20 Years Of Neo Conservative Propaganda

After twenty years of the 'new' right political dominance of the media messaging about political economy are you surprised?!

More than half of Canadians think a family of four can get by on $30,000 a year or less, while a similar number believe that if poor people really want to work, "they can always find a job."

Read more: http://www.canada.com/business/Report+finds+poverty+myths+rampant+Canada/4362961/story.html#ixzz1FKcgPAGD

Which leads to: Neighbours dismayed woman forced to live in garage

Det. Sgt. Mike Stones said the woman appears to suffer from dementia and was declared legally incompetent in the fall. His son was named as her guardian. Since then, she has been living in “deplorable” conditions in the attached garage of her son’s home, said Stones.

This is the face of poverty in Canada, which the Fraser Institute statistically denies.

How The MacDonald Commission Changed Canada

With the Conservative governments announcement of further bi-lateral free trade agreements, we should return to the roots of this policy. One that was developed by the Liberals over twenty years ago. Credit where credit is due, the Liberals set the agenda for the development of Free Trade which the Conservatives under Mulroney and Harper have merely inherited. Proving once again the axiom, Liberal, Tory same old story.

Tracing the roots of Canada’s contemporary involvement in North American free trade back to the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada in 1985 – also known as the Macdonald Commission – Gregory J. Inwood offers a critical examination of the commission and how its findings affected Canada’s political and economic landscape, including its present-day reverberations.

In this case the recommendations that led to the reinvention of the Liberal government as a Neo-Liberal government began with the Commission they set up under Donald MacDonald.

Macdonald represented the Toronto-Rosedale riding for 16 years as a federal member of parliament. He served nine years as cabinet minister in portfolios such as national defence, finance and energy, mines and resources. He was high commissioner for Canada to the United Kingdom from 1988 to 1991, and from 1982 to 1985, he chaired the Royal Commission on the Economic Development Prospects for Canada (known as the Macdonald Commission).

What the Liberals didn't do was follow the MacDonald Commission recommendations on UI/EI.

Moreover, instead of following the Commission’s recommendation for increasing federal contributions to UI during recessionary periods, the government eliminated all contributions to the program by 1990. And there is no evidence that the government has seriously considered proposals made by the Commission and others for experience-rating the program’s financing.

The intensity rule and benefit clawback of 1996 were sold as “worker-side experience rating” (see Nakamura and Diewert (2000)), but they proved as politically unpalatable as employer-side experience rating of premiums. Indeed, since the mid-1990s and continuing today, the feds’ most notable attitude toward EI is that the program is a handy, covert source of net funds for other governmental purposes.

Nor did they follow the Commissions recommendations for a Guaranteed Annual Income.

The Universal Income Security Program (UISP) was the Commission’s other major recommendation for reforming income security. In essence, the UISP was a guaranteed income scheme that would have replaced other programs such as the Guaranteed Income Supplement, Family Allowances, the refundable child tax credit, child and marital tax exemptions, federal social housing programs, federal transfers to the provinces for Social Assistance (SA), and the income support functions of UI. UISP payments were to be made on an income-tested basis, with a tax-back rate of 20 percent applied to all income in addition to the normal personal income tax rates. The Report stated, “The UISP seems to Commissioners to be the essential building block for social security programs in the twenty-first century.

Instead they applied a neo-liberal approach of tax credits, which increased the taxable income of those who received government supplements. So in effect the working poor, paid for a benefit they received from the government. The Federal government let the provinces off the hook by paying their share, and allowing them to cut Social Assistance on the promise that the savings would go back into broad based public programs for the working poor.

The reality was a claw back of provincial benefits, real cash in your pocket, for a credit chit from the Feds, your tax dollars at work. The ensuing benefit not being taxed, meant that the working poor moved up the income tax scale. Not unlike the current Conservative Child benefit; their so called universal child care program.

Second, beginning in 1998 the National Child Benefit (NCB) System subsumed the CTB and replaced its earnings-related benefit with a substantial cash supplement for lower income households with children. Under agreements with the federal government, most provincial governments reduced their SA benefit rates for children by amounts equivalent to the NCB supplement. Again, this scheme pursued a Commission goal of reducing the disincentives for welfare beneficiaries to seek or return to work. These changes also reduced the break-even
income levels for welfare beneficiaries, though the provinces have not reduced phase-out rates for their own benefits. The “reinvestment” of provincial savings from reduced SA cash benefits into in-kind benefits for the working poor and welfare beneficiaries promoted the lowering of the welfare wall, but the benefit phase-outs further aggravated disincentives for the working poor.

Despite the visible positives from the NCB initiative, the scheme also mirrored the
hidden deficiencies of the Commission’s UISP scheme. That is, the NCB supplement phase-out sharply raised the effective marginal tax rates faced by many working poor and near-poor families. The NCB scheme did reduce the “welfare wall” but simultaneously erected a higher “success wall” keeping the working poor and near-poor from advancing to higher earnings.

What made the MacDonald Commission unique was the near unanimty of the political economists who agreed that Free Trade was the panacea for Canada's stagnating economy. An economy that was no worse off nor better off than any other at the time of global recession. However dissident voices were not to be found amongst the Academics of the day who promoted Free Trade saying There Is No Alternative. And so the Liberals led the push for Free Trade despite John Turners tearful denials in his debate with Mulroney and Broadbent.

Policy makers who want a policy initiative in place may well foster the research to support the initiative. This fostering could come in various forms: commissioning background studies from sources known to favor the initiatives; designing the terms of reference in ways that will yield favorable results; “advertising” favorable results while “burying” unfavorable results; or, reviewing the research with suggestions tilted towards influencing the results or having them presented favorably.

In Canada, the signature recommendation of the Macdonald Royal Commission of 1985, was for a bilateral free trade agreement between Canada and the U.S. That recommendation led to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA), negotiated between 1985 and 1987 and implemented January 1, 1989. The research of the Commission was extensive, involving 280 studies done mainly by 300 different academics in 70 volumes.

The importance of academic research to the Commission is also illustrated by the fact that 84 percent of the 1,014 references in the final report are to research studies (67 percent from the academic literature and 17 percent from the background research studies of the Commission which tended to synthesize the academic research). Only 10 percent of the references were to briefs formally presented to the Commission and 6 percent from references to transcripts of the public hearings (calculations from data in Inwood, 2005:181).

The fact that the academic research generally favored free trade while the briefs and public hearings generally involved advocacy positions opposed to free trade, suggests that the research also had a greater impact (Inwood, 1998:18).

The research on trade had a number of important characteristics that likely facilitated its
impact on public policy. It was high quality research done by top researchers in the country and coordinated by a prolific and respected trade economist. The computable general equilibrium models were particularly influential, especially because they captured the indirect productivity enhancing effects of the restructuring that would occur because of the economies of scale for producing for a large market. The research of the Commission generally involved a synthesis of the cumulative stock of existing research, the vast majority of which favored free trade. The near consensus perspective favoring free trade is illustrated by the fact that “only one academic could be found to make the anti-free trade case out of the approximately three hundred hired by the Commission” (Inwood, 1998:35).

This homogeneity of perspectives within economics and the rigor with which they are advanced made economics prominent as a source of policy advice to the Commission (Simeon, 1987). Brooks and Gagnon (1988:109) conclude that this is a more general phenomenon: “There can be little doubt that economists remain pre-eminent among social scientists in their integration with the policy process.”

The research also had champions who made the case for free trade to the Commissioners and to the politicians, and who defended it in the heated public debates that ensued. Trade unions strongly opposed the FTA and organized public forums against it. In countering this, Macdonald (2005:11) acknowledges the important role played by an Industrial Relations academic, John Crispo, for “his robust platform technique which ultimately frightened away the union leaders from contested meetings where initially it was they who had brandished the verbal brass knuckles.”

There were certainly attacks on the research and on the academic case for free trade. However, the attacks tended to be polemic and based on more nationalistic denunciations of free market economics in general. They tended not to provide alternatives based on different methodologies, and the work was generally simply presented at conferences or published in forums of contemporary opinion as opposed to peer-reviewed academic journals (Inwood, 1998:5).

The term neo-liberal was coined in this period to note the shift that mainstream political economists were making in calling for Free Trade, reductions in social benefits, reinventing government, contracting out services and privatization. All these went hand in hand, and while promoted by neo-cons elsewhere in Canada they truly were policies of the New Liberals; neo-liberalism.

Begun by Trudeau and MacDonald they were then carried through in the nineties by Chretien and Martin. The current Conservatives are the beneficiaries of the Liberal restructuring of the state.

While free trade was the signature recommendation of the Macdonald Commission, numerous other recommendations were made backed by labor and social policy research. As Riddell (2005) indicates, many of these
recommendations were implemented into policy, including unemployment insurance reforms; active adjustment assistance policies; income supplements to the working poor; national testing of student achievement; and deemphasizing minimum wages.

In his overall assessment, Bradford (1999/2000:158, 159) concludes: “The Macdonald Commission report remains the essential component reference point for the host of era-defining policy innovations, ranging from continental free trade to restrictions on unemployment insurance and retrenchment of the federal role in social assistance, legislated between 1985 and 1997 by successive Conservative and Liberal governments.”

Freer trade was also regarded as a potentially effective way for the federal government to pressure provincial governments to adopt market-oriented reforms given the substantial control they have over policy initiatives in Canada’s system. This was especially the case since there was a backlash against the nationalist and government interventionist policies that prevailed during the 1960s and 1970s, including wage-price controls, energy price fixing, foreign investment restrictions, government procurement policies, and a state trading corporation to
assist smaller Canadian firms to sell to centrally planned economies (Chant, 2005:14). Such policies were often regarded as contributing to the worst recession Canada experienced since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Interestingly, while he was previously in political office, Macdonald himself presided over many of these interventionist strategies including a national oil policy, a state-owned petroleum company, government investment in oil developments that were avoided by the private sector, price controls on uranium exports, and the wage-price control program. He attributes his conversion to free trade and less government intervention to: “My experience in the private sector after my departure from government made it clear that state-controlled programs
had failed to achieve the rates of growth to which we all aspire” (Macdonald, 2005:9).

This rejection of nationalist-interventionist policies also occurred for Prime Minister Trudeau who had earlier instituted many of the policies in the 1970s. By 1982, he indicated: “Personally, I remain convinced that the primary engine of economic development must be a dynamic private sector and that the marketplace is in most circumstances the best allocator of scarce resources”

The Liberal reinvention of government in this period meant the whole scale contracting out of government services, in particular computer based IT as well as P3 programs and the sell off and lease back of government buildings. Which has resulted in the the various scandals and boondoggles from the Gun Registry to the RCMP pension fund scandal.

That the Conservatives could get former Liberal Industry Minister David Emerson to cross the floor days after his election to occupy his old cabinet seat shows how interchangeable the two parties are when in power. After all Emerson is simply following through on Liberal policy even as a Conservative.




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Global Farmers Fight Back

My comrades who are Free Market Libertarians and mutualists who oppose capitalism in favour of a cooperative marketplace, will find much to praise in this new farmers movement. It poses a real alternative to capitalist globalization and corporatist free trade. None other than creation of a new movement for a cooperative commonwealth.

The latest attempt to destroy the Wheat Board in Canada is an example of the attack by the State on small farmers in favour of the Agribusiness cartels in the developed world. The Green Revolution, the push for GMO crops and patents on crops as well as using arable land for production for export; palm oil, are examples of non sustainable agribusiness versus the sustainable production of local farmers.

The recent Fraser Institute report by Preston Manning and Mike Harris calling for the end of supply management, the Wheat Board , and subsidies in the market place for farmers, does nothing but open up the farm marketplace to the agribusiness oligopolies. Ironic since Manning's daddy ran a party; Social Credit, made up of farmers that saw these same oligopolies as enemies of a producer run economy.


The fact is that the majority of farmers in the world are family farmers, not far removed from their peasant roots. It is the peasantry that provides the basis for the survival of the food economy. But with the advent of capitalist globalization the peasantry has become a new force in the world economy as Warren Bellow points out.

It is agricultural reform, the privatization of the inherent collectivism of peasant farming, the enclosure of common lands that led to the creation of capitalism in Britain. Forced off the land the peasants move to the cities to look for work becoming the proletariat.

But not all have done so, since it is the farmers who support the cities with their food production. And forced by globalization to collectivize farmers are reforming cooperatives to deal with the new demands of the marketplace.

Thai pig farmers protest at CPF headquarters

S. Korea may allow farmers to export locally grown rice: gov't source

Farmers Cooperative Extends Rollout Of SOA Tool

Connecting Coffee Growers and Drinkers

Cameroon: Coffee - Reasons Behind Poor Performance

Phoenixville Farmer's Market returns to town for sixth season

Innovations in rural financial system inPunjab

What began in England over 400 hundred years ago is now writ wide across the globe. It is not Free Trade nor Free Markets but the concentration of capital and its power to monopolize the market. It is the transformation of agriculture from sustainable economics to the economics of unrestrained growth. Thus the land, people and environment suffer as we see in Indonesia as the islands there burn for the sake of the agribusiness palm oil industry.

Whereas export crops like organic and fair trade coffee have become a basis for sustainable export farming, which can support sustainable agriculture as well as meet the farmers need to be part of a global market place.


Free Trade vs. Small Farmers

Walden Bello is Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute, and a Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines at Diliman.

The main battle cry of Via Campesina, whose coordinating center is located in Indonesia, is “WTO Out of Agriculture” and its alternative program is food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means first and foremost the immediate adoption of policies that favor small producers. This would include, according to Indonesian farmer Henry Saragih, Via's coordinator, and Ahmad Ya'kub, Deputy for Policy Studies of the Indonesian Peasant Union Federation (FSPI), “the protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports, remunerative prices for all farmers and fishers, abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies, and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture.”

Via's program, however, goes beyond the adoption of pro-smallholder trade policies. It also calls for an end to the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds, thus appropriating for private profit what has evolved through the creative interaction of the natural world with human communities over eons. Seeds and all other plant genetic resources should be considered part of the common heritage of humanity, the group believes, and not be subject to privatization.

Agrarian reform, long avoided by landed elites in countries like the Philippines, is a central element in Via's platform, as is sustainable, ecologically sensitive organic or biodynamic farming by small peasant producers. The organization has set itself apart from both the First Green Revolution based on chemical-intensive agriculture and the Second Green Revolution driven by genetic engineering (GE). The disastrous environmental side effects of the first are well known, says Via, which means all the more that the precautionary principle must be rigorously applied to the second, to avoid negative health and environmental outcomes.

The opposition to GE-based agriculture has created a powerful link between farmers and consumers who are angry at corporations for marketing genetically modified commodities without proper labeling, thus denying consumers a choice. In the European Union, a solid alliance of farmers, consumers, and environmentalists prevented the import of GE-modified products from the United States for several years. Although the EU has cautiously allowed in a few GE imports since 2004, 54% of European consumers continue to think GE food is ”dangerous.” Opposition to other harmful processes such as food irradiation has also contributed to the tightening of ties between farmers and consumers, large numbers of whom now think that public health and environmental impact should be more important determinants of consumer behavior than price.

More and more people are beginning to realize that local production and culinary traditions are intimately related, and that this relationship is threatened by corporate control of food production, processing, marketing, and consumption. This is why Jose Bove's justification for dismantling a MacDonald's resonated widely in Asia: “When we said we would protest by dismantling the half-built McDonald's in our town, everybody understood why -- the symbolism was so strong. It was for proper food against malbouffe [awful standardized food], agricultural workers against multinationals. The extreme right and other nationalists tried to make out it was anti-Americanism, but the vast majority knew it was no such thing. It was a protest against a form of production that wants to dominate the world.”

Many economists, technocrats, policymakers, and urban intellectuals have long viewed small farmers as a doomed class. Once regarded as passive objects to be manipulated by elites, they are now resisting the capitalist, socialist, and developmentalist paradigms that would consign them to ruin. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious “class-for-itself.” And even as peasants refuse to “go gently into that good night,” to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas, developments in the 21st century are revealing traditional pro-development visions to be deeply flawed. The escalating protests of peasant groups such as Via Campesina, are not a return to the past. As environmental crises multiply and the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life pile up, the farmers' movement has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone who is threatened by the catastrophic consequences of obsolete modernist paradigms for organizing production, community, and life.

Farmers hungry for change

At this week's intergovernmental meeting in Rome to assess progress towards the pledge to halve hunger by 2015, the mood was sombre. Figures from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) show not a reduction but an increase of more than 25 million chronically undernourished people since 1996. The figure, now at more than 850 million, is testament to how current global policies are consigning the hungry to stay hungry.

So what is going wrong? In 2002, when the UN World Food Summit pledge was last reviewed, the parallel Forum for Food Sovereignty, organised by non-governmental groups representing small farmers and those who feel the sharp end of hunger directly, concluded that the problem was not a lack of political will, as the FAO asserted, but the opposite. Trade liberalisation, industrial agriculture, genetic engineering and military dominance, it said, were now the main causes of hunger.

The farmers, from 30 countries, who participated in the conference were eloquent about how farming for small producers is more than just a food production system. Edgar Gonzales Castro, from Peru, said his vision of the future was "traditional" agriculture aimed at satisfying the needs of farmers, rather than generating profit. "What matters is that, on the family plot of land, farmers and their families have a range of crops to fill the cooking pot," he said.

"When governments decide to hold public consultations to help guide their decisions, policy experts as well as representatives of large farmers and agrifood corporations are usually centre stage, not small-scale producers, consumers and their organisations," says Pimbert.

The message of the report is that small-scale farmers - the majority of growers in the world - want radically different policies from those being promoted by their governments. The call is for policies to start from the perspectives of food producers and consumers rather than the demand for profit.

If "one-planet farming" means that western governments will only support farming practices that provide healthy, local food, maintain livelihoods for local producers and conserve resilient landscapes, then there is common ground with small-scale farmers. But if it means a uniform system for all, this will accelerate the hunt to source food globally and as cheaply as possible.

This will result in a continuing decline in food quality, with ever higher social and environmental costs, and be lorded over by fewer and fewer transnational agribusinesses. It would lead both to greater obesity and greater starvation, and see the eradication of more farmers and further loss of farmland.

Farmers' Views on the Future of Food and Small Scale Producers is at http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdf/full/14503IIED.pdf

Friends of African Farmers & Fishermen

Friends of African Farmers & Fishermen is a Non Profit local community organisation formed by local women and men who are farmers and fishermen. Due to increasing poverty in the area, the local people formed this organisation of Volunteers to help themselves. Due to lack of money and machinery for farming and fishing, wish to appeal for donations of Farm Machinery ie, tractors, irrigation equipment etc. Donations for our Agricultural and development projects in Volta Region of Ghana. To help women and children to have food to eat.Train the young women and youth to acquire the needed skills. To also help farmers with farming machinery and fishing equipment. This would generate income for the local people.Non Profit Organisation.

SEE:

Free Trade Not Aid

Free Trade and Africa

The War For Chocolate

IWD Economic Freedom for Women

Water War

Development Versus Population Growth

WTO: Privatization of Water

Is There a Silver Lining to the WTO Talks? No




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