The “Crash of 2007-8” is underway -- Strong leadership required
How Far Will the Crash Go and What Do we Do Now? Part III of III
| Richard C. Cook, who worked in the Carter White House, NASA, and the Treasury Department, spotlights reformers whom the corporate media ignores. This article appeared on website of Global Research, August 18, 2007. |
by Richard C. Cook
The “soft landing” is a political power play.
It’s what they did in 1984, when Ronald Reagan was reelected on a campaign theme of “It’s morning in America,” after the Fed let up following the twenty percent-plus rates it used to trash the producing economy from 1979-83. The Fed did the same with the housing bubble to get George W. Bush reelected in 2004.
The financiers’ worst fear is that if things get too bad the American people might elect a reformer in 2008. So far the corporate press has kept two such reformers -- Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich -- in the shadows. Now that Hillary Clinton is starting to sound more progressive, they’ll attack her overtly since she is too big a player to be ignored. The Washington Post has already begun.
So we’ll see if the Fed’s plan succeeds as well over the next couple of years as it has in the past. In the meantime, what remains firmly in place is the monetarist regime through which the financiers and the Fed have ruled America for the past thirty-six years, since President Richard Nixon closed the gold window for international exchange in 1971.
During this period, we have seen several interlocking phenomena:
- 1) interest rates that on the whole have been much higher than the previous period of the New Deal and its aftermath, lasting into the 1960s;
2) inflation that has eroded eighty percent of the value of the dollar;
3) replacement of our producing industrial economy with a service economy dominated by high finance;
4) almost continuous warfare with a clear objective of world domination whose purpose is to shore up the dollar as the world’s reserve currency;
5) ever-deepening public, private, and household debt;
6) the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, with increasing numbers of the poor, homeless, and hungry who are left out of the nation’s economic life;
7) a crisis in the nation’s crumbling infrastructure; and
8) the constant whipsawing of over 200 million ordinary people.
It’s our citizens who are batted around like ping pong balls between alternating conditions of boom and bust as every few years many of them watch the overnight disappearance of their homes, pensions, savings, health insurance, and jobs. Added to this is the stress that has eroded the health and even life expectancy of the U.S. population.
It’s a horrible picture created by a filthy system. It’s why religious leaders for thousands of years have characterized usury, and a culture ruled by usury, as a crime against God and humanity. The monetarist rule of the Federal Reserve is legal, institutionalized usury. Over the years they have mastered all the tools of the trade, the objective of which is to continually allow the financial superstructure to skim the cream off the producing economy. Come to think of it, isn’t that how the Mafia used to work with its protection and loan-sharking rackets?
And can anything be done about it? Of course.
In previous articles on the Global Research website and elsewhere, this writer has offered a list of reforms -- mostly monetary -- that can and should be made. They all involve the recognition of credit as a public utility, part of the societal commons, not the private playground of the financiers, with the Fed as their facilitator.
Low-cost credit overseen by the federal government was the basic building block of the New Deal. It was done by strong people with an ideal of public service, though in many respects they didn’t go far enough and relied too much on World War II and armaments to attain a full-employment economy. We now need a New Deal for the 21st century that would correct the flaws of the last one, resolve the present crisis, and carry us into a future that will benefit everyone, not just the privileged few.
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Richard C. Cook, a frequent contributor to Global Research, is a retired federal analyst who worked twenty-one years with the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles have appeared on Economy in Crisis, Dissident Voice, and Atlantic Free Press. He is the author of “Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age.”.
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Also see: The “Crash of 2007-8” is underway -- and the Fed is our pilot
Real Estate Cycle on Schedule as Manufacturing Falls
From Keynesianism to Neoliberalism: Shifting Paradigms in Economics |
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