"The Economy" is Another harper Weakness

Here's a depressing story:

Canadian voters rank the economy as the top issue in this election campaign, far outpacing the question of ethics and accountability which helped bring down the Harper government Friday, according to a detailed poll conducted for the Toronto Star and La Presse.

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper is their clear choice as the best person to manage the economy, according to an Angus Reid Public Opinion survey of 2,365 Canadians over the past two days.

“Stephen Harper by a pretty clear margin,” said Jaideep Mukerji, vice-president of Angus Reid Public Opinion.

This is depressing on a couple of levels. First of all, it makes it look like Canadians would be just as happy living in the People's Republic of China as they are in democratic Canada. The PRC dictatorship now bases most of its right to govern on its effective management of the economy.

"But don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone?"

It's also depressing though because it reveals the dominance of right-wing ideology in this country so that even when they fuck-up, right-wing, pro-business ideologues retain their aura of competence.

But things aren't entirely hopeless. Because just as harper's "COALITION!!! COALITION!!" scaremongering can be, and has been, blown out of the water by the belated focus on his own proposed coalition with the separatists and the socialists, so too can harper's reputation as a steady hand on the tiller of the economy be devastated by a quick look at the reality.

Part I of our look at the economy is the dismal mess that has resulted from three decades of "pro-market" dogmatism. Households are increasingly indebted as wages have stagnated and employment is increasingly insecure.

The deregulation of the financial markets has produced a culture of lawless fraud and carelessness which resulted in a speculative bubble the implosion of which caused the great recession, necessitating trillions of dollars in bail-outs in the USA, UK, Ireland, and elsewhere. harper was prepared to go down that road, deregulating finance and real estate, but thankfully he was unable to move fast enough.

Canada's banking and real-estate sector did not require tens of billions of dollars in bail-outs, but the recession itself has necessitated deficit spending that will amount to well over a hundred-billion dollars by the time it's over. Think about that! One-hundred billion dollars not to build infrastructure or to invest in people, but just to keep from falling backwards, just to stand still basically.

But when it came time to maybe force the bloated financiers on Wall Street, Bay Street, the City of London, etc., a tax on their transactions, ... say as an INSURANCE PREMIUM to help governments pay for the disasters these subsidized gangsters create, harper was in front of the movement to nix that idea.

Of course, there's also the big deal that Flaherty was too blind and stupid to see the great recession coming even when it was already upon us. In the fall of 2008 the dunce was predicting small surpluses for the foreseeable future. Six months later the deficit was going to be 40-something billion dollars. Remember when Paul Martin would always be "surprised" by 5-10 billion dollar surpluses (which he'd "discover" long after budget time so that he couldn't spend them on needed public services)? Flaherty makes Martin look like an atomic clock for accuracy with his errors of tens of billions of dollars.

The harpercons are pretty proud of their "Economic Action Plan" aren't they? You'd almost think the whole thing was their idea. But remember, a stimulus package to prevent the economy from falling into a recessionary spiral was forced upon harper and Flaherty by the opposition parties. Everything that the harpercons want to attribute to their "Action Plan" should in all fairness be credited to the opposition parties.

So, given the fact that Flaherty doesn't have a clue what's going around him, that he advances the policies that caused financial sector meltdowns around the globe, that his forecasts are off by tens of billions of dollars, that he rewards the people who cause global downturns, and that he had to coerced into responding to the great recession, why does he think he's a competent economic manager?

And, furthermore, how can Canadians trust a guy who won't tell them how much his party's policies are going to cost them? Besides the fact that the massive prison-building campaign and the new fighter jets are useless bullshit policies, we're also talking about possibly spending $50 billion on them. While there's a recession and already $40 billion annual deficits. And he's going to compound his revenue problems with corporate tax-cuts that do not pay their way??

Flaherty is the same bungling incompetent he was during the Harris reign of error. He'd be laughable if he wasn't impacting so many innocent peoples' lives.