To Rick Smith, Executive Director of The Broadbent Institute, Canada
An Email Letter Sent From David Bain To Rick Smith, Executive Director Of The Broadbent Institute, Canada
Preface:
I do not profess to be an economist or a close follower of political and business evolution and history. However, I consider myself to be an intelligent enough layperson that I can put together the logic that I have put together below.
I expect that there will be many who disagree with my assessment of what I am writing about but that is the nature of my arena as a sometimes provocative and controversial writer. I say it as I see it, and though I will couch my words to try to prevent misunderstanding and/or over-interpretation, still I will not sugar-coat my words to the point of detracting and subtracting from my message. You can't waffle in your writing and expect to make your point.
To be clear, I believe in both big and small businesses being able to make a fair profit -- but not an excessive, gouging profit that involves 'win-lose' relationships, particularly of the type described below. I believe in everyone being able to make money to the best of their abilities but not to the point of 'pushing someone in the mud' to do it. Now, I understand that oftentimes the borderline between 'narcissistic capitalism' and 'ethical, humanistic-existential capitalism' can become hazy and murky -- where is this 'metaphysical line' to be drawn?
However, the type of scenario that I am describing below I do not believe is anywhere close to this hazy, murky boundary line. If families are being destroyed -- broken up -- world wide, in North America, in Europe, in Asia, because one or both of the parents cannot support the family with the types of jobs that are available, that in effect, much of the middle class is being pushed down into the lower class, and the lower class onto the street, this is an international, universal problem because stables families are the hallmark of a stable, well-functioning society.
Free trade and global capitalism -- in the way that it is being applied today is leading us down a path of world-wide family destruction, a crash of the middle and lower classes that is leaving more and more families unstable, and in some cases, as in the scenario described below, even homeless and broken up.
At some point -- even amongst those of us who may be doing well -- we have to look at the whole global situation, and family stability and/or instability within this global situation.
This essay was stimulated by an article I read about a week or so ago called, 'Abandoned Children and China's Economic Apartheid'. It was written in 'The Epoch Times', July 2nd to 8th, Toronto Edition, by staff writers, Jenny Li and Leo Timm.
Here is the first paragraph of that article:
'In early June, China received a blunt wake-up call when four rural children, aged 5 to 14, ended their lives by drinking pesticide. They had been abandoned by their parents who separated and left their peasant life in Southern China to find work in the city.'
Stunned and appalled by this lead paragraph, here is my remaining message.
Hi Rick,
I am in the process of creating a new political ideological party that is basically non-partisan as far as the existing political parties in Canada are concerned.
I cut through all of them -- and will promote those beliefs, values, and agendas that I support while criticizing those that I am most against. This is an application of my DGB Post-Hegelian, Humanistic-Existential Philosophy-Psychology-Business-Political beliefs.
Here is a cross-section of some of my most significant beliefs:
1. You can call me a 'neo-capitalist' with a social-ethical conscience, or a 'humanistic-existential capitalist' as opposed to the more 'manipulative, narcissistic capitalists' that I see conducting their business from my vantage point as both an employee and a customer. Thus, I support the rise of humanistic-existential capitalism and the demise of manipulative, exploitative, narcissistic, unilateral or bilateral collusion capitalism. I do not pretend to be 'perfect' ethically but I think I am a lot better than some of these 'schmucks' that I write about.
2. I believe that the various free trade agreements were put together by a combination of narcissistic politicians and capitalists aimed at busting unions in North America, finding cheaper labour in cheap labour markets elsewhere in the world, to build products and/or offer telephone services that would not be taxed when they came back into North America for consumption. This basically destroyed the manufacturing industry in North America as well as part of the service industry as companies like Bell Telephone sent much of their customer service business overseas to a cheaper labour market in India.
China became the country of choice for huge companies like Walmart who wanted to be able to sell their products cheaper in North America (even as labour prices here in North America have dropped hugely in the face of continuing immigration from workers and families from these same countries that already have cheap labour (China, India...), who are used to the cheap labour, and who are contributing to the 'busting' of labour unions, and the dropping of labour prices here in North America, along with a high if not rising unemployment rate.
Thus, the big corporations have the best of both world -- cheap labour abroad, dropping labour prices in North America, and a crashing middle class in the process who have been 'more or less forced into accepting lower wages' while their negotiating leverage has been taken away from them by broken unions, free trade, constant immigration, and high unemployment rates, while their cost of living keeps rising.
3. It might not bother me so much -- if my losing say -- $10 an hour here in Canada -- was keeping a family together in any rural country area in China. But the opposite seems to be happing according to an article I just read the other day from a new Toronto newspaper that I picked up at Toronto General Hospital. And this was horrific to read. Rural parents in China were being 'forced' to leave -- that is, abandon -- their children in the heartland of China in order to look for urban manufacturing jobs in the cities where starving rural families were being discriminated against settling in the cities because it was causing 'urban poverty and ghettos' which obviously meant that blue collar workers in the city were not being paid enough for their labour either in order to adequately support their families.
4. If my loss of income here in Canada was keeping even one family together in the heartland of rural China, then I could justify it. But that's not who's pockets the loss of my labour income in Canada is going into. In Canada here, it is obviously going into my owner's pocket, as well an increased 'power leverage' position whereby Canadian employees and/or contractors can now be 'abused and exploited' like they were in the 1940s and 1950s before unions came in and changed the landscape. Now, I am not thrilled with some of the behavior patterns of unions between say the 50s and the 80s that contributed to the bankruptcy -- or near bankruptcy -- of most of the major car dealerships in Detroit, and elsewhere. In business and in politics, we need a 'homeostatic balance' and 'multilateral, transparent, democratic negotiations' -- not big business and big politics bilateral, exploitative collusion.
5. In order for the whole concept of 'free trade' to work, it almost demands that we move towards: 1. a global government that is democratically transparent and that negotiates multilaterally with both national governments and world-wide citizens rather than making behind the scenes, bilateral or trilateral collusionary agreements (the North America -- U.S. Canada, Mexico agreement) that have more or less led to (along with ongoing wars, hedge funds, bank and mortgage frauds, etc.,) the current recession and ongoing crash of the middle class -- the narcissistic capitalists who engineered global capitalism and free trade agreements to take advantage of countries that have no labour rights in place for their citizens and allow them to be exploited mercilously....getting richer from the cheaper labour prices while the blue collars workers in these companies sink out of the middle class and into the lower class...
6. Included in the movement towards an international 'neo-capitalist government with a social, ethical conscious' (as opposed to a narcissistic capitalist government without a social conscience which is far more likely to happen), would be the movement towards an international currency and an international minimum wage. Then free trade -- become fair trade -- assuming that this international neo-capitalist government is built on democratic, transparent, multilateral, humanistic-existential principles involving ethics and a social conscience.
7. Narcissistic capitalist practitioners like back rooms, back alleys (Mulroney with his briefcase full of cash). They like public darkness, not public light. Narcissistic politicians (Harper) preach 'transparency' and 'accountability' before they get into power -- showing the greatest of (pseudo)-respect to the legacies of our Enlightenment philosophers (Voltaire, Montesquieu, Paine, Diderot, Washington, Smith, Lincoln, Jefferson , Franklin...) -- but, in reality, the deeper they get into power the less they like Enlightenment philosophers because their actions speak nothing of transparency or accountability....The narcissistic politicians and businessmen feed themselves first, and then start handing down the leftovers to the rest of the citizens like male lions eating first and leaving the leftovers for the females and children...Narcissism cuts across species, and man has not risen above it. We are all born with narcissistic instincts but what I am talking about is 'pan-narcissism' the type that the Bible (even though I am not particularly religious) rails against in The Ten Commandments. (Thou shalt not be greedy.)
8. Narcissism and greed not only cut across different species; they also cut through our long human history without much if any abatement -- modern day capitalism only getting worse and worse in terms of Karl Marx's criticisms of it. I don't support Marxian political ideologies -- I prefer Adam Smith -- but even Adam Smith, I believe, would cringe and either scream or cry relative to anyone trying to connect today's brand of Capitalism to his ideological and Idealistic treatise -- The Wealth of Nations. I do not believe that Smith was referring to either The Wealth of Nations (the way they collect money today) nor The Economic Collapse of nations like Greece (where the money has all dried out) -- and whatever the Domino Effect might be to a potentially larger collapse of European nations -- when Smith was laying out his key Capitalist principles in his idealistic capitalist treatise, The Wealth of Nations.
9. One of the problems among power-seeking politicians is that they promise you this, or they promise you that -- they promise you the moon until they are elected. And then, there is nothing to hold them to these promises. They can just say, 'Things change.' We promised you that we would get rid of the GST but now we think we will keep it -- because we need the money to govern (and to feed the biggest fish, the biggest lions, the you know what at the troughs....). Money disappears from public coffers -- know one knows what happened to it -- and know one is accountable for it. It just disappears. Pension money disappears -- transferred to accounts unknown....and the longer a group of politicians are in power, and the more they learn the system, the more they start to believe that they are above the law, immune to the law -- and will not be 'busted' for transgressions that may or may not finally end up in a public scandal. These politicians believe that they have at least three years to do more or less what they want, cater to those business lobbyists who put the most amount of party support money into their party coffers, -- and divvy up between them the largest spoils of citizen tax money -- and pass down the rest.
10. The cost of all of this 'bilateral' and 'trilateral' collusion is an exploited citizenship and a crashing middle class. The richest getting richer -- and the middle class crashing into the lower class. The lower class being pushed out of their homes and onto the streets -- the horrific vision in my head of parents abandoning their children in rural China to look for exploiting urban manufacturing companies (some coming into China to support our North American and European free trade agreements that are not supporting Chinese families one iota).
11. It seems that everything we learned during the Enlightenment period of human history and philosophy -- the period where so many people died in both the American and French revolutions -- was all for naught. We have actualized 'Schopenhauer's Narcissistic World' -- a more apocalyptic version of 'Lord of The Flies'. And worse -- it is getting worse, not better.
12. 'Transparency' and 'accountability' are perhaps the two most over-used political words that mean nothing when politicians are elected. They throw both words in the garbage as soon as they are elected.
13. The narcissistic politicians and businessmen celebrated in Dionysian joy. The unions have been defeated. Minimum wage has been defeated. (Just turn an employee into a contractor and you don't have to pay him or her overtime, benefits, holiday pay or minimum wage. You can get around all the labour laws. You can turn the calendar back about 50 years, before unions were created in North America to stop the exploitation of workers trying to feed their families. From the narcissistic politicians and businessmen/women we hear their battle cries: 'Free trade!! Global Capitalism!! Free market!! Let the id rule!! Let the strong get stronger, and the weak get weaker....Don't destroy the nickels and dimes -- leave them for the sinking middle class. Who is going to shop at the businesses the middle class used to shop at? No one. Because the middle class is now shopping at Walmart and Dollerama -- to support Chinese governments and business who don't even care about their urban poverty -- and their rural families being split in half with the parents leaving their homes, and the oldest kids being left to 'play parents' for the younger children.
14. Welcome to Our Brave New World -- It is Not So New Anymore -- of Free Trade, Global Capitalism, and Government-Business Collusion-Based Bilateral and Trilateral Agreements That Are Not Meant To Serve The Interests of The Majority of Citizens Who They Are Supposed To Be Representing But Rather Feeding Themselves First, and Handing The Left-Overs -- If There Is Any -- Down. Or Even Worse -- Taxing These Citizens Again to Make Up For Their Over-Spending, Their Deficit Spending, and Their Feeding Themselves First and Foremost.
15. We need a new age of ethical humanistic-capitalism where transparency and accountability actually mean something and politicians can go to jail and/or pay huge fines for misuse and abuse of citizen tax money The whole practice of contracting out work that used to be done by corporate employees needs to be reviewed because it is being used as a system of misuse and abuse -- to not have to pay benefits (same with firing full-time workers and hiring part-time workers) not to have to pay overtime, not to have to pay statutory holidays, not to have to pay for vacations, to downsize corporate expenses (like gas onto fleet drivers), and in the cases where these individual contractors (like fleet drivers) are being short-changed on all of the items below -- to furthermore, pay them by the kilometer rather than by the hour while having control of the kilometers which means that they can pay them half of the minimum wage -- say, 7 dollars an hour rather than 13 dollars an hour.
This is barely even touching upon the abuses that are being piled on workers in places like mentioned here, in rural and urban China, where worker rights are even less than they are in North America here today, and getting worse.
16. People who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it. Someone profound wrote that (maybe Hegel). It looks to me like we are going to have to live the lessons of The Enlightenment, The American Revolution, The Boston Tea Party, The French Revolution (will it be The Greek Revolution this time?), The American Civil War, The Labour Wars...all over again...because obviously the relevant politicians in place today didn't learn the lesson from history....Expect these types of strifes and wars to start happening again as more and more people's wages are decreasing as their expenses and taxes keep increasing...
One day, it will all come to a head!
-- dgb, July 13, 2015,
David Gordon Bain
David Gordon Bain
From: "Rick Smith, Broadbent Institute"
To: David Bain
Sent: Monday, July 13, 2015 9:30 AM
Subject: Save the Date!
To: David Bain
Sent: Monday, July 13, 2015 9:30 AM
Subject: Save the Date!
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