American Politics – Page 35

One of Justin Trudeau’s better moves.

June 24, 2015 by Peter Lowry

It makes sense to make nice with the United States. It is surprising for many Canadians when that becomes necessary. Not since Prime Minister John Diefenbaker pissed off President John Kennedy have relations with the Americans been more in the dumpster. Not only has Prime Minister Stephen Harper been a nag about the Keystone XL pipeline but his open admiration for President Obama’s Republican opponents in Congress has hardly gone unnoticed.

The phony bonhomie played out between Harper and Obama at G-8/G-7 meetings has been shallow and forced for some time. Sure there have been other tiffs between the two countries’ leaders (Lester Pearson versus Lyndon Johnson and Pierre Trudeau versus Dick Nixon are good examples) but these tended to be quickly patched over and cordial relations continued. Fights with a neighbour are rarely productive.

Justin Trudeau noted all of this with more restraint than you would have expected. While he called Harper’s a belligerent brand of partisan politics, he used it as an example of the need for real change. He told his audience that Harper has been hectoring the Americans throughout the past decade. He explained that “Canada’s special relationship with the United States is not automatic. Like any strong relationship,” he said, “you have to put a lot of work into it.”

But Trudeau also suggested that better relations with Mexico can be a back door to relations with the U.S.A. He noted what he referred to as Harper’s “churlish” approach to Mexico. Trudeau promised to lift the visa restrictions on Mexican visitors to Canada and to work more cooperatively with Mexico. He sees Mexico as a better trade opportunity than Mr. Harper obviously has. It also makes good sense to build relations with the other smaller member of the North American Free Trade Agreement. There are times when Canada could use an ally in dealing with the United States about some aspects of the three countries’ free trade deal.

It was also good to notice that the Liberal leader had no comment on any merits of the Keystone XL pipeline. The Obama administration is well aware that the true purpose of that pipeline is to access ocean shipping capabilities on the Texas Gulf coast to send Alberta bitumen to countries around the world that do not care about the environmental damage of converting tar sands material into synthetic oil. Maybe it’s been explained to the Justin Trudeau that no matter where in the world it’s processed, it causes global warming and Canada shares the blame.

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Bearing bad news for NDP’s Tom Mulcair.

April 28, 2015 by Peter Lowry

George Lakoff is an American who thinks. The UCLA Berkeley professor was in Toronto last week. We missed a chance to meet him. He is reported to have told his audience there is no such thing as the political centre. That must have been bad news for the New Democrats who came to see him. Their federal Leader Tom Mulcair has been busy trying to find the political centre and in the process he has lost touch with the left. Lakoff could have told him that the centre is just a hypothetical point on a bell curve, drawn by statisticians.

In the same way, maybe Babel-on-the-Bay is just a hypothetical place. It stands on a lonely island where we are constantly besieged by the insufferable Whigs of Canada’s right-wing liberalism. Alone, we have to take on the harsh reality show known as Stephen Harper’s Conservatism while observing the wanderings in the wilderness of Tommy Douglas’ child-like socialists.

What do you have to do around here to get the system working for Canadians? Do we have to copy Preston Manning and start our own political party? Manning did that and his Reform Party turned around and ate the Conservative Party’s lunch. In response to that the Liberals and New Democrats should have merged into the Canadian Social Democratic Party. It was just neither party had the leadership, the will nor the smarts and Canadians have suffered ever since.

Maybe Lakoff would have known how to solve that. He might have sent the muddled moderates off to fornicate and produce offspring that could appreciate the necessity for more and more intrusive government and more taxes. Just not in our lifetime.

He thinks the basic difference between Democrats (progressives) and Republicans (Neanderthals) is that the Democrats went to college and the Republicans went to church. They are both mislead and confused.

Lakoff gives the right-wing full marks for marketing their product. He says they frame their proposition better because more of them must have gone to business schools. Moderates might understand philosophy but they seem to know squat about selling. Lakoff laughs at them for thinking reason will win.

What, regretfully, Lakoff cannot explain is the growing intransigence of the right and left of the United States of America. There is hatred in Washington that you can smell from the Beltway. Let us fervently hope this political vehemence does not spread into Canada.

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If there is Will, he will find a way.

January 23, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Not being a regular reader of the Washington Post, we might not have read many columns by George F. Will. It was only when Toronto’s National Post picked up one of his commentaries last weekend that we had the fun of trying to figure out how his mind works—or maybe does not. What appeared to start out as a mindless Republican tarring of America’s first black President, was found to include some mindless repetition of TransCanada Pipelines’ news releases.

This guy Will must be a staunch anti-environmentalist. Yet he has the temerity to say about President Obama that “his mind has always been as closed as an unshucked oyster.” Will adds that the more Mr. Obama talks about the pipeline, “the more ignorant he seems.” Would it be politically incorrect under these circumstances to suggest Mr. Will is guilty of being the pot that is calling the kettle ‘black’?

Mr. Will talks as though he cares about Canada leaving the wealth of the Athabasca and Cold Lake tar sands in the ground. Why should he give a damn? The states of California and Utah both have large tar sands deposits that also would be better off staying in the ground. Will seems to prefer to ridicule people who point out that tar sands are the dirtiest source of oil in the world. Just in refining the tar sands bitumen to synthetic crude oil produces three times the carbon of crude oil refining. The bitumen coke residue of the processing is dirtier than the most polluting coal.

If Mr. Will had any knowledge of his topic, he would have known that Alberta Premier Jim Prentice and the top brass of Enbridge were in Texas before his commentary went to press re-announcing the three-year old Flanagan South pipeline project from Pontiac, Illinois southwest to Cushing, Oklahoma where it connects to existing pipelines to the Texas Gulf Coast. While it is a less direct route than Keystone XL, it does not require State Department or Presidential approval. It has always been the bitumen pumping backup for the Alberta tar sands.

Mr. Will accuses people who care about the environment of working from some environmental catechism. We can assure him that we do not. He obviously does not understand the difference between oil and bitumen despite bitumen being the source of pitch used to waterproof the galleys that plied the Mediterranean back when the pyramids were being built.

If Mr. Will even had a clue as to the reasons for the currently low prices for oil, he would know that the last thing we need is to speed climate change for unnecessary profit.

But that seems to be what Republicans want.

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A friendly note to the American Congress.

January 15, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Hey you jerks, please do not do that for us. We do not want the Keystone XL pipeline either. Canadians who care are firmly against any pipelines that try to pump bitumen to the sea. That tar sands stuff is three times as polluting as West Texas crude oil. Why in hell would you want to promote faster global warming?

We hate to tell you this but President Obama is right. There is no profit for America to allow that atrocity by TransCanada Pipelines across the United States. There are no long term jobs. There are some royalties to landowners and there are some dock workers’ wages where that crap would be pumped into ocean going tankers.

What you get instead is part of the blame for destroying our planet when there is really no need for anyone to dig up that tar sands bitumen to make synthetic oil. Hundred years from now when we are shipping humans off to other galaxies because our planet is dying, we might need some bitumen then. And we know where it is.

And do you realize how stupid it makes you look to fight with President Obama on this issue? What are you, a bunch of Johnny One-Notes? Why do you not find something worth fighting about? Our administration in Ottawa makes so many mistakes it is hard to tell where to begin in the list of things that need fixing. You people do not seem to have any bloody imagination.

Your Republican Senator from Indiana, Dan Coats is quoted in one our newspapers as saying that the Keystone XL pipeline was the “largest ready-to-build infrastructure project in the United States.” That is sad. He is actually quoted as saying that the pipeline creates thousands of jobs and invests billions in the American economy. It would seem that your Mr. Coats is a failure of the American public school system. He might also be feeble-minded.

But he does not seem much smarter than another 59 of your Senators who intend to pass that foolishly named Bill 1 by the end of January. They must be doing this because they are not allowed to use a sharp stick to goad your president. He has already told you that he will refuse to sign your Bill. So get a life.

This fiasco is nothing but a political argument between Democrats and Republicans. It is really too bad that none of you were elected to do something positive for your constituents. You actually make those dumb bunnies Canadians keep caged in Ottawa’s Parliament Buildings look intelligent.

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That was another good year.

January 8, 2015 by Peter Lowry

The New Year came and went and it was such a busy time for political comment that we missed commenting on the past year. And that year needs a look. Babel-on-the-Bay set some records. Readership is up. In 365 days, there were 365 commentaries. Other sites are asking for our commentaries. Others send us readers. The numbers are confusing because so many of you are frequent flyers. This blog is fun but on the occasional cold day, it can also be onerous.

But the record continues. Babel-on-the-Bay called the shots on every election of interest to us last year. The Liberal win in Quebec was a slam-dunk after a nouveau péquiste Pierre-Karl Péladeau blew his opening news conference.

Very few agreed with us that the Ontario Liberals were going to win so easily against the embarrassment of Conservative Timmy Hudak and the incompetence of New Democrat Andrea Horwath. And the amusing part of that was that we guessed wrong in our own riding. We have a very surprised new Liberal MPP from Babel. Since the local Whigs did not think they needed a rabble-rouser around for their token campaign, we missed what was happening in our own backyard.

The best long-range prognostication was the Scottish Referendum in Great Britain. That was a nip and tuck situation but the sensitivity to the Scottish side of the family came through for us. Mind you the Scottish side of the family left Dundee more than 200 years ago, so guess-work also helped.

Municipal elections can be an interesting study but Babel’s municipal election was a snore last year. Only the Toronto mayoralty contest held any interest and Babel-on-the-Bay went with winner John Tory from day one.

There was no question that Americans had tired of Mr. Obama’s rhetoric and both of the American Houses of Congress fell to the Republicans in November. Canadians will be sleeping with a very cranky, dyspeptic elephant for the next two years.

Everyone is now girding their loins (whatever that means?) for the three-way tilt for the pan-Canadian title of Prime Minister some time in 2015. The more serious problem is what this election is going to do to our democracy? That is the real question for the voters this year.

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Which twin has the Toni?

November 26, 2014 by Peter Lowry

During a career in public relations in Canada, you kept an eye on what was happening in PR south of the border as well as the Canadian market. You always wanted to be aware of what firms were doing for their clients. A firm watched over the last 60 years was started by the late Daniel Edelman who opened a firm with his name on it in Chicago in 1952. One of Dan’s first clients was Toni Home Permanents for whom he had previously worked. His most noted accomplishment for Toni was the strategy of doing media tours throughout the United States with twins posing the question: “Which twin has the Toni?”

As you can imagine, Dan’s stunt opened the door to many marketing public relations programs focussed on product awareness and sales. When you could measure actual sales of product through PR, contract renewals were always easier.

It certainly works for Dan’s firm, now run by his son, which has become the largest public relations firm in the world. Edelman has more than 5000 employees worldwide and annual billings of the privately held firm are reputed to be in excess of $700 million.

One of the major challenges for the firm is its client TransCanada Pipelines. It has been estimated that TransCanada paid the Washington office of Edelman more than $50 million to try to get the Keystone XL pipeline past the legislative barriers in the United States.

Despite the lack of success to-date, TransCanada must like something about Edelman’s Washington office. They have also retained the same office to convince Canadians of the benefits of TransCanada’s EnergyEast pipeline project that runs from Hardisty, Alberta to Saint John, New Brunswick. And this is no nickel and dime campaign!

Many Canadians are becoming nauseous from the repetition of TransCanada’s television advertising that shows ubiquitous greenery and the hoary tag line that “we not only work here, but we live and play here.”

But it is the more insidious assault that a firm such as Edelman mounts that works on the acceptance of their versions of the truth. An editorial in a local newspaper last week screamed of Edelman’s expertise. The writer in this case does well with farm reports but this one was way out of his league. He wrote about how North Americans need to work together to unify their strategies for our new-found energy self-sufficiency. The ideas in that editorial were pure Edelman and pro TransCanada Pipelines.

Having worked the corridors of both Ottawa and Washington over the years, it is amusing to note that the our Conservative government has hired the Ottawa office of PR firm FleishmanHilliard to influence Washington to approve the TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline while the Washington office of Edelman is doing the EnergyEast job in Canada.

Maybe both PR company offices should pay heed to those EnergyEast TV commercials and work where they live and play!

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The Bully Pulpit of the Paul’s.

July 24, 2014 by Peter Lowry

This is not the Apostle Saint Paul under discussion here. Libertarian extremists Ron Paul and his son Randal Paul are something else. The senior Paul is still the cantankerous fanatic who took his pre-Tea Party Libertarian followers to seek the American Presidency in 1988 and tried in both 2008 and 2012 to win the Republican presidential nomination. While the older Paul is almost retired from politics at 78, his son “Rand” is readying for a presidential bid in 2016 from his Senate seat for the State of Kentucky. What is frightening about it is the highly sophisticated use of the Internet by the Paul’s. It is the real bully pulpit.

While in the usual sense, a bully pulpit is a position of power from which one can speak with authority, the Paul’s are actually using the Internet to create that authority. As their high-powered public relations people put it, the Paul’s are using the Internet to crowd source what they see as a digital bully pulpit. This is a giant step beyond being ‘liked’ on Facebook. The Paul Plan is to dominate.

Rather than call their supporters Libertarians, the Paul’s refer to their supporters as “liberty-minded” and obviously Republican. Their objective is to drive the political energy of the extreme right wing of American politics into feeding ideas, support, names of activists and local leadership from the grass roots to the Bully Pulpit that encompasses the Paul’s sites. It is a pyramid building exercise that could be the envy of Amway.

What the Paul’s are doing is creating conveyance. They see themselves as opening the flood gates for the real wishes of the American people. All that Randal Paul needs to do is offer leadership. He wants to be able to scratch today’s itch for millions of Americans. It is terribly simple and frightening as hell.

When you consider that almost half of the American population have no real love for their fellow man, Paul’s job is easy. Washington inside the Beltway is the enemy. Foreigners are to be distrusted and they are not even sure about Canadians. Business is good and welfare is bad. And no, young “Rand” is not named after former right-wing guru Ayn Rand but he might as well be.

The Paul’s Internet platform is based on Voices of Liberty, a supposedly ‘non-partisan’ site for exchange of right-wing theories, rants, ideas and arguments. And how do we know all about this? The public relations people for the Paul’s sent this blog a news release about it because we have readers in the United States of America.

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There are liars and damn liars.

July 18, 2014 by Peter Lowry

The Woodrow Wilson Institute based at the Smithsonian in Washington is an honoured institution recognizing the only American President to have earned a PhD. It seems a shame that its name is being besmirched by the cant of the tar sands exploiters and the sham of Prime Minister Harper’s energy policy. This commentary is instigated by a Toronto Star opinion piece on July 17 saying Canada must diversify its energy pitch to the U.S. It is by Andrew Finn program associate at the Canada Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Institute.

The first (complex) sentence of the article is all you need to read to question the writer’s veracity. He refers to the United States decision to “deny Gulf Coast refineries the heavy crude they so desperately need.” This is not only a flat out lie but it uses the wrong words to describe the Canadian goods planned to be shipped through the Keystone XL pipeline.

The facts are that the Texas Gulf Coast refineries have no need for the Canadian bitumen from the Athabasca tar sands. Utah has lots of tar sands type bitumen it can ship south. The refineries around the Texas Gulf oil ports have little interest in bitumen because of the additional and highly polluting processing required. They certainly do not need it.

And Canadian bitumen is not by any stretch of the imagination “heavy crude oil.” Bitumen is one of the oldest materials used by man. It provided the waterproofing pitch for the boats that plied the Mediterranean before the pyramids were built. It supplied the mortar for the bricks of Babylon. Bitumen might be available in the largest quantity in Alberta but it is found around the world.

But if you wash out the sands and add polymers to the mix, bitumen can be heated and pushed at high pressure through a pipeline. It is the most efficient way to move the stuff. And if you are ecologically minded, you leave the stuff where it lies. It can be refined into synthetic crude oil at great expense to the environment when our dying planet is desperate for oil resources.

But this does not justify the confused and inaccurate story from Mr. Finn and the Canada Institute. He uses Canada’s hydro power electrical generation as a counterpoint to the bitumen. He says the United States should buy more electrical power from Canada’s renewable resources while agreeing to move our bitumen to the oil ports for export.

Frankly nothing much is achieved by propaganda such as this. It makes life even more complex when you cannot trust the Smithsonian or the Woodrow Wilson International Institute. And worse, why is the Toronto Star running such garbage?

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Is the White House burning?

March 29, 2014 by Peter Lowry

The last time Canada and the United States went to war on some pretext, our British troops went to Washington and set fire to the White House. That was 200 years ago. The current campaign against the American capitol is being run by the Ottawa office of a communications company called Fleishman-Hilliard. In a time of false austerity in Ottawa, this company has a pot of Canadian gold to win the hearts and minds of U.S. law-makers to the side of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Why Canadian taxpayers are funding this campaign is a question for another time. The Harper Conservatives have been pouring Canadian money into the Keystone XL money pit for quite some time. And everything tells us that the TransCanada Pipelines project will lose. The intense pressure from U.S. environmental lobby groups has been unabated. The attempts by Stephen Harper to cajole, threaten, convince and plead with President Obama have been a wasted effort.

Obama has identified the Canadian Prime Minister for what he is. And Obama does not like what he sees. Harper is a stuffed-shirt, right-wing ideologue and Obama has met and fought with that type of people during all his adult years. He is surrounded by generations of right-wing Republicans and loony-tunes Tea Party activists in his nation’s capitol and he knows how they think, how they react and just how useless they are to humanity.

President Obama must have been appalled at that G7 minus Russia meeting in The Hague recently. Here was the Canadian Prime Minister with his war sabre at the ready leading the charge of the light-minded brigade against Vladimir Putin across the Eurasian Steppe.

It could not have been more pointed in Obama’s speech to the European Community after the meeting in The Hague that he did not agree with the Canadian Prime Minister. During the, as usual, eloquent speech, he talked about America and the EU—he never once mentioned Canada.

Obama could do that because he knows Harper’s Achilles heel. Harper does not have Canadians onside. As much as Harper postures and pretends, he has built an animosity to his energy plan for Canada. Canadians distrust his pipeline plans to the East and West coasts. They are coming to understand his destruction of the manufacturing economy of the eastern half of the country. They are seeing what he is allowing to happen to the environment. Obama knows that Harper is in trouble.

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Revving up the Keystone pipeline controversy.

February 2, 2014 by Peter Lowry

It is called doublespeak. Bureaucrats use it to leave themselves open to whatever their political bosses prefer to do. They have not said yes and they have not said no. The American State Department issued its Final Environmental Impact Statement on the last day of January and leaves everyone in the same state as they were before it was issued. All the State Department functionaries did was get it out and get it done with as far as they were concerned. Like the Oracle at Delphi though you will learn that their findings are whatever you want them to be.

And in the classic stance of combatants, both sides of the argument about the controversial pipeline claimed victory. All that really happened was that others now get to have their say and, ultimately, President Barack Obama will make up his own mind whenever he gets around to it. His is the only opinion that seems to matter.

But how Mr. Obama is going to sift through all the half-truths, weasel words, obfuscation and out-right lies is the wonder. It is not that he is unused to that type of argument. His gut instinct on some of the concerns might be all that he needs. He has already made it very clear that he is concerned about the environmental impact. And the State Department telling him that something, even as big as the Keystone XL, is not going to drastically affect the pace of Canada’s Athabasca “oil” sands development, does not give him the out you might suppose.

The fact that the writers use the term ‘oil sands’ instead of the term ‘tar sands’ is a half-truth on which the tar sands exploiters are getting a pass. Read the State Department claim again that “no single project—not even TransCanada’s Keystone XL—will drastically affect the pace of Canada’s oilsands development.” Now tell us exactly what it means. The statement is gratuitous—it means nothing, to Americans.

What is important is the process continues. The President has no need to make a decision yet but there will be further pressures later in the year. Frankly, he will probably be too busy until the off-year elections in November as he does not want to face opposition control of both the House and the Senate for the last two years of his term of office. He has more important work to do and why set himself up for trouble with a decision that he does not have to rush?

The big lie is that the bitumen to be shipped on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline links to the Texas Gulf ports is for the refineries located there. The Texas refineries can get bitumen from Utah tar sands—and they do not want it. The Alberta bitumen is for shipment to world markets that do not care about the environmental damage it causes.

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