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Media
Who needs democracy?
Not the Globe and Mail or senior writer John Ibbitson, who advocates handing over all of government to private investors
By Kevin Potvin
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Now John Ibbitson, senior columnist on America writing for the Globe and Mail, is despairing of the vagaries of democratic government as economic indicators turn troubling. And he is openly suggesting the denoument of democracy.
Taking fiscal policy—control over government taxing and spending issues—out of the hands of elected officials and placing it in the hands of institutionally-trained economic technicians employed by national central banks is his preferred solution. “Their record would certainly be better than that of politicians,” Ibbitson writes. “Handing control of fiscal and trade policy to central banks would put an end to war,” he goes on, “which is almost always fiscally inefficient. Sadly,” he points out, “it might not be possible for a country to implement such enlightened policies and remain a democracy.”
Might? Fiscal policies are pretty much all that remain under the control of democratically-elected officials after decades of evisceration of government’s role in society instigated by a concerted private enterprise attack on us, the public. Decades of corporate newspaper columns, private enterprise think tank “studies,” and political party imposters have denigrated all acts of elected representatives, smeared the reputation of the civil service, and sowed suspicion and visceral hatred for all things government. The full-court press by private money has so totally hemmed in defenders of the public sector for so long that virtually no one is left who would suggest that elected representatives might do a good job of directing resources to any aspect of society to produce public goods. The mere suggestion is so laughable today that even new hospitals and schools, public health and public education being historically the entire sine qua non of government, are without question to be built by and for the private investor with nary a peep about whether or not the public good is even part of the equations.
Monetary policy—control over national currency lending rates and the overall supply of money and credit in the national economy—has already been wholesale delivered into the hands of private banks. In the case of America, by far the biggest economy that drives the global economic system, the central bank, the Federal Reserve, is already a wholly private-bank owned and controlled institution.
Monetary policy in Canada was finally delivered completely into private banks’ hands by Prime Minister Paul Martin’s finance minister John Manley, when he lowered the reserve amount banks must hold in deposits compared to loans they create, from 5% to 0%. At that point, private banks assumed total private control over one of the traditionally important roles of the national economy since long before the advent of democracy even. While overnight interest rates are still controlled by a Prime Minister-appointed chief, in our case David Dodge, currently head of the Bank of Canada, the advice and approval of bankers for every move he makes far outweigh the advice and approval of Parliament before which he is far more rarely seen to be speaking than before closed-door gatherings of bankers in Toronto and New York.
It should be unbelievable that the Globe and Mail would run a column, and that Ibbitson should think to write one, that advocates the handing over of taxing and spending policies to the private sector. Yet this column will surely pass without comment everywhere in the press but here, in the lowly and humble Republic. While control over national interest rates and money supply are by far the more important levers, now that they have long since been taken out of public control already, control over taxing and spending remains as the most important role for publicly-elected officials. To suggest as The Globe and Mail does that these powers too should pass from public control to private control, and to admit even that that would likely spell the end of democracy in Canada, is surely treasonous. It’s a measure of how far Canada has gone down Mussolini’s corporatist road that this suggestion, far from marching the publisher of the Globe and Mail and guilty columnist Ibbitson before a specially convened Parliamentary committee for some tricky ‘splainin’ to do ahead of serious jail time, instead is greeted with no reaction at all even from among elected officials sworn by oath to uphold the most basic principles of democracy, and even when Ibbitson boldly, audaciously, and fearlessly put it right in his column, “it might not be possible to . . . remain a democracy” if his suggestion were followed.
Murphy and Ibbitson are erecting signposts on the road unnoticed for now, but surely to be uncovered in books in the future exploring how Canada got to where it went, much like shelves full of books today attempt to recover the signposts that were unnoticed in their time on Germany’s road to fascism.
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