So an amazing little story was leaked out this week. Turns out that a lot of the taxpayer money going to AIG is actually going to save European banks. The implications that US taxpayers are bailing out the bank, Societe Generale, via proxy through AIG, cannot be something Mark Penn, one of AIG's new PR men, would have preferred got out.
But it also may explain the timing of Gordon Brown's visit last week.
Personally, I found it a bit in bad taste for the British PM to be addressing a joint session of Congress so shortly on the heels of president Obama's address to a joint session of Congress. It's bad enough the Crown suspended Canada's Parliament. Now it's trying to appear presidential.
But with the AIG revelations, it's starting to make a little more sense. Just as we learn that AIG needs another 30 billion, the Prime Minister is over here imploring the US to "renew our international economic cooperation." A renewal which would, presumably, include us continuing to bail out the UK's insolvent banks. The WSJ got hold of a document that showed some of the recipients of AIG money to be UK banks including the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds, Barclays, and HSBC Holdings.
So maybe Brown felt a pressing need to lobby Senate leaders to make sure AIG survives. But I'm far more interested in what else Brown was selling on his visit to the Capitol.
Brown's Crusade
Gordon Brown is a driven man. He's been jetting around non stop to pitch his big vision: A global governing body to oversee the world's finances. Here is him selling the idea to congress the other day:
Our task is to rebuild prosperity and security in a wholly different economic world, where competition is no longer local but global and banks are no longer just national but international.
It seems to me banks are already too international, where some bad loans in California ends up bankrupting a bank in Dubai. But Brown isn't just talking about cooperation. He's talking about something far more profound:
"Or we could view the threats and challenges we face today as the difficult birth-pangs of a new global order -- and our task now as nothing less than making the transition through a new internationalism to the benefits of an expanding global society."
I laugh when people talk about a new world order. But when Gordon Brown talks about it, I don't see the humor. These assholes, Brown and the global economic elite that he represents, are trying to use a catastrophe of their own making as an excuse to usher in a scheme that they've been trying to pull off for a long time. Shock Therapy, Naomi Klein style. But unlike Katrina, 911, or the fall of the Soviet Empire, this time they are desperate. This time, they're trying to prevent Britain and Western Europe from utter collapse. Not just financial collapse, but the whole globalization regime:
They can barely let the words pass their lips, but some of the EU's most important policymakers were forced this week to discuss what was once unthinkable: that at least one of the 16 eurozone countries might be on the brink of ditching the single currency.
Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, admitted that the 10-year-old eurozone was under "extreme strain", with weaker countries struggling to keep their economies afloat in the face of the devaluation of other currencies, such as sterling and the dollar.
Oh no, someone might ditch the single currency. These are dangerous time for the parasite class of international banking.
As one UK minister said recently, "we're fucked."
Privately, something close to desperation is starting to develop inside government. After watching the slide in bank shares on Friday, one cabinet minister did not altogether joke when he said: "The banks are fucked, we're fucked, the country's fucked."
And, as it turns out, without the US to bailout AIG, all of Europe is fucked. Of course, as it is now, if Europe goes down, we all go down, and vice versa. This is the leverage Brown has over all those hapless congresspeople and senators he spoke to on Wednesday.
But I hope that the congresspeople had their extra smart thinking caps on as they listened to Brown's speech. While Brown and other's in the parasite class have been trying to use this crisis as shock therapy to implement even more global interdependence and centralization of national economies, or, as Henry Kissinger recently put it on Charlie Rose, "a new international order", it should be crystal clear by now that this kind of interdependent global economy is exactly why the whole world is on the verge of collapse.
Instead of "too big to fail", think of 'the harder they fall'. A friend of mine wrote a lovely little piece about two sidewalks. One was made of bricks, and the other of big concrete slabs.
The slightest intrusion - a tree's roots growing underneath - completely destroyed the concrete sidewalk. It was too big and rigid to adapt. But the brick one, with it's many individual parts, easily adapted to the new topology and lasted a century. This is a true story by the way.
Countries are like the bricks. The vision of the globalists like Brown and Kissinger is like the concrete slabs. The slightest deformation breaks it into a thousand pieces and it becomes useless. And when it fails, it fails big. Like now.
I assure you friends, right now, the crazy class that got us into this mess is scheming for a radical solution. A new global governance body that will unite global finance under one regulatory authority and consolidate wealth and power into the hands of the very people who are now begging for our help.
Read this wild conspiracy theory paranoia:
I have never believed that there is a secret United Nations plot to take over the US. I have never seen black helicopters hovering in the sky above Montana. But, for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible.
A "world government" would involve much more than co-operation between nations. It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. The European Union has already set up a continental government for 27 countries, which could be a model. The EU has a supreme court, a currency, thousands of pages of law, a large civil service and the ability to deploy military force.
So could the European model go global? There are three reasons for thinking that it might.
Who wrote that? Some nutjob surely? No, Gideon Rachman writing for the Financial Times.
Sure, he's just throwing things out there, you might say. Until you read and listen to the Big Thinkers at the World Economic Forum in Davos recently. It was all global governance all the time. Here's a little snippet from an essay posted at the website of the Council on Foreign Relations called, Davos, the Poor, and the Crash of '08
There was fear in the air at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland...
Adherents argue that it is every bit as urgent to get the governance of this moment right as it is to pump money into banks and revive the global credit machinery. They insist that avoiding unpopular or controversial political decisions today will lead to lost opportunities, even massive political despair tomorrow. The optimists in this line of thinking insist that this is the historic moment we have all been waiting for to transform globalization into a force for good.
Yes, a global government even further removed from the people is exactly what we need. And the limited version they have going now has shown such promise. Here's another snippet of Gordon Brown's thinly cloaked appeal to Congress:
Just think how each of our actions, if combined, could mean a whole, much greater than the sum of the parts
all and not just some banks stabilised
on fiscal stimulus: the impact multiplied because everybody does it
rising demand in all our countries creating jobs in each of our countries
and trade once again the engine of prosperity, the wealth of nations restored.
You mean combined like the British Empire was combined? Of course not.
Now every time I write about this stuff, some idiot always claims that this is some super secret conspiracy theory. This despite the fact that I always go to the trouble to make perfectly clear that it is not a conspiracy any more than Daily Kos is a conspiracy. These people have a political belief system that they are united behind and they plot and scheme to make it happen. Just like us. And just like us, they lobby and have various organizations. That's it. They are a political movement, who also happen to be made up of billionaires.
But this kind of conspiratorial thinking, whether by proponents of a silly belief in some secret cabal pulling all the strings of the world, or by the skeptics who immediately see any mention of the Council on Foreign Relations or the Ruling Class in a conspiratorial light so that they immediately dismiss it, this kind of thinking is making us ignorant.
This is serious stuff. These are serious people, with extremely serious resources. Their vision for the world has wide ranging implications for the United States and it has to be addressed politically. We can no longer go on pretending that the Ruling Class doesn't exist. As David Rothkopf writes for Newsweek:
A glance at this high-powered class illuminates several key trends. Political elites may be the primary powers where national governments remain dominant—in places like China, Russia and much of the Middle East— yet overall, the list reveals a marked shift from public to private power. Globalization and, to a large extent, privatization, has fueled the superclass (and vice versa).
...
This concentration of wealth and economic influence has translated into a concentration of power, a trend helped by the fact that the power of national governments is on the wane in many parts of the world. The rise of transnational activities (both public and private), a broad move away from state intervention in national markets and the effective reduction in the state's ability to use force due to the awesomely high price of modern warfare, have all contributed to the declining power of the individual nation-state. In turn, those whose organizations are built for global activity, like multinational companies or financial institutions (or terrorist networks or NGOs), have gained a relative advantage over individual governments and governmental organizations.
So to address it seriously, we have to first recognize that the globalist movement is just that: a movement. And second, we have to understand exactly what their agenda is.
The Agenda
It has taken me years to figure this out. It's an amazing story. They seek to create a world that is united by a single corporate economy where they, who deal in billions daily, can move capital and commerce around the globe unimpeded, have unfettered access to indigenous peoples and resources, and not have to put up with that pesky thing called democracy. Not all of them are completely nefarious. Some, including Rothkopf, actually believe that the masses need to be governed by a tiny elite. Like shepherds. Most, however, are just greedy dogs.
If you own fourteen copper mines in fourteen different countries, you can understand how you might like to remove some of the red tape. And you can also understand how you might see little countries with their cheap labor and plentiful resources as ripe fruit, waiting to be plucked. So your buddies and you start talking about crazy things like a "new global order" and "the twilight of sovereignty." 'Let's Get rid of those pesky national borders, and we can really make some money.'
This goes beyond the usual definition of globalization. These people actually envision a world where national sovereignty is abolished - at least as we know it today.
And while they would prefer we not know too much about it, being how it's horrifically unpopular and all, it is by no means a secret. They even write books about it, like Walter Wriston, the former, blueblood CEO of Citi's, "The Twilight of Sovereignty". This very exciting book discusses how the concept of national government is obsolete now with modern technology and all, and how in the future, we'll all just be global citizens who vote with our credit cards whenever we make a purchase. They, the crazy class, call this Market Democracy.
Hey, I'm all for the world citizen concept. But not the one envisioned by people like Walter Wriston, Henry Kissinger, or Gordon Brown. Not one that further centralizes power away from common people, thereby eliminating all accountability to democratic authority. That is what's at stake here. Our system of government is already to centralized and unaccountable enough. Imagine this global authority, even in a likely scaled back form, where it just regulates banks and such. What recourse would I, as an American citizen, have to such a monstrosity?
Rothkopf identifies the fundamental flaw in the current globalization regime:
The current financial crisis is another such example, producing serious questions about the influence of the superclass. Of the world's elites, none has strutted the world stage for the past decade like global investment bankers. Masters of money, they created something new: global markets and a constantly evolving array of securities that were both beyond the reach and the comprehension of regulators. Now, the value of some of the complex investment vehicles they created is proving to be illusory.
As a consequence, the world economy was set for the crisis that is currently unfolding. There was no effective global regulator to keep the system in check, and there was no real voice for the average Joe. The Federal Reserve stepped in to stabilize the burnout of one of these major market makers—even though they have no jurisdiction over investment banks, even though many of those supporting the bailout/buyout were the same who have long clamored for "self-regulation," even though many were the ones who had cited the moral hazard of helping to bail out homeowners and encouraging their bad borrowing behavior. And so you have a financial leadership structure that bails out investment bankers worldwide, but not homeowners.
Indeed, there is no effective global regulator because there is no effective global governance system. And this is exactly what Gordon Brown and his crowd are trying to sell all over the world. Just as the world is reeling from the crumbling of one big concrete slab, their trying to pour a bigger one.