Democracy's Silent Killer

Neoliberalism in Canada and most other Western nations is the default political-economic operating system. Ushered in by Brian Mulroney and consolidated under Jean Chretien it was sold to a naive public with grand promises of an ever better future - more jobs, better wages.

Few of us realized what Mulroney pushed and Chretien normalized was actually a contagion, a malignancy.

Terminal diseases are sometimes described in "stages." As the disease progresses through these stages it becomes less treatable, more lethal.  Neoliberalism seems to follow a similar path.

There are markers that define the progression of the neoliberal disease. It begins with a weakening of the body politic as governments enter into trade pacts with each other for the mutual surrender of incidents of state sovereignty to the newcomer, the corporate sector.

It begins with surrender of control over access to markets. The Nike runner is a good example. Why pay a worker in Ohio $20 an hour plus benefits to produce runners when a worker in Vietnam costs $3 a day?

Of course moving that job only makes sense if you don't have to sell those runners where the going wage is $3 a day. Those workers can't afford a month's salary for a pair of runners. You want to pay nothing in wages to make them provided you can still sell them in a high wage market - like the one you just left.

So what is the advantage to the country that lost that well paid job only to see that product now from a low wage country on its store shelves? Cui bono? It's not the out of a job work force. It's not their families. It's not the community that once prospered from a high level of employment. No, the wealth that they once enjoyed has gone somewhere else. It's gone to the company that offshored those jobs, to its shareholders and its investors. The wealth associated with those runners, once distributed among all levels of society, now goes to the most advantaged level of society, the financial sector and the rentier class. That is the means by which economic and political power is transferred to the elite. It is the engine of inequality, wage stagnation and the dependence on consumer debt to indenture white and blue collar workers.

Some have predicted the neoliberal malignancy comes with markers.  It starts with what is called "political capture." This occurs where the corporate sector, especially the financial industry, insinuates itself between elected representatives and the voters who installed them in office. We see this manifested most clearly in America's "bought and paid for" Congress. This was chronicled in the 2014 study by Gilens (Princeton) and Page (Northwestern) that found America's legislators routinely allowed the corporate interest to prevail over the public interest.

After examining differences in public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues, the political scientists Martin Gilens, of Princeton, and Benjamin Page, of Northwestern, found that the preferences of rich people had a much bigger impact on subsequent policy decisions than the views of middle-income and poor Americans. Indeed, the opinions of lower-income groups, and the interest groups that represent them, appear to have little or no independent impact on policy.

When political capture has been achieved, the next stage in this malignancy is called "regulatory capture." This occurs when the government tribunals charged with regulating industries are themselves stacked with representatives of the regulated industries. The industries are allowed to corrupt the system by which they are themselves regulated. We've even had our own example in Canada's National Energy Board.

The theory of neoliberal malignancy has one final, terminal stage. This is where the corporate sector controls the executive. It doesn't merely influence it, it occupies it. The corporate sector and government merge as one. Trump is one. Many of his cabinet picks, most of them excluding, perhaps, a few generals well conditioned to obey orders, are of the corporate sector. Their job is to enshrine, perpetuate this form of rule - oligarchy, autocracy, an end to messy, unpredictable democracy.

All of this came flooding back as I read the latest warning from George Monbiot who writes:

Trump was prepared not only to promote the cause of corporations in government, but to turn government into a kind of corporation, staffed and run by executives and lobbyists. His incoherence was not a liability, but an opening: his agenda could be shaped. And the dark money network already developed by some American corporations was perfectly positioned to shape it. Dark money is the term used in the US for the funding of organisations involved in political advocacy that are not obliged to disclose where the money comes from. Few people would see a tobacco company as a credible source on public health, or a coal company as a neutral commentator on climate change. In order to advance their political interests, such companies must pay others to speak on their behalf.

Soon after the second world war, some of America’s richest people began setting up a network of thinktanks to promote their interests. These purport to offer dispassionate opinions on public affairs. But they are more like corporate lobbyists, working on behalf of those who fund them.

...

Long before Trump won, campaign funding in the US had systematically corrupted the political system. A new analysis by US political scientists finds an almost perfect linear relationship, across 32 years, between the money gathered by the two parties for congressional elections and their share of the vote. But there has also been a shift over these years: corporate donors have come to dominate this funding.

I could not do justice to Monbiot's narrative by attempting to summarize or excerpt it. His essay deserves to be read carefully in its entirely and I urge you to do that.

America, now in the terminal stage of neoliberalism, has provided us with a roadmap of what surely lies ahead for us if we continue our indifference to the threat facing our democracy.

I rebuked Justin Trudeau's abandonment of electoral reform not because he had broken another campaign promise but because he had done nothing to make it possible. I condemned him because, in the face of what's going on right next door, he's doing nothing - absolutely nothing - to restore our already ailing democracy. Trudeau is merely a handmaiden to the same process that brought America to where it is today and I cannot ignore that.