We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, August 10, 2012

The Fed, Ben Bernanke and the rotten Libor

Click here to access article by Dean Baker from Al Jazeera.
Ben Bernanke had an obligation as Fed chair to expose and stop the rigging of inter-bank lending rates.
This sub-headline is nonsense if one understands society from a class point of view--which this liberal author cannot. Instead, he serves to maintain fantasies about our government. Such as the "obligations" mandated by Congress, especially the one about maintaining full employment are only ruses to legitimate the function of the Federal Reserve--a self-interested consortium of private bankers. 

In the US the sixteen trillion dollars used mostly to bail out domestic and foreign banks could have been a bonanza in the creation of full employment if it had been used in the reconstruction of the antiquated infrastructure in the US. But, in the real world the so-called Federal Reserve is really only obligated to their fellow bankers--the international bankers club that largely rules the world. Thus, Bernanke and his fellow bankers at the "Federal Reserve" fulfilled their true obligations!

Likewise, the government prosecutors fulfilled their obligation to their masters in the banking sector by not prosecuting Goldman Sachs that benefited from both the profits from selling financial products they knew were defective and the bailout of AIG that insured their bad bets.