Tag Archives: economic democracy

Raise taxes on capital and the rich

24 Feb

In the 1940s, following decades of booms, busts, unemployment, disorder, wars and destruction, rigid free market policies were abandoned. Governments began to deliberately act to maintain employment and market demand. This shift was identified with J.M. Keynes, a prominent British economist and government adviser who had made the case that classical economics was wrong. Depressions, he wrote, were not caused by a decline in the supply of capital but by a fall in demand caused by declining wages and rising unemployment.

During Keynesian times, until the late 1970s, economies and employment grew steadily. Democracy came to mean that governments had a responsibility to protect and advance the interests of common people. Keynesian policies, including increased access to higher education, public health care and income support were funded by taxes on those with the means to pay. The marginal tax rate on the highest income was 80 per cent. Taxes on corporate income were 50 per cent and higher.

Humankind now faces global crises. Widening disparities in income, opportunities and control are provoking disorders, militarism and wars. Emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels threaten the climates on which human well-being depends. Private capital, focused on short-term profits, systemically aggravates these problems. Prevailing ideology is now aggressively hostile to government action. Tax cuts for corporations and the super rich have reduced the public funds required.

Since 1980 taxes paid by corporations and the rich have been methodically reduced. During Keynesian times, the richest one per cent got ten per cent of total income. The richest one percent now gets twice as much, twenty percent. Ten per cent of total income has been transferred from public revenues to private capital.

Neoconservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan claimed that giving capitalists more money and freeing corporations to maximize profits would be generally beneficial, trickling down to the masses. Instead disparities widened. Tax cuts not only provided private capital with more funds to invest; it gave the super rich more money to manipulate political agendas. Regulations on corporate finance and industry were weakened. Union rights were curtailed. Corporations were freed to move capital to countries with lower taxes, and jobs to places with lower wages. Real wages fell. Unemployment rose.

With consumer markets stagnant, investors awash in funds turned to speculation in stocks, bonds, futures and real estate, to derivatives, index funds, credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. Capital markets became casinos, adding little to real production. Gains for a few came out of the losses of many others.

Meanwhile as taxes on capital were reduced, public deficits and debt increased. Concerned that capital would lose value, the rich demanded austerity. Although governments were more than willing to spend more on prisons, intrusive surveillance, militarism and war, social programs and infrastructure spending were frozen and cut. Public assets were privatized. Here in Canada, while courts were confirming rights of indigenous people, governments used deficits as an excuse to disregard Treaty obligations.

Meanwhile, carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels continued to rise. In 1995 countries meeting at the Kyoto Conference agreed to voluntarily reduce carbon emissions. Science had concluded that carbon dioxide levels had to be kept below 350 parts per million. But corporate capitalism preoccupied with profits from existing industry did not act. Declining public revenues and corporate opposition prevented government action.

By 2014 carbon dioxide levels exceeded 400 parts per million.  If green energy had replaced two percent of fossil fuel energy each year since 1995, as the Kyoto Accord proposed, carbon emissions would already have been reduced by half. Instead, corporate capitalism responded by spending hundreds of millions to deny that carbon dioxide emissions were a problem. Hundreds of billions were spent to develop, produce and transport more fossil fuels.

Everyone not blinded by capitalist dogma or the prospects of immense profits now knows that fossil fuel emissions are melting polar ice caps and glaciers, raising sea levels, flooding coastal communities, acidifying oceans, and generating more frequent and more destructive weather events.

Now that denying climate change is no longer credible, capital simply disregards the threat, claiming that there is no technologically realistic alternative to energy from fossil fuels. Yes, the technology to efficiently store and distribute alternate energy on the scale required has yet to be developed. But the needed technologies would already be available if solar, wind, wave and geothermal power had received the investments, tax breaks and subsidies provided for offshore drilling, fracking, tar sands and oil pipelines.

Technology is not the problem.  With relatively small expenditures Denmark in 2014 got 40 percent of its electricity from wind power. Renewable energy, mostly solar, is providing Germany with 25 percent of its electricity. Solar power is providing China, India, Brazil, and African countries with expanding shares of electricity.

Capitalism is the problem. So long as major shareholders and top corporate executives are entitled to make major economic decisions in their private interests, capitalist profits will continue to trump employment, labor income and public services. Environmental costs will continue to be externalized—passed off to communities and future generations. Replacing capitalist title with human entitlement begins with deliberately transferring income from private capital to the public.

In his Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty makes the case that corporation taxes should return to 1950s levels. Marginal tax rates on personal incomes over $500,000 should be raised to 80 percent. He proposes an annual tax of 0.1 percent of private wealth over half a million dollars rising in steps perhaps to 2 percent on wealth over three or five million dollars.  Homes are already taxed annually.  Why should stocks, bonds, and other wealth be excluded?  Piketty adds a progressive estate tax on inheritances over one million dollars and a tax of 0.1 percent on financial transactions. He argues that more transparency in income records and better statistics gathering would make it practical for countries to cooperate in preventing income and wealth from being hidden in offshore accounts.

Of course, the super rich will aggressively object. But nearly everyone else would gain. Taxing capital could provide local governments with funds to reduce disparities and expand social services. Public spending on green infrastructure would provide more employment and increase market demand. Public spending to reconfigure cities could make it practical for people to live their daily lives without cars. Public spending on solar, wind, wave and geothermal power and public transit would reduce carbon emissions and generate more jobs.

Al Engler

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Top 10 Ways to Save Ourselves From Global Warming

7 Oct

My fellow lobsters, we are being cooked.

I know some of you don’t believe it and others have come to the conclusion there is nothing we can do, but the simple truth is the gas has been turned on, the fire lit and the temperature is slowly rising. There is no significant disagreement amongst our lobster pot scientists about these basic facts. In fact the latest study argues the water is much hotter than previously thought. Our only way of avoiding the rolling boil is to come up with a plan to turn the gas off and then take the steps necessary to implement that strategy. But, as individuals we cannot claw our way to a solution. Lobsters of the world we must join together.

Here are 10 things we can do to start:

10. Read Naomi Klein’s new book This Changes Everything — Capitalism vs. the Climate. This is a great way to become informed about the problem and what to do about it. Klein offers a comprehensive, thoughtful, witty and sometimes personal analysis of how we can still save the planet, if enough people put their minds and bodies into the project. The book is an absolute must-read for every environmentalist and everyone who has ever challenged the status quo.

9. Help create and strengthen local food systems. Build and participate in self-sustaining regional economies. Demand governments get rid of “free trade” agreement language that prevents this or limits measures that would reduce global warming.

8. Escape the clutches of the private automobile. Walk, take public transit, ride a bike, join a car share and demand cities that thrive on human energy in a sustainable relationship with nature. Understand there is a better, healthier life waiting if we evolve beyond homo automotovis. Read Stop Signs — Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Environmental Decay by Yves Engler and Bianca Mugyenyi, an entertaining and enlightening road trip through a car-crazy world.

7. Spread the word that human beings are part of nature and do not have dominion over it. Learn from aboriginal peoples around the world about our place in the environment.

6. Support alternative energy sources. We must quickly replace all carbon-based energy with alternatives, a project that is doable. The barrier is not technological but rather economic and political. The only reason burning fossil fuels is currently cheaper than wind, solar or geothermal is because the carbon-based fuel sector does not pay for the real cost of its emissions.

5. Assert the principle that polluters must pay for all the negative consequences of what they put into the environment. We must calculate the price of repairing the damage caused and add this to their cost of production. Not paying the true cost of production is, in effect, a subsidy. Ending that subsidy will leave most of the fossil fuel industry uneconomic.

4. Get off the consumption treadmill. Every time you think about acquiring more stuff or buying more services ask yourself these questions: Do we really need this? Is this good or bad for the environment? To answer these questions objectively we must understand and combat the marketing/advertising system that twists our emotions and desires to mould us into the sort of consumers that make the most profit for multinational corporations.

3. Elect and support governments that take global warming seriously. Without that we have little hope of success. To ensure that the governments we elect really do what is best for people and our planet rather than what is good for the rich and powerful, we must end the power of money to control politicians.

2. Work to change our current economic system, which is the ultimate source of the problem. We must construct an economy based on human need rather than capitalist greed. The foundation of this new economy must be an understanding that our most basic human need is a safe and healthy environment. To ensure that our economy works for the benefit of all it must be democratic and inclusive, rather than run by and for a wealthy minority.

1. Become part of a mass movement to make all of the above happen. We must come together to say no to any further expansion of carbon extraction. We must blockade the carbon industry into extinction. To succeed we must build a grand coalition of all those who are fighting for a better world. This means environmentalists finding common cause with the union movement, First Nations, poor people, poor nations, liberation movements, anti-capitalists, and with all those who do battle against the many forms of inequality.

Lobsters of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but the chains that keep you on the stove.

Gary Engler

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Top 10 ways we can build a better economic system

26 Aug

For the numerous readers who asked: “But what can we do?” after reading my Top 10 Reasons to Hate Capitalism:

  1. We can elect governments that represent people rather than corporations. This will require serious electoral reform and include laws to make it clear corporations are not people and therefore cannot participate in the political process. A government representing all the people would regulate corporations to ensure socially responsible behaviour and transform psychopathic capitalist monstrosities into democratic, social enterprises that benefit all.
  2. We can build communities and organizations that encourage solidarity, compassion and altruism. These will include worker, consumer, housing and producer cooperatives, as well as institutions of government. People must always remain vigilant, especially while capitalism continues to exist, about the pervasive power of greed to destroy these communities and organizations.
  3. We can promote and build a democratic economy in which social ownership replaces private ownership of communities’ means of livelihood. The people who work in them and the communities in which they are located should control economic enterprises.
  4. Since authentic freedom for any of us can only come when all of us are free we must create enterprises, communities, forms of governance and institutions that respect the rights of everyone and encourage the creativity of all. Socially useful individual enterprise should be encouraged but everywhere people work together we must create effective forms of democratic decision-making to promote creative input from all involved.
  5. Everywhere we work we can organize in ways that become the building blocks of a new, democratic economy. Sometimes this will be through existing unions but often we will create new organizations that defend our day-to-day interests while self-consciously preparing to replace capitalist minority rule with democratic social control of all enterprises.
  6. We can work to undermine capitalist, consumerist propaganda whether it masquerades as news, entertainment or advertising. We can create forms of newsgathering and information-exchange that challenge capitalism while building the self-confidence of people everywhere to democratically manage our economy. Rather than spend countless empty hours consuming mindless advertising-driven ‘entertainment’ we can relearn the myriad forms of healthy social interaction that brought joy and solidarity to generations past. Millions of us can discover the fun in making a better world.
  7. We can rebuild a progressive taxation system in which people with extreme incomes pay very high levels of taxes. We can promote a one person, one vote system of decision-making everywhere we work together, whether in the political, social or economic realm. The means of bringing about such fundamental change may, in part, come through existing political structures, but will also include diverse forms of mobilization as workers, residents, concerned citizens, producers and human beings supporting a healthy planet.
  8. We can speak up for our planet as one community with intertwined interests that can only be satisfied through mutual respect and cooperation. We can learn from indigenous communities to respect the earth. We can act on the principle that an injury to one anywhere and everywhere is an injury to all. At a minimum this requires an end to war and environmental destruction of every sort. We can work together in enterprises and organizations that exist in local communities, but which also connect with like-minded regional, national and international groups to accomplish the changes we need.
  9. Through our words and actions we can demonstrate that the realistic alternative to capitalism is an expansion of democracy. In order to build the peaceful, ecologically sane world we desire, our tactics are non-violent, but we understand that people under attack have a right to self-defence.
  10. We can replace capitalism with a system based on social ownership, equal human entitlement and workplace democracy. Building an economic democracy is the key to human survival. We can exist in harmony with our environment if we get rid of capitalism and promote respect for nature and understanding the interdependence of all forms of life.

Gary Engler

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Capitalism a leech on publicly funded research

23 Aug

Prevailing neo-liberal dogma holds that private capital is responsible for most economic innovation and that governments stand in the way. In The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs, Private Sector Myths, Mariana Mazzucato points out that most research is funded by governments and that current anti-government policies not only widen disparities but threaten future innovation, especially the mobilization of resources necessary to rapidly shift away from dependence on carbon-spewing fossil fuels.   

Mazzucato—professor of The Economics of Innovation at Sussex University in the UK—argues that capitalists are not the visionary risk-takers that free-market economists, the corporate media and politicians would have us believe.  Their focus on maximizing profits actually makes capitalists risk-averse.

Governments fund and organize research and development precisely because they do not have to answer to shareholders. They can have broader goals—future well being, new employment, reduced disparities, or environmental integrity.  And in fact, even in the U.S. the federal government funds two-thirds of the country’s research and development: private business funds less than twenty percent.

Neo-liberal ideology aside, capital has long depended on governments to fund research. In earlier times, governments funded research on canon fire and ocean shipping. They funded construction of railways, telegraph then telephone lines, and funded research on aerodynamics and jet engines. After government funding has made production profitable private business takes charge.

Today, military-industrial corporations continue to rely on publicly funded research to develop weapons and equipment. They then sell the results to governments at cost plus inflated profits. Pharmaceutical corporations do the same. Most new drugs are developed in publicly funded labs.  These are then modified slightly, patented and sold to government-funded health care systems at hundreds of times the production cost.

Contrary to public opinion, neither Steve Jobs nor Apple had a critical role in the development of the Internet  or iPhones.  Hard disk drives were developed by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Internet was constructed by U.S. federal agencies working with publicly funded universities. The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the World Wide Web were conceived by U.K. government-funded scientists.

Touch screen technology was developed in government labs in the U.S. and U.K.  GPS was developed by the U.S. military and continues to be funded by the U.S. Air Force. Lithium Ion batteries were developed by U.S. Department of Energy scientists. Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) and Thin Film Transistors (TFT) were developed in government-funded labs. So were SIRI, an artificial intelligence program, and the critical Web Search algorithm.

Steve Jobs and Apple can be credited with stylishly rounded edges on computers and iPhones. Eye-catching design and effective marketing allowed their shareholders to make billions from the socialization of research and the privatization of profits.

Future innovation in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, Mazzucato argues, is threatened by current anti-government policies. A few—wealthy capitalists—have unquestionably benefited from neo-liberal policies. Corporations have been freed to move technical and professional employment as well as jobs in manufacturing and services to places where wages are lower, where enforcement of labor and environmental regulations is lax. Meanwhile, cuts to taxes and government spending have widened disparities, aggravated market stagnation, and by reducing funds available for research are prolonging dependence on fossil fuels.

If carbon-induced global warming is to be reversed, massive sums will have to be invested. Widely coordinated action will be required to rapidly replace dependence on fossil fuels with solar, wind, tidal, wave, and geothermal power. Existing capital is locked into profits from fossil fuels; private capital cannot be expected to take the lead. Only the public can mobilize the resources required.

Where measures have been taken, public authorities have taken the initiatives. Denmark is a leader in the technology of wind power.  China has massively increased its production of wind and solar power.  Germany has installed solar panels that can produce as much electricity as 24 nuclear power plants. Wider action is blocked by corporate lobbying anti-government ideology. Denying carbon-fueled climate change is no longer credible; still so long as governments are denied the means to act, corporations and their shareholders can continue to make massive profits from fossil fuels.

Concerted public action is urgently required to develop low-cost electricity storage, to construct the smart grids and digitized energy distribution systems needed to “optimize the flexibility, performance, and efficiency” of wind and solar power.  Concerted public action is also required to rapidly reduce consumer waste and industrial and agricultural pollution.  National, regional and local governments could gain the resources needed if taxes were raised on corporations and top incomes as well as on financial transactions, wealth, and inheritance. Increasing taxes on capital would socialize some profits. Most of the costs of innovation have already been socialized.

Al Engler

 

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Top 10 reasons to hate capitalism

13 Aug
  1. Capitalist corporations suffer from a personality disorder characterized by enduring antisocial behavior, diminished empathy and remorse, and are rewarded by shareholders for acting that way. If corporations could be sent to a criminal psychologist’s office they’d be diagnosed as psychopaths and locked away forever.
  2. Capitalism encourages greed. But greed is only good for capitalists. For normal people it is anti-social and soul destroying, not to mention very bad for our communities, which rely on altruism, compassion and a generalized concern for others.
  3. Capitalism is a system of minority privilege and class rule based on the private ownership of means of livelihood. This gives a few rich people the power to buy and sell jobs, which means they can build or destroy entire communities that depend on those jobs.
  4. Capitalists praise freedom and individualism, but they destroy freedom and individualism for everyone but themselves. The vast majority of us who work for a living are daily asked to uncritically follow orders, to act as if we are machines, and limit our creativity to what profits our bosses.
  5. Capitalists denigrate cooperation and collectivism, but create mass production processes that rely on both from workers. Their system requires us to be cogs in a giant profit-making machine, but because they fear the power this gives us we are told working together for our own interests is illegitimate and bad. Thus capitalists undermine unions and other organizations that encourage workers to cooperate with each other and act collectively.
  6. Capitalism requires the largest propaganda system the world has ever known to convince us it is the only system possible. It turns people into consumers through advertising, marketing, entertainment and even so-called news. Millions around the world are employed to use their creativity to twist our feelings of love, desire, human solidarity and fairness into tools of manipulation, so that ever more profits can flow into the hands of a tiny minority.
  7. Capitalism is a system in which the principle of one dollar, one vote, dominates that of one person, one vote. Those who own the most shares (bought with their dollars) control giant corporations, many of which are more powerful than all but a few governments. Rich people also use their money to dominate the elections that are supposed to give us all one, equal vote. Under capitalism those with the most money are entitled to the most goods and services as well as the most say in directing our governments and our economy.
  8. Capitalism proclaims the virtue of naked self-interest, but self-interest without regard for morality, ecology or common sense leads to environmental degradation, destruction of indigenous communities, colonialism, war and other forms of mass destruction. Self-interest leads capitalists to seek profit absolutely everywhere, regardless of the damage done to other people and the health of the planet’s ecosystem. Self-interest leads capitalists to destroy any rival economic system or way of thinking (such as indigenous communal land use and respect for nature) that can be a barrier to their endless quest for profit.
  9. Capitalism is not a friend to democracy but ultimately its enemy. When pushed, capitalists choose capitalism over democracy. If people use democracy to weaken the power of capitalists the rich and powerful turn to various forms of fascism in order to keep their privileges.
  10. Capitalism is a cancer taking over our planet. Capitalists make profits from global warming, from destroying our oceans, from pumping ever more chemicals into the atmosphere and from patenting everything they can, including life itself. Only by getting rid of capitalism can we rescue our environment

Gary Engler

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The new Capital — a review

24 Jun

Thomas Piketty’s, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is a sensation—an economics textbook, translated from the French, that has been on the New York Times best-seller list. It is an important work. If you ignore more than one hundred pages of notes, it is still a long but easy read.

Piketty, a prominent French economist and social scientist, uses rigorous logic and reputable statistics to dismiss the mainstream claim that capitalist markets are based on individual equality, and that great wealth is a fair reward for individual contributions to general wellbeing. He shows that capitalism in its logic and observable practice actually widens disparities between the super rich and everyone else.

The title of the book conjures images of Karl Marx’s Capital. But Piketty says he is not a Marxist; he does not call for the abolition of capitalism. He is a social democrat who explicitly rejects the top-down centralized state ownership of the twentieth century USSR. He looks to a more democratic alternative, arguing that economics, which he prefers to call political economy, should refocus on how best to meet human needs. He looks to cooperatives, community ownership, and more democratic control of workplaces.

The two Capitals have distinct starting points. Marx began with the commodity. He makes the case that exchange value is determined by labor time embodied in commodities, and that the wealth and power of capital come at the expense of labor. Although Marx grumpily dismissed campaigns to abolish market exchange as utopian, his focus on the commodity convinced many of his readers that opposing capitalism meant opposing commodity exchange.

Piketty’s analysis is focused on the distribution of income and wealth. He begins with a logically indisputable proposition: when the rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of economic growth, capital increases its share of total income. He then tests this hypothesis with historical statistics. These show that national growth rates usually range from one to two percent; the return on capital is usually around five percent. Without deliberate public intervention the share of income going to capital must grow.

Piketty’s focus on income distribution is a more direct and convincing critique of capitalism. To be fair, Marx was writing in the 1860s. Credible income statistics did not become available until governments adopted income taxes to pay for World War I. Marx’s critique was necessarily more abstract, more a criticism of capitalist market theory than of capitalist practice.

Piketty, born in 1971, knows that twentieth-century attempts to replace market exchange with top-down state direction required unacceptably heavy and intrusive repression. The USSR’s disadvantages have been well documented, but capitalism is hardly the utopia of equal opportunity its supporters claim. In France, the U.K., and the U.S., the share of total income currently appropriated by capital is thirty percent. The top 0.1 percent of income earners own twenty percent of wealth. The top one percent own 40 percent. The top ten percent own 80 to 90 percent. The bottom 50 percent own a mere five percent of wealth.

Mainstream economics justifies great fortunes in a few hands by claiming these are just rewards for successful work, innovation, and merit. In fact sixty percent of great fortunes are inherited. Piketty shows that capitalism continues to be a system of patrimonial wealth. Even for those few wealthy individuals who are or were innovators, it does not take long before the income earned from their past capital exceeds the income from their work. For countries with reliable statistics, annual income from capital now accounts for thirty percent of total income. Privately-held wealth equals 600 per cent of annual national income.

Nonetheless, governments, electoral parties, and the corporate media insist that the main problem facing economies is public debt. Actually public debt in most countries ranges between thirty and seventy percent of GDP. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the governments of major capitalist countries had debts that reached 200 percent of their GDP. Past governments reduced debt by cutting public spending, by allowing inflation to rise, and by increasing taxes.

Austerity is the most damaging way to reduce public debt. Government cutbacks increase unemployment, reduce working-class income and consumer purchasing power, aggravating market stagnation. Inflation does reduce the real value of debt, but largely at the expense of the investments of middle income pensioners. The most benign way to reduce public debt is to increase taxes on great wealth and on the highest top incomes.

Piketty argues that marginal tax rates on income over $500,000 could reasonably be raised to 80 percent and that progressive inheritance taxes should be instituted or raised. In addition, he calls for an annual tax on all private wealth including real property, stocks, bonds, bank balances, and assets held abroad. This annual wealth tax could be one percent on wealth from $1 to $5million; two percent on wealth over $5 million; and 5 to 10 percent on wealth over $1 billion.

Piketty concedes that such taxes in the present political climate appear utopian and could lead to capital flight, if not coordinated among numerous countries. Still people should begin discussing such taxes. Once widely implemented by the international community, public debt could be quickly eliminated. Public spending to meet human needs and to sustain consumer markets could be increased. The tendency of capitalists to appropriate more and more income would be reversed. Democracy would be strengthened as information on private wealth become more transparent. Such taxes could also provide the public with the means to respond to climate change. Massive investments are required to move away from dependence on fossil fuels: if private capital does not take the initiative, taxes on wealth could provide the public with the revenues needed.

Al Engler

Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty, The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2014, 685 pages

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Corporate organized crime

23 Jun

“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” is one of the most famous lines in cinematic history. It is the set-up for the scene in Godfather where a big shot Hollywood producer wakes up with a bloody horse’s head in his bed.

In less than 10 words it also perfectly sums up how the rich and powerful get their way. Use of the tactic has certainly never been limited to Mafiosi.

In fact, countries possessing military might have made “offers they can’t refuse” all through history to less powerful nations or regions.

But today’s ultimate practitioners are giant corporations that dominate the world economy. The 0.1% wealthiest people on the planet use their control of these corporations to impose their will on the rest of us.

Their “offers we can’t refuse” go something like this:

“Cut pensions, chop government jobs, privatize everything you can, or we will start a run on your currency and sink your entire economy.”

“Sign this ‘free trade agreement’ or we will pull all our investments from your country and move them to places that have agreed to everything we want.”

“Cut our taxes or we will fund a political party that will.”

“Build this pipeline if you want jobs.”

“We don’t care about democracy, satisfying us is more important that satisfying the will of the majority.”

“Weaken unions, or we’ll take our money and run.”

“Ignore global warming, or we’ll make sure you regret it.”

“If we don’t like your response or you protest too much, maybe even at all, we will use the violence at our disposal, including that of the governments we own, to crush you.”

But it’s not just threats. Like Don Corleone, the corporations also have politicians, judges, journalists, academics, lobbyists, personalities and many others on their payroll to lie, obfuscate, corrupt, manipulate and who knows what else in order to get their way. Both the wise Mafia Don and the effective corporate CEO understand that power comes in many forms. The use of violence needs to be minimized. Better to save it for when there is no other way to impose your will, or it loses its effectiveness. And too much looks bad. (Witness Iraq and Afghanistan.)

But here’s the thing with both organized crime and our economic system in general. There’s always some competitor — be it a long established rival or neighbourhood punk/upstart capitalist — willing to employ whatever means necessary to steal your territory. If you get soft you risk losing everything. If your profit margins are less than your competitors their power will grow while yours stagnates.

As the movie (and its sequels) vividly shows, there can be no Mr. Nice Guy Mafia Don. The logic of organized crime makes it impossible. To be successful — to survive — lying, cheating, bribing and ultimately violence is necessary.

The same is true of our wider economic system. While violence is usually confined to governments that the corporations control, in both worlds hands get dirty doing whatever it takes to succeed because the system demands it.

This is why environmentalists who look for capitalist solutions to global warming are either extremely naïve or in the pay of corporations. This is why union leaders who fail to see the fundamental contradiction between workers’ and capitalists’ interests often sell out to the bosses. This is why in the long run there can be no capitalism with a human face.

If the 0.1% who own and control most of our economy want to keep their power they will act as capitalists have always acted. They will grab as much profit for themselves as they can and pass the environmental costs onto the rest of us while doing so. They will try to reduce wages to increase their profits. They will manipulate democracy to get their way. They will attempt to overthrow democracy if it threatens their existence. They have no choice. Greed, self-interest and a relentless drive to increase profits are the foundations upon which the capitalist economic system is built.

Only when the vast majority of us, the 90% who work for a living, come together to use our collective power to create a new democratic economic system will anything change.

Only greater power can overcome the might of the Mafia Don or the corporate CEO: The power of the people who actually do all the work that makes up our economy.

Gary Engler

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Piketty’s book important, but should go one step further

2 Jun

Is Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century a left-wing book?

Yes and no. It depends on how you define left wing.

If you believe the litmus test of being “left” is opposition to capitalism then the book may be interesting and important, but it is not left wing. If, on the other hand, you believe capitalism is a dynamic economic system worth preserving, but in need of a tune-up, you would likely have a different answer. In the range of political/economic opinion allowed in the corporate North American media the book is certainly at the left end of the spectrum.

But perhaps there is another more important question to consider. Is the book useful, including to those who think an alternative to capitalism is both desirable and necessary? And the answer is an unequivocal yes.

Strangely, it’s not primarily for the reason you may think, if all you know about the work is what you have read or heard in the mainstream media.

While most of the commentary has been about the book’s take on inequality and the author’s prescription (a tax on capital) for controlling the problem, the really unique and useful aspects of Piketty’s work are his insistence on what might be called “reality-based” economics and his straightforward, easy-to-read language.

Unlike the obscurant writing and “fairy-tale” premises that typify most works of economics, Piketty bases his arguments in actual data and sets out to explain them in a style that is accessible to a broad range of readers.

Imagine that! Economics for everyone, including those of us who insist that theories should be tested in the real world! Refreshing, almost scientific.

If Piketty can do it we should hold all economists to these standards. Imagine no more theories of perfect competition where all buyers know everything about all sellers, but instead explanations of what really happens when individuals suffering from a lifetime of brainwashing come up against the might of multinational corporations. Imagine economics that explained the world as lived by ordinary people in a fashion that most of us can understand.

This threat of a good example explains much of the “emperor does so have clothes” reaction of orthodox academic economists and their fellow travellers in the business press to Piketty’s book. Then you add in the overwhelming evidence presented in Capital that inequality does exist, has grown over the past three decades of neoliberal reform, and is likely to grow much greater  — and yes sir those apostles of greed sure are angry.

So, the book is important and you should read it, but … let’s just say one should be aware of its limitations.

Contrary to what you might assume based on the attacks from certain quarters, the author does not advocate socialism — unless you believe socialism can be defined as simply trying to be nice to everyone and sometimes using the government to override the power that capitalism gives rich people.

Piketty is firmly in the camp of those who would save capitalism from itself. While he does argue too much inequality is bad because it threatens democracy and leads to revolution, or at least economic nationalism, there is no question he supports the system. He frequently and explicitly praises capitalism as the best economic system because it produces the most growth. There is no mention of an environmental crisis and its link to inequality and an economic system that values greed above all else until the very end, almost as an afterthought. He does not deal with environmental limits to growth.

Still, the book provides all sorts of useful information about the last 200 years of actually existing capitalism. Its offers a glimpse of what the study of economics should be. Piketty seems to be on the side of ordinary people and even makes mention of economic democracy.

Go and buy Capital in the 21st Century from your local bookstore, but read it with this thought in mind: Rather than tinkering with capitalism, can’t we come up with a better system? One that democratizes economic decision making while rescuing our environment from the ravages of unchecked greed, also known as the fallacy of unlimited growth?

Gary Engler

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An impertinent question

21 May

Do people exist to serve the economy or does the economy exist to serve people?

This question came to me as the left side of my brain was reading Thomas Piketty’s important new book Capital in the 21st Century while the right side of my brain watched the news.

There was an item about the B.C. government chopping money from university arts’ programs to fund apprenticeships because it would produce more taxpayers, which would be good for the economy, followed by a commercial touting the Northern Gateway pipeline, which also would be good the economy. As my right brain soaked in the TV images my left brain was digesting statistics that demonstrated conclusively most wealth is owned by a few people and this inequality is growing.

Do people exist to serve the economy or does the economy exist to serve people?

When the two sides of my brain began acting together I realized this is not merely a rhetorical question. Rather, even raising the issue is subversive, or at least impertinent to those who maintain the status quo.

At its most basic level the economy is the sum total of the things people do to provide themselves food, shelter and other things that enhance life, such as recreation, healthcare, entertainment and art. So, the answer to our question should be clear-cut: The point of an economy is to serve people.

But the reality for most of us is exactly the opposite.

We are told the economy demands this or that as if it were some sort of primitive deity to be appeased.

Raising the minimum wage is bad for the economy. Expanding the tar sands and building pipelines to ship bitumen around the world is good. Public daycare or increased pensions are not affordable. Mass layoffs and wage rollbacks are necessary. But consume anyways (the more disposable the better), because that’s what makes the economy go round and round.

Politicians, corporate executives and the media all send us the message that our lives only attain meaning in so far as we contribute to the economy as consumers or taxpayers.

Rather than serving us, “the economy” has become an excuse to treat many people badly, to create unhealthy products, to damage our environment, to justify exploitation, to steal from other people and even to wage war.

Why?

The primary reason is that too much of the economy is run by and for a small minority of people. As Picketty’s statistics show, actual existing capitalism (as opposed to the phoney idealized system taught in school) concentrates ownership of wealth in the hands of a few people. This wealth produces both income and power, so much of which has gone to the richest 1% that any effective democracy is threatened.

Many of us feel powerless in the face of this inequality. Our unions have been undermined and delegitimized. The system tells us our only valid participation in the economy is as consumers, but getting to choose between Coke and Pepsi hardly inspires a sense of engagement.

We certainly get no vote in directing the economy, unless we are shareholders, and in that realm decisions are made by one-dollar-one vote, so billionaires hold sway. Moreover, for at least the past 30 years, the prevailing wisdom has been that governments are incompetent and therefore must keep their hands off the economy. We are told any sort of democratic control is bad because it creates distortions in the natural working of the system, as if there was some divine order that was being interfered with.

But it is not god’s will that is being challenged when democratic control is asserted. Rather it is the will of the 1% who currently own a vast proportion of the economy and direct it (and us) in their self-interest. There are no mysterious natural forces deciding what gets built, what gets shut down, who loses their jobs, how much to invest in green energy versus the tar sands; there are only very wealthy people and the managers who work for them.

Given that, it is really no surprise that the economy seldom serves the interests of the majority — it serves other masters. The economy follows the orders of the people who own it. And it gives the biggest rewards to the ones among them who are the greediest, the most willing to grab huge profits for themselves while making the rest of us pay for the pollution, ill health and other forms of destruction their industry causes. Then they spend some of those vast profits to buy politicians, think tanks and media pundits who work to convince us that this form of minority rule is good for us — the natural order — and trying to create a better system is hopeless.

But what if, despite all that, we demanded an economy that served all of us? What would we do?

Piketty argues for a tax on wealth and that might be a good starting point, but if we really want to fix this we must go further. When the problem is too much power in the hands of a few the obvious solution is to distribute that power more widely.

We should take away control of the economy from the greedy minority and share it amongst all of us. A good name for such a system is economic democracy.

The exact form such a system might take would probably depend on a country’s history, culture and level of development. But essential elements would be: one-person-one-vote instead of one-dollar-one-vote decision making in all aspects of the economy; workplace democracy instead of master-servant relations and community control instead of corporate control.

If we want an economy that serves all people we must create a system of democratic governance to ensure that happens.

 Gary Engler

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Global warming is caused by capitalist greed

30 Apr

Humans have caused climate change by pumping ever more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and we must quickly cut these emissions.

True, but what has this got to do with unions?

Well, at their core unions are organizations that bring people together to fight for the common good. This essential truth is reflected in the structure, philosophy and history of most unions.

But exactly whose “common good” a union is fighting for can vary widely.

Is it narrowly defined as immediate job interests of local union members? Is it the common good of all those working in a particular trade? All union members in one industry?

Or is it more widely defined as the common good of every union member? Every worker in a particular country? Of all Canadians? All the workers of the world? Every person in the world? Or even wider as the common good of all life on the planet?

The truth is every thoughtful union member, and especially every union leader, must consider the common good from many different perspectives. Everyone has more than one self-interest and therefore more than one common good.

No one is solely a pipefitter, nurse, front desk clerk; or employee of General Motors; we are also children, parents, residents of a city or town, citizens of a country, inhabitants of a planet who are dependent on a common environment, and much more besides.

But unions often find it easiest to fight for the narrowest common good, the immediate self-interest of workers in a particular trade, industry, or company. Higher pay, improved benefits, better job security — members almost always cheer if a union achieves these things. Fighting for all life on the planet or against inequality is a bit more complicated.

But there is another reason as well why unions find it easiest to fight for the narrowest common good. “Looking after No. 1” is what capitalism tells people to do. You are a consumer. Buying more is what life is all about.

In fact, proponents of capitalism argue there is no such thing as the common good, that we are all simply individual consumers and therefore unions are an illegitimate intrusion into the free market. Still, if workers are going to unite for any purpose it had better be limited to stuff like higher pay, something that allows people to buy more and does not challenge capitalism.

So, here’s the reality we face: In so far as a union, its leadership and members have bought into capitalism, the greater the likelihood that union will choose to focus on a very narrow self-interest and ignore such issues as climate change or inequality. Some unions do buy into capitalism despite the fact it does not like workers joining together to fight for any common good, whether narrowly or broadly defined. If it were up to capitalists there would be no unions at all. Capitalists — the bosses — are not our friends. The more people buy into their system the weaker unions are.

And the opposite is also true. The more people come together to fight for the common good, the stronger unions are. The more unions fight for the widest common good, the more people will be on our side and the stronger unions will be. The more unions fight the existing system the stronger unions are.

History shows that the periods of greatest growth in unions were times when capitalism faced widespread challenges and the periods when unions have shrunk, like during the past 20 years, were times when opposition to capitalism was weak.

History also shows that unions have been willing to fight for the widest common good despite opposition from the rich and powerful. Unions were part of the struggle to end slavery and child labour; unions helped win universal voting rights, public education, equal rights, Old Age Pensions, Medicare, the 40-hour work week, paid vacations and numerous other social programs that have benefited society as a whole.

It won’t be easy to stop global warming. Many brothers and sisters earn their living extracting oil, building private automobiles and mining coal, industries that must shrink or disappear to save our planet. Of course this raises difficulties inside the labour movement because it pits narrow self-interest against the wider common good.

But progressive unions were not deterred by similar internal problems in the struggle for civil rights or against sexism and homophobia. As in those battles we must do what is necessary and right. We must demand jobs that do not harm the environment. We must not shy away from battling climate change because there is no more important common good than the health of our environment. We must learn from and work with environmentalists.

But environmental activists must also learn an important lesson from the long history of the labour movement: Capitalism is the problem and certainly not the solution.

The capitalist drive to maximize profits explains the externalizing of environmental costs. Capitalism is a system of small minorities profiting at the expense of others. Private ownership of what are social means of livelihood allows capitalists to make decisions that pass the real costs of industry to communities, workers, future generations and other species.

Capitalism requires growth. But what happens when the environment needs a smaller human footprint? When, at least in wealthier countries, we must learn to live with less stuff?

If a capitalist economy shrinks for a sustained period the system goes into a crisis. Banks crash, unemployment rises and wars suddenly make sense to rich people in order to get their system growing again.

Supporters of capitalism claim the system is based on freedom and choice, but when it comes to the environment for many people this amounts to the freedom to choose between destroying the planet or having a job. The promoters of tar sands, fracking, coal mining and pipelines are explicit about this. The business pages are full of stories quoting the captains of the carbon-industrial complex as telling us: “You must choose between economic prosperity and what is good for the environment, because you can’t have both.”

With capitalism they are correct.

Yet someenvironmentalists, as well as some union members, look to capitalism for solutions. That’s like expecting Toronto Mayor Rob Ford to tell the truth. A sustainable, democratic economy is incompatible with a system run in the interests of a tiny minority that constantly demands more profit.

Science leaves little reasonable doubt that the burning of currently known reserves of coal, oil and natural gas will push atmospheric carbon dioxide levels past a tipping point, after which rising global temperatures will irreversibly undermine the conditions on which human life as we know it depends.

Despite the evidence, today’s capitalism rests on the expansion of fossil fuel production and use.

In Canada capitalist investment is focused on expanding tar sands production. The promoters claim that these developments will create jobs. But every analysis shows more jobs would be produced if equivalent investments were made in solar, wind and geothermal power. Far more jobs could be produced by investing in domestic employment for domestic markets, in the production and distribution of sustainable local agriculture, clothing, etc. Even more jobs would be created by investments in childcare, elder care, social housing, public transit and other green infrastructure.

More jobs but less profit. Capitalists invest in fossil fuels because corporate profits now largely depend on cheap fuel. Equivalent profits cannot be made meeting actual human needs.

So, unions and environmentalists share a common enemy: an economic system run by and for the wealthiest people in the world.

Together we can fight for a different sort of economic system that will prosper in harmony with the environment. Or apart we can fiddle with capitalism as our planet burns.

Gary Engler

From a speech given on the weekend at the Peoples’ Social Forum Assembly on Climate and Oil & Gas in B.C.

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Rebuilding the commons through economic democracy

5 Apr

Who runs your workplace?

For most of us the answer is a boss, who reports to a higher boss, who reports to an even higher boss, who reports to a … all the way up to the “owner” of the enterprise. This is called a chain of command.

The words “chain” and “command” are both suggestive of a fundamental truth: Today’s rules about the power of bosses and workers evolved from a time of masters, servants and slaves. While many norms and expectations have changed over the years the fundamental truth that bosses give orders and workers are required to obey remains the same.

This explains the use of the term “wage slavery” by some who oppose capitalism. It suggests that working for wages is similar to being a slave. The Wikipedia entry on wage slavery offers a good introduction to the subject, pointing out the concept is much older than capitalism and that even ancient Romans argued accepting wages for work put one into a slave-like position. The idea that giving up your free will for any reason or length of time makes you a slave is as old as wage work itself.

Interestingly, the usage of the term wage slavery has diminished as a greater and greater proportion of us work for wages. The notion that most of us are effectively slaves is probably too uncomfortable to contemplate. And, of course, not talking about this serves the interests of those who profit from our labour.

But I’d like to suggest there’s another reason as well.

As more and more of us work for wages it becomes more and more normal and we lose the sense of an alternative. I was reminded of this while reading Peter Linebaugh’s stimulating new book Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, a series of 15 essays “written against enclosure, the process of privatization, closing off, and fencing in.”

Contrary to the mythology of a modern, progressive and democratic capitalism replacing backward feudalism, most ordinary people had more say in their day-to-day work life before our current economic system came along. In fact, the rights and privileges of “commoners” (the majority of people, whose independent livelihood depended on the shared commons) were destroyed as part of capitalist expansion. To this day, everywhere capitalism goesthe rights and privileges of indigenous people disappear as the commons are enclosed (become private property) so that rich people can steal their profits.

When commons were common, through tens of thousands of years, people mostly developed technology and systems of usage that respected the land, ocean, river, forest, grassland and creatures that lived there. They did this because it was in their collective self-interest to do so. This was reflected in their religions and how their societies were organized, including the ways people thought of themselves.

Mutual respect, independence, collective responsibility, reciprocity, community and what we would now call a sense of ecology were encouraged because all served a society that held its resources in common.

As Linebaugh points out in Stop Thief, 200 years ago poets bemoaned the loss of these values as well as the ugliness created when capitalism enclosed the land and resources that people depended on for their livelihood. Capitalism waged war on the rights, privileges and ideology of commoners. Enclosure of the rest of the world (colonialism) was the logical next step. That war has continued ever since, with today’s military interventions, as well as the mass marketing of never-ending consumption and individualism just the latest in a long line of assaults.

But this is not just interesting history. People who work for wages today can learn important lessons from those who resisted, and continue to resist,the enclosure of the commons.

We should learn that:

  • Every enclosure of the commons is an assault on the environment. The point of capitalism is to exploit nature and other human beings for private profit.
  • Our strength is always collective; it flows from the commons. As individuals we are weak and defeated.
  • We must insist that everywhere people work together be transformed into a commons. The factories, the shops, the distribution systems, all the places of our employment — the entire means of production — are a commons enclosed by capitalists in order to profit at our expense.
  • To create an environmentally sustainable, healthy, nurturing economy requires we no longer accept being wage slaves. We must take responsibility for what we do. We must understand that our world is a commons, not private property, and begin to act collectively to protect the resources that belong to all of us.
  • We must re-learn the values of mutual respect, independence, collective responsibility, reciprocity, community and living in harmony with the environment that were once the hallmarks of commoners.

During most moments of sudden, great change in human history people have been motivated by rights that were lost, insisting they be restored.

To accomplish the great change necessary today let us demand that which requires social labour be recognized for what it is, the common property of all. Let us rebuild the ways of thinking, the social relations, as well as the rights and responsibilities that were lost when our commons were enclosed.

The term that best describes what we would be fighting for is economic democracy. The commons was always an economic democracy.

The term also helps explain a key flaw in our current so-called democracy — power flows from control of the economy, which is “owned” by a tiny minority.

The most successful social movements in the past two centuries have all pushed for an expansion of democracy. The fight for economic democracy would be a continuation of these movements.

Let’s build an economic democracy to rebuild the commons!

Gary Engler

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Understanding the intellectual whores of capitalism

28 Mar

There’s nothing worse than ignorant and opinionated.

You know the type: Most mainstream newspapers have at least one; they dominate radio talk shows and certain TV “news” networks.

Loud supporters of the existing economic system who deny inequality is a problem or even claim it doesn’t exist.

Business leaders/columnists/celebrities/media hacks and the “think tanks” they come from who also deny climate change is a problem or even claim it doesn’t exist.

Apostles of greed who claim to be “conservative”, defend chemical-laden, genetics-manipulating industrial food production, ignore all the ways corporations poison our environment, ridicule anyone who points out there must be some limit to the exploitation of the earth’s resources, promote the use of private automobiles, hobble public transportation (and every other public good) by promoting tax cuts, love pipelines and usually claim to speak on behalf of the “middle class” or even the “little guy.”

How should we respond to these defenders of the status quo who frequently pretend to rail against a mythical left-wing media agenda?

Argue with them? Quietly loathe them? Ridicule them? Ignore them?

I’d like to make the case for understanding and pity as the most appropriate reactions.

First, to understand them we must examine the role they play, the first step of which is to recognize whose interests they represent, which is another way of asking: Who would pay them to say/write the things they do?

The answer is, of course, the people who profit most from pipelines, tax cuts, unlimited growth, a private automobile dominated landscape, industrial food production, chemicals poisoning the environment, pipelines, global warming and an acceptance of income inequality.

But why would the billionaires and mere multi-millionaires whose fortunes depend on the continued flow of profits from oil, agribusiness, automobiles, chemical, real estate, media and capitalism in general think it worth their while to handsomely reward thousands of cheerleaders who endlessly repeat a few shallow ideas on the sidelines of capitalism?

Because it is necessary. The wealthy 0.01% minority who rule over the 90% majority understands that the future of their system depends on convincing or paying off 9.99% of the population who become the opinion leaders, the managers, the foremen, the supervisors, the small businessmen and the other shock troops of the system. The rich are like the pathetic men who frequent red-light districts — they must pay for it — and the right wing columnists/celebrities/media hacks/researchers do it for money, often working in the political equivalent of brothels, called think tanks.

The choices offered young writers, journalists and academics who aspire to earn a decent living at their craft are not great today. There are many more opportunities to voice opinions supporting the system than to criticize it. If you do get a job in a shrinking newsroom or social science department the best way to get ahead is always to support the existing power structure, not oppose it. Arguing in favour of the rich and powerful certainly pays better.

And in a time when the Left seldom confronts capitalism, confining its criticisms to tinkering around the edges, rather than offering a vision of an alternative system, should it be a surprise that the easiest route to intellectual success is selling out to the highest bidder?

Media whores are not that much different than the women and a few men who earn a living from selling their bodies. (And I do apologize to every sex-trade worker who is offended by the comparison to Rush Limbaugh.) They too are just trying to survive; they are typically people who don’t have many alternatives; they are often victims of abuse by a system that penalizes intellectual non-conformity (amazing the number of conservative pundits who claim a left-wing background); the ones who do really well at it typically claim they actually enjoy it.

Given the similarities between these two forms prostitution doesn’t it make sense that we respond to both the same way?

We don’t hate streetwalkers or harangue them; we mostly pity them because of our understanding that they are products of sexism and other forms of oppression.

So too should we pity the sycophants of the rich and powerful because we understand they are nothing more than the intellectual prostitutes of an economic system that attempts to buy, sell and profit from everything we do.

Gary Engler

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Sustainability and capitalism: Can we have it all?

30 Jan

From a speech given at the One World Week Forum at the University of Warwick on January 30, 2014.

Can capitalism solve the problems of global warming and growing inequality?

It seems to me this is like discussing the issue of inappropriate hyper-sexual imagery bombarding 11-year olds and then asking: Can Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga fix the problem?

Real capitalism, not the theoretical version taught in school, is a system of minority rule in which a few people profit at the expense of others.

Real capitalists are always trying to cut their costs and increase their profits, which leads to unemployment, falling wages, rising economic disparity and not paying for the environmental damage they cause.

Private ownership of what are social means of livelihood produces incentives for capitalists to pass along the real costs of industry to communities, workers, future generations and other species.

Private ownership makes growing inequality inevitable. A system can proclaim itself democratic, but if a minority holds most of the economic, and therefore social and political power, that minority will inevitably reward itself, its power will grow and ever-expanding inequality will be the result.

Capitalism is sociopathic. Its ideologues, like the late Margaret Thatcher, reject the social, claiming only individuals exist. Yet capitalism has driven individual producers to the fringes of economies. Most people, ninety per cent in the U.K., depend on wages or salary, working with others in cooperative, coordinated labour — social labour, but directed by wealthy minorities for their own profit.

Capitalism promotes greed. It boasts of this. So why would we be surprised when a small minority with most of the power looks after itself, in effect telling the rest of us: “Screw you and the planet you live on! We don’t care about global warming because we have the money to buy a nice place regardless of how high the oceans rise.”

Capitalism requires constant growth to satisfy its need for more profit. But what happens when the environment needs a smaller human footprint? When, at least in wealthier countries, we must learn to live with less stuff?

History shows capitalism reacts badly to declining markets. When the economy shrinks for a sustained period the system goes into crisis. Banks crash, unemployment grows and capitalists often turn to war to get their profits rising again.

The truth is a sustainable economy is incompatible with a system that constantly demands more profit.

To quote the greatest living English political philosopher, Russell Brand: “I know what the fucking system shouldn’t do. It shouldn’t destroy the planet and shouldn’t create massive economic disparity.”

Like Russell we know what we don’t like. That’s the easy part. But how can we get rid of capitalism and what is the alternative?

To answer we must go back to the issue of power and how to distribute it in a way that promotes the common good, a key element of which is a healthy environment. The best way is through more democracy. REAL democracy. Economic democracy.

Do you want an equitable, sustainable economy? Then help overthrow capitalism and create an economic democracy.

What exactly does this mean?

Let me give you an example: With the one pound one vote system that governs corporate capitalism, Richard Branson, with a net worth of 3.5 billion pounds get 3.5 billion votes. In comparison you (pointing) get 147 and you get 58. Most of you poor buggers owe more than you own so you get no votes at all. Economic democracy means giving everyone the right to a voice and an equal vote in their communities’ economic decisions. When everyone has an equal right in decision-making, economies will be motivated by general wellbeing, not private profit. Economic democracy means eliminating the divide between workers and owners by making everyone an owner. Economic democracy means multiple owning communities  — local, regional, national, international — so that power does not become concentrated in the hands of a single central state. It means that wherever social labour occurs a system of democracy manages the enterprise.

Imagine companies that are democratically run by workers together with a local, regional, national or international government, whichever is appropriate to that enterprise; companies whose mandate it is to promote the common good, rather than the narrow self-interest of rich shareholders; companies that no longer have incentives to destroy the planet, but rather face real penalties for harming the environment.

Now, I know what at least some of you are thinking. This is not realistic. Your ideas are just pie in the sky. But the truth is capitalism has already created what one might call “objective conditions” that do indeed make economic democracy possible. Most people in most countries already depend on social labor. Most of you, if you find paid employment, will be salaried or wage workers. If we choose to fight for it, we can expand one-person, one-vote decision-making into every area where people work collectively, which is most of our economy. If we elect governments committed to it we could pass laws that limit private property to what is truly private and doesn’t give an individual power over others. We could create a system of social ownership with multiple democratic owning communities.

If we accomplish these three things — replacing corporate ownership with social ownership, replacing capitalist entitlement with equal human entitlement and replacing master-servant relations with workplace democracy — the system that drives enterprises to maximize profits, regardless of the consequences, would no longer exist.

Capitalism and sustainability, can you have it all? No. But there is a much better alternative: Economic democracy, a system that will offer authentic jobs, a nourishing work-life balance, your fair share of power and a healthy environment. This sounds like the essentials of a good life to me.

Gary Engler

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Capitalism uses unemployment to keep workers in line

1 Jan

A just society should provide everyone with access to a job yet nearly 2 million Canadians can’t find work.

Officially 6.9 per cent of the Canadian workforce is unemployed. But this number rises to 10.3 per cent when those who’ve given up searching for work are included. Counting “discouraged workers”, about 1.8 million Canadians can’t find a job.

Looked at from a different perspective, StatsCan announced last week that there were six job-seekers for every job available in September. Counting “discouraged workers” that number increases 50 percent.

Incredibly, some consider Canada’s unemployment rate a success. In his October throne speech Stephen Harper misleadingly declared that “Canada now has the best job creation record in the G-7 — one million net new jobs since the depths of the recession.”

This isn’t simply self-promotional rhetoric. Policy moves suggest the government is little concerned by the large number of Canadians out of work. Over the past two years they’ve curtailed Employment Insurance benefits, increased the age at which people can receive Old Age Assistance and slashed public-sector employment.

While the government would never say as much publicly, some among the corporate-funded think tanks argue that having over 1 in 10 Canadian workers out of a job is actually too few. “Canada’s unemployment rate dangerously low” was the title of an April Financial Post article by Philip Cross, Research Coordinator for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Hostility to anything approaching full employment reflects the growth of neoconservative policies. Over the last three decades the idea that everyone should have access to a job has largely disappeared from political discourse. But it used to be fairly common.

In the 1963 election Liberal leader Lester Pearson ran on a “Sixty days of decision” platform that included a pledge of full employment and during his time as Prime Minister Canada’s official unemployment rate dropped below 3%. Similarly, the UN’s International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which was adopted in 1966 and signed by Canada in 1976, called for the right to employment. It recognizes that “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.”

Instead of focusing on peoples’ right to employment, policymakers today emphasize property rights. In effect, this has meant extending patents, easing safety/environmental regulations on corporations and enabling investors to move to low-wage jurisdictions.

While these policies certainly benefit some, few of us gain our income from owning property. The vast majority of Canadians are wageworkers, their dependents or retired wageworkers. And without a job it’s difficult to get by.

But a job is not only about paying the bills. What one does is generally an important part of a person’s identity and most people want to feel like they are contributing to society. Persistent unemployment can be psychologically damaging for individuals.

It’s also socially damaging. Mass unemployment is a waste of peoples’ energy and ingenuity. Imagine what the 1.8 million Canadians out of work could accomplish if they were mobilized to develop green energy sources or to expand mass transit and childcare services.

But how do we mobilize all this latent human energy. One socially useful way to stimulate employment would be to have the government significantly expand its role in mass transit and childcare. Another would be to push Corporate Canada, which is sitting on over $575 billion in cash, to invest in renewable energy.

It’s time to rekindle the idea that all adults have the right to a job. There are 1.8 million Canadians waiting to better contribute to their society.

Yves Engler

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Workers and their unions must fight climate change

24 Dec

For those of us in the labour movement, tis the season to ponder what good our unions can do in the upcoming year and to renew our commitment to a key principle: What we desire for ourselves we wish for all.

At this time of year, while many of us focus on gifts, it is easy to desire the latest gadget, that new car or even a remodelled bathroom. But, most of us would agree, in the grand scheme of human priorities, certain fundamentals are more important than simply acquiring more things.

For example, decent housing, nutritious food, public education, a safe and loving atmosphere to nurture every child and access to quality healthcare would all be understood by most union members as essential, rather than as simply “stuff” that would be nice to possess. In other words, when we come together in a union we acknowledge certain basic social priorities. Thus the first unions fought for a living wage, the eight-hour day, public schools, pensions etc., not simply more money. Without the basics of life, being able to buy more things is meaningless.

And that’s how we need to think about our environment and especially global warming.

There is nothing more important than a healthy environment. Without that, all the other fundamentals — food, housing, education, family, leisure, pensions etc. — are at risk. If human activity, in the pursuit of accumulating more stuff, destroys the liveability of our planet, we will have done a great wrong to all creatures, including ourselves.

And the best evidence we have is as categorical as science gets. Humans have caused climate change by pumping ever more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and we must quickly cut these emissions.

Here’s how one leading climate change expert put it earlier this month:

“We need a radical plan for cutting emissions to avoid the radical repercussions of climate change,” said professor Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre, based at the University of Manchester in England. “To do this, industrial countries have to cut energy use by around 8-10% each year or 60-70% over the decade, and we have to start now.

“Low-carbon supply and incremental reductions are no longer sufficient to avoid dangerous climate change. We have to have early, rapid and deep reductions in emissions and this can only be achieved in the short term through reductions in energy use.”

Will corporations that dominate the world economy provide us with the “rapid and deep reductions in emissions” that scientists tell us must happen soon to avoid environmental catastrophe? No.

Rather than cutting back on emissions we see corporations invest billions in the tar sands, fracking, offshore drilling and digging up more coal, because all are profitable.

Our current economic system requires ever expanding profit. As a result, if corporations were people they would be diagnosed as psychopaths. They are ruthless in the single-minded pursuit of profit. Psychopaths feel no empathy for their victims. They do not care if the consequences of their actions could soon be the overheating of our planet to the degree that our grandchildren no longer have a habitable environment.

So who will fight to protect our planet?

For 175 years unions have fought for justice, democracy and to make life better for all. We helped end child labour and slavery. We fought for universal franchise and equal rights for all. These battles required enormous sacrifices to overcome opposition of the rich and powerful.

Sacrifices will be necessary as well to stop global warming. Many brothers and sisters earn their living extracting oil, building cars and mining coal, industries that must shrink or disappear to save our planet. This raises difficulties inside the labour movement.

But progressive unions were not deterred by similar contradictions in the struggle for civil rights or against sexism and homophobia. Similarly we must not shy away from battling climate change.

Unions must defend our common interests. There is no more important common interest than the health of our environment.

Gary Engler

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Canada serves corporate interests around the world

22 Dec

Should the primary purpose of Canadian foreign policy be the promotion of corporate interests?

Canada’s business class certainly seems to think so. And with little political or ideological opposition to this naked self-interest, Harper’s Conservatives seem only too happy to put the full weight of government behind the promotion of private profits.

Recently, the Conservatives announced that “economic diplomacy” will be “the driving force behind the Government of Canada’s activities through its international diplomatic network.” According to their Global Markets Action Plan (GMAP), “All diplomatic assets of the Government of Canada will be marshalled on behalf of the private sector to increase success in doing business abroad.”

The release of GMAP is a crass confirmation of the Conservatives’ pro-corporate foreign policy. In recent years the Conservatives’ have spent tens of millions of dollars to lobby US and European officials on behalf of tar sands interests; expanded arms sales to Middle East monarchies and other leading human rights abusers; strengthened the ties between aid policy and a Canadian mining industry responsible for innumerable abuses.

While some commentators have suggested that GMAP is a “modern” response to China’s international policy, it actually represents a return to a time many consider the high point of unfettered capitalism. Often in the late 1800s wealthy individuals not employed by Ottawa conducted Canadian diplomacy. The owner of the Toronto Globe, George Brown, for instance, negotiated a draft treaty with the U.S. in 1874, while Sandford Fleming, the surveyor of the Canadian Pacific Railway, represented Canada at the 1887 Colonial Conference in London.

From its inception the Canadian foreign service reflected a bias towards economic concerns. There were trade commissioners, for instance, long before ambassadors. By 1907 there were 12 Canadian trade commissions staffed by “commercial agents” located in Sydney, Capetown, Mexico City, Yokohama and numerous European and U.S. cities.

Despite this historic precedent, in the 21st century it should be controversial for a government to openly state that economic considerations drive international policy. Yet criticism of GMAP has been fairly muted, which may reflect how many progressives feel overwhelmed by the Conservatives right-wing aggressiveness in every policy area.

Or perhaps there’s a more fundamental explanation. The mainstream political/media establishment basically agrees with the idea that corporate interests should dominate foreign policy.

In response to GMAP, Postmedia ran a debate between John Manley, head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and a member of the advisory panel that helped draw up the Conservatives’ plan, and former foreign minister and leading proponent of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, Lloyd Axworthy. While Manley lauded the Conservatives’ move, Axworthy criticized it as “bad trade policy. The best way to enlarge your trade prospects and to develop a willingness for agreements and to improve economic exchange is to have a number of contacts to show other countries that you are a willing and co-operative player on matters of security, on matters of human rights, and on matters of development.”

Axworthy did not express principled criticism of the Conservatives’ move; he simply said that “trade prospects” — a euphemism for corporate interests — are best advanced through a multifaceted foreign-policy. Widely lauded by the liberal intelligentsia, Axworthy reflects the critical end of the dominant discussion, which largely takes its cues from the corporate class. And Canada’s business class is more internationally focused than any other G8 country.

Heavily dependent on “free trade” Canadian companies are also major global investors. The world’s largest privately owned security company, GardaWorld, has 45,000 employees operating across the globe while another Montréal-based company, SNC Lavalin, has engineering projects in 100 countries. Corporate Canada’s most powerful sector is also a global force. The big five banks, which all rank among the top 65 in the world, now do a majority of their business outside of this country. Scotiabank, for example, operates in 50 countries.

The mining sector provides the best example of Canadian capital’s international prominence. Three quarters of the world’s mining companies are based in Canada or listed on Canadian stock exchanges. Present in almost every country, Canadian corporations operate thousands of mineral projects abroad.

With $711.6 billion in foreign direct investments last year, Canadian companies push for (and benefit from) Ottawa’s diplomatic, aid and military support. As their international footprint has grown, they’ve put ever more pressure on the government to serve their interests. There is simply no countervailing force calling on the government to advance international climate negotiations, arms control measures or to place constraints on mining companies.

There’s also limited ideological opposition to neoliberalism. Few in Canada promote any alternative to capitalism. Until unions, social groups and activists put forward an alternative economic and social vision it’s hard to imagine that Canadian foreign policy will do much more than promote private corporate interests.

Yves Engler

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Remaking Mexico’s oil industry on behalf of the 0.1%

16 Dec

MEXICO CITY  — Are we living in a time when ordinary people have forgotten their history, when all those who fail to remember the past will be condemned to relive its harsh reality?

I thought of this as two Canadian tourists marched with thousands along the Paseo de la Reforma last week to demonstrate opposition to the energy “reform” bill being debated by Mexican legislators. The new law would allow foreign oil giants into the country for the first time in 75 years.

Certainly the people who had come from every corner of the country to form a human chain around the Mexican Senate and Chamber of Deputies were well aware of history and cited it on their signs, in their chants, speeches and songs that began in the early morning and continued until late at night. (The noise, traffic jams and thousands of riot police were scaring off tourists and locals alike.) For the students and others banging on the metal barricades surrounding government buildings changing the constitution to allow foreign multinational companies to exploit the country’s oil and natural gas resources is a return to the bad old pre-1930s era when Mexico’s government exercised less real power than the foreign corporations that controlled its vital energy sector. Posters taped to the barricades harkened to history. One read: “The Spanish came to steal the yellow gold for trinkets. The gringos are coming for the black gold … Are you going to stay silent?”

In fact, the 1938 expropriation of the world’s second largest oil industry, which was the first nationalization by a capitalist country, and the creation of government-owned Pemex are celebrated throughout Mexico and their significance in transforming the country is taught in schools.  Kids learn how oil profits that once went to foreign investors remained in the country to build schools, roads and provide social services. The moderately leftish president, Lázaro Cárdenas, who confronted and defeated the British and American oil giants of the day, is honoured with streets, parks, schools and other buildings named after him and is generally considered one of the founders of modern Mexico.

Ironically it is the party that Cardenas was instrumental in creating, the ruling PRI, together with the more overtly right-wing PAN, that over rode the constitution with a two-thirds vote in both the Senate (95-28 on Tuesday) and lower house (353-134 on Thursday). All that is left for the bill to become law is approval by 17 of the 31 state legislatures, most of which are controlled by the PRI and PAN.

Given the statues and school curriculum, it is difficult to argue that ordinary Mexicans are unaware of the history of their country’s oil industry and the excellent reasons to retain “the peoples” ownership of this vital resource. Indeed, a survey published in June, before the legislation was introduced, showed 65 percent of Mexicans opposed foreign investment in the oil industry. Most clearly believe that the oil belongs to the people and profits should be invested in the country’s future rather than fatten the bottom line of ExxonMobil, Shell, BP or Chevron.

In reality the problem confronting Mexico is not the lack of historical memory. It is the lack of real democracy. It is the power of the ruling class, both international and Mexican, to get their way. The people who will benefit from an influx of foreign capital and a reintroduction of “free enterprise” into the oil industry know full well that this legislation will ultimately be bad for most Mexicans, but they don’t care. Their primary concern is how to enrich themselves.

The cheerleaders for capitalism proclaim loudly for all to hear “greed is good” and yet we act surprised when capitalists act in their own self-interest, ignoring the common good.

Mexican capitalists will destroy government-owned Pemex (as they have been trying to do for decades) because for them any economic activity that does not produce private profits is useless — worse than useless, because it may offer an example of an alternative economic system.

What is happening to the Mexican oil industry is another in a long line of international rollbacks of anything that limits the power of the 0.1% richest people around the world, who take the vast bulk of profits from the capitalist system.

Until we, the 90% who work for a living and have the power to take over, rise up and challenge this minority rule of the 0.1%, things will continue to get worse. More social programs will be chopped, more nationalized industries will be sold off to private interests and our so-called capitalist democracy will continue to prove itself no more than a system of one dollar, one vote.

The sellout of the Mexican oil industry is just the latest example of where capitalism is taking us.

Gary Engler

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Do we have enough time to fix global warming?

13 Dec

Even Vladimir Lenin was surprised when the Russian Revolution began in 1917.

Is this just an interesting historical tidbit or a profound example of how fast seemingly stable political, social and economic systems can collapse?

The subject of how long lasting our current system really is comes up frequently in discussions about global warming and what we can do about it.

Usually the conversation goes something like this:

“Scientists tell us we’re getting close to the point of no return. We don’t have much time left to drastically cut our carbon emissions.”

“Yes, but corporation keep investing billions in the tarsands, in coal, in building ever more private automobiles. The oil sector, that’s where the money and jobs are.”

“Even the people who understand global warming is a problem need jobs.”

“Governments pay lip service to combating global warming, but in reality they follow the money too. Big corporations buy them off. They run everything.”

“The problem is capitalism. Capitalists require ever-expanding profits and will do anything to keep them flowing. That’s just the way the system is.”

“So what can we do about it?”

“Get rid of capitalism.”

“How likely is that?”

“I guess it depends on how many people come to the same conclusion and are willing to do what it takes to change the system.”

“In other words, it’s hopeless.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Look around, people don’t care. They’re too busy shopping or worrying about their own private problems. People are too scared to join a union, let alone overthrow capitalism.”

“Things can change, very quickly.”

And that’s where the story about how the Russian Revolution surprised everyone comes up.

For those of us who understand the importance of acting quickly to reduce carbon emissions and that capitalism is incapable of dealing with this urgent problem, the question of how fast we could build a new, environmentally friendly economic system is critically important.

Is there time or are we cooked? Literally.

The answer depends, in large part, on one’s views about how “revolution” occurs.

If you believe that major change only happens after long years of organizing by dedicated, professional revolutionaries building a party that can lead the masses into a brave new future, then human beings today are probably like a lobster in a pot just before the chef turns on the burner: “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. This water seems quite comfortable to me.” It’s doubtful if we have the time to develop the cadre necessary for taking over a system as complex and all-encompassing as world capitalism.

On the other hand, if you believe in the power and ability of ordinary people to rise up when confronted by a crisis that affects us all, then it is possible to be optimistic. If the system you want to build begins with working people around the world taking over the reins of the economy and replacing capitalist minority rule with economic democracy, then that could happen relatively quickly. Yes, it still requires “leaders” working hard, talking and organizing, but history offers many examples of ideas spreading quickly and then people acting upon them.

The critical element — the “objective conditions” — already exists. Capitalism itself has created an economy overwhelmingly dominated by social labour. This gives the working class the potential power to take over almost every part of the economy in the vast majority of major economies around the world.

Most people in most countries are workers. If we chose to do so, we could easily expand one-person, one-vote decision-making into every area where people work collectively, which is most of our economy. We could limit private property to what is truly private and doesn’t give an individual power over others. We could move to a system of social ownership where multiple democratic owning communities based on the appropriate level of government — local, state/provincial, national, international — replaced corporations. If we did these three things the system of greed that propels capitalists to earn profits, regardless of the consequences to our environment, would no longer exist.

Saving the planet from global warming and ensuring a future for our grandchildren are powerful incentives for billions of working people to participate in this necessary global movement.

Can it happen quickly enough? Yes.

Will it happen quickly enough? That is up to us.

Gary Engler 

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The truth is Canada supported apartheid

10 Dec

It’s enough to make one who knows even a little history gag.

The death of Nelson Mandela has led to an outpouring of vapid commentary about Canada’s supposed role in defeating South African Apartheid. “Canada helped lead international fight against Apartheid”, noted a Toronto Star headline while a National Post piece declared, “Canada’s stance against apartheid helped bring freedom to South Africa.”

Notwithstanding this self-congratulatory revisionism, Canada mostly supported apartheid in South Africa. First, by providing it with a model. South Africa patterned its policy towards Blacks after Canadian policy towards First Nations. Ambiguous Champion explains, “South African officials regularly came to Canada to examine reserves set aside for First Nations, following colleagues who had studied residential schools in earlier parts of the century.”

Canada also supported South African apartheid through a duplicitous policy of publicly opposing the country’s racist system yet continuing to do business as usual with this former British Dominion. It’s true that in 1961 John Diefenbaker’s Conservative government called for South Africa to be expelled from the British Commonwealth. But this position was not a moral rebuke of apartheid. “Nothing has been more constant in Diefenbaker’s approach than his search for a tolerable way of averting South Africa’s withdrawal,” commented an External Affairs official at the 1961 Commonwealth meeting where South Africa left the organization. Diefenbaker pushed for South Africa’s exclusion in an attempt to save the Commonwealth. The former British colonies — notably in South Asia and Africa — threatened to leave the Commonwealth if South Africa stayed. This would have been the death of the British Empire’s Commonwealth. Diefenbaker’s lack of principled opposition to apartheid helps explain his refusal to cancel the 1932 Canada-South Africa trade agreement.

Sentenced to life in prison in 1964, Mandela, joined 1,500 black political activists languishing in South African jails. In June 1964 NDP leader Tommy Douglas told the House of Commons: “Nelson Mandela and seven of his associates have been found guilty of contravening the apartheid laws … [I] ask the Prime Minister if he will make vigorous representation to the government of South Africa urging that they exercise clemency in this case”? Lester Pearson responded that the “eight defendants … have been found guilty on charges of sabotage and conspiracy … While the matter is still sub judice [before the courts] it would, I believe, be improper for the government to make any public statement on the verdict or on the possible sentences.” This author found no follow up comment by Pearson regarding Mandela.

Widely viewed as a progressive internationalist, Pierre Trudeau’s government (1968-1984) sympathized with the apartheid regime not the black liberation movement or nascent Canadian solidarity groups. Throughout Trudeau’s time in office, Canadian companies were heavily invested in South Africa, enjoying the benefits of cheap black labour.  In October 1982 the Trudeau government delivered 4.91 percent of the votes that enabled Western powers to gain a slim 51.9 percent majority in support of South Africa’s application for a billion-dollar IMF credit. Sixty-eight IMF members opposed the loan as did 121 countries in a nonbinding vote at the U.N. General Assembly. Five IMF executive directors said South Africa did not meet the standards of conditionality imposed on other borrowers. The Canadian minister of finance justified support for the IMF loan claiming that “the IMF must be careful … not to be accused of meddling in the internal affairs of sovereign states.” A few months later, Ottawa opposed IMF funding for Vietnam because of its occupation of Cambodia (largely to stop the Khmer Rouge’s killing).

Officially, the Trudeau government supported the international arms embargo against South Africa. But his government mostly failed to enforce it. As late as 1978 Canadian-government financed weapons continued to make their way to South Africa. Canadair (at the time a Crown company) sold the apartheid regime amphibious water bombers, which according to the manufacturer, were useful “particularly in internal troop-lift operations.” (The official buyer was the South African forestry department.) In the early 1970s the Montréal Gazette discovered that the RCMP trained South African police in “some sort of liaison or intelligence gathering” instruction.

Supporters of apartheid would say anything to slow opposition to this cruel system. At a 1977 Commonwealth meeting, Trudeau dodged press questions on post-Soweto South Africa suggesting that Idi Amin’s brutal regime in Uganda should be discussed along with southern Africa. For its part, the Globe and Mail argued in 1982 that “disinvestment would be unwittingly an ally of apartheid” since foreign investment brought progressive ideas.

After decades of protest by Canadian unions, churches, students and others, Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government finally implemented economic sanctions on South Africa in 1986. The Conservatives only moved after numerous other countries had already done so. “The record clearly shows”, notes Ambiguous Champion, “that the Canadian government followed rather than led the sanctions campaign.” Unlike Canada, countries such as Norway, Denmark New Zealand, Brazil and Argentina also cut off diplomatic ties to South Africa. Even U.S. sanctions, due to an activist Congress, were tougher than those implemented by Ottawa.

From October 1986 to September 1993, the period in which economic sanctions were in effect, Canada’s two-way trade with South Africa totaled $1.6 billion — 44 percent of the comparable period before sanctions (1979-1985). Canadian imports from South Africa averaged $122 million a year during the sanctions period.

Canada did business with the apartheid regime and opposed the liberation movements. Ottawa’s relationship with the African National Congress (ANC) was initially one of hostility and then ambivalence.

Canada failed to recognize the ANC until July 1984 and then worked to moderate their direction. In an August 1987 letter to the Toronto Star, Foreign Affairs Minister Joe Clark explained the government’s thinking: “Canada has been able to develop a relationship of trust with the … African National Congress that it is hoped has helped to strengthen the hand of black moderates.”

With apartheid’s end on the horizon, Ottawa wanted to guarantee that an ANC government would follow pro-capitalist policy, contrary to the wishes of many of its supporters. The man in charge of External Affairs’ South African Taskforce said that Ottawa wanted an early IMF planning mission to the country to ensure that the post-apartheid government would “get things right” from the start. One author noted: “The Canadian state has entered fully in the drive to open South Africa to global forces and to promote the interests of the private sector.”

Ottawa’s policy towards apartheid South Africa was controversial among Canadians. There was an active solidarity movement that opposed Canadian support for the racist regime and to the extent that Canadian politicians played a role in challenging South African apartheid it was largely due to their efforts.

Yves Engler

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CEO fat cats purring all the way to their Swiss banks

5 Dec

Last week in Switzerland big money staved off an important challenge to big paychecks. But the sentiment that spurred a Swiss effort to tie executive compensation to common workers’ wages will not be defeated so easily.

A Sunday ago Swiss voters said no to a referendum question that would have capped executive compensation at 12 times the lowest paid worker in the firm. After gaining over 130,000 signatures to put the question to voters, proponents of the initiative were overwhelmed by a flood of money claiming a “yes” vote would drive companies away. Early polls found 46% of the Swiss public opposed to the 12:1 pay measure but with opponents spending up to 50 times more than the “yes” campaign, 65% ultimately voted “no.”

According to supporters of the measure, the average Swiss CEO made 43 times the average wage in 2011, up from six times in 1984. A number of top Swiss CEOs make more than 200 times their employees’ wage.

But Switzerland’s CEO-to-worker pay differential appears socialistic compared to North America’s. After the U.S., Canada has the second highest CEO-to-worker pay ratio. Last year, for instance, the CEO of BCE, George Cope, received $11.1-million in compensation. This staggering sum is nearly 200 times more than what a Bell Canada technician in Toronto makes and 2,000 times the pay of an Indian call-centre worker who responds to Bell customers.

Despite making 200 times the average industrial wage, Cope was not the best-paid executive in Canada. According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ summary of Canada’s 100 highest paid CEOs in 2011, the $11.1 million Cope made in 2012 would have placed him just off the top 15. Incredibly, the CEO of Canadian Pacific, Hunter Harrison, took home four and a half times Cope’s pay.

In recent years the difference between regular employees’ pay and CEO compensation has grown rapidly. A recent Globe and Mail survey found that ratio has reached 122-1 at Canada’s biggest firms, up from an average of 84-1 a decade ago. Using a different set of data, the CCPA and AFL-CIO put the Canadian CEO-to-worker pay ratio significantly higher.

As a flagrant symbol of growing inequality, executive pay is increasingly facing political challenge. While the 12:1 initiative was defeated, in March more than two-thirds of Swiss voters supported a referendum question requiring companies to give shareholders a binding annual vote on executives’ pay, while outlawing bonuses to executives joining or leaving a business or as part of a takeover. Similarly, some EU officials have suggested that shareholders should be given the right to vote on the ratio between a company’s best and worst paid workers.

The French government took office last year saying it would limit executive salaries at state-controlled companies to a maximum of 20 times that of the lowest-paid employees and on Wednesday, Ontario New Democrat leader Andrea Horwath called for the salaries of CEO’s at the province’s hospitals, electrical utilities and other public sector agencies to be capped at $418,000, twice the premier’s annual salary.

Politicians should legislate a maximum pay differential between the best and worst paid workers in all companies. How about a ratio of 20 times that’s steadily reduced over time?

It may be difficult, but I’m sure CEOs like Bell’s George Cope could learn to cope on a million bucks a year.

Yves Engler

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Unions should lead the fight against global warming

4 Dec

What is working class culture?

This question arose as part of a conversation about convincing members of Canada’s newest union, Unifor, to make saving the planet from climate change a priority.

“You’ll run up against working class culture,” said a friend who considers himself an anarchist.

“What do you mean?” I responded.

“Consumerism. High paying jobs with lots of overtime to buy ever more stuff, two cars, a big house in the suburbs with NASCAR and hockey on the two big screens in the basement, plus Housewives of Vancouver on the TV in the kitchen,” he said. “And how many thousands of your members build cars, dig up the tarsands and work in oil refineries? How can people with jobs like that ever be environmentalists?”

The first response I thought of was: “Are you saying soldiers never turn against war? Because history proves they do,” which spun the argument in another direction.

But the subject of working class culture lingered. Is there one and is it defined by consumerism? Or are there many, including ones opposed to the “culture” that TV tries to convince us is how we all live?

And regardless if there is only one, or many, where does it/they come from? Does culture simply happen or is it imposed upon us? Is it something that we can consciously build?

Certainly working class movements in the past have sought to educate themselves in an attempt to create an explicitly anti-capitalist culture. Many social democratic, anarchist and communist groups, including unions, grew into mass movements precisely by challenging the dominant ideology and suggesting an attractive, believable alternative. Rather than bemoan, but accept, the culture that rulers imposed on the working class, social democrats, anarchists and communists instead talked and listened to their fellow workers, convincing them that an alternative to capitalism was desirable, possible and necessary.

Those of us who understand that capitalism is environmentally unsustainable must do the same work today. We must inform people about the importance of immediate action to slow global warming and fix other ecological rifts that threaten human existence on our planet. We must challenge the notion that capitalists will solve environmental problems when in fact they are the ones who profit from mining the tarsands and building the pipelines which threaten our children’s and grandchildren’s future. We must point out that constant economic growth (unsustainable on a finite planet) is at the core of capitalism. But most important of all, we must offer a vision of an alternative to capitalism. This system must be environmentally sustainable, more democratic, provide a comfortable life and be fun to build.

One such alternative to capitalism is economic democracy. This means replacing master-servant relations with workplace democracy, replacing capitalist title with equal human entitlement and replacing corporate ownership with social ownership. The essential ideas of economic democracy are: Expanding one-person, one-vote decision-making into every area where people work collectively, which is the vast majority of our economy; Limiting private property to what is truly private and doesn’t give an individual power over others; Replacing corporations with multiple democratic owning communities based on the appropriate level of government, local, state/provincial, national or international.

In an economic democracy individual greed could not overrule the collective good, which would be determined by democratic means. When the majority of people understand the causes and dangers of global warming, their governments and collective enterprises would become agents of change rather than barriers. Entrenched interests who profit from spewing ever more carbon into the atmosphere would not control them. If workers and communities ran industries, such as the automobile and oil sectors that must change or disappear if we are to make the necessary drastic cuts in carbon emissions, they would be a lot less likely than profit-addicted corporations to blackmail society into supporting private interests that damage the environment. Worker and community owned enterprises would support just transition strategies to move jobs from polluting to sustainable industries. They would also be much more likely to promote an alternative culture of artistic leisure over mindless consumerism.

Environmentalists in and outside the union movement should not cite “working class culture” as an excuse to avoid raising critical issues about the jobs we do. Hundreds of millions of workers have proved capable over the past two centuries of managing the contradiction of opposing capitalism while seemingly dependent on capitalists for their jobs. Pointing out how capitalists use jobs to blackmail us into supporting their interests helps people understand why capitalism is the problem, not the solution. Rather than being a barrier to environmental understanding the fact that capitalism cannot do what is necessary to repair the damage it has already done, is a powerful argument in favour of building a working class alternative to the current system.

Strong, democratic, environmentally conscious, militant unions are one of the keys to success in this project. Such unions do not shy away from difficult but necessary discussions.

Gary Engler

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If Canada was truly democratic

7 Nov

What would a trade agreement intended to benefit all Canadians look like?

This is of more than academic concern right now as the Harper Conservative government will eventually unveil the full details of the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA).

From what we know about it now this agreement is little more than a ‘corporate bill of rights’. It gives corporations even more power to shift investment as they see fit and directly strengthens their interests in everything from public procurement to patent laws.

The one-sidedly pro-corporate nature of the agreement reflects the power that corporations yield over discussions of international trade. Despite the corporate world’s current stranglehold over international economic decisions, a here and now People’s Alternative to CETA is feasible.

To protect multinationals from the scourge of “discriminatory” government policies, CETA includes an investor-state dispute settlement process. This will give corporations based in Canada and the EU a new supranational tool to sue governments for pursuing policies that interfere with their profit making.

But rather than giving even more power to the top 0.1% richest people in the world, who are the investor class, an economic accord driven by a People’s Alternative would set up a labour-state dispute settlement process. In these tribunals workers could sue governments that fail to force employers to abide by labour law and International Labour Organization statutes.

CETA also gives multinational corporations unprecedented rights to bid on public contracts. In a bid to create a “level playing field” for multinationals in public procurement, the agreement will weaken provincial and municipal agencies ability to “buy local” and pursue other environmental and socially minded policies.

Instead of undermining public agencies’ ability to pursue ecological and social goals when tendering contracts, a progressive economic accord would prod firms to follow the highest ecological and social standards within the trading area. A People’s Alternative would give priority to firms that cut their carbon emissions in line with the stronger levels mandated by the EU. It would also prioritize companies that establish works councils, which give workers some formal voice in the operation of the firm and are common throughout Europe.

Under CETA Canada will lengthen the time drugs remain under patent, which is expected to drive up already high Canadian pharmaceutical drug costs by more than $850 million a year. Instead of extending Canadian patent laws to more closely reflect Europe’s rules, why not harmonize daycare programs to reflect the best of the trading area?

Most European countries provide public day care services, which have both costs and benefits to the economy. According to the logic that says trading partners are supposed to be on similar economic footing, it makes as much sense to standardize daycare systems as it does patent rules.

Another argument presented to justify extending patents is that it will lead to more research and development taking place in Canada. But, over the long-term, publicly funded day care would better accomplish this objective. Particularly beneficial to the intellectual development of poor kids, quality public day care increases the likelihood that disadvantaged children will be successful in school and contribute to future innovation.

With the corporate perspective so thoroughly dominating public debates on international trade it can be difficult for critics to do anything more than oppose the current policy direction. But when we disentangle the “economy” from what’s good for corporations a pro-people international economic accord is entirely feasible.

If we enjoyed real democracy, our governments would consult the people about their priorities in trade agreements.

If we lived in an economic system of one-person-one-vote, rather than the one-dollar-one-vote corporate system we have today, trade would flourish but trade agreements would look much different. They would be concerned with benefiting ordinary people, not just the already wealthy and powerful.

Yves Engler

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Working for a living in an irrational economic system

1 Nov

Our economic system is pretty funny, eh.

I don’t mean of the belly laugh sort, but rather the ironic variety (although a decent argument could be made that many elements of modern work life have the humour quotient of a Three Stooges skit).

There was a rally Thursday to support unionized cleaners working in Cadillac Fairview buildings in downtown Vancouver who are paid in the $12 per hour range. Cadillac, self-described as “one of North America’s largest investors, owners and managers of commercial real estate” and owned by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, has given its former $12 per hour cleaning contract to another supposedly unionized company that pays its workers $10.50 per hour.

These hard working people, mostly immigrant women, clean the offices of financial analysts, brokers, accountants, lawyers, executives and others, mostly men, who are paid five to many hundred times more.

Among the many ironies in this sad situation is the realization that the harder and more important the job the worse it pays. The more pointless and socially unnecessary the work the more cash is thrown at the person.

Keeping buildings where we work clean is pretty important. Making the clothes everyone needs to wear, picking the vegetables and fruit that keep us healthy, making sure urban sewers don’t get blocked, or picking up garbage are all important and difficult jobs, but how much are people doing them paid?

Gambling, on the other hand, pays extremely well, if it’s the sort that rich people do. Of course we’re told that what they do on Wall Street or Bay Street is part of the real economy and only what happens on the Las Vegas Strip is gambling.

But it seems to me, real gambling is when you don’t understand what is going on. Think about it: If I bet my pension on whether or not the little ball is going to fall in a red slot or a black slot, at least I can see what happens. If I hand it over to a mutual fund, I don’t have a clue.

How many of us really understand how the stock market works? Sure, we nod in agreement when the analyst comes on the six o’clock news and says: ‘Bond prices rose six basis points and the Dow dropped 43 points today on news the September durable goods figures were higher than expected.’ Say what?

If I put my hundred on the table the least they can do is show me the cards to prove whether I won or lost. On a Las Vegas craps table I see the pit boss check the dice. Cameras cut down on cheating. On Wall Street? No pit boss, no cameras, not even some guys named Guido and Tony to take a cheater out in the alley. Two years after some company steals ten billion, the government starts a court case that lasts another 14 years with appeals and at the end of it all, five rich guys lose their trading privileges.

But I digress.

If you want to earn the really big dough in capitalism you get a job in one of those Cadillac Fairview-owned buildings buying and selling numbers, letters and symbols that only exist on a computer screen. They call this working in the financial sector, but is it that much different than gambling?

And even better paid than those doing the buying and selling are the guys who give advice about which numbers, letters and symbols — that only exist on a computer screen — to buy and sell. Best paid of all is the guy who hires all these people and then sits back and lets them do their job. He’s called a hedge fund manager and can pull down a pay cheque of two million per week or more if he’s really, really good at convincing other rich people to let him “invest” their money.

Sure, some of these number pushers are smart and even have a lot of education, but is what they do socially useful? Compared to cleaners or seamstresses or fruit pickers or garbage guys?

They “make” money, that’s all, something that is supremely valued in our current economic system, but which when judged by any sort of authentic human experience is nothing more than fantasy.

It’s as if the world were one gigantic cornfield, but instead of harvesting it for food, we build mazes because they fascinate the people with money. Cornfield owners can earn huge profits if they invest in mazes. Trillions of dollars change hands, with the really big bucks going to the experts who design them and those who help people find their way through the mazes. But the people who grow the cornfields are paid barely enough to live on.

The truth is, the cleaners of Cadillac Fairview buildings — like the people who grow the corn — perform easily identifiable useful work. The same cannot be said for many of the people who work in the buildings.

What does this reality say about our economic system?

Gary Engler

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Russell, the revolution’s name is economic democracy

26 Oct

In the match between comedian and journalist it was a straight sets victory for the funny guy at the Who Makes More Political Sense Grand Slam event near Wimbledon.

Hundreds of thousands have already watched the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman take on Russell Brand in an interview about the need for revolution, a sign that the subject is of more than passing interest.

While it should not be surprising that humour was more effective than earnestness, it was curious to watch how effective Brand’s self-acknowledged ignorance about politics was in scoring political points. Perhaps it was because it made him seem more like the vast majority of ordinary people who know that something is wrong with our economic and political system, but can’t articulate an alternative.

Brand hit an ace when challenged about how he would do things differently and responded by saying what the system shouldn’t do. It “shouldn’t destroy the planet and shouldn’t create massive economic disparity,” he said.

In those ten words he brought together the most important political issues facing humanity today. And they share common roots: Power. Or the lack there of.

Both growing income inequality and the inability to deal with our looming environmental crisis are a result of the concentration of economic and social power in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

In our one dollar, one vote economic system that power inevitably becomes political power. In every system throughout history economic and social power always became political power (then military power).

If left unrestrained, those with more economic, social and political power will use it to get themselves an even larger share of the economic pie, regardless of the effect on the environment or other people.  That’s how the system works.

So, money is power, but it is also a result of power. More money, more power, more money, more power — a virtuous cycle if you are among the wealthiest 1%, but a vicious cycle if you belong to the 99%.

This concentration of power in the hands of the few is the enemy of democracy, which is why so many people are concerned about rising income inequality. But it is also the source of the powerful resistance to dealing with global warming and other looming environmental catastrophes. Oil and coal, for example, make money for powerful people.

Once this reality is understood the question of what to do about the problem of growing income inequality and fixing our environment needs to be reframed as: What can we do to fix the inequality of power?

Answers in the past have included: High taxes on high incomes (up to 90% in many countries); Inheritance taxes on the wealthy; Taxes on all forms of property; Nationalizing sectors of the economy to bring them under “public” control; Encouraging the growth of unions. Most people call this package of policies Keynesianism.

All of these measures do reduce the power of the very rich and have in fact worked well for ordinary people in many countries. Prosperity was the result. The gap between rich and poor shrunk. And capitalism survived, despite protestations of the wealthy and their sycophants.

Capitalists survived so well that they eventually reversed many of these reforms. They demanded and won drastic cuts in their taxes, the privatization of nationalized industries and the destruction of unions. Even in most of the countries that once proclaimed themselves socialist or communist, capitalism has returned. New capitalist classes have emerged. The result has been growing inequality.

Is this return to the past proof that capitalism and inequality are inevitable? Just the way things are? That capitalism is natural or god-ordained? That we like it? That the economic elite is better than the rest of us and deserve what they get? Or is there a better explanation?

These are questions that I would have liked to hear Russell Brand answer. And here is my suggestion for what he should say:

Minority rule is what makes growing inequality inevitable. A system can proclaim itself democratic, but if a minority holds most of the economic and therefore social and political power the result will be the same: The minority will inevitably reward itself, its power will grow and ever-expanding inequality will result.

So we are back to the question of power and how to distribute it equally. The answer is more democracy. Real democracy. Economic democracy. Workplace democracy. Social democracy as it was originally conceived.

We need to experiment to find the best ways to have workers and communities democratically administer the economy, to look after our environment. We need multiple owning communities so that power doesn’t become concentrated in the hands of a central state. We need to eliminate the divide between workers and owners by making everyone an owner. Everyplace where social labour occurs — people working in coordination with others — must be governed by democratic principles. We must get rid of incentives to destroy the planet.

That’s the sort of revolution that I think Russell Brand was talking about.

Gary Engler

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Economic democracy is the solution to global warming

18 Oct

Why are greenhouse gas emissions not being drastically curtailed? As carbon dioxide levels rise, temperatures rise, oceans become more acidic, polar ice caps melt, sea levels rise, the atmosphere absorbs more water. Floods, hurricanes and droughts become more frequent and more destructive.

Science makes it clear that global warming is caused by the burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil, natural gas—and biofuels.

In September 2013 scientists on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released their conclusion: the burning of fossil fuels at current levels will lead to devastating warming within this century. In 2012, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study reached the same conclusion. This was a surprise since it had been financed by Charles Koch and led by Richard Muller, one of the few reputable scientists who had remained a global warming sceptic. Shortly after the release of the Berkeley study, the U.S. association of meteorologists, who had not taken a position on global warming, announced that they accepted the science.

In the face of the scientific consensus and worsening natural disasters, corporate capitalism responds by investing billions in fracking, tar sands, deep sea petroleum development, and expanding pipelines.

Although some individual capitalists are alarmed by global warming, capitalists as capitalists focus on maximizing profits. In theory, green industry could be just as profitable, but profits are made on existing corporations. In resource extraction, materials processing, agribusiness, manufacturing, international trade, communications, and finance, profits are based on cheap energy from fossil fuels.

Supporters of the system claim that capitalism empowers individuals. Capitalism has actually pushed individual enterprise to the fringes of economies. No more than ten percent of populations are self-employed. In Canada and the U.S. ninety percent depend on wage and salary work. Although capitalism gives individual capitalists title to means of livelihood—title that is bought and sold for private profit—wage and salary workers are actually engaged in cooperative, coordinated social labor.

Corporations, capitalism’s dominant institutions, are minority-owned collectives that dominate markets, monopolize supplies, and control technologies. The twenty largest transnational corporations have more revenues than most governments.

Corporate governance is neither democratic nor egalitarian. Those with the most shares have the most votes. Less than one in four own any corporate shares. Most corporate shares are owned by less than five per cent of populations. Major shareholders and top executives, who combined are less than 0.1 percent of populations, control most corporations.

Under capitalism, the productivity of social labor has substantially increased. Aided by technology and expanding markets, humankind can now deforest entire continents, level mountains, dam major rivers, deplete mineral reserves, and fish sea life to extinction. Meanwhile, private title allows corporations to give priority to profits and to externalize environmental costs, to pass these on to communities, workers, future generations, and other species.

In the 1970s, neo-conservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan initiated what are now called neo-liberal policies. Taxes paid by corporations and the wealthy were cut. Laws and regulations were changed to make it more difficult for unions to organize and to make gains in collective bargaining. Public utilities and services were privatized. Capital was freed to move abroad in pursuit of cheaper labor, lower taxes and weaker environmental standards. As capitalists got richer, they gained more capacity to dominate political agendas and to manipulate the media and the outcome of elections.

So long as capital-owning minorities are entitled to direct economic and political activity in their private interests, private profit will take precedence over human wellbeing. The alternative is economic democracy. With economic democracy, community ownership would replace corporate ownership. Everyone—wage and salary workers, the self-employed, the unemployed, students, and the retired—would have a right to a voice and equal vote in their communities’ economic decisions. Workplace democracy would replace master-servant relations.

When everyone is equally entitled, communities will focus on meeting human needs, on providing employment and social services, on sustaining and improving the quality of present and future life. Instead of focusing on what is the most profitable, communities—responsible to all equally—would aim to balance employment opportunities with available labor. Public revenues would be balanced with needed social services. Imports would be balanced with exports. Industrial activity would be deliberately limited to the carrying capacity of environments.

Humankind cannot afford to delay action until the system changes. We must act now to cut greenhouse gas emissions. As individuals we can walk instead of driving, live in smaller residences, travel fewer air miles, eat less meat and choose produce grown organically. But so long as capitalists are entitled to direct economies in their private interests, corporations will continue to externalize environmental costs. The corporate media will continue to identify happiness with consuming more. Most employment will continue to depend on capitalist profit.

Isolated individual action has little impact, but human activity does transform the natural environment for good and ill. Capitalists can pass on environmental costs; humankind cannot.

We can begin by acting together to reduce damage to the environment. Some action—far too little—is already being taken to cut dependence on fossil fuels. Cities can be reconfigured so that most people can walk or bike to work, to school, to entertainment and recreation.

Investment in public transit can reduce dependence on private automobiles. With current technology, wind and solar energy could be much more widely used. Geothermal and waste heat networks would further reduce fossil fuel emissions. Governments could speed up development of cheap, safe, plentiful sources of energy. Public investment—freed from nuclear weapons interests—could determine whether breeder reactors would eliminate radioactive waste, and whether thorium reactors would eliminate the danger of meltdowns.

International agreement to raise average tariffs from the current five percent to thirty percent (as in the 1950s and 60s) would increase local production in agriculture and manufacturing, replacing fossil fuels with human energy. The revenues raised would help provide governments with the funds needed to redirect social labor to more sustainable ways of meeting human needs. Substantially increasing taxes on corporations and the highest incomes would further increase public revenues and would have the added benefit of reducing the money available to promote narrow capitalist agendas.

Communities can act now to assert their right to veto damaging industrial activity. Parties and coalitions can be formed to give priority to human wellbeing. Campaigns for electoral reform can make governments more transparent and responsible to general human interest. Expanding social entitlements, the right to food, housing, education, health care, employment and basic income would reduce dependence on capitalist profit.

Al Engler

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Taking responsibility at work requires taking power

15 Oct

Something about the Canucks versus Canadiens hockey game Saturday night has stayed with me, producing a mental itch that won’t go away.

It wasn’t Dan Hamhuis scoring on his own net on a whiffed pass, double ricochet off Roberto Luongo , although that will haunt the Canuck defenceman for the rest of his career.

It was in a break from the action when my TV screen filled with beautiful images of crystal clear streams, healthy salmon and pristine British Columbia back country. A kind and gentle voice praised the incredible environment that Mother Nature has bestowed on this province. One felt a sense of soothing comfort, tinged with pride at having chosen to live in this part of the world.

It was a commercial promoting the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline. An ad for a project that is an essential part of what one could argue is the greatest single environmental threat currently facing the planet.

After the initial shock at the over-the-top doublespeak of using our love for nature to promote a pipeline proposal to transport some of the most carbon intensive oil on the planet, I began to wonder who would sell their soul, along with their creative energy, to create a piece of propaganda that would have amazed George Orwell himself.

Somewhere, a group of artists, or at least reasonably creative women and men, had sat in an office discussing how best to convince a skeptical public (polls have shown well over 60 per cent of B.C. residents opposed) on the merits of building a pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to the west coast.

Imagine these human beings, not much different from you or me, pitching proposals, exchanging ideas and debating the merits of various creative approaches to ignoring climate science, disregarding the likelihood of breaks in any pipeline, discounting the well-reasoned fear of shipping accidents and completely overlooking the opposition of First Nations whose land the pipeline must cross.

“Let’s sell them on a pipeline by showing pretty pictures of nature,” one of them says. “And use a voice that people trust to brand the pipeline as environmentally friendly.”

“That’s it,” says another. “That’s it exactly. It’s the same as selling beer. If we can convince young men that getting drunk makes them more attractive to women, we can easily use people’s love of nature to sell a pipeline.”

“Exploit the very thing that the pipeline will destroy to sell it, that’s hardcore,” says yet another. “Deviously wicked.”

“I love it,” says the client.

And not one of them feels the least bit guilty for helping to destroy the livability of our planet. Why? Because they are just doing their jobs.

So the commercial is written, produced, directed, location scouted, lighted, costumed, filmed, acted in, edited, catered, etc. and not one of the dozens of people making it feel the least bit guilty for contributing to global warming, because after all, they too are just doing their jobs. Likewise the sales rep at the TV station, the traffic person, the director, master control operator and every other worker from Calgary to Fort Mac to Vancouver who take no responsibility — all are also just doing their jobs.

Am I the only one who is bothered by this? “Just doing my job,” sounds eerily similar to “just following orders,” a soldier’s excuse for committing a war crime. Is this where our economic system’s pursuit of ever-greater profits has led us? The sum of our individual actions is creating an environmental disaster but none of us are responsible?

I’m pretty certain most who work in Fort McMurray understand how destructive what they do is to the environment. I feel confident that the vast majority of creative people involved in selling products that are bad for us understand what they are doing. Most may prefer not to think about it, but they do understand. They believe there’s no choice. Acting like you don’t care is simply what it takes to successfully earn a living.

This is the attitude of people who feel powerless. It is the attitude of a soldier who has learned the negative consequences of ever questioning an order.

Our economic system gives the power to decide most things to a small number of people motivated by greed. Most of us must follow orders if we are to succeed. Our ability to choose is confined to decisions like Coke versus Pepsi. We feel powerless because that is our reality.

To take responsibility requires taking power.

This is the mental itch that won’t go away: How do people who feel powerless take power and build a world with a democratic economic system where we collectively decide what to produce and how, rather than let the profit motive decide all?

We better quickly figure out an answer because all the science tells us it will soon be too late.

Gary Engler

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The NDP should move to the left on foreign policy

12 Oct

Is the NDP the solution or part of the problem for those us who promote a Canadian foreign policy that favours ordinary people around the world?

While pushing arms control measures and oversight of Canadian mining companies, this ‘Left’ party generally backs the military and a Western pro-capitalist outlook to global affairs.

In 2011 the party supported two House of Commons votes endorsing the bombing of Libya. The party’s most recent election platform called for maintaining the highest level of military spending since World War II. In a more recent display of militarism NDP veterans affairs critic Peter Stoffer joined some veterans in criticizing an agreement between retailer Target and the Royal Canadian Legion allowing red poppies to be sold outside the company’s stores. “We agreed that outside the front doors would be ideal and obviously if the weather is inclement or they prefer they are welcome to stand inside the double doors as well,” said Target spokesperson Lisa Gibson at the end of last month.

But this wasn’t good enough for many red poppy sellers who want to set up inside. So Stoffer demanded that Target “let these veterans into their stores, set up their tables and sell the poppies” and called on the company “to allow them [red poppy sellers] to come into the store at all times.”

Remembrance Day Poppies commemorate Canadians who have died at war. Not being commemorated are the Afghans or Libyans killed by Canadians in recent years or the Iraqis killed two decades ago or the Koreans killed in the early 1950s or the Russians, South Africans, Sudanese and others killed before that. By focusing exclusively on ‘our’ side Remembrance Day poppies reinforce a sense that Canada’s cause is righteous, a sentiment often used to promote wars.

One wonders if the NDP is willing to call on Target to allow peace organizations to set up tables and sell anti-war white poppies?

The same day Stoffer criticized Target, Michael Byers, a former NDP candidate and Thomas Mulcair leadership campaigner, co-authored aNational Post opinion piece titled “Putting Politics Before Soldiers”. Based on a report Byers co-authored for the Rideau Institute and Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the article argued that Harper’s Conservatives are spending $2 billion to buy tanks that are no longer necessary since the US military has shifted its counterinsurgency tactics. The article glowingly cited the Petraeus Doctrine, which is named after General David Petraeus who was in charge of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The doctrine calls for soldiers to engage with and support local people so as to erode any incentive they might have to side with insurgents.”

The article said nothing about the thousands of Iraqis and Afghans killed by the US-led forces implementing the Petraeus Doctrine. Nor does Byers’ report call for a reduction in Canada’s high-level of military spending.

While promoting US counterinsurgency tactics and red poppy sellers, the NDP was quiet on the recent visit to Toronto by Africa’s most blood-stained leader, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. Nor have they said much about Ottawa’s support for the Egyptian military’s ongoing repression or foreign minister John Baird’s anti-Iran efforts with the Gulf Cooperation Council monarchies.
It wasn’t always this bad.

A new biography about one of the NDP’s more courageous MPs touches on the party’s tendency to support the foreign policy establishment. In a published excerpt of Svend Robinson: A Life in Politics, Vancouver NDP MP Libby Davies told the book’s author: “Some people are concerned that we’ll slide, especially on foreign affairs. He [Robinson] was an outstanding voice on foreign affairs when he was critic for so many years. He never shied away from things… People wanted it. They wanted a party that actually had a real, critical position on foreign affairs — that wasn’t the Time magazine version … and that’s, I fear, what we’ve come around more to now.”

Robinson was willing to aggressively and creatively challenge the foreign-policy establishment. He was a founder of the Canadian wing of Parliamentarians for East Timor and questioned Canada’s role in the 2004 overthrow of Haiti’s elected government. In a particularly principled action, Robinson responded to Israel’s effort to seal off Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat in Ramallah by trying to travel there in October 2002. This act of solidarity unleashed a media storm, prompting NDP leader Alexa McDonough to strip Robinson of his role as foreign affairs critic.

Robinson’s time as foreign critic represents a shining moment for the party’s international policy (It should be noted, however, that Robinson backed the 1999 bombing of the former Yugoslavia, only turning critical over a month after it began.). His term also highlights the tension within the party between those who support a critical approach and those basically willing to go a long with the Canadian foreign policy establishment. Unfortunately, the latter group has generally determined the NDP’s international policy.

At its 1949 convention the CCF, the NDP’s predecessor, passed a resolution supporting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Even worse, the party also expelled two elected legislators who were critical of NATO.

While officially the West’s response to an aggressive Soviet Union, in fact NATO was established to blunt the European Left and extend North American/European power in light of the de-colonization taking place in Asia and the Middle East. NATO planners feared a weakening of self-confidence among Western Europe’s elite and the widely held belief that communism was the wave of the future. External Minister Lester Pearson was fairly open about NATO’s purpose telling the House of Commons in March 1949: “The power of the communists, wherever that power flourishes, depends upon their ability to suppress and destroy the free institutions that stand against them. They pick them off one by one: the political parties, the trade unions, the churches, the schools, the universities, the trade associations, even the sporting clubs and the kindergartens. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is meant to be a declaration to the world that this kind of conquest from within will not in the future take place amongst us.” Tens of thousands of North American troops were stationed in Western Europe to deter any “conquest from within”.

The other major motivating factor for the North American elite was a desire to rule the world. For Canadian officials the north Atlantic pact justified European/North American dominance across the globe. As part of the parliamentary debate over NATO Pearson said: “There is no better way of ensuring the security of the Pacific Ocean at this particular moment than by working out, between the great democratic powers, a security arrangement the effects of which will be felt all over the world, including the Pacific area.”

In the eyes of Pearson and the US leadership NATO’s first major test took place far from the north Atlantic in Korea. After the Communists took control of China in 1949 the US tried to encircle the country. They supported Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, built military bases in Japan, backed a right-wing dictator in Thailand and tried to establish a pro-Western state in Vietnam. The success of China’s nationalist revolution also spurred the 1950-1953 Korean War in which eight Canadian warships and 27,000 Canadian troops participated. The war left as many as four million dead.

The 1950 CCF convention endorsed Canada’s decision to join the US-led (though UN sanctioned) war in Korea. It wasn’t until huge numbers had died and China entered the war that the CCF started questioning Ottawa’s military posture.

In the early 1950s Iranians pushed to gain greater benefit from their huge oil reserves. But the British had different plans. As one of the earliest sources of Middle Eastern oil, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (British Petroleum’s predecessor) had generated immense wealth for British investors since 1915.

With Anglo-Iranian refusing to concede any of their immense profits, Iran moved to nationalize the country’s oil industry. It was a historic move that made Iran the first former colony to reclaim its oil.

Despite calling for the nationalization of numerous sectors of the Canadian economy, the leader of the CCF criticized Iran’s move. On October 22 1951 M.J. Coldwell told the House of Commons: “What happened recently in Iran [the nationalization of oil] and is now taking place in Egypt [abrogation of a treaty that allowed British forces to occupy the Suez Canal region] is an attempt on the part of these reactionary interests to use the understandable desire of the great masses of the people for improvements in their condition as an excuse to obtain control of the resources of these countries and to continue to exploit the common people in these regions.” The CCF leader then called on the federal government to “give every possible aid to the United Kingdom in the present crisis.”

Mohammad Mossadegh’s move to nationalize Iran’s oil would lead the US and UK to orchestrate his overthrow in 1953. The CCF failed (or at least it’s not recorded in the Hansard parliamentary debate) to criticize Ottawa for backing the overthrow of Iran’s first popularly elected Prime Minister.

No issue better reflects international policy tensions within the party than Israel/Zionism. Initially the CCF opposed the nationalism and imperialism associated with Zionism. In 1938 CCF leader J.S. Woodsworth, stated: “It was easy for Canadians, Americans and the British to agree to a Jewish colony, as long as it was somewhere else. Why ‘pick on the Arabs’ other than for ‘strategic’ and ‘imperialistic’ consideration.” At its 1942 convention the CCF condemned Nazi anti-Semitism but refused to endorse Zionism. “The Jewish problem can be solved only in a socialist and democratic society, which recognized no racial or class differences,” explained a party resolution.

But before Israel’s creation the CCF officially endorsed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. In September 1945 new CCF leader M. J. Coldwell said the Zionist record in Palestine “in terms of both social and economic justice” spoke for itself. Three decades later, in 1975, NDP MP and former leader Tommy Douglas told Israel’s racist Histadrut labour federation, “The main enmity against Israel is that she has been an affront to those nations who do not treat their people and their workers as well as Israel has treated hers.” This speech was made eight years into Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Golan Heights and Gaza Strip and a quarter century after 800,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed during the 1948 war.

While better today, this extreme deference to Israel has yet to be expunged from the party. In May 2008 the soon-to-be NDP leader, Thomas Mulcair, was quoted in the Canadian Jewish News saying, “I am an ardent supporter of Israel in all situations and in all circumstances.”

The NDP ought to shake off its history of supporting the Canadian foreign policy establishment. Beyond the moral imperative, sticking to mild and safe criticisms may be a losing electoral strategy.

Forceful and creative criticism of the Conservatives’ foreign policy could be a way to pushback against Jason Kenney’s successful outreach with immigrant communities (more than 20% of Canadians are born outside the country). The Conservatives have played off the fact that immigrant communities are generally more socially conservative. While this may be true, individuals with a strong connection to another country would also tend to be less supportive of Western domination, which the Conservatives have strongly pushed.

Additionally, Harper’s foreign policy has been designed to please the most reactionary sectors of the party’s base — evangelical Christians, right-wing Jews, Islamophobes, the military-industrial-complex as well as mining and oil executives. To a certain extent the Conservatives view international policy as a relatively low political cost way to please the party’s right wing base (the clearest example of them taking a more extreme position on foreign policy is the Conservatives’ refusal to give Canadian aid to projects abroad that include abortions — even for rape victims — but Harper strongly opposes efforts to challenge abortion domestically).

Could this same thinking not work for the NDP? Is there not a counter block of individuals and organizations focused on issues ranging from international climate negotiations to Palestine, global peace to mining justice? Wouldn’t a forceful and principled NDP position on these issues help galvanize party activists?

With average Canadians more knowledgeable and interested in international affairs than ever before, it is likely. But party strategists fear that the dominant media will lambaste the NDP for expressing forthright criticism on many international issues. The media would. But the growth of online news and global television stations makes it easier than ever — if the party cared to try — to defend critical positions on issues such as the recent coup in Egypt or Canada’s indifference to Paul Kagame’s murderous escapades in the East of the Congo.

Ultimately, the options for the NDP is reasonably straightforward: work to create an electoral strategy that significantly improves Canadian foreign policy or continue to make opportunistic appeals to veterans, the military and those who believe a “Time Magazine version” of international affairs. The latter option is tantamount to being complicit with current policies and — if elected — becoming the agent of a pro-corporate/pro-empire Canadian foreign policy.

Yves Engler

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Why would any young person support capitalism?

11 Oct

They say you get more conservative, nostalgic for the past and critical of young people as you age. In my case it’s true, but maybe not in the same way most people expect.

This 60-year-old grandfather’s conservatism is reflected in a growing respect for the institutions, programs and social services that previous generations of ordinary working people built through organizing and struggle. I believe in preserving these institution, programs and social services despite the onslaught of right-wing choppers and cutters who proclaim “progress” when in fact people’s lives are being made worse.

My nostalgia for the past is reflected in fond memories of huge anti-war demonstrations, picket lines packed with people determined to get a good union contract and the feeling of being one among millions who believed another world was possible.

And I do sometimes ask myself what’s up with young people today. Mostly I’m just amazed they’re not out in the streets making a revolution.

I mean, they’ve got a hell of a lot of good reasons. Aside from the ongoing crap —war, the latest empire trying to dominate the world, poor people being screwed, aboriginal people being screwed, racism, sexism, other forms of discrimination — the economic system has put a huge bulls-eye on young people’s backs and the environment is about to collapse.

University and college costs at least six times more than it did when I was young and this at a time when you need a graduate degree just to get an unpaid internship. Youth unemployment is high and rising. And the jobs that are available? Suck-up service jobs. Smile and say, “have a good day,” or you won’t get a tip, if you’re lucky enough to have a job where you get tips. More likely you don’t have any incentive to smile except fear of a pathetic power-deprived supervisor who will ream you out for telling a customer your true feelings.

But let’s say you do get a decent job working for the government or making things in a factory or working in an office, the current economic system says you’re worth less than your parents and you damn sure don’t have a right to a decent pension and benefits. All that stuff is being cut back because the system can’t afford it, or so the people running things say.

A steady job? That’s not how it works anymore. Retire at 65? Sorry no, if you’re under 40 you’ll have to work years longer than your parents to qualify for any sort of pension. And all those good union jobs that people once enjoyed? Forget about it, the system has decided to crush unions. Or in the unlikely event you do find a union job, the new reality is lower wages for new hires.

Since the era of Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher the system has gone out of its way to screw young people. Since the stupid capitalists took power the system says it can no longer afford the wages, benefits, social services and rights that the smart capitalists managed to provide in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. (But it can afford war and bailouts for banks.) Ever since the rise of neo-conservatism (also called neoliberalism) in the 1970s the cheerleaders of capitalism on crack have been up front about attacking unions, pensions, public education, healthcare and social services — all stuff that people over 50 got to benefit from, but which young people are told they can’t have.

Then to top off all this shit, people under 40 and their kids are the ones who will really feel the effects of global warming.

So, what’s with a generation that accepts punch after punch and then insults on top of the beating, barely raising a peep in protest? How could anyone under 40 support capitalism? Why aren’t they organizing, striking, picketing and marching?

Sure they have more distractions than we had: video games, the Internet, texting, Tweeting, Facebooking etc, But most of these could be put to good use rabble rousing the revolution, if the dream was there.

Most likely young people are so brainwashed by the system that they simply can’t imagine another world is possible. Consumerism and its evil twin individualism are the most likely culprits. Both have been pushed down the throats of young people the past four decades like bird parents stuff regurgitated food into the beaks of their babies. Buy, buy, buy. Me, me, me. Both these isms lead to ill health, alienation, and social paralysis. Inaction is the result.

And who is responsible for pushing individualism and consumerism? People my age. The me generation. Hippies. The turn on, tune in and drop out crowd. The feel-gooders through substance abuse. Individualism and consumerism were their bag.

Teach Your Children was the name of a famous 1970 song. We did, but now we can only hope that they are wise enough to unlearn much of what they were taught.

Take some advice from a grandfather: Dream of a better world with a democratic economic and social system. A system that lives in harmony with the environment rather than one that wrecks our planet. Get involved to make it happen. Take action, especially collective action. You’ll have the time of your life.

And teach your children well.

Gary Engler

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Capitalism or a healthy environment — time to choose

4 Oct

If all you care about is making more stuff, capitalism may be the best system ever. But if you want to save the planet from environmental catastrophe our current economic system is a dead end.

I remember in my socialist youth often being told: “Your ideas sound good but that’s just not how things work in real life.”

Today, in my socialist sixties, these same words seem appropriate as an analysis of mainstream environmentalism.

Here is the harsh reality:

Capitalists make huge profits from destroying the planet. The capitalist drive to maximize profits explains the externalizing of environmental costs. Capitalism allows small minorities to profit at the expense of others. Private ownership of what are social means of livelihood allows capitalists to make decisions that pass the real costs of industry to communities, workers, future generations and other species.

Worse, capitalism requires constant growth because it always needs more profit. Making ever more profit is what motivates people to make investments. But what happens when the environment needs a smaller human footprint? When, at least in wealthier countries, we must learn to live with much less stuff?

All the evidence shows capitalism is really lousy at dealing with declining markets. Every time the economy shrinks for a sustained period capitalism goes into crisis. Banks crash, unemployment rises and wars are often necessary to get capitalism out of its crisis.

Supporters of capitalism claim the system is based on freedom and choice, but when it comes to the environment for many people this amounts to the freedom to choose between destroying the planet or having a job. The promoters of tar sands, fracking, coal mining and pipelines are explicit about this and in fact go even further. The business pages are full of stories quoting the captains of the carbon-industrial complex telling us what amounts to: “You must choose between economic prosperity and what is good for the environment, because you can’t have both.”

If we continue with capitalism they are correct.

Yes, some so-called environmentalists do look to capitalism for solutions, but that’s like asking the fox to fix the henhouse. You can’t be a serious environmentalist and support capitalism. A sustainable economy is incompatible with a system that constantly demands more profit.

Now that the human population has passed seven billion, it should be obvious that we inhabit a planet of finite resources. But population growth is not the problem. Human energy remains our most precious and underutilized resource. Once basic material needs for food, clothing, housing and healthcare have been met, human wellbeing depends less on consumption than on opportunities for education, employment, social participation and social recognition.

Science leaves little reasonable doubt that the burning of currently known reserves of coal, oil and natural gas will push atmospheric carbon dioxide levels past a tipping point, after which rising global temperatures will irreversibly undermine the conditions on which human life as we know it depends.

Despite the weight of evidence and the urgency of the problem, capitalism rests on the expansion of fossil fuel production and use.

Around the planet trillions of dollars are being spent to develop massive deposits of shale oil and gas. In Canada capitalist investment is focused on expanding oil production from tar sands. The promoters claim that these developments will create jobs. But the funds required to extract and transport that fuel will create far fewer jobs than would be produced if equivalent amounts were spent on the development of solar, wind and geothermal power. Far more jobs could be produced with investments in the production and distribution of local agriculture, clothing, shoes and communications products. More jobs would be created by investments in childcare, elder care, social housing, public transit and other green infrastructure.

But capitalism prefers investments in fossil fuels because corporate profits now largely depend on cheap fuel. Equivalent profits cannot be made meeting actual human needs.

So, we have some important choices to make: Support capitalism or support the environment. Build a different sort of economic system that can prosper in harmony with the environment or fiddle with capitalism as our planet burns.

Gary Engler

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Capitalist entitlement is the EU problem

21 Sep

The movement to occupy on behalf of the ninety-nine percent has flagged, but the wealthiest one percent have not relented in their campaigns to enrich themselves at the expense of others. This was made clear in the 2012 World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. The tone was set by Canada’s Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper. He blamed Europe’s social entitlements for current government debt problems, and then came back home to call for cuts in Canada’s pension entitlements.

Europe and Canada are facing crises of unsustainable entitlements, but social programs are not to blame. In Europe the countries with the most comprehensive social programs — Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands — are not facing severe deficit crises. The countries that are — Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and the U.K. — have far less generous social programs.

Rapidly expanding capitalist entitlement began in the 1980s with the election of neo-conservatives Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Brian Mulroney. Their governments rejected government intervention to maintain employment and consumer demand, substituting what they called supply-side policies, claiming that putting more money in the hands of the rich would increase the supply of money available for investments and employment.

Since then, the governments of most countries have adopted supply-side policies. Taxes on higher incomes, on corporations, on capital gains and dividends have been methodically lowered. In the 1950s and 1960s the effective tax rates on the highest incomes in Canada and the U.S. were 70 percent. In the early years of this century, these had fallen to 30 percent, much the same rate as paid by median income earners. (A smaller number — who may earn millions a year from capital gains and dividends — pay as little as fifteen per cent of their income as taxes.) As the tax on upper incomes fell, government revenues as a proportion of total income fell, even though governments increased sales taxes, value-added and payroll taxes.

Putting more money in the pockets of the rich did not lead to more investment. In fact, the rate of growth in private and public investments was higher in the 1950s an 60s than in the 1980s to the present in North America and Europe. The super rich do have money to spend on luxuries, private jets, yachts, and mansions. As money was available for financial speculation, share prices grew faster than the real economy, increasing capitalist claims on existing means of livelihood. To sustain and increase profit margins, corporations turned to places with cheaper labour, further reducing domestic employment. As disparities between rich and poor widened, governments with shrinking revenues were faced with expanding needs for social programs.

In Europe the most prosperous countries were shielded from the most damaging consequences of neo-conservative policies by more comprehensive social entitlements—pensions, unemployment insurance, retraining, and childcare. Poorer countries have not been as fortunate. Europe’s problem is not overgenerous social programs, but the failure to harmonize social conditions.

The European Union began with the Treaty of Rome in 1957, a time when most governments accepted the responsibility to maintain employment and improve living standards. Initially signed by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and West Germany, the Treaty of Rome envisioned a Europe with a common market for goods, workers, services, with common transport and agricultural policies, and with a European social fund that would help harmonize social conditions in all countries.

As it now exists, the European Union began with a treaty signed in Maastricht, Holland in 1992. By this time, most of the continent’s major political parties had come to adhere to the Washington Consensus, a set of policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. Its ten points can be summarized as holding that governments should give transnational corporate interests precedence over domestic employment and enterprise, and give creditors’ interests priority over social programs.

In harmony with the Washington Consensus, the Maastricht Treaty provided for a common currency, common interest rates, and agreement to limit government deficit and debt levels. The idea of a social fund was dropped and no effort was made to harmonize wages or living standards.

For a time, the economies of poorer countries like Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Spain did grow substantially. Their lower wages did attract investment until countries with even lower wages like the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovenia joined the EU. As the continent’s major corporations moved more operations east in pursuit of cheaper labour, workers’ income declined; markets stagnated.

Before the financial crash of 2007-08, the decline in employment and markets was masked by bubble economies — European versions of the U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis. Interest rates of one per cent and lower in Japan and the U.S. allowed German, French, and U.K. banks to borrow abroad and to lend these funds at three or four per cent to countries desperate for investment. As it became obvious that debts were unsustainable, interest rates jumped to six and seven per cent and to double digits. As more public revenues were diverted to pay creditors, governments cut spending and employment. In the U.K., Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece unemployment rose to ten per cent and higher. Youth unemployment rose to 20 per cent, 30 per cent, and even fifty per cent. Nonetheless governments focused on creditors’ interests continue to promote spending cuts which will increase unemployment and reduce consumer demand.

Stephen Harper in Davos encouraged further attacks on social entitlements. He then came home to call for reduction in future pension entitlements here. Why? Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement for seniors currently costs less than three percent of Canada’s national income. Factoring in the expected growth of the population of seniors, the cost will rise to around four percent. In Italy, public pensions cost fourteen percent of national income. The current conservative coalition insists that Italy will have no problem meeting these obligations.

Yes, prolonged public deficits can lead to future problems. Costs of borrowing may rise. The value of a currency may erode. Taxes may have to be raised. For minorities preoccupied with maximizing capitalist profits, these are concerns. For majorities who depend on income from labour and social entitlements, declining wages, and reduced benefits are far more serious problems.

Deficits would not be problems for governments focused on the interests of the vast majority. Unsustainable debts would be written off, reduced, and rescheduled. What remains would be paid at fixed low interest rates. Where financial institutions that engaged in reckless lending practices must be bailed out to sustain credit markets, public funds would become public equity. Publicly owned financial institutions, transparently and democratically regulated, would focus on providing access to credits for community-owned, cooperative, and owner-operated enterprises.

To weaken the power of transnational corporations, governments would actively expand social entitlements, institute guaranteed annual income legislation, expand access to pensions, health care, post-secondary education, and public child care. The public revenues required could be raised through steeply graduated income taxes on the highest incomes. Tobin taxes on financial transactions and international agreement to raise tariffs enough to encourage domestic production for domestic markets everywhere would generate further public revenues.

Instead of giving priority to the interests of capital-owning minorities, governments would focus on policies that sustain employment, working-class income, and social entitlements. They would promote and support initiatives the are intended to provide everyone with a voice and equal vote in their communities and employment.

Al Engler

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