Gucci Shoes and Imelda Marcos

Oh, yeah. Six hundred dollars for a pair of shoes! And ugly ones at that. Shades of Imelda Marcos! There obviously comes a time in some upper crust women's lives when they don't blink an eye and even think it's cute to buy a pair of shoes that cost six hundred dollars. Or maybe even six thousand. That's probably an exaggeration but probably not much among the wealthiest elite. Which explains why they have so much trouble trying to actually imagine how poor and even middle class citizens get along on so little. In fact, the economic elite has so much trouble with this they feel at some level that really poor people are not quite human so therefore they can take whatever crumbs they can snatch from poor people to add to their own huge money piles. And they have a legal and moral philosophy for continually taking and trying to take the crumbs from the poor, it's simply this...Privatization good, government programs bad.

Of course Carole Taylor is more of a symbol that a force behind the economic throne of British Columbia. She does as she is bidden by policy directives and if it happens to suit her real beliefs, good, but that's not what is called for. What's called for is an pseudo-intellectual economic voice to prop up Gordon Campbell's philosophical mandate to trash all of the public resources of this province. That's his version of Gucci shoes. But as much as Gordon Campbell would like to privatized the very air we plebeians breath there is a limit.

In spite of the valiant efforts of The Vancouver Sun and Province and Times Colonist to convince citizens that it would be a smart and Nobel thing for us plebs to agree to cut our own economic throats in order to further the increasing amassing of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, in final analysis all real political power rests with the people. It does. It really does. And Carol Taylor's Gucci shoes may have the same affect on the provincial body politic as Imelda Marcos'
shoes had on the psychie of the people of the Philippines.