Sunday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your weekend.

- Ralph Surette nicely summarizes the Cons' economic plan for Canada - and the less opportunity they have to focus on forcing it on the country, the better:

(D)espite the huge wealth of its oil boom, the Alberta government is all but bust: deficits in the billions, schools and hospitals being cut back to pinch pennies, inadequate infrastructure, and accumulated oil money from the past being depleted to pay the bills. All this is the result of basically giving it away to oil companies — in the middle of a resources boom!

Someone sent me a link to a B.C. online investigative magazine called The Tyee which interviewed Allan Warrack, a minister from the Peter Lougheed government of 40 years ago when plans were laid down to preserve Alberta’s oil wealth for future generations, and to diversify the economy. He says the province is now being run like a "banana republic" for failing to extract fair rents from its resources; the Alberta Heritage Fund which he helped set up hasn’t had a cent added since 1987; and a huge legacy of environmental "carnage" is building up with no money to fix it. Worse, the economy has not diversified, having become even more dependent on oil.

Even a $300-million fund for medical research, set up in 1980 to attract scientific talent to the province, has been shut down, despite its arm’s-length status and the fact that its endowment had grown to $825 million. "It’s hard for me not to fly into a rage when I recount what happened," says Warrack.

This is the "vision" that’s playing out for Canada on a larger scale: an increasingly resource-dependent economy with its booms and busts, massive giveaways to oil and mining companies (including tax cuts), environmental controls out the window, the dollar up and down, and manufacturing taking hit after hit. And no plan for tomorrow, except to seek more resources jobs with ever more corporate giveaways as our manufacturing shrivels, thanks to a high and volatile dollar.

- Which fits nicely James Laxer's list of differences between the Cons' plans and what Canadians actually want:

Canadians list health care and jobs as their top priorities. Harper’s leading issues are: corporate tax cuts, crime, jet fighters, deficit reduction, and income splitting. A Fortress North America security deal with the United States is very much on his to-do list. Further down the list is the privatization of CBC television and a much expanded role for religious organizations in the delivery of social policy.
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Harper’s advice to young people looking for jobs will be to act eager, be polite, wish your customers a nice day, smile and don’t worry too much about the pay. (The Harper government actually has no job creation strategy, apart from lower corporate taxes. Their stimulus program----forced on them by the opposition----has expired. Now their strategy is to sell oil sands oil to the Americans and pray for economic recovery south of the border. Prayer is undoubtedly good for the soul, but only in business schools is it regarded as an economic policy.)

- So the best hope under a Con majority might be for Harper and company to be too imcompetent to carry out their plans. Though as pogge points out once again, that's a distinct possibility.

- But as kirbycairo notes, the issue with an economic and political system designed to disempower the public goes beyond the Cons alone, leading to an obvious prescription for change:

A century and a half ago republicans and leftist naively thought that universal suffrage would solve many of the problematic and exploitative aspects of capitalism because they thought that people would elect representatives who would act in their interests. The problem is, however, that over time, the rich and powerful trained their economists and technocrats to essentially convince people that they HAVE to choose certain kinds of economic policies and that a more cooperative society is simply impossible. As a result, much like war, many of the most exploited have been cheerleaders in their own exploitation.

But it is all a lie. A very large, elaborately constructed lie. All the wealth of a nation, of the world, comes from the labours of people who make things and grow things, not from people who push papers around. And if all those people decide to create a cooperative society in which 90% of the wealth isn't in the hands of 10% of the population, then that is precisely what they can do. We are many, they are few.