I attended a board meeting the other night. It was an organized protest at Peralta Board of Trustees meeting that runs some community colleges in this area. (East side of San Francisco Bay)
A number of groups organized a protest as the board is closing one of the childcare centers at the College of Alameda. The state of California, through the chancellor’s office has cut funding to the center, not only that, the funding cut was retroactive, in other words, they cut the funds after the center began this years operation.
Most of the parents are young working class mothers trying to find some way to a decent living. The center is vital to their being able to continue with their education. The board members, as they always do, talk about how it hurts them, then they blame it on those above them and then carry out these vicious policies directed against working people and the most vulnerable members of our class. We ended up shutting the meeting down which was a step in the right direction and will be meeting to figure out where we can go from here; how we can stop this attack on young student parents.
Contrast that to what’s happening in Washington this week. Goldman Sachs, J.P Morgan, Morgan Stanley and what the Wall Street Journal calls the bankers “army of allies” the huge industrial companies that profit from these banks dealings in the derivatives markets, are waging a war against any curbs on their activities. And what are these activities?
Well, they basically just gamble with money they stole from workers. They bet on anything. They bet on interest rate fluctuations. They bet on whether or not that little mom and pop will fail because they won’t be able to work enough hours or make enough money to pay the money lender the interest on the front money. One group of billionaires is betting they will and the other they won’t and they’ll go under.
Alongside this they have a good time betting against your ability to pay your mortgage—half of them hoping you’ll collapse, lose your job or get sick so that you default and they win the bet.
They sent an army of lobbyists to Washington to bribe the politicians to back off. Another issue for them is that gambling in the derivatives market takes place outside of the exchanges the capitalists set up to play this game so they don’t fleece each other so much but can take us to the cleaners, there has to be a certain honor among thieves after all. In the wake of the recent financial crisis and the hatred of bankers that exists in society the government wants to give some order and openness to this very secretive activity to lessen the chance of social unrest.
Marx described the state as the Executive Committee of the capitalist class as a whole and this is what is happening here. With a whole bunch of robbers like this, there can be a tendency to ignore the interests of the system as a whole, the system that allows the robbery to take place in an organized way and their executive committee has to intervene. They came close to losing it a couple years ago and had to fall back on public funds and increased borrowing. With the help from the leaders of the workers movement they pulled capitalism from the edge of the abyss.
A group of them from Goldman Sachs and other banks went to Washington to meet with the Agriculture Committee. One might wonder why they would be doing that but betting on the fluctuations in corn, wheat and other agricultural commodities is another source of profit for them.. They are quite clear in the Wall Street Journal; engaging in this speculative activity on exchanges instead of in private, “reveals more details about the pricing and structure of the deals..” that could “eat in to profits”.
So the squabbling between our enemies goes on. The Obama administration has no problem with this parasitic activity that treats the food we eat and the shelter we cover our heads with as mere exchange value, in fact it wants to ensure such a lucrative activity survives, and in order to do that, it has to have some order to it. What they call the Great Recession really shook them up. They saw how close they came to killing the goose that lays the golden egg. The most astute of them also understands history and the revolutionary potential of the working class; they contained the anger this time with the help of workers leaders but this is not going to work forever and they know it.
The pressure mounts. Last night I hear that foreclosures have skyrocketed in the counties of the East Bay in the last year; San Francisco 196%, San Mateo 191%, Marin County, 150%, Santa Clara 70% and 11% of home owners are not making mortgage payments. The speculators that bet on defaults have had a good couple of years.
Meanwhile, as of 2008, the derivatives market was valued at about $596 trillion. This was more than the value of the world's financial assets—including all stock, bonds, and bank deposits which was estimated at about $167 trillion. * This doesn’t make sense but nor does speculating on the price of food or whether someone will be homeless or not. Imagine your income depending on whether or not someone loses their job and hopefully their home----every day wishing it—what sort of person would you be? And they say dope dealers are scum.
The politicians who voted to shut down the children’s center, who vote to support layoffs or furloughs, who cut social services and jobs then send youth to wars that can develop new derivative markets, they are all our enemies. We can stop this madness. We can build an alternative economic system, a system that produces for needs and not profits and obscene wealth for a few.
We can provide childcare for student mothers.
*This is because the same asset might be involved in many different derivative deals. See: http://www.slate.com/id/2202263/
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