Winter 2014 Part 3

Neoliberalism Exposed

The Federal Reserve being exposed for its corruption and nefarious policies are a great thing to do. The Bank of Israel's Governor Stanley Fisher is nominated as the Federal Reserve Vice Chairman. It is obvious when you have select central banks controlling an inordinate influence in the world, then that is wrong and problems will occur. When the government is dependent for money on the bankers, then the government leaders can never totally control the nations. Many financiers in real life have no loyalty to patriotism or decency. The Federal Reserve just commemorated 100 years of financial terrorism. In mid-December, President Barack Obama nominated Stanley Fischer as the Federal Reserve vice chairman. If she will be confirmed, he will replace Janet Yellen. Yellen will soon be the first woman to be the Chair of the Federal Board of Governors. She will replace Ben Bernanke. She will become the Fed Chairman in the end of January. From January 2005 through June 30, 2013, Fischer was Bank of Israel governor. He holds dual US/Israeli citizenship. He was involved earlier with the Bank of Israel. In 1980, he was a visiting scholar. In 1985, he was Reagan administration advisor to Israel’s economic stabilization program. During that time, neoliberalism just grew. Knesset members amended the Bank of Israel Law. It prohibited it form printing money for industrialization, full employment, and immigrant absorption. Israel embraced transformative change for the worst. Power began shifting from various government agencies to the Finance Ministry and Bank of Israel. It’s similar to how America was financially dealt with. In 1985, Israeli policy included budget deficits reduced to near balance. Inflation was dampened the wrong way. Wages, public pensions, and other social benefits were cut. The shekel was debased. Unions lost power and workers were exploited. The Arrangements Law established an emergency Economic Stabilization Plan. Doing so sidestepped normal legislative procedures. Knesset members were prevented from debating its socially destructive provisions. A race to the bottom followed. It continued throughout the 1990s. It did so under Fisher. It does so today. In Israel and America we have mass privatizations. We have welfare and social benefits cuts. There is wealth disproportionately shifted from ordinary Israelis to corporate interests and super rich elites as well as other so-called structural adjustments. Fischer studied in England and America. He was an University of Chicago associate professor. He became an U.S. citizen in 1976. He worked in the IMF before. He was in the Group of Thirty by late 2001. We see neoliberalism as part of much of U.S. economy policy. Israel today gets billions of dollars in annual aid, the latest weapons and technology, unrestricted US market access, benefits afforded no other nations, and much more. It does so in violation of the 1961 US Foreign Assistance Act. He supports regime change in Syria. He worked to arrange the 2008 bailout of Citigroup. QE reduced the money supply. It did so “by sucking up the collateral needed by the shadow banking system to create credit,” said Ellen Brown. It’s an “asset swap.” Assets for cash reserves “never leave bank balance sheets,” she said. Doing so is counterproductive. It’s self-defeating. It constrains economic growth. It doesn’t create jobs. It benefits Wall Street. It does it at the expense of Main Street. When you have money used wisely in the economy, then growth can come. The QE policy benefits the banks not the workers or most Americans struggling at all. We need true economic populism without neoliberalism. 

Economic Inequality

Economic inequality is a serious problem and it has been growing for decades. The cutting of unemployment benefits from 1.3 million Americans is part of the larger symptom of how neoliberal economic policies don't work at all to help the economy. Cutting those benefits does nothing to solve our economic issues. It can grow problems instead of solving them. The unemployment benefits don't make up a major part of federal spending since it would be only 25 billion dollars in 2014 or less than 1 percent of federal spending. So, we should handle short term issues of allowing the benefits to continue. Also, we should deal with the long term issue of poverty, unemployment, the Federal Reserve, and other issues. The policy of cutting the benefits is hypocrisy, because while the Congress refuses to extend quaint unemployment benefits, they will authorize nearly $633 billion in military spending for 2014, money that will go toward funding the war in Afghanistan, overwhelmingly opposed by the American people, and Washington’s preparations for even more bloody military interventions. Military fraud, waste, and abuse are harming the economy in America. Ending imperialism can allow us to gain resources necessary to fund American society. We should deal with public and private debt in a rational fashion too. Also, the federal government has used cuts in the SNAP program or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. It will be 11 billion cuts over 3 years. Democrats and Republicans are currently negotiating the terms of further cuts in the food stamp program. Just days after Congress passed the budget allowing long-term jobless benefits to expire; the Federal Reserve announced it would continue to keep its benchmark interest rate at near-zero at least into 2015. At the same time, it pledged to continue pumping tens of billions of dollars into the financial markets every month, although at a somewhat reduced level, for months to come. There is the continuing of the redistribution of wealth from the poor to the super rich. Austerity threatens to cut resources from public education, Medicare care for seniors and the poor, pensions, restraints on child labor, health and safety rules, environmental regulations, workers' compensation, public museums, and libraries. Even more evidence see that the ACA will boost profits of insurance companies and corporations while some will have their care manipulated in a wild direction. Human beings have the right to secure their jobs, education, Medicare, pensions, housing, access to culture, etc. My views on economics are the same as Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, and other Brothers and Sisters with amazing intellectual insight and excellent intelligence. The policies of the Federal Reserve benefit oligarchy and not most of the American people at all (with their fractional banking system controlled by select central banks. The FED has been exposed by folks from across the political spectrum. Bill Still has great research on this issue). We know the criminal actions of Wall Street and some big banks hiding trillions of dollars. We should fight for self-sufficiency, allowing the people to form independent banking systems, and to create unique ways to invest in our infrastructure.

Important History


The Mont Pelerin Society has been a strong reactionary entity in that it is under the control of the establishment. It was created in 1947 in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland by Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek was clear on his intensions. He wanted laissez faire capitalism and the free market to not be unencumbered by government regulation. Other founders of the Mont Pelerin were Otto von Hapsburg or the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and other oligarchs. So, the elitist aristocrats aided von Hayek not the masses of the common people. Von Hayek wrote, "The Road to Serfdom" was a defense of laissez fair free market capitalism as a reaction to the New Deal. He wanted laissez faire capitalism and the free market to rule in society. The Mont Pelerin Society included journalists, economists, Nobel Prize recipients, and others. Friedrich von Hayek heavily influenced the modern libertarian movement and the Austrian school. Ludwig worked in Count Coundenhove Kalegri's Pan Europe movement in 1943. This movement wanted an united Europe. University of Chicago Professor Milton Friedman was president of the Mont Pelerin Society from 1970 to 1972. Milton Friedman was a leader of the University of Chicago’s “Chicago School of  Economics” which overturned Keynesian economic theory with the Austrian School economic philosophy of laissez faire, free market capitalism. Even the Federal Reserve is a privately owned bank not a government entity per se, which refutes the lie that the Federal Reserve is totally a public entity. The MPS worked with the Heritage Foundation, the CNP, and other reactionaries to advance their agenda. Many founders of the Mont Pelerin Society were prominent members of eugenics societies, etc. Sir Antony Fisher, a member of the Fabian Society, founded the Manhattan Institute in 1977 with Friedrich von Hayek. In 1994, Manhattan Institute scholar Charles Murray co-authored The Bell Curve, a landmark publication advancing the theory of intellectual inferiority of black human beings (which is a lie). Another founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society was “Ralph Harris, a leader of the British Eugenics Society which had earlier helped draft Hitler’s race laws.” The Austrian School of Economics was launched to preach and teach the doctrine of laissez faire, free market economics. Unfettered by government regulation, the market place would regulate itself, the new preachers exhorted their students, and the central banks would oversee the economic and financial reorganization of the world. Ludwig von Mises and and Count Coundenhove-Kalergi loved this free market doctrine. Pure unregulated, unbridled capitalism is wrong, because it can remove the safeguards necessary to prevent pollution, civil liberty abuses, and other human rights. There has to be a way to prevent the existence of monopolies polluting the environment, to prevent those from having unwarranted greed, to prevent some from robbing our nation of our resources, and to stop other evils in the name of creating "sound money." The wealthy taking away the public benefits from citizens is folly. Each human has the right to have an education, to have healthcare, to drink clean water, and to breathe clean air. To provide education to human beings, to protect our environment, to help those in need, and to promote our vital interests has nothing to do with violating personal freedom (if these actions are done correctly). It has to do with showing human compassion and human dignity. Wealth should never be totally privatized into select hands of a few central banks (in the headquarters of the BIS in Switzerland). Wealth has been increasingly centralized into a few financiers. Also, the IMF has been overseeing the U.S. economy in an unjust way. The IMF as we know has been involved in harming the political, economic, and human rights of many nations of the world (especially Third world nations and nation of color). The IMF has a wicked history then and now. We do not need anarchy to take over the nation or the world. We need righteousness to take over society. True liberty is about doing things to advance righteousness, morality, and truth not to advance materialism, greed, and selfishness. Real liberty is about restraining evil as a means to establish justice, tranquility, and providing the general welfare plus defense of humanity. That is why we should have a watchful eye and a real hand on the wealthy who covet money. When the schemes of the wealthy try to harm the poor, then we have the right to speak up for the poor. So, we should have justice for humanity including the poor.

The War on Poverty

The War on Poverty is now over 50 Years Old. We all want the same goal of fighting and ending poverty completely. Many of us disagree with some of the ways to get to that goal. President Lyndon Baines Johnson delivered his speech on wanting to end poverty, joblessness, and hunger in America during his first State of the Union Address on January 8, 1964. “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America,” Johnson said in the speech, delivered not quite seven weeks after the assassination of his predecessor, John Kennedy. Many of the programs that Congress and the President enacted in this period were part of the Great Society. These programs included: the Social Security Act of 1965 creating Medicare and Medicaid, which respectively provided health insurance to the elderly and introduced federal health care coverage for the disabled and poor; the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the first significant legislation addressing institutional racism since the era of Reconstruction nearly a century earlier; and a number of job training, urban development, educational, and nutritional government agencies and initiatives, including the pre-kindergarten educational program Head Start and the Food Stamp program. The War on Poverty was a test of U.S. capitalism and economic policies. The verdict is in. The War on Poverty made some improvements in society, while there is a long way to go. Some of Johnson's programs included tax cuts for the which and the funding of the American war machine. The U.S. economy grew in the 1960's. Soon, came the decline of U.S. industry. Tax cuts came under Johnson. The United States Revenue Act of 1964 reduced the top marginal tax rate from 91 percent to 70 percent, handing over 30 percent of the aggregate tax cut to the top 2 percent of tax filers. Corporate taxes were also reduced. The logic was that these tax cuts would inspire industries to grow jobs. This didn't work. Corporate profits grew by 65 percent over the decedes. Yes, the corporaitons and wealthy stockholders increasingly diverted resources overseas—industrial investment by US corporations abroad increased by 500 percent in the 1960s—and toward financial speculation, in what historian Alfred Chandler has called the mergers and acquisitions “binge” of 1965-1969. The tradition of long-term and stable ownership of stocks was steadily replaced by a purchase strategy that centered on short-term profits. High military spending harmed domestic services too. That is why Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was right to say that the US spent “$500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor.” By the end of the 1960s, one in every ten jobs in the US was tied to the Defense Department budget. We have the liberal reformism of the Great Society. There were wage strikes of the 1970's, and the decline of Western capitalism later on. Today, the ruling class views any government expenditure on social programs as intolerable. The War on Poverty was heavily impacted negativity by the Vietnam War and other issues. Even today, the poor is being regularly scapegoated, demonized, and disrespected by ignorant narrowminded human beings. Much of the poor are poor by no fault of their own. It has been a perverted pasttime for some of the Western elites to demonize the poor in an unfair fashion. It is a shame. The poverty rate was cut in half from 1960 to 1970, but we still have a long way to go in ending poverty (because of the recession and some human beings giving up finding jobs. Underemployment represents a serious problem). In the years between 1965 and 1973, poverty rates plummeted, and especially in urban areas, by about 38 percent. Many of the Great Society problems were cut or eliminated by the mid 1970's. We haven't won the war on poverty, because of unjust wars, economic regressive actions, massive austerity cuts, and massive giveaways to the super rich (and other reasons). Billions of dollars can be spent for imperialism and the military industrial complex, but now we see no serious effort to address poverty in the world. Our social safety net is ever threatened by reactionaries. The solution is not a one size fit all approach though. Every level of government and a wide spectrum of human beings should be part of the solution to assist the poor, to give human beings JOBS, to fight crime, to grow our education, and to see human beings to have a radical, revolutionary improvement of their standard of living (via INVESTMENTS, INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT, ETC.). WE HAVE TO TAKE A MORE HOLISTIC APPROACH WHEN DEALING WITH FIGHTING POVERTY. Classism, Racism and Sexism are inextricably linked to our issues as well. We have to address the structural problems involving poverty. We have to address economic inequality and vast wealth transferred to the top of society. To eradicate poverty, there should be radical policies.

Educational Justice 

The movement for educational justice is real and it continues. Studies have documented that smaller class sizes will develop into better education for children. Yet, the powers that be still want large class sizes. Now, in Portland, people are fighting for smaller class size. School officials want another agenda. Since 2007, Portland Public Schools (PPS) has spent over $2.5 million on this employee training program, and the district has plans to spend another $1 million a year to fund its own equity office based largely around these ideas. About half of $2.5 million has gone directly to PEG--the rest was spent on travel and related costs for teachers and administrators to attend conferences in San Antonio, Texas, and San Francisco. The issue is that the PEG and the PPS must deal with institutional biases and class size more adequately. There should be alternative ways to address inequality in Portland schools. There is the battle between PPS and the Portland Association of Teachers or the PAT. There is the teachers strike looming on February 20 over the union's demands for a contract that addresses not only their working conditions, but the learning conditions for all of their students. MULTIPLE STUDIES (here and here, for example) have shown that while reducing class size has a positive effect on all students in every way that can be measured--including improved grades, improved attendance and higher test scores--it has a disproportionately positive effect on minority and low-income students. One Princeton University study concluded that class size reduction is "one of very few educational interventions that have been proven to narrow the achievement gap." For example, the Princeton researchers found that attending what they classified as small-sized classes, compared to regular-sized classes: "...raises the likelihood that Black students take the ACT or SAT college entrance exam from 31.8 to 41.3 percent, and raises the likelihood that white students take one of the exams from 44.7 to 46.4 percent. As a consequence, if all students were assigned to a small class, the Black-white gap in taking a college entrance exam would fall by an estimated 60 percent..." More students found that reduced class size for minority students extend beyond academic achievement like improved reading and math test scores. The studies prove that black teenage males who attended small-sized classes were 40 percent less likely to become fathers at a young age, compared to their peers in regular-sized classes. One issue is that more minorities should be in smaller class sizes. We should address the roots of racial disparity in student experience, etc. There are institutional biases in the system that must be eliminated as a means to handle resources. We know about the schools in the Jefferson cluster located in Portland's historically Black North Portland area. It has the only majority black high school in the school. 75 percent of the students are on free or reduced lunch, but it has been underfunded all of the time, closed down, or restructured via market based strategies based on the idea of "school choice." For the last 10 years, the Jefferson cluster has seen more schools closed than the rest of the PPS clusters combined. The cluster's students and families have disproportionately suffered disruptions to their educational experiences. Schools in the cluster are systematically underfunded. This leads to a downward cycle: Transfer policies allow families who can manage to do so to put their children in other schools, which leads the district to pull more money out of the "failing" schools as enrollment goes down. The students left behind often attend classes with over 40 students--or in other cases, can't get into the classes they need to graduate after teacher positions and entire programs are slashed. So, reasonable people want smaller class sizes, an end to stop and frisk, and an end to mass incarceration (which is related to the school to prison pipeline). So, the PPS including Carole Smith should spend money on resources and programs that deal with minorities and low income students in the classroom. The PPS can fund programs in the arts, music, theater, and P.E. including advanced courses. That can cause students to grow and be challenged in the world. Health programs food programs, qualified counselors, and Head Start is key solutions too. True educational justice when that we fight corporate interests that wants public education to benefit them (that deals with consulting firms, money sent to private charter schools, etc.). Communities in Portland, Medford, and other cities in America are standing behind real teachers, and real students who want better conditions in the educational field. It is all about the people at the end of the day.

The 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos 

Many corporate criminals and billionaires are starting their World Economic Forum in Davos. This is the 44th annual World Economic Forum (WEF). There are over 2,000 corporate executives, major investors, government leaders, central bankers, and celebrities there. Davos is where it has a Swiss Alpine resort. The whole deal is the annual celebration of wealth and avarice. This comes when the world's super rich have record profits in 2013. There are stock prices and corporate profits surged to new record highs. There has the swelling of the bank accounts and portfolios of the financial elite, even as austerity measures, wage cutting, and layoffs slashed living standards and threw tens of millions more people into poverty. On the eve of the forum, the British charity Oxfam released a study. It documented the staggering growth of social inequality. Oxfam reported that the richest 85 individuals possess more wealth than the poorest 50 percent of the world population or 3.5 billion people. The Davos Conference embodies the emergence of a new global financial aristocracy. The meeting has 80 billionaires and hundreds of millionaires. The general tone of the opening day deals with "fragile optimism" according to a survey of attendees. There is the expectation of more discussions about the recession now. There have been festivities there. The plundering of society still existed by the elites represented in Davos. The conference goes from January 22 to the 25th. It officially adopted the title "The Reshaping of the World: Consequences for Society, Politics and Business.” It will draw 1,500 business executives, 48 prime ministers and presidents, and the heads of twenty central banks. US attendees include Secretary of State John Kerry, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and Environmental Protection Agency head Gina McCarthy. Panel discussions on topics such as “Regulating Innovation,” “Closing Europe’s Competitiveness Gap,” “Higher Education—Investment or Waste?” and “Immigration—Welcome or Not?” are sandwiched between galas and parties for the rich and powerful. As the Washington Post quipped, “After absorbing so much info during the day, evenings are your usual party scene, devoted to celebrity-spotting, night skiing and such, and apparently a fair amount of alcohol consumption.” The Davos' prestigious Belvedere Hotel alone has ordered 1,594 bottles of champagne and Prosecco, as well as 3,088 bottles of red and white wine according to the BBC. This is done to facilitate the “320 parties in five days, its 126 rooms crammed with chief executives, prime ministers and presidents.” 

The attendees are celebrating for many reasons. The wealthiest 300 people in the world saw their net worth grow by $524 billion over the last year according to the Bloomberg News. The Bloomberg article, entitled “Davos Billionaires See Wealth Gains on 2014 Stocks Rally,” noted that Bill Gates was last year’s biggest gainer, having increased his fortune by $15.8 billion to $78.5 billion, recapturing the position of world’s richest person. The conference was created in 1971. It was created by the German business professor Klaus Schwab, who invited hundreds of corporate executives all over the Europe. He called the group "European Management Forum." The event changed its name to the World Economic Forum in 1987. Under Reagan and under Thatcher, the era of political reaction caused the WEF to grow. There has been the redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. Many hundreds of executives are at Davos. Many of them are from banks whose speculative and fraudulent actions triggered the 2008 financial crisis. Goldman Sachs sent eight delegates (including CEO Lloyd Blankfein), Citigroup and HSBC sent seven apiece, and JPMorgan Chase sent six, including CEO Jamie Dimon. Panelists at a Wednesday forum entitled “Is the International Financial System Safer Now than it was Five Years Ago?” included HSBC Chairman Douglas Flint and Barclays CEO Anthony Jenkins. Barclays paid regulators $450 million in 2012 to settle charges that it illegally manipulated the world’s main interest rate, the London Interbank Lending Rate, or Libor. HSBC paid $500 million to regulators to settle similar allegations and hundreds of millions more to settle charges of drug money laundering. They are trying to talk about income inequality. We all know that income inequality threatens the poor and the rest of humanity. It is a serious threat that must be fought against. They are not proposing radical social solutions to stop the plight of the working class or redistribute wealth downwards from the top. Workers should have their protections. The environment must be addressed and human life is superior to corporate profit. We have record taxation in the States in some cases and massive austerity globally. So, some want to continue in cutting regulations and cutting taxes alone and these actions will never grow the economy totally at all.




By Timothy