The purpose of the healthcare system is to keep people from getting sick in the first place, and, if they do get sick, to make them better as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

The purpose of business is to make money.

There is no money in keeping people from getting sick, and curing the sick ASAP.

The way to make money through healthcare is to get people sick as soon as possible and keep them sick as long as possible, meanwhile draining them dry of funds for the “treatments.”

The healthcare system is fundamentally incompatible with profit motives. We must abandon private healthcare thinking as quickly as possible.

Update (25Jul2009): See Bill Maher’s piece in the Huffington Post, New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit. FTA: “If conservatives get to call universal health care “socialized medicine,” I get to call private health care “soulless vampires making money off human pain.” The problem with President Obama’s health care plan isn’t socialism, it’s capitalism.”

5. Mad Scientists

I blame bad movies. Well-meaning scientists are not going to accidentally destroy the world like in bad movies.

Yes, the Large Hadron Collider may create tiny black holes. No, they can’t consume the planet. If you calculate the size of possible black holes, and their maximum potential growth rate, you find that it would take billions of years for them to get large enough to do anything.

Yes, scientists are trying to make more intelligent machines. No, they are not going to take over the world terminator-style. Machines cannot magically leap beyond their programming the way they do in the movies. A computer cannot suddenly leap beyond its programming and become self-aware. Sorry, doesn’t happen. The fear that some scientist will create a computer that will try to destroy the human race is based on fear of change coupled with society’s overwhelming ignorance regarding how computers work. Besides, scientists have already created something that can destroy the world: it’s called a nuclear bomb.

Why it’s been inflated: Some groups trump up, just make up, the “dangers” of scientific advancement to bolster the anti-science, anti-empirical, anti-rational subculture. These are the same assholes who want creationism taught in science class.

4. Socialism

The way people talk about socialism in North America, you’d think it was a biblical plague. Socialism is just a different way of distributing wealth. There are lots of socialist countries. I’ve been to some of them. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France – they all seem like nice places to live. No signs of the apocalypse as far as I can tell. If you think socialism is going to magically destroy humanity by reducing the centrality of greed in the politico-economic bullshitscape, you’re a tool. Go visit Norway, and then try to tell me that all those tall, healthy, attractive blond people who get free medical care and five weeks of vacation each year are the end of the world.

Why it’s been inflated: As I’ve described before, the rich have to work very hard to maintain support for capitalism among the poor, who, in most countries, have figured out that capitalism is bad for them.

3. Population movement (illegal immigration)

Nothing gets as much undo media attention as illegal immigration, especially across the Mexico/U.S. border. What the hell do you think a bunch of poor Mexicans are going to do that will bring down life as we know it? They mow lawns and pick fruit and live in fear of deportation. Leave these poor people alone and worry about the things that might actually kill you! Oh, and shut the fuck up about the border fence! Ever hear of a ladder you ignorant redneck fucktards?

Why it’s been inflated: People who take on illegal immigration do so under cover of employment statistics: ‘Illegal immigrants are stealing American jobs’ and all that. This is, of course, just the cover story. The real reason is racism pure and simple. An influx of latinos and hispanics threatens the purity of the great Aryan Klan… er, I mean race. Yes, race. Aryan race. I would argue that the same is true of resistance to immigration in many countries in europe and asia. The primary reason for resistance is making sure ‘we’ (whoever we are) maintain a controlling majority – not give up ‘our’ country’ to ‘them foreigners.’ The secondary reason is about jobs and strain on social services, but even this argument finds its genesis in the racist premise that jobs somehow ‘belong’ to members of the ruling group and that immigrants will require greater help from social services and contribute less to national productivity than the locals.

2. Economic disasters (recessions/depressions)

Whenever you hear some corporate/government douchebag agree, in principle, that the environment should be protected, but argue that now’s a bad time, what with the economy and all, HIT THEM.

Remember that scene in The Day After Tomorrow when the hero/scientist guy is trying to explain how the impossibly-fast ice age is about to glaciate all of Canada and the Continental U.S. in about 6 seconds? And then one of the big-wigs, who looks a lot like Dick Cheney, says ‘What will this do to the economy?’ WTF, right? Yeah that’s what I feel like whenever someone says we can’t have a carbon tax because it’s bad for business. Or we can’t have stricter pollution controls. Or stronger fuel efficiency standards for cars. Or areas protected from mining.

Let me put this as simply as possible. Recessions cannot kill billions of people. Environmental collapse and climate change-induced food shortages can. Fuck the economy. The economy’s not going to kill us. Ignoring environmental concerns because money is tight is barking mad.

Why it’s been inflated: Some people are just too damn thick to get their heads around the idea that their actions create reactions in their habitat, and that those reactions can and will kill them. Even if anything comes of it, they think they’ll be long dead beforehand, and they honestly don’t give a fuck about their children and grandchildren, or the fate of humanity in general. And the crazy thing is, we not only let people like this vote, but also let them run for office!

1. Terrorism

Without venturing into the absurd, the realistic worse case for terrorism is a single nuclear detonation in a major city. If optimally placed, this might kill hundreds of thousand or even a few million people. That would be bad. Extremely bad. However, it is not the end of humanity. Humanity would go on. Japan went on after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed at the end of WWII. The modern world would go on after the bombing of another major city.

Compare this to bona fide EXISTENTIAL threats to humanity. Just one medium-sized asteroid impact, and the only things left would be bacteria and cockroaches.

Yet, the world spends spend trillions of dollars on terrorism and a paltry few million searching the skies and trying to figure out how stop a giant rock from ending life on earth. That’s something in the order of 100 000 times as much money going to a lesser threat as goes to an existential threat.

Why it’s been inflated: Are you familiar with Dick Cheney? Donald Rumsfeld? Governments have all kinds of reasons to inflate the threat of terrorism. It helps control the populace by stimulating blind support for the government. It creates a culture of fear that facilitates the undermining of civil rights to increase executive power. The political opposition cannot effectively convey its message without seeming down right unpatriotic. Information that would damage the administration can be hushed up ‘for national security reasons.’ And most of all, Cheney and Rumsfeld were heavily involved in defense contractors. Even when they took office (when, normally, one would have to divest themselves of all private holdings to avoid conflicts of interest) they both flatly refused, and retained stock in defense contractors (see Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”). Inflating terrorism is about two things: money and power.

The rich in the United States of Torture, however, have successfully tricked the poor into supporting capitalism and viewing socialism with disgust. To accomplish this, they have employed at least six tactics. Although I focus on U.S. examples in this article (because they are the most obvious) the same tactics are used in many other countries.

1. Conflate economic conservatism with social conservatism

During the cold war, it was important to maintain support for retarded military spending. To do this, the U.S. government demonized two apparent traits of the Soviet Union: a centrally-planned economy and the promotion of atheism. Hence, “godless communists.” To further rally the people, it was crucial to make atheism and communism seem inherently evil. This nonsense remains prevalent today.

The Lunatic Fascist Theocracy Party (commonly called The Republican Party), has used this to their advantage by further conflating socialism with communism and secularism with atheism. They can then arguing that, in promoting social spending and separation of church and state, the Spineless Conservative Party (a.k.a. The Democratic Party), are evil, as is there agenda.

This effect has been exacerbated by the promotion of evangelicalism, especially in the southern states.

2. Conflate economic freedom with civil rights

Using some rhetorical voodoo I simply don’t understand, many people in the U.S. have been tricked into thinking that restraints on businesses, like those sought by unions, are the same as civil rights violations. Telling a corporation that it cannot destroy a national park to build a mine, or make pickup truck that only get 8 mpg, has nothing whatsoever to do with civil rights. Human rights such as the right to free speech and freedom from arbitrary discrimination, apply to individuals, not corporations. Economic ‘freedom’ has nothing to do with social freedom. If anything, increased economic freedoms allow corporations to impinge on human rights.

3. Fool the poor into thinking they can one day be rich

One reason the poor don’t revolt is that they live with the hope that one day they can be rich. They don’t want a fair distribution of wealth, they want to maintain the unfair distribution so that they can become ridiculously rich. For most people, of course, this is a pipe dream. Unfortunately, prominent examples including rappers and professional athletes serve to prop up this fiction. They, however, have something most poor people don’t: unusual talent.

4. The tax-and-spend liberal meme

Another piece of brilliant malevolence involves promoting the Tax-and-Spend Liberal stereotype. Liberals (socialists) supposedly pass oppressive taxes and spend money like trailer trash at Wal-Mart. This is, of course, complete bullshit because, between WW2 and 2007, the Republicans increased the U.S. national debt by about $6.9 trillion while the Dems only increased the debt by about $1.8 trillion. Both parties spend money like mad, they just spend it on different things. Republicans spend money on unnecessary wars, Dems spend it on healthcare and other social programs. This is, of course, painting with a broad brush, but you get the idea.

5. Demonize socialism as a welfare state

You often here these talking heads going on about the U.S. becoming a welfare state, “like France”. I have a feeling that they don’t actually know what “welfare state” means, but it sounds bad, so they say it anyway. A welfare state is a nation where the government assumes some responsibility for the health, happiness and fortunes of the people, often implemented through a social safety net. In other words, if you lose your job and you don’t have any family or friends who can or will support you, you don’t starve to death or have to live on the street. If your response to a person who’s lost his job and can no longer support his family is “fuck ‘em – let ‘em die,” seek psychiatric help. But this is exactly what conservatives are saying when they deride the ‘welfare state.’ Their derision is based on the fallacious conclusion that any sort of government assistance for the poor will incentivize them not to work. This is bullshit. People are not rational, self-interested computational agents. People have pride and dignity and ambition and a desire to do something with their lives. And besides, we have substantial scientific evidence that creating a social safety net does not decrease economic performance (see A. B. Atkinson, Incomes and the Welfare State, Cambridge University Press, 1995).

6. The illusion of progressive taxation

Progressive taxation means that the more money you make, the higher your marginal tax rate will be. Poor people generally don’t understand the tax system (because it’s really fucking complicated). Thus, they think that, since they have to pay more taxes when they move up to a new tax bracket, the millionaire down the road pay a higher rate than they do. Nope. Sorry. Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the world, pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.

You see, there is a difference between the official tax rate and the effective tax rate. Rich people hide their money through various exemptions, credits and legal mechanisms so that they pay far less in taxes than their marginal tax rate suggests. This creates an illusion of progressive taxation, which helps to cover up how badly the poor are getting screwed.

Conclusion

In most countries, the poor support socialism and the rich support capitalism. Since there are more poor people than rich people, and everyone gets one vote, countries with fair elections tend to move toward socialism. Therefore, to maintain a largely unregulated economy, the rich in the U.S. must expend significant effort and resources to hoodwink the populace into supporting capitalism, or rig the elections. Or both.

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This is bullshit.

The fact is, those corporations often didn’t get to their billions through wisdom or creativity, or even good luck. They got there through criminal activity, inherited wealth, and ruthless disregard for the value of anything but the stockholders and the corporation’s profit.

Case #1: duPont Chemicals

The duPont corporation is the perfect example of why these global companies think something like a whipping boy is a damn good idea. It’s because these are the same assholes who had whipping boys in feudal Europe. We have this silly idea in America that we are no longer controlled by the monarchs and scoundrels of medieval Europe, but is that really true?

It’s hard to believe that is true when I look at a family like duPont, who were Burgundian nobility who emigrated to the United States to escape the guillotine for their injustices to the lower class during the French Revolution.

If that’s not enough, they were one of the biggest companies accused by Smedley Butler of trying to overthrow the U.S. government to install a fascist dictator, as fascists tend to be more friendly to big, ruthless business. Now, you might not believe in Major General Smedley Butler’s accusations, but that doesn’t clear duPont of dirt. They’ve also been accused of having hemp made illegal to destroy the competition against their new product – Nylon – and they are also responsible for the lovely carcinogen probably in your kitchen right now: Teflon. They’re not even close to the worst.

Case #2: Chiquita

Chiquita weren’t always the non-controversial banana company with the wacky mascot that we all know now. At one time, they had a different name – the United Fruit Company – and a very different business ethos.

You see, rather than grow by producing affordable, delicious fruit… they bribed government officials in third-world countries, amassing enormous power over the politics of these developing nations and using it to exploit the workers in those places, to grow the cheapest fruit known to man (second to slave labor, I guess). Hence the banana republic.

Oh yeah, the guy the U.S. government supposedly sent in to make these banana republics more docile for the companies? None other than Major General Smedley Butler.

Case #3: Ford, GM, IBM and the Nazis

I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like helping the Nazis massacre millions doesn’t seem like a very American way to make billions, but that’s just what these companies have been accused of.  Yet Ford and GM have been accused of not bothering to close shop when fascists took power in Europe; hell, they took the opportunity to borrow some slave labor from the concentration camps.

IBM took it a step further, and actually provided the punch card system the Nazis used to keep track of all those slaves.

Conclusion

That’s not counting the German corporations you buy products from every day who provided such valuable technology as Zyklon B, the gas used to exterminate the Jews. And the horrible and well-documented business practices of Wal-Mart and the Disney Corporation. Or the ruthless monopoly of Standard Oil, and the shady dealings of Microsoft… the list goes on.

These executives are not the benevolent and wise leaders portrayed by people like Rush Limbaugh or Ayn Rand. They are liars, cheats, and ruthless narcissists. Would you give your money to the Nazis? Then why give it to the people who enabled them?

Businesses exist to make a profit; CEOs of corporations are supposed to keep the interests of their shareholders in mind over just about anything else. Of course they will do what benefits those people who own the majority of a corporation. The problem is that we have set up and accepted, for far too long, a system, a relationship between government and business, that is fundamentally flawed – we have created the corporation as a whipping boy of the executives who run it, allowing them to act for profit regardless of law or morality.

The nobility of Europe often had a privilege for their children that was not at all extended to the common man: the whipping boy. The children of royalty could not be touched, upon penalty of death, and so their parents – terribly concerned with proper child rearing – created the whipping boy as a way to punish their children’s misbehavior without actually punishing their child. Instead, their kid would grow up with a good buddy – some commoner – who would take the beating for the noble child any time they acted improperly.

Now, this seems like a bizarre idea to those of us in America, who live without divine rights and nobility and class divisions (don’t we?). Unfortunately, it’s a concept that is still in practice, except it’s not the children of monarchs who benefit from it; instead, it is the board of executives of national corporations. The corporation actually exists, legally, as an individual, a person – they have the same property rights as you and me, they can sue or be sued, and, more importantly, they can be charged with crimes.

Unfortunately, charging an imaginary scapegoat with a crime doesn’t do too terribly much for the executives who are actually making the poor decisions and breaking the law. It is not the individuals making these decisions who face the consequences of their actions, but the corporate whipping boy – the imaginary ‘person’ the corporation represents. Well, you can’t send an imaginary person to jail. The most you can do is chastise them, and maybe issue a fine.

Thus, we have a corporate system where there are actually business executives sitting around a table with a cup of coffee, discussing whether it is more profitable to break the law and pay a fine, or to follow the rules and regulations passed by our government. Is there any wonder we have places like Cancer Alley in Louisiana, where oil refineries and chemical companies have polluted the water and air to the point that the cancer rate is astronomically high? If I stand to lose $4 million by implementing the proper safety procedures to keep those pollutants out of the water, and only $40,000 if I break the law, dump my chemicals in the river, and get busted by the EPA, of course I’m going to break the law!

Of course, it’s no wonder businesses have adopted an idea from the nobility we decided to throw the hell out of this country during the American Revolution, when you really consider where some of these wealthy corporations originated. For one thing, some of them are the same people who ruled Europe as monarchs. Next week, we’ll take a closer look at some of corporate America’s richest, and we’ll see how much we really have done to divorce ourselves from the same people who have been running the show since they called themselves barons.

The first-generation American from the deep south was chosen to offer to rebuttal to President Barack Obama’s address to Congress - often a speaking slot that signals the party has some interest in putting them up as a presidential contender, or, apparently as an alternative, a replacement for Mr. Rogers.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, delivering his rebuttal to President Obama’s address.

More telling still is that Gov. Jindal has visited seven other states in his quest to raise campaign funds – supposedly for a 2011 governor’s race in Louisiana, but you would think he’d have more luck winning a second term in his home state by not, say, being a dumbass.

A big bag of dicks. Completely unrelated.

What am I talking about? Oh, just that Jindal is a goddam lunatic, and here’s why…

1. It’s not a good idea to turn down unemployment money from the government when your industries are collapsing.

Bobby Jindal is among a handful of Republican governors debating refusing some or all of the stimulus money being sent out by the federal government. Specifically, Jindal does not want to accept the stimulus funds directed toward unemployment, saying it has a provision that would require Louisiana to raise taxes in the future to fund the expanded benefits.

Now, the fact that Louisiana pays some of the lowest taxes in the country aside… what the hell are you thinking, Jindal!? I could understand if Louisiana did not face a higher unemployment burden in the next year, but the mass layoffs happening around the state tell me that is not the case.

Alright, so you don’t like the stimulus plan, Jindal. Ideology aside, though, don’t you give a damn about your citizens? Apparently not, since you want to kill them, too.

2. Bobby Jindal wants to kill sex offenders.

That’s right. Bobby Jindal involved himself in a battle with the Supreme Court to keep a convicted child rapist on death row. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of child molestors, but expanding the list of crimes for which you can execute people is dangerous business, especially if you’re a nutjob conservative. The Supreme Court struck down that hope, so instead, Jindal pushed a bill to allow judges to sentence sex offenders to indefinite civil confinement - a slightly more reasonable sentence.

Oh, did I mention that he also signed a bill allowing for chemical castration? Alright, so the guy doesn’t give a shit about the unemployed, and he wants to kill or, barring that, castrate people. It can’t be much worse, right? But it is.

3. He can’t do math.

Seriously. At all. I mean, I haven’t looked at his school records or anything, but clearly Jindal doesn’t know dick about basic math, or he’d realize that cutting taxes while facing a budget shortfall is retarded, yet that seems to be his solution to the budgetary woes of the state.

Louisiana has a projected $1.3 billion budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year, so what does Jindal do? Propose extending tax breaks for the entertainment industry. Oh, but it’s okay, nevermind! He knows that will hurt the budget more, so he claims the lost $8 million will be made up by cuts in the budget (hint: education and healthcare, the two largest portions of the budget without protection under the state constitution). What do I expect, though? He’s the guy chosen to lead this bunch of lunatics, who also think cutting the source of state revenue is a good idea when the state has no goddam idea how to pay for the next year.

Conclusion

All that being said, I’d like to officially offer my support for Gov. Bobby Jindal’s presidential run on the Republican ticket in 2012. I mean, I’m not going to vote for him, but I’m telling you, Michael Steele, this is the guy your party wants. The GOP really need to get behind this guy. Really. The world doesn’t think you’re a bunch of dimwits enough already.

Well, big surprise, conservatives are once again full of shit. The American work ethic is the worst thing to ever happen to the health and wellness of children in our country. This idiotic idea that employers should be able to pay their employees basically whatever they want, and it’s an employee’s responsibility to either work enough hours at that job or take on another source of income just to feed their kids has got to die for us to solve any of the real social issues we face as a nation.

Isn’t it interesting that the Republican party – the same politicians who tout family values – are the same people spouting the notion that people should work harder? And this in the country where we already work more hours a day than the rest of the world! It’s hard to raise your children when you never see them. I am often told that problems with crime, problems in education, and problems with drug abuse all start in the home; maybe parents would have an easier time dealing with these problems their children face if they actually saw them once in a while – and I mean more than the hour of homework they might do with them before the kids have to go to bed.

But equally important is the question why should we work that much? You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who enjoys their job more than I do, but even I am more than ready to go home and see my loved ones when the clock hits 6 o’clock. There is currently 7.6 percent unemployment in our country. Hey, you know how maybe we could give those people jobs so they aren’t just collecting the government checks Republicans despise so much? If the people with jobs weren’t working so goddamn much!

According to a New Yorker study:

Today, Americans work about as many hours each year as they did in 1970, and, instead of thirteen weeks of vacation, the average American now gets four (and that includes holidays). But there is a place that has got considerably closer to the leisure society of the futurists’ dreams—Western Europe. The French work twenty-eight per cent fewer hours per person than Americans, and the Germans put in twenty-five per cent fewer hours. Compared with Europeans, a higher percentage of American adults work, they work more hours per week, and they work more weeks per year.

Alright, but they aren’t as productive as we are, right?

One obvious result of this is that America is richer than Europe.

See? We make more money! But…

In effect, Americans trade their productivity for more money, while Europeans trade it for more leisure. Folk wisdom suggests that the reason for this difference is cultural, which, depending on your perspective, means either that Europeans are ambitionless café-dwellers or that Americans are Puritan grinds with no taste for the finer things in life. But, while culture undoubtedly matters, not that long ago it was the Europeans who worked harder; in 1970, for instance, the French worked ten per cent more hours than Americans.

You want to know what changed? Europeans realized that there is something more important than GDP. There is something more important than having the largest economy in the world, or the most powerful military. Your family and your life. Work should not be your life, and any society that thinks it’s all right for a person to put in 80 hours a week to feed their kids should seriously re-evaluate their priorities. I like my job, but I damn sure enjoy my weekend too. If you don’t, you’re as psychotic as Republicans.

The major implication of this is that infrastructure and food stamps are significantly more effective means of stimulus than tax cuts. Therefore, the stimulus bill should include only infrastructure and food stamps spending, and no tax cuts.

Now, MSNBC and Co. are screaming that Republican attempts to trade more effective spending for less effective tax cuts smacks of insanity. I have two comments on this:

First, The whole idea of creating a law by negotiating is insane and doomed to failure. A stimulus package is a socio-technical artifact that needs to be rationally designed based on facts.

Second, where the hell did these numbers come from??? I spent the last hour trying to find out how Moody’s came up with these numbers and I can’t even find the original report? Did they pull them out of their collective ass or what? This brings me to my second point: freedom of the press notwithstanding, society needs to hold the media to two very important (and related) standards. First, no lying. Ever. That includes Hannity. Second, I think we need to regulate the way information is sourced. Saying, ‘according to Moody’s economy.com’ is nearly useless. You can never get away with this in scientific writing and for good reason. News organizations must be required to provide sufficient information to actually find the reports they refer to. This is the only way to stop the distressingly common phenomena where some asshole makes something up, which is then picked up by more and more blogs until some network reports it, and before you know it, millions of people think Obama is a radical muslim.

Let’s flesh this out a bit.

Canada has four national parties currently represented in the House: The Conservative Party (socially conservative, fiscally corporatist, in charge), The Liberal Party (socially moderate/fiscally corporatist), The NDP (socialist) and the Bloc Quebecois (separatist; i.e., they want to break up the country). Nobody has more than 50%. Still, in Canada we don’t throw around this bullshit about not having a mandate. Whoever has the most seats in the House is in change, period.

While the US government has been throwing handfuls of cash out the White House windows, ineptly attempting to seem like they’re addressing the financial crises, the Canadian government has had its fingers planted firmly in its ears, holding its breath until the crises agrees to go away and leave it alone.

Needless to say, the Canadian people and business community have not been impressed. Neither have the Liberals, Bloc or NDP. So the three minority parties created a coalition last week and planned to vote Harper’s conservatives out of office today. Inundated by the coppery scent of defeat, Harper appealed to the Governor General to put parliament on hold. The Governor General represents the Queen of England in Canada, a commonwealth country. She’s just a figurehead and has no real power – at least, that’s what they tell you in grade school. It turns out, she has the power to “prorogue” (i.e., suspend) Parliament. Which she did.

Now, with the economy somewhere between the toilet and the busted sewage treatment plant, we have to sit and wait 7 weeks until Parliament resumes and the Conservatives roll out a budget. If the budget passes, the Conservatives maintain power. If it fails, either the coalition takes over or we have another election.

Let me try to explain why this is the most dysfunctional political clusterfuck I’ve ever encountered.

1. Suspending the legislative process to prevent a vote of no confidence undermines our democratic system.

In a Parliamentary democracy, elections don’t happen on a proscribed schedule (as in the U.S.). They happen when the Prime Minister dissolves Parliament, the Parliament votes to give the Prime Minister the boot, or when the Prime Minister hits constitutional term limits. By preventing Parliament from ejecting the Prime Minister via a no-confidence vote, the Governor General has undermined Canada’s political system.

2. Giving important decision authority to a figurehead-representative of a figurehead of another country

The Governor General is not an elected official. She was appointed by the Queen of England, another unelected official, from another country. What business she has affecting Canada’s political situation is beyond me. If I were in charge of this coalition, my first act would be extraditing her and removing her position from the political system.

3. The Conservatives don’t know what the hell they’re doing

Economists have been pretty clear that Canada is heading for a recession. The Conservative government, so far, has done jack shit about it. Furthermore, the Conservative Party isn’t really conservative, but corporatist. As Naomi Klein describes in The Shock Doctrine, Canada’s Conservative Party, like the US Republican Party, embraces free-market principles and fiscal conservatism only insofar as it enriches their corporate bedfellows, and will spend like mad when corporations are hurting or they find an excuse to empty the National treasury into the pockets of big businesses.

4. A coalition of a moderate, a socialist and a separatist will be a fucking nightmare

I don’t support the Conservatives, but I fail to see how this strategy is better. Giving Gilles Duceppe (leader of the Bloc) de facto veto power in a coalition government will only facilitate his let’s-break-up-the-country agenda. Furthermore, while the leaders of the Liberals, NDP and Bloc will cooperate long enough to topple the conservatives, as soon as the coalition takes power, that cooperation is doomed. If history is any guide, there will be nothing but infighting and bickering and nothing will get done.

5. Suspending Parliament in the middle of a looming global depression…

While Barrack Obama holds near-daily press conferences to assure businesses and the American people that help is on the way if they can just hang in there until he takes office, Canada has willfully shut down its legislative assembly, incapacitating any attempt to address the recession. I wonder if public floggings of everybody involved would help matters. Probably not, but it would make me feel better.

6. No economic playbook for response to recession

It is widely believed that World War 2 and The New Deal (big investments in infrastructure) ended the Great Depression in the U.S. by providing “Keynesian stimuli.” However, on closer inspection, this is a myth. Put simply, economists have no clue how to stop a recession. If governments think that cutting corporate takes and spending on infrastructure will magically undo an economic decline, they are confused.

Recessions are caused by our fundamentally flawed economic system, not by corporate taxes and lack of government spending. We have to treat the problem, not the symptoms. Society needs to move away from a free market system that enriches the wealthy, eradicates the middle class and enslaves the poor. More on this in posts to come.

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Let me explain, as succinctly as I can, what’s going on. Now that the Bush administration has emptied the treasury into the pockets of their corporate bedfellows, they’ve turned to giving away money they don’t even have. They’re committing money they haven’t even collected.

This money is not going to preserve jobs, it’s going to further enrich the rich. When a company goes bankrupt, it doesn’t just shut it’s doors and lay off all its employees. Usually it just gets bought by another company. Stopping a company from going bankrupt bails out its shareholders and executives, not its employees.

The House and Senate are going along with it because they’re scared of lapsing into a depression. They’re scared of this because they are overwhelmingly stupid. Or maybe they’re just ok with the biggest theft of all time.

If the government is going to loan money to businesses to keep them afloat, they should have a plan to recover. You see, the banks are not failing because of the credit crunch, they’re failing because they consistently made bad decisions. Thus, step one of solving the problem is to get rid of bad decision-makers (i.e. management). Similarly, the automakers are not failing because of their unions, they’re failing because they make shitty cars. Again, the union didn’t decide to make the shitty cars. Find the people who did (hint: they’re the ones flying around on the private jets) and FIRE THEM. Nevermind withholding their bonuses, withhold their salaries.

Any plan that begins by giving dump-truck-loads of money to the people who created the problem is a bad plan.

One last thing: not only is Bush a war criminal, he’s also leading the biggest theft of taxpayer money in the history of humanity. Indict him. Try him. Convict him. Life in prison for him and his enablers. That’s change I can believe in.