SYNOPSIS

The 1913 Federal Reserve Act let powerful bankers usurp money creation authority in violation of the Constitution's Article I, Section 8, giving only Congress the power to "coin Money (and) regulate the Value thereof...." Thereafter, powerful bankers used their control over money, credit and debt for private self-enrichment, bankrolling and colluding with Congress and administrations to implement laws favoring them.

As a result, decades of deregulation, outsourcing, economic financialization, and casino capitalism followed, producing asset bubbles, record budget and national debt levels, and depression-sized unemployment far higher than reported numbers, albeit manipulated to look better.

After the financial crisis erupted in late 2007, even harder times have left Main Street in the early stages of a depression, with recovery pure illusion. Today's contagion has spread out of control, globally. Wall Street got trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to socialize losses, privatize profits, and pump life back into the corpses by blowing public wealth into a moribund financial sector, failing corporate favorites, and America's aristocracy.

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Review by Ian Fletcher

America’s Fate Under Chinese Hegemony:

The news has recently hit the press that China’s economy, measured on the purchasing-power basis that adjusts for price differences between nations, may surpass the U.S. in only another five years or so.

Surprisingly, China has still shown no signs of morphing into the cuddly liberal and democratic nation, devoted to American ways from Coca-Cola to democracy, whose eventual appearance has been assumed by American policy for thirty years now.

Our policy during this period has, after all, enthusiastically cooperated with China’s efforts to build up its economic power—which entails, of course, every other kind of power, including the military kind.  So our assumption of a benign China had better be right, or else we have been abetting the creation of a monster.  A hostile China will be arguably even worse than the USSR, because it will not do us the favor of sabotaging its economy by adhering to a dysfunctional economic ideology.

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