THE COMING AMERICAN REBELLION PART ONE

THE COMING AMERICAN REBELLION

Analysis of the Global Insurrection Against Neo-Liberal Economic Domination and the Coming American Rebellion

David DeGraw

THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION

Part One :: Neo-Liberal Economic Domination

I Centrally Planned Economic Repression

II Economic Imperialism: IMF Plunder of Egypt and Tunisia

III US-Egypt Economic Parallels: Inequality & Poverty

IV Debt Slavery: Unemployed, Underemployed, Underpaid, In Debt

V The American Dream Foreclosed Upon

VI A Recipe For Revolution: Tax Breaks for the Rich, Budget Cuts for the Poor

VII “Hungry People Don’t Stay Hungry For Long”

VIII The Empire State Rebellion

IX The Battle in Madison: A Sign of Things to Come


If you think what’s happening in Egypt won’t happen within the United States, you’ve been watching too much TV. The statistics speak for themselves.

In previous Revolution Roundups, before we were knocked offline, we featured mass protests by the people of Ireland, Italy, Britain, Austria, Greece, France and Portugal, as the Global Insurrection contagion spread throughout Europe. And now, as we have seen over the past month, North African and Middle Eastern nations have joined the movement as the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Morocco, Gabon, Mauritania, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan and Algeria have taken to the streets en masse.

The connection between this latest round of uprisings and the prior protests throughout Europe is one the mainstream media is not making. We are witnessing a decentralized global rebellion against Neo-Liberal economic imperialism. While each national uprising has its own internal characteristics, each one, at its core, is about the rising costs of living and lack of financial opportunity and security. Throughout the world the situation is the same: increasing levels of unemployment and poverty, as price inflation on food and basic necessities is soaring.

Whether national populations realize it or not, these uprisings are against systemic global economic policies that are strategically designed to exploit the working class, reduce living standards, increase personal debt and create severe inequalities of wealth. These global uprising, which have only just begun, are the first wave of the inevitable reaction to the implementation of a centralized worldwide Neo-Feudal economic order.

The global banking cartel, centered at the IMF, World Bank and Federal Reserve, have paid off politicians and dictators the world over — from Washington to Greece to Egypt. In country after country, they have looted national economies at the expense of local populations, consolidating wealth in unprecedented fashion – the top economic one-tenth of one percent is currently holding over $40 trillion in investible wealth, not counting an equally significant amount of wealth hidden in offshore accounts.

IMF imperial operations designed to extract wealth and suppress populations have been ongoing for decades. As anyone researching economic imperialism will know, a centrally planned Neo-Liberal aristocracy controls the global economy.

PART ONE

NEO-LIBERAL ECONOMIC DOMINATION

I CENTRALLY PLANNED ECONOMIC REPRESSION

The IMF has a well-worn strategy that they use to conquer national economies. As I warned four months ago, we have now progressed into Step 3.5: World Wide IMF Riots. Back in October, in a TV interview with Max Keiser, we discussed leaked World Bank documents that revealed the IMF’s strategy. I stated the following:

“They have a four-step strategy for destroying national economies…. We are about to enter what they would call Step Three. Step Three is when you’ve looted the economy and now food and basic necessities all of a sudden become more expensive, harder to get to. And then, Step 3.5 is when you get the riots. We are fastly approaching that….
We are headed to, as the IMF said, and as they plan, Step 3.5: IMF Riots. That’s what’s coming…”


Fast-forward four months to today, and now we see country after country rebelling against high food prices. Since our October interview, food prices have spiked 15%. According to new World Bank data, since June 2010, “Rising food have pushed about 44 million people into poverty in developing countries.”

As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced another round of Quantitative Easing (QE2), those of us paying attention knew that the trigger had been pulled and Step Three had been executed. It was a declaration of economic war, an economic death sentence for tens of millions of people – deliberately devaluing the dollar and sparking inflation in commodities/basic necessities. It was a vicious policy that would impact people from Boston to Cairo.

When QE2 was announced, I warned: “Food and Gas Prices Will Skyrocket, The Federal Reserve Just Dropped An Economic Nuclear Bomb On Us.” I also wrote: “The Federal Reserve is deliberately devaluing the dollar to enrich a small group of a global bankers, which will cause significant harm to the people of the United States and severe ramifications throughout the world…. The Federal Reserve’s actions are already causing the price of food and gas to increase and will cause hyperinflation on most basic necessities.”

To be clear, there are several significant factors contributing to rising food prices, such as extreme weather conditions, biofuel production and Wall Street speculation; but the Federal Reserve’s policies deliberately threw gasoline all over those brush fires. QE2 was another economic napalm bomb from the global banking cartel.

In a recent McClathy news article entitled, “Egypt’s unrest may have roots in food prices, US Fed policy,” Kevin Hall reports:

“‘The truth of the matter is that when the Federal Reserve moved on the quantitative easing, it did export inflation to a lot of these emerging markets…. There’s no doubt that one of the side effects of the weak dollar and quantitative easing has been rising commodity prices. It helped create this bullish environment for commodities. This is a very delicate balancing act.’

It’s a view shared by Ed Yardeni, a veteran financial market analyst, who reached a similar conclusion in a research note to investors…. He joked that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke should be added to a list of revolutionaries, since his quantitative easing policy, unveiled last year in Wyoming, has provoked unrest and change in the developing world.

‘Since he first indicated his support for such a revolutionary monetary change… the prices of corn, soybeans and wheat have risen 53 percent, 37 percent and 24.4 percent through Friday’s close,’ Yardeni noted. ‘The price of crude oil rose 19.8 percent over this period from $75.17 to $90.09 this (Monday) morning. Soaring food and fuel prices are compounding anger attributable to widespread unemployment in the countries currently experiencing riots.’”

The people throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa, on the fringe of the Neo-Liberal economic empire and most vulnerable to the Fed’s inflationary policies, are the first to rebel.
Before analyzing the situation within the US, let’s take a closer look at the global Neo-Liberal economic policies that led to the Egyptian and Tunisian revolts.

II ECONOMIC IMPERIALISM: IMF PLUNDER OF EGYPT AND TUNISIA

In the Middle East and North Africa populations are rising against their local dictators. However, these “dictators” take orders from the IMF.

A report from the Center for Research on Globalization revealed some background and historical context:

“The Alliance between Global Capitalism and Arab Dictators

It is paramount to understand that the Arab dictators and tyrants serve the interests of organized capital. This is their primary function. They are elements of the global system formed by organized capital.

Looking back, protests and riots started in 1977 against the regime of Mohammed Anwar Al-Sadat, Mubarak’s predecessor. The causes of these protests were the neo-liberal policies that the I.M.F. had handed down to Sadat. The I.M.F. policies ended government subsidies on basic daily commodities of life. Food prices jumped and Egyptians became hard-hit….

The Arab people grasp the fact that their ruling class and governments are not only corrupt regimes, but also comprador elites, namely the local representatives of foreign corporations, governments, and interests…. In Egypt, Gamal Mubarak (who was being groomed by his father for the presidency) worked for Bank of America.

In Tunisia, Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali was a military officer trained in French and American military schools who, once in power, served U.S. and French economic interests. In Lebanon, Fouad Siniora was a former Citibank official before he became prime minister…. Within the corrupt Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad worked for one of the banks forming the U.S. Federal Reserve and the World Bank….

Moreover, almost all Arab finance ministers are affiliated to the major global banking institutions. All of them also strictly adhere to the Washington Consensus of the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) and the World Bank…”

Samer Shehata, professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, summed up the situation in Egypt and Tunisia:

“Beginning in 2004… Egypt began implementing economic reforms called for by the IMF—or really forced on them by the IMF and the World Bank… a new government was appointed, new ministers were appointed, who believed wholeheartedly in the ideas of the IMF and the World Bank. And they quite vigorously pursued these policies. And there was at one level, at the level of macroeconomic indicators, statistics, GDP growth rates, foreign direct investment and so on—Egypt seemed to be a miracle. And this, of course, was the case with the Tunisian model earlier. You’ll remember that Jacques Chirac called it the ‘economic miracle,’ and it was the darling of the IMF and the World Bank, because it implemented these types of reforms earlier. Well, of course, we saw what happened in Tunisia. In Egypt, from 2004 until the present, the government and its reforms were applauded in Washington by World Bank, IMF and US officials…. Egypt received the top reformer award from the IMF and the World Bank…”

Former Goldman Sachs executive Nomi Prins reveals more details:

The Egyptian Uprising Is a Direct Response to Ruthless Global Capitalism
“The revolution in Egypt is as much a rebellion against the painful deterioration of economic conditions as it is about opposing a dictator…. When people are facing a dim future, in a country hijacked by a corrupt regime that destabilized its economy through what the CIA termed, ‘aggressively pursuing economic reforms to attract foreign investment’ (in other words, the privatization and sale of its country’s financial system to international sharks), waiting doesn’t cut it….

Tunisia’s dismal economic environment was a direct result of its increasingly ‘liberal’ policy toward foreign speculators. Of the five countries covered by the World Bank’s, Investment Across Sectors Indicator, Tunisia had the fewest limits on foreign investment…. Egypt adopted a similar come-and-get-it policy, on steroids…. But, as we learned in the U.S., what goes up with artificial helium plummets under real gravity…. Not surprisingly, those foreign speculation strategies didn’t bring less poverty or more jobs either. Indeed, the insatiable hunt for great deals, whether by banks, hedge funds, or private equity funds, as it inevitably does, had the opposite effect….

Ironically, the [Egyptian Ministry of Investment] brochure touted the large college graduate population entering the job market each year — 325,000. The same graduates are the core of the current revolution. They failed to find adequate jobs and are faced with an official unemployment rate of just below 10 percent (though, similar to the U.S., that figure doesn’t account for underemployment, poor job quality or long-term prospects)…. Meanwhile, 20 percent of Egypt lives in poverty… For in the United States, economic statistics are no better. By certain measures, like income inequality, they are worse than in Egypt.”

III US-EGYPT ECONOMIC PARALLELS, INEQUALITY & POVERTY

Comparable economic statistics between the US and Egypt are facts that US mainstream media propagandists are not reporting.

Inequality of Wealth

Income inequality has reached a record level within Egypt, as Pat Garofalo explained:
“One of the driving factors behind the protests is the… growing sense of inequality. ‘They’re all protesting about growing inequalities…. The top of the pyramid was getting richer and richer,’ said Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the Middle East.

As Yasser El-Shimy, former diplomatic attaché at the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote in Foreign Policy, ‘income inequality has reached levels not before seen in Egypt’s modern history.’”


As the US mainstream media references the “oppressive” and “corrupt” inequality of wealth throughout Egypt, the hypocrisy is shameful. The inequality of wealth in the United States is currently the most severe it has ever been. Gini coefficient ratings are a measure of a nation’s inequality – the higher a nation scores, the more unequal the society is. The US has a Gini coefficient rating of 45, compared to Egypt’s 34.4, Yemen’s 37 and Tunisia’s 40, making the US the most unequal, “oppressive” and “corrupt” of the four.

As John Dewey once said, “There is no such thing as the liberty or effective power of an individual, group, or class, except in relation to the liberties, the effective powers, of other individuals, groups or classes.”

Poverty

When well-paid “experts” in expensive suits sitting behind desks in state of the art studios discuss the hardships of the Egyptian people, something tells me that these pundits haven’t spent much time interacting with tens of millions of people living in inner city America – just because the mainstream media doesn’t cover them, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They exist in larger numbers in the US than they do in most rebelling countries.

The rising price of food has played a pivotal role in sparking the uprisings, food prices have a larger impact in countries like Egypt and Tunisia, as they represent a more significant percentage of total income. However, the overall costs of living in the US are significantly higher. When these costs are factored in — medical expenses, housing, transportation, education, etc. – the US poverty level of $22k per year, for a family of four, is comparable to the poverty rate measure in Egypt.

According to the CIA, the poverty rate in Egypt is 20%. With a population size of 83 million people, this would put 16.6 million Egyptians living in poverty. In the US, the current poverty rate is 16.8%, with a population of 309 million, this puts 52 million Americans living below the poverty line.

When you consider that the US has 52 million people currently living in poverty, you realize, as shocking as it may sound, that we have a larger number of desperate people in the US than rebelling populations in countries throughout the Middle East and Europe. Overall, in comparison to Egypt, the US population is obviously more geographically spread out, but if you breakdown the demographics, many large US cities have a poverty rate higher than the 20 percent rate in Egypt.

Consider that, according to low-ball government statistics, nine major US cities have a poverty rate over 25%.

IV DEBT SLAVERY: UNEMPLOYED, UNDEREMPLOYED, UNDERPAID, IN DEBT

The unemployment rate in Egypt mirrors the unemployment rate in the US, currently fluctuating between nine and ten percent, according to government sources. The unemployment rate among recent graduates attempting to enter the workforce also mirrors the crisis in the US. The young unemployed and underemployed demographic has played a pivotal role in leading the rebellion. Reporting for the Financial Times in an article entitled, “At hand, an Arab awakening,” Roula Khalaf sums it up this way:

“In Egypt, as in Tunisia, the young people who initiated the street campaigns were educated, internet-savvy activists with no political affiliation. [Sound familiar?] After watching the fervour unleashed in the past month, young Syrians, Bahrainis, Algerians and even the quiescent Libyans are turning to Facebook and Twitter to call for their own ‘day of rage’.

As Mr Khashoggi puts it: ‘The 25-year-old unemployed today has become the strong man.’”
A report from Business Week entitled, “The Youth Unemployment Bomb,” provides more detail:

“In Tunisia, the young people who helped bring down a dictator are called hittistes—French-Arabic slang for those who lean against the wall. Their counterparts in Egypt… are the shabab atileen, unemployed youths… In Britain, they are NEETs – ‘not in education, employment, or training.’ In Japan, they are freeters: an amalgam of the English word freelance and the German word Arbeiter, or worker. Spaniards call them mileuristas, meaning they earn no more than 1,000 euros a month. In the U.S., they’re ‘boomerang’ kids who move back home after college because they can’t find work. Even fast-growing China… has its ‘ant tribe’ – recent college graduates who crowd together in cheap flats on the fringes of big cities because they can’t find well-paying work.

In each of these nations, an economy that can’t generate enough jobs to absorb its young people has created a lost generation of the disaffected, unemployed, or underemployed—including growing numbers of recent college graduates for whom the post-crash economy has little to offer….

More common is the quiet desperation of a generation in ‘waithood,’ suspended short of fully employed adulthood. At 26, Sandy Brown of Brooklyn, N.Y., is a college graduate and a mother of two who hasn’t worked in seven months. ‘I used to be a manager at a Duane Reade in Manhattan, but they laid me off. I’ve looked for work everywhere and I can’t find anything,’ she says. ‘It’s like I got my diploma for nothing.’”

The collapsing job market, declining wages, loss of benefits and skyrocketing cost of education has created a “lost generation” of young college graduates with little options and massive debt. When millions of American students took out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans to pay for an education which they assumed would give them the skills needed to make a good living, they never imagined that they would be either unemployed, working part-time, or making significantly less than people in their chosen profession have traditionally made. The majority of young workers in their twenties and early thirties have debt that they will spend most of their life trying to pay back. They’ve been sentenced to a life of…

Debt Slavery

Mike Whitney recently interviewed Alan Nasser on CounterPunch for a piece entitled, “The Student Loan Swindle.” Here’s an excerpt:

“MW: Is it possible to ‘walk away’ from a student loan and declare bankruptcy?
Alan Nasser: No, it’s not possible for student debtors to escape financial devastation by declaring bankruptcy. This most fundamental of consumer protections would have been available to student debtors were it not for legislation explicitly designed to withhold a whole range of basic protections from student borrowers. I’m not talking only about bankruptcy protection, but also truth in lending requirements, statutes of limitations, refinancing rights and even state usury laws – Congress has rendered all these protections inapplicable to federally guaranteed student loans. The same legislation also gave collection agencies hitherto unimaginable powers, for example to garnish wages, tax returns, Social Security benefits and – believe it or not – Disability income.

Twisting the knife, legislators made the suspension of state-issued professional licenses, termination of public employment and denial of security clearances legitimate measures to enable collection companies to wring financial blood from bankrupt student-loan borrowers. Student loan debt is the most punishable of all forms of debt – most of those draconian measures are unavailable to credit card companies….

MW: Is it fair to say that the student loan industry is a scam that targets borrowers who will never be able to repay their debts? Are these students like the people who were seduced into taking out subprime loans? How much money is involved and how much of that money is either presently in default or headed for default?

Alan Nasser: It’s as fair as fair can be. First, the student loan industry is huge – a large majority of students from every type of school are in debt. Debt is held by 62 percent of students enrolled at public colleges and universities, 72 percent at private non-profit schools and 96 percent at private, for-profit (‘proprietary’) schools. It was announced last summer that total student loan debt, at $830 billion, now exceeds total US credit card debt, which is itself bloated to the bubble level of $827 billion. And student loan debt is growing at the rate of $90 billion a year.”


These students weren’t expecting an economic crisis to occur, and, unlike the banks that lent them the money, they’re not getting a bailout. Also factor in that the overwhelming majority of new jobs, the few that are being added, are either part-time, temporary or in low paying fields without health or retirement benefits. Mix all of this together, and you have a vicious cycle with devastating consequences.
Given the size of this segment of the population, carrying this much debt, at such a young age, with limited prospects, you can feel the winds of revolution blowing.

Contrary to all the propaganda you hear from the mainstream media and politicians, the economy is still shedding jobs at a staggering pace. ZeroHedge recently featured a report entitled, “Just How Ugly Is The Truth Of America’s Unemployment” by economist David Rosenberg:

“It is laughable that everyone believes the labor market in the U.S.A. is improving.… The data from the Household survey are truly insane. The labor force has plunged an epic 764k in the past two months. The level of unemployment has collapsed 1.2 million, which has never happened before. People not counted in the labor force soared 753k in the past two months.

These numbers are simply off the charts and likely reflect the throngs of unemployed people starting to lose their extended benefits and no longer continuing their job search (for the two-thirds of them not finding a new job). These folks either go on welfare or they rely on their spouse or other family members or friends for support….

Of all the analysis we saw over the weekend, the only one that made any sense was the editorial by Bob Herbert:

‘The policy makers don’t tell us that most of the new jobs being created in such meager numbers are, in fact, poor ones, with lousy pay and few or no benefits. What we hear is what the data zealots pump out week after week, that the market is up, retail sales are strong, Wall Street salaries and bonuses are streaking, as always, to the moon, and that businesses are sitting on mountains of cash. So all must be right with the world.

Jobs? Well, the less said the better.

What’s really happening, of course, is the same thing that’s been happening in this country for the longest time — the folks at the top are doing fabulously well and they are not interested in the least in spreading the wealth around.

The people running the country — the ones with the real clout, whether Democrats or Republicans — are all part of this power elite. Ordinary people may be struggling, but both the Obama administration and the Republican Party leadership are down on their knees, slavishly kissing the rings of the financial and corporate kingpins.’

… the civilian population rose 1.872 million last year. At the same time, the labor force fell 167k. Those not in the labor force soared 2.094 million. Just in January, we saw 319,000 people drop out of the work force. These numbers are incredible. This is a highly dysfunctional labor market. People are falling through the cracks at an alarming rate as they come off their extended jobless benefits….”


In the US, we have over six million people who have now been unemployed for over six months, the highest total we have ever had. Factoring long-term unemployed and part-time workers looking for full-time work in to the total unemployment count, we now have over 30 million Americans in need of employment.

V THE AMERICAN DREAM FORECLOSED UPON

The foreclosure crisis in the United States, which has already affected over seven million people since the crisis began, is not slowing down, it’s accelerating. Economist Joseph Stiglitz recently predicated another two million foreclosures in 2011. David Walsh sums up the growing crisis:

Nearly 30 percent of US homeowners now ‘underwater’

“Year over year, home values were down 5.9 percent nationally, and have fallen 27 percent since their peak in June 2006. The total value of US single-family homes fell a staggering $798 billion in 2010’s fourth quarter, and for the entire year, more than $2 trillion….

The number of US homeowners ‘underwater,’ i.e., owing more than their homes were worth, at the end of 2010, jumped to 27 percent, up from 23.2 percent in the third quarter…. ‘The rate of homes selling for a loss reached a new peak in December, with more than one-third (34.1 percent) selling for a loss. The rate of homes sold for a loss has increased steadily for the past six months.’ Some 15.7 million homeowners had negative equity at the end of the fourth quarter, in households home to more than 40 million people.

The massive number of those underwater will ‘surely lead to higher foreclosure rates soon,’ notes CNNMoney…. Economist Joseph Stiglitz, speaking at a conference in Mauritius February 9, predicted that another 2 million foreclosures would take place in the US in 2011, adding to the 7 million already recorded since the financial meltdown of 2008.

Banks repossessed 1 million homes in 2010, and this year is expected to be bleaker. Approximately 5 million borrowers are at least two months behind in their mortgage payments.”

VI A RECIPE FOR REVOLUTION: TAX BREAKS FOR THE RICH, BUDGET CUTS FOR THE POOR

Let’s recap the statistics: we have 59 million people without healthcare, 52 million in poverty, 44 million on food stamps, 30 million in need of work, seven million foreclosed upon and five million homes over two months late in their mortgage payments. Meanwhile, all new political policies and proposals on the table, on the state and federal level, are committed to major cuts in social services. In a sign of what’s to come, Obama’s first disclosed spending cut targets the poor. As Salon recently reported:

New Obama strategy: Beat up poor people

“To prove it is ‘serious’ about the deficit, the White House proposes cutting a program that helps pay heating bills. The Obama administration… will propose big cuts to a program that provides energy assistance to poor people when it unveils its suggested 2012 budget. ‘The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP… would see funding drop by about $2.5 billion from an authorized 2009 total of $5.1 billion.’

The news is generating a lot of outrage… in large part because of a paragraph that suggests that the White House wants to gain political advantage from being seen as tough on the most vulnerable Americans — people who can’t afford heating oil during cold winters…. If the White House wants to convince Americans that it is serious about budget discipline, it should do so by ‘going after powerful vested interests rather than those least able to defend themselves within the political arena.’ The White House could redouble its efforts to cut oil company subsidies or repeal tax cuts for the rich, for example.”

As The Independent reported, “Obama to set out painful budget plans for austerity in America. Americans are about to get a first glimpse of what tight-fisted federal government looks like with President Barack Obama releasing an austerity-tinged draft budget.”

In a report we featured on the AmpedStatus Hot List with the headline, “US Democracy Crushed By Economic Elite,” Bob Herbert sums it up:

“One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from nearly all quarters.

The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won’t be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They’ll be genuflecting before the very rich.”

Austerity measures and draconian cuts to the social safety net are occurring just after passing hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to multi-millionaires and billionaires. On the state level, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report revealing, “Thirty-one states have released their initial budget proposals for fiscal year 2012 (which begins July 1 in most states), and, for the fourth year in a row, these budgets propose deep cuts in education, health care, and other important public services…”

After committing trillions of dollars to bailing out the big banks, the Federal Reserve and government officials have now made it clear that the states will not receive the same treatment. In fact, the bailed out players on Wall Street, who have taken our tax dollars and given themselves all-time record-breaking bonuses, are looking to cash in on the suffering of states across the country. As Lynn Parramore recently put it:

Crank Up the Casino! Hedge Funds to Short American States and Cities

“The looming possibility of municipal defaults, which some say could total hundreds of billions of dollars, is causing grave concern. Hedge funds are also deeply concerned about America’s municipal debt crisis. They worry about how to best profit from it.

The Wizards of Wall Street have looked over the catastrophe of cash-strapped America and found it good for business. In their corporate laboratories, they are working furiously to whip up wondrous new financial products that will allow them to reap millions from misery. You might think that after plunging the country into said Recession with their fancy financial products, these Wizards might feel a little indelicate about gearing up for a game of shorting a community near you. Clearly you don’t know Wall Street. The Financial Times reports that once-boring muni bonds are suddenly sexy.”


Speaking of reaping millions from misery, the food stamp racket pays off just as well as the war racket. The economic parasites profit off of food stamps:

Food Stamps: JPMorgan & Banking Industry Profit From Misery

“JPMorgan’s division that makes food stamp debit cards made $5.47 billion in net revenue in 2010. As the head of this division, Christopher Paton, says, ‘This business is a very important business to JPMorgan in terms of its size and scale.’ According to the company’s most recent quarterly filing with the SEC, the Treasury & Securities Services segment, which is the division that includes the food stamp business, was up 2% in the last three months of last quarter and brought in $5.47 billion in net revenue for most of 2010.”


Republicans and Democrats, along with their Wall Street masters, are so arrogant, deluded with wealth, completely lacking perspective, shortsighted and, quite frankly, ignorant.

As the economic top one-tenth of one percent has more wealth than they have ever had, the middle class is quickly disappearing and poverty is soaring. As politicians ignore the needs of the suffering masses in favor of a Kleptocratic Oligarchy, which operates above the law, it is only a matter of time before an uprising takes hold.

After analyzing societal and economic indicators within the US, in comparison to rebelling countries, it is not a matter of whether people will revolt or not, it’s a matter of when.

There are two significant differences between the United States and other rebelling nations:

1) The US has a much more powerful, sophisticated and omnipresent propaganda media system to keep the populace suppressed – isolated and confused.

2) The US keeps 52 million people temporarily pacified in anti-poverty programs by giving them food stamps, unemployment benefits or other forms of life-sustaining government assistance.

Both of these differences are temporary, and not in any way sustainable. The safety nets here are unraveling and cuts in vital social services will be implemented just as millions more will need them. At the same time, food stamps and other forms of limited government assistance will be worth less and less as food and gas prices continue to rise.

Rising commodity prices will push the 239 million Americans currently living paycheck to paycheck over the edge. Also factor in healthcare costs, which have been skyrocketing even faster. On a personal level, my health insurance provider just notified me that my family has to pay 45% more for coverage – and we already had the world’s most expensive healthcare system. For my wife, one child and myself, we will now have to pay over $1100 per month for a basic health insurance plan.

There are currently 59 million Americans who don’t even have healthcare insurance. The health system has become vintage Grapes of Wrath, as have most aspects of the centrally planned system of economic despotism that we live under.

Add all of these factors together and you have a recipe for revolution. The mainstream propaganda news outlets and “Reality” TV soma will only keep people at bay for so long. The propaganda system collapses when people can’t afford to eat. Americans may be late to the party, but once one city revolts, the dominos will fall and a wave of protest will sweep through the country like a tsunami.

The only questions are: when will it happen, and how it will begin?

VII “HUNGRY PEOPLE DON’T STAY HUNGRY FOR LONG”

Food prices have been a leading indicator for rebellion thus far. Given the Federal Reserve’s commitment to driving food prices higher, as a matter of policy, and the government’s commitment to cutting assistance programs, people lining up at Wal-Mart on the last day of the month, waiting for the clock to strike midnight so they can buy their family milk and bread on their food stamp debit card, seem to be the most likely to rebel first.

As food prices increase, food stamps are obviously going to buy you less food. On top of that, as food prices escalate, millions more will need food assistance, right at the point when the current safety net can least afford it.

Let’s analyze the most recent food stamp data to see how America’s inevitable revolution may begin.

With 43.6 million Americans currently relying on food stamps, there are 13 states with over a million people already on food stamps:

• Texas 3,925,119 (number of people on food stamps) — 15.6% (of state population)
• California 3,521,881 — 9.5%
• Florida 2,994,413 — 15.9%
• New York 2,934,493 — 15.1%
• Michigan 1,920,330 – 19.4%
• Ohio 1,772,608 — 15.4%
• Georgia 1,732,865 — 17.9%
• Illinois 1,732,169 — 13.5%
• Pennsylvania 1,673,714 — 13.2%
• North Carolina 1,531,255 — 16.1%
• Tennessee 1,264,407 — 19.9%
• Arizona 1,050,181 — 16.4%
• Washington 1,019,791 — 15.2%

States with over 18% of the population on food stamps:

• Mississippi 612,889 — 20.7%
• Tennessee 1,264,407 — 19.9%
• Oregon 749,498 — 19.6%
• Michigan 1,920,330 — 19.4%
• New Mexico 399,454 — 19.4%
• Louisiana 866,905 — 19.1%
• West Virginia 345,683 — 18.7%
• Kentucky 813,041 — 18.7%
• Maine 241,117 — 18.2%
• South Carolina 839,109 — 18.1%
• Alabama 863,606 — 18.1%

In our nation’s capital, the District of Columbia, there are 131,611 people on food stamps, which is a stunning 21.9% of the population.

As mentioned before, cities with a poverty rate over 25% – Detroit 36%, Cleveland 35%, Buffalo 29%, Milwaukee 28%, St. Louis 27%, Miami 27%, Memphis 26%, Cincinnati 26% and Philadelphia 25% – are also highly vulnerable to revolt.

VIII THE EMPIRE STATE REBELLION

Given all the data, due to New York’s geographical lay out, population size and proximity to power, it is a prime candidate for insurrection. There are currently 2.9 million people living in New York that are on food stamps, which is equivalent to the entire population of Manhattan. Just imagine three million people flooding into lower Manhattan. Imagine if three million people decided to take a 15-30 minute subway ride down to the Financial District and camped out from Wall Street to the NY Fed, spilling over to the corporate offices of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America.

Perhaps the one million people on food stamps from New Jersey and Connecticut will make a short trip into lower Manhattan as well, four million strong shutting down lower Manhattan, the economic capital of the world.

How would that play out in the global media?

One million people gathering in Cairo, Egypt sent shock waves throughout the world, and rightfully so, but just wait until millions of Americans begin flooding the streets. The revolution contagion will spread throughout the world like a category five hurricane.

“The civilization may still seem brilliant because it possesses an outward front,
the work of a long past, but is in reality an edifice crumbling to ruin
and destined to fall in at the first storm.”

– Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

IX THE BATTLE IN MADISON: A SIGN OF THINGS TO COME

While bloated federal and state spending has grown to staggering levels of debt, and demands immediate attention, any cut in spending or attempts to reduce the deficit must first come at the expense of the organized criminal class that has looted the national economy. Any cuts that happen before that need to be understood as an escalation and extension of the attacks on the American people.

While continuing their attacks on American small businesses and private-sector workers, the global financial elite are now stepping up their attacks on public workers. In this context, the Wisconsin state government attacks against the state teachers’ union doesn’t have anything to do with the old Democrat Vs. Republican divide and conquer debates of the past. This is about people fighting back against their economic oppressors. In Egypt, Mubarak was the Neo-Liberal Aristocracy’s local enforcer. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker is the Neo-Liberal Aristocracy’s local enforcer.

This battle in Madison, Wisconsin, between the American people and the global financial elite, represents the opening salvo, the awakening of an American resistance movement and a sign of what’s to come.

In a report entitled, “Wisconsin governor threatens to call National Guard on state workers,” Andre Damon explains the situation:

“Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, announced an assault against state…. Walker’s proposal, which he said would quickly pass in the state legislature, drastically limits collective bargaining, removing the right of unions to negotiate pensions, retirement and benefits….

When asked by a reporter what will happen if workers resist, Walker replied that he would call out the National Guard. He said that the National Guard is ‘prepared … for whatever the governor, their commander-in-chief, might call for … I am fully prepared for whatever may happen.’

Walker’s proposal allows state authorities to arbitrarily fire workers who ‘participate in an organized action to stop or slow work,’ or who ‘are absent for three days without approval of the employer,’ according to the governor’s press release.”

Democracy Now pointed out:

“… the governor’s actions could have national ramifications: ‘If Governor Walker pulls this off… if he takes down one of the strongest and most effective teachers’ unions, WEAC, in the country, then we really are going to see this sweep across the United States.’”

As a recent Washington Post report summed it up:

Workers toppled a dictator in Egypt, but might be silenced in Wisconsin
“In Egypt, workers are having a revolutionary February. In the United States, by contrast, February is shaping up as the cruelest month workers have known in decades.

The coup de grace that toppled Hosni Mubarak came after tens of thousands of Egyptian workers went on strike beginning last Tuesday. By Friday, when Egypt’s military leaders apparently decided that unrest had reached the point where Mubarak had to go, the Egyptians who operate the Suez Canal and their fellow workers in steel, textile and bottling factories; in hospitals, museums and schools; and those who drive buses and trains had left their jobs to protest their conditions of employment and governance. As Jim Hoagland noted in The Post, Egypt was barreling down the path that Poland, East Germany and the Philippines had taken, the path where workers join student protesters in the streets and jointly sweep away an authoritarian regime.

But even as workers were helping topple the regime in Cairo, one state government in particular was moving to topple workers’ organizations here in the United States…. Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s new Republican governor, proposed taking away most collective bargaining rights of public employees. Under his legislation… the unions representing teachers, sanitation workers, doctors and nurses at public hospitals, and a host of other public employees, would lose the right to bargain over health coverage, pensions and other benefits. (To make his proposal more politically palatable, the governor exempted from his hit list the unions representing firefighters and police.)….

[Those who] often profess admiration for foreign workers’ bravery in protesting and undermining authoritarian regimes. Letting workers exercise their rights at home, however, threatens to undermine some of our own regimes, and shouldn’t be permitted. Now that Wisconsin’s governor has given the Guard its marching orders, we can discern a new pattern of global repressive solidarity emerging – from the chastened pharaoh of the Middle East to the cheesehead pharaoh of the Middle West.”