The Olympic Games are competitions between athletes in individual or team events and not between countries
-International Olympic Committee

I don’t like it one bit, it makes me feel somehow, I dunno … unclean. Just as the Macbeths needed more than water to remove the blood from their hands, Monday’s shower couldn’t remove the stink from my hangover. The blood was symbolic of the stain left on the conscience of those royal usurpers by unchecked ambition while the stench of nationalism hangs in the air thanks to an all-out pursuit of medals and glory. I admit it, I’m proud that Canada won the most gold medals at this year’s Winter Olympics; so why does it make me want to puke? Easy, as most foreign journalists have observed over the past couple of weeks it’s just not Canadian, this kind of jingoistic flag-waving belongs to our neighbours to the south.

“Own the Podium“. The program sponsored by the Canadian federal government at a cost of C$117 million is what got under the skin of most people. Seems that us canucks were fed up with coming in fourth place and seeing that as host nation, this would be Canada’s chance to shine in the world’s spotlight, funding was directed towards those events where we deemed our chances of winning to be greatest. Based on the results from the two previous times Canada hosted the Olympics, perhaps you can’t really blame the Canadian Olympic organizers for wanting to improve on their past performance. You see, Canada failed to win a single gold in either Montreal in 1976 or Calgary in 1988, the only host nation in history who can claim such a dubious record. OK, Montreal was the summer Olympics, but Calgary? We couldn’t even muster a gold in the winter games!

So, this time it would be different. Thanks to a $66 million infusion from the country’s taxpayers, along with $51 million in sponsorship funds, the program offered Canadians who take home gold $20,000 apiece in a stated goal to take the overall medals title. While we may not have reached it, you can’t argue with the result that was achieved as Canadians took home the most golds, 14. But hold on, it seems there is no agreed upon way of measuring who ‘owned’ the podium. Europeans generally tend to rank the countries by total golds won, while ironically North Americans usually rank by total medals. Both methods have their inherent weaknesses. Is a bronze really as valuable as a gold? Conversely, if a team wins only one gold while another country garners, say nine, but all of them silver and bronze, can you say the gold winners had a better Olympics? Such was the case in Turin in 2006 as the Japanese with a solitary medal, golden, were ranked ahead of the Fins with six silvers and three bronzes according to some tables.

But here’s the rub: should it even matter? After all, the trappings of podiums and flag-raisings were not even part of the rebirth of the Olympics in the modern era. 1956 and Soviet domination brought it about as rivaling ideologies jockeyed for superiority any way they could. Those Italian Winter Games saw the Soviets come out ahead with seven gold and a total of 16 medals, but it wasn’t until the Melbourne Summer Games that the world noticed politics taking over the event. The Hungarian Uprising and the Suez War combined to see multiple nations pull out of the games: Lichtenstein, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden boycotted due to the Soviet presence while Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon did likewise in response to the Israeli invasion of Egypt. The age of political boycotts was initiated, up to then no one had made such a political statement, not even of the Nazi games of 1936. Of course the fall of the Berlin Wall has brought with it the end of the age of politics, ushering in the age of economics which coincidentally hasn’t seen a single boycott in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

Sadly, ‘Own the Podium’ didn’t begin and end with solely helping Canadians; it also hindered everyone else as access to practice sites was strictly limited to non-Canadian athletes. It started last winter when speedskaters from several countries were denied access to the Richmond Olympic Oval. The benefits of familiarity vary by sport. It may be irrelevant for some sports, after all, an oval is an oval, but it is particularly important on one-of-a-kind new sites like the alpine skiing runs or the track for luge, bobsled and skeleton. At the Whistler downhill course, unfamiliar to most of the world’s best skiers, several medal contenders were left watching over a fence as the Canadian team trained. Meanwhile a gentlemen’s agreement between the luge teams of the United States and Canada was ignored, cutting practice runs. Canadian athletes had hundreds of trips down what is widely considered the world’s most treacherous course while foreign athletes had a few dozen. Some have gone so far as to say that lack of access to the luge run was a factor in the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili.

But really, who won? Just as in Beijing, where the Chinese led in golds while the US led in total medals, the US repeated the overall medal victory while again losing in gold, this time to Canada in Vancouver. So depending on your view, optimists may see it as two winners, while pessimists may see none. It’s all academic anyway as even winning ‘only’ nine golds in Vancouver, the Norwegians continued there medal per capita dominance at the Winter Olympics. In fact the nation of 4.7 million has won more medals than any other country at the Quadrennial Cold Weather Athletic Competition (thanks Stephen Colbert). Norway has 290 total medals to the USA’s measly 237, with Canada lagging well back in 7th with 127. Well, at least the success of “Own the Podium” allowed the canucks to move past the Swedes who are now back in 8th and in fact if measured by gold, Canada is now tied with Finland for 6th with 42.

Yes, the maple leaf was in your face at these games, but that’s the idea for the home team isn’t it? To show the rest of the world you kick ass, like they did in Sydney and more recently at the Beijing coming out party for the aspiring G2 superpower. Every country that is awarded the Olympics immediately prioritizes the winning of more medals than ever to inflate its national ego and help justify the enormous expenditure and effort. China was guilty two years ago of favouring the home team and don’t forget their Project 119, named for the number of additional gold medals it might contend for by focusing on medal intensive sports. Yes, I guess what’s ok in China is ok in Canada. And don’t forget Salt Lake City in 2002 which saw a nation desperate to prove to the world that it was still the world’s superpower and therefore needn’t fear anyone. What’s a few maple leafs jerseys when the stars and stripes were just as ubiquitous eight years ago? Oh yeah, that was the fringe benefit to these Olympics for the host nation’s government, it distracted the people’s attention from that little political fiasco that saw democracy shut down for over three months in the true north strong and free. Canada’s national fascist rag admitted as much and even claimed the strategy a success. Yeah, that’s right, it’s ok to torture, or it least be complicit to torture, like the Americans too.

So, unfortunately for Canada, it seems it’s alright that they have a leader determined to turn their once distinct nation into a watered-down version of their southern neighbour so long as he’s a hockey fan. Somehow Harper has missed who’s winning the global race these days, but he better wake up quick as the thin-skinned response of the Canadian media to comparisons between 1936 Berlin and 2010 Vancouver won’t be in evidence at the site of the next winter Olympics, Socchi, Russia in 2014. I’m sure they’ll choose more dramatic nationalistic maneuvers, anyone remember the Arctic? Medvedev has already demanded officials responsible for Russia’s abysmal medal performance step down so we know that one of the stories of 2014 will again be the home nation’s drive to top the podium. As China has raced to lock up resources around the world to feed their growing economy, Canada (and the US, Denmark and Norway) better watch the Russians close. After all, they did take advantage of the distraction that the opening ceremonies in Beijing afforded them in 2008 as the Georgian conflict kicked off. Guess we’ll have to wait and see what they have in store for the world.

And then there’s hockey. Without the gold medal victory Sunday night against the American squad, the Canadian Olympics would’ve been deemed a bust by most no matter the other results. Again, I must admit that my nationalism gene was activated as I walked into my local bar here in Poznan and in my Polish-English garble inquired whether the game would be on TV there. After a moment of confusion the owner/bartender broke into a smile and said “Oh, your friends!” And so it was, as my Canadian brethren took the ice, I was settled in comfortably on a bar stool, beer in hand enjoying ‘The Game’ on the other side of the world. The win wrapped up Canada’s 14th gold from 17 days of competition, moving them past the Norwegian team’s 2002 performance for most ever. The glow of victory remained Monday as everyone seemed to have seen the game as well and made sure to tell me what a good game we played, on the street or in school. But when the hangover finally cleared on Tuesday, this dirty feeling crept back, nagging me, demanding to know what comes next for Canada?

The first week of the Vancouver Olympics threatened to turn the games into the worst ever, but by the end of day 17, the city and Canadians had managed to turn this perception on its head. The city seems to have come out a big winner, but I fear it’ll turn into a loss for the country. Politically rudderless, a wasteland with no credible opposition and a megalomaniacal leader intent on burning the Reichstag; economically dependent on her sickly neighbour to the south and the biggest environmental disaster in the world (which coincidentally just welcomed billions in investment from, you guessed it, China); and morally corrupt, where the Olympics sponsors can snow the public with a green campaign while being the dirtiest corporations on the planet (and no, I won’t go into the irony of trucking in snow to a Winter Olympic site bereft of snow thanks to trucking). My hangover has passed, the world seems less foggy. Now that the Olympics are over, Canada gets to have a functioning government once again. I think I can deal with the new Canadian attitude so long as the energy from Own the Podium gets turned into Own Your Government.

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,
To stir men’s blood: I only speak right on;
I tell you that which you yourselves do know;

-Shakespeare Julius Caesar Act III, Scene 2

I heard, or rather read, the decade that’s now coming to a close referred to as the ought’s the other day. Looking back at the disastrous past ten years makes we think we need a more descriptive moniker. The Brits say noughties but maybe we should have something with zero in it seeing as the world hasn’t put any points on the scoreboard over the decade, I guess the double zeros would do, or double oh’s, the oh-oh’s. (Is it the teens next before the 20’s, the tens?) For a variety of reasons no one seems to even try to understand the problems we face anymore, instead they rely on some talking head’s opinion or blogger’s spin. Ten years ago we had the Kyoto Protocol, hopes for a final Mideast peace agreement and an economic boom with no end in sight. How did it all go so wrong? Fear could be one explanation. Fear that our beliefs are wrong, fear that our lifestyles are destroying our world and fear of the other. Fear, the old fight or flight, paralyzes and poisons as it confuses, robbing us of our self-control. Most frustrating of all, faced with the triple threat of climate, finance and terrorism, instead of focusing on facts and solutions, the rhetoric of fear has driven us onto a self-destructive path through lies and misinformation.

The decade of fear brought many global threats, from SARS and swine flu to Jenny McCarthy and Osama Bin Laden. The shadow of 9/11 pushed terrorism into our everyday lives with threat level updates and two intractable, open-ended conflicts. While acknowledging that we were dealing with a new kind of enemy, our leaders responded in the traditional manner, war and increased defence spending. The jingoistic fear factory pumped up the rhetoric as Dubya and his cronies fed a nation’s desire for revenge with the Bush Doctrine which imperceptibly altered an entire country’s mindset, guiding a bloodthirsty nation to war.

Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.

-Otto von Bismarck

In Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein describes the window that opens between a shock and analysis, a disorientation gap where a new set of beliefs find fertile ground . When planes hit the WTC on September 11th, 2001, that window was blown wide open and a new narrative was created. First in Afghanistan, the “With Us or Against Us” doctrine provided the justification for not only pursuing Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but also for deposing the Taliban. If you ever wonder why no one knows the reason we’re in Afghanistan, don’t worry you’re not alone, that was the idea. While Condi Rice first came up with the “no distinction” idea, it was Darth Cheney who first started calling it the “Bush Doctrine” in public. Blurring the lines between terrorists and states that harbour them was a propaganda coup. In a November 2001 speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Cheney offered this definition: “We will hold those who harbor terrorists, those who provide sanctuary to terrorists, responsible for their acts.”

It wasn’t until the anthrax and smallpox threat hysteria broke out that the justification for war in Iraq achieved critical mass. With a leap of faith, and a huge dose of fabrication (think WMD’s and “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.“), Iraq was linked with every terror plot ever hatched against the US, giving birth to the war of preemption. Even today, many would link Saddam and Osama in their minds as one and the same threat. Only now, after Obama has picked up his Nobel Peace Prize, do we realize the extent to which the public have become disoriented. Instead of seeing the honour as an incentive to change and repudiate the disastrous actions of the last decade, the US press and public responded like a wounded animal, lashing out, forcing Obama’s hand into escalating a war he cannot win.

We’ve entered the true bizarro world where putting an end date on a war is wrong after having wasted more that 8 years ensuring there can be no resolution to the conflict. The cognitive dissonance involved when claiming to promote liberal democracy one hand while supporting a corrupt leader who stole an election at a cost of a million dollars per soldier must be painful (yes, 30,000 extra troops will cost about $30 billion a year). I guess it’s nothing having fundamentally shifted from the knowledge that torture was wrong with even Reagan signing the UN Convention on Torture to a society that produces Abu Ghraib and believing torture can now be justified and certainly not prosecutable.

Fear is the foe of the faddist, but the friend of the fundamentalist

-Warren Buffett

The efficacy of fear as a manipulator has been further tested in the financial world, selling us the need to put capitalism on permanent life support. Taking a page out of the terrorism playbook, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson played a little game of fear tag team with Geithner, Bernanke, Bush, the IMF and Warren Buffet to pull off the greatest transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to the rich in history. Somewhere between $4.7 and $23.7 trillion in the US alone. Buffet, the world’s sometimes richest man, threw his weight behind the programme in order to avoid “an economic Pearl Harbour”, then going further, saying “…we were at the brink of something that would have made anything that’s happened in financial history pale…I’m not saying the Paulson plan will eliminate the problem but it’s absolutely necessary, in my view, to avoid going off the precipice.” Wasn’t there a line about fear during the real Depression, yeah, some Roosevelt quote, er, what was it again? Oh yeah, “we have nothing to fear, but fear itself”. How adorable, so folksy, but then again, that was another time. A time when instead of handing the economy over to those who ruined it, rules and policies were implemented to try to ensure it didn’t happen again.

This time, normal legislative procedures were bypassed as congressmen were warned of civil unrest, martial law and stock market collapse if they failed to pass the bank bailout. Never mind the true cause of the failure of the economic model, an over-concentration of wealth and power brought about by globalization, tax-policy and focus on short term profits. Instead of fixing the inequity brought about by the failed policies of the past, the world was hoodwinked into transferring trillions over to those who caused the problem. A decade that began with the internet bubble and merger between AOL and Time Warner is ending with their quiet divorce and the entire financial world on life support. The warnings were there all along if we’d of just paid attention and connected the dots from WorldCom to Enron, Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff, Tyco to Parmalat (a list of corporate scandals in 2000-2002 only!), putting power in the hands of the few as the world rushed to embrace the madness of the markets. Instead, every action seemed to reinforce bad behaviour; as CEO pay and bonuses grew, taxes were sliced for the privileged few. Those left behind saw their power shrink along with their wages until a breaking point was reached, inequality not seen since the Great Depression. The top 1% of earners now earn a higher percentage of income than anytime since 1928 while income mobility, the chances of being born poor and becoming rich, has shrunk to pre-Horacio Alger levels. Somehow though there isn’t enough evidence to convince the true corporate shills, those Ayn Rand dreamers, who wholeheartedly believe in the superiority of the rich, that their financial pyramid is all an illusion. Fear of collapse seems to be enough to keep us all chasing our tails.

“They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent… Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…. We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now…”
- Winston Churchill, November 12, 1936

Fear has been the sales tool of the decade. It’s worked great for the military industrial complex, selling us two wars. It’s worked even better convincing us that we need to have rich, large, powerful corporations controlling our lives. Sadly, we can be fooled into killing foreigners and giving money to bankers but we can’t be ‘tricked‘ by those pesky fear-mongering scientists into any kind of real action to prevent a global catastrophe resulting from climate change. It’s become clear that this marketing tool doesn’t always work as witnessed by the dismal failure to sell the world on the need to save it from ourselves. We’ve been inundated with stories of melting glaciers, shrinking ice caps, sinking islands and polar bears eating their cubs for the past decade in an attempt to convince the world that we’re hurtling towards disaster. So why has shock and awe environmentalism failed so miserably? Why does it seem more important to the deniers that Al Gore may profit from green energy than Goldman Sachs profited from the bailout or Blackwater and Haliburton from the wars of preemption? How can we justify subsidizing an oil based economy that enriches kings in Saudi Arabia over investing in new technologies at home to lessen our reliance on others and spark a real economic recovery? Why is Obama labeled as ‘dithering’ for delaying a decision to send young men to die in a futile effort while the reality is he’s playing the part of the prototypical Danish procrastinator Hamlet in his native land, trying to sell us some more smoke and mirrors wrapped in hope and change and carbon trading, driving us all to the inevitable tragic conclusion of the play?

God, time and money. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein claims to be “doing God’s work while the same deity guided Dubya “‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.“. Meanwhile, those pesky scientists are once again questioning the divine by saying that man may actually be influencing his environment. Typical human arrogance, thinking we hold god-like influence over our planet. Fear also fails here due to the time scale, to work it cannot be an implied threat of something too far in the future, or people will lose interest. This is especially true as climate gets mixed up with weather all too easily in people’s minds and there are too many cold winter days between now and the tipping point for people to feel any urgency. Given enough time and resources one can convince the majority of folks just about anything. The most remarkable aspect of the deniers success is that they’ve convinced a large segment of the population that they are really smart because they can recite the rhetoric the global plutocracy has tricked them into believing instead of actually believing in science. Such beauties as: “Remember global cooling“, “Medieval Warm Period“, “No warming since 1998“, “Faulty evidence”, “Solar energy output“, “Plants need CO2“, “Water Vapour is a greenhouse gas“; most have truth to them, but all have been misused and disseminated to the public in order to confuse the masses.

All the while the ultimate fear card is played over and over. “Climate-change policies will destroy jobs and growth”. It’s here that the real irony starts to hit home. Not only can sharp reductions in emissions be attained with limited impact on growth at low costs, but an agreement in Copenhagen could have been the recipe for real economic recovery. But here’s the real kicker. The fear factory may have already cost itself its place at the top of the global pecking order by refusing to see the obvious. Climate change feedback loops are self-reinforcing cycles; problems that echo off each other and quickly spiral out of control. Here’s how it goes: Melting tundra in Siberia releases methane into the atmosphere, which raises the water temperature, which melts sea ice, causing more solar heat to be absorbed by the oceans. As the Arctic has been melting and America has been acting the part of a 2-year old who can close his eyes and make the world go away, Russia and China have put themselves in position to reap the resource rewards, a sort of global power feedback loop. The last lie has been that we’ll run out of cheap oil soon enough forcing the market to solve the problem for us. But the effects of a warmer planet are not only making it easier to dig up northern Alberta, it’s also thawing the cover off of the final poisoned payload. Not only will we be sailing across the pole, a quarter of the world’s mineral wealth will also be accessible, ensuring that we’ll keep burning until we’re truly burning. At the same time, China has positioned herself to lead the world, if not through some kind of carbon treaty, then she has at least bought up enough of Africa and South America to feed herself during the coming droughts and to maintain a steady supply of resources. Droughts? Let’s not even get started on freshwater.

And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought

-Shakespeare Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1

Put it all together with the latest “Climategate” (nice name-calling propaganda technique wouldn’t you say?) scandal involving the hacked emails and public confidence in climatology is probably at its lowest point in at least the past decade. The facts are simple though. The planet is warming; for 150 years we’ve known that CO2, even in low concentrations, acts as a greenhouse gas; man is contributing to the increase in CO2. No, we don’t know for certain that we are driving the warmth, but as then-Vice President Dick Cheney said when faced with concerns that a Pakistani scientist was offering nuclear-weapons expertise to Al Qaeda “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.” Well Dick, I’d say that we’re at least 1% sure about us playing a part in global warming, so, shouldn’t we respond?

Cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? About $1 trillion to date
Cost of the financial bailout? About $5 trillion
Cost to save the planet? You guessed it…priceless

Sometimes it’s tough to take the media filter glasses off. We live in a world where all the important information is brought to us thanks to these internets, pity the fools that have to rely on the idiot box. So how is it that the most obvious of patterns are impossible to discern? The collage painted by the press should allow us to see the world how it really is, yet we miss the most obvious. Self-fulfilling prophecies such as last week’s BRIC meeting spring to mind as the media simply brushed over the fact that the 4 nations that make up 43% of the world’s population met last week to try to chart a mutually beneficial path through the future. The G8 will meet next month and there will be wall to wall reporting yet a group formed by the prediction of a Wall Street analyst gets swept under the carpet.

Reuters declares: Much-Trumpeted BRIC Summit Ends Quietly. “BRIC” is an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India and China, the world’s four major developing countries. Jim O’Neill, global head of economic research at Goldman Sachs, first started the idea of BRIC in 2001. While it’s obvious today thanks to the economic growth of these countries, which averaged 10.7% from 2006-8, it was only the idle talk of an analyst predicting the economic world of 2050, when the four countries would together pass the G7 in size. Since then we’ve watched the US economy lead an implosion of western economic power as these four nations have made strategic manoeuvers to position themselves to be exactly what we knew they’d be, the masters of our world. With Brazil and Russia pumping out the raw resources, China and India will consume the world.

The June 16 summit in the Russian Urals city of Yekaterinburg marked a huge step toward BRIC cooperation as a group. The fact that they have now met formally is story enough, but at the same time, the Russian city hosted another meeting, this a more formal grouping, the SCO, Shanghai Cooperation Organization (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, with Iran, India, Mongolia and Pakistan as observer states). Even more interestingly, both India and Iran took part at the most senior level as the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attended. Yes, just days after the election in Iran, Mahmoud was there, yet we barely heard a whisper of the meetings as his nation’s spiral towards revolution captured our attention along with David Letterman’s 14-year old rape inciting. Background buzz as we stumble towards a real new world order.

While BRIC countries account for 15 percent of the $60.7 trillion global economy, China is the world’s largest holder of U.S. Treasuries with $767.9 billion while Russia holds around $400 billion in their foreign reserves. More importantly, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has made proposals on giving a greater role to the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights that echo ideas from Chinese central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan. China, Russia and Brazil have pledged to help capitalize the IMF as they seek more influence at the fund. Together, the BRIC have a 15-percent share of the world economy and a 42-percent share of global currency reserves. Last week Brazil and Russia joined China in announcing they would shift some $70 billion (50 billion euros) of reserves into multicurrency bonds issued by the International Monetary Fund. Tiring of the inequity of the system, Brazil, for example is the world’s 10th largest economy, but has just 1.38 percent of the IMF board’s votes, compared to 2.09 percent for Belgium, an economy one-third the size, they are starting to make noise about changing it.

Navel gazing is far more interesting as it seems more important whether or not Obama, and America, are doing enough, or meddling too much in the Iran election quagmire. The future is just the Heisenberg uncertainty principle at work, que sera, sera, plus there’s the Jon and some chick thing to worry about, or Letterman. America has put the BRIC on the path to controlling the world, why would they need to worry about where the road goes? Of course looking forward to the year 2050 involves a myriad of uncertainties, it seems forecasts for when the combined BRIC GDP will pass the G7’s are being revised with every new report, from 2050 to 2045 to 2032, sure to change again due to the current financial crisis. Of course they’ll be potholes on the road to cooperation, not the least of which will be inter-BRIC conflict, particularly between China and Russia as they vie for dominance in Asia. China announced plans at the SCO summit to give $10 billion of loans to Central Asia, upstaging traditional power Russia whose promises of aid have not been fully delivered amid the financial crisis. But India’s economy is projected to be 90% of the US while China will have grown to 130% by the year 2050. Not only will the BRIC dwarf the G7 in global importance, but the N11 (harder to make an acronym for an 11 nation group: Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam. Maybe BEIIKMNPPTV) will rival the economic size of the present elite 7 nations.

Notice how all these numbers assume unlimited resources to achieve growth. There will be a far more interesting chess game played with a more level economic table. China locks up resources in African nations without any of those human rights strings attached. Russia is circling the arctic, winning the new polar race. Markets are necessary too, and the US is sure to remain an important one, making killing the greenback a double edged sword, especially for China. Comments by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev questioning the dollar’s role pushed down the U.S. currency by 0.9 percent against other key units, thereby hurting the value of China’s investments. Baby steps towards independence from the west and the dollar will be the key word, but they’ll add up quicker than you think.

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently”

-Henry Ford

It must have felt pretty cool being one of the selected few to be among the delegates representing 44 different countries at the Bretton Woods conference in the summer of 1944. Everything about it was planned to ensure that the talks would result in a world economic order that would foster cooperation and prosperity for future generations. The rural location, New Hampshire’s plush Mount Washington Hotel, was chosen so that the delegates would have no distractions, and no pressure from lobbyists or other politicians. While the focus was to establish a stable system of exchange rates, and how to pay for rebuilding the war-damaged economies of Europe, the meetings also led to the creation of the IMF, World Bank and to a lesser extent, the United Nations, the Marshall plan and the International Trade Organization (later GATT and the WTO). A lot has changed since those days when John Maynard Keynes, representing the UK, along with the other delegates hammered out the foundations for the American financial order.

Fast forward to the dying days of 2008 and the world is again in crisis. This time instead of worrying how to rebuild a world in the aftermath of a World War, we’re faced with the aftermath that 65 years of greed has wrought on the world’s economy and the planet. The stock market crash of 1929 and the decade of protectionism that followed was one of the main causes of WWII and the financial aftermath; this time it’s the devastation that has been brought about by the oil based economic model. If only Keynes had got his way back in ‘44 and a world central bank (to be known as bancor) would have been created to reflate the world’s money supply. Instead, it was left to America, who by the mid-70’s gave up the gold standard and switched 100% to the oil standard.

Last week and next, representatives from 190 nations are meeting in my adopted hometown of Poznan, Poland to try to map out a plan to Copenhagen next year, where it is hoped that a new emission protocol to replace Kyoto will be reached. Unfortunately, instead of being a headline event, it’s playing 2nd fiddle to the financial crisis. In the perfect world, the two would be sharing top billing, hand in hand giving policy makers the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. This won’t be the case though as special interests ensure that no compromise will be reached. As one government after another announces trillions of dollars in shock therapies for national economies, the only market that matters, the planet, will be left out in the cold.

Imagine, if you will, a world where greedy bankers actually pay for their lending mistakes. Or car makers are forced to be competitive. Yeah, I know that’s how it’s supposed to work, but it no longer does. I can hear the cries of “the banks need to survive to provide financing for investment”, but who can make rational investment decisions when governments are handing money out for failure? Imagine what could be done with the money if it was spent with the view of improving the world. Instead of delivering a better world, our desperate battle for growth at all costs has put us on a crash course with ecological disaster. The average person works more hours and has less to show for it than 30 years ago. Add to that the crumbling safety nets, such as pension plans and health care coverage and it makes one wonder why we’d want to fix the system at all. Let it crash, we have to start fresh.

What I can’t wrap my head around is the typical response that people have to the proposal of carbon taxes or the likes to try to reduce CO2 emissions. “Don’t spend MY tax dollars on something that might not even exist!” Yet they don’t seem to have any problems with having their tax dollars go to banks, or worse yet, car companies. Whether or not the theory that human activity is causing climate change is eventually proven or disproven should be irrelevant. Dependence on fossil fuels is ridiculous and all our efforts should be focused on lessening this reliance. It’s not a coincidence that oil prices have fallen drastically over the past few months. The world is hostage to the oil supplying nations, yet even those nations know that there is a line that when crossed, will force us to actually change the way the world works and end the reign of oil. Yes, I do realize that forecasts for demand have fallen due to the failing world economy, thus pushing down the price, but it’s more than that as anyone without fossil fuel blinders can see.

There’s a few reasons why the Poznan conference or the meeting to be held next year in Copenhagen won’t come up with an agreement to save the planet. The price of oil dropping to $20 a barrel is the easiest scapegoat, but it’s the public’s perception of the climate change debate that is the most troubling. One of my student’s referral to “that conference, or whatever you call it” causing traffic difficulties is the perfect illustration of how many people have been misinformed and feel there are more important issues to deal with. The developed world won’t tell Asia and Africa to choose poverty, disease, hunger and illiteracy over electricity. Kyoto was a failure, I don’t know of a single region or country that will reach their targets. Dubya made sure the people knew what he thought of it, and while he is Dubya, there are people whose opinions are formed by their president. These CC deniers will fight tooth and nail to defend their right to pay foreign nations huge amounts of money to import fuel in support of big oil companies.

The biggest problem though lies in the complexity of the issue and the way the media has presented it to the people. While the evidence pointing to human activity as the cause for climate change has been slowly solidifying, the media has been bombarding us with other discordant findings. In effect, the media is to blame for obfuscating the issue, creating a breeding ground for apathy. The arctic ice sheets melting, the Brazilian tree frogs disappearance and the hurricane season all might have something to do with climate change, but by hitting the people with these stories in rapid succession and linking them to CC, it’s easy to see why there are still so many skeptics out there. Another brilliant example comes from a Republican presidential debate in Iowa in which the candidates were asked, “How many of you believe global climate change is a serious threat and caused by human activity?”. Here, the mistake of conflating two distinct questions into one only serves to confuse the issue: whether climate change is a ’serious threat’ and whether humans contribute to it. Furthermore, by wording the question in this way, the candidates were given the chance give general responses, without dealing with the issue, such as “I believe that global climate change is serious” (Rudy Giuliani), and “I think that climate change is real” (John McCain).

Poznan ain’t gonna be Bretton Woods. I wonder if the UN was trying to say something by choosing ths city to host the event. Poland burns so much coal that the air is often thick and yellowish while at the same time the government is doing all it can to stymie the implementation of an EU emission standard. The word homogeneous was invented for Poland, where 95% of the population is white and catholic. Real debate is impossible in an environment such as this, where just having a car is considered to be a status symbol. It seems natural to want to live in a cleaner world, so instead of scaring people, we need to focus on showing the benefits that a new way of thinking can achieve. Until the people can be convinced that we’re faced with an opportunity rather than a threat, events such as the Poznan conference will be nothing more than a blip on the media radar.

In case you missed it, there’s a Canadian election around the corner. I know, it’s easy to miss with the one happening down south, but Stephen Harper is doing his best to be seen, in the Great White North. The Canadian Prime Minister is in the middle of a trip to make sure the world (read Russia) hears about the new extension of Canada’s jurisdiction over icy Arctic waters to 200 nautical miles off its coast. Territorial waters are usually defined by the 1982 United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea as a belt of coastal waters extending at MOST twelve nautical miles from the baseline (usually the mean low-water mark) of a coastal state. At the same time as battling the Ruskies to the north he’s fighting a legal battle against charges he’s an authoritarian ruler at home.

The election call may come September 5th. Also known as the writ period, once the election is called it can take place anywhere from 36 days to infinity later. That’s right, there’s no maximum limit to the number of days from the call to the handing in of the writs (vote results), by the electoral officers in each district (currently 301 across Canada). The Prime Minister can ask the Governor General, the Queen’s rep, for an election anytime he chooses. Just as Harper didn’t go to the opening ceremony for the Olympics, the GG isn’t going to be in Beijing for the para-lympics opener on September 6th, making him available for a visit. We don’t have this whole complicated set date thing like in the US. Harper had been pushing a bill to fix the election for October of ‘09, but with the world’s economy going in the tank, getting out sooner is better. This is a hidden danger for the Democrats and Liberals if elected, they could get holding the bill when the debts need to be paid.

Harper’s Arctic adventure is all about Russia. The Russian’s were down there (up there, but underwater) with a sub awhile back and have been busy re-asserting their geo-political power elsewhere in the world. Part of that aforementioned UN Convention on the Sea gives Canada, Russia, the US, Denmark, and Norway ten years to submit their map of the Arctic sea bed after ratifying. The economic rights of countries on the Arctic Ocean extend 320 kilometers from their shores. They can base claims on the reach of their continental shelf, creating the potential for overlapping stakes. The Canadians ratified in 2003 and are currently cooperating with the Danes in mapping, though we’ve disagreed about much of the Arctic in the past. Their technique? Setting explosives off Elsemere Island to seismically map the ground under the Lincoln Sea region of the Arctic Ocean. While the Americans haven’t ratified the treaty yet (surprise!) they’ve been busy mapping the Chukchi Cap and elsewhere. Only a year ago the US was most concerned with the Canadians’ inability to do the work, not about the Russians even as they planted that flag.

In order to change that perception, Harper’s government has been trying to convey a new, tougher image. Since coming into office, Harper has visited the north seven times. This time while trying to talk about environmental concern, he said “Whether it is the thawing of the Northwest Passage or the suspected resource riches under the Arctic seabed, more and more countries are taking an interest in the waterways of the Canadian Arctic.” Of late, Canada has: bought eight arctic patrol ships, decided to fast-track native land claims, announced a series of scientific and infrastructure projects such as building a scientific research base in Churchill and upgrading it’s rail line and port, announced plans to develop a new deep water port at Nanisivik, on Baffin Island and a northern army training base at Resolute, and most recently launched a search for a lost ship?!

The tired sounding irony is that the rush for perhaps 25% of the Earth’s resources is being precipitated by the melting of the north, and the opening of the Northwest Passage that sailing ships sought 500 years ago, so we can burn more oil to finish the job quicker. Earlier this year in May, the leaders of the five competing nations met on Greenland to discuss the looming problem of who gets what. There are many issues, such as the application Russia submitted to the UN for the right to own the 1.2 million square kilometres along the Lom
onosov underwater mountain chain the same one which Denmark thinks is a continuation of Denmark, while Iceland whose not even part of the group, also claims it. The US Geological Service (USGS) thinks Greenland may have the largest crude and natural gas reserves in the Arctic region. Crude reserves in the north-eastern part of the island exceed 30 billion barrels. Yet, after the conference the countries said they did not see a need in elaborating the new international regime to administer the Arctic Ocean and the Russian representative Sergei Lavrov, was even more specific in his statements: “We do not share uneasy forecasts pertaining to the future clash of interests of Arctic and even non-Arctic states under global warming conditions, which lighten the access to natural resources and transport routes.”

Even during the Georgian conflict Pravda was declaring “Arctic region likely to become the center of World War III“. Sounds even more important that an election, Canadian at least. The image of a strong leader claiming and exerting strength buys votes in the sticks. Oh yeah, while this is all going on, Harper is fighting a legal battle over a Liberal expert claim that he is an authoritarian ruler. It’s all part of a defamation suit against the party in which he is hoping to claim $3.5 million (Canadian I assume). The two North American claimants don’t have a common front, they have disputing claims. One voice best be found as events in the North are already being compared to Georgia, and once again, the Russians seem to have the edge so far.

Guide to numbers for last picture:
1) North Pole: Russia leaves its flag on the seabed, 4,000m (13,100ft) beneath the surface, as part of its claims for oil and gas reserves
2) Lomonosov Ridge: Russia argues that this underwater feature is an extension of its continental territory and is looking for evidence
3) 200-nautical mile (370km) line: Shows how far countries’ agreed economic area extends beyond their coastline. Often set from outlying islands
4) Russian-claimed territory: The bid to claim a vast area is being closely watched by other countries. Some could follow suit