By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
I’ve just finished reading an article on the website of the French-language Montreal daily La Presse which has really set my blood a-boilin’.
The newspaper reported, as I’m sure almost all did, that the New York stock exchange finished lower today as investors grew incrasingly concerned about public debt levels in some European and North American countries.
I am simply appalled at the unmitigated, greed-driven selfishness of the investor class.
Most of the advanced industrial countries in the world have just finished spending scores of T-R-I-L-L-I-O-N-S of dollars bailing out the banks, the corporations and the billionaires and megamillionaires whose unbridled greed, incompetence, corruption and criminality plunged the world into economic chaos.
And while the socioeconomic elite has now fully recovered from its paper losses of the past year and a half, hundreds of millions in the world’s poor and middle classes – including tens of millions in the U.S. and Canada – are still suffering greatly – from unemployment, from reduced wages and working hours, from foreclosures and from a growing credit crunch.
Those governments had the gall to lavish trillions of dollars on the super-rich, which was a major cause of the exploding debt woes now facing so many countries. And now that they’ve been bailed out, the super-rich – the kings and queens and princes of corporate capitalism – have the gall to protest the mushrooming levels of public debt.
They’re still screaming, of course, for tax cuts for the wealthy and their corporations but now they are also demanding that public debt be curbed.
Guess whose backs they want those debts to be curbed on?
Certainly not the beneficiaries of the biggest swindle in the history of capitalism – those who got bailed out and “stimulated.”
No, it is their victims – the innocent masses – who must now bear the burden of the bailout of corporate capitalism and the biggest upward redistribution of wealth in history.
The poor and the middle class – in Canada, the U.S., Europe and many other places – will now start to pay the hidden price of the bailout of capitalism.
Yes, once again the pampered socioeconomic elite will have its way with the NeoLiberal and NeoConservative governments of most of the world.
Yes, once again the desperate and legitimate pleas of the poor and the middle class will be ignored.
United States President Barack Obama has already promised to cut federal spending, even as his country continues to seek deeper into the mire of worsening recession.
And here in Canada, (Prime Minister Stephn) Harper the Toad – aided and abetted by Iggy the Enabler (Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff) – has vowed to cut all federal government spending except, of course, military spending. (As if more death and destruction wasn’t the last thing Canada and the world needs now.)
Back in the mid-Nineties, when Conservative Ontario Premier Mike Harris began lavishing humongous tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy at the height of a recession, the Tories tried to mollify their opponents by placing an item on the income-tax form inviting Ontarians to voluntarily pay a higher tax, but only if they so chose.
Instead of demanding more and more tax cuts for themselves and more and more government spending cuts for the masses, these banks and corporations and the billionaires and megamillionaires who control them should now be volunteering to pay more taxes. After all, they now have all the spare cash.