Category: Politics

China: Money for Nothing

chinaI’ve taken a lot of flak over the years for my abhorrence of government programs and/or government intervention in anything beyond the bare necessities – education, health, security etc.  I have argued (sometimes successfully) that my government should keep its fingers off most of the stuff it’s currently up to its elbows in, and should never — under any circumstances — even look at new programs.  My point is, since the only people keeping an eye on the government are the government, they aren’t in the best position to assess the damage they’re doing–and they’re doing plenty.  This is because not only is every politico in all directions wasting money as fast as they can tax it, but while they’re playing Daddy Warbucks on extracurricular activities, they’re neglecting the essentials.  Governments should confine themselves to things like minimum standards for clean water (which BTW, my country does not have) national standards of education (oops, don’t have that one either) or perhaps overhauling our antiquated Catch-and-Release justice system (I’m not even going to go there.)  If my government would quit dickin’ around and do what they’re supposed to, between the money they’d save and the money they’d never spend in the first place, my country would be a veritable paradise.  The problem is the government is the problem not the solution — and now, I can prove it.

This week, austerity budget week in Canada, buried on page 352, my government has declared it’s about to save me 30 million dollars a year because it’s going to stop sending aid to China.  Wow!  Good on ya, folks!  That’s 30 million I didn’t have yesterday.  [Incredulous Pause]  Hey, wait a minute!  We’re sending foreign aid to China?  WTF?

Anyway, one quick Google later and you betcha, folks, not only does Canada send piles of money to China, we’ve been doing it for decades.  This is insanity on such a biblical scale it’s impossible to discuss it rationally.  My only option is to use the infamous rhetorical question.

First of all, somebody had to think this up in the first place.  Who in their right mind would even conceive of giving – GIVING! —china1 the second largest economy in living history financial assistance?  That’s like me sending a cheque to Bill Gates. (“Here, Bill. I thought you could use the extra cash.”)  Were the politicos all sitting around Parliament Hill, blasted on peyote?  China has more US currency in its banks than America does.  It has launched a guy into space and an aircraft carrier into the Pacific. It hosted the Olympics and won them.   It has factories bigger than most of our towns and could, if it so chose, swallow our economy whole and spit out the GST.  What Carlos Castaneda dream do we think we’re living in?

Secondly, who approved it?  What committee came to the incredible conclusion that giving China buckets of money was the very best allocation of my nation’s wealth?  What overwhelming argument convinced them?  Whatever it was, it must have been smack-bottom good.  After all, it obviously beat out spending that money to feed the hungry, house the homeless or even educate the stupid – which might have helped us out, in this case.

Thirdly, what good did it do us?  What was the cost-to-benefit ratio for those ordinary Canadians the politicos are always yipping about?  Is there one Canadian out there who can lift his Molson and say, “I’ve had a better life since we starting sending millions of dollars to China.  Salud!”  Perhaps, but I doubt it.

Fourthly, this squander has been going on for decades. Why didn’t somebody – somewhere — put a stop to it?  Why didn’t at least china2one of the several successive governments we elected in the last 40 years ever eyeball the cancelled cheques and say, “What the hell is this?  We’re cutting EI benefits to send money to China?  That’s just wrong.  We should discontinue this waste.”  Oddly, nobody did.

Finally (there’s more, but I have to stop this somewhere) who possibly ever thought this was a good idea?  I don’t think anybody.  I think everybody from Trudeau (not Justin, the real one) to Stephen Harper thought it was unbelievably stupid to give – GIVE — millions to China, but they just kept doing it anyway — government inertia at its absolute finest.

There is one good thing that’s come out of this monumental cock-up, though.  I’m waiting in the weeds for the next person to tell me what a utopia government programs could create if they were just given the chance.  It will be an interesting conversation.

Mali: The Next Afghanistan!

Mali is one of those places we’ve all heard of but, without Google, can’t actually find on a map.  (I tried and only got close.)  In fact, it’s not exactly a country so much as an ill-defined area with poor people in it.  Most Westerners’ knowledge of Mali starts-and-stops with Timbuktu, the proverbial name for nowhere from our childhood.  At one time, it was the centre of a great trading empire (built on slaves and ivory) but by the time the French marched their Foreign Legion there at the end of the 19th century, all they found was a mud and waddle village.  According to all reports, they were deeply disappointed.

For the last half century, since independence from France in 1960, Mali has been kept in permanent poverty by UNICEF and a number of other well-meaning humanitarian agencies.  Unfortunately, since the Malians as just soul-suckingly poor, and not actually starving, people like Bono and Geldof give them a miss, and Oprah hasn’t built them any schools.  The only real distinction Mali has in the family of nations is it’s generally listed as the poorest place on the planet.  Mostly it flies under the radar — at least until now.  You can read about it here.

Mali is rapidly becoming a future destination for Western military might, and, like Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq before it, many of our young people won’t be making the return journey vertically.  This deadly adventure is going to be brought to you by the dithering diplomats of the United Nations who are practically digging the graves even as we speak.  If it sounds as though I’ve lost my girlish laughter over these relentless debacles, it’s because I have.  I’m fed up to the eyeballs with career politicos weeping crocodile tears over the honoured dead, when they are the ones doing their incompetent best to stretch the casualty lists to the breaking point.  Let me explain.

Recently, a Moslem fundamentalist group (read Al Qaeda) has taken control ofPeople who have fled fighting in Mali rest at the Banibangou refugee camp in Niger northern Mali.  That’s the deserty bit that runs from Timbuktu to the Algerian border.  They now control a patch of real estate that’s roughly the size of Afghanistan.  Hmmm?  These boys (No Girls Allowed) are working flat out, to establish a safe haven for anybody with a homicidal grudge against the 21st century.  To that end, they’re collecting tons of Libyan weapons that NATO neglected to inventory after they bombed Gaddafi out of business.  They’re loading up on food, vehicles, oil, etc., creating safe routes in and out of Algeria, and generally digging in for the duration.  Basically, because nobody’s asked them to leave (the Mali military isn’t up to the task) they’re going full throttle Taliban and telling the legitimate Mali government to take a hike.

Cut to the chase: our world doesn’t exactly need yet another band of frontline fanatics hell-bent on destroying anything that doesn’t happen to fit their 7th century view of reality.  Nor, having seen the results in Somalia and Sudan, do we need another pack of heavily armed jihadists spreading their mutant Arab Spring across the lower Sahara.  Why?  Because recent history has shown us that, once these folks get established they tend to branch out.  Argue black is white all you want, but this Mali crew (actually, many of them aren’t locals) are eventually going follow the trail of their older brothers to London, Madrid and New York mali1and bring the battle to us.  Why?  They don’t like us.  They think we’re evil.  Everything we do sets their teeth on edge.  They don’t like our consumer society, our liberal education, our divorce rate, our homosexuals or our half-naked women.  They don’t like our social structure or our crazy adherence to the notion of democracy.   Plus, and most importantly, they don’t like our live-and-let-live brand of tolerance.  In the jihadist world, it’s their way or the highway.  No amount of reasonable discussion is going to change that.  These are facts, and anybody who hasn’t come to terms with them by now is either an abject apologist or a complete dolt.

The bottom line is at some point we’re going to have to fight these people.  Our only choice is where and when.  We can dick around like we did (and are still doing) in Afghanistan.  That’s basically waiting until all hell breaks loose and then getting tangled up in an Orwellian series of never-ending counterattacks with the resulting continuum of casualties.  Or we can exercise some political will and decide to commit our military and economic resources to the novel notion of victory — minimize the casualties (on both sides) and then go back to real life.

Unfortunately, it looks like the United Nations and the Western world are, once again, going to stick with Plan A.  So, I suggest you get out the Google Maps, folks — because Bamako, Kidal and Gao are going to be as familiar to our children as Darfur, Kabul and Mogadishu are to us.  And they are going to be there for a long time.