The Media and Jim Flaherty's Death

It doesn't really surprise me that Jim Flaherty would be remembered as a competent financial manager by the mainstream media. You see, I belong to the team that is never surprised when the corporate-capitalist system falls flat on its face. We instinctively understand that when corrupt greed-heads compel their politician cat's-paws to impoverish and exploit the majority, then the overall economy is not going to prosper. Wealthy media elites and the journalists that they tend to hire are incapable of such insights. Therefore, the fact that Jim Flaherty was a dangerously deluded simpleton with a legacy of disastrous failure simply doesn't compute for them.

But, what does surprise me, and what is far more ominous, is the way these airheads treat Flaherty as more than just an ideological soul-mate. In death, he's been elevated into having been a "statesman." And this, my friends, is what is so disturbing. Presumably, as finance minister, Flaherty would have been one source for the majority in Parliament (you know, the people's elected representatives) to obtain the cost estimates for his governments building of new prisons and purchasing of white elephant fighter-jets.

If so, they were sorely disappointed, weren't they? You see, Flaherty was finance minister in a government that decided that Parliament shouldn't know how much government policies were going to cost before they voted whether to commit the people's tax dollars towards them. The oral statements that this government did provide turned out to be deliberately fraudulent and under-estimated costs by tens of billions of dollars. (Which is why, when the same people who support Flaherty and harper also support Rob Ford, in the name of "fiscal responsibility," I tend to sneer at them. They obviously don't give a shit.)

Flaherty's government was so insistent on not providing the people's representatives with the information they desired that they were prepared to be found guilty of contempt for it. "Contempt of Parliament." It's actually a serious charge. Just because the sun came up the next morning it doesn't mean that demonstrated contempt for our system of democratic accountability is unimportant.

Anyone with a modicum of understanding should have seen that.

It was Flaherty's government that then engaged in a sordid, anti-democratic, debasing, and evil campaign of election fraud in the 2011 federal election that followed their having been found in Contempt of Parliament. Again, you would think people whose job it is to report and comment on "politics" (which is to say, our democracy) would understand that this is a bad thing. Even those pathetic vermin who mewl that nobody says their vote was changed or prevented by the robo-calls, ought to grasp that attempted robbery is a crime in the same way that robbery is a crime. (And, anyway, were people to come forward and say that the harpercons' election fraud impacted on their vote, the harpercon partisan hacks would then insist that they were lying.)

And, after having stolen a majority government, Flaherty's government then crafted an ENTIRE SERIES of anti-democratic MEGA-OMNIBUS bills, to ram through major assaults on our entire system of government and body of laws, with minimal democratic oversight. And it was Jim Flaherty, as finance minister, who allowed his budgets to be the vehicle for this omnibus legislation.

You know, you would think that people whose job it is to watch and report on our democratic system at the federal level would instinctively grasp why such behaviour is wrong, bad, repulsive, appalling. Alas! This is Canada. A brain-dead democracy from the far-right to the far-left of the spectrum.

Typing this entry has changed my opinion of Jim Flaherty. I still believe that he was too fucking stupid to grasp the enormity of his crimes against democracy. But now, having added it all up, and including his alcohol-fueled "friendship" (if the camaraderie of lower life-forms such as Rob Ford and Flaherty can be called such) with likewise repulsive characters, I think it matters not that Flaherty was mentally incapable of knowing what he was doing. He was a villain who has done monumental damage to the health of Canadian democracy. On top of being, among the worst, if not THE WORST finance minister in Canada's history.

And the journalists and the pundits who can't grasp that (let alone the scum who actively supported him) show themselves for the miserable failures that they are by loading this idiot with undeserved accolades and laurels.

EDITED TO ADD

I've been doing my best to shut-out the media coverage of Flaherty's funeral. The whole coverage of this non-event. I therefore forget the even more distressing fact that opposition politicians, who Flaherty had abused for years, were likewise unable to see Flaherty for what he was. Thomas Mulcair's idiotic tears at Flaherty's death were much more disgusting than media fawning over the man. Sadly, ... this whole sordid episode reveals the incapacity of those opposition politicians who, in his death, saw Flaherty as one of their own rather than their enemy.