rabble.ca Canadian federal election blog

Representing Joe 6 pack-hockey mom or Trojan Horse

• by Robert Chernomas *

$3 trillion in tax cuts

Cutting corporate and upper income taxes means they are free to spend more of their unearned income on things most important to them. If we are corporations we can take this money and invest it in China or buy hedge funds with it. If we are wealthy individuals we can get on line for one of those new private submarines so hot in the upscale market or put it in a bank, stock or bond somewhere on earth where we can get the highest return.

If we aren’t rich, your meager tax cuts under the plan means you get to hold on to more of your hard earned money which is all the more important because those corporations are paying us less and less as a share of what we produce while the corporate share of income explodes. Unfortunately for every tax dollar we don’t pay we discover that our private costs for health and education goes up faster so that we are worse off.

Government spending.

Government spending means every dollar will be used to hire your own workers, increasing domestic employment, putting pressure on the corporations to pay hirer salaries.

But of course governments waste money on schools, hospitals, roads, electricity, research and development, and bureaucrats who might regulate our food, water, and air safety and even possibly our financial markets. Some tax dollars are spent on bridges to nowhere, unlike the private sector, where competition insures there will be no waste of resources-or not one dime more than $700B.

Health Insurance

The self-styled representative of the working class hockey mom will tax health care employer paid health benefits effectively relieving US corporations of the responsibility of paying for their workers health insurance, forcing workers to turn to the notorious private health insurance industry in the US with a tax credit that will pay for very little health insurance. Playing hockey becomes a much more dangerous activity.

Jane 6 pack becomes Jane 3 pack, and she better not get sick from the unregulated beer that she can afford because her private health insurance won’t cover the health costs.

Top ten reasons for thanking conservatives.

• by Robert Chernomas *

1. You can find Walkerton, Ontario on the map.

2. You know that Listeria is not a street where desperate housewives live.

3. You now know a word, Vioxx, with more than one X in it.

4. You know how many zeros there are in a $700B

5. You don’t need to remember how to pronounce Kyoto.

6. You finally know whom they are talking about when they say, “the meek shall inherit the earth.”

7. You understand how dinosaurs and humans could occupy the earth at the same time in B movies.

8. Liberals sound more like Trudeau than Bush.

9. You can understand why gravity requires Canadian oil to flow south instead of east and west.

10. You finally understand the idiom, “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.”

The Fundamentals of the US economy are Strong - Can I Borrow $700 billion?

• by Robert Chernomas*

A crisis brought to you from the people who ask you to vote for tax cuts (mostly for the rich and corporations) deregulation and privatization. Our job as citizens is to free the corporate world of any responsibility other than to provide us with the opportunity to work for them and consume their products. When necessary they must be protected from their own excesses, in the current US case, by potentially handing the corporate sector a sum of taxpayer dollars equal to the entire GDP of Canada.

Deregulation began in the United States in the 1970s. Some two decades (2002) after it began, Consumer Reports (CR) evaluated deregulation in the US. According to CR consumers have lost ground since deregulation began.

Not exactly a bastion of radicalism, for CR the marketplace has become more adversarial toward consumers. The absence of strict rules has inspired aggressive tactics and enabled sellers to gain disproportionate power over buyers. Banking, for example, according to CR, has been a disaster, with 1600 bank failures in the US and a mammoth 160 billion dollar bailout. * This all took place before the current banking crisis.*

CR suggests that free market players are always devising new mischief, and governments must remain vigilant and respond swiftly.

Toxic food, air, toys, water, electricity blackouts, disappearing savings and pensions are only a part of the problem.

Exploding deficits will bring the call for more cuts to health, education and welfare along with more privatization and deregulation because the state can’t afford to spend those increasingly scarce taxes or interfere with the efficient private market while spending on the military and cutting taxes further.

A decade of Liberal rule has helped put Canada on a similar path. A Conservative majority will accelerate that process and a potentially crisis ridden US economy with whom we have become so much more dependent threatens to further expose the dangers of our made in Canada right-wing model.

Sweden, Finland and Norway are highly regulated, highly taxed, welfare states that are among the most competitive in the world, while running fiscal surpluses.

The cancer epidemic as an election issue or how free trade gives you cancer.

By Robert Chernomas

In 2001, Canadian industries reported the release of 18,455,237 kilograms of known carcinogens into our air, soil and water. This dumping of carcinogens into our environment enables corporations to lower (externalize) their costs and maybe our prices as consumers (Wal-Mart), but not as citizens or workers who suffer the costs of lost labor and leisure time and costs to the health care system, not to mention the suffering and premature loss of loved ones and friends.

From 1970 to 1998, after controlling for aging, the incidence of cancer in Canada increased by 35% for men and 27% for women. One in every 2.4 Canadian men (41.2%) will develop cancer and one in every 3.6 (27.4%) will die from it. One in every 2.7 Canadian women (37.6%) will develop cancer and one in 4.3 (23.1%) will die from it. It is not as a result of individual lifestyle choices that most of us are exposed to carcinogens at work, in the environment and at home. This is demonstrated by a recent study led by researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, in collaboration with the Environmental Working Group and Commonweal. Nine volunteers, including PBS journalist Bill Moyers, were tested for the presence of chemicals, pollutants and pesticides in their blood and urine. None of the volunteers worked with chemicals on the job. Yet their bodies contained an average of 91 compounds, most of which did not exist 75 years ago. On average, each of the nine subjects carried 53 chemicals linked to cancer in humans or animals.

A 2006 Security and Prosperity Partnership report identified stricter pesticide residue limits in Canada as a “barrier to trade.” The Canadian Free Trade “solution” is to raise pesticide limits on hundreds of fruits and vegetables in an effort to merge its policies with the United States. Deregulating the food industry might help corporate profits, but not our cancer rates. Cancer is not a lifestyle issue or genetics issue nearly as much as it is a political issue.

How to give Medicare a terminal social disease?

by Robert Chernomas

How to give Medicare a terminal social disease?

I recently received an advertisement from my incumbent Conservative MP asking me to check off the box as to which leader will do a better job of fighting crime. He went on to tell us of the new tools of repression that Harper and company had brought to bear on this social disease to ensure I had the information I needed to answer the question properly.
So I thought to myself, what information (to be fit on one page) would I provide if I wanted to ensure that past and future crimes against Medicare would see the light of day?

Support For-Profit Medicine. For-profit medicine is more costly, of lower quality (even deadlier) and turns away those who cannot afford it. Paying more for lower quality more dangerous less accessible health care will add to the disease burden of Medicare.

Support a parallel private system. A guarantee that the public wait times will grow in direct proportion to the reduction in the wait times of those who pay to cut in line will add to the disease burden of Medicare.

Support for User Fees. An added cost that guarantees some of us will have less access to the Medicare that they need, adding to their disease burden (you get sicker if you wait for needed care), increasing costs to the system and the disease burden of Medicare.

Leave pharmaceuticals to the private sector. For decades the fastest growing cost factor of Medicare without evidence that these newer more expensive and heavily used drugs are more effective, safe or safer adding to the disease burden of Medicare.

Please check off the box of the leader(s) most likely to give Medicare a terminal social disease.