The Art of Economics

This blog discusses the debt crisis in the US and the impacts of this crisis on Canada. As this is an artist’s blog, it includes a few samples of my artworks that have investigated the economic system that has led to this debt crisis and its impacts on society and the environment. The discussion then looks at some alternative approaches to the art of economics and propose a workable Canadian alternative to the business-as-usual approach that has not served us well.

Debt

The most important message in the excellent film, Surviving Progress was that debt is the driving force behind the world’s current economic, social & ecological crises. As apostate Wall Street bankers and IMF bureaucrats explained, debt is the force behind: destruction of the world’s most crucial ecosystems; poverty and social upheaval in developing countries; and the likely end of civilization as we know it.

In pre-capitalist societies, debt was owed to the state rather than private individuals. When the burden of debt for most of its citizens became unreasonable, in the interests of avoiding revolution, the rulers would forgive all debt, ride out the consequences & start afresh.  With capitalism, however, debt ownership has concentrated in the hands of 10% of the world’s private individuals, the financial oligarchy, and they do not have any interest in the health or even continuation of society as a whole.  As a class they would rather destroy the planet than  give up their self-interest.

Though the financial oligarchy has a great deal of power, those of us with surviving democracies do still have the means to fight back through the political process.  As Michael Moore says, “we’re a democracy – we can pass any laws we want!” Whether this is still true remains to be seen. Surviving Progress clearly advocates that we elect rulers willing to cancel debt in order to save civilization rather than the financial oligarchy.

The US Debt Crisis

This might be easier said than done. According to the US Treasury, the federal government currently has $36.22 trillion in federal debt and every day, the US spends $2.6 billion on interest. As of September 30, 2024, the US debt-to-GDP ratio was 123%. This means that the US debt was $35.46 trillion, which is higher than the GDP of $28.83 trillion for the fiscal year 2024. The main cause of this crisis is that revenue from taxes exceeds spending. If the US were to fairly tax some it’s billionaires, this problem would go away, but unfortunately the billionaires are in charge, and choose to cut spending instead. As the billionaires who hold the US government debt are also in charge of the country, they would not be willing to see any forgiveness of the debts they are owed. Fifty+ years of policies designed to enrich the few, at the expense of the country as a whole, have created this debt and the enormous inequalities in wealth & power that threaten the stability of the country and, by extension, the world.

Canada’s Government debt accounted for 69.4 % of the country’s GDP in March 2024, so it is not as dire as in the US. Many Canadians may believe that debts owed by our neighbours are not our concern, but because Canada is so closely tied to the US, it they catch a cold, we sneeze. Or more accurately, we catch our death. The current US president’s threats to annex Canada stem directly from the debt crisis in that country. That crisis has been exacerbated by de-industrialization and de-funding of the educational and other social systems so hat the US has become less competitive internationally. Other countries like China have surged ahead economically and creatively, especially in technology, and the US is falling ever-further behind.

Instead of reforming an unworkable economic system of distribution, ruling elites in the US, both Democratic and Republican, have chosen to step up the extraction of wealth from other countries. In addition to the list of countries from which the US has traditionally appropriated their wealth, the US has added Mexico, Panama, Denmark, Europe and Canada. So US debt has become Canada’s problem.

Annexation

If the US were to “Annex” Canada, it is unlikely that we would we become a 51st state, as Trump has said, but instead would become a protectorate like Puerto Rico, without voting rights. As in Puerto Rico, the main source of revenue for the country would be from impoverished young Canadian women leaving their families to become US nannies and cleaners, while Canada’s natural resources would go south. Would Canadian ruling elites fight to prevent the annexation of Canada by the US? Canadian Author and Activist, Yves Engler suggests that Canadian armed forces are so heavily integrated militarily with the US, that they might instead participate in a possible invasion.

“The depth of the Canada-U.S. military alliance is such that if US Forces attacked this country it would be extremely difficult for the Canadian Forces to defend our soil. In fact, given the entanglements, the Canadian Forces would likely enable a US invasion.” Engler goes on to suggest that, “It’s time politicians start demanding Canada decisively break away from the US empire and the place to start is severing the military ties.”

In addition to withdrawing from NATO & NORAD, Engler suggests that Canada should sever its economic ties to the US, as it’s global aggression will not solve it’s economic problems and debt crisis. “The G7 has successfully asserted capitalist/NATO influence. But the imperial alliance is facing renewed pressure from the expansion of the BRICS. The Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa recently added Indonesia as a full member and numerous other associate members. As an expansionist Donald Trump becomes president of the USA, all those who support a truly independent Canada must work towards a multilateral world. We must expand our relationship with other countries and move away from our dangerous economic, diplomatic, social and military reliance on the United States. A good first step would be Canada withdrawing from the G7. “

Who Runs Things? Running Man

While heightened US aggression to Canada & others can be traced to its debt crisis, the US debt crisis itself can be traced to the incredible wealth that has been allowed to flow from the public to the private sphere – to individuals, corporations and oligarchies. With that wealth has come unlimited power so that the wealthy are able to manipulate the political system to ensure wealth continue to flow from the public to the private sector.

How is a mere artist to respond to the threat, not only to Canadian, but to global economic, social and political stability? This is, of course, not a new threat, as this situation has been brewing since corporations first began their rise to power and the possibility of true democracy began to fade in North America. As an artist, my response, 25 years ago, was a series called Running Man. This was an overtly political theme and it drew criticism from my peers, as the dominant paradigm is that contemporary art must not be didactic and present a point of view.

Running Man appeared as three drawings for Artmoney, an international art project presenting a global, alternative currency. Artmoney is currency-sized original art, contributed by artists around the world. My contribution was 3 bills showing the evolution of a running man into a corporate man – or the man who runs things.

The motto on each bill, “This is the way the world will end“, is an embarrassing misquote from the poem The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot. The final stanza may be the most quoted of all of Eliot’s poetry: “This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.”

This motto was also carved around the base of a piece called Special Cases in 1999.  As described in more detail in my blog On Corporate Power, that sculpture was about Running Man in his bureaucratic context – ensuring that economic  demands must always take precedence over social or ecological needs.

Running Man also took the form of a public art piece in Kelown BC, where he stands today.

Economics: The Dismal Science

There is one dominant economic philosophy that has led to the unmanageable debt and enormous inequalities that now threaten the stability of the US and Canada. This is the approach to economics characterized as The Chicago School. The economic philosophy of the Chicago School, of unfettered free markets and little government intervention, has been adopted by ruling elites and has led to waves of successive financial crisis and growing income inequality.  One alternative economist suggested that the Chicago School economists are, “the product of a Dark Age of macroeconomics in which hard-won knowledge has been forgotten.”

My father, the late Dr. Stuart Jamieson, was an economist who applied his hard-won knowledge to improving the lives of working people.  As a Keynesian and Labour Economist, he supported the rights of workers to organize and improve their negotiating position with the owners of the means of production.

Like many progressives, Stuart Jamieson’s faith in the union movement was shaken by events in the early 1980’s in British Columbia.  A draconian far-right government, bent on removing the social safety net, had managed to galvanize the many opposing factions into a unified force.  But on the eve of a threatened general strike, the unions struck a deal with the government that protected workers and left the poor, sick, disabled & otherwise disadvantaged to fight for themselves. Disillusioned with the union movement and the potential for Economics to solve real-world problems, Jamieson turned to direct action.  He joined the movement to save the old-growth forests in Clayquot Sound on Vancouver Island from timber harvesting and was arrested for blocking access to logging trucks.  In his late eighties, he was fitted with an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet and placed under house arrest at his home on Bowen Island.

What was seen as a betrayal of a unified opposition to a right-wing attack on human rights was an example of why many on the far left distrust the union movement and socialism as a whole. When push comes to shove, they tend to sell out any larger movement in order to strike a deal that will protect their interests. This distrust of unions and socialism was based on the writings of Proto-Economist Karl Marx.

Marx is described as one of the most influential figures in human history and in a 1999 BBC poll was voted the “thinker of the millennium” by people from around the world.  He argued that accumulation of capital shapes the social system and that social change was about conflict between opposing interests driven, in the background, by economic forces. He theorized that human history began with free, productive and creative work that was over time coerced and de-humanised, a trend most apparent under capitalism. Marx criticised utopian socialists, arguing that small scale socialistic communities would be bound to marginalisation and poverty, and that only a large scale change in the economic system can bring about real change. In other words, the workers of the world should unite in order to create a force large enough to confront capitalism. But this large scale change seems farther off than ever as workers in the US support politicians whose interest are diametrically opposed to their own.

 Environmentalist David Suzuki tried to provide an alternative economic model in an article in the now defunct magazine, Common Ground.

Suzuki suggested that Economics can address the narrow focus of the dominant economic model by putting a value on natural capital such as wetlands and forests. He reinforced this suggestion by noting that “These economic benefits have even received the attention of the World Bank, which plans to assist countries in tracking natural capital assets and including them in development plans, in the same way we track other wealth using the GDP index“. However, given that this is the World Bank, they would likely be interested in tracking natural assets the better to turn them into wealth for transnational corporations. The concept of turning natural resources into wealth was the inspiration for my sculptural piece below called Conversion, where green trees become gold to a backdrop of graffiti.

Suzuki’s idea of using capitalism to fix capitalism is the preferred path for those who want to tinker with the system to protect the environment, but leave the system itself intact.

Other ideas in that issue of Common Ground were more practical. The article by John Restakis, Beyond the Camps: Occupation and the Co-op Connection, provided a more practical approach to change that can be activated by ordinary people.  John Restakis was the author of Humanizing the Economy – Co-operatives in the Age of Capital. He advocated participation in the co-operative movement which has a long history in Canada.  As he said, “we have the experience of 170 years of co-operation to see that the tenets of democracy can be applied to economics just as in politics and that they work. It is this heritage of economic democracy that is invaluable to the movement that so ardently seeks an alternative to the status quo“.

As examples he pointed to the survival rate of co-ops which is double that of conventional businesses. He highlighted how credit unions, by responding to the actual needs of their members, didn’t engage in the fraudulent financial speculations that bankrupted the economy and had no need of massive public bailouts. He suggested that shifting our money from banks to credit unions is something concrete everyone can do. Co-ops reduce inequality on a global level because fair trade, based on the return of profits to small producers through their co-ops, isn’t based on the extraction of profit by exploiting the weak. And at a time of global economic recession, the experience of the recovered factory co-ops of Argentina, Uruguay and elsewhere shows how workers and the communities in which they live can take back control of shuttered factories and provide a living for workers and their families.

The left-wing Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, or CCF, was a Canadian political party that was the forerunner of the now centrist New Democratic Party, or NDP.  Founded in 1932 in it was an aggregation of socialist, farm, co-operative and labour groups,with a number of goals, including: public ownership of key industries; universal pensions; universal health care; children’s allowances; unemployment insurance; and workers compensation. It also stated that “No CCF Government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation the full programme of socialized planning which will lead to the establishment in Canada of the Co-operative Commonwealth.” In 1939 and again in 1941, my grandmother, Laura Jamieson, was the first CCF MLA elected in Vancouver Centre.

In 1944, the CCF formed the first socialist government in North America in Saskatchewan, but during the Cold War, it was accused of having communist leanings. The party addressed these accusations in 1956, by replacing its original goals with more moderate ones, and becoming the NDP.

This underscores that Canada has roots in the cooperative movement and that this philosophy can provide an alternative to the global, dog-eat-dog capitalist system that now threatens us. This alternative would entail local and regional self-reliance and shortening the supply lines for imported and exported goods. This would not only make areas of Canada less reliant on global trade, but would lower greenhouse gases produced from shipping products over long distances. If the regions of Canada were to shorten supply lines and become as self-reliant as possible, this would lesson impacts from extortionist trade policies of the current US administration. The art of economics could be made to work for, rather than against, Canadians.

It would not, however, protect us from invasion. If Canada survives this administration, the ruling elites would do well to learn from this period. That lesson is: if we side with the school yard bully while he steals all the other kids’ lunch money, it should come a no surprise when he comes to steal ours.