NightBlogger

This from NEWSWEEK: People nationwide may start hoarding their cash as recession fears grow. But in Riverwest—a progressive enclave of Milwaukee—residents have another answer to their money trouble: they’ll print their own. The proposed River Currency would be used like cash at local businesses, keeping the area economy humming whatever the health of the country at large. “We can create our own value,” explains Sura Faraj, 48, one of the plan’s organizers.

It’s an attractive idea when times are tight. Communities print what look like ordinary bills with serial numbers, anti-counterfeiting details and images of local landmarks (the Milwaukee River, for instance) instead of presidential portraits. Residents benefit through an exchange system: 10 traditional dollars, for instance, nets them $20 worth of local currency. And when businesses agree to value the funny money like real greenbacks, they also get a free stack to kick-start spending. It’s all perfectly legal (except for coins) as long as it’s not for profit and the bizarro dinero doesn’t resemble the real thing. Dozens of such systems flourished during the Great Depression. In the 1990s, they re-emerged as a way to fight globalization by keeping wealth in local hands. Now the dream of homespun cash is back because it keeps people liquid even if they’re unemployed or short on traditional dollars. (The U.S. Treasury declined to comment on the burgeoning interest in local currency systems.) More

Many economists argue that globalization will not shift into reverse even if oil prices continue their rising trend. But many see evidence that companies looking to keep prices low will have to move some production closer to consumers. Globe-spanning supply chains — Brazilian iron ore turned into Chinese steel used to make washing machines shipped to Long Beach, Calif., and then trucked to appliance stores in Chicago — make less sense today than they did a few years ago. To avoid having to ship all its products from abroad, the Swedish furniture manufacturer Ikea opened its first factory in the United States in May. Some electronics companies that left Mexico in recent years for the lower wages in China are now returning to Mexico, because they can lower costs by trucking their output overland to American consumers.

Decisions like those suggest that what some economists call a neighborhood effect — putting factories closer to components suppliers and to consumers, to reduce transportation costs — could grow in importance if oil remains expensive. A barrel sold for $125 on Friday, compared with lows of $10 a decade ago. “If prices stay at these levels, that could lead to some significant rearrangement of production, among sectors and countries,” said C. Fred Bergsten, author of “The United States and the World Economy” and director of the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, in Washington. “You could have a very significant shock to traditional consumption patterns and also some important growth effects.” More

Joan Veon
NewsWithViews.com
We live in a globalized world—a world without barriers or borders, which means every aspect of our economic structure has to change. A private corporation, we call the Federal Reserve, controls the majority of our monetary system. To understand the new set of powers being advanced by the U.S. Treasury Department to the Federal Reserve, we first must recognize that the Federal Reserve Act passed in 1913 never gave them (the Feds) total power over our economy.

To appreciate the importance of what is currently taking place, we must first realize that as a private corporation, the Federal Reserve is not required to make public who sits on their board of Directors nor who or what banks and corporations hold stock in their private company. Additionally, they are not required to publish an annual report, and I am told, they pay no taxes. So why is it that the American people cannot forgive themselves the interest on their debt? It is because it is owed to a private corporation!

The entire financial and business cycle of market highs and lows is controlled by how much money the Feds pump into or glean from the banking system. When they add money to the system, interest rates fall and the market rises and when they take money out of the system, interest rates rise and the stock market falls or corrects. In doing so, this private corporate structure allows for an elite group of people to literally buy low and sell high, thus transferring the wealth into their pockets while those who continue to hold take the “hit.” More

Matt Renner
t r u t h o u t
Slavery never ended in the United States; it continues here and across the globe, facilitated by globalization, corruption and greed. There are more people enslaved today - controlled by violence and forced to work without pay - than at any time in human history.

Experts put the number of slaves at 27 million worldwide. These men and women work across many sectors of the global economy, raking in profits for the criminals who hold them against their will. The US State Department estimates that 17,500 slaves are brought into the United States every year. An estimated 50,000 slaves are forced to work as prostitutes, farm workers and domestic servants in the US. Read more

Mark Engler, analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy, discusses the disputes between the different factions behind our global empire, the differences in the doctrines of corporate and imperial globalization, the misuse of the term “free-trade” by politicians to describe their mercantilist/fascist policies, how the neocons’ alienating the U.S. from the international organizations has hurt the empire’s domination of the world economy, the IMF/World Bank’s loss of power and influence over the third world, the tension between a state of democracy and empire and the numbers Republican business leaders are now contributing to Democrats over Republicans. Go here