Rewarding the criminals: how global capitalism preys upon the poor

by Jiwan Kshetry

Corporations wiping out large chunks of biodiversity and killing people with impunity in Honduras and Brazil in collusion with the corrupt state machinery, are being rewarded for their contribution to 'clean development' as are those throwing hundreds into abject poverty and total unemployment in India. At the end, however, their projects are not 'clean' with no net gain for environment in terms of carbon emission. In its march from one triumph to another, global capitalism brutally preys upon the poorest, weakest and the most vulnerable.

We are an inclusive company that respects and celebrates the diversity and human rights of its employees, customers and communities. But we never stop trying to improve as a company, employer and member of the community.

A corporation concerned about the human rights of the employees, customers and communities, isn't that something we are desperately looking for?

That was how Miguel Facusse, arguably the most powerful businessman in Honduras responded to the news that he was being awarded with CEAL International Award by Business Council of Latin America (CEAL).

Now juxtapose the noble words of Facusse with these words from the 'unidentified' kidnappers who threatened the MUCA (Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán) journalist Karla Zelaya on 23 October 2012 after kidnapping her: "This time you’re lucky. We’re not going to kill you because you’re worth more to us alive than dead."

The association of these people to Facusse is the open secret in Honduras as is the collusion between the Facusse's militia and the state's security forces, particularly after the 2009 coup-de-tat that deposed the democratically elected president. According to the Front for Popular National Resistance (FNRP), this new act of violence happened after two more campesinos or peasant farmers were killed over the weekend and three more were found buried in Farallones, lands belonging to Miguel Facussé.

The news coming from Honduras over the past few months is equally horrifying as indicated by these two reports (here and here) from Amnesty International. After brutal murder of campesino leader Margarita Murilo on 27 August, another leader Juan Angel Lopez Miralda met with the same fate on 11 November this year.

After all, how long could have they tolerated Murilo—a survivor of twenty-two days of detention and torture in the 1980's and life-long fighter against the oppressive state—who dared say this after disappearance of her son in 2009: "If the army took my son to deter me, it was very poor judgment on their part. I've been in struggle for twenty-five years; I'm not going to abandon it."

Obviously, the state was forced to deter her by taking her life itself. Even though Facusse and his corporation are not mentioned in the AI reports, there is no doubt as to either the motive or the mechanism of her elimination.

With thousands of hectares of lands in Bazo Aguan region itself and more elsewhere, Facusse has every reason to eliminate anyone who advocates the rights of the creatures who claim to be the rightful owners of the same land. Himself having been the economic advisor for one of the Honduran past presidents and counting another past president as his own nephew, there is literally nothing Facusse cannot do in Honduras.

There is no dearth of people like Facusse in this world where capitalism rules the roost. If we look closely, every developing country and economy has its own shares of Facusses who not only decide who wins and who loses in elections but also can depose or oust those who refuse to play by their rule after gaining power. Indeed, these super-wealthy tycoons—with opaque business activities and capability to both make and break rules and governments—in the under-developed countries, are the equivalents of the wealthy and powerful multinational corporations in the developed countries and economies.

The neo-liberal theologians would like us to believe that these people who value their own wealth-gathering much more than lives of hundreds to thousands of paupers out in the communities are a transitory phenomenon before rule of law comes to fruition in these modernizing societies. In other words, we should bear with plutocracy and mass pauperization for the sake of capitalist economic development that will somehow lead us into more prosperous if not egalitarian societies.

Is that the truth, after all? Let's draw some similarities between Facusse's Dinant corporation and Vallourec & Mannesmann Tubes (V&M), a joint venture of French Vallourec Group (with more than 23,000 employees, sales of $5.3 billion in 2012, 78% generated outside Europe, according to Compay's site) and German Mannesmannrohren-Werke AG.

To start with, contempt and disregard for human rights is equally strong in both. As Facusse's militia shoot the peasants in Honduras point blank and leave them to rot in the fields before police can take their body, V&M poisons the lands to clear the natural vegetation in Brazil for its vast eucalyptus plantations. As the usual fruits—the means of livelihood—and the underground water sources disappear, people in small towns like Minas Grais are forced into hunger and misery all the same. Those who dare to raise a finger at V&M here are killed as mercilessly as those challenging Dinant in Honduras are.

The similarities, however, do not end there. Both the companies are now beneficiaries of a supposedly noble initiative from Kyoto protocol intended to reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emission. While Dinant's palm trees are used to produce supposedly 'renewable' bio-fuels, V&M's eucalyptus are used to make 'renewable' coal. They trade off their carbon credits to other big industrial polluters thereby receiving huge amount of money under the 'Clean Development Mechanism' of the UN and the World Bank. At the end however, both the biofuel and coal go on to be burnt thereby emitting the greenhouse gases.

Net outcome: as people keep being killed or stifled in Brazil and Honduras, profits for corporations like Dinant and V&M keep rising exponentially, the biodiversity being irrecoverably damaged in both the supposedly noble sources of clean development.

As Clive L Spash articulates in a well-researched article titled 'The brave new world of Carbon Trade':

The pervasiveness of the greenhouse gas emissions, strong uncertainty and complexity combine to prevent economists from substantiating their theoretical claims of cost-effectiveness. Corporate power is shown to be a major force affecting emissions market operation and design. The potential for manipulation to achieve financial gain, while showing little regard for environmental and social consequences, is evident as markets have extended internationally and via trading offsets. (...) I conclude that the focus on such markets is creating a distraction from the need for changing human behavior, institutions and infrastructure.

As fortunes of people like Facusse multiply overnight, the real sufferers of the whole fiasco live in abject poverty and increasing marginalization. As their fellow citizens face brutality of the forest rangers from V&M and other big companies, the Brazilian middle class is pre-occupied by something else. Apparently, the Rousseff administration's sellout to the corporations is too little for them: 142,000 of them recently signed a petition on the White House Website asking 'president Obama' to take a stand against the 'Bolivarian Communist expansion in Brazil promoted by the administration of Dilma Rousseff'.

That tells a lot about why the plight of indigenous people in Brazil, Honduras and elsewhere rarely makes it to the mainstream media even as the street protests against leaders like Brazil's Rousseff and Venezuela's Maduro receive a round-the-clock coverage.

But even as the mainstream media works day and night to manufacture consent for the neo-liberal economic order and the resulting political order thereby obfuscating the reality, not everybody has abandoned the poor and the downtrodden. Plight of these people in Brazil and Honduras has been retold vividly in the 2012 documentary 'The Carbon Rush' directed by social justice organizer and activist Amy Miller. The documentary was shown as the part of recently concluded Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival in Kathmandu (KIMFF), leaving the audience flabbergasted.

The documentary brilliantly captures the misfortune of the victims of some more projects under the so called clean development mechanism including the one in India which snatches the livelihood of the rag-pickers. As a big company moves on to produce energy from the garbage (the amount of energy produced being minimal as air pollution reaches intolerable levels with use of incinerators in residential areas) it is also bestowed with monopoly in recycling the recyclables from the garbage forcing the already poor people into a vicious cycle of abject poverty and total unemployment.

So, what is in the store for these people duped by their states and hounded by the wealthy? The smart and educated people in India may not have exactly petitioned the US president the way their Brazilian counterparts did but their attitude about the economic and social malaise of the society is also basically the same. The only solution to the crushing poverty and rampant unemployment is, for them, to let the wealthy corporations exploit the natural resources even faster—thereby transforming this planet into unlivable garbage dump even earlier than it would otherwise become—so that more jobs are created. The living conditions of the workers and the plight of the displaced people is the luxury that the state cannot afford to ponder over at this point of time.

It is then no wonder that after Narendra Modi came to power in India with a promise to 'development', his government is now going to depend on the 'utmost good faith' of the polluting industries to control pollution rather than strict laws enforced by the state.

So, when will this mad rush to seek solution of every problem in endless economic growth end? As the wealth gap widens between the rich and poor leaving the wealthy few increasingly beholden to the remainder of the rapidly depleting natural resources in the planet, how many more millions of people will have to suffer before the illusion of mankind's invincibility over the nature crashes?

Miguel Facusse is already over 90 and still wants to gather wealth at the cost of thousands of Honduran lives. But, will the fragile ecosystem of the planet survive for another 90 years without a major disruption? Even if it does not survive, Facusse will be long gone by then having left a disastrous track record of swallowing up entire genera and multiple species of flora and fauna in the South American continent for his palm plantations. Likely, the V&M's owners will also be gone by that time contributing to loss of an even large chunk of biodiversity in the planet for their eucalyptus plantations. But who can blame them? They are neither the biggest nor the last culprits in the whole sordid saga.

These people will be remembered especially for one reason though: as they tore through the ecosystem speeding the degradation of the most bio-diverse parts of planet earth, they were being paid for precisely the opposite of that, in other words, they were getting rewards instead of punishments for their crimes.

Author is a Kathmandu-based freelance writer who regularly blogs at South Asia and Beyond.

Debt and Democracy – Has the Link Been Broken?

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, for Naked Capitalism

A longer version of this article in German was published in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on December 5, 2011

Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.

Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders (“tyrants” to Aristotle) win popular support by cancelling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state.
 

Since the Renaissance, however, bankers have shifted their political support to democracies. This did not reflect egalitarian or liberal political convictions as such, but rather a desire for better security for their loans. As James Steuart explained in 1767, royal borrowings remained private affairs rather than truly public debts. For a sovereign’s debts to become binding upon the entire nation, elected representatives had to enact the taxes to pay their interest charges.

By giving taxpayers this voice in government, the Dutch and British democracies provided creditors with much safer claims for payment than did kings and princes whose debts died with them. But the recent debt protests from Iceland to Greece and Spain suggest that creditors are shifting their support away from democracies. They are demanding fiscal austerity and even privatization sell-offs.

This is turning international finance into a new mode of warfare. Its objective is the same as military conquest in times past: to appropriate land and mineral resources, communal infrastructure and extract tribute. In response, democracies are demanding referendums over whether to pay creditors by selling off the public domain and raising taxes to impose unemployment, falling wages and economic depression. The alternative is to write down debts or even annul them, and to re-assert regulatory control over the financial sector.

Near Eastern Rulers Proclaimed Clean Slates to Preserve Economic Balance

Charging interest on advances of goods or money was not originally intended to polarize economies. First administered early in the third millennium BC as a contractual arrangement by Sumer’s temples and palaces with merchants and entrepreneurs who typically worked in the royal bureaucracy, interest at 20% (doubling the principal in five years) was supposed to approximate a fair share of the returns from long-distance trade or leasing land and other public assets such as workshops, boats and ale houses.

As the practice was privatized by royal collectors of user fees and rents, “divine kingship” protected agrarian debtors. Hammurabi’s laws (c. 1750 BC) cancelled their debts in times of flood or drought. All the rulers of his Babylonian dynasty began their first full year on the throne by cancelling agrarian debts so as to clear out payment arrears by proclaiming a clean slate. Bondservants, land or crop rights and other pledges were returned to the debtors to “restore order” in an idealized “original” condition of balance. This practice survived in the Jubilee Year of Mosaic Law in Leviticus 25.

The logic was clear enough. Ancient societies needed to field armies to defend their land, and this required liberating indebted citizens from bondage. Hammurabi’s laws protected charioteers and other fighters from being reduced to debt bondage, and blocked creditors from taking the crops of tenants on royal and other public lands and on communal land that owed manpower and military service to the palace.

In Egypt, the pharaoh Bakenranef (c. 720-715 BC, “Bocchoris” in Greek) proclaimed a debt amnesty and abolished debt-servitude when faced with a military threat from Ethiopia. According to Diodorus of Sicily (I, 79, writing in 40-30 BC), he ruled that if a debtor contested the claim, the debt was nullified if the creditor could not back up his claim by producing a written contract. (It seems that creditors always have been prone to exaggerate the balances due.) The pharaoh reasoned that “the bodies of citizens should belong to the state, to the end that it might avail itself of the services which its citizens owed it, in times of both war and peace. For he felt that it would be absurd for a soldier … to be haled to prison by his creditor for an unpaid loan, and that the greed of private citizens should in this way endanger the safety of all.”

The fact that the main Near Eastern creditors were the palace, temples and their collectors made it politically easy to cancel the debts. It always is easy to annul debts owed to oneself. Even Roman emperors burned the tax records to prevent a crisis. But it was much harder to cancel debts owed to private creditors as the practice of charging interest spread westward to Mediterranean chiefdoms after about 750 BC. Instead of enabling families to bridge gaps between income and outgo, debt became the major lever of land expropriation, polarizing communities between creditor oligarchies and indebted clients. In Judah, the prophet Isaiah (5:8-9) decried foreclosing creditors who “add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.”

Creditor power and stable growth rarely have gone together. Most personal debts in this classical period were the product of small amounts of money lent to individuals living on the edge of subsistence and who could not make ends meet. Forfeiture of land and assets – and personal liberty – forced debtors into bondage that became irreversible. By the 7th century BC, “tyrants” (popular leaders) emerged to overthrow the aristocracies in Corinth and other wealthy Greek cities, gaining support by cancelling the debts. In a less tyrannical manner, Solon founded the Athenian democracy in 594 BC by banning debt bondage.

But oligarchies re-emerged and called in Rome when Sparta’s kings Agis, Cleomenes and their successor Nabis sought to cancel debts late in the third century BC. They were killed and their supporters driven out. It has been a political constant of history since antiquity that creditor interests opposed both popular democracy and royal power able to limit the financial conquest of society and an almost autonomous dynamic turning the economic surplus into interest-bearing debt claims for payment.

When the Gracchi brothers and their followers tried to reform the credit laws in 133 BC, the dominant Senatorial class acted with violence, killing them and inaugurating a century of Social War, resolved by the ascension of Augustus as emperor in 29 BC.

Rome’s Creditor Oligarchy Wins the Social War, Enserfs the Population and Brings on a Dark Age

Matters were more bloody abroad. Aristotle did not mention empire building as part of his political schema, but foreign conquest always has been a major factor in imposing debts, and war debts have been the major cause of public debt in modern times. Antiquity’s harshest debt levy was by Rome, whose creditors spread out to plague Asia Minor, its most prosperous province. The rule of law all but disappeared when publican creditors arrived. Mithridates of Pontus led three popular revolts, and local populations in Ephesus and other cities rose up and killed a reported 80,000 Romans in 88 BC. The Roman army retaliated, and Sulla imposed war tribute of 20,000 talents in 84 BC. Charges for back interest multiplied this sum six-fold by 70 BC.

Among Rome’s leading historians, Livy, Plutarch and Diodorus blamed the fall of the Republic on creditor intransigence in waging the century-long Social War marked by political murder from 133 to 29 BC. Populist leaders sought to gain a following by advocating debt cancellations (e.g., the Catiline conspiracy in 63-62 BC). They were killed. By the second century AD about a quarter of the population was reduced to bondage. By the fifth century Rome’s economy collapsed, stripped of money. Subsistence life reverted to the countryside as a Dark Age descended.

Creditors Find a Legalistic Reason to Support Parliamentary Democracy

When banking recovered after the Crusades looted Byzantium and infused silver and gold to review Western European commerce, Christian opposition to charging interest was overcome by the combination of prestigious lenders (the Knights Templars and Hospitallers providing credit during the Crusades) and their major clients – kings, at first to pay the Church and increasingly to wage war. But royal debts went bad when kings died. The Bardi and Peruzzi went bankrupt in 1345 when Edward III repudiated his war debts. Banking families lost more on loans to the Habsburg and Bourbon despots on the thrones of Spain, Austria and France.

Matters changed with the Dutch democracy, seeking to win and secure its liberty from Habsburg Spain. The fact that their parliament was to contract permanent public debts on behalf of the state enabled the Low Countries to raise loans to employ mercenaries in an epoch when money and credit were the sinews of war. Access to credit “was accordingly their most powerful weapon in the struggle for their freedom,” notes Ehrenberg: “Anyone who gave credit to a prince knew that the repayment of the debt depended only on his debtor’s capacity and will to pay. The case was very different for the cities, which had power as overlords, but were also corporations, associations of individuals held in common bond. According to the generally accepted law each individual burgher was liable for the debts of the city both with his person and his property.”

The financial achievement of parliamentary government was thus to establish debts that were not merely the personal obligations of princes, but were truly public and binding regardless of who occupied the throne. This is why the first two democratic nations, the Netherlands and Britain after its 1688 revolution, developed the most active capital markets and proceeded to become leading military powers. What is ironic is that it was the need for war financing that promoted democracy, forming a symbiotic trinity between war making, credit and parliamentary democracy in an epoch when money was still the sinews of war.

At this time “the legal position of the King qua borrower was obscure, and it was still doubtful whether his creditors had any remedy against him in case of default.” The more despotic Spain, Austria and France became, the greater the difficulty they found in financing their military adventures. By the end of the eighteenth century Austria was left “without credit, and consequently without much debt” the least credit-worthy and worst armed country in Europe (as Steuart 1767:373 noted), fully dependent on British subsidies and loan guarantees by the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

Finance Accommodates Itself to Democracy, but Then Pushes for Oligarchy

While the nineteenth century’s democratic reforms reduced the power of landed aristocracies to control parliaments, bankers moved flexibly to achieve a symbiotic relationship with nearly every form of government. In France, followers of Saint-Simon promoted the idea of banks acting like mutual funds, extending credit against equity shares in profit. The German state made an alliance with large banking and heavy industry. Marx wrote optimistically about how socialism would make finance productive rather than parasitic. In the United States, regulation of public utilities went hand in hand with guaranteed returns. In China, Sun-Yat-Sen wrote in 1922: “I intend to make all the national industries of China into a Great Trust owned by the Chinese people, and financed with international capital for mutual benefit.”

World War I saw the United States replace Britain as the major creditor nation, and by the end of World War II it had cornered some 80 percent of the world’s monetary gold. Its diplomats shaped the IMF and World Bank along creditor-oriented lines that financed trade dependency, mainly on the United States. Loans to finance trade and payments deficits were subject to “conditionalities” that shifted economic planning to client oligarchies and military dictatorships. The democratic response to resulting austerity plans squeezing out debt service was unable to go much beyond “IMF riots,” until Argentina rejected its foreign debt.

A similar creditor-oriented austerity is now being imposed on Europe by the European Central Bank (ECB) and EU bureaucracy. Ostensibly social democratic governments have been directed to save the banks rather than reviving economic growth and employment. Losses on bad bank loans and speculations are taken onto the public balance sheet while scaling back public spending and even selling off infrastructure. The response of taxpayers stuck with the resulting debt has been to mount popular protests starting in Iceland and Latvia in January 2009, and more widespread demonstrations in Greece and Spain this autumn to protest their governments’ refusal to hold referendums on these fateful bailouts of foreign bondholders.

Shifting Planning Away From Elected Public Representatives To Bankers

Every economy is planned. This traditionally has been the function of government. Relinquishing this role under the slogan of “free markets” leaves it in the hands of banks. Yet the planning privilege of credit creation and allocation turns out to be even more centralized than that of elected public officials. And to make matters worse, the financial time frame is short-term hit-and-run, ending up as asset stripping. By seeking their own gains, the banks tend to destroy the economy. The surplus ends up being consumed by interest and other financial charges, leaving no revenue for new capital investment or basic social spending.

This is why relinquishing policy control to a creditor class rarely has gone together with economic growth and rising living standards. The tendency for debts to grow faster than the population’s ability to pay has been a basic constant throughout all recorded history. Debts mount up exponentially, absorbing the surplus and reducing much of the population to the equivalent of debt peonage. To restore economic balance, antiquity’s cry for debt cancellation sought what the Bronze Age Near East achieved by royal fiat: to cancel the overgrowth of debts.

In more modern times, democracies have urged a strong state to tax rentier income and wealth, and when called for, to write down debts. This is done most readily when the state itself creates money and credit. It is done least easily when banks translate their gains into political power. When banks are permitted to be self-regulating and given veto power over government regulators, the economy is distorted to permit creditors to indulge in the speculative gambles and outright fraud that have marked the past decade. The fall of the Roman Empire demonstrates what happens when creditor demands are unchecked. Under these conditions the alternative to government planning and regulation of the financial sector becomes a road to debt peonage.

Finance vs. Government; Oligarchy vs. Democracy

Democracy involves subordinating financial dynamics to serve economic balance and growth – and taxing rentier income or keeping basic monopolies in the public domain. Untaxing or privatizing property income “frees” it to be pledged to the banks, to be capitalized into larger loans. Financed by debt leveraging, asset-price inflation increases rentier wealth while indebting the economy at large. The economy shrinks, falling into negative equity.

The financial sector has gained sufficient influence to use such emergencies as an opportunity to convince governments that that the economy will collapse they it do not “save the banks.” In practice this means consolidating their control over policy, which they use in ways that further polarize economies. The basic model is what occurred in ancient Rome, moving from democracy to oligarchy. In fact, giving priority to bankers and leaving economic planning to be dictated by the EU, ECB and IMF threatens to strip the nation-state of the power to coin or print money and levy taxes.

The resulting conflict is pitting financial interests against national self-determination. The idea of an independent central bank being “the hallmark of democracy” is a euphemism for relinquishing the most important policy decision – the ability to create money and credit – to the financial sector. Rather than leaving the policy choice to popular referendums, the rescue of banks organized by the EU and ECB now represents the largest category of rising national debt. The private bank debts taken onto government balance sheets in Ireland and Greece have been turned into taxpayer obligations. The same is true for America’s $13 trillion added since September 2008 (including $5.3 trillion in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bad mortgages taken onto the government’s balance sheet, and $2 trillion of Federal Reserve “cash-for-trash” swaps).

This is being dictated by financial proxies euphemized as technocrats. Designated by creditor lobbyists, their role is to calculate just how much unemployment and depression is needed to squeeze out a surplus to pay creditors for debts now on the books. What makes this calculation self-defeating is the fact that economic shrinkage – debt deflation – makes the debt burden even more unpayable.

Neither banks nor public authorities (or mainstream academics, for that matter) calculated the economy’s realistic ability to pay – that is, to pay without shrinking the economy. Through their media and think tanks, they have convinced populations that the way to get rich most rapidly is to borrow money to buy real estate, stocks and bonds rising in price – being inflated by bank credit – and to reverse the past century’s progressive taxation of wealth.

To put matters bluntly, the result has been junk economics. Its aim is to disable public checks and balances, shifting planning power into the hands of high finance on the claim that this is more efficient than public regulation. Government planning and taxation is accused of being “the road to serfdom,” as if “free markets” controlled by bankers given leeway to act recklessly is not planned by special interests in ways that are oligarchic, not democratic. Governments are told to pay bailout debts taken on not to defend countries in military warfare as in times past, but to benefit the wealthiest layer of the population by shifting its losses onto taxpayers.

The failure to take the wishes of voters into consideration leaves the resulting national debts on shaky ground politically and even legally. Debts imposed by fiat, by governments or foreign financial agencies in the face of strong popular opposition may be as tenuous as those of the Habsburgs and other despots in past epochs. Lacking popular validation, they may die with the regime that contracted them. New governments may act democratically to subordinate the banking and financial sector to serve the economy, not the other way around.

At the very least, they may seek to pay by re-introducing progressive taxation of wealth and income, shifting the fiscal burden onto rentier wealth and property. Re-regulation of banking and providing a public option for credit and banking services would renew the social democratic program that seemed well underway a century ago.

Iceland and Argentina are most recent examples, but one may look back to the moratorium on Inter-Ally arms debts and German reparations in 1931.A basic mathematical as well as political principle is at work: Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be.

Notes:

1.James Steuart, Principles of Political Oeconomy (1767), p. 353.
2. Richard Ehrenberg, Capital and Finance in the Age of the Renaissance (1928):44f., 33.
3. Charles Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship: 1603-1763 (London: 1965):89.
4. Sun Yat-Sen, The International Development of China (1922):231ff.

Must watch documentary: "The End Of Poverty"

The true face of capitalism, the true face of Western "Christianity", the roots of the society we live in today:

What is really happening in Europe?

Londres flambe, Londres flambe,

Quelle affaire, quelle affaire,

Au feu ! Au feu !

Pas d'eau, rien à faire.

French children's song

First, there were the riots in France.  Then the riots spread to other countries, Spain, Greece, and now the Britain.  As I sit and watch the various news reports I am amazed to see to what degree they are all missing the point and misreading the nature of what is going on.

London's burning!

As some of you might now, when I was still living in Europe I was a military analyst doing strategic intelligence analysis for a European country.  Among other things, I had access to a lot of the brainstorming about potential social unrest which might happen not only in my country, but also in the rest of Europe (we were primarily interested in that because of potential refugee movements).  I can tell you that all of what is going on today has long been foreseen by the security services.  The problem, the dilemma, really, is that there is nothing which they could really do about it.  Let me explain.

There are several, distinct, factors which are acting together in a positive feedback loop help to create this "perfect storm" of social unrest.  And even though the media did correctly identify many of them, it failed to understand their nature.  Let's take them one by one.

Immigration:

Yes, absolutely, beyond any shade of a doubt, immigration plays a role in these riots.  But its not a simple, straightforward "there are too many immigrants" kind of thing.  First, there are many different types of immigrations, not just one immigration.  It is one thing to have a large percentage of Italian or Portuguese immigrants in your neighborhood, and a totally different one when the immigrant are Albanians or Pakistani.  I will not go into a long discussion of why Albanian immigrants are so different from, say, Moroccans or Senegalese immigrants, suffice to say here that anybody who has had any experience in the security forces will tell you, off the record, of course, that the worst immigrants to deal with are first generation Albanians (2nd generation are just fine) and second generation Algerians (1st generation are just fine).  Weird, but true, and largely off-topic for this article.

Second, it is important to stress here that even in the worst types of immigrants, its only a rather small minority, say 10%, which causes all the troubles.  The vast majority only want a peaceful and decent life.  The problem here is simple: how do you deal with the former without alienating the latter (nevermind grievously violating the civil and human right!)

Third, some immigrants have kept close ties to their country of origin and in some cases that can make them ideal agents for all sorts of illegal activities (funding through narcotics trade is a big favorite here).  In the past, Kurdish immigrants used to be deeply infiltrated by the PKK, more recently we saw the Albanian immigrants providing a powerful lobby and source of support for the KLA.

The main problem with immigrants is that there is no government branch which can adequately deal with them.  Think about it.  Security services cannot simply single out or target a group solely based upon its ethnicity or religion.  Not only would that be wrong, it would also be illegal, and eventually counter-productive.  Keep in mind that many, if not most, immigrants are have a legal status, and often even citizenship.  They are entitled to being protected by the security services, not harassed or otherwise singled out. Besides, most security services are too small, and they are really trained to deal with gangsters, terrorists and spies, not 10-20% of any one country's population.  The police is no better.  First, let's be frank here, they are rarely the smartest folks around, and they have to deal mostly with much more mundane issues such as common crime or traffic.  In these times of economic crisis, the cops are also pretty much maxed out - they don't have the resources to allocate to such a big and complex phenomenon as immigration-linked problems.  The military?  Sure, its big, but it simply does not have the mandate to deal with internal threats, in particular not threat coming from its own legal residents and citizens.

So while the cops and even the military can make all sorts of shows of force, they are really useless.  And they know that. Let me just give you one example.

Say that in our country Albanian immigrants control 90% of the hard drugs market.  They have no problems shooting cops or any competitors.  They make huge money and the put at risk entire neighborhoods.  What do you do about it?

You can't just arrest all Albanians.  You need to find the bad ones.  How?  Well, monitor them, infiltrate them, at arrest all the bad guys in one big operation.  Sounds good, no?  Except.  Except that what judge is going to allow you to tap somebody's phone just because he is an Albanian and owns a bar?  And where are you going to find enough language specialists capable of translating and transcribing Albanian?  And how do you propose to infiltrate Albanian gangs when their social structure is quasi tribal and everybody knows everybody?

As for the European xenophobes daydreaming about some "Christian West" and about how they would "expel all these foreigners", they are simply out of touch with reality.  Their theories are utter nonsense.  These folks make good speeches about how they would solve the problem if they were in power, without even realizing that the state simply does not have a tool which could be used to implement their empty promises.  Finally, the xenophobes will not be voted into power simply most Europeans are educated enough to realize that immigration is simply a function of disparity and that if the West exploits and and terrorizes the rest of the planet, immigrants will always try to flee to a safer, better place.

The economic crisis:

Of course it plays are role here.  Somebody with a psychologically and financially rewarding job is highly unlikely to spend his free time going on a rampage or looting.  I am not saying that poverty is the cause of these riots, there are few really poor and destitute people in Europe and they don't riot at all.  It's the pointlessness of being unemployed or having a disgusting job which makes people angry enough to go out and fight the visible instruments of the "order": the cops.  So these riots are not hunger riots, they are hate riots, and that is very different.

The so-called "victory" of the West in the Cold War has resulted in a wave of unrestrained turbo-capitalism run amok and we now see the inevitable conclusion of the previously exported exploitation (in the form of imperialism - thanks Lenin, you were right here!) coming back home and doing what Marx had long predicted: a nasty class war.

As an aside, allow me this little digression here.  I was one in the hall of a UN conference where the representatives of the West were congratulating each other on "winning the Cold War".  And then, the Representative of Pakistan took the floor and with his unique Paki accent said: "has anybody here ever considered that the West did not win the Cold War, but that the internal contradictions of Communism did catch up with the Communist system before the internal contradictions of Capitalism will catch up with Capitalist nations?".  His statement was greeted in total silence, and then rapidly forgotten, of course.  But he was right, this is exactly what we are seeing today.  Class warfare not so much between the haves and have-nots, as between the rulers and their alienated subjects.

Political factors:

Let's put it bluntly.  Europe is a US colony.  Just as in the Middle-East or Latin America, the US Empire relies on a class of collaborators which is rewards with wealth and power for its subservience to the US Empire.  Everybody knows that Europeans did not want to go to war in Iraq of Afghanistan.  Everybody knows that Europeans did not want to start a war in Libya.  Heck, most Europeans did not even want the kind of EU which the elites did impose upon them.  The vast majority of Europeans are opposed to the IMF/WB "austerity measures" and the vast majority of Europeans know that the international bankers have screwed one European country after another.  Everybody also knows that there is no real "Left" in Europe (Tony Blair or Cohn-Bendit are not more leftists than a tiger is a vegetarian) and that the only non-co-opted political parties don' stand a chance in any real election.  And here is where the immigration factor also comes into place.

Most immigrants know all to well what role the West has played into turning their countries of origin into such a hell-hole that they had to emigrate to the very same West not because they love or admire it, but in spite of the fact that they hate it.

Another digression, if I may.  I often hear Americans saying that "if our society is so bad why do people from all over the world emigrate to the USA".  Guys, let me break you the bad news: these immigrants *hate* you and *hate* your society.  And this is why they are so willing to rob you, whether at gunpoint or otherwise: they are robbing the robber.  I personally live in Florida and I am fluent in Spanish and I can assure you that most Hispanics *despise* the Anglos and will say so quite openly to any Spanish speaker.  I have heard that many times.  First, I approach some Hispanic and ask him - in English - for something and he basically tells me to get lost.  I switch into Spanish.  The guy immediately makes a 180 and not only helps me, but goes out of his way to accommodate me.  Once I was even told that "we need to help each other against these assholes" (meaning the Anglos).  Its exactly the same in Europe, I have seen that many times there too.  And, please, don't simply get offended at that - if you are European or Anglo-American - but understand this is only a case of karma, of chicken coming to roost, of "he who sows the winds, reaps the tempest" as the French expression goes.

So the combination of thoroughly alienated European youths with angry and resentful immigrants makes for an explosive mix.  I would even say that many European youths who oppose the imperialist and capitalist systems identify themselves far more with the brown-skinned immigrants and their hatred of the "system" than with their parents, teachers or politicians.

Of course, not all immigrants hate their host-country.  But enough do.  That is the point.

Secularism/atheism/agnosticism:

Now a lot of you will get really mad at mine.  Fine.  I will tell you what I know and what I think, and you can shoot or dismiss the messenger.  I don't care, really.

The sentence "If God does not exist, everything is permitted" (often attributed to Dostoevsky) might anger secularists/atheists/agnostics (further called "SAAs") but, guys, its indisputable.  The very concepts of "right" and "wrong" have absolutely no basis in logic, even if most SAAs don't realize it, or choose not to act on it.  But that is more of a philosophical point and, thus, off-topic again.  More relevant to my topic is this: religious communities are never involved in the type of riots and civil disturbances we see in Europe.  I lived right next to a mosque and I can tell you that when most "proper and law abiding citizens" were informed that a large mosque would be built in our neighborhood they were horrified.  They thought that this would result in an influx of rapists, muggers or even terrorists.  Within one year of the opening of the mosque the "proper and law abiding citizens" realized that the kind of immigrants who show up for prayers at the mosque were far more "proper and law abiding" then the locals!  This is also why a vice-cop once told me in Toulon "we never have any problems with first-generation Algerian emigrants, they are all Muslims and have a traditional education; it's the second generation Algerians (who often become SAAs) which are the cause of all our problems".

And no, I am not dismissing religious riots in India or Egypt, and no, I am not saying that Muslims or Christians are "better" than SAAs.  In fact I will even admit that a 'negative' religion like the atheistic Communism or the pagan National-Socialism can yield an ethos, if not quite a real morality.  But Europe is a post-Christian society in which the very concepts or right and wrong have been ridiculed beyond any hope of redemption and in which the majority of the ignorant, alienated and angered youth believes in absolutely nothing.

Consider this: there is an entire generation (several, I would argue) that has been raised in a society in which lies and hypocrisy are the norm, in which violence, in particular, but not only, against dark-skinned people is an integral part of the social order, in which the rich get richer, the poor poorer and in which democracy is an empty word meaning little more than submission to authority.  How could anybody seriously expect that kind of generation not to explode, sooner or later?

Not only do most European youth believe that Christianity, Islam and all other religions are a lie, they also believe that Socialism, Communism, Democracy or free-market Capitalism and globalization are also lies.  And, frankly, they are right: the kinds if Christianity, Islam, Communism, Democracy, free-market Capitalism or globalization which they have been exposed to are, really, all lies.

And this is why to simply call them "thugs" and "criminals" not false, but also not quite correct.  Yes, their actions are criminal, and their excuses about "racism" and "poverty" are just that - excuses, cop-outs.  But on a deeper level, what these riots show are the signs of the agony of a system built on one and only "value": greed.  Because this is what capitalism, the putative victor of the Cold War, truly is. It is an ideology whose fundamental dogma is that the ideal society is the product of the sums of everybody's greeds.  As a direct by-product of this is the truism that "growth is always and by definition, good" (the mere fact that infinite grow in a finite environment is exactly the reason why tumors kill their hosts is simply not considered).

So this is what, I believe, these riots are really about: a comprehensive failure of the Capitalist system.  An economic failure of course, but also a political and moral failure. Capitalism is a fundamentally anti-human system which cannot be sustained without killing its host.  The riots in Europe are only one - amongst many other - symptom of the fact.

The Saker

Another interesting discussion of the crisis in Greece

This time its Bonnie Faulkner on Guns and Butter who interviews Max Keiser.  Another excellent discussion you can listen to here:

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/70900

Enjoy,

The Saker

Excellent discussion of the crisis in Greece

George Kenny has recorded yet another most interesting interview, this time with Dr. Richard Wolff. They discuss the economic crisis in Greece, of course, but also the larger implications of the latest manifestation of the crisis of capitalism.

Excellent stuff, I highly recommend it! Check it out here:

http://www.electricpolitics.com/podcast/2011/06/the_athenian_zephyr.html

More generally, George churns out one interesting interview after another, week after week.  Keep an eye on his "Electric Politics"!

The Saker

The obtuse idiocy of US capitalism in one small paragraph

Here is a recent article from the BBC website: 

How long is the ideal nap?

Air traffic controllers in the US have been advised to take 26-minute naps, after a string of incidents involving workers falling asleep. So is 26 minutes the ideal length of time for a nap?  Five cases of air traffic controllers falling asleep on the job have been revealed since March. In three of those cases, disclosed by the Federal Aviation Association, workers have been fired.


Now the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is calling for "controlled naps" to be built into night shifts.  Referring to a 1995 study from Nasa, which he co-authored, NTSB member and fatigue expert Mark Rosekind said that a 26-minute nap would improve performance by 34% and alertness by 54%.  There was other supporting evidence that said naps of between 20 minutes and 30 minutes were beneficial, he said.  His call for work naps is supported by the controllers' union, which wants naps to be allowed in both overnight and day shifts.


Beyond the aviation industry, combating fatigue is an issue that affects many people across all professions, working day and night, although it carries obvious risks in jobs that involve motoring or machinery.  But other experts are doubtful that 26 minutes is the optimum napping time.  It's a bit too long and risks you falling into a deep sleep, says Jim Horne, director of the Sleep Research Council in the UK, which advises the government on guidelines for drivers.


"What we recommend is that a nap is combined with a cup of coffee so you have some caffeine, and that takes about 20 minutes to kick in.  "Have a cup of coffee and get your head down. Done together it has a more powerful effect."  It probably works out that a nap of about 15 minutes is best, he says, because once you get beyond 20 minutes, you risk a deep sleep and you can be much more groggy when you wake up.  "A lot of people take caffeine after they wake up, but you have a window of opportunity of 20 minutes, so it will help you wake up. It works, there's no doubt about it."


People can't instantly fall asleep, so it's impossible to exactly time how long you will be asleep, he says. But even 15 minutes of dozing is beneficial.  "At least by having caffeine, you know that in 20 minutes you will feel more alert."


If you haven't had a wink of sleep the night before, then this tactic won't be enough to refresh you, says Mr Horne, but for those that have had merely a poor night's sleep, it will work.  Longer naps would work if they became part of your daily routine, he says, because your body would get used to it and could wake up quite easily without feeling too groggy.


Health writer Linda Wasmer Andrews, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, also believes 26 minutes is too long. She says a nap of between 10 and 20 minutes is enough.  The timing of the nap is also important, she says. Putting your head down too early means your body may not be ready to sleep yet, but a nap that is too late in the day might make it harder to fall asleep come bedtime.  Early afternoon is often the best time, between 1-3pm, she says, when people experience a post-lunch dip in energy.


Whatever the best strategy is, it's unlikely that the US air traffic controllers will be adopting any such tactics soon.  Transport Secretary Ray LaHood has dismissed the proposal for on-the-job naps to be implemented in the aviation industry.  He said workers would not be paid to sleep, and instead ordered for more managers be hired to supervise nightshift workers and ensure they don't fall asleep on the job.

[I pull up my soap box, take a deep breath, and begin my rant]

This last paragraph really sums up all the boundless stupidity of the capitalist thugs: I mean, GOD FORBID!!!! that anybody would be paid to 'sleep on the job', oh NO!!!.  It's much 'better' to hire 'managers' (aka slave drivers) regardless of the fact that the salary of the said managers will be bigger by several orders of magnitude than whatever money Uncle Sam might 'loose'  by letting his workers (slaves) to take a short nap on the job.  And (a most American touch now:) nevermind the science.  And nevermind the experience of the rest of the planet.  And if the controllers union supports this kind of "socialist" laziness, they can all go to hell.  What are unions anyway, but a bastion of commie parasites?!

We are A*m*e*r*i*c*a*n*s!!  We 'pull ourselves up by our bootstraps', we are proud of our 'pioneer spirit' and our 'rugged individualism', right?  Social right?  They are for that effeminate bunch of Euro-trash fags on the Old Continent.  We are real men!

And if those lazy air traffic controllers cannot get with the program, we will fire them and hire new ones, just like our beloved Ronald Reagan did.  And if an exhausted air traffic controller makes a mistake, we will send him to jail for a long long time, where "Bubba will make him his girlfriend" and where any resistance will be punished by sending him to isolation.

I call this the "plantation mentality" which, I am sorry to say, is still EXTREMELY prevalent in large segments of the US society, in particular the South.  Slavery was never truly abolished in the USA, it only changed form (several times): the salves changed, but the slave-owners did not.  Now they are called CEOs, politicians, commentators and all the rest of the plutocracy running the USA.  The top 1% if you want.  And the slaves are pretty much everybody else or, at the very least, the bottom 80% or so.

With no health-care, no social security, no unions, no workers rights, a frightening level of unemployment, a minimal level of education, a super policed society with the highest cop/civilian ratio in the world combined with the highest incarceration per capita figure in the world (followed by Rwanda and Russia if I remember correctly), absolutely insane minimal sentencing laws, a prevalent death penalty, an all-knowing Uncle Sam spying on their every communication, the USA has become one big plantation, run by unrepentant slave-owners who see their fellow Americans as little more than cheap spare parts for their wealth producing machine.

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? 

What a sad joke!

[Having vented my outrage, I get off my soapbox and kid myself into thinking that somebody actually paid attention to my rant.  Well, even if nobody paid attention, it felt good to "scream" the truth out loud as best as I can. Now I can go and store away my soapbox until the next time I feel like ranting]

The Saker

Capitalism's underlying slave labor requirement explained

Labor Day / May Day

The observation of Labor Day on the first Monday in September is usually attributed to the Knights of Labor who held their first parade on September 5, 1882. But far more important is the Haymarket Riot/Massacre of 1886. (See also graveyards.com and kentlaw.edu. There are several interpretations of what occurred, and monuments have been constructed to both the demonstrators and the police. A reasonable summary is that the labor organizers were peacefully demonstrating for an eight hour day, an anarchist threw a bomb in to the crowd, which killed a policeman, the police killed several demonstrators and some policemen, the powers that be arrested the labor leaders.

It was in 1887 that Oregon became the first state to establish Labor Day as a holiday, which it put on the first Saturday in June. Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York observed Labor Day on the first Monday in September that year. Then in 1889, the First (Paris) Congress of the Second Socialist International selected May First as a day for international celebration of the working man, no matter what day of the week it fell on. May first was chosen in commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre which occured in Chicago in 1886. In 1894, the first Monday in September was established as a federal holiday in the United States.

Why should the American working man celebrate Labor Day in September when the workers of the world are celebrating it on May first in commemoration of American Martyrs to the labor movement? This question is clarified by the fact that May first is observed unilaterally by workers (not by management), while the September holiday is enjoyed by all, perpetuating the myth that Labor and Management are both working together. The proclamation of Labor Day in September in the United States can only be interpreted as an effort to isolate the working American from his colleagues around the world, and obscure the history of what Management did to Labor in Chicago in 1886. Labor Day in the United States is better described as mocking than celebrating the working man in America.

[The immediate cause of the establishment of Labor Day as a holiday in September was to appease the working man after the Crushing of the Pullman strike in 1894.]

[A sanitized history of Labor Day can be found at History of Labor Day.]

June 2007

campbell@math.uni.edu
http://www.math.uni.edu/~campbell

source: http://faculty.cns.uni.edu/~campbell/gened/labour.html

Top 10 percent of earners in America now receive nearly 50 percent of all the income earned in the United States

by Daniel Tencer for the Raw Story

The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans now have a larger share of total income than they ever have in records going back nearly a century — an even larger amount than during the Roaring Twenties, the last time the US saw such similar disparities in wealth.

In recent years, the fact that differences between rich and poor are the greatest they’ve been since the Great Depression has become a popular talking point among liberal-leaning economists.

But an updated study (PDF) from University of California-Berkeley economist Emanuel Saez shows that, in 2007, the wealth disparity grew to its highest number on record, based on US tax data going back to 1917.

According to Saez’s study, which Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman drew attention to at his New York Times blog, the top 10 percent of earners in America now receive nearly 50 percent of all the income earned in the United States, a higher percentage than they did during the 1920s.

“After decades of stability in the post-war period, the top decile share has increased dramatically over the last twenty-five years and has now regained its pre-war level,” Saez writes. “Indeed, the top decile share in 2007 is equal to 49.7 percent, a level higher than any other year since [records began in] 1917 and even surpasses 1928, the peak of stock market bubble in the ‘roaring’ 1920s.”

By comparison, during most of the 1970s the top 10 percent earned around 33 percent of all the income earned in the United States.

The contrast is even starker for the super-rich. The top 0.01 percent of earners in the US are now taking home six percent of all the income, higher than the 1920s peak of five percent, and a whopping six-fold increase since the start of the Reagan administration, when the top 0.01 percent earned one percent of all the income.

There is no consensus among economists on whether large disparities in income lead to economic disruption, but it is hard to ignore the correlation between rising income inequality and the onset of economic crisis. The last time the US saw similar differences in income was in 1928 and 1929, just before the start of the Great Depression.

Saez also broke the numbers down by administration, and found that while the wealthiest few saw their incomes rise as quickly during the Bush years as they did during the Clinton years, the same was not true for the rest of the population.

Saez suggests that the economic growth seen on paper during the Bush years was little more than an illusion for the vast majority of Americans, who saw their income grow much more slowly in the 2002-2007 period than they did during the Clinton years.

During both expansions, the incomes of the top 1 percent grew extremely quickly at an annual rate over 10.3 and 10.1 percent respectively. However, while the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew at a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993–2000, these incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002–2007. As a result, in the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth.

Those results may help explain the disconnect between the economic experiences of the public and the solid macroeconomic growth posted by the US economy since 2002. Those results may also help explain why the dramatic growth in top incomes during the Clinton administration did not generate much public outcry while there has been an extraordinary level of attention to top incomes in the press and in the public debate over the last two years.

Saez, who this spring won the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal for economists under 40, links this disparity to the Bush tax cuts, noting that “top income tax rates went up in 1993 during the Clinton administration (and hence a larger share of the gains made by top incomes was redistributed) while top income tax rates went down in 2001 during the Bush administration.”

TWO MORE RECESSIONS?

The economic crisis that has taken hold over the past year isn’t over, and the world could in fact see two more recessions before the crisis is finally over, says the chief economist of Germany’s influential Deutsche Bank.

Norbert Walter told CNBC that investors are worried about the health of the US dollar, and many countries are facing difficult financial problems because of overspending by governments on bailouts and stimulus. Those things combined could push the world economy downwards not once but two more times in the near future, he said.

“I believe that the rescue packages brought on have been so costly for so many governments that the exit from this fiscal policy will be very painful, very painful indeed,” he said. “Some of us are already talking about a W-shaped recovery. I’d probably talk about a triple-U-shaped recovery because there are so many stumbling blocks here to get out of this.”

“The world is in trouble,” Walter told CNBC.

Chicken a la Carte - a true story

Yes, I am my brother's keeper

By Siv O'Neall, Axis of Logic Columnist

The polarized world

Do we need further proof that greed is not the solution for a sound economy? Do we need further proof that capitalism is foundering? Do we need further proof that ignoring the poor is not the way to make the world go round? That selfish accumulation of wealth is not the key to peace of mind and a life worth living?

The weirdoes who are presently at the helm of the world don't know a thing about what a good life is all about. A half-starving family in India may well have a more meaningful life than high-riding madmen who accumulate riches and who never stop striving for more – the very people who are ruining the lives of the poverty-stricken slum dwellers in the third world, people who were once farmers, poor but self-sustaining. Now they are scavenging on the garbage dumps on the outskirts of the big cities. The goals in the lives of the poor rich people who are ruining the earth couldn't be more out of joint.

There is certainly no beauty in desperate poverty, nothing positive in being deprived of the decent lives of billions of the earth's population. But the poor soulless billionaires who have set as a goal in their lives to destroy the lives of millions, so as to wallow in luxury in their secluded mansions, are the victims of their own selfishness and their disastrous misjudgment of the human psyche.

Why haven't those criminals who are the mad founders of 'disaster capitalism' been tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail a long time ago?

Then again: Why was Hitler so very close to conquering the world?

Love and solidarity have so many ingenious and dangerous enemies – the ones who know nothing about the humane qualities that hold us up and keep us together in a community, spiritual or geographical. Those are the dangerous fanatics who construct edifices of world domination theories in an attempt to compensate for the lack of anything constructive in their lives. They are trying desperately to use power and wealth to cover up the emptiness of their inner beings.

The world before the meltdown

There are two major problems today. And don't miss the forest for looking at all the trees. There is the willful murder of the poor and there is the killing of the environment, thus ending life on earth as we know it.

Greed is the ultimate cause in both these disasters. Lack of vision and lack of the urge to live a meaningful life of love, solidarity, and intellectual challenges are the secondary factors that have shaped our modern world since large-scale expansionism became the leading urge for a handful of madmen who wanted to rule the world. Greed combined with utter lack of empathy, such as is seen in today's deranged heads of state and corporations.

In order to rule the world, they have been working very deliberately and consistently on expanding their territories and on spreading their so-called culture all over the world, to make us all into Disneyworld-going, shopping-mall-loving, and anti-intellectual robots. Dumbing down the people was one of their prime goals. Robots do what their propagandized brains have been made to indulge in. Which is more television propaganda, digesting preposterous lies (such as spreading democracy and freedom and fighting 'terrorism'), more consumerism, more borrowing to make for more indebted and dependent consumer addicts. Once they are indebted heavily and propagandized to a state of mental vacuity, thought the ruling madmen, we'll command all their movements. They will be helpless victims in this wonderful world where only the lives of the very few have any real importance. The rest of the people of the world will get by on the scraps from the rich man's table and, since they've been dumbed down, there is nothing they can or will do to change anything.

What the people of the world want more than anything else is peace. So the clique who runs the show invents the Pax Americana. Trumpets are blowing and flags are waving. Wow! To begin with people went hysterical with ostentatious patriotism. Pax Americana, democracy at home and abroad, freedom for all people. The United States of America, always the fighter for freedom and prosperity for all its citizens. The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave! U.S. citizens were floating around on clouds of slogans.

The U.S. brand of patriotism replaces true solidarity. Fear makes the people at home deaf and blind to the true nature of the aggression of the powerful – those same madmen who have lost all touch with reality. There is no attempt to actually try to understand the way foreign peoples react to the cruel acts of domination by the superpower. There is only a naive belief in the possibility of remaking the psyches of the vanquished masses. Making them into a brand of new-age Americans.

"O brave new world that hath such people in't!" The United States dominates the planet with hundreds and hundreds of military bases on all five continents. People all over the world would be sold to the 'American' way of life and they would just be begging to get more McDonalds, more Disneyworlds, more shopping malls. The non-thinking gluttons for self-aggrandizement would see their mirror images in people all over the world. Steeping the world in the red white and blue virtues is seen as a lark. Patriotism is for Americans, the rest of the world is just supposed to be grateful for the civilization that the U.S. domination is bringing to them so generously. Since the only civilized country is the United States, the rest of us must be oh so grateful for the opportunity of sharing in this civilization. The total ignorance of the U.S. leaders and of most of its citizens as to what real civilization is all about and its long and wonderful history is appalling.

Doubt is rearing its head

But something has gone sour. The American people are beginning to see that maybe we are not fighting for peace in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe we were not fighting for peace in Somalia, maybe we were not fighting for peace anywhere in Asia or Africa. Wasn't this Pax Americana costing them too dearly at home? Weren't they all paying for this war that their sons and daughters were being killed for? Weren't the Big Corporations making huge profits while they suffered foreclosures of their homes?

Was there ever going to be an end to this horrid war? No, say the masters of war, there will be a war without end. Finally a word of truth. And the people began to see that they'd been had. The madmen at the helm of their own country and a huge part of the rest of the world were the only winners. They were the kings for a day in this world without compassion, without a vision for the future, without a plan for how to make their gambling craze be compatible with the survival of the planet. The gambling became a goal in itself and the short-time winning spree made the madmen dizzier than ever and things got a bit out of hand.

There was one value in this setup and its name was money. Paper money, useless money, huge fortunes that only increased the poverty at home and in the third world, but, or so said the 'wise men', they themselves were going to be immune to any wild fluctuations on Wall Street. Let the poor people lose their homes, they themselves would sit comfortably in their mansions. Let the hurricanes blow, they were always going to be protected by the high walls surrounding them. Family values be damned. The phrase had been useful as a political slogan but values were barely needed any more. The people were made powerless and totally malleable to the whims of the masters of war. The slogans of Patriotism, Terrorism and Eternal War were on the agenda of the day.

The end of winner take all

And then the bottom fell out. The U.S economy was in shambles and the crisis spread to the rest of the world. Can this meltdown of the world economy possibly lead to a rethinking in the minds of the ruling 'elite', the bankers and Wall Street conmen who are now scrambling to put a lid on the violently boiling stew? If compassion does not work for the psychopaths who rule the world, can reality tell them that something went terribly wrong? Their monolithic machine hit a massive wall.

Will this be the final proof that raw capitalism does not work? Will the Big Money men finally understand that there has to be production behind capital gains, not just speculation for short-term gains? And who are the producers? You and me. The producers were the people who are now laid off and hurting, who lost their homes through the urge to get into deep debt that was preached to them by the bankers. Preached to them by the Wall Street prophets who have not lost their fortunes or their standing. Only the workers are hurting. This government takes care of its own.

When will the people finally be able to convince Big Money that their wealth is due to the ceaseless efforts of the workers? That they must have a share in the profits or else the economy is bound to tank. Again and again. No buyers, no profits. The Big guys can sit safe on their big estates only for so long before they too begin to hurt. You don't eat shares and derivatives. You don't go on luxury cruises when there is noone to make up the crew. (noone in one word is perfectly correct)

Even the people who don't understand the words compassion and sharing will find one day that speculative short-term gains do not make the world go round.

Being your brother's keeper

How about reinstating an equitable way of running the ship? When will the leaders of the world see that with the billions of the world's population who are starving or on the edge of starvation, the lack of equilibrium on the planet is not going to be solved by letting those billions starve to death?

The people who fail to understand that we are all born equals and that the only humane thing to do is to be your brother's keeper have to do some serious thinking. If your brother is starving it's not because he is lazy, it's because he was never given a chance to earn a decent living, or else you, the criminals who rule the planet, took it away from him. Given equal chances to make a decent living to begin with, the human being is instinctively a hard worker. If you ruined his chances to look out for himself, it's your responsibility to restore his rights to a decent life.

Call it socialism, call it welfare if you like; but I call it repairing the damage caused by colonialism, expansionism and corporatism, and the effects of a game of loaded dice that you invented. You naively believed that you could run the world without the cooperation of the honest people, the workers, the producers, the ones who were not brought up to become rapists and predators. You thought those people could be exploited indefinitely, until they conveniently died from starvation and overwork. In the meantime, you had reaped all the profit possible from their delivering diamonds and gold from the mines in the Congo or in the badly constructed and ill-secured mines in your own country where several deadly accidents have occurred in the past few years alone. Who cares? There are millions of unemployed workers who are waiting to take their dangerous jobs. That's the way you planned your game of Big Profit.

How unfortunate for you to realize finally that your wealth is not going to go on multiplying endlessly, with just a tolerable number of victims of your greed every year. How unfortunate for you to realize that you have to be your brother's keeper or else the economy will come to a screeching halt.

Was democracy a dream only?

If it's unrealistic to think that we might be able to change the minds of the madly accumulating psychopaths, today's world leaders, or to put them in straitjackets, we can at least hope for a future world where humility, cooperation and concern for the Other will reign, instead of fear.

When will we all have a voice in where the world is going? When will we get some semblance of democracy back?

Can we finally have some degree of basic human rights and decency in the running of the world? Please.