LOOKING AHEAD - IN A REAR VIEW MIRROR

I keep watching those political shows that are the staple on Sunday morning TV. The current dither is all about Mitt Romney and about how Sarah Palin upstaged him by going to New Hampshire right at the time Romney was (surprise surprise) announcing his candidacy. Even the New York Times weighed in with a piece about Sarah and her mindless tour of America: Gettysburg etc. The story was headlined by a picture of her on the buddy seat of a motorcycle. She has this traveling bus but she “avoids” media coverage. She even parked her bus at the door of her hotel to distract journalists who didn’t notice her slipping out the back door. That’s just one example of how crazy the run-up to 2012 is already. There’s more to come!

On ABC’s look at the coming presidential primaries there was the usual jabber about the “most important” element in the next campaign: employment. Obama is already fretting over the meager new job figures for May, passing it off as a “blip.” Some blip.

They, especially the Republicans, along with a roomful of “maverick” Democrats, keep hoping that Corporate America will step up and create jobs. After all, the market economy is everything. Just look at China,. They have a bad economic year when growth is only 8%. Ask yourself: “how much is China depending on private corporations to create jobs?”

In the pursuit of the orthodoxy that only the private sector can get the job done, government looks at heaping even more tax cuts on corporations. They believe, in spite of all the evidence, that corporations need more money to spend on jobs and on capital expenditures. Truth is it all gets stashed away in the company treasury. Meanwhile, American home prices have fallen to 1992 levels with no recovery in sight. Until the American consumer starts spending money the corporations are not going to be hiring more people to make more goods to sell to a nation that has sopped buying stuff. But they cling doggedly to their orthodoxy. They support the claims that government should spend less by citing the wastefulness of countries like Greece and Portugal, and the Celtic Tiger – Ireland. In fact, Ireland is suffering from a real estate boom that burst while collecting some of the lowest corporate taxes in the world. Greece’s credit rating is in the toilet. The G7 thinks they should be spending less. But at the same time perhaps they should be more diligent in collecting taxes. Speaking of which, what ever happened to the Obama promise to rein in the flight of capital to tax-free offshore havens?

They still look in the rear-view mirror, expecting wisdom to spring from what used to be.

In fact, what used to be maybe never was. Maybe it was all part of a grand illusion.

At the heart of America’s problems is not the unwillingness of cash-rich corporations to bail the economy out, it is in the enormous disparity between the rich and the dispossessed. One percent of the wealthiest Americans have more assets than the bottom ninety percent! The only instrument that can right this obvious wrong is a government with the will to make changes. In America, and I have to guess, in Canada too, no one wants to rock the leaky boat. Let’s try another tax cut. Thankfully Harper seems to want to delay any such government largesse, at least for the near future. Which I guess is the fundamental difference between us and our neighbours: they are the wealth-based orthodoxy and ours is, no matter what government is in power, still a “liberal” democracy which pays attention to social responsibilities. Most of the time.