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Political discourse has been reduced to talking about saving money
September 18, 2011 - 1:52pm
see below
Rick Salutin hits the nail on the head when he says:
The examples he gives are:
• Toronto politics, where the debates are all about what is "gravy" and what is not; what can be done cheaper by private contractors than city employees; how can we cut the costs of operating libraries and public transit, etc.
• Health care in the USA being run by number-crunching HMOs.
• Harper government cuts to arts funding, which are met not with arguments about the value of publicly-supported culture, but talk of "jobs generated, how cheaply artists work, [and] the 'multiplier' effect on the economy."
There are many other examples, of course, that Salutin didn't mention:
• The Harper government wants to spend $30 billion or more on F-35 fighter jets, and the opposition doesn't ask "why do we need 65 first-strike death machines" but rather, "why not submit the contract to tender so we could get a better price?"
• Taxation policy, which used to be seen as a means of encouraging desirable ends in society and discouraging undesirable ones, is now universally discussed by politicians as if it is an end in itself, regardless of the consequences, good or bad.
• "Political parties trying to court voters by railing against rising energy prices, and even proposing regressive energy policies to get energy prices 'under control.'" - Dale Marshall
• Ontario provincial election politics are all about how can we curb spending on health care and on post-secondary education it's all about tuition fees - as if there aren't a couple of dozen serious issues about health and education that don't involve saving the "taxpayer" money.
• The perversion of the word "efficiency" to mean making do with less money for social programs, rather than a measure of the effectiveness of the programs themselves in achieving their objects.
..all this talk has been made possible by deficits. much more needs to be done on the demystification of the debt. how it occurred in the 1st place. how it was privatized when there was no need for it to be. how we are charged compound interest costing us billions of dollars. it the biggest racket going in canada. not one politician speaks against this systematic transfer of wealth.
Another example is the current media fuss over Canada's Chief of Defence Staff using government and military aircraft to travel around the country.
The ever-fearless media have done an investigation that shows Gen. Walter Natynczyk has used over $1 million worth of aircraft at the public's expense since 2008. Oh the horror! Pity the poor taxpayer!
If the media had been really doing their job they would years ago have exposed Natynczyk as the war criminal he is. Only when government money is involved, however, do the media (and the opposition) get all upset and outraged.
It's like nailing Al Capone for tax evasion, as if that's the worst thing he ever did.
It's a show trial. The chances of nailing him for war crimes are nil next to none in the current western world political climate. And I don't think the NDP should be caught up in trying to nail him for war crimes either. It would be like expecting the NAZIS to have investigated their own false flag operation Himmler leading to the attack on Poland, or like expecting the American inquisition to implicate themselves in 9/11 terror leading to the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq and subsequent U.S. military occupations. Never happen without a trial in a World Court of law. We would need the equivalent of Nuremberg to force these criminals to admit their crimes to the world. Anything less would actually harm the pro democracy movement including the official opposition NDP.
No, it's not like that at all.
Nazi war criminals WERE in fact prosecuted and convicted - not by the Nazis themselves, of course, but by those who dispossessed them of power.
There's no reason why the NDP couldn't promise to bring the criminals to justice after they form the next government. But of course they won't do that because they don't recognize the criminality of the butchers who run the Canadian military.
When Natyncyk and Bouchard retire, Prime Minister Mulcair will praise them as heroes who served their country well.
Even many of the NAzis at Nuremberg were let off easy to win German support against the Communist menace rising in the East
There was an effective opposition to the NAZIS madness there in Germany in the 1930s, too. Many of them were, in turn, given kangaroo trials and beheaded long before Nuremberg ever happened. The point I was making about operation Himmler is that the Nazis would never have allowed themselves to be convicted of war crimes during their dictatorship. Our corrupt stooges and yes-men in the military don't have to worry about it happening here in Canada either. War crimes are typically not prosecuted by governments deeply involved in commiting them.
And our own yes-men to U.S. Military power in Canada's pretend sovereign military know full well that they won't be facing prosecution for their war crimes no matter how many resources the NDP waste on trying to achieve that end. The criminals and their enablers would love nothing better than for the NDP to add fuel to colder war baloney.
The NDP will not be promising to deviate from their focus of accusing the Harper Government of Bananada of anything other than their usual lack of transparency and accountability to the people of Canada. It's mundane, we know. The NDP will be focusing on the vicious toadies' overall poor performance in running the economy into the ground and lack of respect for democratic process in general. If Canadians don't understand that the Harpers violate basic rules of democracy on a regular basis, then why would Canadians be convinced that war crimes have been commited? You might as well ask the NDP to please commit worst-past-the-post equivalent of political suicide. And I'm actually glad youre not a party strategist. And I think you should try to wait until the NDP has served at least one term in federal government before judging them. That's what fair trials are about as a rule.
government propaganda is quite clearly directed at getting us to think this way.
Chomsky talks about this a lot, and about how it's a way to atomize people and break down solidarity.
the idea is you don't care whether the old lady across the street has enough to eat, that's her problem. Your responsibility is to think about yourself and maximize productivity. We are "taxpayers". We're told special interests are things to do with women, workers, minorities, homelessness, civil rights etc. and "the national interest" is things like corporate profits, the military, low tax rates etc.
the ironic thing is that when governments talk about "spending" and lowering taxes, what they really mean is INCREASING the spending of individual "taxpayers" in terms of the share of taxes they pay versus the wealthy, how much certain services cost, etc.
This isn't always such a bad perspective. Poverty is incredibly expensive. People not reaching their full educational potential is expensive. The costs imposed by air and water pollution are expensive. Prisons are extremely expensive relative to the results achieved.
And of course along comes Doug to provide yet another example of how political discourse is now all about saving money. Thanks, Doug!
I commented on one of these "cost of poverty" reports on rabble.ca not long ago. That one was about B.C., not Ontario, but it expressly used the same methodology as the Ontario report you linked to. All such reports take the same approach and have the same flaws. Here's an excerpt from what I said:
If they can keep us diverted from reality by getting us to believe that "everything boils down to money", it serves the wealthy and corporate culture well.
Climate change, or AGW ["human caused global warming"], is another one, where oilmen say "it would be stupid to risk the economy for something that might not even exist" instead of staying focused on the fact that we have released a lot of CO2 in a very short [geological] time and that there are consequences to that.
{ If I was to stay with the economic argument, I would still point out that "it is stupid to fail to address AGW for the sake of an economy that could implode on itself anyway". }
I can't agree. The dynamic becomes we will spend only on what we have to rather than what we can achieve. Policy becomes reactive rather than proactive and that helps the wrong priorities become predominant.
As for saying poverty is expensive, that is debatable.
Poverty is a necessary byproduct of giving the rich more and more and more and more. Poverty keeps many people from fighting for change -- it knocks many out of the system and forces them in to expoitative jobs making more profit for the rich. Poverty is expensive for those whoa re poor. But those who support policies of high poverty don't care about them. Poverty hurts the collective wealth of the country but those who support those policies don't even acknowledge the existence of collective wealth and it serves their individual wealth just fine.
Some of the wealthiest people in the world live in jurisdictions of great poverty and inequality.
If you want to engage any debate about what is good or what is bad you have to add "for whom" on to every statement otherwise you will miss the point every time. This is the lost conclusion to every policy debate and every comment like who is best for PM or Premier or who is doing a good job.
Like that joke about reading Chinese fortune cookie fortunes adding "in bed" to the end of each (I know people who do this every single time laughing their guts out). We should be adding "for whom" in the same way to every qualitative statement about policy, every subjective opinion, every statement of benefits and costs.
Until we are able to do this, to ask this fundamental question each one of us for ourselves, democracy will be a wasted exercise. After all, the point of democracy is to have the individual think for themselves what is best for them so we have a majority of interests managed.
That said we need to adequately sort between assumptions about what is best and what is desirable. In part because what is best assumes there is one way of looking at benefit whereas what is desirable opens the door to recognition that choices are more subjective than objective and priorities not as universal. What is desirable makes fewer pretensions of some universal good. Universal good when it comes to politics tends to mean what is best for those with the most resources and loudest voices.
There is a collective good but there is no universal good. We used to kid ourselves that there was a universal good-- that everyone could be better off. The idea was founded on the concept of endless growth. If there is too much inequity-- just grow your way out of it-- you won't have to take anything from anyone. It is a clean, polite, non confrontational idea. And it is also bullshit. Of course now that we have reached the limits to growth as a planet and species the lie of it is clear. Even if growth could undo inequity (it never could so long as the rich take the growth) now there can no longer be growth.
Today, we have reached a new economic dynamic making recovery from recession impossible. Instead of single or double dip recession we have an up and down weaving that confuses many economists. That is caused by having too little oil and rising energy costs. When the economy starts to recover, energy cost goes up, we don't have enough. Price rises and the growth is choked off and down we go. When we go down demand for energy eases, prices go down until the next time we start to recover and the weaving continues. The new reality allows no sustained recovery as long as our prime energy sources are non-renewable and in short supply. The old economy itself was based on growth. Lack of growth means economic distress but that is the new global condition.And I have not even addressed the cost to the planet, our health our prospects for survival caused by the pollution from overuse of this finite resource.
As increasingly people understand that things are finite and growth is gone, the only way one person does better is for someone else to do worse. The lot of the poor cannot get better unless the well off give up some of what they have. When you think about this long enough you realize that poverty is no longer a cost on all society but the means by which the rich can stay as rich. The extremes of wealth are socially unsustainable but they will hang on as long as they can. They will build more jails because they know the unrest is unavoidable. They will hope enough of the exploited are pushed down far enough that their struggle will be for survival rather than equality. The early stages of ecological collapse serve them well in that regard.
The idea of common cause, that we all can be better off is dead and the sooner voters understand this the sooner they can begin to answer the hard questions of which side are they on. The mass religion that is the opiate for the masses today is the false hope that somehow we can all as a society be better off. The rich who are carting off every advantage and every scrap of wealth want you to believe that-- they want you to think there is such a thing as a best premier (as opposed to a premier best for them) and they want you to believe in the rising tide raising all boats. Some used to say that a rising tide rises all boats, others a rising tide swamps small boats. The argument is obsolete. There is no longer a tide. There is just a scramble for what is left. The rich have 90% of everything and want the remaining 10%. They want you to think that there will be a new tide so you don't notice when they take the last 10% and you have nothing. they want you to think about whether your boat will rise or be swamped in the next tide so you don't notice there are no more tides just an increasing momentum towards concentration of what is left.
There is also the problem in the environmental movement. Too many think that they can separate concepts of environmental and social sustainability. An environmental plan that does not adequately address social sustainability -- such as unchecked rising energy costs without any measures to address inequality will fail. In that sense, I have parted company with David Suzuki who seems to believe now that rising costs will just let supply side economics force conservation. Suzuki must believe everyone lives as he does because he misses the point entirely that the rich will still blast the AC through monster homes filled with conspicuous consumption long after the poor have been shivering in the dark. I raised the idea with all parties here in Ontario that we cannot either ignore the problem or look to the market to resolve it through high energy costs. We need to regulate over consumption because the inequalities make pressure to change both ineffective and inhumane. One area of regulation i proposed is creating standards for energy efficiency for rental tenancies. In Ontario we have none. So long as you can heat your place to room temperature (68 degrees F; 20 C), there is no requirement for insulation or concern about waste and cost. Non-thermo windows and baseboard heaters make no sense if you are paying the bills but for landlords who do not pay the utilities they are an inexpensive and viable choice. Partial grants to upgrade homes have no purpose to a landlord who does not pay the bills if it is a rental property and competing landlords are no better. But too many so-called environmentalists assume that we can jack the prices, make tenants responsible for *their* choices and solve the problem. It is a punitive rather than practical idea since tenants cannot replace inefficient furnaces, windows, or replace lost or non-existent insulation. These are the policies of environmentalists who think that we can achieve environmental sustainability without regard for social sustainability and using the market to achieve this. The market is not designed for the public good it is designed to maximize growth and to create individual wealth. Good people like Suzuki are having a fantasy thinking we can just use market rates on energy to force massive changes in behaviour. It will punish the poor while the rich will afford to ignore it. Someone has to tell Suzuki that the middle class his policy is aimed at has left the building and is as alive as Elvis something people talk about, aspire to, dress up as but it no longer exists. Studies have shown Toronto, our biggest city, is split between rich and poor having lost its middle class. It is between those who cannot make a change to react to the market who will be only punished by higher energy rates and those for whom those higher rates will be mostly meaningless.
Time more people started talking about the new dynamic rather than the old.
(Edited to add further comment on Greens conversion to supply side economics as it fits a macro understanding of the problem)
I get the point of the OP, but frankly I think many of our political decisions could do with a harder look at the real costs of things.
The problem is that most of those financial arguments are far too narrow, and don't look at the whole picture. To say that cutting a government budget item is saving money is inaccurate, because usually those cuts mean much higher costs and greater financial imbalances somewhere else.
When you look at something like the omnibus crime bill I think the whole debate would be a lot more comprehensive if we could actually find out how much it is going to cost.
Of course the Harper government doesn't know or isn't saying how much it is going to cost, and there's little reason for them to worry about it, since it is other governments' (provincial) budgets that will have to pay for most of the costs of policing, justice and incarceration.
So again, agree in spirit with the OP. I think part of how these financial arguments are screwed up is that they are presented as reducing costs rather than investment (in the good sense of the word, of course).
— Wallace Shawn, Fragments from a Diary, The Nation, March 31, 2003.
Obssession with crime and punishment is 12th on the list of Dr Lawrence Britt's defining characteristics of fascism. In the U.S., guard labour and protection of private property is said to tie-up human resources of one in four workers. That in itself is a crime against prosperity.
Fascists are not very interested in creating prosperous domestic economies based on products and services beneficial to the true majority. Fascists begin by handing what seem to be limitless powers to police and shovelling outrageous amounts of money and manpower to the police and military hand over fist. They like to build prisons and convince their supporters that it's all for the good of the nation, and that it's to protect good people from bad.
And there is a defining characteristic on Britt's list that I don't see and probably lumped-in with opposition to organized labour. He doesn't really mention the domestic economy. And it is fascist tendency to want to destroy the domestic economy while attacking organized labour and labour rights in paving the way for a more militarized economy. This doesn't occur over night, but it doesn't take very long either. The right has undermined labour power in Canada and other rich countries and effectively so over the last 30-35 years. And today, crises within the economy are becoming the new normal throughout the Western world. And they are blaming ordinary people and our unrealistic expectations for middle class prosperity which they themselves made solemn promises to provide during a cold war era. We were obviously lied to on a constant basis.
There is a really good quote by an American woman from the 1970s who warned us here in the future concerning the unrealistic promises for middle class capitalism based on consumption. That was the cold war era, and such empty promises were short-term ones and never meant to be fulfilled. Fascists are very bad at making long term promises for the future, and it's because their true agenda is typically hidden from the public.
Actually, that's just plain old neo-liberalism.
No matter what you call it, sadly, it is our shared reality.
Anyone watch P&P last night? Some Conservative blowhard is introducing a private members bill to protect the Canadian flag, with a possible sentence of two years if you prevent someone from flying it (he gave as an example a condo board that asked a war vet resident to take down his flag). Charlie Angus and the Liberal rep (forget his name) are okay with the proposed law, just not okay with the punishment part. That Conservative guy said our brave men and women have died defending the flag - what horseshit! When was the last time Canada fought a war of national defence - WWII? 1812? This is all about becoming more jingoistic, like our neighbours to the south.
cut and posted elsewhere
Our L'oil Opizishin, which has no problem with making war on Libya and killing civilians from the air, is now getting all bent out of shape over the CO$T of the war on Libya.
It seems Peter McKay's greatest crime was not being forthright about how much the Canadian taxpayers were paying for Canada's role in making Libya safe for democracy.
But it is always about money, the rich against the poor, as much as we would like to delude ourselves otherwise, although it is rarely if ever packaged that way.
Right-wingers are in politics for one reason, and one reason only, and that is who gets the next government contract. All the rest is a smokescreen - as if Harper gives a shit about abortion or any other issue like that.
You may wish to delude yourself about it, but I don't.
The political discourse in this country (which is what this thread is about) is NOT about the rich versus the poor, unfortunately. In fact all the political parties want us to forget that there are actually classes in this society.
They prefer to talk about how much everything costs the taxpayers, as a way of avoiding the real political issues. The Libya war is a perfect case in point. They vote to support NATO's war on Libya, which predictably results in the killing of thousands of civilians and the destabilization of that country for the foreseeable future, and the only criticism they can come up with is that the government wasn't upfront about the cost.
Same with the fighter jets. They wring their hands about the cost, instead of questioning the need for aggressive military hardware in the first place.
Read the thread.
I read the thread and I disagree with its premise.
You are talking about government and you may wish it isn't so but government is all about money - who gets the next government contract. Everything else is secondary. You are just being suckered into this political issue or that political issue as a diversion. Do you think someone who gets defense contact gives a tinker's damn wherether it is used to fight one particular country over another. Come on, you are smarter than that.
I don't object to focusing on the discrepancies in the cost, because it is a separate issue - lying and deception - and at this point that is the issue that the government is most vulnerable on, and the one which most people are most likely to listen to.
Sure it's not the only thing they could be hit with, but it is the best thing to hit them with - unless the opposition want to ignore the fact that the government is lying, and has been shown to be lying by the auditor general, and instead turn the debate into "who supports freedom and who supports the terrorists".
And sure, most things that might seem a matter of principle do come down to money, but I am pretty sure Harper cares about a good deal other than just money, from looking at his cuts to women's groups and reproductive services overseas, just to name a couple.
The problem is the fetishised discussion of costs and debt/deficit as if it was an evil no matter how much it is projected to be.
This for example contributed greatly to the "discussion" of the deficit that began in Nova Scotia with the NDP taking power.
There was indeed a structural deficit. But as we have seen, it did not take that much to wipe it out. [Education spending is the second largest of provincial expenditure, so no small thing, but the deficit was essentially wiped out in two years of deep cuts solely to education that could have been done in 3 or 4 of modest cuts. Hardly a ravenous beast.]
Its not like every discussion of costs and debt/deficit needs to be banned. On the other hand, it can be argued that even 'being reasonable about it' is going down the garden path.
So fetishisation of costs and debt/deficit is destructive.
Then how do we navigate when it simply is true that the way governments and spending on service delivery works- the total bill would just go through the roof if we dropped the discussion about 'choices have to be made'.
Nowhere is this more apparent than health care. We could double taxation rates and it would not be very long before we were still faced with "well, we can do just about anything in patching up sickness and disease, but how much resources do we want to put to it?" [And we would still be faced with that question even if we did a far better job of putting those extra resources to prevention and building of health. People would still get very ill, even if fewer. And how far do we go?]
This links to the unanswered sustainability questions: we have got to the point that there is an enormous amount we CAN do, but should we? Can we? And that is not only a distribution question that the few get everything and the many are left lacking. With perfect distribution of resources we would still face the same questions of what limits.]
The culture around the finances of government is rotten and has been so for so long now most people don't even remember it being different.
One of the great Conservative achievements of the Mulroney era was to change the way we spoke about public money and engagement.
Before then we used to speak of "citizens" when we talked about public good and public finance. During the Mulroney era this was purposefully changed to taxpayers. I remember the change well as I was quite upset about it even though I was very young.
Not everyone is a net taxpayer and not everyone pays the same amount of taxes. When we make the language about taxpayers and say it is taxpayer's money we imply that the more you pay the more important you, and your opinion, is. We imply that those members of our society who are not taxpayers (defined as getting back more in credits than they pay in in taxes), be they students, ill, unemployed, seniors, are not stakeholders and have no right to the discussion.
There is also a denial about the insistence of public good and a public as a collective. The presumption of individual ownership over taxes even after they are paid rather than public collective ownership over the proceeds of our society is troubling because of the way we look at things. There is a presumption that only those who pay taxes should get good value and what they get has to be justifiable to them. If we considered public good then we could have a better value-for-money discussion that engages the entire population. Giving money to someone who has nothing may never be considered good value to an individual taxpayer but it makes good sense when you consider the tax revenue to be a public good belonging to all of us.
I'll be picky for a moment: the one trouble with the citizen term is that permanent residents should also be part of our collective. They too are stakeholders in our society. We may be looking for a word that encompasses both citizens and permanent residents of Canada-- a word for our society. then it is that to which we should refer when we speak about the ownership of revenue as well as any other public good available.
We must combat this idea that says when you follow the twisted logic that the environment is owned by the government and the government is owned by taxpayers (rather than citizens and perhaps PRs) and that they own it by virtue of their taxation and therefore their say is proportional to what they pay.
This is also a very old idea in which property owners used to have political rights rather than everyone and that those who owned more property had more say. The culture is moving back to that very regressive idea.
I'll post what I did under Salutin's article here:Take it a step further.
Government has been recast as owned by the taxpayer rather than the people. Everything is on behalf of the taxpayer. Only the taxpayer deserves good value and consideration.
By cultural implication is that anyone not a net payer of tax deserves no consideration: the sick, the unemployed, seniors who do not earn enough, students. The second implications equally serious: If you are a stakeholder by virtue of the taxes you pay then those who pay more have more at stake more reason to be heard, more weight in public consideration.
Thirdly, people are citizens, corporations are not. But corporations are taxpayers (even if they are paying less than their share). When we acknowledge taxpayers rather than people we include those who are not people while excluding actual people. Corporations are tools of people. they do not deserve extra consideration when it comes to the public good. Those who own an interest in a corporation should not get extra say because they have that good fortune.
If we are to fix this, we should only refer to taxpayer when talking about the collection and paying of tax, not public goods that belong to everyone by virtue of them being part of the public in Canada.
I believe it is this presumption that a taxpayer retains an interest in tax paid after it is paid that has caused the problem Salutin is talking about. Ironically, the public do not have claim to money given to corporations. Once we purchase a good or a service from a company we do not refer to their profits as our money. So why then should the public money still considered belonging to the one who has contributed it?
FWIW, I really appreciated M. Spector's raising this issue, and hadn't previously noticed his comment on that rabble piece last September or so.
This reminds me of the shock and horror about $1 billion cost of security for the G8 and G20 in 2010 - the price tag, not what the aim of the "security" really was.
What price is too high to safeguard Canadian streets from democracy?