2012-02-02 "How US Fascism Comes Out on Top Via 'Too-Big-to-Fail'?"
[http://thedailybell.com/3576/How-US-Fascism-Comes-Out-on-Top-Via-Too-Big-to-Fail]
'Too Big to Fail' Clearinghouse Hunt .. Regulators have notified some payment and clearing firms that they face a review to determine whether their failure could pose a risk to the economy. The Financial Stability Oversight Council, comprising top financial regulators and created by the Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law, last month sent letters to so-called financial-market utilities—the minutes didn't specify which or how many—saying they are being considered for designation as systemically important. The council disclosed it had sent the letters in minutes from its last meeting, released Wednesday. – Wall Street Journal
Dominant Social Theme: Important businesses cannot be allowed to fail. If, in fact, government must prop them up and take them over, then so be it. Look how well GM is doing!
Free-Market Analysis: Is this how fascism comes to America? It would seem a steady drip, drip, drip of frenetic government activism is concretizing the fascist state the way lime solidifies cement.
Even in the 1980s under the Reagan administration, the media mythos of the US emphasized its marketplace affiliations. The idea was that US civilization was succeeding because it was market based. But this rhetoric seems to have been abandoned in the 2000s.
The US sociopolitical stance, more and more, is one of "bigness" in which large entities are seen as successful or important no matter the reality of their evolution or current status.
It is a kind of trick, of course. Those with access to the levers of power will always be able to create large facilities. The issue is actually the competence of these facilities and whether they fulfill the purposes for which they were created.
Many modern, large-scale entities, especially those with government affiliations, are anything but competent. This is an entirely logical perspective. Large entities are usually advantaged ones. And the more artificial advantages an entity receives, the less apt it is to be exposed to market forces.
The less operative market forces are, the more inefficient and hapless the enterprise becomes – entailing yet more bailouts and special advantages. It is soon a vicious circle, a feedback loop of incompetence and even futility.
Has it been planned that way? The Anglosphere power elite that wants to run the world via global government is not apparently interested in stability or efficiency. Its handful of immensely powerful and wealthy leaders are interested mainly in DESTABILIZATION, from what we can tell. Bigness is yet another resource within their tool kit.
The more the West – and the world – is destabilized, the easier it will be, seemingly from their point of view, to impose world government. Starving, homeless, sick, war-weary populations are apt to put up less resistance to a New World Order than healthy, engaged citizens.
If one was to try to build a New World Order – global government – the logical manifestations would be hunger, misery, pestilence and violence. The causative agent would be bigness – of every kind. The bigger the better – especially if that bigness is buttressed by a bureaucracy supported by taxes and divorced from competition.
And what better way to inculcate bigness than to declare that certain hitherto private entities are "too big to fail"? It is a perfect dominant social theme. These power elite-generated fear-based promotions are intended to separate middle classes from wealth and power while reinforcing globalist agencies.
In fact, the idea that certain businesses are "too big to fail" is merely an extension of the propagandistic effort that gave us our current catastrophic central banking economy, worldwide. State-monopoly central banking is supposed to be an antidote to economic collapse. But always, the power elite will make arguments that are entirely opposed to the reality it wants to inculcate.
If the elites are arguing that government regulations and government funding will somehow make private enterprise more stable, you can be sure the reverse is true. The modern world is based on this sort of sick propaganda, which constantly informs people of solutions that generate exactly the opposite results from those that are putatively intended.
This kind of propaganda-as-program was unleashed on the West at least a hundred years ago, from what we can tell. In hindsight, it seems increasingly evident that those who campaigned for monopoly central banking (like JP Morgan himself) probably had a hand in the Panic of '07 that ultimately led to the passage of the Federal Reserve Act 1913.
Since that time, US government intrusion into all sectors of private enterprise has only grown. Various government activities are routine now that would have generated an outcry even in the 20th century a decade or two ago.
The invasive practices of "Homeland Security" are just on example. Hardly a day goes by without some new and obvious outrage: a child is tasered, an elderly woman with cancer is strip-searched at the airport, innocent people are shot when a SWAT team raids the wrong house looking for marijuana cigarettes.
But as obvious and horrid as these episodes are, the main evolution of government intrusion takes place within the context of sociopolitical policies. When bigness and its justifications are enshrined as statist polity, then fascism itself has becomes the dominant "ism."
This is what is happening now in the United States. Fascism is taking over capitalism not just within the context of a business evolution but as a matter of course. This is no accident, in our view. Its expansion has been falsely justified and then enshrined as law. Here's some more from the article:
[begin excerpt]
A lot of attention has been paid to the law's provision directing regulators to give the designation to big banks and other financial firms, but it also includes a similar process for clearing and payments firms. The law automatically considers any bank with $50 billion or more in assets systemically important. Regulators haven't yet designated any other financial institutions thusly ...
The letters, sent in January, indicate regulators completed the first of a two-stage process to decide which financial-market utilities warrant tougher regulation. In the first step, regulators look at information they already have, such as an institution's exposure to counter-parties and links to other financial institutions, to determine which entities merit further scrutiny ...
Later, the council will vote on individual clearinghouses; a two-thirds majority is required to designate one as systemically important. Those that are ultimately designated so face heightened regulatory requirements and scrutiny. But they could gain new access to some of the Federal Reserve's loans, including the discount window.
[end excerpt]
It is hard even to begin to unpack the untruths in these three paragraphs. Clearinghouses are a necessary part of the financial process, but guaranteeing clearinghouses with federal money merely ensures that sooner or later there will be a cataclysmic financial disaster. (Ask any thinking person whether there is any facility in the world – government or otherwise – that can guarantee solvency and the answer should be "no.")
Now, those who have created central banks will argue that indeed government – or its agents – can ensure solvency but this is not true. A central bank can inflate away catastrophe via money printing but at some point that same money printing passes the costs of catastrophe onto hapless citizens who are burdened with higher prices and higher taxes as a result.
One trades financial instability for social instability. That's what is happening now, in fact. Extend the trend logically and one begins to perceive that while the financial system has been "stabilized" the social system has been DE-stabilized.
From the point of view of the power elite, social instability is perhaps preferable to financial instability. We reply: Be careful what you wish for.
Then there is the issue of regulation. Every regulation is a price fix, transferring wealth from those who have created it to those who have not and are unable to utilize it as efficiently. Regulations DISTORT economic activity and usually have results that are the opposite of what is intended.
Too-big-to-fail legislation is toxic on every level. It marries government to private industry, drains competition from the marketplace and ensures that the most important elements of the modern financial system are further constrained by regulatory fiat.
Of course, one could argue that the modern system – one that has been built on the monetary fraud of central banking – is not worth saving anyway. We would agree with that, in fact. The current financial system not only deserves to collapse, it DID collapse three years ago.
The dollar reserve system, from our point of view, is already dead. From what we can tell, central banks – at the behest of their controlling power elite – have injected some US$50 TRILLION into the system worldwide.
These horrible numbers are actually incomprehensible. The larger financial system is effectively frozen. It has not been allowed to shed its failing elements, and one could argue, in fact, that these failing facilities have been enshrined at the heart of the system's decisive economic dysfunction.
In other words, the very entities that are the most important to the system's current operation are the ones that should be allowed to fail. They exist only because the system – worldwide – is a kind of elite command-and-control operation that has little or nothing to do with free markets.
But as the current central banking system becomes more and more dysfunctional, the costs of keeping it going are rising exponentially. As we have pointed out, the current environment has a manifest logic, and it's not a pleasant one.
There is no economic justification for "too-big-to-fail" except the brutal logic that government funds must compensate for private failures. This will work for a while, but not forever. Eventually, the dysfunction will be too big even for governments' large pockets. In the meantime, we will have "isms" – specifically, growing fascism in the US. Europe, we would argue, is headed in the same direction.
Remove competition from the marketplace and you end up with a collection of enterprises that perform inconsequential functions incompetently. More importantly, you end up with a federalized private sector and a series of disastrous "public-private" partnerships.
The result is ruin – ruin of every kind. Militarism thrives in a fascist environment. So does a certain kind of ignorance, civic dysfunction and increasingly poverty and civil violence. Chaos looms. Of course, out of chaos ... order. A New World Order. That's obviously the plan.
But as we often point out, we would tend to believe that what we call the Internet Reformation will make the elite's main dream rather hard to achieve. The more that the powers-that-be plot to increase the dysfunction of the Western world and especially America, the more push back is generated, in our view. It may turn out that ordinary people in the Internet era are far more resistant to fascism – statism – than elites currently believe.
Conclusion: Will the world-spanning plans of the Anglosphere be realized? Just as too-big-too-fail is ultimately an insupportable concept, so is the idea of world government. They are both based on enormous economic fallacies and carry within their implementation the seeds of their own destruction.