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Rory Medcalf writing in Foreign Policy:

Obama remains more popular in Australia than in most countries, if only for the reason that he is not George W. Bush. The current hand-wringing angst on the Australian left about the prospect of a U.S. military presence here is nothing next to their public displays of outrage during the last presidential visit in 2003, when the leader of the Greens party, Bob Brown, heckled until he was ejected from parliament. This time, Brown and all his Greens were on their best behavior, even while they sat through a speech extolling an alliance they can barely abide.

The Irish Times reports that, yesterday in Beijing, China welcomed Zimbabwe madman Robert Mugabe with open arms. Mugabe ranked right at the top of this list of The World's 10 Worst Dictators. Xi Jinping, the heir apparent to Chinese president Hu Jintao, called Mugabe an “old friend” and a “trustworthy friend” of China. Here's the Times Beijing correspondent Clifford Coonan:

Mr Xi described the 87-year-old Mr Mugabe, who has been marginalised by most of the international community for human rights abuses, as “a famed leader of the national liberation movement in Africa and also an old friend whom the Chinese people know well”.

A paragraph later comes what one normally refers to as an understatement:

China is often criticised for its “values-free” approach to dealing with some of the countries in Africa and elsewhere that the international community shuns.

Canada, of course, is warming up its relations with China. At this point, Canada can only aspire to Zimbabwe's lofty status! The last time a Canadian leader was in Beijing — that would be Prime Minister Stephen Harper — Canada got a dressing-down from the Chinese premier for not showing up enough. (I reacted badly to watching Wen dis Harper)

Christian Fuchs is a professor in media and communications studies at Uppsala University in Sweden. In a recent paper, he concludes that Google is, has been, and always will be evil:

“…Google permanently surveils the online behaviour of the users of Google services and thereby economically exploits them. In Google’s moral universe, prosumer exploitation does not seem to be evil, but rather a moral virtue. Google thinks that advertising is evil when it displays irrelevant information, when it is flashy and if it is not recognizable as such. It ignores that the problem is that for organizing and targeting advertising, Google engages in the surveillance and exploitation of users and the commodification of personal data and usage behaviour data. Advertising is furthermore a mechanism that advances the monopolization of business, the manipulation of needs and the commercialization and commodification of culture and life. Advertising and exploitation are always “evil”, therefore Google is just like all capitalist advertising companies “evil”. In capitalism, evil is not a moral misconduct of individuals, who are blinded and could also act in more positive ways, exploitation is rather a structural and necessary feature of capital accumulation, which makes evil a generic feature of all forms of capitalism and of all capitalist organizations.

…Google is a sorcerer of capitalism”

[Read the whole paper]

From Conservative Senator Hugh Segal's The Right Balance: Canada's Conservative Tradition (published this summer but I've just had the chance to finish it):

When Ottawa is top of the news all the time, in part because the Ottawa media presence has no other choice (regardless of whether what is happening in Ottawa is newsworthy or not), and in part because the government of the day is pushing, advocating, changing, risking, reorganizing, negotiating and campaigning on one issue or another of high intensity or contrived controversy, voters tire and turn away. (p 164)…

In reflecting on my own disconnnection from any understanding of the Reform “The West Wants In” option and how much more positive that was than “The West Wants Out” alternative, the paralytic and destructive haze of the Ottawa bubble has emerged over the years as an important factor. Extreme partisanship on all sides produces its own distorting “fog of war” Intensive media coverage of trivial divisions or partisan excess combines with those excesses themselves and unites with the endless and often trivial (but no less intense) anxieties and micro-manoeuvres of the civil service to produce a deeply unreal world quite disconnected from life beyond the bubble, where people go about their day-to-day activities. The amount of time MPs now spend in Ottawa and the ever-increasing number of conflict-of-interest strictures cut them off even more from reali life on the ground. The days when citizen farmers, teachers, haberdashers, small business owners and the rest went to Ottawa for only a few weeks of the year to represent their communities are long gone. This focus on Ottawa always makes it easier for insurgent political movements to gain momentum, while those in the bubble fight their own internal pettifogging partisan engagements. Many political capital cities have this problem, and one of its impacts is that those near the centre of the fray do no see, sense or hear what matters in the ral world as they get consumed by the skirmishes that have no meaning outside of their own tiny universe of partisan to and fro. That the national media covers most of this activity in Ottawa as competitive news of objective value only magnifies the distortion. I have been no less susceptible than others caught in the bubble and no doubt I’ve done my share to contribute to the distortion on more than one occasion. Having, along with many others, passionately campagned for the “yes” side on the Charlottetown Accord, my focus on the Quebec threat had clearly dulled my understanding of the western dynamic around a similar axis of inclusion and exclusion. (pp 166-167)

Some interesting observations on Twitter this morning from Dave Stubbs, a columnist and feature writer for The Montreal Gazette whose main preoccupation is covering the Montreal Canadiens. He tweets under the handle habsinsideout1. As you'll see below, he thought about turning these observations into column, then discarded the idea. (Been there, done that, about every 20 minutes) But I think they're interesting enough observations for all those interested in journalism and the practice of the craft to package them up for posterity here. Twitter, for all that I like about it, tends to be a lousy service when it comes to search and archiving. Blogs, like this, do a better job on that score.

So here's Stubbs/habsinsideout1 at about 10 am this morning, with the tweets in sequence:

• Storytelling in sportswriting is a rapidly fading art. Now it's mostly about providing multimedia content before the next guy
• Shooting video in #Habs room totally undermines establishing rapport w/ players for good conversation
• Can't make eye contact, observe body language or subtleties if you're worried about framing/lighting interview subject
• Video clips have their place in multimedia world. But camera stays in my knapsack when I'm interviewing for a feature or column
• Multimedia horse has left barn & he's not coming back. But it's a tightrope between creative work & content in bulk…
• And I've learned web is very much like me: needs to be fed 24 hours a day. Too much junk food in us both
• This rant might have been a decent column. But I've knocked it out on Twitter instead. Typical…
• Used to go to #Habs morning skate/practice for stories. Now: tweeting water-bottle #s to determine who's practising. My fault, yes…
• Readers/viewers' “need” to know everything 10 mins ago has put boots to much storytelling in shrinking newsrooms

Statscan this morning reported that Canada shed 54,000 jobs in October, mostly full-time, the biggest single-month job loss outside of a recession since 1996.

But for Scotiabank economists Derek Holt and Karen Cordes Wood, the “body count” is less important than data about hours worked and wage gains:

“Wage gains slowed again to 1.3% y/y. We maintain that this matters more than volatility in the headline body count. Swings of tens of thousands in the monthly job count matter far less than the fact that the millions of employed Canadians are just not making wage gains that are keeping up with the cost of filling their grocery carts, fueling their cars and what they're spending on other staples. This is imposing real wage reductions upon the Canadian consumer and is cause for a defensive bias toward the outlook for consumer spending particularly given structural peaks on most forms of activity in the household sector.

* The key in this report is that hours worked fell for the second consecutive month. Barring a strong gain in labour productivity in September and again in October, this points to the risk of negative prints for GDP growth for two consecutive months. Recall that GDP equals labour productivity times hours worked.

After reading Greek the riot act, European leaders are now turning their attention to the lousy state of Italy's finances and that's bad news for Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi:

Italy, under fierce pressure from financial markets and European peers, has agreed to have the IMF and the EU monitor its progress with long delayed reforms of pensions, labor markets and privatization, senior EU sources said on Friday.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, his government close to collapse after more loyalists defected on Thursday, agreed to the step in late-night talks with euro zone leaders and U.S. President Barack Obama on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Cannes, France. [Read the rest from Reuters]

Here's the front page of French daily, Le Figaro:

And if that wasn't enough piling on Berlusconi, here's the hilarious front-page photo of the biggest selling broadsheet paper in the UK,the Daily Telegraph:

Eurozone leaders are meeting this weekend trying to figure out how and what they can do about their financial crisis. On Friday, BMO Capital Markets chief economist Sherry Cooper sent around this note [pdf], summing up what, it seemed to me, was the consensus view on Bay Street about what the Europeans need to do (my emphasis):

There is no way this Sunday’s summit or the one after that will provide all that is needed to really deal with the European Debt Crisis. The true litmus test for credibility is a writedown of Greek debt of €200 billion, a recapitalization plan of €200 billion, and an increase in the effective capacity of the EFSF to €1 trillion. Anything short of this extends the crisis and suggests the Europeans still don’t get it or at least not enough to accept the real price tag of the mess they are in.

So far, not so good (at 7 pm GMT in any event): There has been squabbling between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. As for the benchmarks that Cooper (and others) set out, none have been reached. European finance ministers agreed to a recapitalization plan for the banks of just €100 billion – half what is needed to be seen as “credible”.

Meanwhile, an economist is quoted in the very last paragraph of a front page piece in the New York Times today which looks at the bailout of one Belgian bank, Dexia, and wonders if this is not simply nuts:

Walker F. Todd, a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and a former official at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, said governments were setting a troubling precedent when they bailed out a company and paid its trading partners in full, as occurred with A.I.G. and as might occur with Dexia.
“In the short run, it would help if the authorities would say they refuse to provide publicly funded money for the payoffs of derivatives,” he said. “This is like using public funds to support your local casino. It is difficult to see how this is good for society in the long run.”

Yesterday, our papers across the country, carried my call to fight for cheap cheese. An excerpt:

…as Conservatives bust up one kind of agricultural monopoly [ending the monopsony of the Canadian Wheat Board], how about taking on the other agricultural cartels such as the dairy farmers who force Canadian consumers to pay more for food and hurt our standing on the international stage as free traders?
Sadly for consumers, the Conservatives, like the Liberals before them, don’t seem interested in dismantling the so-called supply management system that gives the country’s dairy farmers $2.4 billion a year in subsidies that one think-tank called “an implicit tax that governments have authorized farmers to impose on consumers.”

I was pleased to see my inbox fill up with lots of thoughtful reaction, including this one from Bruce Beaumont, a dairy farmer from Ontario:

As a dairy farmer for over 60 years, I'm in total agreement with your assessment of quotas (expensive, useless and totally uneccessary) but before you criticize the farmers please try and understand how we got into this mess.

At the time quotas were being debated most farmers were opposed to quotas.The government subsidized farmers during the WWII period to encourage more production, and it did increase production substantially. During the post-war period when production overshot demand and prices tanked,  goverment again introduced subsidies and guess what? Subsidies increased production just as they did during wartime.

Faced with overwhelming supply some that could not even be given away the idea of quotas was contemplated. The quota solution had the almost unanimous support of both the rural and urban press of the period. The farm majority who opposeded quotas were just ignored.

In the end qotas were unilaterally imposed on the dairy and poultry industry without ever allowing farmers ( who were considered just too dumb) to even vote on the issue.  By imposing  severe penalties on anyone who broke the rules everyone was forced into submission. Now that farmers have invested billions and billions of dollars to buy mandated quota to farm, a withdrawl of quotas without adequate compensation would vertually wipe out the industry.

Speaking with a resident of Australia a while back I mentioned how well farmers there had adjusted “Yeah,” he said “but they don't tell you how many commited suicide.”

In the period leading up to the imposition of quotas on farmers without even  allowing them to vote the goverment was spending huge amounts to subsidize farmers and subsidize the export of the excess product that susidies were helping create there was a 33% import tarrif on manufactured goods coming into Canada.

Industrial wages were three times farm wages (earnings) yet farmers were not  permitted to bid on factory jobs because of the closed shop policies that are still in place today.