Global fascists wrecked the US middle class, and now they want to wreck it some more

 UN Calls on Fed to Halt Rate Rises...

Joel Kotkin has come around, now calls it what it is: Global fascism

In 2018, Kotkin was still tip-toeing around the obvious, but not anymore:

Mussolini’s notion of fascism has become increasingly dominant in much of the world . . .

Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving centre of economic life”. In Italy and, to a greater extent, Germany, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded highly populist welfare state much as we see today.

Mussolini’s idea of a an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. ...

fascism — in its corporate sense — relies on concentrated economic power to achieve its essential and ideological goals. ...

China, in many aspects the model fascist state of our times, follows Il Duce’s model of cementing the corporate elite into the power structure. ...

But in the battle between the two emergent fascist systems, China possesses powerful advantages. Communist Party cadres at least offer more than a moralising agenda; they can point to the country’s massive reduction of extreme poverty and a huge growth in monthly wages, up almost five-fold since 2006. At a time when the middle class is shrinking in the West, China’s middle class increased enormously from 1980 to 2000, although its growth appears to have slowed in recent years.

Like Mussolini, who linked his regime to that of Ancient Rome, China’s rulers look to Han supremacy and the glories of China’s Imperial past. “The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,” Xi Jinping told party cadres a decade ago, “is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and [to] rejuvenate the Chinese nation.”

Kotkin recognizes at least that American right-wing libertarianism is part of the problem, not part of the solution:

the consolidation of oligarchic power is supported by massive lobbying operations and dispersals of cash, including to some Right-wing libertarians, who doggedly justify censorship and oligopoly on private property grounds.

Regrettably, however, Kotkin still does not connect this failure of the old liberal order in the West with the failure of the old moral order which gave it birth and on which it depended. This is because Kotkin still sees things in primarily materialistic terms.

Kotkin is oddly politically correct when he denounces possible recourse to nativism, which blinds him to the nativism which is at the heart of Chinese state capitalism and gives it much of its appeal and strength. He calls for "a re-awakening of the spirit of resistance to authority" in the West, not realizing that it was Protestantism which made that even possible in the first place.

The problem of the West is spiritual, and Catholicism will never be able to rise to the occasion of refounding it as long as globo-homo defines Rome. The whole idea is inimical to the notion of founding a nation "for our posterity".

LOL @ fascism stops exploitation of the poor when its handmaid libertarianism atomizes the opposition into millions of isolated, helpless, and at length subservient individuals

We are living under GLOBAL fascism and there's hardly a commentator who notices it.

Welcome to the Global Fascist State, where politics is a crime no matter where you live: China, Venezuela, Iran, USA, France, Britain . . .

Tucker Carlson says there's nothing free about this market, falls short of calling it an expression of global fascism

But who knows, maybe his forthcoming book connects the dots between the multinational corporations and their revolving door governments, and the central banking system which mediates the operation.

Here:

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: 

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is worth about $150 billion. That’s enough to make him the richest man in the world, by far, and possibly the richest person in human history. It’s certainly enough to pay his employees well. But he doesn’t. A huge number of Amazon workers are so poorly paid, they qualify for federal welfare benefits. According to data from the nonprofit group New Food Economy, nearly one in three Amazon employees in Arizona, for example, was on food stamps last year. Jeff Bezos isn’t paying his workers enough to eat, so you made up the difference with your tax dollars. Next time you see Bezos, make sure he says thank you.

Same with the Waltons. The Walton family founded Walmart. Collectively they’re worth about $175 billion. That’s more than the entire gross domestic product of Qatar, the oil-rich Gulf state. The Waltons could certainly afford to be generous with their workers. Instead, they count on you to take up the slack. In 2013, taxpayers sent more than $6 billion to Walmart’s workers, for food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance.

And if you think that’s shocking, meet Travis Kalanick. He’s the youthful founder of Uber. His personal fortune is close to $5 billion. His drivers, by contrast, often make less than minimum wage. One recent study showed that many Uber drivers lose money working for the company. That’s not a sustainable business model. The only reason it continues is because of your generosity. Because you’re paying the welfare benefits for Uber’s impoverished drivers, child billionaires like Travis get to keep buying bigger houses and more airplanes. He’s someone else who definitely owes you a thank you note.

If you can think of a less fair system than that, send us an email. We’d love to hear it. It’s indefensible. Yet almost nobody ever complains about it. How come? Conservatives, like us, support the free market, and for good reason. Free markets work. But there’s nothing free about this market. A lot of these companies operate as monopolies. They hate markets. They use government regulation to crush competition. There’s nothing conservative about that, just as there’s nothing conservative about most big corporations. Just the opposite. They’re the backbone of the left. Pick a leftwing cause that you think is hurting the country. Check the donor list, and you’ll find the name of some corporation. Often many corporations. Corporate America enables the progressive lunacy you see every night on this show. They’re funding the revolution now in progress.

That’s why liberals say nothing as oligarchs amass billions by soaking the middle class. Because they’ve been paid off. For example, you probably assumed the people who founded Walmart were conservative. Most of their customers certainly are. Yet the bulk of the Walton family backed Hillary Clinton in the last election. They gave the Democratic Party more than $700,000 during the 2016 cycle. Almost every billionaire in Silicon Valley did the same. In return, they got immunity from criticism, and you got to keep paying their employees. Not a bad deal for them.

There is one person in Washington who’s offended by this arrangement, and we’re sorry to say he’s wrong on pretty much everything else. But this is a weird moment, so you take allies where you can find them. Bernie Sanders, of all people, is trying to get your money back from Jeff Bezos. This is especially amazing since Bezos is on Bernie’s side on most things. They’re both leftwing activists. But on this question, Bernie’s right. He’s planning legislation that would force big corporations to return the taxpayer-funded welfare benefits you’ve paid to their workers. It’s not a perfect solution, and it probably won’t pass. No matter what they claim in public, liberals in Congress would never support something like that. Their loyalty isn’t to you. It’s to Uber and Jeff Bezos. But at the very least it might awaken a sleepy population to the new reality of activist corporate America. And that’s a good thing.

America has changed enormously in the last 20 years. A lot of people you thought were your allies are in fact working against your interests. They have contempt for you and your family, your customs and your faith. Included in this group, I’m sorry to say, are a lot of big corporations. They have no use for you or the country you grew up in. Stand in their way, and they’ll crush you. It’s all shocking enough that I recently wrote a book about it. It’s called “Ship of Fools,” and it explains what happened and who did it. The book is out in a month, the first week of October, but you can preorder a copy now, and I hope you will.

The irrelevance of real money to the global fascist banking cabal

Jeffrey Snider, here, fascist emphases added in red for your reading pleasure:

For as long as there has existed the dollar, there has existed the temptation to make it pliable enough to fit the fancy of its masters. In the context of the economic system as it has developed since the earliest stirrings of industrial transformation.

In the current age, there is no mistake about where the dollars strings attach. The Federal Reserve sets policy but does not really operate the "printing press", that is reserved for the global banking cabal including eurodollar participants. There are relatively persuasive arguments on both sides as to which end is in actual control, the banks or the Fed, but in my mind there is no degree of separation, at least not meaningfully in this setting. The banking system operates as the business end of policy. Banking interests have become fully aligned with policy directives as the banking system has been re-oriented in that direction by progression in the past six or so decades.

A full part of that changing systemic character has been the gradual reduction in the relevance of real money. Convention always marks 1971 as the end of the gold era, but it really began its demise far earlier. The Bretton Woods system was plagued almost from the start by this impulse toward dollar pliability, whether for US government purposes, US banking purposes or global trade. The formation of the London gold pool in November 1961 was a symptom of market forces attempting to re-assert authority over currency; and how far government control would be stretched to wrestle free of any competition over monetary monopoly.

Joshua Kurlantzick Totally Ignores Theft And Corruption At Heart Of State Capitalism

To know how far we've descended along the path to global fascism, with authoritarian technocrats in partnership with ideologues like Barack Obama pulling the levers and picking the winners and losers, consider this opening to a puff piece on the rise of state capitalism by Joshua Kurlantzick of teh Council on Foreign Relations for Bloomberg Businessweek, here:

Over the past five years, as much of the developed world has staggered through crisis, a new type of capitalism has emerged as a challenger to laissez-faire economics. Across much of the developing world, state capitalism—in which the state either owns companies or plays a major role in supporting or directing them—is replacing the free market. By 2015 state-owned wealth funds will control some $12 trillion in assets, far outpacing private investors. From 2004 through 2009, 120 state-owned companies made their debut on the Forbes list of the world’s largest corporations, while 250 private companies fell off it. State companies now control about 90 percent of the world’s oil and large percentages of other resources—a far cry from the past, when BP (BP) and ExxonMobil (XOM) could dictate terms to the world.

Kurlantzick spends not one moment considering the massive European and American efforts to prevent creative destruction in the banking and housing industries through the use of bailouts and monetarist central banking interventions, which represent state capitalism already in practice at the expense of hostage populations. Well, why would he spend any precious column inches on an utter and abject failure?

There's no room for that in a propaganda piece for the status quo.

Global Fascism: Casually Described, Matter of Factly Accepted

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.

John Hussman Describes The Recent Victory Of Global Fascism, Without Using The Term

Just yesterday, in his column, here:

[O]ver the past 15 years, the global financial system . . . has been transformed into a self-serving, grotesque casino that misallocates scarce savings, begs for and encourages speculative bubbles, refuses to restructure bad debt, and demands that the most reckless stewards of capital should be rewarded through bailouts that transfer bad debt from private balance sheets to the public balance sheet.

What is central here is that the government policy environment has encouraged this result. This environment includes financial sector deregulation that was coupled with a government backstop, repeated monetary distortions, refusal to restructure bad debt, and a preference for policy cowardice that included bailouts and opaque accounting. Deregulation and lower taxes will not fix this problem, nor will larger "stimulus packages."  

The New Global Fascist Order Slashes Dollar Borrowing Costs, But Not For You

It's not fascism when WE do it.

As reported here:

The U.S. Federal Reserve slashed the cost of emergency dollar loans to foreign banks as the world’s major central banks took coordinated action to prevent Europe’s debt crisis from triggering a global liquidity crunch.

The moves were announced in statements issued simultaneously by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Canada and the Swiss National Bank. ...

“Global central banks are opening the spigots and the casualty has been the dollar,” said Kathleen Brooks, research director at Forex.com.

“The extension of the dollar swap lines essentially means that dollars will be available cheaply and on request for the next 15 months to Europe’s troubled financial sector, which will probably greedily eat them up after being starved of much-needed dollar funding since the summer.”

Meanwhile the US consumer's liquidity crisis continues apace:

hours worked remain flat year over year;

real wages have declined nearly 2 percent year over year;

housing values have declined $6.6 trillion since 2006;

owners' equity in real estate is down $6.9 trillion since 2005;

household net worth is down $5.55 trillion since 2006;

unprecedented unemployment above 8 percent has continued for 33 months straight;

the US dollar has declined 27 percent in value in ten years;

debt delinquency rates are running at 10 percent;

open credit accounts have declined by 23 percent since 2008;

the annual percentage rate on the average credit card is nearly 15 percent;

a three year new car loan will cost you nearly 4.5 percent;

a 30 year mortgage will cost you 4 percent, if you can get one;

and the bank pays you doodily squat on your savings.

But if you're a European bank, the US Federal Reserve is making a gift of loans at just 0.58 percent:

The new [dollar swap] pricing will be applied to operations starting on Dec. 5. Seven-day loans would carry an interest rate of about 0.58 percent, down from 1.08 percent, based on the current one- week OIS rate of 0.08 percent.


The bankers' bank has picked its winners again. And you aren't one of them.