“The
ascendance of finance in recent decades has oriented understanding of
‘the economy’ toward financial terms and policies. The Federal
Reserve at the heart of ‘monetary’ policy in the U.S. is a
public- private consortium run by bankers in the interests of Wall
Street. The history of Fed policies in the modern era, from the end
of WWII to the present, is of engineering periodic recessions to
protect bank ‘assets’ from depreciation through inflation.”
“When
considered in historical context Mr. Volcker’s actions were at the
vanguard of the corporate-capitalist coup that goes far in explaining
present circumstance.”
“That
Fed Chair Volcker was appointed by Democrat President Jimmy Carter in
the midst of broad moves to ‘de-regulate’ the U.S. economy and
the wholesale abandonment of the Keynesian policies that had guided
the U.S. since the Great Depression is more than an accident of
history. The epic that followed, finance capitalism, is still under
way and it represents a series of manufactured crises in support of a
financial plutocracy."
"Mr.
Volcker was a former banker and the confluence of circumstances that
contributed to public acceptance of barely plausible explanations of
the events of the 1970s, the roots-genesis of current circumstance,
were contrived and sold with the goals of breaking organized labor
and creating-recreating the system of economic expropriation through
finance that preceded the Great Depression."
"The first
‘tool’ used was the sequential energy ‘crises’ that began
with multi-national oil companies holding oil supplies offshore under
the misdirection that an ‘Arab oil embargo’ was the cause of
suddenly reduced energy supply. The Iranian Revolution later in the
decade was a real but geopolitical, not economic, explanation of
energy shortages. The OPEC ‘cartel’ members initially in favor of
withholding oil from the U.S., Iran and Venezuela, were supporting
U.S. geopolitical interests in the early-mid 1970s. (Oil prices have
international consequence). The engineered energy ‘crises’ did
cause a rise in ‘inflation,’ but the term is wholly misleading as
economic explanation.”
“By
raising interest rates Mr. Volcker attracted international capital
chasing high yields on U.S. assets and raised the value of the U.S.
dollar. In conjunction with sequential energy ‘crises’ Mr.
Volcker effectively killed the industrial economy by making U.S.
goods more expensive overseas. The massive industrial unemployment
that resulted took place at the precise time of pivot toward
financialization of ‘the economy.’"
"The
misdirection put forward then and now was that factories were closing
because U.S. labor was too expensive and that U.S. factories were no
longer ‘competitive.’ To be clear, the currency exchange rate
determined the ‘price’ of U.S. labor relative to overseas labor
and this is the ‘price’ that was dramatically raised by Mr.
Volcker. Upon Ronald Reagan’s election the process of
financializing the economy was moved further forward through Mr.
Reagan’s appointment of ex-Merrill Lynch banker Don Regan as
Secretary of the Treasury.”
“The
distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ unemployment is
a dim hoax designed to convince workers who are being screwed that it
is ‘nature’ doing the screwing when it is specific industrialists
and financiers who are doing it and particular economists who are
mystifying the process.”
“And by
putting forward discussion of ‘inflation’ framed as a
relationship between ‘real’ prices and employment the mainstream
has supported the banker economics of the Federal Reserve in
regularly and needlessly increasing unemployment and it has directed
attention away from the role of bank money, leverage and financial
asset price inflation in the massive concentration of ‘wealth’
that has taken place since the 1970s.”
“In
other words, radical economic redistribution schemes are not only
feasible, we’ve seen one of the greatest demonstrations of radical
redistribution in human history over the last thirty or so years.
Rarely in human history have so few ‘owned’ so much. And the
Federal Reserve has been at the heart of that ‘success’ story.”
Full
article and graphs:
Related:
“... if more money were going to the market, then they would lose
much of their value and we would lose profits because we are the ones
who print money! That's why we invented inflation, to keep
governments in fear and directing money back to us through the
so-called Quantitative Easing Policies. [...] When money start to
spread in the society 'above acceptable limits', we create
financial crises to take them back. We dictate governments to take
measures and apply austerity policies directing money back to us. We
keep money valuable to everyone and secure our profits.”
Comments
Post a Comment