BEEN THERE - DONE THAT

The arrogance of youth is far outmatched by the arrogance of age. Youth believe that anything that happened before 1995 is irrelevant. Age believes that everything that ever happened is relevant. The argument rages.

Like others of my age I remember fifty, sixty, even seventy years ago. I don't have to go to the archives or dust off old newspapers - I was there. So - while I continue to stress "Looking Ahead," I will respond with the wisdom of the elderly - the ones who were there, the people who were, as they say, "on the ground" when it all happened.

Today I watched Charlie Rose on PBS talking to some economist about the present economic crisis. It was all about how much money would be needed to bail out mortgage defaulters, banks, car companies, and sundry other victims of their own foolishness.

I also read, and it is daily reading, about the huge deficits that are coming, while at the same time commenting that the patience of the countries who lend us money, is wearing thin. How long, ask the pundits, will China continue to subsidize American extravagance? My comment: it is in the interests of their own survival that they keep the money taps open.

Now for the arrogant part as I dip back into my historical memories. I was around for the Marshall Plan, a massive infusion of money from the U.S. to rebuild a shattered Europe - mostly Germany.

The reason, we were told, was that having learned the lessons that followed the Great War, we should not allow an impoverished, beaten Germany to plan revenge, but that we should rebuild.

It all sounded very altruistic, but we who understood knew that it was not. The Soviet Union represented the threat. And ironically, just as we did with Hitler's Germany, we needed a bulwark against Soviet aggression, which had already occupied everything up to a dividing line in Germany.

Now, for the scholarly among you, the real reason. Yes, there was merit in rebuilding Germany, but let us not forget that the money from the Marshall Plan had strings attached: it was to be spent in America. (There is another irony here. The country that was economically shattered by the war - England - got little help from generous America.)

If all that sounds familiar you are right. The Chinese can not afford to become impatient with American prodigality and wild consumerism. They lend America money (most countries on the Pacific Rim lend money by buying U.S. Treasuries) to keep the American economy afloat. The world';s greatest consumers are the biggest customers for the products that are churned out by Cbinese (and other Asian) factories.

So all the sanctimonious preaching about how Anericans (and to some extent Canadians) will have to curb their out-of-control spending because the lenders like China will lose their patience, remember the Marshall Plan. You take our money You spend our money back where it came from.

Unfortunately, if you are under 50 you won;t remember the events. You weren't there.

Now can we please cut out the nonsense and get on with the business of rebuilding our economy.

LIFE'S TOO SHORT

Perhaps I've just been around too long. Perhaps the fact that my patience has worn thin is a function of age. Possibly my growing cynicism about public opinion is part of a kind of mental decay. Perhaps I was always this way - cranky and critical.

I realize that I am totally sated with certain social/[political cliches. Tops on my list is the proclamation currently in vogue: belt-tightening. Politicians trying to woo support from a disenchanted public proclaim that there will be this tightening of our collective belts. Sounds great, Sounds really attractive to mindless voters who believe that all governments and all politicians are nothing but vermin who feed off their (the public's) hard-earned money. "Belt-tightening" is supposed to mean that there will no longer be lavish spending on things like the Arts or Welfare, of Education. Why, in belt-tightening times are these almost always the first things to go.

The whole evocation of "belt-tightening" has a ring of sincerity to it. It says: "We're really trying to put the pressure on the lavish spenders." It's B.S. and they know it.

You and I, and perhaps one other person, realize that belt-tightening always falls on the most vulnerable, the ones who are on the verge of unemployment, the chronic poverty that affects one in five of our children, the single mothers - etc...etc...

People of means, the rich and the near rich simply hunker down in their big homes or condos and postpone for a year a trade-in to the newest Mercedes. Belt-tightening does not impact too severely on their cruise ship holidays or their visits to their condos in sunnier places. Yet they are the first to deplore the "waste" of their hard-earned dollars at a time when the financial world seems to be tanking.

Chief among the political architects is our own Finance Minister, who champions the whole hunkering down principle and vows not to spend money on anything - thus guaranteeing him a place in the Pantheon of miserly creatures who speak only for the affluent.

And you thought you were feeling rotten before you started reading this.

I guess what troubles me most is how so many people swallow the guff that comes from above. The people of the Oshawa-Whitby-Bowmnanville area are looking doom squarely in the face as the major area employer cuts back and eliminates production of new cars and trucks. They are holding their collective breath waiting for some pronouncement from Ottawa that may save some of their jobs. They watch the American Senate and House both insisting that the Big Three spend whatever money they may get right at home in America. They are sweating. But, and this was my point: they voted for that same Jim Flaherty who sneers at them while making sanctimonious prono8uncements about weathering hard times.

So we have to blame the people who gave us the government we all deserve.

They are the same people who fall for guff like "soft on crime." They are same nitwits who actually believe that tougher sentences "send a message." Send a message - to whom???

The same guys who sent Parliament home are responsible for stoking that fire. Ironically, when a national crisis is hanging over us, the Prime Minister usually recalls Parliament for an emergency session. This guy - the :tough on crime" guy - sends them home!

Maybe i am getting too old and my patience is gone. But it seems top me that even when I was a whole lot younger I insisted, often to people who didn't, wouldn't and couldn't listen - that tougher sentences deter no one and that extreme cases make bad laws.

And that ":belt-tightening" is just another way of saying: less money for those who need it.

THE COALITION

I find the entire issue quite astonishing - that it is an issue that is.
What I find distressing is when the TV news decides to do a "streeter," asking people on the street what they think.

If you know anything about TV news you know that one of the worst jobs is to have the assignment editor send you out to do streeters. First of all, most of the people you stop on the street breeze by refusing to talk, often without even saying a word. So you have to pursue each one diligently. What you get, aside from an occasional "pearl" of wisdom, is pure rubbish. The people responding know little, if anything, about how a coalition works in the parliamentary system. They, the people in the street, have opinions backed by little information. The worst ones are the naysayers who can't wait to let us all know what crooks, cheats, opportunists, liars, and scalawags politicians are. (Try running for office and see how much fun it is to be a "crook.")

I am dismayed by the complete lack of cool from our Prime Minister. His hold on Quebec is tenuous at best, having wrecked his big chance to form a majority by angering Quebec, and one spokesman in particular, with his planned cuts to culture and the arts. It may have been enough to cost him the seats in Quebec that could have given him a majority.

Now, not content with having alienated the province, he is attacking Duceppe and the Bloc. Most Quebecois do not, at this reading, want to separate. The Bloc knows that. But Quebecers are a proud people and they will not take kindly to Harper's swings at one of theirs - even though they may not have voted for the Bloc. That Mr. Harper, is called shooting yourself in the foot.

If Parliament expresses its dissatisfaction with the job the government is doing, and can get enough votes for no confidence, the government falls.

The idle tongues that proclaim: "The Conservatives won the election" have no idea what winning is all about. They had no clear majority. It saddens me that so many people do not understand how this works. It saddens me even more when I bear a well meaning s=high school kids say to the TV camera: "Majority rules. That's what democracy is all about." When she is old enough she may read John Stewart Mill and his ideas about what he called the "tyranny of the majority." The majority has the right to govern unless they throw it away,

As for coalitions - doesn't anyone remember when after the Harris Government was put out the Conservatives under Frank Miller actually won the election. But Frank Miller did not get to be Premier. David Peterson and Bob Rae formed a coalition government.

You are entitled to an opinion - but only if you get the facts straight. Otherwise, who cares what you think?