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Economic Recovery Plan for BC Restructuring State Arrangements to Strengthen Provincial Pay-the-Rich EconomyThe BC government released an economic recovery plan called "A Stronger BC, for Everyone: BCs Economic Recovery Plan" on September 17, just prior to calling the provincial election for October 24. The plan is a continuation of the neo-liberal anti-social offensive aimed at structuring the state to strengthen pay-the-rich schemes within the U.S.-dominated imperialist system of states.
Placing the economy and political domain under the authority of private interests is presented as a given. Job creation, wages and benefits for workers, and even social programs and steps to heal the environment are all framed in the neo-liberal jargon as trickling down from those who own and control the economy. The plan reiterates time and again that the path to recovery from the crisis is to prime private enterprise with provincial and federal public funds. According to the government, the future is in the hands of the rich and their decision-making about how to control the economy, aided by governments that ensure the oligarchs have in hand the public funds, political power and state institutions necessary to exploit the working class and use the immense natural resources of the province to their advantage. Several issues are notable in their absence from the recovery plan. Missing is any analysis as to why economic crises are a recurring feature of the BC economy, both general crises and those specific to certain sectors such as forestry. The government says it represents working people and a social-democratic orientation but nowhere in the plan does it even attempt an explanation as to why the economy regularly fails and poverty is a constant feature. The absence of an investigation and discussion of the root of the recurring economic crises and problems leads to an acceptance of the current failed direction of the economy and the politicization of the private interests in control at all levels. The absence of investigation and analysis in turn directs political thought towards the erroneous viewpoint that the role for working people is to behave as impotent bystanders to their own fate and choose between good and bad policies of the cartel parties of the ruling elite. This blocks the working class from building its own independent organizations, especially political ones, developing its own thinking, theory, analysis, reference points and political program and engaging in actions to defend what belongs to it by right. The demand to stop paying the rich and increase investments in social programs is integral to the empowerment and the flowering of the democratic personality that arises with actions which defend the rights of all. In the absence of any investigation and discussion of a new direction, the NDP government forges full speed ahead with pay-the-rich schemes that have proven to be a complete failure, as the current crisis shows. The measures in the plan to politicize private interests are breathtaking in their scale. The government pushes, holus bolus, the neo-liberal line that through paying the rich some of the generated wealth will trickle down to working people. The propping up of private enterprise with public funds is couched in the bogus neo-liberal line that doing so is the only way to create jobs, develop the economy and generate value to sustain social programs even though this has been proven false in practice with the rich becoming richer and social and natural problems worsening. The BC economy is now more than ever integrated into the U.S. war economy and the clutches of the global oligarchy. The NDP's recovery plan attempts to block discussion of the necessity for a new direction for the economy, to change its aim to one of serving the needs of the people and society. Such a new direction asserts cooperation and mutual benefit of all its sectors and parts through planning in opposition to the destructive competition and striving for maximum private profit of imperialism. This new direction seeks to utilize the enormous productive capacity of modern production and international trade to meet the needs and well-being of all humanity without war and exploitation, and to humanize the natural and social environment and make Canada a zone for peace.
Another missing aspect of the plan is any mention of how the government borrows money from private moneylenders generating an enormous debt to them that continually sucks enormous value out of the economy through servicing to pay interest. The BC government this year is forecasting a deficit of $12.8 billion. It plans to sell bonds worth $18.5 billion to institutional investors to cover the deficit plus refinancing debt coming due. This year's deficit is forecast to increase the existing provincial debt to private moneylenders to $87.9 billion. The annual interest charge paid to the moneylenders is approaching $3 billion. No BC government has ever proposed or even discussed an alternative to borrowing from private moneylenders, which in fact is another form of paying the rich that should be banned as unnecessary, socially irresponsible and even criminal. Included in the recovery plan are details of how BC government funds are to be funneled to prop up private enterprise at every level. The plan offers a blueprint of how the global oligarchs are taking measures to structure the state so that the BC economy ensures that collective public funds are regularly used to pay the rich and divert them away from social programs and any notion of developing public enterprise and services as the backbone of a renewed economy.
The working people now have thirty years' experience with the anti-social offensive and its neo-liberal dogma. They must not fall prey to gibberish, either of Trudeau, Horgan or any other proponent of the pay-the-rich measures which are being taken. The necessity for a new direction for the economy to stop paying the rich and increase investments in social programs is the starting point for the new direction to make headway. NoteFor extracts of the BC Government's Economic Recovery Plan with comments, click here.
This article was published in Article Link:   Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca |
The plan contains
numerous measures to pay the rich, which in effect politicize private
interests. In other words, the structural changes in the plan
strengthen the take-over of the decision-making power, exercised
through the executive and legislative functions, by the most dominant
global oligarchs. BC's socialized economy and human and natural
resources are at their disposal and they brook no limitations on what
they can do with it. No suggestion appears anywhere in the plan that a
pro-social alternative is possible to the current domination of the
economy by powerful global private interests.
Also missing from
the recovery plan is any mention of the two largest public-private
projects now underway. First is the Site C dam and power plant on the
Peace River, complete with power transmission lines to supply
electricity to mines, gas wells and LNG plants controlled by the global
rich. Second is the LNG Canada project to extract gas through hydraulic
fracturing in northeast BC, build a highly contested Coastal GasLink
pipeline across unceded Indigenous land to Kitimat on the west coast
and there construct an LNG plant and new shipping port. These projects
on unceded Indigenous land are highly contentious multi-billion dollar
projects to pay the global rich and intensify their grip on Canada.
The public funds
going to prop up the imperialist economy have as well the aim to
nurture a strata of small and medium-sized business owners,
intellectuals and certain trade union leaders who are expected to side
with the global imperialist oligarchy against the working class and
Indigenous peoples. The broad aim through the neo-liberal trickledown
jargon is to convince them that their future and that of the people of
BC lies within the realm of adopting "good polices." No alternative is
to be considered, certainly not a new direction for the economy that
breaks the grip of the global oligarchs over their lives and future and
builds a new state that assumes its social responsibilities to the
people and Mother Earth.