Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Pillars of American “Democracy”: Introduction

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

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Pillars of American “Democracy”: Introduction

Click here to access article by Moti Nissani from Veterans Today.

Nissani like many others appears to limit his analyses of the threats to real democracy by targeting major bankers and the major financial institutions where they reside. This is where we differ a bit. I target the system of private ownership of the economy known as capitalism whereas he targets bankers.

I regard bankers as the top of the heap of the capitalist class. They like their industrial corporate counterparts have enjoyed the benefits of the ownership of production of commodities and their sale for profit which is a central feature of capitalism. As is commonly known, capitalism tends to convert everything into a commodity so that capitalists can secure profits from them. Money has also been transformed into a commodity by the system. Major bankers who own the Federal Reserve are very much like industrial corporations except that they have monopoly ownership of the production of money and they secure their profits from their rental fees (interest) on the money they lend mostly to industrial corporations and other banks. Banks outside of the Federal Reserve derive their profits from the method of fractional reserve loans by charging interest on money they lend out but mostly don't have.

(Note: I tried and failed to reach a link to a most valuable source of explanation about money at the Wizards of Money site, but it doesn't appear on my computer. You can reach the audio portion of these broadcasts here, but not the transcripts--my old ears have difficulty hearing any spoken English other than with a standard American accent. I have just received an email from the administrator of the website indicating that they are having temporary problems. Another option is this website which contains many links about money.)

Anyway, in this introduction to a series of articles he broadly outlines how any pretense of a genuine democracy in the US has been subverted by bankers.

Given the fact that, over the last 35 years, every single political decision in America served the bankers’ interests and harmed the interests of the American people, how did the bankers manage to steadily increase their power and wealth at the expense of the vast majority?