Younger Canadians will not remember David Lewis as the leader of the New Democratic Party from 1971 to 1975, but he made a critical contribution to the political lexicon of our country when he coined the term “corporate welfare bums” and ran a federal election campaign on that theme. It is a term that was very pertinent then and has even greater pertinence today, as today these same bums have become even more pervasive and dangerously parasitic.
If we want to see an example of what happens when corporate welfarism gets out of control all we have to do is look to our Southern neighbor. In what has been termed a “slow motion coup d’etat” we see a country where the legislatures; the Congress and the Senate have abdicated their power to Wall Street, The Pentagon and corporate lobbyists. While the American presidency is vaunted as the most powerful political office on earth, it is more accurately hostage to a truculent and well entrenched status quo. The president may have an agenda for change but political dysfunction reigns supreme. Grand intentions are reduced to rhetoric, and real change becomes as elusive as a frosty Friday in Hell. For a country so bent on exporting its own democratic values around the world, its own is on the verge of collapse. It is a country where hope yields to despair all too quickly, and where the population has for the most part failed to address the real enemy in all its hydra-headed manifestations. But one enemy of the public good all too conspicuous is the stranglehold corporate power has on the levers of government. The USA of today becomes a case study in how corporatism can undermine a democracy and reduce it to an oligarchy.
Since Lewis’ time we have seen the emergence of the neo- liberal free market economy. Big business, namely the corporate sector, cried out that free enterprise had to be truly free, free from regulation, free from accountability, and free from government interference. This free market economy would be self-regulating!
Indeed, part of their message was that government was the big bad wolf. Denigrating the role of government as regulator, the voice of moderation and the custodian of democratic values became a favorite past time of corporate bum boys and ultra-right think tanks. Government, so easily seduced by these nabobs of nullity, decided to abdicate their constitutional and democratic obligations, betray the public good, and become courtesans to corporatism.
Big business got its way. Government stood back and allowed the deregulated, privatized neo-liberal market driven economy free rein and we have been rewarded with the biggest financial calamity in the history of the world. The US, supposedly the world’s most powerful economy, is bankrupt. Thanks to the Wall Street bailout and the consequent economic ruptures it will be running multi-trillion dollar deficits for the next decade. We are led to believe sub-prime mortgages caused the Wall Street collapse, when the real culprit was a failure to regulate. Regulations like the Glass–SteagallAct were repealed and those left in place were not enforced. Now finance ministers of the West are at loggerheads as to how to put Humpty Dumpty back on the wall and hope he doesn’t have yet another great fall.
As big business denigrated government it also attacked what it saw as the excessive costs of the social welfare state. Now we see in all its blazing glory the revelation that the social welfare state was then and still is a bargain compared to the wanton profligacy and corruption of the corporate welfare state.
With the profound economic downturn reverberating through societies, governments are now going to attempt to cut social spending with the excuse that hard times require belt tightening. But what is manifest now is that any belt-tightening has to be at corporate expense rather than public expense. The public good has been ravaged by corporate greed and irresponsibility (with government complicity) and massive reparations are due.
It is a brutal irony that a country like the US which champions capitalism in its purest form, and scorns anything that resembles “dreaded socialism” is so tolerant of its well entrenched and shamelessly parasitic corporate welfarism. Americans are in a war to save their country yet they have failed to address the enemies within who are undermining their constitution, their democracy (the remnants there of) and their faltering economy.
Where Americans lead we follow. Corporate welfarism is in a more acute phase in the US but we are not far behind. Where lobbying is a billion dollar business in Washington we are blessed with the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. The Council‘s membership is the top 150 Canadian Corporations. They are ever present in the halls of government and like to see themselves as an unelected “shadow cabinet.”
In a June 2nd, 2004 speech Stephen Harper as aspiring prime minister condemned corporate welfarism:
“It was an NDP leader, David Lewis, who coined the term corporate welfare bums in 1972. Unfortunately, in the past 30 years, too many corporations have been drawn into this trap by the available plethora of government loans, grants, and subsidies."
Harper cited then Prime Minister Paul Martin’s, Canada Steamship Lines, in receipt of 160 million in loans and grants, as one of the “worst offenders.”
In Canada, as in the United States, corporate welfarism is a bipartisan activity. Liberals and Conservatives, Democrats and Republicans when granted the electoral mandate to do so pander to the corporate needs. It has become an accepted norm. Politicians elected to exercise the public and national good become agents of corporatism, where, especially in the US, wealth is privatized and debt socialized- never more dramatically than the ‘08 Wall Street bailout.
It was the same Stephen Harper who attempted to reverse legislation that subsidizes all political parties with public money so that they do not have to accept corporate donations. Fortunately, the Canadian electorate has held Harper to successive minority governments. Should he ever gain a majority with his imported Republican style conservatism we would see the final betrayal. One of the afflictions of the US system is that legislators from the president down are deeply indentured to corporate funding. Similar legislation in the US could go a long way to encouraging some political integrity.
The Numbers speak for Lewis
In 2007 Calgary political scientist Mark Milke wrote the Fraser Institute report, Corporate Welfare: A $144 billion addiction. In a 2008 update the following statistics were included:
• Between 1994 and 2006, the last year for which statistics are
available, Canada’s federal, provincial, and local governments
spent $182.4 billion on subsidies to business
• In 2006 alone, Canada’s federal, provincial, and local
governments spent $19.3 billion on corporate welfare, almost
double the 1995 figure of $10.3 billion
• The cost to each taxpayer who paid income tax in 2006 was
$1,291, which was 38% higher than the 1995 figure of $934
• Over 12 years, the total cost per tax filer who paid tax in every
year amounted to $13,639 per person (in 2008 dollars)
• Between 1994 and 2006, provincial governments spent $98.5
billion on corporate welfare. The federal government spent
$61.4 billion and municipal governments spent $22.5 billion
• Quebec disbursed the highest amount of public money to
corporations: over $5.4 billion in 2006. Ontario followed at
$2.4 billion, then Alberta at almost $1.5 billion, then British
Columbia at just under $950 million
• Since 2004, the federal and Ontario governments have made
available $752 million to Canada’s automakers, mostly in the
forms of grants.
When governments cry out that there is no money for social spending it has merely been diverted to corporate welfarism. When we hear the clarion call for deregulation and privatization it is in reality an expansion of corporate welfarism. Canadians and Americans alike are huge shareholders in corporate welfarism with no equity and no dividends forthcoming. War has been corporatized and the plethora of so called free trade agreements are really just corporate entitlements.
When Lewis coined the term he established an important benchmark to measure a growing and ever more pervasive corporate welfarism that reduces citizen and taxpayer from stakeholder to spectator; and democracy from reality to illusion.
Robert Billyard 2010 ©
Stumble It!
Harper cited then Prime Minister Paul Martin's, Canada Steamship Lines, in receipt of 160 million in loans and grants, as one of the "worst offenders."
http://www.windsorstar.com/homes/bail+a ... id=1105782
Do as I say, and not as I do? Or is it a case of 'MY subsidies are more meaningful than YOUR subsidies'?