Matters of Concern to the Polity

Growing Concern with the Direction of the Economy

The economic crisis that exploded this year into massive unemployment, shutdowns and bankruptcies is causing great concern among the people. The current crisis follows the economic crisis in 2008-09 and the oil price drop in 2014 and subsequent upheaval in the economy in Alberta and elsewhere that the present crisis has worsened. The disquiet among the people has deepened because they have no confidence that the ruling elite in control are either capable or willing to tackle the root of the problem in the economy. A new pro-social direction and aim for the economy are required to resolve its problems.

Since the great economic crisis in the 1930s and with each subsequent crisis, those in control revert to similar responses that have proved incapable of solving problems and preventing crises from recurring. Economic crises have become "opportunities" for wealthy oligarchs to enlarge their holdings and control over the economy, wipe out smaller competitors and put working people on the defensive as they struggle to defend their jobs, terms of employment and standard of living. With each succeeding crisis, oligopolies seize more of what is considered the public good, interest, enterprise and control. Under their aegis, nation-building projects lie in tatters.

The people's consciousness of the absolute control exercised by those who own the economy has grown from the image of a company town where everyone has to buy from the company store to that of a company country where global cartels own and control all the major sectors of the economy and demand complete subservience to their will.

Merle Travis, the son of a Kentucky coal miner captured the conception of a company town in his 1946 song Sixteen Tons:

I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal
And the straw boss said "Well, a-bless my soul"

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

After reading the federal government's Fiscal Snapshot of the current crisis and thinking of all that has happened since 1946, Canadians may well sing:

We load sixteen tons, what do we get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call us 'cause we can't go
We owe our souls to the oligarchs' store

The rich have extended their reach from control of the company store to control of the global economy. No matter how many tons the working people produce, they end up more and more indebted to global private interests and with increasing real insecurity and uncertainty for their jobs, living conditions and future.

The motivation of those in control of the economy in the Kentucky mining town was to plunder the mine and fleece the miners, not to sort out the problems of a mining town and certainly not the problems of those who produced the coal and their desire for a stable life for their families in the present and future. When crisis struck, the miners paid with loss of their jobs yet still saddled with their debts to the company store. Today, the working class pays with the loss of millions of jobs, personal tragedies and stupendous collective debts to the oligarchs' store.

Today everything throughout the economy is organized to pay the rich and serve their private interests starting from the usurpation of the state and its institutions by these private interests. Governments have become arms of the private interests. They borrow from the rich; they use the money they borrow to pay the rich, to buy from the rich, to contract the rich to build this and that, and to use the value workers produce to service the debt to the rich and generally fatten their coffers at the expense of everyone else and society.

The concern of the working people is palpable. Where is all this heading? We do not want "business as usual" of cutbacks, "austerity agendas," bankruptcy protection frauds, loss of our pensions, reinvention of companies who hire back the same people at half their wages and the like. The economy goes round and round while those in authority are increasingly self-serving. They do not even pretend to resolve its problems.

The workers through their work-time on the means of production produce all the value in the economy but in the end they are individually and collectively in debt to the rich for having created the value the rich control. And now, the ruling elite are warning the people to prepare themselves for further privatization of all fields of endeavour as if this is the solution to the problems. Canadians will foot the bill to pay even more to the rich through higher taxes, privatized social programs, a lower standard of living, and insecurity in retirement.

Already consumption and personal taxes are going up. Such taxes represent a cut in wages, a loss in spending power, a reduction in the standard of living. The collective debt to global private interests is seen as a panacea and irrevocable because that is the law according to the rich where the rich get richer and the poor poorer and the cartel parties and governments do not care if it all falls apart because they have cushy jobs waiting for them with the private interests they serve so well.

Where is all this concentration of wealth and power in fewer hands heading if not to war? Canada's economy has been integrated within that of the United States of North American Oligopoly Interests. The contradictions in their ranks are such they are planning very possibly to attack Venezuela in the hopes of wiping out Cuba in the process. It is not an unlikely scenario for which they are preparing with their ridiculous accusations that the Venezuelan president and government are drug traffickers or that they are interfering with the freedom of the seas and their increasing threats to attack any ship headed for Venezuela.

Can they unite the military bureaucracy with such an attack? Not likely, but this does not mean they will not launch such an attack in their desperation to divert from the contradictions in their ranks within the country, dragging in tow Canada and its Lima Group alleging they are upholding multilateralism in another farcical coalition of the willing.

New Direction for the Economy

The narrow private interests which control the economy control the decision-making power and this has to change. Canadians must speak out to oppose the pay-the-rich schemes the government is embroiling them in.

The new direction for the economy to open a path to progress is for the value workers produce to stay in their hands to organize the economy and life in a sensible manner without crises. To demand such a direction for the economy would be a great achievement.

The immediate step needed is to step up opposition to the anti-social offensive with its inherent usurpation of the state including governments by narrow private interests. This step forward requires opposing the special police powers governments at all levels have given themselves to dictate wages, working conditions and the destruction of unions and criminalization of the workers' resistance struggles as well as taking Canada to war through NATO and imperialist coalitions which claim to defend democracy and human rights to overthrow governments or take them over. It means fighting for the rights of all on all fronts, whether against state-organized racist attacks, human trafficking, police violence and impunity, criminalization of labour and all who resist attacks on their rights, recruitment of youth to "volunteer" for imperialist projects at home and abroad and for war, and all other retrogressive programs governments are funding along with NGOs backed by shady interests. All the organizations pushed by these private interests are to make sure the peoples have no organizations of their own and, in time of crisis, they are left defenceless, at the mercy of those who do not wish them well.

Organizations which defend people's rights and claims within the situation of imperialist control and a debtors' purgatory are necessary to mobilize and energize our collective strength.

Demand a moratorium on debt servicing of government debt and make illegal state borrowing from private interests!

Organize for political renewal by setting the people's line of march against the anti-social offensive and to develop a pro-social direction.

The youth and working people are quite capable of consciously organizing and developing a political march forward to a new pro-social aim and direction for the economy on the basis of political renewal to ensure a bright future for all.

It Can Be Done! It Must Be Done!