THE RECORD
February 14, 2001

Fiat Lux

by Ed Deak

Having grown up in a fascist country, then graduating to nazism and communism I thought I had heard all the propaganda garbage ever spread by the human race, but what goes on now from our elected governments and the corporate media, beats them all.

The story of the development of today's capitalist economics, otherwise known as neoclassical economics, goes back to the distorted words of Adam Smith from over 200 years ago, and to one of his followers by the name of David Ricardo who wrote the Iron Law of Wages in 1818.

In his Iron Law of Wages he theorized that to make maximum profits employers can not pay more than the barest minimum survival wages to their workers. This was one of the mainstay arguments for the so called "laissez faire" economy of 19th Century Britain that gave us the literary masterpieces of Charles Dickens with his "Oliver Twist" and other books depicting the misery of legalized destitution in the name of deregulated and uncontrolled profiteering.

By a curious coincidence what the Cato, Fraser, Hudson, CD Howe and a hundred more of these propaganda machines, disguised as economic think tanks, are also advocating is exactly this same laissez faire economics. This time fully supported by most of our politicians as the miracle of global competition that will lower costs and prices, creating wealth and prosperity for everybody.

Well, I have never seen, or heard of any kind of competition that didn't raise costs and where everybody came out as winners. I would like to see the magic mathematical formula that would permit everybody to make profits and grow rich, because profits can not be created, only taken from others. This means that the people at the end of the line must remain poor....As they are now, while a few literally get away with murder.

Between 1948 and 1973 the median wages in the USA and Canada went up considerably, raising overall living standards. Big business started to get worried about this trend and decided to put a stop to this nonsense of too much freedom and too high wages once and for all.

They collaborate in the elite Bilderberger Conferences that were first organized by Prince Bernard of the Netherlands in 1954, and the Trilateral Commission involving the business moguls of the USA, Europe and Japan, that was formed in 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. In addition they have established many other organizations to develop economic policies favourable to them and then bend governments to follow their orders.

As the then US Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat said to the Transatlantic Business Dialogue in 1997, "We're in a world in which governments are less important and companies more important. Business is driving policy." In the same TABD release US officials are quoted as saying: "80 percent of the TABD's recommendations are now official policy."

I'm always amused when union leaders are called "labour bosses" by the media, but business bosses are called "leaders." No one has elected them to lead and yet, they control our lives and buy and sell elected politicians.

Now, there are secret talks on the Free Trade Area of the Americas and the also secret WTO talks on the General Agreement on Trade in Services. A big shindig is planned for Quebec City in April. The people of the world will be locked out behind a 4km chain link fence set into concrete, and the biggest police presence in Canadian history, lest their screams be heard while big business is feted and promised that all their demands will be met.

Copyright (c) 2001, West's International