Economic Collapse Could Lead to a Practice of Responsible, Diversified Economies

The economic collapse is inevitable, yes. It is a crisis of global and historic proportions, yes. Let us not forget, however, that every crisis is an opportunity. That is, if we allow ourselves to perceive the opportunity in the danger, and then act.

Forgive me if I do not wax sympathetic here about the plight of Americans. Look, I don’t want a global financial meltdown, but what do you expect to get when you have an economy that is run on virtually nothing that comes from your own damn country, and insist that you be the center of economic attention?  What can you expect your economy to do when you outsource jobs to cut financial corners and import cheaply-made goods marketed by cheap big-box corporate stores with no accountability? What do you really expect is going to happen to a country run on entitlement; run with an arrogant attitude that, to paraphrase Roseanne Barr in Michael Moore’s new free movie Slacker Uprising, constantly repeats, “the world is my bitch and if she don’t give me what I want, I will bust a cap in her ass?” Some of these questions have moral implications, and I’d argue that morality is embedded in good economic sense–”right livelihood” and all that. But even from a purely economic standpoint, this crisis has been waiting to happen for some time, exacerbated by an irresponsible and just plain greedy cultural ethos of rugged individualism against the world.

I could rail on like this for a little longer, but that’s not what I want to do right now. This is a time for Americans and our elected representatives to ACT in a way that corrects the culture of greed and irresponsibility and brings a genuinely renewed sense of economics into the sphere of public life.

I strongly believe in local communities and their economies. The current pyramid scheme of wealth and power squelches communities and small-scale economies in favor of massively concentrated wealth for the elite and the privileged few. Whether anyone believes this is as it should be or not has suddenly become irrelevant because the system is not working. President Bush said it himself last night, “The market is not functioning properly.” Well, that’s obvious.

Or maybe it is functioning properly, but it’s just reached its limit. At any rate, the crisis is a clear indication that now would be a good time to think about alternative ways to structure economies–plural economies, with a focus on local and regional levels, not on corporate CEOs and their global fantasies.

People are talking about this, proposing alternative visions and plans for an economics that doesn’t continue to follow the same failed patterns of robbing from the poor to prop up the economic wet dreams of the conscienceless elite. Dennis Kucinich has criticized the proposed bailouts: “Our first trillion dollar compression bandage will hardly stem the hemorrhaging of an unsustainable Ponzi scheme built on debt ‘de-leverages.’” He’s got more to say, and it should surprise none that I think people should read this stuff:

kucinich.us – Protecting the public interest in any economic “bailout”
kucinich.us – Kucinich’s Main Street Recovery Plan

Others have come forward with their own ideas, and as long as Congress doesn’t bend over for Paulson, Bernanke, CheneyBush, and Company, I feel we’ll have a right proper slow-paced discussion of what to do and how to proceed. I like the ideas proposed by Chuck Collins and Dedrick Muhammed:

Funding the Bailout: Basic Principles

• Wall Street and speculators should pay now for the mess they created.
• Instead of borrowing from the super-wealthy beneficiaries of the casino economy, we should tax them.
• Any bailout should stimulate the real economy with investments in Main Street, not just Wall Street.

Pagan activist Starhawk has also written an excellent essay on the economic collapse and presented a vision for government aid now as a short-term solution to empowering local communities and economies. It should be up on her website within the next few days.

Rather than feel cynical and disempowered, as some are apt to do in a time of widely vanishing investments, why not step up and agitate for changes that will benefit not only Americans, not only the global economy, but the entire actual living Earth? This could be a historic opportunity for a reconceptualization of economic life, or we can stay the course, painfully grinding our way to an economic bottom that is far, far, far down from where we are floating in the haze of a corrupted American Dream.

Choices.

 

 

Dog Fight at the Economic Corral

After Money that Never Really Existed Anyway Disappears in a Puff of Steam, Investors Cry, “WTF?!”

 

Oh, the financial markets are ruined!

Could it be that the Wall Street brokers, the day traders, the speculators who have been shuttling and shuffling pretend money across the continents and back millions of times throughout the nanoseconds of the days, just had an “Oh, shit!” moment?  After all, what was the substance of those bits of ‘earnings’ they were playing an infinite game of higher returns with?  We know it wasn’t gold, that hallowed substance for which Europeans plundered and raped the New World and its indigenous peoples.  Gold hasn’t backed money in America since at the latest the 1970s.  If that so-called money had been based on something as concrete as oil, perhaps we could have an easier time understanding the current disintegration of the U.S. economy.  Oil, after all, at least according to the Debbie Downers among our thinkers, such as M. King Hubbert, E.F. Schumacher, and Richard Heinberg, is a finite resource which we are probably beginning to run out of.  So if barrels of oil were the measure of the dollar, we might have a clearer idea of why there seems to be so suddenly less viable money; i.e. less oil = less money.

But with good reason, it’s more complicated than that.  I’ve even heard some say our money is based on capital, which strikes me as a dumb assertion, since it breaks down to a silly equation where money = money.  While it’s clearly true, that equation in its raw form doesn’t get us any closer to understanding why the financial shit just hit the Big Fan.  To grasp the complicated dynamics of the modern economy, we must first understand that not all money is created equal.

Some people who decided to make it their job to make more money from money seem to have made a collective decision that their money is worth more than regular money.  What’s more shocking is that these people were backed in this assertion by other people, who indeed affirmed that their money was a special kind of money.  This, as I understand it, is the reason those people could make transactions, equations, and statements that are hinged on the following elementary math problem: $1 + speculation = $30.¹  Never mind that this is not the math that state-supported education usually teaches the general populace in school–this is math for special people!

 What is Speculation?

Now there’s a funny question, and probably one on which some very clever financiers could make some money.  From my perspective, it appears as if a mass of speculators have been pursuing the American Dream in one of its most raw forms: disregarding natural, political, and social boundaries, these American Pioneers of the Brave New Economy busied themselves by making split-second financial transactions in a convoluted, computerized, zig-zag of speculative chain lightning which could ring the globe fifty or one hundred times in a few hours.

 On a concrete level, it might play out something like this, but with the speculator not really intimately involved with, or even aware of, the ground work; he’s a detached funder, if you will:

 One hundred square miles of rainforest are felled, turning a profit for our financier.  He takes those assets and adds them to a pool of money supporting the forced removal of indigenous Alaskans from their traditional lands so that a pipeline and several oil rigs may be built.  As the native people settle uncomfortably into their allotted trailers crowded on a strip of land far to the north, the pipeline goes online and our financier profits from the extracted non-renewable resource.  Ka-ching!  Many people fill up their gas tanks.  The financier celebrates with a large dinner, some friends, cigars, and a rented woman, then reinvests a large sum of his money the next day in Boeing, a corporation who has been profiting nicely for a while now in its business of making smart bombs which are used to eradicate people in countries which have been dubbed villainous and in need of “freedom” by the United States government.  As freedom from their lives, or perhaps from a few limbs or family members, is delivered to these people from the sky, our financier casually moves his money along a profit chain felling ancient stands of trees; dragging massive nets to dredge the ocean of all varieties of life for consumption and waste; mining ores to be made into many machines; squashing peasant rebellions; inventing new and better pesticides; and funding advertising for a plethora of products; etc. until somebody, somewhere, registers surprise.  Perhaps that surprise is something along the line of:

“It’s no longer economically feasible for us to pull this here oil out from the ground, chiefs!  It’s going to, like, take more oil to get this oil out here than the oil that we’ll get when we get it all out!  Know what I mean?” 

Eyes popping and feeling light-headed, venture capitalists swoon.

There’s a blip, and burp, a gurgle.  The oil stream chokes up in Alaska as elsewhere.  A hurricane hits.  That hurts.  Newly homeless people sell shares.  The market seizes up, free fall.  It’s dizzy at the top and down we go.  Bailouts and band-aids and plastic wrap are applied to stop the bleeding.  “Do anything!!” scream the speculators, clutching their securities, which are washing away in the rain.  Turns out that investment in corn starch packing peanuts isn’t paying off anymore.

“I’m melting!  I’m melting!”

Big business’s bully ally, corrupted corporate government, rushes in.  Whispers.  Hushed meetings behind police barricades.  Renegade camera flashes, tear gas. 

“Tell them we’re helping,” squeaks one of the weasely, shiny kingpins of corporate capitalism.  “Yes, yes.”  The rubbing of hands, the scheming of shifty, yet dull, eyes.  “Yes, yes.  Yes, master.”  The village idiot, representative of the will of the people, lurching forward like Igor, steps up to the podium.  “We’re helping… you,” he drivels, the syllables coming out in long, stitched drones.  Then he marches off.

Dog Fight at the Economic Corral

On Wall Street, a dog has been frantically chasing its tail.  The investors egg it on.  “Get the tail, boy!  Get the tail!  The good stuff is in the tail!”  They place bets on the tail, some on the dog, but the majority on the tail.  The leverage from tail to head is something like 30 to 1. 

How long did they think it could last?

The dog bites its own backside, which bleeds.  The head howls.  The investors panic, stare around wild-eyed.  “Oh.  That wasn’t supposed to happen,” they say.  They shake their heads.  Some approach the dog, but it is a canine possessed, violently attacking itself with its body.

Someone gets a bright idea: “Our money’s in there somewhere!”  The crowd echoes, “The good stuff!”  They hold a dying dog up to the cameras and spotlights.

Big brothers come onto the scene, the village idiot lurching behind.  “Let’s have a look at that injured dog,” they say professionally, grimly.  One of them attempts some humor, “It sure is a dog-eat-dog world, huh?  Hehe.”  They take the dog to a table and begin butchering it, pass around the salvageable parts.

A small sigh escapes the brokers and speculators, the investors and traders.  People are dissatisfied with their portions. 

“Hey, I had more than this slab of liver.  Where’s the rest?”

“Where’s our money?”
“Where’s our money?!”

“It’s gotta be around here somewhere,” muses the council of government elders.

“We’re on it,” claims the village idiot resolutely.

The crowd looks around, murmuring.

Perhaps there is another dog nearby.

 

1.  See “Only a Roosevelt-Scale Counterrevolution Can Prevent Great Depression II” by Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect http://www.alternet.org/workplace/99241/ for a proper analysis of the economic meltdown.

The Business and Celebrity of American Politics

In a Week of Police Brutality and Mass Arrests, While the Poor People March for Their Lives, the Spotlight Shines on Sarah Palin

 

 

The list of offences against people and democracy and media in St. Paul during the week of the Republican National Convention is staggering.  These have been reported extensively by independent and grass-roots media, but here is a brief and hopefully representative sampling:

 

Amy Goodman and two Democracy Now! producers were arrested for covering the protests on Monday, September 1st.  The two producers were bloodied by police, and are now facing felony charges.  On Thursday, Sharif Abdel Kouddous of Democracy Now! was arrested a second time, along with Rick Rowley of Big Noise Films.

 

The rented home of five youths, who were hosting 23 of their friends, was raided by some 25 police in riot gear, who refused all requests to show a warrant until after the people had been made to lie face-down for 45 minutes.  Computers and other personal items were seized, and intimidating statements about “the Executioner” and “the Terminator” were made by police.

 

An estimated 800 people were arrested as of Thursday.  The police used tear gas, nightsticks, flash grenades, and other weapons against protesters.  Video footage is widely available on the internet.

 

But the big story this week has not been the repressive and brutal antics of police against dissidents and journalists in St. Paul.  No, rather it has been the ascent of Sarah Palin from relative isolation and obscurity in Alaska to her position as the Vice Presidential nominee of Senator John McCain.

 

A Personal Digression Necessary to the Development of This Essay

 

It’s been an odd week for me.  I work quietly, a bookseller bookworm on the fringes of a university town.  I like quiet, I like nature, and I like freedom.  Because of the first two things I like, I did not consider traveling to St. Paul to protest.  But reading the reports coming in through the internet, my electronic window to a speeded-up, unnatural, and sometimes overwhelming world, I’ve at times wished I was there—you know, because of my fondness for that third thing I listed: freedom.

 

The candidates and delegates at the Republican National Convention do not stand for freedom.  The police being willfully employed to threaten, intimidate, harass, beat, and arrest people who are not walking the Republican Party line in St. Paul are not the defenders of freedom.  To call them freedom’s executioners would be melodramatic, but perhaps more appropriate. 

 

Fear and the Need for Order

 

At the heart, if we may call it that, of the official gathering of candidates, delegates, party affiliates, and law enforcement in St. Paul is a severe illness, a bad malady that has been festering not so much in the individuals themselves, but in the spirit of a people separated from nature, from community, a people so frightened of the Other—even within their own country and even within the security and riches of their party’s convention!—that they take the kind of draconian measures we have seen this week in order to prevent any disruption of the play they are enacting, any obstacles set in front of the lumbering political machine that they are trying to commandeer and salvage.

 

One wonders what these people have to be so afraid of.  The obvious and official answer, as we all know, because it has been used to bludgeon our senses and sense of identity endlessly over the past seven years, is terrorism.  And indeed domestic terrorism in the fabricated threat that has been produced as the official reason for the squelching of people’s freedom—freedom to move, to be, to speak, to dissent—over the past week at the RNC in St. Paul.

 

The terrorism charges stem from police infiltration of the Republican National Convention Welcoming Committee.  Using the infiltrators as informants, police created a pretext of a suspicion of domestic terrorism, and also the charge “conspiracy to riot”, to raid homes, places of assembly, as well as to justify the very aggressive street actions of riot squads armed with submachine guns, tasers, and chemical weapons.  It should be noted that information provided by informants should be considered highly suspect, given the precedent of COINTELPRO and other covert actions where infiltrating agents have been known to actively promote violent ideas for action–or as the quote form wikipedia has it, “increase factionalism, cause disruption and win defections”–which are then used in charges against individuals involved with the organization.  For this reason, information about how the Welcoming Committee planned to kidnap delegates, or use Molotov cocktails, caltrops, bricks, etcetera, as reported to the public by the Pioneer Press, should be critically assessed and not taken for fact or at face value.

 

What is Really Happening in the Hearts of People and On the Streets

 

The RNC Welcoming Committee describes itself on its website as an anarchist/anti-authoritarian organizing body.  Unfortunately, for many people the label “anarchist” immediately brings to mind violence: homemade bombs, property destruction, people wearing black kerchiefs to conceal their faces, showing nothing but their anti-social, shifty eyes, and the like.  And certainly it cannot be denied that anarchists have a history in America that includes violence.  Two things should be noted, however.

 

First, anarchism is a broad, general term that can be used to describe any number of idiosyncratic ideologies.  As a general term, anarchy can be understood to mean, “absence of government,” and recognized as coming from the Greek anarchos, which is defined as “having no ruler.”  Simply put, the broadest generalization that can be made about anarchists is that they believe that a society can function without government.  Some anarchists may subscribe to violent tactics and want to overthrow existing power structures, or more likely wish to engage in physical destruction of those power structures or their symbols; many others may be dedicated pacifists.

 

The second point to make in terms of the perception of anarchists as violent is that anarchists by no means have a monopoly on violence.  Indeed, the entire American culture is violent: one simply needs to look at the current wars being fought by the American government, or look even at the excessive police action in St. Paul.  For those inclined to look deeper, a strong argument can be made for the roots of aggressive violence in this country stretching far back in time, back to English witch-hunts, Spanish conquistadors, to Puritans and frontier cowboys fighting Indians, and—why not?—to the Revolutionary War.  If anarchists are violent, they are pathetically so, often like an angry child lashing out at a parent: a bomb here, some property damage there, all embedded quite snugly in the greater imperial and yes, racist violence of the Euro-American legacy.

 

Sherri Honkala, a speaker at the Poor People’s March for Our Lives, which is an entirely different movement than the RNC Welcoming Committee, responded to criticisms and fears that were expressed to her that the “anarchists” would cause trouble for her movement:

 

“It wasn’t the anarchists four years ago or eight years ago,” she said, using a megaphone to address a large crowd, a crowd which was hemmed in by police in riot gear and with submachine guns and other instruments of violence.  “It was the police department.”  She continued, “I don’t give a damn if you’re an anarchist, democrat, or republican, or whatever your political ideas are.  All I know is that I’m going to march today with people who have a similar vision of a different kind of world for us to live in.”

 

Also standing and marching with the Poor People’s March was a prominent member of the Mississippi Band of the Anishinabe Nation, Nee-Gon-Nway-Wee-Dung (Thunder Before the Storm, also known as Clyde Bellecourt), who founded the American Indian Movement in 1968.  He spoke the following to the camera crews of Big Noise Films: “I’m here to stand up to this George Armstrong Custer Bush frontier mentality and John Wayne, John Wayne McCain frontier mentality that exists in America today.”

 

While indy journalists were filming from inside the protests—some of them being arrested for doing so—Fox News was embedded with the Minneapolis Police.

 

One protestor marched along in the crowd, shooing the police away with his hands and the following words: “Take your guns and go home!  Bye!  Take your armor and go home!  Bye!  Bye!”  The protesters, chanting “Peaceful protest!  Peaceful protest!” pushed the line of police back with only the movement of so many bodies.

 

The march ended with Sherri Honkala speaking through a megaphone and through a chain-link fence, through lines of police, delivering the following speech to the walls of the Xcel Center, where the RNC was assembled:

 

“People are dying here in Minnesota and across the country.  They don’t have access to health care.  They join wars.  They go overseas and poor people kill other poor people just so they can have a job!  I just want to practice my first amendment rights to speak out and I can’t do that behind a cage!  I’m not going to hurt anybody, I just want to talk to somebody.  I’m just going to deliver the citizen’s arrest through the fence.  Please don’t kill me for that!  It’s a piece of paper and an American flag.  The whole world is watching.”

 

After her speech, she shoved an American flag and a citizen’s arrest for the people inside the Xcel Center, a piece of paper charging them with crimes against humanity, under the fence.  The police then ordered the assembly to disperse.  After the order, they opened fire with tear gas and flash grenades.  They infiltrated the now chaotic crowd of protestors with tasers and shields and batons, and made arrests.

 

Inside the Xcel center, the convention went on.