You Can't Save The Environment Without Democracy

Remember when harper had a minority and he didn't control the Parliamentary committees that examined and critiqued his legislation, so he had a manual printed up for his committee chairs about how to stymie their work? Remember how harper and his minions repeatedly lied to Parliament and obstructed Parliament until they were eventually found in contempt of Parliament, triggering the 2011 Federal Election? Remember how harper employed electoral fraud on a larger and larger scale until he eventually was able to steal a majority government? Notice that now that he has a majority he's rammed-through legislation to make it even easier to steal elections and to hide this fact from the public? Or how about how he smashes through massive omnibus bills that include the wholesale gutting of our environmental laws and he invokes closure on debating them and allocates very little time for Parliamentary committees to examine them?

"Democracy and the Rule of Law."

Now that harper has democracy bleeding on the floor, it's the Rule of Law's term. Among other signs of his contempt for the Rule of Law, the most important is his constant battling and belittling of the Supreme Court. Because he wants nothing to stand in his way.

Even if it was the case the harper is so delusional and stupid that he imagines his pro-pollution actions, his undercutting of Canadian workers with the Temporary Foreign Workers Program, his anti-Muslim bigotry, his militarist fantasies, his pandering to the wealthy, etc. etc., are in the best interests of Canadians and the Canada as he knows it (as the empty-headed idiot savant Wayne Gretzky seems to think); he should still be condemned for his utter cowardice at defending and fighting for his beliefs.

No matter how delusional harper might be, he has no right to knee-cap democracy just because he thinks he's doing good.

And, given the likely probability that harper knows that he's just servicing the rich and powerful and placating his necessary voting base with red-meat such as Islamophobia, poor-bashing and vicarious wargasms, his abuse of democracy is just insane, evil bullshit.

My expectations for Canadian democracy are pretty low at this point. Search this blog using the term "Mulcair," and you'll see I'm no great fan of the man. I'm far to the left of the NDP but I tend to vote for them because they're the most left-wing party likely to have an impact politically. Use the search-term "Liberal" on this blog and you'll see that I hate those corporatist mother-fuckers as much as I hate the corporatist, sell-out mother-fuckers of the USA's Democratic Party.

But I believe that both these parties will show, because they have done so in the past, more respect for our quasi-pseudo-democratic system than has harper. We will at least return to the stage where our politicians at least have respect for the forms of our quasi-pseudo-democratic system. (As opposed to the United States, where decades of abuse of the system, aided and abetted by the moronic delusion that "they're all the same" and "those damn politicians in Washington and their stupid games! We can, and we should, ignore them, and allow the oligarchs to do whatever they want, and nothing bad will ever happen to us!" ... led to a situation where Congress refused to approve Obama's military action in Libya and Obama went ahead with it anyway. And then life supposedly went on.)

I say this even though I realize that the stink of harper's nauseating contempt for parliamentary democracy will linger and continue to infect our political culture, long after he's died in prison. he already infected Daltonbot McGuinty who refused to provide the majority in the Ontario legislature with the information on his $750 million gas-plant closure scandal. Other parties elsewhere will probably look at harper's behaviour as guides to swift and sure implementation of their own agendas, rather than as the horrible, anti-democratic precedents that they are.

We must remain vigilant after harper goes.

We could stop harper now if we weren't such a bunch of clueless, lily-livered sheep. But given that we ARE clueless, lily-livered sheep, we must depend upon elected representatives, utilizing the formal powers they have as parliamentarians, to defend the forms of our quasi-pseudo-democracy for us.

I'm not interested in the debates on the economy. They're all neo-liberals drunk on the rancid kool-aid. I'm not interested in yet another Liberal resorting to left-wing rhetoric on the campaign trail. (Lucy, Charlie Brown and the football come to mind here.) I'm not interested in Mulcair's present platform or his past or present delusions at the moment.

All I care about is whether they'll return us to a stage where we respect the forms of our parliamentary traditions.

Because we won't be able to do anything about the environment unless we have a government that listens to the scientists that it pays to provide information on important subjects like the health of the environment, that the private-sector greed-head despoilers don't care about and won't pay for.

We won't be able to be a grown-up people who vet their legislation in an open and honest manner.

And we won't have those crucial, vital things unless harper is defeated.

Which is why I find it the height of juvenile folly to fixate on a distant FOURTH party in a first-past-the-post electoral system. Why am i supposed to care about your fucking pride and your stupid sense of entitlement as you do what you can to split the progressive vote and allow harper to steal yet another majority and thereby condemn my children and my grandchildren to blargle-rargle, rahr, roar! Rant! Rave! Flecks of spittle!!! ....