Benjamin Dangl
Upside Down World

The following is an excerpt from the introduction to Benjamin Dangl’s new book Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America (October, 2010, AK Press).

Ben Dangl breaks the sound barrier, exploding many myths about Latin America that are all-too-often amplified by the corporate media in the United States. Read this much-needed book.”

The motorcycle thundered off the highway onto a jungle road of loose red dirt framed by trees, families lounging in front of their farmhouses, and small herds of disinterested cows. We pulled up to a dusty store to buy food for our stay in the rural community of Oñondivepá, Paraguay, and asked the woman behind the counter what was available. She nodded her head, picked up a saw, and began hacking away at a large slab of beef. We strapped the meat and a box of beer on to the back of the motorcycle and roared off down the road.

A volleyball game was going on when we arrived in the area where landless activist Pedro Caballero lived. His wife offered us fresh oranges while his children ran around in the dirt, playing with some wide-eyed kittens. The sun had set, so Caballero’s wife lifted a light bulb attached to a metal wire onto an exposed electric line above the house, casting light on our small gathering of neighbors. Suddenly, the dogs jumped to action, joining in a barking chorus, and lunged toward the edge of the woods. They had found a poisonous snake, a common cause of death in this small community far from hospitals.

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Rodrigue Tremblay
The New American Empire

"Under a paper money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation." ~ Ben Bernanke, future Fed Chairman (in 2002)

“My thesis here is that cooperation between the monetary and fiscal authorities in Japan could help solve the problems that each policymaker faces on its own. Consider for example a tax cut for households and businesses that is explicitly coupled with incremental BOJ purchases of government debt – so that the tax cut is in effect financed by money creation. Moreover, assume that the Bank of Japan has made a commitment, by announcing a price-level target, to reflate the economy, so that much or all of the increase in the money stock is viewed as permanent.” ~ Ben Bernanke, future Fed Chairman (in 2002)

“The Fed, in effect, is telling the markets not to worry about our fiscal deficits, it will be the buyer of first and perhaps last resort. There is no need - as with Charles Ponzi - to find an increasing amount of future gullibles, they will just write the check themselves. I ask you: Has there ever been a Ponzi scheme so brazen? There has not.” ~ Bill Gross, PIMCO's managing director

On Wednesday, November 3rd, the Bernanke Fed announced that it stands ready to resume money printing to stimulate the economy through quantitative money easing, an euphemism for printing more dollars. Indeed, it intends to buy $600-billion of longer-term Treasury securities until the end of the second quarter of 2011, plus some $300 billion of reinvestments, on top of the some $1.75 trillion of various types of securities, many of which were mortgage backed securities, that it has added in 2009 to its balance sheet, currently standing at a total of $2.3 trillion. There could even be additional increases in newly printed money as the Fed intends to

"regularly review and adjust the program as needed to best foster maximum employment and price stability."

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Stephen Lendman

Ahead of the November 11 - 12 G-20 meeting in Seoul, South Korea, the Fed announced QE II, another $600 billion between now and end of June 2011, a flexible figure to be raised or lowered freely, the Fed saying it will:

"....regularly review the pace of its securities purchases and the overall size of the asset-purchase program in light of incoming information and will adjust the program as needed to best foster maximum employment and price stability."

An additional $300 billion received from maturing securities will also be used. Easing, in fact, began around mid-year. Wall Street insiders knew it to take advantage, but not the public, QE being used to debauch the currency, harm the economy, and destroy, not create, jobs.

Market Ticker's Karl Denninger calls QE

"the largest tax ever imposed on the American people in the history of the nation. It is more than fourteen times the Bush tax cuts....Goldman Sachs believes that Bernanke will impose a total tax through (QE) of more than four trillion dollars over the next two years, or more than fifty-seven times the Bush tax cuts."

How so? Because credit created is going into asset markets (stocks, bonds, commodities, etc.), not the economy. QE I's tax, in fact, diluted stimulus funds, an offsetting tax "directly into the bankers' pockets" for speculation, big salaries and bonuses.

Add to that inflation. According to James Grant of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, QE will create unsustainable asset bubbles and debase the dollar, making products and services more expensive, ending "everyday low prices." Bernanke wants inflation, a hidden tax. Devaluation is being used to get it, no matter the serious consequences.

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David Walsh
WSWS

"The well-heeled liberal element [...] makes a profession of spreading illusions in the Democrats."

The outcome of the 2010 midterm elections is an indictment of the apologists for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

As a result of the November 2 elections, in which the Republican Party regained control of the House of Representatives and picked up seats in the Senate, the entire political system in the US has shifted farther to the right. The consequences for millions of working people will be severe, as the attack on social conditions and democratic rights is intensified and military violence is employed even more aggressively around the world.

Two years ago, a variety of “left” and liberal forces strove to convince those sections of the population over whom they had influence that the Obama campaign represented a watershed in American politics and that under his administration the policies of war, attacks on jobs and social programs, and the shredding of Constitutional rights would come to an end.

The Nation magazine and others painted Obama, a thoroughly conventional bourgeois politician with a track record of subservience to the Democratic Party machine in Illinois and to big business, as a “progressive” who would turn America around. This effort, which combined self-deception and deliberate falsification, helped generate illusions in Obama and lull the population to sleep.

What are the results? Obama, given a free hand by his left-liberal apologists, steered a right-wing, pro-big business course from his first day in office (and even before). In the face of the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression, the administration bailed out Wall Street while doing nothing for the millions of unemployed and impoverished workers and the legions of families facing the loss of their homes.

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