Canada's Economy Contracts
Time for a New Pro-Social Direction for the Economy!
Statistics Canada announced that Canada's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell 0.3 per cent in the third quarter.[1] The Statcan announcement of an economy going backwards despite population growth is not surprising. After all, that is the "plan," if you can call it a plan.
The ruling elite said publicly they wanted to plunge the country into recession to "tame inflation." They proceeded to hike central bank interest rates aggressively to discourage investment in the economy and let it flounder. Certainly, the list of global and other large companies firing thousands of workers in recent weeks is not good news for working people but to be expected according to the "plan" of the ruling elite.[2] They want workers on the defensive and discouraged from organizing and fighting for higher wages, better working conditions and increased investments in social programs.
With price inflation tamed or not and an economy contracting or not, the working people pay the price with unresolved social problems and growing inequality. In fact, for the ruling elites, they have become disposable which gives rise to a serious feeling of helplessness people have regarding the economy. Working people are the human factor in the economy yet they exercise no control over it. Nor, for that matter, do the rich who have lost control of the huge productive powers the productive forces on a world scale have created. They use their positions of power and privilege to form coalitions and cartels of oligopolies and parties in government to plunder the wealth produced by the workers at home and abroad. Then, what the rich cannot control in this way, they seek to destroy. Individual owners of means of production and financial instruments are obsessed with their own possessions and revel in the collapse or takeover of others considered competitors. They see the economy not as the possession and responsibility of all for the betterment of all but as something to be exploited for the benefit of a few and their particular private interests.
However, the modern economy is a single whole made up of parts that must operate in harmony if downturns and crises are to be avoided. This is certainly not the aim of the ruling elite who squeeze maximum profit out of the economy for their particular private interests. With competing interests in control of decision-making and out to fatten their own pockets and pillage the public purse, it is not surprising that the economy suffers from recurring crises. How can it be otherwise when the socialized economy and its parts are not organized to function in conformity with one another for the common good?
The
government and those in positions of power and privilege declare they
can tame inflation by forcing an economic contraction all the while
insisting governments borrow from private moneylenders to cover debts
from paying the rich and preparing for war. These are principal causes
of price
inflation. They throw people out of work without regard for their
security, privatize public property and starve social programs of
needed investments all with the blind aim of forcing a socialized
economy into serving their narrow competing private interests, even
though that is not its basic nature.
Statcan announcing a contraction in the economy would be funny if not so serious in negatively affecting the people. Statcan describes a situation where the ruling elite in control of decision-making at the level of governance have no intention of finding and applying solutions, which arise from objective considerations to serve the common good and address the whole and root cause of the problems.
The working people are the vastly superior human force and produce all that society and the people require for their existence. The more they make the claims on society for what belongs to them as a matter of right, the more they settle scores with the old conscience of society and the apparatus of the liberal democratic state which no longer functions to sort out contending interests.
The time has come to stop paying the rich, stop paying the debt, end all military purchases from the U.S., make Canada a zone for peace and increase investments in social programs to solve the country's problems and humanize the social and natural environment!
This article was published in
Volume 53 Number 12 - December 2023
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2023/Articles/M530121.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca