January 2009 marks the 10th year Fightback’s ideas have been present in the Canadian labour movement. Back in 1999 a small group of young activists, largely members of the NDP youth in Vancouver and Edmonton, launched the paper L’Humanité to defend Marxist ideas and promote working class unity (especially between Anglophone and Francophone workers – hence the name). Since then we have gone from strength to strength. To resonate better with workers in struggle we changed the name to Fightback, which now has a regular readership from Victoria, to Calgary, from Toronto to Montreal and Halifax. To commemorate our 10th anniversary, we are revisiting a subject that was addressed in our very first issue.
In an article titled “Kings of Capital,” we exposed the actions of the capitalist club, the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI). Since the time the article was first written, the BCNI has changed its name to the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE). In the last 10 years, the class convictions of the CCCE have remained just as firm as those of Fightback. To help us continue fighting against corporate power for another decade, we encourage everybody to get a subscription to Fightback. 10 years from now, we hope to be celebrating the nationalization of the members of the CCCE.
To shed some light on what the CCCE is, here are some basic facts. The CCCE is comprised of CEOs from the top 150 corporations in Canada and since 1999 has grown from a combined $1.9 trillion in assets to $3.5 trillion today. According to their website, they also “have annual revenues in excess of C$800 billion and account for a significant majority of Canada’s private sector investment, exports, research and development, and training.” Now what does this group do? According to their website, www.ceocouncil.ca: “Founded in 1976, the CCCE is an association of business leaders committed to the shaping of sound public policy in Canada, North America and the world.”
So what happens when a group that controls the majority of the economy wants to shape political policy? You guessed it! This small group of the wealthiest corporate CEOs in Canada has spearheaded the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Security and Prosperity Partnership, slashing corporate taxes and limiting government spending on anything which benefits the working class.
Coincidentally, every privatization, every cut to health care, every increase in tuition fees and every military operation that past Liberal and Conservative governments have undertaken were all part of what the CCCE is fighting for. But you don’t have to take our word for it, just let CCCE president, Thomas D’Aquino speak for himself: “All the governments, all the major parties…have adopted the agendas we’ve been fighting for in the past two decades…the business community now has the most power over public policy since 1900.”
There you have it! This is what the great “democracy” that we all know amounts to. This is the true meaning behind all the hollow propaganda about “freedom” and “democracy.” It is the freedom to be a slave to the fine people of the CCCE, the freedom to make them hundreds of billions and barely scrape by. It is the democracy to rubber-stamp their proposals (usually the only ones proposed) every 4 years and to go back to work so they can get on with lording over us.
These “civilized” leaders prostrate themselves before the church of the “free market.” They oppose any sort of state intervention in the economy, any regulation of their ability to make profit, and ultimately argue that any initiative which seeks to ameliorate the conditions of the oppressed is bad because it is against the “free-market.” Any social program, welfare, health care or state run enterprise is bad because they are all publicly funded from corporate taxes.
However, with the world financial crisis exposing the failure of free market capitalism, they are starting to change their tune. What it comes down to is that they support the free market as long as it makes them cash. Just like their brothers and sisters in the US financial banking elite, they will cry and beg the state for intervention on their behalf to give them billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to save themselves when the time comes. In other words, they will demand that the government gut our social services and privatize anything they can get away with in order to “stimulate the economy.”
This is what d’Aquino means when he says, “Our governments have a responsibility to act, but any descent into deficit must last no longer than the economic downturn, Canadians learned from bitter experience that entrenched deficits are a recipe for years of rising taxes and brutal cuts in public spending. We must not go down that road again.”
So what Mr. D’Aquino is saying is that the government should go into debt to save their asses, but that after we bail them out we must then ‘correct’ the deficit by gutting our social services! How convenient! This is what is known as socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. Rather than bailing out the top 150 corporations at public expense, we should nationalize them under the control of the working class. They have shown that their system does not work, so it is time for the workers to take over the commanding heights of the economy and run them for the good of all.
If only our leaders were as class conscious as the leaders of the bourgeoisie! Sadly, what we have is utter confusion and lack of leadership in most cases and even absolute spineless betrayal. At the current moment what is needed more than ever is leadership that is as class conscious and as stern as the CCCE. We need leaders who can provide bold leadership within our organizations, within the unions, the NDP and Quebec Solidaire to provide real solutions, socialist solutions to the current economic crisis. Join Fightback in our fight to build that leadership here in Canada.
