I shit you not. Apparently the G8 leaders and their entourages are such delicate flowers that they can’t bear to see the effect of the global recession on the towns they drive through, such as upcoming host Enniskillen in Northern Ireland.

Via RTÉ, the Irish national broadcaster:

Local councils in Northern Ireland have painted fake shop fronts and covered derelict buildings with huge billboards to hide the economic hardship being felt in towns and villages near the golf resort where G8 leaders will meet this month.

Northern Ireland’s government has spent £2m (€2.3m) tackling dereliction over the past two years, the environment department said. Some buildings have been demolished and others have been given a facelift in an attempt to make areas more attractive.

Almost a quarter of “dereliction funds” were freed up for local councillors in Co Fermanagh in anticipation of Britain hosting the annual Group of Eight leaders’ summit there on 17-18 June. More than 100 properties have been spruced up. In the one-street town of Belcoo, the changes are merely cosmetic.

At a former butcher’s shop, stickers applied to the windows show a packed meat counter and give the impression that business is booming. Across the street, another empty unit has been given a makeover to look like a thriving office supply shop.

Locals are unimpressed. “The shop fronts are cosmetic surgery for serious wounds. They are looking after the banks instead of saving good businesses,” said Kevin Maguire, 62, an unemployed man who has lived all his life in Belcoo.

Full story here.

 
The London offices of Shell, BP, Statoil and Platts, the world’s leading oil price reporting agency, were raided yesterday by European Commission inspectors, investigating allegations of collusion in price-fixing over the past 11 years.

After last year’s Libor scandal, these new allegations of price-fixing look set to be a further damning indictment (if ever that were needed) of capitalism and the unfettered greed of its corporations.

If the allegations are true, then it again shows how prices are based NOT on true cost, but on an arbitrary figure dreamed-up to give as much money to a selfish, spineless, avaricious few.

The price people pay for oil is based on a “benchmark” which is calculated by price reporting agencies based on data received from firms such as oil companies, banks and hedge funds, which all trade oil on a daily basis. It is these submissions which the EC suspect are possibly fraudulent.

A spokesman for the European Commission said:

“The commission has concerns that companies may have colluded in reporting distorted prices to a price reporting agency to manipulate the published prices for a number of oil and biofuel products.

Officials carried out unannounced inspections at the premises of several companies active in and providing services to crude oil, refined oil products and biofuels sectors.

Even small distortions of assessed prices may have a huge impact on the prices of crude oil, refined oil products and biofuels purchases purchases and sales, potentially harming final consumers.”

The price fixing of fuel just doesn’t hit drivers—everything that is dependent on road haulage is directly affected by such underhand collusion—food prices, heating, public transport costs—all are increased and the costs will always hit the poorest worst.

According to the Guardian, Lord Oakeshott, former Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said:

the alleged rigging of oil prices was “as serious as rigging Libor” – which led to banks being fined hundreds of millions of pounds.

He demanded to know why the UK authorities had not taken action earlier and said he would ask questions of the British regulator in Parliament. “Why have we had to wait for Brussels to find out if British oil giants are ripping off British consumers?” he said. “The price of energy ripples right through our economy and really matters to every business and families.”

As yet, there is no fixed date for the conclusion of the EC investigation. Read the full story here.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Why the Libor Scandal is the most important story in the world

The Mediterranean island of Cyprus is the epicenter of an epic shitstorm…

This is a guest post from Charles Hugh Smith. His newest book is Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It

The deposit-confiscation “bailout” of Cyprus reveals much about the Eurozone’s fundamental neocolonial, neofeudal structure.

At long last, Europe’s flimsy facades of State sovereignty, democracy and free-market capitalism have collapsed, and we see the real machinery laid bare: the Eurozone’s political-financial Aristocracy will stripmine every nation’s citizenry to preserve their power and protect the banks and bondholders from absorbing losses.

The deposit-confiscation “bailout” of Cyprus confirms the Eurozone’s fundamental neocolonial, neofeudal structure and the region’s political surrender to financialization.

Let’s list what Cyprus reveals about the true state of financial-political power in Europe:

1. The Core-Periphery terminology masks the real structure: the E.U. operates on a neocolonial model. In the old Colonialism 1.0 model, the colonizing power conquered or co-opted the Power Elites of the periphery regions, and proceeded to exploit the new colonies’ resources and labor to enrich the Imperial core.

In Neocolonialism, the forces of financialization (debt and leverage controlled by State-enforced banking cartels) are used to indenture the local Elites and populace to the financial core: the peripheral “colonials” borrow money to buy the finished goods manufactured in the core economies, enriching the Imperial Elites with A) the profits made selling goods to the debtors B) interest on credit extended to the peripheral colonies to buy the core economies’ goods and “live large”, and C) the transactional skim of financializing peripheral assets such as real estate and State debt.

In essence, the core banks of the E.U. colonized the peripheral nations via the financializing euro, which enabled a massive expansion of debt and consumption in the periphery. The banks and exporters of the core exacted enormous profits from this expansion of debt and consumption.

Now that the financialization scheme of the euro has run its course, the periphery’s neocolonial standing is starkly revealed: the assets and income of the periphery are flowing to the core as interest on the private and sovereign debts that are owed to the core’s central bank and its crony money-center private banks.

This is not just the perfection of neocolonialism but of neofeudalism as well. The peripheral nations of the E.U. are effectively neocolonial debtors of the core (quasi-Imperial) banks, and the taxpayers of the core nations (now reduced to Germany and The Netherlands) are now feudal serfs whose labor is devoted to making good on any bank loans to the periphery that go bad.

Though we can term the E.U. a plutocracy or oligarchy, the neofeudal structure compels us to distinguish a class of those holding wealth and political power that is not limited to national border: This is an Aristocracy.

Serving the Aristocracy is a well-paid technocrat class of factotums, lackeys, toadies and enforcers. Below this well-compensated caste of technocrats is the larger class of debt-serfs, enslaved to interest payments on either their own debts or the debts of others, and bound by their class powerlessness to protecting banks and bondholders from losses.

Cyprus merely adds an expropriation twist to this well-oiled plunder: deposits will be expropriated directly to insure no Imperial (core) banks or bond holders lose money on their absurdly risky loans to periphery nations and serfs.

2. This is a supranational plunder. While commentators can wile away years debating how much Germany benefited from the euro, the real core is not national, it is supranational banks and the political machinery of the E.U. the banks have effectively captured.

The citizenry of Germany may approve or disapprove of the Cyprus expropriation, but it doesn’t matter either way: their own serfdom to banks and bondholders is simply being masked: the bailouts of periphery nations are transparently bailouts of core banks and bondholders.

The nation-states of the neocolonial periphery are simply convenient propaganda placeholders, useful misdirections aimed at the naive and sentimental, hollowed-out national structures propped up to mask the ugly neocolonial reality of servitude and plunder.

3. Democracy is a fiction when no matter who you vote for, the banks and bondholders win control of the national income stream and private wealth. Democracy in Europe is a travesty of a mockery of a sham, an absurd play which is acted out as a form of blood-sport circus to distract the masses from their powerlessness and debt-serfdom.

Democracy is a fiction when the policies protecting banks and bondholders from losses remain in place regardless of which political party, coalition or politico is nominally in power.

The German taxpayers’ private wealth is being expropriated via taxes to bail out core banks and bondholders; how is this any different from the blatant expropriation of private assets in Cyprus?

It is only a difference in technique; the result is the same: the forced transfer of wealth from those who earned it from their labor to banks and bondholders which in a truly capitalist economy would be immediately forced to absorb the losses of their leveraged, highly risky bets.

4. The ideological fiction of capitalism is dead in Europe. Capitalism is a fiction if capital that is placed at risk for a return cannot be lost.

5. Cyprus is a test to see how blatant the expropriation of private assets can become without triggering overthrow and revolution. If the furor dies down soon enough, then the same technique of expropriation will be imposed elsewhere. If the reaction is sustained and threatening to the Aristocracy, other less blatant expropriations will be tested in other neocolonies.

6. Divide and conquer is the propaganda order of the day. The Power Elites are attempting to set the serfs of the periphery against the serfs of the core, the goal being to keep both sets of serfs from realizing they are equally indentured to the core’s pathological political-financial Aristocracy.

This is a guest post from Charles Hugh Smith’s Of Two Minds blog. You should bookmark it and read him daily. Charles Hugh Smith’s newest book is Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It

Image via Polyp

 
This is a guest post by UK blogger and leftist activist Scriptonite Daily

A new ad campaign hit the streets of London two days ago, drawing attention to a surprisingly unrecognized state of affairs: the City of London is the tax haven in our own backyard.  While the British government is busy protecting banker’s bonuses, a global grass roots campaign has set up to take on the rules which create the institutionalized inequality which sees 0.1% of the world’s population owning 81% of the world’s wealth, while 8 million people will die this year because they are too poor stay alive. It’s time to help make The Rules.

The Way it Works Isn’t Working

The 2005 United Nations World Summit, before the bloated banking sector crashed the global economy, revealed the system was well broken before the crash;

Half the world lives on less than $2 a day
30,000 children die every single day due to poverty
2 billion people have no access to electricity
20% of people in the highest-income countries consume 86% of the world’s resources. The poorest 20% account for a minuscule 1.3%
 

 

A recent study showed that the neoliberal policies of the last thirty years have seen such a decline in social mobility that capitalism’s so called “meritocracy” delivers results no better than the medieval oligarchy. In fact, the top 1% of earners now pocket 10p in every £1 earned in Britain – an increase of 7% in the last fifteen years. The poorest half of the population taking home just 18p – dropping 1% during the same period.

The story in the US is similar. Robert Reich, former US Labour Secretary under Bill Clinton commented:

“Income inequality and wealth inequality even more so, are worse in the United States since the 1920s, and by some measures since the 1890s. Most of the economic gains in the past 25 years have gone to the top 15-20 percent of Americans, but more recently, in the past six to seven years, most of the economic gains have gone to the top one percent. . . . The average CEO is making about 380 times more than the average worker – a huge gap relative to what it used to be 40 years ago – it was about 30 times.”

Whilst wages, working conditions and social security for the majority of the world are being undermined, the conditions of the 1% continue to improve as the rules which govern the world are bent in their favour.  It is time we stopped living in a fantasy land of “trickle-down economics” and “anyone can make it if they try” fairy tales.

The Rules – A Campaign We Need to Get Behind

The campaign, which encompasses phone boxes (60 in all across the capital), a mobile billboard, viral video, postcards (and more) will run from the 11th to the 24th of March, is being brought to the UK by new anti-poverty initiative – The Rules  - on behalf of people from the majority world who have signed a petition by people online and via a new mobile innovation called Crowdring, which enables people to sign a petition via dialling a “missed call.” This is a similar mechanism to Indian anti-corruption campaign of 2011, which became the biggest petition-type campaign ever seen, allowing people to participate without internet access and at very low cost.

The Rules invites all comers, anywhere in the world, to join a global movement to rewrite the rules in the interests of the majority of the world, rather than the minority:

“Our world has never been more connected or more prosperous than it is today. Yet right now, one in every three of us alive today does not have access to the most basic needs for a decent life – food, education, medical care, a safe environment.

The good news is that for the first time, ordinary citizens like you and I have the power and ability to change the rules that are creating these injustices. Technology and the shift of global power mean that we can now demand our say in decisions that have traditionally been made by elites behind closed doors. But the truth is, these things will only change if we demand it.”

The campaign operates as a decentralised network with several campaign hubs around the world, including in Johannesburg, Mumbai, New York and Rio. The focus of these hubs is to identify issues, opportunities, technologies and regional strategies for each campaign.

The ‘engine room’ for their campaigns is the Working Group, which is made up of more than 70 people from around the world. Members come as individual volunteers, not as representatives of their respective organisations. They come from a broad range of organizations – from civil society, to grassroots advocacy groups, to policy think tanks, to technology providers.

The sole objective of the Working Group is to help create campaigns for viable, alternative rules that serve the interests of the world’s majority, with disproportionate benefit to the poor, vulnerable and marginalised among us.

There will be a day of action on 16 March, where representatives from the majority world, The Rules and UK activists from groups such as Occupy and UK Uncut will all come together to transform a space in the City of London into a “tropical tax haven.” Pete the Temp has been confirmed to MC.

So, spread the word and join the campaign.  It is time to stop complaining about the rules, and start rewriting them.

Take Action

Join The Rules campaign and be a part of the solution

This is a guest post from UK blogger and leftist social activist Scriptonite Daily. Follow Scriptonite Daily on Facebook and Twitter.
 

 
Last month on 60 Minutes, reporter Steve Kroft filed a fascinating story about how technological advances in automation and robotics have totally revolutionized American business and manufacturing, while we’ve seen the number of decent paying jobs shrink.

After he indicated how information workers like paralegals are about to become as SOL as airport counter personal and travel agents, two of the Kroft’s interviewees, MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, told him we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet:

Andrew McAfee: Our economy is bigger than it was before the start of the Great Recession. Corporate profits are back. Business investment in hardware and software is back higher than it’s ever been. What’s not back is the jobs.

Steve Kroft: And you think technology and increased automation is a factor in that?

Erik Brynjolfsson: Absolutely.

I’ve never really considered 60 Minutes to be much of a cutting edge outlet to “break” stories, instead I feel like once a story has made it to the highest rated American news magazine, that it’s been minted, or confirmed, as a legitimate mainstream thing (or celebrity or whatever). That’s to say that by the time 60 Minutes gets around to reporting on some sort of long-term trend we’re usually already mired DEEP within this event. Sometimes, not just as a nation, but in this case, as with global warming or AIDS, as a planet.

What is so remarkable to ponder—and it’s touched on somewhat in this piece—is how cost-efficient advances in automation will probably have the most negative consequences in countries like China and India, not the first world countries where automated manufacturing plants will probably mostly end up being built. Shipping to the US from China, for instance, adds a not inconsiderable amount of cost to the price of a given commodity. To purchase one of the robots featured in the segment would be cheaper than three years of Chinese labor. There’s cold comfort in that for the “Made in America” crowd, of course, as it’s not like there’s going to be that many more jobs created in America if production is brought back to these shores.

There sure will be a hell of a lot fewer opportunities for employment in the Third World, though, this much seems assured.

It brings up the question of how the wealth of nations will be divvied up when only the holders (hoarders, if you prefer) of capital, employing armies of automatons and few human beings, will hold ALL the cards? Clearly not sustainable and besides that, WHO is going to buy their products anyway when no one will have a job or any money in the first place? In America, and around the world, too, we’re moving away from the notion of “Fordism” at a breakneck pace.

The long-term implications for the longevity of the capitalist system seem dire indeed when viewed through this lens (and let’s not forget, this sort of circling the toilet bowl endgame was predicted by a certain Mr. Karl Marx many, many years ago). The implications of all of this are enormous.

Labor unions will become obsolete in such a scenario, although in a sense, they’ll be replaced by much larger armies of the long-term unemployed!

The flipside of all this is a free-market sort of argument that holds as prices for automated “workers” would come down, there should be a corresponding explosion in small business innovation. Whereas, I do think that is possible with certain cases, how many people do you personally know who would make good entrepreneurs in this bold robotic future?

Unless there’s an Elon Musk born every second, we’re doomed!
 

 
With the news that a five-member panel of the FCC are considering creating a series of super powerful free WiFi network across America, it’s to be expected that the corporate lobbyists for the $178 billion wireless industry are already working overtime to scuttle these plans.

Conversely, according to The Washington Post, there has been an equally aggressive push coming from tech giants like Google and Microsoft for free WiFi networks “who say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most Americans, especially the poor”:

The airwaves that FCC officials want to hand over to the public would be much more powerful than existing WiFi networks that have become common in households. They could penetrate thick concrete walls and travel over hills and around trees. If all goes as planned, free access to the Web would be available in just about every metropolitan area and in many rural areas.

The new WiFi networks would also have much farther reach, allowing for a driverless car to communicate with another vehicle a mile away or a patient’s heart monitor to connect to a hospital on the other side of town.

If approved by the FCC, the free networks would still take several years to set up. And, with no one actively managing them, con­nections could easily become jammed in major cities. But public WiFi could allow many consumers to make free calls from their mobile phones via the Internet. The frugal-minded could even use the service in their homes, allowing them to cut off expensive Internet bills.

In a country where Wal-Mart is the nation’s largest employer and doesn’t really even pay a living wage, this sort of monthly savings for what has become a necessity of modern life would seen quite attractive for the common man. The costs are surprisingly minimal, too.

But what of the poor, put-upon media barons who won’t be able to continue sticking the masses with a monthly cell phone bill? Should the management and stockholders of AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Intel and Qualcomm be disallowed from skimming around a hundred bucks a month from the bank accounts of the average American?

Of course, the wireless telecom and cable providers are determined not to let this happen. In a January letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, the architect of this ambitious plan, and a powerful member of the Obama inner circle, several major companies argued that the government should concentrate on selling the public airwaves to private business, and raising money for the US Treasury that way, rather than going with the free WiFi for all, option.

They would feel that way, wouldn’t that??? LOL.

Naturally, the Republicans are lining up behind this ridiculously blinkered, backwards “free market” approach. Who can forget watching the Tea party dolts who were against net neutrality—because someone on Fox News told them it was something “socialist,” I guess—and braying like buffoons for the privilege of being able to give more power to the telecoms, even if it would mean seeing their own monthly bills rise... because, um, THEIR FREEDUMBS were apparently at stake.

This is a different kind of free market entirely that we’re talking about, one that could alter American lives in profound ways, spurring great innovation and perhaps even unprecedented high tech job creation. The saying goes that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but free WiFi is already occurring in New York City and parts of Silicon Valley. In January, Google announced that it was providing free WiFi for NYC’s Chelsea neighborhood (where Google is headquartered in Manhattan). Soon that will extend to indoor fiber optic wiring as well. Google also rolled out high-speed fiber-optic Internet coverage recently in the Kansas City area, with download speeds up to 1 Gigabit per second. That’s pretty good. In fact it’s approximately 200 times faster than your home broadband connection. It’s not five times faster, it’s 200 times faster. (So much for innovation among the cable companies themselves, eh?)

Google’s blazing fast fiber optic service is beginning to draw hi-tech start-ups to Kansas City. Who would have thought that would happen a few years ago?

Furthermore, the major wireless carriers own far more spectrum than would even be necessary to provide public WiFi, and it would also improve their existing wireless networks for their own consumers. The only downside for this is for a relatively tiny group of stockholders. The benefits for Americans overall? Well, they seem limitless in terms of what can be imagined from 2013.

Designed by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, the plan would be a global first. When the U.S. government made a limited amount of unlicensed airwaves available in 1985, an unexpected explosion in innovation followed. Baby monitors, garage door openers and wireless stage microphones were created. Millions of homes now run their own wireless networks, connecting tablets, game consoles, kitchen appliances and security systems to the Internet.

“Freeing up unlicensed spectrum is a vibrantly free-market approach that offers low barriers to entry to innovators developing the technologies of the future and benefits consumers,” Genachow­ski said in a an e-mailed statement.

He’s 1000% right. Although not seeing the economic benefits flowing upwards at first may discombobulate their tiny brains, how idiotic would even Republicans have to be not to see the logic of this decidedly free market approach? If they balk, they need to be reminded of what the earlier—but far more technologically limited, pre-PC, iPad and smartphone, of course—Reagan-era changes in the management of the public airways wrought for the economy.

This is a real us vs.against them situation. The fattest cats versus EVERYBODY ELSE. It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out. It’s an idea that’s time has come—IF NOT, WHY NOT—and I don’t think it’s going to go away until there’s free Wifi for all. The cat’s out of the bag and it ain’t going back in.

 
What toys would the 3 Wise Men bring the infant Jesus today? Certainly not the body lotion, jewelry or cologne they gave upon that first Christmas night.

According to this short film report, from 1975, toy manufacturers would have a pretty good idea what to give, as they already know the kinds of gifts they will be foisting onto kiddies as Xmas presents years in advance.

But before we get too cynical, a newly published survey of British children has revealed that not all children are so predictable in their wishes. Top of UK children’s Christmas list was a baby brother or sister, next a reindeer, followed by a horse, and a car (ambitious little things aren’t they?). While a ‘Dad’ was number 10, and a ‘Mum’ was 23rd. It would seem for some children that good relationships with humans or animals are far more important than owning a ‘Gangnam’ Furby or a Doc McStuffin’s Time for Your Check-Up Doll, which let’s be honest can only be good for us all.
 

 
With thanks to NellyM
 

 
Over the weekend, there was a fascinating article about the foreclosure crisis in Southern California that appeared at the Huffington Post with the title “San Bernardino Eminent Domain Fight Closely Watched By Other Struggling Communities.” That title might not have grabbed you, but what’s in the article, penned by Ben Hallman, is extraordinary and needs to gain more traction.

If you read what’s written there and disregard all of the “opinion” (what Rahm Emanuel and the banking PR flacks have to say) and just concentrate on the plan of action that’s being offered to deal with the mortgage crisis, it’s a winner.

It’s being proposed that “eminent domain,” the power local government have to seize property for the common good, be employed to help stressed communities in San Bernardino County. The idea for this originates with Steven Gluckstern, the executive director of Mortgage Resolution Partners: Local authorities could seize home loans—not properties—and “condemn” the ones that were underwater, though not in arrears, and held by private trusts. The local government would then forgive the debt in excess of current market value of the home. Homeowners could then refinance at the new, lower value, freeing up hundred of dollars per month, and boosting the local economy and jobs growth. The pension and institutional investment funds that actually own these loans would get paid fair market value. For investors in Inland Empire property, this will mean taking a significant haircut.

It’s estimated that there are around 150,000 homeowners in the county who owe more on their homes than they are worth, yet only a small percentage of them would actually qualify for a loan modification because their credit is bad.

One estimate sees as many as 42,000 homeowners in San Bernardino County benefiting from the plan. It would have a significant impact on the lives of county residents.

It’s also a beautiful solution that fucks over the capitalist greed-heads who deserve it the most. They made investments in bad securities. That’s capitalism, baby! Shit happens!

It’s thrilling to think we could be on the verge of seeing something like this occur:

This old railroad town in the heart of the Southern California foreclosure belt doesn’t attract many visitors these days, especially not in the blazing summer heat. Yet on a recent Thursday morning, a handful of well-heeled business travelers from the East Coast hurried along a sidewalk to address a government official they have come to know well.

Gregory Devereaux is the chief executive of San Bernardino County and its 2 million residents. At his urging, local authorities are considering a proposal that would allow local governments to exercise their power to seize private property without landowners’ consent in a dramatic—some say radical—new way.

Governments usually use this power, known as eminent domain, to acquire private land for public purposes, such as roads or utility lines. But this plan, proposed by a San Francisco-based venture fund Mortgage Resolution Partners, calls for government authorities to seize the mortgages of underwater borrowers, paying the investors that own them a fraction of what they are owed, using money borrowed from the fund. Homeowners could then refinance with a federal loan at a much lower rate, based on what their home is actually worth instead of what they owe.

Supporters say the plan would send a supercharged bolt of energy into the housing market, spurring economic development and preventing even more of the foreclosures that have wrecked many communities.

“It is a disaster of epic proportions,” said John Vlahoplus, chief strategy officer at Mortgage Resolution Partners, of the dramatic decline in home prices that in many areas has left homes worth less than half what the borrowers paid. “The crash has devastated the family wealth of these communities.”

Gregory Devereaux… you are my new hero.

You’ve met the good guys, now meet the bad guys (so to speak):

The group from the East Coast, representatives of the mortgage finance industry, don’t like this idea much at all. They have worn a path to Devereaux’s office in recent months to tell him, and anyone else who would listen, that the proposal amounts to nothing less than a threat to the entire mortgage finance system, and an assault on free enterprise and the U.S. Constitution.

They’re sort of right about that, but have you been in San Bernadino County lately? It’s very very easy to see why a plan like this would be popular in the Inland Empire: It’s getting to be just like Mad Max there. The local economies will never recover with so many residents underwater on their mortgages. If you owe $400,000 on a house that’s worth $150,000, tops, not that you could sell it anyway, just what the fuck are you going to do next? What if you lose your income? Then what’s your move?

You don’t have one. The bulldozer-like plan that Mr. Devereaux is proposing has the potential to change the lives of tens of thousands of desperate families in his county. He’s worried about them, not about some bankers, mortgage brokers and fat cats taking the hit. (Did I mention yet that Gregory Devereaux is my new hero?)

Absent something like this, how would the Inland Empire EVER be expected to recover? It probably won’t be during many of the current generation’s lifetimes, we’re talking decades to recover. Seriously, it’s fucking GRIM there. Really, really super grim. (Comparing parts of San Bernadino to Mad Max is only a slight exaggeration, trust me)

[“Blah, blah. blah” said mortgage industry spokespeople. “Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah” said someone else. Back to what matters…]

Proponents, meanwhile, argue that bold measures are worth considering in the face of a festering foreclosure crisis. Recent modest increases in home prices have done little to help the estimated 16 million underwater homeowners nationwide, who, according to the real estate valuation website Zillow, collectively owe $1.2 trillion more than their homes are worth.

The proposal also comes amidst broad frustration with the Obama administration, which has so far refused to offer a broad-based plan to bail out underwater borrowers, even as taxpayers have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up banks.

“We’ve seen a bailout of the banking industry, but no bailout for homeowners,” said Arie Giddens, a San Bernardino resident whose home is worth less than half the $300,000 she paid for it in 2005, according to Zillow.

About a dozen communities have voiced some level of interest in the eminent domain plan, including Chicago, Sacramento, New York’s Suffolk County and most recently—according to sources familiar with the discussions—Detroit. Not coincidentally, these communities have also been particularly hard hit by the housing crisis. In San Bernardino County, more than half of all homeowners are underwater, and the foreclosure rate is three-and-a-half times the national average.

“Everyone here has a friend or a family member who has lost their home to foreclosure,” said Greg O’Donnell, the development director at Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services, a housing nonprofit in Ontario, Calif.

At the public hearing, Devereaux said the eminent domain plan is still far from reality.

“Thank you very much,” he said more than once in response to the mortgage industry lobbyists’ criticism of the plan. “We appreciate your involvement.”

Gregory Devereaux, you are a badassmotherfucker…

Nothing had been decided yet, he cautioned. Mortgage Resolution Partners has not even submitted a formal plan yet, he said.

What worries the finance industry is that nothing has been ruled out, either.

Officials in other jurisdictions, by all accounts, are waiting for someone else to make the first move. That someone, if it is anyone, will likely be Devereaux. What he thinks could determine whether the eminent domain proposal winds up on a scrap heap of failed ideas to resolve the housing crisis—or sets new legal precedent on the way to providing mortgage relief to a population at the highest statistical risk of losing their home to foreclosure.

It has come to this: More than five years after home prices fell like a rock into a well, the last hope for some borrowers stuck at the bottom could be a public official unknown even to many citizens of his own county.

On Thursday, Mortgage Resolution Partners announced that they are expanding their original proposal to help individuals underwater on their mortgages by including homeowners who have defaulted or are delinquent on their mortgages.

Keep in mind that this is not all bad for the investors themselves. There’s a (theoretical) “silver lining” upside for them, too: Laurie Goodman, of Amherst Securities, analyzed the potential impact of eminent domain mortgage write-downs: “Taking select loans out of a trust could conceivably result in a higher realized value for (the) investors,” Goodman wrote. “Using eminent domain is a novel (albeit aggressive) idea to reach this goal.”

Banks holding loans already use formulas to decide how far they can write down a mortgage and still make money. The same should hold true for mortgages held in trusts, at least that’s the theory.

The top regulator at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has warned that the agency might “take action” against San Bernardino County should it decide to adopt the Mortgage Resolution Partners. A highly visible supporter of the plan is California’s lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom. This could get really interesting.
 

Gregory C. Devereaux, Chief Executive Officer for the County of San Bernardino, California

Thank you Michael Backes!

Image by Skywalker11

I grew up in West Virginia. Practically from the day I was born, I was exposed to the idea of what a strip mine is. When I saw The Lorax on TV for the first time, I would have been about six, and I can recall drawing an immediate connection to the barren wasteland hell-pit down the hill from my parents’ house as I watched. My childrhood was spent in an area where the “Truffula trees” were hard, black and underground, but the point Dr. Seuss wanted kids to instinctually grok, I can assure you, was not lost on me.

Large coal companies have been coming in and raping the land without opposition for decades. That is the way things are in West Virginia. Without opposition? Who am I kidding, they roll out the red carpet for the pleasure, because residents of the state are so desperate for the work. When your family is hungry, it’s all about the here and now. The coal companies write the laws in WV. This is how they’re able to saw the tops off of once pristine mountains and hills, fuck up the drinking water and destroy the soil, generally leaving the place looking like a lunar landscape in their wake.

When the coal is gone, West Virginia is going to be a big hole in the middle of the country. That’s all that’s going to be left of it. The people who live there who would like to stop it, can’t stop anything and most people outside of the state are either totally unaware of what’s going on there or they simply don’t care.

Very few images of the so-called “sacrifice zones” left behind by rapacious late-stage Capitalism make it to the mainstream media. Once in a while, maybe, but what goes on in the hills of Appalachia isn’t really the stuff of The New York Times, CNN or even MSNBC. The state is too far removed from the media centers and corridors of power, so the mountain tops keep getting removed and now the guy living in the mobile home down the road has sold the fracking rights to his five acres. Who gives a shit about your drinking water?

The answer, quite frankly, doesn’t seem to be anyone. This is just the way it goes…

After the jump, watch Bill Moyers and Chris Hedges discuss Capitalism’s ‘sacrifice zones’...
 

 
Al Jazeera’s Riz Khan asks Slavoj Žižek, “the Elvis of Philosophy” about climate change, Obama’s handling of the BP oil spill, if a classless society can exist, the need for a social safety net and if we’re about to see the end of the liberal capitalist system.

Žižek is really on fire here. It’s one of the best interviews I’ve seen with him and Khan is a sympathetic, intelligent interviewer (one of the best in the business, I think)

Slavoj Žižek’s latest book is Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. You can see more of Riz Khan’s interviews on Al Jazeera English and YouTube (which has a live Al Jazeera English feed, check it out).
 

 
This is a guest editorial from Dangerous Minds reader Em, expanding on some pointed commentary he’s made elsewhere on this blog. Em—who’ll keep his last name to himself, thank you very much—works in the financial industry:

One day you’re going to arise from your habitual feast

To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast they call The Revolution

“They Call It Democracy”—Bruce Cockburn

When Bruce Cockburn sings these lines during a performance, his largely left-leaning audience will often cheer, apparently not comprehending that this is intended to be a cautionary tale. In They Call It Democracy, Bruce is informing the international 1% that time is running out, and that if they don’t use their disproportionately vast resources to reform and truly democratize access to goods and services and capital, then the 99% are going to lose faith in the system itself and eventually overthrow it. And Bruce is fully aware of the fact that The Beast isn’t well represented by romantic notions and Che Guevara T shirts. The Beast is often ugly and brutal and doesn’t always bring in something better. But by the time it comes to that, the 99% will be fully aware of the risks but just won’t give a shit anymore.

That’s why the LIBOR issue is so damned dangerous.

Back in 2009 I was working at a “Too Big To Fail Bank” on Canary Wharf in London, and during my lunch hour walked over to where LIBOR is set and took the above photo. (LIBOR is housed in that building on the left.) Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine, however, that the setting of this key rate upon which the price of mutual funds and derivative securities are indexed, could be easily manipulated by a tiny number of coked-up traders. Although I worked on the retail half of that TBTF Bank, for one summer, I did actually utilize the famous Ho-Lee model to analyze derivative securities for volatility risk. So I knew enough about LIBOR to understand that it is in some ways as important as the prime interest rate, set by the Fed. But I naively assumed that the US and UK governments, along with the Big Banks, would tightly control the LIBOR process because a loss-of-faith in LIBOR could set international markets into chaos.

And that’s the last thing we anyone really wants right now. Right?

But I was wrong. And who knew? Who knew LIBOR could be impacted by such a slipshod and unregulated process? What the hell? Conflicts of interest seem to be practically built into the system, but it only hands out benefits to those in special positions of power. And if I, a banker, can begin to view the system as this deeply corrupt, how will rank-and-file investors feel? Will they put their money into real estate? Hide it in mattresses? That can only accelerate a possible collapse or, worse yet, a revolution.

Revolution? Hah. No one in the US would seriously consider a socialist much less a communist revolution. But those aren’t the only kinds of revolution. The Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 proves to us that even moderate and reasonably urbane and clever people will sometimes simply choose the devil they don’t know when the Devil they do know (in that case the Shah) has proven beyond all doubt that his system won’t work for most people by design. On purpose. Like the American version of capitalism.

And is that what we really want? OK, maybe in the US we won’t have an Islamic revolution. But who knows what our idiotic science-denying masses might come up with? Maybe the Tea Party was just a first try and all that’s needed now is some less idiotic reformulation that appeals to a wider audience. And remember, it doesn’t have to work in reality, it just has to be able to convince enough people that it might or could be better than the corrupt and closed system most people believe operates today. All it has to do is make a few promises while providing a sort of “purity code” that allows the rank-and-file to throw off outside influence. And for all of its bloodshed and hostages, the Iranian revolution at least returned Iran’s destiny back into the hands of the Iranians, rather than the US and UK-backed torturous regime that was impoverishing practically everybody outside a tiny cabal of the well-connected. And if the Iranians can do it (ie, create a populist strain of Politcal Islam that freezes out external meddling influences), there’s no reason to believe the Americans can’t come up with something of their own in order to lock out and dismantle predatory economics and access structures.

Back in the late 1990s and during the Bush II era, The Fed continued to lower interest rates in order to boost the housing sector. They did this precisely because it worked, and because the traditional industries that provided wealth and capital to the working classes had been strip-mined of value by not only upper-level managers but by Private Equity firms (such as Bain Capital) that searched for value and then capitalized it into their own pockets by moving jobs and manufacturing overseas. As the “Mighty Trucks of Midnight” (another lefty Bruce Cockburn ref there) moved whole industries overseas and Labor imploded, there were fewer and fewer investment opportunities for fund managers. So the steroidally pumped-up housing sector took up the slack while the level of personal indebtedness (to the banks, of course) skyrocketed. We were, in effect, borrowing chunks of our future in order to pay the bankers that colluded with an unregulated system to enrich a very few but without the creation of real new wealth.

When the Great Recession hit, we had to pay the piper for all that debt we had amassed but, Lo! We had no money left. A lot of the money we had been spending had come from debt but now we couldn’t borrow anymore, because the banks were failing and couldn’t make any more loans. And yet, no one really wanted to change anything because it looked like the system was essentially fair so we just had to let it recover a bit so we could all continue on our merry way.

But now, perhaps, we know that wasn’t the real story. And that the system was rigged. We are slowly becoming aware of the fact that only a tiny minority benefit from it while the rest of us work our asses off and still suck shit and struggle every day to feed our families and keep a roof over our heads. As awareness of what LIBOR-fixing really means begins to penetrate popular consciousness, more and more people will begin to question whether the system is even reformable at all. What the 1% and their Walking Dead-like minions do not comprehend, however, is that even if there is a way to reform the system and keep this party rolling a little longer, we are rapidly passing the time where anyone will still believe the system can be reformed. In other words, the window of reform and long-term survival of a system that resembles our current one is closing, and closing rapidly. It will have to be the 1% who choose to utilize their resources in order to give themselves (and their privileged families) a shot at longer-term survival.

That is the only chance the 1% has of keeping the 99% from invoking The Beast, in some form or another.

About the author: After living in China in the late 80s, Em worked in the physics and electrical engineering space until 2002, at which time he moved into the financial world. In July of 2010, Em returned to the US after living in London for several years.
 

 
“The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea” by William Blake

 
American banks are about to be engulfed by the biggest scandal in financial history. Or maybe not, it will largely depend on how closely the public pays attention. If they are paying attention, the game, as it is currently being played, is finished.

The Libor scandal reveals capitalism’s vaunted Free Market is a con trick, which has been fraudulently controlled by international banks for their own and select cartels and speculators’ interest. The cost of this fraudulent activity has been paid for by the public - the savers, mortgage owners and pensioners. There is now proof positive that the financial elite have been playing us all for fools.

The bankers at the tip top of the food chain (literally) have been caught red-handed with their collective hands in our collective cookie jars, to put it another way.

Last week, Barclays’ Bank was fined $450-million for manipulating Libor (the London Inter Banking Offered Rate). This is the rate through which banks lend. The rate is agreed upon every day by a select group of banks, and is considered a “global benchmark worth hundreds of trillions of pounds.” The slightest deviation in the rate can cost a bank billions.

Libor along with Euribor are the central mechanisms for setting global interest rates for a vast array of financial services and products.

Libor is the largest, operating over 10 currencies, which includes determining the rate of US dollars in the form of Eurodollars.

Traders in the main financial markets in London, New York and Japan colluded to set inter bank rate, thus making either huge profits or covering-up their losses.

Traders like low interest rates so they can buy cheap bonds and make quick speculative profits. The retails side prefers high interest rates, which can help savers make higher return on their savings. Between the two positions is a “sacrosanct” wall which prevents either side from fraudulent collusion. At least that’s the idea…

Last week, Barclays’ Bank admitted their bankers broke through this so-called “sacrosanct” wall, and that there was collusion in the “fixing” of inter bank rates. (Translation: The bankers are behaving like the mafia)

The US watchdog the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) said it wasn’t just Barclays’ traders who were involved in the market manipulation but the bank’s top bosses.

‘...as a result of instructions from Barclays’ senior managemnet, the Bank routinely made artificially low LIBOR submissions to protect Barclays’ reputation from negative market and media perceptions concerning Barclays’ financial condition.’

Leaked e-mails between traders revealed the staggering level of collusion between traders and bank staff.

‘Dude. I owe you big time! Come over one day after work and I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger.’

While the bankers bashed the Bolly, the public picked up the tab.

That investment bankers are corrupt, psychopathic thieves of the lowest order is nothing new, but the Libor scandal shows that the whole process of rate fixing is not dependent on the realities of market values, but on the arbitrary say so of investment bankers!!!

In other words, the whole of Capitalism is based on a house of cards, which are, at last, about to come tumbling down.

A friend, with ties to the financial industry, recently said that the public’s relationship with the banks was similar to a put-upon wife with an abusive and violent husband. The worse the husband behaves, the more the wife forgives. Until one day, something snaps, and the wife realizes her husband is a brutal bully, a monster, a low and despicable human, and there has been no real love in their relationship on his side. ‘One day, the public will similarly wake-up and realize the banks have been brutalizing them for centuries.’

If not NOW, when? It’s now of never with this one. It’s off the scale of scandal. This is a real “lock them up and throw away the key” moment.

This is what must be kept in focus as the Libor scandal begins to expose the scale of the other banks involved in similar fraudulent activity. At present, sixteen other banks are suspected of involvement. Already, a blame-game has commenced with the current Conservative government attempting to lay the blame for the Libor scandal at the previous Labour government’s door. All of this is of secondary importance.

Here’s the take-away: Governments have colluded with banks to keep the public imprisoned with debt. Cheap loans, credit cards, mortgages, and unemployment, are the core values of Western-Liberal-Capitalist society, which is based on keeping its citizens impoverished and debt-ridden. We can only hope that the Libor scandal will lead to the irrevocable damage of the banking and finacial industry’s reputation, which will in turn lead to the nationalization of banks and strict regulation of the financial industry.

Below, Matt Taibbi tells Eliot Spitzer: “This is like finding the whole world is built on quicksand”
 

 
One of the big “sacred cows” of libertarian “free market” Capitalism is the supposed “invisible hand” of the marketplace keeping supply and demand in line with the price of a particular commodity or service.

The problem is, it’s just a myth, albeit a persistent one.

Jonathan Schlefer writes at the Harvard Business Review, that there is no evidence for the invisible hand:

One of the best-kept secrets in economics is that there is no case for the invisible hand. After more than a century trying to prove the opposite, economic theorists investigating the matter finally concluded in the 1970s that there is no reason to believe markets are led, as if by an invisible hand, to an optimal equilibrium — or any equilibrium at all. But the message never got through to their supposedly practical colleagues who so eagerly push advice about almost anything. Most never even heard what the theorists said, or else resolutely ignored it.

Of course, the dynamic but turbulent history of capitalism belies any invisible hand. The financial crisis that erupted in 2008 and the debt crises threatening Europe are just the latest evidence. Having lived in Mexico in the wake of its 1994 crisis and studied its politics, I just saw the absence of any invisible hand as a practical fact. What shocked me, when I later delved into economic theory, was to discover that, at least on this matter, theory supports practical evidence.

Adam Smith suggested the invisible hand in an otherwise obscure passage in his Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. He mentioned it only once in the book, while he repeatedly noted situations where “natural liberty” does not work. Let banks charge much more than 5% interest, and they will lend to “prodigals and projectors,” precipitating bubbles and crashes. Let “people of the same trade” meet, and their conversation turns to “some contrivance to raise prices.” Let market competition continue to drive the division of labor, and it produces workers as “stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”

That’s Adam Smith talking there, about 75 years before Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto!

Just saying….

The search by classical economists for a concrete and mathematically verifiable theory of economic equilibrium continued throughout the decades, but apparently no one could ever really find much evidence for it:

Leon Walras, of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, thought he had succeeded in 1874 with his Elements of Pure Economics, but economists concluded that he had fallen far short. Finally, in 1954, Kenneth Arrow, at Stanford, and Gerard Debreu, at the Cowles Commission at Yale, developed the canonical “general-equilibrium” model, for which they later won the Nobel Prize. Making assumptions to characterize competitive markets, they proved that there exists some set of prices that would balance supply and demand for all goods. However, no one ever showed that some invisible hand would actually move markets toward that level. It is just a situation that might balance supply and demand if by happenstance it occurred. [Emphasis added].

In 1960 Herbert Scarf of Yale showed that an Arrow-Debreu economy can cycle unstably. The picture steadily darkened. Seminal papers in the 1970s, one authored by Debreu, eliminated “any last forlorn hope,” as the MIT theorist Franklin Fisher says, of proving that markets would move an economy toward equilibrium. Frank Hahn, a prominent Cambridge University theorist, sums up the matter: “We have no good reason to suppose that there are forces which lead the economy to equilibrium.”

Schlefer concludes by accusing the Federal Reserve of assuming market equilibrium would avert something like the subprime mortgage crisis—and being so wrong about it—precisely because their models incorrectly assumed equilibrium. That’s a hell of an overlooked variable! Of course when the economy did implode, the Fed responded with a flood of money and Keynesian tactics aimed at propping up the system.

But the misconceptions about the free market don’t end there. Have you heard of the “Minsky Moment”? Hyman P. Minsky? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Most orthodox economists have never heard of him, either.

Hyman Minsky is the name of a once obscure “contrarian” professor of macroeconomics who died in 1996.  A “red diaper baby” born to socialist parents in Belarus, Minsky spent the 1950s and 60s studying the causes of poverty. Throughout his entire career Minsky’s theories carried almost no weight in the field of economics. When the global economic crisis shook faith in the Capitalist system, his star began to rise. Minsky came to be regarded as “perhaps the most prescient big-picture thinker about what, exactly, we are going through” as the Boston Globe’s Stephen Mihm described him.

Minsky, Mihn wrote in 2009: “[P]redicted, decades ago, almost exactly the kind of meltdown that recently hammered the global economy.”

Minsky drew his own, far darker, lessons from Keynes’s landmark writings, which dealt not only with the problem of unemployment, but with money and banking. Although Keynes had never stated this explicitly, Minsky argued that Keynes’s collective work amounted to a powerful argument that capitalism was by its very nature unstable and prone to collapse. Far from trending toward some magical state of equilibrium, capitalism would inevitably do the opposite. It would lurch over a cliff.

This insight bore the stamp of his advisor Joseph Schumpeter, the noted Austrian economist now famous for documenting capitalism’s ceaseless process of “creative destruction.” But Minsky spent more time thinking about destruction than creation. In doing so, he formulated an intriguing theory: not only was capitalism prone to collapse, he argued, it was precisely its periods of economic stability that would set the stage for monumental crises.

Minsky called his idea the “Financial Instability Hypothesis.” In the wake of a depression, he noted, financial institutions are extraordinarily conservative, as are businesses. With the borrowers and the lenders who fuel the economy all steering clear of high-risk deals, things go smoothly: loans are almost always paid on time, businesses generally succeed, and everyone does well. That success, however, inevitably encourages borrowers and lenders to take on more risk in the reasonable hope of making more money. As Minsky observed, “Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.”

As people forget that failure is a possibility, a “euphoric economy” eventually develops, fueled by the rise of far riskier borrowers—what he called speculative borrowers, those whose income would cover interest payments but not the principal; and those he called “Ponzi borrowers,” those whose income could cover neither, and could only pay their bills by borrowing still further. As these latter categories grew, the overall economy would shift from a conservative but profitable environment to a much more freewheeling system dominated by players whose survival depended not on sound business plans, but on borrowed money and freely available credit.

Once that kind of economy had developed, any panic could wreck the market. The failure of a single firm, for example, or the revelation of a staggering fraud could trigger fear and a sudden, economy-wide attempt to shed debt. This watershed moment—what was later dubbed the “Minsky moment”—would create an environment deeply inhospitable to all borrowers. The speculators and Ponzi borrowers would collapse first, as they lost access to the credit they needed to survive. Even the more stable players might find themselves unable to pay their debt without selling off assets; their forced sales would send asset prices spiraling downward, and inevitably, the entire rickety financial edifice would start to collapse. Businesses would falter, and the crisis would spill over to the “real” economy that depended on the now-collapsing financial system.

Sound in any way familiar?

If the “invisible hand” is just hogwash and if Minsky is right, what’s to stop the economy from imploding again?
 

 

 
Noam Chomsky has long advocated simply reading the Wall Street Journal if you wanted to understand the mindset of the ruling class. No special detective work is necessary to divine the attitudes and intentions of the rich and powerful. In the pages of their house organ you could find what you were looking for, often with unvarnished bluntness.

It’s good advice, but today, the WSJ isn’t the only place to look for hints of ruling class attitudes. In a column published today at Huffington Post, Dr. Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum poses a salient question: If this is the end of Capitalism, then what’s next?

One of the criticisms of capitalism centers on the widening gap between winners and losers due to the so-called turbocapitalism that is a result of global competition. In this context, the so-called Nordic model demonstrates that a high degree of labor market flexibility and social welfare systems do not have to be mutually exclusive—indeed, they can actually be combined to very good effect. This type of economic policy also enables countries to invest in innovation, childcare, education and training. The Scandinavian countries, which underwent a similar banking crisis in the 1990s to that which we are now experiencing in other Western economies, have shown that by reforming regulation and social welfare systems, flexible labor and capital markets really are compatible with social responsibility. So it is no coincidence that these countries are now among the most competitive economies in the world. [Emphasis added]

Other aspects of the criticism of capitalism that are worthy of serious consideration are excessive bonuses, the burgeoning market in alternative financial instruments and the imbalance that has emerged between finance and the real economy. However, we do see some progress in these areas thanks to mounting pressure from the general public, governments and also the market.

So even though capitalism was not laid to rest in Davos, it is fair to say that capital is losing its status as the most important factor of production in our economic system. As I outlined in my opening address in Davos, capital is being superseded by creativity and the ability to innovate—and therefore by human talents—as the most important factors of production. If talent is becoming the decisive competitive factor, we can be confident in stating that capitalism is being replaced by “talentism.” Just as capital replaced manual trades during the process of industrialization, capital is now giving way to human talent. I am convinced that this process of transformation will also lead to new approaches within the field of economics. It is indisputable that an ideology founded on personal freedom and social responsibility gives both individuals and the economy the greatest possible scope to develop.

If this is the sort of intellectual currency that was circulating around Davos this year, I think this is a pretty strong indication that the Occupy backlash is having a big effect. You’d hope that by now the elites must know that the natives are restless!

Obviously a worldwide group-mind consensus is demanding, if not exactly the end of Capitalism, certainly a major rethink/reformation of the way it is practiced in the 21st century. The world is a different place than it was before the Industrial Revolution, it’s high time we updated the operating system to reflect those changes.

It’s just getting to be so fucking stupid, isn’t it?

Michael E. Porter, a Harvard University professor cited by Schwab in his essay, explains why business leaders must focus on “shared value creation.”
 

 
Eric Hobsbawm, the prominent British Marxist historian was on BBC Newsnight earlier this month discussing the “pathological degeneration” of the Capitalist system. The eminent, 94-year-old best-selling author recently published a new book How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism.

It’s difficult to imagine a conversation like this appearing on American television, but that is what YouTube is for, isn’t it?
 

 
Via Adbusters