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A local TV reporter caught Our Boy Bush making jokes about the housing crisis.  Just like his Mother who thought that "it was working out nicely" for the Katrina victims in the Astrodome in Houston, Bush yuks it up with supporters on looking for a house to live in after next January.   http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/92508/"banned"_bush_video_emerges%3A_blames_recession_on_his_drunken_wall_street_cronies/#more

But as most of us know, the shock doctrine of falling house prices. lost jobs and rising food and gas prices is not a laughing matter to the majority of us.  The Feral Cats of Freedom invite Glen Ford back again to talk about the reason the "lords of capital" might push to attack Iran or somewhere even if it looks downright crazy.  Check out his just published story here: www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=707&Itemid=1

 Glen remarks in this piece that he wrote back in January of 2003 that the plan to attack Iraq was about "mega theater":

"The real show is in the show, itself. The people who created George Bush's ridiculous War Face are not just playing crazy to gain transient advantage over Frenchmen and Russians. They are Hell-bent on proving to the natives (all of us) that they are capable of unimaginable destruction. We must see it to believe it - which is why this war is all but inevitable. In the aftermath of horror, the world will become malleable, ready for reshaping in the not-yet-defined New Order. That's the plan. The pirates are confident they can improvise the post war details at their leisure, later. What we are witnessing is essentially the buildup to a global consciousness-searing U.S. military demonstration - the Mother of All War Shows. If we search for the military or economic objectives of the conflict on anything so crude as a map, we have missed the point."

So here we go again with Iran, says Glen.  At its all to maintain a failed system.  But how has this monster capitalism managed to keep itself bloated?

The answer appears in the form of the Mother of all Bubbles, the $750 trillion in "fictitious capital" that former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and other European social democrats point out "represents 15 times the gross domestic product (GDP) of all countries" on Earth, including more than $500 trillion in derivatives and other "notional" instruments.

This is the "money" that capitalist financial institutions pretend is real - and whose shadowy presence overwhelms and distorts the real world's comparatively puny $50 trillion economy (the U.S. GDP is $15 trillion). Derivatives and such instruments are not wealth, but mainly organized debt that is treated as money, and which threatens to strangle real economic activity. It is a "ticking time bomb" that no one - no one! - knows how to diffuse, much less eliminate.

For more on the "ticking time bomb", listen in on Saturday's show at 2PM Mountain Time or wait for the podcast that I will have up after the show.  Identifying the problem is a start.  I find Glen Ford able to make complicated economic issues easy to understand.  Most economists would rather keep you in the dark.

Speaking of good economists who want to simplify rather than mystify, last week Glen wrote an article on The Green Party nominees for President and VP, Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente.  The Green Party is interested in changing how the Federal Reserve works.  That seems to be of interest to our listeners.  Check it out athttp://monetary.org/

Monetary reform is the critical missing element needed to move humanity back from the brink of nuclear disaster, away from a future dominated by fraud and warfare, toward a world of justice and beauty.

The power to create money is an awesome power – at times stronger than the Executive, Legislative or Judicial powers combined. It’s like having a “magic checkbook,” where checks can’t bounce. When controlled privately it can be used to gain riches, but more importantly it determines the direction of our society by deciding where the money goes – what gets funded and what does not. Will it be used to build and repair vital infrastructure such as Levees to protect major cities? Or will it go into warfare or real estate loans, creating asset price inflation - the real estate bubble.

Thus the money issuing power should never be alienated from democratically elected government and placed ambiguously into private hands as it is in America in the Federal Reserve System today.

Indeed most people would be surprised to learn that the bulk of our money supply is not created by our government, but by private banks when they make loans. Through the Feds fractional reserve process the system creates purchasing media when banks make loans into checking accounts. So most of our money is issued as interest-bearing debt.

We are borrowing this money system from private banks when instead we should own the system, not rent it. Our government has the sovereign power to issue money (Art.1, Sect.8) and spend it into circulation to promote the general welfare through the creation and repair of infrastructure, including human infrastructure - health and education - rather than misusing the money system for speculation as banking has historically done. Our lawmakers must now reclaim that power!

 

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