Keeping Canadians Safe

Prime Minister Steven Harper is keeping Canadians safe, he says. He just bought four C-17 Globemaster III monster airplanes from the U.S. aircraft manufacturer, Boeing. These giant transports will be used to send Canadian troops and materiel where they are needed anywhere in the world. (Has anyone wondered from where Harper got the money?)

The C-17s cost almost a billion dollars each. They will require additional money to operate and to be maintained. A trip to Afghanistan will cost a million dollars, they say. Canadian boys and girls can now go off to bludgeon the wogs to keep the subjects of the empire in line. They will no longer have to hitch a ride with the Americans. Canada now is self sufficient and independent! Well, sort of. But Canada will be "pulling its own weight" now. Canadians can be proud.

But are they making us safe? Would this money not be better spent helping people rather than harming them? Maybe there is a better way to make friends than invading some country and killing it's people. Oh, of course, they deserve what they get as we are told nightly on the news. And we are helping them too. And Boeing employees get to keep their jobs by building airplanes. And U.S. taxpayers get to help out by paying for the whole operation. Or do they?

Actually, the Chinese have been buying U.S. Treasury Bills with the dollars they have been accepting for the Chinese goods we have been buying. So the Chinese are actually paying for everything by loaning us the money to do it. See how that works? The Japanese have been doing this since 1945 when we finished bludgeoning them. Japan has magnitudes of order more U.S. debt than China.

So it isn't actually very simple to figure out who is doing what to whom — or who is responsible for what is going on. Maybe you, yourself, are responsible when you buy something made in China when you go to Wal-Mart. But then, you have no control over what Mr. Harper does, even if you voted for him. Perhaps you didn't even vote for him. And, unless you are an American, you didn't vote for Mr. Bush either, or Mr. Blair for that matter. And Mr. Blair is off organizing peace in the Middle East so we can't blame him, that's for sure.

Maybe the stories they have been telling us are true. But if you have been watching carefully, you know they are not true.