Year 9-5
Stephen Harper doesn’t get it. He thinks it’s business as usual. He doesn’t understand that we live in new times that yesterday’s answers don’t work anymore. His loyal lackey Jim Flaherty is also of the old school: they reduced the GST by 30 percent, from 7 to 5, increasing its administration cost from 28 percent to 40 percent. Still they want more cuts. In their book Government is bad: long live their ‘free market’ god, whose prophet was Milton Friedman, and whose faithful followers were Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. All three promised to show the world the way back to freedom and prosperity; all three said that government was the problem and privatization the solution!
Now with the Collapse of 2008, economists are switching gods: John Maynard Keynes is king of all whose bible says that massive government intervention can put us back on track.
But is it too late for that also. Both assume that, because population, resource extraction, and available energy grew throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the economy can continue to grow in perpetuity. That was never possible. Yet the people in power still think that all they need to do is come up with the right mix of money, market forces and government regulation, and, pronto, all will be well again. No one considers that Earth’s supplies of fossil fuels, topsoil and water are limited, and that someday soon the lack of these resources will drastically reduce economic activity.
To me what old-school Harper and new school Obama are trying to do looks like an exercise in futility. Welcome to a ring-side seat watching the battle between the Ottawa-based free marketers and the new-to-the-game Washington state controllers over who is capable of restoring perpetual growth. I bet that neither can win, because we have reached a significant physical obstacle to growth—Peak Oil—that spells ruin to all economic philosophies that fail to take this new reality, of living in new times, into account. New times call for cooperation, for getting on board together, for unity and consultation.
P.M.Harper is exactly the opposite. He wants confrontation, he thrives on strife. He is at his best when cutting down others. His mean streak is no more evident then when the times cry for compromise, something he is unable to do. George Bush is also of that sort. When asked last week whether he had made any mistakes, he was still unable to see that Iraq was wrong, that tax cuts for the rich were criminal, that his refusal to work with the UN on Climate Change was being out of touch with reality. Stephen Harper is playing that same tune, in part because he is too much a Mike Harris, evident also when he hired former Premier Harris’ chief of staff and having several of his cronies in cabinet.
So what then should happen?
New times call for new approaches. From now on, whether we like it or not, we must have coalition governments. Europe has always had it. There the division between rich and poor is not nearly as stark as it is in the English speaking world, where, somehow proportional representation, a much more democratic system, has never caught on.
By now we know that Dion is a dead duck. He is a decent man, who tried his level best to sell Canada on the dangers ahead, and failed because he is no salesman. To tell people what is the rational thing to do, is not good enough. They have to be persuaded through eloquent arguments, as the President-elect did in his campaign to get the nomination and win the presidential campaign although Barack Obama’s boastful oratory will obviously backfire. Harper with his whale-size ego deserves harpooning. Without real friends, lacking goodwill, he has become a liability.
Here is my Christmas wish. I hope that Harper also will be replaced during the next 7 weeks. I sincerely hope – but do not expect- that the new leaders will tell the nation the true score. The true score is that we live in new times, where the old remedies do not work anymore. We see it in the USA where, with trillions of government moneys pumped into the economy, matters are getting worse. Money is at the heart of the trouble, and more money will not set matters aright.
A consensus between all parties, Conservative, Liberal, NDP, the Bloc and the Green Party, has to be formed to devise an entire new way where we can live within the means of nature. We can no longer force a finite nature to accommodate our infinite wants.
That’s why our challenges go far beyond the economic problem. Harper’s simplistic answers to the most complex situation humanity is facing are totally out of touch.