FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘Oligarchy’ Category

“Sometimes the ‘people’ are right.”

Anonymous leader

******

“There are two kinds of outrage:

The anger of the disappointed spoiled;

The authentic moral wrath of the common people betrayed.”

Anonymous sage

Permit me to sketch some real-world political context.

America has evolved two cooperating political elites, each of which runs one of the two parties and shares three common traits: (1) high education levels, (2) important wealth (3) a distrust of the populist vote bordering on fear.  Winning elections for each requires a periodic courting ritual during which the populist vote (on which success depends) is earnestly sought, followed by a measure of post-election betrayal. Well before the 2008 credit-bubble crash and the advent of the Tea Party movement, I noticed the growing populist pressure.

“Populism in this usage represents the politically relevant precepts, attitudes and core positions that distinguish an enduring majority of adults from the political elites that depend on their approval.”

For decades, the corporate country club conservatives and the Lexus limousine liberals succeeded in achieving a rough division of the populist center: social populists on one side, economic populists on the other.

That situation was mutating well before the 2008 real estate credit bubble burst.  Just before that calamity, I wrote the following (in an analysis of developments in American populism):

“While I still believe that a legitimate populist movement can accommodate local custom (when popular sentiment clearly differs from the mainstream, thinking of the accommodations for gay marriage in Vermont for example), I also believe that there can be no accommodation for the anti-democratic reversal of the popular will in the rest of the country in this important area of life, especially by judicial fiat.  When judges, for example, abuse their trust by overriding the popular will, especially on essential ‘family values’ issues, a populist rebellion is virtually inevitable.

Politics is a game played among four players, each representing one mindset.

The game is about power, challenges to boundaries, and the reallocation of other people’s money & property.

1. For typical liberal minds, boundaries are obstacles to be eliminated, including the boundary between “mine” and “yours”.
2. For typical conservative minds, boundaries are bulwarks to be defended, including the boundary between “my kind of people” and the “unwashed”.

[Liberals and conservatives share a great deal more than they are willing to admit.]

1. For centrist minds, boundaries are threats to a delicate balance and boundary relaxations are always preferable to conflict.
2. The reasonable minds, the rarest of all, are equally wary of the toxicity of the ideologues and the weakness of many centrists whose tendency to conflict avoidance undercuts courage and principle when both are most needed.

People endowed with common sense agree that “extreme” ideologies[5] are harmful, yet many of them tend to ignore the extremism of the ideologues who claim to share the same general socio-political vision. But the difference is not just one of degree, as in intensity or passion. When actually adopted, all ideologies operate as powerful reality filters, screening out or distorting every inconvenient data set or challenging point of view that cannot be accommodated to the “correct” view. In a sinister operational sense, the extreme ideologies work like mind-worms, feeding on the vulnerable, substituting a secular catechism for critical thinking. The vulnerable groups include those closest to a particular ideology in the spectrum of belief, the rootless ones searching for “meaning and purpose” and all the post-modern thinkers who have abandoned their allegiance to the core moral order. They were Lenin’s “useful idiots”.  I like the term “unwitting prey” or even “pets”.

At this juncture in history, the most toxic ideologically saturated minds are still found among the progeny of the two malign ideologies of the last century:  Marxism and National Socialism. The beliefs of Lenin survive in the guise of bureaucratic egalitarianism and those of Hitler survive as population eugenics. The true believer ideologues[6] dance on a scary precipice, unaware of the yawning abyss, one foot-slip away.[7]  History taught in the classic manner, with fidelity to the past, sans ideological filters, is a powerful vaccine against the toxic infectious ideologies. We can hope that such classic history will once again be widely taught.

Each of the four archetypal mindsets (liberal, conservative, centrist and reasonable) is “onto something”. They are not ideologues – these mindsets are traditional styles of rational thought and communication. Each is a gift to us conveying some essential part of the big picture. Each has had its day and will again. No culture can afford to ignore or marginalize a single one of them, except at a steep cost, because each mindset is part of the civilized historical tradition.

No society without liberal, conservative and centrist minds – all of whom are in a mutual dialogue mediated by the reasonable minds – can avoid the “bubble trap”. The real world abhors a bubble.  Those who insist in living in one will eventually find themselves in an unchecked downward slide. The slope is steep and the momentum of the fall is constantly accelerating. The reasonable minds among us are the first to notice the pending disaster, but only an aroused population can stop it.

“Not my problem”, you say? No part of a human society falls over the precipice without taking others down with it. I believe that during times of great imbalance – like our present situation – we are in acute danger because the consequences of a major misstep will be unforgiving: We are permitted to briefly lose our balance, but we must quickly regain our footing or we will fall.  The precipice is always near, and it’s a very long way down.

Dialogue pierces bubbles and augments balance. At times like this, when political posturing and maneuvering trump dialogue, the abyss is much closer that we think.

About that Giant

Now, here is a secret. All this time a huge giant has been sleeping under our floor.

Go with the metaphor for a moment, and ask yourself: What would a dreaming giant dream?

HINT: The giant is us, the people, not the population, but that ancient virtual collective memory that holds the precious life lessons of our ancestors.  This is our giant, the keeper of our pains, joys, successes and failures – especially of our failures. The Sleeping Giant embodies our common wisdom, our common sense and our common morality.

When the players in the political game become too corrupt, too careless, too unbalanced and too arrogant, the center does not hold and things fall apart[8]. Eventually the noise from all those gnashing teeth awakens the Giant under the floor.  Meantime the Giant dreams of wisdom ignored.

Elites are typically out of touch. It is their nature, whether conservative, liberal or centrist.  They are disconnected by circumstance, out of touch almost by definition, and always distanced by the habits of comfortable neglect. In the Giant’s world, loyalty and trust trump ideology and one’s station in life – especially the ideological fads of the elites.  In the Giant’s world, loyalty and trust start with family and friends then radiate to neighborhoods, then to communities, and so on, ending at the borders of the country. Loyalty and trust are at the heart of the ancient moral code, the “Deep Torah[9] of humanity” if you will, the main precepts of which cannot forever be ignored by any people, including, especially, by the elites.

Our daily lives, the reality “on the ground”, shapes the alpha and omega of real life.  When we say that the elites are disconnected, this is what we mean they are disconnected from – and this is why they need to be watched at all times. But the common people are too busy living and struggling with daily life to keep up surveillance of the miscreant elites.

Among all the precepts and aphorisms of the ancient moral code, five themes sound in the Sleeping Giant’s dreams like thundering heartbeats:

1. Earning entitles one to keep its fruits – the harder the earning, the fiercer the keeping. This precept applies to all people regardless of their station. One does not initiate a general program of taking property from any group (i.e., without a fair individuated adjudication, such as reparations for theft) without threatening all groups. In the Giant’s world, the earnings of the common people the fruits of which are more precarious and therefore more precious, are to be carefully respected by the elites. Significant price inflation is a thinly disguised, elite-engendered theft of earnings.
2.  The common people and their children entitled to the same human dignity as the elites enjoy. In the Giant’s world, the common people must be every bit as well protected from predators (human, animal, institutional and inhuman) as are the elites and their children. For example, the specter of private security guards for the elites and underfunded, under-deployed police for the poor people is a violation of human dignity.  In the Giant’s world, the elites (who are functionally necessary, but not individually indispensable) will be “kept on” only so long as they honor the basic human dignity of the common people.
3.  Theft by a common person is stealing and should be punished. In the Giant’s world, there is no theft exemption for the elites. The “Deep Torah applies to all – ruler and ruled, powerful and powerless.  Yet theft by an elite person is sometimes a mere “resource reallocation”, until the crime is discovered, when it may be called “misappropriation.” In the Giant’s world, elites do not steal from the common people…even elected elites acting under color of law.
4.  Trust is the baseline commitment of the social order and individual relationships.  When elites disparage the family ties, the loyalty and trust relationships and arrangements of the common people, the foundation of general trust is damaged. Elites do not break trust with the common people nor publically undermine its value by disregarding it among themselves, except at their great peril. They do not debase the Deep Torah by adopting a separate moral standard for themselves.  Not without deeply angering the awakened Giant.
5.  Beware when the trust with the common people is finally broken: Then, even the most benevolent gestures of the elites become traps – hungry tigers are then considered safer company. In the Giant’s world, the elites do not trick the common people.

Our current elites include some very clever types who value their personal status over anything else.  Some of these clever ones actually fear the Giant, but they have a plan to lull it into sleep.  These elites have kept a subset of “the population” as pets.  These human pets enjoy a very limited capacity for independent thought and action, because they have been conditioned to dependency, and they live on highly filtered information[10].  These pets can be easily manipulated and even teased into a state of faux rebellion.  Occasional pet outbreaks are arranged or exploited[11] to create conditions that will allow the elites to reestablish themselves by changing costumes.

This is why mobs of noisome pets should not be confused with a Sleeping Giant Awakening.  Two distinct things must not be confused: The anger of the disappointed spoiled and the authentic moral wrath of the common people betrayed. Those unruly pets sleeping in tents in the public square are an intended distraction.  Moral outrage grounded in the Deep Torah will always trump ordinary discontent.

The awakened Giant is the real deal. But how can we tell the difference? How will we know when the Sleeping Giant has awakened?  Listen closely for a critical the voices cohering around five themes: (a) keeping earnings; (b) being kept safe from predators; (c) holding thieves accountable, no matter their status; (c) honoring trust relationships; (d) rejecting the falsely benevolent gestures. This is the growl of the “Deep Torah”. It is the authentic voice of the people that, when aroused, exhibits a sudden moral coherence and unmistakable power.

You may have noticed that the Giant is stirring. It may soon be fully awake. I leave it to the reader to decode the signs, both false and true.

Timing is everything.

A fully awakened, angry giant is a very blunt instrument indeed.  This is why populist rebellions tend not to end well, even for the common people who first cheered the “protesters”, only to discover, too late, that a new set of elites had been using them as unwitting foot soldiers all along.

There is a strategy for the survival of the good people and good institutions, the constitution of this Republic and the prospect of an American renewal during an Awakened Giant Event.

The strategy is grounded in five simple rules, easy to outline, but difficult to implement….

Rule One: The ideologues cannot be trusted.

Rule Two: Listen closely for the ancient moral message (see above).  The more quickly that message is heeded, the sooner the Giant will go back to sleep

Rule Three: When things go seriously awry, the voices of practical and moral authenticity will not diverge.  So beware those who are still trying to trick the people – even – or especially- in a “good cause.” Beware those who want to “break some eggs” to make an omelet when they really mean break some heads to make a revolution. And shun those who want to destroy human dignity and freedom to make “a better world”, because the really mean “a bigger kennel.”

Rule Four: The Sleeping Giant is us.

Rule Five:  Victory goes to the most self-disciplined, morally rooted (think deep Torah here) and determined candidates, parties and movements.

How awake are you?

Copyright © 2011 by Jay B Gaskill, Attorney at Law, All rights Reserved

Forwards and links are welcome.  For other permissions, contact the author via e-mail law@jaygaskill.com

The author is a California Attorney and the creator and administrator of The Policy Think Site www.jaygaskill.com and the linked blogs.

Kabuki financial theatre – Congress net worth up 15 percent from 2004 to 2010 while the average American sees their net worth decline by 8 percent in the same timeframe.  Welcome to plutocrat USA.

We truly have the best government money can buy.  From 2004 to 2010 members of Congress increased their median net worth by 15 percent while the average American saw it fall by 8 percent.  Yet this fall in net worth does little justice to the rising cost of food, energy, healthcare, and college expenses that have eaten away any iota of progress families try to achieve in a prosperous nation.  The fact that Congress presided over a Wall Street pilfering of the middle class and income inequality never seen in the history of the United States, we are starting to get a full understanding of what it is to live in a full-fledged plutocracy.  The reason people are frustrated with government is that it no longer looks out for their own interests and is narrowly focused on promoting the aggregation of wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

The rise of low wage capitalism

It is a fascinating exercise in consumer behavior that Americans are out spending in full force even if it is with other people’s money.  The economy is still in bad shape and those who were fortunate enough to land jobs in this recession are likely in employment that now pays much less.  Most of the jobs that were lost during the recession were higher paying jobs yet most of the jobs that have been added have come from the lower wage sectors:

Source:  NLEP

To sum up the above chart, over 5,000,000 mid-wage to high-wage jobs were lost yet less than 1,000,000 have been added since this recession supposedly ended in the summer of 2009.  Where does this leave most Americans?  It leaves them further and further behind while their elected officials continue to practice an ancient art of dog and pony show yet most Americans are waking up from the fog.  This is why there is so much fragmentation in the current political system.  The mainstream press is built on a clean and simple two party battle.  Ultimately this allows the system to continue to pilfer the majority and keep people as docile spending vehicles.  Yet that game is no longer holding up.

The cracks in the median income

The median household income in the United States is $50,000.  This figure has actually moved backward in the last decade while the cost of things like food, fuel, healthcare, and a college education have all soared.  In other words Americans are much poorer and many are realizing this.  Take for example the cost of fueling up a vehicle.  The days of $20 or $40 a barrel oil are long gone.  Remember when it was affordable to go to a state university?  The nostalgia is largely there because the pangs of a lighter wallet are real.

Read the rest at My Budget 360

Confidence in a systemically corrupt financial system cannot be restored without a complete public exposure of all the lies, fraud, misinformation and complicity.

The truth has a unique sting, and an equally unique ability to heal the destruction wrought by  dishonesty, fraud and lies.The truth hurts, because the daylight of truth demands changes  that the self-serving and those in denial desperately wish to avoid.

But there can be no healing or reconciliation without the truth, baldly stated and  plainly spoken without artifice or spin.

If we can finally be truthful with ourselves as a nation, then we must admit that our financial system is fundamentally based on lies, fraud, embezzlement, misinformation, perverse filters and incentives, shadow systems that mock transparency and regulation, class privilege and the systemic flouting of the rule of law.

This is the truth that hurts because it reveals the financial system as one stupendous exploitative fraud; but it also reveals the complicity and irrelevance of our judicial system and the complete capture of the legislative and Executive processes of governance.

There is a system of government in which rule of law is merely a propaganda screen, where financial and political Elites run the show and escape the consequences of their actions: it’s called tyranny.The truth is that we live in a financial tyranny.

There is no other truthful way to describe the U.S.

If you want evidence, then ask yourself:

How many people have been indicted, convicted and served time for financial crimes during the current era of financial fraud and malfeasance, the most pervasive in U.S. history?

Answer: essentially none; the number is signal noise.

Was the American public lied to about the need and true purpose of TARP and the  other bank bailouts?

Answer: yes.

Did Congress meekly cave into the demands to “save the banks” and swallow whole the most absurd threats, i.e. save our cronies lest anarchy become the order of the day?

Answer: yes.

Did the Federal Reserve backstop the banks to the tune of $7.7 trillion in complete secrecy?

Answer: yes.

Are there  two sets of laws and rules, one for the Financial and Political Elites, who are free from oversight and the rule of law, and another for the rest of us?

Answer: yes. Just look at the massive level of corruption and systemic fraud, and the near-zero number of investigations which result in indictments, convictions and prison time.

Has anything been done to change any of this systemically?

Answer: no. The Kleptocratic Power Elite likes the system as is.

This is the perfection of financial tyranny.

The Status Quo is anxious to “restore confidence” in their corrupt financial tyranny, but without confessing the corruption or naming names.In a system constructed of lies, then sweeping the lies under the carpet and acting like “everything’s fixed now, let’s move on” restores nothing–rather, it proves the system is a sham.

Nothing is fixed until the whole truth and nothing but the truth is revealed for all to see, in broad daylight.This is the origin of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that have been established after a brutal tyranny has finally fallen, and the ruined nation seeks to heal itself from the misrule and exploitation of its Elites and from the officially sanctioned coverups of  systemic corruption and predation.

Quite frankly, the American system of justice is too far gone, too corrupted, too worm-eaten, to issue justice at this point.It would be nice if national resources were devoted to rooting out the fraud from 2001 on, but if nothing has been done to date except wrist-slap fines, then we cannot expect a thoroughly compromised and corrupted judiciary to suddenly transform itself into a judiciary worthy of democracy.

But we can demand a Truth Commission, where every one of the millions of people who committed fraud and who lied or mis-stated the truth can come forward and state the truth and name names, under oath.Everyone from the notaries who robo-signed foreclosures and home buyers who mis-stated their income and assets to obtain mortgages to the Wall Street apparatchiks who packaged the mortgages knowing they were fraudulent, the executives who looked the other way, to the politicos who accepted contributions from the engines of financial tyranny– give each and every one the chance to come forward and state the truth of their role in the system of fraud, collusion, avarice, lies and complicity.

Every single employee of Wall Street and the investment/mortgage banks and those Federal and State agencies tasked with their oversight should be called forth and given a chance to free themselves of the guilt of silence and self-serving complicity in a massively,  systemically corrupt system.Those who refuse the opportunity will be duly noted and their names entered in a public register of those who must have known some small sliver of the system but who have refused to tell the truth under oath.

The names of those who worked the machine revealed by their peers will also be publicly listed. If they think it unfair to be identified, then let them come forth and state the truth under oath. If they lie or mis-state the truth once again, then let them go to prison for  perjury.

If 10,000 citizens lie to protect themselves from the truth, then let us empty the prisons of  petty drug users and fill them with white-collar perjurors.

There is no other way to “restore confidence” but to insist that the truth finally matters. This will not be justice, but it will at least release the healing power of truth.

Charles Hugh Smith – Of Two Minds

Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.

Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders (“tyrants” to Aristotle) win popular support by cancelling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state.

Since the Renaissance, however, bankers have shifted their political support to democracies. This did not reflect egalitarian or liberal political convictions as such, but rather a desire for better security for their loans. As James Steuart explained in 1767, royal borrowings remained private affairs rather than truly public debts. For a sovereign’s debts to become binding upon the entire nation, elected representatives had to enact the taxes to pay their interest charges.

By giving taxpayers this voice in government, the Dutch and British democracies provided creditors with much safer claims for payment than did kings and princes whose debts died with them. But the recent debt protests from Iceland to Greece and Spain suggest that creditors are shifting their support away from democracies. They are demanding fiscal austerity and even privatization sell-offs.

This is turning international finance into a new mode of warfare. Its objective is the same as military conquest in times past: to appropriate land and mineral resources, also communal infrastructure and extract tribute. In response, democracies are demanding referendums over whether to pay creditors by selling off the public domain and raising taxes to impose unemployment, falling wages and economic depression. The alternative is to write down debts or even annul them, and to re-assert regulatory control over the financial sector.

Near Eastern rulers proclaimed clean slates for debtors to preserve economic balance

Charging interest on advances of goods or money was not originally intended to polarize economies. First administered early in the third millennium BC as a contractual arrangement by Sumer’s temples and palaces with merchants and entrepreneurs who typically worked in the royal bureaucracy, interest at 20 per cent (doubling the principal in five years) was supposed to approximate a fair share of the returns from long-distance trade or leasing land and other public assets such as workshops, boats and ale houses.

As the practice was privatized by royal collectors of user fees and rents, “divine kingship” protected agrarian debtors. Hammurabi’s laws (c. 1750 BC) cancelled their debts in times of flood or drought. All the rulers of his Babylonian dynasty began their first full year on the throne by cancelling agrarian debts so as to clear out payment arrears by proclaiming a clean slate. Bondservants, land or crop rights and other pledges were returned to the debtors to “restore order” in an idealized “original” condition of balance. This practice survived in the Jubilee Year of Mosaic Law in Leviticus 25.

The logic was clear enough. Ancient societies needed to field armies to defend their land, and this required liberating indebted citizens from bondage. Hammurabi’s laws protected charioteers and other fighters from being reduced to debt bondage, and blocked creditors from taking the crops of tenants on royal and other public lands and on communal land that owed manpower and military service to the palace.

In Egypt, the pharaoh Bakenranef (c. 720-715 BC, “Bocchoris” in Greek) proclaimed a debt amnesty and abolished debt-servitude when faced with a military threat from Ethiopia. According to Diodorus of Sicily (I, 79, writing in 40-30 BC), he ruled that if a debtor contested the claim, the debt was nullified if the creditor could not back up his claim by producing a written contract. (It seems that creditors always have been prone to exaggerate the balances due.) The pharaoh reasoned that “the bodies of citizens should belong to the state, to the end that it might avail itself of the services which its citizens owed it, in times of both war and peace. For he felt that it would be absurd for a soldier … to be haled to prison by his creditor for an unpaid loan, and that the greed of private citizens should in this way endanger the safety of all.”

The fact that the main Near Eastern creditors were the palace, temples and their collectors made it politically easy to cancel the debts. It always is easy to annul debts owed to oneself. Even Roman emperors burned the tax records to prevent a crisis. But it was much harder to cancel debts owed to private creditors as the practice of charging interest spread westward to Mediterranean chiefdoms after about 750 BC. Instead of enabling families to bridge gaps between income and outgo, debt became the major lever of land expropriation, polarizing communities between creditor oligarchies and indebted clients. In Judah, the prophet Isaiah (5:8-9) decried foreclosing creditors who “add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.”

Creditor power and stable growth rarely have gone together. Most personal debts in this classical period were the product of small amounts of money lent to individuals living on the edge of subsistence and who could not make ends meet. Forfeiture of land and assets – and personal liberty – forced debtors into bondage that became irreversible. By the 7^th century BC, “tyrants” (popular leaders) emerged to overthrow the aristocracies in Corinth and other wealthy Greek cities, gaining support by cancelling the debts. In a less tyrannical manner, Solon founded the Athenian democracy in 594 BC by banning debt bondage.

But oligarchies re-emerged and called in Rome when Sparta’s kings Agis, Cleomenes and their successor Nabis sought to cancel debts late in the third century BC. They were killed and their supporters driven out. It has been a political constant of history since antiquity that creditor interests opposed both popular democracy and royal power able to limit the financial conquest of society – a conquest aimed at attaching interest-bearing debt claims for payment on as much of the economic surplus as possible.

When the Gracchi brothers and their followers tried to reform the credit laws in 133 BC, the dominant Senatorial class acted with violence, killing them and inaugurating a century of Social War, resolved by the ascension of Augustus as emperor in 29 BC.

Rome’s creditor oligarchy wins the Social War, enslaves the population and brings on a Dark Age

Matters were more bloody abroad. Aristotle did not mention empire building as part of his political schema, but foreign conquest always has been a major factor in imposing debts, and war debts have been the major cause of public debt in modern times. Antiquity’s harshest debt levy was by Rome, whose creditors spread out to plague Asia Minor, its most prosperous province. The rule of law all but disappeared when publican creditor “knights”  arrived. Mithridates of Pontus led three popular revolts, and local populations in Ephesus and other cities rose up and killed a reported 80,000 Romans in 88 BC. The Roman army retaliated, and Sulla imposed war tribute of 20,000 talents in 84 BC. Charges for back interest multiplied this sum six-fold by 70 BC.

Among Rome’s leading historians, Livy, Plutarch and Diodorus blamed the fall of the Republic on creditor intransigence in waging the century-long Social War marked by political murder from 133 to 29 BC. Populist leaders sought to gain a following by advocating debt cancellations (e.g., the Catiline conspiracy in 63-62 BC). They were killed. By the second century AD about a quarter of the population was reduced to bondage. By the fifth century Rome’s economy collapsed, stripped of money. Subsistence life reverted to the countryside.

Creditors find a legalistic reason to support parliamentary democracy

When banking recovered after the Crusades looted Byzantium and infused silver and gold to review Western European commerce, Christian opposition to charging interest was overcome by the combination of prestigious lenders (the Knights Templars and Hospitallers providing credit during the Crusades) and their major clients – kings, at first to pay the Church and increasingly to wage war. But royal debts went bad when kings died. The Bardi and Peruzzi went bankrupt in 1345 when Edward III repudiated his war debts. Banking families lost more on loans to the Habsburg and Bourbon despots on the thrones of Spain, Austria and France.

Matters changed with the Dutch democracy, seeking to win and secure its liberty from Habsburg Spain. The fact that their parliament was to contract permanent public debts on behalf of the state enabled the Low Countries to raise loans to employ mercenaries in an epoch when money and credit were the sinews of war. Access to credit “was accordingly their most powerful weapon in the struggle for their freedom,” Richard Ehrenberg wrote in his Capital and Finance in the Age of the Renaissance (1928): “Anyone who gave credit to a prince knew that the repayment of the debt depended only on his debtor’s capacity and will to pay. The case was very different for the cities, which had power as overlords, but were also corporations, associations of individuals held in common bond. According to the generally accepted law each individual burgher was liable for the debts of the city both with his person and his property.”

The financial achievement of parliamentary government was thus to establish debts that were not merely the personal obligations of princes, but were truly public and binding regardless of who occupied the throne. This is why the first two democratic nations, the Netherlands and Britain after its 1688 revolution, developed the most active capital markets and proceeded to become leading military powers. What is ironic is that it was the need for war financing that promoted democracy, forming a symbiotic trinity between war making, credit and parliamentary democracy which has lasted to this day.

At this time “the legal position of the King qua borrower was obscure, and it was still doubtful whether his creditors had any remedy against him in case of default.” (Charles Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship: 1603-1763: 1965.) The more despotic Spain, Austria and France became, the greater the difficulty they found in financing their military adventures. By the end of the eighteenth century Austria was left “without credit, and consequently without much debt,” the least credit-worthy and worst armed country in Europe, fully dependent on British subsidies and loan guarantees by the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

Finance accommodates itself to democracy, but then pushes for oligarchy

While the nineteenth century’s democratic reforms reduced the power of landed aristocracies to control parliaments, bankers moved flexibly to achieve a symbiotic relationship with nearly every form of government. In France, followers of Saint-Simon promoted the idea of banks acting like mutual funds, extending credit against equity shares in profit. The German state made an alliance with large banking and heavy industry. Marx wrote optimistically about how socialism would make finance productive rather than parasitic. In the United States, regulation of public utilities went hand in hand with guaranteed returns. In China, Sun-Yat-Sen wrote in 1922: “I intend to make all the national industries of China into a Great Trust owned by the Chinese people, and financed with international capital for mutual benefit.”

World War I saw the United States replace Britain as the major creditor nation, and by the end of World War II it had cornered some 80 per cent of the world’s monetary gold. Its diplomats shaped the IMF and World Bank along creditor-oriented lines that financed trade dependency, mainly on the United States. Loans to finance trade and payments deficits were subject to “conditionalities” that shifted economic planning to client oligarchies and military dictatorships. The democratic response to resulting austerity plans squeezing out debt service was unable to go much beyond “IMF riots,” until Argentina rejected its foreign debt.

A similar creditor-oriented austerity is now being imposed on Europe by the European Central Bank (ECB) and EU bureaucracy. Ostensibly social democratic governments have been directed to save the banks rather than reviving economic growth and employment. Losses on bad bank loans and speculations are taken onto the public balance sheet while scaling back public spending and even selling off infrastructure. The response of taxpayers stuck with the resulting debt has been to mount popular protests starting in Iceland and Latvia in January 2009, and more widespread demonstrations in Greece and Spain this autumn to protest their governments’ refusal to hold referendums on these fateful bailouts of foreign bondholders.

Shifting planning away from elected public representatives to bankers

Every economy is planned. This traditionally has been the function of government. Relinquishing this role under the slogan of “free markets” leaves it in the hands of banks. Yet the planning privilege of credit creation and allocation turns out to be even more centralized than that of elected public officials. And to make matters worse, the financial time frame is short-term hit-and-run, ending up as asset stripping. By seeking their own gains, the banks tend to destroy the economy. The surplus ends up being consumed by interest and other financial charges, leaving no revenue for new capital investment or basic social spending.

This is why relinquishing policy control to a creditor class rarely has gone together with economic growth and rising living standards. The tendency for debts to grow faster than the population’s ability to pay has been a basic constant throughout all recorded history. Debts mount up exponentially, absorbing the surplus and reducing much of the population to the equivalent of debt peonage. To restore economic balance, antiquity’s cry for debt cancellation sought what the Bronze Age Near East achieved by royal fiat: to cancel the overgrowth of debts.

In more modern times, democracies have urged a strong state to tax rentier income and wealth, and when called for, to write down debts. This is done most readily when the state itself creates money and credit. It is done least easily when banks translate their gains into political power. When banks are permitted to be self-regulating and given veto power over government regulators, the economy is distorted to permit creditors to indulge in the speculative gambles and outright fraud that have marked the past decade. The fall of the Roman Empire demonstrates what happens when creditor demands are unchecked. Under these conditions the alternative to government planning and regulation of the financial sector becomes a road to debt peonage.

Finance vs. government; oligarchy vs. democracy

Democracy involves subordinating financial dynamics to serve economic balance and growth – and taxing rentier income or keeping basic monopolies in the public domain. Untaxing or privatizing property income “frees” it to be pledged to the banks, to be capitalized into larger loans. Financed by debt leveraging, asset-price inflation increases rentier wealth while indebting the economy at large. The economy shrinks, falling into negative equity.

The financial sector has gained sufficient influence to use such emergencies as an opportunity to convince governments that that the economy will collapse they it do not “save the banks.” In practice this means consolidating their control over policy, which they use in ways that further polarize economies. The basic model is what occurred in ancient Rome, moving from democracy to oligarchy. In fact, giving priority to bankers and leaving economic planning to be dictated by the EU, ECB and IMF threatens to strip the nation-state of the power to coin or print money and levy taxes.

The resulting conflict is pitting financial interests against national self-determination. The idea of an independent central bank being “the hallmark of democracy” is a euphemism for relinquishing the most important policy decision – the ability to create money and credit – to the financial sector. Rather than leaving the policy choice to popular referendums, the rescue of banks organized by the EU and ECB now represents the largest category of rising national debt. The private bank debts taken onto government balance sheets in Ireland and Greece have been turned into taxpayer obligations. The same is true for America’s $13 trillion added since September 2008 (including $5.3 trillion in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bad mortgages taken onto the government’s balance sheet, and $2 trillion of Federal Reserve “cash-for-trash” swaps).

This is being dictated by financial proxies euphemized as technocrats. Designated by creditor lobbyists, their role is to calculate just how much unemployment and depression is needed to squeeze out a surplus to pay creditors for debts now on the books. What makes this calculation self-defeating is the fact that economic shrinkage – debt deflation – makes the debt burden even more unpayable.

Neither banks nor public authorities (or mainstream academics, for that matter) calculated the economy’s realistic ability to pay – that is, to pay without shrinking the economy. Through their media and think tanks, they have convinced populations that the way to get rich most rapidly is to borrow money to buy real estate, stocks and bonds rising in price – being inflated by bank credit – and to reverse the past century’s progressive taxation of wealth.

To put matters bluntly, the result has been junk economics. Its aim is to disable public checks and balances, shifting planning power into the hands of high finance on the claim that this is more efficient than public regulation. Government planning and taxation is accused of being “the road to serfdom,” as if “free markets” controlled by bankers given leeway to act recklessly is not planned by special interests in ways that are oligarchic, not democratic. Governments are told to pay bailout debts taken on not to defend countries in military warfare as in times past, but to benefit the wealthiest layer of the population by shifting its losses onto taxpayers.

The failure to take the wishes of voters into consideration leaves the resulting national debts on shaky ground politically and even legally. Debts imposed by fiat, by governments or foreign financial agencies in the face of strong popular opposition may be as tenuous as those of the Habsburgs and other despots in past epochs. Lacking popular validation, they may die with the regime that contracted them. New governments may act democratically to subordinate the banking and financial sector to serve the economy, not the other way around.

At the very least, they may seek to pay by re-introducing progressive taxation of wealth and income, shifting the fiscal burden onto rentier wealth and property. Re-regulation of banking and providing a public option for credit and banking services would renew the social democratic program that seemed well underway a century ago.

Iceland and Argentina are most recent examples, but one may look back to the moratorium on Inter-Ally arms debts and German reparations in 1931. A basic mathematical as well as political principle is at work: Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be.

Counter Punch

This article appears in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on December 5, 2011.

MICHAEL HUDSON is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) and Trade, Development and Foreign Debt: A History of Theories of Polarization v. Convergence in the World Economy. He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com

Suppressing dissent, transparency and fact inevitably leads to systemic collapse– exactly what we’re seeing in the European financial system.

Fortunately for us, when our immune system identifies a cancer cell, the cancer cell can’t demand to be saved by threatening to kill the entire system. You see the irony here, of course; the cancer cell willdestroy the entire organism/system if it is spared, so its threat to bring down the entire system if it is eradicated is pure self-serving artifice.

This is a precise analogy for the “too big to fail” banks in the U.S. and the Eurozone:once again we are hearing the heavy-breathing threats that a systemic bank failure would destroy civilization. The truth is that preserving the cancerous banking system will inevitably bring down the entire system, so the only way to preserve the global economy is to eliminate the financial cancer now,before it triggers systemic collapse.

The best way to understand this is to consider the economy as a system.All sustainable, stable systems require a free flow of information: multiple pathways of communication, experimentation/mutation and transparent feedback.  This essential activity generates the low-intensity instability of volatility and fluctuation.

A system which suppresses information and the low-level instability of dissent and negative feedback thus suppresses the information the system needs to remain stable.  Suppressing dissent, facts, transparency and feedback inevitably destabilizes the system.It is ironic, isn’t it, that the suppression of dissent, facts and transparency creates the surface illusion of stability, but it is only a facade.  Beneath the surface, the lack of information and low-level fluctuation/volatility builds up system instability which is suddenly released as non-linear, chaotic volatility and collapse.

What Europe, the U.S., China and Japan have now are leaderships that substitute lies for fact,  obfuscation for transparency,  artifice for feedback and   propaganda for communication.The essential negative feedback of dissent has been choked off,  leaving only self-reinforcing positive feedback loops in the system, feedback that inevitably leads to runaway collapse.

In a financial example, when the negative feedback of short positions is banned, then there are no buyers left when the selling begins.  The selling cascades, triggering more selling, which then feeds more selling until the bid disappears entirely.

In Europe, the political and financial Elite is preserving the Status Quo with artifice and lies. This can only lead to non-linear systemic collapse.  Beneath the surface, they are manipulating, intervening, propping and pumping, but preserving a terminally unstable system with more lies and intervention is impossible.

The only question left is how much longer the system can wobble unsteadily before it  finally collapses in a heap of depreciating euros.

Charles Hugh Smith – Of Two Minds

This video says it all.  Every single American needs to understand this right NOW: