Dear Editor,

Privatize everything. Deregulate corporations. Cut corporate taxes.  Take public resources and give them to private companies.  That’s the simple economics of Steven Harper and Christy Clark. These economic strategies won’t do much for average Canadians, but it sure gets you corporate support come election time.

As the last federal election shows, elections are won in boardrooms, not poll booths. PR firms market the political product like they do any other merchandise. Marketing is a fine art; with the right effort, you can sell anybody anything.

The party with the biggest advertising budget wins 94 per cent of the time.

Throw in a little “voter suppression.” Voila, you’ve engineered a majority — 54. per cent of the seats with just 39.6 per cent of the votes.

Big banks, big oil, the US military-industrial complex have been fixing elections and installing puppet regimes in oil rich nations worldwide for a long time. Think they’re not here?

Want to see what a country looks like after corporations are done with it? You needn’t go to Iraq or Afghanistan, go to Haiti.

Deregulated corporate scavengers were turned loose on this once beautiful country. Haiti is now 98 per cent deforested.  They no longer have an economy. Sewing T-shirts is the only work.  When corporations are done with Canada, what will it look like?

Can’t we refine our bitumen — or saw our logs — in Canada? What happened to “value added?”

Big business is now boss, that’s what. They refuse to pay Canada’s high wages — the first symptom of Dutch Disease. But Harper will fix that: No more unions, no more collective bargaining; you’ll work for minimum wage before you collect EI — and for two years longer. If you don’t like it, foreign workers will be standing by.

Respected economist John Kenneth Galbraith analogized Harper economics this way: “If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows.”

Bryan Stawychny

Edgewater