The Great Reversal

So, Barack Obama caved in to the wealthy. He likely had to if he hoped to win re-election, but still his recent decision has left a bitter taste in many mouths. By going back to the Bush tax cut era, where the wealthy just got a whole lot richer, the President has set in motion a series of events that will likely keep America mired on the brink of financial ruin for a decade or more to come.What's with this modern era? As gaps between rich and poor grow ever wider, the relentless pressure to provide even more breaks for the wealthy just seems to pick up steam. In a word, in most of the industrialized world things have become "intractable." The rationale is always the same: give tax cuts to the wealthy corporations and they will invest it back into the system, creating new jobs and more productivity. The problem is, it doesn't happen that way anymore, and hasn't for decades. After going through our greatest economic challenge since the Great Depression, we have now got ourselves into the situation where we look to rich corporations to save us even as we watch the middle-class deteriorate because they can no longer get their equitable piece of the pie.Besides, I worry when we merely talk about the middle class. There are people who come to the food bank in London, or any other across the country for that matter, who wouldn't mind paying taxes, if they only earned enough. Our aboriginal people, those on disability, part-time workers - these and many other classifications are having trouble purchasing food or paying the rent. While the gap between the rich and the middle class grows ever wider, the significant chasm between the wealthy and the poor seems impossible to shrink.We are now being told by the Parliamentary Budget Officer and others that stimulus funds didn't create the number of jobs predicted. Food bank numbers are climbing, as are those who have just given up on looking for work altogether because they have lost hope. For some reason, we have placed ourselves in the situation where we are being asked to accept some $6 billion in corporate tax cuts while all this is going on. The government bails out car manufacturers and other corporations but fails to protect pensions. Soon enough it will force more restraint on the unemployed. Economists who work for banks are telling us to celebrate because we're not as bad off as other countries. But how can we rejoice when we all know someone who can't get a job?As with the 1980s, we have entered an era where socialism now works for the rich corporations while the rest of us are told to be content with the volatile rigors of capitalism. It was supposed to be the other way around. Canada is perilously short of a growth strategy. The jobs of tomorrow are expected to be found in the green economy, but we've just finished picking up a number of embarrassing "fossil" awards at the Cancun environmental summit this week. In other words, we don't have a plan. We're going to wing it and hope that the solvency and stability of our banking system will somehow produce results. It's not to be.Again, an American president has steered toward another compromise to assuage the rich and the corporations. The Bush tax cuts, which so imperiled the economy and brought on the crisis in the first place, will now be extended. In Canada, further tax cuts for the corporations are planned. And while families struggle to pay their mortgages, students borrow more to attend university, pensioners come up short on their monthly income, more and more seniors frequent food banks, and long-term care becomes a distant dream, we are borrowing over $160 billion dollars on our children's future in order to build prisons even when the crime rate is declining, and purchasing remarkably expensive fighter jets when our future is in peacebuilding, Our tax dollars aren't going towards what average people would ask. Our money is being used to enrich those that have already left us in the dust. The Great Reversal is on, and it isn't pretty.