Think About It

How  safe is your money, in this time of financial crisis (If you have any)?  Politicians won’t give you a solid answer during the mindless clamour  that they call an “election campaign,” but you can look it up on the Internet       

The answer may help people decide how to vote in future and throw some light on the fuzzy idea of “strategic voting.” People who are struggling to survive on minimum wage or welfare have a stake in the issue, because savings and money-flow plus a  global social-justice shareout of commonly-owned  resources (a real shareout, not a token pretence) could yield a higher level of health and safety, which benefits everybody.

It starts with the personal wealth of citizens in prosperous countries, which is under threat just now.   

The Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation  (CDIC), a federal corporation created by Parliament, will replace up to $100,000 for each individual in each bank, if the bank goes broke. But the bank must belong to the CDIC. Not all of them do. Check yours at info@cdic.ca 1-800-461-2342. Stocks, bonds and mutual funds are not covered.  B.C. credit-union accounts are  protected up to $100,000 per individual per credit union. by the  Credit Union Deposit Insurance Corporation (CUDIC).

     Forty-three financial institutions have failed since 1967, but no insured depositor has lost money since CUDIC and CDIC were founded in  1958 and 1967 respectively.  Don’t let that make you feel too cosy, however. The CDIC would not be able to pay for the failure of any of Canada’s 14 biggest banks. Its $1.6-billion reserve is maybe one-third of the amount on deposit.

Canadian banks are among the strongest and most stable in the world. They stayed alive in the l929-1930s market crash and depression, when dozens of U.S. banks were closing. But they are not immune to damage or bankruptcy. The current panic may be worse than the l929-30s event, which was bad enough.

Some oldsters can remember thousands of ragged hungry men riding railway boxcars, and they remember Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett mobilizing police to crack their heads. They had no jobs and no money. Few of them visited banks.

So let’s forget the good old Tory policy for  handling social and financial distress. What about the current declared programs of the Conservatives and Liberals? They seem equally futile.

Libs and Cons are locked into the “free market” fairy-tale. The reality is the manipulated market, rigged for the benefit of insiders. Check The  smartest guys in the room, the amazing rise and scandalous fall of Enron by Bethany Mclean and Peter Elkind.

Enron insiders looted the electrical and gas market and made multi-million-dollar personal fortunes by building a paper skyscraper of self-deals. They faked consumer demand and congestion and exported and re-imported electrical power to drive up the price, with the connivance of Wall Street.

Enron-type greed repeated on a wider scale caused sleazy brokers to overreach, and write deceptive mortgages which were bound to collapse and cause a global disaster. Manipulators piled paper on paper;  regulators and financial authorities condoned such practices. Millions of ordinary citizens — taxpayers,  shareholders, employees, home-owners — were left to suffer losses while manipulators bailed out with fortunes.

Such events are not minor glitches. They are business as usual. Sharp game-players always find a way to shortcut ethics and regulations.

You continue the  campaign to civilize the greedy market. Meanwhile, you set up a parallel public-enterprise structure, as in health-care clinics staffed by salaried professionals. The satisfactions come from the exchange of benefits.

Married couples know how this works. The more pleasure each partner gives the other, the more he/she receives. A Tobin tax on currency trading and stock-and-bond sales could finance a parallel outcome in the wider society. The time is ripe for it.

Long-term strategic voting suggests supporting the NDP, which sponsored a Tobin resolution that passed in the House by a majority in 1999.

gemort@pacificcoast.net

—G.E. Mortimore is a Langford-based writer. His column appears every second week in the Gazette.