Canadian Banks, Workers and the Farcical “Green Economy”

Global financial markets and the capitalist system are in the midst of a new cyclical, severe and deepening crisis. The crisis is being managed within the capitalist system and by the very same investor classes whose policies of wide open market capitalism are driving the world’s labouring masses into greater misery and untold hardship and ruin.

Canada, far from the reassurances of Prime Minister Harper, Finance Minister Flaherty and Bank of Canada Governor Carney, is neither immune and insulated nor are Canada’s big banks “fundamentally sound”. Close to half a million jobs have been wiped out in Canadian manufacturing, forestry is devastated, communications are undergoing harsh rationalization with 1300 jobs being axed by Nortel, energy investment is being radically scaled back with an almost total halt in oil sands projects in Alberta, house construction is in free fall with new home starts off over 50% since a year before, consumer spending has virtually stopped and agriculture; cattle, hogs and grain and barley is in crisis.

Canadian working families are under threat and on the verge of being totally ruined and thrown into life-long poverty and despair.

The destruction of the Canadian industrial economy is just the tip of a growing separation between real material production and finance capital speculation. Finance capital growth remains unabated. Finance and speculative capital is the dominant force and consideration within all proposed global financial solutions being bandied about by the leading capitalist nations. Speculative capital persists and entrenched in the planned “coordinated” global approach to crisis mitigation.

The “solutions” proposed by Finance Minster Flaherty ahead of the November G20 meetings in Brazil are described as “aggressive”. The minister announced today on behalf of Canadian people that he is transferring a further $50 billion in mortgages from the bank’s books to Canadian public via Flaherty’s “mortgage purchase program”, increasing the spread between what the Government of Canada lends banks and what the banks charge Canadians and a further $8 billion of public funds to the speculative money markets. Don Drummond Toronto Dominion Bank chief economist said that Flaherty’s measures “are exactly what the banks wanted”.

While Flaherty doles out billions to the banks in a global coordinated attack to “thaw” credit markets Canadian workers are losing jobs by the 10,000’s. The bank’s request for more public money was met by Flaherty with a willingness and eagerness more befitting a lap dog then a Canadian Finance Minster.

The solution to the economic crisis proposed by banking capital is; lend more money - period. Increasing the productive capacity of the nation is completely abandoned in favour of a continuation of the same speculative capital economy. It is within this context that the real needs of workers and those of the casino capitalists are brought into sharp relief when calls for industrial “suppression” are made by the environmentalists.

Canadian workers are asking the basic questions. Where is the productive basis for the massive introduction of renewable forms of energy to come from? With the wholesale destruction and transfer of Canadian industrial capacity to lower labour cost jurisdictions being carried out a feverish pace and the investment capital required, being used to prop up the remaining big 3 US banks, the ability of Canada to make this miraculous transformation to a “green economy” is farcical.