My Canadian friends are telling me that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is under fire for offering 9.5 billion dollars to GM. I tell them, who cares? Canada is 10% the size of the USA, so that would be 95 billion for us. I still believe in Harper, and in any case, he already expressed that his preference would be to let the companies go bankrupt.
But let’s take a look at the latest news from Canada. In Canada, they have corporations that are owned by the government called Crown corporations. Some of them are losing money. So what does Harper want to do about that?
The federal Department of Finance has flagged several prominent Crown corporations as “not self-sustaining,” including the CBC, VIA Rail and the National Arts Centre, and has identified them as entities that could be sold as part of the government’s asset review, newly released documents show.
…Finance Department documents, obtained by Canwest News Service under the Access to Information Act… reveal that the government will consider privatizing Crown corporations that require public subsidies to stay afloat.
“The reviews will also examine other holdings in which the government competes directly with private enterprises, earn income from property or performs a commercial activity,” states a Finance briefing note dated Dec. 2, 2008. “It includes Crown corporations that are not self-sustaining even though they are of a commercial nature.”
In the briefing note, the Finance Department identifies nine Crown corporations that fall in that category, including Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the CBC and VIA Rail.
CBC is their NPR/PBS and Via Rail is their AMTRAK. Harper is taking a lot of heat right now because he is running a 50 billion dollar deficit. That’s chump change compared to our nearly 2 trillion dollar deficit this year alone, with no end in sight. Not only that, but Heritage Foundation reports that Obama’s calling up the mayor of Detroit and reassuring him that GM will not move their headquarters to Warren, from Detroit.
I remember when Stephen Harper took over from the corrupt left-wing Liberal party in Canada, the first thing he did was to pass the Federal Accountability Act, which requires all expense claims to posted on government web sites for the public to see. Conservative MPs could be seen having business meetings at Subway, while Liberals bilked the public for thousands for various junkets. I was so happy for the Canadians.
But the Conservative Party isn’t running things in secular socialist Britain…
It turns out that the Blair-Brown Labour government could not bring itself to raise salaries for MPs, but instead set up “the system” of allowances that were privileged and kept secret. An MP could claim thousands of pounds more or less on his own say-so, with shaky receipts for dubious expenditure, and the result is that some have built property portfolios worth a million pounds or more.
…Supervising this milking of “the system” was Michael Martin, the Speaker. In the early days of Tony Blair, this man was press-ganged into a job for which he was unfit. An old hardline socialist and trade-union man, he saw himself as defender of entitlements rather than liberty and proper government. He put in outrageous claims for himself and his wife. He did his very best to suppress information about the embezzling and spivery going on under him, in the classic manner of a trade unionist getting whatever he could for his comrades.
…A government minister, one of the richest men in the House of Commons, claimed $150,000 from the taxpayer to finance the mortgage on a “second home.” (He already had seven.) A leading Tory repaired the moat around his stately home on expenses.
Sometimes, the claims were trivial and comically embarrassing: tampons, diapers, the repair of leaky pipes, ice-cube trays ($2.50), hair straighteners ($150) and Scotch eggs ($1.25). Taxpayers unknowingly rented two pornographic movies for the husband of another Cabinet minister. A Tory spokesman on “skills and education” hired an electrician to change his light bulbs. (Cost to the taxpayer? About $225.)
The worst claims bordered on the fraudulent — and some stepped over that border. One MP claimed mortgage-interest payments of about $17,000 on a house that had no mortgage. Another took $55,000 in expenses on a necessary “second home” near Parliament, when his primary home was only a few hundred yards away.
Many MPs “flipped” — i.e., changed their homes from primary to secondary in order to receive second-home allowances. One MP flipped three times and got more than $150,000 of public money.
…Prime Minister Gordon Brown claimed $8,000 to pay for his brother to clean his London apartment. My favorite example, though, is the case of Sinn Fein MPs from Northern Ireland who claimed about $750,000 in expenses to attend a Parliament that they refuse to attend on principle.
Yes, when I champion the Republican party, obviously I mean the conservatives within the Republican party. (See my blogroll, and notify me if any changes are needed. I would also link to true conservatives in other countries!).
I think we need to remember that the NRSC has an abysmal record at picking and backing the right candidates. Not only did they opposed Pat Toomey when he ran against that squish Arlen Specter, (now a Democrat), but now they are backing Crist against a Cuban-American.
Excuse me? Without a conservative message, we cannot win.
The NRSC has once again decided to stick it to us Conservatives in an extremely rare move; they immediately came out and endorsed Gov. Crist over Conservative Marco Rubio. Even appearing to go so far as to try and get Rubio to drop out. Of course, obviously, we should never support the NRSC I was hopeful that when Sen. Cornyn, a Texan, took over he would recruit Conservatives.
Instead he has made it apparent he will only recruit and support RINO’s. He supported Specter before his defection, he encouraged Ridge to run, and now he is taking sides in an open primary to support Crist. What good does it do us if we elect Senators who agree with the Democrats the majority of the time. It is just repeating the mistakes of the Bush years. Senator Cornyn should step down.
And what should we do?
Until the establishment wants to support Conservatives they should receive no support from the base. I am actually quite excited about this development though. They are not hiding the fact that they plan on blowing us Conservatives off. If we get behind good Conservative candidates like Rubio and Toomey. The grassroots could be responsible for electing Conservative candidates and putting the Party establishment on notice. They believe Crist will raise more money than Rubio; let’s prove them wrong.
This is exactly the kind of candidate the NRSC should be backing! My previous post on Rubio and Toomey’s candidacy announcements is here, and there are more videos in that post!
RUBIO: Two things. There’s one group of Republicans who feel our slogan should be, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” That, in essence, it’s too hard to take on this expansion of government, this overreliance on government to grow our economy and create jobs. And so what we should do is just be more like the Democrats. Another group of Republicans believes that we should basically be the party of opposition without any ideas in return — that all we have to offer is ideology, but without any new ideas behind the ideology.
I think both sides of that debate are wrong. We are a party that should have a very clear vision about government’s role in our economy and government’s role in our country, and we should back that up with specific solutions for the future. That’s what I’ve built my career on, and that’s what our candidacy should be about.
And here’s my favorite, oh, how I wish that the economic-illiterates could understand this:
FREDDOSO: What do you make of President Obama’s plans to change the taxation of deferred corporate income?
RUBIO: He’s dealing with a symptom rather than the cause. There’s a reason why companies move their assets overseas and do these things. Those are legal loopholes that exist because they’re trying to escape the punitive and anti-competitive nature of the American tax system. If we had a system that’s fair, there are few countries in the world people would rather do business in. . . . Our laws are stable; their contracts will be enforced here; we have a system of infrastructure that’s still superior to the rest of the world; we still produce the best college graduates in the world. So all things being equal, everyone would rather be in America doing business and headquartering their companies here.
And there’s another thing that’s really wrong with our tax system, and we’ve been complicit in it as Republicans. We’ve allowed the system grow so complicated that it benefits those people who can afford to hire lawyers and accountants to find loopholes, and lobbyists to create loopholes. And I think the Republican party stands to blame for that as well. So I think the Republican party is ripe for reform — if not from the inside out, then from the outside in.
You want to shut down manufacturing and ship jobs overseas? Elect a democrat who will raise corporate taxes, regulate companies with mandatory health-care and impose cap and trade. Mark my words: unemployment will be 12% by December, if cap and trade passes. And rising!
WINTERY KNIGHT 