The Rural Voice, 1992-03, Page 10Oto
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6 THE RURAL VOICE
I'VE GOT THIS
FUNNY FEELING ..
Keith Roulston, a newspaper publisher
and playwright who lives near Blyth,
is the originator and publisher of The
Rural Voice.
Have you ever been to a fair and fallen un-
der the spell of one of those fast -talking pitch -
men who is so convincing you buy one of
those machines that slices, dices and cubes be-
cause you're convinced you just can't live the
rest of your life without it? Have you ever had
the strange feeling, once you got out of earshot
of his mesmerizing voice, that maybe you've
been had? Sometimes I get that feeling when I
set down my newspaper or tum off the radio
these days.
I get the feeling that maybe we're being
had by the right-wing, big business lobby
whose thinking has come to dominate every-
thing we read or hear about the economy and
the future. The same message these people
have been preaching for years is now dominat-
ing the news media. The argument we
wouldn't buy before we're now willing to ac-
cept without question, because we've been
scared silly by the recession. The smaller-gov-
emment, less -regulation, open-intemational
border arguments which once had to fight to
get space in the newspaper other than on the
business page, now dominate front page, no
questions asked. Big business leaders and ec-
onomists are the most quoted, least questioned
people on the news.
But I wonder. I keep getting this uneasy
feeling. I get that feeling whenever one point
of view gets to dominate the pack -journalism
mentality of the media to the exclusion of any
other thought. I had the same uneasiness in
the '70s and early '80s when the liberal left
dominated the media and bashed business and
promoted govemment action with virtually no
presentation of altematives. I know that the
pendulum always swings to the opposite ex-
treme but really, can't we have just a little bal-
ance in these things?
For instance, government overspending
and borrowing get almost total blame for what
is wrong with the economy these days. Busi-
ness and business -backed economists and lob-
by groups have brainwashed us until we ac-
cept it as a black -and -white fact. But nobody
mentions that at the same time as the govem-
ment was running up its deficit (and most of
the debt accumulated in the 1980s), businesses
in North America also accumulated a huge
debt in a feeding frenzy of companies swal-
lowing other companies, often financed by
junk bonds that were really just a high-cost
way of borrowing money.
We know that 30 -odd cents out of every
tax dollar go to service the national debt, and
we know that the higher taxes this causes
drives up the cost of doing business and leaves
consumers with less money in their pockets to
spend on goods made by our factories, which
in tum puts people out of work. Nobody has
bothered to calculate, however, how much ser-
vicing the huge business debt has added to the
price of goods, so that consumers had to pay
extra for the same goods they could have
bought cheaper if that debt hadn't been need-
lessly accumulated. Let's remember that the
government's borrowing produced extra jobs
and put money into people's hands. Business
borrowing for takeovers didn't produce any-
thing except rich lawyers and bond salesmen.
How much did the collapse of Robert
Campeau's huge empire — financed by junk
bonds — contribute to our current mess? How
much did greedy dreams of speculative real es-
tate profits help undermine the economy?
How much did the collapse of savings and
loan institutions in the U.S., often caused by
business fraud, help along the process?
Business leaders would have us believe
that only they know how to read a bottom line
but we've had a pro-business govemment
dominated by former business people for sev-
en and a half years in Canada and what have
we got? Unemployment, huge govemment
debt, and a country so demoralized it some-
times seems we've lost the will to live. South
of the border, they've had a right-wing govem-
ment listening to the business lobby and what
have they got? Recession bordering on
depression and a huge national debt. And a
rhetoric that says they can't afford a national
health plan and that falsely blackens the
Canadian plan to prove the point.
Thanks to business thinking, we've got
free trade which even the negotiators admit
isn't working out. We're on the verge of free
trade with Mexico and likely even more con-
cessions to the Americans so they'll agree to
it. We've got a high Canadian dollar that
makes it virtually impossible for us to win in
free trade because the right-wing lobby says
that inflation is the only concern of the Bank
of Canada.
Now the right-wing, free-market lobby
appears on the verge of undermining the only
healthy sector of the farm economy, the sup-
ply -managed sector, in order to get a wider
trade agreement through GATT. Did anybody
ever believe this govemment, with its unfetter-
ed free market philosophy, wouldn't eventual-
ly sell out supply management? And because
our urban media has fallen into a right-wing,
politically correct economic reporting style,
few voices will even be raised in protest. Why
do I feel we've been had?0