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Seven Lean
Kine
By Israel Shamir –
November 28, 2008
It is warm and sunny in
Jaffa, a fishing harbour on the Eastern Mediterranean just south of
Tel Aviv; the skies are blue and the sea rather calm, with the
clientele of sidewalk cafés enjoying their milky arak and
coriander-laced coffee. The economic crisis never arrived here;
there are few lay-offs, prices have remained high, though the
shopping frenzy has somewhat subsided. A steady stream of tourists
from overseas reassures us that Israel is not the only island of
calm in a troubled world. However, the newspapers compete with one
another's economic horror stories. They
say that sales of vintage French champagne
in Kazakhstan are down. “Sales of Porsche and Mercedes cars have
fallen by half so far this year. People are just going to have to
get used to buying fewer Louis Vuitton bags”, bewail American
salesmen. Jeez, this is a real calamity, calling for emergency
measures!
I read
Tom Friedman’s column in the NY Times,
asking young Americans who normally crowd restaurants to stay home,
eat tuna fish and be afraid, very much afraid – but they do not heed
his warnings. Well, the old boy has cried wolf too often. He tries
to scare us, but I do not get scared, as Leo Tolstoy once said about
a fellow writer. The great Western propaganda machine has run too
many scares for us to care. Do you remember Iraqi WMD, evil
al-Qaeda, world terror, Peak Oil, global warming, mad cow disease,
bird flu? Do you know personally of even one person who suffered
because of any of it?
Or look further back, into the great AIDS scare of 1990. Then, AIDS
was supposed to destroy the world as we know it and kill billions;
but actually it caused just a few casualties within the gay
communities. Yes, condom manufacturers and the Big Pharma made a
fortune and professional guilt-trippers accused us of being
not-sufficiently-compassionate with the sufferers, but otherwise, it
was just a scare. Now they want to scare us into eating tuna fish
sandwiches.
This is not to say that they can’t succeed. If one shouts ‘Fire!’ in
a crowded cinema, the results could be tragic even if there is no
fire. And there are reasons why things happen this way.
The usual explanations refer to bankers being stupid. They did not
know what they were doing when they flooded the markets with their
cheap credit, or sold swaps or marketed derivatives. Alternatively,
it is argued that they were so greedy that did not understand their
long-term interests and ruined everything. But the bankers and the
financial elite are not stupid, neither are they short-sighted. I
believe that things happen because people intend them to happen,
unless there are very strong proofs to the contrary. I believe that
unless we do something pretty drastic, they will emerge out of this
crisis even more rich, more powerful and in fuller control of our
lives.
A similar development took place in ancient Egypt, we are told.
There were some years of prosperity, and the clever guys hoarded the
stuff; afterwards, some years of scarcity duly followed, and the
ordinary folk ended up being indebted and enslaved to the clever
guys.
You probably recognise this as the story of Joseph and the Pharaoh
(Genesis 41). The Pharaoh had a dream of seven nice fat cows coming
out of the Nile and feeding in a meadow. And suddenly, seven other,
ugly and lean cows came up after them out of the river. “And the
ugly lean kine did eat up the seven nice fat kine”, saith the Writ.
So Pharaoh awoke and asked for Joseph’s advice; and he advised him
to hoard the harvests up until the days of scarcity, when the
collected harvests could be used – not just to feed the people, but
to enslave the people. And so it worked: all the people of
Egypt became slaves of the Pharaoh, thanks to the clever advice of
Joseph. For this reason, the people of Egypt bore a serious grudge
against Joseph and his tribe of financial advisers.
History is always repeating itself. Latter-day financial advisers
have used the archetypal model of Joseph in the Bible, but they went
it one better: Instead of enjoying prosperity and being prepared for
scarcity, they orchestrated both. First, they opened the gates of
credit and got a lot of people hooked. Afterwards, they shut the
gates and ushered in their Armageddon weapon, the seven lean kine.
The bottom line remains the same as of old: they intend to enslave
America and the world.
Our like-minded friends on the Web (Mike
Whitney) condemn technical tools – swaps,
derivatives, ABS, MBS, CDO, CLO and other abbreviations. They get
into the technicalities, how this device worked, how they convinced
others, how they dumped and securitised the toxic debts. The “how?”
part can be entertaining, but the “why?” should interest us more. If
we deal with a burglar, we do not waste much time on discussion of
his tools of crime, we look at the crime itself.
What did they plan to do? At Stage One, they turned the US into a
great money-sucking device, a vacuum-cleaner for the world's assets.
They printed paper dollars, issued worthless bonds, generated
trillions of debts. Income from Russian gas, Arab oil, Chinese
labour, Japanese innovations, African ore, Swedish cars and French
wine was trapped in this black hole. Michael Khazin, the Russian
economist, explained that these criminals acted like any
professional bankrupt: they got into debt, and then they took their
money and stepped out while leaving debts for the public to handle.
They succeeded in putting a lot of Americans and Brits into debt,
and with these debt-promissory notes they swindled the rest of the
world.
At Stage Two, they fleeced the ordinary Americans who had been quite
happy to participate in the grand larceny of Stage One. Their
bankruptcy does not hurt them a tiny wee bit. You do not have to be
a Jew to use Jewish tactics, and the American bankers – Jewish and
non-Jewish alike - took a leaf from traditional Jewish scam book and
applied it on an unheard-off scale. And among these scams,
bankruptcy was one of the most popular. Enron was a first try; the
idea was a very successful one: you take a public commodity and
steal it; eventually people will have to buy you out.
If their plan is completed, the ordinary people of the US will find
themselves deep in debt, while the profits will go to a happy few.
Their plans to “save the economy” are just follow-up for what they
did earlier. A few guys make millions, salt their fortune away, and
then ask the people to foot the bill, for otherwise, (God help us!)
there will be massive layoffs among the PR companies who advertise
for champagne in Kazakhstan. The remedy is also the same as it was
of old. The people of Egypt could answer Pharaoh and his financial
adviser Joseph: the collected harvests are ours, thank you for
temporary storage, now please move away. Do not even dream that we
shall indebt ourselves and our children in order to get what is ours
by right.
Likewise, Americans may answer austerity planners, including Tom
Friedman: you made money, now you pay back. You promoted the plan,
now you foot the bill. You planned to confiscate our assets, now we
shall confiscate yours. Take over private and personal assets of the
fat cats, cancel their accounts, sell their houses and tangible
assets. Make every person who was employed in a bank fully
responsible for their bank's failure. Lynch Goldman Sachs. Forbid
bankruptcy. Try those responsible for the crash: they knew it is
coming, they planned for it. It is not by chance that architect of
the collapse
Alan Greenspan swore his oath of Federal
office on the Talmud in front of Ayn Rand, Satanist and creator of
the Enlightened Selfishness cult. (Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
reads like a novelization of Mein Kampf by Barbara Cartland,
quipped our friend Ian Williams.) And Greenspan has been rightly
described by Stephen Lendman as
Public Enemy No 1.
This economic crisis provides us with some important lessons: World
economy has been run for the last twenty years (and made a lot of
progress) using no “real money”, just inherently worthless IOUs of
paper dollars, promissory notes and bonds. The money we use is
“monopoly money”, play money – and it still works! We should
demystify money, understand that it has no real substance, that it
is just a provisional device that may help accountants, and serve as
measure of investments, but not the final measure of everything. The
world can take the next step, and switch to issuance of some future
zero-interest free-credit money, which will not enrich one group of
people at the expense of another. Such money was used in Soviet
Russia with great success, until the party nomenclature swapped it
for the US dollars, reaping immense profits for themselves and
leaving the rest of the public penniless. Now, the US nomenclature
has decided to use the example of the Russian oligarchs and rip off
the US public. But we may use the new knowledge: market model had
“won” its competition against the socialist model only because of
fraudulent banksters.
Do not panic, because that is what Friedman and Greenspan want you
to do. Panic is a bad adviser. The crisis is imaginary: machines
still work; the people still know how to do their jobs. The sharks
will eat each other, but the small fish will escape the net. The
Americans had a lot of good, if borrowed, time. Though a lot of it
was stolen or wasted, some of the debts funded real improvements.
Outside of the Anglo-American Neoliberal core, the economy is sound.
A cooling-off period would not be too bad for the planet. Some job
restructuring is called for – after the crisis, there will be less
need for brokers and more need for menders. And as for the debts,
there is a solution: instead of robbing the public, expropriate the
expropriators – rob the robbers!
Source:
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=9743
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The talented Mr. Greenspan
salon.com > News Jan. 10, 2000
The Federal Reserve chairman has resisted
slowing the economy while waiting for his reappointment,
but will he put the brakes on now?
By Ian Williams
....For example, reportedly he is a staunch atheist,
but that did not stop him taking an oath on the Talmud
(held by his aged mum) to become chairman
of Nixon's Council of Economic Advisors,
while his prophetess Ayn Rand beamed away in the front row.
Apart from his quasi-cultist past, the main problem
with Greenspan is that he has too much power based on
his alleged powers of economic prediction....
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