Guest Post: Analysis of the Global Insurrection Against Neo-Liberal Economic Domination and the Coming American Rebellion

01 Agriculture, 01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth

Guest Post: Analysis of the Global Insurrection Against Neo-Liberal Economic Domination and the Coming American Rebellion

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/26/2011 20:53 -0500

If you think what’s happening in Egypt won’t happen within the United States, you’ve been watching too much TV. The statistics speak for themselves.

Join The Movement In previous Revolution Roundups, before we were knocked offline, we featured mass protests by the people of Ireland, Italy, Britain, Austria, Greece, France and Portugal, as the Global Insurrection contagion spread throughout Europe. And now, as we have seen over the past month, North African and Middle Eastern nations have joined the movement as the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Morocco, Gabon, Mauritania, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan and Algeria have taken to the streets en masse.

The connection between this latest round of uprisings and the prior protests throughout Europe is one the mainstream media is not making. We are witnessing a decentralized global rebellion against Neo-Liberal economic imperialism. While each national uprising has its own internal characteristics, each one, at its core, is about the rising costs of living and lack of financial opportunity and security. Throughout the world the situation is the same: increasing levels of unemployment and poverty, as price inflation on food and basic necessities is soaring.

Whether national populations realize it or not, these uprisings are against systemic global economic policies that are strategically designed to exploit the working class, reduce living standards, increase personal debt and create severe inequalities of wealth. These global uprising, which have only just begun, are the first wave of the inevitable reaction to the implementation of a centralized worldwide Neo-Feudal economic order.

The global banking cartel, centered at the IMF, World Bank and Federal Reserve, have paid off politicians and dictators the world over — from Washington to Greece to Egypt. In country after country, they have looted national economies at the expense of local populations, consolidating wealth in unprecedented fashion – the top economic one-tenth of one percent is currently holding over $40 trillion in investible wealth, not counting an equally significant amount of wealth hidden in offshore accounts. Read More….

Tip of the Hat to Contributing Editor Jock Gill for the link.

2011/02/272011/02/27

Poverty, Not Terrorism, Is Threat #1

01 Agriculture, 01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Peace Intelligence

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends....

The price of food is at the heart of this wave of revolutions

No one saw the uprisings coming, but their deeper cause isn't hard to fathom

By Peter Popham
Independent, Sunday, 27 February 2011

Revolution is breaking out all over. As Gaddafi marshals his thugs and mercenaries for a last-ditch fight in Tripoli, several died as protests grew more serious in Iraq. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah tried to bribe his people into docility by splashing out $35bn on housing, social services and education. Across the water in Bahrain the release of political prisoners failed to staunch the uprising. In Iran, President Ahmadinejad crowed about chaos in the Arab world, but said nothing about the seething anger in his own backyard; in Yemen, the opposition gathers strength daily.

And it's not just the Middle East. This is an African crisis: Tunisia, where it started, is an African country, and last week in Senegal, a desperate army veteran died after setting fire to himself in front of the presidential palace, emulating Mohamed Bouazizi, the market trader whose self-immolation sparked the revolution in Tunisia. Meanwhile, the spirit of revolt has already leapt like a forest fire to half a dozen other ill-governed African nations, with serious disturbances reported in Mauritania, Gabon, Cameroon and Zimbabwe. Read more….

2011/02/252011/02/25

US Economy, US Federal Budget–To Cut or Not to Cut?

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, Budgets & Funding, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, IO Sense-Making, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

ECONOMIC SCENE

Why Budget Cuts Don’t Bring Prosperity

By DAVID LEONHARDT

New York Times, February 22, 2011

Remember the German economic boom of 2010?

Germany’s economic growth surged in the middle of last year, causing commentators both there and here to proclaim that American stimulus had failed and German austerity had worked. Germany’s announced budget cuts, the commentators said, had given private companies enough confidence in the government to begin spending their own money again.

Well, it turns out the German boom didn’t last long. With its modest stimulus winding down, Germany’s growth slowed sharply late last year, and its economic output still has not recovered to its prerecession peak. Output in the United States — where the stimulus program has been bigger and longer lasting — has recovered. This country would now need to suffer through a double-dip recession for its gross domestic product to be in the same condition as Germany’s. Read more….

Does The U.S. Really Have A Fiscal Crisis?

By Simon Johnson, The Baseline Scenario, 24 February 2011

The United States faces some serious medium-term fiscal issues, but by any standard measure it does not face an immediate fiscal crisis. Overindebted countries typically have a hard time financing themselves when the world becomes riskier – yet turmoil in the Middle East is pushing down the interest rates on US government debt. We are still seen as a safe haven.

Yet leading commentators and politicians today repeat the line “we’re broke” and argue there is no alternative other than immediate spending cuts at the national and state level.

Which view is correct? And what does this tell us about where our political system is heading? Read more….

Continue reading “US Economy, US Federal Budget–To Cut or Not to Cut?”

2011/02/222011/02/22

Tim Geithner: Con Man, Dupe, Idiot? Dangerous!

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government

Geithner’s Gamble

Simon Johnson

Geithner’s Gamble

LOS ANGELES – In a recent interview, United States Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner laid out his view of the nature of world economic growth and the role of the US financial sector. It is a deeply disturbing vision, one that amounts to a huge, uninformed gamble with the future of the American economy – and that suggests that Geithner remains the senior public official worldwide who is most in thrall to the self-serving ideology of big banks.

Geithner argues that the world will now experience a major “financial deepening,” owing to growing demand in emerging markets for financial products and services. He is thinking, of course, of “middle-income” countries like India, China, and Brazil. And he is right to emphasize that all have made terrific progress and now offer great opportunities for the rising middle class, which wants to accumulate savings, borrow more easily (for productive investment, home purchases, education, etc), and, more generally, smooth out consumption.

Read detailed critique….

Phi Beta Iota: The persistent idiocy of the Administration can only be understood if one recognizes that the White House and Congress have been bought and paid for. They are NOT representing the American public interest, and they are a danger to the rest of the world. The silence of the goats in senior positions is reprehensible. Foreign countries should be banning US banks [and expelling US forces] entirely–the US has taken legalized corruption to extraordinary heights, and as Matt Taibbi has documented so well, “no one goes to jail“–the US Government and Wall Street have merged to become GRIFTOPIA.

2011/02/202011/02/20

Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? + US Fraud RECAP

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Phi Beta Iota: With a tip of the hat to Rolling Stone and author Matt Taibbi, reproducing the entire article was the only way to show the emphasis added by Brother Chuck. Updated to add photo and observe that this particular article is rocketing around the Internet. See also our review of GRIFTOPIA.

UPDATE: Three comments from Facebook:

Robert Smith Socrates became disheartened. Machiavelli was on to something – power corrupts. I suspect that a true and totally transparent democracy of ideas and information are requisite groundwork for an enduring democracy.
Robert David Steele Vivas Transparency, truth, and trust. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both understood, Will Durant says it best (see my review of his Philosophy and the Social Problem)
Lynn Wheeler In the late 90s, got asked by NSCC (before they merged with DTC) to look at improving integrity of trading transactions (in part because had recently done something similar for payment transactions) … after putting some amount of work int…it was suspended. The comment was that a side-effect of improving the integrity would have also greatly increased transparency and visibility (which apparently is antithetical to trading culture … some x-over with recent RS article focusing on secrecy as a fraud-enabler).

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them

Matt Taibbi. Rolling Stone, 16 February 2011

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

“Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”

I put down my notebook. “Just that?”

“That's right,” he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. “Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there.”

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18.

Entire Piece with Emphasis from Chuck Spinney Below the Line

Continue reading “Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? + US Fraud RECAP”

2011/02/192011/02/19

Participatory Budgeting Practices, Games, Resources

03 Economy, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence

Dear friends,

Recently I've seen a swirl of information (mostly on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation listserv) about participatory budgeting. Below, you'll find a sampling of this info, in relatively raw form. I do not know enough to sort it all out, but it looks really fascinating.

Most of this material is about online public budgeting exercises, but some of it also describes the kind of face-to-face, seriously empowered mass-participatory civic budgeting processes developed in Brazil which have spread widely in the last decade or so.

I had no idea there was so much activity in this arena. Given

(a) the attention currently focused on the budget crisis,

(b) the dire impact of that crisis at all levels of government in so many places,

Continue reading “Participatory Budgeting Practices, Games, Resources”

2011/02/152011/10/22

NO LABELS Fraud Reprise….Hypocrisy Round II Mike Bloomberg Fiddling While David Walker Burns Money and Loses Time?

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence

No Labels to tackle hyper-partisanship, fiscal responsibility, election reform

Ken Bingenheimer

National Common Ground Examiner
February 14th, 2011 1:28 pm ET

After soliciting the thoughts of its members, the No Labels organization has settled upon three areas of focus for the group's efforts: Policing partisan politics, promoting fiscal responsibility, and election reform.

No Labels founding member John Avlon announced this decision Monday during the weekly leaders conference call.

“Based on your feedback we have decided to focus on three core policy principles going forward.

Continue reading “NO LABELS Fraud Reprise….Hypocrisy Round II Mike Bloomberg Fiddling While David Walker Burns Money and Loses Time?”