Sunday, February 13, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
by Will Wilkinson
At first glance, the “leaderless revolution” in Egypt has nothing in common with the recent closing of Allyson’s, a local deli here in our small Oregon town. Until you hear why the bank called the note. “… the balance and payments are due.”
Quoting from a CommonDreams.org article by David Porter on Egypt:
The banker’s quote appeared in a story carried by our local paper and it wasn’t accompanied by any mitigating compassion. Apparently he didn’t feel it was necessary to show any. It’s the golden rule in action: he who has the gold makes the rules. Period. And, it’s happening everywhere.
A San Francisco friend tells me about his eleven months of futile communication with the bank that holds his mortgage. They lost his paperwork three times. All he wanted was to renegotiate the payments. Finally, he’s walking away. But first, he’s stopped making any payments at all. He’ll live in the house until he is forced to leave. When he does leave, the house will sit empty, tied up in red tape, while homeless people crowd the streets nearby.
A Texas couple fights Blue Cross and Blue Shield who have both denied coverage of life saving heart surgery for their newborn baby, on the basis that it is a pre-existing condition. Pre-existing? He was born with it. Reading the official responses from these companies… it’s the same story. They simply don’t want to pay. They are in business to make money, as are the banks. Providing some sort of service is an irritating necessity. The less actually provided, the more successful these businesses are.
Meanwhile, out on the streets where we live, the anger is building towards a breaking point. How many Allyson’s closing down, how many home owners walking away (or being driven out), how many of us losing our savings to pay for health care, how many “confrontations with local officials and elites” will it take to finally get us out on the streets? When will the world start watching a “leaderless revolution” here in America? We don’t have a dictator to oust. For us, it’s a ruling oligarchy immune to influence by voting. It’s bankers, corporations, multi-whatillionaires, an enabling government, those with the gold, the power and no interest in us, beyond milking us everyday like the docile sheep they believe us to be.
The leaderless revolution in Egypt took years to develop. There wasn’t much news about it along the way. Likewise here in the good old USA. So, when it finally erupts, as it inevitably will, it may seem like a surprise. But it won’t be; it is inevitable. The only question is “When?”
But we’re innovators, at least those of us who’ve survived so far with our imaginations intact. We don’t have to wait for thousands to march together, maybe in Times Square. We’ve actually got a lot of power right now. And, ironically, our power resides in the same place it does for those who rule us: money. Imagine the day when we take our money out of those banks and begin lending it to each other? Fifty friends in our small community coming up with $5,000 each could have saved our favorite deli.
Risky? Not as risky as banks and the carnage they wreak in our communities every day. So, am I suggesting local, citizen-operated banks? Sort of. But what I imagine is more neighborly than the word “bank” can possibly ever convey now, it’s meaning forever corrupted by the heartless behavior we’re witnessing. It’s simpler, more like friends just supporting each other. Financially. What a concept. And imagine not charging interest. No interest. No taxes. Just favors between trusting friends.
Maybe some day we will be out on the streets and the world will watch breathlessly as the next American Revolution turns tables. But we can start right now without any fanfare at all, taking baby steps to regain our power, one friendly exchange at a time. We hear the stories of grief every day and it’s our friends who are telling them. How about, instead of just sympathizing and worrying that I might be next - which explains why I’m clinging to that $5,000 I’ve got stashed in the stranger’s bank - I respond in the most practical way possible? I take my hoarded wealth and put it in play. “Here, will this help?”
What have I got to lose? Well, my $5,000. So how much have I already lost to investments gone bad? To strangers? (As I write this I’m feeling a bit like I do when I wake up from a weird dream.) Why not lose mine to friends right here in my own community? But, of course, as we all know from experience, true no-strings-attached generosity always returns rewards that far exceed the value of what we offered. We do know that, because we already give and receive with each other that way. But now may be the time to start exchanging cash. It’s been the hold out. For obvious reasons. After all, it’s the symbol of what enslaves us, the currency of the middleman.
This is probably a worst-case scenario for our masters, that we make them and their paper power unnecessary. But if they aren’t going to be neighborly, why would we really want to have anything to do with them?
Monday, February 14, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
by Will Wilkinson
At first glance, the “leaderless revolution” in Egypt has nothing in common with the recent closing of Allyson’s, a local deli here in our small Oregon town. Until you hear why the bank called the note. “… the balance and payments are due.”
Quoting from a CommonDreams.org article by David Porter on Egypt:
“It is the slowly-accumulating momentum of hundreds of thousands of confrontations with local officials and elites… that slowly develop the courage, confidence and essential horizontal networks bubbling below the surface…”How many Allyson’s stories are accumulating throughout America? How many business owners and employees, home owners and credit card users have had their lives turned upside down by banker’s decisions like this one, so utterly devoid of humanity?
The banker’s quote appeared in a story carried by our local paper and it wasn’t accompanied by any mitigating compassion. Apparently he didn’t feel it was necessary to show any. It’s the golden rule in action: he who has the gold makes the rules. Period. And, it’s happening everywhere.
A San Francisco friend tells me about his eleven months of futile communication with the bank that holds his mortgage. They lost his paperwork three times. All he wanted was to renegotiate the payments. Finally, he’s walking away. But first, he’s stopped making any payments at all. He’ll live in the house until he is forced to leave. When he does leave, the house will sit empty, tied up in red tape, while homeless people crowd the streets nearby.
A Texas couple fights Blue Cross and Blue Shield who have both denied coverage of life saving heart surgery for their newborn baby, on the basis that it is a pre-existing condition. Pre-existing? He was born with it. Reading the official responses from these companies… it’s the same story. They simply don’t want to pay. They are in business to make money, as are the banks. Providing some sort of service is an irritating necessity. The less actually provided, the more successful these businesses are.
Meanwhile, out on the streets where we live, the anger is building towards a breaking point. How many Allyson’s closing down, how many home owners walking away (or being driven out), how many of us losing our savings to pay for health care, how many “confrontations with local officials and elites” will it take to finally get us out on the streets? When will the world start watching a “leaderless revolution” here in America? We don’t have a dictator to oust. For us, it’s a ruling oligarchy immune to influence by voting. It’s bankers, corporations, multi-whatillionaires, an enabling government, those with the gold, the power and no interest in us, beyond milking us everyday like the docile sheep they believe us to be.
The leaderless revolution in Egypt took years to develop. There wasn’t much news about it along the way. Likewise here in the good old USA. So, when it finally erupts, as it inevitably will, it may seem like a surprise. But it won’t be; it is inevitable. The only question is “When?”
But we’re innovators, at least those of us who’ve survived so far with our imaginations intact. We don’t have to wait for thousands to march together, maybe in Times Square. We’ve actually got a lot of power right now. And, ironically, our power resides in the same place it does for those who rule us: money. Imagine the day when we take our money out of those banks and begin lending it to each other? Fifty friends in our small community coming up with $5,000 each could have saved our favorite deli.
Risky? Not as risky as banks and the carnage they wreak in our communities every day. So, am I suggesting local, citizen-operated banks? Sort of. But what I imagine is more neighborly than the word “bank” can possibly ever convey now, it’s meaning forever corrupted by the heartless behavior we’re witnessing. It’s simpler, more like friends just supporting each other. Financially. What a concept. And imagine not charging interest. No interest. No taxes. Just favors between trusting friends.
Maybe some day we will be out on the streets and the world will watch breathlessly as the next American Revolution turns tables. But we can start right now without any fanfare at all, taking baby steps to regain our power, one friendly exchange at a time. We hear the stories of grief every day and it’s our friends who are telling them. How about, instead of just sympathizing and worrying that I might be next - which explains why I’m clinging to that $5,000 I’ve got stashed in the stranger’s bank - I respond in the most practical way possible? I take my hoarded wealth and put it in play. “Here, will this help?”
What have I got to lose? Well, my $5,000. So how much have I already lost to investments gone bad? To strangers? (As I write this I’m feeling a bit like I do when I wake up from a weird dream.) Why not lose mine to friends right here in my own community? But, of course, as we all know from experience, true no-strings-attached generosity always returns rewards that far exceed the value of what we offered. We do know that, because we already give and receive with each other that way. But now may be the time to start exchanging cash. It’s been the hold out. For obvious reasons. After all, it’s the symbol of what enslaves us, the currency of the middleman.
This is probably a worst-case scenario for our masters, that we make them and their paper power unnecessary. But if they aren’t going to be neighborly, why would we really want to have anything to do with them?
++++++++++++++
Monday, February 14, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
The massive rise of popular protests around the Middle East and North Africa coincided with the convening of the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal. While the former were the subject of deserved and extensive media attention, the latter was virtually ignored by mainstream media. Yet all these gatherings of activists should be seen as part of a single, global movement that has been unfolding for over a decade.
While protesters in Egypt seek to topple corrupt and authoritarian rulers, activists at the World Social Forum have been doing the long-term and painstaking work of building a global movement to transform the basic structures of our world economy. It is those structures that enable the greed and brutality of individual leaders while maintaining the conditions against which Egyptians, Jordanians, Yemenis as well as Ecuadorans, Indians, and Detroiters are all resisting.
A new regime in Egypt will not fundamentally reduce youth unemployment. New leadership in Jordan will not solve the global climate crisis. Changes in local and national governments, without larger structural changes, will not end the land speculation, corporate monopolies, and militarization that plague communities worldwide.
While we must support the protests in the Middle East, it is vital that we see how they are connected to other struggles, including the massive protests last fall across Europe as well as the larger and more inclusive global justice movement that has created the World Social Forum process.
In a recent analysis of the Egyptian protests, Horace Campbell identifies the most important characteristics of these “21st century revolutions”:
As governments and empires use force to maintain their preferred world order, another world is being created and nurtured “from below.” We must recognize the many forms the revolution of the 21st century takes and support it in all of its manifestations.
Monday, February 14, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
While protesters in Egypt seek to topple corrupt and authoritarian rulers, activists at the World Social Forum have been doing the long-term and painstaking work of building a global movement to transform the basic structures of our world economy. It is those structures that enable the greed and brutality of individual leaders while maintaining the conditions against which Egyptians, Jordanians, Yemenis as well as Ecuadorans, Indians, and Detroiters are all resisting.
A new regime in Egypt will not fundamentally reduce youth unemployment. New leadership in Jordan will not solve the global climate crisis. Changes in local and national governments, without larger structural changes, will not end the land speculation, corporate monopolies, and militarization that plague communities worldwide.
While we must support the protests in the Middle East, it is vital that we see how they are connected to other struggles, including the massive protests last fall across Europe as well as the larger and more inclusive global justice movement that has created the World Social Forum process.
In a recent analysis of the Egyptian protests, Horace Campbell identifies the most important characteristics of these “21st century revolutions”:
- The revolutions are made by ordinary people independent of vanguard parties and self-proclaimed revolutionaries;
- They are network-based and are developing innovative tools and technologies to foster autonomous, horizontal, and cooperative networks;
- They are led by ordinary people who have taken initiative and stepped up to contribute to the movement’s self-mobilization and its effort at self-emancipation;
- They rely on and seek to build revolutionary non-violence for self-defense;
- Their ultimate revolutionary idea is for a world where human beings can live in dignity and freedom from dictatorship and violence
As governments and empires use force to maintain their preferred world order, another world is being created and nurtured “from below.” We must recognize the many forms the revolution of the 21st century takes and support it in all of its manifestations.
+++++++++++++++++++++
Monday, February 14, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Many reasons have been cited for the runaway food costs that have plagued Egypt's citizens: increased global demand, floods and drought in grain-producing nations, reduced supplies because of biofuel production, Federal Reserve policies. But it's becoming clear that our own dirty little secret -- risky financial derivatives, like those that spurred the U.S. mortgage crisis -- have bubbled up from the toxic Wall Street pavement as a major cause. We need to dig deeper into the dirt.
The richest 1% of Americans, unlike lower-income earners who spend mostly on consumer goods, can spend much of their annual trillion dollar windfall from tax cuts and deregulation on high-stakes investment opportunities. And this they have done, with great success and little regard to the global consequences.
One of their strategies is the "long-only" commodities index fund, by which speculators keep buying even when a rising market would normally motivate them to sell. This can put massive inflationary pressure on a commodity. According to 25-year trading veteran Daniel Dicker, these investment vehicles, which didn't even exist a few years ago, have caused such a market imbalance that it's nearly impossible to avoid a bubble in food prices.
Dicker remarks about the importance to financial traders to "capitalize on the supply shortages," and about the need by governments to stockpile basic commodities to prevent food emergencies. He also notes the speed with which these trades occur. Apparently it all happens too fast for a humanitarian response.
As a result, according to the New York Times, wheat has reached its highest price in 28 years, and the effects are being felt in Egypt and Haiti and other countries whose citizens live on a few dollars a day. Harper's Magazine editor Frederick Kaufman notes that Egypt's inflation rate on food has reached 17% PER MONTH.
The financial players, says Kaufman, are investing in "imaginary wheat." In 2008 the publication Price Perceptions said, "index funds alone now own about 1 billion bushels of Chicago wheat compared to annual US production of about 500 million." 'Fantasy finance,' as Les Leopold calls it.
Not surprisingly, unregulated free market defenders deny all this. The Economist says, "there is little empirical evidence that investors cause more than fleeting distortions to commodity prices." Resource Investor claimed in 2008 that while "commodity market speculation by long-only index funds has increased markedly...most commodity futures markets experienced an equally dramatic or even greater increase in selling by commercial hedgers."
But Frederick Kaufman counters that "speculators are outnumbering the physical hedgers by about 4 to 1 in these markets." Revenues from speculative trading at Goldman Sachs alone more than quintupled over the past two years. Way back in 2007 a Market Club Trader's Blog commented that "As money has flooded into this (Goldman Sachs Commodity Index), prices have continued higher."
In his February 4, 2011 Common Dreams essay "Food, Egypt and Wall Street," Institute for Policy Studies writer Robert Alvarez cited one of the main reasons for this sordid financial state of affairs, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000: "Before this law, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) served as a cop on the beat, enforcing rules that prevent distortion of manipulation of prices beyond normal supply and demand. But Wall Street Banks and companies such as ENRON, and British Petroleum were determined to make a lot more money from speculation by exempting energy-derivative contracts and related swaps from government oversight."
Alvarez quotes noted hedge trader Michael McMasters: "This amounts to 'a form of electronic hoarding and greatly increases the inflationary effect of the market. It literally means starvation for millions of the world's poor.'"
We're letting a few thousand well-positioned financial experts fashion games of chance that earn them billions with other people's money. And, now, with other people's lives.
The richest 1% of Americans, unlike lower-income earners who spend mostly on consumer goods, can spend much of their annual trillion dollar windfall from tax cuts and deregulation on high-stakes investment opportunities. And this they have done, with great success and little regard to the global consequences.
One of their strategies is the "long-only" commodities index fund, by which speculators keep buying even when a rising market would normally motivate them to sell. This can put massive inflationary pressure on a commodity. According to 25-year trading veteran Daniel Dicker, these investment vehicles, which didn't even exist a few years ago, have caused such a market imbalance that it's nearly impossible to avoid a bubble in food prices.
Dicker remarks about the importance to financial traders to "capitalize on the supply shortages," and about the need by governments to stockpile basic commodities to prevent food emergencies. He also notes the speed with which these trades occur. Apparently it all happens too fast for a humanitarian response.
As a result, according to the New York Times, wheat has reached its highest price in 28 years, and the effects are being felt in Egypt and Haiti and other countries whose citizens live on a few dollars a day. Harper's Magazine editor Frederick Kaufman notes that Egypt's inflation rate on food has reached 17% PER MONTH.
The financial players, says Kaufman, are investing in "imaginary wheat." In 2008 the publication Price Perceptions said, "index funds alone now own about 1 billion bushels of Chicago wheat compared to annual US production of about 500 million." 'Fantasy finance,' as Les Leopold calls it.
Not surprisingly, unregulated free market defenders deny all this. The Economist says, "there is little empirical evidence that investors cause more than fleeting distortions to commodity prices." Resource Investor claimed in 2008 that while "commodity market speculation by long-only index funds has increased markedly...most commodity futures markets experienced an equally dramatic or even greater increase in selling by commercial hedgers."
But Frederick Kaufman counters that "speculators are outnumbering the physical hedgers by about 4 to 1 in these markets." Revenues from speculative trading at Goldman Sachs alone more than quintupled over the past two years. Way back in 2007 a Market Club Trader's Blog commented that "As money has flooded into this (Goldman Sachs Commodity Index), prices have continued higher."
In his February 4, 2011 Common Dreams essay "Food, Egypt and Wall Street," Institute for Policy Studies writer Robert Alvarez cited one of the main reasons for this sordid financial state of affairs, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000: "Before this law, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) served as a cop on the beat, enforcing rules that prevent distortion of manipulation of prices beyond normal supply and demand. But Wall Street Banks and companies such as ENRON, and British Petroleum were determined to make a lot more money from speculation by exempting energy-derivative contracts and related swaps from government oversight."
Alvarez quotes noted hedge trader Michael McMasters: "This amounts to 'a form of electronic hoarding and greatly increases the inflationary effect of the market. It literally means starvation for millions of the world's poor.'"
We're letting a few thousand well-positioned financial experts fashion games of chance that earn them billions with other people's money. And, now, with other people's lives.
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