The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that the number of Israeli settlers displaced from north of occupied Palestine has reached 230,000.
It is worth noting it is the first time that the northern settlements get evacuated since the establishment of the usurping occupation entity.
The psychological and economic repercussions of Hezbollah attacks on the northern settlements are added to the security threats, according to the Israeli Channel 13.
For his part, the former Israeli minister Avigdor Liberman stressed that the Zionist settlers could not return to their houses due to the failure of the Army in face of Hezbollah.
Hezbollah managed to destroy the Zionist settlements in the north just as the Israeli occupation army did in Gaza, he added.
Meanwhile, the Zionist occupation, according to Al-Manar TV report, turned the settlers’ houses in the north to be shields that protect them from Hezbollah attacks. The report added that Israeli occupation army caused havoc in the northern settlements because of its strategy.
Benjamin Norton from Moderate Rebels interviews Dr. Michael Hudson. The interview is more wide-ranging than the title suggests but, with razor-sharp intellect, Dr. Hudson breaks open the reason for today’s inflationary cycles. Dr. Hudson again looks at the roots of de-dollarization, the new financial system, China’s purported slow-down, and common prosperity policy being implemented now.
The term financialization is generally used as a reference to that part of the economy indicated by the acronym FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) and its growing importance in the economy in both qualitative and quantitative terms. Financialization has been a developmental process whereby financial markets, financial institutions, and financial elites have gained greater influence over economic policy and economic outcomes. Financialization transforms the functioning of economic systems at both the macro and micro levels. Its principal impact has been to elevate the significance of the financial sector relative to the real value producing sector of the economy; that is to say to transfer income from the value-producing sector to the extractive sector and thereby increase income inequality and wage stagnation.
EXPANSION AND GROWTH
Since 1970 this part of the economy has grown from a significant part of the US economy as well as of those overseas. This means that a significant magnitude of market transactions are associated with finance. In terms of corporate profits finance is said to account for approximately 40% of US GDP. This is a significant but disputed figure and, moreover, it does not include those overseas earnings of companies whose profits are repatriated to their countries of origin. Thus, the increasing presence and role of finance in overall economic activity and the increase of profits channelled to the financial sector represent the salient indicators as to what has been termed financialization. However, the level and importance of finance in the US economy is held in some quarters to have been actually deleterious to growth. A 2012 International Monetary Fund study concluded that the U.S. financial sector has grown so large that it is slowing economic growth. New York University economist Thomas Philippon supported those findings, estimating that the U.S. spends $300 billion too much on financial services per year, and that the sector needs to shrink by 20%. Harvard University and University of Chicago economists agreed, calculating in 2014 that workers in research and development add $5 to the GDP for each dollar they earn, but finance industry workers cause the GDP to shrink by $0.60 for every dollar they are paid. A study by the Bank for International Settlements reached similar conclusions, saying the finance industry impedes economic growth and research and development-based industries.
Wall Street – Belly of the Beast
So this 40% figure increasingly looks like an estimate and does not necessarily represent value or productivity since financialisaton is essentially an extractive process which basically moves wealth from one group to another. For example from everyday wage earners and productive enterprises to the banking, insurance, real estate, and other extractive retail and loan industries. In a study in 2016 two finance academics one at the University of Massachusetts, Professor Gerald Epstein one of the best-known authorities on financialization, together with Juan Montecino of Colombia University published a joint document.(1) It was a type of financial curse for the United States, and it sought to use established methods which attempted to measure the overall damage created by a bloated financial sector in the US. It was argued by these eminent scholars that financialization would put the economy at risk of debt deflation and prolonged recession. Crunching the figures the conclusion that they arrived at was ‘that the US financial system will impose an excess cost of between $12.9 trillion and $22.7 trillion on the US economy between 1990 and 2023, thereby ‘making finance in its current form a net drag on the American economy.’
This calculation of the putative benefits of the financial sector to the US economy, minus the costs imposed by this same sector, was equivalent to a net loss of $105,000-$184,000 for the average American family: without this loss, the typical US household would have doubled its wealth at retirement. The US economy would have been stronger today if the US government had simply paid its highest paying financiers their full salaries, then sent them off to live in luxurious gated communities to play golf all day. (2)
Regardless, financialization operates through three different conduits: changes in the structure and operation of financial markets, changes in the behaviour of nonfinancial corporations, and changes in economic policy. Countering financialisaton would call for a multifaceted agenda that; restores policy control over financial markets; challenges the neoliberal economic policy paradigm encouraged by financialization; makes corporations responsive to interests of stakeholders other than just financial markets, and; reforms the political process so as to diminish the influence of corporations and wealthy elites. As policy options go, this seems eminently sensible. But when have sensible ideas ever been given house room by the financial powers-that-be (PTB). Unfortunately, therefore, we seem stuck with this enemy within.
THE DESTRUCTION OF VALUE.
This ongoing transformative process – akin to an economic late-stage carcinoma – represents a regressive structural change in the nature of the late capitalist economy. This is to say the relationship between the value-creating manufacturing sector and the extractive sector, (FIRE) Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. In the earlier phase of capitalism, the financial sector was much smaller and served to grease the wheels of industry by providing investment capital and credit obtained from depositors. That symbiotic relationship has now ended, and finance has increasingly taken on a life form of its own relegating manufacturing industry to the second tier. Financialization is a pattern of accumulation that relies increasingly on profit making through financial channels even for firms which are not financial. As a case in question: General Motors in the US, for example, had a trading and finance sector which was to grow larger than the original auto-vehicle operation itself. And it was precisely this branch of the company which went bust during the 2008 crash, which gave rise to a bail-out from the Federal Government of $50 billion dollars. What’s good for GM is good for America, yes? Unfortunately, the same Federal Government was unable to stump up petty-cash of $13 billion for the home base of GM – Detroit – which also became bankrupt. This I think speaks volumes regarding the US government’s priorities. Interestingly Detroit was largely a population of Afro-American people.
The ongoing rise of financialization has been attributed to the decline in the rate of profit of manufacturing industry over the period of the post-war boom, the Trente Glorieuses 1950-1970, as the French called it. (3) The reasons for this long-term decline are another article, but the decline was palpable, nonetheless. Suffice it to say that the fall in the level of profitability occasioned a basic reconfiguration, both political and economic, in the nature of the global political economy. During this period of economic and political turbulence firms had to look for other ways of making profits other than through boom-style brick- and -mortar investment.
Fattening up the bottom line through reductions in corporation tax, tax avoidance scams such as transfer pricing, company share buy-backs, some very dubious mergers and acquisitions, the creation of ‘flexible’ labour markets, all generally involved finance and banking services which expanded their services to meet this increased demand; a demand that this sector created in the first place.
The financial leech on the productive economy may be best understood by a reference to biology.
There is a particular type of parasite which preys on humans – dracunculus – which can reach a metre in length. Care must be taken extracting these creatures since when one simply pulls off the protruding head of the worm, the worm will break and leak high levels of foreign antigen which can lead to anaphylactic shock and fast death of the host. Professor Michael Hudson compares this sort of biological parasitism with the financial parasitism, which is now sucking dry the world economy, the host. He writes:
‘’Furthermore, the rise of the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate sector – banks, credit agencies, investment companies, brokers and dealers of commodities and securities, security and commodity exchanges, insurance agents, buyers, sellers, lessors, lessees and so forth – has now reached such a level that it has become larger, more ubiquitous, and profitable than productive industry. Prior to the ascent of financialised capital and the deregulation and privatisation mania, the role of finance was usually restricted to greasing the wheels of the productive (value-creating) economy. Commercial banks took the publics’ deposits and funnelled it as credit into manufacturing and commercial enterprises. In this regulated environment commercial banks and other financial institutions were legally circumscribed in the level of credit they could extend.’’ (4)
FINANCE GOES GLOBAL
The seemingly unstoppable financial Runaway Train rolled on with the ‘Big Bang’ – that is to say the deregulation of finance carried out initially by the Thatcher government in the UK in 1986. The phenomenon was to spread around the world now that finance was off the leash. Instead of producing real value as embodied in goods and services, the selling of ownership titles – fictitious capital, which effectively represents accumulated claims, legal titles, to future production and more specifically claims to the income generated by that production – were simply paper claims to wealth rather than wealth itself. Banks for example were loath to lend to start-up manufacturing companies but fell over themselves to lend mortgage loans to anyone who had a pulse. This was to become the chosen field of investment. It was the essence of extractive capitalism. (5)
Unfortunately, as a result of financial deregulation the situation actually got worse. The Bank of England had, in its infinite wisdom, decided to host but not regulate a new market for homeless dollars in London. Yet this new business was not regulated or taxed by the United States either, so who was regulating or taxing it? The answer was nobody. Amid high anxiety about the loss of empire the City of London establishment had quietly turned Britain into an offshore tax and financial haven. Currency and financial traders immediately took note. The Americans gave this business an appropriate name. Eurodollar markets or Euromarkets. (6)
Thenceforth a Eurodollar, a dollar which was simply a dollar which had escaped Bretton Woods controls and was being traded in these new libertarian markets which were mostly located in Europe. Eurodollars were a new form of stateless monies and, as a London banker put it ‘completely isolated from the monetary mass of the rest of the UK .’… So Eurodollars were in one sense dollars like any other, but in another sense, they were different because they had escaped into a market outside of US government control, where they could behave freely.
According to A Bank of England memo in those early days this move explained the Euromarkets attractions: to wit, freedom from local supervisory controls such as Banking regulations to stop excessive risk taking – with OTO – ‘other peoples’ money’. Freedom from macroeconomic controls such as foreign exchange restrictions; low or zero taxes for the customers and players; secrecy and very liberal company legislation.
And where did this leave national governments? Well, the Euromarkets provided anonymity to tax avoiders, scammers and criminals of every stripe which included flight capital, terrorist and illicit drug cartels so they were the natural bases and hideaways for both elements of both the haute bourgeois and the criminal cartels. An illustration of the amount of monies secreted away in these tax havens can be gleaned from the figures: The Shadow Banking Sector of the Cayman Islands, stood at assets worth $5.8 trillion – equivalent of 170,000 percent of Cayman’s GDP and over twice the size of the UK’s GDP. Worth adding that the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean is only one tax-avoidance venue in Britain’s hidden empire.
The Cayman Islands.
Other dubious income stream recipients include, Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Nearer to home in the English Channel, there lie the tax havens of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. These are now known as Crown Dependencies who did not cut all their ties after the Empire expired. (7)
But although in this respect the UK, that is to say the City of London and Canary Wharf, could arguably be regarded as being market leaders, it is only one of many well-heeled investor outposts in an archipelago of a global no-tax, no-questions asked, venues including Delaware – does Delaware ring any bells? It should. This is a multinational operation organized by multinational institutions, offering its services to an opulent global multinational clientele.
CLASS, POWER AND POLITICS
Reading the material for this article I became increasingly reminded as to the manner of which the present political/ideological developments and present conjuncture came into being along with its past manifestations. Back in the 18/19th centuries there was a battle royal taking place between the old aristocratic landed classes and the newly emerging bourgeoisie based in the manufacturing towns of both Europe and the United States (8). The United Kingdom was very much at the centre of this political confrontation and the challenge to the established order of the King and the divine right to rule which had already been shaken by the English Civil War 1642-49 and had visibly weakened – particularly when Charles 1 had his head chopped off in 1649; this was followed by the French Revolution when Louis XVI also lost his head in January 1793. After which the French seemed to have developed a penchant for revolutions! (See 1848 and 1871.) But the new order was beginning to make its presence felt. Thus the 18th and 19th centuries were in essence class struggles which carried on into the 20th century with the rise of socialism and nationalism.
But the interesting aspect has been the late 20th century counter-revolutionary movement predicated on the development of a new bourgeois class which has effectively established itself inside the financial sector of the economy and has effectively become a new ruling class ably assisted by a vast political bureaucracy, the entertainment industry, Big Tech/Pharma and the media which now plays the role of an organized religious pillar of support to the existing order. History seems to be repeating itself, but not in quite the same fashion. So as Marx once said: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte).
Key Historical Figures:
ADAM SMITH 1723-1790
Adam Smith was born in the Scottish town of Kirkcaldy 1723 son of a customs officer. Attended the university of Glasgow where he studied moral philosophy (1759) and was to publish The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And in 1776 The Wealth of Nations.
This was the age of Industrial capitalism.
He was a friend of the great conservative Scottish philosopher David Hume.
In 1776 his magnum opus ‘’An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations. A work which became the foundation for the new ‘science’ of Political Economy.
Smith saw the economy as being subject to a set of invariant scientific laws. Economic processes were driven above all by ‘’the natural effort that every man is continually making to better his own condition … within the complex and changing web of economic phenomena we will find one constantly acting force; the uniform, constant and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition, the principle from which public and national as well as private opulence is originally derived.’’
This is human nature, according to Smith. Moreover, this invariable human nature manifests itself most forcefully under social conditions, namely those of the bourgeois order of private property and unrestricted competition.
So far as economic contacts are concerned everyone enters intercourse with others only insofar as this is dictated by his own personal interests and promises some form of gain. The form of this intercourse is exchange conducted in markets.
Famous quote: ‘’It is not from the benevolence of the brewer, the butcher or the baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interests.’’
Smith deduces the basic socio-economic institutions that characterise a commodity-capitalist economy from the nature of man; what he takes as human nature, however, is the determinate nature of man under the influence of the commodity-capitalist economy.
A philosophy of rational and radical individualism.
Society and the individual will prosper with freedom of individual economic initiative and the elimination of state interference. ‘’Thus, every man as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interests in his own way, and to bring both his industry and his capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty performed ….
Smith was the founder of the doctrine of economic liberalism – maximum freedom for the individual and freedom from coercive state interference.
Smith therefore considered the economic phenomena of bourgeois society to be ‘natural’ in the sense that they had been arranged in the best possible fashion and required no conscious intervention by any agencies of state or of society.
Smith was vehemently opposed to the creation of monopoly, which he viewed as simply criminal organizations.
Ricardo was part of the radical intelligentsia who believed that history was cyclical rather than linear. His was a high-Tory view rather than the Whiggish notion that history was advancing in the direction of progress and reason. This is clearly reflected in Ricardo’s views (see below) as well as others such as Thomas Malthus. What Ricardo foresaw was rather different than the Whiggish view of progress. This latter view postulated a world in which everyone moved together up the escalator of progress. Unlike Smith, however, Ricardo saw that the escalator worked with different effects on different classes. Some rose triumphantly to the top, whilst others, who managed to move up a few rungs of the ladder could be kicked down to the bottom; whilst those who got the full benefit of the ride – the landed aristocracy – did nothing at all to earn their reward – i.e., the power of the soil and the rent on land.
To Adam Smith society was one great family; to Ricardo it was an internally divided camp. ‘’The interest of the landlord is also opposed to the interest of every other class in society – namely, capitalists and workers. Ricardo’s animus toward to the land-owning classes was in part based upon this theory of economic rent as outlined in his definitive work, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation first published in 1817.
THE THEORY OF RENT
Suppose, says Ricardo, there are two neighbouring land-lords. On one landlord’s fields the soil is fertile, and with the labour of a hundred men and a given amount of equipment he can raise 15 hundred bushels of wheat. On the second landlord’s field the soil is less fecund; the same men and their equipment can only raise one thousand bushels. This is merely a fact of nature, but it has an economic consequence; the grain will be cheaper per bushel on the fortunate landlord’s estate. Obviously since both landlords must pay the same wages and capital expenses, there will be an advantage in cost to the man who secures 500 more bushels than his competitor.
It is this difference in costs that rent springs. For if the demand is high enough to warrant tilling the soil on the less productive farm it will certainly be a very profitable operation to raise grain on the more productive farm. Indeed, the greater difference between the two farms, the greater will be the differential rent. If for example it is just barely profitable to raise grain at a cost of £2 a bushel on very infertile land, then certainly a fortunate landowner whose rich soil produces grain at only 50 pence a bushel will gain a large rent indeed. For both farms will sell their grain on the market at the same price say £2.10 – the owner of the better ground will therefore be able to pocket the difference of £1.50 in their respective costs of production.
No-rent on Marginal Land:
In the diagram below the most productive land (A) has the highest yield 35 quintiles. The marginal land (D) which just covers its expenses and no more. This land is called ‘no-rent land’. All rents are measured from it upwards.
‘D’ quality and land which produces 20 quintals per plot is the marginal land. Here the return and cost are equal. It is just worthwhile cultivating this land since it just covers expenses of cultivation and yields no surplus to the cultivator. Thus, the concept of economic rent, more broadly applied, means a rent (surplus) income over and above the normal/average income which normally accrues to factors of production. This particularly applies to monopolistic and oligopolistic market conditions. Present day monopolists/oligopolists pay a premium for their costs of output over and above average profit – this premium is ‘economic rent’.
DIMINISHING RETURNS
However, Ricardo was astute enough to point out the capitalism was (still is) a dynamic system, constantly mutating and expanding. This had the effect of an increasing demand for factor inputs, including labour. This led to rising wages; but only temporarily, since this increased income produced more children, future labourers, who would flood the market with still more labourers. And this is where Ricardo parted company with the sunny, prosperous world predicted by Smith. Ricardo postulated that as population expanded it would become necessary to push the margin of cultivation out further. More mouths would demand more grain and more grain would need more fields. Naturally, the newly cultivated fields would not be so productive as those already in use, for it would be a foolish farmer who had not already used the best soil available to him.
Therefore, as the growing population caused more and more land to be put into use, the cost of producing grain would rise. Thus, the selling price would also rise and so would the incomes of the well-situated landlords. Moreover, wages would need to rise pari passu also, since as grain became more expensive the labourer would have to be paid more, simply to enable him to buy his sustenance to stay alive.
This is the ‘law’ of diminishing returns. And it benefits nobody except the landlords. The capitalist-the man responsible for the progress of society in the first place-has been caught in two jaws of a vice. 1. He must pay higher wages which increase costs, since bread is become more expensive. 2. The landlords are much better off, since the rents they have been rising on good land, as worse and worse land has been planted. And as the landlord’s share in society’s bounty increases, there is only one class that gets elbowed aside to make room for him – the capitalist. What a different conclusion from Adam Smith’s great pageant of progress. Suffice it to say Ricardo was the voice of the rising industrial bourgeois class against what both he and they considered a parasitic, rentier landowning gentry. It was in this spirit that he campaigned against the high tariff on imported corn.
FREE TRADE & COMPARTIVE ADVANTAGE: The condition in which the free flow of goods, services and finance in international exchange is neither restricted nor encouraged by government intervention. This line of reasoning was originally given a theoretical elaboration by David Ricardo (1772-1823) and his theory of comparative advantage. This was a hypothetical construct where two nations – England and Portugal – both produced wine and cloth. Portugal had an absolute advantage in both. But a comparative advantage in wine. It would therefore benefit all if England were to specialise in cloth and Portugal in wine. This theory rested upon a number of questionable assumptions. These are as follows:
a) Factors of production are perfectly mobile within each country and they can be instantly switched between industries without any adjustment problems. However the same factors are immobile between countries, though final goods and services can be traded.
b) There are constant returns to scale and constant average costs of production in both industries and both countries
c) Both commodities, wine and cloth, are in demand in both countries.
d) The limited resources and factors of production in each country are fully employed.
e) Transportation and adjustment costs involved in trade are discounted
In the real world, however, none of the above assumptions hold. All governments are heavily involved in regulating overseas trade. They either seek entry into other markets or attempt to restrict entry into their own. Essentially all governments are in one way or another mercantilist (see below) and in this sense free-trade is just another policy option to be placed alongside protectionism: they are not antipodes but twins. International trade, like war, is a continuation of politics by other means.
NOTES
The development of political economy did not of course stop at this point, but quite simply I did not have any inclination to go further and summarise the significant impact of Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill in the 19th century and J.M.Keynes and J.A.Schumpeter in the 20th. The process is of course open ended.
(1) Overcharged: The High Costs of High Finance. 2016
(2) The Finance Curse – Nicholas Shaxson. – 2018 – p.11
(3) K.Marx – The Long Run Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall – Capital Volume 3, Chapter 25. And/or J.A.Schumpeter, ‘Business Cycles ‘- Schumpeter believes in the existence of the long wave of upswings (or boom) and downswings (or depression). Once the upswing ends, the long wave of downswing begins and the painful process of readjustment to the “point of previous neighbourhood of equilibrium” starts.
(4) M.Hudson – Terminal Infection – Killing The Host 2015
(5) The Big Bang – 1986 – finance goes global. See also, Fictious capital, Marx, chapter25 Volume 3 of Capital.
(6) What is a Eurodollar? The term Eurodollar refers to U.S. dollar-denominated deposits at foreign banks or at the overseas branches of American banks. Because they are held outside the United States, eurodollars are not subject to regulation by the Federal Reserve Board, including reserve requirements. Dollar-denominated deposits not subject to U.S. banking regulations were originally held almost exclusively in Europe (hence, the name Eurodollar). Now, they are also widely held in branches located in the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands. What is a euromarket? The euromarket extends beyond the Eurozone countries that use the euro currency to all countries signed on to that free trade agreement.
(7) Nicholas Shaxson – The Finance Curse – 2018 passim.
(8) Although there was no Aristocratic class in the US – perhaps in the South. There was King George of course but he was on the other side of the Atlantic.
People want to know where the economy is headed. What they should be asking is does the US still have an economy? My answer is no, it doesn’t. I will explain why.
For a quarter century I have pointed out the destructive effect of moving American investment and jobs to China and other points abroad. Offshoring served the interests of corporate executives and shareholders. The lower labor costs raised profits and, thereby, executive bonuses and the prices of the stocks, resulting in capital gains for shareholders.
These benefits accrued to a small percentage of the population. For everyone else these closely held benefits imposed huge external costs many times greater than the rise in profits. The American manufacturing workforce was devastated, as was the tax base of cities, states, and the federal government. The middle class shrunk and the populations of St Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, South Bend and Gary Indiana, Flint Michigan and other cities declined as much as 20%. The hopes and aspirations of millions of Americans were crushed. Once thriving American cities became blighted. Supply chains and real estate values collapsed. (See Paul Craig Roberts, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, Clarity Press, 2013. https://www.claritypress.com/book-author/paul-craig-roberts/ )
As incomes fell for the bulk of the American population, incomes rose for the One Percent. Income and wealth gains have been concentrated at the top resulting in the United States today having one of the most unequal distributions of income and wealth in the world.
As the offshoring of high productivity, high value-added manufacturing jobs reduced American incomes, US aggregate domestic demand was impacted and economic growth fell. The Federal Reserve expanded credit and substituted an increase in consumer debt for the missing growth in consumer income. This aggravated the indebtedness that economist Michael Hudson correctly emphasizes is exhausting consumer income to pay debt service—mortgages, car payments, credit card and student loan debts—which leaves little or no discretionary income to drive economic growth.
Hudson, who has been on the job of analyzing America’s eroding economy for a long time, emphasizes that the US economy is no longer a productive or industrial economy but a financialized economy in which bank lending is not used for new plant and equipment but for the financing of takeovers of existing assets in pursuit of interest, fees, and capital gains– what the classical economists called unearned income or “economic rent.” In short, Hudson demonstrates that the American economy is no longer a productive economy. It is a rent-seeking economy.
Hudson points out that as the economy is increasingly financialized, looting shifts to the privatization of public assets. The examples are endless. In the UK the post office was privatized at a fraction of its value, along with public housing, transportation and British Telephone, resulting in huge private gains. The French also privatized public holdings. In Greece the municipal ports and water companies were privatized along with Greek protected islands. In the US, segments of the armed forces are privatized, along with prisons. Chicago sold 75 years of its parking meter fees to a private entity for one lump sum payment. Everywhere public assets, including services, are being sold to private interests. In Florida, for example, the issuance of the annual vehicle license tag is privately provided. When there is nothing left to privatize, what will banks finance?
Hudson notes that the real economists, the classical ones, focused on taxing unearned economic rent, not labor income and productive activity. Today’s neoliberal economists are unable to differentiate between economic rent and productive activity. Consequently, GDP analysis fails to reveal the economy’s transformation from a productive to a rentier economy. Hudson terms neoliberal economists “junk economists,” and I concur. Essentially, they are shills for the financial sector and for the offshoring corporations who paid them to conflate job and investment offshoring with free trade.
I am convinced that if the entirety of neoliberal economics were erased nothing of value would be lost. Economists, particularly academic economists, are in the way of truth. They live in a make-believe world that they created with assumptions and models that do not bear on reality.
I am familiar with universities and academic economics. I graduated from an engineering and scientific institution—Georgia Tech—and then was a graduate student in economics at the University of Virginia, University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University. I had four Nobel prize-winners as professors. I have a Ph.D. in Economics. I have made contributions to major journals of economics and to others outside the field, 30 published articles altogether before I left academia. I served for years as a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy with the power to decide publication of submitted research. I have peer-reviewed books from Harvard University Press and Oxford University Press. I have debated Nobel prize winners before professional audiences. I served as a Wall Street Journal editor and as Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, and have had many university appointments. Michael Hudson also has real world experience in major financial institutions, international organizations, and governments, as well as US and overseas professorships and contributions to academic publications in many languages.
In other words, we know what we are talking about. We have no interest to serve except truth. No one pays us to serve an agenda.
But we are only two voices.
Two decades ago I was presented with the prospect of a large increase in amplification of my voice about the deleterious effects of offshoring. In December 2003 I received a telephone call from US Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat, New York. Senator Schumer had been reading my columns in which I made the case that under the guise of free trade, jobs and investment were being moved offshore at the expense of US economic success. Senator Schumer shared my concern and asked if a Reagan Treasury official would agree to coauthor with a Democrat Senator an article for the New York Times raising the issue whether job offshoring was in America’s interest.
Our article appeared on January 6, 2004. Here it is:
Second Thoughts on Free Trade
By CHARLES SCHUMER and PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
New York Times, January 6, 2004
“I was brought up, like most Englishmen, to respect free trade not only as an economic doctrine which a rational and instructed person could not doubt but almost as a part of the moral law,” wrote John Maynard Keynes in 1933. And indeed, to this day, nothing gets an economist’s blood boiling more quickly than a challenge to the doctrine of free trade.
“Yet in that essay of 70 years ago, Keynes himself was beginning to question some of the assumptions supporting free trade. The question today is whether the case for free trade made two centuries ago is undermined by the changes now evident in the modern global economy.
“Two recent examples illustrate this concern. Over the next three years, a major New York securities firm plans to replace its team of 800 American software engineers, who each earns about $150,000 per year, with an equally competent team in India earning an average of only $20,000. Second, within five years the number of radiologists in this country is expected to decline significantly because M.R.I. data can be sent over the Internet to Asian radiologists capable of diagnosing the problem at a small fraction of the cost.
“These anecdotes suggest a seismic shift in the world economy brought on by three major developments. First, new political stability is allowing capital and technology to flow far more freely around the world. Second, strong educational systems are producing tens of millions of intelligent, motivated workers in the developing world, particularly in India and China, who are as capable as the most highly educated workers in the developed world but available to work at a tiny fraction of the cost. Last, inexpensive, high-bandwidth communications make it feasible for large work forces to be located and effectively managed anywhere.
“We are concerned that the United States may be entering a new economic era in which American workers will face direct global competition at almost every job level — from the machinist to the software engineer to the Wall Street analyst. Any worker whose job does not require daily face-to-face interaction is now in jeopardy of being replaced by a lower-paid, equally skilled worker thousands of miles away. American jobs are being lost not to competition from foreign companies, but to multinational corporations, often with American roots, that are cutting costs by shifting operations to low-wage countries.
“Most economists want to view these changes through the classic prism of “free trade,” and they label any challenge as protectionism. But these new developments call into question some of the key assumptions supporting the doctrine of free trade.
“The case for free trade is based on the British economist David Ricardo’s principle of “comparative advantage” — the idea that each nation should specialize in what it does best and trade with others for other needs. If each country focused on its comparative advantage, productivity would be highest and every nation would share part of a bigger global economic pie.
“However, when Ricardo said that free trade would produce shared gains for all nations, he assumed that the resources used to produce goods — what he called the “factors of production” — would not be easily moved over international borders. Comparative advantage is undermined if the factors of production can relocate to wherever they are most productive: in today’s case, to a relatively few countries with abundant cheap labor. In this situation, there are no longer shared gains — some countries win and others lose.
“When Ricardo proposed his theory in the early 1800’s, major factors of production — soil, climate, geography and even most workers — could not be moved to other countries. But today’s vital factors of production — capital, technology and ideas — can be moved around the world at the push of a button. They are as easy to export as cars.
“This is a very different world than Ricardo envisioned. When American companies replace domestic employees with lower-cost foreign workers in order to sell more cheaply in home markets, it seems hard to argue that this is the way free trade is supposed to work.
“To call this a “jobless recovery” is inaccurate: lots of new jobs are being created, just not here in the United States.
“In the past, we have supported free trade policies. But if the case for free trade is undermined by changes in the global economy, our policies should reflect the new realities. While some economists and elected officials suggest that all we need is a robust retraining effort for laid-off workers, we do not believe retraining alone is an answer, because almost the entire range of “knowledge jobs” can be done overseas. Likewise, we do not believe that offering tax incentives to companies that keep American jobs at home can compensate for the enormous wage differentials driving jobs offshore.
“America’s trade agreements need to to reflect the new reality. The first step is to begin an honest debate about where our economy really is and where we are headed as a nation. Old-fashioned protectionist measures are not the answer, but the new era will demand new thinking and new solutions. And one thing is certain: real and effective solutions will emerge only when economists and policymakers end the confusion between the free flow of goods and the free flow of factors of production.
“Charles Schumer is the senior senator from New York. Paul Craig Roberts was assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy in the Reagan administration.”
Senator Schumer’s staff seemed to think that free trade was the problem because real world conditions had changed. My position was that jobs offshoring was not free trade. But I realized that any opening of the question was promising.
Our article in the New York Times had an extraordinary impact. The Brookings Institution, at that time an important liberal economic policy think tank that was home to former economic policy makers, called a Washington conference to hear us and examine our position. There was a panel with myself, Schumer, a former policymaker and the head of the US manufacturing lobby who could not figure out which side to be on. C-Span gave the conference live coverage and rebroadcast it a number of times.
Schumer and I carried the day. Members of the audience came up afterwards, including World Bank economist Herman Daly, in support of my position that the destruction of the American manufacturing economy could not be reasoned away as a free trade result.
Senator Schumer had a sincere interest in what job offshoring was doing to his constituents. He proposed that we continue our collaboration and write a second article for the New York Times. In those days the Times was still, partly, a newspaper rather than a total propaganda voice for the Establishment, and the Times assumed nevertheless that a Democrat Senator from New York and an Treasury Official who had been confirmed in office by the US Senate were part of the establishment.
The second column began and then suddenly went dead. No response. A telephone call revealed that the staffer with whom I was working was no longer there. After discussing this with old Washington hands, I concluded that Schumer had not realized that he was threatening Wall Street’s interest in higher profits by opening the question of jobs offshoring and had received a good talking to.
Wall Street Killed the Schumer/Roberts truth squad and protected the profits from job and investment offshoring.
This is what happens to elected officials when they attempt to represent the general interest rather than the special interests that finance political campaigns. The public interest is blocked off by a brick wall posted with a sign that says get compliant with the Establishment or get out of politics. Unless money is taken completely out of electoral politics, there will be no democracy.
Globalism serves to destroy sovereign and accountable government. In the US globalism destroyed the manufacturing middle class. Now Covid lockdowns are destroying the remainder of the middle class—family businesses. Businesses have fixed costs. When they cannot operate red ink mounts and the businesses fail. The lockdowns together with jobs offshoring monopolize the economy in few hands. This is not a theory. It is what we are experiencing. Feudalism is being resurrected. A few lords and many serfs. The serfs will be dependent on the lords and will have no independence.
On election day, countless progressive and liberal commentators throughout the entire mainstream media were foolish enough to admit that the battle at stake wasn’t really about ‘Trump or Biden’ but about the ‘American way,’ the future, so to say, of the public discourse and public life in the USA. Progressives and liberals were confident enough to believe that with nearly 100 million ballots given in before election day, Americans had already cast an unprecedented spectacle of rejection of everything that may even mildly resemble ‘conservative values.’ They were convinced that America had made its choice already. For them, I must assume, the election was just an act of formality. The battle was basically won already.
But then just a few hours later, it became clear that the pollsters failed them completely once again. The ‘Trumpsters’ refused to evaporate. They grew substantially and even expanded demographically into some ‘unexpected’ electoral territories traditionally associated with Democratic politics.
The clear meaning of the election is that America, like most other Western states, is divided in the middle into two opposing societies that have very little in common. Far more worrying is the clear fact that the two sides of the divide cannot tolerate each other.
As much as the Left, Progressives and Liberals are convinced by the absolute validity of their way of thinking, to the point that they insist to dictate them by authoritarian and tyrannical measures, at least as many people do not buy, follow and even reject those values. Many Americans do not accept the identiterian shift. Many Americans are not convinced at all that gender isn’t binary. I assume that most disappointing and worrying for the DNC is the fact that members of ‘diverse minorities’ as the Democrats call them, have switched sides. They became vocal Trump supporters.
This is very easy to explain. The Democratic Party offers Blacks, Gays, Latinos and so called ‘diverse minorities’ to be marginalized forever in an amalgam of ‘Others United’. The GOP is offering those people an immediate integration as ordinary people into the American realm. All you need to do is get yourself a red Trump baseball cap and join your next local Trump rally. It is this most basic existential togetherness that was so vivid within the Left revolutionary discourse, but only materialized into a populist sustained tsunami of political resistance within the contexts of right-wing populist politics.
In the upside-down world in which we live. The Republican party has become the party of the American working-class people. People who are defined by their adherence to family values, the church, hard work and see themselves as the ‘Americans.’ The Democratic party that claimed to be the voice of those working people, has gradually morphed into an urban identiatrian conglomerate. A collective of ‘as a’ people: humans who insist to identify with their biology: ‘as a Woman,’ ‘as a Gay,’ ‘as a Trans,’ ‘as a Black,’ ‘as a Jew.’
In the upside down world in which we live, the Left ended up adopting the most embarrassing and problematic Hitlerian ideological aspect: Unlike Italian fascism that adhered to the concept of ‘socialism of the Italian people,’ or early Nazism that pushed for the idea of ‘equality of German speaking people,’ Hitler insisted upon ‘socialism of one race.’ Hitler believed that people’s politics is intrinsic to their biology. As opposed to traditional inclusive Left thinking that was class oriented, the contemporary Left pushes people to identify politically on biological terms: ‘as a woman,’ ‘as a black,’ ‘as a gay,’ ‘as a trans’ etc. The GOP on the other hand, is coming closer and closer to universal class politics.
On the morning of the 3rd of November, the liberal press was ready to announce that the ‘as a’ philosophy had won. But as things stand right now, this battle between the ‘as a’ people and the ‘Americans’ may escalate into a real violent conflict as there is no one in America or anywhere else who knows how to unite the people into a simple concept of peoplehood. Again, this is hardly an American phenomenon. The exact same division and the lack of a political unifying prospect is currently apparent in every Western State.
On Thursday, Wall Street rose substantially. Naturally, many commentators believed that our oligarchs and financial tycoons were excited by Biden’s likeliness to win the American election. But it may also be possible that Wall Street was way more thrilled by the prospect of a possible civil war. When people fight each other, capitalism, mammonism and usury can be celebrated mercilessly and boundlessly. This is exactly what Wall Street is after.
It may as well be possible that in the global universe in which we live, in a world where all existential concerns reintroduced themselves as ‘global threats’ to do with: global warming, global financial turmoil, global pandemics etc., a state of bitter civil war is exactly where global capitalism wants us the people to be. Democracy and the fantasy of political choice, as such, are just a camouflage. It is there to convey the image that the current chaos is merely our own choice or fault.
To understand ID politics and its disastrous impact on contemporary society read Being in Time
Globalization – i.e., neo-liberalism writ large – is essentially a negative phenomenon destroying the sovereignty and cohesion of nation states and thereby depriving markets of the social and political guidance without which they cannot function effectively…The result will be a socially divisive, politically destructive, ethically abhorrent and even economically inefficient structure.(1)
JOINED AT THE HIP
Transnational Corporations (TNCs) can be compared to a tree: they have extensive branches everywhere, but their roots are firmly based at National HQ. Of late this has become a disputed view. One of the contemporary clichés in the current discussion of global political economy is the rather dubious concept of the end of the nation state and the subsequent breaking of the shackles which had hitherto tied TNCs to specific geographical and legal locations. It has been argued that these organizations have moved beyond the control of nation states who can no longer exercise effective jurisdiction over their activities.
This ‘state-denial’ thesis has been articulated by the influential hyper-globalist faction ensconced in the financial press, academic economics departments and political parties. In a ‘borderless’ world the state apparently no longer matters; economic power has shifted from sovereign states to global markets. In the words of the German political and social theorist, Wolfgang Streeck, ‘Markets were once fitted into states; now states are fitted into markets.’(2)This change has involved a global transmutation which reputedly has been brought about by the invention of revolutionary technologies in transport and communications. Such is the thesis put forward by the spokespersons of globalization.
True to say that in general terms all states have to choose a global strategy; they have to look at the full range of choices, then they have to decide what is in their best interests. In the current era of global competition, trade liberalization via the market remains the riskiest choice of all. It demands that trade barriers of all kinds be dismantled – the EU model being the archetype. With this policy governments have to let international competitive pressures restructure industries without recourse to state aids or other protectionist methods. This requires states to open their borders regardless of the costs and consequences in industries and vulnerable workers. Russia in the 1990s was a textbook example of what would happen if a state opened its economy too early, namely, a massive economic contraction. In the official textbooks among the neo-classical scribblers in academe and the media, markets are seen to be self-organizing social and economic space responding to universal demand and supply signals.
For countries which accept this view of the world economy, state power to make policy independent of a country’s major trading partner is being progressively eroded as countries find themselves trapped in a seamless web of interdependency. Larger markets do not come without a cost. This much is axiomatic.
Since the 2008 crisis, however, and now the 2020 blowout the state-denialist view has been more difficult if not actually impossible to sustain. It was after all the allegedly redundant state (or states) which pulled capitalism’s chestnuts out of the fire with the bail-out of insolvent American banks in 2008. As the story goes, during the meeting between Obama and the Wall Street elite at the height of the 2008 crisis the President apparently remarked that it was only himself who stood between the assembled financial movers and shakers of Wall Street and ‘the pitchforks’. The US government also ponied up some US$50 billion to bail out distressed auto manufacturers General Motors and Ford who were based in ‘Motor City’ (Detroit). Detroit itself was also bankrupt but the Federal government was unable to find an additional US$13 billion to bail out the city itself. Maybe – just a thought – because the population of Motor City was largely African-American.
However, the received wisdom emanating from the neoliberal elite has been challenged with a more critical assessment coming from heterodox economic theorists.
As follows.
‘’Contrary to the globalist supposition and as a matter of fact, the (sovereign) state always has, and continues to be the mobilizing force in shaping and guiding national economic development, including globalization itself. Given that an increased capability to overcome geographical distance made possible by technological innovations in transport and communication technologies is of little use if there are political barriers to such movements. Thus, policies of liberalization, deregulation and privatisation were necessary to overcome non-technical barriers to the free flow of labour, capital, and commodities. Therefore, the enabling force of globalization was the state. In fact, the bigger and more powerful states have used globalization as a means of increasing their own power and interests.
States actively construct globalization and use it as soft geo-politics and to acquire greater power over, and autonomy from, their national economies and societies respectively … E.g. … The US and G7s other dominant members design and establish the international trade agreements, organizations, and legislation that support and govern trans-border investments, production networks, and market penetration constitutive of contemporary globalization. Advanced capitalist states, particularly, use these political instruments to shape international economic decision making and policy making in their interests.’’ (3)
In addition, nation-states protect, subsidize, manipulate currencies, impose quotas, sanctions, give tax breaks and exemptions to export industries, R&D, and grant patents, use procurement policies and intellectual property rights to their indigenous corporations to both protect their home markets and help them penetrate overseas markets. This is laughingly described as ‘free trade’. States and corporations are not antipodes they are twins, and arguably the state is the senior partner in this arrangement.
For example, in 1934 the Roosevelt administration passed the Glass-Steagall Act. This involved a forced separation of investment banking from commercial banking which stopped banks speculating with depositors’ monies. In 1999, however, Bill Clinton signed the Financial Services Modernization Act, commonly known as Gramm-Leach-Bliley, repealing the key components of Glass-Steagall whose articles became largely toothless. This was what Wall Street had been angling for and which gave an additional push to the eventual debacle in 2008.
The state giveth, and the state taketh away.
Thus, the notion that powerful trends of internationalization and interdependence have ended national sovereignty is vastly overstated. States remain in charge of the essential part of their national sovereignty: monetary policy, (except in the Eurozone of course) law-making, macroeconomic policy, finance and taxation, environment, education, labour markets, industrial relations, pensions, health and welfare, social policy, science and technology and so forth. Arguably no supra-national entity has yet been designed to replace what has been an effective system of national government. Unimpeded global flows of capital in search of lucrative investment opportunities, are hardly conducive for countries wishing to plan and stabilize their future free from the vagaries of uncontrolled markets
TENSIONS
Power to shape/control the global system is concentrated in the hands of states and/or the newly emergent TNCs. Of course, there is not going to be a simple description of this development as the relationship between these two pillars of modern imperialism is both fractious and permanently mutating. The received wisdom, as put forward by the various spokespersons for globalization, ranging from the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) OECD, WTO, World Bank and IMF, and through the globalist house journals of the global Transnational Uberklasse – The Financial Times, The Economist and Wall Street Journal – is predictable enough. Namely that the state is always in a subservient position vis-à-vis the dominant TNCs.
This perhaps would qualify as a procrustean effort to make the facts fit the theory. Contrary to the image of the all-powerful TNC demanding fealty and obedience from prostrate states, the relationship is somewhat more symmetrical; corporations and states are always to a certain degree joined at the hip.
They are both competitive and competing, both supportive and conflictual. They operate in a fully dialectical relationship, locked into unified but contradictory roles and positions, neither one nor the other partner completely able to dominate.
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Additionally, the widespread notion that a TNC can simply up sticks and move lock, stock, and barrel to a more compatible venue if its home base no longer suits its purposes, is fanciful in the extreme. All TNCs have home bases, national HQs. Here is where global strategy is determined; here is where top-end R&D is carried out; here is where design and marketing strategies take place; here is where the domestic market is situated and where long-term domestic suppliers are located; here is where overseas operations are conceived planned and carried through; here is where AGMs of the Corporations takes place with published accounts circulated to all shareholders; here is where the local workforce, at all levels, is recruited; here is where the political bureaucracy and the above mentioned institutions are situated and amenable to lobbying. Picking an obvious example, the US defence industries, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, are all based domestically and are not, even if they could, going to jump ship anytime soon.
It is unquestionably true that TNCs and states often have divergent goals: TNCs’ primary function is to maximise profits and enhance shareholder value, whereas the economic role of the state should be to maximise the economic welfare of its society. But although this conflictual relationship exists, states and TNCs need and lean on each other in a variety of ways. States might wish that TNCs are bound by allegiance to national borders – and in many ways they are (see above) – but total allegiance is not an option in a liberal capitalist economy. Indeed, it would be true to say that some states regard TNC (activities) as being complementary to their foreign policy. Here economic issues merge with geopolitical imperatives. For example, American political leaders have believed that the national interest has also been served by the foreign expansion of US corporations in manufacturing and services. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has been considered a major instrument through which the US could maintain its relative position in world markets – as is of course the US$ acting as the world’s reserve currency – with the overseas expansion of TNCs being regarded as a means to maintain America’s dominant world position. As it was succinctly stated. ’What’s good for General Motors is Good for America’.
THE EU: SUPRANATIONAL OR NATIONAL STATES.
Which brings me to the EU. The state-declinist thesis seems to have gained a considerable traction in Europe among the orthodox left. No less a personage than Yanis Varoufakis – the initiator of DiEM2025 (Democracy in Europe) – has been reading the last rites of state democracy and sovereignty in Europe. Apparently, the model of politics based on the nation state is ‘finished’. The sovereignty of national parliaments has been dissolved. Today, national electoral mandates are impossible to fulfil. Hence, reform of the European institutions (specifically the Euro Parliament), is the only remaining option.
Essentially this is the latest version of the TINA ‘argument’, (there is no alternative), pioneered by Mrs Thatcher and rolled out with monotonous regularity ever since by every cornered establishment politician, both left and right. As has been noted elsewhere. ‘’Tell the population that the nation-state is ‘finished,’ that it is unable to guarantee full employment (or to work towards it) and you free yourself of the responsibility of even trying.’’ The same goes for austerity or anything else. If the nation state is ‘kaput’ it is futile to oppose it.’’(4)
Globalization, however, is far from being the all-powerful and all- encompassing Leviathan postulated by the declinists. ’There are major cultural and linguistic differences that preclude a full mobilisation of resources across national borders. There is ‘home bias in investment portfolios. There is a high correlation between national investment rates and national saving rates. Capital flows between rich and poor nations fall considerably short of what theoretical models predict. There are still severe restrictions to the international mobility of labour. The truth is that we do not live in a completely globalised world, far from it. Ergo, nation-states can pursue their own fiscal and monetary policies.
Ex-leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn’s (quite moderate) policy proposals, during the 2017 and 2019 UK elections, namely, peoples’ QE, renationalisation of the Railways, taking into public ownership the energy and water industries together with the Royal Mail were not beyond the scope of the UK qua sovereign and democratic state. Additionally, these policies found considerable support among the UK’s population at large. (5) Unfortunately Corbyn’s programme was derailed by pro-EU elements in the Parliamentary Labour Party, the MSM and a vicious and mendacious ‘antisemitic’ smear campaign aimed at Corbyn. But this doesn’t alter the fact that a sovereign country can issue its own currency and formulate its own fiscal and monetary policy that can override the EU neo-liberal package of free movement of labour, capital, and commodities. This in addition to blocking the drive to deregulate labour markets (euphemistically, ‘flexibilization’). The sovereign state is perfectly capable of a policy for growth rather than for continued austerity which has become the hallmark of the EU area. But to carry out such growth policies would require an exit from the EU. There’s the rub. Social-democratic policies are incompatible to the EU’s liberal orientation, which is a structurally, neo-liberal capitalist institution.
The euro has in fact simply been designed to ensure that Germany runs a permanent trade surplus whilst the southern periphery runs continuing trade deficits – a simple accounting identity. Eventually something will have to give. It is also noticeable that Germany seems to be harbouring increasingly regional hegemonic ambitions regarding the rest of Europe. It seems to be positioning itself as the EUs anti-Russian key front-line probably with US backing. Euro state Socialism or even tepid social democracy can never truly thrive within such a hostile and increasingly militarised political environment. But that’s another explosive can of worms.
The position of the globalist left as outlined in the DiEM2025 manifesto, however, seems like a back-to-front attempt to by-pass national institutions and to attempt through a supra-national democracy to make fundamental reforms, through a democratised and strengthened EU. But even Varoufakis regards this as being ‘utopian.’ But he continues, it is ‘a lot more realistic than trying to maintain the system as it is’ or ‘trying to leave.’ (6)
More realistic, really? But this begs the obvious question of why such an entity is going to be any different from the present dispensation; will be any less neo-liberal and undemocratic if it is given greater powers and is integrated further? It seems to make more sense to work from the national to the supra-national level than the other way around – particularly given that most states in the EU are governed by centre right coalitions with social-democrats in tow (but acting like centre right liberals). Moreover, the transfer of local democracy – which we are told is now obsolete – to supranational democracy contributes to a weakening of popular control. This leapfrogging of national democracy to supranational democracy perforce requires a supranational electorate. This is problematic however since for the great majority of ordinary European citizens linguistic barriers and cultural differences impair the opportunity for political participation at a supra-national level. And so the dialogue, such as it is, goes on – ad nauseam.
This should not be considered a mere academic nit-picking issue for Socratic Senior Common Room dialogue. It is the key geopolitical issue of the day, as to whether sovereign nation states can determine their own future and political structures and policies, against the globalist project to turn the world into a borderless playground for international finance, corporate hegemony and the corollary of extinguishing democracy.
IDEOLOGICAL INTEGRATION OF STATES INTO NEOLIBERAL MARKET THEORY
But perhaps a more disturbing feature of the state/economy relationship has been the ongoing and gradual privatisation of the state itself. The role of the state has traditionally been a provider of public goods – education, healthcare, culture, parks, libraries, museums, transport infrastructure, including water, energy, forests and national parks, defence, law and order and judiciary, telecommunications, egalitarian social policies and so forth. The role of the market qua economy is to produce private goods and services for sale on a market. There has always been a tension between ‘the commons’- i.e., that which is public and open for everyone to use – and ‘commodification’ which turns things into commodities for private ownership and money-making. To use Marxist terminology, the commons has use-value, not an exchange-value (a market price) simply because it is not – and by definition cannot be – a commodity that can be bought, sold, or commercialised. The elevation of use-value over exchange-value is integral to the commons.
Throughout history, powerful interests have sought to privatise, close, and commodify the commons whether land, other spaces, amenities, or even intellectual ideas – to contrive scarcity and create income-earning assets. To the extent to which the succeeding enclosure and privatisation drives up rental income and proliferate its sources, increasing private riches while eroding public wealth. Such asset-stripping, rent-seeking behaviour by private companies intent on rent-extraction is not only tolerated by public authorities but actually encouraged.
Other examples of this have been the government/private sector liaison whereby private companies are now employed by the government to perform the role which was once the prerogative of governments. These government/private financial arrangements were called Private Financial Initiatives PFIs or Public Private Partnerships PPPs and were operationalised in both the UK and Australia. These predatory organizations were simply looking for public authority institutions to milk. Their incompetence – and outright looting – was legendary. The privatisation of British Rail, for example, led to increased accidents, higher costs, monopolistic rents (in terms of ticket prices), overcrowded trains, and failure to meet the timetable criteria.
In Australia, a report by the New South Wales Auditor General in 2002 warned of the considerable risks associated with the outsourcing of information technology and of the need to ensure that agencies are clear why they should do so. The previously inconceivable opportunities for the security of private information, collected and held by governments to be compromised, opening the way for identity fraud and held by governments was dramatically exposed in November 2007, when the British Department of Revenue and Customs was unable to account for two compact disks which had been sent through the mail at the National Audit Office. These disks contained highly detailed personal information concerning the 25 million citizens who received child benefits, information which included their addresses and bank account numbers, along with details of their children.
This was not an unusual occurrence it was simply another example – among many – of the ongoing rip-off of the public taxpayer by rent-seeking marauders. The market is always right, always works best, and always delivers the goods, or so it is ordained. Such is the categorical imperative of neoliberalism.
Coming full circle, the point of arrival involves a recognition that the relationship between (usually capitalist) states and markets has been a permanent and alternating process which started with the industrial revolutions in western Europe and North America. On the one side there are the permanent state bureaucracies and organizations which function as the basis for the production of public goods, and the national interest as they define it. This is complemented by the free-wheeling, cosmopolitan, financial and corporate interests whose outlook and policies are global as well as national and whose objectives are both practical and ideological. Practical in the sense that their motives are commercial and predicated on the imperative of growth and development not necessarily restricted to their national base. Ideological in terms of their neo-liberal Weltanschauung.
It was the great American social and political theorist C. Wright Mills who postulated the existence of what he called, The Power Elite as early as 1956. The American elite groups were composed of most importantly The Corporate Rich, The Warlords and The Political Directorate which together with various lower ranking sub-elite groups controlled the United States. State and Economy have to an extent always coexisted, their positions and influence moving back and forth, but in recent years (circa 1980) there has been – to put it mildly – a marked tendency of power and influence to tilt away from the state and toward the corporate/commercial configurations. Whether this trend will continue is an open question; but it would not be amiss to assert that nothing goes on forever.
NOTES
(1)Manfred Bienefeld – Is a Strong National Economy a Utopian Goal at the end of the 20th Century? – States Against Markets – pp. 434,435
(2) Wolfgang Streeck – ‘Buying Time’ – The Democratic Crisis Of Democratic Capitalism. ‘
(3) M. Gritsch – (2005: 2-3) (Nye 2002) Quoted in – The State Really Does Matter, Global Shift 2012 – p.223
(4) Picciotto, S. 1991 The Internationalisation of the State – Capital and Class 43.43-63 – quoted in Global Shift 2012– Peter Dicken)
(5) Although it should be said that the 2019 – the Brexit election – was very much watered down to the policies of the electoral manifesto of 2017.
(6) The Independent. UK Newspaper
(7) In Government We Trust – Market Failure and the Delusions of Privatisation. pp.90
Wall Street is forever rising. The S&P500 index rose to 3,581 on September 2nd, 2020 – the highest level it has ever reached since its creation. This makes no sense. Wall Street is a reflection of the state of the economy which is in recession since February[1], the worst recession since 1929. How can share prices rise when the economy is falling? To answer this question, let’s analyse the economic policy of the United States these past few years, taking Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s speech of August 27th, 2020 as our starting point. Going back in time, we see that American leaders ignored the fundamental laws of economics. We note that foreign leaders, such as the European Central Bank governors, followed the same path. We conclude that stock prices do not reach the sky, and that the United States is caught in a bind from which the only way it can extricate itself is through a dollar depreciation. This bodes ill for the American Empire. The dollar is one of its main pillars.
Jerome Powell questions the validity of quantitative easing
Depending on their editorial stand, the media understood Powell’s speech as a return to inflation, giving greater attention to unemployment. But this summary ignores the essence of the message which questions the validity of quantitative easing – a policy followed by the Federal Reserve since November 2008. This is what Powell said: “With interest rates generally running closer to their effective lower bound even in good times, the Fed has less scope to support the economy during an economic downturn by simply cutting the federal funds rate.” In short: pushed to its limit, quantitative easing loses its capacity to alter employment and inflation. Quite logically, Jerome Powell and the Federal Open Market Policy (FOMC) call for a softening of the rules governing inflation and employment: “appropriate monetary policy will likely aim to achieve inflation moderately above 2 percent for some time”, and “a strong labor market, particularly for many in low-and moderate-income communities”.[2] This was understood as a return to inflation which it is not. It is an attempt to rescue quantitative easing while waiting for a return to more traditional economic policies.
By dropping surreptitiously quantitative easing, Jerome Powell is sending a message to Congress: economic policy cannot rest solely on monetary policy. Congress has at its disposal another tool: the budget. Over the past thirty years, priority has been given to monetary policy for several reasons. For conveniency reasons: monetary policy is essentially defined by one man, the Federal Reserve Chairman with the FOMC congruence. Budgetary policy, on the other hand, is defined by Congress and the President. It takes time for the two to agree, especially if Congress is split between a Democrat and a Republican majority. For efficiency reasons: changes in monetary policy are felt quite rapidly in the economy: six months to a year. It takes a lot longer (one to two years) for changes in the budget to be felt. For practicality reasons: budgetary measures imply taxation or indebtedness. Taxation is not very unpopular with the electorate, and indebtedness, if overused, leads to higher interest rates and slower economic growth. For all these reasons and the more theoretical ones set out by Milton Friedman and the monetarists, monetary policy became the policy of choice for the last thirty years, with quantitative easing being its most advanced form.
Priority being given to monetary policy with the budget playing second fiddle, the budget deficit should have come down and, with time, turned into a surplus. It did not happen. Worse, it has grown over the last twenty years to reach -4.6% in 2019. The initial figure expected for 2020 (-4.6%) will be substantially larger due to the Covid-19 virus. The $2,200 billion CARES Act approved by Congress in March to provide much needed relief to individuals, families and businesses, will translate into a much higher deficit, and a much higher level of debt.
Quantitative easing and the economy
Excessive money creation by central banks is anathema to financial markets since it is synonymous to inflation, higher interest rates, slower growth and the collapse of the stock market. It must be prohibited at all cost. Yet, that’s what quantitative easing is all about, and quantitative easing saved Wall Street and the economy after the 2008 subprime crisis. How can this be? In the fall of 2008, banks’ balance sheets were loaded with corporate bonds whose market value were well below their face value. To avoid a collapse of the market, the Federal Reserve bought the bonds, in effect replacing junk bonds with cash on banks’ balance sheets. The Fed’s bailout commitment totaled $29 trillion.[3] In view of this amount, it is no wonder that the program worked… to Wall Street’s satisfaction. Trust returned, the economy took off, and shares regained and exceeded their previous values. All is well and good, except the Federal Reserve exceeded its mandate. Its job is to provide the liquidity the economy needs to grow and achieve full employment without generating inflation. Under normal circumstances, the banks whose equity was washed out by bad investments, due to senior management’s poor decisions, should have been allowed to fail. To avoid a collapse of the economy, the government would have bought the banks’ shares at their market value, fired the management, and re-introduced the banks on the stock market once their business was back to normal. But these were no “normal circumstances”. Neither Congress which oversees the Federal Reserve policy, nor Barack Obama who was anxious to move past the crisis, blamed the Federal Reserve for outstepping its legal framework. As for Wall Street, it had every reason to rejoice. Not only was it saved from total collapse, but within five years the market value of its stocks, as measured by the S&P500, exceeded its pre-crisis value. It has more than doubled (graph 1).
The Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing did not result in a depreciation of the dollar, as could have been expected. In fact, the subprime crisis strengthened its value somewhat, as it was perceived by foreign investors as a safe haven to protect their wealth in a tumultuous environment. This strength of the dollar and the relative stability of foreign exchange market is also due to the interconnexion of world’s economies. The subprime crisis first emerged in the United States but spread rapidly around the world. Faced with a potentially damaging economic crisis, world leaders of the largest twenty economies – the G20 – met in Washington DC on November 14-15, 2008, i.e. only two months after Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy. Asian and European central banks agreed to espouse the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policy. Money creation around the world being essentially the same in relative terms, currencies retain their value in relation to each other, as shown by graph 2 (note: exchange rates are expressed as an index, and the value of the pound sterling and the euro have been inversed to make them comparable to the yen and yuan).
Money creation saved Wall Street without depreciating the dollar, but what about employment? The United States’ performance is excellent. The December 2019 unemployment rate is 3.5% – a rate lower than all other advanced economies with the exception of Germany and Japan. The picture is less rosy if one looks at it from a different angle: the length of time it takes to return to full employment. It took 15 months after the 1973 recession, 30 months after 1990, 46 after 2001 and 75 months after 2008, i.e. over six years (graph 3). Quantitative easing which served Wall Street so well, did little for Main Street. Of course, as noted by Jerome Powell, there are other factors to be considered besides monetary policy when studying labor issues. Nonetheless, the conclusion is inescapable: quantitative easing worked better for Wall Street than it did for Main Street.
What about inflation? Ever since Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker put a brutal end to stagflation[4] in letting the overnight rate go over 21% in June 1981, inflation has been subdued. Quantitative easing which is an inordinate increase of money in the economy should have, according to the quantity of money theory, led to inflation. It did not. The large quantity of money injected in the economy by the Federal Reserve had no impact on the price level. Graph 4 compares the velocity of money[5] with the Consumer Price Index – the velocity (blue line) is inversed to underline its exceptional rise in the last few years. Full employment did not lead to higher prices either. Jerome Powell observes that “the historically strong labor market did not trigger a significant rise in inflation”, as the Phillips Curve[6] would predict. He then notes that “inflation that is persistently too low can pose serious risks to the economy”. Clearly, the United States is in a peculiar situation where neither money creation nor full employment translates into higher prices, as economic theories tell us. Several hypotheses may explain this abnormality.
The fairly rapid opening up of the American market[7] in the early 1990s, followed by the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1994, shaped a new environment in which the procurement of a given product was no longer restricted to the home country. Bilateral trade relations among advanced nations became global to include developing nations, such as China which joined the WTO in 2001. Competition among manufacturers became global, pushing prices down. Corporations offshored their production to take advantage of lower wages in developing nations. This weakened the negotiating power of trade unions who were faced with an unpalatable deal: accept lower wages or lose jobs to the Chinese. The digital revolution also played a role in bringing costs down with many firms “rightsizing” their labor force thanks to the adoption of the personal computer. Finally, Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire 11,000 air controllers in 1981 had a tremendous impact on middle income employees who realized status did not protect them anymore: they could lose their jobs as easily as manual workers could. These events put an end to what was known as cost-push inflation – an overall increase in prices due to higher labor and raw material costs.
Increased energy efficiency, as measured by the ratio of oil consumption to GDP[8], also helped contain inflation. The ratio doubled over the last twenty years. While a barrel of oil produced $450,000 of economic wealth in 2000, it produced $920,000 in 2019. This is why the rapid rise in oil prices over the last fifteen years had little if any impact on the state of the world economy, as opposed to shocks inflicted by the 1973 and 1979 price hikes.
In summary, inflation remained subdued due to globalization, the Reagan and digital revolutions, and energy saving. These watershed events spare the United States a rise in price levels that quantitative easing would normally have brought up. Quantitative easing is not inflation-free, it benefited from exceptional conditions. With respect to employment, the Federal Reserve’s performance is dismal when compared to previous periods. But Wall Street has every reason to be satisfied with it.
The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy in the recent past.
The decoupling of quantitative easing and inflation partially explains why Jerome Powell is distancing himself from this much vaunted but, in truth, inefficient policy. Besides the dual, yet incompatible inflation-employment objective Congress assigned to Federal Reserve, he must also watch over the largest banks’ financial health to make sure it remains strong. In fact, this was the main role the Federal Reserve Act assigned to the Federal Reserve in 1913. This duty is crucial. Economic crises often arise from a bank failure, as was the case with Lehman Bros.’ bankruptcy in September 2008. From this standpoint, Jerome Powell deserves our praise for he averted two crises in the recent past even though one may argue about the reasons they were conducted.
The first rescue took place in September 2019. Without warning, interest rates on the “repo” market shot up to 10% in mid-day on September 17th., 2019.[9] This market is a corner stone in Wall Street’s architecture. If it fails, the whole structure crumbles. The Federal Reserve had to act promptly to calm the market down. This is what it did in injecting $41 billion into the market that very day. Interest rates plummeted. On September 18th, they had returned to their September 16th level. The cause of this ephemeral panic remains a mystery. But the fact that the Federal Reserve had to keep intervening for several months, leads one to conclude that structural causes might have been at work.
This incident was the prelude of a much worse crisis which was averted thanks to the combined effort of the Federal Reserve and Congress. On February 19, the S&P500 reached a new high: 3,386, then dropped abruptly reaching its lowest level in the year: 2,237 on March 23, i.e. a 30% fall in 36 days. This time, the Federal Reserve was slower in reacting. It’s only on March 11th, nearly a month after the stock market began to tumble, that it began injecting liquidity into the economy, propping up the stock market (graph 5). On March 13th, two Congressmen from the Democratic Party offered to help people who lost their job due to the pandemic. It took the form of The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act for short, which was unanimously approved by the Senate on March 25th and signed by Donald Trump on the 27th. It took only 15 days to ratify a law granting $2,200 billion, or about 10% of the gross domestic product – the largest amount ever approved in the history of the United States – to dodge an economic crisis in the making. Considering that by March 11, only 37 people had died from the virus while the S&P500 had already lost 19% of its value, one may question the politicians’ motivation. Was it the Covid-19 or was it Wall Street which led them to act decisively? Generous as it is to the unemployed, the CARES Act is equally generous to corporations which already benefited from the Federal Reserve’s action. Wall Street resumed its rise.
May the stock market rise to the sky? One is tempted to believe it when considering its performance. Could investors be the victim of an “irrational exuberance”? Not so, say some analysts who attribute the market rise to the “big tech” corporations (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft), also known under the acronym GAFAM. They account for about 20% of the market value and they are pooling up the market. But, excluding them from the S&P500 would mean excluding them – as well as other outperformers such as Tesla, Netflix, Nvidia, or Salesforce – from the American gross domestic product. One cannot dissect the market according to one’s view. The market is a reflection of the economy at large: the more profitable the corporations, the higher the value of their shares. Right? Wrong. Over the last few years, the stock market is disconnected from the economy. Net income has been flat since 2017 while share values gained 43% (graph 6). This makes no sense. The market is acting irrationally. It’s a matter of time before it corrects itself.
Returning to orthodoxy
In the 50’s and 60’s, the American government was a paragon of virtue. The budget was in quasi-equilibrium. There was little debt, no inflation, and the workforce was fully employed. Things have changed since then. The deficit is rising, the debt is growing ever-larger, and employment is not what it is purported to be. In the trio it makes up with the Federal Reserve and Wall Street, the federal government is the most important element for it defines the economic policy.
This brings us back to Jerome Powell’s speech. A lesser importance granted to monetary policy, as he posits, means a great one given to budgetary policy, assuming of course that the government has the latitude necessary to do so. This is not the case. The deficit is on a downward slope ever since the late 1960s, with the exception of a four-year gap from 1999 till 2002[10]. The federal debt rose from 40% of GDP in the early 1980s to 107% in December 2019. The combined Federal Reserve/CARES Act rescue package pushed it up to 137% as of June 30th – a level higher than at the end of World War II (119%). Giving a greater role to budgetary policy means either higher taxes or more debt, or both. Taxes have never been very popular with the electorate, and the federal debt reached a level beyond which the United States’ credit rating may fall and the value of the dollar may drop. Authorities are caught between a rock and a hard place: monetary policy lost its effectiveness at a time the budget deficit should be reined in.
With 29.7 million unemployed (including the 13.6 million “gig” workers with no insurance coverage), the situation could quickly become worrisome, politically and socially. Aware of the danger, members of Congress had hoped to prolong the CARES Act for the unemployed, but electoral rivalry with the upcoming presidential election quickly set in and any attempt to maintain some of the benefits of the CARES Act were doomed to failure. On August 8th, Donald Trump signed an Executive Order granting $300 a week to unemployed people – humanitarian and electoral reasons no doubt explain his decision. The Center for Control Disease and Prevention declared a moratorium forbidding tenant evictions until the end of the year, bringing some relief to the most vulnerable families. Praiseworthy as the decision might be, it carries a risk: bankruptcy for real estate owners who, deprived from rental revenues, may not be able to reimburse their bank loans. In turn, this may weaken the banks’ financial health and be the cause of a crisis.
The situation is becoming inextricable. The on-going deterioration of the economy increases the budget deficit and the public debt beyond reasonable levels while monetary policy has lost its effectiveness. The government’s two main levers to direct the country’s economic policy have become ineffectual. Due to the presidential election, no new measures are likely to be implemented between now and February or March – a time lapse during which the economy is likely to deteriorate further.
To prevent such an unwelcome development, Ms. Loretta Master, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland suggested on September 23rd to credit every American’s bank account with “digital dollar” directly from the Federal Reserve. Her proposal was well received. Market analyst Wolf Richter calculates that a $3 trillion transfer would translate into a $28000 sum for a household of two adults. This would prop up consumer spending and pull the American economy out of recession. But it would also create inflation and depreciate the dollar. A digital dollar is a dollar. Ms. Master’s proposal is another form of money creation. The total of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet which amounted to 40% of the gross domestic product in the 1960s, rose to 100% in December 2012. It now stands at 125%. Is the United States on its way to repeating the Wehrmacht Republic’s mistakes of the 1920s? What will happen to the dollar, if the Federal Reserve pursues its money creation policy? And what will happen to the United States’ credit rating?
Icarus’s wax is melting
Whatever measures are eventually agreed upon the public debt will rise. Who will finance it? About 70% of it is presently financed by the American public, federal agencies and the Federal Reserve. The remaining 30% is financed by foreigners. The percentage is dropping. In the summer of 2012, foreign investors held 34% of the public debt. The trend is likely to continue if we use gold prices. Gold is a yardstick of investors’ confidence. For several years, worried investors have been exchanging their dollar-denominated U.S. Treasury holdings for gold, pushing up its price. Graph 7 is most interesting in that it shows the investors’ change of mood. Following the 2008 subprime crisis, they put their financial assets into dollar and gold. Today, they are moving out of the dollar into gold. This is not a good sign for the dollar.
Meanwhile, the stock market is fumbling. After reaching its highest value ever on September 2nd (3,581), it is falling. Share values, like Icarus, do not rise to the sky. If the stock market fall continues which is most likely due to the state of the economy, the American recession will translate into a world recession, since the U.S. economy accounts for 15% of the world economy. In turn, the world recession will aggravate the American recession in a vicious circle analogous of the Great Depression. This could mean the demise of the American Empire.
Jean-Luc Baslé is a former Citigroup (New York) Vice President, Columbia University graduate, Princeton University graduate, 20 years in the United States, author of “The International Monetary System: Challenges and Perspectives” (1982), “L’euro survivra-t-il ?” (2016).
A repurchase agreement “repo” is a short-term secured loan: one party (usually a financial institution) sells securities to another and agrees to repurchase them within a short period of time. ↑
If America and the western order is to somehow find its moral fitness to survive and if a world war is to be avoided in the coming near-term future, then certain fundamental banking reforms will be needed. Among the most important of these reforms will be a breaking up of banking activities into two categories under a renewal of the Glass-Steagall bank reform which was repealed by Bill Clinton in 1999. These two categories would include: 1) speculative trash and illegitimate usury which must be “deleted” under a debt jubilee and 2) legitimate savings and other useful commercial banking activities tied to “real” values without which society couldn’t sustain itself.
Many readers might immediately scoff at my words, and assert that such a reform were impossible at this late stage of rot and corruption in western society but I would retort with the question: If this were so impossible, then how was it done already at a similar time of crisis only 87 years ago under similar circumstances of economic breakdown, fascism and world war? How have other national resistance movements blocked this sort of misanthropic agenda from succeeding in the past?
In this case, I speak of course of the forgotten Pecora Commission and an often-forgotten war on Wall Street which changed the course of human history.
What was the Pecora Commission?
Many are aware of the economic meltdown of October 24, 1929 that ushered in four years of depression onto America (and much of the western world). However not many people are aware of the intense fight that was launched by patriots in both parties against the Wall Street/deep state parasite of that age which prevented both a fascist coup against the newly elected Franklin Roosevelt while also crippling Wall Street’s command of American life. In spite of whitewashing revisionist history books that contaminated the past 70 years, America’s recovery from the depression never occurred without a life or death struggle and this struggle was made possible, in large measure by the courageous work of an Italian lawyer from New York. This man’s name was Ferdinand Pecora.
By 1932, when Senators Peter Norbeck (R-SD) and George Norris (R-NB) spearheaded the establishment of the U.S. Committee on Banking and Currency, the American economy was on life support and the people were so desperate that a fascist dictatorship in America would have been welcomed with open arms if only bread could be put on the table. Unemployment had reached 25%, while over 40% of banks had gone bankrupt and 25% of the population had lost their savings. Thousands of tent cities called ‘Hoovervilles’ were spread across the USA and over 50% of America’s industrial capacity had shut down. Thousands of farms had been foreclosed and the engines of American industry had grinded to a screeching halt.
Across the ocean, the fascist regimes of Germany, Italy and Spain were growing more powerful by the day fed by injections of hundreds of millions of dollars of capital by London and Wall Street bankers. Notable among these pro-fascist financiers was none other than Bush family patriarch Prescott, who provided millions in loans to Hitler’s bankrupt Nazi party in 1932 (and continued doing business with the party through 1942- having only stopped after being found guilty for “trading with the enemy”).
The Committee on Banking and Currency was a relatively impotent body when it began in 1932, but when Senator Norbeck called in Ferdinand Pecora to lead it in April 1932, everything began to change. A first generation Italian-American, Pecora was forced to quit high school after his father was injured in order to support his family. Years later, the young man found work as a clerk in a law firm, and managed to work his way through law school, passing the bar in 1911. His unimpeachable reputation earned him the animosity of powerful NY financiers who ensured that his successes in prosecuting brokers never resulted in attaining Attorney General, where he made a name for himself shutting down over 100 illegal brokerage houses that speculated on fraudulent securities during the depression.
Within days of accepting the Washington job as Chief Council of Norbeck’s committee (for the meager salary of $250/month), Pecora was granted broad subpoena powers to audit banks and drag the most powerful men in America to testify in the committee’s hearings.
In his first two weeks, Pecora made headlines by auditing the books of major Wall Street banks and pulled in pro-fascist National City President Charles Mitchell (then preparing to advise Benito Mussolini) to testify. Within days, Mitchell’s team of expensive defense attorneys could do nothing but watch in despair as the powerful financier admitted to short selling his own bank’s stocks during the depression, scamming depositors with purchases of Cuban junk debt and avoiding taxes for years. Mitchell was forced to resign in shame followed days later by NY Stock Exchange Chair Dick Whitney- who left the court in handcuffs.
This crackdown on Wall Street’s abuses were highly publicized and put the spotlight on the criminal schemes used to gamble with savings and commercial bank deposits on securities and futures markets which led to the orchestrated collapse of the bubble economy in 1929 (ironically much of the bubble built up during the “easy-money days” of the “roaring 20s” was centered in the housing market). Pecora’s crackdown also set the tone for the incoming Roosevelt administration.
Unlike the previous 1911 Pujo Commission, which also exposed Wall Street’s abuses of power, the Pecora Commission was supported by a President who actually cared about the Constitution and amplified Pecora’s powers even further. When FDR was told that supporting Pecora’s exposures of financial crimes would hurt the economy, the President famously responded with “they should have thought of that when they did the things that are being exposed now.” FDR followed up that warning by encouraging the attorney to take on John Pierpont Morgan Jr.
Rather than controlling an American institution as many believed 70 years ago and today, J.P. Morgan Jr. was actually running an operation that had earlier been created in the mid-19th century as part of a British infiltration of America. As historian John Hoefle pointed out in a 2009 EIR study:
“The House of Morgan was, in truth, a British operation from its inception. It began life as George Peabody & Co., a bank founded in London in 1851 by American George Peabody. A few years later, another American, Junius S. Morgan, joined the firm, and upon Peabody’s death the firm became J.S. Morgan & Co. Junius Morgan brought in his son, J. Pierpont Morgan, to head the New York office of J.S. Morgan, and the New York office became J.P. Morgan & Co. From its original role in helping the British gain control of American railroads, the Morgan bank became a leading force in the oligarchy’s war against the American System, using the deep pockets of its imperial masters to become a powerhouse in not only finance but steel, automobiles, railroads, electricity generation, and other industries.”
By 1933, the House of Morgan grew into a multi-headed hydra controlling utilities, holding companies, banks and countless other subsidiaries.
Senator George Norris showcasing a chart of Wall Street power
When J.P. Morgan jr. was called to testify, the banker carried a midget on his lap in mockery of the “circus of the commission”. As the questions began however, the arrogant banker was caught off guard by Pecora’s proof of Morgan’s secret “preferred clients lists” of politicians whom the banker owned and who received stock offerings at discount rates. Named among the thousands of traitors on this list, Pecora revealed former president Calvin Coolidge, Coolidge’s Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon (a Schacht-Hitler supporter from the start), financier Bernard Baruch, Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts and Democratic Party controller John Jacob Raskob. Raskob was not only a major speculator but was also the leader of the American Liberty League which tried repeatedly to overthrow FDR between 1933-1939 and worked to ally America with axis powers from 1939-1941.
Morgan’s god-like ego was brought down to the level of mortals when the flustered banker was only able to answer “I can’t remember” repeatedly when asked if he had paid taxes over the past 5 years. As it turned out, by the end of the trial, it was revealed that NONE of the subsidiaries of the House of Morgan paid any taxes during the entire period of the depression, and were caught gambling with depositors assets from commercial accounts. These revelations didn’t sit well with a population dying of starvation across the streets of America.
Similar displays of corruption were made of the heads of Kohn Loeb, Chase Bank, Brown Brothers Harriman and others.
Faced with these revelations, The Nation magazine famously reported “If you steel $25, you’re a thief. If you steal $250 000, you’re an embezzler. If you steal $2.5 million, you’re a financier.”
Pecora’s ally Sen. Burton Wheeler said “the best way to restore confidence in our banks is to take these crooked presidents out of the banks and treat them the same as we treated Al Capone.”
FDR Drains the Swamp
With the light cast firmly upon the dark shadows where vile creatures like J.P. Morgan and other financial gremlins reside, the population was finally able to start making sense of what injustices befell them during the years of post-1929 despair. While not every banker went to prison as Wheeler or Pecora would have liked, examples were made of dozens who did and many more whose careers were shamefully ended. Most importantly however, this exposure gave Franklin Roosevelt the support needed to drain the swamp and impose sweeping reforms upon the banks.
In the first hundred days, FDR was able to:
1) Impose Glass-Steagall banking separation (forcing Wall Street banks to break up their functions and preventing speculators from gambling with productive assets)
2) Create the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) that protected citizens’ savings from future crises
3) Create the Securities Exchange Commission to provide oversight to Wall Street’s activities and on whose body Pecora was appointed commissioner in 1934.
4) Unleash broad credit through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) which acted as a national bank bypassing the private Federal Reserve, channeling $33 billion to the real economy by 1945 (more than all private commercial banks combined)
5) Impose protective tariffs on agriculture, metals and industrial goods to stop dumping of cheap products in America and rebuild America’s physical economy
6) Create vast public works, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, Grand Coulee dams, Hoover dams, St Laurence development and countless other projects, hospitals, schools, bridges, roads and rail under the New Deal that acted in many ways then as China’s Belt and Road Initiative has in our modern age. Unfortunately, Roosevelt died before this new form of political economy could be internationalized abroad in the post-war years as an anti-colonial program.
Ferdinand Pecora’s Commission shaped the dynamics of America so intensely by its simple power of speaking the truth, that efforts to run a fascist coup against FDR using a general named Smedley Butler also came undone before it could succeed. Butler played along with Wall Street’s plans for some months before deciding to publicly blow the whistle in congress. Butler exposed the intension to use him as a “puppet dictator” leading thousands of American legionnaires in a storming of the White House displacing FDR.
It is often forgotten today, but in the early days of the 1920s-1930s, the Legion was modeled on Mussolini’s fascist squadristi and even its leader Alvin Owsley made explicit in 1921 saying:
“If need be the American Legion is ready to protect the institutions of this country and its ideals, in the same way as the Fascists have treated the destructive forces threatening Italy. Don’t forget that the Fascists are for today’s Italy what the American Legion is for the United States.”
Butler’s startling revelations amplified FDR’s popular support and inoculated much of the population from the fake news pouring out of Wall Street propaganda agencies spread across the media.
“Under the surface of the governmental regulation of the securities market, the same forces that produced the riotous speculative excesses of the ‘wild bull market’ of 1929 still give evidence of their existence and influence. Though repressed for the present, it cannot be doubted that, given a suitable opportunity, they would spring back to their pernicious activity.”
Pecora went onto deliver one more warning which current generations should take seriously “Had there been full disclosure of what has been done in furtherance of these schemes, they could not long have survived the fierce light of publicity and criticism. Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the bankers’ stoutest allies.”
Today’s oncoming economic meltdown can only be prevented if the lessons of 1933 are taken seriously and patriots who actually care about their nations and people stop legitimizing the casino economy of fictitious capital, derivatives, debt slavery and anti-humanism that has become so commonplace across the governing strata of the technocratic and banking elite today trying to control the world. This elite, just like the financiers of the 1920s, doesn’t care ultimately for money as an end but sees it merely as a means for imposing fascist forms of governance onto the world population. In the same way that FDR’s Wall Street/London enemies sought a world government under Nazi enforcers then, today’s heirs to that anti-human legacy are driven by a religious-like commitment to “manage” a new collapse of world civilization under a Green New Deal and World Government.
So why accept that dystopic future when a brighter one is offered us by the Multipolar alliance today led by Russia and China?
While the world’s attention is absorbed by tectonic shifts unfolding across America as “a perfect storm of civil war, and military coup threatens to undo both the elections and the very foundations of the republic itself, something very ominous has appeared “off of the radar” of most onlookers. This something is a financial collapse of the trans-Atlantic banks that threatens to unleash chaos upon the world. It is this collapse that underlies the desperate efforts being made by the neo-con drive for total war with Russia, China and other members of the growing Mutlipolar Alliance today.
In recent articles, I have mentioned that the Bank of England-led “solution” to this oncoming financial blowout of the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble is being pushed under the cover of a “Great Global Reset” which is an ugly and desperate effort to use COVID-19 as a cover for the imposition of a new post-covid world order operating system. Since the new “rules” of this new system are very similar to the 1923 Bank of England “solution” to Germany’s economic chaos which eventually required a fascist governance mechanism to impose it onto the masses, I wish to take a deeper look at the causes and effects of Weimar Germany’s completely un-necessary collapse into hyperinflation and chaos during the period of 1919-1923.
In this essay, I will go further to examine how those same architects of hyperfinflation came close to establishing a global bankers’ dictatorship in 1933 and how that early attempt at a New World Order was fortunately derailed through a bold fight which has been written out of popular history books.
We will investigate in depth how a major war broke out within America led by anti-imperial patriots in opposition to the forces of Wall Street and London’s Deep State and we will examine how this clash of paradigms came to a head in 1943-1945.
This historical study is not being conducted for entertainment, nor should this be seen as a purely academic exercise, but is being created for the simple fact that the world is coming to a total systemic meltdown and unless certain suppressed facts of 20th century history are brought to light, then those forces who have destroyed our collective memory of what we once were will remain in the drivers seat as society is carried into a new age of fascism and world war.
Versailles and the Destruction of Germany
Britain had been the leading hand behind the orchestration of WWI and the destruction of the potential German-Russian-American-Ottoman alliance that had begun to take form by the late 19th century as foolish Kaiser Wilhelm discovered (though sadly too late) when he said: “the world will be engulfed in the most terrible of wars, the ultimate aim of which is the ruin of Germany. England, France and Russia have conspired for our annihilation… that is the naked truth of the situation which was slowly but surely created by Edward VII”.
Just as the British oligarchy managed the war, so too did they organize the reparations conference in France which, among other things, imposed impossible debt repayments upon a defeated Germany and created the League of Nations which was meant to become the instrument for a “post-nation state world order”. Lloyd George led the British delegation alongside his assistant Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), Leo Amery, Lord Robert Cecil and Lord John Maynard Keynes who have a long term agenda to bring about a global dictatorship. All of these figures were members of the newly emerging Round Table Movement, that had taken full control of Britain by ousting Asquith in 1916, and which is at the heart of today’s “deep state”.
After the 1918 Armistice dismantled Germany’s army and navy, the once powerful nation was now forced to pay the impossible sum of 132 billion gold marks to the victors and had to give up territories representing 10% of its population (Alsace-Loraine, Ruhr, and North Silesia) which made up 15% of its arable land, 12% of its livestock, 74% of its iron ore, 63% of its zinc production, and 26% of its coal. Germany also had to give up 8000 locomotives, 225 000 railcars and all of its colonies. It was a field day of modern pillage.
Germany was left with very few options. Taxes were increased and imports were cut entirely while exports were increased. This policy (reminiscent of the IMF austerity techniques in use today) failed entirely as both fell 60%. Germany gave up half of its gold supply and still barely a dent was made in the debt payments. By June 1920 the decision was made to begin a new strategy: increase the printing press. Rather than the “miracle cure” which desperate monetarists foolishly believed it would be, this solution resulted in an asymptotic devaluation of the currency into hyperinflation. From June 1920 to October 1923 the money supply in circulation skyrocketed from 68.1 gold marks to 496.6 quintillion gold marks. In June 1922, 300 marks exchanged $1 US and in November 1923, it took 42 trillion marks to get $1 US! Images are still available of Germans pushing wheelbarrows of cash down the street, just to buy a stick of butter and bread (1Kg of Bread sold for $428 billion marks in 1923).
With the currency’s loss of value, industrial output fell by 50%, unemployment rose to over 30% and food intake collapsed by over half of pre-war levels. German director Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Dr. Mabuse (The Gambler) exposed the insanity of German population’s collapse into speculative insanity as those who had the means began betting against the German mark in order to protect themselves thus only helping to collapse the mark from within. This is very reminiscent of those Americans today short selling the US dollar rather than fighting for a systemic solution.
There was resistance.
The dark effects of Versailles were not unknown and Germany’s Nazi-stained destiny was anything but pre-determined. It is a provable fact often left out of history books that patriotic forces from Russia, America and Germany attempted courageously to change the tragic trajectory of hyperinflation and fascism which WOULD HAVE prevented the rise of Hitler and WWII had their efforts not been sabotaged.
From America itself, a new Presidential team under the leadership of William Harding quickly reversed the pro-League of Nations agenda of the rabidly anglophile President Woodrow Wilson. A leading US industrialist named Washington Baker Vanderclip who had led in the world’s largest trade agreement in history with Russia to the tune of $3 billion in 1920 had called Wilson “an autocrat at the inspiration of the British government.” Unlike Wilson, President Harding both supported the US-Russia trade deal and undermined the League of Nations by re-enforcing America’s sovereignty, declaring bi-lateral treaties with Russia, Hungary and Austria outside of the league’s control in 1921. The newly-formed British Roundtable Movement in America (set up as the Council on Foreign Relations) were not pleased.
Just as Harding was maneuvering to recognize the Soviet Union and establish an entente with Lenin, the great president ate some “bad oysters” and died on August 2, 1923. While no autopsy was ever conducted, his death brought a decade of Anglophile Wall Street control into America and ended all opposition to World Government from the Presidency. This period resulted in the speculation-driven bubble of the roaring 20s whose crash on black Friday in 1929 nearly unleashed a fascist hell in America.
The Russia-Germany Rapallo Treaty is De-Railed
After months of organizing, leading representatives of Russia and Germany agreed to an alternative solution to the Versailles Treaty which would have given new life to Germany’s patriots and established a powerful Russia-German friendship in Europe that would have upset other nefarious agendas.
Under the leadership of German Industrialist and Foreign Minster Walter Rathenau, and his counterpart Russian Foreign Minister Georgi Chicherin, the treaty was signed in Rapallo, Italy on April 16, 1922 premised upon the forgiveness of all war debts and a renouncement of all territorial claims from either side. The treaty said Russia and Germany would “co-operate in a spirit of mutual goodwill in meeting the economic needs of both countries.”
When Rathenau was assassinated by a terrorist cell called the Organization Consul on June 24, 1922 the success of the Rapallo Treaty lost its steam and the nation fell into a deeper wave of chaos and money printing. The Organization Consul had taken the lead in the murder of over 354 German political figures between 1919-1923, and when they were banned in 1922, the group merely changed its name and morphed into other German paramilitary groups (such as the Freikorps) becoming the military arm of the new National Socialist Party.
1923: City of London’s Solution is imposed
When the hyperinflationary blowout of Germany resulted in total un-governability of the state, a solution took the form of the Wall Street authored “Dawes Plan” which necessitated the use of a London-trained golem by the name of Hjalmar Schacht. First introduced as Currency Commissioner in November 1923 and soon President of the Reichsbank, Schacht’s first act was to visit Bank of England’s governor Montagu Norman in London who provided Schacht a blueprint for proceeding with Germany’s restructuring. Schacht returned to “solve” the crisis with the very same poison that caused it.
First announcing a new currency called the “rentenmark” set on a fixed value exchanging 1 trillion reichsmarks for 1 new rentenmark, Germans were robbed yet again. This new currency would operate under “new rules” never before seen in Germany’s history: Mass privatizations resulted in Anglo-American conglomerates purchasing state enterprises. IG Farben, Thyssen, Union Banking, Brown Brothers Harriman, Standard Oil, JP Morgan and Union Banking took control Germany’s finances, mining and industrial interests under the supervision of John Foster Dulles, Montagu Norman, Averill Harriman and other deep state actors. This was famously exposed in the 1961 film Judgement at Nuremburg by Stanley Kramer.
Schacht next cut credit to industries, raised taxes and imposed mass austerity on “useless spending”. 390 000 civil servants were fired, unions and collective bargaining was destroyed and wages were slashed by 15%.
As one can imagine, this destruction of life after the hell of Versailles was intolerable and civil unrest began to boil over in ways that even the powerful London-Wall Street bankers (and their mercenaries) couldn’t control. An enforcer was needed unhindered by the republic’s democratic institutions to force Schacht’s economics onto the people. An up-and-coming rabble rousing failed painter who had made waves in a Beerhall Putsch on November 8, 1923 was perfect.
One Last Attempt to Save Germany
Though Hitler grew in power over the coming decade of Schachtian economics, one last republican effort was made to prevent Germany from plunging into a fascist hell in the form of the November 1932 election victory of General Kurt von Schleicher as Chancellor of Germany. Schleicher had been a co-architect of Rapallo alongside Rathenau a decade earlier and was a strong proponent of the Friedrich List Society’s program of public works and internal improvements promoted by industrialist Wilhelm Lautenbach. The Nazi party’s public support collapsed and it found itself bankrupt. Hitler had fallen into depression and was even contemplating suicide when “a legal coup” was unleashed by the Anglo-American elite resulting in Wall Street funds pouring into Nazi coffers.
By January 30, 1933 Hitler gained Chancellorship where he quickly took dictatorial powers under the “state of emergency” caused by the burning of the Reichstag in March 1933. By 1934 the Night of the Long Knives saw General Schleicher and hundreds of other German patriots assassinated and it was only a few years until the City of London-Wall Street Frankenstein monster stormed across the world.
How the 1929 Crash was Manufactured
While everyone knows that the 1929 market crash unleashed four years of hell in America which quickly spread across Europe under the great depression, not many people have realized that this was not inevitable, but rather a controlled blowout.
The bubbles of the 1920s were unleashed with the early death of President William Harding in 1923 and grew under the careful guidance of JP Morgan’s President Coolidge and financier Andrew Mellon (Treasury Secretary) who de-regulated the banks, imposed austerity onto the country, and cooked up a scheme for Broker loans allowing speculators to borrow 90% on their stock. Wall Street was deregulated, investments into the real economy were halted during the 1920s and insanity became the norm. In 1925 broker loans totalled $1.5 billion and grew to $2.6 billion in 1926 and hit $5.7 billion by the end of 1927. By 1928, the stock market was overvalued fourfold!
When the bubble was sufficiently inflated, a moment was decided upon to coordinate a mass “calling in” of the broker loans. Predictably, no one could pay them resulting in a collapse of the markets. Those “in the know” cleaned up with JP Morgan’s “preferred clients”, and other financial behemoths selling before the crash and then buying up the physical assets of America for pennies on the dollar. One notable person who made his fortune in this manner was Prescott Bush of Brown Brothers Harriman, who went onto bailout a bankrupt Nazi party in 1932. These financiers had a tight allegiance with the City of London and coordinated their operations through the private central banking system of America’s Federal Reserve and Bank of International Settlements.
The Living Hell that was the Great Depression
Throughout the Great depression, the population was pushed to its limits making America highly susceptible to fascism as unemployment skyrocketed to 25%, industrial capacity collapsed by 70%, and agricultural prices collapsed far below the cost of production accelerating foreclosures and suicide. Life savings were lost as 4000 banks failed.
This despair was replicated across Europe and Canada with eugenics-loving fascists gaining popularity across the board. England saw the rise of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in 1932, English Canada had its own fascist solution with the Rhodes Scholar “Fabian Society” League of Social Reconstruction (which later took over the Liberal Party) calling for the “scientific management of society”. Time magazine had featured Il Duce over 6 times by 1932 and people were being told by that corporate fascism was the economic solution to all of America’s economic woes.
In the midst of the crisis, the City of London removed itself from the gold standard in 1931 which was a crippling blow to the USA, as it resulted in a flight of gold from America causing a deeper contraction of the money supply and thus inability to respond to the depression. British goods simultaneously swamped the USA crushing what little production was left.
It was in this atmosphere that one of the least understood battles unfolded in 1933.
1932: A Bankers’ Dictatorship is Attempted
In Germany, a surprise victory of Gen. Kurt Schleicher caused the defeat of the London-directed Nazi party in December 1932 threatening to break Germany free of Central Bank tyranny. A few weeks before Schleicher’s victory, Franklin Roosevelt won the presidency in America threatening to regulate the private banks and assert national sovereignty over finance.
Seeing their plans for global fascism slipping away, the City of London announced that a new global system controlled by Central Banks had to be created post haste. Their objective was to use the economic crisis as an excuse to remove from nation states any power over monetary policy, while enhancing the power of Independent Central Banks as enforcers of “balanced global budgets”. elaborate
In December 1932, an economic conference “to stabilize the world economy” was organized by the League of Nations under the guidance of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and Bank of England. The BIS was set up as “the Central Bank of Central Banks” in 1930 in order to facilitate WWI debt repayments and was a vital instrument for funding Nazi Germany- long after WWII began. The London Economic Conference brought together 64 nations of the world under a controlled environment chaired by the British Prime Minister and opened by the King himself.
“The conference considers it to be essential, in order to provide an international gold standard with the necessary mechanism for satisfactory working, that independent Central Banks, with requisite powers and freedom to carry out an appropriate currency and credit policy, should be created in such developed countries as have not at present an adequate central banking institution” and that “the conference wish to reaffirm the great utility of close and continuous cooperation between Central Banks. The Bank of International Settlements should play an increasingly important part not only by improving contact, but also as an instrument for common action.”
Echoing the Bank of England’s modern fixation with “mathematical equilibrium”, the resolutions stated that the new global gold standard controlled by central banks was needed “to maintain a fundamental equilibrium in the balance of payments” of countries. The idea was to deprive nation states of their power to generate and direct credit for their own development.
FDR Torpedoes the London Conference
Chancellor Schleicher’s resistance to a bankers’ dictatorship was resolved by a “soft coup” ousting the patriotic leader in favor of Adolph Hitler (under the control of a Bank of England toy named Hjalmar Schacht) in January 1933 with Schleicher assassinated the following year. In America, an assassination attempt on Roosevelt was thwarted on February 15, 1933 when a woman knocked the gun out of the hand of an anarchist-freemason in Miami resulting in the death of Chicago’s Mayor Cermak.
Without FDR’s dead body, the London conference met an insurmountable barrier, as FDR refused to permit any American cooperation. Roosevelt recognized the necessity for a new international system, but he also knew that it had to be organized by sovereign nation states subservient to the general welfare of the people and not central banks dedicated to the welfare of the oligarchy. Before any international changes could occur, nation states castrated from the effects of the depression had to first recover economically in order to stay above the power of the financiers.
By May 1933, the London Conference crumbled when FDR complained that the conference’s inability to address the real issues of the crisis is “a catastrophe amounting to a world tragedy” and that fixation with short term stability were “old fetishes of so-called international bankers”. FDR continued “The United States seeks the kind of dollar which a generation hence will have the same purchasing and debt paying power as the dollar value we hope to attain in the near future. That objective means more to the good of other nations than a fixed ratio for a month or two. Exchange rate fixing is not the true answer.”
The British drafted an official statement saying “the American statement on stabilization rendered it entirely useless to continue the conference.”
FDR’s War on Wall Street
The new president laid down the gauntlet in his inaugural speech on March 4th saying: “The money-changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit”.
FDR declared a war on Wall Street on several levels, beginning with his support of the Pecorra Commission which sent thousands of bankers to prison, and exposed the criminal activities of the top tier of Wall Street’s power structure who manipulated the depression, buying political offices and pushing fascism. Ferdinand Pecorra who ran the commission called out the deep state when he said “this small group of highly placed financiers, controlling the very springs of economic activity, holds more real power than any similar group in the United States.”
Pecorra’s highly publicized success empowered FDR to impose sweeping regulation in the form of 1) Glass-Steagall bank separation, 2) bankruptcy re-organization and 3) the creation of the Security Exchange Commission to oversee Wall Street. Most importantly, FDR disempowered the London-controlled Federal Reserve by installing his own man as Chair (Industrialist Mariner Eccles) who forced it to obey national commands for the first time since 1913, while creating an “alternative” lending mechanism outside of Fed control called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) which became the number one lender to infrastructure in America throughout the 1930s.
One of the most controversial policies for which FDR is demonized today was his abolishment of the gold standard. The gold standard itself constricted the money supply to a strict exchange of gold per paper dollar, thus preventing the construction of internal improvements needed to revive industrial capacity and put the millions of unemployed back to work for which no financial resources existed. It’s manipulation by international financiers made it a weapon of destruction rather than creation at this time. Since commodity prices had fallen lower than the costs of production, it was vital to increase the price of goods under a form of “controlled inflation” so that factories and farms could become solvent and unfortunately the gold standard held that back. FDR imposed protective tariffs to favor agro-industrial recovery on all fronts ending years of rapacious free trade.
FDR stated his political-economic philosophy in 1934: “the old fallacious notion of the bankers on the one side and the government on the other side, as being more or less equal and independent units, has passed away. Government by the necessity of things must be the leader, must be the judge, of the conflicting interests of all groups in the community, including bankers.”
The Real New Deal
Once liberated from the shackles of the central banks, FDR and his allies were able to start a genuine recovery by restoring confidence in banking. Within 31 days of his bank holiday, 75% of banks were operational and the FDIC was created to insure deposits. Four million people were given immediate work, and hundreds of libraries, schools and hospitals were built and staffed- All funded through the RFC. FDR’s first fireside chat was vital in rebuilding confidence in the government and banks, serving even today as a strong lesson in banking which central bankers don’t want you to learn about.
From 1933-1939, 45 000 infrastructure projects were built. The many “local” projects were governed, like China’s Belt and Road Initiative today, under a “grand design” which FDR termed the “Four Quarters” featuring zones of megaprojects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority area in the south east, the Columbia River Treaty zone on the northwest, the St Laurence Seaway zone on the North east, and Hoover Dam/Colorado zone on the Southwest. These projects were transformative in ways money could never measure as the Tennessee area’s literacy rose from 20% in 1932 to 80% in 1950, and racist backwater holes of the south became the bedrock for America’s aerospace industry due to the abundant and cheap hydropower. As I had already reported on the Saker, FDR was not a Keynesian (although it cannot be argued that hives of Rhodes Scholars and Fabians penetrating his administration certainly were).
Wall Street Sabotages the New Deal
Those who criticize the New Deal today ignore the fact that its failures have more to do with Wall Street sabotage than anything intrinsic to the program. For example, JP Morgan tool Lewis Douglass (U.S. Budget Director) forced the closure of the Civil Works Administration in 1934 resulting in the firing of all 4 million workers.
Wall Street did everything it could to choke the economy at every turn. In 1931, NY banks loans to the real economy amounted to $38.1 billion which dropped to only $20.3 billion by 1935. Where NY banks had 29% of their funds in US bonds and securities in 1929, this had risen to 58% which cut off the government from being able to issue productive credit to the real economy.
When, in 1937, FDR’s Treasury Secretary persuaded him to cancel public works to see if the economy “could stand on its own two feet”, Wall Street pulled credit out of the economy collapsing the Industrial production index from 110 to 85 erasing seven years’ worth of gain, while steel fell from 80% capacity back to depression levels of 19%. Two million jobs were lost and the Dow Jones lost 39% of its value. This was no different from kicking the crutches out from a patient in rehabilitation and it was not lost on anyone that those doing the kicking were openly supporting Fascism in Europe. Bush patriarch Prescott Bush, then representing Brown Brothers Harriman was found guilty for trading with the enemy in 1942!
Coup Attempt in America Thwarted
The bankers didn’t limit themselves to financial sabotage during this time, but also attempted a fascist military coup which was exposed by Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler in his congressional testimony of November 20, 1934. Butler had testified that the plan was begun in the Summer of 1933 and organized by Wall Street financiers who tried to use him as a puppet dictator leading 500 000 American Legion members to storm the White House. As Butler spoke, those same financiers had just set up an anti-New Deal organization called the American Liberty League which fought to keep America out of the war in defense of an Anglo-Nazi fascist global government which they wished to partner with.
The American Liberty league only changed tune when it became evident that Hitler had become a disobedient Frankenstein monster who wasn’t content in a subservient position to Britain’s idea of a New World Order. In response to the Liberty League’s agenda, FDR said “some speak of a New World Order, but it is not new and it is not order”.
FDR’s Anti-Colonial Post-War Vision
One of the greatest living testimonies to FDR’s anti-colonial vision is contained in a little known 1946 book authored by his son Elliot Roosevelt who, as his father’s confidante and aide, was privy to some of the most sensitive meetings his father participated in throughout the war. Seeing the collapse of the post-war vision upon FDR’s April 12, 1945 death and the emergence of a pro-Churchill presidency under Harry Truman, who lost no time in dropping nuclear bombs on a defeated Japan, ushering in a Soviet witch hunt at home and launching a Cold War abroad, Elliot authored ‘As He Saw It’ (1946) in order to create a living testimony to the potential that was lost upon his father’s passing.
As Elliot said of his motive to write his book:
“The decision to write this book was taken more recently and impelled by urgent events. Winston Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, had a hand in this decision,… the growing stockpile of American atom bombs is a compelling factor; all the signs of growing disunity among the leading nations of the world, all the broken promises, all the renascent power politics of greedy and desperate imperialism were my spurs in this undertaking… And I have seen the promises violated, and the conditions summarily and cynically disregarded, and the structure of peace disavowed… I am writing this, then, to you who agree with me that… the path he charted has been most grievously—and deliberately—forsaken.”
The Four Freedoms
Even before America had entered the war, the principles of international harmony which FDR enunciated in his January 6, 1941 Four Freedoms speech to the U.S. Congress served as the guiding light through every battle for the next 4.5 years. In this speech FDR said:
“In future days, which we seek to secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
“The first is the freedom of speech and expression–everywhere in the world.
“The second is the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the world.
“The third is the freedom from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants–everywhere in the world.
“The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.
“That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
“To that new order, we oppose the greater conception–the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
“Since the beginning of American history, we have been engaged in change–in a perpetual peaceful revolution–a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions–without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.
“This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or to keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.”
Upon hearing these Freedoms outlined, American painter Norman Rockwell was inspired to paint four masterpieces that were displayed across America and conveyed the beauty of FDR’s spirit to all citizens.
FDR’s patriotic Vice President (and the man who SHOULD have been president in 1948) Henry Wallace outlined FDR’s vision in a passionate video address to the people in 1942 which should also be watched by all world citizens today:
Churchill vs FDR: The Clash of Two Paradigms
Elliot’s account of the 1941-1945 clash of paradigms between his father and Churchill are invaluable both for their ability to shed light into the true noble constitutional character of America personified in the person of Roosevelt but also in demonstrating the beautiful potential of a world that SHOULD HAVE BEEN had certain unnatural events not intervened to derail the evolution of our species into an age of win-win cooperation, creative reason and harmony.
In As He Saw It, Elliot documents a conversation he had with his father at the beginning of America’s entry into WWII, who made his anti-colonial intentions clear as day saying:
“I’m talking about another war, Elliott. I’m talking about what will happen to our world, if after this war we allow millions of people to slide back into the same semi-slavery!
“Don’t think for a moment, Elliott, that Americans would be dying in the Pacific tonight, if it hadn’t been for the shortsighted greed of the French and the British and the Dutch. Shall we allow them to do it all, all over again? Your son will be about the right age, fifteen or twenty years from now.
“One sentence, Elliott. Then I’m going to kick you out of here. I’m tired. This is the sentence: When we’ve won the war, I will work with all my might and main to see to it that the United States is not wheedled into the position of accepting any plan that will further France’s imperialistic ambitions, or that will aid or abet the British Empire in its imperial ambitions.”
This clash came to a head during a major confrontation between FDR and Churchill during the January 24, 1943 Casablanca Conference in Morocco. At this event, Elliot documents how his father first confronted Churchill’s belief in the maintenance of the British Empire’s preferential trade agreements upon which it’s looting system was founded:
“Of course,” he [FDR] remarked, with a sly sort of assurance, “of course, after the war, one of the preconditions of any lasting peace will have to be the greatest possible freedom of trade.”
He paused. The P.M.’s head was lowered; he was watching Father steadily, from under one eyebrow.
“No artificial barriers,” Father pursued. “As few favored economic agreements as possible. Opportunities for expansion. Markets open for healthy competition.” His eye wandered innocently around the room.
Churchill shifted in his armchair. “The British Empire trade agreements” he began heavily, “are—”
Father broke in. “Yes. Those Empire trade agreements are a case in point. It’s because of them that the people of India and Africa, of all the colonial Near East and Far East, are still as backward as they are.”
Churchill’s neck reddened and he crouched forward. “Mr. President, England does not propose for a moment to lose its favored position among the British Dominions. The trade that has made England great shall continue, and under conditions prescribed by England’s ministers.”
“You see,” said Father slowly, “it is along in here somewhere that there is likely to be some disagreement between you, Winston, and me.
“I am firmly of the belief that if we are to arrive at a stable peace it must involve the development of backward countries. Backward peoples. How can this be done? It can’t be done, obviously, by eighteenth-century methods. Now—”
“Who’s talking eighteenth-century methods?”
“Whichever of your ministers recommends a policy which takes wealth in raw materials out of a colonial country, but which returns nothing to the people of that country in consideration. Twentieth-century methods involve bringing industry to these colonies. Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation—by making sure that they get a return for the raw wealth of their community.”
Around the room, all of us were leaning forward attentively. Hopkins was grinning. Commander Thompson, Churchill’s aide, was looking glum and alarmed. The P.M. himself was beginning to look apoplectic.
“You mentioned India,” he growled.
“Yes. I can’t believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.”
“What about the Philippines?”
“I’m glad you mentioned them. They get their independence, you know, in 1946. And they’ve gotten modern sanitation, modern education; their rate of illiteracy has gone steadily down…”
“There can be no tampering with the Empire’s economic agreements.”
“They’re artificial…”
“They’re the foundation of our greatness.”
“The peace,” said Father firmly, “cannot include any continued despotism. The structure of the peace demands and will get equality of peoples. Equality of peoples involves the utmost freedom of competitive trade. Will anyone suggest that Germany’s attempt to dominate trade in central Europe was not a major contributing factor to war?”
It was an argument that could have no resolution between these two men…
The following day, Elliot describes how the conversation continued between the two men with Churchill stating:
“Mr. President,” he cried, “I believe you are trying to do away with the British Empire. Every idea you entertain about the structure of the postwar world demonstrates it. But in spite of that”—and his forefinger waved—”in spite of that, we know that you constitute our only hope. And”—his voice sank dramatically—”you know that we know it. You know that we know that without America, the Empire won’t stand.”
Churchill admitted, in that moment, that he knew the peace could only be won according to precepts which the United States of America would lay down. And in saying what he did, he was acknowledging that British colonial policy would be a dead duck, and British attempts to dominate world trade would be a dead duck, and British ambitions to play off the U.S.S.R. against the U.S.A. would be a dead duck. Or would have been, if Father had lived.”
This story was delivered in full during an August 15 lecture by the author:
FDR’s Post-War Vision Destroyed
While FDR’s struggle did change the course of history, his early death during the first months of his fourth term resulted in a fascist perversion of his post-war vision.
Rather than see the IMF, World Bank or UN used as instruments for the internationalization of the New Deal principles to promote long term, low interest loans for the industrial development of former colonies, FDR’s allies were ousted from power over his dead body, and they were recaptured by the same forces who attempted to steer the world towards a Central Banking Dictatorship in 1933.
The American Liberty League spawned into various “patriotic” anti-communist organizations which took power with the FBI and McCarthyism under the fog of the Cold War. This is the structure that Eisenhower warned about when he called out “the Military Industrial Complex” in 1960 and which John Kennedy did battle with during his 900 days as president.
This is the structure which is out to destroy President Donald Trump and undo the November elections under a military coup and Civil War out of fear that a new FDR impulse is beginning to be revived in America which may align with the 21st Century international New Deal emerging from China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Eurasian alliance. French Finance Minister Bruno LeMaire and Marc Carney have stated their fear that if the Green New Deal isn’t imposed by the west, then the New Silk Road and yuan will become the basis for the new world system.
The Bank of England-authored Green New Deal being pushed under the fog of COVID-19’s Great Green Global Reset which promise to impose draconian constraints on humanity’s carrying capacity in defense of saving nature from humanity have nothing to do with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and they have less to do with the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. These are merely central bankers’ wet dreams for depopulation and fascism “with a democratic face” which their 1923 and 1933 efforts failed to achieve and can only be imposed if people remain blind to their own recent history.
It usually makes sense to follow the money when seeking understanding of almost any major change. The strategy of following the money in our current convergence of crises in late summer of 2020 leads us directly to the lockdowns. The lockdowns were first imposed on people in the Wuhan area of China. Then other populations throughout the world were told to “shelter in place,” all in the name of combating the COVID-19 virus.
Understanding of the enormous impact of the lockdowns is still developing. The lockdowns are proving to pack a far more devastating punch than any other aspect of the strange sequence of events that is making 2020 a year like no other. Even when the issues are narrowed to those of human health, the lockdowns have had, and will continue to have, far more wide-ranging and devastating impacts than the celebrity virus.
The lockdowns have, for starters, been directly responsible for explosive rates of suicide, domestic violence, overdoses, and depression. In the long run, these maladies from the lockdowns will probably kill and harm many more people than COVID-19.
But this comparison does not tell the full story. The nature and length of the lockdowns are causing millions of people to lose their jobs, businesses and financial viability. It seems that the economic descent is still gathering force. The assault of the lockdowns on our economic wellbeing still has much farther to go.
The lockdowns have proven to be a powerful instrument of social control. This attribute is becoming very attractive especially to some politicians. They have discovered they can derive considerable political traction from hyping and exploiting the largely manufactured pandemic panic.
The lockdowns are still a work-in-progress. There are past lockdowns, revolving lockdowns, partial lockdowns, mandatory lockdowns, voluntary lockdowns, severe lockdowns and probably an array of many lockdown types yet to be invented.
The lockdowns extend to disruptions in supply chains, disruptions in money flows, drops in consumption, breakdowns in transport and travelling, increased bankruptcies, losses of finance leading to losses of housing, as well as the inability to pay taxes and debts.
The lockdowns extend beyond personal habitations to prohibitions on large assemblies of people in stadiums, concert halls, churches, and a myriad of places devoted to public recreation and entertainment. On the basis of this way of looking at what is happening, it becomes clear the economic and health effects of the lockdowns are far more pronounced than the damage wrought directly by the new coronavirus.
This approach to following the money leads to the question of whether the spread of COVID-19 was set in motion as a pretext. Was COVID-19 unleashed as an expedient for bringing about the lockdowns with the goal of crashing the existing economy? What rationale could there possibly be for purposely crashing the existing economy?
One possible reason might have been to put in place new structures to create the framework for a new set of economic relationships. With these changes would come accompanying sets of altered social and political relationships.
Among the economic changes being sought are the robotization of almost everything, cashless financial interactions, and elaborate AI impositions. These AI impositions extend to digital alterations of human consciousness and behavior. The emphasis being placed on vaccines is very much interwoven with plans to extend AI into an altered matrix of human nanobiotechnology.
There are other possibilities to consider. One is that in the autumn of 2019 the economy was already starting to falter. Fortuitously for some, the new virus came along at a moment when it could be exploited as a scapegoat. By placing responsibility for the economic debacle on pathogens rather than people, Wall Street bankers and federal authorities are let off the hook. They can escape any accounting for an economic calamity that they had a hand in helping to instigate.
A presentation in August of 2019 by the Wall Street leviathan, BlackRock Financial Management, provides a telling indicator of foreknowledge. It was well understood by many insiders in 2019 that a sharp economic downturn was imminent.
At a meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole Wyoming, BlackRock representatives delivered a strategy for dealing with the future downturn. Several months later during the spring of 2020 this strategy was adopted by both the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve. BlackRock’s plan from August of 2019 set the basis of the federal response to the much-anticipated economic meltdown.
Much of this essay is devoted to considering the background of the controversial agencies now responding to the economic devastation created by the lockdowns. One of these agencies is empowered to bring into existence large quantities of debt-laden money.
The very public role in 2020 of the Federal Reserve of the United States resuscitates many old grievances. When the Federal Reserve was first created in 1913 it was heavily criticized as a giveaway of federal authority.
The critics lamented the giveaway to private bankers whose firms acquired ownership of all twelve of the regional banks that together constitute the Federal Reserve. Of these twelve regional banks, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is by far the largest and most dominant especially right now.
The Federal Reserve of the United States combined forces with dozens of other privately-owned central banks thoughout the world to form the Bank of International Settlements. Many of the key archetypes for this type of banking were developed in Europe and the City of London where the Rothschild banking family had a large and resilient role, one that persists until this day.
Along with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, BlackRock was deeply involved in helping to administer the bailout in 2008. This bailout resuscitated many failing Wall Street firms together with their counterparties in a number of speculative ventures involving various forms of derivatives.
The bailouts resulted in payments of $29 trillion, much of it going to restore failing financial institutions whose excesses actually caused the giant economic crash. Where the financial sector profited greatly from the bailouts, taxpayers were abused yet again. The burden of an expanded national debt fell ultimately on taxpayers who must pay the interest on the loans for the federal bailout of the “too big to fail” financial institutions.
Unsettling precedents are set by the Wall Street club’s manipulation of the economic crash of 2007-2010 to enrich its own members so extravagantly. This prior experience bodes poorly for the intervention by the same players in this current round of responses to the economic crisis of 2020.
In preparing this essay I have enjoyed the many articles by Pam Martens and Russ Martens in Wall Street on Parade. These hundreds of well-researched articles form a significant primary source on the recent history of the Federal Reserve, including over the last few months.
In this essay I draw a contrast between the privately-owned regional banks of the Federal Reserve and the government-owned Bank of Canada that once issued low-interest loans to build infrastructure projects.
With this arrangement in place, Canada went through a major period of national growth between 1938 and 1974. Canada emerged from this period with a national debt of only $20 billion. Then in 1974 Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau dropped this arrangement to enable Canada to join the Bank of International Settlements. One result is that national debt rose to $700 billion by 2020.
We need to face the current financial crisis by developing new institutions that avoid the pitfalls of old remedies for old problems that no longer prevail. We need to make special efforts to change our approach to the problem of excessive debts and the overconcentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
Locking Down the Viability of Commerce
Of all the facets of the ongoing fiasco generally associated with the coronavirus crisis, none has been so widely catastrophic as the so-called “lockdowns.” The supposed cure of the lockdowns is itself proving to be much more lethal and debilitating than COVID-19’s flu-like impact on human health.
Many questions arise from the immense economic consequences attributed to the initial effort to “flatten the curve” of the hospital treatments for COVID-19. Did the financial crisis occur as a result of the spread of the new coronavirus crisis? Or was the COVID-19 crisis set in motion to help give cover to a long-building economic meltdown that was already well underway in the autumn of 2019?
The lockdowns were first instituted in Wuhan China with the objective of slowing down the spread of the virus so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed. Were the Chinese lockdowns engineered in part to create a model to be followed in Europe, North America, Indochina and other sites of infection like India and Australia? The Chinese lockdowns in Hubei province and then in other parts of China apparently set an example influencing the decision of governments in many jurisdictions. Was this Chinese example for the rest of the world created by design to influence the nature of international responses?
The lockdowns represented a new form of response to a public health crisis. Quarantines have long been used as a means of safeguarding the public from the spread of contagious maladies. Quarantines, however, involve isolating the sick to protect the well. On the other hand the lockdowns are directed at limiting the movement and circulation of almost everyone whether or not they show symptoms of any infections.
Hence lockdowns, or, more euphemistically “sheltering in place,” led to the cancellation of many activities and to the shutdown of institutions. The results extended, for instance, to the closure of schools, sports events, theatrical presentations and business operations. In this way the lockdowns also led to the crippling of many forms of economic interaction. National economies as well as international trade and commerce were severely impacted.
The concept of lockdowns was not universally embraced and applied. For instance, the governments of Sweden and South Korea did not accept the emerging orthodoxy about enforcing compliance with all kinds of restrictions on human interactions. Alternatively, the government of Israel was an early and strident enforcer of very severe lockdown policies.
At first it seemed the lockdown succeeded magnificently in saving Israeli lives. According to Israel Shamir, in other European states the Israeli model was often brought up as an example. In due course, however, the full extent of the assault on the viability of the Israeli economy began to come into focus. Then popular resistance was aroused to reject government attempts to enforce a second wave of lockdowns against a second wave of supposed infections. As Shamir sees it, the result is that “Today Israel is a failed state with a ruined economy and unhappy citizens.”
In many countries the lockdowns began with a few crucial decisions made at the highest level of government. Large and proliferating consequences would flow from the initial determination of what activities, businesses, organizations, institutions and workers were to be designated as “essential.”
The consequences would be severe for those individuals and businesses excluded from the designation identifying what is essential. This deep intervention into the realm of free choice in market relations set a major precedent for much more intervention of a similar nature to come.
The arbitrary division of activities into essential and nonessential categories created a template to be frequently replicated and revised in the name of serving public heath. Suddenly central planning took a great leap forward. The momentum from a generation of neoliberalism was checked even as the antagonistic polarities between rich and poor continued to grow.
To be defined as “nonessential” would soon be equated with job losses and business failures across many fields of enterprise as the first wave of lockdowns outside China unfolded. Indeed, it becomes clearer every day that revolving lockdowns, restrictions and social distancing are being managed in order to help give false justification to a speciously idealized vaccine fix as the only conclusive solution to a manufactured problem.
What must it have meant for breadwinners who fed themselves and their families through wages or self-employment to be declared by government to be “non-essential”? Surely for real providers their jobs, their businesses and their earnings were essential for themselves and their dependents. All jobs and all businesses that people depend on for livelihoods, sustenance and survival are essential in their own way.
Was COVID-19 a Cover for an Anticipated or Planned Financial Crisis?
A major sign of financial distress in the US economy kicked in in mid-September of 2019 when there was a breakdown in the normal operation of the Repo Market. This repurchase market in the United States is important in maintaining liquidity in the financial system.
Those directing entities like large banks, Wall Street traders and hedge funds frequently seek large amounts of cash on a short-term basis. They obtain this cash from, for instance, money market funds by putting up securities, often Treasury Bills, as collateral. Most often the financial instruments go back, say the following night, to their original owners with interest payments attached for the use of the cash.
In mid-September the trust broke down between participants in the Repo Market. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York then entered the picture making trillions of dollars available to keep the system for short-term moving of assets going. This intervention repeated the operation that came in response to the first signs of trouble as Wall Street moved towards the stock market crash of 2008.
One of the major problems on the eve of the bailout of 2008-09, like the problem in the autumn of 2019, had to do with the overwhelming of the real economy by massive speculative activity. The problem then, like a big part of the problem now, involves the disproportionate size of the derivative bets. The making of these bets have become a dangerous addiction that continues to this day to menace the viability of the financial system headquartered on Wall Street.
By March of 2020 it was reported that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had turned on its money spigot to create $9 trillion in new money with the goal of keeping the failing Repo Market operational. The precise destinations of that money together with the terms of its disbursement, however, remain a secret. As Pam Martens and Russ Martens write,
Since the Fed turned on its latest money spigot to Wall Street [in September of 2019], it has refused to provide the public with the dollar amounts going to any specific banks. This has denied the public the ability to know which financial institutions are in trouble. The Fed, exactly as it did in 2008, has drawn a dark curtain around troubled banks and the public’s right to know, while aiding and abetting a financial coverup of just how bad things are on Wall Street.
Looking back at the prior bailout from their temporal vantage point in January of 2020, the authors noted “During the 2007 to 2010 financial collapse on Wall Street – the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Fed funnelled a total of $29 trillion in cumulative loans to Wall Street banks, their trading houses and their foreign derivative counterparties.”
The authors compared the rate of the transfer of funds from the New York Federal Reserve Bank to the Wall Street banking establishment in the 2008 crash and in the early stages of the 2020 financial debacle. The authors observed, “at this rate, [the Fed] is going to top the rate of money it threw at the 2008 crisis in no time at all.”
The view that all was well with the economy until the impact of the health crisis began to be felt in early 2020 leads away from the fact that money markets began to falter dangerously in the autumn of 2019. The problems with the Repo Market were part of a litany of indicators pointing to turbulence ahead in troubled economic waters.
For instance, the resignation in 2019 of about 1,500 prominent corporate CEOs can be seen as a suggestion that news was circulating prior to 2020 about the imminence of serious financial problems ahead. Insiders’ awareness of menacing developments threatening the workings of the global economy were probably a factor in the decision of a large number of senior executives to exit the upper echelons of the business world.
Not only did a record number of CEOs resign, but many of them sold off the bulk of their shares in the companies they were leaving.
Pam Marten and Russ Marten who follow Wall Street’s machinations on a daily basis have advanced the case that the Federal Reserve is engaged in fraud by trying to make it seem that “the banking industry came into 2020 in a healthy condition;” that it is only because of “the COVID-19 pandemic” that the financial system is” unravelling,”
The authors argue that this misrepresentation was deployed because the deceivers are apparently “desperate” to prevent Congress from conducting an investigation for the second time in twelve years on why the Fed, “had to engage in trillions of dollars of Wall Street bailouts.” In spite of the Fed’s fear of facing a Congressional investigation after the November 2020 vote, such a timely investigation of the US financial sector would well serve the public interest.
The authors present a number of signs demonstrating that “the Fed knew, or should have known…. that there was a big banking crisis brewing in August of last year. [2019]” The signs of the financial crisis in the making included negative yields on government bonds around the world as well as big drops in the Dow Jones average. The plunge in the price of stocks was led by US banks, but especially Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase.
Another significant indicator that something was deeply wrong in financial markets was a telling inversion in the value of Treasury notes with the two-year rate yielding more than the ten-year rate.
Yet another sign of serious trouble ahead involved repeated contractions in the size of the German economy. Moreover, in September of 2019 news broke that officials of JP Morgan Chase faced criminal charges for RICO-style racketeering. This scandal added to the evidence of converging problems plaguing core economic institutions as more disruptive mayhem gathered on the horizons.
Accordingly, there is ample cause to ask if there are major underlying reasons for the financial crash of 2020 other than the misnamed pandemic and the lockdowns done in its name of “flattening” its spikes of infection. At the same time, there is ample cause to recognize that the lockdowns have been a very significant factor in the depth of the economic debacle that is making 2020 a year like no other.
Some go further. They argue that the financial crash of 2020 was not only anticipated but planned and pushed forward with clear understanding of its instrumental role in the Great Reset sought by self-appointed protagonists of creative destruction. The advocates of this interpretation place significant weight on the importance of the lockdowns as an effective means of obliterating in a single act a host of old economic relationships. For instance Peter Koenig examines the “farce and diabolical agenda of a universal lockdown.”
Koenig writes, “The pandemic was needed as a pretext to halt and collapse the world economy and the underlying social fabric.”
Inflating the Numbers and Traumatizing the Public to Energize the Epidemic of Fear
There have been many pandemics in global history whose effects on human health have been much more pervasive and devastating than the current one said to be generated by a new coronavirus. In spite, however, of its comparatively mild flu-like effects on human health, at least at this point in the summer of 2020, there has never been a contagion whose spread has generated so much global publicity and hype. As in the aftermath of 9/11, this hype extends to audacious levels of media-generated panic. As with the psyop of 9/11, the media-induced panic has been expertly finessed by practitioners skilled in leveraging the currency of fear to realize a host of radical political objectives.
According to Robert E. Wright in an essay published by the American Institute for Economic Research, “closing down the U.S. economy in response to COVID-19 was probably the worst public policy in at least one-hundred years.” As Wright sees it, the decision to lock down the economy was made in ignorant disregard of the deep and devastating impact that such an action would spur. “Economic lockdowns were the fantasies of government officials so out of touch with economic and physical reality that they thought the costs would be fairly low.”
The consequences, Wright predicts, will extend across many domains including the violence done to the rule of law. The lockdowns, he writes, “turned the Constitution into a frail and worthless fabric.” Writing in late April, Wright touched on the comparisons to be made between the economic lockdowns and slavery. He write, “Slaves definitely had it worse than Americans under lockdown do, but already Americans are beginning to protest their confinement and to subtly subvert authorities, just as chattel slaves did.”
The people held captive in confined lockdown settings have had the time and often the inclination to imbibe much of the 24/7 media coverage of the misnamed pandemic. Taken together, all this media sensationalism has come to constitute one of the most concerted psychological operations ever.
The implications have been enormous for the mental health of multitudes of people. This massive alteration of attitudes and behaviours is the outcome of media experiments performed on human subjects without their informed consent. The media’s success in bringing about herd subservience to propagandistic messaging represents a huge incentive for more of the same to come. It turns out that the subject matter of public health offers virtually limitless potential for power-seeking interests and agents to meddle with the privacies, civil liberties and human rights of those they seek to manipulate, control and exploit.
The social, economic and health impacts of the dislocations flowing from the lockdowns are proving to be especially devastating on the poorest, the most deprived and the most vulnerable members of society. This impact will continue to be marked in many ways, including in increased rates of suicide, domestic violence, mental illness, addictions, homelessness, and incarceration far larger than those caused directly by COVID-19. As rates of deprivation through poverty escalate, so too will crime rates soar.
The over-the-top alarmism of the big media cabals has been well financed by the advertising revenue of the pharmaceutical industry. With some few exceptions, major media outlets pushed the public to accept the lockdowns as well as the attending losses in jobs and business activity. In seeking to push the agenda of their sponsors, the big media cartels have been especially unmindful of their journalistic responsibilities. Their tendency has been to avoid or censor forums where even expert practitioners of public health can publicly question and discuss government dictates about vital issues of public policy.
Whether in Germany or the United States or many other countries, front line workers in this health care crisis have nevertheless gathered together with the goal of trying to correct the one-sided prejudices of of discriminatory media coverage. One of the major themes in the presentations by medical practitioners is to confront the chorus of media misrepresentations on the remedial effects of hydroxychloroquine and zinc.
On July 27 a group of doctors gathered on the grounds of the US Supreme Court to try to address the biases of the media and the blind spots of government.
Another aspect in the collateral damage engendered by COVID-19 alarmism is marked in the fatalities arising from the wholesale postponement of many necessary interventions including surgery. How many have died or will die because of the hold put on medical interventions to remedy cancer, heart conditions and many other potentially lethal ailments?
Did the unprecedented lockdowns come about as part of a preconceived plan to inflate the severity of an anticipated financial meltdown? What is to be made of the suspicious intervention of administrators to produce severely padded numbers of reported deaths in almost every jurisdiction? This kind of manipulation of statistics raised the possibility that we are witnessing a purposeful and systemic inflation of the severity of this health care crisis.
Questions about the number of cases arise because of the means of testing for the presence of a supposedly new coronavirus. The PCR system that is presently being widely used does not test for the virus but tests for the existence of antibodies produced in response to many health challenges including the common cold. This problem creates a good deal of uncertainty of what a positive test really means.
The problems with calculating case numbers extend to widespread reports that have described people who were not tested for COVID-19 but who nevertheless received notices from officials counting them as COVID-19 positive. Broadcaster Armstrong Williams addressed the phenomenon on his network of MSM media outlets in late July.
From the mass of responses he received, Williams estimated that those not tested but counted as a positive probably extends probably to hundreds of thousands of individuals. What would drive the effort to exaggerate the size of the afflicted population?
This same pattern of inflation of case numbers was reinforced by the Tricare branch of the US Defense Department’s Military Health System. This branch sent out notices to 600,000 individuals who had not been tested. The notices nevertheless informed the recipients that they had tested positive for COVID 19.
Is the inflation of COVID-19 death rates and cases numbers an expression of the zeal to justify the massive lockdowns? Were the lockdowns in China conceived as part of a scheme to help create the conditions for the public’s acceptance of a plan to remake the world’s political economy? What is to be made of the fact that those most identified with the World Economic Forum (WEF) have led the way in putting a positive spin on the reset arising from the very health crisis the WEF helped introduce and publicize in Oct. of 2019?
As Usual, the Poor Get Poorer
The original Chinese lockdowns in the winter of 2020 caused the breakdowns of import-export supply chains extending across the planet. Lockdowns in the movement of raw materials, parts, finished products, expertise, money and more shut down domestic businesses in China as well as transnational commerce in many countries outside China. The supply chain disruptions were especially severe for businesses that have dispensed with the practice of keeping on hand large inventories of parts and raw material, depending instead on just-in-time deliveries.
As the supply chains broke down domestically and internationally, many enterprises lacked the revenue to pay their expenses. Bankruptcies began to proliferate at rates that will probably continue to be astronomical for some time. All kinds of loans and liabilities were not paid out in full or at all. Many homes are being re-mortgaged or cast into real estate markets as happened during the prelude and course of the bailouts of 2007-2010.
The brunt of the financial onslaught hit small businesses especially hard. Collectively small businesses have been a big creator of jobs. They have picked up some of the slack from the rush of big businesses to downsize their number of full-time employees. Moreover, small businesses and start-ups are often the site of exceptionally agile innovations across broad spectrums of economic activity. The hard financial slam on the small business sector, therefore, is packing a heavy punch on the economic conditions of everyone.
The devastating impact of the economic meltdown on workers and small businesses in Europe and North America extends in especially lethal ways to the massive population of poor people living all over the world. Many of these poor people reside in countries where much of the paid work is irregular and informal.
At the end of April the International Labor Organization (ILO), an entity created along with the League of Nations at the end of the First World War, estimated that there would be 1.6 billion victims of the meltdown in the worldwide “informal economy.” In the first month of the crisis these workers based largely in Africa and Latin America lost 60% of their subsistence level incomes.
This pandemic has laid bare in the cruellest way, the extraordinary precariousness and injustices of our world of work. It is the decimation of livelihoods in the informal economy – where six out of ten workers make a living – which has ignited the warnings from our colleagues in the World Food Programme, of the coming pandemic of hunger. It is the gaping holes in the social protection systems of even the richest countries, which have left millions in situations of deprivation. It is the failure to guarantee workplace safety that condemns nearly 3 million to die each year because of the work they do. And it is the unchecked dynamic of growing inequality which means that if, in medical terms, the virus does not discriminate between its victims in its social and economic impact, it discriminates brutally against the poorest and the powerless.
Guy Ryder remembered the optimistic rhetoric in officialdom’s responses to the economic crash of 2007-2009. He compares the expectations currently being aroused by the vaccination fixation with the many optimistic sentiments previously suggesting the imminence of remedies for grotesque levels of global inequality. Ryder reflected,
We’ve heard it before. The mantra which provided the mood music of the crash of 2008-2009 was that once the vaccine to the virus of financial excess had been developed and applied, the global economy would be safer, fairer, more sustainable. But that didn’t happen. The old normal was restored with a vengeance and those on the lower echelons of labour markets found themselves even further behind.
The internationalization of increased unemployment and poverty brought about in the name of combating the corona crisis is having the effect of further widening the polarization between rich and poor on a global scale. Ryder’s metaphor about the false promises concerning a “vaccine” to correct “financial excess” can well be seen as a precautionary comment on the flowery rhetoric currently adorning the calls for a global reset.
Wall Street and 9/11
The world economic crisis of 2020 is creating the context for large-scale repeats of some key aspects of the bailout of 2007-2010. The bailout of 2007-2008 drew, in turn, from many practices developed in the period when the explosive events of 9/11 triggered a worldwide reset of global geopolitics.
While the events of 2008 and 2020 both drew attention to the geopolitical importance of Wall Street, the terrible pummelling of New York’s financial district was the event that ushered in a new era of history, an era that has delivered us to the current financial meltdown/lockdown.
It lies well beyond the scope of this essay to go into detail about the dynamics of what really transpired on 9/11. Nevertheless, some explicit reckoning with this topic is crucial to understanding some of the essential themes addressed in this essay.
Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the relevance of 9/11 to the background and nature of the current debacle. The execution and spinning of 9/11 were instrumental in creating the repertoire of political trickery presently being adapted in the manufacturing and exploiting of the COVID-19 hysteria. A consistent attribute of the journey from 9/11 to COVID-19 has been the amplification of executive authority through the medium of emergency measures enactments, policies and dictates.
Wall Street is a major site where much of this political trickery was concocted in planning exercises extending to many other sites of power and intrigue. In the case of 9/11, a number of prominent Wall Street firms were involved before, during and after the events of September 11. As is extremely well documented, these events have been misrepresented in ways that helped to further harness the military might of the United States to the expansionistic designs of Israel in the Middle East.
The response of the Federal Reserve to the events of 9/11 helped set in motion a basic approach to disaster management that continues to this day. Almost immediately following the pulverization of Manhattan’s most gigantic and iconographic landmarks, Federal Reserve officials made it their highest priority to inject liquidity into financial markets. Many different kinds of scenario can be advanced behind the cover of infusing liquidity into markets.
For three days in a row the Federal Reserve Bank of New York turned on its money spigots to inject transfusions of $100 billion dollars of newly generated funds into the Wall Street home of the financial system. The declared aim was to keep the flow of capital between financial institutions well lubricated. The Federal Reserve’s infusions of new money into Wall Street took many forms. New habits and appetites were thereby cultivated in ways that continue to influence the behaviour of Wall Street organizations in the financial debacle of 2020.
The revelations concerning the events of 9/11 contained a number of financial surprises. Questions immediately arose, for instance, about whether the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers had obliterated software and hardware vital to the continuing operations of computerized banking systems. Whatever problems arose along these lines, it turned out that there was sufficient digital information backed up in other locations to keep banking operations viable.
But while much digital data survived the destruction of core installations in the US financial sector, some strategic information was indeed obliterated. For instance, strategic records entailed in federal investigations into many business scandals were lost. Some of the incinerated data touched on, for instance, the machinations of the energy giant, Enron, along with its Wall Street partners, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup.
The writings of E. P Heidner are prominent in the literature posing theories about the elimination of incriminating documentation as a result of the controlled demolitions of 9/11. What information was eliminated and what was retained in the wake of the devastation? Heidner has published a very ambitious account placing the events of 9/11 at the forefront of a deep and elaborate relationship linking George H. W. Bush to Canada’s Barrick Gold and the emergence of gold derivatives.
The surprises involving 9/11 and Wall Street included evidence concerning trading on the New York Stock Exchange. A few individuals enriched themselves significantly by purchasing a disproportionately high number of put options on shares about to fall precipitously as a result of the anticipated events of 9/11. Investigators, however, chose to ignore this evidence because it did not conform to the prevailing interpretation of who did what to whom on 9/11.
Another suspicious group of transactions conducted right before 9/11 involved some very large purchases of five-year US Treasury notes. These instruments are well known hedges when one has knowledge that a world crisis is imminent. One of these purchases was a $5 billion transaction. The US Treasury Department would have been informed about the identity of the purchaser. Nevertheless the FBI and the Securities Exchange Commission collaborated to point public attention away from these suspect transactions. (p. 199)
On the very day of 9/11 local police arrested Israeli suspects employed in the New York area as Urban Movers. The local investigators were soon pressured to ignore the evidence, however, and go along with the agenda of the White House and the media chorus during the autumn of 2001.
In the hours following the pulverization of the Twin Towers the dominant mantra was raised “Osama bin Laden and al-Qeada did it.” That mantra led in the weeks, months and years that followed to US-led invasions of several Muslim-majority countries. Some have described these military campaigns as wars for Israel.
Soon New York area jails were being filled up with random Muslims picked up for nothing more than visa violations and such. The unrelenting demonization of Muslims collectively can now be seen in retrospect as a dramatic psychological operation meant to poison minds as the pounding of the war drums grew in intensity. In the process a traumatized public were introduced to concepts like “jihad.” At no time has there ever been a credible police investigation into the question of who is responsible for the 9/11 crimes.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld chose September 10, the day before 9/11, to break the news at a press conference that $2.3 trillion had gone missing from the Pentagon’s budget. Not surprisingly the story of the missing money got buried the next day as reports of the debacle in Manhattan and Washington DC dominated MSM news coverage.
As reported by Forbes Magazine, the size of the amount said to have gone missing in Donald Rumsfeld’s 2001 report of Defense Department spending had mushroomed by 2015 to around $21 trillion. It was Mark Skidmore, an Economics Professor at the University of Michigan, who became the main sleuth responsible for identifying the gargantuan amount of federal funds that the US government can’t account for.
As the agency that created the missing tens of trillions that apparently has disappeared without a trace, wouldn’t the US Federal Reserve be in a position to render some assistance in tracking down the lost funds? Or is the Federal Reserve somehow a participant or a complicit party in the disappearance of the tens of trillions without a paper trail?
The inability or unwillingness of officialdom to explain what happened to the lost $21 trillion, an amount comparable to the size of the entire US national debt prior to the lockdowns, might be viewed in the light of the black budgets of the US Department of Defense (DOD). Black budgets are off-the-books funds devoted to secret research and to secret initiatives in applied research.
In explaining this phenomenon, former Canadian Defense Minister, Paul Hellyer, has observed, “thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects about which Congress and the Commander In Chief have deliberately been kept in the dark.” Eric Zuess goes further. As he explains it, the entire Defense Department operates pretty much on the basis of an unusual system well outside the standard rules of accounting applied in other federal agencies.
When news broke about the missing $21 trillion, federal authorities responded by promising that special audits would be conducted to explain the irregularities. The results of those audits, if they took place at all, were never published. The fact that the Defense of Department has developed in a kind of audit free zone has made it a natural magnet for people and interests engaged in all kinds of criminal activities.
Eric Zuess calls attention to the 1,000 military bases around the world that form a natural network conducive to the cultivation of many forms of criminal trafficking. Zuess includes in his reflections commentary on the secret installations in some American embassies but especially in the giant US Embassy in Baghdad Iraq.
The US complex in Baghdad’s Green Zone is the biggest Embassy in the world. Its monumental form on a 104 acre site expresses the expansionary dynamics of US military intervention in the Middle East and Eurasia following 9/11.
The phenomenon of missing tens of trillions calls attention to larger patterns of kleptocratic activity that forms a major subject addressed here. The shifts into new forms of organized crime in the name of “national security” began to come to light in the late 1980s. An important source of disclosures was the series of revelations that accompanied the coming apart of the Saudi-backed Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the BCCI.
The nature of this financial institution, where CIA operatives were prominent among its clients, provides a good window into the political economy of drug dealing, money laundering, weapons smuggling, regime change and many much more criminal acts that took place along the road to 9/11.
The BCCI was a key site of financial transactions that contributed to the end of the Cold War and the inception of many new kinds of conflict. These activities often involved the well-financed activities of mercenaries, proxy armies, and a heavy reliance on private contractors of many sorts.
The Enron scandal was seen to embody some of the same lapses facilitated by fraudulent accounting integral to the BCCI scandal. Given the bubble of secrecy surrounding the Federal Reserve, there are thick barriers blocking deep investigation into whether or not the US Central Bank was involved in the relationship of the US national security establishment and the BCCI.
The kind of dark transactions that the BCCI was designed to facilitate must have been channelled after its demise into other banking institutions probably with Wall Street connections. Since 9/11, however, many emergency measures have been imposed that add extra layers of secrecy protecting the perpetrators of many criminal acts from public exposure and criminal prosecutions.
The events of 9/11 have sometimes been described as the basis of a global coup. To this day there is no genuine consensus about what really transpired to create the illusion of justification for repeated US military invasions of Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Eurasia.
The 9/11 debacle and the emergency measures that followed presented Wall Street with an array of new opportunities for profit that came with the elaborate refurbishing and retooling of the military-industrial complex.
The response to 9/11 was expanded and generalized upon to create the basis of a war directed not at a particular enemy, but rather at an ill-defined conception identified as “terrorism.” This alteration was part of a complex of changes adding trillions to the flow of money energizing the axis of interaction linking the Pentagon and Wall Street and the abundance of new companies created to advance the geopolitical objectives emerging from the 9/11 coup.
According to Pam Martens and Russ Martens, the excesses of deregulation helped induce an anything-goes-ethos on Wall Street and at its Federal Reserve regulator in the wake of 9/11. As the authors tell it, the response to 9/11 helped set important precedents for the maintaining flows of credit and capital in financial markets.
Often the destination of the funds generated in the name of pumping liquidity into markets was not identified and reported in transactions classified as financial emergency measures. While the priority was on keeping financial pumps primed, there was much less concern for transparency and accountability among those in positions of power at the Federal Reserve.
The financial sector’s capture of the government instruments meant to regulate the behaviour of Wall Street institutions was much like the deregulation of the US pharmaceutical industry. Both episodes highlight a message that has become especially insistent as the twenty-first century unfolds.
The nature of the response to 9/11 emphasized the mercenary ascent of corporate dominance as the primary force directing governments. Throughout this transformation the message to citizens became increasingly clear. Buyer Beware. We cannot depend on governments to represent our will and interests. We cannot even count on our governments to protect citizens from corporatist attacks especially on human health and whatever financial security we have been able to build up.
Bailouts, Derivatives, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
The elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 was essential to the process of dramatically cutting back the government’s role as a protector of the public interest on the financial services sector. The Glass-Steagall Act was an essential measure in US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Some view the New Deal as a strategy for saving capitalism by moderating ts most sharp-edged features. Instituted in 1933 in response to the onset of the Great Depression, the Glass-Steagall Act separated the operations of deposit-accepting banks from the more speculative activity of investment brokers.
The termination of the regulatory framework put in place by the Glass Steagall Act opened much new space for all kinds of experiments in the manipulation of money in financial markets. The changes began with the merger of different sorts of financial institutions including some in the insurance field. Those overseeing the reconstituted entities headquartered on Wall Street took advantage of their widened latitudes of operation. They developed all sorts of ways of elaborating their financial services and presenting them in new packages.
The word, “derivative” is often associated with many applications of the new possibilities in the reconstituted financial services sector. The word, derivative, can be applied to many kinds of transactions involving speculative bets of various sorts. As the word suggests, a derivative is derived from a fixed asset such as currency, bonds, stocks, and commodities. Alterations in the values of fixed assets affect the value of derivatives that often take the form of contracts between two or more parties.
One of the most famous derivatives in the era of the financial crash of 2007-2010 was described as mortgaged-backed securities. On the surface these bundles of debt-burdened properties might seem easy to understand. But that would be a delusion. The value of these products was affected, for instance, by unpredictable shifts in interest rates, liar loans extended to homebuyers who lacked the capacity to make regular mortgage payments, and significant shifts in the value of real estate.
Mortgage-backed securities were just one type of a huge array of derivatives invented on the run in the heady atmosphere of secret and unregulated transactions between counterparties. Derivatives could involve contracts formalizing bets between rivals gambling on the outcome of competitive efforts to shape the future. An array of derivative bets was built around transactions often placed behind the veil of esoteric nomenclature like “collateralized debt obligations” or “credit default swaps.”
The variables in derivative bets might include competing national security agendas involving, for instance, pipeline constructions, regime change, weapons development and sales, false flag terror events, or money laundering. Since derivative bets involve confidential transactions with secret outcomes, they can be derived from all sorts of criteria. Derivative bets can, for instance, involve all manner of computerized calculations that in some cases are constructed much like war game scenarios.
The complexity of derivatives became greater when the American Insurance Group, AIG, began selling insurance programs to protect all sides in derivative bets from suffering too drastically from the consequences of being on the losing side of transactions.
The derivative frenzy, sometimes involving bets being made by parties unable to cover potential losses, overwhelmed the scale of the day-to-day economy. The “real economy” embodies exchanges of goods, services, wages and such that supply the basic necessities for human survival with some margin for recreation, travel, cultural engagement and such.
The Swiss-based Bank of International Settlements calculated in 2008 that the size of the all forms of derivative products had a monetary value of $1.14 quadrillion. A quadrillion is a thousand trillions. By comparison, the estimated value of all the real estate in the world was $75 trillion in 2008.
As the enticements of derivative betting preoccupied the leading directors of Wall Street institutions, their more traditional way of relating to one another began to falter. It was in this atmosphere that the Repo Market became problematic in December of 2007 just as it showed similar signs of breakdown in September of 2019.
In both instances the level of distrust between those in charge of financial institutions began to falter because they all had good reason to believe that their fellow bankers were overextended. All had reason to believe their counterparts were mired by too much speculative activity enabled by all sorts of novel experiments including various forms of derivative dealing.
In December of 2007 as in the autumn of 2019, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was forced to enter the picture to keep the financial pumps on Wall Street primed. The New York Fed kept the liquidity cycles flowing by invoking its power to create new money with the interest charged to tax payers.
As the financial crisis unfolded in 2008 and 2009 the Federal Reserve, but especially the privately-owned New York Federal Reserve bank, stepped forward to bail out many financial institutions that had become insolvent or near insolvent. In the process precedents and patterns were established that are being re-enacted with some modifications in 2020.
One of the innovations that took place in 2008 was the decision by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to hire a large Wall Street financial institution, BlackRock, to administer the bailouts. These transfers of money went through three specially created companies now being replicated as Special Purpose Vehicles in the course of the payouts of 2020.
In 2008-09 BlackRock administered the three companies named after the address of the New York Federal Reserve Bank on Maiden Lane. BlackRock emerged from an older Wall Street firm called Blackstone. Its former chair, Peter C. Peterson, was a former Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The original Maiden Lane company paid Bear Stearns Corp $30 billion. This amount from the New York Fed covered the debt of Bear Stearns, a condition negotiated to clear the way for the purchase of the old Wall Street institution by JP Morgan Chase. Maiden Lane II was a vehicle for payouts to companies that had purchased “mortgage-backed securities” before these derivative products turned soar.
Maiden Lane III was to pay off “multi-sector collateralized debt obligations.” Among these bailouts were payoffs to the counterparties of the insurance giant, AIG. As noted, AIG had developed an insurance product to be sold to those engaged in derivative bets. When the bottom fell out of markets, AIG lacked the means to pay off the large number of insurance claims made against it. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York stepped in to bail out the counterparties of AIG, many of them deemed to be “too big to fail.”
Among the counterparties of AIG was Goldman Sachs. It received of $13 billion from the Federal Reserve. Other bailouts to AIG’s counterparties were $12 billion to Deutsche Bank, $6.8 billion to Merrill Lynch, $5 billion to Switzerland’s UBS, $7.9 billion to Barclays, and $5.2 billion to Bank of America. Some of these banks received additional funds from other parts of the overall bailout transaction. Many dozens of other counterparties to AIG also received payouts in 2008-2009. Among them were the Bank of Montreal and Bank of Scotland.
The entire amount of the bailouts was subsequently calculated to be a whopping $29 trillion with a “t.” The lion’s share of these funds went to prop up US financial institutions and the many foreign banks with which they conducted business.
Much of this money went to the firms that were shareholders in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or partners of the big Wall Street firms. Citigroup, the recipient of the largest amount, received about $2.5 trillion in the federal bailouts. Merrill Lynch received $2 trillion,
The Federal Reserve Bank was established by Congressional statute in 1913. The Federal Reserve headquarters is situated in Washington DC. The Central Bank was composed of twelve constituent regional banks. Each one of these regional banks is owned by private banks.
The private ownership of the banks that are the proprietors of the Federal Reserve system has been highly contentious from its inception. The creation of the Federal Reserve continues to be perceived by many of its critics as an unjustifiable giveaway whereby the US government ceded to private interests its vital capacity to issue its own currency and to direct monetary policy like the setting of interest rates.
Pam Martens and Russ Martens at Wall Street on Parade explain the controversial Federal Reserve structure as follows
While the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. is deemed an “independent federal agency,” with its Chair and Governors appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, the 12 regional Fed banks are private corporations owned by the member banks in their region. The settled law under John L. Lewis v. the United States confirms: “Each Federal Reserve Bank is a separate corporation owned by commercial banks in its region.”
In the case of the New York Fed, which is located in the Wall Street area of Manhattan, its largest shareowners are behemoth multinational banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
There was no genuine effort after the financial debacle of 2007-2010 to correct the main structural problems and weaknesses of the Wall Street-based US financial sector. The Dodd-Frank Bill signed into law by US President Barack Obama in 2010 did make some cosmetic changes. But the main features of the regulatory capture that has taken place with the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act remained with only minor alterations. In particular the framework was held in place for speculative excess in derivative bets.
In the summer edition of The Atlantic, Frank Partnoy outlined a gloomy assessment of the continuity leading from the events of 2007-2010 to the current situation. This current situation draws a strange contrast between the lockdown-shattered quality of the economy and the propped-up value of the stock market whose future value will in all probability prove unsustainable. Partnoy writes,
It is a distasteful fact that the present situation is so dire in part because the banks fell right back into bad behavior after the last crash—taking too many risks, hiding debt in complex instruments and off-balance-sheet entities, and generally exploiting loopholes in laws intended to rein in their greed. Sparing them for a second time this century will be that much harder.
Wall Street Criminality on Display
The frauds and felonies of the Wall Street banks have continued after the future earnings of US taxpayers returned them to solvency after 2010. The record of infamy is comparable to that of the pharmaceutical industry.
The criminal behaviour in both sectors is very relevant to the overlapping crises that are underway in both the public health and financial sectors. In 2012 the crime spree in the financial sector began with astounding revelations about the role of many major banks in the LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate. The LIBOR rates create the basis of interest rates involved in the borrowing and lending of money in the international arena.
When the scandal broke there were 35 different LIBOR rates involving various types of currency and various time frames for loans between banks. The rates were calculated every day based on information forwarded from 16 different banks to a panel on London. The reporting banks included Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, and Deutsche Bank. The influence of the LIBOR rate extended beyond banks to affect the price of credit in many types of transactions.
The emergence of information that the banks were working together to rig the interest rate created the basis for a huge economic scandal. Fines extending from hundreds of millions into more than a billion dollars were placed on each of the offending banks. But in this instance and many others to follow, criminality was attached to the financial entities but not to top officials responsible for the decisions that put their corporations on the wrong side of the law.
One of the factors in the banking frauds comprising the LIBOR scandal was the temptation to improve the chance for financial gains in derivative bets. The biggest failure of the federal response to the financial meltdown of 2007-210 was that little was done to curb the excesses of transactions in the realm of derivatives.
Derivatives involved a form of gambling that exists in a kind of twilight zone. This twilight zone fills a space somewhere between the realm of the real economy and the realm of notional value. Notional values find expression in unrealized speculation about what might or might not come to fruition; what might or might not happen; who might win and who might lose in derivative speculations.
The addiction of Wall Street firms to derivative betting remains unchecked to this day. The bankers’ continuing fixation with unregulated gambling, often with other people’s money, is deeply menacing for the future of the global economy…. indeed for the future of everyone on earth. According to the Office of the Controller of Currency, in 2019 JP Morgan Chase had $59 trillion in derivative bets. In July of 2020 it emerged that Citigroup held $62 trillion in derivative contracts, about $30 trillion more than it held before it was bailed out in 2008. In 2019 Goldman Sachs held $47 trillion and Bank of America held $20.4 trillion in derivate bets.
A big part of the scandal embodied in these figures is embedded in the reality that all of these banks carry their most risky derivative bets in units of their corporate networks that are protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. This peril played a significant part in deepening the crisis engendered by financial meltdown that began in 2007.
One of the most redeeming features of the Dodd-Frank Act as originally drafted was a provision preventing financial institutions from keeping their derivative portfolios in banks whose deposits and depositors were backed up by federal insurance.
Citigroup led the push in Congress in 2014 to allow Wall Street institutions to revert back to a more deregulated and danger-prone economic environment. The notoriously inept decisions and actions of Citigroup had played a significant role in the lead up to the financial debacle of 2007 to 2010. Since 2016 Citigroup has become once again the biggest risk taker by loading itself up with more derivative speculations than any other financial institution in the world.
By returning derivative speculations to the protections of federal financial backstops, taxpayers are once again forced to assume responsibility for the most outlandish risks of Wall Street’s high rollers. It is taxpayers who are the backers of the federal government when it comes to their commitment to compensate banks for losses, even when these losses come about from derivative bets.
How much more Wall Street risk and public debt can be loaded onto taxpayers and even onto generations of taxpayers yet unborn? How is national debt to be understood when it plunders working people to guarantee and augment the wealth of the most privileged branches of society? Why should those most responsible for creating the most excessive risks to the financial wellbeing of our societies be protected from bearing the consequences of the very risks they themselves created?
Along with Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase stands out among a group of financial sector reprobates most deeply involved in sketchy activities that extend deep into the realm of criminality. In a simmering scandal six of JP Morgan Chase’s traders have been accused of breaking laws in conducting the bank’s futures trading in the value of precious metals. They have been accused of violating the RICO statute, a law meant for people suspected of being part of organized crime.
In the charges pressed by the Justice Department on JP Morgan Chase’s traders it is alleged that they “conducted the affairs of the [minerals] desk through a pattern of racketeering activity, specifically, wire fraud affecting a financial institution and bank fraud.”
In 2012 JP Morgan Chase faced a $1 billion fine for its role in the “London Wale” series of derivative bets described as follows by the Chair of the US Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation. Senator Carl Levin explained, “Our findings open a window into the hidden world of high stakes derivatives trading by big banks. It exposes a derivatives trading culture at JPMorgan that piled on risk, hid losses, disregarded risk limits, manipulated risk models, dodged oversight, and misinformed the public.”
Traders at Goldman Sachs appear to have been part of the Wall Street crime spree. The tentacles of corruption in the Goldman Sachs case apparently extend deep into the US Justice Department. The case involves allegations of embezzlement, money laundering and missing billions. These manifestations of malfeasance all spin out of a scandal-prone Malaysian sovereign wealth fund administered by Goldman Sachs.
A big part of the scandal reported in Wall Street on Parade in July of 2020 involves the fact that the Justice Department’s prosecutors seem to be dragging their feet in this possible criminal felony case against Goldman Sachs. The prosecutors, including the US Attorney-General, William Barr, worked previously for the law firm, Kirkland and Ellis. Kirkland and Ellis was retained to defend Goldman Sachs in this matter.
Pam Martens and Russ Martens express dismay at the failure of US officialdom to hold Wall Street institutions accountable for the crime spree of some of its biggest firms. They write, “Congress and the executive branch of the government seem determined to protect Wall Street criminals, which simply assures their proliferation.”
Even racketeering charges against officials at JP Morgan Chase, where Jamie Dimon presides as CEO, failed to receive any attention from the professional deceivers that these days dominate MSM. The star reporters of Wall Street on Parade write, “Crime and fraud are so de rigueur at the bank led by Dimon that not one major newspaper ran the headline [of the racketeering charge] on the front page or anywhere else in the paper.
While federal charges that JP Morgan Chase’s Wall Street operation engaged in criminal racketeering was not of interest to the press, Jamie Dimon’s surprise visit in early June to a Chase branch in Mt. Kisco New York aroused considerable media attention. Dimon was photographed with staff wearing a mask and taking the knee. By participating in this ritual Dimon signaled that his Wall Street operation is in league with the sometimes violent cancel culture pushed into prominence by the Democratic Party in partnership with Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
*(JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon takes a knee with employees in front of a bank vault. Credit: JPMorgan)
In an article on 21 July marking ten years since the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, the Martens duo conclude, “So here we are today, watching the Fed conduct another secret multi-trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street while the voices of Congress and mainstream media are nowhere to be heard.”
Enter BlackRock
In March it was announced that representatives of the US Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Board and the BlackRock financial management were joining forces to make adjustments in the US economy. The aim was to address the financial dislocations resulting from the decision to lock down businesses, citizens, schools, entertainment, and social mingling outside the home, all in response to the health care hysteria promoted by governments and their media extensions.
The format of this process suggested some relaxation in the strict distinctions historically drawn between the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. What would be the role of the third member of the group? In reflecting on this topic Joyce Nelson observed, “the new bailout bill not only further erases the line between the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury, it places BlackRock effectively in an overseer position for both.”
Some saw as symbolically instructive the delegation to BlackRock of a larger role than that assigned it during the first bailout of 2007-2008. It would be hard to overestimate the significance of this prominent Wall Street firm’s return to a strategic role near the very heart of this major exercise of federal power. This invitation to take part in such crucial negotiations at such a consequential juncture in history caused some to characterize BlackRock as a “fourth branch of government.”
As Victoria Guida commented in Politico, “This is a transformational moment for the Fed, and BlackRock’s now going to be in an even stronger position to serve the Fed in the future.”
BlackRock officials had been instrumental in helping to manoeuvre their company into such a strategic role by responding proactively to the understanding in some elite circles that another financial debacle was imminent. Only months before the financial meltdown actually occurred a group of former central bankers all commissioned by BlackRock delivered a recovery plan in August of 2019.
Presented at a G 7 summit of central bankers in Jackson Hole Wyoming, the plan for the government responses to the looming financial collapse was entitled Dealing with the Next Downturn. Its authors are Stanley Fischer, former Governor of the Central Bank of Israel, Philipp Hildebrande, former Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, Jean Boivin, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, and Elga Bartsch, Economist at Morgan Stanley.
The BlackRock Team at Jackson Hole put forward the case that a more aggressive and coordinated combination of monetary and fiscal policy must be brought to the job of stimulating a financial recovery. Monetary policy includes the setting of interest rates. Where monetary policy has historically been the domain of the central banks, fiscal policy, involving issues of taxation as well as the content and size of government budgets, lies within the jurisdiction of elected legislatures.
The nub of the proposal to unite fiscal and monetary policy put the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve on the same political platform. As the author of this merger of monetary and fiscal policy, BlackRock became third member of the triumvirate charged to address the broad array of economic maladies that arrived in the wake of the lockdowns.
In the spring of 2020 BlackRock has been hired by the Bank of Canada and by Sweden’s Central Bank, the Riksbank, to deliver on the approaches to crisis management its representatives had laid out at Jackson Hole. BlackRock’s most high-profile and strategic engagement, however, began with its involvement in the negotiation of the $2 trillion CARES stimulus package that passed through the US Congress in March of 2020.
The CARES Act included $367 billion for loans and grants to small business, $130 billion for health care systems, $150 billion for state and local government, $500 billion for loans to corporate America, and $25 billion for airlines (in addition to loans).
The heart of the plan involved a payout of $1,200 per adult and $500 per child for households making up to $75,000. This payment to citizens approaches the concept of disseminating “helicopter money” as referred to in BlackRock’s initial outline for dealing with the “downturn.” Helicopter money distributed by the federal government to its citizens was also related to the concept of “going direct” in strategies for stimulating the economy.
BlackRock seems to be moving into the space recently held by Goldman Sachs as Wall Street’s best embodiment of ostentatious success including in the preparation of its corporate leaders for high-ranking positions in the federal government. Laurence Fink, BlackRock’s founder and CEO, might well have replicated this career path to become Treasury Secretary if Hillary Clinton had succeeded in becoming US President in 2016.
BlackRock’s leadership went to great lengths to avoid being tagged with the title in the United States of a “systematically important financial institution” (sifi). To be subject to this “sifi” label entails added federal scrutiny and regulation as well as heightened requirements to keep high amounts of capital on hand. BlackRock’s status as a private company not subject to sifi regulations makes the financial management firm more attractive to its federal partners in the federal payout operation presently underway.
One of the reasons for including a private company in the trio of partners involved in the payouts is to sneak around limitations on the legal powers of the Federal Reserve. As explained by Ellen Brown in her essay, Meet BlackRock: The New Great Vampire Squid, the Federal Reserve can only purchase “safe federally-guaranteed assets.” As a private company, BlackRock apparently faces no such restrictions. It can purchase more risky assets not backstopped by federal insurance.
The regional banks of the Federal Reserve Board are owned by private companies whose directors seem to have been part of the decision to include BlackRock in the implementation of the CARES process. There can be no doubt that the format of the CARES negotiations pulled the supposedly independent Federal Reserve more deeply into the political orbit of the US Treasury branch. The presence of a major Wall Street firm in the process, however, apparently gave the advocates of the Fed’s supposed independence from politics a sense that they retained some leverage in the process.
The inclusion of private companies in the conduct of government business has become in recent decades a very common expression of neoliberalism. One of the reasons for this embrace of public-private partnerships in the conduct of government business is to take advantage of the legal nature of private companies. The apportionment to private companies of significant roles in deciding and implementing public policies helps put veils of secrecy over the true nature of government decisions and actions.
Private companies can more easily assert claims to “proprietary information” than can public institutions when they act on behalf of citizens. This feature of privatization in the performance of public responsibilities by elected government runs counter to the imperatives of democratic transparency. It puts obstacles in the way of genuine accountability because the public is more likely to be kept in the dark about key aspects of what is being decided and done on their behalf.
Suck Up Economics and State Monopoly Capitalism
BlackRock owns, controls, or manages about $30 trillion in total in securities. It directly controls or owns somewhat less than a third of this amount. The remainder of the assets BlackRock manages are to service clients responsible for taking care of pension funds, philanthropies, foundations, endowments, family offices, superannuation funds and such.
A big part of BlackRock’s business model involves attracting customers by allowing them access to great masses of timely information of significant utility to those responsible for making investment decisions. This technological wizardry happens on a very advanced computational platform known as Aladdin.
Aladdin remains a work-in-progress, one that is widely recognized as the most sophisticated medium of its kind for assessing all manner of financial risks and potentials for profit. Its future as an investment platform is to become more and more integrated into the complex mix of hardware and software animating Artificial Intelligence.
BlackRock’s job is to dispense funds ushered into existence through the money-creating powers of the Federal Reserve. These transactions are to take place through eleven so-called “special purpose vehicles” similar to the Maiden Lane companies that BlackRock administered during the prior bailouts.
The funds it distributes in this round starting in 2020 are meant, at least at this early stage of the crisis, as payments for various sorts of assets. These assets might include an array of corporate bonds spanning a range from so-called investment grade to garbage grade junk bonds. The losses incurred in this exchange, involving supposed assets that might turn out to be worthless, or loans that might not be paid back, are to be charged to the US Treasury. Ultimately the liability lies on US taxpayers who are the holders of the national debt.
Bonds of varying levels of worth lie beneath another asset eligible for transformation into cash. This instrument of value is referred to as Exchange Traded Funds, ETFs. ETFs happen to be a specialty of BlackRock ever since the company launched a range of commercial ETFs into Stock Market circulation through its iShares division. BlackRock’s role on both sides of buying and selling ETFs comes up repeatedly as one of the many conflicts of interest of which the Wall Street firm stands accused.
Given that BlackRock is involved in one way or another in the proprietorship of pretty much every major company in the world, there is plenty to back up the allegation that Black Rock is an interested party in most of the transactions in which it engages as part of its partnership with the US Fed and Treasury Branch.
Pam Matens and Russ Martens have been very critical of the role of the Federal Reserve and BlackRock in the current economic crisis. They have anticipated that, if the current drift of events continues, American taxpayers will once again be gobsmacked with a huge growth in the national debt. This development would amount to another major transfer of wealth away from working people to the beneficiaries of Wall Street firms and the same commercial institutions that received the lion’s share of funds during the last bailout.
The co-authors picture BlackRock is part of a scheme to use “Special Purpose Vehicles” like “Enron used to hide the true state of its finances and blow itself up.” They entitle their article published on 31 March, 2020 as “The Dark Secrets in the Fed’s Wall Street Bailout Are Getting a Devious Makeover in Today’s Bailout.”
The authors observe. “What makes the New York Fed’s bailout of Wall Street so much more dangerous this time around is that it has decided to use a different structure for its loans to Wall Street – one that will force losses on taxpayers and, it hopes, will provide an ironclad secrecy curtain around how much it spends and where the money goes.”
I find this account of an effort by the Federal Reserve to create an “ironclad secrecy curtain” shocking under these circumstances. It suggests an intention to exceed the deceptiveness of the last bailout. This warning renews longstanding suspicions that the failures of transparency and accountability have not subsided since the beginning of the era when deregulation and the 9/11 deceptions converged in the domestic and international operations of Wall Street.
The structural problems already identified in the process initiated to implement the CARES Act could have enormous consequences if the current economic crisis continues to deteriorate. This deterioration is not likely to stop anytime soon given the depth of the crash and its probable domino effects. It was reported in late July that during the second quarter of 2020 the US Gross Domestic Product collapsed at an annualized rate of 33%, the deepest decline in output ever recorded since the US government began measuring GDP in 1947.
The CARES Act helped set in motion a program with the potential to repeat elements of the earlier bailout. The amount of $454 billion was to be set aside to assist the banking sector. The Fed can leverage this amount by ten times according to the principles of fractional reserve banking.
The news of this development caused Mike Whitney to imagine “the Fed turning itself into a hedge fund in order to buy the sludge that has accumulated on the balance sheets of corporations and financial institutions for the last decade,” Whitney pictured an onslaught of “scheming sharpies who will figure out how to game the system and turn the whole fiasco into another Wall Street looting operation.”
Meanwhile the Martens Team at Wall Street on Parade called attention to the $9 trillion already injected by the New York Fed to flood liquidity into the still-troubled Repo Markets that began to falter in September of 2019. Add to this revelation the news that the Fed “has not announced one scintilla of information on what specific Wall Street firms have received this money or how much they individually received.”
There is no doubt that the nature of economic relations will be substantially altered in the process of dealing with the financial meltdown induced by the lockdowns and by the overreliance on high debt rates combined with artificially low interest rates prior to 2020. The altered political economy that is beginning to emerge following the lockdowns is sometimes described as state monopoly capitalism.
In deciding what companies get bailed out and what companies don’t, the financial authorities that are intervening in this crisis are pretty much deciding what enterprises get the advantage of federal financial backstops and what enterprises will not enjoy government sanction. Increasingly, therefore, it is the state that determines winners and losers in the organizing of financial relations. This development further undermines any notion that some idealized vision of competition and market forces will determine winners and losers in the economy of the future.
As Peter Ewarts has observed, it seems that BlackRock is being delegated by federal authorities to exercise “discretionary powers to pick winners and losers,” a choice that is “where the real bonanza and clout lies.” Will the winners be chosen from the companies run by executives that used the money gained from the prior bailouts to engage in stock buy backs? This process of buying back stock tends to be reflected in CEO bonuses and higher share prices. Alternatively this way of allocating funds tends to short change workers as well as innovation and efficiency in industrial production?
Will companies be rewarded whose executives have moved production facilities overseas or issued billions in junk bonds? Will companies be rewarded whose directors have participated in the effort to censor the Internet, bring about lockdowns or foment mask hysteria? Why is it that the coddled elites serving the financial imperatives of most wealthy branches of society are being put in the best position to decide who gets a life preserver from the state and who must sink and drown?
Might this bias be a factor in the current process that led Forbes Magazine to conclude in a headline that “Billionaries Are Getting Richer During the Covid-19 Pandemic While Most Americans Suffer.”
There can be no doubt that the financial transactions beginning with the CARES Act represent a crucial initial stage in what the promoters of the World Economic Forum have been labeling as the Great Reset. Laurence Fink and the BlackRock firm are significant participants in the World Economic Forum. The WEF helped introduce the pandemic in Event 201 in October of 2019 even as it is now trying to put a positive face on the fiasco.
Why should the people most harshly affected by the lockdowns tolerate that the very Wall Street interests dispossessing them, are tasked once again to lead and exploit the reset of the financial system? As presently structured by the likes of BlackRock and its beneficiaries, this process is once again transferring new wealth to the most wealthy branches of society. Simultaneously it is burdening the rest of the population with yet another massive increase in both personal and national indebtedness.
There is no more discussion of “trickle down” economics, a frequent metaphor invoked in the Reagan-Thatcher era. Instead we are in the midst of an increasingly intense phase of suck up economics. The rich are being further enriched and further empowered through the dispossession of the poor and the middle classes. This procedure, initiated when locked down citizens were sidelined from the political process, has the potential to result in the largest upward transfer of wealth so far in history.
BlackRock Versus the Debt-Lite Legacy of the Bank of Canada
At the end of March Laurence Fink, CEO and founder of BlackRock, announced in a letter to his company’s shareholder, “We are honored to have been selected to assist the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of Canada on programs designed to facilitate capital to businesses and support the economy.”
This announcement might leave the impression that the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York are similar institutions. This impression is unfounded. The two banks have very different structures and histories. A spotlight on these differences helps illuminate the nature of a number of core financial issues.
These financial issues should command avid attention during this time of reckoning with a serious economic crisis that may well be still in its early stages. Such issues inevitably draw attention to the current manifestations of very old questions about the character of money and its relationship to the concepts of usury and debt. Questions about debt, debt enslavement as well as the possibility of debt renunciation or debt forgiveness are becoming especially pressing.
These controversial queries arise in an era when a tiny minority is aggressively asserting sweeping claims to ownership of vast concentrations of the world’s available assets. The other side of this picture reveals that the largest mass of humanity is sinking into a swamp of rising debt on a scale that is concurrently unsustainable and unconscionable. How did this level of inequity reach such audacious extremes? Are there any remedies in sight?
There is nothing to suggest structural remediation in the current approach to the economic crisis. In fact so far there is every indication that the current approach of bringing about an enormous expansion in the availability of debt-laden money will only compound the further dispossession of the already dispossessed in order to expand the wealth of the already wealthy.
As already noted, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is one of twelve regional banks that together constitute the US Federal Reserve. Every regional Federal Reserve Bank is owned by a group of private banks. Each of the private banks at the base of a Federal Reserve regional bank marks its proprietorship through the ownership of shares. These shares cannot be freely traded in stock markets. The ownership of these shares expresses the private ownership of the US banking system.
The Fed’s New York regional bank has a special role in money creation given its location at the heart of the US financial sector on and around Wall Street. In this crisis, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is creating new money in the name of holding back onslaughts of destitution and penury in a traumatized society. Ever since 1913 every new dollar brought into existence by the Federal Reserve, which is the central bank of the United States, creates added debt that collects compound interest as long as it is left unpaid.
The Bank of Canada was created to counter the delegation of money-creating authority to privately-owned banks. The Bank of Canada was founded during the Great Depression, a time when the failure of many existing institutions created the conditions to try out alternative entities in the attempt to improve economic relationships.
One of the driving forces in the creation of Canada’s new banking system was Gerald Gratten McGeer. McGreer was an elected official in British Columbia dedicated to changing the system so that the people of Canada could generate their own currency through the sovereign authority of Canada’s Parliament. McGeer helped to push the national government of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett in this direction. The wheels were set in motion in 1933 through the work on the Royal Commission on Banking and Currency.
McGeer drew much of his inspiration from former US President, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln led the US federal government throughout the US Civil War. To finance the Armed Forces of the Union, Lincoln used the authority of the federal government to create “Greenbacks” as a means of paying the troops. By employing the sovereign authority of the US government to create its own currency, Lincoln avoided the intrigues that often accompanied the process of borrowing money from foreign lenders.
McGreer had obtained what he viewed as credible evidence that Lincoln had been assassinated because of his antagonism to the designs of private bankers seeking to widen their base of power in the United States. The Canadian politician had taken to heart a comment attributed often to Lincoln: “The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government’s greatest creative opportunity.”
The Bank of Canada was created in 1934 and nationalized as a Crown Corporation in 1938. To this day it retains its founding charter that affirms,
WHEREAS it is desirable to establish a central bank in Canada to regulate credit and currency in the best interests of the economic life of the nation, to control and protect the external value of the national monetary unit and to mitigate by its influence fluctuations in the general level of production, trade, prices and employment, so far as may be possible within the scope of monetary action, and generally to promote the economic and financial welfare of Canada.
The Bank of Canada formed an essential basis of a very creative period of Canadian growth, development, and diversification throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century. The Bank of Canada created the capital that financed the Canadian war effort from 1939 until 1945. After the war the Bank of Canada lent money at very low rates of interest to the municipal, provincial and national governments. The monies were used for infrastructure projects and for investments to increase the wellbeing and creative potential of Canada’s most important resource, its people.
This type of low interest or no interest financing formed the economic basis for projects like the creation of a national pension plan, national health care insurance, the Trans-Canada Highway, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Avro-Arrow initiative as well as a formidable system of colleges and universities.
One could say that the Bank of Canada provided an indigenous money supply that was spent into the operations of a fast growing economy greased with lots of federal liquidity. The new money derived its value from the efforts of Canadian workers. Together they brought about significant increases in the country’s net worth through practical improvements that bettered the lives of all citizens.
Consider the contrast between this type of national development and the kind of larceny facilitated by the Federal Reserve’s infusions of the money it creates into Wall Street’s operations in the twenty-first century. In, for instance, the financial bailouts of 2007 to 2010 the largest part of the newly-created money ended up in the coffers of the wealthy whereas the new debt created ended up as part of a US national debt.
The burden of carrying this debt falls inter-generationally on average working people who form the lion’s share of taxpayers. They have long been saddled with an “inextinguishable debt” that unrelentingly grows, hardly ever shrinks, and remains basically unpayable forever. The very concept of “compound interest” conveys the image of an overall debt spread out over many venues. This debt must grow in perpetuity. There is a constant need for additional debtors while existing debtors must face constantly growing personal debt.
There is reason to suspect that the financial debacle of 2020 will re-enact some the worst excesses of the 2008 bailout. Might the payouts this time around to derivative-addicted Wall Street firms like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase exceed the scale of the prior bailout? Would there be any way of even knowing whether the current round of payouts outdoes the former round of bailouts? The current process of federal disbursements is not transparent. In fact the process has been described as one designed to “provide an ironclad secrecy curtain around how much [the Fed} spends and where the money goes.”
Why is the Canadian government turning to the very firm that emerged as Wall Street’s main fixer and winner in the 2008 bailouts? Why is Justin Trudeau looking to BlackRock to respond to the Canadian aspects of the 2020 economic crash?
Justin Trudeau seems unwilling or unable to provide a coherent answer to this question and others requiring thoughtful replies rather than barrages of platitudes. Why is Justin Trudeau instituting what Joyce Nelson has characterized as a “new feudalism” in Canada’s economic policies?
Any decent effort of response on Trudeau’s part would have to make some reference to the background of the current debacle. There would have to be some acknowledgment that between 1934 and 1974 the Canada government did not build up any significant national debt. Then, between 1974 and 2020, the national debt of Canada skyrocketed from $22 billion to $700 billion.
Why was such a good and sustainable use of the Bank of Canada put aside, one that contributed magnificently to the health and wellbeing of the Canadian people as well as the Canadian federation? Who lost out? Who gained besides the international bankers?
The incomprehensible abandonment of a winning formula for Canadian development by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau puts a special onus on his son, Canada’s current PM, to explain the incredibly costly mistake of his father. Why won’t Justin Trudeau fix the mistake of his father and restore the Bank of Canada to its former role in Canadian nation building?
There has never been a full and satisfactory explanation of what really happened in 1974 to persuade Pierre Trudeau to throw aside the means of developing infrastructure with resources generated internally within Canada. Trudeau Senior’s decision to stop building up Canada through the operation of the Canadian people’s own national bank was not debated in Parliament. The option was never part of an election platform let alone the subject of a national referendum.
Apparently the Swiss-based Bank of International Settlements, which is often referred to as the central bank for central bankers, had some role in Pierre Trudeau’s decision to cease using the Bank of Canada’s powers to generate near-debt-free Canadian currency.
Government as a Means of Escaping Debt Entrapment
That powers of debt-lite money creation invested by Parliament in the Bank of Canada have never been formally withdrawn. The Bank of Canada could still revert back to the direct creation of Canadian currency to be spent into an economy of national recovery; to be spent in investments in infrastructure as well as in cultivating and applying the creative skills of the Canadian people.
Between 2011 and 2017 a court case was brought against the government of Canada with the aim of restoring the Bank of Canada to its former role. As Rocco Galati, the lawyer for the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER) explained “Not only has the government abandoned its constitutional duty to govern, but it has transferred it to international private banks which corresponds to an abandonment of its sovereignty.”
After some significant rulings and contentious appeals, the COMER case came to an end without delivering results that its plaintiffs sought. But the court case helped to put a spotlight on the potential of the Bank of Canada. If properly utilized, this institution could provide a model corrective to the subordination of governance to the international Lords of Debt Explotation and their minions.
This process of politicizing the role of the Bank of Canada should extend to a process of calling out Justin Trudeau’s current approach to selling off key components of Canada’s infrastructure.
This topic came up in private discussions between Larry Fink and Justin Trudeau at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January of 2016. Fink apparently got Trudeau interested in attracting private investors to the project of improving or building Canadian infrastructure projects like roads, high-speed trains, airports and such. This kind of approach to developing infrastructure projects runs counter to the role once played by the Bank of Canada in incorporating self-sufficiency into the process of national building.
The dangers and opportunities in this time of manufactured crises are indeed unprecedented. Instead of rejecting the Davos crowd’s preoccupation with a giant reset, why not embrace the concept? Why not treat this moment as an opening to reset the global economy in a way that would restore the Bank of Canada to some of its former functions. Why not highlight this return to the sovereign embrace of benevolent nation building as an example for the rest of the world?
Why not reconstitute the worldwide structures of the international system of economic relations to restore elected governments to the functions that have been pre-empted by unaccountable institutions like the US Federal Reserve or the Bank for International Settlements? Why not renew the model of banking as an exercise and expression of national sovereignty and the self-determination of peoples in a dynamic global arena of rules-based economic interaction?
Why not withdraw the power from private bankers to create national currencies? Why not follow the advice of the deceased Abraham Lincoln by restoring “the greatest of all creative possibilities available to governments,” namely their power to issue money and set interest rates. The restoration of economic power to governments and the people and peoples they represent would involve the infusion of life into conceptions of globalization very different than those used to justify the industrialization of China and the deindustrialization of North America.
By delegating to international organizations much of their capacity to influence the economic conditions affecting their own people, national legislatures have lost much of their capacity to provide responsible government. Governments thus weakened are not realistically in a position to derive their authority from the consent of the governed. When representative bodies cannot effectively express the right of their constituents to collective self-determination in economic realm, what legitimacy is left to the institution of representative government?
This strange moment puts humanity face to face with much that is novel and unprecedented and much that is old and integral to the history of human interaction. The economic dimensions of this crisis constitute its most devastating and far-reaching attribute. The supposed remedy being rushed into operation is to flood large quantities of debt-laden loans into existence and for governments to distribute the borrowed funds to individuals, businesses, and organizations as they see fit.
Once again, vast quantities of debt-laden money are being created without the informed consent of those on whose shoulders the vastly increased loads of debt are falling. Once again governments are rewarding political friends and punishing political enemies by means of the way the new funds are being apportioned.
Decisions are pushed forward that emanate not from citizen constituents but from cabals of supranational connivers actively engaged in wrecking what little remains of responsible government. As governments lose legitimacy by engaging in collusion with corrupt cronies and international crime syndicates they must depend more and more on police state thuggery to enforce some semblance of order.
This process is going forward in spite of the fact that alternative means exist to create as much new money as is required without having to pay large amounts of compound interest to private bankers. Every sovereign government has the capacity to generate new money by following the model of the Bank of Canada between 1938 and 1974.
There is an especially urgent need at this time for some serious reckoning with the economic dimensions of the crisis before us. This reckoning will inevitably meet the resistance of extremely powerful interests who are deriving great benefits from the existing system. The process of privatizing the creation of money has enriched and empowered a clique whose institutionalized, deep-rooted and continuing kleptocracy was exposed in part by the bailout of 2008.
Why should we take for granted in 2020 that the best way to deal with the economic debacle put before us is to create new money by agreeing to go much deeper into a quagmire of debt entrapment. This debt trap, whose cumulative amount will soon be more that $300 trillion globally, creates gross liabilities in a trajectory of disadvantage that severely limits the life chances even of many generations still unborn.
The other side of debt is embodied in assets. Who gets the assets and who gets the liabilities that coalesce to form indebtedness? What is to be made of the role of birth or inheritance or race or natural ability or social connections in apportioning assets or imposing the enslavements of accumulated debt?
John Perkins addressed some of these issues in his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and in a subsequent follow-up volume. Perkins chronicled how an inter-related complex of US institutions aligned themselves with his own greedy and unscrupulous interventions. The goal of their coordinated aggressions was aimed at imposing the enslavements of massive debt with compound interest. Their version of loan sharking is one of many manifestations expressing a very old and common phenomenon. It often happens that powerful interests parasitically exploit the weak to further enrich themselves.
This partnership between John Perkins and the kleptocratic agencies directed by the US government has long been drawing wealth from struggling countries by pushing them more deeply into national indebtedness. Once the governments of target countries succumbed to greater dependence on debt-based financing, the conditions were ripe to force officials into adopting policies of austerity that harmed local citizens in order to augment the assets of international investors.
Significantly the World Bank demonstrated how this coercion works in the context of the current economic crisis. The World Bank attempted to impose conditions on a loan of $940 million to Belarus because the WB wanted Belarus to conform to the lockdowns that are a primary cause of the current manufactured crisis.
As revealed by the Belarus’s President, Alexander Lukashenko, the World Bank wanted his country to adopt the full set of COVID-19 measures that had been implemented by the Italian government. Lukashenko said no to the loan. He refused to accept the conditions and carried on the established policies of Belarus, a country that has “not implemented strict coronavirus containment measures.”
Lukashenko is far from alone in his contempt for the manipulative tactics of the apparatus promoting the manufactured crisis. For instance Tanzanian President, John Magufuli, tested the accuracy of the testing procedures being forced on his country by the World Health Organization. President and Medical Doctor Mugufi included in the samples submitted to the testing agency some tissue of a goat and a papaya. Both the goat and the papaya tested positive for COVID-19, an outcome he publicized before ordering the WHO group to leave his country.
The Political Economy of Usury From the Middle Ages to the Era of Social Credit and Ezra Pound
We cannot assess the division of humanity between a massive group of debtors and a much smaller group of creditors without touching on the issue of usury. The subject of usury, the lending of money with the addition of interest payments, has been an extremely contentious issue throughout much of human history.
There were prohibitions against usury in ancient Greece, ancient India and the Roman Empire. Throughout much of the last thousand years usury has been regarded as a sin outlawed in the Bible, the Torah and the Koran. At different times in history the Roman Catholic Church has been an especially zealous opponent of some forms of usury.
Considering the nature of our current predicaments including obscene levels of economic inequality, usury might yet again arouse contentions. Some of the core ethical issues raised by the resort to usury remain unresolved. How is it ethical, for instance, to subject disinherited children in poor countries to the indignities of deepened poverty so that rich folks in rich parts of the world can reap larger dividends?
Beginning in the Middle Ages, forms of usury began to show up first in the Italian city states and in the towns of the Franco-Flemish realm. The act of loaning money with interest gradually spread throughout Europe. In some predominately-Muslim jurisdictions, the concept conveyed in the Arabic term, “riba,” approximated the idea of usury or interest. Over time various versions of riba have affected Muslim banking practices.
Often there were prohibitions preventing Jews from demanding interest on loans made to other Jews. There were many Talmudic teachings, however, permitting interest to be collected from gentiles when they borrowed money from Jews. Many accounts of Jewish efforts to break down prohibitions on usury highlight obstacles preventing Jews from pursuing other lines of work. The case is made that the pull of some Jews into banking came about in part because of their exclusion from other occupations.
Whatever the case, the obstacles to usury continued to be lessened including through the changes to Biblical interpretation that came with the Protestant Reformation. Even in the twentieth century, however, usury continued to arouse criticism and distrust. Ezra Pound was one of those who became very outspoken when it came to problems with usury.
The modernist poet and scholar, Ezra Pound, was one of the most influential literary figures of the twentieth century. The importance of his work was expressed not only in his own literary efforts but also in his contributions to other authors in his circle of friends and colleagues.
Pound’s outspoken criticism of usury formed part of the discourse that was integral to the political movements seeking economic reform. The creation and successful nationalization of the Bank of Canada was one of the outgrowths of the concerted quest to give substance to economic institutions that would more effectively serve human needs.
The creation of the Bank of Canada drew on the ideas of Abraham Lincoln and also on those of many other theorists including Major C.H. Douglas. While Major Douglas and John Maynard Keynes each denounced one another’s work, both sought to stimulate economic activity by expanding the supply and distribution of money. Major Douglas’ vision of Social Credit, one that Pound enthusiastically embraced, sought to bring about greater harmony and equilibrium between the forces of production and consumption.
A biographer of Pound has explained that this formidable literary figure believed “there was the prospect of building a Social Credit society where money served the consumer and served the producer.” As Pound pictured it, “the middle men” seeking usurious, interest bearing profit” to be collected “without work or prior motivation, could be cut out.” During the Depression the hope of prosperity through the application of Social Credit principles was seized upon by many. One of them was an evangelical preacher in the Canadian province of Alberta.
Largely as a result of the popularity he gained by incorporating Major Douglas’ analysis of Social Credit into his Sunday afternoon Christian radio broadcast, “Bible Bill” Aberhart became the Premier of Alberta. His Social Credit Party gained 56 of 63 seats in the Alberta Legislature. The Social Credit Party continued in power until 1971.
The Social Credit preoccupation with bringing about changes in the relationship of citizens to financial institutions helped add to the discourse from which the Bank of Canada emerged as a dynamic instrument of nation building.
The enthusiasm was well placed of those who threw their lot in with the movement to create and enlivened the Bank of Canada. The generations that put their trust in this federal financial institution had the satisfaction of knowing that their taxes were not devoured to pay big amounts of interest to private bankers in the style that presently prevails almost everywhere.
Like his good friend and colleague, Ernest Hemingway, Pound was a devotee of clear, terse and succinct prose.
This characteristic of his writing comes through strongly in his harsh condemnations of usury. “Usury is the cancer of the world,” Pound wrote. He explained, “Until you know who has lent to whom, you know nothing of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles.”
Ezra Pound was born in Idaho but was attracted to Italy throughout long periods of his life. In Italy he lionized its fascist leader, Benito Mussolini. He embraced the Axis side in World War II developing close relations with the British fascist leader, Oswald Mosley. Pound threw himself into the contest producing a torrent of radio broadcasts seeking to win over English-speaking converts to the Axis side. These broadcasts are today widely described as war propaganda.
Pound was indicted in the United States in 1943 and arrested at the war’s end by the US Armed Forces in Italy. After being jailed in Pisa, Pound was charged with treason. Then Pound was diagnosed as being mentally unfit to face charges.
The finding that he was mentally ill caused Pound to be locked up as a patient in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in the Washington DC area for the next 13 years. In spite of his severe prejudices against Jewish bankers and his active embrace of fascism during the war years, Pound continued to carry on very lively interactions with his formidable circle of poets, essayists and novelists.
Pound’s circle included James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot. All these writers wrote works that won a Nobel Prize for Literature. These and many other authors benefited from Pound’s encouragement and mentorship. In 1948 Eustace Mullins joined Pound’s circle. Mullins was introduced to the famous poet and scholar through Pound’s wife, Dorothy Shakespeare,
When he first met Pound, Mullins was an art school student and a veteran of the US Air Force. He had already published some short pieces in the British journal, Social Creditor. Mullins remembered Pound’s place of forced residence as “a hideous, urine-soaked madhouse in Washington D.C.” As their visits became increasingly regular, Pound encouraged Mullins to conduct research into the history and activities of the Federal Reserve.
When Pound proposed the idea Mullins was unaware of the existence of the Federal Reserve. Nevertheless, Mullins threw himself into the project that he supported by combining his research with work as a book stacker at the Library of Congress. At the Library he befriended George Stimpson who was well known among Washington journalists and government officials for his wealth of knowledge and his ability to locate relevant research materials.
Stimpson happily worked with Mullins. He helped the aspiring author by guiding him into the primary and secondary literature illuminating many facets of the Federal Reserve’s history
Eustace Mullins Explores the Secrets of the Federal Reserve
An initial edition of the volume appeared in 1952 as Mullins on the Federal Reserve. Another edition with added information was published in 1954. The text has been republished many times, sometimes in different editions under the title Secrets of the Federal Reserve. The text is organized around both thematic and chronological facets.
Mullins lays out the history of the Federal Reserve with considerable attention to the institution’s roots and origins. The author emphasizes several strands of continuity showing the links of the Federal Reserve to the banking establishments of Europe but especially those of Great Britain and Germany.
Mullins characterizes the Federal Reserve as the most powerful institution in the United States whose influence grew so that “it gradually superseded the popular elected government of the United States.” The power of the Fed and its core facet, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is said to have become so formidable because the agency operates in secrecy without any genuine form of accountability to any public institution. The NY Fed combines the power of secrecy with the enormous power to create new currency and to set interest rates becoming in the process “the most gigantic trust on earth.”
Mullins makes the case that the financial district known as the City of London exercised enormous influence over the activities of the Federal Reserve and many of the large Wall Street banks. Mullins wrote, “London is the world’s financial centre, because it commands enormous sums of capital created at its command by the Federal Reserve Board of the United States.”
Mullins is conscientious in presenting many citations to back up his observations and interpretations. He cites, for instance the New York Times on January of 1920 where it states, “The Federal Reserve is a fount of credit not capital.” The manipulation of credit, however, can greatly affect the industrial economy by affecting the ability of manufacturers and farmers to produce.
Mullins emphasizes throughout the text how events are often engineered to strengthen the hand of the Lords of Credit in the matrix of society’s operations. In referring, for instance, to a secret banker’s plan to crash the stock market in 1929, Mullins expressed a view that could as easily describe the growing suspicion in 2020. Could it be that the lockdowns of businesses and workers were purposely engineered to strengthen the hands of the Lords of Credit whose main platform is the Federal Reserve Bank of New York?
Mullins explains that sometimes “bankers paralyse the industrial energies of the country” in order to highlight and strengthen “their tremendous powers” over the financial and business organization of the American economy. Mullins’ observation that “panic is an instrument of [financial] power” is another statement with obvious relevance to the current crisis.
As have many authors since, Mullins emphasizes the importance of a top-secret meeting on Jekyll Island in the state of Georgia in 1910. At this meeting Paul Warburg essentially took the intellectual lead in creating a plan for a Central Bank in the United States. Such an institution was long contemplated and promoted but it had been stopped repeatedly, most famously be Andrew Jackson. Jackson’s political career culminated in his winning the US presidency between 1829 and 1837.
Warburg left his family banking business in Hamburg Germany in 1902. He joined the Wall Street Office of Kuhn Loeb, a Wall Street House that helped finance the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Mullins devotes much effort to describing the complex of alliances and rivalries that characterized banking before and after the founding of the Fed.
Weaving throughout these networks of financial activity were the banking operations of the Rothschild family. Mullins leaves no doubt that the operations of the Rothschild family of bankers were extensive, elaborate and very influential.
In the nineteenth century the Rothschild banking establishment gradually wove its operations into those of large segments of Europe’s royal and aristocratic establishments. Mullins emphasizes the genesis of the close business relationship between the Rothschild banking clan and a London-based US company, George Peabody and Company.
Peabody’s bank was passed on to a father and son team, Junius Spencer Morgan and John Pierpont Morgan. In the days of the Fed’s founding and even today, the name of J.P. Morgan is synonymous with New York banking. Mullins explains how the Rothschild bankers kept a fairly low profile in New York by conducting much of their American business largely through the financial organizations associated with the name and reputation of J.P. Morgan.
Mullins outlines the role of the Federal Reserve in the funding of two world wars. Many of the topics covered in Secrets of the Federal Reserve were later pursued in much more detail in the prolific writings of Antony C. Sutton.
Most of Sutton’s volumes describe the role of Wall Street in helping to bring about many of world history’s major turning points during the twentieth century. These turning points include Wall Street’s funding of the rise of the National Socialist government in Germany in the 1930s and the role of Wall Street in financing the Bolshevik Revolution and the business activities of the Soviet Union.
The capacity of the New York Bank of the Federal Reserve to create vast quantities of credit to finance wars, often with the same bankers funding competing sides in conflicts, provided the key to the creation of huge fortunes. The funding of both sides in war can be seen as an early form of hedging one’s bets. This kind of high impact intervention through banking sometimes created huge leverage for a very small number of people to steer history towards preconceived destinations.
As Mullins explains it, the Federal Reserve was founded in extreme secrecy and often employs deceptive tactics to misrepresent its true nature. As Mullins sees it, for instance, the creation of the twelve regional banks was a ploy to gain political acceptance for the Central Bank’s core entity, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Mullins explains, “the other eleven banks were so many expensive mausoleums erected to salve local pride and quell the Jacksonian fears of the hinterland.”
The ability of Wall Street bankers to invoke the credit creating powers of the New York Fed forms a key aspect of the frequent military adventurism of the US government. This military adventurism continued full force even after the United States became the world’s largest debtor nation after 1990. How large has been the role of the US Fed in building up the US national debt together with the tens of trillions missing from the books of the US Defense Department?
The Israel Lobby and the Federal Reserve
Much of the military adventurism of the United States especially after 9/11 was directed into invasions of Muslim-majority countries that threaten a particular view of Israel as a dominant power in its region and in the world. Why would it be that the Federal Reserve is any less involved in creating the available credit for the waging of wars in the twenty-first century than it was in creating the wars of the twentieth century?
In his authorship of The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, Mullins seems largely oblivious to the role in world history of Zionism and the genesis of Israel. His main attention lay elsewhere. As I read his text, he accurately conveyed how the large Jewish influence in the banking institution of Europe, including the influence of the Rothschild consortium, was extended into Wall Street including the Federal Reserve.
While Mullins does not shy aware from dealing with the Jewish component of the story he set out to tell, I don’t think he belabours this subject or becomes aggressively polemical about it. Certainly the same cannot be said of some of his critics whose condemnations of Mullins can sometimes be extremely polemical.
Mullins might have made more of the identity politics prevailing throughout the twentieth century. The sensibilities of the dominant Christian constituency in the United States probably influenced the decisions of many customers shopping for banking services. Quite likely some of them would have been more comfortable dealing with firms identified with names like J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller and Mellon rather than Warburg, Greenspan or Fink. Times, however, have changed.
Some of the more severe prejudices seem to have subsided around the time that Sandy Weill combined his Travellers Insurance Company with Citicorp to create Citigroup. This merger helped create the political momentum leading to the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. With Glass-Steagall’s elimination, Citigroup tried to become a giant department store of varied financial services. In its inner sanctums, however, Citigroup developed a preoccupation with derivatives that continues yet.
In the twenty-first century it happened that some of the cosmetic overlays were removed that had previously been imposed to disguise the large representation of Jews in Wall Street banking, including in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. For good or bad, usury has become a core features of how the contemporary world is organized. Some reckoning with the ethnic inheritances attending usury are therefore inescapable, especially when dealing with the some of the most dramatic displays of usury on steroids in Wall Street institutions.
Where I see the need to draw a line in the sand is not on the question of the ethnicity of Wall Street personnel. Rather this line in the sand involves the question of how power is used or abused at the domineering heights of our financial institutions. Generally speaking it is not a justifiable use of the Federal Reserve to produce credit that enables the waging of wars that are offensive rather than defensive in character.
The waging of war has long been one of the big bonanzas producing major windfalls for international bankers. In the twenty-first century so many of the wars involve the flexing of military might by the United States to advance the expansionary designs of the Israeli state. The US Federal Reserve has been part of the process of creating what some would consider wars for Israel in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
Why are the money-generating powers of the secretive Federal Reserve being invoked to help fund wars for Israel and also to help shape public opinion to accept the US role in these wars of aggression. Especially sensitive is the further indebting of the American people to subsidize the production of propaganda aimed at persuading them to back wars for Israel. This propaganda is deemed necessary to deflate opposition to Israel’s actions including the ruthless dehumanizing treatment of Palestinian Arabs.
We have seen that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was deeply engaged in 2008 in transferring tens of trillions into the coffers of its own member institutions and counterparties. What uses were made of this bailout produced through a dubious process of legalized financial larceny?
One way or another the Israel Lobby must be a prime beneficiary of the machinations of Wall Street and its money spigot, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This pattern of priority can easily be related to US federal funding of the Israel project as a higher priority in federal budgeting than even the basic needs of the domestic population of the United States. Black Lives Do Matter but why is it that the lives of Israel First Partisans seem to matter more than any other group?
This Israel Lobby has the power to prevent any critic of Israeli policies from gaining the nomination of a major US party to run for US president. The result is that, in election after election, Americans are offered a very limited choice between competitors who are equally supportive of Israel.
The Israel Lobby can intervene to prevent the leadership of opposition parties from adopting policies that emphasize equity in Israel-Palestinian relations. Through its campaign contributions, the Israel Lobby dominates the process of choosing and electing representatives in Congress. How much does it cost to buy the political obedience of most federal politicians? How much does it cost to replicate this feat in the state legislatures and even municipal governments?
Through the ownership and/or control of major media outlets, the Israel Lobby exerts major influence in determining the main outlines of much public discourse when it comes to US-Israeli relations and many related subjects. How could one calculate the amount of money it took to achieve this feat? How much of this money is directed into payments for compliance, in other words, bribery? In the post-Epstein era what is the role of bribery’s criminal cousin, namely backmail?
The Israel Lobby is deeply engaged with other lobbies in transforming the Internet from an open forum of public interaction and debate into a centrally controlled propaganda instrument. Prominent among the Internet’s most aggressive censors and thought police are Google, You Tube, Facebook, Twitter and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.
Through all kinds of interventions the Israel Lobby asserts significant forms of control over a broad array of institutions and operations including those of the judiciary, the universities, book publishing, magazine publishing, municipal governments, trade unions and cultural groups. The biggest and most influential cultural group of all is the Hollywood film industry. Not surprisingly there is little in its cinematic output that provides critical perspectives on Zionism and its emanations.
The injection of huge amounts of money are essential to the exercise of so much concerted influence over such a broad sweep of political, intellectual and cultural organizations. Where do the large quantities of money supporting the activities the Israel project come from? Why is it that so many of agencies of the Israel Lobby have the status of charitable organizations with the capacity to extend tax write-offs to donors? What is the relationship of the Israel Lobby to Wall Street and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York?
Even the act of asking such questions will be seen by some as heretical. There is, however, nothing wrong with looking into issues that have so much impact on the quality of our political discourse… so much impact on our capacity to live together with the civility and security we have been losing so quickly with the imposition of the economically crippling lockdowns.
It is no less legitimate to ask questions about the ethnic identity of those who benefit most from the US economy than it is to ask questions about what groups suffer the most from the deprivations of poverty. Wouldn’t it make sense to try to moderate the disparities beginning with processes of research and discussion?
In a book of the same name, former ADL Executive Director, Abe Foxman, has opened the discussion of Jews and Money. Foxman effectively counters the view that all Jews are rich. Foxman, of course, is correct in this assertion. All Jews are not rich. Some are outright poor. A fairly large number of Jews, however, are somewhat rich and a small minority of Jews are disproportionately invested with wealth and power. Jews are especially well represented in the billionaires club both within the United States and internationally.
Some of the wealthiest Jews are part of the Wall Street establishment including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Perhaps the time has come to begin retiring this, “the most gigantic trust on earth.” Perhaps it is time to retire some of the debt created over more than a century of putting private bankers in charge of dictating interest rates as well as creating debt-laden dollars. Perhaps the time has come to lessen the debt burden that is narrowing the life chances of so many people who have been funding the wars for Israel mounted in the wake of the 9/11 deception.
The severity of the crisis before us compel all thoughtful people of conscience to look beyond the redeployment of old institutions and old remedies for old problems that are different from the challenges facing us now. One of the most obvious ways to avert further calamity is to move away altogether from the empowerment of private bankers to massively expand national debts with compound interest charged to tax payers.
The alternative to this approach is to change the present means of creating new money. The creation of many banking systems similar to that of the Bank of Canada should be considered in the quest for the main ingredients of a global reset. The Bank of Canada brought about an almost-debt-free run of prodigious nation building before Pierre Trudeau bent the policies of his government to meet the impositions of the Bank of International Settlements.
The division of the English-speaking community into two great powers – “one aristocratic, ‘chosen’ and imperial; and one democratic, ‘chosen’ and manifest destiny-driven”, as Philips correctly establishes – was accomplished by, what else, a war triptych: the English Civil War, the American revolution and the U.S. Civil War.
Now, we may be at the threshold of a fourth war – with unpredictable and unforeseen consequences.
As it stands, what we have is a do-or-die clash of models: MAGA against an exclusivist Fed/Wall Street/Silicon Valley-controlled system.
MAGA – which is a rehash of the American dream – simply cannot happen when society is viciously polarized; vast sectors of the middle class are being completely erased; and mass immigration is coming from the Global South.
In contrast, the Fed as a Wall Street hedge fund meets Silicon Valley model, a supremely elitist 0.001% concoction, has ample margins to thrive.
The model is based on even more rigid corporate monopoly; the preeminence of capital markets, where a Wall Street boom is guaranteed by government debt-buybacks of its own debt; and life itself regulated by algorithms and Big Data.
This is the Brave New World dreamed by the techno-financial Masters of the Universe.
Trump’s MAGA woes have been compounded by a shoddy geopolitical move in tandem with Law and Order: his re-election campaign will be under the sign of “China, China, China.” When in trouble, blame a foreign enemy.
That comes from serially failed opportunist Steve Bannon and his Chinese billionaire sidekick Guo Wengui, or Miles Guo. Here they are in Statue of Liberty mode announcing their no holds barred infowar campaign to demonize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to Kingdom Come and “free the Chinese people”.
Bannon’s preferred talking point is that if his infowar fails, there will be “kinetic war”. That is nonsense. Beijing’s priorities are elsewhere. Only a few neo-conned Dr. Strangeloves would envisage “kinetic war”- as in a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Chinese territory.
Alastair Crooke has masterfully shown how the geoeconomic game, as Trump sees it, is above all to preserve the power of the U.S. dollar: “His particular concern would be to see a Europe that was umbilically linked to the financial and technological heavyweight that is China. This, in itself, effectively would presage a different world financial governance.”
But then there’s The Leopard syndrome: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”. Enter Covid-19 as a particle accelerator, used by the Masters of the Universe to tweak “things” a bit so they not only stay as they are but the Master grip on the world tightens.
The problem is Covid-19 behaves as a set of – uncontrollable – free electrons. That means nobody, even the Masters of the Universe, is able to really weigh the full consequences of a runaway, compounded financial/social crisis.
Deconstructing Nixon-Trump
Russiagate, now totally debunked, has unfolded in effect as a running coup: a color non-revolution metastasizing into Ukrainegate and the impeachment fiasco. In this poorly scripted and evidence-free morality play with shades of Watergate, Trump was cast by the Democrats as Nixon.
Big mistake. Watergate had nothing to do with a Hollywood-celebrated couple of daring reporters. Watergate represented the industrial-military-security-media complex going after Nixon. Deep Throat and other sources came from inside the Deep State. And it was not by accident that they were steering the Washington Post – which, among other roles, plays the part of CIA mouthpiece to perfection.
Trump is a completely different matter. The Deep State keeps him under control. One just needs to look at the record: more funds for the Pentagon, $1 trillion in brand new nuclear weapons, perennial sanctions on Russia, non-stop threats to Russia’s western borders, (failed) efforts to derail Nord Stream 2. And this is only a partial list.
So, from a Deep State point of view, the geopolitical front – containment of Russia-China – is assured. Domestically, it’s much more complicated.
As much as Black Lives Matter does not threaten the system even remotely like the Black Panthers in the 60s, Trump believes his own Law & Order, like Nixon, will once again prevail. The key will be to attract the white women suburban vote. Republican pollsters are extremely optimistic and even talking about a “landslide”.
Yet the behavior of an extra crucial vector must be understood: what corporate America wants.
When we look at who’s supporting Black Lives Matter – and Antifa – we find, among others, Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, WalMart, Warner Brothers and YouTube.
This who’s who would suggest a completely isolated Trump. But then we have to look at what really matters; the class war dynamics in what is in fact a caste system, as Laurence Brahm argues.
Black Lives Matter, the organization and its ramifications, is essentially being instrumentalized by selected corporate interests to accelerate their own priority: to crush the U.S. working classes into a state of perpetual anomie, as a new automated economy rises.
That may always happen under Trump. But it will be faster without Trump.
What’s fascinating is how this current strategy of tension scenario is being developed as a classic CIA/NED playbook color revolution.
An undisputed, genuine grievance – over police brutality and systemic racism – has been completely manipulated, showered with lavish funds, infiltrated, and even weaponized against “the regime”.
Just to control Trump is not enough for the Deep State – due to the maximum instability and unreliability of his Demented Narcissus persona. Thus, in yet another priceless historical irony, “Assad must go” metastasized into “Trump must go”.
The cadaver in the basement
One must never lose track of the fundamental objectives of those who firmly control that assembly of bought and paid for patsies in Capitol Hill: to always privilege Divide and Rule – on class, race, identity politics.
After all, the majority of the population is considered expendable. It helps that the instrumentalized are playing their part to perfection, totally legitimized by mainstream media. No one will hear lavishly funded Black Lives Matter addressing the real heart of the matter: the reset of the predatory Restored Neoliberalism project, barely purged of its veneer of Hybrid Neofascism. The blueprint is the Great Reset to be launched by the World Economic Forum in January 2021.
It will be fascinating to watch how Trump deals with this “Summer of Love” remake of Maidan transposed to the Seattle commune. The hint from Team Trump circles is that he will do nothing: a coalition of white supremacists and motorcycle gangs might take care of the “problem” on the Fourth of July.
None of this sweetens the fact that Trump is at the heart of a crossfire hurricane: his disastrous response to Covid-19; the upcoming, devastating effects of the New Great Depression; and his intimations pointing to what could turn into martial law.
Still, the legendary Hollywood maxim – “no one knows anything” – rules. Even running with a semi-cadaver in a basement, the Democrats may win in November just by doing nothing. Yet Teflon Trump should never be underestimated. The Deep State may even realize he’s more useful than they think.
Have you noticed the peculiar fact that despite the lockdown, the economic crisis, tens of millions unemployed and multiple corporations filing for bankruptcy, Wall Street is having a ball? CNBC‘s Jim Cramer examined this anomaly earlier a few days ago, his verdict: “we’re looking at a V-shaped recovery in the stock market, and that has almost nothing to do with a V-shaped recovery in the economy. What is going on is one of the greatest wealth transfers in history.”
How can the market rebound when the economy has not? Cramer’s answer is so simple. “Because the market doesn’t represent the economy; it represents the future of big business.”
Cramer points out that while small businesses are dropping like flies, big business—along, of course, with bigger wealth, is coming through the crisis virtually unscathed.
Cramer projects that the transfer will have a “horrible effect” on the USA. We are already seeing a tsunami of bankruptcies. The economic fallout is inevitable. Federal data shows that the nation faces a 13.3 percent unemployment rate. The fortunes of U.S. billionaires increased by $565 billion between March 18 and June 4 while the same 11-week period also saw 42.6 million Americans filing jobless claims. The results are devastating, if hardly a news item: while the American people are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer.
One would have thought that the American Left and progressive political institutions would be the first to be alarmed by these developments. We tend to believe that tempering the rich and their greed, caring for working people and fighting for equal opportunities and justice in general are the Left’s prime concerns.
The American reality, however, suggests the opposite. Instead of uniting us in a fierce battle against Wall Street and its broad daylight robbery of what is left of American wealth, the American Left is investing its last drops of political energy in a ‘race war.’ Instead of committing to the Left’s key ideological values, namely: class struggle that unites us into one angry fist of resistance against this theft and discrimination, and without regard to our race, gender, or sexual orientation, the American Left makes us fight each other.
The silence of the Left on the current Wall Street “wealth transfers” is hardly an accident. American Left and Progressive institutions are supported financially and by Wall Street and global financiers. This funding means that, in practice, the American Left operates as a controlled opposition. It maintains its relevance by sustaining social and racial tensions that draw attention away from Wall Street and its crimes. The so called ‘Left’ is also reluctant to point at Wall Street and its current theft, as such criticism, however legitimate, would immediately be censured as ‘antisemitic’ by the Jewish institutions that have appointed themselves to police Western public discourse.
There is plenty of history of such divisive politics from the Left and the way it often ends up betraying the Working Class. The collapse of the German Left in the early 1930s is probably the most interesting case-study of this.
Prior to the 1929 economic collapse, Germany’s fascist movement was a relatively marginal phenomenon consisting of various competing factions. In the 1928 elections the Nazi Party received 2.8 percent (810,000 votes) of the general vote. But then the 1929 crash led to a rapid and sharp rise in unemployment; from 1.2 million in June 1929 to 6 million in January 1932. Amidst the crisis, production dropped 41.4 percent from 1929 to the end of 1931, resulting in skyrocketing poverty. Like millions of Americans at the moment, in the early 1930s millions of Germans spent many days and nights in food queues.
One would assume that the collapse of capitalism would have been politically celebrated by the German Communists and Marxists as the Germans lost hope in ‘bourgeois democracy’ and capitalism alike. The German Communist Party (KPD), like the Nazi party, increased its power exponentially following the economic meltdown. Yet the German Left missed its golden opportunity. Despite the poverty and the austerity measures, it was Hitler who eventually won the hearts and the souls of the German working class. By the September 1930 election Hitler had won 18.3 percent and then in July 1932 37.4 percent. In just four years the Nazis increased their support by 13 million votes.
A lot has been written about the failure of the German Left, both Marxists and Communists, to tackle Hitler and Fascism. Some Marxists are honest enough to admit that it was actually the KPD, its authoritarian and divisive politics that paved the way for Hitler and Nazism.
Like Stalin, the German KPD was quick to employ the term ‘fascist’ to describe any and all political opponents. In an act of gradual self-marginalisation, the German Left reduced itself into irrational political noise that finally lost touch with reality. The KPD were so removed from understating the political transition in Germany that on January 30, 1933, the day Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, the KPD foolishly declared: “After Hitler, we will take over!”
Like the American radical Left today, the KPD fought in street battles against the Nazis from 1929 to 1933. These battles cost the lives of hundreds of Nazis and KPD members. But in 1933 no political group paid as high a price in blood as the KPD. Nearly a third of KPD members ended up in prison.
It is notable that one of the most concerning aspects of Left politics is the peculiar fact that agitators who claim to be inspired by ‘dialectics’ appear blind to their own ideological past. Consequently, they are detached from the present and totally removed from a concept of ‘future.’
I have been saying for some time that Trump often makes the right decisions if always for the wrong reasons. For instance, he declared ‘a war’ on social media authoritarianism in the name of the 1st Amendment. Though this is clearly the right result, Trump is not motivated by any genuine concern for ‘freedom of speech’ or ‘human rights’ he is simply upset that his tweets are subject to ‘fact checks.’ The Left, peculiarly enough, tends to make the wrong decisions if usually for good reasons. Fighting racism is, no doubt, an important goal; Combating America’s police brutality or racial discrimination is a major crucial battle, however, fuelling a race conflict is the worst possible path toward eliminating both racism and discrimination. Such a tactic will only deepen the divide that already splits the American working class. I wonder whether this divide is exactly what the American Left is trying to achieve: is this possibly what it is paid to do?
Today as American progressives and leftists gear up for a long relentless battle, I have a little advice to offer. History teaches us that Fascism always wins when the conditions for a Marxist revolution are perfect. When you push for a race conflict and further fragmentation of the American society, bear in mind that you may end up facing a real Trump character (as opposed to Donald) that may be able to unite America and make it great for real, but you won’t find your place in it.
Covid-19 driven collapse of global supply chains, demand and mobility will painfully spawn next great tech-led economic models
Is the world on a collision course with the financial and economic equivalent of a meteor impact with shock wave? Fractal illustration: AFP
Nobody, anywhere, could have predicted what we are now witnessing: in a matter of only a few weeks the accumulated collapse of global supply chains, aggregate demand, consumption, investment, exports, mobility.
Nobody is betting on an L-shaped recovery anymore – not to mention a V-shaped one. Any projection of global gross domestic product (GDP) in 2020 gets into falling-off-a-cliff territory.
In industrialized economies, where roughly 70% of the workforce is in services, countless businesses in myriad industries will fail in a rolling financial collapse that will eclipse the Great Depression.
That spans the whole spectrum of possibly 47 million US workers soon to be laid off – with the unemployment rate skyrocketing to 32% – all the way to Oxfam’s warning that by the time the pandemic is over half of the world’s population of 7.8 billion people could be living in poverty.According to the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) most optimistic 2020 scenario – certainly to become outdated before the end of Spring – global trade would shrink by 13%. A more realistic and gloomier WTO scenario sees global trade plunging by 32%.
What we are witnessing is not only a massive globalization short circuit: it’s a cerebral shock extended to three billion hyperconnected, simultaneously confined people. Their bodies may be blocked, but they are electromagnetic beings and their brains keep working – with possible, unforeseen political and other consequences.
Soon we will be facing three major, interlocking debates: the management (in many cases appalling) of the crisis; the search for future models; and the reconfiguration of the world-system.
This is just a first approach in what should be seen as a do-or-die cognitive competition.
Particle accelerator
Sound analyses of what could be the next economic model are already popping up. As background, a really serious debunking of all (dying) neoliberalism development myths can be seen here.
Yes, a new economic model should be revolving around these axes: AI computing; automated manufacturing; solar and wind energy; high-speed 5G-driven data transfer; and nanotechnology.
China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are very well positioned for what’s ahead, as well as selected European latitudes.
Plamen Tonchev, head of the Asia unit at the Institute of International Economic Relations in Athens, Greece, points to the possible reorganization – short term – of Belt and Road Initiative projects, privileging investment in energy, export of solar panels, 5G networks and the Health Silk Road.
Covid-19 is like a particle accelerator, consolidating tendencies that were already developing. China had already demonstrated for the whole planet to see that economic development under a control system has nothing to do with Western liberal democracy.
On the pandemic, China demonstrated – also for the whole planet to see – that containment of Covid-19 can be accomplished by imposing controls the West derided as “draconian” and “authoritarian,” coupled with a strategic scientific approach characerized by a profusion of test kits, protection equipment, ventilators and experimental treatments.
This is already translating into incalculable soft power which will be exercised along the Health Silk Road. Trends seem to point to China as strategically reinforced all along the spectrum, especially in the Global South. China is playing go, weiqi. Stones will be taken from the geopolitical board.
System failure welcomed?
In contrast, Western banking and finance scenarios could not be gloomier. As a Britain-centric analysis argues, “It is not just Europe. Banks may not be strong enough to fulfill their new role as saviors in any part of the world, including the US, China and Japan. None of the major lending systems were ever stress-tested for an economic deep freeze lasting months.”
So “the global financial system will crack under the strain,” with a by now quite possible “pandemic shutdown lasting more than three months” capable of causing “economic and financial ‘system failure.’”
As system failures go, nothing remotely approaches the possibility of a quadrillion dollar derivative implosion, a real nuclear issue.
Capital One is number 11 on the list of the largest banks in the US by assets. They are already in deep trouble on their derivative exposures. New York sources say Capital One made a terrible trade, betting via derivatives that oil would not plunge to where it is now at 17-year lows.
Mega-pressure is on all those Wall Street outfits that gave oil companies the equivalent of puts on all their oil production at prices above $50 a barrel. These puts have now come due – and the strain on the Wall Street houses and US banks will become unbearable.
The anticipated Friday oil deal won’t alter anything: oil will stay around $20 per barrel, $25 max.
This is just the beginning and is bound to get much worse. Imagine most of US industry being shut down. Corporations – like Boeing, for instance – are going to go bankrupt. Bank loans to those corporations will be wiped out. As those loans are wiped out, the banks are going to get into major trouble.
Derivative to the max
Wall Street, totally linked to the derivative markets, will feel the pressure of the collapsing American economy. The Fed bailout of Wall Street will start coming apart. Talk about a nuclear chain reaction.
In a nutshell: The Fed has lost control of the money supply in the US. Banks can now create unlimited credit from their base and that sets up the US for potential hyperinflation if the money supply grows non-stop and production collapses, as it is collapsing right now because the economy is in shutdown mode.
If derivatives start to implode, the only solution for all major banks in the world will be immediate nationalization, much to the ire of the Goddess of the Market. Deutsche Bank, also in major trouble, has a 7 trillion euro derivatives exposure, twice the annual GDP of Germany.
No wonder New York business circles are absolutely terrified. They insist that if the US does not immediately go back to work, and if these possibly quadrillions of dollars of derivatives start to rapidly implode, the economic crises that will unfold will create a collapse of the magnitude of which has not been witnessed in history, with incalculable consequences.
Or perhaps this will be just the larger-than-life spark to start a new economy.
Thursday’s jobless claims leave no doubt that the country is in the grips of another severe recession. More than 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment insurance in the last week. That number exceeds the gloomiest prediction of more than 40 economists and pushes the two-week total to an eye-watering 10 million claims.
According to CNBC:
“Those at the lower end of the wage scale have been especially hard-hit during a crisis that has seen businesses either cut staff outright or at best freeze any new hiring until there’s more visibility about how efforts to contain the coronavirus will work.
“We’ve lived through the recession and 9/11. What we’re seeing with this decline is actually worse than both of those events,” said Irina Novoselsky, CEO of online jobs marketplace CareerBuilder.” (CNBC)
According to New York Magazine:
“Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis projected Monday that job losses from the coronavirus recession would reach 47 million and push America’s unemployment rate to 32.1 percent — more than 7 points higher than its Great Depression–era peak.”
2– Service Sector has been walloped by the virus
Services account for 70% of the US economy, but presently the sector is in meltdown. According to the analysts at Wolf Street: “Employment contracted sharply and hours were reduced for those still employed. “The employment index plunged from +6.1 to -23.8, also the lowest level on record…
Retailers got whacked. The Retail Sales Index of the Texas Retail Outlook Survey collapsed from the already beaten-down level of -2.5 in February to an epic all-time low of -82.6 in March… (Also) the general business activity index collapsed from the beaten down level of -5.0 to a historic low of -84.2….
Comments from retail executives were somber:… “Most of our business has gone to zero except for essential locations such as hospitals, military bases and prisons… We are contemplating at this moment sending most employees home while our owners determine whether they can afford to pay reduced salaries and cover benefits for a short period while we see if things improve or worsen” (Wolf Street)
3– Economic carnage extends across sectors
Business Insider: “Recession risks are rising as coronavirus spreads around the world…The crisis will clobber airlines, shipping, hotels, and restaurants…
“Sectors reliant on trade and the free movement of people are most exposed,” said Benjamin Nelson, a Moody’s vice president and co-author of the report.
Carmakers, gaming, and retail will be hit hard by supply chain disruptions, the analysts said…
“A lengthy outbreak would affect economic activity for longer, leading to heightened recessionary dynamics and a more significant demand shock,” Moody’s said. “A sustained pullback in consumption would hurt corporate earnings, prompt layoffs, and weigh on consumer sentiment.”(Business Insider)
Car sales have also dropped dramatically in the last two weeks. On Wednesday, Hyundai reported that sales had seen a decline of 43 percent for March compared to the same period in 2019. That’s a drop from 61,177 vehicles in March 2019 to just 35,118 during the same month in 2020. All other car manufacturers are experiencing similar weakness in demand.
4– The Bloodbath on Wall Street continues
U.S. shares sold off again on Wednesday for the third time in four days wiping out most of last week’s bear market rally. The SandP 500 dipped 114 points while the Dow Jones lopped-off nearly 973 points by the end of the session. Analysts now believe that last week’s 20% surge was a temporary reaction to Trump’s multi-trillion dollar fiscal plan. By a 9 to 1 margin, investors are now betting that stocks have further to fall.
“Investor pessimism today is as bad as it has been,” said Dennis DeBusschere of Evercore ISI. “All estimates of when this will end are being pushed out…”
Before the outbreak of the virus, traders believed that low rates, liquidity injections and easy credit would keep stocks on a permanent upward trajectory. But the daily deluge of bad news coupled with an economy that is in freefall has undermined confidence in the Central Bank sending stocks into a tailspin. The Dow closed Wednesday at 20,943, which is three times higher than its March 9, 2009 low of 6,547. Stocks still have further to fall.
An article at The Medium explains how the composition of the workforce has changed since the 2008 financial crisis. Gig workers make up are a significant part of the workforce, but they do not have the protections or benefits of most wage earners. These independent contractors will impacted the most by the sudden downturn in the economy. Their ability to consume will also weaken the post-crisis recovery and lead to slower growth. Check out this short excerpt from A crippling collapse in consumer spending is coming:
“From restaurant workers, caterers, and Uber drivers to office and hotel cleaning staff to event venue staff to people supplementing earnings with AirBnB revenue, income is cratering across the country for hourly and gig workers. And most have little to no financial cushion…
Thirty-six percent of U.S. workers are now involved in the gig economy…. Most gig and hourly workers are walking a financial tightrope. They will not be able to afford even a short-term hit to their earnings. It will mean a further spike in auto loan and credit-card delinquencies. It will mean a spike in healthcare-driven bankruptcies. It will mean unpaid rent. And it will mean consumer spending will plummet…. A sudden shock to gig and hourly-worker earnings will have seismic implications for the economic and political future of the U.S….
More than 15.5 million Americans work in restaurants. Of those workers, roughly 3 million live in poverty….Unpaid rent will eventually lead to landlord defaults… Consumer spending now accounts for roughly 70% of the U.S. economy. Reportedly, government stimulus may not reach consumers until the end of April. Gig and hourly workers need help now.” (“A crippling collapse in consumer spending is coming”, The Medium)
How many of these gig workers will fall through the cracks, lose their apartments or rental units, and wind up on the streets, homeless and destitute?
6– Americans continue to stockpile food
According to the Wall Street Journal: “In the past two weeks, Americans have hoarded food as restaurants close their dining rooms and more are told to stay home from work and school. General Mills, which makes Cheerios cereal, Yoplait yogurt and Progresso soup, on Wednesday said retailers in North America and Europe are purchasing more of its products and its factories are running at near capacity to meet the demand….(WSJ)
“Consumers across the globe are still loading their pantries — and the economic fallout from the virus is just starting...
“You could see wartime rationing, price controls and domestic stockpiling,” said Ann Berg, an independent consultant and veteran agricultural trader.” (Bloomberg)
CNBC: “Psychologists ..weigh in on why our brains push us to panic buy — even when authorities are assuring the public there’s no need to. According to Paul Marsden, a consumer psychologist at the University of the Arts London,…
“It’s about ‘taking back control’ in a world where you feel out of control…When people are stressed their reason is hampered, so they look at what other people are doing. If others are stockpiling it leads you to engage in the same behavior. People see photos of empty shelves and regardless of whether it’s rational it sends a signal to them that it’s the thing to do….” (CNBC)
7– Most Americans have no savings
From Yahoo Finance:
Saving money continues to be a challenge for Americans….
Since 2015, GOBankingRates has asked Americans how much they have in savings. Each year, the survey results have shown that a majority of adults don’t even have $1,000 in a savings account…
This year, GOBankingRates asked more than 5,000 adults, “How much money do you have saved in your savings account?” Respondents could choose from one of seven options:
The survey found that 58 percent of respondents had less than $1,000 saved.
“It’s always concerning when a large part of the population is seemingly living paycheck to paycheck because when unexpected personal or financial hardships occur, it can be challenging to recover without adequate savings,” Jason Thacker, head of consumer deposits and payments at TD Bank, said.” (“58% of Americans Have Less Than $1,000 in Savings, Survey Finds”, Yahoo Finance)
8– Household debt is at an all-time high
From CNBC: “Household debt surged in 2019, marking the biggest annual increase since just before the financial crisis, according to the New York Federal Reserve.
Total household debt balances rose by $601 billion last year, topping $14 trillion for the first time, according to a new report by the Fed branch. The last time the growth was that large was 2007, when household debt rose by just over $1 trillion....
“The data also show that transitions into delinquency among credit card borrowers have steadily risen since 2016, notably among younger borrowers,” Wilbert Van Der Klaauw, senior vice president at the New York Fed, said in a statement.” (“Household debt jumps the most in 12 years, Federal Reserve report says”, CNBC)
9 — Many businesses might not survive long enough to get stimulus
Many businesses shut their doors either for a lack of customers or on orders from state or local governments as emergency declarations began rolling across the country in mid-March,. Yet it could be weeks more before the business loans, bigger unemployment checks and direct payments to individuals from the stimulus plan flow into the economy.
Small businesses account for almost half of U.S. private employment. A complete collapse of even some of those enterprises not only would dash the dreams of entrepreneurs and threaten the livelihoods of many, it risks sapping the power of an eventual economic rebound as the financial distress ripples through to landlords, vendors and lenders.
Already, 50,000 retail stores have shut in just over a week across the country, putting more than 600,000 workers on furlough, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The National Federation of Independent Business, had a record 13,000 people register for a webinar it hosted Monday on the stimulus plan and financial resources….After the webinar ended, more than 900 emails flooded in, she said, with business owners asking: “Am I going to have anything left? Will I be evicted? Will I have to file for bankruptcy? Will I be able to reopen?”
“The emails almost make me want to cry,” Milito added. “What I’m hearing from members is fear, uncertainty and almost heartbreak.” (“Stimulus May Come Too Late for U.S. Businesses Already Stretched”, Bloomberg)
10– Food banks are seeing a sudden, sharp rise in demand
This is from Newsday:
“Emergency food programs are bracing for a wave of new recipients in the coming weeks as more Long Islanders are expected to lose their jobs, get furloughed or have work hours and wages reduced. At the same time, volunteers — many of them at high risk of contracting the virus — are staying home to protect themselves and needy people from getting sick.
Compounding the problem is a crippled national supply chain that delays food deliveries by weeks.
“It’s a perfect storm of tragedy on top of each other,” said Jean Kelly, executive director of the Interfaith Nutrition Network, a Hempstead soup kitchen. “Everything that could go wrong is going wrong.”
Soup kitchens and pantries in many communities closed temporarily in recent weeks to protect volunteers or because sponsoring agencies, such as houses of worship and nonprofits, also shut their doors.
“The reason they’re closed is they don’t really have an infrastructure of people to work there….The majority of the food pantries are operated by volunteers. The average age is in their 70s. They’re fearful of contracting the coronavirus.” (“Demand at LI food pantries rise as volunteers and food supplies fall”, Newsday)
Final Note from an article titled: “Americans Are Worried About The Coronavirus. They’re Even More Worried About The Economy”
“An overwhelming majority of Americans are really concerned about the economy. … A Morning Consult poll conducted between March 20 and March 22 found that 90 percent of Americans said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned that the coronavirus would impact the economy…Americans are also worried about job security — 49 percent said they were worried about losing their job, according to an Economist/YouGov survey conducted between March 22 and March 24.” (FiveThirtyEight)
Not surprisingly, some polls suggest that “more Americans are worried about the effect of the coronavirus on the economy than about their own health.” I would include myself in that group, which is why I hope that President Trump expands his economics team by adding more experienced, top-notch economists who can help him navigate this unprecedented and potentially-catastrophic crisis. This isn’t the time for the B Team (Kudlow, Mnuchin) to making decisions that will impact the entire country.
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Is the planet under the spell of a pair of black swans – a Wall Street meltdown, caused by an alleged oil war between Russia and the House of Saud, plus the uncontrolled spread of Covid-19 – leading to an all-out “cross-asset pandemonium” as billed by Nomura?
Or, as German analyst Peter Spengler suggests, whatever the averted climax in the Strait of Hormuz has not brought about so far “might now come through market forces”?
Let’s start with what really happened after five hours of relatively polite discussions last Friday in Vienna. What turned into a de facto OPEC+ meltdown was quite the game-changing plot twist.
OPEC+ includes Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Essentially, after enduring years of OPEC price-fixing – the result of relentless US pressure over Saudi Arabia – while patiently rebuilding its foreign exchange reserves, Moscow saw the perfect window of opportunity to strike, targeting the US shale industry.
Shares of some of these US producers plunged as much as 50% on “Black Monday.” They simply cannot survive with a barrel of oil in the $30s – and that’s where this is going. After all these companies are drowning in debt.
A $30 barrel of oil has to be seen as a precious gift/stimulus package for a global economy in turmoil – especially from the point of view of oil importers and consumers. This is what Russia made possible.
And the stimulus may last for a while. Russia’s National Wealth Fund has made it clear it has enough reserves (over $150 billion) to cover a budget deficit from six to ten years – even with oil at $25 a barrel. Goldman Sachs has already gamed a possible Brent crude at $20 a barrel.
As Persian Gulf traders stress, the key to what is perceived in the US as an “oil war” between Moscow and Riyadh is mostly about derivatives. Essentially, banks won’t be able to pay those speculators who hold derivative insurance against a steep decline in the price of oil. Added stress comes from traders panicking with Covid-19 spreading across nations that are visibly unprepared to deal with it.
Watch the Russian game
Moscow must have gamed beforehand that Russian stocks traded in London – such as Gazprom, Rosneft, Novatek and Gazprom Neft – would collapse. According to Lukoil’s co-owner Leonid Fedun, Russia may lose up to $150 million a day from now on. The question is for how long this will be acceptable.
Still, from the beginning Rosneft’s position was that for Russia, the deal with OPEC+ was “meaningless” and only “cleared the way” for American shale oil.
The consensus among Russian energy giants was that the current market setup – massive “negative oil demand,”positive “supply shock” and no swing producer – inevitably had to crash the price of oil. They were watching, helplessly, as the US was already selling oil for a lower price than OPEC.
Moscow’s move against the US fracking industry was payback for the Trump administration messing with Nord Stream 2. The inevitable, steep devaluation of the ruble was gamed.
Still, what happened post-Vienna essentially has little to do with a Russia-Saudi trade war. The Russian Energy Ministry is phlegmatic: Move on, nothing to see here. Riyadh, significantly, has been emitting signs the OPEC+ deal may be back in the cards in the near future. A feasible scenario is that this sort of shock therapy will go on until 2022, and then Russia and OPEC will be back to the table to work out a new deal.
There are no definitive numbers, but the oil market accounts for less than 10% of Russia’s GDP (it used to be 16% in 2012). Iran’s oil exports in 2019 plunged by a whopping 70 %, and still Tehran was able to adapt. Yet oil accounts for over 50% of Saudi GDP. Riyadh needs oil at no less than $85 a barrel to pay its bills. The 2020 budget, with crude priced at $62-63 a barrel, still has a $ 50 billion deficit.
Aramco says it will be offering no fewer than 300,000 barrels of oil a day beyond its “maximum sustained capacity” starting April 1. It says it will be able to produce a whopping 12.3 million barrels a day.
Persian Gulf traders say openly that this is unsustainable. It is. But the House of Saud, in desperation, will be digging into its strategic reserves to dump as much crude as possible as soon as possible – and keep the price war full tilt. The (oily) irony is that the top price war victims are an industry belonging to the American protector.
Saudi-occupied Arabia is a mess. King Salman is in a coma. Every grain of sand in the Nefud desert knows Jared of Arabia Kushner’s whatsapp pal MBS has been de facto ruler for the past five years, but the timing of his new purge in Riyadh speaks volumes. Princes Mohammed bin Nayef, the king’s nephew, and Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, his younger brother, are now really in detention.
The CIA is fuming: Nayef was and remains Langley’s top asset. When Saudi regime spin denounced “Americans” as partners in a possible coup against MBS, that word needed to be read as “CIA.” It’s just a matter of time before the US Deep State, in conjunction with disgruntled National Guard elements, comes for MBS’s head – even as he articulates taking over total power before the G-20 in Riyadh next November.
Black Hawk down?
So what happens next? Amid a tsunami of scenarios, from New York to all points Asia, the most optimistic say that China is about to win the “people’s war” against Covid-19 – and the latest figures confirm it. In this case, global oil demand may increase by at least 480,000 barrels a day.
Well, that’s way more complicated.
The game now points to a confluence of Wall Street in panic; Covid-19 mass hysteria; lingering, myriad aftershocks of Trump’s global trade mess; the US election circus; total political instability in Europe. These interlocked crises do spell Perfect Storm. Yet the market angle is easily explained: that may be the beginning of the end of Wall Street artificially inflated by tens of trillions of US dollars pumped by the Fed through quantitative easings and repos since 2008. Call it the calling of the central bankers’ bluff.
A case can be made that the current financial panic will only subside when the ultimate black swan – Covid-19 – is contained. Borrowing from the famous Hollywood adage, “No one knows anything,” all bets are off. Amid thick fog, and discounting the usual amount of disinformation, a Rabobank analyst, among others, came up with four plausible Covid-19 scenarios. He now reckons it’s getting “ugly” and the fourth scenario – the “unthinkable” – is not far-fetched anymore.
This implies a global economic crisis of, yes, unthinkable magnitude.
To a great extent it will all depend on how fast China – the inescapable crucial link in the global just-in-time supply chain – gets back to a new normal, offsetting interminable weeks of serial lockdowns.
Despised, discriminated against, demonized 24/7 by the “system leader,” China has gone full Nietzsche – about to prove that whatever does not kill you makes you stronger when it comes to a “people’s war” against Covid-19. On the US front, there’s scant hope that the gleaming Black “helicopter money” Hawk will crash down for good. The ultimate Black Swan will have the last word.
As coronavirus panic hits the U.S., a financial lobbying group is attempting to use the crisis to push through the deregulation of its industry. The Bank Policy Institute (BPI), a Washington-based lobbying organization representing many of the nation’s largest banks, released a set of proposals this week, the most important of which recommends that the Federal Reserve lower capital requirements to zero. This would mean banks could lend an unlimited amount without having any assets or wealth to back it up. It also advocated relaxing the so-called “stress tests” that force banks to show that they can withstand economic shocks. This, it claims, would help America fight the COVID-19 virus. The report’s lead author was BPI CEO Greg Baer, former Managing Director of JP Morgan Chase.
The recommendations have been condemned as incoherent and “transparently opportunistic” by Jeremy Krass of the University of Michigan School of Business. “The whole idea of capital requirements and stress-testing banks is to make sure they have enough cushion to absorb losses” in a period of economic crisis, Kress told the Washington Post. Now that the economy has gone into a sudden shock, Wall Street wants those regulations lifted.
The government itself is also trying to force through measures that it dubiously claims would help fight the coronavirus. Earlier this week President Trump called on Congress to enact a large tax cut and pushed Democrats to support it.
These efforts perfectly encapsulate the idea of the “Shock Doctrine” that author Naomi Klein laid out in her 2007 book of the same name. Klein argued that the wealthy elite use the confusion caused by economic and other disasters to quickly force through pro-free-market legislation that would otherwise meet with widespread and coordinated opposition. As she said, “the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of [economist] Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning – this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance.”
“Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by antidemocratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market ‘reforms,’” she explained.
Klein cites Hurricane Katrina – where the Bush administration rushed through privatization and charter school bills for New Orleans while residents were reeling from the devastation – as a perfect example. Going further back, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet used his coup against President Salvador Allende to turn Chile into a free-market, neoliberal experiment almost overnight, over the protestations of ordinary Chileans, whom he suppressed with overwhelming force.
Coronavirus, the Stock Market, and the Economy – Center for Economic and Policy Research
Many people have become very concerned about the economy because of the stock market’s plunge in the last two weeks. While the spread of the coronavirus gives us very good reason to worry about the…
The stock market is in serious decline amid fears that the coronavirus will disrupt international supply chains; the Dow Jones index plummeted nearly 1,000 points yesterday. Yet, as the Center for Economic Policy Research’s Dean Baker has noted, the stock market is a very poor indicator of the economy’s current and future health. It is, however, a great gauge on how the top one percent are faring. Stocks also tend to surge after natural disasters (like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami) or when conservatives win elections (in December, British banks and weapons manufacturers’ share prices jumped after Boris Johnson beat Jeremy Corbyn). This is because corporations, ignoring the devastation, expect big orders to rebuild or to destroy.
Existential Comics@existentialcoms
News that will cause stocks to go up:
– a minimum wage increase is struck down
– employees are prevented from unionizing
– corporate taxes are reduced
– labor laws are relaxed
The stock market is not the economy, it’s an estimate of how much wealth can be extracted from workers.
Today the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide reached 100,000, with 3,461 recorded deaths. In response, the Himalayan nation of Bhutan closed its doors to tourists altogether, Starbucks announced it would no longer allow customers to use their own cups due to concern about contagion, and the world’s smallest country, the Vatican, recorded its first case of coronavirus. In the U.S., 259 people have been infected, and 14 have died.
While emergency funding to combat the virus will be passed today, the American response has not been swift. Workers have not been guaranteed full sick pay while quarantining, leading to a situation where many poorer citizens will have to choose between doing the right thing and going broke. A Miami resident returning from China was presented with a $3,500 bill after reporting his flu-like symptoms to medical staff, leading to fears that a lack of universal healthcare will help the virus spread. Analysts, however, appear more concerned about the health of stock prices than the health of the nation. CNBC’s Rick Santelli suggested infecting the entire population with COVID-19 so nobody would have an excuse to miss work, thus effectively sacrificing the country for the sake of the economy. While there are many economic steps the United States could take to help the situation, deregulating Wall Street might not be the most necessary.
There’s overwhelming just cause to impeach and remove Trump from office for legitimate high crimes.
The same is true for most of his predecessors, along with most current and former congressional members.
The Constitution’s Article II, Section 4 states “(t)he President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Evidence supporting the removal of Trump from office for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, rising to the level of impeachable offenses as constitutionally defined, is lacking — charges against him by undemocratic Dems politicized.
Unrelated to removing him from office by Senate trial, they’re all about wanting him delegitimized and weakened ahead of November 2020 elections.
Ahead of proceedings to begin on Tuesday, Trump’s legal team formally slammed what’s going on as a “brazen and unlawful attempt” to overturn results of the 2016 presidential election. More on this below.
How would Abraham Lincoln fare today. He illegally suspended the Constitution and habeas rights, forcefully closed courts, arbitrarily ordered arrests, conscripted US citizens without congressional consent, closed newspapers opposing his policies, and ordered generals to commit war crimes.
Under his command, General William Sherman’s march to the sea involved rape, pillaging and mass murder.
His Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free a single slave. He wanted them deported at war’s end to maintain America as a white supremacist society.
Glorifying him as one of the nation’s greatest presidents ignores his dark side.
History taught Americans in secondary school, college, graduate school and in doctoral studies conceals the US dark side.
Slave owners Washington, Jefferson, and other US presidents diminished their moral and ethical standing, clearly not believing that all Americans are created equal.
Despite his lofty rhetoric and intellectual pursuits, Jefferson knew slavery was wrong, but owned them anyway, never freeing them like Washington.
He had a slave as mistress and lied about it. He or Washington could have set an example by freeing the nation’s slaves, neither figure having the courage to do the right thing.
According to historian Stephen Ambrose, “(o)f all the contradictions in Jefferson’s contradictory life, none is greater,” adding:
“Of all the contradictions in America’s history, none surpasses its toleration first of slavery and then of segregation.”
Ambrose omitted endless US wars throughout most of the nation’s history — from exterminating Native Americans to ongoing war on humanity.
Washington reviled the nation’s native people, calling them “wolves” and “beasts of prey.”
He dispatched General John Sullivan to attack noncombatant Onondaga people in 1779, ordering him to destroy their villages, homes, fields, food supplies, cattle herds and orchards, wanting as many as possible killed. He stole Indian land.
Dem Woodrow Wilson’s tenure was defined by US involvement in WW I — after pledging to keep America out of Europe’s war.
It was also disgraced by signing the 1913 Federal Reserve Act into law, giving Wall Street control of the nation’s money, the supreme power above all others.
Policies under Franklin Roosevelt pressured imperial Japan to attack the US, giving FDR the war he wanted.
US history isn’t pretty, Trump the latest in a long line of presidents whose policies supported wealth, power and privilege exclusively over peace, equity and justice, notions considered un-American — based on policies pursued by its ruling class throughout US history.
The Clinton co-presidency was anti-New Deal, anti-Great Society, pro-war, pro-business, anti-populist, anti-labor, anti-public welfare.
Bush/Cheney waged US war OF terror, not on it in Afghanistan, Iraq, and against Muslims in America, numerous police state laws enacted on their watch.
Obama bragged about terror-bombing seven countries in eight years.
He institutionalized indefinite detention, authorizing the military to indefinitely detain anyone anywhere without charge, including US citizens, based on suspicions or spurious allegations.
His disposition matrix kill list ordered the elimination of alleged enemies of the state.
Trump exceeded the worst of his predecessors’ domestic and geopolitical policies — filling the swamp he pledged to drain with neocon hardliners, militarists, and super-wealthy individuals like himself.
He broke virtually everyone positive promise made, operating in bad faith, never to be trusted, while waging war on humanity at home and abroad.
Yet none of his legitimate wrongdoing is included in impeachment charges against him.
On Saturday, his legal team led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and personal attorney Jay Sekulow submitted a six-page response to impeachment charges against him — ahead of Senate trial proceedings to begin this week.
Rejecting charges by Dems, it said “articles of impeachment (they) submitted are a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their president,” adding:
“This is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election — now just months away.”
“Nothing in these Articles could permit even beginning to consider removing a duly elected President or warrant nullifying an election and subverting the will of the American people. They must be rejected.”
Rejection is virtually certain in the GOP-controlled Senate, trial proceedings likely to conclude in two or three weeks.
No president in US history was removed from office by impeachment, Trump highly unlikely to be the first.
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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
The most insidious and pervasive form of modern warfare by Wall Street and the Pentagon, acting in coordination, is passing largely unnoticed and unchallenged. This calculated attack is rolling back decades of progress in health care, sanitation, housing, essential infrastructure and industrial development all around the world.
Almost every developing country attempting any level of social programs for its population is being targeted.
U.S. imperialism and its junior partners have refined economic strangulation into a devastating weapon. Sanctions in the hands of the dominant military and economic powers now cause more deaths than bombs or guns. This weapon is stunting the growth of millions of youth and driving desperate migrations, dislocating tens of millions.
‘A crime against humanity’
Sanctions and economic blockades against Venezuela, Cuba and Iran are well known. But the devastating impacts of U.S. sanctions on occupied Palestine — or on already impoverished countries such as Mali, Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau, Kyrgyzstan, Fiji, Nicaragua and Laos — are not even on the radar screen of human rights groups.
Most sanctions are intentionally hidden; they don’t generate even a line of news. Some sanctions are quickly passed after a sudden news article about an alleged atrocity. The civilians who will suffer have nothing to do with whatever crime the corporate media use as an excuse. What are never mentioned are the economic or political concessions the U.S. government or corporations are seeking.
Sanctions cannot be posed as an alternative to war. They are in fact the most brutal form of warfare, deliberately targeting the most defenseless civilians — youth, the elderly, sick and disabled people. In a period of human history when hunger and disease are scientifically solvable, depriving hundreds of millions from getting basic necessities is a crime against humanity.
International law and conventions, including the Geneva and Nuremberg Conventions, United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, explicitly prohibit the targeting of defenseless civilians, especially in times of war.
Sanctions draw condemnation
Modern industrial society is built on a fragile web of essential technology. If pumps and sewage lines, elevators and generators can’t function due to lack of simple spare parts, entire cities can be overwhelmed by swamps. If farmers are denied seed, fertilizer, field equipment and storage facilities, and if food, medicine and essential equipment are deliberately denied, an entire country is at risk.
The Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations, Samuel Moncada, spoke to the XVIII Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement held in Baku, Azerbaijan, Oct. 26. Addressing the 120 countries represented, he denounced the imposition of arbitrary measures, called “sanctions” by the U.S., as “economic terrorism which affects a third of humanity with more than 8,000 measures in 39 countries.”
This terrorism, he said, constitutes a “threat to the entire system of international relations and is the greatest violation of human rights in the world.” (tinyurl.com/uwlm99r)
The Group of 77 and China, an international body based at the U.N. and representing 134 developing countries, called upon “the international community to condemn and reject the imposition of the use of such measures as a means of political and economic coercion against developing countries.”
The Group explained:
“The criminal, anti-human policy of targeting defenseless populations, which is in clear violation of United Nations Charter and international law, has now become the new weapon of choice for these powerful states since they are faced with strong opposition from the majority of their own population to the endless wars of occupation that they are already involved in.”
The power of banks
The mechanism and the ability of one country or one vote to destroy a country on the other side of the world are not well understood.
International capital uses the dollar system. All international transactions go through U.S. banks. These banks are in a position to block money transfers for the smallest transaction and to confiscate billions of dollars held by targeted governments and individuals. They are also in a position to demand that every other bank accept sudden restrictions imposed from Washington or face sanctions themselves.
This is similar to how the U.S. Navy can claim the authority to intercept ships and interrupt trade anywhere, or the U.S. Army can target people with drones and invade countries without even asking for a declaration of war.
Sometimes a corporate media outlet, a U.S.-funded “human rights” group or a financial institution issues charges, often unsubstantiated, of human rights violations, or political repression, drug trafficking, terrorist funding, money laundering, cyber-security infractions, corruption or non-compliance with an international financial institution. These charges become the opening wedge for a demand for sanctions as punishment.
Sanctions can be imposed through a U.S. Congressional resolution or Presidential declaration or be authorized by a U.S. government agency, such as the departments of the Treasury, Commerce, State or Defense. The U.S. might apply pressure to get support from the European Union, the U.N. Security Council or one of countless U.S.-established regional security organizations, such as the Organization of American States.
A U.S. corporate body that wants a more favorable trade deal is able to influence numerous agencies or politicians to act on its behalf. Deep-state secret agencies, military contractors, nongovernmental organizations funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, and numerous corporate-funded foundations maneuver to create economic dislocation and pressure resource-rich countries.
Even sanctions that appear mild and limited can have a devastating impact. U.S. officials will claim that some sanctions are only military sanctions, needed to block weapons sales. But under the category of possible “dual use,” the bans include chlorine needed to purify water, pesticides, fertilizers, medical equipment, simple batteries and spare parts of any kind.
Another subterfuge is sanctions that supposedly apply only to government officials or specific agencies. But in fact any and every transaction they carry out can be blocked while endless inquiries are held. Anonymous bank officials can freeze all transactions in progress and scrutinize all accounts a country holds. Any form of sanctions, even against individuals, raises the cost and risk level for credit and loans.
There are more than 6,300 names on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List of individuals sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control at the U.S. Treasury Department.
The OFAC describes its role this way:
“OFAC administers a number of different sanctions programs. The sanctions can be either comprehensive or selective, using the blocking of assets and trade restrictions to accomplish foreign policy and national security goals.”
There is also a Financial Action Task Force list and an International Traffic in Arms Regulations list.
The sanctions weapon has become so extensive that there is now a whole body of law to guide U.S. corporations and banks in navigating sales, credit and loans. It is intended to be opaque, murky and open to interpretation, payoffs and subterfuge. There seems to be no single online site that lists all the different countries and individuals under U.S. sanctions.
Once a country is sanctioned, it must then “negotiate” with various U.S. agencies that demand austerity measures, elections that meet Western approval, cuts in social programs, and other political and economic concessions to get sanctions lifted.
Sanctions are an essential part of U.S. regime change operations, designed in the most cynical way to exact maximum human cost. Sudden hyperinflation, economic disruption and unexpected shortages are then hypocritically blamed on the government in office in the sanctioned country. Officials are labeled inept or corrupt.
Agencies carefully monitor the internal crisis they are creating to determine the optimum time to impose regime change or manufacture a color revolution. The State Department and U.S. covert agencies fund numerous NGOs and social organizations that instigate dissent. These tactics have been used in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, Syria, Libya, Zimbabwe, Sudan and many other countries.
A weapon of imperialism in decline
Gone are the days of Marshall Plan-type promises of rebuilding, trade, loans and infrastructure development. They are not even offered in this period of capitalist decay. The sanctions weapon is now such a pervasive instrument that hardly a week goes by without new sanctions, even on past allies.
In October the U.S. threatened harsh sanctions on Turkey, a 70-year member of the U.S.-commanded NATO military alliance.
On Nov. 27, Trump suddenly announced, by presidential decree, harsher sanctions on Nicaragua, calling it a “National Security Threat.” He also declared Mexico a “terrorist” threat and refused to rule out military intervention. Both countries have democratically elected governments.
Other sanctions sail through the U.S. Congress without a roll call vote — just a cheer and a unanimous voice vote, such as the sanctions on Hong Kong in support of U.S.-funded protests.
Why Wall Street can’t be sanctioned
Is there any possibility that the U.S. could be sanctioned for its endless wars under the same provisions by which it has asserted the right to wreak havoc on other countries?
The Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, in November 2017 asked the Hague-based ICC to open formal investigations of war crimes committed by the Taliban, the Haqqani network, Afghan forces, and the U.S. military and the CIA.
The very idea of the U.S. being charged with war crimes led then White House National Security Advisor John Bolton to threaten judges and other ICC officials with arrest and sanction if they even considered any charge against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
“If the court comes after us, Israel or other U.S. allies, we will not sit quietly,” Bolton said. He noted that the U.S. “is prepared to slap financial sanctions and criminal charges on officials of the court if they proceed against any U.S. personnel. … We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system. … We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans.” (The Guardian, Sept. 10, 2018)
Bolton also cited a recent move by Palestinian leaders to have Israeli officials prosecuted at the ICC for human rights violations. The ICC judges got the message. They ruled that despite “a reasonable basis” to consider war crimes committed in Afghanistan, there was little chance of a successful prosecution. An investigation “would not serve the interests of justice.”
Chief Prosecutor Bensouda, for proposing an even-handed inquiry, had her U.S. visa revoked by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Sanctions are a weapon in the capitalist world order used by the most powerful countries against those that are weaker and developing. One hundred years ago, in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson advocated sanctions as a quiet but lethal weapon that exerts pressure no nation in the modernworld can withstand.
Sanctions demonstrate how capitalist laws protect the right of eight multibillionaires to own more than the population of half the world.
U.N. sanctions demanded by Washington
The U.S., with the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet and 800 military bases, claims — while engaged in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya — that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran are the greatest threats to world peace.
In the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. succeeded in winning harsh new sanctions against Iran and the DPRK by threatening, on the eve of “war games,” that the U.S. would escalate hostilities to an open military attack.
This threat proved sufficient to get other Security Council members to fall in line and either vote for sanctions or abstain.
These strong-arm tactics have succeeded again and again. During the Korean War, when the U.S. military was saturation-bombing Korea, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Warren Austin held up a submachine gun in the Security Council to demand expanded authority in the war from that body.
Throughout the 1990s the U.S. government used sanctions on Iraq as a horrendous social experiment to calculate how to drastically lower caloric intake, destroy crop output and ruin water purification. The impact of these sanctions were widely publicized — as a threat to other countries.
Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, when asked about the half a million children who died as a result of U.S. sanctions on Iraq, replied, “We think the price is worth it.”
The sanctions imposed by the U.S. against Iran are book-length, spanning 40 years since the Iranian Revolution. The blockade and sanctions on Cuba have continued for 60 years.
Sanctions Kill campaign
It is an enormous political challenge to break the media silence and expose this crime. We need to put a human face on the suffering.
Targeted countries cannot be left to struggle by themselves in isolation — there must be full solidarity with their efforts. The sheer number of countries being starved into compliance via U.S.-imposed sanctions must be dragged into the light of day. And one step in challenging the injustice of capitalist property relations is to attack the criminal role of the banks.
The effort to rally world opinion against sanctions as a war crime is beginning with a call for International Days of Action Against Sanctions & Economic War on March 13-15, 2020. Its slogans are “Sanctions Kill! Sanctions Are War! End Sanctions Now!”
These coordinated international demonstrations are a crucial first step. Research and testimony; resolutions by unions, student groups, cultural workers and community organizations; social media campaigns; and bringing medical supplies and international relief to sanctioned countries can all play a role. Every kind of political campaign to expose the international crime of sanctions is a crucial contribution.
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On the Global Research News Hour we do our best to cover a wide spectrum of topics from the environmental crisis to economic and geopolitical analysis to debunking war pre-text narratives.
“The President of the United States is a transient official in the regard of the warfare conglomerate. His assignment is to act as master of ceremonies in the awarding of posthumous medals, to serve when needed as a salesman for the military hardware manufacturers and to speak as often as possible about the nation’s desire for peace. He is not free to trespass on the preserve of the war interests nor even to acknowledge that such an organism exists.” – Jim Garrison (May 27, 1969) [1]
The murder of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 is widely recognized as a pivotal moment in U.S. history.
It was the first assassination of a U.S. president in the television age. The death of Kennedy enabled Cold Warriors within Washington to pursue their pillaging of the African, South American and Asian continents with substantially less resistance. But perhaps just as significantly, it marked an important chapter in a long-standing power struggle between big moneyed interests in America along with their intelligence operatives, and recognizable constitutional government, made up of representatives elected by the people and accountable to the public.
It was in direct response to inconvenient questions around the first Kennedy assassination that the CIA weaponized the term ‘conspiracy theory,’ a thought-stopping ad-hominem attack intended to disarm truth-seekers challenging the crimes that a controlled media fail to thoroughly investigate.
The existence of Wall Street overlords acting in tandem with military-intelligence figures as a kind of shadow government or ‘Deep State’ to appropriate the foreign policy and war-making apparatus of a country puts in doubt any assertions of America as a properly functioning democracy with power overseen and exercised by duly appointed representatives.
There have been several examples of similar State Crimes Against Democracy deliberately concealed and covered up so as to protect unaccountable elites. The assassinations of John Kennedy’s brother Robert, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, as well as the (false flag) terrorist attack known as 9/11 being among the more famous examples.
Against this backdrop, we witness the spectacle of President Trump having his authority challenged in an exhaustively publicized impeachment proceeding. Considering documented war crimes and other malfeasance committed by presidents spanning the last half century, one wonders why the particular allegations against Trump are being pursued so relentlessly, and not others. At the end of the day, impeachment or no, will the people end up with a marginally more accountable government, or will the unaccountable power behind the throne have been reinforced by this 21st Century Kabuki theater?
This week’s episode of the Global Research News Hour radio program is as much an attempt to view the current impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump through the lens of ‘deep politics’ as an anniversary commemoration of the assassination of one of America’s most popular presidents. We have taken the liberty to reach out to two authoritative scholars of events like the Kennedy assassinations and 9/11 to get their insights into what the Trump impeachment drama might mean from the stand-point of entrenched unaccountable power within the USA.
In our first half hour. We hear from writer, researcher and frequent guest Mark Robinowitz. He discloses his thoughts about how and why earnest investigators into clandestine operations implicating the Deep State get side-tracked and typically fail to achieve the changes in the political and legal system that should, in a fair world, spring from revelations of truths implicating high officials.
In our second half hour, legendary ‘Deep State’ researcher and author Professor Peter Dale Scott joins us to describe some of the characteristics all of these events have in common, he locates the commonalities between Trump and former Presidents Nixon and Kennedy, and tracks the evolution of the National Security State’s grip on power since that fatal shooting in Dallas 56 years ago.
Mark Robinowitz is a writer, political activist and ecological campaigner. He manages the sites oilempire.us and jfkmoon.org which look into the Deep Political events and how they intersect with politics, economics and ecology. He is based in Eugene, Oregon.
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Notes:
Interview with Jim Garrison, District Attorney for Parish of Orleans, Louisiana. File Reproduced at the National Archives and released June 7, 2004; 200https://statick2k-5f2f.kxcdn.com/images/pdf/garrison-interview-05-27-1969.pdf
The original source of this article is Global Research
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 