I had some interesting encounters with a few left wing opportunities among the Occupy Wall Street protesters this week. Although in no way they represent the group’s voice, it is nonetheless a good experience to get to sample what these people have been thinking. They seem to know more about what they don’t want as a destructive force but have no concrete ideas on how they might make some contributions for their own lives or for our country. It may grow to be a kind of destructive force that our country may need to eradicate the crony establishments on Wall Street and Washington, DC, but they seem to have nothing to offer, at least as of this writing, to help reconstruct our country in a new direction after their intended target destructions.
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Excerpts from the debate on socialism and capitalism with left wing opportunists among the Occupy Wall Street protesters:
First of all. I’d like to let you know that I am on your side against the crony and incompetent establishment on Wall Street and in DC that have brought our country’s economy down to its knees. That is right, the crony establishment. Not capitalism. Don’t tell me you were born an egalitarian socialist and you always wanted to fight for your noble causes since you were little boy. That kind of story could only be made up afterwards for those people who did miraculously succeed and become a revolutionary hero one day. Neither Castro nor Mao cared the slightest about the ideological ideas between communism and capitalism. They just wanted their power and to win the wars.
They were all opportunists just like you are, trying to take advantage of the situation to enrich themselves with fame and power. When it is convenient for them to get people to support them they leaned towards the people’s psychological needs to win support in their power struggle. So it is really fruitless for us to go into a huge debate about capitalism and communism. I am not Adam Smith and you are no Karl Marx either.
All I know is that they both could be good individually and they both have their own disadvantages. On balance capitalism outweighs socialism and last longer because it is associated with more freedom and democracy. What is more interesting is that they both could coexist. Singapore is a good example of social capitalism and the modern day China is a good example of a totalitarian communism/capitalism by chance. It is only the extremist revolutionaries who wanted to have mutually exclusive monopolistic communism, socialism or capitalism system so that they could drive people’s naive ideological support like the power of a religion.
What I have observed in history is that socialism (communism) and capitalism come in cycles. For example, the Soviet Union in the 50’s was the strong and powerful country on earth. Due to the evil nature of people, whoever enjoyed the power for a long time, especially during a prosperity period, they started to abuse the system and enrich themselves with money and power. So it was always the abuses and the abusers of the systems that have brought the existing system down, no matter the existing system was communism or capitalism, and hence the revolution opportunity for the opportunists.
What you guys are doing was exactly what I expected when I set up PeoplesAlly Foundation earlier in the year. That was in fact the reason I had set it up because I believe in the free market system and wanted to offer an alternative to empower common people on Main Street by providing them with the necessary intellectual know-hows so that they could stand up and beat Wall Street in their own game. I could understand that when the system had been abused to the extreme the first knee jerk reaction of the disadvantaged class in the system is to ask for a change but they have not the slightest ideas what is the best change for them or for the country. So during that time it is easy to fan the disadvantaged people’s emotions and sell socialism or even communism if things really get worse to the people. That is what we wanted to help these people to avoid.
During the transitional periods in history, the revolutionaries might have succeeded through brutal forces, but after the regime changed hands, when they were bestowed the responsibility to rebuild the country, the ideological dogma could continue to hurt the people for quite a long time. Look at how long the Chinese people had suffered before they finally embraced a variation of capitalism system to bring up the prosperity. Yes the old capitalistic regime that they had toppled before was corrupt to the teeth and yes China’s class distinctions will continue to become polarized again when people get rich and start to abuse the system for personal benefits again, but at least there will be a period of prosperity for the people and many achievements for the human race. A Utopian socialism system would never be able to do that on the same scale.
In history nobody has ever tried to fix the capitalism system by toppling the crony establishment and keeping the good part of the capitalism in place when the abuse problems like what we are facing happened before. Why not give it a chance? Why do the revolutionaries always have to drag the whole system down?
Anyway, I hope you could understand, I am simply trying to offer an alternative for the change. Since it is no longer in the 30’s or 50’s, those old time communist style revolutions would have no chance to work in modern day America, nor should it. Arab Springs would not turn out to be what people had hoped it to be either since chaos simply does not produce prosperity.
All we need to do is to create a new type of capitalism to let working class people be able to stand up to compete with the corrupted Wall Street under the free market system without being held hostage by Wall Street through their superior intellectual power. That is exactly what our Foundation’s missions are. http://peoplesally.wordpress.com/foundation-missions/
One simple example, if you rally all your people to campaign and call for all American people on Main Street to stop doing business with the corrupt big banks on Wall Street and only do business with the independent community banks or local credit unions, wouldn’t that be a non-violent first step to let the corrupt big banks on Wall Street to die on their own? If the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department are the crony forces that misdirected our country’s economic policies then vote them out and indict them for the sufferings they have caused us American people. All these could be done through proper channels without hurting the innocent majority of American people in a revolutionary change of a system.
Let’s be honest, these easy fixes for a revolution may be easier to accomplish but they may not make you a Che Guevara. This could be your chance in a life time to shine and you won’t let it go until something spectacular happens. The something spectacular may just hurt the millions on Main Street. So that is the choice you will have to make on whether what you are doing is for yourself or for our country.
My point is, capitalism has been abused by the economic elite exploiters on Wall Street and the crony forces in Washington DC, go fix them. We will all support you. Help shift the power and our country’s destiny back to people on Main Street. If you want to understand the blueprint of a new decentralized peer-to-peer financial system that is how we could help, beginning with bringing everybody’s housing finance back to common people on Main Street without the unnecessary participation of banks, Wall Street firms or even the federal government.
Please read the explanations and the academic papers on FARJHO and SwapRent at http://www.PeoplesAlly.org and feel free to ask me any technical questions on them. Housing is the first issue we will all need to fix for our country to have an economic future. I have repeated over and over again in other postings, it is very important that these new housing finance system inventions should not land in the wrong hands of the Wall Street exploiters or they would be totally ruined again. Let Main Street have a chance to develop a new housing finance system on its own.
After that, the capitalism system on Main Street will be back working well again without the intervention by those crooks on Wall Street. So please continue to occupy Wall Street and DC only. There is really no need for you to try to come occupy our Main Street and change our system. We love our small business capitalism here.
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On PeoplesAlly Foundation’s role:
You don’t have to be on the left or on the right to help working class people left and right.
Let’s help Main Street beat Wall Street in their own game. Escaping from capitalism will never be the ultimate solution. We simply need to help the working class people avoid exploitation by the privileged few and help them obtain their fair shares of the economic benefits of the capitalistic system in an intellectual way.
Singling out the abuses and the abusers of our system and fix them would be a much better way than blindly trying to topple our capitalistic system. Come up with viable constructive alternative solutions before you seek destructions.
Make innovations, not wars.
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Excerpts from the debate on whether to socialize the banking system:
To continue our discussions, you guys will need to read (at http://www.PeoplesAlly.org ) what academic research outcome and inventions that I have produced over the past 10 years for a new home ownership structure called FARJHO and a new housing finance system called SwapRent that could eliminate the involvements by the big banks and the Federal Reserve System to understand why I see the world differently and why there is no need to throw the baby out with the water. Mind you, big banks and the Fed are not the baby, they are the dirty water. Capitalism will always be America’s baby.
Without understanding the value brought about by new innovations, people would end up arguing the same old things over and over again and likely to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Try to imagine, when a horse rider and a donkey rider argues against each other on who can ride faster but neither has ever seen a car before, it is hard for them to understand that we don’t need either if only you have the availability of the new invention called a car.
So why bother keeping arguing on whether to socialize the big banks vs. the free wheeling status quo of Wall Street if only you could understand that housing finance could easily be done through new inventions like FARJHO and SwapRent delivered via the new peer-to-peer method without any profiteering financial middlemen? We won’t even need the big banks and the Fed anymore. That is what I meant by saying to bring the destiny of our country’s economic future from the dirty hands of Wall Street back to the people on Main Street.
It is the Joseph Schumpeter’s creative destruction under free market that I am talking about. That is how the society improves itself, through new innovations, not by revisiting old ideologies. And the innovations that I am referring to are on social systems and financial systems, not just on tech gadgets as people usually refer to. FARJHO and SwapRent are exactly such social innovations that I had started to work on over 10 years ago.
The despair you described is a lack of understanding of the availability of new innovations to improve our society. Thanks for trying to recruit me in your guys’ efforts. In fact you will need me if you succeed. Here is why.
I wouldn’t care much if the big banks, Wall Street firms and the Federal Reserve System have a natural demise through creative destruction under a free market system or by a brutal force of a revolution, I only know that going forward for the benefits of the American people on Main Street we won’t even need them if FARJHO could become an overwhelmingly new method to own homes and SwapRent will be a new alternative way to obtain financing for people on Main Street. I hope it could be the latter because it may make it happen sooner. However, after the destruction you will need an alternative to rebuild the country’s economy, rather letting another version of Wall Street and Fed rise from the ashes again.
That is why I stated over and over again that we would need people’s help in preventing Wall Street’s crooks from laying their dirty fingers on these new inventions for them to reincarnate themselves in a the future revised capitalism. Let’s hope the transparency of the Internet could do that for us.
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On Anti-usury:
You may like this due to your expressed Muslim background but first you have to learn to understand free market enterprise and usury are by no means the same thing. Please do not try to confuse people on that. We could ban usury but that has nothing to do with a free market enterprise capitalism system. The lending abuses of Wall Street and the debt oriented culture that have led our country into so far need to go. That is what we both have agreed on. So we are really on the same side.
FARJHO and SwapRent are both pure equity based financial methods and systems. You can’t find any more anti-usury financial methods in this modern world, not even in the Muslim world. It is ironic that you call FARJHO “another old usury laden xxxx”. You should always try to read before you open your mouth or you appear uneducated.
With that ideological coincidence, I felt the Muslim people must love the new all equity based home ownership structure and housing finance methods that I had invented since that is what their God told them to have, i.e. the Riba restriction. So I devoted the whole year of 2009 studying and researching the Islamic finance principles and the current practices of Islamic mortgages in each country. I have also marketed FARJHO and SwapRent to the academic institutions and central banks in the Muslim world. I have received great feedback and support from Islamic Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, many central banks in the Gulf Region and academically from many Islamic finance scholars from Pakistan.
Although many Western academics that I had corresponded with at the time back in 2009 expressed the feeling that even the Muslim people themselves do not appreciate how valuable a concept that the Riba thing (burden people with debt) is to the society, what I had found out unfortunately is that the currently called Islamic mortgage as practiced by the Muslim people is nothing but a sham. They simply copied the same Western mortgage structure and simply called the interest payments by different names. These Islamic mortgages still contain all the evils and trappings of usury, e.g. people could still get foreclosed.
That started my interest to further extend the new all equity based FARJHO structure and SwapRent services to the Muslim world as well because these are the genuinely new methods that could coincidentally comply with the spirit of the Shariah laws. The home occupier in a new FARJHO home ownership structure will never get foreclosed, no matter they are Chinese, Muslim, Jews, Christians or Eskimos.
It is only in the US version of the FARJHO LLC that we plan to launch here for the primarily Christian-Judaic US population, we have relaxed the structure to allow borrowing but only at the member level so that the social stability value could still be maintained. As long as no FARJHO LLC borrows money or using the property as collateral to borrow money, there would still be no more foreclosure possibility.
So if you genuinely want promote Riba and defeat usury for people’s benefits, FARJHO and SwapRent are what you will need to learn. Destructively ranting about what is bad will not change the system. Constructively promoting what may work better probably makes more sense. I hope you could start behave like a respectable educated person and devote your time to more constructive causes. Thanks.
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Filed under: Economic Viewpoints, FARJHO, Federal Government, Housing, Mortgage, Occupy Wall Street, PeoplesAlly, SwapRent, 1%'ers, 99%'ers, Capitalism., Left wing opportunists, Mortgage abuses, Occupy Wall Street, Riba, Sharia laws, Socialism, Wall Street elites