Today's must-reading comes from The Wall Street Journal, where a libertarian correctly describes the current state of affairs as a global fascist order, but uncritically accepts it as a fact which explains things rather than as a disease to be cured:
The Greek tragedy began with a fiscal crisis—brought on by the government spending more money than it took in—that became a banking crisis. In Spain, there is a fiscal crisis that exacerbates a banking crisis.
Fiscal and banking crises are often linked because in modern economics the state and banking are joined together. Banks purchase government debt, supporting the state, and governments guarantee the liabilities of banks. When one party is weakened, so is the other. ...
The banks, not fiscal deficits, will be the undoing of the euro.
The author believes federal union as in the US should have come first in Europe before the common currency, in order to equalize structural differences in labor markets among other things, for example taxes and spending.
Yes, it should have, the more securely to anchor the foundations of fascism. Somehow ancient memories kept that from happening in Europe, and Spaniards and Greeks still think of themselves as such and not as Europeans who answer to Brussels and the European Central Bank.
But unlike Europe federal union in the US has allowed the partnership between government and banks to run the show unfettered, the more ominously so since 1913 with The Federal Reserve Act, a measure which concentrated power in the hands of the few and took it away from the many. The bankers were put first in line for Federal Reserve Notes. Citizens last. Like sheep they turned in their gold.
Augmented by the growth of the imperial presidency which got its impetus first under Wilson and then under FDR, the Congress claimed its role in the new cabal in the 1920s by stopping the natural and constitutionally prescribed growth of representation, enhancing nothing but its own importance. Trading on insider information, election to the US House or Senate has become a path to wealth and power, if not fame.
These all act in concert to protect their gig, not yours, not America's.
In its fecklessness and greed, however, the government by turns has lost control of the money creation process, most notably since 1971, and has ceded it to the banking interest and cannot get it back. Our national debt may now surpass our $15 trillion GDP and gold may be $1,600 the ounce, but it takes a banker to really screw things up and create an over the counter market in derivatives with a notional value in excess of $600 trillion.
The banks won't be the undoing only of the Euro.
Read the entire column here.
