Aleatoric

The Naked Empire: 'Low Intensity Conflict' and State Sponsored Terror, Part 1

2011-08-08T13:25:00.007-04:00

"They have cast all the mysteries and secrets of government... before the vulgar (like pearls before swine), and have taught both the soldiery and people to look so far into them as to ravel back all governments to the first principles of nature...” Clement Walker, on the English Revolution, 1661

From Miami with Love

Something very interesting happened this past April in an El Paso courtroom. There, a verdict was returned in the case of one Luis Posada Carriles, a man that has notably been described as the "Osama Bin Laden of Latin America" and "one of the most dangerous terrorists in recent history". [1]

The circumstances of the case and the details of Posada's extraordinary biography could be mistaken for the plot of an international thriller -- there's ample evidence of a long career in the business of international terrorism, including declassified FBI and CIA documents [2] and Posada's on-the-record admission of involvement [3] in a string of hotel bombings in Havana. Add to that terrorism convictions by multiple governments that have found themselves in Posada's crosshairs, an outstanding INTERPOL warrant, sundry bombings and other paramilitary attacks within Cuba and abroad. He ran guns to the Contras during their cross-border war with Nicuaragua, as exposed during the Reagan-era 'Iran Contra' scandal hearings [4]. He was caught flying 200 lbs of C4 plastic explosive into Panama City and convicted of a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro [5]. He's connected with the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 in 1976 and the immolation of 78 people. [6]

Far from being reviled as a mass murderer however, among the fervently anti-Castro members of Miami's Cuban exile community Luis Posada Carriles is considered a hero and a freedom fighter. The Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), a well-connected [7] organization Posada claimed to have received money from to carry out a 1997 bombing campaign in Havana stated in that same year in a publication that they did not regard attacks against Cuba to be 'terrorist actions'. [8] Note that this defies the common understanding of the term as "the use of violence and fear to achieve a desired political end."

It also defies understanding that a known militant of Posada's notoriety was allowed to apply for asylum and set foot in Miami in 2005, having been just recently pardoned and released from jail in Panama for the attempted Castro hit. [9] This political double standard or blind spot in the US-led 'War on Terror' was not lost on the hundreds of thousands of Cubans that turned out in massive anti-Posada rallies held in Havana during the middle of May 2005. [9]

Posada was arrested shortly thereafter, but he was not charged under any anti-terror statutes or treaties. Instead, he was charged with lying [10]: specifically, lying to immigration about whether he had arrived in the US by boat or by bus and lying about his past involvement in Havana bombings, all charges that carry relatively light sentences [11]. Any questions of charges under the various national and international statutes against terrorism were off the table.

To understand the reasons behind this unique new approach to prosecuting the war on terror, it is necessary only to understand that for decades Posada was America's terrorist. As it turns out, that makes all the difference in the world.

'School of the Assassins'

Outrage in Havana. Welcome in Miami. Diffidence in Washington. The polarized reactions occasioned by Posada's return to the US provide an unusually clear example of what's meant in practice by the saying 'one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist' [12] Posada himself has displayed little inhibition in the past to relate his exploits to the media and appears adamant in the belief that his mission is to help free Cuba and/or fight Communism in the region. As for his methods, he claims he's not losing any sleep [13] over their bloody toll in Havana, at least -- an ability we might chalk up to extensive practice.

Young Luis lived through and was shaped by the turmoil and civic unrest of the latter years of the US-backed Batista regime. He studied medicine and chemistry at Havana University, meeting Castro during the student uprisings, violence, and protests of the era [14]. However, he opposed the Cuban Revolution and was active in speaking out against the new regime, convictions which landed him in prison. Upon his release, he fled to Mexico and then to Miami where he was recruited by the CIA [15] for the ill-starred Bay of Pigs invasion, though his squadron within Brigade 2506 never saw action.

Between 1963 and 1964, Posada trained in demolitions and sabotage at the US Army's infamous 'School of the Americas' at Fort Benning in Georgia. Whistleblower site SOA Watch describes the operations of the School of the Americas as having

trained over 64,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. These graduates have consistently used their skills to wage a war against their own people. Among those targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, “disappeared,” massacred, and forced into refugee by those trained at the School of Assassins. [16]

The alumnus of this school counts among its members a significantly higher number of military dictators and secret police than your average collegiate. The SOA Watch online database [17] of program graduates lists some 395 alumni of particular notoriety for their reign as military or intelligence officers once they returned to their home country, including those working with cocaine traffickers [18], those involved in church burnings targetting activist preachers [19], the organization of death squads [20], the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero [21], and other similar breaches of human rights.

Posada's career took off. Fast forward a number of years and we find the by-now seasoned militant heading up the feared Venezuelan intelligence agency, the DISIP or Dirección Nacional de los Servicios de Inteligencia y Prevención which by that time had become a CIA-supported base of operations against the Castro regime in Cuba. [22]

The remarkable career of Luis Posada Carriles and other graduates of the SOA (since renamed but still very much in operation and teaching "the identical courses" [23]) should not come as any great surprise to students of Latin American history, as even a cursory perusal of the public record reveals a comprehensive, decades-long involvement in the area by American intelligence, special forces, and their proxies. Yet time and again, public debate on the issue (on the rare occasions it receives exposure in the mainstream media) fails to question the ongoing policy of shipping US military resources and expertise to the area, instead focussing on issues narrow enough in scope as to exclude any discussion of the wider context.

Such as the distraction of Posada's 'immigration fraud' charges. Such as the Army's contention that SOA Watch “claims a false cause-and-effect relationship between training at [SOA] and the criminal acts of a few who have attended the school’s programs in the distant past.” Such as one oft-cited attack on the founder of the SOA Watch (Catholic priest Roy Bourgeois), the allegation by Paul Mulshine of the New Jersy Star-Ledger that he "had once gone on patrol with the Salvadoran guerillas" [24]. Looking into the available facts on the matter, it becomes apparent instead that the priest's goal was to travel the countryside, speak with the poor, and investigate who may have been responsible for the assassination of Archbishop Romero and a number of catholic nuns of his order, as reported in Time magazine and a 1999 interview with the priest [25] [26].

Some irony may be detected in the way Bourgeois' trip to interview dispossessed natives was ginned-up into a 'guerilla patrol', given that the embedding of US agents within guerilla groups is a fairly standard military practice in the area. The study of these and similar tactics, a field known as 'Low Intensity Conflict', has produced a body of military scholarship on counterinsurgency documenting the use of tactics as diverse as the direct creation of armed insurgent (or counter-insurgent) militias, the use of embedded special forces operatives as agents provocateur, the administrative suspensions of civil rights in occupied regions, and 'psuedo-operations', the use of violence and fear undertaken while masquerading as the enemy.

Counterinsurgency, by the Book

One of the first recorded outline and proposal of guerilla warfare is found in Sun Tzu's The Art of War, a practical manual on military strategy written in the 6th century BC [27]. Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, published somewhat later in 1532 AD, is one of the West's earliest works of modern political philosophy and presents a treatise on regime change and the pacification of rebellious subjects in newly acquired realms. Machiavelli infamously advises aspiring princes that "whoever becomes master of a city accustomed to the free way of life invites his own destruction unless he destroys it first ... Anything you implement or plan is useless if you do not set the citizens against each other and scatter them throughout the land, because otherwise they will forget neither the name of liberty nor those institutions..." [28]

For current students of Low Intensity Conflict in this past century, there's the writings of General Sir Frank Kitson, a British military man that held the title Commander in Chief of UK Land Forces from 1982-85. During the 1950s, he was assigned to serve in the suppression of the Kenyan and Malayan uprisings during the postwar collapse of Britain's colonial empire, and he committed his experiences to print in a number of volumes. Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping, published in 1971, came to print around the time he was actively applying the same concepts in Northern Ireland, setting up a covert British Army unit [29] subsequently accused of drive-by shootings and assassinations [30].

Kitson outlined a theory of the 3 stages of insurgency and subversion [31] in which, chillingly, any criticism of the state is seen as falling along a continuum of insurgency. This 'slippery slope' model encompasses a preparatory period in which the subversives communicate their ideas to the population, the non-violent phase in which the use of protest, pickets, strikes and boycotts by critics are presented as the dangerous precursor to violence -- and the use of police force becomes an operational decision to put down protest. Finally the insurgency erupts, and militants stream into the streets, engaging in armed conflict with government forces.

Just such a theory of 'subversion', where protest is seen as leading inevitably to violence appears to have become entrenched in law-enforcement practice. In 2009, the American Civil Liberties Union discovered that US Department of Defence anti-terrorism training course material identified protest as a form of 'low level terrorism' [32]. The recent experience of the Toronto G20, in which large crowds of protestors and passerby were held captive for long periods of time in defiance of Canadian civil charter rights suggest that this attitude is operational in Canada as well. When questioned about the roundup of innocents outside the Novotel building on June 26, 2010, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair stated that "I know a lot of people who did not come to commit crimes but were facilitating the potential of that breach of the peace … by providing cover in a crowd" (emphasis added), thus justifying the suspension of civil rights in the city [33].

Counterinsurgency and Low Intensity Conflict theory provides for the use of a number of continuum-of-force tactics ranged along various stages of the insurgency: the use of informants, psychological operations or propaganda campaigns during the 'non-violent phase', the stick-and-carrot approach of police force followed up by concessions offered to aggrieved communities upon restoration of public order, the use of velvet-glove intimidation by military or police forces to create an atmosphere of “respect and awe” among populations, the cordon and search of civilian areas, the use of central identity databases or watch lists on the population and the insertion of 'psuedo-operations' special forces disguised as insurgents to wreak deliberate mayhem and confusion. [34]

Lawrence E Cline, a military instructor at the US Naval Postgraduate School notes crisply in his 2005 monograph Psuedo Operations and Counterinsurgency: Lessons from Other Countries that "Pseudo operation strategies used in earlier counterinsurgency campaigns can offer valuable lessons for future missions." He goes on to present an exhaustive survey of such lessons from the Phillipines to Africa, offering first a word of caution:

These operations, although of considerable value, also have raised a number of concerns. Their use in offensive missions and psychological operations campaigns has, at times, been counterproductive. In general, their main value has been as human intelligence collectors, particularly for long-term background intelligence or for identifying guerrilla groups that then are assaulted by conventional forces. Care must be taken in running these operations both to avoid going too far in acting like guerrillas, and in resisting becoming involved in human rights abuses. [35]

Cline also writes that the "potential political impact" of direct psuedo-operations unfortunately makes it "all too easy for government opponents to brand the teams conducting these missions as 'death squads' beyond the reach of the law." [36] His apprehension is well-founded.The first case described in his paper, the paramilitary response to the 1946-1955 Huk Insurrection in the Philippines, crops up continuously in the literature for its early innovations in the field like the deployment of small hunter-killer teams. In his book Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990 Michael McClintock quotes a top army officer describing the style of the Nenita or 'skull squadron', named for their use of the skull and crossbone flag "The special tactic of these squadrons was to cordon off areas; anyone they caught inside the cordon was considered an enemy.... When I was stationed in the Candaba area [in Pampanga], almost daily you could find bodies floating in the river, many of them victims of Valeriano's Nenita Unit." [37] His source for the quote is a book co-authored by the same Major Napoleon Valeriano.

As a top agent working under Phillippines CIA station chief Colonel Lansdale, Valeriano was a central figure in shaping future counterinsurgency policy. Roland G. Simbulan, Manila Studies Program coordinator at the University of the Philippines writes

The CIA's success in crushing the peasant-based Huk rebellion in the 1950s made this operation the model for future counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam and Latin America. Colonel Lansdale and his Filipino sidekick, Col. Napoleon Valeriano were later to use their counterguerrilla experience in the Philippines for training covert operatives in Vietnam and in the US-administered School of the Americas, which trained counterguerrilla assassins for Latin America. [38]

Valeriano was instrumental in the training of Cuban exiles [39] [40] for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and so in tracing the thread of Major Valeriano's career we may observe an unbroken decades-long succession of covert involvement in foreign LIC operations from Indonesia to the operations of Luis Carriles Posada in Latin America and beyond, and it is to Posada's trial in El Paso that we now return.

The conclusion of this article will examine the categories of counterinsurgency and state terror, their use in domestic operations, and cover the verdict in the trial of Luis Posada Carriles.

Other Resources

Video

"Terrorist Cuban Exile Luis Posada Carriles Seeking Political Asylum in U.S.", Democracy Now May 9, 2005 http://www.democracynow.org/2005/5/9/terrorist_cuban_exile_luis_posada_carriles

Papers

The Posada Files, Bardach Reports http://www.bardachreports.com/posada_files.htm

Reading

Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Though Control in Democratic Societies, House of Anansi, 1989 http://home.nvg.org/~skars/ni/

Michael Mclintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990, Pantheon, 1992 http://www.statecraft.org/index.html

US Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual, 1940 http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/swm/index.htm

Small Wars Library, Small Wars Journal http://smallwarsjournal.com/reference/counterinsurgency.php

Dr. Lawrence E Cline, Psuedo Operations and Counterinsurgency: Lessons from Other Countries, Srategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College, 2005, 5 http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=607

Frank Kitson, Low Intensity operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peacekeeping, Stackpole Books, 1971 http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27/054.html

Notes

1. Peter Kornbluth, "Former CIA Asset Luis Posada Goes to Trial", The Nation http://www.thenation.com/article/157510/former-cia-asset-luis-posada-goes-trial

2. The National Security Archive, Luis Posada Carriles: The Declassified Record http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/index.htm

3. Ann Louise Bardach, Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miamiand Havana, Chapter 7, Heading "Resurrection" http://www.bardachreports.com/articles/cc_chapter7.htm
Ms. Bardach writes, "With a rueful chuckle, he described the death as a freak accident but said he nonetheless 'sleeps with a clean conscience. It is sad that someone is dead, but we can't stop,' he said. 'That Italian was sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time, pobrecito.'"

4. The National Security Archive, Luis Posada Carriles: The Declassified Record
http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/#irancontra

5. Wikipedia, Panama: Arrest, conviction and release (2000-2004), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Posada_Carriles#Panama:_Arrest.2C_conviction_and_release_.282000.E2.80.932004.29

6. The National Security Archive, Bombing of Cuban Jetliner 30 Years Later http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB202/index.htm

7. Patrick Jude Haney, Walt Vanderbush, The Cuban embargo: the domestic politics of an American foreign policy, 35. http://books.google.com/books?id=3R-1nFSMUSkC&pg=PA35&lpg=PA35

8. Wikipedia, Panama: Arrest, conviction and release (2000-2004) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Posada_Carriles#Alleged_relationships

9. Glenn Kessler, "U.S. Denies Role in Cuban Exiles' Pardon", The Washington Post, August 27, 2004 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36924-2004Aug26.html

10. James C McKinley Jr, "Terror Accusations but Perjury Charges", The New York Times, January 9, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/us/10posada.html?_r=1

11. "Posada Carriles Trial Hinges on Yacht", Fox News Latino, Febraury 2, 2011 http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2011/02/02/yacht-ship-luis-posada-carriles-prison-trial-ex-cia-operative-miami/

12. First written by Gerald Seymour in the 1975 book Harry's Game. See Wikianswers, Who said one's man's terrorist is another man's revolutionary? http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_said_one_man%27s_terrorist_is_another_man%27s_revolutionary

13. Ann Louise Bardach, Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana, Chapter 7, Heading "Resurrection" http://www.bardachreports.com/articles/cc_chapter7.htm for quote cited in note 3.

14. Wikipedia, University of Havana, Student Organizations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Havana#Student_organizations

15. See heading "The CIA Connection", The National Security Archive, Luis Posada Carriles: The Declassified Record
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/index.htm

16. What Is The SOA? SOA Watch http://www.soaw.org/about-the-soawhinsec/what-is-the-soawhinsec

17. SOA Grads, SOA Watch http://www.soaw.org/about-the-soawhinsec/soawhinsec-grads

18. Toby Muse, US trained Colombian soldiers jailed for working with cartel, says human rights group, The Associated Press, August 18, 2007 http://web.archive.org/web/20071016120930/http://www.soaw.org/newswire_detail.php?id=1390

19. Notorious Graduates from Haiti, SOA Watch http://www.soaw.org/about-the-soawhinsec/soawhinsec-grads/notorious-grads/240

20. Paramilitaries in Columbia, SOA Watch http://www.soaw.org/about-the-soawhinsec/victims-and-survivors/colombia/359

21. Kate Doyle, Emily Willard, "'Learn from History', 31st Anniversary of the Assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero", Global Research, March 24, 2011 http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=23923

22. Eva Golinger, "Venezuela Rejects CIA, But Opens Doors to FBI & DEA", Venezuela Analysis, June 29 2005 http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1220

23. US Army Maj. Joe Blair, who was a former director of instruction at the school, has testified in court that "They teach the identical courses that I taught, and changed the course names and use the same manuals", see Bill Wallace and Jim Houston, "Bay Area Protesters Sentenced in Georgia", San Francisco Chronicle, July 13 2002 http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0713-03.htm

24. Paul Mulshine, The War in Central America Continues
http://web.archive.org/web/20021219221936/http://216.247.220.66/archives/politics/watchwar.htm

25. El Salvador: Wayward Cleric, Time Magazine, May 18, 1981 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,951680,00.html

26. Greg Speltz, "Interview With Fr. Bourgeouis: The School of the Americas and US Tax-Supported Terror in Latin America", The Harbinger, October 19, 1999 http://faculty.txwes.edu/csmeller/Human-Prospect/ProData09/03WW2CulMatrix/ColdWar/SchoolAmer/Bourgeois1999SchAm.htm

27. Wikipedia, History of Guerrilla Warfare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_guerrilla_warfare

28. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince and other Political Writings, Everyman, London, 2005, 52

29. Mark Urban, Big Boys Rules, Faber and Faber, 1992, 36 http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/MRF#Creation

30. Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, WW Norton and Company, 2003, 119 http://books.google.com/books?id=5PNAtCeYpgYC&pg=PA119#v=onepage&q&f=false

31. Dale Wharton, reviewing Frank Kitson, Low Intensity operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peacekeeping, Stackpole Books, 1971 http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27/054.html

32. Steve Watson, "DoD Training Manual Descrobes Protest as 'Low-Level terrorism'", Infowars, June 15, 2009 http://statismwatch.ca/2009/06/15/dod-training-manual-describes-protest-as-%E2%80%9Clow-level-terrorism%E2%80%9D/

33. Todd Howe, "The Criminalization of Dissent - The Toronto G20 Redux, Pt 2", We Are Change Toronto, October 31, 2010 http://wearechangetoronto.org/2010/10/31/the-criminalization-of-dissent-the-toronto-g20-redux-pt-2/

34. Dale Wharton, reviewing Frank Kitson, Low Intensity operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peacekeeping, Stackpole Books, 1971 http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27/054.html

35. Dr. Lawrence E Cline, Psuedo Operations and Counterinsurgency: Lessons from Other Countries, Srategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College, 2005, 5 http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=607

36. Ibid., 15

37. Michael Mclintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990, Pantheon, 1992, Chapter 4, see note 98 http://www.statecraft.org/chapter4.html#98

38. Roland G Simbulan, The CIA in Manila: Covert Operations and the CIA's Hidden History in the Philippines, transcript, Lecture at the University of the Philippines-Manila, Rizal Hall, Padre Faura, Manila, August 18, 2000 http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/filipinas/doc/cia.html

39. Michael Mclintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990, Pantheon, 1992, Chapter 5, see note 21 http://www.statecraft.org/chapter5.html#21

40. Joseph Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior, Putnam, 1976, 94 http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=13800

State-Corporate Cybersurveillance Partnership Exposed

2011-07-05T22:06:00.002-04:00

Public Service Announcement: If you object to warrantless state surveillance of your online activities, visit http://stopspying.ca now and sign the OpenMedia.ca petition to stop the Harper government's forthcoming 'Lawful Access' provision.

"If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves." - Marshall McLuhan

During a 1969 interview conducted during the dawn of the new age of electronic media, oft-cited futurist and tech critic Marshall McLuhan made the point that for our species, the market of information we call 'culture' is the frame we think within, a common set of ideas and symbols analogous to the air we breathe. Because this set of ideas is so all-pervasive and seemingly without boundaries, leaving us with little to compare and contrast it to, it slips into the background of our awareness.

One of the consequences of this reflexive inability to see the forest for the trees is that it's precisely those technologies capable of causing social upheaval, of changing the ways people interact with their culture and with each other, that do much of their transformative work out on the liminal edges of awareness. And we tend to prefer it this way, McLuhan suggests -- taking refuge in the familiar, numbing our responses to great change like trauma survivors might while technology extends the reach of our nervous system to new and unaccustomed horizons. All the while, we try bravely to take it in stride while the world is changed around us.

All of this is by way of introduction to a story that has largely slipped under the radar this past week, the exposure of a sprawling state-corporate intelligence complex unearthed in the emails of one US intelligence contractor HBGary Federal.

The story, as reported in the Guardian and Network World, began last year when a group of private contractors were discovered to have targetted US activist groups, Wikileaks, Anonymous, journalists like Glenn Greenwald over at Salon.com, and presumably other official enemies. Upon bragging that he would out the leadership (if any such can be considered to exist) of distributed hacktivist group Anonymous, Anonymous responded to HBGary ex-CEO Aaron Barr's challenge by dumping some 70,000 of the corporation's emails on the web.

That was February. On June 22nd, Barrett Brown, a writer for Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, and his new 'Project PM' site was able to release the results of an investigation into those emails, exposing a classified US intelligence datamining operation called ROMAS/COIN and its upcoming replacement ODYSSEY. This massive operation would collate information from new media sources as diverse as social networks, the marketing information continually leaked by closed-source smartphone apps and online gaming platforms among others. Corporate team players listed in the emails include network infrastructure and online service platform giants Akamai, Google, and Apple.

According to Project PM, "the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once", and that within this corporate intelligence complex, "Unprecedented surveillance capabilities are being produced by an industry that works in secret on applications that are nonetheless funded by the American public - and which in some cases are used against that very same public. Their products are developed on demand for an intelligence community that is not subject to Congressional oversight and which has been repeatedly shown to have misused its existing powers in ways that violate U.S. law as well as American ideals."

It appears that these new information warfare capabilities are coming home to roost with a vengeance. In case anyone was under the impression that the era of intrusive state surveillance ramped up under POTUS George W. Bush, including the massive siphoning-off of communications at the service provider level has abated under the velvet glove of the current office holder, think again.

Introducing: Your Domestic Surveillance Network!

In light of the observations McLuhan was making about electronic media as an extension of the human nervous system over 40 years ago, perhaps it was inevitable that incentives to collate and cross-reference personal and public information would arise as individuals, institutions, and states all began jockeying for control of the new information technologies. Knowledge engenders power over one's environment and in the realm of information this power struggle has had two discernible forks -- the quest for measurement of available information and (subsequently) the control and suppression of publicly available information.

While a tension has always existed between the interests of the unlimited state and the individual, historic instances of state surveillance networks have relied extensively on the mobilization of compliant and traumatized populations to serve as the eyes and ears of state power. This is no longer a requirement for the effective measurement of public attitudes as automated filters and scripts now accomplish many of the same aims while requiring minimal resources in a turnkey environment. This capability has existed in some degree since the early 2000's - in 2003, the US Congress shut down one attempt at an all-encompassing surveillance scheme known as 'Total Information Awareness', but the withdrawal of Congressional authorization for intelligence programs has not been known to stop the NSA in the past.

The buildout of this capability has to a large extent been hidden in plain sight, and is by no means limited to the United States. The Swedish wiretapping law case of June 2008 is just one recent example in which cross-border electronic state surveillance was unveiled with some fanfare to a Western public. As part of the 'Echelon' network, the Canadian wiretapping facility and SIGINT spook factory the Communications and Security Establishment (CSE) is being upgraded with a new $62 million dollar headquarters, with construction slated to be completed this year.

The 'Vision 2015' and 'Einstein' programs, also previously exposed by independent journalists as components in a warren of overlapping international and domestic surveillance systems, are just two further examples of moves by international intelligence networks towards a systemic, centralized ability to track attitudes in the way Google tracks websites.

Most pressingly for Canadians, the Harper government has made it clear that they will again be pursuing the benevolently-named 'Lawful Access' provisions we last heard of in 2009, which would require Canadian ISPs to install backdoors on their systems for the warrantless access of citizen's IP data upon request. This is an administration which has already been caught monitoring political speech online, so it seems unlikely they will back down now after securing a majority in the house. For more on this matter, Michael Geist at the University of Ottawa and TVO's Jesse Brown are good sources of information to follow as the issue develops.

Running through further examples would only be redundant this point, but there is ample open-source information on state surveillance available online at sites such as Techdirt, Cryptogon, Slashdot, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Munk Centre's Citizen Lab, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Fencing Off the Information Commons

The purpose of measuring a system is to understand and control it, and in this arena we find that operational capabilities have also been advancing. Chinese-style Internet filters capable of blocking various sites deemed unsavoury have now been installed or are on the agenda in Australia, the UK, and the United States. A bill advanced by Joseph Leiberman in the US Senate advocates for a means to “shut down or limit internet traffic on private systems", effectively calling for an internet kill switch. The emergency powers asked for are in this case advanced under the pretext of protecting 'key infrastructure', a line which has also been taken in Canada, a measure aimed at effectively nationalising the security of 'critical' private sector assets.

Such broad regulatory approaches to restricting the flow of information are not the only tools available to state and media interests when the two intersect as they do in the present political climate. Steps may also be taken to stake out expanded legal controls of cultural and intellectual content, concentrating the 'ownership' of ideas into fewer hands and creating a finer-grained control of information flow by delegating the role of gatekeeper to appropriate media partners holding copyrights in perpetuity.

It may be helpful to think of the sum total of information available to an individual or a culture online as being analogous to a vast open expanse, such as once existed prior to the colonization, subdivision, and parcelling out of property in the American 'Wild West'. These days, the talk is of taming the 'Wild West' of the Internet instead as artificial barriers to access - paywalls, proprietary standards, DMCA takedowns, mass RIAA lawsuits - spring up to blunt the Internet's utility as a great leveller of barriers to knowledge. The justification given for this ongoing 'virtual' land grab for the control of Internet properties is a respect for intellectual property, but a closer look at this burgeoning field of law suggests that this reasoning is disingenuous. For one thing, 'intellectual property' protection has ballooned out far beyond the original intent of copyright and patent law to grant a short state-backed period during which innovators could recoup investments without fear of competition from others, sometimes to decades past the death of the creator. Also, it is in the very nature of human economic and intellectual progress to collaborate and borrow ideas, reworking them to fit new situations. By the standards of intellectual property, even the most basic human innovations like the humble grain of rice may never have come into being, as such a valuable property today would doubtless be tied up in genomic patent lawsuits before seeing the light of day.

Of course this simple analogy breaks down on the crucial point that good land is a scarce resource while information may now be infinitely replicated, but that's just the point. The discussion around whether one may or may not actually own an intangible must be set aside for later exploration, but with multiple international jurisdictions racing to introduce new laws further restricting the use and reuse of ideas (for two examples due to impact Canada see the failed bill C-32, due to be reintroduced posthaste by the present government, as well as the global 'Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement' or ACTA, a severely flawed document largely negotiated in secret meetings between media executives and international lawmakers) the practical outcome is to incrementally control and restrict information flows, putting out the eyes of the public by creating new barriers to the new forms of media McLuhan once envisioned as an external extension of our bodies and restricting new online platforms to the role of branded entertainment delivery. We can see this beginning to happen as eg; the New York Times online presence goes dark behind its new paywall and Youtube automatically pulls and/or restricts new videos containing incidental samples of copyrighted work.

Nothing to Hide?

As Barrett Brown notes in the conclusion to his Guardian column,

Altogether, the existence and nature of Romas/COIN should confirm what many had already come to realise over the past few years, in particular: the US and other states have no intention of allowing populations to conduct their affairs without scrutiny. Such states ought not complain when they find themselves subjected to similar scrutiny – as will increasingly become the case over the next several years.

To this it could be added that states very often have no intention of allowing themselves to be scrutinised in this manner. Upon learning of a simple application now available on smartphones that might allow an undetected recording to be made of police in situations where an abuse of power is in progress, Arizona advised its police to troll through citizen's phones to see what similar applications they may possess. The isolated destruction of journalist's equipment during the recent Toronto G20 illuminates a similar reflex to disable uncooperative civilian media.

The apologetics trotted out by supporters of state surveillance typically include an argument along the lines of, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." While the argument is facile on its surface - there's a reason we put curtains up in our homes - a lengthy article by George Washington law professor Daniel Solove does a good job of further demolishing the argument as bundling in the false assumption that privacy is a sort of craven or misguided need for secrecy. Solove writes

the computer-security specialist Schneier aptly notes, the nothing-to-hide argument stems from a faulty "premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong." Surveillance, for example, can inhibit such lawful activities as free speech, free association, and other First Amendment rights essential for democracy.

The deeper problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of secrecy. In contrast, understanding privacy as a plurality of related issues demonstrates that the disclosure of bad things is just one among many difficulties caused by government security measures.

He notes that privacy harms are not limited to 'the disclosure of bad things' but that unseen harms are introduced by, for instance, the vast resources of a state to centralize, aggregate and collate discrete bits of information about you that falls outside the normal expectation of how your public information may be used, raising the risk of false positives, the suppression of legitimate dissent, and other harms to fundamental rights.

While some countermeasures currently exist to help circumvent the ability of state and corporate actors to gather information about you online - the use of VPNs, encrypted email, anonymizing proxies such as the TOR network, web script blockers like the popular Firefox plugin Ghostery and others, there's nothing to say that these and other similar personal safeguards will not be defeated or ruled illegal in future. Instead, the looming problem of state and corporate surveillance needs to be addressed as a matter of fundamental human rights, perhaps in some future Section 8 challenge in this country.

Until that day comes, the best defence against the expanding threat of online surveillance and its corollary, restricted access to information, is education on the issues and the will to help others in your community understand the threat to free expression posed by the architecture of surveillance being built into the very fabric of new media platforms.

Be Seeing You: The Coming Surveillance Expansion

2010-12-08T05:29:00.002-05:00

Imagine the following. It's dusk and you're walking with your best friends down a quiet side street in a major urban centre. You all stop for a moment under the pooled glow of a streetlight – maybe you light a smoke, or send a text. A few minutes later, someone looks up and so you do, too. There on the utility pole above is a cluster of cameras, their dark spherical globes the strange fruit of an uneasy era, and a sign – Warning: This area under surveillance. In that moment, you see your image reflected in the glassy blister as you regard the camera eye. Freeze frame.

What goes through your mind? Do you feel a little uneasy? Do you feel protected? Or do you think nothing of it?

It's an encounter and a question that an ever-expanding number of Canadians will experience for themselves in the coming months. On November 15th, Toronto police chief Bill Blair announced his intention to 'buy back' 52 of the 67 cameras the Federal government had purchased to monitor the June G20 summit (riot gear and LRAD acoustic cannons for crowd control are to be transferred as well in the federally subsidized arrangement). The G20 cameras, installed in May, were to be removed at the end of the summit and indeed came down in July as promised. It will come as no surprise to those following these developments, however, that they are now back on the agenda. For the past number of years, the Toronto Police Services have been building out the CCTV network in the city through a program of 'pilot project' installations and rotating trials that amount to nothing more than a shell game.

First it was the 'temporary' holiday season installation of three police surveillance cameras in Yonge and Dundas square in the wake of the 2006 Jane Creba shooting. Then Dalton McGuinty and John Tory got involved, publicly lobbying for the benefits of CCTV and an additional thirteen cameras went up around the city in another 'six month' pilot project at a cost of $2 million, a cost covered through the largesse of the Ontario government. Sharp eyed readers will note that it has now been substantially longer than six months since the cameras were installed – 3 years and 7 months, in fact. (See Infographic, below.) If the Toronto Police Services Board approves Blair's $90k funding request at its January meeting, the number of surveillance cameras deployed in the city will more than triple, rising from 19 to 71. From the CBC:

Blair says the existing cameras have been useful and adding the new cameras could help deal with crime downtown, as well as in other neighbourhoods.

"What we're seeing is an expansion of our entertainment district. [The cameras have] been used very effectively in the entertainment district, but they're starting to move a little bit west, so there's some additional places that we would like to deploy cameras," he said.

Heads up, Ossington Ave.

INFOGRAPHIC
CCTV Network Growth vs. 'Pilot Project' Length

Click to enlarge

INTERACTIVE TIMELINE
Click events for media links

Toronto Public CCTV Proliferation on Dipity.

'Legacy Cameras'

It wouldn't be the first time that a major international event resulted in a persistent surveillance network. Summits and the Olympics have a way of leaving a mark on a city. In many cases, this involves the training of police to paramilitary standards (cf. the 'Miami Model', covered here) and the gift of funding from regional or central governments for a large stock of surveillance equipment which – sooner or later – is redeployed after the event is long gone. There's ample precedent to establish the a pattern. The 2000, 2004, 2006, and 2008 Olympic Games have bequeathed a legacy of surveillance cameras to Sydney, Athens, Torino, and Beijing respectively. In the first major Canadian study to be released studying CCTV, A Report on Camera Surveillance in Canada (Lyon, Lippert, Johnson, Deisman et al. 2009), the Surveillance Camera Awareness Network (SCAN) project out of Queens U. wrote (pt. 2, pp77):

As the examples of these cities suggests, such mega-events as the Olympics are “consciously leveraged as development opportunities for long-term security legacies, providing the justification and finances for security and surveillance surges that are intended to leave an infrastructure of urban surveillance (Boyle and Haggerty 2009:19-20)

David Murakami Wood, Assoc. Prof of Surveillance Studies at Queens sounded more optimistic when he wrote in June of this year that

Recent 'mega-events' have almost always produced a surge in the numbers of CCTV cameras. In Vancouver for the Winter Olympics, a new CCTV control room was even built, part of the 'security legacy' of the games, a trend which followed the Olympic Games in Athens and Soccer World Cups in Japan and Germany. But it is certainly not always the case that such installations are always permanent. These days, many mega-events come with ready-made security requirements and surveillance solutions, which descend on cities for the duration of the event, but then are just as quickly removed afterwards. And certainly, in the case of Toronto, the lack of consultation about extending CCTV would lead us to hope that this is not the start of an uninvited and unnecessary extension of video surveillance.

One might hope. Two other recent G20 host cities, London and Pittsburgh, were already in possession of extensive public surveillance networks which explains why much of the debate has now settled on Toronto and Vancouver. Which is not to say that these cities have a monopoly on the issue. The SCAN study reports that by 2007, at least fourteen Canadian cities had implemented public street surveillance cameras, and at least sixteen others were actively considering, or had considered installing a network. (ibid.,pt.2,pp11)

Better Watch Yourself

In the quote above, Professor Wood mentions a new CCTV control room built to oversee the public network in Vancouver as a legacy of the 2010 Games. That's bricks-and-mortar infrastructure and it occupies a similar niche in Vancouver's security ecology as the police intelligence information 'fusion' centers that are springing up across America.

While much larger in scale, the 'super fusion center' set up to coordinate police, intelligence, and military security teams for the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Colorado (the Colorado Intelligence Analysis Center or CIAC), was constructed to monitor feeds from various surveillance technologies, collate and cross reference the results and liase with over 55 local, state, and federal agencies. With little to no oversight, independent management, and generous DHS funding US Fusion centers have been caught brokering information on peaceful protesters and activists, and in a document leaked from the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC), supporters of libertarian congressional representatives and former presidential candidates Ron Paul, Bob Barr, and Chuck Baldwin were targeted. Muslim civil rights groups, anti-war organizations, even black colleges have also been identified as potential sources of terrorism by these massive datamining operations. The American Civil Liberties Union produced a report, updated in 2008, entitled What's Wrong With Fusion Centers that's available here.

In a move mirroring the Colorado DNC experience, an expansion fusion center was situated in Barrie for this summer's G8/G20 meetings. The Joint Intelligence Group center was built in an old toilet seat factory renovated for the purpose and provided an additional layer of intelligence gathering and operational support to the existing Toronto INSET Special Operations Center, one of four multi-agency intelligence sharing centres in Canada. It remains operational today at a couple of somewhat discreet locations in north Toronto's industrial parks, readily discoverable via Google Maps.

The point here is that it's not the private camera in the local convenience store that's a threat. And overwhelmingly, this is the perception of video surveillance held by most Canadians – unobtrusive, isolated, and only referred to in case of emergency. This is a naïve perception, because it's the network rather than the camera itself that introduces the threat. Public surveillance is qualitatively different than private security on account of the resources that the state can bring to bear, the interconnection with other agencies of government, and the potential to automatically create cross-referenced profiles or 'human mosaics' on individual citizens. The SCAN report notes that the courts have never subjected public surveillance to a Section 8 test under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and that in any future challenge

Surveillance recordings will likely be of particular concern to Courts due to due to their potential to convey intimate details about individuals, especially as computers provide the ability to collate, compare, and analyze recordings together, allowing new conclusions to be drawn from what would otherwise be meaningless information. Any additional connections to biometric systems will likely be met with even greater concern. (SCAN report pt.2,pp.21)

(Biometric face scans, incidentally, are no longer the province of speculative fiction and may be readily implemented on public surveillance networks – though with questionable accuracy. A borough of London, England trialed such a system in 2002, Germany and Australia use it in their border screening processes, and INTERPOL wants to see a global system established.)

In the Privacy Commissioner of Canada's annual report to Parliament for 2001-2002, commissioner George Radwanski also attempted to warn Canadians of the substantive threat of an interconnected and over-exuberant security state. The following is from the Commissioner's Overview:

The fundamental human right of privacy in Canada is under assault as never before. Unless the Government of Canada is quickly dissuaded from its present course by Parliamentary action and public insistence, we are on a path that may well lead to the permanent loss not only of privacy rights that we take for granted but also of important elements of freedom as we now know it.

He identifies as threats to privacy the following

...dramatically enhanced state powers to monitor our communications, as set out in the "Lawful Access" consultation paper; a national ID card with biometric identifiers, as advanced by Citizenship and Immigration Minister Denis Coderre; and the Government's support of precedent-setting video surveillance of public streets by the RCMP.

The federal privacy commissioner continues

A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."

By that reasoning, of course, we shouldn't mind if the police were free to come into our homes at any time just to look around, if all our telephone conversations were monitored, if all our mail were read, if all the protections developed over centuries were swept away. It's only a difference of degree from the intrusions already being implemented or considered.

The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others. Most of us are only willing to have a few things known about us by a stranger, more by an acquaintance, and the most by a very close friend or a romantic partner. The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.

If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl. Even if we suffered no other specific harm as a result, that alone would profoundly change how we feel. Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.

As the CBC reported, Radwanski resigned under fire in 2003, blaming “a powerful political backlash from some who would prefer a less forceful privacy commissioner.”

And yet Comissioner Radwanski's foresight has been vindicated. His warnings regarding the monitoring of communications, the proposed biometric tracking of citizens and the expansion of video surveillance on public streets are now reflected in current Federal and Provincial initiatives to track internet usage and the integration of biometrics and RFID radio tags with Canadian's drivers licenses and passports. In regards to surveillance, British Columbia is building a network of license-plate scanning cameras on its roadways and pilot projects are already in place in Toronto and elsewhere in Ontario to mount roving scanners on police cruisers, a technology capable of running thousands of plates through a police database per day regardless of whether there's any suspicion that a crime has been committed. We won't even get into the stripsearch scanners now in use at major airports. And in perhaps the most disturbing preview of the new technologies coming online, the Canadian Bankers Association supplied the Toronto Police Service with face scanning software to troll through the hours of footage generated by G20 security cameras, a move that should raise difficult questions about conflict of interest in the wake of the financial summit.

Though the rollout of these technologies are in their infancy, there's no expectation that their expansion will be arrested any time soon, enabled as they are by handouts from Provincial and Federal governments. Your tax dollars at work.

Pulling Wool over Canadian Eyes

With massive sums and hard-won civil rights at stake, Canadian taxpayers might at the very least ask if they're getting value for their tax dollar.

Astonishingly, there is no evidence to indicate that surveillance networks are particularly effective either at preventing crime or solving crimes once they've occurred – the parade of unsolved surveillance images on network television programmes like Crime Stoppers bears ironic witness to this fact. While high profile shootings are often used to mobilize public opinion in favour of camera surveillance, the RCMP's own report suggests only that some forms of property crime may be deterred, in some circumstances, while there is little support for the claim that they prevent crimes against persons. (SCAN pt.1,pp14)

Similarly, a major 2005 report prepared for the UK Home Office and surveying 14 CCTV systems there found that “the majority of the schemes evaluated did not reduce crime and even where there was a reduction this was mostly not due to CCTV” and went on to conclude that these systems are oversold by governments as a magic bullet to address the crime problem. (SCAN pt.1,pp17). In a 2008 Guardian article entitled CCTVs don't keep us safe, yet the cameras are everywhere multiple failings and abuses of CCTV are laid out.

The UK, to quote a conservative estimate, has over 1.5 million public cameras yet when only 3% of street robberies in London are solved using CCTV as a senior police detective has observed (SCAN pt.1,pp.7) you'd think that some sort of rational cost-benefit analysis might be in order to compare the utility of camera surveillance to other police investigative tactics. In the UK, over $500 million pounds or close to a billion dollars has been spent on camera surveillance in the past decade. Nobody knows the total cost to Canadians so far – the G20 cameras alone cost $1.2 million.

In practice however, cost-benefit arguments fall on deaf ears. Efficiency in solving crimes, though repeated as a mantra by police officials lobbying for additional funding has little to do with decisions to implement camera surveillance. Wade Deisman, a professor of policing, criminology, security and intelligence wrote in the SCAN report that “Decisions to avoid or embrace CCTV do not appear to hinge upon evidence that video surveillance is the 'most effective strategy' to respond to crime and/or disorder” (pt.1,pp26) but rather in the wake of 9/11 “'national security' concerns increasingly underlie all discussions regarding crime detection and prevention” (ibid. pp.22). He points out that there's now simply a culture of making unsupported claims about the efficacy of cameras, with deterrence, crime detection/resolution and an increased public perception of safety the main reasons cited in support of CCTV.

The wide availability of these and similar studies to professional criminologists and police policy advocates suggests something other than ignorance of the facts is at work.

For the launch of Toronto's citywide 13-camera pilot project in 2007, a consultation with the public was announced via a press release, a posting on the Police Services website and notices distributed to community centers, banks, grocery stores, rinks, etc. Randy Lippert, Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Windsor wrote of these meetings that

After receiving a 2 million dollar provincial government grant, nine consultative meetings encouraged Toronto neighbourhood residents to inspect details of new temporary CCTV arrangements before implementation. However, few people actually attended these meetings about the CCTV pilot program. The twenty to fifty persons in attendance could hardly be seen as representative of the public. Now was there much of a consultation. It simply entailed a Powerpoint presentation by police. Moreover, once the pilot program began, cameras were moved to other neighbourhoods without any formal public consultation beforehand. (SCAN pt.1,pp.31)

A survey was distributed to participants and the results were tallied. Of the 131 responses fielded, 84% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that “it would be okay to use CCTV cameras”, and the results of the survey were subsequently touted to justify deployment. (TPS Minutes, Mar 22 2007, pp.46)

However this survey can hardly be considered a rigorous snapshot of public opinion – 66% of the demographic surveyed was older than 46 (ibid. pp.59) and as observed in an analysis of surveillance opinion polls

Social scientists approach public opinion with strategies embedded in their questions which are meant to isolate factors, test prior knowledge of the subject, and make comparisons possible. Consequently, they tend to offer a much more detailed view of the various aspects of respondents' attitudes. In general, these polls on camera surveillance also show significantly less support among respondents than media and professional polls (rarely above 65%).

The findings of these polls can be summarized as follows. First, both question order and wording can have powerful impacts on results. As Jason Ditton (2000) has observed, when questions about camera surveillance are preceded by statements or other questions referring to criminality and security, support for surveillance goes up by 20%. (SCAN report, pt.1,pp.44)

It appears that the Toronto Police Services survey was subject to precisely this form of manipulation, as it included three such questions prior to any mention of CCTV. The questions were 1. Are you concerned about the possibility that you or anyone else who lives with you might become a victim of crime? 2. What is your perception of safety in your neighbourhood at night? and 3) In your opinion, what is the crime issue in your neighbourhood? with Break and Enter/Property Theft, Vandalism, Fighting, and Drugs listed as the top four concerns. (TPS Minutes, Mar 22 2007, pp.52)

With members of the public already conditioned to believe that CCTV represents an effective deterrent and criminal prosecution tool in the absence of any evidence to that effect, clearly a survey is not an appropriate policy tool.

Be Seeing You

One notable early fictional portrayal of the surveillance society hit the small screen in 1967 when The Prisoner aired in Britain, a classic allegory of a controlled society in which conformity is rewarded and those who refuse to self-censor and conform in an environment of pervasive surveillance face a trip to hospital for 're-adjustment' or worse. Social cohesion is enforced by Number 2, the keeper of secrets and the public face of administration in The Village as well as a cadre of unseen guardians watching the public through their camera eyes. But enforcement is also provided by fellow residents of The Village, who've become accustomed to acting as proxies for the secret police lest they, too, fall under suspicion. While the writing doesn't shy away from depicting the complexities of individual integrity vs. egalitarian group-think, its sanitized, surreal environments and situations are uncomfortably reminiscent of our own sanitized suburbs and gated communities and suggests that much of the prison is found within.

Fiction and literature are useful here because they provide ways that enable us to look at the human condition with heightened clarity. History, too, provides ample precedent for the oppressive nature of surveillance. No discussion of surveillance would be complete without mention of Bentham's Panopticon, a word meaning 'all-seeing'. In the 16^th century, Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed a prison constructed around a central surveillance tower in which warders could observe the inmates, but inmates would never know if or when they were being observed. The French philosopher and sociologist Michel Foucault described the effect of this Panopticon upon the mind in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.

East Germany prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain provides another instructive example. Ongoing surveillance was conducted by a caste of secret police called the STASI. In 1989, just prior to the destruction of the Berlin Wall, over 91,000 people kept watch on a population of 16.4 million. While video cameras were typically used for hidden surveillance by police agents rather than in public view, the mere knowledge of the STASI's infiltration of every aspect of East German society kept the population distrustful, isolated, and apart from the most dedicated activists the people were cowed and readily controlled by fear.

What is it about this sort of panoptical observation that provides so much power? Reflection suggests that there are two factors at work in the relationship between observer and observed. The observer, by the nature of the act, collects information. Information is knowledge, and knowledge is power. The observer wants... information.

Accompanying this is the more subtle dynamic of objectification. The observed, when they realize that they are the object of observation may feel self-conscious, and thus subordinate to the second viewpoint of the observer: an external force which they cannot control. This is what is so brilliant and horrifying about the Panopticon and mass social surveillance – it functions also as a means to exert psychological control.

Another French philosopher, the Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, knew something of this and wrote of 'the Look' as the unsettling gaze of the Other in his greatest work, Being and Nothingness. The powerfully mythic Christian creation story, too, tells of Adam and Eve being ashamed when they eat of the Tree of Knowledge and come to know their nakedness before The Lord. And all but the smallest child attempts to hide, to avert their face from the parent's gaze when they are shamed.

Subverting the Gaze: Restoring the Balance of Power

The question then must be, why don't most (urban) Canadians seem to mind the gaze of the camera eye?

There are a few possible answers to this seeming paradox. Ignorance of the cameras is one obvious possibility. Focus groups conducted in Montreal made it clear that at least some respondents living in surveilled areas didn't know cameras had been installed, and in any case a majority of residents couldn't place cameras on a map or say whether they lived or worked in a camera's field of view. (SCAN report, pt.1,pp.51)

Another possible explanation is education and conditioning. Cameras are not only ubiquitous, a commonplace in the media but

as the embodiment of the promise of high-tech protection and comfort, have become [viewed as] a universal positive. Any perceived flaws are explained in terms of improper or inadequate implementation or inefficient follow-up by police officers. (ibid.)

Another problem is the simplistic identification of personal privacy with intimacy and the functions of the body. Accordingly, citizens have difficulty identifying any privacy issues when they are under public surveillance since the areas in which surveillance is most commonly objected to are fitting rooms, washrooms, and the interiors and entrances of homes. In the conclusion of his contribution to the SCAN report, Stephane Leman-Langlois suggests that

Privacy might regain cogency if it were recast as a form of security. Within the various forms of security production, room should be left for the security of privacy. This can be done easily if privacy is conceived as a sum of information about persons, which should be protected. Arguments around camera systems would then revolve around the appropriateness, or equilibrium, of any distribution of protection resources among various objects: spaces, persons, and information (ibid.,pp.52)

This last point reflects George Radwanski's thought about the 'right not to be known against our will'. In a networked era, one in which many of us think nothing of offering up hundreds of pictures of ourselves or our children to Facebook and posterity, perhaps the best way to go about explaining this is with a variation of the famous libertarian “How Many Men” thought experiment.

How much information, and of what nature, would you be uncomfortable with the state collecting on you? Would your photo, collected once or twice a day without your full informed consent be too much? What if that photo was accompanied by identity information? What if this was cross referenced with images of your family, your employment status, back taxes, and any political groups you may be involved with? What if your image was taken multiple times a day and indexed to your physical location in the city, producing a record of your travels? All of this is possible using 21^st century tracking technology – but is it desirable? How much is too much in the pursuit of some illusory, perfectly safe society?

Whose information is it anyways, and does your limited exposure of personal information by appearing in a public space – a fleeting sample of identity + location – imply your consent to collect and store it in a pervasive manner? It's the principle of the thing that is at stake, and this is not a principle that it's in our best interest to breach or degrade. To do so fundamentally upsets the balance of power between the individual and the state.

It may be that people don't care, and will not respond to demand a rollback of the surveillance state's control grid until its invisible walls have been constructed around us and the consequences of massively networked camera systems have become apparent. We lead busy lives and the marginal utility of fighting surveillance in the public sphere may be overwhelmed by the drain on personal resources it presently demands. But at some point the two sides of this equation could reach equality and demand action of even the most submissive ward of the surveillance society.

We're not there yet, but things aren't looking too good.

Major Works Cited

A Report on Camera Surveillance in Canada (Lyon, Lippert, Johnson, Deisman et al. 2009)

Privacy Commissioner of Canada's annual report to Parliament for 2001-2002 (Radwanski 2003)

What's Wrong With Fusion Centers? (ACLU 2008)

Home Office Research Study 292: Assessing the Impact of CCTV (Gill, Spriggs 2005)

Excerpt from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Foucault 1975)

Counting the Cost: Canada's Longest War

2010-11-23T10:09:00.012-05:00

In March 2009, PM Stephen Harper was being interviewed on CNN when he told Fareed Zakaria that “...we are not ever going to defeat the insurgency.” The interview was remarkable not only for its candor (and Harper's in reputable company on this point) but also because it seemed so off-message. He went on to say that “[From] my reading of Afghanistan history, it's probably had an insurgency forever, of some kind.” Really?

Afghanistan lies at the crossroads of of central Asia and is the intersection of empires. The windswept homeland of independent nomadic peoples, it's weathered waves of invaders – Alexander and the Macedonians, the Mongols, English and Russian empires, all have come seeking occupation of this geopolitical keystone and all have been repelled. The present conflict, which has been dubbed the 'New Great Game', has very deep roots.

From Freedom Fighters to Terrorists

Veteran Middle Eastern correspondent Robert Fisk has covered the region since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and in his book The Great War for Civilization provides one of the clearest sketches of the true political motivations in the region. From the CIA's campaign in the 80s to arm Reagan's 'freedom fighters' – the Afghan and Arab mujahedin fighting the Russian military's occupation at the time – to UNOCAL executive Hamid Karzai's failed negotiations for a trans-Afghan pipeline with those same mujahedin – now known as the Taliban – Fisk documents the legacy of failed interventions in the area. He's also heard a lot about terror during his long career:

“Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists […] this word would become a plague, a meaningless punctuation mark in all of our lives, a full stop erected to finish all discussion of injustice, constructed as a wall by Russians, Americans, Israelis, British, Pakistanis, Saudis, Turks, to shut us up. Who would ever say a word in favour of terrorists? What cause could justify terror? So our enemies are always 'terrorists'. In the seventeenth century, governments used 'heretic' in much the same way, to end all dialogue, to prescribe obedience.”

Canadians didn't hear about terrorism too frequently before 9/11. It's interesting to note then that Jane's International Security News reported on March 15th, 2001 that the invasion of Afghanistan was underway well before 9/11's trauma spurred the expansion and public unveiling of the campaign. Battle plans for this full-scale invasion were tabled On September the 10th. All they were wanting was an enemy. And when the call came to take a role in the war, Canada answered.

The Peace Mission and its Costs

With the deployment of regular troops in January 2002, the nation entered a minefield of competing interests, corruption, and long standing ethnic hostilities between the two major tribes in the country, Tajiks and Pashtun. Matthew Hoh, American diplomat to Afghanistan threw up his hands and resigned in disgust, citing the existence of 'civil war' as the primary dynamic in Afghanistan. In his interview with Matt Lauer on NBC, Hoh quoted the disposition of American troops who had approached him, reportedly stating “We’re not sure what we’re doing here. It doesn’t make any sense. All we’re doing is fighting people who are fighting us because we’re occupying them.”

A Frontline report aired in 2007 entitled “Afghanistan: The Other War” covered the situation at Forward Operating Base Martello, staffed by a Canadian contingent charged with the task of guarding the road to Kandahar. The film follows the isolated team in their quest to obtain a couple of spark plugs to repair a local village's water pump, an impossible task undertaken in an environment where the hills bristle with Taliban militia. Outside of the occasional model school, precious little reconstruction is apparent to Afghans. Even Canada's signature development project, the Dhala Dam, has been sidelined by violence associated with the corrupt Karzai administration and its camp followers.

The desire to assist in the reconstruction of villages shattered by war is no doubt a sincere one on the part of frontline troops, but they've found themselves caught in the gears of war. Sold as a peacekeeping mission from its earliest days, the combat nature of the Afghan campaign was downplayed. First Liberals and then Conservatives fed Canadians a narrative of development and reconstruction, training, and aid. By 2007, the message was so tightly controlled by a partisan Privy Council that it was issuing 'Message Event Proposals' for the Prime Minister's Office, literal word by word scripts making sock puppets of those government agencies and employees chosen to appear in the media.

This campaign to emphasize development projects minimizes and distracts from the real situation on the ground – a noxious maelstrom of violence and political corruption. The UK Telegraph just reported that this year is the worst since the war began for civilian casualties, that insurgency and violence are growing. Detainees handed over to Afghan police by coalition forces from Canada and its coalition partners are routinely tortured, corrupt governors linked to narcotics trafficking run around blowing up UN workers to encourage instability and well connected corporations clean up on NATO security and massive military construction contracts to build these hardened garrisons.

Is this the return Canadians were expecting for the loss of (at last count) 152 soldiers and 11.3 billion dollars?

Multiple Extensions Threaten Runaway War

Malalai Joya, a former Afghan Member of Parliament and one of the few women to speak out in a hostile legislature visited Toronto in October and gave a speech at Bloor Trinity United Church. While detractors in the audience loudly insisted she didn't speak for Afghans, Joya methodically recounted the impacts that the Afghan war has on a largely voiceless civilian population.

Tens of thousands of civilians have died since the war began, caught between a vindictive Taliban and the loose triggers of ISAF coalition forces. Opium production and drug addiction have skyrocketed. The protection of women's rights is a miserable sham across the country. Elections are occasions for widespread fraud and intimidation. Aid sent into the country is siphoned off by the warlords and power brokers controlling the government, men tied to human rights abuses and past massacres in the country.

She suggested that if the coalition forces in the country are benefitting anyone it is certainly not the people, women least of all. And with the Taliban now involved in peace negotiations to rejoin the government, the Afghan campaign has accomplished little more than poverty and steadily declining security since the occupation began. This view was further underscored by her Guardian piece of Nov 2, another urgent plea for NATO to decamp.

To those following exclusively domestic coverage of the war, this may all come as a bit of a shock. She wants us to leave? When the government wanted an extension of the war's initial 2009 end date, a commission of study chaired by John Manley duly reported that the majority of Afghans wanted Canadian forces in the country. Digging into the methodology revealed what was actually said was that Afghans wanted foreign aid and investment, but why split hairs?

This past week, Canadians were told once more that the war requires an extension. While regular forces will begin to come home, some will remain to provide training. In lockstep with American policy to stay past 2011 first mentioned in June, Harper unilaterally declared the passage of this extension with the greatest reluctance and assurances that Canadian troops would be safely out of harm's way. This time, the extension is for 2014, which happens to also be the date suggested by NATO at the recent Lisbon summit to general acclaim. 2014, being an 'inflection point' in their words is a date which NATO stresses is 'not set in stone'.

When it comes to limitations on this conflict, clearly nothing is set in stone. It's estimated that another three years of war will cost Canadians a total of $1.5 billion, and it's difficult to feel assured that would be the end of it. Last month, the NATO Council Secretary told a roomful of Concordia students that Afghanistan still promises to be a “very long military venture”. And US President Barack Obama has more than doubled the size of the American forces in the country since 2009.

With no reliable end in sight, the war threatens to spill over more borders and engulf the wider region in conflict. If the continuing litany of outrages suffered by the Afghan civilians don't make for convincing enough of a moral argument for withdrawal, practical considerations should speak to this government. According to the latest Ipsos-Reid poll, the vast majority of Canadians oppose the NATO extension on the war in Afghanistan. It's really time we came home – we've done enough.

Inside the Wall - The Toronto G20 Redux, Pt 3

2010-11-11T17:00:00.008-05:00

This week world leaders, finance ministers and their retinues are once again meeting for the G20 summit, descending this time on the city of Seoul. Protests have broken out in the streets, as expected. The mandatory dramatic images of citizens being pepper sprayed have been rolled out to the international media. And South Korea has shown it can deploy a militarized security force with the best of them: demonstration is simply 'illegal' within 2km of the site and a battery of water cannons, armoured vehicles, robots, roadblocks and helicopters says so.
As it turns out, the real melee to watch in Seoul may be inside the security wall this week. With talk of a showdown between the US and Germany and China over currency manipulation, the World Bank's push for a stronger global trade unit, and the ongoing implosion of sovereign European bonds in overexposed countries (most recently, Ireland), the occasional firework is sure to be lit inside the conference center as well. Despite the mass media's overwhelming focus on protest, violence, and damage to property it's clear that the police, the intimidating hardware, and the very real populist opposition to the summit are symptomatic of, but are not the ultimate cause of the dis-ease afflicting the streets of any recent G20 host site. That's the part of the story reserved for the business sections and back pages of the paper, couched in the pallid language of global economics, abstraction, and understatement.

For an example, look no further than our PM Stephen Harper, a journeyman of some reknown in the art of public misdirection. Speaking in Gatineau back in April, he said;

"...to the extent we now have a truly globalized economy, we need some semblance of global governance. That’s what the G20 is so if the G20 doesn’t work, something else will have to fill that gap. We’re not talking about world government. No one is prepared to surrender their sovereignty to the G20 or some other body but what they are going to see in practice is that we are going to need to co-ordinate our policies to create stability for all of us.”

Yet at a press conference held at the Toronto G20 summit's conclusion, he said something a little different:

"we cannot be effective at major economic matters any longer unless we work with our economic partners around the world and work with them closely and intimately. That is essential. I know some people don't like it. It is a loss of national sovereignty but it is a simple reality. It is a simple reality." (emphasis added)

Global Governance or Global Government?

Terence Corcoran, editor of the Financial Post and someone who knows a thing or two about economics dismantled the semantics of 'governance' in his column of June 8, backed up by a recent study from the University of Waterloo's global policy thinktank CIGI which advises us: “We should not shy away from naming the big fish honestly. It is global government.” Corcoran writes;

"G20 mania has a darker side — a growing push for forms of global government. Paul Martin rejects such suggestions. In the latest issue of Policy Options, Mr. Martin says 'effective global co-ordination does not mean the slow road to global government.' He’s not reading the background papers."

The term 'governance' is one that stretches back to Plato and means, roughly, 'to steer'. While there's some dispute about distinctions between the political process and what governments do versus the wider process of governing or administering any institution, clearly the concept of governance is the wider of the two. It's also a term which, until a few years ago, most people would associate more with the corporate boardroom (see eg; 'corporate governance') than a representative, democratic government. In practice, it has become a euphemism which equates the two, and this is an important shift, an expansion in our understanding of the nature and purpose of government and its relationship to other institutional powerbrokers: “NGOs, research institutes, religious leaders, finance institutions, political parties, the military etc.” all have a place at the table, in the view of one large UN agency. Ideas of good governance are content-free however when it comes to giving direction on the structure of government, merely advocating an effective “mediation of the different interests in society”. Presumably, anything goes so long as it keeps the trains running on time.

The G20's Democratic Deficit

By any standard of governance Canadians might find remotely familiar, rule by a council of elite ministers unelected to their office is anathema.

It's a corrosion not only of this country's sovereignty but its parliamentary institutions as well. It is a serious and potentially critical insult to the Westminster tradition to have heads of state negotiating de facto economic treaties beyond the reach of national jurisdiction and (worse yet) far beyond the reach of those marching to have their voices heard outside the summit's steel wall.

Harper may soft-shoe the issue, assuring us that this is just the way things are now, but there is no way to reconcile Canada's pluralistic ideals with the image of twenty global leaders and guests debating economic policy behind closed doors in a high-powered board meeting. Perhaps he's perfectly comfortable with this arrangement - after all, this is the PM that has taken action to sideline parliament, muzzle his own party and shift power into his own office and that of the Privy Council - but the rest of us should view these developments with growing apprehension. History has taught us the hard way that questions of economic and foreign policy must be subject to the debate of a representative legislative branch, they cannot and must not be left to arbitrary executive power. Strong rule of this sort is the philosophical provenance of Plato, Hobbes and Machiavelli - the autocrats, not the great egalitarians that shaped Western democracies - Pym, Locke, Smith, Jefferson, and our own George Brown.

It ought to go without saying, then, that it's doubly obscene for our Prime Minister to attend such a meeting on November 11^th, a day we remember the sacrifices that helped define our status as a nation independent of empire.

Central Planning, Economic Apartheid

Canadians did not vote for the G20. South Koreans did not vote for the G20. The G20 nominated and elected itself the supreme economic council for the globe last year in Pittsburgh. In association with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of International Settlements, the European Central Bank and the US Treasury (among others) the G20 has now undertaken the task of formulating regulation for lesser banks as well as finding a global income stream with which to fund future projects - in other words, economic central planning.

The need for a ‘New Bretton Woods’ agreement has been invoked on multiple occasions, referring to the meetings held in the wake of WW2 that resulted in the creation of these very same global financial institutions and the canonization of Keynesian economic theory. (See here and here for examples of thought opposing Keynes.)

For the grandees and mandarins that move within this network of summits and conferences, this is no doubt a capital idea – it's a very clubby sort of world at the top. Many of the finance ministers and heads of central banks that attend have worked at the largest banking institutions, rotating in and out of private and public sector jobs. There’s even a name for this jet-set class of powerbrokers: ‘Davos Men’, implying regular attendance of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Our own Bank of Canada governor, Mark Carney, is an alumni of Goldman Sachs, which played such a notable role in the property derivatives crisis of 2008 and has been described, in one notable column by Matt Taibbi as a 'blood sucking vampire squid'. It should come as no surprise, then, that the G20 generates such outrage wherever it goes, though most particularly among students - those who have the most to lose when their futures are forfeit to the will of distant councils.

The fact that the views of those in the streets are not representative of other broad sectors of the population deserves comment. While much of this disconnect may be chalked up to apathy, there’s also a fundamental dissonance at the heart of the message sent by labour, students, and the many civil society groups that form up to push back against the institutions of globalization. They blame ‘capitalism’ and critique the international system on this basis, clamouring for various degrees of socialism under which they believe that the very real injustices facing the poor and the colonized will be addressed. In some sense, what they hope for is to have their people at the tables of power.

But how are these not their people? IMF managing director Dominique-Strauss Kahn is a longtime scion of French socialism, and as the head of a fund empowered to issue Special Drawing Rights to nations is in the van of international central banks and satisfying one of the central planks of the Communist Manifesto: “Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.” Ditto for the Federal Reserve and World Bank, both agencies of the sort of economic centralization that binds together smaller jurisdictions and forces them into a collective dependency. China is of course a Communist state incorporating growing elements of Corporatism. Canada and the US are mixed economies both, combining elements of capitalism and redistributive socialism.

The critique of ‘capitalism’ levied by anti-globalization marchers could hardly be more anachronistic. In the first place because there is scarce little capitalism around to be observed in the wild, and secondly because those silent masses who do not feel moved to speak out against the G20 implicitly know that they owe the standard of living they enjoy to either the few remnants of economic liberty that still exist – or the ongoing seizure of foreign resources by multinationals. When told that internationally managed trade is ‘free’ trade and the G20 is ‘capitalism’, their silent consent is thereby secured by a radical confusion of these terms.

The irony here is that when the choices offered by either side of the traditional political spectrum result in central planning, hierarchy, and the redistribution of wealth to their people, economic apartheid and the creation of walls follows time and again. Instead of having a debate on the role of the G20, it’s the very legitimacy of institutions like the G20 that should be under debate.

Historically, entire cultures have undergone trauma and schism under the yoke of central planners. When that happens, we are segregated by race, by resources, by tribe or class, and begin developing along different lines: with different interests and different myths. When this happens we look for difference, we are fearful of the other, we point fingers and we build walls. This fact should have been thrown into sharp enough relief by the steel fence that bifurcated Toronto in June.

Us and Them

us, and them
and after all we’re only ordinary men
-Pink Floyd

It's past time for a radical rethink of the state’s role in society. To return to the issue of global governance - can the G20 ever accomplish its stated goals? Can this potent combination of high finance, questionable conflicts of interest and macroeconomic management ever work? Or is it a doomed project – does the desire to impose broad solutions from above ignore the crucial contingencies within each nation that rule out a one-size-fits all solution?

Enlightenment thinkers never intended that the modern state should be a Leviathan, an overarching corporation delivering ‘services’ with maximum efficiency and enjoying invested rights as an individual (you can't rebroadcast question period due to 'crown copyright'), a chief executive or Crown, a security force, and phalanxes of lawyers to fight for its interests by any means necessary. What they intended was that the state and its overwhelming resources should be bound in chains so that its citizens could be free. Washington said: “Government is not reason, it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

The revolutions that rocked Europe and America in the 18^th century were in large part a reaction against imperial governance – groups of powerful citizens that ruled by law yet by various machinations were not subject to the rule of law.

In a petition to James I of England in 1610, the English House of Commons wrote:

“Amongst many other points of happiness and freedom which your majesty's subjects of this kingdom have enjoyed under your royal progenitors, kings and queens of this realm, there is none which they have accounted more dear and precious than this, to be guided and governed by the certain rule of the law which giveth both to the head and members that which of right belongeth to them, and not by any uncertain or arbitrary form of government....” (emphasis added)

Four hundred years have passed and the year is 2010, yet we find ourselves mired in these same issues. Protests rock Europe and the global economy hangs in the balance, pushed to the brink by debt leveraged out into the global economic system while financial institutions deemed ‘too big to fail’ clean up on taxpayer bailouts and consolidate their market positions. It’s time that corporations were sundered from the state and its enforcers in the same way and for the same reasons that the church once was, but fear of the unknown, of disrupting the social order keeps populations in check and so top banks are given slaps on the wrist and continue the drive for global regulation while federal governments militarize local police.

Unfortunately, the passion for individual rights necessary to counter this tide has wholly evaporated from the culture, and people are ideologically neutered by cultural pressure to support either the 'left' or the 'right', positions which in practice or theory both support massive increases in the size of the state. In his seminal work The Road to Serfdom (read the illustrated version here in 60 seconds flat) FA Hayek, a noted opponent of Keynes and one of the last champions of economic liberty wrote that:

“’Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.”

We live in an age of crisis, we’re told. Measures must be taken. So – just relax, shop, enjoy entertainment, and the experts will take care of the threat of terror, of the economy, of the constitution of government, of your collapsing standard of living.

They just need a little more power is all.

Back to: Everything is OK – The Toronto G20, Redux: Part 1Back to: The Criminalization of Dissent – The Toronto G20, Redux: Part 2

The Criminalization of Dissent – The Toronto G20 Redux, Pt 2

2010-10-31T16:56:00.004-04:00

Early on the morning of Sunday June 27th, police burst into the University of Toronto's Graduate Student's Union. There they arrested around seventy sleeping political activists, protesters, guests from out of town that the GSU had billeted for the weekend and allowed to crash on the floor of the gymnasium. They were seized and led away (some barefooted) to waiting buses for the trip to the freezing cold, perpetually illuminated cells of Torontonamo Bay - otherwise known as the Eastern Avenue detention center. Fast forward three and a half months to October 14th, and all charges of conspiracy and unlawful assembly have been dropped. In fact, of the roughly 1,100 people arrested over the course of the G20 weekend, charges have been dropped against all but 100 detainees as of this writing.

Two other glaring instances of detention and mass arrest occurred during the evenings of Saturday June 26th, outside of the Novotel building on the Esplanade, and Sunday June 27th at Queen and Spadina. In the Canadian Civil Liberties Association's preliminary report on the summit, the authors write "it appeared that after 5pm on Saturday, the constitutional protection against arbitrary detention and unreasonable searches had effectively been suspended across downtown Toronto."

During Police Chief Bill Blair's interview on TVO's flagship current affairs show The Agenda, host Steve Paikin asked him to account for these police actions given the peaceful nature of the protests that were underway. He responded (referring to the Novotel arrests), that it was up to police officers on the scene to decide if there was a "reasonable apprehension" that people in the crowd were "determined to engage in criminal acts" and that the crowd was then asked to leave:

"...unfortunately, a lot of people came down to - either to witness what was happening or to get in on the action and became part of the problem. It made it very difficult to manage that other group that came to commit criminal acts. And so unfortunately when, in order to prevent those breaches of the peace or to prevent those criminal acts you have to ask those people to disperse or when they don't - whether it is intentionally complicit or simply negligently, and involved in presence there it made it very difficult for us to prevent those breaches of the peace and I know a lot of people who did not come to commit crimes but were facilitating the potential of that breach of the peace ... by providing cover in a crowd." (emphasis mine)

Seriously. Watch the interview - the quote's at 15:14 in.

Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with this account. Preemptive arrests of protesters or people leaving restaurants in the area or even those attempting to access their hotel rooms, when premised on the vague potential criminality that Chief Blair makes reference to, is of course wildly unconstitutional. But even more disturbing is the fact that numerous reports from the scene filed by human rights observers and others [report page 16-17 ] indicates that any warning to leave the area came only after all avenues of egress had already been blocked by riot police, directly contradicting Blair's account as well as his implication that protesters and passerby were unresponsive, uncooperative, or complicit.

This week, the House of Commons Public Safety Committee held hearings to investigate the security response at the G8/G20 summits. Part of an ad-hoc patchwork of narrowly scoped inquiries that sprang up in the wake of the summit, this particular Committee heard from witnesses on the astronomical cost of G8/G20 policing as well as the now familiar and harrowing accounts of the use of force and imprisonment. Much of the effort exerted in the attempt to understand how and why our police acted the way they did could have been spared, however, were the committee to simply search online for the phrase "the Miami Model". Because as it turns out, this is standard operating procedure drawn from a common playbook.

The Miami Model - Militarizing Civilian Police

As Star columnist Catherine Porter points out, the tactics used in Toronto have been in development for years and are supported by the US Department of Homeland Security, the sister organization of our own Ministry of Public Safety. These governmental bodies were both created in the wake of 9/11 and share more than an affinity for Orwellian naming conventions - they're both active in integrating elements of the police, the military, and other security forces to form multi-level paramilitary organizations. For the G8/G20, operations were run out of secretive integrated command centres (Toronto's INSET and Barrie's Joint Intelligence Group) reminiscent of the federally funded 'police fusion centres' springing up to fuse the police and military intelligence throughout American cities. There is little that is new here - many of the tactics deployed in Toronto were first widely noted at the Miami FTAA summit in 2003 (read one account of that fracas here) and have become so well defined that a forty-point checklist has been developed identifying the practices involved. Play along at home and see if any of these highlights sound familiar (click each item to reveal its local implementation):

Incidentally, the same well-polished narrative was employed last year at the Pittsburgh G20. In a scene eerily reminiscent of the crackdown in the 'Designated Protest Zone' at Queen's Park in Toronto, police riot units indiscriminately cut through groups of peaceful protesters and onlookers alike at Schenley Park wielding batons, rubber bullets, and sound cannons. The legal director of the ACLU's Pennsylvania chapter told the Associated Press in the aftermath that "The deployment of police seems to be more geared towards suppressing lawful demonstrations than actually preventing crime." (Emphasis mine)

It's difficult to disagree with this analysis, given the checquered history of the 'Miami Method'. That is to say, it fits the available evidence better than the official explanation when, time and again, the paramilitary tactics employed result in the public and peaceful protesters taking the brunt of police violence and abuse even as masked cadres already well infiltrated by police are given free reign to break store windows and run wild for news cameras. By any definition of legitimate police activity, this should be regarded as a failure rather than any kind of measured response.

Einstein's popular (if facetious) definition of insanity entails doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. Applied to the Miami Model, there's either a serious case of institutional insanity at work here, leading police in summit cities to imagine that tactics contravening established constitutional rights and the rule of law will work this time around - or there's a method to this madness.

To Serve and Protect?
Looking back on a weekend many in Toronto would as soon forget, one of the clearest concerns to emerge is the lack of clarity in regards to public accountability by local and federal police forces. At the Parliamentary Committee on Oct 25, Vic Toews, Minister of Public Safety, was asked a simple question by Vancouver MP Don Davies "Who was responsible for the decision to arrest some 900 innocent Canadians?" In response, the Honourable Vic Toews suggested that it would constitute political interference to make a determination on the guilt or innocence of the arrestees and that Mr. Davies should ask all the police departments involved whether there was inappropriate conduct by any of the officers involved.

Huh? An interesting response, considering the question was not a request for a ministerial judgement call on the decision - the question Toews chose to answer. It would appear that he dodged the real crux of the matter here - who was in charge? Even the terms of reference of the 'Independent Civilian Review' crafted for the Toronto Police Services Board explicitly acknowledges that this is an area of concern. Clause 1(c) in defining the inquiry's subject matter calls for "A review of the role played by the Toronto Police Services Board in the command structure for the policing of the G20, including whether the fact that a number of other police agencies and security agencies were involved with the Toronto Police Service impacted on the Toronto Police Service delivery of police services or created complications in the command structure during the G20." (emphasis added)

The men and women involved in police operations understand hierarchy and clear chains of command. They're absolutely vital to the functioning of any centralized organization. Obfuscation of this reporting structure implies either the breakdown of public accountability by the formation of independent cells (a gambit we might expect of paramilitaries rather than peace officers) or a deliberate shell game orchestrated at the highest levels of the service. Neither possibility bodes well for a parliamentary democracy.

Ultimately, whatever rationalizations are offered, the Miami Model serves as a de facto conditioning and training exercise for police in those cities visited by global summits. Front line officers are conditioned to attack dissenting citizens. Those on the sidelines are conditioned to view our peace officers as enforcers and propagandized to view dissent as facilitating criminal activity. Weapons and surveillance equipment are purchased and stockpiled for an uncertain future.

In a healthy political ecosystem, police are supposed to act like white blood cells - targeting invaders and mediating the immune response of a society regulated by law. Our peace officers are supposed to be our white knights; their motto is To Serve and Protect, and this is why we respect them so dearly. This is also why it's so disturbing and traumatic to the culture of a city when this expectation is undermined by the sight of rioting police, the equivalent of an autoimmune response, a disease that occurs when the body politic's defensive systems are turned against those it was intended to protect.

Unfortunately, this disease is spreading. As the FBI amps up raids against anti-war activists in Minneapolis this past September, actions one former US Treasury policy chief equates with the witch hunt against Vietnam protesters and the 'Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy' or TAVIS team demands Toronto citizens produce identification during patrols in less well-heeled areas of this city, it's becoming clear that there is a shift underway that affects policing long after the steel fences have come down.

To understand why this is happening, we need to go inside that fence. While the cameras of the world's media focused on the streets of Toronto, on violent 'anarchists', on (to a lesser degree) the various demands made of the G20 by civil society groups, few stopped to question the legitimacy of the forum itself. What is this group of central bankers and national heads of state? What legitimacy can this forum claim when the citizens of this country were never consulted on Canada's participation in a council Paul Martin and Larry Summers literally sketched out on the back of an envelope? As posh global summits like the G8/G20, Davos, WEF etc. proliferate along with their attendant promises to cure the ongoing economic crisis - promises typically benefiting those same institutions implicated in precipitating the crisis - more and more people are beginning to ask who the new militarized police cadres are really protecting. What is it that's really going on behind the wall?

Back to: Everything is OK - The Toronto G20, Redux: Part 1
Next up: Inside The Wall – The Toronto G20, Redux: Part 3

Everything is OK – The Toronto G20 Redux, Pt 1

2010-10-14T16:49:00.007-04:00

It's been three months since the Toronto G20 upended this city's downtown core, and October has produced a promising crop of critical and artistic reactions to the summit. Local documentarian Adam Letalik released his new film Toronto G20 Exposed to a packed room at Ryerson University October 6th. The Hindsight's G20/20 multimedia art retrospective of the summit was exhibited this past weekend at Studio 561. And on October the 20th, Steve Paikin is scheduled to interview TPS Chief Bill Blair on TVO's The Agenda.
Yet while memories of June's G20 summit may still be fresh to political pros, activists, and residents of Toronto's metro core, for many Canadians this memory is already fading, becoming history. The leader's big top is dismantled, the circus long since latched on to its next international host. And why not? For those that caught the weekend's news at home, the coverage in the aggregate presented a simple morality play of clashes between black-garbed 'anarchists' and police, leading inevitably to the rain-drenched roundup of hundreds of protesters, passerby and media on Sunday evening. And maybe this is explanation enough. Maybe the largest mass arrest in Canadian history was a regrettable yet unavoidable business in a nation that prides itself on Peace, Order, and Good Government.
The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

The only problem with this mythology is that it has little to do with the experience of the people who were on the ground that weekend – their accounts paint a strikingly different picture. One visual symbol of this disconnect is suggested by the handbill for the Hindsight G20/20 show, on which a young man poses for the lens in (ironic?) jacket and tie, rumpled and smudged from the weekend's encounters, holding a sign that reads: “Everything is O.K.”

Everything is not O.K. In one striking interview in Toronto G20 Exposed, a Jays fan describes leaving a game a few days before the summit, unwittingly wishing RCMP officers at a traffic checkpoint “good luck with Saturday” only to find his cab surrounded and his ass dragged off to a jail-cell strip search, beating, and interrogation. TTC worker Elroy Yau was in full uniform when he was jumped on his way to work along College St, accused of resisting arrest and being in possession of a weapon (his tiny transfer punch) before being held for 30 hours. He's been on disability since. Then there's the guy protesting in his wheelchair that had his artificial leg physically removed as being a 'potential weapon', was kicked and accused of resisting arrest before being sent to detention. Others, searched arbitrarily or violently taken down for such major transgressions as being in a park or wearing something black describe a frigid Eastern Avenue gulag with inmates penned 40 to a cell and forced to rattle the cage for a glass of water twice daily. Take a tour here.

These stories are legion, and they illustrate a disturbing corrosion of civil rights. In response to the epidemic of arbitrary and preemptive searches and arrests that occurred throughout the city, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association released a report entitled “Breach of the Peace” on June 29th. Based on the evidence returned by over fifty observers they'd deployed to the field, the report described police conduct as being “at times disproportionate, arbitrary, and excessive.”

Why did it have to be like this? Clearly, this is not the impression the vast majority of Toronto's residents have of their peace officers at any level of government. Both before and after the summit, we expect the OPP, RCMP, and municipal forces province-wide to help us when we wreck on the roads, to protect us from predators, to investigate fraud and corruption. We expect them to respect and uphold our Charter rights and Canadian common law in the performance of their duties. And for the most part, they deliver. All organizations might be expected to have some number of bad apples. But these stories from the summit are jarring, they seem surreal precisely because they flout our expectations so thoroughly. Do our political rights now not apply everywhere and at all times? Can they now be arbitrarily suspended? If so, can it really be said that they exist in any substantive, real way? And what was Officer Bubble's problem, anyways?

Oh Canada

One of the most iconic pieces of video from the G20 shows a small band of protesters sitting down near Queen and Spadina, singing Oh Canada, and rewarded for the gesture with an aggressive charge from Toronto's (or Barrie's, or Durham's) finest. This plows through the small demonstration like a knife through butter. In the end, one must ask: what was the point? For over a week, Toronto had a Wall of its own in the full Roger Waters sense of psychological and physical isolation, the ring of expanded steel slicing through the city a potent symbol of social division and hierarchy. Was anything accomplished on either side of this fence? Was the breezy expenditure of 1.2 billion dollars on security by a government that cries poor on services really good value for taxpayers? In the end, why do people from all walks of life protest the G20? What was this meeting of world leaders, international banks and finance ministers really all about?

Next up: The Criminalization of Dissent – The Toronto G20, Redux: Part 2

The G20 Summit: Global Compact to Descend on old York

2010-02-22T12:00:00.007-05:00

“The promises of yesterday are the taxes of today.” – William Lyon Mackenzie

Crusading publisher, republican rebel, and first Mayor of Toronto William Lyon Mackenzie was an ardent supporter of the patriation of sovereignty to the colony of Upper Canada from the distant British Crown. One can only imagine then what he might think these days if, scanning his city’s dailies, he were to lay aside his old friend George Brown’s Globe and Mail and come upon the following headline in that recent upstart, The Toronto Star: G20 Security Could Strangle Downtown
Though he may not have been above a bemused grin at the thought of a de facto occupation of the city centre, accompanied by “thousands of police and endless kilometers of security fencing” (history, it seems, has a way of repeating itself) it is certain that upon reflection and a closer look at the nature of the G20, the dour publican’s old indignant fire would start to rise. Managed by a ‘troika’ of three rotating chairs and consisting of national leaders, finance ministers, and central bankers from global economic institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, the G20 is no abstract debating society. Its power is as real as its accountability to Canadians is tenuous: At the Pittsburgh summit in September 2009, the G20 declared itself the world’s new ruling economic council. At the time Gordon Brown, UK Prime Minister announced that “The old system of international economic co-operation is over, the new system, as of today, has begun.”

So what is this ‘new system’ that the G20 promises to bring? A slow but steady trickle of pronouncements in the media from the chief boosters of globalization provides a reasonably clear view. During the London summit in April 2009, Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, stated “If leaders are serious about creating new global responsibilities or governance, let them start by modernising multilateralism to empower the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank Group to monitor national policies.” Gordon Brown, never shy of venturing his opinion upon the global stage, concurred by stating “I think a new world order is emerging with the foundation of a new progressive era of international cooperation”. And the august pronouncements continue, with calls for a global currency, new global levies and taxes to be handled by the IMF, and ongoing ‘stimulus’ as central banks continue inflationary policies.

It is in terms of multiple crises – the financial crisis, the terror crisis, the climate crisis, the hunger crisis, the rising European currency crisis and so on, that these calls for a strengthened international layer of ‘governance’ are being framed. Economist Milton Freidman famously observed that “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Mackenzie would have recognized the truth in this, having played his part in the political turmoil of the early 19th century which led directly to the union of Upper and Lower Canada.

Libertarians, of course, do not view the modern world through the lens of 19th century sensibilities. Some ideas, however – accountability and the decentralization of power, to name just two – are evergreen and worthy of debate. While Mackenzie may have viewed the G20 as yet another manifestation of the political oligarchy he pledged his life to resist, the objection might reasonably be offered that incremental centralization and economic union brings its own advantages too, with Canadian federalization and the European Union offered as examples. To this, the obvious response must be that not all political unions have been so fortunate as to enjoy the political traditions which, though seriously degraded, still underpin much of the freedom we enjoy in Canada and the western world. Libertarians have much cause for concern at the ideas that are “lying around” and available for use in the culture today – collectivism, statism, authoritarianism, not to mention a general political apathy of the sort that allows global summits to pass without much comment.

While it’s not possible to expand upon these ideas any further in this short article – in fact, the G8 in Huntsville deserves its own column – it should suffice to say that now, more than ever, the ideas and ideals of small-l libertarians, advocates for reason, and true laissez-faire free market advocates need to be heard. Look into the G8 and the G20, read and research voraciously online, and raise awareness in your community. While these institutions purport to be for free capital markets, sound fiscal management and free trade, this is a far cry from the truth as their approaches to managed trade and the ongoing merger of private central financial institutions with governmental bodies makes clear. We’ve seen this before. On the global stage, economic treaties are the vanguard of political union, and the empty promises of today are certain to become the institutional taxes of tomorrow if we allow a new political order to be erected beyond the reach of representative national parliaments.

Are you interested in continuing the conversation or helping this message be heard at the Toronto G20? It's up to you to get involved, and you can do so over at G20Central.com

Let's Welcome the G20 To Toronto

2009-12-21T12:40:00.006-05:00

As you may or may not know, the G20 meeting of the 'world's leaders' will be visiting its presence upon our fair city in June, 2010.

The G20 is the pre-eminent global economic Council - and I use the word advisedly - having voted to supplant the G8 in September of this year. This is no mere debating society. Following a trajectory similar to other regionalization strategies we've seen in the past, such as the institution of the European Economic Community over 50 years ago and its eventual culmination in the avowedly anti-democratic Lisbon Treaty, the G20 seeks what it refers to as harmonization and cooperation amongst states. This recognition of state's responsibilities in the new 'world order', we're told, is necessary because of the global economic crisis. It is important, we're told, that nations be bound together. A new global currency based on fiat World Bank special drawing rights is being advocated by the UN. Even the notion of instituting a global Tobin Tax is being kicked around by the likes of Soros and Gordon Brown, and language about this may have been slipped in the back door via the Copenhagen summit, which as we've seen had little to do with environmental outcomes.

Without drawing out all of the required arguments here - there's plenty of time for that if it seems necessary - it should be sufficient to say that Libertarian-minded folks might have a lot of qualms about the move towards a vast new level of global bureacracy that supercedes national sovereignty.

Why should the anarchists and socialists have all the fun, fouling the ideological pool? I don't mean to dump on the 'left' any more than the 'right' of course, but it should be pointed out that Libertarians have real, principled qualms with a summit of this nature that are the logical conclusions of the principles we hold. And our voices must be heard. The world's media will be in Toronto in June and this presents an exciting, dynamic opportunity to get our message out.

Libertarians and their allies must protest the G20. I can do some research on organization, but as of this writing, I have zero skill in this area, being more inclined to focus on philosophy, research, and writing. So any help would be appreciated. Who's onboard?

Regards;
Todd

NB: Crossposted to the following in order to try and drum up support from various potential allies. If you're in town I'd encourage you to throw your hat in the ring - we're looking for a few good people to help defend this nation.

Toronto Libertarian Party Meetup
Toronto Truth Seekers Meetup
PrisonPlanet Forum

Abortion, Rights, and the State

2009-12-21T12:01:00.002-05:00

In the forum of public debate, there are few issues that possess the staying power of legalized abortion. Its continuing ability to ignite controversy and open broad demographic divisions has made it the bane of successive Canadian governments despite the landmark 1988 rulings of Morgentaler, Smoling, and Scott v. The Queen. In this essay, I will advance the case that it is the very contestability of issues of this sort that demand not Supreme Court rulings, but a benevolent neglect on the part of the state. I’ll proceed by sketching John Rawl’s argument in support of liberal democracies, then move to a survey of the differences between ethical and legal questions in the policy domain to support the conclusion that reproductive health clinics, not to mention “the bedrooms of the nation”, are places in which positive determinations of law are misplaced.

The Nature of Liberal Democracies

It’s commonly held that a fundamental purpose of the liberal state is to act as an impartial arbiter of rights. A classical approach to political philosophy has been to argue for the existence and nature of political institutions by appeal to prior principles, as is the case with Kant and Mills. However in his groundbreaking work Political Liberalism, John Rawls pioneered a ‘freestanding’ approach to political philosophy in response to what he saw as a threat to the existence of states on the classical liberal model of the American constitutional republic. The problem, as stated by Rawls, is “how can religious and secular doctrines of all kinds get on together and cooperate in running a reasonably just and effective government?” (Prusack, 13)

Rawls, as an American political philosopher, identified what he called the fact of reasonable pluralism – the reasonable existence, within certain bounds, of disagreement on issues of conscience. Rawls advances this as a political boundary condition and an antidote to ideological conflict and social division, noting that “the usual way historically [to settle such issues] is to fight it out, as in France in the sixteenth century. That’s a possibility. But how do you avoid that?” (15)

It’s a fair question, and it’s clear that Rawls values civil dialogue, tolerance, and social cohesion over the needs of a variety of sacred cows. But his project is not to offend or deny the validity of doctrines of conscience (15); it’s to place democratic liberalism on a foundation common to the interests of all citizens. His solution is the political conception of justice, an idea which stakes out the territory at the intersection of all civil-minded doctrines by urging a narrowing of political aims to “[apply] to the basic structure of a society, its institutions, constitutional essentials, matters of basic justice and property … it doesn’t intend to cover anything else”. (13)

Morality and Rights

In restricting the coercive demands of dogmatic or ideological doctrines from the legal sphere, John Rawl’s idea of a ‘political conception of justice’ necessarily delimits the province of legal rights. Though detractors may take issue with the ‘Why can’t we all just get along’ nature of his reasoning for urging that deeply held ethical convictions should be personal rather than political, his is by no means the only argument for erecting a conceptual firewall between ethical doctrines and legal rights.

A number of philosophers grappling with the ethics of abortion have identified a gulf between questions of conscience and the status of a ‘right’. Rosalind Hursthouse has placed virtue at two removes from legal conceptions of rights by supposing that the morality of abortion as rooted in virtue ethics is not only separate from the question of the justice of particular laws, but inheres in the specific context of an individual’s decisions and is thus difficult to generalize . (Hursthouse, 235) Ronald Dworkin, amplifying this distinction, makes the claim that abortion is “sometimes wrong not because it violates a fetus’s rights or harms its interests, but in spite of a fetus’s having no rights or interests to violate”. ( Dworkin, 69) He premises his argument on the idea that life is intrinsically sacred, and that those who disagree about abortion’s legal status actually do so on the basis of differing ethical convictions rather than on questions of fetal or women’s rights as is commonly claimed. (101)

Laura Purdy, while arguably equivocal about the need of society to ‘facilitate moral behaviour’ (Purdy, 49) nonetheless adds a pragmatic argument to the case against the legal enforcement of reproductive questions by pointing to the costs, the risks to individual freedom, and the intellectual hazard of enforced closure in matters of public debate. (41, footnote 4)

Abortion, Rights, and the State

Critics of Rawls have levelled the accusation that he fails to make a substantive contribution to the civil dialogue he promotes by dodging the question ‘What’s freedom for”? (Prusack, 12) And, in truth, he presents much of his argument for liberal democracy as being a self-evident end in itself. He speaks of the good of political life as being a ‘great political good’ (13), and similar circularities may be teased out of his stand on, eg; non-coercion as demonstrated by his example of the religious wars of the 16th century. Why shouldn’t we ‘fight it out’, one might ask? (15) Because, the answer comes, liberal democracy is a great political good. Why is it good? Because it prevents us from resolving our ethical conflicts through force.

A deeper criticism that might be levelled is that Rawls does not place his defence of liberal democracy upon a firm foundation of prior principles, as the framers of ‘comprehensive doctrines’ of truth and conscience do. Why not fight it out if ethical issues around abortion involve questions of good and evil?

The strength of Rawls’s approach is in the way that he insulates his argument from these conflicts by assuming a pre-existing commitment to both social stability and self-determination, while allowing for vigorous disagreement on moral questions. Rawls doesn’t deny a more comprehensive validation of the classical liberal tradition, but, stepping around it, simply attempts to show that this is the tradition which works best in practice, if only all citizens will agree to refrain from coercion by “recognizing the duty of civility to one another” (15).

“Liberal constitutional democracy is supposed to ensure that each citizen is free and equal and protected by basic rights and liberties. You see, I don’t use other arguments since for my purposes I don’t need them and it would cause division from the start.” (16)

The question of abortion’s morality is a deeply divisive one on which conscientious adults hold a wide variety of competing views, each motivated by constellations of ethical doctrines and beliefs which no state could ever hope to accommodate, were that state’s purpose simply to enforce doctrinaire belief. It is for this reason that John Rawls restricts the state’s mandate and the province of legal rights – to enable social cohesion, he says, we must recognize the fact of reasonable pluralism.

Philosophers further separate legal rights from the ethical concerns of abortion by arguing that moral decisions are highly contextual and often individual, that these moral judgements are the cause of our demands for various legal rights, and that the cost of enshrining all such demands imposes risks on society’s resources and freedoms.

But it is precisely this freedom of individual conscience and the stability afforded by a tolerant society that provides a platform for the mediation of ethical conflicts. Under these conditions, it’s more than problematic to equate the demands of coercive ethical doctrines with legal rights – for a liberal democracy, it’s suicidal. Political rights, therefore, must be strictly limited to those rights necessary to frame the operations of states in the classical liberal tradition, those states dedicated to the basic rights and liberties of their citizens.

Abortion on this view is not a basic right but an individual’s considered choice, and apart from the way in which the state’s fundamental protections for the individual against force and fraud may be brought to bear on the provision of abortion, it must remain silent. To go any further, even with the intent of protecting a ‘right’ to abortion, is to overstep the bounds of state power as defined by the liberal tradition and risk not only the individual’s right of conscience in matters such as abortion, but the very structure of liberal democracy itself.

Works Cited

Prusack, Bernard G., “Politics, Religion, and the Public Good: An interview with philosopher John Rawls” from Commonweal, Sept 25, 1998; 125, 26; Pg 12

Hursthouse, Rosalind, “Virtue Theory and Abortion” from Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 20, No.3 (Summer, 1991), pp. 223-246. Blackwell

Dworkin, Ronald, “What is Sacred?” from Life’s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom, Pp 68-101. Vintage, N.Y., 1994

Purdy, Laura M., “Genetics and Reproductive Risk: Can Having Children be Immoral?” from Reproducing Persons: Issues in Feminist Bioethics, Pp 35-49. Oxford University Press, 1996

Parental Investment, Surrogate Birth, and Dworkin’s ‘Intrinsic’ Model of the Sacred

2009-12-21T11:44:00.010-05:00

The practice of surrogate parenthood raises interesting ethical questions in light of cherished views of the maternal process and the natural bond between mother and child. The concern of this essay will be to demonstrate that, within the framework established by Ronald Dworkin in Life’s Dominion, it is the conception of the sacred as determined by the creative contributions of human agency that best describes the choices of and rationale for surrogacy despite the internal failings of his appeal to intrinsic value. We will proceed by making the positive case for this view and illustrating how the exclusion of human agency fails to meet this requirement, then conclude with a foundational critique of his model with a view to its improvement.

Parental Investment and the ‘Sacred’ as Process

The relationship of a surrogate mother to her clients, the expecting parent(s), is a contractual one in which the biological mother agrees to surrender any interests or right to the child after successful delivery. The unique constellation of choices, agreements, and transactions involved in such an arrangement implies a certain view of how the interests of the adult parties to the agreement are related to the child. We can understand these choices and account for the biological mother’s repudiation of her stake within the context of Ronald Dworkin’s appeal to the outcome of a creative process as the “nerve of the sacred” [78]. On this view, there is an implicit conviction underlying conventional notions of life’s sanctity; the unexamined premise that “even unconscious mental processes of creation should be treated as investments worthy of respect”. [79] Clearly, Dworkin has not made a direct claim for the legal status of parents or surrogates per se, yet it is on the concept of investment and its corollary, interest, that we may apply his model to the question of their rights.

Chapter 3 of Life’s Dominion advances that framework for our understanding of deeply held views of the sacred and the intransigence we see in debate over applied ideas of life’s value (eg; abortion, medical rationing, euthanasia, etc.). This is not the product of disagreement over whether life is sacred, Dworkin holds, but rather over why life is sacred. He finds a binary tension between two major sources of contribution to the development of a human life – human agency and those factors external to it, such as the natural or the divine.

“[Human life] starts in mere biological development – conception, fetal development, and infancy – but it then extends into childhood, adolescence, and adult life in ways that are determined not just by biological formation but by social and individual training and choice…” [88]

We may understand natural human development, then, as being divided by a fuzzy yet distinct boundary positioned somewhere on life’s timeline shortly after birth. Prior to this time, human choice plays a much diminished role as the foetus develops. After this time, choice is the determining factor in the life of the child. If the means by which we value life and hold it as ‘sacred’ are the function of a process of creative investment, then identifying the nature, actors, and duration of this process is important.

The arrangements made between the parties to a surrogacy agreement are a striking example of planned parenthood, of deliberative choice and control applied to the often haphazard or accidental process of childbirth. From the decision to contract with a surrogate mother, to choosing that mother, to the timing and conditions of the child’s transfer, deliberate choice replaces many potential instances of chance throughout. In fact, surrogate parenthood creates a dimension of choice – one might say ‘selection’ – unavailable in traditional heterosexual relationships, given that the mother’s availability and genetic traits are freed from any of the conditions of culture or lifestyle that might otherwise act as bounding conditions. There is the paradigmatic example of the gay couple choosing to have a child, but other possibilities come to mind as well, such as that of a single male arranging for the birth of a child by a woman possessing genetic characteristics otherwise unavailable to him by virtue of class, distance, culture or habit.

Such dramatic choices flout traditional conceptions of pregnancy and childbirth, and within Dworkin’s model are best explained by the view that human agency holds primacy as the factor determining the sanctity and value of the child as s/he develops, rather than the mother’s biological contribution. Once entering into such an agreement, such choices are literally out of her hands. While the conditions of surrogate motherhood do not reject the woman’s contribution as valueless – she is, we expect, thanked and rewarded for her time and efforts – it is clear that the duration of the investment process beyond the point of infancy is of primary interest to those taking possession of the child. Their claim to the child confirms their belief that, in time, continued contribution to the life of the child must overtake any interest on the part of the birth mother.

The alternative view that the primary creative investment in the child’s development is a result of divine agency or the biological processes operating between conception and childbirth would deny this case for the interests of the surrogate parents to be.

Dworkin’s Intrinsicism as Equivocal

While Ronald Dworkin makes a compelling case for how two widespread views of the sanctity of life explain the range of opinion on the matter [91], it is difficult to endorse his model without serious reservations about how he grounds his concept of the sacred by simultaneously invoking the social and the intrinsic.

Dworkin takes extensive note of the “belief” or the “idea” of the intrinsic value or sanctity of life [68, 69, 70] and then moves by an argument of similarity to other beliefs in intrinsic value, stating “much of our life is based on the idea that objects or events can be valuable in themselves”. [69] In reference to fine art, he writes “We say that we want to look at one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits because it is wonderful, not that it is wonderful because we want to look at it.” [72] But this view of valuation seems overly restrictive and it is not clear that he successfully makes a case for intrinsic value – would anyone seriously make the claim, tilting to solipsism, that a Rembrandt is wonderful because they think it so? And is our belief in the value of a Rembrandt necessarily intrinsicist? Also, in his analysis of the motivation to conserve endangered species, Dworkin dismisses the idea that there might be some objective value in maintaining the planet’s fauna for their aesthetic or instrumental value by simply asserting that “none of these arguments rings true”. [75]

In his attempt to couple the sanctity of life’s value to the intrinsic realm, two further problems are encountered which outline an internal inconsistency or equivocation in the argument. One is the creation of two categories of intrinsic value, the incremental intrinsic and the inviolable intrinsic [70]. The second is Dworkin’s own admission that “…in different ways we are selective about which kinds of creative or natural processes we treat as inviolable.” [80]. His threadbare attempts to i) find daylight between the idea of the ‘incremental’ intrinsic and instrumental valuations by dismissing the contributions to practical human knowledge of archaeology and astronomy [73], and ii) account for the contradiction between the ‘inviolable’ intrinsic and the observed human selection of intrinsic values as in the Rembrandt and conservation examples given above undercuts his position on intrinsic value as “…independent of what people happen to enjoy or want or need…” [71].

Although the model of intrinsic belief outlined in Life’s Dominion itself possesses undeniable utility in describing the dynamics of real world debate on life’s value, there is irony in the fact that Dworkin critiques our unacknowledged premise of the sacred as a “gravitational force” [68] informing our views, when inconsistencies in his own argument reveal a similar strange attractor. The uneasy truce Dworkin effects by grounding an ‘intrinsic’ conception of value in a collective analysis of shared belief is an unstable one, threatening collapse into the singularity of moral relativism. On the grounds that Dworkin’s analysis of intrinsic value as independent of wants or needs is incompatible with a purely social analysis of expressed values, his argument fails – but this is not to deny that his model could not be rehabilitated by appeal, instead, to a more robust conception of instrumental or objective value.

Works Cited

Dworkin, Ronald, “What is Sacred?” from Life’s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom, Pp 68-101. Vintage, N.Y., 1994

Cost, Copyright, and Embodiment - A Submission to the Canadian Copyright EConsultation

2009-09-16T10:33:00.005-04:00

The following is my submission to the Canadian Copyright EConsultation which was conducted recently to give Canada's citizens - the ultimate stakeholders - a chance to register their views on copyright reform. Sorry if the writing clunks a little or verges on the didactic - I banged it out in three hours right before the deadline. But please do critique the reasoning, as I've come to what I'm sure are some pretty controversial conclusions. You can get more info about the consultation at Professor Michael Geist's blogs here and here. The original Consultation page is here.

Copyright Consultation Submission

My name is Todd Howe. I’m drafting my submission to the Consultation today in my capacity as a private citizen. Though I am employed in the lower tiers of the telecommunications industry and have taken an active interest in issues of copyright and privacy, I have no direct economic interest in the outcome of this consultation process other than that shared in common by all Canadians. Without prejudging the difficult work the consultation now has before it in finding an equitable synthesis of the many views it has received, I would urge the ministry to consider this factor carefully during its deliberations: the starting point of native impartiality which the many ordinary Canadians involved in this process bring to the table.

I am grateful for this opportunity to present my views to the Consultation. On my view this process, enabled as it is by the unique ability of our age to rapidly collate and disseminate information, is one of the most important innovations in Canadian public policy in recent memory and I would encourage the government of Canada to continue in this vein as we move towards the desired reformation of copyright law. I believe it is, in fact, ultimately illustrative of the correct approach to take in enabling Canadians to interact with their own culture – an open and fair one.

Why does copyright matter? (How do Canada’s copyright laws affect you?)

There’s little doubt that issues of copyright have become increasingly important to Canadians in a way that the original framers of copyright law could never have imagined. It is now possible, thanks to technology, to divorce the content of a creative work from its physical manifestation, to abstract it away from books and journals and recordings and performances.

I would like to suggest that, in principle at least, this process has only one precedent in our history as a species, and that is the oral tradition - which of course predated any form of physical transcription and which continues to exist today. This simple, human process by which we relate news to our neighbours, whistle a popular tune whilst walking down the street, or read aloud to one another accomplishes, on a smaller scale, the same sort of symbol-reproduction enabled by the digital realm. Before the scriptorium, before the invention of movable type, before the cassette, our minds were the original means of reproduction and dissemination of information. Like a sort of mental lithography, we have always possessed the native ability to peel away a token of some original experience and transmit it to our neighbours via language.

Reproduction, then, is at the heart of communication and I believe this is why the framers of our Constitution enshrined the “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication” as an inviolable right under Article 2(b). We are fortunate to live in a state that recognizes these rights and in the present context I believe this is vital since the history of technology tracks a progression towards removing physical resistance to the storage and flow of information. This, naturally, has positive consequences for the individual’s ability to communicate, to understand the broadest context of world events, and to participate in public dialogue.

Of course, this all takes place within an external economic context, and I wouldn’t suggest that we lose sight of this, but I want to stress that with the advent of the Internet, it is as though information has undergone a phase change. Like ice to water, and water to vapour, information has evaporated. It may now exist in this highly lubricated realm, a place that, as it becomes increasingly reproducible, increasingly has no place, and within this realm its supply has so outstripped external physical demand that information’s price is rapidly approaching zero.

Unless we make the decision to impose onerous restrictions on the architecture of the Internet itself, this progression is a linear one, and in my opinion is an emergent property of our nature as human beings. We move within this symbolic medium of information and culture, it informs and expands our views, and we create more and more of it as time goes by. It has become more of an ecology than an economy, though there are important similarities between these concepts, and similarly to the economy of commodities, we are poorer and less free if these flows are unnaturally restricted. Although we have the ability to manipulate markets, this is in most (if not all) cases highly inadvisable. If we accept the idea that economies are an emergent property of our natural interactions, then we must largely adapt to their conditions rather than the other way round. If this means that the price of information (when divorced from physical media) must collapse, then so be it.

This is the viewpoint I wish to bring to the table, and the specific way in which I will frame the remainder of my response: the creation of the digital realm, in my opinion, has created something like a vast shared memory, a resource that is both intimately personal and radically collective. It is no more subject to the laws of commodities than one’s memories of an experience can be. All forms of information have been absorbed into what we call our culture. Copyright law affects me by imposing external conditions on world culture. Unless handled very carefully, we run the risk of creating injustices of the quality experienced during book burnings, the banning of native traditions and languages, and religious proscriptions on certain ‘heretical’ thoughts. And what is thought, other than a series of symbols processed by a mind?

If the Internet is a new type of global memory, inappropriate restrictions could very well convert it into a mechanism for the destruction of thought and culture not dissimilar to George Orwell’s famous description of a ‘memory hole’.

How to remain relevant? (How should existing laws be modernized? How should copyright changes be made in order to withstand the test of time?)

So much for principle. Pragmatic concerns must be addressed, of course – though our minds spend an increasing amount of time in the ‘cloud’ of global information technology, we still stand upon the ground. I would not suggest any fundamental dichotomy between these realms, but there are differences.

In reaching for new ways to formulate copyright law, I will largely defer here to the framework established by Professor Michael Geist – any new legal regime must strive for balance between the rights of the creator and the user, it must be technologically neutral, it must strive for simplification and clarity, and it must embody enough flexibility to adapt to changing technological, and thus economic, conditions.

To this, however, I would add an important caveat. To truly ‘withstand the test of time’ copyright law absolutely must not attempt to hold back the tide of the information revolution no matter how much the beneficiaries of the old order may protest. We simply can’t protect the market of the candle makers once the lightbulb has come on the scene, nor should we. I do not believe that it is possible for any copyright law to remain relevant if it does not acknowledge and accept the most important consequence of this sea-change – the collapsing price of information as information.

Thus, I would suggest that ideally, Professor Geist’s suggestion of the scope of copyright law should in fact be restricted solely to the commercial distribution of physical media. This would greatly simplify the task of crafting new copyright law and, though the suggestion may appear shocking, it is the logical conclusion of the ideas developed above. If we were to apply copyright law exclusively to the problem of counterfeit product, we would in one stroke satisfy the four conditions Professor Geist calls for.

First, this would strike an objective balance between creator’s rights and user’s rights. In the physical realm, we have a right to dispense of the values we have created through our labour. Copyright, patent, and similar law, in my understanding, was developed in order to give the creator of a new idea a head start in the market, to encourage the requisite effort, investment, and innovation by making it more likely that a return of some sort will be realized. We brand the products we create because we wish to capitalize on the reputation we establish in the market. In the realm of culture, however, I would suggest that reputation is the only objective limiting factor. If we counterfeit, we commit the injustice of fraud by misrepresenting the provenance of our product, of stealing time from its creator, and they deserve monetary compensation. If we plagiarize, we commit a similar injustice of misrepresentation but the coin here is exclusively moral rather than economic. What we owe the creator of an intellectual work is citation and recognition.

This idea easily meets the second, third, and fourth conditions of the need to maintain relevance by creating a clear distinction between the commercial physical embodiment of an idea or a work, and non-physical and non-commercial distribution modes. It’s simple, clear, easy to enforce without creating the kind of massive intrusions on privacy being suggested by other national jurisdictions, and it’s certainly flexible enough to deal with the changing environments created by cultural and technological transformation when the problem itself collapses.

I believe the problems were are grappling with today are nothing more than an artifact of a misunderstanding of the nature of information, a misunderstanding we ignore at our peril. As many artists and creators are discovering, there is an important linkage between the realm of idea and the realm of distribution – marketing. It becomes, then, a problem of finding new ways to entice people to purchase physical transcriptions of ideas by adding value to their product, whether it be a boxed set or a performance. However the ideas that inhere within these products, when subjected to lossless reproduction, are their gift to the body of human knowledge. For law to remain relevant, we need to realize that though the labour of an artist may be great, ‘intellectual property’ is a myth. Once an idea is created, it slips from our fingers for the same reasons that a physicist will never own the second law of thermodynamics, Ohm’s law, or any other nonmaterial product of labour.

If we value intellectual creation, as even the most prolific young consumers of ‘pirated’ media must admit upon reflection, then it becomes a moral and cultural problem of ensuring the respect exists to drive reward. And despite the protest of media interests, there is data available to indicate that such a culture has already taken shape as reproduction drives reputation and purchase of product, though the precise patterns of usage may change in unpredictable ways.

What to do? (How to foster innovation and creativity? How to foster competition and investment? How to position Canada as a global leader in the digital economy?)

I have avoided addressing the existence of current international law (eg; WIPO and the distressingly exclusionary ACTA) until this point for the simple reason that I find much of it to be wrongheaded. However, it may be relevant to quote the Berne Convention’s three-step test here:

“Members shall confine limitations and exceptions to exclusive rights to certain special cases which do not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rights holder.”

The test here turns on the inclusion of terms such as ‘normal’ and ‘legitimate’, and are open to a wide variety of interpretation. I would interpret it in the sense outlined above – non-physical and non-commercial uses fall completely outside of its scope. This test actually makes a lot of sense to me because at the time it was written, it really only applied to questions of counterfeit and physical, commercial right.

It is my belief that a laissez-faire approach to non-commercial usage would in fact foster the outcomes desired. But to see this, it depends on where one places the boundaries of concepts such as ‘innovation’ and ‘competition’.

Under the system I’m suggesting, it’s undeniable that there would be structural changes in the media industry as progress towards a freer regime of information and culture erodes many of the implicit or explicit monopolies previously it has previously enjoyed. But it’s also hard to deny that this would be a net benefit to Canadian interests seen as a whole.

How could innovation and creativity possibly not be fostered by giving every Canadian freer access to their culture, to use and manipulate and amplify our values? How could competition and investment possibly tear itself away from a population steeped in a culture of expanded awareness? Is this not a better outcome for Canada than a geography punctuated by illumined centres of learning and priviledge surrounded by dark provincial backwaters? If Canada wishes to become a leader in the global digital economy it must embrace it rather than resisting its conclusions.

I think in this situation, which we might refer to as a radically expanded knowledge economy, there is still plenty of opportunity to get paid. I don’t see the need to rush into any further systems of international legal integration, and particularly not when the outcomes are being decided behind closed doors, as is demonstrably the case with ACTA. This can only undermine Canadian sovereignty and our right to decide our own future.

I believe that the abolition of non-commercial copyright provisions lights the way forward for Canada. I do not believe that a serious concern exists that people will stop writing novels or creating culture or engaging in intellectual innovation. This is a part of who we are, and we engage in these activities for many reasons. Some economic interests may lose some of their control over the flow of ideas – this is to be lauded as a great improvement for Canadians. If an interim fund were to be created or sustained, as many such funds already exist to fund innovation in Canada, I would not protest too loudly. I may suggest they be given an appropriate sunset clause as the emerging market forces show the way forward. But in the end I believe most of the impetus behind the drive to copyright reformation is about maintaining crumbling monopolies as the world changes around us.

Thank you for your consideration.

Kant, Wegner, and the Clockwork Will

2009-04-06T18:58:00.009-04:00

This essay explores Kant’s claim that free will is a necessary precondition for morality by contrasting it with the experimental results of Wegner’s inquiry into instances of illusory will, and concluding that Kant’s system relies on a conception of will that Wegner’s results challenge. Also, an inquiry is made into whether there may be other ways in which to view or resolve this tension and its wider implications for questions of will and causation.

The moral necessity of an autonomous will

In the wake of the Newtonian revolution, Immanuel Kant proposed that the good will operates closest to form when in complete coherence with an objective law derived from its nature as will. This state of affairs entails when the ideal will might not “be conceived as obliged thereby to act lawfully, because of itself from its subjective constitution it can only be determined by the conception of good.” [Kant, 17].

Yet for Kant and those of us with less than perfect wills, it is duty, obligation, and intent that holds moral primacy, rather than any end in the objects of our actions as moral beings – after all, good outcomes may happen accidentally regardless of one’s intent, and any decisions based on practical reason must always be contingent on the specific conditions and events in the world. Kant writes “the purposes which we may have in view in our actions, or their effects regarded as ends and springs of the will, cannot give to actions an unconditional or moral worth.” [8]

For Kant, then, it is vital that the will possess autonomy, for there to be any sound conception of moral worth. The will must be free to make the decision to pursue its moral duties or not, where such duties lie in cleaving to the logical forms of moral law – Kant’s categorical imperative – rather than in one’s desires, which Kant viewed as mechanistic, the dross ‘springs’ of contingent behaviour.

Will as illusion

Turning the clock forward to the twentieth century and the work of Daniel M. Wegner, an experimental psychologist, we find a rather different view of the will emerging. Wegner conducted a series of trials in which the experimental subject and an assistant of Wegner’s were both instructed to view a set of images on a screen, and jointly move a cursor about the screen in a sort of high-tech Ouija game. An auditory cue, a word corresponding to one of the images onscreen is played to the subject and the assistant, and at some point after this cue the subject and assistant are both instructed to stop the cursor on an image of their individual choice.

What the subject does not realize is that some of these stops are forced by the experimental assistant. And yet, for all stops made during the course of the experiment, the subject rates their level of intention as high, and most particularly so when the auditory cue corresponds with the image selected – regardless of whom it was selected by.

Wegner interprets his results as indicating that empirical will and phenomenal will are separable, and that the experience of will may be no more than a feeling or interpretation of events, disconnected from any causation on the subject’s part. The results pose the challenge, “How can we know when, and by extension if, we will?”

A challenge to Kant’s moral Idealism

This poses an enormous difficulty for Kant since the nature of will is the linchpin of his moral system.

Implicit in Kant’s philosophy is the enlightenment view of nature as a giant clockwork of sorts in which all objects in the natural world mesh and interact in a fine orchestration of cause and effect so that if all prior states of a system are known, then its successive states may be reliably predicted. As Kant makes clear, however, moral decisions must not be informed by the states of objects in the natural world since this would effectively yoke the moral will to deterministic natural forces and circumstances, rendering the sort of clarity of principle he sought impossible, resulting instead in a “disgusting medley of compiled observations and half-reasoned principles”. [14]

Kant requires that we reason our way to decisions motivated by the categorical imperative, a law transcending these worldly ‘springs of the will’. Kant’s moral system requires a free will for the exercise of this reason for morality to be relevant. And yet Wegner has provided us with evidence that free will may not exist at all or, if it does, that it may be attenuated. There is a contradiction here which threatens to blast the foundations of Kant’s view of human nature and ethics.

Is Volition then Causal?

The issues of human nature, volition, and their relation to causality raise some questions in regard both to Wegner’s results and Kant’s moral theory. Though the modern impulse is to infer the signature of a deterministic, clockwork will in Wegner’s results, this may not be necessary since his results would be just as consistent with a theory of internally caused and acausal events of will as it is to the caused/determined hypothesis, and indeed modern physics provides some evidence for acausal events in its analysis of collapsing probabilistic states. This itself suggests that there is the potential of a different interpretation; our causal models may be dated.

But leaving this aside, there is an even more interesting premise shared by Wegner and Kant in this discussion – Kant makes an appeal to omniscience and an essential will when he rejects the natural world (and thus, synthetic a posteriori knowledge) as a source of moral guidance. Wegner, identifying a very specific grey area in which people mistakenly identify (or project) their will on account of correlation rather than causation, also makes an implicit appeal to omniscience and analytic truth when he moves to question whether will in its wider applications is an illusion. Must this be a question of not-will excluding will?

Only those with an existing vision condition could seriously doubt the efficacy of their own eyes for long after having viewed an optical illusion. Wegner, no doubt, experienced various instances of will to create his experiment. And despite Kant’s apparent disdain of the will’s real-world efficacy (witness his reification and hence isolation of will as an end-in-itself as well as the proposal that instinct may be more fitting to the cause of human happiness [6]), even he appears to smuggle in a test against ‘phenomena’ by creating a sort of social test for the imperative (cf. tests and ‘universal legislation’ [22,28]).

Wegner has brought some interesting evidence to the table that apparently contradicts the evidence by introspection that we have will. But as Sternberg [28] points out, many revolutions in science do not wipe out one or the other side of a dichotomy, but rather introduce a new way of thinking about problems in a wider sense that inform both views. In fact, the interface of many concepts in the natural world exhibit grey areas, gradations. It is to be hoped that further work in both epistemology and neurology will find new analytical tools and heuristics to subsume or explain such apparent volitional contradictions, in much the same way as we can identify astigmatism, and in much the same way as Einstein was able, finally, to fine-tune the clockwork of Newtonian physics.

Works Cited

Kant, Immanuel. Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (Handout)

Sternberg, Robert J. “Is the illusion of conscious will an illusion?” Precis of The Illusion of conscious will Ed. Wegner, Daniel M (Handout)

Hobbes’ State of Nature: The War of All Against All

2009-04-06T18:41:00.007-04:00

Note: Page references are to a handout, but you can search the text of the work here. (NB: Uncheck the box under the search field, it introduces a typo into your search.]

In the lawless, primeval world envisioned by Hobbes’ Leviathan, the best defence is a good offence. On his view, humanity may be envisioned as existing in a ‘state of nature’ in which both the antecedent and consequent of this state holds “no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain”. [52]

This uncertainty is derived not only from a condition in which man is compelled to rely upon pre-existing values to secure his position, but human nature itself. Being essentially equal in our physical and intellectual capabilities, and most particularly so in our capacity for treachery by force or guile, the conclusion follows – abetted by our internal estimation of success in the untrammelled pursuit of a goal – that a level playing-field exists. All values are fair game, and the inclination must be to tilt the odds in one’s favour in the interest of self-preservation.

This is Hobbes’ “war of all against all”, in which all efforts are bent to the nasty, brutish endeavour of survival. The greatest profit in this competition is obtained by seizing value, and the most expeditious means to that end is to remove or disable your competition by force. Accordingly, no one is to be trusted, and this wariness or diffidence means no efforts may be diverted to "plant, sow, build, or possess a convenient seat" [51], since it would be suicide to turn one’s focus and capacities from security to the creation of value. Under constant threat of attack, the only reasonable response is to respond with overwhelming force: to wipe out or subdue all potential challengers, to "master the persons of all men he can so long till he see no other power great enough to endanger him…"

Hobbes is at pains to emphasize that there is no rest in this atavistic world. There is no hope of respite from competition as continuous expansion of one’s gain and suppression of enemies is required to ensure the greatest chance of success in this war of attrition. Even those wishing to take a merely defensive posture when their desires are satisfied risk being overwhelmed by those whose inclination is to glory in victory for its own sake, and so an inflationary cycle of violence exists, in which even the meek must develop a reputation for crushing brutality in order to give their enemies pause. The nature of competition in such a world means attack is not only expected, but mandatory.

Blog Content, JSTOR, and the Mysteries of (Free) Time

2009-03-02T14:42:00.006-05:00

Just a quick note to point out that I haven't actually abandoned this blog, although any writing time I have is largely being siphoned off by studies, family, and other projects for the time being. So here's a brief update.

It occurred to me the other day that there is a lot of knowledge available online that isn't accessible to the public, locked away in academic archives such as JSTOR. Having run up against their barricades on occasion while doing research for earlier articles on Aleatoric - which was extremely irritating - it struck me how unfortunate this is. It's not that people don't want knowledge as specific as the stuff ferreted away on JSTOR, it's just that they don't have access to it and so have no way of appreciating it. Why? I gather there are a few factors - it must cost JSTOR a lot to host it, but I imagine the artificial scarcity created by locking it up also plays a large part by providing the justification for the kind of institutional fees they can charge to universities and other large institutions. Since I am (as of recently) a student once more, I now have access to this goldmine of information, and understand the fact that the people who archive this content need to get paid, but we are all a little poorer than we would be if, say, JSTOR began opening parts of their archives, since the number of searchable ancient texts there are legion, and they are of course all long since in the public domain. A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but a mountain of it is self-correcting, as long as there are people to comb through it, and those willing to engage in a dialogue in the search for truth.

While I can't hook you up with JSTOR, what I can do is make my own small contribution to online knowledge by posting some of the assignments that I've done reasonably well on. While the appeal of this stuff is going to be pretty selective, no doubt someone will come along and learn a little bit more about whichever subject is involved, and it may at least prompt some continued curiosity about the subjects I'm fortunate enough to be in a position to study.

I'd encourage anyone in university, and especially those taking Masters or Doctorates to pick up this idea and run with it. If the material you post is good, and it wouldn't really be seen by anyone once you've passed your courses anyways, why not post it online? Essays, thesis projects, whatever. Open-source your archives. At the very least, the resultant flood of material might distract momentarily from the hordes of tech and celebrity bloggers out there. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

I'll start. You're free to quote and republish my stuff as long as you credit the source, as per the terms of the Creative Commons attribution share alike license, but I would insist that you not plagiarize this material, especially when it comes to your own courses. Not only will it make you feel like a tool, but your teachers know how to use Google too, kids.

Any comment on these offerings is welcome.

Cheers... Todd

Aesthetics: Valuation and Viewer Engagement: Gaut’s Ethicist Integration

2009-03-02T13:45:00.010-05:00

Artistic Value and Ethics

The question of artistic value – what makes a [thing] a good work of art – is a problem to be reckoned with by any modern philosopher of aesthetics. Perhaps the issue has always been in the public eye. In recent years though, from Voice of Fire to a Stuffed Shark in formaldehyde, many feted artworld events inspire reactions ranging from ennui and bemusement to resentment and accusations of profiteering. Media dismissal on the allegation of brand opportunism was widespread in the case of Damien Hirst. Often in these rarefied reaches of the artworld, major financial interests often hinge on questions of artistic value, as the film Who the *&^* is Jackson Pollack seeks to inform and ‘edutain’ us.

The relationship of ethics to art and value seems a perennial one as well. Motivating questions of censorship and ‘community standards’, political considerations of taboo or protest art may themselves create change or be party to upheavals in culture, as book burnings throughout history may attest to. A number of philosophical forays have been made into this charged subject, among them Moralism, the position that ethics is the issue in art’s value (which shall remain unexamined here), Autonomism, which posits no place for ethics in artistic value and Ethicism, one of the moderate views and dominated these days by the work of Berys Gaut.

Two Viewpoints

Autonomism holds that the value of an art work as a work of art is independent of other values. In the view of Rob van Gerwen, “Ethical autonomism holds that art’s autonomy consists in its demand that art appreciators take up an artistic attitude. A work’s agency is then in how it merits their audience’s attitudinal switch.” 1 On this view, the art appreciator is expected to undergo an internal transformation, a shift in consciousness to assume a view of the work as a world of its own, one to become absorbed in, as though it were a experiential axiom of a sort. The work presents a morality-free virtual environment for a contemplative transaction with the viewer. By firewalling the area within an artwork’s [frame] off from questions of ethics, autonomism naturally engages itself with the question of the autonomy of the artist and free expression, or political autonomy for art as well:

“Art’s autonomy is a fact of modern Western history. This autonomy refers to the practice as a whole. We think it an intrinsic value that there be such a practice (Art) where people can entertain thoughts and feelings with regard to issues deemed important, without immediately being affected by these thoughts and feelings in more usual agent-related ways.” 2

Ethicism rejects the notion of an artwork’s moral autonomy while refraining from moralizing. Gaut writes, in reference to the idea that art may be morally corrupting, “This is a version of the causal thesis and should be kept distinct from ethicism. Further, ethicism has nothing to say about the issue of censorship…” 3 However, Gaut does not suggest that the viewer remains unaltered by an artwork.

“It is obvious that works prescribe the imagining of certain events: a horror film may prescribe imagining teenagers being assaulted by a monster; Juliette prescribes imagining that acts of sexual torture occur. Perhaps less obviously, works also prescribe certain responses to these fictional events: the loud, atonal music of the horror film prescribes us to react to the represented events with fear, Juliette invites the reader to find sexual torture erotically attractive, to be amused by the contortions described, to admire the intricacy of their implementation, and so forth.” 4

Gaut’s merited-response argument makes the case that such prescriptions are aesthetically relevant, since a failure to respond in the manner intended by the work involves an internal failing on the part of the artwork; a lack of conviction, potentially, or clarity, or integration between means and ends. In this, Gaut shares the autonomist idea that art may be a moral agent – the difference is that ethicism sees a role for this aspect of a work in its evaluation, while autonomism discards it. “Art can teach us about what is ethically correct,” he writes, “but the aesthetic relevance of this teaching is guaranteed only when the work displays it in the responses it prescribes to story events.” 5 Gaut believes works ought to show rather than tell. He also believes that ethical values in a work of art are merely one ingredient in any pro tanto, all-things-considered impression of the work.

Ethicism: Choosing a Frame for Value

The seemingly fantastic variations in art prices on the market suggests, when you place the twenty-five dollar knock-off of ‘Dogs Playing Poker’ acquired in an ironic mood at the local flea market against the latest six-figure Group of Seven slab at Sothebys, that the patrons of select schools, styles, and artistic media value them highly, far above the valuation of an average artwork. As a working theory, we might assume that since the physical utility-value of most forms of art approaches zero (unless you’re Chretien, in which case bedside sculptures make for fine cudgels), the higher valuation of one art-work over another is mainly attributable to psychological needs. Of autonomism and ethicism, ethicism best accounts for the psychologically biased real-world valuation of some select piece of [art] by the clever device of not discounting ethics – a central part of human society, culture and law – from people’s evaluations of representational art.

Though many forms of art seem to exist as a medium that is passively experienced (dance the notable exception), they are in fact a participatory experience, and this is Gaut’s point, all-things-considered: by integrating ethics and aesthetics, he is making the connection that human values and valuation occupy a substantial amount of one’s attention while making decisions in the real world - of which the art world is a part. The emotional responses prescribed by a work of art are experienced as a visceral, highly personal connection to one’s real-world values. As Gaut says, “…these responses are actual, not just imagined ones.” 6

While one ought to be able to make the argument that ethics is itself a value – in which case autonomism, which places a frame around the artwork declaring that inside the frame ethics shall not tread, would be dead. Autonomism does not deny that art is itself a value. However, the aim here is to make the weaker case that ethicism is a better model. Simply situating it on an ordinal axis is enough, and the evidentiary requirements are simpler to fulfill: produce one real-world example the value of which ethicism accounts for better.

Perhaps iconic and sacred artworks fit the bill. Ethics and art have been intimately connected with religious and legal institutions since their inception. From Egypt’s innovative hieroglyphs to Michelangelo’s frescos, large scale artistic undertakings have adorned temples and palaces around the world. In many cases, the temples and palaces are themselves artistic expressions. Since the patron, be they individual or institutional, would usually pick the theme for their new work of art it would reflect the patron’s favourite religious symbols, maxims, literary scenes, decorative motifs, etc.

To judge by the surprising number of icon shops in Toronto today, the connection is still a relevant one. The purchase of an icon, iconic depiction or religious scene is an act of valuation of a particular kind of art-work, one which often specializes in bringing to mind stories, mental states such as equanimity, even codes of behavoir as alluded to through their characterization of a diety and its attendant symbolism. Since a substantial amount of the value of these pieces inheres in their connection to ethical precepts, since this is why they are valued as artworks, a problem is presented to autonomism: if there are no relevant valuations of artworks that include considerations of ethics, how are icons to be accounted for?

And why, then, do people like the Stuffed Shark? Could it be because it presents some implicit commentary in iconic language? Ethicism doesn’t create a value-free zone within the frame of an art-work, thereby restricting the scope of ethics to ‘all decisions other than art’. While the autonomists hold that art trumps a major area of valuation, ethicism identifies the connection between the viewer, his environment, and the [art] object’s representational feedback from that environment. While it’s a given that a meditative, focused, or framed attitude is widely adopted when viewing certain artworks, this point of view is a contemplative one, not passive reception – active, participatory, psychologically engaged with the work – and so values and our systems of valuation participate as well. Beys Gaut’s merited-response argument keeps ethics in the basket of values used to evaluate artworks, and rightly so, since deeply held beliefs often trigger the most deeply experienced emotions.

“The aesthetic relevance of prescribed responses wins further support from noting that much of the value of art derives from its deployment of an affective mode of cognition – derives from the way works teach us, not by giving us merely intellectual knowledge, but by bringing that knowledge home to us.” 7

Works Cited

1 van Gerwen, Robert. “Ethical Autonomism: The Work of Art as a Moral Agent” http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=217

2 Ibid.

3 Gaut, Berys. “The Ethical Criticism of Art” Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Ed. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen: Blackwell Publishing, Malden. 2004, 284

4 Gaut, 288

5 Gaut, 290

6 Gaut, 289

7 Gaut, 290

Aesthetics: From Soup to Nuts: The Problem of Universals and Margolis’ ‘Peculiar’ Solution

2009-03-02T13:27:00.007-05:00

1. The Peculiar Status of Art

The philosopher of aesthetics (particularly, one wishing to address issues regarding the ontological status of art and artworks) is confronted with a unique set of problems. His is a field of inquiry open to the opinion and adjudication of the public in a way that other, more fundamental fields of philosophy are not – art and works of art are available for perusal on the walls of public galleries, in private collections, and increasingly in the streets and public spaces of urban centres. In fact, the field of aesthetics has a kind of relationship to tangible existents that cannot be said of, say, epistemology or metaphysics. This relationship introduces both challenges and opportunities to the philosopher. In effect, it bundles constraints into the project of aesthetics while providing a series of accessible sources around which tests may be created.

Two such conditions that arise in ontological considerations of aesthetics are i) the need to accommodate or describe the wide variety of extant art forms, and ii) the need to develop a theory that corresponds to and is descriptive of actual practices in the contemporary and historical practice of art criticism and evaluation. It is important to note, then, that the field of art – as Plato illustrates in his analogy of the cave – contains pre-existing layers of subject and object. (Plato, VII:514a-515a) Art regards a formal or worldly subject, and the audience for art regards an objet d’art that in some way represents, embodies, references, or stylizes its subject. This is the opportunity open to the philosopher of aesthetics: whether she regards it as a question of induction or as a social test or poll of some sort, the fact remains that she has access to a tangible, or ‘pragmatic’, set of data.

The constraints described above, then, may be understood as outlining a normative relationship between the successful ontological theory of art and its real-world referents. Simply put, if such a model fails to describe it’s referents, then its primary project of describing and providing insight into their nature has failed. Similarly, in the absence of any demonstrable contradiction between the practice of art criticism and its referents, then the successful theory of art must adopt such evaluative practices that can be shown to have an impact on art’s status as a concept.

2. Two Semantic Approaches

The issue of abstraction is central to the philosopher’s need to address the practice of considering artworks as historical individuals. Although the practice of art criticism tends to consider artworks as historical individuals, in the case of artworks that exist in multiple instances such as prints, performances, literature, etc., it is not a simple matter to intuit the status of a thing that is understood to exist as multiple copies. The naïve particularist approach of considering such works as physical objects fails since no one physical object can be understood as the work itself. Some form of abstraction is required. However, in the case of some individual objet d’art, it is not immediately clear how certain theories of art maintain the metaphysical connection between their explanations of singular and multiple artworks.

In Art and its Objects, Richard Wollheim sought to develop a conceptual framework by which to define the properties of a type. While it seems clear that he sought only to provide an approach to understanding multiple artworks (Wollheim, 84) and therefore, by providing an incomplete theory fails to meet our first constraint in describing art’s variety, it is instructive to consider one way in which his token-of-a-type model fails us. Wollheim regards the original type as a “piece of human invention” yet allows that from this original manuscript or score “there is no way of determining the properties that a token of a given type has necessarily, independently of determining the properties of that type”. (ibid, 86) Since the type is a physical object, this would not seem to present an immediate difficulty, yet Wollheim denies our intuition that an etching-plate or a mould is not the finished product by identifying the type as the beginning of a causal sequence of reproduction. This lack of congruence between type and token both breaks our second constraint and points out a further internal difficulty with Wollheim’s theory, as his example of the Red Flag (86) makes clear – a type shares the essential physical properties of it’s tokens.

Gregory Currie seeks to improve on this view in Art Works as Action Types by emphasizing the process of discovery. And in fact, his theory provides a better explanation for our second constraint, for it removes our objection to Wollheim’s type as the initial creation followed by a causal chain of reproduction. His addition of a heuristic term to his theory of action types provides “an account of the artistic problems faced by the artist and the methods he used to overcome them” (Currie, 114) which not only unifies the form of a type and its token by collapsing them into a single act of discovery via process, but provides additional insight into the methods of art criticism. However, this particular approach presents its own difficulties in its approach to the object of a singular artwork.

Currie objects to the notion of a singular artwork as being constitutive of a work by positing a possible alternate world (119) on which an identical action type is created, and thus the possibility of multiple instances of what would otherwise be regarded as a singular work within the same universe. However, a problem of context is created, for the identical artwork must possess an identical heuristic, and Currie provides us with no means of contextualizing the bounds of this heuristic. The alternate world cannot, after all, occupy the same location in space-time and given the metaphysically dubious status of it’s probabilistic existence, not only does the heuristic become contextual, but the referents of the structure of the artwork are themselves called into question. Currie attempts to address this objection by his use of David Lewis’ ‘Ramsay sentence’ which posits a multiplicity of potential worlds in order to justify the notion that there will, or may be, some potential worlds in which the referents of an artwork’s identification will be close enough (119). In other words, Currie’s claim is that singular artworks in fact have metaphysical status as multiple artworks, which is impossible to determine via observation (constraint i)) as well as being wildly inconsistent with our understanding of critical practice (constraint ii)). His strategy here is to draw on an alternate understanding of identification: “on this theory there will be worlds in which the referent of ‘The Mona Lisa’ does look a little different that the way it actually looks” (121). But if this is true, then the terms in his theory of action types themselves become probabilistic and this makes it impossible to determine whether a tokenized singular artwork is an instance of its action type.

Both Wollheim’s and Currie’s approaches would seem to rely more on a semantic (or strong) theory of abstractions than is immediately evident. Wollheim redefines the objet d’art while Currie, by redefining identity, renders its existence questionable. Their attempts to finesse the problem of universals result in their theories ensnared in a greater difficulty, creating a tenuous connection to their referents and violating our understanding of the dataset. As Wollheim states in his theory of types, “it is a question about the structure of our language.” (Wollheim, 85)

3. Glickman’s Soup and Margolis’ Monist Solution

This problem of abstract particulars is perhaps best summarized by Glickman’s analogy of an original pot of soup. In The Ontological Peculiarity of Works of Art, Joseph Margolis treats of it in the following way:

“…if universals cannot be created or destroyed, then in creating a kind of soup, a chef must be creating something other than a universal. The odd thing is that a kind of soup thus created is thought to be individuated among related creations; hence, it appears to be a particular of some sort. But it also seems to be an abstract individual if it is a particular at all… it is difficult to concede that what the chef created is an abstract particular if one may be said to have tasted what the chef created” (Margolis, 73)

Here Margolis is addressing the ontological question of where the abstraction may be said to inhere – if it is not the soup, which one may destroy by consumption, then where is it? Since Margolis’ position on the strength of the soup example is that it must be possible to instantiate both ‘particulars’ and ‘universals’ – he refers to them also as ‘properties’ – then it is his project to find a new way of locating these properties. His method is to collapse abstractions into particulars: “My own suggestion is that (token) works of art are embodied in physical objects, not identical with them.” (ibid, 75) In other words, artworks themselves are not merely the sum of their materials, but subsume a history or a process of creation – Margolis’ theory may be said to predict Currie’s later notion of a heuristic in this way.

But what is the status of a type? Margolis states that: “types are abstract particulars in the sense only that a set of actual entities may be individuated as tokens of a particular type.” (75)

Margolis’ view, then is that types and tokens are in some way merely a conceptual form. He views tokens and types as both possessing status only insofar as they are instantiated in a physical object. Types, specifically, are “heuristically introduced for purposes of individuation, though they cannot exist except in the sense in which particular tokens of particular type artworks exist.” (76) Further, “The very process for individuating tokens entails individuating types, that is, entails individuating different sets of particulars.” (76)

In denying that either types or tokens possess metaphysical status apart from the artwork they are instantiated in, Margolis has collapsed the abstract into the particular as a kind of emergent property. “…every work of art is a token of a type; there are no tokens or types tout court.” (76) In other words, Margolis views abstractions as being held in common by a set of similar works, but embedded in them.

The referents of Margolis’ ontological theory of artworks exist and do not depend on any particular extrinsic properties. This at least bears similarity to our intuitions regarding classes of non-artworks. For example, if we were to identify the concept ‘nut’, the generally held belief would be to categorize this as an abstraction of less abstract concepts, namely ‘brazil nuts’, ‘pistachios’, ‘peanuts’, and so on. In this way, Margolis satisifies our second constraint, that of adherence to the methods of art criticism, which depend on categorization and identity in the commonly understood way. By further introducing socio-historical modifiers through his notion of heuristics, he satisfies our practice of regarding these features as important to our understanding and individuation of art as an audience regarding some objet d’art (particularly in the case of readymades). (74)

Finally, by creating a monistic notion of artworks – all types are tokens – his theory is capable of speaking to both singular and multiple forms of art, satisfying our first constraint, in which the ontological status of all varieties of art available to the observer may be accounted for. Whatever its imperfections might be, Margolis’ ontological theory thereby addresses fundamental concerns and constraints about art’s referents which Wollheim and Margolis are unable to resolve.

Works Cited

Currie, Gregory. “Art Works as Action Types” Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Ed. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen: Blackwell Publishing, Malden. 2004, 103-122

Margolis, Joseph. “The Ontological Peculiarity of Works of Art” Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Ed. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen: Blackwell Publishing, Malden. 2004, 73-77

Plato. The Republic Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1968

Wollheim, Richard. Art and its Objects 2nd ed. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980

Forming Lines: Thousands turn out for rally against Gaza seige in Toronto

2009-01-13T12:00:00.011-05:00

TORONTO - Braving cold January winds, two thousand protesters gathered this past Saturday at the intersection of Avenue Rd and Bloor St W to protest the siege and ongoing violence in the Gaza strip. Organized by a coalition of anti-war and Palestinian/Arab rights groups, the crowd chanted and waved placards under the angular glass facade of the Royal Ontario Museum and the Israeli embassy across the street. Both the media and police were out in force for the event, their vehicles lining the street. Equestrian units and bicycle units, video surveillance vans, and riot cops watched the demonstration closely, the latter having erected a fenced barrier and formed a strategic line barricading the embassy entrance.

The peaceful if raucous crowd expressed their anger by marching within the bounds of the police cordon and heaping their scorn on the nations they regard as the aggressors in the conflict with cries of "Shame shame Israel" and "Shame shame USA", as well as demands to "Free free Palestine, occupation is a crime."

A brief history of the situation

Police units stood in phalanxes, holding the plexiglass helmets and wearing the uniform black coveralls that have become standard issue, seemingly overnight, for the expansion of militarized police units throughout the world. The irony seemed palpable - that at a protest to express dismay and anger at the treatment of a people fenced in half a world away by the enmity of distant leaders, one could observe the roots of any such conflict - the polarization of opinion, the indignation of some group of people to the apartheid of an imposed, asymmetrical power, the deployment of militarized units to protect assets, and the expression of fundamental ideological divides in the lines of fences and men trained in combat. Push those buttons long enough, and the outcome is inevitable.

Watch the video:

Credit Crisis Franchise Sale: Backwater Blog

2008-10-28T07:17:00.006-04:00

Wouldn't it be a rather swift coup de grace to the financial credit crisis if the UN, IMF, World Bank just decided to take over VISA and Mastercard?

And, just to extend our situation, a coup de grace to freedom - since that would see you paying your taxes to a world government. Since you've basically been forced off cash by sheer virtue of the fact that you no longer have any (poverty due to the credit crisis), this would create a system that does fiat currency one better - it wraps it in controls, creating an inflationary multiplier in the same way that fiat currency was placed at a remove from cash.

Money > Money' > Money'' ... (it could be an infinite series, though it seems unlikely any civilization could survive it for long)

One way this possible future scenario may not pan out is if global bankers actually own VISA and Mastercard already - in which case what we're seeing is more a corporate merger (or creation of a new venture) than a corporate raid.

Either scenario, at least, would explain the gathering of the Zheads online insisting it would be great to simply walk in a store and be able to take what you need. All religions need utopias but - are they high? That's the way to the prison planet, get on the rocketship. The way business entities are supposed to be is, you invest in them, they pay dividends, they're the milch-cows that made America great. Right? Credit cards let banks - the cops and lawyers of the financial world - buy a share in you, instead.

It doesn't sound like a good idea. And neither does the fact that the IMF has acquired two new client states, Iceland and the Ukraine Republic. Empire, two up, bottom of the ninth. Empire, endgame of a long series of frauds in the financial system. The IMF and World Bank are the AT-ATs of the invading force, two leviathans, cyclopean in their singularity of focus to feed off of the system of debt they're a creation of.

Maybe it's just the curse of our species that we naturally organize things like banks, and government, which are fine until they're taken over by another thing we organize, called mafia. The ensuing creation, frightening to behold in roughly the same way samurai were, could easily be mistaken for "the devil". Old Moloch, gorging on its own children. All traditions have these images of evil, and what could be more evil and anti-life than an enslaving institution?

The framers of the Constitution were brilliant. They knew that this sort of thing went on, and resolved to fix it by framing a new social contract. That boat leaked, but it was a damn good ship in its day. Perhaps it could be refurbished.

They knew humanity could become a bit of a hive, so they invented individual rights. Or defined them, rather - people have likely been fighting for them forever, through everything from tribal negotiations down to the new electronic commons...

And credit has likely always been around to 'un-invent' them - once there are debtor's prisons again, we'll know we've come full circle. It's the heat death of any civilization, waiting for another to rise from its ashes. It's the Bastille, the labour camp, it's docking at the Deathstar, it's the prison gates, it's Mordor. Or, for the glass half-full folks, it's the Rising Sun, it's a shiny and 'new' world order.

And it's going to be hell if people aren't able to pay down their credit cards, because you're the smallest corporation, now. You have a number. And you have value. And you are owned.

Well, franchised, actually.

Collectivism and the SPP

2008-06-14T18:28:00.006-04:00

The following is the text of a speech given at the SPP rally in Toronto on June 14, 2008.

Friends;

You can’t imagine how encouraged I feel, how happy it makes me to see so many engaged Canadians standing on this lawn today, ready to speak truth to power. It’s the weekend, and you’ve actually chosen to protest the SPP instead of, say, checking out North by Northeast. You’ve actually picked geopolitics over music, which for me personally is a tough choice. But that makes you leaders – leaders at getting the word out to friends, family, and co-workers, and for that I applaud you, and I think you should all give yourselves a hand for coming out and defending your country. You are heroes.

I’d like to open with a quote that some of you here may recognize.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.

(The bourgeoisie) compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, ie., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

So it’s clear, I’m sure, that this was written by Karl Marx. He penned these words in 1848, one hundred and sixty years ago, and his book, the Communist Manifesto, has without a doubt been one of the most influential political and economic tracts in the intervening years. How prescient he was! How farsighted! And, in my humble opinion, how poisonously wrong in his implication that capitalism necessarily greases the skids for the increased socialization and integration of the world – a situation from which the workers need only pick up the pieces and introduce some beneficent dictatorship of their own.

As Alan Watt is so fond of reminding us in his excellent podcast, Marx also foresaw the creation, in Das Kapital, of a world organized around three major trading blocs overseen by a world government. George Orwell or Eric Blair, a socialist in his own right, wrote of a similar arrangement in his famous novel 1984, a dystopia in which Eurasia, East Asia, and Oceania - roughly corresponding to today’s EU, APAC, and the various regional initiatives comprising the Americas – are played off against one another with the intent of pigeon-holing the peoples of the world into a paradigm of unending economic warfare.

This brings us to the ‘Security and Prosperity Partnership’, a title which Orwell would surely have found some amusement in. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he wrote disparagingly of the “hypertrophied sense of order” displayed by his Fabian socialist counterparts, whom he said were not offended by the world for it’s miseries, but rather because:

it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard. … The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders...

Having watched the behavior of our elected leaders as they roll out the SPP, I can only agree with him. In fact, did you hear that just this week, Canada, Mexico and the US met in Meech Lake of all places to sign a ‘trilateral ministerial declaration’ – just think about that language for a second – ‘trilateral ministerial declaration’! I would have had no idea about this but for the Council of Canadians, who posted it on their website. Among the provisions cited are the creation of

national transportation infrastructures that, taken together, will develop gateways and trade corridors and better allow the countries to maximize the opportunities associated with global supply chains. Canada and the U.S. have strengthened collaboration to enhance crossing capacity at the Windsor-Detroit Gateway, while the U.S. and Mexico have taken important steps toward fulfilling components of the NAFTA’s trucking provisions.

What they’re talking about of course, is a North American Union on the pattern of the European Union – a situation created by interlocking trade deals and legislative harmonizations – more nuspeak – that threatens to dissolve the border by fiat. But do not mistake this for free trade – this is another misleading aspect of NAFTA and the SPP. Freedom does not require volumes of regulation and a separate class of interpreters.

You want to know who knows a little something about freedom? The Irish people, that’s who, and this brings us to the good news section of my talk – and don’t worry, I’ll only ask you to bear with me for another minute or two as I’m sure that you’d like to have your say, as well – the Irish people who just yesterday, despite the best efforts of the political elite in Europe, voted down the Lisbon Accord, which they rightly recognized as simply a repackaged version of the European Constitution, a document which would have continued the march to integration on the continent, introducing a Presidency and accruing greater powers to Brussels as the culmination of a process that began fifty-odd years ago and was sold as an industrial and economic treaty. Well, the Irish know a little something about encroachment and economic imperialism, and I think they deserve our recognition today. They’ve smashed the latest step towards the centralization of power in Europe and set the creation of that unaccountable, unelected state back for years. Let’s give it up for their courage!

Incidentally, they were the only country in all of Europe allowed a referendum on the ratification of Lisbon, and the reason was their constitution, which demanded it. And this brings me to the importance of law.

John Adams, a framer of the American Constitution, wrote famously that he desired “a government of laws, and not of men”. I do not believe his intention was to create a system in which laws are perverted and twisted by the arbitrary desires of men, but rather immutable laws which protect the conditions of our well-being. And this is perhaps the most devastating aspect of the Security and Properity Partnership. Under a different context some of its provisions might actually make sense if freely accepted by the people in the course of their independent actions in the marketplace. But as it stands it can provide neither Security nor Prosperity if it comes at the cost of our liberty, sovereignty, and self-determination. Canadians must not be cattle, must not accept unquestioningly the ministerial declarations of unaccountable supra-national bodies put together in secrecy by business interests in partnership with the state.

We must not accept the increasing centralization of state power under our government or that of any other, the purpose of a government of laws being to prevent the seizure of power by men. The only place that power belongs, friends, is in your hands – the power to see to your own life and affairs. National boundaries, far from being arbitrary lines in the sand, protect the individual by acting as firewalls to the growth of state power. Should one country go bad, it cannot then metastasize over the surface of a continent except by the provenance of war.

I found it interesting as I was putting this talk together this morning to discover that the Italian for union is fascio. It’s latin root, fasces, referred to the bundle of rods which the ancient Roman magistrates used as their symbol of authority. How often have you heard that we will be stronger through unity? The strength of the fasces in Rome were used for corporal and capital punishment at the pleasure of the law-makers. Thankfully, this symbol does not appear in Canada’s coat-of-arms. The word fascism – as it has evolved and come down to us today – should not be seen merely as a label to be applied exclusively to the far right, but as a symbol of the danger of collectivism, whether of the right or of the left. Does it matter if you’re punched in the face with a left or a right hook? This distinction is an artificial one and distracts us from a more fundamental truth:

The only alternative to collectivism is to once more enshrine the rights of the individual, an idea which in today’s political context is given some lip service but which has in practice and in law has been all but abandoned.

We are Canadians, and we live in North America, but we are individuals first, with friends, family and communities reaching out around ourselves as though in concentric rings. Our consent to be governed derives from the fact, that as individuals, we possess individual rights, and any legitimate government, distanced from the individual as it is, must respect these rights.

We must not accept surveillance and tracking, as provided for in the SPP, in the name of Security. We must not accept the diminution of our legal protections and the abandonment of our workers by industry for third-world neo-feudal states in the name of Prosperity. We must let Ottawa know that we are not part of a collective, that we are not here to be herded into a North American Union. It’s regarded as something of a truism that we as Canadians are in favour of peace, order, and good government, and now it is our turn to prove it to the world. Thank you.

Toronto Citizens Betrayed: New Crop of Cameras Revealed on Queen St W

2008-05-02T08:18:00.007-04:00

Like mushrooms after a spring rain, a new surveillance zone has appeared in the downtown area at the intersection of Bathurst and Queen St W. The cameras presently cover an area about a block in each direction.

Walking through the area, this reporter had noticed activity at the corner over the past couple of days - ladder trucks with the usual protective complement of officers to administer pedestrians and vehicular traffic. Expecting that it was just electrical work or streetcar repair that they were doing, I thought nothing of it until this afternoon:

No longer any need to beware occasional panhandlers and concert goers

This latest installment in the installation of Toronto's new 'panopticon'-styled system of enforcement represents an outrage inflicted upon it's citizens - the cumulative effect of their betrayal by their current municipal public servants, 'Toronto's Finest', and the local media as well for failing to alert them to this plan.

Because it's easy enough to figure out - some of you must have known. Jeremy Bentham outlined the theory behind this setup in 1785. He called it the 'panopticon'. It was the design for an open-concept prison in which the prisoners were visible to a nearby guard station at all times but could not see if the guard was there or not. Michel Foucault famously included the Panopticon's design in his critique of hierarchical structures like the army, the school, the hospital and the factory - implying that it's an exercise of power in order to impose some particular idea of social order, whether its purpose be to train, to nurse, or to bring to heel. The intention of these systems was exemplified in ancient Rome by the words of one Gaius Cassius, a senator noted for his history of corruption, when he said "exemplary punishment always contains an element of injustice".

Sufficient cause? Site of unsolved arson.

Presumably the reasons given to justify the new cameras will be; the recent arson, the occasional panhandler, kids going out to hear music at the live venues in the area. All of which are, no doubt, fine and salutory reasons for a crackdown. But it becomes clear upon a casual survey of world events that the use of local events as justification is to a large degree a ruse. Similar surveillance networks - grids of cameras with the capability of being hooked into central stations for police observation - are being installed throughout Britain, The United States, Australia, and Canada, despite the lack of evidence to prove they have any effective deterrent effect on criminals.

Privacy International, in their 2007 "International Privacy Ranking", portrayed Canada's privacy as "decaying", and made it clear that we would soon be on the road to joining the club of "endemic surveillance societies" if we didn't clean up our act - although the beleageaured efforts of the nation's privacy commissioners are given due credit.

Can we ever justify the kind of enforcement that treats citizens in the same way as it treats criminals?

Outside "The Meeting Place", a drop-in centre

It's a suitable irony then, that the name of the drop in-centre on the north-west corner of the intersection is 'The Meeting Place', often identified as the Huronian translation of 'toronton' - one explanation for the origin of our city's name. The department of Natural Resources Canada, however, takes care to point out on their website that the true origin is found in the French name for the fort that stood on these grounds prior to the establishment of York. Fort Toronto was named, instead, after the Mohawk site 'tkaronto' (present day Orillia) - a good place for catching fish.

It's up to the people of Toronto, though, to decide what the city of Toronto means to them.

We can choose to have a meeting place - Toronto the Good? - or we can reconstruct, and update, the old garrison.

Call your councillor and tell them that you're opposed to Toronto the Panopticon.

Members of Toronto City Council 2006 - 2010
http://app.toronto.ca/im/council/councillors.jsp

Snuffing out Inflation: The ‘Standard Candle’ and The Credit Crisis

2008-03-31T14:04:00.007-04:00

Do you know how much your money is worth?

“Certainly”, you may say, confidently brandishing a blue Canadian five dollar bill, or a brown hundred-dollar note. “This is five dollars, and this is a hundred.” But what does that mean, exactly, when both are physically pieces of paper of the exact same size? What does it mean to ask the price of money?

What would the world be like, if people couldn’t rely on any kind of measurement? We use measurement every day: whether it be to check the time, estimate hard disk capacity, dispense fuel for a transoceanic flight, or count produce in the supermarket aisle. So what would things be like, then, if your watch ran backwards, your hard drive shrank, flight crews had to guess at fuel requirements, and apples randomly transformed into oranges? What if you wished to know the price of goods or services in such a world?

Welcome to the arbitrary realm of modern economics. When it comes to questions of value, there has been no reliable yardstick for measurement since the last neutered vestiges of the gold standard were abolished in 1971 when Nixon closed the door to redemptions in gold under the Bretton-Woods international monetary regime. [1] In order to understand the connection between the contemporary declines in living standards and the rising costs gripping families and North American markets alike, it’s necessary first to grasp the true purpose of the concept of ‘value’: what it is, how to measure it, and how some reliable means of measuring economic activity today is an absolute requirement to lighting the way out of the current credit market meltdown and attendant inflationary crisis. When inflation rises, your dollar buys less. (See Figures 1 and 2)

Figure 1 - Loss of US Purchasing Power

Figure 2 - Canadian Loss of Purchasing Power vs US

The answer, remarkably enough, is a simple yellow metal: one which served as money for millennia by tacit agreement, a metal which was all but jettisoned as an age of world wars and economic turmoil dawned. To understand how this metal was found uniquely suited for the measurement of price, credit, and the sorts of things that make the world go ‘round, we turn first for inspiration to another sticky historical problem of measurement: figuring out how big the universe that world goes ‘round in really is.

The Physical Requirements of Measurement: How High the Moon?

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Man may not be the measure of all things, but he and she are the measurers of all things. If some aspect of the world is not brought within the perspective of our senses by measurement, we cannot ‘grasp’ it. So imagine if you will, the void: beyond the reach of our own solar system, out past the last cold, scattered remnants of the sun’s formation, there lies a most ancient sea – vacuum and darkness. A chasm so seemingly absolute as to be directionless, with no bottom, top, or sides.

Yet the points of light that we see on those few dark, clear summer nights when the stars beckon in a country sky seem to belie this truth of distance and isolation. The image we see when we look up, is that of the starry night as a dark sphere upon which the heavens are painted in light. This, as we know today, is an illusion.

It was not always so. For millennia, people believed that the stars were set in a celestial sphere (see Figure 3) as surely as they knew that the earth was flat. For whom, on the evidence of their senses, could believe otherwise? The curvature of the earth lay beyond the perception of all but the keenest-eyed sailors able to perceive that the first part of a ship to become visible on a distant horizon was the crow’s nest rather than the stern. The true chasms of space between even the nearest stars would only reveal themselves, within the last few hundred years, to the most persistent astronomers: those willing to precisely measure and map the positions of bright stars from widely separated positions on the surface of the earth.

Figure 3 - The Celestial Sphere [2]

The effect of these careful observations served to prove a point: that the baseline for measurement of some phenomenon is dictated by the thing itself, and the context in which it is observed: the distances of ships at sea provided the first evidence of the earth’s curvature, just as the long-baseline terrestrial measurements of the early astronomers provided the first quantitative evidence for the three dimensional structure of space and the abyssal distances between our nearest stellar neighbours.

Another way of putting it is, if an appropriate yardstick of some kind isn’t available, then measurement isn’t possible. In the case of the earth’s curvature, or the distance between earth and its stellar neighbours, measurement may not even be comprehensible. The scale of the distances involved are simply too large for the human mind to grasp unless they can be brought back within the range of our senses by somehow comparing them to a standard unit that we are already familiar with. We may know it’s three day’s journey to the nearest village – but how high the moon?

So how do we go about measuring things that we can’t see or experience directly? Although the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus was able to calculate approximations of the distances between the earth, sun, and moon around 150 BC, (using trigonometry and measurements timed to a solar eclipse in two different cities), it was not until 1771 of our present era that the French astronomer Jerome Lalande was able to use sufficiently accurate observational data – the result of a global scientific effort [3] to observe transits of the planet Venus across the face of the sun – to calculate that the distance to the sun from the Earth was 153 million kilometres (give or take a million kilometres).

Extending the ability of science to reach out into space, the German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel became the first to accurately determine the distance to a nearby star in 1838 by using new observational techniques [4] capable of measuring the tiny apparent movements of stars over time to assess distance.

Other astronomers found different techniques [5], scaling out to further and further distances, each technique uniquely suited by natural circumstances to measure distances within a certain range. Those relating to the intensity of a distant source of light and radiation proved best suited for the largest distances, and these objects were named, appropriately, ‘standard candles’[6].

The Type 1a Supernova is, currently, the furthest directly observable standard candle. A supernova is the explosion of a star at the moment of its death, and it is known that the physical characteristics of this event result in an intense outpouring of energy which is however constrained by the known limits nature places on the size of stars. Knowing that this emission’s brightness, or luminosity, is constant, astronomers can reason that the dimmer the supernova, the more distant the galaxy in which it is observed.

This relationship satisfies the important requirement for establishing a known baseline at a scale relevant to intergalactic distance. Since the drop-off in brightness is geometrically proportional to the distance in question, then a relationship has been established.

Brightness becomes the convenient ‘yardstick’ in this case. A given drop in brightness may be directly compared to a given distance in space, in the same way that a given length of wood, marked at a length of 100 centimeters, may be directly compared to a meter’s worth of any other substance: the actual substances (light, wood) involved are relevant only insofar as they satisfy the requirements of the measurement at hand.

“The requirements of a standard of measurement are: that it represent the appropriate attribute, that it be easily perceivable by man and that, once chosen, it remain immutable and absolute whenever used.” [7]

How to Compare Apples and Oranges: Gold’s Unique Ability to Measure Value

An astronomer today would no more consider measuring the distance between the earth and the moon in units of ‘day’s travel time’, grains of sand, or elastic bands than a tradesman of a few short generations ago would be willing to accept small green pieces of paper in payment for his labour. The reasons were many and compelling: paper is flammable. You can tear it in half. Paper can be damaged by water. If stored improperly, mice may use it to make nests. It is susceptible to wear and tear. Paper is plentiful, and therefore easily counterfeit by reproduction. In fact the only real advantage paper holds in its capacity as a currency is that it’s easy to carry.

Yet for most of recorded history, it was gold and similar metals that were used to settle debts. While some attempts were made to use items such as seashells [8] and cows for trade, these proved ineffective in the long run for similar reasons to the objections against paper. Seashells may be crushed. Cows may perish. When it was discovered, however, that certain metals, and gold in particular, were not subject to corrosion or wear (since they might be simply melted and reformed at will) and were also naturally scarce, then it became clear through the convergence of the common practice among people involved in trade that these were ideally suited to measuring quantities of various kinds.

While barter (using commodities directly in trade) is another possibility, barter is limited by its inability to set relative prices between commodities. An example: you may lay five oranges beside five apples in two neat rows and say they are equivalent, but if I like juicy oranges better than apples in the first place, or have an orange tree of my own at home, I may not be willing to trade my oranges for apples at a one to one equivalence. So I make a deal: I’ll take three apples for each orange since I recall that I could use a large quantity of apples to make applesauce, which I do enjoy. We’re rapidly met with another problem: to acquire your five apples, I am going to have to give you one and two-thirds of an orange. Now, on a hot day, two thirds of an orange is going to spoil.

This presents a problem. We need some kind of intermediary, something that represents the characteristic we are trying to measure in both fruit – a way to compare apples and oranges. What’s needed is a uniform unit for the measure of value, which is a way of saying we need a way to count value:

“The key to applying mathematics to a particular science is finding the correct uniform units to count. In geometry, the uniform units include units of length (eg, meters) and units of angles or direction (eg, degrees). In mechanics, units include units of mass, speed and time. In business, units include units of money and time… In general, any kind of uniform unit may be substituted for any other and the relations among quantities will still hold … [as] analog measurements or representations, based on the principle of analogy.” [9]

If I were to accept pebbles in place of apples, then, with the cost in pebbles being three per orange and one per apple, then we would have found one way to count and thereby measure the relative values of apples and oranges by arbitrarily setting the price of a pebble. Of course, the use of pebbles suffers from one fatal flaw. With pebbles being so easy to come by, both our larders would be depleted of fruit in short order as we rushed to redeem all of the pebbles we could find. With money so easy to come by, we would both have, effectively, an infinite amount of credit. So there is another problem that we need to solve to move from a barter exchange to a direct exchange of value – the supply of money chosen must operate in such a way as to reflect real people’s value judgements and price estimates. Pebbles have limited usefulness for this application, since in choosing a commodity to use as money, it’s best to pick one whose available quantity isn’t going to grow any more quickly than is needed for trade.

Of course, this is merely stating the obvious, but at some point ancient peoples had to settle on a solution to the twin problems of finding a uniform unit for the measurement of value, and ensuring that it was sufficiently scarce in order to be able to represent the values required when held in the palm of one’s hand. The solution was found, as we’ve said, in the form of the scarce metals – the Group 11 elements of the periodic table of chemical elements – which could be distributed in different sizes and weights of coin to reflect different fractions of value without the attendant problems of spoilage and availability that plague the barter and fiat systems of trade.

Inflation: Burning the Candle at Both Ends

Ludwig von Mises, intellectual fountainhead of the Austrian school of economic thought, had this to say on the topic of inflation:

“The course of a progressing inflation is this: At the beginning the inflow of additional money makes the prices of some commodities and services rise, other prices rise later… This first stage of the inflationary process may last for many years. While it lasts, the prices of many goods and services are not yet adjusted to the altered money relation. There are still people in the country who have not yet become aware of the fact that they are confronted with a price revolution which will finally result in a considerable rise of all prices… But then the masses finally wake up. They become suddenly aware of the fact that inflation is a deliberate policy and will go on endlessly. A breakdown occurs… Everybody is anxious to swap his money against ‘real’ goods, no matter whether he needs them or not, no matter how much money he has to pay for them. Within a very short time, within a few weeks or even days, the things which were used as money are no longer used as media of exchange. They become scrap paper. Nobody wants to give away anything against them.” [10]

The relative historical stability of purchasing power under a gold standard is well documented. In his book The Golden Constant: The American and British Experience, 1560-1976, economist Roy Jastram provided the fascinating charts depicted in Figures 4 and 5.

Figure 4 - Gold's Price Stability and the US Dollar

Figure 5 - Gold vs Historic Dollar and Sterling Prices

Richard Salsman neatly sums up the significance of these charts:

“Jastram found that gold’s purchasing power was relatively constant through more than 4 centuries. For most of this history, Britain and the United States were on a gold standard. The pound and the dollar were defined in terms of a fixed weight of gold, which meant that the price of gold was fixed. Commodity prices also tended to be stable, and the real value of gold was quite stable over long periods of time. Even during episodes when the gold standard was suspended and price inflation took hold, gold still maintained its relatively constant purchasing power. When prices rose due to inflating, so did gold prices. If prices eventually fell, so did the price of gold. In either instance, a certain weight of gold bought substantially the same basket of commodities.” [11]

As the chart clearly depicts, since the process of alienating money from the gold standard began with the founding of the Federal Reserve system in 1913, purchasing power has undergone wild swings, from the inflation of war and the sudden deflation of the Roaring Twenties. The end of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971 heralded the final decoupling of gold and money, and the results may be seen on the graph.

But the debasement of money is not a new phenomenon. It has occurred throughout many periods in history when money moved away from gold. The distance may be seen in the vertical distance between the two lines in Figure 4.

Note the period between 1861 and 1865. During the American civil war, gold was dispensed with in favour of a strictly paper currency, in a similar situation to that which exists today. A steep drop in purchasing power is reflected for this period on the chart as well. The gold standard was restored after the war.

During other periods, money was debased by thieves and kings alike by making the coins imperceptibly smaller in size, or by diluting the constituency of their makeup to include baser metals. In this way, money could be stolen, physically, and by stealth. In more brazen periods of confiscation, stockpiles of gold were occasionally captured by governments, usually in times of war. These actions, however, were regarded with loathing by the citizenry and resulted in a loss of esteem and confidence. For example,

“It became the practice of the citizens of London to lodge their surplus coin and bullion at the Mint in the Tower of London. This practice continued until 1640 when the confidence of the London merchants in the Tower as a place where their gains might be deposited with safety was rudely shaken, for the King, failing in his attempts to raise money by grants from parliament or by means of levies, ordered the treasure of the merchants to be seized. Vigorous protests resulted in the money being returned on condition that 40,000 pounds was lent to the King, but after such an occurrence it became obvious to the merchants that the Tower could not be regarded as a safe depository…” [12]

Even though objections have been raised against gold in some quarters to the effect that it is too easy to seize control of a commodity based money supply, this argument is contradictory on its face when one realizes that the alternative is inflation – and inflation accomplishes the task of delivering control of a nation’s money to its leaders at the stroke of a pen rather than the stroke of a sword. (And it matters little which central bank wields the pen.) When taxation could not raise enough to fund some war or project, governments have always turned to debasement of currency to raise funds. Inflation is nothing but a particularly subtle way of debasing currency and may be regarded as implicit taxation. Some, like US Congressman Ron Paul, are explicit on this point. “Inflation, as the late Milton Friedman explained, is always a monetary phenomenon. The federal government consistently wants to spend more than it can tax and borrow, so Congress turns to the Fed for help in covering the difference. The result is more dollars, both real and electronic – which means the value of every existing dollar goes down.” [13]

Inflation is a means of burning the candle of a nation’s wealth at both ends. Government intervention in the economy by taxation redirects value (and human action) out of market-driven production, out of producing goods desired by consumers, and into state-sponsored projects. Intervention by inflation is the equivalent of writing bad cheques. The estimate of an individual’s wealth is her credit. The estimate of a nation’s wealth is the strength of its money. When an individual or a nation becomes bankrupt, then its real assets are forfeit to those who extended the credit. In the current international monetary regime, the creditors are the central banks. And taxpayers, not nations, are ultimately the debtors.

The Measure of Your Freedom

The utility of precious metals, the reason that they were adopted as money, is because they allow men to peer into the future and make decisions based on accurate measures of risk and value, for the same reason that telescopes were developed and ‘standard candles’ established in order to allow astronomers to peer into the furthest depths of the Universe and to begin determining its size. The human economy, too, is a universe unto itself: full of worlds with strangely remote continents and oceans, their tidal flows of value outlined by the sum total of all decisions, values, choices, preferences, and actions undertaken by people the world over. Such a system needs a standard candle in order to resolve and make sense of its complexity.

Being a tool of measurement and bound by the science of weights and standards, the gold dollar places certain objective limitations on the use of money and stands directly in the way of cheap financing for wars and other monolithic state projects. John Maynard Keynes, perhaps the principal architect of the gold standard’s abolition and the economist most revered by the academe throughout the twentieth century, showed a clear understanding of what the outcome of his Fabian pretensions would be:

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at the security but at the confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become ‘profiteers’, who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflation has impoverished, not less than the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds, and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overthrowing the existing basis of society that to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and it does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” [14]

But if so pernicious a public policy has been thoroughly exposed in the past, and if inflation’s role (and therefore currency debasement) in the so-called business ‘cycle’ can be so clearly demonstrated, then why do we keep falling for it? Von Mises weighed in on this point:

“A retailer or innkeeper can easily fall prey to the illusion that all that is needed to make him and his colleagues more prosperous is more spending on the part of the public. In his eyes the main thing is to impel people to spend more. But it is amazing that this belief could be presented to the world as a new social philosophy. Lord Keynes and his disciples make the lack of the propensity to consume responsible for what they deem unsatisfactory in economic conditions. What is needed, in their eyes, to make men more prosperous is not an increase in production, but an increase in spending. In order to make it possible for people to spend more, an “expansionist” policy is recommended.” [15]

In the 21st century, however, the results of such expansionism are becoming clearer. Men are blinded as calculations of value become futile. Their dollars, the yardsticks for value that they are forced to use by coercive legal tender laws, continue to shrink. It is as though we are forced to stand upon a conveyor belt which runs backwards at an arbitrary and increasing rate, forcing us to walk and finally, run full out in order to stand still. The rug is being pulled out from under the economy, and we are blinkered by the shrinking dollar like dray horses, until all that we are permitted is to walk forward under the urging of our masters. And when the wealth of the nation has been destroyed, all that may be left is the atavistic scramble to secure the wealth of neighbouring nations instead in the logical end of all expansionist policies: war.

It is not capitalism that creates war, but it’s negation. Left to our devices, we are generally peaceable creatures, we humans: freely trading with one another, and willing to come to terms on our civil differences. The truth of this may be seen on the scale of one’s own local community, in goods and services bartered and sold. But the tension of inflation, when manufactured, inevitably creates conflict – and conflict creates further tension in an unending spiral.

This dynamic is mirrored in the current credit crisis and the wave of home foreclosures sweeping the American public. After years of extending easy credit and thereby blowing up the housing market bubble to untenable levels [16], banks have hit a wall and the smallest investors are inevitably the first to suffer, their wealth drawn further up the chain of arcane credit devices (eg; commercial paper) as banks consolidate their debt holdings. The economy is reaching the limit of the inflation that it can reasonably be expected to absorb. Tellingly, the solution offered by the private central bank at the head of the US money supply, the Federal Reserve, is more intervention to cure the ills of the old interventions: by subsidizing and propping up failing banks, which amounts to a reward for fiscal mismanagement. Recent reports have even indicated that the Fed may be considering a nationalization of the banking system [17], in which case the fraud perpetrated against the American people beginning in 1913 would finally be complete.

Economist Isabel Paterson relates a story in her classic book on economic engineering, The God in the Machine, about the response of Isaac Newton when he was questioned on the subject. Newton, arguably the most celebrated physicist and theoretician prior to Einstein also happened to be master of the British mint at the time. If only he had been given the final word on the subject:

“Sir Isaac Newton was asked by the British Treasury officials and financiers of his day why the monetary pound had to be a fixed quantity of precious metal. Why, indeed, must it consist of precious metal, or have any objective reality? Since paper currency was already accepted, why could notes not be issued without ever being redeemed? The reason they put the question supplies the answer; the government was heavily in debt, and they hoped to find a safe way of being dishonest. But Newton was asked as a mathematician, not a moralist. He replied: “Gentlemen, in applied mathematics, you must describe your unit.” [18]

Sources

[1] Salsman, Richard M. Gold and Liberty Economic Education Bulletin. Vol XXXV No. 4. (1995) p. 76
[2] The Celestial Sphere
http://www.shef.ac.uk/physics/people/vdhillon/teaching/phy105/phy105_celsphere_intro.html
[3] Wikipedia – Transit of Venus: Modern Observations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus#Modern_observations
[4] Wikipedia – Stellar Parallax
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax#Stellar_parallax
[5] Wikipedia – Cosmic Distance Ladder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance_ladder#Distance_determination_based_on_physical_assumptions
[6] Wikipedia – Standard Candle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_candle
[7] Rand, Ayn. Ed. Binswanger, Harry and Peikoff, Leonard. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd ed. Middlesex. Penguin (1990) p 7
[8] Wikipedia – Cowrie: Human Use
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowrie#Human_use
[9] Pisaturo, Ronald “Mathematics in One Lesson” The Intellectual Activist 12.10 (Oct 1998) p 19-22
[10] Mises, Ludwig von. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics 4th rev ed. NY The Foundation for Economic Education (1966) p 427-428
[11] Salsman, p 29
[12] Acres, W. Marston. The Bank of England From Within, 1694-1931 (London: Oxford University Press, 1931). p 4
[13] Lew Rockwell – Monetary Inflation is the Problem by Ron Paul
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul354.html
[14] Keynes, John Maynard. The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, brace and Howe, 1920) p 235-236
[15] Mises, p 432
[16] Wikipedia – Subprime mortgage crisis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis
[17] Telegraph – Fed eyes Nordic-style nationalization of US banks
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/03/31/cnfed131.xml
[18] Paterson, Isabel. The God of the Machine (New Jersey, Transaction Publishers, 1993 org 1943) p 203-204

Continental Integration Deniers Growing Increasingly Shrill

2008-02-29T14:07:00.002-05:00

On February 27, 2008, the Centre for International Policy published an article on their website entitled, "The North American Union Farce", seeking to dispel fears that the North American neighbour states; Canada, Mexico, and the US, are moving towards an arrangement of continental integration much like that which exists in Europe, and calling such fears a right-wing distraction from the real work which needs to be done on the part of progressives in order to block the Security and Prosperity Partnership: a set of integrationist policies which the author confirms the existence of.

Article

Laura Carlson writes:

"How, then, to explain the fact that the NAU conspiracy has gone viral among rightwing populists in the United States?

How to explain how a baseless myth has garnered the support of millions, made it into presidential candidates' debates, and become the subject of 20 state resolutions and a federal one?

Given the absolute lack of factual data to support the existence of a secret plan to create a North American Union, it's tempting to assume that the NAU scare was put forth as a red herring to divert attention from real issues facing the country. By channeling the insecurities of white working-class Americans into belief in an attack on U.S. sovereignty, the NAU myth obscures the very real globalization issues raised by NAFTA—job loss, labor insecurity, the surge in illegal immigration, and racial tensions caused by the portrayal of immigrants as invaders. This is convenient for both rightwing politicians and the government and business elites they attack because real solutions to these problems would include actions anathema to the right, including unionization, enforcement of labor rights, comprehensive immigration reform, and regulation of the international market. Instead, these options are shunted aside with the redefinition of the problem as a conspiracy of anti-American elites."

It is worth noting that the CIP is a government and Ford-foundation funded entity, staffed by former members of the American diplomatic corps and NGOs. It's curious that such a foundation would deny a broad-based movement towards regionalization and dissolution of national sovereignty in North America while simultaneously supporting "regulation of international markets". Spurred to reply, I sent the following response to their feedback section.

Just keep on pushing the false left-right paradigm.

I feel the author is disingenuous, to say the least, to state and presumably try to convince us on her word alone that there's some complete lack of evidence of a movement towards continental integration. She plays a semantic game by reciting a litany of facts on integration, then claims that since there is no _single_ public face of continental integration, no cabal so to speak, then the "conspiracy theory" (another canard) of the North American Union isn't true. No, it's just hundreds of groups and policies, sharing the same goals, operating at the same time and towards the same end. NAFTA, SPP, TILMA, WHTI, Atlantica, nothing to see here, move along. Don't think in terms of context, stay focussed on minutia.

She's happy to suggest, and then winkingly retract, her own theory that perhaps it's all a right-wing plot to undermine action being taken against the SPP. But - no, wait! It's really a mass delusion that such people are predisposed to (?) when their imaginary communities (nations, presumably) are under imaginary threat. She's a psychologist, then?

It's a dizzying spin job, albeit a transparent one: the technique is to take a political goal you wish to obscure, set up the strawman of "conspiracy theory" and then proceed to bash it in the head by demanding that some central agency be produced. (The CFR and SPP don't qualify as pieces of this puzzle incidentally, also because she says so.)

Here's what I've been able to determine: Globalization and its effect on the regional scales we're talking about here needs no central agency to move ahead, any more than ants need supervision to build an ant-hill. It's a cultural meme. And while it's good to break the task of opposing global statism into manageable chunks (eg, by fighting the SPP), the existence of the SPP doesn't deny the fact of innumerable thinktanks, policy initiatives, and freshly scrubbed neo-Fabians on campus all pushing for convergence under some expansive statist vision of the future. We can prevaricate and deny that linkages exist between the CFR and the SPP's principals, and we can imagine that initiatives like the SPP don't exist within a larger context of intention on the part of the establishment: but wishing won't make it so.

The following video is but one example of how the idea that continental integration will continue apace is guiding assumption for those in the political establishment.

Vicente Fox on Larry King: Harmonized Currency a 'Long Term' Goal

What Karl Rove Said

2008-02-26T13:10:00.001-05:00

[Karl Rove] said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Perhaps the most lethal knowledge ever discovered by man was the knowledge of the means to kill stories and, after altering their genetic code, to reanimate them as shambling, lurching horrors in the service of their new masters.

As humans, we depend upon stories in the same way that we depend upon air. We breathe the atmosphere to sustain our lives as mammals in the moment. We breathe in stories and symbols from our culture to tell us of the world of the past and future. We build our conception of the world beyond the range of our senses upon the foundation of story, news, myth, and deposition. Without them, we would be helpless atoms with no knowledge but that which we might discern on our own.

Rove was incautious to reveal so much of his worldview, for it really underlies the fundamental philosophical problem from which the world is now suffering its agonies.

In making a diagnosis, a medical doctor must be cautious not to confuse cause and effect. S/he must have knowledge of the symptomatic effects of a disease and keep them separated from the root, the true cause of disease. A modern physician would not make a diagnosis of "lesions and scrofula of the extremities" and go on to prescribe leeches to cool the fevered blood - though this might provide temporary relief, the victim would eventually face amputation. S/he would instead diagnose the invisible bacterium causing the infection and eradicate it by means of antibiotics.

It's the same with politics. The current political situation is merely symptomatic of the kind of thinking that can be attributed not only to Karl Rove, but almost the entire academic establishment. To varying degrees the current crop of academics, the people driving policy from the wings, from universities and thinktanks, DO NOT THINK REALITY HAS SPECIFIC IDENTITY. They treat it as though it's malleable, devoid of natural law apart from their consciousness, putty in their hands so to speak. And the misguided sheep that run out to purchase the popular detritus of this disease of the mind (I'm thinking here of 'The Secret' and its ilk) are clinging to the same false hope offered by the King's Touch of the middle ages, the false hope of the 'plague doctors', the snake oil of subjectivism.

Subjectivism, or the belief that wishing can make it so, isn't a new thing. It has deep roots in Western culture, stretching back at least to the time of Plato. It lies at the root of all tyranny, of the delusional manias exhibited by tyrants throughout history. But never before has it's grip been so global. If we choose to regard this as merely a political problem, then we are applying leeches to the wound.

The choices are clear. We face either amputation or some form of deep cultural therapy to halt the infection. It's instructive to note that it has been at points in history when the subjectivist impulse has been weakest that we have seen the greatest advances in human health, wealth, and happiness. Athens. The Renaissance. The Enlightenment. The Virginian revolution.

We cannot let the remnants of our freedom fade into the dark dreams of another age of unreason, though the whole culture may be working against us. Modern media culture is a replication process that has become so perverted that its default influence is to sunder the necessary connection between your singular, precious mind and the world that it was designed to apprehend. The proper relationship between one's mind and reality is to strengthen these connections, to behold, to appreciate the awesome beauty of the natural world and seek to understand it. The time to wake up is now, before the love of truth becomes sedition. All that's needed is to open your eyes, shake off the lies, and tell it like you see it, letting reason be your guide. This is the root of the universals we dimly recognize in the stories and myths that move us. And this is the deepest heart of the truth movement: we must reclaim the sovereignty of the individual mind before we can reclaim the culture, and the future.

National Newspaper Launches Column pushing Cross-Border Economic Merger

2007-10-28T16:23:00.002-04:00

The Globe and Mail, in it's newly revamped Weekend edition, has just launched a column by Richard Florida, currently being feted as the golden boy of Toronto society.

The inaugural editorial is here:
Wake Up Toronto: You're bigger than you think
Richard Florida on his adopted city's central role in a new world order built not around nations but around mega-regions
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071026.wfloridatoronto2710/BNStory/National/home

In it, Richard Florida states that "place, not statehood" is the primary driver of economic activity and calls for "fixing the border problem" between cities so that they may more effectively be yoked into transnational "mega-regions", citing the bi-national trade at Mexico's border with the USA as an example of the success that may be expected.

Richard Florida is the newly appointed head for the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, Ontario. Sandra and Joseph Rotman are both intimately involved ($100,000 donation and seats at the gala last week) in the newly minted Canadian International Council (CIC), touted as the new Canadian player among global foreign relations councils. Jim Balsillie, a member of the powerful globalist confab the Trilateral Commission, is the creator of the CIC. Roger L Martin, dean of the Rotman school, sits on the board of Research in Motion, the company Balsillie founded.

Here, in Mr Balsillie's own words, is:
Why we're creating the Canadian International Council
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=a6d47f5d-7452-4ccc-86b2-24ebf81d0b69&k=13862

"Applying expert and fact-based research to complex issues is the essential foundation for creating effective policy. Business leaders have an opportunity to play a transformative role for Canada by supporting CIC research fellowships."

Last I checked, I hadn't voted for any business leaders to be 'transforming' Canadian policy.

A Field Guide to Objectivism

2007-10-17T02:09:00.001-04:00

Objectivism is the philosophy of Ayn Rand. A Soviet expatriate, she developed and refined it over a period of many years during her life in America in response to a need she perceived:

Rand had no intention of becoming a philosopher initially - her love was writing fiction. But when she discovered that, in order to make the bright, affirming worlds of her novels - such as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged - more intelligeable to an America which had lost touch with the optimistic, moral principles on which it was founded, she spent the last twenty-five years of her life writing nonfiction essays. This is a body of work which passionately defends reason, the individual, and political and economic freedom - but which was never collated into a single treatise. This was left to her intellectual heir, Dr. Leonard Peikoff.

The following are point-form notes derived from Dr. Leonard Peikoff's 'Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand', itself a systematization of Ayn Rand's work. Because of the extremely wide scope of integration demanded for any serious study of philosophy in general and 'OPAR' in particular, I have found my notes useful on more than a few occasions when it was necessary to acquire a wider context, to recall earlier fundamentals, or when it became necessary to study broad similarities between a number of different facets of what is an interrelated whole.

The relevant propositions are here included, though of course the accompanying proofs are better developed in the text. All polemics against other philosophic positions are here excluded.

Though this is no more than a field sketch in the broadest strokes I thought possible (and in no way can be viewed as a substitute for the text itself), I hope its brevity may be of assistance to those interested in a better understanding of Objectivism.

'Objectivism - The Philosophy of Ayn Rand' and other books relating to Objectivism may be obtained through Amazon or The Ayn Rand Bookstore, both online.

Contents

Metaphysics
Epistemology
- Perception
- Volition
- Concepts
- Objectivity
- Reason
Ethics
- Man's Nature
- Value
- Virtue
- Happiness
Politics
- Government
- Capitalism
Esthetics
Glossary

(Hyperlinks are to the included glossary, unless an idea has not yet been introduced, in which case it jumps forward to the appropriate note - a link back to the table of contents may be found at the end of the glossary, and at the end of majorsections within the notes.)

I - METAPHYSICS

existence, consciousness, identity are the basic axioms
the axioms mean - existence (reality) is, consciousness exists perceiving it, something is what it is
- 'There is something of which I am aware' sums them up
causality is a corollary of identity, relates an entity and its action
- every entity has identity, which it must act in accordance with ( it cannot contradict it's own nature)
- this is the law of identity applied to action, all actions are caused by entities
existence possesses primacy over consciousness
- one is conscious because one exists, not vice versa
- i.e.; the object of consciousness precedes its subject - that to which consciousness is directed must necessarily come before consciousness itself
- consciousness observes reality, it does not alter its identity (non-contradiction)
- knowledge of existence (apart from one's consciousness) can be gained only by directing one's consciousness outwards, to apprehend reality
- knowledge of consciousness itself may be gained by introspection
the metaphysically given is absolute
- anything in existence apart from human action is metaphysically given
- the metaphysically given is 'necessary' since its non-existence would involve contradiction (causality)
- necessary is the antonym of chosen, but man-made objects do not violate causality
- man must enact the requisite causes by rearranging combinations of natural elements
- value judgements can not be made of the metaphysically given, it simply is

Back to Contents

II - EPISTEMOLOGY

to validate epistemology, one must first validate sense perception and volition
- if one is unable to observe reality (without distortion) there can be no cognitive enterprise, since there are no innate ideas, conceptual content is derived from the senses
- if the conceptual level is automatic, if human beings are determined, then no cognitive guidance is applicable

Perception

the validity of the senses is an axiom, it is a precondition of proof
- if one is conscious of that which is, then one's means of awareness are one's means
  of awareness; are valid - a corollary of consciousness
- sense organs are a link in a causally determined chain, they do not have an ability to
  distort; they give us evidence of everything impinging upon them, the full context
  of the facts
- sensations are caused in part by objects in reality and in part by our organs of perception (in the forms they provide) - a difference in sensory form, however,
  does not matter. Beings with different senses will not come to different conclusions, they simply gain different kinds or amounts of knowledge
- sensations are real, they are the inexorable effects of primaries, they are neither wholly in the object or the subject, they are results of an interaction of the two; however in the sense that the source of sensory form is a fact independent of consciousness, they are 'out there'
- consciousness, like all entities, possesses identity; it is finite and limited, it is something which has to grasp its objects somehow
- it is not omniscient - an infinite consciousness would have no identity, it is a nothing, it does not exist since it has no identity in particular - infinity is merely a potentiality, the actual is always finite
- a means to perception cannot be used to negate perception
- the perceptual level is the metaphysically given, the brain integrates disparate sensations into percepts automatically
- the conceptual level, however, is not automatic

Volition

the actions required of a consciousness on the conceptual level are not automatic
- the primary irreducible cause of volition is the choice to 'focus' ones consciousness
- this decision to perceive reality precedes value judgments and ideas
- volition does not defy causality - man is neither indeterminate nor determined, man chooses the causes that shape his actions, his actions do have causes; they are both caused and free
- volition is axiomatic, self-evident by introspection
- to ask for proof of free will is to presuppose the validity of volition, since proof is only necessary because of free will
- volition is a corollary of consciousness
thus the need for epistemological norms is proven

Concepts

the conceptual level (which animals do not possess) is the ability to regard entities as units
units are things viewed as being in existing relationships
differentiation and integration of entities into a concept are the means to a unit-perspective, concepts achieve 'unit-economy' - they condense the vast array of units 'out there' into a single idea - so instead of the need to remember all the trees ever encountered, one simply remembers the concept tree and its characteristics
words, language, are essential to the process of conceptualization and thought by providing a visual/auditory 'tag' for a concept, itself functioning as a unit
the unit, both in measurement and conceptualization, brings the universe, the potential
of all existents and quantities within the range of finite consciousness
man relates concretes quantitatively; to form a concept we retain characteristics but omit their measurements (which exist but are not specified)
a concept is 'a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristics with their particular measurements omitted'
higher level concepts (those removed from the strictly perceptual level) also involve measurement omission, they are abstractions from previous concepts
a definition is the final step in concept-formation
a definition specifies the essential characteristics of a concept's units, since listing all characteristics is impossible
the genus and differentia, or species, are the necessary parts of a definition, which
reflect the differentiation of the units from a larger group (genus)
concepts are contextual, as are definitions since man's mind operates under a certain context of knowledge (it is not omniscient, it has identity)
as one's knowledge expands, definitions may have to be revised to reflect the new context - the new definition does not contradict the old one however, it is just a refinement of it since the facts in the old definition no longer serve to differentiate the units subsumed
concepts also remain open-ended to new knowledge - characteristics which are added to the concept which do not contradict earlier knowledge
a definition is made on the basis of the concept's fundamental characteristic(s); the definition implicitly contains all known features, but it is not interchangeable with the concept itself - it is a condensation
concepts and definitions are objective, there is a real metaphysical precedent (observed characteristics), which are processed by a volitional consciousness; concepts are the products of existence and consciousness
some concepts (synonyms or borderline cases) are optional, one can alter an existing concept to accommodate the new concept, create a new concept, or simply describe the object (i.e.; hanging tables) as long as the option makes no cognitive difference or leads to contradiction

Objectivity

knowledge is the grasp of an object through an active, reality based process chosen by
the subject (to find this method and explain it is epistemology's purpose)
this method is logic ('non-contradictory identification')
objectivity, the means to knowledge, is 'volitional adherence to reality by the method of logic'
knowledge is contextual and hierarchical
- a concept is objective when defined within the full context of current knowledge,
  this context cannot be stripped away since knowledge on every level is relational, a
  non-contradictory sum - not disconnected concretes
- knowledge is hierarchical, proof is available by reduction to perception (axioms); 'stolen concepts' cannot be proven to have any relation to reality - dropped context
false concepts represent attempts to integrate errors, contradictions, and cannot be reduced to perception - they are invalid

Reason

the objectivist epistemology amounts to the injunction to follow reason
reason is 'the faculty that organizes perceptual units in conceptual terms by following the principles of logic'
reason is the faculty of proof, one cannot then 'prove it' as such by simpler factors, it
must be accepted since it is reality
however reason can be validated by showing that it is man's only means of knowledge, and that it can lead man to certainty
reason is man's only means of knowledge, all other claims are reducible to emotional response (i.e.; how do you know? 'I feel I am right')
- emotions are not inexplicable, they are products (effects) of ideas
- they are an automated value judgment based on explicit or implicit beliefs
- there is no dichotomy between reason and emotion, they are integrated
- since emotions are the consequences of conclusions, they can only seem inexplicable if one does not explicitly identify and logically integrate ideas
- emotions are not tools of cognition because they have no means of independent access to reality, their basis can be either true or false
- emotions are important, Objectivism is not anti-emotion (stoicism), emotions play an
  essential role in life, but not in cognition
- arbitrary statements are neither true nor false, they are entirely divorced from cognition, they are worse than false, they are wholly invalid
- one can transfer the status of an arbitrary statement to truth or falsehood only by relating it to an established context
- the onus of proof is on someone who states the arbitrary, one cannot prove a negative or disprove the arbitrary if it has no relation to existence - 'no inference can be drawn from a zero' which has no impact on reality
reason leads one to objective certainty
- certainty is contextual, like concepts and definitions
- certainty is an absolute within the relevant context
- further knowledge will not lead one to contradiction of previously held ideas, if their contextual nature is preserved

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III - ETHICS

Man's Nature

it is crucial to identify what man's nature is; normative ethics (value judgments) presuppose an answer to this question, for it is necessary to know man's nature in order to know what we should do
living organisms are goal directed and conditional
their existence requires action to maintain (death is a static state)
man is a living organism
there are three forms of consciousness: sensual, perceptual, conceptual
man cannot live by the survival means of lower organisms, ours is a conceptual consciousness and our means of survival is reason; we survive by means of our knowledge and action, not unerring instinct
reason is an individual attribute, there is no 'collective mind'
- men may share their knowledge,but not their thinking
- a conclusion can be reached by discussion, but each person's brain is theirs alone to use
- the individual is a sovereign being

Value

a code of ethics should deal with three questions
- for what end should one live (value) - life
- what principle should one follow to achieve this (virtue) - rationality
- whom should benefit from one's actions (beneficiary) - oneself
morality is not a primary, facts of reality give rise to it
a value is 'that which one acts to gain and/or keep'
a value needs both a valuer and at least two choices, an alternative to the value; otherwise it cannot be a value
the alternative of existence vs. nonexistence is a precondition of values, an immortal being could not possess them, only living organisms have grounds to pursue a particular side of this alternative - life is the root of value
morality is a code of values accepted by choice
man needs morality in order to survive - man's life is the root of morality
if man is to sustain his life, he must act long range
this need to project consequences into the future is made possible only by the same kind of consciousness that necessitates it - man must conceptualize the requirements of survival
man must abstract principles (a general truth on which other truths depend) and then act on principle in any given circumstance
the opposite, a short range outlook, viewed long-range, is self destructive (pragmatism)
rationality is the primary virtue, reason the ruling value
evasion of reality constitutes the essence of irrationality, of evil
reality is an interconnected whole; any evasion of its parts will grow in scope if it is sustained, resulting in intellectual disintegration, in non-perception
hope, faith, wishing are the opposite of virtue
the individual is the proper beneficiary of his own moral action
egoism - rational self-interest - is the correct policy - 'selfishness'
- involves not sacrificing yourself to others, nor sacrificing others to oneself
- man's life is not ruled by conflict, it does not require martyrs
- neither does egoism rule out caring for those whom you value
values, like concepts, are not intrinsic (i.e. mandated by gods) or subjective (picked
arbitrarily), but objective - they depend on a proper relationship between your mind and existence
value presupposes an act of evaluation, it is not good in itself
the 'good' is also an aspect of reality in relation to man, its not intrinsic or arbitrary
the three ruling values of one's life if one chooses to live are - reason, purpose, self-esteem
these values imply and require all of man's virtues

Virtue

the primary virtue is rationality; six derivative virtues are
- independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productivity, pride
- these are useful for clarification of the primary virtue, but not necessarily an exhaustive list, they are the minimum knowledge of virtue needed to follow reason
  consistently
- independence is one's acceptance of the responsibility of forming one's own judgments and of living by the work of one's own mind, it is an orientation towards reality, not towards living off of others
- integrity is loyalty to one's own convictions and values, loyalty to rational principles
- honesty is the refusal to fake or evade reality, it is the rejection of unreality
- justice is the virtue of judging men's character and conduct objectively, and of acting accordingly when dealing with them - rationality when evaluating others
- productivity is the process of creating material values, whether goods or services - adjustment of nature to man (this is the main existential content of virtue)
- pride is the commitment to achieve one's own moral perfection, it is moral ambitiousness
the initiation of physical force against others is the primary vice, which negates the ability to employ reason
force is the opposite of both mind and value - good cannot be achieved through evil

Happiness

in existential terms, the moral man's reward is life
in emotional/spiritual terms, the concomitant reward is happiness
the achievement of happiness is the only moral purpose of ones life
virtue is practical - there is no dichotomy between virtue and value since virtue is the means to value, to be moral is to be practical
virtue is not automatically rewarded however, since man is neither omnipotent nor omniscient
- it is rewarding in the sense that is maximizes one's possibility of success
- virtue is long-range, one must enact the means to succeed
as virtue is practical, so evil is impotent, capable only of negation
- evil is capable of destroying only itself and its victims
- no thought, knowledge, or consistency is necessary to destroy
- evil can only exist as a parasite on the achievements of virtue if one gives it sanction
  to do so
morality can only be viewed as impractical if one holds a flawed view of consciousness and the nature of existence - a culmination of errors
happiness is the normal condition of man
- pleasure's cause is the gain of some value, which on the physical level is a requirement of survival - pain is the opposite
- the emotion of joy results from the gain of some value chosen on the conceptual level, suffering from a failure in this regard
- - pleasure/pain is a barometer of the fundamental alternative of life vs. death
  - properly, so is joy/suffering - but man's chosen values are not necessarily in harmony with the requirements of survival
happiness is the state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values (since a course of self-destruction is an anti-value course, one cannot long pursue values opposed to life and be happy, since irrational values cannot be achieved - the irrational man is tortured, unhappy)
happiness is not the absence of unhappiness, but vice versa - values can only be achieved by seeking goals, not by seeking to escape consequences
rationality is a sufficient precondition of happiness, because though one may be beset by obstacles, the pain is superficial
beneath this pain are the values of reason, purpose, self-esteem- one feels the efficacy of knowing that achievement is possible
contrast: the irrationalist feels that happiness is superficial, beneath which lies anxiety, 'nausea',conflict, self-doubt, metaphysical pain
happiness is thus the normal underlying state - one holds the recognition that the universe is benevolent (neutral), that it is not malevolently pursuing your destruction
by accepting this premise, one refuses to take pain seriously, to grant it metaphysical primacy or significance; pain is a stimulus to corrective action (What can I do?) not (What is the use?)
a rational man needs not only to know of his efficacy, but to experience it metaphysically as well
sex is the way in which one directly experiences a celebration of life, of self-esteem, and the benevolent-universe conviction
sex is to love what action is to thought, to introduce a breach between the two (under the appropriate circumstances) is to breach one's integrity
sexual feeling is a summation which presupposes all of a rational human being's moral values and one's love for them (and one's self), and one's love for a partner who also embodies them; it is a physical capacity in the service of a conceptual need of mind-body harmony; it is an end in itself and not necessarily a means to a further end (i.e. procreation)
- one cannot reverse cause and effect - if one wishes to gain self esteem
  through sex, it becomes an act of escapism, of trying to momentarily diminish the anxiety caused by false premises (malevolent universe) - it is tantamount to groveling for self respect
any human pleasure is largely spiritual, meaning not mere satisfaction of physical need
- our pleasure comes dominantly from our emotions, from human satisfaction
- this principle applies preeminently to sex - no human pleasure so intense can be dominantly a matter of physical sensation - it is dominantly an emotion, and it's cause - intellectual ecstasy

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IV - POLITICS

Government

politics is the normative branch of philosophy which defines the principles of a proper social system - it rests upon, and is an application of, ethics
what kind of a society conforms to the requirements of man's life? is the question all political principles must answer to
the basic principle of politics is - individual rights as absolutes
rights have no meaning outside of a social context, they are a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action with regard to other men
- rights are the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, they subordinate society to moral law.
the fundamental right is the right to life, which has the derivatives of the right to liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness
- man has a method of survival, his mind - and he requires the freedom to act and achieve his values - liberty
- to sustain life, man needs to create the material means of his survival - the right to property is the right to gain, keep, use, and dispose of material values
- man needs to be governed by a motive to sustain his life, which is his own welfare - the right to happiness is this right, the right to live for one's own sake
freedom is indivisible, none of these rights are possible apart from the rest
man's life is the moral standard, it is only the requirements of mans life that make morality (and rights) possible
these are the only rights - all other valid rights are applications of these three, and are derived from them
rights pertain only to action - they are the freedom to act, the freedom from physical compulsion, interference or coercion (force)
a man's rights impose no duties on others - they are stated in the form 'freedom from...' X or 'thou shall not...', not 'freedom to...' X, or, 'you must...' since man does not act by permission
rights are a negative obligation, not to infringe another's rights, they do not constitute a claim to assistance on others, nor are they a guarantee of success in all endeavours
the idea of human rights vs. property rights is a contradiction - it means some human beings want to make others their property (by controlling their ability to live independently)
rights are an attribute of the individual, there are no such things as collective rights
(rights possessed by a group) since these all demand a distinction between beneficiaries and servants
an individual can neither acquire new rights nor lose rights by belonging to a group
there are no rights to other's labour, no rights of groups, nor rights of parts of humans or non-humans
rights can be violated only by the use of force
rights are objective, and their protection involves protecting innocents from force
this is the sole moral purpose of government
- a government's power must derive from the people, it is a servant and not a ruler
- it is the agency of protection, of self-defence
the government has a monopoly on the use of retaliatory force in a rational society - this use of force cannot be arbitrary, it must be objectively defined by law
citizens therefore delegate the right of self-defence to the government except in cases of immediate peril
government, therefore, must consist of police, military, and a court system in order to protect citizens against criminals (both individuals and aggressor nations) and to resolve honest disputes and misunderstandings (contracts, civil law)
since force is inherently negative (destructive), it must be used in this capacity only to destroy agents of destruction
- government's power is thus inherently negative, it cannot be used to sustain virtue
- it must not intervene in the intellectual or moral lives of its citizens
- the function of government is to protect freedom, not truth or virtue
- a government can play no part in promoting the philosophy it is based upon, this is the responsibility of private citizens (if they so choose)
laws must be objective and clear-cut, neither capricious in interpretation norindefensible; meaning, not arbitrary
- citizens cannot spend their lives trying to anticipate the government's whim
the government may not initiate force in regard to its own legitimate functions by demanding service in the police or the militia, nor may it seize property to finance its activities (taxes)

Capitalism

politics identifies the principles which should govern every social field
one of the aspects of a proper political system is a proper economic system
the economic system which does not prevent man from acting in accordance with individual rights is capitalism
capitalism is the only moral social system
- it is the social system based on the recognition of individual rights (incl. property rights) in which all property is privately owned
- capitalism is the moral system because it is the only system which subordinates society to moral law
- it adheres to the virtues of independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride
capitalism rewards the pursuit of rational self-interest and thus, though this is not its primary validation, everyone benefits
- the justification of capitalism is that it is a system which implements a scientific code of morality - which recognizes man's nature and needs - which is based on reason and reality
- the good of the public can only be achieved through freedom - to reject this causal sequence is to reject reason, capitalism, the public good, and freedom - this leads to slavery and statism
capitalism is objective because it is based on the proper view of metaphysics and epistemology
- virtue and objectivity are the same phenomenon as viewed from the aspect of action (existence) or thought (consciousness) - it is the proper volitional relationship between consciousness and existence
- economic value (price and profit) can not be set or gained arbitrarily under a capitalist system
- economic power is not the same as political power (political power is negation, economic power (like knowledge) is an earned value
- the degree to which these attributes are arbitrary is the degree to which a society has adopted statist controls - unadulterated capitalism has never yet existed
opposition to capitalism is based upon a bad view of epistemology - on rejection of reason to some degree - evasion, whim, dialectic, etc.
to defend it, one must first grasp capitalism's intellectual basis
two opposing systems of thought, not conflicting 'ideologies' (meaning, arbitrary political systems viewed in a vacuum), is the arena in which the intellectual battle for the world is being fought

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V - ESTHETICS

the last of the five branches that comprise a full system of philosophy is esthetics, the philosophy of art, since art is a need of man, not simply a professional field
art has the purpose of fulfilling an essential spiritual need of human life
- man's consciousness is conceptual, and a spiritual being needs guidance
- this guidance is provided by philosophy, which integrates principles
- however, man cannot explicitly, consciously, think in philosophical terms all the
  time, he must have an implicit philosophical context available at all times - an ultimate integration, a sum of his metaphysical value judgments; since his mind is
  an integrating mechanism, it needs this vision, this unity - this is the function achieved by art
art is a 'selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value-judgments' - whether these judgments are explicit or not
an artist presents what he considers to be of metaphysical import
art is an end in itself, it's purpose is to show, not tell (not didactic)
the telling is the province of philosophy, but either art or philosophy alone are not enough to satisfy man's need of philosophy
art converts man's concepts into the form of a percept - it not only integrates
metaphysics, but objectifies it in the form of an existential object - presenting it not as a content of consciousness, but of existence
since the purpose of man's consciousness is to observe, this conversion makes one's metaphysical abstractions into a concrete, which one may deal with directly, in the same way that language concretizes concepts
men respond to art in a profoundly personal way since it is either an affirmation or
rejection of their deepest values
both subject and style are significant in art - one reveals the artist's metaphysics, the other his psycho-epistemology
art cannot be an instrument of literal reproduction of reality (naturalism)
it is a selective recreation - since art is subject to contemplation, everything included is
important by the fact that it is included, it acquires metaphysical significance - in life, one ignores the unimportant, in art - one omits it
all men are able to respond to art by virtue of an implicit sense of life - a subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and life which is created as a sum of one's choices and conclusions throughout life - most men do not know in explicit terms what they consider to be important, but they consider it nonetheless - and since art is implicitly philosophical (if not explicitly) they react accordingly
there is a difference between philosophical judgment and esthetic judgment
- in judging an artwork's philosophy, one is interested in truth
- the purpose of art however is to show - and so an artwork's philosophy is irrelevant to an objective esthetic judgment
- it is on the basis of an artwork's theme that one judges it, as in how well it projects this theme, to what degree of mastery
- three ways to judge esthetic value are selectivity in regards to subject, clarity, and integration
- - the subject of an artwork ought to suit its theme, it can not be meaningless,
    random, or plagiarized
  - art is not for art's sake; but for man's sake - philosophical freedom is not the
    freedom to dismember art, thus non-selectivity in regards to art's subject, or non-representational art, undercuts itself
  - technique is not enough by itself
  - clarity is also essential since the purpose of art is not to revel in ambiguity, but to overcome the opacity of human experience, to show it's essence - not to disintegrate and destroy art
  - the hallmark of art is integration, every item included must be part of an
    indivisible whole - the inclusion of the insignificant produces a contradiction,
    it undercuts the artist's recreation of reality as being unreal
art can be judged rationally - it is neither in the object nor in the eye of the beholder - beauty is a value, it is objective, it is in the object, as judged by a rational beholder
it is both an esthetic appraisal and one's own philosophic standards which one must consult to judge whether a work of art is of value to oneself - it may be a great work of art, but it is not a contradiction to not like it
esthetics completes philosophy, by linking it back to concretes, to metaphysics, to reality

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Glossary

absolute - a concept or existent removed from any need for rational doubt, something which
is undeniably true

abstraction - a selective mental focus that seperates a certain aspect of reality from all others (especially attributes, quantities, actions)

art - a selective recreation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value judgments

arbitrary - a claim put forth in the absence of evidence of any sort, perceptual or conceptual

axiom - a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge - in metaphysics, a proposition relying upon an axiomatic concept, which is the identification of a primary, irreducible fact of reality, a directly perceived fundamental starting point which requires no proof or explanation, but on which all proof and explanation rests

capitalism - a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned

causality - the law of identity applied to action, which states that since all existents possess a specific identity, which they must act in accordance with, nothing in reality can occur causelessly or by chance

certain - established, conclusive in light of the evidence available within a given context of knowledge

collectivism - the political idea which holds that it is a collective, or group of people as an integrated social organism, which is the unit of value and the standard of reality, not the individual

concept - a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristics but with their particular measurements omitted

consciousness - the faculty of perceiving that which exists

context - the sum of cognitive elements conditioning the acquisition, validity or application of any item of human knowledge

contradiction - two or more statements which, when held to be true simultaneously, violate
the law of identity by positing more than one distinct identity for the same entity

corollary - a self-evident implication of previously established knowledge

definition - an essentialized description of a concept's attributes designed to distinguish it from all other concepts and to keep it's units differentiated from all other existents

dichotomy - the opposition between two mutually exclusive ideas

differentiation - the process of isolating a group of existents from all others on the basis of similarity

economics - the science which studies the consequences of political systems on man's productive activity, and the consequences of productive activity for man

emotions - a deeply felt set of automatic judgements based on one's implicit or explicit values

entity - a solid thing open to human perception and capable of independent action

epistemology - the branch of philosophy which studies the nature and means of human knowledge

esthetics - the branch of philosophy which studies the nature of art and defines the standards by which an artwork should be judged

ethics - the branch of philosophy which provides a code of values to guide one's choices and actions

evasion - an active conscious process aimed at suspending one's knowledge of a specific mental
content

evil - anything which opposes, negates, or destroys the life of a rational being

existence - the fact of being, the fact of one, any, or all entities in reality

explicit - the state of those mental contents which are held or realized consciously

force - the coercion of man's actions, by rendering his mind impotent in the face of direct or implied threats of harm - the opposite of persuasion

freedom - in politics, the absence of physical coercion in an individuals' action(s)

fundamental - that upon which everything in a given context depends

genus - a wider concept which subsumes or contains a variety of similar species, ie; the concept 'dwelling' is the genus of house, of hut, of condominum, etc.

good - anything proper to the life of a rational being, that which sustains such life

government - an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of conduct in a given geographical area

happiness - that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values

hierarchy - a set of items ranked in order of logical dependence according to each item's distance from the base of the structure

honesty - the refusal to fake reality

identity - the set of characteristics possessed by an entity; Aristotle's discovery that a thing cannot simultaneously be what it is and what it is not, thus a thing cannot ever be what it is not - it has a particular nature

implicit - the state of those mental contents which are held subconciously, only dimly realized if at all - but which have an impact on one's thought and action

integration - the process of uniting elements into a single inseparable whole

integrity - loyalty in action to one's convictions and values

independence - one's acceptance of the responsibility of forming one's own judgments and of living by the work of one's own mind

individualism - the view that in social issues, the individual is the unit of value

judgment - the act of deciding upon a preference and discarding impartiality; in morality, the responsibility to distinguish between good and evil when it is possible to do so, thereby affirming the good and condemning the evil

justice - the virtue of judging men's character and conduct objectively and of acting accordingly, granting to each man that which he deserves

knowledge - a mental grasp of a fact(s) of reality, reached either by perceptual observation or
by a process of reason based on perceptual observation

law - a codified system of behavoir under which the allowable use of force, both initiated and
retaliatory, is clearly defined and controlled

logic - the science of non-contradictory identification

measurement - the identification of a quantitative relationship established by means of a standard that serves as a unit

metaphysics - the branch of philosophy which studies the nature of reality as a whole

morality - a code of values accepted by choice

mysticism - any set of ideas which do not rely on perceptual evidence to establish their truth

nature - existence regarded as a system of interconnected entities governed by causal laws: also - synonym of identity

objectivity - volitional adherence to reality by the method of logic

omnipotence - the (non-existent) state of being all-powerful

omniscience - the (non-existent) state of being all-knowing

perception - the mental faculty which automatically retains and integrates sensations into mental units

philosophy - the science which guides man's conceptual faculty by providing him with an
integrated view of existence

politics - the branch of philosophy which studies the nature of a social system and defines the proper functions of government

premise - a proposition upon which an argument or belief is based

pride - the commitment to achieve one's own moral perfection

primacy - the state of one proposition being logically (thus factually) prior to another

principle - a general truth on which others depend

productiveness - the process of creating material values, whether goods or services

proof - the process of establishing truth by reducing a proposition to percepts

purpose - the central value of one's life, that which integrates and determines the hierarchy of
all other values

quantity - a measurement of units in a group, after having abstracted away the entities which
are themselves considered as the units

rationality - the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge, one's
only judge of values and one's only guide to action

reason - the faculty that organizes perceptual units in conceptual terms by following the
principles of logic

reduction - the process of identifying in logical sequence the intermediate steps that relate a cognitive item to perceptual data

rights - moral principles defining and sanctioning man's freedom of action in a social context

sacrifice - the surrender of a greater value for a lesser value

science - systematic knowledge gained by the use of reason based on observation

self-esteem - the value of the certainty that one's mind is compentent to think, that one's
person is worthy of happiness, is worthy of living

sensations - that which is produced within consciousness by the automated reaction of a
sensory organ to external stimuli

skepticism - the philosophic doctrine that knowledge is impossible to man by any means

spirituality - a deep concern with those issues of nature affecting one's mind and emotions

statism - any political doctrine relying upon the premise that man's life and work belong to the
state

truth - the recognition of reality

unit - an existent regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more members

validation - the process of establishing an idea's relationship to reality

value - that which one acts to gain and/or keep

virtue - the action by which one gains and keeps an objective value

volition - man's faculty to consciously select the causes and motivations of his actions -
free will

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Canadian PM Stacks Deck of new Afghan Mission Review Board

2007-10-12T12:23:00.002-04:00

Given that Canada's role in Afghanistan is due to expire in 16 months, Canadian PM Steven Harper has just anointed an 'independent' committee to review the Afghan mission in Canada. This stacked deck is limited to evangelicals, CFR members, and North American Integrationists. Just what we'd expect from Canada's New (neo-con) Government.

John Manley - Co-authored 'Creating A North American Community' (Union!) document for CFR
Pamela Wallin - Senior Advisor to the Council of the Americas, a David Rockefeller founded institution for NAFTA
Derek Burney - Ex ambassador to the USA and sat on the CCCE's Action Group on North American Security and Prosperity
Paul Tellier - Ex CEO of Bombardier, sits on the CCCE sponsored integrationist North American Policy Committee with D'Aquino and Burney
Jake Epp - Evangelical, Ex President of TransCanada Pipelines, worked under Manley to review Energy Policy

CBC News Link | digg story

Thanks, Harper. Really.

Aleatoric

The Naked Empire: 'Low Intensity Conflict' and State Sponsored Terror, Part 1

State-Corporate Cybersurveillance Partnership Exposed

Be Seeing You: The Coming Surveillance Expansion

INFOGRAPHICCCTV Network Growth vs. 'Pilot Project' Length

INTERACTIVE TIMELINEClick events for media links

Counting the Cost: Canada's Longest War

Inside the Wall - The Toronto G20 Redux, Pt 3

The Criminalization of Dissent – The Toronto G20 Redux, Pt 2

Everything is OK – The Toronto G20 Redux, Pt 1

The G20 Summit: Global Compact to Descend on old York

Let's Welcome the G20 To Toronto

Abortion, Rights, and the State

Parental Investment, Surrogate Birth, and Dworkin’s ‘Intrinsic’ Model of the Sacred

Cost, Copyright, and Embodiment - A Submission to the Canadian Copyright EConsultation

Kant, Wegner, and the Clockwork Will

Hobbes’ State of Nature: The War of All Against All

Blog Content, JSTOR, and the Mysteries of (Free) Time

Aesthetics: Valuation and Viewer Engagement: Gaut’s Ethicist Integration

Aesthetics: From Soup to Nuts: The Problem of Universals and Margolis’ ‘Peculiar’ Solution

Forming Lines: Thousands turn out for rally against Gaza seige in Toronto

Credit Crisis Franchise Sale: Backwater Blog

Collectivism and the SPP

Toronto Citizens Betrayed: New Crop of Cameras Revealed on Queen St W

Snuffing out Inflation: The ‘Standard Candle’ and The Credit Crisis

Continental Integration Deniers Growing Increasingly Shrill

What Karl Rove Said

National Newspaper Launches Column pushing Cross-Border Economic Merger

A Field Guide to Objectivism

I - METAPHYSICS

II - EPISTEMOLOGY

III - ETHICS

Man's Nature

IV - POLITICS

V - ESTHETICS

Canadian PM Stacks Deck of new Afghan Mission Review Board

INFOGRAPHIC
CCTV Network Growth vs. 'Pilot Project' Length

INTERACTIVE TIMELINE
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