Connexion
It's with an extremely heavy heart that I sit down to write today's post. Although widespread civil unrest was easy to predict, it doesn't make the situation any less sad and dangerous. We're in the thick of it now, and how we respond will likely determine the direction of the country for decades to come.
If the combination of peaceful protesting, looting and violence witnessed across American cities over the past few days completely caught you off guard, you're likely to come to the worst possible conclusion about what to do next. The knee-jerk response I'm already seeing from many is to crush the dissent by all means necessary, but that's exactly how you give the imperial state and oligarchy more power. Power it will never relinquish.
Tucked into the recent recovery bill was a provision granting the Federal Reserve the right to set up a $450 billion bailout plan without following key provisions of the federal open meetings law, including announcing its meetings or keeping most records about them, according to a POLITICO review of the legislation.
The provision further calls into question the transparency and oversight for the biggest bailout law ever passed by Congress. President Donald Trump has indicated he does not plan to comply with another part of the new law intended to boost Congress’ oversight powers of the bailout funds. And earlier this week, Trump dismissed the government official chosen as the chief watchdog for the stimulus package.
The changes at the central bank – which appear to have been inserted into the 880-page bill by sympathetic senators during the scramble to get it approved -- would address a complaint that the Fed faced during the 2008 financial crisis, when board members couldn’t easily hold group conversations to address the fast-moving economic turmoil.
The provision dispenses with a longstanding accountability rule that the board has to give at least one day’s notice before holding a meeting. Experts say the change could lead to key information about the $450 billion bailout fund, such as which firms might benefit from the program, remaining inaccessible long after the bailout is over.
The new law would absolve the board of the requirement to keep minutes to closed-door meetings as it deliberates on how to set up the $450 billion loan program. That would severely limit the amount of information potentially available to the public on what influenced the board’s decision-making. The board would only have to keep a record of its votes, though they wouldn’t have to be made public during the coronavirus crisis.
A Fed spokesperson did not comment on the changes in the law or whether the Fed would continue keeping records of its meetings.
- Politico: Recovery Law Allows Fed to Rope off Public as It Spends Billions
An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
- Arthur Miller
Before going any further, I want to share a graphic that accurately summarizes my position on the current pandemic affecting the world.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away
- Percy Shelley, Ozymandias
It didn't take long for the most opportunistic, nefarious and corrupt actors in the U.S. to turn a pandemic crisis into another massive power grab attempt. We've seen it before; after 9/11 and also throughout the response to the financial crisis a decade ago. The irredeemable sociopaths who always make the big, important decisions used those crises to consolidate wealth and power. They're going for it again.
There are many examples, but let me list a few:
The United States has historically bragged about its free and transparent markets. But what the Fed is doing today is pulling a dark curtain around the financing of this so-called free and transparent market. The public has no idea which Wall Street firms have received this $3 trillion or why they can’t borrow it elsewhere. This kind of obfuscation by the Federal Reserve could actually stimulate distrust in the U.S. banking system. The Fed admitted as much in its most recent Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) minutes, writing that participation in the Fed’s loan program “could become stigmatized.”
- Wall Street on Parade: Is the Fed’s $3 Trillion in Loans to Trading Houses on Wall Street Legal?
The business model of Wall Street is fraud.
- Bernie Sanders
Financial services as currently structured is the most pernicious, predatory and corrupt industry on earth. Moreover, it's the deliberately complex and opaque nature of the industry which then limits public debate when some problem arises and governments and central banks are called upon to take emergency measures to "save the system," which is just a euphemism for enormous sums of corporate welfare being funneled to people and institutions who couldn't survive otherwise.
It is systemic looting on a massive scale and the primary patrons of this ongoing and seemingly endless scheme are central banks. In the U.S. this means the Federal Reserve, which recently came back into the "market" with enormous new interventions in both the repo market and via renewed balance sheet expansion. I've read many of the smart takes on the repo crisis and still don't feel confident I know precisely what's going on. This is intentional.
We cannot content ourselves with simplistically dividing civilization into a workday world of everyday life that is properly social, as I call it, in which we reproduce the conditions of our individual existence at work, in the home, and among our friends, and, of course, the state, which reduces us at best to docile observers of the activities of professionals who administer our civic and national affairs. Between these two worlds is still another world, the realm of the political, where our ancestors in the past, at various times and places historically, exercised varying, sometimes complete control over the commune and the confederation to which it belonged.
- Murray Bookchin, A Politics for the Twenty-First Century
Today, the concept of citizenship has already undergone serious erosion through the reduction of citizens to "constituents" of statist jurisdictions, or to "taxpayers" who sustain statist institutions.
- Murray Bookchin, Cities
In the spirit of my recent interest in direct democracy and the future of human governance, I finally got around to reading something that's been on my radar for a while. It's a collection of nine essays by the late political philosopher Murray Bookchin published together in a book titled:The Next Revolution - Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy. It did not disappoint.
While there are numerous key points on which Bookchin and I would have disagreed spiritedly, that's not the purpose of this piece. Aside from being a wealth of information and knowledge (he closely studied nearly every major revolution in the Euro-American world), his greatest service here is a framework through which to understand human governance and how and why it's all gone so terribly wrong. Many of his themes cover ideas and realizations I've come to on my own, but the clarity with which he describes certain key concepts helped refine my thinking. The purpose of this post is to outline some of these ideas.
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