The Policies of the Polite Banker – Part 1
Canada’s Prime Minister seems to be an affable guy. Polite, well-educated and knowledgeable. He is also a central banker and that’s where the problem lies. What’s worse, he is a neoliberal capitalist banker. He is not a friend to the regular Canadians but represents exploitative industry and the obscenely rich. Corporations are run by people, and they belong to a class that few realize. Central Bankers are the enemy of the people. They are the root of the problems we are facing. At a time where people can’t afford the basic, essential necessities of life. Affordable housing is out of their reach because they are not affordable. The see the value of their dollar shrink in value. Few though see that their hard earned, taxpaying money is not spent on the public, but to shore up profits for these industries. The greatest recipient of that money is fossil fuels.
Central bankers drive economic policy. They have played a heavy role in creating a financial market built on nothing but sand. They supported the derivative market, an investment which most people do not understand. The derivative market is built on nothing. It is a construct of the financial world, that serves the rich, not the public. It’s a bet, based on the performance of an asset, but not the asset itself. Derivatives have no inherent value.
Of course, the financial sector saw how wildly successful the derivative market was. There had to be another way to make more money. The rich never have enough. They are in perpetual search for the golden financial grail. So, they made a new product which is the subprime market. That’s when you lend people money they can never repay. If the interest rate goes up, people lose their houses. The financial sector now owns that house. They also have made a great deal of money. Because people who ownership is out of reach, they pay a higher interest rate than anyone else.
So, this very big house imploded, people lost their homes and the very people who built that house of cards received bonuses that none of us could even imagine.
We learn about the Great Depression, a ten-year period where there was widespread suffering. One of four people were unemployed. People lost their savings, their homes and couldn’t afford food. Banks failed wiping out their savings. That is what the financial market almost caused. If it were not for one of the largest financial bailouts the second depression would have occurred. The financial bailout came at the expense of the public, not the people who caused it.
The investment bankers got bonused, while the public paid for it. It was too big to fail. The biggest player in the derivative and then the subprime market was and is Goldman Sachs. Mark Carney worked at Goldman Sachs for 13 years. It’s all a financial grift and like every other grift, at some point the grift crashes. That tells something about Mark Carney’s character.
Eventually Mark Carney became the head of the Bank of England. Central Banks have a lot of influence. They drive the economy, economic policy, interest rates, essentially anything to do with the economy. So, Mark Carney became the head of the Bank of England. Central Bankers are critical to things like derivatives, subprime market. They determine who can buy a house or a car. They influence everything.
Economic inequality in Canada large. A small percentage of Canada’s wealth rests in the hands of families and corporations, which are run by rich people. Canadians should have been very leery of bankers, especially central bankers. They control the interest rates, which in turn allows people to buy things they cannot afford.
That alone should have made it impossible for Mark Carney to win an election, but a threat from Donald Trump, an economy where people weren’t getting ahead and on top of it, he believed climate change was a big threat. The problem is that Mark Carney’s role in Climate Change is the financial end of things, not the part where real climate action takes place. His role at the UN was Special Envoy of Climate Change and Finance. It was the finance that defined his role
Mr. Carney had the anti-greenwash law weakened to the demand of the fossil fuel industry. LNG is far from clean or a low emission source of energy. It releases enormous amounts of methane, as well as a wide variety of other greenhouse gases.
It is not surprising that Mark Carney is expanding fossil fuel production, doubling it by 2030. He was a central banker who sees everything as monetary value, not in human beings. He is handing the fossil fuel industry billions of dollars in subsidies and that’s where the industry’s profits come from. It’s not a product that benefits an economy, but one that destroys one. Canadians are paying for infrastructure, exemptions from carbon taxes, given Capital Cost Allowance, guaranteed loans that the public will to repay they’re defaulted on. They invest very little. We pay for everything. It’s our money. Beyond hard cold cash, they’re given reduced electricity rates, exemptions from steel tariffs, reduced corporate tax and PST. The mere act of declaring it to be a major project in the interest of national interest is a subside too. The affordability factor isn’t from a downturn in the market, it’s because they use our money to prop up an unsustainable system.
Canada loses half of its annual GDP growth to climate change. Climate change is devastating the Canadian landscape. The insurance industry is paying out an alarming number of claims. In BC, the insurance industry has raised rates, denied coverage in high-risk will fire/storm areas and reduced coverage. No insurance, no mortgage. It’s as simple as that. Mark Carney is propping an industry that is completely unsustainable. It is ensuring our children and grandchildren have a horrific future. We are already experiencing climate events that not too long ago were not so long ago imaginable. People are dying. In 2021, 619 people residing in and around Vancouver due to extreme heat died in the span of a week. In Europe, in 85 cities, 24,400 Europeans died in a three-month period of time. These number will grow with time. Climate change is accelerating.
The economy won’t save us. We will see an increase in environmental refugees. We are flooding the moat and pulling up the drawbridge. We might as well post a sign that says No Immigrants or Asylum Seekers. The Inn is Closed,
Almost all western countries are passing anti-immigrant legislation. Canada, after committing genocide on the indigenous population, was built on the backs of immigrants. Multiculturalism has been Canada’s official policy since October 9, 1971. Our immigration policy is not like the United States’ truly a cookie cutter policy of immigration, where an immigrant has to shred its cultural practices in order to join the club.
Pierre Elliott Trudea defined the character of the nation. In 1971, he told the House of Commons, “here are few policies potentially more disastrous for Canada than to tell all Canadians that they must be alike and expanded by adding “Canada is not a melting pot in which the individuality of each element is destroyed in order to produce a new and totally different element. It is rather, a garden, into which have been transplanted the heartiest and brightest flowers from many lands.”
Our social and economic construct is being dismantled. Regardless of what Mark Carney says about distancing our nation from the United States, it is far from true. We are involving ourselves in a global arms race through military expansion. Our increasingly growing participation in NATO’s agenda makes us less safe, not more. NATO is not bringing democracy on an olive branch. It is a war machine at the bequest of the arms defence industry, an industry that serves the American agenda, not ours.
The grift is up and the governments, both provincial and federal, know this. They know very well that climate change will destroy our society and our physical world. This is the part of the play where the unsuspecting people are left with nothing. We are those people. This is the last chance the public has to stop this. We need a French Revolution. Does anyone really believe in the grift? Politeness, implied respect won’t. A capitalist only has one interest, which is to maximize profit through the private ownership and control of capital assets.
As Che Guevara, a true revolutionary once said, ““At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” Changing the world, ending suffering, educating the masses is truly what revolution is built on. It’s time for us to revolt.