Is Our Governor General Up to the Job?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

“Since our Governor-General made her critical decision on prorogation 2½ weeks ago, there's been a sustained regal silence. Nary a word from the celestial Michaëlle Jean to explain it.”

So wrote Lawrence Martin, a columnist who can usually be relied upon to view politics through a fairly Liberal prism, in a Dec. 22 Globe and Mail commentary.

“We don't know what the PM told her, whether it was accurate, whether he torqued the separatist threat, whether he raised the possibility of legal recourse. We don't know whether her decision came with any strings attached or how she determined it was consistent with the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy,” contended Martin.

Canadians have not worried all that much about the role of our constitutional stand-in for the head of state, Queen Elizabth II. Even those who think the office archaic and a relic of colonial times have reassured themselves that, after all, it’s a job consisting mainly of ceremonial functions.

So in recent decades it became a patronage appointment, just another plum, like a seat in the Senate. Recent Governors General have been retired politicians and CBC personalities. Who really cared?

But we’ve now been reminded that in a Westminster system of parliamentary government, the Crown, in the person of the Governor General, can wield important reserve powers. It would have been within Jean’s right, legally, to have installed Stéphane Dion as prime minister, without benefit of another election.

And should Stephen Harper’s minority government fall next month, we might see a man who last October wasn’t in the running for the job – or even leader of his party – become our head of government.

Michael Ignatieff would be the beneficiary of behind-the-scenes decisions which we, the other 33 million Canadians, would not be privy to.

So Martin’s concerns are well-founded. Given that we’re in a period where minority governments are common and the Governor General’s discretionary powers are therefore large, he wants Jean to publically disclose the reasons for her action on Dec. 4.

But is it possible she herself can’t quite articulate the constitutional rationale behind her decision? Here's the real problem: our Governor General is an inexperienced former TV announcer placed in the job by a besotted former prime minister.

She herself may have had no idea what to do when Harper arrived asking her to suspend parliament, and may therefore have relied completely on unnamed “experts.” In effect, our constitutional monarchy has now become the equivalent of a regency, where a monarch too young to rule leaves governing to others.

A Letter from Jerusalem – Circa 1972

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish-Tribune

Recently a friend in Montreal mailed me a copy of a letter – one of those old aerogrammes -- that I had sent to him in August 1972, when I spent the summer at the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, while I was a student at Brandeis University. (No e-mail back then!)

The letter is indeed a piece of history all in itself. I was amazed, given the relatively low cultural state of students today, that I could write to him that I was reading at the time books by the Soviet novelist Mikhail Sholokov, the American writer Sinclair Lewis, and the American Communist supporter Waldo Frank, among others – and not because I “had to,” for a course, but simply out of interest. (Who today even remembers these authors?)

I spoke in the letter about going along on demonstrations with the left-wing Matzpen people, a now defunct and forgotten Israeli socialist organization. They were among those protesting an expropriation that had taken place by the Israeli government back in 1948 of two Arab Christian villages, Birim and Ikrit, whose land near the Lebanese border had later been taken over by kibbutzim.

The inhabitants had not been able to return despite repeated rulings of the Israeli Supreme Court, so in the summer of 1972 they returned to their villages, and police had to use force to remove them. On August 13, a few thousand people in Jerusalem demonstrated on their behalf.

The leftists hung out at the Cafe Ta’amon on King George Street, and I used to spend time there. I looked for it on the Internet and the place still exists, though it looks a lot fancier today.

Well, what can one say about all this? It was a different era; many of us still lived in the zeitgeist of the sixties. It’s all such ancient history now.

In 1972, I could walk by myself down from Mount Scopus through the Old City and into West Jerusalem, even late in the evening, without fear.

Who would do that today? No one had yet heard of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the host of other groups around the world who are today mortal enemies of Israel.

Between the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, we Jews lived in a fool’s paradise -- it was probably one of the few times in our history when we forgot that we are weaker, not stronger, than our enemies.

But when Yasser Arafat spoke to the UN a year later, in 1974, and then when the “Zionism is Racism” resolution was passed by the General Assembly in 1975 (on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, no less), we began to live in today’s “epoch.”

Even the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of Communism as an attractive ideology hasn’t really changed things all that much, in terms of the ongoing offensive against Israel.

The “anti-Zionism” these leftists advocated, we now understand, had nothing to do with “socialism,” because all the nonsense peddled by the Soviets, and by China, is history now -- except, of course, for the anti-Israel strand.

And today it’s not the Russians or Chinese who are behind it, but an amorphous worldwide “left,” which has really become little more than an anti-Semitic “Internationale.” I’m sure, for instance, that many leftists will defend the destruction of the Chabad Jewish Centre in Mumbai, India, by terrorists, because it was an “outpost of imperialism.”

So though much has changed in 36 years, even more has not. But as for that 1972 letter, I guess the Jerusalem postmark alone is worth saving it for.

Bye Bye Parliamentary Legitimacy

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

In the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, our own political system is in turmoil.

Stéphane Dion’s Liberals, Jack Layton’s New Democrats, and the separatist Bloc Québécois led by Gilles Duceppe have cooked up a deal whereby they will overthrow Stephen Harper’s newly-elected Conservative government and form a coalition to replace him.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May has announced that she too supports this political troika. In fact she’d like Dion, the presumptive prime minister, to appoint her to the Senate -- so much for the Greens being “different” than the old-line parties.

No one is quite sure whether this power grab will succeed or not. Harper has managed to get the governor general to suspend parliament until the end of January.

“The highest principle of Canadian democracy is that if one wants to be prime minister, one gets one’s mandate from the Canadian people, and not from Quebec separatists,” he declared earlier in the House of Commons.

But one thing is certain. Canada is now leaving, perhaps forever, that small and happy group of countries such as France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, which have periodic elections that create stable governments.

We are now joining the Belgiums, Israels, Italys, Polands, Thailands and Ukraines, all those nations where parties come and go, where shifting coalitions create and break governments, where politicians seek power however they may seize it, and where, as a result, chaos reigns and no one quite knows who will be running the show the next week or month.

Their parliaments all look as though we were viewing them through a kaleidoscope.

Since Dion and Layton by themselves do not control enough votes in the House of Commons by themselves, Duceppe will now effectively be in the driver’s seat, making sure Quebec gets its fair share – and then some – of the goodies the coalition will soon be handing out.

No wonder former Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau has announced that he supports this deal. He called the Bloc’s inclusion in the three-party coalition agreement an “impressive victory” for separatism

“This victory sweeps aside any hesitation Quebecers might have had on the presence of the Bloc in Ottawa,” Parizeau said.

Yet Layton has remarked, with a straight face, that this deal will be good for Canada. Too bad we don’t have the equivalent of “Saturday Night Live” in this country. But then, this isn’t even funny, the way Sarah Palin was.

Can we assume, with the Bloc about to effectively become part of Canada’s government, that the Clarity Act setting out specific rules for Quebec’s departure from Canada (which I never thought was worth the paper it’s printed on anyhow) is now dead? Surely this will be understood by Dion and Layton as being one of Duceppe’s demands, even if unspoken?

I wonder what all those people on Prince Edward Island who vote Liberal, no matter what, think of Stéphane Dion embracing a party whose aim is the secession of Quebec.

Can we expect Liberal members of parliament who represent P.E.I. constituencies to break ranks with their party, as it moves forward in its unholy alliance with the separatist Bloc Québécois and the New Democrats? Or do they value power more than principle?

Is Stéphane Dion About to Become PM?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Hey, why should a little thing like losing an election stop Canada’s perennial rulers from resuming their rightful place as the government in Ottawa?

Don’t look now, but is Stéphane Dion about to become our prime minister?

This shift in power would be even more dramatic than Dion’s Green Shift, which went nowhere in October.

Apparently the Liberals have been making plans to bring down the Harper minority government by putting forward a motion of non-confidence in parliament to defeat the Conservatives and replace them with a coalition made up of themselves and the New Democrats, and perhaps even including the separatist Bloc Québécois.

And what is their flimsy excuse? Ontario MP John McCallum said they were seeking to replace Stephen Harper because the Conservatives failed to offer an economic stimulus package when the rest of the world had done so.

This Liberal ploy may be technically legal, but it almost amounts to a non-military coup d’état. No federal government has ever been replaced by a coalition of parties that lost an election (though it has happened provincially).

The Conservatives won a renewed mandate just seven weeks ago. They increased their numbers in the House of Commons by 19 seats, and in fact, with 143 seats, were just 12 short of obtaining a majority in the 308-seat House of Commons.

The Liberals, on the other hand, were not just defeated but trounced.

They lost 26 seats, and their share of the popular vote, at 26.2 percent, was their worst showing in over a century.

Yet now they are talking about a coalition with the NDP and maybe also the Bloc. “The three opposition parties agree on more things than they disagree upon,” one NDP MP has stated.

The Liberals and NDP would need the Bloc to be at least onside, because together the Liberals, with 77 seats, and the NDP, with 29 seats, don’t even come close to reaching the 155 seats needed for a working majority.

The Bloc holds 49 Quebec seats.

So, are we about to see our Liberal-appointed Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, ask Stéphane Dion, a man who has resigned the leadership of his own party, to form a government and become prime minister?

Or might it be Bob Rae or Michael Ignatieff, neither of whom was even running for the job in the recent election? Neither man has even been elected leader of his own party, much less of the country.

And if this coalition were to include the Bloc Québécois, might Gilles Duceppe perhaps get a cabinet position? How about something like minister of national unity?

The chutzpah of Canada’s “natural governing party” is boundless. They really do think they have a divine right to rule Canada, and clearly see Stephen Harper as merely a usurper who has gained a temporary hold on government through some kind of electoral sleight of hand.

So, should the three opposition parties defeat the government, Harper should ask the Governor General to dissolve parliament and call new elections – unpalatable and expensive as that will be. Under no circumstances should someone else be allowed to form a government without going to the country first.

Why? Because, while it is true that the opposition parties won more seats and votes on Oct. 14 than did the Conservatives, the electorate was not in full possession of the facts.

How many people across the country who voted for the Liberals or NDP might instead have voted for the Tories, had they known these parties planned an alliance with each other and, more particularly, with the Bloc? We don’t know.

Liberal voters, in particular, might not want to be in bed with either separatists or social democrats. So let’s do it right this time: let the Bloc, Liberals and NDP run under their true collective colours, and if they beat Harper, fine, they can then form a government.

And, should the Liberals and NDP join with the Bloc and manage to overthrow the newly-elected Conservative government of Canada, they will in effect be saying that they consider the separatists more legitimate, and better for Canada, than the Conservatives. Wonder what Alberta, in particular, will make of this.

Should this come to pass, the road to Canada's dismemberment will become a superhighway.

Closing Thoughts on the American Presidential Election

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Thankfully, the American election is finally over, and the good news is that Barack Obama won. But what a task he faces.

In the United States today, income for most people has stagnated while the exceptionally wealthy have been making out like bandits, some Wall Street financiers and hedge fund managers earning more than a billion dollars a year.

Forty million people are without health care, while others who get laid off from their jobs find themselves suddenly losing their health insurance. Infrastructure – roads, bridges, hospitals – is in drastic need of repair. Public education and transportation are a mess.

And Americans are fighting in a war that has taken some five thousand American lives, for no particular end – Iraq will probably be plunged into internal conflict almost as soon as they leave.

For years, Washington turned a blind eye to the shenanigans of a financial “industry” that has now led to the economy crashing down around our ears. “Deep recession” is the new euphemism for what was once called a “depression.”

Yet what we got from John McCain was hectoring about Obama’s so-called “socialism,” because he wanted to raise taxes on millionaires!

What offended many most of all was the selection of Sarah Palin for the vice-presidential position. This was an affront to anyone who values learning, education, and knowledge, and isn’t simply an anti-intellectual philistine. It was a slap in the face. She probably hasn’t read a single book since college.

African-Americans and Hispanics voted overwhelmingly for Obama, because most non-white and non-evangelical groups have begun to see the Republican Party as a “white fundamentalist” party.

McCain on November 4 won little more than the reactionary states of the old Confederacy and the thinly-populated great plains states. He lost every major state except Texas. Just about every major city and college town – the places where American industry and brainpower resides – voted for Obama.

The Republican Party has been reduced to a rabble of bigots, racists and nativists. They now resemble the so-called Know-Nothings of the 19th century.

The Know-Nothings, whose actual name was the American Party, gained traction in the United States in the 1850s. The party was organized to oppose the great wave of immigrants, mainly Catholic Irish and Italians, who had begun immigrating to the United States.

Know-Nothings claimed that the immigrants threatened to destroy the American experiment, as the new groups would be subservient to a foreign power – the Roman Catholic Church, led by the Pope in Rome.

The Know-Nothings wanted to preserve their vision of an Anglo-Saxon Protestant society. Their state and national platforms demanded that immigration be limited and that a 21-year wait be imposed before an immigrant could become a citizen and vote. They also sought to have the Protestant version of the Bible read daily in classrooms.

Since the 1980s, a once relatively secular, big-business party, centered in the northeast and Midwest, has been taken over by such small-town, rural evangelicals. People like Sarah Palin of Alaska, truly a know-nothing in every sense of the word, are the reductio ad absurdum of this politics.

In her speeches, she divided the citizens of America into “real patriotic” Americans, and others – by which she meant, like her 19th century political ancestors, non-Protestant “foreigners” and “terrorists.”

Unless the Republican Party frees itself from such people, it will be doomed to irrelevance. America becomes day by day a more diverse society. Demography is not on the side of intolerance.

Just What Does it Take to Run the Office These Days?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Most people who have actual, real jobs would find it hard to abandon their work for a couple of months, unless given an official leave of absence and being replaced temporarily by someone else.

How many teachers, lawyers, garage mechanics, barbers, insurance salespeople, and, for that matter, professors, could just take time off from work, without their disappearance having an effect on others in their workplace?

But Sarah Palin has been on the road, running as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, since August. So who’s minding the store up in Alaska? She is, after all, the governor – the chief executive officer, the CEO, of the state.

Barack Obama, John McCain and Joe Biden, are senators, members of the legislative branch, the Congress, so this question doesn’t apply to them. Indeed, Congress isn’t even in session right now.

Sure, Palin may be signing off on bills, but how different is this from Queen Elizabeth giving the royal assent to legislation passed by the British Parliament?

The fact that Palin’s absence in the state makes little difference tells us something about the dirty little secret of modern politics, especially as practiced in America today. Many political figures today are really just “fronts,” people placed on their parties’ tickets as a result of their “electability” or “persona,” and thus the recipients of large amounts of cash from donors, who in return hope for policy decisions that will favour them.

The elected officials don’t actually do the work. They are not all that different from British aristocrats who, until the practice was abolished in 1868, bought army commissions for their sons, and expected others in the military to do the actual thinking when it came to warfare.

At least Biden and Obama attended law school, while McCain was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and an officer in the Navy. Palin barely managed to obtain a BA from the University of Idaho. She seems to use the word “maverick” as a synonym for being unlettered.

It was not always this way. When Abraham Lincoln ran for president in 1860, the voters expected him to really do the job. Honest Abe didn’t have a whole staff around him for the heavy lifting.

He wrote the “Gettysburg Address” himself, and didn’t use focus groups to see if it would be well received. Today, of course, presidents have speech writers, media consultants, analysts, strategists, and hundreds of other specialists at their side.

This is why the charges of “plagiarism” levelled against a politician when someone discovers they have lifted parts of another official’s speech fall flat. After all, it’s just one ghost writer stealing from another! None of this stuff is actually written by the candidates.

Just imagine, using my own job as an example, if this were the case in other walks of life:

Competing with others for a university position, I am selected by (and only by) the “electorate,” in other words the student body, for reasons best known only to themselves. And they have absolute control of the process; none of the faculty or administrators can veto their decision.

My specialty is comparative politics, and perhaps I’m not really up to speed in my field. But that doesn’t really matter. I’ll simply hire genuine political scientists to prepare my course syllabi, write my lectures, mark exams and term papers, and do all of my scholarly research and writing, up to and including the books that I will publish. And I get all the credit.

Not a bad gig, eh? Welcome to the world of 21st century democracy, where image is all and expertise comes a distant second.

That’s why the Republican National Committee spent $150,000 on new clothes for Sarah Palin, rather than on books. Too bad -- she might have learned what the position of vice-president of the United States really entails.

Quebec Marches to Its Own Electoral Drummer

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In his column published recently in the Guardian, Richard Gwyn remarked, in commenting on the federal election, that "Quebec acted as if completely disengaged from the national political process."

The Bloc Québécois won 50 of Quebec's 75 seats last week, leaving the three major federal parties (and the Greens) in the dust. The Liberals got 13 seats, mostly around Montreal, the Conservatives 10, the NDP one, plus a single independent.

Though Stephen Harper "showered money and favours and attention on the province," Quebec's response was "to yawn." Gwyn added that, when it comes to federal politics, "Quebecers, it now seems, look exclusively at themselves."

Globe and Mail writer Jeffrey Simpson analyzed the results in the same vein. "Bloc voters obviously feel comfortable with the party," he wrote. "Some are separatists; others are not. They apparently welcome a party that wants no part of governing Canada while continuing to demand more and more from it."

The party, he observed, wants more money and jurisdictional power, plus a larger international presence, for the province. These are all "way stations to the Bloc's eventual goal of an independent Quebec."

Canada, concluded Simpson, "is no longer a country they wish to participate in governing, but one from which they wish to withdraw cash, like an automated teller machine."

Remember, the Liberal Party, which in the past had a hammerlock on Quebec, has been unable to win a majority of Quebec's 75 seats since 1980, even when led by francophone Québécois such as Jean Chrétien and Stéphane Dion. And of course the Tories have been toast since the days of Brian Mulroney.

The Bloc's strength also weakens Canada's national parties. With Gilles Duceppe winning upwards of 50 seats per election, as he did on October 14, it becomes very difficult for any other party to reach the 154 seats needed to form a majority government.

We achieved our objective, Duceppe told supporters. Without the Bloc Harper would have formed a majority government.

And this suits the Bloc just fine. It gives the party, which is in effect a Quebec nationalist lobby, more power to extract money and other goodies from those who govern in Ottawa, lest the government fall.

So guess what, mes amis. While you've all been monitoring the state of the Quebec sovereignty movement, wondering whether it remains a viable option for francophones, the game is practically over.

This is the sixth election since 1993 where the majority of francophone votes and seats in Quebec have gone to the Bloc Québécois. This can't be written off as a series of "accidents" or "sour grapes," with the Bloc simply taking advantage of miscues by the leaders of the other parties.

Quebec is already a "nation within a state." Even the provincial government of Jean Charest, nominally Liberal, acts like a national government, making demands on Ottawa little different from those of the separatist Parti Québécois.

Becoming independent one day will for Quebec be little more than a formality. Most people, either there or in the rest of Canada, will hardly notice the difference.

McCain Carrying a Load of Ethical Baggage

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

If Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin can spout silly nonsense about Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, it’s only fair that Obama in return should hammer away at another piece of history, the ‘Keating Five’ scandal of the late 1980s.

In recent campaign speeches, Palin has criticized Obama’s association with Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground, a 1960s radical offshoot of the New Left student movement that engaged in a number of bombings at the time.

Palin said that Obama sees America as so imperfect “that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

But Obama, who was all of eight years old when these crimes were committed, barely knows Ayers, who is today a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Both have been involved with school reform in Chicago and were members of the board of an anti-poverty group, the Woods Fund, between 1999 and 2002.

In fact, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has declared that he, too, has worked with Ayers. “I don’t condone what he did 40 years ago but I remember that period well. It was a difficult time, but those days are long over.”

Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago Democratic Congressman, warned that “If we are going to go down this road,” he would remind voters that, two decades ago, “John McCain was associating with Charles Keating.”

During the 1980s, Senator McCain received $112,000, and free vacations for his family, from Charles Keating, the head of Lincoln Savings & Loan. Such savings and loan banks had been deregulated in the early 1980s, allowing them to make highly risky investments with their depositors’ money. Keating took advantage of this change.

McCain, a personal friend of Keating’s, voted repeatedly against congressional efforts to tighten regulation of savings and loans, and in 1987, when he learned that Keating’s bank was the target of a federal investigation, McCain met with regulators in an effort to get them to back off.

Keating ended up defrauding his customers and when his bank collapsed in 1989, some 23,000 people were victimized and many lost their life savings, largely because they now held securities issued by another Keating-owned company, American Continental Corporation, which had declared bankruptcy, rather than federally insured bank deposits.

Keating went to prison, and the Senate Ethics Committee reprimanded McCain for “poor judgment.” (Four other U.S. senators were also involved; they became known collectively as the “Keating Five.”)

William Black, who was a deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation at the time, indicated that McCain’s chief error was in underestimating the importance of regulation and relying too heavily on slanted advice from bankers and lobbyists.

Black, now an associate professor of law and economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, added that McCain’s campaign still remains heavily influenced by lobbyists working in his campaign.

When it comes to the economy, the so-called maverick John McCain, who bragged until recently that he was fundamentally a deregulator, is part of the problem, not the solution.

The Economic Chickens Come Home to Roost

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

U.S. President George Bush last week appealed to the nation to support a US$700 billion rescue for the nation’s financial system in order to avert a credit market collapse.

After much wrangling, Congress has acceded to his demand, lest the economy fail.

The bill authorizes government intervention to buy distressed debt – mortgage-based securities and other assets – from private firms currently stuck with them, with the tab picked up mainly by the taxpayers.

Legislators did put in place some safeguards, including close supervision of the program by an oversight board and the creation of a privately funded insurance program for mortgage-backed securities. They also limited compensation to executives of corporations that would be covered by the rescue plan and allowed for more help to homeowners facing foreclosure.

A part of me hoped the U.S. Congress would refuse to bail out the fat cats on Wall Street and let them go under. I realize that, unfortunately, many innocent victims of their greed would go down with them, but it’s the price Americans would have to pay for allowing their leaders to condone such legalized robbery.

To use an expression beloved by some, “short term pain for long term gain.”

America has been living beyond its means for years. George Bush went to war and – incredibly – lowered taxes on the rich. He told Americans they could show their patriotism by “going shopping.”

Don’t blame only Bush. The Clinton administration was just as culpable.

Since the late 1990s, the personal savings rate in the U.S. has plunged to almost zero from 3 per cent of income, according to research by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors Inc. Credit card debt is up 80 per cent.

In 1999, mortgage giant Fannie Mae came under increasing pressure from Bill Clinton to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people, and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits. And so the so-called sub-prime mortgage market, now at the root of the financial crisis, grew until it became a giant house of cards.

The current crisis was not caused by greedy executives breaking laws.

What they did was perfectly legal. It resulted from increasingly lax government regulation.

In 2004, for instance, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the agency with primary responsibility for regulating the securities industry and stock market, loosened the rules governing the amount of debt major investment banks could assume in their trading activities.

The Wall Street financiers have been allowed to in effect “print” money at a pace counterfeiters can only dream of. Read this and weep:

*In 2007, the CEO of a Standard & Poor’s 500 company received, on average, $14.2 million in total compensation, according to the Corporate Library, a corporate governance research firm.

*Lehman Brothers chairman Richard Fuld Jr. made $34 million in 2007; the firm went bankrupt a few weeks ago.

*Insurance giant American International Group’s Martin Sullivan got a $14 million compensation package in 2007; the insolvent company has now received $85 billion in a federal bailout.

*Stock brokerage Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain was paid $17 million in salary, bonuses and stock options in 2007; his company too has ceased to exist.

*Washington Mutual, the country’s largest savings and loan bank, nearing collapse, was seized by federal regulators last week. Its new chief executive, Alan H. Fishman, who has been on the job for less than three weeks, is eligible for $11.6 million in cash severance and will get to keep his $7.5 million signing bonus, according to an analysis by James F. Reda and Associates.

There are many more such stories; these figures come from the filings made by these companies to the SEC. No one could possibly be worth the obscene amounts paid to these people – even if they hadn’t run their companies into the ground.

Since there really is a finite national economic pie, this left less on the plate for others, including minimum wage workers who can’t afford a doctor for their sick children.

And more than a million people have lost their homes through foreclosure in the last two years, among the other consequences of this debacle.

A financial crash, like a lost war would have provided a salutary lesson, a form of “tough love.” Now, within a few years we’ll just be back to business as usual as people forget the lessons learned from this mess.

Americans failed to elect the kind of politicians who might have prevented this. They will now have to learn to live with the consequences

Crisis in the American Financial System

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Since the Reagan years of the 1980s, the American financial system has been allowed to operate virtually unchecked by elected officials.

“Government” and “bureaucrats” became the objects of derision, especially on the part of Republicans, while the “Masters of the Universe,” Wall Street investment bankers and financiers, went about their business: the business, not of producing things, but of making money, and tons of it.

During the same period, the economic condition of middle and working class Americans deteriorated, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Unions were weakened, more and more full-time manufacturing jobs were “outsourced” to low-wage countries overseas, and replaced by minimum-wage service jobs.

The gap between the very rich and everyone else grew. Three decades ago, notes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, heads of major American corporations typically earned between 30 and 40 times the income of ordinary workers. Last year such CEOs averaged 344 times the average pay of workers.

The now disgraced head of Lehman Brothers, the venerable 158-year-old Wall Street firm that went bankrupt last week, took home nearly half a billion dollars in total compensation between 1993 and 2007. That’s not a typo – half a billion!

Both political parties allowed, indeed even encouraged this. You think Bill Clinton provided more oversight than George W. Bush has? Think again. His daughter Chelsea works, not for a company that produces something with use value – say, cars, or paper clips, or shoes – but for a hedge fund.

(Here’s Wikipedia’s very simple definition of a hedge fund: “a private investment fund, having a largely unregulated pool of capital, whose managers can buy or sell any assets, make speculative trades on falling as well as rising assets, and participate substantially in profits from money invested.”) Because a hedge fund markets to accredited investors only, it is free from direct regulation. These are, so to speak, exclusive clubs.

So the fact that Chelsea Clinton was hired as an “analyst” at Avenue Capital Group, a US$12 billion hedge fund, rather than as an executive at, say, Acme Widget or the Jones Shoe Manufacturing Corp., should tell you something. In fact, Wall Street traders were among the biggest donors to Bill Clinton’s campaigns, and to his wife Hillary’s, as well.

Don’t place all the blame on Bush.

Hedge funds, derivatives, leveraged buying and selling, sub-prime mortgages – all forms of financial sleight of hand, really – grew by leaps and bounds, until they all became part of a giant house of cards, in effect pyramid schemes destined, as sure as down follows up, to eventually collapse.

Now has come the reckoning. The U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve are now pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial system to rescue companies such as insurance giant AIG from insolvency.

Many more dominoes may fall. The administration is preparing a massive intervention to revive the financial system, including a plan to sweep away the unpaid loans that are choking banks and blocking the flow of money to borrowers. It involves using hundreds of billions of dollars in government funding to buy up bad loans.

And who will, in the end pay for all this? Not the CEOs who walked away with billions of dollars. It’ll be the taxpayers, including people making US$16,000 a year at gas stations or supermarkets, who typically don’t even have any health insurance. They will in effect be bailing out the multi-millionaires.

This has been “Hurricane Wall Street,” and it will have as detrimental an effect on John McCain’s presidential campaign as Hurricane Katrina did in 2005 on George Bush’s legacy, which has never recovered from the disaster in New Orleans.

These economic woes should certainly help Barack Obama to victory in November. Rightly or otherwise, the Wall Street mess is blamed squarely on the Republicans.

And since this economic crisis isn’t going away anytime soon, no one wants the 72 year old McCain in office lest he moves on to the hereafter and Americans wake up to find themselves governed by the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin – who got her first passport in 2006 and had never been overseas until last year.

Obama and the Clintons: A Convention Hijacking

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The Democratic Party's Denver convention is over - and it was hijacked by the Clintons. So if you want to know why Barack Obama might, against all logic, lose the November presidential election to John McCain, look no further than the former "first couple."

Two of the convention's four evenings were ceded to Bill and Hillary - each gave a speech on prime-time television. Talk of appeasement - Neville Chamberlain couldn't have choreographed it better. Never before have the losers in a primary contest had such exposure.

Of course Hillary Clinton in her speech to the assembled delegates said all the right things: Obama is the party's candidate and everyone should unite around him. That's a dog bites man story.

However, she made sure to remind them that "18 million people voted for me, 18 million people, give or take, voted for Barack." According to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, "She keeps acting as if her delegates are out of her control, when she's been privately egging on people to keep her dream alive as long as possible, no matter what the cost to Obama."

Remarked Dowd, "Hillary looked as if she were straining at the bit to announce her 2012 exploratory committee."

While Hillary Clinton is in the midst of a "catharsis," according to her confidantes, her husband remains bitter about Obama's portrayal of his political tactics as having been tinged by racism.

"He was particularly upset about the race card deal," contended historian Taylor Branch, who has written a number of books about the American civil rights movement.

"There is still work to do on the Bill Clinton front," stated Howard Wolfson, Ms. Clinton's former communications director. "He feels like the Obama campaign ran against and systematically dismissed his administration's accomplishments."

Earlier this summer, Obama was blindsided from an unexpected direction - the liberal New Yorker magazine. Its July 21 cover featured Obama in Muslim garb, alongside wife Michelle sporting a large Afro and carrying an AK-47 machine gun - clearly meant to portray her as a Black Panther style radical terrorist.

The New Yorker claimed it was satirizing rumours about Obama, such as that he's a Muslim and anti-American. But if this cartoon was meant to ridicule such misconceptions it fell flat, and could only hurt Obama.

One has to wonder: Given the Clintons' clout with the New York literati, could they have had a hand in this? The New Yorker, after all, is not part of that famous "vast right wing conspiracy" they used to talk about, but rather a magazine one would have expected to be in Obama's camp. And it was strange to see the magazine playing upon Americans' fears of Islam.

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that only 42 per cent of former Clinton voters classify themselves as "solidly behind" Obama, and 20 per cent plan to vote for McCain.

Many of these voters are women, and now that McCain has picked Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, that number is sure to grow.

The Clintons would love to see Obama lose this election, so they could have another shot at the White House in 2012. They will do "whatever it takes" to achieve that - behind the scenes, of course.

Obama has come a long way, but as long as he remains in the Clintons' shadow, he may yet not make it to the finish line.

A Tale of Goose and Gander

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

So, we’re suddenly confronted with another war in the Caucasus -- not over Chechnya this time, but rather South Ossetia, a place few Canadians have ever heard of.

Russia is now fighting on behalf of, rather than against, a region seeking to secede from another country.

Last week, Russian troops crossed their border into South Ossetia, which technically belongs to a former Soviet Republic, Georgia. Russian-supported separatists in another breakaway region of Georgia, Abkhazia, have also targeted Georgian troops by launching air and artillery strikes to drive them out.

What is this all about? It’s probably best to see it as the continuing “slow-motion” unraveling of that faux Communist federation, the old Soviet Union.

When the USSR collapsed in 1992, full-fledged so-called “union republics,” such as Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine – and Georgia – were quickly recognized by the international community as being entitled to nationhood, and became sovereign entities, with UN seats, embassies in foreign countries, and all the other accouterments of statehood.

The same thing occurred in the other multi-national Communist federation, Yugoslavia, where Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, even Bosnia-Herzegovina (a hodge-podge that was hardly a candidate for independence), all attained sovereignty.

Because of the vagaries of history, though, ethnically homogeneous units such as Albanian Kosovo (part of Serbia), Chechnya (part of Russia proper) and South Ossetia (part of Georgia) were merely “autonomous regions” or “autonomous republics.”

But this was all just Communist claptrap. These territories had simply been “tacked on” to the larger units for the sake of political convenience.

Not surprisingly, when the Communist empires collapsed, Kosovars, Chechens, Ossetians, Abkhazians, and many other peoples, quite understandably also wanted to exercise their right to slf-determination.

Yet the same nations that had just acquired their freedoms refused to grant it to others. Hence the wars of the Soviet and Yugoslav successions.

The 70,000 people in South Ossetia are overwhelmingly ethnic Ossetians, related to the people in North Ossetia (across the border in the Russian Federation). Like the Kosovar Albanians, they have demonstrated their desire to be free of foreign control.

In two referenda held in the territory in 1992 and 2006, they voted overwhelmingly to secede from Georgia. They broke away from the Tbilisi-based Georgian government during a bloody 1991-1992 conflict that killed more than 1,000 people. They have been a self-governing entity for almost two decades, yet remain a de facto state not recognized by the international community.

Ottawa and Washington were quick to blame Russia for the violence, though it remains unclear whether Moscow was in fact responding to a Georgian attempt to reclaim South Ossetia by force.

“We call on Russia to cease attacks on Georgia by aircraft and missiles, respect Georgia’s territorial integrity, and withdraw its ground combat forces from Georgian soil,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a statement. The European Union and NATO also called for a halt to hostilities.

But “who started it” is not the point here. The Ossetians do not want to be ruled from Tbilisi, any more than the Albanians in Kosovo wanted to be governed from Belgrade.

Interesting, isn’t it, that the U.S., in a case of “diplomatic amnesia,” has seen fit to ignore the obvious parallels between Kosovo in 1999 and South Ossetia today. The Russians have not.

Earlier this year, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, warned Rice that if the U.S. recognized Kosovo, they would be setting a precedent for South Ossetia and other breakaway provinces.

Yet American commentators see only Russian aggression. Robert Kagan in the Washington Post suggested that “Putin cares no more about a few thousand South Ossetians than he does about Kosovo's Serbs. Claims of pan-Slavic sympathy are pretexts designed to fan Russian great-power
nationalism at home and to expand Russia's power abroad.”

How do we know that? How quickly the discourse of the Cold War reasserts itself!

What if I wrote this in 1999: “Bill Clinton cares no more about a few thousand Kosovar Albanians than he does about Iraqi Kurds. Claims of pro-democratic sympathy are pretexts designed to fan American great-power nationalism at home and to expand America's power abroad.”

After all, if “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity” are such important principles to Canada, the United States, and other western countries, why then did they wrest Kosovo away from Serbia nine years ago and recognize Kosovo's independence earlier this year? Or is sauce for the NATO goose different than sauce for the Russian gander?

Barack and Bill: Not a Good Match

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Now that the American general election campaign is underway, Barack Obama has begun making overtures to Bill as well as to Hillary Clinton. At the end of June, Obama spoke to the former president, asking Bill to campaign with him this fall. They also discussed making a public appearance together later this month.

Obama has told his advisers that he is eager to bury any animosity and seek advice from Clinton.

“Senator Obama had a terrific conversation with President Clinton and is honored to have his support in this campaign,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton told the Washington Post.

“He has always believed that Bill Clinton is one of this nation’s great leaders and most brilliant minds, and looks forward to seeing him on the campaign trail and receiving his counsel in the months to come.”

Actually, Obama would be wise to keep as far away from the former president as possible.

In recent years, Americans have begun to treat past presidents like retired grandees – allowing them to build mausoleums (“presidential libraries”) as monuments to themselves, as Egyptian pharaohs once did, referring to them by the honorific “president,” as if they were still in office, and so forth.

But the trade-off was that these ex-presidents would become “elder statesmen” who did not get involved in partisan politics.

Bill Clinton this past spring broke all these unwritten rules by engaging in a vicious political war against Obama. He has also been involved in all sorts of questionable business practices since leaving the White House. He is in effect the first *former* “former president.”

In any case, Obama’s attempts to mend fences have so far been unreciprocated. According to the London Telegraph, a senior Democrat who worked for Clinton has revealed that the forty-second president recently told friends that Obama could “kiss my [posterior]” in return for his support.

“You can't talk like that about Obama,” added the source. “He’s the nominee of your party, not some house boy you can order around.”

A second source said that Clinton still does not believe Obama can win the election. “He is telling people he doesn’t believe Obama can win round voting groups, especially working-class whites, in the swing states,” remarked this strategist.

As well, many black Democratic members of Congress with large African-American constituencies who supported Hillary Clinton rather than Obama during the primaries now face anger from their supporters. Though the two former rivals have begun to put their divisions behind them, some strains remain evident. As for Bill Clinton, many blacks still accuse him of having played the “race card” against Obama on behalf of Hillary and are not at all ready to forgive him.

Maybe Obama needs to mend fences with Hillary, who still commands a large following, especially among women, but he should definitely stay away from Bill.

How Would Clinton Fit on the Vice-Presidential Ticket?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Barack Obama has finally bested Hillary Clinton for the nomination of the Democratic Party. But no sooner had he won than her supporters began a campaign, on the internet, in newspapers, and on television, to force her onto the ticket as the vice-presidential nominee.

Right to the end, Clinton maintained that she, not Obama, deserved to win – she claimed she had more of the popular vote and had won most of the primaries in major states, including California, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

Indeed, earlier in the campaign, she had suggested that Obama become her running mate.

So why, despite the animosity between the two rivals during the long, drawn-out primary campaign, might Clinton accept the second spot?

Because it’s a win-win situation.

Obama, by allowing the party bosses to place her on the ticket, would show himself to be a weak person amenable to pressure.

If he managed to win the election, due in large part because of Clinton’s support from women, blue-collar whites, and others -- people who would otherwise not vote for Obama -- then she, not to mention former president Bill Clinton, would be in the driver’s seat.

The Clintons would be dictating policy from the vice-presidential mansion, much as Dick Cheney did with George W. Bush. And Bill Clinton’s rather questionable business dealings since 2001 would erode Obama’s squeaky-clean image and slogan of change.

It would become untenable. As commentator Chris Matthews observed on MSNBC, you can’t have three presidents in the White House.

If Obama lost, it would be because the millions of people who thought he represented change would sit home or even, to prevent a “third Clinton term,” cast their ballot for John McCain. So much of Obama’s vote would actually come from Hillary’s base.

She’d be able to say to the party, “had you reversed this, and selected me as the nominee, we would have won.” Obama, having lost the election, would disappear from the scene, the party would again be in the hands of the Clintons and their entourage – insiders like Harold Ickes and Terry McAuliffe -- and Hillary Clinton would make another run for the nomination in 2012.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have decided to portray Obama’s spouse Michelle as an angry and unpatriotic black woman. She has been referred to as Barack Obama’s “baby mama,” a colloquial term for an unwed mother (which of course she is not).

The Democrats seem to be retaliating by painting Cindy McCain as a woman with a troubled past, including drug use.

With the U.S. still mired in a war in Iraq and the economy in a terrible state, is this really what the election will be about? I hope all those who were so dedicated to Hillary Clinton, and angry at any instances of sexism against her, will come to the defence of these two women as well.

Will gender rivalries impact institution of marriage?

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Given the “gender nationalism” that was unleashed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency of the United States, is the battle between the sexes becoming literal?

Women’s groups such as Emily’s List, the National Organization for Women, and the Women Count Political Action Committee(WCPAC) provided unconditional and uncritical support for Clinton, held rallies on her behalf, reviled women who supported other candidates as “traitors,” and considered any criticism of Clinton as being motivated by misogyny and sexism.

From Chaviva Hosek, Michele Landsberg and Judy Rebick in Canada, and Betty Friedan, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Gloria Steinem in the US, Jewish women have had a very high profile in the modern women’s movement, as theoreticians and activists. Clinton was supported by political strategists such as Ann Lewis, her senior campaign advisor.

Clearly, feminism, which has now become a political movement in America and Canada, has produced a paradigm shift in our society. Has the primary conflict become that of gender, as opposed to class, ethnicity, religion, or any other division?

I used to think there would be a “self-correcting mechanism” that would not allow animosities between men and women to go beyond a certain point. True, relations between the sexes have always been problematic and fraught with a kind of danger: After all, romance and love may involve rejection and humiliation of a particularly intimate and psychologically damaging sort, which oftentimes has resulted in negative feelings towards the opposite sex. This has been the stuff of novels and poems from time immemorial.

Still, most men and women have always somehow managed to accommodate and show concern for each other. After all, racial, ethnic or even religious groups can live in physically segregated and homogenous territories, up to and including sovereign states, should it prove necessary, but most men and women inhabit households that usually include partners of the other sex, may have both male and female children, and have parents and other relatives of both genders.

This, I thought, made it impossible to carry gender hostility to the levels we have seen among rival ethnicities, nationalities or religions throughout history.

To belabour the obvious, Gentiles don’t have to care about the fate of Jews, Serbs about Croats, Hindus about Muslims, or whites about Blacks. Callousness and indifference do not have an immediate and personal impact. Those who harbour particularly deep prejudices and hostilities can avoid, if they wish, most personal ties with the objects of their hatred or bigotry. But such separatism has been almost “biologically” impossible between men and women.

Nowadays all that seems to be changing, and a lot of male-female relations are beginning to feel like religious or ethnic intermarriage, in which larger group divisions can overwhelm what might otherwise be a harmonious alliance between two individuals.

Social scientists tell us that our identities are socially constructed – even if they do sometimes build upon physical traits such as skin colour or sex. Religions, ethnicities and cultures are the products of human development, not “natural” phenomena. And they only too often acquire significance when they become markers by which people segregate themselves into competing groups.

For example, Catholics married to Protestants do not face personal dilemmas if they live in a society where religion is not a salient political issue – say, in secular and liberal countries such as Canada or the United States – or where both their respective faiths are marginal – Hindu India or Muslim Iran, for instance.

But their religious background would remain a constant problem and have an immense impact on their lives in Northern Ireland, where members of their two faiths form antagonistic communities and vie for political power.

In the same way, a Jew and an Arab would have an easier time of it as a married couple in Arizona than in either Israel or Iraq, and a Black married to a white might prefer Indonesia to Zimbabwe. All of this is surely self-evident.

But gender is now forming an ideological and political fault line and is becoming a socially significant means of differentiating between people; it is thus assuming a role not that dissimilar to those historically occupied by ethnicity, language, culture and religion.
If men and women will indeed come to see each other primarily in terms of conflict, as contenders for jobs, power, position and status in society, then, with increasing frequency, heterosexual relationships may in the future face strains similar to those that used to be confined to unions that crossed ethnic or racial or religious lines.

And a very large percentage of marriages may become subject to the types of stresses previously confined to intermarriage. (Statistics Canada tells us that almost 40 per cent of marriages in this country now end in divorce.)

Perhaps there’s a material basis for this change in society. Men and women in our society simply don’t need each other as much as they once did. Women can work, and they don’t need men to provide for them. And advanced technology makes even the most basic reason for male-female cohabitation – reproduction – unnecessary.

Most members of historically antagonistic ethnic groups have always understood that it is prudent to avoid intimate relations with people from the opposing camp. That way lies grief. Are men and women now moving in the same direction? This will not be good for anyone, including Jews.

Discourse and the end of the Clinton campaign

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Hillary Clinton has finally left the building — and, though her loyal followers would disagree, none too soon.

Only now can the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, Barack Obama, begin challenging John McCain for the presidency.

Clinton’s campaign hit so many low points it’s hard to remember them all.

For the past 30 years, academics have led the way in changing the very way we talk. They have taught us that words have consequences, that our very discourse can insult and marginalize people.

This is why we now speak of ‘flight attendants’ rather than ‘stewardesses’, and ‘police officers’ instead of ‘policemen’. We are careful not to use terminology that reinforces sexism, racism, and homophobia.

So why, pray tell, did the Clinton campaign get a free pass when derogatory language rarely heard outside back rooms was used publicly by her surrogates in this election?

Clinton operative James Carville called New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson a “Judas” back in March, on Good Friday no less, for switching his support from Clinton to Barack Obama. As the man who, according to the Gospels, betrayed Jesus Christ to the Romans, Judas has been vilified for centuries by those propagating anti-Semitism and religious Judaeophobia.

In late April, Governor Mike Easley of North Carolina, during that state’s primary campaign, said Hillary Clinton “makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy.” This is a nasty epithet often hurled by homophobes at gays.

Paul Gipson, president of a steelworkers local in Indiana, admired her “testicular fortitude” (as opposed to Barack Obama’s) as that campaign heated up during the same period.

Male chauvinists have made use of this and similar terms in their representations of women as being ‘weak’ and therefore ‘unfit’ for the serious, tough work of running companies — or countries. Was Clinton trying to show she was really ‘one of the guys’?

In none of these cases did the Clinton campaign apologize for such statements.

Hillary Clinton began this race with a political machine that was unequalled by any of her competitors. “She had virtually exclusive access to the chequebooks in the Democratic fundraising pool,” noted Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson.

“Her web of connections, oaths of fealty and debts owed spread throughout the Democratic Party, which she viewed as an extended family.”

In various national polls, Clinton was running ahead of Obama by at least 20 to 35 per cent as late as the fall of 2007.

As well, women’s groups such as Emily’s List, the National Organization for Women, and the Women Count Political Action Committee (WCPAC) provided unconditional and uncritical support for Clinton, held rallies on her behalf, reviled women who supported other candidates as “traitors,” and considered any criticism of Clinton as being motivated by misogyny and chauvinism.

Such ‘gender nationalism’ also provided her with advantages over Obama.

Women make up more than half the American population, blacks about 13.5 per cent.

Yet not only was Hillary Clinton not ready to be president on “day one,” it turned out that, despite her immense early lead over Obama in name recognition, money, and support from the party establishment, she wasn’t even ready to beat a rookie senator whom she initially dismissed as just another bump on the road to victory.

She now blames sexism for her loss. No doubt it was a factor, but it’s mainly hubris that did her in.

Clintons’ shady dealings have taken the shine off
Two-for-One Deal, Part 2

By HENRY SREBRNIK, for the [Halifax, Nova Scotia] Chronicle-Herald

http://thechronicleherald.ca/Letters/1057351.html

Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is hugged by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, as he introduces her during a campaign rally in Louisville, Ky. on Monday. Many Democrats are uneasy with the prospect of a second Clinton presidency. (Elise Amendola / AP)

BARACK OBAMA has again become the favourite to win the Democratic Party nomination – and that’s a good thing.

Because even when Hillary Clinton was beating Obama in primaries in states like Indiana, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, super-delegates continued to move towards him, many stating they didn’t like Clinton’s "negative" campaign.

This may have been their way of saying "we know the Clintons better than the public does, and we know what unethical operators they are."

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Often, when the well-known head of an institution – say, a CEO of a corporation, a president of a university, or a leader of a political party – leaves, the people on "the street" remember the "positive" things they have accomplished, but those working close to them may be glad to see a domineering, autocratic, aggressive boss depart.

As well, some Democrats were uncomfortable with the idea of having another Clinton in the White House, eight years after the previous one – who would himself be returning to the executive mansion as a spouse – left office.

Would this couple not in effect be circumventing the 22nd amendment to the U.S. constitution, which forbids more than two terms to a president?

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he and Hillary said people were getting a "two-for-one" deal.

Indeed, one could make the case that she was as much in charge as he was. Bill was useful to her, the advance guard, so to speak, for her own ambitions.

Now we would have seen the reverse. Bill would, at the very least, have been helping to formulate policy – and with no official legal standing, he would be far harder to control by the other branches of government. The system of checks and balances would not apply to him.

The former president has been involved in business dealings with shady characters around the globe, including government leaders, from Colombia and China to Kazakhstan and Dubai.

Would it be appropriate for the spouse of a sitting president to be in business with the leaders of foreign countries? Would some of these people have attempted to buy favours from Hillary through Bill?

Bill Clinton established the William J. Clinton Foundation in 1997 and it has raised $500 million since then, most of which has been spent on his presidential library in Arkansas. Donations soared to $135 million in 2006 alone, much of it from unsavoury foreign sources. Clinton has said he won’t violate the "privacy" of donors by disclosing their names.

An article by Greg Gordon that ran in the Miami Herald and other McClatchy newspapers on May 9 reported that special interests have paid millions of dollars to Bill Clinton for speeches and other work since he left the White House. "The ex-president has been crisscrossing the globe, speaking roughly 250 times on tours that brought him more than $40 million in six years."

By drawing on her husband’s earnings, Hillary Clinton was enabling sponsors, who have paid as much as $450,000 to hear Bill speak, to "funnel their funds through the Bill Clinton front," according to Lawrence Jacobs, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance.

"It’s an ingenious method for fundraising" that bypasses campaign finance rules and the limits placed on those contributions, he added.

Clinton also granted some 140 last-minute pardons as he left office in 2000. In fact, Hillary Clinton’s brothers, Tony and Hugh Rodham, had lobbied the president on behalf of criminals who then received presidential pardons or a sentence commutation from Bill.

Even Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, a Clinton ally throughout the 1990s, called the pardons a "betrayal" and "contemptuous." Were there some quid pro quos involved?

These are important questions that were never adequately addressed.

In the latter days of her campaign, Hillary Clinton had adopted a populist stance, attacking the oil-producing nations and the energy industry as being responsible for the high price of gasoline.

Yet while she railed against the OPEC cartel, her husband was getting donations for his library from many Middle Eastern tycoons.

No wonder many voters couldn’t really believe anything she said.

The Delayed Reaction to the Holocaust

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Rafael Medoff’s article in the Jewish Tribune of April 24, on the impact of Robert Morse’s 1968 book, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, was a timely reminder of the indifference displayed even by the United States towards Jews trapped in Hitler’s Europe during World War II.

As we well know, the same held true for Canada, as documented by Irving Abella and Harold Troper in their 1982 book None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948.

It took a long time even for Jews to come to terms with the enormity of the crime against our people. As Franklin Bialystok has recounted in his book Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community, published in 2000, few in Canada spoke about the genocide at first.

Indeed, before the 1967 Six-Day War, Holocaust memorial commemorations were confined mostly to survivors themselves.

I recall running across, by mere chance, Raul Hilberg’s massive study The Destruction of the European Jews, in the McGill University library stacks, in 1966. It had been published, after much difficulty, in 1961, by a minor American press, after many others had rejected it. I had never even heard of the book. In those days, McGill did not offer a single course in Jewish Studies.

Amazing as it may seem to us today, the two major Jewish advocacy organizations working as one in the Jewish Community Relations Committee – B’nai Brith Canada and the Canadian Jewish Congress – displayed little interest immediately after the war.

Following the end of hostilities, once the scale of the Holocaust had become apparent, a National Jewish Black Book Committee had been formed. It was a joint venture of the American Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists and Scientists in the U.S.; the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the Soviet Union; the Vaad Leumi, the Jewish National Council of Palestine; and the World Jewish Congress.

The committee gathered a stellar group of sponsors: Albert Einstein was honorary chairman, the journalist B. Z. Goldberg the chairman, and novelist Sholem Asch the president.

Also involved were academics, artists and writers like Eddie Cantor, Morris Carnovsky, Marc Chagall, Thomas Mann, Dr. Raphael Mahler, Yehudi Menuhin, Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson and Maurice Schwartz; and Jewish public servants and Zionist leaders such as Nahum Goldmann and Rabbi Stephen Wise.

The committee in 1946 published, in New York, The Black Book: The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People, one of the earliest works documenting the enormity of the Nazi genocide. Yet the book went almost unnoticed in Canada.

Valia Hirsch, the executive secretary of the committee, voiced her concerns that no meetings had been held in the Jewish communities of Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, or Hamilton, to bring it to the attention to the Jewish community.

The Canadian Jewish Congress had ordered 100 copies of the book in the summer of 1946, but had never bothered, according to Hirsch, to obtain them from Canada Customs. The CJC indicated a year later that they were no longer interested and “cannot use them.”

Some Canadian Jews even remarked that enough had already been written.

Nathan Cohen, who would go on to become a major literary critic and television personality in Canada, in May of 1946 suggested that while the “incalculable cruelty” of the Nazi mass murders should be fully treated, “it is equally important that we should stress the rehabilitation of European Jewry” and the “healthy and constructive life of Jews in other countries.”

The CJC’s reticence was probably politically motivated. The problem for them, as the Cold War intensified, was that pro-Soviet Jews were the main force behind this book. After all, most of the Holocaust had taken place in what had become the east European “people’s republics” or the Soviet Union itself, so they had access to the sources and could make use of them for pro-Soviet ends.

Thankfully, things are different now. No longer are Jews divided by ideology when it comes to memorializing the six million who were murdered.

Indiana and North Carolina Vote . . . What Next?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

The Indiana and North Carolina primaries take place today.

Hillary Clinton has proven remarkably successful in her “shape-shifting” during this long campaign, acting hurt one day, being tough another.

She was sniffling the night before the New Hampshire primary back in February, then turned into a barroom street-brawler, daring Barack Obama to come out and fight, before the Indiana and North Carolina contests.

MSNBC carried North Carolina Governor Mike Easley’s endorsement of Clinton a few days before the primary. He admired her for being so “determined” that she made “Rocky Balboa look like a pansy.” (Are homophobic remarks acceptable among North Carolina Democrats?)

A day later, the president of a steelworkers union local, when introducing Clinton at a rally in Indiana, said the nation needed a leader “that has testicular fortitude.”

To demonstrate how hawkish she is on foreign policy, Clinton had told ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America.” on April 22 that she would be prepared to “totally obliterate” Iran with nuclear weapons if necessary – a statement that Iran has formally complained about at the UN.

Clinton is benefitting, whether she set out to do so intentionally or not, from the support of two groups that loom large in this election.

First, women. While most of them are enthused by the idea of finally being able to vote for a fellow female, some, having been the victims of emotional, physical or career-related slights from men, are vicariously “getting back” at them by voting for Clinton.

Clinton’s differences on policy with Obama are irrelevant. They don’t care what she says, as long as she doesn’t have a Y chromosome. For them, simply put, “it’s our turn.”

We heard not a word of protest about Clinton’s threat to Iran from the most influential women’s group in America, the National Organization for Women, which would have been outraged had a male “warmonger” Republican made such a statement.

Secondly, lower-income, poorly-educated whites (of both genders), in many cases outright racists. Remember the 1970s TV show “All in the Family?” We can call these the Edith and Archie Bunker voters.

In the 29 caucuses and primaries held before May 6, Clinton got more votes than Obama among white working-class voters, those making less than $50,000US a year, in all but four.

America remains a more racist than sexist society. The idealistic intellectual has been “ghettoized” in their minds as just another Black candidate.

“Racism is deep in the culture of this country,” said Roger Wilkins, a prominent Black author to the New York Times. “I’m surprised that it took the Wright business to put it out on the table.”

He was referring to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Black minister accused of making incendiary remarks about America. Obama was a member of his church for two decades.

But it was the Clintons who put racial politics back on the table. They may not be racists, but they opportunistically know how to benefit from it.

Here’s an apt comparison: Hitler was an ideological anti-Semite, pure and simple; Stalin used anti-Semitism when it helped him, and didn’t when it wasn’t necessary.

The Clintons have opened deep wounds within the Democratic Party which will take years to heal.

And Hillary Clinton’s constant 180 degree turns may yet exact a toll, should she end up as the nominee. Perhaps not too many people recall that she declared herself “absolutely honored” to be on the same stage as Obama at the end of their Austin, Texas debate back on Feb. 21.

Clinton’s Republican opponents, though, have longer memories than most voters. Should she emerge as the nominee, you can be sure that John McCain’s team will be showing clips of her love-in with Obama in their attack ads.

Hillary wins Pennsylvania - but why?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama by a 10 per cent margin in the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, even though he outspent her massively in the state. Why?

An exit poll conducted at 40 precincts across Pennsylvania for the Associated Press on election day found 16 per cent of white voters said that race mattered in deciding whom they voted for, and just 54 per cent of those voters would support Obama in a general election were he the nominee.

In fact, 27 per cent of them said that in that case they would vote for John McCain, while 16 per cent said they would not vote at all.

It's also interesting to note that barely more than a third of Clinton voters in Pennsylvania said they would be happy with Obama atop the Democratic ticket, whereas more than half of those backing Obama said they would be satisfied with Clinton as the nominee.

This is another sign that racism trumps chauvinism and misogyny in this race. Much of this contest has had nothing to do with "message" or "personality"- it is simply the colour of Obama's skin.

Since almost all African Americans in Pennsylvania voted for Obama - he won black-majority Philadelphia 65-35 per cent - and two-thirds of white women supported Clinton, the 'swing' vote that decided the race came down to white men, who went strongly for Clinton.

Clinton did particularly well among rural whites, traditionally less receptive to black politicians. She also got 70 per cent of whites who never went to college and 72 per cent of Catholics, many of whom are blue-collar workers of Irish, Italian and east European descent.

These are all people who have competed with African-Americans for jobs and housing in the big cities and sometimes see them as rivals.

Of course there are many reasons why all these groups might prefer Clinton to Obama apart from ethnic and gender issues. But in actual fact little separates the two candidates in terms of their overall ideology and platforms.

So if we discount these minute differences, what can we conclude? That many voters were saying, in effect, "better the white woman than the black man."

This is, needless to say, an oversimplification, but it's probably the "Occam's razor" answer. (This is the famous principle that states that the simplest explanation for some phenomenon is more likely to be accurate than more complicated ones, as propounded by the fourteenth century English friar William of Occam.)

And Hillary Clinton, while certainly no racist herself, is nonetheless making sure the super-delegates, who in the end will decide who gets the nomination, are made aware of this. Not above demagoguery, and using code language, she whispers to them that, despite having more delegates and a lead in the popular vote, Obama will be "unelectable" in the general election.

How different is this from a shopkeeper, in the days before there were laws against discrimination in hiring, justifying not employing blacks because "the customers wouldn't come into my store?"

This contest reminds me of those elections that take place in deeply divided societies.

How many Albanians would have voted for Slobodan Milosevic, or Serbs for the Kosovo Liberation Army, in pre-war Kosovo, had such an election been held?

How many Kikuyu in Kenya voted for Raila Odinga, a Luo, in last December's presidential election? And how many Luo voted for Mwai Kibaki, an ethnic Kikuyu?

How many Turks on Cyprus voted for Greek parties, or vice versa, before that island was partitioned in 1974? How many Israeli Arabs vote for far-right Zionist parties, and how many Israeli Jews would vote for Hamas or the PLO (were that an option)?

We know the answer.

In other words, such elections are merely "census counts" - you pretty much know the result in advance simply by looking at the population breakdown. In Pennsylvania, all of Obama's money couldn't change that.

Has Running for the U.S. Presidency Become a Wrestling Match?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

As we know, Hillary Clinton has done just about everything to Barack Obama but physically assault him. And she’s proud of it. She is gleeful that he apparently can’t take a punch.

Clinton ridiculed Obama for lacking “toughness” as she campaigned in Pennsylvania in the days before that state’s April 22 primary contest. “Who do you think has what it takes?” asked one of her television ads.

Claiming the Obama was not up to the task of adequately protecting America, Clinton quoted the famous line from Harry Truman, “If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

Maybe that’s why an MSNBC poll taken a day before the vote showed hunters and gun owners favoring Clinton over Obama.

A few weeks earlier, the New York Times had quoted Bill Clinton telling listeners at a rally in West Virginia that “if a politician doesn’t want to get beat up, he shouldn’t run for office.” He called politics “a contact sport.”

But wouldn’t Obama’s so-called lack of toughness also apply to kids being attacked by bullies in schoolyards? Is this what Senator Clinton meant when she asserted, years ago, that “it takes a village to raise a child?”

Pummeling Obama through innuendo and guilt-by-association – Obama has crossed paths with a Chicago professor who forty years ago was a New Left radical; his former pastor has made controversial statements about America – has become the Clintons’ version of “scrutiny” and “vetting.”

I’d be more inclined to call them the kinds of smears once employed by the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Though it worked in Pennsylvania, where she won the primary, many Democrats can’t stand these scorched-earth tactics anymore. Obama has now been endorsed by Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s first Secretary of Labour. Reich became the fifth former Clinton cabinet member to endorse the Illinois senator.

“I did not plan to endorse. But my conscience wouldn’t let me stay silent after this latest round of mudslinging,” Reich told the Los Angeles Times on April 18.

“The negative ads coming out of the Clinton camp were just appalling at a time when our nation is facing such huge challenges,” he said. “Those ads are nothing but Republicanism. It’s old politics at its worst -- and old Republican politics, not even old Democratic politics. It’s just so deeply cynical.”

Anyhow, why has running for office become like boxing or wrestling? Do we really want politicians to be street-hardened thugs, or people with inspiring ideas and well-crafted political programs?

And shouldn’t feminists, who have long argued against such a macho approach to politics, be the first to criticize Clinton’s approach? Should a woman – any woman – be supported, no matter what she says and does? Why aren’t people like Gloria Steinem, who earlier this year came out in support of Clinton, speaking up?

The next major contests are in Indiana and North Carolina on May 6. They should post a “mud alert” in both states.

The Democratic Party Race: The Beat Goes On...and On...and On

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

The next big primary in the ongoing Democratic Party race is on April 22. The Pennsylvania contest will apportion 158 delegates and is the biggest single state left in the fight between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Though Obama has won the endorsement of Bob Casey, one of the state’s senators, Clinton has the support of Governor Ed Rendell and most of the party establishment there. She leads Obama in the polls and is predicted to win.

Despite that, many pundits and politicians think that Clinton’s fight to gain the Democratic Party nomination is all but hopeless. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont said in an interview carried by National Public Radio March 27 that Clinton should quit the race because she has hurt Obama “more than anything John McCain has said.”

Of course this assumes she feels bound to play by the rules. But what if her sense of entitlement is so strong that she is willing to break them if necessary? In an e-mail she sent out at the end of March, and quoted by the Washington Post, Clinton declared she would not be “bullied out” of the race by the “big boys.”

In an interview with the same paper during a campaign stop in India on March 29, she declared that “I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started and until we see what happens in the next 10 contests.”

In fact, she went further. Clinton told Time magazine that even pledged delegates are not legally bound to support the candidate to whom they are pledged: “Every delegate is expected to exercise independent judgment.” Which translates as, my delegates are mine, but his are mine to poach.

As well, 20 well-heeled backers of Clinton’s have sent a letter to Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, chastising Pelosi for declaring that the super-delegates should support the winner of the pledged delegate count. Clinton’s backers went so far as to threaten to cut off their financial contributions to the party.

Many of the extremely wealthy people who signed the letter benefitted from legislation passed during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and are happy in return to scratch the Clintons’ backs.

The Clintons’ 28 year old daughter Chelsea, for example, in 2006 took a job analyzing investments at Avenue Capital Group, a hedge fund run by banker Marc Lasry, a loyal donor to Clinton-related Democratic causes. Her salary is in the high six figure range. Lasry was one of the 20 signatories to the letter.

When another prominent Democrat, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, endorsed Obama, he was denounced as a “Judas” by one of Clinton’s political operatives, James Carville.

Carville told the New York Times on Good Friday that the endorsement was an “act of betrayal” that “came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out (Jesus) for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic.”

Carville seems to regard the Democratic Party as a Clinton family enterprise, much as the Pakistan Peoples Party belongs to the Bhuttos. No doubt he’ll be expecting loyalists to support Chelsea Clinton when she seeks office in the future.

If you compare Obama’s endorsements with Clinton’s, one thing becomes evident: one side consists primarily of people with integrity, while the other side is dominated by ethics-challenged hacks.

As she grows ever more frenzied in her pursuit of the nomination, Hillary Clinton is fast becoming the Mwai Kibaki of American politics. (Kibaki is the Kenyan leader who stole the presidential election from a rival last December.)

What’s next, a coup d’état if Barack Obama wins the nomination?

Carville and the J-Word

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Jewish defense organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in the United States, and the Canadian Jewish Congress and the League for Human Rights here in Canada, are always on the alert for even the slightest whiff of anti-Semitism. And rightly so.

To pick a somewhat minor example recently in the news, Congress wrote to the Kirkland Lake, Ontario, town council, inquiring as to why a street in the town was named Swastika Ave. It turns out this name dates back to 1911 and long predated Nazism -- the swastika was, after all, a Hindu symbol that Hitler appropriated as an “Aryan” emblem.

Frankly, I’d feel better were the street given some other name; after the Holocaust, the swastika, I’m afraid, can never lose its sinister connotations. Still, it turns out to have been an innocent misunderstanding.

We know that Jewish groups will sometimes censure people or groups for remarks that seem only tangentially to have anti-Jewish implications. So why has there been relative silence from American Jewish organizations when political operative and Hillary Clinton supporter James Carville called New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, once a member of President Bill Clinton’s Cabinet, a “Judas”?

Carville made the remark after Richardson endorsed Barack Obama for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the U.S. presidential race. Carville called it an “act of betrayal” that “came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out (Jesus) for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic.”

In much of western culture, Judas became the stereotype of the greedy, traitorous Jew, the man responsible for deicide. His very name and image has been used to incite violence against Jews over the centuries. How many of us have been murdered in pogroms due to this libel?

Hitler, among many others, certainly knew the power of the “J-word.”

No doubt Carville did not intend to malign Jews – but could he not have used a different example, one less offensive to Jewish ears? The traitor Benedict Arnold, the American general who switched sides and sold out to the British during the American Revolution, comes to mind.

Were an evangelical Protestant to have made a similar statement – say, while accusing some Republican of turning against John McCain – my guess is we’d have heard more of an outcry.

But most American Jews are fairly secular and a majority support the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton is a U.S. senator from New York state and has many Jewish supporters.

So is there a double standard at work here? Judge for yourself.