Are they covering their butts selling off your property?

How about another pack of Highway 407 giveaways? That’s what neocon make-believe liberal Dalton McGuinty is offering you to make himself look less like the loser he is. He’s having you join him in that column by asking the lowest form of socalled bankers to look into bailing himself out of Ontario’s debt by selling off one or more of your most productive assets.

He might as well be Mike Harris. Or Tim Hudak.

The longer he stays premier, the longer McGuinty’s nose grows. As big a liar as any reactionary Tory, as big as Stephen Harper, he’s backtracked on his word numerous times. From building houses on the “protected” Oak Ridges Moraine, to stripping down our health-care system, to effectively privatizing a hospital, to continuing the Harris-era downloading onto the city; now he’s selling off the furniture.

A giveaway is more like it. He’s asked financial villains in the form of “investment bankers” (including disgraced Goldman Sachs of U.S. banker payoff infamy) to take a few hundred grand of your money and maybe put your property in play. Well-paying assets such as casinos could be sold off to private interests, making them much more accessible by organized crime. Same with the lucrative provincial liquor monopoly.

Keep in mind that investment bankers produce nothing. Zero. Nada. They are not an “industry.” They invent paper scams like the notorious junk-mortgage “derivatives” that brought down the U.S. economy, or like cap-and-trade derivatives playing off carbon taxes that could impoverish our middle class if we fall for it in Canada.

(Of course they can also deal in less harmful investment forms that are mainly for the well to do. Ordinary folks should be mostly invested in paper that pays interest and not subject to the vagaries of the stagemanageable investment markets where insiders make as much money in a few seconds as you earn in a good year.)

Investment bankers include those who plot mergers and acquisitions that monster corporations use to grow even bigger by gobbling up other companies and firing workers: producing grief and nothing more. They’re the casinostyle “industry” that some in Toronto want to invite in as keystone occupants of a revitalized Downtown. (Perhaps figuring that at least they’ll rent hotel rooms for their lovers and mistresses, go to plays, buy cars, expensive booze and lots of fine dinners: Reagan-style trickle-down economics.)

Not only is neocon McGuinty plotting a privatization sell off, so is the so-called socialist mayor, David Miller, who wants to sell your complete Toronto Hydro. He’s already sold off a lucrative wireless business of that company. All this to deal with his and council’s overspending.

Miller and his favoured councillors have a sweet thing going for them. And that’s expensive for you. Though most public figures shrug off being misquoted or misunderstood, it’s not true of Princess Sandra Bussin, councillor for the Beach. She was offended that a gadfly little ward newspaper accused her of wrongdoing around a development issue. She said she was “acting on behalf of the city” in suing that local editor, and charging you up to $175,000 to do so. And council agreed.

The blessed position of a councillor doesn’t end there. The heady little club voted to break the law— despite the city attorney counselling otherwise—to give good-buddy Adrian Heaps $65,680 of your money for defending a defamation lawsuit. It involved raising his salary by enough money to pay off the lawsuit, plus the tax payable on the amount.

A majority of councillors last month voted for the motion by Princess Paula Fletcher, whom Coun. Rob Ford says remarked when advised that the law was being broken: “Council is supreme.”

Expect to see more fallout from that bit of council arrogance this month. Turns out Heaps, before election, had lost the lawsuit and had to pay $20,000 in damages to the winner. (Actually, you had to pay. ) Plus the tax on the “income” council voted for him.

But the main point is that council elitists are not watchful of your tax money and are absolutely brain dead to the point of considering the sale of city assets, especially one that actually brings in steady revenue.

Selling off Toronto Hydro would likely institute the sort of corporate abuse that has top executives making outrageously high drains on the utility’s cash to keep their “excellence and expertise” from leaving. Government corruption at all levels exists mostly in the service of corporations, which exist to enrich their insiders. That’s okay when you’re selling hamburgers or paint. There is rarely a legitimate reason to privatize a public utility or a public service. Government mismanagement isn’t a reason for privatization, it’s a reason for changing the players and getting honourable politicians and competent managers.