If you take nothing else away from his excellent post, just note what we in the news business like to call the “nut graf.” In this case, it’s the part where he points out that in all this panicky, apocalyptic, sky-is-falling shrieking, there’s been no real discussion of the revenue side. So we’re not allowed to talk about raising revenues. Taxes are still a dirty word. We still can’t have an adult conversation about it, apparently because the Sun will crank up the outrage-manufacturing bullshit machine into overdrive.
(I’d also recommend Erika Shaker’s trenchant essay over at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, if you’re in a sardonic frame of mind.)
Anyway, nothing new or revealing there. It’s not as if Ontario is unique among Western jurisdictions in its inability to put two and two together: in essence, that we create a decent society by pooling our resources and shouldering our collective obligations to our fellow citizens. Filter that through the right-wing stupidity machine and it turns into the old “tax-and-spend-socialism” epithet.
So once again, we’re supposed to sit back and suck it as the fabric of our community and all the things essential to our quality of life are attacked with machetes, meat cleavers and chain saws. While well-paid pundits, columnists, bankers and accountants lecture us pompously about living within our means.
You’d think after god knows how many futile decades of this, we’d have learned something.
Again with the austerity koolaid? These people have precisely one tool in their intellectual toolbox: cut cut cut. We’ve listened to them for decades, and where’s it gotten us?
Right where we are today with increased poverty hunger inequity and millions of people taking to the streets in protest Yet they doubledown Tis the last gasp of a dying system
No. If there’s one observation I might make, it’s this: This is what comes of allowing government and international regulatory regimes to be colonized, captured, and operated on behalf of the 1 per cent, instead of set to ensuring the greatest good for the greatest number. That’s why anything that makes life better for the rest of us is under attack. It’s not rocket science.
Related posts:
- Let’s stop fetishizing “The Market” | #cdnpoli #TOpoli #classwarfare #austerity
- In defence of the public sphere | #TOpoli #TeamFord
- Adam Smith: It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion
- Austerity’s Targets « Framed In Canada | #cdnpoli #classwarfare
- BBC: Markets dive in reaction to unfortunate outbreak of democracy in Greece
[…] Don Drummond’s austerity medicine: suck it, Ontario | #onpoli […]