Banksters vs Humanity: Round 14
By Derryl Hermanutz
Posted July 10, 2015

Progressives, socialists, radicals, revolutionaries, typically rail against the excesses of corporate industry; and against co-opted governments that serve corporate commercial and financial interests over human social and economic interests. Even classical free enterprise liberals, and free market libertarians, oppose corporate monopolists who enjoy state-supported market power, in violation of the ideal of independent businesses competing on a level playing field.

All of these well-intentioned critics, idealists and reformers are — if not exactly tilting at windmills — at least attacking symptoms rather than attacking the root cause that drives them. You could cure all of the symptoms, but they will reappear as long as the root cause remains in place.

The root cause is the world’s privately owned money issuance and allocation system, otherwise known as “banking”. Private commercial banks enjoy a near absolute monopoly on the initial creation and the primary allocation of the world’s supply of “money”. Very large scale transnational banks exercise this “money power”, and have been doing so for centuries. The Money Power is the “invisible hand” that builds and manipulates all of the other structures of power in capitalist civilization. In the capitalist world, everything is bought and sold for money. The issuance and allocation of money assigns the power to “buy and own” everything. More…

Economic Democracy vs Bankster Plutocracy
By Derryl Hermanutz
Posted July 8, 2015

Bankers have long exercised a near absolute monopoly on the creation and primary allocation of money. International bankers engineered and enabled the present and intensifying corporate-plutocrat ownership structure of the Western world. What might happen if a people-serving government issued its own debt-free fiat money, instead of using bank-issued credit/debt money that commits the nation to debt servitude and neo-corporate serfdom?

Banksters, corporatists and plutocrats who enjoy great wealth and abundance are happy to perform the role of indebting, ruling over, and punishing us. So maybe it’s a symbiotic relationship after all: sadists punishing masochists. But there’s nothing “natural” or “inevitable” about it. More…

America’s Slave Empire
By Chris Hedges
Posted June 24, 2015

“The worst thing is the water,” said James Pleasant, a St. Clair prisoner who has served 13 years of a 43-year sentence. “It is contaminated. It causes kidney, renal failure and cancer. The food causes stomach diseases. We have had three to four outbreaks of food poisoning in the last four months.”

“It takes brutality and force to make a person work for free and live in the type of conditions we live in and not do anything about it,” Ray said. “The only way they made slavery work was to use force. It is no different in the slave empire of prisons. They use brutality to hold it together. And this brutality will not go away until the system goes away.” More…

A City Where Everyone Works, There Is No Police, And The Salary Is 1200 Euros
by Jade Small
Posted May 28, 2015

With virtually no police, crime or unemployment, meet the Spanish town described as a democratic, socialist utopia. Unemployment is non-existent in Marinaleda, an Andalusian village in southern Spain that is prosperous thanks to its farming cooperative.

In this province alone there are 690,000 empty properties due to bank foreclosures. But not in Marinaleda, because Gordillo has a solution: anyone who wants to build their own house can do so for free. Materials and qualified workmen are provided by the town hall, and the generous allowance of 192 square meters means the homes are spacious. Families then pay just 15 euros ($19) per month for the rest of their lives, with the agreement that the house cannot be sold for private gain.

In Andalusia, unemployment now stands at 37 percent (a staggering 55 percent for young people). But Marinaleda, population 2700, has virtually full employment through the town’s farming cooperative, where laborers earn equal wages of 1200 euros ($1600) per month. Here, in a region where 1 in 3 people are unemployed, this achievement cannot be understated. More…

10 Quotes From a Oglala Lakota Chief That Will Make You Question Everything About Our Society
By Wisdom Pills
Posted May 11, 2015

Luther Standing Bear was an Oglala Lakota Sioux Chief who, among a few rare others such as Charles Eastman, Black Elk and Gertrude Bonnin occupied the rift between the way of life of the Indigenous people of the Great Plains before, and during, the arrival and subsequent spread of the European pioneers. Raised in the traditions of his people until the age of eleven, he was then educated at the Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School of Pennsylvania, where he learned the english language and way of life.

Like his above mentioned contemporaries, however, his native roots were deep, leaving him in the unique position of being a conduit between cultures. Though his movement through the white man’s world was not without “success” — he had numerous movie roles in Hollywood — his enduring legacy was the protection of the way of life of his people. More…

Baltimore as a Microcosm of America
by Michael Krieger
Posted May 3, 2015

Baltimore, Maryland is in many ways the perfect microcosm for these United States of America. If you still don’t get that, you’ll be in for a rude awakening in the years ahead.

A gradual erosion of the Constitution and the civl rights of the citizenry, the abuse of power by people in authority, perverse financial incentives that lead to horrible outcomes, zero accountability, and a ubiquitous surveillance state apparatus; Baltimore has it all. Yet all of these troubling traits have also come to characterize early 21st century America.

David Simon, creator of the excellent hit HBO series “The Wire,” recently sat down for an interview with former New York Times reporter Bill Keller to explain the situation in Baltimore as he sees it; its origins and what is needed to fix it. As you read, think about the many parallels to the U.S. economy in general; the endless criminal maneuverings within the centers of power in Washington D.C. and Wall Street, the forever spinning revolving door of corruption, the marauding gangs of cronies making impossibly large piles of money based on connections, fraud and rigged markets as opposed to adding value, the idiocy of the war on drugs, the fraudulent accounting, and the overbearing surveillance state. Increasingly, when America looks in the mirror Baltimore and Ferguson are staring right back. We just haven’t admitted it yet. More…

Food Power and Human Connection – Edesia Rising
By Zhiwa Woodbury
Posted April 20, 2015

The Orwellian oligarchy has done a masterful job of convincing us that we are powerless, reducing us to despair and symbolic political actions in pursuit of wholly inadequate, piecemeal changes where science and nature demand radical, systemic reforms. The result is a cultural malaise in which we “medicate” our natural depression with OCDD: obsessive compulsive distraction disorder. And, of course, the plutocrats are more than happy to supply us with a seductive cornucopia of distractive electronic suppressants and copious amounts of antidepressants and opioids to numb our spiritual pain.

The reason we are losing this autocratic game, and losing the world in the process, is that we are playing by their rules. We’ve been conditioned to believe that our power is limited to voting for the lesser of corporate-sponsored evils, marching in the streets and feebly petitioning our broken political institutions for crumbs of incremental change. Which is to say, no power at all – trickle-down politics. To pull the curtain back and reveal our naked emperors, we must stop thinking within the dark political box by which they’ve disenfranchised us. We must recognize our most effective powers. More…

How To Sell Off a City
By Rick Perlstein
Posted February 25, 2015

For over a decade now, Chicago has been the epicenter of the fashionable trend of “privatization”—the transfer of the ownership or operation of resources that belong to all of us, like schools, roads and government services, to companies that use them to turn a profit. Chicago’s privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm’s investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much.

And as mayor, Emanuel has proven himself practically an addict when it comes to brokering deals with his former investment banker comrades and the other business interests he keeps on speed dial. As the Chicago Reader’s Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke discovered when they filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the mayor’s private schedule, Emanuel almost never met with community leaders during his first year in office, but he met constantly with rich bankers like Rauner, BMO CEO William Downe and Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s biggest money management firm. These are his people. More…

Release the Ego—Transform the World
by Nanice Ellis
Posted January 26, 2015

There is enough for everyone. Our magnificent earth provides an abundance of food, energy, natural medicine, and building supplies that could easily meet the needs of everyone on this planet. Mother Earth does not charge money for any of these things, but our artificial economic system creates lack, scarcity and a slave civilization. We are killing our world and ourselves with poison food, toxic water, and polluted air, not to mention depression, anxiety, poverty and a host of other socio-economic issues – all caused or related to the global economic system.

It appears very easy to blame corrupt world leaders, governments, corporations and a host of other problematic sources — but the system continues because we agree to it. Perhaps, our agreement is complacent, but nonetheless, our lack of non-agreement perpetuates the dysfunction. So the question is, “What is it about each of us that makes us comply and go along – enabling the corrupt and moral-less?” More…

The Only Road Out Of Davos
by Raúl Ilargi Meijer
Posted January 23, 2015

The Davos crowd are not the important people, it’s just propaganda that makes you see them in that light. There’s no glory in wealth. The important people are your neighbors, your families, and most of all your children. And the answer to their insidious schemes is really simple; its that very simplicity which may well be the reason you never saw it.

You see, a dollar spent on locally made products goes much further than one spent on products that are shipped in. About 4 times further. Because if you buy local products, you support local jobs, which in turn support the community you live in through taxes that pay for strengthening the community, and so forth. Ergo: if something produced locally costs twice as much as what’s available from 1000 miles away, you’d still be better off. Even if it’s three times more expensive, you’ll still end up richer. More…

1700 PRIVATE jets ferrying the billionaire class decended on the Davos Economic Forum. So many that it caused air traffic control problems. You just know these people have the best interests of working people and the planet in their hearts.