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The Wealth of the Poor
By
John Maxwell
It starts, as everything does, in
the slums. These are high-class
English slums, though, where Mrs
Thatcher and her acolytes have been
able to prove that when the state
abandons its responsibilities there
is indeed, no such thing as
‘Society”
Despite this, judges are still
willing to sentence teenagers to
jail sentences longer than they have
been alive, and to denounce said
teenagers for their “brutality and
cowardice and lack of discipline,
training and honour”. In an
exquisitely oxymoronic Thatcherism,
people deprived of their rights and
their dignity by the state are to be
punished by the state for their
depravity.
In Britain, in Liverpool this week
an 18 year old boy, disturbed,
dysfunctional and the product of a
dysfunctional social and economic
background, was sentenced to 22
years in jail for murder. The
teenager had been trying to shoot
one of his teenage enemies and hit
an 11 year old innocent in error.
Fortunately, it was not Jamaica, or
we would have had street-dancing to
celebrate another death sentence.
The Poverty of the Rich
At this moment the British and other
capitalist realists are abandoning
the welfare state in order to
encourage self reliance among the
working class; they are,
simultaneously seizing the
commanding heights of the economy in
a programme of nationalisation
designed to calm, revitalise and
recapitalise the failed capitalist
economy.
What is good for the rich is not
good for the poor.
Except that some formerly rich are
now, due to their own efforts, not
so rich anymore. In New York, a week
ago, a friendly gentleman, with the
face of a kindly gnome and unknown
to most people rich or poor,
confessed that he had managed to
obliterate wealth the equivalent of
the GDP of Cuba or Luxembourg. This
man known previously only to a
close and select circle of very rich
people, , disclosed that he,
single-handedly, had struck a
grievous blow against capitalism,
destroying fortunes, wiping out
whole charitable foundations and
leaving a great many people, many of
them his friends wondering exactly
what had hit them.
Mr Bernard Madoff, a quiet
unassuming securities broker, had
managed, over the last 20 years or
so, to transform himself from a mere
broker to a high-class money
manager, a safe pair of hands for
delicate funds requiring rapid
multiplication. Mr Madoff was the
soul of discretion. He didn’t take
money from just anyone. You had to
be recommended, to be a member of
one of his golf clubs or possibly, a
patron of the hairdressing salon
where Mr Madoff got $65 haircuts and
$50 pedicures. The super-rich begged
to be allowed to meet him.
Mr Madoff it is now apparent, took
a lot of people to the cleaners,
among them, his nearest and dearest
friends and even his own family. He
damaged several banks in France,
Spain and England, wrecked a number
of hedge funds and charitable
foundations, and has managed to
generate an enormous amount of
distrust among the growing gaggle of
millionaires and billionaires who
cannot abide the thought that their
excess riches are not somehow,
generating even more excess,
pullulating like spirogyra in a
stagnant swimming pool..
The Madoff swindle is a classic
Ponzi scheme, such as some we have
had here, where investors are paid
‘dividends’ from the investments of
people who come into the scheme
later. Basically, it is another
version of the privatisation of
development. In this scenario,
governments are forbidden to borrow
from their own people’s resources.
This was called printing money.
Governments must be forced to borrow
from private usurers whose resources
come out of the same consumers
(erstwhile taxpayers) from whom the
government is forbidden to borrow.
Since these resources come out of
the surplus value created by the
consumers themselves in the form of
profit margins, they
(consumers/taxpayers) have no claim
on any share of it as they would
have, were their taxes being used.
Capitalist democracy means that in
Jamaica, 35% of our taxes go to the
government and 65% goes to the
usurers. In the privatisation
scenario, the government taxes,
which would have gone straight into
bridges and social security are
instead diverted to be sanitised by
the banking system and then lent
back to the government at greatly
increased cost because, of course,
the private sector must get its
proper tribute.
This process, the so called
financial system, resembles a
multilayered casino, in which
several different forms of gambling
take place depending on the taste
and affluence of the gamblers. At
the beginning of the Bush
administration the world was
startled by what was then the
world’s greatest corporate
bankruptcy, the Enron disaster. In
this boondoggle the Enron geniuses
devised a whole slew of so called
financial ‘vehicles’—basically
different forms of scratch and win
multimillion dollar bets. In the
process Enron managed to steal
billions from the citizens of
California by cornering the market
in energy and forcing the
Californians to pay extortionate
prices for electricity.
In the latest crisis of capitalism
now wracking the world, the prime
suckers were the poor and
underprivileged of the United
States. It was suddenly realised
that no matter how poor these people
were, if you got enough of them
together in the same corral, you
could get important money out of
them. People who had been denied
housing loans because of their race
or income were suddenly eligible,
and—whether they could or could not
pay for a whole house, were able to
pay for at least several months.
This was fine. When the mortgage was
foreclosed the process would begin
again and again. Except that as more
and more people ‘bought’ houses, the
prices of houses rose, and soon,
more and more of the mortgages were
for overvalued housing bought by
people who could not pay. The
avalanche of foreclosures made the
situation even worse, as people were
now paying for houses worth much
less than they were supposed to be.
In the meantime, bundles of these
mortgages were being packaged and
sold as ‘securities’—debentures—rock
solid investments. As soon as the
foreclosures began the bubble burst.
In the Enron catastrophe, in the
toxic mortgage disaster and
recession and in the Madoff debacle,
there is one constant. The
regulators, the overseers, the
auditors, the protectors of the
public interest were at all material
times, non-functional. This of
course means that the ‘system’ is an
unsupervised racket.
The Paupers Pay
Transparency International and other
NGOs whose purpose is to back up the
usury of the International Financial
Institutions, have very little to
say about these catastrophic
failures of private sector
governance. This is so despite the
fact that these recent failures
have cost us more than all the
government failures in history.
The double standard is crude and
easily recognisable. In the US, the
taxpayer is seen to have a duty to
rescue the financial industry and
its grossly overpaid minions. The
taxpayer, according to the
Republican party, has no business
rescuing the auto industry, because
the workers in that industry are
unionised and earn too much.
Nobody appears to have noticed that
the securitisation of the sub-prime
mortgages in the US was an almost
exact analogue to the privatisation
of Third World debt a few years
earlier.
And that is why the current
recession will become a global
depression and why all of us need to
do some serious emergency thinking,
mainly about growing food and
achieving food security.
Mr Bartlett, the Minister for
Tourism, apparently believes it is
unpatriotic or shameful to
anticipate hard times ahead for
tourism or for the country as a
whole. I would ask him to consider
this: The collapse of bauxite is
part of the general collapse of the
commodities market which is a part
of the general economic malaise
precipitated by the collapse of the
big financial institutions, the
disappearance of credit and the
collapse of the stock market.
Embedded in this are other factors
such as the collapse of the general
housing market, hedge funds and
widespread unemployment especially
in the financial industries.
Where in that scenario does Mr
Bartlett discern hope for a vibrant
tourism industry and a sparkling
economy?
Copyright 2008© John Maxwell /
jankunnu@gmail.com
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 22
December 2008
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