![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")
In 2006, which was a very good year at Merrill Lynch, Dow Kim, at the time Executive Vice President and President of Global Markets and Investment Banking, took home a modest salary, $350,000. But then he received a bonus that made things more comfortable for him---$35 million.
That year Merrill's profits came in at a record $7.5 billion. To express its appreciation not only to the top guns at the company like Kim, but also to the company analysts who had helped make it all happen, the company paid out between $5 billion and $6 billion in bonuses that year. Analysts in their twenties with salaries of around $130,000 received bonuses of $250,000. Company traders in their thirties, a little higher up the pecking order, with salaries of $180,000 were treated to bonuses of $5 million.
There was a problem at Merrill though. The record profits were illusory. Because the company was so heavily invested in mortgages that have since crashed in value, Merrill has lost three times as much as the fat profit realized in 2006.
The geniuses at Merrill Lynch played a role in driving the economy over the cliff. But they haven't returned the bonuses they received, bonuses that allowed them to live like modern day Roman aristocrats.
Even since the crash and the multi billion dollar bailouts, the bonuses haven't stopped flowing. Things aren't as lavish as they were a couple of years ago, but bankers in New York are still in line for bonuses worth millions of dollars a year.
In the media, both south and north of the border, however, the target of choice these days is the unionized auto worker, whose annual salary wouldn't pay for one fat-cat dinner in New York to celebrate bonus day. During the smash-up of the economy over the last three months, it was unclear what direction the political right would take to cope with their new surroundings. Now it's become all too clear. The American right and its Canadian subsidiary will devote their energies to attacking auto workers and other unionized wage and salary earners.
Meanwhile, the Harper government has assembled an eleven member economic council to advise it on the upcoming federal budget. No workers or trade unionists were asked to participate. Instead the council is replete with millionaires and billionaires---Jim Pattison, Paul Desmarais Jr., and James D. Irving among them. I wonder if they'll recommend corporate taxes as a way to stimulate the economy!
The Harperites are operating on the theory that people who know how to make money for themselves are experts on how to manage an economy for everyone. Anyone who believes this should read John Kenneth Galbraith's classic, The Great Crash: 1929. He tells the story of how the big New York bankers thought all they had to do was to ride to the rescue of the stock market and reinvigorate it with a spirit of confidence. They tried it, were cheered for a couple of hours, and then the Depression took hold.
The truth is that tycoons know very little about the economy. They tend to assume that because they made it so big they have some special insight into how things work in the economy and society. Usually their assumptions amount to little more than a grab bag of Social Darwinist ravings about how the true giants rise to the top in the ferocious jungle of the real world and that's how homo sapiens makes progress. Tycoons often think they conceived of this theory of the world themselves as a consequence of their own life experience. Little do they know that they are reciting tracts from some hack who was writing in the late 19th century.
The dirty little secret of capitalists is that they all know that it benefits them in their own enterprises to keep wages as low as possible. Paradoxically though, they also know that to sell their goods and services somebody out there has to have money to spend. In their economic theorizing, the fat cats can never get around this elementary conundrum. And that takes them back to their fantasies about themselves as Big Cats in the jungle.
Two final notes:
I'm so glad that the CBC has decided to balance its left-leaning At Issue Panel by adding Rex Murphy to it.
And congratulations to Harper's 18 new senators. Now that Mike Duffy is in the Senate, he can interview himself about the ethics of a Prime Minister who prorogued parliament to prevent his government from being defeated on a vote a confidence but feels free to anoint Senators before parliament resumes and he receives that vote of confidence.
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