Submitted by Terence Blackett
“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke
Greece is on the verge of a calamity – with a cure worst than the disease; Italy’s financiers have issued a death knell about it debt levels; Portugal continues to teeter-totter on the precipice of a Greek-style implosion; Spain is destined to move from a “siesta” environment to outright social bedlam; France continues to contract with its economy froth with massive future job losses, possible riots and social anarchy not seen since the French Revolution; Britain is also in throes of a winter of discontent with mass labor strikes and social unrest as more and more jobs move off-shore – coupled with social and structural imbalances which could incinerate the fragile, fragmented fabric of British life. And all this is only a fraction of the EU’s woes.
The other irony is that the ripple effect and the contagion in this part of the world will have even more seismic repercussions beyond the Stock Market Crash of 2008. If the Euro implodes, (and many commentators believe it will) – the fallout will make the Wall Street debacle of 2008 pale into insignificance setting in motion a global crisis of apocalyptic proportions. What we could witness in our lifetime is unparallel poverty, biting hardship and evaporated life chances unseen on such a scale in recorded history.
The question many are still asking – how did we get to this point? Was this engineered? Why was nothing learnt from the Great Depression of the 1930’s? And out of the possible ashes – what will emerge?
Stuart Chase in his book published in 1929 entitled – “Prosperity: Fact or Myth” commented that “ For [12] ebullient years the curve went swinging upward, and ended with a dizzy nose dive in the panic of 1837… In the year 1906, the (US) Secretary of the Treasury was publicly praying that the country be delivered from more prosperity. That his prayers were in order was evidenced by the glorious crash in the following year – the profound business depression of 1907…”
From the historical evidence, nothing was learned from any of these dangerous market situations and in the book – The Causes of the 1929 Stock Market Crash: A Speculative Orgy or a New Era? Author Harold Bierman Jr. on p.29 argues that “During 1929 the public was bombarded with statements of outrage regarding the speculative orgy taking place on the NYSE. If the media and respected people in authority say something often enough, a large % of the investing public is likely to believe it. By October 1929 the overall revealed opinion in the Federal government was that there was excessive speculation in stocks and the market was too high. Galbraith (1961), Kindleberger (1978), and Malkiel (1996) all clearly accept the assumption that the market was too high. The Federal Reserve Bulletin of February 1929 stated that the Federal Reserve would restrain the use of “credit facilities in aid of the growth of speculative credit.” Sadly, those were empty, hollow words!
The U.S. Senate adopted a resolution stating that the Senate would support legislation according to Bierman that was “necessary to correct the evil complained of and prevent illegitimate and harmful speculation.” The president of the Investment Bankers Association of America (Trowbridge Callaway) gave a talk in which he spoke of “the orgy of speculation which clouded the country’s vision.” Galbraith wrote in (1961, p. 16-19) about “The mass escape into make-believe, so much a part of the true speculative orgy, started in earnest.” So the culture at the top and the shenanigans of Wall Street speculators have not changed in spite of boom and bust cycles for either way, their bets are hedged.
Today, we are witnessing an insurrection on Wall Street as protestors gather to vent their frustration at a system hell-bent on similar economic destruction. Public sentiment has decided to grab the “proverbial” BULL* by the horns using the leverage of political capital, the moral gumption, and the censorial will to put a halt to the Wall Street/ London City speculators from running the world economy into the ground – with conspiratorial plots to siphon off even greater wealth for their hedge funds and investment bank coffers, while propping up a fractional Elite* whose sole aim is to control the world by mandated social dictat. These new breed of fiddlers on the penthouse roofs of Wall Street dictate economic and social policy in their own self-interest while governments are complicit in spinning a tangle web of lies and intrigue to appease and dumb-down the social masses into willing compliance.
The smash and grab tactics of these financial terrorists are supported by men like British PM David Cameron according to serious market commentators like Max Keiser who already know that we have entered the 2nd wave of an impending Great Depression 2, but these voices are drowned out in the chorus line of deniers, media pundits, shysters and egomaniacal psychopaths who have a platform to vent their spurious, specious, putrefying venom in print, visual and social media in an all out war for the minds of the people.
Webster Tarpley cited proof that a conspiracy was hatched on Feb. 8th 2010 with an “ideas dinner, held at the Manhattan townhouse of (HEDGE FUND) – Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co, a boutique investment bank. Among those present were SAC Capital Advisors, David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital (a veteran of the fatal assault on Lehman Brothers in the late summer of 2008); Donald Morgan of Brigade Capital, and, most tellingly, Soros Fund Management.”
“The consensus that emerged that night over the filet mignon was that Greek government bonds were the weak flank of the Euro, and that once a Greek debt crisis had been detonated; all outcomes would be bad for the Euro. The assembled predators agreed that Greece was the first domino in Europe. Donald Morgan was adamant that the Greek contagion could soon infect all sovereign debt in the world, including national, state, municipal and all other forms of government debt. This would mean California, the UK, and the US itself, among many others. The details of this at dinner were revealed in the headline story of the Wall Street Journal on Friday, February 26, 2010.”
History reminds us that the month of October seems to be the month that brought us Market Crashes in 1929 and 1987 – single-day declines in the Dow that would be the equivalent to 1,400 and 2,500 points in today’s market. Then the Market Crash of October 2008 which changed our world. Some are now even predicting another Black October Crash in the making whether this year or next year. But the use of the word “BLACK” does not do justice to these man-made anomalies seeing that 95% of those who fiddle the gaming table of the Stock Market both in terms of Hedge Fund managers, bureaucratic staff and investors are predominately Caucasian American and Europeans.
Electronic money as well as cold, hard DRUG* cash – cleaned up and subsequently laundered as legit currency then flows back into the pocket of dubious speculators, evil drug lords and the high priests on Wall Street who then bank-roll wars and the toppling of governments that do not support their nefarious economic agendas. So these ongoing systematically engineered crises have long ago stopped being just a financial one – the connotations are now intrinsically a MORAL question.
The White man has shown categorically that for over 400 years of running the planet that his rule has been fundamentally flawed, intrinsically and diametrically opposed to true justice, equality and fairplay while building a Western capitalist model on the backs of and by the blood, sweat and tears of other human beings as a form of slavish industrialization, rank comodification, and a cesspit of commercialization and virulent “chattel labor”.
Governments are printing little of the money put into circulation – this is left to Luciferian Central banksters who flood the market with monopoly $$$ that most on Main Street do not even have access to. Instead it is mostly put into circulation by banks, as interest bearing DEBT*. They demand the money they create back, together with exorbitant interest rates. Banks therefore own a greater percentage of the property and money in circulation, and hence are getting a greater share of the world’s wealth and power.
All the bailout money earmarked in 2008 didn’t prevent the “real” economy from sliding into recession in 2009 through to 2011. Factories are still closing. Layoffs are rising. In the UK alone, unemployment numbers ebb towards 3 million. Spending is slowing. Investment capital is frozen. And the downturn that began in the U.S. in 2008 has spread to every other economy around the world. Even China had to downgrade its growth forecast. Now BAE the UK’s largest defense contractor is about to lay off some 3000 workers in a cost cutting exercise.
Meanwhile, business moguls, hedge fund bosses and investors though betting the bank and its furniture in a frenzied orgy of Russian roulette still want us to reward them with “Golden Parachutes” – some as much as $45 million in rewards as a means of holding on to the brightest and best in the marketplace. A pattern of lies, damn lies and monetary fiddling – yet nothing is done about it!
Blatantly, those are the same ones who got us in this mess in the first place. So again, no lessons were learnt from the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Speculative casino banking has taken on new dimensions with every day, $3 trillion passes through the trading desks and clearing operations of JPMorgan Chase (who bought the dwindled shares of bankrupt bank Washington Mutual), and that’s just one of thousands of U.S. banks which went into meltdown.
It’s not money in the sense most of us understand; it’s computer data. But it’s good enough for the world governments, major corporations, fund managers and others who need banks to move their money around and park it wherever they think it best belongs.
So we are happy to have politicians lie to us while the news media refuses to ask the hard questions and insist on the hard data. Liz Moyer of Forbes Magazine says that “Money is becoming much more of a concept than a physical entity.” Richard Hole also argues that “Banks create money out of nothing (derivatives today – Junk Bonds in the 80’s) and lend it to the people. The people are then deceived that they will make a profit, but all they will end up doing is paying the bank the interest, and often all their property, which the bank claims upon bankruptcy.”
Joel Kurtzman in his 1993 book “The Death of Money” argued that “MONEY – in the traditional sense no longer exists (i.e. paper money). It died two decades ago when Richard Nixon forever abolished the ‘Gold Standard’. Since then, money as we once knew it has been replaced by an unstable new global medium of exchange that is called ‘Megabyte Money’… megabyte money is a threat not only to our country’s long-term growth and prosperity, but to the individual as well.”
This prediction came to pass in 2008!
Author Peter Temin, in his book – “Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression?” argues that in the absence of equilibrating forces: “Most economic models contain equilibrating factors that will eventually bring the economy back to an equilibrium in which all factors, including labor, are fully employed. While these models acknowledge the possibility that the economy may not be in such equilibrium, even for extended periods of time, they insist that the economy would eventually return to such a position. We cannot hope to learn from the experience of the Depression whether the economy is of this sort or not. For even if none of these equilibrating forces were in evidence, they might have appeared at a later date if the decline in income had continued. Nevertheless, it is of great interest that none of these equilibrating forces were apparent in the early 1930’s.”
Temin further contends that “the demonstration that equilibrating forces did not immediately come into play can start at no better place than wages. According to classical theory, disequilibrium in the labor market, like disequilibrium in any market, should be corrected by a change in the price. The cure for unemployment was lower wages. But, as most economists realized by the 1930s, cutting wages was only effective by this reasoning if they could be made to fall relative to prices.”
The political consequences therefore of the Great Depression according to Dietmar Rothermund were evidenced in “Fascism in Europe, populism in Latin America and freedom movements in the colonies… Almost everywhere, the depression hit the poor harder than the rich. Peasants, unemployed workers, small traders – they all suffered from severe deprivation. Debtors were faced with debt service at constant rates whereas their incomes had declined considerably. The only beneficiaries were those who received fixed salaries as they could enjoy cheap food and a drop in the prices of most consumer goods. Those who were confronted with the depression, including politicians and economists, had no idea why all this had happened, and looked for scapegoats. Speculators, bankers and monopoly capitalists were blamed for the depression.”
“Since scapegoats have to be named there were even more concrete allegations: the people in Wall Street, the Jews, etc. were at fault.” “Some people went a step further and constructed conspiracy theories. There must have been a deep laid plan behind all this to fool the people and to destroy their livelihood. In many countries this led to the rise of populism. Politicians tried to portray themselves as protectors of the people against these sinister forces. They usually had no idea of economic affairs, but they made up for this by impressive rhetoric. Wherever the political system had been dominated by a small upper class in previous years, such populist leaders managed to seize power and to cling to it by making arrangements with the upper classes without depending on them too much. Rothermund believes that the deepening Depression by 1931 saw “the decline in income continue for approximately two more years. It was destined to continue for another two years before the decline was arrested…” (The Global Impact of the Great Depression, 1929 – 1939. p. 136).
If what is suspected comes to pass – October may pose challenges which are unheard of in our lifetime. As the banks create more and more money for themselves – the facts suggest that by creating more for themselves with our money means giving most of us less and less. This is the other side of capitalism where others profit from other people’s woes. The impending social fragmentation can thus be categorized as an episode from “Star Trek” – “to boldly go where no one has gone before”…
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