Thank you. Welcome to the sticks.
We have been at this for quite a while and have spoken to many committees over the years. Usually it happens at the end of a mandate.
I am one who is known a little bit for being audacious, so I'm going to look at things not from a micro-economic point of view, which is what you'll get at most of these travelling committees, but from a macro-economic view, if I may.
What I have done, remarkably, is reduce 35 years of economic history into a page and a half, so it shouldn't take too long.
In the early 1970s, capitalism was restructured. After Henry Kissinger met Zhou Enlai, vice-premier of China in 1971, and Richard Nixon shook hands with Mao Tse-Tung in 1972, Nixon then moved the U.S. off the gold standard in 1973. The American dollar became the base currency of world trade and business competition. These events placed the American and Canadian workers in wage competition with the same jobs developing on a much larger and cheaper scale in the third world.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the structural adjustment of capitalism became global, and this saw American and Canadian secondary industries, the job creators and the product makers, seek cheap labour off shore, aided and abetted by government. Consequently, America and Canada, with Canada in tow, exported their secondary industry to low-wage countries and thereby exported their ability to create production jobs at home, the backbone of job creation and nation building.
In order for consumers in North America to have the purchasing power to buy all of these cheap labour products made by the third world, and especially the developing Chinese joint ventures, North American workers had to have access to more money than their stagnant pay cheques provided. So credit cards and, a little later, debit cards were introduced. Presently, everyday things like gas and food, for example, are being credited and debited by the consumer. The future is financing the present.
This financial process channels all the workers' money through the banks, instead of only the money that workers had previously chosen to deposit. Finance markets boomed, financing both the new factories abroad and the developing service-based debt-dependent economy at home. Business expansion and job creation are now dependent on financed capital and/or taxpayers' money through government assistance. Structural adjustment, viewed on a global scale, has all countries dependent on a global supply chain for everyday things.
In the face of a sustained crisis in finance capital, such as the present one, the sustainability of the global supply chain is dependent on the success or failure of the third world worker, who is working in or unemployed from what was once our secondary industry.
It is the view of FAPO that unemployment and impoverishment will affect more income groups in the near term in New Brunswick and in Canada. Once the morphine of government financial injections has worn off, inflation will combine with unemployment, creating the first major crisis of unemployment in this new debt-dependent financial market system in North America.
The ability of government to create jobs by bailing out the financial sector with borrowed money secured by the debt-ridden taxpayer, as opposed to assisting the long lost productive sector, is throwing good money after bad. It is a recipe for disaster that sees a future financing the present, instead of the present financed by the past.
A little bit about FAPO, the Fredericton Anti-Poverty Organization. Established in 1983, FAPO is New Brunswick's largest poor people's organization, helping many thousands of people each year throughout central New Brunswick maintain their standard of living through our recycling and distribution programs.
FAPO does not receive funding assistance of any kind from government, organizations, associations or individuals. Our three facilities are open seven days a week.
Thank you.