What this means is that, even if the RIAA is successful in its mean-spirited attempt to sue Americans that allow music to be downloaded from their servers and hard drives, Americans can simply turn to Canadian servers to get their music fix. One more reason why suing your customers doesn’t make sense.

This isn’t the only area where so-called ‘free’ trade is opposed to the interests of public health. The US FDA recently prohibited Americans from purchasing drugs in Canada. They had to do this because the Canadian standard of living (at least as measured by purchasing power) is 20-40% less than that of Americans, so in order to get market share in Canada, multinational drug firms have to sell their product at commensurately lower prices in Canada. The Canadian government regulates prices to ensure this happens, as does every country in the world except the US. Same product, lower price, in a country that is part of NAFTA, the great leveler of all things. As a result, the free market has adapted to the distortion: Hordes of grey-haired Americans come up to Canada on tour buses every weekend, not to see the sights but to get their needed prescriptions cheaper. The tech-savvy ones have gone further, buying them from Canadian distributors on the internet. The FDA, goaded by the drug conglomerates, has tried to use every method in its arsenal to prevent this, but the market works pretty efficiently, so now Americans are buying Canadian addresses to get around the FDA prohibition of selling drugs from Canada to American addresses. Sounds a bit like the RIAA game, doesn’t it?

Now the public sector is getting on the bandwagon. The governor of Illinois is planning on buying its drugs from Canada as well, for all state employees, saying: “If you can buy the same drug made by the same company, and it is safe and it costs less, then that makes sense.” The FDA’s response was typical scaremongering — this guy sounds like someone on the pharmaceutical payroll:

Aw, gee, Mr. Hubbard, you’re all heart. What if everyone started doing this? The sales of the pharmaceutical firms would drop 20-40%, they would have to adjust their US price to the lowest global price, and their profits would disappear.

The pharmaceutical companies’ answer, of course, is to require all countries in the world to abandon their price caps on pharmaceuticals. Don’t think that’s not on the agenda of the secretive WTO talks going on now. The consequence of this would be uniformly high prices everywhere, bankruptcy of most of the world’s egalitarian health care systems, and lots more deaths of those that can’t afford to pay monstrous prices for life-and-death medicine so that pharmaceutical companies can research new designer drugs like Viagra for the rich who can afford them.

It’s just one more example of the lunacy of ‘free’ trade. It’s heartening to see that the developing nations of the world are catching on: Last weekend 21 of them walked out of the WTO talks in Cancun when the US and EU refused to end the $300 billion (conservative estimate) in annual agricultural subsidies they pay to farmers to allow the US and EU to undercut local agricultural producers in the third world. Western leaders, whose domestic employment is being destroyed by cheap foreign imports and the export of jobs to the third world, need to re-invest that $300 billion in local job creation and support for domestically-consumed products. Although the multinational corporations would cry foul if they did so, the people — everywhere in the world — would be winners.

It’s time to make the export and the elimination of American jobs the number one political issue in the 2004 campaign.

1. The world is a single global market, and competitiveness means producing goods at the lowest possible cost.
2. To do that, jobs need to be eliminated as much as possible, since labour is a major component of cost.
3. Jobs that aren’t eliminated need to be filled with people who are prepared to work for the lowest possible wages; these people are almost invariably in third world countries.
4. Another way of reducing costs is to manufacture and operate in the country that has the lowest possible social and environmental standards and regulations; the damage that this creates in that country is not the corporation’s concern.
5. Trade barriers need to be eliminated so that the corporations that can produce a product at the lowest possible cost can dominate the global market; the labour dislocation this creates is not the corporation’s concern.
6. In order to eliminate those trade barriers over the objections of local country citizens and governments, all world governments need to be coerced to sign ‘free’ trade agreements that require them to eliminate any domestic social and environmental regulations that are one iota higher than the most lax regulations in the trade area, on the basis that such regulations represent ‘unwarranted restrictions on trade’.
7. Trade protection and subsidies given to domestic corporations need to be disguised and hidden by convoluted legal and economic agreements, so that these corporations sustain their competitive advantage over new upstart organizations, particularly those operating in low-cost, third world countries.
8. Corporations must minimize any social and environmental responsibility to the communities in which they operate and sell products, and simultaneously maximize their rights in these communities, by using batteries of lawyers and political influence to obtain ‘personhood’ rights.
9. These ‘personhood’ rights can then be used to stifle all criticism of corporations for false and misleading advertising (right of ‘free speech’), for producing defective products (right to sue anyone criticizing their product for defamation) and for buying political favours (right to contribute unlimited amounts to political campaigns).
10. All of these coerced advantages, and unwillingness to take any responsibility for the consequences of corporate actions, must be blamed on the corporation’s mandate and the demand of shareholders to maximize corporate profits at any cost; this allows greedy, unscrupulous, socially and environmentally negligent corporate management to be protected from litigation for any damage that any corporate actions produce.

The endgame of this insane and out-of-control abuse of power is a cowed, beaten, unemployed and underemployed American workforce, the unraveling of decades of social programs and standards, privatization of all public property to a small corporate elite, and the destruction of the environment. This is the proverbial race-to-the-bottom, achieved through a barefaced coup that turns over all power, all wealth and all resources, resources that rightfully belong to all Americans, to a tiny elite. And the final ignomy is that Americans, turfed from well-paying professional and technical jobs that are eliminated or exported to the third world, can only afford with their drastically reduced income to buy the shoddy, inferior products produced by the equally downtrodden third-world labourers who took their jobs.

It must be stopped. Americans must start working together to use the only resources that haven’t already largely slipped from their control — their votes and their dollars — to stop the coup and take back their country from rapacious corporations and their political handmaidens. To do this they must:

• Demand that political leaders support aggressive programs to end corporatism and undue political influence, including the elimination of corporate ‘personhood’ and other corporate ‘rights’, campaign finance reform, and the elimination of indemnity of corporate managers and directors from litigation for corporate misdeeds. This will be the most difficult change, since it literally requires politicians to bite the hand that feeds them.
• Demand that political leaders reform corporate taxation to prevent corporations from using offshore tax havens, strongly discourage them from eliminating or exporting jobs, and penalize them for environmental destruction and wasteful resource consumption.
• Demand that political leaders put a total moratorium on the sale to private interests of public lands, property and resource rights, on the basis that these public resources belong to the people.
• Demand that political leaders revoke ‘free trade’ agreements, and replace them with statutes that strongly discourage international trade in goods and services that can be readily provided locally (even if they can be produced elsewhere cheaper), and strongly encourage international trade in goods and services that cannot be readily produced locally.
• Refuse to buy imported products when domestic products are, or should be, available, even when those imported products are cheaper in price.
• Refuse to support retailers that import the majority of their merchandise.
• Identify, publicize, and organize nationwide boycotts of the products and services of corporations that have eliminated valuable jobs (and hence lowered the quality of their products and customer service) or exported jobs to lower-cost countries.
• Support local businesses that employ people at reasonable salaries and show social and environmental responsibility for the community.
• Learn to take responsibility for their own employment by establishing new local businesses with high labour standards, and high social and environmental standards, which place a greater value on the well-being of their people and communities than on their profitability.

Politicians will only learn to behave responsibly when they are held to account by informed citizens, and forced to wean themselves off the patronage of corporate elites. Corporations will only learn to behave responsibly when they are stripped of legal and tax protections that encourage them to behave otherwise, and lose in the marketplace to businesses that put people and community welfare above profits.

This problem is not unique to the US. It is as global as the reach of the corporations that created it. But the 9-point prescription above that can solve it is universal. It applies equally in every country in the world.

It’s even worse than that. There is every indication that the metrics used to measure economic health and danger are now obsolete and horribly flawed: While these old measures suggest the recession is over, poverty and layoffs are skyrocketing and it is increasingly clear that the ‘recovery’ is not only not ‘trickling down’ to mainstream Americans, it is being made on the backs of those Americans. Productivity is ‘improved’ by the charade of laying off millions of American workers, exporting millions more jobs to third world countries (more on this in my blog tomorrow), and hence recording increased profits and pushing the already wildly overpriced stock market to levels of sheer delusion.

There is inevitably going to be a train wreck, and it’s going to hurt everyone. Expect to see interest rates start to soar, and to see foreign countries abandon the US dollar in favour of currencies with much stronger fundamentals. Only the fact that so much of the US’s debt is held by foreigners in US currency (who therefore have a vested interest in keeping the US dollar strong) has delayed the inevitable precipitous decline in the dollar. Then the dominos will start to fall — the US stock market, the housing market, followed by further massive layoffs and the kind of inflation that third world countries with wildly inflated currency and unsustainable debt levels are used to seeing. Since we’re all connected, the rest of the world’s economies will also slip back into deep recession.

There is some ironic good news in all of this. The tax cuts will have to be cancelled early, since they are simply unaffordable. MidEastern wars and invasions will also be unaffordable, so expect to see the troops come home quickly and unceremoniously. The vacuum there will be probably be filled by warlords and fundamentalists, but that’s inevitable anyway the way Bush is operating, so at least no more American lives and dollars will be wasted on a naive effort to force democracy on countries that won’t be ready for it for generations, if ever.

And best of all, the untenable and ridiculous economics of Reagan will finally be put to rest forever, and Bush will be acknowledged, in time for the 2004 election, to be the most irresponsible — and the worst — president in American history, a lesson that will hit home so hard that we should be spared another neocon, and another Republican con game, for at least a couple of decades.

Three quick picks from around the blogosphere for a busy Saturday:

• Business Loses Interest in New Ideas: Management guru James Champy tells Fast Company that corporate America has lost its appetite for innovation and its ambition for greatness. The ‘idea recession’ is not news to me, but maybe when Champy says it someone will listen.
• Democrats Need to Reframe Liberalism as Pragmatism and Common Sense: Matthew Miller writes in the NYT (now behind PPV firewall, but still free at Common Dreams) that the Democrats need to reinvigorate their ideas and ideals, not as ideology, but as simple common sense, and by staking out that pragmatic ground make the Republicans look ideological and unsensible by contrast. Example:

• Tom DeLay the Hero of Affirmative Action?: First, we had the brave but futile effort of Alabama’s conservative Republican governor Bob Riley to increase state taxes and make the tax system less regressive. Now, a Texas women’s group that advocates equal opportunity for women and minorities, gay rights, and reproductive rights is praising the notorious Tom DeLay as a champion of affirmative action and quotas. Must be a full moon in Dixie…

There is a provincial election in Ontario in three weeks, and I’ve been doing a bit of campaigning for the Green Party. In the process, I am astonished at the number of people who tell me, sometimes but not always guiltily, that they have no intention of voting. A bit of research shows that voter turnout is dropping everywhere, that rates are lowest in the US (below 50%), and that, unlike the rest of the world, US voter turnout rate correlates closely with voter income.

Why don’t people vote? The most common reasons seem to be, in order:

1. There isn’t enough difference between the candidates/parties to make it worthwhile
2. The outcome is a foregone conclusion/one vote won’t change it
3. The candidates can’t be trusted to do what they say
4. Voters don’t know enough about the candidates to differentiate
5. Voters don’t know enough about the issues to make an informed choice
6. Except at the highest level, politicians don’t really have the power to do anything anyway
7. Voters get depressed when the candidates they get worked up about almost invariably lose, or fail to deliver

What are the consequences of this? It mitigates in favour of incumbent candidates and parties in power. It shifts the balance of political power and influence from citizens to corporations and pressure groups, who lavish attention and money on politicians and image-oriented political campaigns. It allows back-room abuses like kickbacks, pork-barreling and redistricting to go unchallenged. And it creates the vicious cycle shown in red in the chart above.

To try to understand this, consider as an analogy the reasons most people don’t exercise. They’re remarkably similar to the reasons most people don’t vote: It won’t make enough difference to justify the time needed to do it. I’m not going to stick with it anyway, so why set myself up to fail. My body doesn’t respond to exercise, and I might end up hurting or overstressing myself. I don’t know what kind of exercise my body needs, or can endure. I don’t know what exercise equipment/regimen to employ. The exercise equipment/regimen probably won’t work anyway. I’ll be depressed when I fail.By nature, most of us don’t like change. When something is very difficult, it is human nature to disengage, to avoid it, unless and until the pain of the status quo exceeds the pain of making the change. In the case of exercising, being told you are at high risk of a heart attack might raise the the pain of the status quo (not exercising) above the tipping point level of pain of the change (exercising).

The same is true in elections. Most of us need to be worked up about issues and candidates in order to get engaged in the political process. It is therefore in the best interest of incumbents to:

• Lower voter expectations
• Not rock the boat
• Keep the economy flat
• Disclaim ability to do much when adverse political or economic events occur
• Minimize personal responsibility for anything the government does that might be unpopular
• Discourage voter awareness of, and interest in,  issues (focus on personalities instead)
• Bribe voters with their own money by constantly lowering services (under the guise of ‘lowering taxes’)

The chart above shows how this leads to a sedating and ‘dumbing down’ of the electorate, and ever-lower voter turnout. There are two potential tipping points that can, at least temporarily, break out of the vicious cycle:

• If an incumbent does something to annoy the electorate enough, or if an exciting new candidate emerges to run against him, voters may show up in enough numbers to turf the incumbent.
• The increased enthusiasm that led to the new candidate’s election will sooner or later be dashed, and when voters are disenchanted they will either disengage again (leading back to the vicious cycle with the new incumbent) or will get angry enough to turf the new incumbent as well (in a two-party system, often forcing voters to grit their teeth and vote for his predecessor, who they’d kicked out the last time).

What happens when an adverse political event (e.g. 9/11) or economic event (e.g. recession) occurs? Initially, voter expectations will rise. Incumbents can counter this either by disclaiming ability to anything about it (or blaming it on the previous administration), hence lowering expectations again, and/or by taking some action (like the Patriot Act or invading Iraq) and trying to persuade voters that this was the appropriate response. If they fail, it will lead to one of the two tipping points above; if they succeed, it will lead to voter apathy and the resumption of the vicious cycle.

The political pattern you see in most countries at both the national and local level indicates that reaching one of the two tipping points, and breaking out of the vicious cycle, is getting harder and harder. There is less and less attention paid to issues in campaigns, and more focus on personalities and mud-slinging (which plays into our aversion to change unless absolutely necessary and hence into the hands of incumbents). The seven bulleted techniques above that incumbents use on voters to stay in power, along with the back-room kick-backs to recurring big campaign donors, and the scandal of redistricting, all work effectively to entrench incumbents. And when incumbents are seen as invincible, voters disengage and make that invincibility a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Let’s look at each of the seven excuses above for not voting, in turn, and see what solutions might be available to overcome voter apathy.

The solution to Tweedledum/Tweedledee mediocrity and similarity of candidates is to get rid of ‘first past the post’ voting, and open up the electoral system to multiple political parties. With ‘instant runoff‘ ballots, voters can vote in order for the candidates they want, with the votes of the candidate with the fewest first-place votes shifting to their second choice, until one candidate has reached a clear majority of votes. This encourages supporters of small minority parties to vote, since they are no longer ‘throwing away their ballot’, and also solves the problem of vote-splitting, which tends to discourage voters who feel they can’t vote for the candidate they really want from voting at all. Of course, we also need to pressure the media to invite third party spokespeople to political debates and give them reasonable coverage.

The solution to the ‘foregone conclusion’ apathy is to introduce European-style proportional representation, and to eliminate redistricting. Under proportional representation, a block of seats in the House are set aside and allocated proportionately to the highest-polling candidates of parties whose share of the popular vote is lower than their share of the seats in the House (because they consistently place second or third in most districts/constituencies). That means that small parties with a substantial number of supporters widely geographically scattered get some House representation. Proportional representation would also alleviate non-voting excuse #7 above, the discouragement of always supporting losing candidates.

Even the fiercely pro-American Economist has railed against the partisan American redistricting process (“a national disgrace”). Redistricting allows the party in power to grossly manipulate riding boundaries to maximize their party’s chances of retaining power in the next election. The US is one of the few countries in the world that tolerates it. Other democracies use an independent electoral commission, which uses a neutral and systematic method to set logical electoral boundaries.

The third reason for non-voting (the candidates won’t do what they say anyway) is best solved through proper electoral finance reform. That means prohibiting corporations and organizations from making political donations or otherwise attempting to influence (through partisan advertising) elections and politicians. That means making it illegal, and revoking the charter of corporations and organizations that break the law. It is only by making politicians responsible once again to their constituents, and not to their campaign contributors, that politicians will start paying attention to citizens first.

There is no way to force politicians to state their positions on issues, or to mandate that citizens be informed about those issues, especially when we have media that pander to viewer ignorance to garner higher ratings. The solution lies in our beleaguered education systems. Europeans are more informed about political issues than we are because they have been brought up to think that it’s important, and as a result they talk about issues among themselves socially, and watch more television programs that address these issues.

The sixth reason for non-voting (that politicians can’t do anything anyway) is simply wrong-headed. Yes, there has been an enormous shift in power over the past several decades from governments to corporations, but this has happened before, and it’s reversible if there is political will to do so.

In some countries, the vicious cycle shown in red on the chart is less prevalent than the almost-as-vicious cycle represented by the five boxes in the lower left of the chart. In Canada provincially, and in some European countries federally, voters routinely dump the government in power in favour of an opposition party. In some cases this is due to more political activism, and holding elected officials to a high standard. In others, it’s due to a more cynical view that by changing governments regularly you prevent any party from getting too used to power, and allow each government to unearth and expose its predecessor’s scandals once they discover what really went on.

We can only hope that, for either reason, American voters decide next year to opt for this alternative vicious cycle when they mark their ballot for president.

Bottom line: the excuses for not voting are understandable, but weaselly. So even if you have to hold your nose and vote ‘strategically’, get off your rear and vote. Better yet, don’t just complain about the political process and politicians, get involved with them, and help bring about instant runoff balloting, proportional representation, an end to partisan redistricting, electoral finance reform, and better education of young, minority and low-income voters (who have the lowest voter turnout rates of all) on the issues that shape all our lives. So stop blogging and get out there.