Maude Elisabeth Barnstone

IX

Maude: With the exception of the religious fanatics, the people were rebelling against the BBMC; against government secrecy; against arbitrary search and seizures; against arbitrary imprisonment and deportations. They were rebelling against the conditions that the BBMC and the government had imposed on them.

For some, it was abject poverty, for others, it was because they no longer had a voice in running their country, for still others it was big business’s destruction of the environment … It was a rebellion of the citizens against the BBMC, its influence on the public agenda and the wealth and power it had accumulated at their expense.

Johnny: Babelization of the airwaves then just provided a means for people sharing their grievances against the BBMC and the government in their own language and planning their revenge in their own language.

Maude: Boom-Boom was right, you are a fast learner.

Johnny: Who was it that wrote that when a small segment of the population accumulates the lion's share of a country’s wealth, to keep most of it, and maintain the privileged position wealth makes possible, they must share it with the less fortunate, usually through taxes, or convince their government to build more prisons? The choice to build more prisons invariably being the wrong choice.

Maude: I think it was John Kenneth Galbraith in a book called The Culture of Contentment where he predicted a revolt of what he called the underclass against the privileged, wealthy, the contented few. His prediction, except for the religious element, which he did not, could not foresee, is a fair description of the situation that led up to The Fracture.

Johnny: How did so few get to amass so much wealth?

Maude: Largely because big business found a use for all those new immigrants coming into Canada. For big business, the immigrants were just another commodity to be used in the race, which many economists referred to at the time, as the global economic race to the bottom.

Johnny: A race to the bottom, the term rings a bell. What was this race all about?

Maude: It was about whom could manufacture the most goods at the cheapest prices and produce the biggest profit margins. In this race, the cheap labour of new immigrants, the downward pressure their willingness to work for less had on the wages of those already employed were key factors in the outcome of this race.

Johnny: That would explain big business’s encouragement of higher and higher import levels for cheap labour.

Maude: Yes, and the politicians were more than happy to oblige, big business being the biggest contributor to their election campaigns and big business being the owner of big media and vice versa. Eventually this race became a mechanized race to the bottom and more and more Canadians and immigrants found themselves without jobs, without homes.

Johnny: And who benefited from this race?

Maude: As if you didn’t already know; big business, their senior management and their shareholders. If you were just plain rich before, you were filthy rich now. The big banks for example, though they usually did not hire first generation immigrants, were one of the big winners of the mechanized leg of this race and their profits just soared.

Johnny: What did they do with all the extra profits?

Maude: The banks you mean?

Johnny: Yes.

Maude: Why, they bought other banks, silly. Through mergers and acquisitions the Canadian banks became so big that they rendered the Bank of Canada obsolete. At The Fracture the three Canadians banks, The Three Little Pigs as they were called by some, set monetary policy for the country and not surprisingly it was a policy that favoured the BBMC and those with big bank accounts.

Johnny: Considering the size of the three Canadian banks little is not the word I would have used.

Maude: Here’s a question. What is the difference between large banks and large corporations?

Johnny: I don’t want to guess. Tell me.

Maude: Corporations accumulate, banks hoard.

Johnny: What’s the difference?

Maude: Dammed if I know. All I know is that they don’t share the loot with what Galbraith called the underclass.

Johnny: So, to restate the obvious, the race did not make everybody worse off, it did not reduce everybody’s standard of living or quality of life?

Maude: Of course not. There would have been no point to the race if all it did was make everyone worse off. Actually, that is not completely accurate. The religious types, especially in the south and south-western United States and in the alliance known as HAMM believed that a miserable existence in this life guarantees you a better life in the next and that worsening conditions meant the coming of their saviour was imminent, which for them could not be too soon. For them spending money or doing anything to save the environment was only going to delay the yearned-for end-of-times, so why bother.

Johnny: No more religion, please.

Maude: If money can buy happiness, the race to the bottom made another group of people exceedingly happy. I know it has become a cliché, but the race did make the rich richer, millionaires became billionaires; billionaires became super billionaires and a handful became trillionaires and in the process a large part of the middle class loss their jobs and joined the underclass, those with low paying jobs, menial jobs or no jobs at all and often no home.

Johnny: What I don’t understand is this. With Canada’s social safety net, its unemployment insurance program, its universal health care why would people rebel. All they had to do was wait it out until conditions got better.

Maude: What social safety net? Conditions improving??? Unlikely, since that would mean the rich and powerful would have to share. The unemployed had already lost most of their protection with the pathologically parsimonious Paul Martin having established the precedent that the unemployment insurance fund was not for the unemployed but to pay off the government’s budget deficit.

Johnny: What about the budget surpluses that the government was accumulating every year?

Maude: That was mostly used to provide tax cuts for the rich.

Johnny: So where was the government getting its money to maintain the social safety net?

Maude: [getting irritated] As I said previously “What social safety net?”

Johnny: But Canada at The Fracture had a social safety net!

Maude: It was a net in name only. A social safety net can only be maintained with tax dollars and if there is one thing the rich hate to do is pay taxes. They like the free government services as long as they don’t have to pay for them. They denied the net the oxygen, the tax dollars it needed to deliver the goods for the unemployed, the poor, the homeless while providing for their own well-being at the expense of the less well off.

Johnny: Do you have an example?

Maude: Health care. They allowed the government to spend tax dollars, mostly tax dollars from the underclass, to build and maintain the infrastructure that the rich would need, such as hospitals but not enough for the services. You had to pay a premium to get health services, a premium which the underclass could ill afford. In effect, the poor paid for the facilities that only the rich could afford to use.

Johnny: You’re talking about Machiavellian type manipulation. How could even the wealthiest cabal influence a government to that extent?

Maude: Like Mulroney’s elimination of MacDonald’s National Policy, in retrospect it was surprisingly easy and the tactics used were reminiscent of that successful exercise in deceit.

The BBMC started the campaign to reduce its taxes and the taxes of the rich and transfer the tax burden to what remained of the middle class and the working poor by asking the question in editorials “Are the Poor Paying Their Fair Share?” They then proceeded to prove, using the self-serving dubious research of supposedly independent think tanks such as the Fraser Institute or the ramblings of the head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives that they were not. The governing party took up the theme and another round of tax cuts for the rich and increased taxes for Galbraith’s underclass was approved by Parliament.

Johnny: How often did the rich go to the well?

Maude: When The Fracture occurred Canada had managed to shift most of the tax burden to this underclass. In the decade leading up to The Fracture the government, spurred on by the BBMC, adopted the reverse regressive taxation doctrine as the best way to encourage the underclass to work harder, to, in their words, be more productive. Under this doctrine the highest earners in the land paid no taxes at all.

Some of the government slogans that appeared in the media at the time encouraging Canadians to work harder included The More Money You Make the Less Taxes You Pay or the corny A Thousands Dollars a Day Makes the Taxman Go Away.

Johnny: The average working man or woman could not make that kind of money?

Maude: The only people who made that kind of money were those living off inherited wealth, chief executives, large shareholders, senior bureaucrats and white collar criminals.

Johnny: Anything else?

Maude: Yes, the BBMC also favoured the disastrous policy of spending any tax surplus from taxing the underclass to pay off the relatively small deficits that governments naturally accumulate.

Johnny: The unemployment insurance fund wasn’t enough?

Maude: No, especially after the BBMC convinced the government that it should not have to contribute to the fund. When The Fracture occurred, Canada had been debt free for a number of years. It was only the second country in modern history to accomplish this, Romania under the Ceausescu dictatorship being the first.

The Romanians, instead of being grateful – the zero debt policy had completely destroyed their economy and made Romania the poorest country in Europe – had the Ceausescus, husband and wife, executed by firing squad. History had a message there but again Canada was not paying attention.

Johnny: How did the BBMC, both in Canada and the United States, take such effective control of the public agenda? How did big business get to be equated with what was good for the country in Canada and the United States when in fact, it was a threat to the very freedom they had us believe they were defending?

Maude: Remember, the period we are talking about witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Big business took credit for a period of enlightened capitalism that allowed the flourishing of an informed middleclass, which provided both the moral and financial backbone to win the cold war.

Big media, big business, rich republicans and Presidents who did nothing to win the cold or the hot wars still claimed it was all their doing. Furthermore, they advanced the preposterous notion that if capitalism had defeated the communist hordes therefore more of it could only be good for humanity. Unfortunately, it was not the enlightened kind that had proven itself a winning formula but the more primitive, brutish form that even Adam Smith would have condemned.

Johnny: We are fortunate that the world chose to return to an enlightened form of capitalism before it was too late.

Maude: But it was too late for Canada.