Yeah, right, President Harper and his Stepford Wives Are Such Good Economic Managers

Let me get this straight. This past week we learned that the Harper Regime spent $53.8 million in 2009-10 spinning their "Economic" Action Plan to a gullible populace - a budget that is more than the annual advertising budget for the entire federal government before 2006, the year the Regime took power. That's bad enough, right? But the Regime's spending on spin in general has also tripled since that year, going from $41. 3 million in 2005-06 to $136.3 million in 2009-10.  I wish I could say I'm surprised, but, unfortunately, such bad behaviour from the Harperites has become the norm, to be expected. No one - least of all the media - is shocked any more since it's become so commonplace.


We also learned this past week that Our Glorious Leader (John Doyle's term, which alternates for him with Hair-in-the-Fridge) ran up the PS by 33,000 employees and wages by $5 billion since 2006.   And, now, demonstrable hypocrite that he is, he's instructed one of his bulldogs, Tony the Pork-Barreller, to slash and burn the PS in the interests of  the festishized  deficit, a strategy which of course is a smoke screen for introducing "efficiencies" - a common neoliberal tactic in the private sector - a euphemism for firing people. 


Oh, yeah, and we also learned on the occasion of yet another completely unnecessary corporate tax cut - even several neoclassical economists said it was not called for in these recessionary times -  that Canadian businesses are sitting on more than $583 billion in Canadian currency and deposits and more than $276 billion in foreign currency. That's not to mention what is stashed away in tax havens like the Bahamas. Thanks, Steve, for the New Year's present. See you at the Fords or at our place offshore soon.


And of course before all these revelations this past week, let's not forget who slashed the GST by 2% to keep the red meat hounds from yapping more and who  blew a substantial Liberal surplus recklessly. These indulgences were such sound economic policies, yah? 


We're sinking, as I've suggested several times in this blog, and still we have no job initiating strategies. Why? Because neoliberal captialism thrives on a financial crisis. It's always a marvellous opportunity to introduce measures that will benefit the financial class and their neoliberal buddies - a sort of variation on Naoimi Klein's shock doctrine - in the name of emergency measures while the populace is in a condition of alarm and extremely receptive to spin.


We must find a way to begin educating the mainstream media about how deeply they themselves are inscribed in neoliberal ideology, as the three stories defending CEO salaries this past week clearly indicate, and we may have to begin moving from protest to reveolution of some sort, I'm beginiing to think, before this Regime becomes a full-fledged neoliberal fascist one. What emerges from the occupy movement in the spring is the key.