1381

1381. Remember this year. Mark it on your calendar, for we shall see it again.

Wat Tyler and the king

In 1381 the peasants revolted, and under the leadership of Wat Tyler 20,000 of them almost succeeded in taking Richard II’s crown from his head and his head from his shoulders. They failed of course.

If I remember correctly, it was Laurence Eldridge, my professor of medieval English literature some 30 years ago, who first pointed out to me the significance of this event. Though professional historians might consider his explanation a bit of an over-simplification, it illustrates my point well.

In the fourteenth century the plague killed off a good portion of the English population. With labour in short supply, those serfs who had survived were able to demand better terms from their feudal lords, whose wealth was directly dependent on the serfs who worked the land. But people being people, those who survived the plague made children, and in a couple of generations, labour was no longer in short supply. The new generation of peasants could not demand the favourable terms their fathers had obtained in their day. They saw their standard of living decline.

15 year olds and their parents

My point is not about supply and demand for labour and its effect on wages. It is that the peasants revolted when they saw their lives becoming worse than their parents’ lives had been. This is why, more than 700 years later, 1381 is a year to remember.

Look around. Name me one country where a 15 year old can reasonably expect his life to be better than were his parents. If this 15 year old is a girl, her prospects are likely even worse.

The happy few and the hopeful

There might be individual exceptions, of course. The very rich are getting even richer, so their children just might be even better off, assuming that life is good in gated compounds. And there are many countries where hope is not dead.
 
The Arab Spring, for one, has only just begun. Burma alias Myanmar seems to be changing. South Sudan, just a year past independence and still not out of war, is understandably looking to the future.

In Europe

But where else? In the countries once known as “Eastern” Europe, the euphoria after the fall of the old regimes succumbed quickly to economic expedience. If you are curious for details, read Geert Mak’s In Europe. In the rest of the Europe—the rich part for the latter half of the last century—the young see a future of unemployment and idleness.

South Africa, the U.S. and China

In South Africa, the end of apartheid has not meant the end of poverty and inequality; nor did it end the violence, as the recent killing of striking miners showed. In the U.S., Obama, who inherited two wars, an exploding deficit and an imploding economy from his predecessor, has been unable to answer the dreams of those who voted for him. The speculation is on that in China the collapse has already begun.

Even in Happy Canada

Even in Canada, with its tiny population and enormous resources, the young are unemployed or underemployed. They look back at the fabled times of their parents and grandparents, when a job was a living and—if you wanted it to—lasted until you retired.

As Stéphane Hessel has written, addressing the young in Time for Outrage!, there is no lack of reasons to be outraged. All you need to do is look around. Hence the indignados, hence the Occupy movement, hence the 99%, the student strikes in Québec.

Action and reaction

So what of 1381? It’s simple, and it’s been repeated innumerable times, with innumerable variations. When the young lose hope in the future, they call for change. Be it a feudal monarchy, a creaking empire, a modern klepocracy, or a technocracy and its markets—yes, Eisenhower warned us—the military-industrial complex, the ancien régime has a tradition of answering these calls with the same foresight and wisdom that brought on the mess in the first place: with bludgeon and noose.

Things are going to get nasty. But they don’t have to. Next, we’ll look at FDR.

Hysteria: Koran Burning and Hockey Games

It doesn’t seem to take much to touch off a firestorm in the Muslim world these days. Someone slaps together a nasty little movie insulting Islam, and the “Muslim mob” rears its ugly head.

In Benghazi, as everyone knows, this mob attacked the American consulate and killed Christopher Stevens, a man who, according to Robert Fisk, “really knew the Arabs as many of his colleagues did not” and was apparently a decent sort. He certainly didn’t deserve to be killed by a mob. He wasn’t the only victim, and there will likely be more.

The nastiness continues, from the Maghreb across South Asia to the shores of the Pacific. Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine publishes some cartoons insulting Muslims—and, incidentally, Jews—and France increases security at its embassies,  shutting some temporarily as a precautionary measure. Probably a good move. Charlie Hebdo insults everyone, and is hardly worth dying for.

We are rightly shocked and appalled. Methinks, though, that in our righteousness and indignation we might also do well to try to understand what this is all about.

I suggest that we try two things. First, we might do as the Quakers suggest: try to put ourselves in the other’s shoes and express his (for they are mostly men in this mob) point of view, as best we can understand it. Second, we might look at ourselves and how we react to provocation.

The other’s shoes

I am 23 years old. I am poor. The “elite” in my country live in luxury and shop in fancy boutiques in London and New York. They fly in and out, while I trudge across the city in broken shoes to save the bus fare.

This elite sends its children to schools in Switzerland and universities in England and America. I studied hard and earned good marks—until I dropped out to try to bring a little more money into the household, as my parents can’t make ends meet on their own.

My parents, God bless them, learned to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. They learned the hard way. My uncle was imprisoned and tortured. We’ll never know what happened to him. He wasn’t the only one. I’ve been beaten up by the police, just because they could.

I am unemployed, in a world in which even those with jobs can’t make ends meet. My tomorrow promises only odd jobs and idleness. Without work I have no hope of getting married, of having children.

The Arab Spring, if it came here (and mostly it didn’t), has not brought me any material benefits—not yet, though I still sometimes hope. In the meantime, I look at my parents still scraping out an existence. I can’t even do that.

In short, everything about my life tells me that I am worthless. Everything except my religion. My religion gives me dignity and community. It tells me that I am a human being.

Why are you surprised, then, that I react with anger when you insult my religion?

This portrait is surely an over-simplification and perhaps a little sentimental, but I do think that trying to imagine how it is to live inside another person’s life is a useful exercise in understanding.

Perspective and introspection

We of the European tradition had a Renaissance and an Enlightenment. We left the Middle Ages behind long ago. We know that the best thing to do about a third-rate movie or crude cartoons insulting our beliefs is to ignore them. They’ll soon be forgotten.

And we’ve learned tolerance. I’m rather less sure about introspection or perspective.

Perspective would help us remember, before we start on about the intolerance of Islam, that every religion, as every society, has its saints and its monsters, and the most of us in between, and that no one has a patent on righteous hysteria.

Perspective might also help us remember, for instance, that until the middle of the last century Jews were the majority in Salonika (now Thessaloniki in Greece) largely thanks to an influx of Sephardic Jews fleeing the embraces of the Inquisition, and had thrived under the (very Muslim) Ottomans. Perspective might also help us remember how this population was destroyed and by whom. Hint: it wasn’t the Ottomans.

For a bit of introspection, we might ponder how the “West” reacts when provoked. As a proud Canadian, I suggest we start with the 2011 Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver, provoked by a … hockey game!

We could also look at the reaction to 9/11, the terrorist attacks eleven years ago that killed some 3,000 innocents.

There is no question that these were heinous, morally reprehensible acts. But did they warrant the level of violence with which America and its friends lashed out?

We are still at war in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein (a monster of the first order, but formerly our friend) is hanged, and a few trillion dollars and some 650,000 dead later, neither Afghanistan nor Iraq knows any peace. And the great American economy, which only a generation ago had spent the Soviet Union into its grave, is on its knees, bled white by the War on Terror.

The same, I fear, may be the fate of our cherished democracies. Try to imagine the world as it was on 10 September 2001, before there was a terrorist under every bed. We did this to ourselves.

Who’s hysterical?

Who’s hysterical here? The men who burned the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, certainly. The men (and women) who lashed out after 9/11, certainly as well I think. The chief difference I see is that the mobs egged on by the imams are poor and disorderly; they are not governments and businesses with all the apparatus of state and enterprise channelling our anger and our hurt into orderly and methodical destruction for profit.

The Strange Political Psychology of Canadians

If The Toronto Star’s Sarah Barmak is to believed, the Ontario government—usually considered teacher-friendly—has just declared ‘all-out war’ on the province’s teachers. It is a strange move, and one wonders what the McGuinty government hopes to gain from it or, indeed, how Mr. McGuinty sold the idea at home. His wife Terri is, after all, a teacher.

Equally strange is how—in my experience at least—Canadians so often react to confrontations of this sort. These reactions bring to mind two observations.

How we value our children

First, we are usually willing to pay more to someone to clean our house than to look after our children. We pay $15-$20 for a housecleaner without blinking, but balk at paying the neighbour’s kid $10 to baby-sit. I am not suggesting that housecleaners are overpaid. What I am trying to do is point out a rather strange order of values.

Our children are supposed to be our first priority, and yet we pay less to someone we trust with their lives than we do to someone who vacuums up. Now it is possible that, as a friend quipped, a well-looked after child might die of cholera in dirty house, but this is unlikely.

So, why is it we skimp and safe and run ourselves ragged to ensure that our children get the best we can provide, and yet we place so little value on the work of those who look after them, not mention those who teach them?

The rich will always be with us

Second is our attitude to other people who work for a living, and to those we don’t. Perhaps I frequent the wrong people, but I rarely hear anyone complaining about millionaires and billionaires. I hear little about them from our politicians, unlike, for instance, France’s newly-minted president, François Hollande, who proposes to (whisper this) increase their taxes.

We ignore the wealthy, we (wilfully it seems to me) forget how much power they have over our lives, and we do not begrudge them anything. The rich are rich in much the same way that the sky is blue and the grass is green. It’s the way the world is made. The old proverb has been turned on its head: the rich will always be with us.

And yet, when someone who works for a living very much as we do appears to have better working conditions, say, more sick days, longer holidays, some sort of job security, a bit of respect at work, we are resentful. Whenever there is a confrontation between employer and employees the resentment, not against the employer but against the employees rises to the surface.

Never mind that the employer might be a millionaire. Never mind that as now with Ontario’s teachers the employees do exhausting and often thankless work (if you don’t believe me, try standing in front of a Grade 6 class for half a day) without which our society would fall apart.

We begrudge the luck of those who are like us

We resent the employees, blaming them for the disruptions and inconveniences, however minor, the labour dispute brings to our lives. When negotiations fall apart because, say, the employer wants to cut cost of living increases, effectively handing employees a wage cut every year, we are indignant. Not with employer, but with the employees for wanting too much: “I don’t get a cost of living increase. Why should you?”

Instead of saying, “Right, I don’t want to get paid less every year. How do I get a cost of living increase in my job?” we begrudge those who have just a little something we don’t.

Running water

Imagine that we live in a village with 100 households. Twenty households in the village have running water. The rest of us must go to the village well, draw our water there, and carry it home. Should we, who must go to the well for our water, curse the good fortune of these other households, or should we try to get running water into our homes as well?

Prisons and Taxes

I'm just catching up on old e-mail, and a petition came by asking me to oppose the Conservative's "Cruel Crime Bill". I signed. Prisons are an unfortunate necessity, but more prisons do not a safer society make. I am sure that there is a minimum number of people who do need to be restrained. Perhaps they are pathological cases. I don't know.

What I do know is that from one society to another the number of people in prisons differs. Is that because some societies are just made up of 'worse' people? Not likely. What is more likely, I think, is that different societies define crime differently, and deal with it differently. Many have reflected on this question.

Now back to prisons and taxes. On the right side of the political spectrum (read that as you will), the burden tax payers must bear seems to be a recurring theme. If only we could get the lazy and irresponsible to work and pay their share of taxes everything would be just fine, and we could all get our swimming pools, decks, enormous garages, etc. etc. etc.

Then, instead of investing in education, health and support for families so that children grow up to be full and productive members of society, ergo, taxpayers, we leave people on the street and we build prisons.

Forget the gratuitous cruelty of this way of doing things (and gratuitously cruel it is). Think of it this way: every man or woman not working is one more person whose share of the tax burden I must bear. More prisons don't even make sense for the most selfish of motives. If 10% of the population is not working, I must pay 10% more taxes to cover what they don't pay. If I put them in prison as well, then I'm also paying their room and board and the whole dreary infrastructure needed to keep them there.

Look at this example: one dollar spent on mental health for a child translates into $11 dollars in mental health costs alone saved for every year of that child's future adult life. Prevention is not just more effective that punishment. It's rather less expensive as well.

Which forces me to conclude that our government is not only gratuitously cruel, but likes to waste money as well.

E plus 1: The Price of a Seat

It's going to be a long four years. As promised, here are some charts illustrating the strangeness of our electoral system.

Chart 1 shows the percent of the popular vote that went to each party.

Chart 2 shows the seat distribution in the House of Commons.

Chart 3 shows the number of votes each party needed to get one seat in Parliament. You will notice that Elizabeth May represents over a half million Canadians, while each Conservative MP represents just under 35,000 voters. This is not quite the same disparity as the 1993 Federal Election I mentioned earlier, but it doesn't seem quite fair to me.

Methinks we're long overdue for electoral reform. I'm not holding my breath, though. It seems that the parties in power see quite clearly that they have the number of seats they do because our system is so perverse, which blinds them, not just to how unrepresentative this system is, but also to the fact that next time around they might be the ones paying a half million votes for a single seat, while the other guys get theirs in for 30,000 a head.

E minus 1: Issues

I must begin by apologizing for having over-promised and under-delivered. I did not post every day as I had promised, barring brain death, etc. etc. I did post four short essays, plus this one, which is not an essay, and learned a bit about blogging: I suppose I could have delivered each day if I had broken the essays up into shorter bites.

Thank heavens for Newfoundland. Where would we be without you? Where would we be without Rex Murphy and Rick Mercer? Whether you agree with them or not (I do not often agree with Mr. Murphy, and I’m sure he doesn’t care), at least they are thinking and they are eloquent.

The other night Rex Murphy suggested that all our political parties had tacitly agreed not to talk about Afghanistan and Libya, about what Canada is still doing in a ten-year old war, and in a new one before we even know what we want from the first. Good for him.

I did hear very briefly about Afghanistan during the English-language leaders’ debate, but it didn’t stick. Like Mr. Murphy, I did not hear anything about Libya. Nor have I heard (enough) about a great many other things I believe should concern us. Here are just a few, in no particular order:

Item 1: Child poverty

Remember when we were going to eradicate child poverty in this country by the year 2000? Millions of children wake up and go to bed hungry in Canada. This is not just shameful, it is stupid and shortsighted.

If you don’t care about these children, at least care about yourself. Your pension depends on these children. If you feed them and school them and show them that they matter, they may well look after you when you’ll need it. If you teach them that they have no value because you cannot pull an immediate benefit out of them, how do you think they’ll feel about your pension?

Item 2: Global warming

Yes, I insist on calling it what it is and not “climate change”, which is what the deniers want it called. All the experts agree. And in this country we’ve done as much about global warming as we’ve done about child poverty.

Item 3: Education

Twelve years of schooling is no longer sufficient. Our children need 16 or more years of schooling to be able to enter the workforce doing anything but the most menial jobs. And, if this country wants to compete in the world, we need an educated workforce. So, why is post-secondary education not free? Michael Ignatieff talked about some education passport.

How about starting afresh with truly free and accessible education, from start to finish?

Item 4: Energy

English is the lingua franca of the world today because some time in the 17^th century the English had used up their forests and turned to coal for energy. As luck would have it, fossil fuel turned out to be much more efficient than wood, and the rest of the world was left playing catch-up to coal-burning England.

The future belongs to the nation that first moves from fossil fuels to the next energy source. What is our plan?

Item 5: Transportation

Belgium gave up its national airline. But you can bicycle across Belgium in a day. Why does it cost more to fly from Ottawa to Vancouver than from Ottawa to Paris?

If any country needs a transportation policy, we do. Why do we subsidize highways in cities, where just about any other method of transportation would be better? Remember, the point is to move people and goods, not to move cars. Why do we build high-speed trains here only for export? If Turkey can build high-speed rail connections across its mountains, what are we missing?

Item 6: Bankruptcy protection — for the employees

Remember Nortel? There are countless others. Workers left with nothing after their companies spent their pensions. Ask just about anyone in Hamilton.

Other countries, such as France, have laws protecting employees’ wages and pensions if a company goes bankrupt. It’s good for the employees, and it's good for the company. Employees don’t abandon ship at the first sign of trouble, afraid that they’ll discover they’ve been working for nothing.

In this country, go to the back of the line and hope there’ll be something left for you. There won’t be.

Item 7: Senate reform

Senate stuffing is more like it. It takes a man or woman of uncommon integrity to resist the temptation once in power.  That person was not Jean Chrétien or Paul Martin or, despite the ardent promises, Stephen Harper.

 
Item 8: Electoral reform

In view of what vote splitting might get us on Monday,  the pollsters and pundits are on this one. I’ll put money on their forgetting it within a week.

Here’s a quick exercise that illustrates well the perversity of our first past the post electoral system. Monday, after the votes are counted and seats allocated, calculate how many votes each party had to pay for each one of its seats.

I’ve done this for quite a few other elections, federal and provincial. Here is the 1993 federal election, as an example.

If you don’t feel like doing the arithmetic, then please be patient. I won’t be able to resist doing it myself, and I’ll post the results here.

E minus 4: Predictions

When the polls started coming out a few days ago out with predictions of the NDP pulling ahead of the Liberals and even having a chance at forming a government, I was going to make a prediction of my own:

Canada’s banking industry and friends will immediately begin fear mongering. An NDP government will be fatal to the Canadian economy, they will say, because the NDP are not pro-business. Investors will head for the lifeboats.

Point 1: There’s nothing to predict. It’s already started.

The braying on Bay Street has already begun. See, for example, the following from an article in the Globe and Mail and on the CTV web site: “BMO Nesbitt Burns’ No. 2 economist Doug Porter caused a stir when he wrote that the poll numbers hint at a result that would be ‘not exactly market-friendly.’” 

Now why, I ask, would Mr. Porter be making such a comment, or would the venerable Globe be running a long article on the subject if they did not want to turn it into news — and instil the fear of (economic) damnation in us?

Point 2: It wasn’t their fault.

Bay Street has certainly done better than Wall Street of late. But that, I would venture, is not because our bankers and brokers were not salivating to follow their brethren in New York, but because being cautious Canadians and rather slow off the mark, we did not deregulate our banking industry in time for the Great Crash. Canadian financial institutions did lose big; they just didn’t lose our shirts for us, as did Iceland’s banks for Icelanders and a few others.

Point 3: George Soros probably wouldn’t agree.

About eight years ago, coming back from my grandmother’s funeral I came across some comments George Soros made to Le Monde, which was running a series called something like “Three Questions for Someone Really Important”. You will remember that, as well as being a great philanthropist, George Soros is a rather successful financier, “the man who broke the Bank of England”.

The questions Le Monde had for Soros were about the appropriate roles of private enterprise and of government in the economy. Soros’s answer was simple, and I paraphrase from memory: Private enterprise is very adept at creating wealth, and should be allowed to do so. It is not very good at creating or maintaining the infrastructures it needs to create wealth. Governments are the best at doing this. Private enterprise should therefore support strong governments that invest in these infrastructures.

From what I’ve read and seen over the years, it’s the Social Democrats (the NDP here) who understand this truth, and who recognize the lie that a strong economy requires continuous tax cuts.  Red Tories understood this as well, but they are all but extinct in this country, eaten by the far more voracious New Conservatives.

If you had to choose — and you do, there’s an election on — would you go with the suits who brought you the Great Crash of 2008, or with George Soros?