The (Foul) Deed Done

Here's hoping that the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate won't live to rue the day they succumbed to panic, urged on by a new president whom unkind fate has introduced to the world on a maelstrom of internal and external financial disaster. Compelling the good man to act in haste, whereupon he may eventually, and the world with him, repent in leisure. But perhaps not - for who, after all, is able to foresee the future?

Certainly not all the financial experts wringing their impotent hands in confusion. None of this, after all, was supposed to happen in an atmosphere of trust that the markets should be self-regulating and eventually self-righting, and never behave in a manner that would prove to be inimical to their prolonged good health. They most certainly would, if this were a mechanical and as such trusted mechanism outside the wayward hand of humankind.

Now here is a bill representing 5% of the American GDP, with no guarantees of success, but burdened with much hope, (despite the prospect for failure), now awaiting President Obama's signature. There are simply too many imponderables in the financial collapse, and too few informed 'cures'. The alarm expressed by America's trading partners at the resolute xenophobia expressed in the Buy American clause cautioned the administration of its international obligations.

Of its trading partners none is more invested in future trade and inter-related economies than is Canada, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper has become uncharacteristically morose about the frailty of the partnership. Whatever difficulties the United States faces, so too does Canada for our economies have become so entwined that it becomes difficult to find where one can do without the other. Whither goes the U.S. market, so too goes Canada's.

One and a half billions-worth of goods and services every day pass across the U.S.-Canada border, amounting to a whopping $700-billion in this last year alone. Each country represents the other's largest, most reliable trading partner, a circumstance responsible for seven million American jobs. Canada supplies more energy to the United States than any other country, including fossil fuels.

We're also the largest customer of American exports. Protectionism has proven in the past to be harmful to the world economy. Examples abound, not the least of which was the wrong turn taken during the dirty 30s when the U.S. closed trading ranks in upon itself in a wrong-headed effort to save itself from financial ruin, abandoning its global responsibility and as a result deepening the financial disaster.

The dread 'Buy American' clause has been diluted in its final presentation, but it remains there, an ugly warning to American trading partners in a global economy. We have full evidence of how critical the inter-relationships in this global economy are, and what the enormously deleterious fall-out is, given that the collapse of the U.S. economy has directly impacted on its international financial partners to begin with.

Having been the initiator of a world-wide financial collapse, the United States, in a desperate effort to save itself from any further losses, beggars itself, and in the process abandons its international, and legal responsibilities. Republicans were stridently averse to signing on to this emergency package; viewing with regret and distaste the earlier rescue launched by their Republican president, resulting in failure and waste.

This entire scheme, in its vast, far-reaching and ultimately partisan oneupsmanship, reflects the values and the ethics of the Democratic Party, strenuously taking steps to perform an unequivocal left-turn from the Republican Party's choices and values on the tail of an emergency. Somewhere, in between each party's rigid partisanship, there resides balance and intelligence of choice.

It will be President Obama's unenviable task to struggle to find that balance, beyond mere rhetoric of bipartisanship. But all the best intentions in the world won't help him if he remains strictured by his own party's vigorous self-availment, leading to the other party's resentment and unwillingness to lend itself to a non-partisan unity of meaningful purpose.