Keeping African people hungry and undernourished is the simplest way for the West to keep them firmly under its control
Read how the National Security Council planned to use food to control population growth in Developing Countries
What is NSSM 200 )"Population Control" by Kissinger?
http://www.mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=90207
30 Years Ago Haiti Grew All the Rice It Needed. What Happened?
The U.S. Role in Haiti's Food Riots
By BILL QUIGLEY
Riots in Haiti over explosive rises in food costs have claimed the lives of six people. There have also been food riots world-wide in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivorie, Egypt, Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. The Economist, which calls the current crisis the silent tsunami, reports that last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16%, but since January rice prices have risen 141%. The reasons include rising fuel costs, weather problems, increased demand in China and India, as well as the push to create biofuels from cereal crops.
Hermite Joseph, a mother working in the markets of Port au Prince, told journalist Nick Whalen that her two kids are “like toothpicks” they’ re not getting enough nourishment. Before, if you had a dollar twenty-five cents, you could buy vegetables, some rice, 10 cents of charcoal and a little cooking oil. Right now, a little can of rice alone costs 65 cents, and is not good rice at all. Oil is 25 cents. Charcoal is 25 cents. With a dollar twenty-five, you can’t even make a plate of rice for one child.”
The St. Claire’s Church Food program, in the Tiplas Kazo neighborhood of Port au Prince, serves 1000 free meals a day, almost all to hungry children -- five times a week in partnership with the What If Foundation. Children from Cite Soleil have been known to walk the five miles to the church for a meal. The cost of rice, beans, vegetables, a little meat, spices, cooking oil, propane for the stoves, have gone up dramatically. Because of the rise in the cost of food, the portions are now smaller. But hunger is on the rise and more and more children come for the free meal. Hungry adults used to be allowed to eat the leftovers once all the children were fed, but now there are few leftovers.
The New York Times lectured Haiti on April 18 that “Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself.” Unfortunately, the article did not talk at all about one of the main causes of the shortages --the fact that the U.S. and other international financial bodies destroyed Haitian rice farmers to create a major market for the heavily subsidized rice from U.S. farmers. This is not the only cause of hunger in Haiti and other poor countries, but it is a major force.
Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed. What happened? In 1986, after the expulsion of Haitian dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million in desperately needed funds (Baby Doc had raided the treasury on the way out). But, in order to get the IMF loan, Haiti was required to reduce tariff protections for their Haitian rice and other agricultural products and some industries to open up the country’s markets to competition from outside countries. The U.S. has by far the largest voice in decisions of the IMF.
Doctor Paul Farmer was in Haiti then and saw what happened. “Within less than two years, it became possible for Haitian farmers to compete with what they called ‘Miami rice.’ The whole local rice market in Haiti fell apart as cheap, U.S. subsidized rice, some of it in the form of ‘food aid,’ flooded the market. There was violence, ‘rice wars,’ and lives were lost.” “American rice invaded the country,” recalled Charles Suffrard, a leading rice grower in Haiti in an interview with the Washington Post in 2000. By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many stopped working the land. Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest who has been the pastor at St. Claire and an outspoken human rights advocate, agrees. “In the 1980s, imported rice poured into Haiti, below the cost of what our farmers could produce it. Farmers lost their businesses. People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities. After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down.”
Still the international business community was not satisfied. In 1994, as a condition for U.S. assistance in returning to Haiti to resume his elected Presidency, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced by the U.S., the IMF, and the World Bank to open up the markets in Haiti even more. But, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, what reason could the U.S. have in destroying the rice market of this tiny country? Haiti is definitely poor. The U.S. Agency for International Development reports the annual per capita income is less than $400. The United Nations reports life expectancy in Haiti is 59, while in the US it is 78. Over 78% of Haitians live on less than $2 a day, more than half live on less than $1 a day.
Yet Haiti has become one of the very top importers of rice from the U.S. The U.S. Department of Agriculture 2008 numbers show Haiti is the third largest importer of US rice - at over 240,000 metric tons of rice. (One metric ton is 2200 pounds).Rice is a heavily subsidized business in the U.S. Rice subsidies in the U.S. totaled $11 billion from 1995 to 2006. One producer alone, Riceland Foods Inc of Stuttgart Arkansas, received over $500 million dollars in rice subsidies between 1995 and 2006.
The Cato Institute recently reported that rice is one of the most heavily supported commodities in the U.S. -- with three different subsidies together averaging over $1 billion a year since 1998 and projected to average over $700 million a year through 2015. The result? “Tens of millions of rice farmers in poor countries find it hard to lift their families out of poverty because of the lower, more volatile prices caused by the interventionist policies of other countries.”
In addition to three different subsidies for rice farmers in the U.S., there are also direct tariff barriers of 3 to 24 percent, reports Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute -- the exact same type of protections, though much higher, that the U.S. and the IMF required Haiti to eliminate in the 1980s and 1990s. U.S. protection for rice farmers goes even further. A 2006 story in the Washington Post found that the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all; including $490,000 to a Houston surgeon who owned land near Houston that once grew rice.
And it is not only the Haitian rice farmers who have been hurt.
Paul Farmer saw it happen to the sugar growers as well. “Haiti, once the world's largest exporter of sugar and other tropical produce to Europe, began importing even sugar-- from U.S. controlled sugar production in the Dominican Republic and Florida. It was terrible to see Haitian farmers put out of work. All this sped up the downward spiral that led to this month's food riots.” After the riots and protests, President Rene Preval of Haiti agreed to reduce the price of rice, which was selling for $51 for a 110 pound bag, to $43 dollars for the next month. No one thinks a one month fix will do anything but delay the severe hunger pains a few weeks.
Haiti is far from alone in this crisis. The Economist reports a billion people worldwide live on $1 a day. The US-backed Voice of America reports about 850 million people were suffering from hunger worldwide before the latest round of price increases. Thirty three countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices, World Bank President Robert Zoellick told the Wall Street Journal. When countries have many people who spend half to three-quarters of their daily income on food, “there is no margin of survival.” In the U.S., people are feeling the world-wide problems at the gas pump and in the grocery. Middle class people may cut back on extra trips or on high price cuts of meat. The number of people on food stamps in the US is at an all-time high. But in poor countries, where malnutrition and hunger were widespread before the rise in prices, there is nothing to cut back on except eating. That leads to hunger riots.
In the short term, the world community is sending bags of rice to Haiti. Venezuela sent 350 tons of food. The US just pledged $200 million extra for worldwide hunger relief. The UN is committed to distributing more food. What can be done in the medium term? The US provides much of the world’s food aid, but does it in such a way that only half of the dollars spent actually reach hungry people. US law requires that food aid be purchased from US farmers, processed and bagged in the US and shipped on US vessels -- which cost 50% of the money allocated. A simple change in US law to allow some local purchase of commodities would feed many more people and support local farm markets. In the long run, what is to be done? The President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who visited Haiti last week, said “Rich countries need to reduce farms subsidies and trade barriers to allow poor countries to generate income with food exports. Either the world solves the unfair trade system, or every time there's unrest like in Haiti, we adopt emergency measures and send a little bit of food to temporarily ease hunger."
Citizens of the USA know very little about the role of their government in helping create the hunger problems in Haiti or other countries. But there is much that individuals can do. People can donate to help feed individual hungry people and participate with advocacy organizations like Bread for the World or Oxfam to help change the U.S. and global rules which favor the rich countries. This advocacy can help countries have a better chance tofeed themselves. Meanwhile, Merisma Jean-Claudel, a young high school graduate in Port-au-Prince told journalist Wadner Pierre "...people can’t buy food. Gasoline prices are going up. It is very hard for us over here. The cost of living is the biggest worry for us, no peace in stomach means no peace in the mind. ¦I wonder if others will be able to survive the days ahead because things are very, very hard."
“On the ground, people are very hungry,” reported Fr. Jean-Juste. “Our country must immediately open emergency canteens to feed the hungry until we can get them jobs. For the long run, we need to invest in irrigation, transportation, and other assistance for our farmers and workers.” In Port au Prince, some rice arrived in the last few days. A school in Fr. Jean-Juste’s parish received several bags of rice. They had raw rice for 1000 children, but the principal still had to come to Father Jean-Juste asking for help. There was no money for charcoal, or oil. Jervais Rodman, an unemployed carpenter with three children, stood in a long line Saturday in Port au Prince to get UN donated rice and beans. When Rodman got the small bags, he told Ben Fox of the Associated Press, “The beans might last four days. The rice will be gone as soon as I get home.”
*Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He can be reached at quigley77@gmail.com People interested in donating to feed children in Haiti should go to http://www.whatiffoundation.org/
People who want to help change U.S. policy on agriculture to help combat world-wide hunger should go to:http://www.oxfamamerica.org/ or http://www.bread.org/
Is Starvation Contagious?
John Maxwell
Few people, much less their governments, appear to be concerned about what is happening in Haiti, next to Cuba our nearest neighbour and, in historical terms, the people who paved the way for our freedom from slavery and implemented for the first time anywhere in the world, the idea of universal human rights. Yet, today, while Haiti suffocates in poverty, hunger and dirt, her neighbours in the Caribbean, with the exception of Cuba, pass by on the other side of the road where Haiti lies in pain and anguish, ignoring the brutalisation of the poorest people in this hemisphere by the richest nations in the world. Four years ago the Americans and Canadians with the backing of the French, decapitated Haitian human rights, kidnapping her President and instituting fascist rule by a combination of some of the greediest businessmen in the world and the murderous thugs they hired in an attempt to depose the overwhelmingly popular president of the Haitians, Jean Bertrand Aristide.
Mr Bush and Mr Colin Powell and a mixed gaggle of French and Canadian politicians had decided that freedom and independence were too good for the black people of Haiti. Lest you think I am being racist there is abundant evidence that the conspiracy against Haiti was inspired by racial hatred and prejudice. I have gone into this before and I will not return to it today. Suffice it to say that the US, Canada and France, acting on behalf of the so-called ‘civilised world’, decided on the basis of lies that, as in the case of Iraq, a free and independent people had no business being free and independent when their freedom and independence was seen to threaten the economic interest of the richest people in Haiti and, by extension, the wealthiest countries in the world.
Today, and especially for the last few weeks, the starving people in Haiti have been trying to get the world to listen to their anguish and misery. Along with some other poor people in other countries the Haitians have been driven to desperation and the edge of starvation by the rapidly increasing price of food. Unlike all the others the Haitians are over the edge, they are starving, refugees in their own proud country, many forced to eat dirt to survive, however tenuously. Only the Cubans, the Venezuelans and the Vietnamese appear to care about what is happening in Haiti. The rest of us are too concerned with ‘wealth management’ and the prospects of foreign investors with bursting wallets floating down from the sky to make us all rich.
But if one listens to people on the Jamaican street it is obvious that we too are in the early stages of the same curse of the globalisation which makes Haitians expendable and assesses their value at well under the price of one Jamaican patty per day. So, the Haitians have taken to the streets and more than half a dozen starvelings have already been shot dead by the armed forces of civilisation, by the satraps and surrogates of George Bush and his Canadian and French accomplices.
The World Food Programme has appealed to the world for help for the Haitians. So has the Vietnamese representative on the UN Security Council. Venezuela has given Haiti money and supplied them with cheap oil. Cuba, among other things, is training nearly 500 Haitians to be doctors, about half in Cuba and the rest in Haiti. The Golding government, like its predecessors, pays no attention to our suffering neighbour languishing and dying because of the explicit actions and strategies of the United States of America and its President, George Bush.
Which is why after Aristide, Haitians died like flies because of hurricanes and rainstorms: their local democracy and their early warning systems had been destroyed by the criminal gangsters who Bush put in charge of 8 million Haitians. And when the situation became too noisome even for Bush and the Republican party, Haitians were allowed to vote but not allowed to vote for the man they wanted, so they voted for a surrogate. This meant that the Haitian elite friends of Bush, the Chalabis of our hemisphere, were back in charge and the primacy of the light-skinned minority re-established, just as it was in the eighteenth century, before the American, French and Haitian revolutions. It is possible that Haiti may not even be Bush's worst crime. In Haiti he destroyed nearly 300 years of History and the Rights of Man. In Iraq he obliterated much of the record of the last 8,000 years of civilisation and set the people at each other’s throats
Many Haitians were killed by the American-paid assassins who inherited military power from the American and Canadian Marines. More were murdered because they were community leaders and allies of Aristide. Even more died from unnatural disasters precipitated by the decapitation of democracy. And many, many more will die from the effects of eating dirt for the greater glory of George Bush and because they have had enough of Bush’s modern version of slavery.
I told you so
Just to be tiresome I want to remind you of a column published in this paper on Sunday, December 10, 2000, my 240th column for this paper. It was published just as the Republican party was prepping the US Supreme Court to appoint George Bush President of the US.
I wrote, inter alia
"The approaching triumph of Greenspan/Ayn Rand capitalism may just be slowed down by the latest developments in the US economy, but that is not cooling down the ardour of the “Cognitive Elite” to gain a handle on the whole business of corporate control of the economies and governance of the world. The Americans a few days ago, chastised Haiti for electoral defects which, compared to Florida, were child’s play and did not really affect anything very much more than the letter of the law.
“… George Bush, if he is appointed President, will use his time to destroy the integrity of the country he rules, starting with the Supreme Court. Then he can start on dealing with the rest of us. That’s his job, and as the American Press has made plain, nothing needs to be known about him and his multifarious incapacities because Big Brother in the giant corporations will tell him what to do.
We are all in a for a very rough ride."
That was published before Bush became president, before Enron, before 9/1, before the invasion of Iraq and before the rape of Haiti.
Today when the world faces climatic, ecological and economic meltdown we in Jamaica are as far away from reality as ever. We persist in our suicidal pursuit of unsustainable development-by-gimmick, heading for disaster like the Haitians but of our own free will, unlike the powerless Haitians. We are determined to grow sugar cane until it destroys our society, watching helplessly and cluelessly as food prices rise out of our reach and unwilling to even try to save ourselves by growing more food and putting idle hands and idle lands to work, and unwilling to face the elemental truths about this slave society.
We can’t afford rice or cooking oil, or bread or Lexuses.
Where, one wonders, is our Marie Antoinette to advise us to eat Johnnycake?
More than sixty years ago when we were faced with the (for us) less dire crisis of the Second World War our British governors forced all landowners to plant at least ten percent of their land in food crops. Sugar estates began to produce food for the first time in 300 years and our unemployment and malnutrition rates plummeted.
Today we face our unreality bravely, encouraging the most backward among us to sing songs of hate against homosexuals, denying Amnesty’s findings about our internecine violence although they are merely echoing what people like me were writing forty years ago. We are going to grow food for cars while our people starve
We know what’s wrong but resolutely refuse to face reality. In the struggle for survival we say, along with George Bush, every man for himself and let the devil take the hindmost.
The title of my 2000 column I quoted earlier could serve as our epitaph.
It was:
“Democracy? Enough already!”
I told you so.
Source: the blackist
Obama, Imperialism and the Paradox of Plenty amid Poverty
By Michael Novick,
Anti-Racist Action-Los Angeles/People Against Racist
Terror (ARA-LA/PART)
In the 1950s and '60s, liberal and conservative social theorists used to speculate about the reasons for "the paradox of poverty amid plenty." How could we account for persistent and unyielding cross-generational poverty in certain sectors of the US population, when the US was the richest and most powerful country in the world? These 'thinkers' shared the assumption that the Empire was capable of endless growth, producing ever-increasing wealth. The idea that this horn of plenty could not seem to eradicate poverty even inside its own borders was a nagging perplexity. Neither school of thought could admit or even contemplate the reality that increasing wealth was extracted from, and in turn produced, increasing poverty. Nor could they begin to acknowledge the on-going process of race-based settler colonialism and "primitive accumulation" that characterizes the US Empire. Openly racial explanations were either too discredited or too embarrassing to allow in the era of the civil rights struggle and decolonization in Africa, Latin America and Asia. So the liberals and conservatives alike tended towards slightly different varieties of blaming the victim. Liberals focused on a lack of education; conservatives blamed sociopathic family inadequacy. These were two different sets of code for pinning the problem on Black women.
Perhaps the fact that most of these social critics were well-educated and well-paid white men helps explain how this 'analysis' developed. Some lined up with JFK's New Frontier and LBJ's War on Poverty; others cast their lot with Nixon's "benign neglect" and later Reagan's "supply side" economics. Globally, the permutations of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism use imperial 'rule-making' and austerity measures, in combination with imperial saber-rattling and direct military intervention, to impose "solutions" that further enriched US corporate interests at the expense of the rest of the world.
Forty years on, we can begin to recast, in fact reverse, the nature of the paradox they attempted to explain - the paradox in fact is the existence of plenty amid poverty. This is the era of peak oil, limits to growth, and the environmental devastation of global warming, mass extinctions and oceanic acidification. Now it is clear that endless growth is a cancerous, destructive and unsustainable delusion. So the paradox is not why a few people insist on staying poor amid all the wealth. Rather, the paradox is how is it possible for a handful to become increasingly, obscenely wealthy when so many billions of people in the world, and the planet itself, seem doomed to misery and poverty.
Seen from that angle, the explanation is self-evident. All the wealth has been extracted from the masses of exploited and colonized people and from the biosphere of the planet itself. All the power is amassed by transferring it from the masses of oppressed and colonized people and nations into the hands of the oppressors and colonizers. Not really a paradox at all, it is simply the irreconcilable and inescapable contradiction that is at the heart of the system of colonialism/capitalism. The stratagems of liberal or neo-liberal, conservative or neo-conservative theorists and practitioners only serve to delay and increase the enormity of the inevitable explosive resolution of that contradiction through the expropriation of the expropriators and the suppression of the oppressors.
However, socially, culturally and politically, new paradoxes do seem to emerge in this stage of not merely moribund but necrotic capitalism. One that springs to mind is the paradox of how a Black man can emerge as the front runner for the Democratic nomination and the presidency, at the same time that a majority of all Black men in the US serve time at some time in prisons and jails. How is it possible that simultaneously with the nation-wide spread of nooses at high schools, colleges and workplaces- when the noose is a symbol of mass white complicity in racist terror through lynchings - that a Black candidate for president would garner compelling majorities in predominantly white states? Yet really, the two phenomena are flip sides of the same coin, the desperation of the doomed social system of settler colonial empire and white supremacy. It is not uncommon in the history and life span of empires that in their decadence and senescence, they seek rejuvenation and a new lease on life by conferring the imperial throne on someone from the ranks of the colonized. Neither is the last-ditch, die-hard turn to reactionary violence and terror uncommon, particularly among settler-colonial societies that see the handwriting on the wall, such as in the Reconstruction-era South, "French" Algeria or Rhodesia.
The notion that Barack Obama is to any degree the candidate of a "movement" is a measure of the degradation of both language and politics in the period since the defeat and disorientation of the revolutionary struggles of the 60s and 70s through COINTELPRO and other counter-insurgency warfare. It is not racist to compare the Obama candidacy to Jesse Jackson's reformist Rainbow Coalition campaigns in the 1980s. Doing so makes it iimmeiately clear that Obama is simply a youthful, charismatic and rhetorically gifted speaker and a conventional politician. He has never challenged or opposed the Empire or even its most retrograde and reactionary sectors through any form of mass action, militance or grassroots organizing and resistance during his entire career or in his current platform.
Jackson, for all his personal flaws and political reformism, at least came out of a massive social movement, and attempted to unite various opposition sectors beginning with poor and working people. Jackson staked his campaign on voter registration of the disenfranchised, unity among Black, Mexicano, Asian and white workers. He actually had success in winning some white 'Reagan Democrat' workers in places like Michigan, because he created a pole of attraction by uniting significant movement sectors of people of color and by speaking out forcefully gainst unfair privilege and advantage.
Obama, on the heels of massive electoral fraud and ongoing disenfranchisement directed against Black people, of the institutionalization of thuggishness in the Republicans and spinelessness in the Democrats, presents himself as a post-racial, post-partisan "unifier." Democrats who spent eight years praying for someone who would stand up to and stick it to the Republicans are now falling head-over-heels for someone who presents himself as a paragon of bipartisanship. This only serves to underline the deeply delusional nature of a belief in the efficacy of the US electoral system to produce any meaningful or significant change. Supporting Obama allows people who are not prepared to acknowledge or break with the system of white supremacy and settler colonial empire the ability to feel that they are color-blind and have transcended racism. Thus their extreme discomfort with Hillary Clinton and her "injection" of race into the race. Aren't we beyond that?
Obama, conveniently for Euro-American society, answers the paradox of poverty amid plenty - he 'proves' that poverty, particularly Black poverty, is the fault of the poor - while allowing the privileged to ignore the paradox of plenty amid poverty. Perhaps more pertinent than the comparison to Jackson would be one to Cynthia McKinney. McKinney fought back ferociously against Black disenfranchisement, opposed US support for Zionist aggression, questioned the official story of '9-11' and opposed gentrification, mass incarceration and the locking up of political dissidents and Muslims. As a result, she was twice ousted from her Congressional seat, and her campaign for the presidency via the Green Party receives scant media attention, all of it negative. Bycontrast, Obama politely opposed the war in Iraq when he could do little officially, and has done little officially against it since he could. As the war enters is 6th (or really, 16th) year, he now proposes to withdraw 'combat' troops - not all US forces. So he is the Democratic front runner.
To get there and stay there, Obama has had to discipline and/or distance himself not only from Farrakhan but even from his own wife and his spiritual advisor. John Edwards has had more to say about New Orleans than Obama. George Bush, for that matter, spoke out more forcefully about the spate of nooses in the aftermath of the Jena Six case than Obama did. Is it possible to even imagine Obama drawing attention to the selective prosecution and set-up case of the Black Rider 3 in Los Angeles, or calling for a moratorium on the incarceration of Black and Mexicano/indigenous youth, or speaking out against the unparalleled increase in police killings in Los Angeles and around the US? Would Obama use his candidacy to draw attention to the Winter Soldier hearings organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, let alone support active duty resisters inside the military? Obama asks us only to put rage and resentment behind us, and trust him.
It's noteworthy that Obama's candidacy has in fact failed to stimulate an outpouring of Black voters from the ranks of the poor and dispossessed. He is winning high percentages of the Black people who cast ballots, but the new voters he is drawing to the polls have come not from the poor Black masses but from young college graduates, predominantly white. His candidacy is a manifestation of the class divide that has opened inside the Black community between the downtrodden, dispossessed poor and the stratum that has been given a degree of entry into positions ofstatus and wealth within the corporate economic and political system.
Where once relatively well-to-do Black people functioned in relationship to, and drew their support and their wealth from, the Black masses, perhaps serving as interlocutors between them and white society, today's so-called Black bourgeoisie owes its status to separation from the Black masses and incorporation into the white power structure. We have moved beyond the 'house negro/field negro' distinction drawn by Malcolm X, to a distinction between Black overseers, managers and consiglieres of white property interests on the one hand, and Black lumpen, super-exploited andcurrent, former and future prisoners on the other.
The smart money in the Empire is betting on Obama in hopes that he will prove clever enough, charismatic enough and capable enough to pull their chestnuts from the fire, to buy a little more time for them to maneuver. This is a pipe dream. The decay and disarray of imperialism, particularly that of the US Empire, is too far along to be easily surmounted (in which case Obama may then serve as a convenient fall guy if he does win). The paradox of plenty amid poverty is reaching its over-extended conclusion. No amount of "confidence-restoring" infusions of credit or monetary tinkering with interest rates will solve the ballooning crises of theUS economic system, because the crisis is not one of confidence - it is a crisis of the disappearance of wealth and productive capacity. The bursting of the housing bubble and the inevitable toppling of the rest of the house of cards derived from it is because the median-priced house is now far beyond the capacity of the median-income family. No amount of gentrification and no amount of sub-prime lending can create a market that will sustain the unsustainable. If there is no market for housing, because oppressed and exploited people cannot afford to buy, the price will collapse. Speculative flipping, interest-only loans, and packaging of mortgages into financial instruments have only made the collapse more colossal and damaging to the entire financial and banking system.
In an economic system whose growth sectors are prisons and health care, in which most productive capacity has been exported abroad to take advantage of super-exploited labor in China and India, and where even high-tech, high-value service jobs have followed the flight of capital, Obama has no solutions to offer. He will not deter US aggression against Iran or China.The oppressed, colonized and exploited inside the US must take responsibility for our own survival and future, in the first place by making common cause with the oppressed, exploited and colonized around the world, and by learning from them. We need to apply the methods of horizontal organizing, of environmentally-sound food production, of factory and land takeovers that are developing in Latin America, Africa and Asia. We need to recognize that those who rule this society - those who benefit from the paradox of plenty amid poverty - are our enemies. White supremacy, neo-colonialism and other forms of privilege within the empire will only bind us to a sinking ship and take us down with it. It is time to make a break with illusion, and end our identification with the Empire and the oppressor. We need to begin to strategize now, not how to ensure Obama's election, but how to deal with the Empire if Obama indeed becomes Emperor.