Turning the Ship of State

OK - so I am still a little upset by the events of the G20 police actions, in Toronto. In fact, I cannot erase it from my mind. It torments me night and day. Maybe the Black Bloc successfully accomplished what they were attempting by showing that the might of the state is authoritarian, and it will come down on your head, without due process, and 1000+ people now know what that feels like. . .

I fear that we are at the beginning (or maybe in the middle) of what I, in later years, will see more clearly as a "police state" - when common protest - taking to the streets is somehow perceived by too many as dangerous, out of the mainstream and not representative of their needs or views. I do not know immediately how to change the direction of the country - but I am thinking about it (and you are being subjected to reading about it) and I know I am not alone - but too few people are troubled.

I was reading a lot about corruption in India, this morning, and some of the attempts to "clean it up". It is still pretty bad - but I thought, in a lot of ways maybe they are more honest about their politicians' and bureaucrats' corruption. There, they have investigative journalism - more than one weekly magazine dedicated to exposing corruption and theft from "the people". These are not far left publications - more like McLeans - but exposing what is going on. I think of all of the horrible things that I know about from reading "alternative" news sources, Twitter, Blogs and yes I suppose left analysis; from Canadian Mining Companies' behavior in Canada and around the world (esp exploiting first nations - see: http://www.miningwatch.ca/) to the behaviour of our federal government - refusing to uphold democratic principles and acting like a dictator. . . e.g from James Travers in the Star :
The Star, by the way, has had some decent stories and columns around the city losses, destruction and out of control policing. . . )

Systematically, and without explanation, the Prime Minister is testing every limit on his power. Along with successfully shuttering Parliament for the second time, he's neutering committees charged with the primary democratic responsibilities of safeguarding the treasury and forcing the government to explain its actions. He's challenging independent rulings against how Conservatives funded their 2006 election and how this government treats Canadians in trouble abroad.

Politics is an uncompromising blood sport played to win within loose rules. By learning Liberal dirty tricks, adapting to changing circumstances and reinterpreting every regulation in his favour, Harper is proving to be a shrewd and accomplished contestant.

Far less clear is what he accepts as legitimate constraint, the line in the democratic sand not to be crossed.

Last year ministers threatened to go over the head of the de facto head of state if Governor General Michaëlle Jean allowed a coalition of "Liberals, socialists and separatist" to use their Commons majority to topple his minority. This winter Harper is essentially making the argument that Parliament is getting in the way of his government governing.

or see: the new Lawrence Martin Book,

The Martin book will chronicle how Harper has come to be the master controller, dominating every aspect of governance. It will assess his accomplishments and failings and his effect on the workings of the democratic system.

The "democratic deficit," as it is sometimes called, has become an issue of such concern to Canadians that they recently staged nationwide protests over Harper's decision to suspend parliament. The book will chart how, since Pierre Trudeau, Canada has seen a steep decline in its democratic standards.

So, we know, and I think can all agree, that we are slowly eroding our democracy and that governments, now govern for the "owners" and for the corporations and their shareholders - those of us who earn a living (80% of us) get little, and indeed, less all the time.

In case that is in doubt, I offer the details of how things have been for the last while, which are well demonstrated on the CCPA's site - http://www.policyalternatives.ca/projects/growing-gap

but also in this statement from Armine Yalnizyan, the economist at CCPA, from another paper:

But, after three decades, the evidence shows the neoliberal game-plan just didn’t deliver, at least for most of us. Still, we were running too fast to gripe much about it, or perhaps we were distracted by our ridiculously cheap baubles and toys… when along came a global financial meltdown. That turned the “less government, more market” mindset on its head -- at least for a time.

But now that we’ve spent $66 billion in Canada stabilizing what we have repeatedly been told is the world’s best financial system, that damn mantra is back – “less government, more market” – just in time to tell the people who are the collateral damage of neoliberalism what we can’t afford to do: help them.

What we really can no longer afford, however, is the discredited, corrupt idea of neoliberalism. It didn’t deliver prosperity to the majority of Canadians. Instead, it brought:

• a huge tax shift -- from corporations to households, from richer people to poorer ones; from taxing incomes to taxing spending; from taxing income flows from savings and capital gains to shielding those forms of income;

• the lowest rates of spending and revenue collection by the federal government since late 1940s (as a share of the economy);

• a vastly smaller safety net, and more expensive basic services like education and housing;

• less collective action through governments, and less collective action outside governments (unionization rates today are at same level as 1961, 31.4%; the peak was 36.5% in mid-1980s; today only about 18% of private sector workers are covered by collective agreements, about 75% of public employees);

• a shrinking share of jobs from the two traditional sources of middle-class employment, manufacturing and public sector;

• median wages stagnant for 30 years;

• greater inequality: the bottom 40% of Canadian families raising kids are worse off now than their predecessors 30 years ago, though they are better educated and working more; only the top 10% have seen significant gains;

• record household indebtedness;

• less regulation and oversight on investments and credit creation;

• more foreign ownership of our enterprises (and more Canadian capitalists owning stuff offshore);

• climate change (and a disregard for it);

• economic collapse; and

• workers hating other workers more than the people who wrecked the system: ("I don't have what you have, so why should you have it?")

Also, in a paper by Ed Broadbent - in case you need any more convincing that we, the working people of this country, are not doing well ,and that there is a war against us, going on. . .

It’s important to note that, even at the peak of the deficit problem, alternative policies were available. In continental Europe, it is widely accepted that higher and more progressive taxation is needed to maintain an equal social rights-based notion of citizenship. Even in the U.S., in dealing with a similar deficit problem in the 1990s, President Bill Clinton (although he did further deregulate the financial sector) made few changes in social policy. Instead, he dealt with the U.S. deficit by relying on economic growth and tax increases on upper-income Americans.

The scale of the increase in inequality and the reduction of social rights, beginning in the last decade of the 20th century, is immense. Keep in mind that most Western economies, including Canada, had experienced the best decade of economic growth in 40 years, a period which the trickle-down soothsayers said would benefit everyone. Between 1998 and 2007, the average wage of full-time workers rose from $33,000 to $40,000, but that was less than the rate of inflation. During the same period, the top 1% of Canadians increased by 100% their share of total wages and salaries, and the compensation of the top 100 CEOs tripled, from an annual average of $3.5 million to $10.4 million.

The vast majority of Canadians actually experienced a downward shift in their share of the national income that they had worked to create. Seventy per cent of Canadian households have a smaller share now than they had at the end of the 1970s. A final statistic: excluding the elderly, the bottom 50% of Canadians have lower after-tax incomes than their equivalents in the late 1970s.

I don't know what else to do besides sign petitions, write letters, send emails and rant in blogs. I go to protests, and I have not stopped, but I really do feel like hitting the streets is not effective any more. If, as the recent poll, reported in the Toronto Star suggests,

The Angus Reid poll, which surveyed 1,003 Canadians and 503 Torontonians, found that 73 per cent of Torontonians and two-thirds of Canadians believe police treatment of protesters was justified during the G20 summit.

It is no way to get the public onside! So how do we turn this around?

What news are these folks watching? Could they have got the impression that those arrested were the same folks who were smashing windows, burning cars and generally using violence and (property) damage? I suppose that they could be - 'cause we know that the city (or someone in charge) did not send the fire department, but let a police car burn for 2 hours to make sure that all of the news gathering agencies "got their shot". . . but I am not sure that "the public" just feels like "protesters" are "someone else" - that they do not represent their (the public's) interests - why is that? Probably because TV news (where most folks get their news these days, although there is lots of "multi -sources" of news - TV, radio, newspapers, the Internet) is big in Canada esp among those who access only one news source - But if you are listening to talk radio, getting your news from yahoo.com or just reading newspapers online - National Post.com - you may be getting multiple sources but you are not getting multiple viewpoints.

I am too lazy today to put in the links to prove some points, but if you have doubts - send me a message and I will make that attempt - but I have been adding info to a previous blog about the G20 - if you want some evidence, about police atrocities. At this point it is questions of another nature - not proving that something was "fishy" and undemocratic and totalitarian - you'll have to accept that at the moment. And then I can move on. . .

to exploring how we can get Canadians to rise up, to question, to make demands . . .

There is this great video about how the questions need to be reframed. . .



Because I want somehow to influence the public, I no longer donate to "charities" - After years of donating a day's pay a year to the United Way, all of my annual donation money now goes to groups in other countries like Navdanya.org in India; in Canad to think tanks and alternative news. Rabble.ca, The Dominion (Media Co-op) and CCPA get monthly donations - along with the provincial and federal NDP - but sometimes I don't know why I bother with the NDP . . . certainly I have for 25 years been disappointed with NDP governments - although most (but not all) are not much better than their Liberal counterparts -- but I don't know how to refrain from electoral politics . . . I work in every election, but even when "we win" somehow it doesn't feel much different. Sure would like to try a federal NDP government but not convinced that they would be willing to do anything militant or radical and I suppose - how can they control or change what happens at the provincial level?

So, musing today -- really just bummed about the world, the country I live in (no pride here - no Happy Canada Day) and wondering why no one pays attention - I think I'd best go read Ralph Milliband again . . .

Hm m m interesting. . . In The State in Capitalist Society, Ralph says p. 4/5 (OK - I am demonstrating my age here -- he wrote in 1969 and 1973 but it had a big influence on how I see the state , capitalism and the world)

. . . But most Western 'students of politics', tend to start, judging from their work, with the assumption that power, in Western societies, is competitive, fragmented and diffused; everybody, directly or through organized groups, has power and nobody has, or can have too much of it. In these societies citizens enjoy universal suffrage, free and regular elections, representative institutions, effective citizen rights, including the right of free speech, association and opposition; and both individuals and groups take ample advantage of those rights, under the protection of the law, an independent judiciary and a free political culture.
As a result, the argument goes, no government, acting on behalf of the state, can fail, in the not very long run, to respond to the wishes and demands of competing interests. In the end, everybody, including those at the end of the queue get served. . . its [believing in this liberal-pluralist view] first result is to exclude , by definition, the notion that the state might be a rather special institution, whose main purpose is to defend the predominance of a particular class. "

So maybe people don't believe that there is a dominant class - maybe they believe in that bourgeois democracy, or that there is fragmentation among groups and classes - but my personal experience (esp canvassing in elections where you get to talk to everybody) is that people now believe that there is a dominant/elite class, and they know that they are not part of it; but they believe (however erroneously) that there is class mobility and they want the rich to benefit because everyone (well too many people) believes that they may be rich before their life is over. . . So we don't have to convince "the public" that there is a class that benefits from the state's power - we simply have to convince them that they are not part of that class or that they are unlikely to have "upward mobility" any longer.

The details of how things have been for the last while are well expressed on the CCPA's site - http://www.policyalternatives.ca/projects/growing-gap but also in this statement from Armine Yalnizyan the economist at CCPA, quoted above.

On the other hand, having said all that, maybe we have little to complain about in N.A. - maybe although we are worse off en masse, than we were twenty five years ago - maybe we don't notice because of the human exploitation in other countries that allows us to get our food, our clothes, electronics and and our baubles, made by people who are far worse off than us -- at low cost. Maybe we should be thinking about the exploitation of others, in other countries, but supported by this state - like where the clothes we wear are made, or where Canadian mining companies are exploiting children, or raping the land, and how that may be putting money into our RRSPs, from our mutual funds (for those of you that have such a thing!)

Maybe we don't think about the international distribution of wealth BECAUSE we feel that we are hard done by - that we didn't get as much as someone else - that we are lacking, have unmet needs, and so we think only about getting our due and not about the Human Rights, and progressive economics, combined with progressive legislation and regulation - that might make the world a better place and in the long run,make us happier by making us less alienated, and more collective, less of a consumer, more of a citizen, less of an atomized individual and more a community member. . . that's the world I want to head for - I just don't know how to get there or how to get the great mass of people to care enough, or believe it is possible enough, to come with me.