Comment les pays créanciers décident en République démocratique du Congo

par Renaud Vivien*, Damien Millet*

A quelques jours d’intervalle, le ministère français de l’Économie réunissait en grande pompe le « Forum Franco-Chinois de promotion du commerce et de l’investissement » et en toute discrétion le « Club de Paris ». Cette seconde instance, composée de créanciers publics, a enjoint à la RDC d’annuler ses contrats commerciaux avec… la Chine.

S’appuyant sur le mécanisme de la dette odieuse, les Occidentaux poursuivent leur politique néo-coloniale malgré la globalisation. Ils interdisent aux Africains de choisir leurs partenaires commerciaux et aux Chinois de s’approvisionner en Afrique. Ils exigent l’exclusivité du commerce avec l’Afrique et avec la Chine.

Les 19 pays créanciers composant le Club de Paris [1] se sont réunis le 18 novembre pour examiner le cas de la République démocratique du Congo (RDC), après deux reports liés à la révision du très controversé contrat chinois. Ce contrat, qui hypothèque de gigantesques quantités de minerais au profit de la Chine en échange de la construction d’infrastructures en RDC, a finalement pu être révisé dans le sens souhaité par les bailleurs de fonds occidentaux représentés par le FMI [2]. Suite à cela, l’affaire semblait réglée : le Club de Paris allait accorder les assurances financières demandées par le FMI pour conclure un nouveau programme de 3 ans avec le gouvernement congolais d’ici la fin 2009 et effacer début 2010 une partie importante de sa dette extérieure publique. Loin s’en faut ! Le Club de Paris a décidé, à son tour, de « faire chanter » la RDC en exigeant le maintien de deux contrats léonins signés avec des transnationales occidentales.

Le Club de Paris prouve une fois encore qu’il est une instance gouvernée par le Nord dans laquelle les pays du Sud ne jouent qu’un rôle de figurant. Aucun membre du gouvernement congolais n’a été invité aux discussions menées à Bercy, au ministère français des Finances, où siège le Club de Paris. Ce Club se définit lui-même comme une « non-institution » n’ayant pas de personnalité juridique. L’avantage est clair : le Club de Paris n’encourt aucune responsabilité quant à ses actes et ne peut donc être poursuivi en justice puisqu’officiellement, il n’existe pas !

Pourtant, ses décisions sont lourdes de conséquences pour les populations du tiers-monde car c’est en son sein qu’est décidé, de concert avec le FMI et la Banque mondiale, si un pays endetté du Sud « mérite » un rééchelonnement ou un allégement de dette. Lorsqu’il donne son feu vert, le pays concerné, toujours isolé face à ce front uni de créanciers, doit appliquer les mesures néolibérales dictées par ces bailleurs de fonds, dont les intérêts se confondent avec le secteur privé.

Le 18 novembre dernier, c’est la RDC qui en a fait les frais puisque le Club de Paris a décidé d’aller au-delà de la seule révision du contrat chinois exigée par le FMI en s’ingérant encore plus dans ses contrats miniers, domaine qui relève pourtant de la souveraineté permanente de la RDC, selon le droit international et l’article 9 de sa Constitution.

Officiellement, c’est le risque d’augmentation de la dette congolaise, lié à la garantie d’Etat initialement prévue dans le contrat chinois, qui avait justifié l’ingérence du FMI dans les affaires internes congolaises.

Mais en réalité, la RDC, à l’instar d’autres pays africains regorgeant de ressources naturelles, est le théâtre d’une compétition acharnée entre les pays occidentaux et la Chine, dont l’appétit ne cesse de grandir au point d’être aujourd’hui le troisième partenaire commercial pour l’Afrique derrière les États-Unis et la France. Le Club de Paris est donc l’instrument qu’ont utilisé les pays occidentaux, notamment le Canada et les États-Unis, pour exiger du gouvernement congolais qu’il revienne sur sa décision de résilier le contrat ayant donné naissance au consortium Kingamyambo Musonoi Tailings (KMT) et de réviser la convention créant Tenke Fungurume Mining (TFM), dans lesquelles les États-Unis et le Canada ont d’importants intérêts.

Les bailleurs de fonds occidentaux appliquent la politique du « deux poids, deux mesures » selon qu’il s’agisse d’un contrat conclu avec la Chine ou avec une entreprise occidentale. Les intérêts du secteur privé l’emportent sur les considérations de légalité et de développement puisque le caractère frauduleux de ces deux conventions a été rapporté par la Commission de « revisitation » des contrats miniers, mise sur pied en RDC en 2007 [3]. Les États du Nord se servent du Club de Paris et des institutions financières internationales, où ils sont surreprésentés, comme d’un cheval de Troie pour s’accaparer les ressources naturelles du Sud.

C’est le trio infernal Club de Paris – FMI – Banque mondiale qui a organisé à partir de 2002 le blanchiment de la dette odieuse de la RDC en restructurant les arriérés laissés par le dictateur Mobutu. Il s’agissait à l’époque de prêter de l’argent au gouvernement pour apurer les vieilles dettes du dictateur, permettre au gouvernement de transition de s’endetter à nouveau tout en lui imposant des politiques antisociales, notamment un nouveau Code minier très favorable aux transnationales.

En 2009, la dette continue d’asphyxier le peuple congolais dont les droits humains fondamentaux sont piétinés pour assurer le remboursement du service de la dette. Malgré les effets d’annonce des créanciers qui promettaient une annulation de la dette congolaise, celle-ci s’élève aujourd’hui à 12,3 milliards de dollars, soit l’équivalent de la somme réclamée à la RDC au moment de la mort de Laurent Désiré Kabila en 2001… Or, cette dette est l’archétype d’une dette odieuse, nulle en droit international car elle a été contractée par une dictature, sans bénéfice pour la population et avec la complicité des créanciers. Le gouvernement congolais pourrait donc la répudier, ce qui lui permettrait de surcroît de ne plus accepter les diktats du Club de Paris.

Le chantage du Club de Paris n’est pas une surprise : cette instance illégitime est depuis sa création à la fois juge et partie. Elle doit donc être purement et simplement abolie, tout comme la dette de la RDC.

En attendant, le gouvernement congolais doit suspendre unilatéralement le paiement de cette dette, à l’instar de l’Équateur en novembre 2008 et de l’Argentine qui avait décrété en 2001 la plus importante suspension de paiement de la dette extérieure de l’Histoire, pour plus de 80 milliards de dollars, tant envers les créanciers privés qu’envers le Club de Paris, et ce sans que des représailles n’aient lieu.

La crise économique nécessite des actes forts et immédiats contre la dette, et au profit des peuples. Pour ce faire, les pays du Sud auraient tout intérêt à constituer un front uni pour le non-paiement de la dette.

or: I’ll trade you civil liberties circa 1980, for the right to beat your wife circa 1920

or: If Glenn Beck were a decade, which one would he be?

For almost a year now, and even further back possibly, I have been fascinated with politics and punditry. I have become a self-proclaimed politico and I follow politics and media pretty closely, as closely as my tenuous hold on sanity will allow. In following politics my liberal mind has always been perplexed by the conservative party line of ‘returning to traditional American values’ and trying to recapture the ‘lost spirit of what it is to be an American’. In recent months it as been the loud ram’s horn call of Glenn Beck, and his ever growing audacity matched only by his ever growing audience, that has caused me to pontificate further on this subject. For the past few weeks this idea of lost values and traditional American fundamentals has led me to research where we might have gone wrong. Is there a specific time and place, a particular era that the GOP and other right-leaning hard-liners would want us to return to? If I can put my finger on the ethos that these guiding principles existed in, can we get back there? I delve in to this quagmire of American history to try and find “Glenn’s America”, so that he and others can stop preaching in general broad strokes and say, “we need to get back to what we believed in 19XX (or 18XX as it may be).”

When examining the general party ideas of what I understand to be the GOP’s fundamental idealogical structure I take my understanding from some 25 years on this planet, though you can’t count the first 16. I think that until you turn 17 and start trying to find yourself and begin to shape your views and identity in preparation for voting and contributing to society you are more of a blank slate in terms of personal free thought; up until this point you do not question a source but only try to fit in to the general parameters of ‘normal’ life as to not rock the boat and interfere with the indoctrination that American public schools instill in our youth. My true views have been shaped in my most recent years and as such I have adopted a view of the world quite different from my parents’, a direct result of informing myself for the first time in my life. In my home growing up as a small boy liberal leaders and democratic ideals warranted venom and crass, lewd criticism. The views I set forth will be of my own creation, independent of those I was raised on, either despite or in spite of them, I cannot tell. A crazy person isn’t crazy if he knows he’s crazy. Indeed.

The GOP seems to feel that gays should not marry, and are sinful. This makes no sense to me as sinful is a religious idea, not a political one; though it seems one position is quite often the result of the other. Gun rights should be protected at all costs to personal safety and public responsibility. Abortion is a no-no, ‘nuff said. They want smaller government, tax cuts, reform to let states decide things, though not gay marriage rights or any of the other items I just mentioned. They are for fiscal responsibility. GOP feels that a free market should regulate itself, again smaller government. They claim to fight for the middle class but public programs and universal anything is bad, that’s more government. They hate the environment as far as I can tell. Campaign finance reform (yeah right), education in America (no child left behind has gone so well after all). Prayer in school is ok, capital punishment and the death penalty are pretty much thumbs up, and the Ten Commandments should be at the steps of a courthouse flying the confederate flag. I am pretty close on this, right? So, basically it is a small government that has an abridged copy of the constitution, a cliff’s notes of the Bill of Rights, and a bible as it’s guiding principles. Hmmm, ok.

So, in American history, where can we find this utopia we strive for every day? This shangri-la we lost so long ago would obviously be the one saving grace for this country of godless sodomites. If we could only return to this point in time then everything would be fine. As far as I can tell it is the GOP that can save us if you believe the rhetoric. The liberals and the liberal media have scattered us across the nation and we are divided along partisan lines and are all doomed unless we jump on the Republican band wagon like some lifeboat after the Titanic sank. This is what self proclaimed “libertarian” Glenn Beck would like you to believe. I will give him credit for criticizing the government as a whole, even in the Bush days, though not in such inflammatory terms, but in reality he is like a Liber-publican. So, let’s take a step, Glenn, in to the way back machine and start a search for the time in American history you would like us to return to, as well as all of the Republican nay-sayers.

I want to start by saying that I am skipping the nineties completely being that he wasn’t happy with Clinton either, and it is far too close to the 21st century and the liberal progress this country has made; there is no way anyone wants to get back to how we were in the nineties, not even me and I loved my teen years in the nineties. And I am going to come back to the eighties later, they were too soon as well, but I will look at them briefly. We are sending our way back machine to a time when I think this country went bat-shit crazy and we were in maybe the most turmoil as a nation than anyone today can recall. I want to start out in the era that good old Glenn was born in, and that many of our current figure heads today, that make our decisions, can remember very ‘fondly’…the sixties.

Well I start here, in this decade of utter unrest by trying to illustrate that this can’t possibly be the America Glenn wants back. This cannot be the period in American history we want to recapture. This was a time that the late Strom Thurman must have hated with more zeal than any other period in history. It is hard to decide where to start. The sixties started out innocent enough, Kennedy beat Nixon and became the President, what followed was the Bay of Pigs incident, rumors about Marilyn, the meager beginning of Vietnam, the cuban missile crisis, then the man is assassinated. Further Vietnam BS, Malcolm X is killed, the Compton Cafeteria Riots in San Fran, then Nixon and all his Vietnam BS and his ‘secret plan to end the war’, the massive inflation crisis, MLK Jr. is killed, Bobby Kennedy is killed, the Stonewall riots of ’69, oh and a little thing who was named Manson did some killing. Great decade.

The sixties were a time of massive riots in the black and gay communities. Civil rights on all fronts tore the fabric of this country apart from women liberation, blacks, gays, even the Chicano revolution in this country. Outside of that was the acid wave of the sixties, a complete change in television, film, art, and especially music. The counterculture as it came to be known galvanized this country after the death of JFK, I think. The nice, homely manners of the 50’s were gone in a big way and now came very free thinkers, revolutionaries, protests exploded, demonstrations, inflation choked the middle class as they tried to compete with the changes in the landscape. The sixties were an ugly, hate-filled time, the emerging civil rights movement after the death of JFK was really the catalyst for it all. There is no way we want to return to the sixties as a country. America was in a violent turmoil and unsure of it’s identity and where the road we were on was going to lead us and people were strung out or scared for their lives, or both. I don’t think Glenn wants that back, so let’s move on.

How about we take a step forward and find Glenn in the seventies as a small boy, maybe these are the innocent and moral times he wants back…but I doubt it. Well in the seventies music really got good including the first ‘rap’ song, movies got weird, TV got lewd, and the country just got fucked up worse. This country started watching shows like All In The Family and the Brady bunch, dealing with some of the issues of the day. Vietnam choked the first few years while a little thing called Watergate slipped by the news press during Nixon’s re-election campaign and then killed him by ’74. It was the most embarrassing and shocking scandal in American political history, which in my opinion was the death of politics. I think that Nixon and his escalation of the doomed Vietnam war and his scandal killed the American political system. Outside of the US revolution was abundant across the world. Woodstock was a shining beacon of what drugs and music and mud can do for young people, a complete change from how we started the decade on the campus of Kent State where the National Guard gunned down peaceful protestors of the war on a college campus; unthinkable today, one would hope. The draft was the height of outrage, an unbelievable moment when Ali fought the draft and Elvis went in. Protest and anti-war sentiment was as widespread in this country as pant legs were flared. The Cold War ramped up a bit and this country got really scared, really fast. Our involvement in a few revolutions and military coupes as well as an assassination or two was a continuation of poor foreign affairs decisions. The middle east started down the road to where we are today with Israel, Egypt, Syria, the Soviet Union, and Afghanistan, all starting to kick each others asses.

The seventies brought women’s rights to the forefront as the sixties had civil rights for minorities eclipsing women’s rights to some extent. Vietnam ended finally, well our involvement, leaving the North to just wait for us to leave and drop Saigon to it’s knees and claim the country unified again. A sad end to a war we should have not been in and an end that was mostly our fault. Oh and lest I forget the massive recession we were in mixed with oil crises a couple of times resulting in rationing and further middle class stresses that included a very high unemployment rate. Then of course there was Jonestown, about 900 dead there. Idi Amin started his tyrannical, violent rule of Uganda as well. Is this the era we should return to? Hatred, war, violence, and tragedy pock marked this era. The seventies hold within their years scandal, racism, and fear-mongering, of the most epic scale one can imagine. There is no way we want to return to the moral or political views of this era. The seventies were the time for change for sure, but it came at great expense on the heels of a decade of radical change and upheaval. The 70’s continued the massive crime rate spikes that the sixties brought and the country still sat on the edge of it’s seat every day as nothing seemed to get better. Surely we don’t want the seventies back.

Ok, the eighties might be better, the days of Reagan and Bush, this might be the most likely time we want to return to. The eighties would be the most formidable years of Beck’s life; the decade of excess. The eighties brought the yuppie, and with it, all the coke, parties, and BMW’s we could handle. We saw great multinational growth and wall street was glamorous, they were kings then, still total scum, but they had better PR people then. Of course Reagan declared a War on Drugs, the Cold War raged to a massive scale. Sure, communism fell apart as did the Berlin Wall, but we saw the further mishandling of the middle east that is the source of our problems and involvement there today, can’t argue with that. Reagan put a major black eye on his presidency with the discovery of the Iran-Contra debacle that Oliver North was the mastermind behind. This country saw massive economic growth against the backdrop of very complicated and protracted battles all over the world including Asia, the middle east, central and south america, and ever Ireland with ‘the troubles’ brewing. (Only badass Irish would call a modern, religious civil war ‘the troubles’, an understatement to say the least)

The eighties, I think were a time of thinking that we could not be beaten, being the short attention span of Americans forgetting the seventies. We were coked out of our minds, living beyond our means, and we were kicking Commie ass. But the eighties, world wide, were complicated, painful growth, some democratic, but on the whole we saw massive famine and destruction abroad as the industrialized countries were making head way. The middle class of nations was being evaporated as the gap between rich and poor nations grew drastically. Domestic issues were tough though, as it seemed we were trying to use our power for good as a people with things like LiveAid and becoming more aware of issues in Africa and other countries, the eighties saw the rise of the religious right. They really got fired up on the gay issue and the discovery of AIDS, ‘the gay plague’. This country grew in many way, a decent decade I guess, I don’t really remember much of it but it seemed like a lot of people were having a lot of fun, safer fun.

Glenn probably liked the eighties, he used to be a liberal and an alcoholic, he draws a fine parallel between the two in a Katie Couric interview you should look up on YouTube, and this might have been his favorite time. Old enough to enjoy and understand it, he probably had a great time. Conservatives in power, strides made internationally, excess and money everywhere. The eighties were a wild party time, a decade that seemed to be a release of the past twenty years of hard work, growing pains, and controversial conflict. The 60’s and 70’s were going to lead inevitably to a time when we finally just cut loose and took a deep breath after so much bloodshed, upheaval, and serious talk. It was the decade we all remembered fondly on VH1. Music was weird, movies were great, TV was filled with classics we all watched, and standup comedians were making it big; the country was having a good laugh, a bump, and some beer. Not too bad.

I discount the nineties entirely so let’s jump back to a more general era I don’t think we can reasonably go back to, the 50’s to the 30’s. This was another era of massive wars, depression, civil rights injustice, bigotry, no women’s liberation, industrialization, organized crime, et al. These were times when blacks were openly hung from gallows, women were expected to be barefoot and pregnant in front of the stove, except when they were making tanks for the troops overseas for next to nothing wages. A time where minorities were rightfully scared at night of police or white boys out for a joyride. The prohibition, crime in the streets, Bonnie and Clyde, the Tommy gun, the B.A.R., saloons, speakeasy’s, and rampant bank robberies and crooked cops on the beat. This was a different time for this country and I don’t think we can agree with many of the ideals that were held to in this time and apply it today, the role of women alone is too much inequality to bare, let alone the rest.

OK, let’s take a big jump to my favorite era, the old west. You know the times, I’m talking post manifest destiny, pre-FBI. A time of no gun laws, showdowns in the streets, legal prostitutes, and riding in to town on a horse. Tombstone, San Francisco, Indian and cowboys. A time where gold was rushing and crazy white drunks ran amok and contracted TB and polio. Yes, when there were still a few Indians around, you had ranchers with thousands of acres, cattle drives, train robberies, and the men of storied legend lived and died by Winchester, Colt, and Smith&Wesson. I like to think I lived in the times with a town sheriff, shitty beer, floozies, and general martial law over most of the country. A time where you could shoot a man in the street in broad daylight in front of 50 people, and they might actually clap and then go about their day. The good times.

I think this might not be far enough back though. When I hear Glenn speak, he talks about the founding father’s principles. The true foundation of the country as he sees it with the men who earned America through blood, sweat, and tears. Jefferson’s America. OK, well let’s first examine the fact that we are talking late 1700’s and early 1800’s. These are pre-electric, pre-phone times. We are talking Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere, plantations, etc. If this is the time Glenn thinks we need to get back to I want to highlight a couple of things. First off, slavery was alive and well…need I say more? Secondly, this country treated women like shit, there were no civil rights, and it was unindustrialized. This country was populated and run by rich, white land owners, and then there was everybody else. I don’t want anyone to romanticize this era. This country was created, founded, and declared on the bodies of millions of natives and the death and suffering of minority races of people removed from their homes and treated worse than dogs in the time period.

America has never been truly righteous. We revolted for selfish reasons, nothing simpler than that. We turned against the imperialism of the Queen and her rule and declared our independence; the worst “dear John” letter ever. Up to that point we had slaughtered, tricked, infected, raped, and pillaged our way to the Mississippi and thought very highly of white skin and could kill a black man for any reason at any time, or sell them, whatever struck our fancy. What I am about to say is going to piss off the right, but if I could meet George Washington I think I would take the opportunity to shake his hand and then slap the wooden teeth out of his head. These were racist white bigots with an knack for the written word and hard on for ‘freedom’ by their definition as it applied to them as an emerging nation of first class citizens at the top of the shit pile. All due respect, but their ideas and principles were fundamentally offensive and their beliefs of equality were for themselves and those they agreed with. How many minorities or women were running around enjoying their freedom of speech or right to bare arms…or even read? I rest my case.

So maybe Glenn does have a time in mind. Maybe he wants the scandalous, violent 70’s, or the civil unrest and inequality of the 60’s. The old west certainly had smaller/non-existent national government, and the 40’s sure were good times to be a gangster, Nixon would have done well, that’s for sure. The eighties surely had the best coke, and some unprecedented growth, outside of post-industrialized America (without all of these pesky labor laws we got). Maybe he wants the great depression era, maybe to live amongst the greatest generation, or rub elbows with white men who raped their slaves on their plantation as a matter of principle and patriotism. The history of America is short, embarrassing, and seemingly without a lesson learned throughout. Glenn, I dare you and your constituents to point out that shining beacon in American history that is so much better than now, ‘cause I must have missed it. All those moments have led up to now, and I’ll be damned if where we are isn’t a hell of a lot better than where we were; you can pry this progress from my cold dead hands, pal.

by Tula Connell, Oct 22, 2009

When you’re a member of the American Bankers Association (ABA) meeting in Chicago amid the worst U.S. jobless crisis and most disastrous economy since the 1930s Depression, what’s the logical move to make?

Dress up in a Roaring ’20s costume and party like it’s 1929.

Proving yet again that not only do taxpayer-bailed-out CEOs have no shame, word has it that they plan to flaunt their taxpayer-fueled wealth in our faces, the ABA is sponsoring its Roaring ’20s party in conjunction with its Oct. 27–29 meeting.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will lead thousands of mad-as-hell Americans in a rally outside the ABA meeting on Oct. 27, demanding financial reform and re-regulation that will allow us to rebuild our communities, our lives and our economy.

(If you’re in Chicago, join us Oct. 27 at 10:30 a.m. CST. The march departs from the corner of East Wacker Drive and Stetson Avenue. After about a 15-minute march, the rally will be outside the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers at 301 E. North Water St.)

Because when they’re not stocking up on Jay and Daisy attire, Big Bankers and financial institutions are using the $700 billion in taxpayer bailout money to attack proposals like the Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would actually help working people while decreasing the chance of another Big Bank-fueled financial meltdown. Of course, they’re not using all of our money to fight reform. Some of it—about $7 billion—is going to bonuses for top CEOs.

For decades, these bankers have been dealing to each other, inventing more and more exotic financial vehicles together and basically regulating themselves. No one is safe while they are doing business with each other without oversight or regulation. A 2006 Citigroup report clearly puts it all out there: While the rich are getting a greater share of the wealth, and the poor a lesser share, political enfranchisement remains as was—one person, one vote.

Unfortunately, a big problem in making financial reform happen is actually trying to explain what’s involved. Who understands this stuff? Here’s a simple outline of what the union movement is pushing for right now in Congress.

The Consumer Financial Protection Agency. President Obama’s proposed agency would protect the public against credit card and mortgage rip-offs. The agencies that were supposed to protect us from financial meltdown failed. The new agency would place consumer protection authority in the hands of a single entity that would monitor banks and other institutions—but not your butcher, as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ludicrously claimed.

A council of regulators to identify and fix systemic risks that could threaten the entire financial system—risks such as institutions becoming “too big to fail,” too complex or too interconnected. When the government intervenes, the goal must be to protect the public, not just rescue executives and rich investors. The past year has proven that the Federal Reserve Board is just too close to the banks. Either we need to reform the Fed or we need to give this job to a truly public agency.

Bring the “shadow markets” into the daylight. Most people—like Michael Moore’s Wall Street guy—probably don’t really know what hedge funds, private equity funds and derivatives are or do. You’re not supposed to—it makes them easy to manipulate. They’ve been unregulated and totally lacking in transparency. These vehicles need serious regulation and oversight before they suck more money into the black hole of convoluted transactions.

Reform corporate governance and CEO compensation to protect the interests of long-term investors—people saving for retirement, not speculating.

As Robert Shapiro notes on the NDN blog, CEOs are richer than ever: “We didn’t need this latest and most conspicuous instance of greed at Goldman Sachs to know that the compensation provided to the uppermost echelons of American business is out of control.”

Since 1990, the pay of American CEOs has jumped from 90 times the average workers’ pay to 250 times—compared to 15 to 30 times for British, French and Japanese CEOs.

Wealth inequality in the United States has been long in coming, according to a new paper by the Center for Economic Policy Research:

While the United States has long been among the most unequal of the world’s rich economies, the economic and social upheaval that began in the 1970s was a striking departure from the movement toward greater equality that…was a central feature of the first 30 years of the postwar period. This is…the direct result of a set of policies designed first and foremost to increase inequality.

Hearkening back a few decades ago when we were told to relax and love to learn the bomb, David Dayen noted yesterday how a Goldman Sachs executive offered us little people similar advice for this jobless era: We “must tolerate the inequality.”

And just to show how big-hearted they are, financial giants are offering jobless workers gigs standing in line for wealthy financial industry lobbyists. Seems the well-coiffed from Goldman Sachs and other beneficiaries of taxpayer bailout money don’t want to wait to get into congressional hearing rooms—where these lobbyists are fighting to kill regulatory reform and proposals like the Consumer Financial Protection Agency and other reforms that would actually help America’s workers.

* Les origines de la dette : « les origines de la dette remontent aux origines du colonialisme »; « ce sont les colonisateurs qui endettaient l’Afrique »; « les colonisateurs ce sont transformés en assistant technique. En fait on devrait dire qu’ils ce sont transformer en assassins technique »;
* Le remboursement de la dette : « si nous ne payons pas, ces bailleurs de fond ne mourront pas, soyons en sûr. Si nous payons, c’est nous qui allons mourir, soyons en sûr également »; « ils ont joué ils ont perdu, c’est la règle du jeu, la vie continue »; « nous ne pouvons pas rembourser la dette car nous ne pouvons pas la payer »;
* La dette de sang: « le plan africain qui a permis à l’Europe de faire face aux hordes Hitlériennes lorsque leur économie était menacée, leur stabilité était menacée. »;
* L’origine de la crise : « les masses refusent que les richesses soient concentrées entre les mains de quelques individus »; « il y a crise parce que quelques individus déposent dans des banques à l’étranger des sommes colossales »; « non nous ne pouvons pas être complice, non nous ne pouvons pas accompagner ceux qui sucent le sang de nos peuples »;
* Création du club d’Addis Abiba : « nous entendons parler du club de Rome, club de Paris, (…) club des sept, club des cent, … »; « ceux qui veulent exploiter l’Afrique, sont ceux qui exploitent l’Europe, nous avons donc un ennemi commun »;
source
et un autre lien source qui va un plus loin.

Et après sarkozy ou obama font des discours pour exhorter les africains à se développer…
Nous avons pillé et nous avons contrôlé l’Afrique comme aucun autre continent.

L’ironie de la vie fait que aujourd’hui, ce sont les occidentaux qui sont en train d’être étranglés par la dette !
Une fois de plus nous avons la preuve que notre inaction face à de graves injustice se retourne contre nous.

Il fallait être stupide pour imaginer que ceux qui exploitaient des africains ne se mettent pas à exploiter des occidentaux.
Contrairement à ce que l’on pouvait penser, ce n’est pas par racisme que nos élites ont anéanti les africains, c’est parce que ces gens méprisent les humains,noir,blanc, jaune, ils s’en foutent, ce n’est que du bétail.

Le président du Rwanda, Paul Kagame, salue le programme d’investissements de la Chine en Afrique. Il critique, en revanche, l’aide occidentale qui “n’a pas fait avancer” le continent.

“Nos ressources ont été exploitées et ont servi à d’autres. Des sociétés occidentales ont pollué l’Afrique à grande échelle et elles continuent à le faire”, déplore Paul Kagame dans un entretien au quotidien économique “Handelsblatt”, à paraître lundi.

En revanche, “les Chinois apportent ce dont l’Afrique à besoin: des investissements et de l’argent pour les gouvernements et les entreprises. La Chine investit dans l’infrastructure, construit des routes”, estime-t-il aussi.

Le président rwandais reconnaît encore “que les Européens posent davantage de questions, notamment sur les droits de l’homme”. Mais “cela a-t-il contribué au développement de l’Afrique?”, demande-t-il.

“Je préfèrerais que le monde occidental investisse au lieu de fournir de l’aide au développement”, dit-il. “L’aide est nécessaire mais elle doit être employée de sorte à faciliter le commerce et à créer des entreprises”, ajoute-t-il.

Il suggère que les pays industrialisés garantissent à l’Afrique les mêmes droits commerciaux qu’ils s’accordent entre eux.

Depuis son lancement en 2006, le fonds de développement chinois pour l’Afrique a investi 400 millions de dollars sur le continent africain.
romandie

Nous connaissons tous la triste histoire du Rwanda, je veux dire par la que ce n’est pas étonnant que ce soit des rwandais qui affirme cela.

Je suis tout de même un peu perplexe sur le rôle ” bénéfique ” de la Chine en Afrique.En même temps après le pillage sans partage des ressources du continent noir pendant 3 siècles, le simple fait de construire des routes et autres infrastructures change tout.

En même temps que dire quand on lit ” Je préfèrerais que le monde occidental investisse au lieu de fournir de l’aide au développement”, dit-il. “L’aide est nécessaire mais elle doit être employée de sorte à faciliter le commerce et à créer des entreprises “.

Bien entendu les médias occidentaux, non content de ne pas faire une auto critique sur les méfaits de la colonisation, attaquent les chinois et leurs pratiques du commerce.
Nous sommes des mauvais perdant.

En gros, nous nous sommes fait damer le pion par les chinois et voila que nous critiquons ce que nous avons fait pendant des siècles.

Les chinois font ce que nous avons fait au début de la colonisation, ils construisent des routes , des chemins de fers, des ports mais ne soyons pas naifs, c’est pour mieux sortir du continent les minerais et autres ressources que ces travaux sont réalisés.

Pauvres africains, espèrons tout de même que les chinois seront moins malsains que nous.

Wall Street Lies Blame Victims to Avoid Responsibility for Financial Meltdown

By Nomi Prins, Wiley Press
Posted on September 29, 2009

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Nomi Prins’ new book, It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street.

The Second Great Bank Depression has spawned so many lies, it’s hard to keep track of which is the biggest. Possibly the most irksome class of lies, usually spouted by Wall Street hacks and conservative pundits, is that we’re all victims to a bunch of poor people who bought McMansions, or at least homes they had no business living in. If that was really what this crisis was all about, we could have solved it much more cheaply in a couple of days in late 2008, by simply providing borrowers with additional capital to reduce their loan principals. It would have cost about 3 percent of what the entire bailout wound up costing, with comparatively similar risk.

Just as great oaks from little acorns grow, so, too, can a Second Great Bank Depression from a tiny loan grow.  But so you know, it wasn’t the tiny loan’s fault. It was everyone and everything that piled on top. That’s how a small loan in Stockton, California, can be linked to a worldwide economic collapse all the way to Iceland, through a plethora of shady financial techniques and overzealous sales pitches.

Here are some numbers for you. There were approximately $1.4 trillion worth of subprime loans outstanding in the United States by the end of 2007. By May 2009, there were foreclosure filings against approximately 5.1 million properties. If it was only the subprime market’s fault, 1.4 trillion would have covered the entire problem, right?

Yet the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and the FDIC forked out more than $13 trillion to fix the “housing correction,” as Hank Paulson steadfastly referred to the Second Great Bank Depression as late as November 20, 2008, while he was treasury secretary. With that money, the government could have bought up every residential mortgage in the country — there were about $11.9 trillion worth at the end of December 2008 — and still have had a trillion left over to buy homes for every single American who couldn’t afford them, and pay their health care to boot.

But there was much more to it than that: Wall Street was engaged in a very dangerous practice called leverage. Leverage is when you borrow a lot of money in order to place a big bet. It makes the payoff that much bigger. You may not be able to cover the bet if you’re wrong — you may even have to put down a bit of collateral in order to place that bet — but that doesn’t matter when you’re sure you’re going to win. It is a high-risk, high-reward way to make money, as long as you’re not wrong. Or as long as you make the rules. Or as long as the government has your back.

The Second Great Bank Depression wouldn’t have been as tragic without a thirty-to-one leverage ratio for investment banks, and, according to the

New York Times

, a ratio that ranged from eleven to one to fifteen-to-one for the major commercial banks. Actually, it’s unclear what kind of leverage the commercial banks really had, because so many of their products were off-book, or not evaluated according to what the market would pay for them. Banks would have taken a hit on their mortgage and consumer credit portfolios, but the systemic credit crisis and the bailout bonanza would have been avoided. Leverage included, we’re looking at a possible $140 trillion problem. That’s right — $140 trillion! Imagine if the financial firms all over the globe actually exposed their piece of that leverage.

But for $1.4 trillion in subprime loans to become $140 trillion in potential losses, you need two steps in between. The most significant is a healthy dose of leverage, but leverage would not have had a platform without the help of a wondrous financial feat called securitization. Financial firms run economic models that select and package loans into new securities according to criteria such as geographic diversity, the size of the loans, and the length of the mortgages. A bunch of loans are then repackaged into an asset-backed security (ABS). This new security is backed, or collateralized, by a small number of original home loans related to the size of the security. Some securities, for example, might be 10 percent real loans and 90 percent bonds backed by those loans. Some might be 5 percent real loans. Whatever the proportion, the money the mortgage holders pay to lenders on their loans is used to make payments on new assets or securities. Those securities, in turn, pay out to their investors.

During the lead-up to the Second Great Bank Depression, the securities themselves were a much bigger problem than the loans. Between 2002 and 2007, banks in the United States created nearly 80 percent of the approximately $14 trillion worth of total global ABSs, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and other alphabetic concoctions or “structured” assets. Structured assets were created at triple what the rate had been from 1998 to 2002. Bankers from the rest of the world created, or “issued,” the other 20 percent, around $3 trillion worth. Everyone was paid handsomely. In total, issuers raked in a combined $300 billion in fees. Fees can be made for all types of securitized assets, but the more convoluted they are, the riskier and more lucrative they become. Fees ranged from .1 percent to 0.5 percent on standard ABS deals and up to 0.3 percent for mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and whole business securitization (WBS) deals. Fees were better for CDOs—between 1.5 and 1.75 percent for each deal, and higher for the riskier slices. All told, the $2 trillion CDO market alone netted Wall Street around $30 billion before CDO values headed south. Because U.S. investment banks were making huge profits from packaging churning loans and leveraging them, mortgage-and asset-backed security volume skyrocketed.

Investment banks, hedge funds, and other financial firms could use the $14 trillion of new securities as collateral against which to borrow money and incur more debt (leverage them). There is no way of knowing exactly how much was leveraged, because the players operated in an opaque system — that is, a system without proper regulatory oversight or enforcement to detect or curtail leverage. But a conservative estimate of the average amount of leverage is about ten to one, considering the roughly eleven-to-one leverage of the major commercial banks and the thirty-to-one leverage of investment banks. So, we’re talking about a system that ultimately took on $140 trillion in debt on the back of $1.4 trillion of subprime loans. How insane is that? And, it happened so fast.

In 2005, the mortgage on some little home in Stockton provided the capital for two or three ill-advised loans that soon disappeared into an ABS. But it was the global banks, the insurance companies, and the pension funds — particularly in Europe — that purchased the related ABSs. Like their U.S. counterparts, European financiers bought boatloads of ABSs with borrowed money. 13 They also shoved them off-book into structured investment vehicles (SIVs) that required no capital charge and little reporting.

By the fall of 2008 those ABSs, CDOs, and all their permutations would be known as “toxic assets.” They were considered by many to be the major cause of Big Finance’s failures and losses. The push for TARP centered on ridding banks of these poisonous creatures. But make no mistake: toxic assets are not the same as defaulted subprime mortgage loans; loans are merely one of the ingredients that make up the assets. All the subprime loans in existence could have defaulted and the homes attached to them could have been devalued to zero (which didn’t happen), but without the feat of securitization, the banks wouldn’t have become nearly insolvent. Toxic assets became devoid of value, not because all the subprime loans stuffed inside them tanked, but because there was no longer demand from investors. If no one wants your Aunt Mary’s antique gold-plated, diamond-encrusted starfish, for all intents and purposes, it has no monetary value at the moment. This basic supply-and-demand concept is something our government apparently didn’t understand when it offered to take the toxic assets off the banks’ books. And the Fed, as we’ll see, doesn’t seem to care that it took on trillions of dollars’ worth of these assets.

Lazy Lending Legislation

The greedy predatory lending that fueled the Second Great Bank Depression could have been avoided. Back in 1994, there was actually enough popular pressure to introduce legislation that would have ushered in controls on lending and other banking activities. As is par for the course, a handful of consumer-oriented congresspeople and watchdog groups initially faced an uphill battle against a band of well-funded, well-placed politicians such as Florida’s Bill McCollum, Texas’s Phil Gramm, and Iowa’s James Leach and Charles Grassley, who were carrying Wall Street’s torch toward deregulation.

But a burgeoning predatory lending crisis reached a very public head in 1994 amid allegations that Fleet Finance Group had gouged hundreds of low-income and minority consumers. Busloads of irate anti-loan-shark-T-shirt-sporting citizens rallied through the halls of Congress to chronicle lending abuses.

In response, just before Newt Gingrich assumed power as Speaker of the House under Democrat president Bill Clinton, the House battled for the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act of 1994 (HOEPA) to cap the most outrageous predatory loans. 37 It was the last piece of legislation that attempted to regulate appalling lending practices. Perhaps if lending had been better regulated, subprime loans wouldn’t have been the fodder for the Second Great Bank Depression. Maybe something else would have been. But that wasn’t the case.

HOEPA contained several provisions that curbed “reverse redlining,” in which nonbank lenders target low-income and minority borrowers. But it didn’t reinstate full interest rate caps, which had been deregulated during the previous two decades, or limit fees or tighten requirements to determine the ability of borrowers to repay their loans. As you can imagine, the industry and certain Republicans bitterly opposed the original House bill.

“Why can’t the lenders police themselves?” Senator Richard C. Shelby (R-AL) asked. Sure, and while we’re at it, why not let power companies determine what’s pollution and what isn’t? Why not let agribusiness make the rules about what farms can do? Why not put lions in charge of your gazelle sanctuary or hire a fox to guard the henhouse? Shelby, as you may reca ll, later sprouted an activist streak in 2009 and took the Treasury Department to task for lying to Congress about TARP.

Even with the best intentions, HOEPA’s passage had dire consequences. First, it left a huge gap between the first and second tier of rates and fees a lender could charge. If lenders didn’t want to hit the new caps, they had plenty of fertile ground to play on by extending loans with rates and fees just beneath the HOEPA triggers. Because lenders would make less money from each loan, due to the reduced rates and fees, they’d have to find more borrowers to make the same profits. Voil à , the quiet birth of predatory subprime lending.

During those early and middle years of the Gingrich revolution, there was no talk of regulation. The market zoomed, and even though a spate of corporate fraud was percolating, it didn’t look broke, so no one in Congress fixed it.

As the late 1990s stock market boom headed into the new millennium, there were renewed legislative attempts to rein in the lending industry. Notably, in April 2000, the dynamic duo of Representative John LaFalce (D-NY) and Senator Paul Sarbanes (D-MD) introduced the Predatory Lending Consumer Protection Act of 2000 (PLCPA) to strengthen the Truth-in-Lending Act.

PLCPA would have brought down the HOEPA triggers and cut origination fees so that profit from home mortgages had to come from payments, ensuring that everyone in the chain had an interest in homeowners’ ability to repay loans. Sarbanes and Senate staffer Jonathan Miller worked feverishly to line up cosponsors.

The industry attacked the bill and won, with help from McCollum and Connie Mack III (R-FL). What did pass, however, was Phil Gramm’s Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA). That act ushered in tremendous growth of unregulated commodity trades through its “Enron Loophole,” which allowed companies to trade energy and other commodity futures on unregulated exchanges.

It also sparked growth in the unregulated credit derivative trades that bet on defaults of corporations or loans, which became the main ingredient in the hot new Wall Street financial gumbo. Credit derivatives were a type of insurance contract written against not just one corporation or loan but on investments that scarfed up bunches of subprime loans and stuffed them into the unregulated CDOs that imploded and hastened the greater lending crisis. The problem was that they weren’t regulated (even half-heartedly) like insurance policies were.

Meanwhile, the quixotic Sarbanes and LaFalce soldiered on, trying to avert lending disaster through appropriate regulation. They reintroduced their bill as the Predatory Lending Consumer Protection Act of 2001, but the mortgage industry and its mouthpieces were relentless. In July 2001, Stephen W. Prough, chairman of Ameriquest Mortgage Company, said at the Senate’s Banking Committee hearings, “‘Predatory’ is really a high-profile word with no definition.” In August 2001, Senate Banking Committee chairman Gramm concurred, “Some people look at subprime lending and see evil,” he said. “I look at subprime lending and I see the American dream in action.” The 2001 version of PLCPA also died.

Down and nearly out, Sarbanes and LaFalce tried to pass their act again in May 2002. It failed again and then again, for the final time, on November 21, 2003. Bush’s ownership society ideology was in full swing by then, and the country was at war. Any hope for regulation or transparency in the lending or banking sector was basically dead.

The culmination of years of minor and significant acts of deregulation coalesced with mortgage industry sycophants beating back solid attempts at regulation or transparency. Loans that lenders pushed on homeowners were the perfect fodder for Wall Street, which eagerly packaged the loans and profited. House prices, in turn, skyrocketed.

How Lenders Created a Risk-Free Business

Meanwhile, lending practices had gotten really wild. Alan Greenspan had chopped rates dramatically to bolster the economy following the stock market plunge in 2001 and 2002. Lower rates meant that it was cheaper for banks to borrow more money from the Fed and from one another. It also meant that lenders had more funds to play with. Because prime loan rates fell in tandem, these loans weren’t funneling as much profit to lenders. To make up for it, lenders extended riskier (nonprime) loans at higher rates to more borrowers.

With cheaper money, lenders were able to fund more mortgages for those riskier borrowers. If some loans didn’t go well, it wouldn’t matter. Lenders bet that they could either sell the underlying homes for higher prices, which would more than cover the defaulted loans, or convince the borrowers to take out equity loans backed by the homes’ presumably rising value.

That increased the risk of default and, more so, the potential loss to the lender: the same house could now back two loans instead of one, so if its value fell and the borrower couldn’t pay up, both loans were screwed. Super-low teaser interest rates lasted for two or three years and begged to be refinanced (for which lenders got extra fees) before they zoomed up. This added more risk to the system: loans couldn’t be refinanced, and borrowers couldn’t make the high rate payments. But as long as home prices kept rising as they had since at least the early 1960s, systemic loan defaults weren’t a huge concern.

While rates remained fairly low, there was always more cash for lenders to dole out. Lenders pushed an ongoing cycle of refinancing and new home purchases, both of which could be classified as new mortgages on their books, which was good for stock prices. Between 2002 and 2005, the stock price of the once-largest independent mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial, had tripled — well before Bank of America agreed on January 11, 2008, to buy its remains. The firm created $434 billion in new loans in 2003, a 75 percent increase over 2002, securing a post in Forbes America’s top twenty-five fastest-growing big companies for 2003. The number-three home lender, Washington Mutual, issued $384 billion in loans that year. (Emulating Countrywide’s rapid descent later in the decade, Washington Mutual lost a combined $4.44 billion in the first and second quarters of 2008, before JPMorgan Chase swooped in to buy it, with the government’s help, on September 25, 2008.) Wells Fargo, which hung on to buy Wachovia in October 2008, topped the charts in 2003 with $470 billion in new loans. That’s a combined $1.3 trillion in new home loans created by the big three mortgage lenders in 2003.

As home prices spiked amid low rates, demand increased for securitized loans, and more loans were offered. In 2003, the securitization rate of subprime loans matched that of prime loans in the mid-1990s. From 2002 to 2006, subprime loan originations went from 8.6 percent of all mortgages to 20.1 percent.

The more subprime loans there were in the market, the more the securities piled on top of them became exposed to the risk that a larger number of loans than expected might default. Of course, this risk was hidden until home prices started to fall and defaults started to rise. Subprime defaults decreased to 5.37 percent in 2005 (nearly half of what they’d been during the 2001 recession), right before those seeds of risk between lenders and borrowers began to sprout like Audrey II, the alien plant in Little Shop of Horrors.

Consumer protections were simultaneously chucked. On April 20, 2005, President George W. Bush signed the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse and Consumer Protection Act, sponsored by Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), which worsened the quietly growing housing crisis for consumers. 55 Borrowers facing bankruptcy could no longer negotiate down the principal of their mortgages with their creditors if the market declined, meaning that they had no way to avoid foreclosure, even if they wanted to.

On September 1, 2005, two years after the final Sarbanes-LaFalce bill failed to gain traction, Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) chief economist Patrick Lawler said, “There is no evidence here of prices topping out. On the contrary, house price inflation continues to accelerate, as some areas that have experienced relatively slow appreciation are picking up steam.”

Markets weren’t yet constrained for credit. Because lenders were assured money through securitizations on Wall Street, they didn’t have to worry about guidelines on individual loans. If rating agencies would certify trillions of dollars worth of collateralized packages of loans with the highest possible rating, AAA, Wall Street investment banks could sell them to a wider pool of investors, which included pension funds, university endowments, and municipalities. High-interest loan volume, which includes most subprime loans, soared to a combined $1.5 trillion between 2004 and 2006, representing 29 percent of home loans made in 2006.  Home equity loans bulged simultaneously. It was a loan-lending fest until adjustable rates ultimately kicked in, and prices topped out. At the same time that housing values were faltering, borrower mortgage payments jumped by 25 to 30 percent as adjustment periods began. Then the foreclosures ramped up to levels last seen during the Great Depression.

The Cruelest Lie of All

There are those who blame lending, and certainly subprime lending was terribly predatory. Conservatives, however, toward the end of 2008, began to blame the people getting the subprime loans and the Democrats for pushing through the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1977, which sought to end discriminatory home-lending practices.

CRA “led to tremendous pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which in turn pressured banks and other lenders — to extend mortgages to people who were borrowing over their heads. That’s called subprime lending. It lies at the root of our current calamity,” the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote on September 26, 2008, in his nationally syndicated column. Translation: the Democrats allowed Poor People to do this. And innocent Wall Street paid the price.

Krauthammer continued, “Were there some predatory lenders? Of course. But only a fool or a demagogue — i.e., a presidential candidate — would suggest that this is a major part of the problem.” 95 (Of course, maybe Krauthammer is just always reactionary. At the beginning of the Iraq War, he wrote, “Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.” 96 Credibility problem indeed.)

Since late 2008, plenty of fools and demagogues have argued and, in fact, proved Krauthammer wrong. But for a while, conservative stalwarts such as Fox News’s Neil Cavuto and newspaper columnist George Will echoed the idea that it wasn’t greed but a 1977 regulatory law that brought down the economy. 97 Given that the value of subprime loans in the market is overwhelmed by the amount of the full federal bailout by a factor of ten to one, that’s not anywhere near reality.

The finance community’s theory is one of selective Darwinism: Little people who take bad risks deserve the consequences. Companies that take bad risks are a welcome addition to the fallen competitor list. Banks that survive the chaos can reposition themselves at the top of the financial piles, and deserve all the federal bailout money, and assistance in growing even bigger, that they can get.

Indeed, after the Bear Stearns bailout, then treasury secretary Paulson said of his former competitor, “When we talk about moral hazard, I would say, ‘Look at the Bear Stearns shareholder.’” 98 Blaming the bad apple and delivering some well-chosen words about America’s destiny will usually mute the need for regulation. That’s why current congressional packages tend to offer cosmetic financial solutions to long-term regulatory dilemmas.

No matter where the blame lies, as housing prices kept dropping and foreclosures kept rising, the feds jumped into gear late and indicted several hundred mortgage players, including former Bear Stearns credit hedge fund stars and current scapegoats Ralph Cioffe and Matt Tannin, and many lesser-known characters. The FBI and the Department of Justice targeted a slew of small and big firms after the fact, from Puerto Rico – based Doral Financial Corporation, unknown to most households, to more prominent names: AIG, Countrywide Financial, Washington Mutual, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, UBS AG, New Century Financial, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae.

When all is forgotten and we’ve moved on to our next financial crisis, there will be certain fingers frozen in time pointing at the subprime loans as the cause of the calamity. Big Finance would prefer that. But the truth is that the subprime loan tragedy was merely the catalyst that exposed the mega-tiered securitizations of securitizations, the massive leverage chain derivatives attached to nothing concrete, and the ineffective regulatory restraints. All of which led us down the rabbit hole of the Second Great Bank Depression.

Nomi Prins is a senior fellow at the public policy center Demos and author of It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street.

© 2009 Wiley Press All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/142944/

From the email adventures:

I find most often religion is the excuse rather than the reason. Like “we want your gold” isn’t a virtuous enough reason so people would rather be all “your religion sucks, dude”. That’s why the Vikings were awesome. They were all like “Yo, British people, I’m really happy for you and I’m going to let you finish building your civilization, but these ho’s are the best in the world.” Then they raped and pillaged and went back to Iceland or wherever they came from.

I like tracking the evolution of jokes, like the Kanye meme. For me at least, that joke went like : Initially funny->Quickly turns old->Eventually turns funny in an ironic way->Now funny in a nostalgic way.

Kanye at his Best

Et oui,Frank Dipascali,le bras droit de Madoff,qui faut-il le rappeler était dans la confidence des faux attentats du 11/09,a plaidé coupable de COMPLOT,et fraude.

Aujourd’hui,je ne sais pas trop pourquoi,ce mot,complot,est très mal vu,c’est un mot repoussoir,qui fait rire les gens et rend ridicule celui qui l’emploi.

Donc ne vous genez pas de donner cet exemple quand on vous ris au nez,parceque si un simple banquier,plutot un bankster,plaide coupable de complot,imaginez un peu ce que les Bush,les Obama,le CFR,les bilderberg et consort font chaque jours depuis des dizaines d’années.

Et surtout n’oubliez pas que Madoff était au courant du false flag du 11/09,son comportement ce jour là a été stupéfiant,et tout le monde fait mine de ne pas comprendre.C’est incroyable.

vidéo ici

C’est un des plus gros foutage de gueule du mois,quand un ami m’en a parlé,je n’y pas crû,pensant qu’il avait mal compris,mais non,c’est atrocement vrai,quel est le dégénéré,l’enfoiré de nazi qui a sorti cela,je vous jure qu’il devrait être jugé et envoyé en prison pour longtemps,oser dire cela est véritablement un comble.

Tout ça pour dix millions d’euros en plus,voila ce que cela rapporterait au développement.c’est à dire rien du tout.

Très honnêtement c’est vraiment un méga foutage gueule cette histoire,en plus de donner un vice,tout ce que l’on propose aux africains c’est l’espérance,le rêve.

Réver d’être Obama ou Mandela,réver d’immigration,réver de devenir un coureur de fond ou un footballeur professionnel,et maintenant réver de gagner au loto,franchement c’est minable et honteux,c’est tellement honteux que j’ai honte moi même.

Quand je vous dis que tout est fait pour pousser les Américains à la Révolution,voila ce que l’on apprend dans article du figaro :

“Le ministre de la Justice de l’État de New York, Andrew Cuomo, a publié jeudi, 22 pages de chiffres détaillés dénonçant la culture des primes à Wall Street en pleine crise financière. Fin 2008, neuf grandes banques ont versé 33 milliards de dollars, dont un million par personne à près de 5 000 de leurs meilleurs traders, alors qu’elles enregistraient plus de 80 milliards de dollars de pertes.

Alors qu’elles distribuaient leurs largesses d’un côté, ces banques touchaient 175 milliards de l’autre, en aide gouvernementale via le programme du TARP.”

Bey voila tout est dit,c’est fou,et une fois de plus ya des coups qui se perdent.

Goldman Sachs a généré plus de 100 millions de dollars de revenus au cours de 46 séances différentes en transigeant sur les marchés pendant les mois d’avril, mai et juin. C’est un record pour la banque. L’ancienne marque était de 34 jours en un trimestre.

Ça veut dire que Goldman Sachs a généré 100 millions en revenus de transactions dans plus de 70% des journées au cours du deuxième trimestre. La banque a perdu de l’argent en transigeant sur les marchés pendant deux séances seulement en trois mois.

Ça veut également dire que Goldman Sachs va suivre avec intérêt les démarches de la Securities and Exchange Commission qui a indiqué mardi vouloir éliminer les inégalités qui peuvent être causées par le «flash trading».

(NDLR: Les détracteurs du «flash trading» soutiennent que c’est une technique qui permet à l’aide d’un ordinateur sophistiqué de voir les transactions des investisseurs avant exécution. De cette façon, il peut être possible de transiger rapidement et de réaliser un profit.)

article la presse affaire.ca

lol,

“voir les transactions des investisseurs avant exécution”

C’est pas bon ça!

“La banque a perdu de l’argent en transigeant sur les marchés pendant deux séances seulement en trois mois.”

c’est exactement la photo,il suffit d’appuyer sur un bouton pour gagner automatiquement,sur 60 séances,58 gagnantes,et ils ont dû faire exprès d’en perdre 2,pour gommer le coté parfait de l’opération.

Une escroquerie impunie de plus,mais une raison de plus d’aller tuer les responsables.

Vous savez,attendre de n’avoir plus rien à bouffer pour se révolter,c’est incroyablement contre productif,dans une telle situation,les gens suivront le premier guignol fasciste qui donnera à manger et sécurisera le pays,c’est donc un scénario qui leur est  déja acquis.

]]> http://bibledonate.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/8-christians-burned-to-death-in-pakistan/ Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:37:13 +0000 Ross http://bibledonate.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/8-christians-burned-to-death-in-pakistan/

From London Times

The mob opened fire indiscriminately, threw petrol bombs and looted houses as thousands of frightened Christians ran for safety. “They were shouting anti-Christian slogans and attacked our houses,” Rafiq Masih, a resident of the predominantly Christian colony, said. Residents said that police stood aside while the mob went on the rampage. “We kept begging for protection, but police did not take action,” Mr Masih said.

Police and local officials said that at least eight people, including four women and a child, were killed in the fires. Two others died of gunshot wounds. Residents said that the casualties were much higher; one claimed that the number of dead could be in the dozens as many bodies were still buried under the rubble. Shahbaz Bhatti, the Minister for Minorities, said that 40 Christian homes were torched in rioting. He said there was no truth to allegations that a Koran had been defiled, and accused the police of ignoring his appeal to provide protection to Christians.

Tension started mounting last week after Muslims accused three Christian youths of burning a copy of the Koran. They denied the allegations, but clerics called for their death. On Saturday, hundreds of supporters of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, an outlawed Sunni sectarian group, poured into the town from surrounding district.  Television footage showed armed men running through the streets, gunfire, and women and children wailing. Blackened furniture lay outside burning homes, while a group of people rushed a man suffering from burns on a cart through the streets. Rehman Malik, the Interior Minister, said that the paramilitary troops were sent after police and the local administration failed to control the situation. Security forces were also placed on high alert to prevent violence from spreading to other towns of Punjab.  The group is believed to have close links with Al Qaeda and has been involved in several terrorist attacks targeting security forces in recent years.

What were once homes and schools had been bulldozed into mounds of crushed adobe and rock. Where ancient pine trees stood, there now were deep craters, accessible by the nicest highways I had seen in Honduras.

But a local resident at the end of one of those roads told me: “We have lost everything.” The mine had displaced him from his home, and he was now without clean water to drink or fertile land to sow.

via The Tyee — Shame on Canada, Coup Supporter.

• D.I.M. & TAI – Lyposuct (NOOB remix) (thks to BED!)

Le nouveau Cassius!

• Cassius – Almost Cut My Hair

• SonicC – Stickin’ (Original Mix)

• Felix da Housecat – Elvi$

• Redman – I Hold The Crown (Gigi Barocco Remix) (Highly recommended, thks to the ugly boy Dims)

• boy futur & pillage – Freundschaft

Enjoy Yourself!

I swear I if hear “beat the heat” one more time, I will hurl my body on the floor, flop like a fish and soil myself. Go ahead. Say it. I dare you.

Too many of you act as if the sun will cause your skin to blister in 60 seconds, make your Lawn Boy explode, and chaos will hit the streets as a sun-induced frenzy causes us to pillage the town and rape our virgins.

I know the rules: drink plenty of water, wear light clothing and avoid the outdoors at all cost, but I think I have a real solution.  It’s called stop being a pussy.

We’ve survived millions of years with the heat, and we’ll survive millions more. Blue-collar workers deal with this all summer. They get hot. They drink water. They survive. It’s the white-collars workers who whine about the heat. Ahhh, the poor man in a business suit that has to walk 20 feet from his air-conditioned car to the air-conditioned building. I hope he can survive two minutes outdoors.

It’s tragic when a white-collar worker has to dab a little sweat off his forehead and carry a melted Starbucks Iced Caffé Mocha into the office. The suffering, oh the suffering. You want to know real suffering? Try a heat rash from the sweaty groin of a blue-collared worker. That’s some serious rank on a hot summer day.

The next time someone complains to you about the heat and you’re a blue-collar worker, take off your pants and let the boys roam. They may not feel better, but at least you will.

…spells Amoeba Avenue A_ddict, Avenue B_arbiturate, Avenue C_rack = PILLAGE a book by Brantly Martin, by powerHouse Books.

pH: Cracula, the main character and narrator is in a constant state of “pillaging.” Is this a battle with himself and his addictions, or is it a metaphor for his relationship to the entity that is New York

BM: I don’t think he is. That would imply he’s taking advantage of his spoils. There is a moment in the book when Cracula says: ‘I flashed like a cursor in the middle, alternating vampire blood bank vampire blood bank’ I think that’s his battle, or perhaps his fate? But if he views being a vampire or blood bank as the only options for his disposition, his fate, that would mean he’s resigned to it. Is he? I’m not sure, maybe. I think there are numerous other characters that have no problem pillaging the land—New York. More specifically, a certain slice of Manhattan. They possess different spoils—beauty, money, drugs, humor, wit, sex, or the possibility of sex. Power—perceived or otherwise. The pillaging of the land goes hand in hand with the formulaic structure of these little micro-universes within the city. In my life, and in the book, there have been these folks who are fucking artists (scam artists perhaps) at the manipulation of the moment. Each conversation, an application of a formula they understand and (most importantly) accept. These folks are the most successful ‘pillagers’ and, I feel, the happiest. Does it matter that every detail of the situation was manipulated (name-dropping, references, drinks, drugs, promises, out and out lies) if you get what you want? I think Cracula grew to despise these plastic moments. But what’s better? To accept the formula dictating the land or to detach while still a resident?

pH: Many people foresee the current economic recession as a potential leveller for the city. Do you think that would be a good or bad? Why?

BM: That will never happen. New York thrives on status. Status dictates everything—real estate, clubs, restaurants, parking spaces, the corner office, a better shift, fashion, Hip-Hop—the latest phone, latest iPod, latest sneakers, latest girl, latest guy. People need a pecking order the city dies without it. I laugh when people refer to New York as a European city. It’s the most American of cities.
pH: Describe your relationship to New York and how you came to live there.

BM: I grew up in Houston, went to college in Austin, and moved to New York as soon as I could. I showed up with one bag full of clothes, $500, and not one friend. I slept in Central Park the first night, ended up crashing with a friend of a friend for a few weeks (in a depression-era brothel, some of the whores still alive, paying $50 a month, rent-controlled), somehow ended up working in the nightlife. I have a love-hate relationship with New York, as I do with every other city and person on Earth – and myself.
pH: You now live in Rome, what does New York look like from a distance?

BM: I’ve been in Rome for seven months. The only thing I see from a distance is Obama and The Crisis. I worry about my friends that depend on disposable income that gets spent on eating out and paying for over-priced vodka and champagne. Maybe the rents will drop and young folks who aren’t the sons and daughters of the rich will be able to move to Manhattan again? Maybe the train of Nepotism will lose some speed? Doubtful.

CONGRATS B !

Let the pillaging and plundering of the Disier Constellation begin! Oh wait its been going on for years, now it will be reported as such!