Canada and Third Parties… A Lesson for the United States?

Canada and Third Parties…  A Lesson for the United States? 

 

"These weapons were designed for one purpose and one purpose only — only to kill the largest amount of people in the shortest amount of time," he said in a press conference on Friday.

 

"You don't need an AR-15 to bring down a deer."

 

-       Trudeau announces ban on 1,500 kinds of assault weapons, BBC

 

 

By JM Hamilton (5-29-21)

 

I had the privilege of moving from the United States to Canada in January of 2020.  My reasons for doing so were numerous, but primarily it was to soak up Canada’s beauty and to gain a step, or two, on climate change (that is, to remove myself from hotter temperatures as well as the States’ increasingly dark trajectory). 

 

As an economics & political observer my timing couldn’t have been more perfect, as the pandemic hit North America one to two months after my move.  Here, in real time, I was able to analyze and observe two countries, Canada and the United States, and the respective governments’ responses to that pandemic. 

 

As I’ve written on more than one occasion, COVID has revealed a great many things about the state of democracy, economics, and the health of respective governments… and, as better days appear to be on the horizon, COVID will, likely, continue to reveal much more. 

 

And while I’m no expert – not even close – on Canadian politics and institutions…. I feel like I’ve learned enough on a macro basis to comment or offer some comparisons vis a vis the United States. 

 

First, unlike the United States, Canadian democracy is thriving and running very well. Canada has a vibrant and very healthy political system, with parties that run the gamut from Greens all the way to Conservatives. In the middle, we have several national parties, not the least among them: Liberals, The New Democratic Party (NDP), and Bloc Québécois.  I say, ‘middle’ but the Liberals and the New Democratic Party are progressive, and put America’s Democratic party to shame (both as functioning political parties and their ability execute, act rapidly, and get things done). Presently, Liberals and the NDP form a coalition (or minority) government, under Canada’s parliamentary democracy. 

 

Canada’s pandemic response was nothing short of spectacular.  Perhaps, second best after New Zealand and PM Jacinda Ardern’s response.  Canada didn’t hesitate, it acted. Unlike the Unite States with its endless haggling and failed two-party system, the Liberal government’s response was a work of art.  Among other programs, Liberals and the NDP offering a UBI for Canadians put out of work by the pandemic, along with aid to small businesses and large businesses alike.  In fact, Canada spent the most, comparatively, among its G7 peers, and it certainly could afford to do so because it had the lowest debt to GDP ratio… and holds an identical debt to GDP standing today.  In fact, S&P just confirmed Canada’s AAA credit rating. 

 

In its most recent budget, the Trudeau government is not standing down, it’s ramping up state spending: with green initiatives (green hydrogen captures my attention); national childcare programs that will unburden women and put them back to work (should they so desire); and Liberals are looking to increase the federal minimum wage to $15, and peg annual increases to inflation (essentially, taking future minimum wage hikes out of parliament’s hands).  Again, Canada’s government can afford to act aggressively, because unlike our southern neighbor, Canada doesn’t have a rabid – Wild West – banking system requiring continuous bailouts.  And unlike the United States, Canada doesn’t do endless wars… Wall St bailouts and Endless Wars have caused the US’ national debt to spiral out of control. (To such an extent, that a 4.4 trillion dollar bailout for Wall St, under the CARES Act, wasn’t added to America’s national debt, but rather, was called a ‘loan’…  the FED’s bloated balance sheet notwithstanding.)

 

I’m partial to Trudeau and the Liberals … they stand for women’s rights, gay rights, and are pushing the country in the correct direction on first nations and minority rights. The Liberal government legalized cannabis, which has been a godsend for jobs and provincial tax revenue.  After a sluggish start, the Liberal government is blowing away the majority of other G20 members in placing vaccine jabs into Canadian arms.  

On trade agreements, the Liberal government has entered into revised agreements, with a more nuanced perspective in favor of Canadian labor, and it favors a global minimum tax for tax dodging multinationals.  And in terms of making Canada safer, after a mass shooting in Nova Scotia, Trudeau outlawed automatic weapons.  

 

Zero drama, outlawed, done, finito: Mic drop. 

 

You can’t make this stuff up.  And as for my beloved United States… unmitigated chaos, a government in serious dysfunction & entirely corrupt, a billionaire welfare state, systemic looting by the oligarchy, a population riven in two, and racial problems on an unprecedented scale.  Congress shrugs and plays its Washington games.  And a newly elected POTUS, who talks a great game, but is chronically handicapping himself by reaching out to a political party – the GOP – that is hellbent upon Biden’s destruction.  

 

Trust me, on any number of fronts, I want to see the United States turn it around; not the least of which, I don’t want to see hell come spilling over the Canadian border from the South. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the end of the day, the Liberal party is no Democratic party.  PM Trudeau is his own man, and the Liberals, again, are genuinely progressive, indisputably successful.  Their instincts, generally, are to do the right thing.  But where Canadian democracy triumphs, and where the United States is clearly failing, is in the introduction of strong viable third parties. 

 

Here, the NDP should take a bow.  It’s one hell of a wingman.  And as a progressive wingman, Jagmeet Singh, not unlike an angel, sits on Mr. Trudeau’s shoulder encouraging the PM to adopt a more progressive path (it’s already in Trudeau’s DNA to do the right thing for Canadians). 

 

Personally, as a progressive, and when we see the United States without a national progressive party, and the Democratic party constantly failing the United States (constantly bailing out billionaires, while one in four American children live in poverty) … the importance of third parties cannot be underestimated. 

 

And the NDP, with nearly 18% national support (based upon current polling), is a credible threat… if say, some future Liberal PM was to start to lean too far right, too centrist, too corporate, too bellicose.  

 

The NDP is such a positive influence, I believe it impacts Canada’s Conservative party… imagine an American conservative leader asking his party to acknowledge climate change.  Not happening. 

And that’s perhaps my biggest takeaways:  Democracy is alive and well in Canada; the government is genuinely concerned about Canadians; the government executes & functions; and – crucially – Canada’s multi-party-political system is an insurance policy against the corruption, the heinous actions, the abject irresponsibility, and callous disregard for citizens (we see exhibited everyday by the FAILED TWO-PARTY SYSTEM within the Unites States).  

 

Third parties are desperately needed competition against an American political duopoly.  A duopoly that serves – exclusively - itself, billionaire ownership, and multinational ownership (and to the exclusion & complete detriment of the nation’s long term & citizens’ interests). 

 

Selah.

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2021

 

 

America’s Billionaire Welfare State

America’s Billionaire Welfare State

 

Quite simply, the GOP and the ruling elite have created a monopoly/trickle-down economy, characterized by:

 

White supremacy, systemic racism, slave wages - a welfare state for billionaires - and failed for profit healthcare … while a pandemic rages. 

 

By JM Hamilton (5-15-2021)

 

The financial news media was all abuzz with the I-word this week… the dreaded inflation that Wall Street has been warning about. Many will recall failed economist, Larry Summers, used inflation as an excuse to recommend withholding stimulus spending for labor, during the 2008 Wall Street crisis.  Larry was wrong, of course, and the remnants of the middle class, and blue-collar workers, pivoted to Trump in 2016.  Now, Larry is ringing the inflation alarm all over again. 

 

What the financial media has not covered, in any detail, if at all, is the outsized role Wall Street and America’s monopoly economy plays in jacking up prices, arbitrarily and capriciously, and passing a monopolistic tax (i.e. inflation) onto consumers.   Lumber prices have more than doubled, thanks in no small part to Wall Street commodity speculation. Wall Street sees a hot commodity, bids up the price, and those costs – complete with speculative markup - are passed onto the consumer (and of course, retailers must get their cut, as well, and marks up said commodity even higher).  In this regard, Wall Street adds zero value and is pure overhead.  Foreign supply chains, and globalism & monopoly, falls on its keister, and no new cars are built… consumers pivot to used cars and prices shoot up.  Famed robber baron, and monopolist, Warren Buffett, recently said he has the pricing power to pass along increased costs to consumers, and has therefore, used monopolist pricing power to pass along an obscene tax upon the American people.  That’s the power of unchecked monopoly.  And the only thing that has the power to hold a monopoly in check is regulation, competition, and congress… but both parties are on the take, so don’t look for the duopoly to take on America’s monopoly problem or badly needed, structural economic reforms. 

 

To be sure, there’s undoubtedly some increased demand in the inflation equation, but already there are signs that Trump/Biden stimulus are fading, along with consumer sentiment. Read here.

 

So why is Wall Street banging the inflation gong so hard, presently? 

 

As usual, it has to do with crushing the largest cost component of the business community, and that is US labor. 

 

The Wall Street, supply-side, inflation initiative has two simple aims.

 

One, eliminate all discussion on raising the minimum wage to $15.  Status: Mission accomplished.

 

Two, shutdown any dialogue about congress passing any public works or new deal legislation.  Status: Looking good. 

 

Anything to help labor or give workers greater negotiating power with their employers must, per Wall Street, be cut off at the knees.  This is what the republican party has stood for, since Reagan, and Larry Summers – establishment Dem & Clintonista – clearly stands for today. 

 

This was made even more manifest when several right-wing governors cut off federal aid to workers, unilaterally, during a horrible labor market and in the middle of a global pandemic.  Yes, you read that correctly: in order to perpetuate the slave labor economy, the monopoly/monopsony economy, White Supremacy party governors cut off aid to American workers, in an attempt to drive them back into the labor market.  A US labor market characterized by: disease, a sky-high US body count, extraordinarily rude American consumers, and wage slavery (almost forgot, America’s failed for-profit healthcare system).

 

Clearly, the GOP and establishment Dems care very little about the bottom half of society, many of whom live in poverty or hand to mouth.  Tens of millions of workers are unemployed, underemployed, given up looking for work, and are subjected to wage slavery (aka a nonliving wage).  And the Dem congress has completely stalled out on Biden’s proposed infrastructure plans, essentially sabotaging itself in the run up to 2022 midterms. 

So much for those hard won Georgia Senate seats.

 

 

 

 

When Wall Street ran into trouble in 2020, congress came forward in a rare display of bipartisanship to pass $4.4 trillion in welfare for Wall Street; but notice, when it comes time to give American workers aid or a government job… this is worthy of months of debate, stalling, and Washington games.   The bottom line on all of this:  The US runs a billionaire/multi-millionaire welfare state.  All four branches of government - including the FED - are captured, owned, and controlled by billionaires & multinationals.  Fiscal, monetary, regulatory, and foreign policies of the United States… It’s all trickle-down.  You know, trickle-down, the very policy that POTUS Biden denounced in his speech before congress as a failure. 

 

The FT reported this week that central banks dumped nine trillion in monetary stimulus into markets, and shockers… billionaires suddenly were eight trillion dollars richer?  So nice of billionaires to somehow allow the extra trillion to escape their grasp.  Someone screwed up!

 

All of this, of course, begs questions.  Questions nobody in Washington - nor the MSM - is asking.   Questions like: 

 

How is it that the monopolists in the American economy, allegedly the greatest economy in the world, can’t meet a momentary spike in aggregate demand, w/out setting off inflation-mongering?

 

Why is an increase in minimum wages so threatening to American elites?  Can the US economy, the monopoly economy, the slave wage economy, not rise to the occasion to meet increased aggregated demand w/out setting off paroxysms of inflation?

 

What does it say about the US today, that its elites will go to any extremes to crush labor, women, minorities, and homosexuals?  Not only rigging the entire economy in their favor, but generating supply-side inflation to shut down any pro-labor reforms or progressive legislation?

 

What of the systemic misogyny, racism, and homophobia that is deeply ingrained within the US economy, and absolutely nothing has been done to address?  (Sorry, a couple of tokens in boardrooms, does absolutely zero to address the plight of tens of millions of disenfranchised Americans. Zero.) 

 

There are so many more questions that need answering; questions that the elites will do everything in their power to evade.  The United States is, clearly, rotting from within.  And at the center of that rot is the US slave wage/monopoly economy, a massive billionaire welfare state, and a highly corrupt US government.  

 

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2021

 

Ask what your country can do for you…

Ask what your country can do for you… 

 

In more normal political times, Biden’s record during his first 100 days in office wouldn’t have inspired comparisons to FDR. But in the wake of Trump’s malignant incompetence, Biden’s success in returning government to something like functionality seems, to his supporters at least, almost worthy of Mount Rushmore.

 

-      Geoffrey Kabaservice: Consensus still eludes Biden, The Guardian 

 

By JM Hamilton (5-1-2021)

 

Biden’s first hundred days came and went this week, and it provided an opportunity to reflect.

 

The fact that Biden doesn’t behave like Trump, and is competent, is a breath of fresh air to many.  But to say that Biden isn’t Trump is very low bar by which to judge the Biden White House.  Biden’s actions, to date, from executive orders reversing Trump’s orders, to the passage of $1.9 trillion in stimulus, were largely expected. In fact, the $1400 checks were the bare minimum (essentially a band-aid for a bottom half of society that has long been neglected & abused by Washington elites and US corporations), especially with tens of millions of Americans jobless, given up looking for work, or subject to wage slavery. 

 

Perhaps the biggest surprise, so far, is that Biden appears to have stood up to the Deep State (aka the Pentagon & the MIC) and announced that the United States was finally pulling out of Afghanistan, much to America’s collective relief.  Otherwise, a great deal of what President Biden has done, in the first hundred days, is preservation of a failed status quo.  

 

There has been no New Deal type legislation that has addressed, and reformed, the massive structural defects of the US economy and political system. For several generations now, Americans have been beaten down and told not to expect much from their government.  Austerity has reigned supreme for the average American… while trillions in plutocratic welfare, tax breaks for the wealthy - and the capture of government by oligarchy - has grown ever more ruinous for the nation, its economy, and social cohesion.  Seemingly, lost in America’s rearview mirror are the creation of a middle class, the defeat of national socialism in Europe, and the development of programs like Social Security.  

 

Of course, FDR is the President who addressed the failed status quo, who took on the structural defects of the capitalist economy… by building a social safety net, creating government jobs, when the economy was on its back and subject to an exceptionally nasty Wall St crash.  FDR paved the way to demonstrate that America could be dynamic, and that government had a key role to play in the economy and ameliorating capitalism’s very worst attributes.  But above all, FDR showed that the structural defects that threated the future of the United States could, and must, be addressed. 

 

 

 

POTUS Biden’s speech this week was remarkable, if for no other reason than he announced that trickle-down was a failure.  But in announcing that the cornerstone of forty years of American economic policy was wrong, Biden also owes it to Americans to address the deep void left by republican party’s – as well as establishment dems’ - failed dogma.  And just as the neoliberal house of cards has fallen (brought low by the pandemic and bailed out yet again, by the American taxpayer), nothing short of structural solutions will take care of the problems before us. Fourteen hundred dollar band-aids won’t stop the hemorrhaging for nearly half of all Americans. 

 

What structural defects am I writing of?  For starters, let’s go with a campaign promise Biden ran on… a living wage for all Americans. How Congress cannot pass an increase in the minimum wage -- and continue to subsidize billionaire & multinational profits with taxpayer dollars, essentially keeping labor alive -- enters into the theatre of the absurd. There’s also the structural defect of America’s monopoly economy, where TBTF (too big to fail) monopolies and cartels privatize gains, while socializing losses.  

 

America’s monopoly problem was on full display this week when Big Pharma threw a fit over the possibility that Washington might share publicly funded patents with the rest of the world, so as to eliminate the existential threat that is the global pandemic.  Here on full display was a microcosm, Big Pharma, of a disease that threatens the entire US economy: that is to say, monopoly and monopsony.  Such irony, the biggest threat to Western economies and the dynamism of capitalism isn’t communism, but rather, rent seeking utilities spawned by the private sector.  Here, for all the world to see, is an intransigent, self-serving, and entitled American crony capitalism - in the form of Big Pharma.  A Big Pharma industry that is nothing more than a rapacious and venal middleman, sponging off taxpayer funded research for its very existence. 

 

And yet, not a word from the Biden Administration on serious antitrust enforcement. 

 

The US government has many, many structural defects, but perhaps none are as debilitating, or provides such low hanging fruit for reform, as the senate's filibuster. The senate is where all good legislation goes to die, and where a crony status quo is preserved.  We are about to find out very quickly if Biden is serious about the variety of programs, he pitched this week.  Key to getting Biden’s progressive agenda through will be the elimination of the filibuster, ending the charade of bipartisanship with a racist & insurrectionist GOP, and the administration’s ability to rein in & control bitterly partisan right-wing democrats (see Manchin, Sinema, Et Al.). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the end of the day, America’s structural defects go back to an entirely corrupt congress, and oligarchs and multinationals, who have rigged the entire system in their favor.  Exceptional wage and wealth inequality, as well as the pandemic, have exposed the dry rot and decay of the US economy and the government.  It is this void, this vacuum, that must be addressed not with $1400 band-aids, but with meaningful structural reforms, both economic & political. 

 

Not that long ago, a former president – in his inaugural address – exhorted ordinary Americans to sacrifice for their country:  

 

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

 

For decades, ordinary American gave and gave… while the wealthy and the powerful stole and took. Now, to save our democracy and the United States, it’s time for ordinary Americans to ask, what their country can do for them? 

 

And it’s time for the government – with or without the assistance of the wealthy - to deliver for the American people, big time.

 

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2021