Canada needs to grow up

Bob Rae was a socialist once upon a time. Since 2020 he’s been Canada’s ambassador to the UN. Today he gets a half-page spread in The Globe and Mail; “World needs to grow up, Canada’s UN envoy says.” According to Bolshevik Bob, there remains a tendency for “governments to see the world as a chessboard on which national ambitions are played out… a global tendency not particular to Canada or the United States or anyone else.” Maybe so, but there’s only one country that claims to own the chessboard, and that’s the USA. I refer to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. It’s a must read for anyone wanting to make sense of the last 25 years of US foreign policy, right up to the current disaster in Ukraine. While I don’t want to spoil it for you, the “geostrategic imperative” can be summed up thusly; America must strive to maintain full-spectrum dominance of any country or grouping of countries that could potentially threaten its role as global hegemon. America has been striving mightily indeed. After a series of lopsided victories over a string of upstarts (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria) America is now on the cusp of victory over Putin’s Russia. America’s Ukrainian proxies have dealt the Russians “heavy military blows” and garnered “a groundswell of international opinion on their side.” The reality is that Ukraine is on life-support provided primarily by American tax-payers, and the US-designed sanctions are taking a far greater toll on the economies of America’s allies than they are on Russia. And while just a few more months and a few more hundred billions in weapons may or may not cement our victory, Bob bemoans the fact that this challenge has been more difficult, militarily and economically, than many had expected. It’s sad to see a former man of principle reduced to shilling for American Exceptionalism. Hey Bob, maybe we should do a little growing up before we lecture the rest of the planet.

Celebrating the basic human decency of a lying stooge

Must admit we made something of a faux pas with this post from a couple weeks ago, praising the integrity of former Liberal leader Bob Rae.

Bob has betrayed the trust we had in him with his unfortunate comments about Libya that appeared in the Globe and Mail today.

Bob did get one thing right; it's rare for an establishment commentator, especially one who was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the war, to admit that two years after the demise of Gaddafi the country is a shambles.

But here's the whopper that floored me; "Gaddafi did not invest in people, institutions, or infrastructure."

Gaddafi's people enjoyed free housing, health care, and education. Before we liberated them they enjoyed the highest standard of living on the African continent.

Under Gaddafi, tens of thousands of Libyans studied abroad at the expense of the state.

Gaddafi built one of the greatest infrastructure projects of all time, the Great Man-made river.

And notice how Bullshit Bob bemoans the fact that "aid money is drying up."

How is it possible that Gaddafi was able to do all the above without aid money, but now that we've liberated them the Libyans have become aid dependent?

Perhaps the key to this mystery is revealed by the note at the end of the article. Bob is working with the "National Democratic Institute." That is one of a multiplicity of US funded "democracy promoters" busy on the ground to help guide nascent democracies towards the "right" sort of democracy.

And only a Washington approved democracy will ever be the right sort.

First Nations poverty? Bob Rae to the rescue!

I remember Bolshevik Bob when he was the first "socialist" premier of Ontario.

Bob will forever be famous for signing agreements with huge swaths of public sector workers in the province, and then turning around and unilaterally "amending" them.

Amending them down, that is. Gave the nurses a nice pay raise and then closed tens of thousands of hospital beds.

Gave the teachers a nice pay raise and then told them they were going to take enough days off without pay to bring them back to where they were before that nice pay raise.

"Rae days" were born.

When he wasn't busy screwing the workers he was busy jetting around the world trying to entice multi-national corporations to set up shop in Ontario.

His sales pitch was "look how tough I am on organized labour, build a branch plant in Ontario!"

Didn't meet with a whole lot of success as I recall. The multi-nationals didn't trust him because he was a "socialist," and the workers didn't trust him because he'd just stabbed them in the back.

Which made him a perfect candidate to join the Liberal Party!

Which is where he's been till today.

Today he announced he was leaving party politics to be the point man for the First Nations trying to negotiate agreements with mining companies wanting to open up the "Ring of Fire" area in north Ontario.

I think Bob is a fundamentally decent human being. His heart has always been in the right place. He's not a guy who you'll find sinecured into some seven number bullshit "advisory" job with Glencore in a couple of years.

In spite of everything he has clung to his integrity.

Not too many career politicians can make that claim.

Canada's former socialist party elects new leader

Sometimes, when the excitement of watching the Leafs miss the playoffs for the seventh year in a row becomes too intense, I like to downshift to something a little more sedentary. Canadian politics.

So after the Leafs lost to the Rangers in OT last night I caught a bit of the NDP leadership convention.

They've got themselves a new leader to replace the late Jack Layton.

Thomas Mulcair. Used to be a Liberal in the Quebec parliament. Now he's the official Leader of the Opposition in the Federal Parliament, and the leader of the NDP.

He's going to be going head to head not only with the Harper gang, but with the interim leader of the Liberal Party, former Ontario NDP Preem Bob Rae.

Confusing? You bet!

But the fact that an NDPer can seamlessly morph into a Liberal and vice versa is the least of it.

I'm of the generation that remembers too well Bob Rae's tenure as leader of Canada's richest province. Socialist ideals met capitalist realities and it wasn't pretty. By the time Mike Harris and his ultra-right conservatives consigned Bob to the dustbin of history in the next election Bob had achieved two things.

He brought casino gambling to Ontario, and he made bicycle helmets mandatory.

So much for the socialist agenda.

Now that Bob's climbed out of the dustbin to become acting leader of the Liberal Party, and a former Liberal is at the helm of the NDP, what remains of that agenda?

Not much. In fact, as the NDP becomes more and more a centrist party, I think it's just a matter of time before it absorbs what's left of the Liberals, in much the same way that the once upstart Reform Party ate the old Progressive Conservatives.

That would open up the left of the political spectrum to a new party that could return to the socialist roots that the NDP have steadily distanced themselves from.

Watch for the Marxist-Lenninist Party from Falling Downs!