The Tent People of today

Who is to Blame
for the Tent People?

By Garda Ghista
May 22, 2009 Hyderabad, India
Source
In America, more and more people are subjected to the humiliation of losing their job, and then when they cannot pay their mortgage they get a fat wad of papers delivered to their door by the local sheriff telling them in brief to pay up or vacate.

And then they have to leave or be thrown out of their own home. And then when no job is forthcoming they cannot even downsize to an apartment. They are forced to go to the lowest level of subsistence. They buy a tent and pitch it near some water, maybe a river or a tap somewhere.

I was becoming more and more appalled living in America in 2008 and up to May 2009 and watching more and more "tent cities" springing up across the country. And then as those tent cities get more and more established, at regular intervals, maybe once a month, the local police invade the area and make a brutal sweep of the premises and drive all those tent people out of their tents and onto the road somewhere. And after the police have gone, the people return to what's left of their tent and their meager possessions.

This is America today. It is "poverty amidst plenty." That phrase is from the 1929 Great Depression. And in 1929 the police conducted the same sweeps that they are doing today across America. Is it not heartbreaking? Or shall we say, does it not make your heart bleed to see this kind of existence of the people?

And now I am in Hyderabad, India. And if you go along Highway 9 which runs through Hyderabad, what do you see? All along the highway, there are vendors selling this and that like nariyal pani - coconut water - or mangoes or colorful little trinkets. But behind those vendors, in a fifteen foot wide corridor running along the wall, are tents. More tents.

And these tents have been there forever. They are not so nice as the American tents. They are made of dark green or black pieces of plastic somehow moulded or stuck together in some shape so as to rise a bit above the ground with one opening. And here is where the people live and sleep and go to the bathroom and take bath - but where do they go to the bathroom and where do they take their bath? And where do they cook and eat?

In the daytime they are lying in front of their "tents" or sitting and chatting happily. That's the amazing part of it. If we visit a tent city in America - the newly created tent city - it is sure we will find severe mental depression. Economist Shrii Prabhat R. Sarkar told us that this new Great Depression will be accompanied by severe mental depression. It is but natural.

But in Hyderabad, along Highway 9, I don't yet see that mental depression. And earlier in the 1990s when I used to visit the slums here or see the women breaking stones with axes in the rock quarries, there was no mental depression.

Why? I think it is because this was their life from birth. They never knew any other life. They never expected any other life. They lived with No Expectations.

But why should anyone, why should even a single person, be relegated to living in a tent, to living without a bathroom, without running water nearby, to keep themselves clean? Who is to blame that people live in tents? In America I was saying that it is the *&^%$ bankers and speculators who have robbed the country blind and are hence directly responsible for the tent people. But what about India where tent people have lived for decades if not longer? Who is to blame?

Is it the sum total of politicians who ruled all those decades and never gave a *&^%$ about the tent people? Then what do we tell to those tent people? Should we not tell them that God never meant for them to live under pieces of plastic along the highway? Should we not tell them that it is the moral responsibility of all political leaders to provide them with food, water, shelter, clothes, soap, health care and education?

How do we tell these simple, sweet tent people that there is a better way? How would you tell them? I want to tell them this now, but I don't know how to start. How do we talk to them in a way that is relevant to their lives? Is it our job then to take away their simple acceptance of their plight and inspire them to demand the minimum necessities from their cold, callous government?

Is that our job? Is it our job to take away their simplicity and raise their political consciousness and make them outraged at the economic injustice of their lives? For some reason, i cannot bear their plight and neither can I bear that they accept their plight so happily.

It reminds me of what Professor Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank founder, wrote in his autobiography regarding the famine of 1970s in Bangladesh. He would be teaching economic theories to his students inside the classroom, and outside, just at the door, starving men, women and children would just lie down and wait to die. They didn't fight. They didn't rebel. They were not even angry with anyone. They accepted everything – even their own vastly premature death.

See how painful also it is to read that 150,000 farmers across India have committed suicide in the past five years to escape the slow and agonizing process of starvation. Easier to die the short agony of poison than the long agony of starvation! But why do they feel no anger? Why don't they rebel? Is it that they do not know whom to rebel against? That they do not know who is responsible for their tortures and humiliations and finally their starvation?

Then again, isn't it our duty to tell them who is responsible? Isn't it our duty to inspire them to fight back? Did wealthy people ever distribute their wealth voluntarily to the downtrodden? No. They only distribute when the poor demand it.

So why not all of us go and meet the tent people and tell them that they do not need to live like this, that the immoral, indifferent, heartless politicians are responsible, and that they should fight those politicians, remove them from power and bring moralists to power who have hearts full of love for the common people. And whoever has a conscience, whoever loves morality should join them in that fight and guide them and become one with them.

Garda Ghista is a freelance journalist and author of The Gujarat Genocide: A Case Study in Fundamentalist Cleansing and Wife Abuse: Breaking It Down and Breaking Out. She is also Founding President of the World Prout Assembly, a non-profit organization dedicated to transferring economic power from corporations to the common people and to fighting injustice in every sphere of life.

The comments from oringinal article are quite interesting, especially the one from "Hide Behind".

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Elites: they are playing with your marbles.

Leaked Agenda: Bilderberg Group
Plans Economic Depression

Elitists divided on whether to quickly sink economy and replace it with new world order, or set in motion long, agonizing depression

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Source
On the eve of the 2009 Bilderberg Group conference, which is due to be held May 14-17 at the 5 star Nafsika Astir Palace Hotel in Vouliagmeni, Greece, investigative reporter Daniel Estulin has uncovered shocking details of what the elitists plan to do with the economy over the course of the next year.

The Bilderberg Group meeting is an annual confab of around 150 of the world’s most influential powerbrokers in government, industry, banking, media, academia and the military-industrial complex. The secretive group operates under “Chatham House rules,” meaning that no details of what is discussed can ever be leaked to the media, despite editors of the world’s biggest newspapers, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Financial Times, being present at the meeting.

According to Estulin’s sources, which have been proven highly accurate in the past, Bilderberg is divided on whether to put into motion, “Either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty … or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.”

The information takes on added weight when one considers the fact that Estulin’s previous economic forecasts, which were based on leaks from the same sources, have proven deadly accurate. Estulin correctly predicted the housing crash and the 2008 financial meltdown as a result of what his sources inside Bilderberg told him the elite were planning based on what was said at their 2006 meeting in Canada and the 2007 conference in Turkey.

Details of the economic agenda were contained in a pre-meeting booklet being handed out to Bilderberg members. On a more specific note, Estulin warns that Bilderberg are fostering a false picture of economic recovery, suckering investors into ploughing their money back into the stock market again only to later unleash another massive downturn which will create “massive losses and searing financial pain in the months ahead,” according to a Canada Free Press report.

According to Estulin, Bilderberg is assuming that U.S. unemployment figures will reach around 14% by the end of the year, almost doubling the current official figure of 8.1 per cent.

Estulin’s sources also tell him that Bilderberg will again attempt to push for the enactment of the Lisbon Treaty, a key centerpiece of the agenda to fully entrench a federal EU superstate, by forcing the Irish to vote again on the document in September/October despite having rejected it already, along with other European nations, in national referendums.

“One of their concerns is addressing and neutralizing the anti-Lisbon treaty movement called “Libertas” led by Declan Ganley. One of the Bilderberger planned moves is to use a whispering campaign in the US media suggested that Ganley is being funded by arms dealers in the US linked to the US military,” reports CFP.

Daniel Estulin, Jim Tucker, and other sources who have infiltrated Bilderberg meetings in the past have routinely provided information about the Bilderberg agenda that later plays out on the world stage, proving that the organization is not merely a “talking shop” as debunkers claim, but an integral planning forum for the new world order agenda.

Indeed, just last month Belgian viscount and current Bilderberg-chairman Étienne Davignon bragged that Bilderberg helped create the Euro by first introducing the policy agenda for a single currency in the early 1990’s. Bilderberg’s agenda for a European federal superstate and a single currency likely goes back even further. A BBC investigation uncovered documents from the early Bilderberg meetings which confirmed that the European Union was a brainchild of Bilderberg.

In spring 2002, when war hawks in the Bush administration were pushing for a summer invasion of Iraq, Bilderbergers expressed their desire for a delay and the attack was not launched until March the following year.

In 2006, Estulin predicted that the U.S. housing market would be allowed to soar before the bubble was cruelly popped, which is exactly what transpired.

In 2008, Estulin predicted that Bilderberg were creating the conditions for a financial calamity, which is exactly what began a few months later with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Bilderberg has routinely flexed its muscles in establishing its role as kingmaker. The organization routinely selects presidential candidates as well as running mates and prime ministers.

Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were both groomed by the secretive organization in the early 1990’s before rising to prominence.

Barack Obama’s running mate Joe Biden was selected by Bilderberg luminary James A. Johnson, and John Kerry’s 2004 running mate John Edwards was also anointed by the group after he gave a glowing speech at the conference in 2004. Bilderberg attendees even broke house rules to applaud Edwards at the end of a speech he gave to the elitists about American politics. The choice of Edwards was shocking to media pundits who had fully expected Dick Gephardt to secure the position. The New York Post even reported that Gephardt had been chosen and “Kerry-Gephardt” stickers were being placed on campaign vehicles before being removed when Edwards was announced as Kerry’s number two.

A 2008 Portuguese newspaper report highlighted the fact that Pedro Santana Lopes and Jose Socrates attended the 2004 meeting in Stresa, Italy before both going on to become Prime Minster of Portugal.

Several key geopolitical decisions were made at last year’s Bilderberg meeting in Washington DC, again emphasizing the fact that the confab is far more than an informal get-together.

As we reported at the time, Bilderberg were concerned that the price of oil was accelerating too fast after it hit $150 a barrel and wanted to ensure that “oil prices would probably begin to decline”. This is exactly what happened in the latter half of 2008 as oil again sunk below $50 a barrel. We were initially able to predict the rapid rise in oil prices in 2005 when oil was at $40, because Bilderberg had called for prices to rise during that year’s meeting in Munich. During the conference in Germany, Henry Kissinger told his fellow attendees that the elite had resolved to ensure that oil prices would double over the course of the next 12-24 months, which is exactly what happened.

Also at last year’s meeting, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice formalized plans to sign a treaty on installing a U.S. radar base in the Czech Republic with Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg.

Rice was joined at the meeting by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who reportedly encouraged EU globalists to get behind an attack on Iran. Low and behold, days later the EU threatened Iran with sanctions if it did not suspend its nuclear enrichment program.

There was also widespread speculation that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s “secret meeting,” which was accomplished with the aid of cloak and dagger tactics like locking journalists on an airplane to keep them from tracking the two down, took place at the Bilderberg meeting in DC.

It remains to be seen what kind of mainstream media press coverage Bilderberg 2009 will be afforded because, despite the proven track record of Bilderberg having a central role in influencing subsequent geopolitical and financial world events, and despite last year’s meeting being held in Washington DC, the U.S. corporate media oversaw an almost universal blackout of reporting on the conference, its attendees, and what was discussed.

Once again, it will be left to the alternative media to fill the vacuum and educate the people on exactly what the globalists have planned for us over the coming year.

How are you?.... Oh just fine........Really?!!!!!!!

Former chief economist for the world bank says
“you have to be in fantasy land to say that everything is fine”

Nobel Prize Winning Economist:

Crisis As Bad As Great Depression Or Worse

Steve Watson
Source
Wednesday, Sept 17, 2008
Two time Nobel-prize winner and former chief economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz has warned that the current financial crisis will continue for at least another eighteen months and in many ways represents a worse situation than the one faced by Americans during the great depression of the 1930s.

“You can paper things over for a while but eventually you have to face reality.” Stiglitz told the nationally syndicated Alex Jones show yesterday.

“This is clearly the most serious problem since the great depression and in some ways worse in terms of the financial institutions.” Stiglitz commented, referring to the fact that lenders are unwilling to take risks to finance each other because they no longer have complete access to their own undertakings let alone those of other institutions.

“The reason, in part, is that while some of the same problems that occurred during the great depression and have occurred since, such as excessive leverage, pyramid schemes, bubbles, have happened before, the so called innovation of Wall Street, the financial innovations, that were supposed to manage risk, created a kind of non transparency that is now so great that no one knows exactly the magnitude of the risk they face.”

“It is particularly bad because our financial institutions are based on trust, you put the money in the bank and you trust that you can get your money out, so trust is absolutely essential for the functioning of our financial markets and the functioning of our economy.” he continued.

“The problem is that much of the news on what is going on in the financial markets comes from those who are making money out of the financial markets. So if you were one of the people involved with Lehman Brothers or AIG, you’re going to be talking up the economy. The head of Lehman Brothers was quoted last April as saying we have turned the corner, the economy is on the uptick. And the same thing goes for the president and the secretary of treasury.”

“The fact is that they are involved in salesmanship.”

Describing the current situation as a “top down crisis”, Stiglitz also cited the $3 trillion cost of the Iraq war as a key factor in the economic downturn, saying it has increased the budget deficit and consumed resources that would otherwise promote growth.

“This is the first war in American history that has been totally financed on the credit card… For the last five years as the war has gone on we have been a debt economy. It is the first war since the revolutionary war that we have had to turn to foreigners to finance, 40% of our national debt is now being financed by foreigners… Even as we went into the war we had a big deficit, and yet the president called for tax cuts for upper middle class Americans.” he said.

“And there is another level of trust, those in other countries have to have trust that the American economy is working well, they have to trust that when the president says everything is going well, it is. This administration has really burned that trust, the president said there is no problem, there’s just a few too many houses been built. Well if that is the level of analysis the Untied States is giving about the nature of its economic problems, no wonder everybody around the world is losing confidence. “

Stiglitz is no stranger to positioning himself in opposition to the establishment on the economic front. In October 2001 he caused controversy when he exposed rampant corruption within the IMF and blew the whistle on their nefarious methods of inducing countries to fall under their debt before stripping them of sovereignty and hollowing out their economies.

“It is clear that the Bush administration is not responding to these problems, partly because the problems are of their own making.” Stiglitz asserted.

Over the next twelve months, Stiglitz predicts that house prices will continue to fall, more mortgages will go into foreclosure and more financial firms will be put into crisis.

“I am particularly worried about what I call the ‘real economy’. Basically when the financial system starts getting weak, it is not in a position to provide credit, to provide loans, to provide mortgages and that means in turn that housing prices are going to fall further, businesses are going to contract, unemployment is going to grow and it is a downward vicious cycle… I don’t want to be obsessively pessimistic but you have to be in fantasy land to say that everything is fine, and even to say that we have turned the corner. We’re still in the downward phase of this economic cycle. We should not anticipate emerging from this for a year and a half or longer.”

In a long term prediction 22 months ago, Stiglitz told listeners of the Alex Jones show that he believed a global economic crash would occur within 2 years. With major financial institutions now folding every week, others touting mergers just to stay afloat and stocks continually plummeting on a daily basis it seems that prediction is coming to pass.

Stiglitz stressed that in order to emerge from the crisis, the economy needs a stimulus, that really works, consisting of increased aid for local government, stronger unemployment insurance and more investment in infrastructure.

“I would take advantage of this particular time in order to stimulate our economy in ways that provide the basis of our longer term economic growth. If our economy is growing then we will be better able to manage some of this financial turmoil.” he concluded.

Listen to the interview below:





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