Webster at the Barricades

I almost incredibly agree with most of what Webster Tarpley has to say in this letter to his congressman. Webster has a website at http://Tarpley.net, and is a hot opponent of our messing around in Libya, etc. and our other murderous activities around the world (not that I am so crazy about the New Deal but I am all for 0% interest from the central bank to build infrastructure and make entitlement payments):

Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
TARPLEY.net
July 21, 2011

My dear Congressman –

The American people are not interested in Obama’s Grand Bargain or the Gang of Six plan, which are cowardly and dishonest attacks on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, jobless benefits, and other vital programs. Cuts in these programs will not reduce the deficit, but they will kill Americans. Such cuts represent a veiled form of genocide. We want to save money by ending all the wars, including Obama’s fiasco in Libya. We want the repeal of the failed Bush tax cuts. We want to see Wall Street forced to pay their fair share through a Tobin tax or Wall Street Sales Tax of 1%, with half the proceeds kept by the US Treasury and the other half distributed to the states to stabilize budgets and protect social services. We want the most toxic derivatives — including credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations — banned, as they were from 1936 to 1982. We want a recovery and jobs program in the New Deal FDR tradition, all financed by 0% federal credit from a nationalized Federal Reserve. Reactionary Republicans and Tea Party fanatics need to be fought, not appeased. As for the ratings agencies, they should be on trial for their malfeasance of 2008, and not dictating policy to the US government. If Obama thinks he can get re-elected by catering to Wall Street and by betraying his own base to pander to those morally confused independents, he will meet the fate of Jimmy Carter. Any Democrat who votes to weaken entitlements must expect to be primaried and ousted. We urge you to call McConnell’s bluff and avoid the cataclysm of default by passing a clean bill to raise (or, better, abolish) the debt ceiling with NO CUTS to our hard-won New Deal and Great Society economic rights.

Webster G. Tarpley Ph.D.

Creating "Demand"

Watched Charlie Rose last night. He had Larry Summers on for the second night running. Summers is a weird guy, no kidding. It would take a month to try to tell how powerful and wicked he has been over the years, but he manages to look "simple and innocent" on TV.

Last night he kept harping on one thing needed to "get the country moving again": create demand. He outlined four ideas for doing that. I forget what they were. They all stopped short of what I would go for. Summers would as soon mention knocking the bankers out of control of money issue in this land as he would undress in public. Nonetheless that is the way to go. Have the government create all money, interest free, spend it on infrastructure and, if necessary, give it away in great gobs to the people (not the rich).

That is, implement Major Douglas's plan for govt. handouts to create demand, to bring the "power to buy" somewhere near the "power to make." I'll give Summers credit for spotting the main problem: there isn't enough purchasing power to buy even the limited amount of stuff available now from the factories.

I do recall one of Summers's ideas: step up promotion of American manufactures to foreign nations. Why is that better than getting our own people to buy our own stuff? These giant economic brains seem never to see the obvious.

All this may seem a little obscure to the uninitiated. Have no fear. We live in a world of (relative) abundance even in spite of peak oil. It's just that our damned élites are terrified of letting ordinary people have some access to it.

But that's the needed trick: let the people be able to buy their own product. What a revolutionary idea!

Class War

The signs are unmistakeable. The Class War is on, full tilt. The central raw fact is this: 1 percent of the population gets one-quarter of all income, and owns 40% of the nation's wealth.

All the shouting and screaming among the people is chiefly directed to making this worse by stressing anti-government attitudes, favoring "privatization," and booming ignorantist candidates for office who can be counted on to curry influence with the rich by pushing their agenda. The agenda of the rich can be simply stated: open the road to their getting even more of the income and wealth of the nation into their hands. It is the apotheosis of greed, the ultimate statement of fealty to the Great God Mammon. Ye gods, what a picture of national lunacy! Or, as it may be, world lunacy, since the same thing seems to be going on nearly everywhere.

It would be nice to say some sort of relief lies directly ahead, but I do not see where it can come from. The government is quite corrupt at present and would have to be cleansed somehow. By whom and how? The rich are corrupt. Nothing new there. Some sort of catastrophe is our only hope. Not a gradual improvement, but a sudden shocking change of some kind that would leave our present rich without ownership of the media and the leading think tanks, bereft, that is, of their usual bugles, and relatively helpless against a great swelling of the rage of the people. But I find it impossible to think of this in any detail or with any glee because it will certainly be an ugly business, very hard indeed on the mass of people.

So I won't think of it any further today. Perhaps think of it tomorrow.