First, there was the radical disconnect between the global regulatory aspirations of Philipp Hildebrand — defenestrated governor of the Swiss National Bank and vice-chairman of the macroprudentially panoptic Financial Stability Board — and his inability to oversee his judgment-challenged wife.

Compared, however, with another Swiss-based institution, the World Economic Forum, the FSB looks to have dreams of control no more megalomaniacal than those of a peewee-hockey linesman. The WEF, whose annual Davos networkfest is due to start in two weeks, is a fount of monstrous pretension hiding behind Orwellian globaldegook, a nest of Malthusian global governors who appear incapable of being embarrassed by their failures. Read more

This has been a bad week for the Swiss national brand. First, there was the radical disconnect between the global regulatory aspirations of Philipp Hildebrand — defenestrated governor of the Swiss National Bank and vice-chairman of the macroprudentially panoptic Financial Stability Board — and his inability to oversee his judgment-challenged wife.

Compared, however, with another Swiss-based institution, the World Economic Forum, the FSB looks to have dreams of control no more megalomaniacal than those of a peewee-hockey linesman. The WEF, whose annual Davos networkfest is due to start in two weeks, is a fount of monstrous pretension hiding behind Orwellian globaldegook, a nest of Malthusian global governors who appear incapable of being embarrassed by their failures.

Nevertheless, if there is one art at which the forum excels, it is apocalyptic fretting. Its latest report, Global Risks 2012, is beyond parody as a compendium of worry. The study was developed to “map, measure, monitor, manage and mitigate global risks.” Full marks for alliteration, but its analysis and recommendations are despicable, deplorable and doorknob dumb.

The WEF has always been a promoter of the European social democratic model that now lies in tatters; a champion of catastrophic man-made climate change, which has now disappeared from the policy agenda; a perpetual bleater about resource depletion even as the oil industry is developing shale gas and oil that promise a centuries-long hydrocarbon bonanza. Although the NGO storm troopers that the WEF has perpetually cheered on secured a major victory last year over the Keystone XL pipeline, and are set to try to talk the Northern Gateway proposal to death, these examples of WEF-style “success” prove that the institution is much better at destroying jobs than creating them.

The WEF is ruled by a kind of North Korean mindset where everything should be centrally co-ordinated on behalf of The People by puppet masters such as WEF head Klaus Schwab. In the past decade or so, Kim Jung Schwab has lost a bundle of WEF cash on high-tech stocks, been implicated in conflicts of interest, lost a boatload of disgruntled staff, and witnessed his hand-picked successor caught up in a bribery scandal. As with all fixated master regulators, however, none of this seems to lead him to doubt his expansive visions for global control, even though its plausibility ranks with that 11 holes-in-one the Dear Leader pulled off during his single round of golf.

Global Risks 2012 projects a “dystopian future for much of humanity.” Worse, aspirations for beneficent global governance are under threat. “Our safeguards may no longer be fit to manage vital resources and ensure orderly markets and public safety,” it warns.

Risk analysis is a fundamental of human behaviour. However, specific risks are best dealt with in specific contexts. The WEF is unembarrassed to attempt to bring labour market imbalances, geophysical destruction, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, mismanaged urbanization, religious fanaticism, chronic disease, intellectual property, orbital debris, and dozens of other issues into one gigantic, unwieldy utilitarian calculus.

According to the one-way mindset of the WEF, this proliferation of problems justifies and necessitates ever more ambitious globally co-ordinated schemes, embracing more and more political input (as long as it is 100% WEF-compliant), to address them all at once. Just imagine the Northern Gateway inquiry, only with the hearings being about every issue on earth, and everybody gets a turn at the mic.

And how will they manage everything? Rather like getting four elephants into a mini car, only instead of idiot logic, use positive adjectives. Squeeze two in the front and two in the back in a “more agile and cohesive way.”

As for the woeful specifics, in 2011 the top brow-wrinkler was “meteorological catastrophe.” This year it is “severe income disparity,” which makes it look as if WEF surveys are being designed by the young folks who were squatting in Zucotti Park. In what way is severe income disparity a risk, and to whom?

The report’s charts and graphs represent a forensic treasure house of bad ideas. “Unforeseen negative consequences of regulations” is seen as a relatively unimportant area of risk when in fact it looms like a Frankenstein monster over the global economy. Failure of global governance is not regarded as a major risk factor (because thankfully we don’t have too much of it), but since it is crucial to the WEF’s pretensions it is installed in the midst of a mystic looking chart — part Jungian mandala, part cat’s cradle string game for a thousand hands — which elaborates fantastic webs of connection and potential control.

World Economic Forum

In his mushy intro, filled with the usual pseudo-academic flapdoodle, Mr. Schwab suggests that “Underlying all these risks are velocity, multiplicity, and interconnectivity — creating a global system where mastering complexities will be the foremost challenge.” This complexity, he claims, “threatens to overwhelm countries, companies, cultures and communities.”

But only if you are fatally conceited enough to imagine that you can, and must, manage everything. Meanwhile, we might note that entirely absent from the list of civil and political rights being demanded by Arab Springers is the notion that their activities be overseen by consultants holed up in the Swiss mountains.

The resignation of Swiss National Bank chairman Philipp Hildebrand over his wife Kashya’s currency transactions may be seen as a personal tragedy or a national embarrassment, but it also raises questions about one of the other organizations from which Mr. Hildebrand has resigned, the Financial Stability Board. The FSB is the organization of which Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney recently became chairman. Mr. Hildebrand’s resignation inevitably cast a pall over Mr. Carney’s first FSB press conference on Tuesday, but perhaps not for the right reasons.

Mr. Hildebrand’s problems arose from his wife’s betting against the Swiss franc shortly before he imposed restrictions that caused the franc to tank. The franc had been subject to an influx of money seeking a safe haven from the euro fiasco. Mr. Hildebrand declared last week that his wife, whom he had met when they both worked for a New York hedge fund in the 1990s, had a “strong personality” and “her own thoughts.” Read more

If officials can’t keep track of their wives, how can they regulate millions of bankers?

The resignation of Swiss National Bank chairman Philipp Hildebrand over his wife Kashya’s currency transactions may be seen as a personal tragedy or a national embarrassment, but it also raises questions about one of the other organizations from which Mr. Hildebrand has resigned, the Financial Stability Board. The FSB is the organization of which Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney recently became chairman. Mr. Hildebrand’s resignation inevitably cast a pall over Mr. Carney’s first FSB press conference on Tuesday, but perhaps not for the right reasons.

Mr. Hildebrand’s problems arose from his wife’s betting against the Swiss franc shortly before he imposed restrictions that caused the franc to tank. The franc had been subject to an influx of money seeking a safe haven from the euro fiasco. Mr. Hildebrand declared last week that his wife, whom he had met when they both worked for a New York hedge fund in the 1990s, had a “strong personality” and “her own thoughts.”

However, one thought she didn’t appear to have was that it might not look good to be speculating in the currency of which her husband was custodian. Mrs. Hildebrand has apologized to all and sundry for her “error of judgment,” but the optics are horrible. Similarly, Mr. Hildebrand’s donation of US$79,000 to charity — apparently as expiation for the ill-gotten (or not) gain — makes things look even worse.

The more significant point is that Mr. Hildebrand was a leading light in the FSB, an organization designed to oversee and sometimes override global financial markets, and yet he couldn’t oversee his own wife. That is not a cheap shot. It points to the ridiculousness of the notion that keeping tabs on the financial dealings of somebody who shares a bed with you is hard, but regulating the activities of millions to beneficial effect is manageable.

The FSB came into existence in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. It was a name-changer. That’s not “game changer” with a typo. The FSB had previously been the Financial Stability Forum, which was set up under the aegis of the unwieldy G20 to make sure that crises such as 2008 didn’t happen. The response to the FSF’s manifest failure was to make it more expansive and give it a new moniker. The FSF/FSB’s very existence invited questions — which were never even officially asked, let alone answered — about why the existing international financial institutions, in particular the IMF, had done such a lousy job.

Still, the FSB, like the FSF before it, wasn’t about mere prudence, it was about “macroprudence,” the notion that bureaucratic wizards could rise above the complexity of markets and address those markets’ alleged flaws, which in 2008 turned out to be in reality the fruits of misregulation, low interest rates and lousy housing policies. The stability wizards had either missed the implications of the collateralized debt obligations and the credit default swaps hitting the fan, or had issued warnings to which nobody was paying heed. However, the regulatory dream could not be abandoned. All that was needed was larger and more frequent meetings between officials of the FSB, the G20, the Bank for International Settlements, the Basel Committee, the IMF, central banks, finance ministries, etc., etc., all based on the useful fallacy that global markets require global regulation.

The euro crisis that has exploded since the FSB got its new name further reveals the folly of trusting government regulation, since it is the governments themselves that are out of control. Meanwhile, the FSB has had to deal with a constant stream of shifting priorities from its political masters, from restricting bankers’ pay, through imposing financial transaction taxes, to possibly factoring in Gross National Happiness.

Mr. Carney is declared to have credibility because Canada faced and dealt with its own problems of fiscal unsustainability in the mid-1990s (when Mr. Carney wasn’t around). However, as a recent report from Scotiabank pointed out, the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin dealt with the country’s problems the old-fashioned way: by cutting government down to size. That seems to be the one solution that most troubled European nations are still trying to avoid.

Mr. Carney Tuesday reportedly declared that countries “must guard against a negative feedback loop” from sovereign debt. No arguing with that, whatever it means.

The FSB’s press release was a monument to wonkspeak and Pollyanna semantics. The world should apparently be comforted that endless assessments, peer reviews, plans, co-operation agreements and “next steps” are in the works (or “workstreams,” as they are now called). However, while the FSB drones on about its ever-expanding “architecture,” around it in Europe all heck continues to break loose in distinctly unco-ordinated fashion. The Greeks are playing games, knowing that everybody else is terrified that they will default. Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy are still privately at loggerheads over the role of the European Central Bank as a sucker of last resort. They seem agreed, however, on one way to deal with the euro crisis: punish the British financial sector. The issue that never seems to reach the table is how far this unfolding fiasco is due not merely to countries spending like drunken sailors, but to the deluded mentality embodied in the FSB.

At least the Swiss authorities have been quick to act in at least one respect in the wake of the Hildebrand affair: They are prosecuting the individual who leaked the details of Mrs. Hildebrand’s trading.

MORE THOUGHTS FOR 2012   —  

MONTE SOLBERG   —   How come so many of the hard right, Reform, Republicans, Americans, Fascist / Conservatives, friends of Pastor Manning and disciples of Ted Byfield [ a racist, intolerant bigot ] dominate the pages of our newspapers. They attack Canadians, the Order of Canada, medicare, unions, social programs, the arts, free speech, the CBC, CRTC, Can. Wheat Board, Can. Nuclear Safety Comm., the Auditor General, Elections Canada, the Senate, Canadian Judges, our Courts, pensions, Pro Choice , same sex marriage, minimum wage, UI, cell phone ban when driving  and any other things that doesn’t adhere to the rabid right ideology. All of these people constitute less than 10% of Canada’s population . Remember we live in a democracy where the majority rules and this doesn’t mean a majority in the House of the People. Our system allows the party with the largest number of MPs with over 50 % of the seats to govern [ not to rule or form a dictatorship ]. The key ingrediant in this society IS * THE * WILL* OF* THE* PEOPLE. Governments like Herr Harper, with a SLIM MAJORITY AND LESS THAN 40% OF THE VOTES IN THE LAST ELECTION WHICH SAW 38% OF CANADIANS NOT EXERCISE THEIR  FRANCHISE ARE ON SHAKY GROUND IN TERMS OF ANY STRONG LEGISLATIVE PROGRAMS.  Solberg’s mindless  article in the Sun had the headline, “Now is Harper’s time to change Canada “. Herr Harper was not given a mandate to change Canada in any way. He was given barely enough votes to form a government and he had better respect that or there wil be a Constitutional crisis. Some years back I began the question the slide of California into becoming a have-not-State. How could 34 million have-everything people get themselves into such a financial mess? I discovered the US oil cartel had financed the State Republicans under the table to allow them to take unfair advantage of the political system there. In addition the oilies bought off the media as well. What has emerged is a process whereby the minority 20% can thwart the will of the majority 51%. And the Republicans have put reclaiming their democratic right beyond reach. California is bankrupt and ungovernable. In Canada the US oil cartel is following the very same course. The oilies are slipping Harper big chunks of illegal cash. The media claims he is a great fundraiser. They’ll say anything for a bloody buck. Like the PeeM is sporting thousands of dollars in hockey equipment and the opposition is relegated to playing with used sticks and rusty skates.  The voter subsidy was supposed to level the playing field. Harper has done away with the subsidy and the oil cartel has actually bought him the entire playing field. Those who now dominate the pages of our newspapers have their roots in the failed Alberta / Western Reports [  magazines 19 79 ] which Ted Byfield peddled. The circulation was so low that the publications failed. Few people were interested. Ezra leRant tried the same kind of right wing ploy with the Western Standard and he couldn’t make a dime. Again few Canadians were interested in buying what LeRant was selling. In typical Republican style, if you fail, redouble your efforts without changing a thing. All of a sudden we have a whole army of these baboons chirping away. Why??? I will answer my own question. Oil money has not only bought Parliament Hill, they financed hundreds of public relations firms to lobby for the right. Who hire shills who can write, mindlessly but right. As well an endless number of charities have been set up supported by the taxpayer’s nickel to churn out right wing propaganda [ Tom Harris Climate Coalition, MacDonald Laurier Inst, Fraser Inst., C D Howe Inst. Ethical Oil, Canada West, Can. Constitutional Assoc, Canadian Taxpayers Fed., Montreal Economic Inst., Fair Questions.org and the list goes on ]. YOU, YOU, YOURSELF ARE PAYING TO HAVE ALL OF THIS HATEFUL PROPAGANDA CIRCULATED. Going to a Club shop, buying a club and then handing it to the cartel /Harper so they can beat you over the head makes no sense to me. The one way this proliferation of right wing  tripe can be stopped in its’ tracks is for the ad media TO JUST SPEAK UP ABOUT THE LIES AND ABUSE AND REFUSE PRINT SPACE TO THESE KOOKS ON THE RIGHT. But the media stays mum and for a very good reason, money. Newspapers are dying, circulation is down as is regular  advertising. Can you imagine a businessman advertising in the Tor. Sun wherein Ezra Le Rant, Brian Lilley and Charles Adler appear each day to talk loud baby talk?  Did you know that the stock value of newspapers across North America has fallen 95%. 300 papers have gone out of business and 15,000 journalists are now on the street [ 20% of the total ]. Hopefully Terry Corcoron and Pete Foster will soon join them.  Our friend, the Fascist PeeM has increased Government spending on advertising by a factor of three and this can be added to all the money the US oil cartel puts into advertising. The  Can. Assoc. Petroleum Producers [ CAPP ] in Calgary has some doozie advertising. Full page paper ads with a guy hugging  an evergreen and a gal strolling down a leafy lane in a golden sunset. The newspapers are scared shitless. Speak out about Harper’s abuses and the offender is off the Fascist advertising list. Like Conrad Black the paper owners now offer kisses up to Harper’s ass every morning. Hitler controlled the press by force. Harper controls the media with Government / oil cartel advertising. The media management also loves the free reportage from the right and has to play along. All of these right wing ranters, HAVE NOTHING IMPORTANT TO SAY like Ezra LeRant, Monte Solberg, Pastor Manning, Gwyn Morgan, Andrew Coyne to name some. But they get automatic front page coverage. I have been blogging for more than 2 years. On occasion I will print my posts on paper and snail mail them to policians, the media and newspapers particularly. I have never had a single post published. Lies and money count for everything. The truth stands for nothing with the media. What we have is a 20% view of things getting 90% of the media coverage. This is the repeat of the media experience in the USA. The media down there, particularly the newspapers saw nothing, heard nothing and SAID  nothing about Wall St. theft. I don’t have to explain the result of this failure of duty, it is there for all the world to see. The end of America as we have known it. The US already owes China bigtime. That Country is a success financially and was asked by the Europeans to help bail them out. Since the USA and China have such a close working relationship why not ask the Chinese to come in and manage the Government in Washington. The immediate saving will be the salaries of the members of the House, the Senators, their staffs and a corrupt bureaucracy. This would also smarten up the US banks and Wall St., no more funny money stuff or into the clink Chinese style. Your answers to all of the propaganda from the right are there on the net sitting in your computer. Net info will not be served up to you all neat as it has been in the past in the papers and on TV. Journalists and commentators have gotten quite smooth over the years at making propaganda, easy to understand, easy to digest and easy meat for a lazy brain. Sort of popcorn like. The net has the facts and the truth but you have to work for your info. So you have to make a decision. Either you dwell in the land of wishful thinkers where the Harper, the oilies and media wants you to stay and contribute to the demise of your very own society. Or you can dig for the facts upon which you can base your adaptability strategy so important in life’s journey. 16,000 years ago the Solutreans in France faced a critical situation. The ice sheet was melting and the Woolly Mammoth habitat was disappearing from around Paris. The Mammoth numbers were dropping and fewer of them were passing through the Loire Valley where these early people lived in caves and decorated same with beautiful drawings. Early humankind had followed the animals out of Africa when the climate changed. Change had arrived again and the Mammoths began leaving France, travelling along the north shore of the Mediterranean, through Italy, into central Europe,  across Russian into Siberia, over the land bridge to Alaska, down the Rockies to the Denver plain and Clovis New Mexico. It took the Solutreans 5000 years to travel 12,000 miles following the Woolly Mammoths. These big game hunter survived, to this day actually. The Mammoths however didn’t make it. It is said that at it’s height the Solutrean population numbered from 35,000 to 40,000 people. A successful civilization that had been around for 7000 years when the move out took place. So if you count from 23,000 years ago till now it is even more impressive. They didn’t have cell phones, computers, the net or pizza and look how they managed. They had to live in the real world, something we are not doing in North America. The Roman experiment lasted for but 700 years. The USA will NOT live to see its’ 300th birthday and Canada won’t get to 150 years the way Harper is going. Screw you Monte Solberg, WE CAN’T ALLOW HERR HARPER TO CHANGE CANADA INTO THE MIRROR IMAGE OF THE USA.  Monte is a right wing air head, his babble is not even worth the price of the ink used. By printing same Pierre Peladeau shows himself to be an enemy of the people.

THE MINISTER OF BANANAS / JASON KENNEY / DEPUTY MINISTER OF BANANAS / RONA AMBROSE   —   What happen to the idea of the Government of Canada actually governing the Country. All we see from day to day is Herr Harper trotting out his pet peeves and settling old scores. The tar sands is a filthy operation, Canadians know it and the world knows it. No matter how much the US oil cartel pays Harper and how much he wishful thinks they are not going to win this one. Chiquita, an American Corporation is exercising its’ right to create the lightest CO2 footprint possible. The planet is obviously important to the Company and it is good public relations as well. Rona and her boycott of the firm’s bananas, is frankly bananas. I was a Director of the Conservative Riding Association in Belleville for almost 2 years and I wrote to Ambrose a couple of times on the matter of Global Warming [ 2007 ]. These letters related to stupid statements she was making. Nothing came of  my suggestions to her and Harper. Garry Lunn was another nincompoop. Getting an inside view of this bunch of clowns caused me to bail. I have great difficulty dealing with people who are mental midgets and who talk about manipulation and indoctrination.  I’d say to Chiquita, go your merry way and ignore Herr Harper and HIS BROWNSHIRTS.  This is a matter of free speech. If people are going to be attacked by the Harper biased media and bludgeoned into silence then Canadians have a much bigger problem than I thought. I have already spoke about his use of Rev. Can. to intimidate his opponents.  Under the circumstances both Kenney and Ambrose should resign. Now Ezra LeRant has gotten into the fray by making disparaging remarks about a Chiquita executive on Sun TV. In a sense this LeRant / Peladeau dust up shows just how unimportant FOX North really is. Up till now only one complaint about Ezra’s outburst has been received by the CRTC. A clue, nobody is watching Pierre’s TV station. Peladeau recently sold off some TV assets and laid off 400 staff. Quebecor has the smell of death about it. If investors in the operation are only reading the newspaper I pity them.  Pierre has even lowered himself to the point where he is printing Paul Godfrey’s National Post for him. Talk about the lame leading the blind?  They set Ezra loose on this Ethical Oil [ a right wing front ] nonsense. Since the US oil cartel is only interested in stealing the raw tar from Albertans I have urged LeRant to change his campaign to Ethical Bitumen. When Ezra was next let out of his cage he went on a rampage about the CBC. The Corporation holds a special place in Canada these day. An honour to add to its’ well filled trophy case. It is the ONLY MEDIA OUTLET THAT TELLS THE TRUTH IN THIS COUNTRY. When LeRant first started running off at the mouth I couldn’t figure out where this guy came from. His pronouncements were of little value to our society so I  questioned , why was he being paid any attention? I have come to realize latterly that all these right wing wing nuts are being employed by the oil cartel and come out of Alberta. The only way the oilie message can make it into the public domain is to have it delivered by a whole slew of village idiots. LeRant was the first rightie I scoped out on the net. Since leaving the University of Lying in Alberta Ezra has made a mess of his life. He has never been a success doing anything. I think he has mental problems. You know, Hitler’s Brownshirts were recruited from the ranks of the jail birds, thugs, the criminal element and the mentally unbalanced. I believe Herr Harper suffers from mental illness. This was confirmed for me when Steve during his time in politics just vanished for a couple of weeks. His constant lying only convinces me more. One thing I do is keep clipping the important stories, especially those on energy. My file keeping goes back at least a dozen years. My readers constantly asking the question,” where do you find all this information “? It is easy. I go back reread the article / articles, scan the net and connect the dots. Having a written history to depend upon propelled humankind forward at an ever increasing rate. We did not have to keep relearning the lessons of our forefathers. Canada is now a Country without a history thanks to the media. The journalists / reporter of old used to dig back and put together stories that might span decades. Now the media tells stories, if they tell them at all and then they’re mostly fiction. There is no reference to last week and no hint of what is coming down the track. In dictatorships the idea is to keep the citizenry ignorant, confused, anxious and always topped up with government propaganda. We are close to that now. Do you remember Gary Lunn. He was the Minister of Natural Resources who fired Linda Keen in the middle of the night to prevent her from testifying before a Commons Committee. Harper said Keen had closed down the NRU reactor at Chalk River because of safety concerns. That was another lie but the media just stayed silent. The CNSC had ordered AEC to add pumps to their system to guard against a possible earthquake. AEC did nothing but the Agency wrote to the CNSC to say the pumps had been installed. Another lie, the pumps were still in their packing crates. Keen’s inspectors were at Chalk River doing regular checks and discovered no pumps. Management at AEC had agreed with the installation of the pumps for safety reasons and one of their people wrote to say,” the job’s all done “. The moment that AEC realzed they had their asses in a vise they cooked up a scheme with Harper and Lunn wherein AEC would actually close the plant voluntarily themselves and Lunn would blame Keen. The CNSC is a very important agency seeing that the people at AEC have been lying about everything for years. It is a wonder that we have not had a serious accident to date. Gary Lunn could not tell the media why Linda Keen had been fired and then he too vanished for two weeks to let the story cool. Once the heat has gone down and 2 weeks passes the media can ignore the story, the people are focused on new bread, wine and circus events. AEC did not install the 2 pumps they agreed to, they sent a bogus letter to the Commission lying about the installation. All of the blame for their mistake and the incompetence of Gary Lunn was shifted to Linda Keen. AEC was rewarded for its’ inexcuseable behaviour by getting an extention on the pump installation. Who knows whether the pumps were ever installed but we will find out if  Ottawa has an earthquake. Linda Keen was replaced by a Fascist / Conservative stooge whose only apparent attribute is parroting what ever Herr Harper says and still the media sleeps on. Mind, it a great kind of business to be in even though the press is not long for this world. For doing nothing and saying nothing they get well paid. My difficulty would be kissing the PeeM’s ass all the time.  But I am here to tell you how sweet  the democratic system is. Gary Lunn got thumped by Elizabeth May in the 2011 Federal Election. I am sure the media has been warned by Harper not to give Elizabeth any coverage. If true it is a shame for the almost 32,000 voters who voted for her in Saanich – Gulf Islands. The dominate right media wrongly trumpets Harper’s so called massive majority. It is a crock. Any shill who says / writes  huge majority, shows where his or her cheque is coming from and should be branded an enemy of the people.  Harper has 165 seats and needed 155. He has already lost one Fascist / Conservative MP who crossed the floor to sit as an independent. Harper’s new seat total 164. So now we need 9  more defectors. Only former Reformers get to speak on behalf of the government. There have to be at least 100 very unhappy true PC MPs.  To utilize his majority Harper needs everybody in the House. If too many MPs go to Mexico to get married as Peter Macay did the opposition could pounce. In 2008 Garry Lunn got 28,000 votes and the Greens 6732. In 2011 the voters of Saanich – Gulf Islands handed May a victory with 32,000 vote, Lunn got 24,500. The turnout of voters was 75%.  No voter apathy here Mr. Harper. Cross Canadians and you pay a price. This is an important story about May’s vistory that the media is too timid to cover. Even though Pastor Manning keeps talking about Canada moving to the right what is he says is really rubbish and more wishful think. The people of Saanich gave the deceitful / incompetent Gary Lunn the finger. May gained 26,000 votes. I don’t know if that has ever happened before in one riding. This is the kind of thing the press used to cover. But now it is a matter of dancing to Harper’s tune and tuning out Canadians. I can’t wait for Canadians to tune out the newspapers, they are worse than useless and are a danger to our democracy. There is a strong discussion going on as to the fate of newspapers. In my view they are already dead. It is just that there are still idiots like Peladeau around who are prepared to throw good money after bad. I would advise those who think papers will come back to donate their money to Sunnybrook, at least they’ll get a Ward or elevator named after them. Sinking their dough into a failing papers will only get them into the line at the food bank. The National Post as I have said is 90% owned by Americans which is against the rules of Canadian ownership. Harper has done nothing about this situation and the other members of the media ain’t saying nothing. The’re cowards in the extreme.  But you know I am not really that worried. The Post loses money each quarter and has for years. There are no buyers for the Paper so it will go belly up a second time and the Yanks will take a bath. What a pleasant happening. If  Pierre Peladeau is allowing Post / Godfrey to get too far in the hole for the printing bill the death of the Post could take the Sun with it. Now that will be a happy day for me. The question is where do we go from here. A strong / free press is important to this democracy. The present press, now in the service of the movers and takers presents a grave danger to us. The internet is like a young bird, still in the nest, that has yet to test its wings. We have to transition from the dangerous place we are in now to the place we need to be. The information flow now eminating [ mostly lies and propaganda ] from Herr Harper and the ad media doesn’t equip us for the journey that we must shortly begin. I have some ideas on how we might proceed to find a new way of delivering information that is dependable and that can actually be used in day to day human activity. Where most of us live. I will cover that subject in the next few days.

JAN CARR / A DANGEROUS INSIDER / GUY HOLBURN / A DANGEROUS OUTSIDER WHO CAN GO HOME / PLEASE   —   I have had Carr in my sights for some years. Jan first came to my attention when he was perched on the catwalk overlooking the generator gallery in the old Rankin Hydro plant. Carr closed the plant to assist Dwight Duncan in his black out scare campaign. The nukies are still using threats of blackouts. When I take over our electrical system I will fire the lot.  Johnny Spears wrote the story for the Star and everything went over his head as usual. You know Spears. He has spent at least 8 years under my tutelage on matters of energy and has yet to learn a single thing. Johnny has written a hundred or more stories about electricity [ mostly ] and has managed to include false and misleading  information in each and every one. How does John Honderich tolerate such an incompetent writer, 8 years and he failed every one of my exam??? The answer is that in to-day’s world people who do the reporting rise to the top due mainly to being empty headed. They never challenge the white / right / rich 20%. When Carr closed the Rankin plant he gave two reasons. It was old and in need of repairs. That was a lie. The other reason was the Water Agreement with the USA was running out. Another lie. Here we are 6 years later and Jan is still telling lies and getting away with it. Carr used to be the darling of the Star because he facilitated the Liberal Government’s push to build more nuclear plants. This approach would have seen the nukies benefit and would have opened the public treasury to the private sector. McGuinty’s nuclear dreams turned to ashes during the US financial meltdown of 2008 /2009. Even though the nukies bought King Dalt a house he couldn’t pull the rabbit out of the hat for them. McGuinty made the mistake of using our electrical system as a way to score political points. That’s like trying to use your car engine to heat your coffee. First the Dalt announced the closing of the coal plants. This meant that the nukies would lose back up for their faulty nukes. McGuinty then dragged his feet on coal plant closures. This gave the nukies time to arrange for an alternative back up system, natural gas generating plants which can be built closer to population centres. But burning gas creates CO2 and carbon monoxide. In this regard the nukies don’t care. To maintain the supremacy of their nukes, any back up will do no matter the damage to the health of people. Any back up other than hydro electricity of which Ontario has 27,000 MWs. Our daily use at present is 19,000 MWs. So we have 8000 MWs surplus of Green / clean / cheap KWs that could be transmitted to the Alberta tar sands and still have enough electricity to power the Province totally with all the nuclear / coal / nat. gas plants closed. Water doesn’t need a back up. To this mess of the 5 dwarfs electrical system created by Mike Harris was added the McGuinty green initiative which his keepers thought would win votes. Paying 80 cents per KW was a brilliant idea if the 500,000 jobs had actually materialized. But alas, as we have seen wishful thinking doesn’t cut it even if the media has been bought with Queen’s Park advertising to ensure favourable coverage. Since the days when Harris failed to seize the moment in 2000 to fix the electrical system as I had urged and the failure in 2004 [ onward ] of McGuinty to recognize the dimensions of the KW problems Ontario has continued to stumble electricwise, to our great cost. And it keeps getting worse. The tools to solve the KW problems exist but the supporters of the Libs and the PCs understand at what cost it will be to their insider friends. So your hydro bill has just one way to go, UP. To change that trejectory you are going to have to get off your butt.  Your Lib. / PC  MPP will be of no help to you because their Party machines won’t let them help you. We need 55 MPPs at Queen’s Park to vote to form an all Party Commitee to begin to reconstitute our electrial system. I have covered this many time. Please remember to send your KW questions to your MPP. This present mess has angered the private sector because they have been waiting to get their slice for years.  Friends of the Libs and the PCs have waited a long time for the beanfeast and McGuinty’s misfires have put the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow even further out of reach. Thank heavens. Jan Carr has now ditched McGuinty and the Liberals and realized the best bet for he and his associates [ sharks ] is to back Hudak. So Carr had a piece printed in the National Post entitled, ” Stop government meddling in power “. It is right wing propaganda full of the usual lies. His assistant  in this endeavour was a Guy Holburn who hangs out at the Ivey School of Business / U of Western Ont. Guy is not native to this Province and has no understanding of electricity or our needs. Paul Godfey will print anything that is free and comes with a cheque. The Jan / Guy pitch is that McGuinty has issued 56 Directives to the nukies telling them what to do. Oh really. Our electrical system belongs to the people and McGuinty [ for good or ill ] was elected to govern. Who the hell does Carr think he is questioning the conduct of a democratically elected Government even if they have screwed up badly? This is right wing claptrap. The right says that governments has no right to interfere with private business. This is also American thinking. Government in the US has been given a bad name by the Republicans and this message is repeated by most of the media Stateside over and over and over and over. It is a lie. I would like to say to the backers of Jan Carr, the National Post, the Fraser Inst. and TransAlta  GO FUCK YOURSELVES. Ontario’s electrical system is surely hurting but we have the tools to fix it. All we need is 55 MPPs with some spine and more of an interest in the welfare of this Province than the Lib / PC  Party machines. We will either get the gang of 55 out of the present legislature or we will get them in the upcoming election. There are enough problems in Alberta over the loss of their markets for nat. gas and oil to keep Carr, the Post, Fraser and TransAlta real busy for the next little while. We can handle our own difficulties, thank you very much. The National Post is owned by Americans when it should not be. The US oil cartel contributes a lot of money to the Post, just witness all of the oil propaganda and lies appearing in the Paper’s pages. Interestingly we can get the flavour of just who we are dealing with. Jan Carr is a former Director of TransAlta which has just settle a ruling by the Alberta Market Surveillance Admin. in respect to TransAlta’s gaming of the electrical system. The Company cheated Albertans out of $ 5.5 million. They manipulated the supply of KWs from BC by blocking potentially cheaper prices just like ENRON used to do. Harper / Kent had announced new pollution regs for coal fired generating plants across the Country. Now they are pulling back the regulationa nd giving these crooks at TransAlta [ and other private operators ]  a gimmee. These private energy operators are rotten to the core but the money to Harper does work well. As long as they flourish and can buy the allegiance of politicans and the ad media our wallets are not safe. Ontario is now a have-not-province and Alberta is about to duplicate our slide here. This doesn’t have to be the case. There are Green / clean / cheap solutions but the  media won’t touch the good news. It is a matter of the people [ YOU ] taking back the power over power. In Ontario we must return to our roots and reactivate the tremendous hydro resources we possess. In Alberta the one customer market [ USA ] for nat. gas and oil has failed them. American demand for gasoline has dropped 20% in 3 years. There are new finds of tight oil and tight nat. gas in America which means they DON’T NEED ALBERTA NAT. GAS OR OIL ANYMORE.. There is an old saying adapt to the conditions at hand or die. In a sense Ontario and Alberta could make beautiful music together. Alberta can refine its’ own bitumen and send the FINISHED OIL by the Twin Beaver pipelines along with nat. gas to the east [ Ont., Que, NB, NS and PEI ]. Any surplus could be exported  to the world market through Churchill Man. The provinces in the east can sent hydro KWs west to the tar sands on the cross Canada grid. Any such plan to bring energy benefits to the citizenry will be fought tooth and nail by the US oil cartel, pipeline firms, private energy businesses, bought politicians [ Harper ] and the ad media. The proposed Keystone pipe would have taken raw tar to Texas to restart idle refineries in Port Arthur after which the finished oil would have been sold to China. The only benefit from this scam would be One US oil company [ Valero ] and one Arab oil  company [ Saudi Aramco ].  The proposed Northern Gateway pipes will move raw tar from Alberta over the Rockies to the Pacific where it will be sent to refineries in California or China. There is no money in shipping raw bitumen out of the Country so as to make the Americans / Chinese rich. This is what we did early in our history and thus we were called drawers of water and hewers of wood. Herr Harper beckons us to return to those days. If we become again drawers and hewers the reponsibility will be totally on our shoulders. If so it will be a matter of us choosing to go meekly as lambs to a slaughter administered by the RIGHT.

Catch you next time   —   Ken                                  www.ge-eman.com                                                LAOCOON

For the second time in a week, a corrupt, leftist South American government appeared to have gained a legal “victory” over Big Oil. The Chevron decision followed hard on the announcement that the government of Venezuela had to pay only a fraction (under US$1-billion) of Exxon Mobil’s demands (US$7-billion) related to expropriation of the company’s assets. Read more

I was in a hotel room in Mexico City when I watched the Tokyo fight in which Buster Douglas beat Mike Tyson 22 years ago. The result seemed so bizarre that I wondered if I might have stumbled into a parallel universe. That is not an unusual feeling in Latin America. The decision by an Ecuador appeals court to uphold a US$18-billion judgment against petroleum giant Chevron was perhaps less surprising, but hardly less surreal.

For the second time in a week, a corrupt, leftist South American government appeared to have gained a legal “victory” over Big Oil. The Chevron decision followed hard on the announcement that the government of Venezuela had to pay only a fraction (under US$1-billion) of Exxon Mobil’s demands (US$7-billion) related to expropriation of the company’s assets.

Any case involving Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is likely to be weird and wonderful. However, the Chevron case in Ecuador — which is ruled by another socialist mobster, Rafael Correa — looks like a plot by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, not just because it features incriminating outtakes from documentaries, payoffs to Ecuadorian court officials and evidence that court decisions were ghostwritten by the plaintiffs, but because it has recently been linked with an even more shameless shakedown: the “Yasuni ITT Initiative.”

The Chevron case goes back almost 20 years, to accusations that Texaco, which Chevron acquired in 2001, had failed to compensate adequately for its pollution of the Amazon while in partnership with state oil company PetroEcuador. This despite having paid for a cleanup that was certified by the Ecuadorian government. The case has — with the help of radical NGOs and U.S. lawyers, and the prospect of a bonanza payday — dragged on. A year ago, an Ecuadorian court ordered Chevron to pay US$8.6-billion, a sum that would double if it was not joined by an apology. No apology was forthcoming.

Despite this week’s ruling, Chevron certainly doesn’t appear to be heading for the canvas. “Today’s decision,” it noted in a statement on Tuesday, “is another glaring example of the politicization and corruption of Ecuador’s judiciary that has plagued this fraudulent case from the start.… Chevron does not believe that the Ecuador ruling is enforceable in any court that observes the rule of law. The company will continue to seek to hold accountable the perpetrators of this fraud.”

The plaintiffs’ notion that Chevron might post a US$18-billion bond is pure fantasy. However, their ever-reasonable lead Ecuadorian lawyer, Pablo Fajardo, suggested that a mere US$3-billion might do the trick. After all, shakedown artists are usually prepared to negotiate, which is where we come to the Yasuni Initiative.

Under Yasuni, which was announced in September, 2010, Ecuador would agree not to develop part of an Amazon national park in return for a modest US$3.6-billion from the international community (names to follow). In fact, there is already drilling in Yasuni by PetroEcuador, whose record of oil spills makes it the Inspector Clouseau of oil companies. Meanwhile, a much bigger problem for Yasuni is illegal logging.

The Seinfeldian concept of monetizing eco-virtuous non-activity was pioneered by Canada’s own “World’s Leading Environmentalist,” Maurice Strong. Since then, some governments (Norway) have actually paid other governments (Indonesia) not to chop down trees.

Under The Yasuni Job, not only would sacred biodiversity be preserved, but hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide would be kept out of the environment. The cash would be laundered via the United Nations toward alternative-energy projects and helping indigenous peoples. If at least US$100-million hadn’t been coughed up by the end of last year, then the self-immolation would begin.

According to an Amazon activist with access to The Huffington Post, Chevron may have been involved in dastardly negotiations to put cash into the floundering Yasuni initiative as the price of making the bogus court case go away. Where this gets a bit complicated is that it involves Chevron allegedly attempting to corrupt the woman running the Ecuador side of Yasuni, a former trade minister named Ivonne Baki.

Since Ms. Baki is front and centre of a scheme blatantly to extort cash, the notion that Chevron might have been trying to corrupt her is a bit of a stretch. Nevertheless, an alleged smoking gun is an April 2008 cable from the U.S. embassy in Quito — released by Wikileaks — noting that “Chevron had begun to quietly explore with senior GOE [Government of Ecuador] officials whether it could implement a series of social projects in the concession area in exchange for GOE support for ending the case.”

This hardly amounts to an astonishing revelation. The most fascinating aspect of the allegation, however, is that private shakedown artists are accusing Chevron of trying to corrupt government-appointed shakedown artists. Obviously, Ecuador likes to keep its shakedowns neatly compartmentalized. One thing is for sure, the Yasuni shakedown is not going well. Ms. Baki claims that the US$100-million target has been reached, but the names of the donors have still to appear. Chevron isn’t among them.

It is problematic enough that oil companies support petrotyrannies. The notion that they might pay off ecotyrannies is worse. Still, it’s not as bad as taxpayers being lumbered with the bill, which is at the heart of the moribund climate scam. Fortunately, taxpayers are paying a little more attention to where their money is going these days. The Amazon, it seems, is about as popular a destination is Kyoto.

Reuters

Does the decision to award Exxon Mobil just a fraction of the compensation it sought for the 2007 expropriation of its Venezuelan properties represent a win for asset grabbers such as President Hugo Chavez? In fact, to the extent that the decision — by a tribunal of the International Chamber of Commerce — represents a blow against property rights, it is more likely to do even greater damage to an economy already being destroyed by caudillo socialism.

Exxon had initially sued for US$12-billion for Mr. Chavez’s seizure of its stake in the Cerro Negro project — which is situated in the giant Orinoco heavy oil belt — but subsequently reduced its claim to US$7-billion. The ICC tribunal awarded it US$908-million, which the Venezuelan state oil company, PDVSA, is already trying to whittle down. Exxon is meanwhile pursuing another challenge before a tribunal of the World Bank. Read more

Reuters

Green denuciation of ‘dirty oil’ backs Venezuela’s repressive regime

Does the decision to award Exxon Mobil just a fraction of the compensation it sought for the 2007 expropriation of its Venezuelan properties represent a win for asset grabbers such as President Hugo Chavez? In fact, to the extent that the decision — by a tribunal of the International Chamber of Commerce — represents a blow against property rights, it is more likely to do even greater damage to an economy already being destroyed by caudillo socialism.

Exxon had initially sued for US$12-billion for Mr. Chavez’s seizure of its stake in the Cerro Negro project — which is situated in the giant Orinoco heavy oil belt — but subsequently reduced its claim to US$7-billion. The ICC tribunal awarded it US$908-million, which the Venezuelan state oil company, PDVSA, is already trying to whittle down. Exxon is meanwhile pursuing another challenge before a tribunal of the World Bank.

Expropriation is a “principle” recognized by all governments, since all governments are potential expropriators. The key issue is one of compensation. The ICC decision — whose reasoning has not been released — seems to indicate that the chamber favours awards based on book value investment rather than market value. This looks almost like an invitation to seize successful projects.

The Exxon Mobil challenge to Mr. Chavez, meanwhile, highlights two additional issues: that of the relative power of corporations and governments; and that of “ethical oil.”

The left perpetually claims that Big Government is essential to counter the depredations of Big Corporations. One press report this week noted that “Exxon’s US$406-billion market value exceeds Venezuela’s total economic output and is larger than the gross domestic products of all but 23 of the world’s nations.” However, comparing Exxon’s market capitalization with Venezuela’s gross domestic product represents not so much apples and oranges as apples and rubber truncheons. Corporate heft is in no way synonymous with political power, except if the political system rewards rent seekers, which it invariably does.

Venezuela is a classic example of why oil is sometimes perceived as a “curse.” It can insulate governments from their own people and/or provide the funds to buy votes in support of unsustainable policies. Despite the fact that Venezuela accounts for around 14% of global proved oil reserves, its economy is in a shambles, with a mounting deficit and soaring inflation despite a spreading system of price controls, which are merely moving merchandise onto the black market.

President Chavez has not only used PDVSA as a piggy bank for his social program, thus denuding it of funds to invest in additional oil production, he has used oil wealth to spread his defective vision throughout the region, with inevitably disastrous consequences. It is hardly comforting that Mr. Chavez’s hero and role model is Fidel Castro, who succeeded single-handedly in turning one of the richest countries in Latin America into one of the poorest.

The oil curse, meanwhile, leads into the issue of “ethical oil,” the term coined by author Ezra Levant for oil from the Alberta oil sands, which has become the focus for vicious attacks from the environmental movement and their moralistic media fellow travellers.

President Chavez’s version of morality is to eradicate selfishness and individualism, that is, human nature. Exxon Mobil wants to look after consumers, shareholders and employees. Fortunately, it is wealthy and diversified enough — and sufficiently clear about the morality of property rights — to be able to pursue the rule of international law. When it comes to human welfare — which is the ultimate focus of morality — a “loss” for Exxon represents more than corporate hit, it suggests a loss for global investment security and thus the eradication of poverty.

Mr. Levant, meanwhile, wasn’t so much inviting a universal moralization of resources — an invitation into a conceptual swamp — as pointing to the hypocrisy of the green movement, which, by attempting to hold up the development of the oil sands as “dirty” and contributing to the “moral issue” of climate change, are de facto supporting production from repressive regimes such as Venezuela (where the oil is just as “dirty.”)

Their attack has become all the more shrill as Kyoto has collapsed and green energy strategy has become a costly bust. They have also sought to drown out the devastating revelations of the Climategate emails, which confirm that climate science has been fudged and that “consensus” is a fraud. Still, green NGOs pulled off a stunning victory — at least in the short term — with the U.S. decision to delay and reroute the Keystone XL pipeline.

It is no coincidence that many of those who want to stop Keystone and the oil sands also find a hero in Hugo Chavez. Naomi Klein, who got herself conspicuously arrested outside the White House during an anti-Keystone rally last year, is a classic example. Certainly Ms. Klein and her ilk would find no virtue in Exxon Mobil, although that company’s pursuit of property rights is in fact the only sure route to a better life for the poor whom Hugo Chavez and climate fanatics claim are their primary concern. In fact, climatism, like chavismo, is all about political power.

The oil sands has become the main target (and fund-raising opportunity) for radical green groups. The recent decision by the U.S. administration to hold up approval of the Alberta-to-Gulf Coast Keystone XL pipeline was a major coup, and has encouraged radical NGOs to up their campaigns of lies and intimidation.

One well-worn technique is to demand of U.S. companies — “When did you stop beating your wife?”-style — whether they are using “dirty” oil sands oil. Read more

Ohio-based Chiquita has discovered that kowtowing to eco-fascism is not without its costs. The famous banana company is facing made-in-Canada outrage for caving in to NGO ForestEthics by committing not to use oil from the Alberta oil sands, and to “expose” those that do.

The oil sands has become the main target (and fund-raising opportunity) for radical green groups. The recent decision by the U.S. administration to hold up approval of the Alberta-to-Gulf Coast Keystone XL pipeline was a major coup, and has encouraged radical NGOs to up their campaigns of lies and intimidation.

One well-worn technique is to demand of U.S. companies — “When did you stop beating your wife?”-style — whether they are using “dirty” oil sands oil.

Last year, ForestEthics, a veteran of anti-corporate thuggery, sent a demand to Chiquita. Senior vice-president Manuel Rodriguez sent a grovelling response committing “to directing our transportation providers to avoid, where possible, fuels from tar sands refineries and to adopt a strategy of continuous improvement towards the elimination of those fuels.” ForestEthics released Mr. Rodriguez’s letter with much fanfare.

For once, however, there was pushback. The Canadian organization EthicalOil.org — which was set up to make the case for the oil sands — launched a radio attack ad against Chiquita and organized a protest outside an Edmonton Safeway store, complete with sombreros and ponchos. The ad called Chiquita a “foreign bully” (a particularly sensitive point given the company’s “banana republic” past as the United Fruit Company), and pondered whether Chiquita preferred oil from “OPEC dictatorships.” Prime Minister Stephen Harper and several Cabinet ministers stepped up to denounce Chiquita either directly or indirectly. The Alberta Enterprise Group called for a Chiquita boycott. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers wrote to Chiquita asking where it was getting its (mis)information.

Although touting the moral credentials of commodities is a potential minefield, it is difficult not to cheer this initiative. California-based ForestEthics, an anti-capitalist organization that is — ironically but not untypically — supported by money from capitalist foundations, has run roughshod over truth and jobs for too long. Its previous corporate victims included U.S. clothing giant Limited Brands, which was brought to heel for the crime of using paper in its Victoria’s Secret catalogues, and thus allegedly threatening the Canadian Boreal forest. Rather than attempt to refute ForestEthics misrepresentations, Limited Brands paid to “work with” the NGO, thus setting a precedent for green extortion. Earlier this year, ForestEthics released an ad featuring California grocery chain Trader Joe’s previously untrumpeted acquiescence in the anti oil sands campaign. It didn’t bother to ask Trader Joe’s permission. Did Trader Joe’s complain? No. It was obviously too scared. ForestEthics has other campaigns going to force Walmart and Safeway to condemn the oil sands.

Some companies have sought to rush to the front of the anti-oil sands parade without being pushed. These include the British bath products company Lush, which gets its scientific objectivity from ForestEthics’ fellows Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network. According to Lush, “If left unchallenged, the tar sands will turn an area the size of Florida into a toxic sacrifice zone.”

ForestEthics achieved another enormous symbolic victory last year in joining forces with similarly self-selected guardians of the planet to dictate an agreement with the Forest Products Association of Canada that claimed to sanitize vast swathes of land that had been permitted for logging. Not only did this give credence to claims that the FPAC had previously refuted as “simplistic and biased,” but it made Canadian governments look like also-rans in the policy formulation department.

This kind of “corporate social responsibility” has — as Milton Friedman famously suggested — always been a slippery slope. Every time a corporation caves in, it opens the door to further encroachments. For example, ForestEthics used Chiquita’s letter to bolster its attack on rival fruit company Dole. “Dole Bananas: Brought to you by dirty Tar Sands oil,” claims the ForestEthics website, inviting its acolytes to use social media to pressure Dole. Dole’s response? To grovel. The company’s vice-president of worldwide corporate responsibility and sustainability, Sylvain Cuperlier, went on YouTube to claim that the company didn’t use oil sands oil, as far as it knew, but begged ForestEthics to “share information” with them.

ForestEthics response was that this just wasn’t good enough: “[A] business as large as Dole is filthy with Tar Sands unless, like Chiquita, they are actively working to get it out of their footprint. ForestEthics has repeatedly asked Dole to disclose the refinery sources of origin for the fuel they use, but they haven’t.”

By what right does ForestEthics demand information from anybody? Who gave them, or any of their fellows, a “social licence?” In the interests of transparency, let’s have a full accounting from ForestEthics of all the money they have received from the corporations who have been bullied into “working with them.”

Meanwhile here, in all its tawdriness, is “stakeholder capitalism:” green-cloaked shakedown artists dictating corporate policy on the basis of misinformation and intimidation.

Four years ago, Chiquita paid a stiff fine for buying mafia-style “protection” from South American thugs masquerading as freedom fighters. Is trying to buy protection from the mendacious green lobby any different?

Did Ebenezer Scrooge wake up on Christmas morning calling for a guaranteed annual income? Did the expansion of the Grinch’s heart persuade him that he should lecture Whovilleans on the merits of carbon taxes? Was George Bailey rescued by the citizens of Bedford Falls leveraging their contributions via the International Monetary Fund?

This pre-Christmas week sees the unwanted welter of bad old policy ideas, the most bizarre of which suggest that Canada needs to become more like the eco-obsessed nanny states of Europe.

The ever-meddlesome Conference Board of Canada suggested a guaranteed annual income to counter “rising social inequality and never-ending concerns about social exclusion.” Here’s a modest proposal to deal with those never-ending concerns: put a Christmas sock in them. Read more

Council of Chief Executives should reveal members’ own energy use before criticizing ordinary Canadians

Did Ebenezer Scrooge wake up on Christmas morning calling for a guaranteed annual income? Did the expansion of the Grinch’s heart persuade him that he should lecture Whovilleans on the merits of carbon taxes? Was George Bailey rescued by the citizens of Bedford Falls leveraging their contributions via the International Monetary Fund?

This pre-Christmas week sees the unwanted welter of bad old policy ideas, the most bizarre of which suggest that Canada needs to become more like the eco-obsessed nanny states of Europe.

The ever-meddlesome Conference Board of Canada suggested a guaranteed annual income to counter “rising social inequality and never-ending concerns about social exclusion.” Here’s a modest proposal to deal with those never-ending concerns: put a Christmas sock in them.

Then there’s the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, which chose this festive season to confirm that Canada’s business leaders don’t understand — or like — markets. A CCCE report, Energy-Wise Canada: Building a Culture of Energy Conservation, bemoans Canadians driving so much, living in ever bigger houses, and possessing culpable amounts of energy-consuming gadgets. All this wealth, convenience and freedom obviously needs to be nagged down to size, and the CEOs have just the carbon taxes to do it.

A Christmas suggestion for the CCCE. First, publish full details of your individual members’ square footage, driving details, home entertainment systems and personal energy consumption. Then, take your report and shove it beside the blazing Yule log.

Finally comes the very model of the disasters attached to overblown welfarism and enviro-meddling, Europe. We might remember that the eurozone’s banks didn’t get into trouble because of anything like Old Man Potter filching the Savings and Loan’s cash from addled Uncle Billy. They got into trouble because they loaned money to big, reckless governments. This explains why the citizens of Europe Falls aren’t rushing to the houses of bank CEOs to empty their pockets onto the dining room table. It does mean, however, that the bureaucratchits are going to be burning the midnight wind-powered compact fluorescents as they resolutely refuse to countenance austerity.

One strains for sufficiently outlandish analogies to describe how remote from reality this process already is. One newsy comparison for the credibility of the latest euro plan might be the score reported from the late lamented Kim Jong-il’s single game of golf: a round of 38 under-par with 11 holes in one.

While the Germans stand as the clearest voice of fiscal responsibility, even they apparently think it’s reasonable to extend the europonzi scheme by sucking in innocents. That the europowers consider such countries as China and Russia, whose citizens are both way poorer and more oppressed than the average eurozoner, as potential “partners” in bailing themselves out indicates both their desperation and their utter immorality.

This week, the euro powers agreed to “put up” an additional ¤150-billion ($202-billion) as a “backstop” (as opposed to a “bazooka”). Unfortunately, the required sum was meant to be ¤200-billion. The Emperor’s New Money will be laundered via the IMF in the hope of attracting other “investors.” This presumably on the basis that China has expressed an interest in promoting that great agency of moral hazard, which in turn may not be entirely unrelated to China’s desire to diversify away from its mountain of U.S. debt.

Will the two great ex-Commie nations come up with any substantial help to their merely semi-Marxist European cousins? Nope. Will anybody else? Very unlikely. Still, according to an official statement, “EU member states support a substantial increase in the IMF’s resources.” Also, the EU “would welcome G20 members and other financially strong IMF members to support the efforts to safeguard global financial stability by contributing to the increase in IMF resources so as to fill global financing gaps.”

So you see it’s not about bailing out political deadbeats, it’s about “stability.” Meanwhile, for those unfamiliar with sophisticated terminology, a “financing gap” is what you have when, say, a crack addict goes to the bank for a loan. Financing gaps are there for a reason.

This week, even disgraced former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn suggested that the IMF was “in denial.” It’s certainly being asked to backstop denial. European Central Bank president Mario Draghi reminded everybody on Monday that euro banks and governments face more than a half trillion euros’ worth of refinancing in the first quarter of next year. That can’t possibly go well.

Then again, perhaps I’m being too naively micro-oriented when I should be adopting the wisdom of non-Euclidean quantum macro Keynesianism. However, Keynesian upside-downism (borrow and spend yourself rich!) seems to be having a bit of a North Korean moment right now.

Is it not remarkable meanwhile that, as European nanny statism, with its unsustainable social programs and its carbon hysteria, collapses, in Canada, solemn convocations of the socially concerned and economically powerful, in the shape of the Conference Board and the CCCE, suggest that we become a little more like Europe.

We would be better to remember the lessons of Dickensian London, Bedford Falls, and Whoville. Redemption — like a sound economy — is based not on collectivism and forced redistribution, but on personal responsibility and charity.

In it, he draws our attention to the long-term consequences of such policies, not only for stakeholders but also for society as a whole. The MEI is happy to highlight the work of Peter Foster, a columnist who has demonstrated his ability to explain complex economic concepts in plain English.

The prize is accompanied by a $3,000 grant. The other award went to Mario Dumont, host of the public affairs program Dumont on the V television network. The award, made possible by the Lotte & John Hecht Memorial Foundation, goes to journalists who demonstrate an understanding of the economic consequences of government policies.

It may seem a little incestuous to be praising to the skies When We were Europe, by Scotia Economics’ Derek Holt and Karen Cordes Woods, but it should be required reading for all U.S. and European policymakers, not to mention their Keynesian advisors, whose credibility is shrinking faster than the Wicked Witch of the West in a wet T-shirt contest. Read more

If, as suggested by a pundit from a rival newspaper, Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney’s speech on Monday ranks up there with the Gettysburg address, then an analysis that appeared on this page on Thursday can only be compared with the wisdom and insight that would emerge from melding The Wealth of Nations with War and Peace.

It may seem a little incestuous to be praising to the skies When We were Europe, by Scotia Economics’ Derek Holt and Karen Cordes Woods, but it should be required reading for all U.S. and European policymakers, not to mention their Keynesian advisors, whose credibility is shrinking faster than the Wicked Witch of the West in a wet T-shirt contest.

Messrs. Holt and Cordes Woods explode the assumption that the Liberal government’s success in dealing with Canada’s debt problems in the 1990s was “easy.” More important, however, they identify, with great analytic clarity, the only route to salvation for both Europe and the U.S. Forget all Obamaesque notions of a “balanced” approach that bashes the 1% “fairly,” much less barmy schemes from the likes of Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz that the U.S. government needs to indulge in a massive debt-funded program of “investment” in infrastructure and education. Salvation, according to the Scotia economists, lies in only one direction: cutting government down to size. Messrs. Holt and Cordes Woods assert forcefully that “[M]ost of Canada’s fiscal improvement in the 1990s was achieved through domestic program-expenditure reduction — not through revenue gains.”

Their insights are even more sorely needed in Europe, where economic policy looks like something out of Lewis Carroll. Repeated calls from European politicians and policy wonks to do “whatever it takes” imply infinite latitude in seeking solutions. Messrs. Holt and Cordes Woods explain why that is not so, and why indulging the spend-yourself-rich shtick still being peddled by the likes of Mr. Stiglitz and Paul Krugman would be suicidal. Then again, Messrs. Stiglitz and Krugman still believe that there’s no “stimulus” like a good world war. The Scotia authors not only douse more spending, they deep-six all Keynesian notions that “now is not the time” for austerity. They stand firm against the delusions of “quantitative easing” as anything but a worsening of the inevitable. They stress that, based on Canada’s experience, Germany is right in resisting those braying for the European Central Bank to buy up subprime governments’ bonds. The only sound policy lies in austerity and structural reform, for which politicians need to promote public support rather than continuing to claim they can finagle a painless exit.

In fact, thanks to easy monetary policy and “forgiving bond markets,” plus a healthier corporate sector, the Scotia economists suggest that the task facing the U.S. and Europe should in fact be easier than it was for Canada. They conclude, refreshingly, that “Canada achieved fiscal progress the old-fashioned way: through austerity that followed an over two-decade-long debt binge and by paying its bills.”

Other recent books and studies confirm that effective fiscal consolidation has to be a matter of cutting spending rather than hoisting taxes. These analyses — which also tend to point to Canada as a shining example — include a recent tome from the IMF titled Chipping Away at Public Debt, edited by Paulo Mauro, which looked at 66 instances of fiscal adjustments in Canada, France, the United States, Japan, Germany, and Italy. Success was linked not merely to hefty spending cuts but to fundamental structural reforms in entitlements. Indeed, the most effective reform involved rethinking the role of the overbloated state. The IMF book also found that — as with the Chrétien Liberals — ambitious and painful plans didn’t necessarily go with being tossed out of office. Again, the authors found that it was essential to get the public onside.

Another recent study, by Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna, for the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research, also analysed the role of taxes vs. spending in solving growth and debt problems and came down even more strongly against tax increases, and for spending cuts. The authors looked at attempts by 21 OECD countries to reduce their debt on 107 occasions between 1970 and 2007, and concluded that “Fiscal stimuli based upon tax cuts are more likely to increase growth than those based upon spending increases. As for fiscal adjustments, those based upon spending cuts and no tax increases are more likely to reduce deficits and debt over GDP ratios than those based upon tax increases.”

Their work was subsequently corroborated and built upon by scholars from the American Enterprise Institute, who found that a typical unsuccessful consolidation consisted of a “balanced” 53% of tax increases and 47% of spending cuts, while successful consolidation consisted on average of 85% spending cuts.

These are unpalatable but unavoidable economic facts for the political class, not simply, or perhaps even, because they are difficult to sell, but because they point to the true cause of the current crisis: out-of-control government. Instead, when European politicians call for “whatever it takes,” what they tend to mean is using the ECB as a toxic dump, and robbing lenders and those on fixed incomes by stoking inflation.

That is not merely immoral but — as Messrs. Holt and Cordes Woods so clearly point out — it doesn’t work.

Cloudmacroland, for the uninitiated, is a region just high enough in the policy sky that one can see forests from it, but not trees. Its denizens’ wonky perspective is that to grow a forest involves not primarily the planting of seeds but the creation of a Boreal Stability Board.

On Monday, Mr. Carney suggested that it was metaphorical time to give forestry companies — indeed the entire private sector — a chance at promoting growth. However, this was perhaps less a recognition of where jobs actually come from than an example of passing the buck. Sorry, I mean “baton.” Read more

Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney, fresh from his elevation to command the G20’s Financial Stability Board, delivered an address on Monday that superficially suggested that he had come somewhat closer to earth from Cloudmacroland.

Cloudmacroland, for the uninitiated, is a region just high enough in the policy sky that one can see forests from it, but not trees. Its denizens’ wonky perspective is that to grow a forest involves not primarily the planting of seeds but the creation of a Boreal Stability Board.

On Monday, Mr. Carney suggested that it was metaphorical time to give forestry companies — indeed the entire private sector — a chance at promoting growth. However, this was perhaps less a recognition of where jobs actually come from than an example of passing the buck. Sorry, I mean “baton.”

The speech, delivered to a joint meeting of the Empire Club of Toronto and the Canadian Club of Toronto, was titled Growth in the Age of Deleveraging, which is to say keeping your business expanding when your customers — especially governments and the private households that government policies have encouraged to load up with debt — are furiously trying to pay down their unsustainable burdens.

In Canada, apparently, policy bazookas are unnecessary. All that is needed is for business to pick up that baton.

Mr. Carney gave a masterful summary of the current global crisis on Monday, although one couldn’t help feeling he was being a little harsh on markets and a little light on the culpability of government policies. He suggested that households got into trouble in the U.S. and U.K. not because of borrowing against government-promoted housing bubbles, but because they were on some mystical consumption treadmill.

He did not apply any lipstick to the eurozone pig, but claimed that the U.S. policy response to the crisis had been a “success,” at least by the standards of the Great Depression. However, that assumes that the U.S. policy response hasn’t set in train another Great Depression. He didn’t even countenance how a less regulated, less bailout-friendly, less debt-heavy stimulative policy might have been more successful, certainly in the long run.

Three years ago, just after the U.S. banking crisis hit (and when all those snooty Europeans were condemning Anglo-Saxon capitalist “greed”) Mr. Carney, as a good Keynesian, was warning against the “paradox of thrift,” the notion that saving was potentially dangerous and that spending was good. Canadian consumers didn’t so much take his advice as rationally pursue the signals that he delivered via artificially low interest rates, which were in turn dictated by the artificial rates of our southern neighbour.

Unlike the U.S., however, those low interest rates have not only kept Canadian real estate bubbling, they have also inclined homeowners to continue to take advantage of their home equity lines of credit. Canadian household borrowing, noted Mr. Carney, has actually gone up and is now higher than in either the U.S. or the U.K.

Mr. Carney has for some time been signalling — with his words rather than his policies — that this is a very bad idea. He was signalling a bit less vigorously on Monday, although he still implied that if individuals were overborrowing, it wasn’t his fault. Nevertheless, the overborrowing has to stop. He really means it.

Unfortunately, bringing down household debt and government deficits will leave a demand “gap” that has to be filled, mixed metaphorically, by the passing of that baton. According to Mr. Carney, the “most palatable strategy to reduce debt is to increase growth.” So it’s over to you Mr. Canadian Businessman for a bit of “rebalancing,” which is another euphemism for passing the buck.

Mr. Carney claimed that Canadian businesses “panicked” after the initial meltdown at the end of 2008, exercising culpable prudence and forgetting the paradox of thrift. Now, according to the governor, they are letting Canada down again. They need to be more aggressive in investing to increase productivity, and stop being “underexposed to fast-growing emerging markets.”

“What we really do want to avoid is having another sudden stop on investment in this country because it’s ‘all too difficult,’ ” Mr. Carney declared at a press conference after his speech. “Well, it’s actually not that difficult, we’re not as productive, we’re not as exposed to bigger markets.”

See. Business looks easy when you inhabit the policy clouds.

Mr. Carney’s logic is certainly impregnable: “A virtuous circle of increased investment and increased productivity would increase the debt-carrying capacity of all, through higher wages, greater profits and higher government revenues.”

If only businesses thought in such magnificent macro terms. Sadly, they tend to concentrate — in their grubby micro blinkerdom — on such mundane realities as actually making and marketing specific products to actual customers, managing supply chains, meeting wage and tax bills, and staying solvent.

I scanned Mr. Carney’s speech for an example of a particular piece of productivity-enhancing equipment that a named manufacturer might be guilty of having failed to purchase, or a specific example of a business opportunity in a particular emerging nation, but could find none. I assume that Mr. Carney neglected to give such examples because he did not want to embarrass any dimwitted manager or entrepreneur, or start any investment stampede to a surefire winner somewhere in Africa.

Of course, I suppose it’s also possible that he didn’t provide examples because he didn’t have any, but then up there in Cloudmacroland you have to take the big picture, not sweat the small stuff.

The magazine recently featured a picture of Barack Obama with a red clown nose, but how does that even begin to compare with Italian apparel manufacturer Benetton’s portrayal of the U.S. President engaged in eyes-closed smooching sessions with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Chinese paramount leader Hu Jintao?

Benetton’s Orwellian “Unhate” campaign also featured a doctored image of Pope Benedict XVI getting up close and personal with a prominent Egyptian imam. Benetton claimed coyly that it was using the kiss as a “symbol of love.” It looked far more like a prelude to an assignation in a bath house. The company is already infamous for using images of AIDS patients, war and death row to sell its woollies. Read more

Adbusters, the Vancouver-based lefty magazine behind the Occupy movement, has always specialized in spoof ads and irreverent visuals. The problem is that it finds itself as increasingly outflanked by beyond-parody marketing as it has been isolated by political reality, whatever claims are made for the “success” of the Occupiers.

The magazine recently featured a picture of Barack Obama with a red clown nose, but how does that even begin to compare with Italian apparel manufacturer Benetton’s portrayal of the U.S. President engaged in eyes-closed smooching sessions with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Chinese paramount leader Hu Jintao?

Benetton’s Orwellian “Unhate” campaign also featured a doctored image of Pope Benedict XVI getting up close and personal with a prominent Egyptian imam. Benetton claimed coyly that it was using the kiss as a “symbol of love.” It looked far more like a prelude to an assignation in a bath house. The company is already infamous for using images of AIDS patients, war and death row to sell its woollies.

When it comes to that kissing campaign, since Adbusters supports communism over consumerism, perhaps it wouldn’t want to unleash satire lest it stir memories of bulldog-faced members of the Politburo locking lips in the good old days before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Adbusters’ immutable socialism and its related foundational — but erroneous — belief that consumers are manipulable morons brought to mind a gloriously misguided ad campaign by the British company Watneys in the early 1970s. The brewer attempted to promote its much-reviled Red Barrel brand of beer with a campaign inviting drinkers to “Join the Red Revolution.” It featured posters sporting the likes of chairman Mao, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro. However much consumers might have been put off by the prospect of mass murderers as pitchmen, the main problem was that the beer was awful. In fact, it inspired a true consumer revolution against “mass-produced fizzy pap.”

Benetton too seems to believe that flagging sales can be helped by outdoing anything Adbusters could parody. Meanwhile, there is another reason why Adbusters might not go after the Pope: the Vatican, too, specializes in spouting economically challenged leftist policy drivel.

One of the demands to come out of Occupy Wall Street was for a “Robin Hood tax” on financial transactions. The Vatican called for a similar measure at the end of October. It also modestly proposed a world central bank and a global economic authority, along with subsidizing banks that pursue “virtuous” economic behaviour.

Word doesn’t seem to have reached the Holy See that the U.S. subprime crisis was ultimately rooted precisely in the government promotion of “altruistic” mortgages to the “underserved,” along with central banks’ reckless suppression of interest rates and thus promotion of unsustainable housing booms both in the United States and beyond.

The Vatican appears to think that the answer to government incompetence is to have more and bigger government. At least the motley crew of transgendered anarchists and others who wound up running the show at Occupy Wall Street weren’t naive enough to believe that.

Meanwhile — swinging to the opposite end of the political spectrum — if Adbusters wanted to execute a parody of a company trying to alienate its own customers by being unacceptably right-wing (which is to say, at all right-wing), how could it possibly beat the decision by fellow Vancouver icon Lululemon to print “Who is John Galt?” — a recurring phrase from Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged — on a shopping bag?

The John Galt bags were the inspiration of Lululemon founder and chairman “Chip” Wilson, who reportedly read and was impressed by Atlas Shrugged when he was 18. However, Mr. Wilson has dumbed down Ms. Rand’s uncompromising intellectual world view to a bland message about rejecting “mediocrity” and pursuing “greatness.”

Ms. Rand’s promotion of selfishness might be stretched — like yoga wear — to embrace self-indulgence, but one just can’t imagine her frequenting a yoga studio unless smoking was allowed.

In an interview in 2009, Mr. Wilson had already betrayed that his grasp on Galt-ian ideals was a little loose. He suggested that the government has a role in taking over troubled corporations and turning them around, albeit so they can be privatized later. Not in Galt’s Gulch it doesn’t.

Lululemon, meanwhile, has a record of peddling distinctly non-objectivist mystic flapdoodle. Three years ago, it got into trouble for making ludicrous claims about the revitalizing effects of seaweed T-shirts. As noted in this space at the time, companies should be free to make all the wacky claims they want for their products, short of endangering their customers, but Lululemon’s problem was that it had previously adopted a holier-than-though posture toward other companies, including manufacturers of kitchen cleaning chemicals and cola products. Lululemon wisely ditched its attacks on Coke and Pepsi (although ammonia is still on the hit list).

In response to Vatican outrage at being used for crass “commercial” purposes, Benetton has withdrawn its pictures of the kissing Pope. Still, it is difficult to imagine that those images would induce anybody to buy a sweater, any more than invoking John Galt would inspire the purchase of $100 yoga pants.

Although the hundreds of responses to the John Galt bags on Lululemon’s blog contain a surprising amount of support for the campaign, they also demonstrate — as one might suspect — that much of Lululemon’s clientele lean more towards the Tuesdays with Morrie school of soft left hypocrisy. My favourite example appeared not on the blog but in a letter to The Globe and Mail, in which a Lululemon shareholder announced that her sell order was in and that “Any profits I make will be donated to a charity and the Occupy movement.”

Perhaps she might also take out a subscription to Adbusters. That is, if she doesn’t have one already.

I ended my previous article with the claim by the University of Virginia’s Jonathan Haidt that “climate-change denialism” sprang from conservatives treating free markets as “sacred.”

In fact, Dr. Haidt subsequently modified his views after watching a British television program called The Great Global Warming Swindle, which persuaded him that there were well-credentialled and well-motivated skeptics who at least deserved a hearing. More significantly, he came to realize that climate change might be more of a “sacralized” issue for the left than the right.

Dr. Haidt notes that what makes morality — our notions of good and bad, and right and wrong — so hard to examine is the nature of morality itself, which has been a topic of philosophical inquiry since before Socrates. We are steeped in it, but reluctant to think about it. Indeed, we appear designed by evolution to believe that what we “feel” to be morally right is unquestionably right in cosmic terms. Read more

I ended my previous article with the claim by the University of Virginia’s Jonathan Haidt that “climate-change denialism” sprang from conservatives treating free markets as “sacred.”

In fact, Dr. Haidt subsequently modified his views after watching a British television program called The Great Global Warming Swindle, which persuaded him that there were well-credentialled and well-motivated skeptics who at least deserved a hearing. More significantly, he came to realize that climate change might be more of a “sacralized” issue for the left than the right.

Dr. Haidt notes that what makes morality — our notions of good and bad, and right and wrong — so hard to examine is the nature of morality itself, which has been a topic of philosophical inquiry since before Socrates. We are steeped in it, but reluctant to think about it. Indeed, we appear designed by evolution to believe that what we “feel” to be morally right is unquestionably right in cosmic terms.

Psychologists such as Dr. Haidt are leading us back towards the discomforting view of morality posed by some of the great thinkers of the 18th century, in particular Scottish philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith. He believes that the great skeptic Hume was correct when he pointed out that our “reason” is inevitably slave to our passions. First we feel, then we rationalize our feelings, marshalling all the evidence that fits. The trendy new psychological name for this human characteristic is “confirmation bias.”

Dr. Haidt presents the image of our rational mind as a small, somewhat conscious rider on a very large subconscious elephant. The rider doesn’t so much guide the elephant as act as its press secretary, justifying what the elephant wants to do.

Adam Smith’s long-neglected first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, proposed that such sentiments had been “designed” to help us live in society, although they also made us prone to “faction and fanaticism,” that is, to lose all sense of proportion when it comes to politics or religion. Climate change involves hefty doses of both.

Smith and Hume were Enlightenment renegades because they believed that morality was rooted in human nature and human interaction rather than divine revelation. The big unanswered question was: Exactly how had those moral sentiments been formed?

Charles Darwin provided the basis for an answer. In addition to outlining the process of biological evolution, he suggested that morality had also “evolved” as an adaptive aspect of “group selection.” Morality was a set of biological inclinations and specific rules that helped groups live together. Its dark side was the tendency to demonize opponents and outsiders, leading to Smith’s “faction and fanaticism.”

The Enlightenment view of human nature as flawed — sometimes known as the “Tragic Vision” — was subsequently rejected by those who claimed that reason could conquer all. What Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” of Marxist utopian rationalism came crashing with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but then made a comeback through the claim that carbon dioxide-spewing industrial capitalism was threatening life on Earth.

One might imagine that the first step before introducing grand schemes of global control would have been to make sure the science was solid, but that would be to assume that policy was being guided by science rather than moral ­ideology.

The fact that moralism clashes with scientific objectivity — which is in any case a much less objective exercise than imagined — was pointed out by Thomas S. Kuhn in his seminal book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He noted that scientists adopt, and commit to, theoretical “paradigms” which then become fundamentally unquestionable. Kuhn noted that this stance is further hardened if moral values are involved. Then skeptics are cast as crackpots.

“Deniers” must be excluded from the court of public opinion. To give them “equal time” is an offence against justice. Perhaps not surprisingly — but certainly disturbingly, as Lord Turnbull noted in my previous column — much of the mainstream media has adopted this attitude.

An inquiry undertaken for the BBC Trust in the U.K. earlier this year suggested that the state-owned corporation was giving too much space and time to skeptics. The inquiry’s author, Prof. Steve Jones, a geneticist, declared that “For at least three years, the climate-change deniers have been marginal to the scientific debate, but somehow they continued to find a place on the airwaves.” However, the very use of the term “deniers” establishes Prof. Jones’ own bias. Meanwhile, he didn’t apparently consider how the psychology of taboo might have been responsible for the “marginalizing” of skepticism. Instead he suggested more taboo. Don’t give them air time! Don’t listen to them!

Since the Jones report, the “Climategate 2” emails reveal that there was in fact a co-ordinated effort by the BBC and the University of East Anglia to marginalize skeptics.

Whatever the science, the appropriate policy response should be a matter of weighing costs and benefits. However, as noted, morality and cost-benefit analysis don’t mix. “One argument we hear [with climate change],” says Jon Haidt, “is that we’re probably going to be able to solve it much more cheaply in 10 or 20 years with new technology, so we shouldn’t do much about it now. That violates a taboo by treating it as a non-sacred issue. Those who approach this from an engineering or economic angle would be committing a taboo by not treating it as a moral crisis. Such people could be ostracized even if they had the best long-run interest of the Earth at heart.”

One such individual is Danish Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg. Prof. Lomborg has been reviled not for doubting man-made climate change, but for suggesting that the immediate threat is exaggerated, and that there are plenty of more practical ways of helping the poor than trying to change the weather. The vituperative reaction to Lomborg suggests that his approach is considered “profane.”

Nevertheless, climate alarmists, while fiercely rejecting concepts such as geoengineering, feel that globally co-ordinated economic control (under their direction) is feasible, although the ultimate answer is for mankind to change its “materialist” ways.

“If you’re trying to make the case that the left is showing more tribal moralism than the right on climate change,” concludes Jon Haidt, “that might be true.” Nevertheless, Dr. Haidt still believes that global warming is anthropogenic (although he admits that he knows little about the science and so is inclined to follow — quite rationally — what he believes to be the weight of scientific opinion). Steven Pinker, too, is inclined to go with the “consensus,” and even believes that moralists — presumably including climate moralists — might be thankful for having the origins, nature, and potential flaws of their psychology laid out for them. He cites Chekhov: “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.” However, man tends to be reluctant to look — even sometimes incapable of looking — into that mirror.

Adam Smith and David Hume suggested that we should be wary of our moral intuitions, particularly when it comes to religion and politics, but they also explained why such self-examination was unlikely. After all, who wants to admit that he is not merely a slave to his passions, but inclined to science-bending demonization because he has an irrational hatred of capitalism, and is sitting on a subconscious elephant motivated by a lust for power?

For those who believe that the Kyoto process is politically dangerous, economically destructive and based on dubious science, this is a good thing. Nevertheless, there is bound to be plenty of hand-wringing over the failure of rich countries to hand over more cash to poor ones as “compensation” for the climate catastrophe to come. This is one of the reasons why Al Gore and Archbishop Desmond Tutu maintain that climate change is a “moral issue.” The psychological roots and practical consequences of this claim have received much less attention than they deserve.

Lord Andrew Turnbull, a former head of the British Civil Service, has become profoundly concerned about the corruption of climate science by moralism. “There is a strong alignment,” he told me, “between those who subscribe to anthropogenic global warming as the preponderant driver of climate change, and those whose view of the world is fundamentally anti-market and anti-capitalist. Read more

The 17th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that begins this week in Durban isn’t expected to see much progress in replacing Kyoto.

For those who believe that the Kyoto process is politically dangerous, economically destructive and based on dubious science, this is a good thing. Nevertheless, there is bound to be plenty of hand-wringing over the failure of rich countries to hand over more cash to poor ones as “compensation” for the climate catastrophe to come. This is one of the reasons why Al Gore and Archbishop Desmond Tutu maintain that climate change is a “moral issue.” The psychological roots and practical consequences of this claim have received much less attention than they deserve.

Lord Andrew Turnbull, a former head of the British Civil Service, has become profoundly concerned about the corruption of climate science by moralism. “There is a strong alignment,” he told me, “between those who subscribe to anthropogenic global warming as the preponderant driver of climate change, and those whose view of the world is fundamentally anti-market and anti-capitalist. That climate change should have become part of the battle of political ideas is not surprising. What is profoundly shocking is the way large parts of the scientific community have allowed themselves to be co-opted into this movement.”

Lord Turnbull notes that the leaders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the ­IPCC, the alleged fount of objective climate science, “have formed a tight-knit circle which seeks to portray their explanation of changing climate as the unique and correct one, while at the same time seeking to obstruct or suppress the views of those with other viewpoints.” He points out that large parts of the mainstream media “have trotted along uncritically behind the consensus.”

The recent release of a second round of hacked emails to and from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia further confirms Lord Turnbull’s take.

Harvard’s Steven Pinker, an eminent student of human nature, has remarked on the moralism behind the global-warming issue. In a 2008 article in The New York Times Magazine, titled “The Moral Instinct,” Professor Pinker wrote: “And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting.”

Prof. Pinker nevertheless finds it hard to believe that moralism might have entirely corrupted the science, but then he may not have taken into account the link between moralism and politics.

According to Al Gore, the fact that climate change is a moral issue places it “beyond politics.” This claim is, to say the least, puzzling since moral issues are the deepest motivators of — and justifications for — political activism. What Mr. Gore really seems to be claiming is that we should move past “quibbling” about the science and get straight to draconian action, which just happens to coincide with his own brand of politics: more government control at all levels; more redistribution both within and between states.

Putting the policy cart before the scientific horse makes no logical sense, but then — as philosophers have been telling us for a very long time — moral issues aren’t about either logic or sense, they are about feelings. One of those feelings is that those who challenge our most fervent moral convictions are not just wrong, but wickedly self-interested (as opposed to ourselves, whose motives are pure and selfless), stupid or downright evil.

According to prominent left-liberals such as Paul Krugman, climate deniers are analogous to benighted believers in anti-Darwinian “intelligent design.” They are non-scientific fools whose views do not deserve examination. The very term “denier” suggests psychopathology — the rejection of truth — and invites links to “Holocaust denial.” However, “deniers” are not denying a truth, they are skeptical about a theory, the theory of catastrophic man-made climate change. The devil is in the adjectives. Skeptics are also disturbed by the policies this “settled science” is said to require, because those policies have always and everywhere failed, damaging human wealth and welfare. However, those questioning the ­IPCC process, or alleged “consensus,” are castigated for their heresy.

Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise, who recently published a book, The Delinquent Teenager who was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, about the profound flaws of the IPCC process, noted the moralistic vitriol that her inquiries had unleashed. “It is peculiar, indeed,” she wrote, “that people who see things differently try to link my climate views to racists, Holocaust deniers, child murderers, mental illness and the tobacco industry.… It is bizarre that prime ministers and other officials think it remotely appropriate to publicly denounce climate skeptics as cowards, saboteurs, and anti-science Flat-Earthers… Whatever happened to tolerance and mutual respect?”

The simple answer is that when ardent moralism rears its head, tolerance and mutual respect tend to be tossed out of the window, along with any inclination even to listen to what skeptics are saying.

A couple of years ago I attended a conference of skeptics about climate orthodoxy in New York City. At the end of one session — on the unfolding disaster of European climate policies — a young man appeared at the back of the room and declared that he had never witnessed “such hypocrisy.” How, he asked, could the panelists sleep at night? One of the puzzled presenters asked the young man with which parts of their presentations he disagreed.

“Oh,” said the young man. “I didn’t come here to listen to the presentations.”

Psychologist Philip Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania coined a phrase for the tendency to regard some perspectives as so morally wrong as to be beyond examination. He called it “The Psychology of Taboo.” Prof. Tetlock asked his students their opinions on a number of contentious issues, including buying and selling human organs, auctioning adoption licences, or buying one’s way out of jury duty. Respondents tended to be outraged at even being asked to consider such proposals.

Significantly, purchasing children, selling organs or buying your way out of jury duty all involve a clash between moral values and commercial values. Moral values are non-negotiable, whereas commercial values are all about haggling, and never the twain shall meet.

Climate change is not primarily a moral issue; it is a scientific issue with moral implications. To put the moral issues first is to risk corrupting the science, since moralism tends to crowd out objectivity and lead to a closing of ranks. The potentially corrupting influence of moralism on science is itself a critically important area of scientific study. Ironically, however, it is one that may be neglected because of the strong left-liberal bias of the academic community.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychologist who specializes in the moral foundations of politics, created an ideological uproar earlier this year when he suggested that his own field might have become “broken” because of left-liberal bias.

Dr. Haidt’s call for attempts to understand conservative moral perspectives and for a truce in the “culture wars” was admirable, but he also claimed that “climate-change denialism” was an example of conservative moral bias, of a “moral-tribal community … protecting their sacralized free markets.”

But was that suggestion itself left-liberal bias?

One embarrassing aspect of the affair was the pathetic willingness of politicians and pundits to express support for the protesters’ “conviction,” albeit that they lacked any coherent message apart from the narcissistic claim to represent all those outside the demonized “1%” of the most wealthy.

This festival of Merry Pranksterism does, however, invite reflection. One key issue is that of a sense of perspective. Perspective is important not just because the movement’s mouthpieces dared to compare themselves with those genuinely brave people protesting dictatorship and being brutalized in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Read more