CANADIAN ELECTIONS AND THE WASHINGTON CONSENSUS

As a new chapter in Canadian history approaches with tomorrow’s election results, the various debates and policy discussions will end with either the status quo or a change. Various issues have been discussed the last 78 days – foreign policy, security, economic prosperity, TPP, taxes, spending, the niqab and so on. One issue that has not been mentioned is the shadow of the great superpower to the south, and what is called the ‘Washington Consensus’ (WC). No one reasonably in touch with the major events of the last few decades can be unaware of the major stride inequality has made in most societies where the WC’s power or influence is exercised. No accident – this is the result of deliberate policies political and economic designed to achieve precisely the status quo. Also called ‘ neo-liberalism’ – the policies have essentially been to enrich the 1% at the expense of the rest. The super-rich has virtually doubled its share of national wealth in many if not most countries certainly of the West but not just the West. Buttressed by US Supreme Court decisions like McCutcheon and Citizens United (both v. FEC) the result has been the ‘corporate takeover of the political system’ and the inexorable replacement of democracy by plutocracy, the replacement of ‘vote’ by ‘note’ ($). These policies are of course cloaked in Orwellian jargon, which makes it difficult for the general public to keep track of what is being done. With this lens in mind it is possible to make some comments about the issues that were discussed in the campaign: 1. Taxes and spending and trade agreements. One of the recurring themes of the past few decades was that taxes had to be cut for the super-rich, which would then result in investment by them, which would create jobs. Associated with this was the idea that ‘free trade’ was good and would also create jobs. Warnings when NAFTA was being put in place about ‘a giant sucking sound’ did not stop either NAFTA or globalization. The result is known to most people.: a major dismantling of manufacturing industry and its shipment to places where labor was dirt-cheap. All the clever planning of Wall Street's investment banks and consulting firms amounted to old-fashioned ‘arbitrage’. The US destroyed tens of millions of jobs so that a tiny fraction of 1% would become even more obscenely rich. And spending for the 99% was cut, while the major economic program that drove American innovation and investment – the so-called ‘defense’ industry kept on expanding, because it is essential to enforcement of the WC. People seem to have forgotten about the MAI which was justly hated and defeated as its policies to enforce corporate rights against those of nations and populations were a thinly disguised assault on the sovereignty of nation-states. But the Corpo-Rat lawyers and lobbyists who were defeated then don’t give up easily. Isn’t the TPP (and its European counterpart the TAP) simply a resurrection of the MAI?. Isn’t that why its text has been kept secret from the voters everywhere, not just in Canada.? The Liberal and NDP leaders acted rightly in refusing to attend a Privy Council briefing on TPP absent a public knowledge of the text. 2. National security, the jihadist threat, ISIS, niqab etc. The ‘Clinton doctrine’ openly declared the US’s unilateral right to use force to ‘access markets, energy supplies and resources’. Never mind that those markets, supplies and resources are located all over the planet and belong to the populations of the 190+ countries in it. Behind its talk of security, democracy-promotion, and so on (which major Western allies are pressured to agree with and to join in the actions that follow, as well as benefiting from them) is the reality of the rape and plunder of those countries and the devastation of those who resist, with pretexts invented as needed. Whether it was coups in Iran, Guatemala or Chile, or the killing of millions in South East Asia to prevent ‘dominoes’ from falling, or later actions financed by the grotesquely ‘exorbitant privilege’ accorded by the Petro-dollar (which replaced the constraints of Bretton Woods with virtually unlimited capability to the US to continue to spend half the planet’s expenditure on WMD) the global hegemon has been able to do whatever it wants. 3. Should countries like Canada connive in or resist the WC? It is easy to join a Western gang-up and tell the Russian President to get out of Ukraine. No one seems capable of telling the US to get out of Ukraine, Central Asia, the Middle East, or any of the 134 countries in which (according to TomDispatch.com) it is conducting secret, bloody and illegal wars, The WC and the ‘unbridled capitalism’ that motivates it now adds (for the planet) the unprecedented risk of environmental catastrophe with increasingly extreme and bizarre weather events (like the California mudslide) to the decades old nuclear one. The Nobel Peace Prize winning incumbent of the White House has maximized fracking and authorized a trillion dollars of upgrades to the US’s nuclear weapons, which already can blow up the planet several times over. Dr. Strangelove still is here, and the underground bunkers in which the masters of mankind might live would only have to be modified for climate change. 4. Our media often fails to tell the truth, even resorting to brazen lies about what is going on. When a Malaysian airliner was mistakenly shot down, Maclean’s and Economist magazines had covers screaming Putin the Murderer. No one bothered to ask what motive he might have, or mentioned that some decades earlier a US warship had shot down an Iranian airliner and its captain been given a medal. Was Clinton called a murderer for sacrificing a half-million Iraqi children through sanctions, a price his Secretary of State called ‘worth paying’. Or Bush W for the price Iraq paid for the democracy (ISIS) they were force-fed? One has to search hard to find stories that recount the true origins of jihad – US-UK sales of WMD to Iran, Iraq and all the countries of the region…….wars in which ‘unpeople’ die are tremendously good business for the West….. or that it was Kissinger who introduced the nuclear program to Iran – or Reagan who recruited the most fanatic jihadists to dislodge the Soviets from Afghanistan, having first apparently manipulated them to invade….. to give them their own ‘quagmire’. 5. The Drone papers – on Obama’s personal authorization of the assassination of some 80,000 people (an International Herald Tribune estimate from April this year) have just been released. No doubt our magazines will be screaming….