McGuinty to Harper: Tag You're It!

Wouldn't wanna be a retired auto worker today!

Premier Dalton McGuinty's admission yesterday that "Ontario's pension plan safety net isn't large enough to cover auto workers if GM goes bankrupt" signals a new round of TAG YOU'RE IT in Canadian politics.

And in this case, PM Stephen Harper is the 'it'.

Effectively, McGuinty gave notice to the federal Tory's yesterday that Ontario "is moving to limit the amount of money it would have to pay in a pension bailout." Ergo, come what will for Canada's auto sector (hell, high-water, or bankruptcy) the ball is now in Ottawa's court. In case there was ever any doubt, McGuinty made it clear that it is Harper's government that is going to have take ownership of the mammoth catastrophe that may await the ten of thousands of auto retirees who depend on their pensions to survive.

Of course, Ontario "is partly responsible for the pension crisis at GM Canada because of 1992 legislation that enabled the company to underfund its own plans." It was a change that all but guaranteed that if GM were ever to fail, her long serving employees and generations of pensioners were bound to find themselves where every worker man and working woman finds themselves at the end of the day amidst an economic collapse - Shit-out-of-Luck. While McGuinty did admit Ontario had "a political and moral responsibility to pensioners"; he also confessed that, really, the province has no capacity to meet the needs of those "experiencing troubles with their pension plans". According to the Report on Business, the problem is that Ontario's Pension Benefits Guarantee Fund, mismanaged for decades, is running a deficit. Though to be fair, even had the fund been administered properly, it was never designed to meet the demands created by a wholesale collapse of the auto sector. Simply put, if GM goes bankrupt, there is no way Ontario will be able to step into the breech to fix a "total pension shortfall may exceed $6-billion".

"Tag" Harper - you're it!

No worries though, Harper's federal Industry Minister Tony Clement is doing his best to help prepare pensioners for their possible fate by "offering words of warning" that they "need to be prepared for possible bankruptcy filings in the auto sector." But tell us Tony, how do 70 and 80 year old auto retirees "prepare" themselves for the disappearance of their pensions? What do you recommend? Do they take to the pavement in search of work with their walkers, wheelchairs and oxygen tanks?

As one retiree shouted at Finance Minister Jim Flaherty yesterday in Oshawa: "Your government asked me to take a haircut as a retiree, ... I took the haircut, but, dammit, I'm not going to let you scalp me on my pension, too." Frustrated by the retirees questions, Dim-Jim Flaherty responded to their concerns with this observation nugget; "Listen, this is a very serious time! ... All of these issues being raised about jobs, about pensions, ... these are very major questions that are being discussed right now in a serious way."

"Serious"? No kidding. Again Harper - "Tag you're it!"

Harper goes Potty at G-20

Canadian Prime-Minister Stephen Harper craps out a lot. But if the BBC is right, he's going to have to get himself a pair of depends. After all, missing the official photo at the G-20 because you're on the potty is just bad optics. What is he? In kindergarten?

Not the kind of PR we need right now.

It might even give some credence to assertions that he flushing our country's future down the toilet!

Take 2: G20 group photo snapped again after Harper's absence

CBC: Thursday, April 2, 2009 | 9:24 AM ET

The traditional photo of the G20 leaders was reshot after Prime Minister Stephen Harper missed his opportunity Thursday to be in the first snap.

Harper met with his officials following the first working session in London on Thursday morning when the picture — dubbed the family photo — was scheduled to be taken.

Officials said the prime minister was getting a quick briefing on changes to the communiqué that is expected to be released by the G20 at the end of the summit.

The BBC, however, is reporting that Harper was in the bathroom while the photo was being taken.

The other leaders initially waited for Harper but then went ahead with the photo without him.

Harper was scheduled to stand in the right flank of the group next to German Chancellor Angela Merkel for the original photo.

A second attempt to gather the leaders for the photograph was made about an hour later with Harper there.

Some of the other leaders ribbed Harper as they gathered for the second take, reportedly calling out, "Harper, Harper, is Harper here? Harper, this one's for you."

ENOUGH!

Gotta give the Globe & Mail's uneven opinion maker, Jeff Simpson, his due. Today he is on to something. We can only "hope", he says, that our economic "Canadian plutocracy" (you know, the one "removed from the preoccupations of ordinary people") will see the "justified humbling of Wall Street and its shameful greed" as a reason to pause and reconsider its modus operandi. After all, its repeated justification for "large salaries, bonuses, stock options and the like" to keep Canada's homegrown talent from leaving for the US may no longer carry any weight. Maybe we should just let them go?

Need proof? See this story in the very same paper.

"Lawyers for Nortel Networks Corp. [NT-T] are to appear in court on Friday to ask for approval of a controversial $23-million (U.S.) bonus plan for its top executives that the company says is needed to boost falling morale at the company..... The bonus plan for executives would reward them for achieving cost reduction goals and tightening the organization's focus, based on their annual base salaries."

Executive Rewards? Hmmm? If you go to Pink Sheets to see a real time stock quote on just how well these executives have been performing their duties you will be greeted with this banner warning.

Bonus indeed! Reward for what? Driving the shareholders stock value to the 0.78 pennies mark?

The rampant hypocrisy that seems to govern the mindset of North America's economic elite should not be allowed to stand. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann nailed it last night: "ENOUGH!"

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Socialism Now? Hardly.

"Obama wants to establish a very powerful socialist, authoritarian government... what Obama is doing is cruel. What the Democrat Party has done is cruel, cruelty in the guise of compassion." -Rush Limbaugh

Contrary to what sweaty, verbose, twisted, bombastic Neo-con windbags such as Rush Limbaugh sputter - "socialism" in America is dead. The bogeyman Limbaugh and company keep trying to inflate to frighten Joe & Jane America is an illusion of Potemkin proportions. Only true idiot villagers see it as a "threat." In fact, the only air in the sails of "socialism" today actually comes from the gaseous emissions the far-right is constantly trying to blow up its long dead ass. And no matter how hard they try to resurrect "Socialism" as a whipping-boy of convenience, it will not float.

Long ago, during the nadir of the Great Depression, America's socialists traded their dogma in for the pragmatic promise of progress. At the periphery of the political process ever since, today's socialists pose no threat to American capitalism: capitalists do. As the Washington Post's Harold Meyerson has aptly observed, US socialists were lured by FDR into trading in their fundamental guiding principles for a chance at partaking in the promise of the New Deal. According to Meyerson, the shift conformed perfectly to the theories of German socialist Eduard Bernstien "who argued that the immediate struggle to humanize capitalism through the instruments of democratic government was everything, and that the goal of supplanting capitalism altogether was meaningless".

Meyerson pegs the US Socialist Party's 1936 decision to endorse FDR's New Deal as the moment when American Socialism abandoned its core beliefs. Since then, in the perverse dance known as US politics, socialists have become little more than the acne riddled policy geeks who can't get the elitist Belle of the Ball to dance with them. Out of tune and out of step with the electorate, they operate solely on the political fringe. The GOP's fear mongering notwithstanding: Today's US Democrats are to socialism, as George W. Bush was to deep thought: both unfamiliar and unacquainted.

In Canada, our 'socialists' long ago found themselves morphing into watered down 'new democrats'. Content to rest on their ancestral laurels and the myths associated with the fight for Medicare; today's NDP is lost. More interested in high profile shenanigans than in presenting voters with a truly alternative political vision; the NDP vainly continues to try and make deals with a status-quo devil their ideological forefathers would have rejected out-of-hand. Opportunists in the true Bernstien-ian sense, Canada's NDP Party perfectly exemplifies Meyerson's point - in North America, socialism is dead.

Socialism is sooo yesterday because its proponents are afraid to speak plainly and take the steps necessary to advocate for the ideology's true principles: nationalization of major industries; and the abolition of the usury speculative fiscal marketplace that props up an economic elite that preys on the poor. In Canada, this has led to the NDP becoming a weirdly-wired and sadly predictable political party destined to remain inconsequential to the debate over true reform. Here, as in the US, voices in support of true socialist ideals are rare, muted and marginalized. Fated to remain largely absent from the coming debate over how we restructure capitalism in the wake of the present crisis. That is a pity.

Better Canada's NDP admit now that they will never win federal power. Better, instead, that it commit itself to a radical new take-no-prisoners political action plan. One designed to exert as much pressure as possible on the sitting government to bring forth real and meaningful social and economic reform. One that pushes the boundaries of acceptable political discourse in this country. One that fervently lobbies for the kind of economic reforms needed to protect us from the very same political status-quo the NDP are constantly trying to appease. Otherwise, nothing will change. Usury capitalism will secure new concessions from the state that see it re-emerge unrepentant and unbowed; and at the end of the day... still in control.