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!
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