In
2008, the loss of 11 billion dollars by the world’s largest insurance
company, AIG, and the bankruptcy of the US investment bank Lehman
Brothers, triggered a domino effect of financial consequences
which brought the entire capitalist system within a hair’s breadth of
total collapse.
But, as the events leading up to the
financial crisis were slowly unveiled, it became ever clearer that the
crisis was caused, quite knowingly, by the bankers themselves.
The Cause
In the years leading up to the economic
crisis in 2008, banks increased the funding for the riskiest loans
(called subprime loans), from $30 billion a year to over $600 billion a
year, rigged even higher interest rates on those loans, and then, while
the bankers were making billions of dollars of profits off the
borrowers’ high interest repayments, they made further profits betting
against their customers ever being able to pay back the loans they had
just been given.
The FBI warned the government about this
in reports as early as 2006, the IMF’s chief economist, Raghurum Rajan,
presented a paper to the men in charge of all the world’s major banks,
including the Federal Reserve, warning of the potential collapse of the
system due to dangerous incentives, and journalist Allan Sloan published
articles in Fortune magazine and The Washington Post in 2007 – nothing
was done.
Instead, the men who created the crisis
were allowed to make billions of dollars of profits before their
institutions hit bankruptcy, paid themselves millions of dollars more in
bonuses out of the government bailout packages, and left the rest of us
to deal with mass increases in unemployment and poverty, and national
debts that no amount of austerity measures will ever be able to repay.
The Effect
The ever more concentrated power that
forms from a system based on a motive of profit before people, planet,
morals and ethics is leading many to turn away from the mainstream
narrative towards new political alternatives, and solutions.
Podemos supporters gather in Madrid, Spain.
Photo: David Ramos/Getty Images
July 2015, and Greece’s new left-wing
party Syriza gave the people of Greece the option to vote on continued
austerity measures and increased bailouts from Germany and the EU.
Since all the bailout money is only going
into paying off interest on the debt that Greece already has – whilst
at the same time creating even more debt for Greece thanks to the
interest charged on the bailout money itself – for the first time since
the Eurozone was created in 1999, people united en masse to stand up
against banks and politicians and said ‘no.’
Since then, people’s movements like Podemos (‘we can’) in Spain and Syriza (‘from the roots’) in Greece
keep rising out
of the financial ruin of the hardest hit European countries, and the
socialist debate has picked up serious momentum in the USA due to
Bernie Sanders and the UK due to
Jeremy Corbyn,
while votes for Brexit and Trump show that ordinary people are willing
to take big risks and force change if this is the only way to create a
new narrative to capitalism.
However, the first example of people power since the financial crisis began took place in
Iceland.
People flocked to the streets in protest after the government let the
banks borrow 10 times Iceland’s GDP and then left the people of Iceland
with a debt to income ratio of 240%.
Ongoing demonstrations that included
stones thrown at the parliament building led to a relatively peaceful
revolution; the prime minister was indicted, Iceland’s main bank was
nationalized, 200 criminal charges were made against the bankers, and
debt exceeding 110% of home values was simply wiped clean.
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The
mainstream media
have mostly ignored the significance of all these events, but one event
that the global media could not ignore was when thousands of people
poured onto the streets in the Wall Street financial district in 2010
demanding a new, humane, sustainable system.
As demonstrations rapidly spread to some
840 cities in the US, and many cities in Europe and Asia, the media was,
however, quick to demonize the movement – until finally the
demonstrating fizzled out. It therefore may seem that the efforts of
Occupy Wall Street were perhaps all in vain.
The Solutions Revolution
Oxfam released
a report
that by 2016, 1% will own more wealth than all the rest of the people
on planet earth. In the UK, 1% now owns more wealth than 55% of the
population, and in the USA, the top 0.01% are currently worth as much as
(if not more) the bottom 90%. The Occupy Movement is the reason that
the idea of the 99% is now in the public debate.
Occupy Wall Street may have fizzled out,
but global solidarity of the 99% is increasing exponentially: new
radical alternatives like
The Venus Project and
Contributionism are now being implemented, completely new economic systems
are forming and
being implemented, solutions movements
are uniting,
new coalitions
are forming, and an ever increasing number of demonstrations are taking
place, en masse, all over the world. It is only the mainstream media
that is not talking about it – but a global solutions revolution is
already taking place.
This April, German mainstream
news channel ARD joined
Russian news in reporting that the US-led coalition against Iraq, Syria and now Iran
is faking news
to justify their ongoing illegal, preemptive take over of the Middle
East. Not because Germany has suddenly decided to become best friends
with Russia, but because they know where
this war is headed.
In 2015, I was inspired by all of the events that had unfolded so far to create a short documentary as the third episode of my
Truth Behind Politics series.
The documentary
encourages critical thinking and debate by controversially critiquing
capitalism from the perspective of Karl Marx. In just 30 minutes, it
covers the history of the central banking system, the Eurozone, the
Occupy Movement, the increasing number of coalitions and demonstrations
taking place worldwide, events in Iceland and in Greece, and asks the
audience one main critical thinking question:
Is capitalism on the verge of collapse and a positive new community-based social system coming to fruition in its wake?
As I continue to develop
Wake Up World Education with
the aim of taking critical thinking and solutions education around the
world, I have now created my first Trews-style video, asking if it is
really possible that the recent chemical weapons attack in Syria was
fabricated and what we can do.
Please watch and share these videos, and
join me in waking people up to the positive news that a solutions revolution is underway right now all around the world.
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