The Mound of Sound

The Republicans have been in power in too many places for far too long. It’s made them say the most stupid, hateful things and they’re starting to pay the price for it.

In keeping with the theme underlying the McCain-Palin campaign, North Carolina congressman Robin Hayes sought to warm up the crowd for a McCain campaign rally with this zinger:

“Liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God.”

Hayes later denied he’d said any such thing – until the tapes came out. When he shot himself in the foot, the incumbent Republican was five points ahead of his Democratic rival. Oopsie! Hayes Democratic opponent now leads 51-46.

Another report today on the state of man’s ecological deficit. What’s that? It’s the rate at which we’re depleting our planet’s renewable resources faster than they can be replenished. That doesn’t sound possible, does it? Well it is.

We have an ecological deficit. It’s everywhere. You can see it from space. It comes in the form of deforestation, the rapid loss of our planet’s forests. It comes in the form of desertification, the transformation of once arable (farmable) land into desert wasteland. It comes in our rapidly emptying seas where we’ve exhausted fish stocks. It even comes underground in the ancient freshwater aquifers we’ve been voraciously draining.

If you’ve got a cow you rely upon for milk, you’re not doing yourself any favours if you begin chewing the flesh off its bones. You’re going to kill the cow, aren’t you? Once it’s dead and you’ve finished off the meat, you’re not going to have meat or milk, are you?

A new report out today, the Living Planet study of just how well we’re doing with earth’s renewables. Full points if you guessed “not good.” The report is the joint effort of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) based in Geneva, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network based in Oakland, Calif. From CBC News:

Demands on natural resources overreach what the Earth can sustain by almost a third, the report says, adding that people are drawing — and often overdrawing — on the agricultural land, forests, seas and resources of other countries to sustain them, it adds.

“If our demands on the planet continue to increase at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we would need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles,” said James Leape, international director general of the WWF.

Now here’s a little something to chew on. It was only a few years ago that we figured we had until 2050 to reach the point of consuming two planets-worth of resources. That’s just been moved up by about 15-years.

The report claims that three-quarters of mankind live in countries where consumption is outstripping environmental renewal. Let’s see, that’d be just shy of five billion people. And it’s not just the poor countries that make the list.

Even the United States is facing a looming freshwater crisis. Normally arid parts of the U.S. have been transformed into agricultural powerhouses thanks to acquifer irrigation – that is pumping groundwater to the surface. Think about places that used to be arid, prairie grassland like Kansas. The problem is they’ve been pumping ground water at rates up to ten times their acquifers’ recharge rates. That means pumping out ten barrels of water for every barrel of rainwater that makes its way back in. Do the math, it’s a suckers’ bet. And yet they’re still filling artificial lakes around Las Vegas casinos. Mind-boggling.

There’s the great Colorado River that supplies water to much of the southwest. So important is the Colorado that decades ago the neighbours signed a treaty defining which state got how much. Something like 20% was supposed to be left for the Mexicans. Guess what? The Colorado no longer flows into Mexico and the US states are at each others’ throats over what remains.

Madness? Of course it is. Sheer madness and it’s a mental infirmity that’s rapidly becoming the norm around the world.

Trust the French. They’ve come up with an idea to vent frustrations over their country’s rightwing demagogue, Nick Sarkozy. It’s a voodoo doll. From The Guardian:

A Nicolas Sarkozy voodoo doll that became a bestselling cult classic when the president tried to have it banned is to remain on sale after a French court threw out the case today.

A judge ruled that Nicolas Sarkozy: The Voodoo Manual, which features a doll, a set of pins and a book explaining how to put the evil eye on the president, fell within the boundaries of “free expression” and the “right to humour”.

With recession staring Canadians in the face there might soon be a lot more of us looking to fill some time. Wouldn’t a Stevie doll be just the thing?

The next thing you know they’ll be on The View or maybe even Oprah.

Pakistan is talking to them, so is Afghanistan. The Saudis are always up for a chat with them. The Brits have exchanged pleasantries. Canada thinks it’s not a bad idea that someone talks with them and now even the Americans are toying with the idea of having them over for tea.

The Terrors of the Khyber Pass are the most popular bunch in town these days. Everybody wants to make nice. But wait, these are the insurgents, the bad guys, the widowmakers of Kandahar. Aren’t we supposed to be talking to them across open sights?

Welcome to the era of “if you can’t beat’em, try something, anything else.” Everybody is trying to find some deal sweet enough that even an Islamist fundamentalist can’t refuse.

Imagine what it must be like to be a Taliban leader these days. You have to decide which invitations you’re going to accept (presumably the ones with the best swag), what to wear, what hat goes with which shoes – these are tough things for a jihadi mountain man.

Now the trick is to always negotiate from a position of strength. Oh, that might be a problem for our side. You can’t find an American or NATO general these days willing to say we can beat them. They used to say that – a lot – they said it for years – and years – but no more, sigh. Now that they’ve decided it’s better for their careers to change course, it’s no longer just a military problem, no, no, no. Now it’s a political problem. In fact you just might notice that, when it comes to sitting down with these guys, there’s not a general to be seen from our side. No, that would be rude.

So, if you’re going to sell a deal, you have to have a deal to sell. We know they’re not bringing any deals to us. We’re the offeror, they’re the offeree. What have we got that they want? What do they want? What do they have that we want?

It’s obvious that we’d be happy if they stopped blowing up our convoys and shooting at people. We want them to “stop.” To make sure they don’t start again, we’d like them to integrate into the political structure of Afghanistan and of Pakistan. It would help no end if there was a viable political structure in either Afghanistan or Pakistan but you have to play the cards you’re dealt. I mean, let’s be realistic. What would you pay for a piece of the action at Hamid Karzai’s table? Probably even less than it’s worth and that’s hard to do when it’s worthless.

Reality sets in. We know we’re not going to land any sweetheart deals with the Taliban so we’ll leave that futile chinwag up to the Afghan, Pakistani and Saudi governments. What we want is to focus on the supposedly less-extreme parts of the Taliban, persuade them to defect. We’ll set them up on Easy Street and that will lure even more to come over. This way we’ll hollow out the insurgency.

It sounds like a plan – a very, very bad plan. To begin with, you never, ever let the other side know they’ve got the upper hand. You don’t let on that they’re winning. Well, that horse is already out of the barn. If we can’t control the insurgency – and we can’t – we can’t protect defectors, or their families, from retribution. The Taliban doesn’t get its support from playing nice, we know that. Given that the insurgents have already infiltrated the government and the police and the army, where’s a defector to hide?

“Too many cooks.” The Saudis and Afghans and Pakistanis are talking with the Taliban Head Office boys. If we Infidels start messing about with the Branch Office types, how well do you think that’s going to go down with the Taliban board of directors?

The Talibs have always said they would negotiate but only after US and NATO forces leave. Do we have some reason to believe they’re bluffing, that they’ll settle for less? If we don’t, we’re in an “A” or “B” situation and if we can’t break that, we’ll eventually have to accept it. We’ve pretty much known that all along. That’s the whole idea about establishing a strong, central government supported by a well-trained, well-equipped army. Now, if we were succeeding on the government thing and the army thing, we wouldn’t be talking about negotiations, would we? Of course not. We’d have them sew on their brigade patches, hand them the keys to the armoury and di di mau right out of there. Oops, sorry for the Vietnam reference.

No, my take on all these negotiations is that they’re a tacit admission of defeat, even fear. We haven’t done what we said we’d do when we went in there seven years ago. We haven’t even held the line. We haven’t succeeded on a single front over there, not one. Now we’re in a dilemma. The Taliban are not only resurgent in Afghanistan, able to operate pretty much as they chose wherever they chose, but they’re also destabilizing our key ally next door, Pakistan. And we don’t have anything in our fabulous, state-of-the-art bag of tricks to make it go away.

What would success from these negotiations look like? I figure if we could somehow get the Taliban to sever ties with al-Qaeda, that would be victory beyond what we deserve. We’ve spent the last seven years driving them into the arms of al-Qaeda so undoing what we’ve wrought would be a Herculean task. Still, al-Qaeda is an Arab outfit. It’s not Pashtun or Hazara or Uzbek or Tajik or Turkmen or Kurd or any of the other ethnic players in the region. They’re foreigners in a land that doesn’t particularly like foreigners. That may be enough to tip the scales.

Getting out of Afghanistan isn’t going to be pretty, no matter how these talks turn out.

Inheriting a government with a balanced budget, a solid economy and big surpluses is a pretty sweet deal. Ideology doesn’t matter much when the good times are rolling.

Facing the prospect of having to govern in a recession with a big unemployment problem and government deficits is something else altogether. That’s where ideology comes into play and where it can truly make or break a minority government.

Dealing with a nation in trouble doesn’t come naturally to Stephen Harper. In hard times, Canadians expect you to govern from the left. They begin to worry about themselves and their kids and their neighbours and how everyone is going to get by.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives study released yesterday couldn’t be clearer. 96% of the 2,000 surveyed want the government to move, now, to protect their jobs. Four in ten believe they’re just one to two paycheques away from poverty. 90% want government action to reduce poverty.

There’s the dilemma for Stephen Harper. Social spending goes against his grain. He’s defunded the government so that he’ll have to go into deficit if he has to introduce recession relief programmes. And yet the Canadian public won’t be thinking of that 2-cent GST cut when they’re feeling vulnerable and a right-wing, doctrinaire government doesn’t meet their expectations.

Right now no one knows what’s in store for Canada, how bad the fallout from the American meltdown is going to get. Steve has already committed billions to bail out Canadian banks and the insurance industry is looking for a bailout too. If Steve “spreads the wealth” around the financial sector but doesn’t come through for the populace, he may be writing his own pink slip.