Jim Flaherty claims that the public service cuts he is making are moderate. He argues that the Harper government is simply demonstrating prudent financial management. But, Susan Riley notes, the cuts present a textbook case on how not to downsize. Worse still, it's becoming more and more apparent that, under the guise of "moderation," the Harperites are getting rid of agencies they despise.
Riley quotes Linda Duxbury, a business professor at Carleton, whose area of expertise is organizational health:
When it comes to layoffs, Duxbury says, “it is more merciful to say ‘you’re losing your job,’ than sending letters to thousands saying ‘you might lose your job’.” That only creates insecurity across the system, and “turbulence and chaos for those left.” They suffer a form of “survivor syndrome,” a debilitating mixture of guilt and relief.
If anything, the F35 debacle proves that these impostors couldn't run a 7-11. But they are very good at destroying the people and the organizations which don't fit their Social Darwinist paradigm. Rights and Democracy died because, when it looked at the Middle East, it saw more than the state of Israel. The CBC is outside the paradigm because it is a "public broadcaster."
And yesterday, Carol Goar reports, the "prudent" managers of Canada's finances threw the National Council on Welfare "on the scrap heap:"
Since 1962, the National Council of Welfare had held up a mirror to the nation, highlighting the pockets of poverty and warning policy-makers of the consequences of neglecting those in need. It gave non-profit groups the facts they needed to speak credibly about hardship in a land of plenty. It tracked the emergence and growth of a crack in society between the comfortably well-off and the struggling. And it brought together social policy thinkers to find solutions to poverty — or at least keep the debate alive.
Dr. Kellie Leitch -- who remained silent as her colleagues continued to ship asbestos to the Third World -- claims that the government is simply rationalizing its resources. She says organizations like Campaign 2000 and Canada Without Poverty are duplicating the Council's mandate. Goar writes:
Actually they don’t. They don’t have a government mandate “to advise the (human resources) minister on matters concerning poverty and the realities of low-income Canadians.” They don’t have the resources to buy Statistics Canada’s unpublished data. They don’t have the statutory authority to create opportunities for the poor to participate in the national decision-making process.
There was another reason for the death of NCW:
Everybody working in the field knew the real reason the Conservatives dumped the agency was that it was an unwanted piece of Liberal baggage. They hadn’t listened to it in years. They didn’t want to be nagged about poverty, inequality or social responsibility.
Under the smokescreen of fiscal responsibility, the Harperites are eliminating their enemies.
7 comments:
Health, safety, fisheries protection, environmental monitoring and assessment, even border security are, to Harper, akin to the census. They're places where things are measured and weighed, calculated and recorded. They're places that generate facts and statistics that have no place in a 'faith based' ruler entwined in fundamentalist religious superstitions. As I wrote this morning, Harper's preferred means of governance is truly primitivism. All he's missing is a loincloth and a bone through his nose.
I find you using the word "enemies" in the last sentence not the right one. "Organized critics" might be better. There actions are actually increasing their enemies, unfortunately they now may have to do research and organize from the ground up.
In other circumstances, Mound, the image of Stephen Harper with a bone through his nose would generate howls of laughter.
Somebody like Terry Mosher (Aislin, of the Montreal Gazette) would wring that picture for millions of laughs.
Unfortunately, the cartoon is too close to the truth.
The problem, Philip, is that the Harperites see their "organized critics" as their enemies.
Politics to them is war by other means. They believe that, to win, you need to scorch the earth in front of you.
Harper is a Neo-Nazi Reformer, from his Northern Foundation Party of 1989. They said, the skinheads organized Harper's party.
Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Harper and every dictator, have the same typo personalities.
All dictators are paranoid. They are so evil, they are very fearful their dastardly deeds will become known, by the public. Dictators don't feel safe, unless they control absolutely everything, they can get their very dirty hands on.
Controlling the media is always first on their list. They don't want the public to hear, of their dastardly deeds. They had secret meetings behind closed doors, just as Harper does to-day.
Harper is every bit as hateful, as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and every dictator is. It is not beneath Harper's dignity to, lie, deceive, thieve, use dirty politics, dirty tactics, use dirty criminals, and certainly not beneath his dignity, to cheat to win. Nor, was it beneath the three most evil tyrant dictators dignity. They are who Harper patterned, his own evil dictatorship government by.
All the evil dictators, started out the same, getting rid of their opponents. Control is the foremost of a dictator. The media is number one on their lists, to be controlled.
Hitler committed suicide, he didn't want what happened to Mussolini, to happen to him. Stalin extremely ill, lying in his bed. Not one person lifted a finger, to look after him. He was left to die, which Stalin's daughters accused the people of doing. Stalin murdered, some of his own blood relatives. His paranoia was such, he wildly murdered anyone he suspected opposing him. Whether guilty or not, the people died.
Dictators get rid of their enemies, one way or the other.
Harper needs to remember...People who have lost everything...and have nothing left to lose...lose it.
What I fear most, Owen, is that across North America the Right, that is today the radical Right, has so deftly exploited wedge politics as to create an unbridgeable rift. There is one group for whom reality is determined on facts and analysis. The other supplants knowledge and finds truth in faith, in the ultimate suspension of disbelief, in the utter rejection of logic, critical thinking and the scientific method.
I have a close friend of 40-years. He is a Conservative insider, a real backroom boy. Lawyer, judge, politician, he's been an embedded fixture in his decades with his party.
Yet today he is an avowed climate change denialist. Despite his advanced education and his considerable experience of the adversarial process both at the bar and on the bench, he has become utterly intellectually arrested. For a man whose professional career was founded on the laws of evidence he dispenses with all that now to be a good trooper in today's "faith based" Conservatism.
Anyone familiar with the writings of Burke or Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt would immediately see the agonizing perversion of Conservatism that prevails today.
When I was a kid my Dad was a freshly returned WWII infantry Lieutenant (after years in rehabilitation in England). I was utterly fascinated with Naziism and, in particular, how a nation of people so accomplished in the arts and sciences could turn so monstrous. I wasn't more than six or seven before I began wondering just how different were we really from those Germans, what would or could make us also follow something akin to their path?
I never answered my own question and it has haunted me ever since.
I understand your concern, Mound, and I share it. Hitler could never have succeeded if Germany's intellectual elite had not backed him.
It was easy to gain the support of the beer hall mobs. But it was the support of those who should have known better that gave Hitler what he needed -- the patina of respectability.
The Greeks knew a great deal about human foolishness.
There are times I think we are all characters in a Greek tragedy.
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