American Politics – Page 38

Can America restore its greatness?

January 26, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Watching American President Barack Obama deliver the State of Union address the other day, we could not help but relate some of the early part of the speech to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR was already President of the United States when we were born. He, more than any other American, was the leader who brought America to greatness in the world. We can only reflect today on how that greatness has been trampled.

Roosevelt said it as far back as May 1932 when addressing a commencement at Oglethorpe University. Three years before, the greed of Wall Street had taken the nation’s economy into a tail spin and FDR said: We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer.

FDR was working to correct those faults when interrupted by World War II. He had to set that work aside to provide the leadership to help win that war. In the process, he made an imperfect America the strongest nation on earth.

Addressing much the same issues as FDR, Obama laid out a smorgasbord of ideas for Congress the other evening. He talked about his nation’s military might, America’s ability to solve problems, the need for ideas not ideology and the need for people to work to common goals. Yet you looked at the faces of the Republicans that the cameras scanned throughout the chamber and the feeling of depression grew.

America is a nation that has forgotten humility. It has become a nation without compassion. It is a nation that commits aggression of raw, brutal economic power. It believes it owns the world and lets business abuse it. It stands proud against the evil empire of communism but fails to win in the rice paddies of Vietnam. It treats the Middle East countries as pawns while building their hatreds. America fails as a peacekeeper because it threatens war.

You can only admire the effort that Barack Obama is putting into restoring some of that greatness, restoring the ideal that can be America. For, in many ways, America has been built on ideals. In the land of the free, the ‘Occupy’ movement rose against the top one per cent of Americans who controlled 40 per cent of the nation’s income last year. This is a land of spacious skies where people fly on wings of paranoia. Where people wrap themselves in a brave flag and go to a tea party for the lunatic fringe.

Regrettably, Barack Obama is no black Franklin Roosevelt. The world has gone through too much since FDR addressed the issues. Now it is President Obama’s turn. We can only hope he wins.

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Who do you trust?

January 21, 2012 by Peter Lowry

There seems to be a universal inability to trust these days. We have come a long way from the politics of trust. We can forget the former grandfatherly images of the sage politicians who would look after our interest. Today we look at politicians as no-holds-barred fighters in a cage. Politics has become a survival of the fittest contest as the savaged and bleeding winner earns the title by being the last person standing.

As usual it is American politics that leads the way. Who is Mitt Romney and why is he ordained to lead anyone, anywhere? And why is President Obama so relaxed and laughing while it is the Republican’s turn in the cage? Is Newt Gingrich that funny? And did Rick Santorum (who?) really win in Idaho? And does it matter? Can the Tea Party recover in time to win South Carolina and save the nation from Romney?

Stay tuned folks.

The question is not who is going to win, but why. The United States of America is practicing the politics of hate and if you hate, you no longer trust. And that is the growing concern of political observers across North America.

In Canada we are already reaping the fruits of Conservative hatreds. The formerly docile pet poodles of Stephen Harper’s Conservative caucus are growing fangs and demanding the raw meat of vengeance on their left-wing opponents. Harper is still looking at the long-haul strategy and is trying to keep them penned.

But enough of their hatred for the liberal left spills through to keep the tensions high.

In Ontario, Premier McGuinty is about to exact his revenge on the electorate for reducing his caucus to a minority government. When he plotted this, he must have thought he was going to lose. He hired a banker, Don Drummond, to plan his revenge. The not very secret Drummond report is soon to be released. The fact that McGuinty is still there to present it presents him with a conundrum. This is not chicken soup he is bringing to the electorate. It is a political expectorant. In bringing up the worst of the detritus of government, he is likely to have coughed himself right out of office.

Meanwhile, back in the United States of Hysteria, the Republicans continue to savage each other to prove who is the most pure, the most religious, the most hate filled—and who can defeat that abominable Obama. The election is in November.

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In Carney we trust.

December 27, 2011 by Peter Lowry

As children, we were always excited with the trips from Toronto to Chicago to visit mother’s family. It was the American greenbacks—slipped to us by generous relatives—that impressed us the most. What was of concern though was to note the American money seemed to put in trust with God while the stability of Canadian money was put in the hands of the Governor of the Bank of Canada. Lately, the score in that regard has been Mark Carney: 1, God: 0.

As governor of the Bank of Canada, Carney has an enviable reputation. He has even been loaned to the G20 members as chair of the Financial Stability Board by Prime Minister Harper. It is his control of the Canadian dollar that has most impressed the member countries of the G20.

God’s currency, by comparison, seems beyond anyone’s control. While supposedly under the stewardship of Federal Reserve Board Chair Ben Bernanke, that economist finds that most days, the American buck has a mind of its own. Bernanke’s main problem is that while he has used the money printing presses to try to shore up the American economy, he is much too right-wing in his political outlook. It leaves the Fed Chairman in somewhat a conflicted position.

Mind you, Barack Obama had no alternative to Bernanke. He knew it was guaranteed that he would never get a more left-wing Federal Reserve chair past a Republican-dominated Senate. Being from Alberta did no harm to Mark Carney when Stephen Harper promoted the then Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada to the top job.

Bernanke and the American dollar are on a roller-coaster ride while he tries to find some satisfactory answers to the American economic problems. The Canadian dollar has so-far withstood most of the pressures this causes on the smaller Canadian economy.

But the longer the world-wide economic troubles continue, both Bernanke and Carney will find they have fewer and fewer options left to them. While Wall Street might have started all the problems with the American lack of controls and the uncivilized greed, it is Main Street in every country in the world that is paying the price.

What we must do is start to get ahead of the problems. We must first protect our citizens from corporate gluttony. Senior executives should not be making incomes over ten times that of the average worker. ‘Buyer beware’ is no longer appropriate as a corporate slogan. Corporate citizenship must go beyond the laws. Corporate responsibility is to all countries where the company operates or sells its products or services. Our corporate world serves people—we do not serve the corporations.

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Toronto Star needs better research.

November 13, 2011 by Peter Lowry

There are people who consider Toronto Star editorials as gospel. Their numbers will be decreasing if the editorial writers do not pull up their socks and do a little more research before pontificating. The editorial (Nov. 13, 2011) on the delay of Trans Canada’s Keystone XL pipeline is a good example of the lack of research.

The headline was that the pipeline delay was a shabby rebuff from a friend. They could have started with a little better understanding that ‘the friend,’ by the name of Barack Obama, is fighting for his political life and Trans Canada Pipelines is not even in his vocabulary. What President Obama saw was a concerted effort by major environmental groups to derail a plan for a pipeline to get Alberta oil-sands crude toTexas Gulf coast refineries. Those environmentalists are Obama’s supporters and he needs them to help keep his job in the 2012 elections.

The Star editorial writer just sees this as another rebuff from Obama after the ‘Buy America’ provisions of his $447 billion American Jobs Act.

Has the Star writer even considered that Canadians might not want to ship their expensive, polluting crude from oil sands to American refineries? Maybe Canadians think that there should be enough refinery capacity in Canada to handle what crude we have to produce from oil sands. That would at least keep some of those refinery jobs in Canada, if not the profit from doing the refining in Canada.

The Star writer thinks it is just rotten, crass American politics that Trans Canada Pipelines is not being allowed to go ahead with the creation of 20,000 jobs (mainly in the United States of America) to build its pipeline.

What that writer should read is the posting in Bloomberg News about Mr. Obama’s decision. Bloomberg, in case the writer does not know it, is a well respected business news network that pays attention to matters such as U.S.-based pipelines and new construction plans. Bloomberg says that Trans Canada’s loss is probably Enbridge’s gain. Enbridge is a Calgary based energy company that runs pipelines from Alberta down through Illinois. Enbridge would like to compete for the contract to ship the oil-sands crude through Illinois and, from there, down to the Texas Gulf coast. Bloomberg’s conclusion is that Trans Canada’s loss is Enbridge’s gain.

It seems Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is also unaware of the Enbridge plan. When he heard about Obama’s delay of the Trans Canada proposal, he suggested a pipeline to the West Coast so we could ship all that crude to China. Flaherty must also be an environmentalist. It seems nobody wants to refine Canadian crude in Canada. The Toronto Star writer never thought of it.

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Those environmentalists are Obama’s voters.

November 11, 2011 by Peter Lowry

Give them marks for creativity. It was a group of environmental lobbies that targeted the Trans Canada Pipelines’ XL Pipeline that was designed to take Alberta oil-sands crude to Texas refineries. President Barack Obama finally got their message.

Their best visual was actually a bit of a bust but the idea of hundreds of people holding up a pipeline around the White House was the winning visual—even if the television shots of it were in disparate pieces. That, combined with the concern for the aquifer nature of the Sandhills of Nebraska, did the trick. President Obama had no choice but to stop the process. The delay is likely to ensure that Trans Canada Pipelines cannot make the deadline to start shipping oil-sands crude in mid 2013.

But the bad news for the environmentalists is that their work has just begun. With Trans Canada Pipelines on the mat and the referee counting, Enbridge, Trans Canada Pipelines’ competitor has emerged as the saviour for the Texas refineries. As Enbridge already has pipelines running from Alberta into Illinois, it does not have to get U.S. State Department approval to build an extension down to the Gulf Coast of Texas. President Obama cannot just call the State Department to stop Enbridge as easily as he was able to stop Trans Canada Pipelines.

And while the Enbridge route is a bit round about, it does not come close to Nebraska.

The environmentalists will have to beat their ploughshares back into swords and take the field again. And this time they are going to have to be wary of the Canadian Government. The Harper Conservatives want to sell oil-sands crude in volume and moving it by pipeline will give them a solid market for many years—certainly longer than they will be in power.

It is not as though more enlightened Canadians really care about the oil-sands. As long as the recovery of oil from them is a serious pollution problem, they would prefer that they just go away. And, if the pollution problem is solved, why do we not want to refine the oil in Canada?

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