BTW, if you have not read it, you can find my take on monetary theory here. You will easily understand why I am an Ellen Brown fan.
What Goes Around Comes Around
IMF-Style Austerity Comes to America
By ELLEN BROWN
When billionaires pledge a billion dollars to educate people to the evils of something, it is always good to peer closely at what they are up to. Hedge fund magnate Peter G. Peterson was formerly Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and head of the New York Federal Reserve. He is now senior chairman of Blackstone Group, which is in charge of dispersing government funds in the controversial AIG bailout, widely criticized as a government giveaway to banks. Peterson is also founder of the Peter Peterson Foundation, which has adopted the cause of imposing “fiscal responsibility” on Congress. He hired David M. Walker, former head of the Government Accounting Office, to spearhead a massive campaign to reduce the runaway federal debt, which the Peterson/Walker team blames on reckless government and consumer spending. The Foundation funded the movie “I.O.U.S.A.” to amass popular support for their cause, which largely revolves around dismantling Social Security and Medicare benefits as a way to cut costs and return to “fiscal responsibility.”
The Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform has pushed heavily for action to stem the federal debt. Bills for a budget task force were sponsored in both houses of Congress. The Senate bill was narrowly defeated, and the House bill was tabled; but that was not the end of it. In Obama’s State of the Union speech on January 27, he said he would be creating a presidential budget task force by executive order to address the federal government’s deficit and debt crisis, and that the task force would be modeled on the bills Congress had failed to pass. If Congress would not impose “fiscal responsibility” on the nation, the President would. “It keeps me awake at night, looking at all that red ink,” he said. The Executive Order was signed on February 17.
What the President seems to have missed is that all of our money except coins now comes into the world as “red ink,” or debt. It is all created on the books of private banks and lent into the economy. If there is no debt, there is no money; and private debt has collapsed. This year to date, U.S. lending has been contracting at the fastest rate in recorded history. A credit freeze has struck globally; and when credit shrinks, the money supply shrinks with it. That means there is insufficient money to buy goods, so workers get laid off and factories get shut down, perpetuating a vicious spiral of economic collapse and depression. To reverse that cycle, credit needs to be restored; and when the banks can’t do it, the government needs to step in and start “monetizing” debt itself, or turning debt into dollars. more
How Greece's Crisis Could Impact America
Ann Pettifor
New Economist, Author, "Debtonation - The Coming First World Debt Crisis"
Posted: February 27, 2010 12:19 AM
Citizens are rightly angry at the way both the Bush and Obama administrations, aided by Governor Ben Bernanke -- pretty well unconditionally bailed-out the bankers of Wall St., just like governments in Europe and Asia.
While politicians and regulators rushed to dampen the flames of financial crisis with taxpayer funds, what happened to those guilty of financial arson?
Besides the odd rogue and loner like Bernard Madoff, none has gone to jail for crimes against the people, as far as I know.
As if to rub our collective noses in it, bankers have paraded their contempt for both politicians and taxpayers by using bail-out resources to post massive capital gains and bonuses. It's hard to believe they could be guilty of worse.
But believe it you must. For now these self-same bankers are turning on their rescuers -- the governments that bailed them out. more
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