Editor's Blog

Back in March the Canadian Press broke the story that the Conservative Party was scripting call-in responses for supporters to read out on the air. Well, according to a leaked memo from Prime Minister Harper’s Chief of Staff Guy Giorno, they’re at it again. Here are just a few of the scripted lines to listen for on your local call-in show:

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Jeremy Scahill’s Alternet article: This Is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama’s White House.

2. Scahill and Mother Jones’ s David Corn on Democracy Now: Agents of Change or Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons? A Discussion about Barack Obama’s Advisers and Transition Team

“I think . . . this is the precise moment when this kind of journalism matters, when we have to remind people of the history and the previous policies implemented by the people that are at the center of Obama’s foreign policy team right now, because we’re going to be living with these people for the next four years running the show. And I think it’s incredibly important to be all over this right now, before they’re named.”

Like gallows humour, only darker. Parental discretion is advised.

Watch video.

Get your war on. More episodes here.

Rebecca Solnit on the election of Barack Obama:

I thought we were entering an era where we would do without heroes, but we have been given a hero, which is a bit like being given a chainsaw or a credit card: you have to be careful how you use it.

This moment of joy will subside, and those who expected Obama to be flawless or to keep inspiring them forever and a day may be disappointed. Still, his strength is that he speaks the language of community organizers, of “si, se puede,” and that, at least for a while, he may spread rather than consolidate power.

When you come down to it though, that’s our responsibility, not his. His responsibility is to preside over a nation that must shrink from empire, on economic as well as moral grounds, from the mad consumptive prosperity of the postwar era, and from the profligate environmental destruction that went with it. Perhaps he will be our Gorbachev, a man with the boldness to yield and reduce.

Watch this. Implausible and funny.

Read this.

Excerpt: “The entire world is currently spooked by the Argentine ghost. Even if wealthy countries reach out to ailing nations, some governments will not survive the storm. Even this would not be truly dramatic. But if the industrialized nations then decide to leave the threshold countries to their own devices, the ensuing wildfire will burn indefinitely.”

Watch this again. No longer implausible. Still funny?

From today’s “debt rattle” on the blog Automatic Earth — a site worth visiting from time to time if you’re looking for a refreshingly downbeat perspective on the massive transfer of wealth currently underway:

With the Dow Jones safely tucked in back down below 9000, and European exchanges losing 7% on average, the positive overall global effect of an unprecedented transfer of public funds to the private sector, to the tune of some $4.5 trillion, has lasted about a day and a half.

The $4.5 trillion could have been used to the benefit of the people it rightfully belongs to, the same people who will soon desperately need every singly penny of it. Instead, it has been given away, and is now no longer available to help in what is cynically called “the real economy”.

And that is where the reason for today’s plunging stocks lies: the real economy, in the real world, where the real people live. Unfortunately for them, financial decisions are all taken by those who live in other universes, for whom the real world has no meaning without the world of finance, who are under the illusion that their multi-million bonuses exist for the good of the people.

A nice way of putting it is this: “If you spent $1 million per day from the day Jesus was born until Christmas 2008, you would have spent $733 billion”. In other words, you could have spent a million a day for 12,000 years, and still not get to the amount spent in the past 5 days.

Full article.

Here are three by financial economist and historian Michael Hudson to help guide you through the economic meltdown currently underway. Best taken with a stiff drink.

1. “The new road to serfdom: An illustrated guide to the coming real estate collapse.” Harper’s Magazine, May 2006.

2.  Michael Hudson and Nomi Prins on the AIG bailout. Democracy Now, Sept. 17, 2008.

The bailout is “the worst possible move, and it puts the class war back in business with a vengeance. Wall Street has been preparing for this for years, because every financial analyst knows that the debts can’t be paid. And the question that Wall Street has, if you’re going to take a gamble on bad debts that can’t be paid, how are you going to come out a winner? And there’s only one way of coming out a winner, and that’s to make the government bail you out.”

3.”The insanity of the $700 billion give-away.” CounterPunch, Sept. 29, 2008.

“No economy can keep up with the burden of debts growing at exponential rates faster than the economy itself is growing. No economy can grow at steady exponential rates; only debts can multiply in this way. That is why Mr. Paulson’s $700 billion giveaway to his Wall Street colleagues cannot work.

“What it can do is provide a one-time transfer of wealth to insiders who already have been playing the debt-credit system and siphoning off its predatory financial proceeds to themselves.”

The gist: today’s failed bail-out bill was a really, really bad idea that wouldn’t have worked anyway. The biggest danger now? That they’ll come up with something even worse.

The only workable solution is to write-down or forgive the bad debts and let the banks and investors eat it. That’s the only way “Main Street” is going to recover. But don’t hold your breath for Paulson to propose that.

Judging from yesterday’s Globe & Mail, Briarpatch indeed has its finger on the pulse of emerging ideas in Canada. Not only was the Saturday Report on Business dubbed “the debt issue” (a topic we covered in some depth in our May 2008 Money & Debt issue), but it featured interviews with both literary icon Margaret Atwood on her new book and forthcoming Massey Lecture Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. and, in the Focus section, with respected public intellectual John Raulston Saul, who also has a new book that will be of interest to Briarpatch readers. Saul’s new book A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada starts from the idea that “Canada is a Métis civilization,” a notion that will ring true to readers of our June/July 2008 “settler/indigenous relations” issue.

Is the Report on Business editor reading Briarpatch? Are Peg and Jack? It would seem that good ol’ Briarpatch is leading the pack.

The good folks at rabble.ca have pulled together an impressive collection of progressive bloggers, many of whom will be known to Briarpatch readers (ahem), to share commentary and analysis on the slow-motion car crash — er, federal election — currently unfolding. Check it out at rabble.ca/election.

Check it out, weigh in on the issues, and consider making it your homepage for the duration. Strength in numbers, folks….