clive

Posted 22nd March 2012

This article appeared on Information Clearing House on 21st March 2012 – it is posted here in full just in case it gets removed which would be a tragedy.  Arundhati Roy writes incisively and in beautiful prose.  It is long but it is well worth persevering to the end:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30877.htm

Rockefeller to Mandela, Vedanta to Anna Hazare…. How long can the cardinals of corporate gospel buy up our protests?

By Arundhati Roy

March 21, 2012 “Outlook India” – – Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamont Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace, things have not been the same. “Here we are,” the friend who took me there said, “Pay your respects to our new Ruler.”

Antilla belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I had read about this most expensive dwelling ever built, the twenty-seven floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and the six hundred servants. Nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawn—a soaring, 27-storey-high wall of grass attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches; bits had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly, Trickledown hadn’t worked.

But Gush-Up certainly has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2 billion, India’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of the GDP.

The word on the street (and in the New York Times) is, or at least was, that after all that effort and gardening, the Ambanis don’t live in Antilla. No one knows for sure. People still whisper about ghosts and bad luck, Vaastu and Feng Shui. Maybe it’s all Karl Marx’s fault. (All that cussing.) Capitalism, he said, “has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.

In India, the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post-IMF “reforms” middle class—the market—live side by side with spirits of the nether world, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains and denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on less than twenty rupees a day.

Mukesh Ambani is personally worth $20 billion. He holds a majority controlling share in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalisation of $47 billion and global business interests that include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fibre, Special Economic Zones, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research and stem cell storage services. RIL recently bought 95 per cent shares in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls 27 TV news and entertainment channels, including CNN-IBN, IBN Live, CNBC, IBN Lokmat, and ETV in almost every regional language. Infotel owns the only nationwide licence for 4G Broadband, a high-speed “information pipeline” which, if the technology works, could be the future of information exchange. Mr Ambani also owns a cricket team.

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Posted 19th November 2011

We stand at an inflection point in history and western civilisation faces a critical choice: Revolution or Evolution.

Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” analyses factors which caused civilisations to collapse in the past.  The factors are relatively few (environmental challenges, external threats or loss of a supporting neighbour, internal disintegration etc.) but what distinguished civilisations which collapsed from those which survived, was the reaction to these threats.  Universally, those that collapsed were led by an elite which became increasingly remote from the majority and instituted selfish, short term policies to protect themselves from the perceived threats.  Meanwhile the populace suffered hardship, famine, and increased suppression.  Sound familiar? Recent, less acute examples, are the French, Russian Revolutions and the rise of China’s communist party (Stalin’s headcount of victims was some 30 million and Mao Tse Tung’s 35 million).

This is what we’re heading for and whether or not you are a short term beneficiary of the current economic system, it would be wise to understand the fundamental root cause of economic turmoil and other global problems.

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Posted 29th October 2011

Margrit Kennedy: Interest and Inflation Free Money (Published by Seva International; ISBN 0-9643025-0-0; Copyright 1995 by Margrit Kennedy)

http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/kennedy/english/

The following extracts are useful in providing quantitative context for why a new interest free money system is needed and the existing monetary paradigm is unsustainable.  The full paper proposes an alternative interest free monetary system.  It describes what a new money system could look like and the benefits.

The numbers relate to Germany prior to 1995 when the paper was written. The inequality of wealth distribution and the interest burden/benefit is even greater today and particularly acute in the privatised Anglo Saxon economies.

First Misconception :

THERE IS ONLY ONE TYPE OF GROWTH

Figure 2 shows the time periods needed for our money to double at compound interest rates:

at 3%, 24 years;

at 6%, 12 years;

at 12%, 6 years.

Story: Persian emperor who was so enchanted with a new chess game that he wanted to fulfill any wish the inventor of the game had. This clever mathematician decided to ask for one seed of grain on the first square of the chess board doubling the amounts on each of the following squares. The emperor, at first happy about such modesty, was soon to discover that the total yield of his entire empire would not be sufficient to fulfill the “modest” wish. The amount needed on the 64th square of the chess board equals 440 times the yield of grain of the entire planet.

That is exponential growth!

The solution to the problems caused by present exponential growth is to create a money system which follows the natural growth curve. That requires the replacement of interest by another mechanism to keep money in circulation.

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Posted 29th October 2011

The Federal Reserve Banks (which make up the Federal Reserve Board) are privately owned but the Federal Reserve Board website gives the misleading impression that it is owned and controlled by the US government.

Ownership is stipulated in the Federal Reserve Act and the capital of the Federal Reserve Banks is subscribed by member banks. The member banks receive a 6% dividend annually. The Act also provides for money to be paid over to the government but this in no way means that the Federal Reserve isn’t under the bank member/owners’ control.

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Posted 23rd October 2011

Fractional reserve banking is legalised fraud. The issuing of money, by central banks, is theft from the 99%, aided and abetted by leveraged bank lending.

Money as Debt, a 45 minute video, is an introduction to banking from its origins and describes the process by which the 99% are enslaved in debt and the 1% end up with all the power and wealth.

Circulate it to everyone you know. When the 99% understand how they are being robbed, the pressure for change will be irresistible.

Our debt based money system:

finances the military industry complex which depends on perpetual war for its development;

corrupts politics, media and our public institutions, leading the 99% into slavery with their lies;

underpins an economic system which is raping the planet of its resources at an exponential rate and relies on us consuming stuff we don’t need.

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Posted 18th October 2011

The challenge for the various Occupy movements is how to create a coherent message.  Clearly the movement is born out of frustration and anger but different people have different priorities.  In addition, the media and others want to know the purpose of the occupations and their objectives.

If one accepts the root cause of the ills in the world today is the monetary system which enslaves the 99% in debt while banks continue to accrue yet more wealth and power, an alternative system needs to be developed.  Fractional reserve banking has evolved over centuries and the financial system has become infinitely more complex over the last thirty years.  Coming up with a new system is not going to happen overnight; it will take time and much discussion across a broad range of people with different interests.   And so we need a process or framework to ensure the movement doesn’t become distracted or diverted into subsidiary issues which would weaken it.

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Posted 16th October 2011

The mainstream media is beginning to wake up to the global, grass roots uprising coalescing around the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS).  Inspired by the youth demonstrations which began in Spain in May this year and the various uprisings (Egypt, Tunisia, Greece etc.), disparate groups came together on Wall Street on 17th September 2011 to protest against the financial system which no longer works for 99% of the people.  In spite of being ignored, dismissed or ridiculed by the mainstream media the occupation of the renamed Liberty Square in New York persisted.  Repressive police tactics against the peaceful protesters only swelled their numbers and four weeks later the movement has spread across the globe with over 1000 demonstrations taking place on 15th October.

In London yesterday, the occupation of St Paul’s Churchyard, next to Paternoster Square began, coinciding with the global demonstrations.  The initial objective was to occupy Paternoster Square itself but heavily manned police barricades denied the protesters access.  At midnight on the first day of the occupation there remained between 300-500 protesters and a heavy police presence (circa 600 officers).  During the day the police attempted to kettle and intimidate the protesters using riot gear clad officers and police dogs.  A line of some 40 officers with riot gear to hand were posted along the top of the steps to St Paul’s, where they remained throughout the night.  The following day, Reverend Giles Fraser, Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s, said he was happy for people to “exercise their right to protest peacefully” outside the cathedral and asked the officers “guarding” the entrance to the Cathedral to go as he felt the Cathedral was not under any threat. The first victory is won.

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