transparency, democracy and the environment

          Do you care? Here's a first step:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/286/802/967/?z00m=20308889

Internal blog link, June 5, 2012:

http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2012/06/bill-38-clear-window-open-on.html

Swedish in Milwaukee: My Life as a Writer: In times like these, why write?

 Interesting thesis: art as a reflective tool, a means of distancing ourselves from the world's programmed / manipulative chaos. Find the clear space within from which to see anew..


Swedish in Milwaukee: My Life as a Writer: In times like these, why write?: I am driven to write. The more I do it, the more driven I am. It starts crowding out all the other things I need to do, like make a living. ...

Bill 38, a clear window open on the environment?

http://www.newswire.ca/en/story/986335/insurance-bureau-of-canada-releases-new-research-report

              Insurance companies are feelin' the pinch of extreme weather damage caused by global warming / climate change. The effects are strong enough now to be statistically measurable and verifiable.. Such is the gist of a hot-off-the-press report released by the Insurance Bureau of Canada. (The above link includes a link to the full report for download.)

               If insurance companies feel that climate change / extreme weather event loss are cause for concern (their bottom line: $$$), one would think that the public should to be informed. In a democracy the public, the people, are the (nominal) rulers but a ruler, to be effective, needs to be well informed. It follows then, that our government should be doing all in its power to keep the public abreast of developments relating to climate change, its social and economic costs, risks, possible remediation, adaptation measures, not to mention, an active participation in the development of a vibrant, future oriented alternative energy sector. That would be rational in a democracy, wouldn't it? 

                Alas, in the government that Steven Harper built, things are not so clear, so limpid, so transparent..

                 For example, the current federal "omnibus" budget bill, Bill C-38. It has environmental groups and earth scientists climbing the walls. Why?

                  "The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, which brought Canadians from all walks of life together to provide advice on federal policies, has been dismantled." 


http://focusonline.ca/?q=node/392

                   The pattern is consistent. It is often repeated in the actions and opinions of the Harper government. Naysayers to corporate greed are muzzled: funding is cut so they can't speak out. It is hard not to feel that the operative principle is: No news is good news! Regulatory mechanisms to monitor and control environmental impacts of energy / mineral megaprojects are being systematically dismantled by the Harper government, activists claim. But such behavior is nearsighted at best and folly at worst: denying the existence of problems does not make them go away! They will simply fester and come back worse later. 

                   Once again, we must insist, in a democracy, the people - being ruler - must be kept informed of issues in the domain of public interest, that is, of the Public Good. The Public Good - or the Civil Society - is that "model" or ideal of the Good Society in which all citizens - NOT "clients" - are called to have a hand. It is a common construction which serves all and which all serve. It is ultimately what defines us as a social being, a "citizen" or member of such and such a clan, tribe, society, nation, country,..

                 A "democratic" government which stiffles free information flows - and their proper contextualization / interpretation - is in dereliction of its duties to its citizens. The State, theoretically and juridically, is the nominal representative of the people, the organ of expression of the popular will or Vox Populi. A government which degenerates to the role of Servant of the Corporate Elite - and their supporting classes in the professions and administration - is in dreliction of its duties to its citizens. One definition of fascism is "control or seizure of the State by the corporate elite"..

                  This is no way to run a planet. It is fool's logic. The price to be paid by future generations will be immense. Our collective behavior on environmental questions is both mad and criminel..

                  Unfortunately, there is no simple way to reach a man in the grip of ideology. All information not conforming to the True Faith will be denied, deleted, ignored or re-interpreted to conform to the dominating paradigm. A bizarre example comes to mind: one of the predictions of standard global warming models (General Circulation Models or GCMs) is that BECAUSE the lower atmosphere traps heat more efficiently (thus warming), less heat reaches the stratosphere which - naturally - COOLS down a bit. For a while, GW "sceptics" actually had the cheek to re-interpret the verified prediction of the GCMS as "proof" that GW isn't happening: "if the world is warming, why is the stratosphere cooling down?" Duh..

                 In the final analysis, it will be History who determines who the fools were..

"The precautionary principle denotes a duty to prevent harm, when it is within our power to do so, even when all the evidence is not in."

http://www.cela.ca/collections/pollution/precautionary-principle

Transparency: what it is, what it's good for..

                 In physics and optics, transparency refers to the property of a substance to transmit light (or some other form of energy). Since information encoding requires energy, one could say that transparency refers to the capacity of a "channel" to transmit information. These physical and technical uses of the term can be applied symbolically to human and institutional behaviors. We say, for example, that a man's behavior is "transparent" if we feel he is guileless - honest, that he has nothing to hide, that he is "telling it like it is", that "what you see is what you get"..

                  Transparency, in this metaphorical sense, is essential, we believe, to the functionning of any democracy worthy of the name. Information must flow freely from lower levels of social / command hierarchies to the top, and from the top to the bottom. Exceptions, of course, have always been allowed for "State Secrets", especially in times of war: one does not want one's invasion plans to fall into the hands of the enemy; we want to catch him off balance. This is why it has been remarked that "truth is the first casualty of war".

                   But why, exactly, is transparency so important to the functionning of democracies? If one takes the term literally, democracy means rule by the common people:

http://www.democracy-building.info/definition-democracy.html

                    Taken at face value, the answer is simple! Rulers, in order to rule competently, require information. For the people to rule competently, it, too, requires "unbiased", "objective" information. "Transparent" channels of information provide the required objectivity and lack of bias: they do not distort, alter or color the information that flows through them.

                     It should be obvious - I hope - that terms such as "objectivity" and "unbiased" are to be taken in the sense of goals or objectives which we should aim for and that different people, with different perspectives and agendas, will legitimately argue over whether or not a given piece of information is indeed "objective". Such divergences do not render the goal of transparency impossible; they merely stress the need for an open consensus on what terms like "objectivity" and "bias" mean in a given socio-historic context. Transparency is a difficult, subtle, self-referential ("recursive") term, included in its own definition (the "chicken or egg" conundrum). Defining - and implementing! - transparency would appear to require a minimum of goodwill and respect for honest opposition - the existence of a vital "civil society" open to debate and the expression of various opinions and views.

                      With the spread of modern means of communication and mind control and the consequences of untoward consequences of action by major players (nuclear reactor manufacturers, governments..), transparency is now, at the dawn of the 21st century, more important than ever. Various groups are now coalescing, focusing on the various ways to implement or safeguard governmental transparency:

http://www.transparency.org/

Law prof takes Feds to court over Kyoto pullout

          Québec law professor Daniel Turp has taken the Harper government to court over their decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Greenhouse Gas Emissions Regulation Accord.

           In the following 12 min French language podcast Prof Turp explains all.

http://www.radioprotectionanimale.org/podcastgen/?p=episode&name=2012-05-12_kyoto.mp3

               In essence, Prof Turp declared that the Harper government is acting illegally on several fronts. First, it's unilateral withdrawal is itself illegal by international law. Second, in a democracy the government represents the will of the people. The Canadian people, in general, and the people of the Province of Québec, in particular, supported the Accord and its implementation. Turp holds that, at the very least, the government is required to consult with the people via its representatives (Parliament) before engaging in any unilateral action contrary to the stated will of the Canadian (and Québécois) people.

               Turp then analyzed the possible reasons for the government's decidedly non-transparent actions on the greenhouse gas emissions file. The Harper government is, in effect, non-transparent in it's legislative and policy orientations. The Haper government is guilty of acting according to a "hidden" - non-stated - agenda: maximizing the short and medium term profit of the extractive industry sector (petroleum, minerals, forestry products, energy..). Such an "agenda"' Turp believes, would lead them to oppose - or reduce - environmental regulations and funding to organizations and ministries involved with protecting the environment or developing alternative energy sources. Alternative (non-fossil) energy production, don't forget, reduces global demand for extractive industries like coal, oil and natural gas. Turp is undoubtedly speculating at this point but, retrospectively, many of the government's more puzzling orientations make sense when viewed from the perspective of such a putative "agenda". For example, note the curious "mantric" use of the word "economy" in all the Feds' discussions about the "recovery" from the current "economic recession". All that SEEMS to count is the "economy": "It's the economy, stupid!" Meanwhile, the public, brainwashed from continual repetition of the mantra, day and night, on the media, concurs. (The brainwashing has worked..) But nowhere do we find the least recognition that our REAL problems are essentially ecological in nature - the physical interactions of humanity with the supporting planetary ecosystem and the non-renewable resource base. No recognition that the BASE, the physical / energetic foundation of ANY "economy" (human, animal, plant..) is the living planetary ecosystem, the inorganic non-renewable resource base and the global energy flows that sustain these systems.

                   Be that as it may, five universities - English and French speaking - have implicated themselves in Turp's supreme court challenge to the Harper government.

                    Prof Turp has also denounced the Harper government's robotic lockstep imitation of American environmental and foreign policy stances. Thus while Europe - even Africa and Asia! - begin to take environmental protection and alternative energy sources seriously, Canada increasingly falls in step with reactionary American, pro-corporate business policies. Canada and the US both, for example, went out of their ways to deliberately sabotage the Kyoto Accords and, later, their implementation. This stance, Turp argues, is functionally "undemocratic" since it does not represent the will of the majority of Canadians or Québécois.

printemps primavera spring

In praise of folly: budget cuts cost more than saving

         This is folly, of course: budget cuts for ideological reasons that end up costing more than they saved! Yet the Harper government may have arrived at this point of absurdity. Except that there is now a moral issue concerned: human lives may be put at risk so that Harper can grandstand to his populist - reactionary hardcore.. which is starting to get a bit scary.. this is no longer "just" a question of political buffoonery but of human safety and wellbeing.

            When Newfoundland fisher Shang Rideout's father took ill at sea, he called the Coast Guard. Unfortunately, Harper's budget-cutters had previously passed and, in the interest of "saving money",  medical emergency calls formerly handled by a regional (Atlantic Canada) company are now handled by CIRM Roma, an ITALIAN company. As might be expected, this resulted in a few hiccups: ideological budget cutters, like all ideologues, are not at all interested in practical details like efficiency, competence, relevance, safety or even - curiously!- cost. The person handling Rideout's call could hardly understand English, for starters. They did not know where Newfoundland was or with what country it is affiliated, either. Definitely not a good start for a medical emergency.. not..

              A former employee of an axed Marine Rescue Sub-centre, Merv Wiseman said "We thought we would see things fall through the cracks. We just didn't think it would happen this quickly." "Just didn't think it would happen so quickly"! Indeed, Mr Wiseman, life is barrel of surprises with the Harperite ideologues, ain't it now? LOL, what NEXT??

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/2012/05/09/nl-marine-medical-rome-509.html

              Frustrated with the lack of communication or useful medical assistance, Rideout decided to return to shore to seek medical assistance for his father, a trip that took 10 hours. A similar emergency six years ago happened to the Rideout crew. Then a medical chopper was sent out to ferry the sick person ashore. Fortunately, this time, the patient survived the 10 hour trip by boat. (Lucky for him)