Jacobin has a story about "Canada's New Gilded Age." Here's some highlights:
Welcome to “Canada’s Gilded Age.” That’s what the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) is calling the era of runaway corporate salaries and bonuses. The name is fitting. In a new report, the think tank finds that 2022 was a smashing success for CEOs, who broke records with an average annual pay of $14.9 million — a surge of $600,000 above their 2021 remuneration. It’s good work, if you can get it.
However, for the rest of us that aren’t corporate executives, the struggle to make ends meet continues. The average CEO salary shakes out to 246 times the earnings of the average worker, which means that by the morning of January 2, chief executives had earned as much as one of their workers does in a year.
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The CCPA reveals that CEO salaries grew by 4.4 percent last year — amounting to an average increase of $623,000. ... Workers, on the other hand, saw a 3 percent pay bump, translating to a meager $1,800 for the year. When put against the inflation rate, this essentially means they took a hefty pay cut, compromising their ability to meet basic needs such as food and housing and transportation.
A fall report from Food Banks Canada found that more people accessed a food bank last year than in any year since it began collecting data in 1989. In March 2023, nearly 2 million people in Canada relied on a food bank, and more than 17 percent of visitors were employed. According to HungerCount 2023, food bank use has surged to 80 percent higher than 2019 levels, with one month witnessing over 640,000 visits by children.
The housing market softened in Canada last year, but the housing crisis is still firmly entrenched, putting tremendous pressure on workers and others struggling to afford shelter. The average home price in Canada in the fall was $757,600, according to RatesDotCa — or 141 percent more than most people can afford.
In cities like Toronto and Vancouver, the situation is even more dire, with home prices at 250 percent and 210 percent of the affordable level, respectively. Renters face an even bleaker scenario. Average rents for a one-bedroom apartment in November 2023 was $2,174 — with units in Vancouver going for $2,866, with Toronto close behind at $2,594.
My reaction to reading stuff like this is to ruefully chuckle at all the times I read other left-wing writers talking about our movement's recent victories. "We stopped this." "We achieved this." "We merely organized around this because even that is to be considered a victory."
As I've said; I'm a pessimist. I tend to anticipate the worst. It isn't the best way to look at the world. Most people are more optimistic than me. The species wouldn't survive if most people felt the way that I did. But just as pessimism isn't always accurate or healthy, neither is optimism. This compulsion to see victories where there aren't any, or where they're so negligible that they don't matter because the losses outweigh them, ends up obscuring reality. And, if the reality is that for all of our patting ourselves on the back for our victories we, the working-class, the union movement, human rights, the eco-system, etc., continue be impoverished, weakened, violated and destroyed, the end result will be our doom.
Obviously SOMETHING has been accomplished by the exertions of leftists and progressives. Important criticisms and analyses have been written that newbies to our causes can learn from. Sometimes the worst ambitions of the oligarchs have been stymied. Institutions exist in some form or another around which people can mobilize. But the overall trajectory has been against us. And I'm not trying to tell people to give up. I'm trying to tell them to stop seeing success where there isn't any. Not to be a downer. But to stop you from ignoring the reality of our failure and continuing in the same ineffectual way that has allowed the oligarchs and the militarists and the polluters to continue to destroy civilization, us, and the eco-system.
The Jacobin article outlines some ways that a potential government could counteract this trend to inequality.
The CCPA recommends introducing new top income brackets targeting extreme pay. Revenues from the bracket could be redistributed to fund social programs, infrastructure, and other prosocial undertakings. In the same spirit, they call for a wealth tax to achieve these goals.
Addressing the favorable tax treatment enjoyed by the rich, the think tank suggests that Canada should eliminate the rule that sets limits on the deductions a company can take from pay packages. This means that pay over a million dollars would no longer count towards a tax break against corporate earnings. They also recommend an increase in the capital gains inclusion rate. Since shares often make up CEO pay and generate capital gains when sold, they are currently taxed at a preferential rate compared to earned income. Right now, a mere 50 percent of capital gains are taxable. The CCPA argues we ought to tax a greater proportion of capital gains, and they’re right.
Don't expect the Conservatives to do anything like that. We all know that any Conservative Party of Canada talking about the interests of "ordinary working Canadians" is just posturing. The CPC is only about worshipping the oil patch, destroying environmental regulations and ensuring that the price of labour is as cheap as possible and the regulation of the labour market as non-existent as possible. They'll cut taxes for both billionaires and the working poor and make up for it by slashing services and applying user-fees to what services remain. Whether some of these idiots actually believe that their 19th-Century ideas will super-charge the Canadian economy and produce a plethora of jobs is unimportant. We know they won't and even if they, themselves were forced to admit that their policies have failed, they wouldn't change them. Because they're servants of the employer class.
Don't expect the Liberals to do anything about housing prices. If they did anything serious about addressing the supply situation housing prices would plummet. People would hold mortgages more expensive than their property after that. Which would piss-off a lot of potential voters, but more importantly, it would piss-off the banks. Because people would walk away from their mortgages and the banks would be left with losses. And that must never happen according to the Liberal Party of Canada. They'd come up with some sort of sleaze-ball "solution" to keep the banks whole. Just like the Democrats did in the USA. Remember how the fraud-created housing bubble in the USA collapsed and right-wingers blamed it on 1970's programs to prevent banks from "red-lining" minority neighbourhoods for loans? The Obama administration bailed-out Wall Street, turned a blind eye to the banks foreclosing on properties they didn't own, and subsidized keeping devalued housing off the market until private-equity firms figured out how to profit from short-term rentals and predatory landlordism.
That's enough for now. I've got shit to do. Just remember the main point. If things are continuing to get worse it means we have to think that maybe our tactics up to this point have been flawed.
Caitlin Johnstone the day after I posted this. (Which is not to insinuate that I thought it first. Just to explain why I'm adding it now.)
We’re all just standing here praying that this lunatic doesn’t ignite yet another horrific war in the middle east while watching him unapologetically sponsor a genocide in Gaza, and we’re still a ways off from emerging safely from the world-threatening nuclear brinkmanship his administration dragged everyone into with Russia in Ukraine. And it’s hard not to notice that this all sure looks an awful lot like what liberals were terrified would happen when Trump got into office.
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In the end Trump turned out to be a fairly standard evil Republican president. He sanctioned Venezuelans into starvation, vetoed attempts to save Yemen from the US-backed atrocities of Saudi Arabia, assassinated Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, imprisoned Julian Assange, and, despite the incredibly virulent mass delusion that he was a secret agent of Moscow, spent his entire term ramping up cold war hostilities against Russia with extreme aggression.
All of which were monstrous. But none of those crimes rise to the level of single-handedly facilitating a genocide in Gaza or taking the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis with his peace-killing efforts in Ukraine.
Biden has turned out to be everything we were warned Trump would be: a genocidal monster fueling racist violence and crimes against humanity while imperiling the world with insanely reckless foreign policy decisions.
Onwards n' upwards!!!
2 comments:
The basic problem for the left is that being as good as the establishment isn't good enough. The playing field is not level. With tactics about as clever as the establishment, we lose. With tactics noticeably more clever but basically in the same league as the establishment, we still lose. In order to win, the left has to be way better--way smarter, way better organized, way more innovative, way more energetic and committed. If you're depending on leadership it takes a Hugo Chavez. If you're depending on grassroots it takes an amazing process/structure for empowering everybody's contributions.
That leaves me with two perspective: First, yeah, we need to do way better than we're doing now. But second, in a weird way we shouldn't be too down on ourselves over failure--even when we fail, we may have done a better job than the winners. Often on the left there's this despairing feeling that we're actively bad at this and the right is much better. But they're not, they're just richer; they can use some pretty basic playbooks and they work because they can pour money into them. We don't have that luxury, and we need to learn from failures and improve until we're so much better at politicking and rabble-rousing that we defeat the money imbalance. But when a campaign has been good, but not quite effective enough, we also shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater by concluding everything we did sucked.
Purple library guy,
It's true that the gang that includes stephen harper, Doug Ford, Pierre Poilievre, aren't more talented than we are.
Nor is the gang that includes Justin Trudeau, Crystia Freeland, Paul Martin, Dalton McGuinty.
Nor their paymasters on Bay Street or in the oil patch or anywhere.
But my points remain: Any status quo that has people forced to choose between things like Biden and Trump is irredeemable. It's too far-gone to be fixed. It has to be destroyed.
And whatever superiorities we have (of conformance to reality, or morality, etc.,) we also spend far too much time re-describing the problem, and not enough articulating a coherent path to a solution.
The masses won't follow if we won't tell them where we want to go. Or, if we do have some sort of vague destination in mind, we don't say how we plan to get there.
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