The Mound of Sound

I’ve been away for a couple of weeks and it seemed almost like a reprieve from the daily drudgery of right versus left. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Darfur and Washington were all monitored from a distance that created a somewhat fresh, if no more optimistic, perspective.

Then there’s Stephen Harper. Having seen one initiative after another falter and collapse and in the wake of a dismal caucus retreat that did nothing to rejuventate Canada’s Stalled Government, Harpo now seems to have found a niche issue – the Arctic.

It’s a no-brainer. A clear cut issue of Canadian sovereignty under threat from those Russian bastards we spent half a century learning to distrust. While most Canadians never venture further north than cottage country we none the less hold this soulful attachment to our country’s “far north.” We see it as something that belongs to us that is worth defending. Even Jack Layton understands the enormous political impact of the Arctic.

The Arctic is an issue that ideally suits both Stephen Harper’s strengths and his weaknesses. No one cares if you have the personality of a sandbag when it comes to this sort of issue. There’s no East versus West landmines to weave through. It is perhaps the lone issue on which right and left, at least for now, seem to agree. The Arctic offers all the benefits of being a “wartime prime minister” without the ugly necessity of an actual war and the all the risks that entails.

The Arctic is an issue that can be used to manipulate public opinion. Granted it’s not the same as squadrons of red-starred bombers over Toronto but that’s not necessary to instil a measure of anxiety and a sudden desire among the electorate for a steely tough leader. It is not difficult to subtly depict the Arctic of the 21st century as the Hungary of the 50’s or the Czechoslovakia of the 60’s facing the approaching threat of a ravenous and omiverous Red Bear.

Harper watched how his American Idol was able to manipulate the emotions of his people to distract them and allow him to pursue legislative goals that would otherwise have blown up in his face. Imagine taking your nation to war and cutting taxes for the rich at the same time, leading to huge deficits – and managing to get re-elected, albeit with a good dose of chicanery.

I expect Harper to try to showcase the Arctic as “his” issue, to use it as a foil to cast the already-bookish Dion as weak and not fit for the challenge. How can a leader hope to become prime minister if the voters perceive him as unable to defend them and their country?

Which brings me again to the same old question, where in hell is Stephane Dion? A Google search showed me he’s been carping about some free trade deal with South Korea. Apparently he wants to protect the right of Canada’s automakers to freely sell their cars in South Korea as if that’s likely to happen. I guess it scores some points in Windsor and Oshawa but, beyond that, who cares?

No, Stephane Dion has used the summer break to all but consign himself to obscurity. Just because he won the student council election doesn’t mean the kids are going to make him King on Prom Night, the runoff that counts.

The coming election is an extremely critical election. Treating any election as anything less than critical is to embrace defeat. The one leader who is not showing that he gets that is Stephane Dion. That the Liberals are tied with the Conservatives isn’t because of Stephane Dion. It’s despite him.

I’m going away again. See you in a week or two.

The U.S. media are an enormously powerful engine driving public opinion in the most powerful nation in the world (wait a second, aren’t all nations – by definition – “in the world”?).

Getting back to the point, the American media are now recognized as having been instrumental in misleading their nation’s populace on the war against Iraq, WMDs and Iraq’s connection to al-Qaeda.

A big part of the problem is the “new media” – the Fox News types that, in saner times, would have been consigned to the lunatic fringe but now enjoy a huge following of the easily deluded.

A new study suggests that what the American media did for Iraq it’s also accomplished when it comes to public perceptions of global warming. This from, dare I say it, CanWest:

The report, in the latest edition of a magazine published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, said there are multiple examples of major American media organizations watering down recent warnings from peer-reviewed scientific literature about the consequences of global warming and the human-produced pollution that is causing it.

The watchdog group based its analysis on a comparison of American and British headlines and articles about the release of a series of international reports that assessed the latest peer-reviewed on climate change.

“Where U.K. media generally presented climate change as an urgent crisis that requires immediate action, in the U.S. it’s still widely portrayed as an unresolved debate,” says the article, written by Neil deMause in the July-August edition of Extra!.

The coverage is helping to prop up U.S. government policies which suggest aggressive action to tackle climate change could be economically costly, deMause said. For example, he explained that many Americans were unaware of a British government study by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern that warned the cost of doing nothing would be much worse than immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“The Stern report is something that has been hashed out in the British and Canadian media and argued back and forth, whereas in the U.S., nobody has heard of it,” said deMause in an interview. “That’s the problem. It’s not particularly what stand the media takes on what should we do about climate change, it’s the information is getting out about climate change, and I think that in the U.S., it’s a very limited debate.”

An American law professor says the Russians weren’t indulging in a quaint but meaningless ritual when they used a sub to plant their flag on the seabed beneath the north pole. He says that, as far as North America is concerned, “finders, keepers” is very much the law of the land. Robert J. Miller, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, writes in the LA Times that the “Doctrine of Discovery” is alive and well.

The flag-planting ritual and the thinking behind the Russians’ audacious territorial claims have their roots in the development and use of the Doctrine of Discovery by European and American explorers from the 15th through the 20th centuries. Starting with Pope Nicholas V in 1455, the Europeans conveniently declared their divine right to empty land or to land occupied by “pagans and enemies of Christ.” The main requirement was just first-come, first-served discovery.

Canada is also facing off against Denmark over tiny Hans Island near northwestern Greenland. In 1984, Denmark’s minister for Greenland affairs landed on the island in a helicopter and raised the Danish flag, buried a bottle of brandy and left a note that said “Welcome to the Danish Island.” Canada was not amused. In 2005, the Canadian defense minister and troops landed on the island and hoisted the Canadian flag. Denmark lodged an official protest.

Planting a flag or burying brandy isn’t enough these days to guarantee possession — international treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea are invoked. But historically, staking a physical claim is the first rule of the discovery doctrine. Spanish, Portuguese and, later, English and French explorers engaged in all sorts of rituals on encountering new lands: hoisting the flag, displaying the Christian cross and leaving evidence to prove who was there first.

As early as 1790, federal law reflected the discovery doctrine, but it wasn’t until 1823 that the doctrine was formally recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court — and its full meaning spelled out. In the Supreme Court case Johnson vs. McIntosh, about whether private citizens could purchase Indian lands, Chief Justice John Marshall, in a long, detailed opinion for a unanimous court, established that discovery had been the law on the North American continent since the beginning of European exploration. Indian rights “to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished, and their power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased, was denied by the original fundamental principle, that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it.”

In short, Indians couldn’t sell their tribal lands to private citizens because their conquerors — the U.S. government by then — essentially owned them. Today, that aspect of the 600-year-old Doctrine of Discovery still prevails in U.S. and international law. It remains the principle by which the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia continue to control the lands of their indigenous peoples.

As to the larger principle of “finders (or claimers) keepers,” it also lives — notwithstanding international treaties. The proof is in that symbolic Russian flag planted 2.65 miles below the North Pole, at the potentially lucrative, already contested bottom of the deep blue Arctic sea.

A humanitarian catastrophe is looming in south Asia. Upwards of 19-million have been displaced by heavier than normal monsoon rains. The deluge has also destroyed massive amounts of crops in the countryside.

Now rescue workers are bracing for an epidemic of fever, acute respiratory infections, diarrhoea and snake bites among refugees. Simply finding food and water for the displaced is nearly impossible with stocks described as “perilously low.”

Words alone cannot convey the tragedy that is unfolding. The Guardian has run a photo essay on the devestation from which the pictures below were taken. The first five photographs were taken in India. The bottom picture shows Beijing police linking arms as they conduct a search along a flooded street.

Iraq’s energy ministry has been accused of taking a page out of Saddam’s book in suppressing the nation’s oil workers’ union. From the Guardian:

Iraq’s energy ministry is using a Saddam-era decree to crack down on trade unions and stifle dissent against foreign exploitation of the country’s vast oil reserves, the Basra-based oil workers’ union claims.
Hassan Juma’a, the union’s leader, has been at the forefront of a public campaign against the signing of a controversial new oil law – demanded by Washington – that would lead to long-term profit-sharing contracts being signed with multinational oil giants.

Juma’a said the minister’s approach echoed an infamous law passed by Saddam Hussein in 1987 – the so-called ‘Article 150’ – suppressing trades unions. He insisted this weekend that his members would not recognise the directive, saying ‘we are working for Iraq’.

The union argues that, like other Gulf states, Iraq should keep its oil ventures in state hands. With the second-largest reserves of quality crude oil, the union claims the country should borrow the funds needed to restore Iraq’s oil production.

While the debate over the American-initiated oil law expands, Iraq’s electricity grid is said to be on the verge of collapse as temperatures soar to 45 C. The country’s electricity network fell into serious deterioration as a result of the sanctions imposed on Saddam’s government after the 1991 Gulf war.

Compounding the problem are provinces that have better electricity generating assets taking their systems offline for their own benefit. Particularly hard hit by this is Baghdad.

Hazim Obeid, who sells clothing at a Kerbala market stall, said: “We no longer need television documentaries about the stone age. We are actually living in it. We are in constant danger because of the filthy water and rotten food we are having.”