NEOLIBERALISM - THE ECONOMICS OF FRAUD, THEFT AND ARMED ROBBERY

THE ECONOMICS OF FRAUD AND THEFT Attached is a 407 bill. I accidentally entered the 407 and departed it at the next exit. The bill shows a Toll charge of 46 cents, plus trip toll charge of $1, plus camera charge of $4.05, plus account fee of $3.75, for a total of $9.26. That's an impressive statement of 'efficiency' by the private sector. Efficiency at maximising private profit at citizenry cost. The last few decades have been described as the neo-liberal assault on populations and democracy. It might equally be called the Economics of Fraud and Theft, a fundamentalist 'religion' called the 'free market'. Free for whom? For the 0.1% and their slaves? The major components of this religion included privatisation of public property in different parts of the world, including of resources like water, on the theory that the public sector is inefficient and the free market will do better. From the cost of the subway in London, England, to the cost of electricity in Ontario, to private medical care in the US this is undeniably a scam. Everywhere private sector costs are grotesquely higher, and massive thefts of public property took place at bargain prices, creating the billionaire class of oligarchs who rule most Western countries and Western-influenced countries like Russia. A second leg of this religion was deregulation - to 'free the business class from red-tape and encourage innovation'. This reached ultimate heights in the unregulation of derivatives, where regulation was stopped on inception. A quadrillion dollars of derivatives contracts is estimated to exist on the balance sheets of American banks, and despite clever mathematical formulas suggesting precision, no one can really estimate the degree of risk and fraud they contain. Hence, despite the multi-trillion dollars of 'quantitative easing' (creating money from thin air by privately owned central banks led by the Federal Reserve), 'liquidity' remained elusive. Deregulation and the gutting of the SEC led to innovations like securitization (the creation of dangerous instruments like CDOs which destroyed mortgage audit trails, allowed the sale of trillions of dollars of junk CDOs bearing fraudulent AAA ratings, because billions of dollars in commissions and fees were earned by Wall Street). Financial officers openly spoke of 'off-balance sheet financing', or violating the requirement of 'full disclosure' on balance sheets. This part of the religion relies on 'self-interest' leading to optimal solutions.... as if eliminating traffic rules, speed limits and police would lead to safer and more optimal driving because every driver's self-interest would guarantee it. Dr. Chomsky has challenged the 'free-market innovation' assumption, stating that most of the major components of the post-industrial economy like the computer, the internet, wi-fi, smart phones, and so on, were developed at public cost and risk, in institutions like MIT funded by the taxpaying 99%, but the benefits went elsewhere. But economics students were consistently led to parrot the idea that 'public investment crowds out private investment'. A third leg was 'supply-side economics'. .... The Trudeau government pulled off a minor revolution when it campaigned on tax increases. Since Reagan however the mantra continued virtually unabated that tax cuts for the rich would lead them to invest and this would create 'trickle-down' jobs. But the Laffer curve was another fraud, as the super-rich took the cuts and then disinvested, dismantling manufacturing in major Western economies and moving it to cheap-labor countries, citing 'market forces' and 'globalization'. Why isn't there a movement to reclaim the falsely earned tax cuts back? In the UK in particular but generally in the West, working-class people were encouraged to invest in speculative things like stocks and real estate to distract attention from their stagnant or declining wage. The attack on the deceased Keynes and his replacement by the ‘monetarist’ Milton Friedman almost certainly was ideological. Keynes counselled putting money in the hands of the 99%, who would spend it on the necessities of life. This created the post-WW2 social welfare states, which stuck in the craw of the super-rich, who could not stand the notion of a middle class earning a decent wage. So they set about destroying it, following the advice of the 'Powell memorandum'. Friedman's monetarist theory of growth of money supply a point or so ahead of inflation has been proven to be a 'false doctrine', as credit creation by the Fed proceeds in ways intended to create and support bubbles, with inevitable crashes. A major unasked question is why are the Federal Reserve, the IMF and most central banks privately owned, and why is the identity of the owners secret? Why do private bankers have the license to print/create money from thin air, and then charge the public interest? How much of today's government debts and deficits would vanish if this license (protected by the world's greatest weapons of mass destruction and deception) were to be taken away, and returned where it arguably belongs - in the hands of 'the people'. And no modern economic theory concerns itself with the Economics of Armed Robbery aka Empire.... the use of weapons, armed forces, and 'intelligence agencies' to allow powerful nations to rob and plunder the weak. Perhaps that's what the 'free' market refers to - the freedom of the Empire to do what it wants. To be fair though, the US-UK 'Ivy League' (Harvard, Oxford, etc.) do refer to the strange 'resource curse' which causes countries possessing oil, gold, minerals etc. to plunge into an abyss which the wonderful West then miraculously benefits from..... the unofficial activities of the 'Christian' West in engendering these events by inciting civil wars, insurgencies, toppling of democracies, bribing and arming military or non-military insurrections, etc., do not form part of the profession of economics, which requires its adherents to spend years in the study of exquisite mathematical models leading to 'equilibrium', based on assumptions (rationality, 'efficient markets', etc) which have no equivalence in reality. A 407 BILL.pdf