THE RECORD
February 20, 2002

Fiat Lux

by Ed Deak

If there was the slightest doubt in my mind that our esteemed Premier is a mindless puppet on a string, it has been permanently set aside when I watched his TV performance last Wednesday.

It has been obvious for a long time to people with communications experience that the platform and propaganda machine of the BC Liberal Party is being planned and executed by some of the best mind benders in the business. These are the people who work out the advertising schemes to sell the unwary public anything from soap to political ideologies without any pangs of conscience or thought of the damage they may cause, as long as the money is pouring into their pockets.

We find these people all through history. They sold the Holy Inquisition and the colonizations by the Europeans to the faithful as the Will of God. They made the excuses for all the wars and the murder campaigns of the Nazis and the communists. And, they are now pushing the neo-liberal agenda of big business as the road to prosperity, an agenda which is starving some 40,000 children to death around the world every day.

What did Mr. Campbell really say in those thirty minutes of theatrical performance? Exactly nothing that may have helped his lost cause to regain public confidence. If anything, he made people more mad than before. The whole exercise was a waste of his employers' money and of the public's time. The only winners were the TV stations that broadcasted the whole nonsense without commercials and raked in the big bucks for their untiring support of the BC Liberal Party.

It is bad enough to have our TV programs broken up by repetitious commercials every few minutes, but to watch and listen to a whole half hour of a boring commercial without some comic relief is more than anybody should be forced to endure.

First of all, what happened to six billion bucks in eight months? Gordie never mentioned it, but the truth will come out one day. He claimed that some expert commission discovered that instead of having a balanced budget and $1.5 billion left in the kitty, he inherited a $4.4 billion shortfall from the dastardly NDP.

So, who were the members of this, what BCTV called "gilt edged", commission? Were they accounting professionals under oath to uphold the law and impartiality? Or were they the usual group of big business executives who have been paying into the Party coffers for years and may even have supplied the mind benders for the propaganda campaign?

The day after Gordie's song and dance routine BC's Auditor General, who is indeed a sworn and impartial professional, who has used some very hard words for past NDP mistakes, came out with his own report that shows that there was indeed $1.5 billion in the kitty when the Campbell gang took over. Further, that far from having been at the rock bottom among Canadian provinces in economic performance, BC was at the second place, behind oil rich Alberta. As the AG pointed it out: "Another widely used indicator of government financial performance is its credit rating. BC has kept its high standing in the international financial market, although its ranking among the provinces has dropped to second, after Alberta." These facts can be found at the Auditor General's website at: http://bcauditor.com/AuditorGeneral.htm

Now, the Liberals have made and are still making a lot of noise about the NDP's so called fudgit budget, also mentioned by Gordie, in spite of the fact that it was ruled a false charge by the Courts. When he claims that the previous budget was not balanced and there was a $4. billion shortfall, then the Auditor General proves that the claim is false, isn't he the perpetrator of a really fudgit budget? If I win the $5 million on the 6-49 this weekend, my first act will be to take Gordie and his gang of vultures to Court over this. Lucky for them that it is very unlikely to happen, but we can dream.

I have been lied to by experts in my political experience under various regimes, but I can say without a doubt that the lies of this pathetic bunch take the cake over all the others. They must think that because most of BC has voted for these two branches of the Alliance, there are no people left who can still think. On the other hand was Campbell really lying? Is he a compulsive liar, or a moron who is incapable to distinguish between fact and fancy.

One thing is certain, the blueprint for all his actions can be found in the 1979 book Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman, the Bible of the Fraser Institute, the American and Canadian governments and generally of the globalizing neo-liberal movement.

Want to read something funny? Go to the chapter on labour unions and find out that, according to the Friedmans, unions depress wages and are bad for working people, because they prevent employers from competing for workers.
No, I am not joking. The Fraser Institute and our university economics departments are saturated with this kind of garbage There are major demonstrations planned right across BC over the insane sellout plans of the Campbell gang, but what good are they, when the universities are pushing out new economists by the hundreds every year, brainwashed with this Friedmanite, neo-classical garbage?

Copyright (c) 2002, West's International