A Debate Primer for Ignatieff for tomorrow's debate

The Globe and Mail's John Ibbitson says you have a 6-minute opening in your 1-on-1 with Harper, in which you have to "win the face-off."
Let's start with the acknowledgement that a staged "face-off" win will likely flop, because it will be seen for what it is: a set-up. The real challenge is less to win the face-off than to demonstrate your authenticity by being yourself, by not rising to the phoney bait that you know Harper will throw at you in the hope of throwing you off your demeanour. Your authenticity is also inside your person, where it always was, and always will be. It is Harper whose person and whose government leave the country gasping for real oxygen, in the sense that while he and Baird throw off a storm of bluster, there is very little substance to that bluster.
Right now the polls suggest that you are still down by some 10-12 points as a party behind Harper and his party, and while difficult to close that gap in a 120-minute debate, the erosion could easily be started.
The Auditor General today says the Harper gang misrepresented her report on the G-8 Conference; according to Greg Weston on CBC's Power and Politics with Evan Solomon, she is hopping mad at the Harper gang, again.
That 40% of the vote that seems stuck on Harper has to be left alone, but attracting people who might not be planning to vote is, perhaps, your only window of opportunity.
How to attract that 41% of people who did not vote in the last election...given the fact that only 59% of Canadians elegible to vote, made their way to the polls, is perhaps the real question. Concentrating on throwing small pieces of bait to small segments of the electorate, as Harper has done, in the hope that the vast majority will stay home, is the Conservative's way of angling for a majority.
Exploding his "divide and conquer" modus operandi, by demonstrating the Liberal approach effectively to include the dispossessed, the unemployed, the under-educated, the hungry and the sick, without slipping into the trap of the "nanny state" could help your party build a coalition strong enough and large enough to bring about a change in government, a change that Canada truly needs.
Even Mulroney, not one of my favourites, is luke warm on Harper, while effusive about both you and Layton.
A comparison of the corporate tax rates in other countries, to the 18% to are proposing, would demonstrate your party's competence in integrating Canada with other developed countries, and put some foundational support under your $8-billion "Family Pack" of proposals.
Some of us simply do not "like" Harper, and anything you can do to demonstrate that you are not only approachable but also likeable, not ordinary in the mediocre sense, but a "smart" authentic person who is comfortable in your own skin, would go a long way to increasing both interest in and appetite for you and your candidates.
The "debate book" is undoubtedly filled with much more "erudite" stuff than you will read here, but what do I know? I'm only the permanent outsider looking in the window of your office, from fifty years of watching this country, hoping that, without your strategizing for it, Harper stubbs his proverbial tongue on his excessive ego demonstrating his monstrous self-righteousness and the camera grabs the photo of the undressed emperor we know he is.
Good luck! We are all in this together, and we are all pulling for you! (with thanks to Red Green)

Chris Hedges: How America is destroying her Education System

By Chris Hedges, from truthdig.com, posted April 10, 2011
A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.
Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.
Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.
“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”
Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized, poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.
“It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.”
“I cannot say for certain—not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing—but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we (have) been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination.”
The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities.

“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”
“If the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,” he said, “they have succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it’s possible to please their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This is not how you run a school system. It’s how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors—poverty, depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition—are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work and the Effective Teacher.”
The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.
“It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself,” Socrates said.
Those who can ask the right questions are armed with the capacity to make a moral choice, to defend the good in the face of outside pressure. And this is why the philosopher Immanuel Kant puts the duties we have to ourselves before the duties we have to others. The standard for Kant is not the biblical idea of self-love—love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but self-respect. What brings us meaning and worth as human beings is our ability to stand up and pit ourselves against injustice and the vast, moral indifference of the universe. Once justice perishes, as Kant knew, life loses all meaning. Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside—including religious laws—are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason. Socrates made the same argument when he said it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
“The greatest evil perpetrated,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”
As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.
“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.”
Editor's Note: In Canada, we learn that boys are being given "how to" manuals for their high school reading classes "because they are interested in them" in the words of an Ontario administrator. More of those and more technology are the two recipes he cited as his wish-fulfilment dream for the future of Ontario educaion.
Seems as if Ontario school systems and their students may be going down the same road as their U.S. counterparts. And who is going to stop this headlong, headstrong march to the kind of reductionism that Hedges posits?...
Certainly not the people whose careers depend on their maintenance of a bullet-proof capsule in which they operate with immunity and impunity, from the inception of their careers to their retirmement thirty years later.

Glimpses of differences between Canada and the U.S.

Kingston, April 11, 2011
Back home, after one week in Denver Colorado, it is time to reflect on some of the obvious differences between America and Canada...and while much of the superficial aspects of both countries look very similar, there are really large differences that a newcomer might miss.
Both countries boast a hard-working, almost frenetic majority who work long hours,  commute often for at least one hour to get to work, (and to return home) and who attempt to juggle many tasks, seemingly simultaneously. Both majorities seems quite tired and a little listless by day's end, and certainly by week's end.
However, the exposure to global information, in the public media is radically different.
In Canada, we have three national TV networks, all of them spending more time on international news than any of the major American networks. And the tone and perspective of the coverage of the information from abroad also differs. It would seem that, for the American anchors, all international stories need special billing, special emphasis, almost as if they have to be "sold" in order for their audience to take an interest.
The personal attacks against American politicians far exceeds that in Canada. We encountered deep personal contempt for Obama, and a continuing perception that he is Muslim, obviously a projection of a deep-seated fear of the extreme elements of that religion onto their president.
The divide between the "have's" and the "have-not's" in America is so visible as to be almost embarrassing. One can and does experience both within minutes in the core of a major city like Denver, and often the difference is accompanied by a racial overtone with the have's often being white and the have-not's being black or Latino. And with that comes the note of a fear among some Americans that the second language, Spanish, will move some states to secession, should the majority of their citizens actually become Latino, as is happening in California. Even bilingual ballots in some districts sends shivers of anxiety into some conservative voters.
On the other hand, Canada struggles with a reality of one province, Quebec, willing and eager to send a majority of representatives to the national government whose sole raison d-etre is to separate from the rest of Canada. Ask a knowledgeable American who has travelled the world in fairly exclusive and intelligent company if he might know of another country willing to tolerate such an anomaly, and you will get the answer, "I can't think of one!"
And then there is the conversation in American conservative circles of Obamacare, the dreaded Health Reform Act, which is still being shrilled as "going to bankrupt the country" and "bring death panels" because of its "socialism"...a word feared like the word Russian, during the cold war. The American capitalism, clearly linked to globalization, is a virtual religion, and those on the right will fight for its labels as if they were fighting another civil war....anyone who suggests he might have socialist tendencies, like Lawrence O'Donnell did recently on MSNBC, is  considered an apostate to the state by the right.
In Canada, on the other hand, we welcome the Liberal party's committment to restore the National Health Care with substantial fiscal support in the 2014 negotiations with the provinces, without even speaking or hearing the word "socialism". We know it is one of the landmark signatures that keeps Canada a more or less compassionate country, seeking to achieve a kind of equality for its citizens that Americans would consider
taboo.
But if you want to shop, go to America where the choices are falling over each other in every category of consumer good and service. And if you really want to witness both eccentricity and kenetic energy, try New York city. We stopped briefly at JFK and just watched the parade of people, especially those working in the airport, and noted both their friendly attitudes and their helpful nonchalance, as foreground to the backdrop of airplanes from many world countries, sitting on the tarmac.
This last scene brought home the shrinking quality of the world through the availability of easy (if not cheap) travel to all corners of the globe, much of it eminating from New York city.
Does one good to get out to see other parts of the world for so many reasons...just as it is good to return home safely, at the hands of flight and accommodation professionals in both countries.

Denver Family Re-union...happy times mixed with sad news

Sunday, April 4, Denver Colorado
After flying here on Friday, on Delta airlines, we are rested, and experiencing the changeable weather of the southwest. This morning was sunny and warm, and this afternoon, rainy with snow. There is a saying in Colorado, "If you don't like the weather in Colorado, wait 15 fifteen minutes and it will change."
Family reunions are prompted by many triggers; some of them might include anniversaries, birthdays, retirements, or even graduations. This particular one is prompted by a doctor's diagnosis of Stage 4 cancer in a forty-something scientist.
Much of the conversation has centred around how busy, driven and tech-dependent the forty-something generation finds their lives to be. One teacher listed her schedule, including e-mails, texts and personal visits daily, weekly from the parents of her students. She currently teaches in a private elementary school in the Denver area.
Leaving the house at 7.30 a.m. and returning home at 6.45 in the evening, with barely a fifteen minute time for lunch, an hour for make-up time for students who are struggling, a couple of prep sessions, and four or five classroom teaching assignments, the twice-weekly faculty meetings, and literally dozens of messages from both parents and students all expecting immediate responses...
Her story left me feeling both exhausted, and grateful for having left the classroom before the "access" to the teacher became a kind of scorched earth normalcy. Since when did parents need to contact the teacher every day, about the progress (or lack) of their child's performance in math? Since when was the teacher so important that dozens of messages each day were an integral part of the profession.
Since when did the technology become the master of the student-teacher relationship?
One has only to guess that the North American tech-addiction is not exclusive to teens. It apparently extends at least to their teachers, parents and school administrators.
The diagnosed male scientist is under experimental program administered by Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York city, and, although the outcome of the experiment will not be known for some weeks or even months, he is determined not to "feel sorry" for himself, to continue working, and to make the most and the best of whatever days he has remaining.
He is truly an inspiration to any who might have the opportunity to meet him!
Caught the last few minutes of the Kentucky-UConn final four game last night, but missed the Butler-VCU opening game, which Butler apparently won by 8 points.
There is a constant feeling of dryness in one's mouth that comes with the altitude (5000+ feet above sea level), and I have already consumed more water in two days that I would normally in a full week.
Warm welcomes from family whom we see once a year at most, always warms the heart and feeds the soul, and the company of early teen nieces, with questions about "Taming of the Shrew"  which she is currently studying in grade nine, have made the first few days a welcome break, and a beautiful gift.

Defections, Secret Talks...signify end of Gadhafi reign of terror?

By CNN Wire Staff, April 1, 2011 from CNN website
On Thursday word emerged that Gadhafi's pick for U.N. ambassador had defected to Egypt -- a day after Libya's foreign minister fled to London and told the government there that he had resigned.

Citing unnamed British government sources, the Guardian newspaper reported Friday that a senior adviser to one of Gadhafi's sons was in London for secret talks with British officials. The adviser to Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, Mohammed Ismael, told CNN earlier this week that he would be traveling to London for family reasons. Calls placed to his mobile phone by CNN on Friday were not answered.
AND THIS...
By David D. Kirkpatrick and C.J. Chivers, New York Times, April 1, 2011
TRIPOLI, Libya — A senior aide to one of Col Muammar el-Qaddafi’s sons has held secret talks in London with British authorities, a friend of the aide said on Friday, adding to the confusion and anxiety swirling around the Tripoli regime after the defection of a high-ranking minister and the departure of another senior figure to Cairo.
Mohammed Ismail, a senior aide to Saif al-Islam, one of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons, traveled to London for talks with British officials in recent days, the friend said, speaking in return for anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters.
The nature and timing of the contact was not clear, but the friend said Mr. Ismail had planned to return to Tripoli after his discussions. Word of the apparent overture coincided with a welter of rumor that more officials planned to defect. A Foreign Office spokesman, who spoke in return for anonymity under departmental procedures, said: “We are not going to provide a running commentary on our contact with Libyan officials.”
This story is moving so quickly that it is very difficult to predict outcomes, timings, or even decisions by other outside players. There are rumours that the U.S. is considering providing arms, weapons and more military leadership, including command and control resources to the rebels...but that decision is still in the "rumour" stage.
Everyone can only hope that the loss of life and number of injuries to rebels is kept to a minimum, if not zero, in the wake of whatever decisions are required to remove the Libyan dictator.

John Howard Ex. Slams Harper's proposed prison reforms

By John Hulton, Executive Director, John Howard Society of Manitoba, Winnipeg, in Globe and Mail Letters to the Editor, March 31, 2011
While it is true that programming offered in federal prisons can be an effective tool in terms of rehabilitation (of prisoners, as suggested by D'Arcy Jenish in "Harper Judged It Right: Fixes Are Needed," March 30, 2100), there is already a shortage of resources for programming and these new laws are making a bad situation even worse.
Figures recently released by Correctional Service of Canada show that 40 per cent of offenders requiring programs in 2009-2010 did not get them.
In his annual report, Canada's Correctional Investigator Howard Sapers expressed concern over this and predicted the situation will worsen as prison populations increase due to new legislative changes (brought in by the Harper government.)
We have only to look south of the border to see that when the number of prisoners inreases, programming is the first thing to go; prisons become nothing more than warehouses which do little if anything to rehabilitate inmates.
This is one of the reasons why Newt Gingrich, a prominent U.S. conservative, has spoken out publicly against the very kind of changes the Harper government is promoting because they simply aren't effective.
Longer incarcerations, for more prisoners is simply not the way forward for Canadian law enforcement, even if there is a small band of arch-conservatives, forming the base of the Conservative party, that self-righteously supports such moves. As the crime rates are falling, by all statistical evidence, across the country, there is only the twisting of the evidence to justify the ideological approach to "evil" in this case represented by those whose actions are considered criminal, in order to eliminate that "evil".
Basing decisions on the empirical evidence, of course, is counter-intuitive to the way the Harper government operates...they seek to create new reality, like faux lakes, when the real one is less than one kilometer from the site of the G-20 meetings, at a cost of $2million to Canadian taxpayers...Movie producers create new realities for their audience. The Canadian government is not and must not become another Hollywood movie production house, creating new realities for their own dramatic inflation of their own ego's.

Binary Harper dictates voter options....I don't think so

Harper paints a picture of two options, as outcomes of the May 2nd vote:

1. a Conservative majority government
2. a coalition of Liberals, NDP and Bloc

However, not being the lemmings that Harper considers most members of the electorate to be     and knowing that  there is a difference in the real world between a binary choice and a multitude of options, and not being willing to be herded into the narrow corral of Mr. Harper's mind like cows ready for slaughter, we voters do not and will not subscribe to his prescription.
There are a multitide of optional results to the vote on May 2nd.
They include the two Harper proposes along with others:

• A Liberal majority government
• A Liberal minority government, with a loose alliance with the NDP alone, on specific issues
• A Conservative minority government with much fractiousness and more shouting in Parliament
• An NDP minority government with a loose alliance with the Liberals, on specific issues

It is the unadulterated gall of a Prime Minister, and not a very effective or popular one at that, to begin to tell Canadians how he is charge of the options framing the voter's choice when s/he enters the ballot booth to vote that truly offends. Of course, he tells the media how many questions he will answer; he tells his cabinet ministers what they will say publicly and when and how, and with what backdrops.
In addition to the nickname of Stephen Hubris, we could legitimately add: Stephen Binary Hubris, as if all complex issues can and will be reduced to two options, and those will come, always and inevitably, from the mind of the Prime Minister.
If  Harper thought he was on a short leash in the last elections, it just got tighter as a consequence of    his own  attitudes, statements and actions...hopefullly so short that he will be reduced to the Leader of the Opposition and be forced out by his party as leader.