Category Archives: Social democracy

Why are Governments not Trusted?

June 14, 2025Death of Truth, Decline of the west, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Neo-liberalism, Oligarchy, Social democracy, Social Democracy and Trust, Trust and Distrustmeanderer007

As I mentioned in my last post, a lot of hesitance to trust vaccines is a result of distrust of government. This is a shame, because particularly in troubling times such as pandemics, it is essential that people trust their government about the information they give about vaccines or other health measures. Distrust in government is not a laughing matter. Distrust in government is a very costly matter.

Figuring out why governments are not trusted is a tricky thing. Nesrine Malik said this about citizens of her country of Sudan who believed the government could not be trusted in giving them good vaccines for free:

This sounds like completely irrational behaviour, but in fact it is the opposite. In countries such as Sudan, nothing good, and certainly nothing free, comes from the state. The government is an extractive body that exists not to serve citizens, but to rifle through their pockets and charge them for going about their daily business. Corruption is endemic – from bribing one’s way through traffic violations, to being forced to use private hospitals because government cronies have hoarded medical technology. The state is something that you thrive in spite of. The government’s communication reflects this uneasy relationship. Officials speak to the public either to scold them or spread propaganda, and dissent is banned; in Egypt, doctors who contradicted the government’s account of the pandemic were arrested, while oxygen tanks ran out in intensive care units in Cairo.

We tend to learn from experience. Our own experience. In Sudan the consistent experience of people with the government is that it will try to screw the citizens in favor of their cronies. They are naturally reluctant to believe that free vaccines are given to them for the welfare of the people. After all, their government has rarely considered the welfare of the people. This is called crony capitalism, or in extreme cases, oligarchy. Oligarchs won’t hesitate to use their power to screw us. That is what they do all around the world. And in Canada and the US the trajectory is in the direction of oligarchy.

In the US they are increasingly nearing oligarchy, if they are not there already. The rich in the US who have the ear of the government use that power to ensure that money is not “wasted” on public health. Many of the health insurance companies do all they can to maximize their profits even at the expense of their customers. Christiane and I have recently experienced a most bizarre version of this that I must blog about some day.

As Nesrine Malik said in her Guardian article: “Suspicion is easily sown, because political systems don’t need to be fully authoritarian to sustain exploitative and dishonest regimes that breed mistrust.” Americans know that pharmaceutical companies earn enormous profits. You might even say, as Malik did, “outrageous profits.” In the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic people were reluctant to trust the government because journalists revealed how their government kept changing the rules while leaders refused to obey the rules themselves. We had that in Canada too. We have no vaccine against corruption. Or ignorance for that matter. As Malik said, “State failure breeds paranoia. And when trust in government breaks down, people turn to personal vigilance.”

This is what Nesrine Malik said,

“Vaccine rejection doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s easier to dismiss hesitancy and conspiracies as unhinged behaviour; it makes us feel less unnerved by displays of unreason from those who we think are, or should be, rational people. Sure, among vaccine-hesitant people are those who are simply stubborn, misanthropic or selfish. But, just as the pandemic exploited the weaknesses of our economic and public health systems, vaccine hesitancy has exposed the weaknesses of states’ bond with their citizens. There are no easy answers for how to deal with those who repeat conspiracy theories and falsehoods, but scrutinising the systems that lost their trust is perhaps a good place to start.”

I think Malik makes a lot of sense. It is not a simple answer to a complex problem. It is a complex answer, as it should be.

In the west, since the time of extreme neo-liberalism of Saint Ronny Reagan, the Iron Lady, Maggie Thatcher, and to a lesser extent their dedicated follower Brian Mulroney anti-government propaganda has flourished since the 1980s as Americans and Canadians have been fed a steady diet of dubious claims that the state is unreliable and predatory. As Saint Ronald Reagan said, “the most scary 11 words in the English language are, ‘I am from the government and I have come to help.’ For decades, conservative political leaders have repeated over and over and over again that the government cannot be trusted.

As a result many of us believe this. And that is a costly mistake. This is all part of neo-liberal dogma/propaganda that the government can’t be trusted only the private sector is worth our trust.

Of course, this ideology has for decades served the interests of the wealthy who care most about minimizing their personal or corporate taxes. This ideology is now so prevalent that even people whose best interests would be served by government are reluctant to accept its help. Governments provide many things of enormous value including hospitals, roads, libraries, universities, parks, environmental regulations, health and safety standards to name only a few. Governments are important! And vaccines are a very important part of this. For decades we have been taught, and many of us believed, that governments are bad and private enterprise is good. Now we are paying a heavy price for blindly following that ideology.

A fighter for justice

June 8, 2025Oligarchy, Social democracymeanderer007

All his political life Bernie Sanders has been a passionate fighter for justice. But in the United States, even though the Sanders/AOC ‘Fighting Oligarchy Tour’ was wildly popular most Americans were content with the injustice. Everyone knew these tax cuts for the wealthy oligarchs were coming because Trump never hid the fact. He knew his supporters would buy that. They voted for it. A lot of poor people even voted for it. In some cases they voted for Trump for strange reasons. For example, many voted for Trump, I believe, because they enjoyed the cruelty of deporting immigrants, illegal or otherwise. They enjoyed trampling on the rights of vulnerable people. I was struck by the glee on their faces at the Republican National Convention in 2024 when they held signs that read, ‘Mass Deportation Now.’ There is something very sick about this country I once loved.

Bernie Sanders made another important point. Why are the richest people in the world getting richer while 800,000 people in the US sleep on the streets? And 60% of Americans are living pay cheque to pay cheque? Why are taxes being reduced on the rich while poor people have their Medicaid benefits cut and children of poor people have their nutritional intake reduced? In what kind of a world does this make sense?

It only makes sense from the point of view of the oligarchs.

Sanders believes that such maneuvers are only possible because of the corruption of politics by the huge influx of cash since the Citizens United case. The corrupt election finance laws in the United States are the problem. Those laws allow the rich to put unlimited funds into politics to fund both Democrats and Republicans and then to tell them what to do. This is what oligarchy is all about. And the United States has it. Government for the rich.

As a result of those laws and the corrupt system they generate as well as the current constitutional rules, and a conservative controlled Supreme Court, it will be very difficult for the U.S. to get out of this mess. Ever.

Bernie asked another good question: Does it make sense for the richest man in the world to be allowed to cut funding to support funding to support nutrition for poorest children in America?

Why is the United States the only major country not to guarantee health care to all of its citizens. To Bernie Sanders the answer is clear. The problem is caused by a corrupt system flooded with money from the rich so that it’s interests can be served at the expense of the majority of people. The system has been ruined by too much money.

Sander also asked, “Does it really make sense for Elon Musk, the richest man in America to own as much wealth as the bottom 52% of the population combined? Who thinks that makes sense?”

Here is another question from Sanders: “Can such a system be called anything other than an oligarchy?”

One more thing puzzled Sanders. At the same time as the American Congress has arranged for a $2.7 trillion tax cut to the wealthiest Americans $2.7 billion was cut from spending on cancer research by the Musk-led DOGE department. That doesn’t even benefit rich people! Does Elon Musk think he can buy a cure for cancer? Does it really make sense to put a chainsaw to work on cancer research? Or other important scientific research projects which have been cut? This is madness. The madness of Trump is the madness of oligarchy.

This is what happens when the United States elects as president a man who has the empathy of a turnup. Even capitalists must understand that such a corrupt system urgently needs reform.

On the tour with AOC, Sanders also said, “They own the Congress, they own the White House, but they don’t own us.”

Sanders also said, “I’ve been to every state of this country the people of this country do not want oligarchy. They do not want authoritarianism. And they want a government that works for all of us, not just the 1%.”

The people have the electoral power; they just have to seize it. That is what a fighter for justice is trying to do. But he needs help.

What is oligarchy?

June 5, 2025Social democracymeanderer007

It is generally agreed that Russia has an oligarchy. But what about the United States? Is it also an oligarchy? To answer that we must know what an oligarchy is.

Oligarchy is a system of government in which the government is in the hands of the very few who use that power for their own benefit, including the power to keep that system in place. Such a system allows the privileged to retain their privileges, even when they make no sense.

I also heard Bernie Sanders interviewed by Stephen Colbert on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. And Bernie was a gem. I felt the Bern. On the show he started off this way:

“We are living increasingly in an oligarchic society. When I was at the inauguration…standing right behind me were three of the wealthiest guys in America. Multi-billionaires who were nominated by Trump to head up main government agencies.

Lincoln talked about government of the people, for the people, and for the people. What you get now is government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires…And these are not nice guys. They are extremely greedy people. And they want it all. And we are living in a moment of the greater inequality of income than we have ever had in the history of the country.”

I once had a friend ask me what is worse income inequality or poverty? That is a tough one. Not an easy question to answer. This friend specializes in tough questions. Both are bad. This day, Sanders railed against inequality which can tear apart democracy even in the richest country in the world where most people are rich by world standards. But is that good enough? Not according to Sanders. And I agree with him.

In the United States which has more billionaires than any other country in the world, those billionaire have made it very clear that they want a government that is good for them, no matter how bad it is for everyone else. That is precisely what an oligarchy is.

As Sanders said,

“They are willing to step on anybody to get more.” What’s good for billionaires is good. End of story. It doesn’t matter who gets hurt in the clamor of the billionaires for more. This is the world we live in now. As Sanders said, “It is hardly unfair to say the American government is an oligarchy.”

Americans of course don’t think about their own country as an oligarchy. Russia is an oligarchy. China is an oligarchy. America is a democracy. Bu are they right? There is a lot of evidence that they are wrong.”

That is why America is willing to fund $600 billion in tax cuts that benefit primarily the rich, and particularly the very rich They don’t care what they take away from poor people. This is shown by the fact that Americans are by and large eager to cut Medicaid for poor people, reduce nutritional food for poor and hungry children, and education for all children just to get tax cuts that benefit mostly very rich people. As if they are the ones that need help. This is modern America. This is strong evidence that America is an oligarchy.

And Sanders concluded, “in no religion on earth would anyone think this is moral behaviour.”

But in the land of Trump, this is what justice looks like. It is the only thing Republicans in the US can agree upon. They will even ditch long standing wishes, like balancing the budget, to get tax cuts for the wealthy—i.e. for the oligarchs and their kin. The conservatives in their midst say the government can’t afford anything, except tax cuts for wealthy people. That is a no-brainer. And that is precisely what it is.

The Fighting Oligarchy Tour

June 3, 2025Social democracymeanderer007

I have a confession to make—Bernie Sanders is my favorite politician. He is radical. More radical than I am. But he makes a lot of sense and has the courage to speak his mind no matter the audience. He is not feeding them pablum. And even though I don’t agree with everything he says, I agree with a lot of what he says.

I really wonder what would have happened had he secured the nomination for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020. Most assume America was not ready for such a radical political voice. But most assumed that America was not ready for the granted radical voice of Donald Trump, yet they elected him twice. I think they did that because Trump seemed authentic. Crazy perhaps, but authentic. Would Bernie not have been seen the same way on the left? I don’t know, but I sure wish I could have seen it.

In 2025 Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (‘AOC’) (went on a stunning American tour that included conservative hots spots such as Arizona and met with astounding success.

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC )have recently completed a tour of much of the United States concentrating on the red states like Arizona. Many people think Bernie Sanders and AOC are too radical to be popular. So instead, the Democratic Party turned to bland—Joe Biden. I actually think he did a lot as a one term president but now all people remember is his collapse in the debates.

There are some surprising things about this tour. First, at a rally in Denver, Sanders and the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had reportedly drawn thirty-four thousand people. In an article in The New Yorker, Staff writer Emily Witt, compared this to former Vice-President Kamala Harris’s appearance in Houston, with Beyoncé, late in her 2024 presidential campaign where she drew about 30,000 but she was dragging Beyoncé with her. President Trump in his famous rally in Madison Square Garden drew nearly 20,000. What are these two lefties—one of them a very old leftie—doing attracting such huge crowds?

In Tucson Arizona, 3 out-of-state politicians—Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Greg Casar, a young congressman from Austin—none of whom were actually campaigning for any national office attracted 20,000 people. Something very strange is going on. What is it?

I have a theory.

As Emily Witt said,

“Standing at a lectern affixed with a “FIGHT OLIGARCHY” sign, they hammered home a single message: the government has been taken hostage by a cabal of billionaires, and the only way to wrest it back is by unifying the working class.”

According to Sanders, who is a bit biased they are “scaring the hell out of them” (Musk and Trump). They might not be scaring them, but they are taking notice.

That is actually an important message. I think it has legs. I want to show you what Sanders said. That is why they called their tour, The Fighting Oligarchy Tour.

More next time.

Do Public Service Workers Deserve Respect?

April 19, 2025Social democracymeanderer007

It is always difficult to see the water in which we swim. It is so natural we just don’t see it. For decades our minds have been poisoned by the poisonous little people that haunt the dark places on the right. And we have been poisoned by lies and false assumptions to believe that most public employees are parasites on society. Such criticism is so common and so prevalent that we just don’t see it any more. I heard it so often I believed it must be true.

I remember as a young lawyer my principal (boss) asked me to attend each week at the Land Titles Office to go and try to correct mistakes our office had made on Land Titles documents in order to correct them to avoid the time and extra expense of a rejection, for that meant we would have to start over. It was great experience for a young lawyer to see all the mistakes law firms could make on legal documents. After all, we all make mistakes. What really impressed me was how the employees at the Land Titles Office were diligent about reviewing our documents to make sure their office did not accept documents which for various reasons were unacceptable and if accepted would make the system worse and less reliable. And they were always eager to make it better. They did not do it to make our job harder. They just did it to make our work better for the benefit of all who worked in the land titles system. It opened my eyes, which badly needed opening.

The shallow common assumptions held by so many, that public workers are lazy, unreasonable, and incompetent are frequently wide of the mark.

The author Michael Lewis was interviewed recently on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He talked about civil servants whom he had recently written about in his new book. He pointed out that many of them could make more money in the private world, but they were actually devoted to public service. They did it because they wanted to do some good and that gave them great satisfaction and they are often under-appreciated for that. He said, “The fact that we have allowed these government workers to be demonized says a lot about the state of our souls.”

I would add, and the fact that we have allowed public servants to be defamed by the likes of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, tells us even more about the state of our souls.

A World-Wide Problem

August 17, 2023Decline of the west, Health, Social democracy, Social Issues, Social Mediameanderer007

Jonathan Haidt made another important point to the Senators that he has often made in print, namely, that this is not just an American problem. The same crisis has hit “many countries” not only the United States. That means that it cannot be blamed solely on problems unique to the US such as gun violence, particularly in schools. The cause must be broader than that. He then made a statement that should concern Canadians, namely that

“The patterns are nearly identical in the UK and Canada, and the trends are similar though not identical in Australia and New Zealand. We do not yet see signs of similar epidemics in continental Europe or in East Asia, although I have not yet found good data from those regions.”

Together with His associate researcher Jean Twenge, they had discovered

“a sudden increase between 2012 and 2015 in all regions of the world. These patterns indicate that whatever happened to American teens was not uniquely caused by trends and events in the USA (e.g., a sudden fear of school shootings after the Newtown massacre of 2012). The cause is likely to be something that affected teens in many or all regions of the world at the same time.”

This is a world wide problem, partly because social media is a world wide phenomenon.

Note in particular the sharp rise for Girls after 2020. In particular, between 2012 and 2020 The rates of major depression for girls more than doubled during this time. The increase for boys was not as high.

Most of the research is confined to the west, but by no means exclusively.

One must always bear in mind the scientific point often made, that correlation does not prove causation. For example, just because 80% of sex assaults are perpetrated by men who ate potatoes that day does not prove potatoes are a cause of sexual assaults.

First, Jonathan Haidt explained to the Senate Select Committee that “Correlational studies consistently show a link between heavy social media use and mood disorders, but the size of the relationship is disputed.”

Haidt then drilled down:

“Nearly all studies find a correlation, and it is usually curvilinear. That is, moving from no social media use to one or two hours a day is often not associated with an increase in poor mental health, but as usage rises to 3 or 4 hours a day, the increases in mental illness often become quite sharp.”

The graphs are quite explicit. To see them go to the reports. The message is loud and clear. The more young people use social media the more they suffer from serious depression and anxiety and the more likely they are to attempt to commit suicide. Haidt puts it this, contrary to what some of his critics have said, “The correlation is much larger than for “eating potatoes” or “wearing glasses.”

This is a big deal. We should all take note but particularly our political leaders who have the capacity to respond. This is not something that should be swept under the rug.

Are Prayerful Hopes Enough?

August 4, 2023Decline of the west, Health, Social democracy, Social Issues, Social Mediameanderer007

The American Center for Disease Control and Prevention (‘CDC’) is respected widely around the world, though among right-wing science-denying Americans not so much. Perhaps they don’t like their reports for ideological reasons rather than scientific reasons.

The CDC has issued a vitally important report that these same right-wing opponents will also want to reject. The report was called the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (‘CDC Youth Risk Report). According to this report, teen girls in the US have experienced record levels of violence, sadness, and suicide risk in recent years.

The CDC Youth Risk Report also shone a spotlight on alarming statistics about young girls being forced into sex and harbouring serious thoughts of suicide. How is this possible in the greatest country in the world?

If the report is true, and I have heard no evidence-based critique of it, it is extremely important that American political leaders of all stripes not ignore it. Although more than 17,000 students participated in the report it was conducted in the fall of 2021 in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Naturally many children, no doubt more than normally the case, were anxious and feeling isolated.

Jonathan Haidt a social psychologist at New York University and a leader at a laboratory on social psychology has shown the scientific data does not support the idea that the cause of this problem is the pandemic. The evidence clearly showed that this trend predated the pandemic and there was only a surprisingly minor blip during the pandemic.

I want to also say that this is not an American problem. Haidt confirmed that the science is very similar for Canada and the UK.

Nonetheless, according to Debra Houry, the Chief Medical Officer for the CDC “the results are alarming.”

The CDC Youth Risk Report said that more than 40% of high school students had feelings of sadness or hopelessness “that prevented them from engaging in their regular activities for a least two weeks of the year.” That is nearly half! Do we think nearly half were just trying to get an extended vacation?

I know some students in Canada who had such feelings and they were real. Interestingly, girls suffered more than boys with rates nearly double that of boys. 57% of girls and 29% of boys felt persistently sad or hopeless. Added to that, nearly 1 in 3 teenage girls considered attempting suicide! That was 60 percent higher than 10 years earlier!

Finally, 1 in 7 teen girls said they had at some point been forced to have sex and nearly 1 in 5 had experienced violence within the past year.

Some parents on hearing about this report said they were filled with “prayerful hope” that this was a mere “reflection of this pandemic uncertainty.”

Personally, I hope that Evangelical supporters of right-wing regimes across the US consider more than just prayerful hopes and pay some attention to the scientific data, even if it’s not perfect. Relying solely on such hopes could be dangerous for young people.

They really need more than prayerful hope!

A Marshall Plan for Children

August 2, 2023Decline of the west, Health, Social democracy, Social Issues, Social Mediameanderer007

I am hearing a lot about mental health of young people in the United States. The stats are depressing. No pun intended. Kids are dying from self-harm and drugs. This is a wicked problem.

I don’t know the stats for Canada, but I know from experience that they must be similar and can’t be good. In fact, Jonathan Haidt , an American social psychologist who studies problems like this empirically, has said that the same statistics prevail in both Canada and the UK, making clear that they evince a western problem not just an American problem.

Young people are suffering. And young people should not suffer. That job belongs to old people and we shouldn’t give it up without a fight.

Kids are dying in huge numbers on account of suicide and drugs. More than ever before. One would think this would call for action–sort of like a war effort.

A good friend of mine actually knows something about the subject. Unlike me. He worked for many years in Brooklyn as nurse with indigent children and has decades of experience. He tells me this problem is not a new one. People were just not paying attention. When he received an award for New York City employees way back in 1992 he called for “a Marshall plan for children” in the city. Actually, one is needed for the entire country and Canada too. “Unsurprisingly,” he said, “no such plan was forthcoming.” He called the region where he worked with neo-natal children “a health care war zone.” But as he pointed out, shoutouts from neonatal nurse practitioners don’t usually trigger changes in public policy like complaints by political leaders of western democracies.

Problems with the heath of young people in America, the richest country in the world, have been well known for decades but little or nothing was done until Joe Biden put the child tax credit into effect during his first year in office and this reduced poverty among children by an astounding 50% in 2021, but characteristically, when the Republicans took over control of the American House of Representatives they acted quickly to get rid of that ‘unnecessary’ expense. Tax cuts for rich people are important. What are poor children worth? Republicans, including the 80% of Evangelicals who support them, care about “children” in the womb, but outside the womb not so much.

Frankly, my friend is understandably pessimistic that things will ever improve. I hope he is wrong. I fear he is right. We seem to be doomed.

Elementary Justice

June 8, 2023Capitalism, Conservative, Social democracymeanderer007

When you spend almost 4 months living in the USA as I did this winter you get to hear some pretty weird stuff. This was one of those occassions.

Al Franken is a former Senator and now a stand-up comedian again. He has returned to his roots. I head him guest hosting the Daily Show,

According to Al Franken, “the combination of stone age technology and understaffing has created a very weird situation.”

As Jesse Eisinger, a Propublica Senior reporter said, “You are more likely to be audited in the United State if you make $20,000 than if you make $500,000 a year.” Is this because Republicans think ordinary people should pay more taxes than wealthy Americans? Is it because this a very perverse form of trickle-down economics where many Americans believe that if you give money to rich people this is the best way to help poor people because that money will flow down to poor people? Or is it because the Republicans want to give their wealthy donors and cronies what they are begging for?

The reason is that the poor tax payers are low lying fruit. The less money you have the less likely it is that you can hire fancy accountants or tax lawyers to defeat the IRS claims! So why should tax auditors waste their time going after the rich when they can go after the poor! Only in America!

As one commentator said,

“The IRS does not have enough money to go head to head with the wealthy. Ultimately it is easier for them to audit low income people because it is cheap and can be done by mail and does not take a lot of time.”

Or as Franken said,

“The IRS is so understaffed that they audit poor people more than the wealthy because they just don’t have the experts to handle the most complex returns. They are going after poor people because its easier! …So how much money are we talking about in lost taxes here? According to the former head of the IRS it could be as much as $1trillion a year! The solution is a bargain. Comparatively speaking, just adequately funding the IRS so it can improve its enforcement capabilities so it can collect that extra trillion dollars…”

And of course a lot of good things could be done with an extra trillion dollars. It could be applied to the national debt. Or it could pay for universal health care. Or subsidize child care as they do in every other civilized nation. Or as Franken suggested, a trillion dollars could

“eliminate taxes completely for the bottom 90% of American households!… Or we could fund an entirely new Iraq war. And why are we the only f…..g country in the world that doesn’t have universal health care? The point is that polling shows that 93% of Americans think that it is everybody’s civic duty to pay taxes and I think you can guess who the other 7% are. So let’s make sure that we give the IRS enough resources for it to make sure that everybody does what we all should do for the right to live in this great country and make it even better if we do the rational thing and collect the taxes that people actually owe.”

Everyone should note that this is not pie-in-the-sky rosy socialism. It’s not communism. It’s not evil. It’s not even wrong. It’s just a small attempt to get people to actually pay the taxes that are lawfully owing to the government so it can pay for the things that are important to us. Like social security. Like schools. Or the armed forces. Or police. Or fire fighters. Or health inspectors. A lot of the things we get from the government are good and important. Everyone who can afford to pay taxes should be required to pay their fair share. Even the rich! Even Republican cronies! Not just the poor suckers who have no one fighting for them. This is just elementary justice.