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The Way I See It! May 12, 2008
June 1st Wherever You Are – Be On the Streets of Oshawa! Send a Message of Solidarity! When the Autoworkers are In Trouble – We Are All in Trouble! From BC to the East Coast – Tell Harper – Canadian Jobs Are Not for Export to Bail Out a Made in USA Economic Crisis!
In the 1930’s unemployed workers clambered aboard boxcars and roamed the country seeking work where none was to be found. Today workers drive to Alberta where there is some work but no affordable housing to be found.
The shock of job loss confronts thousands of Ontario GM autoworkers and their families with such dilemmas, to stay put or break up the family and hit the road in search of work “out west”. How an assembly line worker earning a living wage plus benefits in Oshawa or Windsor is supposed to overnight become a skilled construction worker in Fort McMurray earning comparable income in a totally new work environment is glossed over by the comfy “friends of labour” ensconced in their university ivory towers and the “economic experts” spreading their blather over the business pages of the Globe and Mail and the National Post.
Flaherty Comforts Investors While Workers Lose Their Jobs!
As working class families ponder how to survive, Finance Minister Flaherty frets about $32 billion in paper losses of brokerage houses, near banks and the shrinking portfolios of their feckless upscale ABCP investors.
On the day thousands of GM workers learned that next September they will be denied productive work at a living wage, the Harper Government hosted a meeting of the Governor of the Bank of Canada, the Banking Regulator and the largest banks to consider proposals emanating from a G7 Financial Stability Forum aimed at “restoring stability to the global economy and financial markets”.
Finance Minister Flaherty commented as he left the meeting grinning for the photo op, that financial institutions required regulation “for the benefit of investors, big and small.” Not a word from Flaherty about restoring economic stability for workers confronting loss of homes and jobs. For the Harper Government, it was all about how to protect investors threatened by the capitalist monetary system undermined by a made in US economic crisis resulting from the war in Iraq and the sub-prime crisis.
Autoworkers Out of Work! Governor of the Bank of Canada Bails Out the Banks
Mr. Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of Canada in his April statement pretends that the US Fed isn’t devaluing the US dollar to deliberately ruin Canadian manufacturing industries and spreads the myth that the Alberta economy, based on cheap energy exports to the US, can save the entire Canadian profit system from another recession. He keeps silent about the destabilizing affects of the Harper Government spending billions on the war in Afghanistan. Harper has just announced another $30 billion over twenty years for the military.
Mr. Carney accurately reflects in monetary policy the core political policy of the Harper Conservative Government. By using the power of the Bank of Canada to set interest rates to maintain the spread between what the banks pay to borrow and charge to sell money, the banks are being allowed by government to recoup their losses from the sub-prime fiasco and set adrift the hapless borrowers stuck with $32 billion of worthless paper. Is it any wonder the banks are refusing to cooperate blue ribbon committee stuck with the thankless job of convincing ABCP investors they should take 50 cents on the dollar and keep quiet.
And ultimately who will pay for this debacle? It is Canadian wage and salary workers locked into the personal debt system created by the banks who will be whipsawed by higher interest and banking charge rates and stagnant wages that have risen according to Stats Canada an outrageous $52 dollars in real purchasing power since 1980.
Corrupted Media Sides With the Bosses
Dutifully, the corrupted media “explain” why Big Oil isn’t responsible for high gas prices, big banks didn’t cause the debt crisis, and Lib-Con Government’s aren’t responsible for the war in Afghanistan. The corrupted mass media trivializes the depth of the economic crisis for wage earners, all the while filling the society pages of the National Post and the Globe and Mail with the mindless twaddle of the idle rich.
And what about the Liberals? Liberal Leader Stephane Dion was quoted a week ago saying he is delaying a federal election so the people of Canada can find out more about the Conservative Government. The working people of Canada know quite enough about the Harper Government.
That’s why on June 1st wherever we are - we will all be on the streets of Oshawa with the autoworkers in defense of their jobs, their community and their industry.
For A Made in Canada Economic Policy of Full Employment, Job Security, Rising Wages!
Stop the De-Industrialization of Canada!
Put Monopoly Under Control!
Defeat the Sell-Out Harper Government! |