An Open Letter to Barack Obama and John Kerry

Dear President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry:

As a concerned Canadian, I am writing to urge you to reject TransCanada’s application to build the Keystone XL pipeline for purposes of transporting dirty oil from Alberta’s tar sands to refineries in the United States.

I assure you that not all Canadians are quite as eager to export climate-busting bitumen as our federal government seems to be. Many of us recognize that the high energy demands required to exploit this unconventional resource give it a dangerously large carbon footprint. For this reason, we consistently oppose similar projects, such as proposed pipelines to the Canadian West Coast by Enbridge and Kinder Morgan.

According to estimates of greenhouse gas trajectories needed to avert runaway climate change, global emissions need to be peaking right about now (if not earlier). That means that we as a planet need to start drastically decreasing our use of coal, oil, and natural gas. At a bare minimum, we must not engage in further expansion of existing fossil fuel infrastructure — especially when it involves something so exceptionally dirty as tar sands bitumen.

Many Americans seem to recognize this too. Barely a week ago, tens of thousands gathered in Washington for the country’s largest ever climate rally. Earlier this year, the Sierra Club agreed for the first time in its 120-year history to adopt the use of civil disobedience. Any jobs that may or may not temporarily be gained from the proliferation of pipelines are more than outweighed by the jeopardization of the climate system upon which agriculture, forestry, and our very ways of life depend.

So please reject TransCanada’s application once and for all. To do so would benefit both of our countries, as well as the world at large.

Sincerely,

David Taub Bancroft

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Mass Shootings by the Numbers

Over three-quarters of the firearms used to carry out mass shootings in the United States since 1982 were obtained legally. How on Earth can there not be a national discussion on gun control?

And to those gun advocates who say that tragedy ought not to be politicized, that we need to wait a respectful amount of time before debating such contentious issues as gun control (but who don’t object when such violence is attributed to the absence of God from public schools), I will point out that there have so far been sixteen mass shootings in the United States since the start of 2012, resulting in a combined death toll of eighty-eight.

There is literally not enough space between shootings to be respectful.

Finally, yesterday, on the same day as the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, a similar attack took place at a primary school in Henan province, China. Thankfully, although twenty-two children and one adult were injured, nobody died.

Instead of a gun, the attacker carried a knife.

’Nuff said.

Emerging Consensus on Gay Marriage

Assuming that the world survives this coming December 21, the United States Supreme Court is expected to rule on two cases in June which could result in the nation-wide legalization of gay marriage.

I cannot forecast with certainty how the court will decide, but supposing for a moment that it rules in favour of marriage equality, the short-term results are easy to predict: conservative commentators across the country will complain of judicial activism, despite having in many cases urged precisely such an overreach one short year before when Obamacare hung in the balance. Right on cue, public support for same-sex marriage rights — steadily on the rise for years — will drop by approximately ten points.

But despite this frothy chorus of apocalyptic whining (maybe that’s what the Mayans were referring to!), the homophobic naysayers will not succeed in preventing a single same-sex couple from exchanging vows. The US Constitution is the law of the land, and the Supreme Court has final say over its interpretation. Gay marriage, assuming a favourable ruling, will be here to stay.

A more interesting topic for consideration, however, is how American attitudes to marriage equality will evolve over the long-term. Will the coming Supreme Court decision be more Brown v. Board of Education or Roe v. Wade? The former ruling from the 1950s, which desegregated public schools and marked a major victory for the civil rights movement, was incredibly controversial at the time, but is now almost unanimously recalled as a just and necessary decision. Roe v. Wade, by contrast, the 1970s ruling that legalized abortion across the country, has done nothing to settle the debate over a woman’s right to choose. So is gay marriage more like desegregation or abortion?

I believe it is more like desegregation. Marriage equality can very easily be framed as a civil rights issue, since after all it is about guaranteeing equal rights for a persecuted minority. On the subject of abortion, however, the applicability of equality is muddied by the fact that some people demand rights for women while others demand them for fetuses. Although I personally count myself in the former category, and believe that any depiction of the pro-life community as a modern-day civil rights movement for the unborn rests on a fundamental confusion, I can at least understand how such a confusion could come about and how much work it will take to clear it up. Gay marriage is far more clear-cut, and I see something approaching a consensus emerging over time.

But might it actually be something else that determines the public’s attitudes on social issues? Might it instead be the powerful influence of religious conservatives? If so, gay marriage could be doomed to share the stage with abortion as a highly symbolic subject of perpetual debate whose status is never secured.

Fortunately, I do not think this is likely. Take a look at Canada. We have had same-sex marriage for nearly a decade now and unrestricted abortion rights for a quarter century. While the latter is not nearly as much of a hot issue here as in the United States (perhaps owing to the reduced influence of evangelical Christianity), occasional attempts to chip away at a woman’s right to choose still make their way into Parliament. But marriage equality has not been up for serious contention in years, and that appears to be just how the public likes it.

This does not mean that homophobia has completely disappeared from Canada any more than racism disappeared from America within a decade of Brown v. Board of Education. But after a little time passed and the Canadian public saw that the institution of heterosexual marriage was not under threat after all (at least not from homosexuals), gay marriage quickly lost its status as boogeyman to be exploited by reactionary politicians.

If the United States Supreme Court comes to a similarly enlightened conclusion a few months down the road, I think the American public will look back on the present day ten years from now and wonder what all the fuss was about.

On the Latest School Shooting: Symptoms, Disease, and Gun Control

With every problem, there are the symptoms and there is the disease.

In the wake of yet another mass shooting in the United States today — this one leaving twenty-seven dead at a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school — the disease, clearly, is the culture of violence that pervades the country, and I do not blame anyone for wanting to tackle this disease directly. But when the symptoms manifest themselves in the form of twenty dead children, a call to manage the symptoms through gun control is more than just understandable; it is urgently necessary.

Without doubt, these frequent shootings represent an evil deeper than the mere existence of guns. The country must undergo some major soul searching. But firearms enable the destruction of life with an efficiency that is unconscionable and all-too-effortless. While it may be true that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people,” we must always remember to end this cliche with the common revision that, far too often, “people with guns kill people.” Any object or tool or implement with such undeniable risks — regardless of its occasional usefulness — needs to be subject to strict public oversight and regulation.

I do not know if today’s massacre in particular could have been averted through gun control, but surely at least some of the mass shootings that riddle the country are preventable. Their unyielding prevalence, in addition to being tragic, is becoming ridiculous. There is no more appropriate time than now, after today’s horrific events, to start a serious national conversation about gun control in America.

My thoughts go out to the victims and their families.

Obama, Romney, and the Electoral College

2008 Electoral College

With opinion polls ahead of next week’s election showing the two candidates for President approximately tied but giving Barack Obama a slight edge in the Electoral College, there now exists the real possibility that the latter could be reelected despite losing the popular vote. In other words, we could have a reversal of 2000.

Now perhaps this occurrence is less likely than it appears to be, but in some ways, it could be an ideal outcome. First, Mitt Romney would not be President, so yay! Second, the sight of an Obama win despite his second-place finish in popular support might be just the infuriating kick in the crotch Republicans need to align themselves with efforts to get rid of the Electoral College. And with Democrats still fuming over George W. Bush’s victory over Al Gore in 2000, this kind of reform might actually have a chance.

The Electoral College is the archaic institution that — despite all the symbolic hoopla of a one-person-one-vote national election — is solely responsible for selecting the President of the United States. Its members are chosen by state governments on the basis of state-by-state results of the national vote. In other words, whichever Presidential candidate wins in a state gets all of that state’s Electoral votes (except in Maine and Nebraska where Electoral votes are distributed by Congressional district).

The problem with this method of indirectly electing a President is threefold. First, there is the aforementioned chance that the popular vote winner might lose the election, an anti-democratic travesty that has already occurred in 1876, 1888, and — most famously — 2000. Second, states with small populations are overrepresented in the Electoral College (be afraid, dear Republicans, this sounds suspiciously like redistribution!) — with one Electoral vote being worth 478,000 eligible voters in Pennsylvania, but only 139,000 in Wyoming. And third, it is thanks to the Electoral College that Americans must put up with the absurd spectacle of virtually all the campaigning in a supposedly national election occurring exclusively in ten to fifteen “swing states.” Taken individually, the majority of American voters who live in “safe states” — red or blue — have virtually no impact on who wins the Presidency.

So what can be done? Even with considerable bipartisan support, there is little chance of a Constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College. Such a reform would require two-thirds support in both houses of Congress, plus the approval of three-quarters of the states — an almost prohibitive level of consensus. Thankfully, there exists an alternative in the form of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

According to this voluntary agreement, state governments pledge to distribute all their Electoral votes to whichever Presidential candidate wins the national popular vote, regardless of in-state results. Once the agreement comes into effect with states representing more than fifty percent of Electoral votes signing on, it would, in effect, allow the Electoral College to be bypassed without having to bother with a Constitutional amendment. And with eight states and the District of Columbia already having agreed, advocates of this plan are nearly halfway to their target.

So now it is only a matter of finding the other half. If Mitt Romney wins the popular vote next week while Barack Obama wins the Electoral College, it is conceivable that more than a few red states might climb aboard the popular vote bandwagon, and the United States could be one giant step closer to this strange idea that in a democracy, you vote for your leader directly.

On Polarization in America

Tea Party protest

Every four years, the American airwaves are saturated with pundits claiming that the upcoming Presidential election is the most important in the nation’s history. Partisans — official and unofficial — paint dire pictures of apocalyptic disaster should the wrong candidate be voted in. Ever-escalating stakes seem an indelible feature of the American electoral game.

This framing has always struck me as somewhat silly, especially since everyone knows that Republicans and Democrats are one and the same. Yes, there is the “polarization” people have long complained of, but this seemed more a matter of tone and symbolism and rhetoric than of substantive disagreement. A bipartisan consensus came about decades ago that favoured neoliberalism and military misadventure, resulting in a much narrower scope of policy debate in the United States than in almost any other democracy.

Or at least, that’s how I used to feel.

Yesterday, I filled out a questionnaire set up on the Wall Street Journal website by Vote Compass, the Canadian organization that tries to situate participants on the political map next to the candidates and parties they have the most in common with. I have filled out Vote Compass surveys many times before in the context of Canadian federal and provincial elections, but I was surprised to find that when dealing with American issues, my answers were much more extreme than usual. In this latest questionnaire, I was more likely to “strongly” agree or disagree with a statement than to “somewhat” agree or disagree.

Something new has happened in recent years. America’s infamous Tweedledum/Tweedledee political system, as Ralph Nader described it, has suddenly become interesting.

I believe that this change, which has come to define Barack Obama’s entire first term as President, originated in the 2008 financial crisis. Now, for the first time in as long as I can remember, there is a battle of ideas being waged in the United States — specifically, over the role of government in the economy. In a country so often dismissed as having become an anti-intellectual wasteland, the ideas of thinkers such as John Maynard Keynes and Ayn Rand have forced their way into mainstream discussion. Grassroots(ish) movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street popped up and shifted the national debate. Politicians and regular people alike are having something that looks eerily similar to a grown-up conversation about taxes, regulation, and government programs. Obama, while hardly a leftist dreamboat, has to some extent picked a side in this fight by implementing a stimulus package and calling for a slightly higher tax rate on the rich in the face of ridiculous class warfare accusations from his rivals.

But for all the excitement of substantive, intellectually stimulating debate, there are undoubtedly risks too. While Obama is the first sitting President in decades to embrace quasi-Keynesian policies, the vast majority of recent polarization comes courtesy of an increasingly extreme Republican Party. Mitt Romney may be playing to the centre now that the Presidential campaign is winding down, but he made too many promises to his party’s right-wing base during primary season to be able to govern the country as moderately as he did Massachusetts. The Tea Party, while perhaps less reflective of public opinion than Occupy Wall Street, has been much more successful at worming its way into the party structure and influencing political elites.

So this time around, American voters do indeed face a real choice, as well as at least some of the urgency and alarmism being propagated by the nation’s characteristically hyperbolic talking heads.

All this being said, even in this brave new era of open debate and expanded possibilities, there are still some vitally important issues that Democrats will not touch. I would give anything to see Obama put himself on the line on climate change — the globe’s foremost challenge at the moment — in the same way he did for health care. Instead, he brags about oil production having gone up during his Presidency.

On the subject of the United States’ bloated military budget, there is disconcertingly little distinguishing Democrats from Republicans. Perhaps the President could go beyond mere lip service in promoting worldwide nuclear disarmament.

And I would love (maybe once the economy gets stronger) to see the beginnings of a national discussion on revenue that would include the possibility of raising corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, and perhaps even the income taxes of the much-pandered-to middle class. America needs to get over this foolish impression it has that taxes are only a cost. If well spent, they benefit everyone.

The sad truth is that any American readers who agree with me on the above issues cannot realistically expect much from either of the two major parties. Instead, the enterprising voter is advised to look into that dark, most cavernous place where few have ventured before: third-party candidates. In particular, I recommend Green Party Presidential nominee Jill Stein. Granted, her party does not have ballot access in all fifty states, and I can understand if some swing state progressives are reluctant to vote in any way that might hand Romney an unearned victory. However, the majority of American voters whom these considerations do not apply to should seriously consider Stein as a positive choice for their country — not to mention as a means of gently prodding the Democrats in a more productive direction.

Yes, there may now be political choice in the United States of a kind that did not exist a few years ago, but there could always be more. Polarization is not all bad. Diversity is necessary for a healthy society no less than for a healthy ecosystem.

So please, America, why don’t you give those talking heads something to really talk about?

The Three Obamas

One of the most fascinating things about the race for the Presidency currently underway down south is the dearth of enthusiasm shown both Obama and Romney by their respective supporters. Nobody is excited about their guy; rather, what motivates them is how horrible the other guy is.

Perhaps I am deceived by the political amnesia we all fall victim to from time to time, or by my relatively young age. (Yes, I may be thirty now, but I’ve only lived through seven Presidential elections. “Just a pup,” as I was recently told.) Perhaps this lack of hopey-changey passion is precisely what happens every time a first-term President runs for reelection. The practical experience of governing has sapped the incumbent’s supporters of optimism while providing ammunition to the challenger.

Yet somehow, I cannot resist the arrogance of the present with respect to past and future. This time, I insist, is different. Brace yourselves, Republicans, for there now exist in America no less than three distinct President Obamas.

The first is a fictional character crafted by Romney supporters. They have constructed a fantasy world — “Bullshit Mountain” in the parlance of Jon Stewart — in which Barack Hussein Obama is a socialist, black nationalist, anti-colonial, Kenyan, Islamic fundamentalist atheist hell bent on providing solace to America’s enemies abroad while waging a class war at home that will radically transform the country we all know and love into a leftist dystopia that not even a million Reagans could fix.

The second and third Obamas come courtesy of his supporters, who fall broadly into two categories. The first, more-or-less mainstream wing sees their candidate as neither the messiah (as they did four years ago) nor the spawn of Satan (as Republicans do today), but as a somewhat moderate and competent administrator who may not be as perfect as everyone would like but is at least better than the other guy. “A modicum of progress is possible with a second term,” they maintain.

The second grouping sees their candidate as quite a bit more problematic. This camp of downright hostile supporters will attempt to reelect the President with fingers pinched firmly to nose, because for all his faults, they fear Mitt Romney would be infinitely worse. “Obama doesn’t go far enough,” they complain. “He compromises too readily on taxes and health care without demanding anything in return. His stimulus plan was too small to be truly effective. He has done next to nothing to solve the problem of climate change or close down Guantanamo Bay. It’s nice that he came out in favour of gay marriage, but why did he have to take so long? And let’s not forget the countless drone strikes halfway around the world — attacks that we would be out in the streets demonstrating against if George W. had launched them (which he did and we were).”

(Ahem. I haven’t betrayed my biases, have I?)

So the question is: whose mass of unenthused, lukewarm supporters will be sufficiently motivated by hatred of the other guy to win an election? I fear that Romney may have an edge here due to his base’s seemingly unprecedented conspiratorial fervour and flight from reality. The only way for the President to recapture the momentum — especially after losing last week’s much hyped debate to a less-cardboard-than-usual Mitt Romney — is to experiment with an innovative new campaign strategy: giving the people something to vote for rather than against.

I know that 2008 magic hasn’t run out yet. Come on, America. Get excited again.

Twisting the Facts on the Environment

Infographic courtesy of sumofus.org

Case #1: BC Premier Christy Clark has a job creation plan. One component of said plan involves three liquefied natural gas plants in the northern part of the province. Unfortunately, this runs afoul of the provincial Clean Energy Act. So what does Premier Clark do? In June, she redefines “clean energy” to include natural gas — a resource that emits greenhouse gases just like any other fossil fuel — provided that it is used to power those plants in northern BC. Just like that, everybody wins!

Case #2: Scientists advising North Carolina’s Coastal Resources Commission recommend that the state plan for a sea level rise of 39 inches along its coast by 2100 due to climate change. Business groups complain that the resulting restrictions on coastal development will damage the economy. State lawmakers respond by introducing a bill that would bar officials from taking such pessimistic predictions into account. Instead, they would be required to consider only historical trends. In July, after North Carolina is widely mocked for trying to declare rising sea levels illegal, state legislators agree to a compromise and instruct the Coastal Resources Commission to come back with another report in four years. In the meantime, officials are still to ignore the scientists’ original advice.

Case #3: As a signatory to the Copenhagen Accord, Canada is required to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. Earlier this month, Environment Minister Peter Kent announces that Canada is halfway there. This must mean that the country has already lowered its emissions to 8 or 9 percent below 2005 levels, right? Wrong. By “halfway,” the minister means only that if we continue along the same path, we will be halfway to our target by 2020. Furthermore, this 2020 “halfway” projection does not use 2005 emissions as a baseline, but rather hypothetical 2020 emissions assuming inaction on the government’s part. The upshot is that by 2020, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions are currently projected to drop to only 2.7 percent below its 2005 emissions, rather than 17 percent below. Halfway indeed!

Case #4: Enbridge would like to build a pipeline pumping Alberta oil to the BC coast for export. Sadly for Enbridge, people are increasingly concerned about accidents and the possibility of oil spills. To reassure the public, the company puts out several promotional videos. Earlier this month, it is discovered that in two of these videos, a string of islands in Douglas Channel, with a combined area of over 1000 square kilometres, is completely erased from the map. One must admit, the tanker route certainly looks a lot safer this way.

The PR lessons from this summer have been fascinating. If the facts are not convenient, simply invent new facts. Staying on message is the important thing. Who are we to let reality get in the way?

Free Speech, Hate Speech, and Chick-Fil-A

In honour of Pride Week here in Vancouver, I can think of no better time to wade into the growing Chick-fil-A row currently ruffling the feathers of our southern neighbours.

For those who don’t follow American news (it’s not like we’re a different country or anything), Chick-fil-A is a US-based fast-food chain whose President, Dan Cathy, is known for supporting anti-gay Christian groups. The controversy boiled over in recent weeks with a couple of high-profile interviews in which Cathy expressed his opposition to gay marriage: “We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit,” and “I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.’”

While some regard such literal interpretations of scripture as praiseworthy (no word yet where he stands on mixing more than one fabric in a single garment), the mayors of Boston and Chicago responded by saying that the restaurant’s expansion is not welcome in their cities. Predictably, anti-gay apologists like former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee declared this past Wednesday Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, and the hateful hordes turned out right on cue.

To my mind, the sight of thousands of Americans lining up at Chick-fil-A locations across the country to show their support — clogging their arteries for bigotry — suggests that government efforts to silence hate speech do not work. The pattern is a familiar one. Preachers of intolerance claim they are being persecuted by an intolerant government, and public sympathy for the poor little martyrs is cultivated. What is really a civil rights issue — marriage equality — is being turned into a free speech one, and millions of Americans are now convinced of the absurd notion that homophobes are the ones being victimized.

A much better approach than that taken by the Boston and Chicago mayors is for reasonable people to make reasonable arguments on why Dan Cathy is wrong. And, of course, for comedians to ruthlessly make fun of him and his supporters. Nothing more effectively demonstrates the ridiculousness of a position than its well-deserved ridicule. But to give homophobes the opportunity to distract the public with charges of censorship is counterproductive and puts at risk the trend of steadily increasing support for gay marriage in American society.

After all, if the goal isn’t to convince the public, then what is it?

Friendly Canadian Input on the US Election

The sun is shining. The flowers are blooming. We are in a year that is divisible by four. I think we all know what that means. In a matter of months, our American friends will once again start hanging chads or whatever it is they do to hold a presidential election, and the entire world, as usual, will be watching.

I hope my southern neighbours (yes, we spell it with a “u” up here) will not take offence (with a “c”) if I offer a little advice. Barack Obama is without doubt a much better choice than Mitt Romney, but he is still far from ideal. For this reason, I recommend that American voters consider all their options in November and not hastily rule out third party candidates such as presumptive Green Party nominee Jill Stein.

This, of course, leads us to that perennial (or at least quadrennial) topic of political contention, strategic voting. In my quaint little Canadian elections, I have yet to fall victim to this temptation, for I question its long-term value. Yes, strategic voting can be a useful way to prevent the worst of the worst from taking power, but is that all we should aspire to? What incentive do Obamaesque moderates then have to take strong progressive stances without the pull of small third parties putting the fear of God in them and threatening to siphon off their votes? Even if the Greens and their ilk have no realistic shot at victory in the current election, they can have an excellent influence on those who do win.

So does that mean that strategic voting (or tactical voting, more accurately, keeping in mind the military distinction between tactics and strategies) is never justified? No. Sometimes there is so much at stake in a single election that the conscientious voter must temporarily abandon the long view.

So what is at stake in 2012?

One word (umm, give or take): health care.

With Obama’s health law no longer at risk of being tossed out by the Supreme Court, the fight is set to move onto centre stage of the election campaign. Mitt Romney has promised that if elected President, he will immediately kill Obamacare with an executive order, and while his constitutional ability to do so has been questioned, he probably does have at least some ways of sabotaging the young law with or without a compliant congress.

As I have argued in this space before, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is far from perfect, but it is a major step in the right direction. For the first time in American history, it is illegal for health insurance companies to deny someone coverage simply because he or she has a prior condition. Many an entertaining semantic tussle could be waged over whether or not this truly qualifies Obama’s law as “universal health care,” but whatever it is, this year’s election is the Republican Party’s last and best chance to destroy it. They know that if they don’t dispose of Obamacare before the benefits start to kick in over the next few years, they never will. Voters might discover that they actually like it.

So with the fate of tens of millions of uninsured Americans hanging in the balance, it is crucially important that Romney not be elected President. Does that mean that all progressives need to vote for Obama? Thankfully, no. The Electoral College is an archaic institution, but its one redeeming feature is that since only a few “swing states” decide presidential elections, most Americans can safely follow their hearts without risk of splitting the vote. Simply by browsing one of the web’s many electoral maps, progressive voters can devise informed voting strategies based on where they live.

But do not think that just because I wish to prevent the other guy’s election, Obama is off the hook. It is up to environmentalists, civil libertarians, and corporate accountability advocates (even if they live in swing states and wind up voting for Obama) to maintain — indeed, crank up — the pressure. From now until election day and beyond, the President must be lobbied, petitioned, and constructively protested until he agrees to make up for the shortfalls of his first term — chief among them the appalling lack of action on climate change. If Romney is the one to be sworn into the Oval Office, however, it will all have been for naught.

In summary: a vote for Obama in the swing states, a vote for Jill Stein in the safe states, and unrelenting pressure on all who wield power. That, my American readers, is a surefire formula for success. Now if only you would be so kind as to advise us on our own government problems.

Do you still do regime change?

Update 14/07/2012: This post has been republished here at backofthebook.ca.