![James Laxer](http://rabble.ca/sites/rabble/files/imagecache/thumbnail/category_pictures/picture-62_0.jpg "James Laxer is regularly asked to comment on current national and global issues by the Canadian media and frequently writes columns in major newspapers and periodicals.
In 1969, he was one of the founders of the Waffle Group, Canada’s largest New Left political movement. In 1971, at the age of 29, he ran second for the national leadership of the New Democratic Party. In the mid 1970s, James Laxer was a leading crusader against the power of multi national petroleum companies. His books, speeches and television appearances helped lead to the creation of a nationally owned oil company, Petro Canada, established to counter the power of companies like Exxon in Canada.
In 1981, Laxer was appointed research director of the federal New Democratic Party. At the end of his two year term, he wrote a controversial, book length critique of the party’s economic policies, charging that they were seriously dated. The report was front page news in Canada and was debated for months in the national media.
In 1984, the National Film Board of Canada hired Laxer to be host narrator, for a series of documentaries on the changing global economy and Canada’s place in it. In preparing the series, Laxer travelled extensively in Japan, Europe and the United States. The series, entitled Reckoning, was denied broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation because it was seen as too controversial.
Instead it was broadcast by a hook up of all the English language educational networks in the country. The series was also broadcast in the United States, as well, by a large number of PBS stations. The Reckoning series has won awards in both the United States and Canada. One of its films won the blue ribbon, first prize, at the prestigious American Film and Video Festival, for best political documentary. The same film won the Atlantic
Film Festival and national Gemini Awards in Canada for best writing in an information series, awards which went to Laxer and the film’s director as co-authors.
In 1986-87, Laxer spent a year in Europe writing Decline of the Superpowers. From 1978 to 1981, he hosted a public affairs television program on TV Ontario. He regularly went to Europe to conduct interviews with leading European political and intellectual figures. In 1993 his book False God: How the Globalization Myth Has Impoverished Canada, was published by Lester Publishing. In Search of a New Left: Canadian Politics
After the Neo-Conservative Assault was published by Viking in 1996. The Undeclared War: Class Conflict in the Age of Cyber Capitalism, was published by Viking in 1998, and by Penguin Canada in 1999, in a paperback edition. Dalton Camp wrote that the Undeclared War "is an informed and cogent book on the great and growing dilemma of our time: how to preserve a free society in the face of increasing disparity and the creation of a new class society---‘a dominant class and a dominated class.’ This is stuff we need to know." Laxer’s book, Stalking the Elephant: My Discovery of America was on national best seller lists for seven weeks in the autumn of 2000. In his review of the book for the Globe and Mail, David Shribman, Pulitzer prize winning columnist for the Boston Globe, commented: "This is a book by a Canadian that can change the United States." Stalking the Elephant is to be published by The New Press in New York in September 2001. In 2003, his book, The Border: Canada, the U.S. and Dispatches from the 49th Parallel, was published by Doubleday Canada. In 2004, Douglas and McIntyre published his book Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism. This memoir of James Laxer’s childhood was the winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award for best biography/memoir in 2005.
James Laxer is a Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto")
The global economy is undergoing a dramatic transformation, the greatest since the decline of the British Empire as the world's leading economic power. At their peril, politically active Canadians are failing to analyze the transformation and its consequences for Canada.
With the political stage in the United States dominated by the sputtering Obama administration and the ever more extravagant behaviour of the Tea Party movement, insufficient attention is being paid to the underlying reality that the United States is in decline as an economic power. No matter how well or how badly the decline of the U.S. is managed -- and this will matter -- the shift to a new global economic order is underway.
Meanwhile in Canada, the Harper government, with little coherent opposition from the parties that hold the majority of seats in the House of Commons, is proceeding to tighten Canada's economic ties with the United States. During the period of parliamentary prorogation, the Conservative government extended the right of U.S. firms to bid on provincial and municipal contracts in Canada in the most significant extension of NAFTA since the trade deal began in 1994. The step was taken by the Harper government to enable Canadian firms to bid on the tail end of contract offerings at the state level in the U.S. under Washington stimulus spending plan. (In an earlier post, I critiqued the Harper government's initiative.)
Now the Harper government has signaled that it soon plans to open the door to a massive influx of foreign investment and foreign control in the areas of telecommunications and the mass media.
The Harper government's strategy is to end stimulus spending, keep taxes low for the wealthy and for corporations and to seek the fuller integration of the Canadian and U.S. economies.
What are the Liberals and the NDP doing?
Not much.
They criticize the Harper government initiatives by going after their peripheral details. What they have not done is to attack them at their very centre. They have not explained what needs to be explained -- that the course Canada is now on will be catastrophic for the Canadian people in coming decades.
If you step back from the debates on Parliament Hill and take in the wider reality, it is overwhelmingly apparent that massive change is coming in the global economy.
Take for instance the recent attack on American economic policies by China's Premier Wen Jiabao. Wen took sharp aim at Washington, saying that the U.S. is failing to rebuild its own economy and to maintain the value of the dollar. China, whose foreign reserves exceeded $2.4 trillion at the end of 2009, held nearly $900 billion of those reserves in dollar-denominated U.S. government Treasury Bills. What Beijing fears is that the U.S. is engaged in policies that will sharply reduce the value of the dollar and that this will not only slash the value of the Treasury Bills China holds, it will close off much of the U.S. market to Chinese exports.
Last year, Chinese officials speculated that the epoch in which the U.S. dollar serves as the world's reserve currency is coming to an end.
The current warnings from the Chinese government could force up interest rates on U.S. Treasury Bills and that would worsen the already perilous fiscal crisis in which the U.S. government finds itself.
In my view, China's relationship with the United States is bound to change with Chinese wages rising and the American ability to import on the same scale as in the past falling.
It's part of the transition of the global economy that our politicians are failing to debate. A future generation of Canadians will be bound to ask what they Hell our leaders were doing. Their anger will more likely be directed at the centrists and left-wingers who should have known better, and did nothing, than at the ideological conservatives who insisted on going down with the U.S. Ship in which they believed so deeply.
In the rest of this post, I'm including an excerpt from my book Beyond the Bubble: Imagining a New Canadian Economy [2], published by Between the Lines Publishing in November.
Links:
[1] http://rabble.ca/taxonomy/term/309
[2] http://www.jameslaxer.com/2010/03/great-economic-debate-canada-needs-and.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JamesLaxer+%28James+Laxer%29
[3] http://rabble.ca/user
[4] http://rabble.ca/user/register