April 2008

By Nick Dearden
Counterpunch.org

In recent weeks, Haiti has been gripped by violent protest yet again. And yet again the inhabitants of this impoverished country are suffering the most brutal consequences of the fallout of the global economic crisis. This time it is the rise in global food prices, which has sparked riots in Port au Prince, Haiti’s capital, where UN peacekeepers used rubber bullets and tear gas against protesters attempting to storm the presidential palace. Days later the prime minister was fired.

It is therefore particularly appropriate that on Tuesday this week -the anniversary of the death of Haiti’s dictator, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier - hundreds of debt campaigners fasted for Haiti’s debt to be cancelled. Haiti’s fate has been tied up with the issue of international debt more than any other country. Despite the fact that its debt is illegitimate by any standards and despite Haiti’s sorry position as the poorest country in the western hemisphere, it still owes $1.3bn. Every year debt repayments flow from Haiti to multilateral banks, just as its resources once enriched the French empire.

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Stretched buyers fuel boom in housing: Engine behind the country’s housing boom has been increasingly leveraged first-time buyers

By Tavia Grant
Globe and Mail
April 23, 2008

Canada may not have the sizable subprime market of the U.S., but the engine behind the country’s housing boom has been increasingly leveraged first-time buyers.

Legions of first-timers are adding years of extra mortgage payments so they can buy a house, or putting little or no money into a down payment, a Re/Max survey revealed yesterday. Nearly two-thirds of buyers in major centres now favour extended amortization periods of up to 40 years, while putting little or no money down was prevalent in 38 per cent of regional markets surveyed across Canada.

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The B-List is your monthly media supplement of 7 recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch. Sign up to have the B-List delivered to your inbox at briarpatchmagazine.com

By Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
March 11, 2008

“In the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today’s left, however, effectively offers global capitalism with a human face: more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not.”

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/11/everybody_in_the_world_except_us

2. The Canadian Nixon: Stephen Harper’s feud with Elections Canada is just the latest front in his war against government institutions

By Dimitry Anastakis and Jeet Heer
The Guardian
April 24, 2008

“Canadians have never had a prime minister who has literally made his career attacking and undermining the legitimacy of Canadian institutions. Until now.”

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dimitry_anastakis_and_jeet_heer/2008/04/the_canadian_nixon.html

3. To hell with good intentions: The case against volunteering abroad

By Ivan Illich
An address to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects
April 20, 1968

“All you will do in a Mexican village is create disorder. At best, you can try to convince Mexican girls that they should marry a young man who is self-made, rich, a consumer, and as disrespectful of tradition as one of you. At worst, in your ‘community development’ spirit you might create just enough problems to get someone shot after your vacation ends — and you rush back to your middle-class neighborhoods where your friends make jokes about ’spits’ and ‘wetbacks.’”

http://www.augustana.ab.ca/rdx/eng/activism_illich.htm

4. The other Eliot Spitzer: Why the $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked

By Greg Palast
Air America Radio
March 14th, 2008

“Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush’s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of ‘federal pre-emption,’ Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws. Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer’s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush’s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.”

http://www.gregpalast.com/elliot-spitzer-gets-nailed/

5. Want to save the economy? Spread the wealth and give workers a raise

By Mike Whitney
Counterpunch.org
April 12, 2008

“Working people don’t need lectures on saving money; they need a raise. The big-wigs at Bear Stearns are still dining on crab-cakes at the Four Seasons while the working folk are just trying to make their way through Greenspan’s nuclear winter living on beef jerky and Big Gulps. Where’s the justice?”

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney04122008.html

6. The Politics of Food is Politics: An alternative agriculture is possible

By De Clarke and Stan Goff
Counterpunch.org
April 24, 2008

“The Food Underground is already here. It has been invisible to many of us, because our eyes were fixed on ‘higher’ ideological struggles, while the basis of effective counter-ideology — skill and design — quietly passed us by. It is time to change that. Political resisters need to learn and apply the skills and designs of the food underground; and the food underground needs deeper, more focused and intentional politicization.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/goff04242008.html

7. Take action on the global food crisis

Avaaz.org
April 28, 2008

“Petition to G8, UN and EU leaders: We call on you to take immediate action to address the world food crisis by mobilizing emergency funding to prevent starvation, removing perverse incentives to turn food into biofuels and managing financial speculation, and to tackle the underlying causes by ending harmful trade policies and investing massively in sustainable agricultural productivity in developing nations.”

http://www.avaaz.org/en/global_food_crisis/1.php?cl=82304029

The B-List is made possible through the generous support of the print subscribers of Briarpatch Magazine.

“Buy this car to drive to work
drive to work to pay for this car.”
Metric

When the world is combusting all around us, it seems a little petty to devote an entire issue of Briarpatch to questions of debt and personal finance. But in many ways, the subject couldn’t be more pressing or more in need of radical intervention. Canadians’ debt levels have never been higher, and widespread indebtedness, in addition to serving as an effective vehicle for transferring more wealth to the wealthy, also acts as a powerful means of social control. Debt restricts people’s choices, compelling them to work longer hours at jobs they hate, and limits their ability to unplug from the engine of growth and to seek out alternate ways of sustaining themselves and their communities.

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By Don Sawyer
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2008

In fighting plans for a mammoth big box store that would devour the small city I call home, I have made a startling discovery: a dangerous cult has spread from the heart of darkest Arkansas, jumped the border and brainwashed millions of innocent Canadians into its doctrine of diabolical materialism.

The cult I speak of is called Wal-Marxism, and it is so pervasive and insidious that it is quickly supplanting all other contemporary belief systems. Wal-Marxism can be summed up in a single statement promulgated by leading Wal-Marxist theorists: “From each according to his/her ability to mortgage, borrow, leverage and squander, to each according to his/her constantly expanding, insatiable, advertising-fuelled need for stuff.”

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By Calvin Neufeld
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2008

The plan: save money, buy land, build a house, grow food, heat with wood, quit jobs, and self-sustain­ — all without going into debt.

Although I was raised in the suburbs of Montreal, my life today resembles that of my Mennonite ancestors. In the winter I bathe in a tub of snow (melted and heated first, of course). I live in a one-room house without electricity or plumbing. I do my business in an outhouse, or sometimes, to my wife’s displeasure, in the great outdoors. I cut and chop all of my own firewood, and gather twigs almost daily for kindling. It’s hard work, but it pays off. The earth isn’t the only beneficiary of this lifestyle, either; this is my ticket to financial independence.

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By Geordie Gwalgen Dent
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2008

Ah, springtime, 1930. U.S. stock markets had slightly recovered from the “Black Tuesday” crash of the year before. Credit was cheap and the Western world was spending freely. Though people had been spooked, optimism reigned again. Few people knew that the entire global economy was on the edge of a precipice and about to begin a slow, brutal, downward spiral that would usher in almost a decade of misery for countless Canadians and others around the world.

If you’ve been following the recent financial news about the “subprime crisis” closely, some of this might sound eerily familiar. This financial fiasco involving thousands of mortgage defaults in the U.S. was considered by many to be a minor bump in the road when it made headlines last August. And now? The U.S. is in recession and there is speculation it will spread to other countries.

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By Dave Oswald Mitchell
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2008

“The rich ruleth over the poor,
and the borrower is slave to the lender.”

Proverbs 22:7

Reasons to get out:

1. We are a nation of debt slaves

“Debt throughout most of history has been little more than a slight variation on slavery,” wrote Michael Hudson in his prescient May 2006 article in Harper’s (”The New Road to Serfdom: An illustrated guide to the coming real estate collapse”). Today, however, perceptions have changed to such a degree that a mortgage is now seen as an “investment,” and levels of personal indebtedness for both Canadians and Americans have never been higher.

The Vanier Institute of the Family recently reported that Canadians’ household debt rose seven times faster than income between 1990 and 2007. This debt now represents a record 131 per cent of average household income, meaning that for every $100 of net income earned in Canada last year, $131 was owed.

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By Kubate Baba Edward
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2008

My thoughts on money and investing have been shaped by my upbringing. I was raised in a 20-person household in northern Ghana. Six of us shared a small hut, beautifully roofed with thatch. The rest of my relatives lived in adjacent huts. We sustained ourselves on earnings from a small rice and millet farm. Whatever little money or food came into the home was shared equally among us.

Life with six people in a small hut was not easy. We would clamour for space like an elephant trying to enter a pigeonhole. I was often embarrassed when friends came from the city to visit me. Accommodating these friends often meant having to sacrifice my sleeping space and pass the night outside in the cold. This experience lingered in my mind and compelled me to own my own house, even if it meant the last drops of my blood.

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By Daniel Tencer
MediaScout

An easily overlooked article, buried in today’s La Presse and the Star, suggests that the human race came within a whisker of extinction seventy thousand years ago, when the homo sapiens population may have dropped to as few as two thousand people. That should give us pause for thought as we look at today’s news cycle, which is, almost without exception, focused on the apparently sudden arrival of serious problems with our supply of two basic necessities: food and energy. CIBC economist Jeff Rubin is all over last night’s broadcasts and today’s papers, announcing that we can expect a serious shock at the pumps: By this summer, Rubin says, we’ll be paying $1.40 per litre of gas, and that will rise to $2.25 per litre over the next several years, bringing the cost of an average tank of gas to around $100. And, in a not unrelated story, Canadians can soon expect to pay considerably more for basic foodstuffs as well, as grain prices (and therefore, by extension, meat prices) soar over the next few years. The two issues come down to a basic problem that is at the heart of all economics, but one that we, in our age of affluence and seemingly endless economic growth, have mostly forgotten about: scarcity. As developing nations become wealthier, the demand for food and energy rises, while the supply remains stagnant. That is what is happening, and the result appears to be a return to an us-or-them, zero-sum mentality. As Rubin told The National last night: “For every new driver who gets on the road in India or China or Russia, someone’s got to get off the road in [our] part of the world.”

In all fairness, we could have seen this coming. Economists and academics have been warning us for years that oil supplies are peaking, and will begin to decline, and that increasing demand for food will put pressure on the planet’s ability to sustain the human race. The predictions of social unrest and war arising from the problem of scarcity continue to be ignored, even as food riots break out in poor countries and the US continues to fight a war in the middle of the world’s largest oil pool. What is conspicuously absent from the Big Seven’s coverage of this issue today is any discussion as to how to solve these problems. There are few questions posed on how to increase food production, no discussion of alternative energy sources. Yet it is becoming increasingly obvious that, if we want to maintain our standard of living, then finding alternatives to fossil fuels and reforming the creaky, at times senseless structure of global agricultural trade can no longer be treated as political footballs to be accepted or rejected-they have to be seen, quite literally, as matters of survival. If we fail to rise to the challenge, then nature itself will no doubt provide a draconian solution. As an example, take another lesson from pre-history in today’s news cycle, an item in The National (not available online) and the Star regarding the fate of the king of the dinosaurs, the tyrannosaurus rex. New genetic evidence suggests that, when conditions became unfavourable for the enormous creature, the t-rex evolved into something more manageable-the everyday barnyard chicken, and the ostrich, to be precise. If we fail to address the problems facing us now, nature could reduce us, too, to a species that is less demanding.

FULL ARTICLE