THE NIGHTWATCHMAN WHO FELL ASLEEP ON THE JOB

"The economy we're evolving into will be un-global, necessarily local and regional, and austere. It won't support even our current population. This being the case, the political fallout is also liable to be severe. For one thing, we'll have to put aside our sentimental fantasies about immigration."

James Kunstler , futurist, author of “The Long Emergency”

Did that sink in, Mr. Olivia Chow (Jack Layton), Elizabeth May, Sierra Club, Suzuki Foundation, and assorted soft green dupes of the corporate cheap labour agenda? Renewables won’t fuel your growth economy nor support your never ending shopping list of social services. There will be no “global” market place to compete with to justify your madness. And no fantasy technologies to recover the ecological damage that your immigrant-driven population growth policies have inflicted on our landscape. Suzuki said that politicians who denied AGW climate change should be jailed. Sounds like a good prescription for the population deniers. Maybe when this is done, and the system crashes, there will be a Nuremburg Trial for those who shoved 5 million consumers down the throat of Canada’s environment since 1990----the number of immigrants that we have suffered since the mass immigration binge began. The first to be executed will not be the politicians but the leaders of the environmental movement, who should have been our watchdogs, but instead were the silent partners to the wildlife holocaust and loss of farmland that consequently took place. They are the Marshall Petains of the occupation we have endured, the Green Collaborators who have tried to pacify us with slogans like “smart growth”, “green living” and “renewable technologies”---as if we could live with infinite increases in our total consumption by reducing our per capita consumption, by being good “Green Citizens” and being clever in steering growth in the “right” direction.

We hired them as night watchmen to take care of business but when morning broke we found that our business had been robbed---all along they have been asleep on the job. Their resume of boy scout community work, of do-good and feel-good environmentalism made a good impression in the job interview but failed the litmus test of actually protecting the environment when it needed protecting the most. Like a rotten sundeck railing it offered us false assurance of safety from disaster, but when tested by the forces of growth we have all gone over the edge. It would have better had we saved our donations and our illusions and been without a railing altogether. Then perhaps we might have fended for ourselves and directed our resources into authentic institutions that would resist madness.

When history is written it will read that the environmental NGOs together with their talking heads---the Greens, the socialists, the social democrats, the progressives and the liberals---not only did nothing to prepare us for the Long Emergency---but they actually made us even more unprepared for it. The superstructure of social services that they insist on building up when the status quo cannot even be sustained is all funded by revenues from a fossil fuel economy. But instead of weaning us away from dependence on the state, in their bidding war for the feminist, immigrant and progressive constituency they promise more child benefits, more daycare spaces, broader medical coverage for unproven New Age medicine, free college tuitions, and more and more regulations that can only be enforced by a growing and expensive bureaucracy. All of this of course, is never paid for by “the people”, by some shadowy abstraction called the “big corporations” with whom “the people”, and their unions, have shares in, and which can take flight at the click of a mouse when taxes get uncompetitive. They believe in limiting the behaviour of corporations but not limiting the appetite of unsustainable government. As things take a steep downward spiral the tax grab will get frantic, but in trying to get blood out of a stone they will only succeed in chasing away what remains of their diminishing tax base. Read Gibbon’s treatise on the decline of the Roman Empire and follow the course of Diocletian’s reign. Same scenario.

The companion policy to tax and spend is more growth. That too is the trade mark of social democratic-progressive administrations. They can’t deliver their basket of social welfare goodies with income redistribution because of capital flight so they become growthists. But to salve their conscience they attach with great fanfare a “Green Agenda” to the program. A “cake and eat it” platform. Every NDP leader in Canada has espoused the same line. Jack Layton repeated what NDP Premier Lorne Calvert had once said. That the only thing that was wrong with growth was that its “benefits” were not evenly shared. Green Party leader Elizabeth May meanwhile recently joined the attack on the Harper government for not countering the recession that the country was falling into following the financial meltdown in the fall. Economic growth was called for---this from a leader who once mouthed the old slogan that “growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

We are on a ship of fools with a corporate captain. But his “challengers” would have taken us on the same course to disaster.

Tim Murray
December 16/08

Note of explanation: I woke up suddenly at 4:30 am and went straight to the computer to write this rant. The quote by Kunstler was like a time bomb dropped into my subconscious the day before like one of those bombs the Germans dropped over London that would burrow deep below the basement of buildings and explode unexpectantly years afterward. It is a regurgitation of cumulative thoughts over the past two years but the Kunstler quote was the trigger. To have someone of his eminence step forward and validate my thinking was all I needed. Some wonder why I don't direct my rage at Exxon or the logging companies. For the same reason I am more angry at the nightwatchman who fell asleep than the burglars who robbed me. Burglars are burglars. Robbing is what they do. I know they are criminals. My enemies I can deal with. It is my so-called "friends", the ones hired by donations to protect me, but betray me by falling asleep on the job, or even worse, by misleading me, who deserve my rage. They are the ones at my back who need to be taken care of first before I deal frontally with the enemy.