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2008 capitalism died: Money Scam, cornerstone of our slavery
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Whitehall_Bin_Men
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 04, 2017 8:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

At the heart of a rotten system
Is a basic rotten lie
Repeated like a mantra
On BBC and Sky

There Is No Alternative
We must live with in our means
So cut your cloth accordingly
And set aside your dreams

Education fueled by debt
Feeds parasites in banks
No money for a hospital
But plenty spare for tanks

No money left for libraries
Or to care for the old and needy
But plenty left for Trident
And bonuses for the greedy

But when do we hear the question
In the House or in the press?
Where does money come from?
The root of our distress

What is this magic substance
That can cultivate or kill
That can build a home or smash it
That can work for good or ill?

Is there a magic money tree
In some walled-off sacred wood?
Or does government create it
In the name of the public good?

We never hear the question
In case we get upset
For the truth is banks create it
Out of pure fresh air as debt.

We can't run out of money
As some letters might suggest
And before we get to tax it
First we must invest.

So next a time a politician
Tells you money has run out
Ask then where it comes from
And watch them fill with doubt

And if they try to dodge your question
Keep on til they reply
There is no more vital matter
It is why we live or die.

_________________
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'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com
http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 24, 2017 6:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

'Quantitative Easing, The Largest Transfer Of Wealth In History':
http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/07/24/quantitative-easing-the-larg est-transfer-of-wealth-in-history/

'....Given that – judged by its official aims – QE has been a total failure, this makes perfect sense. By ‘injecting’ money into the economy, QE was supposed to get banks lending again, boosting investment and driving up economic growth. But overall bank lending in fact fell following the introduction of QE in the UK, whilst lending to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) – responsible for 60 percent of employment – plummeted.

As Laith Khalaf, a senior analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, has noted: “Central banks have flooded the global economy with cheap money since the financial crisis, yet global growth is still in the doldrums, particularly in Europe and Japan, which have both seen colossal stimulus packages thrown at the problem.”

Even Forbes admits that QE has “largely failed in reviving economic growth”.

This is, or should be, unsurprising. QE was always bound to fail in terms of its stated aims, because the reason banks were not funneling money into productive investment was not because they were short of cash – on the contrary, by 2013, well before the final rounds of QE, UK corporations were sitting on almost £1/2trillion of cash reserves – but rather because the global economy was (and is) in a deep overproduction crisis. Put simply, markets were (and are) glutted and there is no point investing in glutted markets.

This meant that the new money created by QE and ‘injected’ into financial institutions – such as pension funds and insurance companies – was not invested into productive industry, but rather went into stock markets and real estate, driving up prices of shares and houses, but generating nothing in terms of real wealth or employment.

Holders of assets such as stocks and houses, therefore, have done very well out of QE, which has increased the wealth of the richest 5 percent of the UK population by an average of £128,000 per head.

How can this be? Where does this additional wealth come from? After all, while money – contrary to Tory sloganeering – can indeed be created ‘out of thin air’, which is precisely what QE has done, real wealth cannot. And QE has not produced any real wealth. Yet the richest 5 percent now have an extra £128,000 to spend on yachts, mansions, diamonds, caviar and so on. So where has it come from?

The answer is simple. The wealth which QE has passed to asset-holders has come, first of all, directly out of workers’ wages. QE, by effectively devaluing the currency, has reduced the buying power of money, leading to an effective decrease in real wages, which, in the UK, still remain 6 percent below their pre-QE levels. The money taken out of workers’ wages therefore forms part of that £128,000 dividend. But it has also come from new entrants to the markets inflated by QE – primarily, first time buyers and those just reaching pension age.

Those buying a house (which QE has made more expensive), for example, will likely have to work thousands of additional hours over the course of their mortgage in order to pay this increased cost. It is those extra hours that are creating the wealth which subsidizes the spending spree for the richest 5 percent. Of course, these increased house prices are paid by anyone purchasing a house, not only first time buyers – but the additional cost for existing homeowners is compensated for by the rise in price of their existing house (or by their shares for those wealthy enough to hold them).

QE also means that newly retiring pensioners are forced to subsidize the 5 percent. New retirees use their pension pot to purchase an ‘annuity’ – a bundle of stocks and shares generating dividends which serve as an income. However, as QE has inflated share prices, the number of shares they can buy with this pot is reduced. And, as share price increases do not increase dividends, this means reduced pension payments.

In truth, the story that QE was about encouraging investment and boosting employment and growth was always a fantastical yarn designed to disguise what was really going on – a massive transfer of wealth to the rich.

As economist Dhaval Joshi put it in 2011: “The shocking thing is, two years into an ostensible recovery, [UK] workers are actually earning less than at the depth of the recession. Real wages and salaries have fallen by £4bn. Profits are up by £11bn. The spoils of the recovery have been shared in the most unequal of ways......................”

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PostPosted: Mon Jul 31, 2017 11:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

9/11 to Armageddon: Bankers Plan Wars - William Stuart
YouTube - 30 Mar 2014

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB-4O5C2hVw

_________________
--
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com
http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 01, 2017 10:14 pm    Post subject: 9-11 to Armageddon, Bankers Plan Wars Reply with quote

9-11 to Armageddon, Bankers Plan Wars
William Stuart 9 11 to Armageddon Bankers Plan Wars Interview by Janie Full Version

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLGZbg4u0Yo

Janie of Taxfree UK 15 interviews William Stuart on his latest book: 9-11 to Armageddon, Bankers Plan Wars
http://william-stuart.blogspot.co.uk/

He is outlining the incredible story about the "Untouchables" who now will become touchable and are being exposed for what they are. He is decribing the historic build up of the Arab Brotherhood, Al Quaeda by the globally operating Bankster Cabal through their minions.

_________________
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www.rethink911.org
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www.mp911truth.org
www.ae911truth.org
www.rl911truth.org
www.stj911.org
www.v911t.org
www.thisweek.org.uk
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www.elementary.org.uk
www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149
http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
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Whitehall_Bin_Men
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 07, 2017 6:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

UK productivity sinks again as Britain edges closer to decade of stagnation
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-productivity-growth -latest-sink-stagnation-decade-public-finances-economy-second-quarter- wages-a7986111.html

The ONS reported that real output per hour worked fell by 0.3 per cent in the three months to June

Ben Chu Economics Editor @Benchu_ a day ago 5 comments The Independent Online

The UK’s productivity sank again in the second quarter of 2017, edging Britain closer to a lost decade of productivity growth, increasing the likelihood of the emergence of a new hole in the public finances.

The Office for National Statistics reported on Friday that UK real output per hour worked fell by 0.3 per cent in the three months to June.

This followed an expansion of just 0.1 per cent in the first quarter.

Labour would remedy 'lost decade' of Tory failure, pledges Corbyn
5 charts that show the UK economy is in the middle of a 'lost decade'
Britain ‘facing lost decade of economic growth’
That means the level of UK productivity remains below where it was in the final quarter of 2007, before the financial crisis and recession hit.

Such a prolonged period of productivity stagnation for the UK is unprecedented in modern times and is one of the key drivers of the dismal performance of average wages since the crash.

At the time of the March Budget, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast output per hour would grow by 0.5 per cent in the first quarter of 2017 and 0.3 per cent in the second quarter.

Over 2017 as a whole the OBR projected the UK economy’s productivity would grow by 1.6 per cent, with 1.5 per cent next year and 1.7 per cent in 2019, rising to 1.8 per cent in 2020.

The Treasury expects the OBR to respond to the latest disappointing outturn data to revise down its productivity growth forecasts over the next five years, slashing projected tax revenues and eating deep into the £26bn of headroom that the Chancellor Philip Hammond had been projected to have in 2020-21 against his own fiscal rules.

The ONS also reported on Friday that the output per hour gap between the UK and the average for the rest of the G7 economies was 15.1 per cent in 2016.

Lost decade approaching

Productivity, by this measure, was 25.6 per cent below Germany's and 22.3 per cent below that of France.

Many economists expect Brexit to reduce the UK’s long-term productivity performance by lowering trade flows with our nearest neighbours and also restricting immigration.

The OBR revised down its forecast for UK trend potential productivity growth in the wake of the Brexit vote between 2017 and 2020, reflecting its expectation of less productivity-enhancing business investment due to uncertainty over future trade arrangements and resulting in a £7.2bn hole in the public finances by 2020-21 relative to otherwise.

_________________
--
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com
http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
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TonyGosling
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 28, 2017 9:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Friday 27 October 2017 6:00am
"Shocking ignorance" from MPs who don't know where money actually comes from
http://www.cityam.com/274631/shocking-ignorance-mps-dont-know-money-ac tually-comes

The majority of Britain's politicians don't know where money comes from, despite being tasked with deciding how much of it ends up being spent, according to a poll of MPs published today.

Only 15 per cent of MPs surveyed answered correctly when asked a true/false question on whether banks create money when they make loans.

Almost two-thirds of the 50 MPs surveyed by Dods for campaign group Positive Money wrongly thought banks can't create money, while a quarter admitted they didn't know.

Read more: Politicians get lost in search of the fabled Magic Money Tree

In a far from stellar field Conservative MPs outperformed slightly “in this regard”, with 19 per cent answering correctly, compared to only one in 20 Labour MPs.

More than three-quarters of the MPs surveyed incorrectly believed that only the government has the ability to create new money. Some 23 per cent knew this to be false, with Labour performing better than the Conservatives.

The Bank of England has previously intervened to point out that most money in the UK begins as a bank loan. In a 2014 article the Bank pointed out that “whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money.”

The perception of money creation has been complicated further by the unorthodox use of quantitative easing, in which the government creates money electronically, which is then used to buy financial assets.

Fran Boait, executive director of Positive Money, said: “Despite their confidence in telling the public that there is ‘no magic money tree’ to pay for vital services, politicians themselves are shockingly ignorant of where money actually comes from.

“There is in fact a ‘magic money tree’, but it’s in the hands of commercial banks, such as Barclays, HSBC and RBS, who create money whenever they make loans."

_________________
www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org
www.rethink911.org
www.patriotsquestion911.com
www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org
www.mediafor911truth.org
www.pilotsfor911truth.org
www.mp911truth.org
www.ae911truth.org
www.rl911truth.org
www.stj911.org
www.v911t.org
www.thisweek.org.uk
www.abolishwar.org.uk
www.elementary.org.uk
www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149
http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
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Whitehall_Bin_Men
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 05, 2017 12:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Creeping erosion of privacy: New EU directive will help internet cartel giants access your BANK ACCOUNT
New EU directive will help internet giants access your BANK ACCOUNT
express.co.uk
https://t.co/VRHBnmu0Ph

_________________
--
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com
http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 18, 2018 9:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

In a new era of official nastiness, it’s suddenly a crime to be homeless
John Harris John Harris
Instead of addressing the causes of homelessness, local authorities are using public space protection orders to displace, fine and punish the vulnerable
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/10/nastiness-crime- homeless-homelessness-local-authorities-public-spaces-protection-order s

A week ago, a case involving a homeless man called Ashley Hackett was thrown out of court in Brighton. He had been arrested by a plain-clothes police officer for asking a passer-by for 10p, an episode that triggered reports about Sussex police arresting 60 people on similar grounds in 2015 alone.

One night on the street witnessing Britain's homeless crisis – as it happened
Read more
The story exploded in the pages of the Brighton Argus: local MP Caroline Lucas said she could not see “how criminalising desperate people for begging is helpful”; 30,000 people signed a petition decrying the policy responsible – and then, in the final denouement, prosecutors decided that the case was not in the public interest, and a district judge called time on the whole pathetic affair. In among the small print, there lurked truly Kafkaesque details, such as Hackett’s lawyer’s insistence that “he pleaded not guilty to begging because the offence says you’ve got to place yourself in that location to beg. He says he’s homeless and that’s where he lives.”

Unfortunately, the end of that case will probably have no effect on a monstrous shift in policy and official attitudes towards homeless people being rolled out around the country. As in-depth reporting in the Guardian this week has highlighted, rough-sleeping in England is up nearly a third year-on-year, and the figures have doubled since 2010: a plainly shameful fact that underlines the sense of a government locked into a grim re-enactment of the 1980s. Meanwhile, all over the country, police and local councils are criminalising begging and rough sleeping, seemingly trying to push such mounting problems out of sight.

Which brings us to a particularly horrible policy instrument known as public space protection orders (or PSPOs), brought in by the coalition government in 2014. As with New Labour’s antisocial behaviour orders, this new legal invention creates opportunities to criminalise hitherto non-criminal behaviour – but instead of Asbos’ focus on individuals, PSPOs are defined by particular areas.

The basic idea is simple enough. Designate a particular area, specify the behaviour you want to outlaw, and you’re off. In certain areas of Nottinghamshire, Bassetlaw’s Labour council has prohibited people under 16 “gathering in groups of three or more”; in Hillingdon, the Tories who run the borough have criminalised feeding pigeons in the park and, for young people in certain places, “gathering in groups of two or more persons unless going to or from a parked vehicle or waiting for a scheduled bus at a designated bus stop”. Obviously, those actions look comically draconian. But when PSPOs are applied to homeless people, the sense of punitive nastiness goes off the scale.


Homelessness crisis: ministers consider 'prevention duty' for councils
Read more
We are essentially talking about the policy equivalent of those spikes now affixed to modern buildings as a matter of course, in case anyone thinks of bedding down for the night. In Folkestone in Kent, a PSPO covers drinking, rough sleeping and begging; the latter is also a potential criminal act in Corby, Swindon and Oxford (where the council says it only applies to “aggressive” begging, though that includes simply asking for money near a cashpoint). In Wrexham, similar sanctions now apply to sleeping in a town centre park. Failure to comply entails a possible on-the-spot fine of £100 – this is for homeless people, let’s not forget – and, if the case goes to court, a penalty of up to £1,000. It is seemingly too early for cases to start colliding with the judicial system, but when they do, the waste of public money and chaotic fallout will speak for itself.

Nonetheless, the idea is catching on. Recent Freedom of Information requests by the Vice website discovered that at least 36 local councils in England and Wales “have introduced or are working on PSPOs which criminalise activities linked to homelessness”. In some places, there has been loud controversy about what is afoot: protests in Exeter, a U-turn in Newport, and another successful campaign in Hackney, east London, that last year forced the council to back down.

But all too often there’s a sense of dull inevitability: in the absence of any real local or national scrutiny, councils do what they like, and no one really cares. Put another way: these days, if something happens in Corby, Swindon or Wrexham, can it really be said to have happened at all?

‘I am well-spoken and not an addict’: how homelessness can happen to anyone
Sarah Marsh and Guardian readers
Sarah Marsh
Read more
Moreover, as the Brighton case proves, the story runs much wider than PSPOs. Aside from London and Bristol, the city I visit most often is Manchester, where rough sleeping has exploded and, despite a more enlightened attitude to homeless people than you see in some other places, the city council and local landlords spent some of 2015 locked into an on-off game of injunctions, clearances, and ongoing bad feeling.

As a dry space long used by homeless people was suddenly cleared and fenced off – which is how it remains – and protest camps set up by homeless people spread across the city, the council won an injunction against anyone pitching a tent, which went as far as listing the items (sleeping bags, cardboard boxes) that were still permitted, and led to homeless people facing fines of up to £5,000. When I last visited, a new canvas encampment had sprung up on land owned by Manchester University, close to Piccadilly station: a fragile mini-shanty town, symbolising the fact that in the surrounding regenerated wonderland, scores of homeless people seem to have been reduced to an inconvenience.

Fines and arrest back up the rightwing idea of character failure; George Osborne sleeps that bit more easily
At the heart of all this, there is often a kind of municipal Trump-ism, whereby police and crime commissioners, senior officers and politicians of all parties affect a crass language of crackdowns and zero tolerance, while doing little to get to grips with the actual issue. Obviously, they can account for their actions in terms of austerity: if average local authority funding for services helping people avoid homelessness was cut by 45% between 2010 and 2015, and homelessness and rough-sleeping are reaching such uncontrollable heights, what else can they do?

The answer to that is simple enough: whatever your intentions, once you start blankly criminalising people who need serious and wide-ranging help, you surely risk shutting down any argument for that kind of assistance ever returning. Fines and arrests back up the rightwing idea of character failure; George Osborne sleeps that bit more easily.

Here, though, is perhaps the most awful aspect of what’s happening. If the official attitude to people who sleep on the streets looks like cold contempt, we shouldn’t be all that surprised if that is reflected not just in public indifference and hostility, but in outright acts of inhumanity.

Back in Brighton, this week brought news of a homeless man suffering burns after his sleeping bag and cardboard shelter were set on fire. Vulnerability to violence is often at the heart of living without a home: if we reduce people to being annoying untouchables, maybe that’s the kind of terrible thing that will happen more often.



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_________________
www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org
www.rethink911.org
www.patriotsquestion911.com
www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org
www.mediafor911truth.org
www.pilotsfor911truth.org
www.mp911truth.org
www.ae911truth.org
www.rl911truth.org
www.stj911.org
www.v911t.org
www.thisweek.org.uk
www.abolishwar.org.uk
www.elementary.org.uk
www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149
http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 09, 2018 10:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote


Link

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d3mfkD6Ky5o


97% Owned - Positive Money Cut
QueuePolitely151,164 views

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Published on 30 Apr 2012
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/independentdo...

To join the campaign to democratise money see http://www.positivemoney.org.uk/97per...
Watch the sequel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Ac7...

When money drives almost all activity on the planet, it's essential that we understand it. Yet simple questions often get overlooked - questions like: where does money come from? Who creates it? Who decides how it gets used? And what does that mean for the millions of ordinary people who suffer when money and finance breaks down?

97% Owned is a new documentary that reveals how money is at the root of our current social and economic crisis. Featuring frank interviews and commentary from economists, campaigners and former bankers, it exposes the privatised, debt-based monetary system that gives banks the power to create money, shape the economy, cause crises and push house prices out of reach. Fact-based and clearly explained, in just 60 minutes it shows how the power to create money is the piece of the puzzle that economists were missing when they failed to predict the crisis.

Produced by Queuepolitely and featuring Ben Dyson of Positive Money, Josh Ryan-Collins of The New Economics Foundation, Ann Pettifor, the "HBOS Whistleblower" Paul Moore, Simon Dixon of Bank to the Future and Nick Dearden from the Jubliee Debt Campaign, this is the first documentary to tackle this issue from a UK-perspective, and can be watched online now.

Help us caption & translate this video!

http://amara.org/v/teJ/

_________________
--
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com
http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 15, 2019 3:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

2008 Financial Crisis: A Ten-Year Review conference. Panel: Central Banking in Crisis Management

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGzwtXC79Vc
The Role of Central Banking in Crisis Management. Moderator: Stanley Fischer. Participants: Ben Bernanke (former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board), Mervyn King (former Governor of Bank of England), Jean-Claude Trichet (former President of the European Central Bank)

_________________
www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org
www.rethink911.org
www.patriotsquestion911.com
www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org
www.mediafor911truth.org
www.pilotsfor911truth.org
www.mp911truth.org
www.ae911truth.org
www.rl911truth.org
www.stj911.org
www.v911t.org
www.thisweek.org.uk
www.abolishwar.org.uk
www.elementary.org.uk
www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149
http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 20, 2019 1:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Federal Reserve Cartel: The Eight Families
By Dean Henderson
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-federal-reserve-cartel-the-eight-fam ilies/25080

Global Research, January 31, 2018

This article was first published by Global Research on June 1, 2011.

(Part one of a four-part series)

The Four Horsemen of Banking (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) own the Four Horsemen of Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP and Chevron Texaco); in tandem with Deutsche Bank, BNP, Barclays and other European old money behemoths. But their monopoly over the global economy does not end at the edge of the oil patch.

According to company 10K filings to the SEC, the Four Horsemen of Banking are among the top ten stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation.[1]

So who then are the stockholders in these money center banks?

This information is guarded much more closely. My queries to bank regulatory agencies regarding stock ownership in the top 25 US bank holding companies were given Freedom of Information Act status, before being denied on “national security” grounds. This is rather ironic, since many of the bank’s stockholders reside in Europe.

One important repository for the wealth of the global oligarchy that owns these bank holding companies is US Trust Corporation – founded in 1853 and now owned by Bank of America. A recent US Trust Corporate Director and Honorary Trustee was Walter Rothschild. Other directors included Daniel Davison of JP Morgan Chase, Richard Tucker of Exxon Mobil, Daniel Roberts of Citigroup and Marshall Schwartz of Morgan Stanley. [2]

J. W. McCallister, an oil industry insider with House of Saud connections, wrote in The Grim Reaper that information he acquired from Saudi bankers cited 80% ownership of the New York Federal Reserve Bank- by far the most powerful Fed branch- by just eight families, four of which reside in the US. They are the Goldman Sachs, Rockefellers, Lehmans and Kuhn Loebs of New York; the Rothschilds of Paris and London; the Warburgs of Hamburg; the Lazards of Paris; and the Israel Moses Seifs of Rome.

CPA Thomas D. Schauf corroborates McCallister’s claims, adding that ten banks control all twelve Federal Reserve Bank branches. He names N.M. Rothschild of London, Rothschild Bank of Berlin, Warburg Bank of Hamburg, Warburg Bank of Amsterdam, Lehman Brothers of New York, Lazard Brothers of Paris, Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York, Israel Moses Seif Bank of Italy, Goldman Sachs of New York and JP Morgan Chase Bank of New York. Schauf lists William Rockefeller, Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff and James Stillman as individuals who own large shares of the Fed. [3] The Schiffs are insiders at Kuhn Loeb. The Stillmans are Citigroup insiders, who married into the Rockefeller clan at the turn of the century.

Eustace Mullins came to the same conclusions in his book The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, in which he displays charts connecting the Fed and its member banks to the families of Rothschild, Warburg, Rockefeller and the others. [4]

The control that these banking families exert over the global economy cannot be overstated and is quite intentionally shrouded in secrecy. Their corporate media arm is quick to discredit any information exposing this private central banking cartel as “conspiracy theory”. Yet the facts remain.



The House of Morgan

The Federal Reserve Bank was born in 1913, the same year US banking scion J. Pierpont Morgan died and the Rockefeller Foundation was formed. The House of Morgan presided over American finance from the corner of Wall Street and Broad, acting as quasi-US central bank since 1838, when George Peabody founded it in London.

Peabody was a business associate of the Rothschilds. In 1952 Fed researcher Eustace Mullins put forth the supposition that the Morgans were nothing more than Rothschild agents. Mullins wrote that the Rothschilds, “…preferred to operate anonymously in the US behind the facade of J.P. Morgan & Company”. [5]

Author Gabriel Kolko stated, “Morgan’s activities in 1895-1896 in selling US gold bonds in Europe were based on an alliance with the House of Rothschild.” [6]

The Morgan financial octopus wrapped its tentacles quickly around the globe. Morgan Grenfell operated in London. Morgan et Ce ruled Paris. The Rothschild’s Lambert cousins set up Drexel & Company in Philadelphia.

The House of Morgan catered to the Astors, DuPonts, Guggenheims, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. It financed the launch of AT&T, General Motors, General Electric and DuPont. Like the London-based Rothschild and Barings banks, Morgan became part of the power structure in many countries.

By 1890 the House of Morgan was lending to Egypt’s central bank, financing Russian railroads, floating Brazilian provincial government bonds and funding Argentine public works projects. A recession in 1893 enhanced Morgan’s power. That year Morgan saved the US government from a bank panic, forming a syndicate to prop up government reserves with a shipment of $62 million worth of Rothschild gold. [7]

Morgan was the driving force behind Western expansion in the US, financing and controlling West-bound railroads through voting trusts. In 1879 Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Morgan-financed New York Central Railroad gave preferential shipping rates to John D. Rockefeller’s budding Standard Oil monopoly, cementing the Rockefeller/Morgan relationship.

The House of Morgan now fell under Rothschild and Rockefeller family control. A New York Herald headline read, “Railroad Kings Form Gigantic Trust”. J. Pierpont Morgan, who once stated, “Competition is a sin”, now opined gleefully, “Think of it. All competing railroad traffic west of St. Louis placed in the control of about thirty men.”[8]

Morgan and Edward Harriman’s banker Kuhn Loeb held a monopoly over the railroads, while banking dynasties Lehman, Goldman Sachs and Lazard joined the Rockefellers in controlling the US industrial base. [9]

In 1903 Banker’s Trust was set up by the Eight Families. Benjamin Strong of Banker’s Trust was the first Governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The 1913 creation of the Fed fused the power of the Eight Families to the military and diplomatic might of the US government. If their overseas loans went unpaid, the oligarchs could now deploy US Marines to collect the debts. Morgan, Chase and Citibank formed an international lending syndicate.

The House of Morgan was cozy with the British House of Windsor and the Italian House of Savoy. The Kuhn Loebs, Warburgs, Lehmans, Lazards, Israel Moses Seifs and Goldman Sachs also had close ties to European royalty. By 1895 Morgan controlled the flow of gold in and out of the US. The first American wave of mergers was in its infancy and was being promoted by the bankers. In 1897 there were sixty-nine industrial mergers. By 1899 there were twelve-hundred. In 1904 John Moody – founder of Moody’s Investor Services – said it was impossible to talk of Rockefeller and Morgan interests as separate. [10]

Public distrust of the combine spread. Many considered them traitors working for European old money. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, Andrew Carnegie’s US Steel and Edward Harriman’s railroads were all financed by banker Jacob Schiff at Kuhn Loeb, who worked closely with the European Rothschilds.

Several Western states banned the bankers. Populist preacher William Jennings Bryan was thrice the Democratic nominee for President from 1896 -1908. The central theme of his anti-imperialist campaign was that America was falling into a trap of “financial servitude to British capital”. Teddy Roosevelt defeated Bryan in 1908, but was forced by this spreading populist wildfire to enact the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. He then went after the Standard Oil Trust.

Most Americans Don’t Know that the Federal Reserve Banks Are Private Corporations
In 1912 the Pujo hearings were held, addressing concentration of power on Wall Street. That same year Mrs. Edward Harriman sold her substantial shares in New York’s Guaranty Trust Bank to J.P. Morgan, creating Morgan Guaranty Trust. Judge Louis Brandeis convinced President Woodrow Wilson to call for an end to interlocking board directorates. In 1914 the Clayton Anti-Trust Act was passed.

Jack Morgan – J. Pierpont’s son and successor – responded by calling on Morgan clients Remington and Winchester to increase arms production. He argued that the US needed to enter WWI. Goaded by the Carnegie Foundation and other oligarchy fronts, Wilson accommodated. As Charles Tansill wrote in America Goes to War, “Even before the clash of arms, the French firm of Rothschild Freres cabled to Morgan & Company in New York suggesting the flotation of a loan of $100 million, a substantial part of which was to be left in the US to pay for French purchases of American goods.”

The House of Morgan financed half the US war effort, while receiving commissions for lining up contractors like GE, Du Pont, US Steel, Kennecott and ASARCO. All were Morgan clients. Morgan also financed the British Boer War in South Africa and the Franco-Prussian War. The 1919 Paris Peace Conference was presided over by Morgan, which led both German and Allied reconstruction efforts. [11]

In the 1930’s populism resurfaced in America after Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bank and others profited from the Crash of 1929. [12] House Banking Committee Chairman Louis McFadden (D-NY) said of the Great Depression, “It was no accident. It was a carefully contrived occurrence…The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so they might emerge as rulers of us all”.

Sen. Gerald Nye (D-ND) chaired a munitions investigation in 1936. Nye concluded that the House of Morgan had plunged the US into WWI to protect loans and create a booming arms industry. Nye later produced a document titled The Next War, which cynically referred to “the old goddess of democracy trick”, through which Japan could be used to lure the US into WWII.

In 1937 Interior Secretary Harold Ickes warned of the influence of “America’s 60 Families”. Historian Ferdinand Lundberg later penned a book of the exact same title. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas decried, “Morgan influence…the most pernicious one in industry and finance today.”

Jack Morgan responded by nudging the US towards WWII. Morgan had close relations with the Iwasaki and Dan families – Japan’s two wealthiest clans – who have owned Mitsubishi and Mitsui, respectively, since the companies emerged from 17th Century shogunates. When Japan invaded Manchuria, slaughtering Chinese peasants at Nanking, Morgan downplayed the incident. Morgan also had close relations with Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, while German Nazi Dr. Hjalmer Schacht was a Morgan Bank liaison during WWII. After the war Morgan representatives met with Schacht at the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland. [13]

The House of Rockefeller

BIS is the most powerful bank in the world, a global central bank for the Eight Families who control the private central banks of almost all Western and developing nations. The first President of BIS was Rockefeller banker Gates McGarrah- an official at Chase Manhattan and the Federal Reserve. McGarrah was the grandfather of former CIA director Richard Helms. The Rockefellers- like the Morgans- had close ties to London. David Icke writes in Children of the Matrix, that the Rockefellers and Morgans were just “gofers” for the European Rothschilds. [14]

BIS is owned by the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, Bank of Italy, Bank of Canada, Swiss National Bank, Nederlandsche Bank, Bundesbank and Bank of France.

Historian Carroll Quigley wrote in his epic book Tragedy and Hope that BIS was part of a plan, “to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole…to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements.”

The US government had a historical distrust of BIS, lobbying unsuccessfully for its demise at the 1944 post-WWII Bretton Woods Conference. Instead the Eight Families’ power was exacerbated, with the Bretton Woods creation of the IMF and the World Bank. The US Federal Reserve only took shares in BIS in September 1994. [15]

BIS holds at least 10% of monetary reserves for at least 80 of the world’s central banks, the IMF and other multilateral institutions. It serves as financial agent for international agreements, collects information on the global economy and serves as lender of last resort to prevent global financial collapse.

BIS promotes an agenda of monopoly capitalist fascism. It gave a bridge loan to Hungary in the 1990’s to ensure privatization of that country’s economy. It served as conduit for Eight Families funding of Adolf Hitler- led by the Warburg’s J. Henry Schroeder and Mendelsohn Bank of Amsterdam. Many researchers assert that BIS is at the nadir of global drug money laundering. [16]

It is no coincidence that BIS is headquartered in Switzerland, favorite hiding place for the wealth of the global aristocracy and headquarters for the P-2 Italian Freemason’s Alpina Lodge and Nazi International. Other institutions which the Eight Families control include the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Conference and the World Trade Organization.

Bretton Woods was a boon to the Eight Families. The IMF and World Bank were central to this “new world order”. In 1944 the first World Bank bonds were floated by Morgan Stanley and First Boston. The French Lazard family became more involved in House of Morgan interests. Lazard Freres- France’s biggest investment bank- is owned by the Lazard and David-Weill families- old Genoese banking scions represented by Michelle Davive. A recent Chairman and CEO of Citigroup was Sanford Weill.

In 1968 Morgan Guaranty launched Euro-Clear, a Brussels-based bank clearing system for Eurodollar securities. It was the first such automated endeavor. Some took to calling Euro-Clear “The Beast”. Brussels serves as headquarters for the new European Central Bank and for NATO. In 1973 Morgan officials met secretly in Bermuda to illegally resurrect the old House of Morgan, twenty years before Glass Steagal Act was repealed. Morgan and the Rockefellers provided the financial backing for Merrill Lynch, boosting it into the Big 5 of US investment banking. Merrill is now part of Bank of America.

John D. Rockefeller used his oil wealth to acquire Equitable Trust, which had gobbled up several large banks and corporations by the 1920’s. The Great Depression helped consolidate Rockefeller’s power. His Chase Bank merged with Kuhn Loeb’s Manhattan Bank to form Chase Manhattan, cementing a long-time family relationship. The Kuhn-Loeb’s had financed – along with Rothschilds – Rockefeller’s quest to become king of the oil patch. National City Bank of Cleveland provided John D. with the money needed to embark upon his monopolization of the US oil industry. The bank was identified in Congressional hearings as being one of three Rothschild-owned banks in the US during the 1870’s, when Rockefeller first incorporated as Standard Oil of Ohio. [17]

One Rockefeller Standard Oil partner was Edward Harkness, whose family came to control Chemical Bank. Another was James Stillman, whose family controlled Manufacturers Hanover Trust. Both banks have merged under the JP Morgan Chase umbrella. Two of James Stillman’s daughters married two of William Rockefeller’s sons. The two families control a big chunk of Citigroup as well. [18]

In the insurance business, the Rockefellers control Metropolitan Life, Equitable Life, Prudential and New York Life. Rockefeller banks control 25% of all assets of the 50 largest US commercial banks and 30% of all assets of the 50 largest insurance companies. [19] Insurance companies- the first in the US was launched by Freemasons through their Woodman’s of America- play a key role in the Bermuda drug money shuffle.

Companies under Rockefeller control include Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco, Marathon Oil, Freeport McMoran, Quaker Oats, ASARCO, United, Delta, Northwest, ITT, International Harvester, Xerox, Boeing, Westinghouse, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, International Paper, Pfizer, Motorola, Monsanto, Union Carbide and General Foods.

The Rockefeller Foundation has close financial ties to both Ford and Carnegie Foundations. Other family philanthropic endeavors include Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, General Education Board, Rockefeller University and the University of Chicago- which churns out a steady stream of far right economists as apologists for international capital, including Milton Friedman.

The family owns 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where the national Christmas tree is lighted every year, and Rockefeller Center. David Rockefeller was instrumental in the construction of the World Trade Center towers. The main Rockefeller family home is a hulking complex in upstate New York known as Pocantico Hills. They also own a 32-room 5th Avenue duplex in Manhattan, a mansion in Washington, DC, Monte Sacro Ranch in Venezuela, coffee plantations in Ecuador, several farms in Brazil, an estate at Seal Harbor, Maine and resorts in the Caribbean, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. [20]

The Dulles and Rockefeller families are cousins. Allen Dulles created the CIA, assisted the Nazis, covered up the Kennedy hit from his Warren Commission perch and struck a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood to create mind-controlled assassins. [21]

Brother John Foster Dulles presided over the phony Goldman Sachs trusts before the 1929 stock market crash and helped his brother overthrow governments in Iran and Guatemala. Both were Skull & Bones, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) insiders and 33rd Degree Masons. [22]

The Rockefellers were instrumental in forming the depopulation-oriented Club of Rome at their family estate in Bellagio, Italy. Their Pocantico Hills estate gave birth to the Trilateral Commission. The family is a major funder of the eugenics movement which spawned Hitler, human cloning and the current DNA obsession in US scientific circles.

John Rockefeller Jr. headed the Population Council until his death. [23] His namesake son is a Senator from West Virginia. Brother Winthrop Rockefeller was Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas and remains the most powerful man in that state. In an October 1975 interview with Playboy magazine, Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller- who was also Governor of New York- articulated his family’s patronizing worldview, “I am a great believer in planning- economic, social, political, military, total world planning.”

But of all the Rockefeller brothers, it is Trilateral Commission (TC) founder and Chase Manhattan Chairman David who has spearheaded the family’s fascist agenda on a global scale. He defended the Shah of Iran, the South African apartheid regime and the Chilean Pinochet junta. He was the biggest financier of the CFR, the TC and (during the Vietnam War) the Committee for an Effective and Durable Peace in Asia- a contract bonanza for those who made their living off the conflict.

Nixon asked him to be Secretary of Treasury, but Rockefeller declined the job, knowing his power was much greater at the helm of the Chase. Author Gary Allen writes in The Rockefeller File that in 1973, “David Rockefeller met with twenty-seven heads of state, including the rulers of Russia and Red China.”

Following the 1975 Nugan Hand Bank/CIA coup against Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, his British Crown-appointed successor Malcolm Fraser sped to the US, where he met with President Gerald Ford after conferring with David Rockefeller. [24]

*

Dean Henderson is the author of Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network and The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries. His Left Hook blog is at www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

Notes

[1] 10K Filings of Fortune 500 Corporations to SEC. 3-91

[2] 10K Filing of US Trust Corporation to SEC. 6-28-95

[3] “The Federal Reserve ‘Fed Up’. Thomas Schauf. www.davidicke.com 1-02

[4] The Secrets of the Federal Reserve. Eustace Mullins. Bankers Research Institute. Staunton, VA. 1983. p.179

[5] Ibid. p.53

[6] The Triumph of Conservatism. Gabriel Kolko. MacMillan and Company New York. 1963. p.142

[7] Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons and the Great Pyramids. Jim Marrs. HarperCollins Publishers. New York. 2000. p.57

[8] The House of Morgan. Ron Chernow. Atlantic Monthly Press NewYork 1990

[9] Marrs. p.57

[10] Democracy for the Few. Michael Parenti. St. Martin’s Press. New York. 1977. p.178

[11] Chernow

[12] The Great Crash of 1929. John Kenneth Galbraith. Houghton, Mifflin Company. Boston. 1979. p.148

[13] Chernow

[14] Children of the Matrix. David Icke. Bridge of Love. Scottsdale, AZ. 2000

[15] The Confidence Game: How Un-Elected Central Bankers are Governing the Changed World Economy. Steven Solomon. Simon & Schuster. New York. 1995. p.112

[16] Marrs. p.180

[17] Ibid. p.45

[18] The Money Lenders: The People and Politics of the World Banking Crisis. Anthony Sampson. Penguin Books. New York. 1981

[19] The Rockefeller File. Gary Allen. ’76 Press. Seal Beach, CA. 1977

[20] Ibid

[21] Dope Inc.: The Book That Drove Kissinger Crazy. Editors of Executive Intelligence Review. Washington, DC. 1992

[22] Marrs.

[23] The Rockefeller Syndrome. Ferdinand Lundberg. Lyle Stuart Inc. Secaucus, NJ. 1975. p.296

[24] Marrs. p.53

The original source of this article is Global Research



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PostPosted: Fri Dec 27, 2019 12:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Economic Tribulation by VINCENT C. VICKERS of UK arms industry fame
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/vickers/

The Vickers VC10 is a mid-sized, narrow-body long-range British jet airliner designed and built by Vickers-Armstrongs (Aircraft) Ltd and first flown at Brooklands, Surrey, in 1962. The airliner was designed to operate on long-distance routes from the shorter runways of the era and commanded excellent hot and high performance for operations from African airports. The performance of the VC10 was such that it achieved the fastest crossing of the Atlantic by a jet airliner, a record still held to-date for a sub-sonic airliner, of 5 hours and 1 minute;[1][2] only the supersonic Concorde was faster. The VC10 is often compared to the larger Soviet Ilyushin Il-62, the two types being the only airliners to use a rear-engined quad layout; the smaller business jet Lockheed JetStar also has this engine arrangement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_VC10


http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/roehrigw/vickers/
 
"In so far as we are able, we must try to assist our fellow-men to understand. This we can do fearlessly; for that which is mistaken or false will carry no weight and will be lost and forgotten, whilst that which is true will prevail."
 
LONDON
John Lane, The Bodley Head
 
First published 1941
Reprinted 1941
 
Printed in Great Britain by
STEPHEN AUSTIN AND SONS, LTD., HERTFORD
for John LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LIMITED
8 Bury Place, London, W.C. I
 

CONTENTS
NOTE *
FOREWORD *
I ECONOMIC POLICY AND OUR STANDARD OF HONESTY *
II THE OLD SCHOOL OF THOUGHT *
III CHANGES AND EXCHANGES *
IV THE CASE FOR AGRICULTURE AND THE PRODUCTIVE INDUSTRIES *
V DEMOCRACY OR FINANCIAL DICTATORSHIP? *
VI TO BANKERS AND OTHERS *
VII THE DIRECTION OF FUTURE POLICY *
 
NOTE
VINCENT CARTWRIGHT VICKERS was born on 16th January 1879, and educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a Deputy Lieutenant of the City of London, a director of Vickers, Limited, for twenty-two years, and a director of the London Assurance from which he resigned in January 1939. In 1910 he was made a governor of the Bank of England, and resigned this appointment in 1919. Later, he became President of the Economic Reform Club and Institute.
He died on 3rd November 1939, after a long illness during which, against time and with failing strength, he was working and writing on economics. A few days before his death he wrote: ‘My keen desire to help up to the end has been the sole incentive which still enabled me to carry on perhaps a few weeks longer.’
It has therefore been my privilege to arrange my father’s papers into the book which he laboured to finish, and which represents only a part of his ceaseless work towards national and international economic stability and his single-minded convictions of its attainment.
WILMA CAWDOR

 FOREWORD
I who write this, need no proof of the importance of the money system upon the very lives of the people and even to the future existence of the British race, so long as that system fills the position which it now holds in our National Economy.
There are many thousands of well-educated men and women who, I believe, endorse my views in their entirety. But even for the most zealous of money reformers to attempt to write upon so vast and momentous a subject as our monetary system and the management of our national finances, such attempt would appear doomed to failure unless it were supported by great financial experts whose names were a by-word in the country. The next best alternative was that the author should himself be qualified by past experiences to express an opinion worth reading.
I therefore decided to take the unprecedented course of offering to my readers my own qualifications for putting down before the British people the very precarious condition of our monetary system as it exists in this country to-day; that this our money system forms the most important part of our, economic system, and that the nation’s economic system forms part of our social system.
Ever since that day in 1926, when, not in arrogance but with humility, I felt it my duty to explain to the Governor of the Bank of England, Mr. Montagu Norman, that ‘henceforth I was going to fight him and the Gold Standard and the Bank of England policy until I died’ – (and well I remember the words of his reply) – I have been an ardent money reformer.
Some few years afterwards I resigned my long directorship of Vickers, Limited, since when I have spent much time and money in advocating the necessity for a reform of the monetary system. This has naturally brought me into contact with most sections of the community; with Communists and those with axes to grind, with malcontents and debtors, and, in addition, with men and women who are honest and disinterested patriots. Not more than a tenth of my income is earned; the rest comes from investments in Banks, Bank of England stocks, American and Canadian securities, etc., and, mainly, from British industrial securities. I am therefore a ‘capitalist’ – one who as seen better times – and content to remain in my present financial position, but most unwilling to have my present standard of living further reduced. I bear no ill-feeling towards my own class or any other class. I seek neither notoriety nor kudos. If someone can change my convictions I shall be only to ready to alter them. But in fifteen years nothing whatever has occurred to make me alter my views. I still believe that the existing system is actively harmful to the state, creates poverty and unemployment, and is the root cause of war.
This personal Confession is merely to demonstrate that I have seen both sides of the picture. My opinions are based upon my own experience and knowledge. I am to-day in the unique position of being absolutely and entirely devoid of animosity and wholly disinterested. I feel myself no longer under any restrictions whatsoever, except to guard against doing harm to my country or giving offence to anyone.
V. C. V., October 1939
 
I ECONOMIC POLICY AND OUR STANDARD OF HONESTY
Slowly but inevitably the old financial system is crumbling under the weight of modern conditions and the better education of the people; the sooner it crumbles the better, and the sooner it gives way to a better and more modern technique the sooner will the world achieve goodwill and peace amongst men.
The present order of things must change. The economic structure of civilisation is obviously leaning heavily. To build upon it, to add weight to it as it now stands, crooked and unsafe, can only bring nearer the day of its collapse.
The structure must be surveyed from its foundations upwards, and the quality and suitability of its masonry tested. Then, having discovered where its weaknesses lie, we must endeavour with honesty to restore the walls and make them strong once more and upright as they were meant to be. Then and then only can we safely proceed with the building and work in peace. We can no longer trust to a complication of endeavours to conceal the existing flaws and to cover up gross injustices and mistakes by temporary expedients. In future our labours, if they are to succeed, must be directed towards the general betterment of mankind and the progress of humanity. Only by such efforts can our economic structure once more follow the proper plan of it’s building, in accordance with the original design of its Architect.
For the hard-headed business man, for the astute financier, for the man in the street, sheer common-sense and force of circumstance must now compel the realisation that it is only the powers of the spirit which can be relied upon to save humanity from the consequences of man’s failure to follow the right way. President Roosevelt has said: ‘Rules are not necessarily sacred. Principles are. The methods of the old order are not, as some would have you believe, above the challenge of youth ... .’ Is it not time to see that in the future we are no longer to be enslaved by the methods of the old order, but that we are to be equitably governed under principles which will indeed be sacred, because they will be founded upon Christianity itself and will be Christian principles?
But, it will be asked, how can we, as practical men with mundane mentalities, combine Christian principles with business abilities? Our business is to quote you a price, not a text from the Gospel according to St. Luke! When it comes to business, the Parson cuts no ice and is merely an interfering busybody who has often been instrumental in creating strikes and lockouts and controversies between Master and Man. What do you mean by putting forward such an impossible and grotesque suggestion? Would our shareholders be satisfied if we said: ‘We can pay you no dividend, but the Lord will provide’?
And the answer is this. We do not ask you to unseat your directors and put the bishops in their place, nor to introduce psalm-singing among your employees; but rather to carry on as you are now doing, with only one exception – an exception to which no industry will dare openly to object, even though it may seriously affect certain trades which, like the mistletoe, thrive upon others. We ask that you carry on your affairs as at present, except that you be honest – honest not only with others but with yourselves. It is not enough to be able to call a spade a spade; with others, as with yourselves, you must be able to put all the cards, and not only the spades, on the table, and to play the game throughout by the Christian principle of honesty.
Let us acknowledge the truth. Humanity is not suffering from unavoidable circumstances over which it has no control, but from the results of deliberate and dishonest actions of its own creation and invention. Fundamental laws, originally designed for the common welfare of the individuals of a community, have been broken – community laws which were never intended to permit the individual to grow fat upon the poverty of others; nor to permit him, in pursuit of his own personal profit, to base his standard of honesty upon his own flexible conscience, consoling himself with gratitude that he is within the law. Nevertheless, just as man has brought, upon himself, or has permitted, this world tribulation, so can he play his part in undoing the harm that has been done.
But how is this possible? How can the ordinary individual change the world? Shall the man in the street become an expert economist, or a banker, or a cabinet minister and control the press and public opinion? How otherwise can he assist in the regulation of mankind? What is meant by ‘lack of economic equilibrium’, ‘sound finance’, ‘stability of foreign exchanges’, ‘currency restrictions’, ‘the creation of credit’, ‘the inverted pyramid of credit’, and a host of other such phrases? They smell of long study, special technical ability, and great learning. Surely, then, it is commonly felt, it is better that ordinary individuals should leave economics to the economists, finance to the bankers, and national policy to the politicians? But, alas, that is exactly what we have for too long been doing. Look at the result! The experts have hopelessly failed. What is needed is a little less economics and a little more common sense.
All that is necessary for us ordinary men is that we should make use of the knowledge that is already ours – that is to say, the knowledge of good and evil; so that we may recognise, not only in others but in ourselves, those habits and customs and practices which are definitely harmful to the community as a whole, however advantageous they may appear to be to the individual or to some particular section of the community. For it is these habits and practices which have twisted scientific development into fetters upon the arms of society and turned the immense advantages of improved education into a growing discontent amongst the mass of the people. The future of the world is the future of the human race; the human race is the world; and the character and the welfare of Britain is the sum of the character and welfare of its population.
In so far as we are able, we must try to assist our fellow men to understand. This we can do fearlessly; for that which is mistaken or false will carry no weight and will be lost and forgotten, whilst that which is true will prevail.
What follows is certainly no economic treatise for experts to smile at. lt is merely an attempt to show clearly that every man and woman in the country has his or her part to play in building up the future of the world; and it is primarily for them that this book is written.
If the country were happy and contented, with its agriculture and its great basic industries at full swing, full of confidence in the future; if the numbers of our unemployed stood at something approaching the unavoidable minimum, with the standard of living of the people far above any threat of starvation, malnutrition or real poverty – then it might be possible for the nation to overlook some of the difficulties which are imposing such heavy handicaps upon its progress. But, as things are, the nation cannot continue to carry unnecessary burdens and can no longer afford to let these adversities pass unnoticed and untouched.
If it be true that we have, in fact, a democratic government, the will of the people will prevail; and if it be not true, then it is best that this should be realised. For, in the latter case, still greater changes are inevitable.
Although it is the money system which is to be accused of dishonesty, those who use and depend upon a dishonest system, knowing that system to be dishonest, cannot themselves be regarded as honest men. Moreover, it may be that the present system, which international finance has forced our democratic government to adopt, uphold, and protect by every possible means, has undermined the character of the people and forced them to alter their definition of the word honesty so that it may be made to comply more nearly with modern practice.
There has never been a time in history when men and women in this country and all over the world have been so ready to admit that something is profoundly wrong somewhere. All of us have real or imaginary grievances; most of us are discontented with the general order of our lives. We want things we have not got; we are restricted when we want to be free; we ask questions but there is no one to answer. We search in vain for an honest opinion and for leadership, and yet, when things go wrong, we see how even our leaders foist the blame upon others for their own actions or inaction’s. There is, amongst us a continual competition one with another for the good things of life.
What is the reason for this selfish and continuous struggle of humanity for a better life?
It is a recognised and acknowledged fact that the economic structure of the world is out of alignment, out of truth; and naturally this has created an intense desire to discover how and why and where it is at fault, and how best to rectify the defects of our social system.
The young men of this country and those who will some day rule it, have been trained and educated to fill vacancies which no longer exist; the country has no room for them and no work. We can hardly blame them if they have become reformers, malcontents, or even Bolshevists. A dull intellect may for a time be satisfied with an enforced idleness; but he who has an educated brain must be given scope to exercise his abilities or his intellect must inevitably become twisted and his vision distorted.
We others, we older men, who have spent by far the greater part of our lives in a ‘rising market’, where an average brain meant an average income and a superior intellect the promise of luxury, have no right to decry or belittle the attitude of the younger generation. Those who are to-day in a position to lead the country, influenced by happy memories of the old economic system, must endeavour to realise and to analyse more modern tendencies; to distinguish between those tendencies which are false and useless and those which are based upon human nature and are unconquerable and inevitable. Rather than obstruct and ignore, genuine desires for a new and more equitable economy we should assist them and try to guide them in a proper direction.
If this is not done, if we set our faces against social reforms and continue to preach a return to the effete arrangements of the early Victorians, we shall be deliberately forcing the future majority of the country to adopt a ready made policy rather than to study and create a new and better plan, subject to present needs. That ready made policy, that advertised refuge for those who are fleeing in terror from the oppression, imaginary or real, of the old system, is a refuge open day and night; its gaily painted doors wide flung to welcome the poor and needy and those in trouble or distress of mind or body. In fact, it is that form of so-called Socialism which holds out the illuminated promise of freedom, but which, in reality, is the gateway to the established slavery of Bolshevism.
Under our existing parliamentary system, the first consideration of any self-respecting and duly elected government is to remain in office. The party that can count on the whole-hearted support of that undeniable ‘cheque-book influence’ which banking, finance, and big-business leaders have at their disposal and which they can at all times exert, possesses in itself an electoral advantage which renders true statesmanship in our political leaders almost impossible. Our would-be statesmen, old and young, no matter to what section of what party they may happen to belong, can never usefully emerge from the sub-imago stage. Had we possessed in this country a statesman with imagination bold enough to defy the orthodox principles of an antiquated -financial system, there was much that might have been done years ago which was not done, but which would have very greatly assisted the conditions of this country and prevented the chaotic conditions of the world’s production. But true statesmanship implies the advocacy of a far-sighted National Economic Policy, designed to benefit, not only this nation as a whole, but this British Empire as a whole, and consequently the Trading World.
Whether it be true to-day or not, the City of London is, by repute, still considered to be the money market of the world. It therefore stands to reason that, in so far as British policy is affected or controlled by the money-power of the City of London, so also must that same money-power most seriously affect the trade status of the world. It is inconceivable that British policy should flourish an enforced alliance with, and largely controlled by, the money market of the world and the Bank for International Settlements and almost innumerable international, industrial, and financial combines.
To advertise our gifts of oratory by informing the people that ‘this great country of ours should lead the world to prosperity’, fails to divert the national tendency, and the national necessity, to discard old-fashioned and orthodox ideas and to create a more modern economic system. But the immense task of bringing about any such economic evolution, entailing, as it does, a complete change in the relationship between the supply of money and the supply of goods, will be difficult enough even were all interests agreed upon the national necessity for such a change. Unfortunately, we have to contend with two schools of thought, possessing views which are often diametrically opposed to one another; so much opposed, in fact, that open animosity and mistrust are becoming more and more apparent as the faults of the old system are driven out into the open by the pressure of new circumstances, and by the increasing demands of democracy for social justice which it is the aim of the new school to make possible and to achieve.
 
II THE OLD SCHOOL OF THOUGHT
The basic argument governing the mentality of the old school might roughly be described as follows: -
‘Without money, nothing can be bought and nothing sold. Therefore nothing matters but money. No matter what the cost to the nation and its industries, no matter how it affects our volume of trade and unemployment and the trade of the world, under no circumstances must we allow anything to affect the smooth working of the money system. Obviously, the productive industries and their output must be regulated and organised; for if left to manage their own affairs, producers would tend to produce more than the markets could consume. This applies also to our trade with foreign countries. Otherwise one class of producer, or one section of industry, or one trading country, would be obtaining more than its fair share of the strictly limited amount of money that we can render available for trade and commerce generally, for the markets, and for the purchasing power of the people which, above all, enables markets to absorb a greater or less volume of the output of producers, in accordance with the amount of money spent and with the price of the products.’
And it has therefore devolved upon the directors and managers of the money industry and of banking and finance, headed by the Bank of England with its charter, to exercise the existing monetary system, even if it entails war.
It is important to bear in mind that our monetary policy of the last several years has not, as heretofore, been a Bank of England policy, but the policy of H.M. Treasury, initiated by a Chancellor of the Exchequer who apparently realised that what had been permanently and definitely wrong with the nation’s economic development was a monetary system controlled by the professional moneylenders and the professional creators of credit – controlled, that. is to say, by financiers imbued with the theory that, because money and credit were obviously essential to the interchange of goods and commodities, therefore it was equally obvious and essential that those who controlled money and the issue of credit should control trade, and should determine and regulate (under their own highly profitable system) those economic processes which enable production to find a market. : This, of course, means that financiers in reality took upon themselves, perhaps not the responsibility, but certainly the power, of controlling the markets of the world and therefore the numerous relationships between one nation and another, involving international friendships or mistrusts.
Ignorant acquiescence in this theory, constantly and profusely advertised and upheld, has penetrated into the minds of the peoples and of their Governments; so that to-day it is not food and shelter, comfort and health, recreation, enjoyment of life, and a fair share of the prodigious capacity of the world to produce and to benefit mankind, which are the direct aim of all men and all nations. Those who are hungry do not ask for bread or meat; they ask for money, so. that they can buy.
So it is that the main concern of the average industrialist, and of the average director on the board of an industrial company, is to produce his goods as cheaply as possible, and, having done so, to sell his goods at the very highest price obtainable from the consumer; in order that his shareholders may benefit and that he build up reserves of money against the ‘uncertainties of the future’ – whilst, at the same moment, the nation is told that ‘confidence has been restored’. Confidence in what? Has our friend the director confidence in the banking system? If so, why should he hold up the profits which belong to the shareholders? Can he not be quite sure that, if and when occasion should arise, he has only to go to his bank, for all the money he needs? Does he not realise that, by distributing more money to his shareholders, he is increasing the purchasing power of those who buy his products? Perhaps he forgets that production is dependent upon the purchasing power of consumers, and that his first consideration should be the capacity of consumers to absorb his production, and not, first of all, the capacity of his works to produce at the lowest possible price and to sell at the highest possible price. The future of his business is dependent upon the consumer, and it is the economic position of the consumer which governs not only the volume of the producer’s output but the price that he can successfully ask for it.
Under our modern economy, it is true to say that all producers are consumers. But it is certainly not true to say that all consumers are producers; for there are millions, in this country alone, who have never produced anything at all, who never will, and who could not if they would. Like the banker and the agent and the broker, they are middlemen. Nevertheless, it is the consumer, in his millions and in his capacity to purchase for money what is for sale on the market, who, fundamentally, governs the world’s economy and therefore the peace of the world. For where there is contentment there will be no war; and where there is discontent there will remain war and the threat of war.
From our earliest youth we have been brought up and nurtured under a false economy, which was originally acknowledged because of the simplicity and immense facilities which money, as a substitute for barter, gave to us all. We did not realise that the acceptance of this obvious benefit to mankind might one day dominate our welfare and eventually govern and control our progress. We have welcomed electricity instead of the oil lamp and the night-light, the advent of the motor car as a substitute for the hansom-cab, the water-supply company in lieu of laborious visits to a perhaps unreliable well. But have we been wrong in grasping at these modern opportunities? Is it conceivably possible that a great nation, anxious and determined to go forward into a better and more equitable social era, will be persuaded that, regrettable though it is, this is not a reasonable request, but is in fact quite impossible because the nation does not possess enough credit, or notes, or cheques, or money, or gold or silver, to enable this most desirable object to be achieved?
Almost unbelievably, there are still individuals in this country who advocate a return to gold, emphasising the importance of banknotes being once more convertible into gold on demand. To some people this suggests and implies that all notes should again be convertible into golden sovereigns, pound for pound; but it was never remotely possible to exchange the note issue for an equal number of sovereigns, nor even with the necessary weight of gold bars. The British public, even under the Gold Standard, could only be sure of the possibility of changing notes into gold provided they never asked for it in kind. For there never was, and never will be, sufficient gold to permit the note issue to be thus exchanged. The maître d’hôtel of the big restaurant prints canard sauvage à la presse on the menu, but even if one-quarter of his clientele should happen to demand it on the same day, they would quickly discover that it was ‘off’.
In August 1914, when the public very foolishly thought that gold money was preferable to paper money and actually did demand gold for notes in considerable numbers, the Joint Stock Banks, like Brer Rabbit, lay low, and referred clients demanding gold to the Bank of England. A run on the Bank of England followed; and when a paltry ten millions or so of golden sovereigns had been handed over the counter to the waiting crowds, in exchange for notes, the whole money system collapsed and there followed a double Bank Holiday and a moratorium; we went off the Gold Standard, and we were not even permitted to draw our own money from our own bank unless we could ‘satisfy’ the bank officials. Therefore the British public should be warned to regard with suspicion those who glibly talk of the advantages of gold convertibility; for it is a technical term which is grossly deceptive and misleading, and should carry about the same weight as the expression ‘sound finance’.
Every new invention, almost every phase in our progress, tends to produce a new nomenclature and new expressions. Some years ago we heard a great deal about ‘rationalisation of industry’, which in plain English meant ‘drastic cuts of wages and schemes- of amalgamation’, so that the price level of production should make the restored Gold Standard look respectable by still leaving a margin of profit for the producer. Similarly, Inflation and Deflation of the currency: We have been taught that Deflation which benefits the lenders of money (such as banks), is at times an unavoidable and necessary action in-order to preserve ‘sound finance’; whilst Inflation, benefiting the debtor (such as farmers, shopkeepers, and traders), entails action which is so disgraceful that it should never be mentioned in any respectable bank parlour. When things changed, so that it had to be mentioned, the word ‘Reflation’ was coined – in order that orthodox economists should not have their delicate digestions upset by being made to eat their own words.
And ‘sound finance’ means nothing at all. It is merely a sort of bankers’ slogan adopted to disguise the injustices of a credit system; so that whatever the form of financial jugglery in question might be, it should, in the ears of the public, give the true ring of the genuine coin or, at any rate, have a comforting sound about it. Whether we like it or not, we must realise that the opinion of the City of London very often does not represent the opinion of the Country; that ‘sound finance’ is essentially an expression invented by the, banker and the dealers in credit. It involves stout adherence to a customary ratio as between deposits and loans; it entails the principle of giving the lowest possible interest to the depositor and obtaining the highest possible return from the borrower; it favours, quite naturally, the rich, as against the poor, borrower, and gives a preferred credit to saleable collateral in the form of Stock Exchange securities rather than, to any other security. But, above all, it entails that there should exist at all times a demand for credit and currency which, normally, exceeds the supply; and it prescribes that there should be no reform and no legislation which might deprive the money industry of the natural and interested advantage of its monopoly or of its existing policy.
It permits and often encourages the taking of risks on the part of Industry and Commerce, but must avoid participation in that risk. It favours Deflation; but abhors Inflation even when it is rechristened Reflation; and, in an emergency, is always the first into the lifeboat, the first to leave the sinking ship, and the last to man the pumps. It refuses to understand that money should be only a means of facilitating an equitable barter economy, and that there can be in reality no such thing as ‘sound finance’ so long as the country is unsound. It fails to believe or to understand that the welfare of the country’s productive industries are of far greater national importance than the non-productive business of withholding, managing, and distributing a credit founded upon bank deposits which are the property of the bank’s customers and are based upon the unlikelihood that depositors will all withdraw their credits at the same time. Under the immense advantages of the cheque system, hundreds of millions of pounds change hands every week between the bank’s individual customers. This cheque system is dependent upon the integrity of the people as a whole, and mainly constitutes a series of book-entries involving the movement of an extremely small percentage of actual currency.
Another of the great features of the present monetary system is that extraordinary economic propensity known as the Trade Cycle – a phenomenon which is regarded by the majority of our banking and finance experts, and many an orthodox economist of the old school, as an unavoidable and unaccountable economic reaction, comparable with the to-and-fro swing of a pendulum but having, nevertheless, no definite frequency of vibration; whereby a boom must inevitably be followed by a slump, and a slump be the precursor of a boom. This ‘unaccountable phenomenon’ is of course a very objectionable feature; for it destroys the confidence of the optimist whilst at the same time confounding the pessimist, and therefore induces a get-rich-quick-or-the-tide-will-turn mentality which tends to convert the most sober trader into a quick-change artist, destroys permanent confidence, fills us with the spirit of gambling and speculation, and turns us all, so to speak, into Trade-cyclists.
The finance industry, the exchange bankers and the Stock Exchange grow rich upon the ups and downs of trade, and are largely dependent on variations and changes of the price levels of commodities. But productive industry grows rich upon stable markets, a constant price level, and the Absence of violent economic fluctuations.
There are not a few in the City of London who have (wholly legitimately) converted their annual incomes into annual repayments of capital, in order to escape the over-burden of British income-tax and super-tax. And yet it is the financiers of the City of London who are the great conscientious objectors to any ‘premature’ or ‘emergency’ reduction in this heavy burden of income-tax. How can one justly blame the Chancellor of the Exchequer when he budgets for the ultimate benefits of ‘sound finance’ rather than for the immediate necessities of producer and consumer?
Under such general conditions the Communist is naturally content to abide his time; for he observes that the trend of affairs is slowly converging towards the very conditions which he most desires to see – a growing discontent with finance and the money system, an increasing weariness of the present form of Party government, and an increasing poverty and loss of influence among those who have so recently been the mainstay and backbone of the country. Unless the great producing industries of this country hold together, consult together, and support one another, there is no safe anchorage for the nation in the storm that is already on the horizon.
 
III CHANGES AND EXCHANGES
In a national emergency it is essential that the nation should be able to rely implicitly upon an adequate supply of credit and currency to meet all possible contingencies. We cannot risk a repetition of the financial fiasco of August 1914, nor permit any unregulated flight of capital such as occurred at the time of the Munich crisis. We do not want once more a sudden inflation of the currency, followed eventually by a still more ruinous policy of long-term deflation. We know how we stand with regard to our Navy, Army, and Air Force, and that Fourth Arm, our Civil Defence. In addition we have the assurance that in time of war the nation can rely upon an adequate food supply. And yet, in spite of these defences, each one of which adds its quota to national confidence and spurs us to further efforts, we have heard little of encouragement concerning our money preparations for this emergency. The nation cannot be expected to have full confidence in the future whilst this vital Fifth Arm remains a more or less unknown quantity, obscured from the public eye and wrapped in mystery.
Cheap money and the exchange equalisation fund have well fulfilled their peacetime objectives, and the nation has thrown off for ever the restrictions of the Gold Standard; but such steps are not in themselves enough. The supply and issue of money and the creation of credit still remain almost entirely outside the control of the Government, and are still managed by Banking and Finance and by the Bank of England with its intimate associations with the Bank for International Settlements; whilst, until our actual declaration of war, Foreign Exchange speculators were permitted at all times to gamble with the nation’s credit, untrammelled by any sense of patriotic duty and thinking only of their own profit. Although an Act of Parliament was designed to enable the police to give the citizens of this country greater protection against the bomb-dropping propaganda of the I.R.A., these misguided terrorists have not done half as much harm to the nation as that consortium of Foreign Exchange speculators who were left free to initiate a national financial crisis whenever a profitable opportunity presented itself. Until these financial Gangsters are permanently exterminated there can be no complete confidence in the economic welfare of the country.
Just as the greatest advocates of a better agricultural policy for the nation are the agriculturists themselves, so the greatest opponents to a change of monetary policy are those who are themselves satisfied with the present order of things. Although there has always been grounds for the assertion that the Bank of England considers the profits of its stockholders as coming second in importance to the interests of the nation, the money industry, in all its branches, is not a charitable organisation, but a non-productive industry working for profit. That part of our invisible exports which is profit to ‘the money market of the world’ (estimated at, say £ 50´000´000 per annum) is obviously a national advantage of great importance. But in so far as this profit may accrue to the City of London at the expense of the nation, by promoting the importation of goods which can be better produced at home, so this profit becomes of infinitely less value than profit derived from home productive industries which carries, in the cost of production, 70 per cent to 80 per cent of wages.
The moment we realise that, under the existing system, the main inducement to work is one of profit, it follows that the practices and rules and regulations governing the money industry must be mainly based upon its controllers’ own desire for their own profit. It is therefore important to understand where the interests of banking and finance clash with those of the producer and consumer – that is, the community. Three great deterrents to progress in productive industry are: -
Indebtedness and the fear of indebtedness.
Lack of capital.
Lack of adequate purchasing power in the markets.
Therefore the nation, the community, requires freedom from indebtedness where that hinders trade; easy credit facilities at low rates of interest with adequate and just terms as to time of repayment; and an ample purchasing power available to the public.
On the other hand, the money industry lives and depends upon the indebtedness of others – upon those who must borrow. The greater the nation’s indebtedness, the greater the profit of the moneylenders and, in the same way as the money market of the world, the greater the world’s indebtedness, the greater the profit of London’s international financiers – provided, of course, that the borrower pays his interest and eventually the capital.
It may be said that capital is always available to ‘credit-worthy’ applicants; but, as the lender is always the sole judge of what constitutes credit-worthiness and bases his judgement upon comparisons of other securities available, those most urgently in need of capital are often unable to obtain it at all, or must pay exorbitant rates of interest to issuing houses, underwriters, or banks, etc. The slogan of the money lender is, ‘To them that hath shall be given.’
When we come to the question of interest it is plainly evident that the business of the lender is to obtain the highest possible return for his money; which is, of course, diametrically opposed to the interests of the producer. When we come to adequate purchasing power, which means adequate markets for produce, we see at once that a plethora or abundance of available free money, or of unborrowed currency in the hands of purchasers, would immediately lower the demand for money lent at interest, which is the stock-in-trade of the banks and the money industry generally. It is therefore the first concern of the money industry to regulate the supply of money that there shall at all times be a constant demand for it.
Turning to other instances where financial and money interests are opposed to productive and public interests, we find that the exchange broker lives, not upon exchange, but upon movements and alterations of exchange. The public, and production, need fixed exchanges. The moneylender, up to a point, welcomes a high bank rate, and takes advantage of changes of the rate. The merchant banker lives upon exports and imports and has little interest in home production or the home market. The stockbroker lives upon rises and falls, quite irrespective of merit, so that the outside investor is at all times losing to the Stock Exchange, even when he gains. (The cost, plus stamps and fees, etc., of our Stock Exchange is far higher than any other Stock Exchange in the world.) The company promoter and the issuing house quote the highest price to the productive industry and give to the public the least possible advantage. The underwriter, saddled with a new issue, calls upon the Press to persuade the public to take the burden off his shoulders. New issues vary; from those which are merely advertised in the Press but are not an application for public subscription, being too good for the public, down to the issue which has special advertisement in the Press and where prospectuses are sent to country addresses and should be treated with suspicions. Loans to foreign countries are organised and arranged by the City of London with no thought whatsoever of the nation’s welfare but solely in order to increase indebtedness, upon which the City thrives and grows rich. When a productive industry is unable to meet its commitments, it fails and goes into bankruptcy. When the money industry fails, the whole country is forced to make sacrifices in order to save the ‘financial interests’. If productive industry could cut out the intervening profit of the middleman and trade direct with the individual consumers of their products, there would follow an immediate demand throughout the country for a much greater production, necessitating an increased employment of labour and therefore an eventual reduction of taxation. Unfortunately this is an ideal situation which is impracticable and impossible. These middlemen, these agents, these brokers and jobbers, money and metal exchange operators, money lenders, issuing houses, banks and insurance companies – these entrepreneurs create nothing at all. They are the drones of the national beehive and live and are dependent upon the honey that others collect. Like the unemployed, they are supported at the cost of the nation.
In recent years a curious change has come over the British investing public. They refuse to do what is expected of them; more often than not ignoring the advice of City editors which is so temptingly laid before them in the Stock Exchange news; casting on one side the advice of their broker to switch from this investment to that, almost as if they suspected that some other broker was advising his client to switch from that investment to this.
With a flourish of printer’s ink, some desirable new issue is underwritten, sub-underwritten, strenuously advertised, and strongly recommended – only to prove a dismal failure. The issuing houses are completely out of touch with the sentiment of the public investor. Foreign lending has become a thing of the past. What has happened? Is it really the vagaries of Hitler which are responsible for this lethargy and inaction? Have we lost the gambling spirit? We watch our securities rise and fall and then rise again. ... We just smile and do nothing. At the week-ends, Friday to Tuesday, jobbers widen the prices of securities just in case someone might come along to buy or sell while they are away. But there is no real movement, no business, nothing doing. The Stock Exchange every now and then emits a buzzing noise as if it were anticipating some activity in the hive; but nothing happens, and once again it relapses into ins its now customary drone.
Not long ago influential voices in the City were crying out against Treasury restrictions and demanding the resumption of foreign lending. To-day those voices are silent. The semi-concealed failure of certain important loans has demonstrated in no uncertain manner that the British investing public is no longer content to be exploited for the sole benefit of the City of London, and of such industries in this country as profit by foreign orders and, for their exports, receive payment out of the pockets of the British investor. Over the last fifty or sixty years, something in the neighbourhood of £ 8´000 million has been lent abroad, on which the promoting and underwriting commissions alone must have been considerable. Of this huge amount, something like £ 4´500 million can be regarded as wiped off the slate and gone for ever. The British investing public, who have carried the long-term risk, are no longer foolish enough to continue throwing good money after bad; and they are right. Foreign lending, as once we knew it, is now also gone forever. As it happens, I have known the island of Madeira for some thirty years, and in that time I have watched its climatic change. It is true to say that the climate of the island has entirely altered because Madeira wine, once in great demand, became no longer fashionable. But the actual sequence of events, in outline, is that demand for the wine was lowered, and the vineyards, bare in winter, gave way to sugar plantations which absorbed and retained the moisture of the rains by shading the soil from the sun; resulting in more clouds, more rain, less sun and so a very different climate. There are innumerable instances showing how simple it is to confuse causes with effects and how easy to conclude that intermediate effects are primary causes. Some assert that armament companies are a cause of war. So also we are led to believe that the main cause of international disequilibrium, in the exchange of goods and commodities between one nation and another, is to be found in the trade restrictions imposed by individual nations, which hamper international trade and delay world economic recovery. Remove or greatly modify these restrictions and all will be well. ... It seems a perfectly logical argument, but the question might be examined from a slightly different angle:
It was raining heavily; the nations were getting wet; so they put up their umbrellas to protect themselves as best they could. But umbrellas are encumbrances to activity. In these days of competition we want both hands free, and so we said, ‘Let us by mutual agreement cast aside our various umbrellas, in order that we may all work with both hands.’ An excellent idea. But unfortunately the rain still continues, and if we all discard our umbrellas we shall all become most miserably wet. What in reality we want, is for the rain to stop. If and when that happened, the umbrellas would automatically become useless. Once we have arrived at this conclusion, we are logically bound to ask what has been the cause of the economic downpour which has produced these economic protective measures; and we immediately find that it resolves itself into a question of Prices and Costs – and not entirely that, but also the variability and the changes of these Prices and Costs.
The first consideration of a nation is, or should be, the protection of its own nationals and its own industries. It will never allow, in principle, a foreign importation to ruin its own producers of that same commodity. In other words, no one will buy a pair of boots for a sovereign if he can get them for 15s. And so, gradually, it dawns upon us that the whole question of International Trade and of greater freedom in exchanging goods with one another, is not a question of the real value of the exports themselves but of the price of those export – that is to say, the money value. The problem is therefore, essentially a money problem. The value of a ton of butter may be the same everywhere, but its price when delivered to this country or that may be very cheap in one market and prohibitive in another. Why? Because, we do not possess, and have never possessed, a true and honest measure of value. Those ‘umbrellas’, those trade restrictions, came into being solely because money in one country buys much more, or much less, than it does in some other country.
The restoration and comparative freedom of International Trade does not depend primarily upon the elimination of existing trade restrictions; it depends fundamentally upon a new and better money system, so that money based upon goods and commodities shall represent the true and international value of those commodities, and shall cease to be, as it is to-day, a permanent and constant irritant and restriction standing in the way of the world’s economic progress, the happiness of the peoples, and the achievement of a lasting peace among nations.
 
IV THE CASE FOR AGRICULTURE AND THE PRODUCTIVE INDUSTRIES
It is impossible to over-estimate the extreme importance to agriculture and to the individual farmer which a stable measure of value would be. Supposing, for a moment, that the stable measure of value already existed, we can see what a difference it would make to a rather impecunious farmer who has la loan from his bank which he cannot repay; a tithe to pay, which is out of all proportion to his agricultural turn-over, where an unprofitable price level exists.
In the first Place he would be able to calculate within a few shillings what extra quantity of produce would need to grow in order to meet annual interest, and, eventually, the capital of his loan. He could look at a field of potatoes, or a herd of cattle, and work out roughly what his profit should be when he finally sold them for cash, and what proportion of his produce would be needed to meet his bank-loan requirements. He would know what his cost of living would be, he would know what the price of machinery would be, and, with the help of government statistics, he could make up his mind what it was safe to grow. He could distinguish between his crops as an investor distinguishes between Gilt-edged stocks and ordinary shares; carrying a greater risk, but with the possibilities of larger profits.
From the national standpoint it is essential to realise the nature, and to weigh the importance, of conflicting interests. But it is not right to do so solely from the point of view of foreign trade and international finance; nor is it right to decide, as if it were a recognised economic law, that no development of British agriculture must be permitted to go so far as to interfere with these supposedly prior claims. It is not right that the interests and influence of money should persuade our leaders that imports from foreign countries are of greater importance than the encouragement of our home markets and of the employment of British labour; nor is it perfectly honest to persuade the public that the first and foremost duty of a National Government should be the protection of international interests.
Thus, British agricultural interests, and the development of the land for the production and proper marketing of home-grown meat and foodstuffs generally, still remain confined and restricted by the definite limitations imposed by more powerful interests which are considered to be of greater importance to our economic system. In its development the home-grown meat industry can go so far and no farther for as soon as the proper development of the land begins to encroach upon the built-up area of those more powerful interests, it is met with an impassable barrier.
Until we can begin to realise, perhaps by still greater suffering, that a policy of exaggerated internationalism is by no means the only approach to peace, British agriculture will remain of third-rate importance on the list of reforms which should constitute our national and imperial policy. It is only by amalgamated effort that agricultural interests will find once more their rightful place in our economy.
With the help of nature, mankind to-day is capable of producing far more than mankind can consume; more food than he could eat, more clothing than he could need, more houses than he could occupy, more entertainment than he could enjoy, more protection, more work, more leisure, more opportunity, and a .more contented mind. Even were the productive capacity of the world to stop still where it stands to-day, the world would not suffer for years to come. If need be, the world can produce more than the whole world can usefully consume. How fortunate we are, and how contented we should all be! What a wonderful world! – divided, it is true, into sections of different sizes, speaking different languages, possessing different climates, characters, temperaments, habits, and customs; some educated, others primeval; some clever some foolish, and some intellectual; wearing different clothing, and having different religions; yet, nevertheless, all bound together by the one common and universal desire of man: to be happy and contented, to possess the hope and opportunity of becoming even happier and still more contented, to live and let live, and to help one another.... An idiosyncratic picture, so unreal, so far from the actual truth, that it seems mere waste of time to contemplate it. And yet, however difficult or even impossible it may seem to turn this dream into reality, we are confronted with the undeniable fact that the chaotic state of the world is due to the inability of consumers to use and profit by the world’s ability to produce. If once we can decide what it is that constitutes a barrier between the producer and the consumer whilst both remain dissatisfied, we shall have discovered, not only the main cause of the world’s discontent and of the existing enmities and jealousies among the nations, but at the same time the true road to the peace of the world. If the producers are waiting to produce more, if ships are waiting to carry the goods, if there are railway and transport services wheresoever there is a demand for them, then the fault must lie with the consumer. Why does he hold back the trade and commerce and progress of the world, and prevent the consummation of a lasting peace by deliberately refusing to avail himself of the good things the world can offer him? The answer is obvious. The consumer cannot afford to buy more; he has not enough money! Let us discard all biased opinions, and we shall find it possible only to arrive at one decision – that the health and welfare of the individual, the happiness of the community, the contentment of the nation, and the peace of the world, are mainly, if not entirely, a monetary problem.
Those whose main business it is to make profit out of short-term money are inclined to have a short-term outlook. Those who deal in money and who profit by the indebtedness of others may attempt to argue that Finance is still the handmaiden of Industry and that the fault is in reality one of ‘over-production’ or of industrial inefficiency; or that the world has been attempting to live beyond its means; or that, because we have by habit regarded money as wealth, we are confusing produce with its value in terms of money. So also German does not admit her responsibility for war any more than the armament firms admit their sinister influence over pacifist premiers. We do not allow brewers to dictate our licensing laws nor the hours of opening public houses, any more than we allow motorists to decide our speed limits or to dictate by-laws for the pedestrian or to decide the price of petrol. In the same way, a very large section of the community is becoming unreconciled to the fact that the nation’s monetary and financial policy is influenced, if not entirely directed, by the directors of the money industry and international finance, whether these be British subjects or not.... Shall the claimant choose his own compensation, or the thief his term of imprisonment?
The United States have already made a move to break away from this country’s policy of inaction. Having thrown overboard the gold standard, President Roosevelt has had the courage and true statesmanship to inform the world by his defiance of the orthodoxes of finance, that in his view the prosperity of the producer and the consumer are of greater importance than strict adherence to the principles of what is termed by its exponents as ‘sound finance’. His especial determination to assist American agriculture, taken in conjunction with the demand of the United States farmer for an ‘honest dollar’, reflects the desire of the British farmer for additional credit facilities and an ‘honest pound’. Although President Roosevelt has not yet been given scope to develop his freedom of action, upon its development, and upon his not being forced to submit to the powerfully combined influences of international finances, will depend the repercussions which will result from his policy and their effect upon producers in this country and in the rest of the world.
It is a logical and undeniable fact that once we could point to a prosperous agriculture, down would go our unemployment figures, up would go the demand of the primary producer for manufactured articles, and their increased output would in turn necessitate a greater demand for labour. This important repercussion, with its beneficial results upon the health, stamina, and birth-rate of the people, seems to have escape attention altogether. To those who believe that a properly balanced economy is still possible and desirable, it would seem that our trade policy is to be based upon the idea that it is impossible and undesirable to alter what already exists.
During a speech in Northumberland in 1938, the then Financial Secretary to the Treasury made the following statement: ‘Securing the greatest measure of prosperity in the country does not mean securing the prosperity of one industry or one class at the expense of another, or vice versa.’ No one would dare attempt to refute this ideal dictum; and yet, since that is precisely what we have been doing for half a century, it could only have referred to a future policy and could only have meant one of two alternatives – on the one hand, a Governmental determination to recognise existing economic factors to stabilise the existing order of things, and to maintain the existing relationships between our different productive industries where must continue to compete with each other in a restricted market possessing strictly limited purchasing power. But at the same time we were told that prosperity could not be achieved in this way. What, then, is the alternative? Virtually, we have been given to understand that British agricultural prosperity would be a national catastrophe; but we have not yet been told the solution of this inequitable and impossible economic situation, nor what action it is proposed by the Government to take in order to remove the economic obstacles which necessitate and have established the admittedly unchallengeable fact that, under the present order of things, British agriculture must not be given the opportunity of becoming a prosperous and profitable business employing hundreds of thousands more men, because its prosperity would adversely affect other vested interests, some of them foreign, supported by the political influence of financial internationalism.
It is so easy to say that the Government’s agricultural policy is based on the view that town and country are interdependent and that neither should be sacrificed to the other. But agriculture has already been sacrificed until it has been reduced almost to bankruptcy, and the first consideration should be a restoration of its rightful position so that the interests of town and country may meet on equal terms. The more foodstuffs we import, the better for our export trade and the worse for our own agriculture; and to say that the best guarantee of prosperity for the British farmer is a prosperous urban and industrial community which in turn depends on a flourishing export trade, is, in other words, to say: Let us import still more food from abroad for the people, and then they will consume more food produced at home!
To say that any measure which gives the farmer immediate benefit at the expense of our overseas trade would soon react against him by throwing more people out of work and reducing their ability to buy his products, is an admission that, in spite of all our boasted social reforms, the man out of work would immediately be forced to cut down his own food supply, to buy less from the home producer of food, and so become, to the national disgrace, inadequately fed. But why should this have an adverse effect upon the home producer if foreign imports of food continue to flood the market? On the other side, it would be equally true to argue that any measure which gives the farmer immediate benefit at the expense of our overseas trade would nevertheless benefit the employment of British labour and increase their ability to buy home-grown food.
It is not the object of these comments to refute the arguments of our politicians, but to emphasise the fact that very often there is an evident tendency to adapt an argument to suit a prearranged policy and to discount. the reactions which it involves. Agriculture is in the doldrums and must apparently be kept there, lest by its prosperity it should damage the interests of other industries, and especially of our export trade.
A prominent feature of our policy having long consisted in securing the prosperity of one industry and one class at the expense of another, the following instances may be quoted:-
British investors in foreign loans have, over the last fifty or sixty years, lost some £ 400´000´000, so that our exporters and importers might flourish and continue to export gifts to foreign countries at the expense of one class – to whit, the exploited British investors.
Have we not hitherto heaped burdens of taxation upon one section of the community in order to benefit another? Has not our whole economy depended upon the process of robbing Peter to pay Paul?
Have we not deliberately delayed the production of oil from coal, in the interests of international oil companies?
Have we not destroyed coffee, cocoa, wheat, herrings, for the benefit of those most interested to keep up the price of these things against the consumer?
Have we not issued war loans, and inflated the currency and then deflated it for the benefit of the moneylenders?
Is it not common sense that in the case where a consumer has one hundred pounds per annum to spend, a new and additional expenditure on a motor car benefits the motor industry at the expense of other industries?
But the most outstanding instance of all is the case of the British primary producer. In British agriculture, which is peppered all over the Country, there is lack of cohesion and co-operation. For this, the greatest of productive industries, there has never existed a national policy; for the simple reason that British agriculture under party politics can be dealt with piecemeal, as consisting of widespread village voters who form a purely local minority of electors. Thus, British agriculture – by which is meant the interests of the producers of food from the land, and not the many lucrative businesses of the middlemen and distributors – has been consistently used and exploited in order to secure or to maintain the prosperity of other industries.
It has been so easy to raise the cry: ‘Your food will cost you more’; so easy to persuade the ignorant townsman that, because food is the first essential of life, therefore cheap food is fundamental to the lives of the many millions of under-nourished families in this wealthy country, who possess full voting power but totally inadequate incomes to live decently and contentedly. It has therefore been easy to obtain political support against any Legislation which might benefit the primary producer, or to obtain it in favour of any legislation whereby the primary producer is squeezed in order that other industries may remain assured of their market.
World peace and prosperity, the recovery of agriculture, and the restoration of confidence between industry and finance can only be achieved by the introduction and adoption of a stable measure of value, permitting a better and more equitable system to operate successfully.
 
V DEMOCRACY OR FINANCIAL DICTATORSHIP?
AGREEMENT amongst the nations to co-operate in the avoidance of war, so that the temptation to regard might as right may be eliminated for ever, and the consciousness of offensive or defensive superiority no longer exist in our mentality as a weapon to add force to national diplomacy, is an ideal which will always remain the aim of the civilised world. But democracy is in danger for the very reason that democratic government itself is subservient to the sectional interests which control finance, and which have it in their power to inflict a financial crisis upon the nation should they anticipate Le

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PostPosted: Mon Feb 10, 2020 2:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dr. Michael Hudson: Economic Lessons for 2020

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nluLNA30e8k

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PostPosted: Mon Apr 06, 2020 6:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Black Rock Ascending
This Wall Street Firm Has Quietly Gained Control Over the Financial Sector During Coronavirus Panic

BlackRock is gaining power because of this crisis.

Published 9 hours ago on Apr 5, 2020 By Shane Trejo
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/this-wall-street-firm-has-quietly-gained -control-over-the-financial-sector-during-coronavirus-panic/

A big winner of the economic peril caused by the coronavirus pandemic has been the monolithic Wall Street management firm BlackRock, which has been granted sweeping new powers by the Federal Reserve.

Last month, the Fed named BlackRock as the adviser and investment manager for three emergency programs meant to prop up the fledgling markets. They are now tasked with controlling the primary market corporate credit facility (PMCCF), the secondary market corporate credit facility (SMCCF), and granting new bond and loan issuance.

Critics of the move fear that the agreement between the Fed and BlackRock are recreating the exact circumstances that have allowed systemic Wall Street corruption in the past.

Trending: Banished Journalist Laura Loomer’s $1.5 Billion Lawsuit Against Tech Giants Will Be Heard in Court

“By giving BlackRock full control of this debt buyout program, the Fed is further entwining the roles of government and private actors,” wrote many different consumer-advocate groups in a letter criticizing the BlackRock’s deal with the Fed.
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“In doing so, it makes BlackRock even more systemically important to the financial system. Yet BlackRock is not subject to the regulatory scrutiny of even smaller systemically important financial institutions,” the letter added.

BlackRock has become the world’s preeminent investment management corporation under the stewardship of its founder Larry Fink. Fink has exploited his Washington D.C. connections throughout his career, and he has particularly strong ties with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Fink was expected to lead her Treasury Department if Clinton defeated President Donald Trump in 2016. With Washington D.C. in his back pocket, Fink has been able to dominate Wall Street despite no apparent expertise or even basic competency.

“His economic empire is less a result of his economic skills and competitiveness and more a result of his political connections and trillion-dollar state contracts,” wrote sociologist and geopolitical scholar James Petras about Fink’s career.

“Fink’s most famous financial product, mortgage-based securities led to the biggest collapse in world financial markets since the Great Depression,” Petras added.

BlackRock has grown into the world’s most powerful firm because of Fink’s success in peddling influence with politicians in the Washington D.C. swamp. They capitalized during the last economic crisis, benefiting mightily from sweetheart deals orchestrated under former President Barack Hussein Obama. While corporations were going under left and right in the 2008 economic crash, BlackRock was cleaning up and consolidating power.

They profited from the economic misery by being awarded lucrative government contracts, often without having to even bid on them. BlackRock was tasked with managing the proposed rescue operations of Bear Stearns, the American International Group and Citigroup. They also implemented a Federal Reserve program to resuscitate the beleaguered housing market and were brought on as consultants to evaluate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Their growing influence was a major cause of controversy at the time.

“They have access to information when the Federal Reserve will try to sell securities, and what price they will accept. And they have intricate financial relations with people across the globe,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said in 2009. “The potential for a conflict of interest is great and it is just very difficult to police.”

“In other words, the conflict results in an enormous profit for the fund manager at the expense of the taxpayer,” wrote Neil M. Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, in a 2009 report about BlackRock’s gaming of the system.

In a decade’s time from 2009 to 2019, assets under the control of BlackRock skyrocketed in value from $1.3 trillion to $6.84 trillion. Cronyism has paid off for Fink, and BlackRock is perfectly situated to exploit coronavirus hysteria in order to commit another heist.

Petras noted: “Fink has turned BR into an empire by spending his time and energy in the politics of controlling and milking the US Treasury. Controlling this activity is more influential than the President of the United States or Pentagon in deciding who among the elite wins and who loses!”

BlackRock has maneuvered themselves into the same role they were in when they cashed out on the economic peril during the previous crash. While Americans struggle to pay the rent, BlackRock will be racking up trillions more in ill-gotten gains.

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PostPosted: Sat Apr 18, 2020 8:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Over 43,000 US millionaires will get ‘stimulus’ averaging $1.6 million each
https://nypost.com/2020/04/16/43k-us-millionaires-will-get-stimulus-av eraging-1-6m-each/

By Lee Brown April 16, 2020 | 2:39pm
Over 43,000 US millionaires will get ‘stimulus’ averaging $1.6 million each

NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea's wise warning on 'compassionate' coronavirus prison releases

At least 43,000 American millionaires who are too rich to get coronavirus stimulus checks are getting a far bigger boost — averaging $1.6 million each, according to a congressional committee.

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act trumpeted its assistance for working families and small businesses, but it apparently contains an even bigger benefit for wealthy business owners, the committee found.

The act allows pass-through businesses — ones taxed under individual income, rather than corporate — an unlimited amount of deductions against their non-business income, such as capital gains, the Washington Post said. They can also use losses to avoid paying taxes in other years.

That gives the roughly 43,000 individual tax filers who make at least $1 million a year a savings of $70.3 billion — or about $1.6 million apiece, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Hedge-fund investors and real estate business owners are “far and away” the ones who will benefit the most, tax expert Steve Rosenthal told the Washington Post.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) called it a “scandal” to “loot American taxpayers in the midst of an economic and human tragedy.”


Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) claimed that “someone wrongly seized on this health emergency to reward ultrarich beneficiaries.”

“For those earning $1 million annually, a tax break buried in the recent coronavirus relief legislation is so generous that its total cost is more than total new funding for all hospitals in America and more than the total provided to all state and local governments,” he stressed in a statement.

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PostPosted: Sat Apr 18, 2020 9:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Interest Accrued $4,693,332 since you arrived 59 seconds ago
Read more at: https://commodity.com/debt-clock/

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PostPosted: Fri Apr 24, 2020 8:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Apr 11, 2020,07:00am EDT
10 Billionaires Gained $51 Billion This Week As Markets Edged Up From The Stock Crash
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hayleycuccinello/2020/04/11/billionaire-g ainers-ortega-bezos-buffett

Hayley C. CuccinelloForbes Staff
Billionaires
Following the world's richest people.
US-IT-lifestyle-Amazon-internet-technology-economy-computers
Despite reports that Amazon may cancel Prime Day, [+]
AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The unemployment rate and the COVID-19 case count continue to soar, but the stock market is faring a bit better. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 both surged by more than 12% in the week ending April 9. (The markets closed on April 10 for Good Friday). Stocks made a notable jump on Thursday as the Federal Reserve announced $2.3 trillion in loans to support the economy. The market gains led to a combined $51.3 billion boost for 10 of the world’s billionaires since the market closed a week ago, on April 2.

Amancio Ortega — of Spanish fast-fashion giant Inditex — gained the most, in both dollar and percentage terms. His net worth surged by $7.2 billion, to $64.8 billion, as Inditex stock rebounded by nearly 15.5% this week. (Shares are still down 20.4% from the beginning of the year.) Many Spanish stocks are edging upwards as the country’s COVID-19 death toll slows down. The IBEX 35, the index of the biggest publicly-traded companies in Spain, ended the week up 7.6%.

Celebrities Sighting In A Coruna - November 17, 2018
Amancio Ortega received the biggest net worth [+]
EUROPA PRESS VIA GETTY IMAGES
Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, logged the second biggest increase. He gained $6.8 billion, bringing his net worth to $124.7 billion. Despite reports that Amazon may cancel Prime Day due to coronavirus, the company’s share price rose by 6.5% this week, as homebound customers are still flocking to the retail giant for groceries and other necessities.

Luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault’s net worth jumped by $6.3 billion, to $92 billion, as shares of his LVMH increased nearly 7%. French stocks across the board are generally rallying, with a 10% surge for French index Euronext Paris. According to the Financial Times, LVMH, which owns brands like Louis Vuitton and Dom Perignon, has reversed its decision to use government assistance for its employees.

Berkshire Hathaway stock has taken a beating recently, but bounced back 7% this week, increasing Warren Buffett’s net worth by $5 billion, to $76 billion. Berkshire has dumped much of its airline holdings, which have been in freefall with customers afraid to travel. The conglomerate announced on April 3 that it had sold 18% and 4% of its Delta and Southwest Airlines stakes, respectively.

Indian oil and gas tycoon Mukesh Ambani’s fortune jumped by $4.4 billion, to $44.5 billion. Morgan Stanley published an optimistic research note on April 8 positing that Ambani’s Reliance Industries could decrease its net debt, even if oil prices and demand continue to fall for the next six months.

Below are the world’s 10 biggest billionaire gainers this week:

Amancio Ortega
Source of wealth: Zara

Country: Spain

Net worth change from April 2 to April 9: +$7.2 billion

Jeff Bezos
Source of wealth: Amazon

Country: U.S.

Net worth change: +$6.8 billion

Bernard Arnault
Source of wealth: LVMH

Country: France

Net worth change: +$6.3 billion

Mark Zuckerberg
Source of wealth: Facebook

Country: U.S.

Net worth change: +$6.2 billion

Warren Buffett
Source of wealth: Berkshire Hathaway

Country: U.S.

Net worth change: +$5.0 billion

Mukesh Ambani
Source of wealth: petrochemicals, oil & gas

Country: India

Net worth change: +$4.4 billion

Elon Musk
Source of wealth: Tesla

Country: U.S.

Net worth change: +$4.2 billion

Larry Ellison
Source of wealth: Oracle

Country: U.S.

Net worth change: +$4.0 billion

Bill Gates
Source of wealth: Microsoft

Country: U.S.

Net worth change: +$3.6 billion

Larry Page
Source of wealth: Alphabet

Country: U.S.

Net worth change: +$3.6 billion

MORE FROM FORBES
Billionaire Tracker: Actions The World’s Wealthiest Are Taking In Response To The Coronavirus Pandemic
By Hayley C. Cuccinello

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Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 31, 2021 9:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

St George's Hill have a public footpath in the middle of their 'private' gated estate

TonyGosling wrote:
The land scam is even greater than the money scam


Link


part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fzWnfGO_jI

part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3ZwXCsbkq8

The World Turned Upside Down - The Diggers - Leon Rosselson
In 1649 to St. George's hill they came... This song has been covered and sung by many many protest signers al over the world. At last a version on youtube by the man who wrote it. Covered by Billy Bragg, Dick Gaughan and many others (including about six covers on here) this tale of Winstanley and his peaceful protest cruelly put down hundreds of years ago is a socailist anthem. This rare concert footage of Leon Rosselson was recorded in Edinburgh in October 2007. This hugely powerful song is also on his album Rosselsongs available from his website www.leonrosselson.co.uk Leon kindly allowed us to record this performance and this contains an intro about the 350th anniverary of that event.



st georges hill public footpath.jpg
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_________________
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PostPosted: Tue May 24, 2022 9:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ben Norton aka Multipolarista interviews Michael Hudson: Destiny of Civilization

Economist Michael Hudson on decline of dollar, sanctions war, imperialism, financial parasitism

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlUSqQ8U8T8
30613 Views May 12, 2022 55 Comments
https://www.bitchute.com/video/fXyqqPL9Apyu/

UPDATE: This wonderful transcript is now available just underneath the video
https://thesaker.is/ben-norton-aka-multipolarista-interviews-michael-h udson-destiny-of-civilization/


The decline of the US dollar, the three ‘systems’, the sanctions war on Russia, on the eve of the publication of Prof. Hudson’s new book: The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism.”

Transcript

BENJAMIN NORTON: Hey, everyone. I’m Ben Norton, and this is the Multipolarista podcast. And I have the great pleasure of being joined today by one of my favorite guests, one of I think the most important economists in the world today. I’m speaking with Professor Michael Hudson.

If you’ve seen any of the interviews I’ve done with Professor Hudson over the past few years, you probably know that he’s a brilliant analyst. He always has, I think, the best analysis to understand what’s going on economically and also politically, geopolitically, in the world today.

And right now is, I think, a very important moment to have Professor Hudson on today. We’re going to talk about the economic war on Russia and the process of economic decoupling between Russia and China and the West, which is something that Professor Hudson has talked about for many years. And that really has accelerated with the Western sanctions on Russia over Ukraine.

We’re also going to talk about the decline in U.S. dollar hegemony. A recent report from the International Monetary Fund, which is dominated by the U.S., acknowledged that the use of the dollar in foreign bank reserves is gradually declining.

Now, it’s not going to disappear overnight. But even the IMF is acknowledging that dollar hegemony is eroding. And, of course, the IMF acknowledged that the Western sanctions on Russia are going to further erode the hegemony of the U.S. dollar.

We now see Russia doing business with China in the Chinese yuan. Russia is also doing business with India with the Indian rupee. And of course Russia has been telling Europe that if it wants to buy Russian energy, it has to do so with Russian rubles.

So there’s so much to talk about today, Professor Hudson, but I want to begin in the first half of this interview today talking about a new book that you’re just about to publish.

Today is Monday, May 9th. You said on Wednesday, May 11th, the book comes out. And it’s called “The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism.”

And everything that I just prefaced this interview with, discussing the economic war in Russia and sanctions and decoupling, this is all deeply related to what you talk about in this book. And I had the pleasure of getting an early copy and reading through it. It’s a really important book, I think.

And you talk about this fundamental divide internationally – and this is a divide that actually goes back historically as well – between these three models for different economic systems you discuss: finance capitalism, industrial capitalism, and socialism.

And your argument is that the U.S. empire has been a force for imposing neoliberalism, which is a particular form of finance capitalism, which is nonproductive, in which finance capital destroys productive industries in pursuit of rent-seeking, and what you call the rentier class.

So instead of producing, as the classical bourgeois economists had said capitalism would be a productive system instead, finance capitalism is fundamentally a system of destruction and debt.

And your argument is that this is deeply rooted in U.S. foreign policy. This is the U.S. foreign policy strategy for expanding its economic power, is imposing this finance capitalist model on the world.

So can you expand further on your argument about the fight between finance capitalism, industrial capitalism, and socialism, and why you decided to publish this book now?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well the book came out of a series of 10 lectures that I did for my Chinese audience. I’ve been a professor at Peking University for a number of years in economics, and have professorships at other universities, Wuhan and Hong Kong.

And I have a fairly large audience of about 65,000 people per lecture there. And I was asked to give my general overview, sort of a history of economic development in the West, for the Chinese.

And in order to understand today’s finance capitalism, you have to understand what industrial capitalism was, as it was described in the 19th century.

And it’s often forgotten, or played down, that industrial capitalism was revolutionary. What it was trying to do – from the physiocrats in France in the late 18th century to Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Marx, and the whole late-19th century flowering of socialism – the ideal of classical value theory and rent theory, was to say what is the actual value, the cost value of producing goods and services?

And what is earned by the capitalist, when he employs labor to make a profit, and what is unearned? And what is unearned was the landlord class. That was the hereditary warrior class that conquered all of the European kingdoms in the Middle Ages.

And the attempt by England’s industrialists was saying, look, we cannot become the workshop of the world; we cannot undersell foreign countries if we have a landlord class ripping off all of the money in land rent.

And if we have predatory banking, or the wealthy people just lend really for buying property, or making distressed loans or predatory loans that have nothing to do with financing actual capital formation.

Well, what made this capitalism revolutionary was the British industrialists and advocates of industry, even the bankers in Ricardo’s time, said, well, in order to overthrow the landlord class, which controls the House of Lords and all of the upper chambers of government in Europe, we have to have democratic reform.

If we have democratic reform and give voting to the people, they’re going to vote against the landlord class, and then we can have an efficient economy where our prices of our exports and our goods and services reflect the actual cost of production, not the rake off for the rentiers class, not the rake off of what landlords take, not the rake off of what predatory bankers take.

And the whole long 19th century leading up to World War One was this revolutionary value theory that depicted land rent and monopoly rent and financial returns as being unearned income and wanting to strip it away.

And all of this seemed to be moving toward socialism. The industrialists were all in favor of government public utilities, of government enterprise, because they said, if the government doesn’t provide health care, then individuals are going to have to pay it, and it’ll cost a lot of money, like it does in the United States.

And so you had the conservative prime minister of England, Benjamin Disraeli, saying, health, all is health, we’ve got to provide public health for the people.

And it was the conservative Bismarck in Germany that said, we’ve got to provide pensions. If labor has to save up for the pensions, then it’s not going to have enough money to buy the goods and services that we Germans are producing. We have got to make pensions public.

So all of this move towards socialism was not only in favor of increasing living standards, which soared in the 19th century, but also in freeing the economy from the rentier class, from the landlords, from the bankers.

And for the classical economists, a free market was a market free from landlords, free from bankers, free from monopolists.

Well, needless to say, the rentiers fought back. And by after World War Two, we’ve seen a continual anti-classical theory replacing the classical idea of free markets with a value of free theory, saying, well, everybody earns whatever they they have. All wealth is earned, not unearned. And if Goldman Sachs partners are paid more than anyone else, that’s because they’re so productive.

So you had a move rejecting classical economics, a junk economics, and a kind of artificial economics that doesn’t really talk about how finance capitalism has worked.

And as it turns out, the business plan of finance capitalism was so predatory that it was anti-industrial.

That’s why President Clinton in the United States moved to invite China into the International Labor Organization, saying, well, we can fight wage rises in America by a race to the bottom. We can we can hire Asians to do work, and that will cause unemployment here. And that’s wonderful for the industrialists. It will basically cut wages and keep American wages down.

Well, that basically is the strategy of finance capitalism, and the aim of finance capitalism is not to invest in factories, and plant equipment, and research and development, but to live in the short term, but to make money by financial engineering, not industrial engineering.

And it becomes predatory, and so you have the whole ideological attack on public enterprise. You have Frederick Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” where you say, if government provides public healthcare, that’s “the road to serfdom,” where actually it’s finance capitalism that is the road to debt peonage and serfdom.

And you have now a whole disparagement of government. And all of this is a counter-revolution to the revolutionary impetus of industrial capitalism in its early stages.

And it’s true that corporations now are just as right-wing as the the banks and the hedge funds. But that’s because corporate industry has been taken over by the financial sector, and the heads of almost every industrial corporation are rewarded the how high they can push the stock price, to exercise the stock options they’re paid in.

And you increase the stock price not by investing more, not by hiring more labor or increasing productivity or increasing sales, but simply by using whatever income you have to buy back your stocks. And by buying back your stocks, this forces up their price.

And, most of all, by giving political contributions in this country to the Democrats and Republicans alike, who appoint Federal Reserve heads that have spent $7-9 trillion buying up stocks and bonds to increase the price of buying a retirement income, to increase Wall Street prices, to increase housing prices, and make America even less competitive industrially.

So finance capitalism is what has essentially de-industrialized the United States and turned the Midwest into a Rust Belt.

Well, the alternative, obviously, are the societies that have not followed this neoliberal finance capitalist plan. And the most successful economy, obviously, has been China, which is why it has been spending so much time there.

And China has done exactly what 19th-century United States, Germany, England, and France did. It has kept basic utilities, basic needs, housing, and above all, finance and banking, in the public domain, as public utilities.

Instead of having an independent financial sector operating on its own self-interest, the Bank of China creates the money. And the Bank of China lends money by deciding, where do we need to have investment in real estate to provide housing for the population at as low a price as we can make it? How do we build up the industry? How do we provide an educational system with training? How do we provide health?

And the fact is that the central planning in an efficient socialist style, not the Stalinist planning that everybody refers to of Russia, but a mixed economy as you have in China, which is truly a mixed economy, with guidance, like the French planification.

Well, that is obviously the way in which you survive and you avoid the kind of overloading the economy with debt service, with high rents, with high payments to the health-care monopoly in the United States, by avoiding all of this payment to a rentier class that has what the classical economists call unearned income, predatory income.

And instead of unseating them, we’ve put them in charge, and made the banks and Wall Street, and the city of London, and the Paris Bourse, the central planners.

So we do have central planning much more centralized than anything that was dreamed by the socialists. But the planning, the centralized planning is done by the financial sector.

And financial planning is short-termism; it’s short-term planning; it’s take your money and run. And that’s what is stripping and impoverishing the global economy today.

BENJAMIN NORTON: Absolutely. And, in your book, you write about the important distinction between the classical economic idea of a so-called free market, and how, you argue that, neoliberals turn that idea on its head.

So this is what you write in your book. And this is, again, Michael Hudson’s new book, “The Destiny of Civilization,” which is out this week. You write:

“The neoliberal ideology inverts the classical idea of a free market from one that is free from economic rent to one that is free for the rentier classes” – that is the rent-extracting classes – “to extract rent and gain dominance.”

So they they completely flip the idea of what it means to have a free market.

And then you note that, “in contrast to classical political economy, this neoliberal ideology promotes tax favoritism for rentiers, privatization, financialization, and deregulation.” And you discuss all of that.

That is, of course, what we could call the Washington consensus.

And then you argue that “U.S. foreign policy seeks to extend this neoliberal rentier program throughout the world.”

And you have a very interesting section of your book where you discuss this concept as “free-trade imperialism.”

So can you talk about what your idea of “free-trade imperialism” is and how it relates to U.S. foreign policy?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the Nobel Prize is given basically for junk economics. And probably the worst junk economist of the century was Paul Samuelson.

He made the absurd claim that he proved mathematically that, if you have free trade then, and don’t have tariffs, and don’t have any government protection, then everyone will become more equal. At least the proportions between labor and capital will be more equal. Well, the reality is just the opposite.

And the term “free-trade imperialism” was actually created by a British historian of trade theory who pointed out that, wait a minute, when England went for free trade, the idea was, if we have free trade, we can stifle other countries from being able to industrialize, because if we have free trade, then we can tell America, we will open our doors to your markets – meaning the markets of the slave South, that Britain supported – and in exchange, you will open your markets to our industrial goods.

And America followed that until the Civil War, which was fought not only over slavery, but by the Republican Party after 1853 that said very explicitly, if we’re going to win the election – the Whigs never could win – if we, the new party, are going to win the election and industrialize America, we’ve got to integrate ourselves with the anti-slavery issue, with emancipation, but for us, the economic war of America is a war of, either we’re going to have protective tariffs in the North, or we’re going to end up as a non-industrial, raw materials-producing society, as the South wants.

And that was the debate from 1815, when the Napoleonic wars ended and world trade began again, until really the Civil War.

And America became strong in the way that Germany became strong too, by having protective tariffs, in order to have prices large enough to nurture what was called infant industry, to nurture American manufacturing.

And I wrote a long book about this, published some years ago based on my PhD dissertation, “America’s Protectionist Takeoff.”

Well, the English tried to fight against other countries protecting their economy, saying that if you just have free trade, you’ll get rich. Whereas the reality is, if we have free trade, you’ll get poor, if you’re not already able to have industrial and labor productivity and agricultural productivity on par with the most advanced countries.

Free trade was an attempt to prevent other countries from investing government money and building up their agriculture, and building up their industry, and building up their productivity, and creating a school system, to raise wages, to make wages more productive.

And the American protectionists said, well, we’re going to have a high-wage economy because high-wage labor undersells pauper labor. And skilled, well-fed, well-rested American labor can produce much more than the pauper labor of other countries that have free trade.

Well, what the leading American protectionist economist, Erasmus Peshine Smith, went to Japan and helped industrial help Japan break away from British free trade, helped Japan industrialize.

And other American economists, other foreign economists, all picked up the ideas of the American protectionist, like Friedrich List went to Germany promoting protectionism.

And Peshine Smith’s book, “The Manual of Political Economy,” was translated into all the foreign languages – Japanese, Italian, French, German.

And you had Europe realizing that free trade polarizes economies. Well, it was this that after World War One, and especially World War Two, when you had orthodox economics turning into basically propaganda.

That’s where you and Samuelson and others try to convince other countries, governments are bad, leave everything to the wealthy people, to the finance people, trickle-down economies, it’s all going to trickle down, don’t worry, just give more money to the rich, and don’t have any government interference with markets.

Whereas America had got rich by interfering with markets, to shape them in the years leading up to World War One.

But after World War One, America had already achieved its industrial dominance. And it was after World War One that America said, ok, now our protective tariffs have enabled us to outproduce all the other countries, and our protectionist agriculture especially – the most protected sector in America, has always been agriculture, since the 1930s.

Basically it said, well, now we can outproduce other countries, we can undersell them, now we can tell them to go for free trade.

And after World War Two, the Americans created the World Bank for economic impoverishment, and the International Monetary Austerity Fund.

And the World Bank’s leading objective was to prevent other countries from investing in their own food production.

The guiding line of the World Bank was, we’ve got to provide infrastructure for building up plantation agriculture in Latin America, and Africa, and other countries, so that they will grow tropical export crops, but they cannot be permitted to grow grain or wheat to feed themselves; they must be dependent on the United States.

And so the function of free trade, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund has been to finance dependency, backed up by the American support of dictatorships throughout Latin America who agree to have client oligarchies supporting pro-American trade patterns and avoiding any kind of self-reliance, so that the United States can do what it has recently done to Russia and other countries, impose sanctions – say, well, now that you depended on us for your grain, we can now impose sanctions, and you can’t feed yourself if you don’t follow the policies we want.

That was the policy that America tried to use against China after Mao’s revolution. And fortunately for China, Canada broke that monopoly, and said, well, we’re going to sell grain to China. And China was always very friendly to Canada in those earlier decades.

So basically, free trade means no government, no socialism. It means central planning essentially by Wall Street – countries should let American firms come in, buy control of their raw materials, resources, control of their oil and gas, and mineral rights, and forests and plantations, and basically let other countries send their whole economic surplus to the United States, where it will be duly financialized to buy out other countries’ raw materials and rent yielding resources.

BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah, and in your book, you have a very funny passage that I think really encapsulates this ideology that you’re talking about here.

You referred to Charles Wilson, who was the secretary of defense under Eisenhower in the U.S., and he was also the former CEO of General Motors.

And he famously said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” And that idea has morphed into the idea that, “What’s good for Wall Street is good for America.”

And then you note that “this merged with evangelistic U.S. foreign policy that says ‘What’s good for America is good for the world.’ And therefore the logical syllogism is clear: ‘What’s good for Wall Street is good for the world.’”

And you describe this, you link it to the new cold war, this idea that what’s good for the U.S. is good for the world and what’s good for Wall Street is good for the U.S., therefore, what’s good for Wall Street is good for the world.

You argue, “We must recognize how finance capitalism has gained power over industrial economies, above all in the United States, from which it seeks to project itself globally, led by the financialized U.S. economy. Today’s new Cold War is a fight to impose rentier-based finance capitalism on the entire world.”

And this is such an important analysis. Because among those very few people of us who talk about this idea of the new cold war and how dangerous it is, there are very few people who frame it in economic terms.

Usually we frame it in political terms, right, the geopolitical interests between the US and the EU on one side, and China and Russia on the other.

And going back to Brzezinski and The Grand Chessboard, his 1997 book, where he talks about the importance of preventing near strategic competitors from emerging in Eurasia. That’s of course a geopolitical discussion and economics is part of it, but it’s often not at the forefront.

But your analysis I think is even more important, and more accurate, because your argument is not only is it geopolitical, but the geopolitical struggle is rooted in economics. And this is an economic struggle between systems.

So talk talk more about the new cold war and how you see it.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, as we’re seeing now, the world is dividing into two parts. We can see that in the fight against Russia, which is also a fight against China, and against India, as you noted. And it seems Indonesia and other countries as well.

The United States is pushing a world that can be controlled by American investors. The ideal of the American neoliberal plan is to do to other countries what it did to Russia after 1991: take all of your public domain, your oil companies, your nickel mines, your electric utilities, give them all to the wealthy oligarchy, that can only make money once it’s taken control of these companies, by selling the stocks to the West.

The West will buy out oil, just like Mikhail Khodorkovsky tried to sell Yukos oil to Standard Oil in the West. And we’ve got to put an oligarchy that will sell all of the national domain, all of the patrimony and natural resources, and all the companies, to American investors on the cheap.

The Russian stock market led all the stock markets in the world from 1994 up to about 1998. This was a huge rip off. The United States wants to be able to do that to the rest of the world.

And it was furious when Russia said, we’ve lost more population as a result of neoliberalism than we did in all of World War Two fighting against Nazism. We’ve got to stop.

And Russia began to say, we’ve got to use Russia’s population, and industry, and natural resources for Russia’s benefit, not for the United States’ benefit.

Well, the United States was absolutely furious with this. And the fury has erupted in the NATO war against Russia in the last few months, and what’s ongoing now.

And the United States says, U.S. State Department officials have said, what we want to do is carve up Russia into maybe four different countries: Siberia, western Russia, southern Russia or Central Asia, maybe northern Russia.

And once we’ve done that, we cut Russia off from China, then we go into China. We finance, we send ISIS and al-Qaeda into the Uyghur areas, the Muslim areas, and we start a color revolution there. And then we break up China, into a northern part, a southern part, a central part.

And once we break them up, we can more or less control them. And we can then come in, buy up their resources, and take over their industry, their labor, and their government, and get richer to obtain from China, Russia, India, Indonesia, and Iran the wealth that we’re no longer producing in the United States, now that we de-industrialized.

So the world is dividing into two parts. And it’s not simply the United States and its European satellites on the one hand versus the non-white population on the other hand; it’s finance capitalism versus the rest of the world, which is protecting itself by socialism, which in many ways fulfills what was the ideal of industrial capitalism during the 19th century, when industrial capitalism was actually progressive.

And it was progressive. That’s part of the whole theme of my book. It was revolutionary. It tried to free economies from the legacy of feudalism, from the legacy of hereditary landlords.

And now the financial class is no longer the landlord class, but the landlord class pays most of its rent to the financial class in the form of mortgage interest, as it borrows money to buy property and housing and commercial sites on credit.

And you have the kind of financialization that has increased housing prices in the United States to over 40% of income, that is officially guaranteed for mortgages. That has priced American labor out of the market.

Privatized health care, 18% of GDP, that is pricing America out of the world market. Debt, auto debt, student debt, which in other countries education is free; that’s pricing America out of the market.

So you have a basically un-competitive economy that’s committing financial suicide, following the same dynamic that destroyed the Roman empire, where a predatory oligarchy took over and maintained power by an assassination policy of its critics, just very similar to what America has been doing in Latin America and other countries.

So you’re having history repeat itself with this same kind of world split. And this split couldn’t have occurred back in the 1970s, with the Bandung Conference in Indonesia. There were other attempts by the Non-Aligned nations to break free of American imperialism, but they didn’t have a critical mass.

So right now, for the first time, you have a critical mass. And you have the ability of China, Iran, Russia, India, other countries together to be self-sufficient. They don’t need relations with the United States.

They can handle their own; they can create their own monetary system outside of the International Monetary Fund, which is basically an arm of the Defense Department. They can give loans to build up the infrastructure of countries outside of the World Bank, which is basically an arm of the Defense Department, the deep state.

So you have the American economy – essentially a merger between the military-industrial complex and the Wall Street FIRE sector, finance, insurance, and real estate – really cannot develop any more than the Roman Empire could develop, by trying to obtain militarily what it could not produce at home anymore.

Well, China and other countries, now that they have their industrial base, the raw materials, the food, the ability to feed themselves, the agriculture, and the technology, they can go their own way.

And so we’re seeing in the last few months the beginning of a war that is going to go on for, I think, 20 years, maybe 30 or 40 years. The world is splitting away.

And it won’t be a pretty sight, because the United States and its European satellites are trying to fight to prevent an inevitable break away they cannot prevent, any more than Europe’s landlord class could prevent industrial capitalism from developing in the 19th century.

BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah, and this is a good segue to what I wanted to ask you about, Professor Hudson, which is the economic war on Russia.

And I should say, of course, that today is May 9th. Today is Victory Day in Russia, celebrating the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two. Not the US and British victory over Nazi Germany, the Soviet victory, in which 27 million Soviets died.

And actually I should say that, here on YouTube, in the comment section, there are some Russians who are your fans, Professor Hudson, saying they’re thanking you for your cogent analysis of Russia.

But on the subject of Russia, Professor Hudson, we now have seen that since Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine on February 24th, we saw really what could be referred to as financial shock-and-awe. That’s a term that’s been used.

Just as when the U.S. invaded Iraq, it waged a military shock-and-awe campaign on Iraq. Well, now it is waging economic or financial shock-and-awe on Russia.

And Russia has been referred to as the most heavily sanctioned country in history. Which I think is probably accurate, although maybe the DPRK, maybe North Korea, is more sanctioned. But I mean we’re talking about levels of sanctions not seen against a country of this size ever.

And you can also refer to it as the contemporary equivalent of medieval siege warfare against Russia.

Joe Biden, in a speech in Poland, made it clear what Washington’s goal is: it’s regime change. The U.S. wants to overthrow the Russian government, as it did in the Soviet Union in 1991, and clearly install a a pliant alcoholic neoliberal puppet like Boris Yeltsin.

So can you talk about, from an economic perspective, what do you see as the effects of this economic war on Russia?

And specifically in terms of the concept of decoupling, which you have talked about for years, and you have said that the Western sanctions on Russia and China were accelerating that process of decoupling. And this was before the financial shock-and-awe we’ve seen.

So you talked about a move away from this neoliberal globalization where everything is interconnected, or at least capital is interconnected globally, to the creation of a kind of, what you could say is kind of an economic iron curtain.

But how do you see that also in terms of integrating the Eurasian economies more deeply?

And also what is the effect on the European economies, which my impression is that Europe is going to become what you call an economic dead zone, more and more reliant on the U.S., whereas Russia, China, and Iran, and even potentially India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia – we’re seeing much more economic integration of Asia, which is, of course, where the majority of humanity lives.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well you have used the words shock-and-awe, picking it up from the U.S. statements of shock-and-awe. There hasn’t been any shock-and-awe; there’s been a self-defeating piffle, and laughter.

That’s not all. There was an attempt to grab $300 billion of Russia’s foreign reserves, saying, well, any country that leaves their reserves in American banks or in the American Monetary Fund to stabilize their currency, we can grab if we don’t like their policy.

So the idea was, now Russia is going to go broke. It can’t afford to buy anything without U.S. dollars. And the people are going to get so angry, they’re going to vote against Putin. And then we can pour in our money to twerps like Navalny and other right-wingers who have promised to be the new Yeltsins.

Well, it didn’t work that way. They did grab the $300 billion of Russia’s reserves. Russia immediately said, ok, we have our own money. We now, fortunately, have enough oil and gas that we don’t have to sell to Europe and Germany. If they want to freeze in the dark and let their pipes burst when the weather gets cold, that’s their problem. We’ll sell to India, and China, and other countries.

And there was, for a few days, the ruble plunged, by saying, uh oh, what is Russia going to do? So all the foreign exchange traders thought, you can trust Biden to have a really brilliant policies.

I think Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winner, said Biden is the greatest American president since Roosevelt, or since Truman, that he was so smart. Well, that’s why Krugman got the Nobel Prize, for making statements like that.

So immediately Russia said, well, obviously we can’t get paid in dollars anymore, or in euros, because, you’ll just grab them, so you’ll have to buy oil and gas in rubles. We’re going to price it in our own currency. Just like China had talked about pricing its exports in yuan.

And so what has happened is that immediately the ruble not only recovered, but is now selling at a higher rate than it was before the American sanctions. So there was no shock at all. The Americans felt shock.

The Americans are shocked. The Americans are awed. The Russians are laughing and everything is going their way.

So it’s almost as if – I would not accuse Biden of being on the pay of Russia, and I would not say that the leaders of Congress are the Russian agents, but if they were Russian agents, if they were paid by Russia, they could not have done a better job of helping Russia catalyzing its protectionism that it wouldn’t do itself.

The fact is that President Putin and many of the people around him still were neoliberals. I mean, they began as neoliberals, in the ’90s.

They began by hoping that they could make an arrangement with Germany and Europe, that Europe would develop their industry and make Russia as efficient an economy as Germany or the United States. Well, obviously that hasn’t happened.

All the same, they didn’t think of imposing protective tariffs as the United States did. They didn’t protect their agriculture. They bought grain, and cheese, and other agricultural products from the Baltics, and from other countries.

Well, now that, once the Americans put on the sanctions, beginning already under the Trump administration, all of a sudden Russia had to produce its own food.

And it did. It made the investment. It is now the largest agricultural exporter in the world, not a food-deficit country. It’s not importing any more cheese from Lithuania and the Baltics. It has its own cheese segment.

And the sanctions are forcing Russia to do exactly what the United States, Germany, and other protectionist countries did in the 19th century, developing their own industry by isolating it from low-priced foreign imports that would be priced so low that the Russians otherwise could not afford to make the investment in factories, plants, equipment, research, and development.

So what the United States has done is actually catalyze Russia moving together.

And also, for three or four years, I have been talking with Russians, and with the Chinese, and other countries about the need to de-dollarize. If you want to develop your own economy, you have to develop your economy in your own interest with public spending and planning, independent from the United States.

Well, now everybody thought that, well, in a few years it may take a decade for China, Russia, Iran, all these countries to break away from the U.S. But America said, we’re going to help you, we’re going to speed up the breakaway process. We’re going to isolate you. So you’ve got to band together against us.

So that’s exactly what it has done. You can just imagine how the Russians are crying all the way to the bank about this.

And how China is watching what the Americans are doing to Russia, and listening to President Biden saying, you know, Russia is not our real enemy, our real enemy of China. And when we’re finished with Russia, then we’re going to go against China and do the same thing to it.

Well you can imagine what this is leading the Chinese government to try to plan to be sufficiently independent from the United States, so that similar type sanctions will not hurt it.

And President Xi in the last few weeks has said we’ve got to make China as independent as possible. We’ve got to make our own computer chips. We’ve got to not depend on the United States for anything, except maybe Walt Disney movies. That’s basically about it.

So it’s as if – you know, I had mentioned earlier that finance lives in the short term. American policy, being financial policy, lives in the short term. And it’s looking at if it can make a quick, a quick victory, and forget about what’s going to happen next.

I’m told that, years ago, already from the war with Iran, and then Iraq and Syria, in the State Department, if there were Arab specialists who spoke Arabic, they were all fired. Because they said, well, if you can speak Arabic, you must’ve learned Arabic because you’re sympathetic with them. You’re fired. We won’t have anyone who can read Arabic here.

Well, now in the last decade or so, they fired all the Russia specialists from the the State Department and CIA, saying, well, if you can read Russian, why would you want to learn Russian? You must like something in Russia. You wanted to learn it. You’re fired.

So they have people who have no idea of what’s happening in Russia, no idea what’s happening in these other countries. And they’re blinded by their ideology.

And if anyone would say, wait a minute now, public planning and making education a public utility is actually making them more competitive, well, that’s against the ideology. That’s not the corporate type.

And they’re taught, well, we really can’t trust people, maybe they’re tending toward socialism, and they’re out the door.

So you’re having American policy pretty much run by the blind, and the Europeans are simply taking orders, and money in little white envelopes from the United States, to just show their loyalty, and basically are willing to spend three to seven times as much for their energy, for their liquefied natural gas and oil, by buying from the United States, than they are by a long-term contract with Russia.

Europe is willing to spend now $5 trillion on putting together ports that can handle shipping tankers for liquefied natural gas instead of relying on the Russian pipeline, the Nord Stream Two, that’s already there.

So Europe is making an enormous sacrifice. If it doesn’t have Russian gas, and it refuses to pay rubles, it says, if you don’t give us our gas and oil for free, you’re attacking us, because we’ve been getting all of your oil and gas for free, because all the dollars, all the money we pay, you’ve recycled to the United States in your foreign reserves. Thank heavens, the U.S. can grab it all. If you don’t continue to give it to us for free, then you’re attacking us.

To the United States, other countries protecting their economy, other countries trying to raise their living standards, and especially other countries undertaking land reform, are viewed as enemies of the United States, because they’re an enemy of the neoliberal American financial system.

And the idea of the unipolar world where the United States gets all of the profits, and rents, and interests of the world economy, just as ancient Rome stripped its provinces by getting all of their wealth and income for themselves, not producing it at home, while impoverishing their own domestic population. It’s just an exact parallel.

So Europe is willing to say, well, ok, if we don’t have a Russian gas, well, that means that our chemical companies cannot buy the gas to make the fertilizer to make our crops grow, and our agricultural productivity is going to fall by about 50%.

We’re also going to spend a lot more money on America’s military, NATO arms to support NATO. So higher food, higher military spending, higher energy costs.

This ends Europe as an industrial rival to Asia, and Eurasia, I should say, because now the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative and other spending investment, capital investment, throughout Western Asia is creating a new productive plant that is not only self-sufficient, but is leaving the United States and Europe without any industrial competitive power. They’ve priced themselves out of the world market. They’re no longer competitive.

So the world is developing. And I’m sure the only way that the NATO countries can fight against it is militarily, by threatening to bomb. But they can’t fight economically. They can’t fight financially. They tried by disconnecting Russia from the SWIFT system. It put it in its own system very quickly.

It really is left without a strategy, except that it’s done a wonderful job of controlling the public relations dimension of this war, making it appear as if somehow other countries are the aggressors, in not letting America exploit them, and making it appear as if Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine, instead of NATO prodding and prodding Russia to say, we’re going to capture your port at Crimea, and we’re going to attack the Russian-speakers if you don’t fight back, and we’re going to keep bombing them year after year, from 2014 on, we’re going to keep bombing them until you protect them.

So all of this is treated as if America is purely defending itself. Well, this is what the Nazis said in World War Two. Hitler and Goebbels said, we can always mobilize a population to support our war by saying it’s a war to defend ourselves.

And that’s how the United States in Europe are doing it. Not only are they pulling a strategy out of Goebbels’ Nazi book, but a few weeks ago, Germany went to the museums, the military museums, where they had the old Panzer tanks from World War Two, and they sent the Panzer tanks, the Nazi tanks from World War II, to Ukraine, saying this is symbolic, now we can fight Russia with the same German Nazi tanks run by the neo-Nazi groups, that Zelensky is supporting, the same Nazi fight against Russia. We can reenact World War Two with the same tanks, even symbolically, to show that this is a fight of Naziism, and neoliberalism, against Eurasia.

BENJAMIN NORTON: We’ve also seen Germany not only re-militarizing, but also boosting its relations with Japan. There are some terrifying echoes of of World War Two.

But you mentioned something that I want to analyze a little bit more, which is the strength of the Russian ruble. I talked about the concept of financial shock-and-awe that was waged on Russia. And President Biden said, “the Russian ruble has become rubble,” he joked. He said the Russian ruble has become rubble.

Well, that’s actually not at all what happened. This is the value of the dollar to Russian rubles, right now [showing a graph]. Russian rubles are at 69 to the dollar. A few days ago, it was at 64, or 65 to the dollar, which is actually better than it was even before the Russian war in Ukraine, which began in February 24th.

And it did spike, and there was a peak here, at which it was devalued to 139 to the dollar, about half the value it has now. But in the months leading up to the Russian military intervention, in November and December, it was around 75 to the dollar.

So the ruble has actually strengthened despite these sanctions. And here’s a report from Reuters from five days ago, that was May 4th: the “Rouble leaps to over 2-year high vs dollar, euro as EU ups sanctions.” So the ruble is doing quite well.

And you talked about the Russian mechanism to force Europe to buy energy exports from Russia in the Russian ruble. And this graphic here, for people watching, it’s in Russian, but really it just shows this mechanism in which a European firm that wants to buy gas from Russia’s state owned gas giant Gazprom, it has to send the money in euros to the Gazprombank, which is the obviously the bank that works with Gazprom, and then it puts it in a special account in euros, and then that is sold in the Moscow exchange for Russian rubles.

And then those rubles are put in another special account, called a K account, that belongs to that European firm. It has two accounts, two special accounts with Gazprombank, one in euros, one in rubles. And then this special ruble account sends that money to Gazprom. And then once the money reaches Gazprom, that’s when Russia considers that the payment officially went through.

So this is the mechanism by which Russia is getting paid in rubles. And much of Europe claimed at first that they would not do so, but eventually they gave in. So that’s an incredible development.

And related to that, what I wanted to ask you about, is I think another reason that the Russian ruble has strengthened and stabilized is not only because Russia continues to maintain constant exports of energy to Europe and other parts of the world.

You can talk about the central bank policies. But one of the policies is that the Russian central bank has basically put the ruble on gold, which I think is a very interesting and historic development.

And we saw that from the beginning of April until the end of June, the Bank of Russia says that it’s going to buy gold at a fixed price of 5000 rubles per gram of gold. And then the question is whether or not in July, when this policy ends, if it’s going to continue, and if the ruble will basically become fixed, it become pegged to gold like the U.S. dollar was up until 1971.

So you don’t think it will be? So talk about this policy. Do you think that that the gold standard is going to come back? Or apparently you don’t think so.

MICHAEL HUDSON: No, Russia is not going on on the gold standard. What it is doing is investing, its foreign exchange in the only way that is not grabbable. It’s investing it in gold; it’s putting gold in its reserves.

It is not setting its exchange rate according to the price of gold, but it is buying gold with what it has been getting.

I want to go back to your talk about rubble. You talked about, “from ruble to rubble,” what President Biden said.

There have been a lot of pictures of rubble in the news for the last few days. For instance, there are talks of, here’s a Ukrainian picture, and look at this picture of a Russian tank, we shot it down, it’s rubble. Turns out it’s a Ukrainian tank, that they just say it was the Russian tank we shot down.

So basically, they’re taking their own destruction, and they’re saying that, while they’re being destroyed, they’re saying, no, this is a picture of Russia being destroyed, Russian assets, not Ukrainian assets being destroyed.

Well, the similar thing is with the Russian ruble. America says, look, we’ve isolated the the ruble. Well, what has happened? If you isolate the ruble and you say we’re not going to export anything more to Russia, so it’s not going to be able to spend any of its rubles on buying American or European products.

Well, meanwhile, Russia can continue to earn rubles from Germany and Europe, and it can continue to earn foreign exchange from other countries that it’s selling its agriculture to at rising prices, its oil and gas at rising prices, too. So obviously, the balance of payments is going way up.

And they believe that what is in store is a new monetary system that is an alternative to the dollar IMF system.

And in this system other countries will hold their reserves in each other’s currencies. In other words, Russia will hold Indian rupees and Chinese yuan. China will hold rupees and Russian rubles.

There will be the equivalent of what Keynes thought of as something like artificial special drawing rights that the banks will be able to create to help fund governments to undertake capital investment.

But for settlements settling balance of payments deficits among countries, once they don’t have enough foreign exchange to make a swap, they will use gold as the means of settlement, because gold is a pure asset. It’s not a liability.

Any foreign currency basically is held in a foreign country that has the power to do what America did to Russia and just grab it all, and say, we’re just wiping it all out.

It’s as if you have a bank account, and the bank says, we’ve just emptied out your account to give it to one of our friends, and you don’t have it anymore. You can’t do that if gold is held in your own country.

Venezuela made the problem of keeping its gold in England, trusting England, saying that, even if there is war, they’ll never interrupt gold and finance. And England just grabbed Venezuela’s gold.

So, obviously, countries are not going to leave their gold in other countries. Even little Germany has asked America to begin sending back the gold that it has in the Federal Reserve Bank of America because it’s worried that what if it ever buys Russian gas again? America will grab all of Germany’s gold, grab all the German money, and it’ll be like World War One all over again.

So this act that America did of grabbing Russian money, Afghanistan’s foreign reserves it grabbed, this is telling all the other countries, pull all your money out of dollars. What are they going to put it in? There’s not that much they can put it in that it is absolutely safe.

So gold is a flight to safety today, because it’s one of the things that all of the world realizes as having an international value for settling balance of payments deficits, that is independent of world politics.

So that’s the explanation. Russia is not going on gold. It’s going on an independent standard from the United States with gold as an element of its foreign reserve, just as it’s holding Chinese yuan and Indian rupees.

It’s not going on the rupee standard. It’s not going on the yuan standard. And it’s not going on the gold standard. But these are elements of its foreign reserves.

BENJAMIN NORTON: I have a question for you. It’s kind of a more technical question that I’ve always wondered. And I’ve tried to do research on this, because there’s not much information.

So we know that that the U.S. and European Union have frozen over $300 billion from Russia’s central bank foreign exchange reserves. And of course they did this after doing the same to Iran, to Venezuela, to Afghanistan, which is now threatening a famine in Afghanistan that could kill more people than died in the 20-year NATO-U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan, which is another topic that really needs to get more coverage.

And I should add, by the way, that the US and the EU, they’ve frozen nearly half of Russia’s central bank’s foreign exchange reserves, and are now saying they’re not going to give it back. So they stole it. I mean, they stole half of its reserves.

My question is, what is the mechanism by which they effectively freeze and steal those reserves?

Because my understanding is that there is of course a physical element of those reserves, which you’re talking about, which is gold. But not all of the $640 billion in Russia’s central bank reserves is physical currency, right? A lot of it is just computerized? It’s number in computers and bank accounts.

So when when the U.S. and the EU steal this money from central banks like in Russia or Afghanistan – obviously in the case of Venezuela, as you mentioned, they physically stole the gold. But if it’s not gold, is it physical cash stored in Moscow, like physical dollars and euros? Or it’s mostly just numbers in a computer, which is why they can steal it?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Every country needs to manage its exchange rates, and there’s always like an up-and-down and a zigzag in the flow of payments for imports and exports, investment, capital movements, debt service, all of that.

So countries want to stabilize their exchange rate. How do they do that? Well, most of the big exchange markets are in New York and in London.

So countries would leave their money in correspondent banks. Like when Iran, at the time under the shah, kept that foreign reserve in the Chase Manhattan Bank. So when Iran, after the revolution and Khomeini came in, and Iran wanted to pay interest on the foreign debt that the shah had run up, they told Chase, please, here’s our bondholders, please pay them.

Well Chase was told by the Treasury, don’t pay them, just take the money and hold it. So Chase said, we put a freeze on your account. And so Iran defaulted, and then Chase and the State Department said, oh, Iran defaulted, it missed the payment. Now, all the money that it’s due for foreign debt has to be paid all at once. And Chase paid all of the bondholders off. No more money in the account. It was all emptied out.

Suppose you had an account in Chase Manhattan. And they said, ok, now you’ve done something really bad, you put Michael Hudson on the show. We’re going to grab your account. We’re going to give it to Mr. Guaidó, because he needs the money in Venezuela because the people still are not voting for him. So all of a sudden, you won’t have money in your account. It’ll go to Mr. Guaidó’s account.

Well, that’s what happened with Russia. They took the money. They grabbed the money from Russia’s account. And they said, half the money we’re going to give to, I think, to the 9/11 people, because we all know that it was Russia that bombed the World Trade Center on 9/11.

And we’re going to give it to all sorts of other people who suffered all over the world. It’s all Russia’s fault.

BENJAMIN NORTON: But Professor Hudson, when you say that they seized Russia’s assets, you mean the assets held by the Russian central bank in foreign bank accounts?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, yes.

BENJAMIN NORTON: And these are not physical assets, these are numbers in a computer, right?

MICHAEL HUDSON: In Venezuela’s case, Venezuela had used some of its oil company earnings to buy oil stations and refining companies and the United States actually grabbed the ownership of the gas stations and the refineries and distribution system that Venezuela had in America.

BENJAMIN NORTON: It’s called Citgo.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Citgo, yeah. Russia doesn’t really have any capital investments in the United States. It did have bank accounts, and that was all that the United States could grab.

BENJAMIN NORTON: So when you say that, when Russia, at least for now, the central bank is allowing convertibility of rubles at a set rate into gold, that’s a temporary policy to make sure that they have a physical asset that their central bank can hold on to, because if they have dollars or euros in their reserves, my understanding is that’s not physical cash, it’s actually just numbers in a computer, so they don’t have it physically in their bank reserves, so it’s easy to steal that money.

Obviously, if they had billions of dollars worth of cash, of paper cash, it would be much harder to steal it, but if it’s just on a bank account, if it’s numbers in a computer, then they can just freeze it.

So I think this is also a reflection of a point that you’ve also made about the financialization of the economy, is it’s also just a lot of this capital is not even physical capital.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes. Savings take the form – one person’s savings is another person’s debt. So these are Russia’s deposits in American banks that it used to buy or sell rubles, or to buy goods from America, or to receive payments in, if Russia exports something such as oil. Americans buyers of Russian oil would put the money into the Russian bank account.

They never dreamed that this would be grabbed. But now Russia says, ok, you’ve grabbed our money, now that means that we get to grab all of your assets in Russia. This is great! All of your stock holdings in nickel, and Yukos, and all these other companies, ok, you’ve got the money, we have the assets, look at us as just buying the assets on the cheap.

And the Western investors in Russia have all been selling their Russian assets to show that they’re good American citizens in NATO, and the Russians are buying up these European and American assets on the cheap, largely by borrowing money from the banks, that get the money from the central bank, now that they’re so wealthy, and all of the foreign exchange reserves is a result of the American shock-and-awe statement, that’s sort of shock-and-awe in reverse.

So Russia is coming through just fine. And you can imagine how the American strategists are gnashing the teeth. They don’t understand how Russia was able to avoid being bankrupted by this.

They really are not economists. They’re not really financiers. They’re foreign-policy strategists. They’re ideologues that are not very well educated in how to think about the future and how to recognize the fact that the world can actually change from what it is today into something else. And sometimes that change is not in America’s interests. That is sort of not a permitted thought over here.

So essentially, Americans and Europe are operating in the blind, and Russia and China, and Iran, and India, are all looking at how are we going to restructure the world so that we come out of it more prosperous than we were before, not more impoverished. That’s really what the world is dividing into.

BENJAMIN NORTON: Professor Hudson, I don’t know if this is directly related, but it’s it’s something that’s always been a very curious question in my mind.

Germany, back in 2016 and 2017, it moved, physically moved, its central bank’s gold reserves, which had been stored in New York, London, and Paris, and it physically moved those reserves, those gold reserves, to Frankfurt.

Now this was before the U.S. and Britain stole Venezuela’s gold reserves and other reserves. But do you know anything about what motivated Germany’s central bank to move the physical location of its gold reserves into Germany itself?

MICHAEL HUDSON: I don’t think it’s all moved yet. It’s still going on. Gold is very heavy, as heavy has lead, basically. And America said, well, we can only do a little bit, trickle by trickle. So America has been returning the gold very slowly.

So I think Germany, with all of its history of hyper inflation, I think just realizes that, now that gold is not used to settle balance of payments deficits anymore – the gold that Germany had in America was all of the exports that it made to the United States during the Vietnam War. This is Vietnam War gold.

You remember that President de Gaulle would every month cash in, the dollars that America spent in Vietnam would all be spent from Vietnam to Paris, the dollars would end up there, the central bank of Paris would essentially buy gold on the London exchange and keep the gold either in New York or in London.

Well, Germany, because America defeated Germany, and it wasn’t going to keep its gold in Russia, that defeated it even more, it said, well, ok, we’re cashing in our surplus dollars for gold, but we’re going to hold the gold in America.

But now it says, well, America is never going to settle its balance of payments deficits and its foreign debt in gold again, because it doesn’t have any balance of payments surplus, any ability to do that.

It’s going to spend its export surplus and its investment surplus on war. So it’s never going to be able to pay. That’s obvious. Let’s get the gold back.

That was the calculation that every country was making already a decade ago. They realized that America can never repay its foreign debt, unlike other countries.

When other countries can’t pay their foreign debt, they have to go to the International Monetary Fund, that tells them, well, we’ll make you a loan, but you have to sell off your natural resource reserves to the Americans, or we won’t lend you the money.

Well, basically, that’s not going to happen anymore. They realized that America is just going to say, haha, we’re just not going to pay.

Well, now other countries are saying, wait a minute, if America’s never going to repay its foreign debt, why do the Global South countries have to pay their debt to the IMF and the World Bank, all this dollar debt to dollar bondholders?

If America won’t pay, we don’t have to pay. Let’s have a clean slate. Let’s start from the beginning. And we’re only going to have debt and credit relations with friendly countries, not countries that want to go to war with us like America did in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and now Russia.

So that’s basically what’s happening.

BENJAMIN NORTON: Great. And just to wrap up here, I have another question. And I know your time is limited, so I really appreciate you being here.

I have a quick question about the decline in U.S. dollar hegemony. We were talking about the strength of the ruble, the economic war on Russia; we talked about the bilateral trade that’s growing between Russia and China using the Chinese yuan, between Russia and India using the Indian rupee. And Iran also is talking about doing business with a basket of currencies.

I want to point to a report that was recently published by economists who work with the IMF. And I published an article about this over at Multipolarista.com, “IMF admits US dollar hegemony declining due to rise of Chinese yuan and sanctions on Russia.”

And there is this report that was published by the IMF, by these economists, and I cite you, Professor Hudson, in this report. It’s a working paper from the IMF, published in March, titled “The Stealth Erosion of Dollar Dominance.”

And here’s a graph, for people watching, here’s a graph from the report. And it shows not a large, but a noticeable and consistent decline in the use of the holding of the U.S. dollar in the foreign exchange reserves of central banks around the world. So this is around the world.

And it has declined in the past years from about 70% of central bank exchange reserves to about 60%. So a 10% decline. That’s not massive, but it’s steady and I think it’s going to accelerate.

And at the same time they’ve also found an increase in the use of what they call “non-traditional currencies” in the foreign exchange reserves of central banks around the world.

And here you can see this graph. I mean it looks like a significant influence because if you look at the y-axis it’s only from 90 to 100. But there is a significant increase in the use of other currencies in foreign exchange reserves, aside from the U.S. dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen, and the British pound. And the currency that is increasingly popular is the Chinese yuan.

So that’s one half of my question. The other half is about this interesting report that was published in the Financial Times, and it’s titled “Russia Sanctions Threaten to Erode Dominance of Dollar, says IMF.”

And the FT interviewed the IMF’s first deputy managing director, Gita Gopinath, who acknowledged that the sanctions imposed on Russia over its military intervention in Ukraine could lead to what she says “fragmentation at a smaller level.”

And she did say that the dollar is eroding influence, but “would remain the major global currency.”

So, that’s a two part question. I’m wondering if you could talk about the decline in U.S. dollar hegemony and how the sanctions will potentially erode that. And then the other half of the question is, can you comment on the declining use of dollars in foreign exchange reserves?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, this is what my book “Super Imperialism” was all about. When I first published it in 1972, I could see how the whole thing was unfolding for the next 50 years. And we just published last year a third edition of it, bringing it up to date.

Dollar hegemony means America’s entire balance of payments deficit in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s was military. So the dollars that were being pumped into the world economy were the result of military spending.

But the dollars would end up in foreign central banks, especially from Asia to France, Germany, others. What were they going to do with it? Well after 1971 they could not buy gold anymore, so all they could do was buy U.S. Treasury securities. IOUs.

And so they re-lent to the Treasury all the money that America was spending militarily. And the more money America spent in waging its cold war militarily against the world, the more money central banks would lend to the U.S. government to finance the U.S. deficit that was spent largely on the military-industrial complex and foreign military operations.

So dollar hegemony was a free lunch financing America’s almost 800 military bases across the world, to fight against communism, defined as any country that doesn’t let American industry and finance buy control of its raw materials, agriculture, resources.

And this has now come to an end. Right now America has grabbed Afghanistan

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PostPosted: Wed Jul 13, 2022 9:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Programmable digital currency. True slavery. True fascism.

Bank of England tells ministers to intervene on digital currency 'programming'
Digital cash could be programmed to ensure it is only spent on essentials, or goods which an employer or Government deems to be sensible
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/06/21/bank-england-tells-min isters-intervene-digital-currency-programming/

By Tim Wallace 21 June 2021 • 6:24pm
The Bank of England has called on ministers to decide whether a central bank digital currency should be “programmable”, ultimately giving the issuer control over how it is spent by the recipient.

Tom Mutton, a director at the Bank of England, said during a conference on Monday that programming could become a key feature of any future central bank digital currency, in which the money would be programmed to be released only when something happened.

He said: “You could introduce programmability - what happens if one of the participants in a transaction puts a restriction on [future use of the money]?

“There could be some socially beneficial outcomes from that, preventing activity which is seen to be socially harmful in some way. But at the same time it could be a restriction on people’s freedoms.”

He warned that the Government would be required to intervene and make the final decision.

Mr Mutton said: “That is a really delicate debate that needs to be had. It is not something we can settle ourselves, that is for the Government to lead on.”

A digital currency could make payments faster, cheaper and safer, but also opens up new technological possibilities, including programming: effectively allowing a party in a transaction, such as the state or an employer, to control how the money is spent by the recipient.

One potential use could be control over benefits payments, said Sandra Ro, chief executive of the Global Blockchain Business Council.

She compared a programmed digital currency to the US system of paying benefits in vouchers, as it could have a similar goal of restricting the recipient to buying only essentials such as food with the money.

Earlier this month Sir Jon Cunliffe, a deputy Governor at the Bank, said digital currencies could be programmed for commercial or social purposes, even down to the way children spend pocket money.

He told Sky News: “You could think of smart contracts in which the money would be programmed to be released only if something happened.

“You could think of giving your children pocket money, but programming the money so that it couldn’t be used for sweets. There is a whole range of things that money could do, programmable money, which we cannot do with the current technology.”

A Treasury spokesman said: “Programmability is a potential feature of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). The Taskforce is coordinating the exploration of a potential CBDC and no decisions have been taken on whether to introduce a CBDC in the UK or its design."

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'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
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Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
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Whitehall_Bin_Men
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 01, 2022 11:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The British protestants threw out the pope, but brought in Freemasonry, and Usury.
Confiscating all the vast monastic wealth.
Quite a capitalist, empire builders coup. Extraordinary!


In England, Henry VIII's Parliament of 1545 enacted a statute permitting interest payments up to 10% (on all loans); any higher rates constituted usury. But, in 1552, a hostile Parliament, with radical Protestants, revoked that statute, and revived it only under Elizabeth, in 1571. Since the maximum rate was also taken to be the minimum, subsequent Parliaments, seeking to foster trade, reduced that rate: to 8% in 1624, to 6% in 1651 (ratified 1660-61), and to 5% in 1713: a rate maintained until the abolition of the usury laws in 1854. The consequences of legalizing interest payments, but with ever lower maximum rates, had a far-reaching impact on the English economy, from the 16th century to the Industrial Revolution. The first lay in finally permitting the discounting of commercial bills. Even if medieval bills of exchange had permitted merchants to disguise interest payments in exchange rates, the usury doctrine nevertheless required that they be non-negotiable, held until maturity, since discounting would have revealed the implicit interest. Evidence for the Low Countries and England demonstrates that discounting, with legal transfers either by bearer bills or by endorsement, with full negotiability, began and became widespread only after the legalization of interest payments in both countries. https://ideas.repec.org/p/tor/tecipa/tecipa-439.html

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