Plumping the Municipal Election

There is no grand prevailing wisdom about how people should vote. It’s hard enough to get people to show up at the polls as it is–and for many good reasons. But once people show up, there are competing views about how we should cast our votes: in this case, to plump or not to plump.

This is particularly important with municipal, district and school board elections on Saturday, November 15.

Voter turnout for local elections in BC is traditionally well below 50%. Add to this the recent 20 month US presidential election soap opera, another minority government election in Ottawa last month and for many in Vancouver, two provincial by-elections also last month. More on lessons from these later, though.

When we look at how to vote in local governments, it’s critical to understand how the “at-large” electoral process is different from voting provincially, federally and in the United States. In fact, understanding the at-large nature of local elections motivates a greater number of people to actually vote.

The at-large system is in some ways opposite to the first-past-the-post system in the provincial and federal elections. At-large means there are no ridings or constituencies within the municipality or regional district. Aside from casting one ballot for mayor, voters will vote from a pool of candidates anywhere from one to however many sit on each local council or school board.

This is where plumping comes in. If there are six spots beyond mayor on your city council we can vote for up to six candidates standing for election. But why not vote for one? This is plumping or bullet voting, where we target one or a small number of candidates to focus our vote on without diluting the effect of our vote by voting for other people who could end up beating our preferred candidate(s).

Many object to the spirit of plumping for some good reasons. They argue that it undermines the value of at-large voting where we get to vote for more than one candidate, unlike in provincial and federal elections. It can also undermine one view of the spirit of voting: if we are allowed six votes, we shouldn’t waste any of them.

Fans of plumping argue that most people are not familiar with enough candidates running to be able to cast completely informed votes. So many people want to avoid casting ballots for people who aren’t necessarily deserving of that vote.

Plus, our electoral system is broken, so we should make the best of it when we get that pencil in our hands. This is a tired refrain for many of us, but it is something you should be braced to hear much more of in the future as there are broad movements to fix our electoral process.

I won’t even go into the complications of the US Electoral College, that great 18th century relic that skews the popular vote to elect a president, but the provincial and federal systems are equally irrelevant.

First-past-the-post worked quite well a century ago when there were typically two parties running for government. With only two candidates in a riding, the winner will get more than 50% of the vote and wasted votes were always less than 50% of those cast.

But today, with five viable federal parties (even with the Bloc only in Quebec) and more than two viable parties in most provinces, first-past-the-post ensures millions of votes are wasted across the country.

Dreadfully, in 1988 Brian Mulroney was reelected prime minister and rammed his Free Trade Agreement through government when 43% of Canadians voted for his party, which perversely allowed him to get a majority government. Considering that voter turnout was only 72%, less than one-third of eligible votes actually voted for free trade. Now we need to clean up that illegitimate mess.

The electoral reform referendum almost passed in BC in 2005 and likely will this spring, even though a similar referendum only got around 37% support in Ontario’s election last fall [see the comments below]. But then again, Ontario has often been pivotal in Liberal and Conservative governments for all of Canadian history, so they likely aren’t eager to move to a proportional representation system and lose their inordinate electoral power.

Also, our system typically produces majority governments for parties that earn less than 50% of the popular vote, where federally, voter turnout has declined in almost every election since that disastrous free trade election in 1988.

With five viable federal parties, a voting system designed for a two-party system is obsolete, as are majority governments. So people have responded with coordinated vote swapping systems on the internet, and some rather complicated strategic voting schemes.

All this means that our electoral systems are up for debate.

When it comes to your municipal, district and school board votes on Saturday, ask yourself how many candidates you are capable of effectively evaluating. Search the web, check your municipality’s website. Get informed.

Then ask yourself how many of them you can truly support with integrity. And then vote responsibly. This will likely end up meaning that in Vancouver many COPE, Vision and Green supporters will likely only be voting for their own party’s candidates, despite the electoral agreement. The agreement does not outlaw plumping, after all.

And while you’re fighting off the strain of so many elections, look into BC-STV. That referendum will be on the ballot again on May 12, 2009 during our provincial election. It’s not a perfect proportional representation system, but it makes our current system look like the largely inadequate attempt at democracy we’ve been stuck with for our whole history.

So plump if you want to, but by all means make your vote matter–at least to yourself.

Welcome Back to Civilization, America!

Wendy Yuan’s Policy Emptiness is Bad for Vancouver-Kingsway

A vote for the NDP and Don Davies is a vote for progress, humanity and real political representation in Vancouver-Kingsway.

A vote for the Liberals and Wendy Yuan is a vote for the federal Liberal party “brand”, elitist and pro-corporate policies and the Paul Martin-David Emerson gang.

Worst of all, NOT voting is a vote for Wendy Yuan. Here’s why:

As far as I can tell, Wendy Yuan seems like a nice person: earnest, believing in the importance of a prosperous future for Canada [she owns a small business so you do the math] and somewhat down to earth.

But in the context of who we want representing us in parliament, she’s an empty vessel and fully uninspiring on the issues.

Don Davies has actually lived and volunteered in the riding for years, works for human rights and social and economic justice, and is interested in his fellow citizens in the riding and our concerns as opposed to pro-corporate issues or concerns of people who own big homes in Richmond like Wendy Yuan.

And without going into Wendy Yuan’s foibles which you can read about elsewhere:

• the tragic optics of the apartment she rented last fall in Collingwood to go along with her house in Richmond
• her probably good work with SUCCESS, the Richmond Economic Advisory Committee and SFU in Surrey [as opposed to any real work in Vancouver-Kingsway]
• whether she was involved in nomination meeting voter shenanigans, racially-divisive advertising, or supporting or failing to oppose China’s practice of murdering Falong Gong members for lucrative organs,

on what she actually brings to the table, she is a disastrous pick for MP.

You can review it for yourselves in a few places. Her YouTube site has a few vignettes of true policy emptiness that reflect her party’s abject refusal to address issues of real people. Its three features are so free of issues that we hear our anthem, see some pictures of her showing up at public events and trust-based service pledges. Empty otherwise.

She also seemed quite useless at the all-candidates meeting on October 7, 2008. While these videos may have neglected her best moments, what we do see is cringe-inducing.

Here are a few of the highlights:

• She lacks irony as she proudly claims to being the first democratically elected candidate, presumably in this round of elections, while for 2004 she stepped aside to help her colleague Paul Martin parachute the toxic David Emerson into this riding as the Liberal candidate. Whoops. But then we don’t really expect business people to demonstrate much facility with political, moral or social philosophy…and I should know, having been a business major when I first went to university.
• She totally dodged, but not even as “deftly” as Sarah Palin [whoops], a question on the SPP, claiming that among his criticisms, Don Davies’ facts may be wrong and that she would have to research them, so she wouldn’t comment on them. One of the facts was that Paul Martin was one of the original 3 Amigos who signed the deal: hard for her not to be aware of earlier this decade as she was “appointed as Leader’s Representative to the Liberal Party of Canada (BC) by then Prime Minister Paul Martin in 2004.”
• She continually talks about how she understands the issues of constituents, but living in Richmond, that is hard to believe, and given an opportunity to explain what the constituents care about, she shows little knowledge of anything beyond what immigrants and small business owners want [she is both]…oh yes, that and a desire to serve. But the problem is that she evidently wants to serve her party [remember the David Emerson connection] more than the largely poor and working class community of a riding she doesn’t live in.

In short, she is a master of cliche and substance-free “apparent” responses and comments in the all-candidates meeting and her own video vignettes. And she is quite a poor public speaker, with real difficulty framing ideas of any real substance beyond cliches and empty platitudes.

So how will this riding go tomorrow?

Reform/Conservative candidate [in name only] Salomon Rayek will not win. He didn’t even bother to show up at the all-candidates meeting. This was smart and the best option compared to actually being there and suffering the focus of how much everyone hates David Emerson. Showing up would actually end up costing the party votes and tax funding. And judging from the emptiness that Wendy Yuan showed in actual content breadth at the meeting, she should have thought about skipping the meeting too.

Rayek also will not win because his job is just to get out the Reform/Conservative vote. His flyer in the mail the other day also highlights his commitment to his party–instead of our constituents–and its boogeyman crime and punishment initiatives and tax cuts, he’s a blood donor[!], his children once attended schools in the riding and the best part: he’s the “president of a local Electoral District Association for the Conservative Party” which happens to be Delta-Richmond East. So he actually may live as far away from our riding as Wendy Yuan.

Since the Reform/Conservative party will not win Vancouver-Kingsway strategic voting to keep Harper out is irrelevant. A vote for Don Davies does just as much to reduce the Reform/Conservative representation as a vote for the policy-vacant Wendy Yuan.

Green party Doug Warkentin also won’t win. He’s a late entry candidate who admitted to not fully knowing his party’s platform at the all-candidates meeting and showed a distinct lack of breadth of knowledge of federal issues, but he sure sounded like an earnest, caring man. Just like Wendy Yuan. So she earned no more support than he did based on her performance.

No one from the small parties will get much of a vote either.

So that leaves NDP candidate Don Davies as the candidate that should win. During the all-candidates meeting he showed a fantastic breadth of knowledge of issues, with far more policy knowledge than Wendy Yuan. He was articulate, thoughtful and spoke of real people’s concerns, fears and hopes.

But winning means getting the vote out. Democracy in Canada is largely sub-contracted. People haven’t typically been directly engaged or even committed as members of parties. They vote sporadically and let professional political parties, lobbyists and activists do their business, however corrupt and deceitful it can be at times. This is why Wendy Yuan’s little YouTube ads don’t really say anything of substance. It’s all about the party brand, not about mobilized human beings.

And the Liberal Party is no more populist than it was with the sponsorship scandal kneecapped them.

So when we look for how the Obama bump affects Canada we see that individual voter disenchantment with big party politics that has become a social movement after initially crystalizing around Obama in the USA, has moved into Canada raising bazillions of dollars for the NDP, increasing their poll standing and reflecting the reality that the NDP has been the official opposition for two and a half years while over 40 times the federal Liberals abstained on votes in the last parliament, giving the Harper Reform/Conservatives a de facto majority. Why did they abstain? They weren’t confident of being able to win at least a minority government if they opposed the government on a confidence motion.

And why are we voting tomorrow? Because Harper himself crashed his own parliament since the Liberals wouldn’t. If I were Wendy Yuan, I’d be afraid of that too.

And while Harper called this election for many reasons, two of them underscore why Don Davies should win tomorrow:

1. Harper, being a US-Republican American Idol, cannot be re-elected to anything if Obama wins the presidential election. A shift to the populist “left” in the USA will remove his cover of having a more radical soft fascist in the White House. Even though the Democrats are Republicans-Lite, an Obama election is a rejection of the fear-mongering conservatism that has ruled North America this decade. Bad for Wendy Yuan is that Paul Martin’s co-creation of the SPP and the North American Union puts that stink on her, and would have even if she weren’t close to him personally. So Harper has shot for re-election before the US election and the Liberals are no more ready to govern than they have been for the last 30 months.
2. The global economic meltdown hurts everyone with conservative fiscal policies. Even the director of the anti-human International Monetary Fund has characterized this “event” as dire. So who pays for this? Harper’s Reform/Conservative party and the Liberals, whose fiscal platform is so identical to the Harper gang that after David Emerson crossed the floor he justified himself grandly by telling the truth that the parties were essentially the same to him. And Paul Martin spent years making Canada the envy of the world [as Wendy Yuan was eager to keep repeating at the all-candidates meeting] because of the balanced budgets and surpluses created by gutting Canada’s social programs. So Saloman Rayek was wise to skip the all-candidates meeting, but Wendy Yuan didn’t figure that out: the Liberals’ de-regulated fiscal free trade policies are just as much responsible for the economic disaster we’re in now as the Harper government.

So it’s time to vote tomorrow and it’s time to tell everyone you know in Vancouver-Kingsway to get out and vote for Don Davies, unless they are committed to solid, corporate-friendly, 20th century politics that ignores real people and real issues. And if that’s the case, they’re part of the problem.

Capitalism as Extortion: 700,000,000,000 Ways

Over the last 7 days, I’ve been watching the repulsive song and dance in the USA to bail out some of the wealthiest corporations in the world. Congress finally passed bailout legislation today.

But instead of reforming the system that allowed the kind of greed and manipulation we’ve seen, we see capitalist extortion at work. The price is $700,000,000,000 from US taxpayers, their children, their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren…most of whom aren’t yet born so they have no political rights in this situation.

In this bailout, we see an arbitrarily derived number, $700,000,000,000, borrowed from non-US banks and added to the US debt. The money is essentially a gift to maintain the solvency of the financial firms at risk of tanking. Despite all the free market competition rhetoric from the neoliberal, neo-conservative Democratic and Republican White Houses for the last 3 decades, the government has chosen to intervene in the market to avoid the socio-economic ramifications of the collapse of so many firms. Surely, their collapse would be devastating to the US economy and the rest of the world, but the nature of this bailout says a great deal about options not embraced.

The cause

This is perhaps debatable, but the sub-prime mortgage collapse last year is the likely trigger of this mass insolvency.

The US economy has been in trouble for a long time. Right after 9/11 Bush’s initial advice to Americans was to go shopping. Their economy is so dependent on consumer purchasing that if it were to stall, their trade imbalances and currency stability would crash, leading to a domestic and likely global depression. Canada is not much better. Such is the desperation of those running the US economy that they have supported a massive culture of consumer debt to underwrite increasing spending. This cannot go on forever.

Part of this consumer debt cycle is the sub-prime mortgage. Financial institutions lured desperate people who are reasonably unable to buy homes or expensive homes, to purchase them beyond their means with interest rates temporarily below the prime rate. Just like pyramid schemes, the system was profitable…for a while. Then it becomes untenable. Last summer, the sub-prime mortgage market crashed.

A humourous and accurate portrayal of this crisis is this short cartoon, well worth watching and spreading around: http://www.businesspundit.com/sub-prime/

The sub-prime crisis was a warning that went unheeded. It indicated that consumers were overextended and financial institutions were overextended in their lending. That left both citizens and institutions vulnerable to slight problems that could push them over the edge.

Options

There are several options available to the US government in recent weeks. They include the following:

1. Let the corporations collapse
2. Pay off their debts
3. Nationalize them

1. Let the corporations collapse

Capitalism is all about risk and reward. Even though Canada and the USA do not allow people to drop their student loan debt when declaring bankruptcy, corporations can drop all their debt if they orchestrate their collapse effectively enough. Bankruptcy is designed to stimulate entrepreneurship. The problem comes when corporations get so large and powerful that their collapse has devastating ripples throughout society: job loss, pension fund collapse, currency devaluation, increased trade imbalances, recession, depression, increased working class and middle class bankruptcy and homelessness.

Governments that espouse free market principles, deregulate and undermine their own ability to intervene in markets are faced with a painful choice: live up to their free market ideals and let insolvent corporations collapse and allow their society to suffer, or pretend it’s OK to intervene sometimes and dodge criticisms of pulling a socialist tactic to save the economy.

Clearly, letting corporations collapse is painful medicine. CEOs have gambled that the government will not let them crash. Thus they have a get out of jail free card allowing them to behave irresponsibly knowing that the taxpayers will bail them out. Sounds like extortion to me. Ah, if only the taxpayers had bailed out Enron and Worldcom there wouldn’t be such hardship! Maybe.

2. Pay off their debts

Any kind of bailout package that shores up the insolvency of these financial institutions will allow them to survive another day, minimize some or most of the negative ripples they’ve instigated and keep the economy from tipping too far over the cliff overlooking depression. The US government today has guaranteed that these firms will survive another day, at least until the next crisis. But the US citizen has no true accountability from the financial sector or the government. While a future White House is required to prepare and monitor a payback plan, there is nothing actually requiring the $700,000,000,000 to be repaid to the consumers/taxpayers who have been lured into over-consumption in the first place.

3. Nationalize them

As the UK has done, instead of taking citizens’ and future citizens’ wealth to give to the irresponsible extortionists in their troubled financial firms, the government has nationalized some of the firms. This means the government, on behalf of current and future citizens, has taken actual ownership of the firms. Sure, they intend to sell them off again, but at least Joe and Margaret Citizen get an asset for their forced investment of wealth.

Fear-Mongering and Inducing Panic

So how is the USA coping with this crisis? The other night on Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN, queen of hysteria Suze Orman shared her thoughts. Her personal opinion is that the current crisis will not recover until the middle of the next decade. She continued by advising people who expect to retire in the next 10 years to get their money out of the market.

This is a fascinating and dangerous piece of advice. The first of the baby boomers are in their early 60s right now. In 10 years, most of the boomers will be in retirement age. Orman, has thus advised the largest portion of the biggest demographic blip of the last century to extract their wealth from the market.

Granted, the market is over-inflated. The bubble needs a correction. This explains some or most of the trillions of dollars of air leaking out of global markets in recent weeks. But when Orman says you can recover what you’re losing now after 10 years, boomers who can’t wait a decade to retire will be pulling out their cash, risking a run on the market.

Hysteria and fear-based withdrawal of wealth from a market tends to accelerate into a run as the desire to sell outpaces the desire to buy, causing stock prices to fall, potentially even below book value of companies themselves. At the same time, there is predatory buying, as we’re seeing now as behemoth corporations are buying up simply gigantic companies leading to less competition and more oligopolistic collusion.

The 1994 Mexican Peso Crisis

This kind of bailout is not completely new. In 1994, the Mexican peso crisis led to the USA orchestrating a $50 billion loan guarantee. Canada coughed up a hefty $1 billion, significant for a population of less than 30 million people then. The crisis came from the convergence of a number of incidents including the new Mexican government devaluing their currency, an act that was aggravated by a run by investors to dump the peso, thus compounding the tailspin.

US motivations for bailing out the weakening peso orbited around protecting US banks from bad loans. Does that sound familiar? So using taxpayer dollars to extend loans to support a foreign currency to keep domestic banks from suffering is a transfer of wealth from the mostly unborn future generations of Americans [and Canadians] indirectly to US banks that were greedy and stupid enough to extend such loans in the first place. But then, is it greed and stupidity when you behave like an extortionist and the system lets and encourages you?

The 1979 Chrysler Bailout

Another example of this capitalist extortion-based bailout involved Chrysler 30 years ago. In 1979 the US government spent $1.5 billion on loan guarantees for the virtually bankrupt Chrysler corporation. As one of the big 3 car makers in the USA, a bankrupt Chrysler would have meant a significant blow to the USA’s industrial capacity. The free market dictates that entrepreneurialism has rewards and risks. The fact that capitalist societies shelter capitalist activity with benefits like limited shareholder liability and bankruptcy protection seems to not be enough. When Chrysler was in dire need of assistance, the government intervened with taxpayer dollars to interfere with the hallowed free market of capitalists to protect the national economy from a body blow.

With these bailouts, what incentive do CEOs and entrepreneurs have to avoid running their corporations into the ground. If you owe the bank $300,000 for your mortgage, you work for the bank. If you owe the bank $300,000,000, the bank works for you because if you default on your loan, it goes out of business. This is the extortionist principle that has worked the last several weeks. Not so surprisingly, the threat of a massive foreign debt default by developing countries has never materialized despite its potential to reform the global trade and currency regime. So not everyone can pull of that kind of threat.

What the Bailout Doesn’t Do for Suffering People

By the time the House eventually voted for the amended bailout package today, some “members of the Congressional Black Caucus…said they changed course after securing commitments from presidential candidate Barack Obama that he would back legislation to help struggling consumers and homeowners facing foreclosures if he wins the White House.“

This is a nice sentiment, but when the bailout package is initially designed to help obscenely rich corporations instead of actual human beings suffering in this crisis, we see the clear priorities of the bailout’s supporters. We heard it too on CNN last weekend as announcers kept referring to the importance of helping “the financial firms that are suffering.”

Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine

The themes of Naomi Klein’s latest book on disaster capitalism fit well with the last few weeks. Extortionist capitalists have overextended their institutions past solvency. Since their existence is parasitically symbiotic with the bone marrow of the US society, letting them die would threaten the existence of the host. When the public purse comes to the rescue, we see a massive transfer of wealth from humans to the corporations (and their rich investors) that have contributed to their insolvency. The neoliberal agenda is advanced and the tens of millions of dollars the finance executives have been making in recent years looks like a good investment to shareholders since they can run the corporate profits up with unsustainable business practices and then get the people of the land to reimburse them for their irresponsibility.

Any time we see a fiscally conservative government cut taxes to the rich while increasing them to lower income groups, it is a wealth transfer from the poor and middle income groups to the rich. This is pure theft. What we’ve seen in recent weeks is the same pattern, all through the lens of a dire financial crisis.

Solutions

So what would really work to improve the situation we are in?

Firstly, the rapacious, over-consumptive social norm is unsustainable in any economic, social or ecological sense. Watch The Story of Stuff now if you haven’t yet!

Secondly, deregulated neoliberal capitalism allows a psychotic parasite to imprison us all. Society has the right to regulate its market activities. We need to enhance our regulatory capacity in many ways, including invoking our right to revoke the state-bestowed charters of corporations that are destructive in their behaviour.

Thirdly, we need to seriously re-think the notion of limited liability for shareholders. Allowing most of us in society to indirectly and ignorantly own stakes in dozens of corporations without having to worry about their destructive activities creates a culture of irresponsibility. Enacting investor liability will force us all to pay some attention to what our investments reap. It may throw a wet blanket on rampant, “innovative” entrepreneurialism, but I think we’ve seen enough of the horrible consequences of such innovation in recent generations that a little responsibility is necessary now. And in the end, the profit-maximizing corporate model is inherently unsustainable in a world of finite resources. Removing limited liability for investors will encourage most of us to explore more sustainable market models like co-operatives.

Fourth, we need to pull out the sledgehammers and destroy the crumbling vestiges of the economically imperialistic global trade and finance regime: the WTO, IMF and World Bank. That triumvirate of exploitation is being undermined monthly by countries and movements that reject the free trade cult in favour of trade and development plans that put people, social and physical infrastructure and the environment first.

Fifth, read what progressives are saying about the bailout, what problems will still exist, and alternative ways of addressing these toxic problems. Alternet.org is a good start. So is spending a minute and a half watching Dennis Kucinich explain a better focus than the bailout.

Some common sense

In the end, this crisis was inevitable. The overinflated market needed a correction. Housing bubbles in Vancouver and many other cities need to be corrected. Markets respond to positive and negative hysteria to create and deflate bubbles. And along the way regular people lose their life savings, homes and economic freedom. The collateral damage is simply intolerable. That is why the US House of Representatives initially voted down the bailout: they have to get re-elected every 2 years. The bailout saves Wall Street, not the citizens.

Without a fundamental rejection of market-based greed and over-consumption, this crisis will be far from the last one. As long as we neglect systemic changes, we will continue to suffer. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, our continental and global economic system is insane and so are we if we think it will fix itself while we ignore its systemic flaws. Shame on us if we let that happen.

The Venezuelan-Russia-USA Dance

We should all be noting a few things about escalating dance between the USA and Venezuela.

A few months ago, after 58 years of being a part of the larger US Second Fleet, the USA reconstituted its Fourth Fleet to enhance its presence in its traditional sphere of influence: Latin America, perhaps the most successful political opposition to the USA’s imperial positions of late, with an electoral machine opposing US hegemony virtually consistently.

And as much as Venezuela is increasing its trade relations with China, the next economic superpower after the USA economically implodes, Chavez has been talking with Russia about getting technology to become the third South American country to develop nuclear energy capacity, while working on joint naval operations with Russia.

Hawks in the USA spins this as reminiscent of one to three generations ago of the Russian Bear infiltrating the USA’s sphere of influence, the sphere itself being an inherently arrogant and imperialist assertion. The Soviet Union’s involvement in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America freaked out the USA during the Cold War. Russian-Venezuelan cooperation on the military and nuclear energy has the potential to either provoke an increasingly desperate and declining empire to rash actions, or more hopefully, to let the increasingly more introspective and protectionist USA know that just because they are part of the Americas doesn’t mean they’re in charge.

And unlike the first 9/11 in Chile in 1973 where the Americans coordinated a coup of the democratically elected government and installed Pinochet, the hemisphere won’t go quietly.