Too many people buying into the corporate version

Too many people buying into the corporate version

Written by Mark Sandilands

Tuesday, 08 June 2010

Re: “Writer failed to recognize economic realities” (Herald, May 26). In my May 12 letter, I described two narratives to the royalty fiasco. One is the corporate narrative: the government jacked up the royalties too high and drove out the oil industry; the non-corporate narrative says even this feeble attempt to increase royalties angered the oil companies and they decided to teach the government a lesson. Clearly Mr. Wilson has bought the corporate, oil industry version. He shows thinking that is ages old, from at least the time of feudal lords and serfs through the beginnings of industrialization to now. It’s always the same message: we must trust big corporations (and now their right-wing political parties) to bring us economic prosperity. Any attempt to take away the lords’ or owners’ privileges will only result in economic ruin for the common folk. We’re now hearing the corporate narrative from the same industry that is telling us the “accident” in the Gulf of Mexico was not BP’s fault, when evidence appears daily of malfeasance by BP in this dangerous kind of drilling. This kind of thinking has led to right-wing governments in Alberta for almost its entire history. Mr. Wilson mentions the NDP government in B.C. in the ’90s, conveniently overlooking the Asian meltdown that happened during its term of office. If we want to consider governments in neighbouring provinces, how about Grant Devine’s Conservatives in Saskatchewan in the 1980s? That was definitely a “lost decade”! (At least six of Devine’s cabinet ministers were subsequently convicted of fraud, by the way.) It took the social democratic government of Roy Romanow to balance Saskatchewan’s books, a year ahead of Alberta. Manitobans also seem happy to elect NDP governments who’ve had a string of balanced budgets. Indeed, data from the federal finance department shows NDP governments consistently have the best track record for the past 25 years for balancing their books. Further evidence of Conservative collusion with corporations can be seen in the Harper Conservatives’ Bill C-27, which would require that only producers delivering at least 40 tonnes of grain can vote in Canadian Wheat Board elections. Also note Conservative tinkering with the percentage of Canadian sugar in goods, which will negatively affect local sugar beet growers. When common folk begin to understand that Conservative governments generally don’t have their interests in mind, perhaps we will elect different governments. Mark Sandilands Lethbridge

p.s. [not included in Herald letter due to lack of space].  I'm reminded of a couple of books I've read recently.  One is The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, discussed here  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged_Trousered_Philanthropists  and available as a free e-book: (see  the bottom of the page of the Wikipedia article for URLs).  The other is The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, discussed here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle and also available for a frree e-book (again see the bottom of the Wikipedia article for links).