Subject: A view of globalization, Part 2 (fwd)
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 1999 040258 -0600 (CST)
From: "Roy L. Beavers"
To: emfguru
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Roy Beavers (EMFguru)
rbeavers@llion.org
.....It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.....
NEW!!! Website
...................People are more important than profits.................
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 05 Nov 1999 09:12:56 -0800
From: Connie Fogal
To: emfguru
Subject: O CANADA.... Part 2
PART TWO of A Speech Delivered by the Honourable Paul Hellyer
at the Save Canada Conference held in Ottawa August 20 and 21, 1999
O CANADA, WILL ANYONE STAND UP FOR THEE?...
Corporations first; people last
I think one of the most alarming revelations made this weekend has
been that Canada aids and abets the U.S. in trying to force Monsanto’s
often evil products – such as terminator seeds, seeds that grow crops but
can’t be replanted because they’re genetically sterile and won’t grow
another crop – and we are helping the American government by going along
with this sort of thing.
They want to buy our industries. Over the 10 years since Free
Trade came in, thousands and thousands of Canadian industries have been
sold, mostly to Americans. Now they’re getting the big ones: MacMillan
Bloedel – not a murmur from our government; La Group Forest – not a word;
Canadian Club Monaco; a piece-by-piece sale of Rogers’ Cantel.
Disappearing like salami
Do you know about the salami theory? You cut off a little slice,
so little that no one knows the difference, and then another little slice,
and another little slice, until finally, there’s nothing left but the
string. Well that’s what AT&T is doing with Cantel and eventually there’ll
be nothing left but the string.
CNR? 75 per cent owned in the United States. CPR will soon be
forced to follow. They’re talking about increasing the ownership limit for
our two airlines. They’ll both be controlled in the United
States. Nothing is sacred! Not even Laura Secord! This was a symbol of
resistance that reminded us that we won the war of 1812, thanks to people
like Laura Secord. We’re losing this one without a shot being fired.
This kind of democracy in which governments are little more than
water boys for the big corporations, it may be democracy but it’s a
joke. Yet it is the kind of democracy that is being imposed on countries
all over the world. The new kings and queens want to be able to rent
politicians who will play the game their way. And that way includes what
is euphemistically called economic reform – a perverted way of describing
total subjugation to the new kings and queens of business and finance. It
means signing treaties that allow them to cherry pick our best resources
and our best industries – the same all around the world. All this is tried
in the name of laissez faire economics which insists that governments are
bad and markets are good. Government-owned services must be privatized,
even basic services like health and education which came to be recognized
as legitimate areas of government concern. They new providers, alas, are
accountable, not to the sovereign citizens, but to the sovereign shareholders.
One of the most alarming things, again, that we’ve heard today –
it wasn’t entirely new – was that in the next round of negotiations under
the World Trade Organization, health care and education are going to be up
for grabs and we will lose all control of those as well.
What’s new is old
Well this brand of economics, now called neo-classical economics,
or neo-classical monetarist economics, is the brainchild of Milton Friedman
and his colleagues at the University of Chicago. They shouldn’t call it
neo (new) because it’s old. It’s the pre-depression system, the boom/bust
system that gave us the crash of ‘29, the depression of the’30s, and World
War II, and now they’re setting us up for another one. It’s not a good
system. Mainstream economists won’t admit it, but their 25-year experiment
in neo-classical economics has been a monumental flop.
Proof that it’s bad economics
The Canadian performance has been humiliating. I’d like to give
you a few important statistics so when you go back you’ll be able to refute
some of this non-sense about our present economic system being good for
Canada and good for the world and the wave of the future.
We sort of divide the system into two parts: before 1974, when we
had what they call the Keynesian years when central banks actually helped
central governments finance various things, and then the 25 years after
1974 when central banks stopped helping governments by providing them with
low-cost money and when they adopted the monetarist neo-classical brand of
economics. So in Canada, for example – in that earlier period, the average
increase in Gross National Product was 4.9 per cent; in the years since,
2.8 per cent: a 43 per cent reduction. And that, if we hadn’t lost it,
would have been enough to pay for our health care and our education and our
environmental concerns and all of the other things that we haven’t been
able to do. We could have done them if we hadn’t run the system into the
ground in that way.
Both inflation and unemployment would have been higher in that
early period. From 1949 to 1973, the Consumer Price Index increased by an
average of 2.86 per cent, whereas from 1974 to 1998, it increased by an
average of 5.62 per cent each year – an increase of 97 per
cent. Unemployment for the earlier 25 years averages 4.74 per cent and for
the last 25 years, 9 per cent – 90 per cent more men and women unemployed
and on the breadlines since this new, wonderful ne-classical system of
economics was put into effect. Boy! If that’s progress!
An finally, the debt. In that first period, the federal debt
increased by 76 per cent. Since 1974, it has increased by 2,289 per
cent! And this is not primarily due to overspending on health and
education, as the right wing economists and politicians will tell you. It
is primarily due to slower growth and debt compounding at high interest
rates set by the monetarists.
Bad news globally as well
The experience in Australia was very similar. The growth rate was
43 per cent less in the 20 years after neo-classical economies came into
effect; the Consumer Price Index was more than twice as high and
unemployment soared from under 2 per cent to the 8 to 9 per cent range.
Even in the U.S., the comparison is dismal. The average increase
in GDP was down by 38 per cent and unemployment has been 42 per cent
higher. Their federal debt soared by more than 1,000 per cent.
But the global statistics are the ones that make me shudder. From
1950 to 1973, the average annual compound growth rate of per capita GDP in
the world was 2.9 per cent. In the years since, it was down to a
disastrous 1.11 per cent – less than half.
And so when you listen to all of these people or if you go to
these countries that Shirley [Carr] was telling us about, you see the
poverty and see the kids can’t afford to go to school and have no health
care and have no hope. It is because of this terrible economic system
that’s been pressed on them by the north. They’ve been told it’s their
salvation when, in fact, it has been just the opposite.
It affects every Canadian
All of these examples are very disturbing. But what does it mean
for us Canadians and for each one of us as individuals?
If you are a doctor or a nurse, chances are you are overworked –
sometimes to the point that patient care is compromised. The same kind of
stress is true for many teachers.
If you are a student, you may have to borrow a lot of money to
finish your college or university education – assuming you can borrow,
which is becoming increasingly difficult. Some of you will go further into
debt than my generation did to buy a house. Should you be a challenged
student, you may find that money is no longer available to provide the kind
of special help you need to develop to your maximum.
If you are someone who believes that there is more to life than
just those things that money can buy, you may find that music or drama or
both have been eliminated from the curriculum.
If you are a farmer, you may find that you can’t compete with
international agri-business. And if you hang in, you may find Monsanto
pushing you around and you may become hostage to the transnational
monarchs. Bend the knee or starve.
If you are mentally challenged, you may live or you may die
because the market has no place for you.
And no matter who you are, if you lack the proper skills, you will
probably spend much of your life unemployed because globalized markets, as
has been pointed out, do not provide full employment. They’re not designed
to provide full employment. To provide jobs for everyone would require the
reimposition of demand managements, a kind of government intervention in
the marketplace – a neo-classical no-no.
No one is secure. Your company may be sold out to one of the
transnationals and either downsized or closed because it and you are
redundant. There is no security in a globalized economy.
Floating the leaky ship
Both the world and Canada are at a crossroads. The world debt is
now unsustainable. It will crash unless the banking system is really
reformed. If you want to know more about that, you can buy my latest book,
Stop: Think, or you can go to more seminars like you had this morning or
you can do both.
The system would have crashed already if it hadn’t been for the
IMF using our money to lend to Third World countries to pay interest on
what they already owe so it looks as though those loans are performing
when, in fact, they are non-performing. They’re a debt that can never be
repaid.
I don’t thing our government has leveled with us and told us, “We
have used billions of your dollars to finance the international banks and
to keep them solvent.” Did they put that [message] in with your income tax
when they sent it to you? I don’t think so.
So we are the ones who are keeping the leaky ship afloat.
And what about Canada? Our last two governments have sold us into
bondage for the proverbial 30 pieces of silver. They have hoodwinked us
and lied to us. Nothing is sacred – our industries, our resources, our
environment our culture nothing. Even as we speak, our government is
putting our health care and education on the table in the next round of
World Trade Organization negotiations.
Not even our money is sacrosanct. The selling job to persuade us
to trade the loony for the U.S. dollar has already begun. Preposterous at
first, it is now being considered inevitable by more and more naive
Canadians who don’t have a clue where money comes from or how the monetary
system works. As Michel Chossudovsky pointed out, whoever controls the
issue of money controls everything.
If we give up our monetary sovereignty, adopt the U.S. dollar, and
accept a customs union, we are signing our own death knell as a country.
Monetary sovereignty and foreign domination was what the American
War of Independence was all about. Canada now finds itself in a similar
state of domination. And if we don’t do something about it now, it will be
too late.
The question is, and this, I guess, is what the conference is all
about, the question is, are we ready to start our own war for independence
through the ballot box, and abrogate – no half measures as somebody said –
abrogate the Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA to free us from the oppressive
national treatment clause? And to do it before we sign any other treaties
that would lock us in for five or 10 years or forever?
There is no party in the House of Commons, as Michel pointed out,
that is going to do it because they all accept globalization as the wave of
the future. No wonder people are so fed up with government. We have a
whole generation of young people who have never seen a good government and
probably don’t believe that one is possible. I think we owe it to them to
prove it is possible.
Canada can compete in trade, but not in investment. When we
signed the Free Trade Agreement, we sold our birthright and we set a
frightening precedent. Only an about turn will save the world and save
Canada because our futures are all wound up together. Only an about turn
will save us from catastrophe.
So the problem is now for Canada and for the world – before those
investment clauses are entrenched in the WTO and before the Free Trade
Agreement for the Americas is signed. I don’t care, frankly, what the Tory
Party does in 10 years. And I don’t care what the Liberal Party does in 10
years, or the Reform Party, if it still exists, or the NDP, or the Bloc.
I want to know if we are ready to start our own revolution and our
own war for independence. But we need a vehicle.Popular movements don’t
abrogate treaties; governments abrogate treaties.
Could the Canadian Action Party be that vehicle? Yes it could! Could the
Canadian Action Party win the most seats of any party in the next
election? Yes it could! All it would take is for the people who loved
Canada enough to fight the MAI last year, to love it enough to fight to
save it now. That’s all it would take.
It’s not a case of having enough people to start a party in the
traditional sense. It’s a case of having a vehicle to facilitate a
revolution, and revolutions are spontaneous events. They develop with
lightning speed. How could we get the word out and not have it censored by
people like Conrad Black? Through the Internet – the same way it was done
with the MAI.
So do we have the will to fight? Does our country really mean
enough? Does it matter to us?
If it does, let us light the flame that will restore the hope and passion
in the hearts of Canadian patriots! Let us do whatever it takes to
guarantee that our children and grandchildren will always be able to shout
and to sing. “O Canada, we stand on guard for thee!”
Write Mr. Hellyer and the Canadian Action Party at Suite 302- 99 Atlantic
Ave., Toronto, ON, M6K 3J8 or fax (416) 535-6325 or e mail cap-pac@istar.ca
DEFENCE of CANADIAN LIBERTY COMMITTEE/LE COMITÉ de la LIBERTÉ CANADIENNE
C/0 CONSTANCE FOGAL LAW OFFICE, #401 -207 West Hastings St., Vancouver,
B.C. V6B1H7
Tel: (604)687-0588; fax: (604) 872 -1504 or (604) 688-0550;cellular(604)
202 7334;
E-MAIL cfogal@netcom.ca; www.canadianliberty.bc.ca
“The constitution of Canada does not belong either to Parliament, or to the
Legislatures; it belongs to the country and it is there that the citizens
of the country will find the protection of the rights to which they are
entitled” Supreme Court of Canada A.G. of Nova Scotia and A.G. of Canada,
S.C.R. 1951 pp 32
Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com