Excited Delirium

Full story here .

Michael Moore has pretty much nailed the reasons why we have to stop spending taxpayer money on financial bailouts:

Falling for whom? NOTHING in this "bailout" package will lower the price of the gas you have to put in your car to get to work. NOTHING in this bill will protect you from losing your home. NOTHING in this bill will give you health insurance.

In fact, he points out that most of the core issue of mortgage defaults is related to people who can’t pay their medical bills.

Aaaah!!  It all makes so much more sense now.  No wonder we haven’t experienced this problem yet in Canada.  We don’t have outrageous medical bills in Canada because we have a public health care system.  We aren’t getting fleeced by privately-run institutions that won’t accept us if we don’t have a credit card.

Thank you Michael.  Things make a little more sense now.  Really.

As you can see, this spells out why the components of the financial crisis pose a critical election issue for Canadians (or at least they should be) for the following reasons:

1. Our public-run health care system is keeping our economy stable.  Privatizing it (like the Cons would do if they got a majority, based on Tony "Dr. Death" Clement’s experience at the provincial level).
2. Canadian banks don’t have to worry about toxic debt waste on their books because Canadians aren’t being forced to default on their loans.
3. Canadian taxpayers should NOT be funding any bailouts from federal bank reserves because it’s not our problem.  Paying MBAs on Wall Street to wreak havoc on the largest economy in the world is not my idea of sound monetary policy.
4. If you’re going to spend OUR money, spend it on national day care and peace-keeping missions.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

ABC.

Full story here .

Even if we’re able to defeat the Cons, we’ll still have to muddle through a pile of political patronage appointments.  What to do in a situation like this?

In the future, should public appointments of this nature be made more public, even going so far as to give the public the right to vote on appointments like this?  Or is it a ‘bonus’ that all politicians should enjoy when they’re elected, shoving their ideology down the pipe?

One thing I know for sure is that you can’t blame the Liberals for any previous management issues, because the Liberals are long gone from having their finger on the political pulse in Ottawa.

It’s been blue since day one.

Steve thought he’d pull a fast one on the Canadian public and launched his illegal election campaign with the sweater-vest fire-side chats.

Unfortunately, Canadians seem to be falling for it.  That, or the polls are full of ‘unusual anomolies’.  Something smells.

Anyways, I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I have some suggestions for the other leaders that they should at least consider if they’re going to have half a chance of beating Steve at his own game.  Here they are, in no particular order (readers are asked to submit their suggestions here as well or submit them as comments with the number of anti-Steve pages that exist on Facebook):

1. Collectively, we need to make him snap.  I remember seeing him bark at a reporter once ("Do you have a question, Barbara?") when electioneering on the 2006 campaign.  (If someone’s got a link to a video, please post it in the comments).
2. To make him snap, you’ll have to poke and poke often.  Dion tried referring to ‘ABC’.  Jack talked about Steve quitting.  Keep it up.  It will work.
3. When talking with, about or to Stephen Harper, always refer to him as ‘Steve’.
4. NEVER apologize for calling him Steve.
5. Maybe every once in a while, find a creative way to suggest that there’s something not quite right (while we know there’s something too right) about Steve.
6. Voting for Steve is voting for Steve.  Have you heard anything from any other Conservatives?  No.  This is Steve against Canada.
7. Refer to all of the people that can’t work with him.  Refer to all of the people that have quit under his ‘command’.
8. Talk about Daffy Duck or Elmer Fudd (what with his hunting jacket and all) and Steve in the same sentence.
9. Constantly drop soundbites that speak to the notion that he’s a little more tolerable than that dude that Martin Sheen played in ‘The Dead Zone’.  ‘Hallelujah!!’
10. Without getting into religion, get into religion.
11. Without getting into race, get into race.  This is a great example of what happens when race, guns and violence become a topic of discussion.
12. Without getting into homosexuality, get into homosexuality.
13. Force him to talk about Obama and what he would do if Obama were the President of the US.
14. Throw things at him that will be sure to dig a little at the superficiliaty that they’re showing us and watch him snap.

Anyways, I know I’m talking a lot of BS now as well.  It seems like everywhere you read, Dion and Layton are incapable of pushing the wrong buttons.

Consider this story in context with this video .  Insert "John McCain" with "Laureen Harper" and you should get the idea.  Stephen Harper is afraid of ‘the arts’ because he knows that people in this community will call him out for what he is:  a wet rag in a blue sweater vest.

And Steve:  I’m an ordinary person.  You’re not.  I’m actually OK with you spending taxpayer money on arts and the events that support them.  Meet Tony Bennett.  Sing along to a love song.  Relax a little.  Stop being such a cod.

I’m not OK with you spending taxpayer money on killing innocents in Afghanistan or spending tens of billions of dollars on new defense contracts.

Across Canada, people are lobbying for "Anything But Conservative", hoping that we will come to our collective senses and ensure that the Conservatives do not run this country any longer.

However, every day, we are pushing them closer to a majority because we all have different views on who the strongest party should be.  LIiberals?  NDP?  Greens?  The Marijuana Party?

Our muddled structures devoted to democracy are preventing us from actually having democracy.  It’d be OK if we had proportional representation (a platform of the Greens and occasionally for the NDP) and then we could vote as we pleased, knowing that our party of preference would still have a voice in the Canadian House of Parliament.  But we don’t.

As it stands, we are about to hand a majority to the Conservatives because the progressive vote is too interested in pursuing individual seats for individual parties and not interested in collectively abolishing the federal Conservatives.

With that in mind, I’d like to go on record and suggest that we start considering some fairly radical strategies.

The main one that comes to my mind:  get relatively ‘weak’ candidates in split ridings to withdraw from the election.

It’s grossly undemocratic, but then, so are the Conservatives.

The strategy would have to be something similar to vote-swapping, but it’d be more like candidate swapping. Here’s a theoretical example (I didn’t bother to make numbers add to 100%):

Each riding has an obvious winner in the progressive camp, but because we split the vote, the results will look like this:

Riding A:  Winner = Conservative
Riding B:  Winner = Conservative
Riding C:  Winner = Conservative

Now, in Riding A, the NDP and Green candidates withdraw with the Liberal and NDP withdrawing from Riding B.  Similarly, in riding C, the Liberal and Green candidates withdraw.  Here’s what the results might (in theory) look like:

Riding A: Winner = Liberal
Riding B: Winner = Green
Riding C: Winner = NDP

Losers:  Conservatives in all ridings.

So many questions:

1.  Is this legal?

2.  How do we orchestrate this for immediate ‘consumption’ of the public?

3.  How do we expand the concept by marketing / PR etc?

I know it’s undemocratic, but in each riding, the progressive candidate that should have won actually wins , so we all get what we’re after:  The Conservatives are pushed out.

I’m a visual person.  This "graph" depicts the history of US bailouts from 1970 through to the current day.

Please note that the "Troubled Asset Relief Program" is nowhere near its end.  By the time we’re done, my prediction is that American taxpayers will be on the hook for more than $2 trillion worth of toxic debt that Wall Street has created.

Bravo.  Well done fellas.

Meanwhile, Bush and McCain are described as threatening the US (and the world’s financial system) with economic and financial terrorism.  For the full story, please click here .

Stephen Harper announced last week that after the election, he would look at deregulation and privatization as a central mandate for ‘his’ government.

I’ve decided that we should call this ‘cbay’, but it would be quite opposite of ebay, where consumers buy things, based on the highest bid.

Instead, cbay would focus on ways to sell off prime Canadian assets like health care, the AECL, the Canadian Wheat Board and other organizations that help Canadians fight off rapacious greed in the world AT THE LOWEST POSSIBLE PRICE.  All you’d have to do is be a mega-international co and find a way in to the inner circle (assuming you’re not there already).

Canadians, who have invested billions in our public infrastructure, would be left holding the bag.  Woohoo!!

Citing research from Sweden, this article identifies that letting your child use a cell phone might be like letting them play with a stick of dynamite – with charges.

What’s frustrating for me is that I work in an industry where mobile is being positioned as ‘the next big thing’ as far as marketing opportunities go.  Ugh.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has posted a very timely review of the Harper Conservative Record.

The link to the download is here:

http://www.policyalternatives.ca/reports/2008/09/harperrecord/index.cfm

Please, people:  copy the link, download it, read it and please, please, please distribute the link widely and often to friends and family to ensure that everyone understands ‘the Harper Record’ before the Canadian election finally occurs on Oct 14.

Original video link here .

Naomi is in a state of real wild heaven and was introduced by Bill Maher as being "the most perfect booking (they’ve) ever had".

As she begins to present her theory about Disaster Capitalism – now proven exceptionally well by the meltdown on Wall Street – Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and author of "The Conservative Soul" continues to interrupt her.  As he does so, and decries her comments about how we’ve expanded our ’socialism for the rich’, but she puts him to shame by suggesting that we should stop nationalizing the junk and start nationalizing the profitable companies like Exxon.

Apparently – according to Sullivan – the Bush folks are actually socialists and Wall Street is NOT to blame for the crisis.  Instead, he suggests that Americans demanded it and we should not be bailing them out because they over-extended themselves.  He’s actually got a point.

However, to paraphrase Klein, the most important thing we have to do is look to who benefits from national and potentially international bailouts.  The payouts to executives on Wall Street exceeding $5-6 billion, whereas most people are just leaving their keys in the mailbox.

Also, the US never bailed out failed dot-coms.

At the end, they agree on Naomi’s central point:  we have what she calls ‘cry-baby capitalism’.