by SCOTT FERGUSON & WILLIAM SAAS

We are joined by David I. Backer, associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University, to discuss his new book: As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Schools (The New Press, 2025). The right-wing attack on education has cut deep. In response, millions of Americans have rallied to defend their cherished public schools. Backer’s incisive book asks whether choosing between our embattled status quo and the stingy privatized vision of the right is the only path forward. In As Public as Possible, Backer argues for going on the offensive by radically expanding the very notion of the “public” in our public schools.

Helping us to imagine a more just and equitable future, As Public as Possible proposes a specific set of financial policies aimed at providing a high-quality and truly public education for all Americans, regardless of wealth and race. He shows how we can decouple school funding from property tax revenue, evening out inequalities across districts by distributing resources according to need. He argues for direct federal grants instead of the predations of municipal debt markets. And he offers eye-opening examples spanning the past and present, from the former Yugoslavia to contemporary Philadelphia, which hastens us to envision a radically different way of financing the education of all children.

Backer’s book is thus a must-read for anyone interested in building a robust and democratic public education system today and in the future.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Scott Ferguson

David Backer, welcome to Money on the Left.

David Backer

Hi there. Thanks so much for having me. I guess I’m a longtime listener, first time caller.

Scott Ferguson

We are so overjoyed to have you. So we’ve invited you onto the podcast, finally, after many years, to talk about your forthcoming exciting new book, As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Public Schools that is set to be published December 2nd. Do I have that correct?

David Backer

That’s right.

Scott Ferguson

Cool. We want to dive into this book, but per usual we’d like to invite you to introduce yourself to our listeners a little bit. Talk a little bit about your intellectual, academic background and work and what brought you to this book. I think we’d also love to hear something about your history as an activist and an organizer in educational spaces and potentially beyond. So, the floor is yours.

David Backer

Thank you. Well, thank you again for having me. Again,  I’m a fan of the pod, and I’ve learned a lot from it and a lot from you, Scott, in particular over the years, so it’s great to be with you and with your listeners. About me, I started studying philosophy in undergrad. I guess I’ll start there. I was really into the philosophy of mathematics, logic, that kind of stuff. I don’t know what it was.  I was a terrible math student growing up. I guess I hated math and not only that, one of the reasons I hated math was because if you weren’t good at math, you weren’t smart. I wanted to be smart. Everyone wants to be smart, right? I was made to feel like I wasn’t because I wasn’t so good at math. I hated tests. I hate practical jokes and it really felt like one big practical joke. Like, what’s the answer, you know? So, I really hated it and I hated all the emphasis that my parents put on it growing up.

Scott Ferguson

Were they big math people? Did they work in mathematical professions? My father was an accountant, by the way. Big math and incredible penmanship.

David Backer

Yeah. My grandfather was actually an accountant and my whole family’s from South Brooklyn and, I found out recently, worked in the Empire State Building in the 40s and 50s, but he was actually the nicest in terms of all this stuff. He was the most understanding of all of it somehow. My parents, I don’t know. They had sort of reformed Jewish middle class types of anxieties about having a successful son and being good at math is just such a badge of success that there was a lot of pressure. I don’t know what it was, but I got that from teachers. You get that from everywhere too.

So by the time I got to college, I took a logic class for a language requirement and the professor said I was really good at it. She ended up being my advisor and I ended up taking a course with her over and over again where she just created her own sort of graduate seminar in lieu of a graduate program in philosophy of math and logic. I also studied continental philosophy and I had a real hatred of the continental analytic divide. I really didn’t like it. I didn’t understand it. We had a little group as undergraduates and we tried to name ourselves. We were in Washington DC, so we called it the Washington Circle. We tried to really do it up, you know. We called ourselves the “New Positivists” because we were positive about all philosophy. We’d get together and have these reading groups, people would give papers on Heidegger and the empty set, or things in philosophy of law. I just really hated how some of these professors on both sides, frankly, were so dismissive of the other when I felt that there were tools on each side that were really great. After that I found I really had a flavor for teaching. I also thought philosophy was great to do with young people and so I was a part of the Philosophy for Children movement.

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by EDWIN F. ACKERMAN

Claudia Sheinbaum took the helm a year ago riding a high wave. With 60 per cent of the vote and a supermajority for her party MORENA in both chambers, the Mexican President entered office in October 2024 with an approval rating of around 70 per cent – a figure she has not only sustained but during some months surpassed, reaching the 80s, making her among the most popular leaders in the world. With a clear mandate, Sheinbaum has pushed through a slew of constitutional reforms, expanded welfare programmes and successfully navigated a fraught relationship with the Trump administration. Sheinbaum – whose tenure as mayor of Mexico City (2018-2023) saw a 40 per cent drop in the murder rate – has also made inroads into the country’s notorious problem with organised crime: although regional violence remains high and the recent murder of Carlos Manzo, mayor of Uruapan, has dampened any triumphalism, Sheinbaum’s government can boast a 37 per cent reduction in homicides.

The political cycle which began with the 2018 election of Sheinbaum’s predecessor and political mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has been distinguished by significant democratic legitimacy. According to the recently released OECD Trust Survey 54 per cent of Mexicans have a high or moderately high trust in the federal government, well above the average of 39 per cent. A Gallup poll from last year indicated that ‘confidence in national government’ had jumped from 29 per cent to 61 per cent since MORENA took power, and that ‘confidence in the honesty of Mexico’s elections’ had risen by 25 points. The Pew Research Center has likewise shown that Mexicans’ ‘satisfaction with their democracy’ has soared by a remarkable 36 points between 2017 and 2019. This legitimacy is premised on the gains of MORENA’s post-neoliberal social pact – AMLO’s ‘Fourth Transformation’, a national renewal conceived in a lineage of historic upheavals, beginning with the struggle for independence in the 19^th century. During López Obrador’s term real wages went up nearly 30 per cent and over 13 million were lifted out of poverty.

Yet building the transformation’s ‘second storey’, as Sheinbaum has described her mission, has revealed crucial tensions besetting the populist left-wing project: expanding welfare with a dilapidated state apparatus; pursuing neo-developmentalist strategies amid escalating ecological crisis; passing progressive taxation reform in a context of stagnant economic growth; freeing Mexico’s economy from its subordinate status in transnational circuits of capital without abandoning global markets tout court. These interlocking issues illuminate not only the specificities of the Mexican case but the structural limits and strategic dilemmas facing progressive forces worldwide.

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by CAROLE CONCHA BELL

Chile’s new far-right president seeks to recycle the military regime’s political project, risking hard earned advances in human, Indigenous, and environmental rights.

On December 14, Chile elected far-right politician José Antonio Kast as president with 58 percent of the vote, defeating Communist candidate Jeannette Jara, who won 42 percent. The outcome marks a sharp political rupture with the center-left government of outgoing President Gabriel Boric and represents the Chilean left’s worst electoral defeat since the country’s return to democracy in 1990.

Kast’s victory was welcomed by U.S. President Donald Trump and Argentine President Javier Milei, underscoring his alignment with a growing international far-right bloc. Within Chile, however, human rights, Indigenous, and environmental organizations have expressed deep concern about a wide variety of his campaign proposals and his repeated defense of Augusto Pinochet’s bloody military dictatorship. Kast’s family history has also drawn scrutiny: his father was a former registered Nazi Party member who was accused of involvement in human rights abuses during the dictatorship. 

The election was driven in large part by public anxiety over rising crime, increased migration, and economic stagnation during the Boric administration. Kast centered his campaign on these issues, advancing proposals to expel undocumented migrants, strengthen policing and punitive security policies, cut taxes, and reduce state regulation. This law-and-order platform proved electorally effective, allowing him to secure a decisive margin of victory.

Beyond security policy, Kast has also signalled his intentions to deregulate key economic sectors, including aquaculture, and accelerate extractivist policies by speeding up the permitting process and attracting increased foreign investment in the sectors like mining. Critics warn that such measures could weaken environmental oversight and intensify existing conflicts over land, water, and Indigenous rights. As Kast prepares to take office, Chile faces a critical moment, with hard-won advances in human rights, environmental protection, and democratic accountability increasingly under strain.

The Kast Family in Chile

José Antonio Kast’s political rise is best understood from his family’s history, which is deeply tied up with the violence and neoliberal restructuring of Chile’s dictatorship. The Kast family patriarch, Michael Kast Schindele, was a Bavarian lieutenant who joined the Nazi Youth at age 18. After World War II, he assumed a false identity and fled to South America, ultimately settling in the commune of Buin in Chile, where he opened a sausage factory. His role during the dictatorship has been the subject of serious allegations. In a report aired by Chilean TV channel Chilevisión, former detainees identified Kast Schindele and the eldest son Christian as civilian participants in acts of torture. Another survivor, Luis Martínez, testified that Kast Schindele denounced workers as communists and took part in physical assaults, allegedly declaring “we need to kill all of these Marxists” during interrogation sessions.

The family name has also appeared in connection with the Caravan of Paine, a coordinated campaign of repression in which 70 rural workers, supporters of Salvador Allende, were detained, tortured, and disappeared. Paine became one of the regions with the highest concentration of forced disappearances during the Pinochet regime. Survivors and human rights organizations have accused members of the Kast family of playing a direct role in the violence.

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by MEDEA BENJAMIN & NICOLAS J. S. DAVIES

If the United States wants safety at sea, whether in the Caribbean or the Red Sea, it should stop enforcing illegal sanctions by the illegal use of military force.

The United States has now intercepted multiple Venezuelan oil tankers as part of its escalating aggression against Venezuela, while also destroying dozens of small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific under the banner of “drug enforcement,” killing over 100 people whose identities the US has obscured. At the same time, the Trump administration has threatened a naval blockade of Venezuela—a sovereign country with which the United States is not at war.

How can Washington claim the right to seize or blow up vessels, disrupt maritime trade, and kill civilian boaters—while bombing Yemen and condemning its de facto Ansarallah government for intercepting ships in the Red Sea to counter Israel’s genocide in Gaza?

This contrast exposes a stark double standard in US policy. The US government labelled the Ansarallah’s actions as “terrorism”, piracy, and a threat to US national security, even as the Ansarallah government presented plausible legal justifications for its actions based on the laws of war. But Washington has tried to normalize—or even glorify—its own attacks on tankers, pineros (ferries or water-taxis) and fishing boats, which violate the most basic principles of international law.

Beginning in November 2023, Yemen’s Ansarallah movement launched a naval campaign in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Arabian Sea in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza. The Ansarallah publicly announced their criteria, stating they would target only vessels linked to Israel, bound for Israeli ports, owned by Israeli companies, or connected to states materially supporting Israel’s war.

The United States and its allies immediately denounced these actions as criminal. And there were legitimate grounds for scrutiny. Human rights groups raised concerns about attacks that struck vessels without obvious Israeli connections and about the safety and treatment of civilian crews.

Over the course of the campaign, the Ansarallah targeted more than 100 commercial vessels, damaged dozens, sank several, and seized at least one ship outright—the Galaxy Leader—detaining its multinational crew for more than a year before releasing them in connection with Gaza ceasefire negotiations.

But as a matter of law, the Ansarallah consistently framed their actions as a blockade and interdiction during an armed conflict, justified by Israel’s grave breaches of international humanitarian law. That legal framework exists.

Under the Geneva Conventions and customary international law, parties to an armed conflict have the right—and in cases of grave breaches, the obligation—to interdict shipping that materially supports a belligerent committing mass civilian harm. In the case of Israel’s genocide, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found, and the UN General Assembly (UNGA) has affirmed, that all states are obliged to cut off all military and economic support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.

The United States’ response was not to pressure Israel to halt its genocidal assault—an outcome that would have also immediately ended the Ansarallah campaign—but to unleash overwhelming force against Yemen. Beginning in December 2023, Washington organized Operation Prosperity Guardian, a multinational naval deployment backed by extensive US airpower.

Over the following year, the United States and Britain carried out hundreds of airstrikes on Yemen, bombing radar sites, missile launchers, ports, the capital, Sanaa, and other infrastructure. Several hundred Ansarallah fighters were killed, along with scores of civilians. One US strike on the Ras Isa oil terminal killed dozens of African migrants when US bombs hit a detention facility.

But how do the Ansarallah interdictions compare with the Trump administration’s actions toward Venezuela?

On December 10, Donald Trump boasted to reporters, “We have just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela — a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually,” as his administration released video of US Marines rappelling from helicopters onto a civilian oil tanker. This was not a conflict zone. Venezuela is not at war with the United States. There was no UN Security Council authorization, no armed conflict, and no claim of self-defense.

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Chomsky reassessed?

by MICHAEL ALBERT

One of the late acts of Noam Chomsky’s incredible life was to become one of thirty initial co-signers of a document titled “Twenty Theses for Liberation.” Noam didn’t agree with every word, nor did any of its co-signers, not even those who contributed, as Noam did, to its actual words. All the co-signers including Noam did agree, however, on the aim. Propel an on-going conversation to continually update broadly shared vision and strategy. Work to unify a growing left. Win a new world. 

That document, (still available at 4liberation.org) accrued three hundred signers, including ten organizations: Diem25, Academy of Democratic Modernity, Meta Center for Post Capitalist Civilization, Cooperation Jackson, Collaboration for Change, Srsly Wrong, Organizaciija Z’s Participatorno Druzbo, Real Utopia, Demokraisk Omstållning, and ZNetwork. The document highlights gender, race, class, authority, ecology, and internationalism. It does not elevate any one above the rest. It urges mutual aid, collective support, listening, empathy, patient collective self-correction, and outreach. So did Noam lie when he signed it?

As I signed it, I wondered, what if everyone who has learned from Noam and who has appreciated his efforts over the decades decided to give the Twenty Theses a close read? What if lots, and then lots more, decided to sign it and to bring it to still greater attention? Perhaps that could help put movements on a path to change Noam’s epitaph, which he not long ago said he would like to be “He Tried,” to instead be “He Helped.” And to change all of ours as well, when our time comes, to “We Helped” by way of going from 300 signers to 3,000 and then to tens and hundreds of thousands and more, all committed to developing and enacting shared vision and strategy. All working to unite diverse movements to undertake intersecting mutually supportive campaigns. All seeking to win a new world that each helps all to win. Did Noam lie when he signed that? And in his lifetime of literally countless words and deeds, did he lie tens of thousands of times?

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What Noam Chomsky’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein says about progressive politics

by KAVITA KRISHNAN

The Left icon overlooked sexual violence, much like India’s literary and cultural progressives have embraced a man whose rape conviction was overturned.

“I’ve met [all] sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.” That was public intellectual Noam Chomsky’s belligerent reply in 2023 to a newspaper’s question about his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. More recently, Epstein’s emails reveal a close friendship with Chomsky and his wife.

Of particular interest is a testimonial (undated but written in or after 2017) written by Chomsky for Epstein, in which he describes their friendship of six years as a “valuable” and “rewarding” experience, thanks to Epstein’s intellectual breadth and insights, and says that “Jeffrey has repeatedly been able to arrange, sometimes on the spot, very productive meetings with leading figures in the sciences and mathematics, and global politics, people whose work and activities I had looked into though I had never expected to meet them.”

In the infamous BBC Newsnight interview, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor was asked if in retrospect, knowing Epstein was a paedophile and sexual predator, he felt any “guilt, regret, or shame” about his friendship with Epstein. No, he said, “the reason being is that the people that I met and the opportunities that I was given to learn either by him or because of him were actually very useful…(it) had some seriously beneficial outcomes in areas that have nothing to do with (his crimes).”

Both Chomsky and Andrew are saying they don’t regret being Epstein’s friend because through him they could meet useful and important people.

Andrew faces the allegation of raping a young minor girl trafficked by Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein. I must emphasise here that knowing or meeting Epstein does not in any way imply that Chomsky was party to his crimes against girls and women. I’m not suggesting “guilt by association” nor am I interested in a “gotcha” moment at his expense.

But for me the question is this: what does Chomsky’s relationship to Epstein tell us about whether sexual violence survivors matter to our politics – to Left and progressive politics?

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by JINOY JOSE P.

Dear Reader,

Cinema was born oversized. Even before it learned to speak, it learned to tower. The medium never pretended to be modest. It arrived with the self-confidence of a deity descending to earth: light, shadow, and sound arranged on a wall capacious enough to dwarf the human body. Call it a show, spectacle, cathedral, or dreambox—the one thing it never was, in conception or intent, was small.

The Lumière brothers projected their first reels on walls, on sheets, in cafés where people gasped and clutched one another when a train pulled into a station. In India, cinema entered through tents and touring theatres wide enough to mimic the sky. André Bazin wrote that cinema’s primary instinct was “the myth of total cinema”, the desire to recreate life in full, and you feel that instinct in those early accounts: people screaming, children weeping, adults rubbing their eyes at the sorcery of life enlarged.

This is why we called them—from Brando to Dilip Kumar, from Madhubala to Mammootty, from Rajinikanth to Shah Rukh Khan—stars. Not because they were famous. Because we literally saw them above us. A giant face, magnified forty times, holds a power a phone screen cannot simulate.

Size was not merely about scale. It was about mechanics. Film, the physical thing, behaved like a living organism. If you have ever seen a 35mm or 70mm print spool through a projector—celluloid breathing like an animal—you know why Christopher Nolan still talks about film stock as though it were a moral choice. You know why Martin Scorsese fought for decades to preserve it. Susan Sontag, in her essay “The Decay of Cinema”, warned that cinema would lose its soul when it lost its rituals. She was mourning a future we now inhabit.

And then came television.

Television did not kill cinema. It shrank it.

The move from screen-as-sky to screen-as-appliance flattened the metaphysics of the medium. When a cowboy, a drifter, a dictator, a tragic lover, or a cosmic traveller sits in your living room, they are no longer mythic. They are simply visiting. A little dusty. A little too familiar. They are just people who look like they will get up and rummage in your fridge.

Something else happened. The suspension of disbelief dipped. When characters are tiny, we judge them faster. We forgive less. Spectacle becomes “content”. Heroism becomes a trope. Drama becomes a convenience. Jurassic Park becomes “that movie with the dinosaurs” instead of an encounter with something prehistoric and unknowable. Narasimham becomes a vibe rather than a phenomenon.

Cable television amplified the injury. The problem was not quantity. It was ubiquity. Earlier, a film had to sit in you. It had to settle, unclench, make meaning over hours or days. You talked about it with friends. You replayed scenes in your head. Now, it simply moves on to the next thing in the queue. When everything is special, nothing is.

Then came the truly existential threat—mobile phones.

A film made for a forty-foot screen suffers a kind of species extinction when forced into a six-inch rectangle. The horizon, as John Ford tells Spielberg’s avatar, the young Sammy, in The Fabelmans, is no longer north or south; it is the dead middle of a shot built for algorithmic consumption on a platform that does not care whether your film breathes or suffocates.

The pandemic finished what these technologies started. OTT mutated expectations. For three years, we lived in a world where cinema was piped into our homes like groceries. Home viewing should have been supplementary. It became primary. Theatres became optional, then ornamental, and the new gospel of “convenience” asked: Why bother with a hall?

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by MICHAEL K. SMITH

Super-hawk Elliot Abrams is back in the news again, worrying that Donald Trump lacks “clarity” about what he intends to do in Venezuela. Abrams recommends the president eliminate all doubts and ambiguities in his mind and directly attack Venezuelan territory, in order to bring down the “dictator” Nicolas Maduro. 

Abrams, U.S. special envoy to Venezuela during Trump’s first term, said in a recent Foreign Affairs article that the president’s advisors should promptly persuade him that the point of no return has already been passed in Venezuela, and that the only possible outcomes are that either Trump or Maduro will win the contest that is now well underway.  Forthrightly titled, “How To Topple Maduro,” Abrams calls for doing more than blowing up “narco-trafficking boats” (i.e. Caribbean fishing vessels), though he does not go so far as to advocate the deployment of U.S. ground troops in the South American nation.

According to the Mexican daily La Jornada, Abrams wants Washington to destroy Venezuelan’s air defense systems, the F-16s at the air base of Palo Negro, and the Sukhoi jets at the air base in La Orchila, an island one hundred miles off the coast of Venezuela. He also desires to see U.S. attacks against bases in western Venezuela used by the Army of National Liberation (ELN) a Colombian Marxist group allied with Maduro. 

Abrams worries that after a prolonged show of massive U.S. force off the coast of Venezuela, Washington may end up leaving Maduro in power, sending a signal to the world that it has declined from superpower status to the “pitiful helpless giant” that Richard Nixon feared the U.S. was becoming by not being aggressive enough in Vietnam. Such an outcome, he feels, would only benefit the Venezuelan “regime”, as well as irrationally hostile countries (presumably) like China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran.

Abrams nowhere takes note of the huge risks U.S. military escalation necessarily carries with it, namely, that it might provoke a Vietnam-style bloodbath or worse, after uniting all of Latin America against Washington’s unprovoked aggression. Even Colombia, which regards the Marxist ELN affiliated with Maduro as a drug-trafficking terrorist group, has made it very clear it will not tolerate a U.S. attack on Venezuela. If Washington overthrows Maduro and Venezuela turns to prolonged popular resistance via guerrilla war and sabotage, expect a large number of Americans to return home in body bags.

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by B. R. GOWANI

sometimes it happens that intense hate turns into love
this happened with our Dear Beloved Leader, Nobel Dove
he was not religious, but was never far from religious stuff
his talk, mind, morality spoke a lot, since he was a Jesus buff

then one day it happened, our Dear Leader thought
by end of this century, Islam is going to take #1 slot
what’s the use of remaining a Christian and become #two
He converted to Islam and offered prayer as Muslim anew

His racist Islamophobic advisor leaked the Leader’s praying pic
our Dear Leader felt like he was beaten with a back stick
advisor right away ordered ICE to arrest our Leader Dear
Dear Leader was put on a plane headed to an Islamic sphere

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by YVES ENGLER

Mark Carney is a ‘lying Liberal’, not a defender of international law, let alone an anti-imperialist. The prime minister’s speech in Davos reflects a long Liberal tradition of seeking to convince people to ‘judge what I say, not what I do’.

At the World Economic Forum in Switzerland yesterday Carney gave a speech challenging Donald Trump and defending sovereignty. He was widely lauded for explicitly criticizing the so-called international rules-based order.

Liberal Canadian politicians are adept at rhetorical flourishes and too often liberal, even left-minded people buy their snake oil. But Carney has an actual record and except for a small positive shift towards China — driven by corporate Canada — that record is highly imperialistic.

Days ago, Carney said he would join the Trump-chaired, international law violating, so-called ‘Gaza Board of Peace’. The PM has repeatedly said Canada would only accept a “Zionist Palestinian state” and his foreign affairs minister, Anita Anand, described Canada’s “unwavering support for Israel’s security.” In practice, this means refusing to uphold Canadian law — on arms sales, registered charities, foreign enlistment and war criminals in Canada — vis a vis a genocidal apartheid state.

Two weeks ago, Carney “welcomed” the US kidnapping Venezuela’s president in a crass violation of international law that killed about 100 people. Canadian soldiers working through NORAD and Operation Caribbe, as well as integrated in US units, likely assisted US violence on Venezuela.

Last week Carney echoed US/Israeli statements on Iran. Israel was hoping to reignite its summer war on that country, which Carney backed. In June Canada’s PM immediately labelled Israel’s destruction of multiple buildings in Tehran and the assassination of numerous scientists and military officials as “defending itself”. A month ago, foreign minister Anand publicly rejected restarting diplomatic relations with Tehran. (Canada has sanctions on Iran, labels the country a state-sponsor of terror and lists part of its military a terrorist organization.)

Carney’s Canada remains part of the Haiti Core Group, which has been dictating that country’s affairs since the US/France/Canada overthrew its elected government in 2004. Canada remains part of the imperialistic Five Eyes, NATO and NORAD. Last year Carney hosted the G7.

Under pressure from Trump, Carney has radically increased Canadian military spending. This country’s armed forces are structured to assist US global power projection. Despite Trump’s annexation threats, it’s unclear if a single one of the hundreds of treaty-level agreements, memoranda of understanding and bilateral forums on defence Canada has with the US military has been paused or canceled. The Canadian military has maintained a slew of aggressive international deployments alongside the US. Joint naval patrols in far flung oceans, US arms testing in Canada and officer exchanges all seem to be continuing as usual. In “Canadian soldiers have been carrying out Donald Trump’s orders”, a January 20 Economist article notes, “there may be hundreds of Canadian soldiers serving in the United States. Publicly available information suggests that several are deployed within units that have been carrying out some of Mr. Trump’s most controversial orders” in Venezuela, El Salvador and elsewhere.

In my 2020 book The House of Mirrors: Justin Trudeau’s foreign policy I have a section titled “Judge What I Say, Not What I Do”. It’s relevant to understanding Carney’s speech to the World Economic Forum. It notes:

“Early in the Liberals reign Stéphane Dion presented ‘a guiding principle for Canada in the world’. During a major policy speech, the foreign minister claimed ‘responsible conviction’ was the principle motivating the government’s international policy. The ‘responsible conviction’ label was a way to distinguish the Liberal brand from the Conservatives. It supposedly also offered a moral-philosophical basis for signing off on the controversial light armoured vehicle sale to Saudi Arabia.

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