Mouood Mouood English Edition
An aura of uncertainty prevails. People across America are impoverished as a result of the curtailment of “entitlements”, mass protest and civil unrest could erupt. Homeland Security (DHS) is the process of militarizing domestic law enforcement.
What is diabolical in this process is that major banking conglomerates will not hesitate to destabilize stock, commodity and foreign exchange markets if it serves their interests, namely as a means to appropriate speculative gains resulting from a situation of turmoil and economic crisis, with no concern for the social plight of millions of Americans.
The manipulation through derivative trade of the markets for basic food staples is particularly pernicious because it potentially creates hunger. It has a direct bearing on the livelihood of millions of people.The global economic crisis is a carefully engineered.
The end result of financial warfare is the appropriation of money wealth through speculative trade including the confiscation of savings, the outright appropriation of real economy assets as well as the destabilization of the institutions of the Federal State through the adoption of sweeping austerity measures.
The speculative onslaught led by Wall Street is not only impoverishing the American people, the entire World population is affected.
Aftermath of US Shutdown
Groups campaigning against Obamacare are funded by multibillionaires Charles and David Koch. Days before Obama and Congress struck the last-minute budget deal on October 16, the Koch brothers, seeing that their plan had gone wrong, “jumped off the train” and wrote an open letter to Congress, distancing themselves from accusations of a shutdown blackmail conspiracy. There are people like the Koch brothers who may be exerting influence in the corridors of the US Congress. US is on the brink of final fiscal collapse and what is at stake is the future of the Federal Government itself.
This Federal Government is now hit by a debt crisis which is unprecedented. The debt is gone up 70% since the 2008 financial meltdown and at the same time they are implementing what I would describe as “shock and awe economics” which essentially consists in cutting virtually everything, all the entitlement programs of the US administration.
We are essentially experiencing in the US the types of policies applied in several European countries in the last couple of years: very destructive from the social point of view. This is a policy of impoverishing people. Food stamps, social security and of course, Medicare and Medicaid are the programs which are affected. Meanwhile, of course, Defense and the financing of the war economy remains powerfully with a very large military budget.
The Koch Brothers did indeed pay the Republicans to vote against Obamacare but what could have been their bigger agenda?
The Republicans and the Democrats share the same economic policy agenda. They are both committed to massive austerity measures, irrespective of who is pulling the strings. Why? Because both parties are in fact controlled by the same lobby groups. When we think of lobby groups we are not thinking strictly of one or other rich families like the Koch Brothers. We are talking about Wall Street, we are talking about JP Morgan Chase, we are talking about the Federal Reserve Bank which is a private institution which holds a large portion of the US public debt. And essentially what is now being implemented is a scenario of massive privatization of the federal State system.
We have already had that process occurring at the municipal level where more than a hundred major cities across USA are technically bankrupt. What happens? Private corporations take over public lands, institutions, state assets. They confiscate essentially what belongs to the people and government.
The lobby groups want complete privatization of the assets of peole and government of USA and that is not something which is necessarily new, we have seen that happen in developing countries where the IMF comes in and imposes sweeping reforms and then orders the government to privatize state assets in favor of private corporations.
So in a fact, we are experiencing that in the US today. The aftermath of this crisis and the shutdown creates an atmosphere of economic uncertainty: people are loosing their standard of living, there is mass unemployment which is the direct result of macroeconomic privatization of the assets of peole and government of USA and it is “shock and awe” process of financial warfare directed own all the assets of American people and government. This financial warfare is engineered by interest groups, by lobby groups, by powerful financial institutions. Now let us look at the scenarios from 2013 onward. If we look at the figures published by the Congress Budget Office (CBO) which is a key body within the US legislature in practice represents major cuts in the entitlement programs. So in fact this budgetary shift is a form of economic shock therapy.
Who Owns The Federal Reserve?
Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders.
The Federal Reserve (or Fed) has assumed sweeping new powers in the last year. In an unprecedented move in March 2008, the New York Fed advanced the funds for JPMorgan Chase Bank to buy investment bank Bear Stearns for pennies on the dollar. The deal was particularly controversial because Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, sits on the board of the New York Fed and participated in the secret weekend negotiations.1 In September 2008, the Federal Reserve did something even more unprecedented, when it bought the world’s largest insurance company. The Fed announced on September 16 that it was giving an $85 billion loan to American International Group (AIG) for a nearly 80% stake in the mega-insurer. The Associated Press called it a “government takeover,” but this was no ordinary nationalization. Unlike the U.S. Treasury, which took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the week before, the Fed is not a government-owned agency. Also unprecedented was the way the deal was funded. The Associated Press reported:
“The Treasury Department, for the first time in its history, said it would begin selling bonds for the Federal Reserve in an effort to help the central bank deal with its unprecedented borrowing needs.”
This is extraordinary. Why is the Treasury issuing U.S. government bonds (or debt) to fund the Fed, which is itself supposedly “the lender of last resort” created to fund the banks and the federal government?
Normally, the Federal Reserve swaps green pieces of paper called Federal Reserve Notes or US dollars for pink pieces of paper called U.S. bonds, in order to provide Congress with the dollars it cannot raise through taxes. Now, it seems, the government is issuing bonds, not for its own use, but for the use of the Federal Reserve which allows the big banks members of Federal Reserve to improve their capital position so they can make new loans to people and government on interests. In its latest power play, on October 3, 2008, the Federal Reserve (Fed) acquired the ability to pay interest to its member banks on the reserves the banks maintain at the Fed. But the point to be noted that the Fed’s money comes ultimately from the US taxpayers, that means the taxpayers are paying interest to the banks on the banks’ own reserves – reserves maintained for their own private profit. Who owns the Federal Reserve, who actually controls it, where does it get its money, and whose interests is it serving?
The Federal Reserve was set up in 1913 as a “lender of last resort” to backstop bank runs, following a particularly bad bank panic in 1907. The Fed’s mandate was then and continues to be to keep the private banking system intact; and that means keeping intact the system’s most valuable asset, a monopoly on creating the national money supply. Except for coins, every US dollar in circulation USA and world is now created privately as a debt to the Federal Reserve or the banking system it heads.
The Federal Reserve is considered an private and independent central bank of USA because its decisions do not have to be ratified by the US President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branch of US government.
1. The Fed is privately owned.
Its shareholders are private banks. In fact, 100% of its shareholders are private banks. None of its stock is owned by the government.
2. The fact that the Fed does not get “appropriations”from Congress basically means that it gets its money from Congress without congressional approval, by engaging in “open market operations.”
Here is how it works: When the government is short of funds, the Treasury issues bonds and delivers them to bond dealers, which auction them off. When the Fed wants to “expand the money supply” (create money), it steps in and buys bonds from these dealers with newly-issued dollars acquired by the Fed for the cost of writing them into an account on a computer screen. These maneuvers are called “open market operations” because the Fed buys the bonds on the “open market” from the bond dealers. The bonds then become the “reserves” that the banking establishment uses to back its loans. In another bit of sleight of hand known as “fractional reserve” lending, the same reserves are lent many times over, further expanding the money supply, generating interest for the banks with each loan. It was this money-creating process which has converted the Federal Reserve “a total money-making machine.” When the Federal Reserve writes a cheque for a government bond it does exactly what any bank does, it creates money, it created money purely and simply by writing a cheque.
