Bankers or Farmers: Dirty, Sexy Money

How Market Forces Operate
redacted, from 8/2007

Who is more important in society, the banker or the farmer? This is the question we will have to answer in the very near future. Society will have to decide to save the producing masses or the small, greedy ruling class. This decision does not appear to be a difficult one, except so far all the wrong decisions have been made. This reflects the crisis in thinking that has resulted from the war of misinformation being waged against people everywhere. Those waging this war want society to believe their interests are the important ones, the interests of capital. However, we have to understand that this is a battle to the death. If the ruling class wins, the vast interwoven social fabric of our planet will suffer. We have to pose the questions in the simplest terms. It is a choice between workers and bosses, between farmers and bankers.

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Now, the art of the con game originated in America and spread across a World which had little concept of the swindle, since rulers and chieftains had held their own subjects in peonage from antiquity. So today's fat cat swindlers – like lawyers, politicians, bankers, insurers, accountants and stock traders – drive Imperialism. They drive it solely in their own venal interests, for their own self-enrichment.

Whatever Karl Marx sed about capitalism being a thoroly rotten, bloodsucking system, well, he barely pipped the shell.

Of course, everybody kno that the labor product is converted into values appropriated and exchanged for commodities ultimately held as futures, securities or some other stake floated on paper to peel a profit off of anything produced, traded or consumed by honest, hard-working people. Based upon a sometimes faulty yet most often dishonest assessment of what happens in this economy, working people get lured into an investment scheme which persuades them to believe they may actually own part of the "American Dream".

This swindle has been used against workers repeatedly in the housing market, the Savings and Loans busts, and stock-based retirement plans. Bank notes, shares, bearer bonds, stocks, mutual funds – their conversion from paper into real assets defines the best part of a process that 98% of all people lack any inkling of whatsoever.

For that reason, working people should be discouraged from participating in stock plans.

Then there's the saying, after every boom follows a bust. The Dot Com shake out bankrupted 401k plans, KEOGHs, and other retirement funds. The Enron scandal era – which included MCI-WorldCom, Tyco and other notables – sucked up what was left. Teachers, clerks and other "educated" workers, whom most people expect to play it smart, got soaked. Think they would have learnt from the S&L swindles of the Eighties, when lenders robbed people outright and no perpetrators were ever prosecuted.

The current housing bust earnestly began in 2006 and has shaken out dozens of investors who purchased asset-backed commercial paper with the expectation they would make a killing when interest rates rose. They never counted on the massive default rate from the introduction of exorbitant rates when Bernankhe dictated a deregulation which adjusted the predatory mortgages upwards.

Currently, stock market surges and losses have reached an unpredictability which investors characterize as volatile. Subprime housing loans drove the stampede towards mortgage lenders during the Greenspan era, now the crash bludgeons even buyers with perfect credit. Retail sales lagged during last Christmas; gas prices kept seasonal vacationers home and affect food prices, while the debate over drilling ignored the fact that oil is a privately-owned commodity and deregulation drives price, not costs.

Fear, because your house is a real asset that can be sold out from under you due to no fault of your own. Mortgages, bought and sold by investors the moment one gets signed, are pieces of paper floated all over the globe. A minute number of deep pocket investors controlling the voluminous horde of mortgage debtors, a.k.a. "homeowners", determine that sooner or later the herd will be eaten. Homes, stores, factories, office buildings and malls all sit on mortgaged property so the investment belongs to those making the loan. Tho it is the loan which investors interest themselves in, they acquire supremacy over the market (economy) because of the massive value accumulated in so very few hands. When they enforce collections, that results in market corrections.

During a "market correction", businesses fail or curtail production, resulting in higher unemployment. This spiraling effect has nothing to do with production but is based on seedy speculators whose very existence obstructs the flow of goods and services. Resources bottled up by a parasitic redundancy in trade relations can lead to the point where conflicts and wars erupt. Recent results have produced famine, shortages, hyperinflation, border wars, so-called piracy and other by-products of Imperialism.

Indeed, the farmer can't sell futures in his orange crop because the bank owns them and controls the market where they must be sold. Third-party negotiators then acquire rights to the futures and so on in transactions which do not benefit the real producer. A paradox, society can thrive without the banks and stock market, but not without the farmer. This system of wild market speculation drives prices not costs, accounting for the rise of fuel, interest rates, food, college degrees, health insurance, everything.

Keep dreaming. Anyone without a convenient $150k to sink into a mutual fund cannot even think about becoming a real capitalist. That designates the level where investments begin, as any commercial advertising portfolio prerequisites during PGA tournaments or NBA and NFL games may well tell you.

International finance capital, Imperialism, operates thru a political system which protects the swindlers and cares little for the masses. IMF-World Bank policies account for the horrendous wars in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Credit-Suisse, Deutsche Bank, CITICORP, Ameriquest Mortgage, Washington Mutual and HSBC Finance Corp. led the shake out in the current housing bust. Some are defendants in discriminatory lending suits being pressed by the NAACP. Nobody can quite quantify the social impact, but look forward to a renewed phase of the racist wars against America's colonized workers like the police murder of Oscar Grant or the New York Post negrophobic war against the black president.

Meanwhile, investors holding complex mortgage securities and Wall Street bankers always manage to come out on top. Homeowners, on the other hand, will never be winners under this system. The only advantage for the people is to decolonize their minds, return to the source, and break down Imperialism like kung fu masters…

What is the dollar value of one point on the NYSE? Anyone who doesn't kno has no business letting their employers talk them into an IRA, CDs or a 401k. Refuse to let your union leaders follow the advice of business agents who want to invest dues money in the stock market. Have they explained how that loot is converted, transferred, traded, exported and reinvested, ultimately prompting you to rant about foreign products and their threat to American workers?!

At the same time lenders poise to snatch the roof from over your family's heads, you want to bomb China, India, Pakistan, Mexico and the ghetto, America's black colony.

Dirty, sexy money is the root of great evils. Its finance scams originated when the folks who violently swindled North America from the Indians redistributed it amongst the haves. This swindlers regime imposed itself upon the "new" Indians, working people. These same suckers pay record prices for gas swindled from Iraq, then send their kids to fight terrorism.

Yes, they blame Mexicans for trying to flee a more repressed economy. Suckers blame the Arabs for resisting a Beast who occupies their land. They blame neocolonies like China and India for jumping at dollars held out to them by American financiers. Homesteaders who slaughtered American Indians for the robber barons turn to racist political theory out of expedience. They blame Blacks, just because. But in the heartland of the Homelanders, an ideological campaign must be carried out to turn society right side up. A society on the ball will choose farmers over bankers. We better fight for workers and not bosses. Make it hard, if not impossible, to find a sucker for America's racist, bloodsucking anti-labor con game.

Neo-Fascism Waiting in the Wings

Capitalism Calls for Nationalized Banks

The word for today, boys and girls, is NATIONALIZE! All thru out the news yesterday, economic pundits called on the government to NATIONALIZE THE BANKS! What does this mean? Leading economists of the capitalist system calling for nationalization can mean several things. But first, we need to define nationalization and society in the age of misinformation.

President Barack Obama made a speech in Arizona, which has the third highest foreclosure rate in the country. Obama wants to help banks restructure mortgages, and refinance some mortgage holders who owe banks for homes no longer worth what they paid. All this is part of his stimulus package.

However, the automakers continue to be in distress and Goodyear lays off workers because slow car sales means less tire manufacturing. The New York Stock Exchange closed down by 300 points. Economic activity is predicted to contract and unemployment is expected to rise. Most experts believe the recession will last at least 24 months if it doesn’t plunge into a depression.

Structural readjustment for the US economy can only lead towards financial disaster. The bloodsucking international banking system proved this in Africa, Asia and Latin America. When economists begin demanding the nationalization of banks, capitalism is in big trouble. Nationalization means a government takeover of a sector or the whole economy. This can happen under a socialist state, which we do not have, or it can happen in a state moving towards fascism, which we appear to have.

While the administration has not broached this subject, since Larry Summers of the White House’s National Economic Council appeared in several interviews and never even hinted at it, business experts and leading economists have begun making powerful cases for nationalizing the banks. To underscore, Timothy Geithner, Treasury Secretary and former head of the New York Fed, has a grounded policy initiative due to a sharp change of course which resulted in tanking markets on Wall Street. The pundits have panned Geithner and made an issue of Obama trying to fix the economy from the White House, citing politics and, paradoxically, George W Bush’s policy of giving the Fed a free hand.

All the leading capitalists, from the president on down, smell like a stinking joke.

But to nationalize the banks? Wow, that is a great leap, and not of the Maoist kind. Because we must ask the inevitable question, how will that happen? Especially after banks continue to receive massive monies from the public coffers. In the age of misinformation, where the neocons have convinced white workers that welfare, national health care reform and Social Security are socialist programs while remaining silent on gov’t giveaways to financial institutions, people must be wary of what it means for certain forces to make the call for nationalization. Because if Obama’s administration emerges from this period looking like the Weimar Republic, it will set the stage for a neoconservative administration out for blood.

I am not trying to solve the Imperialist crisis. Yet a government takeover of the banks musn’t transpire after so much money has been doled out to them, nor without purging the top management of any banks that get seized. No takeover should happen with compensation going to stockholders, either. Altho this contradicts US laws concerning imminent domain, the banks have already received massive liquidity injections of public funds on a periodic basis since July 2006. Whichever banks are insolvent the government has no business acquiring them in attempting to make them float.

Thus, experts calling for nationalization seem to be pulling the wool over our heads. They have the temerity to defend Bush’s economic policy decisions while criticizing the moves made by the four week old Obama presidency. Business experts Nina Easton, Fred Mishkin, Nuriel Roubini and Mark Zandi appeared on Charlie Rose to form a consensus on nationalization and against having a White House-run national economic group. However, the calls for nationalization have been broader than just theirs, cattle-prodding the black president into a less deliberate response to a crisis that has built up over the life of the entire subprime mortgage era.

Since the Clinton-era “war on crime”, codified in repressive criminal legislation and accompanied by a massive prison boom on the backs of black prisoners that jolted the voodoo economy of his predecessors, plus the passage of NAFTA alongside the unspoken war against Chicanos and other Latino immigrant workers, the United States has become a neo-fascist republic. This trend sharply intensified under two terms of the Bush 43 administration with the so-called “war on terror”, itself a form of terrorism. Combine that with an economic crisis in the making since the S&L scandals of the Eighties thru the DotCom shakeout on to the current subprime mortgage meltdown, if it can be correctly characterized that way.

The effect of these combined scandals and crises has been a huge concentration of liquidity into the hands of ever fewer hands. The credit regime arose because liquidity had been squeezed to the extent that people lacked the resources to buy with cash.

So, in growing paper tigers from coast to coast, it became necessary for economic growth to rely heavily upon consumer credit spending. And this practice resulted in a more intensified concentration of liquidity. By concentrating cash in so few hands, money became even scarcer for workers, the middle class and small business. Towards the end, statisticians revealed how Americans worked longer and harder than their counterparts in other industrial countries, how production had increased -- because of people trying to work themselves out of debt -- and folks had less to show for it.

In a country where workers happily settle for $300 tax kickbacks while the government doles out $750 billion to financial institutions, anybody calling for nationalization of banks is either delusional or on a serious mission to turn this country into a fascist state. The steps towards fascism remain firmly in place and Obama, being a part of the ruling class, may not be turning away from that. We need a workers economy based upon distribution of wealth. We need a society built upon people power instead of crass dollarism.

Congo Crisis Update

Nkunda's "Arrest:" Rwanda's Latest Shell Game in Response to International Pressure

January 30, 2009

Over the past week, events have unfolded at a dizzying pace in the Central Africa region; hence Friends of Congo thought it would be useful to add some context to the situation based on questions posed to us. Is Laurent Nkunda’s arrest a positive development?

We have reasons to doubt that Laurent Nkunda has been arrested. Rwandan Maj. Jill Rutaremara said that Nkunda was in Rwanda but "not in jail." If Nkunda has in fact been arrested it would be a positive development but not a massive change as some analysts would like you to believe. A true marker of the veracity of Rwanda’s claims of arresting Nkunda will be the extradition of Nkunda to the Congo where he committed the crimes against the Congolese people. If Nkunda is not extradited to Congo in short order then that will be a clear sign that this is part of the shell game that Rwanda has been playing for the past 12 years, a period during which they replaced one proxy leader with another while they continued to occupy Eastern Congo. Even if Nkunda were to be arrested, it would be a fundamental flaw in one’s reasoning to believe that Nkunda was the primary cause of the conflict in the east. In essence, what has happened is that Nkunda’s National Congress for the Defense of the People has been replaced by thousands of Rwandan troops. The problem is Rwanda’s and Uganda’s aggression against the Congo backed primarily by the United States and British governments and corporate interests since 1996.


If Rwanda did in fact arrest Nkunda, doesn’t this mean that they never supported him as the December 12th UN Report documented?

No, to the contrary, over the past twelve years Rwanda has shuffled different rebel leaders according to its interests. It is in part for this reason there were so many versions of the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD, former rebel militia backed by Rwanda), which Nkunda was a part of in 1998 – 2002 war. Nkunda’s apparent replacement, Jean-Bosco Ntaganda, also has an arrest warrant out for him issued by the International Criminal Court; one human rights offender has been replaced by another as Bosco now proclaims to head the CNDP.

A systemic and historical analysis is warranted in order to demystify current events in the Congo and arrive at prescriptions that will lead to lasting peace and stability. Unfortunately, the majority of Great Lakes analysts offer Rwanda-friendly analysis and prescriptions as Rwanda represents the US and British foreign policy interests in Central Africa. These analysts’ job is to provide intellectual and advocacy cover for an otherwise disastrous policy across now two US and British administrations that have led to the deaths of millions of Congolese and the systematic looting of Congo’s wealth to the benefit of U.S. allies Rwanda and Uganda as well as Western corporations.



Isn’t the new collaboration between Congo and Rwanda a good sign on the road to peace and stability in the region?

On December 5th, Rwanda and Congo signed a secret pact in Goma that the Congolese people know nothing about (President Kabila is scheduled to speak to his nation on this issue on Saturday, January 31, 2009). James Kabarebe, Chief of General Staff of the Rwandan Defense Forces and former private secretary and aide-de-camp of Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame was later dispatched to Kinshasa to consummate a deal with President Kabila. Thus, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, James Kabarebe, and President Kabila worked out a deal that resulted in over 5,000 Rwandan soldiers entering Congo. These are the same characters that collaborated in 1996 when Congo was first invaded by Rwanda during the Clinton administration. During that period they traversed the Congo slaughtering Hutu man, woman and child and anyone else who was in the way. The United Nations says that the killings were so massive and systematic that they can be considered crimes against humanity and possibly genocide. The United Nations investigation into these crimes against humanity by the Rwandan army, Kabarebe and Kabila was blocked and still remains to be resolved (see the UN investigations: http://www.inshuti.org/onua.htm). Once a responsible and credible government is in place in Congo all these crimes must be investigated and justice must be delivered so that the Congolese people can be made whole. Find out more about the Kagame, Kabarebe, Kabila connection in our January 20th Blog. In the final analysis, more troops and further militarization of the region is not the answer. A robust political path must be established in order to lead to peace and stability in the Great Lakes region.


So are you saying that President Kabila allowing Rwandan troops on Congolese soil to hunt down those responsible for the 1994 genocide is not a good thing?

The logic that allowing Rwandan soldiers on Congolese territory to hunt down Hutu rebels will bring about peace is fundamentally flawed. Below are some factors to consider:

1. The deal allowing Rwandan soldiers on Congolese soil was not between the Congolese government and the Rwandan government. It was between the Congolese president Joseph Kabila, whom many suspect is not even Congolese and the Kagame regime in Kigali. Neither the Congolese parliament nor the Congolese people were either consulted or addressed regarding Rwandan troops entering Congolese territory. In fact some Congolese are calling for the impeachment of Kabila. When it comes to matters in Africa, we tend to drop all critical faculties and common sense. Can you imagine troops entering US territory without the US Congress knowing about it and the president not even addressing the population to explain why? What is even more farcical is that some Congolese government officials are trying to convince the world that thousands of Rwandan soldiers are coming into the Congo as advisers to the Congolese troops. It has even been stated that the Rwandan troops will be under Congolese command. Will they be under the same compromised command that Nkunda chased out of North Kivu?

2. It is beyond imagination that Rwanda is going to do in a few weeks what it was not able to do or interested in doing when it occupied the Congo from 1996 – 2002. During this period of the occupation of eastern Congo they did not wipe out the so-called Hutu militia. In fact, the biggest battle they had was with their ally Uganda over mining concessions. Also, during this time they systematically looted Congo of its wealth. (See UN Reports from 2001 – 2003). It is this looting of Congo’s wealth that spurred the economic miracle that President Clinton and other Western officials wax eloquently about in Rwanda. You will notice that they never mention the degree to which ill-gotten wealth from the Congo contributed to Rwanda’s “economic miracle”. Former Secretary of State for African Affairs, Herman Cohen says it best when he notes “Having controlled the Kivu provinces for 12 years, Rwanda will not relinquish access to resources that constitute a significant percentage of its gross national product”.

3. What is almost certain is that Rwandan troops on Congolese soil will lead to more suffering of the people of the Congo. Analysts in the West have not fully appreciated the enmity that the average Congolese holds toward Rwanda. Remember, it was the US and British backed Rwandan and Ugandan invasions of 1996 and 1998 that unleashed the deaths of estimated millions of Congolese. So, for one to say that Rwandan soldiers are now going to make things better for the people of the Congo does not take history into account. One merely has to look at the Congo-Ugandan action against Ugandan rebels inside Congolese territory to see where this latest action is heading. Over 600 Congolese civilians lost their lives as a result of military action against the Lord’s Resistance Army in Congo, which began over a month ago. Moreover, that operation was supposed to take a few weeks and now Uganda is requesting more time on Congo’s soil, while Congo’s gold and timber continue to find its way into Uganda.

What role are great powers playing in what is unfolding in the Congo?

It is key to understand how the game is played to keep Africa dependent and impoverished. Because the West is more powerful than the divided and weak African nations, they have been able to assassinate or systematically sideline leaders who truly serve the interest of the people. They facilitate the ascension to power of those who demonstrate a proclivity for killing their fellow Africans. Once these feckless leaders are in power and predictably incapable of governing, western diplomats condescendingly intervene on the premise that those they have assisted in acquiring power either through elections or otherwise cannot in fact justly govern. This narrative is buttressed by superficial media coverage of African society, intellectuals for hire by Western powers and the humanitarian industry. It is in this context that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Herman Cohen, have proposed the balkanization and economic neutering of the Congo. They have made proposals to reward Rwanda and their Western support structure for the systematic looting of Congo, which has resulted in unmatched death and terror for the Congolese people. Nearly 125 years since Europe gave Congo to King Leopold II of Belgium as his own personal property, the situation is fundamentally the same whereby the affairs of the Congolese people are not determined by themselves; but rather by external forces.


So what can be positively drawn from recent events?

Several things can be looked at positively:

1. It is clear that international pressure works. It has moved Rwanda to at least announce the arrest of Nkunda. As was said, the litmus test for whether Nkunda has actually been arrested is his extradition to Kinshasa, otherwise for all intents and purposes he is vacationing in Rwanda at the behest of Kagame while Rwandan troops roam the hillsides of Eastern Congo with the blessing of Joseph Kabila. The U.S. is finding it increasingly difficult to defend its proxy, Rwanda, as both French and Spanish courts (the same Spanish court that ruled against Pinochet of Chile ) have arrest warrants out on President Kagame’s top officials for commission of war crimes, one of whom, Rose Kabuye, was arrested in Germany in November 2008. Despite such repeated damning evidence against the Kagame regime, under the auspices of Donald Rumsfeld’s AFRICOM program, the US sent a shipment of military equipment to Rwanda for peace keeping purposes in Western Sudan in early January 2009, coinciding with Rwandan troops intervention in Congo. The military shipment is supposed to be used for peace keeping in Western Sudan. Both Sweden and the Netherlands suspended aid to Rwanda and of course the damning December 12th UN Report have made it difficult for anyone to defend Rwanda except for some ideologically-driven humanitarian institutions. Even the New York Times editorial board continues to call for international pressure on Rwanda.

2. Kagame felt a necessity to adjust to the new realities in Washington. He could not necessarily count on President Obama to give him carte blanche as he has received from Presidents Clinton and Bush. Rwanda is certainly still a staunch ally of the U.S. However, Kagame cannot be certain that President Obama will fully support him in spite of some of the old guards (Susan Rice at the UN and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State) being in the administration. The Obama administration can hardly present itself as an administration of change with an old policy for the Great Lakes in particular and Africa in general. The new administration would be best served to implement policies that serve the people and not strongmen like Kagame and Kabila.

3. The US and British baked resource war of aggression is being disrobed on a daily basis. The hunt for the Hutu rebels is an attempt to recast the conflict in an ethnic context. The Hutu rebels, otherwise know as the Interahamwe or Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR in French) need to be dealt with, but not in the manner currently underway. Remember, it has been the Congolese people who have been the primary victims of the presence of the Hutu rebels in the Congo. Nonetheless, what is happening in Central Africa is a high stakes geo-political battle for precious and strategic resources that are vital to the world’s military, aeronautics, electronics and technology industries. This interview with British Foreign Minister David Miliband provides some insight and perspective on the vital corporate interests in Central Africa.

4. The average person is becoming better informed and more engaged about the root causes of the deadliest conflict in the world since World War Two. They are better equipped to demand action from their elected officials and challenge humanitarian institutions that come to their communities peddling warmed over ethnic explanations for the suffering of the people of Congo.

We are confident that with persistent education, organization and mobilization, the people of Congo will be free from the forces that have her sons and daughters living in absolute misery while we in the West benefit from her riches.

Join the global movement in support of the people of the Congo and strike a blow for justice and human dignity.

Produced by the FOTC Team

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