Friday, February 22, 2013

Greed And Secrecy



The Neo Conservative revolution has spawned an alliance between government and corporations. What that means in practice is that we now have an alliance between Greed and Secrecy: Michael Harris writes:

The sad fact is that secrecy and information control are the twin plagues of our age. Elites get to run their own shows and, for the most part, write their own report cards. It’s how Montreal got to be a giant Mob restaurant. It’s how the Catholic Church preached morality and concealed sexual abuse in its parish shadows for decades. It’s how the cod were wiped out. It’s how Stephen Harper uses the aura of office to ward off demands for information. All he wants you to see are the commercials you pay for saying what a great job he’s doing.

The antidote to that alliance is democracy. And that is why, around the world, the Right has been on the march to stamp out what it has called an "excess" of democracy. It's much safer to buy your politicians. In Britain, the financial services industry had Tony Blair's Labour government in its pocket. The Libor scandal

was actually aided and abetted by the government of the day and the Bank of England. No one was regulating the Wild West banking practices because they had opted for the so-called “light touch” approach to supervising banking.

People with the lightest touch usually turn out to be pickpockets. De-regulation of the banking industry unleashed 10,000 hyenas on an unsuspecting public.

In Canada, as recently released documents make clear, the Harper government exists to actualize the oil companies' agenda. Citizens just get in the way. If they don't know what's going on, life is so much easier.

2 comments:

e.a.f. said...

they always said, information was power. That is why stevie slime doesn't want people to have any information. A democracy is fine but if we don't know what is going on how do you vote and how do you know what to fight back at.

The cons are in bed with corporations. There is no doubt about that but I'd really like to know what stevie slime is getting out of it, exactly. All I can conclude so far is power. However, if he is beholden to the corporations he doesn't have any power at all. The corporations have the power and he is just their puppet. He can't be that stupid he doesn't realize he doesn't have power, except with the approval of the corporations. Power freaks, want unrestricted power so if he doesn't have that what does he have? Maybe it is still all about the money.

Owen Gray said...

It's a safe bet, e.a.f. that Mr. Harper's friends will look after his well being when he leaves politics.