Economics « Aletho News

Obama: The “Trust-Buster” Who Never Busted a Trust

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | December 7, 2011

President Obama thinks he can win reelection by running the same hoax on his Democratic base as he did in 2008: flavoring his speeches with progressive sounding rhetoric while tightening the bankers’ grip on government and continuing his pursuit a “grand bargain” with the Republicans. In his speech on Tuesday in Kansas, Obama depicted himself as the reincarnation of President Teddy Roosevelt, known as a corporate “trust-buster” at the turn of the 20th century. But Obama is no trust-buster. He has never busted a corporate monopoly. His administration approved the merger of Comcast and NBC, consolidating even an bigger monopoly and giving the lie to his 2008 campaign promise to reinvigorate anti-trust enforcement.

The Obama m.o. is to talk a progressive game and then do just the opposite. He claims he found it “infuriating” to rescue the banks from collapse when he came to office. If that’s the case, then the best thing that could happen to Black people would be for Obama to get absolutely furious at us – and then the trillions would flow. When Obama supposedly got furious at the banks, he put the whole government and the Federal Reserve at their beck and call and funneled more than $16 trillion into their accounts. Apparently, it pays big time to get Barack Obama “infuriated.” If he gets mad enough at you, he’ll open up the windows at the Federal Reserve and hand out trillions of dollars in interest-free loans. Then, if you’re a bank that he’s really mad at, you can take the people’s money and buy U.S. Treasury bonds and get a healthy return on your cost-free investment.

In Kansas, Obama claimed that his so-called banking reform legislation will funnel money to “families who want to buy a home or send their kids to college.” We’ve seen no evidence of that happening. But Obama did make sure that his “reforms” did nothing to upset the Wall Street derivatives casino that is now notionally valued at at least $600 trillion – about the same as it was before the 2008 meltdown and bailout. $600 trillion is roughly ten times the value of all the yearly goods and services produced by every man woman and child in the world. It is a ticking time bomb that will inevitably bring down the real world economy if it is not defused. Apparently, that makes Obama absolutely paralyzed with rage.

Obama says the banks “should be remedying past mortgage abuses that led to the financial crisis, and working to keep responsible homeowners in their home.” It’s nice to hear what he thinks banks “should” be doing, but he didn’t use his presidential clout to compel them to do much of anything to change their ways, even when he could, back when Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress. And Obama’s own pitiful program to keep families in their homes was a colossal failure that helped only a fraction. Perhaps Obama is now infuriated with himself.

Throughout his Wizard of Oz Kansas speech, Obama attempted to put moral and philosophical distance between himself and the Republicans. But this is not 2008. Anyone with eyes and ears and a memory now knows that Obama is a true believer in the old time deficit cutting religion, a disciple of austerity, a man who wants nothing more than to join hands with the GOP to gut Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Obama is a charlatan who cites the deeds of dead presidents but pursues policies that are directly the opposite. In other words, he is a very elaborate liar.

December 7, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

A point for the Israel lobby theory, from Panetta

By Philip Weiss on December 5, 2011

‘Defense’ Secretary Leon Panetta

One of the big arguments against the Israel lobby theory is that our Middle East policy is driven by the military industrial complex. And so the Iraq war was a war for oil and military spending. This cynical materialist theory (spawned by Eisenhower in ’61) dismisses my cynical theory of history (spawned by realists in 2006), which turns on ideology and religion– that many of the war’s proponents wanted to make Israel safer by invading a country that had attacked Israel.

Well when I was in Cairo recently Issandr El Amrani, who largely agrees with me, said that if American corporate interests really were driving policy in the region, why not have a robust arms race among all the feuding countries there? Why not foster an arms race between Israel and Iran and Egypt– that would be great for profits! End the treaty between Israel and Egypt, let Egypt militarize itself even more…

But we don’t foster an arms race. And Leon Panetta explicitly does not want an arms race. From the Defense Secretary’s conversation with Kenneth Pollack at the Saban Forum Friday:

MR. POLLACK: …What do you think the consequences of Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon would be and why do you – (inaudible)?

SEC. PANETTA:… once Iran gets a nuclear weapon, then they’re not – you will have an arms race in the Middle East. What’s to stop Saudi Arabia from getting a nuclear weapon? What’s to stop other countries from getting nuclear weapons in that part of the world? Suddenly we have an escalation of these horrible weapons that, you know, I think create even greater devastation in the Middle East.

So a key for all of us – for all of us is to work together – together – to ensure that that does not happen. We have made good progress in these efforts. We continue to make good progress in these efforts. That’s where we ought to continue to put our pressures, our efforts, our diplomatic, our economic, experts working together to make sure that that does not happen.

December 5, 2011 Posted by aletho | Economics, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Outsourcing Jobs, Offshoring Markets

By ALAN NASSER | CounterPunch | December 2, 2011

Conventional economic wisdom teaches that it is not in the interests of employers to drive wages down to desperation levels, since most consumers are wage earners and consumption demand generates from 66 to 72 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. Were employers to drive wages too low they would at the same destroy their customer base, which is good for neither capital nor labor. This line of reasoning assumes that capitalism is organized such that each nation’s labor market is both entirely domestic and the sole source of the demand for its economy’s output. But capitalism is a global system and its sovereign components are not closed economies. The typical large corporations’ labor pool and customer base are now globally dispersed. In fact, the last few decades have seen the creation, for the first time in history, of a global labor market.

The outsourcing of jobs has become common knowledge, and is perceived by most working people as a significant source of the nation’s unemployment woes. The loss of jobs to cheaper labor markets is nothing new; it has been building since the 1960s. In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of domestic output. In 2008, it represented 11.5 percent. This tendency has accelerated with the deregulation of cross-border capital flows. Since 2000 the United States has lost thousands of factories and a total of about 5.5 million manufacturing jobs, representing a 32 percent decline. By the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing. The last time we saw those numbers was in 1941.

Widget production is not the only sector that has seen job outsourcing. We are perhaps most familiar with offshore phone centers, but all sorts of uptown jobs have also been shipped out. Highly trained engineers and draftsmen, architects, computer programmers and other kinds of high-tech workers are increasingly employed by US companies in China, Russia, India, and the Philippines.

In these neoliberal times we are no longer scandalized to learn that this pattern is heartily championed by none other than the chairman of president Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, Jeffrey Immelt, who happens to be CEO of General Electric. 2010 was a banner year for GE, when $9.1 billion of its total profits of $14.2 billion came from its overseas operations. Immelt pulls no punches in his indifference to US workers. At a December 6, 2002 investors meeting he enthused “When I am talking to GE managers, I talk China, China, China, China, China. You need to be there. You need to change the way people talk about it and how they get there. I am a nut on China. Outsourcing from China is going to grow to 5 billion. We are building a tech center in China. Every discussion today has to center on China. The cost basis is extremely attractive. You can take an 18 cubic foot refrigerator, make it in China, land it in the United States, and land it for less than we can make an 18 cubic foot refrigerator ourselves.”

This is the man Obama put in charge of a committee assembled to address the nation’s unemployment crisis. But don’t think that Immelt’s obsession with overseas economic activity is only about cheap labor and lower costs. He goes on: “Today we go to Brazil, we go to China, we go to India, because that’s where the customers are.” My goodness, this looks like the Leninist thing about the insufficiency of domestic markets to absorb the economy’s output. The US worker is not only becoming decreasingly important as an input to production, (s)he is no longer seen by big capital as the most promising customer, the most robust source of sales revenue.

On both the supply side and the demand side, the US worker/consumer is perceived as incrementally inessential. The former Labor Secretary under Clinton and current liberal blogger Robert Reich thinks that this strategy is irrational, even on capitalist terms: “Corporate profits are up right now largely because pay is down and companies aren’t hiring. But this is a losing game even for corporations over the long term. Without enough American consumers, their profitable days are numbered. After all, there’s a limit to how much profit they can get out of cutting American payrolls or even selling abroad. European consumers are in no mood to buy. And most Asian economies, including China, are slowing.” Reich doesn’t get it.

The reference to “European consumers” is beside the point; Immelt and company don’t have Europe in mind. Exports are indeed the name of the current game, but the consumers are thought by the elite to be found in the emerging markets. Obama has for years been chanting the “export more, consume less” mantra as the key to US economic revival. His bosses reason by process of elimination. They know that the economy’s total product is generated by four and only four kinds of spending: consumption demand, investment demand, government demand and export demand. Consumption is not promising as a spur to production and profits because most consumers are wage earners, and they are low-paid, have taken absolute reductions in pay, are heavily indebted and are un- or underemployed. Investment doesn’t cut it for two reasons: no employer invests when purchasing power is exceptionally low, and, more importantly and completely unacknowledged by commentators, the present depression is not caused by a scarcity of productive facilities or by outdated equipment. A well developed complement of productive facilities is fully in place and ready to go. There is no need for additional investment. As for government spending for productive purposes, this is ruled out by the neoliberal consensus. Obama has repeatedly stressed that recovery must be rooted in the fabled self-restorative workings of the private sector.

We are left with exports as the economic Open Sesame. Obama has laid out the game plan in some detail in a speech, on his National Export Initiative, to the annual conference of the Import-Export Bank (March 11, 2010): “The world’s fastest-growing markets are outside our borders. We need to compete for those customers because other nations are competing for them.”

The focus on exports is consistent with the current geopolitics of the elite, which is reliably registered in the business press, most notably in such key journals as Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times and The Economist. There is thought to be a global shift of manufacturing activity from “the West” to “the East,” as the economically mature US, Europe and Japan deindustrialize while the emerging markets, mainly in Asia, take up the global slack by developing their own industrial prowess. Reich’s observation that “most Asian economies, including China, are slowing” is correct but inconsequential. What matters, as Obama notes, is where the “world’s fastest-growing markets” are to be found. Asia’s current slowing growth is compatible with the rapid growth, within China and India for example, of a new middle class and a nouveau riche. These are viewed by Western elites as where the present and prospective action is.

A now notorious Citigroup report encapsulates this economic cosmology in its thesis that “the World is dividing into two blocs – the Plutonomy and the rest.” Mounting inequality has become planet-wide. In a globalized world, the story goes, national consumers -“the US consumer”, “the French consumer”, “the Japanese consumer”- are obsolete. There are only the rich and the rest. The former are proportionally small in number but growing rapidly as neoliberal policy transfers to them the resources of the rest. The latter are accordingly marginal to what matters to the owning class.

A US-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told a writer for The Atlantic that “the hollowing out of the American middle class didn’t really matter.” The CEO described the subject of an executive discussion earlier this year: “… if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade.” The Chief Financial Officer of a US internet company expresses the same sentiment: “We demand a higher paycheck than the rest of the world. So if you’re going to demand 10 times the paycheck, you need to deliver 10 times the value. It sounds harsh, but maybe people in the middle class need to decide to take a pay cut.” At the summer 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival, the CEO of the Silicon Valley firm Applied Materials claimed that were he starting from scratch, only 20 percent of his workforce would be domestic. “This year, almost 90 percent of our sales will be outside the US. The pull to be close to the customers -most of them in Asia- is enormous.” And Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, is unabashedly frank about the way in which globalization generates an opposition between working-class and business interests: “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business… American businesses will adapt.” (See Chrystia Freeland, “The Rise of the New Global Elite,” in The Atlantic, January/February 2011.)

What all this comes to is a political economy of redistribution. Slow global economic growth over the past 30 or 40 years, and with no end in sight, has been construed by the Left as an indication of spreading “crisis,” a failure of capitalism to live up. From the perspective of working people the characterization is on the mark, since capitalism’s legitimizing ideology assures us that all will prosper when capitalism is doing its job. But from the point of view of capitalists, whose objective is to accumulate wealth, slow growth is not necessarily a sign of crisis, since wealth can be accumulated by redistribution, by widening inequality, in the absence of robust growth rates. This is what is currently taking place intra- and internationally. The outsourcing of jobs and customers is part of that game. Profits are revenues minus costs. Revenue maximization is thought by elites to be sought offshore. Cost reduction is to be created everywhere.

We can call this the Third-Worldization of the Rest, or, if we focus on the wage-earners of the developed countries, the creeping obsolescence of the working class. Workers can of course never be rendered entirely obsolete. What is happening is that we are approaching that condition asymptotically. One might object that there are clear limits to how impoverished working people can be made – after all, workers have to be maintained as work-ready. Upward redistribution can only go so far. But ever-widening inequality is perceived by elites as feasible by virtue of the limitless possibilities of greater indebtedness. Workers can make ends meet by indefinitely mortgaging their future income.

It is not far-fetched to see a growing resemblance of US and poor-country workers. High-priced economic forecasters and consultants are known to refer to the US as “Europe’s Mexico.” In the near future, they predict, some US states, mostly in the South but also including California and the Rust Belt, will be not only the cheapest manufacturing locations in the developed world, but also competitive with India and China. Wages are rising in the production- and service-oriented poor countries and falling in the rich ones. And US workers tend to quiescence, while unrest is brewing in the periphery. Costs of production are gradually converging between China and the US: declining-wage US workers are more productive. Non-union workers contracted by Ford to do inspection and repairs at the Dearborn truck plant make $10 an hour without benefits, which is projected to be less than the Chinese average by 2015.

Companies like Ford, Caterpillar, Wham-O Inc. (Frisbees), Master Lock, Suarez Manufacturing and General Electric have recently relocated production from China and Mexico to Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, California and Michigan. This may or may not be a growing trend, but the mere fact of some US regions becoming newly competitive with Mexico and China bespeaks the declining fortunes of the US worker.

The New York Times’ favorite neoliberal wild man Thomas Friedman summarizes the immiseration project in his trademark manner: the task in our country is to “cut public sector pay, freeze benefits, slash jobs, abolish a range of welfare entitlements and take the ax to programs such as school building and road maintenance.” Friedman goes on to excoriate US and Western European workers for believing in the “tooth fairy” and expecting government services without paying for them. In America, Friedman says, the baby-boomers, who inherited the prosperity of the post-war years, had “eaten through all that abundance like hungry locusts… After 65 years in which politics in the West was, mostly, about giving things away to voters, it’s now going to be, mostly, about taking things away. Goodbye Tooth Fairy politics, hello Root Canal politics.” (May 9, 2010)

The oligarchy has laid out, in plain and simple terms, its game plan. What shall be our response?

Alan Nasser is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. This article is adapted from his book in progress, The “New Normal”: Chronic Austerity and the Decline of Democracy. He can be reached at nassera@evergreen.edu

December 2, 2011 Posted by aletho | Economics, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Debt Slavery – Why It Destroyed Rome, Why It Will Destroy Us Unless It’s Stopped

By MICHAEL HUDSON | CounterPunch | December 2, 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, also 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 for debtors 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 per cent (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 7^th 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 – a conquest aimed at attaching interest-bearing debt claims for payment on as much of the economic surplus as possible.

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, enslaves 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 creditor “knights” 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.

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,” Richard Ehrenberg wrote in his Capital and Finance in the Age of the Renaissance (1928): “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 which has lasted to this day.

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.” (Charles Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship: 1603-1763: 1965.) 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, 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 per cent 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 the economy will collapse if 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.

December 2, 2011 Posted by aletho | Economics, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

General Strike Rocks Nation: Workers Across Britain Confront Conservative Austerity Demands

By Linn Washington Jr. | This Can’t Be Happening | 12/01/2011

London — Standing on a picket line in front of her work place at a world renowned heart-lung hospital in London wasn’t Jeanette Anderson’s first choice for how to spend her day.

However, Anderson said protesting was her “only choice.”

Protesting as part of a nationwide general strike in the UK, Anderson said, was necessary to combat austerity measures from Britain’s conservative led government that now targets the pensions of public sector workers like Anderson and her picket line colleagues at the Royal Brompton Hospital in this city’s up-scale Chelsea section.

“We do not get the fat-cat pensions like the rich,” Anderson said, noting that participating in the one-day strike action wasn’t something she took lightly.

“Public sector workers are already into a two-year pay freeze and now the government plans to extend that pay freeze for another two years.”

Anderson, her Brompton Hospital picket line colleagues and an estimated two million other public sector workers staged a one-day general strike across Britain Wednesday (11/30).

Public workers prepare to march through Central London in Wednesday’s UK General Strike (photo by Linn Washington)

That strike – the largest labor action in Britain in 30 years – closed 62 percent of the public schools in England, Scotland and Wales in addition to shuttering many government offices (local and national) including courts plus disrupting government services, such as forcing the postponements of some

Three miles from Anderson’s Brompton Hospital picket line over 25,000 public workers staged a rally and march that was one of over 1,000 protest actions by workers across Britain on November 30th.

Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron mocked the effectiveness of the general strike, citing its failure to disrupt operations at the nation’s major airports.

The Cameron government brought strikebreakers for the airports from as far away as the Caribbean to off-set the strike’s impact. Further, major airlines initiated programs to reschedule flights to avoid problems from the strike, particularly anticipated delays in processing passports of arriving passengers.

Countering Cameron, Brendan Barber, head of Britain’s Trade Union Congress, termed the strike a success, saying, “There has been magnificent support” for the strike. Barber promised similar labor actions in the near future if the Cameron government continues to assault the living standards of workers.

The flash point of the strike is the British government’s demands that public sector workers make higher contributions to their pensions and work longer before retirement.

Yet, the wider context of the strike is the set of austerity measures Britain’s conservative leaders say are required to reduce massive national budget deficits.

Deficit reduction actions, many contend, are unfairly targeting the middle and lower classes by forcing them to pay for the economic woes created by the upper class that is largely escaping the slash-and-burn pain of tax increases and service cuts.

“They want us to increase our contributions into the pension pot to ten percent of our pay and then they want to cut our pensions by twenty percent. Where is the fairness in that?” asked Steve Caddick, a National Health Service worker on the picket line with NHS colleague Anderson.

The National Health Service is the government funded healthcare system in the UK that provides much of its comprehensive medical services free of charge unlike the steep fee based system in the United States.

Sam Wheeler, another Brompton Hospital NHS picketer, echoed criticism of the fundamental unfairness in the government’s initiatives.

“Our pension fund makes profits each year but the government takes those profits for other purposes, unlike private pension funds that reinvest the profits to increase the fund,” Wheeler said. “All of this is the government taking from public sector workers to pay for the deficits caused by the bankers. The government still is not putting regulations on the banks and that’s what upsets me.”

Those participating in the general strike challenge claims pushed by conservative government officials and media coverage that public sector workers enjoy plush pensions particularly when compared to private sector workers.

The average pension for a worker in the National Health Service – Britain’s largest public sector employer – is $12,500 annually in U.S. dollars… hardly sufficient for a lavish life style, especially with the costs of food, energy and seemingly everything else soaring.

According to Britain’s Trade Union Congress, a key organizer of the general strike, public sector pensions average between $7,859-to-$14,147 annually in U.S. dollars.

Many workers argue that government official’s the pitting of public sector pensions against pensions for lower-waged workers in the private sector is both deceptive effort devised to maliciously divide workers.

“Some people in the private sector do have lower pensions than those in the public sector but most forget that many of those lower paid private sector workers used to hold public sector jobs that were privatized, with pay and benefits subsequently reduced,” veteran labor activist Glenroy Watson said.

Watson said there should be “parity” between public and private sector pensions but divide-and-rule tactics are a part of “the general attack” by the conservative government to “claw back” gains that workers have achieved in the past few decades.

“The fact of the matter is that this government’s austerity program is the same program of [the late Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s when she stole a lot from ordinary people. Here are the same kinds of people back again taking for themselves,” Watson said.

“All the issues in conflict under Thatcher like stealing benefits from ordinary people are nothing new. Too many people refuse to analyze this properly. There is no difference between Thatcher and the current government of [David] Cameron.”

The day before the November 30th general strike, Prime Minister Cameron’s finance head, George Osborne, announced new austerity-driven fiscal measures including pay freezes for public workers and hundreds of thousands of additional job cuts in the public sector.

Osborne’s announcements did include plans for billions in infrastructure improvements to stimulate the economy, government loans for small businesses to expand, targeted programs to reduce massive youth unemployment and increases in welfare benefits.

But data from Osborne’s own independent Office of Budget Responsibility stated that his cuts directed toward reducing deficits only had a 60-percent chance of meeting the stated goal of eliminating deficits by 2015-16.

Bracketing Osborne’s announcements were reports from think-tanks painting grim pictures of a possible new recession in Britain, steep reductions living standards for the average family and the poorest 30-percent of households losing more than three times as much as the richest 30-percent of the population.

The day after the general strike news reported that researchers for the British Parliament’s House of Commons library calculated that women in the UK will bear 73-percent of changes in tax credits and caps on public sector pay pushed by Osborne compared to 27-percent impacting men.

Others outside of public sector employment also oppose the austerity initiatives, criticizing the failure of the Cameron coalition government to end accelerating income inequities and crack down on the corporate classes that created the economic collapse with manipulative enrichment-schemes.

“That notion of shared sacrifice pushed by the government is nonsense. It is predicated on the assumption that during the boom economic times everyone benefited and they did not,” activist Osagyefo Tongogara said, while leafleting near the route of the protest march through Central London.

Tongogara, who supported the general strike, said the measurements the government uses to set public pension rates were changed earlier this year to an accounting methodology that short-changes workers by undercounting the impact of inflation.

Austerity actions, Tongogara said, are increasing rates of poverty, especially among children and the elderly – an assertion backed by economists and other experts. “The rich continue to off-shore billions of pounds to avoid paying taxes. Tax evasion is illegal for working people but tax avoidance is not illegal for the rich…that is wrong,” he said.

Activist Selma James, 81, criticizes Cameron’s coalition government for failing to seriously address accelerating income inequities that aggravate existing poverty particularly impoverishment impacting children and the elderly.

“The 1% is pushing us around determining our lives, stealing our money, our resources and our possibilities,” James, the founder of London’s Crossroads Womens’ Centre, stated in an email interview.

James, the widow of the late Caribbean author/activist C.L.R. James, said actions like the general strike and the Occupy Movement are vital.

Those activities, said James, are a “strength for all to stop suffering in silence and spell out our real conditions of life and the brutality we try to defeat every hour we’re alive.”

December 1, 2011 Posted by aletho | Economics, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

The Worst of the One Percent?

Meet Wal-Mart’s Rob Walton

By DAN BACHER | CounterPunch | November 30, 2011

Brave New Films, the film studio that produced the ground-breaking documentary, “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price,” is holding an online vote to pick the “worst of the 1%.” They’re looking for the person who is doing the most with their wealth to exploit the rest of the country – and to privatize public services and public trust resources.

Walmart Watch is urging people to vote for Rob Walton, chairman of Walmart and an heir to the Walton’s family fortune, as the worst of the one percenters. Walmart Watch is an organization that “seeks to hold Walmart fully accountable for its impact on communities, the American workforce, the retail sector, the environment and the nation’s economy.”

I also strongly urge everybody to vote for Rob Walton as “worst of the 1%” for his efforts to crush labor and human rights and drive local “mom and pop” operations out of business, as well for funding corporate environmental NGO efforts to privatize the oceans by promoting “catch shares” programs and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s privately funded Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative.

To vote, go to: http://www.bravenewfoundation.org/dirty-thirty/all/rob-walton.

“When it comes to the 1%, Rob Walton and the Walton family are it,” according to Walmart Watch. “The Walton family has amassed more than $93 billion in wealth, making them the richest family in the country.”

“The Waltons inherited that wealth, much of it was created by paying many workers at poverty-level wages, offering poor benefits, and lowering conditions in the supply chain by demanding ever-lower prices. Walmart’s trade deficit with China alone eliminated hundreds of thousands of US manufacturing jobs,” the group ntoed.

Rob Walton himself has an overall estimated worth of $21 billion running the world’s largest private employer. It is estimated now that 1.4 million people work for Walmart or 1 out of every 222 people in the U.S.

“The dividends of the Walmart stock the Waltons own alone could go a long way toward making Walmart jobs good, living wage jobs. Instead he chooses to keep the average employee below the family poverty line and cut health benefits for hundreds of thousands employees,” the group added.

The Waltons have used the Walton Family Foundation to advance an extreme anti-worker and anti-human rights agenda. In the last five years, the Walton Family Foundation (where Rob sits on the board) has given money to the Heritage Foundation, the National Right to Work Foundation and other groups that advance the agenda of Wall Street banksters and other corporate operatives who have looted the economy.

Walmart Watch stated, “In 2010, the Walton Family Foundation spent more than $157 million to support the so-called school choice movement. This movement generally seeks to divert money from public schools to private schools through policies such as vouchers and charter schools. These donations make the Walton Family Foundation one of the largest funders of efforts to undermine public education.”

Wal-Mart gives $36 million to ocean privatization efforts

In addition to anti-worker and school privatization campaigns, the corporate giant also dumps millions into “environmental” programs to greenwash the privatization of public trust resources.

The Recreational Fishing Alliance (RFA), a national grassroots recreational fishing organization, in August slammed the Walton Family Foundation’s contribution of $36 million to ocean privatization efforts through “catch shares” programs and the creation of so-called “marine protected areas.”

“Wal-Mart announced this week its efforts to help fund the demise of both the recreational and commercial fishing industry while also working to ensure that the next generation of sportsmen will have less access to coastal fish stocks than at any point in U.S. history,” according to a news release from RFA.

In a August 16th news release from Wal-Mart corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, the Walton Family Foundation announced “investments” totaling more than $71.8 million awarded to various “environmental” initiatives in 2010. The foundation handed over $36 million alone to Marine Conservation grantees including Ocean Conservancy, Conservation International Foundation, Marine Stewardship Council, World Wildlife Fund and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).

The five top grantees were: Conservation International, $18,640,917; the Nature Conservancy,$9,305,449; Environmental Defense Fund $7,086,054; the Marine Stewardship Council, $4,500,000; and the Ocean Conservancy, $3,757,768.

Critics of Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world, have blasted the company for decades for being able to sell its products at cheap prices only by employing sweatshops, undercutting competitors, wielding its market power to cripple both competitors and suppliers, and flouting national and international health, safety, labor, and environmental standards. Anti-corporate globalization opponents have long regarded Wal-Mart as a virtual “Darth Vader” of retailers, as documented in the film, “The High Price of Low Cost.”

Greenwashing Wal-Mart’s Image

However, in 2006 the retail giant hired Adam Werbach former Sierra Club president to “polish” its image. This latest Wal-Mart release is apparently part of a carefully orchestrated campaign to greenwash its image – and extend control over public trust resources.

According to the release, the Walton Family Foundation “focuses on globally important marine areas and works with grantees and other partners to create networks of effectively managed protected areas that conserve key biological features, and ensure the sustainable utilization of marine resources – especially fisheries – in a way that benefits both nature and people.”

“We focus our work in the United States’ primary river systems and in some of the world’s most ecologically significant marine areas,” said Scott Burns, director of the foundation’s Environment Focus Area and the former director of marine conservation at the World Wildlife Fund. “It’s important to us to protect and conserve natural resources while also recognizing the roles these waters play in the livelihoods of those who live nearby.”

The RFA countered that these specially managed areas of coastal waters are also referred to as “marine protected areas” or “marine reserves,” and the end result is denied angler access, of little or no benefit to the very people whom Wal-Mart claims to benefit.

Marine protected areas without real protection

“A quick visit to the Ocean Conservancy website should be telling enough for anglers interested in learning where Wal-Mart’s profits are being spent,” said RFA executive director Jim Donofrio. “These folks are pushing hard to complete California’s network of exclusionary zones throughout the entire length of coastline, and they’ve made it very clear that they would like to see the West Coast version of the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) extended into other coastal U.S. waters.”

Grassroots environmentalists, fishermen, members of Indian Tribes, civil liberties activists and environmental justice advocates have criticized Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative, privately funded by the shadowy Resources Legacy Fund Foundation, for its numerous conflicts of interest and the violation of numerous state, federal and international laws.

The so-called “marine protected areas” established under the MLPA Initiative fail to protect the ocean from oil drilling and spills, water pollution, wave and wind energy projects, military testing, corporate aquaculture, habitat destruction and all other human impacts upon the ocean other than fishing and gathering. In an extreme case of corporate greenwashing, Catherine Reheis-Boyd, the president of the Western States Petroleum Association, served as chair of the MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force that created these questionable “marine protected areas” on the Southern California coast. She also served on the task forces for the North Central and North Central Coasts.

When not chairing or serving on these rigged panels, Reheis-Boyd has been busy lobbying for new oil drillling off the California coast, tar sands drillling in Canada, and for the weakening of environmental regulations throughout the West.

The Walton Family Foundation release also said that so-called “marine protected areas” being promoted with the foundation’s money include those in Indonesia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Panama, the Gulf of California and the Gulf of Mexico.

“Here’s an organization which has publicly opposed creation of artificial reefs used by Wal-Mart’s tackle buyers, in some cases openly advocating for their removal, yet the Walton family is handing over tons of money for support,” Donofrio said of Ocean Conservancy in particular.

Jack Sobel, a senior scientist for the Ocean Conservancy, has said “There’s little evidence that artificial reefs have a net benefit,” citing concerns such as toxicity, damage to ecosystems and concentrating fish into one place (worsening overfishing).

Wal-Mart boycott follows Safeway boycott

“Shopping for fishing equipment at Wal-Mart is contributing directly to the demise of our sport, it’s supporting lost fishing opportunities and decreased coastal access for all Americans,” Donofrio said. “I hope all RFA members across the country will remember that when it’s time to gear up, but I would also wonder if perhaps our industry can help spread the message and support our local tackle shops by also pulling product off Wal-Mart’s shelves.”

RFA in April 2011 announced its support of a national boycott of the Safeway Supermarket chain, including Genuardi’s in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, because of that corporation’s support for California’s widely-contested MLPA initiative.

“Apparently Safeway has gotten some bad advice from the people in the ocean protection racket, a community to which the California-based mega-corporation is now donating profits,” said Jim Martin, West Coast Regional Director of the RFA. “Safeway says it is supporting groups that make a difference like the Food Marketing Institute’s Sustainable Seafood Working Group, the Conservation Alliance for Seafood Solutions and the World Wildlife Fund’s Aquaculture Dialogues, but it’s little more than corporate greenwashing.”

RFA believes it’s time that Wal-Mart was added to the angler boycott list as well.

“The Walton family created this huge corporate entity which has threatened the vibrancy of our local retail outlets, and now they’re essentially doing the same thing with our fishing communities,” Donofrio said.

“Much like Safeway has done with their financial investment in the environmental business community, Wal-Mart apparently prefers customers buy farm-raised fish and seafood caught by foreign countries outside of U.S. waters, while denying individual anglers the ability to head down to the ocean to score a few fish for their own table,” noted Donofrio.

Wal-Mart pushes catch shares program

The Walton Family Foundation is also working “to create economic incentives for ocean conservation,” while candidly pledging their support for “projects that reverse the incentives to fish unsustainably that exist in ‘open access fisheries’ by creating catch share programs,” according to the official news release.

A broad coalition of commercial and recreational fishing, consumer and environmental groups is opposing the catch shares programs being pushed by NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, a former vice-chair of the Board of Directors of Environmental Defense, because these programs amount to the privatization of public trust resources by concentrating fisheries in the hands of a few corporate hands. Wherever catch shares have been introduced, local fishing communities, fish populations and the environment have been devastated.

“A catch share, also known as an individual fishing quota, is a transferable voucher that gives individuals or businesses the ability to access a fixed percentage of the total authorized catch of a particular species,” according to Food and Water Watch. “Fishery management systems based on catch shares turn a public resource into private property and have lead to socioeconomic and environmental problems. Contrary to arguments by catch share proponents – namely large commercial fishing interests – this management system has exacerbated unsustainable fishing practices.”

Donofrio emphasized, “Our local outfitters and tackle shops along the coast have had to face an immense challenge by going up against Wal-Mart’s purchasing power during the last decade, but now that the Walton family is so up front about their opposition to open access fisheries, it’s hard for me to believe that any sportsmen would ever be interested in shopping there again.”

“California anglers have been outraged to learn that money they spend at a Safeway grocery store might end up in the hands of anti-fishing groups like the EDF and the Ocean Conservancy, so I hope more anglers will join the national boycott by sending a message to Wal-Mart as well as Safeway,” Martin added.

Sam and Helen Walton launched their “modest retail business in 1962″ with guiding principle of helping “increase opportunity and improve the lives of others along the way,” according to the Walton Family Foundation website. It is that principle the foundation says, that makes them “more focused than ever on sustaining the Walton’s timeless small-town values and deep commitment to making life better for individuals and communities alike.”

RFA said grassroots efforts to combat the corporate anti-fishing, pro-privatization agenda are more than just an uphill climb.

“The EDF catch share coffers are already filled to the top, while Pew Charitable Trusts has billions in reserve,” Donofrio said. “The individual anglers and local business owners are being denied opportunity, and I hope the federal trade representatives are willing to get onboard with their support of real small-town values.” He emphasized that the Ocean Conservancy and EDF combined received more than $10 million in Walton Family Foundation grants in 2010.

EDF: RFA’s contention is ‘just wrong’

The EDF public relations department was quick to respond in defense of their $7,086,054 Walton Family Foundation donation.

Tom Lalley, communications director for the Oceans Program of the Environmental Defense Fund, claimed, “RFA’s contention that the contribution in question was made by Wal-Mart is just wrong.”

“The contribution was made by the Walton Family Fund and not Wal-Mart,” Lalley told http://www.fishnewseu.com. “These are two different entities. There is no connection between the two other than the fact that the fund’s money comes from private holdings of the same Waltons who started and managed Wal-Mart, but none of the money comes from the existing company. So it was the family, and specifically the family’s foundation, that made a contribution for sustainable fishing and ocean conservation, and not the store.”

According to RFA managing director Jim Hutchinson, Jr., the marketing executives at EDF are “some of the best in the ‘astroturfing’ business,” but he calls Lalley’s claims “almost comical.”

“So I leave you a $1,000 bill in the cereal aisle at Wal-Mart, tucked under a box of sugar coated corn flakes, does that mean that Wal-Mart actually gave you the $1,000, or maybe EDF would argue it was really a contribution from Tony the Tiger himself,” Hutchinson laughed.

“The heirs to the corporate fortune have spent two decades successfully building back their stake in this publicly held company to the point they now own over 50% of the Wal-Mart operation. The Walton Family Foundation is Wal-Mart, and the Walton family itself is making billions in our local communities, so to say that the two are separate entities is simply ridiculous. Actually expecting us to believe that statement is borderline insanity,” Hutchinson emphasized.

Commercial fishermen join recreational anglers in denouncing Wal-Mart’s support of privatization

Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA), praised the RFA for criticizing Wal-Mart’s contributions to ocean privatization efforts and welcomed the organization’s call for a Wal-Mart boycott.

“Wa-Mart is wrong on this issue, just as it has been in the past on labor and community issues,” said Grader. “The privatization of public trust resources is the antithesis of conservation.”

“I’ve been boycotting Wal-Mart for decades and it’s absolutely great that recreational and commercial fishermen are together on this,” noted Grader.

It is worth noting that Conservation International and the Nature Conservancy, the two top recipients of Walton Family Foundation funds, are known throughout the world for their top-down “environmental” programs that run roughshod over local communities to achieve their corporate greenwashing goals.

Corporate environmental NGO ‘leaders’ support peripheral canal

The Nature Conservancy in California is a strong backer of state and federal plans to build a peripheral canal or tunnel to export more Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta water to corporate agribusiness and southern California water agencies. Peripheral canal opponents, including recreational anglers, commercial fishermen, Delta residents, family farmers and California Indian Tribes, believe the construction of the canal would result in the extinction of Central Valley steelhead, Sacramento River chinook salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt and other imperiled fish populations.

The Walton Family Foundation’s contribution to Conservation International is no surprise, since Rob Walton is chairman of the executive committee of Conservation International’s Board of Directors (http://www.conservation.org/about/team/bod).

Also serving on the Board of Conservation International is Stewart A. Resnick, Chairman of the Board of Roll International Corporation, who is the largest tree fruit grower in the world and one of the biggest recipients of subsidized water from the imperiled California Delta. While making a tidy profit from selling his subsidized water back to the public, Resnick has waged a relentless campaign to divert more water from the Delta through the peripheral canal and has done everything in his power to eviscerate Endangered Species Act protections for Central Valley steelhead, Sacramento River chinook salmon, Delta smelt and other listed species.

Resnick’s Coalition for a Sustainable Delta, an agribusiness “Astroturf” group, has also spent a great deal of effort in litigation attempting to eradicate striped bass from the Bay-Delta Estuary by falsely claiming that “striped bass,” rather than water exports, are the cause of Delta smelt and salmon declines.

MLPA Initiative Background:

The Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) is a law, signed by Governor Gray Davis in 1999, designed to create a network of marine protected areas off the California Coast. However, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2004 created the privately-funded MLPA “Initiative” to “implement” the law, effectively eviscerating the MLPA.

The “marine protected areas” created under the MLPA Initiative fail to protect the ocean from oil spills and drilling, water pollution, military testing, wave and wind energy projects, corporate aquaculture and all other uses of the ocean other than fishing and gathering.

The MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Forces that oversaw the implementation of “marine protected areas” included a big oil lobbyist, marina developer, real estate executive and other individuals with numerous conflicts of interest. Catherine Reheis Boyd, the president of the Western States Petroleum Association who is pushing for new oil drilling off the California coast, served as the chair of the MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force for the South Coast.

The MLPA Initiative operates through a controversial private/public “partnership funded by the shadowy Resources Legacy Fund Foundation. The Schwarzenegger administration authorized the implementation of marine protected areas under the initiative through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the foundation and the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG).

Dan Bacher can be reached at: Danielbacher@fishsniffer.com

November 30, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Economics, Environmentalism | Leave a comment

Gaza farmers keep working despite export ban

Ma’an – 30/11/2011

GAZA CITY – Farmers continue to grow produce in the Gaza Strip despite Israel’s ban on exports, but productivity has plummeted.

Israel bans all exports from Gaza aside from a few trucks of berries and flowers each day during winter under an agreement with the Dutch government. Farmers are denied access to lucrative markets in Israel and the West Bank.

Meanwhile, Israel has leveled vast areas of arable land in the coastal enclave over the last decade.

But farmers continue to produce strawberries, carnations, cherry tomatoes and bell peppers to export in limited quantities to Europe, although shipping fees reduce the profit margins.

Mahmoud Ikhlayyil, chairman of the strawberry and carnation association in Gaza, says farmers used to plant 2,500 dunams of strawberries before Israel’s siege, but only plant between 900 – 1,000 dunams today.

This year, farmers avoided growing potatoes after a disastrous season in 2010 when no potatoes were exported, Ikhlayyil said.

“Farmers paid storage fees equal to 1.5 shekels ($0.40) per kilo, and in the end they sold it in the local market for 1 shekel per kilo.”

In 2010, 25,000 dunams of fields had been planted with potatoes, he added.

In 2009, Gaza flower and berry growers suffered big losses when Israel delayed export permission by two months.

The Palestinian Bureau of Statistics says the enclave’s exports in 2005 were worth $41 million.

The figure plummeted to $30,000 in 2006 and $20,000 in 2007 and there was no significant export trade in 2008.

November 30, 2011 Posted by aletho | Economics, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Single truckload of strawberries leaves Gaza

Ma’an – 29/11/2011

GAZA CITY – One truckload of strawberries left the Gaza Strip on Tuesday for export to Europe, crossings officials said.

Farmers in Gaza started to export limited amounts of produce to Europe via the Kerem Shalom crossing on Sunday, said crossings liaison officer Raed Fattouh.

The strawberries and carnations were the first produce to leave the coastal enclave in six months due to an Israeli ban on exports which has crippled the Gaza economy.

The agricultural goods are exported under an agreement between Israel and the Dutch government to allow five trucks of farm produce to leave Gaza each day.

The Israeli legal rights organization Gisha notes that if Israel fully implements the agreement, the exports represent just 1 percent of the exports Israel agreed to in 2005.

Under the 2005 agreement, Israel pledged to allow 400 trucks of Gaza produce to be exported every day.

“This exception to the ban is helpful for select growers, but it fails to address the manufacturing shut-down and massive unemployment caused by the export ban,” Gisha said in a statement released Monday.

Before 2007, 85 percent of Gazan produce was sold to Israel or the West Bank, Gisha said, adding that exporting to Europe was expensive due to high shipping costs and low demand.

Gaza farmer Monthar al-Boudi told Gisha he exported 1,500 tons of strawberries annually before Israel banned exports from Gaza to Israel and the West Bank in 2007.

In 2010, al-Boudi was only allowed to sell seven tons of strawberries to Europe.

Gisha director Sari Bashi said: “It is not clear how preventing producers in Gaza from selling eggplants, school desks, and oranges to the West Bank enhances Israeli security, but the ban is clearly harming Palestinians trying to engage in productive, dignified work.”

November 29, 2011 Posted by aletho | Economics, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Bankers Seize Europe

Yet Another Goldman Sachs Take Over

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | CounterPunch | November 28, 2011

On November 25, two days after a failed German government bond auction in which Germany was unable to sell 35 per cent of its offerings of 10-year bonds, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Germany might retreat from its demands that the private banks that hold the troubled sovereign debt from Greece, Italy, and Spain must accept part of the cost of their bailout by writing off some of the debt. The private banks want to avoid any losses, either by forcing the Greek, Italian, and Spanish governments to make good on the bonds by imposing extreme austerity on their citizens, or by having the European Central Bank print euros with which to buy the sovereign debt from the private banks. Printing money to make good on debt is contrary to the ECB’s charter and especially frightens Germans, because of the Weimar experience with hyperinflation.

Obviously, the German government got the message from the orchestrated failed bond auction. As I wrote at the time, there is no reason for Germany, with its relatively low debt to GDP ratio compared to the troubled countries, not to be able to sell its bonds. If Germany’s creditworthiness is in doubt, how can Germany be expected to bail out other countries? Evidence that Germany’s failed bond auction was orchestrated is provided by troubled Italy’s successful bond auction two days later.

Strange, isn’t it. Italy, the largest EU country that requires a bailout of its debt, can still sell its bonds, but Germany, which requires no bailout and which is expected to bear a disproportionate cost of Italy’s, Greece’s and Spain’s bailout, could not sell its bonds.

In my opinion, the failed German bond auction was orchestrated by the US Treasury, by the European Central Bank and EU authorities, and by the private banks that own the troubled sovereign debt.

My opinion is based on the following facts. Goldman Sachs and US banks have guaranteed perhaps one trillion dollars or more of European sovereign debt by selling swaps or insurance against which they have not reserved. The fees the US banks received for guaranteeing the values of European sovereign debt instruments simply went into profits and executive bonuses. This, of course, is what ruined the American insurance giant, AIG, leading to the TARP bailout at US taxpayers’ expense and Goldman Sachs’ enormous profits.

If any of the European sovereign debt fails, US financial institutions that issued swaps or unfunded guarantees against the debt are on the hook for large sums that they do not have. The reputation of the US financial system probably could not survive its default on the swaps it has issued. Therefore, the failure of European sovereign debt would renew the financial crisis in the US, requiring a new round of bailouts and/or a new round of Federal Reserve “quantitative easing,” that is, the printing of money in order to make good on irresponsible financial instruments, the issue of which enriched a tiny number of executives.

Certainly, President Obama does not want to go into an election year facing this prospect of high profile US financial failure. So, without any doubt, the US Treasury wants Germany out of the way of a European bailout.

The private French, German, and Dutch banks, which appear to hold most of the troubled sovereign debt, don’t want any losses. Either their balance sheets, already ruined by Wall Street’s fraudulent derivatives, cannot stand further losses or they fear the drop in their share prices from lowered earnings due to write-downs of bad sovereign debts. In other words, for these banks big money is involved, which provides an enormous incentive to get the German government out of the way of their profit statements.

The European Central Bank does not like being a lesser entity than the US Federal Reserve and the UK’s Bank of England. The ECB wants the power to be able to undertake “quantitative easing” on its own. The ECB is frustrated by the restrictions put on its powers by the conditions that Germany required in order to give up its own currency and the German central bank’s control over the country’s money supply. The EU authorities want more “unity,” by which is meant less sovereignty of the member countries of the EU. Germany, being the most powerful member of the EU, is in the way of the power that the EU authorities desire to wield.

Thus, the Germans bond auction failure, an orchestrated event to punish Germany and to warn the German government not to obstruct “unity” or loss of individual country sovereignty.

Germany, which has been browbeat since its defeat in World War II, has been made constitutionally incapable of strong leadership. Any sign of German leadership is quickly quelled by dredging up remembrances of the Third Reich. As a consequence, Germany has been pushed into an European Union that intends to destroy the political sovereignty of the member governments, just as Abe Lincoln destroyed the sovereignty of the American states.

Who will rule the New Europe? Obviously, the private European banks and Goldman Sachs.

The new president of the European Central Bank is Mario Draghi. This person was Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Goldman Sachs International and a member of Goldman Sachs’ Management Committee. Draghi was also Italian Executive Director of the World Bank, Governor of the Bank of Italy, a member of the governing council of the European Central Bank, a member of the board of directors of the Bank for International Settlements, and a member of the boards of governors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Asian Development Bank, and Chairman of the Financial Stability Board.

Obviously, Draghi is going to protect the power of bankers.

Italy’s new prime minister, who was appointed not elected, was a member of Goldman Sachs Board of International Advisers. Mario Monti was appointed to the European Commission, one of the governing organizations of the EU. Monti is European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, a US organization that advances American hegemony over the world. Monti is a member of the Bilderberg group and a founding member of the Spinelli group, an organization created in September 2010 to facilitate integration within the EU.

Just as an unelected banker was installed as prime minister of Italy, an unelected banker was installed as prime minister of Greece. Obviously, they are intended to produce the bankers’ solution to the sovereign debt crisis.

Greece’s new appointed prime minister, Lucas Papademos, was Governor of the Bank of Greece. From 2002-2010. He was Vice President of the European Central Bank. He, also, is a member of America’s Trilateral Commission.

Jacques Delors, a founder of the European Union, promised the British Trade Union Congress in 1988 that the European Commission would require governments to introduce pro-labor legislation. Instead, we find the banker-controlled European Commission demanding that European labor bail out the private banks by accepting lower pay, fewer social services, and a later retirement.

The European Union, just like everything else, is merely another scheme to concentrate wealth in a few hands at the expense of European citizens, who are destined, like Americans, to be the serfs of the 21st century.

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

November 28, 2011 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Economics, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

UK anti-war campaigns to join labor unions in strike

Press TV – November 27, 2011

British anti-war campaigns have thrown their weight behind the nationwide strike against the government’s cuts in pensions and welfare services, urging the government to cut warfare not welfare.

Stop the War Coalition (SWC) and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament announced that they would participate in the November 30 strike action organized by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) to call on the government to cut war and Trident spending not pensions.

The campaigns stressed that the government’s spending cuts have only been applied on jobs and public services, while spending on war is mounting without interruption.

Britain spent at least £1.5 billion on the Libya war, and spends about £5 billion per year on the Afghanistan war, SWC revealed. The campaign also said that the overall costs of the war on terror to the US are $3 trillion.

It is estimated that over three million public sector workers will participate in the pension strike across Britain, to defend their pensions against the government’s austerity measures.

The anti-war campaigns proclaimed they would support the strike action of 28 unions, believing the Tory-led government’s wrong policies would boost poverty and misery for the poor people.

“The budget deficits in the US and Britain have been caused in part by the rising cost of wars. Governments have borrowed money to pay for war. They are now asking people to accept cuts and austerity to pay for them,” SWC convener Lindsey German said.

Suggesting an alternative to the cut plans, German said the government could “cut spending on war and the Trident nuclear submarine system and use the money to fund welfare.”

Mark Serwotka, general secretary of Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), also condemned the government’s war policies. “The war in Afghanistan and the war in Libya are wrong. They are misjudged; they are not about what people claim they are about. And we should actually find a way out of those pretty quickly, not make the situation in those countries worse as well as at the same time take valuable resources that could go into schools and hospitals,” he said.

November 27, 2011 Posted by aletho | Economics, Militarism, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

Pakistan defies US over Iran gas deal

Press TV – November 25, 2011

Pakistan says it will press ahead with its Iran gas pipeline deal despite a strong opposition by the United States, Press TV reports.

Pakistan’s Information Minister Firdous Ashiq Awan said on Friday that Islamabad will not accept any dictation regarding its internal affairs from any foreign country, adding that importing gas from Iran is in the country’s best interest.

The remarks came as a reaction to earlier pleas by Washington’s Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter that the Pakistani government abort its multi-billion dollar gas pipeline project with Iran.

“Pak-Iran gas pipeline is not a good idea….However, the plan to get gas from Turkmenistan is a better idea,” Press TV correspondent quoted Munter as saying on Friday.

The USD 7.6 billion gas pipeline deal, which was signed in June 2010, aims to export a daily amount of 21.5 million cubic meters (or 8.7 billion cubic meters per year) of Iranian natural gas to Pakistan.

Last month, Pakistan’s Minister of Oil and Natural Resources Asim Hussain said the Iran-Pakistan natural gas pipeline would be inaugurated before the end of 2013, one year ahead of the original schedule.

Maximum daily gas transfer capacity of the 56-inch pipeline, which runs over 900 km of Iran’s soil from Asalouyeh in Bushehr Province to the city of Iranshahr in Sistan and Baluchestan Province, has been given at 110 million cubic meters.

Iran and Pakistan finalized the details of the deal during bilateral talks held in Tehran in October 2007.

The deal comes in the face of Washington’s efforts to isolate Iran economically through UN Security Council sanctions and its own unilateral penalties over Tehran’s nuclear programs.

Iran ranks second in the world in natural gas resources after Russia with available gas reserves estimated at over 33 trillion cubic meters.

In addition to exporting gas to Turkey, Armenia, and Pakistan, the country is currently negotiating gas exports to Iraq.

November 26, 2011 Posted by aletho | Economics | Leave a comment

French megabank BNP Paribas pulls out of Israel after pressure from boycott campaign

By Saed Bannoura | IMEMC News | November 26, 2011

The French bank, BNP Paribas, has decided to cease operations inside Israel, after the bank was targeted by the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which aims to use economic pressure to get Israel to adhere to its obligations and abide by international law.

Although the bank stated that its withdrawal from Israel was not due to the pressure campaign, but instead due to heavy losses sustained during the Greek financial crisis, Israeli officials and bankers have stated that they believe the bank gave in to pressure from European human rights groups to pull out of Israel.

BNB Paribas will close its offices and lay off sixty employees in Israel, and will end its financing of projects in the Jewish state.

The Governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, told reporters from the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that he had met with top executives from BNB Paribas several times, and exchanged harsh words with them when they announced their decision to leave Israel.

The Bank of Israel is a private institution that prints currency for the Israeli government and regulates interest rates in Israel. It is the successor to the Anglo-Palestine Bank, which carried out those functions until 1948, when the state of Israel was created on the land of historic Palestine.

BDS campaigners have targeted banks, financial institutions, businesses and universities around the world that have investments inside Israel. The movement has compared itself to the anti-apartheid movement against the white South African government in the 1980s. Some of the main organizers of the BDS campaign against Israel are South Africans who compare the situation of Palestinians to that of black South Africans under the racist apartheid system. The group includes Archbishop Desmond Tutu, President Nelson Mandela, and the largest trade union in South Africa, COSATU.

In recent years, the BDS movement has succeeded in convincing dozens of businesses to pull out of Israel; including the Deutsche Bank divesting from Elbit, a company involved in construction of the Israeli Annexation Wall; the Norwegian government’s divestment from an Israeli security firm; and Harvard University’s decision to divest from Israeli companies.

The group hopes that by using economic pressure, they can convince the Israeli government to end its occupation of Palestinian land, and cease its discriminatory laws that target Palestinians.

November 25, 2011 Posted by aletho | Economics, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | France, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

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By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | July 8, 2021

Gene research companies tend to come and go. They start out banging and popping like fireworks in the sky, and then they fade out—selling themselves to larger outfits who’ve hired better liars…

Once upon a time, it sounded easy. Start with a disease, find the gene responsible for the disease, and correct the problem.

Then, researchers wondered, was disease the result of one gene or a group of genes acting together?

Either way, the proof would be in devising cures for diseases using gene therapy. “Not yet, but soon…”

And regardless, the major need was: money. Lots and lots of money.

This need required good PR people. “We have to pump up the idea that we’re on the edge of tremendous breakthroughs. We’re always on that edge…”

This hype also needed to obscure the fact that there wasn’t (and isn’t) ANY gene cure for ANY disease. … continue

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