For QMI to say, as they did in a recent editorial entitled ‘Canada must take lessons from European debt woes’ (Dec. 28, 2010), that public sector programs and wages are the chief reasons Canada is headed toward the same problems facing England, Ireland Portugal, Greece and Spain, is almost comic.
I actually got more truth from a same-day Dilbert cartoon.
["Final panel and punch line below"]
For some unnamed editor to write that social programs are unaffordable and “we cannot continue to fund costly programs such as all-day kindergarten... we must get civil service salaries and lavish pensions under control... we must get public sector pay hikes under control - now... they are ticking time bombs waiting to blow up in the faces of future generations” is a far cry from “reliable, complete and up-to-the-minute news coverage” as per the QMI mission statement.
Why?
Because not one word is said about any expensive short comings in the private sector or business enterprises.
I can assure you, if there are time bombs in the public sector, there are far greater ones in the private.
For example:
Our own mayor recently expressed a wish to impose a special levy (and create an economic development fund) on local taxpayers so that monies could be collected and used to encourage local economic development.
(I wrote about it in my blog here.)
(I wrote about it in my weekly column here.)
Here are the juicy bits:
“The city waives development charges — levied to help pay for the cost of growth — for new and expanding industries. Those charges totalled $9.5 million in 2009. Instead, taxpayers picked up the tab.”
“Homeowners are also paying $4 million a year in higher water rates than recommended, so business can get a break.”
“Those two policies alone amount to $13.5 million a year.” (‘Subsidies In Spotlight’ by Norman De Bono, The London Free Press, August 17, 2010)
If you can show me that London’s public programs and wages would be as unaffordable as QMI implies if our wise city fathers had $13.5 additional dollars at their disposal - annually! - then I’ll eat my hat.
["Trust me. The hat is safe": photo GH]
And London is just one of dozens of medium-sized cities across Canada supporting private enterprise through public tax dollars. The total amount of subsidies, bailouts, no-interest loans, etc., must be in the billions.
I’d ask QMI Agency for a number but I’m sure they don’t know. They’re so busy painting the public sector black that they have no time to notice how quickly and deeply the private sector is bleeding the country dry.
Read ‘song for the blue ocean.’ (See ‘read This’ in right hand margin). Private fisheries are bleeding the oceans dry.
Read ‘The Politics of Oil.’ Private oil refineries are bleeding governments, whole countries dry.
Read ‘The Collapse of Globalism’ in which I recently read the following:
“It was noticed that from the second half of the 1990s on, two-thirds of American corporations paid no federal income tax. Yet corporate profits were soaring.
“Ninety percent of companies paid under 5 percent of their total income.
“In Equatorial Guinea, newly rich in oil, the national income is statistically sixth in the world. In reality the money goes elsewhere (i.e., not into the public purse, e.g., to help with public education) and the multinationals involved are complicit in its disappearance.”
On every corner of the globe private enterprise has degraded the land, sea, air and public purse for the sake of profit and power.
Yet QMI degrades the public sector, and like the upstanding private citizen that it is, forgets to mention any harm its fellow corporate friends have done to the public purse they all eat and benefit from.
According to a Dilbert cartoon featured on the same day as the unbalanced, incomplete editorial (note - I'm being very kind), there’s a common name for the type of sandwich that private enterprise wants the common man to eat every single day of the year.
["With a tip of the hat to Scott Adams and Dilbert.com"]
Can you guess its lovely name?
***
Please visit Deforest City Blues Pt 1 here.
Please visit Deforest City Blues Pt 2 here.
Some common men will say, "I've never tasted a Sh_t Sandwich."
They would be wrong.
.
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