Topic
The SPP is dead. Good. That helps reduce dependence on a downbound US.
Logo for Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America: Never mind.
Biggest voter issue off media's radar? Canada's stealthy 'integration' with US.
It all links up. Proof? Play the video.
'Deep integration' comes out of shadows.
The SPP is dead. Let's keep it that way.
With virtually no fanfare or media analysis, one of the most transformative agreements ever signed by Canada and the U.S. (and Mexico) is officially dead. The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), the formal expression of a corporate lobbying campaign called deep integration, is no more. Its official U.S. government website declared last month: "The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) is no longer an active initiative... There will not be any updates to this site." (It's been edited since to be a little less brutal).
We should celebrate. It seems the economic crisis had a silver lining.
The SPP met a fate similar to the ill-fated MAI back in 1998: death by secrecy and hubris. Terrified of another public battle a la "free trade" its proponents knew they would lose, the Masters of the Universe chose not only secrecy but an exclusively executive agreement in overt partnership with a super elite, corporate committee of 30 CEOs from the three countries, called the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC).
Almost as important as the SPP's demise, the NACC has been left cooling its heels. It was not even invited to the August trilateral summit in Guadalajara, where the SSP would normally have been discussed. According to David Ganong, a Canadian member of the NACC, "Whether the [North American Competitiveness Council] will be allowed to meet with the national leaders in 2010 remains unclear."
That's an incredible humbling for a group that is used to dictating policy to politicians.
SPP proponents virtually never talked about it, leaving the field open to relentless critics to the point that even capitalist advice columnist John Ibbitson at the Globe and Mail got disgusted with the lack of transparency, declaring, "If you're going to negotiate freer trade sing it from the rooftops. Keep the media informed. Make it a Big Deal."
Return of the dead?
Some on the left are so accustomed to losing that they make the claim the SPP will just re-emerge with another name. While some of the nastier initiatives are still in place, like energy "integration" and common regulations, a zip-locked North America is off the agenda. Now we have a weak version called the PPA -- the Pathways to Prosperity in the Americas.
Launched by Bush last December and being expanded by Obama, the PPA is a neoliberal fantasy about revising the FTAA, the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Sorry, guys, it's never going to happen because the U.S. has already lost the largest economies in South America to another agenda.
The PPA is a stalking horse for a weakened U.S. empire trying to reassert itself in its own backyard. The new version of the Canadian government carrying the bully's coat is renewed Canadian "interest" in Latin America -- the empire's junior partner helping out in the hope that Uncle Sam will throw it a bone.
The SPP was the ultimate expression of Bay Street's hare-brained determination to put all of Canada's economic eggs in one basket -- or in this instance, basket case: the U.S. economy. Barack Obama's administration has apparently figured out that globalization is critically wounded if not dead and wants to retrench into the safety of protectionism and its old sphere of influence.
How trade liberalization crippled Canada's economy
The demise of the SPP should provide Canada with an opportunity to have a serious debate about our economic future. One of the consequences of "free trade" and the pursuit of the SPP was that Canadian governments effectively abandoned the domestic economy as a driver and reduced all economic development policy to a single objective: increased trade with the U.S.
No one imagined that the whole world trading system could suffer such a catastrophic decline. But it did, and now the once-robust, high-wage Canadian domestic economy isn't there to cushion the blow.
In the period immediately following the signing of the 1989 Free Trade Agreement with the U.S., federal governments of both stripes began an intensive program of structural adjustment. The program was sold as the creation of a level playing field with the U.S. so that Canadian companies could compete. But we savaged the domestic economy for nothing. Industry Canada reported that 92 per cent of the increase in trade with the U.S. was due to our low currency and the U.S. economic boom.
Waged and salaried employees got hammered in this nasty race to the bottom. One of the results was the shrinking of the middle class and the total stagnation of disposable income. This was largely the result of the policy of "labour flexibility" -- a euphemism for driving down both the cost and the bargaining power of labour.
Liberal finance minister Paul Martin slashed unemployment insurance benefits, and he repealed the Canada Assistance Plan, freeing the provinces to gut their welfare programs. His radical low inflation policy deliberately kept unemployment at high levels (8-9 per cent) for most of the 1990s -- essentially creating a recession to emasculate labour. This crude strategy for driving down wages was so successful that Canada ended up with the second highest percentage of low wage jobs (after the U.S.) in the OECD.
This was an unprecedented assault on Canadian living standards and workers' safety nets. The middle class lost enormous ground in terms of real income, and lower income Canadians fared even worse. Between 1980 and 2005, the increase in yearly median income, in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars, amounted to a paltry $51. The amount of wealth and income lost was counted in the scores of billions of dollars; government tax revenue also took a huge hit.
The middle class did what you would expect: they went into more and more debt to maintain their lifestyle. The savings rate plummeted to near zero. And now that the economy desperately needs a strong domestic sector to counter the collapse of trade, we have a terminally indebted population, living from paycheck to paycheck, afraid to spend the money they do have because the safety net is shredded and there are precious few new jobs to replace those lost forever.
But the Canadian corporate elite, led for 30 years by Tom d'Aquino's Canadian Council of Corporate Executives (CCCE), has learned absolutely nothing. It is holding on for dear life to the "promise" of the SPP, says d'Acquino, whether "it's called SPP or it's given a new name, which I predict will be the case." Bay Street is still committed to the path of least resistance -- i.e. least risk -- and yearns for "open access" to the U.S. market.
But the U.S. economy will never recover from its current economic catastrophe. It has a gargantuan public debt and a huge balance of payments deficit. Consumer debt is equally enormous. The trillions pumped into the economy will eventually destroy the dollar even if it doesn't lead to hyper-inflation. The U.S. recklessly de-industrialized, assuming that globalization would continue for ever, and lost millions of its best paying jobs. They will never come back. The U.S. dollar is doomed as a global currency. And it's headed for another bubble as Wall Street spends millions lobbying to stop financial re-regulation.
Fully 50 per cent of the economic growth in the world since 2007 has taken place in the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Yet Bay Street is still blindly tying their future, and our own, almost exclusively to a fragile and sick U.S. economy.
But we need and deserve something better. Bay Street has been dictating economic policy to Ottawa for 25 years. They had their chance and failed. Now it's Main Street's turn. ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
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OilbertaRedTory
3 years ago
Bay Street's Chagrin
Will Neo-liberals or true Tories support a new National Policy ?
http://tiny.cc/natpol
Russ-Johnson
3 years ago
d'Aquino
By the end of next month Thomas Paul d'Aquino will have retired, and he will have been replaced by John Manley. It seems fair to say that John Manley would not have been chosen for the job unless the CCCE knew that it was going to need to shift its approach in relation to its level of transparency in its activites, at least to an extent. More likely, they knew that the days of working from the shadows are no longer possibe, based on the fact that the internet is raising awareness of their existence on an unprecedented scale.
In other words, the highly organized stucture of Corporate Canada/the Business Community/ Big Business...whatever you want to call them, is going mainstream, and they know it. It is a very strange fact of the Canadian reality that the heavyweight companies within our borders have been members of one 150 member organization, with a 8 member executive committee, a 32 member board of directors, and some 40-50 members of what is called the "Entrepeneurs Circle," since 1976, and fewer than 10 in a thousand Canadians even know it is going on...Strange indeed.
Since 2004, as an activist out of Montreal, I have hours of phone and personal exchnages with Ross Laver, the VP of Policy and Communications for the CCCE. I have come to feel sorry for the guy, because he is a smart man, who is forced to try to explain away the impossible using empty spin and rhetoric, and it just ends up descending into a great big insult to everyones intelligence. Harper has been completely surrounded by the 2003-4 CCCE executive committee that launched the SPP, then known as the North American Security and Prosperity Initiative, from the start.
Very importantly, this includes the ever so democratically challenged David Emerson. What David Emerson did to our democracy MUST be revisited, and the fact that he was part of the CCCE's SPP campaign when he flipped a day after the election is not something that can go without punishment. It MUST be challenged.
It is time for a grasroots look at what took place, and that includes the TYEE. Mr. Dobbin, men , and now women, have died for our democratic rights, and it is the rsponsibilty of journalists to step up, look these CCCE folks in the eye, and deal with what they have done.
Please get started...
Russ Johnson, Montreal
doggone
3 years ago
this article makes sense
One of the few (very few) things I have read lately that do that.
It is somewhat reassuring to read that the skeemers
had to take one step back but I do not trust them to bow out gracefully
Fiat lux
3 years ago
It has been quite obvious
It has been quite obvious for those of us who have been involved in the fight against the "free trade", "deep integration" etc. rackets from the beginning, that they have been and are nothing less, than brutal colonizations and enslavement under a corporate dictatorship using imaginary capital for weapons.
Canada should get the hell out from under the curse of the WTO, NAFTA etc. fraudulent rackets, all designed to ruin democratic decision making powers.
There's no such thing as "globalization", except under a brutal, worldwide dictatorship.
The "globalized, competitive economic environment" inflated our living costs by over 1,000 % and prices are still going up every day , because all forms of competition increase costs and wear out and destroy the participants.
Ed Deak.
Jeffrey J.
3 years ago
Celebrate? Hell yeah
Citizens worked very hard to expose the SPP as the secret, anti-democratic agenda that it was. Without the tireless effort from groups and organization across Canada (Murray Dobbin, Council of Canadian, CCPA, rabble.ca, Maude Barlow, etc) it is nearly certain the SPP would be law today.
Congratulations to every Canadian who helped expose and stop this creepy plan.
Recognition of progress for social activists is very, very important. Positive reinforcement (and recognition of success) is as powerful as negative reinforcement.
Monopoly capitalism 'reinforces' its managers with money. While in a limited way this is 'effective' for business, for most of us, it's too toxic and leads to chauvinsm, misongy and other side effects.
For activists, people need to regularly appreciate the role they are playing in a free (sort of) and democratic society. We are free to speak out, to organize, to criticize, and to work against monopoly corporate plans for Canada's future. In many other countries this is unlawful. And every now and then, success occurs. Like now, when the SPP mercifully dropped off the face of the earth.
Great article.
Barryeng
3 years ago
Wether you buy all the
Wether you buy all the conspiracy theories or not is beside the point. In provable fact, our standard of living has been decreasing since Mulroney foisted the Free Trade Agreement on us. Canadians threw him out of office for this among other crimes, but the ruling group(not the politicians) have just gone out and found other patsies to spout their globalization policies. The end result is that the rich get richer and the poor get poor. The difference is that there are fewer rich, and more poorer all the time.
Maybe its time we went after the disease instead of the symptoms.
Dan the socialist
3 years ago
This is why I will never
This is why I will never ever vote Liberal or conservative. Neither party represents the people.
mikev
3 years ago
:-)
"all forms of competition increase costs and wear out and destroy the participants." -- Ed Deak
Cheers to you sir.
And good job Mr. Dobin.
siamdave
3 years ago
don't forget this elephant ...
- Murray's commentary is right on the money, as usual - but speaking of money, don't forget how central this is to every problem we have - we cannot even dream of being sovereign someday if 'our' money is privately controlled, for priivate profit - as it currently is. In terms of government being short of cash, and citizens having no savings anymore, this is much more important than the trade deals - we have, for instance, paid something like two trillion dollars in interest on government debt over the last 3 decades or so - because the national government is allowing private banks to create money, and then borrowing it from them, rather than creating that exact same money themselves, debt free. This really is the mother of all scams - and we are not digging ourselves out of any hole unless we get rid of this one first. More here - Global Financial Meltdown: Forces beyond our control, or the greatest scam ever?
http://www.rudemacedon.ca/greatest-sting-ever.html
BC Mary
3 years ago
I've been waiting a long time
... to hear somebody say:
all forms of competition increase costs and wear out and destroy the participants. [Quoted from Ed Deak, above.]
How could it be otherwise?
And yet we hear it spoken, written, trumpeted on all sides that "Competition lowers costs." How could that be true?
Thanks, Ed.
zalm
3 years ago
Golly I'd like y'all to be right...
'Specially Ed.
But as long as our system is set up the way that it is, with fiat money standing in for the representation of true value in our workplaces, this crisis and loss of FTAA and SPP is nothing more than a temporary setback. A little judicious expansion of the money supply M-3 (carefully kept under wraps by the US Fed and not so carefully by Canada, making us more prone to speculation) and we'll be right back where we started from, with rascals like Tom d'Aquino spouting Objectivist gibberish from Ayn Rand every week in the Financial Post, and Facile Mihlar at the Sun dredging up every obscurantist dirtbag he can find to represent the "money makes right" point of view.
Murray, I don't think you have any idea how easy it is for those rascals to seize power again, especially having held the vast majority of us poor working slobs in relative penury for so long, anaesthetized by our DVDs and 2-for-1 burger deals.
Paul Krugman in his rewrite of his excellent primer on greed and the money supply in the modern work The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 outlines several ways that the big boys had us over a barrel, and how they screwed up only when the whole lot of them go too greedy, expanding the money supply too fast with credit unsupported by actual value.
If you all can't think it can't happen again, you're all kidding yourselves. The only question is "in which market, and in which country will the bubble begin again?" Because it will come again.
And I'm not even quite sure what to do about it. Except ban the corporation as a form of ownership and property, not to mention personhood. And that won't stop it, but merely make those who do the damage a bit more accountable for their crimes. This need s a lot more careful thought.
Anybody?
alive
3 years ago
Radical measures needed
Hmmm ban the corporations?
Ban the idea of shareholders and stockmarkets is more like it!
That is what causes this craze where intelligent people brainstorm in order to create new products that nobody asked for.
A total ban on advertising would be a great stepforward!
We are deliberately wasting energy and materials for the sake of profits.
I have a ten year old stove and am unable to get parts for it, because it is considered too old to keep inventory for.
S'cuse me it is as new and except for one lousy part I am supposed to scrap it?
We need to rethink our way of life here people.
Moses
3 years ago
So what now?
We need to have greater democratic control over at least some sectors of our economy.
It is unlikely that this will happen with either the Conservatives or Liberals in power.
We should be working together to build other alternatives... http://canadiancitizensparty.ca
G West
3 years ago
zalm
I think you've basically hit the nail on the head.
I'd add one further problem - something that is a subtext to everything Ed writes.... the way we 'live' now makes us puppets in what's become the dumb show of modern 'industrial' capitalism whether we like it or not.
It isn't just the ipod/twitter/facebook/DVD culture that has unmanned society and made, after a fashion, victims of us all.
We've been collected into urban and/or suburban ghettoes - willing slaves to a supply chain for food, warmth, health care and shelter that is, almost completely, outside of our control and management.
Unlike Ed, who made a choice some decades ago to step out of the rat race, the rest of us have opted in. And opted in BIG TIME: We don't have a lot of 'real' choices anymore. I agree that grassroots organizing might 'seem' to make it possible to press for the kinds of changes we need to encourage relative to fiscal and corporate change, the brutal fact of the matter is that the system which imprisons us also keeps us alive.
Change is gonna hurt and people are going to die.
morechatter
3 years ago
He stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum
Or so Tom thought but that has all changed as the elite decide are fate with the mere intelligence of greedy men. There is a certainty about the entire crisis no matter what there just has to be something in it for them. Even if that means there is nothing left for anyone else. Its the name of the game, the laws of the land as nothing should get between a corporation and the CEO's profits not god or man or the law for that matter as its written into the law and out of the budget. No money for white color crime especially the type that may get governemnt officials in serious crime. Anyways law enforcement and government are on the same page so to speak, DELETE but you never get to read the really interesting stuff.
morechatter
3 years ago
Birds of a Bush
I remember playing that game with all the top investors at merril lynch after work and of course after a few rounds everyones perception became even more clouded. Not much has change only now the Birds in the Bush are Harper and Bush and really can Canada chance it? And free trade what free to come across the border and take advantage of Canadians now that America is into regulations. Can't chance that but Canada now anything goes and how frightening is that?
West End Bob
3 years ago
Maybe so . . . .
Hope you're right about this, Murray.
There are, however, opposing viewpoints, re: "the PPA is a neoliberal fantasy."
Such as this one . . . .
lynn
3 years ago
You say tomato......
This is a tenaciously greedy cancerous system
With a built in memory for our weak spots...
And an ability to morph and travel incognito.
Thus it comes with great risk of recurring malignancy.
Remission will only come with radical surgery.
And even then should be closely monitored at all times..
Maybe I've watched too many medical shows lately. ;-)
(Thanks for that link, West End Bob.
I think you're right - "different name, same game".)
I wonder what life was like before language?
Des
3 years ago
Competition
belongs on the sportsfield, not in the boardroom. But co-operation like that found in the SPP or the PPA is odious because it is manipulative and is not intended to be of benefit to all persons.
The Magna Carta was formulated to be of benefit to some (the Nobility) vs. the one (the King) but it is the document that inspired the many (the Commoners) to eventually take political power for themselves.
It will require political will - not commercial convenience - to keep the Commoners as "first among equals" and maintain corporate power as servant instead of master in the natural order of things.
We are losing - or maybe already have lost - that political will when electors relinquish their right (and privilege) to exercise their franchise.
ME2
3 years ago
Thanks Murray
Well, after having already slagged Dobbin on another thread, I feel somewhat sheepish in having to admit that I'm impressed by his contribution above.
And thanks to West End Bob too for that link. Geez, these guys aren't going to give up easily, are they?
Given the hardship the failure of the American Empire would wreak upon the average US citizen, it seems meanspirited to wish that on them. However, they did vote those crooks in and profited from their previous doings.
Come to think of it, we voted ours in too, and if they succeed in bringing us down with the Yanks, we deserve no better.