Revolutionary Liberation Gospel
Syzygy Revolutionary Liberation Gospel
Typical of corporatist media economic CTV is spin doctoring, the Canadian masses are collectively getting a lopsided view of an impending baby boomer retirement tsunami that threatens to implode the Canadian economy. According to repeated media reports, the baby boomer retirement generation will soon form a huge influx of those receiving pensions while there are less young workers as a tax base to support all the new pensioned retirees. According to the report, what was once a 6 to1 worker to retiree support ratio has shrunk to a mere 3 to 1. This means that instead of six workers' taxes supporting just one pensioner, it will soon be only three workers supporting one pensioner [1,2]. The unspoken math suggests the each worker is now going to have to pay twice as much tax to support all those senior citizens. We are reminded of the poor economy, the shrinking tax base, high unemployment and the need for austerity or making people work until they drop dead. What is left out of the whole picture is the increase of immigrant workers on temporary work visas or on a permanent basis as landed immigrants who themselves do not qualify for government pensions. Over the last few years, that ratio of immigrant worker to Canadian worker has also changed from about 8 to 1 down to 5 to 1; or from 16 % of the population to 20 %. These workers represent a new tax base as well as more loan clients to banks from student loans, car loans, mortgages and credit cards, all highly profitable for the banks due to interest charges and service fees. It also means more revenue from income taxes. While the domestic sector is shrinking, the immigrant sector is mushrooming built on cheaper, non-unionized, non-English and non-French labour. There is thus an influx of new money from work and these workers are paying into the income tax dept just as the domestic worker does. There is actually little or no shrinkage of incoming dollars, but not much of an expansion either in the face of increasing domestic unemployment.
We are witnessing propaganda for the upcoming implementation of home bred austerity and the message is clear. Either you keep working, or expect only half the pension rate of your predecessors, or nothing at all if the economy sours to the point where Canada defaults on its debt to the IMF. Based on the promotion of half truths, people are being sold to a life of hard labour until they drop dead from disease or exhaustion. Employers are going to have to get used to old workers dropping dead on the shop floor and falling into some machine and gumming up the works until their remains are cleared out by co-workers. But being the profit oriented sort, this is likely to be of little concern. We need only look at Asia, the new boom economy in an otherwise depressed world economy, where there are no safety or health standards to hamper profit. There are few unions and no environmental restrictions to block profit either. It's an exploiter's paradise and the regime in China seems to have no problem flirting and dancing with this kind of capitalism. Meanwhile, jobs everywhere else have evaporated with an admission of Washington DC of 14 million unemployed and 3.5 homeless in once the mightiest and richest industrial nation on the planet. Now it is increasingly a wasteland along with the domestic scene in Canada. But, the US does not have a vigorous immigrant work force like Canada to pump in more money [3,4] and that is where the two differ.
It is the immigrant labour force that has spared Canada the fate of other nations around the world. Though Canada cannot boast a mushrooming economy like China, it can say that none of its banks have failed, unique in all the nations on the planet bar none. Though the banks are in trouble, they have thus far managed to stave off the disasters that are sweeping south of the Canada-US border. This is being done on the backs of immigrant labour with all the new loans that are propping up the banks even though loaded with toxic assets. Similarly, these workers are also supplying funds to the tax base. This has not been mentioned in any context. It is simply ignored as the media hammers home the message being spun out by the banksters and corporatists, which says that seniors are going to have to give up their golden years to a barking straw boss that will continue to intimidate and bully them to ever greater levels of production until their dying day. But, it the economy continues to sour, and it shows every sign of doing so, they will have to compete with jobless youth and even immigrants for a dwindling supply of everything. For the seniors and as far as that goes, the rest of the toilers, this spells a death sentence. There is but one solution and that is to organize and seize the means of production out of the hands of the self proclaimed owners. Everyone no matter what status on the employment scale, whether a student, a labourer, the unemployed of a retiree will have to unite into peoples' councils world wide to overthrow this lying exploiting system of profiteering on the misery of everyone.
References:
1. http://www.irpp.org/cpa/briefs/foot.pdf
2. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/jobs/cana...
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Canada
4. http://www.workpermit.com/news/2008-03-17/record-number-immigrants-...
Welcome to
Revolutionary Liberation Gospel
© 2024 Created by William Prest. Powered by
You need to be a member of Revolutionary Liberation Gospel to add comments!
Join Revolutionary Liberation Gospel