This is why Jean Chretien can be a partner in a law office in Ottawa and one in the same law office as Peter Lougheed in Calgary.
When these guys “retire” from politics they are only retiring from the public aspect of it and are now selling, away from the public eye, the influence/connections they gained while in public office to their corporate cronies.
Gordon Campbell was forced to resign as leader of the BC Liberals and thus premier of BC, for foisting the H.S.T. upon us after saying he wouldn’t, yet he was honoured with the Order of B.C. and now he’s High Commissioner to the U.K.
Politicians, if they reach high enough levels, exist on a different plane than we mere mortals do.
Case in point: Bill Clinton. The former President appears to have his hand in everything. 🙂
It has been ever this way. The Chateau Clique and the Family Compact ( a corporate collection of elitists) ran upper and lower Canada for a century (and probably still do – look at the Montreal and Toronto factions of the Liberal Party). When my ancestor protested and joined the Upper Canada rebellion and carried the flag emblazoned with the word Liberty, he was equivalent to a tea-partier. he just wanted more freedom and a say in the circles of power. That was denied him at the point of a bayonnete on Younge Street. This is an argument about centralists, centeral authority, big government and centrized power versus regional autonomy and local power and empowerment. I recall seeing some some letters to Rome from regional governors complaining of the same thing near the end… at look what happened there.
“and the one on the left was in the middle” Johnny Cash
It’s always been up-down. At the beginning of the previous century, up was identified with right and down was identified by left. With the onset of the post war Cadillac Socialists, these clear left-right distinctions became blurred. With the recent rise of populism within the right in North America, these distinctions became blurred still further.
With respect to your specific blog post, Cjunk, as I’ve said before there will never be any meaningful restrictions on carbon dioxide as long as Harper is PM. What noises the government does make about it is mere smoke and mirrors to fend off the international anti-oil sands lobby. Yes, Fantino is a bit much, but he’s there principally to reinforce the government’s law and order image, despite being seriously dented by Caledonia.
Posted by: chutzpahticular at September 14, 2011 1:14 PM
So, being the least-taxed jurisdiction in Canada (according to the Fraser Institute) apparently was not good enough.
Now that the BC voters have cut off their nose to spite their face, how are they going to repay the $1.6 billion back to the feds?
My guess is by increasing taxes.
Smart move, guys. Not.
IMO, it’s a little early to comment on the Harper majority — Parliament hasn’t even resumed after its brief post-election pre-summer experiment with Jack Layton’s “let’s all show respect in Parliament” while Jack staged a Parliamentary filibuster against the budget, and wreaked as much havoc as possible with his striking Unionists in Canada Post and Air Canada, as well as his Vancouver environmental “hockey” rioters, while still claiming that “Harper and the Canadian military tortured innocent Afghan farmers” even when a non-partisan Parliamentary committee exonerated them after classified military documents were finally opened to MPs and jurists for scrutiny. If that’s the Oppositions’ idea of “let’s all hold hands and be nice”, I wonder what it will be like when they actually decide to attack Harper when Parliament is actually in full swing later this month?
That being said, I do think there is a danger that the Harper majority would fall into corporate/private/public top-down elitist trap, where Left versus Right becomes irrelevant. After all, isn’t that the global trend? E.g. nobody likes to call China “communist” anymore and increasingly refers to China as “capitalist” (although the Communist Chinese government would probably beg to to differ and would be thoroughly insulted by the label “capitalist”).
So what is the alternative? Fascism! That’s right folks, that’s what it’s called when you combine corporate-Statist capitalism, private property rights and socialism under authoritarian control: Fascism. And if China is no longer Communist, then it is at least National Socialist or something akin to Fascist.
My, my, how the West has “progressed” — we all want to prosper like China! It appears that we are combining the worst of all the political systems in history in an attempt to satisfy everybody’s greed for money or control.
(just an aside, but what’s a “Prole”? I hate the flagrant use of acronyms in the presence of illiterate “peasants” such as myself!)
cjh;You are a vile creature and so is anyone else wishing to limit CO2.The enviro’s banned florine to limit air conditioning but it was replaced.Then it was methane because methane was killing the ozone hole but that was’nt taken too seriously as nature itself and land fills produce methane.You vile creatures then took on CO2 which is a basic of life on this planet and any one wanting to limit it is despicable beyond belief.If you really want to know what I think of you and your henchmen,just ask.
cjh;You are a vile creature and so is anyone else wishing to limit CO2.
~spike 1
cgh, isn’t a warmist.
He is assuring Cjunk that PMSH will not put any meaningful restrictions on carbon dioxide.
You read it wrong and owe cgh an apology.
That’s the way I read it, too, spike.
I did not understand cgh’s comment to support limiting CO2. Let us not digress from the topic.
I also think it is too early to put Harper into a up/down mold, although some of his people, for example James Moore playing footsie with the CBC comes to mind, are from the too of the up/down crowd. We need to keep putting pressure on the CPC to identify with folks that brung them.
Every major horizontal societal change eventually evolves into an up/down situation. Soviet Russia was an example and Oz and chutzpahticular give contemporary examples of men who belong to the “club”.
I also think it is too early to put Harper into a up/down mold,
~Ken (Kulak)
Want a clue as to which PMs are in the up/down mode?
The ‘tell’ is in the lifetime appointments to the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada.
The quorum for Privy Council meetings is four.
Some appointments are window dressing, such as the Canadian artists or atheletes that have sometimes been appointed.
Look to the appointments of people who are international financiers/businessmen like Paul Desmarais and Maurice Strong and you’ll have an indicator of which PM is an up/down policy maker. http://tinyurl.com/6y6lbn7
Some of you appear to have a reading problem. We will NEVER have CO2 restrictions as long as we have PMSH, and that’s a GOOD thing. My comment was that Cjunk is always being unduly alarmist on this issue. The supposed CO2 crisis is complete vapour-ware, and it died a clean death in the frozen snow of Copenhagen.
All of the federal government’s talk about CO2 is complete disinformation designed to confuse the enemy. Unfortunately it seems to have confused some of us as well.
Ken, not only is it too early to tell, it’s also too early to clearly see what elitist forces are at work. Even the strongest PM is never entirely a free agent.
I see the problem as follows:
Too much Up-Down flow makes it almost impossible to govern or be elected. It’s like herding cats as Peter Newman described it.
Too little Up-Down creates a statist system that will eventually break(in a free society, that is). The longer it takes to break though, the uglier that implosion will be. Harper has a golden chance to re-create Canada because I can’t see him losing an election for a long long time … but????
My feeling is that Harper, if he could, would utterly wall off the Up-Down dynamic simply because of the difficulty it creates in governing and winning elections; and for a control-freak, that’s anathema. It’s up to the CPC membership, then, to yank his chain again and again … or lose the party to a new statist elite. Once the headiness of power wears off, it’ll be time to hold the hacks accountable.
However, to expect to be heard every time, when the grassroots conservative movement is so diverse (herding cats), is simply not a reasonable expectation. Governing Canada requires some balance, but not “balance” that simply re-creates a new Liberal Party from the CPC.
Cjunk, I agree. Too much up-down and what you get looks like France between 1789 and 1800, or Athens after Themistocles, a revolution overthrowing the government every five minutes, and absolutely no consistency in policy. Too little up-down, and you have Imperial China or feudal Japan.
“Imperial China or feudal Japan.” … or the EU, or up until the last congressional elections, the USA.
The Gilded Age descendants, meets Marx’s children. Than both party down on the flesh of Americas middle class. Drinking champagne with blood chasers called: “Hope & Change”. An example in Mayor Bloomberg in cahoots with a Saudi prince for a new TV channel. Country or allegance, means nothing to this class of political aristocrates. Only money with power over all, for themselves. Liberty be damned.
Learn About the Gilded Age http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/gilded_age/index.cfm
What happened, therefore, to the system of checks and balances?
Those are some interesting comments from Sarah Palin. I haven’t really been a fan of hers to this point, but give credit where it is due.
It certainly does seem like that the United States is governed by a “‘permanent political class’, drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people”. Part of the problem is that a “two-party system” is not the same thing as a democracy. The two parties stack the deck to try to make it as difficult as possible for other parties to challenge them electorally. That is absolutely not acceptable in a true democracy. There is a web site called http://www.ballot-access.org that for years has detailed the depredations in the United States.
In Canada the party subsidization-per-vote is unfortunately an example of an anti-democratic measure. Probably far worse were the election law amendments of 1993, which forced parties to run 50 candidates or be wound up. This was the most flagrantly totalitarian law relating to elections ever passed in Canada, and it was passed after only 15 minutes of debate in the House of Commons. The transparent rationale was to fend off the Reform Party. It didn’t work, but that does not lessen the disgrace.
The Eureferendum web site concludes: “On top of the political classes, therefore, our enemies are the corporates.”
No, your enemy is still the government, because the government passes the laws that enable “corporatism” and the government contains the politicians who dole out favours to corporations that they could not obtain in a truly free market. The problem is government intervention, and the solution is laissez-faire.
There will always be someone in the top state position, just as a business must be run by someone. The issue is a moral one: what is the proper function of the state? It is supposed to be to protect individual rights via police, military and courts — not to dish out loot to corporations favoured by the party in power.
One of the options that should be looked at in Canada is to create an organization like the NRA which doesn’t run candidates in elections, but lets people know about anti-gun candidates. They’ve had considerable electoral success through this policy.
We could recreate the Reform party which could seriously damage PMSH should he choose to rule as an autocrat. I think it would be worthwhile to have a grassroots party of this kind, even if it didn’t run candidates in federal elections, to keep politicians honest. The introduction of various recent totalitarian bills by the CINO’s has given me reason to separate myself from the “conservative” party and vote either Libertarian or spoil my ballot in the next federal election. Then again, it was only a temporary alliance on my part.
Once an organization becomes super sized it becomes less responsible and less answerable to its members. These huge organizations attract unscrupulous people who rise to leadership positions where they abuse their power for personal benefit and corrupt the institution. This has happened to governments, corporations, unions, the Olympics, FIFA, the Catholic Church (at times, Kathy) and NGOs. Too big is the problem.
This is why Jean Chretien can be a partner in a law office in Ottawa and one in the same law office as Peter Lougheed in Calgary.
When these guys “retire” from politics they are only retiring from the public aspect of it and are now selling, away from the public eye, the influence/connections they gained while in public office to their corporate cronies.
Gordon Campbell was forced to resign as leader of the BC Liberals and thus premier of BC, for foisting the H.S.T. upon us after saying he wouldn’t, yet he was honoured with the Order of B.C. and now he’s High Commissioner to the U.K.
Politicians, if they reach high enough levels, exist on a different plane than we mere mortals do.
Case in point: Bill Clinton. The former President appears to have his hand in everything. 🙂
It has been ever this way. The Chateau Clique and the Family Compact ( a corporate collection of elitists) ran upper and lower Canada for a century (and probably still do – look at the Montreal and Toronto factions of the Liberal Party). When my ancestor protested and joined the Upper Canada rebellion and carried the flag emblazoned with the word Liberty, he was equivalent to a tea-partier. he just wanted more freedom and a say in the circles of power. That was denied him at the point of a bayonnete on Younge Street. This is an argument about centralists, centeral authority, big government and centrized power versus regional autonomy and local power and empowerment. I recall seeing some some letters to Rome from regional governors complaining of the same thing near the end… at look what happened there.
“and the one on the left was in the middle” Johnny Cash
It’s always been up-down. At the beginning of the previous century, up was identified with right and down was identified by left. With the onset of the post war Cadillac Socialists, these clear left-right distinctions became blurred. With the recent rise of populism within the right in North America, these distinctions became blurred still further.
With respect to your specific blog post, Cjunk, as I’ve said before there will never be any meaningful restrictions on carbon dioxide as long as Harper is PM. What noises the government does make about it is mere smoke and mirrors to fend off the international anti-oil sands lobby. Yes, Fantino is a bit much, but he’s there principally to reinforce the government’s law and order image, despite being seriously dented by Caledonia.
Posted by: chutzpahticular at September 14, 2011 1:14 PM
So, being the least-taxed jurisdiction in Canada (according to the Fraser Institute) apparently was not good enough.
Now that the BC voters have cut off their nose to spite their face, how are they going to repay the $1.6 billion back to the feds?
My guess is by increasing taxes.
Smart move, guys. Not.
IMO, it’s a little early to comment on the Harper majority — Parliament hasn’t even resumed after its brief post-election pre-summer experiment with Jack Layton’s “let’s all show respect in Parliament” while Jack staged a Parliamentary filibuster against the budget, and wreaked as much havoc as possible with his striking Unionists in Canada Post and Air Canada, as well as his Vancouver environmental “hockey” rioters, while still claiming that “Harper and the Canadian military tortured innocent Afghan farmers” even when a non-partisan Parliamentary committee exonerated them after classified military documents were finally opened to MPs and jurists for scrutiny. If that’s the Oppositions’ idea of “let’s all hold hands and be nice”, I wonder what it will be like when they actually decide to attack Harper when Parliament is actually in full swing later this month?
That being said, I do think there is a danger that the Harper majority would fall into corporate/private/public top-down elitist trap, where Left versus Right becomes irrelevant. After all, isn’t that the global trend? E.g. nobody likes to call China “communist” anymore and increasingly refers to China as “capitalist” (although the Communist Chinese government would probably beg to to differ and would be thoroughly insulted by the label “capitalist”).
So what is the alternative? Fascism! That’s right folks, that’s what it’s called when you combine corporate-Statist capitalism, private property rights and socialism under authoritarian control: Fascism. And if China is no longer Communist, then it is at least National Socialist or something akin to Fascist.
My, my, how the West has “progressed” — we all want to prosper like China! It appears that we are combining the worst of all the political systems in history in an attempt to satisfy everybody’s greed for money or control.
(just an aside, but what’s a “Prole”? I hate the flagrant use of acronyms in the presence of illiterate “peasants” such as myself!)
Proletariat.
Prole:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proles
cjh;You are a vile creature and so is anyone else wishing to limit CO2.The enviro’s banned florine to limit air conditioning but it was replaced.Then it was methane because methane was killing the ozone hole but that was’nt taken too seriously as nature itself and land fills produce methane.You vile creatures then took on CO2 which is a basic of life on this planet and any one wanting to limit it is despicable beyond belief.If you really want to know what I think of you and your henchmen,just ask.
cjh;You are a vile creature and so is anyone else wishing to limit CO2.
~spike 1
cgh, isn’t a warmist.
He is assuring Cjunk that PMSH will not put any meaningful restrictions on carbon dioxide.
You read it wrong and owe cgh an apology.
That’s the way I read it, too, spike.
I did not understand cgh’s comment to support limiting CO2. Let us not digress from the topic.
I also think it is too early to put Harper into a up/down mold, although some of his people, for example James Moore playing footsie with the CBC comes to mind, are from the too of the up/down crowd. We need to keep putting pressure on the CPC to identify with folks that brung them.
Every major horizontal societal change eventually evolves into an up/down situation. Soviet Russia was an example and Oz and chutzpahticular give contemporary examples of men who belong to the “club”.
I also think it is too early to put Harper into a up/down mold,
~Ken (Kulak)
Want a clue as to which PMs are in the up/down mode?
The ‘tell’ is in the lifetime appointments to the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada.
The quorum for Privy Council meetings is four.
Some appointments are window dressing, such as the Canadian artists or atheletes that have sometimes been appointed.
Look to the appointments of people who are international financiers/businessmen like Paul Desmarais and Maurice Strong and you’ll have an indicator of which PM is an up/down policy maker.
http://tinyurl.com/6y6lbn7
Some of you appear to have a reading problem. We will NEVER have CO2 restrictions as long as we have PMSH, and that’s a GOOD thing. My comment was that Cjunk is always being unduly alarmist on this issue. The supposed CO2 crisis is complete vapour-ware, and it died a clean death in the frozen snow of Copenhagen.
All of the federal government’s talk about CO2 is complete disinformation designed to confuse the enemy. Unfortunately it seems to have confused some of us as well.
Ken, not only is it too early to tell, it’s also too early to clearly see what elitist forces are at work. Even the strongest PM is never entirely a free agent.
I see the problem as follows:
Too much Up-Down flow makes it almost impossible to govern or be elected. It’s like herding cats as Peter Newman described it.
Too little Up-Down creates a statist system that will eventually break(in a free society, that is). The longer it takes to break though, the uglier that implosion will be. Harper has a golden chance to re-create Canada because I can’t see him losing an election for a long long time … but????
My feeling is that Harper, if he could, would utterly wall off the Up-Down dynamic simply because of the difficulty it creates in governing and winning elections; and for a control-freak, that’s anathema. It’s up to the CPC membership, then, to yank his chain again and again … or lose the party to a new statist elite. Once the headiness of power wears off, it’ll be time to hold the hacks accountable.
However, to expect to be heard every time, when the grassroots conservative movement is so diverse (herding cats), is simply not a reasonable expectation. Governing Canada requires some balance, but not “balance” that simply re-creates a new Liberal Party from the CPC.
Cjunk, I agree. Too much up-down and what you get looks like France between 1789 and 1800, or Athens after Themistocles, a revolution overthrowing the government every five minutes, and absolutely no consistency in policy. Too little up-down, and you have Imperial China or feudal Japan.
“Imperial China or feudal Japan.” … or the EU, or up until the last congressional elections, the USA.
The Gilded Age descendants, meets Marx’s children. Than both party down on the flesh of Americas middle class. Drinking champagne with blood chasers called: “Hope & Change”. An example in Mayor Bloomberg in cahoots with a Saudi prince for a new TV channel. Country or allegance, means nothing to this class of political aristocrates. Only money with power over all, for themselves. Liberty be damned.
Learn About the Gilded Age
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/gilded_age/index.cfm
What happened, therefore, to the system of checks and balances?
Those are some interesting comments from Sarah Palin. I haven’t really been a fan of hers to this point, but give credit where it is due.
It certainly does seem like that the United States is governed by a “‘permanent political class’, drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people”. Part of the problem is that a “two-party system” is not the same thing as a democracy. The two parties stack the deck to try to make it as difficult as possible for other parties to challenge them electorally. That is absolutely not acceptable in a true democracy. There is a web site called http://www.ballot-access.org that for years has detailed the depredations in the United States.
In Canada the party subsidization-per-vote is unfortunately an example of an anti-democratic measure. Probably far worse were the election law amendments of 1993, which forced parties to run 50 candidates or be wound up. This was the most flagrantly totalitarian law relating to elections ever passed in Canada, and it was passed after only 15 minutes of debate in the House of Commons. The transparent rationale was to fend off the Reform Party. It didn’t work, but that does not lessen the disgrace.
The Eureferendum web site concludes: “On top of the political classes, therefore, our enemies are the corporates.”
No, your enemy is still the government, because the government passes the laws that enable “corporatism” and the government contains the politicians who dole out favours to corporations that they could not obtain in a truly free market. The problem is government intervention, and the solution is laissez-faire.
There will always be someone in the top state position, just as a business must be run by someone. The issue is a moral one: what is the proper function of the state? It is supposed to be to protect individual rights via police, military and courts — not to dish out loot to corporations favoured by the party in power.
One of the options that should be looked at in Canada is to create an organization like the NRA which doesn’t run candidates in elections, but lets people know about anti-gun candidates. They’ve had considerable electoral success through this policy.
We could recreate the Reform party which could seriously damage PMSH should he choose to rule as an autocrat. I think it would be worthwhile to have a grassroots party of this kind, even if it didn’t run candidates in federal elections, to keep politicians honest. The introduction of various recent totalitarian bills by the CINO’s has given me reason to separate myself from the “conservative” party and vote either Libertarian or spoil my ballot in the next federal election. Then again, it was only a temporary alliance on my part.
Once an organization becomes super sized it becomes less responsible and less answerable to its members. These huge organizations attract unscrupulous people who rise to leadership positions where they abuse their power for personal benefit and corrupt the institution. This has happened to governments, corporations, unions, the Olympics, FIFA, the Catholic Church (at times, Kathy) and NGOs. Too big is the problem.