Inequality, Democracy, and Class Warfare

Inequality, Democracy, and Class Warfare By Rolf Auer Written out of respect for Sandy Cameron, Wendy Pederson, and all the fine citizens of the Downtown Eastside. I was reading an e-mail circulated by Wendy Pedersen about the Olympic Village “affordable housing” going for $1,600/mo for a 1-bedroom suite to $2,000/mo for a 3-bedroom suite (and these were subsidized!). She had commented that she wished someone would write that at Woodward’s, some families were paying $1,599/mo for a 3-bedroom suite for so-called “affordable” housing. I got to thinking about the Woodward’s ripple effects (as documented in The Newsletter) and gentrification in general, and it started me thinking about class warfare. The last place I could recall that being discussed was in The Carnegie Newsletter, in an article that Sandy Cameron wrote. So I went through my back issues trying to track down the quote. I didn’t find it until sometime in 2001, and then, to my surprise, found that the quote referenced one of his own works. So I called Sandy, and asked if he had a copy available. He did, and it’s called Taking Another Look At Class. (It’s available from the BC Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 604-801-5121, $3.) We sat talking a while when he gave it to me, and he said, “Equality is a keystone of democracy. Without equality, there can be no democracy.” In one essay titled “A Working Class Vision Vs. A Business Class Nightmare,” those statements are borne out by this paragraph: “The business class ridiculed the poverty and roughness of the workers. Putting people down was a way of excluding them from power. It was ironic that, of the two classes, the working class had the nobler vision: a vision of democracy built on the foundation stone of opportunity.” (p.8) Be not daunted, gentle reader, for this is no giant tome we are dealing with here: it is less than 50 pages long. It would take you one, maybe two hours to read carefully. Yet one of the questions Sandy asks is, “Why is it so hard to talk about class?” (p.3) Certainly Canadians (and the rest of the world) have some sense of class consciousness but because it is discussed so little in the mainstream news media and because the rich and the business classes have virtually expropriated the term “class” for use for themselves (by claiming, for example, that we live in a “classless” society), the term has almost fallen into disuse. When was the last time you saw it mentioned in a newspaper? Consider: the richest 10% of Canadians own 51.3% of Canada’s wealth. The poorest 20% own minus 0.3% of wealth. (p.3) Bear in mind that this book was published in 1999. The figures are probably worse today. It’s to the well-off classes’ advantage to stay out of sight, unidentifiable: that allows them as developers to attack with impunity the Downtown Eastside like sharks sensing bleeding prey in the water. That’s why we’re seeing Terry Hui of Concord Pacific, and Bob Rennie, “the Condo King,” popping up all over the place in the Downtown Eastside: they are members of the business elite, the rich business class, accountable to nobody but themselves. They build developments like Woodward’s and throw out crumbs of social housing hoping that we won’t notice the accompanying class inequalities. It’s a study in contrasts in equality: a large percentage of the citizens of the Downtown Eastside (and indeed, the world) squeaking by on meager amounts of money per month finding it difficult to just stay alive, while those of the super-rich classes have so much that all they can think to do with it is influence some political party. (p.34) Look at the anti-democratic disconnect between our federal government and Canadians as evidenced by the chicanery at the recent G20 conference in Toronto: $2 million for a fake lake. $1 billion for questionable security. This in a time of austerity. What kind of idiots do the federal Tories take us for? And their ridiculous prison legislation. (From Sandy’s book, Canada already has the fourth highest incarceration rate in the Western world. (p.24)) Instead of instituting a national social housing program, the federal Tories are spending $5 billion on new prisons. But that’s not all. They expect the provinces to bear some additional costs as well. (“New jails will cost BC taxpayers up to $1.1 billion,” Jonathon Fowlie, Janice Tibbetts, Vancouver Sun, June 23, 2010) Then this, about two weeks later: (“Province cuts spending, deficit drops $996 million,” Jonathon Fowlie, Vancouver Sun, July 9, 2010). Are you going to try to tell me that the two are unrelated? Maude Barlow, head of the Council of Canadians, spoke at Toronto’s Massey Hall in protest of the G20 meeting. From Democracy Now, July 2, 2010, here’s a little of what she said: “The richest 2% own more than half the household wealth in the world. The richest 10% hold 85% of total global assets and the bottom half of humanity owns less than 1% of the wealth in the world. The three richest men in the world have more money than the poorest 48 countries.” I was doing my own research on related questions. From Murray Dobbin’s book, The Myth of the Good Corporate Citizen, (p.123), “In 1995 there were ‘only’ 357 billionaires. Their net worth was $760 billion, more wealth than the bottom 45 percent of humanity. That is, 357 people in the world owned more combined wealth than 2.7 billion other people.” According to a March 11, 2010 article in The Globe and Mail titled “The New World Order,” there are now over 1,000 billionaires. (Note the themes of the growing inequality, increasing wealth gap.) Some research on the Net showed that their net worth is $3 trillion. I checked with Shannon Daub, Communications Director of the BC Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and she told me that their value was equivalent to the net worth of more than the poorest 3.5 billion human beings (out of 7 billion) on the planet. I recall reading a letter in The Guardian recently: “Do we want riches for some now, and death for all later, or happiness and sustainability for all?” it concluded. (June 25) Locally and globally, indeed, now is a good time for Taking Another Look At Class.