"The lights are going out all over America," wrote Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate in economics and New York Times columnist, last month.
Krugman was speaking both literally and metaphorically. Among the items he cited:
- - Cities across the United States, desperate to save money, are turning off their streetlights.
- - Local governments are tearing up their roads and returning them to gravel because they can't afford the maintenance costs.
- - Teachers are being laid off and school programs eliminated throughout the United States.
Elsewhere in the news pages of the Internet we learn:
- - The state of Utah is entertaining apparently serious talk of eliminating Grade 12 to save a little cash.
- - 48 million Americans, about 14 per cent of the population of the United States, require food stamps to survive.
- - The city of Camden, N.J. -- once home to Walt Whitman, for pity's sake -- is on the verge of having to close its public library system.
As old Walt observed: "What a devil art thou, Poverty! How many desires -- how many aspirations after goodness and truth -- how many noble thoughts, loving wishes toward our fellows, beautiful imaginings thou hast crushed under thy heel, without remorse or pause!"
Without remorse or pause, indeed. Where is the U.S. government? Basically it does nothing -- other than cutting hungry citizens' access to food stamps. It is paralyzed by its sclerotic bicameral structure, hostage to big-money interests, in hock to insane wars, in thrall to the ignorance of Birthers and Flat Earthers.
Lights out. Roads closed. … Who needs roads and streetlights, anyway? Nowadays the rich folks fly, and live in gated enclaves at their coastal destinations.
Schools closed. Minds closed. The census emasculated. … Who needs or wants facts or knowledge? Ignorance is Wisdom!
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This bad movie is the economic model that our Tea Party Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, would tie us to, and the political model he would turn us into! The economic and political anvil he’d chain us to, more like, before he tosses us into the lake.
As the man himself said in 2003: "The time has come to recognize that the U.S. will continue to exercise unprecedented power in a world where international rules are still unreliable and where security and advancing of the free democratic order still depend significantly on the possession and use of military might." There's no reason to believe he's changed his mind.
Military might, indeed. Talk about unreliable international rules. Well, Harper's favourite next-door neighbour is a Third World giant on the verge of collapse, armed with somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 nuclear weapons!
At least those Harperista Conservatives are tough on immigration, because, by the sound of it, we’re going to be facing a never-ending river of frost-back refugees from the Lower 48, streaming across our border from Montana and North Dakota!
The time has come, all right. The time has come to think seriously about the "stark choice" Mr. Harper's media echo chamber presented us with today and get rid of these so-called Conservatives before the lights go out in Canada, too.
This post also appears on David Climenhaga's blog, Alberta Diary.
