Sister Sage's Musings

Posts Tagged ‘Gov’t social programs’

Another great find from Montreal Simon today.  Paul Wells writes an article about the census, in part, referring to Stephen Taylor’s  blog post from July 22; it mirrors his article in the Natty Po dated July 26.  Yes, that very article, where Mr Taylor confirms what we already knew about Master Steve; his intent to dismantle our social programs being the main reason to gut the census. 

Paul Wells asks the question whether or not the whole census debacle matters:

I’ve been mystified by Stephen Harper’s willingness to squander so much political capital on an issue as trivial as the long-form census. Only slightly less so by the media’s piling on, treating this as a matter of great national importance, and by the level of emotional investment so many apparently attach to census-gathering.

The opposition? They’re just reveling in the unexpected bounty of low-hanging political fruit, and Tory self-inflicted injury.

I don’t get it. It’s just not that big a deal – either way.

— Charles W. Moore, New Brunswick Telegraph Journal, today

And he uses a quote from Taylor’s July article:

Stephen Harper seeks to diminish or destroy the Liberal Party to replace them with the Conservatives as Canada’s default choice for government. His greatest challenge is to dismantle the modern welfare state. If it can’t be measured, future governments can’t pander.

— Blogger Stephen Taylor, July 22.

Wells further goes on to suggest that according to Taylor’s tweets and his blog posts of late that Taylor seems to have somewhat detracted from those earlier statements and joined the ” I don’t care club” like Charles Moore, indicated above.  From Twitter, I had observed the same thing from him; that whole ‘…Media blowing the census thing out of proportion again schpiel’.  

Is Taylor trying to put Pandorra back in her box?

According to his rebuttle to Wells’ article today, if he is, he isn’t being successful, is he? Though he claims even today that he stands by what he wrote about  Stevie Spiteful  dismantling of the welfare state, he certainly is pushing the whole “It’s much ado about nothing” agenda much further. In so doing,  he also seems to compare the census debacle to that of the anti-prorogation movement last winter. By the by, Steve, the Christopher White’s Facebook Anti-prorogation group had over 200, 000 members at the time, not a mere 20,000 as you suggest. Just sayin’. 

Anyhow, he seems to think that  anti-prorogation was a passing fad. Yes and no: yes, Steve bounced back because of Canadians’ shallowness and their love of shiny things like olympic hockey gold medals, but at the same time, no one has forgotten; folks are still talking about prorogation; it’s still mentioned in corporate media from time to time.

The census ain’t goin’ away any time soon. I agree with Wells; the census changes certainly do matter; they matter, most of all to Master Steve. As Wells points out, he was willing to he has burned two useful ministers  idiots, Tony Clement and Stock Day, rather badly in advancing this little project. The master tactician, of course, as we would see, was also willing to alienate much of his own base; many of whom probably even funded the Harpercon war chest in the past in pursuit of this project. Master Steve is certainly reminding of a mad man about to lose it.  Oh, this isn’t going away anytime soon. And it seems the more Clement and Stock open their mouths or try to tweak something, the more disastrous the effects. I mean, moving questions from the new voluntary long form to the compulsory short form??

While I agree with Wells and Taylor that the main objective for the scrapping of the manditory long form census is indeed to scrap our social programs, a few commenters over at Taylor’s blog and at Wells’ article seem to disagree, pointing out that our welfare state was built without census data and that future governments could rebuild the welfare state without the census data again. Perhaps. But as the top commenter at Wells’ page, Stephen Gordon points out, the programs were built rather inefficiently and more costly without reliable data to rely upon.

Another thought, Mr. Taylor, I had no idea that something as big as the dismantling of our universal social programs; something that took years to build; something that all Canadians, including yourself and your loved ones, I’m sure, have come to rely upon at some point in our lives or  another was something to be so easily dismissed.  Didn’t realize it wasn’t supposed to be a big deal.

No sirree, Steve, you can’t put Pandorra back in her box; Steve let her out a long time ago; just many either ignored or forgot about her.  Whether or not you had a good talking to or  some kind of verbal thrashing from somewhere for bringing her back to the forefront  ain’t gonna change that.  As I said, most of us already knew a long time ago that this was Master Stevie’s intent. All one had to to was read his quotes from back in his glory days at NCC and Reform to find out the true blue colours of  Master Stevie Spiteful.

Oh yeah! I asked some rhetorical questions of Mr Taylor in my previous post, responding to his article in the Natty Po on July 26:

I would like to know if Stephen Taylor still uses his OHIP card to see the doctor? There are private clinics he can use and pay with his credit card in his area if he bothered to look.  If he has kids, did his wife benefit from maternity leave? If she doesn’t work; did he benefit from any kind of parental leave?  Do his parents (or grandparents if they’re still alive) receive CPP or the old age pension? If they were war vets; do they receive veterans services? Has he ever filed a claim with workman’s compensation for getting hurt or sick on the job? If he or any of his family members were unfortunate enough to lose their jobs, have they ever applied for Employment Insurance? Do his kids go to public school?

Again, I can’t oblige Taylor or his cheerleaders to answer these questions. I have tried to ask them, particulary those regarding health care; never get a straight answer from them. Just that tired old “it’s illegal for me to go to private clinics”; Bull-shit, those clinics exist legally under the nose of the federal government. Then I hear the whole tax Bull-shit; again, once that is gone, we’re still going to pay higher taxes (someone has to foot the bill to line the pockets of Steve’s fat cat Christian and oil and banker friends; bible translators and Christian Colleges, F-35 bombers, G20 boondoggle, all those disastrous changes to the census, etc).  But anyhooo, since Taylor is the one who wrote that article in the NattyPo, telling all those readers just how gung-ho tally-ho he is about the dismantling of the welfare state, pushing to those same readers just how fabulous it would be for all Canadians, perhaps he owes his readers the answers to my questions above. Does he lead the pure  conservative/libertarian lifestyle? He really should put his money where his mouth is before he preaches to others. I have a feeling that if Stevie Spiteful succeeds with this hideous project, Taylor and his compatriots will be the first to bitch & whine when they realize that a credit card will be asked for at the hospital or clinic rather than his OHIP card; that when retirement age comes, there will be no CPP or old age pension; that if he hurts himself on the job, tough luck, Charlie! And so on…

So Prime Minister Harper is all in a tizzy that a convicted Murderer named Clifford Olson is getting the Old Age Pension while in prison.

Olson is undoubtedly an evil man, a child killer and the worst sort of perversion of humanity imaginable.

These are the very attributes Harper was looking for. A very convenient Bogeyman indeed.

You see, to the Far Right, social programs are anathema, and universal social programs are the devil’s own spawn.

By setting up Olson as the straw man to be skewered by Harper’s righteous sword, the Conservatives also are aiming at setting a very dangerous precedent.

Whipping up the fury of the masses at the monster on a pension, they hope to be able to insert the thin edge of a very large wedge that soon will be striaght up the collective asses of aging Canadians.

Once Harper is able to argue that convicts should not be eligible for pensions, who’s next.

Once the universality of pensions is no longer sacrosanct, how long before universal Health Care (the real long term target IMO) will start to be dissected, one segment at a time.

If nothing else, Harper knows how to take the long view. He once promised that when he was through with Canada, we would no longer recognize it. In this case I believe he is a man of his word.

Fern Hill’s post regarding taxation on sterilization particularly grabbed my attention this morning. She found this idiotic idea from yet another one of those unstable blogging neo-tards where she expresses idiotic ideas like hitting childless couples with heavy tax penalties and taxing contraception (500%) to the point of turning it into illegal contraband like cocaine and machine guns. Like most of those Romper roomies, those ideas didn’t just hit her. She was reading more convoluted causes of of the recession being caused by anything but the real cause which is, of course,  unregulated corporate greed, Bush’s deregulation of the banking system and everyday folks going bankrupt because they bought into those western ideals that measure a person’s value by how big their houses and cars are and how many material posessions they don’t use they can get their hands on simply for the sake of bragging rights to ooo-ing and aw-ing neighbours.

This time, this blogging neo-tard can get all relieved and even cum in their pants  now because the Vatican Economist is stating that the recession is not the fault of the banks, but rather, the fault of lower birth rates.

This of course, brings me back to a time when Lucien Bouchard enraged many folks when he stated in October of 1995:

“We’re one of the white races that has the fewest children.”

All Bouchard did was make a whole lot folks pissed.  Socon or bust honestly thinks that beating childless couples over the head with excessive “sterilization” taxes will turn these women into instant baby factories.  What about couples who are infertile who do want children but can’t afford fertility treatments? You want to tax them to death due to being baron, but you also stress that you don’t want our health care system to cover fertility treatments? How does that work?

A future workforce, after all, is essential to the growth and continued existence of the State.

Again, a problem with that;  even though many are retiring these days, most of their jobs are not being refilled either in the public or private sectors.  My current job is an example of that. Due to the retirement of the receptionist at the point of service where I work, my position and her’s merged. In addtion to doing my duties, I’ve also had this retired receptionist’s work load added. I don’t mind, I’m always up for to a challenge and it keeps me employed at a place I really enjoy working at.  I am merely providing an example of the current work trends.

 It’s been a long time since either Canada or the U.S.  has produced more than we consume. We keep outsourcing manufacturing and call-center jobs to China, India, Thailand and other Asian countries.

In a few years, due to either this recession or a raise in the retirement age, the flow of workers retiring will come to an eventual halt, thus not much new job growth, nor much opportunity to grow in any industry.

Also, as technology evolves, there is less of a need for manpower. In other words, even if we all get barefoot and pregnant, we would probably have a bunch more unemployed adults who would need to use government resources, much like the aging baby boomers.

Do I really have to touch on the utter stupidity on taxing contraception 500%??  That will really curb the spread of AIDS and other STDs.

Yes, yes,  While Bouchard, Socan or Bust, other neo-cons and theocrats and the Vatican Economist all twist themselves over no one in the western world is having babies to condemn them to indentured servitude, they seem to forget that there are many,  many babies born in the developping world.  Their own economies don’t help these families to help themselves or any economy of the future for that matter. This whole we’re not having enough babies thing kind of flies flat doesn’t it?

 I’m surprised they haven’t gone for the most offensive and insist that childless westerners adopt third world babies a la Madonna and Brangelina, thus having more future tax-payers, but then, that would bring us to our current “problem” here in Canada, according to many Canadians bigots: too many immigrants. This, of course, is no surprise, check out that CBC comments page today. Many of their comments go in so far as to really come off as white supremacists. 

Yes, they’re all scared they may have to make certain concessions and learn to be tolerant of these new tax payers. This too would make them blame us for not having white babies to endenture them to a life of servitude and to protect the lilly-white neo-con greedy bigots.

My question is to these neo-cons like Socon or Bust: Are you all barefoot and pregnant expecting minimum your 5th child. Hell neo-con evangelicals like St-Stevie and GW Bush only have two children each, for the most part.

Once again, this is a case of neo-cons shifting the blame in order to justify their own selfishness in order to hide from the real cause of the recession which was greed; pure unabashed capitalist greed and now they bitch and moan over the lack of births and can’t stand it when they have to learn to live in the same world as our new immigrant tax-payers. After all, unless you’re Native Indian,  you too are derived from immigrants.

No, it’s about time to swear off greed and materialism and start thinking about the communities in which we live.   Job creation is vital and we have to stop sending our jobs overseas at the expense of our workers. And yes, more regulation is definitely needed in the banking industry.

The blame game just doesn’t accomplish anything anymore, neither does greed nor bigotry.

I agree with Fern Hill on this one: I personally don’t care who is paying for our social programs.and such