Running a country into the ground

The absolutely stupid harpercon decision to blow $9,000,000,000.00 on new prisons (ostensibly to jail those convicted of the unreported crimes our useless and intrusive national statistics agency said rose by three percentage points in 2004), joined with the $1,200,000,000.00 wasted on the G8 & G20 summits, and the $16,000,000,000.00 that harper wants to spend on F35 fighter jets (so as to protect us from Al Qaeda's box-cutters) made me think about how rich a country that Canada is that our governments can even seriously think of blowing money like this.

I mean, McGuinty was able to blow $1,000,000,000.00 on useless consultants on his "E-Health" debacle and we really didn't miss it. (Of course, in economic reality, all that money was spent on conspicuous consumption in the GTA and "invested" on Bay Street, but we, the tax-payers of Ontario can pretty much say we kissed it goodbye with nothing in return.)

In an example of the extreme, nauseating arrogance of hegemony, the Glib & Stale's Gary Mason said that the Vancouver Olympics' price-tag of over $1,000,000,000.00 (discounting the permanent infrastructure benefits such as the Sea to Sky Highway and a new convention centre and etc., which, built at inflated Olympic construction rates put the bill at around $6,000,000,000.00) was worth it, because:

There is little question, however, that B.C. will derive economic benefits from the Olympics for years to come. The Games will have been the main driver of economic growth in the province for 2010. Given the fallout from the most recent recession, their arrival couldn’t have come at a better time for the province.

Moreover, I think the Games gave the country something you can’t put a price on: a feeling of pride that has spurred a new confidence that you could feel the day after the Olympic cauldron was extinguished.

Maybe it’s not a tangible benefit, but it may be the most important one of the Olympics. One that can justify the cost all by itself.

Awwww! What a sensitive, artistic soul Gary Mason is! I gotta say it again! AWWWWWW!!!! Who could argue with such a poet?

It would certainly be easier for governments not to do these sorts of things, to think small, not big, never to take chances for fear of being criticized. And there are certainly people who believe every available dime of taxpayers’ money should be spent on health care and education and not trivial pursuits such as sporting festivals.

Huh. When you put it that way, it makes a lot of sense actually. Gary Mason, who has looked with equanimity on the devastation of Canada's health care and social welfare infrastructure generally, and who no doubt trashes left-wing Canadians as stupid, tree-hugging, hippy air-head flakes who can't make the serious, tough decisions, wants us to ignore wasting billions of dollars on fascist athletic spectacles because they give him a woody. Fuck you Mason, you contemptible piece of shit!

How many governments would like to be able to toss that kind of money around 'eh? Imagine what Haiti or Angola or Vietnam could do for their people with the $33,200,000,000.00 that I've mentioned so far? That's right folks, three of our governments (harper's federal government, and Ontario and British Columbia) have managed to piss-away thirty-two billion dollars on useless events and useless military junk and failed software programs over the past few years.

Don't get me wrong. Economically, some of this money never left the country. It was taken from the pockets of Canadians or Ontarians or British Columbians and put into the pockets of other Canadians or Ontarians or British Columbians. (Most likely police, private security contractors, construction contractors and construction workers, and, last but not least, asshole "consultants" of some sort who made thousands of dollars a day but who still billed us for the coffee they bought on their coffee breaks while they were failing utterly to build a secure, virtual database for Ontarians' health information.) But even accounting for this, the money that didn't get given to foreign military contractors and what-not, tended to benefit a small minority of people and didn't build anything of any lasting value to the majority. You can't have a functioning economy just buy issuing cheques to everyone and allowing them to buy Toronto condos and imported consumer goods. You have to build things that work once in a while.

And, as well, we can't afford this sort of nonsense forever. These multi-billion dollar vanity projects, combined with general austerity for the majority of the population, including in our education and health care sectors, have been leading us on the road to ruin for a couple of decades now. It's not just an amusing curiosity that Ontario is now a recipient of equalization payments now. No, no, no. This sad achievement is a direct result of the moronic policies of the revolting mike harris regime of the 1990s and the arrogant dithering of McGuinty since then. And Ontario's sorry state was made worse by the austerity of the Chretien-Martin Liberals and now the harpercons, who are themselves running the entire country into the ground.

The fruits of unregulated capitalism are the suicidal farting attacks of the world's financial sector and the Earth's vomiting of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico and over the skies of the Tar Sands of Alberta (and thence into the world's atmosphere where it contributes to the Global Warming that will upset the balance of all life on earth).

These people are maniacal, wasteful, self-destructive psychopaths. They must be stopped.