Ed Broadbent announces new thinktank
June 18, 2011 - 2:23am
This is very exciting and something that's been needed for a long time.
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How do "think tanks" actually work? My understanding via right wing think tanks is that they are akin to P.R. companies, in that they intend to shape what our ever gullible media talks about.
But is this also a way of garnering academic support and ideas through publishing? This is all sans the usual sardonic sarcasm you should always be on gaurd against when I post... I honestly have no idea, but want to know the nuts and bolts of this.
Is the Douglas-Coldwell Foundation a "think tank"? I sincerely don't know how these things are defined. Would the Broadbent Institute be competition?
In 1971 this dream became a reality with the establishment of the Douglas-Coldwell Foundation with Tommy Douglas as it's founding President. In the words of Tommy Douglas, the Foundation would be "a gadfly to provoke discussion…to keep the movements on the left-whether the co-operative movement, the trade union movement or the political movement- from getting in a rut."
In 1987, our numbers were strengthened through a merger with Toronto's Ontario Woodsworth Memorial Foundation.
http://www.dcf.ca/en/about_us.htm
Restricted as I am to being a one man think can, it strikes me that it's all for naught if the ideas don't get picked up on and talked about in the media. How do you do this? Pick up the tab for editors and reporters at bars? If so, fundraising will be a challenge.
We can't offer Senate appointments to them. Other government jobs?
Think tank
A think tank (or policy institute) is an organization that conducts research and engages in advocacy in areas such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military or technology issues. Most think tanks are non-profit organizations, which some countries such as the United States and Canada provide with tax exempt status. Other think tanks are funded by governments, advocacy groups, or businesses, or derive revenue from consulting or research work related to their projects.[1] A few have endowments.
indepth reading provided @ your leisure!
I like this idea - sure beats the Fraser Institute for the pasture of turfed neocons!
Sounds like a very positive development. The right is so far ahead of the left when it comes to "institutionalizing" their movements and providing a long-term perspective. I'm not sure how much sense it makes for the NDP to provide funding though. It's typical that those who pay the bills want control. Would this undermine the long-term perspective in exchange for short-term (election to election) positioning?
It is providing start up money. Let's see how it goes and get behind it.
I think it's long overdue so I'm definitely positive about it.
Great there are now two on the left (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Broadbent Institute) vs three on the right (Fraser Institute, Manning Institute and the CD Howe.
so he wants a think tank to explore social democratic policy, but he won't make a peep in convention about expunging ndp 'socialism'. Got it...tanks Ed.
Shhhh.... NDPP, we can only solve one issue at a time. It was more pressing that the NDP removed the last bit of socialism from the party before anything else. Remember it is all about getting elected in 2015 according to Fidel.
It was, is, and always will be only about getting elected. For Broadbent. For Layton. For Harper.
I gather that this is supposed to be like the Manning Centre - not focused directly on research in the way CCPA is but rather being about policy design and developing political talent.
I gather that this is supposed to be like the Manning Centre - not focused directly on research in the way CCPA is but rather being about policy design and developing political talent.
Add media messaging of NDP positions.
It was, is, and always will be only about getting elected. For Broadbent. For Layton. For Harper.
And all us lefties, too. Marx said to win the battle of democracy, meaning to overthrow the bourgeois phony democracy. And right now there is no phonier, bullshit democracy than our Worstminster FirstPastThePost system.
The NDP pledges to fix the bourgeois electoral system in Ottawa.
Modern democracy will be of utmost importance to any possible political supremacy of the working class and something the phony opposition "Liberals" have never dared to mention in any "red book".
Any truth to the rumors that the Young New Democrats are going to start a "think juice box"?
Hmm. Maybe we should set up a Stalinist Think Tank named in honour of Hardial Bains.
Is there a reason you keep bringing up Bains? I hope you're not implying that I'm a supporter of the ML's.
If anyone can convince me that there are any fundamental differences between Ed Broadbent ( supposedly a social democrat) and Bob Rae ( definitely a member of what Christopher Hedges calls the Liberal Class), then maybe I could get excited about this think tank he is proposing. Otherwise, who cares? Going down that road is a dead end - its been tried and the capitalists have won. The only way to go is to develop a counter hegemonic program to challenge capitalism. That is why we need to keep references to democratic socialism, the fundamental illegitimacy of capitalism and the supremacy of the working class in the pre-amble to the Constitution.
Is there a reason you keep bringing up Bains? I hope you're not implying that I'm a supporter of the ML's.
some of his stuff on the ndp is bang on nonetheless
Can you link to it? I wouldn't mind reading it. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't being accused of being a Maoist or something.
It was, is, and always will be only about getting elected. For Broadbent. For Layton. For Harper.
And all it's ever been about for me is running a huge blanking press. Because it's my job. It's what the people who pay me expect. If I don't do that, I won't get paid.
The leader of a political party does his or her best to get elected. I'd be offended, volunteering in an election if they were doing anything else, because they'd be wasting my time and energy.
Political leaders do not lead. We lead-- they follow from the front. If we want a left wing NDP, then we have to lead it to the left by changing the public discourse.
But compared to countries with social democrats in power and strong opposition long time, Canada rates among the most unequal.
Therefore, Canada's social democrats should be a significant improvement over the party currently wielding 110% dictatorial power with just 24% of the eligible vote under them.
These well funded Bay St. stooges in phony majority government could be very beatable in four years, and they know it.
In the June 18 issue of New Socialist, Murray Cooke argues that "based on the parameters of postwar social democracy around the world, the NDP is no longer a social democratic party. Around the world, social democracy is either dead or has lost all meaning." If you accept this argument, which I do, how can I get excited about Ed Broadbent's announcement? Given that social democracy is dead, and the NDP long ago gave up the pretense of trying to reform capitalism, then the NDP and Ed Broadbent have to be something else. I would contend that, like Bob Rae, Broadbent is a member of the Liberal Class that is also effectively dead as any kind of buffer between the excesses of capitalism and the working and middle classes. So what will this think tank do? How will it be any different from any of the existing neo-liberal think tanks?
Well if Murray Cooke ignores the fact that Sweden, Denmark and Norway still manage to plow a third of their GDPs back into social spending, then I guess he might be making a point with people who just don't care to know otherwise. And they have strong federal governments insisting that those taxes be paid and collected.
And if Murray Cooke wants to ignore statistics that show Canada's federal governments have been collecting overall federal tax revenues that are below the OECD average as a percentage of GDP, then I'm not sure what point Murray Cooke is trying to make about social democratic countries.
And we're pretty sure Cooke will not want to know that Canada is well below the EU-15 average when it comes to collecting overal federal tax revenues, again as a percentage of GDP.
What does Murray Cooke say to any of this? Or does he prefer dealing in anti-NDP rhetoric rather than facts and statistics?
It says in his tagline in the article being referred to that Murray Cooke is a member of the NDP and volunteered on a successful campaign last election.
If anyone can convince me that there are any fundamental differences between Ed Broadbent ( supposedly a social democrat) and Bob Rae ( definitely a member of what Christopher Hedges calls the Liberal Class), then maybe I could get excited about this think tank he is proposing. Otherwise, who cares? Going down that road is a dead end - its been tried and the capitalists have won. The only way to go is to develop a counter hegemonic program to challenge capitalism. That is why we need to keep references to democratic socialism, the fundamental illegitimacy of capitalism and the supremacy of the working class in the pre-amble to the Constitution.
I am sympathetic to that point of view, but at the same time, it doesn't mean that one cannot be playing more than one game at once. I think we often get at each other here, not because we have fundamental dissagreements, but more often because some are talking about things as they are, and figuring out how best to deal with it, while some come at the discussion from the perspective of how we want things to be. And the same person can enter discussions from the other perspective in the next discussion.
Hey. If nothing else, it creates employment for moderators.
As for the preamble, I told my wife yesterday, as our huge rose bush is about to explode in bloom any moment, that I was going to start calling them 'Gorgonzolas', to see if the scent will change.
If we want a more left wing NDP (myself, I think what we need more is somekind of revolutionary spirit) we have to change the public discourse, and move the center back our way. Accomplishing that is no small thing... and no one has a magic bullet solution to the problems involved, because there is none. Various things have to be done at the same time. It's good that Broadbent is starting a think tank. And it would be good if we did our best to discredit, attack, and generally muddy the waters of think tanks.
@Ken Burch I am not accusing you of being a CPC-ML supporter. In fact I thnk your analysis is consistently good!
Yet if we are going to have a jingoistic monarchistic warmongering Social Democratic think tank, why not have a bureaucratic centralizing cult-of-personality Stalinist think-tank, and why not even a petty-bourgeois middle class college student ideologically whiter-than-white exclusionary Trotskyist think tank?
All of this stuff, if you will excuse the expression, is Taurean Scatology. B.S. Think tanks are for rich people to make mathematical models and extrapolate existing data, and write essays on the sorry state of the world. No chickens are going in any pots. "The great unwashed" plebeans such as myself are kept away.
There is no substitute for rasing socialist consciousness in and organizing the working class (and friendly others) both into unions and politically. Only then will we get the change we want to see, economically and politically. There is still a chance for the NDP to do that, however there seems to be a meme in Canada that if you do that you are somehow disqualified from having power.
It says in his tagline in the article being referred to that Murray Cooke is a member of the NDP and volunteered on a successful campaign last election.
And? He's saying social democracy is dead around the world. Are we not supposed to challenge that notion?
Let's not fool ourselves into thinking every other rich capitalist country is as low on the social achievement order as Canada when we are dead last according to OECD reports. Criticizing social democrats for not creating socialist utopia in a neoliberal world order of things is a subtle argument for the stoogeaucracy in Ottawa not against. And it's not a very strong one at all. Inequality and poverty in Canada really is that bad that electing a social democrat government in Canada, and by dierct comparison of social democrat performances in other rich countries, should make them a better choice than the stooges in hand in Ottawa.
The choice for Canadians right now is one of social democrats vs epic stoogery and pandering to corporate welfare bums by Ottawa not social democrats versus Jesus' communism or anything close to the promise of nirvana inside of just one four-year term in government for the NDP. There will be no red book of lies and half-hearted promises scabbed together at the last by anyone in NDP. That we can count on.
I just think it is curious that for putting forwards a series of relatively uncontroversial points about social democracy and the NDP, you basically rail into a series of non-sequiturs about federal tax revenues and then accuse him of "dealing in anti-NDP rhetoric rather than facts and statistics?" based on two lines of his original article (here). Especially when this guy you accuse of "dealing in anti-NDP rhetoric" is a member of the NDP!
And so if you have nothing to say again, I'll be ignoring you and your rabid anti-NDP rhetoric as usual.
In terms of the kind of work that is done... correct, like the Manning Centre rather than the CCPA.
And no, not about madia messaging. Think tanks do all kinds of work, but the best generalization is that it focuses on long term and developmental [and institutions] in a way that parties just dont do.
The Labour Party has always had a number of think tanks 'orbiting' it. The Fabian Society is not typical. When you think about- it is easy to see that when a 'think tank' is as modest as 2 people, it can do a great deal that the party will just never have the focus for.
And the independence is more important for that longer term nose off the grindstone discipline, than it is needed for independence from the decisions and policy perse of the party.
Because if the NDP was 'doing' an institute directly, it would end up being glorified messaging development.
I don't think I've said anything "anti-NDP", much less "rabid" in this thread. All I did was point out the guy you accused of "dealing in anti-NDP rhetoric" was in fact a member of the NDP!
I honestly did not know that Cooke was involved in an NDP election campaign. I don't maintain a mental database of names of everyone ever associated with the NDP in every area of the country as difficult to believe as that may seem.
But it did appear to me that Cooke's comment was being used in this thread to sully the ahievements of social democrats around the world in general. No one here has anything to say about poverty reduction and social democracy in the Nordic countries compared to the sad situation here in the Northern Puerto Rico. And I do realize there won't be anything further from the anti-NDP rhetoricals in that regard.
You're much better at posting anti-NDP gibberish and personal attacks than discussing actual social democracy as it exists around world.
I post gibberish and personal attacks? That's pretty rich, considering your posting style.
Well when it comes to identifying neoliberalism in Canada versus blaming a small NDP prairie province for everything wrong under the sun, we know which side of the fence yer on. Back on the other side o' the line, spiffy.
Nice strawman. Say, aren't you supposed to be ignoring me (see post #30)?
I see youre posting something but I can't tell what it is. It's completely blank. Sorry.