Open Letter to Matt Galloway and the CBC:
I am wondering if you could tell me and your listeners why it is that we continue to ask the foxes to comment on the health and well-being of the henhouse.
As I mull this over a bit, I assume it is because we have bought the Tory PR machine propaganda that our financial system remains to a large extent untouched by the 2008 meltdown. We didn’t bail out our banks and thus we don’t need to put into place any regulatory changes.
The only problem is, it’s not true. The hair-splitting is around how one defines a bail-out: if narrowly defined as a direct injection of capital into a bank, the propagandists can say, nope it didn’t happen here. But what did happen here amounts to the same thing: Harper manoeuvred access to $130 billion in liquid cash (through a complicated selling of CMHC-insured assets) for our banks, more than they even asked for.
Yet the province hires the banks to tell us how to clean house and CBC keeps asking bankers to comment on our economy, Tweedledum to the bankers’ Tweedledee, playing into the hands of the 1% of the 1% who have been responsible for an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to our wealthiest – wealth and political power.
The wealth gap is, by some measures, as bad here as it is in the U.S. and our solution is to protect (or not, according to this morning’s objective observer) health care and education while maintaining corporate tax cuts and finding ‘efficiencies’ in all of those areas that are all about the social determinants of health.
This country needs a public broadcaster that searches out the alternative point of view, not simply falling into line, providing yet one more platform for the bankers to continue driving a trajectory of inequity. There is little opposition left in Ottawa; the CBC has a job to do. This is not about balance in a mainstream media environment that has become compliant servants of the 1%.
Photo by Gary Bendig on Unsplash