Prime Minister Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty on the eve of the G20 meeting in Washington next weekend have no mandate to support the plan of US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced today that rewards insider cronies of the Bush Administration for plunging the world economy into chaos and crisis.
Paulson is shoveling $700 billion of US taxpayer’s money directly to the banks, near banks and their own private insurance company AIG, and then pleads with them to give it back to cash starved US industries. They won’t. The money is not intended for job creating industries such as auto, or to keep working class families confronting foreclosure in their homes.
The $700 billion will be used to bolster the strength of the last three major US banks and investment houses left standing, U.S. global financial giants Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, the latter the former employer of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. These favoured mega banks are being shored up with taxpayer’s money in an attempt to bully all US private capital to join in a bar room brawl with the EU and British Banks and the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) that are openly challenging US dominance and control of the world capitalist financial system.
What is totally missing from Paulson’s report is the ruinous affect on the global economy of the ongoing squandering of the US treasury on US-NATO wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fortune Magazine last January estimated the total cost of the “war on terror” (Iraq) to average about $100 billion per year or a total of $500 billion to that date. The US War Resistors League places the total closer to $200 billion per year out of a total US military expenditure for 2009 of $965 billion. The war is consuming about 1 to 2% of US GDP and if it continues for a decade may reach 5% when overall total US GDP is likely to contract. The CIA Fact Book puts US GDP for 2007 at $13.78 trillion.
The Harper Conservative Government has no mandate to continue to tie Canada to this US economic boat anchor. Prime Minister Harper has no mandate to use Canada’s wealth and resources as a powder monkey for US imperialism. The Harper Government has no mandate to place at risk the wealth and welfare of Canadians in an inter-imperialist brawl that will break out at the G20 next week.
Canadians have the right to demand a made-in-Canada solution to our economic future and end our dependence on a shrinking crisis ridden US economy.
Canada has everything it needs to create jobs, provide capital and to produce cheap energy for economic expansion and to produce goods needed for the home and international markets. The way forward for Canada is independence of economic development and the establishment a new relationship with the world, free of the domination and control of US imperialism. If Harper won’t do it – it is time for the left to discuss the kind of government that will.
Left Turn Canada!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Don
In purely tactical terms, the Coalition made a pretty amateur error, in my opinion. They had to have a big media splash. A signing ceremony. With Duceppe.
If they just did their deal and shut up, then voted non-confidence Dec. 1, they might the government now, or we might be having an election. Either one would be preferable to Harper going on.
But you still have got to talk to the West, Don. Harper is liked, and not only in Alberta, by Westerners. The votes indicate it. So talk to the other side. And I do not mean corporations, I mean ordinary voters who vote Harper policies.
Post a Comment