Attack on Workers Unprecedented, Silence is Not an Option

William O'Casey
February 19, 2010

The attack on workers is unprecedented, brutal and total.  The extent of global plundering by monopoly capital is unparalleled and without historical comparison.   Vast fortunes reside in the hands of a corrupt, degenerate and immoral parasitical gated capitalist class.

Pastoral care is daily exposed as child abuse and trafficking – Pope Benedict rushes to prayer with Irish Bishops and the US state frees the Baptist child traffickers in Haiti.   The traffickers' legal advisor is suspected of running a child prostitution ring in El Salvador.  This is how US imperialism protects children.  Canada has its own share of Catholic pedophiles that run rampant in residential schools for decades, continuing to this day in the pews and backrooms of the "Lord's Cathedrals".

The height of bourgeois culture is a steady diet of moronic reality TV where drugs, violence and the sex lives of the idle rich and socialites are front page news – pornography is big business. The New York Times in 2001 estimated it at $10-14 Billion, ten years later is is even greater.  At the start of the US depression the very same “industry” demanded a $5 Billion dollar bailout.  Former US President George Bush’s stimulus package was credited to a big jump in porn industry revenues.

The ridiculously outlandish Lady Ga-Ga is presented as an "artist" and a role model for young women while the Nazi Gene Simons lends “street cred” to PM Harper.  The total cultural, moral and intellectual assault on the working class, and especially the barbarity that women and children are subjected to, is so expansive, so complete and despotic that only a total eradication of those forces that peddle, support and market in the garbage will win the day.

Capitalism will never stop or “reform” the depravity inherit in the system.  Only the revolutionary transformation to socialism can stop the human exploitation and suffering of an unprecedented magnitude that may only be rivaled by the German Nazi death camps or the Roman Catholic Church of the middle ages.

The contradictions within the global ruling class are sharpening.  Inter-imperialist relations are rapidly changing and intensifying, primarily over energy, resources, finance capital and military contracts.  However all sectors are affected and undergoing radical realignments.  Big monopoly capital is concentrating ever enormous sums and small and medium capital is ruined and cast into the growing labouring masses.

The environmental parvenu use monopoly capital eco-destructionism as the ruse to create the new “benign” and benevolent industrial class and ascend the social ladder of global capitalists.  Capitalists, we are told, are no longer interested in making money they are more interested in “doing good” – “social entrepreneurs”.  

Public sector workers and hard won social benefits and programs are being rapidly chipped away.  Pensions are under attack.  Harper’s administrators are attacking the most vulnerable and unorganized first while weakening the organized labour through a combination of downward pressure on wages and enhancing “social partnerships”.

The weakness within organized labour is critical and will not be able to withstand the highly organized ruling class without a complete rejection of bourgeois theories.  Organized labour remains fragmented and without an independent program.  That is problematic.

The overt and massive plundering of Canadian raw materials is done so in the name of “jobs and expanding the economy”.  It is astounding that the labour movement, the left (and this includes the CPC and CoC) are all mute.  They have been disarmed by the “left” environmentalists - even going so far as making outlandish claims that they have defeated the SPP.

While self congratulatory accolades are liberally dispensed by the liberal radicals and various hyper left forces claiming that they have stopped SPP in its tracks the Pacific Coastal Collaborative moves forward under the cover of “environmentalism”.  As well the treasonous western Canadian Premiers in concert with the Western Governors Association has mapped out the prime hydro locations from BC and Manitoba to supply US markets.

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach continues to kneel at the alter of big oil, accelerating the sell-out of Canadian energy.  Alberta Energy Minister Ron Liepert announces that a royalty review will create the lowest cost jurisdiction in North America.  Natural gas accounts for 7% of Canadian GDP.  The renegade Stelmach and his cowboy caucus of Texas wannabes are ensuring that Canadians will get less of that 7%.

Along with oil and gas in Alberta and British Columbia, hydro power in Quebec, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador and thermal and nuclear power in Ontario it is clearly evident that Canada is being grossly plundered and our dependency on resource extraction and in the first place energy exports to the US is creating real economic imbalances in the Canadian economy.

Internationally finance capital is holding whole nations hostage for massive recapitalizations, demanding that governments implement harsh austerity measures on public programs, social services and reduce wages.  The hypocritical US demands that the derogatory so called “PIIGS” cut their debt while the U.S. federal debt is bloated with military contracts and California wallows in debt larger than any of the European countries under attack.

Europe is shaping up as a battle ground for inter-imperialist struggles.  The phony paper capitalizations have collapsed requiring intensified theft from national treasuries.  That is why Stockwell Day is in place to oversee the redistribution of the public treasury to Canadian Banks.

Canadians are in debt like never before.  The Canadian housing market is teetering on massive default as they artificially pumped up demand.  Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney has signaled that a sharp rise in interest rates is just around the corner.  It is a crass attempt to protect bank profits by raising interest rates.  This is another scheme to recapitalize Canadian Banks with a greater spread between the Central Bank rate and what is charged to Canadian workers.

Many thousands of young Canadian families will go into default and loose homes – they will be blamed for taking on too much debt and vilified as irresponsible.  It will not be surprising to see interest rates rise rapidly over the next 2-3 years and even approach the rates of the early eighties.  The conditions are in many respects similar to the conditions of that period.

Military expenditures have not changed and are increasing.   This of course is the single largest drag on the economy.  Harper’s boasting of C-17 Globemasters and that Canada needs “hard power” to implement soft power of course is a ploy to disarm the weak liberal radicals, NDP, peace movement and align the Liberals with the Harper regime’s foreign policy intents.  An article by Anthony Fenton is an exposure of the sinister extent the autocrat Harper and the reactionary right is planning to take Canada.

The ½ trillion dollar CFDS is the greatest impediment to Canada moving forward in an independent path and is intimately linked to the sell-out of energy – both hydrocarbons and power related.

The woefully inadequate response by the CPC is a very grave problem for the Canadian working class and in fact is not only problematic in the organizational sense, but in its absence from the national stage creates a vacuum for all forms of nefarious opportunistic and revisionist forces to enter allowing and aiding the unencumbered attack on the working class to proceed at an accelerated rate.

In other words by its absence there is not even an appearance of any resistance to capital.  There is much to attack.  Capitalism is in chaos and not united. Now is the time to strike.  Silence is a statement.