Thanks a Trillion

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it,”  said Leo Tolstoy in his A Confession.  Americans got a sobering and slightly angering dose of that reality early last week when a new economic report revealed that the rich of that country had gained $5.6 trillion during the economic recovery, while the rest of the people lost some $669 billion.  Okay, that’s some difference, but one of the great ironies of that discovery is that average people have gone along with it (the “million” Tolstoy was speaking of).

Breaking the numbers down a bit doesn’t make us feel any better.  From 2009 to 2011, the richest eight million families (the top 7%) saw their wealth rise from $1.7 million to $2.5 million each.  The remainder of American families, some 111 million of them, suffered a decline of $6,000 each.  You can read the report here.Consider what it means in broad terms.  While the supposed recovery is going on, almost its entire wealth has been going to the wealthy.  We more or less know this already.  We have heard repeatedly how the economy is rebounding and things are looking up.  But for who exactly?  Hardly anyone I know feels any change at all.  Unemployment remains at stubbornly high levels and people continue to feel the financial squeeze.  During a coffee with someone I had just met last week, she read in the newspaper of one article asking why, since we’re in good economic shape, the Prime Minister’s poll numbers continue to slide?  “Come on,” she blurted, throwing the paper on the next table, “nobody I know thinks thing are good.”  And she was a lawyer.Canadian economist Armine Yalnizyan has been asking citizens north of the border if wealth has become too powerful in Canada.  In a sage observation she notes,Over the course of the past generation, the wealthy have become a lot more wealthy and a lot more powerful in Canada and around the world.  The problem is not that the wealthy are too powerful.  The problem is that, with rare exception, as their power has increased, it has not been matched by an increase in their sense of responsibility. On the contrary, they have been using their power for decades to reduce their responsibilities.I know Armine.  She used to come and speak to our all-party committee of MPs and was relentless in her logic - often to the great frustration of government members.  The way she sees it, the wealthy have been voicing the same things for years and using their influence to sway government at all levels.  Taxes are too high, especially the corporate kind.  A big and interventionist government is bad, just as labour organizations are holding back innovation and investment.We all know this is happening and have believed it for years.  We don’t like it and complain about it.  But in our belief that we can’t change it, we play right into the hands of those with financial resources and we refuse to vote in increasing numbers - a phenomenon that merely convinces the elites to press in ever-increasing numbers to speed up legislation to their benefit.They read blogs like this (if they do at all), or speeches like Armine’s, and blow them off because people don’t care enough to press for change - they know people won’t complain enough to improve their own condition.Just to be clear, though, let’s think about what all this means.  Some people are making trillions of dollars, but they can’t be content with such gains.  In order to acquire more, they press governments to relax regulations, kill off unions, hold off on aggressive environmental reform, let charity take care of the homeless, permit the gap between rich and poor to continue increasing, and refuse to close that gap between what men and women make in employment.  In other words, they want their cake but wish to deprive us of ours.This gets us back to the “responsibility” thing.  Do they honestly wish that average Canadians continue seeing declines in their economic empowerment?  Have they no concern for the growth in the number of citizens falling increasingly below the poverty line?  Before we answer that multinational companies don’t really have any allegiance to any particular country, let’s remember Yalnizyan’s research that shows that only 20,000 of this nation’s 2.5 million businesses are multinational.  So, the vast majority of our companies are Canadian and that should count for something.  Sadly, however, it accounts for increasingly little.As citizens, we are not in the process of working with our elected representatives and the private sector to develop an equitable financial system.  We actually had that, and it worked for over a century, with certain flaws.  The difficulty we face is that this powerful and historic economic system, with all the cumulative and weight behind it, has fallen into a state of imbalance.  And as long as the democratic system refused to address that balance Canada will be on the road to decline.“Wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual and the state,” Socrates wrote. This country once build a largely equitable and prosperous nation on such a practice.  It now awaits for an intrepid party and engaged citizenry to rescue capitalism from itself.