From a 'Speculator Stag' Nation to Secular Stagnation.

Capitalism's Inner Circle.

Neo-gliberalism: enriching the world's .1% while impoverishing America. With another Black Friday fast receding and we face a new barrage, this one trumpeting the arrival of  Cyber Monday, the dynamic of the world's superpower channeling its workers' salaries into Chinese worker's paychecks, via War-Mart, which acts more like a conduit or an investment bank for a regime that is headed by the largest Communist Party on the globe, still leaves the question of why the disparity between how the US overtly helped engineer the collapse of the Soviet Union by driving down the price of oil and entrapping the USSR in a war in Afghanistan, yet pours a tsunami of dollars into propping up the Chinese State and its corrupt Bureaucracy, once again intrigues me.

The impetus for reflecting on this topic is the article published regarding the new Russian submarines that are "so silent the US Navy calls them 'black holes'". You have to wonder if whether the US under president Reagan hadn't decided to jettison detente with the Soviet Union, and instead work to collapse it in order to gain access to its oil reserves, if this technological marvel, most likely using stealth technology stealthily procured, would have come to fruition.

This is just the latest of world developments that forces me to ponder just what is the neo-liberal agenda? Thanks to the Tea Party, the country's liberals have a feast of idiotic assertions and lame-brained statements fed to it to discredit the so-called Neo-Conservative's agenda, which is neither neo, nor conservative, so that it is so busy congratulating itself for their perspicuity that they fail to understand, never mind question, what the Neo-liberal agenda, with Larry Summers pretty much the poster boy, as Groveling Norquisling is for the Neo-cons (although they admittedly have deeper ranks with Karl Rove, and well, the entire Fox news staff, ready to assume the mantle) just might be.

For whereas the Neo-Cons, for all their mendacity, are now fairly forthcoming with their agenda, the Neo-liberals, the most stark statement of their intention being delivered by Larry Summers, in the prospect of transferring millions of jobs out of America, where(at that time) employers were forced to pay healthcare costs for a citizenry being made ill by industrial pollution, only stated objective, articulated best by candidate Ross Perot in the campaign against Clinton and Bush, being the enrichment of other nations' citizens so that they could then buy this country's exports, creating newer, better jobs here. That was in 1992, more than a generation ago, and there's been absolutely nothing to bear it out, because, without a representative form of government, which China has never, ever had, nor has any prospects of ever having, citizens have labor camps if they don't like working conditions and rural impoverishment if they don't like urban living. Thus, the only part of the Neo-liberal program that worked was the one warned about by candidate Perot: the great sucking sound as jobs left this economy permanently.

And now, low interest rates, or, as should be more accurately called, transferring income from savers and retirees to banks who already had so few viable candidates for loans that they'd developed an entire infrastructure, called "shadow banking", to accommodate making loans to unqualified, high credit-risk individuals and business (few remember the covenant-lite loans being foolishly indulged in by the banks pre-crisis to allow behemoths with no cash to swallow whole businesses which were healthy, asset-strip them, and spin them off)  to somehow spur consumer spending and increase employment even though it has failed in the five years since its implementation to do anything of the sort.

But to suggest that taking money out of the pockets of the country's citizens and funneling it instead into the accounts of speculators and carry-trade robots such that it permanently impoverishes the country's citizens by design, rather than by mistake, by using the same excuse GW worked so well during the Iraq War, such that staged incompetence is used to prolong the disastrous consequences of a failed action because it enriches those who are enriching you, is a concept so foreign to a naive and feckless American public, that it never even occurs to them.

However, that is the wonder of the GW regime, it is the gift that keeps on giving, because the milestone it achieved was that of separating completely and permanently the entire concept of Accountability for one's actions, a syndrome that swung through the revolving door between politics and business as easy as Abramoff's acolytes, such that now it reigns even in the realm of the business world, an eventuality for which Jon Corzine owes his continuing existence outside the walls of a prison. What it  means in politics, though, because government jobs, already having a low correlation between performance and expectation, is that now any government agency can declare certain steps must be taken in order to achieve certain objectives. Period. If it should happen that those steps lead us over a cliff to our ruination, well, we are to blame; the 
steps, having once been decided upon, being  themselves inviolable.

So as we continue to stuff mortgages at an unprecedented pace into the same MBS that now, (Pfew!) no private institution, the same ones that offer those mortgages at a cut-rate interest rate, the liability for which they then sweep right off their books and onto the back of the taxpayer via Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and The FHA which in combination gobble up more than 90% of them, would ever consider investing in. While the same investment banks that brought the global economy to its knees charges fees that even a banker would balk at if they were paying them instead of skimming them.

So, following the head-scratching pantomime of feckless and reckless GW, Larynx Summers wonders aloud about 'secular stagnation' knowing full well that it is the Neo-Liberal agenda of enriching citizens in other countries to allow them to afford the products of American Exporters, and completely aware that the American people he represents are those newly-created people called corporations, and that those same corporations have no allegiance to the United States of America, nor any more of a sense of brotherhood with its flesh-and-blood citizens than with the cattle it slaughters for purveying cheap hamburgers.

That this is the true agenda of so-called globalization is everywhere manifest. But rather than face that, we continue to enhance the very structures, such as Fannie Mae, that are designed for our impoverishment, despite the fact that the flimsy facade of providing access to the middle class, that their creation was heralded as providing, has been proven completely erroneous. They are instead, and at least this time, totally transparently, being used to force the American taxpayer to subsidize the purchase of an asset to a class of people who can ill afford them, at a price in far excess of affordability, held there by the stated market manipulation of the Federal Reserve, as it blows another bubble to be burst in the near future to propel another generation into the streets and hold the carrot out for the next. This is the new American Dream. Not to have a place to live, but to buy, on credit, temporary shelter until AmeriCorps decides it's time for new blood and you end up on the street, with no job, no healthcare, no home, no savings, just lots of debt ready to be force-fed to the taxpayer to assume. That's why there can be no more social security, it will all be consumed for debt security. At least that's one thing you can bank on.