Epigram crosstime parade

I really enjoy band names. They can convey so much with a few words. Their music notwithstanding, who could forget She Wants Revenge, the Refreshments, or the New York Dolls? Names are very personal; they can be obvious or arcane (the Jackson 5, U2), sober or silly (Nirvana, the Bare Naked Ladies), cerebral or juvenile (the The, the Go! Team). Some band names disappear without a trace after a few gigs, and some become so big they take on a life of their own. Off the top of my head, here are some good ones:

Staggered Crossing

the Plain White T's

Cold War Kids

Iron and Wine

Metric

Joy Division

Panic! at the Disco

Aerosmith

30 Odd Foot of Grunts

the Clash

the Postal Service

the Doors

the Beastie Boys

No Doubt

Counting Crows

the Pretenders

Iron Butterfly

Arcade Fire

Vampire Weekend

Smashing Pumpkins

Pink

Ill Scarlett

Sum 41



Now let's compare that to these stinkers:

Kid Rock

the Monkees

Bow Wow

Gob

the Eagles of Death Metal

Sugarland

How I spent my summer vacation

I've been in Vancouver just under five months now. My objectives here were straightforward: find a good job, reconnect with distant family, and in the meantime, frugally enjoy myself. I'm glad I decided to come here; but I still haven't found a job, and my savings won't last forever, so the time has come for me to move back east. I can job hunt in a larger market, see friends and family... and stay rent-free with my parents until I find a proper job.

I won't bore you with reminiscences of my time here. But I didn't want it to pass away completely unmarked either.

So long, Vancouver, and thanks for all the fish.

Seeing life through black-coloured glasses

It's a Friday night, and I'm sitting on my bedroom floor in the darkness. I've been here a while, and in the diffuse light of my clock radio I can trace the outline of all my possessions. The world outside my window is darker still, deep space meets Baycrest Drive. I don't know what I expect to find, but I keep sitting, looking around in the darkness at my tiny and transient sliver of real estate.

I've believed since childhood that I have exceptional night vision because I can move in shadows as easily as in light. (When others are around, of course, I keep the lights on.) Lately I'm not so sure--perhaps it's not a sign of physical acuity but of unusual willingness to forgo colour and comfort and accept a twilit existance. I know I suffer from mild depression; some days, life's kaleidoscope of events, people, and relationships fades to the emotional equivalent of the hazy and menacing silhouettes I see before me. And indeed, I treat a darkened soul the same way I treat a darkened room: I boldly (or stubbornly) go about my business in spite of collisions with the unseen. I remember how things were before darkness fell, and that is my map to navigate my new obscure and shapeless surroundings.

Ending a depression is not as easy as flipping a light switch. Even so, I sometimes feel that I haven't really tried. I seem to have a minor flagellant ethic, a buried conviction that I deserve to suffer for the sins of others. I don't know if I should accept that as part of who I am, fight against it as a self-destructive character flaw, or ignore it as a small price to pay for living on this beatiful but imperfect Earth.

International Hope Day

Obama won big, in spite of everything the Republicans could throw at him, and right now the world is partying like it's 1999. It felt good to hear a president(-elect) who shows some humanity, who can form complete sentences, who offers unity not distrust. Today is a day for hope, even for a skeptic like me. I hope that I'm wrong about Obama, that he really will lead the world into a new era of peace and equality. His ambiguous public statements and Senate record don't matter any more: his legacy starts now.

Ballots or Bullets?

After almost two years of glitz and theatrics, voters can finally choose between Obama and McCain. As I said before, I'm lukewarm about Obama, but McCain and his crew are so ignorant, callous, and irrational they make Obama look like Martin Luther King. I don't care how much vote-tampering there is--if Americans accept McCain as their president, it would symbolize the final triumph of American xenophobia and imperialism. The White House would lose any pretense of global or even national leadership, reduced to a Commander-in-Chief presidency.

Watch your step, America.

Still rage against the heart

I keep a placid existence in this bright and fierce world, partly from my lack of imagination and partly out of emotional self-protection. I strive and fight for life, without fear and without joy. Once, a liv passerby cut right through me, through my armour and artifice to my very self. She is far and away on rivers of heartbeats now, but the colour she planted in my shadow still shows up the seams and lends tears to my dry soul.

I look behind and see no flowers grow from my tears. The dust ahead breathes promise of new colours where none should be, yet always I shut my eyes and sleep to forget the dawn.

Market magic

I promise this will be my last post on economics. It's not something I enjoy thinking about--the Invisible Hand is so HP Lovecraft--but with financial fire-and-brimstone all over the news, I start to feel as though it could be important. The trouble is, media "experts" have a vested interest in the status quo, so I can't get an accurate picture or explanation of the carnage. Some things just sound wrong to me...


I know what real investment and assets look like: 1000 people get together and spend $1 million on a cracker factory, and it makes them $100 000 a year of profits for 50 years. All things being equal, you could even say that investment is beneficial for society by efficiently supplying a cracker-hungry nation. Inflation, depreciation, debt, and fluctuations in the price of labour and raw materials muddy the situation, but that's the basic idea. Combine a million factories and other productive assets, and you get macroeconomics. (That classical picture ignores social and physical limits, but I'll let that slide for now.) But it's the financial crisis that's in all the papers, and that's rooted in the speculative side of the economy.

First, let me just say that derivatives trading is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. People have been "investing" by betting whether a numerical value will go up or down. That's the same as betting on a horse race, and it has just as much to do with the real economy. Let them gamble if they want to, but the rest of us shouldn't bail them out when they have a losing streak. Worse still, it exaggerates the upswings and downswings of the market, which is making the current collapse even worse. (Warren Buffet himself called derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction" in 2002.) From what little I understand of the other opaque 21st-century "financial instruments," the same is true for them.

But let's get back to that old august gambling house, the stock market. It's supposedly been the motor of economic growth for centuries. It's true that IPO's lead to real investment, ie mobilize unproductive wealth and labour. (Often it's more effective when the state mobilizes resources itself, but I digress.) But the currency, stock, futures, real estate, etc. speculation that occupy 95% of trading have nothing to do with real investment. It's a series of side bets. If Microsoft shares go up or down, that doesn't change its working capital, only the wealth of those who happen to buy or sell that day. And unlike the cracker factory, that value is entirely imaginary: just like tulips or baseball cards, shares only have value if someone else believes they do and is willing to pay. Elsewhere we call that a pyramid scheme. (Some shares give dividends, inside information, or voting privileges, which gives them some real value, but they are still grossly overvalued.) So why do we have billions of dollars tied up in the stock market? Why have we bet the entire global economy on "irrational exuberance"? It's true that small investors are often ignorant, emotional, and short-sighted, but the large investors who control most of the stock market have professional, expert staff, and they should know better. Maybe the Marxists are right--the whole thing is a shell game designed to transfer wealth from the working class to the rich, and whenever there is financial collapse, that's the biggest transfer of all.

It's been proven many times that the more stocks you own, the more you tend to make from them. The irrational cycles of the market punish small investors and reward large ones because large investors have more information, expertise, and control and can predict or orchestrate downturns. The speculative economy also impoverishes the working class by making small investors feel more rich than they are. If you bought $100 of my stock yesterday and now own $500 worth (on paper), you'll feel like celebrating, and you'll go ahead and spend some of your non-speculative money. Studies show a 3-4 cent increase in spending for every dollar of stock increase. You can see how that can lead to disaster: when your stock goes back to $100, or to zero, you just bought things you can't afford. Many people end up going into debt rather than sell their stocks, on the assumption that the value of their stocks will always go up faster than their debt. When stock prices finally do fall, the hardship is multiplied immensely because people have more debt and smaller savings.

I have one last rant, so bear with me. Lately, I've often heard TV talking heads say that global markets lost a trillion dollars overnight. That is, the total face value of global stocks went way down. What a catastrophe, right? But here's the problem: the listed stock price is its marginal price not its value. Let's say my company issued 1000 shares at $1. So $1000 of real money is invested. Then the next day people learn my grandfather is John Lennon, so 100 stocks are sold to Beatles fans for $5. Now $1500 is "invested" in my stock, $1000 in the company itself and $500 in the pockets traders. But the media would say the value of my stock is 1000x$5=$5000! If some investors change their minds the next day and sell for $2.50, economists go ballistic because the stock "crashed" from $5000 to $2500, even though there is still only $1250 or so invested. That's why trillions of dollars can be created and destroyed in the blink of an eye; it's a mathematical fiction. The true value of a stock would be something like this: the total cash raised if all stocks were sold one by one. It would be above $1000 since the marginal price is high, but it wouldn't be much above it.

If I have the time and the patience, I'll read up more and see what I can figure out. So I may come back and post an update. In the meantime, my advice is to ignore anything economists say and get on with your life.

No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn

Media pundits like to discuss "the economy" and "the environment"--especially during an election campaign--as if there is some difference between them. The economy is the subset of the environment which is most useful to man. Only the most brainless dilettante could discuss economic or environmental changes without some knowledge of their interaction. The term "environment" itself is misleading; it implies that human society is somehow separate from the air, water, earth, and life that surround us. On the contrary, every molecule in our bodies comes from our daily food, drink, and air. That's not new-age religion, that's science. Our bodies are also an ecosystem unto themselves, containing thousands of symbiotic microbes, as are our food and drinking water. Changing "the environment" means literally changing ourselves.


As an environmentalist, I'm a bit unusual. I have no particular affection for fuzzy animals, stately trees, and pristine rivers. I find them beautiful, of course, but like most people, I don't stir myself to protect them. My concern is the health and happiness of humanity, and we've reached a point where ecological damage is our biggest threat. To put it bluntly, we've been shitting where we eat for a long time, and it's starting to pile up. I have no doubt that the myriad toxins, pharmaceuticals, and pathogens we put into our water, air, and food are making us more stupid and sickly. Climate change, loss of biodiversity, and resource depletion are already reducing our standard of living, with potential catastrophe on the horizon. I want my grandchildren to eat cotton candy, dance to the Beatles, make snowmen, not scratch out a stunted living east of Eden.

In this post, I won't talk about the dangers of deforestation, persistent pollution, or other traditional environmental issues. Those already get decent media attention. Instead, I'll discuss the set of problems called "peak oil."

A non-technical explanation of peak oil can be found here. For a technical explanation, refer to eg. Beyond Oil by Kenneth Deffeyes. The short version is that, for geological reasons, the rate of oil production follows a bell curve. Technical, political, and economic factors make the curve noisy. The US has the world's most intensively explored oil reserves, so it shows the trend the most clearly:
No matter how much money the US spends, it can never raise its production above the 1970 peak, so it imports oil from countries whose production hasn't yet peaked (currently only Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia). However, total global oil production will peak in the next 5-10 years, if it hasn't already. Experts such as Dick Cheney (!) estimate a 3% per year decline from then on.

Why is that a problem? For the past 100 years, our society has used more and more oil every year. That oil is used for agriculture, transportation, electricity, and manufacturing to supply our growing population and our growing sophistication. The earth is very bountiful, but we've been living beyond our means. So the first problem is that we need to accept a 3% per year drop in food, transport, power, and consumer goods. The second problem is that free-market pricing will mean a large increase in the price of those things, which means many will struggle to obtain food and fuel. The price has already gone up considerably the past few years even though no oil peak has been announced. A sudden crisis could lead to disruption of supplies or hoarding, which would exacerbate a price spike.

It's true that oil is not our only energy source. Natural gas, coal, nuclear power, and alternative energy also exist. But with our current infrastructure, none of those can be used for transportation, large-scale agriculture, or manufacturing. That is, if gasoline jumps to $10 a litre or pumps run dry entirely, individuals have no way to switch to alternative energy to get to work. It'll work itself out in the long term, but many people could suffer. With proper planning, we could break our fossil fuel addiction and find a way to travel, grow food, manufacture, etc. without oil. If we wait too long, we'll one day find ourselves in a permanent 1973-style energy crisis, and it'll be that much harder to restructure. (The Internet, of course, has plenty of imaginative worst-case scenarios.)

Despite the potential for a humanitarian catastrophe, peak oil doesn't concern me much. I only mention it because it may help to explain upcoming events. The fact is, if we burn all the world's oil in the next few decades, we will cause uncontrollable climate change, which will have far more serious consequences. So we need to reduce global fossil fuel use with or without peak oil.

And Stephen Harper just got re-elected. I need a drink.

Update: I heard an interesting metaphor the other day. The transition from industrial capitalism to a sustainable society is like the metamorphosis of a hungry, single-minded caterpillar to a beautiful, low-impact butterfly. Even though both stages are necessary and inevitable, the first butterfly cells that form within a caterpillar are always attacked by the caterpillar's immune system as foreign cells; it's only the weight of numbers that allows the butterfly cells to finally take over, not through any conscious organization but simply because they have the same purpose.

Dispatch from the trenches

Left to right: our campaign manager Vandy, candidate Jim, and party leader Elizabeth May.

My riding, North Vancouver, has been a tight race between the Liberals and Conservatives for years. The results this time: Con 42%, Lib 37%, Green 11%, NDP 9%. The Conservative was an investment banker from outside the riding who echoed Harper word-for-word; the Liberal was a popular 2-term veteran and former mayor; the Green was a personable businessman and former professor; and the NDPer was an unknown actor. So clearly the personality and competence of the candidates was not the deciding factor for voters.

Across the country, the wind in the Conservatives' sails came from Harper and only Harper. For the first month of the campaign, none of the metro Vancouver Conservative candidates would attend public debates or media interviews (!). But I realize in retrospect that the biggest difference between their campaign and ours was the quality of their campaign machinery. For the uninitiated, a traditional campaign involves the following major parts:

planning and organizing
creating and updating a website
creating and erecting highway signs
creating and distributing lawn signs, buttons, car decals, etc.
creating and distributing fliers
newspaper, radio, TV ads
bulk mailing, robodialling
media interviews and press releases
damage control
all-candidates debates
phone canvassing and supporter identification
door-to-door canvassing
pamphleteering
mainstreeting
coffee parties, open houses, meet-the-candidate, etc.
get-out-the-vote (calling supporters on voting day)
driving voters to the polls
scrutineering (observing the voting and vote counting process)
retrieving highway and lawn signs
compiling and analyzing the election results

Our riding had one of the best Green campaign teams, with a dozen very active volunteers, an extensive support network, and (eventually) $25 000 to spend. But we've never run a campaign before; our candidate ran in 2006 with a campaign team of two. The major parties have a paid, professional team. We made dozens of rookie mistakes, which cost us hundreds of votes. It seems ludicrous that our choice of government hinges on copious highway signs and glossy pamphlets, but that's the reality. In the next election, we'll be much better prepared in that respect.

I encourage anyone interested to get involved in a political campaign. It's more interesting than it seems at first glance, and it really gives you a stake in the outcome. The national leaders get all the media attention, but the local community is where the rubber meets the road. You can also donate to the local campaign rather than the central party, which not enough people do; it's 75% refundable through your taxes, so a $100 donation only costs you $25.

That's definitely enough politics for me this year...

Make that a four-colour map

I've worked about 150 hours for the Green Party over the past few weeks, and on election day I spent one last 12-hour day as a scrutineer. So naturally I'm disappointed that my candidate and my party did so poorly. Based on the voters I've talked to, the reason is quite clear: the Green Party has the "softest" voters, and many of them voted strategically to defeat the Conservatives. And they did help deprive Harper of a majority, so I take some consolation in that.

Another big reason for the low Green vote is our amateur "party machine"--events planning, PR, get-out-the-vote, etc. See the next post.

Stephen Harper bet his political career on a majority and lost; after a $300 million campaign, we are exactly where we were 6 weeks ago. Many people don't follow the issues, but a frivolous election is highly unpopular, and Harper is entirely to blame.

The Liberals and NDP didn't change their standing significantly. The seat numbers changed, but the Libs are still the Loyal Opposition, and the NDP are still far behind. When the Liberals get a more popular leader, I predict they will be back in majority territory at the expense of the NDP and Bloc Quebecois.

I thought the Bloc would do quite poorly because their provincial equivalent, the Parti Quebecois, slipped to third place in their last election. The Bloc's entire campaign strategy was to attract strategic voters, and I suspect that's where most of those seats came from.

In the final account, only the Green Party benefited from this 5-week waste of time. In the next campaign we will have significantly more legitimacy, name recognition, money*, and expertise. It would have been nice to have at least one Green in Ottawa, but there's no use crying over spilled milk.

There is one last thing I want to add. If all eligible voters are included, the party support drops to 22% Con, 16% Lib, 11% NDP, 6% Bloc, 4% Green, and 40% undeclared. That's a pretty meagre mandate. A big reason for the low turnout is that the election was the day after a long weekend: I don't know about you, but my brain told me Oct 14 was Monday (heading to work after a weekend out of town) when I knew the election was Tuesday. I think Harper chose that day deliberately because low turnout always favours the incumbent.


*Federal parties are publicly funded. Each vote cast gives $2 per year to that party, split between the local riding and headquarters. If it gets above 10% of the vote, a local campaign gets 60% of its spending refunded (which is a huge advantage: my candidate will start with $18 000 next time not $3 000). With 12 MPs elected, a party gets official party status and hence additional funding. So that's the next thing we're working towards.

Ralph

I've heard many people cite the "Ralph Nader effect" as a reason to vote strategically on October 14. Even Elizabeth May said, "I don't want to be the Ralph Nader of Canada." So I'll say this once more for the record: Ralph Nader DID NOT make Al Gore lose in 2000. It's all public knowledge for anyone who cares to look.

By the official count, Bush beat Gore by a few hundred votes in Florida. The theory since then is that Gore would have won if 500 Florida Nader voters had voted for Gore instead. (And Gore would have stopped Enron, 9/11, Katrina, you name it...) But there's far more to the story than that. Hundreds of thousands of Democratic voters were disenfranchised in swing states (including Florida) through Diebold machines, arcane voting rules, spurious criminal records, inadequate polling stations, etc. In fact, Florida itself was going for Gore, but the Supreme Court stepped in to stop the vote count when Bush was temporarily in the lead. When the recount was completed weeks later, it was found that Gore won Florida and hence the Presidency. Again in 2004 (when Nader wasn't even running!) Bush won amid widespread vote fraud. It's entirely possible McCain will win fraudulently next month as well.

Furthermore, Nader attracted very different voters than Gore. He raised issues like Pentagon profiteering, corporate control of the political process, addiction to fossil fuels, criminalization of the poor, etc., which neither Bush nor Gore would address. (Gore has become a progressive poster boy since he released An Inconvenient Truth, but in 2000 he showed no sign of a pulse, let alone progressive ideals.) However, the rules made it effectively impossible for Nader to win, so it was 100% a protest vote. If Nader hadn't run, those voters would likely have stayed home not voted for Gore.

The reason there is such a sustained anti-Nader campaign is because the US establishment--including the Democratic leadership--doesn't want the political/economic system itself to be called into question. If Nader is ridiculed and marginalized, it allows the press to avoid answering (or even asking) the questions that Nader and others like him want to address.


Can the real "Nader effect" happen here? There is occasionally small-scale vote fraud in Canada, but it isn't enough to sway more than a few thousand votes nationwide. A larger problem is that election-day workers are exhausted by the time they count the votes--they work a 14-hour day and are not allowed to leave their post for more than a few minutes. That's what scrutineers are for, but it's hard for the parties to get enough volunteers for the 40-50 polling stations per riding. All in all, ballot chicanery in Canada is trivial compared to the systemic electoral distortions I mentioned earlier.

Nov 3 update: Greg Palast, who wrote a book about vote theft in the 2004 Presidential election, just wrote an article describing the current state of American vote theft. Scary stuff.

20 million artists paint a 5-colour map

This is going to be a very interesting election. I won't make any predictions here; with the sharp rise in Green and NDP support and fall in Liberal, Conservative, and Bloc support, all bets are off. Then there is all the organized and unorganized strategic voting, which doesn't show up on the radar until voting day.

For what it's worth, the election prediction project currently predicts 118 Con, 77 Lib, 29 NDP, 47 Bloc, 2 Independent, and 35 too close to call (including my riding).

Oct 13 update: the final pre-election prediction is 125 Con, 94 Lib, 36 NDP, 51 Bloc, 2 Independent, zero Green. If that is indeed the case, the Liberals and NDP could form a coalition government and keep Harper out of 24 Sussex.

Splitting headache

Elizabeth May demonstrated in the Leaders' Debates that Greens are not ignorant, utopian, or flaky. She earned her place at the grownup table. Most Canadians aren't paying attention, so it will take time for that to change voting patterns, but the ball is rolling now. At this point I'd say we'll win one seat in this election and 5-10 in the next one.

Political inertia is bad enough, but a more serious obstacle to Green success is strategic voting. (At this point, that's the Liberal Party's main campaign strategy.) Roughly half of Green supporters will vote Lib, NDP, or Bloc to defeat the Conservative candidate in their riding. No-one knows which progressive candidate is actually in the lead, so everyone assumes it will be the same as 2006, when Greens had 5% national support not 10-12%. In fact, there is a lot of animosity against loyal Greens for splitting the vote* and helping the Conservatives win. (Actually, many fiscal conservatives vote Green, so we take votes from the Cons as well.)

In my opinion, it's pointless to blame individual voters for this--vote splitting is a systemic flaw. "Dark Green" voters will keep voting Green, so the only way to avoid vote splitting is electoral reform. The central problem is this: our electoral system was created when there were only two parties and only rich white men could vote. Now we have 5 major parties and a broad diversity of voters, so it's no wonder the election gives strange outcomes. (Seriously... why should the Conservatives win a majority of seats when 2/3 of the public is against them?) Harper called an election when his popularity went up by 5% because he knew that would translate into 25% more seats. Widespread strategic voting only exacerbates the flaws of the system because it rewards only well-established parties and leads to narrower margins of victory. Most democracies in the world have some kind of proportional representation in order to avoid this endless lesser-of-two-evils voting. For those who want a detailed description and analysis of Canada's political system, I'd recommend the latest edition of Canadian Politics: Critical approaches by Rand Dyck.

With all this talk of strategic voting, people forget the whole purpose of democratic elections: The People, in their incomplete but complementary wisdom, choose those who reflect their values to govern them. If voters feel forced to vote for their 2nd or 3rd choice, it distorts the resulting government. In a way this is also an attack on free speech since for many voters, election day is the only time they feel comfortable to take a clear political stand.



*Our federal elections consist of 308 separate first-past-the-post elections. That means that the candidate with the most votes in a given area wins the seat. So if Bart Simpson got 60% and Homer got 40%, Bart would win. "Vote splitting" occurs when two or more candidates are similar to each other. If Lisa also ran, the vote might be 30% Bart, 30% Lisa, and 40% Homer--Homer would win even though 60% of voters were against him. Nationwide, only 50%+1 of seats are needed to control government, so with enough vote-splitting a minority party can dominate the country. With 4 major anti-Conservative parties and 60% voter turnout, this means that Harper could control government even with only 25% support. (The American system is even more distorted: Bush won in 2000 with only 21% popular support. Vote fraud and a stacked Supreme Court are another matter.)

To continue the analogy, strategic voting says all anti-Homer voters should vote for Bart because he came along first. The first problem is that Bart doesn't address issues that Lisa voters care about. As well, in the long term Bart becomes corrupt and ineffectual because he knows the 60% of anti-Homer voters will always vote for him.

Shadow Boxing

Last night was the first debate between presidential hopefuls McCain and Obama. Many people here and in the US watched it hoping to get a feel for the two candidates. However, as you may have noticed, the whole thing was rather bland and scripted. That's because since 1988, the debate format is chosen by the two candidates themselves. They choose the issues, the moderator, the audience, the time allocation, the venue, everything. There are no unexpected questions, no detailed explanations, and certainly no third-party candidates. It's essentially a joint press conference.

This is a serious problem for American democracy because, along with corporate control of the media, it ensures that 95% of Americans never learn about the fundamental issues the candidates don't want to talk about. If someone like Ralph Nader were in the room, he could ask important questions in front of the whole nation: "Why do you both say the military needs more money when Americans spend as much as the rest of the world put together for it?" "Why do we base our economy on the ludicrous idea that goods and services can and must keep growing forever?" "Why do you oppose single-payer health care for Americans while members of Congress already receive it?"

A Shadow Congress

If this week's bailout goes through, it will be a massive transfer of wealth from working Americans to the ultra-rich. But there is another aspect which is less obvious: this legislation is also a massive transfer of political power. Under the current agreement, the Treasury Secretary--a member of the President's cabinet--would have the authority to buy and sell assets at any price with no oversight or time limit. Traditionally, the legislative branch (Congress) has the final say on all spending; this is one of the "checks and balances" of the US system, intended to curb an autocratic President. If Congress agrees to grant this power to the White House, it makes itself that much more irrelevant, and makes the US that much less democratic.

It's possible that the White House will choose not to abuse this newfound power, just as they chose not to use most of the powers Congress has granted them in the past few years. But who in their right mind wants to take that chance?

Sept 25 update: An American economist gives a similar criticism here. (There are many others.) And the Monkey-in-Chief is playing the fear card again.

I just read that the current Treasury Secretary--the man who will have unlimited authority to reward or punish Wall Street--is a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, with a net worth of $500 million. The White House plans to send this man into a closed meeting with his former colleagues carrying a blank cheque, and somehow that will resolve the debt crisis. Un-fucking-believable.

Sept 26 update: I asked a friend of mine who has a PhD in economics whether this bailout is necessary. He says that, in fact, it is. The immediate problem is that there is financial paralysis--no-one in the US can buy or sell a house or get other large financing because the banks are not willing to lend to anyone. Under the current financial system, good debt gets bundled with the toxic sub-prime mortgages as mortgage-backed securities, and bankers don't want to risk losing more money. Due to poor record-keeping, it's impossible to know which debts are solid and which are toxic. (Or perhaps they stopped the music because they know they'll get a bigger bailout that way.) The longer this paralysis lasts, the more it will interfere with day-to-day commerce. The only way to avoid a deep recession is to clean the slate and restore lending confidence again. I asked him whether the government itself could lend money and thereby get the financial system going again--after all, they apparently have a trillion dollars on hand, and that way they could ensure transparency. He said that couldn't work because only bank employees have enough expertise to run a lending program of that magnitude and complexity. At that point our conversation was interrupted.

It's true that the financial system is so broken that it needs to be wiped clean, and soon. But a blank cheque to Wall Street criminals won't solve the problem--there needs to be strict regulation and accountability. The details don't all need to be in place tomorrow, but there needs to a coherent and sensible plan. Senior financiers knew all along that they would get bailed out, which is why we are in this mess; if we send a message that those who destroy the economy will get punished not rewarded, it will be a major deterrent to future MAD financing.

My preferred approach would be to use FannieMae and FreddieMac, which are already nationalized, to lend money under a new set of regulations; poorly financed banks would go bankrupt, as per the rules of capitalism, thereby wiping the slate clean of bad debt. Ordinary Americans would not lose their life savings because of the FDIC protections. There would still be hardship for a lot of people, but less than the hardship they will have if they give away a trillion dollars and have another financial crash in two or three years. In any case, there are many people in the US with good ideas who understand economics better than I do; I just hope Congress listens to them and not the White House.

Meanwhile, on Wall Street (Part II)

Part I here.

In response to the debt crisis on Wall Street, Washington itself has been going into debt like there's no tomorrow. (For the world's pre-eminent nuclear and military power, that phrase takes a whole new meaning.) Now Bush is ready to write a blank cheque to prop up the debt bubble and delay financial collapse until after his term. Although they disagree on the details, senior US decision-makers agree that this bailout needs to go ahead. But they simply don't have the wealth to back up all the dollars they're throwing around. (Maybe it's time to sell Louisiana territory back to France!)

It would be pointless for me to discuss solutions to this crisis. They are obvious, and it's up to the US public to demand them. I'm more interested in what the ripple effect will be for me and mine if the bailout does go ahead. I readily admit that I don't understand macroeconomics, but here's the situation as I see it.

In the short term, since the government is offering no support to individual debtors, hundreds of thousands of families will lose their homes and become New-Orleans-style internally displaced persons. Although this will cause widespread misery, it will not affect the economic or political systems much because those Americans are already disenfranchised. In the medium term, the most likely outcome is hyperinflation. By all appearances, the government intends to keep running a deficit, but sooner or later creditors will no longer be willing to buy US securities (public debt). To stay solvent, the government will need to either default on its debt payments or print a lot more money*. When this happens, US dollars and US securities will devalue, international investors will dump them, and the value of the currency will crash. The end result would be that financial wealth (dollar bills, bank accounts, shares) quickly becomes worthless while real wealth (real estate, factories, goods) becomes much more valuable. Wages couldn't keep up with inflation, so those in debt would go bankrupt. Nearly all of the debt-free real wealth is held by the richest 1%, so in practice, hyperinflation quickly leads to deep and widespread poverty. What happens next depends on many things, but there would certainly be a humanitarian crisis.

The financial industry protects itself with opaque or absent record-keeping, so very few really know what's going on. It's impossible to predict with any certainty what will happen in the US, let alone in Canada. Export-oriented industries will certainly suffer from a loss of American spending power, and if Canadian financiers get spooked, our own debt bubble could burst. Individuals can insulate themselves somewhat by reducing their debt load, but the only real defence is to work collectively to create an economy which is insulated from speculative bubbles.


*The fundamental value of a US dollar has been very murky since they stopped using the gold standard in 1971. The dollar has been anchored by the global oil trade--Washington (backed up by the Pentagon) insists all oil must be traded in US dollars. In other words, any time the US wants $20 worth of oil they can simply print another $20 and get the oil. In fact, any country that wants to buy oil must first buy dollars from the US at face value. Most countries also use US dollar reserves to anchor their own currencies. So if the US dollar has hyperinflation, it would trigger hyperinflation around the world. Theoretically a country could protect itself by starting to sell its US bonds and dollar reserves, but no-one is willing to do so because such a public "lack of faith" would trigger a mass sell-off of dollars which would wipe out their own currency.

You Have Got To Be Kidding Me

The Conservative party is actually running a "tough on crime" campaign. Longer jail time, less protections for young offenders, that sort of thing. Crime rates have been falling for 20 years, we are facing economic and environmental meltdown, and this is what he focuses on?

The Liberals finally released their full platform today. We're still waiting on the Conservatives and NDP.

The Other Election

Any time I feel bad about Canada's stunted democracy, I just need to look south. Their political system is even more archaic, arcane, and corporate than ours. And they are 16 months into an 18-month campaign--my heart goes out to them. At least this time one of the candidates gives good speeches.

I try to avoid following presidential elections. A few years ago I realized that mainstream US politics--primaries, recalls, conventions, debates, elections--have as much to do with government policy as an office's Christmas party does to its year of work. The Democratic and Republican leadership agree on nearly everything, and they co-operate to marginalize third parties as well as dissent within their own parties. Off the top of my head, here are a few policies which will continue under either Obama or McCain (and feel free to consult their public statements if you don't believe me):

increasing military and paramilitary spending
private health care
narrow media ownership
for-profit prisons
the occupation of Iraq
corporate control of the economy
unhindered stock market, real estate, and currency speculation
spying on Americans without a warrant
no bill of rights, habeas corpus, posse comitatus, etc.
endemic poverty and homelessness
the War on Drugs / Plan Colombia
the death penalty
privately funded elections
the G8, WTO, and IMF/World Bank
expansion of NATO
unconditional support for Israel
fossil-fuel-only transportation policy
capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich
inadequate action on climate change
support for foreign dictatorships
war profiteering
antiquated infrastructure

I'm not saying that none of these problems will ever be fixed; there are numerous avenues for active and informed Americans to influence their government. I'm saying that Americans need to ignore the electoral theatrics and study their political system as a whole. I myself could get involved in the Canadian Liberal Party to defeat the Conservatives; but in practice, the two parties are not very different, and in the long term I would be better to invest my time in alternate democratic channels.

Obama will certainly be more progressive than McCain. (And Joe Biden may be an establishment man, but Sarah Palin is a lunatic.) He probably won't repeal Roe vs Wade or invade Iran. He may even improve health care, permit gay marriage, and invest in alternative energy. But the central concerns of the establishment are not on the table. He will defend the American establishment to the bitter end... that's what he was chosen for.

Sept 29 update: An anonymous internet denizen gave this succinct description of the Democratic leadership: "they don't mind imperialism; they just want a more efficiently and rationally managed one." That's what I mean--both parties are inherently authoritarian and imperialist, and the only difference is their management style.

Many Americans oppose the policies I listed above, and they do elect a few anti-establishmentarians like Dennis Kucinich or pre-2000 John McCain. But the structure of the parties and of the political system itself means that even elected dissidents have little effect on the overall government policy.

Yawn

This election hasn't been very interesting so far. The media are obsessed with "gaffes" and "campaign strategies"; party leaders promise chocolate éclairs for all, trying to exude Leadership Potential; and rank-and-file candidates (let alone party members) are invisible unless they do something stupid. Only the Green Party has released a platform so far, and the consensus in the media is that platforms are all hot air anyway, so they focus on the theatrics instead. I wish we could sit down like grownups and discuss what problems we are facing and how to solve them.

I haven't seen much coverage of the Greens since Elizabeth May got accepted to the debates. CBC mentioned approvingly that she is financially prudent and that she is slowly gaining in the polls. Private media are openly dismissive of Jack Layton and Elizabeth May because they won't be Prime Minister.

This is interesting. A man from Hamilton has set up a Facebook page to co-ordinate vote-swapping to help defeat the Conservatives. Last time I checked there were 6500 swappers out of 10 million voters, so it probably won't have a big impact. Considering the distortions* of our electoral system, though, it's worth a try.


*Our "first past the post" system has several flaws. First, it discourages new parties because until they have 20% or so support in a given riding, all votes for them are wasted (except for vote-based federal funding). Second, it exacerbates regional divisions because it benefits regional parties, which have concentrated voters. Third, it punishes similar parties or candidates through vote splitting. The final result is that a party can form government with 30-40% of the vote, while a party with 10-20% support (like the Progressive Conservatives in the 90's or the Greens now) get little or no seats.

Under the Misty Mountains

Above: Deep Cove at night. More photos here.

Two weeks ago, I moved from Vancouver proper to the District of North Vancouver, just below mount Seymour by Deep Cove. I'll describe my area briefly then give my impressions of Vancouver as a whole in the next post.

I wish I could live here forever. It is half an hour from downtown Vancouver, but it is in the midst of wilderness. (I've seen a coyote and two deer, and one of my roommates saw a bear.) Everywhere you look are lush plants, wild berries, and fragrant flowers. It is a rainforest, after all. Although I loved living in downtown Montreal, I felt oppressed by all the concrete and car exhaust. (I can't imagine living somewhere like LA.)

It is also old and prosperous enough to have good cultural facilities, and if I want something more, Vancouver and its boroughs are a short bus ride away. Mass transit is expensive--like every else here--but I can travel cheaply on evenings and weekends.

I live 3 blocks from an inlet, Indian Arm. On the waterfront, of course, there are many rich houses. The richest of all are in Deep Cove itself, which has a yacht club and a bunch of yuppie stores. Even the house I'm staying in is valued at about $2 million. (There are 6-10 tenants staying there, so the rent is affordable.)

I haven't met many people here or gotten involved in the community: I haven't found work, so I'm keep my expenses to a minimum. I spend my days looking for work, reading, hiking, and so on. I temporarily have a computer at home, so I can blog as well. I've been helping with the local Green Party election campaign as well, which is much better organized and financed than my 2006 campaign in Montreal.

This may turn out to be just an extended vacation. I calculated that I can afford to stay here until Christmas; if I can't find work here by then, I would move back to Ottawa with my parents until I got a job there. Or I may take a McJob and stay a few more months.

Also nearby:
Baden-Powell trail

Meanwhile, on Wall Street

Americans are so fucked. But first, these messages...

Until recently, there was a major housing bubble in the US: normal working-class houses would sell for a million dollars or more. Banks offered subprime mortgages, multiple mortgages, and interest-only mortgages with minimal credit check, which encouraged many Americans to buy houses they couldn't afford. Some call it NINJA financing: "No Income, No Job: Approved!" As long as the price of houses kept rising, they were solvent because they could theoretically sell the house and make a profit. Investment banks like Bear Sterns began trading mortgages, insurance on mortgages, and other pieces of paper as if the housing industry were a stock market, and this kept driving up the price of homes. Homeowners acquired more and more debt to avoid losing their houses, so superficially the money supply kept growing. At some point, though, too many people started missing mortgage payments, and all those pieces of paper became worthless overnight ("loss of investor confidence"). At the end of the day, a few dozen people on Wall Street became billionaires and many Americans lost their life savings. To add insult to injury, the US government bailed out Bear Stearns but not homeowners, so the fraudsters got another $2 billion windfall. Fast-forward to this week: the US government just stepped in and nationalized the $5 trillon mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If their assets are made of air like those of Bear Stearns, the US public debt will double overnight, and all that money will go to the people who are responsible for the crisis in the first place.

The subprime mortgage crisis is not the end of the story; there is a similar crisis looming with consumer debt (credit cards, installment debt, etc). We all know people with several maxed-out credit cards they'll never pay off. Sooner or later, a critical mass of creditors will call in their debts, credit card holders will go bankrupt, and the apparent wealth of the nation will evaporate. Obama's VP Joe Biden has deep connections to the credit card industry, so a government shakedown is very unlikely.

I won't waste my breath highlighting the massive injustice of all this. It's clear that those responsible deserve to work in a rice paddy the rest of their natural lives. The point I'm trying to make is this: the US government itself is very shaky financially, and soon it won't be able to backstop the "failures" of the economy any more.

For 200 years, the fastest way to get rich in the US has been to take over an essential service, run it into the ground, and wait for a government bailout (cf railways, Lockheed Aircraft, Chrysler, Savings & Loan, Enron, Bear Sterns). When the industry becomes profitable again, it gets sold back to the private sector for cheap because a profitable government agency is "socialism". The stakes are bigger than ever now because of all the corporate mergers. But now, the government itself is broke due to decades of corporate handouts (especially via the pentagon) and tax cuts. It has stayed solvent by taking on more private and foreign debt--an additional $2 trillion or so since 2000. A leftwing administration could redistribute money back from Wall Street to the public purse, but there is no American Left to speak of. Besides, there needs to be serious, longterm investment in education and infrastructure before the US can become economically self-sufficient again.

So where will it end? What happens when an essential service fails and Japan and China aren't willing to underwrite a bailout any more? Will we discover that all the non-imaginary wealth in the US is owned by a few hundred thousand people, like 1929? And what will happen to the rest of us?


September 20 update: Since I wrote this post, the US government has pledged another 800 billion dollars of bailouts for Wall Street. No word yet on where all that cash will come from. This raises the US debt ceiling to 11.3 trillion dollars, $32 000 for every man, woman, and child in the US.

I wonder when this will start to qualify as odious debt.

High Noon in Debate Gulch

Green Party leader Elizabeth May has been excluded from the Leaders' Debates next month. Stephen Harper said he would not share a stage with her because she is secretly a Liberal (!) while Jack Layton says the Green Party is not a real party because we have no elected MPs yet.

Harper's evidence is that Stephane Dion is not fielding a Liberal in May's riding. Yet May represents the Green Party, which is running 306 candidates against Liberals. If we really were closet Liberals, Harper would support us 100% in order to split the Liberal vote. Clearly that isn't the case.

Layton is invoking a rule that doesn't exist. The Bloc Quebecois had no elected MP the first time they were in the debates. We represent as many voters as the Bloc--if all our voters were concentrated in one place like them, we would have been in Parliament years ago.

The Green Party takes voters away from all the major parties, which is why they have a common interest in marginalizing us. But I think this kind of backroom chicanery reflects badly on them.

This is a major setback for us because we have big ideas but not a big wallet; we can't afford TV ads like the established parties to get our ideas heard.

Sept 10 update: the Green Party will be in the debates after all! Harper and Layton bowed to public pressure. Now May has had free publicity as the defender of democracy, and we still get to speak our piece to a national audience.

The New Kid in Town

The first post in this series is here.

The Green Party is where I intend to invest my time and my vote. We are still poorly understood, so I'll explain how we are different than the other parties.

Although environmentalism has a long history, its political arm (the Global Greens network) was slow to develop. Most environmentalists are individualistic, nonconfrontational, well-rounded, and middle-class, whereas electoral politics favours those who are hierarchical, aggressive, single-minded, and rich. However, we know urgent political change is needed, so we overcame our reluctance and entered the political arena.

Traditional political parties came from economic divisions--Conservatism from landowners, Liberalism from merchants, Socialism from workers--but the Green Party started as a philosophy, so it cuts across class divisions*. Its fundamental principles are ecological wisdom, social justice, participatory democracy, nonviolence, sustainability, and respect for diversity. Among global Green Parties, Canada's is considered more capitalist, eg. by proposing tax and subsidy changes rather than deeper systemic changes. Still, compared to Canada's other major parties it is very radical.

The major difference with other parties is that Green Party policy is based on concrete facts and proposals, not horsetrading and piecemeal election promises. Canada has a variety of short- and long-term problems, and to address them all, the solutions need to be holistic and comprehensive. It is important to us to have a detailed plan because we intend to plan ahead several decades, not simply until the next election. We also want to encourage genuine debate in hopes of improving it further.
Until the mid-90's, the federal Green Party was essentially a protest vote, a way for local activists to raise awareness of environmental issues. In 1997, the first comprehensive policy was released, 20 pages long. This was expanded and improved to the 120-page Vision Green released 18 months ago.

Incidentally, the Green Shift promised by the Liberals is the same tax shift the Green Party proposed three months ago, including slogans like "taxing bads not goods" and "neither Right nor Left." It's a good idea, and I hope they adopt more of our platform; but I still don't trust them, and I don't intend to vote for them.

(The central idea is to tax things we don't want, like pollution, and reduce taxes on things we do want, like income and trade. That way, society discourages pollution and not benign commercial transactions. There are exemptions so people like farmers don't go bankrupt from the new tax.)

The Green Party isn't perfect, but it's the best we've got right now. In subsequent entries, I'll address more specific issues of this election.


*Political activity in general is highly class-based: the poor almost never get involved because they have the least time and money to spare, whereas the rich are always involved because they have the most to lose.

The Old Democratic Party

The first post in this series is here.

I have a lot of respect for the NDP. They have been fighting against economic and political inequality for decades, a voice in the wilderness. Their approach is different than mine, but largely I feel that we are on the same side. So why am I a Green and not an NDPer?

The platform, tactics, and organization of the NDP reflect an industrial viewpoint, workers versus capitalists. To them, the most important thing is to weaken big business and strengthen John Q Public: the more secure and prosperous the working class becomes, the more government policy will reflect their interests. (Presumably, working class interests include complex and longterm problems like climate change.) So far so good. But they will alleviate inequality through economic growth, which is part of the problem--we need a zero-growth economy, or we will continue to expand and degrade more and more of our life support system. If we reduce our enormous inefficiency, we can provide a good life to everyone without selling out our future in the process.

The Green Party, on the other hand, is concerned with issues which affect rich and poor alike such as climate change, a stable economy, and an ethical foreign policy. We are cooperative rather than confrontational. I would like to dismember transnational corporations as much as anyone, but first I want to make sure that my children don't die from tainted food or water, out-of-control weather, or tropical disease.

I'm not a big fan of Jack Layton. He cooperated with Stephen Harper several times against the Liberals, which strengthened the Conservatives but didn't help the NDP much.

I hope that the NDP and Green Party can someday join forces. We have so much to offer each other. First we need to overcome egos in both parties, and that probably won't happen unless our infighting causes a Conservative majority next month.

Ad Libs

The first post in this series is here.


Above: a Liberal ready to retire from politics.

Liberals in Canada are nicknamed Grits, from their 19th-century slogan, "all sand and no dirt, clear grit all the way through." At the time, they were abrasive opponents of Sir John A MacDonald's corrupt Conservative Party. Recent Liberal governments have been quite different...

High-ranking Liberals are expert politicians. They give handouts to the right people to get re-elected. They are effective at solving problems which concern them, such as Canadian unity, low taxes, and a growing economy, but they pay lip service to other issues (child poverty, aboriginal land claims, health care) or ignore them entirely (American war crimes, media concentration, the global financial bubble). They also have an authoritarian streak; they ignore backbenchers, civil servants, and civil society in favour of backroom deals, and they coddle foreign dictators when it suits them (notably President Suharto). So they are similar to the new Conservatives except that they are better managers and they care more about Canadian sovereignty.

Liberal leader Stephane Dion is not very popular, even less so than Stephen Harper or Jack Layton. He's seen as awkward, academic, and "another Quebec candidate." Maybe he'll improve his image during the campaign.

The issue that concerns me the most is the environment, and this graph says it all:

(If you can't read it, it shows Canada's greenhouse gas emissions rising throughout the Liberals' 12-year term.) I could show similar graphs with respect to urban sprawl, pollution levels, deforestation, etc. They now claim to be the party of the environment, but I'm not impressed... did they think we weren't paying attention for the past 15 years? A Conservative government means disaster, but a Liberal government means the status quo, and neither option is acceptable to me.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Because of our electoral system, only the Liberals or Conservatives have ever controlled Parliament. Many people vote Liberal purely to keep the Conservatives out of power ("strategic voting") even though they dislike the Liberals. I can understand that sentiment, but I can't do it myself. The endless promises and betrayals remind me of an abusive relationship--"This time he'll change! I know he will!" We need to break the cycle or the Libs will end up like the US Democrats, who are distinguishable from the Republicans only during an election campaign.

Pros and Cons

It sounds like Prime Minister Harper plans to call an election, breaking his previous promise to wait until October 2009. Rumour has it that he fears an Obama victory in the US will weaken Conservative support here. So I'll give my current impressions of the major national parties, starting with the incumbent Conservatives.

The new Conservative party is essentially the Canadian branch of the US establishment. They favour direct military and economic integration with the US, eg. the "Security and Prosperity Partnership." Before he was PM, Stephen Harper was president of the National Citizens Coalition, which campaigns for private Medicare and CBC, widespread deregulation, privately-funded elections, more military spending, etc. Their religious wing is anti-abortion, pro-death penalty, and generally draconian. Thankfully, they haven't had a majority government, so they haven't been able to fully implement those policies.

My major concern is to have robust national food, water, transportation, and energy systems which can withstand the disruptions of climate change, financial speculation, and peak oil. For some reason, that is considered part of the Ministry of Environment. How do the Conservatives fare in that respect?

Allow me to introduce Canada's environment minister, John Baird. His approach is to attack political opponents and to ignore all inconvenient facts. Canada's greenhouse gas emissions are still rising exponentially, and sustainable infrastructure is a patchwork of local initiatives. Baird is the poster boy of business-as-usual government.

Aside from their ideology and general nastiness, I dislike the Conservatives because they are self-serving, secretive, and short-sighted. A poor man's Republican Party, if you will.

I call them self-serving because they ignore any rules that don't suit them. The party was created in 2003 when Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay broke a written promise not to merge with the Reform party. Since they were elected in 2006, they broke many rules and traditions such as appointing an unelected businessman to Cabinet (Michael Fortier). Harper's comment was "If you look carefully at what I said in the election campaign, I did leave open that possibility." With that attitude, how can I trust anything they say?

Which leads to the next problem... they don't say much! In the last election, their platform was released only a few days before the election, and it consisted of vague promises on Accountability, Opportunity, Security, Families, Communities, and Canada. Even so, they've largely ignored that document. They rarely announce their plans, and we know little about the operation of government because of their policy of secrecy; they routinely deny access-to-information requests. For instance, by law military spending needs to be published every year, but it hasn't been published since 2003. (Notice the continuity with Liberal policy; I'll address them in the next post.) I suspect that our military is heavily funding the war in Iraq, but at this point there is no way to know.

Finally, I say that they are short-sighted because they ignore pressing issues such as climate change, endemic poverty, and the collapsing US economy. In fact, they make things worse by expanding the tar sands, cutting social programs, and increasing trade with the US. The Kyoto Protocol, which is already woefully inadequate, has been ignored: when the Conservatives were elected in 2006, we were 24% above the emissions limit, and now we are about 35% above it. In contrast, Norway's emissions are 25% below the Kyoto target. We are a rich nation, so in the short term we are insulated from our mistakes, but as a sparse northern country we are also very vulnerable to climate change and economic dislocation.


According to this poll, party support nationwide is currently 38% Conservative, 28% Liberal, 19% NDP, 8% Bloc Quebecois, and 7% Green. Because of the electoral system, that would mean about 60% Conservative, 20% Liberal, 10% NDP, and 10% Bloc in Parliament. We progressives have our work cut out for us.

A Farewell to Cuteness

Tomorrow I'll move out from my aunt and uncle's and into my own place. Here is a little tribute to the household I'm leaving behind.

Noah (left) and Tomoki. My umbrella is a source of endless merriment to them.


Other thrills include washing their hands, rolling up their sleeves, standing on one foot, and jumping off of things.
The twins with their mother:

And finally, Kenji and his father simulating a roller coaster (2 parts):

Where is he now?

Since I came back to Canada, I've been in Vancouver looking for work. I can't get a permanent place until I know where my work will be--it may not even be in Vancouver. I'm staying with my aunt and uncle and their (mostly) adorable young kids.

From foreground to background: Noah, Tomoki, and Kenjiro MacMartin.

Vladivostok

After a week in central Asia, Vladivostok was a big change of pace. It's like going from Thunder Bay to Halifax. The weather was cool and rainy; the smell of the sea permeated the city; downtown was along the Pacific. There was much more tourist activity and activities, and many merchants spoke broken English.

According to our guidebook, it would cost $50 and two hours to get downtown from the airport, yet we found a $3 shuttle bus waiting (1 hour transit). When we arrived downtown, we tried to find our hotel on foot, and it took us about an hour to do so. Partly it was our lack of sleep, but it was also about 500 m from the street, in a stone plaza hidden behind a sheet metal fence. Here is the front. Pretty flash, eh?
It is the Amurskiy Zalif (Амурский Залив), the name of the bay it overlooks. Here's the plaza before it:
Below the highrise you can see the dozens of uneven stairs to get down from the street. Imagine crossing all that with heavy luggage. It gets worse: the colourful front entrance leads straight to three flights of stairs because it's built into a cliff. Overall, though, this was our best hotel: for $80 a night we got a clean and well-equipped room with a view of the Pacific. It was quiet except when there were Sea-Doos in the bay. Here is the view from our room. With private fridge, TV, balcony, and bath and free buffet breakfast! Amazing!

On the first day, we just walked around the centre of the city. Near our hotel is a long beach and boardwalk. Farther afield is the Aleutskaya street, which has the train station, phone/Internet centre, and several museums; Revolutionary Fighters Square (пл. Борцов Револуции) with a large plaza and a cluster of statues; and Okeanskiy avenue, a ritzy shopping street. Here are the statues, "Monument to the fighters for Soviet Power in the Far East" (Памятник Борцам за Власть Советов на Дальнем Востоке). There is a central statue and two smaller ones flanking it (the picture of the second one didn't turn out). Incidentally, Vladivostok means "To conquer the East."

Here is another memorial. Next to it is a cathedral and a World War 2 sub converted to a museum.
I should explain something about Vladivostok at this point. There are a lot of monuments there, and not only because it is a major city. It was founded in tsarist times as a military outpost, and in the USSR it became a "closed city" (ie foreigners were forbidden to visit it, it was removed from public maps, and citizens needed special permission to enter or leave). Under its tourist façade it is ultra-Russian, the antithesis of Canadian multiculturalism.

You can see from the map above that it is much closer to Korea and China than ancestral Russia. In 1917, the population was 80% East Asian. Japan, Britain, the US, and Canada landed troops there to fight for the tsar against the Bolsheviks, and when the city fell to the Red Army in 1922, that marked the end of the Civil War. During Stalin's reign, all non-Russians were killed or exiled from the city. It became closed in 1930 and remained so until 1992. Despite the collapse of the USSR, the population is still almost 100% ethnic Russian, and they are very pro-Russia. It reminds me a lot of the attitude of those who live in the US states which were seized from Mexico in the 1840's: any remaining Mexicans are "illegal immigrants" who deserve nothing but scorn and forced labour. In other words, there is a siege mentality because geographically, historically, and demographically, the territory should be part of Mexico. In the case of Vladivostok, they are keenly aware that they are a few hundred thousand Russians living next to 1.3 billion Chinese and Koreans.

Sorry for the depressing sidebar. Here, look at this bright and shiny arch!

We tried to find a scenic vista of the city, but this is the best we could find.

In our walks, we found many other poor districts as shown in the Urban Russia entry. Outside of downtown, it was very hard to cross major streets. We had to cross in groups of 4-5 people or cars wouldn't stop. Another frequent hazard is open manholes or pits in the sidewalk. Downtown has pedestrian underpasses, which are excellent, although we found one of them that was in disrepair and pitch black. (It was safer to brave the dark than try to cross the road at street level.) We only went out during daylight, so it was never very dangerous. Vladivostok is still a port city, though, so we were careful.

We also found a wonderfully shaggy park:
Several times, we saw a pack of domesticated dogs roving the streets near our hotel. I tried to take a picture, but they run pretty fast.

As in Irkutsk, we tried in vain to take a hydrofoil out along the shore. In this case, everything was ready but the weather stayed cold and rainy.

We found two art galleries, but after looking at the shoddy art in the lobby, we didn't even bother to go in.

Most shops in Russia have a security guard and a set of lockers for bags to deter shoplifters, but Vladivostok had many more. One grocery store had three armed guards and even a bookstore had one. They were always polite, at least to us.

There was supposed to be a giant Friday market in the central square, but either it starts in the afternoon or our guidebook lied to us again.

Our trip out of the city and out of the country was uneventful. Or perhaps I'm used to the eccentricities of Russian travel now. We left at midday and arrived in South Korea around 4pm local time.