Economic reality – where it’s leading – the management of public perceptions

2009-04-20

Richard Moore


Previous posting:
not about Obama – re/ the true nature of global economics

Friends,

In the previous posting I presented an overview of the global economic situation, and gave you references to several good sources, including a really excellent talk by Michel Chossudovsky. Since then Jeff Jewell interviewed me on Vancouver radio, and I had a chance to clarify by views on where things are going under the Obama administration, economically and otherwise. Whether you agree or not, you might find this interesting, as it’s a very clear presentation of my overall analysis. Somehow it’s much faster to say things than it is to write them down:


Let me add to our references this other well-researched article that just came across my desk:
The Tower of Basel: Secretive Plans for the Issuing of a Global Currency
     The Bank of International Settlements (BIS)
by Ellen Brown
Based on all that information and analysis, and as is revealed for the most part in mainstream sources as well, I believe the following conclusions are beyond dispute:
• All Western nations have responded to the collapse with the same basic formula.
• The response begins with massive bailouts, measured in hundreds of billions of dollars.
• The bailout liabilities essentially transfer insolvency from the banks to the governments.
• This creates a long-term fiscal crisis, requiring ongoing borrowing and austerity budgets.
• Officials everywhere say we’re in for increased austerity later, or we won’t be able to borrow.
• The justification given for this formula is that it will revive economic growth, eventually.
• Growth in the real global economy has been stagnant for decades.
The final point, about real growth, is very important to keep in mind. There is no acknowledgement of this fact in the media discussion of the financial situation. There is no distinction made between the era of real growth that we experienced after World War 2, and the era of finance-speculation-based growth that we’ve experienced since the 1970s. When you understand this distinction, then it becomes clear that restoring economic growth, in any substantial way, simply isn’t going to happen. And when you consider the ecological angle, with resource scarcities mounting, the impossibility of restoring a growth-based global economy becomes even clearer. Furthermore, with governments and citizens strapped by debt, and with austerity budgets, we have the worst possible scenario for restoring any kind of economic functioning.
Regardless of whether this was all planned, or happened by accident, we are currently in a dead-end situation. The recession is only beginning to take effect. Decreasing sales and exports, plant closures, small-business failures, increasing unemployment, more credit defaults, and declining tax revenues — all these things make up a positive feedback loop, and a spiraling downward to a severe global depression and frightening social conditions. We can expect large-scale unemployment, poverty, and homelessness — like in the Great Depression of the 1930s. There’s also the likelihood of considerable social unrest, and there have already been food riots and anti-government riots in various parts of the world.
It might be interesting if some of you sent in stories of how the collapse has affected you or your friends personally, if it has yet. As it effects more and more families directly, and as overall conditions get worse, there will obviously be increasing public demands for governments to do something. The worse it gets, the greater will be the public outcry for something to be done. And yet strapped governments will have little ability to stem the tide, particularly when protectionism is a strong taboo. Their response to widespread unrest will necessarily focus on keeping people under control, maintaining civil order, while being unable to significantly improve social conditions. This will of course lead to deeper anti-government sentiment, requiring more repressive measures to maintain order, and again we have an ominous feedback loop.
I do not believe that this downward social spiral will be allowed to continue indefinitely. There are people who have the power to do something to stop it, and it is not in their interest for civilization to descend into perpetual chaos. In this regard, the article mentioned above, about the Basel-based Bank of International Settlements, is very relevant. The BIS is the central bank of the central banks, where global financial policy is established. In fact, the recent collapse was triggered when the BIS decreed a mark to market requirement on the world’s financial institutions. That’s the kind of power the BIS has, and it is independent of any government. In the article we read:
When the world’s central bankers met in Washington last September, they discussed what body might be in a position to serve in that awesome and fearful role [as global central bank].  A former governor of the Bank of England stated: “[T]he answer might already be staring us in the face, in the form of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS)…
… the real business gets done [in] “a sort of inner club made up of the half dozen or so powerful central bankers who find themselves more or less in the same monetary boat” – those from Germany, the United States, Switzerland, Italy, Japan and England.  Epstein said:

  “The prime value, which also seems to demarcate the inner club from the rest of the BIS members, is the firm belief that central banks should act independently of their home governments. . . . A second and closely related belief of the inner club is that politicians should not be trusted to decide the fate of the international monetary system.”
So in fact we already have a global central bank, totally independent of governments. In addition, emerging out of the recent G20 meeting, we have the IMF creating $250 billion of credit out of thin air in the form of SDRs, and we have a new global agency, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), chartered to define the regulatory regime for the world’s financial institutions. And this whole apparatus was created and is controlled by a clique of central bankers who see their province as being above that of governments. None of this is a conspiracy theory. It’s simply a description of how things are today, and it’s all available in mainstream sources. The material I have cited above includes lots of references and footnotes, and I’ve been posting dozens of corroborating articles to newslog.
Putting it all together, we have a clique of central bankers who are holding governments in a no-win downward spiral debt crisis, and who are at the same time preparing a new financial infrastructure that would have the ability to offer a way out of the quagmire. While governments lack the resources to mount an effective recovery program, these central bankers do have the resources, because they have the power to create credit out of nothing.
There is a lot of confusion about the relationship between fiat money and financial stability. It turns out that the basis of a a money system is not really that important, as regards basic stability. What’s important is the size of the money supply, and credit policy. If those are managed wisely, either by policy in the case of a fiat currency, or by scarcity in the case of a gold standard, then the currency can function effectively and there can be financial stability. A fiat currency is more easily abused than a gold-standard currency of course, but it need not be abused, not if there is a will to manage it conservatively on the part of those doing the managing.
When conditions get considerably worse, and governments are failing to deal with the situation, people will be eager to accept any plan that sounds reasonable, and that offers credible promise of salvation from the economic quagmire. And the central bankers would have every reason to put forward such a plan, when the outcry for change gets loud enough. With government treasuries saddled by debt, and existing currencies most likely suffering from serious inflation or deflation, the obvious proposal will be to introduce a new global currency, to promise that it will be managed conservatively, and to offer to infuse the global banking system with a huge amount of credit in this new currency. And with their control over the various national central banks, the same clique can ensure that the banks really do use the new credit to get a recovery program going. 
The central bankers have the professional competence to proceed with such a program; they have established the necessary institutional infrastructures, and government leaders have clearly placed their faith in these people as regards our financial future. When the media starts telling the public about the bold new plan to bring about recovery, with all the pundits supporting it, and everyone desperate for salvation, how could the (mostly corrupt anyway) governments fail to accept the central banker’s plan? 
There would be some protests about loss of economic sovereignty, but those would be dismissed as parochial, in the same way that objections to increased power for Brussels have been dismissed in the EU. There would also be some serious reservations, in some cases, among national elites regarding loss of economic sovereignty (eg, Conservative Republicans, China). That’s why the proposal will be held in reserve, until the pressure for change becomes a major crisis for governments. This is also why a few more influential nations are being invited to send their finance ministers to participate some of the new global institutions. 
This analysis has not been based on any theories about long-range planning or conspiracies. It’s based on the realities of the current central banking system, on the institutional changes the central bankers have recently made, and on the realities of the predicament national treasuries are now facing. Regardless of how we got here, this is the situation we are now in, according to all the evidence I’ve seen. A bailout from the bailouts will be required if any kind of recovery is to be achieved, and today’s central bankers, in the face of today’s circumstances, are preparing such a bailout, a solution that will give them direct control over the global financial regime, independent of all national governments.
I’m not saying this will be entirely a bad thing, particularly compared to the the hopeless austerity future we’re facing at the moment. It will be possible to get economies going again, but this won’t be based on growth in the same way it has been. It will be more like a command economy, with the central bankers deciding what kids of development projects, infrastructure projects, and industries will be allocated credit, and on what terms. Such ventures will still operate on a profit principle, and individual enterprises will seek growth, but the overarching organizing principle of the economy will be intentional management, not market forces. Again, these conclusions are not based on conspiracy revelations, but rather on the realities of economics when perpetual growth has reached its limits, and on the prerogatives that the central bankers have at their disposal.
This is not at all a future I would like to see happen. I see it as grotesque, as serfdom. But its only a difference in degree and form from what we have now, not a difference in kind. And unfortunately people will get used to it and the next generation will forget there was anything else. History books will call what went before a ‘period of chaos’ before ‘world order was finally achieved’. 
Given such a scenario, it is easy to understand why right-wingers think of a banker-controlled world as being communistic. They see the ‘command economy’ part, and for them that spells communism. But in fact the banker-world lacks the social responsibility component of the idealistic communist vision, and it lacks the prohibition of private exploitation that marked the Soviet version of communism. So the new order isn’t communistic at all. But it is, in essence, dictatorial. It could be very pleasant, or very unpleasant, depending on how the central bankers decide to manage it. Most likely the first launch of the new currency and the new financial regime will be greeted with enthusiasm, and we’ll see people going back to work, and things getting moving again, although not like before. Gratitude will be the overwhelming sentiment, as is felt at the end of a war.
Now let’s turn to the question of how we got to our recent state of affairs. In particular, let’s focus on Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, and the circle of Wall Street insiders they’ve gathered around themselves in the Obama administration. I think the following statements are clearly established by the preceding evidence and analysis, regarding this group of people, who routinely shuttle between jobs in Wall Street and Washington:
• While in government, they deregulated the financial markets and handcuffed regulatory agencies.
• While working in Wall Street, they designed the derivative instruments enabled by the deregulation.
• They aggressively  marketed those derivatives, knowing they were worthless, along with fraudulent insurance.
• As participants in BIS, they then punctured the bubble they had created, with the mark to market rule.
     • As government advisors, they then insisted that bailouts were the only response to the collapse.
     • They are now in charge of running the US economy, as their colleagues are in charge elsewhere.
     • As central-bank insiders, they are active participants in designing of the new financial infrastructures.
     • While in government, they will be in position to advise governments to accept the banker’s recovery plan.
• As central-bank insiders, they will be privileged players in that new financial regime.
I think it is pretty clear that this whole collapse scenario has been orchestrated by such insiders, in response to the unsustainability of the growth model, and in order to preserve the position of power and influence that the central bankers have managed to achieve over the past centuries of growth-based capitalism. None of this argument is based on an assumption of any long-range conspiracies. The assumption is simply that these insiders have been coy about their plans for the past few decades, as they scrambled to maintain growth in the economy.
So we’re left with a situation, as I see it, where a new world order is being installed; it will be under the control of central bankers; it is being done by stealth; and whether he realizes what’s going on or not, Obama is the main global salesman at the moment for continuing on this path. None of what I’m saying is based on right-wing sources, or on long-range conspiracy theories. It is based on an assumption of normal administrative discretion, solid documented evidence presented by academically qualified researchers, and extended by my own analysis, which is out in the open for you to evaluate. However, what I’m saying is quite different than what you see in the mainstream liberal media. Even though most of the evidence can be found in that media, the conclusions that Chossudovsky, and I, and many others are drawing from that evidence would be quite beyond the pale on those channels.
Meanwhile, consider what we’re seeing recently on Fox News, and what we’re hearing from Alex Jones. To liberal and progressive audiences, Jones and the folks at Fox are crazies. They are against gun control, they see all kinds of conspiracies everywhere, they hate immigrants, they tend to be racist and anti-semitic, they deny global warming, they don’t seem particularly well-educated, and they sound like their personalities were paranoid from birth. And yet over these channels, it so happens that part of what we’re hearing is also the truth about the new world order. Jones’ charts about the banking hierarchy are more or less accurate. His predictions about a stealth central-banker regime are right in line with what serious analysts are also saying, but who aren’t getting any airtime in the liberal media.
So we have an ironic situation where publishing the truth, provided that is done in right wing channels by right wing voices, embedded within right-wing nonsense, succeeds in hiding the truth from the liberal majority: If a crazy like Alex Jones shouts it through his bull horn, and puts it on his conspiracy-theory website, the idea of a new world order has got to be nonsense. No sensible, educated person can take that kind of ranting seriously
It is important to note here who it is that owns Fox News. Rupert Murdoch is not an enemy of the central-banker’s agenda. He goes to the Bilderberger meetings, and is very much part of the insider circles whose most inner circle is the central-banking clique. The last thing Murdoch would want to do is upset that apple cart. His decision to run stories about the new world order, mixed in with his right-wing propaganda, is a deliberate project, intended to help polarize left and right audiences, and to prevent liberals and progressives from recognizing where we’re headed. He’s playing his part, in his special way, within the overall matrix of media propaganda — a matrix that is orchestrated by the same central-banker insider clique.
rkm

___________________________


Share: