Yesterday, I posted this diary: The Great Restructure
We are not facing a rerun of The Great Depression. What is coming will be both worse and not as bad, in different ways.
A more appropriate term is
The Great Restructure.
Tomorrow, GEAB will publish its open letter to the heads of state of the G20 countries. This is a special edition in addition to their monthly bulletin which appears on the 16th of each month.
According to LEAP/E2020, there are only two options left for the G20 leaders who gather next April 2nd in London: either they rebuild a new international monetary system, creating the conditions for a new global system that involves all the main global players, and reducing the crisis to a maximum of 3 to 5 years; or they strive to prolong the current system, thrusting the world into a decade long tragic crisis starting at the end of 2009.
In this 33rd edition of the GEAB, we wish to describe the two ways forward that remain open until summer 2009. Beyond that, our team estimates that the "short-term crisis" option will be obsolete and that the world will be on the path towards global geopolitical dislocation (1), and a deep and decade-long crisis.
For this reason, due to the urgency, LEAP/E2020 has decided to publish next March 24th on a global scale an open letter to all the leaders of the G20. This will be our team’s attempt to divert the system from the long and tragic crisis option.
I am asking for Kossacks to gather here in a series of diaries meant to focus on outlining the steps that need to be taken to preserve the global monetary system before it is too late. I am not an economist or financial expert. I am just a reasonably well educated person with an increasing interest in understanding how our global financial system works.
Over the weekend, it became painfully obvious that any discussion of what Geithner, et.al. are doing wrong is met with extreme hostility from Kossacks who interpret any criticism of Obama's decisions as an attack.
I want to go on the record here as an Obama supporter who worked very hard for him and donated money I could not afford to the campaign. Obama's moves in these past few weeks on almost everything non economic have led to a quiet sigh of relief in my home. I adore Michelle even more than him. Both Michelle and I were out planting a community garden last week. I remain thrilled he is in office, and at the same time increasingly sad that he has to bear an impossible burden willed to him by more than thirty years of extreme capitalism. Please do not bother to post in this diary if all you want to do is rant that I am undermining Obama. I will not respond.
But
I do not believe his economic policies as constructed by Geithner are appropriate or adequate. This does not mean that I am throwing Obama under the bus. Quite the contrary, I believe that he is the first President we have ever had who has the capacity to listen to the ordinary citizens of this country. But we have to speak up with coordinated voices and tell him that we are not pleased, not pleased at all, with the economic policies he has chosen.
Under normal circumstances, I would agree that it might be too early to critique plans that have barely been put in place, but frankly, Geithner et. al. plans do not pass my smell test. They don't even come close.
Propping up corporations filled with malfeasance and criminal activity, be they banks or AIG or any other entity including the Federal Reserve, is not the way to go. As Jerome a Paris has stated, along with others, putting the money at the bottom in the hands of the ordinary American would make more sense on any given day.
Geithner, et.al. are indeed too implicated in this whole disaster to think creatively. The idea that these people have the brains and training to do this is absurd. They have failed. Neither do they have the ethics or moral courage to do the right thing. I reject the idea that all this requires some sort of financial genius; it does not. It requires common sense, a clear head and the ability to speak truth to power.
And don't even mention Summers to me. It flat out astonished me that Obama would chose a man who, as President of Harvard, bitch slapped one of America's most brilliant African American professors, Cornel West, just because he could. West is not only a brilliant philosopher; he is a minister. Obama ought to have had a conversation or two with West and some Harvard faculty before bringing Summers on board.
I believe humanity as a whole, not just Americans, has reached a crossroads. What we do in the next few weeks (and in this the GEAB seems entirely rational) and the next few years will determine the future of this planet for quite some time. And if global warming is indeed out of control, then our problems will be magnified astronomically.
I do not want to live in a dystopian nightmare a la "The Matrix." It is almost incomprehensible that the warnings science fiction narratives have given us for at least fifty years have gone almost entirely unheeded.
I will fight to my last breath to make a better world. I am not undermining Obama. Our collective speech might save Obama!!
I am asking for us to use our collective wisdom to propose a set of alternate policies that we can take to him with the endorsement of millions of Americans just like us.
I am asking us to gather here in a series of diaries that explicitly collate the many good sources Kossacks have uncovered regarding economic plan alternatives. Reading every diary and cut and pasting every nugget into one place is just not possible for any one of us, but gathering together to share ideas over a series of diaries dedicated to that purpose is possible.
This diary is advertising for tomorrow's diary which will discuss the meat of the GEAB letter.