So you think you can stop Gordon Campbell? Can you stop evil? Of course you can’t, not the really pure concentrated kind that we’re talking about here. But we stopped Hitler (I imagine some of you are saying, whilst the others are rolling your eyes going, oh not the Nazis again). Yes we did stop Hitler, but it took billions of dollars and cost millions of lives, so that option isn’t really available to us.
And to the eye rollers who are (again I imagine) asking why I have to keep bringing up the over the top Nazis comparisons and why I have to keep picking on poor little Gordon Campbell. Well I’ll tell you why because he’s financing the province out of deficit on the backs of small business and middle class families so he can give the five or six corporations who pay his bills a break.
Not Nazism by any stretch or even of nearly equitable evil, but still pretty darn loathsome.
And Campbell continues to add to his inherent loathsomeness by acting indignant whenever he is criticized for his economic policies.
He proclaims loudly to anyone still listening (I do…purely for amusement) that his government has set the province’s finances back on track. That’s actually true to a certain extent and it was only because he broke with the NDP policy of bribing us with our own money. Campbell has pulled off the neat trick of taxing us and then bribing the handful of corporations headed by his country club pals with our money; which if you think about it is a fairly audacious maneuver for someone usually portrayed as blander than white bread.
But like any Ponzi scheme eventually the house of cards collapses, and those at the top abscond with the funds, while the vast majority are left wondering what happened.
Campbell likes to refer to his government as the free market alternative to the NDP, but they are not. Granting monopolies and duopolies to a privileged few is no more free market than Glen Clark’s policy of handing everything over to three or four powerful unions.
Not too mention Campbell’s pandemic of corruption seems to be spreading as municipal governments figure, ‘what the hell everyone else is doing it why shouldn’t we join the gravy train?’ ‘Junkets to China at taxpayer expense, sure why not, it’s not like they really need new roads or play ground equipment.’
It’s not like we need arts spending or youth programs, those damn kids have to grow up sooner or later and let’s face it the smart ones will figure out how to get on the gravy train. The rest of course will have to pay, and pay and pay – a carbon tax here, H.S.T there and whatever new tax the Liberals come up with between now and 2013 to squeeze the last few pennies out of the majority to finance the few.
The Liberals are baffled as to why more people have signed the petition against the H.S.T. than voted for them in almost 30 ridings. Here’s the simple answer (and it is simple) they hate you.
People have just had enough. And after the multi-billion dollar Olympics, where we saw Campbell grinning and waving his mittened paws from his luxury box like a five-year old boy hopped up on cookie dough, people are wondering why they are being asked to pay for the premiere’s showcase.
Well the answer here is simple too, because the Liberals can get away with it. After 10 years of NDP mismanagement they’ve been able to coast on lingering mistrust of the Dippers, and so they’ve been able to line their pockets and those of their corporate pals with impunity.
Eventually the music has to stop and someone should be caught out. But sadly I’m not so sure that’s Campbell’s fate. As unjust as it is, his corruption has paid off enough people in high places that he will likely be able to retire to a six figure consulting ‘job’ as is political career winds (slowly) to a halt.
Unfair and doubling insulting is that the rest of us will be paying for it in the tax breaks and subsidies granted to the aforementioned corporate friends of Campbell.
