Calling all impending seniors! According to Mr. Harper we are all simply pawns to his desire to become one of the rich and infamous! We are now only poker chips in a ruthless game of power among the rich and the privileged!

At the recent elitist World Economic Forum in Davos, a poker game where to gain a seat you have to be not just rich but filthy- filthy rich, Stephen Harper pulled out a stinker! He didn’t even get off his chair, he simply lifted one haunch and spouted about how it was now necessary for all Canadians to work an extra two years before they can collect their old age pension! No debate, no tabled motion, only a blank, sanctimonious, knee jerk announcement.

He leaned across the table and pushed in his pile of chips (read: we sixty something citizens) to assert himself among the other players as a man of power, a man of influence, a man who sees nothing but the pot, the prize, the global economy and the old boys club of capitalistic desperadoes who care nothing for our quality of life unless it benefits them!

Just like the infamous Bourbon king of France, Louis XVI, Harper is raising the price of bread, ignoring the people and feathering his own nest at our expense. Will he wait until he is sixty seven to get his pension? Will his pension be $450 a month? Has he worked all his life only to be told that he has to wait two more years to claim what has been mandated to be his at the age of sixty five?

I think he is naively overbetting. I think he has forgotten that many of his colleagues at that card table see a broader ambition, not just the pot in front of our myopic leader, but the fact that the more he gives away to them, the richer they become.

Harper is being led down a garden path, following a trail of Marie Antoinette cake crumbs, selling off his people’s welfare as the fat cats of the world stuff their pockets and watch the world fall into ruin.

What comes next? What will the next pot contain? More cheap oil as WE pay more and more here at home? Perhaps our water is to be next, sloshed onto the table as another naïve attempt to insinuate himself into the big boys league?

The global economy is not about people, it is about making a few people very rich at our expense. The sixty something citizens of this country deserve more than that.

More info:   http://m.ctv.ca/bc/20120126/harper-davos-swiss-economy-20120126.html#menu

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Opening up a coal mine anywhere is tantamount to falling back into the pit of using up a toxic non-renewable resource without any good reason. Actually there is a good reason for the proposed re-opening of coal mines everywhere, but that reason has nothing to do with the environment, global warming, non-renewable resources, employment nor any other form of smoke and fumes that you might be fooled into accepting. The real reason, and the underlying cause of most of our environmental and ecological woes, is one of economy.

Not our economy let me reiterate this point, not our, “mine” or your economy, but only the economy of our nouveau demi-god; the globalized corporate empire. Corporations, by virtue of their legislated charters, are not individuals; they have no legal or moral requirement except one; to make money for their shareholders. Anyone who tells you any different should check into a first year law course! If they do anything that benefits the community, it is only if that act or acts can be justified to their shareholders as PR or a write off.

Coal dust is lethal. It is purely and simply lethal. You can talk all you want about scrubbers, washing machines and chemical cleaning. You can talk all you want, but the science does not make any sense. Coal dust causes cancer, coal dust causes black lung and coal dust causes emphysema. It doesn’t matter how you wash it, clean it or chemical-ize it. And yet we are planning to dig up coal, transport it to China and let them deal with the consequences!

What we are doing (once more) is acquiescing our morality in favour of an empirical and alien economy. We would never expose our own people to the toxic fumes from incendiary coal, as we would never expose our own people to the products of asbestos. We mine asbestos, but we are banned from using it here because it causes cancer. And so we mine it and ship it to China, in the same way as we now want to ship our coal. Let them deal with it! We must have jobs, we must make profits, we must be a part of the capitalistic neo-liberal empire that puts a few extra jobs out as a carrot, and causes us to forget who we are, who we were, who we should be.

Canada should never have become a place where an alien, globalised economy and commodity prices can change, alter, deface and diminish the quality of moral life for the citizens of Canada. It should not be a place where our ethics of humanity are suborned to the ambition of legally soulless, alien, barren, nouveau demi-gods who tell us what is right and wrong, what is morally acceptable or not, based on a skewed and spun equation of commodity futures and corporate ambition. If coal is known to be a carcinogen, how can we as Canadians ethically mine it and then sell it to anyone else?

If you still don’t believe me, if you still think that a little itsy bitsy coal mine in the back forty fields of Royston does no harm, then take a trip to where I came from; back to the coal pits and slag heaps of Yorkshire. Have a good look at the guys with no lungs, lurching around the streets with their oxygen masks; check out the average lifespan of coal miners and their immediate families, or better yet, come and watch me as I huff and puff my sorry sad way up a set of gradual stairs!

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I have recently returned from a trip to China. The Chinese statistics are staggering: Cities with the population of Canada. Provinces the size of European countries; constant traffic, eight lane highways though the middle of towns; domestic tourists who flood those towns (every week) in their millions and high rise apartment blocks that are being erected (in Shanghai for one example) at the rate of two thousand in the next nine month period alone. The problems involved in dealing with those numbers are also staggering for the Chinese government. How do you govern a population of 1.3 billion people in a unified and equitable manner and yet still ensure the individual rights of each and every person? The answer of course is that you cannot. And it is this dichotomy that both highlights our present problems and portends to future, politically catastrophic ones, right here in Canada.

We prefer a system that purports to put the rights of individuals ahead of those of our collective society. We prefer to pretend that our “government” works for us not as a collective race but as specific, individual people. And yet we also realize that our present system does not work. That our present system does not in fact cater to the majority. If it did, then why do we have so many homeless people? Why do we have food banks and why do we have one per cent of our population holding on ferociously to ninety per cent of this country’s wealth?

The Chinese government is a government that does work for the majority. The Chinese government openly and honestly admits that it cannot acknowledge the rights of all, only those of the majority. We call that an abuse of human rights and then we view our own abuses (twenty three per cent of Canada’s children living below the poverty line for instance, as billions are spent on foreign military adventures) through a crack’d mirror that calls our system democratic (yeah!) and theirs (the Chinese) socialist or communist (boo!).

My point is one of honesty. Democracy is a system whereby the population of a nation state has the right to elect a government that will advocate for them, on their behalf and in their best interests. Socialism is a system in which the citizens of a country abdicate their individual rights and interests to those of their collective society. The political officers of both systems however, by definition, can have only one allegiance. That allegiance has to be directly to the citizens who elected them. If it isn’t, if their loyalties are divided, then they can no longer truthfully represent their own electorate’s interests.

And that is why we have ceased to be a democratic society except in name only. We elect officials to represent us and, once elected, they divide their allegiance between their electorate, their own political parties and the interests of a global economy as disguised under the cheapened and debauched flag (probably made in China) of some abstract ideology of self serving patriotism. We must address this dishonesty and rid ourselves of our lethargic acceptance of something less than true democracy. Do any of us wish to live in a totalitarian society? Of course we do not. But unless we address the problem of our own “democratic” system, unless we insist that our government works for the ninety nine per cent instead of for a chosen few, we will eventually regress into such a totalitarian state- simply because (as with the Chinese) it will be a better option for the majority of our people.

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