Sunday Thoughts

Well the filibuster is finished and the Conservatives have gotten their way. There is nothing new in that. It is something we will have to face over the next few years. If this government wants to do something, it will do it. Still, the opposition did the right thing by opposing this bad bill, with everything it had. It is a bad law and a bad precedent for the rest of the economy.

This government is sending a signal that it is open season on pensions, wages and benefits. The Conservatives are saying that working people should be thankful for a job and to not question their betters over what pittance they are given. The strategy of the government is clear, scapegoat the last group of middle class workers in this country with good benefits, public service employees. It is pitting private sector workers, who have already lost their benefits against public sector employees who have not and using resentment as their weapon. If not stopped, the entire middle class will be reduced to an insecure future of few benefits, low wages and no pensions.

Meanwhile, the government is moving ahead with tax cuts to profitable corporations and for the investor class. It is simultaneously shrinking the middle class and enriching the ruling class of this country. Conservatives often like to say that socialism is shared poverty. It seems that conservatives don't mind shared poverty, as long as their friends in the owner class are exempted from it.

That is what we are fighting against. That is why the opposition must continue to oppose this government. That is why the filibuster, though doomed from the start, was important. It was a marker, given by the NDP to the working class, promising that their voice will not be silenced in the government's headlong race to the bottom.

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Conservative Economics

What would you do if you had a shaky economy with not great employment numbers and you want to balance the books? Well if you are the Harper government, you start by laying off 6000 people. Meanwhile, the owner class is doing very well, thanks very much. You remember them, they are the ones who destroyed the economy in the first place. We can't raise taxes on these folks, oh no. They are too important to make sacrifices. Best lay off more clerks. That will fix everything.

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Rape In Wisconsin

Played out for the whole world to see. Class warfare is real and the rich are winning.

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Shooting Yourself In The Head

To fix a broken arm. Thomas Walkom's column is a depressing read today. In it, he outlines how governments are going to use deficits as hammers to break their unions and cut their workers' pay and benefits. In other words, they are fighting the recession and its loss of economic demand from the private sector, by intentionally depressing the spending power of their own workers. If the economy is a drowning man, the governments are throwing it an anvil. Do you suppose a public sector worker, upon hearing his wages are going to be cut, is going to go out and buy a new car? Not on your life, he is going to hunker down and save. This will further depress the demand for cars and other goods and services and create a death spiral of more cuts in the private sector followed by calls for more cuts in the public sector.

I can see how pitting private and public sector workers at each other's throats makes good politics. Driving a wedge between the private and public sector working class keeps the focus off of the poor performance of the government and the ruling class (and has a side benefit of keeping people from thinking too much about bankers' bonuses and just how we got into this mess in the first place). But, gutting public sector wages, as an economic policy, during an economic downturn, it makes no sense at all.

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Who Is Engaged In Class Warfare?

Leftists are accused of "class warfare" for opposing tunnels to airports, while shutting people out of mass transit so visiting Pan Am Games poobahs can have a train to themselves is treated as normal.

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