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It’s Time for a Global New Deal |
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| The Global New Deal declares that the world’s economy should work for the poor, such as this woman who works in India for about $2.50 a day. |
More than 2,000 political leaders, trade unionists, representatives of progressive international organizations and grassroots activists last week called for a Global New Deal to change the face of the global economy.
The call came during the Global Progressive Forum meeting in Brussels following the G-20 summit. Guy Ryder, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), says the demand “shows the determination of progressive people across the planet to forge a new world.”
The declaration says progressives have been warning about the risks and injustices for people and the planet for decades. According to the declaration:
Now, the fundamental and systemic failures of the current economic system are undeniable: The time has come to restate our values, our vision and our proposals for a new direction, transforming our societies, improving the lives of our and future generations.
The Global New Deal, which the AFL-CIO supports, would include:
- Implementing the biggest coordinated fiscal stimulus in modern history to stop unemployment and poverty;
- Regulating global financial markets, including abolishing tax havens to end tax avoidance by the elite;
- Supporting the transition to a renewable and energy-efficient economy;
- Promoting fair trade;
- Pushing decent work up the global agenda;
- Sharing revenue between capital and labor more equitably;
- Ensuring women’s rights;
- Committing massive new resources to secure development in the world’s poorest countries.
Read the entire declaration here.
The Global New Deal mirrors some of the proposals presented by the global trade unions to the G-20. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, who led the trade union delegation to the G-20, says the international economy cannot go back to “business as usual.”
The need for change goes much deeper, and there is a real risk that when the economy begins to improve, there will be an attempt to return to the failed policies of the past. There can be no “business as usual.” Together, we must build a new framework for a stronger, more sustainable and more just global economy going forward….The global task is just beginning.
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Solidarity among working people must be an international solidarity. Working people have the same essential human needs world wide. They have the same enemy: global capitalism.
Capitalist globalization will move essential jobs overseas to maximize profit. When jobs leave it impoverishes workers in this country. But it also impoverishes the workers in other countries as well. The ability to minimize labor costs, to maximize the exploitation of workers, is what drives the capitalist drive in globalization.
In Canada the living standards of working people are being destroyed by the same collapse of capitalism as in the U.S. The unions in this country have done NOTHING to oppose the destruction of auto workers in this country. This lack of militancy, complete lack of an oppositional political program in the U.S. promotes the further destruction for working people in other countries.
Canada is a “foreign country” as far as the auto companies are concerned.
An opportunity to set working people against each other, to wring out the maximum profits. As in the United States, corporate interests control the government of Canada.
Ontario won’t abide by its pension guarantees to auto workers
By Carl Bronski
10 April 2009
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty warned Wednesday that in the event General Motors or Chrysler declare bankruptcy his Liberal government will not honor a provincial guarantee to make up pension shortfalls, threatening tens of thousands of retired auto workers with impoverishment.
(read the full article here.)
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/apr2009/onta-a10.shtml
Capitalism has been global since its beginning. In the 15th through the 20th centuries, the drive to discover and exploit labor and natural resources and develop markets in distant lands by common stock companies in Europe led to colonization, imperialism, and eventually to the creation of the US, Canada, and most of the nations we see on modern maps. Spurred on by business interests, the US and Canada in their turn continued the process of colonization and expropriation of native people’s land.
The power of the global economic system has been all-pervasive. Capitalism not only intruded into and overwhelmed existing economic systems in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, it took labor - often by force - from under-developed areas and relocated it where needed. Today you will find Africans, Asians, and Europeans all over the world. Because so much capital was invested overseas from the 16th century on, millions of Europeans were impelled to enter into voluntary servitude in the Americas as a way to survive. Beginning in the 17th century, Africans were enslaved and sent to work in export-oriented agriculture in the Americas; In the late-19th and early 20th centuries, millions of Asians and Pacific islanders were forced by desperation and trickery into a labor system verging on peonage and shipped to locations around the world.
The aim of investors large and small has always been to keep down costs. Some costs are fixed but the cost of labor can always be manipulated. Large-scale immigration to the US drove down wages in the 19th and 20th centuries and continues to do so today. Every effort has been made to inhibit formation of class-consciousness and worker-led organizations and institutions, such as unions and mutual aid societies, have been strangled, if not crushed at their inception. However, in some cases, unions have been perverted and induced to participate in the inherently exploitive economic system that they intially struggled against. Some unions never struggled against the system, they were formed to improve the standard of livng of their members, even at the expense of more militant workers. The AFL, for example, worked with businesses and governments to crush IWW locals in the US and Canada. During the Cold War, US unions aided the CIA and reactionary regimes by funding moderate unions that undermined the support of socialist governments and labor organizations.
Today, American workers identify themselves as middle class and their well-being - in the form of union pensions and retirement accounts - depends on the success of their investments in capitalist enterprises around the world.
We need to ask, are we part of the problem?
Yes, we are!
Education is the greatest solution.
Try this, for a start:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6182802717158469419&ei=7z7bSc7tFYvcqALEydG_Aw&q=money+as+debt
It’s a bit boring and korny to start with, just give it some time to develop a storyline. It covers part of the historical timeline to which you have referred.
JeryWells & Kent why don’t you two fools move to Russia or China or anywhere but the United States and spout your crap to someone who thinks your right.I for one am completelt fed up with your anti-union socialist garbage.Find a blog where someone wants to listen to your crap.
The problems we face will not be solved by the minds that created them. Pure Capitalism is essentially an economic ideal that maintains that greed is good. I, for one, disagree with that premise. Pure Communism failed in Russia. The only reason that it seems to be doing well in China is because of the blending of free markets with other nations. China still has to exploit it’s masses in order to attract the participation of such trade. Un-regulated Capitalism would have been the undoing of the United States of America had it not been for the credit extended to it from communist China! Much to my dismay, the failure of Capitalism in America may just pave the way for the rise of Socialism; should the greedy Wall Street tycoons not wake up, soon.