The Debt Crisis in the European Union (Part 2/7) The great Greek bond bazaar

Click here to access article from the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt.

Eric Toussaint: The ECB is entirely devoted to serving the bankers’ interests.

CADTM: But how?

I don't know if you can follow all the financial tricks that European banks use to enrich themselves, but it is clear to Eric Toussaint that the European Union and its institutions were designed for the welfare of the private banks and their owners, the capitalist ruling classes, and not for the benefit of the vast majority. Surprise, surprise!

I will continue to run all seven parts of the author's articles to shed some light on the dire debt situation that the private banks have laid upon Europe's working people. It is a situation that is still developing, and many think that it will deteriorate into a much deeper crisis. (For example, see this.)

World Bank Policies "enabling" African Land Grab

Click here to access article from Bretton Woods Project 

...WBG has, through an array of different policies, overseen a shift towards prioritising large-scale commercial agribusiness, achieved by attracting and promoting foreign agricultural investment. The Foreign Investment Advisory Service and the Remove Administrative Barriers to Investment program, both projects of the International Finance Corporation, the Bank's private sector arm, have "been working - often behind the scenes - to ensure that African countries reform their land laws and fiscal regimes to make them attractive to foreign investors". The Bank has financed legal reform mechanisms that are promoting rapid changes in land tenure laws, "driven by a desire to facilitate large-scale agricultural investment".

The Bank has also been funding investment promotion agencies in African countries that place private sector advisors in key governmental ministries, including presidential offices.

Death of the Republic on 9/11/01 "For Security Reasons" , "Credible and Unconfirmed Reports"...

Click here to access article by Dr. Bill Friend from Global Research.

...what made me mourn, not only for the lost innocents in my community, but for the death of the Republic, was what began on Friday 9/9....

...those continuing reports on all the mainstream networks and their cable affiliates of "CREDIBLE but UNCONFIRMED" reports of some group of "terrorists" who were coming to somewhere in NYC in some truck or other vehicle loaded with explosives of an undetermined nature to be blown up somewhere in some crowd.  One couldn't get away from these reports and they became incessant.

FBI training material portrays Islam as an indicator of terrorist activity

Click here to access article by Abdus-Sattar Ghazali from OpEd News. 

The seven-million strong American Muslim community was shocked to know that the FBI has been using anti-Muslim instructors and Islamophobic materials in counterterrorism training.

You can be sure that the ruling class will continue to use every trick in their trickster's book to get American workers to fight against each other in order to divert attention away from them.

From Henry Gale's Study Abroad Blog.

A 3 part series by Henry Gales from The Pioneer. Click on links below to access the articles.
 
The author is apparently a student at Whitman College in southeastern Washington state, and is probably doing a "junior year abroad" at a university in Argentina. He offers a comparison of the pseudo-democratic form of government in the US with that of Argentina which is commonly found throughout Latin American with some variations: clientelism.

Government, Part One: Fascism

Goverment, Part 2: Democracy + Part 3: Clientelism 

Famous Wall Street trader: “the system is ‘fuck the poor’”

Click here to access article by Jérôme E. Roos from RoarMag. 

The fact that knowledgeable people like Eisman wasn't initially aware of what was going on is testimony to the covert and sophisticated nature of the operation. It was essentially a conscious criminal enterprise perpetrated by banksters and Wall Street investors that differs little from the methods used by the Mafia and other such criminal organizations. They boldly saw that lower-middle income people in the US were an "easy mark" because they naively believed in the American Dream. One of the leading pitchmen for this operation was none other than George Bush, Jr.

In the eye of the storm: the debt crisis in the European Union: Part 1 of 7 - Greece

Click here to access article by Eric Toussaint from Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt.

...Western European private banks used the money they received at very low rates from the ECB, the Bank of England, the US Federal Reserve and the US money market funds in order to increase their loans to countries such as Greece without taking risk into consideration. Private banks thus bear a heavy responsibility for the crushing debts of Greece. Greek private banks also loaned huge amounts to public authorities and to the private sector. They too have a significant responsibility in the present situation. Consequently the debts claimed from Greece by foreign and Greek banks as a result of their irresponsible policy should be considered illegitimate.

I don't know if you can follow all the financial tricks that European banks use to enrich themselves, but it is clear to me that the European Union and its institutions were designed for the welfare of the private banks and their owners, the capitalist ruling classes, and not for the benefit of the vast majority.

I will continue to run all seven parts of the author's articles to shed some light on the dire debt situation that the private banks have laid upon Europe's working people. It is a situation that is still developing, and many think that it will deteriorate into a much deeper crisis.

On Ideology: From Below and to the Left

Click here to access article by Henry Gales from The Pioneer. 

Liberalism and statism, for centuries, have cast a long shadow over all types of ideology. However, there are growing movements that realize the reality of today’s world. We do not need to take state power, work through political parties, or establish hegemony. Instead, we need to build projects of governments that are inseparable from the people, and in opposition to any form of hegemony.

I essentially agree with this thesis, but I worry about the degree of liberal (capitalist) indoctrination of false ideas and values that has informed the thinking of several generations of ordinary people now living. I agree with the author's rejection of vanguardism, but reject his implied notion that left political parties have little to contribute toward building a genuine working class consciousness and viable working class organizations. (It is possible that he differentiates between formal parties that run in elections and political organizations.) Left political parties (and I include organizations) have preserved the history of working class struggles and there are many lessons that can be derived from this historical experience. Thus, they have much to contribute.

Why we are marching in Paris on September 17

Click here to access article by Jérôme E. Roos from RoarMag.

We are mobilizing on September 17 because we know that the total cost of saving the US banking sector was higher than the total cost of WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan and the Apollo Project, all added together and adjusted for inflation; and we know that the people are now being made to pay for that through years and years of austerity measures — while the bankers themselves are getting away unscathed.

There are many links to information about the role banks have played in the economic collapse and the way they have with impunity looked to taxpayers to bail them out and to provide them with cheap money to gamble with again. I have been covering this scene with in-depth articles for nearly the past two years. Such information informs the anger toward the mega-banks against which the protests are directed.

As I see it, such protests are long overdue in the US, but better late than never.

The World Consequences of U.S. Decline

Click here to access article by Immanuel Wallerstein from his blog.

Politicians and journalists are talking openly of the “dysfunctionality” of the U.S. political situation. But what else could it possibly be but dysfunctional? The most elementary fact is that U.S. citizens are stunned by the mere fact of decline. It’s not only that U.S. citizens are themselves suffering materially from the decline, and are deeply afraid that they will suffer even more as time goes on. It’s that they have deeply believed that the United States is the “chosen nation” designed by God or history to be the model nation in the world.

This distinguished liberal sociologist doesn't seem to realize that we are now entering into an era of globalized capitalism. National boundaries are irrelevant to capitalist elites because they have removed all impediments to their investment activities. Boundaries are now only used to control the movements of workers. Capitalists can and do move workers across boundaries whenever they see profit opportunities, but workers find it very difficult on their own initiative to move across boundaries for better opportunities.

Western capitalist ruling classes have decided on a merger just like corporations have merged with each other to provide more capital and power to extract more profits. The new empire that has formed out of the former Western countries is called NATO, and it is very much in the ascendancy. All the other capitalist countries such as China, Russia, Brazil, Japan, etc. are competitors, but pose little threat to NATO at the present time. Okay, I know that cartographers haven't changed their maps, but this is because NATO's ruling elites want to preserve some fictions about national identity just like they preserve fictions about democratic rule.

Although US and citizens of many other Western capitalist countries are experiencing decline in their living standards, the wealthy elites have never had so much wealth and power. They are clearly in the ascendancy.

We are now entering a world where extremely wealthy people live on well guarded, gated communities like islands in a sea of poor workers. This is the dismal world we are entering and must resist with all of our imagination and courage.

Neoliberalism, Austerity and Participatory Democracy

Click here to access article by Sveinung Legard from New Compass. 

Is there truly an inherent contradiction between fighting for welfare rights on one side and participatory democracy on the other? Do our attempts to achieve immediate reforms to regulate the economy necessarily preclude the revolutionary goals of a post-capitalist society?

Clearly, the answer is no!

The central demand in all of the new mobilizations and uprisings against neoliberalism and austerity policies around the world, has been the demand for real and participatory democracy.

 

Who will occupy Wall Street on September 17?

Click here to access article by Nathan Schneider Waging Nonviolence. 

Something...is definitely going to be happening. A lot of people are definitely going to be there, though 20,000 seems pretty optimistic. Some will know what they’re doing more than others, and all will learn. Not only will this weekend be a test of Americans’ readiness to resist, but of whether an idea lobbed into the internet by Adbusters, then grabbed by artists, students, Twitter hashtags, and a shadowy network of hackers (and hacker wannabes), can really turn into a “flood,” a show of meaningful political force, a new way forward.

If the level of political consciousness of US activists is represented in this article, then I fear for US activism. Assuming that this website is representative of the thinking of US activists, just the name of this website suggests that the only thing they can agree upon is to be non-violent in their actions. 

I have seen this call for non-violence emphasized in nearly every activist organization in the US. One might easily think that it was a basic principle of activism rather than simply a tactic for the present when one is faced with an overwhelmingly armed opponent: the organized security services of the global ruling class who have absolutely no hesitation about their use of violence against political dissenters. 

All humans feel an innate sense of the need to protect themselves from assault; and if they must use violence to protect themselves, they will do so. Given the present circumstances, it just doesn't make much sense to do use violence offensively. There are other ways to thwart our oppressors, and these must be identified and used aggressively.

And they seem wary of ideology as if they hadn't been subject to capitalist ideology all of their lives. It seems that citizens in the US have been swimming in the waters of capitalism for so long that they find it difficult to imagine any other form. Worker history has been expunged from history books by their capitalist masters. Thus, it seems that all the worker struggles for emancipation from capitalists over the past 200 years plus has no relevance for them. It seems like they feel the necessity to start over in the first school grade of political understanding. God, I hope I am wrong!

Of one thing I am certain: we, the people, must learn quickly how to resist this capitalist juggernaut and replace it with something that serves all of humanity; because, if we fail, the consequences will be horrific.
 

NOTICE:

I will be having visitors from now through September 14th which will limit the amount of posting that I will be doing during this period. Should be back on full schedule on the 15th. 

Ron Horn

Airplanes Have Been Flown By Remote Control Since 1917

Click here to access article from Washington's Blog.

Haven't had time to review this article thoroughly, but it appears that this blogger has assembled substantial evidence that the 9/11 "hijacked" airplanes may have been under remote control when they crashed into the towers. 

Peak Oil, Peak Debt, and the Concentration of Power

Click here to access article by Charles Eisenstein from The Oil Drum. 

I haven't had time to fully read this article or comment on it, but it looks interesting to me. The first thing that struck me--and, this is typical of many articles written by academics--is that the author is writing about the capitalist system but is unable to name it. He writes around the subject by using  phrases which really refer to capitalism without naming the system. See if you agree.

It should not be surprising, since the profit motive has been the primary driver towards these peaks, that we should be approaching a peak in the realm of money as well, a peak that we might call "peak debt." The crisis in money is ineluctably related to the crisis in everything else, because the viability of our money system depends on growth: the conversion of nature into goods, and relationships into services. This conversion cannot proceed much farther, due to resource depletion and the inability of society and biosphere to sustain more damage.