The Dark Age of Money: Milton Friedman and the Rise of Monetary Fascism

[Octafish]

America, we have a problem, a financial problem that gets ZERO coverage in Corporate McPravda:

Milton Friedman and the Rise of Monetary Fascism

The Dark Age of Money

by JAMES C. KENNEDY
CounterPunch Oct. 24, 2012

EXCERPT...

Monetary Fascism was created and propagated through the Chicago School of Economics. Milton Friedman’s collective works constitute the foundation of Monetary Fascism. Knowing that the term ’Fascism’ was universally unpopular; Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics masquerade these works as ‘Capitalism’ and ’Free Market’ economics.

SNIP...

The fundamental difference between Adam Smith’s free market capitalism and Friedman’s ‘free market capitalism’ is that Friedman’s is a hyper extractive model, the kind that creates and maintains Third-World-Countries and Banana-Republics, without geo-political borders.

If you say that this is nothing new, you miss the point. Friedman does not differentiate between some third world country and his own. The ultimate difference is that Friedman has created a model that sanctions and promotes the exploitation of his own country, in fact every country, for the benefit of the investor, money the uber-wealthy. He dressed up this noxious ideology as ‘free market capitalism’ and then convinced most of the world to embrace it as their economic salvation.

SNIP...

[font color="green"]Monetary Fascism, as conceived by Friedman, uses the powers of the state to put the interest of money and the financial class above and beyond all other forms of industry (and other stake holders) and the state itself.[/font color]

SNIP...

Money has become the state and the traditional state is forced to serve money’s interests. Everywhere the Financial Class is openly lording over sovereign nations. Ireland, Greece and Spain are subject to ultimatums and remember Hank Paulson’s $700 billion extortion from the U.S. Congress. The $700 billion was just the wedge. Thanks to unlimited access to the Discount Window, Quantitative Easing and other taxpayer funded debt-swap bailouts the total transfers to the financial industry exceeded $16 trillion as of July 2010 according to a Federal Reserve Audit. All of this was dumped on the taxpayer and it is still growing.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/24/the-dark-age-of-money/

We need to get back to the day when people were more important than profits; when peace trumped money. I'm so old, I remember when that was what being a Democrat stood for.

[byeya]

1. Friedman and his laissaez-fairytalism was just what the corporate-fascists were

praying for: Someone to articulate greed in economic jargon so that they could have "academic" backing for destroying unions(and making unionization next to impossible): taking retirement and health care from employees; failing to share increases in productivity with the workers because Milton and Hayak wrote these books on how the economy works, gol' dang it and we have to follow them.
We've had this economic regime pretty much since 1981 and it's a total failure for the majority. We tried Keynes during the Depression and it worked very well.
So we have two competing economic capitalist systems, both have had a fair shot and one failed - Friedmanism. Yet this system is still on the networks and front pages although it's not grounded in reality and has proven itself to be a failure.

[Octafish]

2. A total failure for the nation and the 99-percent.

A stunning success for the ownership class and its 1-percent.

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." -- John Kenneth Galbraith

Apart from a few astute readers, most will not hear about it, unfortunately.

Some days, though, there is hope. Thank you for putting it into words, byeya!

[byeya]

9. You're welcome; but, you deserve the credit in bringing this little reported fact - a life

ruiner for most - to our attention. It's a pity that the corporate media willfully misrepresents, or ignores, the outcome of this insidious econo-myth.
The Stanford Hoover Institution is a quasi academic center that propagates this imjpoverishing doctrine as well as the usual suspects lined up for their turn on the PBS nightly news as experts.

It's killing the American Dream and has no more substance than Laffer's scribble curve on a napkin.
Thanks again.

[NYC Liberal]

14. Sadly, today's Republicans are even worse than Friedman.

Friedman (perhaps this wasn't until later) at least recognized that environmental regulations were justified and legitimate (because pollution affects people who never agreed to do business with a company). He also opposed the "war on drugs".

The GOP today has moved so far to the right it's not even funny.

[Starry Messenger]

3. k&r

Friedman's rude and sanctimonious interview in the documentary "The 1%“ really shows the absolute moral bankruptcy of his "philosophy ". He and his cronies took their hatred for humanity and dressed it up to sound like economics.

[Octafish]

13. Thank you for the heads-up. Incredible.

At the 4:30 mark, Dr. Friedman's patience becomes exhausted.

IMFO, Friedman is one of those Straussian fellow travelers.

[HiPointDem]

23. who was the latin-looking guy after friedman?

[Starry Messenger]

25. Adnan Khashoggi--Iran/Contra guy.

He's pretty laid back, considering.

[HiPointDem]

38. thanks.

[Uncle Joe]

4. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Octafish.

[Octafish]

21. You are welcome, Uncle Joe! Didya see this about Sanford Weill?

A guy who got bounced* from his column at the LA Times reports:

For He’s a Jolly Good Scoundrel

By Robert Scheer
Posted on Apr 18, 2012

How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of U.S. homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation’s economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

So much for the academy’s proclaimed “230-plus year history of recognizing some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, and civic, corporate, and philanthropic leaders.” George Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Albert Einstein must be rolling in their graves at the news that Weill, “philanthropist and retired Citigroup Chairman,” has joined their ranks.

Weill is the Wall Street hustler who led the successful lobbying to reverse the Glass-Steagall law, which long had been a barrier between investment and commercial banks. That 1999 reversal permitted the merger of Travelers and Citibank, thereby creating Citigroup as the largest of the “too big to fail” banks eventually bailed out by taxpayers. Weill was instrumental in getting then-President Bill Clinton to sign off on the Republican-sponsored legislation that upended the sensible restraints on finance capital that had worked splendidly since the Great Depression.

Those restrictions were initially flouted when Weill, then CEO of Travelers, which contained a major investment banking division, decided to merge the company with Citibank, a commercial bank headed by John S. Reed. The merger had actually been arranged before the enabling legislation became law, and it was granted a temporary waiver by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve. The night before the announcement of the merger, as Wall Street Journal reporter Monica Langley writes in her book “Tearing Down the Walls: How Sandy Weill Fought His Way to the Top of the Financial World ... and Then Nearly Lost It All,” a buoyant Weill suggested to Reed, “We should call Clinton.” On a Sunday night Weill had no trouble getting through to the president and informed him of the merger, which violated existing law. After hanging up, Weill boasted to Reed, “We just made the president of the United States an insider.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/for_hes_a_jolly_good_swindler_20120418/

Just-us.

* and replaced by Jonah Goldberg, of all people.

[Uncle Joe]

22. I thought

that would create a major fuck-up when it happened.

I remember separating banks from investment banking was supposedly a lesson learned from the Great Depression.

Why do we have to relearn this shit?!

[Octafish]

24. It was no accident. They learned how to pull it off during the S&L debacle.

As a newspaper reporter during the early 90s, I helped document how one Michigan Savings & Loan was hijacked by crooks connected to the GOP, the DEMs, and the Mafia. The Houston journalist-author Pete Brewton chronicled the time, nationally. People would show up for a "commercial" loan and all they'd have to do for collateral was show a deed to a high-rise as theirs. The fact that the actual owner's name was hidden by White-Out still visible on the photocopy really was no problem. In this example, a guy got $6.5 million to start a business he had no intention of starting. After cashing the check, he distributed the cash to his hidden partners who disappeared the dough to the Caymans and beyond. When the original guy couldn't pay the loan back, he declared bankruptcy. No problem for the S&L, though, as the money would be put back into the S&L's accounts, thanks to the U.S. taxpayer backing the FSLIC. It was legalized bank robbery and it went on across the country, costing taxpayers about a trillion bucks. At the time, it was the biggest bank heist in history.

Background from the 1980s:

Know your BFEE: They Looted Your Nation s S&Ls for Power and Profit

Modern version 2008:

Know your BFEE: Phil Gramm, the Meyer Lansky of the War Party, Set-Up the Biggest Bank Heist Ever.

Here's a good summary of why I still try:

Know your BFEE: Spawn of Wall Street and the Third Reich

They have gotten away with lying America into war; made fortunes unimagined in scale and scope from laws they helped write and enact; created an economic system based on finance rather than production of material wealth in which those of us still able and qualified for indentured servitude will march into their new world as submissive serfs.

[GeorgeGist]

5. People who liked this ...

Also liked

[Octafish]

31. Great intellect, hers...

Pegged the Chicago School.

p91
Milton Friedman in a letter to General Augusto Pinochet, April 21, 1975

If this shock approach were adopted, I believe that it should be announced publicly in great detail, to take effect at a very close date. The more fully the public is informed, the more will its reactions facilitate the adjustment.

p93
Killing and locking up the government was not enough for Chile's new junta government, however. The generals knew that their hold on power depended on Chileans being truly terrified, as the people had been in Indonesia. In the days that followed, roughly 13,500 civilians were arrested, loaded onto trucks and imprisoned, according to a declassified CIA report. Thousands ended up in the two main football stadiums in Santiago, the Chile Stadium and the huge National Stadium. Inside the National Stadium, death replaced football as the public spectacle. Soldiers prowled the bleachers with hooded collaborators who pointed out "subversives"; the ones who were selected were hauled off to locker rooms and skyboxes transformed into makeshift torture chambers. Hundreds were executed. Lifeless bodies started showing up on the side of major highways or floating in murky urban canals.

... Even though Pinochet's baffle was one-sided, its effects were as real as any civil war or foreign invasion: in all, more than 3,200 people were disappeared or executed, at least 80,000 were imprisoned, and 200,000 fled the country for political reasons.

p96
For the first year and a half, Pinochet faithfully followed the Chicago rules: he privatized some, though not all, state-owned companies (including several banks); he allowed cutting-edge new forms of speculative finance; he flung open the borders to foreign imports, tearing down the barriers that had long protected Chilean manufacturers; and he cut government spending by 10 percent-except the military, which received a significant increase. He also eliminated price controls -a radical move in a country that had been regulating the cost of necessities such as bread and cooking oil for decades.

The Chicago Boys had confidently assured Pinochet that if he suddenly withdrew government involvement from these areas all at once, the "natural" laws of economics would rediscover their equilibrium, and inflation-which they viewed as a kind of economic fever indicating the presence of unhealthy organisms in the market would magically go down. They were mistaken. In 1974, inflation reached 375 percent-the highest rate in the world and almost twice the top level under Allende. The cost of basics such as bread went through the roof. At the same time, Chileans were being thrown out of work because Pinochet's experiment with "free trade" was flooding the country with cheap imports. Local businesses were closing, unable to compete, unemployment hit record levels and hunger became rampant. The Chicago School's first laboratory was a debacle.

Sergio de Castro and the other Chicago Boys argued (in true Chicago fashion) that the problem didn't lie with their theory but with the fact that it wasn't being applied with sufficient strictness. The economy had failed to correct itself and return to harmonious balance because there were still "distortions" left over from nearly half a century of government interference. For the experiment to work, Pinochet had to strip these distortions away-more cuts, more privatization, more speed.

... Pinochet and de Castro got to work stripping away the welfare state to arrive at their pure capitalist utopia. In 1975, they cut public spending by 27 percent in one blow-and they kept cutting until, by 1980, it was half of what it had been under Allende. Health and education took the heaviest hits. Even The Economist, a free-market cheerleader, called it "an orgy of self-mutilation .1128 De Castro privatized almost five hundred state-owned companies and banks, practically giving many of them away, since the point was to get them as quickly as possible into their rightful place in the economic order. He took no pity on local companies and removed even more trade barriers; the result was the loss of 177,000 industrial jobs between 1973 and 1983.° By the mid-eighties, manufacturing as a percentage of the economy dropped to levels last seen during the Second World War.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Naomi_Klein/Birth_Pangs_SD.html

What used to happen only overseas is coming to the old homeland.

[Blue_Tires]

6. kick for truth

[Octafish]

41. Economic Domination IS Political

We need to make the financial system work for us, not this toady's chummasters.



Another excellent overview of why we need to change the established order, meaning:

A System of Economic Exploitation and Domination

Wall Street and the Politics of Finance

by ROB URIE
CounterPunch
WEEKEND EDITION OCTOBER 5-7, 2012

In the early days of the Obama administration there was an opportunity, at least in theory, to reconsider the role of finance in Western economies. The financial part of the economic crisis that the banks created left them vulnerable and dependent on visible public support. And while Mr. Obama came relatively late to this history, his decision to wholly revive finance capitalism will haunt the economies of the West until banks are returned to their useful social function as utilities.

Public anger over outsized paychecks, predatory practices and freedom from liability for several decades of straightforwardly criminal behavior aside, banks and the debt based economy they produce force the most destructive elements of capitalism onto a fragile world. Ironically, finance capitalism produces monumental wealth redistribution, the great boogieman of capitalist economists, and serves to justify acts of human and environmental devastation that, when viewed on their own, are quite obviously insane. And while this tendency can be attributed to capitalism in general, financial leverage adds a structural element to economic production that amplifies the worst tendencies of capitalism. The existing system of global finance must be gotten out of the way before less destructive modes of economic life are possible.

SNIP...

Whatever the visceral anger toward Wall Street, the reasons why finance capitalism must be ended and banking returned to its social purpose as a utility are analytical. While financial crashes like that of 2008 are emblematic of systemic instability, it is the transfer of social wealth from labor to finance that is most socially, economically and politically destructive. The focus of official Washington on restoring the existing system as a means to restore economic vitality gets it exactly wrong. And calls to simply re-regulate the banks ignore that while the banks were regulated financial profits accrued that allowed them to buy deregulation from a compromised political system.

Finance capitalism can’t be fixed because of its inherent contradictions. There is no ‘natural’ reason why banks, rather than public institutions, have the right to create money—that is a political outcome. And the political power of finance capitalism is more than just capture of the political system, it lies in the everyday power over the way that the world is set up—the relation between ‘natural’ needs like shelter, transportation, education and healthcare and the debt system used to ‘buy’ them that converts an increasing proportion of the product of our work to financial profits.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/05/wall-street-and-the-politics-of-finance/

Guess things will keep on keeping on, as long as We the People are the ones who pick up the tab.

Now that I think about it, it's probably a good thing some of us are still of use to Capital. Imagine what things would be like if they didn't need us, anymore, for that?

[Stainless]

7. According to Wikipedia

Freidman opposed the economics of Keynes and Galbraith. He also strongly influenced the policies of Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet, Allen Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Thomas Sowell, William F. Buckley and many others known for their extremism. I find it interesting he was also an advisor to President Ronald Reagan, who in my opinion started us down this bumpy road to economic fascism (corporatism).

[Octafish]

42. David Stockman, Pruneface Budget Director, said the wealth transfer was political...

...which spells bad things for those who can't afford to buy their own government.

Taking Stockman: How Nixon, Reagan, Bush and their GOP Demolished the Economy

Pierre Tristam
FLAGLERLIVE | AUGUST 1, 2010

Back in 1981 David Stockman was the wonderkid of the Reagan administration–the director of the Office of Management and Budget who’d craft in actual budgets the trickle-down miracle Reagan had promised on the campaign trail: lower budgets, lower spending, higher tax revenue. But trickle-down economics was a wish, not a reality. It’s never worked. Lower taxes don’t generate more revenue. They generate deficits.

Reagan knew it. So did Stockman. So did their guru, Friederich von Hayek. The deficits were intentional all along. They were edsigned to “starve the beast,” meaning intentionally cut revenue as a way of pressuring Congress to cut the New Deal programs Reagan wanted to demolish. “The plan,” Stockman told Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the time, ” was to have a strategic deficit that would give you an argument for cutting back the programs that weren’t desired. It got out of hand.”

A 1985 interview with von Hayek in the March 25, 1985 issue of Profil 13, the Austrian journal, was just as revealing. Von Hayek sat for the interview while wearing a set of cuff links Reagan had presented him as a gift. “I really believe Reagan is fundamentally a decent and honest man,” von Hayek told his interviewer. “His politics? When the government of the United States borrows a large part of the savings of the world, the consequence is that capital must become scarce and expensive in the whole world. That’s a problem.” And in reference to Stockman, von Hayek said: “You see, one of Reagan’s advisers told me why the president has permitted that to happen, which makes the matter partly excusable: Reagan thinks it is impossible to persuade Congress that expenditures must be reduced unless one creates deficits so large that absolutely everyone becomes convinced that no more money can be spent.” Thus, he went on, it was up to Reagan to “persuade Congress of the necessity of spending reductions by means of an immense deficit. Unfortunately, he has not succeeded!!!” Those three exclamation points, unusually effusive for an economist, are in the original.

Keep in mind: Hayek is speaking his disillusion with the GOP’s misapplication of his theories in 1985. To this day he remains a favored mask of budget-wreckers pretending to be fiscally conservative while pushing for more tax cuts. Those wreckers are at work in Congress today as they argue for an extension of the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which were far larger than Reagan’s of 1981 and 1986 (in 1986, Reagan agreed to some tax increases, but mostly in the Social Security payroll tax, meaning on the middle and lower classes).

Stockman resigned from the Reagan administration in 1985, himself disillusioned. Today in The New York Times, he writes a damning piece that sums up Republican duplicity on budgets and fiscal responsibility going back to the Nixon administration. “IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians,” Stockman begins, “the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase. More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy.”

In a piece entitled “Four Deformations of the Apocalypse,” a clever play on the biblical image of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Stockman outlines four major Republican breaks with discipline that set the stage, then compounded, American bankruptcy, beginning with Milton Friedman convincing Nixon to default “on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world. Now, since we have lived beyond our means as a nation for nearly 40 years, our cumulative current-account deficit — the combined shortfall on our trade in goods, services and income — has reached nearly $8 trillion. That’s borrowed prosperity on an epic scale.”

CONTINUED...

http://flaglerlive.com/8577/david-stockman-reagan-nixon-bush-trickledown/

"Trickle Down Government" doesn't even begin to cover what we are experiencing.

[JackN415]

8. 50 years from now, wonder what economic historians will say?

[Octafish]

43. ''Thus died the American Dream...''

The results of Trickle Down Economics is the transfer of wealth from those who produce it to those who don't.

Income Gaps Between Very Rich and Everyone Else More Than Tripled In Last Three Decades, New Data Show

By Arloc Sherman and Chad Stone
June 25, 2010

The gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007 (the period for which these data are available), according to data the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued last week. Taken together with prior research, the new data suggest greater income concentration at the top of the income scale than at any time since 1928.

While the recession that began in December 2007 likely reduced the income of the wealthiest Americans substantially and may thereby shrink the income gap between rich and poor households, a similar development that occurred around the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the 2001 recession turned out to be just a speed bump. Incomes at the top more than made up the lost ground from 2003 to 2005.

The new CBO data — the most comprehensive data available on changes in incomes and taxes for different income groups — also show the following:

In 2007, the share of after-tax income going to the top 1 percent hit its highest level (17.1 percent) since 1979, while the share going to the middle one-fifth of Americans shrank to its lowest level during this period (14.1 percent).

Between 1979 and 2007, average after-tax incomes for the top 1 percent rose by 281 percent after adjusting for inflation — an increase in income of $973,100 per household — compared to increases of 25 percent ($11,200 per household) for the middle fifth of households and 16 percent ($2,400 per household) for the bottom fifth (see Figure 1).

If all groups’ after-tax incomes had grown at the same percentage rate over the 1979-2007 period, middle-income households would have received an additional $13,042 in 2007 and families in the bottom fifth would have received an additional $6,010.

In 2007, the average household in the top 1 percent had an income of $1.3 million, up $88,800 just from the prior year; this $88,800 gain is well above the total 2007 income of the average middle-income household ($55,300). (1)

CONTINUED...

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3220

"It's like the Depression never happened. Unlike then, though, the American people of 2012 had no FDR to straighten the mess out."

[HiPointDem]

10. Monetary fascism = worse than traditional fascism...

The financial entity is able to extract environmental, capital, tax and infrastructure concessions from the host nation. If the host nation ever seeks to renegotiate its position with the financial entity the entity can enlist the powers of its flagship nation (i.e. State Department). This type of intervention can be very costly to the flagship nation and end very tragically for the host nation. Under Monetary Fascism the financial entity maintains out-sized rents from the host nation by utilizing the state as its enforcement agent, while maximizing tax avoidance via off-shore corporations (and other gimmicks).

Free market capitalism, as conceived by Smith, was Nationalistic in nature and as the Nation State became wealthier, so did its people and industry. This relationship required shared obligations and shared rewards between the State and its people.

Traditional Fascism, as conceived by Mussolini or Hitler, had an aggressive Nationalistic disposition where the State promoted Industry above all others in order to strengthen the State relative to its perceived rivals. Hitler and Mussolini believed that as the State lifted industry, industry lifted the people – dignity and pride in one’s nation were foundational principles.

Monetary Fascism, as conceived by Friedman, uses the powers of the state to put the interest of money and the financial class above and beyond all other forms of industry (and other stake holders) and the state itself.

[byeya]

11. That's as good an explanation as I've ever seen: Thanks. The financial

pirates are parasties: They produce nothing tangible for the society at large and, in fact, prey on society.
Most countries that have become industrialized have practiced protectionism to varying degrees. This "all globalization all of the time" is a race to the depths of human misery and that's where the financialization of the economy is leading us.

[Egalitarian Thug]

15. For roughly 20 years after WWII this nation built up enormous equity. Over the next 30 years

the parasites tirelessly stole that equity, then spent the subsequent 15 years stealing the resulting credit that that equity generated.

[Selatius]

28. The other term I've seen bandied about is "friendly fascism."

They compare it to Nazi Germany but without the oppression and without the suspension of elections or concentration camps. We still have elections and freedom of the press, but the monied interests have the cash to fund political campaigns and run an army of lobbyists who write bills for those politicians to pass, and as far as freedom of the press goes, freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. Rich, powerful people own such things; poor people, not so much.

Often, I'll simply call it corporatism. It's a merger of corporate and state power in the interests of major and institutional shareholders at the expense of everyone else. Instead of embarking in a campaign of colonialism across the world, the corporate leadership moves into host countries to extract resources and undervalue the labor of the people who work for them. Countries that stand in the way of that goal tend to be brought down through military coups or have their government bought out through bribery and kickbacks. In a small number of cases, problem countries are dealt with violent military intervention from the outside.

[Egalitarian Thug]

12. This sentence, "...uses the powers of the state to put the interest of money and the financial class

above and beyond all other forms of industry (and other stake holders) and the state itself." sums up the entirety of the U.S. government's agenda.
& R

[hifiguy]

16. A brilliant article - thanks Octafish.

This distills the essence of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine into a beautifully written thumbnail.

If humanity survives the next hundred years, future historians will list Milton Friedman together with Hitler and Stalin as one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century. Few people have caused more, or more pointless, human suffering than that miserable, rotten bastard Friedman.

[librechik]

17. this is why the EU is failing: They put the demands of the banks above the needs of people.

Thank you Friedman for screwing up our moral base forever, you greedy elitist asshole

[byeya]

20. The EU also needs a treasury and the individual nations need to be able to adjust

their currancies.
A one-size-fits-all Euro is now greatly benefitting the Germans. If the Greeks could devalue, it would be easier for them to grow out of their debt.

[bobthedrummer]

18. K&R#23 n/t, Sir!

[Initech]

19. I call it economic terrorism.

We fight their wars. We harvest their profits and get nothing in return. We allow them to steamroll over us. We allow them to forclose on our homes and take everything we own. We allow them to "garnish" (steal) our wages and then ship our jobs to China. While they laugh all the way to the bank. And they want to elect one of their to justify their terroristic behavior. Isn't that terrorism?

[WinkyDink]

26. Govts need to use the military to take over banks, before the banksters buy their military, too.

[laundry_queen]

27. Friedman has been discredited in nearly every country but the US.

Here in Canadian business school, our texts talk about how that experiment failed in the 80's. So, maybe it's time to start telling the colleges and universities in the US to stop teaching that discredited crap. Keynes has worked very well for us in Canada, TYVM.

[byeya]

39. Friedman was big in Pinochet's Chile - It was a natural fit, imo.

[socialist_n_TN]

29. One quibble with the excerpt........

Exactly how is it "missing the point" to say that this is nothing new? This IS nothing new. This is what capitalism in it's purest form IS. On that I agree with the Friedmanistas. What was new was the "kinder, gentler" version of capitalism practiced in the western developed countries after the Great Depression. And it was only new because they almost lost it all to socialist and Marxist revolution in the earlier part of that century. That fear of losing it all was the ONLY reason the warped version of capitalism happened. When capitalism has no class enemy, this is what results.

That's why I don't pine for the warped capitalism of the middle part of the last century. It only provides a false front that fools the working class into thinking that they can "tame" capitalism into something that actually benefits them. As to the lack of some sort of "nationalist" element to capitalism, nationalism has NEVER really been a part of the system. other than as a front for clashing capitalist groupings. IT'S NEVER BEEN ABOUT NATIONS. It's always only been about capital. When nations outlive their usefulness, nations became irrevelant. And nations have almost outlived their usefulness in the current end times of the capitalist system.

That's why I'm a revolutionary socialist. This system will NEVER work for the average person over the long term. It will ALWAYS devolve into this version. ALWAYS. Regulating capitalism is like riding a hungry tiger. It's VERY difficult to do and you're always in danger of being eaten.

[byeya]

40. Yes, FDR saved the capitalists' bacon and got their hatred in return. It would

have been fine with me if FDR had nationalized the failed industries as Obama could have nationalized the failed investment banks.

[AntiFascist]

30. One concept that sticks...

originally developed by Strauss at the University of Chicago, is the concept of the power of the Great Deception. This concept operates at all levels of humanity and the result, at the low end, is survival of the fittest. At the high end of society, the result is maintenance of the status quo. In a world competing for resources, this philosophy helps to ensure that those at the top remain at the top, and only those at the bottom most suitable for aiding those at the top are allowed to climb the ladder, but usually only up to a point.

The end result is social stratification and this actually runs counter to the goals of a truly free market, which should be much more dynamic, tumultuous, and dare I say revolutionary.

[hifiguy]

34. Leo Strauss is one of those ironies thrown up by history.

A Jewish intellectual who fled Nazi Germany and then spent the rest of his life reinventing a "better" Nazism sans the anti-Semitism.

[Bozita]

32. This entire thread is MUST READ stuff! ... My thanks to all of the contributors.

[woo me with science]

33. K&R

[tex-wyo-dem]

35. thank you Octafish...

Our current economic model basically prays on one of our most basic, yet powerful, lizard-brain activities...greed.

Greed (money/wealth) trumps everything, even the welfare of other people, the planet and our mid- to long-term survival.

We need to get beyond this for our own good.

[Kurovski]

36. K&R.

Thanks as always, Mr. Octafish.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

37. K & R

[Ron O]

44. First post..

..and when I look at the post count from other members, I am astounded!

I found this website while trying to research exactly who JAMES C. KENNEDY is, the author of the excellent article The Dark Age of Money on Counterpunch. The author is described at the end of the article as an "economic consultant" with no further details and no contact information, so I was wondering if it was even remotely possible that he could be the same Kennedy who is chairman of Cox Enterprises (see Wikipeddia). Economic chaos can create strange bed fellows.

Kudos to Octafish for posting this. This article is well worth reading in its entirety, as is much of the material on Counterpunch. And the author's choice of words, including "fascism", is not hyperbole but the spot-on truth. Things are about to get much worse than most of the public can even remotely imagine.