Violence in Denver, Toronto, Barrie, Scarborough, Somalia, Syria, Bulgaria...where next?

By Dan Frosch, William K. Rashbaum, Timothy Williams and Michael S. Schmidt, New York Times, July 20, 2012
( The story details the Aurora Colorado theatre massacre, during the midnight premier of "Dark Knight Rises,| the last of three BatMan movies.
Michael Bloomberg's reactions will likely typify the reactions of millions, inside and outside the U.S.
His reactions will not, however, be echoed by the National Rifle Association.)
New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has waged a national campaign for stricter gun laws, called on President Obama and Mr. Romney to more concretely address the issue of gun violence in their campaigns.

“You know, soothing words are nice,” Mr. Bloomberg said during his weekly radio show, “but maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it, because this is obviously a problem across the country.”
The United States is, effectively, an armed encampment, with guns in the bedside tables of many citizens, in the gloveboxes of many cars and trucks, in the desk drawers of many executives and apparently the violence depicted in both movies and in video games is generating bomb-making enterprises in apartments and houses. The second amendment apparently guarantees the "right to bear arms" although the original intent of the law was to provide legal 'cover' for a national militia, clearly not to provide legal justifiation for the proliferation of weapons, even to the extent that some states now provide legal cover for those who shoot "when they think they are being threatened" as in Florida.
Hunters, and members of both the active military and the Reserves, all of them, learn the skills of the operation of guns. And, most of the time, those who know how to use guns use them appropriately, in the bush or on the shooting range.
However, the easy access to guns, in a society addicted to the thrill of violence, and dependent on the "drug" of easy access to violent video games, and violent movies, not to mention the undeterred violence perpetrated by the U.S. against Iraq, more recently Afghanistan (when the real enemy was in collusion with Pakistan, the recipient of billions of American support, while they played their own game of double-cross), the violence in Syria perpetrated by the official government and its president, the terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah (accused by Netanyahu of killing 7 Israeli tourists in Bulgaria this week) the violence of  El Shabab in Africa, the pirates off the coast of Somalia....and there are just the highlighted theatres of violence that make it to the front pages....

What are we to think and to believe about the relationship between this latest wanton act of violence and

• our pursuit of profit through the sale of violent games and military weapons         
• our pursuit of political revenge  
• the  apparent gang violence that disrupts a block party in Scarborough, just this past weekend,
• the shooting that erupted in The Eaton Centre in downtown Toronto only weeks ago,
• the current investigation of what can only be called a domestic bomb factory in a residential street in Barrie Ontatio, a bedroom town of Toronto workers not known for its violent reputation,
• the historic levels of gang-drug-and criminal activity that is currently holding Chicago hostage in the middle of the worst heat wave and drought in a century
• the uncontrolled and likely even unmonitored violence that is killing hundreds, if not thousands in Syria, most of it committed by the state authorities
• the bombing by Hezbollah of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria
• the tidal wave of guns that flows north across the 49th parallel into Canada every day
• the secret and public provision of weapons by states like Russia, Iran, North Korea to states like Syria, and their disastrous president
• the terror threats that hang over the London Olympics, to begin later this month...
• the thousands of live, undetonated land mines that contaminate the land of VietNam and that have already killed, injured and maimed thousands of people in that country

And the list could go on, and on, and on.......
And that list does not include the millions of young people, around the world who, inspite of a quality education and training, are unable to find work and income, in order to establish their families, while draught and high food prices threaten the existence of millions....
Could we be, through no single, identifiable act of either commission or omission, be producing the perfect storm of violence as the instrument of choice for whatever unrest, discontent, political advantage or mere pursuit of infamy? And could that storm be "catching" in the way that all viruses (both literal and metaphorical) are caught, through exposure, and through imitation, when the conditions in the social petrie dish are warm, wet and easily able to replicate the deadly bugs?
And could the collective omission of public attention, including the failure to generate funds for both
policy and research into the causes and the likely roots of this eruption of the human capacity and need for excitement, in a culture which seems to disregard the "other" including even the other's life, result in a
catastrophic enmeshment of societies, both micro and macro, in webs of espionage, identity theft and overt violence as the way for the ordinary citizen to claim "power" when many feel completely powerless?

 And accompanying most of these "dramas" we hear the usual public statements by elected officials:

• "Our's is a safe city!" or
• "We will not tolerate violence against the innocent!" or
• "This is a tragic, cowardly, despicable act!" or
• "Our hearts go out to the families of the victims of this terrible violence!".....

all nice words, gapingly vaccuous and meaningless without the necessary political action that can only come from  resolute, confident and independent political leaders who shun the support of the "gun lobby" in whatever country is has taken root, and also is willing to confront, directly, the militarization of so much of our foreign relationships, that our national budgets and our budgets for international aid are being drained, while the terrorists and their methods gain power by simple association and imitation...and their manipulation of our fears.

I respectfully nominate Shawn Atleo as a candidate for Liberal Party Leadership

By Tamara Baluja, Globe and Mail, July 18, 2012
Shawn Atleo is just three votes shy of being re-elected as the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, coming out of the second ballot Wednesday with a strong lead of 318 votes.

Mi’kmak lawyer Pam Palmater was the runner-up again in the second ballot, garnering 107 votes. She has been a vocal critic of Mr. Atleo’s tenure at the helm of the AFN, saying he was too close with the Harper government and had little to show for it.
Mr. Atleo, the hereditary chief of the Ahousaht First Nation in B.C., needs 321 votes or 60 per cent of the ballot to secure the office. He received 284 votes in the first ballot.

Many observers speculated the race would turn into a two-person race between Mr. Atleo and Ms. Palmater. However the second ballot results show Mr. Atleo is on track for re-election.
Roughly 535 first nations chiefs and their proxies casted their ballots in the second round of voting in Toronto on Wednesday to choose the new national chief.
First, we would to congratulate Mr. Atleo, hopefully not prematurely, for his re-election as Chief of the AFN. And next, we would like to take this opportunity to share some words of wise, reflective and controversial observation from John Ralston Saul's book, A Fair Country, Telling Truths  About Canada that are merely an attempt to expand on the "newsworthiness" of the moment.
And so, in a self-destructive expression of colonialism, the dominant intellectual current in common use in Canada, whether among anglophones or francophones, remained the European, with its fear of complexity, its idea of linear progress and its racial underpinnings. It remains today the dominant intellectual current.
This was a contradictory situation. The signals flashing out of the Canadian experience simply didn't match the public discourse they ought to have been illuminating. It wasn't surprising then that the idea of First Nations civilization as inferior and therefore destined to disappear ran parallel to the apparently contradictory view that we newcomers were the logical successors to this great old civilization. As successors we were to inherit their natural relationship to this place--the mythological aspect as what we call ownership. In some ways this was the benign theme of the summer camps to which so many children were and are sent.
In this inheritance scenario, the Indians were our Greeks--out Athenians, our Spartans. Like the Romans, we were mere farmers or, more recently, manufacturers, paper pushers,service industry workers, increasingly cut off in real life from this remarkable land. And there they were, our predecessors, in Thomas King's words,"wild, free, powerful, noble, handsome, philosophical, eloquent, solitary." And romantic though this image might be, it was attached to a certain reality. In the 1889's, the poet Charles Mair, who had passed part of his life on the prairies when the two civilizations were
manoeuvring for power, found he had to defend his epic poem, Tecumseh, because of the noble language he had put in the native leader's mouth. "I have never yet heard the Indian speak but as a sensible, intelligent man, fully alive to his interests and conscious of his rights, expressing himself always in language of remarkable vigor and directness."...
The problem with all these attitudes toward the Aboriginals was that they assumed the inevitability of their disappearance and, in the meantime, the disappearance of their culture and thus their voice. Yet somehow, mysteriously, there they were in the First World War, carrying much more than their share of the nation's battlefield burden. To all intentsive purposes, they did seem to be defending their country. This country. And again, between the wars, in spite of mistreatment of their returning veterans, there they were, speaking up in protest, with dignity, as their population began to make a comeback. And again, there they were, carrying more than their share in the Second World War; and from the 1950's on, growing ever faster, finding new ways to speak up, getting back the vote, occupying a growing space in the public discourse. Somehow, they just didn't understand the inevitability of Western Civilization's victory sufficiently to fade away gracefully into a grand and noble myth for us to inherit....
It is the courts that are gradually forcing Canadians to deal with their historic obligations. And the voices of goodwill in the populations at large are stronger than they have been for perhaps a century and a half. But the consciously stated philosophy of our country still has not changed. In place of any organized disappearance policy, we have that new racism I have already mentioned--that which focuses us on Aboriginals as people in trouble with drugs, drink, abuse an so on. We have trained ourselves not to see the Aboriginal nature of Canadian society. And we have developed blinkers to avoid seeing  what does work in Aboriginal communities. And a great deal works well.
We don't talk about the seven thousand Aboriginal students in universities and colleges in Saskatchewan and the thousands in other provinces. Or the experiment with radically decentralized government in Nunavut, which is dependent on high-tech communications. Or the success of the Makivik Corporation in Nunavik, where the Inuit have used the James Bay Settlement money to build the largest business empire in the North. Or myriad experiments with new approaches to education across the country. Or the remarkable success of the Haida in slowly getting Haida Gwaii off the old pulp and paper treadmill to forest extinction. In 2007, they convinced the B.C. government to co-operate in transferring yet another large chunk of the archipelago to a very non-Wedstern land-use model. This put about half of the Haida Gwaii onto a circular approach that their elected president, Guujaaw, says will bring cultural, environmental and economic interests into balance....(.30-33)
Arguing eloquently for a three-legged stool of three forming cultures, french, english and aboriginal in Canada, Saul exhorts Canadians to embrace our diversity, in the form of the aboriginal circle that continues to open to welcome "the other" whether they be immigrants, or people choosing to move to Canada in an embrace of welcome, and of divergent opinions that can be resolved, and of our complexity that differs significantly from the linear, tidy, unambiguous certainty of the european tradition and culture that operates in our southern neighbour, the U.S. Saul also points to the "oral culture" of the aboriginal tradition, a culture which Canadian courts are beginning to value even over the written word of the europeans, especially in their negotiations with the aboriginals in the land treaties.
Now, what follows, is neither prompted by any outside agent, nor sponsored by any organization, political party, or backroom operative. It is merely an assessment of the Canadian truths, along with the blindspots of our vision, and a sincere desire and attempt to move the country forward celebrating our authentic heritage in ways never before contemplated.
What I am proposing is that, should Shawn Atleo be re-elected formally and decisively as Chief of the Assembly of First Nations in Canada, by his people, his name be placed in nomination as candidate for the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. There is a synergy to the historic moment in Canadian political life that requires both new thinking and new attitudes and new approaches to our governance, along with new leaders that can and will inspire our next decade. We cannot and we must not rest on the laurels of a solid banking system, and a teetering health care system, and a non-existent environmental policy or agenda, and a resource-based petro-dollar.
We must bring all Canadians into the circle of hope, education, dialogue and opportunity to serve our nation, currently floundering on the edge of a narrow, and even a niche-marketing government that neither understands our history and culture nor represents our highest and best ideals and aspirations.
The election of Shawn Atleo, first to the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada and subsequently to the office of Prime Minister would elevate the hopes and lives of not only aboriginals across the country, but also raise the level of hope and aspiration of all people living in Canada.

Egypt Roundup: where will Egypt move on Iran, Hamas, Israel, Teheran?

From NPR Program, Fresh Air, from WHYY
Host Terry Gross interviews David Kirkpatrick, Cairo Correspondent for New York Times on Egypt
On Women's Rights
"Women's rights in Egypt today are in a pretty crummy situation as it is. So, it's not like this is a particularly liberal cultural climate that might move into reverse gear. It's an extraordinarily traditional culture, especially outside of the small Westernized elite in Cairo. ... So, in a sense, it's not like they've got a lot to lose. If I were to guess about where the Brotherhood is going on these questions, they've said a lot of positive things about equal opportunity for women and allowing women to have opportunities and participate fully in the nation. Their ideology is conservative, much like the ideology of religious conservatives in this country in that they think the normal order of things is for women to stay home and take care of their children where that's possible. In Egypt today, it's not that possible, because many women have to work outside of the home for income. So one wonders if when [the Muslim Brotherhood is] in charge of the state, they'll start baking those traditional messages into the cultural ministries or education ministries, but certainly they've given no intention right now that they have any plan to do that."

On Egypt's military
"They're proud of the election of President Morsi, and they consider it evidence that they have completed their promise to hand over full power. Now, this is absurd. It's completely and totally false in a kind of 1984/Through the Looking Glass way, because on the eve of his election, they also dissolved the Parliament and issued a decree claiming for themselves not only all legislative authority but all authority over the budget. So they've left him all but powerless. So we're in a kind of bizarre alternate universe in Egypt right now where the nominal president isn't really the president, and you can tell because the state media is constantly trying to undercut him whenever he tries to challenge the ruling generals."
On the term "Facebook revolution"

"I hate this Facebook revolution stuff. I really strongly object to it. You can sit at your computer all day long, and you're never going to get anything done in terms of bringing down a government. What happens is when people got up and went into the streets. So Facebook and Twitter have some advantages as organizing tools — they're definitely an advance over putting up a flier or putting up a pamphlet — but they're similar to that. It's a change in kind. To put the technology in the forefront and not the individuals really misses the point. And in Egypt, some people suspect that when the West characterizes it as a 'Facebook revolution,' what they're really trying to do is put the Western brand name that we know front and center — that we're projecting our own Western ideas onto it and inserting ourselves into the picture, which they don't like. That said, these things are pretty nifty, and especially in Tunisia and Libya, Facebook continues to play an important role as a source of news."
Kirkpatrick also indicated in the interview that he believed that the Muslim Brotherhood did not want to provoke a military conflict with Israel, their much stronger neighbour, nor does he think that Egypt is likely to arm Hamas but would prefer a unified Palestinian voice to begin negotiations with Israel for the long-eluded peace between the two traditional enemies.
And also this piece by Patrick Martin, on whether Egypt will tilt toward Teheran
By Patrick Martin, Globe and Mail, July 17, 2012
It was the No. 1 topic of conversation Monday in Jerusalem when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and it was undoubtedly the big subject for discussion in Iran, too: Will Egypt’s newly elected President, a leader of the revolutionary Muslim Brotherhood, try to tilt Egypt toward Tehran?

For more than 30 years, Egypt under Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak viewed Iran’s revolutionary Islamic leadership as a threat, and relations between the two regional competitors were characterized by hostility and a severing of diplomatic relations.

Now, facing the growing prospect of Iran’s nuclear weaponization, its anti-Israel agenda and its goal of region-wide influence, the West and its allies want to know if Egypt’s new Islamist leadership will try to reverse that state of affairs and embrace Iran.
Certainly Tehran has sensed an opportunity to make a new friend and ally.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was among the first to congratulate Mohamed Morsi on his election last month and to salute his victory as “the final stage of the Islamic awakening.” Tehran was even the first to apparently make up an interview Mr. Morsi had with the official Iranian news agency on the eve of his victory.
In the alleged exchange, Mr. Morsi was reported by Tehran to have said that Egypt must restore good relations with Iran in order to create a strategic “balance” in the region, remarks that a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood leader was quick to flatly deny, as he denied any suggestion that the new leader would undo Egypt’s treaty with Israel.
The seed, however, was planted and it was quickly rumoured that Mr. Morsi would be making his first official visit as President to Tehran, showcasing Egypt’s new friend.
Mr. Morsi’s visit to Riyadh last week was intended to dispel that notion and to reassure Egypt’s biggest backers – the United States and Saudi Arabia – that the President had no hankering to please Iran.
But while there is ample reason to believe that Egypt’s new leadership will eschew all thoughts of an alliance with Tehran, there are some compelling long-term reasons to suspect that a new relationship may well be in the offing.
Standing in the way of an alliance is the fact that Sunni Islam, to which the Muslim Brotherhood adheres, has long viewed Shiism, the dominant faith of Iran, as heretical, and its followers as apostates. The civil war in Syria, for example, is as much about this historical divergence, pitting the Sunni opposition against the regime’s Alawites (a Shia sect), as it is about democracy and dignity.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Qatar-based Egyptian cleric who is a lifelong member of the Brotherhood and its most influential advocate, tells followers to beware of the “Shiitization” of Sunni Arab populations.
And Saudi Arabia has pointed out that if Egypt wishes Riyadh’s financial assistance, the Egyptian government better keep its distance from Tehran.
Mr. Morsi himself has spoken of it being “Egypt’s destiny to lead,” suggesting it would not fall into Iran’s orbit but would lead an orbit of its own.
And, just in case Mr. Morsi had different ideas, Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, a very pro-Saudi body, recently decreed that a National Defence Council would determine any changes to Egyptian foreign policy for the foreseeable future, and that military leaders, not the civilian leadership, have a majority in the council.
But while the odds seemed stacked against Iran at the moment, the idea of a Muslim Brotherhood-led Egypt embracing Iran should not be written off as purely wishful thinking.
The two revolutionary Islamist movements – the Brotherhood and the Shiites – share some common ancestry.
It was a 19th-century Persian Shiite intellectual, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, whose teaching in Egypt revived the Islamic movement and influenced Hassan al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brothers.
And it was the radical teachings of the Egyptian Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb, embodied in works he produced in the jails of Gamal Abdul Nasser in the 1950s and 60s, that gave a rationale to the Shiites of Iran to plunge into revolution against the Shah who then governed Iran.
The man who translated Mr. Qutb’s Arabic works into Farsi was none other than Ali Khamenei, today’s Supreme Leader in Iran.
And while then-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat shunned the Shia revolutionaries, giving refuge to the deposed Shah and providing a permanent resting place for his body, the new leaders of Iran rejoiced at the assassination of Mr. Sadat and named a Tehran street after his killer, an Egyptian Islamist.
Most importantly, says Alastair Crooke, a leading analyst of Islam, the Iranian revolutionaries and the Muslim Brotherhood share a common world view: both stand opposed to “Western individualism and materialism” and are in favour of “the collective welfare of the community” espoused by moderate Islam.”
As well, both also stand opposed to the “narrow, literalist and intolerant interpretation” embodied by the Salafists in Saudi Arabia and, increasingly, in other countries. In Egypt, the Salafists account for an astonishing 25 per cent of the seats in the recently elected parliament and pose a political challenge to the Muslim Brotherhood, which captured 50 per cent of the seats.
To be sure, Egypt’s Muslim Brothers are divided on how to proceed when it comes to Iran. Many argue the common revolutionary battle against Western values and Israel should predominate, while others insist on the practical value of keeping their distance from Tehran.
Indeed, Mr. Morsi will be going to Iran in August – but not to embrace Tehran. He goes to attend the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, a body of some 120 states that mostly stand opposed to U.S.-led Western institutions; Mr. Morsi has inherited the leadership of the movement, which was previously held by Mr. Mubarak.
(At the group’s meeting, Mr. Morsi will be handing over the leadership to Iran’s Mr. Ahmadinejad.)
As in everything else, it seems, the Muslim Brotherhood’s point man, President Morsi, is tiptoeing through the convoluted relationship between Egypt and Iran, hoping to keep everyone happy, at least for now.

Wealthy political segregation from the poor is neither sustainable nor ethical

So the Bavarian wing of the Christian Social Union, another conservative political group on whom the Merkel coalition is dependent, threatens to scupper her plans to bailout euro economies, according to Doug Saunders of the Globe and Mail. (see article below)
Doesn't this sound more than a little reminiscent of the Tea Party threatening to sabotage all attempts by the Obama administration to turn the American economy around, in the hope of rebuilding the middle class?
Or the oil-rich province of Alberta turning a blind eye to the eastern half of Canada, as they attempt, with the federal government's support, to grab big bucks, from the U.S. or other off-shore buyers for               their unrefined tar-sands heavy crude, without even considering a pipeline to eastern Canada both for supply and for refining "their" oil?Doesn't it seem more reasonable and responsible to view that oil as  a   Canadian natural resource, not just an Albertan windfall?
Have we got the beginning of an even tighter squeeze around the necks of the "poor" by the "rich" as they blindly, and somewhat arrogantly, parade their forms of separation, superiority and inward-looking thinking and power-shifting, like a fiscal tidal wave in effect silencing the needs of their brothers and sisters?
It would seem that financial independence, and the power that accompanies that wealth, could easily take over the world, in ways that would render the 99% impotent, and if these rich "blocks" of people think, by restraining their "hand-ups" they will retain both their wealth and their power, in the face of starving hordes who have no work and no prospects for either work or a decent income, they are living in a technicolor dream world of epic proportions.
Just because a province, or a country or a region is less affluent than her wealthy sister provinces or regions does not automatically mean the wealthy are, or have to be in charge. It is their narrow interests they are trying to protect, and such protection is simply neither sustainable nor worthy of being sustained.
We have to help such narrow perspectives to widen their range, lengthen their look into the future which, as they are proposing, they would control, when everyone knows that merely purchasing control of the debates is a very short-term and faulty game plan.
We need some longer-term thinking, sharing and planning and less hostage taking of public policy, in all corners of the world, including, I'm afraid, the re-education of the extremely wealthy, whose wealth, in too many cases seems to leave them deaf and blind to the big picture, that includes their unwanted need of the poor as much as the poor need them. That is not only an ethical goal, but a pragmatic necessity in terms of the much larger reality of interdependence. Denying support where it is needed is the kind of seed that will, like the wildest weed, snuff out the best and the brightest ideas and crops in the field of public policy. Gating rich political communities, in an attempt to preserve both their privacy and their wealth, while denying the poor and the starving and the restless unemployed on the other side of those gates, will only bring those hordes crashing through the gates, in some form at some time, probably sooner rather than later.

By Doug Saunders, Globe and Mail, July 17, 2012
Until now, it seemed that the greatest threats to the future of the euro were the collapsing economies of Greece, Italy, Spain and Ireland. But in recent days, a less likely threat has emerged: Bavaria.

This southern German state, known for its staunchly conservative politics, has launched a multi-pronged mutiny against German Chancellor Angela Merkel, her efforts to build a bailout plan for the euro economies, and the whole notion of European integration.
The rebellion, which has the potential to bring down Ms. Merkel’s coalition government, is led by two stalwart Munich conservatives who had once been strong backers of the Chancellor and her conservative Christian Democratic Union.

It began when Bavarian Premier Horst Seehofer, who is also the head of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian branch of Ms. Merkel’s party, declared two weeks ago that he would pull all the Bavarian seats out of Ms. Merkel’s coalition if she allowed the European Stability Mechanism to finance bailouts of more countries.
Without the backing of Mr. Seehofer’s bloc, Ms. Merkel would not have a majority in parliament and would rely on the wavering support of the left-wing opposition parties.
“The time has come when the Bavarian government and the CSU can no longer say ‘yes’ any more,” Mr. Seehofer told reporters, “and the coalition has no majority without the CSU’s seats.”
While Mr. Seehofer is known for such bombastic declarations – and he has reason to be distancing himself from Ms. Merkel because he faces a difficult re-election campaign next year – most observers feel that he has tapped into a nerve of public discontent over Germany’s economic responsibilities toward the European countries that form the main market for its exports.
“German politics have always been largely consensus-driven, and just as it seemed all the parties were agreeing that more European unification is something good and right and everyone should support it, Seehofer has come in and really opened up the debate and challenged everything,” says Almut Moller, an analyst with the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Indeed, on Tuesday Mr. Seehofer launched another attack on Ms. Merkel by asking Germany’s constitutional court to challenge the legality of Germany’s own internal “solidarity transfers,” in which wealthy states like Bavaria pay about $9-billion a year to help the impoverished states of the former East Germany.
While ostensibly a matter of internal German politics, many Germans saw it as an indirect attack on aid to crisis-ridden European countries.
“There is a real mood among many voters in Bavaria that they don’t want to pay for the rest of Germany, and even less do they want to pay for the rest of Europe,” said Mr. Moller. “It is a message that many people in Germany will recognize.”
Indeed, a poll this week conducted by Stern magazine showed that 60 per cent of German voters oppose giving up any fiscal sovereignty in order to preserve the euro.
The second attack was launched last week by the outspoken Munich economist Hans-Werner Sinn, who organized a widely published letter signed by 190 other conservative economists that condemned Ms. Merkel for allowing the euro-zone bailout fund to create a “banking union” in which troubled banks will be subject to common funds and standards – another key component of Ms. Merkel’s euro package.
The letter warned that “taxpayers, retirees and savers in the still-solid countries of Europe” would be unfairly burdened by the rescue of economies in the periphery and that the policy would result in catastrophe. The Munich revolt has shown that Germany’s consensus is far from stable and that a significant number of people, including some senior officials, are more interested in maintaining national sovereignty than in taking the measures that would prevent a euro failure.
“I wanted to initiate a public debate about the consequences of a banking union,” said Wolfram Richter, an adviser to Germany’s finance ministry who signed Mr. Sinn’s letter. “I feel there is a need to discuss whether the people of Europe are ready to give up national autonomy for the sake of the common currency.”
Mr. Sinn and his Munich-centred movement have struck a chord with voters, and many see Mr. Sinn’s interventions as the vanguard of a political movement that is likely to play a strong role in German politics during the next year.

Words for framing either real action or bookkeeping...Canada must choose!

Recently, while visiting Quebec city, my wife and I had breakfast with two students, one on exchange at Radio Canada from Belgium, the other from Toulouse, France, studying aboriginal tourism in the Province of Quebec, about to write her thesis for defence in September, at the University of Toulouse.
During the animated conversation, the journalist, covering "society" for her network in Belgium, was assigned to do a story on "asbestos" in Quebec. The reason her network had filed the story under "society" is, according to the young woman, because people are dying from the asbestos.
In Canada, the story of the re-opening of the asbestos mine in, of all places, Asbestos QC, is considered an economic story, for the simple reason that the mine will provide jobs, and thereby resuscitate the economy of the town through the creation of some 500 new jobs.
Never mind that hundreds, perhaps thousands and potentially millions have died, are dying or will die from exposure to the deadly material now being shipping to Asian countries, especially India, so long as those jobs are producing income for the residents of the town of Asbestos, and, of course, votes for both Charest (Premier of Quebec) and Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, both of whose governments have thrown some needed cash into the re-opening of the mine.
How we frame a subject is extremely important to how that subject is portrayed by an audience.
Here is a brief quote from John Ralston Saul's book, A Fair Country, that might help to illustrate:
If you examine the way the state organizes itself, you find that utilitarianism has reduced creative economics down to instrumental economics and even further down to classic bookkeeping. In this mindset, every action is a cost. The concept of investment is merely another cost. It is a non-conceptual approach that would have made every historic Canadian breakthrough in public policy appear to be an impossible extravagance.
It is this corner-store approach to cost that prevents us from dealing with poverty or health care or education. This is what shapes our narrow and short-term view of the environment. What is presented as being careful with the public's money, is more often than not a simple failure of imagination. That means those in charge are frightened to act because real action can only be presented as a cost. That is not really an economic theory. It is well below theory. But if it were a theory, it could be described as a linear approach to cost based on the assumption that society is driven by self-interest.
We built our society in quite a different way. Our ideas of fairness and inclusion have been based on an economic theory of investment, in which you create new possibilities of wealth by changing the conditions in which our society operates. To do this takes courage, consciousness, imagination, a taste for risk and an ethical sense of purpose. It is about conduct not contract. It is a way of thinking and acting. (p.319)
Corner-store cost accounting will not a nation build, let alone an economic theory.
We have small-minded, frightened leaders, both elected and appointed to the civil service, whose worlds revolve around the next "investigative" report on their over-spending, while the country's needs continue unaddressed, or even undebated, in a silence of complicity in which the public, the media and the opposition voices are passively aggressive, and nothing is being accomplished. Some nation-building, and what would MacDonald and Cartier and the rest have to say about our fears, and our "bookkeeping" as an inadequate substitute for national policy.

Church decline, especially among liberal Christianity..NYT columnist

In Ross Douthat's piece on the decline of Liberal Christianity, he stresses the motivation and the evidence to adapt to social trends, as a non-starter for church growth, citing the decline in church attendance across the U.S. particularly in the Episcopal church.
However, what he does not mention is how out of sync any body is today with a culture that depends on both instant gratification and instant morale boosting, especially if that body is struggling to find both time and interested particiants to dig deeply into the issues affecting the world. It would seem that churches, especially those with a simply, black and white list of three or four primary 'do's' and 'don't's' such as opposing abortion, and injecting church dogma into the public discourse (witness the Santorum campaign for president) and holding others as "evil" should they not conform (John Kerry being refused the eucharist in his, the Roman Catholic church, because he supported a woman's right to choose) are attracting converts. One especially non-dogmatic congregation has some 40,000 people in the theatre seats in Texas each Sunday, promising "God wants you to be rich, to have a big house, to have a big car and a big salary and investments". Dubbed the "prosperity gospel" by critics, it merges American salesmanship to some kind of faith conglomeration that appears to the outsider more like religious theatre.
But the husband-and-wife leader partnership seems to be reaping the rewards of the riches they promise, as the voice of some God somewhere.
Douthat also, unfortunately, links church growth to the question of its survival, in the typical, corporate method of measuring success. Triumphal churches, with big choirs, and big congregations, and large budgets, with up to half a dozen active clergy are wonderful marketing tools for those in the upper echelons of corporate America, because those attending can brag that they go to a very "well-respected" church, with all the other 'magnates' in the city, as if their size were a stamp of approval of their strength. Their spiritual discipline, neighbourliness, commitment to social justice, study and prayer may, however, be relatively thin, without anyone paying attention. I once asked a retired Motorola executive, friend of the bishop, where he wanted to be in his spiritual life in three years, and because he did not know what I was talking about, he changed the subject. He and his kind would like to populate the pews of large, urban revivalist, evangelical and biblical literalist churches with contemporary music and hymns, and completely ignore the more private, sometimes less public exciting discipline of seeking and finding God.
Small mission churches, however, offer their members much more opportunity to be known and to know and support their neighbours, without the fanfare that attends the triumphal churches, lacking much of the theatrical lustre of those large cathedrals.
If God is a "relationship" and most clergy are not either adept or perhaps even interested in deepening the relationships between and among their congregations and themselves, in a world starved for someone to pay attention, without always solving their problems or removing their pain, there will necessarily be significant drops in attendance. Churches of all dogmatic stripes have to regain sight of their focus on both God and the God-within in order to help to generate spiritual lives and the communities of safety that those lives genuinely require and mutually support.
And, stop paying attention to the "Almighty Dollar" as the route to organizational survival. If the important matters are being attended to, the dollars will look after themselves, but that message is almost impossible to deliver and to have received in the U.S.A. today.
By Ross Douthat, New York Times, July 14, 2012
In 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition — but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States.
As a result, today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict XVI suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians. It still has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.
Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.
This decline is the latest chapter in a story dating to the 1960s. The trends unleashed in that era — not only the sexual revolution, but also consumerism and materialism, multiculturalism and relativism — threw all of American Christianity into crisis, and ushered in decades of debate over how to keep the nation’s churches relevant and vital.
Traditional believers, both Protestant and Catholic, have not necessarily thrived in this environment. The most successful Christian bodies have often been politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of health and wealth rather than the full New Testament message.
But if conservative Christianity has often been compromised, liberal Christianity has simply collapsed. Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance. Within the Catholic Church, too, the most progressive-minded religious orders have often failed to generate the vocations necessary to sustain themselves.
Both religious and secular liberals have been loath to recognize this crisis. Leaders of liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a flesh wound!” bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction. (In a 2006 interview, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop explained that her communion’s members valued “the stewardship of the earth” too highly to reproduce themselves.)
Liberal commentators, meanwhile, consistently hail these forms of Christianity as a model for the future without reckoning with their decline. Few of the outraged critiques of the Vatican’s investigation of progressive nuns mentioned the fact that Rome had intervened because otherwise the orders in question were likely to disappear in a generation. Fewer still noted the consequences of this eclipse: Because progressive Catholicism has failed to inspire a new generation of sisters, Catholic hospitals across the country are passing into the hands of more bottom-line-focused administrators, with inevitable consequences for how they serve the poor.
But if liberals need to come to terms with these failures, religious conservatives should not be smug about them. The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.
What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”
Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that per haps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.
Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.

Happy 100th Birthday, Northrop Frye

Frye Sculpture in Moncton NB

Editorial, Globe and Mail, July 13, 2012
“The Atlantic Ocean was something then. Yes, you shoulda seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days.”


Burt Lancaster waxed that bit of nostalgia for the 1940s while playing Lou, the aging small-time gunsel in the 1980 Oscar-nominated feature Atlantic City. It’s a sentiment with apt application to Toronto in the 1950s and ’60s when you coulda, shoulda seen Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan and Glenn Gould pacing the pavement. Titans all they were, as Yoda might put it, each then at the height of his respective powers, each with an influence rippling far beyond the shores of Lake Ontario.
They’re all dead now – Frye in 1991, McLuhan in 1980, Gould two years later. But were he alive, Herman Northrop Frye would be celebrating his 100th birthday on Saturday. The occasion already has been marked in Moncton, Frye’s home from about age seven to 17, with a barbecue and the unveiling Friday of a life-size bronze sculpture of the illustrious critic, writer and teacher outside the city’s main library. Victoria College at the University of Toronto, Frye’s intellectual home from 1929 until his death, will host a symposium in October to salute both his achievements and the recent publication of the 30th and final volume of his collected works.
Today the name Northrop Frye (“Norrie” to family and select friends) remains synonymous with “big brain” even as most of us likely couldn’t summarize just what that brain did, save, perhaps, to cite the titles of some of his most famous books – Fearful Symmetry, Anatomy of Criticism, The Great Code. Frye himself didn’t make it easy. While he could craft a nifty aphorism (“Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it.” “Good books may instruct but bad ones are more likely to inspire.”), he was no Marshall McLuhan whose “the medium is the message” and “art is anything you can get away with” seem perpetually au courant.
Moreover, as a professional literary critic, Frye worked in a discipline known for its fierce abstruseness, recondite vocabulary and the rapidity by which schools are created and concepts embraced, then discarded. Fryegianism may no longer count as much as it did in Frye’s lifetime but he still matters just as Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot still matter. Happy centenary, Mr. Frye.