Shock waves from last Thursday’s decision by the Saudi-led oil cartel, OPEC, not to cut production in the face of an oversupply on world markets have reverberated throughout the global economy, hitting energy and mining companies as well as financial markets, and threatening whole economies with bankruptcy.
As long as Washington can control the world’s energy supplies and force the world to trade in dollars, it can spend well in excess of what it produces and not be held to account. It’s like having a credit card you never have to pay off.
That’s a racket Uncle Sam is prepared to defend with everything he’s got, even nukes.
The end product has been lawlessness and Somali-style civil war. The state has basically been “failed” by the US and its allies. Post-Jamahiriya governmental authority is only exercised by those in power inside of their offices and a few spaces. Violent crime has proliferated. Tripoli and other major cities are being fought for by different factions and Libyan weapons are being smuggled into different countries. Even US officials, which helped midwife the groups running rampant in Libya, have not been safe from the turmoil they helped create; the murder of US Ambassador John Christopher Stevens in Benghazi on 12 September 2012 is testimony to this.
That is how the Wall Street-owned media routinely write off the exceptional record of this lone publicly-owned bank, crediting it to the success of the private oil industry. But the boom did not make the fortunes of the bank. It would be more accurate to say that the bank made the boom.
The survival of many millions of people is too important to be left to the drug companies. For a fraction of what the federal government is wasting on spreading and failing lawless wars abroad, it can expand from the Walter Reed Army Hospital example to become a humanitarian superpower that produces life-saving vaccines and medicines as if the plight of sick people mattered more than windfall profits for Big Pharma.
Day by day, more and more of us understand that big banks are at the heart of the UK’s failing economic model and have an unhealthy influence over our political system. But still too few of us understand exactly how the banks have become so powerful and why they are so toxic. Banks and finance didn’t just take control of our economy and society out of nowhere. So how have our banking institutions and “too big to jail” bankers come in to being?
As Beijing dreams, Noam Chomsky has been very vocal about a 1914-style chain reaction of catastrophic blunders – by the West – that could fast spin out of control; and the stakes, once again, are nuclear.
If the City Police need to get free advice from RBS on financial crime, then things have truly sunk to a level from which there will be no good outcomes in the foreseeable future, and the City Police should be ashamed of themselves for even contemplating such a move.
The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks: Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits.
. . . Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money.
“The only way you’re going to do effective journalism is to be truly independent,” Webb once said. “It’s a difficult thing to do, but [investigative journalists] George Seldes and I.F. Stone did it. There’s no reason modern-day journalists can’t do it too. You don’t get 401-Ks and health benefits, but at least you get to tell the truth.”
Resistance, Wolin and Saul agreed, will begin locally, with communities organizing to form autonomous groups that practice direct democracy outside the formal power structures, including the two main political parties. These groups will have to address issues such as food security, education, local governance, economic cooperation and consumption. And they will have to sever themselves, as much as possible, from the corporate economy.
The widening chasm between rich and poor is traceable to the policies that were adopted in 2008. That’s why things are so fu**ed up, it’s because the “surge in paper wealth, fueled by the trillions of dollars pumped into the financial system by central banks via zero interest rate and “quantitative easing” policies.”
In other words, it’s all deliberate. Robbing the poor and giving to the rich is all part of the plan.
