Canada: Strong and Free, or Transnational Oligarchy?

Canadian politicians controlled by the transnational oligarchy?

by Mark Taliano - AHT

March 31, 2016

Canada is being colonized by a Washington-led, transnational oligarchy. As with any colony, we are losing our political and economic self-determination and sovereignty. We are increasingly a cog in an imperial apparatus of top down control and exploitation, and our economy is being re-structured to serve transnational oligarch interests. Wealth and power is increasingly concentrated upwards into the criminal hands of domestic and foreign oligarch classes.

We are being driven like cattle by a “full spectrum” apparatus of domination and control.

Synthetic terror events are engineering our consent to impoverishment, police state oppression, and criminal, genocidal foreign policy decisions. We are supporting and inciting terrorism when we sell military armaments to Wahabbi Saudi Arabia. We are committing war crimes when we support and enable the neo-Nazi junta in the Ukraine, and when we support and enable ISIS in Syria. (Writer Sharmine Narwani decodes the Syrian crisis here.)

All of this passes beneath the radar of public awareness because the oligarch class has, increasingly, “full spectrum” control: Corporate mainstream messaging is increasingly an engineered façade of lies, distortions, and omissions that furthers a pre-ordained agenda of permanent, globalized war and poverty.

Transnational corporate sovereignty deals are an economic arm of the transnational ruling class. Agreements such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) entrench oligarchic control and supremacy over our political economy through Investor- State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses, mechanisms wherein supranational secret tribunals and appointed lawyers are the final adjudicators.

An article by David Korten, in Yes magazine, “A Trade Rule that Makes It Illegal to Favor Local Business? Newest Leak Shows TPP Would Do That And More,” identifies and explains the impacts of the TPP, should it be ratified, using these headings:

• Favouring local ownership is prohibited
• Corporations must be paid to stop polluting
• Three lawyers will decide who is right in secret tribunals
• Speculative money must remain free
• Corporate interests come before national ones

This predatory political economy creates poverty and disemployment in a myriad ways – the TPP alone is predicted to cost Canada 58,000 jobs -- as public dollars are funnelled to the transnational oligarchs through privatization schemes, de-regulated exploitation of national resources, reduced taxes, and military expenditures.

Instead of embracing P3 schemes, Canada should insist on (100%) publicly- funded hospitals and healthcare. In an article entitled “ 'Privatization' Is the Problem, Not the Solution,” the author demonstrates the wasteful squandering of public resources in the healthcare field alone:

• Ontario paid 75 per cent more to for-profit labs than it had to non-profit community labs over the previous 30 years, for the same tests.
• Public-private partnerships are 83 per cent costlier to finance than public projects.
• Canadians spend roughly half of what the private U.S. system spends per person and we get better coverage and outcomes.
• Studies comparing U.S. and Canadian outcomes for heart attacks, cancer, surgical procedures and chronic conditions show that Canada does at least as well, often better.
• A recent Canadian study found that expedited knee surgery in a for-profit clinic costs $3,222 compared to $959 in a public hospital (with worse return-to-work outcomes).

We are also being exploited by the financial sector. Instead of borrowing from private international and domestic institutions, and paying compound interest on government loans, Canada should be borrowing interest-free from its publicly-owned Bank of Canada – as it did until 1974 -- when the debt and deficit were miniscule compared to today. Murray Dobbins explains in “Liberate the Bank of Canada, Intrepid Think Tank Urges|Canadians have been fleeced for billions, but no traction in media for complex banking case,”that by 2012, Canadians had paid one trillion (CAN) dollars in interest to private banks.

What additional steps can we take to de-colonize this country from its transnational colonizers?

• First, we should reject the TPP agreement and any transnational agreement that is bundled with an Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clause.
• Second, we should (continue to) decode and reject the lies and distortions of the criminal warmongers and the military-industrial-media complex.
• Third, we need to establish an independent foreign policy that complies with the rule of international law.

Each of these steps would help us break free from the toxic shackles of globalized war and poverty that “benefits” only a miniscule oligarch class. The current neo-con misgovernance is creating and perpetuating catastrophes – such as the 911 wars -- instead of productively addressing catastrophes – such as catastrophic global warming. A global shift towards common sense and the common good is long overdue.