Victorious Canadian leader brings more than sticking it to Trump

I was so glad to pass along that Canada had repudiated Donald Trump in an election in which the American bully had made himself an issue, I didn't do much research on Mark Carney, the guy who led the Liberal Party victory. 

It turns out, according to US environmentalist champion Bill McKibben, Carney is not just some smart, central banker turned politician who grabbed a chance to save his party from electoral purgatory and stick a nationalist finger in Donald Trump's eye: 

... though he was elected a little by accident (albeit after a brilliant campaign) it means something far more: in Carney we now have the world leader who knows more than any of his peers about climate change. And who knows roughly twenty times as much about climate and energy economics as anyone else in power. He may turn out to be a truly crucial figure in the fight to turn the climate tide.

I’ve been watching Carney for a long time. A graduate, of course, of both Harvard and Goldman Sachs, he was governor of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crisis and performed admirably enough that the queen asked him over to run the Bank of England.  (It’s probably not quite how that works, but close enough). While in that job, he had the fun of trying to deal with the UK’s Brexit decision, and by all accounts again performed better than one might have expected. So now he gets the task of cleaning up after Trump’s insane tariffs. 

But actually it’s the much bigger mess—the one in the atmosphere—that I suspect has long interested him most. In 2014, at a World Bank panel, he quite forthrightly pointed out that we would need to leave the “vast majority” of fossil fuel reserves in the ground if we were at all serious about holding the increase in the temperature of the planet below two degrees. This was, on the one hand, clearly obvious to anyone who had looked at the physics, but on the other hand not something that most leaders were willing to say at the time, or to this day. Those of us who had recently launched the fossil fuel divestment campaign found it to be a great boost—one of three or four crucial moments that turned this into one of the largest anti-corporate campaigns in history. 

McKibben credits Carney with helping win the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, the high water mark of international recognition of the planet-wide emergency we are living. 

[Carney] now finds himself leading a nation hard hit by climate change: Canada has a front row seat the melt of the Arctic, which is the fastest-heating part of the earth; it has watched its boreal forests burn like never before in recent years. ...

... I’d say that the rest of the world is going to recognize Carney as the most likely person to midwife us through this transition. I think he’s not done playing a world-historical role, and for that if nothing else we can thank Donald Trump.

• • •

Karen Kelly pointed me to this updated version of a Canadian nationalist statement even more appropriate to the moment. Enjoy.

Canada strikes back

The election up north demonstrated that our neighbors aren't having any of the Orange Bully. 

This is old, but I think captures the sentiment:

 

The lunacy of King Donald

I like charts. I learn well from informative visualizations of data. And therefore, I appreciate the work of Washington Post journalist Philip Bump.

Bump knows what he thinks about Donald Trump's tariffs:

This will almost certainly prove to be bad for the economy, but it has been pretty good for data visualization. For example:

We've gone back to the late 1800s.

 

 

Add a tariff on washing machines, raise the price. Remove the tax and price falls.

 ... tariffs will instead mean surges in the prices Americans pay.

 

How uncertain is the country’s economic future? As the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch put it, it is “equivalent to a global pandemic” uncertain.

At least we get some nice charts out of the deal.

Unfortunately the Canadian cartoon with which I led this post gives an incomplete picture. Presumably King Donald intends to get plenty out of his tariffs, knowing he can shakedown particular businesses and whole favored sectors of the economy for a personal payoff after which he'll make an exemption from his taxes.

If we want this set of impositions to blow back on King Donald, we the people will have to make it so. Along with Canadians, we're the fan.

A Canadian envisions world domination

The morning after our idiot President did his best to murder the international and domestic economy, it would be easy to rave. But I think sometimes it is better to laugh.

When not trying, in a very different world, to ape late 19th century economic foolishness, Trump also claims to want to repeat President William McKinley's experiment in American imperialism (think the Philippines, Cuba) by demanding that Canada be made the 51st state. Canadians aren't having it.

John Manley was Deputy Canadian Prime Minister and Minister of Finance in Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government in 2002-3. He's written a letter to Donald Trump which I reproduce here in full:

• • •

Dear Donald Trump,

My mentor and former boss, prime minister Jean Chrétien, has dismissed your suggestion that Canada and the U.S. merge.

Do not despair. My point of view differs somewhat from his (sorry, Boss). I think we may be able to make this work if Canadians fully understand your proposal. 

Imagine what the “United States of Canada” could be. We would marry American ingenuity and entrepreneurship to Canada’s natural resources, underdog toughness and culture of self-effacing politeness to create a powerful, world-dominating country.

Pointers for starters...

☆ We would be the largest land mass in the world.
☆ We would be self-reliant in every respect (food, energy, minerals, water).
☆ We would attract the world’s most talented people.
☆ We would truly be “the best country in the world,” to use Mr. Chrétien’s words.
☆ We would dominate international hockey competitions.

Your idea is truly brilliant.

As you know from your corporate experience, for any successful merger, the devil is in the details, but I have some suggestions.

(1). Canada could never simply be the 51st state. You see Canada consists of 10 states (we call them “provinces”) and three territories.

Each of our provinces exists for historical reasons and citizens feel a deep loyalty to their province. So we would need to be the 51st to 60th states. With two senators for each state, of course. 

Therefore, our 20 senators will no doubt bring fresh ideas to the institution that will help make the United States of Canada truly great!

(2). Some issues that cause division and frustration in your country are considered settled by political parties of all stripes in Canada, so I suggest adopting Canadian consensus in the interest of making this deal work.

☆ For example, there is no argument in Canada over women’s reproductive rights. There! That hot-button issue is resolved for you! (You can thank me later.)

☆ All Canadian politicians support our single-payer health care system because no one is refused treatment for their inability to pay and no one goes broke because they suffer a catastrophic illness. In effect, all of our citizens have lifetime critical illness insurance provided by the government. And while it’s expensive, our system costs considerably less than yours, with 100 per cent of the population covered! Your citizens will love it, I promise.

☆ I would also observe that Canadians have long preferred to live with many fewer firearms than are tolerated in the United States. The result is a drastically lower rate of deaths and injuries caused by gun violence in Canada. Our gun laws would make the country safer than it is, and safer is definitely greater!

☆ We have some other innovations that you may wish to consider. Our Canada Pension Plan, equivalent to your Social Security, is fully funded and actuarially sound. This requires higher contributions but it pays off with solvency. I believe your Social Security runs out of money in the near future. (That’s not great, is it?)

☆ Lower personal income taxes paid in the U.S. are a great attraction.

☆ But our programs to support both seniors and young families to reduce the worst cases of poverty among them help make society more cohesive and fair. That’s one of the reasons our taxes have been higher.

☆ Oh, and we must consider how we fund government expenses. We’re struggling to bring our deficit back down, but it wasn’t that long ago (2015) that our budget was effectively balanced. In fact, for more than a decade prior to the global financial crisis, Canada ran surplus budgets. In addition to spending discipline, our national value-added tax, the GST, was key. You definitely want to adopt that! In fact, you will love it! (Canadians don’t love it, but their governments do. And it beats borrowing money from the Chinese.) There are many smaller details that I am sure we can work out.

☆ You will enjoy the simplicity of the metric system for weights and measures, for example. Oh, but we’re not crazy, you can keep yards for football! And you will love that sport even more when you play it on a bigger field with only three downs.

I am so excited about this, Mr. Trump. You are truly a visionary leader to have come up with this idea.

I can already see the 60 little maple leaves on the flag with 13 stripes!

I am ready to throw myself into this great project of making the United States of Canada great again! (Oh, that’s too long. Let’s just call our new country “Canada.”)

Respectfully, as I dislodge my tongue from my cheek,

John Manley

Oh Canada! as so often, DJT is shaming us

What if they don't want to get married? 

Historian Marc-William Palen knows a lot more about Canada, and also about the real world consequences of tariffs, than Donald Trump. Trump's attempt to make Canada the 51st state by economic coercion is a re-run of a plan tried by the late 19th century McKinley administration, also to reverse effect.

While Trump’s protectionism and imperial designs are a sharp break with the recent past, they aren’t new. In fact, they’re part of a very old GOP playbook that dates to a period Trump regularly lionizes: the late 19th century. He sees it as a golden era in American history. Yet, the history of the 1890s actually exposes the dangers of the U.S. trying to force Canada into American hands.

Like Trump, Republicans in the late 19th century wanted to annex Canada—which was then still a British colony. The push to make Canada part of the U.S. reached a fever pitch following passage of the highly protectionist McKinley Tariff in 1890, which raised average tariff rates to around 50%.

To pressure Canada into joining the U.S., the McKinley tariff explicitly declined to make an exception for Canadian products. Republicans hoped that Canadians, who were becoming ever more reliant on the U.S. market, would be eager to become the 45th state to avoid the punishing tariffs. 

Secretary of State James G. Blaine saw annexation as a way to eliminate continued and contentious competition over fish and timber. Blaine, who co-authored the McKinley Tariff, publicly stated that he hoped for “a grander and nobler brotherly love, that may unite in the end” the United States and Canada “in one perfect union.” Blaine declared himself “teetotally opposed to giving the Canadians the sentimental satisfaction of waving the British Flag. . . and enjoying the actual remuneration of American markets.” Privately, he admitted to President Benjamin Harrison that by denying reciprocity, Canada would “ultimately, I believe, seek admission to the Union.”

Things didn't work out that way. The McKinley tariff inspired Canadian resistance. 

Canada’s Conservative Prime Minister John Macdonald wanted to react forcefully to send a message to the U.S. He proposed retaliating with high tariffs on American goods, as well as increased trade with Britain. He also recognized a political weapon when he was handed one. He adroitly turned the 1891 Canadian elections into a broader referendum concerning Canadian-American relations. He portrayed the Liberal opposition as being in bed with the Republican annexationists. According to him, they were involved in “a deliberate conspiracy, by force, by fraud, or by both, to force Canada into the American union.”

It looks as if Canada's current prime minister Mark Carney is going to pull out an unexpected victory for the country's updated ruling Liberal Party thanks to the unpopularity of today's Conservative leader Pierre Polievre apeing Trump.

by way of Paul Krugman

Thanks Donald!

Wedding graphic by way of Adam Tooze.

 • • •

I grew up much more aware of and fond of Canada than most residents of the USofA. Canada was just across the Niagara River, shores to sail my little Sailfish to if I was being adventurous. Nobody worried much about the border when I was a kid. Canadians didn't mind US visitors to their side of Niagara Falls and we didn't mind Canadians coming to shop in Buffalo malls when for a moment the value of the currency made this a good deal. My father added a booster antenna to our house so we could watch hockey and other interesting broadcasts on Canadian TV. 

Interestingly, the US Secretary of State James G. Blaine mentioned here also figured in my early life because I went to high school with a descendant of that Republican luminary. Like me, she was interested in what we called "current events." 

Trump's assault on Canada makes me feel ill.

Cosplay meets limits

What wouldn't Donald Trump give to be the recipient of that shit-eating grin? 

The photo is lifted from a tough article by a tough man, National Hockey League Hall of Famer Ken Dryden. In the 1970s, Dryden was THE MAN in Canadian hockey for the Montreal Canadiens who won the Stanley Cup (hockey's Super Bowl) five times with him in goal. 

He writes:

Putin also seems not to understand about hockey something that might relate to this moment: The tough are initiators, they deliver hard, devastating hits, but the really tough take those hits … and keep going, to win in the end. Just like in Leningrad. Obliterating the Ukrainian city of Mariupol doesn’t make you tough.

I'm no fan of this masculine chest bumping, but Dryden sure is more authentic than Vlad.

In some ways the most interesting thing about Dryden was that he took a year off hockey during his peak playing days to complete a law degree, interning for one of Ralph Nader's offshoots, the Ontario Public Interest Research Group. He was later a Liberal Party politician with only moderate success -- that places him with current Premier Justin Trudeau, perhaps a progressive Democrat if he were in the States.

By the way, the picture is from a 2021 exhibition in Sochi, Russia. Putin is looking at the referee who is likely determined not to let anything bad happen to his ruler.

Neighbors

As this Mexican cartoon demonstrates, this is not the moment for "Long time -- no see!" visits. Mexico is currently approaching one million diagnosed COVID cases and 100,000 deaths. Mexico City, unsurprisingly, leads the tally.

North of the widely infected U.S. Dakotas, a Canadian agricultural journal warns farmers not to take COVID risks. Canada is approaching 300,000 cases and has seen more than 10,000 deaths.

As of this morning, the United States has had 10.8 million reported cases and 244,000 deaths.

Just wow!

 

A cabinet shake-up in Canada is making Chrystia Freeland the new finance minister, "the first woman in Canadian history to hold the job federally."

"She has shown competence and capacity in her past portfolios, including foreign affairs, international trade and intergovernmental relations. But what remains to be seen is her plan for managing the pandemic now and recovering from it later — and whether she can get the prime minister to sign on. 

"On Tuesday at a news conference with Trudeau, Freeland noted, “I think all Canadians understand that the restart of our economy needs to be green.” She also pointed out that the economic consequences of the pandemic have been borne disproportionately by women."

Back when the new finance minister was a journalist, she wrote what I consider the most approachable book out there on the horrors of a world economy organized by and for the greedy, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. 

Maybe she's been corrupted by deciding to go for political power via the Canadian Liberal Party and Justin Trudeau -- or maybe the pandemic and US withdrawal from the world gives her a chance to go for it. 

Bravo to Canadians!

Reparations in Nova Scotia

Thanks to Ta-Nehisi Coates, the fraught notion of reparations for African Americans is being discussed again. As well it should be. Do read the article.

Here's his conclusion:

Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced.

An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.

The special strength of Coates' article is that he introduces us to living African Americans who have suffered measurable damage to their economic life chances, as well as to their security and human dignity. Reparations aren't only about the past injustices of slavery, debt peonage, and Jim Crow law; the discussion is also about individuals and communities disadvantaged by white supremacy today.

In the context of absorbing Coates' historical and ethical tour de force, it is both encouraging and daunting to learn that, just this month, some African-descended Nova Scotians have finally received official recognition and some recompense for terrible past abuses. Their story is moving:

They say they are no longer orphaned children cowering from sexual predators, or body blows of switches, fists and boards.

On Tuesday, they became “equal citizens,” taking a step away from the “second-class” sphere they had inhabited for so long.

There will be a public inquiry -- pointedly described as "non-prosecutorial" -- into what happened to poor black orphans lodged at the Nova Scoita Home for Colored Children between 1921 and 1989. The abuse survivors, perhaps as many as 100, will share in a $29 million fund created by the provincial government.

“Right now I feel a sense of relief,” said Harriet Johnson, one of the lead plaintiffs in the class action.

“I’m very happy that all of us, all my brothers and sisters that were suffering with me, we can now start to put this behind us,” Johnson said in an interview from her Ontario home.

“We can start healing.”

In a series of interviews with The Chronicle Herald two years ago, she said that as a teen ward she had been raped by a former home staffer and forced into prostitution in Halifax.

“We proved to the black community that this was happening,” said Johnson. (Most of the home was staffed by African-Nova Scotians.)

“You did turn a blind eye,” she said, referring to that community.

“We had to go through all of this for you to see what was really going on.”

Johnson said she looks forward to a public inquiry.

“That’s where everything’s going to come out and that’s where the home and the province can no longer say it didn’t happen.”

In an irony that Coates would undoubtedly appreciate, the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children was a black community project according to a short history published by Solidarity Halifax.

In response to the racism in this province, and as an act of independence and self-sufficiency, the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children was conceived, built, funded and run by the Black community for African Nova Scotian children in need of care.

In 1921, when the Home was built, White home care institutions would not accept Black children in need. As Charles Saunders, author of a history of the home notes, this was not a case of the Black community wanting to create an institution that was “separate but equal” to White institutions.

This was, rather, a case of  “separate or nothing.”

But something went terribly wrong in the "refuge" that white exclusion forced black Nova Scotians to build. Leading plaintiffs in the class action suit brought to an end by the settlement reported they were beaten, forced to fight each other, as well as being sexually abused. At this link, you can watch a video clip and experience the dignified delight with which formerly abused adults greeted the legal agreement with the province.

Even small gestures of delayed justice can help to heal individuals; reparations is about healing the community as a whole.

IPCC Climate Change report got you down?

It should.

At the blog DeSmog Canada, Carol Linnitt has pulled out a great list of "All the Positive and Helpful Things in the IPCC Report No One Will Talk About." Since the Conservative Stephen Harper government has thrown itself into making the country a C02 exporting "superpower," Canadians who care about the climate need all the encouragement they can get. So do the rest of us. Here are a few of the items Linnitt found in the scary report:

• 1. Start by making changes at the local level where and how they make sense.
  There’s no single catch-all solution when it comes to a complex problem like global climate change. The report’s authors recommend taking a local approach that addresses “risk reduction and adaptation strategies” that attend to specific socioeconomic processes and needs. Oh, and don’t wait for the perfect local strategy — just pursue all solutions simultaneously, even if they overlap.

• 3. Make everything better for everyone and that will help the climate issue. Seriously.
  If you work hard to “improve human health, livelihoods, social and economic well-being, and environmental quality” you’re pretty much guaranteed to make progress on the climate file. Governments should start working double-time on these fronts as a part of their climate change adaption and mitigation efforts. Co-benefits!

• 4. Don’t be so single-minded.
  Climate change in a way is the result of pursuing the objectives of a small sector of society. If we started to recognize “diverse interests, circumstances, social-cultural contexts, and expectations” that could “benefit decision-making processes.” So, if local communities are suffering as a result of new refineries, coal-fired power plants, oil export pipelines or the expansion of the oilsands — take the interests and needs of those local communities to heart. Giving too much sway to vested fossil-fuel interests is exacerbating climate change, after all. And anyway, “Indigenous, local, and traditional knowledge systems and practices, including indigenous peoples’ holistic view of community and environment, are a major resource for adapting to climate change.” We’ve got to stop ignoring these alternative perspectives.

• 11. Start immediately.
  It turns out the sooner we get started limiting climate change, the more time we’ll have to adequate prepare for adaptation. Mitigation, the report’s authors state, “reduces the rate as well as the magnitude of warming.” So, best to get started right away.

There are nine more items in Linnitt's list. Go read them all. Despite the wrong turn taken by their government (and ours!), we still can look for hints from our northern neighbors.

Warming Wednesdays: why the politics of climate are so tough

Studying U.S. history, I found it impossible to understand how the exuberant, creative young nation of the 1820s-50s, a country so proud of its own novelty and freedom, could have been so shackled to the slave system on its Southern plantations. Then I got it: slaves -- African-origin human beings -- were the wealth equivalent for their owners of the value of the contemporary U.S. stock market. Abolitionists (and the slaves) wanted to strip the rich of their patrimony, all of it. No wonder it was a decades long process before the crisis that enabled the other states to destroy the "peculiar institution."

We're living another such crisis. Serious efforts to reduce carbon emissions mean not developing and not burning the oil, gas and coal deposits that energy companies already count as their wealth. Here's Bill McKibben:

Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it's already economically aboveground – it's figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It's why they've worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada's tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.

If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today's market value, [the known] 2,795 gigatons of [potential] carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren't exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won't necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can't have both.

Trying to stop the Keystone pipeline is one element in a fight that means changing the nature of wealth in our society. We're trying to strip some of the richest people around of the only thing they seem to value.

No wonder the Koch brothers and their slightly less visible friends will fight us to planetary death to hang on to their assets.

These things happen to rogue nations

The Supreme Court of Canada recently refused to overturn a lower court decision to deny extradition of an Al-Qaeda suspect who is an Canadian citizen to the U.S. It's not that the Canadians don't think the guy may have done something criminal; it's that they affirm that if they send him, they would be rewarding torture.

The high court has dismissed the federal government’s leave-to-appeal application in the case of [Abdullah] Khadr, the older brother of Omar Khadr, the last western detainee to be held at Guantanamo Bay

… Last year, the Ontario Superior Court decided there were sufficient grounds to send Khadr to the U.S. based on self-incriminating statements he’d given to the RCMP. However, the court ruled the U.S. had violated fundamental justice with its involvement in Khadr’s “shocking” mistreatment during 14 months of detention in Pakistan, a decision that was upheld by the Ontario Court of Appeal.

…Abdullah, who told CBC television before being detained in Islamabad in 2004 that every Muslim dreams of being a martyr for Islam, was accused by Washington of supplying missiles to Al Qaeda in Pakistan and conspiring to murder Americans abroad. The U.S. paid $500,000 to Pakistani intelligence to abduct him in Pakistan in October 2004. For 14 months, he was held secretly in that country, where he alleges he was tortured. … American agents also interrogated him in Pakistani detention and got him to admit he had procured weapons for Al Qaeda.

… Extraditing him would only serve to reward the Americans’ “gross misconduct,” [Ontario Superior Court Justice Christopher] Speyer ruled.

Toronto Star, 11/3/11

One small blow for the rule of law from north of the border.

News you won't see much about in our media ...

Our Canadian neighbors take international law (and morality) rather more seriously than we do. Hence, when former President George W. Bush hied himself to the Vancouver area the other day, human rights groups

... are initiating a private prosecution, by four Guantánamo prisoners, accusing Bush of torture. In addition, campaigners on the ground are planning a huge protest.

Amnesty International got the ball rolling last week, calling for Bush’s arrest for war crimes and torture. In a press release, Susan Lee, Americas Director at Amnesty International, explained, “Canada is required by its international obligations to arrest and prosecute former President Bush given his responsibility for crimes under international law including torture. As the US authorities have, so far, failed to bring former President Bush to justice, the international community must step in. A failure by Canada to take action during his visit would violate the UN Convention against Torture and demonstrate contempt for fundamental human rights.”

No government action this time, but Bush better watch where he goes. Meanwhile, the former President was greeted by hundreds of protesters.

H/t Andy Worthington.***
Then there are those unpiloted drone aircraft the current administration is so fond of. Poof -- we can magically blow away people anywhere in the world ... whoever they are.

You might have heard we just killed, without any legal process whatsoever, Anwar Al-Awalaki's sixteen year old son who apparently happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. He was a U.S. citizen, so a few people have qualms. Perhaps having the wrong parents is not a capital crime?

But had you heard that Nevada-based drone controllers fired a missile at and killed a Marine and a Navy medic last April in Afghanistan? That "friendly fire" incident hasn't gotten much play.

Oh, but we can have a tidy little remote war ... at least until some other country or, more likely, some private group with a grievance starts shooting drones at us. It's not like these are technological marvels that no one else can replicate. War by video game ahead ...

Glimpses of Black communities in pre-Civil War Canada

If you approach From Midnight to Dawn: The Last Tracks of the Underground Railroad by Jacqueline L. Tobin and Hettie Jones looking for historical understanding of mid-19th century African American communities in Canada settled by fugitive slaves and free Blacks, you might be disappointed. This little book is more a data dump, a collection of documentary tidbits and pictures of historical sites, than an integrated story of the life these mostly short-lived towns. Blacks escaped the United States to Canada because life under the British Crown was reliably free of slavery and opportunities were somewhat more equal with whites. But most deserted their new homes when the Civil War ended U.S. slavery, many serving in the Union Army before returning to the States.

I grew up adjacent to the Niagara Frontier area (across the river from Buffalo, New York), which, along with the Windsor, Ontario region across the river from Detroit is one of the foci of this book. I remember a few less-than-enlightening historical markers of crossing points and churches that had been used by these Black communities, but little remained that gave a sense of the lives once led there. So I was interested in what these authors had retrieved even though I wished they had made more of it.

Just to give a taste, an ongoing theme of the communities seems to have been a controversy over "begging," the practice and consequences of soliciting support from white allies to help escaped slaves and free blacks get started in a new country. Frederick Douglass, himself an escaped slave and major abolitionist leader who did not join the exodus to Canada but did run some of the more stable Black newspapers from upstate New York, was drawn into the fray, publishing both sides. Tobin and Jones report the argument he got into with Dr. Martin Delany who later served as commanding officer of Black troops fighting for the Union, but in earlier decades promoted Black emigration back to Africa and self-sufficiency in Canada. He particularly despised white abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, an extremely propogandistic novel attacking slavery.

In 1856, Dr. Martin Delany, a free black man who had already made a name for himself in the States as a writer and physician, moved to Chatham to pursue his interests under the security of the British flag. ... Delany was outraged that Douglass would embrace Stowe's work yet not even mention his, and wrote several letters to Douglass expressing his views. "I beg leave to say that she knows nothing about us, the Free Colored people of the United States," he wrote about Stowe, "neither does any other white person--and, consequently, can contrive no elevation; it must be done for ourselves."

To his credit, Douglass published Delany's letters, creating a written dialogue that represented, in essence, their philosophical differences. "To scornfully reject all aid from our white friends," Douglass responded, "and to denounce them as unworthy of our confidence, looks high and mighty enough on paper; but unless the back ground is filled up with facts demonstrating our independence and self-sustaining power, of what use is such display of self-consequence?"

Controversies about "the begging" repeatedly divided Canadian Black leaders as they accused each of profiting from donations or becoming dependent. Tobin and Jones quote another author rather than offer their own interpretation of the issues:

Historian Donald Simpson, with a century of hindsight, has suggested that the "whole struggle over 'the begging system' was a philosophical battle of major importance." He writes: Most blacks who had self-emancipated to Canada sought autonomy and self-sufficiency and to be let alone. It was difficult then, and it is difficult now, for well meaning whites to grasp the importance of this concept. Some whites through the years moved from the position of doing things "to blacks" to a point of doing things "for blacks." It remained difficult for most, however, to move further to the position of doing things "with blacks" and undertaking projects only if and when they were asked by blacks for assistance.

All of this seems extremely contemporary: people whose need forces them to ask for and use help from individuals and institutions that belong to the class that holds them down necessarily chew over the implications of "the begging." The anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is a fine contemporary example.

Obviously I'm not urging anyone to run out and acquire From Midnight to Dawn, but the authors provide a tantalizing peak at some significant historical by-ways.

Shameful legal hypocrisy

I've written before (here and here) about my bafflement about the case of one Omar Khadr, the Canadian teenager captured in Afghanistan in 2002, threatened with rape by a U.S. interrogator at Bagram, held at Guantanamo ever since, and now on trial before the improvised Military Commissions that are such a prominent part of the Bush administration's legacy of corruption of law and justice.

Khadr is charged with throwing a grenade at U.S. troops during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, killing one soldier. His Islamist father had moved the family from Toronto to Pakistan and then Afghanistan where his children apparently played with Osama bin Laden's children when younger. In 2002, Khadr was staying with other Islamist youths when he allegedly threw the grenade. The house where he was located had been bombed; entering U.S. troops shot him twice from the back.

The story of the events that included Khadr's capture is awful, frightening -- and very confused. The more I have read about this, the more I have wondered under what law this kid has been charged.

I mean, come on ... suppose the United States had been invaded by some very alien, very scary people -- say North Korean true believers in Kim Jong Il. And then a Canadian teenager had responded to these strange, dangerous cultists by grabbing up a gun that his survivalist neighbor had hidden away. If he shot one of the invaders, wouldn't we celebrate him as a precocious hero? Of course we would. Being on the other end of the grenade, we don't think that way -- but it doesn't take much imagination to flip the story.

Anyway, now we are charging Khadr with murder. Today Scott Horton spelled out in Harpers how U.S. authorities make that case.

In the military commissions prosecution of the Canadian child warrior Omar Khadr, the United States charges murder and attempted murder in violation of the laws of war, in connection with an incident in which a grenade was hurled at American soldiers, leaving one dead and injuring several others. The theory underlying this charge is that Khadr was not a member of any lawful armed force, and his throwing a grenade was an unprivileged act of homicide or attempted homicide.

It’s uncontroversial that throwing a grenade with the intention of killing others is a criminal act that can be charged as homicide or attempted homicide unless it’s a privileged act. However, there is a strong opinion among law-of-war scholars to the effect that it is not a violation of the laws of war, but rather a violation of the criminal law of the nation where the incident occurred.

Oh, I get it. George W. Bush said all these guys were "unlawful combatants" so prosecutors at the military commissions have to stretch and rejigger the laws to make the actions Khadr is charged with fit that pre-determined category. Maybe Afghanistan could have charged him with murder, but it seems very unlikely they'd bother, given the 30 years of warfare in that unfortunate country.

Horton goes on to explain that the tortured (!) distortion of the international law that the U.S. is asserting in order to have a case to charge Khadr is in direct conflict with what the United States claims about its right to designate individuals as targets for drone strikes in countries where we not at war. What's the difference between Khadr's crime and some civilian contractor or CIA spook who pushes a button on a computer console to kill a person somehow designated a terrorist? Where's the legal justification for that?

Horton is very convincing that the United States' infatuation with its ability to kill designated enemies at the push of a button is creating a legal contradiction.

Not only did contractors design and fabricate the drones, they also play the key operational role in maintaining the drones, in arming and piloting them. The finger behind the trigger that releases death on the villages of North Waziristan is likely as not that of a civilian contractor. Moreover, the United States is now relying heavily on at least six private security contracting firms to do on-the-ground work in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area, much of it inside of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. These civilian contractors are collecting information used to guide the drones to their strikes; they serve as the “eyes” of the drone force. They are usurping a traditional core military reconaissance function.

All of this is occurring at the same time that the United States, as a matter of legal policy, denounces prisoners taken in the current hostilities as “unlawful” or “unprivileged” combatants and presses charges against them for using lethal force. But private security contractors and CIA operatives are every bit as “unlawful” and “unprivileged” under the laws of war. America’s posture on this issue is shamefully hypocritical, and needlessly so.

Both the Horton articles linked here are clear and succinct. And I didn't even go into his sensible discussion of the dangerous precedent the U.S. is setting for future wars by its reliance on drones -- after all, the U.S. monopoly of this technology won't last. Go read them both.

Image from the Vancover Sun which, like many Canadian papers, is following Khadr's case closely. The paper broke the story of dissension within the Obama administration over the confused legal theory behind the Khadr prosecution.

The meaning of TMI

Too Much Information -- that's apparently what journalists gave out from Guantanamo this week. Omar Khadr, the Canadian-Afghan teenager who is charged with throwing a grenade at alien invaders (that's U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan), is going through a preliminary hearing at our Caribbean gulag. He's been locked up there since 2002.

A witness who the court called "Interrogator #1" testified:

"I told him a fictitious story we had invented when we were there," Interrogator #1 said. It was something "three or four" interrogators at Bagram came up with after learning that Afghans were "terrified of getting raped and general homosexuality, things of that nature."

The story went like this: Interrogator #1 would tell the detainee, "I know you’re lying about something." And so, for an instruction about the consequences of lying, Khadr learned that lying "not so seriously" wouldn’t land him in a place like "Cuba" -- meaning, presumably, Guantanamo Bay-- but in an American prison instead. And this one time, a "poor little 20-year-old kid" sent from Afghanistan ended up in an American prison for lying to an American. "A bunch of big black guys and big Nazis noticed the little Afghan didn’t speak their language, and prayed five times a day -- he's Muslim," Interrogator #1 said. Although the fictitious inmates were criminals, "they’re still patriotic," and the guards "can't be everywhere at once."

"So this one unfortunate time, he's in the shower by himself, and these four big black guys show up -- and it's terrible something would happen -- but they caught him in the shower and raped him. And it's terrible that these things happen, the kid got hurt and ended up dying," Interrogator #1 said. "It’s all a fictitious story."

Spencer Ackerman, The Washington Independent

Very sophisticated interrogation that, threatening the kid with rape -- by scary Black guys. Wonder whose nightmares these Keystone Cops were repeating?

Anyway, Mr. "Interrogator #1" turns out to be a Sgt. Joshua Claus who eventually pled guilty to assault and prisoner abuse at Bagram in Afghanistan. His name had been widely reported previously, especially in Canada where there is great interest in the Khadr case. Several reporters -- among them Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg, Toronto Star's Michelle Shepherd, Globe and Mail's Paul Koring, and Canwest's Steven Edwards -- used Claus' real name in reporting the rape threats revealed at the current hearing since they had already used it in previous reporting on detainees. In retaliation, the military has banned the four from further reporting visits to Guantanamo.

There's no secret here -- what was hidden came out a long time ago. The military kangaroo court system is simply protecting itself from the reporters who are most knowledgeable about the case and about the history of prisoner mistreatment. TMI consists of what makes the jailers uncomfortable.

UPDATE, July 10, 2010: The military has revoked its ban on the four reporters. McClatchy News is still contesting the principle of excessive military censorship (mostly ass-covering, IMnotsoHO.)

News from the no fly list front

The smiling gentleman pictured above is Abousfian Abdelrazik, a naturalized Canadian who has been stranded in his native Sudan since 2003. On a visit to his sick mother, the Montreal resident was twice imprisoned and tortured by the local government, according to him at the instance of Canadian and U.S. authorities who suspected him of ties to terrorism. The Canadians and Sudanese eventually cleared him, but then he found himself with an expired passport and placed on a United Nations no fly list. For the last 14 months, he slept on the floor of the Canadian embassy in Khartoum. Canadian activists helped him go to court to get their government to fly him home. Under court order, they finally did this last Saturday. No wonder he looks happy,

Despite being cleared by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canadian Security Intelligence Service (that's like being cleared by the FBI), Abdelrazik may not be done with his troubles.

Paul Champ, one of Abdelrazik's lawyers, said being on the UN no-fly list means more than travel restrictions.

"It's not simply a no-fly list. I guess you can call it a UN black list. That means an asset freeze," Champ told CBC News. "When he gets back to Canada, he's going to be subject to all kinds of conditions.

"He's unlikely to be able to open a bank account. He likely will not be able to have a job, because anyone paying him or giving him money in any way could be regarded as a crime. So he's going to be living with some severe restraints that we're going to be working very hard to lift by whatever means possible," he said.

This case isn't going away for Canadian civil libertarians.***
Critics of U.S. government no fly lists and watch lists are on the way to picking up some not entirely comfortable bedfellows these days.

It seems that the gun lobby has succeeded in so restricting federal oversight of gun purchases, that individuals on the various government lists can't be impeded from buying weapons. According to the June 20 New York Times:

WASHINGTON — People on the government’s terrorist watch list tried to buy guns nearly 1,000 times in the last five years, and federal authorities cleared the purchases 9 times out of 10 because they had no legal way to stop them, according to a new government report.

In one case, a person on the list was able to buy more than 50 pounds of explosives.

Thanks to the efforts of the National Rifle Association, it's nearly impossible for the government to regulate guns, though they can ban your shampoo and toothpaste when you travel ... I don't quite get it.

Anyway, recognition of this odd legal anomaly has led some Congresscritters to try to deny guns to people on the watch lists. New York Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy and Congressman Steve Israel led off the push for a new law in May. After the report cited above came out, New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg jumped into the project.

The NRA isn't about to let their pro-gun legal regime get infringed on by a little wimpy fear of purchases by bad guys. They are up in arms about the (well-documented) deficiencies of the lists.

However, the National Rifle Association said the terrorist watch list was too poorly maintained to justify preventing gun sales to people on it.

"The integrity of the terror watch list is poor," said Chris Cox, the NRA's chief lobbyist. "To deny law-abiding people due process and their Second Amendment rights based on a secret list is not how we do things in America."

Hmm ... wonder if Mr. Cox applies that standard Muslim-Americans?

I'd bet on the gun nuts in this one -- politicians are probably more scared of Mr. Cox than they are that a terrorist incident will happen "on their watch." It's all one more demonstration that this stuff is theater, not security.

Canadian still stranded.Maybe Kafka could explain

Downtown Khartoum. Might be an interesting place to visit, but Abousfian Abdelrazik doesn't want to be forced to live here.

Abousfian Abdelrazik -- a Canadian citizen blacklisted as a terrorist -- is still stuck in Khartoum, living on the charity of the Canadian embassy. In 2003, he flew to his native Sudan to visit his ailing mother, was fingered by some Canadian police outfit as a terrorism suspect, and jailed and brutalized by Sudanese authorities for 19 months before they tossed him out without charges. By then, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service were smarting with embarrassment over their misconduct in sending Maher Arar to be tortured; they cleared Abdelrazik.

But somehow, the spooks' finding of innocence didn't mean he could return to Canada. He was told that the U.S. had put him on a UN watch list -- and he should get himself off somehow. Later, the line was that the Canadian government would only renew his passport if he could schedule a flight -- but airlines won't sell a ticket to a person on the UN list. When supporters finally found an airline that would carry him, the government changed its requirement, insisting that they wouldn't give him a travel document without a fully paid ticket. And it threatened people who offered to buy him one with prosecution for aiding a terrorist. Several hundred Canadians chipped in; he was supposed to fly home today -- but instead the government curtly faxed a note to his lawyer, claiming a right to

"... refuse or revoke a passport if the minister is of the opinion that such action is necessary for the national security of Canada or another country."

What other country, this jaded U.S. citizen wonders? A broad cross section of Canadians are disgusted. They cry racism.

In Ottawa, Abdelrazik's supporters, including MPs from all three opposition parties, described his situation as "Kafkaesque" during a small protest and news conference on Parliament Hill Friday.

"Obviously, there's a question of racism here," Amir Attaran, a University of Ottawa law professor, told the CBC in an interview.

"He has the unfortunate problem of being the same colour as the president of the United States and the Governor-General. He's Muslim. He has an odd name, but there's no legal reason to deny him a passport."

Referring to the case of Brenda Martin -- the Canadian woman jailed in Mexico whom the Canadian government sent a private jet to bring home last year -- NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar said there was a double standard at play.

"It saddens me greatly. If Mr. Abdelrazik's last name was Martin, would there be a different outcome?" Dewar said.

"... If this had been someone with a different skin colour and with a different last name, would there have been a different outcome?"

CBC News

To be continued, Mr. Abdelrazik and many other Canadians hope...

Canadians say "fly him home!"

Abousfian Abdelrazik, a naturalized Canadian citizen, has been stranded in the Sudan for six years. He has been convicted of no crime. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has said there is no information linking him to any crime. He is living in the weight room of the Canadian embassy in Khartoum.

What's his problem? The United States has him on a "no fly list" as a terrorist suspect.

Now a group of Canadians have raised enough money to purchase a ticket for Abdelrazik to fly home. Supporters include a former Conservative Party notable, David Orchard, as well as the (liberal in U.S. parlance) New Democratic Party foreign affairs specialist Paul Dewar. Ordinary citizen donors include peace activist James Loney who was kidnapped in Baghdad three years ago when there with the Christian Peacemaker Teams.

In theory, the Canadian government could charge the donors with aiding a terrorist. The Toronto Star reports:

Abdelrazik, 47, who has been holed up at the embassy in Khartoum for nearly a year, alleges he was tortured during his imprisonment in a Sudanese jail.

"We've lent our name to the use of torture against ... a Canadian citizen in Sudan and I'm very, very much opposed to that," said Orchard, who didn't know he could face jail time when he made the contribution. ...

Orchard and Wilf Ruland of Dundas, Ont. each donated $400, the largest contributions.

"There is risk (of imprisonment), I've talked about it with my wife and we agreed that something like this can't go unchallenged," Ruland, a scientist, said in an interview.

Previous posts on the Abdelrazik story here and here.

This is madness ...

The New York Times informs us that

Federal Customs and Border Protection authorities are preparing to launch unmanned aircraft patrols from [North Dakota], the first time such monitoring will occur along the nation’s northern border.

A Predator B aircraft, delivered to Grand Forks on Saturday, will make runs along the northern edge of North Dakota using sensors that can provide video and detect heat and changes to landscape, Customs and Border Protection officials said.

The $10 million drones will protect us -- from what, I have to ask? The head of "air security operations" was asked whether there was a significant problem with unauthorized border crossings or illegal drug shipments. He admitted he wasn't sure.

"We hope to actually use this aircraft to measure that," he said. "You don't know what you don't know."

Apparently a guy out of the Donald Rumsfeld school of explanatory prose.

It seems our rulers want to turn us into paranoid lunatics while bankrupting us so their cronies can sell the government high tech surveillance equipment. Can we change this? I remember being proud of living near "the world's longest undefended border" with Canada.