Global Financial Meltdown: Forces beyond our control? Or the biggest Sting ever?by
Dave Patterson
March 2009
To listen to the news these days, with its endless stories of yet more tragedies amongst 'we the people', you would think it was all just some inevitable unfolding of history, some kind of natural disaster that happens every now and then that we can do nothing about, but just have to grit our teeth and get through it, like the big ice storm a few years ago, or the recent tsunami that took so many lives around the coastal areas of the Indian Ocean, or the hurricanes that regularly strike around the Gulf of Mexico, and etc. Every day we hear on the news more stories of the latest victims, and how our noble governments are trying their very best to steer our ships of state through these troubled waters.
Like so much of what we hear on the news, this is all one step short of what is really going on in our lives, in the world around us. The stories of human tragedies amongst we the little people are true enough - but what they are lying about is the 'natural disaster' aspect of it all. These tragedies we read of, the job losses, the loss of huge amounts of money and property by 'average' citizens, need not have happened at all. What we are really seeing is the biggest sting ever perpetrated in history, conducted by the elite who control our society, using the vehicles of the banks and governments and media they control to feed us all the basic sting story of unforeseen, unforeseeable, unprecedented natural disaster, whilst behind the scenes and even brazenly in the open in front of our mesmerized eyes transferring vast amounts of the wealth produced by the working people of the world into their own private coffers in the name of dealing with this 'disaster', and using the fear and uncertainty to impose debts that our children and their children will be paying off, to these same scamsters, for decades to come.
As with any sting, there are many marks and few scamsters, and we could stop them if we just stood up together and said we are not going to allow this theft. We are going to take the lot of you, put you on public trial for vast fraud, take our money and countries back, and send you all to jail for the rest of your lives.
We could. The question is, will we? If most of us continue to sit in front of the televisions and believe the sting 'terrible tragedy nobody could have seen it coming!!' stories they feed us every day, it is unlikely that any uprising will occur - what can you do about a 'natural unpreventable disaster' except do your share, shoulder to shoulder, to stand strongly against the forces of nature, and rebuild our society together? But if you turn off the television, and turn on your brain, and realise what a huge scam this whole thing really is, and the brazen theft of not only your money but the money of your children and grandchildren who will be paying these fraudulent debts for generations - then maybe you will find the strength and wisdom to do what is really necessary - stand up and say No More!!! - take control of your democracy, take back your money from those who are stealing it in front of your very faces, and send all of them to jail for the rest of their lives.
Manic Depressive People Can Be Helped - So Can Manic Depressive Economies
Our 'modern' economy has all the symptoms of someone with manic-depressive disorder, bouncing between periods of great exuberance followed by periods of depression. This is somewhat misleadingly referred to by our 'experts' (economists, financial leaders, business commentators, etc) who influence the policies under which our economy operates as the 'boom-bust business cycle', as if they are, with their great learning, pontificating some great Law of Nature that cannot be changed or challenged but only dealt with as best we all can when the regular cyclical disasters such as we are facing today fall upon us. But these modern priests of the god mammon speak falsely, whether from ignorance or perfidy, and such disasters need not occur at all. Think of automobiles - we could remove all road rules and policemen, and call the resulting carnage a 'law of nature' as people do what comes naturally - or we can choose to say that letting people do as they wish on our highways does not qualify as an immutable law of nature, and this carnage is not acceptable in a civilized society looking out for all of its citizens rather than letting the few crazies behave as they wish, and can be minimized, and do so.
And we could do the same with things economic, if we wanted to. We could choose sanity over insanity, a stable economy over a roller coaster casino economy that is great fun and very profitable for the few and highly precarious and periodically disastrous for the many, if 'we' (as in 'We the People') understood what was happening with our economy, and the choices available as to whether we allow this manic-depressive 'business' cycle to be the norm, or whether we choose to run our economy in a more stable way, to legislate the psychotic drivers who make life precarious for everyone off of our national financial highway. It is simply a matter of political will - however, unfortunately for most of us, currently the decisions that determine what happens in 'our' economy - the actual manifestations of 'political will' - are in the hands of a select group of people who prefer this manic-depressive cycle and thus ensure that our financial system and laws enable this 'business cycle' rather than control it, as they make a lot of money from it in either stage. Also, collectively, of course, the same people, as the ones with the money, pretty much manage the overall direction of our market-oriented 'everything for sale to the highest bidder, including politicians' society, with 'we the people', with far too little money to be purchasing the services of these highest of the high rollers, reduced to 'choosing' between Banker Bob and Lawyer Lois every few years then sitting back in front of our televisions to see what they are doing, with no real power to influence anything between 'elections'. The same people, via the same purchasing power, also control the media, and thus ensure we don't get any real information about what is going on with either the financial policies or the enabling political decisions, or other options that might jeopardize their power. With considerable success, it must be said, as few of 'we the people' seem to have any real idea of what is happening with our economy, or that we could do something about these destructive cycles, and don't take to the streets in protest at the great theft of our wealth engineered by the current policies, which are very much policies of choice rather than necessity, choices which are very good for the few, and very bad for the many.
But if you would like to see your society on a somewhat more even keel financially than this boom-bust-bubble roller coaster thing they pretend is some kind of law-of-nature 'business cycle', read on. If the sight of pension funds vanishing in the market maelstrom troubles you, or the hundreds of thousands of job losses we are seeing as the economy contracts, or the thought of the government going even deeper into debt, for which your children will surely be paying for decades to come if the status quo is not challenged, or you think there should be a better way to organise things than watching the price of oil and housing and the stock market and even your currency bouncing around like ping pong balls as the global speculators play unhindered in our societies, read on. There are indeed other ways to run our economy, other much more stable ways, than having Mad Uncle Milton, and Steve and Mark and Jim and the others in their gang, at the wheel.
If you want it, you can have it. But you'll have to demand it and then take it, for it is certain that the captains of the good ship Midas the Golden Goose surely won't surrender their positions without a serious struggle.
Stumble It!
I wish I had more time right now to join in your comments. Suffice it to say that the central premise of your comments, being that what is now happening to the economies of all capitalism was entirely foreseeable, and not the "kind of unforeseeable accident/tragedy" that the system's ruling class and apologists claim, is spot bloody on.
It was entirely foreseeable as an "inevitable oncoming train event" at least since the late 70s to early 80s, and the recession that occurred then, which was used as the launching pad opportunity of the rising Neoconazi Thatcherites and Reaganites abroad, and their echo BC Bennets, Alberta Kleins and the Ontario Harris's in this country, to attack the trade union movement, introduce their sundry restraint, slash and burn economic theories and practises that began the driving down of working class wages and benefits period. (That the trade union leadership laid down and surrendered up its weapons, including the General Strike, is another matter for perhaps a later discussion.) And the ruling class did this, using their globalization ideological mantra, backed nby a propaganda MSM blitz, declaring the need of the working class in the Western world to lie down, work harder and longer, and take it, in order to compete with the cheap super-exploited labour of the Third World-, offshore to which critical industries and manufacturing increasingly was allowed to move plant and equipment, and the good paying jobs that went with them, lock, stock and barrel.
There was and is no mystery to it. Economics is not an incomprehensible science, but the logic working of cause and effect events. And the cause here, to anyone that "wanted" and was intellectually "prepared" to see it, was and is as I've described above; an attack on the purchasing power and standard of living of the better organized advanced capitalist countries' working class. The effect of which ALL but the most deliberately blind and intellectually slothful, and the most deceitful amongst us (our US Empire Loyalist wannabes and ruling class apologists included) is there and apparent in the collapsing capitalist economy events currently unfolding everywhere around us. By attacking the standard of living of our working class, who are at the same time, also the majority consumers of the products and services they collectively create, "the system" deliberately, in the blindness of its greed of the moment, killed the very goose that lays the golden egg for it. The unbroken circle in capitalist economic practise, that MUST be maintained between production and consumption (in order to realize their very profit, in the final analysis) was broken. And like Humpty Dumpty, once the economy is broken in this way, it is much more difficult and protracted a process to put it back together again.
The central need now is, first, for the working class to organize itself for a class wide Fight Back, AND, if one does not want to see these current collapse events return again, in the lives of their children and children's children, then to carry the fight on through to the complete defeat of capitalism, at least as we know it, and begin the evolutionary process of creating a "co-operative" ownership and management system over the economy of heretofore "private interest serving" capitalists. There is no other "third way" choice. It really is this simple, in one form or another. (And I prefer "democratic" ownership over State ownership.)
Like I say, economics is really not that inscrutable or indescribable a science it often seems and/or is portrayed... unless one of course, has an ulterior motive in making it seem so to the working masses. Economics is but the logical flow of cause and effect, once stipped of its near religious mystique.
There is a need for a return to the historical working class militancy of the last Great Depression era, updated of course to these times and an improved understanding of what went wrong the last time, such that the resistance was in the final analysis, not successful, at least at moving society beyond capitalism. The whole class needs to learn, or at least enough of them to create the critical mass that will sideline the hesitant and unsure remainder, so that they will at least not be inclined to serve the ruling class enemy.
It is. It is time to mobilize the "Fight Back".
Coyote
Coyote
And it is obvious to anyone with half a mind to see and understand, Dave. Mostly it's a matter of so many folks, otherwise good folks doing the best they can, trying to hold their lives together and raise their families etc., nonetheless, in part because of that, just walking around so much of the time with their eyes and ears closed up. And no small factor of course is, that we have all been raised and trained to the conditioned reflexes of the ruling system's narrow individualism... me against the world, and where there is a self-fulfilling tendency for folks to blame themselves for "the system's" inadequacies and failures.
We are still in a time calling for some measure of patience, brother. History and peoples' reactions run according to their own measure, not ours. At the same time, past history does demonstrate to us that there is nonetheless a line out there, never known beforehand exactly where for sure to any of us, where once it is crossed... all Hell breaks loose.
Meanwhile, we should be organizing ourselves, talking to our friends and neighbours, steeling our minds' understanding and our nerves, as much as we realistically can. Go it on long enough and run deep enough, the worm does turn, brother.
Keeping The Faith
Coyote