Since the mid-1980s, and accelerating with the signing of the Canada-U.S. “free trade” deal, the guiding principle of neo-liberalism seems to have been “Ask not what your economy can do for you, ask what you can do for your economy.” This reframing of the relationship between the economy, society and democracy has been largely successful, with most Canadians accepting this personification of the economy and willing to adjust their lives to accommodate it. The economy is now defined as the narrow interests of global corporations. The old notion that economy should serve the national interest and that of workers and their communities now seems almost quaint.

But the results of this remaking of the world of work are increasingly disastrous for working people and the economy, even using capitalism’s own measures. Capitalism has to grow just to survive and the fact that the biggest firms in Canada are sitting on up to half a trillion dollars of cash that they cannot or will not invest does not bode well for growth. Ultimately that’s a good thing as the obsession with growth is at the root of climate change and the rapid depletion of resources. But until we have governments which recognize this, we are all trapped in a growth paradigm and suffer when it fails.

Yet there is precious little recognition that deregulation and the endless promotion of the interests of capital are at the root of the problem. The half trillion in unusable capital represents part of the distortion of the economy caused by policies of labour flexibility and the suppression of wages and salaries. That much and more has no doubt been accumulated by the wealthy, as their share of annual income continues to grow — from seven per cent in the 1970s to close to 15 per cent today (just above the level of 1929). Like the cash-bloated corporations, the wealthy will only spend so much. The rest they squirrel away in stocks and bonds.

This inequality train is picking up speed, according to the OECD, which in a recent study pointed out not only that the wage gap here is at a record high (and well above the 34 country OECD average), but acknowledged its impact on stable economic recovery. Nations with high levels of income inequality experience shorter, less sustained periods of economic growth.

But neo-liberal ideology is immune to rational analysis and mere facts. There is no interest shown by governments or corporations in the question of inequality. The federal government is set to fire some 30,000 federal public employees (How many will end up “self-employed?”), and Caterpillar Inc. feels completely at ease demanding an almost 60 per cent roll-back in wages and benefits at its Electromotive plant in London.

So having succeeded in giving capitalists everything they asked for (and some things they didn’t ask for), what do we have? Keep in mind that the object of consumer capitalism is to sell stuff. It seems that the captains of industry have forgotten this. But while the advertising and marketing of more and more stuff goes on apace, the facts facing working and middle class families paint a totally unsustainable spending picture.

Some 60 per cent of wage and salary earners state that they are one paycheque away from financial insolvency.

The Canadian savings rate is the lowest it’s been for decades.

The debt to income level is the highest it’s ever been, as people try to maintain their standards of living through borrowing.

The net real increase in average pay between 1980 and 2005 was a grand total of $51.

And, of course, the criminal greed of the financial industry is still threatening the world economy. Its aftermath here has resulted in Canadian un- and underemployment, which averaged 10.6 per cent in 2011, and for youth aged 15-24 a brutal 19.7 per cent.

But it is not just private sector income that has declined. The social wage — public services provided by our taxes — has also been dropping thanks to labour flexibility policies and spending cutbacks. Cuts to EI eligibility and social assistance were made in the mid-1990s on the unsupported assumption that they provided a disincentive for workers to work. By 2005, a quarter of Canadian workers were putting in 50 hour weeks, often for no extra pay. Again, these measures enhanced the corporate bottom line and filled corporate coffers — with the money they now can’t invest because there is no new demand.

The rationale for these policies in the 1990s was to enhance Canada’s competitiveness in its trading relationship with the U.S. Indeed, Paul Martin made it clear that pushing international trade was the country’s only economic development strategy. But when the country you want to export to is pursuing the same policies of driving incomes down, exports decline just as domestic consumer spending does.

There is a solution to this ideological insanity, but don’t hold your breath for any Canadian government, federal or provincial, to implement it any time soon. If private capital refuses to invest because its policy preferences have snuffed out demand, then governments must do two things. First, they must reverse labour flexibility policies and return the social safety net to, at least, its previous state. This goes beyond providing dignity for ordinary Canadians. For tens of thousands of small and medium businesses, it actually means more money being spent in their stores.

Secondly, if the private sector refuses to invest the money it has accumulated (with the help of government policies), then this is the time to massively increase public investment. This cannot simply be temporary stimulus but a permanent policy shift back towards a coherent and creative — and high wage — industrial policy that directs the economy rather than assuming allocation of capital can only be done by the market. Public investment must also bring back some dignity to working people in the form of child care, home care, Pharmacare and accessible post-secondary education — all measures that would also enhance the economy.

Public investment could also begin address the crisis of over-production by gradually exploring a long term de-growth strategy (including a different kind of growth) which addresses climate change and the rapid depletion of resources that scientists tell us is threatening the planet. Only by radically reducing the role of private capital can such an outcome even be imagined.

When the global oil companies run your country – when they own your government – economic and environmental catastrophe are literally guaranteed. In Canada the oil companies and the Harper government know with a sinister certainty that an oil spill catastrophe is coming. The precautionary principle, rooted in the notion of the common good and established on a foundation of science, has no place in the calculations of global capital. It is replaced by risk assessment, cost/benefit analysis. But the assessment isn’t aimed at ensuring something bad won’t happen as it seems to imply. It is based on a cost/benefit analysis. How much will the oil spill cost? That it will happen is actually part of the calculation. Remember the Ford Pinto?

Stephen Harper muses about the evil being practiced by environmental and “other radical groups” as they engage in the democratic process provided to them (the hearings on the Enbridge pipeline) by his government. It’s as if by doing exactly what they are called upon to do, they are endangering the nation. This follows Harper’s repeated talk about the pipeline being necessary for the good of the country and the economy – and his declaration that anyone who criticizes the tar sands or the pipeline is sabotaging the economy. He calls then “ideological.” But ideology is meaning in the service of power – and all of it to date is coming from Harper and Big Oil.

This spinning is part of the preparation his government needs as it plans to first, denigrate, and second ignore, the environmental panel set to spend 18 months examining the pipeline and its impacts. He needs to undermine the panel’s work because we already know the project’s impact. The opposition will be backed by science and popular opposition. Any panel decision that gives the go-ahead for Gateway will be one that ignores virtually all the evidence. To maintain its credibility the panel may well rule against it and force Harper to reject its findings. And without a massive public campaign that can actually threaten Conservative-held ridings in BC, that is what will happen.

Harper’s dogged dedication to the oil patch could be his undoing as it privileges one sector of the economy at the expense of virtually all the others (except the financial sector which with government borrowing and the CMHC ensuring mortgages, never loses). This puts the Harper government in a different category than previous neo-liberal governments of Mulroney, Chretien and Martin. All of these governments and their leaders developed most policy positions at the behest of the Business Council on National Issues, now the Canadian Council of Chief Executives.

By delivering on the list of priorities (Paul Martin was presented with an even ten in 1994 and delivered on them all) Canadian governments pre-Harper actually balanced their promotion of corporate interests. This was, said the 150 CEOs, good for the economy – that is, their economy. The BCNI/CCCE represented the biggest players in all the key sectors and their policy interests were balanced by the time the package of preferences (demands?) were presented to the sitting finance minister.

That practice, where no budget was ever presented to Parliament before being vetted by the most powerful CEOs in the country, effectively ended when Stephen Harper became prime minister. The smartest man in the room does not take kindly to being told what to do even by the most powerful. It might have something to do with the fact that they can’t buy favours any more with the new election financing rules.

But actually it goes back twenty years to the formation of the Reform Party where Stephen Harper, as Manning’s policy director, blended neo-liberal policies with culturally conservative policies to create a wholly new phenomenon: a right-wing libertarian party posing as populist to ensure a loyal and generous base. Of course it was Preston Manning who led the party. He had carefully chosen the timing (having got it wrong once before) to coincide with a growing populist discontent amongst prairie and Alberta Conservatives who felt betrayed by Mulroney.

But he and his party needed a kick start. And fortunately for him the oil companies were eager to find someone who could put together just such a party – one that would never mess with them again. The national energy policy of Pierre Trudeau still traumatized them and they wanted insurance that no one would ever get their hands on their oil. One renegade oil man told me, laughing, that people in the oil industry really, really believe that because they found it, it belongs to them – any tax paid or royalty extracted is simply theft.

The oil men knew Manning having researched him and believed he might just fit the bill. But seeing as they were paying the tab to get the party off the ground (an expensive proposition) they wanted Manning close by where they could keep an eye on him, and they wanted him to immerse himself in oil industry political culture to make it the dominant driver of the party. So they insisted that he move from Edmonton to Calgary. Manning obliged. And that was the beginning of the Big Oil Party, brilliantly peddled as a party of the little man all the while planning policies that would impoverish him.

And by declaring themselves a Western party – the slogan was “The West wants in” – Manning and Harper reinforced the importance of Alberta, its American-inspired sense of hyper-independence and, of course, its oil. Indeed, this sense of profound difference that dominates the ruling political elite – reflected in the “firewall letter” penned by Harper and others – that contributes to the privileging of the oil industry in Canada. Not only was Alberta the most “free market” province of all, it was the one that resisted most vigorously the social democratic state that evolved in the 1960s.

Many people from all sides of the political divide – including Peter Lougheed – have pointed out that the rapid expansion of the tar sands is just really bad economic and energy policy. It is also extremely bad national security policy. Most of Quebec and the Maritime provinces rely exclusively for their oil on the Middle East producers – the so-called “unethical oil” of Harper’s spinmeisters. Sending oil to China that could otherwise make the whole country self-sufficient is not just an absence of a national energy policy – it is a declaration the national government simply isn’t national and has no intention of becoming so.

But for all Harper’s touted strategic genius he sometimes seems perversely stuck to a policy that will actually hurt him. He couldn’t resist bashing culture in the middle of the 2008 election and infuriated Quebec, probably losing a majority. This time he is tying his political future in a high-stakes fight (it will dwarf anything seen before) for a pipeline which the majority of oiligarchs thinks is not even needed. Maybe he likes fighting with one hand tied behind his back.

There seem to be three fronts in this battle, each of them distinct and each playing a key and overlapping role with the others. The first comprises the scores of NGOs, First Nations and community groups (and individuals) who will bury the assessment committee in first rate evidence of the madness of the project and its looming, serial disasters. Then comes the provincial government of BC which, under the Liberals, is schizophrenic on then issue but may yet come out against the project. But under the NDP, who I predict will win handily in 2013 as the panel reports, the provincial government must be persuaded to use every power at its disposal to halt this monstrosity. And lastly, folks in the formal political arena (with the help of the NGOs) have as their task identifying 10 or 12 or more Conservative MPS for defeat on this issue.

All of this is on-going at different levels and speeds. And if you are not a part of any of these political fronts you need to take out you checkbooks or credit cards and ask yourself how much it is worth to not experience that horrible moment you will never forget. Not sure of who to give to? Here are five groups which my sources suggests are using their resources and strategic intelligence most effectively: West Coast Environmental Law, Headwaters Initiative, Dogwood Initiative, Friends of Wild salmon and the Wilderness Committee. They – though not just them – are your voice. Make it powerful.

The CBC blurb reads as follows – don’t miss it or the following two programs:

LEFT BEHIND

Monday, January 16, 23, 30

on Ideas at 9:04 pm, CBC Radio One

Over the past 30 years, the benefits of economic growth in Canada, the US
and much of the rest of the world, have gone increasingly to the top one
percent of the population. For the majority of families, however, incomes
have stagnated. This rise in inequality coincided with a sea change in
government policy. Beginning in the 1980s, governments in much of the
English-speaking world embarked on what has been called the neoliberal
revolution – deregulation, privatization and tax cuts, aimed at liberating
markets and stimulating the economy. The rising tide was supposed to lift
all boats, but it didn’t. Jill Eisen explores what happened.

Part 2 airs on Monday, January 23. and part 3 on Jan 30th

There is a deep malaise in Canadian democracy rooted, it seems, in a profound alienation from politics and radically lowered expectations of what is possible from government. Much of this is the result of a deliberate strategy of voter-suppression employed by the Conservatives, a strategy of making politics so offensive and good government so unimaginable that millions of people simply tune out, as if it has nothing to do with them.

For those who thought that this was a temporary attitude of the Harper anti-government, that there would be more civility with a Conservative majority, the evidence is in. This is a permanent strategy to keep the party in power. It will not diminish with time or with the advancement of the Harper agenda. This was never about Harper being frustrated with his minority status. It is about who the man is, a malignant political rogue, contemptuous of his own country. It is about what his agenda has always been — a right-wing libertarian remaking of the nation.

That this is an extraordinary, indeed unprecedented situation facing our democracy can scarcely be doubted, and many commentators normally supportive of the status-quo (like Jeffrey Simpson of the Globe and Mail) have identified pieces of the picture, denouncing Harper for particular policies, or outrages against democracy and the rule of law. Yet the true magnitude of the crisis we face is rarely declared. Until we begin to see the country — and talk about it — as if it has been occupied by a foreign power, we will not create the political atmosphere needed to save the nation.

So far, we aren’t even close to achieving this political framing of the task ahead. While it is true that there is a strong push for proportional representation — which would have prevented a Harper majority from happening — it is a long way off, given that neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives support it. In the meantime, politics as usual is still being practiced by the main opposition parties. The NDP and the Liberals are still playing the game whose rules allowed Harper to gain the power he has. Blind to the threat to the civilized nation built by several generations of Canadians, these two parties still behave and plan as if they are in a simple competition for seats in a normally functioning Parliament.

Yet with the election of Stephen Harper, everything changed. No prime minister in Canadian history has come to power with such a ruthless determination to implement an agenda so at odds with the interests of the country and the values of its citizens. This involves not just a set of policies aimed at eliminating the social and economic role of the federal government. It includes, on a parallel course, a determination to change the political culture of the country to one that either supports or acquiesces to that policy agenda. (The Governor General’s Christmas message was about volunteerism and philanthropy, Harper’s long-term replacement for the state.) Working in tandem, these two political streams, if allowed to proceed for any length of time, could effectively change the country permanently — or at least for all currently living generations. Harper aims for nothing less.

If the NDP and the Liberals continue to do politics as usual, as if Harper is just another political adversary in a normally-functioning system, Harper is almost certain to win again. His voter suppression tactics, permanent campaigning, financial advantage, vicious attack ads against opposition party leaders, and the care and feeding of his loyal base will again give him at least a minority and likely (given redistribution) another majority.

Canadians, whether they are party members or not, must force these two myopic political parties, both trapped in an old paradigm, to recognize the new reality and put the country ahead of their own narrow interests. They must find a way of cooperating in the next election — along with the Green Party, which is already on side — to rid the country of this quasi-dictator. But they won’t do it on their own. Ordinary citizens will have to convince them.

Bob Rae of the Liberals is hard at work trying to convince himself and his party that they are back on the road to becoming the natural governing party. But this is sheer delusion. One more victory for the Harper Conservatives and the Liberal Party will fade from the national scene, joining the Socreds in history’s dustbin. He avoids the issue of cooperation with the other opposition parties by setting up a straw man: the idea of a merger between the NDP and the Liberals. That is simply never going to happen; Rae knows it, and thus continues to flog this particular dead horse so that he doesn’t have to consider practical proposals.

As for the NDP leadership contenders, only Nathan Cullen seems to understand the new political dynamic in the country, telling the Georgia Straight newspaper that Harper is a “clear and present danger to this country.” His proposal is an interesting one. He wants his own party to allow its riding associations in Conservative-held ridings to hold joint nominating meetings with the Greens and Liberals. Whichever standard bearer wins the nomination, their party runs against the Conservatives while the other two agree not to run candidates. The assumption is that enough voters will be concerned enough about another Conservative victory that they will cast ballots for the opposition party even if they would not normally do so.

Cullen’s plan is not the only possibility, and it may be too much to expect from the inward-looking institutions that political parties have become. He says he was inspired by Vision Vancouver. That’s the centrist civic party which has won two landslide victories by attracting Greens, Liberals and NDPers — defeating the right-wing business party that governed the city for decades. The argument is pretty simple: provide a mechanism to unite those who support the Canada we want, and those who wish it gone will be defeated.

Some of Cullen’s other policy suggestions, like a referendum on the monarchy, undermine his credibility. He is unlikely to win the leadership. But his belief that the NDP must put the country ahead of its potential seat count is an important contribution to the leadership debate and the political debate in general.

Political parties being what they are, it is unlikely that such a major shift will come exclusively from their own membership. But if enough Canadians concerned about the rapid devolution of their country and its democracy pressure both these parties — or join them to do so — anything is possible. A movement to demand such cooperation, and a commitment to proportional representation as part of it, may be the only thing that can save the country. The time for that movement is upon us. If we wait until 2014, it will be too late.

A couple of polls suggest the NDP is slipping and the Liberals are gaining at their expense, with the pollsters musing about the impact of the race as well. One poll in particular should cause the party concern as it hints at a more serious cause for declining support: Canadians’ increasing worry about the economy.

In a Nanos poll of a week ago “jobs and the economy” (at 29.3%) pushed the traditional leading issue, health care, well down into second place (22.8%) And that concern for the economy was up 3% in a single month. It should be noted that health care almost never falls from first place – just once in my memory when it fell just behind the environment for a brief period.

While the poll did not probe the reason for the upsurge in Liberal support (tied with the NDP at around 27% while the Conservatives dipped under 36%) it seems reasonable to conclude that if people are concerned about the economy they go to the parties that have traditionally garnered more trust on the issue: the Liberals and Conservatives.

The economy will likely continue to be the number one issue for a majority of Canadians for some time to come. More people are more indebted than ever before, hundreds of thousands have mortgages in danger of default with a two or three point increase in interest rates, wage increases continue to lag behind inflation, unemployment and underemployment are still high, and the crisis in Europe and the weak US economy represent a major threat to the Canadian economy. And now more and more analysts are suggesting China it is headed for slower growth – which means lower demand for Canadian resources. This has not escaped the notice of Canada’s largest corporations, either. They are sitting on some $450 billion of cash that they show no sign of investing.

The NDP has always been skittish about the economy as an issue. After all, it competes politically in a capitalist world and the conventional wisdom is that the capitalist parties have the edge on how to manage the economy. But by avoiding talking about it (like they did even for – most – of the 1988 free trade election) the party continually reinforced the notion that it can’t be trusted on the issue.

The party always counted on its traditional issues to carry the day – Medicare, social programs, the environment, and education – policies that required robust, activist government. So long as government seemed able to provide for those things, the NDP held its own. But during times that either the Liberals or the Conservatives played the deficit hysteria card, they faltered, as they did in the 1990s when Paul Martin successfully cut 40% off federal social spending on the heels of a four year fear campaign about the debt.

In the last election the party ran on Jack Layton and broke through the wall of mistrust of government than characterizes the Canadian electorate. And in Quebec, he benefitted from that province’s long history of supporting a strong social role for the state. But Jack is gone, mistrust is back, and people are looking for reassurances that someone knows how to guide the economy.

There is no better time for the NDP to avoid its coy relationship with economic policy. The Occupy phenomenon highlighted the growing inequality that liberating the market has produced; the Harper government’s policies have been a complete failure (except briefly with a stimulus package forced on it by the opposition); the Liberal Party, despite the recent bump in the polls may well be terminal (see Peter C. Newman’s new book pronouncing it effectively dead).

Sunday’s leadership debate demonstrated that the party is finally getting it: it actually focused on the economy. But only two of the leading candidates – Peggy Nash and Paul Dewar – had released anything like economic policy statements before the debate. It would have been a lot more meaningful if the other candidates (Nikki Ashton also released an economic statement earlier) had their economic policies in place. It should not come as a surprise that Nash, finance critic until she announced her campaign, is leading in this policy contest. She has focused attention on reversing the ten year trend of exporting raw resources and returning to a value-added economy; fairer taxes; requiring companies to make binding commitments on jobs and development (that would violate NAFTA, but perhaps we should); massively increase public investment in the face of the private sector’s refusal to do so; strengthen income security programs that were decimated under the Liberals; and integrate and enhance social programs with a view to boosting jobs and productivity. She also calls for formal co-operation between government, business, labour and universities to guide a return to a comprehensive industrial policy – pointing to Finland, Korea, Brazil, and Germany’s successful approaches.

Paul Dewar’s plan – “Creating Good Jobs and Training for the Jobs of Tomorrow” – is thin and conventional by comparison. Calling for “Support for small and medium-sized businesses” is meaningless rhetoric. “Reinvigorated national training programs…” doesn’t mean much either if the private sector isn’t investing. He does call for a permanent infrastructure program and promotion of value added industries but so far with little detail. He promises to go after tax havens but says nothing about fair tax reform. In the debate he had no answers to Brian Topp’s question about where he would get the revenue for his program promises.

There is a long way to go for the NDP to establish itself as a serious contender for the ‘good economic manager’ title. One debate won’t do it. But if the other candidates take up the gauntlet thrown down by Nash, it could go a long way to breaking the 40 year taboo. The final outcome for an NDP economic policy needs to include, in addition to Nash’s points, a commitment to strengthen the domestic economy by ending the 25 year suppression of wages, a clear and detailed tax reform policy (Brian Topp’s strength at the moment) to increase government revenues; vigorous enforcement of labour standards to protect workers from ruthless employers; a national energy policy that places limits on tar sands expansion and puts current oil industry subsidies to work rapidly developing alternative energy sources, and lastly an acknowledgement that unfettered consumerism is an unsustainable economic policy. That means a shift away from private goods to public goods. Economic policy is seen as dull stuff, but there is no reason it can’t be visionary.

There was a huge campaign against Peladeau’s TV move by those concerned about the airways being polluted by the kind of one-sided, dishonest coverage that passed for news on Fox. Still, a lot of commentators dismissed the worries as far-fetched and alarmist.

But, while Sun TV is not, thankfully, being piped into every Canadian living room, the prediction that it would mimic Fox News is undeniable. The most recent example is the networks nasty, over-the-top attack on Steven Staples, the man who runs the Rideau Institute and its anti-war project, Ceasefire.ca

This particular attack was prompted by a fund-raising letter sent out by ceasefire which made some very pointed and uncompromising criticisms of the arms industry lobby – namely, the Conference of Defence Associations (CDA). The CDA has gotten away with political murder for decades, casting itself as a kind of military think-tank, acting in the interests of the nation. But there is nothing neutral about this gang of arms peddlers and retired generals. Its sole purpose is to ramp up Canadian military spending and to promote the most aggressive Canadian military stance possible. When someone advises you to “follow the money” the CDA is one of the classic examples. The CDA has never seen a military procurement proposal they didn’t love – especially the proposed $30 billion purchase of F35 jet fighters (it doesn’t matter that they don’t work, have cracks in the fuselage and will be delivered years late, if ever).

What Staples said in his letter that really drove the Sun gang crazy was this: “A pro-war advocacy group made up of retired military generals, called the Conference of Defence Associations, used the bodies of soldiers killed and wounded in Afghanistan to lobby for more money.”

The CDA had appeared at a parliamentary committee hearing that was looking into ways “…to maintain social programs and deal with the country’s finances.” Into this serious discussion and debate entered the “old generals” (another phrase Fox North didn’t like) to lobby hard to keep military spending at the current astronomical levels (at $22 billion higher than at any time since WW2).

The war lobbyists shamelessly used the image of dead soldiers to back their case: “After the sacrifices made in Afghanistan and the casualties taken there because we weren’t ready, let us never again find ourselves having to rebuild essential military capabilities which we should have kept up all along.”

No mention of course, of the fact that it was their friends in the Defence Department who sent Canadian soldiers into deadly Kandahar ill-equipped and undertrained for the complex mission. But never mind the blatant opportunism and greed – Sun TV came to the rescue when Brian Lilley, one of its more aggressive program hosts, did a nine minute rant attacking Staples for his “despicable” fund-raising letter.

Framing the debate as “Big Labour versus the Military” Lilley invited another right-wing commentator, John Robson on to the show to back him up. Robson argued that Canadian troops had faced being ill-equipped before, in WW1 and WW2 when facing down “aggression.” But there was no discussion of the recent wars Canada has eagerly participated in – Afghanistan and Libya. Just how these wars were dealing with aggression against Canada was not explained.

One of Staples’ main points in his letter was the fact that this lobby groups actually gets funded by the Defence department to the tune of $500,000 a year – one of the most incestuous relationships that exists in government. Ironically, Lilley actually stated that he agreed with the letter’s argument that this funding should be cancelled – but then declared that this “…wasn’t the point.”

Staples had also criticized journalists for accepting a prize from the CDA for pro-military reporting. One example was Mathew Fisher of the Ottawa Citizen – who also distinguished himself by calling reporter Jane Taber, who had announced she was going to interview Staples, and told her she shouldn’t be interviewing him. Lilley defended Fisher nonetheless.

Lilley was also unimpressed with Staples’ revelation that the $500,000 yearly grant to the CDA was tied very directly and explicitly to “deliverable” – favourable Defence Department news coverage:

“…the Conference of Defence Associations is required to ‘attain a minimum of 29 media references to the CDA by national or regional journalists and reporters . . . 15 opinion pieces (including op-eds and letters to the editor in national or regional publications) . . . [and] a minimum of 100 requests by media for radio/television interviews and materials.’

There is one certain way to know you are being effective in your exposure of the right-wing and the military: they publicly attack you. But Ceasefire turned the tables on Sun TV and the CDA by informing its 20,000 members of the attack and asking whether or not Staples should accept Lilley’s invitation to come on his show. As a result Staples did go on – and raised a lot of money from his members in the process. You can help teach Sun TV and the CDA a lesson, too, by going to ceasefire’s web site and making a contribution.

Governments and the corporations they serve have power — that is, the power of money (and the law) to make decisions that can immediately and dramatically effect people’s lives. Laying off thousands of people with no notice, cancelling or slashing social programs, building mines and oil pipelines, providing subsidies and tax breaks to private companies or refusing to build social housing or provide child care are all things governments and corporations do almost exclusively.

And, most important for the Occupy movement, the power to facilitate the creation of a super-rich class of feudal lords by re-writing rules, making laws, deregulating finance and establishing (and for the state, allowing) corporate practices that pay billions to the one per cent based on nothing more than their elite status.

Those decisions involve power and as the occupiers are discovering anew, that power is entrenched, protected and ruthless, and it will not be denied easily what it has accumulated over the decades.

While there is always reference to people power when new social movements flex their muscles, unless the people in the streets number in the hundreds of thousands or millions (as in Tahrir Square), what we are actually talking about is influence: The capacity to change people’s minds, to inspire resistance, to engage a broader public on an issue in a different way, to change the political landscape so that inconvenient truths are put on the table or to legitimize deeply held values otherwise suppressed or denied by the dominant institutions.

What the occupiers have achieved

The occupiers have already made history. They have broken the media and elite-imposed taboo on talking about the destructive impact of inequality on the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world in developing and developed countries. The new feudalism that has been emerging for over twenty years is now exposed. Everyone can see the elephant in the room.

Compared to the Tea Party movement in the U.S., which is an embarrassment and an affront to rationality (poor and middle class people attacking governments and letting Wall Street continue is rapacious greed), the occupiers have identified the actual source of why Americans (and Canadians) are suffering. It is the first genuine expression of progressive populism literally in decades. And as such it actually targets those at the very top who have benefited from this remaking of Western nations.

But now that the elephant can be seen ,what is the next step in confronting the corporate and state powers that it symbolizes?

The difference between what Occupy is facing and what its predecessors were up against is profound. The last generation of movements which confronted capitalism in the 1960s was facing a state that was relatively benign and was essentially on-side with the postwar social contract. Corporations were still, for the most part, nationally based and subject to national imperatives; in other words, they paid attention to the politics and culture of the countries they operated in and adapted to them.

The fight took place within relatively civilized parameters. The values and broad objectives were agreed upon and the debate was about matters of degree: How much state intervention, what level of equality, what degree of social program universality and entitlement. It is interesting to note that these social and labour movements did not develop in times of extreme poverty or growing inequality. It was just the opposite: They developed at a time when the economy was growing by leaps and bounds, creating rising expectations of what was possible — of what government could deliver.

Of course that all ended by the late ’70s and ’80s with the advent of free trade, the rapid growth of transnational corporations and neo-liberal policies. But the movements, institutionalized in part through government grants that kept them going (perhaps past their natural life spans), did not change with the shift in the structure of capitalism and the power of finance capital. The underlying assumption was still that the state would respond to “legitimate demands” and corporations would behave according to established norms.

But increasingly both the state and its client corporations moved on. Nations were passé — they weren’t even called nations anymore, but “economies.” Corporations moved from adapting to local culture and social norms to imposing their homogenized products and services on every place on the planet with enough people to buy their stuff. It could be argued that the 1990s was the time for a whole new paradigm of social movements — an explicitly anti-capitalist movement which recognized the terrible destructiveness of the unfettered “marketplace.”

But it didn’t happen. With some significant exceptions here and there, the old movements were too bureaucratized and too complacent to see what was coming. They kept doing what they had always done even though, within a few years into the new century, it was obvious that it wasn’t working. The notion of speaking truth to power sounds courageous and bold. The problem is that power doesn’t care and isn’t listening.

The failure of the movements modeled in, and for, the 1960s to come to grips with the mounting crisis for working people is at the root of the Occupy Wall Street rebellion. Tired of waiting for a kind of movement organization that could inspire and mobilize them — or even speak to their experiences — the most conscious and passionate of those left behind took up the call.

This isn’t a ’60s thing

What is the call? Implicitly, that the system is broken beyond repair. Indeed that might just explain why there were no conventional demands: The rebels know that the system is no longer capable of meeting such demands and its utter corruption has taken it far beyond the place where it could be expected to respond in any genuine way to the needs of ordinary people. Young people have been leading Occupy and it is young people who have lived their entire lives with a growing corporatism — that dangerous amalgam of reactionary state and ruthless corporation that Mussolini himself said was the definition of fascism.

My generation of activists keeps insisting that government — the state — is the only possible counterpoint to global corporate power and we just have to take it back. But young people have had such a viscerally negative experience of the hegemony of corporate rule and state complicity — constantly legitimized by a corrupt and monolithic media – that they aren’t buying it. The notion that we can somehow go back to the golden age is delusional and they know it. This is perhaps the most important lesson they are teaching us.

It’s not that they lack a vision consisting of all sorts of elements (call them demands if you like — Occupy Vancouver has pages of them), but they know in their gut that there has to be a whole new economic system and a genuine, radical democracy to go with it, if that vision has any chance of being realized.

But now the question for them and us is how we imagine this transitional explosion of protest and joy, of anger and caring moving to the next stage. No one has any answers because this is something completely different. It’s as if the occupiers are saying we are going to sit there and keep saying the same thing until it begins to sink in to the dominant culture and stay there. Maybe it’s not their job to define the next phase — that’s too much to ask. They have alerted the world, put crushing inequality — the social essence of capitalism — on the map and they are demanding, if anything, that we join with them.

Occupiers are not necessarily asking that we join them in their camps but in their spirit of resistance and cultural rebellion, and in the task of imagining a better world — realizing that we have been sleep-walking towards the edge of the cliff. They are telling us all to wake up before it’s too late.

When Harper stated that he we would not recognize the country after he was through, this is what he was talking about.

Ideology is meaning in the service of power and the Conservative government, libertarian to its core, intends to create the appearance of an increasingly volunteer society as it systematically guts the social and cultural role of government. Harper hopes to justify massive cuts to programs (and in general the role of the federal government, period) by shifting responsibility to charities and foundations. This is the Americanization of Canada – remaking the country in the image of the minimalist government of the US.. The problem is that there is very weak tradition of foundations and corporate giving in this country, so it has to be engineered, too.

The notion of social engineering was one of the most popular concepts on the political right in the past (when it was out of power). The phrase is intended to describe a process by which liberals and the left (read the Liberals, the NDP)“engineer” society – that is, set out to remake it by implementing government programs, intervening in the economy, and redistributing wealth to create a measure of economic. The implication is that these changes were undemocratic and thus illegitimate – imposed by politicians, intellectuals and bureaucrats.

Those shocked at how Harper can shamelessly implement an agenda completely at odds with the vast majority of the country need look no further than this notion of illegitimacy. For Harper and his political base it can all be dismantled – because it was all an elite conspiracy in the first place.

Yet right-wing social engineering is exactly what Stephen Harper intends with his program. Indeed, it is simply an extension of his policies implemented during his two minority terms. We are now a far more militarized country than we were when he came to office four years ago – with an aggressive “war-fighting” military. Our foreign policy is now in lock-step with that of the US, shamelessly serving corporations and aiming for the status of junior partner an increasingly aggressive and desperate American empire.

Harper’s assault on the political culture has included concerted attacks on science, cultural organizations, human rights and women’s groups and now the collective bargaining rights for public service workers. None of these actions were ever part of a campaign platform or, for the most part, even legislation: they are simply a political imperative rooted in the core values driving Harper’s re-making of country.

This is true social engineering if by that term we mean the illegitimate remaking of Canadian political culture and governance. When all the social programs and the activist government that Stephen Harper seems to detest were implemented there was widespread public support for them. Governments were responding to social and labour movements pushing for these things: unemployment insurance, Medicare, subsidized university education, Family Allowances, public pensions, old age security.

These programs were not imposed by a cabal of liberal and socialist intellectuals and bureaucrats. They were rooted in the expressed values – and votes – of the vast majority of Canadians. At the pinnacle of this stage of Canadian democracy in the early 1970s there was a virtual consensus on the part all three federal parties about the direction of the country. This was not a conspiracy – it was democracy as it should be.

All of these elements of Canadian political culture were the result of a democratic imperative. All the polling on these government programs and the social equality they promote suggests at least three quarters of Canadians still support an activist role for government in the interests of community, not to mention the viability of families.

If it were not so destructive and dishonest Harper’s engineering project would be something to marvel at. It is multi-faceted with many moving parts and Harper is totally committed to it regardless of what anyone – including Bay Street – thinks. The political process of reversing forty years of nation-building (begun by Brian Mulroney and Paul Martin) consists of two stages.

The crucial second stage, the gradual dismantling of federal government activism, depends on the first: the gutting of federal revenues. Logically, that stage was implemented early on with the huge, five-year, $60 billion tax cut plan implemented by Jim Flaherty in 2007, the year following Harper’s first election victory. That move, and the cut to the GST, created the deficit – the useful crisis Harper needed to implement big cuts.

The original plan was to implement the cuts quickly and deeply – early on in a majority government whenever Harper was able to achieve it. But every engineering project runs into problems and Harper has two. The first is a result of his decision to stay in power as long as possible and to take the long view of implementing his agenda. The result of this choice (a scorched earth policy of massive changes over four years was his other option) is that Harper actually has to govern the country in such a way that he is able to stay in power long enough to accomplish his goals.

His master plan did not include the worst crisis in capitalism in eighty years. This crisis is no ordinary problem as it goes to the core of what Harper believes in. If you are going to dismantle the state and hand over most of its current operations and responsibilities to the private sector you had better be sure the private sector isn’t a corrupt, risk-averse, basket case. Suddenly, the state Harper loves to hate is absolutely critical to saving capitalism – just as it was following the last big crisis in the 1930s.

In short, Harper’s contempt for democratic governance and the activist state is running up against a capitalist reality that can’t be ignored. Flaherty’s fall economic statement reveals the corner the government is in. It has now pushed forward the date for getting rid of the deficit (read: cutting social spending) by a year. Even so, if they stick to their plan to cut $4 billion in the spring budget, the Conservatives risk driving the economy into a recession – something that could endanger Harper’s chances of re-election. After all, the core of Harper’s carefully crafted image is his role as a competent economic manager.

Harper’s other problem is his naïve assumption that his tax incentives will have any appreciable impact on corporate giving (or enough individual giving) to actually create the conditions for an American-style voluntarism capable of taking over the social role of government. The Big Society scam being implemented by Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron has been widely ridiculed – with 60% of Britons believing it is just a cover for government cutbacks.

Harper is so contemptuous of advice from others – and of actual scientific evidence – that his ideology and objectives easily get disconnected from reality. Business and the wealthy elite in Canada have never had a genuine commitment to the country. There are no Warren Buffetts in Canada. The corporate sector has for decades preferred to get its snout ever deeper in the public trough rather than be innovative or take risks. The likelihood that it will respond to this initiative is close to zero. Indeed, at virtually the same time that the government was announcing its new plan, an analysis of corporate giving revealed one, that it going down and two, that it was being tied more and more to the narrow interests of companies’ bottom lines. These are companies, by the way, that are sitting on some $450 billion of idle cash. If they won’t give now, when will they?

Prime Minister Harper is staring at a double betrayal of Harper by his cherished private sector: corporations and rich Canadians who will ignore his voluntarism initiative and global capitalist system itself which is headed for catastrophe.

One of the things bumped from the headlines is the NDP leadership race. It is not just because the Occupy movement is unique and unprecedented in the past 20 years and more. It is because the themes that drive Occupy make the leadership race look puny and mundane by comparison. This movement is, whether stated or not, an anti-capitalist outburst that is demanding real social justice, real democracy and it is utterly independent of every political agency, institution and traditional organization that exists.

Part of the message is thus crystal clear: the occupiers are telling us — and the power elite — that whatever we and they are doing, it has no meaning for them. Labour politics, social movement culture, political parties, including the NDP, have all been declared, implicitly if not explicitly, defunct, irrelevant and for their purposes — social justice writ large — pretty much useless.

It will take a long time for this to sink in and it seemed unlikely that the NDP would get it any time soon with the existing batch of leadership candidates. Until this week that is, when supporters of Peggy Nash revealed she would announce her candidacy soon. But more on Ms. Nash in a minute. If the party chooses one of the frontrunners, Brian Topp or Thomas Mulcair, it will cement the party’s rightward drift and pre-occupation with tactical maneuvering at a time when world events will make drift of any kind a sideshow. As Chris Hedges wrote recently in a brilliant reflection on the meaning of Occupy: “Tinkering with the corporate state will not work. We will either be plunged into neo-feudalism and environmental catastrophe or we will wrest power from corporate hands.”

Where is the NDP leadership contest on this spectrum of possibilities? Are any of the male candidates even aware of the choices so starkly described by Hedges? We can quickly dispose of Thomas Mulcair as a possibility. He is an unrepentant capitalist and big ‘L’ Liberal at heart who is barely out of synch with the 1 per cent the Occupiers have targeted. In 2007, Kady O’Malley interviewed Mulcair and asked him to describe himself as a politician. He replied: “Above and beyond anything else, I’m a public administrator and a manager. I chaired Quebec’s largest regulatory agency and reduced staff there and brought in management schemes to make things more effective. … When I was minister of the environment, I reduced by 15 per cent the budget of the ministry.” Wow. I wish I could vote for Tom.

When Mulcair was NDP finance critic he rarely said anything critical of the government’s economic policies and virtually never had any progressive proposals that would counter the Harper “get out of the way of business” ideology. He rarely talked about economic policy in the House or, reportedly, in caucus.

But he has been musing lately about, amazingly, how he supports NAFTA. He declared this support in a recent interview and boasted of having helped draft the agreement, stating: “To some people, the NAFTA is an anathema. The NAFTA is the first international agreement that had provisions dealing with the environment. You can’t throw out the baby with the bath water.”

The FTA and NAFTA were the single most damaging political acts the country has ever had to endure — unleashing two decades of suppression of wages, the rapid depletion of natural resources, falling productivity, the loss of several hundred thousand of the best jobs in the country, and despite Mulcair’s naïve declaration, the virtual end to any new environmental legislation by the federal government (after it lost two NAFTA challenges).

Add to this right-wing economic stance Mulcair’s widely reported bullying, bad temper and terrible judgment (as when he exposed the party to humiliation by publicly attacking Libby Davies for her support of Palestinians) and one thing becomes obvious: If the NDP chooses Mulcair he will destroy what is left of its social democracy — something he has already implied he would do by moving the party closer to the centre. With free-marketeers in charge of both the Liberals and the Harperites, the NDP is already in the centre. Mulcair would move them to the right — straight into the liberalism he spent so many years endorsing and promoting.

Brian Topp is worrisome, too, for different reasons. There is no doubt that Topp is a very smart guy and knows his way around both government and running elections. But his leadership campaign is reminiscent of Paul Martin’s — though for sheer viciousness and overkill no one could match Martin, whose take-no-enemies style helped cripple his party. But Topp has been accused of trying to get so far out in front so fast that potential good candidates give up before they’ve even had a chance to decide whether to run. A former NDP heavy weight, Doug MacArthur, quotes a Topp campaigner as saying “let’s get this leadership campaign over before it even starts.”

Topp was Roy Romanow’s closest advisor. But Romanow was essentially a small ‘l’ liberal and his administration slashed education and health budgets almost as much as the previous Tory regime. I once interviewed Romanow just before he became party leader and asked him about the role of social movements and he replied they were “completely useless.” His government reflected that attitude. Maybe Topp disagreed with him — but if he did, he had little influence.

One of the weaknesses of the party under Jack Layton was its preoccupation with tactical maneuvering at the expense of policy development. The party had almost no policy people but a lot of communications flaks. Topp had enormous influence with Layton and we can assume he was one of the architects of this approach — one that moved the party to the centre. At the same time, the party was accused of putting its interests ahead of the country’s — with some going so far as to blame it for allowing Harper to gain his first minority.

Yet to give Topp credit, he seems determined to stake out new ground. He has come out forcefully in favour of increasing income taxes on the wealthy and corporations — the first candidate to do so. It is a stance his competitors must emulate if the party is to remain a viable social democratic force. Topp is also unapologetic about his union connections, telling the Canadian Press: “If it wasn’t for the labour movement, we’d all still be going to work at [the age of] seven.”

But we are facing possibly monumental social and economic change in the next few years. The leadership race is being judged by trying to imagine who can defeat Stephen Harper in four years — but just what are people thinking the world and Canada will look like in four years? Will Harper, the so-called strategic genius, still be as formidable or will the global Depression and increasing climate change disasters have left him in the ideological dust? Will the NDP need a manager and tactical genius or will they need a visionary with the courage to take risks and mobilize the 99 per cent? Do we need someone who will choke on the word capitalism for fear of frightening people or do we need someone who can connect with the only new movement in 40 years that targets capitalism explicitly?

The potential candidacy of Peggy Nash will inject a very interesting choice into this mix. Just the fact that she isn’t a white male is refreshing enough. And she is virtually the first finance critic of the NDP in my memory who actually understands the economy and has the intellectual chops to take on a finance minister. She has been eagerly challenging Flaherty successfully on a regular basis every since she started her position. She could single-handedly end the generations-old framing of the NDP as not to be trusted on the economy. And the economy will be the issue of the day for a long time to come.

But more than that, what distinguishes Nash from the other candidates is her long history of working with social movements and labour. If the NDP thinks it can win the next election on its own it is dreaming. The media and Harper will target the NDP and whoever wins the leadership in a way they never have before because the NDP is now the most serious immediate threat to corporate domination of the country.

A relationship with the occupy movement and whatever it becomes (in addition to traditional movements) will be mandatory and it cannot be based on political opportunism. Nash is quite simply the only leadership candidate capable of building an equal relationship with the social movements that will be the key to defeating Harper and challenging the corporate state. NDP members will hopefully put their imaginations on maximum and pay attention to her candidacy.

As Chris Hedges wrote in a wonderful ode to the occupy movement: “It will not make concessions with corrupt systems of corporate power. It holds fast to moral imperatives regardless of the cost. It confronts authority out of a sense of responsibility. It is not interested in formal positions of power. It is not seeking office. It is not trying to get people to vote.”

Of course to the corporate-complicit media the lack of a traditional list of “clear demands” and “goals” this is a weakness of the movement. But in fact this political-debt-free situation is what gives occupy the ability to stake out a moral imperative of social justice that trumps all the tired, confused and predictable “agents of change” which have been so discredited by their failed response to the worst capitalist crisis in eighty years.

The series we at rabble have been running on reinventing democracy and reclaiming the commons is directed at all of this: the crisis of the traditional – and conventional – left in coming to terms with how to make real change and what kind of change to make. Some would suggest that the occupy movement proves the crisis is ending yet it also confirms the crisis: the “left” is not leading this movement. Reinventing democracy is an extremely complicated, very long process, but as for reclaiming the commons? That, it seems to me, is exactly what the occupy movement has been about. And any reinvention of democracy will rest on a foundation of a reclaimed commons. The occupy movement may well turn out to be a huge first step in achieving both these objectives.

It is confronting not just the facts of inequality, but the ideology that seeks to justify it. The biggest successes of neo-liberalism have been two fold. First, it systematically and dramatically lowered peoples’ expectations of what is possible – that is, what is possible from government in terms of equity and justice. People still believe that government should be a force for good. They just don’t believe it will be. The right has successfully demonized government – more in the US (the Tea Partiers, impoverished by banks, hate government) than in Canada but here, too.

Secondly, in exchange for giving up on government, democracy and what it should provide, people in Western developed nations like Canada and the US have accepted, willingly or otherwise, the offerings of hyper-consumerism. In doing so, they have unwittingly accepted a kind of hyper-individualism, rejecting the promise of the commons as a false promise. Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that there are no such thing as society, just individuals and families, seems very close to becoming true in the US and there are signs of it here as well. I shop therefore I am.

No one on the broad left, from reformers to socialists, has been able to counter these two right wing victories. Having failed to develop a new language of progressive politics that speaks meaningfully to people battered by economic insecurity and a staggering pace of change, we have been ideological punching bags for a determined, focused, enormously well-resourced enemy. We are like the Japanese soldiers, discovered twenty years after the war on isolated Pacific Islands who thought the war was still on. They were still fighting the old war.

The “organized” left is still fighting the old wars using the old tools, the old structures, and old language all contained in a kind of middle class complacency and business-as-usual bubble. There is a global capitalist crisis unfolding before our eyes the consequences of which will be unspeakably miserable for scores of millions of people in western nations – and hundreds of millions everywhere else.

But still we seem unable to respond. The left has been accused of lacking big ideas and in an embarrassing act of self-deprecation, we all eagerly plead guilty. But is it a lack of ideas or as Naomi Klein said recently at an event in my town of Powell River, is it more just passivity and an apologetic presentation of ideas. We have lots of big ideas, says Klein, we just seem meek and mild when it comes to promoting them.

Whichever it is, the occupy movement has given us a message: people are sick and tired of waiting for leaders to provide direction and inspiration. They have woken up, looked for the leaders and discovered, to their shock that they were looking in the wrong direction. The leaders were, inexplicably, behind them.

The act of reclaiming the commons – where we are all (except the 1%) in this together – is wonderfully obvious in the carnival mood of much of the movement’s expression. As Jim Stanford wrote recently, “Their activism has been further unified by a constructive, cooperative and peaceful attitude – disarming those who’ve tried to demonize and criminalize protest in our harsh post-9-11 political culture.”

That there is both anger and joy expressed by the demonstrators speaks not just to their pent up frustration with a sociopathic elite bent on destroying the planet, but also at the sheer pleasure of ending their isolation, even if just for a day or two or three. Tweeting and Facebooking are fine – but there is nothing quite like being in the streets with thousands – even hundreds will do – of like-spirited folk.

A number of American commentators have mused about how the success or failure of the occupy phenomenon will depend on whether or not the middle class eventually identifies with it. It is an interesting observation because historically in Canada and the US while working class organizing led the way to social change, middle class solidarity helped win the day and locked in the gains of the welfare state.

As Stanford points out, one similarity of the occupiers with the 1930s is that the anti-capitalist movement in that decade also started as mass movements, growing out of a seething discontent and was also at times “leaderless.” It took several years to coalesce. But this time around the differences may out weigh the similarities. The passion for equality taps into a deep, some argue genetic, strain of core human values. And that is all to the good. But if the desire for equality is not decoupled from a rampant consumerism, a culture of stuff, then what would that more equal distribution of wealth actually be used for? Can the occupy movement take the next huge step and recognize that equality must be pursued in a totally new context: the need to reject the obsession with so-called “wealth-creation,” recognize that more stuff does not make us happier and destroys the planet, and that we must find meaning outside the shopping mall? The crisis of the 1930 was eventually resolved by a period of stupdendous increases in economic growth. Today’s movement faces an even bigger challenge – de-growth in a era of crushing inequality. Will the middle class sign-on to a movement that dismantles what it built?

Tied to that question is an obvious one. What process will provide the ultimate direction, the ongoing inspiration to continue the movement, and the ideas that will excite more people and broaden it? All the traditional left wing groups have jumped on the bandwagon for fear of looking foolish if they don’t. But can they take from this spontaneous rebellion against savage capitalism the necessary lessons for their own politics. Will occupy give them the courage to take risks and lead their own members from the front? Or will they slip back into their comfortable positions in the bureaucracies that failed people in the first place? Both the movement and the traditional organizations scrambling for relevance have huge challenges ahead. But finally, they are exciting challenges and the potential is enormous.