Where Is the Exit Door?

How long will Canada remain under the boot of market fundamentalism? This is the laissez faire face of modern neoliberalism that has taken hold throughout the developed world, Canada included.

It manifests itself most directly in free trade agreements and associated institutions such as the IMF, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank. Rarely seen is its presence in parallel or "deep government."

Neoliberalism is an ideology and, like most ideologies, it's anchored in both fact and plenty of belief. It's sort of faith-based. Its disciples believe neoliberalism is itself an ethic, in fact the best and preferred ethic to achieve solutions to our problems using the power of the marketplace. It holds that many of the functions ordinarily associated with government can be better undertaken through market forces.

Whether you realize it or not, we've been eating, sleeping and breathing this stuff for forty years. That's been long enough to realize that a lot of the promise of neoliberalism has been hogwash.

Neoliberalism often works at cross purposes to the public interest. Income stagnation is a function of market fundamentalism. Inequality of wealth, income and opportunity is likewise the outcome of adherence to market fundamentalism. It is the engine for transferring wealth from the many to the few and, as so plainly demonstrated by the United States, with that wholesale shift in economic power comes a commensurate shift in political power. This is the rise of illiberal democracy which, unfortunately, is not an outcome but merely an early onset symptom of a darker order to follow.

The problem with illiberal democracy is that many of us see it as genuine democracy. We don't see it for what it is, democracy with a potentially terminal disease. If we did we might be less tolerant of market fundamentalism, globalization and free trade that demand the surrendering of various incidents of our national sovereignty. We might reject the rise of state corporatism.

When your highest court holds that a corporation, itself a "legal fiction", is a person with political rights - you have a real problem. When that same top court holds that corporations cannot be restrained from dominating the political process with massive infusions of money for election advertising and campaign contributions - you have a real problem.

As Stiglitz powerfully chronicles in "The Price of Inequality" the great preponderance of inequality in the U.S. is neither merit- nor market-based. It is legislated, enacted by the people elected to represent the people but instead serving the contrary interests of the few and their corporations. This sort of inequality takes many forms - tax breaks and outright exemptions, subsidies, grants, deferrals and, quite regularly, the transfer of national assets such as water either for free or far below value.  This is a "trickle up" economy where wealth finally crystallizes in the accounts of the investor or rentier class.

America has been our laboratory for this experiment in free market fundamentalism, neoliberalism. What are the observed results? A gutted middle class no longer empowered economically or politically; wage stagnation; inequality of all forms; the collapse of social mobility; the rise of the precariat; the formation of the narrowly held, corporate media cartel becoming an instrument of conditioning and distracting the populace; transactional governance (the "bought and paid for" Congress) and illiberal democracy; and the wholesale, unearned transfer of wealth from the many and from the state, to the few.

So, remind me why Canadians want to go down this road? Make no mistake, that is what we are doing.

We're trapped and so long as we submit to political leadership in thrall to market fundamentalism, we'll become ever more tightly trapped. Tom Mulcair caught hell for his support of both Thatcherism and the Canada-Europe free trade deal, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). One NDP apologist came to Mulcair's defence saying it was preferrable that we trade with Europe because of its social democracy. Oh I know - they're thinking of old Klaus with his alpine hat and lederhosen toiling away in the Black Forest banging out cuckoo clocks.

I guess that person didn't notice that Europe is on fire with discontent triggering uprisings from Athens to London. There's not a lot of social democracy on display in the U.K. and it's being ruthlessly suppressed in Greece with Spain, Portugal and Italy soon to follow. They didn't notice the rise of fascism in Britain, France, Germany and as far east as Hungary where it actually holds power. Neo-nationalism is on the march and it is very angry.

Is there no way out? Sure there is but we'll never find the exit door until we get up and look for it, something for which our political caste shows no appetite.

We need motivation to demand something better.  That begins by recognizing everything we're giving up and what's being steadily drained from us in every context - economically, socially, politically, democratically - through free market fundamentalism. This is not theoretical. It is not hypothetical. It is real. We are living it and we all know that we're feeling it.

A good way to start is to read a few books.  Here are some I would recommend.


David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality.

Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do?

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything.

Thomas Prugh, Natural Capital and Human Economic Survival.

Paul Craig Roberts, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism.

Herman Daly, Beyond Growth.

Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.

Roubini and Mihm, Crisis Economics.

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine.

If you read those ten books you'll see market fundamentalism in the raw and you'll grasp what will befall us, and especially our kids and grandkids, if we don't get out from under it.

It all begins by understanding what we're up against.


* I just checked and, with the exception of Natural Capital and Human Economic Survival (which I still think is an essential read) all of the titles listed above are available in e-book format from Amazon.

A Divided World that Pits Fact Against Fantasy

It's the battle line between conservatives and everyone else.  It's incredibly divisive and it is powerfully corrosive of social cohesion.  It's a high-stakes war to control the national narrative between those who embrace fact and those who prefer fiction.

Pew Research set out to find what’s behind what it considers the increasing political polarization of the United States; why the country is moving away from political moderation and becoming more and more divided between liberals and conservatives. Its first report on the phenomenon, which examines where people are hearing news and opinion in both regular and social media, shows that this is happening for very different reasons among people moving to the right than for people moving to the left.

Or that’s the charitable way to put it. The less charitable way is to say Pew discovered that conservatives are consuming a right-wing media full of lies and misinformation, whereas liberals are more interested in media that puts facts before ideology. It’s very much not a “both sides do it” situation. Conservatives are becoming more conservative because of propaganda, whereas liberals are becoming more liberal while staying very much checked into reality.

...Enter right-wing media, which has a nifty trick of convincing audiences it’s the other guys who are the liars, all while actually being much less trustworthy in reality. From conservative screaming about the “media elite” to Fox News’s old slogan “Fair and Balanced,” conservative media is rife with the message that everyone is out to get you, conservative viewer, and only in the warm blanket of right-wing propaganda will you be safe.

...Pew researchers gave respondents a list of 36 popular media sources and asked how much they trusted each one. Some were liberal, like The Daily Show or ThinkProgress. Some were conservative, like Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. Most of them are fairly straightforward news organizations with no overt political agenda, like NPR, various network news, CNN, and the New York Times.

The findings were astounding. Out of the 36 news sources, consistent liberals trusted 28, a mix of liberal and mainstream news sources. Mostly, liberal respondents generally agreed, holding out a little more skepticism for overtly ideological sources like Daily Kos or ThinkProgress, but not actually distrusting them, either. The only news sources liberals didn’t trust, generally, are overtly right-wing ones, such as Fox News, the Blaze, Breitbart, or Rush Limbaugh’s show.

Conservatives, on the other hand, saw betrayers and liars around every corner. Consistent conservatives distrusted a whopping 24 out of 36 outlets and mostly conservative respondents distrusted 15 and were skeptical of quite a few more. The hostility wasn’t just to well-known liberal sources like MSNBC. Strong conservatives hated all the network news, CNN, NPR, and the major national outlets, except the Wall Street Journal.  Respondents who are mostly conservative fared better, but were still hostile to the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as skeptical of mainstream organizations like CBS and NBC News.

The fact that conservatives are this paranoid should be alarming enough, but it becomes even more frightening when you consider who conservatives do trust in the media. Consistent conservatives only trusted 8 media sources–compared to the 28 liberals trusted–and of the eight, only one has anything approaching respectable reporting or reliable information. And that one, the Wall Street Journal, has good straight reporting but has an op-ed page that is a train wreck of right-wing distortions and misinformation. Most conservative people were a little more open-minded, trusting USA Today and ABC News, but still were supportive of openly distorting sources like Fox News or the Drudge Report.

Once a media source is liberated from fact-based reality, it defaults from news to a more proprietary and lucrative product - messaging.  This is the stock in trade of today's corporate media in Canada and elsewhere.  It is a plague on democracy, societal ebola, for nothing benefits the corporate state more than a divided, and hence weakened, public.  

We have to dismantle the corporate media cartel.  This begins by recognizing that concentration of ownership and excessive media cross-ownership are antithetical to healthy democracy.  The only solution is forced divestiture in order to return the mass media to the broadest possible ownership and the broadest possible range of opinion from across the political spectrum.  We're coming into very dangerous times that demand a well-informed public capable of making very tough decisions.

Busting the Cartel

“this country should no longer tolerate a situation 

where the public interest in so vital a field as information[is] dependent on the greed or goodwill of an extremely privileged group of businessmen” 

That was the seminal conclusion of the 1969 Davey Commission report into Canada's mass media.  It was a warning about the danger to ordinary Canadians and "the public interest" posed by press barons who dominated the media through concentration of ownership and media cross-ownership.

In today's neoliberal Canada, Davey's warnings are more valid than ever but of no moment whatsoever to either the corporate media cartel or the politicians of all stripes who collude with them.  That's not just Harper's Conservatives either.  You won't hear Justin Trudeau or Tom Mulcair rise to the defence of the public interest against the predations of the powerful media cartel, a malignancy loose on the land that endangers our democratic freedoms.

For both Mulcair and Trudeau, the status quo suits them.  They court today's corporate media barons in hope that the favour will be reciprocated, that there'll be an electoral reach around for them at the end of the day, preferably when the public gets steered to the voting booths.

In 1990, just 17.3% of Canadian newspapers were independently owned. Troubling as that should be, by 2005 that had plummeted to just 1%.  One per cent, that's it.

A handy summary of the Davey Report and the 1981 Kent Commission report can be found here.  What is most telling about these reports is that almost nothing was done about them, their warnings went unheeded and the deplorable results they predicted have all come to pass.

In psychology it's sometimes called "triangulation" - the outcome that occurs when the relationship among three parties is altered so that two parties come together to the exclusion of the third.  The ousted party usually fares poorly at the hands of the other two.  In Canada, as in other increasingly authoritarian states, triangulation has occurred through the collaboration of powerful media interests and the political classes to the exclusion - and detriment - of the public.

The lone voice in Parliament to address this fiasco is the Green Party's.  That party's platform provides, "Access to information.  Seek true solutions to the increasing corporate control in Canadian journalism.  Whatever is "dumbed down" must be "smartened up." Call it trite, if you will.  Call it banal.  It is the only party to commit to at least easing corporate control in Canadian journalism.

Canada, like any other country, is facing a very challenging century that will require real social cohesion for us to see it through.  That, in turn, demands a highly-informed electorate, people with enough quality information to make the decisions real democracy requires of them.  Achieving that demands the breakup of the corporate media cartel and the compulsory divestiture of their holdings.