Monday, December 9, 2013

The ‘Socialist Hordes”



Fascism and Contemporary Canada.  Part VIIII.

The ‘Socialist Hordes”

Written by Robin Mathews

Led By The Fiscally Conservative Social Credit W.A.C. Bennett Government. The ‘Fascist Transformation’ By The ‘Liberal’ Gordon Campbell/Christy Clark Governments.



In those ‘Wacky’ Bennett days (1952-1972), a person could step into a Vancouver Hotel elevator on one day with W.A.C. Bennett and Robert Bonner (wearing, as I remember it, black homburg hats and long black overcoats).  The next day a person could share the elevator with Glenn Gould, pale-faced, wearing the gray knitted wool gloves he used to protect his (pianist) genius hands. Another era … so to speak.

It is an era that calls into question all B.C. political parties of 2013. It forces the question about what and who they REALLY are and who they represent. 

Not one of them represents the people of British Columbia.

One need only cast one’s mind back to the so-called B.C. Socred animal that somehow was hatched from the post-Second World War world. Canada had gone from deep Depression into a rationed Second World War – sixteen years of relatively bad times – though, ironically, the War brought back jobs and a measure of financial security to many Canadians, even while their husbands, sons, and brothers were being wounded and slaughtered in distant lands.

After 1945 – for more than a decade – a catch-up game was conducted in public services, manufacturing, and what is now called “infrastructure”. And so the arrival of the hardware merchant from Kelowna as premier and head of (what many believed was) a nutcase Party in 1952 didn’t bode well for the province.

If W.A.C. Bennett were to arrive on the scene today and to set about the kind of innovation and enterprise he did back then, he would be called a Left Nationalist and would face open scorn by fundamentalist neoliberals. They are so powerful few dare to take them on. They reside in almost all Canadian university economics departments, almost all private economic ‘thinktanks’,
among most of the ‘boys in short pants’ in every backroom of Canadian political parties, and everywhere in the mainstream press and media. They are, everywhere, the hired stooges of the One Per Cent.

As a result, not only Canada but the whole West is in crisis. Rafael Correa, president of Equador, spoke of the crisis in a speech at the Sorbonne University in Paris on November 6. “The crisis”, he said, “ is not only economic.  It’s a result of the poverty of both leadership and ideas.  We have been afraid to think for ourselves and we’ve accepted - in a way that is as passive as it is absurd – the ‘diktats’ of foreigners.” (my translation, Le Monde diplomatique, Dec. 2013, p. 16)  He anchors the crisis in what he calls the ‘neoliberal fundamentalism’ practiced by people in power almost everywhere.

Those people, whether in the IMF, the Harper cabinet, the BCNDP or anywhere else are destroying the economies of healthy and potentially healthy communities. They are all doing what W.A.C. Bennett rejected absolutely in his building of the B.C. economy and community.

Looking back at what he achieved, we can see determination that shaped B.C. as a real community in which all shared and were involved in the whole enterprise. There was a Capitalist Class – which the Bennett Socreds believed in, but it was a Capitalist Class unlike anything in B.C. today … and one kept on a leash by government policy.

To begin, the W.A.C. Bennett government exploited the provincial (since 1918) railway. It was not sold off.  It was developed as an infrastructure tool for development. At the time when Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark (premier and deputy premier) set to work to strip it, cripple it, and pass it off to the CNR, it had seventeen years of profitable operation. One of the major activities involved in BC Rail corruption was the organized (and I believe criminal) undermining, stripping, and misreporting of B.C. Rail condition to the B.C. people.

In 1961 the W.A.C. Bennett government united the electrical and other energy enterprises in British Columbia to fashion BC Hydro – a stunningly successful Crown Corporation, which paced expansion, built infrastructure, and guarded costs for both residential users and enterprise. 

Already British Columbians are forgetting that a semi-branch of BC Hydro, added later, was BC Gas – and if it had remained in the structure, there would be no Kinder Morgan in British Columbia, no Fortis.  There would be no secret dealings with the shady and elusive foreign Corporations to pass B.C. energy wealth to neoliberal thieves.

Perhaps the most extraordinary act of pillage and calculated destruction has been wrought on BC Hydro. A successful enterprise adding to General Revenues of government for years and providing absolute assurance of low-cost energy for all British Columbians, it has been dessicated and desecrated by the Campbell/Christy Clark governments. 

(1) The Auditor General of British Columbia has not approved its annual financial report for ten years.

(2) BC Hydro is now in so bad a state of disguised and doctored accounting chaos that experts argue about just how much it is dragging British Columbia into critical insolvency.

(3) To begin the open destruction of BC Hydro as an enterprise owned by British Columbians and operated in their interest, the Gordon Campbell government passed legislation in 2003 forbidding BC Hydro to operate effectively. The Campbell government prevented (and the Christy Clark government continues to prevent) BC Hydro from producing and selling any additional energy than the amount available in 2003. Instead, BC Hydro must purchase (at a great loss) energy from Independent Power Producers. The IPPs have been set up as a totally unnecessary and destructive (of rivers) neoliberal force.

(4) The Gordon Campbell government (with Christy Clark as deputy premier) divided BC Hydro into three parts.  A huge part was (and is) “contracted” to one of the entities very close to the huge 2001 (U.S.) Enron energy scandal. The corporation which became Accenture split off from Arthur Anderson shortly before the scandal exploded into public view.

Accenture is headquartered, now, in Dublin, Ireland. It is a major global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing corporation. It has more employees in India than anywhere else in the world.  It would be deemed by many to be an iconic neoliberal operation. The “contract” from the B.C. government with which it was handed customer service, westech IT services, network computer services, Human Resources, Financial Systems, purchasing, and Building and offices service groups was reported to be a contract with secret sections to which  British Columbians have never been given access.

It is perfectly fair to suggest that a global corporation offering such services is less interested in the well-being of British Columbians than in the profit it can wring from its activities globally.

(5) I believe that a full-scale Public Inquiry and RCMP investigation into all the operations of BC Hydro and the legislation related to it passed by the Campbell/Christy Clark governments would eventuate in criminal charges for Breach of Trust and assorted other fraudulent activities.

Written by Robin Mathews

___________





The Straight Goods


Cheers Eyes Wide Open

9 comments:

Trouble's A-Brewing said...

Riots Break Out In Singapore; Think Your Country Is Immune?

"Yesterday, a 33-year old Indian man got hit by the proverbial bus in Singapore’s Little India neighbourhood. That was the catalyst. What transpired for the next several hours was a full blown riot... the first of its kind since 1969. Singapore has had years of tensions building. These issues are commonplace. Ideological differences. The wealth gap and economic uncertainty. Immigration challenges. They’re the same issues, for example, that have plunged much of Europe into turmoil, including the rise of a blatantly fascist political party in Greece. And these same issues exist, in abundance, in the Land of the true north, strong, and well,… where a number of serious ideological divides are becoming obvious social chasms. And if it can happen in Singapore - one of the safest, most stable countries on the planet, it can happen anywhere. Even in a sterile Canadian city.

Trouble's A-Brewing said...

Link for Singapore Riots is here: http:

//www.sovereignman.com/trends/riots-break-out-in-singapore-think-your-country-is-immune-13259/

The Party System is a Dialectical Trap said...

Time to start thinking outside of their box Consider Anarchism: “The theory that all forms of government are oppressive and should be abolished.”

While it does advocate the abolition of the state, anarchism also includes “a heightened and radical critique and questioning of power and authority: if a source of authority cannot legitimize its existence, it should not exist,”

This has led to anarchism being critiqued by a number of individuals, and an increase in anarchist thought to the point today where there are a large number of anarchist ideas being championed.

Danneau said...

Check out The Lottery of Birth at mango.tv. It speaks to the reasons for the lack of pushback on the theft of the economy, education, the press and the minds of citizens. The fabrications that people will believe allow the thieves to continue uninhibited. There are only voices like RM and the PRP to keep a feeble spark of intelligence and community alive in the shitstorm of obfuscation and misdirection. Good on you folks for being here.

Grant G said...

Thanks Danneau..

AlJazeera produces good commentary too

http://www.aljazeera.com/

Sadly even most bloggers are tepid and stale..

Disaffected Lib..Norman Farrell and Montreal Simon are pretty good..

We live in an advanced society where our Governments engage in propaganda and trickery, everyday they scheme against the public and yes, our mainstream media play along for favour..

Our federal Government props up supports Ezra Levant and Sunnews, they prop up those racists and corporate whores..

That`s why I can`t support anyone who writes for that outfit, those writers are preventd from telling the hard-truth, little pokes and jabs about nothing..

Robin Mathews writes of broken law and real life experiences..

Powell river persuader writes on paper saturated with outrage and emotions..

Mainstream media writes on paper lined with job security warnings.

Grant G said...

Read this lame article..

http://www.theprovince.com/news/Kitimat+perks+energy+sector+builds+foundation/9265454/story.html

"The resource town of Kitimat is getting busy again after years of languishing in the economic doldrums"


"Workers have to stop at steet lights"

"The provincial Government says POTENTIAL revenue for BC`s liquefied natural gas export sector COULD as much as $100 BILLION IN THE YEARS TO COME"

"iT PREDICTS 3000 TO 4000 ADDITIONAL JOBS in the gas and oil industry by 2022"

and the writer?..Finishes off his mail-in write something about LNG article by saying..

"Kitimat is a coastal city in northwestern B.C. whose name means "People of the snow"...

it was a fishing village before becoming home to an aluminum smelter in the 1950`s"


Kent Spencer I believe wrote his ordered up, mailed in article while waiting at an intersection on the way to the bank to cash his paycheque..


sheesh, if that is what goes for journalism or reporting tis writer must be writing War And Peace type novels!

Cheers

Hugh said...

Article today about Site C and Burrard Thermal:

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/metro/Hydro+rejected+proposal+seven+smaller+dams+that+would+reduce/9269319/story.html

Hugh said...

An article in the Province about LNG and West Australia. Seems they had zero debt before exporting LNG. Now they have lots. BC has lots of debt now, and we haven't exported any LNG.

“So five per cent of the community are better off because of higher incomes from a high level of investment in a small sector of the community, in this case LNG. Maybe 10 per cent break even and the other 85 per cent are worse off."
http://www.theprovince.com/business/Western+Australian+experience+shows+boom+come+with+hefty+price/9202815/story.html

Grant G said...

@Hugh...I emailed and called David Carrigg, he`s the writer of that article and editor at The Province newspaper..he repeated Rich Coleman`s lies about our BC Debt...$40 billion debt including crowns, schools hospitals and Government..

Check out the facebook comments on that article..


http://www.theprovince.com/business/Western+Australian+experience+shows+boom+come+with+hefty+price/9202815/story.html

And Hugh...Read this..

http://powellriverpersuader.blogspot.ca/2013/12/british-columbias-lng-nightmare-devil.html

The whole Western Australia story is there.

Cheers