Almost everyone in the country is now buying and selling in foreign currency, rendering the Zimbabwe dollar almost worthless on the domestic market.

Even bank queues that characterized the daily lives of people last year are disappearing, as more people turn to using either the South African rand or U.S. dollars.

The MDC MP for Mbare Piniel Denga told us villagers in Murehwa were selling maize cobs, tomatoes and their livestock in U.S. dollars. The MP was in the area on Sunday were he bought a small dish of five mangoes for US$1. He said three tomatoes cost US$1, and five fresh maize cobs also cost US$1.

'During the festive season I was in Chivhu where people were buying beer and other drinks in foreign currency. I must admit that the use of our local currency is fast dwindling and you hardly see anyone using it anymore. For instance if you use a kombi from Glen View to the city it now costs US$1 as well, so everything has been dollarised,' Denga said.

The Mbare legislator said Zimbabweans had been forced to abandon the local currency for the simple reason that the maximum money you are allowed to withdraw can only buy one small onion.

'Go to any bank now and you hardly see anyone inside. You see few people here and there but otherwise the days of the Zimbabwe dollar are nearing their end. This is not a secret, even the government knows that people have empowered themselves and abandoned their useless dollar. We are headed for interesting times,' the MP quipped.

It costs US$20,000 to buy a foreign currency licence, which legally allows businesses to trade in forex. But with the virtually total collapse of the economy most small business can barely generate enough income to pay their staff at the end of each month. The Reserve Bank's policies, courtesy of Gideon Gono, have created a nightmare for most of these small companies and for the majority of the population who have little access to forex.

With everything now being imported companies have to pay for their inputs in forex, but if they can't afford a forex licence they legally can't sell in foreign currency. So Gono's forex police do the rounds of the shops, impounding 'illegal' foreign currency from these shops. In other words state sponsored theft.

The dollarisation has extended to school tuition with private schools setting fees in US dollars, putting education out of reach of most.

Chisipite High School in Harare is charging US$1,200 per term, and was asking pupils to bring fuel coupons worth US$300 with them on their first day of the term as a deposit.

Roxer Academy primary in Harare is charging US$800 a term, while in Bulawayo the Masiyephambili Primary School is requiring a fee of US$650.

This almost guarantees that when schools open next week they will be virtually empty. Families will be unable to send their kids to school and teachers will have no money for transport. . . read more

After reviewing the contents of this Citibank-friendly new law called the Financial Modernization Act, I asked him: "Do you think the big banks have too much power"?

He paused for a few seconds and replied: "Not Yet." Intrigued by his two word answer, I noted the rejection of modest pro-consumer provisions, adding that now that the banks had had their round, wasn't it time for the consumers to have their own round soon?

He allowed that such an expectation was not unreasonable and that he was willing to meet with some seasoned consumer advocates and go over such an agenda. We sent him an agenda, and met with Mr. Summers and his staff. Unfortunately, neither his boss, Bill Clinton, nor the Congress were in any mood to revisit this heavily lobbied federal deregulation law and reconsider the blocked consumer rights.

The rest is unfolding, tragic history. The law abolished the Glass-Steagall Act which separated commercial banking from investment banking. This opened the floodgates for unwise mergers, acquisitions and other unregulated risky financial instruments. Laced with limitless greed, casino capitalism ran wild, tanking economies here and abroad.

One champion of this market fundamentalism was Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve. Last October before a House Committee, Greenspan admitted he was mistaken and expressed astonishment at how corporations could not even safeguard their own self-interest from going over steep speculative cliffs.

Greenspan and Summers were deemed "brilliant" by the press and most of Congress. Summers' predecessor at Treasury, Robert Rubin, was also a charter member of the Oracles--those larger-than-life men who just knew that the unfettered market and giant financial conglomerates would be the one-stop shopping mart consumers were assumed to be craving.

Now the world knows that these men belong to the "oops oligarchy" that bails itself out while it lets the companies collapse into the handcuffed arms of Uncle Sam and bridled taxpayers who have to pay for unconditional megabailouts. Instead of the Wall Street crooks being convicted and imprisoned, they have fled the jurisdiction with their self-determined compensation. Corporate crime pays, while pensions and mutual fund savings evaporate.

Now comes the next stage of the Washington rescue effort in a variety of stimulus packages which every vendor group imaginable wants a piece of these days. When trillions are offered, many come running.

As the public focus is on how much, when and where all this money should be spent, there are very serious consequences to be foreseen and forestalled. First, consider how much more concentrated corporate power is occurring. Forced or willing mergers, acquisitions and panic takeovers of big banks by bigger banks along with bankruptcies of companies further reduce what is left of quality competition for consumer benefit.

Remember the anti-trust laws. Obama needs to be their champion. The fallout from the Wall Street binge is likely to lead to a country run by an even smaller handful of monopolistic global goliaths.

In the stampede for stimulus legislation, there is a foreboding feeling on Capitol Hill that there is no proposal on the table to pay for it other than by the children and grandchildren. Just the opposite is raining down on them. Everybody including the private equity gamblers, Las Vegas casinos and Hollywood studios along with the banks and auto companies are looking for tax breaks.

So with the economy deteriorating and taxes being cut, where is the enormous money coming from? From borrowing and from printing money. So look out for big time inflation and decline in the dollar?s value vis-à-vis other currencies.

In all the hundreds of pages of stimulus bills, there is nothing that would facilitate the banding together of consumers and investors into strong advocacy groups. We have long proposed Financial Consumer Associations, privately and voluntarily funded through inserts in the monthly statements of financial firms.

If this bailout-stimulus-Wall Street funny money waste, fraud and abuse sounds confusing, that is because it is. A brand new paperback "Why Wall Street Can't Be Fixed and How to Replace It: Agenda For a New Economy" by long-time corporate critic, David C. Korten will explain some of the wheeling and dealing.

You don't have to agree with all or many of Korten?s nostrums. Just read Part II: the Case For Eliminating Wall Street. He considers three central questions:

First, do Wall Street Institutions do anything so vital for the national interest that they justify trillions of dollars to save them from the consequences of their own excess?

Second, is it possible that the whole Wall Street edifice is built on an illusion of phantom wealth that carries deadly economic, social, and environmental consequences for the larger society?

Third, are there other ways to provide needed financial services with greater results and at lesser cost?

Ralph Nader is an American attorney, author, lecturer, political activist, and perennial candidate for presidency as an independent candidate. . . read more

As if there were not enough reasons to go mad, the proliferation of acronyms related to the crisis is such that one can hardly understand them.

The first was the G20, a selected group meeting in Washington that pretended to represent all. The second was the also selective APEC group which met in Lima. There was the richest country, the United States; with a per capita GDP of 45 thousand dollars a year. But there was also the 100th ranked country, the People's Republic of China, with a per capita GDP of 2,483 dollars; China is also the number one investor in US Treasury bonds.

Now, G192 is the way that Leonel Fernandez, President of the Dominican Republic, which is not a member of either of the two, calls the member countries of the United Nations attending an economic conference with Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate of Economics.

George Soros, an immensely rich magnate of Hungarian descent and an American citizen, was one of the attending personalities.

One would have to be a chess player to disentangle the arguments of such diverse national and business interests as are represented in the G20 and the G21.

The truth of the matter is that if a Third World country signed free trade agreements with eight or ten developed or emerging countries, --some of them traditional producers of abundant and attractive low cost goods or sophisticated industrial products, such as the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, etc.-- the nascent industry of a developing country would have to compete with the sophisticated products of the most developed countries' industries or the hard working hands of their powerful partners, one of which handles world finances wantonly. The only thing left to them would be to produce inexpensive raw materials requiring large investments ultimately owned by foreign companies fully protected from nationalizing whims. They would only have their extended hands waiting for a pious development support and an eternal debt to be repaid with their children's sweat. Isn't this what has been happening until today?

That's why I don't hesitate to show my solidarity with Chavez's position as he said that he disagreed with Lima's recipe. There are plenty of reasons. Let's see how the situation unfolds, and keep demanding out rights without ever bending our knees.

What we see is the result of a catastrophic loss of trust in the West. It goes well beyond economics and finance. It is the sincerity of political leaders of the West that is at stake. If those in power in Washington, London and elsewhere cannot be trusted on the critical matters of war and peace, law and justice and treatment of different sections of their own populations, their ability in other areas is bound to be questioned. The leaders of America and its allies have simply become captivated by a doctrine that leaves their economies at home, to be run by the large private institutions that they befriend, while they themselves go and fight wars abroad.

Today, America's wars are financed by money borrowed from China and the oil-rich Gulf states which are awash with petrodollars... And countries like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, which have accumulated huge reserves in U.S. dollars, don't trust the West. The resentment in the Arab world against the treatment of Muslims by the West is strong. And the government of Iceland criticizes its 'friends' for not doing enough to help it and looks towards Russia to bail it out.

The West is simply broke – morally, politically and economically. [More] . . read more

It's holiday season in Manhattan and despite the economic downturn, there seems to be no shortage of well-dressed humans cavorting, laughing, and spending freely. Walking among them, a homeless man begs for money-shaking his tattered coffee cup (adorned with images of Greek architecture) to rattle the few coins therein. A veteran of the first Gulf War, this man is no longer concerned with yellow ribbons. Right now, he'd settle for a scrap of food and a dry pair of shoes.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) estimates that nearly 200,000 veterans are homeless on any given night and nearly 400,000 experience homelessness over the course of a year. Forty-five percent of America's homeless veterans suffer from mental illness and half have substance abuse problems. According to the National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients, veterans account for 23% of all homeless people in America.

The homeless vet is barely noticed by the 30-something corporate lawyer whizzing past him, on his way to dinner. It's a holiday gathering to celebrate hope, change, and all that good stuff. The lawyer-still proudly wearing his Obama button-is running late and his colleagues have already ordered appetizers: shrimp cocktails all around (for only $17 each).

The United Nations Environment Program has estimated that a quarter of the destruction of mangrove forests stems from shrimp farming. After the 2008 Burma cyclone, Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan blamed "encroachment into mangrove forests, which used to serve as a buffer between the rising tide, between big waves and storms and residential areas." He added: "All those lands have been destroyed. Human beings are now direct victims of such natural forces."

The homeless vet sees a Wall Street type-still proudly wearing his Obama button-approaching him. "Hey buddy," the vet tries, "how about a bailout?" The Wall Street type doesn't laugh. The Wall Street type doesn't even see the homeless vet. The Wall Street type tosses his half-finished Coke onto the sidewalk.

As labor activist Ray Rogers explains, "The reality is that the world of Coca-Cola is a world of lies, deceptions, corruption, gross human rights and environmental abuses!" Rogers told Democracy Now that Coke "contracted with paramilitary death squads to torture, kidnap, and murder union leaders at its bottling plants in Columbia." If geo-political issues aren't enough to move you, consider what Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences says about Coke and its ilk: " The relationship between soft drink consumption and body weight is so strong that researchers calculate that for each additional soda consumed, the risk of obesity increases 1.6 times."

The homeless vet picks up the Wall Street type's Coke and downs it in one big gulp. Afterwards, he tosses the empty cup onto the sidewalk and glances to his left just in time to look through the restaurant window and see the corporate lawyer cheerfully biting into a piece of shrimp.

At that precise moment, an underwater tremor deep in the Pacific Ocean creates a powerful wave that will develop into a tsunami aimed directly for a popular vacation destination once protected by mighty mangroves.

Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net/

The banks are hoarding cash to meet their capital requirements. They are trying to compensate for the loss of value to their (mortgage-backed) assets by increasing their reserves. At the same time, the system is clogged with trillions of dollars of bad paper which has brought lending to a halt. The huge injections of liquidity from the Fed have done nothing to improve lending or lower interbank rates. It's been a flop. The market is driving interest rates now. If the situation persists, the stock market will crash. [More] . . read more

It's certainly true that U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson doesn't look much like the traditional depiction of Santa Claus.  However, in 2008 America he is playing that role with a vengeance which will undoubtedly affect and afflict all of us for decades to come.  Indeed, Santa Henry's trillion-dollar giveaway to those who caused much of the present financial crisis is already arriving.  While it may seem paradoxical, not to mention inappropriate, to reward those who got us into the present economic mess, Santa Henry is loyal to his former Wall Street colleagues, investment bankers, and other assorted cronies.  They are Santa Henry's Elves, in a manner of speaking. . . read more

After more than sixty years, the global bully is found to be incompetent. Just as the Cold War ended suddenly and unexpectedly in 1989, the American nightmare is imploding in 2008, even though it could take another twenty years to give up the ghost completely.

The trouble is that in the hands of this clueless giant are most of the weapons sufficient to obliterate the planet. But America wants more, ever more, and running out of credit could trigger a psychotic breakdown. We should be terrified. Not just because of the economic chaos to come, but because of what will happen when this highly armed political dinosaur starts thrashing about in its death spasms.

This time, will the world say "No" when the crunch comes? . . read more

The drop in the ransom price has been confirmed by a number of sources, the discount is a bit less confirmed and the cut-rate by Amex is obviously false because American Express never gives a cut-rate on anything.

Part of the problem, for the pirates, is that Sydney and other cities have regained cheap petrol for a little while. However the general point is solid - the pirates have to reduce their ransom because the world economy, the oil price and even pirates faith in the future are all falling.