The Economic Consequences of Electoral Fraud

A lot of people were talking about yesterday's National Post story about the NDP's high standing in the polls. According to the poll, if an election were held now, there would be an NDP minority government. This isn't all that surprising. The present parliamentary majority enjoyed by the harpercons is based on roughly 6,000 votes and since the harpercon victories were generally achieved through fraud, an NDP minority government was the result of the last federal election as well.

A growing left-right divide in the country also aligns with my prediction that the decay of capitalism's ability to deliver the goods to a majority of the people (even within the imperialist nations themselves!) will mean a polarization of Canadian society and the eventual demise of the centrist Liberal Party of Canada. [Relatedly, crediting Thomas Mulcair's pushing of the NDP to the centre for the NDP's rise in popularity is to confuse things. The move to the centre could be very much the thing that frustrates further political progress.]

The failure of capitalism was inevitable. The three-plus decades of liberalization, financialization and globalization of the economy [or: deregulation/profiteering/union-busting & sweat-shops] were not designed to stimulate the economy but to preserve the economic predominance of capitalists in the face of the decline that set in in the 1970s. Since profits are down, the thing to do is to recoup the losses from out of wages. Stagnant or declining wages would have meant lower sales but for the increase in credit/debt. This increase in debt was not designed to be solved in some theoretical "phase II" of the operation. That assumes there was a long-term plan to raise all of society. Again: In the face of the declining rate of profitability in the 1970s, capitalism elected to tear-up the post-1945 social-economic-political compromise and take its profits out of declining wages for the majority. Consumption was maintained by loading the majority up with debt. Now, the chickens have come home to roost and the capitalists, quite naturally, are refusing to take responsibility for their behaviour and are demanding that the cost of the bail-outs of their financial speculation and corruption, and the recessions and the stimulus spending, must be borne by the majority once again.

So, the population is polarizing, the harpercons stole their majority government, and they're using their majority government to ram-through policies supported only by a tiny elite by the ignorant and stupid third of the population. These policies are not only unpopular, they're counter-productive. Case-in-point, their deforms of EI. Only a party supported by greed-heads and shit-heads would respond to high unemployment caused by recessions and increases in contract and temp-work by making EI harder to get.

In the world we actually live in, the proposed changes to EI will be implemented in the context of slack local job markets, and will put further downward pressure on already stagnant wages.
Long story short, the new rules will, after a short period of time on claim,  require most unemployed EI claimants to accept job offers at significantly lower hourly wages than in their previous job.

It doesn't have to be this way.