Your Comment is awaiting Moderation.#164. A bolt from the grey Posted on February 28, 2020 WHY “BUSINESS AS USUAL” WILL NOT BE RESTORED
rogerglewis Uncategorized February 29, 2020 4 Minutes
At 10-43 this is the crucial point what is the purpose of the banks, what are the end goals or objectives of Banking or the wider financial system and how do we best regulate with those stated aims in the forefront. Excellent Video.
https://notthegrubstreetjournal.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9XQ3_LCl-Q

Usually it’s triggered by the sincerness displayed in the post I looked at. And after this post Jonathan Sugarman versus UniCredit – an update

Your point is that during the last few hundred years we’ve had competition, which eventually always leads to monopoly, and that one group just takes over where another left off (industrialists to finance, for example). I’d agree with you there. It hasn’t always been “greedy bankers”; they’re just the ones in the driver’s seat at the present moment. But it’s the same type of people, people who appear to want something for nothing, whether it’s an industrialist raping some far-off land of its resources, the bringing over of slaves, etc., and they always seem to find politicians who look and think a lot like them, just wearing a different job description.

These people always gravitate to the top, they make and pass the laws, and it hasn’t changed one iota (from feudal lords on down to present-day corporations). I fear another form of capitalism is not going to help at all, just more of the same. We must come up with something that benefits all people, not just the ones at the top.

Backwards,

Yes I agree with much of what you say, and I almost put in a reference to the Shock Doctrine myself earlier. States have certainly played a significant part in facilitating and encouraging the developments we both criticise. The point where we diverge I think is the belief that the solution to all this must be a more purer free-market capitalism with much less government control/interference/regulation. I say this not because I am in favour of big, centralised government (quite the opposite in fact), but because I believe the idea of rolling back capitalism to either its 19th century competitive phase or its post WWII social democratic form (the projects of the libertarian right and the post-Keynesians respectively) is unrealisable even if desirable. In this sense they are utopian.
Yes, absolutely, we have to follow the money and point out the systematic redistribution of wealth from poor to rich going on (‘accumulation by dispossession’ as David Harvey puts it). But I would also point out that we have arrived at this position not simply due to the actions (conspiratorial or not) of a few ‘greedy’ bankers (although they surely exist). Any explanation needs to take in the way capitalism has itself developed over the last two centuries (further and further from the model idealised by the libertarian right but never in fact actually existing): the move from competitive to monopoly capital, from monopoly to global monopoly capital and then to global financial monopoly capital in the late 20th century, i.e. one that exposes how the laws of motion of capitalism has itself led to the dominance of finance over industrial capital and shift to profits from speculation and asset inflation..
I agree totally with you that the world is not haphazard or will-nilly. I just think the solution is less capitalism rather than more, banks owned and controlled by the people who use them rather than better behaved bankers.

The government also manipulates the cost of inflation by changing the rules on how it’s measured. They change what they measure every few years so as to give the impression that inflation is not that great. I read something the other day where it said that if inflation was measured the way they measured it in 1980, current inflation would be around 10 to 12 per cent. Instead they tell us it is 2 to 3 per cent. Nice, if you can get away with it. That way no one gets a raise, and yet we’re paying 10 – 12 per cent more.

Libertarians argue that we are being lied to and that, if we weren’t, things would take care of themselves, they would naturally end. They make sense on many, many issues. When I think about it sometimes, I wonder if they don’t care the most about the common man. Does anyone think going through continual booms and busts, constant inflation is fun? I don’t, and I don’t think it helps the citizens one bit in the end. It just leaves a trail of destruction.

As the students flooded into courses, the prices started to go up. What used to be a reasonable price for an education has increased exponentially. Good old supply and demand, which has now resulted in over a trillion dollars in student loan debt and millions of students who now have degrees of some sort, but cannot find jobs.

This is but one example (housing is another) of where, when the government gets involved, prices go up, we have booms and busts, and this, Libertarians argue, is not a so-called “free market”. It’s a market to enrich a few at the expense of the many, but all under the guise of “helping the people”. We all end up paying in the end, ordinary people’s lives get ruined, but a few people are enriched beyond their wildest imaginations.

Follow the money. Who benefited? Now, this does not explain a conspiracy, I know, but merely illustrates the thinking of Libertarians. I think they’ve got a point, don’t you, that this isn’t capitalism at all. It’s manufactured enrichment of a few to the detriment of the many.

As for a conspiracy, let’s look at a definition: “A secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.” Probably “harmful” fits in with what’s occurred, but “unlawful” doesn’t as, like G. Edward Griffin and others have pointed out, these guys write the laws to make sure that what they do is not unlawful, or they change the laws retroactively.

“The action of plotting or conspiring.” Now the plot thickens. Are you saying there is no plotting and conspiring? Really? Gulf of Tonkin, weapons of mass destruction? TARP? The list is endless.

If you haven’t already ready Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” or “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” please do. To open your eyes and see the world as it really is, not haphazard or willy nilly, but as a well-oiled machine is like getting smacked on the side of the head with a 2 by 4. To see your government as not out (not at all) to help you, help the little guy, is I believe to begin to get some semblance of the truth.

This Analysis programme for BBC Radio 4 last year by Paul Mason looked at the ‘left’ (post-Keynesian/reformist) response to the financialisation of capitalism and the debt crisis:

Radical Economics: escaping credit serfdom
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y6qtb

Mason lays out the narrative of financialisation and neoliberalism concisely and includes some interesting contributions, although his selection does not include anything from the anti-capitalist left or those concerned with acknowledging limits to growth (economic or ecological).

Thanks for the links. G. Edward Griffin is obviously an interesting character and makes some astute observations about the dominance of the finance sector. However, he is marshaling his facts and his reading of history to support a right-wing libertarian/conspiratorial narrative which I find both unconvincing and unnecessary.
One weakness in particular of this focus on the money supply and central banks (and I think this is shared with the reformist positivemoney position) is in explaining the ballooning of public and private debt after the 1970s in developed capitalist economies.
There are alternative narratives which attempt to locate the current crisis in the context of economic and political developments since the Second World War: the growing dominance of transnational corporations and monopoly (oligopoly) capital, a return to economic stagnation after the post-war boom and the resulting financialisation of capital, and the triumph of neoliberalism both in the opening of global markets and the movement of capital, and also in redefining the aims and priorities of governments. Correct me if you think I’m wrong here but it seems to me that while both narratives see the banking and finance sector as part of the problem, beyond that there is little shared ground.
I think the libertarian right are ideologically unable to countenance a problem with capitalism because, for them, it represents the ultimate freedom for individuals, and so they are forced to explain crises and obvious examples of lack of freedom and justice as the result of conspiracies. The search for the guilty conspirators can begin reasonably with banking cartels, but soon ends up including Jews, communists, freemasons or giant lizards (or some permutation of all five!).

The banking sector is farming the value of the fiat and not their “capital” investments which were net negative over time.
The truth is out now.
Its becoming very difficult to hide but you have to give it to them – they have been milking peoples stupidity for so long now it comes naturally to them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UREKohflMi4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENgqp_zsDu0

Re my above link entitled “Money vs Bayonets”, G. Edward Griffin wrote “The Creature from Jekyll Island”. Jekyll Island is an island in Georgia where the financial elite (J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, etc.) secretly met and came up with the idea for the Federal Reserve. It is a well-researched book. He has been interviewed by many people/associations. Just listen to what he says; don’t worry too much about who did the interview.

Here’s another extract from a speech he gave to another organization where he talks about the “banking cartel,” how they always couch everything they say in terms of “helping the people,” yet what they do has nothing to do with the people. It has everything to do with the banks. It’s a good listen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WrMWK-FJzU