Saturday, January 31, 2009

The Recession and the Frozen Body











As I watched this little tug trying to tow a ferry across the frozen lake, only to give up and turn back, I couldn't help but think of Stephen Harper's useless budget.

And wonder why anyone could think that it's going to pull us out of a recession.Or prepare us for the horror that lies ahead.

Or why anyone is surprised that the Americans are becoming protectionists.

When their economy is imploding, millions are suffering, and entire communities are dying.....like the once great city of Detroit.

Where they dug this poor guy out of the ice the other day...













Finally.

There are at least 19,000 homeless people in Detroit, by some estimates. Put another way, more than 1 in 50 people here are homeless.

The human problem is so bad, and the beds so few, that some shelters in the city provide only a chair. The chair is yours as long as you sit in it. Once you leave, the chair is reassigned.

Thousands of down-on-their-luck adults do nothing more with their day than clutch onto a chair. This passes for normal in some quarters of the city.

It's so bad in Motown that some people are predicting that it could become the first ruin of the American Empire.

Meanwhile across the river in Canada we're preparing to go into a brutal recession with a sham of a stimulus budget, and an Employment Insurance system that covers less than half of unemployed Canadians.

And our idiot leaders are in a state of denial.

Neither the governing Conservatives nor the opposition Liberals seem to understand the seriousness of this crisis. Rhetoric notwithstanding, both parties appear to think they are dealing with a problem that will go away in two years and allow the world to return to business as usual.

What is Stephen Harper doing? What are the Liberals thinking by supporting a budget like that one without demanding major changes? Can't they even IMAGINE how bad it could get?

It's time to stop putting cheap politics before the real lives of suffering Canadians.

Because time is running out. The Big Chill is almost here.

And we're going nowhere...

4 comments:

Beijing York said...

Simon, that photo is brutal. Sums up what we are headed for in stark terms.

You should send it to Ignatieff the "humanist". Oh wait, he didn't even wince at the photos of carnage in Gaza.

Oemissions said...

Other things you could send to Ignatieff: old shoes, boxes of kraft dinner he can have handy for the unemployed, and some poop (in a biodegradable bag, ofcourse.)

Anonymous said...

So, Montreal Simon, what is it you think should be in the budget that isn't there?

Anonymous said...

This is my first visit here, but I will be back soon, because I really like the way you are writing, it is so simple and honest