FFaruq

“He knew his father through and through, and he knew that the past was, for him, a solid wooden box locked with a thousand keys that had been cast into the depths of the ocean.”
― Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories

“I remember the shock of it, then questioning how it is that death can be life’s only assurance and yet also its greatest, most devastating surprise.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“We’re all part of each other. When you see what the Americans have done to us, what they’ve done to Iraq, Libya… And it breaks our hearts, all of us.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“You may well ask: when the bubble finally burst, why did we not let the bankers crash and burn? Why weren't they held accountable for their absurd debts? For two reasons.

First because the payment system - the simple means of transferring money from one account to another and on which every transaction relies - is monopolised by the very same bankers who were making the bets. Imagine having gifted your arteries and veins to a gambler. The moment he loses big at the casino, he can blackmail you for anything you have simply by threatening to cut off your circulation.

Second, because the financiers' gambles contained deep inside the title deeds to the houses of the majority. A full-scale financial market collapse could therefore lead to mass homelessness and a complete breakdown in the social contract.

Don't be surprised that the high and mighty financiers of Wall Street would bother financialising the modest homes of poor people. Having borrowed as much as they could off banks and rich clients in order to place their crazy bets, they craved more since the more they bet, the more they made.

So they created more debt from scratch to use as raw materials for more bets. How? By lending to impecunious blue collar worker who dreamed of the security of one day owning their own home.

What if these little people could not actually afford their mortgage in the medium term? In contrast to bankers of old, the Jills and the Jacks who actually leant them the money did not care if the repayments were made because they never intended to collect. Instead, having granted the mortgage, they put it into their computerised grinder, chopped it up literally into tiny pieces of debt and repackaged them into one of their labyrinthine derivatives which they would then sell at a profit.

By the time the poor homeowner had defaulted and their home was repossessed, the financier who granted the loan in the first place had long since moved on.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism