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SPEAKING FREELY
Modern economics' anti-business
missile
By Wendell W Solomons
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please
click
here if you are
interested in contributing.
Water is essential to life. You can hear words
like these in any language:
Droplets of water unite -
A river is
formed.
That version comes from a Sinhala
song.
Modern economics carries the hallmark
"privatization". Yet the exercise brings far more than
that. As markets demonstrate, it is a drying up of the
river by the opportunist.
Synergy essential to
the business company evaporates:
Droplets disperse -
The river runs dry.
See more on how this applies to business
organization.
When England's central bank was
nationalized in 1946, great financial houses in the City
of London retained a hold on the economy. This hold was
exercised mainly through:
(a) The dependence of the
British government's budget on interest-bearing loans
from financial houses (the sale of Treasury bills and
other gilt paper) and
(b) The counterpart,
neck-locking dependence on holding companies (of the
same financial houses) for budgetary purchases of
everyday commodities that range from the British army's
breakfast tea to its energy supplies.
However,
finance capital pursues onward its interest-seeking,
rentier profile. As much as the sheepdog is trained to
protect the flock, the bloodhound is trained to pursue
smell.
The former controllers of the pound
sterling of the Bank of England dropped it as world
money by default and went right across the Atlantic
Ocean for the dollar of the US Federal Reserve System
(USFed). Why? Though across the Atlantic, the USFed was
retained within the ownership perimeter of the same
first-cousin married clans.
The USFed idea was
conceived by Paul Warburg. Arriving in 1907 in New York,
his brother Felix married the daughter of financier
Jacob Schiff. The two clans were connected after their
joint stay in the same Frankfurt mansion in the 18th
century.
Besides that, it must be frankly
declared that the conjecture on USFed ownership today is
based on no more than axiomatic probability verifiable
at the USFed site on the Internet. The USFed - a cartel
like the Bank of England in 1694 - enjoys a monopoly on
the emission of the dollar, but makes no declaration
either about its ownership structure or its financial
accounts.
In this shadowy situation of monopoly,
academe and media must promote the merits of free trade
and free competition to rank and file citizenry.
As to first-cousin marriage, it is a mechanism
for consolidating clan property and the congealing of
single-mindedness in the clan. Because such a marriage
is conventionally outlawed to Westerners, the above
features help the clan elevate and nest itself above the
sharing and dilution that occurs in ordinary betrothal
in the West (a sophisticated chart of relationships is
traditionally drawn up in the East to avoid birth
defects in children in what is also known to
sociologists as uncle-niece marriage).
To follow
this reasoning about the shift across the Atlantic, for
more than half a century now finance capital clans have
had at their hands the US dollar as a lever. During the
period they have dissolved the mediating benevolence of
statesmanship that Adam Smith was compelled to suggest
at the critical time of rebellion of American colonies
against the British Crown in the 1770s.
Adam
Smith took over the idea of individual interests then so
highly publicized by Bernard Mandeville and others. He
wrote in his master work The Wealth of Nations:
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the
brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from
their regard of their own self-interest. We address
ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love,
and never talk to them of our necessities but their
advantages."
Smith says that in the pursuit of
self-interest an individual is "led by an invisible hand
to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
Nor is it always the worse for society that it was no
part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently
promotes that of the society more effectually than when
he really intends to promote it."
The Edinburgh
professor reinforced a message that statesmen must work
toward a higher, common good. Professor of moral
philosophy Adam Smith was applying in essence to words
repeated for centuries in the British Isles to relate to
the higher good, "Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in
heaven."
However, when neo-liberal economists
talk to us from Adam Smith - a known quantity - they
spin us around 180 degrees to the individual interest.
The theme was carried into academe. For its
part, Western celluloid welcomed the job of
re-programming because of the structure of its ownership
(Ted Turner came out with million-dollar handshakes to
use tele-journalists to capture world audiences, after
which the trailblazing "independent" tycoon handed over
CNN's worldwide audiences to media conglomerate
Time-Warner).
Motive? If society were atomized
to its smallest possible unit, to the individual,
neo-liberals estimate that social cohesion would be
lost. Organized community and even the family would be
atomized to rabble swayed by the fortnight's
opportunities, programmed by magnate media. As a result
the penetration of the US economy by the single-minded
finance capital clans would accelerate by leaps and
bounds.
We can recognize a still larger
international conjunction by now applying the term
Finanz Kapital. That may be exemplified by the gold
collected as payment for mustering men in Germany's
Hesse-Kassel and sailing them ("Hessian troops") out to
fight the American rebellion. The war was lost by the
red-coated troops on the king's side, but the money shop
that figured in the international gold transfer won.
Here is another key feature for rising above
competition to do business with the state: the common
banker's risk of not having a live debtor to return
capital and interest is minimized.
From
Frankfurt am Main, the red shield of the money shop's
principals - recently migrated from the Khazar east -
set off on the trail of George III's money to nest with
clans already in the social heights of England.
It is difficult to propose that Adam Smith was
ignorant as to the social hierarchy that controlled the
Bank of England in 1694 or the British East India
Company in 1600 (they were blaring and dominant money
and foreign-trade monopolies).
Smith had
observed: "Neither the most acknowledged probity, nor
the highest rank, nor the greatest public services,
protect [the legislator] from the most infamous abuse
and detraction, from personal insults, nor sometimes
from real danger arising from the insolent outrage of
furious and disappointed monopolists."
Heavy
taxes were raised for 10 years from 1763. Smith's master
work appeared in 1776 and it is more reasonable to
believe that he had been an observer of the possible
onward path of revolution. The spirit of those years is
captured by the Grolier Encyclopedia: "Britain's was a
mentality unable to appreciate the aims and aspirations
of its colonial people. Superpowers, all too often, are
not much given to introspection, to questioning their
values and assumptions."
It is more realistic
for us to propose that the professor - observing the
ferment of revolution - chose to participate in
mitigating and converting toward benevolence the
harshness of the money houses' influence on government.
After the lesson of the US declaration of
independence of 1776, the professor's idea (onetime
prime minister Lord Shelburne was a close friend) came
to be hammered on to the mast of the British ship of
state.
For the other part, Thomas Jefferson had
assured John Adams, "the flames kindled on the fourth of
July" have spread over too much of the globe ever to be
extinguished by the forces of despotism and reaction.
At first glance the two ideas seem different.
The tradition itself, however, dates to the Magna Carta
of the British Isles. We shall see whether it is lost in
the 21st century.
In contrast, not from British
civilization came the core doctrine spread in the United
States by the neo-liberals. Their doctrine used the
anti-Bolshevik missile launched by Alisa Rosenbaum, born
in 1906 in St Petersburg.
Alisa Rosenbaum
retained her initials and assumed the name Ayn Rand
after her arrival in the United States in 1926. She
served as the priestess or "guiding hand" for
neo-liberal Milton Friedman. She achieved that status
through her incantations plagiarizing in her new
location the philosophy of nihilist intellectuals such
as Russian writer Nikolay Dobrolyubov. The term itself
was first circulated by Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers
and Sons.
Nihilism ("nothing matters") in
the Russia of Orthodox Christianity and the House of
Romanov was a survivalist ethic of intellectuals. Theirs
was a country whose money and credit system was desired
by Finanz Kapital, which had begun to rock the Romanovs
from 1812, the time of Napoleon's Grand Army that lost
75 percent of its officers and men in Russia.
Money was required to conscript, train, equip
and feed army men and the endeavor would have been
impossible without the inducement of war loans
contracted in the name of the nation from the
triumphalist money houses after the guillotining of
France's Catholic Bourbon monarchy was done and finished
with.
Napoleon's multi-fold belligerence shows
us how the money houses had honed skills in turning a
quick penny using both aggressor and defender through
subsidiaries extending from Vienna to London until
Napoleon degraded to a self-willed liability (the same
liability situation evolved after power fell into the
hands of Vladimir Ulyanov and Leon Bronstein in 1917 and
of Corporal Adolphus Schikelgruber in 1939).
Both the Romanovs and Bourbons held a dim view
of usury because of the scriptural teaching on the
moneychangers. In England, King Edward I, notable for
his regular parliaments, had banished usury-practicing
clans in 1290 and France had followed suit in 1394.
To return to Alisa Rosenbaum - her associate
Milton Friedman had for his part cast his eyes in the
early 1960s on the position of J K Galbraith. In
Galbraith, president John F Kennedy had selected as
economics advisor a relative outsider (British
Commonwealth-born in 1908 in the Canadian province of
Ontario).
Britain had successfully operated a
nationalized central bank from 1946 and there is little
need for surmise on the roots of Kennedy's presidential
order. The order, still in force, authorized a Treasury
dollar to compete with the USFed dollar (such axial
competition was kept off by his Democratic successors
until the euro arose outside the US domain).
In
contrast to what anyone can read in Galbraith's books in
the world's libraries, Friedman's writings epitomize
street-savvy salesmanship and only a frugal background
in the philosophy of economics or even corporate
business (we can best refrain from speaking of the
classical philosophy and epistemology from which Adam
Smith wrote).
Without such intellectual baggage,
Friedman was easily readied and positioned as salesman
for Finanz Kapital by Ayn Rand's nihilist genie uncorked
from its bottle in the New World. Her seances were given
on Saturday evenings at gatherings in her New York
apartments (Alan Greenspan would also walk in and found
himself elevated from part-time jazz player to head the
USFed).
For all of us today, it was a tragic
case of "fools rush in where wise men fear to tread".
Ayn Rand's Virtue of Selfishness (1930s
book title) could not immediately break down to
individuals the Soviets ("councils" in Russian) as the
Petrograd University alumnus projected for her work. She
was lost to that audience for 60-plus years, the
audience being out of reach of Western newsmagazine,
movie, TV and FM programming.
Her anti-Bolshevik
missile had to wait out World War II until the mid-1970s
when mass markets were flooded with Japanese transistor
radios sporting 16m and 19m short-wave bands. In
addition, jamming of broadcasts on the longer wavebands
was made intermittent as the Leonid Brezhnev circle set
aside the many new beginnings of the Nikita Khruschchev
era to wine and dine under the self-satisfied, plush,
crimson banner of "Developed Socialism".
Better
reception of Munich-based stations such as Radio Liberty
incorporated at last Raisa and Mikhail Gorbachev's
generation in programming on the merits of free trade,
free competition and related goodies churned out for the
interlocked holding companies of Finanz Kapital.
Despite the lack of a Bolshevik audience during
those six decades, neo-liberals were busy messaging in
their trans-Atlantic nest. As a result, in the United
States the process of reduction to the individual began
to destroy the synergy that the business corporation
requires. What destroys the Soviet ("council") was
placed on track to destroy the Board of Directors (the
council of business). It must also hurt the councils of
social and religious organizations.
The only
refreshment that the United States experienced in this
regard was the arrival of Japanese managers in US
factories to help create the cohesiveness that they had
seen and absorbed at home in Japan's huge rise in
shop-floor innovation and productivity incepted by the
work of Kaoru Ishikawa and of US-consigned specialists
Joseph Juran and Edwards Deming.
The Japanese
experience with participatory management sparked off
"The Search for Excellence" in US management literature.
However, by then the hold of Finanz Kapital and of Ayn
Rand and her associates had malodorously soiled the nest
for business and industry. They had space left only for
gas-masked manager-by-directive. Mr Gas Mask has proved
ill-equipped to halt falling rates of US productivity.
Looking at the scandals that rock Wall Street
today, financier George Soros stated in no uncertain
terms that neo-liberalism "is a false and dangerous
ideology" (The New Republic, September 2002). In this we
see a dean of secular business moving in the direction
of Pope John Paul II, who dealt with the dangers of
neo-liberalism in an open-air sermon in Cuba on January
25, 1998. By then the pope had been exposed to
first-hand evidence of what neo-liberals had done for
his flock in Eastern Europe.
Wall Street's
George Soros makes this move because he sees the ferment
in everyday life. Usurpation of resources is happening
within the business organization because neo-liberals
have written off the common good as nonsense in
their process of retreat from Adam Smith.
Soros
is Hungarian-born but he has imbibed the anglophone idea
of "common-wealth". However, Europe in general is still
in the process of realizing that the euro symbolizes
enlarging joint resources. The 400 million population
has gotten as far as "European Communities". Many
Germanic and Romance languages have no equivalent for
"commonwealth". Several nations have only known
submission and subjugation in history, as reflected on
March 28, 1999, by Thomas Friedman, an editorialist
nested in the New York Times: "For globalism to work,
America can't be afraid to act like the almighty
superpower that it is ... The hidden hand of the market
will never work without a hidden fist - McDonald's
cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer
of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world
safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the
United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
Such lobbying was explained by Adam Smith in
several ways. For instance: "People of the same trade
seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion,
but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the
public."
Though brow-beaten and historically
blindsided by lobbyists of Thomas Friedman's status,
General Collin Powell retains a residual idea of
commonwealth thanks to his background in the West
Indies. That residual ethic of British "commonwealth"
extends to people in Belize, Canada, Guyana and then
eastward across Africa and Asia to Hong Kong.
We
will need more civic thinking if only to care for the
environmental resources we share on the planet. We have
to reconstitute civics after the great toll on body
politic taken by neo-liberalism.
On the
World Wide Web, analyst
Sartre stands up to reflect on "a
single world currency, administered through a solitary
clearing house and autarchic central bank". To take that
path in spirit, we must re-benchmark (a) to Adam Smith
and (b) to a civics of commonwealth, as Soros proposed
in his own way in his September 2002 study.
After the breakdown of Russia's Soviets in the
mid-1990s, if Ayn Rand's missile keeps pointlessly
hovering around, the "priestess of liberty" can plug
into the ongoing opening-up of China, there destabilize
social cohesiveness to send millions of its people to
settle in the Chinatowns of the world.
Speaking
with China's nationals today, you find that if they have
an alternative picture, it is gained from the American
movie. Consequently, if China's destabilization follows
Russia's, the media-promised oasis will be continental
North America, where water, energy, housing and other
infrastructural utilities and elements will also need to
be reproduced.
That is part and parcel of an
awaiting future for the existing programming by nihilism
that clouds the higher echelons of the United States.
There nihilism - as usual without acknowledgment - has
adopted J K Galbraith and the Keynesian model in
fly-by-night mode to stimulate someone's business and
save the USFed dollar by state intervention in
destructive warfare.
Britain's Lord Keynes,
talked down in media showtime of free marketers, claimed
that government should play a key, beneficial role in
stabilizing an economy.
It is worth repeating
that George Soros is today among people who comprehend
that we need to re-establish frames of reference and an
ethical bulwark to fend against Ayn Rand's "each man for
himself", her anti-Bolshevik missile that has misfired
on US business and industry.
Also refer to
the W Clark study (several URLs) "The Real Reasons for
the Upcoming War With Iraq". For more on Milton
Friedman/Ayn Rand see
http://www.geocities.com/WorldCityEssays/
.
(©2003 Wendell W Solomons.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have their
say. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing.
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