Newfoundland Austerity

Yesterday the NL government announced the new budget for 2016 and it is an austerity budget. Filled with lots of tax hikes and job cuts and they are not done yet. There is a second budget expected to come later this year which will be more of a privatization budget (or so the rumour goes). Overall they are expected to privatize the liqour board, have massive cuts to services and layoffs in healthcare and education, as well it is expected that the unemployment rate will rise to 20% (all most 3 times the national average). There appears to be a mass exodus of the youth from the province with the median age sky rocketing year after year.  

Newfoundland is in for some rough times.

I saw the report of CBC.

'Austerity' means two things:

1) Government's going broke trying to pay off endless debt accumulated through the private bank's immoral interest rates. Banks get rich, the people suffer.

2) Firing of public workers so that labour pool is flooded and wages remain low. Employers get rich, the people suffer.

The scary fact is that North American economy died in 2008 and that only around-the-clock CPR is keeping it alive - the term being used for this is "Qualitative Easing", it means an continual flow of public wealth into Wall Street. This is not enough so 'austerity' is also needed to keep wealth flowing into the ripe corpse.

In fact the demand by Wall Street isn't just to keep their zombie banks alive but they want them sprinting, doing ballet and running marathons! They want (and are getting) record-breaking profits. The price is that society is collapsing as all it's wealth is being funnel into CEO yearly bonuses. This is happening globally.

Here is a quote on another island - Puerto Rico:

If Puerto Rico misses it's austerity interest payments on May 1, it will soon not have sufficient cash flow to pay government salaries and welfare benefits — and an exodus to the U.S. mainland could follow.

With a population of about 3.7 million, about 12,000 Puerto Ricans  a year seeking better economic opportunity migrated to the U.S. mainland each year from 1980 to 2010. But that number picked up to 48,000 per year from 2010-2013 and to 83,844 in 2014, and an even higher number is expected to be reported for 2015.

Websites that are Wall Street's puppets are quick to explain why Puerto Rico needs to be destroyed to pay it's debts:

Analysis by Breitbart News has suggested that the real reasons Puerto Rico is insolvent and about to miss payroll and welfare payments are that the island changed its official language to Spanish, depriving it of opportunities to make the most of its connection to U.S. markets; and that the island is subject to a Caribbean-job-killing $7.25 minimum wage.

All natural-born Puerto Ricans are constitutionally citizens of the United States. But it was Congress that passed laws making Puerto Rico subject to the U.S. minimum wage.

Puerto Rico’s $7.25 minimum wage per hour compares unfavorably to neighboring minimum wage rates of $4.00 in the British Virgin Islands, $0.96 in the Dominican Republic, and $2 in Venezuela.

Just before the territory’s first $37 million interest payment default, Puerto Rico Governor Alejandro García Padilla, who has difficulty speaking English, decided to pay out $120 million in Christmas bonuses to government employees.

Even in this openly racist analysis the choice could not be clearer: pay thousands of public workers or pay the money to a few banksters. Either keep society going or destroy your country making a few scumbags slightly richer.

Let's get to the dark secret of Harper's 8 years: "Harper-led governments ran a string of six straight deficits between 2008-09 and 2013-14" For all his neo-con ideological nonsense Harper understood the unavoidable fact that unless he kept government spending going the whole Canadian economy would stall out. It was a triumph of political survival over the insanity that is regularly spouted by right-wingers.

When ex-Liberal Muclair campaigned to the right of Harper by promising a 'balanced budget', people saw he was another priest of austerity and abandoned the NDP. Trudeau saw this, positioned himself as the 'anti-Austerity' candidate and is now Prime Minister. Yet Trudeau's sunny federal branding covers up the fact that on the provincial level the Liberals are fully committed to Austerity - like in Ontario and NL. It is a general rule that if you want to slash social programs that the Liberals are your party of choice because it just seems to ugly and obvious when the Conservatives are doing it.

Austerity is the defining political ideology of our era - and it can only be a disaster for the everyone who doesn't own houses in multiple countries so they can keep escaping the social collapse it causes.

John Oliver on Puerto Rico

Interesting backgrounder on US colonial territories. John Olivier has to be the best political commentator working these days. I actually use a clip of him explaining how electing judges corrupts the legal system in my class.

cbc wrote:The library board in Newfoundland and Labrador announced sweeping changes to its services Wednesday, adopting a regional library model which will see 54 branches close in the next two years.

Budget 2016 has also been criticized for bringing in a 10 per cent book tax, which makes Newfoundland and Labrador the only province in Canada to tax books.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/newfoundland-labrador-library-closures-1.3555133

The funny thing is that I just went to the Espanola library last week and I was expecting it to be empty but there were at least 10 people there - they were all either Aborginal or Elderly - there weren't just there for internet access either, they were all reading or asking how to find information. The library was attached to a large community center and a high school was across the road.

I stayed for an hour reading stuff in the local history section, great stuff: binders of photocopied articles, old Laurentian journals, a book on the maritime history of the Great Lakes. It just felt good to be in that place.

The internet has made so much irrelevant but there is something almost sacred to me about public libraries, something about being in a public space dedicated to mass literacy and an informed democracy that outstrips an easy cost/benefit analysis.

As for the provincial book tax...

This article is from the right-wing elitest Foreign Policy website - but they fancy themselves an intellectual site so you can find the occasional insightful piece there:

fp.cpm wrote:
The Plot Against Puerto Rico

Washington set the small island up to fail. And now that the territory is on the verge of financial collapse, Congress is washing its hands of the blame.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/29/puerto-rico-debt-default-lew-ryan-obama/

It gives some insight into Puetro Rico's history (as Frankenstein taught me: it all goes back to Napoleon) and into the modern US politics failing it - but it is the information on how the US has treated that country and its' economy as a colonial possession to be altered at whim that was most interesting.