It doesn't matter where you look, when researching the myth that corporate tax cuts stimulate the economy, creates jobs, and pay for themselves, every expert debunks those notions.
Of course I'm not including most Republicans, Tea Party members, or corporate executives, who are only looking out for their own interests. Even former advisor to Ronald Reagan, David Stockman, says that it has to end. He told Keith Olbermann that it was "insanity to give money to the top 2% of wage earners, so they could go buy jewelry at Tiffany's."
Harper's corporate tax cuts and reduction to the GST, which again helps those with disposable income the most, will cost every Canadian over seventeen hundred dollars. And it is the gift that keeps on giving, as it will drain fourteen billion dollars a year from our income, at a time when we have a record deficit and debt.
Stimulating the economy - For every dollar given to unemployment insurance, $ 1.60 is put back into economic activity. For every dollar of corporate tax cuts, only 30 cents goes back. We lose 70 cents on every dollar.
Under Harper and Flaherty our economy has lost 42 billion dollars, that could have gone toward paying down our debt. But instead we have to add additional debt so that we can give more money to the wealthy.
Economist Armine Yalnizyan says that the money should go toward repairing our crumbling infrastructure, but the Canada Action Plan barely touched the surface. Of course when you look at the fact that some of the projects included building a circus school and $ 800,000 went toward financing a single CFL game, what hope is there?
Corporations may be getting a break, but they aren’t responsible for public infrastructure. Governments are. We are. It is a false economy to stick the next generation with an unnecessarily high price tag for what should be happening now – rebuilding the foundation for business, family and community needs everywhere, while the cost of borrowing is at historic lows and unemployment is still high.
Job Creator - Another myth. Corporate tax cuts do not create jobs. According to Alan Blinder, professor and co-director of Princeton University's Center for Economic Policy Studies:
We could get some substantial job creation by simply reprogramming the $75 billion that would be saved over the next two years by not extending the upper-bracket Bush tax cuts and spending it instead on unemployment benefits, food stamps, and the like."
If a corporation wants to invest in a region, taxes are only a minor consideration. They look to a good infrastructure, and a promising labour pool. This means healthy, educated and experienced workers. Again according to economist Armine Yalnizyan:
There are many things that drive business investment practices, and while taxes are a consideration they are not the primary factor in investment decisions. The historic evidence shows a commitment to this strategy is a costly faith-based proposition.
Costly indeed. And who bears the brunt of those costs? We do.
Corporate Tax Cuts Pay for Themselves - This is now being called 'Voodoo economics" a term first used by George Bush Sr. when critiquing Ronald Reagan's notion that corporate tax cuts pay for themselves. They absolutely do not. They contribute to economic decline and unmanageable debt.
The only ones touting that line with any conviction are the Tea Party crew and Sarah Palin.
We need to break down these myths about corporate tax cuts. The decline in economic growth matches the decline in the amount of taxes corporations pay and the burden placed on the rest of us to finance them.
I posted over a year ago on the Harper government's secret plans to end voter subsidies. Secret because few in the media reported on it. But MP Steve Fletcher granted an interview to the Winnipeg Free Press, in which he revealed that he would be attempting to add more seats in rural areas and Alberta, hoping to create a neoconservative dynasty. And that he would be putting an end to voter subsidies.
Voter subsidies were put in place by Jean Chretien, to replace corporate donations, as a result of protest, that the country's business elite was having far too much control over the politicians they financed. This amounts to less than two dollars for every vote cast, that went to the chosen party, enabling them to continue to operate.
The Conservatives don't need this, because corporate money flows to them through business financed think tanks and AstroTurf groups, like the Fraser Institute, the National Citizens Coalition and the Manning Centre for Democracy (started with a ten million dollar donation from one individual), and countless others.
In an interview with Postmedia News, Harper revealed that he would make ending the subsidies a key part of the Conservatives’ campaign platform. “A subsidy where parties make no effort to raise money is not acceptable, I don’t think, to Canadian taxpayers,” said the Prime Minister. Opponents to the subsidy cut say Harper is hampering other parties’ ability to raise funds outside of the private sector, giving the Tories a big advantage because of their ties to big business.
"Ties to big business"? Heck, they are big business. The only thing grassroots about them now is the grass they get on their expensive Italian leather shoes, when they leave the posh resorts where they are wined and dined for lucrative contracts.
Harper's former chief of staff, Guy Giorno was the top lobbyist for the oil industry. His new chief of staff, Nigel Wright, is a lobbyist for Lockheed Martin, who is sticking us with those damn F-35s, because no one else wants them.
They are being nicknamed the "flying brick" or "Thud” (the sound the plane made when it hit the ground after failing to clear a runway, a rather common occurrence), comparing them to similar used in Vietnam.
And Harper is saying that tax payers object to the few million that our democratic votes provide to our chosen parties. Where was he when we were objecting to his $60 billion in corporate tax cuts?
There was an excellent letter in the North Shore News, which said in part:
Harper wants to undo this, and it's obvious why. Reverting to a reliance on private donors is clearly most helpful to parties who serve the interests of wealthy individuals and organizations. The Tories certainly fit that description. Harper's plan has nothing to do with fairness to taxpayers and everything to do with giving his party an edge. It should be rejected.
This campaign strategy could backfire, because Harper has clearly set his party up as the best friend the corporate elite ever had. And his policies that have favoured Canada's wealthiest citizens, have been to the detriment of the average Canadian, including the 125 billion dollar bank bailout with no strings attached.
The Conservatives have all the money and are using it to act in our worst interests. And that will be the choice next election. Corporations or Canadians.
Obviously I don't want anyone jumping out the window. The question is only symbolic, but it's one we should be asking ourselves.
My parents lived through the Depression and anytime I discussed it, especially with my mother, I would always hear how the wealthy people, who had lost their fortunes, were jumping out of windows. They had gambled and lost and had no idea how to get their fortunes back.
But instead of jumping out of windows, the wealthy came to us and said that they were too big to fail. So we patted them on the back and gave them our money, with the reassuring words of "there, there now. It will be alright". Because we believed that everyone was suffering and sharing the burden of the collapse.
There was an understanding that the wealthy would step back. That corporations would suspend bonuses to their executives. That they would sell their private jets and art collections. That they would cancel lavish vacations and retreats. But that never happened.
Instead they used our money to reward themselves for their failure. Not a tear fell into the Perrier. Not a second of remorse. Not a window even opened a crack.
And as we watched our deficit and debt escalate because of it, we were constantly being told that so many things we took for granted may be lost. Things like healthcare, education and old age security.
And instead of adjusting Canada Pension so that many of our seniors can get out of poverty, Jim Flaherty is going to privatize it, giving the wealthy even more of our money to gamble with.
And as they gamble away not only our future but the futures of our children and grandchildren, Stephen Harper is determined to give the wealthy even more of our money.
More corporate tax cuts. UNFUNDED tax cuts. They are not being paid out of a surplus of money because they have done so much to improve our lot. WE will have to BORROW the money to give to THEM.
Will someone please tell me that this is a bad dream and I will wake up and be reassured that there are adults holding the public purse. Adults with math skills. Adults who give a damn about us.
I read a bit of a posting on the Heritage Foundation website, something I do occasionally. Visit neocon websites to try and figure out how they could possibly be so wrong. And in an attempt to justify taxcuts, they mention the roaring 20's.
The tax cuts of the 1920s: Tax rates were slashed dramatically during the 1920s, dropping from over 70 percent to less than 25 percent. What happened? Personal income tax revenues increased substantially during the 1920s, despite the reduction in rates. Revenues rose from $719 million in 1921 to $1164 million in 1928, an increase of more than 61 percent.
According to then-Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon: The history of taxation shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid. The high rates inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business and invest it in tax-exempt securities or to find other lawful methods of avoiding the realization of taxable income. The result is that the sources of taxation are drying up; wealth is failing to carry its share of the tax burden; and capital is being diverted into channels which yield neither revenue to the Government nor profit to the people.
The logic is that if taxes are too high, people will simply find more ways to avoid paying them. The author also fails to mention that incomes between 1921 and 1928 for the upper echelon, were abnormally high.
But even if we give them that. If we lower taxes more people will pay them. The exact opposite is happening today. The wealthy, despite our generosity, continue to find ways to avoid paying taxes. It's what they do. It's the game they play.
The Religious Right who is providing much of the oxygen for the Harper government, constantly suggest that homosexuality is destroying the moral fabric of our country and risking "the family".
But the "sin" that threatens us the most is not homosexuality (which is only a sin because they say so). It's GREED. Greed that has become so raw, it's now pornographic. You feel like you should be looking away.
Maybe published photos of corporate executives should come with the customary black band over their eyes now, so they can't be identified.
And what I would like to know is, if our money has given the wealthy a soft place to land, who's holding our safety net?
"The test of serious moral commitment to the family is a willingness to spend public money. Effective child protection, universal access to health care, affordable child care, first-rate primary and secondary education - these are the building blocks of the protective arch that society must raise over its families. This institutional arch doesn't come cheap, but those exponents of family values who won't stump up for it are just engaging in cheap talk." - Michael Ignatieff (1)
In Michael Ignatieff's year end interview, he claimed that his Party would be focusing their attention on the middle class. Some in the media are suggesting that Rob Ford, Toronto's new neoconservative mayor, is representing the middle class, which is pure nonsense.
Because to me the middle class were never mean, at least not collectively. Rob Ford represents millionaires who want all services privatized so they can make more money, by destroying the unions there to protect public servants. People who have been able to make their way to the middle because of fair wages and benefits.
The problem with Canada since Brian Mulroney, and the United States since Ronald Reagan, is that the middle is now being ignored, while all focus is on improving the lot of the wealthy, with some ridiculous notion that those wealthy will look after the poor.
That isn't happening and as one Conservative Christian said recently "we cannot foodbank our way out of poverty." We need government intervention to protect all citizens, because it's the right thing to do.
I've come down hard on Jack Layton and the NDP recently, after learning that they will be propping up the Harper government in January, and supporting future corporate tax cuts. Canada will not survive if they move to the right. We need a good strong party governing the centre, with good strong voices from the left making sure that the needs of citizens are being met. The NDP need to get back to the values of people like Tommy Douglas, Ed Broadbent and David Lewis, who took on corporations, not bowed down to them.
And the Liberals need to get back to the values of Pierre Trudeau and Lester Pearson, and even John Diefenbaker, now that his party has been wiped out.
Because when these guys were around, Canada worked. We were envied and admired. I never even heard the word "homeless" until neoconservative Mike Harris ran Ontario. There were vagabonds and tramps, but their lives were romanticized, because many chose that free lifestyle.
But no one chooses to be homeless. And families should not be living in their cars.
Today's Billionaires Do NOT Earn Their keep
The neoconservative principle of everyone being free to make as much money as possible, and then everyone will be taken care of through the trickling down; may be the biggest fraud since the pyramid scheme.
Canadian and American society has had it's classes, and most of the wealthy got that way through hard work, or inheritance from someone else, who worked hard to get rich. There were exceptions, but for the most part you could trace names back to an invention or the improvement of an invention.
I read the story of Henry Ford, a few years back, and when he was working on his ideas, his wife was there tinkering with him (literally, not a euphemism). She told of how she would have to remove engines from the kitchen sink before she could use it, and wipe motor oil off the counters. And eventually through hard work and innovation, they gave us the modern automobile. And the auto industry provided good union jobs and swelled the ranks of the middle class. The Fords got rich and everyone benefited.
Gerber baby foods also started with an idea. The Gerber family was struggling with the canning industry, almost bankrupt, when Mrs. Gerber first suggested that they try making baby food. Initially, her husband rejected the notion, so she left him to feed their baby, attempting to mash the food fine enough for consumption. He relented and turned a small portion of the plant into canning for infants. It went so well that within a short time, a prosperous baby food company and industry was born. The Gerbers got rich and everyone prospered.
Howard Johnson first made flavoured icecream when a boy, peddling it in his wagon. The radio, the television, movies. All started with someones idea and hard work to sell that idea.
But how are many of today's millionaires and billionaires making their fortunes? Some like Bill Gates, with an idea, but too many others with a scam.
And one of the biggest scams of late is the sub-prime mortgage industry.
In their new book: The Trouble With Billionaires, Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks, tell the story of John Paulson and Goldman-Sachs, who cashed in big on the misery of others.
Paulson didn't invent sub-prime mortgages, only took them to unheard levels, after reading a newsletter by an aging, little-known economic consultant named Gary Shilling. While everyone else was painting a rosy picture of continued growth and prosperity, Shilling predicted a crash.
It was now up to Paulson to find a way to exploit this.
Paulson had been looking for an opportunity to bet that the housing bubble would burst. There was enough information around about the shoddy nature of many of the subprime mortgage deals—with clients who had little in the way of assets, income, or employment—that a number of close observers realized a lot of "homeowners" would soon be in dire straits, unable to meet their monthly payments. In the betting parlours of Wall Street, this represented a chance to make some serious money.
The best vehicle for betting against the housing market, as Paulson and a few other Wall Streeters had figured out, was to take out "insurance" on packages of mortgages that had been bundled together and sold as a stock. This was an odd concept that twisted the conventional notion of insurance .... What was unusual here was that the Wall Street types were taking out insurance on something they had no personal stake in, on something that involved other people's assets. It was like buying insurance on a car owned by a stranger, in the hopes of collecting money if the stranger's car crashed. (2)
It was gambling on the misfortune of others. But the problem was that the needed risks were not there. Still too much caution, and you can't make money with this scheme if people are too cautious.
So Paulson decided to take a more pro-active approach. What if he worked through a lending institution, to convince the most vulnerable to buy houses they couldn't afford? That way when they lost those homes, as they almost always did, his insurance policy "against" those foreclosures, would kick in.
This "insurance"—known as a credit default swap (CDS)—was simply a bet. One frustration for Paulson was that there just weren't enough of these stocks, known as collateral debt obligations (CDO), to bet against. So he decided to become proactive. He approached a number of investment banks with the request that they create more CDOs to sell to clients, so that he could then take out insurance betting these would fail. The arrangement Paulson had in mind was rife with potential conflicts of interest. He clearly wanted to help pick the mortgages that would make up the new CDOs. And he would obviously favour particularly risky subprime mortgages, thereby increasing the likelihood that the CDOs would become worthless and he would be able to collect on the "insurance" he had taken out.
Bear Stearns, the giant investment bank where Paulson had once served as managing director, said no to his scheme. But Goldman Sachs agreed to the arrangement, providing Paulson with his dream opportunity: a chance to bet on toxic CDOs worth about $5 billion.(2)
And when the bubble burst and $5 billion dollars worth of mortgages were deemed worthless, Paulson pocketed $1 billion in "insurance." And as his gambling continued to pay off, his net gain was $3.7 billion.
He did not earn this money, he stole it, and yet he was heralded as a hero on Wall Street. The triumph of an underdog. The Greatest Trade Ever, became the name of a book of his exploits, written by Wall Street Journal reporter, Gregory Zuckerman. How can this be?
Certainly, the Paulson—Goldman scheme set off a series of events with extremely negative repercussions. Investors purchasing the toxic CDOs lost billions of dollars, unaware that they were buying faulty merchandise. Furthermore, the scheme exacerbated the impact of the housing collapse and the near-bankruptcy of insurance giant AIG, which had sold some $64 billion of CDS "insurance" on CDOs related to subprime mortgages. AIG was unable to pay out the money it owed to those, like Paulson, who had bought insurance on now-worthless mortgage-related CDOs.
... But it gets worse. Insisting that AIG's bankruptcy would devastate credit markets, the U.S. government stepped in to prop up the giant insurance conglomerate. In a deal overseen by then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson [no relation],' Washington bailed out AIG with $170 billion. Out of that huge pool of taxpayer money, AIG paid Goldman $14 billion to make good on the insurance Goldman had bought on its CDOs.' Similarly, it paid Paulson $1 billion.
This means that a billion dollars of taxpayer money went to ensure that Paulson was able to collect his gambling jackpot. ... So Paulson not only helped spark the financial collapse—with its ruinous repercussions for millions around the world—but he made off with $1 billion of the public's money for his role in what appears to be a crooked gambling scheme. (2)
These are the new heroes. Antiheroes who are able to garner admiration for destroying countless lives. And who we are being told we must give more of our money to, if we hope to survive. Pull out that public trough and gather the wealthy. Slurp, slurp, slurp.
It reminds me of the Irish genocide, dubbed the "potato famine". While people were starving, eight shiploads of produce a day, was leaving the island in export. The hungry masses would gather while the ships were being loaded, hoping to grab a few carrots or ears of corn that fell from the overloaded carts. But if they were caught, they were beaten or sometimes imprisoned.
That is exactly where our society is headed if we don't smarten up.
But What Does John Paulson Have to do With Us?
In 2006, while Paulson was cooking up his scheme, peddling subprime mortgages to unsophisticated would-be homeowners, on a notion that every American had the "right" to own a home, Jim Flaherty was also rubbing his hands together and frothing at the mouth, over his scheme that he said would “result in greater choice and innovation in the market for mortgage insurance, benefiting consumers and promoting home ownership...”
But an investigation by the Globe and Mail revealed:
... as the subprime mortgage crisis was exploding in the United States, a contagion of U.S.-style lending practices quietly crossed the border and infected Canada's previously prudent mortgage regime. New mortgage borrowers signed up for an estimated $56-billion of risky 40-year mortgages, more than half of the total new mortgages approved by banks, trust companies and other lenders during that time, according to banking and insurance sources. Those sources estimated that 10 per cent of the mortgages, worth about $10-billion, were taken out with no money down.
The mushrooming of a Canadian version of subprime mortgages has gone largely unnoticed. The Conservative government finally banned the practice last summer, after repeated warnings from frustrated senior officials and bankers that the country's financial system was being exposed to far too much risk as the housing market weakened. Just yesterday, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty repeated the mantra that the government acted early to get rid of risky mortgages. What he and Prime Minister Stephen Harper do not explain, however, is that the expansion of zero-down, 40-year mortgages began with measures contained in the first Conservative budget in May of 2006. (3)
And like Paulson and his ilk in the United States, there were legions of the unscrupulous, targeting the vulnerable in this country.
"The subprime lenders trashed the market. They were doing loans that no one else would do and people were shaking their heads saying, 'What are these guys doing?' " The data also revealed that scores of wealthy individuals dabbled in subprime lending at a time when many believed the real estate market was on a never-ending ride. Doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers and former bankers offered high-interest-rate mortgages to debt-laden homeowners, many of whom are now facing foreclosure proceedings." (4)
And it could very well hit us in the same way, as the Globe again revealed in 2009:
Since the subprime mortgage meltdown in the United States, Canadian leaders have assured the public that a similar tidal wave of foreclosures can't hit here. They have cited the prudence and market dominance of Canada's five most prominent banks, the conservatism of Canadian consumers and the tiny, 7-per-cent market share of subprime lenders, which is much lower than their 22-per-cent market share in the United States. Just four days ago in a speech, Prime Minister Harper said: "We have avoided the extreme of the unregulated, or barely regulated, financial and mortgage industries that has caused such grief around the world."
However, The Globe's investigation shows that while Canada's real estate sector hasn't suffered as much as its counterpart in the United States, the Prime Minister and others have grossly underestimated the impact of that small portion of subprime lenders.
... The number of subprime lenders who have initiated foreclosure proceedings isn't a surprise to anyone in the business, said Kap Hiroti, the owner of Foreclosurelist.ca, one of the companies that tracks foreclosures and supplied data for this story. "It was almost as if the lenders didn't see the big picture".... (4)
Or were they like Paulson, and did see the big picture? Flaherty allowed AIG (3) to insure our mortgages. Is there a Canadian John Paulson out there, now stuffing their pockets with our money, seeing as how the Canadian taxpayer was forced to bail out the banks when the crisis first hit?
Of course there are. In fact, many I would imagine. These people are not earning their money. They are con-artists and Canadians are being robbed at both ends.
We need to get back to our middle. During the post-war years the middle class began to thrive, often due to good paying union jobs. The rich still got richer, but we were OK with that, unless they got rich by stealing or trickery, and then they went to jail.
People bought homes and raised families, and governments could focus on issues that improved society. Public schools, healthcare, women's rights, equal rights ... All of the things that moved us toward a Just Society.
By suggesting that people like Rob Ford represent the middle class, suggests that the middle class don't care about the environment or poverty, only making a buck. How out of touch the media are.
Many lost good paying union jobs, and are now forced to work two or three part-time jobs, at minimum wage just to make ends meet. This keeps them from their families longer, and for young couples, they put off starting a family until they can afford it, which may be never.
Neoconservatives want to abolish unions altogether, instead allowing corporations to determine wages and employee standards. Many will boast that they are the children of factory workers and labourers who have made it on their own, forgetting that those factory workers were unionized, and their wages and benefits helped to keep them off the streets. And public healthcare and public education gave them the hand up they needed.
No one is really "self-made". We all had a hand in it.
The "Revolt of the Rich" is over. It's time for a revolt of the middle. But even when we vote out the neocons, we can't stop fighting.
And we have to remember that no political party and no politician has all the answers. What we need is a government that never stops questioning, and an informed public that does the same.
THINK!
Sources:
1. The Rights Revolution: CBC Massey Lectures, By Michael Ignatieff, Anansi, 2000, ISBN: 978-0-88784-762-2, pg. 111
2. The Trouble With Billionaires, By Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks, Viking Canada, 2010, ISBN: 978-670-06419-9, Pg. 93-99
With income disparity being the hot topic topic today, there are many of us questioning how the wealthiest citizens, have been able to convince the poorest, that they should be on their side. If conventional wisdom is to soothe the huddled masses, to avoid civic unrest, I don't think it will work in the long term. Eventually growling stomachs will drown out the burps of the well fed.
I actually blogged on this before, questioning the phenomenon, and while I still haven't figured it out completely, I'm getting closer to understanding the tactics used to create this perverse logic.
The wealthy speak the language of their "peasants". It's despicable, but brilliant.
George Bush belongs to one of the wealthiest families in America. His grandfather, Preston Bush, made a fortune financing the Nazis. And the Bush Administration was by far the best friends that Wall Street ever had. And yet much of his support came from Americans with little help of acquiring much wealth.
Karl Rove insisted that when President Bush had "a choice between Wall Street and Main Street," he came on down on the side of "the little guy." And yet the exact opposite was true. Elitism masquerading as populism:
A president who believes in "preventive" military wars certainly understands the value of preventive rhetoric in political wars. At the start of the 2003 battle over his "jobs and growth plan," while talking to reporters at his Crawford, Texas, ranch on January 2, Bush said, "I understand the politics of economic stimulus—that some would like to turn this into class warfare. That's not how I think."
What should it be called, then, when a father and his son attacked rival Michael Dukakis for representing the "Harvard boutique"? Or when Bush Id AP reporter Scott Lindlaw—during a month long vacation at his ranch said--Most Americans don't sit in Martha's Vineyard swilling white wine." Or when W., telling how a teacher and a fireman had difficulty finding a doctor during a pregnancy, blasted high medical malpractice rates, concluding with "What we want is quality healthcare, not rich trial lawyers"? Writing in the Washington Post, E. J. Dionne observed that "if setting up a teacher and a firelighter against 'rich trial lawyers' is not class warfare, then Karl Marx is the current editor of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page."
In George W. Bush we have a president who's a fourth-generation business heir, a man who never really pounded the pavement but accumulated his wealth through family contacts and favors. As president, he moves aggressively and successfully to enact a fiscal program that (a) reduces taxes on the "investor class" more in percentage terms than on the middle class, b) abolishes the "dead billionaires' tax" (estate tax), (c) shifts the burden of taxes to "earned" income and away from "unearned income" (dividends and capital gains), and, for good measure, (d) changes IRS practice so fewer multimillionaires are audited and more poor people are. (The number of civil fraud penalties against corporations plunged two-thirds, from 555 in 1993 to 159 in 2002.) Given that tax cuts for the top I percent equal all the cuts to the bottom 90 percent—and given the trillions of dollars quietly shifting from the accounts of labor and future generations to today's investor class—George W. Bush is redistributing wealth far more than George McGovern or Huey Long ever dreamed possible. (1)
And Bush's tactics are not his alone, but part of the neoconservative strategy.
In Ontario, Neocon Mike Harris used this tactic with NDP leader Bob Rae, often referring to him as "The Professor", because he was a Rhodes Scholar. He also feigned empathy with those struggling due to his policies, by suggesting that he knew what it was like to have to live on beans and bologna, something his parents were quick to refute. Harris never ate those things out of necessity, if ever. He grew up in an affluent home.
Stephen Harper, also grew up never knowing hunger, and yet he tries to paint himself as a man of the people. Opposing those who live in "Ivory Towers", to justify his cuts to the Arts and the Draconian crime bills. And like Bush, who criticized rival Michael Dukakis for representing the "Harvard boutique", Harper is constantly using "Harvard" terms to discredit Michael Ignatieff, who not only got his PhD from there, but also taught at Harvard for about five years.
And let's not forget during the last debates, when Harper pretended to understand how the unemployed felt, by saying that he himself had been unemployed for several months. Yet when reporters later asked him about it, he admitted that he was sitting at home waiting for an election, while his wife ran a lucrative printing business. Her biggest client was the Reform Party that he would be running for. That's not unemployed, it's lazy.
And then there's Rob Ford, another millionaire trying to speak "peasant". And he brings on board yet another millionaire spokesperson for the "little guy", Don Cherry.
We have got to start breaking down the Neocon language. Corporations are funnelling huge amounts of money to think tanks and foundations, all attempting to convince citizens that extreme wealth held by a few is good for us. THINK!
Does that make any sense to you? THINK!
Are the seniors (Baby Boomers) really at fault? THINK!
Is Stephen Harper really a Tory? THINK!
Should Canadians go further into debt to give corporations another huge gift? THINK!
And when you're done thinking, VOTE!
It's time to take this country back, because the only ones feeding from the public trough are the gluttons, and the Harper government is spoon feeding them.
Sources:
1. The Book on Bush: How George W. (mis) Leads America, By Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Penguin Books, 2004, ISBN: 0-670-03273-5, Pg, 54-55
A Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy, or power provided by wealth.
It used to refer to countries with a system where rich persons had more votes than poor, but the definition has been modernized.
Plutocracy is now used to define the "disproportionate influence the wealthy have on political process in contemporary society ... Kevin Phillips, author and political strategist to U.S. President Richard Nixon, argues that the United States is a plutocracy in which there is a "fusion of money and government."" (1)
There is no argument that there has been a fusion of money and power in this country.
But perhaps a better term to describe our system of government today, under Neoconservatism, would be a Corporatocracy, which "denotes a system of government that serves the interest of, and may be run by, corporations and involves ties between government and business. Where corporations, conglomerates, and/or government entities with private components, control the direction and governance of a country, including carrying out economic planning ..." (2)
I first heard the term, when used in a story on the Haiti earthquake, by author and activist Marguerite Laurent. She was the first to suggest that the Earthquake may have been man-made, since American oil companies had been drilling on a faultline there. Soon after she published her theories, the industry went into damage control, and began discussing the oil gushers on the island, that they claimed were triggered by the quake.
After being called crazy and un-American for writing that the 2010 earthquake gives the US the perfect disaster-capitalism opportunity to come out from behind the UN and openly occupy Haiti to secure Haiti's oil ... [a] strategic location and other riches for the corporatocracy... a veteran oil company man comes forward in Business Week to say, and one wonders how he can so authoritatively speculate about the area of the faultline without intimate knowledge of the drillings .. Haiti lies in an area that has undiscovered amounts of oil, and the earthquake "may have left clues" to petroleum reservoirs! Oil that, uhmmm, "could aid economic recovery in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation." (3)
In his annual bluster (once a year that he talks to the press), Stephen Harper cited his handling of the Haiti crisis as one of the shining moments of the year. And yet if you step outside of the Canadian media, you learn that once again Canada has embarrassed itself on the International stage. Only 1.5% of aid came from us.
Stephen Harper was in Haiti to protect corporate interests, fearing that Cuba, one of the first countries to actually provide medical care, might try to lay claim to the poorest nation's riches. He was photographed with our big war machines, letting the communist country know that he had big guns and someone presumably knew how to use them.
Harper once again, used our tax dollars to help his corporate sponsors. And he threatened our charitable organizations, who were actually assisting the victims, with loss of funding if they attempted to criticize his government's handling of anything.
But our Corporatocracy goes much deeper.
The concept of corporatocracy is that corporations, to a significant extent "own" or have massive power over governments, including those governments nominally elected by the people, and that they exercise such power not by back-room conspiracies but by their enormous, concentrated economic power, and by legal in-the-open mechanisms (lobbyists, campaign contributions to office holders and candidates, threats to leave the state or country for another with less oversight and more subsidies.) (2)
These latest corporate tax cuts, which are now being sanctioned by the NDP, are absolutely mind blowing. We are deep in debt and mired in deficit, and yet we are going to give the corporate sector more money? What have they done for us so far, besides create the latest economic crisis?
They are like the spoiled child, continually threatening to run away from home. I say pack their bags and put them on the doorstep. They won't leave. We've got the well stocked refrigerator (all the natural resources) that they need to thrive.
But if they want to live under our roof, they will abide by our rules. It's that simple. We are not raising their allowance because it's more than sufficient. They will clean their room (environment), they will do their chores, and they will behave. Otherwise, there's the door.
The biggest problem facing our country today, is the same problem facing society in the lead up to the Great Depression. Income disparity. And to fix this problem, before it turns into another depression, we need to raise corporate taxes, not lower them. And we need to channel those funds into legitimate job creation.
And we need to get rid of the failed system of neoconservatism. But we can't do that until the media stops calling them 'Tories'. When Canada had a Tory Party, everyone, media included, called the Reform movement, neoconservatism. Everyone. We used to dub Reform the "Revolt of the Rich", because we knew they were a party created by and for, the corporate sector.
Now journalists are banished if they even try to call them neocons, and it is doing this country a great disservice. Sixty-six Reformers may have bought out the interests of 12 PCers, but part of the package was not a 150 year tradition.
That is the point where we must begin to educate Canadians. This is a movement, not a government, and it is promising to destroy us.
