-Caveat Lector-
ça promet...
Kris Millegan wrote:
> -Caveat Lector-
>
> from:
> http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.6/pageone.html
> <A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.6/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City Times
> - Volume 3 Issue 6</A>
> The Laissez Faire City Times
> February 08, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 6
> Editor & Chief: Emile Zola
> -----
> World Government Is Not Imminent?
>
> by Wolf DeVoon
>
> You can depend upon it: when a London Times economist swears that the
> moon is made of dust and rock, then in reality it's green cheese. And if
> Janet Bush is the soothsayer in question, assuring us that nothing's
> amiss in the financial night sky, then lunar cheddar is well past its
> sell-by date and starting to rot.
>
> Last week, the perkiest little jackal in Murdoch's pack of news hounds
> howled a seven-column banner headline that sent a jolt down my spine:
> "World government is not imminent" it proclaimed (Times business
> section, Jan. 27, 1999). Are we so close to global serfdom that
> robo-hacks have been told to deny it?
>
> Apparently so. Bush cites "deadly instability in world financial
> markets" as the impetus for accelerating One World proposals. Argentina
> wants to dollarize its weakening peso, Swedes and Danes are suddenly
> eager to join the euro, and two leading Canadian economists have
> helpfully mooted a single NAFTA currency--to economically merge Mexico
> with the USA. "This rush to unite is an understandable emotional
> reaction," Bush declares, "particularly for countries that have been hit
> hard by the markets crisis over the past 18 months . . . [and some
> economists] go even further, advocating a world monetary union: a
> single, single currency."
>
> You have to admire the brazen Murdoch chutzpah. Every word that followed
> was calculated to turn heads in favour of financial fascism. "The
> proponents of target zones and even of a world currency are not bonkers,
> at least the ones I know," Bush explained. "In fact, they tend to be
> people who are thoroughly fed up with the excessive fecklessness,
> frivolity, incompetence and misused power of international capital. They
> want to protect ordinary people trying to live in real economies . . .
> Their motives are completely honourable."
>
> I often marvel at the distance between financial columnists and factual
> reality, and Janet Bush is truly in a class by herself. I don't know
> which bank she deposits her paycheck into, but it sure ain't the First
> National Bank of Lunatics, proudly offering their customers a portfolio
> of "fecklessness, frivolity, and incompetence." Slamming capital markets
> is sport nowadays, but it's complete bunk, no different than the Big Lie
> pioneered by Hitler and Stalin. I defy anyone to show me a bank manager
> or an investor who specializes in the misuse of capital. The real world
> runs on reason and sober calculation of risk, especially in banking --
> and I refuse to discuss this any further, because the facts are
> abundantly demonstrated every business day in every teller cage, every
> mortgage company, and every stock exchange, to the extent that decisions
> are made by free market participants themselves, instead of being shoved
> down their wallets (and yours) by feckless, frivolous, and incompetent
> governments.
>
> Murdoch's strident denial of imminent global government comes at
> precisely the right time, because the One World bureaucracy is running
> scared, despite all their smiling photo ops at the Davos World Economic
> Forum. Five powerful, intersecting pressures are driving us to global
> government, not much different than the way Native Americans once hunted
> buffalo: by stampeding the whole herd over a cliff.
>
> 1. THE GATHERING EURO STORM
>
> Two decades in the making, the European Monetary Union finally took off.
> But what is it, exactly? Answer: a fixed exchange rate among 11 totally
> different economies, who couldn't stick to a "flexible target" system
> ten years ago that ended in farce when Britain was forced to devalue her
> currency and drop out. I predict that the new single currency "euro" is
> going to die an unpleasant death in about six months, because (a)
> Western Europe is headed for a nasty recession, sending everyone for the
> fiscal emergency exits; (b) Italian gangsters are busy printing a
> mountain of counterfeit euro notes, to take advantage of mass confusion
> when French francs, German marks, etc are confiscated; and (c) private
> sector enterprise is being wiped out in Europe, a victim of increasing
> regulation, low productivity, and punitive taxes.
>
> Socialists are now in government in all 15 EU states, promising free
> lunch with embroidered napkins for all, including Poland and a dozen
> state-subsidized flagship companies. Watch what happens when public
> employee trade unions take them at their word and present a list of
> demands. Worse: all 21 left-wing political party leaders met in Vienna
> last month to sign a European Socialist Manifesto suicide pact,
> promising to end "harmful tax competition" among their respective
> nations -- i.e., to drag everyone down to the weakest economy, the most
> lavish welfare state, the uncompetitiveness attained by whichever EU
> member imposes the highest tax on business and suffers the worst
> unemployment (France? Italy?).
>
> Correctly putting two and two together, the London Sunday Telegraph
> immediately predicted strikes and bankruptcies: "The overwhelming
> evidence is that Euro-Socialism has been a disaster for workers,
> creating unemployment in France, Germany and Spain at levels not seen
> since the Great Depression . . . The contrast with America is great
> indeed. Last month alone the US created more jobs than France and
> Germany have done in the past 10 years."
>
> 2. THE DAVOS CIRCLE-JERK
>
> With Europe tied to a block of concrete and poised to jump from a
> bridge, every economic witch doctor on the planet met in Davos,
> Switzerland, for a round of caviar and champagne chit-chat. The result?
> This year's World Economic Forum unanimously concluded that freedom is
> risky and has to be outlawed.
>
> Chancellor Gordon Brown, speaking for Britain, implored the group to
> "quickly set up a new global standing committee of international and
> national regulators to conduct regular and systematic surveillance of
> our world financial system." Eisuke Sakakibara, Japan's deputy minister
> of finance, agreed to "proceed speedily on the issue of a new
> international financial architecture." Dominique Strauss-Kahn, finance
> minister of France, called for "a commitment by G-7 members to
> strengthen their co-operation by even more frequent meetings and
> systematic co-ordination." Paul Krugman of MIT suggested a freeze on all
> bank deposits to shore up shaky governments in South America. "My view
> is that basically all short-term debt constitutes potential capital
> flight," Krugman argued. "Brazil is at risk not only from foreign
> lenders, but from anyone who can take money out of the country." U.S.
> presidential heir-apparent Al Gore happily ruled out a "laissez faire
> approach that caused so many of today's problems," calling instead for
> "more cross-border reviews and co-operation" -- such as the World Health
> Organization's proposed global ban on tobacco advertising and smoking in
> public.
>
> Of course, the weekend conference at Davos was just another junket for
> bureaucrats and political poseurs, no more significant than a
> wreath-laying ceremony at Dunkirk. But if every G-7 finance minister is
> publicly stumping for global capital controls, what are they promising
> each other in private? That word "surveillance" sounded mighty fishy,
> coming from Gordon Brown, whose UK Treasury has sovereign jurisdiction
> over two-thirds of Europe's foreign currency exchange. Private sector
> lending to so-called "emerging markets" has plummeted to less than $5
> billion a year, down 96 percent from $200 billion in 1996. At the
> moment, G-7 mandarins are talking about freezing bank accounts and
> stepping up surveillance. Confiscation is obviously next.
>
> 3. THE END OF HISTORY
>
> Believe it or not, the world has bigger problems than Al and Tipper
> forging a few deposit slips to balance bad debt in Brazil (perhaps with
> another dose of Brady bonds and IMF credits). Brazil is a comic
> sideshow, compared to Russia and Japan. No matter who does what to whom,
> claiming Super 301 privilege among thieves, the trade surplus piling up
> in Toyko has nowhere to go but higher into the stratosphere. No wonder
> the Japanese are eager to join a One World government, since they're
> holding $1 trillion in U.S. government bonds they can't spend without
> risking a global implosion of confidence. The tidal wave of
> U.S.-European multinational mergers is like a feeding frenzy on the
> cheap, stripping cash from a shrinking industrial pie before the lights
> go out.
>
> And in Russia -- trust me, brother – the lights are already out. There’s
> no way to turn 'em back on again. IMF rescue missions are an excuse to
> dicker. But no one expects Russia to feed itself, or clothe itself, or
> learn to sit up straight at the table and talk sense, ever again. The
> 1999 Russian budget, recently passed by the Duma concurrently with
> another wave of assassinations, is "a piece of fiction, inconsistent
> with the basic laws of economics . . . perpetuating a vicious cycle of
> inflationary financing, wage arrears and weakened credibility,"
> according to US officials quoted by the Financial Times last week. There
> won't be any Brady bonds for Russia. And IMF transfers are creating a
> financial pyramid scheme, providing fresh funds simply to pay off the
> old loans that fall due, contributing zippo to the real Russian economy.
> Growing talk about world government is a sign of geopolitical panic,
> because the scope of post-Soviet economic wreckage quickly outstripped
> our goody two-shoes McNamara-IMF Band-Aid mechanism.
>
> 4. THE END OF EXXON AND IBM
>
> Nobody expected a 40 percent fall in global oil prices, and no one knows
> what to do about it, either. Small wonder the Justice Department turned
> a blind eye to the Exxon-Mobil merger. They'd let Bill Gates off the
> hook, too, if he agreed to merge with an oil company.
>
> Don't be surprised by events this year. Merger mania and skyrocketing
> Internet stocks are the last gasp of our merchant banking paradigm,
> selling unlimited blue-sky growth without reference to earnings or
> dividends. Sushil Wadhwani, research director at Tudor Investment, put
> the cascading Wall Street "weight of money" phenomenon into perspective
> recently: "Although computers and the internet open up many new
> opportunities, the same has been true in technological advances
> throughout history," Wadhwani observed. "Is it really the case that the
> productivity improvements implied by the steam engine, the telephone or
> the aeroplane were less than that implied by the computer?" Good
> question -- since output per worker has only risen 1 percent a year over
> the last ten years, despite the introduction of computers.
>
> The short service life of computers implies that their contribution to
> overall productivity growth has been approximately zero. "The key point
> is that computers make up only a small fraction of US capital stock,"
> Wadhwani concluded. Success stories like IBM and Microsoft are basically
> a fraud -- shipping a majority of their so-called solutions to
> government agencies, where mountains of paper are filling bureaucratic
> cubicles and document warehouses at an alarming rate.
>
> After a decade of equivocal bullshit, Fed chairman Alan Greenspan
> finally decided to admit the truth, in testimony to the Senate budget
> committee last month. "The vast majority [of Internet stocks] are almost
> sure to fail," he said. "When you are dealing with stocks, the
> possibilities of which are either that it's going to be valued at zero
> or some huge number, you get a premium in that stock price which is
> exactly the same sort of price evaluation process that goes on in a
> lottery."
>
> Wall Street is not designed to be a lottery or a slot machine -- it's
> the financial store of value where most people have pensions and savings
> parked for predictable, long-term growth. Wall Street is supposed to be
> our mechanism of industrial capital allocation, funding well-managed,
> profitable companies and valuing them much higher than riffraff, who
> make senseless crap like Ronco Spray-On Hair. The consumer technology
> bubble is about to burst, kicking Yahoo and Netscape into the junkyard,
> where they belong. "We will get a 40 to 50 percent sell-off," Gary
> Shilling predicts, "but it is not going to happen all at once, because
> people will keep on piling back into the market. It is going to happen
> in a saw-tooth pattern until people are ground into submission." Halfway
> to submission, watch everybody suddenly yell for global government and
> fail-safe capitalism.
>
> 5. THE SHARKS AND BARRACUDAS
>
> If you've been reading the financial press, perhaps you already know
> that a new word entered the banking lexicon this year -- "bulge bracket"
> ambition. It refers to global capital underwriting and lending, the
> ability to do deals with governments like China, transferring hundreds
> of billions of dollars in a single keystroke. Finally, these are players
> that everybody is talking about and wants to control. They are few in
> number: Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and
> maybe J.P. Morgan. The Japanese are out -- dead in the water and closing
> up shop. The second-tier Europeans are busy talking about how to combine
> to form a "bulge bracket" entity of their own, in order to survive. This
> is the secret agenda that inspired European Monetary Union, merging 11
> currencies into one, creating a pan-European legal framework that will
> allow dozens of small fry to merge into a few, huge European banks,
> probably one French and two or three Anglo-Dutch-German (depending on
> when the UK finally joins the single currency zone). The people who are
> driving this oligarchy are incredibly evil. They can bankrupt
> governments, simply by refusing to roll over existing debt. Their
> geopolitical guru was and still is Henry Kissinger, who once said: "The
> illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer."
>
> Faced with the power of Goldman Sachs, weaklings like Al Gore and Tony
> Blair have their backs to the wall. All they can do to keep their little
> brown noses above water is threaten to form a "global government."
> Merrill Lynch will probably go for it, since it would simplify their
> bookkeeping to have just one client and they can ditch a bunch of
> obsolete computer systems that never worked right anyhow.
>
> -30-
>
> from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 6, Feb. 8, 1999
> -----
> Published by
> Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc.
> Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar
> All Rights Reserved
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> -----
> Aloha, He'Ping,
> Om, Shalom, Salaam.
> Em Hotep, Peace Be,
> Omnia Bona Bonis,
> All My Relations.
> Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
> Amen.
> Roads End
> Kris
>
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DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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