If one examines closely the speech that Stephen Harper gave to an American conservative think-tank, before he became our Prime Minister [1], one is struck immediately by this: our Prime Minister hates Canada and despises Canadians. We are, in his own words “a second-rate country”[2]. In statement after statement, Mr. Harper made it clear that his only loyalty is to the rich and powerful in other countries, and not to Canada or Canadians. For most of his life, the Rich and Powerful lived in the United States, and that is where his spirit has hovered. The United States that he worships, with the most abject and slavish servility, is not, of course, the real United States, the one embodied in the Declaration of Independence, or in its two centuries of struggle for freedom and justice. No, what Mr. Harper worships is the current, King George’s version of the United States, the one that has been betrayed, degraded, debauched and bankrupted by a generation of Conservative treason.
In many documented statements, Harper has made it perfectly plain that he has nothing but contempt for his own country and its people. The sum of them reveal that he has the cringing mentality of the colonial, the man who berates his fellow countrymen as “second-rate” precisely because he is third-rate, and masks his own inadequacy in a dog-like devotion to an external power. Generations ago, when this country was carving out its own sense of independence, we were plagued by very similar people. At that time, the colonial mentality looked to Mother Britain. Thanks to their influence, tens of thousands of innocent Canadian farm boys were ground into hamburger in the trenches of Flanders, for no reason other than to glorify the incompetent and parasitic aristocrats of Europe. Harper’s mind works the same way, except that he will buy his self-esteem by throwing away the lives of Canadian boys in Afghanistan, and he looks to the pomp and splendor of the Royal Court in Washington for approval, rather than the Court of St. James. If America fades, whoever outside of Canada holds the shiniest crown or throws the most lavish parties will win his loyalty.
Today, the man who gave that servile and cowardly speech is our elected Prime Minister. Thank god he only forms a minority government. Our “second-rate” parliamentary democracy, which brooks no arrogant “Deciders”, has not let him get away with just handing the country over to his masters. We do, after all, have opposition parties, which can occasionally summon the energy to get off their butts and oppose.
The image of his idol has become somewhat tarnished. American Conservatives have, after a generation of power, managed to destroy the economy of the world’s wealthiest country, and handed over most of its assets to the Communist Party. They have destroyed as much as they could of America’s liberties and enlightened traditions. They have perverted and corrupted democracy, and they have sold out America to foreign kings, gangsters, and terrorists. In treasonous act after treasonous act (no other term fits the facts), the Republican Party has done its best to destroy the real America, in the name of a phony “America” carved in the image of a Gulf sheikdom. Their loyalty, like Harper’s, now lies outside of their own country, and their own people. The essence of Conservative thought is the worship of power, and if power resides elsewhere, then loyalty to one’s own people flies out the window. Harper’s entrancement with his perverted version of America is, now that America itself is degraded, easily transformed into servitude to the international aristocracy of wealth and power. That global aristocracy has no home, no people, no nation.
The rapid collapse of the American economy has created a crisis of confidence. Conservatives in all places and times have sought to loot, corrupt, and destroy economies, and their predations are so obvious, now, in the United States, that the people are stunned, discontented, and starting to doubt the slick propaganda that has been shouted at them for decades. Americans now face their most important election since the Civil War, one in which they must decide whether to continue deluding themselves, and continue marching down the path to oblivion, or to face hard facts and rediscover the idea of freedom..
We in Canada also face an election, during the same period. In a parliamentary system, the government in power calls an election when it feels it has the best chance to win. In Harper’s case, this is a very small window. The preceding Liberal government handed Harper an economy strengthened by a decade of balanced budgets, surplus savings, and reduced national debt. Within a few short years, Harpers’ Conservative regime has worked hard to waste that money. Harper is determined to entangle us irrevocably in expensive and pointless foreign warfare, in which we operate as mere step’n’fetchits for the White House. Billions upon billions of our cash reserves have already been thrown away ― mostly handed out to Afghan drug warlords, tin-pot dictators and foreign armaments manufacturers. Harper wants to throw away even more, in an open-ended commitment to eternal servitude, as colonial Gurkhas for the Pukka Sa’bs. The surplus is gone, and we are soon to confront a global recession with our accounts empty. In the meantime, the Conservative Party’s domestic economic policies (based on the theory that we must, above all, cater to the cartel of global oil gangsters) have eroded our industrial base to the bare bones.
Oil, you see, lies at the heart of it, just as oil lies at the heart of Republican treason in America. The global oil industry is purely a creature of State Power. Ninety-five percent of all the oil in the world is controlled by State-owned entities, so it is nonsense to talk about oil as if it was a “market”. Most of the states involved are pure dictatorships. Armies, prison cells, torture chambers, and secret police determine the price and movement of oil. Only a small percentage of the world’s oil is produced in democracies. Even the remaining five percent, theoretically “private”, is in fact mostly owned by Exxon, and if you examine Exxon’s internal structure, it is merely a holding corporation whose subsidiaries are state-owned, or owned by military thugs or hereditary princes. In other words, the global oil industry is Communism.
Now, as far as Harper is concerned, these international gangsters are the “rightful” owners of Canada’s oil, and his economic policy is simply to make sure they get as much profit from it as possible. They are his bosses, and it is their interests that he serves, not ours. Over and over again, Harper has demonstrated that he will serve any powerful entity, as long as it is not in this country, and not us. One of his most recent policy initiatives, disguised as concern for Canada’s security in the arctic, is to have the Canadian taxpayer foot the bill for foreign oil companies’ exploration. Their “investment” is to consist of collecting the profits without risk, while we provide the grunt work for free.
But what is the truth of the matter? Who rightfully owns Canada’s oil? The oil under Canadian soil belongs to us. It belongs to all Canadians, and its exploitation and disposition should only be controlled by us. The needs of Canadian consumers and industry should come first and foremost, above all other concerns, in this disposition. It is stupid and wrong for us to allow foreigners to “own” our oil, and it is monstrous folly and evil to allow foreign dictators, genocidal monsters, and international criminals to have anything to do with it. If we had an ounce of sense, we would immediately: 1) terminate all foreign claims to ownership in Canadian petroleum extraction and refinement, 2) assign oil exploration, extraction, and transportation to private, %100 Canadian-owned, and competitive companies, licensed by us, the owners, and forced to compete on a genuine free market, 3) require all Canadian production to meet domestic needs first, before export, and 4) make it illegal to export unrefined petroleum. Only refined petroleum products should ever leave our territory, and that only after our own needs, present and future, are safely met. Companies in Canada should be forced to compete in efficiency by our leasing licenses to many small operators, rather than a few large ones, and these should not be allowed to vertically integrate. Exploration, extraction, transportation, refining, and product marketing should all be kept separate, and compelled to really compete. What we need is not Conservative “market theory”, disguising mercantilist manipulations of state power, but a real free market, which Conservatives and Corporate Power have always, and always will hate and oppose.
Conservatives love to yap about “national security”, but in the most obvious and critical area of national security, they show no concern at all. Nothing could be more important to our national security than the ownership of our own energy sources. It has reached the point that it is easy to tell what is a real country and what is merely a conquered territory, or colony in disguise. Real countries control their own energy, and their own property. Canada has more than enough oil and natural gas for its own needs, albeit much of it expensive to extract, but we have foolishly handed control of it to foreigners, many of whom are disgusting criminal vermin.
Few Canadians have yet experienced the disenchantment that Americans have with Conservative ideological quackery. Only those who are losing industrial jobs in Ontario and Quebec are coming up short, and it will take some time for the long-term damage of Conservative policies to affect most Canadians directly. Harper has a window of opportunity. If the Canadian economy can limp along without a dramatic debacle for another month, then he can still use all the old lies and scams to good effect. The opposition is divided between the Liberal, New Democratic, Bloc and Green parties, which, of course, hate each other more than the governing power, and none of which seems to have any grasp of what would constitute effective campaigning. It has been particularly frustrating to witness the Liberal Party’s inability to go on the offensive, and inability to grasp what issues matter. Harpers’ coterie of American and American-trained spin-manipulators and strategy advisors have already devised an effective, if entirely unprincipled campaign strategy. Just as in the United States, this is a crucial election, deciding our destiny over the long term. If we retain Harper, the results will be as economically and morally disastrous for us as they will be for Americans, if they are foolish enough to elect McCain.
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[1] Harper, Stephen — address to the Council for National Policy, Montreal, June of 1997.
[2] Harper, Stephen — published letter to the National Post, December 8, 2000.
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As usurpation is the exercise of power, which another hath the right to, so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to. And this is making use of the power anyone has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private, separate advantage. When the governor, however entitled, makes not the law, but his will, the rule; and his commands and actions are not directed to the preservation of the properties of his people, but the satisfaction of his own ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion.…
… the end why they choose and authorize a legislative is, that there be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society; to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every part and member of the society: for since it never can be supposed to be the will of the society that the legislative should have a power to destroy that which everyone designs to secure by entering into society, and for which the people submitted themselves to legislators of their own making; whenever the legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men, against force and violence. Whensoever therefore the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society; and either by ambition, fear, folly, or corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people; by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.
― John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, 1689.
Absolute liberty, just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty, is the thing we stand in need of.
― William Popple, translator of Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration from Latin into English. [Because of censorship and intolerance in his own country, Locke first published the letter in the Netherlands, at that time the freest land. It was available in Latin, Dutch and French in that country long before it was read in England].
A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody, ought not to be trusted by anybody.
― Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, 1791
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