"We [the People] are in Want of a Society... that does not tolerate the plunder of public resources,
nor the theft by corporate criminals of the hard-earned savings of ordinary people.”
“We are determined to build a society defined by decency and integrity, that does not tolerate the plunder of public resources, nor the theft by corporate criminals of the hard-earned savings of ordinary people.”
~ Cyril Ramaphosa
Building on the theme of this election year 2024 and the recent quote by Vivek Ramaswamy that this is America’s 1776 moment, I thought it would be instructive to compare today’s political climate to the times leading up to the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution.
Before Vivek introduced that 1776 meme into his New Hampshire endorsement speech for President Trump, I had been making these sorts of comparisons in my thinking.
But right now, the quickest way to apprehend the global shift already underway is to witness what is occurring in Europe and Texas. Specifically, look at the (farm) tractor demonstrations that are spreading across the advanced nations of Europe, and look at the border crisis showdown that is erupting in Texas.
These are outward symptoms of nationalist, populist movements that show the masses are fed up with policies of open borders and the attempts to dismantle a rich and thriving farming sector ostensibly to protect the environment from too much carbon & nitrogen emissions that food production is supposed to be guilty of.
After I read the book by Bill O’Riley called Killing England: The Brutal Struggle for American Independence, a book focused on the military campaign conducted under the leadership of General George Washington…
When you put things in the context of a battle between an empire and a nascent republic, or between an entrenched oligarchy protecting a rentier economy versus the burgeoning economic destiny of industrial capitalism as it rapidly developed in the 19th century, that line of thinking gives clarity to the bottom line summarized by economist Michael Hudson, referring to the financial oligopoly as it exists in the trans-Atlantic West today:
“The objective of the economy today is to maximize economic rent – it’s what the economists of the 19th century called unearned income”.
The mammon of the gods—passive income. Everyone wants to secure a guaranteed, recurring income without the inconvenience of a daily grind, blissfully riding on the backs of others’ labors.
For a greater understanding of the political, cultural, and historical divide between Great Britain and its North American colonies, I have to say that my fairly recent induction into the circle of influencers within the Lyndon LaRouche organizations has coalesced my thinking on this topic more than any other source material.
It is unfortunate that his name (LaRouche) is either unknown to most generations of Americans, or if known at all, has so many negative connotations attached to it. For now, it is sufficient to say that his prodigious scholarly research and writing as a political economist have educated a core remnant and legacy of historians and commentators who continue to pinpoint with precision the underlying political dynamics that we are witnessing today.
Lyndon LaRouche’s genius intellect was at least a full generation ahead of his peers. He had no peer in his ability to foresee the financial turbulence that lay ahead for America and the world from his vantage point of insightful reckoning. He identified the major historical markers or milestones that led America astray from fiscal sanity and allowed our economy to be captured by the imperial banking elites centered in London with their Wall Street acolytes.
He could tell you concisely why we find ourselves 33 trillion dollars in debt to a (privately-owned) central banking cartel that was created precisely to do just that; capture and control the government’s monetary and financial policies by the leverage of (fiat) money buying political favoritism while preventing the government from trying to rein in un-regulated corporate, monopolistic profiteering under the philosophic ruse of free market, laissez-faire, capitalism.
Sovereign credit of the nation’s treasury once judiciously used by the federal government to advance the general welfare of the nation resourced on the productive output of our industrious citizens has somehow been incrementally routed to a bankrupt economic system that must produce 1 trillion dollars per year just to pay interest on the national debt.
Chalk up nearly another trillion dollars of deficit spending to fund the unchecked military/security industrial complex and it is easy to question what remains in the federal budget to address the “entitlement” social, safety net programs passed by Congress to support our pensioners, disabled or non-employed citizens, health care needy and their dependents, and other types of either federally mandated subsidies or state-run programs that underwrite a wide spectrum of recipients that rely on public monies to help manage their lives.
As an aside, I can have the luxury of having some disposable time away from strictly money-making pursuits and compose this article partly owing to the Social Security checks I receive from the U.S. government, inaugurated under the progressive Democrat FDR. My government pension checks make a huge difference in my life and are the legacy of a liberal politician. I am grateful for this federal program.
But by way of comparison, at the state level, California is projected to have a 68-billion-dollar shortfall in meeting its 2024/25 budget. What does that portend for California state pensioners? The best thing that could be said is that as recently as 2022, California had a surplus of $97.5 billion.1
The point I’m trying to make here is not to examine all the factors that contribute to either state or federal governments running into revenue shortfalls. The fact that California was able to generate a budget surplus despite it having a heady overdose of progressive social programs that come with enormous expenditures is in itself instructive.
America is, or once was, the envy of the world because at one time it operated using a formula that brought an increased standard of living to a very large majority of all who lived within its borders; without running massive, unsustainable budget deficits.
That formula, once heralded, recognized, studied, and experimented with in other nations helped lift our society and others during the 19th and 20th centuries to improve and advance national economies leading to the affluence that brought large percentages of inhabitants into a growing middle class strata liberated from poverty.
Ironically, in a new book by scholar Glenn Diesen, The Ukraine War & The Eurasian World Order, coming out in mid-February, he notes that China has
“… to a certain extent “replicated the three-pillared American System of the early 19th century, in which the U.S. developed a manufacturing base, physical transportation infrastructure, and a national bank to counter British economic hegemony.”2
I want you to note that the American System so described was ‘countering” or antagonistic to what at that time was a system monopolized by the British pound sterling, not the American dollar. Understanding the difference today between an imperial system of central banking and a national sovereign banking system has been mostly obfuscated and conflated in the minds of virtually all modern monetary theorists.
Average lay persons have nary an idea of the difference between a national, not-for-profit public banking system as it sporadically existed in America’s past and the model followed by the current central oligarchic, privately-run-cartel banking that exists under the dominance of supranational financial elites.
The unfortunate fact is that the early successes of America staking out its monetary sovereignty were sabotaged and hijacked during the Woodrow Wilson administration with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Few realized at the time that the nation’s credit policies and monetary/fiduciary powers had been abdicated by Congress and placed into the hands of private banking professionals who prioritized shareholder interests over citizens’ interests. FDR managed to come up with inventive workarounds that allowed him to use national credit to enhance the productivity of the nation’s manufacturing (war-fighting) colossus, despite the restrictions of the “FED”.
But more than a 3 pillared formula as outlined in the Diesen quote, it’s instructive to take note of the truly marvelous American formula that led to the unprecedented affluence our nation’s people enjoyed relative to other countries on the globe.
In the context of describing the technological breakthroughs made during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 4-terms as president, and the accomplishments of constructing 3 major hydroelectric dam projects during those years, particularly noteworthy is the phenomenon that arose out of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s electrification project completed in that era. (Begin quotes:)
“The TVA’s transformation of a four-state region in the American South has been described many times, a productive miracle by which the poorest, least educated, least healthy section of [our] nation became more well-off than most.
But what was the effect of these great projects and this technological advance on the entire U.S. economy, for the following generations? The economic method of Lyndon LaRouche can answer this question. (Author’s note: A LaRouche reading of Hamiltonian banking principles is definitely in the minority opinion in American academic circles, although it is coherent with modern Quantity Theory of Credit (QTC, Werner (1997)
LaRouche stated (here, once of many times) economic principles of Alexander Hamilton which he accepted and to which he richly added content:
As stressed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, there are two keys to the development of a poorly developed land area into a prosperous economy. On the one side, there is basic economic infrastructure: public transportation, water management (both latter substantially public works), and energy supplies. The other side, is what Hamilton identified as “artificial labor”: the increase of the productive powers of labor (per capita, and per square kilometer) through investment in scientific and technological progress.
Hamilton said this progress is the fruit of encouragement of human inventiveness, by protective patents and by national bank credit for new “internal improvements”—infrastructures—and new manufacturing methods.
Roosevelt’s great projects succeeded precisely because of the Hamiltonian intention embedded in their creation and functioning”. (End quotes)3
The” Hamiltonian Intention” is embedded in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution in what is referred to as the welfare clause. The so-called welfare clause which prescribes a government of We the People to be established on promoting the general welfare of its people marks the first time that a nation-state is morally mandated by its constitutional founding documents to” secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”.
The Hamiltonian principles of a strong central government with national banking authorization working within the purview of the U.S. Treasury guiding, (and monitoring) the lending practices of the local and regional banks empowered the presidents* that adhered to an American System of thinking— fostering human inventiveness, resourcefulness, and creativity—through lending and investing only into the physical economy—spectacular projects and enterprises that created wealth that impacted all of society—and directed our nation in defining its best character as the “can-do” leader among nations advancing into the modern age.
“Alexander Hamilton put it in the simplest way, writing to Gouverneur Morris in 1781 that the purpose of banks is “to put the savings of the nation at the disposal of those able to use it most productively” to develop inventions and manufactures”. (ibid)
What happened? The sad truth is that a system once appended upon the government incentivizing private industry to invest in scientific and technological progress (utilizing sovereign credit and a national banking system designed to finance industrial production and growth to free economies from monopolies) and train their workforce with the requisite skillsets needed for modern manufacturing practices has been commandeered by an overarching philosophy of radical environmentalism that excoriates the basic human desire for progress and technological advancement.
All the activities associated with manufacturing and engineering a civilization pushing forward human progress, the climate alarmists tell us, are leaving a carbon footprint that the planet can’t sustain.
The human capacity for technological progress that has enabled the massive increase in urban-based populations to live in metro areas of high-density cities has only polluted our environment and led us to a climate crisis abyss according to the Green New Deal agenda purveyors. A net zero technocracy has all but buried the Hamiltonian legacy that once propelled our nation and others forward in advancing a type of classical liberalism and Protestant-style work ethic that built Western civilization to heights unimagined in earlier generations.
Instead of an ever-expanding understanding of harnessing physical principles (science drivers) towards an ever-increasing ability to apply science (technological innovation and discovery) to improve the living standards of earth’s inhabitants, we are instead headed on a path of deindustrialization, decarbonization, and ultimately de-population.
Economist Michael Hudson lays out the desultory economic landscape that has been imagined by a rentier class of synarchists or what Dr. Steve Turley calls the “clerisy class” —the bureaucratic experts who know better than us proles.
“I had numerous visits to Washington with the White House, the Treasury. They all said that the way to grow is to cut labor’s wages, cut labor’s living standards, and essentially force governments to sell off their raw materials, resources, and lands to [International] Finance.
… the universal message of almost all of the Wall Street people I worked with, and of academia; the way to get rich is to financialize the economy. You’ll get rich by going into debt, and using debt to buy houses, real estate, stocks and bonds and increase their prices. And the whole idea of getting rich was all about not producing more goods and services, but to increase asset prices: real estate, stocks and bonds.
So, for the last 10 years in the United States, 92% of the profits of the Fortune 500 companies have been used to buy stocks – their own stock buyback programs – or to pay out as dividends. Only 8% is used on new investment. [in the actual physical economy that spurs GDP growth]
And the main message of mainstream economics is [that] you want to offshore labor. You want to deindustrialize. You want a post-industrial society. If you could just move as much of America’s industry as possible to China and to Asia, there’ll be more profits for the firms [i.e., the Corporations], and that will increase the stock prices, and the economy is going to get richer.
Obviously, it doesn’t work. This is the advice that’s given to global south countries to develop. It’s the basis of [the] IMF’s so-called “stabilization programs”.4
What is described by Mr. Hudson is the antithesis of what helped America reach its zenith in industrial productivity during the 40 years before the early 1970s.
And as for the guy who vies for re-capturing the American Presidency and whose Agenda-47 bucket list of things he wants to accomplish when he returns would place him in the category of another FDR. On steroids;
But that’s not what the legacy news media wants you to believe…
Let’s make America great again.
(To be continued Part 2)
Notes: * Most presidents who pursued policies coherent with the American System of Political/Physical economics since Lincoln have either been assassinated or mysteriously died in office.
https://larouchepub.com/other/2020/4708-larouche_s_physical_economic_m.html#footnote-004