Harper to join Socialist Plot

Now that Stephen has someone to follow, he's ready to join what he used to refer to as the socialist plot of environmentalism, who needs ethics.

The Ostrich Effect

According to Niall Ferguson, an alleged financial guru from Harvard, there is the potential for a great darkness to cover the earth because most policy heads are in the sand, doing everything they can to pretend that everything is alright, when things so clearly aren't. He also believes strongly that "The lesson of the subprime crisis is that you shouldn't give mortgages to people who can't afford them. Duh …"
As someone who has spent most of my life paying other people's mortgages through rent, I take issue with the notion that the expansion of home ownership to those who allegedly can't afford to pay for their homes is the rootball of this crisis. If someone goes from being a renter, to being a mortgage payer, where is the imbalance of ability to pay ? We are paying the mortgages of the better off, month by month, year by year, increasing the value of the asset to the owner by paying off the owner's mortgage, and when we are done paying off the mortgage, the owner has profit and we have nothing. If there wasn't a need for a massive downpayment, and thus a need for loans in the first place, there would have been no subprime crisis. In a market economy, the owner wins and the renter loses because someone has to lose money for someone else to make it, an imbalance that is further degenerated in a corporate market economy, because the corporation is not only not required to act ethically, but they are expressly designed to profit from their lack of ethics. Corporate economics take an already flawed market system, and intensifies the flaws.
Granted, many new home owners get caught up in corporate media spun delusions about keeping up with consumptive ownership of stuff and more stuff to stuff into their homes, but the simple creating of owners out of renters is not the problem. Duh.
Perhaps a strike by hundreds of thousands or even millions of renters would make it abundantly clear whose money is being used for what profit purposes.

Beyond the Wealth of Nations and Back Again

Beyond Adam Smith came the creation of business charters governing the relation of capital to industry, in the late 19th century, governments created corporate crown charters and thus created corporate capitalism. It was designed from the beginning to be an economy run by legal entities that intentionally lacked 'a conscience to bind them' to statements such as citizens make in court affadavits. Capitalists, having divorced themselves from conscience through charter jurisprudence, were then obligated by government to make a profit above all other considerations. The creation of corporate capitalism led to development of the manageriat: management acted on behalf of shareholders following the directions of the board. The manageriat is not required to act out of conscience, only in pursuit of 'legal' profit. Technically corporate capitalism is not imperialist because an empire requires an actual emperor, or empress, and the manageriat is more Dilbert than Queen Victora. Corporate capitalism was not created to develop the wealth of empires or the wealth the nations, merely the wealth of shareholders, most of who nowadays don't even own voting shares. Corporate citizenship belongs to those who hold voting stock, they are the voters who elect those who govern our markets. Economy is never economy alone because markets are not all there is, therefor corporatism is not all there is in the real politik of power. Here in Canada, ever since the creation of the Charter of Rights snd Freedoms, The people who govern the political economy are us. We constitutionally wear the crown in common these days. We have the right and the freedom to remove corporate capitalism and its conscienceless pursuit of profit). To move beyond the post-Adam Smith globalizing corporate economy we Charter challenge the right of a conscienceless entity to be in court with a citizen, we challenge the existence of their charters, we prove in court that they have no right to be in court with us, and that they have no place in an ethical society.
Corporatism is the rationale for pillaging the wealth of nations by those who own charters which allow them to make money without necessity of conscience: it's Post Adam Smith capitalism.
We must come back from beyond the Wealth of Nations, we must uncharter global corporate capitalism, we must free enterprise from the consequence of the damages caused by businesses that act without conscience, domestically and internationally. We must restore ethics to business: the charter of citizenry must be more important than the charters of shareholders.The pursuit of commonwealth is more important than the wealth of corporatists. Doing so would lead to the the death of free enterprise., but its birth: free enterprise is not corporatist, it's rooted in ingenuity and personal responsibility. To come back from Beyond the Wealth of Nations would always to free enterprise for the first time.

McGuinty's Space

Normally I have a queasy easiness about Dalton, he doesn't impress me, but he doesn't depress me either, politically speaking, he's something of a Larry Grossman PC to me.
Fair enough, reasonably self-possessed, and occasionally quite effective, willing to surround himself with intelligent ministers who he then let's do what they have discussed doing with the public and cabinet and legislature, causing considerably less harm than did Mike Harris's Cromwellian cohort, Dalton is no better a Premier than Rae but then I like Rae. As for McGuinty's request that journalists stay out of what is essentially his intimate space, I think reporters should no more be stuffing a mic or a camera in the eyes of a store clerk who makes the news than they should be getting in the face of a Premier. "Scrum" is a metaphor, not an excuse for violating anything more than the distanced edge of personal space. Five feet seems sensible to me.

Flaherty sings from anti-populist hymn book

Alberta Reformatories and Ontario Lack of Common Sense Reactionaries refute their own populist origins and sing like Ernest Manning from the Big Business Liturgy I say buy and sell bio-regionally, save yourself, your neighbours and the environment, but think globally: cooperate with others to create the most stable and most dynamic international commonwealth possible.

Bob Rae's Last Laugh

How sweet it must feel.