And Likely It
Will Come
to Canada
Wrapped
In The Same US flag
And Carrying
the Same Cross.

Or The State of Our Democracy
by Coyote

All the changes currently occurring within our capitalist dominant and structured social, economic and political systems, over the period since the beginning of the collapse of “socialized capitalism”, as it evolved in the aftermath of WW2 until the late 1970’s to early ‘80s, and of late around NAFTA, TILMA and the neo-conservative ruling class calls and initiatives for a North American Union (NAU), are having a profound effect on our democracy, or what has at least passed for such to here. And the implications for further modifications and deteriorations are manifold and becoming increasingly obvious.

. "I believe in democracy because it releases the energies of every human being" - those are the words of our 28th president of the USA, Woodrow Wilson," said Bill Moyers in a recent article titled A Time for Anger, A Call for Action.

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0322-24.htm

Nonetheless, as we are now witnessing, this president of the United States also obviously understood something else about the nature of the class system that capitalism gives rise to, though he might not have chosen to put it quite the way I have, being then a liberal spokesman for it, when he sounded anyway, what can only be interpreted as a warning as far back as his time, (between 1913-21).

In his now-forgotten political testament called The New Freedom, Wilson described his reformism in plain English no one could fail to understand: "The laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the week." He wrote: "Don't deceive yourselves for a moment as to the power of great interests which now dominate our development... There are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States. They are going to own it if they can." And he warned: "There is no salvation in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters... prosperity guaranteed by trustees has no prospect of endurance."

Which bears repeating: “There is no salvation in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters... prosperity guaranteed by trustees has no prospect of endurance." The undoing of which egalitarian prosperity ideas and practise within capitalism was precisely begun with the rise of neo-conservative Reganism and Thatcherism, in the late 70s through early 80s: Here with the Bill Bennett, Social Credit “Restraint Budgets” in BC, and Conservatives Mike Harris in Ontario and Ralph Klein in Alberta, all sounding the early warning death knell of “socialized capitalism”.

Which process has now twisted, turned, wound and evolved its way down to the present, and as Larry Gambone correctly stated, in effect, here in one of the comment threads on Freedom of Speech.ca, to where the new neo-conservative capitalist ideology, influencing virtually all the “accepted and sanctioned” parties of capitalism to one degree or another, is attempting with TILMA and other such legislation and agreements, to cut off any attempt to reform the neoconservative ideology and practice of all levels of goverrnment, or to go back to even postwar“socialized capitalism". And it is doing that, as in the case of TILMA, by formulating inter-provincial and international agreements and legislation restricting what policies and practises, be they trade, monetary, budgetary, or social policy that duly “elected” governments can even consider or pass into legislation and practise. What "the public" might want or choose, where it does not conform to the new neo-conservative capitalism practise, is to simply be incised out of the loop as a possible consideration.

Not content with the normal limitations of the capitalist class system on what passes for democracy, and such as effectively restricts control and manipulative influence over it into ruling class hands in any case, and as cuts out or limits working class and other social class strata participation, they want to “build in” further blacklists on economic, social and political policy reforms such as will be outside the pale of what can even be raised or considered, by those reformist tendencies as yet may emerge through even the limited “democratic processes”, despite the controlling “Big Money” media and other corporatist influences that effectively “own” it..

While there is a popular social pressure beginning to well up, demanding an opening up and extension of “democratic practises”, and calling for electoral and other reforms, the action that is actually occurring within the New Neo-conservative Capitalist World Order, and arising from its corporate ruling class, is moving in entirely the opposite direction, away from even its own limited past, relatively democratic order practise. All of which represents nothing more nor less than an attempt to prevent any practical possibility of reforms to the new capitalist order of things. There is to be no going back to socialized capitalism. Period. (Though they themselves want to take society back to a time before even it, or back to that future, via a kind of suit and tie "legislated" fascism.) Nor are we to be allowed especially to move forward, away from capitalism, into any other social and economic arrangements, or notions of democracy.

This reactionary vision of our future, which comes out of an insistence on ruling class privilege and prerogatives has to be resisted and fought against with the utmost ferocity and determination.

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