 You
have to give it to conservatives -- they know how to manipulate people.
Economic "laissez-faire" elitist conservatives, the scions of the old
robber barons, have learned to play the social conservatives, the
fearful and resentful anti-city farmers, and the isolated, harried,
anti-government suburbanites. Cobble them together and you have close
to 50% of Americans and 30% of Canadians, enough in both countries to
elect a conservative government.
The last conservative
provincial government stuck it to the city of Toronto (which had the
audacity to vote overwhelmingly against them) by downloading
responsibility for a lot of services to the municipalities, while not
downloading any of the related tax revenues. The current Liberal
provincial government, unpopular for its ineptness and arrogance, is up
against a conservative opposition again in an election in two months,
and is not willing to rectify the inequity because they want the
suburban vote, and have already conceded the Toronto urban vote to the
left-leaning NDP.
As a result, the NDP-dominated City of
Toronto municipal government is now essentially bankrupt. The mayor has
pleaded and threatened, and now must use its new municipal taxing
authority to jack up taxes while also cutting back services.
The
conservatives love watching them squirm. Their answer, in a classic
manipulation, is to argue that the city administration is bloated, and
that salaries should be slashed, staff put on work-share programs
(where they'd only work, and be paid for, four days a week, but still
expected to get the same amount of work done). And of course, that all
the 'inefficient' government services be 'privatized'.
Their favourite whipping boy
is garbage collection. If you work in this profession long enough, you
can earn $24/hour, or about $47,000 per year. This isn't enough to live
on in Toronto, where even tiny run-down houses cost over $300,000.
Nevertheless, economic conservatives, most of whom probably earn
between two and ten times that amount, for office work that many would
suggest is worth less than the work of trash collectors, scream that
these salaries are outrageous. Their friends in private industry, they
insist, could get desperate immigrants who don't speak English and
don't know their employment rights to do the same work for half that
wage, allowing a nice profit for the private company and big savings to
the government.
Of course, those workers only hang around until
they wise up, go bankrupt, starve, return to their native country, or
find something that pays a living wage (like theft, smuggling or
selling drugs). So the turnover at the private contractor's is
enormous, and the quality and reliability of the service atrocious. And
the laid-off garbage collectors go on welfare or unemployment insurance
(which the government and taxpayers pay for anyway), and find something
else that pays a living wage (like theft, smuggling or selling drugs).
The
net effect of this 'privatization' is dislocation and other social
problems, worse service, and higher costs to the taxpayer. But the
conservatives, who know this full well, won't admit it, because they
can flog this lie to whip up anti-government sentiment and get elected
on a 'lower taxes' platform. In the economic conservative suburbs, this
works like a charm.
Meanwhile, the farmers, the social conservatives' political base, are struggling with low commodity prices (thanks to the economic conservative elites' big agriculture oligopoly control of market prices) and rising oil costs. Their only
hope is to make a profit from suburban sprawl onto their land, to take
the money and run further from the city where prices are cheaper, and
wait for the sprawl to reach them again. Most wealthy Torontonians and
suburbanites made their fortunes in real estate development and land
speculation (developers' and speculators' campaign contributions
comprise an astonishing 95%
of all elected municipal politicians' campaign funds). The farmers want
their turn. The Liberals and the NDP want land frozen for agriculture,
and they want greenbelt areas with no development.
So the
conservatives alone support the farmers in their desire to make a
killing selling their land for subdivision and suburban sprawl. Of
course, manipulative to a fault, they don't quite put it that way --
they say that farmers should be "fully compensated" if they're not permitted to make a killing on their
property, in other words that the government (the taxpayers) should pay
the farmers ten times the current agricultural value of their property
to go on farming it. The result would be a draining of government
coffers to make some millionaires who would have no motivation to
continue farming or invest in their farms. They would likely
subcontract the farms to subsistence farmers or factory farming
corporations. Not surprisingly, the conservatives are popular in rural
areas for this policy.
So this October, we are likely to have
another conservative provincial government, because just over a third
of the voters (mostly in the suburbs and rural areas) will support the
conservatives, and the Liberals and NDP will split the rest of the
vote. It's the same motley coalition that elected Bush, and Canadian
minority PM Harper.
It's garbage politics, but it works. The really
sad thing is that, when the people get fed up with the execrable
conservative governments that these perverse coalitions produce, they
tend to rally around the alternative (for the US Democrats or the
Canadian Liberals) that is least
to the left of the conservatives, because they perceive that this is
the alternative that is most likely, one-on-one, to defeat the
conservatives.
So we have a choice between arch-right-wing or right-leaning middle-of-the-road (the two Clintons, Obama). True progressives need not apply.
Ugh.
|
MADE IN CANADA
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