Stephen Lendman

In 2008, a protracted global depression began, criminally manufactured by Wall Street and Washington scoundrels, complicit with major European partners.

Why? To permit greater financial and other corporate consolidation, more power, and ability to buy favored assets cheap, profiting hugely at the expense of millions of working households.

At the same time, Washington's got it own agenda. As White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel (now Chicago's mayor) told the Wall Street Journal on November 6, 2008:

"You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is that's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."

He didn't mean populist ones. He meant hardline neoliberal austerity to make working Americans bear the burden of bailing out banks, responsible for what trends analyst Gerald Celente calls the Greatest Depression.

How? The usual IMF way, including layoffs, wage freezes or cuts, fewer benefits, less social spending, tax cuts for the rich and corporations, crushing trade unionism, mass privatizations, deregulation, and harsh repression against opposition to a system incompatible with social democracy, civil and human rights.

In the 1980s, it was Reaganomics, trickle down, and Thatcherism. Today it's "shock therapy" called austerity, a destructive dead end, the same scheme pitting capital against people - disposable workers tossed out for big money's gain.

It's how predatory capitalism works, harming many for so few - snake oil masquerading as good policies, corrupted politicians and central bankers force-feeding harmful ones, wrecking economies and human lives so corporate favorites benefit. Their short-term losses, in fact, are considered investments for greater gains.

As a result, expect rising unemployment, growing poverty, greater human deprivation, and accelerated transfers of more wealth from working households to corporate favorites and elites.

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Reham Alhelsi

"My home is in Zakariya"

Every morning he wakes up, prays, prepares tea, carries the old tea pot and a small glass and goes to check on his trees and plants. He wanders between the loquat tree and the apple tree and the vineyard, between the jasmine, the sage and the thyme bushes.

He checks on them, waters them, removes unwanted weeds and collects some mint for his tea. He then sits in a corner, under the shade of the loquat tree, sips his hot tea and watches the leaves dance with the cool morning breeze. All his life he had been a villager, a farmer, a land-worker, a land-lover. His father and grandfather and forefathers before him were villagers, farmers, land-workers and land-lovers. They all used to wake up with the first rays of sunlight, often race the sun to the land. They, his father, grandfather and forefathers, all planted olive trees, apple trees, carob trees, loquat trees, apricot trees and fig trees and created a green heaven, a paradise, a home.

They all worked the vast areas of the land that was and is theirs, the land that was and is part of them and they part of. Be it summer or winter, they planted the fertile land, cared for her and she rewarded them every season with successful harvests. They lived on the land and from her and they gave the land their love, watered her with their sweat and their blood, honoured her, and the land gave them food on their tables, a sanctuary and a home.

They were content and needed nothing else, for they had the land and land gave them everything they needed. They existed through the land and the land existed through them. The land gave them existence.

“Come” she said “I want to show you something”.

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