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 that 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. This philosophy 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, galvanized the many factions on the left 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 & 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.

This betrayal of a is an example of why many distrust the union movement and socialism. When push comes to shove, they tend to sell out 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, one of the most influential figures in human history, argued that accumulation of capital shapes the social system and that social change was about conflict between opposing interests driven by economic forces. He theorized that human history began with free, productive and creative work that was, over time, coerced and de-humanised, especially 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 putting a value on natural capital such as wetlands and forests, 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. This has, unforunately, become the platform of the Greens in Canada.

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 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 a 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. 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.

The post The Art of Economics first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

I worked with the Running Man image exclusively from about 1997-2002.  This series, using an image of a man running headlong into the future and oblivious to the past, explores the ideas and assumptions behind the corporate free-enterprise paradigm, consumerism  and the impacts of these ideas on society, economy  and  environment.  The Running Man image is also a vehicle to explore the inner workings of individuals who are pressured into participating in relationships of dominance and ruthless  competition. These people are always in a hurry, rushing toward their own and the planet’s demise.  They must avoid personal attachments that might jeopardize the struggle to get ahead, so personal relationships are neglected in favour of business acquaintances.

Running Man sometimes becomes aware of the emptiness of his inner life but the feeling soon passes as the strength of his ideological commitment to the accumulation of wealth reasserts itself. A wonderful French film in the Vancouver Film Festival called My Piece of the Pie depicts the character of Running Man. This film was especially powerful because it did not follow the usual Hollywood formula where the nasty, ruthless rich guy sees the light at the end of the movie and, through personal transformation, becomes more sensitive & caring.  This film illustrated the reality of the right-wing corporate mind-set: they just don’t get it.  No matter how clearly he is shown the evils and grief caused by a fundamentally unethical economic system,  Running Man is just is too entrenched in his position to change it.  From where Running Man sits, everything looks just fine and when he is exposed to criticism of his world, he can’t figure out what people are griping about.  To him, self-interest is the basis of a divine plan for the creation & distribution of wealth.  Those with the most self-interest create the most wealth and then this wealth will trickle down to the rest of us. If wealth doesn’t trickle down, but continues to float up, this is caused by a lack of gumption among the have-nots.  He believes free-enterprise capitalism is an economic system perfectly aligned with natural human impulses, and those not benefiting are just too lazy to take advantage of its opportunities. Like the pre-revolutionary French aristocrats, Running Man lives in a hermetically sealed world, protected against morality, reality and empathy.

The Personal is Political

The series began as a personal catharsis  for understanding men who flee attachment. But in the process, I became aware that I too was a running man, avoiding real life by chasing success and worldly concerns. As they say, artists always make self-portraits.The Running Man image first appeared in a series of oil paintings in 1997. Below is its first appearance as a painting/sculpture study of a potential clear sheet acrylic sculpture.

Though women can and do participate in institutions of dominance, Running Man remained gender-specific to reflect the predominantly male corporate culture.

Another very early Running Man study in oils,  was again, a study for a sculpture. There is a figure in a business suit cut out of clear sheet acrylic and superimposed on a scene, in this case, a selection of homey items.

I began to make the connection between the problems that men face in relationships with the larger competitive, alienating, consumer culture. As my understanding of the scope of this series progressed, I began to cut figures of the man in the suit out of plywood, put a clear acrylic briefcase in his hands and set him up in 3D configurations. This business-suited figure represented discorporate man, optimizing capital and cutting losses. The 3D series went on to examine the larger influences that were breaking down family, community and society and became a larger critique of global capitalism and its impacts on the economy, society,and the environment.

Another Running Man painting/sculpture study from this period introduced the idea that later became the wooden sculpture All That Glisters (shown below) and finally the large steel sculpture Running Man installed in Kelowna BC (shown above).

The first sculptural piece in the Running Man series was called Special Cases (shown below) and it was an image about the exploitation of natural resources. The clear acrylic briefcases contain water, trees and fish, which are the big three resources of my home province of British Columbia. The piece illustrates that resources are extracted here, then processed elsewhere so that the value of resources does not benefit local economies. I exhibited this piece in 1999 in a sculpture exhibition at the University of Northern BC.

At the time, I had no capability for shipping transporting or installing sculptures, so I roped the plywood figures and the large wooden base to the top of my Ford Escort wagon and headed toward Prince George. Just before Hope I could see plywood figures sliding off the back of the car in my rear-view mirror, so I pulled off the highway and struggled to tie down my load.  Somehow, I got to Prince George where I installed the piece, stayed for a couple of days with a kind friend, then headed home.

When I made Special Cases, I had a day job as a planner for the BC Agricultural Land Commission (ALC), and was sculpting on days off. The title of the piece, Special Cases was inspired by my work at the Commission and an earlier job with the BC Ministry of Environment .  Both bureaucracies were charged with the responsibility of protecting natural resources, but in both jobs, senior bureaucrats and politicians would find ways to avoid carrying out their legislated duties. 

A favourite method of weaseling out from under the requirement to protect agricultural, forests, water and other resources, is to class them as “Special Cases”.  So for instance, though the ALC was mandated to preserve & protect agricultural lands, a category of lands would be classed as Special Cases so that they can be developed in a business-as-usual approach. So new highways, roads, pipelines, pumping stations and prospecting for gravel, oil or minerals could be approved without an application.

This is Running Man in his bureaucratic context – ensuring that the dominant paradigm, which is that economic  demands must always take precedence over over social or ecological needs, prevails.  Briefly stated, the dominant paradigm assumes: 1) the universe revolves around the economic needs of one species (human beings) rather than the needs of the other 1.7 million species; and 2) human beings have a God-given right to consume an unlimited amount of other species and natural ecosystems. This paradigm forms the basis of individual, corporate and government decision making in BC and throughout the world.

The next piece in the series was called Colour Theory and it examined the social impacts of unrestrained capitalism on the lives of workers and others. In this piece, Running Man comes in two sizes: large and powerful, and small and powerless, and expresses relations of dominance. Poorer males accept the domination of wealthy, powerful elites only because the system allows them to dominate females and those further down the economic ladder. The more rigid and repressive the power structure in a society, the greater is the need to encourage subjugation of one group by another. Otherwise, that large pool of disaffected males whose lives are getting harder each year, would turn on the ruling class.

The larger version is the man in the business suit, with a clear acrylic briefcase and a hole where his heart and should should be.  His look is outdated because his character was formed in the 1940s and ‘50s when the current system began.  In a world of diminishing natural capital Running Man must become increasingly fanatical in order to ignore the fact that the system is unsustainable. 

In this piece, the briefcases contains smaller, less powerful naked running men, some of which are dismembered. They represent the social dislocation that occurs when workers are transients, chasing uncertain employment created by increasingly mobile capital.  These smaller figures also appear in a sub-series on the theme of graffiti, discussed in another blog. The title Colour Theory also comments on the ways in which elites set various ethnic groups against each other in order to deflect attention away from the fact that the economic system does not serve the majority’s interests.

The third sculpture in this series of wood & sheet acrylic works is called  All That Glisters (shown below). In this piece,  the briefcases contain bright but worthless baubles, illustrating the distorted values of a corporate culture in which economic wealth is valued over ecological and social health. This piece served as a model for the monumental sculpture of Running Man that was created in & for the City of Kelowna in 2002.

I created a mock-up of the sculpture as it would look onsite.  Here is one of the first images I sent to the City.

I used the above image of All That Glisters, placing it on a pedestal and photo-shopped it into the site. Originally, I had wanted to place the Running Men on a stack of coins & experimented with versions of a stack of coins as shown. The edge of each coin was to be ribbed like a real coin, but the cost of an 8′ pedestal of that diameter and the plasma cutting of the ribbing was prohibitive.

I soon realized that 3 parallel figures did not create a sufficiently stable form, so using cardboard models, I triangulated the figures as shown. I also reduced the pedestal to one coin balanced on a column with CNC routered images of naked running men.  The column referenced ancient columns that featured ancient Running Man successfully defeating his enemies.

Though I did as much work as possible myself, much of the fabrication was done at a fabrication facility called Monashee and other metal shops. Shown below are one of the figures freshly cut out of one 3/8″ sheet of mild steel 8′ x 24′ and being sand-blasted prior to painting..

After the symposium I wanted to experiment with concrete, especially casting in concrete. I cast 3 small running men using a rubber mold, (Smooth-On’s Brush-On 35) and a plaster mother mold to cast the three concrete guys for Off-Centre (below).  The concrete mix I use for casting was just cement & sand (1:3) and water mixed 1:4 with white glue (Polyvinyl acetate).  I got the steel flat stock machine rolled and hung a mossy rock from a steel chain.

Off-Centre depicts Running Man‘s world. The rock represents the earth and around it run the guys in suits. They see the earth as a small part of the economy, an “externality”. As it is external to the economy, it has unquantifiable economic value and therefore isn’t factored in as wealth. This is an inversion of the real world in which the economy is merely one activity by one species on the planet, which is entirely dependent on the earth’s ecosystems for its continuance.

Off-Centre was shown at Peace Arch Park which straddles the Canadian/US border. The rock originally hung from a single chain so that it dangled within the steel rim.  But viewers swung the rock on the chain until it flew up and broke one of the figures.  So a second chain was attached to prevent people from playing with the artwork.  Mindless abuse such as this has had a profound effect on contemporary outdoor art.  In order to withstand the rigours of public interaction, funding bodies favour stolid geometrical shapes designed to withstand oafs that climb on, swing from and have their pictures taken atop any and every artwork in the public realm. This is a far cry from earlier works that overcome the limitations of the material to create sweeping, swooping lines and delicate forms . Nothing can project from public art that will not be snapped off; no small part can be attached that will not be removed; and no paint, powder-coat or other effort to create a durable finish can survive being scuffed and scraped by shoes, pen-knives, stones, skateboards and anything else.

This phenomenon is discussed in more detail in another blog bu suffice it to say that most people have no respect for public art that is unlucky enough to be placed in their path.  Everyone assumes that if something is not a sidewalk, a park bench or a fire hydrant, it must be a climbing apparatus. We in the West need to educate people not to abuse sculpture the same way that people have been coerced into not blowing smoke in the faces of fellow diners or not letting their doggies poop on the sidewalk. In Paris or Rome, every museum and art gallery had groups of school kids sitting in front of works of art learning that these things are an important part of their culture.  As you tour the Tuileries Garden you do not see kids swinging off heroic outstretched arms or using urns as skateboard ramps.

Here in North America we accept that this is will happen and only permit idiot-proof works to be displayed. But even the sturdiest, most well-designed & fabricated work isn’t safe from the public.  An example is a great sculpture called Olas de Viento or “Wind Waves”  by Yvonne Domenge which sat overlooking the beach in Richmond’s Garry Point Park. When I last came across it there were several children climbing through the piece while their Mom attended to her cel phone.  The kids were throwing rocks at the inner surfaces, which is clearly a common activity as the paint finish was chipping off in many places.

Though it is outdoors and relatively unprotected, Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park discourages vandalism of its priceless sculpture collection by unambiguous and continuous signage “Do Not Touch the Sculptures”.  No namby-pamby “please do not climb on the sculptures for your own safety” here.  So no one so much as steps off the foot paths for a closer look.  Every sculpture everywhere should have such signage.

In addition to favouring bullet-proof public art, funding bodies are also reluctant to fund controversial art. Since Kelowna’s bold commissioning of Running Man for its downtown core, there have been no further Running Man commissions. Carved Bears, leaping fish, abstract forms and colourful banners abound and are not likely to generate outraged letters to the editor. And private commissions or purchases of anything in the Running Man series have been noticeably absent as well.  Those who can afford to buy artworks (the big collectors in my town are property developers) don’t want artworks that challenge the status quo.

The last piece in the Running Man series was a maquette for a steel & resin screen called The Many Moods of Running Man. This would entail plasma-cutting running man figures out of 3/8″ steel then filling in the cut-outs with coloured sheet acrylic. I can see it now at a scale of 1:3 or maybe 1:4, astride a grand plaza with a water feature murmuring in the background and the sun casting colourful reflections of Running Man! Below is the maquette in wood and Mylar.

The piece is suggestive of the way corporatism co-opts spontaneous creative cultural products for its own purposes.  So if, for instance,  grass-roots organizations are successful in promoting human rights, ecological awareness or if an art movement or school arises that captures the public imagination, corporations are quick to co-opt this energy to their own ends. Thus the life in every worthwhile cultural development from rap to the “Green” movement is neutralized as a vehicle for profit. 

This was the last piece in the series as I had to admit that buyers weren’t lining up to put a Running Man over the sofa. So for the next 5-6 years I worked on abstract sculptures, creating a two and three dimensional vocabulary of forms that were complete as discreet units and worked together as an overall theme. I also pushed the limits of my technical abilities to design and fabricate works in three dimensions.My thoughts on abstract art have been marshalled in another blog.

The Running Man series challenged the unspoken yet pervasive artistic convention that overtly political art is somehow diminished by its subject-matter. In many ways, I agree that art should operate on several fluidly interconnected levels, rather than be nailed in place. And no matter how strong a point of view an artist intends to project in a piece, viewers see it from their own perspective and interpret artworks in various ways. For instance, most people I spoke to about Running Man assumed it was an almost humorous depiction of how rushed and harried we all are, and didn’t connect it to any larger context. As I had put out a request for baubles, many citizens of Kelowna responded, creating a community connection to the piece.

But at a time in history like the present, when the political spectrum keeps moving farther & farther to the right, as an artist it is difficult to focus on creating new artworks. Yes, performances, galleries and books counter the violence and destruction that is taking place. But these can act as a counter-balance while at the same time trying to engender political awareness. This was the goal of Running Man.

The post Running Man first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.