Joseph, the Liberal

The latest Parliament Hill fireworks have crystallized a number of things. One of them is the complete incongruence of thinking that pertains to religious conservatives when it comes to basic economics. Deriving this conclusion from numerous conversations with my co-parishioners, I conclude that there is a profound and widely held disinterest in actually living to the most celebrated economic examples of the Bible we purport to hold as the highest standard. Let’s consider the glorious wisdom of Joseph, the ruler of Egypt. Yes, he sported an egregiously luxuries Technicolor coat but this is not his most prominent contribution.

His most valuable legacy is his response to the seven years of famine preceded by seven years of abundance and plenty. So what did Joseph do in the first happy years? He restrained consumption by taxation and ran surplus budgets of hoarded grain. And what did he do in the lean years? He spurred on consumption by running budget deficits by unloading the grain. The economy in the process was spared very high peaks and very low valleys.

What the Liberals did under Martin and propose today is exactly this pattern. The Conservatives on the other hand have done quite the opposite. They encouraged consumption during peaks by cutting corporate taxes and consequently gutting the surplus. Today, at the start of famine, they propose to balance the budget while the world, figuratively, starves for grain. Yes, they persist with reduced corporate taxes. But this is of little avail when there is not enough private demand (i.e. consumption) as people’s ability to spend diminishes with every newly laid-off worker.

So considering the above it is essential that religious conservatives re-evaluate the current economic policies of this government as unbiblical. After all, is this not the time to consider a very strong possibility that Joseph was in fact an economic liberal?

McCain's MIddle Name

Throughout the year, and amidst election fever in particular, I enormously enjoy listening to rightwing talk radio on my dial. The content is typically so comedic that I find it impossible to pass on the delight of listening to the likes of Hannity, Limbaugh and Levin (by the far the most entertaining). These characters spin the most outlandish of notions so fluently that listening to the scripted anecdotes by Jon Stewart feels utterly boring. Of course, these folks do not engage in their insanity to entertain me but to mislead millions of people, the kind of folks who take their info at its face value and run with it all the way to the slaughterhouse of rightwing politics.

The great meaty press never gives out, churning, among a myriad of others, the need to fixate on Hussein, Obama’s middle name. It is just a middle name of course. The name given to the infant Barack some forty seven years ago – what could be less consequential than that? Anything more can only be interpreted as sheer bigotry and nonsense. To conceal this fact, the Hannity and Co. resort to the oldest pandering trick in the book by calling their audience the most intelligent and informed.

This is not true, of course. So to test it, ask anybody who imbibes their on-air gibberish a simple question “What is John McCain’s middle name?” I bet nine out of ten will just blanch in response. And this is the joke I would not want to miss.

By the way, the name is Sidney, John Sidney McCain.

Surrey Now - Letter to the Editor

Once again, in Nina Grewal, we elected a quintessential politician. She unfailingly raises her hand of support for the party leader whenever asked, always keeps to her talking points and vastly prefers deafening silence when queried outside her comfort zone. Fantastic! This reminds of a country where I spent my youth in – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Incidental Happiness - Politics in Canada

The local nightline news headline screams: A Farmer in Ohio Wins the Power Ball Lottery Estimated at $250 Million! The ensuing images whirl about some terrifyingly happy faces and droves of anchors with long-pointed microphones and the most idiotic questions. The rest of us, on the other side of the screen, seethe with envy. And we do not stop at breaking just one of the Ten Commandments – Thou Shall Not Covet – and plunge full throttle into much perilous undertaking of asking the Almighty – “Why they, why they?!”

God usually does not heed such gibberish and does on his merry way. In utter despair some citizens speed up to the next watering hole to drown in self-pity, other rush to the next lottery terminal while the rest seize their questioning with a logical consideration of staggering statistical odds – “well, it could not have been me anyway…”

All this happens, of course, on the very individualistic and hence irrelevant level. On the societal plain thing look a bit different as they are just about thirty million people in North America who seem to share in one, very incidental, jackpot. They live in Canada. Trust me, it is incidental and yet we revel in it. And when your elections and ours happily coincide, many of us are starkly reminded of our blundering, lottery luck – the one that is called normal everyday life. And the most unfair about it all is one tiny little fact – we did not fight for it, it has happened just by accident.

We, a docile stock, did not fight in 1776, happily following the overseas masters. We just kept trading our furs for cotton with those from the South. They needed slaves and we did not. Few years later our British masters told us the slavery was off. We, a demurring flock, just agreed and kept on with the furs. You resisted and a murderous Civil War followed. Finally, we got some sort of independence with not a shot fired. They just sent us some Parliament Act instead.

You wanted to be morally pure and announced prohibition. We simply switched from furs to whisky. You got Al Capone, and we got the money. Few years later you drove into Vietnam. We did not. Au contraire, our passivity got us the Universal Health Care sold by some undoubtedly nutty radicals. You then decided that fossil-powered free markets were the answer but we just simply stumbled upon some oil. Since then you have had to fight wars to live up to your ideals while we just sold much of the dark slimy stuff to you.

Today you struggle with many urgent issues, foreign and domestic. But you have hard time revving up as the issue of experience appears so crucial to the current contenders. And this is even after considering the fact that you current morass has been presided by the most experienced civil servant/private enterprise team ever, on paper at least. By some blissful coincidence, in Canada we do not discuss the experience. This is not by design of course but by sheer luck. You see, in our British parliamentarian system, all of our leaders simply come from the same old and trusted perches in the Commons. In Canada no one bickers on this inconsequential score.

Apart from the “experience” discussion you also have to sling some serious mud around and it takes zillions of dollars and light-years of one’s life. By incident of course, we, north of the 49th, largely avoid this pitfall. This is because our mouthy parliamentarian screaming and debates take place daily as long as the parliament is in session. This is sort of like an illegal cockfight that nobody, except for some C-SPAN junkies, ever gets to see. So by the time we start our election campaign, our politicians are in a tired off-season mood and thus rarely put their gloves on. And even when they do, the electorate, suddenly shocked by uncouthness of it all, usually quickly steers the fighters back into the issues corner.

And here is my final point – we never know exactly when our elections will take place within the maximum mandated span of five years. They are usually snap-called and thus mercifully short. Our latest parallel, to yours, routine just opened last week and will be over by October 14th. Imagine all the time one can spend dilly-dallying about some policy issues that normal folks sort of care about. And not only that, we have a seriously taxing public election finance scheme hence our politicians do not have to sell their souls on the fundraising circuit just as much.

I know, bragging like this is akin to receiving a phone call from that darn lucky Ohioan Farmer just to learn that yes, he is your long-lost uncle and no, you will not be seeing any of that money. But instead of seething and raging, why not just relax and stop trying so hard? Why not quit feeding the extremes and begin dusting up the old pearl of public consensus, the shortest route to meaningful solutions.

Perhaps, one day you too will win the lottery….

Surrey Now - Letter to the Editor

I always get a chuckle considering the Fraser Institute’s opposition to any increases in the minimum wage. After all, this is the organization that is also perennially opposed to any controls on executive compensation. However, my personal comedic moment aside is this not the time to ask what the minimum wage is there for in the first place? Is it there to set a minimum price of labour so to avoid a slippage into the long-discredited economic conditions of the Dickensian age, which produced neither full employment nor wide-spread economic prosperity?

If your answer is “NO” then please continue indulging in the Fraser Institute press releases. Otherwise the next question to ask is: what should such minimal benchmark be set at? An official level of poverty income strikes me as a good place to start without destroying the original intent. However, it does not end there since the real value of poverty income fluctuates with cost living just like at any other wage level. Typically, the cost of living (i.e. inflation) goes up, necessitating upward adjustments from time to time.

Since the last minimum wage reset a number of years ago, the cost of living has increased immensely. This is an undeniable fact. On this basis, it appears completely reasonable to argue for minimum wage increases, whatever the actual number. Above all, is it not what would anybody expect from a civilized society?

In conclusion, during the last decade we have witnessed considerable increases in higher, professional, wage levels without any detriment to the overall level of corresponding employment, negating the main thrust of the Fraser Institute’s argument. If accountants, teachers and doctors have managed to maintain their working hours despite increasing wages why should not fast food workers?