What the hell happened? What did the experts make happen? Most peoples’ wages have been falling in real terms since the 80’s, job security nil, and longer and longer costly commutes to work, while the go go ga ga get some rich were pulling it in for twenty years. Hell, all that wealth, there must be a ‘real economy’ growing right? Who wouldn’t think that sooner or later the majority of the workers would get somewhat of a leg up in the richest country of the world? With the constant bombardment from kindergarten through the universities, daily in all our media, and from both parties, it would be near impossible not to hope that the 80’s and 90’s were just a lull in the transition to a 21st century economy. And what ‘american’ could escape the logic that achieving home ownership, after the 30 years mortgage payoff, would not enter ones family with pride into the ‘american’ status of success and security? Did anyone of us ever hear from all the experts that home ownership did not guarantee increased wealth to pass to the kids? That it is maybe not ‘common sense’ to expect the value of your house to rise…forever? Especially while the majority’s incomes are falling? Who is going to keep buying this higher and higher priced real estate if the majority are becoming poorer?
From 1980 to 2006 the richest 1% nearly tripled their after-tax percentage of our nation’s income, while the bottom 90% of America has seen their share drop over 20%. Internal Revenue Service figures show that almost half of our country’s income goes to the richest 10% of Americans (those making at least $283,000 a year). The distribution of wealth is even more skewed, with the richest 1% of Americans owning more than 90%. In 1955, the richest tier paid an average 51.2 percent of their income in taxes under a progressive federal income tax that included loopholes. By 2006, the richest paid only 17.2 percent of their income in taxes. In 1955, the proportion of federal income from corporate taxes was 33 percent; by 2003 it decreased to 7.4 percent. Today, the top taxpayers pay the same percentage of their incomes in taxes as those making $50,000 to $75,000, although they doubled their share of total U.S. income.
Could the upper class, the politicians, all the members of the corporate media really be so unpatriotic, so dishonest to purposely delude the entire middle class and most of the working class?
Was there really no substance whatsoever to all the promises? Most working people thought the only way as an in was to buy a home and bank on increased property value.
The problem was, and is, property value for 150 years has never been that much ahead of inflation except for prime coastal areas and certain urban areas, and the problem is that no one spoke that truth in the media… Without rises in wages, a continuing increase of above subsistence level paying jobs, and a cycle of in-country increase in manufacturing jobs and trade in goods, there is no ‘increasing wealth’ in any nation in history…. for the majority of the people. So no ‘increased wealth’ to meet the skyrocketing increase of property costs. Rising property values don’t produce anything except cash for flippers that flip at the right time at the right place, and developers that zoom in and out in a year. Rising property values have never done any good for any society in any industrialized nation. …only the rich profit, while half the country has to move more, urban communities are torn asunder, wages drop as capital investment is directed to the quicker fast buck of real estate, while police costs, fire department costs, water and power infrastructure costs, and highway costs raise taxes on the population to accommodate more gated communities and more less dense suburban developments.
The problem too was that Clinton and the Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan saw that priming the economic pump on property values was a way out of a recession sure to come with the hyper bubble of investment capital in the dot.com late 90’s. And the Bush administration along with Greenspan primed it harder after that bubble burst. (1) This coming depression is not a problem of millions of subprime mortages being given to people that would later default; the problem was not workers signing papers. If all those subprime mortages had not been bundled into triple A rated paper and shuffled around, it would not have been a pyramid scheme…but simply 20 or so million risky transparent loans.(2)
The worldwide double barrel downturn we have today was caused by unregulated greed by the financial wizards. The experts that control the media, The IMF and World Bank, the politicians, the purse strings of the world, who are also incidentally tied in with all the major arms manufacturers ….are the people responsible. Yes, the ruling class of the world. They are bloated with arrogance and denial of responsibility. It’s all one big expert club with Hollywood type stars, the smartest guys in the room, appearing on magazine covers arms folded looking so superior and smug– camera angle up to increase their height and stature. It’s one big superstar expert go-to-guys party. And all the people of the world, who never engaged in property speculation, always followed the laws, went to work, and paid taxes, suddenly get a boot in the face.
Obama’s appointees are lying like Fox News: “Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke seems to also feel that cautious optimism. “I do think that we will get it stabilized and we will see the recession coming to an end probably this year,”
Then on April 14th “Bernanke also defended the extraordinary actions the Fed is taking to support the housing market, saying home prices have already given back much of the gains they made during the boom and now risk over correcting to the downside.”
Well on April 16, 2009 by Reuters ”U.S. foreclosure activity leaped 46 percent in March from a year earlier, hitting a record high as programs stunting the torrid pace of failing mortgages expired, RealtyTrac reported on Thursday……”
April 16th “Recent favorable data on auto sales, home construction and consumer spending are “tentative signs that the sharp decline in economic activity may be slowing,” Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said. The Fed will raise interest rates and use other policy tools to “drain excess liquidity” when the time comes to turn from economic stimulus to heading off inflation, he said. Reuters (14 Apr.) What the hell is he talking about?
You can go to the financial sites and see panic and predictions of a depression.
Moody’s is predicting at least 283 large USA corporations of teetering,(3) Bloomburg.com has had several articles (4), as world production shrinks at an amazingly fast rate. U.S. employers shed 663,000 jobs in March, and the jobless rate now stands at its highest in a quarter-century. Since the recession began in December 2007, a net total of 30 million jobs have disappeared. People have not been on unemployment this long since the 1930s.
But the media counterbalances any facts leaking out with headlines such as this: “More Quickly Than It Began, The Banking Crisis Is Over” Apr. 10, 2009 Time.com
This is so irresponsible. People have to know a crisis is coming in order to prepare whatever way they can. This irresponsibility will lead to millions more just hoping, and believing, and thus millions more psychologically and economically completely unprepared. “Last week, a Zogby poll found that a majority of the public believes the press made things worse by reporting on the economic collapse. Not only is that blaming the messenger, it also overlooks the fact that much of the media was complicit in the crisis by not covering the forces that caused the collapse when it might have done some good.” (Mediachannel’s News Dissector Danny Schechter is making a film about Wall Street based on his book Plunder (newsdissector.com/plunder)
For those without a dime to their name as far as debt versus income goes, they know pretty much that the trough will be years long. But to add hope and lies to the fluff brains of tens of millions sky god believers that are still able to pay mortgages and still working full-time, is to court worse upheaval and despair. Most of these kinds of believers will react when the truth hits by looking for a scapegoat other than at the gods holding the pillars of their life-long belief system of fakery.
I was oh so ‘american’ hoping Obama would jump past Clinton. For the one hope I held out was that he having spent a relatively brief time within the hierarchy of the corporate run Democrat leadership was the one possible winner that you could ‘hope’ would break from orthodoxy in such an obvious time of crisis, imperial hubris, and odious rank fraud. That he and Michelle, no matter how conservative they are, given their backgrounds would be able to actually sympathize in at least a half hearted way with the humanitarian crisis a depression would bring here, and then domino across the world. I saw from the beginning in easy internet searches where his real money was coming from, contrary to liberal and right headlines and democrat party Leninists, but still I hoped, and prayed (j/k)…And hell, it is the first time in my memory to have a president and wife who actually seemed….well…normal.
Within in one month, this hope was all dispelled. Not only had he appointed the very thieves and whores from previous administrations to every economic and military post, but he began mouthing their platitudes like a robot, with a lawyerly paternalistic ‘look’ before every sentence. As if any of us need to ‘look’ any harder at the plan of handing trillions of tax payer guaranteed free money, loans, and no interest lifelines to financial institutions that represent all that is wrong with the economics of the world, and now obviously represent the trigger and even, the bomb that has exploded. He is carrying out republican like economics, that are even to the right of the majority of his entire party base, not to mention against the vast majority of the half of the population that doesn’t bother to vote.
Moyers: … Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?
Black: Absolutely.
Moyers: You are.
Black: Absolutely, because they are scared to death. . .
Former Reagan-era S&L regulator and current University of Missouri Professor Bill Black was on Bill Moyers’ Journal and detailed the magnitude of what he called the on-going massive fraud:
Black: Geithner is charging, is covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it’s going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they’re allowing all the banks to report that they’re not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can’t be true. It can’t be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they’re fine. These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed, not because…
Moyers: What do you mean?
Black: Well, Geithner has, was one of our nation’s top regulators, during the entire subprime scandal, that I just described. He took absolutely no effective action. He gave no warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI warning that there was an epidemic of fraud. All this pig in the poke stuff happened under him. So, in his phrase about legacy assets. Well he’s a failed legacy regulator. . . .
Moyers: Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?
Black: Absolutely.
Moyers: You are.
Black: Absolutely, because they are scared to death. . . . What we’re doing with — no, Treasury and both administrations. The Bush administration and now the Obama administration kept secret from us what was being done with AIG. AIG was being used secretly to bail out favored banks like UBS and like Goldman Sachs. Secretary Paulson’s firm, that he had come from being CEO. It got the largest amount of money. $12.9 billion. And they didn’t want us to know that.
….Moyers: Even though Goldman Sachs had a big vested stake.
Black: Massive stake. And even though he had just been CEO of Goldman Sachs before becoming Treasury Secretary. Now, in most stages in American history, that would be a scandal of such proportions that he wouldn’t be allowed in civilized society. This is exactly what former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson warned about in his vital Atlantic article: “that the finance industry has effectively captured our government
– a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises.” This is the key passage where Johnson described the hallmark of how corrupt oligarchies that cause financial crises then attempt to deal with the fallout: Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique — the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.”
The Onion had a hilarious Photoshop ala The Shining of the two so damn cute Obama girls in the white house seeing the evil bush twins as ghosts. A not funny, and more appropriate ‘vision’ would be seeing their parent’s bodies with the heads of Hillary and Bill.
The liberals say Obama inherited a disaster. True. But it was not just a Bush disaster. It was a two party fiesta. (5) Rubin, part of Obama’s team, after leaving Clinton’s TeamDeRegulate, made tens of millions of dollars a year at Citibank who ‘we’ are now bailing out. Rubin? An extortionist. A thief of public trust in democracy. Lawrence Summers is an unabashed deregulator, he with Clinton pushed the Yeltsin takeover in Russia in order to sell off everything there….and he is a follower of the clueless ex Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. “When Alan Greenspan appeared before Congress two months ago, he admitted that he had discovered a “flaw” in his theory of how markets operate. The former Fed chief was referring to his belief that financial institutions could regulate themselves and that investment bankers and hedge fund managers could be trusted to uphold the “honor system”. (M.Whitney. counterpunch.org). Greenspan, who as a young idiot licked the high heels of Ayn Rand the free-market sociopath, can’t be blamed. Blaming one or even twenty individuals running the casino suggests a shuffling of personnel will solve the problem. Every politician that has accepted millions of dollars from financial institutions, developers, etc (which includes at least 70% of both parties) should be in prison. A citizen led RICO trial, that is a racketeering charge, would find them all guilty.
Not only is Obama doing the wrong thing, he and all his peoples’ policies are pushing us faster to a depression, and thus to a faster global economic catastrophe. Only McCain, or Sarah Palin or Joe the Plumber could have been worse. Oh boy,what choices! Mentally incapacitated neo fascists, or well mannered and articulate jockeys slapping the asses of the horses of doom. The president and his experts are borrowing trillions against future tax payments not to create massive rail building projects, not to create a green solar and wind building core not even one tenth of what Germany and Denmark have done relative to population and GDP.
“And now that it’s here, and we have to listen to talk of “restructuring” and “automobiles of the future” for the next month or so, I urge you to keep in mind just one historical fact: At the beginning of World War II, the entire U.S. auto industry, then the largest industrial manufacturing center in the world, completely converted from making passenger cars to military vehicles, including tanks and airplanes, in less than one year. One year. They went from producing 4 million cars in 1941 to virtually none in 1942-1944, as they pumped out a quarter million aircraft, along with tens of thousands of tanks and additional military vehicles.” Gordon Clark is the former national Executive Director of Peace Action
Not to subsidize manufacturing or even an undesirable massive public works program ala Eisenhower’s highway building projects, or FDR’s huge dam and suburbanization FHA programs in relative terms, but handing the money directly to the thieves, and for propping up completely toxic assets in the hope that the same wizards of dooms will start a new version of trickle down. Madness. It doesn’t take an expert to realize that if you want a capitalist economy to keep growing, or even exist at static state, there needs to be money in the form of wages to be spent by the population. To buy things.
“We hear a lot of chatter about a “credit crunch” being at the root of our economic woes — that banks aren’t lending to otherwise qualified individuals and businesses. The truth, however, is that before the housing (and stock) markets crashed, the average American household already had 20 percent more in debt than it earned in a year.
Already deeply in the hole, when the markets crashed, consumers stopped spending, and that’s fueled millions of layoffs, led to a mountain of foreclosures, and left state budgets decimated. The connection between decades of false prosperity, the piles of household debt that resulted, and the degree to which that left American families vulnerable to the bubble’s crash is not difficult to see.” Joshua Holland, AlterNet
It’s hard to fathom how our relatively small population compared to the world, how my lifestyle and yours can be part of any engine of consumption that which when broken, could affect so much of the ‘third world’. Our relatively minute wealth/spending power via wages and debt times say 250 million (leaving out the upper and uber rich) is more than one third of the worlds’ countries’ gross national product; which is of course an inhuman rote economists’ figure of ‘production’ but we have to grasp basic numbers to get an overall picture of disparity and responsibility. ‘We’ do buy so many imports that this recession is already causing havoc. In 2008 China exported 337 billion dollars of goods to the USA. (uscb.gov). Hillary Clinton was being honest when at a recent speech in China “Clinton explained to the Chinese media, “We have to incur more debt … the US needs the investment in Treasury bonds to shore up its economy to continue to buy Chinese products.” Current corporate world (“free”) trade pacts actually would make it illegal to use only American steel, technology and only ‘american’ workers to build everything. Obama admitted this after a momentary flub about building it all here. And with no real serious examination by any of the global corporate protectionist people from Obama to everyone he has appointed, even a massive rail and solar project would rely mostly on import. Hardly job stimulating as proposed and hardly a track to put money in the consumer’s pocket. The steel and tooled parts for most building here will come from abroad which not only means there is no real plan to rebuild light or heavy manufacturing here so-called green or otherwise, but also means any so-called green project is heavily negated by the fact of petroleum costs to transport these extremely heavy resources, and that the countries they will come from have industries vastly more ‘dirty’ than even the USA’s. You can imagine what the environmental costs are to transport say one million tons of steel and parts from China compared to what it would cost by rail over land here in the USA. And how the disparity of wages (China $10 a day? -USA $10 or more an hour) makes no sense in a ‘bailout’ for USA people.
“New data about China’s economy is providing further evidence that the global recession is making the once mighty Chinese export machine sputter badly. After falling 17.5% in January, exports plunged a further 25.7% year-on-year in February, the government announced on Mar. 11. The drop was worse than what most analysts expected; a Merrill Lynch research note described it as “an ugly number.” (business week3/09)
“The about-face reflects a U-turn in exports in Northeast Asia. Shrinking consumer demand in the West triggered a sharp fall in China’s exports, creating a turbocharged knock-on effect in its neighbors. China is the No. 1 trader for all three, and recently their shipments to China have been plummeting even faster than they had been growing over the past several years. In January exports fell 46% in Japan and 44% for Taiwan, while in Korea exports fell 26% in the first two months of this year..”(businessweek3/09)
“Worldwide, industrial production has ground to a halt. Goods are stacking up, but nobody’s buying; the Washington Post reports that “the world is suddenly awash in almost everything: flat-panel televisions, bulldozers, Barbie dolls, strip malls, Burberry stores.” A Hong Kong-based shipping broker told The Telegraph that his firm had “seen trade activity fall off a cliff. Asia-Europe is an unmitigated disaster.”
The Economist noted that one can now ship a container from China to Europe for free — you only need to pick up the fuel and handling costs — but half-empty freighters are the norm along the world’s busiest shipping routes. Global airfreight dropped by almost a quarter in December alone; Giovanni Bisignani, who heads a shipping industry trade group, called the “free fall” in global cargo “unprecedented and shocking.” Joshua Holland, AlterNet
What about health care? To most, it would not seem like a topic for an economic ‘nation or global wealth’ discussion. It is merely a desire of most Americans to have a Medicare type program for all (70% say so, over 90% of democrat voters say so). A so-called single payer system where profit is taken out of the hospital and doctor and nurse citizen relationship. It is a topic for peoples’ better wellness as they say. Well there are two reasons to point out how insidiously corporate both parties are, and anti-citizen.
1) Numerous studies have shown that 10 to 14,000 people DIE a year due to lack of health care. Single payer would stop that for the most part. There are over 100,000 deaths a year due to wrongly administered drugs, hospital caused infections etc. Single payer would obviously fix much of that, since doctors would no longer have a limit on time spent with patients, since nurse to patient ratio would be raised, and since a corporation would not be looking at bottom line supply-chain costs.
2)Money and Jobs! What does the ‘change’ administration say? ‘Managed’ care and increase of coverage with massive subsidies to some of the most profitable corporations on the planet. It looks like the government is going to subsidize them with over $100 billion dollars a year, just to bribe them to cover more people. The economics of this are as absurd as the loans to the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) pranksters, though on a smaller scale. But keep in mind the $8 billion figure for rail building in the stimulus bill (which if on the needed scale would cut down on pollution massively, employ tens of millions, cut down on the hundred thousand traffic deaths a year etc.) …….. when you read this:
Public citizen.org “Our fragmented health care system fails to cover nearly 50 million Americans, and tens of millions more cannot afford the care they need. A single-payer national health insurance program, “Medicare for all,” can provide coverage for every American at no additional cost by saving over $300 billion a year from eliminating wasteful administrative spending.”
“Where is the money going? An estimated 15 cents of each private U.S. health care dollar goes simply to shuffling the paperwork. The administrative costs for our patched-together system of HMO’s, insurance companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospitals, and government programs are nearly double those for single-payer Canada. It’s not because Americans are inherently less efficient than Canadians — our publicly funded Medicare system spends under five cents per budget dollar on administrative overhead. And the Veterans Administration, which functions like Britain’s socialized medical system, spends less per patient but consistently outranks private providers in patient satisfaction and quality of care. But in the private sector, profits and excessive CEO pay are added to the paperwork and bureaucracy. The U.S. pharmaceutical industry averages a 17 percent profit margin, against three percent for all other businesses. In the health care industry, million-dollar CEO pay packages are the rule, with some executives pulling down more than $30 million a year in salary and amassing billion-dollar stock option packages. Studies conducted by the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Budget Office, and various states have concluded that a universal, single-payer health care system would cover everyone -including the millions currently without insurance – and still save billions. The United States spends by far the most on health care per person — more than twice as much as Europe, Canada, and Japan which all have some version of national health insurance. Yet we are near the bottom in nearly every measure of our health.”
“California nurses association: ”January 14, 2009 Medicare for All (Single-Payer) Reform Would Be Major Stimulus for Economy with 2.6 Million New Jobs, $317 Billion in Business Revenue, $100 Billion in Wages
Establishing a national single-payer style healthcare reform system would provide a major stimulus for the U.S. economy by creating 2.6 million new jobs, and infusing $317 billion in new business and public revenues, with another $100 billion in wages into the U.S. economy, according to the findings of a groundbreaking study released today. It may be viewed at www.CalNurses.org. The number of jobs created by a single-payer system, expanding and upgrading Medicare to cover everyone, parallels almost exactly the total job loss in 2008.”
So a program, that most Americans want, and would save tens of thousands of lives, and create millions of jobs, and save billions….is “off the table”. Nancy Pelosi, the second strongest democrat in the country, the representative of one of the most progressive districts in the country recently said at a meeting, “I don’t want to hear about single payer anymore. It’s not going to happen.”
The housing bubble provided in equity loan spending (as millions of homeowners borrowed against inflated real estate values) over $800 billion into our economy since the recession of the dot com bust. What ‘flipping properties’ that destroys community and neighborhoods but fuels profit bubbles even more, ….created in wealth for a small minority, I have no stomach to research. This was a calculated and insider plan to keep the American consumption pump primed and to avoid the real necessity of a less deeper burst after the 90’s bubble of speculation; a spoke in the turning wheel . Recently it has been revealed many of these banks/investment/mortgage companies had a blacklist of over 100,000 real estate assessors; who calculate property values. Since ‘they’ were a bit too truthful; good at their job.
The imitation of USA investment schemes and property over valuation scattered over the world. Mortgages, ‘takes’ and ‘calls’, and literal financial debt junk were bundled and jumped from place to place. A worldwide casino. Iceland ‘liberalized’ its financial markets a few years ago, became a huge center for funding continental euro property holdings and corporate raiding and is now bankrupt. Every European nation (a place where ‘we’ think governments are more cautious and banks and financial finagling is more transparent and regulated) has seen it necessary to spend billions of dollars to prop up their banks and some have nationalized them, because they too bought into the casino.
The new government that promised change has now guaranteed over 12 trillion (not a typo!(5b) in a foolish attempt to keep real estate values from dropping more, to prop up paper toxic assets, to reinstall ‘confidence’ in the hearts of crooks, to continue an unregulated pyramid schemes, to continue two occupations of nations that did nothing to us, nor were any threat to invade other nations, and feather the 800 thread count of the beds of the gilded lives of psychotic gamblers who see no moral or ethical repose to stop their destruction and thievery. The relatively low number of billions of dollars in the stimulus bill, which is parsed as a creator of millions of jobs, won’t even match the job loss of the last six months of the Bush administration.
The world threat the USA depression will cause: Mexico, received nearly $24 billion in remittances from immigrants in the USA in 2007….it has already dropped by a billion dollars since. Richard Drefus on Alternet says, ….” a story in the Washington Post by Karin Brulliard that opens the door, a crack at least, on the effects of the worldwide economic crisis on the most vulnerable: people who live in Africa and other “least developed” countries. …”a plunge in global trade has slashed demand for the copper used to construct electronics and houses in the United States and Asia. That is prompting mines here to slow and shut, limiting tens of thousands of Zambians’ access to schooling, health care and regular meals.
And it’s continent-wide: “Africa’s resource-fueled economies have grown steadily in recent years, improving the lives of millions of people. Now, as prices drop for
Botswana’s diamonds, Chad’s oil and Tanzania’s cotton, a crisis that began in the rich world is threatening to drive millions more into poverty, according to the World Bank, and raising the specter of unrest. The article points out that the IMF has identified 26 countries as “highly vulnerable” to the crisis, half in Africa.
“The problem is not just a collapse in commodities prices. Foreign investment is receding in countries such as South Africa and Kenya. Remittances are dropping in Liberia. …”
I’m sure well meaning fools in the rich countries will offer a “ good, the depression here will offer a chance for Africa to throw off the chains of the World Bank, the IMF and start taking care of their own land sustainably”.
No doubt commondreams.org will have some idiotic ‘what if’ article soon. As in, “we” can all return to the land! The land there, as nearly everywhere else, is controlled by militaristic states, owned by proxy African dictators, or by politically powerful multinational conglomerates, all of whose rights to starve and exploit are backed up by the top 20 nations’ militaries. And the process is accelerating… “In an interview with IPS, Hoering said that the land grab in Africa became evident in 2008 as a consequence of the recent run to so-called bio fuels and the price inflation and scarcity of food. Although the investments are also targeting fertile land in other areas of the world, sub-Saharan Africa appears to be these investors’ main destination. The reasons are multiple. On the one hand, ‘‘Africa possesses enormous land reserves,’’ Hoering stated. ‘‘According to the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization, only about 14 percent of the suited land in the continent is presently cultivated.’’ In addition, he said, many African governments are willing to allow this land grab to happen in their territories. A list of the land grab investments of 2008 have been put together by the Barcelona-based NGO GRAIN, based on corporate reports. It confirms that several industrialized countries, like Japan and Sweden, rapidly growing developing nations, like China and India, and oil-rich countries, especially from the Arab Gulf, and even Libya, are buying large estates in Africa.”(IPS The Second Scramble for Africa Starts by Julio Godoy)
Most of the world has become a veritable police state for corporate global rape and profit. It is even ‘illegal’ for most first and third world states to institute tariffs and trade barriers to protect sustainable agriculture in any reasonable large-scale manner.
“As many as 28,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide [more like 100,000-ed] over the last decade as a result of debt incurred from failed GM crops and competition with subsidized US crops…… The KIA allows for the grab of India’s seed sector by Monsanto, of its trade sector by giant agribusiness ADM and Cargill, and its retail sector by Wal-Mart. Though the contours of KIA have been kept so secret that neither senior Indian politicians nor the scientific community know its details, it is clear that Prime Minister Singh has agreed to sacrifice India’s agriculture sector to pay for US concessions in the nuclear field. Vandana Shiva translates, “These are twin programs about a market grab and a security alignment.” Burns announced that while the nuclear deal is the cutting edge, what the US is really seeking is agricultural markets and real estate markets, “to take over the land of people, not through a market mechanism, but using the state and an old colonial law of land acquisition to grab the land by force.”
“Through KIA, Monsanto and the US have asked for unhindered access to India’s gene banks, along with a change in India’s intellectual property laws to allow patents on seeds and genes, and to dilute provisions that protect farmers’ rights…… At the same time KIA has paved the way for Wal-Mart’s plans to open five hundred stores in India, starting in August 2007, which will compound the outsourcing of India’s food supply and threaten 14 million small family venders with loss of livelihood.
“This is not about ‘free trade,’” Shiva explains, “Today’s trade system, especially in agriculture, is dishonest, and dishonesty has become a war against farmers. It’s become a genocide.” -from project censored.
For anyone to label a coming worldwide depression as a ‘chance’ for liberation is not only showing themselves foolish and court jester, but also a rube for an even bigger takeover. Fascism fills despair voids, when there is no libertarian anarchist/socialist left bottom up mass resistance. Bolivia, Chiapas, Oaxaca, Argentina are happening because of years long organization, not from an ‘investment’ void, or abandonment by ‘capital’. The anarchist Spanish CNT and it’s left socialist allies were able to resist the brutal and in-those-times high-tech onslaught of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini for three years because they were organized militant to the core in nearly every facet of the land. And had worked on that for over 50 years.
Historically we can look at the multitude of dictatorships across the world, most supported by the USA, where more misery, famine, and mass murder take place as their economies hit downturns. Typing over wires about ‘what ifs’ is a thoroughly worthless American masturbation.
Back to home. Michael Hudson at counterpunch.org
The Free Market, Financial Style-How the Scam Works
“Newspaper reports seem surprised at how high banks are bidding for the junk mortgages that Treasury Secretary Geithner is now bidding for, having mobilized the FDIC and Fed to transfer yet more public funds to the banks. Bank stocks are soaring – thereby bidding up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, as if the “financial industry” really were part of the industrial economy. Why are the very worst offenders – Bank of America (now owner of the Countrywide crooks) and Citibank the largest buyers? As the worst abusers and packagers of CDOs, shouldn’t they be in the best position to see how worthless their junk mortgages are? That turns out to be the key! Obviously, the government has failed to protect itself – deliberately, intentionally failed to do so – in order to let the banks pull off the following scam. Here’s the rip-off as I see it. For an outlay of $750,000, the bank rids its books of a mortgage worth $2 million, for which it receives $4,250,000. It gets twice as much as the junk is worth. The more the banks holding junk mortgages pay for this toxic waste, the more the government will pay as part of its 85 per cent. So the strategy is to overpay, overpay, and overpay. Paying 15 per cent is a small price to pay for getting the government to put in 85 per cent to take the most toxic waste off your books. The free market at work, financial style.”
And William Greider in The Nation 3/09
“The White House executed a nifty two-step this week to re-educate the public and deflect anger. On Tuesday Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner relaunched the massive bailout of banking and finance. Knowing how unpopular this is with the people at large, Geithner followed on Thursday with his “sweeping” plans to re-regulate the bankers and financiers. Whenever official plans are called “sweeping,” it indicates that they really, really mean it this time. Most Americans are not financial experts. It’s very difficult, nearly impossible, for normal mortals to sort through the dense policy talk and conflicting opinions to figure out if the rhetoric of reform is real. Confusion is widespread in the land. Most Americans want to believe this president is leading us out of the swamp, but how can they know? I say, trust your gut feelings. They are as reliable as the learned experts.
Many Americans want to believe because they think that returning to “normal” means their decimated 401(k) accounts might somehow recover the 30-40 percent that disappeared during the past year. If it takes monster bank bailouts to restore stock-market prices, let’s have bailouts. Good luck with that….. After the crash of 1929, there were occasional stock rallies, followed by fierce bears. It took twenty-five years (until 1954) for the Dow to regain its old peak. Another way to assess the Obama plan for reform is ask: who likes it? The verdict was swift and sure after Geithner’s twin announcements. Wall Street likes it. The blueprint for regulatory reforms was applauded by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association; the American Insurance Association; and the Private Equity Council, the trade group for the major private funds that will get public money and backup insurance to buy the banking system’s rotten assets. This could be born-again patriotism. Or it could be the animal appetites of financiers smelling gorgeous opportunity for returns. Everything being done to rescue and restore the old order gets in the way of creating something truly new and valuable for the future. Those of us throwing logs in the path of the bailouts are dismissed as naysayers or worse, but the financial titans are trying to foreclose just solutions by stampeding Congress and the president to adopt ill-considered ideas. If Wall Street gets its way, the “reforms” may further consolidate power and ratify a corporate state–a grotesque hybrid that combines the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism. The reform ideas announced by Geithner would plant the seeds by creating a “systemic risk” regulator, presumably the Federal Reserve, to oversee the largest, most politically adept banks and financial firms that qualify as “too big to fail.” Capitalism, with its inherent tendency toward monopoly, would have the means to monopolize democracy.”
NYTimes:Paul Krugman(3/09) “But it has become increasingly clear over the past few days that top officials in the Obama administration are still in the grip of the market mystique. They still believe in the magic of the financial marketplace and in the prowess of the wizards who perform that magic. The market mystique didn’t always rule financial policy. America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business. Banks attracted depositors by providing convenient branch locations and maybe a free toaster or two; they used the money thus attracted to make loans, and that was that…. And the financial system wasn’t just boring. It was also, by today’s standards, small. Even during the “go-go years,” the bull market of the 1960s, finance and insurance together accounted for less than 4 percent of G.D.P. The relative unimportance of finance was reflected in the list of stocks making up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which until 1982 contained not a single financial company. After 1980, of course, a very different financial system emerged. In the deregulation-minded Reagan era, old-fashioned banking was increasingly replaced by wheeling and dealing on a grand scale. The new system was much bigger than the old regime: On the eve of the current crisis, finance and insurance accounted for 8 percent of G.D.P., more than twice their share in the 1960s. By early last year, the Dow contained five financial companies – giants like A.I.G., Citigroup and Bank of America…… Underlying the glamorous new world of finance was the process of securitization. Loans no longer stayed with the lender. Instead, they were sold on to others, who sliced, diced and puréed individual debts to synthesize new assets. Subprime mortgages, credit card debts, car loans – all went into the financial system’s juicer. Out the other end, supposedly, came sweet-tasting AAA investments. And financial wizards were lavishly rewarded for overseeing the process. But the wizards were frauds….”
To show how naked these politically appointed experts are in their odious greed while claiming to save the middle class (doing the opposite) you could look at a capitalist success story here in the USA as far as the base idea of savings, loans and solvency of financial institutions goes: ,
“Eighty five million Americans belong to credit unions which are not-for-profit cooperatives owned by their members who are depositors and borrowers. Your neighborhood or workplace credit union did not invest in these notorious speculative derivatives nor did they offer people “teaser rates” to sign on for a home mortgage they could not afford. Ninety one percent of the 8,000 credit unions are reporting greater overall growth in mortgage lending than any other kinds of consumer loans they are extending. They are federally insured by the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) for up to $250,000 per account, such as the FDIC does for depositors in commercial banks.
They are well-capitalized because of regulation and because they do not have an incentive to go for high-risk, highly leveraged speculation to increase stock values and the value of the bosses’ stock options as do the commercial banks.
Credit Unions have no shareholders nor stock nor stock options; they are responsible to their owner-members who are their customers. According to Mike Schenk, an economist with the Credit Union National Association……credit unions are not making as much surplus and “their asset quality has deteriorated a bit. But that’s the beauty of the credit union model. Credit unions can live with those conditions without suffering dire consequences,” he asserted.” (Ralph Nader 2/09)
Isn’t it funny you don’t read this in headlines next to ‘banks need bailouts”? That credit unions are still extending credit, and are basically solvent even in a recession? That no politicians are suggesting ‘we’ extend this model to the entire banking industry?
That the money used to bail out the too big to fail investment gambling houses was actually enough to nationalize them? That the bailouts to the car companies was actually enough to buy them and nationalize them also? Funny, over one hundred banks have been nationalized in the past year; that is, failed banks taken over by the FDIC. Didn’t read that either huh? Only the uber-rich get to keep playing. Cuz their ‘smartest men in the room’ run the whole goddamn government. None of us ever chose to gamble with our jobs, our taxes, our lives, our homes…and none of us speculated in property. And now we bear the brunt of the game. And now the government is going to make us pay, somehow, for the rich’s follies. Remember all that talk in the 90’s about balancing the budget, cutting welfare, for better prosperity in the future? Not enough to build mass transit, affordable housing, or medical care. But trillions NOW for the scum that raised to the top.
Caught under the carriage of a runaway train, jam the gearbox; you didn’t get no ticket to ride….
An economic depression is a fall over a cliff without a benevolent government throwing down the ropes and climbing gear. It is a steady sludge through a morass of despair. It is years of counting down from hundred dollar bills, or twenties to quarters and singles. The 20% unemployment rate we will reach by Summer 2010, will not mean massive increases in government make work programs, nor temporary housing in vacant living spaces in the cities for the millions that will go to where they hear jobs are. It will mean near 40 million shuffling, crying and hollering, lashing out…. and feeling very alone in a society that is built upon rewards for acting alone. And now that the U.S. just committed to 12 TRILLION dollars as loans, and cash handouts, and guarantees to the Financial Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, via the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and other programs, the government can easily go bankrupt. None of this money will ‘build’ anything or create jobs. States across the country are already going ‘broke’ (they can’t print money) and we haven’t even reached the cliff yet.
The unemployed, part time workers, pick up work homeless; will be included in the millions in the line. ….They are already very self aware of being disposable and humiliated. They will be joined by tens of millions that have never questioned the approach of an abyss in their lives. These will walk like ghosts.
…..Many potential supporters of a fascist promising populist.
It will be a years long walk through a trough. An incremental sloughing. Like leprosy, or hepatitis, or air born flu, it will infect every aspect of our lives. Where we go, what we do, how we treat those close to us, and how we reexamine our indoctrinated belief systems. People in the food and housing help and employment bureau’s lines, will wonder is the disease wet or dry? Is it something I did wrong, some fork of somewhere I turned wrong, something I ate, or brushed against… what was unhealthy? Was I not responsible enough? Didn’t hard work, and belief and faith guarantee some stability until old age?
No amount of Colonic cleansing or aroma therapy or work counseling and brushing up resumes will stop the shit storm from raining on most everyone’s awnings. Only the uber rich through government handouts and political connections will avoid the doorbell.
Already, even before the big boot has dropped, pension funds, mutual funds have lost 30% to 50% of their value. The federal pension savior fund that is supposed to step in to save at least 50% of bankrupt corporation’s pensions started playing in the market a few years ago…..guess what happened. (6)
Doorbell is gonna ring, and there is a bag on your doorstep that some vandals lit on fire. Try to stomp it out by yourself, and there is crap on your shoes. Take a walk. You got nothing coming now….
The stimulus bill has only $8 billion geared towards rail building. The Environmental Protection Agency calculates that for distances of more than 1,000 miles, a system in which trucks haul containers only as far as the nearest railhead and then transfer them to a train produces a 65 percent reduction in both fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions. To put this ‘green money’ amount in perspective in order to show how trivial it is: California voters approved $10 billion in bonds for rail…and that will cover about one system from LA to SF to Sacramento. One state. One proposition passed. The $8 billion is part of $64 billion in the stimulus package for roads, bridges, rail and transit, what Obama called “the most sweeping investment in our infrastructure since President Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s.” Hardly a comparison. Another lie. In inflation adjusted dollars the 1950’s highway system cost $425 billion. We spend three times that rail $8 billion amount MONTHLY on two wars. Three investment firms each got THREE times that amount to prop up their roulette wheels. Obama’s increase of the military budget in real terms over Bush the-mentally-deficient-child-warrior is three times that $8 billion this year alone.
“Why am I so vehement about this? Because I’m afraid that this will be the administration’s only shot – that if the first bank plan is an abject failure, it won’t have the political capital for a second. So it’s just horrifying that Obama – and yes, the buck stops there – has decided to base his financial plan on the fantasy that a bit of financial hocus-pocus will turn the clock back to 2006.”
-Paul Krugman NYTimes 3/21/09
“An analysis from the University of Massachusetts’ Political Economy Research Institute, for instance, finds that, for every one billion dollars invested in defense, 8,555 jobs are created. By contrast, the same billion invested in health care would create 12,883 jobs, and in education, 17,687 jobs or more than double the defense stimulus payoff… The United States spent more than $65 billion to design and produce the F-22 Raptor — a fighter plane originally conceived to penetrate the airspace of the long extinct Soviet Union, to counter large formations of enemy bombers in Cold War scenarios that are today inconceivable, (TomDispatch.co-m Frida Berrigan)
And for all the leftists that cheer some 50% chop off of the fake wealth of the top ‘american’ 10%, they show their ignorance of global economics. The G20 top countries that run the ‘engine’ of global finance and the legally entrenched structure to keep those who can afford it consuming at increasing levels, affect every living thing on this planet. They control the FIRE sector, the lending sectors, how and who loans are given too, and how almost all economies are structured. These people control nearly every government. These people gambling on land speculation, and profiting hugely on the colonial model of resource extraction and cutting all social services to the bone to keep people as serfs, are still going to be rich. Just less rich. Nothing to cheer about. They’re still rich and in control of militaries, and nearly all economic systems. And the rich in nearly every third world country are their allies and imitators.
There is no debt relief allowed in Africa, nor no tariffs, or true land distribution allowed to protect, build sustainable farming, and to alleviate export crop corporate agriculture. It’s all a suck hole to the top. And when the suck hole starts to envelope or whirlpool it’s own unsustainable ponzi casino, the wealth does not trickle down, give up to common sense, abandon its stealth and land grabs. More wealth and resources must be sucked at an even faster rate from the people of the world who have never profited from the rape of the land, who have never profited from arms sales to dictators, who have never profited from land speculation, who have never …lets be honest…. profited from any economic system whatsoever. If the rich ALL OVER THE WORLD lose half their assets, they still have the power and militaries to replace the wealth and destroy all ecosystems and all people in the way.
They will panic. And nothing is to be more feared than ruling class psychotics in control of militaries and police forces as they get ‘less rich’. And we should certainly fear, how they will play the populace of the USA . Never has there been such an imperialistic state besides Nazi Germany that has such a large population of adults thinking and acting on evangelical end-time religious hoopla, or arrogant, childish, and reactionary belief systems.
“The bullet to our head, inevitable if we do not radically alter course, will be sudden. We have been borrowing at the rate of more than $2 billion a day over the last 10 years, and at some point it has to stop. The moment China, the oil-rich states and other international investors stop buying treasury bonds the dollar will become junk. Inflation will rocket upward. We will become Weimar Germany. A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populous, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits, from Christian demagogues to simpletons like Sarah Palin to loudmouth talk show hosts, who we naively dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. The elites, the ones with their Harvard Business School degrees and expensive vocabularies, will retreat into their sheltered enclaves of privilege and comfort. We will be left bereft and abandoned outside the gates.” Chris Hedges
Nearly everyone on this planet is intertwined in this madness of constant increasing profits for the rich, the extremely poor feel the backhand in a second on a bankers’ gold Rolex. Our government led by the very investment bankers and their profiteering cronies and free market cheerleaders that inspired deregulation of the markets, and privatization of all things deemed necessary to build a middle class in a democracy, that as a whole pursued corporate profit making over all humanitarian ideals, is psychotically pursuing “moderate and sensible” economic ventures that will and will certainly, amplify the deepness of the trough.
“A few weeks ago, a freshman congressman, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), became an Internet celebrity with the video of him grilling the Federal Reserve vice chairman at a House hearing. The Fed is in the process of handing out almost $3 trillion. Can you tell us which firms and banks are getting money? Grayson asked. Donald Kohn said that would be inappropriate. It might discourage some banks from taking the public’s money”
And what of the biggest cost in the USA budget: the military? The new administration is increasing it.
“The current military budget maintains “268 bases in Germany, 124 in Japan, and 87 in South Korea. Others are scattered around the globe in places like Aruba and Australia, Bulgaria and Bahrain, Colombia and Greece, Djibouti, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Romania, Singapore, and of course, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — just to name a few. Among the installations considered critical to our national security are a ski center in the Bavarian Alps, resorts in Seoul and Tokyo, and 234 golf courses the Pentagon runs worldwide.” (David Vine, “The Costs of Empire: Can We Really Afford 1,000 Overseas Bases?” FPIF, March 10) “As the Congressman assured me, “the only thing that can put a halt to this military spree is for the public to get wind of how much we’re pissing away on this overseas nonsense. My God, it’s going to cost more trillions of dollars than we see in this round of bailouts. People have to start asking of the military budget just as they ask of the bank bailouts: do these expenditures really keep us stable?” Saul Landau (Counterpunch 3/22/09) “
Capitalism in the simple terms as we know it, deems people work, get paid, and then have money to buy things, food, clothing and pay rent. It means in the macro sense of the rich and ruling class, that we who work and build and invent things, are taxed and profited off of, so they can not only make a profit on their original capital investment but also make an increased profit on finance, real estate, and insurance investments, and a myriad of commodities gambling. It’s a spiral of wealth upwards as long as the majority of people are working, paying taxes, buying property, paying for services… and that there are natural resources that can be commandeered, extracted with lowest as possible labor costs to be available for profit as resale to the people. It works remarkably well for a reasonable short period of time; if combined with a controlled representative democracy, and business and citizens’ access to a court system for legal relative leveling. If you consider ‘wealth’ only meaning money and power, not social costs or the earth’s well being. The past 500 years of unimaginable suffering and mass murder inflicted upon people by European colonial states and the USA is testament that keeping half their own population relatively safe, and assured of comeuppance, can keep a capitalist state of control, with all its military, and exponentially increased profit to its allied rich, in safety. The other half of the population of all these imperial states have since the first revolutions, been attempting to institute a second and third. But the lure of stable jobs, and home ownership has always kept the dissent in capitalist democracies to a manageable minimum, even if brutal police state force has to be utilized as in the case of the Black Panthers, or as in the over ten thousand white workers killed while involved in strikes and direct action in the USA since 1850, or of course the drug war with millions of people doing hard time for the reasonable act of selling a commodity or choosing to imbibe on an escape from loneliness and drudgery.
There is not a whole lot you can do individually to convince a population to rise up, who are under an often remarkable and entertaining media umbrella and who are seeing amazing technological advances suddenly becoming affordable. Who while knowing that a third of the world cannot get clean water, and barely enough calories a day to survive, are faced with overflowing abundance, even if much is unaffordable…still remaining seemingly sedate while their own democracy is killing people by the hundreds of thousands.
Tomatoes literally rolling out of bins. A huge bunch of organic lettuce only 50 cents more than five years ago. Steaks the size of clown shoes for $20, sandwiches half the price since the 70’s considering inflation, brought to you in five minutes…. fresh with no pickles, but extra peppers. A barrage of ‘save the planet’ articles in liberal magazines and on blogs that rely on ten step bandages to turn attention from the real corporate and military rape. And the movies and music of the USA. Fascinating to us and much of the world.
All this a cornucopia of spectacle, and goods. A world we live in, though atomized and corporatized, that second by day to paycheck revitalizes the notion that capitalism,
…though it has its faults in so many ways, delivers a wealth of riches to our lives.
I have to admit that most Americans will play out like Sellers in Being There as the depression happens. The ruling class will make it worse controlling the media who are playing the beanie babies’ religious belief in the trope of ‘hope in good individual works’. The disconnect between our innate desires for community, and social well being for all around us have been for some time split into contradictory realms. Wherein it is not uncommon for a worker to demand ‘health care’, and ‘more cops to stop crime’ ‘bombing terrorists’ and ‘less government’ and ‘ more spending on jobs’ and ‘ more freedom’ in one stream of thought.
IF A DEPRESSION COMES…WHAT CAN WE EXPECT?
Expert economists in the mainstream press differ on the definition. A decline in real GDP of more than 10%, a recession that lasts more than three years. America’s Great Depression qualifies on both counts, with GDP falling by around 30% between 1929 and 1933. Output also fell by 13% during 1937 and 1938.”(Economist)
“A depression is not self-correcting. The economy shifts down to permanently lower levels of production and sales, high unemployment rates become chronic, and federal deficits become narcotic—federal deficits dull the senses but don’t cure the disease. Employers in high tech, retailing, manufacturing, publishing, and elsewhere are not temporarily furloughing workers; rather they are restructuring employment downward, permanently, for what they expect to be smaller markets for their products for several years.” (7)
From our ‘inexpert view’, we would see it as continued rising unemployment for more than two years, continued falling wages in real terms, with no worker bailout plan in the works. I wouldn’t predict a depression, if the government had just passed a stimulus bill in the area of the $12 trillion that the FIRE markets have received via direct bailouts, and Fed insurance of toxic paper waste and no interest loans backed by you …say $12 trillion directed to subsidized manufacturing, keeping people in their foreclosed homes, nationalizing all insolvent banks, and instituting a massive nation wide urban housing and rail building project. This is not happening, and will not happen though the democrats have all the power to do it, and polling shows mass support.
Unless they are forced by a mass millions strong independent voice to do so, the next 4 to 8 years will not only see a devastation of what people here consider ‘middle class’, but also an increased centralized power in the elite that gambled on the bubble in time, and have the political connections to grab more.
Beyond the personal and social pain and despair we will all suffer… there will come thousands more mass family murders, work shootings, another million homeless, and as city and state governments cut social services hundreds of thousands more psychotics, addicts, very damaged combat veterans will be wandering pleading, while we look away. A large increase in violent and property crime will give the law and order types a self-fulfilling prophecy to enlarge the inhumane prison system.. Obama’s stimulus bill does have another job creation program: 100,000 more cops!
Such a leveling, and speeded spiral, in these times, could not be more dangerous to us, and to the world. Only a dictatorship, or fascism will fill this void in a nation devoid of any mass peoples movement. The void, the abyss we are skateboarding towards comes from the culmination of public and university schools indoctrination of hyper individualism against building a society, an economic system built and widely accepted schizophrenically by the populace that indoctrinates us that anyone can make it with initiative and you only have yourself to blame if you have not amassed property wealth, and as well…. a hyper individualism/exceptionalism that has infected all aspects of our political and economic grass roots movements since at least the 1930’s. There are “exceptionally” millions of Americans doing great and dedicated and productive work. An untold story 400-page-each ten volume tomes worth of recording of the real social wealth of amazing Americans that refuse and resist, that do mutual aid, that make many lives more livable here.
But the American exceptionalism as in, “this is not Chiapas, this is not Spain 1920’s”, and more absurdly, “well that is France” is deeply imbedded in even my conversational rambling with those on the far left. France just had a general strike. The right wing president is actually fearful of a redux of 1968. A period so volatile there then, even the communist party engaged in reigning in the workers.
In the USA, there was not consideration of a general strike by any large number of ‘good grass roots’ groups before the Iraq war. Let alone now. This has much to do with the liberal indoctrination of a ‘progressive’ and often academic elite that even the ‘left’ minded population absorbs. That ‘labor’ is represented by our unions. It is then compartmentalized. As dissent is, into actions, spectacle, one issue groups. The ‘working class’ is represented by ‘labor’ which is of course our unions. This is absurd. The majority of our ‘unions’ are less democratic than elections for municipal capitalist elections; the majority have 50 years of pro imperialist history. The majority of our unions are not only employment bureau in nature, they are so obviously conservative in nature, in hierarchical design, and so pro-state that they give hundreds of millions of dollars to elect pro corporate democrats. The rank and file have to belong to these unions. They help them. The rank and file has no other choice. There is no militant mass left in the USA. We offer no alternative. I would join any union in any workplace. That is the point. Grasping at frayed ropes. We are falling backwards. There is no progressive anti-militarist union of any size in this country that even considers organizing the ‘masses’. Do you recognize the sheer embarrassment of that? We don’t even have a large union here that would support a general strike. In a free country under the most murderous military in the world.
A depression will unleash a pent up anger and frustration that will not result in any ‘payback’ to the rich that placed their pyramid schemes on the back of an entire world. We will turn on ourselves, and petty targets for revenge. Demonstrations, with attendant infantile vandalism by people who wear black or red and black masks. There is some unfunny irony there. Demonstrations. Again. People on megaphones. More blogs. And not mass organizing. Somehow you do it in reverse, it seems to me that the american left believes in some reversal of fact and history. Rather than a mass movement militant and engaging in face-to-face democracy, we choose strangers showing up for a day as a catalyst to create a mass movement. You organize a demonstration of mostly strangers and then, well ‘hookup’ there to organize another one. Without real power, as power only concedes to power, we will fall as individuals against a very organized militaristic state. What will follow of course, are frustrated ‘leftists’ that become vanguardist with narcissistic acts of bombs and such. As if you can blow up hierarchies and police states, and entrenched worldwide economic suicide with the murder of individuals, or the spectacle of a pipe bomb against one little bank building. Powerless narcissistic fools such as that could ruin what little we can do, not to mention set-up any near ‘them’ for conspiracy prison sentences.
This nation has more ‘security personal’ per capita than any fascist country ever had. Protected and gated, and isolated communities of the rich have been built and buttressed in every way in this country since the 1930’s. People of color know this well. Where you can’t walk, where you can. Police are there. The government already has at least 20,000 military troops in-country ready, in violation of the posse comitatus act, ready for revolt.
Riots will achieve nothing. Unless outpourings of vengeance and disgust happen on the back of a mass cohesive bottom up peoples movement that can then make demands with the power of millions, We know what will really happen if mass riots happen in our cities now. We know who will be deported, thrown in prison, or shot. Not the typing revolutionaries, or ex-middle class ‘radicals’ like me.
A DISASTER FOR THE WORLD
Though even under 150 years of industrial imperialism, colonialism, and USA supported fascism the people of Latin America are making great gains. Bottom up democracy; sustainable agriculture; recognition of indigenous peoples. That is obvious. Bolivia, Chiapas, Oaxaca. Ecuador, Venezuela. These achievements against all odds should inspire us to imitate them, not just type about them.
Although we all need to be inspired, we need to expire. We need to get eyes wide open. If the USA economy tanks in a spiral as in 1930 to 1939, most of the world’s economies go with it. And realize that a military and political structure hell bent on destroying the good that happens, will not just cut back, let alone disappear in a depression. Germany rearmed at a massive rate in just four years in the midst of a depression. The Soviet Union was able to keep a stranglehold of dictatorship for 1925 to 1990, over millions of people that actually wanted real socialism by the people. Mussolini was able to take over the gov’t, in a country that was majority union and at least 40% what we would call real ‘radical left’.
Never underestimate the power of the state’s security forces to institute complete control with a minority of thirty or forty percent of population support. Never underestimate the indoctrination of a people who have an urge ‘to order’. …. No matter their humanitarian urges. Often people have chosen bread and jobs over freedom, without the ‘left’ offering the full breadbasket…or at least having the numbers to seem to be believable! This void, that could very easily be filled by a dictatorship, or fascism, would be a disaster for the rest of the world. With a military this size, with complete psychotics in control of so many positions both political and in the military. ….
…The beast will unleash. We have seen, while we held our signs, and did ‘actions’, what our govt has done to Iraq. One million dead, 3 million refugees.
The problem is a worldwide unsustainable ‘economy’…that demands destruction of all democratic progress people make, that by its completely anti-democratic make-up creates military institutions of pillage and horror. And as the people of the world tell us often, the problem lies in the ‘americans’ to realize, that they have to destroy the main beast. Whether it takes one generation, or two, the world depends on it.
Empires do not fall on their own foolishness and incoherent fabrications of legitimacy to wield destructive power. They go out kicking and killing. Pointing out that they are ‘naked’ does not stop them. Power only concedes to a stronger power. It is up to us to create a stronger power that has faculty, virtue, and ethical consciousness, to create a new ‘war’. A war against the destruction of all beauty, against the destruction of our real wealth; both human and nature.
“Capitalism can survive this crisis. But the world can’t survive another capitalist comeback.” N. Klein
