TheBulletin.ca Journal of Downtown Toronto
The term “free trade” seems so upright; so economically sensible. It presupposes a world where nations without certain geographic, demographic or geological attributes can parlay their advantages in other areas with countries that lack what they have.
This video of an interview with financial expert Max Keiser spells out how corporatists own governments and enable genocide:
The Tories under Brian Mulroney in 1994 put ink on a deal that merged us trade-wise with the US and the narco-state of Mexico.
Mexico had a number of trade advantages for Canadian and transnational corporations to consider. Mexico could provide tropical fruits year round and winter veggies. They had some impressive energy and mining assets. And they had an impoverished but smart working class who would d
o almost any jobs for a comparative pittance in Canadian-dollar terms.
The Americans also had certain advantages for our corporations, including the low-wage south where workers could be hired for a fraction of the price of Canadian labour. So Canadian companies could ship some of their manufacturing there and reap higher profits to produce bigger bonuses for their executives and their shareholders.
A much-touted advantage of NAFTA is how it brings Mexican and American corporations into the country to buy assets. Investment. It’s also known as foreign ownership of Canadian assets.
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Because Canadian corporations are free to spend their earnings all over the world, especially in low-tax nations, who are we to complain? That some of our corporations don’t invest in their country because of our tax laws is considered smart business. Government happily enables that.
Free-trade deals also allow foreigners to challenge Canadians on our home ground and extract benefits we don’t want to provide. That’s a price of making a deal.
Many corporations we consider to be Canadian turn out to be transnational, operating all over the world to find the cheapest labour, materials and tax rates. Often they pay no Canadian taxes due to various schemes and loopholes in our tax laws.
That brings up the question of who is supposed to benefit from our economy? Is it the Canadian public who the government is supposed to serve? Is it Canadian businesses that are owned by Canadians? Or is it the whole corporate universe of local and transnational firms seeking anywhere in the world for the lowest prices and the cheapest taxes to maximize profits?
Now it’s natural that corporations and anyone involved in economic pursuits will try to maximize their returns. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that, so long as there are honest, representative governments to ensure a fair playing field and that the public interest is, if not served, not compromised.
Did we have such a government when NAFTA was signed? Did the US?
In the US it was Pres. Bill Clinton who inked the deal negotiated with Brian Mulroney by ex-CIA chief Pres. George Herbert Walker Bush.
Clinton did the world a massive disservice by later repealing the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that distinguished between real banks and market gamblers. Thus, the 2008 economic catastrophe that’s still with us is a result. The repealed act had been created to prevent such distortions, like derivatives, that still rob all but the best-connected, richest companies and people of their opportunities to thrive in the economy.
Mulroney, for his part, slapped Canadians with a value added tax called the Goods and Services Tax (GST). It is nothing more than a sales tax that has absorbed massive amounts of our wealth in producing an intrusive civil-service regime that oversees the unfair grab against the poorest and most vulnerable of our citizens.
It works like this: Really poor people immediately spend every penny they receive from whatever source. They have no savings.
That means a sales tax hits them on100% of their incomes whereas someone who spends just half of income is sales taxed on only the half spent for purchases. When the poor pay a greater percentage of their incomes in taxes than the rest of us, they’re being treated unfairly. They’re already down and this just kicks them some more.
Sure, the scheme Ottawa invented to pay them a periodic rebate is welcome, but it doesn’t ease the immediate pain and unfairness of being taxed on their few dollars when they’re already hand-to-mouth.
Was the Euro free trade deal announced in haste to focus attention away from Stephen Harper’s stumble into a mud hole? The Canadian House-of-Lards (aka: Senate) is another of the promises Harper fabricated to gain power.
Remember the Triple-E Senate promise? He made gravy-train appointments instead. Remember the promise to be an accountable government? His is the most arrogant, secretive, uncommunicative regime we’ve likely ever had, topped only by Rob Ford’s quixotic meanderings in power.
How will Canadians benefit from a deal with Europe? Cheaper wine? That’s an awful prospect for Niagara’s excellent wineries. Cheaper machinery? Will Canada ever get back its factories, or will they be European imports? And if so, is that necessarily a bad thing?
The thing is, this isn’t other than a great unknown and the touted benefits are as unknown as the ignored prospects for disaster.
Next it’s China. Free trade with a slave-labour economy that’s a few notches above some of the most-evil African slave-labour nations. It’s a country ruled, to a great degree, by murderers, torturers, organ-snatchers, counterfeiters, elephant-slaughterers, and scam artists.
Their clever and potentially deadly counterfeits run the range of everything from pharmaceuticals to vital aircraft parts. Other more benign counterfeits rob legitimate businesses of their rights to profit from their patents and copyrights.
(When caught by their local authorities, Chinese criminals are quite often dispatched with a shot to the head and their families are invoiced for the bullet.)
Will Canadians gain from these vaunted free-trade deals? Or will corporations be the beneficiaries?
We can predict with accuracy that corporations are behind the government imperative for free trade and globalization. Corporations are encouraged by our loose election laws to bribe political parties and candidates. Elections are expensive and unnecessarily so. It’s heaven-sent for those with deep pockets and even deeper lusts for government largesse.
The bottom line on these proposed (and likely unstoppable) deals is: How will it affect most of us?
Will we still be a nation rife with educated soda-jerks longing for a chance to practise skills they’ve gone into decades of debt to learn?
Or will we ride a wave of innovation and new opportunities that actually give us the bright future our corporate and political elites promise free trade will bring?
