14 economic advisors Flaherty consults on policy and budgets are all from the financial sector: Fiscal contraction doesn't work

The 14 economic advisors Flaherty consults on policy and budgets are all from the financial sector, mostly banksters.

Here's what James K. Galbraith says about the implicit danger of such a stacked deck:

 "....economic policy should not be under the control of bankers, and any economic team which is dominated by the financial sector is going to be largely serving that sector's interest. Now, that, I think, is a very clear fact and something which everybody should be prepared to resist and to object to when it occurs and to protest until it changes. Until that happens, very little else will happen."  http://goo.gl/sMidp

 Let me reiterate by way of paraphrase that last bit:  we should be resisting, objecting to - whenever and wherever we can -  the Harper Regime's deep privileging of the financial sector through its overt neoliberal agenda. There's nothing remotely subtle going on here. As I've noted many times, it's such a classic neoliberal agenda it ought to be taught in university political economy classes. If we can't shift that ideological policy ground, none of the social and poltical transformations we seek has a chance. This should be our primary concern in our efforts to bring about system change. Everything else is a symptom.

And here's what even Larry Summers, Harvard professor, late of the White House advisory staff, has to say about misguided austerity such as that implemented by the Harper Regime:

"Fiscal contraction reduces incomes, limiting the capacity to repay debts. It achieves only limited reductions in deficits once the adverse effects of economic contraction on tax revenue and benefit payments are accounted for. And it casts a shadow over future growth prospects by reducing capital investment and raising unemployment, which inevitably takes a toll on the capacity and willingness of the unemployed to work."   http://goo.gl/GyZri

This is what protests around the world yesterday were really about.

My Take-Away from the System Change Initiative

There are of course many different but complementary take-aways  from the Council of Canadians System Change Initiative:  systemchange.ca. 


This is a summary of what seems salient if not crucial to me:

Global Warming is caused by unsustainable economic production in the material world, a process that has been driven by an abundance of energy, the main component of which is oil, which has, unbeknownst to many, already peaked.  As a result, we will have to - whether we want to or not - move to sustainable local economies eventually in order simply to survive.

Neoliberalism (and liberalism before it) is the ideological (social and political)  economic ground of this phenomenon, which assumes that aggregate economic growth is the order of things and can go on forever without repercussions in the natural or social world in which we dwell. 

Global Warming in turn generates climate change, and these together are gradually destroying the planet and, with increasingly less subtlety - because of the necessity for environmental reparations and social adaptation - our socio-economic lives. 

And so our political efforts should focus on the “system" that is the root cause of this unsustainable, destructive set of conditions - on assaulting the particular policies of neoliberalism that facilitate the enabling of this pernicious way of thinking and acting into which the entire western world and much of the developing world as well have inscribed themselves. Neoliberalism's destructive effects extend way beyond the discipline  of economics as such.  

This is the political space in which we need to develop strategies to shift public discourse on our current economic-political-social system, for in 2012 this is the only place where change might actually happen.  As a co-operative endeavour, the occupy movement is a promising beginning, for it has already opened up a gap in public discourse for progressive voices to be heard in the mainstream. The forthcoming Occupy Handbook, which mixes progressive and mainstream voices together, is a testimony to that extraordinary effect - at least in the U.S. Would that we had that sort of revelatory opening up here in Canada.

The Challenge of Envisioning Something Other Than Capitalism

Naomi Klein is dead right about our suspicion that we can never imagine our way outside of capitalism since we have been ideologically inscribed in it unconsciously for time immemorial it would seem - so much so that we have thorougly "naturalized" it as a given way of life. We are all cradle capitalists.

Tabatha Southey once told me everything is economics. She might have really meant capitalism. For Capitalism is indeed everything, and it involves of course much more than an economic system: capitalism informs and structures our political, social, psychological, biological, and economic daily lives. There is no facet of our existence that is not inside capitalism. Is it any wonder then we have difficulty trying to think outside it since we really aren't even aware that we're inside it? We've known nothing else. This is our reality. We are all prisoners of capitalism, and most of us, sad to say, are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

And a simple reform or tweaking of capaitalism is not really the answer - such quick remedies as regulating investment banks, for example. For the occupy movement at its root is about system change, not reform, even if that change can't be either envisioned or articulated at this particular early moment. This is indeed the beginning of a shift or full disruption, as Thomas L. Freidman suggests, but that full change will not happen overnight. It may take years. I call it sloppy democracy. and the important point is patient perseverance in small and big ways everywhere.



Naomi Klein Interview at Occupy Wall St. Grounded News, video report 7

System Change: Naomi Klein from Council of Canadians

Nothing Exposes the Failures of Our Economic System More than Climate Change, which is not merely an isolated, separate environmental issue, for the effects of climate change are in fact the direct result of our market based model of economic growth and all its various capitalist strategies for profit and exploitation including the most damaging - because transportation generates such massive CO2 emissions - global trade. One could say, as Prince Charles has recently (Humans at Risk of Extinction), capitalism as we know it is destroying the planet.