Finance aristocracy pushed trans-Atlantic

Wendell W. Solomons

Anglo-American finance institutions find themselves forced to cough up large and still larger pay for their hit men. Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer argues, “our aim should not be to prevent rewards where they are deserved, for long-term success or hard work.” Today’s rules of unregulated markets allow

executives to go out and become financial raiders in their own right - when they would compete with their previous financial home. This market headache comes at a time when France and Germany at EU Summits ask for a ceiling on the incomes of executives of financial institutions.

Yet, there’s more. Besides the EU, globalization now causes the G20 to take up the risk to world trade posed by financial piracy. China, India, Russia and Japan (which states that it can no longer play the role of Yes-man) belong in the G20 which represents two-thirds of humanity

A diplomat who served Australia for more than a quarter century brings up the year-2005 published work, ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man’ by John Perkins.

This stimulates thought.

Have the hit men been part of the plan to make us walk the economic gangplank today? In the alternative, events in the market may be suggesting that the world’s traditional finance aristocracy travels on a razor’s edge to avoid losing control of its financial raiders whose ranks now expand into thousands. These thousands have been saturated too by the media catch-phrase of the last decades - ‘Free to Choose.’

The US Federal Reserve has been placed on the horns of a dilemma because financial institutions like J P Morgan pay increasingly large salaries and bonuses to keep their financial raiders within instead of their nipping out to carve for themselves a part of the cake like the infamous Bernard Madoff who took a wedge of $ 60 billion worth of savings, including those of his friends.

In this quote, we see a careful US Federal Reserve chief trying to keep financial firms from being restrained in their endeavours: “Forcing large, troubled financial firms to shrink is not a useful solution to the dangers created by ‘too big to fail’ institutions, Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Gary Stern said in an essay released on Tuesday.”

“If we exclusively embrace a reform that misleadingly promises victory over TBTF by constraining the size of large financial firms, we may squander the time and resources needed to address the problem at its roots,” Stern said. (Reuters, Apr. 21, 2009)

Australian diplomat Reg Little recollects how John Perkins had described life as part of an elite group trained to “utilize international financial organizations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our Government and our banks.” The Australian diplomat adds -

“Perkins’ second book on financial strategies, ‘The Secret History of the American Empire,’ invites readers to revisit and reconsider events like the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and ponder on it as the product of a team of economic hit men. It also raises daunting questions about the longer-term viability of major global institutions like the World Bank and IMF.”

Those, then are the dimensions of the hit men’s world and scope of their know-how. We have a salient example next.

Zombie hit men

Lawrence Summers, a nephew of economics textbook writer Paul Samuelson, was placed on a team to conduct economic reforms in the Baltic Republic of Lithuania. Within a year of his team’s effort, the economy of the republic turned pale: Suicide rates rose to the highest in Europe.

Lawrence Summers acted out here not the role of the fat tick but that of a master zombie, groomed by what US journalists in 1976 had called Voodoo Economics.

This behavioural nudging was a legacy from Great Communicator President Ronald Reagan who promoted Milton Friedman to Presidential Economics Adviser, the position he had hankered for after the slaying in 1962 of President John F Kennedy.

Friedman had been translating for two decades for the psyche of hit men such as Lawrence Summers, the social philosophy of Ayn Rand.

Rand, Ayn (1905-1982) was named Alice Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg by her non-observant Jewish family.

A fan of early movies, she had chosen to study social pedagogy in Bolshevik Petrograd. From there she carried her stock-in-trade across oceans to the USA. Her movie scripts to adjust behaviour flopped and she converted to penning books. A wealthy sponsor was found through the grapevine to finance their publishing and promoting on university campus.

Lawrence Summers

Ayn Rand

In the USA of the 1950s and 1960s Rand received promotion as a cult figure for college students.

By 1965, courses on her books were offered in as many as eighty American cities. Wearing a $ sign as a brooch in her dress, the chain-smoker taught that selfishness is a virtue, that altruism is a vice, that the unfettered capitalist, Top Hat of her writings that began in the 1930’s, was the best possible persona for the world.

Lest we miss her purpose, Martin Seymour-Smith, a critic, explains:

“Unfortunately her crypto-totalitarian and ultra-simplistic ideas have had some influence on the conservatively bred young, since they allow people to be ruthless without a bad conscience. Her ‘philosophy’ is capitalistic-Superman (as in the figure in the comics).”

He continues,

“The ‘great’ men are those who use others, in the name of ‘reason,’ with an enlightened ruthlessness.” As icing on the cake, he adds, The Fountainhead - like her other books - is offensively ill written (‘pedestrian, pockmarked with short, clipped staccato sentences’).”

Social philosophy

Many defined her social philosophy as one proposing a dog-eat-dog outlook. Gore Vidal described her outlook as “nearly perfect in its immorality.”

Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman brought forth men like Lawrence Summers as zombie functionaries. Pushed out of Harvard by teachers but himself ‘Too Big to Let Loose,’ the same Summers has been promoted by the financial aristocracy to the position of head of the National Economic Council at the White House of President Barrack Obama.

Hopefully, Summers will now face the music and dance - promoting discipline on the turf as Godfather of financial raiders.

Alerts

Financial icon George Soros with an intellectual coterie of his own, anticipated that the hit men would shift the anchor of the aristocracy. He moved in with an article called The Capitalist Threat a decade ago -

“Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on money as the criterion of value. What is more expensive is considered better... People deserve respect and admiration because they are rich. What used to be a medium of exchange has usurped the place of fundamental values, reversing the relationship postulated by economic theory. What used to be professions have turned into businesses. The cult of success has replaced a belief in principles. Society has lost its anchor.” (Atlantic Monthly, Volume 279, No. 2, February 1997.)

Two centuries ago a forecast on lost moorings had been penned: “This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself... It establishes a monopoly in certain spheres and thereby requires state interference. It reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and simply nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation.” (Marx’s manuscript edited and published by F. Engels in ‘Capital’, Volume III, Chapter 27.)

Contemporary US commentator Laura Knight Jadczyk follows on -

“And so it is: such a state of affairs cannot last long... and, as Lobaczewski says, the outcome is inevitable. Sooner or later, the reality this psychopathic elite think they create is going to turn around and bite them. In fact, it is already beginning to.

And that is due to another psychopathic trait: the inability to remember the past or conceive of the future and the consequences of their actions.”

“Goaded by their character, psychopaths thirst for global power even though it ultimately condemns them to death along with millions - or billions - of others. Psychopaths do not have the capacity to understand the catastrophes that they repeatedly bring on themselves and the world.

Just as germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing, so the psychopath does not understand that the only reality he is creating is the reality of his own ultimate destruction. (http://laura-knight-jadczyk.blogspot.com).

To be continued