On Target

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN FINANCIALLY MANIPULATE?

by James Reed
There is a TV show on at the moment that seems to consist of a large number of male black dancers, teamed up with a white female partner, who do astonishing dance moves. But as politically correct and as trendy as this may be, it is nothing compared to the dance moves being done by the No.1 rap-president, Barack Hussein Obama.

At a time when the World Trade Organisation is warning that world trade will nose-dive 9 per cent this year and the IMF has stated that the global recession will be worse than an 0.5 to 1 per cent contraction, Obama has made Wall Street the 'saviours of the world (Wall St Villains Now Saviours The Australian 25/3/09, p.1). Obama has done the unbeatable dance moves for the global financial elite!

Yes world stocks 'surged after Obama put his baseball cap on back-to-front and changed his rap song from Wall Street fund managers are villains to Wall Street fund managers will be the 'saviours of Main Street. Obama 's scheme, one of the greatest cons ever pulled over the eyes of the American sheeple, is for the Wall Street fund managers to buy US$1 trillion of 'toxic assets, primarily US mortgages and primarily from minorities who were given housing loans which they had no chance of repaying.
The financiers will do so, bleeding the US taxpayer at a rate of US$6 of the government debt to US$1 in equity. All this will do is allow hedge fund executives to become richer without in any way addressing, even in conventional financial terms, the real structural weaknesses in the US economy.

Some white Republican mice have however, been carefully making tiny little squeaks that the big Obama 's US$3.6 trillion budget plan will send the US bankrupt. Although, when it suited him, Obama had slammed executives at the now tax-payer AIG, Obama 's tone is now:
'[We] can 't afford to demonise every investor or entrepreneur who seeks to make a profit. Why not? I demonise them all the time!
Oh, sorry, you can 't keep up your token rhetoric Barack, because you are the financier 's toy. And of course, you are the president of American decline, to you are fulfilling your assigned historical role.

Big Kev 09 McRudd, while over in Washington DC (dance capital) listened to a few dance tracks with Barack, was more cautious about the likely success of Obama 's scheme. There would need to be a similar mad scheme put in place in the UK and across Europe.
But then in the UK Gordon Brown 's government can 't afford to do this. Then there is the problem of more 'toxic assets flowing into the global sewer from central and eastern Europe. I am pleased with this image of filth, toxics and sewerage, used freely by politicians and financial writers to describe the global economy and financial system. A little earthy and crude, but very appropriate.

One of the signs of the times of America 's end of empire is the call by China 's central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan, for a new currency to replace the US dollar as the world 's monetary standard. This was an early indication that up-and-coming powers such as China are not pleased with the global financial status quo where the US economy floated on because foreigners purchased their debt.
In his recent book 'When Giants Fall: An Economic Roadmap for the End of the American Era (Wiley, New York, 2009), Michael J. Panzer author also of 'Financial Armageddon (Kaplan Publishing 2008), points out that such moves represent a sign of American decline. The US is no longer the dominant global power and China and others such as India are set to use US debt 'as a geopolitical weapon, despite the great harm that would also cause to the attacker 's own economy. (p.68)

Panzer says about the fall of the American empire that 'For many Americans, the years ahead will be nothing short of a modern Dark Ages, where each day brings forth fresh anxieties, unfamiliar risks, and a deep sense of foreboding.
The resource depletion produced by globalisation is already leading to hostilities with China, Russia and India, with more to come in the future. IMF Managing Director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn may agree with this. At an anti-crisis meeting in Tanzania on 9 March 2009 he said that the present global financial 'crisis is already throwing millions into poverty and that civil unrest could be sparked : 'the threat of civil unrest, perhaps even a war.

I don 't know about you but I am detecting more and more traces of this suggestion; the financial elites ultimate use of war as a clearing ground when their monster, capitalism, gets into trouble, allowing them to profit in true Mother Courage style. Don 't let your sons die in the war they want to come!

Financial speculator, George Soros ( 'The Deal The Australian March 2009) has had 'a very good crisis. Seeing the crash coming (the top financial elite control the 'crisis so how could they possibly miss out '), he has done well. Now he is gloating about how he helped Obama, through maximum financial donations in June 2004, before Obama had been elected to the Senate. Then he 'urged Obama to run for president and when Obama did Soros organised a meeting between all the players and other Wall Street bankers.
Soros is so self-confident that he can even engage in a token bit of criticism of financiers, like himself, who have profited from 'ideological excess (of) market fundamentalism. 'All hell will break loose, he says if governments allow markets to correct themselves and allow financial speculators like himself, free reign. That will not happen as long as the current financial system exists. Obama has shown that he is not a 'man of the people but a shallow puppet of international finance. That, of course, is what he was created to be.

To end on a positive note:
'It 's Time They Knew (1967)** by D.E. Barclay-Smith is a little book that was distributed by the League of Rights In clear and simple terms Barclay-Smith told us that banks created financial credit against the real productive wealth created by the people. In the so-called fractional reserve banking system only the capital adequacy ratio acted as a restraint upon credit creation: that meant that banks only created financial credit 9 or 10 times more than the amount of cash or legal tender they held in reserve.
Money (credit) thus begins its life as a debt to the banks. The bank by granting a loan (of credit) monetises the real wealth created by productive communities, by individuals. Barclay-Smith pointed out that the private monopoly of financial debt-credit leads on to further debt and taxation bondage.

Nationalisation of the banks is not the answer. Monopolisation is the problem in the first place and as Barclay-Smith noted: 'You don 't make a monopoly any better by making it larger. What is needed is the end of the monopoly and dictatorship of finance by elites.

The Federal government should exercise its sovereign prerogative to create money on behalf of the people, but beyond that, money needs to be deconstructed and decentralised as much as possible. Alternative money schemes need to be encouraged to flourish.
At present, only social crediters, and a small group of ecological economic thinkers, influenced by social credit ideas, are working along these lines. The present global financial 'crisis gives us a window of opportunity to canvas ideas that will never be considered by stooges of the global financial nexus, like Rudd and Obama.

** 'It 's Time They Knew has been updated by the Institute of Economic Democracy and is now titled 'The Money Trick available from all of our Book Services for $10.00 plus postage.

MONDRAGON OF FORD 'S QUANTUM CONCEPTUAL LEAP

Assistance to consumption rather than to an already glut of production:
Nevertheless, Mondragon is making a major conceptual leap in focusing on assistance to consumption rather than an already existing glut of production - in this case of vehicles in his own line of production.
Jobs as means of distributing incomes - obsolete:
In the past, emphasis has almost always been placed on assisting producers to maintain jobs as the main means of distributing incomes. This is doomed to failure because such assistance passes through the costing system and therefore registers as additional price to the consumer.
No one is forced under Mondragon's proposal to purchase a car, but as you can observe, the assistance to consumption under his plan is limited as to consumer choice. If consumers do buy a vehicle, though, under the plan the consumer does indeed benefit to the suggested amount. The producer is also helped in being enabled to recover his costs so that he can remain solvent and continue to serve the community by further production.

If the product is such that the consumer does not value it enough to purchase, then of course the onus is on the producer to improve the quality or desirability of his product. Production should only occur where the consumer chooses to support it. But business should never fail merely because of an inherent systemic insufficiency of purchasing-power in the hands of the consumer.

Source of payment-money critical factor:
I am not aware if Mondragon suggested a source for making these consumption payments. If it would be from taxation then obviously there would be no increased purchasing-power for the economy in a macroeconomic sense. If they were funded by government debt, then they would not be liquidating the costs of production but merely deferring them.

There are two forms of credit: real and financial:
Real credit is the physical capacity of society to provide goods and services, as, when and where desired. Financial credit is the ability to provide money as, when and where required. The latter should always balance the former.
National Credit Account:
The proper way of financing the new consumption credits would not involve either taxation or incurring of debt. A country should have a National Credit Account which would be an estimated inventory of its real credit, i.e., all factors that if used could create a financial cost. This would include an actuarial (e.g., act on behalf of) estimate of the capitalised economic value of the population.
Nation Credit Account added to by production and diminished by consumption:
This Account would be added to by all new production and diminished by all consumption. New consumption credits would simply be drawn down from this National Credit Account - and being an item accounted to consumption would diminish the Account accordingly.
However, we are constantly producing more than we are consuming, capital items included, and the Account is always growing more rapidly than it would be diminishing. No taxation or debt would be involved.

Intuitively correct:
Mondragon's proposal is intuitively correct but he is just restricting it to a selected sector of the economy. He needs to be convinced of the efficacy of extending it to the entire range of consumer goods in the national economy as a whole, so as not to favour any sector over another.
In the light of past orthodox proposals, I think he is making a quantum leap by recognising consumption as being the appropriate area to assist rather than the traditional approach of selectively protecting industry and "jobs" through subsidies to producers. We have to show him the necessity of universalising his limited proposal.

THE (IM)MORALITY OF FINANCIAL CAPITALISM

Although written from an orthodox point of view the following article by Colin James, political journalist and analyst in an Otago Daily Times (New Zealand) column, 24 March 2009, presents an opportunity for further dialogue between social crediters and the journalist. Do make an effort to take up his offer.

He invites: reasoned feedback is welcome at the address below.
He writes: 'Deep in the recesses of New Zealand's political history lies the A-plus-B theorem. United States Federal Reserve Board chair Ben Bernanke could be mistaken for a disciple. The theorem was central to the social credit doctrine, which took hold in the 1930s depression among farmers hit hard by the slump and among some professionals not trained in economics. It postulated a gap between what people produced and what they could afford to buy which the central bank or the government should bridge by creating credit.
Regular economists said there was no gap. Bernanke, an economist by trade, would agree. But he is creating credit on a scale that would make a social crediter look a tightwad. In common parlance Bernanke is printing money, around $US1 trillion.
Normally, a central banker would fear printing money would generate inflation -- too much money chasing too few goods, driving up goods prices. But Bernanke thinks he is arresting deflation -- that is, stopping a downward spiral of prices which might be caused by consumers not consuming, thereby pushing down production, killing jobs and further reducing consumption, as happened in the 1930s.
The United States Treasury is pumping out money, too, to capitalise banks and insurers made insolvent by reckless lending and to ameliorate the havoc wreaked by those firms in the real economy where people make and do things.
This is digging an enormous hole in the American budget: the latest estimate of this year's deficit is 13 per cent of GDP. Someone has to fill this hole and the Chinese, who funded Americans' binge to the tune of about $US1 trillion, have lost their enthusiasm: Bernanke's binge printing of money threatens the value of China's holdings. Besides, China needs to prop up its own suddenly softer economy.

Draw your own conclusions about international savers' willingness to fund New Zealand's own whopping increase in debt over the next three to five years as government spending is slowly brought into line with the economy's capacity to pay. There is also a moral dimension to the Americans' desperate attempts to avoid a real readjustment. Bernanke believed, with his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, that the best regulation of financial (and other) markets is self-regulation. (The government's replacement of Paula Rebstock with Mark Berry as Commerce Commission chair reflects a version of this belief.)

But, as Greenspan has confessed, self-regulation failed. Self-regulation would have meant self-denial, which is not an uppermost character trait of those in financial services outside core banking and old-fashioned insurance -- as the Alex cartoon reminds us. Now Americans who have paid taxes to rescue financial firms that were too big to fail, no matter how bad, find they have rewarded with large bonuses the very people who created the need for the bailouts. The same goes for British taxpayers, where huge bailouts and printing money are also in vogue.

Last week an angry United States House of Representatives approved a 90 per cent tax on bonuses paid to executives of financial firms rescued by taxpayers. Longer-term, what does this hands-in-the-till behaviour say to ordinary folk about market capitalism? Some argue that market capitalism is moral: it rescues people from poverty through productivity-lifting innovation to a degree no other economic system has got near. To improve the poor's lot is a moral act. Moreover, it is argued, market capitalism is moral because it rests on and promotes trust. True, mostly.

It is safer to argue that market capitalism is amoral: willing sellers doing deals with willing buyers are pursuing their self-interests, not pursuing a great good or a great bad. But scoffing large bonuses from the very taxpayers you have betrayed and harmed is neither moral nor amoral. It is immoral. It destroys trust. The Alex cartoon characters are deeply unlovable because they are immoral and untrustworthy. A few criminals do not unmake society. A few miscreants do not invalidate market capitalism. But in the 1920s and 2000s a wild-west mentality spread widely and undermined trust within the system and, as a result, trust in the system.

To undermine trust is to unstick the glue in the market capitalist system. This loss of trust is the deeper crisis under the credit crisis and the real economy slump at which Bernanke and Co are throwing imaginary money. The response to this deeper crisis is political. First, angry and hurt voters demand regulation in place of failed self-regulation.
The risk in that is over-regulation, which undermines market-capitalism's capacity to lift the poor out of poverty and the working class into the middle class. There is a bigger risk if this slump goes too deep for too long: that voters reach for unorthodox, imaginary or populist solutions (1930s social credit was a low-key example).
If that takes hold widely, it wrecks sensible politics. The moral in this affair? Market immorality can do great damage.

CONTACT: Colin James, P O Box 9494, Wellington, New Zealand. Email: ColinJames@synapsis.co.nz

Response to Colin James from Bill Daly, New Zealand:
Dear Colin,
Your article on The (im)morality of financial capitalism, is thought provoking. As I understand it the early social crediters made a number of associated claims in relation to the argument of a "gap", i.e. a rejection of the circulation and velocity theories, and that full employment should not be an objective of the production system.
When I first made a study of the A + B thing a few decades ago I assumed that there would be plenty of well-qualified refutations. I found lots of criticism and a fair amount of scoffing, but I wasn't able to find anything that made any sort of point by point refutation of the SC technical claims.
The theories about money circulation and it's velocity seemed to vary as often as the number of people who spoke in support of them. I remember trying to get my mind around a claim made by Sir Rob Muldoon which from memory was that even $1 could allow the economy to function satisfactorily if it circulated with sufficient speed.
And reading the various economists comments on the present situation gives a pretty clear indication that there is very little agreement on the technical causes of the crisis or solution(s). I have a question. If the US and UK government are resorting to printing money (or typing it on to computers) how is it that this is a cost to their taxpayers?

Many thanks, Bill Daly, Glen Eden Auckland

FOX ADMITS PLANTING POLITICAL BRAINWASHING IN TV SHOWS

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In this case, the propaganda in Rupert Murdock 's TV shows and/or the children 's interest (out of nowhere) in 'global warming '? Rupert Murdoch's Twentieth Century Fox corporation has admitted to planting political brain- washing within its globally popular TV shows and indeed boasts that it is proud of the fact.

A corporate video currently being showcased on another part of Murdoch's media empire, MySpace.com shows Fox executives and stars of its universally recognized shows bragging about how they use the platform of hit shows that are broadcast globally to implant messages about the supposed threat of global warming. This is not the first time Fox have been enthusiastic in propagandising for the establishment. In 2003, Rupert Murdoch himself admitted that the corporation had "tried" to help the Bush administration sell the war in Iraq.

The text accompanying the video states, "In 2006, News Corp. embarked upon a company wide initiative to reduce the size of its carbon footprint."
The means by which this "initiative" was carried out is then made clear by a plethora of clips from Fox's most popular shows - the Simpsons, King of the Hill, Family Guy, Prison Break - which are all loaded with messages about global warming and the need to do something about it.
"What could we do on a practical level to start making a difference," asks one executive before another answers, "The biggest thing we've done is inserting messages about the environment into some of our content."

In other words, Fox has embarked on a deliberate campaign, which could only have been done with the co-ordination of the script writers of each program, to force people to accept the pseudo-science of global warming by brainwashing them into accepting it as a reality. This has been achieved by weaving in messages about climate change and having popular characters in the TV shows embrace specific tenants of the global warming manifesto.
"The most powerful way we could communicate the commitment on behalf of our company, was to change the practices within the production, as well as work in a message about global warming, about environmental changes, about empowering people to take responsibilities, " states Fox chairman Dana Walden.

Source: xhttp://www.infowars .com/fox- admits-to- planting- political- brainwashing- in-popular- tv-shows/

AND NOW LABOR 'S 'CLIMATE CHANGE PROPAGANDA PROGRAM

Source: Kids' comp 'is climate change propaganda' by Mark Kenny in The Advertiser 7/4/09.

Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi has accused Climate Change Minister Penny Wong of pushing "extreme propaganda" on the nation's schoolchildren. Senator Bernardi, who does not disguise his view that man-made climate change is a myth, has attacked a new climate change awareness competition for schoolchildren launched by Senator Wong yesterday.

The competition "Think Climate, Think Change," asks students in years 3 to 9 to use short stories, poems and art work to answer the question "what does climate change mean to me?" First prize is a trip for two to Canberra (the winner and a parent), a Nintendo Wii console, sports kit and Wii Fit pack, and books for the winner's school.

Senator Bernardi slammed the competition.
"Encouraging children to look after the environment is laudable aim but this seems to have more in common with the ministry of propaganda than the balanced education of our children," he told AdelaideNow.
"One can only guess that the only children eligible to win this competition will be those who conform to the Rudd Government and Minister Wong's extreme political propaganda about climate change.
"I doubt the competition materials will include any discussion of how the Rudd Government ETS (emissions trading scheme) will export Australian industry overseas and result in hundreds of thousands of job losses for Australian workers."

Ms Wong said the competition came about because children are naturally concerned about the environment and their future. "Schoolchildren from all over Australia have written to me asking about climate change and sharing their ideas," she said.
"Young Australians are very well informed when it comes to the issue of climate change - they understand that we need to take action now."

Editor 's comment:
Anyone who has been associated with the League of Rights for a number of years knows how hard it is to raise Australian 's awareness of what is going on around them other than their shallow interests in footy, tinnies and telli.
For the nation 's school children to have discovered an inherent interest in global warming - or as it is now called due to the evidence of global cooling rather than the warming, 'climate change - is just too fanciful for words. Senator Cory Bernardi is spot on. This is an extreme political propaganda exercise. If the Rudd government was genuinely concerned it would be looking at ways to counter Mammon 's rapacious exploitation of the natural environment.