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From Detroit to Cyprus, Banksters in Search of Prey
“Detroit and the
people of Cyprus share the same enemy.” The Lords of Capital, who are
preparing to snatch chunks of cash straight out of ordinary people’s
accounts in Cyprus, to pay for a bank bailout, are the same class that
has “devalued the franchise of the 49 percent of Michigan’s Black
population that live in municipalities and school districts under the
thumb of outside financial managers.”
“Either we liquidate the banksters, or Wall Street will liquidate us.”
From Nicosia, Cyprus, to Detroit,
Michigan, the global financial octopus is squeezing the life out of
society, stripping away public and individual assets in a vain attempt
to fend off its own, inevitable collapse. The bankers “troika” that
effectively rules Europe prepares to reach into the individual accounts
of ordinary depositors on the island nation of Cyprus to fund the
bailout of their local banking brethren. Across the Atlantic, a
corporate henchman makes arrangements to seize the assets and abolish
the political rights of a Black metropolis. The local colorations may
vary, but the crisis is the same: massed capital is devouring its social
and natural environment. Either we liquidate the banksters, or Wall
Street will liquidate us.
The proposed seizure of a big chunk of
every ordinary Cypriot depositors’ accounts, in the guise of a one-time
“tax,” was shocking even by the standards of the Euro Zone’s overlords:
the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European
Commission. The original diktat to
finance new lines of credit for Cyprus’s over-extended banks called for
snatching 6.75 percent of the cash of customers with balances below
100,000 euros ($129,500), and 9.9 percent above that threshold. When the
public went berserk, it was proposed that depositors with 20,000 euros
or less be spared – but Cypriot lawmakers balked. The banks are now
closed, to prevent people from withdrawing their money. But Europe’s
ruling triumvirate at the bankers’ lair in Brussels continues to demand
that the public-at-large pay to keep the global criminal financial
enterprise humming, or be starved out. “In the absence of this measure,
Cyprus would have faced scenarios that would have left deposit-holders
significantly worse off,” they said – disaster banksterism.
A rapscallion Black
lawyer for the notorious corporate law firm Jones Day delivered the
bankers’ ultimatum to Detroit. Emergency financial manager Kevyn Orr,
anointed by Michigan’s Republican governor, is a bankruptcy specialist
whose mission is to liquidate the assets of the 82 percent Black city,
especially the revenue-producing Water and Sewerage Department. Orr’s
firm’s clients – which, according to their website,
include “more than half of the Fortune 500 companies” – have plenty of
experience at liquidating in Detroit. Butch Hollowell, general counsel
for the local NAACP, says Wells Fargo has
“done more foreclosures in Detroit and the state of Michigan than any
other firm,” and is Detroit’s number one property tax scofflaw. Jones
Day also represents Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and CitiGroup.
“These are firms that not only got
billions in TARP bailouts, but they’re also the same ones that defrauded
people into signing these predatory leases which cause the crash of the
housing market,” said Hollowell. “Detroit has been hit harder than
anyplace in the country on that score” – hugely aggravating the city’s
money problems. Financial manager Kevyn Orr’s job is to extract more
booty from Detroit for the bankers’ vaults.
To facilitate the theft of the city’s
property, its citizens must first be stripped of their political and
civil rights, through the neutering of their elected officials. Orrlooks forward to
the project. “While I understand there’s a lot of concern and emotion
behind the concept that I’m depriving people of certain rights,” he
said, “actually it’s very consistent with both the history of this
country and specifically in this state.” What he’s about to do “is
democracy in action.”
This corporate concept of
democracy has already devalued the franchise of the 49 percent of
Michigan’s Black population that live in municipalities and school
districts under the thumb of outside financial managers, a violation of
both the Voting Rights Act and the one man-one vote rule embodied in the
14thAmendment, says the NAACP’s Hollowell.
Black Baptist pastors and the AFSCME and UAW unions will join the
NAACP’s planned legal action against the “hostile takeover” of Detroit –
which is fine, as a civil rights response. But this is a much bigger
battle.
Detroit and the people of Cyprus share
the same enemy, a class that is beyond the reach of simple civil rights
suits. The Lords of Capital on Wall Street and the City of London and
the Federal Reserve in Washington and in the “troika” at Brussels
confront their own existential crisis, which compels them to liquidate
the public sector so that it can eventually be transferred to their own
balance sheets. There are many ways to accomplish this, through
privatization of existing public institutions, or by simply blowing a
hole in public services and allowing privateers to fill the void,
subsidized by public funds. However, nothing can save the banksters from
inevitable, and increasingly imminent, collapse. Ever-increasing profit
margins must be achieved, somehow, or the system implodes. Hundreds of
trillions of notional dollars in derivatives must be serviced and fed by
a class that makes nothing and can only survive by chicanery and
coercion by governments under their control.
In Cyprus, they are prepared to brazenly
snatch euros directly from working and retired people’s accounts to
fund a bank bailout, without even bothering to construct a convoluted
pathway from the victims’ accounts to their own. They have reached the
point of outright confiscation, and will not stop until they have
stripped society of the potential to save itself from the ruins.
We have no choice but to confiscate them – to destroy them utterly as a class.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
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