Mel Watkins's blog

Weeks later, the global cost of electing Trump is still huge

melwatkins75 — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 18:25:38 +0000

The clock has been ticking -- or whatever it is that clocks now do. The calendar has been counting. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to figure out how what happened November 8 happened.

Michael Moore foresaw it but who else. Not President Obama, he admits. Not me. Even the pollsters missed out on this one. And if you didn't think it could happen, what credibility do you have if you now pretend you can explain it? Exactly none. So read on with no expectation of the truth except by random error.

Ursula Franklin (1921-2016): Imagining a world of technology where people and nature matter

melwatkins75 — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 18:21:56 +0000

Ursula Franklin was a metallurgist who studied early Chinese bronzes, a crystallographer, a professor of physics, a pacifist, an advocate of women's rights, a Quaker, a moralist, a pioneer in the study of what technology does to us and our environment, a recipient of some 20 honorary degrees, a public intellectual of the first order, and a truly wonderful human being whose eyes actually twinkled, with a mischievous look on her face. She was all of these things rolled together, each of them informing the rest.

Trump is today's Ugly American, but there's much more to America than Donald Trump

melwatkins75 — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 18:33:01 +0000

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Donald Trump is as American as white cops beating up Black men because they are Black, and sometimes forgetting to stop.

Trade deals of yesteryear sow seeds of impending Trexit

melwatkins75 — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 17:30:54 +0000

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Reader Alert: Read immediately in case Trump disappears into the black hole of history.

Trexit. You read it first here on the good enough margin of empire. T is for Trump. Rhymes with Brexit. Occurring at the same time, with an ocean in between, there has to be something in common.

For disaffected Brexit voters living under austerity, what choice did they have?

melwatkins75 — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 18:19:00 +0000

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Globalization is a mighty force -- for good, for putting more food on the table, to give it its due -- and for bad, truly bad, like the fear and loathing of the Other, even the whiff of fascism, in Europe before and now after Brexit -- and, I note in passing, in the air in Trump's America.

Rachel Notley can lead Alberta out of the carbon trap

melwatkins75 — Tue, 19 May 2015 17:08:33 +0000

On May 5, the earth moved in Alberta (we have pictures from outer space). The tremors spread all the way to Ottawa, where I live close enough to feel them, and they felt good.

So here's the question: can the Tar Sands ever be the same?

Bitumen is one of your Canadian staples -- or resources-for-export. So let's think about what staples do and don't do.

They can help you and they can hurt you. On the helpful side, there is economic growth and jobs. That, understandably, is their lure. In the case of bitumen these have been significant for the Alberta economy -- though not necessarily for the rest of the country; think Dutch disease.

Abe Rotstein, a giant of Canadian political economy

melwatkins75 — Tue, 05 May 2015 17:49:28 +0000

Mel delivered this eulogy for Abe Rotstein (1929 - 2015) on April 30, 2015.

My dear friend Abe had lived so long. He kept teaching after his contemporaries had quit, and was still so sound of body and mind, that it seemed to me that he just might live forever.

We both joined the old Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto more than 55 years ago and became the best of friends. We have so remained ever since. Our lives intersected personally, politically and intellectually.

From pulp and paper to magazines and progressive politics

melwatkins75 — Thu, 01 May 2014 13:27:01 +0000

Harold Innis wrote the history of Canada around its succession of staple exports, first to Europe and then to the U.S. He then wrote the history of empires and civilizations around the succession of media of communications. One of the bridges between these two phases of his work was the study of newsprint as a Canadian staple which supplied the input for the American press, with its vast consequences for public opinion and human consciousness.

The hair-raising secret history of the atomic bomb

melwatkins75 — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 22:31:57 +0000

Crave privacy in a crowded world where your every move is being watched? Want to lead a secret life? Next time round, come back as a Bomb. Not any old bomb but the big one, the nuclear kind. Here's the proof -- and don't dismiss it as mere history.

If you believe that Keystone is carbon neutral you'll believe anything

melwatkins75 — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 18:45:06 +0000

Isn't this article great? Why not chip in to help rabble.cachange the environmental conversation in Canada.

The time has come to do an impact assessment of the impact assessment of the Keystone pipeline.

An impact assessment is an assessment of the impact of being hit, ploughed under, in this case by a pipeline. Perhaps because everyone with an ounce of common sense intuitively grasps the potential for harm that is inherently involved in ramming through a megaproject, it is necessary to devise a process that will lend some legitimacy to what is to be done while minimizing the likelihood that it will kill the project.

Clive Thompson latest in long line of Canadians writing about power of media

melwatkins75 — Fri, 17 Jan 2014 18:48:17 +0000

Thinking about how the media affect us and the world around us has been something of a Canadian specialty. Harold Innis taught us about "the bias of communication" and Marshall McLuhan declared that "the medium was the message." Now we have another Canadian, Clive Thompson, a technology writer living in Brooklyn who was once the editor of This magazine, with a most informative and thoughtful book -- Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. It pulls together a considerable literature on what today's digital tools seem to be doing to us. For those of us who spent most of our lives in a pre-Internet world, just learning about how many tools there are is an education.

From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization: Kari Polanyi-Levitt's new book

melwatkins75 — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 17:14:31 +0000

The much respected progressive economist, and my long-time friend and intellectual soulmate, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, having just turned 90, has published a book of no less than 16 scholarly articles, all written in the past 25 years and mostly much more recently. Its title, From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization: On Karl Polanyi and Other Essays (published by Fernwood and Zed Books), accurately describes its content. Half are on Kari's understanding of her father's great book and his other writings, half on the frenzy of financialization, the crisis of 2008 and the lead up thereto. And, to top off this intellectual feast, an afterword by Samir Amin, "Globalization, Financialization and Emergence of the Global South."