Last week, 14 Wisconsin Senate Democrats inspired the nation when they decided to flee the state rather than allow quorum for a vote on a bill that would have decimated the state’s public employee unions and dealt a crippling blow to the state’s hard-working teachers, sanitation employees, and other middle class union members. Since then, tens of thousands of Wisconsinites have taken to the streets in even greater number than before the walkout in support of the fleeing legislators and in opposition to Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) anti-middle class agenda.
Inspired by the events in Wisconsin, thousands of Americans all over the country are taking action to battle legislation that would attack their labor rights, defund their schools, threaten their health and safety, and decimate the American middle class. Here are just some of the places across the nation that are taking part in this new “Main Street Movement” to defend and rebuild the American middle class:
GEORGIA
Hundreds of workers demonstrated outside the Georgia capitol yesterday, declaring their solidarity with striking Wisconsin workers. Some demonstrators wore “cheesehead” hats, a clear reference to a cultural tradition in Wisconsin.
IDAHO
Hundreds of teachers marched against legislation that would layoff 770 teachers and leave schools severely understaffed.
INDIANA
In Indiana, House Democrats fled the state, preventing a vote on legislation that would enact “right-to-work” laws that would’ve crippled the right to organize. After the House Democrats took off, hundreds of workers and students marched into the capitol building and staged a massive sit-in, pledging not to leave until the radical legislation was withdrawn. Yesterday, Indiana’s Main Street Movement scored its first victory as Republican lawmakers withdrew the anti-union bill. Indiana Democrats are refusing to come back until right-wing legislators withdraw legislation to undermine the state’s public education system.MONTANA: More than a thousand “conservationists, sportsmen, firefighters, teachers, correctional officers and others” descended on the Montana capitol to protest against “unprecedented GOP attacks on public services and education and laws that protect land, air, water and wildlife.” Students carried signs that read “Keep Us In School,” protesting crippling cuts to the state’s education system.
OHIO
In Ohio, thousands of ordinary Americans who rely on the right to organize to earn good, middle class incomes are facing off with Wisconsin-style legislation backed by Gov. John Kasich (R). Nearly 10,000 protesters demonstrated in Columbus, Ohio, gaining the support of former Gov. Ted Strickland (D-OH) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). So many demonstrators showed up that the Ohio Highway Patrol was ordered to lock the doors of the state capitol to stop more demonstrators from getting into the building.
TENNESSEE
Hundreds of Tennesseans gathered to protest a bill that would completely strip Tennesee teachers of collective bargaining rights. “What you have right now is 300 or so of us, standing and asking the state legislature to focus on what the priorities are right now, instead of attacking working people,” said Mary Mancini, executive director of Tennessee Citizen Action. “If they listen to us, well then that’s great. … If not, I can see this thing growing.”
WASHINGTON
2,000 demonstrators in Olympia, Washington, marched against the state’s proposed budget cuts that would harm students and middle class Washingtonians and in solidarity with workers in Wisconsin. “If Scott Walker succeeds in ending worker rights in Wisconsin, the birthplace of public servants’ liberty, it could happen here,” said Federation of State Employees President Carol Dotlich.
Even larger demonstrations are planned this Saturday, as thousands more Main Street Americans plan to take to the streets to protest the ongoing assault against the middle class. Moveon.org is organizing protests at every single state capitol in the country, aiming to “Save the American Dream.” Meanwhile, US Uncut, an activist group inspired by United Kingdom’s UK Uncut, plans to protest against American tax dodgers, asking why the rich in the country have been able to get off easy on their taxes while low- and middle-income Americans continue to be asked to sacrifice.
The folks insisting on cuts to Social Security and Medicare have revved themselves up and are now in high gear. They see their final victory on the horizon with the possibility of a bipartisan deal involving substantial cuts to both programs. They argue that the large deficits facing the country make it imperative that we address the long-term budget problem, meaning the cost of these programs, immediately.
Before anyone prepares to surrender it is worth remembering once again how we got into the current situation. Before the downturn the budget deficits were relatively modest. Even with the cost of fighting two wars, the Bush tax cuts and a poorly designed Medicare drug benefit the deficit was just over 1.0 percent of GDP in 2007, the last year before the downturn. This was arguably bigger than desired, but a deficit of this size certainly posed no imminent danger to the economy.
Then the economy ran off the track. The reason was the collapse of an $8 trillion housing bubble. This bubble was easy to see for people who knew basic economics and third-grade arithmetic. It was also easy to see that the collapse of this bubble would derail the economy and lead to a serious downturn. That is why some of us were warning about the bubble as early as 2002.
But where were the current group of anti-deficit crusaders back in 2002-2006, when it might still have been possible to do something to stem the growth of the housing bubble before it reached such dangerous levels? Well, they were crusading against the budget deficit of course.
Peter Peterson, the Wall Street investment banker who is the patron saint and financier of much of the deficit crusade was paying for the “Fiscal Wake-Up Tour,” which was supposed to alert people to the dangers of the country’s budget deficit. This traveling road show of policy wonks and economists had nothing to say about the growing housing bubble that was about to explode and sink the economy.
Then we have the Washington Post, which is continuously setting new records for imbalance on this issue, for example by running six different columns by deficit hawks on the same day. As the bubble grew to ever more dangerous levels the Post had no room for those warning of the risks it posed. In fact, its main source for information on the housing market was David Lereah, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors and the author of the book, “Why the Housing Boom Will Not Bust and How You Can Profit From It.”
The same story can be told about National Public Radio, the major news networks and all the politicians now leading the charge to cut Social Security and Medicare. When the country actually did face a real economic disaster, these people were nowhere in sight. They were diverting attention to other issues and dismissing those of us who tried to warn of the real danger.
Now that we are experiencing an economic disaster – 25 million people unemployed or underemployed, millions of people facing the loss of their homes, more than ten million underwater in their mortgages — as a direct result of their incompetence, these same people are telling us again about the urgent need to cut Social Security and Medicare. The deficit hawks somehow think that their case is more compelling because of the damage done by their incompetence.
It should not work this way. In most lines of work incompetence is not a credential, it should not be one in designing economic policy either. Anyone who cares to tell us about the urgent need to deal with the deficit should first be expected to tell us how they managed to overlook the growth of an $8 trillion housing bubble. They should also be expected to tell us why they have a better understanding of the economy now than they did before the collapse of the housing bubble.
Social Security and Medicare provide essential supports to tens of millions of retirees and disabled workers. The projections are clear. The financing of Social Security poses no major problem – it is projected to be fully solvent for almost 30 years with no changes whatsoever. Medicare poses a problem only because the private health care system is broken.
Honest people talk about the need to fix the health care system. Less-honest people scream about the need to reform “entitlements.” And, they think that the public somehow should listen to them because of their record of incompetence.
Supposedly responsible news organizations, like the Washington Post and National Public Radio, have gotten in the habit of telling their audiences that we have to cut Social Security and Medicare. The need for cuts in these programs is often put forward as an unquestioned fact, not just in editorials and opinion pieces, but in supposedly objective news stories.
President Obama and the Congress have taken 66% of discretionary spending in the federal budget off the table – the Security Budget – while proposing a freeze to the rest of the budget and deep cuts to some programs that provide necessities for the American people. His budget crystalizes a choice that U.S. presidents have been making since President Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex – investment in the military vs. investment in the civilian economy.
The bloated and sacrosanct security budget – the military, domestic security and intelligence budgets –all saw rapid growth under President Bush when the DoD doubled its budget. Under President Obama the trend has continued with record military, intelligence and domestic security budgets. And, while the so-called recovery has only been a recovery for Wall Street and big business, the administration and congress are focused more on the deficit than on re-starting the economy for the rest of us. But there is more talk of cutting Social Security and Medicare than cutting the security budget. In fact, these two items are called entitlements because they are a contract with working Americans who pay for them in every paycheck. For this reason they should not even be considered part of the deficit. Payroll taxes fund these two programs that are essential for older Americans in their retirement years. Both face budget challenges but can be fixed, indeed Social Security has more than $2.5 trillion in Treasury Notes in reserve.
President Obama has proposed the largest DoD budget since World War II, $553 billion (not including war funding or nuclear weapons funding in the Department of Energy). Much attention has been shined on Secretary of Defense Gates’ proposal to “cut” $78 billion in the Pentagon budget. Those “cuts” take place over five years with reductions taking place after the 2012 election in 2014 and 2015. And, the “cuts” do not include the cost of wars. The Afghanistan war alone could eat up projected “savings” and if the CIA’s war in Pakistan escalates that will be an even bigger budget item. Further, we have not seen what the continuing U.S. military footprint in Iraq will cost. These projected cuts are more image than reality.
How does military spending impact Americans? President Reagan’s former assistant secretary of defense Lawrence Korb describes the military budget as “an annual tax of more than $7,000 on every household in the country.” While increasing the security budget, Obama and the Democrats have proposed widespread cuts to critical programs from a 50% cut in low-income heating assistance to nearly a 30% cut to the clean drinking water fund. They have also proposed a 25% cut ($1.3 billion) to the community development block grants used to fund local community development including affordable housing, anti-poverty programs, and infrastructure development. These are essential services needed for Americans health, safety and economic security. Of course, Republican cuts in the House budget are even more extreme but Obama set the table for them by making the debate about deficits and both parties will not touch the security budget. Military analyst, William Hartung, writes “These cuts will be painful, and they will be felt in every middle- and lower-income household in America.”
Cities and states are cutting essential services to balance their budgets. U.S. taxpayers will spend $737 billion for Pentagon spending for FY2011 including war funding). To get a sense of what this means, for the same amount of money tax payers could provide funding for 11.3 million elementary school teachers for one year or 93.5 million scholarships for university students for one year… Instead all these programs face cutbacks, while military spending grows. […]
Cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget is the goal of the Obama administration deficit plan. All of these cuts could come from military spending and still leave the U.S. militarily dominant. In fact, since the administration has projected an increase in spending of $6.5 trillion from 2011 to 2020, even a trillion would be a slowing of growth more than a real cut. Lawrence Korb lays out a five point plan to reduce military spending by $1 trillion without jeopardizing national security and thereby protecting U.S. economic security.
He is not alone, the Sustainable Defense Task Force provides specific cuts without harming U.S. national security including:
•The $238 billion Joint Strike Fighter program: Canceling the program and relying instead on upgraded versions of current aircraft would save almost $50 billion over ten years.
•The MV-22 Osprey: Replacing this dangerous, overpriced, and under-performing aircraft with cheaper alternatives would save over $10 billion over ten years.
•Reducing the number of U.S. troops in Europe and Asia to 100,000 from current levels of 150,000 would save $80 billion over a decade.
•Reforming Pentagon health care systems so that retirees pay modest, reasonable premiums could save $60 billion over a decade.
•Scaling back missile defense and space weapons programs could save over $50 billion over a decade.
•Further reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including deployment of fewer ballistic-missile launching submarines, could save over $100 billion in a ten year period, much of it in operating costs
•Reducing the size of the Navy from 286 to 230 ships would save over $125 billion over ten years.
If you combine these recommendations of the five point plan of Lawrence Korb, which includes items like bringing home 50,000 of the 150,000 troops stationed in Asia and Europe, reducing the size of the Army and Marine Corps to their pre-Iraq invasion level and reducing nuclear weapons from 1,968 to the 311 the Military War College says is needed for defense, the U.S. would save another $200 billion.
For many, these would only be the starting points of correctly prioritizing military spending. President Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex 50 year ago. During that time, U.S. spending on the military adjusted for inflation has more than doubled and we have moved to a permanent war state. Columbia University’s Seymour Melman, a professor of industrial engineering, pointed out that “Industrial productivity, the foundation of every nation’s economic growth, is eroded by the relentlessly predatory effects of the military economy.” In fact, we have seen – as we see in the Obama budget – a constant conflict between the military economy and the civilian economy. The civilian economy is losing that battle.
Thomas Woods, Jr. recently wrote in the American Conservative that military spending is parasitic as it feeds off the economy rather than grows it. The scale of resources used by the military is exorbitant, Woods writes: “To train a single combat pilot, for instance, costs between $5 million and $7 million. Over a period of two years, the average U.S. motorist uses about as much fuel as does a single F-16 training jet in less than an hour. The Abrams tank uses up 3.8 gallons of fuel in traveling one mile. Between 2 and 11 percent of the world’s use of 14 important minerals, from copper to aluminum to zinc, is consumed by the U.S. military, as is about 6 percent of the world’s consumption of petroleum. The Pentagon’s energy use in a single year could power all U.S. mass transit systems for nearly 14 years.”
To get a sense of the competition between the civilian and military economy, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation’s plants, equipment, and infrastructure (capital stock) at just over $7.29 trillion in 1985; and from 1947 to 1987 the military spent the equivalent, $7.62 trillion in capital resources.
With the long record of the ascendency of military spending it is not surprising to see the U.S. economy in collapse, industry disappearing and the infrastructure crumbling. Not only has the U.S. failed to win a major war since World War II, but the cost of the standing army has become a burden on all of us and a drag on the economy. Some describe the U.S. Empire in decline and others see a collapse as possible at any moment.
The failure of President Obama to confront military spending in this time of economic collapse and perceived deficit crisis, when tax dollars are needed to restart the domestic economy, is not only a short term budget failure but does not face up to the long-term damaging economic impact of the American military empire.
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Kevin Zeese is executive director of Prosperity Agenda (www.ProsperityAgenda.US) and Voters for Peace (www.VotersForPeace.US) and an editor of the book ComeHomeAmerica.US (visit ComeHomeAmerica.US for more information and to purchase the book).
I don’t feel that national news has been giving accurate coverage of the rallies in Madison, WI, so I’m here to tell you what people are REALLY protesting about. Hint: it’s not about pay-cuts.
And if you think that’s not bad enough, consider this: 2/3 of corporations in WI don’t pay any taxes AT ALL. Where do YOU think the money should be coming from? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02…
The cost of staples from grains to meat to sugar continues to rise, raising fears of a global food crisis and ensuing political instability.
In 2008, high food prices led to riots in 25 different countries. The specter of another such crisis reared its head in September when 12 people were killed in food riots in Mozambique.
“The food riots in Mozambique can be repeated anywhere in the coming years,” said Indian food analyst Devinder Sharma. “Unless the world encourages developing countries to become self-sufficient in food grains, the threat of impending food riots will remain hanging over nations.”
Global meat prices are currently at a 20-year high, while soybean prices are at a 16-month high. Wheat prices have risen 57 percent over the last six months, and over the same period rice prices rose 45 percent and sugar prices rose 55 percent. In the last few weeks of October alone, wheat and corn prices surged 30 percent.
The price crunch has been worsened by a spate of recent climate-related crop failures worldwide, but the underlying causes are more long-term. The UN largely blames loss of arable land to urbanization, degradation and conversion to biofuels production.
“Worldwide, 5 million to 10 million hectares [12 million to 25 million acres] of agricultural land are being lost annually due to severe degradation and another 19.5 million are lost for industrial uses and urbanization,” wrote UN special rapporteur Olivier de Schutter on the right to food in a recent report.
“But the pressure on land resulting from these factors has been boosted in recent years by policies favoring large-scale industrial plantations. According to the World Bank, more than one-third of large-scale land acquisitions are intended to produce agrofuels.”
In addition, speculation by investors has artificially inflated food prices even beyond their already alarming highs, and is likely to continue doing so.
“A food crisis on the scale of two or three years ago is not imminent, but the underlying causes [of what happened then] are still there,” said Chris Leather of Oxfam.
The eastern Texas Panhandle, a land of rolling sand hills, tree-lined creek beds and tall grass vistas, may seem a desolate place to outsiders. Still, it has its beauty, especially to the cattle ranchers and wheat farmers who work and live on it. But not for long.
Much of this land, the fragile habitat of the Lesser Prairie Chicken and the Whooping Crane, is scheduled to become industrialized if the Texas PUC, the DOE and FERC have their way. Incongruously, the demolition of this mostly native grassland is being proposed in the name of green energy.
The Competitive Renewable Energy Zone (CREZ), a name not without irony, was initiated by a 10 million dollar grant from the Department of Energy (DOE). In December of 2009, plans were expanded when Secretary Chu joined Jon Wellinghoff of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in a Memorandum of Understanding to coordinate efforts to interconnect several transmission lines. The CREZ line, part of the larger Electrical Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) system, is to help supply the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex with wind-generated electricity from the northern Texas Panhandle.
There are problems, however. Protests from disgruntled landowners have been met with staunch resistance from Cross Texas Transmission, the developer of the Gray to Tesla and Gray to White Deer lines. In an escalation of that resistance, landowners were sent a “Access Consent Form” the day before Thanksgiving insisting their lands be made available for survey. With the long weekend, landowners had only two working days to find representation and prepare a response and still meet CTT’s deadline. CTT, acting under the auspices of the Public Utilities Commission, has been given the power of eminent domain. With that looming over their heads, most landowners signed but added wording insisting Cross Texas Transmission follow established environmental laws, the same wording and the same laws now required on state-owned lands. Cross Texas responded to their request by issuing restraining orders and suing for entry without restraint.
The action was not surprising. Since having been awarded the contract to construct, operate and maintain these lines in October of 2009, Cross Texas has consistently reminded landowners that they have no options and has refused to address any of the economic or environmental problems created by the transmission lines.
The Economic Problems
According to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, wind energy in Texas will have in excess of 28 billion dollars in subsidies, federal and state, poured into its development by 2025. When tax breaks, market disruptions, increased production and ancillary costs are added in, the taxpayer’s bill could top 60 billion dollars. In spite of the massive funds being thrown its way, wind-generated electricity remains far more expensive for consumers than that produced from coal, gas or from nuclear facilities. It’s also proven far too intermittent. As a result, continued expansion of wind fields could raise rates paid by consumers by as much as 50 percent, even with the massive federal and state subsidies. The impact to small businesses and to those on fixed incomes could be devastating. Moreover, many experts believe that, due to the intermittent flow and low energy flux, wind generated electricity can never be competitive.
Science and Technology writer Gregory Murphy compared the energy flux density of the Comanche Peak nuclear plant south of Dallas to a hypothetical wind installation. The nuclear plant has two units capable of generating 2,500 megawatts and sits on only 4,000 acres which includes a man-made cooling lake that is open to the public and is used for recreation. Taking into account that the average wind turbine has a capacity of only 25 percent of its nameplate rated output, it would take 6,668 1.5 megawatt wind turbines to equal the output of the Comanche Peak station.
Spacing wind turbines at 5 per section of land, a rate somewhat higher than the density landowners were promised by wind farm developers, a wind installation equaling the output of the Comanche Peak plant would require well over 13,000 sections of land or 8.6 million acres. That is an area roughly 1/20th the size of Texas. All this land, plus the lands decimated by the transmission lines carrying electricity to major metropolitan areas, would have reduced productivity, severely increased erosion and drastically reduced property values—certainly no boon for landowners.
“Wind works only 25 percent of the time,” said Jeff Haley, rancher and Commissioner in Gray County, Texas. “And the CREZ line alone will cost 4.9 billion dollars. That’s a projected cost in 2008 dollars. It will almost certainly be more, but whatever it turns out to be, it will have to be paid for.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” said David Hall, another Gray County rancher. “The consumers will pay for much of this, and we’ll all pay for the rest with our tax dollars. It’s not just that I don’t want them on my land. It’s that this kind of government boondoggle is wrong. The politicians supporting these things don’t understand them. They’re being advised that this or that is the right thing to do, and they’re not informed enough to make the right decisions.”
“We’re dealing with Soviet-style technocrats,” Haley added.
The metaphor isn’t without basis. Cross Texas Transmission is a wholly owned subsidiary of J. L. Power Group, a Delaware shell corporation with no board of directors and only a few employees. SEC filings list Mikhail Segal, a one-time official in the Ministry of Energy in the former Soviet Union and Michael Liebellson as founders. From the outset, landowners say, Cross Texas Transmission has acted every bit the oligarch and used the PUC’s power of eminent domain as a weapon.
“These technocrats understand how to maneuver through the technicalities of the law.” Haley said. “It’s their job. They do it every day. How can we run our businesses and spend the time this is requiring to stand up to this kind of abuse?”
One of the maneuvers he is referring to is the Texas PUC hearings held last August. Three routes had been selected for the proposed Gray to Tesla line with one listed as the “preferred route.” Multiple landowners and attorneys were present to defend their properties from damage along this route. Without discussion, the Public Utilities Commission chose an alternate route automatically subjecting those properties not represented to eminent domain. The landowners on the route selected had received a notice that their lands could, at some point, be affected, but all assumed that only the preferred route would be considered at the hearing. None realized they would not have an opportunity to intervene specifically for their properties should the preferred route be rejected.
In addition to the issues of land spoilage and the usurpation of private property rights, the issue of viability is very much at the forefront. A number of wind power companies are currently being sued by utilities companies and municipalities for not being able to deliver the electricity they promised. In Texas, three wind farms owned by NextEra Energy Resources LLC agreed to sell specified amounts of power annually to Luminant Energy Company beginning in 2002. When they failed to deliver the contracted amount, Luminant sued for $29 million in liquidated damages and won. A similar case occurred years earlier in Washington state, and observers of the wind industry are predicting a deluge of such cases in the future.
The Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade Bill may be momentarily dead, but there are persistent rumors of its resurrection. Even without it, proposals are floating through the halls of Congress which would offer billions more to wind developers and demand that as much as 20% of our electricity be generated from renewable sources. While these proposals are being discussed, three wind farms are cluttering the landscape of Hawaii, monuments in rust to the government’s imposition of a technology that simply does not work.
A similar situation exists in California. In the December 13th, 2010 edition of The American Thinker, Andrew Walden discusses what was once the largest collection of wind farms in the world. “In the best wind spots on earth,” he writes, “14,000 wind turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills.”
If and when federal funds cease to be shoveled into the wind projects now underway in Texas, most industry observers believe they will also be abandoned leaving the once swaying prairie an industrial junkyard of concrete, steel and fiberglass.
Meanwhile, the green jobs pledged by the Obama Administration seem to be suffering the same fate as the birds. Almost 12 percent of the President’s original $814 billion stimulus package, enacted early in 2009, went to renewable energy projects. The White House estimates that the stimulus created 190,700 green jobs. The Department of Energy, however, reports only 82,000 jobs actually resulted from the bill and as many as 80 percent of those went to firms in China, Spain and South Korea. Further, the National Center for Policy Analysis reports that, because of the expense, renewable energy is in reality costing more jobs than it is creating.
The Enviromental Problems
… While pro-wind energy groups maintain that less than one percent of land is removed from actual production by turbines and transmission lines, many experts argue otherwise. First, the towers create large dry spots at their base that, in a semi-arid environment like the Texas Panhandle, simply won’t support a vegetative cover. The resulting “blow spots” grow with each wind storm and can, in short order, consume many acres. Further, roads must be built to service turbines and transmission towers. In sandy areas like most of the Gray to Tesla line, the surfaces must be paved or coated to prevent blowing. These roads prevent normal moisture absorption and interfere with animal migration, and the damage to wildlife by the existence of tall structures is far greater than that from technologies dependent on fossil fuels. Tall grasses and wildlife are also damaged by the turbines’ prodigious oil leaks, plus, in an area already plagued by major grass fires often started by downed power lines, lines of the magnitude proposed are not welcome.
Heavy equipment used to install and service these lines and turbines compacts the turf and churns the surface, destroying vegetation. Then, during the frequent winter and spring winds, the barren spots grow larger. Once productive sandy loam becomes what Panhandle ranchers call “blow sand,” soil leached of organic material by the wind, unable to sustain a vegetative cover.
Both the turbines and the lines interfere with bird migration as well. The tall structures inhibit the breeding of the Lesser Prairie Chicken, and their presence will put the fate of the Whooping Crane very much into question. Further fragmentation of the LPC nesting grounds will almost certainly put it on the Endangered Species list and subject land owners to close federal scrutiny creating even more unwanted intrusion.
Richard Peet, Gray County Judge, wrote in a letter to Assistant Attorney General Moreno and Tom Clark of the Natural Resources Division on December 9, 2010, that prior to allowing Cross Texas Transmission to circumvent the law that requires an environmental impact study, U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents themselves pointed out that the currently proposed positioning of the Gray to Tesla line would “most assuredly” put the LPC on the endangered species list. At the very least, it was expected that the Fish and Wildlife Service would step in and insist that the route be studied for impact to wildlife. But the Service said there was no federal action that triggered a proper Environmental Impact Statement and that no permit would be required of CTT. However, a field coordinator for the Service told one landowner, if a permit is required, more than likely they will just pay mitigation and all resistance would end.
The Problems of Quasi-Capitalism
“Wind power is an open trough of government subsidies, tax credits and state mandates. Taken together, it’s a massive corporate welfare effort that means big money for the wind power developers and big costs for the rest of us.” Loren Steffy, the Houston Chronicle.
In a free market, goods and services are offered for gain. So long as it is mutually advantageous to buyer and seller, it works. When products fail to meet requirements, the buyer finds better, cheaper or more desirable products elsewhere. When the producer fails to make a profit, he generally seeks another market. Or another product
The role of government in such a system is limited. If the producer fails to deliver promised goods or delivers something other than what was promised, or if the buyer refuses to pay the agreed-upon price, the government steps in through the criminal courts system, demands remediation and applies appropriate penalties. But what happens when the government itself exerts influence in the decision-making process or even dictates the outcome of the transaction?
In that case, competitively priced goods or services cease to be the primary concern of the producer. Courting government agencies and influencing laws becomes the chief goal. Government-backed or government-created corporations become an extension of political might, and a symbiotic relationship develops between lawmakers and corporations facilitated by laws that, in many instances, they helped write.
Intermittent sources of power, especially those that require backup from coal or gas, cannot compete in the open marketplace. Equipping corporate welfare recipients with one of the most easily abused powers of the state in an attempt to force the populace to accept an unreliable source of energy at a tremendously inflated price is both unwise and dangerous. Such policies come at great cost, and landowners may only be the first to be asked to pay.
“The government is using corporations as its arm. They’re not just destroying my land; they’re destroying my heritage,” said Mark Cadra, a Wheeler County rancher whose land lies along the route selected by the Texas PUC. “I was taught for as long as I can remember to be a good steward of the land. Now the government has given this company the right to take what they want and do whatever they want with it. Believe me, what they want will damage my land forever. It makes me feel helpless.”
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Sam Pakan is a rancher and writer in Wheeler County, Texas. He is currently producing beef for the health market while writing a series of historical novels set in WWII. He also edits books for selected novelists.
Obama’s new budget is a continuation of Wall Street’s class war against the poor and middle class. Wall Street wasn’t through with us when the banksters sold their fraudulent derivatives into our pension funds, wrecked Americans’ job prospects and retirement plans, secured a $700 billion bailout at taxpayers’ expense while foreclosing on the homes of millions of Americans, and loaded up the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet with several trillion dollars of junk financial paper in exchange for newly created money to shore up the banks’ balance sheets. The effect of the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” on inflation, interest rates, and the dollar’s foreign exchange value are yet to hit. When they do, Americans will get a lesson in poverty.
Now the ruling oligarchies have struck again, this time through the federal budget. The U.S. government has a huge military/security budget. It is as large as the budgets of the rest of the world combined. The Pentagon, CIA, and Homeland Security budgets account for the $1.1 trillion federal deficit that the Obama administration forecasts for fiscal year 2012. This massive deficit spending serves only one purpose–the enrichment of the private companies that serve the military/security complex. These companies, along with those on Wall Street, are who elect the U.S. government.
The U.S. has no enemies except those that the U.S. creates by bombing and invading other countries and by overthrowing foreign leaders and installing American puppets in their place.
China does not conduct naval exercises off the California coast, but the U.S. conducts war games in the China Sea off China’s coast. Russia does not mass troops on Europe’s borders, but the U.S. places missiles on Russia’s borders. The U.S. is determined to create as many enemies as possible in order to continue its bleeding of the American population to feed the ravenous military/security complex.
The U.S. government actually spends $56 billion a year, that is, $56,000 million, in order that American air travelers can be porno-scanned and sexually groped so that firms represented by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff can make large profits selling the scanning equipment.
With a perpetual budget deficit driven by the military/security complex’s desire for profits, the real cause of America’s enormous budget deficit is off-limits for discussion.
The U.S. Secretary of War-Mongering, Robert Gates, declared: “We shrink from our global security responsibilities at our peril.” The military brass warns of cutting any of the billions of aid to Israel and Egypt, two functionaries for its Middle East “policy.”
But what are “our” global security responsibilities? Where did they come from? Why would America be at peril if America stopped bombing and invading other countries and interfering in their internal affairs? The perils America faces are all self-created.
The answer to this question used to be that otherwise we would be murdered in our beds by “the worldwide communist conspiracy.” Today the answer is that we will be murdered in our airplanes, train stations, and shopping centers by “Muslim terrorists” and by a newly created imaginary threat–”domestic extremists,” that is, war protesters and environmentalists.
The U.S. military/security complex is capable of creating any number of false flag events in order to make these threats seem real to a public whose intelligence is limited to TV, shopping mall experiences, and football games.
So Americans are stuck with enormous budget deficits that the Federal Reserve must finance by printing new money, money that sooner or later will destroy the purchasing power of the dollar and its role as world reserve currency. When the dollar goes, American power goes.
For the ruling oligarchies, the question is: how to save their power.
Their answer is: make the people pay.
And that is what their latest puppet, President Obama, is doing.
With the U.S. in the worst recession since the Great Depression, a great recession that John Williams and Gerald Celente, along with myself, have said is deepening, the “Obama budget” takes aim at support programs for the poor and out-of-work. The American elites are transforming themselves into idiots as they seek to replicate in America the conditions that have led to the overthrows of similarly corrupt elites in Tunisia and Egypt and mounting challenges to U.S. puppet governments elsewhere.
All we need is a few million more Americans with nothing to lose in order to bring the disturbances in the Middle East home to America. With the U.S. military bogged down in wars abroad, an American revolution would have the best chance of success.
American politicians have to fund Israel as the money returns in campaign contributions.
The U.S. government must fund the Egyptian military if there is to be any hope of turning the next Egyptian government into another American puppet that will serve Israel by continuing the blockade of the Palestinians herded into the Gaza ghetto.
These goals are far more important to the American elite than Pell Grants that enable poor Americans to obtain an education, or clean water, or community block grants, or the low income energy assistance program (cut by the amount that U.S. taxpayers are forced to give to Israel).
There are also $7,700 million of cuts in Medicaid and other health programs over the next five years.
Given the magnitude of the U.S. budget deficit, these sums are a pittance. The cuts will have no effect on U.S. Treasury financing needs. They will put no brakes on the Federal Reserve’s need to print money in order to keep the U.S. government in operation.
These cuts serve one purpose: to further the Republican Party’s myth that America is in economic trouble because of the poor: The poor are shiftless. They won’t work. The only reason unemployment is high is that the poor had rather be on welfare.
A new addition to the welfare myth is that recent middle class college graduates won’t take the jobs offered them, because their parents have too much money, and the kids like living at home without having to do anything. A spoiled generation, they come out of university refusing any job that doesn’t start out as CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The reason that engineering graduates do not get job interviews is that they do not want them.
What all this leads to is an assault on “entitlements”, which means Social Security and Medicare. The elites have programmed, through their control of the media, a large part of the population, especially those who think of themselves as conservatives, to conflate “entitlements” with welfare. America is going to hell not because of foreign wars that serve no American purpose, but because people, who have paid 15 per cent of their payroll all their lives for old age pensions and medical care, want “handouts” in their retirement years. Why do these selfish people think that working Americans should be forced through payroll taxes to pay for the pensions and medical care of the retirees? Why didn’t the retirees consume less and prepare for their own retirement?
The elite’s line, and that of their hired spokespersons in “think tanks” and universities, is that America is in trouble because of its retirees.
Too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe that America is in trouble because of its poor and its retirees. America is not in trouble because it coerces a dwindling number of taxpayers to support the military/security complex’s enormous profits, American puppet governments abroad, and Israel.
The American elite’s solution for America’s problems is not merely to foreclose on the homes of Americans whose jobs were sent offshore, but to add to the numbers of distressed Americans with nothing to lose the sick and the dispossessed retirees, and the university graduates who cannot find jobs that have been sent to Chine and India.
Of all the countries in the world, none need a revolution as bad as the United States, a country ruled by a handful of selfish oligarchs who have more income and wealth than can be spent in a lifetime.
~
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
The Brookings Institution stands alongside Harvard, Yale and Princeton, among the nation’s elite intellectual institutions. This is why it so striking that it chose to invite former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan to give the keynote address at a forum on reforming the home mortgage finance system last week.
It would be difficult to imagine a more disastrous failure than Alan Greenspan. Tens of millions of people are unemployed, underemployed or have given up looking for work altogether as a direct result of Greenspan’s incompetence. Millions of families are facing the loss of their homes. More than one-quarter of mortgage holders are underwater in their mortgages.
The huge baby boom cohorts saw most of their life savings disappear when the collapse of the bubble destroyed their home equity. They are now approaching retirement with almost nothing to rely upon other than their Social Security.
This is the direct result of Alan Greenspan’s incompetence as Fed chair. He either did not recognize the $8 trillion housing bubble or somehow did not think it was a big deal. This was monumental incompetence of the highest order.
The housing bubble was really hard to miss for anyone who can read a chart and knows arithmetic. For a hundred years nationwide house prices had just tracked the overall rate of inflation. Suddenly in the mid-90s, coinciding with the stock bubble, house prices began to substantially outpace the overall rate of inflation.
By 2002, house prices had already risen by more than 30 percentage points in excess of the overall rate of inflation. At the peak of the bubble in 2006 the inflation in house prices had exceeded the overall rate of inflation by more than 70 percentage points, creating more than $8 trillion in housing bubble wealth.
There was no remotely plausible explanation for this run-up based on the fundamentals of either the demand or supply side of the housing market. Population growth and household formation were much slower during the bubble years than in prior decades. Income growth had been healthy in the late 90s, but went in reverse in the 00s. On the supply side, the country was building homes at near-record rates, so supply constraints obviously could not explain the run-up in prices.
Anyone looking for an explanation in the fundamentals would have to explain why rents were going nowhere. The fact that the vacancy rate had already hit a record high as early as 2002 should have been another really big, bright warning sign that housing was in an unsustainable bubble.
If it was impossible for a competent economist to miss the housing bubble, it should also have been impossible for them to think it could deflate harmlessly. The bubbles in residential and non-residential construction led to enormous overbuilding in both sectors. The wealth effect associated with $8 trillion of transient housing bubble wealth was generating close to $500 billion in annual consumption.
This meant that the combined drop in construction and consumption demand from the collapse off the bubble was almost certainly going to be in excess of $1 trillion. Did Greenspan think he had something in his bag of tricks as Federal Reserve Board chairman that would allow him to quickly replace more than $1 trillion in annual demand?
Absent some new source of demand (which has not appeared), it was inevitable that the collapse of the bubble would lead to a prolonged period of high unemployment. This was all 100 percent predictable; but Greenspan did not predict it…
Incredibly, in spite of this disastrous performance as Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan is still being feted in elite circles. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the people who sit in these elite circles openly celebrated Mr. Greenspan as he drove the economy off a cliff. He was declared the “Maestro” by one of the country’s top reporters. At the annual meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the leading lights of the economics profession debated whether he was the greatest central banker of all time as he prepared to leave his post.
In other words, Greenspan may have ruined the lives of tens of millions of people and cost the lives of tens of thousands (yes, people die because of inept economic policy – they kill themselves, they don’t get health care that they need, and they die from alcoholism and despair), but he does not bear the blame alone. Most of the people who hold top positions in policy and academic circles share blame for disaster – refusing to do the simple analysis that would have allowed them to see this disaster coming.
The pain and suffering caused by Alan Greenspan’s incompetence vastly exceeds the harm that our worst enemies could even dream of inflicting on the United States. Yet, he can always count on a position of honor at the Brookings Institution. Heckuva job, Alan!
“If once [the people] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.”—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), 3rd US President
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), 3rd US President
[Corruption in high places would follow as] “all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), American 16th US President (1861–65)
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”—Frederic Bastiat (1801–1850), French economist
“Inflation made here in the United States is very, very low.”—Ben Bernanke, Fed Chairman, Thursday, February 10, 2011
Let us begin with some macroeconomic indicators of reference.
In October 2010, the world value of total production (all Gross Domestic Products or GDPs) was estimated to be $61.96 trillion U.S. dollars at current nominal prices. The U.S.GDP was estimated at $16.11 trillion or 26 % of world GDP.
The two largest financial markets in terms of trading values are the global foreign exchange market (all currency markets) that has an average daily turnover in global foreign exchange transactions of about $4 trillion per day, and the privately-traded and mostly unregulated world derivatives market (all the derivatives markets) whose total world outstanding contracts has been estimated by the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland to have a notional or face value of about $791 trillion in 2010.
In terms of real wealth, however, the two most important financial markets are the world bond market and the world stock market. In 2009, for example, the global bond market had an outstanding value of $US 91 trillion, with the U.S. bond market, at a value of $US 35.5 trillion, being the largest domestic bond market.–In mid-2010, the global equity market capitalization on regulated exchanges was estimated at $US 54.9 trillion, with the U.S. stock market having a value of some $US 19.8 trillion.
With such a large amount of financial assets, it is understandable that shifts in prices and interest rates have important effects on each market. If long-term interest rates go up, the nominal value of bonds goes down, and conversely, when interest rates decline, bond prices go up. As for stocks, many factors, such as company earnings, future profit prospects and inflation expectations, as well as political and taxation considerations, can influence their value. However, in general, they tend to fare better when short-term interest rates are low rather than high.
Sometimes, these two important financial markets move up together, especially in an environment of general disinflation, when interest rates tend to decline. They also tend to decline in tandem when real interest rates are on the rise, both bond prices and stock prices are then falling.
Sometimes, however, they can move in different directions, especially in the early phase of an inflationary period, such unexpected inflation being good for the stock market but bad for the bond market. Since last fall, this has been case, with the bond market falling and the stock market rising. The question is how long this decoupling can last.
And how does the Fed’s monetary policy fit into such an environment of oncoming inflation, and what should the Fed do?
Last November 3rd, the day after the 2010 mid-term elections, the Bernanke Fed announced that it will be embarking on a second round of quantitative easing (QE2), a fancy word for printing new money in exchange for government bonds—in other words, monetizing the public debt. It seems that Chairman Bernanke and the Fed board felt that months of lending to the large American banks trillions of dollars at close to zero interest rate, while paying them 0.25 percent to keep their excess reserves on its books, was not enough. They announced that the Fed would buy $600 billion-worth of additional Treasury bonds until June 2011, while reinvesting some $300 billion of principal payments from its portfolio holdings of mortgage-backed securities.
In doing so, the Fed professed to follow two somewhat interrelated objectives; 1- to lower long-term real interest rates in order to stimulate economic activity and create employment; and 2- to simultaneously raise inflation expectations in order to avoid the effect of deflation on the U.S. debt-leveraged economy. It should be remembered that from 1913 to 1977, the Fed had only one objective to pursue, i.e. price stability. Currently, however, the Fed has officially a double mandate. As a matter of fact, since 1977, the amended Federal Reserve Act of 1913 stipulates that the U.S. central bank should set its monetary policy in order to promote employment while maintaining price stability. It says that the Fed should promote “maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.”
Of course, a central bank in a fiat currency system can always create inflation through monetary policy and its printing press, but, in a market economy, it has little direct influence on job creation and on long-term interest rates. Employment depends on investments, innovation and market opportunities at home and abroad, while long-term interest rates depend on the amount of savings available, on investment demand and on long-term inflation expectations, all factors that are more or less out of the reach of a central bank. It is easy to delude oneself into thinking otherwise, but that’s the reality.
What the Fed can do with certainty, however, is to create inflation by expanding the monetary base and the money supply; it can also reign in inflation by draining liquidity from the system. If it goes overboard one way or the other, it can also create asset price bubbles by maintaining its managed short-run interest rates too low for too long, or it can create a credit crunch by putting the brakes too hard on credit creation, usually in a haste to correct its previous mistake.
These short-term gyrations in monetary policy are very destabilizing to the real economy, sometimes creating a temporary boom; sometimes precipitating an economic downturn. They are also accompanied by massive shifts of wealth between creditors and debtors.
In the first instance, when the Fed (or any central bank for that matter) creates too much money by buying financial assets and writing checks on itself, inflation and inflation expectations ensue. This pushes short-term interest rates down and long-term interest rates up (a steepening of the yield curve) and the price of long bonds goes down, with the effect of imposing an inflation tax on all the holders of fiat dollars. This inflation tax results in a transfer of wealth between unsuspecting dollar holders and bond holders who see the real value of their holdings go down, while net debtors and stock owners see their real debt load being reduced by inflation and the value of most shares in the stock market going up.
In the second instance, the reverse can happen if the economy is starved of liquidity: the yield curve inverts with short-run interest rates moving way up as compared to long-term interest rates. A stock market crash and an economic recession generally follow.
—That’s pretty much what the Fed has been doing over its nearly 100 years of existence, keeping short-run interest rates too low for too long, creating unsustainable asset bubbles, and then applying the monetary brakes to kill inflation expectations that it has created on its own. Sometimes, the Fed has maintained price stability and the value of the U.S. dollar; but at other times, it has willingly acted to destroy the purchasing power of the dollar by printing too much of it.
As a general principle, if inflation expectations increase faster than nominal long-term interest rates, real interest rates, i.e. the real cost of capital for investors and home buyers, would decline and this would, hopefully, stimulate economic activity and employment.
Unfortunately for the Fed, its Nov. 3rd announcement translated into an important loss of confidence in its ability to design and pursue an appropriate monetary policy and was immediately decried by other central banks and by America’s biggest creditor, China, as a blatant attempt to generate and export inflation. Bond prices began immediately to fall and bond yields to rise. It seems that bondholders began selling longer-term Treasuries at a faster rate than the Fed could buy them.
Chairman Ben Bernanke and his board seem to have forgotten that the United States is now a debtor nation, not a creditor nation. A creditor nation could get away with an outspoken policy of creating inflation—but not a debtor nation. In 2010 alone, the U.S. registered another half a trillion-dollar trade deficit with the rest of the world. This has to be financed, and it is done with foreign borrowings. To a large extent, foreign creditors now decide the final outcome of American monetary policy.
The 10-year Treasury yield, which hit a low at 2.40 percent in October 2010, was at 2.63 percent the day before the Fed’s announcement on November 2, 2010. As it turned out, it closed at 3.64 on Friday February 11, after hitting a high of 3.75 percent on February 8. The same is true of the 30-year Treasury yield that hit a high of 4.76 percent on February 8, thus approaching the dangerous threshold of 4.90 percent. The latter stood at 3.93 percent on Nov. 2, 2010.
Obviously, the Fed’s ultra loose monetary policy has backfired. Its intended policy of printing money in excess of what the economy demands has resulted in raising real long-term interest rates, not lowering them. Indeed, with long-term nominal rates on the rise while inflation will take many months to surface, the immediate effect of the Fed’s November announcement was to raise real long-term Treasury rates, not to lower them. Mortgage rates are also on the rise, threatening to postpone the long anticipated recovery in the housing market.
It is certainly possible that we are entering a period when the already observed rise in real interest rates can derail the stock market rally that has been in force since early March 2009. Later on, however, a slowdown in the economy coupled with fiscal compressions can be expected to push long-term rates down again. Such a roller-coaster path for interest rates is not very helpful.
The current Fed board seems to believe that the Fed is more than a central bank, that it is a sort of a government unto itself that can both control monetary conditions and solve the structural problems in the real economy at the same time, irrespective of what the rest of the world thinks. This would seem to be most unrealistic. Perhaps a dose of humility would be salutary at this time, before irreparable damage is done.
Bahraini youths protest in front of the police in Manama on February 14, 2011
Witnesses say police in Bahrain have violently clashed with pro-democracy protesters during the “Day of Rage” rallies across the country.
On Monday, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at hundreds of demonstrators in Karkazan, a Shia village south of the capital, Manama, AFP reported.
Security forces stepped up their presence with helicopters circling over Manama.
At least 14 people were wounded in overnight and Monday clashes.
Activists, inspired by revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, have dubbed Monday “the Day of Rage” to express disappointment at the political reforms of the past decade, which have failed to bring prosperity and real change.
The majority Shia population in Bahrain has been complaining about inequality and oppression. The government has been clamping down on the opposition since the country’s controversial general elections in August last year.
Since late Sunday, Bahrain’s security forces have been patrolling shopping centers and other locations to monitor people’s movements amid calls by opposition groups for pro-democracy protests.
Mary O’Grady, editorial board member of The Wall Street Journal and champion of the 2009 coup d’état against Honduran President Mel Zelaya “because he was trying to extend his presidency in violation of the nation’s constitution” [read: because he was trying to conduct a nonbinding public opinion survey to gauge popular will to rewrite a document produced at the height of Honduras’ cold war service as a U.S. military base], has finally found an acceptable reason for constitutional revision.
What advocate of free markets hasn’t, at one time or another, fantasized about running away to a desert island to start a country where economic liberty would be the law of the land? If things go according to plan, more than one such ‘island’ may soon pop up here.
Honduras calls these visionary islands ‘model cities,’ and as the Journal’s David Wessel reported from Washington 10 days ago, the Honduran Congress is expected to soon pass an amendment to the constitution that would clear the way to put the concept into action.
The idea is simple: A sizable piece of unpopulated government land is designated for use as a model city. A charter that will govern the city is drafted and the Congress approves it. A development authority is appointed by the national government. The authority signs contracts with the investors who will develop the infrastructure. The city opens for business under rules that act as a magnet for investment.”
It would seem that free market advocates fantasizing about running away to desert islands of economic liberty might have already had their fantasies sufficiently fulfilled via sweatshop opportunities in Honduras.
Undeterred, O’Grady insists:
Now the little country that stood up to the world to defend its democracy seems to be affirming a belief that it needs to change if it wants to ward off future assaults on freedom.”
The valiant Honduran defense of democracy consisted, of course, of the overthrow by the country’s tiny elite, in concert with the U.S., of a president engaged in such assaults on freedom as a raise of the minimum wage to approximately $290 a month in certain sectors, support for legislation to ban open-pit mining, and willingness to discuss land reform.
It is meanwhile unclear how the designation of government land for what is essentially an experiment by an American economist can be construed as democratic in nature when Honduran farmers attempting to reclaim property illegally acquired by wealthy businessmen are subjected to assassinations and other forms of harassment by military and paramilitary units.
In case there is any doubt as to the identity of “the Honduran people” that O’Grady claims to speak for in her articles, she ends this particular one with a quote from Zelaya’s predecessor Ricardo Maduro, described as “a fan” of the model cities scheme:
If we want to develop we have to find a way to counterbalance the populism that causes us so much harm. The model city is a way of decentralizing power and connecting people to their government.”
As for previous counterbalancing efforts against threats posed by the non-elite, Maduro holds the distinction of having presided over a regime that, according to former chief of internal affairs for the Honduran police María Luisa Borjas, exterminated 3,000 extraneous Honduran youths via a liberal application of the term “gang member.”
The Egyptian military, with a US green light, got rid of Mubarak for precisely the same reason they sent the police and thugs that killed over 300 and injured thousands last week — to allow for the economy to run smoothly again. In other words, the disposing of Mubarak is just another solution, as undesirable as it may be, to re-open banks and have business run as usual. Factories, banks, real state, and other businesses are still owned by the same corrupt leaders, with the fate of the Mubarak family stock still unknown.
The High Council of Armed Forces, in all their four communiqués, stressed the “economic interests” of the country, which, in a heavily-privatized economy like Egypt’s, means the interests of the private owners, some of whom are military generals. The forced removal of Mubarak, in the end, served owners’ interests foremost. This economic concern was ranked as the most important objective in the High Council of Armed Forces’ latest communiqué:
First: The High Council of the Armed Forces is committed to all contents in previous communiqués.
Second: The High Council of the Armed Forces has great confidence in the ability of Egypt, its institutions, and its people in surpassing the current critical conditions. And based on this, all sectors, public and private, must commit to their glorious and patriotic mission to push the wheel of economy forward, and that the people are held responsible in this matter.
The third point in the communiquéwas only natural to forcefully uphold “the glorious and patriotic mission,” which is to keep the current government under Suleiman in power until new elections are held. The Council did not set up a time frame for these elections, but it definitively did so for resuscitating the economy (i.e. retrieve flow of income and profits on their investments) as a priority that cannot wait for democracy; which is now! This communiqué went short of repeating Suleiman’s patronizing words yesterday when he said: “Go back to your homes and your jobs.”
There are a lot of people who simply cannot accept that the economy, at this stage, is of much concern to the Egyptian military regime (which is still in power) and the Obama administration and other US officials, let alone the general public and the revolution. But that is because these people are not trained sufficiently to have an economic eye on world affairs. The focus then shifts to the political aspects of the revolution: democracy, fair elections, and freedom of speech and religion. Make no mistake, these are absolutely important elements of any successful revolution, and achieving them deserves euphoric celebrations. But to ignore the economic demands, the very reason why this revolution even took place, is really an act of infanticide against this new-born Egyptian revolution. Bou Azizi (the true catalyst of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions) did not set himself on fire because he couldn’t vote in free elections. He set himself on fire because his only source of income was humiliatingly taken away from him.
All indications seem to favor sustaining the Egyptian economic system and excluding it from the revolution. For example, the Finance minister, Samir Radwan, appointed by Mubarak during the January 25 Revolution, is still running the country’s economic affairs with almost no objection from anyone. He spoke to CNN’s Piers Morgan last night to share his feelings of jubilee, but in fact refrained from using any revolutionary words, and referred to the last eighteen days as “the crisis.” Luckily so far, according to Qatar News Agency (Feb 7, 2011), he refused IMF intervention:
“The minister quoted the CBK chief as stressing that the government’s procedures would be enough to confront the current crisis.”
But then yesterday, he was quoted saying that a stimulus package may be needed, without specifying the source of those funds, to boost up employment. These all sound like innocent events to the economically illiterate. But lessons must be learned from past revolutions, like the Polish Revolution in 1989, when all the fruits of revolution were finally reaped by private owners of the country’s most important resources and industries, after being drowned by IMF loans in return for speeding up the process of privatization and doing away with labor laws and trade barriers.
The January 25 Revolution does not address the private ownership of the country’s telecommunications industry, power grid, water, post, and other major financial infrastructures. Should the country’s resources also belong to the people in the same way that the parliament and presidency ought to? Would democracy be worth anything if the democratically-elected government had no say or authority over the country’s oil, gas, water, energy, agriculture, stock markets and banking regulations, because they are “privately” owned?
Recall that the world stood by watching as the Free Officers Movement, led by Mohammad Najib and Abdul Nasser, took over power in Egypt in 1952. It was only when Abdul Nasser began a campaign of nationalizing the economy (especially the Suez Canal), that the world super powers (Britain, France, and Israel) turned against Egypt and declared war in 1953. This must be a hint to all spectators, that as long as the new freely-elected Egyptian government (to be) secures business contracts and foreign investments, the world shall embrace Egyptian democracy. However, should they choose to nationalize the major sectors of the economy, the free world will turn against Egypt, and we’ll hear western media pundits talking about how Egyptians were never ready for democracy, and how democracy does not fit the Arab mentality or society, and how dictatorships are necessary for the security of the United States of America against possible terrorist cells growing in chaos-hot-bed Egypt.
The Egyptian military, however, being itself invested in the privately owned neo-liberal economy of Egypt, had made assurances in their communiqués to the effect that they are going to protect the economy (read securing investments, foreign and domestic) as a major priority. The Egyptian Revolution of January 25 has put Egypt on the road to democracy, but will it lead to Egyptian economic independence — where economic decisions are made in Egypt, by Egyptians, and serve the interests of Egyptians? Or will they forfeit economic independence and honor free trade agreements that supersede democracy and the people’s will?
One thing is for certain. The Egyptian military rule (and all other dictatorships) can only be forced to make concessions through peaceful and total economic paralysis, as had been witnessed in the past eighteen days of the greatest Arab victory since Saladdin. The lesson to be learned for future Arab revolutions, and all world revolutions, is to keep the economy in the background of all tactics, strategies, and objectives.
Human trafficking is certainly one of the most monstrous mass criminal activities ever undertaken by other humans (although calling them “humans” is a bit of a stretch). And yet, there’s a special kind of this deeply repulsive crime that pushes it to diabolical proportions – child trafficking. Underage kids, particularly those who were abandoned, sold or have very poor/abusive family backgrounds, are by far the most vulnerable group. The depraved criminals who engage in such illicit activities specifically target unfortunate children and given there are millions of them all around the globe, particularly in war-torn areas, the “recruitment pool” is effectively endless. Unfortunately, the demand on the black market also seems to be constant and growing, making it a very lucrative and appealing prospect for criminals. … continue
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Bahraini youths protest in front of the police in Manama on February 14, 2011
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