Posts
Americans have no idea, in general, about how rich the rich have actually gotten to be on their dime. Tax breaks, enormous tax cuts, writeoffs on all their expenses (with commensurate increases for the lower classes to make up that difference), and fraud have immeasureably enriched those who were already rich. And flowed down to those scoundrels making them richer.
It's a proper tale for Charles Dickens in the 21st century.
Nicholas Nickleby comes immediately to mind.
"The world already knows what sort of man I am. You cannot stain a black coat."Although A Tale of Two Cities is not far behind.
Having transformed New York and London, the wealthy are increasingly pursuing new havens. Miami is luring Argentinians, Brazilians, Chinese, Russians and French, some of whom seek refuge from political instability and higher taxes at home. The purchases go beyond the appeal of haute logos: Owning an asset priced in dollars can protect fortunes from the shrunken values of euros, pesos and rubles.
So, the country's wealth is transferred before our eyes to those more clever and connected. With little regard for legalities. Or empathy.
The American People Are Clueless: Why Income Inequality Is So Much Worse Than We Realize (Scientific American)
The average American believes that the richest fifth own 59% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% own 9%. The reality is strikingly different. The top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family, for example, has more wealth than 42% of American families combined.
America’s Super-Rich Are the Real Loafers
While poverty declined in the early years of welfare reform when the economy boomed and jobs were plentiful, it began growing in 2000. By 2012 it exceeded its level in 1996, when welfare ended.
Chossudovsky notes that progressive, left-wing, and anti-war groups have endorsed the “war on terror” and uncritically accept the official 9/11 story, which provides the basis for Washington’s wars.
Having accepted the lies, there is no basis for protest. Thus its absence.
Nomi Prins may be the toughest negotiator around. I think we need her to run for office.
I'd vote for her.
Presidents, Bankers, the Neo-Cold War and the World Bank
Nomi Prins
March 23, 2015
At first glance, the neo-Cold War between the US and its post WWII European Allies vs. Russia over the Ukraine, and the stonewalling of Greece by the Troika might appear to have little in common. Yet both are manifestations of a political-military-financial power play that began during the first Cold War. Behind the bravado of today’s sanctions and austerity measures lies the decision-making alliance that private bankers enjoy in conjunction with government and multinational entries like NATO and the World Bank.
It is President Obama’s foreign policy to back the Ukraine against Russia; in 1958, it was the Eisenhower Doctrine that protected Lebanon from a Soviet threat. For President Truman, the Marshall Plan arose partly to guard Greece (and other US allies) from Communism, but it also had lasting economic implications. The alignment of political leaders and key bankers was more personal back then, but the implications were similar to the present day. US military might protected its major trading partners, which in turn, did business with US banks. One power reinforced the other. Today, the ECB’s QE program funds swanky Frankfurt headquarters and prioritizes Germany's super-bank, Deutschebank and its bond investors above Greece’s future.
These actions, then and now, have roots in the American ideology of melding military, political and financial power that flourished in the haze of World War II. It’s not fair to pin this triple-power stance on one man, or even one bank; yet one man and one bank signified that power in all of its dimensions, including the use of political enemy creation to achieve financial goals. That man was John McCloy, ‘Chairman of the Establishment’ as his biographer, Kai Bird, characterized him. The relationship between McCloy and Truman cemented a set of public-private practices that strengthened private US banks globally at the expense of weaker, potentially Soviet (now Russian) leaning countries.
John McCloy and the World Bank Twist
In 1947, President Truman selected then-partner at a Rockefeller law firm, John McCloy, to be the second president of the World Bank (or International Bank of Reconstruction and Development) that would provide financial aid to developing nations after WWII. McCloy demanded the ability to unilaterally restructure the nascent World Bank—absent Congressional debate –such that its bonds would be sold through Wall Street banks.
That linkage altered the future of global financial relationships, by transforming the World Bank into a securities vending machine for private banks that would profit from distributing these bonds globally, while augmenting World Bank aid with private loans.
World Bank, IMF and other multinational entity decisions about aid vs. austerity or any other ‘reform’ requirements including opening border to private banks, would be controlled by the capital markets. Big private global banks arrange, underwrite and distribute World Bank bonds. Small banks in Greece did not. Financial assistance terms were established to follow a similar hierarchy.
During the Cold War, the World Bank provided funds for countries that leaned toward capitalism versus communism. Political allies of the United States got better treatment (and still do). The Nations that private bankers coveted for speculative and lending purposes saw their debt loads increase substantially and their industries privatized. Equally, the bankers decided which bonds they could sell to augment public aid funds, which meant they would have control over which countries the World Bank would support. The World Bank did more to expand US banking globally than any treaty or entity that came before it.
The Marshall Plan and Eisenhower’s Rise
Another pillar of global reconstructive and foreign policy efforts, the Marshall Plan, would provide further a ide to “friendly” countries in the early years of the Cold War. Truman unveiled the Marshall Plan in the spring of 1947. He presented it as a way to counter the threat of Communism, warning that Europe was disintegrating economically, and Truman feared Greece and Turkey would fall victim to Communist control. America’s new enemy was not Germany nor the Nazis but Communism and its associated countries.
Under the Marshall Plan, Congress approved $13 billion to aid Europe’s fight against Communism, and also to bolster prime trading partners for American industries and banks. As a result, more currencies became available for conversion into US dollars. The Marshall Plan wasn’t just about helping allies: but about spreading dollar domination.
Chase (now JPM Chase) Chairman, Winthrop Aldrich enthusiastically supported the Marshall Plan. To big banks, lending to developing nations and fighting Communism amounted to the same thing. Plus, the Marshall Plan effectively gave each major US bank its own European country to play in. From 1948 to 1952, Chase amassed the most deals in Europe, nearly $1 billion, followed by National City Bank (now Citigroup).
Eisenhower, NATO & Bankers
In 1952, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the new military alliance established between the United States, Canada, and leading Western European powers to deter Soviet expansion, and promote European political integration. NATO blended military, political, and economic power behind the mantra, “an armed attack against one or more of [the allied countries] shall be considered an attack against them all.”. In practice, what held for military support, held for opening borders to dollar based trade and private banking business, too.
In the spring of 1952 Aldrich traveled to Europe with an entourage of power brokers to persuade Eisenhower to run for president on the Republican ticket. Upon election victory, Ike’s banker sphere of appointees included his secretary of war, Thomas Gates, who would later chair the Morgan Guaranty Bank (now JPM Chase), Aldrich who became Ike’s ambassador to Great Britain, and John McCloy, who would spend the Eisenhower years as chairman of the Chase National Bank (now JPM Chase) assuming Aldrich’s role.
Beside the Marshall Plan, the Truman and Eisenhower doctrines extended US military and economic support to nations that adopted US ideology and that were military allies. Overseas offices of major US banks subsequently swelled to accommodate all the private loan demand that accompanied government support.
In 1956, W. Randolph Burgess, former National City Bank Vice President, left his Treasury Department post to become the US ambassador to NATO. By that time, the luster of NATO was fading. By 1963, Burgess noted that “the shine of postwar NATO was getting a little dull.” Stronger European countries felt less threatened by Soviet aggression and this made them less pliable to US policies. In addition, their European banks began spreading their wings globally again. The financial end of the cold war was preceding the diplomatic end by decades.
The International Bank Race
US bankers sought to compete with strengthening European banks by opening more offices overseas and by fighting to eliminate New Deal regulatory restrictions so they could grow domestically and use their size as a broader lending springboard.
Fast forward sixty years later to today , and those seeds of political-military-financial partnerships against the threat of the Soviet Union (now Russia) have sprouted to support US banks and dollar, and US monetary and fiscal policy supremacy the world over.
Much has happened in between; mass deregulation of international banking, technological advancements in trading, and the use of the World Bank (and the IMF and various central banks) to subsidize bank led speculation by submitting weak countries to austerity measures or ‘bailouts’, thereby prioritizing payments to bondholder clients of mega-banks over economic stability. The Big Six banks in the US, a subset of the 30 G-SIBs (global systemically important banks) enjoy a magnitude of government, central bank and multinational entity support that would have been unimaginable back then.
Whether it’s a $17 billion bailout package for the Ukraine. or a $270 billion one for Greece, or Obama doing a 180 on Cuba to keep Russia out, the costs of power alignments are greater than ever for the smaller, weaker countries. Their economic coffers have been pried open by the Western super-powers still calling the political, military and financial shots and again using threats of Russian ‘aggression’ to camouflage expansionary intents.
Under Obama, the US is resurrecting the Cold War and invigorating NATO by promoting the threat notion, just as Truman and Eisenhower did. Financial supremacy and currency dominance remain central to this strategy. But this time, there’s a more dangerous difference – a level of financial opposition that could become military opposition if sufficiently provoked. The counter-movement from a currency and financial perspective is comparatively small. But it’s growing. The global position of super-powers and super-banks remains at play in this newly sanctioned financial Cold War.
For more on historical foundations for present decisions, read: All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power (out now in paperback). Also, please watch my interview with Max Keiser.
You'd think that a country so mesmerized by the much-advertised necessity for higher education as the U.S. was in pre-Reagan Revolutionary times would have recognized those running for office who wanted them to have none. Or a lot less anyway.
And there is no populist movement existing now with any real strength that can resist these gentle rulers. And there's a good reason for that.
Washington and the compliant foundations now fund the dissent movement in order to control it.
Paul Craig Roberts, much-respected ex-Treasury official under Ronald Reagan, and current arch-enemy of all neocon/libs, directs our attention to Michael Chossudovsky's documentation alerting us to the pressing reality of America's wars against humanity (which prey upon the fantasies of those of little educational background).
Humanity had better smarten up.
Quickly.
Manufacturing Dissent
Paul Craig Roberts
Professor Michel Chossudovsky is the author of many important books. His latest is The Globalization of War: America’s Long War Against Humanity.
Chossudovsky shows that Washington has globalized war while the US president is presented as a global peace-maker, complete with the Nobel Peace Prize. Washington has military deployed in 150 countries, has the world divided up into six US military commands and has a global strike plan that includes space operations. Nuclear weapons are part of the global strike plan and have been elevated for use in a pre-emptive first strike, a dangerous departure from their Cold War role.
America’s militarization includes military armament for local police for use against the domestic population and military coercion of sovereign countries in behalf of US economic imperialism.
One consequence is the likelihood of nuclear war. Another consequence is the criminalization of US foreign policy. War crimes are the result. These are not the war crimes of individual rogue actors but war crimes institutionalized in established guidelines and procedures.
“What distinguishes the Bush and Obama administrations,” Chossudovsky writes, “is that the concentration camps, targeted assassinations and torture chambers are now openly considered as legitimate forms of intervention, which sustain ‘the global war on terrorism’ and support the spread of ‘Western democracy.’”
Chossudovsky points out that the ability of US citizens to protest and resist the transformation of their country into a militarist police state is limited.
Washington and the compliant foundations now fund the dissent movement in order to control it. He quotes Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman about manufacturing consent. He lets Paul Kivel describe how funding of dissent by the elite results in the co-option of grassroots community leadership. The same thing is happening to environmental organizations. Black Americans also have lost their leaders to the elite’s money and ability to bestow position and emoluments.
Chossudovsky notes that progressive, left-wing, and anti-war groups have endorsed the “war on terror” and uncritically accept the official 9/11 story, which provides the basis for Washington’s wars.
Having accepted the lies, there is no basis for protest. Thus its absence.
As Professor Stephen Cohen has observed, dissent has disappeared from American foreign policy discussion. In place of dissent there is exhortation to more war. A good example is today’s (March 26, 2015) op-ed in the "New York Times" by neoconservative John R. Bolton, US ambassador to the UN during the George W. Bush regime.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/opinion/to-stop-irans-bomb-bomb-iran.html?_r=0
Bolton calls for bombing Iran. Anything short of a military attack on Iran, Bolton says, has “an air of unreality” and will guarantee that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey will also develop nuclear weapons in order to protect themselves from Iran. According to Bolton, the Israeli and American nuclear arsenals are not threatening, but Iran’s would be.
Of course, there is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, but Bolton asserts it anyway. Moreover, Bolton manages to overlook that the agreement being worked out with Iran halts the Iranian enrichment program far below the level necessary for nuclear weapons. Bolton’s belief that Iran would be able to hide a weapons program if permitted to have nuclear energy is unsubstantiated. It is merely an implausible assertion.
The neoconservatives constitute a war lobby. When one war doesn’t work, they want another. They have an ever expanding war list. Remember, the neoconservatives are the ones who promised us a 3-week “cakewalk” Iraq war costing $70 billion and paid for by Iraq oil revenues. After 8 years of war costing a minimum of $3,000 billion paid for by US taxpayers, the US gave up and withdrew. Today jihadists are carving a new country out of parts of Syria and Iraq.
It is now a known fact that the neocon Bush regime’s Iraq war was totally based on lies, just as is every other neocon war and the current drive for war with Russia and Iran. Despite their record of lies and failure, the neocons still control US foreign policy, and neocon Nuland is busy at work fomenting “color revolutions” or coups in the former Soviet republics of Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.
Without the support of the "New York Times," the neocons could not have got the Iraq War going. Now the "New York Times," faithful to the neocons but faithless to the American people, is helping the neocons get a war going with Iran and Russia.
I have friends who are college presidents who still read and believe the "New York Times." The wars with Iran and Russia that the "New York Times" is encouraging will be much more dangerous than the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan. Humanity might not survive them
No comments:
Post a Comment