Shame On Us

How sad that Canada has come to this. Stephen Harper is an habitual liar with no regard for ordinary people, he has shut down Parliament to save his own skin in the middle of the worst economic crisis in almost 80 years, setting a very dangerous precedent by doing so, and people are mad at the opposition parties. I really don't understand.

People are more concerned about public image than honesty and the ability to govern with the citizens in mind. It seems to me that many Canadians would rather Harper stay on as Prime Minister and ruin the country by pursuing his laissez-faire capitalist programme, than have the coalition safeguard our social institutions and work to fix a fast ailing economy that is inextricably tied to the disastrous mess happening in the United States.

Stephen Harper has used propaganda and scare tactics to confuse, divide and mislead people in order to retain power. He has succeeded in alienating Quebecers right before a provincial election, by accusing the opposition of forming an unholy alliance with Separatists (and Socialists), when his Party has done the same not once, but twice, in order to try and bring down previous Liberal governments. Not to mention the can of worms he opened by standing up in the House of Commons and declaring Quebec a nation not too long ago. Furthermore, he has repeatedly misled the Canadian people by insisting that there was no economic crisis and that he would not run a budget deficit, most recently during the last federal election campaign. As we saw in last week's Economic Update, he tried to use this crisis to further his ideological agenda which is anathema to the vast majority of Canadians. His actions and words are dishonest and hypocritical in the extreme.

Despite all of this and according to the latest polls, support for the Conservatives is stronger than ever, and the amount of outrage at the opposition parties even among traditional Liberal and NDP supporters is high.

This just confirms that people are brainwashed enough to vote and speak out against their own best interests. However, I believe in the end, the Governor General made the right decision.

The Conservatives will force another election when the House of Commons reconvenes, after ten months of inaction on economic matters, and they will win a majority. They will use the worsening economic crisis to scrap all the social programmes we've built up since the 1950s, sell off valuable government assets to their rich friends at rock bottom prices, and continue to shift the tax burden from those who have the most to those who have the least, in effect continuing the laissez-faire capitalist policies that are responsible for the current financial and social crisis in the first place.

The economy is going to disintegrate with the Conservatives at the helm. Wages will be cut, jobs will be lost, companies will shut down, there will be massive inflation, food will become prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of people, and we'll have no one to blame but ourselves.

Like junkies who have to hit rock bottom before they can save themselves, we will all have to suffer for what this government is doing, and when people finally wake up, it's going to get very ugly, very fast.

Only then will we be able imagine building a new society, and believe me it won't include the Conservative Party of Canada.

Scammed!

Banks and multinationals are robbing the vast majority of ordinary people by means of a financial and economic system whereby money can be made from nothing, producing nothing of real value, with full backing of the taxpayer through government bailouts should the shady economic practices be exposed for the illusion they are.

Simultaneously, this same system dominates the vast majority of working people of every social class on two fronts; by holding power over people's livelihoods by the ever decreasing purchasing power of salaried labour through inflation, wage caps, or the threat of unemployment on the one hand and by brainwashing people into leading a shamelessly consumerist lifestyle, often going into chronic debt while doing so, on the other.

The system inherently leads to a widening gap between rich and poor, concentrating ever greater amounts of wealth and power into the hands of the very few, while alienating and marginalizing everyone else. We can plainly see that nations with the greatest amount of income disparity and the weakest social fabric are the ones that are hit hardest by the consequences of these economic charades.

These same banks and companies are managed by strict adherents to a fanatical economic ideology that does not believe in rules, regulations, or social safety nets except when it suits their agenda. Governments are held hostage by the dictatorship of the economy, and have no choice but to either collaborate by meeting their demands, or risk having too many angry unemployed people with a lot of time on their hands. Either way, the rich get what they want, with no guarantees that the economy will recover. Everyone else simply has to tighten their belts, while trying to keep the system afloat, thus continuing the cycle.

People are starting to realize the extent of this scam and are beginning to speak out against the collusion of government with business interests, but they also feel powerless to change the status quo.

Ask yourself why so many people don't bother to vote? Ask yourself why these economic practices are allowed in the first place? Ask yourself where all of that money went?

Books You Should Read II

Theodor Adorno
"The Culture Industry"

Noam Chomsky
"Chomsky On Anarchism"

Herbert Marcuse
"One-Dimensional Man"

Margaret Atwood
"Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth"

Alan Weisman
"World Without Us"

Jean Baudrillard
"The Illusion of the End"

Year To Date Shock Market Performance

Here are some graphs to illustrate the underlying "strength" of the global economy. Remember, we've been hearing from all the "experts" and government "managers" ad nauseam, that the fundamentals of our economy are strong, until last week-end. Almost overnight, it suddenly became necessary to have a $700 billion dollar taxpayer cash injection to keep the economy from a complete meltdown. As is plainly evident from the graphs below, the trend, despite much violent turbulence, is that the markets are shedding value at a steady and accelerating rate.

U.S. markets have lost about 25% of their value during the past year. Tokyo's Nikkei lost almost 23% since the beginning of 2008. European markets fared slightly worse with London's FTSE losing 23% and Frankfurt and Paris shedding around 27%. Toronto fared slightly better, falling only about 17% since the beginning of 2008, cushioned by the record prices of commodities such as oil and gold.

The next three months should be very interesting, given the upcoming elections in both Canada and the United States, and the holiday season. My bet is the markets will continue to tumble, especially when frightened consumers tighten their belts, keep from spending their money, and forgo Christmas shopping altogether. I can hear retailers world-wide trembling already.

The Revolution is Exactly 400 Days Away

I happened to come across these videos on YouTube. The first was published on August 25th, 2007, with a prediction, the second was posted 400 days later. They might mean nothing to you, or you will understand and want to act. The way we live is about to change. Are you prepared?

Fast forward 400 days.

Books You Should Read

Gore Vidal
"United States Essays 1952-1992"
"Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace"

John Ralston Saul
"Voltaire's Bastards, the Dictatorship of Reason in the West"
"On Equilibrium"
"The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World"
"The Unconscious Civilization"

Jean Baudrillard
"The System Of Objects"
"La société de consommation"
"The Perfect Crime"
"Fatal Strategies"
"Utopia Deferred, Writings for Utopie (1967-1978)"

Gwynne Dyer
"War"
"The Mess They Made, the Middle East After Iraq"

Naomi Klein
"The Shock Doctrine"
"No Logo"

Jacques Attali
"Une brève histoire de l'avenir" (soon to be published in English as "A Brief History of the Future")

Christopher Hitchens
"god is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything"

Thorstein Veblen
"Conspicuous Consumption"

Sir Steven Runciman
"The History of the Crusades"

Paul Virilio
"Open Sky"

Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer
"Pure War"

Market Meldown, Corporate Bailouts and Government

The United States is not a democracy and has not had a capitalist economy for a very long time. Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky have been saying this since the 1970s but many people chose not to listen, and look at where we are now.

Our friends south of the border live in a corporatist republic where government, regardless of party affiliation, works hand in hand with big corporations, who pocket as much of the profits as they can, and ship them off-shore to avoid paying taxes. Neither have much responsibility towards their citizens or their consumers. The citizen/consumer, in turn, feels alienated, disenfranchised, and without hope for change. This only reinforces the status quo, both politically and economically.

The U.S. economy is starting to show the symptoms of years of deregulation, mergers, outsourcing, and downsizing. The virtual eradication of the manufacturing sector in favour of a "service" based economy that does not produce anything of concrete value has annihilated their account balance. Their over-reliance on credit has sunk them irreversibly in debt, largely to China, Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia.

The problem we are seeing because of these self-inflicted policies is being exacerbated by the widening gap between rich and poor. By concentrating the vast majority of the wealth in the hands of so few, the economic base of consumers in a large market is effectively wiped out.

Consumers are broke, out of a job or working for a hideously low wage, and their homes are being repossessed. Their credit cards are maxed out and they can't get another mortgage. Their taxes pay for corporate bailouts and weapons, against the wishes of the vast majority.

The plummeting standards in education provide for a huge pool of ignorant, malleable citizens, which is very convenient when in a state of permanent war, but does not make for a strong body politic.

My point is, how long is it going to take people to realize this is not the way we want to live? How long are people going to sit by until they realize our outdated systems do not work?. Balance and clear-headed thinking are needed. Government has to stop treating its citizens like children, and the citizens, for their part, must take a larger part of the decision making process for the greater good. Citizen participation is essential.

Remember that we are the government, we are the economy, we are the nation.

We do not get the government we deserve, we get the government that we are willing to tolerate.

Canada in Afghanistan, Opium and the War on Terror

The easiest and most logical way to solve the Afghan débacle, is to let the Pashtuns harvest the poppies they are already growing, and sell them in a government market, to be used for the production of medicinal opiate derivatives and analgesics. These farmers would have something to do other than shoot at foreign soldiers, and the war would be over. They could make money legally, raise a family, and have a reason to live. The government would have a cash crop to help pay for the reconstruction of a country that has been at war for thirty years.

But that is unlikely to happen because big chemical companies don't want the extra competition. The excuses thrown to the media, however, conform to the current stance on drugs. We might have been a little distracted of late, but there still is a "War on Drugs".

So we are back to square one, the War on Terror, and Canada's military and humanitarian involvement in Afghanistan. There are three options here. Either this is a real war, which entails enacting conscription and shipping over one million troops to get this over with in a timely and decisive way. We can squat on Afghan soil with a brigade or two for the next hundred years with a slow painful stream of bloodletting, in which case we'll finally get tired of shipping our troops home in body bags, and bring them home. Or we pull our troops out now, and let the Americans fight their "war on terror" on their own. The choice is ours to make. I say we let our brave soldiers come home. What say you? What say our politicians?

The Idiocy of Polls

In view of the recent polls that suggest Stephen Harper's conservatives have a comfortable lead over the opposition parties, I have just one thing to say. Polls are nonsense. I can find at least three other polls online, conducted during the same period, with the conservatives and the liberals neck and neck. So what's the deal?

According to Jean Baudrillard "Polls manipulate the undecidable. Do they affect votes? True or false? Do they yield exact photographs of reality, or mere tendencies, or a refraction of this reality in a hyperspace of simulation...?... it is ultimately only members of the political classes who believe in them... this is not due to a particular stupidity (although we can't rule this out), but because the polls are homogeneous to the way contemporary politics operate. Ultimately though, who else does [believe in polls]? It is the burlesque spectacle of the hyperrepresentative (that is, not representative at all) political sphere that people savour and sample through opinion polls and the media. There is a jubilation proper to this spectacular nullity, and the final form that it takes is that of statistical contemplation. Such contemplation, moreover, is always coupled, as we know, with a profound disappointment - the species of disillusion that the polls provoke by absorbing all public speaking, by short-circuiting every means of expression".

In other words, don't believe the hype, learn to think for yourself and make up your own damn mind about the issues.