NO MORE BUSH ECONOMICS! Who Needs Yankee ‘DECIDER’-of-DESTRUCTION? Surrey Summit

Anti-Bush Signs on streets weeks after Bush addressed Regional Economic Development Summit in Surrey, B.C.

 WEEKS AFTER W’s Speech in Canada on “Economic Development” Protest Signs Still Seen on City streets

This blogger writes: The most perverse political joke of  the season came on October 20, 2011 in The City of Surrey, British Columbia. And it just won’t go away! Weeks have passed since Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts introduced George W. Bush as keynote speaker  at the city’s annual Summit on Regional Economic Development, yet fresh anti-Bush protest signs continue to populate Surrey boulevards declaiming “NO MORE BUSH ECONOMICS.”

Surrey Mayor Watts and Bush – Dim son and Low watts.

 

Her Worship‘s courting of  Bush at the summit  set loose howls of protest in the streets the day of the summit and, as evidenced by the protest signs still poking the city mother in the eye, reverberations of anti-Bush sentiment  persist in the Vancouver suburb.

No more Bush economics. 

Indeed.

Even as the City of Surrey’s sober captains of trade and commerce sat playing footsies under the table with the disgraced ex-president, economics analysts from sources as diverse  as The Economist and Vanity Fair  publish devastating condemnations of Mr. Bush’s disastrous botch up of the U.S. economy that led to the near-death financial crash of 2008. Should the man who nearly broke the world’s largest economy REALLY be lecturing Canadian Chamber of Commerce types on “economic development“? What could Watts have been thinking?

Economic development? George W. Bush? WHAT?! 

The growing City of Surrey  enjoys exceptional prosperity. Its 2010 Financial Statistics reports indicate a city always in the black. For more than three years Surrey’s annual budgets have produced significant cash surpluses accompanied by positive net growth, with level incurred debt. The city’s credit rating is ever-positive as well. Who needs the Yankee ‘Decider’-of-Destruction in town advising us on how to manage our money?

What could Watts have been thinking?

◊(Aside from the bad joke on October 20 of giving an audience to Bush’s ersatz economic advice, the worldwide Arrest Bush initiative  the same day tussled with B.C. Provincial Court to act on a criminal indictment of Bush for alleged war crimes. This blogger is awaiting results of a Freedom of  Information request to reveal how dark politics in the office of the Attorney General for B.C. may be protecting Bush from Justice in Canada.)

The ‘Decider’-of-Destruction

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The Economist writes in its online article: “George Bush’s Legacy“:… “He inherited a projected ten-year surplus of $5.6 trillion and bequeaths a ten-year deficit of $6 trillion, assuming his tax cuts remain in place…[Bush’s] policy of cutting taxes while increasing spending—of simultaneously pursuing big government and small government—dramatically swelled the deficit. Hardly the makings of a positive judgment from future historians.

“The most important legislation of his first year in office was a $1.35 trillion tax cut that handed an extra $53,000 to the top 1% of earners. At his farewell press conference on January 12th Mr Bush called his tax cuts the “right course of action”, as if they were an unpopular but heroic decision. They weren’t.

 “George Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America’s reputation since the second world war. The American economy is in deep recession, brought on by a crisis that forced Mr Bush to preside over huge and unpopular bail-outs.The Bush family name, once among the most illustrious in American political life, is now so tainted that Jeb, George’s younger brother, recently decided not to run for the Senate from Florida. A Bush relative describes family gatherings as “funeral wakes”.

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Joseph E. Stiglitz in Vanity Fair magazine wrote: “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush“…”the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle “worst president” when it comes to stewardship of the American economy. Once Franklin Roosevelt assumed office and reversed Hoover’s policies, the country began to recover. The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting…our grandchildren will still be living with, and struggling with, the economic consequences of Mr. Bush.

“As many as 1.7 million Americans are expected to lose their homes in the months ahead. For many, this will mean the beginning of a downward spiral into poverty.

“Between March 2006 and March 2007 personal-bankruptcy rates soared more than 60 percent. As families went into bankruptcy, more and more of them came to understand who had won and who had lost as a result of the president’s 2005 bankruptcy bill, which made it harder for individuals to discharge their debts in a reasonable way. The lenders that had pressed for “reform” had been the clear winners, gaining added leverage and protections for themselves; people facing financial distress got the shaft.

“Decades hence we should take stock, and revisit the conventional wisdom. Will Herbert Hoover still deserve his dubious mantle? I’m guessing that George W. Bush will have earned one more grim superlative.”

This blogger can only say: “Who Needs the Yankee ‘DECIDER’-of-DESTRUCTION in our city?”

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“More and more in our times Canadians have wondered  just what kind of continental neighbour America, is, exactly.  Where will it all end?” 

That’s what this blog is all about.