Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Barbara Ehrenreich: Smashing Capitalism - Poor Stop Paying

Smashing Capitalism

by Barbara Ehrenreich

Published on Tuesday, August 21, 2007 by The Huffington Post
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/21/3319/

Somewhere in the Hamptons a high-roller is cursing his cleaning lady and shaking his fists at the lawn guys. The American poor, who are usually tactful enough to remain invisible to the multi-millionaire class, suddenly leaped onto the scene and started smashing the global financial system. Incredibly enough, this may be the first case in history in which the downtrodden manage to bring down an unfair economic system without going to the trouble of a revolution.

First they stopped paying their mortgages, a move in which they were joined by many financially stretched middle class folks, though the poor definitely led the way. All right, these were trick mortgages, many of them designed to be unaffordable within two years of signing the contract. There were “NINJA” loans, for example, awarded to people with “no income, no job or assets.” Conservative columnist Niall Fergusen laments the low levels of “economic literacy” that allowed people to be exploited by sub-prime loans. Why didn’t these low-income folks get lawyers to go over the fine print? And don’t they have personal financial advisors anyway?

Then, in a diabolically clever move, the poor - a category which now roughly coincides with the working class — stopped shopping. Both Wal-Mart and Home Depot announced disappointing second quarter performances, plunging the market into another Arctic-style meltdown. H. Lee Scott, CEO of the low-wage Wal-Mart empire, admitted with admirable sensitivity, that “it’s no secret that many customers are running out of money at the end of the month.”

I wish I could report that the current attack on capitalism represents a deliberate strategy on the part of the poor, that there have been secret meetings in break rooms and parking lots around the country, where cell leaders issued instructions like, “You, Vinny — don’t make any mortgage payment this month. And Caroline, forget that back-to-school shopping, OK?” But all the evidence suggests that the current crisis is something the high-rollers brought down on themselves.

When, for example, the largest private employer in America, which is Wal-Mart, starts experiencing a shortage of customers, it needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror. About a century ago, Henry Ford realized that his company would only prosper if his own workers earned enough to buy Fords. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, never seemed to figure out that its cruelly low wages would eventually curtail its own growth, even at the company’s famously discounted prices.

The sad truth is that people earning Wal-Mart-level wages tend to favor the fashions available at the Salvation Army. Nor do they have much use for Wal-Mart’s other departments, such as Electronics, Lawn and Garden, and Pharmacy.

It gets worse though. While with one hand the high-rollers, H. Lee Scott among them, squeezed the American worker’s wages, the other hand was reaching out with the tempting offer of credit. In fact, easy credit became the American substitute for decent wages. Once you worked for your money, but now you were supposed to pay for it. Once you could count on earning enough to save for a home. Now you’ll never earn that much, but, as the lenders were saying — heh, heh — do we have a mortgage for you!

Pay day loans, rent-to-buy furniture and exorbitant credit card interest rates for the poor were just the beginning. In its May 21st cover story on “The Poverty Business,” BusinessWeek documented the stampede, in the just the last few years, to lend money to the people who could least afford to pay the interest: Buy your dream home! Refinance your house! Take on a car loan even if your credit rating sucks! Financiamos a Todos! Somehow, no one bothered to figure out where the poor were going to get the money to pay for all the money they were being offered.

Personally, I prefer my revolutions to be a little more pro-active. There should be marches and rallies, banners and sit-ins, possibly a nice color theme like red or orange. Certainly, there should be a vision of what you intend to replace the bad old system with — European-style social democracy, Latin American-style socialism, or how about just American capitalism with some regulation thrown in?

Global capitalism will survive the current credit crisis; already, the government has rushed in to soothe the feverish markets. But in the long term, a system that depends on extracting every last cent from the poor cannot hope for a healthy prognosis. Who would have thought that foreclosures in Stockton and Cleveland would roil the markets of London and Shanghai? The poor have risen up and spoken; only it sounds less like a shout of protest than a low, strangled, cry of pain.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed (Owl), is the winner of the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize.

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Protests at day one of North America summit

by Michel Comte Tue Aug 21, 3:20 AM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070821/wl_canada_afp/canadausmexicosummitmontebello_070821051713

Photo: US President George W. Bush (R) and Mexican President Felipe Calderon shake hands during a bilateral meeting at the Fairmont Le Chateau Montebello in Montebello, Quebec. Thousands of protestors on Monday clashed with riot police at the venue near Ottawa, decrying a summit of North American leaders on bolstering security and economic ties(AFP/Mandel Ngan)

MONTEBELLO, Canada (AFP) - Thousands of protestors on Monday clashed with riot police at this log cabin inn near Ottawa, decrying a summit of North American leaders on bolstering security and economic ties.

With bursts of drums and kazoos, demonstrators taunted host Prime Minister Stephen Harper, US President George W. Bush and Mexico's President Felipe Calderon, at this third installment of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) summit.

Dressed as clowns and guerillas, protestors chanted "Bush go home!" and waved "No to Americanada" placards along the tree-lined shores of the Ottawa River, 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of Canada's capital.

Riot police, using tear gas, pepper spray and batons, blocked an estimated 5,000 demonstrators at the gates of the historic cedar Chateau Montebello, where Group of Seven leaders met in 1981.

Louis Banal, a Quebec police spokesman, said one protestor was arrested, and two officers were injured in the melee.

The summit aims to harmonize North American trade rules and security following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, when closed US borders cost all three countries billions of dollars in lost trade.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon was forced to clip his visit to Canada short as powerful Hurricane Dean roared towards the Mexican coast.

Calderon said he would depart after the summit and return to his country on Tuesday ahead of schedule to monitor the advance of the giant storm, which is expected to hit the Yucatan peninsula early Tuesday.

Monday night, the three leaders dined together and would hear from the North American Competitiveness Council on Tuesday on proposals to boost the continent's competitive edge in key sectors.

On the summit sidelines, Bush and Harper discussed border inspections, bilateral trade, the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, and Canada's disputed Arctic claim, a senior Canadian official said.

Harper also informed Bush that Canada would only extend its troop deployment in Afghanistan beyond February 2009 with "parliamentary endorsement," she said, adding. "That doesn't preclude that that endorsement wouldn't be forthcoming."

The annual summit was launched in March 2005 in Waco, Texas as the "Three Amigos" summit.

But it has been criticized since by a range of activists, labor groups and academics as having an excessive focus on business interests, with 30 top executives from Canada, the United States and Mexico invited to take part.

"Society is not represented at this summit," protestor Guillaume Tremblay told AFP. "Bush, Harper, Calderon and a handful of businessmen are making important decisions about our future and we're not even consulted."

"We want a public debate," he demanded, surrounded by masked demonstrators jostling with officers outside a fence, three meters (10 feet) high and running 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) around the meeting place.

A perceived lack of openness in the negotiations has provoked the ire of anti-globalization activists, environmentalists, peace activists, and civil rights groups -- united in their suspicions of the outcome.

Several of the demonstrators, refusing to remain in a forest clearing set up for them by summit organizers, vowed to try to get closer to Bush, Harper and Calderon to make their views known.

But they were far outnumbered by police with dogs, in aircraft and on river boat patrols.

In talks between the Canadian and US leaders, Harper also drew Bush's attention to former US envoy Paul Cellucci's recently expressed view that it is in the US national interest to have the disputed Northwest Passage considered part of Canada.

This would "enable the Canadian navy to intercept and board vessels in the Northwest Passage to make sure they are not bringing weapons of mass destruction into North America," Cellucci told broadcaster CTV.

Dan Fisk, senior director for Western Hemisphere Affairs on Bush's National Security Council, countered: "I think it's fair to say that the president came away with a far better understanding of Canada's position."

"(But) we continue to believe that the Northwest Passage is an international waterway."

Canada, the United States, Russia, Denmark and Norway are at odds over 1.2 million square kilometers of Arctic seabed, believed to hold 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves.

Labels: SPP, Protest, War On Democracy, Oil
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Sunday, August 19, 2007

2004 Ohio Election Ballots Illegally Destroyed - Democrates Fail To Investigate

Do the Neo-Cons Need Karl Rove When They Can Count on the Democrats?

by Harvey Wasserman
Published on Thursday, August 16, 2007 by Free Press
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/16/3204/

Karl Rove scoots off the sunken White House ship with his plans for future neo-con dominance safe and secure—in the hands of Democrats unwilling or incapable of challenging his dirtiest deeds.

Elected to end a lunatic war, the Democratic Congress has prolonged it, earning approval ratings even lower than those of George W. Bush, whom Rove designated as a “war president” long before the attack on Iraq.

The Democrats have also signed off on the GOP’s all-out assault on the Constitution, meekly certifying a “unitary executive” with totalitarian demands for a blanket suspension of civil liberties, arbitrary detention, official torture and more.

Once again voters will approach a presidential election asking themselves—why vote for Democrats who won’t challenge the most catastrophic GOP outrages?

That question must now be asked again about the illegal destruction of 1.5 million ballots from Ohio’s stolen 2004 election.

The mass shredding includes a wide range of official documents critical to conducting a valid recount in the state that gave Bush/Rove a second term in the White House.

Breaking a total mainstream media blackout, the Cincinnati Enquirer has finally printed a front-page story on the felonious disposal of these federally-protected records by 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties.

The records were shielded until September 2, 2006 by federal mandate, and since then by a federal court order obtained through a class action lawsuit. The counties were also required to inform the Ohio Historical Society before any such records were destroyed.

The counties have responded to critics with an absurd array of “dog ate my homework” excuses reminiscent of Rove’s laptop during his lighter moments. Some of the ballots were ruined by a coffee pot, says one county. Flooding hit others, they say. In one county, recyclers were to blame. In another, counterfeit ballots have been discovered.

In short, the excuses for destroying Ohio’s election records are every bit as credible as Rove saying he’s resigning to “spend more time with my family.”

But far from reacting with outrage, the Democrats have merely shrugged, much as they’ve done with the continuation of the Iraq War and the shredding of the Constitution.

Ohio’s Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has told the media she sees “no evidence” this mass deep-sixing of official records was done “purposefully” by nearly two-thirds of the state’s counties.

By contrast, under Republican Governor Jeb Bush, only one Florida county destroyed its records and ballots from the 2000 election. The rest of the materials are safely on file at a repository in Tallahassee. A thorough media-sponsored investigation used them to conclude that Al Gore was the rightful winner.

While campaigning in 2006, Brunner promised to establish a similar facility in Columbus. Riding a huge popular revulsion against incumbent Republicans, she won in a landslide that also ushered in a Democratic governor, attorney-general and U.S. Senator.

But except for Freepress.org, no independent team has conducted a systematic analysis of Ohio’s 2004 election. Our conclusion remains that John Kerry was the rightful winner. Evidence continuing to surface has deepened that conviction.

As part of the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville lawsuit that secured a federal court mandate for the protection of these materials, it was our expectation that the Freepress.org and other media teams would have time to access those preserved materials for a definitive, ultimately conclusive study.

In a new reality emblematic of the Age of Rove, that will now be impossible.

By all rights, the staff and election boards of all the 56 counties should be subject to investigation and possible federal and state felony charges.

Emblematic of the Democratic Party in the Age of Rove, there seems no movement in that direction.

In the wake of the destruction of these historic materials, Brunner has also told the media she sees “no evidence” that Kerry could have won the 2004 election.

But Bush’s official margin was less than 119,000 votes out of 5.4 million counted, with exit polls showing him the clear winner. More than 100,000 ballots remain uncounted. The litany of ballot stuffing, electronic manipulation, voter intimidation and fraud has now been overshadowed by the illegal destruction of 1.5 million votes cast in precincts that had inflated totals for Bush, according to exit polls. Essential auditing materials were destroyed in the key Republican counties that gave Bush his official margin of victory. In at least one of those counties, counterfeit ballots have surfaced in large numbers.

The Democrats also don’t seem to care that the servers used to compute the Ohio 2004 vote count were the same ones that housed the web site for the Republican National Committee.

Those servers (which were lodged in the basement of a bank in Chattanooga, Tennessee) mysteriously “malfunctioned” during a critical period in the deep night of the election when a 200,000-vote exit poll margin for John Kerry somehow morphed into a victory for Bush/Rove. Rove’s notoriously missing “extra-official” e-mails flowed through those same servers.

Congressional Democrats now pursue Rove over the firing of federal attorneys who refused to play along with the GOP plan to disenfranchise millions of American voters in the lead-up to 2008. But Bush is certain to shield Rove with a pardon, and the matter seems as likely to fade away as those 2004 ballots.

The fifteen months until the 2008 election can qualify as many lifetimes in American politics. Unless the Democrats confront this horrendous war and stop the obliteration of the American Constitution, they’ll give voters little reason to bother coming out for them in 2008.

And unless they face the realities of the last two stolen presidential elections, Karl Rove’s twisted vision for a neo-con America could easily survive the loss of the presidency to a nominal Democrat in 2008, just as it thrives unimpeded after the 2006 loss of Congress and the Ohio statehouse.

Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.

Presidential Economics: Myths, Facts - Gargantuan Deficits, Stupid War, Stagnant Stock Market Getting Worse

   Presidential Economics: Myths, Facts
    By Robert Weiner and John Larmet
    The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Go to Original

Wednesday 15 August 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/081707N.shtml

At last week's news conference, President Bush again said that he's reduced the deficit to $239 billion, created 8 million jobs and generated unemployment at a low 4.5%. He said the economy is strong, largely due to his tax cut policies.

On the other side, Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), House Appropriations Committee chairman, has complained of our limited resources now because of Bush's "gargantuan deficits he created with that stupid war and those stupid tax cuts paid for with our money."

There is a widely held belief that Republicans are better for business than are Democrats. Let's look at the facts.

The wild stock market ride of recent weeks does not compare to the two worst stock events, the crash of 1929 and the 1987 free fall, which also occurred under Republican administrations. Since 1900, Democratic presidents have produced a 12.3% annual return on the S&P 500, Republicans only 8%. Gross Domestic Product growth since 1930 is 5.4% for Democratic presidents and 1.6% for Republican presidents.

Bush inherited from President Clinton an annual federal budget surplus of $236 billion, the largest in American history. Clinton balanced the budget for the first time since 1969. Budget surpluses were expected to total $5.6 trillion between fiscal year 2002 and 2011.

Despite this, Bush transformed the surpluses into a $1.1 trillion annual deficit in just three years because of the Iraq war and his relentless push for permanent tax cuts for wealthy Americans, a new iteration of Herbert Hoover's equally catastrophic "trickle-down" theory. Bragging about a $239 billion deficit sets such a low standard that Bush can claim horrific failure as a good thing for the country. The Bush administration's annual loss of three-quarters of a trillion dollars is unprecedented.

Bush presided over the loss of 2 million American jobs in his first 2 1/2 years and has net gained 5.6 million in six years, the worst since Hoover. Clinton created 23 million jobs.

It's not rocket science to figure out the difference. Clinton: tax breaks for the middle and lower incomes who actually spend the money, no Iraq war. Bush: disproportionate tax breaks for the wealthy (50% to the wealthiest 1% by 2010), $750 billion for a war monetarily benefiting only a few military contractors and a financial sieve for the country.

Democratic presidents spread the wealth through spending on needed social programs and targeting tax cuts to lower- and middle-income Americans, stimulating the economy more broadly. Republicans pump into defense contractors and high-income Americans, creating a significant detriment to the whole economy with larger deficits and higher interest rates.

Economist John Maynard Keynes was right in 1936: When you "prime the pump" into people programs (like jobs or lower income tax cuts to help Americans buy what they need), you get people results. On the other hand, when you move money from the economy into tax cuts for the rich and a military vacuum, you don't prime the economic pump; you deplete it.

Contrary to opinion, we do not have record high stocks. It would take 14,300 for the Dow Jones industrial average just to match for inflation the 11,750 under Clinton in 2000. We're now around 13,000, meaning, in real terms, a stagnant market with a loss for the past six years.

Democrats empower the buyers, Republicans the sellers. Misdirected tax cuts, plus the Iraq war, have taken the money not just from America's working class but from America's businesses as well.

Democratic Versus Republican Presidents

Economic Indicators

In six major criteria - GDP growth, per capita income growth, job creation, unemployment reduction, inflation reduction, and federal deficit reduction - for the ten post-World War II presidencies until Bush, there is a record to track the reality of Democratic versus Republican economic success.

Democrats

Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society" created robust economic expansion, first in both GDP and personal income growth. He also reduced unemployment from 5.3% to 3.4%. Economic growth remained robust through most of LBJ's presidency.

John F. Kennedy campaigned on the idea of getting America moving again, and he did. Under Kennedy, America entered its largest sustained expansion since WWII. GDP and personal income growth were second only to Johnson, all with minimal inflation. Contrary to Republican attempts to say Kennedy's tax cuts are like Bush's, Kennedy's were targeted at middle and lower incomes.

The economy added 10 million jobs under Jimmy Carter despite high inflation; Carter ranks first in job creation next to Clinton during just four years in office. Carter also reduced government spending as a percentage of GDP.

Harry Truman's second term saw the fastest GDP growth and the sharpest reduction in unemployment of any president surveyed (of course, FDR's post Hoover-depression New Deal jobs are first).

Republicans

Ronald Reagan focused on reducing the cost of capital through cutting tax bracket highs for the rich and reducing the size and scope of government. But, instead of lowering spending, Reagan shifted money to the military (i.e. Star Wars) and the deficit tripled with the tax cuts and military spending - as under Bush II.

Under Gerald Ford, the deficit soared and the unemployment rate grew from 5.3 - 8.3% in just 2 years. His "WIN" (Whip Inflation Now) buttons were no match for economic inactivity.

It was under Richard Nixon that inflation started to spiral out of control, from 4.4% to 8.6%, and the deficit shot up from $2.8 billion to $73.7 billion.

The Eisenhower years were characterized by slow growth (2.27% annualized GDP growth) and relatively high unemployment (7.7% at end of term).

George H. W. Bush had the poorest record for both GDP and income growth. During his single term, the deficit ballooned (from $152 billion to $255 billion) more than under every president but his son and Ford.

(Sources: White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), and White House Council of Economic Advisors)

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Robert Weiner is a former Clinton administration public affairs director. John Larmett, senior policy analyst at Robert Weiner Associates, was a legislative assistant to Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.) and an analyst for the House Budget Committee.

Labels: Economics - USA, Deficit, Jobs,
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Canadians Saying No To Stealth Trade Deal For Canada, USA, Mexico - Called SPP - Security and Prosperity Partnership

Security and Prosperity Partnership

Canadian Labour CongressAugust 15, 2007
http://canadianlabour.ca/index.php/view_en/1217

This has been an important year for labour's political action, from the fight for Bills C-55 and C-257, to our latest Better Choice campaign, to the recent launch of our Made-in-Canada Jobs campaign. For those of us engaged in political action, however, there is an important moment next weekend where Canada's labour movement will be present.

US President George W. Bush, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, and Canada's own Prime Minister Stephen Harper are meeting in Canada to discuss the latest trade deal being pushed through the back door by the continent’s corporate elite. It’s called the “Security and Prosperity Partnership” or simply the SPP.

The SPP has been called NAFTA on drugs. According to the corporate elites behind the scheme, it’s just a shot of what business needs to perform better and make corporate profits higher, faster and stronger. The only problem is they won’t tell us what this involves.

Ask any of the hundreds of thousands of workers in Canada who no longer have a good job in manufacturing or forestry and they’ll tell you that life is hard enough under NAFTA. Ask the millions of people who can see how fast our standards for everything from protecting the environment, to retirement security to transportation infrastructure like trains and bridges have fallen in recent times. They’ll tell you the SPP is just the latest corporate party drug.

Either way, the federal government has been doing its best to keep the SPP off the public’s radar screen. That will change after next weekend.

A rally against this latest attempt to pass a trade deal by stealth will happen on August 19 on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. This rally will be followed by a teach-in on the SPP at the University of Ottawa. The organizers are expecting well-known speakers from Mexico, the US and Canada to address the teach-in .On Monday morning, August 20, shuttle buses will leave Ottawa and Hull to bring protesters to a "family friendly" demonstration on the Western perimeter of the SPP Summit.

We invite all labour activists to participate in these events to show their opposition to the SPP, the latest corporate assault on the environment and workers' rights. At the very least, people should give their local Member of Parliament a call – Parliament isn’t sitting, so they should all be working in their local offices. Tell them they can’t let the SPP become law until Canadians know what it’s all about.

Remember back in 1988, when the government actually printed copies of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement for everybody to read? Remember when you actually knew who was negotiating that trade deal, and when they were appointed by the government?

If this was really about making NAFTA better for us all, we would all be included in these negotiations. It’s time to put the brakes on the SPP and tell the people behind it to respect our democracy.

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Aug 18, 2007 09:00 ET

REMINDER: SPP Not About Working Families

Canadian Labour Congress obtains Access to Information documents

OTTAWA, ONTARIO--(Marketwire - Aug. 18, 2007) - The Canadian Labour Congress wants working people to call their M.P.s and demand they put an end to the government's participation in the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a security-centred redrafting of trade relations on the continent. Barbara Byers, executive vice-president of the Canadian Labour Congress, will make the call while speaking at a rally on Parliament Hill on Sunday.

"We have proof to show that the SPP is completely an initiative of Canada's top-earning CEOs, and their counterparts in the United States and Mexico.

This has nothing to do with raising the standard of living of working families nor promoting stronger democracies," says Byers showing a stack of documents obtained by the Canadian Labour Congress under the federal Access to Information Act.

"If this is really about improving NAFTA for all of us, we would all be included in the process. Instead, everything is being done in secret, behind closed doors," says Byers.

The Security and Prosperity Partnership, which is often referred to as NAFTA on drugs, is at the centre of next week's meeting between the leaders of the three countries that belong to the North American Free Trade Agreement - Canada, the United States and Mexico.

Included on the agenda of the Montebello meeting between the three national leaders is a lobby session with a group of hand-picked CEOs from Canada, the United States and Mexico. The ten people chosen to speak on Canada's behalf were selected from a list provided by lobby groups representing the country' s highest paid businessmen. Making the cut for "Team Canada" at the summit: Manulife Financial, Power Corporation, Ganong, Suncor Energy, Canadian National Railway, Linamar, Bell Canada, Canfor Corporation, Home Depot, and the Bank of Nova Scotia.

"They don't speak for Canada. Canadians don't even know who they are. Their shareholders did not send them there, so they are there to represent nobody but themselves. Private interests holding private discussions about their own business with public officials - that's lobbying. The Prime Minister might want to give his own Accountability Act a read before allowing this meeting to proceed," says Byers, Byers says the federal government has to learn that if it wants to pursue new trade deals, it has to do so out in the open, where Canadians can see what's going on and have their say. High security, top secret, backroom discussions that give access to only a few of the wealthiest special interests are doomed to fail.

"Remember the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)? They all came flying apart as soon as people found out what was really going on. The same thing will happen to the SPP unless the process gets opened up," she says.

Byers says that until the big corporate interests and their friends in government learn this lesson, summits like the upcoming meeting between the Prime Minister and the two Presidents are an insulting waste of taxpayers' money.

"Our hard-earned tax dollars are being used to shut us out of a public policy decision-making process." Byers adds that Canadians are outraged at the double standard being show the small, elite group of CEOs who get access to the summit while everyone else is forced to stand behind fences and police barricades.

"This is why we are asking people to phone their M.P.s and insist they put a stop to the SPP the instant they get back to work in Ottawa," concludes Byers . . .

The Canadian Labour Congress, the national voice of the labour movement, represents 3.2 million Canadian workers. The CLC brings together Canada's national and international unions along with the provincial and territorial federations of labour and 136 district labour councils. Web site: www.canadianlabour.ca

For more information, please contact

Canadian Labour Congress
Jean Wolff
Director of Communications
613-878-6040

or

Canadian Labour Congress
Jeff Atkinson
Communications
613-863-1413

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Labels: SPP - Security and Prosperity Partnership, War Against Democracy,

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Saturday, August 18, 2007

Renegotiate Original Mortgage Loans - No Bailouts For Wall Street

Workouts, Not Bailouts

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Friday 17 August 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/081707C.shtml
Go to Original

In April, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, declared that all the signs he saw indicated that the housing market was "at or near the bottom." Earlier this month he was still insisting that problems caused by the meltdown in the market for subprime mortgages were "largely contained."

But the time for denial is past.

According to data released yesterday, both housing starts and applications for building permits have fallen to their lowest levels in a decade, showing that home construction is still in free fall. And if historical relationships are any guide, home prices are still way too high. The housing slump will probably be with us for years, not months.

Meanwhile, it's becoming clear that the mortgage problem is anything but contained. For one thing, it's not confined to subprime mortgages, which are loans to people who don't satisfy the standard financial criteria. There are also growing problems in so-called Alt-A mortgages (don't ask), which are another 20 percent of the mortgage market. Problems are starting to appear in prime loans, too - all of which is what you would expect given the depth of the housing slump.

Many on Wall Street are clamoring for a bailout - for Fannie Mae or the Federal Reserve or someone to step in and buy mortgage-backed securities from troubled hedge funds. But that would be like having the taxpayers bail out Enron or WorldCom when they went bust - it would be saving bad actors from the consequences of their misdeeds.

For it is becoming increasingly clear that the real-estate bubble of recent years, like the stock bubble of the late 1990s, both caused and was fed by widespread malfeasance. Rating agencies like Moody's Investors Service, which get paid a lot of money for rating mortgage-backed securities, seem to have played a similar role to that played by complaisant accountants in the corporate scandals of a few years ago. In the '90s, accountants certified dubious earning statements; in this decade, rating agencies declared dubious mortgage-backed securities to be highest-quality, AAA assets.

Yet our desire to avoid letting bad actors off the hook shouldn't prevent us from doing the right thing, both morally and in economic terms, for borrowers who were victims of the bubble.

Most of the proposals I've seen for dealing with the problems of subprime borrowers are of the locking-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-is-gone variety: they would curb abusive lending practices - which would have been very useful three years ago - but they wouldn't help much now. What we need at this point is a policy to deal with the consequences of the housing bust.

Consider a borrower who can't meet his or her mortgage payments and is facing foreclosure. In the past, as Gretchen Morgenson recently pointed out in The Times, the bank that made the loan would often have been willing to offer a workout, modifying the loan's terms to make it affordable, because what the borrower was able to pay would be worth more to the bank than its incurring the costs of foreclosure and trying to resell the home. That would have been especially likely in the face of a depressed housing market.

Today, however, the mortgage broker who made the loan is usually, as Ms. Morgenson says, "the first link in a financial merry-go-round." The mortgage was bundled with others and sold to investment banks, who in turn sliced and diced the claims to produce artificial assets that Moody's or Standard & Poor's were willing to classify as AAA. And the result is that there's nobody to deal with.

This looks to me like a clear case for government intervention: there's a serious market failure, and fixing that failure could greatly help thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Americans. The federal government shouldn't be providing bailouts, but it should be helping to arrange workouts.

And we've done this sort of thing before - for third-world countries, not for U.S. citizens. The Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s was brought to an end by so-called Brady deals, in which creditors were corralled into reducing the countries' debt burdens to manageable levels. Both the debtors, who escaped the shadow of default, and the creditors, who got most of their money, benefited.

The mechanics of a domestic version would need a lot of work, from lawyers as well as financial experts. My guess is that it would involve federal agencies buying mortgages - not the securities conjured up from these mortgages, but the original loans - at a steep discount, then renegotiating the terms. But I'm happy to listen to better ideas.

The point, however, is that doing nothing isn't the only alternative to letting the parties who got us into this mess off the hook. Say no to bailouts - but let's help borrowers work things out.

The Old Iran-Contra Death Squad Gang

The Old Iran-Contra Death Squad Gang Is Desperate to Discredit Chavez
by John Pilger

Published on Friday, August 17, 2007 by The Guardian/UK
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/17/3236/

I walked with Roberto Navarrete into the national stadium in Santiago, Chile. With the southern winter’s wind skating down from the Andes, it was empty and ghostly. Little had changed, he said: the chicken wire, the broken seats, the tunnel to the changing rooms from which the screams echoed. We stopped at a large number 28. “This is where I was, facing the scoreboard. This is where I was called to be tortured.”

Thousands of “the detained and the disappeared” were imprisoned in the stadium following the Washington-backed coup by General Pinochet against the democracy of Salvador Allende on September 11 1973. For the majority people of Latin America, the abandonados, the infamy and historical lesson of the first “9/11″ have never been forgotten. “In the Allende years, we had a hope the human spirit would triumph,” said Roberto.

“But in Latin America those believing they are born to rule behave with such brutality to defend their rights, their property, their hold over society that they approach true fascism. People who are well-dressed, whose houses are full of food, bang pots in the streets in protest as though they don’t have anything. This is what we had in Chile 36 years ago. This is what we see in Venezuela today. It is as if Chávez is Allende. It is so evocative for me.”

In making my film The War on Democracy, I sought the help of Chileans like Roberto and his family, and Sara de Witt, who courageously returned with me to the torture chambers at Villa Grimaldi, which she somehow survived. Together with other Latin Americans who knew the tyrannies, they bear witness to the pattern and meaning of the propaganda and lies now aimed at undermining another epic bid to renew both democracy and freedom on the continent.

The disinformation that helped destroy Allende and give rise to Pinochet’s horrors worked the same in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas had the temerity to implement modest, popular reforms. In both countries, the CIA funded the leading opposition media, although they need not have bothered. In Nicaragua, the fake martyrdom of La Prensa became a cause for North America’s leading liberal journalists, who seriously debated whether a poverty-stricken country of 3 million peasants posed a “threat” to the United States. Ronald Reagan agreed and declared a state of emergency to combat the monster at the gates. In Britain, whose Thatcher government “absolutely endorsed” US policy, the standard censorship by omission applied. In examining 500 articles that dealt with Nicaragua in the early 1980s, the historian Mark Curtis found an almost universal suppression of the achievements of the Sandinista government - “remarkable by any standards” - in favour of the falsehood of “the threat of a communist takeover”.

The similarities in the campaign against the phenomenal rise of popular democratic movements today are striking. Aimed principally at Venezuela, especially Chávez, the virulence of the attacks suggests that something exciting is taking place; and it is. Thousands of poor Venezuelans are seeing a doctor for the first time in their lives, having their children immunised and drinking clean water. New universities have opened their doors to the poor, breaking the privilege of competitive institutions effectively controlled by a “middle class” in a country where there is no middle. In barrio La Línea, Beatrice Balazo told me her children were the first generation of the poor to attend a full day’s school. “I have seen their confidence blossom like flowers,” she said. One night in barrio La Vega, in a bare room beneath a single lightbulb, I watched Mavis Mendez, aged 94, learn to write her own name for the first time.

More than 25,000 communal councils have been set up in parallel to the old, corrupt local bureaucracies. Many are spectacles of raw grassroots democracy. Spokespeople are elected, yet all decisions, ideas and spending have to be approved by a community assembly. In towns long controlled by oligarchs and their servile media, this explosion of popular power has begun to change lives in the way Beatrice described.

It is this new confidence of Venezuela’s “invisible people” that has so inflamed those who live in suburbs called country club. Behind their walls and dogs, they remind me of white South Africans. Venezuela’s wild west media is mostly theirs; 80% of broadcasting and almost all the 118 newspaper companies are privately owned. Until recently one television shock jock liked to call Chávez, who is mixed race, a “monkey”. Front pages depict the president as Hitler, or as Stalin (the connection being that both like babies). Among broadcasters crying censorship loudest are those bankrolled by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA in spirit if not name. “We had a deadly weapon, the media,” said an admiral who was one of the coup plotters in 2002. The TV station, RCTV, never prosecuted for its part in the attempt to overthrow the elected government, lost only its terrestrial licence and is still broadcasting on satellite and cable.

Yet, as in Nicaragua, the “treatment” of RCTV is a cause celebre for those in Britain and the US affronted by the sheer audacity and popularity of Chávez, whom they smear as “power crazed” and a “tyrant”. That he is the authentic product of a popular awakening is suppressed. Even the description of him as a “radical socialist”, usually in the pejorative, wilfully ignores the fact that he is a nationalist and social democrat, a label many in Britain’s Labour party were once proud to wear.

In Washington, the old Iran-Contra death squad gang, back in power under Bush, fear the economic bridges Chávez is building in the region, such as the use of Venezuela’s oil revenue to end IMF slavery. That he maintains a neoliberal economy, described by the American Banker as “the envy of the banking world” is seldom raised as valid criticism of his limited reforms. These days, of course, any true reforms are exotic. And as liberal elites under Blair and Bush fail to defend their own basic liberties, they watch the very concept of democracy as a liberal preserve challenged on a continent about which Richard Nixon once said “people don’t give a shit”. However much they play the man, Chávez, their arrogance cannot accept that the seed of Rousseau’s idea of direct popular sovereignty may have been planted among the poorest, yet again, and “the hope of the human spirit”, of which Roberto spoke in the stadium, has returned.

· The War on Democracy, directed by Christopher Martin and John Pilger, will be shown on ITV on Monday at 11pm.

John Pilger has been a war correspondent, film-maker and author, and has twice won British journalism’s highest award, that of Journalist of the Year. He has also been named International Reporter of the Year, and won the United Nations Association Peace Prize and Gold Medal. For his broadcasting, he has won France’s Reporter Sans Frontieres, and television academy awards in the United States and Britain. He holds the prestigous Sophie Award for “thirty years of exposing deception and improving human rights”.

Labels: War On Democracy, Venezuela, Propaganda,
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More Socialism For Banks & Hedge Funds - Fed Rewards Them For Taking Too Much Risk

Monetary policy
The first cut is the deepest
Aug 17th 2007
From Economist.com
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9673128

The Fed reduces its discount rate and hints at a change in its policy rate too

AFP/AP

DOES an interest-rate cut always imply looser monetary policy? That was the question economists were pondering after the Federal Reserve cut its discount rate from 6.25% to 5.75% on Friday August 17th. This is the price at which banks can borrow reserves from the Fed in a pinch. But the central bank kept its main policy instrument—the Fed funds target rate, which sets the price at which banks can borrow overnight from each other—at 5.25%. The cut came after requests from two of the Fed’s regional banks in New York and San Francisco and was the latest attempt by the central bank to lubricate the banking system to prevent it seizing up.

The Fed also announced that, in a departure from its usual practice, it would provide discount lending for up to 30 days. This was a tacit acknowledgement that recent money-market interventions had failed to cap the unusually high rates banks were charging each other for one-month and three-month loans. By extending the terms of emergency lending, the Fed sought to reassure banks that the supply of dollars was not about to dry up.

It was not the only salve on offer. A separate statement from the Fed’s Open Market Committee hinted that policy rates might be on their way down soon as well. Turmoil in financial markets and tighter credit conditions could hurt the economy, it said, and the Fed was “prepared to act as needed” to prevent this. Bruce Kasman, chief economist at JPMorgan, said he now expects the Fed to cut its policy rate from 5.25% to 5% at its next scheduled meeting on September 18th with a further reduction likely on October 31st.

Does the cut in the discount rate mean the Fed has already loosened policy? Lending at the discount window is supposed to be penal to discourage its use. The charge is usually a full percentage point higher than the policy rate. In normal circumstances a bank would be loth to use the discount facility as, by doing so, it reveals that it cannot find funding at a reasonable price from peers—a hint of possible insolvency.

These are not normal times, however. A climate of suspicion in the interbank lending market has driven up interest rates. The creeping way in which losses in the subprime mortgage market have emerged had made banks wary of extending credit to each other. Big cash injections by central banks had helped offset the worst effects of this cash hoarding, bringing overnight lending rates down toward policy targets. But securing funds for longer periods is still difficult and pricey. Three-month interbank rates were more than 1.4 percentage points higher than government bills of the same maturity this week. The spread, which reflects the perceived risk of lending to banks, is usually around half a percentage point.

The charitable conclusion is that the Fed’s actions were necessary to open another channel of liquidity to the money markets, which were not functioning because of fear and mistrust. The discount facility bypasses the money markets and allows a far wider range of depository institutions to borrow cash directly from the Fed, with a broader range of assets as collateral. Reducing the penalty rate does not alter the overall stance of monetary policy. And the changes are temporary. The Fed says they will remain in place until it judges that market liquidity has “improved materially”.

The less charitable interpretation is that the central bank has softened the penalty for banks that have funded purchases of very illiquid assets with short-term paper. If it loosens policy while markets are only in the early stages of adjusting and before the economic risks are real, it will seem like a reward for banks and hedge funds that took on too much risk.
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Wall Street Meltdown & Subprime Real Estate Market

‘An Entity We Can’t Even See’
Mythifying Markets and Mystifying the Public About the Financial Crisis.
by Danny Schechter

Published on Friday, August 17, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/17/3222/

“Dig We Must,” was once the slogan of the repair crews of CON-ED, New York’s bumbling Electric utility. It is also now a metaphor for what is happening on Wall Street as all the financial heavy-hitters fled their summer mansions in the Hamptons to return to the trading desks to try to help dig their industry out of the hole it has fallen since the meltdown of the subprime real estate market sparked so much volatility and vulnerability for the global economy. (Asian markets slumped this week)

Those who don’t travel by helicopter have been burning up the Long Island Express to join bankers burrowing in their bunkers. This scary crisis is shaking up the worlds of the high finance boys who were raking it in until they weren’t, as economist Max Wolff writes:

That is the heady road we traveled. It felt great to insiders speeding down the yield superhighway. That was until the sub-prime tire blew-out. Forced to stop and unable to re-inflate the tire with the usual hot air, folks began to look under the hood. That is where we are now. Peek under the hood and you see a lot of shiny borrowed chrome, a debt fueled engine and a lot of rot! There’s suddenly been a wake up call for executives and media pundits who seemed so “clueless” in seeing the “rot” or anticipating and trying to defuse a meltdown that has now cost billions with no end in sight.

It’s not a situation to joke about, although folk singer Ethan Miller has been singing about it for years in “The Market Song” (Written with Kate Boverman) which is now part of an IN DEBT WE TRUST CD of the songs on credit and debt that helped inspire the documentary film I directed. (InDebtWeTrust.Com).

Here’s some of the lyric:

Well the first rule of the market is don’t panic
And the second rule is you should panic first
‘Cause if everybody panics at the same time
Then the whole damn stock exchange is gonna burst

This is the game of the market
Where everybody’s maximizing profit
Money changes hands by the dictates of demand
Well it’s stupid, yes, but no…….body can stop it

Suddenly, as mortgage companies implode and banks withdraw financing deals based on worthless debt, our vaunted “market system” that the GOP candidates and their rightwing ideologues have been gloating about doesn’t look so flawless.

Comments London-based journalist William Bowles:

It should be obvious to all and sundry by now that capitalism is in dire straights. Last week’s meltdown of the world’s major capital markets was only ‘rescued’ by the injection of literally hundreds of billions of dollars from by the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the US Federal Reserve. So much for the magic of the ‘market’ which we are continuously told, solves all problems. And in fact, last week’s injection by the European Central bank of something like $100 billion dollars didn’t do the trick! More had to be ‘injected’ in order to stave off a total collapse of the world’s stock markets. The ‘injection’ is in reality a bail-out of the commercial banks.

Well now how can you hold me to commitment?
I must be flexible and ready for surprise
I’m really sorry that your job’s been terminated,
But the Market told us that we must downsize

Continues Bowles, “added to the sense of dread as investors have no idea which institutions own what debt, leaving the markets to be riven by rumor and counter-rumor. ‘There is great uncertainty as to how far risks are spread within the financial system and exactly where the losses reside,’ said Paul Niven, at F&C Asset Management. ‘The market is trading on fear.’ - (‘Central banks pour in billions - but global slide goes on’ - The Guardian, Saturday, 10 August 2007) Thus the real cause of the current panic is financial speculation caused by unrealistically cheap credit and almost no regulation of speculative markets…”

Does it seem like we’ve given up our power
To an entity that we can’t even see?
Oh, this is not the first time that it’s happened
You can learn about the others on TV

That “entity we can’t even see,” in Miller’s words, has hit a big bump in the road and the ‘free enterprise for us’ gang has turned, where else, but to government to bail them out by lowering interest rates and pumping massive amounts of money into the system. The people who created the downturn are now lining up for subsidies so they can go out and buy “distressed properties” and restart the greed machine. Naturally, the Hedge Funds now want to profit on the misery they helped fund. Deals R’Us is still their mantra.

Feeding our ignorance on the origins of this rollercoaster, which some fear could lead to other bubbles bursting and a global recession, or something worse, is a media that mythologizes markets and presents them as neutral self-correcting mechanisms that fairly regulate supply and demand and deserve confidence. There is nary a word on how they can be dominated, monopolized and ologopolized. (Is that a word?) Last week we were warned about “contagion.” This week, the calming buzzword is “correction.”

Left out in all this is any discussion of the shadowy forces that we don’t see who are calling the shots and the many ways in which the game is damaging our society and is even self-destructive to business. (Remember Lenin’s warning: “sell them enough rope and capitalists will hang themselves.”) Who is investigating the profiteers and the tactics they use? What politicians are speaking out? Isn’t the handwriting on the wall?

Steven Lendman writes, “Some astute financial observers now believe current excesses and resulting turmoil were caused by the intentional engineering of the US housing bubble with the Fed in on the scheme.” The Federal Reserve Bank) by the way, contrary to appearances, is NOT a government agency but a private body run by big banks.

“Insiders made loads of easy money in the process and now stand to cash in big troubled assets for a fraction of their value the way they always do in the wake of market meltdowns. It’s called “vulture” investing with shrewd buyers profiting hugely in good and bad times that are all good for them.”

He concludes, “The problem is deep, structural and aided by stripped away regulatory protections giving predatory lenders and Wall Street schemers free reign to target unsuspecting victims.” In other words, see who benefits.

Enough of all the uncritical market hyping in the media! Lets get at truths that are obscured with vague references to faith-based market “psychology” which has actually been described as motivated by “animal spirits” as if that’s a good thing. They make it sound like fun time-when it’s a crime.

To keep informed about what’s really happening, tune out CNBC and check in on websites like Mi-implode.com, iTulip.com and stopthesqueeze.org, among many others.

As we remember the children’s story of the Emperor who had no clothes. As we try to get a deeper fix on, and control over, that “entity that we can’t see.”

News Dissector Danny Schechter is “blogger-in chief” of Mediachannel.org, His new film is IN DEBT WE TRUST: America Before the Bubble Burst (Indebtwetrust.com) Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org
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Friday, August 17, 2007

Recharge a Car, Recharge the Grid, Recharge the Planet

Electric Cars - Google's Plug In Hybrids

Watch the short video on what Google is doing to convert hybrid cars to plug in electric cars.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDjSbWTJbdo
+++

Recharge a Car, Recharge the Grid, Recharge the Planet

http://RechargeIt.org

RechargeIT is a Google.org initiative that aims to reduce CO₂ emissions, cut oil use and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid technology.

By demonstrating the technology using our own fleet and supporting others through grants and investments, together we will drive toward a plug-in revolution. See for yourself how our plug-in hybrids are performing.

Check out this video on RechargeIT and plug-ins

Our Immediate Goals

Recharge a Car: Google.org is working with A123 Systems and Hymotion to convert our growing fleet of hybrid cars into plug-in hybrids and to collect performance data to demonstrate their efficiency.

Recharge the Grid: We are demonstrating vehicle-to-grid technology and funding research to make this smart energy idea a reality.

Recharge the Planet: By adopting cleaner sources of energy, such as Google's 1.6 MW solar installation that charges our own fleet, we will help mitigate global warming by reducing the use of fossil fuels.

Plug-in Hybrid | Toyota Prius

73.7 MPG

1.4 gal/100 mi, 3.2 liters/100 km

117.6 Wh/mile

Watt hours used per mile

68% fewer
CO₂ emissions

vs. the average car in America

Based on data collected
from our fleet vehicles.
Learn how these numbers were calculated »

Vehicle Calculator

Compare your vehicle with our fleet using our calculator, or if you have a plug-in hybrid, email us and we will add it to our map of plug-ins across the nation.

Labels: Electric Cars, Plug In Hybrid Cars, Google

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Thursday, August 16, 2007

White-Tailed Eagle Back Home In Ireland After More Than 100 Years

White-Tailed Eagle Takes Flight in Ireland

IRELAND: August 17, 2007
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/43761/story.htm

DUBLIN - An eagle that disappeared from Ireland more than 100 years ago took flight again on Thursday as part of a scheme to reintroduce native birds of prey to the country.

Ireland's Environment Minister released six young White-tailed Eagles, one of the world's largest birds of prey, into a national park in the southwestern county of Kerry.

"These eagles had pride of place in the cultural and natural heritage of Ireland for hundreds of years but due to trapping and shooting in the 19th and early 20th centuries they became extinct," Minister John Gormley said.

The eagle chicks came from Norway and were flown into Kerry in June. Some 15 chicks will be brought into the region annually over the next five years as part of the reintroduction.

Organisers hope the project will replicate the success of a similar scheme to reintroduce Golden Eagles, driven out of Ireland by zealous gamekeepers and eager collectors in the early 1900s.

Adult Golden Eagles were brought to Donegal in northwestern Ireland in 2001 and a Golden Eagle chick was born to one of the reintroduced pairs in April this year -- the first to be born on Ireland's shores for nearly a century.

Kerry's rugged Atlantic coastline is an ideal habitat for the White-tailed Eagle, which likes to feed on the carcases of dead seals and porpoises.

The bird has a wing span of up to 2.5 metres (8 feet) and in neighbouring Britain is confined mainly to the northwestern tip of Scotland.

Labels: Nature, Back Home, Restoration, Eagle, Birds, Ireland, Europe
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