B00BLPJNWE EBOK (22 page)

In the meantime the bankers have taken over.
The new president of the European Central Bank is Mario Draghi. This person was
Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Goldman Sachs International and a member of Goldman Sachs' Management Committee.
Draghi was also Italian Executive Director of the World Bank, Governor of the Bank of Italy, a member of the governing council of the European Central Bank, a member of the board of directors of the Bank for International Settlements, and a member of the boards of governors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Asian Development Bank, and Chairman of the Financial Stability Board.

Obviously, Draghi is going to protect the power of bankers.

Italy's new prime minister, who was appointed not elected, was
a member of Goldman Sachs Board of International Advisers
. Mario Monti was appointed to the European Commission, one of the governing organizations of the EU. Monti is European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, a US organization that advances American hegemony over the world. Monti is a member of the Bilderberg group and a founding member of the Spinelli group, an organization created in September 2010 to facilitate integration within the EU. According to news reports, Monti’s “technocratic cabinet” does not include a single elected politician. The banks are taking no chances: Monti is both prime minister and minister of economics and finance
.

Just as an unelected banker was installed as prime minister of Italy, an unelected banker was installed as prime minister of Greece. Greece's new appointed prime minister, Lucas Papademos, was Governor of the Bank of Greece. From 2002-2010. He was Vice President of the European Central Bank. He, also, is a member of America's Trilateral Commission.

Jacques Delors, a founder of the European Union, promised the British Trade Union Congress in 1988 that the European Commission would require governments to introduce pro-labor legislation. Instead, we find the European Commission demanding that European labor bail out the private banks by accepting lower pay, fewer social services, and a later retirement.

Perhaps future historians will conclude that democracy once served the interests of money in order to break free of the power of kings, aristocracy, and government predations, but as money established control over governments, democracy became a liability. Historians will speak of the transition from the divine right of kings to the divine right of money.

Germany has been selected by the EU to provide the financial might to keep the EU glued together. A bailout fund is being established to which Germany is expected to contribute more than its share of the vote. Germans’ inflation concerns are considered to be passe and a constraint on the development of the centralized European state in which European countries and history simply disappear.

A great deal of money is behind this centralization of power, much of it American. A unified Europe is easier to control than a fractured one, and Europe, organized by the US into NATO, has become an auxiliary to America’s Empire, fighting America’s wars of hegemony in Central Asia and Africa.

What do Europeans have to gain? As Washington sends US Marines to Australia to counter China’s rising power and surrounds nuclear-armed Russia with military and missile bases, Washington’s imperial ambitions expose Europe’s population and beautiful capital cities, depositories of centuries of art and architecture, to Russian nuclear weapons. What does Europe, beyond the payoff of its political “leaders,” have to gain from Washington’s hegemony?

Why is Europe lined up against Russia, the country that supplies Europeans with energy and markets for Europe’s production? What does Washington do for Europe except to send its soldiers to die in foreign lands for American Empire?

The government of the US, and the military/security complex and neoconservatives that control it, see Europeans as dupes who can be pressured to sacrifice themselves for the handful of interest groups that control “the world’s only superpower.”

Europeans have their own identity. Why should they sacrifice it for a few American interest groups? If Europe is to be unified economically in a common market, the unity should extend to Russia. Germany should be finding its own destiny, not serving the special interests that control America.

The United States is a failed democracy. Washington has no concern for the economic welfare of citizens or for their civil liberties or for those of its European puppet states. Washington serves the purposes of the interest groups that control it. These interest groups are committed to financial fraud and to war.

This book demonstrates that empty-world economic theory has failed on its own terms and that its application by policymakers has resulted in the failure of capitalism itself. Pursuing absolute advantage in cheap labor abroad, First World corporations have wrecked the prospects for First World labor, especially in the US, while concentrating income and wealth in a few hands. Financial deregulation has resulted in lost private pensions and homelessness. The cost to the US Treasury of gratuitous wars and bank bailouts threaten the social safety net, Social Security and Medicare. Western democracy and civil liberties are endangered by authoritarian responses to protests against the austerity that is being imposed on citizens in order to fund wars and financial bailouts. Third World countries have had their economic development blocked by Western economic theories that do not reflect reality.

All of this is bad enough. But when we leave empty-world economics and enter the economics of a full-world, where nature’s capital (natural resources) and ability to absorb wastes are being exhausted, we find ourselves in a worse situation. Even if countries are able to produce empty-world economic growth, economists cannot tell if the value of the increase in GDP is greater than its cost, because the cost of nature’s capital is not included in the computation. What does it mean to say that world GDP has increased four percent when the cost of nature’s resources are not in the calculation?

Economist Herman Daly put it well when he wrote that the elites who make the decisions “have figured out how to keep the benefits for themselves while ‘sharing’ the costs with the poor, the future, and other species” (
Ecological Economics
, vol. 72, p. 8).

Empty-world economics with its emphasis on spurring economic growth by the accumulation of man-made capital has run its course. Full-world economics is steady-state economics, and it is past time for economists to get to work on a new economics for a full world.

Is The US Economic Recovery Real?

In 2010 the National Bureau of Economic Research placed a 2009 date on recovery from the recession that began in December 2007.
http://www.nber.org/cycles/sept2010.html

The declared recovery is based on an upturn in GDP deflated with a measure that is believed to understate inflation by interpreting price increases as quality improvements.

Statistician John Williams (
www.shadowstats.com
) removes some of the nebulous hedonic quality adjustments to arrive at the corrected real GDP graph below.

Below is real retail sales:

Below is housing starts:

Below is consumer confidence:

Below is nonfarm payroll employment:

The graph below shows the difference in the measure of inflation by a constant basket of goods (top line) and the new substitution-based measure (bottom line):

The graph below shows average weekly earnings: