The Federal Reserve will pump $600 billion more into the US economy and keep interest rates at historical low levels. The short-term impact of the Fed’s move, known as quantitative easing, has been a jump in stock prices across the globe. Many nations, however, have accused the United States of waging a currency war by devaluing the dollar. We speak to former Wall Street economist and University of Missouri professor Michael Hudson. “The object of warfare is to take over a country’s land, raw materials and assets, and grab them,” Hudson says. “In the past, that used to be done militarily by invading them. But today you can do it financially simply by creating credit, which is what the Federal Reserve has done.” [includes rush transcript]
Amazon Page -- New Edition (2003)
QUOTE from the Introduction: “The last time there were a series of devaluations like this it led to WW II.”
QUOTE from the TV Interview: “A legalized way for Wall Street to loot other Central Banks.”
QUOTE from the TV Interview: “In Europe it is illegal for the Central Bank to finance government debt.”
Phi Beta Iota: This interview, viewed in its entirety, destroys the myth of Barack Obama and clarifies with stunning detail the degree to which the Obama Administration is blocking all forms of relief for the public at the state level at the same time that he is assuring that the Chinese yuan will become the global reserve currency. We anticipate all sales of anything to US currency to be blocked by other countries, and we hope that US Governors will start nullifying federal interference with justice at the state level.
John le Carré, the former British spy turned spy novelist, has some grave words for Tony Blair. More than seven years after the invasion of Iraq, the former British prime minister, now out of office and touring the world pushing his political memoir, is encountering serious protests at his book signings.
“I can’t understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretenses has committed the ultimate sin,” he told me when I sat down with le Carré recently in London. “We’ve caused irreparable damage in the Middle East. I think we shall pay for it for a long time.”
In my last Counterpunch essay, “How Obama's Initial Personnel Decisions Hardwired the Wipeout” I organized my argument around verbiage describing how Obama “fatal move” to the middle,” leaving the misleading impression that his connection to the middle occurred after the election. This was sloppy wording and in retrospect it is clear to me that impression did not even reflect what I was trying to say. “Irrevocable” would have been a better modifier than “fatal.” And the word “move” was more related to the perceptions of the people whose enthusiasm he unleashed during the campaign, not Obama's political proclivities.
Obama has always been a center-right politician tightly connected to ruling oligarchs in the US. I have been concerned about this connection with the oligarchy since December 2007, when I became aware of the people who were advising him on defense, foreign policy, and treasury matters. I publicly expressed concerns about his defense advisors in July 2008 and all of them on 5 November 2008, (see last paragraph here) the day after he was elected. “Hardwiring the Wipeout” was basically a first-cut bookend to the 5 November piece (what I called the outer layer of the onion).
Lest you think I am quibbling about what the meaning of “is” is, for the record, I agree with the critical comments (attached below) from my good friend Pierre Sprey, who has taken the trouble to give an incisive correction to my sloppy wording, and which he has graciously agreed to let me forward. Think of this as a roadmap for probing into the second and more rancid layer of the onion.
——————————- [Sprey's Comment]————————
Pierre Sprey
Chuck,
Superb analysis of why the voters tossed out Bush and his cohorts, how Obama generated such strong support and, two years later, why many of those supporters felt betrayed enough to stay home or to vote Republican. The article is most certainly needed and timely to fend off the tsunami of obfuscation that both the Republican and Democratic pundits are about to unleash.
On the other hand, I view your chronology of Obama's (and the Democratic Party's) “move to the middle” a bit differently–and our differences have serious implications for judging Obama's character, his decision-making and the futility of expecting change in anything but his rhetoric:
1. I see no evidence that there's been any change or “move” in substantive actions and stated policies going from Senator Obama to Candidate Obama to President Obama. Needless to say, over this entire time most of his policy “positions” were (and are) rhetoric cleverly crafted to avoid any specific position at all.
2. Given that early financial backers of Obama in Chicago politics were the Crown family (General Dynamics and super-Zionists) and the Pritzker family (credit business, Goldman Sachs allies and super-Zionists), I'd say it's likely that Obama's commitment to the MICC, to Wall Street and to Israel predated his run for the Senate.
In trying to understand why the Democrats just crashed and burned, I think the first layer in peeling the onion takes the form of an admission to two crucial mistakes made by Obama before he took office. He campaigned brilliantly on a vague theme of change. In so doing, he unleashed a hornet's nest of intense expectations that would have been hard to fulfill in the best of circumstances, but Obama's personnel decisions made during the transition period guaranteed the worst of circumstances.
Two big reasons underpinned the power of his appeal and placed his uplifting narrative into sharp contrast with the visceral disgust felt toward Bush by the mass of Obama's supporters in the Democratic party and Independents.
A sense of unfair economic hardship embodied in the widespread feelings of insecurity and anger that emanated from the combined effects of stagnating living standards, the continuing loss of jobs due to deindustrialization, and the systematic transfer of wealth from the middle to the upper classes. The anger reached a bi-partisan critical mass with the onset of a massive middle-class bloodletting in the Great Recession, while the wealthy perpetrators of the bloodletting were bailed out by and even profited from the Bush Administration's so-called counter-recessionary policies.
Growing disgust with Bush's lawless policy of unilateral militarism and never ending war, reflected in the increasingly costly, unfocused wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere (and perhaps augmented by a vague feeling of fear fatigue, reflecting a sense that it was time to end the politics of fear and return to less abnormal state of affairs).
Both Hillary Clinton in the primaries or John McCain in the general election danced to Obama's music of change, but neither was able (or wanted?) to smoke out how Candidate Obama's planned to change directions. In effect, their failure to do so, freed President Obama from having to live within tight policy constraints imposed by specific campaign promises. This opened the door toward a cynical “move to the middle” via a series of timid compromises and accommodations, justified by the shopworn theory that his most committed supporters had nowhere else to go. That tired justification may play well to the self-referencing political class in Versailles on the Potomac, but Obama's supporters did have places to go: the hard core base could simply stay home, and independents like to switch sides.
Obama's fatal move to middle began immediately after his election when he chose to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic by picking members of the oligarchical establishment who helped to create and benefitted from the economic and national security messes he inherited — i.e., Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Robert Gates, and Hillary Clinton, plus the plethora of 2nd tier policy wonks and wannabes who came out the Clinton economic and national security apparat in waiting, eg, the “good war mafia” of precision-strike/coercive diplomacy dilettantes in defense, like Michele Flournoy, whose main achievement to date has been to completely gomer up the Quadrennial Defense Review.
These personnel decisions set the stage for a continuation of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush business-as-usual under a kinder and gentler face, taking the forms of policies that (1) continue the redistributive economic policies to favor the people who caused the meltdown, albeit softened by a highly visible albeit insufficient stimulus policy and (2) continue shoveling money into the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex via (a) an escalation of war policy — e.g., by embracing the idea of the AFPAK theater of operations — under the guise of a phony distinction between expanding a good war against terrorism in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) while ending the bad war in Iraq (which was merely in temporary remission, as the recent escalation of murderous events in Baghdad and Anbar Province show) and (b) increased funding of an outdated cold-war inspired weapons modernization program that does not modernize a shrinking, aging force structure.
Phi Beta Iota: Ben Gilad, one of the top commercial intelligence analysts around, has a point, but he forgets that the modern looting of the USA began in 1981 and reached a cresendo with the Phil Gramm (R-TX) deregulation of the financial “services” industry. For the most recent and most superb story on the axis of crime from Wall Street to the two political parties sharing the power of the public purse, see Matt Taibbi's book, Griftopia–Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America.
Phi Beta Iota: The Editorial Board reviewed this. This site is strictly non-partisan; political propaganda is pointed out not to endorse it, but to highlight the depth of what one author calls Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. This short film demonizes the Democratic incumbent majority while avoiding any reference to the Republican era in which the economy was destroyed (1981 forward), elective wars were started, Dick Cheney performed 23 unnatural impeachable acts and led the telling of 935 lies to the public, and the Wall Street bail-out was foisted on the public, first by the Republicans then by their look-alike lite Democratic partners in crime. BOTH parties are antithetical to the public interest; BOTH parties must be “put down” by an informed public as NEITHER party has the integrity to represent the public interest.
The two previous blasters on this subject forwarded op-ed's that in effect described the strategic aim and strategies of the hidden hands that are fomenting right wing rage. The grand strategic aim of these hidden hands is to lock in their vision of a neofascist New Normal political economy based on a foundation of a more unequal distribution of wealth cemented into place by a pattern of politics and propaganda that prey on the growing insecurities and fears of a diminishing middle class.
This op-ed (also attached below) by Frank Rich enriches the picture further by illuminating the same hologram with a slightly different, but equally valid laser. In the Pentagon, we would call Rich's description a grand tactical perspective of the Cape Job being perpetrated by the hidden hands. These grand tactics are as old as war itself. Sun Tzu called them Cheng and Ch'i, or in more modern parlance, the dazzle and stroke, or the direct and the indirect — hence the term cape job, which conjures an image of using the red cape to capture the attention of the raging bull to set it up for a skewering. Essentially, cheng ch'i operations aim to manipulate the mind (i.e., decision cycle or OODA loop) of one's adversaries (i.e., in this case the increasingly impoverished middle class) to direct their energies against themselves. Rich's analysis fits that description to a tee.
Make no mistake about it, the grand tactics described by Rich are a definitive signature of a war, in this case a class war being waged by an elite oligarchy on the mass of of the people. By its nature, it is a fight to the finish, unlikely to be conditioned by compromise or moderated by enlightened self interest, and in his last paragraph, Rich appears to sense this. Cape jobs may begin insensibly, but if they do not end the conflict quickly, with the victors offering magnanimous terms, the intensity of the conflict builds and eventually the game becomes unavoidably obvious. When that happens the cape job can sow the seeds of unpredictable blow back effects that mutate the form of and escalate the conflict beyond the control of the hidden hands stoking the cheng to stroke their victims — as it did for the German industrialists in the early 1930s (see Rich's last paragraph).
ONE dirty little secret of the 2010 election is that it won’t be a political tragedy for Democrats if a Tea Party icon like Sharron Angle or Joe Miller ends up in the United States Senate. Angle, now synonymous with racist ads sliming Hispanics, and Miller, already on record threatening a government shutdown, are fired up and ready to go as symbols of G.O.P. extremism for 2012 and beyond.
What’s not so secret is that some Republicans will be just as happy if some of these characters lose, and for the same reason.
Entire article below the line, provides deep insight into reality.
