Citizens strike back at tax grab
People in Calgary were almost surely not thinking climate disruption or global warming last week when they voted to kill a mass transfusion of their tax dollars to elitist pursuits and the human Olympic industry that glorifies it. Indirectly however, they did address it.
It has been the diversion of tax dollars away from the public well-being, public institutions and public services and into the hands of the economic-political power block that has produced runaway, heavily subsidized growth and consumption. The brilliant actions of Calgarians have been called an “emphatic victory for common sense and grassroots democracy.”
Governments and corporations absolutely abhor talk of budgeting linkage but when our dollars are pilfered by, in this case the Olympic industry, other, often essential services and a whole bunch of people get hurt. That’s what Calgarians understood.
One critical service, environmental protection, usually gets less than two or three per cent of provincial and federal budgets.
The mindless focus on “paper” prosperity, through never ending growth in consumption, has driven the world increasingly to desperation, as evidenced by terribly destructive fires in California, huge immigration waves in Mexico and the Mediterranean, and a biodiversity and extinction crisis like human kind has not ever experienced.
These are all driven by the redirection of public wealth into the hands of select interests. One Calgary columnist described the attempted Olympic tax grab perfectly; it came from “past and future Olympians who seem to think they have some divine right to endless public funding of often marginal sport, business leaders who imagine some future gusher of easy profits, plus those who figure this Olympic gig would be good for a half dozen years of cozy, high-living employment.” We are already seeing, in Alberta, politicians and special interests don their white-knight armor in an effort to suppress the citizens uprising, assuring the elite that all is well. They still have hundreds of millions of citizens’ dollars at their fingertips and one setback will not put a lid on a century long conviction of entitlement.
Extravagant consumption, often disguised as leisure or recreation, has grown to be a major producer of greenhouse gases. It is estimated that individual extravagance in “advanced” nations consumes as much as eight times what we need to meet the requirements of a comfortable life.
A major part of overconsumption, the kind that is producing extreme exploitation of resources and land, is redirection of tax dollars from central governments into urban “growth factories” like Calgary and Vancouver, but hundreds of smaller towns and cities across the continent have been targets.
Without these buckets of cash – $2.5 billion in Calgary’s case – pressure to increase population, ballooning extravagant services, and state-forced infrastructure expansion – would wilt; environmental bio capacity needed to support it would be left on the landscape, where all of us could and would benefit from it.
Encouraging signs of rebellion for democracy are popping up around the world: Thousands of people blocked traffic across London’s famous bridges to protest complicity by governments in climate breakdown and biological extinctions.
On the U.S. West Coast, crab fisherman, who typically fit the “stakeholder” category often used to undermine the majority of citizens, are suing oil companies for climate change that has forced ocean warming and degraded crab environments.
These events indicate that working and thinking people everywhere have more common ground than the ruling elected and corporate elite ever care concede.
British Columbians have made a bold move too. Snuffing Kinder Morgan was a message heard far and wide. Time will tell is we can hold the line. But it’s also time to start lining up another big target.
Dr. Brian L. Horejsi is a wildlife and forest ecologist. He writes about environmental affairs, public resource management and governance and their entrenched biases.