There are few more bitter ironies than watching the Republican Party -- controlled at its core by the very business interests responsible for the country's vast and growing inequality; responsible for massive transfers of wealth to the richest; and which presided over and enabled the economic collapse -- now become the beneficiaries of middle-class and lower-middle-class economic insecurity. But the Democratic Party's failure/refusal/inability to be anything other than the Party of Tim Geithner -- continuing America's endless, draining Wars while plotting to cut Social Security, one of the few remaining guarantors of a humane standard of living -- renders them unable to offer answers to angry, anxious, resentful Americans. As has happened countless times in countless places, those answers are now being provided instead by a group of self-serving, hateful extremist leaders eager to exploit that anger for their own twisted financial and political ends. And it seems to be working.And here's an honest question. There was a recent Harper's Magazine article about how US presidents have been self-interestedly been monkeying with economic statistics for decades now, to the extent that arriving at the reality of the US economy is perhaps impossible. Is it possible then that Canada's not-as-catastrophic-as-the-USA's economic situation might be due to the fact that the USA is really teetering far more than official statistics would have us believe? (For instance, the April 2008 article mentions "Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today's U.S. unemployment rate is somewhere between 9 percent and 12 percent." This would contrast with the then-official unemployment rate of five percent. That four to seven point difference should be kept in mind when we now hear of an official US unemployment rate of 9.6 percent. Adding four to seven points to 9.6 gives us a real unemployment rate of between 13 and 16.6 percent.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Bankrupt Politics
I would say that there's now only a few millimetres separating Canada's dismal political culture from the thoroughly debased political culture in the United States. I'm linking to this Glenn Greenwald article about the morass of US politics simply because it's so well written and insightful:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
The U.S. is just a century ahead of us in how old its democracy is. If sufficiently large numbers of people behave in consistent patterns, I wouldn't be surprised if Canada's political scene is indistinguishable from the U.S. of today by the time we're senior citizens.
It's exacerbated by our first-past-the-post system. Smaller parties are marginalized (NDP) or downright non-entities. It's conceivable that in a couple of decades, Canada becomes a de facto two-party system like the U.S. From there, business interests would only have to worry about two parties to court, like in the U.S. If those business lobbies become influential, then we have the U.S. in Canada, only a bit late to the race to the bottom.
American voters, when it comes to certain issues, just have no viable political choice (aside from choosing their preferred business lobby groups). They're caught in a pair of pincers closing in on them from the "left" and "right".
It's downright painful to watch, because it's a warning to what may happen in Canada. I wish BC would have voted for the single-transferable-vote system. It would have started the ball rolling back the right way.
As for the unemployment rate, the problem is that it is partly subjective to begin with (through how one defines how many workers are able and "willing" to work). Consistency is what would make it viable, but it's just too tempting for politicians to fudge numbers for their own ends.
No blah,
I think the challenges of Quebec nationalism and the historical peculiarities of social democratic strength in Saskatchewan and a larger public sector and trade union movement provided some structural impediments to the political bankruptcy of US-style politics in Canada.
I'm starting to think though that capitalism as usual really is failing, or that at least its elites are incapable of grasping how bad things are and they're going to drive it into the ditch, presenting us with an opportunity to provide something else.
...the challenges of Quebec nationalism and the historical peculiarities of social democratic strength in Saskatchewan...provided some structural impediments to...US-style politics in Canada.
And let's not forget Alberta! ;)
Until the Leduc discovery, Alberta was a social democratic petri dish: it produced the Progressives, the United Farmers movement, The Labour Party, the Ginger Group, and the CCF. Alberta is, in fact, the inventor of Canadian socialism.
Post a Comment