Government of the Plutocrats, by the Kleptocrats, for the Oligarchs

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  In his humorous but incisive article of September 23rd, 2008, entitled “Hard Landing for the Golden Parachute,” Dana Milbank addresses an issue that can best be described as merely a tit on the hog.
  The golden parachute issue is small potatoes compared with the real problem.  Shrinking the golden parachutes during the present financial meltdown would be a good step toward normative or ethical economics, but it would be better if the CEOs were required instead to pay back the equivalent of their parachutes to their companies out of their own accumulated wealth.  This would reduce the amount of money that the American taxpayer must now pay to prevent the collapse of the financial system.  Why should everyone lose except the ones who caused the losses?

  The real fault and the real problem, however, is not so much any indifference or ill-will on the part of the CEOs as it is the inherent fault of the entire system of money and banking in which they are still ensnared.  There is a classical Islamic alternative, even though the current system of so-called Islamic banking is essentially a fraud designed to mimic the existing system. 

  The best solution would be for Congress to let the entire global financial system collapse and then start over by activating Section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which provides that money will be created without interest, i.e. pure credit, to stimulate the production of real wealth, i.e., hard assets, with a return of the money to the treasury out of profits.  The Fed has never used this mechanism to create money backed by real assets, which is called for by the real bills doctrine.  Instead money is created for which the only backing is debt.  Once this mindset is accepted, it is only natural that debt will devolve into derivitives and the entire financial system will balloon in a gigantic ponzi scheme that survives through the mechanism of periodic booms and busts but inevitably must collapse.

  The solution is not to bail out the ponzi scheme so that it can start all over again with a little more oversight.  The only just and effective solution would be to change the entire system of money and credit so that money is only a medium of exchange and not an artificial source of wealth to be multiplied in an unending escalation of debt.

  The details of such a system of producing real wealth, which happens to be “Islamic,” can be found in http://www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us, for which I co-wrote the platform in 2006, and in the various links, especially http://www.cesj.org, The Center for Economic and Social Justice, which I co-founded in 1984 with Norman Kurland for a presidential task force called by President Reagan to apply the real bills doctrine.  Unfortunately, he did not follow through on our two multi-hundred page reports, but rather buckled under to those who wanted to continue a “government of the plutocrats, by the kleptocrats, for the oligarchs,” as Dana Milbank puts it in his article of September 23, 2008. 

  Reagan wanted to reduce the wealth gap within and among nations by broadening capital ownership, so that pure credit would be available only to firms that would let ownership of the profits vest in the employees or in vehicles such as a community investment corporation to be owned entirely by the residents of a particular town.  The investment of the money would be carried out through the commercial banking system, but companies without employee ownership would have to pay interest for money acquired.  This is known as two-tier banking.  Instead of promoting economic democracy in this way, however, based on the concepts “Own or Be Owned” and “Close the Wealth Gap,” Reagan continued to rely on the wealth-concentrating system of economic oligarchy in its attempts to modulate the faulty system of Wall Street without addressing the cause of the problems in an underlying time bomb.

  If either of the two major political parties in America wants to get serious about real change, they should address our real problems and the real cause of international terrorism, which is the rapidly growing concentration of capital ownership in a system of globalization designed by global oligarchs for themselves.  This violation of what is known in Islamic law as haqq al mal or economic justice produces and maintains both vested interests and vested ideologies committed to protecting the existing system in the first instance by military power.  Peace, prosperity, and freedom can come only from compassionate justice.  Without it civilization will self-destruct.  Without justice, the combination of military power and political oppression is the only solution, and it is at best an ephemeral one.

  If the “Palin/McCain” juggernaut is to live up to its name as a barracuda against the entrenched interests of economic and political injustice, it need look no further for a winning issue.  If Obama is to live up to his track record as an advocate for the marginalized in society, he should grab the current crisis as a God-sent opportunity.

SEE ALSO:

Let’s Stop the Greatest Theft in the History of Humankind, Otto Spengler http://www.alternet.org/workplace/99895/
Mushroom cloud over Wall Street, Mike Whitney http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20839.htm
Paulson: Foreign Banks can use U.S. Rescue Plan, Mark Felsenthal http://news.yahoo.com/story//nm/20080921/bs_nm/financial_bailout_paulson_dc
The New New Deal - Footing the bill and holding the bag, Mike Rivage-Seul http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20841.htm
U.S. orgy of debt, Eric Margolis http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20837.htm
When corporations rule the world, David Korten http://www.pcdf.org/corprule/failure.htm