… governments, that is. The news today is a certain band of minority neoliberal thugs, in a move that should surprise no-one who knows said mob’s capacity for this kind of ideologically-motivated BS, are playing the standard crap such parties always do: trying to use a crisis to hack big pieces out of their political enemies, instead of actually, y’know, trying to do anything substantitive about the oncoming economic mess.
More precisely: they’re trying to take away the federal public service’s right to strike (right… people are gonna strike now, chuckleheads), and, icing on the cake, kill some $27 million that normally goes to registered political parties on a per-vote basis…
As you may be able to work out, or may already know, that’s about $1.90 a vote, and I’d rather expect most folk between these shining seas aren’t too upset to think some $1.90 of their money might go to the party they themselves voted for… It’s not uncommon in democracies, and a nice side effect is that smaller parties not really up to large-scale fundraising get a better shot than they might otherwise, if they can just convince people to vote for them… But this hasn’t stopped the usual neanderthal shock jock types from calling it ‘political welfare’…
I’d call it more larceny to take it away, really. Seeing as most politically educated voters know perfectly well their vote gives that small chunk of their money to their party of choice—and these are voters and parties that already got screwed out of appropriate representation by vote splitting giving the advantage to the thugs currently (nominally, and for now) in power.
More fun ‘n games. The $27 million it is, of course, somewhere a little over 1/100th of one percent of the $200 billion federal budget, and they’re trying to call this sensible and necessary austerity. There’s a fiscal crisis, y’know… So hey, when you’ve got an uneducated, rabid base who can be turned on a dime to carp about anything you can plausibly call ‘welfare’, why would you put real work into addressing that incoming crisis when you can just dick around with that chump change—the very chump change that will hamstring your now very divided and disorganized opposition, who are, yes, currently very much relying on that subsidy to pay back their costs from the last election they just went through (oh… yeah… also one they wound up fighting at Harper’s initiative). Essentially, the Harper ideologues are saying: yes, you had to fight this on our timetable, and people voted for you—more for you than for us, actually—but we’re gonna try to burn you and them for that subsidy, anyway, see if we can’t bankrupt our opposition…
Anyway: the fun part. That previously very divided opposition is now looking a bit less divided, all of a sudden, and talking coalition.
This would amuse me, it would, if the buggers who only got in on vote splitting on the left suddenly lost it when they tried a stunt like this and managed, with such petty politicking in the face of a crisis, to get those votes put back together.
Let’s hope.
More precisely: they’re trying to take away the federal public service’s right to strike (right… people are gonna strike now, chuckleheads), and, icing on the cake, kill some $27 million that normally goes to registered political parties on a per-vote basis…
As you may be able to work out, or may already know, that’s about $1.90 a vote, and I’d rather expect most folk between these shining seas aren’t too upset to think some $1.90 of their money might go to the party they themselves voted for… It’s not uncommon in democracies, and a nice side effect is that smaller parties not really up to large-scale fundraising get a better shot than they might otherwise, if they can just convince people to vote for them… But this hasn’t stopped the usual neanderthal shock jock types from calling it ‘political welfare’…
I’d call it more larceny to take it away, really. Seeing as most politically educated voters know perfectly well their vote gives that small chunk of their money to their party of choice—and these are voters and parties that already got screwed out of appropriate representation by vote splitting giving the advantage to the thugs currently (nominally, and for now) in power.
More fun ‘n games. The $27 million it is, of course, somewhere a little over 1/100th of one percent of the $200 billion federal budget, and they’re trying to call this sensible and necessary austerity. There’s a fiscal crisis, y’know… So hey, when you’ve got an uneducated, rabid base who can be turned on a dime to carp about anything you can plausibly call ‘welfare’, why would you put real work into addressing that incoming crisis when you can just dick around with that chump change—the very chump change that will hamstring your now very divided and disorganized opposition, who are, yes, currently very much relying on that subsidy to pay back their costs from the last election they just went through (oh… yeah… also one they wound up fighting at Harper’s initiative). Essentially, the Harper ideologues are saying: yes, you had to fight this on our timetable, and people voted for you—more for you than for us, actually—but we’re gonna try to burn you and them for that subsidy, anyway, see if we can’t bankrupt our opposition…
Anyway: the fun part. That previously very divided opposition is now looking a bit less divided, all of a sudden, and talking coalition.
This would amuse me, it would, if the buggers who only got in on vote splitting on the left suddenly lost it when they tried a stunt like this and managed, with such petty politicking in the face of a crisis, to get those votes put back together.
Let’s hope.
