You know, I tried. I really did. But the last thing, no really the last thing, this word needs is another fucking blog.
Sorry about that all you good and kind people.
I’m going to leave this blog section up until the fall, and then have another look at it. But for now, just give me a call or come visit if you want to chill out. Be happy to sit and have a beer anytime.
Just a quick note, in part in the context of the Gulf BP Spill, but also as a more general comment:
Across the political spectrum it is very commonly assumed that government and corporations are fundamentally antagonistic. The essential argument of the Right, of all stripes, is that government power and reach must be constricted to allow the market to flourish and individual freedoms to emerge. The Left counters that government is the only brake to the inequities of the market and is the proper arena for ethical politics and decision-making.
This is the basis for virtually all contemporary political arguments. Whether it’s the Tea Party nuts looking to disassemble government or calls for more environmental regulation, it’s the same basic tension – how much does government restrict private enterprise, to what degree should private business be fettered.
Occasionally people wonder if those two assumed antagonists are not all that antagonistic. Commentators wonder about the close ties the Obama administration has with Wall Street bankers, Harper’s Alberta oil pals, the corporate funding of Vision Vancouver and our Mayor, the access that the rich always have to upper levels of all governments, the closeness with which corporate executives and lobbyists work with politicians. This line of thinking suggests that a vibrant media, aggressive public scrutiny, and appropriate checks and balances can make sure that politicians and corporations do not get too cozy – that the liberal democratic process can make sure each of these actors keeps the other in check.
There is something else though that I would like to suggest: that the formulation that government and business are antagonistic is false. That they overwhelmingly tend to be one and the same. We know, for example, the ease with which businessmen become elected representatives then become lobbyists as soon as they lose their seat. There is a seamlessness to the relationships between the corporate world and all levels of government that suggests that they serve the same interests, that they emerge from the same worldview and they have the same intentions.
If this is true, then what might the future for Left politics be? Keep trying to hold government to a promise they never made? How long does the illusion hold? How many BP spills will it take before we give up on the idea that government will keep corporations in check because they are, well, the government? How many kicks to the groin do you want to absorb?
Just for a little example, try this article from last month.Considered from one perspective it is holding the Obama administration accountable in their duty to fetter Goldman Sachs, from another it points out the obvious – that Goldman and the administration are profoundly entwined, and in fact are the same people, just periodically changing job descriptions.
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WASHINGTON — While Goldman Sachs’ lawyers negotiated with the Securities and Exchange Commission over potentially explosive civil fraud charges, Goldman’s chief executive visited the White House at least four times.
White House logs show that Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein traveled to Washington for at least two events with President Barack Obama, whose 2008 presidential campaign received $994,795 in donations from Goldman’s employees and their relatives. He also met twice with Obama’s top economic adviser, Larry Summers.
No evidence has surfaced to suggest that Blankfein or any other Goldman executive raised the SEC case with the president or his aides. SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro said in a statement Wednesday that the SEC doesn’t coordinate enforcement actions with the White House or other political bodies.
Meanwhile, however, Goldman is retaining former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig as a member of its legal team. In addition, when he worked as an investment banker in Chicago a decade ago, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel advised one client who also retained Goldman as an adviser on the same $8.2 billion deal.
Goldman’s connections to the White House and the Obama administration are raising eyebrows at a time when Washington and Wall Street are dueling over how to overhaul regulation of the financial world.
Lawrence Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political scientist, said that “almost everything that the White House has done has been haunted by the personnel and the money of Goldman . . . as well as the suspicion that the White House, particularly early on, was pulling its punches out of deference to Goldman and its war chest.
“There’s now kind of a magnifying glass on the administration for any sign of interference or conversations with the regulators and the judiciary,” Jacobs said.
The SEC investigation of Goldman’s dealings lasted 18 months and culminated with the SEC filing civil fraud charges against the investment bank last week.
According to White House visitor logs, Blankfein was among the business leaders who attended an Obama speech on Feb. 13, 2009, and he also joined more than a dozen bank CEOs in a meeting with Obama on March 27, 2009.
Blankfein also was supposed be among the CEOs who met with Obama in December, but he and two others phoned in from New York, blaming inclement weather.
He and his wife, Laura, were listed on the logs among 438 presidential guests at the Kennedy Center Honors the previous week.
The logs also indicate that Blankfein met twice in 2009, on Feb. 4 and Sept. 30, with Summers, who was undersecretary of the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration when it was headed by Robert Rubin, a former Goldman CEO.
Asked whether Goldman executives had talked to administration officials about the SEC inquiry, Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally said that the firm doesn’t discuss “what conversations we may or may not have had with government officials.”
Schapiro’s statement said that she’s “disappointed” by Republican rhetoric suggesting that the SEC case against Goldman might have been timed to boost legislative prospects for a financial regulation overhaul bill, which Obama plans to pitch in a speech in New York Thursday.
“We do not coordinate our enforcement actions with the White House, Congress or political committees,” Schapiro said. “We do not time our cases around political events or the legislative calendar . . . We will neither bring cases, nor refrain from bringing them, because of the political consequences.”
Obama dismissed any such suggestion as “completely false” Wednesday, saying in a CNBC television interview that the SEC “never discussed with us anything with respect to the charges that would be brought.”
While describing Craig, his former counsel, as “one of the top lawyers in the country,” Obama also said that he’d imposed “the toughest ethics rules that any president’s ever had.”
“One thing he (Craig) knows is that he cannot talk to the White House,” Obama said. “He cannot lobby the White House. He cannot in any way use his former position to have any influence on us.”
Goldman’s chief spokesman, Lucas van Praag, said the firm “wanted Craig . . . for his wisdom and insight.”
Craig, now an attorney with the Washington law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagre & Flom, said: “I am a lawyer, not a lobbyist. Goldman Sachs has hired me to provide legal advice and to assist in its legal representation.”
Goldman’s nearly $1 million in campaign contributions to Obama’s presidential campaign were the most from any single employer except the University of California. Still, they represented only a fraction of the more than $700 million that the campaign raised.
“The vast majority of the money I got was from small donors all across the country,” Obama told CNBC. “Moreover, anybody who gave me money during the course of my campaign knew that I was on record in 2007 and 2008 pushing very strongly that we needed to reform how Wall Street did business.”
One White House insider who knows something about how Wall Street does business is chief of staff Emanuel, who earned millions of dollars in investment banking after he left the Clinton White House. His work for the Chicago-based financial services firm Wasserstein Perella & Co. intersected with Goldman in at least one deal.
In 1999, Emanuel was a key player representing Unicom Corp., the parent of Commonwealth Edison, in forging its merger with Peco Energy Co. to create utility giant Exelon Corp. Goldman was also advising Unicom.
The White House declined immediate comment on that connection.
Several former Goldman executives hold senior positions in the Obama administration, including Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; Mark Patterson, a former Goldman lobbyist who is chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; and Robert Hormats, the undersecretary of state for economic, energy and agricultural affairs.
Jacobs of the University of Minnesota said that the administration now risks “kind of a feeding frenzy.”
“The administration has to be very careful,” he said, “because . . . they’re seen as the ones who bailed out Wall Street. If there are indications that the administration was talking to regulators or to Justice Department people about when and how Goldman or other firms would be investigated, I think that’s going to create almost a mob scene.”
Every place has its chauvinist streak. Everywhere you travel someone’s going tell why their country is so superior, why their city is so revered, why that land is god’s gift. It’s great that people are proud of where they live. The ugly part of course is when it tips into nationalism, xenophobia, blind arrogance, delusion and all the rest.
I’ve been studying Vancouver pretty closely for some time now and my research suggests that this city may well be the smuggest, most-self-satisfied on earth. Some pretty sketchy metrics, but still. It rarely gets too ugly, at least at face value: we’re too passive-aggressive for that, but good lord the self-righteousness sticks in the craw. And especially when places like Mercer or Mastercard or the Economist start talking about Vancouver as the ‘most liveable city in the world’. You know what kinds of cities these dorks approve of and why: scrubbed clean, investor and tourist friendly, blandly available for profit and consumption.
But that’s not how Canadians, and especially Vancouverites, want to see themselves. We imagine ourselves enlightened, literate, compassionate, liberal, ecological and equitable in ways that Americans could never dream of. So when its revealed, for example, that more Americans (73%) have read a book in the past year than Canadians (69%) – a study that confirms a raft of evidence that Americans read a lot more than we do – we brush it off – ‘its probably all Harlequin romances…’. This is not to extol American intellectual culture in particular (fuck!) nor to get into nationalist comparatives, but to get real about who is valourizing Vancouver as the contemporary ideal of the Good City, and why.
One more key piece of evidence in making sense of Vancouver’s exalted place in world urbanism came in this week. We already know and mock the city’s Greenest City on Earth strategy, are shamed that we have the highest child poverty rates in Canada and a festering housing and homelessness crisis that keeps getting worse. We know that middle and lower class folks keep getting pushed further and further out of the city core. We know that we have by far the lowest minimum wage in the country.
And all of it is not an accident. It is part of a comprehensive neo-liberal strategy for remaking the city as a realtor/investor haven. And it’s working hellaciously. As a brand new survey by KPMG highlights:
Vancouver ranks number one in the world when it comes to being business-friendly if you’re talking about taxes.
Accounting firm KPMG’s guide to international business costs looks at the total tax burden faced by companies, including income tax, capital tax, sales tax, property tax, miscellaneous local business taxes, and statutory labour costs.
Vancouver moved up from 4th place in 2008 thanks to continued federal and provincial corporate tax rate cuts and the upcoming change to the Harmonized Sales Tax according to KPMG.
This is after a long and concentrated tax debate in this city that hinged on the argument that business paid too much of the tax burden. Fuckers. The next person who tells you that Canada is a benevolent socialist utopia full of unlocked doors, a generous social milieu and none of the corporate heartlessness of the US – just slug em one for me. Please.
Taxes in Canada are just over one-third, or 36.1 per cent, lower than in the U.S. At the other end of the spectrum, corporate taxes are 81.4 per cent higher in France than the U.S., according to the KPMG report . While personal income taxes and sales taxes are still higher in Canada, payroll taxes have been reduced, capital taxes have been phased out, and corporate tax rates have been falling in recent years. Canada’s federal and provincial corporate tax rates are approaching 25 per cent. The U.S. federal tax rate for business starts at 35 per cent, and state tax rates vary. Among the ranking of cities, Vancouver comes out on top, and ahead of Monterrey and Mexico City. Seattle, its natural U.S. counterpart, ranked at 18.
The Olympics were another huge leap forward in this business-friendly agenda – aggressively moving capital and resources from the public to private sphere – but that shit is hardly done. These jokers will keep remaking this city – and yours too- if we let them.
I’ve been wondering lately what it is exactly about on-line communication - specifically Facebook, Twitter-style communication - that tends to bring out the worst in people. Why is it that folks seem to feel so comfortable speaking with such easy venom, such dismissive arrogance on-line in ways that I very rarely encounter face-to-face? Are people really full of anger and bitterness and finally feel they have the forum? I kind of doubt that.
Sure there’s the distance and anonymity - but that suggests people are essentially cowards. That doesn’t seem right either. I think there might be something about the actual structure of digital discourse that privileges ill-behaviour.
I was speaking at a ‘Digital Literacies’ forum a few months back and I remember a few academic types having a really sincere discussion about how they were so impressed with the ‘comments’ sections of popular news and entertainment sites, and were positing that we were really seeing the emergence of a new, vibrant kind of democratic culture on-line. I listened kind of stunned - what the hell are they reading? As far as I can tell ‘comments’ sections are overwhelmingly loaded with opprobrium, contempt, insult, name-calling and vapidity. Every once in a while I have a look at the comments after a CBC, or HuffPo, or TSN, or Guardian story and I always immediately regret it. I see nothing like democratic emergence, the reverse really, and I am beginning to suspect that it is not going to improve.
As Robert Fisk, the great writer about the Middle-East wrote in the Independent last week: “Friends who are currently abandoning the hate-hell of the internet tell me that the only good button is the one called ‘delete’. ” I’m not there yet, but I wonder if the way the internets have been conceived to this point actively discourages kindness and respect. I don’t have anything more there, just wondering.
Spent almost the whole weekend in the garden: planting, cleaning and preparing some beds at home, then building a series of brick beds at the Thistle where we are taking over a big chunk of lousy industrial land for a community garden. It was all great, of course – and it’s amazing how many people want to stop and talk – sometimes its freaking hard to get anything done cause everyone wants to pull by and socialize. But it’s also amazing to me just how much genuine interest there is in growing food.
I was just in SF, Seattle and Portland and the excitement around urban farming, backyard chickens, for reimagining the city as an agriculture site is even stronger there than it is here, as far as I can tell, and there’s a ton of interest in this city.
Some of that interest is voyeuristic, lots of it is talk, lots of it yuppie self-absorption – but for the most part I think the enthusiasm is for real. And understandable. It’s awesome to grow food. It’s a miracle to grow big plants from tiny seeds (not to go all flake here, but you understand). It’s great not to have to buy eggs any more.
But I think the root (as it were) excitement is something else. In January we started a urban farming group at the Thistle, expecting that a few kids might be keen, but now we have a huge crew of more than 20 kids who are genuinely juiced about growing food. And it seems like the group just keeps growing (as it were) (!) (Fuck, sorry for the cheesy gardening metaphors. But it’s a blog, I’m not editing it much). We have big plans and are taking over a ton of essentially abandoned shitty industrial territory.
I think that all of us are excited about gardening, sure, but I think it’s more than that. I think we are thrilled to be doing something. In a world swamped by digitality, where so many of us spend all our days sitting on our asses, where work means typing all day, where Facebook is the site of most people’s primary relationships, where people get their insights from Twitter, where all our days are dominated by screens - the opportunity to do something real, something tangible is like a cool drink of water on a hot day.
Stats released this weekend from a recent poll by Ipsos Reid show that on-line time is increasing – 18 hours per week on average for Canadians – but TV time is still at 16.9 hours per week (if you’re scoring at home that’s 5 hours per day total) . And that doesn’t include screen time at work, movies, video games or portable screen devices like gameboys or Ithings. Ours is a world lived on screen. (He says while writing a blog). And that doesn’t include all the time spent at school and work buried in abstract thinking, divorced from the ‘real’ world, the world of things, and of consequence.
I think that people love gardening because it is sweet relief from a digital world that seems so insufferable, meaningless and transitory. Being in the garden is a world of things, of flesh-and-blood people who want to talk, of dirt and sweat, of smell and bugs. It’s a ton of fun, but I think more than anything it’s that because its not on screen that makes it matter.