happens out front. By paying attention to protecting our own interests first in an uncertain world, we introduce fear into the equation, and put our own ‘needs’ above others. The game becomes a competition to accumulate to protect ourselves. And in doing so, we also raise the spectre of mistrust as some of us do better than others, and the culture of inequality sets in.

That is precisely what the data tell us about Canada and the United States. Inequality over the past 20 years has been on the rise and the richer are getting proportionately richer at an ever-increasing rate. Meanwhile, our natural environment continues to degrade as the rest of us preoccupy ourselves with hanging on to what we have. It’s a rogue’s game that fosters growing insecurity and the desire for safety.

But safety can’t be attained by adopting a defensive (conservative) position. Real security takes action. In order to secure a better future for ourselves and our neighbours on the planet, we need to begin acting responsibly for all species, including our own. What does that entail?

We all know, but we refuse to do it. We know we need to transition from fossil fuels to alternatives now, not later. We know we need to relocalize, reskill and retool our regional economies based on environmentally-soft practices. We know we need to move from an exponential growth consumer economy to a more-with-less steady-state society. We know we need to switch to alternative transportation and give up our cars.

All of this, of course, will take a cooperative commitment from government and the private sector. But, oops, there’s the Catch-22. Our current government and corporate leaders, who represent the top of the income scale, are the very people least motivated to change the system.

Real change is now only possible from the bottom up. And that means you and me. If we don’t do it…the game may soon be over.

The trouble with stagnating economies

2011-10-31T09:02:00.000-07:00

•••

There’s an old saying in the newspaper business: “If it bleeds it leads.” So, true to form, I asked myself, what’s currently bleeding in Charlotte County? And in asking, I wondered if I’m also compelled to offer solutions? It’s a sticky business.

Any bleeding starts with the economy and I’d have to assess the southwestern New Brunswick economy as stagnant.

Looking at the Fundy isles, the population of Campobello has dropped over the past two decades from 1400 down to just over 1000 people today. That and the fact that the island can’t sustain a bank branch are sure signs of trouble, and declines in both tourism and fisheries explain it. Since 9/11 tourist traffic from the U.S. has slowed, and the island is on the front edge of that trend. And fisheries have been in decline for more than half a century.

Grand Manan suffers also from the same issues. However, it has a productive lobster and seaweed sector that pretty much keeps its economy in a holding pattern.

Deer Island and the coastal communities have aquaculture, which has become a financial mainstay, along with the herring and lobster fisheries, the latter doing quite well.

Up north in neighbouring York County, McAdam is only half the size it once was, and has an unemployment rate 50 percent higher than the provincial average. A bright light is the renovation of the train station, which may bring a few additional tourist dollars to town, and the upgrading of the rail line. But that’s hardly enough to re-energize a town that’s lost its purpose.

St. Stephen is the largest town in the region and its commercial hub servicing the 26,000 or so people living in the area. It supports supermarkets and government offices, but its homegrown retail sector is barely limping along, unable to compete with the Wal-Mart across the river in the States. But what makes the town an economic centre is its manufacturing sector: the Ganong and Flakeboard plants.

Ganong is more than holding its own, taking up slack left by other candy plants closing in Canada and investing $10 million in new technology and adding 40 new staff positions. Even so, it’s forced to keep a tight rein on operating costs, which translates into periodic layoffs.

Flakeboard is doing well, too. Over the past few years it’s expanded from one plant in St. Stephen to seven facilities across the continent. It’s now a major producer of composite board with an annual production capacity measured in billions of square feet. That’s great for the company but not necessarily for the town, as the local plant is no longer the only tool in the Flakeboard kit. Rumours have it that there are “voluntary layoffs” in the works for November.

And finally there’s St. Andrews. The Fairmont hotel management chain is pulling out of the Algonquin Hotel at the end of the year, which leads one to believe that the province itself will be operating the facility next year, and to say that the town’s largest attraction is well past its prime is an understatement. By popular reckoning overnight tourism dollars are down, too. The college is also in a holding pattern, struggling to fill empty seats. The town's Department of Fisheries and Oceans biological station is in a reduction pattern, not replacing retiring scientists as an ongoing part of federal belt-tightening. And the Town itself is dependent on philanthropy, which accounts for 10 percent of its annual budget, which can’t be healthy.

Why should what happens here matter to people living anywhere else? Because we are a microcosm of what’s happening internationally. More people today are reliant on jobs in consolidating industries and in centralizing governments, which means that local self-reliance is a thing of the past. So Charlotte County is now a post-development, post-frontier economy. As with most of North America, but particularly with the American Industrial Northeast, the sense of expansion has disappeared, having long ago migrated offshore to Asia and elsewhere, where development opportunities are cheaper.

What can be done? Offering solutions can be tricky, like predicting the future. It’s a question of reimagining the region in the context of not only today’s world, but tomorrow’s as well. And that reimagining process requires the collaboration of the brightest minds in the region (and from beyond the region) as well as the commitment of the local power brokers, who need to welcome newcomers and share some of their power. That collaboration requires creating a region-wide development forum in which the reimagining and openness to new ideas could take place.

I would say that in my experience openness, collaboration and accommodation is a weak point here, as is the ability to reimagine the region as a whole. The county continues operating as a collection of competing interests and communities. Real risk-taking and vision seems antithetical.

The quick fix, of course, is adding more government money to build new infrastructure, highways, museums, business parks, arenas, etc. The better fix is investing public money to create a “smart” fund that can provide seed money and a forum for new enterprise that focuses on re-localizing the economy (much as aquaculture did 30 years ago).

The last thing any of us needs at the moment is more stale, in-the-box thinking.

Shucking oysters or a steady state economy?

2011-10-24T09:52:00.000-07:00

•••

We went out to dinner with friends this weekend. We had a wonderful evening, but… I’d ordered a dish with jumbo prawns, which, I realized after the first bite, had gone off. I managed to spit it out without embarrassment and the waitress replaced the prawns. But the damage was done; I couldn’t eat.

Somehow, this was a metaphor for things I’d been thinking about: the power of our individual vote, the events in the Middle East, and sustainable economies, all of which have the smell of decay.

Let’s start with the Middle East. I read that John Baird, our Minister of Foreign Affairs, recently headed a junket to Libya with a planeload of Canadian business people, including representatives from Suncor, the oil and gas company, SNC-Lavelin, the giant engineering company, and Pure Technologies, a pipeline company. All three of these companies had already been doing work in Libya for Gaddafi. Now that he’s been conveniently dispatched, it’s back to business, with the Canadian government pledging $10 million to get rid of hand-held weaponry in order to “demilitarize” and “democratize” the country.

Noble sentiments. But what’s really going on is clear. Canada and the rest of its NATO allies are using military force to crack open these dictatorships in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, etc. (that just happen to be close to the valuable resources we want), then allowing our corporations to scoop the vitals out of the shell, in effect oyster shucking someone else’s resources.

It’s no coincidence that Gaddafi, from 1969 to 1988, was recognized by Libyans as a hero who reformed the banking system, provided education for his people, spent on building a social safety net for his people and nationalized the country’s oil and freshwater aquifer reserves—and that this closed, socialist system wasn’t exactly embraced by the international business community, which wanted easy access to Libya’s resources.

From 1988 onward, there was considerable outside pressure to “liberalize” Libya to allow more private sector involvement, and that’s when Gaddafi began to go off the rails. Corruption and greed entered the Libyan development equation, and Gaddafi’s socialist dream spiraled out of control. By 2004, Gaddafi was behaving like a paranoid schizophrenic, alternately conspiring against the U.S. while groveling into submission, even offering to have one of his sons marry Chelsea Clinton. With Obama’s quasi-legal invasion of Libya the oyster was cracked. And now the shucking begins.

In more U.S.-complaint regimes, such as the Saudi Arabian royal dictatorship, none of this is necessary. The shells were opened long ago and the extraction continues unabated.

So if large corporations are able to use friendly governments to pry open access to new resources, what are they doing at home? Noam Chomsky, the famous linguist and political activist, writes convincingly that democracy is dead in the United States. Elections, he says, are bought and paid for by corporate interests, and cites a century of legislation favouring corporations—and working against the general population—as evidence. Barack Obama, for example, will be spending over $1 billion dollars, mostly corporate money, to get reelected in 2012. It’s no accident that Obama’s closest financial advisers were the same people who engineered the financial collapse of 2008 and whose former companies benefited the most from the government bailouts while millions of Americans lost their homes.

Canada is rapidly following America down the corporate rabbit hole. Political discourse is being dumbed down into PR-managed sound bites. Emerging Harper government policies focus on the reduction public freedoms (such as surveillance of all Internet correspondence), increased spending on crime control and punishment, increased militarization, scaling back on foreign aid and environmental protection, and the reduction of taxes and regulations on large corporations, especially in the finance and energy sectors.

In other words, our government is working more for the globalist corporate agenda and less for ordinary Canadians. And the former Liberal government had been moving in the same direction.

I think we all have choices regarding the world around us. We can turn on the flatscreen and watch ‘Battle of the Blades’ or some other diversion, we can blindly follow our governments and argue that they know what’s best, or we can actually try to understand the problems so we can at least respond in an open-minded and intelligent way.

The battle for real democracy is breaking the corporate-state alliance, much as our forebears fought to break the church-state alliance. Capitalism is not democracy. Capitalism successfully functions in totalitarian states such as China, and we’re well on the way toward becoming a totalitarian capitalist, corporate-controlled state here.

With so many environmental issues facing us, we need to move away from the runaway “growth” economic model toward the creation of a “steady-state” economy that moves away from profits, conspicuous consumption and the race for personal wealth and status. We need to focus on social equality, sustainability and energy-transition technologies.

We’ve seen these same solutions discussed since the 1960s only to witness our society move, astonishingly and dramatically, in reverse.

Meanwhile, and ironically, Atlantic Canada will be benefitting from the 30-year, $25 billion warship-building contract for the federal government. Frankly, that money would be far better spent on developing alterative energy than preparing to send our kids off to war.

Powerful thoughts on the long drive home

2011-10-17T09:06:00.000-07:00

•••

We loaded the kids into the car this weekend and headed off to Fredericton to check out the Occupy New Brunswick demonstration. It was a great opportunity, we thought, to show the kids some live history in the making, without having to drive to New York.

Along the way I mentally reviewed a few ideas for this week’s column. My editor had suggested writing about Question 2 on the upcoming Maine ballot. Apparently, the government down there is floating the idea of building a horse track and slot machine “racino” in Washington County. I was leaning toward writing about the Occupy movement in New Brunswick.

It turns out that Frank McKenna is the New Brunswick connection. Frank, our former premier, is now the chair of an outfit called Brookfield Asset Management, which just happens to own Zuccotti Park in New York City, where the Occupy Wall Street protesters are camping out. Coincidentally, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Brookfield planned to clear out the park for “cleaning” that Saturday. But, reacting to a storm of complaints about the plan, they decided to call it off.

It’s not hard to conclude that both Bloomberg and McKenna represent the top 0.1 percent income group. Bloomberg spent literally millions to for the privilege of becoming the mayor of the Big Apple. But what about McKenna?

Well, in addition to being the chair of the $120 billion Brookfield outfit, Frank is currently the deputy chair of TD Bank Financial and is a director of both the CD Howe Institute, the famous Canadian business think-tank, and Canadian Natural Resources Limited. In addition to having been Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. he also sat on the boards of GM Canada, Xstrata (formerly Falconbridge–Noranda mining), FNX Mining Company, Major Drilling Group International, Acier Leroux (steel), AMEX Americas (engineering, including mining), UPS, Shoppers Drug Mart Corp., and CanWest Global Communications. He also was a director of the infamous Carlyle Group, the Bush family–affiliated investment company that was representing the bin Laden family prior to the 9/11 attack.

So Frank seems to be heavily associated with international high finance and natural resources, but that’s not such bad thing. Or is it?

I checked out some of the recent CD Howe’s publications. One on bankcard legislation caught my attention. The first point of focus of the paper was “on removing existing regulatory and governance structures that may be impeding innovation and competition before considering adopting new ones.” And the last point stated that “any [government] interventions should be minimal, clearly defined and limited, and ensure that all its recommendations not impose specific market structures, allocations of cost, decision-making processes or other organizational constraints on complex and evolving payment networks, but rather allow network operators and the markets in which they operate to determine these.”

In case you didn’t get it, that’s code for minimizing government oversight on “complex” electronic payment networks—which is exactly the type of thing that has led to the recent financial collapse. In other words, the CD Howe outfit, which has some influence on shaping government decisions, seems to be promoting a “hands off new finance” government policy.

Meanwhile, Frank’s other current interest, the innocuously named Canadian Natural Resources self-described as “one of the largest independent crude oil and natural gas producers in the world,” is an energy company with big interests in the western Canadian oil sands, which also happens to be one of the world’s dirtiest megaprojects. Of course the oil sands project is directly linked to the controversial Keystone pipelines which will run from Alberta to the Texas gulf, and which, if completed as planned, would supply over 1 million barrels of oil to the U.S. a day—fully 5 percent of its total petroleum consumption.

It’s no understatement to say that these projects are of great strategic importance to the top 0.1 percent of the population that has a financial interest in such ventures.

So how does that connect to the rest of us? Well, it doesn’t really, other than we’re the end customers. Oh, and that guys like Frank have undue influence on government decision-making, which tends to drive even more profits—and power—into the hands of the few. Which is, coincidentally, what the Occupy movement is all about.

And how did this New Brunswick connection link to the Occupy New Brunswick event? Not at all, as far as I could tell. The event, when we finally found it, was more like a concert in the park with loud music, a few generic placards and a handful of built-on-site cardboard tents.

And what about the proposed racino just south of the border? It’s just another ill-conceived attempt to raise government money by voluntarily taxing the poor through legalizing gambling. Billed as boons to tourism, these ventures have been social and economic disasters in other “have-not” regions such as northern Ontario. But it’s a great strategy if the idea is to shift government fundraising from taxing the wealthy to addicting the poor to gambling and false hope.

One wonders how things got this far out of whack. We might ask Frank. Better yet, we might ask ourselves how we allowed so much of our government to be handed over to private corporate interests.

Relax Wall Street. Youth don't care as much.

2011-10-10T11:53:00.000-07:00

•••

Last week Steve Jobs died, my son’s rabbit ran off and one of his former teachers passed away. I handled these events with a somewhat philosophic approach. Jobs was a remarkable man but I’d never met him. I figured the rabbit might come back. And then there was my son’s teacher.

I remember her calling to ask if our son would like a last-minute part in a play, and then her coming over to the house to run lines with him to fast-track getting him ready. That made an impression. Clearly, this teacher was extraordinary.

She’d been suffering with cancer. I watched my brother and several friends die of cancer. It was painful process, as it must have been for our son’s teacher, and my heart goes out to anyone who goes through that, including Steve jobs and his family.

There’s been a lot written about Steve Jobs. One could summarize the guy who made cool computers—and made computers cool—as a man of vision, passion and courage.

Our son’s teacher was a woman of vision, passion and courage, too. She was a passionate pianist, singer and leader, which was obvious to anyone seeing her directing a school concert. Now she’s gone.

It deeply affected our son. After hearing the news he called home, “feeling sick” he said. I understood. I picked him up and he took the afternoon off school. We talked a bit about it. But did I care less? Do we care less as we age?

Well, there’s research that suggests we empathize more as we age. In studies older people register sadness more easily than young adults. Still, there’s not much research available on empathy in children—other than a mention that babies seem to have some form of emerging empathy. As important as empathy is, we don’t know a lot about it.

There are signs that empathy is directly linked to social conditioning. And there is new evidence that we’re becoming less empathetic as a society. There doesn’t seem to be a single cause, though a there are some ideas. For example, researchers at York University in Toronto learned that people who read less fiction are less empathetic, and we’re all reading less fiction these days. OK, not so good.

From a psychological perspective, the late social philosopher Christopher Lasch concluded that “The new patient lacks the capacity to mourn…the strength of his defences, however, makes him resistant to successful analysis...To be able to enjoy life in a process of involving a growing identification with other people's happiness and achievements is tragically beyond [his] capacity...”

He is talking about narcissism and its dramatic rise in modern society, in which image is more important than substance, and wherein self-image becomes more important than self—and certainly more important than “the other,” that is: anybody outside of ourselves.

I would argue that the old are just as susceptible to this spiraling into self-absorbed narcissism as the young. And I would use the Occupy Wall Street protest as an example. The question is often asked by the media establishment, “why exactly are these people protesting and what are their specific demands?” Simply put, what they’re protesting is the narcissistic greed of the top income class of society. And I would have to say that these financial elites are not exactly teenagers. Most of them are middle-aged or older, old even. And the majority of the protesters, who seem to care a lot by the way, are young. So what’s going on?

While older people might feel “sad” about seeing people suffer, and while those feelings of sadness may become stronger as we age, we also lose the passion of youth as we age. When young people care, they care in a passionate, risk-taking and active way, a way that has force. And that scares a lot older people, who value safety and protection over passion and confrontation, however sad they may feel.

This holds true in my own empirical experience. Florida, with its large cohort of old people, is full of road rage and grumpiness—a place typically populated by seniors who are apathetic about political change—unless it affects their fixed incomes. They vote to protect the status quo, in which they are highly invested. Not exactly your Occupy Wall Street rebels.

But if, as the research shows, levels of actual empathy are declining across our society, we’re in trouble. Then it becomes every man and woman for him- and herself, and may the most exploitive transnational corporation and most manipulative media disinformation channel win. And that’s exactly what we’ve just been living through over the last 30 years. Until the financial credit bubble burst.

Now young people are awake and taking to the streets. Adbusters magazine in Vancouver got the original Occupy movement started. Now there’s even an Occupy New Brunswick organization with its next demonstration planned for Fredericton on October 15.

All I can say is thank God we have youth who are less worn down and cynical than we are. Empathy without energy doesn’t amount to much—beyond merely feeling sad.

Marshall McLuhan, fat, the revolution and us

2011-10-03T19:42:00.000-07:00

•••

There was that bag of chips I’d stashed away from the kids, just in front of the macrobiotic cookbook (oops). I reached up and grabbed a handful—and had that familiar flash image about getting fat.

Why did I go for the chips? Simple. It’s comfort food: carbs and fat are jammed into an instant food fix. Neurobiologists tell us that it’s like doing drugs. When we’re bored or anxious or depressed, we eat. It’s cheaper and safer than shooting up.

New Brunswick is the third most obese province in Canada. Almost 30 percent of the people in our province are obese, and almost 65 percent of us are overweight.

Coincidentally, those big facts loom large in the book I’m reading; it's The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. They’re two British scientists who’ve statistically connected income inequality to all kinds of social ills, including obesity. The wider the gap between the rich and the poor in any given region, they’ve found, the more unhealthy the society.

The authors point to key social factors linked to income inequality:

• levels of trust
• mental illness and addiction
• life expectancy and infant mortality
• obesity
• children's educational performance
• teen births
• homicides
• imprisonment rates, and
• social mobility.

The U.S. is, in general terms, the wealthiest nation on earth. But the income gap between the rich and the poor is dramatic and widening. There are more billionaires living in the States than anywhere else, and the U.S. spends by far the most amount per capita on health care, yet the average American dies 4 years sooner than the average Japanese. Why? According to the authors’ research, Japan’s average wealthy CEO is only four times richer than the average worker. In the America the gap is more than 300 times greater. And at the other end of the scale, the United States has a greater number of its citizens—the vast majority of whom are poor—in prison per capita than any other country, developed or not.

On the opportunity and equality scale, New Brunswick isn’t doing so well, either. It has an unemployment rate running over 10 percent, and a seasonal unemployment rate in some regions can push well over 30 percent. Over the past year New Brunswick lost 6500 jobs. At the same time over 13 percent of the total workforce works for the provincial government and the province is currently looking to cut costs—and jobs. These unemployed people are bored, eat more junk food, do more drugs, get sicker and become more worried and depressed than their working cousins.

And on the other private ownership side, two (2) families in the province have a combined net worth of around $13 billion. By comparison, the average New Brunswicker’s net worth is a little over $100,000. McCain Foods alone accounts for $6 billion in revenues annually, which is approaching the size of the provincial government. These two companies and a handful of others have an extraordinary influence, not only on the provincial economy, but on its social dynamics.

Working in a tough economy controlled by a few key players, New Brunswickers have fewer available opportunities. So they’re loyal. They stay in the same jobs longer than any other Canadians and work cheaper. At the same time, like all of us, they compare their own circumstances to the affluence of the corporate owners. And the comparison makes them unhappy. If the theory holds true, Saint Johners, with their close proximity to the wealthy and powerful Irving family, would be less happy than their urban neighbours in Moncton two hours away, who have no dominant billionaire clan and experience a narrower gap between the haves and the have-nots. The socio-economic structure affects personal self-image.

Self-image, it turns out is extremely important. Humans, as Wilkinson and Pickett point out, are highly social—and comparative—creatures. In their discussion about equality they talk about “social evaluation,” that is, individuals and groups comparing themselves to others.

We’re taught by advertising and the corporate media to feed this comparison. We’re sold on luxury goods and exclusivity. And if we can’t afford these things we feel shame, as if we are personally responsible, though most often we’re not. Much of the great wealth we see around us is an accident of birth. Driven by our hunger to consume and bombarded by over-choice, we begin to care less about the people around us.

Wilkinson and Pickett observe that this materialist pathology leads to a fixation on image over substance (brand value over actual worth) that in turn leads to widespread narcissism, anxiety, depression, poor health and even suicide. Status becomes more important than health.

Ostracizing the poor (by stripping them of status and pride) in this kind of society becomes a powerful tool of control. Those who don’t maintain the proper image are subtly shunned. We become anxious to avoid it. So social-commercial conformity, under the guise of individualism and individual choice, becomes the norm. We learn to recognize the best stuff, and buy it, transferring its brand characteristics to ourselves. We don’t hire the fat secretaries, no matter how much better they may be at doing the work. We overtly teach our kids the game of “tops and bottoms” and quietly turn them into dominant tops. Then, ironically, we try to advertise bullying away. And we become skilled at judging by first impressions. One look is often enough tell us whether a person has any power or not.

When it comes to image Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan famously posed “the medium is the message,” in other words, the form shapes the content. So the image of power translates into actual power.

All governments are in power to protect citizens. Military forces are built and maintained and complex systems of administration are constructed to administer the law. However, the operative word—the hidden medium—in all of this process is “no.” The form of all government is therefore based on the power of “no,” the power to restrict action.

Corporations, on the other hand, are all about getting customers to “yes.” But what happens when these two forms merge? What happens when a corporate–government alliance takes place, as is happening in the U.S. and elsewhere, in which corporate influence directly shapes government policy, as we saw with the bailout of the American financial system a few years ago?

In the evolution of this kind of hybrid system, corporations get to short-circuit the “no” and get an instant-on “yes” to their plans, while the rest of us are controlled by the same old “no” structure. But in fact it’s worse than that, because now corporations can begin to impose their own controlling “no” on the public to protect their corporate interests. And that marriage of capitalism and government is simply called fascism. The medium now becomes the message: the message being the rise of repression and growing inequality.

That’s exactly what ordinary people the world over have figured out in the continuing aftermath of the global financial meltdown and the “war on terror.” They see their rights eroding, their jobs evaporating, government leaders in bed with the corporations and they’re taking to the streets. The revolution is beginning. We saw it with the G20 protests in Toronto and the over-zealous policing. We’re seeing it in New York with the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protest.

But we’re unlikely to see it here in New Brunswick. We’ve been trained to our situation for almost a century now. And we’ve proven that if we don’t like it we just leave. But as former New York Times reporter Christopher Hedges recently wrote, it’s time to choose between rebellion and slavery.

Sure it sounds a bit melodramatic. But the times are a’ changin’ again, and fast.

The answer, as Wilkinson and Pickett point out, is getting our governments to focus on creating equality rather than creating top-controlled wealth or bottom-end jobs.

And hell, if they could pull that off, who'd need a revolution?

New Brunswick notes from an accidental tourist

2011-09-26T08:13:00.000-07:00

•••
New Brunswick is a province without a centre. At least that’s how it looks from a traveller’s perspective.

This weekend we did a whirlwind tour of half the province. We travelled up the coast to the Fundy National Park then up to Moncton and east to Sackville for a surprise visit with our daughter at Mount Allison. Then we did a second trip the next day, driving north to Glassville for a family reunion.

I could get into a travelogue here, describing all the highlights, you know, the scenic lookouts where wisps of clouds are rising off the ocean and drifting over the mountains or the rugged coastal towns hanging out over the water or the patchwork of groomed, green farmland stretching over the hills and off to the horizon. But there were interesting social patterns woven into the landscape also worth considering.

Rural New Brunswick seems to be rotting away, with the exception of big farm country. In the stretches between the cities old houses are falling down, old farm fields are turning back into bush. Along the coastal back-roads the tourist infrastructure is aging and falling apart. Vintage ’50s-era motels are boarded up, the signs for hippie-era arts and crafts shops are weathering into invisibility. The only viable businesses seem to be huddled around the major destinations like the Hopewell Rocks park.

Meanwhile, the suburban sprawl is expanding around the province’s three bigger cities, with housing developments sprouting up everywhere like proverbial mushroom patches.

And what of the smaller towns in between? It’s a mixed bag. Each seems to have its single major industry. Florenceville has McCains. Sackville has its university. So as goes the single industry so goes the town. New Brunswick is in mid-transition from a rural to an urban province.

Although there are similarities to other Maritime provinces, New Brunswick is unique. It doesn’t have a single major centre acting as a stabilizing gravitational force for the entire provincial culture. Where Newfoundland has St. John’s, Nova Scotia has Halifax and PEI has Charlottetown, New Brunswick has three, each with different economic and cultural functions.

Globally speaking, we live in a centralized reality. Governments and corporations rely on centralized systems of command and control, development and financing, production and marketing. Both Louis Robichaud and Frank McKenna, New Brunswick’s two most visionary premiers, understood this and worked to centralize the province’s social and economic structures into a more modern, urban framework. But due to the original urban-rural-ethnic design of the province, their efforts were only partially successful (if centralization is the key to success, and success is defined as urban materialism).

So how could one create a more modern, centralized New Brunswick? Well that’s the challenge facing every new provincial government. Given the structural diversity of the province the wisest and simplest answer would be, “I don’t know.”

One could simply anoint Saint John with principal city status and move the provincial capital there. The city has the biggest and best urban environment in the province and is a working international port. Fredericton would be a regional hub servicing the agricultural-education-technology sectors. Moncton would remain, well, Moncton, a franco-anglo transportation-retail-innovation centre. And that would be it. Saint John would be on its way to becoming a big city, and the province would have its gravitational centre.

Alternatively, the Maritime provinces could amalgamate, whereby Moncton would make the ideal capital city for the new province of Atlantica. Now that’s really reaching for it. I somehow doubt that Maritimers, and in particular Haligonians, would ever be willing to agree to that. At least not without some dramatic leadership and a compelling reason to do it.

Back to the local scene, sitting with the family in a shabby Chinese restaurant in Sackville I realized that the town’s main industry shaped its culture and economy. Students, the backbone of Sackville’s economy, don’t spend money on fancy restaurants. And that led my thinking back to the recent study on the state of the province’s educational system, which itself seems to be a decentralized mess with universities scattered everywhere in a province of just 750,000 people and a functional adult illiteracy rate of between 60 and 68 percent. Something seems broken here.

Could these abysmal literacy rates, Canada’s highest rates of obesity and classically high rates of sustained unemployment have something to do with a decentralized, rural-urban split, bilingual provincial structure stitched together—and keeping us trapped motionless in our cars—by the best four-lane highways in Atlantic Canada? Again, I don’t know. But nothing seems to come into focus in New Brunswick other than the two large and famous centralized family conglomerates: the Irvings and McCains. These two companies, as Connors Bros. did before them, seem to get the importance of the centralization concept a whole lot better than our governments do.

So how would I sum up our two-day experience of the province? Well, if it were a tourism slogan it would be: “Visit New Brunswick, the way life used to be,” or “There are so many New Brunswicks you won’t know which one you’ll like the best.”

To summarize, New Brunswick is the result of a failed political strategy of giving everybody a little bit of something—without ever having a grand vision and the discipline to focus on what we could all be, collectively.

Unless one plans to live in the 19th Century—which is another sustainability strategy—and if that’s the solution we’ve been abandoning that heritage as well. Either way it seems to be a pretty sad state of affairs.

But maybe you have some easy answers I've missed…

Walking on air and other dangerous pursuits

2011-09-19T07:58:00.000-07:00

•••
Skype is pretty amazing. I called my sister and brother-in-law on the West Coast the other day and we had a long conversation—that lasted about three hours.

What kind of talk? Mostly the economy and politics, with some family thrown in for good measure. But we ended up talking about the importance of common belief.

We agreed that there seemed to be a widespread desire for more functioning community in our lives but there wasn’t a common foundation of belief in modern society—at least from a spiritual or moral perspective. Instead of community we’re connected to jobs and shopping and our individual pursuits—and long-distance relationships as a replacement for community, and perhaps at the expense of community.

So two things seem to be happening. First, more than ever we’ve become single units in a larger system. And second, the larger system is evermore complex and centralized as organizations merge and expand. Today we occupy more specialized positions in these complex structures than our parents did. Or we fall outside the system altogether.

And falling outside the system is what happens when complex systems break down or fail. Spain, for example, is deeply in debt and facing government austerity and belt-tightening to pay back its loans while it runs a staggering 50 percent unemployment rate for those under the age of 25. It’s no surprise, then, to see Spanish youth take to the streets in months long protests and ongoing clashes with police.

From a sociological point of view, it turns out that the idea of social structures and beliefs—the actual social “ground”—is fundamental to the success of societies. And this changes significantly from place to place. In one data set from a few decades ago we learned that countries with strongly integrated common beliefs had lower suicide rates: lower in Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain, and higher in Germany, Sweden and Denmark.

Translating this to Canada, we might then begin to understand why our aboriginal communities, which have had their traditional beliefs stripped away, are suffering from severe epidemics of suicide.

Here on the East Coast there are long strands of history woven into our communities over the past 300 years. The Acadian and Loyalist traditions are tightly integrated and can be seen in the succession of family names over the generations. That firm social ground makes it relatively easy for Maritimers to identify their places in society and to act out their roles. Everyone knows his or her place. But it also traps many of us in those roles.

Outsiders arriving here, while free from those grounding rules, are at a distinct disadvantage in many ways, as they don’t understand the underlying nuances of the society such as who controls the power and which families are the classic victims. And these are roles we learn early.

Sociology points out is that social structures trump moral systems. The shoe deforms the foot. We see this pretty clearly in Zimbardo’s famous prison experiment conducted at Stanford University in 1971. Professor Zimbardo collected a group of normal students and randomly separated them into guards and prisoners and set up a prison compound on campus. The 14-day experiment had to be called off after 6 days. The guards had simply become too abusive and the prisoners too victimized to continue on. It was an eerie premonition of Abu Ghraib.

The conclusion of social researchers is simply this. Ordinary human beings are capable of the most inhuman behaviour given a sufficiently enabling social structure. We can see this from Nazi death camps and Stalinist gulags all the way to the current suppression of the Palestinians.

Apart from our social structures that can go horribly awry, all we have to stand on is our common moral ground—which, for the most part, no longer exists. Only a common moral ground can give us the courage to resist social pressures of social structures gone wrong. Which was why the Catholic Church was so important to the overthrow of the totalitarian communist regime in Poland, for example.

This leads to a myriad of thoughts. One of which is the fact that power corrupts. Another is the simple fact that more of us are serving the bureaucratically-controlled power at the top rather than our customers or our peers, with whom we’re competing—because that’s just how our system works.

And since our communities have been replaced by corporate central command and individual long distance personal communication, we’ve lost our local common ground—and the ability to resist the forces of power that may heading in the wrong direction.

Harper’s new bill C-51 and the future of Internet freedom is a good example. This new bill will mandate Internet companies to keep track on all of our activity. Not only will this make it more costly for small Internet providers, allowing larger providers to thrive, it will stifle free speech as the government will have full access to our correspondence.

Since “we’ve” given the Conservatives a majority government, we might believe that we have no choice but to give in and let this travesty occur. But we do have choice. Do we become cowering victims in this brave new world? Or do we stand up and fight back?

It’s a choice between walking on air—or finding common moral ground.

(Feel free to e-mail Stephen Harper anytime at pm@pm.gc.ca)

Why the environmental movement is dead

2011-09-12T09:33:00.000-07:00

•••
President Obama delivered his jobs speech last week. It was good. And from a business point of view, there was a collective sigh of relief in the media: there was no mention of the “Green Economy” anywhere—not that it helped the stock market, which tanked after his speech.

Way back in 2009 creating green jobs was at the heart of Obama’s economic recovery plan. So what happened? Well, I guess political and economic “reality” just got in the way. Since ’09 the global economy has stalled and the working classes have been hit hard by unemployment. So it’s come down to survival time—both politically for Obama with an election coming up next year, and for voters, who would rather have jobs and food on the table than taking tax money to fund airy-fairy green projects that might or might not amount to anything “useful.”

But this environmental ambivalence thing isn’t new. Environmental journalism got going in the early 1960s with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the famous exposé on DDT that ramped up the back-to-the-land movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s—the Whole Earth Catalogue generation—which faded away as quietly as silent spring itself. So again, what happened?

In the simplest terms the hippies just grew up and got real jobs. They left the communal farms, got mortgages had kids and raised their families. They morphed into the Me generation of the 1980s and evolved into the Starbucks generation of the 1990s. And yeah, most of them kept their eco-friendly orientation. But they also exploded into a supernova of occupations—from non-profit workers to commercial artists to researchers to tax consultants—with tastes that grew evermore refined, moving upmarket from rusty pickups to the shiniest sheet metal they could afford.

Throughout the process, the successful ones went from comfortable to fabulously wealthy. Today the top ten percent of the U.S. population (and it must be somewhat similar here in Canada) owns 80 percent of the population’s total wealth.

And the politics says it all. The political agenda has turned decidedly conservative. In real terms, that translates into a voting population that seeks to protect and grow its personal assets with as little interference from government as possible. This has led, as we all know, to some predictable results: the deregulation of business, demise of labour unions, massive lowering of taxes on wealth, reduction in government-funded social services and environmental protection and so on. Life, it seems, has become an endless game of “chasing the cash.” And that’s just the domestic scene.

Internationally it’s the same. The Amero-Anglo-Euro agenda has been aimed squarely at the control of strategic resources (read: energy, natural resources, human “capital” and food production). This power axis has been continuously involved in a geopolitical—and real—resource wars for the past 50 years, ever since the prospect of declining oil and gas reserves was first noted by geologists. International concern for the environment? Nadda. Whatever’s been done has been merely window dressing, with the exception of the banning of CFCs, yeah, those nasty refrigerants that were eating a hole through Earth’s ozone layer.

Here in Canada we’re managing to put oil and jobs ahead of the environment in a massive way with our tar sands oil mining venture—one of the dirtiest mega-projects in the world. Meanwhile, our good old underemployed Altantic Canadians make their pilgrimages to Fort McMurray for the fattest paycheques of their lives, and who could blame them, really, what with the fishery in total collapse? (And I’m pretty sure there is some kind of cruel irony in that, too.)

And now that our economy is stalling, like our neighbour’s to the south, our focus will be even less on the environment—and more on business development—as we move ahead.

Want proof? One need only to look at the recent Conservative government’s move to lay off 700 workers—fully 11 percent of the entire staff at Environment Canada—while granting corporations a generous $6 billion annual tax cut in an effort to create jobs, which has yet to materialize. Of course the CEOs of our biggest corporations aren’t complaining about any of this.

And don’t look to science or academia for too much help on the environmental front. Research today is a race toward corporate funding, so only those things that promise to “pay off” get funded. How about mind control research? There’s a market for that in the security sector. Let’s do that!

I haven’t even mentioned the lack of public outrage about the catastrophic Fukushima meltdown and radiation “leaks” (deluge would be more like it) or the inherent dangers of nuclear power on all living things on the planet. Or why ocean life here in Passamaquoddy Bay is full of flame retardants and worse.

Want the real reason the environmental movement is dead? As social critic Naomi Klein pointed out last week, Victoria (Posh Spice-girl) Beckham recently snapped up 100 Hermes Birkin bags for the low, low price of $2 million. Now, how can quoting Albert Einstein that “nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet” offset behaviour like that?

The easiest answer seems to be “human nature;” our nature against the rest of nature, as always.

Forget about all that. Who are you?

2011-09-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

Trying to figure out how the world works can’t be done, and yet we’re all hardwired to try from the get-go. And maybe that’s why we keep listening to experts for answers instead of turning to our personal experience.

This caught my attention twice last week. The first was a discussion with some friends in the US.

I’d sent a bit of research to my friends that seemed to provide a clear view of the global economy. The research conflicted with their worldview only in the fact that it gave a broader perspective. But instead of reviewing it, they were more interested in who authored it. And the entire discussion got tossed out the window.

But the source of the information happened to be quite credible. It’s just that he was neither a famous nor leading expert—making his views easier to dismiss. And what annoyed me was how much the quality of the message seemed to be influenced by the stature of the source.

The second example was a call I got about last week’s column. The caller was a former local businessperson who wanted to discuss the future of the region, and wondered if I was interested in meeting. So we did. And he had a lot of ideas and some great advice for both me and for the local economy. He also set up a few meetings with his old acquaintances here. But I got the sense that his reputation was of more interest to everyone than the actual solutions, and that his reputation would influence the outcomes of his discussions far more than his actual ideas. And I think he was also aware of this.

So what’s more important, I wondered, the message or the messenger?

From a purely rational point of view, information is information and facts are facts. The quality of the data should stand on its own. But from a human perspective everything is relative, especially when facts degenerate into opinion—as in the climate change debate. The facts tell us that our climate is changing. We learn this from internationally respected scientists. But many of our equally influential business people dispute whether these changes are caused by human activity, suggesting that these changes are just natural cycles. Who are we to believe?

The ongoing nuclear hazard from Fukushima is good example. The Canadian government has done little to no monitoring—to the public’s knowledge—of the amount of radioactive fallout in the rainfall dropping on Canada. But one ordinary guy bought himself a handheld Geiger counter and is travelling, on his own nickel, across the country from west to east testing rainfall, and his findings are a bit frightening to say the least. But again, who is he, anyway? And where are the experts on this?

On another newsfeed I read that a suspiciously high number of Atlantic lottery jackpots being won by retailers and insiders. Common sense would say there’s something wrong. The Atlantic Lottery Corporation (ALC) tells us that there’s no reason for concern, even though the rate of insider wins has skyrocketed by almost 300 percent in the last year, and lottery retailers have been winning jackpots of over $10,000 at a rate three times a month over the past four years.

Fortunately, mathematician Maureen Tingley at the University of New Brunswick thinks that the data is “wacky” and has called for more information. But who is Tingley, anyway? I don’t know who she is, nor did the news report tell us. So I checked her out. She’s the director of UNB’s Applied Statistics Centre. I think we’d be more inclined to trust Ms. Tingley than the ALC public relations department, wouldn’t you?

We need experts because we have a difficult time trusting our own common sense. The problems just seem too big. We’ve even handed our own personal problems over to the experts: the educators, the psychologists, the TV self-improvement gurus. And the more highly-credentialed the sources, the more inclined we are to believe them.

So how do we know when to choose between our common sense and the expert’s view?

It all comes down to two things: motivation and specialization. Motivation has to do with what’s behind the big picture, such as who’s selling what? Who has the most to gain or lose? The key to common sense lies in understanding the motivation behind any big decision. For example, why might large corporations debunk climate change and oppose climate change legislation? Why might the U.S. invade oil-rich Iraq but not impoverished Ethiopia? When it comes to general trends, you’ll hear a lot from the experts—but you might want to listen to your own common sense.

When it comes to specifics we’re much better off trusting experts. Dentistry or knee surgery is never a pleasant do-it-yourself venture any more than data-mining ALC’s win ratios would be. We need experts to help us solve very specific problems.

So here’s a clue. When someone asks (or hints at) “who are you?” you might want to think about their motivation for asking. And then address whether the situation calls for specific knowledge or just plain old common sense. And if it’s the latter, you owe it to yourself to trust your instincts.

Because in the end it isn’t who you are, it’s what you do.

Why our soldiers are fighting in Afghanistan

2011-08-28T20:43:00.000-07:00

The blogosphere can be a strange place. Sometimes you make friends there and then just as quickly alienate them as I recently discovered.

I’d been involved in a blog debate with some newfound friends in the States. It was interesting, I thought, that Barack Obama had stacked his administration with the same bankers and financial advisers who were responsible for creating the 2008 financial crisis in the first place, and that the government bailout benefitted the financial elite—at the expense of ordinary people. It seemed to me that Obama had abandoned working class homeowners to save the big financial institutions. It was clearly a failed strategy. The U.S. economy is sputtering and the country has sunken deeper in debt—$14.7 trillion and counting—threatening to set off another financial crisis.

When my blogger buds defended Obama on the grounds that he made the best deal he could under the circumstances, I cited Iceland as a very different example. Iceland’s banks—which had been privatized—had also collapsed, far more dramatically than their U.S. counterparts. The minute the Icelandic government nationalized the banks, the country slipped into a deep recession. Finally the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stepped in offering to lend the country $2.1 billion to bail itself out. And then an odd thing happened. The 320,000 Icelandic citizens just said “no.” They refused to pay the debt, changed governments, told their creditors and the IMF to take a hike and are in the process of rewriting their constitution to prevent anything similar happening in the future.

Of course this hasn’t been reported in the international mainstream media. Instead we hear a lot in the news about the punishing IMF loans being inflicted on Ireland and Greece, and possibly Spain, Portugal, Italy and maybe even France, which all serve as a stiff warning to the Americans to get their financial house in order.

But America isn’t in debt because of its recent love affair with casino capitalism. After all, the $1 trillion U.S. bailout of its financial sector is less than 10 percent of its national debt. So where did the money go?

It’s not much of a mystery. Today, the U.S. military accounts for 47 percent of the world’s total military spending. That’s almost as much as the rest of the world combined. Put in another perspective, the U.S. spends 8 times more than the second place spender, China. The U.S. is currently burning through almost $700 billion a year on its armed forces, and with all hidden costs accounted, is spending 54 percent of the entire national budget on military-related expenses.

So why is the U.S. government giving its corporate class an easy ride while punishing its own working class people to support such a large military force with 737 military bases around the world?

Simply put, corporate America is acutely aware of the fact that the world is running out of fossil fuel. That’s why seven of the world’s top-ten largest corporations are oil-energy companies, and, surprisingly, three of those are Chinese state-owned corporations. The other four are Dutch Royal Shell, Exxon-Mobil, BP and Chevron. And all of these companies have major stakes in the Middle East.

Even before the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush Administration had been planning a military intervention in Afghanistan. The corporate objective was the construction of a major oil pipeline through Afghanistan that was being blocked by the Taliban. Since 9/11 the rest is history.

Afghanistan and oil-rich Iraq have been subjected to a decade of war at a cost of several hundred thousand lives and trillions of dollars. But the U.S. and western corporations have been involved in the region for decades before that, starting in 1933 with Standard Oil in Saudi Arabia and soon afterward the British development of the Iranian oil fields. Today, the Middle East is still the biggest prize in the world’s dwindling oil reserve.

And a military map of the region tells the story. America and its allies are presently involved military ventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan, and may be instrumental in funding “Arab Spring” uprisings elsewhere in the region.

Meanwhile, the Russians are actively involved on the northern periphery. And the Chinese have been building strong trade and military alliances with Pakistan, Iran and Turkey—now directly connecting themselves to the Mediterranean along the old Silk Road. And China also has growing relations with Algeria, Morocco, Chad, Nigeria and Ethiopia and the African Union, mirroring the U.S. strategy.

In other words, we have the makings of a major geopolitical resource war heating up between the U.S. alliance and China in the Middle East-North Africa corridor—with Pakistan and Iran as the most likely flash points.

How does that affect us here in Canada? Aside from our own cozy oil relationship (read: tar sands) with the U.S., the Canadian government told us it was going to war with Afghanistan after 9/11 to a) defend Canada’s national interests, b) ensure Canadian leadership in world affairs and c) help Afghanistan rebuild. Huh? Those can’t be the real reasons. And we were initially told that we’d be out of the war in a little over a year. But we weren’t told anything about the existing U.S. invasion-and-pipeline plans there.

So to date 157 Canadians—including 10 New Brunswickers and 24 other Maritimers—have died in Afghanistan since we entered the war a decade ago, and some 2500 to 2800 Canadian Forces personnel are still on the ground, with recent estimates pegging our cost for the war in excess of $18 billion.

Does anyone else think that our precious blood and treasure might be better spent developing viable fuel alternatives? Or are we just too far gone on our dirty addiction to fossil fuel to get that we’re ready to kill and be killed for the stuff?

Motorcycles, tourism and paradoxes of retirement

2011-08-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

The faint electronic-sounding whisper barely caught my attention. I glanced up from my gardening. Two helmeted older people—riding the quietest, sleekest, deepest burgundy motorcycle I’d ever seen—went gliding past our front lawn.

The bike stopped at the stop sign and took off, and it was only then I could tell it was gas-powered. But even then it was whisper quiet—a highly sophisticated four cylinder or six I figured.

I compared it to the bike and sidecar I’d seen in town a couple of weeks before. It was a noisy antique contraption, its riders wearing matching gang colours: ragged jackets with big Hell’s Angels patches on the backs.

Since the arrival of the Altanticade motorcycle event there’s been a lot more motorcycle traffic to our little town. Most of these bikes—ridden by aging Baby Boomers—are Harleys or Harley knockoffs, with big V-twin engines and minimal exhaust systems. They’re loud, even when the riders are trying to be quiet.

Welcome to the new age of retirement, in which “do your own thing” is the mantra. So the question becomes, how does a small tourist town accommodate the diversity? Well, it can—and it can’t. The town first has to decide what it wants to be. Does it want to cater to folks who like art galleries, crafts shops and upmarket restaurants, or does it want to cater to people who like stripper bars, fast food, loud entertainment and rebel paraphernalia? Either group can spend a lot of money.

These value choices are extremely important: these choices shape the culture in which we live. For example, our small town has somehow managed to keep big franchise stores out of the community, so you won’t find a Burger King or McDonalds or even a Red Lobster here. The people here seem to care about what fits and what doesn’t.

So why is the town willing to distort its values to accommodate motorcycle tourism? The easy answer would be money. But that’s not the whole story. The answer is numbers. Tourism runs on traffic, and motorcycles bring visitors. And when tourist destinations in town sense that their numbers are dropping, they tend to look to “the low-hanging fruit,” which in this case is motorcycle tourism. But whether that type of tourism best fits their existing businesses or their community’ culture is another issue.

As the Baby Boom generation starts to impose new challenges on national scene these value choices aren’t limited to small town tourism. And these challenges bring more paradoxes. Affluent Boomers want to preserve their wealth, while their less affluent cohorts will be relying on the government and social security cheques. And Boomers of all types will be looking at affordable, high quality retirement locations.

Real estate in some parts of Canada is expensive, which makes the East Coast, with its affordable real estate attractive to potential retirees. But the eastern provinces—especially New Brunswick—are “have-not” provinces that depend on federal transfer payments to remain viable. So if the federal government neutralizes the transfer payments, or decides to disconnect the provinces from a national universal health care system (allowing any province to develop a two-tiered, private-public system), the entire social services picture could change depending on where one retires.

New Brunswick also has a rapidly aging population and a historical problem with outmigration of young people. So one would think that these demographic dynamics are extremely important to policy developers, who might view building affordable and efficient retirement housing, seniors’ health care, social and cultural centres, and attracting young and capable service workers as primary challenges.

But reality check: the current provincial government is forced by necessity to focus on internal cost-reduction and paring back its spending to control its spiralling debt rather than looking at the future. And there’s the rock and the hard place.

Retirees from across Canada and the U.S. are looking at attractive, affordable retirement locations. Many of them will make the leap without a full understanding of the long-term implications. Pretty seaside towns may be quaint, affordable and fun while these retirees are still relatively young but may become less desirable as these newcomers move into old age. But the lack of assisted living facilities and distance from comprehensive medical facilities will pose new challenges. As will living within the financial constraints of a “have-not” province.

Perhaps, for the first time, we’re seeing a three-stage retirement: early retirement in which retirees in good health explore their inner adolescent in seaside towns along the coast, mid-retirement in which they scale back youthful desires and move into affordable condo living, and late retirement in which they tighten up their expenses and look after their fading health.

Geographically speaking, these three phases might suggest living in three different towns, creating a new class of aging nomads. Disconnected from their children, who have moved away from home after college, and thus from their grandchildren, the new retirees are a footloose, go-anywhere group.

And that simply means another new market to exploit. Paradoxes and challenges always bring new opportunities for those who willing to anticipate the future. Retirement, like everything else, isn’t what it used to be.

(On a sadder note, rest in peace Jack Layton.)

U.K. riots: forces too great to understand?

2011-08-15T09:13:00.000-07:00

There it was, that disturbing video clip on the web: a gang of street hoodies in London helping a dazed and injured kid to his feet, then riffling through his packsack, stealing the contents. The incident fit with the stern condemnations of the rioters proffered by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron last week.

It’s only a slightly different story this week. In a speech just hours ago Cameron chastised the entire English society for a “slow-motion moral collapse” and pledged to examine policies to tackle a culture of laziness, irresponsibility and selfishness. To be fair, he not only included the young and indigent rioters but also Britain’s privileged: reckless bankers, scandal-prone politicians and the dirt-mongering media itself. The speech was, in Cameron’s own words, “a wake-up call.”

The political reaction has been swift. A couple of hours ago, Labour Party leader Ed Miliband declared that Cameron “has revealed himself to be reaching for shallow and superficial answers,” and pointed out that an economy that required both parents to work 70-hour weeks to raise a family hardly constituted the foundations for a healthy society. And yet Miliband ended up agreeing with Cameron. He too blamed the greedy, immoral, self-serving ruling class in Britain.

Miliband wisely concluded, “Let's not pretend that the crisis of values in our society is confined to a minority only at the bottom when we see the morality of millions of hardworking, decent people under siege from the top as well.”

And it’s true. But where the bottom has only raw, undisciplined street power, the controlling elite have every kind of power, from the powers of law and politics to corporate control to the control of the money supply itself.

But just who are those people and to whom are they responsible?

In July U.S. Representative Alan Grayson tried to find out during an investigation into the disappearance of $9 trillion in off balance sheet transactions at the U.S. Federal Reserve over the previous eight months. How does a bank lose track of $9 trillion? The Fed’s inspector general Elizabeth Coleman didn’t have an answer.

She didn’t really need to have one. Why? Because the U.S. Federal Reserve—unlike the Bank of Canada but similar to the Bank of England and the majority of national central banks in the world—is privately held. And, in special legislative deals with governments, these banks are not required to reveal their owners.

These hidden owners introduce the spectre of great wealth controlling the global economy. Wealth as in people like the Rothschilds. But one doesn’t have to look to the Rothschilds and their great wealth (in some circles estimated to be $500 trillion, or fully half the world’s wealth) to understand the damning effects of economic inequality.

The popular uprisings in the Middle East, the so-called “Arab Spring,” share one thing in common with the British riots: both cultures have a wide disparity between the powerful rich and the disenfranchised poor. The U.K. consistently ranks near the bottom of the European income equity-disparity scale.

This wouldn’t be a problem if there were a public perception of possible upward mobility, which has been a fundamental underpinning of, say, the American Dream, wherein, with talent and hard work and a little bit of luck, you too can become rich. But the financial facts no longer square with the dream. In America and elsewhere in the Western world, the rich are definitely getting richer and the poor poorer, while the middle class plays a desperate game of clinging to its own collapsing rungs on the economic ladder.

Meanwhile the poor are being targeted and punished for their circumstances. In a great piece in the Wall Street Journal, Jessica Silver-Greenberg writes about the return of debtors’ prisons in the U.S. She reports, for example, that a third of all U.S. states allow the jailing borrowers who can’t repay their debts—even if the borrower doesn’t get advance notice through sloppy paperwork, which happened to a young business owner, Jeffrey Sterns, who was arrested by a deputy sheriff, handcuffed in front of his kids, locked up, strip searched, de-loused, and finally released after agreeing to pay $1500 cash to the loan company— even though he’d never been notified he was about to be sued.

This is what happens in stagnating societies when wealth accumulates at the top and ordinary job opportunities disappear.

Meanwhile we’re being constantly chided by the wealthy in the media. Here in Canada there’s David Radler for one. Radler writes a semi-regular column aptly titled “Radler’s Rants” for a chain of western newspapers. In June he bashed the postal union for the recent Canada Post strike. His conclusion: “The best response the government can provide to all of us is to teach them [strikers and union] a lesson.” His solution? To slash the operating budget of Canada Post by 40 percent. One could only conclude that the cuts would come in the form of massive staff reductions. And just how is that going to help the Canadian economy? The only likely way would be through increased dependence on the private courier corporations, which charge up to 10 times more for similar services.

We might take his economic advice with a grain of salt. Radler is a convicted felon, one of Conrad Black’s partners in crime. He’s also, conveniently, a part owner and VP of the western newspaper chain that runs his columns.

But that’s an old story. The elites, such as the Rothchilds, have been buying up the media for over a century, and filling us up with what they want us to hear. As for the real news, it will keep on happening on the streets—until some of the wealth at the top is redistributed back to the bottom—to the people who have actually produced the goods and services, and the real value in the economy.

And the moral crisis to which Prime Minister Cameron refers, is the failure of governments to redistribute the wealth.

Into the valley of Death rode the seven hundred

2011-08-08T11:47:00.000-07:00

It was a quiet little news story but it caught my attention. The Harper government has just laid off 700 Environment Canada workers—that’s a whopping 11 percent of the whole operation. Not surprisingly, the union representing the workers observes that the cuts have been ongoing through attrition (not replacing retiring workers) and that further cuts are in the works.

To say that these cuts to Environment are ideological is an understatement. The Conservatives have long been opposed to funding protection and scientific research related to the environment.

I don’t make this claim lightly. Remember the Bruce Carson scandal that broke out in the news last spring? The 66-year-old Carson, a convicted fraudster and one of Harper’s key political troubleshooters, was accused of lobbying the government on behalf of his 22-year-old fiancée, a former sex trade worker. Harper summarily washed his hands of the issue and sent the matter to the RCMP. But that’s not the whole story.

Investigative reporter Andrew Nikiforuk writes that Carson, while working in the Prime Minister’s Office, was lobbied for money by a University of Calgary think tank—the Canada School of Energy and the Environment. Apparently, Carson then left the Prime Minister’s Office to become the think tank’s executive director, which had just been conveniently awarded a $15 million grant from the Harper government. You might recall that U of C is Harper’s alma mater. But it still doesn’t end there.

Carson went on to revise the think tank’s mandate to include government lobbying and policy development on the oil sands, and then successfully lobbied the feds for another $25 million, while doing work for three federal cabinet ministers—his former associates—and directing a joint industry-government campaign to improve the image of the oil sands industry. Nice work, Bruce.

Nikiforuk concludes that, “In the end, the school [became} a clearinghouse for industrial energy lobbyists working hand in hand with the federal and Alberta Tory government.” Hmm. Isn’t it great to see our tax dollars so wisely spent?

On the other side of the story columnist Barbara Yaffee wrote a vaguely positive account of oil sands lobbying in Saturday’s Telegraph-Journal. She opens with, “Companies harvesting Alberta’s oil sands have begun aggressively fighting back against North American activists working to discredit their industry.” To that end the industry trade organization, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, hosted a media trip to the oil sands operation for an all-paid first hand look, and Barbara went along for the ride. She concluded that, sure, open pit mining is ugly but so are slaughterhouses, but Canada’s oil sands produce only 3.5 percent of the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced by US coal-fired generating plants annually. So I guess she means that 45 megatonnes of GHG is acceptable. OK…

But what about those 700 disappearing environmental jobs? Well, Carson’s $40 million in funding would have supported them for another full year—in wages that would contribute directly to our economy. On the other hand, who knows where Carson’s outfit spent its money?

Closer to home, I read that 1,500 jobs “vanished” in New Brunswick last month; that’s 10,100 jobs lost since the beginning of the year, with the province’s “official” unemployment rate now hovering over 10 percent. Nationwide, Canada isn’t faring much better—with the entire economy producing only 7,100 jobs last month.

This is not a time for the Harper government to be cutting back in a severe austerity effort to reduce the debt that they racked up. Nor is it even time for our destitute Alward-led provincial government to get too tight. The real economy—that is, the one that affects ordinary people like us—is already limping badly. This is a time for government to raise taxes on the top income earners and increase funding for research and innovation to lead us into this new century. That means finding money for things like energy alternatives on a massive scale, new forms of food production that require less fossil fuel inputs and new modes of energy-efficient transportation, to name a few.

Like it or not, we Canadians have a government-heavy country. We depend on our government to protect our way of life, administer our legal and health care systems and safeguard our environment—and to provide us with steady government jobs to do that good work. And it’s a system that does function well, for the most part.

For example, according to commentators Susanna Fuller and Matthew Abbot, the cod and haddock are back. And why is that? Because our government finally shut down the fishery (too little and too late, but still). Not that the writers are fans of government, especially the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which they feel has gone too far supporting big aqua business at the expense of the small family fishermen.

All of this story points in one direction, which is simply this. Our Canadian governments, like their U.S. counterparts, have climbed into bed with big corporate interests at the expense of the rest of us.

The 700 displaced employees, I fear, are headed where many of us are headed: home, without paycheques. And into that particular valley of slow Death we seem to be rushing at breakneck speed.

Reflections on Larry Lack’s beets

2011-07-29T08:28:00.000-07:00

©

Every so often I wake up in terror thinking about the future. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve just had a bad dream or if it has to do with having kids, which seems to amplify things a bit. But, strangely, it also seems to have a lot to do with gasoline.

I think about gasoline way too much. Not like filling up the tank and watching those electronic digits whizzing up toward the $100 mark. More like thinking about the gasoline connection when I pick up a newspaper or drive by a farmer’s field or buy something new that’s made in China.

I also get tired thinking about on fossil fuel addiction and not being able to do much about it. But there I was doing some personal research on it again last night. Like, did you know that there are 36.6 kilowatt hours of energy in a gallon of gas? Or that we can distill about 19 gallons of gas from a 42-gallon barrel of crude? Or that we go through over 1.5 billion (billion!) U.S. gallons of gasoline a day, worldwide?

But what has any of that got to do with Larry’s beets? Well, nothing as it turns out. And that nothing is notable, because my neighbours, Larry and his partner Leanne, grow their food the old fashioned way—without any gas engines or chemical fertilizers.

I’ve mentioned Larry and Leanne’s beets before. We’d invited them over for dinner, and when I told them I wanted to make borscht they offered some beets from their garden. I had some store-bought beets, too, and there was no comparison. The commercial beets were nearly tasteless while the home-grown ones almost took the roof of my mouth off with flavour. And they made a huge difference to the soup.

Larry’s beets came to mind because I was making another borscht yesterday. I had some big, beautiful, fresh-looking supermarket beets sitting in the fridge. But when I diced them up and tasted a piece I was disappointed. Again. They were almost tasteless. So I went into creative mode to make a great borscht, including adding the “secret” ingredient to liven it up: brown sugar.

Imagine having to add sugar to beet soup. Beets, or at least some types of beets, have been a source of sugar for millennia. It’s sadly ironic that my store-bought beets should be so sugar deficient.

But of course we both know that I wasn’t cooking up real beets. I was cooking up the tail end of a massive modern fossil fuel experiment. Today’s beets are grown on fields prepared by diesel tractors, enriched with fossil fuel-based nitrogen fertilizers, shipped on diesel trucks across the continent (or the world) and picked up from the high-tech, fossil-fuel heated supermarket by us in our gasoline powered cars.

That massive experiment was dubbed the Green Revolution and it got started just after the Second World War, which had advanced all that new fossil fuel-based technology.

According to Dale Allen Pfeiffer from his article, Eating Fossil Fuels, nearly 40 percent of earth’s land-based photosynthetic capacity has been appropriated by human beings, and that between 1950 and 1984 “world grain production increased by 250 percent.” He points out that this is an incredible increase in energy available for human consumption, and that the increase came directly through the wholesale use of fossil fuel in agriculture. He writes that by 1994 it took 400 gallons of fossil fuel a year to feed each American—a whopping 31 percent of it coming from fossil fuel-based fertilizers.

All this agricultural petro-chemistry definitely has side effects. On the positive side, we can produce more food more inexpensively and more food means more nutrition, which means generally better health and longer life spans. On the downside, with cheaper food we’re facing an epidemic of obesity and health issues. But that’s somewhat trivial compared to the environmental damage.

I won’t get into the obvious climate change and chemical pesticide issues, both of which have frightening implications for the future of life on the planet.

What caught my attention yesterday was the BBC story about wild boars dying on the Brittany coast beach in northern France. Apparently the boars died as a result of exposure to massive toxic algae blooms, similar to our red tides. As the algae washes up on the beach it rots, giving off lethal levels of toxic gas. Back in 2009 a horse and rider met a similar fate on the same beach. The rider passed out from the toxic gas but survived. His horse died. The cause? Environmentalists and government officials report that it was the result of nitrates in fertilizers running off the farm fields into the ocean.

If land-based animals are dying on the beach, one can only imagine the terror hiding under the ocean waves. But that’s another story.

The only good side of this story is we’re beginning to run out of cheap oil. The question becomes, what will we do instead? Do we stay on the same track and switch to coal and natural gas? Or do we recalibrate and return to a more local-regional agricultural economy?

Before deciding, maybe we should all make a pot of borscht and take Larry Lack’s beet taste test.

Squeezing life between the news feeds

2011-07-25T09:18:00.000-07:00

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I tuck the kids in every night. Nothing unusual in that. But a couple of nights ago I went into the bedroom found our youngest son quietly sobbing in the dark. I gave him a hug, then waited a bit before asking, “What is it?”

“I miss Gracie,” he said.

I didn't quite expect that. Our puppy Gracie has been gone for a couple of years now, neatly buried in the woods. That was one house move ago for us—and an eon ago to a boy, I’d expect.

But life is like that, continually looking forward but rarely looking back. It reminds me of the news feed on Facebook or the news feed from any news source. The ‘new’ news just keeps on coming, replacing the old. So what happens to the old stuff?

Who knows? And there’s a whole lot of old stuff out there, especially now on the Internet. According to one site I found, there are more than 250 million websites on the Internet, and we exchange over 100 trillion (yes, trillion) e-mail messages a year—at a rate of about 300 billion a day!

What that really means is the pressure of the “now” greatly overrides the rapidly deflating memories of the past.

This has proven to be a real boon to both newscasters and politicians. With so much of the public’s attention focused on the immediate present, the sins of the past can quickly disappear. A few weeks ago the public was curious, to say the least, about the manner of Osama bin Laden’s death. Today? Meh.

This goes for pretty much everything, from the flooding here in Charlotte County to what happened to NB Power after New Brunswickers kicked out the Liberals for wanting to sell the money-bleeding utility, and elected the Conservatives on the issue.

And the list of disappearing news nationally and internationally is staggering. Instant media phenomenon Julian Assange is all but forgotten. The Gabrielle Giffords’ assassination attempt is a distant memory (who was the shooter, again?).

By way of examples, here are the top stories from 2009. A U.S. major killed 13 people and injured 30 others in a shooting rampage at a Texas military base. A plane crashed in Buffalo, NY killing 49 people and one on the ground. An Air France jet disappeared over the Atlantic taking with it 228 passengers. North Korea threatened its southern neighbour with a military strike. A German teenager shot 15 people before killing himself. “Balloon boy” never left home in a runaway helium balloon. World leaders meet in Copenhagen for climate change agreement, which fails. A California man is accused of kidnapping an 11-year-old girl, and later investigated for murdering prostitutes. And a story you might remember, Barack Obama was elected as the 44th president of the United States. Those were just the big stories.

So with this constant tidal wave of news, how do we concentrate on the important things that need to be addressed, without experiencing some kind of media fatigue? By that I mean the singularly important things: like the global energy crisis, which will continue to intensify until we finally run out of fossil fuel.

Sure, we cover the symptoms, such as gas prices, or reports of the number of wounded or dead in America’s longest running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we seem incapable of addressing the larger issues, such as our addiction to a fossil fuel-powered economy, and the fact that the Indians and Chinese are just now ramping up their entry into the game.

And the simple facts are compelling. Already there are over 900 million people going hungry every night on planet Earth, while the world’s automobile fleet now exceeds that number by some 10 million according to one report I read. I don’t know about you, but I find something darkly sinister in those statistics.

As the onslaught of news increases, thoughtful discourse seems to be on the decline. We seem to have no public forums in which we can discuss issues such as fossil fuel depletion, climate change and world poverty. Instead, we have the polarizing of public debate into opposing, self-defeating ideologies—and faith-based defensive positions.

This, I think, is what happens to a species that loses its direct connection to its source of survival: the earth. And just as I begin to write this column, my kids run into the house to bring me back into that connection.

“Come outside and see this,” they say, and out we go to look. And there it is, the most impossibly small baby bird lying in the grass beside a fractured bit of eggshell. From the shell colour it looks to be a robin. We search for the nest in the nearby trees, but nothing. It must have been carried from the nest and dropped there by a predator.

So, what to do? What else could we do? We put the naked thing into a makeshift tissue-paper nest under a lamp on the buffet. The kids are hunting for worms, and to our surprise it’s taken a little food.

While I’m not overly optimistic, we’ll see how it does—and keep you posted in the upcoming news feeds.

Time to decouple the corporation from the state

2011-07-18T09:45:00.000-07:00

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The camera turned on the two girls sitting in the NASA lunar rover. Both of them flashed their instant smiles. The camera clicked twice and the smiles dropped as if they’d never existed.

And, photographic evidence to the contrary, they never had. The smiles were the professionally manufactured kind that politicians and celebrities are trained to use—eyes wide open, whitened teeth bared in a calm grin—and I marveled a bit at how these girls had learned this PR ‘secret’ so early in life.

I can only conclude that media awareness comes early to this generation. So it’s no wonder that so few of us are shocked by the news that Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, and perhaps his entire media chain, has been quasi-legally but unethically hacking private e-mails and phone calls for years.

Rather ironically—given the wild ride the tabloid media has given him—the original story was helped along by none other than Hugh Grant, way back in April. When his car had broke down on the motorway he was rescued by former News of the World photographer Paul McMullan—who’d already blown the whistle on the phone-hacking story. McMullan invited Grant to visit his pub any time, and so he did, taking along a hidden tape recorder. During the “interview” McMullan dished on UK Prime Minister David Cameron and News of the World chief Rebekah Wade, who regularly went horseback riding together before his winning election.

What makes this interesting is the importance of Murdoch and his empire to getting politicians elected—from Britain’s Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair to Cameron. You might call it an unholy alliance: the big media corporation and the state.

As we all know, five or six centuries ago our forebears had a similar unholy alliance: between the church and the state. Religious positions were purchased by nobles and the wealthy for their sons, a practice that continued until the time Martin Luther and the Reformation, when the roles of church and state finally began to separate—in an effort to curb corruption in both institutions.

Fast forward to today. I just stumbled across a reference to the innocuously named organization, ALEC. ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council, an insider lobby group aimed at deregulating State government in favour of free-market business, ostensibly to boost the bottom line. Just some right wing fringe group?

No. ALEC brings over 2000 legislative members including over 100 leading politicians together with representatives of 300 big corporations to develop and vote on new sample legislation, which is then introduced as real legislation in State legislatures across the U.S. Of the 1000 bills introduced by ALEC representatives annually, about 200 are actually passed into law.

What kind of laws? Well, they range from privatizing public education to minimizing consumers’ ability to sue drug companies to reducing corporate taxes to weakening labour laws. The kind of things that are great for corporations, but not necessarily so good for us.

But that only happens in America, right? Nope. Paul Martin’s Liberals got slaughtered because their connection to Jean Chrétien’s Quebec sponsorship scandal, which led to Jean Brault of Groupaction Marketing going to jail for 30 months and the federal bureaucrat in charge of the funds, Chuck Guité, being convicted on five counts of fraud.

And then there’s the mysterious Brian Mulroney Airbus scandal, the one where he was accused of taking $300,000 in bribes—while he was still an elected official—from Karlheinz Schrieber to steer Air Canada toward purchasing a fleet of Airbuses (which it did), and which he somehow dodged. Of course, he was duly outraged and indignant, and his lawyers ‘persuaded’ the federal government to give him a $2 million for damages. Hmm.

I’m not saying anything new here. We all know what’s going on. Corporate influence now greatly outweighs the individual voter’s influence. Whether it’s through the use of paid lobbyists to corporately funded think tanks, establishing personal power relationships with leading politicians or advancing their own candidates, corporate influence trumps open democracy.

And if I had to blame someone, it would be free marketer Milton Freidman—the guy who connected the words “capitalism” with “freedom.” A Nobel Prize winning economist, he taught at the University of Chicago for over 30 years and influenced almost everybody associated with politics and economics. Especially Ronald Reagan. Freidman’s big contribution to politics? Deregulation of business.

Well, we know how that went. Wall Street ran off with America’s investment savings and plunged the entire world into a recession as their leaders raked in multi-million dollar bonuses. In retrospect one wonders why anyone (such as his big fan Fed Chair Ben Bernanke) would want to canonize Milton as some kind of saint.

I, for one, think we’re ready for a second spiritual reformation, this time the separation of the corporation from the state. Frankly, I don’t quite know how it can be done. But there’s no doubt in my mind it will be done. Because, fake smiles all around, the alternative is simply this: fascism.

And the welding of corporatism and governance into a fascist state is a price we should all be unwilling to accept.

Have I just seen the end of America?

2011-07-11T05:51:00.000-07:00

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Getting ready to see the last space shuttle launch event must be lot like what a pregnant woman feels going into labour; a lot of agony for a few seconds of fun. And fun it was, including the agony, I guess.

For our part going to see the last shuttle launch was a bit of a whim. Our oldest boy loves astronomy and all things space-related, so that was enough of an excuse. So we packed up into the van for the 30-plus-hour drive to Cape Canaveral.

Along the way we got to see what’s left of America after the great financial crash of 2008. The all-night radio was full of news on the jobless rate in the U.S., now at something like 9.1 percent, and the stalled growth in hiring, sputtering along at only 18,000 new jobs last month. The eeriest part of this was the deserted freeways in northern New England on July 4th. Obviously, vacationers were not travelling in droves to spend their money. When we stopped in Massachusetts at a pretty—and normally very busy—historic inn it wasn’t even half full.

The great thing about this was the customer service. The desk clerks and waitresses treated us royally. By the time we got to New York City and Long Island the effect had worn off. A late night gas fill-up in a seedy southern neighbourhood in Queens was, well, a bit scary. Since my credit card didn’t have a zip code attached, I had to go inside and deal with the locals: a couple of toughs in sleeveless T-shirts and an even tougher clerk, an unshaven Middle Easterner with bad skin in a hoodie.

This was on the way back from maybe the best (or second best) beach in North America near the tony town of Westhampton Beach. Once you find the beach the homes lining the waterfront are wonderful, all architecturally designed and strategically placed facing the sunset on large lots. And the surf crashes up mist in the fading sunlight along a sandy beach that must stretch along 10 miles of coast. Very, very nice.

Back in the van, Barack Obama was on the radio trying to cut a deal with the leaders of Congress and the Senate to get some kind of agreement on America’s budget that would cut the national debt by $4 trillion in a decade. And time is not on his side, or I should say, America’s side, as the country is poised to default on its national debt in two weeks if there’s no deal on the table.

That’s rather bleak news. The big choices are either cutting social services such as Medicare, or raising taxes. But I had to wonder, to whom does America owe this money? To the big banks they just bailed out? Or to investors in the bond market? Turns out they owe the money to pretty much everyone, including some of their own departments and, of course, the Chinese.

And Obama has a big job on his hands. Since Jimmy Carter, who brought the debt down to its lowest levels in a century and Clinton who tried, the Republicans who preceded him: Reagan, Bush I and Bush II have spent the country into a debt of coma-inducing proportions. Which is odd, considering that these arch-conservatives all achieved power by professing to have some understanding of finance. Well, I guess.

Another item in the American news was obesity. Apparently it’s still growing. And, yes, we’ve seen a lot of evidence of it as we’ve travelled south. Given the dire financial straits in the U.S. one would think that people would be eating less, not more. But fat doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. When times are tough the poor tend to eat more cheap carbohydrates, and that means building more fat. So even when they’re gaining they’re losing.

And then there’s TV. I always go into television shock on road trips, but this one was particularly bad. Every news network was obsessed with the “tot mom” acquittal. The jury found Casey Anthony not guilty of murdering her young daughter. In between news bites I watched ads for reverse mortgages, memory foam mattresses and stair climbing machines, all clear signs of an aging America, which was also on the news.

And even the Mexicans seem to be less interested in illegally crossing the U.S. border to find jobs. Things may actually be looking better for them at home. I guess that’s a real sign of the times.

But is this the end of America, I mean the end of financial dominance, the end of social dominance, the end of technical dominance in space? I don’t know.

I noticed that the natives were friendly as we passed through the Carolinas and Georgia—just before we entered the torrential rains of east coast Florida. The weather got so bad that the van’s electronics crapped out from all the water. The alternator probably got doused. But after a half-hour of waiting in the suffocating, humid heat inside the van for the engine bits to dry out, the dashboard warning light went out and we were on our way—to find a hotel.

We hadn’t booked ahead and apparently neither had a lot of others. We were cruising to find a hotel room along with literally another million people. We managed to find a great room an hour away in Orlando (of Disney World fame), which always seems to have tourist capacity in the summer.

Liftoff and aftermath

We got up at 6:00 a.m. to grab a spot on the beach to watch the takeoff of Atlantis. After some hunting we managed to find a good spot. But after spreading out the blanket and pillows, we were immediately accosted by some guy who’d got there, along with about 10,000 others, before us. He wanted to set up a table for breakfast in the spot we’d occupied. He then threatened, gently, to run us into the ocean with his SUV. And all of this without telling us what he wanted, which was for us to move.

Turns out he did us a favour. We found a much better spot on the beach with more interesting wildlife, like the family of rednecks with their kids with shaved blond Mohawks and a huge stork that started stalking us and seemed all set to carry off our baby. There were the shirtless tattooed guys drinking beer and the Muslim-American families, men in flowered shorts and thong sandals, women in full traditional dress, wrapped head to toe in black cloth.

After all of that the launch seemed like a bit of a letdown. Tiny Atlantis was 6 miles away and looked like a distant, elongated burning ball of gasoline on the horizon, and was up and into the clouds in a matter of seconds. And when it was over the crowd, which up until then had seemed kind of surly and self-absorbed, cheered and clapped half-heartedly for a minute or so, and began leaving, clogging up the dual highway. The one-hour drive back to Orlando took three. And that was it.

It was all over. Back in the hotel lobby I watched a newly grey-haired Barack Obama addressing his country, telling them there was still no deal on the budget, and a few minutes later a closeup shot of Atlantis lifting off, followed by a rather dismal CNN documentary on the future of the American space mission.

Evidently, it’s not much of a mission. Florida’s Space Coast will lose about 9,000 jobs. There are plans to develop a new vehicle by 2016, maybe. But until then American astronauts will be visiting the international space station on Russian Soyuz rockets at something like $62 million a seat. And the real hope for American space travel is the private sector, as in, companies building rockets and charging people, including the government, to send stuff up in space. It all sounds pretty sloppy and unfocused.

But I guess it’s to be expected. The real game is back here on earth. By now we all know that there’s nothing much to see in near space. For all practical purposes we’re alone on our little rock. So the investment focus is not on space but on earth: fighting resource wars around the globe, working to keep the U.S. military funded and operational.

OK. But have we just witnessed the end of America? Well, we’ve just been to the far end of America—its southern coast—and seen the decline of its dominance in space. As for the rest of the country, it’s certainly different place. Yes, there are more new cars than ever. And there are more self-centred Americans than ever. But I get the sense that there’s a lack of American focus, a drifting sense of hopelessness.

The best Americans seem to be able to do now is to settle into two angry camps, the left versus the right. Even addressing the rift between the rich and the poor seems too daunting, now, for this America, in the first stages of visible decline.

And how could it be anything other than decline given the steady corporately-fed American diet of junk food, junk media and junk consumerism? Yet, given all this commercial self-indulgence, one might think that Americans are undisciplined. But nothing could be further from the truth. Statisticians faithfully point out that Americans work longer hours and are more productive than, say, their European counterparts. Americans are an extremely disciplined people—who happen to be very good at exporting their corporate and cultural models to the rest of the world. So the reasons for America’s decline are more complex than simply blaming overconsumption.

America was built on the vision of creating a new society on the frontier. But the frontier, now including space, has disappeared, so Americans are facing the prospect of reinventing their own mythology as they become a mature culture. And therein lies the difficulty. Where can America turn for new models?

A look at past empires could provide some guidance. England today has a culture and an economy (based largely on services and finance) that closely resembles the new American direction. Today, post-empire Europe has a very different approach to the future, one that includes technical excellence, ecological concern and energy security as fundamental targets for the future.

The most significant challenge to America will be re-envisioning its role in the world, not as the global leader, but as a cooperative global participant in the world community. The end of the shuttle program may just be the beginning of that process.

Failing that, the country with the frontier myth desperately needs to discover its next frontier.

Life is a compromise—by design

2011-07-04T09:14:00.000-07:00

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’Tis the season. Well, it’s a little past the season, but even so, I’ve been looking at sailboats again. And the question is: do I want to go for a big boat in the off-chance that we’ll do a long coastal trip, or do I want a small, easy to maintain daysailer that’s also easy on the pocketbook?

The choice of used sailboats on the Internet is staggering. And unless you have some criteria for choosing a boat, the whole shopping thing just gets completely confusing. For example, the first choice you have to make is whether you want a multi-hull boat or a monohull. If you go with the multi-hull—like a catamaran—you can expect to pay about twice as much as you would for single-hulled vessel of roughly the same size.

I like the idea of a catamaran. The main cabin sits on top of the hulls, which means your living room is much bigger and has lots of windows, so it’s a lot brighter, especially on long voyages. Cats don’t tip much in the wind, either. And that means kids and sailing newbies like the experience a whole lot more. And then there’s all that extra room below-decks in those two hulls, which usually accommodates four bedrooms and two bathrooms, plus lots of storage. Plus cats are often more than twice as fast under sail as their single-hulled cousins.

The downside? Well, I mentioned expense. Two hulls mean more materials and more cost to build, and there’s also the business of having two motors, one for each hull, adding to the cost. And then there’s the bad weather issue. Although there’s a lot of debate, catamarans have a reputation for flipping over in big storms—and staying upside down, unlike monohulls that tend to roll over and pop back upright with their deep heavy keels acting as counterweights. So a lot of folks consider monohulls to be safer.

Most people pick single-hulled vessels for two reasons. There are lots more of them, and they’re less expensive. So, if that’s the way to go, what’s the difference between a small boat and a big one besides the obvious cost-per-foot? Well, although big boats offer lots of room and amenities, they’re a much bigger commitment in terms of maintenance, portability and storage. Big boats are harder to trailer and get in and out of the water than small boats. So little boats are just a whole lot easier for the do-it-yourselfer.

And then there are the differences in design. Do you want a racing boat or a cruiser? Do you want to go off-shore in the deep scary water or mostly use it as a sunny day, fair weather friend? Do you want to sleep on the boat, party with the family or just sail it alone (leaving the wife and kids at home because they’re bored on board or simply hate the whole seasick experience)? There’s a boat design to suit just about any set of wants and needs you could imagine.

Which also means that there’s no boat that has everything rolled into one design. So every boat is a compromise. You’ve got to trade off some features to get the ones you want. Want a super-safe ocean-going boat? Well, it’ll need a heavy keel and solid construction so it likely won’t be that fast. Want a super fast boat? With its lightweight construction you can bet it won’t be the safest boat in a heavy gale.

I like this sailboat design analogy because it’s a lot like life. Life is all about compromise. If you want to live on a farm for example, you don’t have all the social amenities of the big city. If you live in a small town you don’t have nearly as many options as you would in a big city. And if you live in the city you have to keep all of your stuff locked up and you have less access to nature.

All of which leads me to consider the compromises we make to live here versus the benefits. One of the compromises in living in a pretty seaside town is dealing with its economy, which is based on tourism—since the traditional fishery has all but vanished. But that means I have to share my pretty town with 100,000 strangers every summer—including the few thousand bikers who’ll roar into town on their noisy contraptions next week to tickle the inner biker child of a few of local attraction managers and retailers.

But perhaps I’m minimizing the real compromises. Living in Charlotte County is fraught with compromises, whether one was born here or not. The limited range of opportunities can sometimes create a ‘musical chairs’ effect where people will do almost anything to compete for that one remaining opening. And then there are the constraints that are multi-generational—the “have” families on one side and the “have-nots” on the other.

Simply put, unlike the widely diverse monohull sailboat market, there isn’t a lot of choice out here. All in all, it’s a great place to be a government worker, healthcare provider or a teacher—or the inheritor of the family business.

But for those of you—especially young people—whose designs don’t quite fit here, there’s big old ocean of opportunity waiting for you out there. And you can always come back for a visit (despite the motorcycles I hear it’s a pretty good place for a vacation).

The choices and compromises may be more important than you think.

Black archetypes of the Canadian psyche

2011-06-27T11:56:00.000-07:00

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There it was—on Yahoo News last week. Seventy-year-old Barbara Amiel fainted into her courtroom chair when she heard the verdict: her beloved Conrad would be going back to jail for another year. Well, you might say,’ boo-hoo’ for the tiny rich girl in the Manolo Blahnik pumps.

But of course Lord and Lady Black of Crossharbour are not like the rest of us. I looked out my kitchen window this morning and contrasted what I was seeing—the unburned pile of brush in the fire-pit in the backyard, the patch of yellow grass where the tent sat too long, the kids’ stray basketball—with what they must have experienced: servants delivering The Times on trays, coffee from a silver service, that sort of thing, and good for them.

Conrad Black started from a privileged position. He attended Canada’s prestigious Upper Canada College from which he was expelled for selling stolen exams, entered Trinity College School, managing to get himself expelled again, this time for insubordination. Later, he flunked out of the Osgoode Hall law program, finally getting his law degree from Université Laval in Montreal and a Masters in history from McGill. It goes without saying that, unlike most of us, young Conrad got more than his share of chances and good fortune.

Black inherited a portion of that good fortune from his father. The holdings included Ravelston Corporation with interests in the Argus Corporation, which controlled large stakes in mining, pulp and paper, communications, groceries and manufacturing. Black’s first brush with professional controversy came when he took control Ravelston and Argus amid allegations that he’d taken advantage of the aging widows of the recently deceased majority shareholders.

Barbara came from more pedestrian circumstances. She was born into a Jewish family in Watford, Herts., England, where her parents divorced when she was eight. She and her mom migrated to Hamilton, Ontario and lived a modest, financially-challenged existence, and by her late teens was living on her own. She had three things going for her: her looks, her brains and her ambition.

By the time she was 37 she’d been married three times (the fourth and fifth were yet to come) and was a feature columnist for Maclean’s magazine, transforming herself from school-girl communist to right wing conservative commentator.

Around 1990, Barbara and Conrad became an item. It was rebellious-situationally-ethical-avaricious-media-tycoon meets beautiful-arrogant-ambitious-media-socialite. Perhaps a more perfectly matched pairing couldn’t have been forged in hell.

You get the picture. Especially the one of Lord and Lady Black arriving at a ball in England dressed as wicked Cardinal Richelieu and the excessive Marie Antoinette. Much has been made of the irony of the image, especially after Amiel’s essay comparing herself to the unfortunate Marie in Maclean’s in 2006. But, really, is that the whole story…?

Meanwhile, Canada was changing. While Conrad launched the famously conservative National Post the country had politically moved from Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives of the 1980s to the centrist Chrétien Liberal regime of the 1990s, the government that would refuse to give Conrad dual citizenship if he accepted the royal peerage in Britain. The couple chose to leave, revoking Canadian citizenship.

But why did this couple turn out this way? Better yet, does it really matter, and why should we care? And what does this couple tell us about the Canadian psyche?

Maybe the most telling bit of information comes from biographer, George Toombs, who wrote, “he was born into a very large family of athletic, handsome people. He wasn't particularly athletic or handsome like they were, so he developed a different skill—wordplay, which he practised a lot with his father.”

It’s no stretch to see Black’s rebellion and later towering arrogance as a cover-up for this childhood sense of inferiority, in the same way that Amiel’s excessive ambition became the mask for her own humble beginnings.

Ironically (and that word seems to fit the Blacks' story like a glove), both of these psychologically insecure Canadian media intellectuals are now shunned in the two countries from which they sought the greatest recognition—the United States and England. Conrad will never be allowed back into the U.S. once his prison term has been served, and neither of the Blacks is likely to be received back into British high society.

No matter how one slices it, these striving Canadians were just not good enough. And few of us ever seem to be. Even the most famous of Canadians seem to fall back to second string, from Neil Young to Alanis Morisette to the present rulers of the rumoured-to-be-crumbling RIM-Blackberry empire, James Ballsillie and Mike Lazaridis, who were knocked off the world billionaires list just this month as Apple Inc. threatens to supercede them in the high-end cell phone market.

So what does this say about us as Canadians, or about us as Maritimers? Simply that we’ve still not overcome our inferiority complex when faced with our more powerful neighbours. And how might we get over that? I dunno. But I think the Newfies are leading the way, just as the Irish have done in the U.K.

And it’s definitely mentally healthier to be a great Newfie or Irishman than a second-rate American or Brit. But if you don’t believe me you’ll just have to ask Rick Mercer or Pierce Brosnan…

Your parking space in paradise awaits

2011-06-20T08:35:00.000-07:00

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Back in Northern Ontario they call them “camps.” Out here they’re “cottages” and we’ve been looking for one somewhere on or near a real beach—which isn’t that easy to find in southern New Brunswick.

We went to look at one of the candidates yesterday; call it a Father’s Day retreat. After a long drive we found the place, which was next to a public wharf and a picturesque steel-clad warehouse.

The cottage looked fine in the online photos, but something had been lost in translation. Since taking the pictures the owner had gutted an old 1860s section and started “modernizing” it. The wiring panel was a work in progress, the bathroom was an empty box and the chimney of the historic fireplace (once a lovely, now missing its mantle) had been hacked off and capped in the attic, rendering the entire business inoperable. The whole house smelled damp, and the attached garage, which could have been a real bonus had mold issues. Still, as the real estate guys say in hypnotic client-speak, it has potential…

There must be some kind of universal recessive gene that sucks us into wanting cottages or camping out, tenting, RV-ing, living on sailboats and all the rest of the crazy summer places we crave. But what are we after, really?

Because once we escape the intoxicating thrall of summer, life resumes an arguably saner approach to housing. We go back to the big box that cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars—and tens of thousands of dollars more to decorate—taking for granted all the amenities: the soft beds, central heating, hot water rain-showers, high-speed internet, as if we’ve returned to a birthright, our true reality.

But I have to wonder which is more real: the complex systems and investments we call “home,” or that shabby summer camp in the woods or down on the waterfront? I don’t know.

I do know that the thing I love about a camp is dirt. Back in the “real” house dirt is the enemy. At camp dirt is just another childhood friend that drifts in with the other kids, no reaction required. Beach sand on the floor is one of the romantic attractions of camp—as much as sand between your toes.

Camp means not having to keep things clean, or even staying particularly organized. At camp, you don’t want to worry about paying bills or keeping the cell phone charged or scrambling to keep your coworkers happy back at the office. Camp offers a different kind of work, fun work: cutting firewood or patching up a leak in the roof, mowing the lawn, staining the deck, that sort of thing. And if you don’t get it done today, there’s always tomorrow.

And a few of the lucky ones among us still live as if they’re at camp all year long. From the outside these people might appear to be too lazy or too affluent or too poor, depending on their financial circumstances. The rest of us also tend to judge these people a bit harshly. “What’s wrong with them? Why aren’t they living like the rest of us?” are the unspoken questions. Or we’re inclined to attach labels like, “hippie” or “redneck” or “rich bitch.”

The reason we attach these judgments and labels is simple. We can’t join them because the best places to camp are also the places with the fewest jobs. Sure, we’re attracted to unspoiled places for time off or time out. And we’re attracted to forests and green fields and clear skies and the sound of the waves pounding on the shore. But we’re no longer able survive in these places.

There are two reasons, I think. The first is the great rural-urban migration from a land-based agrarian life to an industrial, post-industrial life—which has moved most of the jobs into the cities. Enough said. The second is the plain fact that we’re running out of resources, and ironically, even places to camp.

Due to the expense and scarcity of good campsites, camping has become a time-shared activity. We rent an RV space for a night, or someone else’s cottage for a week, or even take a sailing cruise for a month. Instead of tying up resources in single ownership, we’ve managed to “stack” ownership, renting spaces in paradise.

But the hidden question remains: if closer-to-nature living is what the inner soul craves, how could more of us get to live that kind of life on a year-round basis?

For the first time in modern history, we have some of the tools. Many of us can work remotely, in an office-less home environment. It becomes a “have laptop, will travel” proposition. And we can see that many professionals and academics spend an inordinate amount of time in hotel rooms and airports doing just that, while their offices sit empty.

But frenetic travel is no substitute for a peaceful residence in a natural setting. It’s one of the human mysteries. We’re restless, yet we crave peace.

Maybe, to paraphrase the old song, we’ll just have to run, run, run until our daddy takes our T-Birds away—that is, run out of cheap gas—before we can all settle down and begin to redesign our lives around nature. Meanwhile, we’ll keep driving around, looking for paradise.

Quietly militarizing our energy policy?

2011-06-13T11:36:00.000-07:00

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I wondered what was going on in the province lately so I checked out CBC News.

Apparently two dumb kids broke out of the Dalhousie jail and got caught in a high speed chase in Fredericton . A 51-year-old Moncton perv was busted by the RCMP for having 5 million images of child porn on his computer. Our good premier, David Alward, refused to lay off cuts to education even though highway construction costs are coming in millions of dollars under budget. Tourism was down on Grand Manan because the ferry is still out of commission. A woman died in a motorcycle crash. Another woman was stranded on the Confederation Bridge. Saint John city officials are forcing some guy to take down the giant three-storey pirate ship he hammered together in his back yard. And Canada Post is still doing its cross-country rotating strikes. Just another happy week here on the East Coast.

Bad as some of this is, none of it affects me much. But I could see that all these news items had something in common. Every one of them had something to with transportation and communications.

To Canada, with its vast geography, the moving of goods, services and information is pretty much fundamental to the operation of a modern economy. Transportation and communications are huge, and it’s no surprise that they affect every aspect of our lives—including our politics, and especially our energy policies.

Speaking of policies, I caught a bit of news last week about Stephen Harper’s post-election approach to the future. He was telling the audience that Canada had to shoulder a larger role on the world stage. It seems it’s no longer Canada’s mission to get along with everyone else’s agenda or to “please every dictator with a vote at the United Nations.” What does that really mean?

I also caught another bit on Harper, this one in an interview with Tom Flanagan, a loyal Harper adviser and University of Calgary prof. who identified the core Conservative strategy for success. It’s incremental change. Which means, instead of provoking public reaction to sweeping dramatic change, the Conservatives are committed to making small, incremental changes over time to remake our country—with the minimum of public backlash possible. Smart.

But just how does all that translate to transportation and communications?

It has everything to do with Canada’s changing role in the world. But what is that role? Well, the biggest changes happening in the world have to do with energy and resource shortages. And, unlike most of the world, including our friends to the south, Canada has an abundance of those resources.

And remember those “dictators” with votes at the UN that Harper mentions? Coincidentally, they also have key resources, including an abundance of oil. These dictators include the leaders of oil-rich Libya, Chad, Sudan, Equatorial Guinea, Congo, and extend to larger states such as Iran.

Dealing with, and moderating the behaviour of, resource-rich “dictator” states would very likely require the increased commitment of our military. If we take Mr. Harper at his word—and connect this with Canada’s increasing alignment with U.S. foreign policy—it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to picture Canada’s growing role in supporting American armed forces.

To my mind, this is a disturbing direction. What this tells us is that Canadian politicians are now more enchanted with power than with peacemaking. And Harper has already demonstrated a mastery of incrementally securing and maintaining power.

There’s a certain tunnel vision to this approach. Yes, the acquisition of power is necessary to any government. But the continual pursuit of power rather than addressing other priorities becomes a dangerous disease. But what’s the actual end game for the power play?

To restate the obvious, it’s oil. Harper remains loyal to his early connections to Alberta’s oil industry. He’s staunchly committed to the ongoing mining of the western oil sands and accessing Arctic oil reserves. On the other hand, he’s slow to endorse and commit Canada to any significant world climate change policy, instead content to follow whatever the U.S. chooses to do.

Canada, with its geographic expanses, faces greater transportation and communications challenges than most countries. Keeping our trans-com sector operating requires huge inputs of energy to service a small and widely scattered population.

In reality, we Canadians should be weaning ourselves from our own addiction to fossil fuels. But with an abundant supply, that’s a difficult proposition. We’re just not that motivated. And besides, there are a lot more profits and jobs to be had by doing business as usual.

If we were a truly conservative country, we’d begin the process of conserving our non-renewable natural resources for the future, and begin investing heavily in new technological innovation rather than arming up to dominate foreign countries to “secure” their resources for ourselves and our American neighbours, wouldn’t you think?

But strangely, given the importance of the transition to alternative sources, we hear precious little about the politics of this in the news—ever. Shouldn’t we be concerned about this, just a little?

Mick Jagger, time is on your side, but why?

2011-06-05T22:15:00.000-07:00

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Way back in 1964 before about a half of the people now living on the planet were born, The Rolling Stones released their first top ten hit in the U.S., “Time Is On My Side.” Was time really on their side?

Well, actually, yes it was—and is. Mick Jagger and his band-mates are now turning 70, just like Bob Dylan did last week and Paul McCartney of The Beatles, who’ll hit that milestone next year. For these guys and most of their generation, time definitely was on their side.

They were born at the start of the Second World War and they were part of a small cohort compared to the Baby Boomers, who would appear a half a generation later. And that made all the difference. Their small generation was able to exploit the economic boom following the war and the huge market of younger preteens hungry for new entertainment.

This wasn’t an isolated phenomenon. Another magic period in the mid-19th Century around the time American Civil War, produced some of the wealthiest and most influential people the world has ever seen. These included Andrew Carnagie (b. 1835), John D. Rockefeller (b. 1839), William Van Horne (b. 1843), Andrew Mellon (b. 1855) and Henry Ford (b. 1863). Why them?

The Civil War was the world’s first industrialized war. For the first time steam engines took the place of horses and sails, bringing a powerful new dimension to the practice of war. The telegraph, mass-produced weapons, armoured steamships and submarines made their first appearance. As invention became the mother of necessity, the ones with the best technologies—in this case the industrialized north—won the war.

The event laid the groundwork for a new American industrial revolution, and the new industrialists of the late 1800s, by accident of birth and by inclination, rose rapidly in this hothouse environment. Driving the revolution were fossil fuels, first wood and coal, and with the first successful drilling for oil in Pennsylvania in 1859—which was soon followed by Rockefeller’s formation of Standard Oil and the start of his billion dollar empire.

Three things made this phenomenal success possible: location, opportunity and timing—which, as they say, is everything. And the rest of the billionaire gang—from Carnagie to Ford—was in on the action. The new industrial machines ran on oil and steel, and so did the fortunes they produced.

Lately I’ve been taking this business of timing a lot more personally. We just took a trip to visit my parents. My mother has been on dialysis for several years and my father is now in his late 80s. Both of them are looking at the inevitable end, and preparing for it. There were many fond looks backward at things done and things regrettably missed. We talked about dances and camping trips as we wandered through the many things they’ve collected including a little Boler trailer where my dad goes to play solitaire and a big old Lowery electric organ stashed in his garage that he and I and my son played, loudly and wildly, for an hour or so.

My dad and I talked about the timing of his life. And I wondered what kind of future my kids are facing, and what kind of happy bounce from timing they’ll get.

There will always be opportunities, of course, even if times are tough. As we run out of fossil fuel and natural resources the naturally resourceful among us will find new ways of developing and providing the alternatives. And there are also the openings that we can’t foresee—like the rise of new trends like social networking was—that that will reshape the future for kids with great timing and proximity to the action.

But if I could actually predict which of these trends would take off, would I guide my kids toward them? I’d like to say “probably not.” Ah, but that’s not what ‘good’ parents do. Parents are pretty utilitarian when it comes to their kids’ futures. They work hard to make sure their kids get the best credentials, form the best social connections and aim for the most prestigious and secure careers.

I’m not sure that this utilitarian approach is actually the best way to go. Why not? Well, call it the Mick Jagger effect. I don’t think that Mick’s parents actually steered him toward his career. In fact, young Mick was predestined to follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps—as a teacher. But his boyhood love of singing, the church choir and rhythm and blues on BBC Radio—added to the serendipity of timing and geography—led to him to his classmate Keith Richards and rock and roll history.

As I look back at my parents’ lives it’s obvious that they never “made it big.” Perhaps it was bad timing or an unlucky location. But really that had nothing to do with it. They made a choice—and time was on their side. They wanted a family, to build a home, to give their kids the opportunities that they didn’t have.

And in that they were supremely successful, and their timing was ideal. All I can say is, “may all our children do so well.”

The energy you put in is the energy you get out

2011-05-30T20:55:00.000-07:00

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You don’t get it. Damn, I don’t really get it; none of us gets it. But more on that later.

We were on a road trip last week and during one of those long dark stretches in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep but me, I tuned in to a radio episode of ‘Living on Earth.’ The thing that caught my attention was the phrase “the [US] military is the biggest consumer of oil in the country…” and it wants to get off foreign oil.

To help facilitate that, there’s a line in a bill presently before the House of Representatives that would allow the US Department of Defense to purchase any amount of alternative fuel for the armed forces—no matter what its effect on the environment.

Apparently the magic bullet is something called “liquid coal,” a fossil fuel replacement for oil, diesel and gasoline. And the US military target is to have fully 50 percent of its fuel supplied by alternatives by the year 2020 (which is only nine years away). That’s a rapid transition. So why the rush?

Checking out a dude named Albert A. Bartlett, a retired physics prof. from the University of Colorado, might help. He has a great little presentation you can find on YouTube about exponential growth and what that means for the future of our oil and coal reserves. He looks at the existing data on the remaining supplies of fossil fuels and, using simple exponential math, shows that the world is going to run out of oil more or less completely within 40 years, and if we turn to coal we’ll burn through that in just 95 years.

So getting back to the US military, I think they ‘get it’—as their desire to switch to alternatives clearly shows. And they also get the urgency. In order to “protect” the world’s remaining oil supplies, the US armed forces, and in particular the Navy need to have a secure source of alternative fuel to keep the war machine going. And that means converting the abundant reserves of West Virginia and Montana coal to liquid fuel as soon as possible.

This is not new technology. The Germans started converting solid coal to liquid fuel in the 1920s and completely depended on the technology during the Second World War when conventional oil supplies were unavailable.

And now the same coal conversion is about to be used by the United States, which peaked its domestic oil production in the early 1970s and has experiencing declining national oil reserves ever since. In short, the US is almost out of gas and is almost entirely dependent on foreign resources to keep its military and its economy running—unless it switches to alternatives, big time, soon.

If I were going to trust anyone about oil availability, security and the future of gasoline, I guess I’d have to trust the US military.

Coincidentally, I noticed a funny thing as we drove across the Northern Ontario wilderness. All those huge steel and fiberglass satellite dishes have disappeared—and a lot of them have been replaced by solar panels. I don’t just mean a few little panels on the occasional roof; I mean big 20- and 30-foot panels standing in arrays in fields.

Another thing I caught—on the radio again—was a news report about a new wind farm being planned for a mountain range along the northern shores of Lake Superior. And it looks as if this project might actually happen. Some paradigm has obviously shifted in the wilderness. People on the frontier are waking up to the new post-fossil fuel reality and are beginning to do something about it.

But here’s what I don’t get—hell, what we all don’t get. It’s the actual amount of energy we’ll have to “find” to replace fossil fuel. I’ve written about this before. But as I drove through the night I thought about it again. Like, how much energy is there in a gallon of gas? (Sorry metric folks, this is easier in Imperial.)

A standard SUV gets about 25 miles per gallon, tops. But what does that mean? What it means is that the one gallon of gas can move a 4000 lb. piece of machinery 25 miles in less than half an hour.

In human terms that’s the same as moving 20 big men (200-lb. men) 25 miles. Now, if those big guys walked at 2.5 miles per hour, it would take them 10 hours to get as far down the road as that one gallon of gas. That’s a staggering (20 x 200 x 10 =) 40,000 multiplier.

In terms of the human lifespan, if we only used one gallon of gas a day and lived until we were 80, we would have extended our time on the planet to (80 x 365 x 40,000 =) 1.168 billion years—each. Now, wrap your head around that. Really. And what does that mean as the world approaches 7 billion people and the developing world is rapidly adopting our fossil-fuelled lifestyle…? Talk about exponential impact.

But reconsider, just so you’ll get it for real. You’re living a life that, in terms of the energy at your disposal, would only be possible to your primitive ancestor if he or she lived to be more than a billion years old! Do we get it yet? (I’m not sure anyone could get the enormity of that.)

Now, do you think our current, cautious government “energy policies” are up to replacing that kind of energy deficit as we run out of gas? Care to bet your grandkid’s future on that, Minister Leonard*?

*Craig Leonard is the New Brunswick Conservative Minister of Energy.

An Astonishing Mind: forever Jung

2011-05-26T12:59:00.000-07:00

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When it comes to religion, everyone has some kind of position. In the modern context both God and religion are dead, though the devoutly religious among us may deny it. Secular humanism has replaced religion as the moral ground for our actions, with science, reason and logic providing the framework for the understanding and application of our morality. Yet, with all the intellectual tools available to modern man, morality seems more than ever to be some kind of chimera, shifting and reshaping on a situational basis and managed by those in a position of advantage. In other words, our morality, like history, is being shaped by the winners.

The realization that morality has fallen into an instrumental, utilitarian philosophical box and meted out at the whim of a power elite in the form of justice and human rights based on their current economic and social paradigms immediately brings to mind Jung, and his study of the dark side of human nature, what he called “the shadow.” In all cases, the shadow leads back to our understanding of god. Jung worked through his own view of the nature of man and god by observing his patients and their presentation of archetypical behaviour, and his study of alchemy and mandalas—all connections to ancient symbolism relating to the origins of—and the need for—a personal god, that is some force that is “extra-mundane” or above worldly influence and control. This may seem at odds with the current scientific or philosophic mindset. But before forming a judgment, let’s look at what Jung says.

“Modern psychological development leads to a much better understanding as to what man really consists of. The gods at first lived in superhuman power and beauty on the top of snow-clad mountains or in the darkness of caves, woods and seas. Later on they grew together into one god, and then that god became man. But in our day even the God-man seems to have descended from his throne and to be dissolving himself into the common man. That is probably why his seat is empty. Instead, the common man suffers from a hybris [hubris] of consciousness that borders on the pathological. This psychic condition in the individual corresponds by and large to the hypertrophy and totalitarian pretentions of the idealized State. In the same way that the State has caught the individual, the individual imagines that he has caught the psyche and holds her in the palm of his hand. He is even making a science of her in the absurd supposition that the intellect, which is but a part and function of the psyche, is sufficient to comprehend the much greater whole.”

Jung makes the observation that science is simply an offshoot of our consciousness, the tip of the iceberg of human psychic reality. In recognizing that, unlike the narrow confines of consciousness, the psyche is far larger, Jung identifies the psyche as archaic and primordial, an ancient, universal mind that encompasses all of our evolutionary developments and contains, along with the rational, the Great Terror and darkness that permeates the collective unconscious of all life. He explains:

“In reality, the psyche is the mother and the maker, the subject and even the possibility of consciousness itself. It reaches so far beyond the boundaries of consciousness that the latter could easily be compared to an island in the ocean. Whereas the island is small and narrow, the ocean is immensely wide and deep and contains a life infinitely surpassing, in kind and degree, anything known on the island—so that if it is a question of space it does not matter if the gods are “inside” or “outside.” It might be objected that there is no proof that consciousness is nothing more than an island in the ocean. Certainly it is impossible to prove this, since the known range of consciousness is confronted with the unknown extension of the unconscious, of which we only know that it exists and by the very fact of its existence exerts a limiting influence on consciousness and its freedom. Wherever unconsciousness reigns, there is bondage and possession.”

What Jung is telling us here, is that our consciousness is bounded and contained by the vast, unknowable unconscious, holding us captive within something we don’t understand or comprehend. He goes on…

“The immensity of the ocean is simply a comparison; it expresses in allegorical form the capacity of the unconscious to limit and threaten consciousness. Empirical psychology loved, until recently, to explain the “unconscious” as mere absence of consciousness—the term indicates as much—just as shadow is an absence of light. Today accurate observation of unconscious processes has recognized, with all other ages before us, that the unconscious possesses a creative autonomy such as a mere shadow could never be endowed with.”

So Jung sees the unconscious as a creative ocean and identifies with Carus, von Hartman, Schopenhauer and others who have equated the unconscious with the world-creating principle, in Jung’s words as “the mysterious agent personified as the gods.” God, then, is the personification of the mysterious world creation force. Jung explains:

“It suits our hypertrophied and hybristic modern consciousness not to be mindful of the dangerous autonomy of the unconscious and to treat it negatively as the absence of consciousness. The hypothesis of invisible gods or daemons would be, psychologically, a far more appropriate formulation, even though it would be an anthropomorphic projection.”

In other words, Jung is simply saying that having a god is a healthier psychological proposition than not having a god. But obviously there’s still that modern scientific problem…

“But since the development of consciousness requires the withdrawal of all projections we can lay our hands on, it is not possible to maintain any non-psychological doctrine about the gods. It the historical process of world despiritualization continues hitherto, then everything of a divine of daemonic character outside us must return to the psyche, to the inside of the unknown man, whence it apparently originated.”

So has Jung merely brought us full circle? Not really.

“The materialistic error was probably unavoidable at first. Since the throne of God could not be discovered among the galactic systems, the inference was that God had never existed. The second unavoidable error was psychologism: if God is anything, he must be an illusion derived from certain motives—from will to power, for instance, or from repressed sexuality. These arguments are not new. Much the same thing was said by the Christian missionaries who overthrew the idols of heathen gods. But whereas the early missionaries were conscious of serving a new God by combating the old ones, modern iconoclasts are unconscious of the one in whose name they are destroying old values.”

Jung now begins to address the modern worldview through Nietzsche’s eyes.

“Nietzsche thought himself quite conscious and responsible when he smashed the old tablets, yet he felt a peculiar need to back himself up with a revivified Zarathustra, a sort of alter ego, with whom he often identifies himself in his great tragedy Thus Spake Zarathustra. Nietzsche was no atheist, but his God was dead. The result of this demise was a split in himself, and he felt compelled to call the other self “Zarathustra” or, at times, “Dionysus.” In this fatal illness he signed his letters “Zagreus,” the dismembered god of the Thracians. The tragedy of Zarathustra is that, because his God died, Nietzsche himself became a god; and this happened because he was no atheist. He was of too positive a nature to tolerate the urban neurosis of atheism. It seems dangerous for such a man to assert that “God is dead”: he instantly becomes the victim of inflation.”

By inflation Jung means sublimating the non-personal aspects of the psyche, aspects of the vast ocean, as if these were acquired personally, thereby partially regressing into the unconscious resulting in a dissolution of the ego into its paired opposites such a good and evil—definitely a recognizable Nietzschean theme. This, then, begins man’s Promethean struggle without a god. Jung goes on…

“Far from being a negation, God is actually the strongest and most effective “position” the psyche can reach, in exactly the same sense in which Paul speaks of people “whose God is their belly.” The strongest and therefore most decisive factor in any individual psyche compels the same belief or fear, submission or devotion which a God would demand from man. Anything despotic and inescapable in this sense is “God,” and it becomes absolute unless, by an ethical decision freely chosen, one succeeds in building up against this natural phenomenon a positive that is equally strong and invincible.”

What Jung is telling us is that, whether we consciously agree to it or not, our psyche is hardwired to create a god of any natural force beyond our control. But, he points out, we have a choice. We can consciously choose a more powerful counterforce.

“If this psychic position proves to be absolutely effective, it surely deserves to be named a “God,” and what is more, a spiritual God, since it sprang from the freedom of ethical decision and therefore from the mind. Man is free to decide whether “God” shall be a “spirit” or a natural phenomenon like the craving of a morphine addict, and hence whether “God” shall act as a beneficent or a destructive force.

“However indubitable and clearly understandable there psychic events or decisions may be, they are very apt to lead people to the false, unpsychological conclusion that it rests with them to decide whether they will create a “God” for themselves or not. There is no question that, since each of us is equipped with a psychic disposition that limits our freedom in high degree and makes it practically illusory. Not only is “freedom of the will” an incalculable problem philosophically, it is also a misnomer in the practical sense, for we seldom find anybody who is not influenced and indeed dominated by desires, habits, impulses, prejudices, resentments, and by every conceivable kind of complex.”

So what is Jung telling us? That we need to have a God but can’t create a God (such as recasting ourselves as God)? Yes, that’s what he’s saying. Jung tells us that it’s not a matter of creating, but a matter of possession—like our response to fear—which is something the psyche understands. Our Gods are already created.

“Bondage and possession are synonymous. Always, therefore, there is something in the psyche that takes possession and limits or suppresses our moral freedom. In order to hide this undeniable but exceedingly unpleasant fact from ourselves and at the same time pay lip-service to freedom, we have become accustomed to saying apotropaically, “I have such and such a desire or habit or feeling of resentment,” instead of the more veracious, “Such and such a desire or habit or feeling of resentment has me.” The latter reformulation would certainly rob us even of the illusion of freedom. But I ask myself whether this would not be better in the end than fuddling ourselves with words. The truth is that we do not enjoy masterless freedom; we are continually threatened by psychic factors which, in the guise of “natural phenomena,” may take possession of us at any moment.”

And here is where Jung identifies the psychic need for God.

“The withdrawal of metaphysical projections leaves us almost defenceless in the face of this happening, for we immediately identify with every impulse instead of giving it the name of “the other,” which would at least hold it at arm’s length and prevent it from storming the citadel of the ego.”

And in modern terms, we do seem defenceless. Jung continues:

“”Principalities and powers” are always with us; we have no need to create them even if we could. It is merely incumbent on us to choose the master we wish to serve, so that his service shall be our safeguard against being mastered by the “other” whom we have not chosen. We do not create “God,” we choose him. So what are the characteristics of that choice?

“Though our choice characterizes and defines “God,” it is always man-made, and the definition it gives is therefore finite and imperfect. (Even the idea of perfection does not posit perfection.) The definition is an image, but this image does not raise the unknown fact it designates into the realm of intelligibility, otherwise we would be entitled to say we had created a God. The “master” we choose is not identical with the image we project of him in time and space. He goes on working as before, like an unknown quantity in the depths of the psyche. We do not even know the nature of the simplest thought, let alone the ultimate principles of the psyche. Also we have no control over its inner life. But because this inner life is intrinsically free and not subject to our will and intentions, it may easily happen that the living thing chosen and defined by us will drop out if its setting, the man-made image, even against our will. Then, perhaps, we could say with Nietzsche, “God is dead.”

And then what? How do we handle this loss of “faith”?

“Yet it would be truer to say, “He has put off our image, and where shall we find him again?” The interregnum is full of danger, for the natural facts will raise their claim in the form of various –isms, which are productive of nothing but anarchy and destruction because inflation and man’s hybris between them have elected the ego, in all its ridiculous paltriness, lord of the universe. That was the case with Nietzsche, the uncomprehending portent of a whole epoch.”

Thus is Nietzsche and his conscious ego trap dispatched.

“The individual ego is much too small, its brain is much too feeble, to incorporate all the projections withdrawn from the world. Ego and brain burst asunder in the effort; the psychiatrist calls it schizophrenia. When Nietzsche said “God is dead,” he uttered a truth which is valid for the greater part of Europe. People were influenced by it, not because he said so, but because it stated a widespread psychological fact. The consequences were not long delayed: after a fog of –isms, the catastrophe [Hitler and the Second World War]. Nobody thought of drawing the slightest conclusions from Nietzsche’s pronouncement. Yet it has, for some ears, the same eerie sounds as that ancient cry which became the echoing over the sea to mark the end of the nature gods: “Great Pan is dead.”

And on that thought Jung points to the present destruction of the ecosystem itself, through the denial of our gods, those inner psychic forces that might reign in our impulses before it’s too late.

Jung possessed an astonishing mind—as do each of us—into which our gods are apparently extremely deeply rooted. What we choose to do with those gods remains to be seen.

Note to self: it’s not about the pursuit of happiness

2011-05-21T10:36:00.000-07:00

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OK. We’ve killed Osama, elected a Conservative majority and gotten rid of the tolls on the Saint John bridge and Grand Manan ferry. The province is finally working on dispatching its the debt, and the local county is getting a brand new economic development strategy. So there’s nothing left to bitch about because we’re finally living in a nearly perfect world. The rest, as they say, is up to us.

So, what to do? Well, we could look to our American neighbours, who seem to have all the answers. It’s the pursuit of happiness, they’d say. Cool, we can handle that.

If that’s the goal, then how do we get there? That depends. For some, being rich is almost equivalent to happiness. Money can’t buy you love, but as someone once said, “I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich, and being rich is a whole lot better.” Yep. More marriages implode on money issues for example.

But now, instead of Gross Domestic Product, we’re looking at Gross Domestic Happiness—measuring our emotional wealth rather than our industrial output.

Excuse me for sounding cynical but that seems like a notion cooked up by the rich to keep the suckers at the bottom satisfied with less. After all, we don’t see the rich giving away their fortunes to go back to the land in the middle of blackfly season.

So it follows that happiness is connected to the pursuit of money, the basis of the entire capitalist system. Ergo, capitalism is the pursuit of happiness, right?

Well kind of. Capitalism is a philosophy. And it’s a pretty powerful philosophy given it has pretty much displaced other “isms” such as communism and socialism. When Ronald Reagan famously declared, “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall,” he de facto invited Gorbachev to join the capitalist world. For those who are still connecting dots, it wasn’t about democracy.

When Boris Yeltsin took over the Soviet Union in the early 1990s he began dismantling the communist system, privatizing the publicly-owned corporations, and creating a market economy—which conveniently allowed many of his associates to become incredibly wealthy. So instead of becoming democracies, the former Soviet states became oligarchies.

Coincidentally, the same thing has been happening here since Reagan. Our governments have been infiltrated by lobby groups, wealthy individuals and corporate boards to the point that nothing can get done without their blessing and financial support, including the nomination and financing of business-friendly candidates. And the redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top income levels in North America over the past 30 years tells the tale.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to conclude that we’re now well along the migration path from democracy to oligarchy. Wealthy individuals are now actively and publicly involved in reshaping government policy—which at first glance may seem altruistic, but on further examination only shows the elite exerting even greater influence over the rest of us with the inevitable prioritization of their personal goals over the collective aims of the general public. So we’re on the slippery slope.

Of course all of this is Osterized into the political debate between the left and the right. But the actual arguments on each side can shift quite dramatically, as on the issue of climate change. Somehow the debate has shifted from the environment to the quality of climate change science. Conveniently, the actual environmental facts can be tossed to the wind.

But conveniently for whom?

Last night I sat down and watched “Who Killed the Electric Car?” with my 12-year-old. It was interesting to watch his reaction to the games played by General Motors and the oil companies to keep the electric cars off the road. He was astounded. “How could they do that?” he kept asking—like when Shell Oil bought up the patents on the new and highly successful NiHM battery technology—to bury it. A 12-year-old could see that the corporations were working hard to kill environmental innovation, in this case the electric car, in order to maintain high profits and a business-as-usual investment model.

A few of my blogging buddies in the US are engaged in a lively ongoing debate about business and the widening rift between the right and left. They have a long list of culprits to blame. Bringing the two sides together seems increasingly impossible. Nobody seems to agree on a common direction. So what would make all sides happy?

Incredibly, the answer that came to me was “suffering.” The only way to bring everyone together in a cooperative way is to focus on the job of relieving suffering in society. Sure, it’s a radical notion. But think about the possibilities.

Think of all the types of suffering—emotional, physical, financial, spiritual, environmental—and how that suffering affects each of us. It’s not a stretch to see that if we just worked on reducing suffering we’d all be a lot more engaged—and a lot happier.

And in fact we’re collectively suffering from a mainline addiction to overconsumption—when we’re really craving more purposeful lives. Isn’t it time we removed the happiness needle and faced the disease?

Mass psychosis or just developmentally handicapped?

2011-05-16T08:55:00.000-07:00

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Apparently, the world’s cheapest car (at just $2200!) is a dud. As of January it wasn’t selling well, not even in India where it’s being built. Which is a puzzle, since you’d think more of India’s budding middle class would want something affordable to get them out of the rain.

It’s not that the Tata Nano is a bad car, though it is tiny and pod-like and has predictably few safety features. It’s actually a cute little smart-tech machine, designed in Italy and manufactured by Tata, a world-class manufacturer that also makes Jaguar and Land Rover. So what’s really going on?

Two things, really. First, competition at the lowest price point in India is pretty fierce. Both General Motors and Suzuki are battling it out for leadership of the second-lowest price point in the market, the $4000 to $5000 range, and they’re marketing aggressively. Second, their marketing works—especially at knocking the Nano. Both GM and Suzuki have managed to position the Nano as an anti-status item for losers. Indians, like the rest of us, are easily lured by upscale products.

Naturally, the negative marketing woke up the giant, and Tata is finally retaliating with some strong marketing of its own, and as of today, sales are up to 10,000 units a month. There’s also been buzz about Tata upgrading the Nano to hit the European and American markets in the $6000 price range.

Meanwhile here on the home front gas prices climbed to $1.34 a liter before dropping a bit a couple of days ago. So gas is on my mind, especially as we consider replacing one of our vehicles. But what to buy? We need a family vehicle with lots of seats, so that rules out the Nano class, for sure, which limits the choices to a minivan, an SUV or a four-door pickup truck.

I’ve watched a couple of neighbours go through the same process recently, and both have gone the big pickup truck route. I’ve done that number, too, and it feels great to be the King of the Road sitting up high with a big V8 underfoot. And the price is right, too. You can buy a good late model truck for under $20,000 and with the difference between that and a brand new $60,000 SUV, you can buy a whole lot of gasoline. Plus there’s a kind of reverse status to the pickup—a tougher image—like what owning a Harley used to deliver.

But there it is again: the status thing. Whether in India or China or Canada, status trumps fuel economy every time. And the car companies know it. That’s why, as their engines have become much more efficient over the past 20 years, the new units have gone into ever larger vehicles, which effectively wiped out most of the fuel savings we might have gained.

Let’s face it. The biggest price we pay for a vehicle is the status factor. If we (or a smart ad agency) could change how we view status, we’d all be jumping into cheap Nano-like gas misers next week.

The second biggest price we pay for a vehicle is poking a hole in the air. Car companies know this, too, and routinely ignore it. But almost all the energy in a liter of gasoline (and the 2.2 kilograms of carbon it produces) goes into opening that hole in the wall of air—especially as we drive faster into the wall. This is the reason trains are more economical to operate per tonne than transport trucks. With just one engine a train manages to very efficiently pull 100+ railcars through a single hole in the air.

So why haven’t we applied that thinking to cars? For example, why don’t we “train” or chain cars together electronically for long highway commutes? Or why don’t we have stretched minicars instead of huge trucks and SUVs? And why aren’t we legislating the exclusive use hybrids and electrics?

Why? Because we’re missing the point. We’ve been trained (and sold) to see things from a purely personal view. But resource depletion is not a personal issue. It’s a collective problem. As a global population, we’re gobbling up more than 80 million barrels of oil a day to keep our economy going, and that’s a real concern, especially since we’re running out of the stuff. And that doesn’t even touch on the 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 we’re pumping out every day.

So, what to do? What to buy? It’s a conundrum. The real answer is, we have to begin acting collectively…and that means government. By regulating the use of tobacco products we’ve managed to make smoking socially inappropriate. Why not do the same with our transportation? We have the responsibility to regulate the kinds of vehicles we allow on our public roads and the volume of emissions we will allow into our ecosphere.

Where we clearly fail is in electing more forward-thinking politicians and not putting more pressure on them after they’re elected. We need to do better.

As for me, I’m confident enough in my manhood. I think it would be cool to drive a stretched Nano or a Prius. How about you?

The importance of head starts and why

2011-05-09T14:14:00.000-07:00

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My good friend from Alberta sent me a link to a website. It showcased a guy we knew years ago. He’d been born with a bit of a silver spoon in his mouth, and he’d done well, now living in Paris and making a career for himself as an artist (which I admit is not such an easy thing to do).

My friend, on the other hand, wasn’t born with the proverbial silver spoon, but she’s done OK. She made the best of her talent, earned a Ph.D. and carved out a nice life for herself. Sure, she had some head-start advantages (her mom was a teacher) but she worked hard and moved herself up the ladder.

Closer to home, I know a few kids who don’t have any kind of a head start at all. These kids are on the negative side of the balance sheet: they started out in poverty, were raised in broken homes by relatives instead of parents, kept failing at school before finally dropping out, falling into substance abuse, violence, petty crime, teen pregnancies and all the rest. As an added bonus, our system seems only too eager to punish these already lost kids.

So, the obvious question is: how do we equalize things to give the kids at the bottom more of a head start—or at least level the playing field?

Well, the real life answer is we likely won’t. Our economic system has been re-jigged since the 1980s to increase the advantages of those at the top, not at the bottom. And the stats show it. The wealthiest .01 percent of society has been getting increasingly wealthy as the less prosperous bottom 50 percent is getting relatively poorer.

For those of us who grew up before the 1980s, the accident of birth didn’t pose the problem it does to today’s kids. We grew up in a rapidly growing economy. There were always better jobs just around the corner. But not today. The expectation of doing better than one’s parents is no longer the norm. Increasingly, your kids will be lucky to remain at the level into which they were born.

What’s changed? Well, governments became more corporate-friendly as the world’s economy globalized. They lowered taxes, deregulated legal constraints and gave tax breaks and incentives to corporations to keep them from relocating elsewhere. It was a political reaction to a particularly insidious kind of corporate blackmail—resulting in the creation of a corporate welfare state. The recent bailout of the financial industry in the U.S. after the housing bubble collapsed (rather than bailing out the victimized homeowners) is simply another blatant example of how the system is squarely aimed at saving (and enriching) those at the top first.

How is this different from the past? Well, once upon a time a long ago, corporations took a similar path. They formed monopolies (like Rockefeller’s Standard Oil), manipulated the markets, rigged the system, paid off politicians and generally took the public on a wildly unregulated investment ride—until the wheels came off and the whole top-heavy finance machine crashed in 1929. During the ensuing Great Depression, governments took up the slack, created public works projects to put people back to work, re-regulated business, increased tax levels on the wealthy, broke up the monopolies and created the modern social services safety net, which, by the 1960s had been universally adopted by most of the world’s leading industrial societies. And then mass amnesia began setting in. Slowly and surely, the wealthy began their assault on the elegantly re-engineered public social welfare system.

Of course, as always, it’s all about money. But what is money? Money in our economic system is like oxygen in the water. It always bubbles to the top. And all of life in the ocean requires oxygen. So what happens to life at the bottom if all the oxygen is driven to the top? It dies, of course.

So if follows that the main purpose of government is to protect all of its citizens, especially those of us who, through no fault of our own, are nearer the bottom. Therefore, one of the key duties of a fully functioning government is to reoxygenate the water—to collect some of the money that has risen to the top and push it back down to the people at the bottom.

This is done by increasing taxes on the very affluent, including the imposition of death taxes on wealthy estates, and penalizing individuals and corporations that shelter their wealth offshore. It also includes raising taxes on large corporations and ensuring rights and protection for workers, including the right to unionize, collectively bargain and strike.

And how would we redistribute that money to level the field for our kids? Well, we might establish a guaranteed annual income for their parents, which is not as far-fetched as it might seem. We might seriously reassess how we deliver education to low-income kids, and while we’re at it, extend free public education to the post-secondary diploma-degree level as soon as possible.

How we offset early disadvantages merits our concern. After all, if we won’t reinvest in our people equitably, what does it say about us as a society?

Meditating on media on May Day

2011-05-02T07:48:00.000-07:00

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It’s May 1 as I write this, May Day, historic day of celebration. Sixty-six years ago Adolf Hitler committed suicide, while today Osama bin Laden was killed by a team of U.S. Navy SEALs in Pakistan. And this weekend a small political sewage truck finally unloaded on the Canadian electorate.

For me, tomorrow is voting day but by the time you read this it will all be over. I expect things will have changed on the political landscape, due in part to Jack Layton’s dramatic rise in popularity—which triggered that nasty media dump of fecal matter.

Yes, an anonymous retired Toronto cop leaked the story to Sun Media that Layton was caught in an illegal massage parlour way back in 1996. He wasn’t arrested. But you get the damning innuendo. What was he really doing there?

Now we hear there’ll be Ontario Provincial Police investigation into the leak and why the cop still had his old notebook, which is the property of the Toronto police force.

Meanwhile, those who oppose Layton and his NDP have been busy trolling Facebook pages in an effort to smear Layton’s reputation one day before the election. It even woke up the Alberta Outdoorsman blog, of all places. A character named “hillbillyreefer” whose tagline reads, “I bet vegans are delicious; the grass fed little buggers,” blames the Liberals for leaking the story.

But the Liberals had their chance to air the dirty laundry years ago—when it was offered to them—and decided not to. They thought the story would do more damage to them than to Layton. No, it isn’t about which political party may have been behind the leak. The telling bit is the media source: Sun Media.

As I wrote a few months ago, Sun is a part of publishing giant Quebecor owned by Pierre Péladeau. And it was Péladeau who hired former Harper staffer, Kory Teneycke, to help induce the Harper government to grant Sun TV a Category 1 broadcast licence to put Sun on every cable carrier in the country—just like CBC (because there’s big money in that). Unfortunately for Pierre, neither the public nor the CRTC went for the deal. But Tenecyke is still big news at Sun TV and a big Harper supporter.

Coincidentally, just as Jack’s NDP team started to seriously threaten Harper’s hope for a majority, the Sun pulled the plug on the bottom of the sewage truck.

But the killing of Osama bin Laden was no coincidence. Clearly, that was a well-laid plan. I watched the Obama late night speech, and looked up some of the online background story before going to bed. Apparently, the event wasn’t so clear-cut. One report claims that one of the four U.S. helicopters was hit by a rocket grenade. A contradictory report claims that the helicopter suffered a “mechanical malfunction”. An early report also stated there was no DNA proof taken, only a “facial recognition” ID, and that the body was taken to a U.S. ship and then quickly buried at sea, in accordance with Islamic tradition. Huh?

Given that the U.S. has spent billions if not trillions of dollars on two wars in the Middle East triggered by Osama bin Laden, wouldn’t you think the American public deserves more due diligence with respect to the identification and handling of the body of its greatest enemy? You’d think.

So what’s going on here? And what has the Jack Layton massage story have to do with the Osama bin Laden killing? Well, both stories are about shaping public opinion through the media, while keeping us in the dark as to actual events. The Jack Layton scandal is being used to discredit his ethical approach to women’s rights and politics. The Osama story is a bit of political theatre, though while real, masks broader intentions in the Middle East and the political-economic conditions in the U.S. which are affecting the popularity of Barack Obama and his upcoming run for a second term. With bin Laden put to rest by order of the president, Obama becomes the decisive military commander Americans need in their next election.

But these attempts to shape public opinion never quite work out as intended. The people of the Middle East are now certain to coalesce around their slain hero—who will now become a mythic figure, and impossible to erase. And the Sun’s bit of last-minute yellow journalism will likely have polarized the undecided vote (those of whom who’ve followed the story) and nudged more support toward the NDP.

Fortunately, the majority of the general public is not naïve enough to swallow everything it’s fed, and has a better set of crap detectors than those who seek to control us would like.

Still, it would be nice to have a reliable media source to which we could turn and trust, one not owned by private or political interests.

But here in Canada we already have that. It’s the same CBC–Radio Canada that some Harperists would like to see cut back or dismantled. Given the sorry state of media south of the border and some of the private media up here, I’d say that would be a big mistake.

Coalition: It's what Canadians want

2011-04-26T10:09:00.000-07:00

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As I write this, NDP chief Jack Layton’s star is on the rise. He is the second-most trusted leader in the country. Not bad for a guy heading up the Number 3 party in Canada.

Of course all of this is moot in this tiny eastern corner of the country. Here, it’s projected that we’ll elect Conservative candidate John Williamson, with about 59 percent of the votes. It’s now considered to be a “safe” riding for the blue team.

Not that all is safe for everyone in this riding. Unemployment is high, and so is drug-related crime. High school completion rates are low. And if anything should happen to the aquaculture or manufacturing industries, particularly Cooke, Flakeboard and Ganong, the economy out here would sink like a stone. The good news is, with Williamson as our rep and a Conservative government in Ottawa, we can be sure of our fair share of government projects heading this way to keep the riding safe.

That’s just how politics is played. It’s skewed from the get-go. Williamson himself was carefully parachuted into the riding by former Conservative cabinet minister Greg Thompson.

And what’s on Williamson’s résumé? Well, a couple of surprises. In March, 2007 he opined, “Rather than reduce the overall tax burden, the Conservative government opted to spend down the federal surplus.” That’s not good.

A month earlier he warned about the Harper government saying, “Ottawa has a revenue problem and a spending problem. Mr. Flaherty can solve the first by cutting taxes on March 19, a move today’s taxpayers will thank him for. He can fix the second by legislating expenditure limits.”

And he followed it up with another quote critical of the Harper Conservatives, “Thank Manning [Reform Party] and Chrétien [Liberal] for today’s prosperity.”

Well, I can understand his positive assessment of Chrétien and by extension, finance minister Paul Martin, as they were the folks from 1993 onward who actually built up Canada’s surplus, and not by slashing taxes I might add. Manning, of course, was never in power. But the point is, if Williamson were to remain so candid after winning his seat, he’d surely run into extreme difficulty with his boss, Stephen Harper. Given Mr. Williamson’s credentials as a PR man, that would be highly unlikely. But it doesn't matter anyway; he fits nicely into Harper's tic-tac-toe "spend us into debt—then cut taxes to the wealthy—and slash social/cultural services to balance the budget" mentality.

That said, the local scene doesn’t matter too much. The question is, should Canadians give Harper the majority he so craves? Or should we vote strategically—electing any opposition candidate that stands a chance of defeating a Conservative?

Well, it’s a crap choice. Less than 40 percent of Canadians, according to polls taken over the past few years, actually support a Conservative government. The other 60+ percent support the other parties. And just who are these other parties? They’re the Left-leaning, socially and environmentally concerned parties: the Liberals, New Democrats, Bloc Quebecois and Greens. All of these parties share far more in common with each other than they do with the Right-leaning Conservatives.

The Conservatives, themselves, got the message and found religion. Under Manning, Stockwell Day, Peter MacKay and Harper, they welded together the Reform, Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties into the new Conservative Party, and this group has a collective philosophy that has more in common with the American Republicans than it does with the old Progressive Conservatives—especially the old centrist “red” Tories.

So perhaps it’s time for the Left to steal from the Right’s playbook: a new coalition of the Left. Each former party would become a wing of the party responsible for it’s original mission. The New Democrat wing would head up social, health and education policy. The Greens would head up environment, and have a strong presence in new energy generation. The Bloc would look after francophone and multi-cultural affairs, broadening their sphere of influence into aboriginal affairs. The Liberals would look after responsible finance and international affairs.

Jack Layton would become the prime minister of the new Liberal-Democrats. Ignatieff would be the ideal minister of international affairs, and so on. This would be the deepest bench of talent in Canadian history. And these leaders are intelligent, reasonable and accommodating enough to pull it off.

It’s not the Conservative agenda that’s the primary enemy of Canada’s progressive future. It’s the fracturing of Canada’s Left. Without a cohesive Left, we leave the country in the hands of the Conservatives and their American-style free-market, militaristic, environmentally out-of-touch ideologies—and it’s that vision we’ll be chained to, giving more tax breaks to the wealthy while cutting back on social and cultural programs.

Given a choice, Canadians, I believe, know what kind of country they want to build. It’s one that takes care of those suffering at home first, acts in a financially responsible manner and does it’s best to relieve suffering elsewhere. So far we haven’t seen much of that coming from Harper’s Conservatives. I expect that with a majority government we’d see even less.

But it’s up to you. Vote as either your habit or your conscience dictates. In the end we’ll all get what we deserve anyway.

Adventures in sustainability and self-deception

2011-04-18T12:13:00.000-07:00

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It “only” took $72 to top off the tank as we left to check out a sustainability site this weekend. The little 12-hour jaunt gobbled over $250 in gas, junk food and highway tolls. And if you sensing that I’m complaining, you’re right. The trip was a waste of time.

Let’s just say the site was somewhat less than its website led one to believe. It’s a legacy left by some almost famous dude from the late 1800s, a hundred-plus-acre homestead that looked pretty attractive in the photos. In reality, it was at the end of a rutted dirt laneway with one of its sandstone gateway pillars knocked over. The “farm” was a plot less than two acres in size with the rest of the acreage returned to standing timber. Yes, there was a small barn and a charming farmhouse. But the site was shabby and hardly a model for sustainability.

Like many of these historic sites, it was donated to the government, which restored the house and grounds a couple of decades ago but failed to provide sufficient operational cash to keep the thing going. Instead, it handed the operation over to a local volunteer board, which has obviously done precious little to raise new funds to keep the place up, let alone create a viable new vision for it.

When we talked to the one board member who was looking after the place, every suggestion about development and fundraising was met with “no, no, we couldn’t do that” for one reason or another. The real problem, we learned, was that the board members saw the site as their personal hobby, micromanaging the real work being done by the summer staffers. As for them doing some organic gardening or fundraising, forget about it.

As we left for home, I pumped another tankful of gas and looked around at the farming landscape and thought about sustainability. Everything we grow is based on fossil fuel. It’s all diesel tractors and petro-chemical fertilizers and pesticides. We’re living on fossil fuel—not food—with a staggering global burn rate of 80 million barrels of oil a day.

Coincidentally, I caught some news on the Internet the other day about an oil find in Norway’s Arctic. The Scandinavian writer was discussing the merits of selling the 240 million barrels of oil now or saving it for later, when it would be most needed. And so I quickly did the math. That big new find in the Arctic is only a three-day world supply! What would it matter if we burned it now or later?

The plain fact is we’re now on the other side of Peak Oil. We’ve now used more oil than what’s left in the ground. And every aspect of our industrial lifestyle is based on fossil fuel. So what are we doing to plan for the end of oil? Clearly, not very much so far.

We have an election going on and our politicians are pretending as if this impending catastrophic crisis doesn’t exist. They’re all harping about the economy. But without cheap and abundant fossil fuel, we won’t have an economy as we know it. So what are they thinking? What are we thinking?

I just watched a documentary “Think Global Act Rural”. It’s an inside look at the real sustainability of agriculture. The main premise of the film is that since the end of the Second World War, industry has waged a fossil fuel-powered military assault on the land. Tanks became tractors, chemical weapons became herbicides and pesticides, and genetic engineering has stolen the ownership and viability of natural seeds from the farmers and handed over the reproduction rights to five global corporations. The truth of the movie is compelling. And disheartening.

Whenever I discuss these trends with my more thoughtful friends, many of them dismiss these views as being too “counter-productive” or “apocalyptic.” The real bet to save us is technology they tell me. But the actual evidence illustrates the fallacy of that thinking.

Corporately-owned technology does not exist to create a better way of life or a healthier planet. It exists to create profits for the wealthy. Technology favours controlled complexity over natural diversity. Witness the mass extinction of species, and the environmental impact of industry, including desertification, nuclear pollution and climate change. Things on the planet are simply not getting better.

What the documentary also tells us is that the world’s industrial-agricultural soil has died. Literally died. The mycelia are gone.
The soil structure is caked and compressed. The only thing keeping the engineered plants alive is water and chemistry.

It doesn’t take genius to realize the sustainability of any species depends on healthy food. Growing food depends on the earth. If the soil isn’t healthy, we’re not healthy. If the air and water isn’t healthy, we’re not healthy. And like our food, our health has been corporatized. When we get sick we also treat the symptoms with surgery or chemistry or gene therapy. It’s a vicious cycle. We’ve become what we have created.

It’s becoming evident (to me at least) that technology won’t save us. Spiritual renewal and self-restraint are the only answers for addicts.

Dirty money savaging our future

2011-04-12T14:53:00.000-07:00

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“A dollar-forty” said the lady at the drive-thru window. “Oh,” I said in a dull tone, “the price went up?” She nodded. As I took my coffee, I noticed the cup. “Evil-genius marketing,” I thought, “timing the price hike with the roll-up-the-rim contest.”

Price hikes are a growing feature of life these days. We’ve noticed our food bills ratcheting up, and gas is now hovering around $1.20 a liter here at home—and almost $4 a gallon across the border. So what’s really driving these increases?

Classical economists define these changes in terms of supply and demand, scarcity and abundance. So we seem to be moving from an era of abundance to one of scarcity here in the West. But Asia, with the exception of Japan, seems to be doing quite nicely, thank you. Why?

As the world’s economy globalized, corporate interests sought out places with abundant resources. One of the key resources is a cheap and willing work force. So, as Western work forces became more expensive, their services were replaced with more affordable alternatives elsewhere. First Japan, then China and southeast Asia, then Brazil and now India became sources for abundant cheap labour.

Raw materials are shipped to the cheap labour and finished goods are shipped back to us. The theory was we’d become a post-industrial consumer society. We wouldn’t need those dirty production jobs any more. But it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

In reality, we—especially the Americans—transferred our production capabilities abroad, while borrowing heavily to finance our new consumer society. And governments got into the game, too. Today, the combined U.S. private and public debt is somewhere north of $22 trillion. And still the U.S. is spending over $620 billion a year to maintain the world’s largest armed force.

And in a wonderfully twisted stroke of timing, the other great resource, fossil fuel, is declining. Which means that, with rising shipping costs, all those cheap goods produced elsewhere are going to start costing a lot more—or they’ll stop selling altogether. Because, as we all realize by now, real wages in North America stalled decades ago, and the real hidden unemployment rate has been hovering around 15 percent of the workforce.

And then the credit bubble burst in 2007-08 as American homeowners ran out of cash. The banks took over their homes, and with no one repaying loans, banks around the world went broke. And so the American government and the privately-held U.S. Federal Reserve began “quantitative easing,” or in other words, printing cash to bail out the banks.

But what actually triggered the collapse was a very odd thing. Back in 2007 there was some major law enforcement pressure on the U.S. banks—especially Wachovia, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America—to stop laundering Mexican drug money. Wachovia had in fact processed $378.4 billion in cocaine cash (equivalent to 30 percent of the Mexican GDP) and when “caught” paid a paltry $110 million fine. So the money from the drug lords dried up. And guess what? Without the big injection of illegal money, the world banks began suffering from a shortfall of liquidity—in other words, they ran out of cash. Unbelievable?

Yes, but here’s what Antonio Maria Costa, then head of the United Nations office on drugs and crime, said at the height of the 2008 banking crisis about the proceeds from drugs and crime: the dirty money was “the only liquid investment capital” available to banks on the brink of collapse. “Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade,” he said. “There were signs that some banks were rescued that way.” To check it out further, read the story at www.guardian.co.uk.

The real point is, despite the huge government bailout, the system is still broke. The watered-down U.S. dollar may be dethroned as the world’s official trade currency. The entire global economy is teetering between deflation and inflation. And it may be that we get both. Either way the ordinary worker is about to get the shaft, along with many vulnerable regional industries.

If it’s deflation, our houses and possessions will lose value. Credit will dry up and the economy will stall. If it’s inflation, the cost of everything will go up, and the cost of borrowing will rise dramatically. Either way, the savings of ordinary people will be wiped out and only the trans-national elite will survive.

But monopoly capitalism is cannibalizing our industry here at home, too. The recent withdrawal of Ganong (“Canada’s Chocolate Family”) and Flakeboard from government hearings on the Enbridge natural gas supply monopoly is one example. With distribution rates threatening to rise to 25 times the North American average, both local companies (neither of which is global nor a monopoly) face an uncompetitive situation—which could directly affect the wages and job security of every employee. Not to mention the effect the ailing U.S. economy could have on all our local businesses, from manufacturing to tourism.

Yet, strangely, despite all this economic bad news, all we seem get from our incumbent Conservative party is the bogey man spectre of a left-leaning coalition government and bad-mouthing Mr. Ignatieff's leadership abilities. I hardly think those are the real problems, do you?

And despite paying 6 cents more, I didn’t win that free coffee, either.

Management, creativity and control in Canada

2011-04-05T05:42:00.000-07:00

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It took a Harvard credentialed couple to tell us that creativity is a good thing—according to a recent article.

Cognitive scientist, Stephen Pinker, and his philosopher-novelist wife, Rebecca Goldstein, lectured on creativity at Mount Allison last week. It hit all the right notes: creativity requires passion, deep immersion, taking risks, building on existing knowledge—and playfulness.

What wasn’t fully explained was that creativity requires a supportive environment that values the creative personality as well as the creative results. Is New Brunswick one of those places?

Certainly New Brunswick fancies itself a creative province. It’s home to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and hosts the Northrop Frye Literary Festival every year. Saint John has an active visual arts scene. And the province certainly has the wealth and cultural mavens to support the arts. But frankly, I don’t see much risk-taking here.

Coincidentally, I’m also reading a book on the same topic, Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion. At the beginning of one chapter he quotes the Bible. “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Hedges’ interpretation of vision and creativity might be somewhat different from Pinker’s and Goldstein’s. Hedges is no fan of career-enhancing positive thinking. He’s a realist who believes that creativity comes from having the guts to first accept the negative and then to criticize, two traits missing in our management-centric society—in which harmony is valued over everything else.

Why the push for harmony and the drift toward illusion? Hedges sees these as agents of control. In a corporately-managed world, the main mission is maintaining obedience and order, leaving the controllers at the top of the pyramid to focus on tweaking the process of generating maximum power and profits. To keep the game going, illusion must replace reality.

Nowhere is this more evident than in politics. Here in Canada we’re still under the illusion that we’re living in a representative democracy. Yet the evidence directly contradicts this. Paul Martin was the son of a Liberal cabinet minister and is the owner of an international shipping company. He was the protégé of Paul Demarais, one of Canada’s hidden mandarins of corporate power whose ironically-named Power Corporation deals in pulp and paper, mass media and financial services, and whose son André is married to Jean Cretien’s daughter. They’re all well-connected but not necessarily to the people.

Conservative Stephen Harper has deep ties to Alberta’s oil industry, but unlike the ever-pragmatic Martin, Harper is even more disconnected—and dangerous. At his core he’s an ideologue who opposes central federalism in favour of decentralizing and modernizing Canada. His ideal version of the country is neo-conservative, in which each region stands on its own without handouts from Ottawa, while the federal government concerns itself with punishing crime, protecting corporate wealth and protecting the country’s borders and international trading status—while privatizing and deregulating Canadian industry.

His style is even less democratic than Cretien’s or Martin’s. By February, 2011, the country was led not by Parliament or even Cabinet, but by the Prime Minister’s Office and his paid staff, which is mostly populated by younger even more ideological versions of Himself.

A great deal has been written about “the Harper government’s” use of power. (Someone recently calculated up to 50 significant abuses to date.) But fortunately for the Conservatives, the Canadian public seems to have been infected by a very American-like case of mass amnesia, and a willingness to accept “strong and wrong” over reasonable and democratic, a much messier process.

Harper is at heart a manager, not a leader. He’s good at forcing consensus and managing power. Canadians, of course, prefer to have a leader, but in the absence of one seem willing to support the strongest manager.

This is a hazardous choice. Strengthening control at the top is not the answer to creating a new vision for Canada. That path leads quickly to proto-fascism, not creativity.

The police-state strategy used to control the G20 protesters in Toronto is a good example. Risk-taking and independent thought do not flourish under repressive regimes.

Of course these are exactly the traits the elite management types running large corporations don’t want. They want a compliant workforce of highly-trained specialists who go home every night to watch “reality” TV, mind their Facebook accounts, go shopping on the weekend for the best brand names, sign up for unhealthy mortgages and new car loans and send their kids off to college be indoctrinated into the same blindly specialized, self-imposed prison.

Against that, Pinker and Goldstein’s timid attempts to promote creativity seem a bit like peeing into a gale. So why should I care? First, I have kids (including a newborn baby girl). Second, the environment is going to hell in a hand-basket. Third, we’re all being put to sleep as we lose our hard-won citizens’ rights.

Harper keeps ranting that the opposition might form a coalition, as if that’s some kind of risk. I think it’s high time we got a little more creative and formed a coalition ourselves—by taking back our democracy from the narrow-minded managers and political cops working for a hidden corporate elite.

We might begin with a critical assessment of this arrogant, fear-mongering Harper government.

(An interview with Chris Hedges on "Death of the Middle Class")

The coming and going of visionaries

2011-03-28T13:58:00.000-07:00

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We’re staying in a hotel in Saint John tonight. We have a hospital visit tomorrow. To pass the time I went online to check the local news and learned that Dr. John Anderson passed away on Thursday.

John was one of my favourite people at the Huntsman. He and I had worked together on the fundraising campaign for the new Discovery Centre and in just one visit (which he’d personally arranged earlier) with a donor we brought in a $500,000 gift. That was the kind of guy John was. When you were with him good things happened.

Other people could tell you more about John. He was a storied guy. He’d been the director of the St. Andrews Biological Station, head director of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans national research program and shortly afterward, president of the University of New Brunswick. And in that same busy period in the early 1970s he started up the Huntsman Marine Science Centre. Its christening, I’m told, involved outdoor video presentations, bigwigs and a real submarine.

The John I knew was near the very end of his career and struggled to keep up. But keep up he did—with passion. John was the keeper of the Huntsman flame and did not suffer fools gladly. To say he could be temperamental at times would be an understatement.

I remember running into that side of him one beautiful spring morning. I was showing a video in the Huntsman boardroom about the state of today’s oceans. The video, Altered Oceans, was produced by the LA Times and documented ocean acidification, the giant plastic garbage swirl in the mid-Pacific and more. About halfway through I turned to John and asked, “What do you think?” He stood up and muttered, “Junk science,” and walked out.

The incident bothered me. I respected John’s opinion and his dismissiveness hurt. It wasn’t until seeing the news of his passing that I figured it out. I realized that for all his adventure and vision, John was an innately conservative man—in the best sense. John saw himself in the role of conservator, educator and consensus-builder.

People will undoubtedly eulogize John the professional man and John the family man. But the John I knew believed that motivated, cooperative individuals could actually save the world. I have to admit to sharing that view, which makes his loss all the greater.

And I now understand why John couldn’t accept that LA Times documentary. I don’t think John could allow himself to believe human beings would destroy something as vast as the ocean he loved. To the end I think John believed that science and industry—working with the public—could manage “the commons.”

I sincerely hope he’s right, though recent scientific evidence stirs up grave misgivings. But if we follow John’s lead, we won’t just sit here waiting for things to happen, we’ll get up and do something.

That “something” could be a wonderful challenge for John’s beloved Huntsman. The oceans are indeed compromised. The ocean story in this region is compelling.

Under John’s watch the Huntsman crew—led by Fred Whorisky, Bill Robertson, Bill Smith, Mike Henderson, Sandra Clark, Tracey Dean, Muriel Jarvis, Gerhard Pohle, Lou Van Guelpen and many others—has rebuilt the physical operation, forged new partnerships with companies such as Paturel and created new programs such as the New Brunswick grade six outreach program. When the new aquarium opens this July, a new era will begin at the Huntsman, as John Anderson’s passing marks an ending.

By design the new Huntsman mandate will be outreach—and saving the oceans. These two things are leagues way from the bricks and mortar build-out over the past five years at the Huntsman—and the parallel rebuild happening at the neighbouring St. Andrews Biological Station.

Capital improvements are never a guarantee of operational success. Staff cuts will always be a possibility at the Biological Station, and the Huntsman itself will have to attract at least twice the visitors of any other attraction in St. Andrews to remain financially healthy (though its industrial science operations could go a long way to offset any shortfalls in tourism visitations).

But still, it will be a tightrope walk. The Huntsman’s future will depend on corporate contracts and corporate largess. Yet a “save the oceans” educational mission could just put it at odds with its corporate sponsors, such as aquaculture companies.

The Huntsman, like so many not-for-profit environmental organizations, will have to define—and clearly state—its ethical mandate to the public as it moves forward.

Unlike many organizations, the Huntsman is fortunate to have two very good role models to whom they might turn in forming either ethical proposition. Both Dr. A.G. Huntsman and Dr. Anderson were visionaries and innovators. A.G. Huntsman spearheaded the research in the 1920s that led to inventions such as the world’s first fast-frozen fish fillets as well as pioneering research into ocean life. John Anderson pioneered partnerships that led to the twin-campus University of New Brunswick and the multi-university partnership that led to the creation of the Huntsman.

Moving into the future—and given the environmental challenges facing us—the new Huntsman leaders might ask themselves, “What would John Anderson do? What would A.G. Huntsman do?”

I’d love to know, wouldn’t you?

Towns, highways, hotels and other attractions

2011-03-21T19:06:00.000-07:00

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The recent local editorials about St. Andrews’ storied Algonquin Hotel got some of it right. The Algonquin is losing its management company, the Fairmont. And the hotel is tired.

What the editorials didn’t tell you is that the Fairmont chain is the final version of Canadian Pacific Hotels, which has been operating the Algonquin, on and off, since 1903. So, the town of St. Andrews is losing a long-term—and historic—partner. It’s the end of an era.

That era began with a group of American businessmen from Boston, who built the Algonquin in 1889. By 1903 they’d sold the hotel, lock-stock-and-barrel to CP. Eleven years later the hotel burned down, and was rebuilt and expanded into the Tudor-style hotel we see today. For more on its illustrious history, check out David Sullivan’s book on the hotel (www.pendleburypress.ca).

So why is the hotel’s history important? Well, it has more to do with the history of transportation and technology than the hotel. The Algonquin was only built because of the rail line to St. Andrews.

By the 1950s highways had replaced the railway as the main mode of passenger transportation, and by the 1970s the writing was on the wall. Passenger rail service was a thing of the past, and CP was getting out of the hotel ownership business, though they’d continue managing them. By 1984 the Province of New Brunswick had purchased the Algonquin, ostensibly because there wasn’t any other buyer available. No one but the Province could afford the white elephant on the hill.

It was a losing proposition. Even with a new addition added that year, the hotel was tired. And has stayed tired. Most of the rooms in the main part of the hotel are closed in the winter and have no air conditioning in the summer. To say that these rooms are small and outdated is an understatement, not to mention over-priced.

To blame the government for not keeping up the hotel is a bit disingenuous. There was no way to keep it up—while justifying it as a business. It simply didn’t earn enough to allow for reinvestment. CP knew that. Even so, the Province ponied up the cash to add a signature golf course to the facility, hoping that would draw more visitors. But that has proven to be a money-pit as well, and failed to attract enough visitors.

Meanwhile, the efforts of the residents of St. Andrews have done little over the past two decades to increase traffic to the town. So now all is riding on the future of the hotel, and finding an investor willing to shell out between $15 to $20 million on a money-losing old hotel with low occupancy.

So what is the future? Well, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message.” And the original (and long gone) medium for the hotel was the railway. The current media are highways and the Internet.

The new divided highway is going in as we speak, and it will smoothly carry people past the St. Andrews turnoff at 100+ kph, just as it bypasses St. Stephen with a sleek new border crossing. The only local beneficiary seems to be St. George, which has excellent visual optics from the new road and great on and off points—one with an actual gas station and service centre! With a bit of a development plan, St. George could actually do some tourism business.

But it’s the Internet that signals the real change. People now shop globally for tourism experiences. And the word “experiences” says it all. Today’s travellers want something to do, not just something to see. When they arrive at a destination, they come with expectations, and their own personal experience (both online and real world) to shape those expectations.

The prime experience in Charlotte County is the ocean. And whale watching is the easiest and best way to access that experience. Sea kayaking comes next. These are active experiences. But there is no main attraction—such as a national park—to draw hundreds of thousands of new visitors to the area. Instead, the Province invested its money into the Algonquin.

A “Passamaquoddy Bay National Marine Park” would be the kind of thing that would make sense for the entire region. It would give the old Algonquin a reason to live. It would add greatly needed dimension (and international marketing power) to the new Huntsman Discovery Centre. It would give new relevance to the towns of St. George, St. Andrews and St. Stephen as waterfront towns, and bring new and much needed attention to Deer Island Campobello and Grand Manan.

National parks of this type can draw in excess of 2 million people a year. And a national marine park is the kind of thing that lends itself to online marketing.

Why is the marine park a good online fit? Because the Internet is about information. (That’s why it’s the called the “information highway,” duh.) So connect the information dots. The world’s oceans are in crisis. And Passamaquoddy Bay is perhaps the most fertile body of water in the northern latitudes. The life in our bay is beyond world-class. Learning about ocean life is critical to our future. And I don’t mean our local future. I mean the future of all of us on the planet.

Now, if that isn’t a marketing opportunity, I don’t know what is.

Loading the ocean economy to collapse

2011-03-14T20:45:00.000-07:00

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As far as I could tell, I was the only one on the block who got through the winter without a snow blower or a contract with a plow-truck owner.

Sure, my shoveling saved some fossil fuel but I couldn’t resist checking out the online classifieds for plow-trucks. And I found one that looked pretty good. It was on Campobello. So I set up a time to see it. The truck was less than I’d expected, but the owner was a nice guy, a fisherman.

He talked about fishing. He was shrimping now, he said, but wasn’t much money in it. He’d only made 500 bucks this year—though last year’s lobster season had been good. Without unemployment insurance he didn’t know how he would have made it.

Good for him, I thought, that our provincial political rep is also a fisherman from nearby Campobello Island. But then again, politicians don’t grow fish. Or do they?

On the way back I tuned the radio to David Suzuki and the young Canadian movie star Ellen Page, who played the lead in the hit movie Juno. One of her comments caught my attention. She said, “The oceans today have more acidity than in the last 20 million years.” Could that be true, I wondered.

So I did a quick search on the Net to see if she got her fact straight. Turns out she did. A 2009 National Geographic report quoted Thomas Lovejoy (the former chief biodiversity advisor to the World Bank), who said, “the acidity of the oceans will more than double in the next 40 years. This rate is 100 times faster than any changes in ocean acidity in the last 20 million years, making it unlikely that marine life can somehow adapt to the changes.”

Oh-oh. Sounds a bit ominous. And it is. Because it turns out we’re causing it. As we cough out more carbon dioxide through our collective smokestacks and tailpipes, the world’s oceans absorb more than 25 percent of all the CO2 we generate. It does this through the magic of biological and solubility pumps.

But thanks to fossil fuel we’re pushing out more CO2 than the ocean can absorb.

And our total output of CO2 is somewhere north of 30 billion tonnes a year. All that CO2 upsets the natural chemical balance of the ocean, creating—acidity.

Here’s what good old Wikipedia has to say about the effects: “research from the University of Bristol, published in the journal Nature Geoscience in February 2010, compared current rates of ocean acidification with the greenhouse event at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, about 55 million years ago when surface ocean temperatures rose by 5-6 degrees Celsius, during which time no catastrophe is seen in surface ecosystems, yet bottom-dwelling organisms in the deep ocean experienced a major extinction.”

That isn’t all. The Wiki page went on to say, “the current acidification is on path to reach levels higher than any seen in the last 65 million years. The study also found that the current rate of acidification is “ten times the rate that preceded the mass extinction 55 million years ago,” and Ridgwell [prof., U of B] commented that the present rate "is an almost unprecedented geological event.” A National Research Council study released in April 2010 likewise concluded that “the level of acid in the oceans is increasing at an unprecedented rate.”

This projection seems to jibe with an earlier report from Dalhousie’s Dr. Boris Worm, who was pilloried for his prediction a few years ago that the world’s fishery would collapse by 2048.

This isn’t the first time human technology will have wiped out a fishery (though it would certainly be the most catastrophic).

From 1960 to 1990 the world’s high-tech factory trawler fleet wiped out the Atlantic cod fishery. Instead of heeding the advice of local in-shore fisherman who foresaw the collapse in their declining catches in the early 1980s, the Canadian government and its Department of Fisheries and Oceans kept the industry going until 1992 before declaring a total moratorium. By that time, as we all know, it was too late. And the cod stocks have yet to recover.

Turns out that a quicker response by Canadian politicians may have resulted in a lot more fish today.

Instead, some 12,000 to 20,000 people lost their livelihoods and the federal government spent an estimated $2 billion in social welfare to offset the economic carnage.

Well, here we are, 20 years into the future, and it’s déjà vu all over again. And it’s not just the fishery we’re going to lose this time. CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change will disrupt just about everything we do on the planet. If ever there was a time for politicians to take action, it’s now. But it’s clear they won’t, at least not in time.

The collective environmental problem seems just too big for politicians to wrap their tiny heads around. How could our local politician, the fisherman, possibly convince his esteemed colleagues that New Brunswick has to completely reinvent itself to build a new post-climate change, post-fossil fuel economy?

Not that I’d discourage him trying. In fact I’d gladly roll up my sleeves and help. And I’d bet there are a few unemployed fishermen who might, too. Before it’s too late.

You and Andy Warhol fighting for bandwidth

2011-03-07T12:01:00.000-08:00

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You can get more money or more stuff. But you can’t get more time. Or so the old adage goes. And it’s true; despite modern health care, we’re only here for a short time.

So it comes down to making choices about what we value. But how do we make those choices? And what influences those choices?

There’s a cool website I’ve mentioned before: www.worldometers.info. It will show you that the world’s population is growing by one person every split second. By the time I finished writing this sentence and checking the site again the world’s population had grown by 325 people. There are a lot of new customers out there.

Worldometers tells us that there have already been 180,263 new book titles published so far this year—that in just a little over two months. It seems that since the advent of the personal computer everyone is a writer. Given that maybe only one in 10,000 manuscripts gets published, how can the poor editor choose the best manuscripts, and worse yet, how can the hapless reader choose a single good book from this tidal wave of publishing?

In 2004 the New York Times reported: “Everyone is reading the same 20 books,” Paul Slovak, the associate publisher of Viking, complains—a problem most attribute to the shrinking press coverage for new books. “It's become a winner-take-all situation.”

This year alone the world audience will have a choice of over 1 million new titles, and yet only 20 books will hit it big. Those are pretty poor odds for a writer. No wonder an endorsement from Oprah is so important. Her choice makes the difference between the remaindered bin and a best seller.

But why is Oprah’s selection any more valuable than, say, yours? No surprise. Oprah has access to bandwidth. By bandwidth, I mean a very large pipeline to the public.

As most of us know, bandwidth is a technical electronics term for the carrying capacity of a communications system. Thin telephone wires of have a bandwidth limit, or a limit to the amount of data that can be pushed through that narrow pipe. Engineers work hard to design work-around solutions to increase the carrying capacity of existing wires—so we can get more information into hour homes.

Today’s telephone system runs on basically the same wires it did 50 years ago. Yet today’s high speed service will deliver high speed internet service to two computers as well as an online movie to my Blu-Ray device and a long distance telephone call—all at the same time. Somehow that ‘twisted pair’ of phone lines got a big dose of steroids. That’s bandwidth increase.

Your brain has bandwidth, too. You can only absorb so much before your brain overloads. It’s like drinking from a fire-hose. So in today’s high-information world, we’re all forced to edit.

And there’s a tremendous amount of competition for the bandwidth that actually gets inside our heads. But that’s increasingly difficult to do in an ever-diffusing and atomized media universe in which we can choose between print, radio and TV, telephones and the galaxy of tools on the Internet—e-mail, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, websites and so on.

Not only that, we’ve become our own content generators. While just 20 years ago we sat passively in front of a TV, we now create our own things to narrowcast to the entire world. Our Facebook pages transmit our impulses, interests and idiosyncrasies, minute-by-minute to anyone who’s watching.

All our history, all our present and much of our future plans are available online. There is so much weird and wonderful personal creativity on the Net that it makes Andy Warhol look like a rank amateur. But for the fact that he’s famous, he’d barely be noticed today.

That said, we’re now awash in information no one actually wants—or knows how to process. What happens to a global society in which the communications bandwidth is completely stuffed to the max?

Well, most of it becomes irrelevant. Like Warhol—or the 20 best selling novels this year—only a handful of mega-brands will sell. Last year’s best seller was Stieg Larsson. Next year, who knows?

Ironically, even though we’ve never before had so much choice—from communication to travel destinations to consumer products—we’re more susceptible than ever to group behaviour. Our massively interlinked communications networks may actually amplify the effects of mass behaviour, rather than increase personal choice.

What we are losing over time are qualified, independent arbiters of choice, that is, the people we can trust to help us make informed choices. Sure, these reviewers still exist. But there’s no way they can keep up with the tidal wave. They’re drowning and disappearing. Only big corporate interests have the complex systems necessary to keep up with trends and exploit them. And this includes big governments.

Their well-funded special interest agencies—aimed at reshaping the messages—are now filling up our bandwidth. We’ve successfully moved from Andy Warhol’s experimental world to Glenn Beck’s one-dimensional universe. Unfortunately, that adds up to a few big influences and a whole lot of noise.

Deconstructing Canada: why Canadians don’t care

2011-02-28T12:00:00.000-08:00

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Canada still seems the same. There’s a blizzard coming, the schools are closed and the kids are at home yet again as I write. But the Canada we know and love is changing, and changing rapidly.

Apparently the change now comes down to two words: Stephen Harper.

Harper’s new Canada is a more politically and geographically divided place. In this Canada, the “have” provinces get to keep a more of their resource revenues. Federal transfer payments to “have not” provinces flatten or fall while “have” provinces prosper. And the West and Quebec now cooperate to reduce federal control over their affairs, while the rest of us wonder about national unity.

This new Canada has a lot to do with the new world. As we run lower on fossil fuels, the big money and big politics follow the bouncing ball. In Canada’s case the ball lands on the vast tar sand and natural gas reserves in Western Canada.

Which explains Canada’s reduced role in offsetting climate change, as we saw when the Harper-controlled Senate killed the Climate Change Accountability Act last November, even though the bill— aimed at reducing Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions to 25 percent less than 1990 levels—had been passed by the House of Commons.

NDP leader Jack Layton declared it “a very sad day for Canada, for the environment, and for the role of Canada on the international stage in dealing with the crisis of climate change."

But Canadians no longer play within the bounds of international fairness they once helped shape. The latest example is the Harper government’s politically-motivated reduction of international aid funding to Kairos, a move that landed cabinet minister Bev Oka in the hot seat.

But that pales in comparison to allowing Canadian forces to hand over our prisoners to Afghan forces, and in the case of Omar Khadr, allowing a 15-year-old Canadian citizen and alleged under-age combatant in Afghanistan to be held without rights and tortured by U.S. forces for seven years in the Guantanamo Bay military prison. The Canadian government—including the preceding Liberal government—did not meet its constitutional duty to petition the U.S. for Khadr’s extradition to Canada. That’s not the kind of Canada we learned about in school.

This begs the question of why we’re in Afghanistan in the first place, supporting America’s venture to secure the region and siphon off Iraqi oil.

Then there’s the $9 billion purchase of U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets, a move that some experts claim will provoke the Russians to challenge Canadian Arctic sovereignty. Could it be there’s more oil up there?

And Harper’s tougher stance isn’t just international. Punishment is a bigger deal at home, too. Even though crime has decreased by 22 percent since 1999, the practice of offsetting one day of pre-trial jail-time for two days of jail-time after conviction was eliminated last year, and the Tackling Violent Crime Act introduced harsher minimum sentences for gun-related crimes. These two bills are expected to increase the number of inmates by at least 3,400 over the next three years.

To house them the Harper government is expanding 20 prison facilities over the next few months—at a price of $2 billion. Do we need them? According to Harper, “Does it cost money? Yes. Is it worth it? Just ask a victim.” Yes, but with crime rates falling, why is our government promoting fear and spending our money on prisons—and spending less on reintegrating offenders?

Perhaps there’s a business case for it. The Harper government is sticking to its promise to lower corporate taxes to 15 percent next year. But the tax cuts will rob the public coffers of $12+ billion a year by 2013–2014—ongoing.

The majority of Canadians disagree with corporate cuts, including Jack Layton who says, “With 1.5 million Canadians still unemployed, growing inequality and with seniors’ poverty doubling since the last round of service cuts, now is not the time to spend another $12 billion on corporate tax reductions.” So, facing the prospect of high unemployment long term, maybe Harper is simply preparing for us an increase in crime.

Okay, but does all this add up to a deconstructed Canada? Yes, when one looks at the erosion of civil rights. The $1 billion Canadians spent on the G8 conference in Toronto last August resulted in house raids without warrants, police abuse and mass roundups leading to over 900 people arrested, the largest mass arrest in Canadian history, all tacitly sanctioned by the Canadian government.

And why don’t Canadians care? First, Harper currently controls the discourse, so we’re paying attention to his issues, not our own. Second, he tends to use the force of his office—and not parliament—to invoke change. Third, the opposition parties haven’t offered a more rational vision for the future. Finally, since the financial meltdown, we’re all more interested in keeping what we have rather than fighting a government that seems quite capable of turning on us—if we’re not loyal supporters.

This “new Canada” is beginning to look a lot like a buffed up version of Bush-league America. And that seems distinctly unCanadian to me.

From high fidelity to endless temptation

2011-02-21T17:36:00.000-08:00

Maybe it comes from having too much time on my hands. Winter is hanging on forever and I’m bored out of my mind, especially in a summer tourist town where nothing happens for six months at a stretch.

So I work to keep myself entertained: I play connect the dots. And that’s what I doing while I was fixing supper last night. While my daughter was listening to her iPod without earphones, all I could make out was the annoying lightweight candy buzzing from the tiny speakers.

It wasn’t the song or the type of music; I generally like her music. It was the machine. The speaker only delivers an approximation of music. And even with the earphones downloaded music quality isn’t up to par; it’s a lot like watching movies online.

Back to fidelity and beyond

A half a century ago the big news in audio was high fidelity. Just what is fidelity? According to my handy-dandy computer thesaurus, fidelity is: faithfulness, loyalty, true-heartedness, trustworthiness, dependability, formal troth (in the case of marriage), accuracy, precision, correctness, closeness, and authenticity. So I guess high fidelity would be a super version of all that.

The Blu-Ray DVD format is definitely high fidelity. But somehow Blu-Ray disc sales haven’t lived up to the manufacturers’ projections. And regular DVD sales are declining, and they’re relatively high fidelity, too. Instead, more people are downloading movies directly from the Internet. And downloaded movies are definitely lo-fi, even worse than digital music downloads.

Back to the dot connecting, I’m reading a book coincidentally titled Connected. In it the authors look into the mechanics of social networking—the hot new suburb of sociology since the advent of Google, MySpace and Facebook.

What authors and Harvard profs Christakis and Fowler propose is the idea that “your friends and your friends friends affect everything you feel, think and do” and they say so right on the front cover. Some of their evidence is remarkable—and initially confusing. For example, they claim you’ll never date the ex-partner of your ex-partner. Or if your friend’s friend’s friend gains weight you will too. But their evidence suggests otherwise.

Applied to regional culture, that may explain why, for example, we New Brunswickers are more prone to obesity or failing economies. Our regional friendship networks amplify these trends.

Weighing the value of fidelity against other options

There’s another aspect of fidelity that connected a few more dots. Say, for example, someone is involved in a long distance relationship with someone who isn’t divorced yet, and both have been married multiple times. Their situation raises the obvious question of fidelity, as in why so many people in our society no longer stay with one partner for life.

Why, I wondered, are we so willing to trade off fidelity for something else? And what are we trading it for? I realized that fidelity becomes less important as the number of choices increases.

When choice is limited we tend to value fidelity. A couple with six kids has a lot fewer options when it comes to considering divorce and remarriage. With a responsibility to six dependents the choice of potential partners is limited. It’s simply easier for the couple to stay together.

But on Facebook choice outweighs fidelity. The kid with 243 friends on Facebook can afford to betray one of them, especially if that friend is one of those remote, online types.

The same is true in any other high-choice environments. In entertainment, variety outweighs fidelity nearly every time. We’re willing to trade quality for choice. And that’s turned out to be a windfall for businesses like Netflix, YouTube and iTunes. Quality is subordinate to choice. Although we can find things that have creative qualities on those media, the media themselves are low-quality mechanisms.

This trend suggests disturbing patterns for future human behaviour, My kids are already accustomed to the lo-fi world of infinite choice. They live in a culture of endless, instant gratification. But as the world runs low on resources, that lo-fi / hi-choice imprinting may be a real liability. Particularly when the job ahead will rely on their ability to develop elegant hi-fi solutions to emerging problems—as in creating hi-fi transportation systems or food production systems or energy generating systems as we empty the world’s fossil fuel tank.

But technology—and human behaviour—is never an “either-or” proposition. The computer didn’t produce a paperless society. Instead, we’re consuming more paper than ever, which is a chilling prospect as the developing world catches up to our levels of consumption. And it’s not just paper; it’s everything.

Maybe we can combine our new knowledge of social networks with the idea of fidelity (loyalty and quality) to avert the looming ecological disaster ahead. But the danger of giving ourselves over to a diffused social network may form an unbreakable habit looking only at interconnections and not what’s happening in the actual world around us. Sure, we’ll talk about the problems, but will we be capable of doing anything about them—particularly if it means restricting our choices?

Good question. Have a friend of your friend get back to me…

Fidelity of personal expression

On a personal level, fidelity versus choice is the difference between a life in which every action is an intention versus a life were every action is an impulse. We all fit somewhere along this scale. And we all deal with this in our own life experiences. It dramatically shapes how others see us.

Here's an example of what I mean: I've recently been looking at Canadian painter Alex Colville's paintings again. The man's art is incredibly high fidelity. And he produces the work in the same high fidelity manner, only producing three works a year, and carefully composing and executing each. The man is also very conservative, both politically and otherwise. His personal life is also framed by fidelity, married to the same woman for over 60 years.

We might compare him, on the other hand, to Picasso. That man was all about the expression of choice and the range of humanity. He was a philanderer, a communist, a humanist among other things. His personal politics and his life were left-leaning in the extreme.

Somewhere in the middle of the range Jackson Pollock tried, I think, to reconcile these two directions, fidelity and choice with his splash paintings, which were both conservative and liberal, if that makes any sense. But Pollock caught the new dynamism of social networks—the complexity of choice—now available to modern humans.

Unifying fidelity with diversity

Interestingly, there are scientists who believe that Pollack's work, which at first seems completely random, is actually an amalgam of fractals, and they use the presence of fractals in Pollack's work to distinguish authentic Pollacks from forgeries.

This self-organizing behaviour in seemingly random systems is perhaps the deepest feature of all life. And within that self-organization is a fidelity not only to the living organism, but to all other species attached to it—all making endless evolutionary choices with, well, fidelity.

Diversity seems to require fidelity in nature, as much as it also strives to break fidelity—to cheat—in order to make evolutionary progress. And in an odd way, it's the same in our own lives. Our creativity depends on both fidelity and betrayal, the seeking of other, more advantageous, options.

The trick, of course, is knowing when to use one or the other approach.

Too few hopeful markers for the future

2011-02-13T14:57:00.000-08:00

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His name must have been intentionally ironic. Mark Twain was a genius in his own time, which became clear as I watched the Ken Burns documentary on the man.

Born Samuel L. Clemens, Twain became the iconographer of his time, showing Americans for the first time how they appeared from the centre of their own universe—as opposed to being crude satellites of European culture. Tom Sawyer, and later Huck Finn, pointed the way toward the creation of a new American mythological hero, which led to all the American heroes of fiction and the movies in the 20th Century.

The irony of Twain’s name comes from the idea of plumbing the depths. “Mark twain” was a call to a riverboat pilot indicating a depth of two fathoms or 12 feet, safe water by Mississippi River standards. “Mark Twain,” the author, explored the unsafe depths of the emerging American psyche following the Civil War, especially with respect to racism. Yet the thing that he marked most was the exuberant growth of the American enterprise: its industry, its new-found self-confidence, its astonishingly hopeful arc of growth.

So here we are, nearing the end of that American project. The results of the era, powered by fossil fuels, have been catastrophic. Our climate is changing dramatically. More animal species are becoming extinct than at any time since the last great prehistoric extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period 65.5 million years ago. Scientists estimate that about half of all species on the planet will be extinct by the year 2100. Life is dying. Our waste fills the oceans, as in the Pacific Trash Vortex, which is now the size of Manitoba and Ontario combined.

Compared to Twain’s rapid growth era, we’re facing rapid decline. Who are our modern sages? Here in Canada there are a few, notably Margaret Atwood and John Ralston Saul. Both are establishment figures, but at the same time both are outspoken critics of the corporate sector.

Atwood has written three post-Apocalyptic novels, the first being The Handmaid’s Tale followed by Oryx and Crake and just recently, The Year of the Flood. In Flood, Atwood takes the reader into a depopulated world run by cloning corporations, religious zealots and misguided utopians—hardly the type of enchanting, endearing characters drawn by Twain over a century ago.

And it’s this difference—the sense of an emerging decline of expectations—that defines the work of our new sages, starkly expressed in Cormac McCarthy’s bleak, end of times novel, The Road.

Our current crop of politicians presents an even more pessimistic picture. In Canada, we have academic Michael Ignatieff on the so-called left supporting the interests of the Bay Street big business boys, and ideologue Stephen Harper on the real right supporting the Bay Street boys and the Alberta energy sector. The only question in the next election will be, “do we want our big business lite, or big business straight up?”

I doubt there’ll be much debate about the most serious issues we face—in particular the looming and frightening prospects of crossing Peak Oil, which is now thought to have already happened in 2005, with projections pointing toward a nearly empty tank around 2040 or so. How, we might ask our politicians, are we going to survive gasoline prices that will climb 5 to 10 times higher than what we’re paying now? How will we get to work, heat our homes, grow our food 30 short years from now?

While Canadians politely discuss issues such as job creation and mortgage rates, other regions are taking their frustrations to the street in a personal way. Ordinary people in North Africa and the Middle East want an end to rule by corrupt elites and to have a say in determining the future of their region. They clearly know, as we should from two ongoing wars, one in Afghanistan and the other in Iraq, that the future is based on access to energy, or the lack thereof.

The fear in the West, of course, is the increasing influence of fundamental Islam in the Middle East (and over “our” oil). Religion has historically laid the philosophical foundation for civilizations. So, how do our religious foundations inform us?

Philosopher Richard Tarnas writes, “Finally, in the wake of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, this privileged position of the human vis-à-vis the rest of creation was assumed and expanded in entirely secular terms—here too, partly as a result of forces set up in motion by the Western religious legacy—as the modern self-progressed in its unprecedented development of autonomy and self-definition.”

Simply put, Tarnas is observing the growing separation of the individual from the rest of life on the planet. He is referring to the Biblical idea of God giving us dominion over all things, and the end result of that entitlement. An entitlement we might now view as unwarranted.

If the philosophy of Twain’s time was attached to growth, today’s philosophy is strangled by a corporatism aimed squarely at self-indulgence.

And, at the heart of it, our addiction to self-interest is proving to be unsustainable for the entire human species. So, where is our Huck Finn to show us a new direction?

On media, loyalty and patronage closer to home

2011-02-07T11:24:00.000-08:00

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Nothing local is real any more. All of us are living in remote suburbs connected by media superhighways to the centre of the universe, wherever that is.

The things that might catch our interest this week are happening in places like Egypt or Tunisa or the Upper Amazon or Hollywood. We learn about these events from media such as Yahoo News (you can just imagine what someone 50 years ago would have thought about that), Fox News, and the “mainstream” media such as our own CBC, CTV and National Post.

Sorting out the important news from the irrelevant junk seems to be a lot more complicated than it was 20 years ago. Entertainment and business seemed to have merged with the news, blurring lines between serious reporting and mere gossip. So how can we simplify the picture?

Two important features of the media have changed.

The first is the proliferation of new technology, which has spawned new ways of communicating—in real time—around the globe.

The second is the consolidation of media ownership into fewer and fewer hands—and the celebrity status of the news business itself. Today, most of our media diet is now being supplied by colossal ventures such as Rupert Murdock’s empire, the Thomson-Reuters group, and a tiny company gone large, Quebecor.

Barely heard of it? According to its website, Quebecor is now Canada’s largest newspaper chain. It owns 37 dailies and 34 weeklies, plus a handful of other publications. It’s also into cable TV, broadcasting and the Internet in a big way. Quebecor is not merely Canadian. Quebecor is the largest printing company in the world. Yes, the world. Quebecor World operates in 17 countries with some 35,000 people on staff. So, when Quebecor’s owner—Pierre Karl Péladeau—wants something, he usually gets his way.

Well, last year Pierre wanted to create Sun TV News, something like Canada’s version of Fox News. So he hired 35-year old Kory Teneycke and made him VP of development. Now, you might think that Kory must be a pretty bright young guy to have risen this high so early in his career. Well, maybe…

But Kory started off in his new post with a bang, declaring that “Canadian TV news today is narrow, its complacent and it’s politically correct.” He went on to say that, “It’s bland and boring, and Canadians, as a result, have largely tuned out.” He claimed that the new Sun TV News would be “unapologetically patriotic” and “controversially Canadian.” Read: Fox-like, and well right of centre.

What Kory and his boss, Pierre, were after was Category 1 broadcast licence from the federal government (CRTC), which would put them on every cable network across the country, just like CBC, which earns $65 million from its licence. To put that idea in perspective, Canada’s largest private broadcaster, CTV, rates a Category 2, giving cable carriers the option of not carrying it, and earning it “only” $15 million in licensing fees annually.

It was a bold move. But Kory had an ace up his sleeve. As Prime Minister Harper’s communications director, he’d had direct access to the PM, and had already lobbied Harper directly on Quebecor’s behalf before leaving to work for Péladeau. And it all might have worked out well for Quebecor, but for the fact that Kory couldn’t seem to keep his mouth shut.

Among other unrelated public faux pas, he challenged journalists with taunts like, “We’re taking on the mainstream media… We will not be a state broadcaster offering boring news by bureaucrats, for elites, and paid for by taxpayers,” and was implicated in sabotaging a petition aimed at blocking Sun TV News.

The mainstream media reacted predictably. By September he’d resigned from Quebecor. Interestingly, he was replaced by Luc Lavoie, former spokesman for former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Then, in a surprise move, Teneycke rejoined Quebecor at Sun TV News last month.

On a local note, when Teneycke left Harper’s office, he was replaced by one John Williamson—our local federal Conservative candidate, who himself got entangled in media controversy when MP Greg Thompson apparently used taxpayer-funded mailing services to officially endorse young Williamson’s candidacy.

Why should this matter? Because we deep into the process of degrading our democratic processes. With ever-fewer media owners we are losing our independent, critical, clear-sighted news reporting—one that should be at arm’s length from special interest. And with ever-larger media conglomerates, we are in danger of getting more news reflecting the political views of the owners, who have ever-greater lobbying clout with our politicians.

Somehow, we’ve slipped into a mindset that accepts that both government and media are simply businesses, one public, one private. But nothing could be further from the truth. Our government still belongs to us. It is not there to make us money, or to always operate in a business-like manner. It is there to protect our interests—all our interests—whether we are rich or poor.

Isn’t it time we stopped enabling the owners and managers of large businesses in their efforts to recruit our politicians as delivery boys for their corporate agendas?

Or have we forgotten that all candidates are local, and so are our votes?

Driving government through the rearview mirror

2011-01-31T11:59:00.000-08:00

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Warning: this post is regionally specific. For out-of-region readers, New Brunswick is a state of mind located north of Maine. It has a population of just 750,000 people spread across some 28,000 square miles, and is the only province in officially bilingual Canada that is, well, officially bilingual. Nearly a third of the population is French-speaking. A large segment of the population remains rural and over half of the population is Roman Catholic. And so...

The problem with New Brunswick is, it doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up—even though it has one of the oldest elected governments in the country.

In 1758, for those of us who aren’t history buffs, Nova Scotia held the first general election in pre-constitutional Canada. This was followed by Prince Edward Island in 1773, and New Brunswick in 1785. These three provinces originally planned to get together at the Charlottetown Conference in 1864 to form the Maritime Union. The idea for the union was to consolidate the region’s power with respect to trading with the U.S. Eastern Seaboard.

Why is this important? Because Ontario and Quebec crashed the party, and hijacked the agenda which resulted in the creation of a newer, bigger union, the Dominion of Canada in 1867.

This wasn’t necessarily a good thing for New Brunswick. Within a matter of months, the new central government erected federal trade barriers, which upset the historic trade relationship between the Maritime Provinces and New England. A union that had been conceived to help the East Coast trade economy ended up hurting it.

In some ways, New Brunswick never fully recovered. The province relied on shipbuilding to keep its economy going, but by the end of the 19th Century, wooden boats were on their way out. People began to leave the region to look for work elsewhere—which became a recurring provincial theme, especially during and following the Great Depression.

It seems that, from Confederation onward, successive provincial governments have lacked the ability to create a new vision for revitalizing New Brunswick. Fortunately, over time, the Connors, Irving and McCain families managed to create large, vertically integrated companies that carried the province into the modern economic era.

There have been two exceptional—and successful—attempts to reinvigorate the province. Starting in the 1950s Louis Robichaud began a process of social equalization in health care, education and bilingualism, which has proven to be an enduring legacy. And throughout the 1980s, Frank McKenna created a pro-business development program that involved tax incentives for new business, small business creation, an open door policy for the premier’s office and an aggressive promote-New Brunswick communications campaign. Louis had a vision of equal opportunity for all, and Frank had a vision of a province open for business.

Despite the two successes, I contend that the Province of New Brunswick still doesn’t know where it’s going. It’s somehow still struggling with the culture of economic defeat it inherited from Confederation—a backwater province operating under the shadows of Ontario and Quebec.

Rather than having a vision for the province, recently elected parties of both colours seem to either have vague wish lists or vague austerity programs, depending on the general economic climate and the availability of federal cash.

These are tactical reactions. By tactics, I mean pulling the levers of government to manage “the problems.” The proposed sale of NB Power was one of those tactics that got the last government into deep doo-doo. The new Progressive Conservative government is heading down the tactical road with its plans to slash civil service jobs and implement highway tolls. It’s a move that two senior economists, Brian Steeves, former economist with the Finance Department and Mike Wong, former chief economist at NB Power, say is unwarranted and may do more harm than good. Better to undo some of the past tax breaks the Liberals handed out (which will amount to $380 million next year) or to simply wait and ride out the recession.

Yes, good advice guys. But still tactical, just pulling on different levers. Where, we should ask, is the strategy? And what do I mean by a strategy? A strategy is an “own the top of the mountain” approach. And the top of the mountain involves three very basic resources: energy, the environment and human enterprise.

Here’s an example of what I mean (repeated again, for those who haven’t been reading this space over the past six months). We, all of us on the planet, are facing a looming energy transition—from fossil fuels to other stuff. I propose that a new Maritime Union focused on transmitting and distributing the vast energy resource of Labrador’s Churchill Falls would create a huge new opportunity to export power to the U.S. through New Brunswick. But instead of getting in the game first, the governments of Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia are already working together on this deal—without us. Is anybody listening?

So far I haven’t been impressed by David Alward’s limp biscuit approach to New Brunswick’s future, any more than I was by Graham’s and Lord’s before him. Alward came to power, not because his party had a strategic vision, but because the public reacted to the previous government’s bad tactics. Invoking more management tactics won’t create a better future.

Here’s a tip to the driver. Mr. Alward, looking back through the rearview mirror and constantly adjusting it isn’t the brightest way to move this bus ahead.

Why kids get caught in snowstorms

2011-01-24T12:08:00.000-08:00

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As a parent, two things caught my eye this week. The first was a letter from our kids’ school. The second was a story on the front page of last week’s paper. Both were about snow.

The principal’s letter outlined the new protocols for school closures in inclement weather. Parents were advised that closures would be communicated via “talk-mail” and e-mail, with instructions on how to access our talk-mail remotely. The instructions were pretty clear.

The front-page newspaper story was the darker side of the story. It was about the two kids near Blacks Harbour who were let off the school bus to walk home in the middle of a snowstorm because the bus couldn’t get up the road to their house. The kids walked to a neighbour’s house a kilometer up the road and called their parents from there. The problem was, neither the school nor the bus driver called to notify the parents. But all’s well that ends well; a white knight with a four-wheel drive managed to bring the kids home.

Despite all the protocols, when storms hit things can go wrong. I wondered. What could we do to make things safer? I tried to remember my own childhood.

As far as I can recall there were fewer school closures back then—and this in Northern Ontario with severe winter storms. Most of us walked to school, and through some particularly nasty, face-and-toe-freezing blizzards. So why was it that none of us perished? I don’t know.

Frankly, how we deal with kids in snowstorms is symptomatic of how societies function. It’s clear from school bulletins and newspaper stories that our school system has taken on more responsibility for child-care in our society. The roles of parents, teachers and school administrators have obviously changed over the last 50 years.

In fact the entire fabric of society has changed. Most parents are no longer home during the day, for one thing. Stay-at-home parents are now in the minority. Two-income families and single-parent families are now the norm. Today, many parents plan tight schedules around their work to accommodate their children—meeting them just as they get off the bus. Unforeseen events such as snowstorms can play havoc with these finely tuned schedules.

Finances have conspired to make these tight schedules possible. In a post-production, managerial-consumer society, working mothers are a key component of the modern workforce. Women carry a disproportionate load in the management and clerical functioning of an economy dominated by the service sector. Ironically, as more women entered the workforce prices rose as wages plateaued, leaving family disposable income at much the same levels as it was when it was the single-income family predominated. In short, more of us work—because we have to, just to keep up.

Governments are also financially challenged. As corporations went global and regions became increasingly competitive, tax bases shrank, putting pressure on governments everywhere to cut services. This, of course, resulted in fewer but larger—theoretically more efficient—schools.

Technology made these changes possible. As kids my friends and I walked to school. Schools then were built close to home. Today, kids are bused to and from school, eliminating the distance factor. Students can arrive from 25 kilometers away with little difficulty. And instead of relying on one parent to be home, telecommunications such as cell-phones, voice mail and e-mail have allowed parents and schools to build complex schedules to handle the students.

These school schedules may at first seem to be a parochial issue, they’re not. They reflect the shifting responsibilities that come with global change. Not only are out children more professionally managed, there are fewer of them per family. That means that the future of each family is increasingly focused on the safety of just one or two children, the family’s most precious resources.

Though there are exceptions, it’s no longer the norm for older brothers and sisters to look after the younger ones. Nor is it the norm for grandparents, aunts and uncles worked together as a cooperative to raise a family clan.

As children grow up and move away from home for new opportunities elsewhere, families have become less attached to specific pieces of geography than at any other time in history. Increasingly, we are trained specialists relocating to where our specialty is required. As professionals we rely on other professionals—not family members—to help us raise our kids.

These more highly structured social mechanisms—the outcome of globalization and technology—are more fragile than earlier, more resilient family-based systems. As much as professional systems aim to protect our quality of life, no professional system can replace a tightly-knit community of family and friends.

So in the end, we’re on our own. As the school district’s letter concludes, “Ultimately, parents have the final decision in inclement weather conditions.” And, they might add, in any other matter that might affect our family’s future.

Lectured about our savings by financial profligates

2011-01-18T04:17:00.000-08:00

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Money is the problem. We need more of it, yet we never seem to have enough. So, according to Canada’s minister of finance, Jim Flaherty, we need more savings. To help, he’s going to make it harder for you to borrow on your home, so you, too, can increase your savings.

Hinting that mortgage rates will be going up "sometime”, Flaherty announced that he’ll be reducing mortgage amortization periods from 35 down to 30 years, and he’ll be downsizing the refinancing limit from 90 percent to 85 percent of your home’s value.

To the average worker–homeowner, this may seem like nonsense. But Flaherty says that ordinary Canadians are carrying record levels of debt—now at 148 percent of their income. To translate, a worker earning $100,000 is now carrying $148,000 in debt, which is now higher than her American neighbour’s.

And the problem isn’t only mortgage debt. It’s also the growing use of home-equity lines of credit and loans, which have risen by 170 percent over the past decade and account for 12 percent of all household debt.

The trouble with Flaherty’s solution is, it doesn’t work. He already tried this approach in 2008, reducing the amortization period from 40 to 35 years and downsizing the refinancing limit from 95 to 90 percent. Instead of stimulating personal savings, Canadians borrowed more, and consumer insolvencies have increased by a whopping 22.5 percent from 2007-8—despite the recession.

Flaherty’s approach is technocratic and instrumentalist. There seems to be no vision for building a prosperous Canadian future.

What little vision for the future the Conservatives do have seems to be centred around shoring up U.S. security interests at home and abroad. It’s doubtful that the purchase of American-built F-35 jets for $16 billion over 20 years is going to help the ordinary Canadian, especially when Flaherty himself is trying to cut back on the hiring of civilian military personnel because we can’t afford them.

Nowhere do Flaherty and his Conservatives take direct action to seriously redistribute the increasing disparity of wealth between Canada’s rich and the rest of us. The only thing that Flaherty’s tinkering with mortgage regulations does is protect the interests of the banks.

The real problem facing Canadians is the growing gap between the size of their incomes and the ever-rising cost of their homes. Canadian incomes have more or less plateaued for the last 20 years. But Canadian home prices, in some areas, have more than quadrupled, which has fuelled huge bank profits. Now, you don’t hear the banks complaining about that, at least until their overburdened mortgage holders can’t pay their monthlies.

Such is the financial disconnect from reality. Savings are not based on financial tinkering. Savings are based on production. And Canada’s real production, like its wages, plateaued two decades ago. Without its vast treasure trove of natural resources such as energy, minerals, forest fibre and natural agricultural assets, the country would be a bit player on the world economic stage. I expect that Harper, Flaherty and company know this intuitively. Or should.

Ordinary Canadians have turned to housing as one of the last real “products” available to them for investment. By the millions they’ve rolled up their sleeves and upgraded their homes to increase the resale values, in order to build their nest eggs for retirement—knowing full well that their bank-managed RRSP portfolios have been flat-lining for years.

What Canada needs now is a new approach. One that tackles climate change, energy transition from fossil fuels to new alternatives, income redistribution from the wealthy to the less wealthy—and 100 percent employment.

Instead, what we keep getting is a mish-mash of lame private sector corporate policies such as belt-tightening, downsizing, financial accountability and efficiency (as if the health and welfare of a population were ever efficient).

Sadly, we get the government we deserve. With a population obsessed with credentializing and inducting our children into the corporatist-managerial economy, we’re handing over our future to the so-called experts as fast as we can. We actually trust these experts to run the country for us, rather than running the country ourselves. And one of the possible reasons is, we’ve lost the ability to actually dream—because we’re living in a corporately-induced coma, in which we think corporate reality is real.

Here’s a wakeup call: it’s not real. Whereas corporate reality is about management and profits, real life is not profitable. We all lose. We die. It’s the quality of life in between that counts. And the quality of life of a country depends on the quality of life of all of its citizens—not just the top .1 percent.

Quality of life includes the opportunity to explore one’s potential. To raise a family. To engage in the community. To do find fulfilling work. To make real products. To direct one’s own destiny. And to take an active role in the political discourse of the region.

Mr. Flaherty’s instrumental fiddling with one of our last sources of real income—our homes—is maddening. Of course we Canadians will take it up the tailpipe gracefully, as usual. Hopefully we may get a few more options for the future with the next election.

But what Canada really needs is a complete new vision for the future.

Travel notes from the pastel-painted Paradise

2011-01-11T13:39:00.000-08:00

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Somewhere around New York City on I-95 we started recognizing other vehicles heading south. There was a big RV towing a new Cadillac SUV, and the car-carrier with a new kandy apple red Mercedes sports coupe and…a 1967 Plymouth Valiant.

Despite the fact that there wasn’t another old car on the road, the Valiant itself would have been unremarkable, except for its mottled patchwork of primer paint and faded old blue factory paint. It looked remarkably bad. The driver looked like a nerdy engineer in his mid-40s with a thick head of hair, glasses and a full beard. Every time we intercepted him (this happens with gas stops, food and bathroom breaks) he was slumped into the door.

Call him a foreshadowing. Late in the night we pulled into a service centre in New Jersey for gas. When I got out of the van a woman came up to me asking for money. She was a bit ratty-looking, with skin-tight jeans and long messy hair. She said she and her boyfriend were from Virginia. They’d run out of cash and their Jeep was out of gas. She wanted me to cover highway tolls and gas, I guess. When I wouldn’t she got quite upset. We got the kids back in the van and headed out of the parking lot with her leaning on the horn and hollering at us.

These two people, the Jeep woman and the Valiant guy, stood out from the rest of the travellers. Most people drove new vehicles. There were a lot of slick SUVs, a lot of big pickup trucks and the usual flotilla of tractor trailers. But somehow the two represented what was hiding just off the sanitized Interstate highways in the rest of America.

I read on-line recently that some place in Arizona has an over 24 percent unemployment rate. And that there are a lot of places with unemployment rates over 15 percent.

We were headed south, without a particular destination, just taking some time with the kids over the long Christmas vacation. We hit Jacksonville, Florida, around midnight as the torrential rains broke loose. It rained all the way to Orlando, where we decided to pull in and call it a night. We were pretty much wiped after two days and 30+ hours on the road.

The next day we did the obligatory visit to a theme park. We chose Universal Studios, and spent the day—and about $700 bucks on admission tickets and food. Let’s just say it was a cultural experience. The Harry Potter theme park was state-of-the-art and filled with visitors from around the world—but strangely with relatively few kids, though lots of adults and seniors. And the Jurassic Park exhibit was, ironically, already prehistoric as theme parks go. The old rides were cheesy and under-attended. No waiting in lines there.

It was there, in the Universal park that I tripped across the other Valiant (the non-Plymouth kind) —Prince Valiant, the ancient cartoon strip character written by Hal Foster. Valiant was hiding out in a section with movie oldies including Betty Boop and Popeye and Olive Oyle, who gladly posed for photos with me and the kids. These were clearly the old franchises waiting to be rediscovered, like Spiderman and Green Lantern. In case you don’t know Valiant, it was a wonderfully drawn strip with a great storyline. Here’s the description from Wikipedia:

“Valiant is a Nordic prince from faraway Thule, located near Trondheim on the Norwegian west coast. Early in the story, Valiant arrived at Camelot, where he became friends with Sir Gawain and Sir Tristram. Earning the respect of King Arthur and Merlin, he became a Knight of the Round Table.”

He was like everything else in Florida, a bit out of context and over the top, where it feels like you’re looking through 3D glasses with coral and turquoise lenses.

We finally landed at our most southerly point: a rental cottage on Sanibel Island on the Gulf coast. While the kids played on the beach I got to know the caretaker. He’s a former mechanic from Chicago who used to tour Canada and the U.S. repairing high-end Rockwell printing presses. He’d moved down to Fort Myers to be closer to his aging mother (there are lots of aging mothers down there), and got into the housing construction boom laying ceramic tile. And he was there for the housing bust, one of the first who saw it coming. He managed to sell his house before the market collapsed. The area was one of the worst hit in the sub-prime meltdown.

Now, he and his wife get free rent and a small salary, sorry no health insurance, for their services as caretaker and bookkeeper for the place. It’s not bad, he says, if you don’t mind being “a prisoner in Paradise.” He can’t afford to relocate, and wouldn’t go back to Chicago if he could.

Oddly, that seems to sum up my own impressions of everything. We’re all prisoners in Paradise. And as the kids flip through the channels I learn that U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has been shot in Tuscon, Arizona, and six others killed by a rampaging gunman.

Nothing seems to make sense any more. But then again, maybe it never did.