More on failures of imagination

From James Laxer:

...

In the U.S., the Bush administration, in its last chaotic hours, is just hoping the bad movie will go away. In Ottawa, Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty (whose first instinct was to sell the CN Tower) are praying that Canada’s oil patch will save them (haven’t they noticed that the U.S. economic crash has already hit Fort McMurray between the eyes.) They want to play the old game of competitive deflation in which Canada lowers labour costs and government spending in the expectation that we can still export enough to the U.S. to keep our economy humming.

The Harperites don’t realize that this downturn is not like the others. It is, at bottom, the outcome of the shrinking role of the United States in the global economy. This time the U.S. market is not going to save us. The Americans are awash in red ink that is spreading in all directions----governmental, corporate and personal.

Canada needs its own large scale and coordinated governmental strategy for staving off collapse. Time is of the essence

When rapid systemic change happens, the established institutions fail to respond accurately in part because they are products of the failing system. The mental monoculture of our neoliberal, US-focused leaders means they may well wake up to sudden irrelevance in the coming months. There's irony in the idea that the people who credit themselves for economically vanquishing Soviet Socialism should find themselves in the same position as their former foe - by their own hand.