March 26—Swiss law required that Credit Suisse’s shareholders vote on the takeover by UBS, but UBS would not participate in the forced marriage without massive government financial commitments and a massive loss to Credit Suisse’s shareholders. The latter would not be approved by the shareholders. What’s a government to do? In a flash, they simply rewrote the law, eliminating the vote.
It was made clear to France’s President Macron by financial authorities that government pensions had to be “reformed”—that is, the age of retirement is pushed ahead by two years. Such an outrage to the population was unlikely to be approved by their legislature. Again the solution—do away with voting on the matter.
And don’t expect the consequences of the bailout schemes of behind-the-scenes emergency meetings of “financial authorities”—such as Janet Yellen’s Friday evening “Financial Stability Oversight Council” affair—to be treated any differently.
The financial markets love democracy, until they don’t—and the lesson delivered is that voters are welcome to vote on almost anything, as long as financial speculation is the autocrat in town.
It turns out that there is a conflict between “democracy” and “autocracy”—but not the one touted by Western opinion-shapers, the one that Biden loves to sermonize on. That phony debate against those labeled as “autocrats,” the leaders of countries who pushed back against financial speculation, who use government powers to defend some notion of the general welfare of their populations. In the current Western world, democracy is fine for “identity” issues, but when each financial heart attack occurs, and a showdown occurs between the survival of populations and the purchase of another round of financial speculation, the pretense of “democracy” is stripped bare. Society cannot afford for you to vote.
What happens to $33 trillion of U.S. government debt when it is allowed to consider the question, what are the chances that such a debt gets paid? And, tangentially, where does anyone imagine the money for bank bailouts actually comes from? Can such an entity, that has been covering the bets of the speculators for decades when they lose, really keep their hands off the supposedly sequestered funds of the Social Security system? When push comes to shove, will Biden submit, as Macron has, to the looting of such sacrosanct savings? And would the matter be put to a vote by you or your elected representatives?
The “American System” economic strategy of Alexander Hamilton and his water-powered projects, of Abraham Lincoln and the transcontinental railroad, of Franklin Roosevelt and the TVA, of John F. Kennedy and the “Apollo” program are real. The United States did it better and longer than anyone. However, the present reality, and irony, is that China, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, is more American than any other force on the planet just now. The basing of credit-generation upon actual physical-economic projects, the old-fashioned distrust of financial speculation games, and the central commitment to raising the general welfare of the population have been key to bringing 800 million Chinese citizens out of poverty over the last 30+ years.
Ten years ago, China’s President Xi Jinping was first elected, and his offer of the poverty elimination program, of his building a middle class, to feeding the billions of undernourished of the world with his Belt and Road Initiative has given reality to the long-frustrated hopes of the underdeveloped. That offer is not just, as Lincoln would say, the last best hope of mankind, but the actual last best hope of the United States getting out from underneath our own debt trap.
Why else would the financial speculators and permanent-war gang spend so much energy building up China as your enemy?
Presently, the Global Majority of nations are getting on board the Belt and Road, not the transparently phony “democracy fighting the autocrats” operation. Sign and circulate the Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s “Call for an Emergency International Conference To Reorganize the Bankrupt Financial System” today!
Tomorrow, and over the next two weeks, drive despair out of your heart and fear out of your poor soul. Organize yourself and all you care around the simple and inescapable reality, that “Without the Development of All Nations, There Can Be No Lasting Peace for the Planet”—the title of the Schiller Institute’s forthcoming April 15 conference.
It’s called voting with your feet.
