Monday, October 29, 2012

monetary fascism - the rise of the financial industrial congressional complex

counterpunch | Challenging Monetary Fascism is much more dangerous for political leaders representing countries outside the G-20.  Populist leaders who put forward Nationalist policies are automatically in violation of one or more international ‘free trade’ agreements.  Non-conformity with these agreements ultimately results in trade sanctions, IMF or World Bank imposed austerity, or worse…

Friedman’s ideology is global and his rules of ‘free trade’ are deeply integrated into the laws of international trade.  All of our Nation’s international treaties on trade and banking are a series of interlocking agreements that force all nations to subvert their sovereignty and conform to Monetary Fascism.  It is a global pandemic built on a world-wide transmission system with universal powers of enforcement.  Sovereign Nations comply or they lose their credit rating.  Considering the world wide mass escalation of debt to GDP for most western nations, a small increase in the cost of borrowing would easily result in default and bankruptcy.
Today, Nation States face nothing less than financial Armageddon – the Sampson Option, if they do not comply with the demands of the global banking industry.  And it is with this weapon that the Financial Class has come to dominate the State.

Forget Al Qaeda, the only legitimate threat to U.S. and international security is the financial class.  They have created Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction (Financial WMDs) and they stand ready to take down the world economy.  They are more dangerous than any ‘terrorist group’, or even all of the ‘terrorist groups combined.

Exaggeration – consider what Friedman’s ‘free market’ banking system has done to Iceland, Ireland, Spain, Greece, Estonia, etc.  How many western nations has Islam overthrown?  Not one, and by comparison that should scare you.

Money has become the state and the traditional state is forced to serve money’s interests.  Everywhere the Financial Class is openly lording over sovereign nations.  Ireland, Greece and Spain are subject to ultimatums and remember Hank Paulson’s $700 billion extortion from the U.S. Congress.  The $700 billion was just the wedge.  Thanks to unlimited access to the Discount Window, Quantitative Easing and other taxpayer funded debt-swap bailouts the total transfers to the financial industry exceeded $16 trillion as of July 2010 according to a Federal Reserve Audit.  All of this was dumped on the taxpayer and it is still growing.

Why must the people of Ireland or Iceland accept the losses of the private banking sector as a public obligation?  Why must Greece accept austerity because its politician’s entered into a series of deals structured by Goldman Sachs specifically designed to deceive its EU partners?  If Goldman Sachs authored documents with the intent of fraud then Goldman Sachs is required to bear the losses and prosecution.  The taxpayer had no hand in this.

It is breathtaking.  Within the last 40 years ‘money’ has gained total control of each and every one of us.  Generations to come will enter this world burdened with the debts of their fathers.  It is inescapable and ubiquitous.  More than just a spider’s web, or a money-sucking vampire squid, it is a global pandemic that infects our very DNA.  It is the Original Sin of money – subject to compound interest, converted into a derivative, hypothecated and rolled into a CMO and then leveraged through CDSs.

The uber-wealthy will continue to aggregate wealth.  The banking system will continue to make ‘risk free bets,’ booking gains and shifting the losses to the public.  As these losses accumulate on the public balance sheet the state will be forced to seek austerity measures from the public. As austerity and debt levels increase the global economy will continue ‘circling of the bowl’ with increasing speed until we suddenly plunge into the vortex.

37 comments:

Fred Ceely said...

Sad, but true, from A to Z. And the backdrop for all of this is the greatest increase in worker productivity in history, with zero of the benefit accruing to the workers. Lovely times we live in, like the punchline of a joke I heard in high school: charming, bloody charming. It's almost enough to make a man bitter, eh? CNu?

umbrarchist said...

NAZInomics

umbrarchist said...

So what has stopped the workers from telling each other that they should all know double-entry accounting?

http://www.toxicdrums.com/economic-wargames-by-dal-timgar.html

CNu said...

Who'da thunk that totalitarianism is the necessary precursor to the restoration of feudalism?

umbrarchist said...

It is not the -isms that matter. It is millions of human beings gaming with each other when the game is not even properly explained to most of them.

http://www.toxicdrums.com/economic-wargames-by-dal-timgar.html


The worst thing is that physical reality does not care about human games. If we wreck the planet so billions of people cannot survive then what will the -isms matter? It will just make the games more intense. I wonder if there is a player who wants just that.

CNu said...

The biggest part of the game is apprehension of the rules. Even if these humans "wreck the planet", broadly speaking - there will be pockets of human survivors - you can bank on that.

Big Don said...

Survivors, perceptive and future-time-oriented, will be disproportionately skewed to the right-hand side of The Bell Curve...

Jonathan Wagner said...

I agree we are facing some serious financial problems, but I want to point a common flaw I see every time I hear the "we are enslaved to money". Short of absolute super abundance, which we don't actually have yet, we will always be slaves to work. You take away all the means of production from the rich and do a distribution, then what? It is almost as if people think that if you were to do a wealth redistribution people would become free. Someone would still need to make the food and the cars etc and ultimately without super abundance you would essentially just have a reduction of luxury items, since it is a physical impossibility for every one to be driving around in a Ferrari. A preemptive acceleration towards socialism will decrease our acceleration towards super abundance.

Money doesn't produce anything, people do. Give someone unlimited money and they can't build another earth, it is a logical impossibility (right now). The 1% don't proportionally spend as much as they earn. In fact, if anything, they mostly act as a deflationary force against all the money the government keeps printing. If they're a million times richer, they don't buy a million cars. It's an absurdity to believe that money equals physical goods and that some form or any form of redistribution would give us more freedom. Fiat money would automatically adjust to any form of redistribution in the form of inflation.

Also, without super abundance, if you do a complete reset you will have currencies reemerge since certain skills and items will inherently be more valuable then others. If you're a doctor you will end up with more chickens and slaves then the next guy, you don't need money to be considered rich. This hyperbolic polarized philosophies of Ayn Rand/Karl Marx is just getting tired. Ultimately the current financial system will collapse, all the debt will be mostly wiped, and we will continue on our marry way. The Jews, at least in the past, did complete debt forgiveness every 7 years. A complete financial collapse would not make planes fall out of the sky, they don't run on cash, they run on oil.

The break to perfect socialism will more then likely happen after a series of revolutions in other spaces outside of anything to do with money. 3D printing, health revolutions, robotic automation etc.. Contrary to what Marx taught, the proletariat will not cease the means of production, they won't have to. Everyone will have all the means of production in their front room.

CNu said...

uh.., before we endeavor to unpack anything else you wrote above Jonathan, you don't see the very concept of "absolute super abundance" as a hole in your own conceptual bucket - something sorta-kinda out of the mythical "genie in a lamp" realm of magical thinking?

Dale Asberry said...

It's not -- low energy economics is the necessary precursor. Totalitarianism is just a useful tool for those that are sitting on the energy to put themselves in place of power once feudalism comes.

Dale Asberry said...

It seems to be more in the "Star Trek Replicator" realm of magical thinking. Jonathan, the common flaw pointed out in these parts is due to dopamine hegemony. Plenty of material around here to get you started on that journey -- strongly recommended before you get intellectually eviscerated...

Dale Asberry said...

Bzzzt. ...although coupled with "perceptive" a necessary and sufficient quality has been posted and discussed here lately...

CNu said...

Those who sit on the energy are already in power, it's just that they're constrained by law to exercise that power rather subtly - through proxies. Lowered energy economics are an inevitability.



So to me, the transition from bourgeois idealism and violence avoidance - with an extremely liminal undercurrent of elite/proprietary violence and state-mediated violence by proxy - to the naked violence of feudal warlordism - is going to take quite a bit more social engineering.

arnach said...

The matrix reloaded or the miseducation of Barack Obama:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/11/20121117172537848.html

Dale Asberry said...

Mebbe... or, they're already encouraging the individualistic, home-protecting, gun-toting to start shooting one another. Hell, they even make good money selling all those bullets!

DD said...

Full contact, A-game mental jousting. Mount up, buckaroo.

Energy use per capita. To quote our stern but kind host, everything else is just conversation.

Take a run through the link at the bottom, Hypertiger Wisdom. Boss didn't say it, but welcome to the spot!

Dale Asberry said...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/quotes?qt=qt0482733

CNu said...

Lol, and there I thought you were throwing a rope to our petulant bondage master...,

Jonathan Wagner said...

Sorry I wasn't notified of replies. That is why I said short of, meaning an impossibility. There will never be the absolution of labor because super abundance will never exist within the confines of our reality. While I was some what long winded, the jist of my argument is this liberal usage of the term enslavement. It seems to me that the word enslavement is used in the context of modern day extremist socialists to define a magical amount of further freedom. If we want to talk about the magical realm of thinking, the socialist extreme is just as wildly magical.

Most arguments I have seen are highly philosophical and theoretical and simply skirt around the actual implications of reality. What would a day look like for a human being in a socialist utopia, I am not being sarcastic, I really would like for someone to define it for me. Assuming every single socialist policy could be implemented in its purest form, and there was no form of political restriction and the ultimate class equalization could occur, as Karl Marx would like it, what would my day be like?

Jonathan Wagner said...

Dopamine is released whenever anyone does anything they believe values themselves. Saying that seeking dopamine is the reason for all our problems is on the same level as saying that humanity is responsible for all human problems. We are all dopamine and endorphin addicts and it has little to do with consumerism, it has everything to do with accomplishment. Without these chemicals there wouldn't be a human race because no one would have sex. Without these chemicals there would be very little motivation to do anything. A monkey discovering a new tree of Apples would causes a variety of different chemicals to be released.

The ego, hoarding, and selfishness is not caused by consumerism. In my opinion, attempts at extreme equalization exasperate the negative aspects of the human ego.

CNu said...

It seems to me that the word enslavement is used in the context of modern day extremist socialists to define a magical amount of further freedom. If we want to talk about the magical realm of thinking, the socialist extreme is just as wildly magical.Not at all sure what you're talking about here, could you help us out with a specific example of "further freedom" or two?Assuming every single socialist policy could be implemented in its
purest form, and there was no form of political restriction and the
ultimate class equalization could occur, as Karl Marx would like it,
what would my day be like?lol, I have no earthly idea. This isn't a socialist or techocracy site. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool fan of Edo period feudalism and the zero population growth model demonstrated by 3.5 million extreme warrior-culture samurai.

Jonathan Wagner said...

The further freedom is usually defined by a higher quality of life for everyone and shorter working days.

If you're a fan of feudalism, I can't really debate that. That's really a personal preference thing, though I don't think it would be very enjoyable. A lot of Amish seem to prefer that life style though.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1605783/quotes?qt=qt1534230

CNu said...

If you're a fan of feudalism, I can't really debate that. That's really a personal preference thing


It's less a personal preference thing than an historical realist thing. See, feudalism never went away, instead, it faded into the background while in the foreground, pseudo-democratic, bourgeois, governance frameworks were established to distract the attention of the masses away from the underlying fact of proprietary governance.



Explicit, proprietary, governance seems preferable to me than the fraudulent alternatives that were on display center-stage this past week.

Dale Asberry said...

Then it looks like you dopamine spurted all over the place!

Dale Asberry said...

BTW, not everyone is a dopamine addict - think neuroatypicals. So, quit the bullshit, "but everybody does it!" line. Some people are literally nauseated by it all which begs that there is some sort of baseline, "healthy", dopamine level.


Plus, all you're doing here is flapping your lips with calming self-talk (opinions). Hey, at least BD -- our resident racist nutter butter -- goes to the effort of bringing peer reviewed research around!

CNu said...

Peacefully grant the State of Louisiana to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government. https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-louisiana-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/1wrvtngl

Dale Asberry said...

Signed! Easier and cheaper than peacefully shooting them in their sleep!

Dale Asberry said...

http://www.examiner.com/article/15-states-including-texas-have-filed-a-petition-to-secede-from-the-united-states-1

makheru bradley said...

Interposition and Nullification on the horizon. That swath of red states in the middle of the country should provide plenty of Lebensraum for Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Rove, and Donnie.

Jonathan Wagner said...

http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1038/nrn3194

Jonathan Wagner said...

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/13/3/900

Jonathan Wagner said...

http://www.sfn.org/index.aspx?pagename=news_050112
http://healthland.time.com/2012/05/02/your-drive-to-compete-may-be-down-to-dopamine/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17072591
This study illustrates that dopamine seems to be linked more to wanting then liking (pleasure).

Jonathan Wagner said...

So I actually didn't know very much about the edo period. After doing some research, I can't really see a difference between a daimyo and the bourgeois. A small collection of feudal lords, and then everyone else as four classes of peasants. Personal merit was dismissed for inheritance.

What about this system specifically do you find more preferable?

CNu said...

lol, broad license to execute less competent adversaries in the street and the concomitant 350 year span of zero human population growth on the Japanese islands that that instantaneous Darwinian feedback system yielded..., ("adversary" is pretty much a catch-all)

Dale Asberry said...

Yes, and...?

If you had taken my original suggestion you would've seen that you're at least 5 years late with all a' that here on this blog and with even a minimal amount of digging that I have been investigating it since 2000ish and CNu likely much longer than that.


I've given you plenty of clues, now piss off until you can add to the conversation.

Jonathan Wagner said...

Doesn't it feel great to attempt to berate people? It's almost like you have a deep strong motivation for validating yourself. I am sure dopamine and endorphines have nothing to do with this right. That adrenaline rush you got when you told me to piss off. Man you're awesome.

If I had to choose between people getting addicted to buying things, or self-righteous people trying to vilify a chemical that is responsible for everything from eating to pissing. I would choose consumerism.

Anonymous said...

MjhZsu [url=http://chaneljponline.org/]シャネル 化粧品[/url] DegWaz http://chaneljponline.org/ GhtBji [url=http://www.coachjpsales.net/]コーチ 財布[/url] YdsRuh http://www.coachjpsales.net/ AhdSuq [url=http://pradasjapan.net/]プラダ バッグ[/url] JgbLac http://pradasjapan.net/ WovMxl [url=http://coachonsales.org/]コーチ バッグ[/url] VtoYsm http://coachonsales.org/

When Zakharova Talks Men Of Culture Listen...,

mid.ru  |   White House spokesman John Kirby’s statement, made in Washington shortly after the attack, raised eyebrows even at home, not ...