The Killing Joke - Chapter 4 of 25

I’m only burning your half.

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Back in the days of the barbarous relic, frivolous expenditures depleted a sovereign’s treasury and plunged his realm into a poverty that invited invasion from abroad.  Bankrupt and beleaguered by rivals nipping at the boundaries of his realm, the insolvent sovereign was faced with two options – remain bankrupt and get ignominiously deposed, or submit to vassal status in exchange for the silver needed to defend his rights.  Medieval wizards were mostly employed by the Catholic Church to keep the serfs in line with promises of salvation in exchange for a life of drudgery in the muddy furrows producing useful stuff for the nobles and wizards.  There were few wizards around to ponder upon a royal fiduciary predicament save the odd court Jew here and there.  Medieval macroeconomics were simple - when the gold and silver ran out there was no more gold and silver left to squander, especially on war.  An empty treasury stopped wars in their tracks because martyrdom for the nation state had yet to be invented and there was no economic science back then to figure out how to prosecute war after the gold and silver was gone. 

Classical European bankers learned well this vital liquidity lesson from their profligate feudal predecessors.  Instead of curtailing wasteful expenditures when the silver ran low, the illuminated bankers concocted the deferment of the national bankruptcy using the black financial magic of fractional reserve alchemy.  It was through the adoption of this monetary magic in the late 17^th century whereby the Great Britain launched and sustained three large-scale naval wars against their Dutch rival in a bid to wrest from them their control over the world reserve currency.  Thousands of fractional pounds sterling were squandered, inflation ran rampant throughout Britannia, and the poorest of the Queen’s subjects starved in the streets for want of the price of tea and a slice, only to see the French and their livre grab the guilder up for themselves as it fell to the ground.  Yet most of the silver in Her Majesty’s treasury remained untouched and ready to prosecute yet another war.  Commoners had magically foot the war bills through the mechanism of inflation.  The costs for prosecuting Britain’s side of these three Anglo-Dutch wars had successfully been socialized upon the people, and the great British monetary experiment proved that if a nation aspired to superpower status, it had no option but adopt fractional reserve banking to fund its wars at the cost of inflation to its subjects.

It was an unlikely coincidence that in 1776 the world did not see the formation of the Bavarian Illuminati but it did see the great American experiment in popular self-government.

So what followed from there during the 18^th century was another seventy-four years and eight declared wars pitting Great Britain with its fractional pound sterling against France and its gold backed livre.  But the classical French treasury lacked an economic science so it was drained of its gold and silver, where financing had continued to rely on the old school shakedowns of the aristocracy and heavy taxation placed upon the poor.  So by the time the French Revolution erupted as a result of an illuminated sorcery conjured up by a shadowy social science, the economic science had established the precedent that monetary sorcery must be practiced concurrently with the prosecution of war.

Thus back in the days of the barbarous relic it was a more civilized time when the wars and killing actually came to a close when the gold and silver ran out.  The death and destruction were contained, and inflation remained a consequence of a war’s disruption to trade.

It was the Bolshevik Soviets who were the first to attempt the grand sleight of hand of fiat money on the world stage when in 1924 they abandoned the Czar’s Gold Rouble and unleashed pure fiat upon the proletariat.  But that trick was not followed up with the social euphoria required to sustain the hoax, and communism ultimately ended up being just plain boring.  The launch of the Soviet fiat money was not accompanied by flappers, negro jazz bands, nor a single guy going over a waterfalls in a barrel to spice up the drudgery of meeting production quotas.  There were few amusements for those united workers of the world, just vodka and rape and endless bread lines.  There was no magic spell cast over communism’s monetary system, it was just Holodomors and gulags and the NKVD to back up the fledgling fiat rouble.  So the Soviet fiat system was destined to collapse and despite a last desperate attempt using glasnost to import some rock ‘n roll and hamburgers, it did collapse spectacularly in 1989.  In the end, it was boredom and the resulting apathy that killed communism, and with communism dead its fiat rouble and the empire it ruled died with it.

Fiat money without the accompanying magic spell is always a short-lived endeavor.

Royal Arch Mason, Master of the Second Veil. Overseer of the communist gateway into the End of History.

But the wizards at The Economic Science™ had long studied the Illuminated Soviet experiment and correctly deduced that the key to keeping any fiat money system viable for any significant length of time was sorcery on a massive scale.  Plain threats and naked propaganda would not suffice, as neither approach motivated the individual from within and only served to reveal the disconnectedness between the individual and those who ruled over him.  Crude and simple enforced compliance never develops into a national collective unconsciousness, it only produced reluctant individual obedience without the spiritual belief in why one complied.  

But everyone had to be all in the American Dream together, everyone watching the exact same movie on the exact same frame at the exact same time.  The American people had to not just act in unison, but to think and believe as a cohesive unit.  The goal of The Apollo 11 Show’s white magic was to pave the way for the release of the black magic finance that kept the people acting in unison once the triggers were broadcast across the mass media programming.  Everyone had to unwillingly play out their roles in the great scripted play without thinking.  The stubborn and rugged individual had to be deconstructed into and played out as a prefabricated stereotypical archetype.  The American people had to be placed into the correct frame of mind to accept the black magic to come.  And it was hard to engender Hope into that late 1960s America as its people were in a sullen mood what with the recessions and that hippy social unrest and civil rights anarchy and those dead Kennedys and the grinding Vietnam War and a summer of love ending in ritualistic murder.

There had to be an unthinking and unflinching belief in the unlimited potential of America before the fiat money was released.  And within that unlimited potential, every man had to see his role clearly defined with a place for himself as the beneficiary of that promise.  Hi Mom, We’re #1 had to reign supreme at home while a constant and pervasive fear had to grip the world abroad.  There had to be the right zeitgeist permeating American society before the wizards could summon the black magic of fiat money.  Because once it was released, it was going to be a very rough ride into the beginnings of the End of History.   

Buzz Aldrin reminding everyone that he really did walk on the moon.

But once the black magic was released, the world wasn’t buying into the pretender king dollar’s reign of fool’s gold.  And Joe Six Pack back home had paid off his mortgage and was in no mood to pile up consumer debt ad infinitum.  No country wanted to accumulate promises to pay based in Full Faith and Credit.  So the Philosopher Kings sent their errand boy Henry Kissinger off to arrange for a war in the Middle East.  But not war in an oil producing country of significance - that would put long-term supply at risk and the Philosopher Kings needed lots of oil brought into production and strictly sold in pure American fiat.  And all that that war cost America was a swap of the Anglo-American Aramco equity for a royal pledge to sell every barrel of oil produced in US dollars and – voila!  Permanent political instability not quite where the oil was produced but nonetheless close enough to where all the oil was.  With every scripted war came the oil prices rise, and with every scripted peace came the oil price decline.  And along with those manipulated price fluctuations, the world economy climbed and fell right on cue. 

The world economy had now become just a grand black magic theater built to house the scripted plot twists and turns needed to justify the predetermined denouement playing out every night for everyone to see all at the same time on the same channels on the Six O’clock Evening News.  Control the energy and you control continents.  Control the money and you control the world. 

Control the script and you control belief.

That 1973 Yom Kippur War didn’t really kick in until the scripted oil embargo went into effect.  Without Kissinger’s war, the price of crude oil only rose 38% in the two years after Full Faith and Credit’s imposition.  But after the oil embargo, prices skyrocketed from $1.80 per barrel – where it had been constant from 1961 to 1970 – to $11.58 per barrel in 1974.  This sudden price rise even pushed the sub-economic giant oil discoveries in both Alaska’s North Slope and Europe’s North Sea into project sanction.  And when in 1980 Iraq was contracted to fight Iran in another scripted Middle Eastern war - but this time where the oil was actually produced – oil’s nominal price hit $36.83 a barrel.  In less than 10 years the Philosopher Kings had successfully driven up the price of oil by an astounding 2,046% and Full Faith and Credit was flowing freely through the arteries of the global economy.  Mission accomplished.

On the American domestic front, monetary black magic was also quietly performed on the country’s enormous natural gas resource using the newly created EPA to phase out oil fired electricity generation and create many localized scrambles for natural gas supply where none previously existed.  Using the mantra of “Environmentalism” and the stick of air quality regulations, the Philosopher Kings drove natural gas wellhead prices up from an average $0.18 in 1970 – back when it was to a large extent just a waste by-product of crude oil production – up to $2.66 per 1000 cubic feet in 1984. 

OPEC net export revenue in nominal Full Faith and Credit rose from about $25 billion in 1972 to around $300 billion by 1980.  However, when a foreign sovereign nation accepts payment for its exports in the pretended king dollar, and the price of those exports rise over time with the issuance of more and more of the credit needed to pay for those price increases, which in turn support the issuance of even more fiat money via the credit creation cycle, this magic has the equivalent effect of a productive output gain back in the United States.  Whether money is created to make stuff or created to pay for the price increase in stuff, the conjured financialized economy cares not.  So as America began to increase the pace of its de-industrialization at home during the 1970s, the rise in oil prices and the flow on effect of those increases into the general supply chain increased the American GDP to offset the de-industrialization GDP losses.  The wider Six O’clock Evening News viewing audience saw only the composite number and not its individual components and heard only reassurances that things, although challenging, had never been better.  We had sent a man to the moon, we could all get through this rough economic patch together.  Hi mom, we’re #1. 

Rockin’ the casbah.

But Joe Six Pack knew full well that these late 1970s oil prices were ripping the productive heart out of his nation as the price to produce all manner of stuff rose dramatically yet the real wages paid to make that stuff flat lined.  However, for the increasing numbers of Americans moving into white collar service and finance based jobs, the gas lines and odd-even days were more of a nuisance than a threat.  They and their young generation left college and entered into jobs that produced nothing but the magic spells needed to grow the financialized economy and keep it humming along.  Since debt had become the hottest commodity in America, this first generation dedicated to wizardry were doing just fine as Joe Six Pack and his Made In America stuff scrambled for relevance.

After Nixon closed the gold window, its supply throttled, and its price pounded down and fixed in the façade of a London “free market”, these semi-medieval oil exporting nations had few investment options available for their foreign exchange earnings save US Treasury bonds.  Investment options were squelched when these same countries aspired to advance beyond their semi-medieval status but were suddenly thrust into a conjured war with their belligerent neighbors.  Now there was no choice but invest those foreign exchange earnings in American made weapon systems to defend their foreign exchange earnings, which rapidly depleted as they bought more and more weapons systems and thus stayed in that semi-medieval status.  And the more war there was, the higher the oil price went, and that generated more foreign exchange earnings to be invested in more weapon systems to fight more war which increased the oil price further which increased USA GDP even more to offset the accelerating American de-industrialization.   

Ad Infinitum. 

Through either US Treasury bond purchases or conjured war, this “Heads I win, tails you lose” foreign policy ensured that the pretender king dollar found itself repatriated back to home soil in what the wizards at The Economic Science™ termed the “virtuous cycle”.  After August 15^th of 1971, debt and proxy wars were cemented as the dual pillars of American foreign policy.  There was no other logical alternative after the jump to Full Faith and Credit because when credit was issued, an equivalent amount of money was conjured up somewhere in The UNITED STATES of AMERICA and through statistical magic, both debt and war were entered into the Grand Ledger as GDP growth.  Most new domestic money creation was squandered, so this waste added to the inflation which increased asset prices that in turn created the new incremental collateral that beget the issuance of more credit that led to the ever expanding GDP growth ad infinitum.

The fiat money system – the ride doesn’t end until the ride burns to the ground.  Just look to the former Soviet Union how that ride went.

The great significance of August 15^th, 1971 is that it marked the official beginning of the American transition from a goods producing economy into primarily a non-productive economy dependent upon the conjuring up of debt, foreign proxy wars, and stuff that nobody needed like pet rocks and lava lamps.  Most of the “jobs” created henceforth were in petty services and government which required little to no skill or know-how yet gave the home front the illusion of value creation from those carefully curated economic data that were allowed to appear on the Six O’clock Evening News.  The American nation had the look and feel and statistics of a productive and vibrant economy, and people expended lots and lots of energy in that economy, but the reality in the basement was that this credit driven “prosperity” masked the massive productive job losses and factory town despair arising out of the American de-industrialization program. 

And there was a good reason for that American de-industrialization program.  A nation could never be pushed into the End of History if it practiced and retained its collective knowledge of how to produce real and useful stuff.  Only the Eloi can be allowed to remain on a planet ruled by Morlocks.

This transition into financialization would beget an almost “perfect” system that was nearly immune to waste, sloth, arrogance, and incompetence.  Indeed, the system would only grow stronger the more voracious and wasteful and stupid it became.  The stronger the system became, the more slothful, arrogant, and incompetent it grew.  And the more slothful, arrogant, and incompetent the system grew, the more voracious and wasteful and violent it became. 

Ad infinitum.

But the fiat money system would eventually reach a point where it ran out of suckers to fleece.  The day would come when everyone trapped in the circus side-show had figured out what “To the Egress →” meant.  At that point, the system would start to devour its self and its sole purpose become the creation of waste - not as a by-product of productive economic activity, but as the end activity of economic conjuring in and of its self.  Financialization under fiat money has no choice but create waste as its primary output since all its productive capacity and shop floor technical know-how get jettisoned and off-shored to facilitate the build-up of foreign earned export dollars for repatriation to feed this home based Frankenstein of fiat money’s creation – the “virtuous cycle”.  The Economic Science™ knew this well – they had discovered this in their calculus but dare not publicly publish their findings.  In fact, they created a great and sprawling de-education edifice to hide and divert from their occult knowledge, and that edifice produced the captains of finance with their MBAs that knew how to get things done but couldn’t do a damn thing themselves. 

The Economic Science™ knew that one day this nearly “perfect” system would perfectly implode into hyperinflation.  And the political science knew that hyperinflation would collapse American civil society because society would eventually produce nothing for which to exchange for real and useful stuff.  And that is why people throughout history generally did not kill each other – because each produced something that he other person relied upon.  But the Philosopher Kings knew that societal collapse would usher in the end to their reign with the reversion to dry beans and ammunition as the primary exchange media.  And everyone in on the joke knew that hyperinflation meant the end of all conjured “wealth” and “prosperity”.  Front that point on, Americans would have to create wealth the old fashioned way – they’d have to earn it, and for the newly minted conjuring class, that just would not fly.

Hyperinflation is the end of financial sorcery and the return to rule by brute force.  But until that day arrived, everyone just partied like it was 1999.

The 1970s gave us disco and fanatical sports to divert our attention away from all that inflation.

And why not party like it was 1999.  The Economic Science™ had discovered the Philosopher’s Stone that turned the evils of usury, war, misery, and that Sword of Damocles of nuclear holocaust into a great big yellow smiley face beaming down upon America.  If the American people could be programmed and conditioned to ignore the potential for their own nuclear annihilation with the simple magic of The Apollo 11 Show, they could be programmed and conditioned to ignore anything.  They could be programmed and conditioned to believe anything.  The sky was the limit, no matter how absurd or ridiculous that belief was. 

Even the millennia old purpose of war and its point of victory had altered by this uniquely American ability to ignore everything pertinent.  No longer was there the need to thoroughly defeat an enemy in battle and parade its prisoners through the festooned streets in triumph.  The Philosopher Kings need now only install proxy regimes by force of bribery to facilitate the imposition of privately owned central banks into the nations of the world.  Those privately owned central banks had a singular mission – to instigate a perpetual defeat over a foreign nation’s people.  And this defeat was accomplished by piling up in ever increasing amounts of dollar denominated debt onto the backs of the citizenry until they woke up one day homeless and starving in the lands that their ancient forefathers built civilizations upon.

So what was generally referred to as the Petrodollar was, in realpolitik international practice, more aptly named the Doomsday Dollar.  And the new store of “wealth” for the American national treasury became the mutually assured destruction of a world split between those that “accepted” and those that refused the pretender king dollar as its medium of international exchange.

Thus the 1970s inflation was purposely ignited to stimulate demand for a gold decoupled fiat dollar using the ubiquitous energy inputs as tinder.  Suddenly, the entire world woke up to find itself vying for Full Faith and Credit, and this artificial demand conjured up out of thin air was what gave a pretender king dollar without the gold – together with its nuclear armed ICBM deliver system - its simulacra of “value”.  A nation either used it or it lost everything or it turned to the Soviets and faced an identical fate.

But to use Full Faith and Credit in the international markets, poor nations with little dollar export revenue had to first convert their own currencies that nobody wanted at extortion level exchange rates.  This way they could buy seed and farm machinery to produce crops like wheat, sell it on the international market, and then buy that wheat back a year later for five times what they had sold it for the previous year when the next year’s crops failed.  That is how the 1970s United States experienced mere inflation, when the 1970s third world got crippling hyper-inflation in their own currencies as currency conversion into the king fiat pretender drained away what little domestic labor inputs were reflected in their money.  Nations not in the dollar denominated export club were kept in a perpetual state of medievalism through this mechanism of foreign exchange differentials, and the nature of the 1970s spread of Marxism shifted from ideology to a better exchange rate deal under a fiat ruble.  And when a country’s currency was especially worthless and its leaders considering a ruble alternative, there was the IMF or World Bank to “lend a helping hand” and facilitate dollar denominated loans because - an equivalent amount of money was always conjured up somewhere and entered into the Grand Ledger as GDP “growth”.

The 1970s were a time of getting the third world in line to receive its financial drubbing.

Thus during these early 1970s the basis of “Free Trade” was established.  The world could trade with whomever it wanted, whenever it wanted, for whatever it wanted - so long as those trades were transacted in Federal Reserve System fiat dollars.  Oil, wheat, land mines, cocaine, and adrenochrome – all were permissible.  Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law, so long as thou doth exclusively do in Full Faith and Credit. 

And with global coronation of the pretender king dollar, so was established the new moral edict for its empire.  So of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of The Economic Science™, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.  So with this edict the people of the world got its official new religion - Globalism.  And with globalism came a new Savior - the privately owned central banks.  The rouble assumed the role of Satan, the economic scientists were ordained as its priesthood, and everything was all wrapped up in this new theology of “Free Trade”.  And the world got divine mutually assured Armageddon from a righteous nuclear armed ICBM delivery system.

Now the black magic conjurers could really get down to the business of getting richer.  And they started their quest right off by cutting Joe Six Pack out of the deal.

The Economic Science™ swears that correlation with August 15^th of 1971 is not causation.

The conjurers fragmented Joe Six Pack’s voting base.  American trade unions – once the unified political movement for the productive class - were systematically neutered into globalist submission using their own inherent corruption against them.  Trades based fraternal orders got infiltrated from within and one by one wound down through intentional mismanagement.  Union controlled pension funds were stolen or these funds purposely bankrupted.  And what vestige of union political clout remained was garnered through the wizardry of television and transformed into a get out the vote vehicle for whatever political party had committed to offshoring the most American manufacturing jobs.

The conjurers froze Joe Six Pack’s real wages and drained his home equity using a combination of inflation and HELOCs.  Many who had paid off their mortgage found themselves unemployed with a hollow union that offered neither benefit nor succor.  Health insurance suddenly disappeared after a lifetime of beer and cigarettes so many found themselves securing home liens to pay medical expenses.  As the medical expenses piled up and the unemployment checks ran out, many still found themselves using those liens to pay living expenses.  And long established inner city black-owned businesses were replaced by a ruinous “urban renewal” that served as nothing more than poverty farms to accelerate the mass transition into permanent welfare dependency. 

The conjurers demoralized Joe Six Pack’s spirit.  The Black Nobility’s mafia ramped up drug smuggling and expanded operations into the heavily unemployed Caucasian working class neighborhoods.  The entertainment industry promoted a new vacuous ideal founded on selfish hedonism and the glorification of sex, material acquisition, drug use, and a diffusive rebellion without purpose.  The ignominious American retreat from Vietnam and the Watergate hearings were televised into Joe Six Pack’s living room on a nightly basis.  His churches devolved into abstract absurdities like ending world hunger and Liberation Theology.  And on top off all this, the intelligentsia gave him feminism and deconstructed everything he held dear and deeply admired.

But the most successful weapon in the conjurers’ arsenal here was unhindered and unmitigated third world immigration into the United States.  As Joe Six Pack’s union dissolved into all but dues payment notices, for the first time since the Depression he found himself competing in the labor market against those ready and eager to undercut his wage base.  At first these new arrivals knew their place and came for the variegated unskilled jobs.  They soon gained in confidence and next took the simple assembly and semi-skilled roles.  And once quality controls were relaxed in the endless pursuit of “efficiency” and profits, they brazenly cornered trades such as painting, dry wall hanging, and all manner of construction.  Decent paying jobs that once served birthright Americans as a springboard for generational upward mobility were now siphoned of every nickel of productivity gain and handed to swarms of ineducable people that had, before coming to America, called a hole in the ground a toilet and a dirt floor home.

Mass immigration kept the industrial and agricultural cost bases static for thousands of small to medium scale enterprises spread across the country which, since the end of WWII, had employed the majority of America’s skilled tradesmen.  But in order to turn that stingy nickel of productivity gain into a big shiny quarter, American corporate behemoths began to offshore most of these skilled manufacturing jobs to the Asian Pacific Rim.  Here the industrial and transport infrastructures were new, the cost base much lower, the workforce obedient, and the work week was ten hours a day for six days a week. 

1971’s Asian factory workers did not go home every night and knock back a six pack in front of the television.  They did not join unions.  They felt shame when production targets were missed and they came to work early to participate in unpaid group calisthenics.  They felt happy when their company prospered.

1971’s Joe Six Pack didn’t get his moniker by accident.  His post-WWII industrial base was aging and energy inefficient.  He had earned three weeks of paid vacation and every year he took every single day of his two weeks of paid sick time.  He regularly attended union meetings where he was indoctrinated into hostility towards his corporate employer.  He was accident prone, could care less if production targets were missed, and generally eschewed exercise.  He regularly came to work late and hungover after a long night of bowling and heavy drinking.  He had put a daughter through college and had paid off his mortgage.  His son didn’t go to college because he died in Vietnam.  He smoked one cigarette after another and that did not end until he fell asleep.  And then he woke up and lit another one to start his new workday.

All of your job now are belong to us.

And yet for those first 226 days of 1971, Joe Six Pack had attained a social status, a standard of living, an amount of leisure, and the political clout that no other worker in the history of the world had attained before him.  From Joe Six Pack’s vantage and for all its faults, America was unquestioningly the greatest country in the world.  Every single Joe Six Pack owned an American flag and lit fireworks in honor of America on the 4^th of July.  Joe Six Pack proudly donned his Korean War dress uniform and, while fighting back tears in memory of his fallen son, marched down Main Street in those patriotic parades.  It was the best of times for both Joe Six Pack and the America that was supposed to be. 

But the Philosopher Kings had decided that it couldn’t be and shipped a big chunk of those best of times first to Japan, then to Korea, and later to Taiwan where people were too busy working to party like it was 1999.  And to ensure that the maximum number of skilled American jobs got offshored, the Philosopher Kings fully activated The Economic Science™.  During a 10 year period beginning in August of 1971, the Federal Reserve Board steadily raised interest rates on 10 year Treasury bonds from 6.86% to an eventual peak of 15.84%.  The Economic Science™ went on The Six O’clock Evening News every night to assure the American public that every successive quarterly rise was necessary to “tame inflation” in a “hot” economy.  But since inflation is purposely conjured and is the raison d’être of the Full Faith and Credit fiat money system, why does The Economic Science™ goof and fiddle with interest rates in the first place?  Why not just set them at some constant rate, sit back, and let squandering and its resulting inflation work its magic on asset prices?

The 1970s rise in interest rates was used in part to “motivate” the dollar export earning nations of the world to start repatriating Full Faith and Credit via the “virtuous cycle” and keep the fledgling fiat abomination alive at its most vulnerable point – at its unholy birth.  So Joe Six Pack’s good paying job got axed to grease the “virtuous cycle”.  But The Economic Science™ calculus had a more sinister and longer term objective.  The Philosopher Kings wanted to ensure that once Joe Six Pack’s skilled job left American shores, his job never returned.  There was no way that the American post-WWII aging and energy inefficient industrial base was going to get the trillion or two of capital investment needed to retool and revitalize with interest rates over 5%.  Not when a reliable alternative existed in Asia where local investors built and paid for new manufacturing and transport infrastructures themselves and assumed the roles of both financier and production contractor.  So this 1970s goofing and fiddling with interest rates was nothing about “taming inflation” – it never is.  Instead, it was a deliberate intervention to starve the American industrial base of capital and permanently shut down most of its aging mid-western production capacity.  Once idled, production capacity moved to Asia along with the jobs to produce more export dollars that went to buy more Treasury Bonds and initiate the Philosopher’s Kings’ larger program of globalism. 

This absolved a great quantity of American capital from being tied up in a fixed industrial infrastructure at high interest rates so Wall Street investment firms connected to the Philosopher Kings could now get down to the business of speculative technology investments and kick-start America’s transition into a financialized economy.  Why have money tied up in factories making products that people may or may not buy when the reduced risk and larger profit margin opportunity lay in merely financing with money backed by nothing the finished products that people actually did buy?  And there’s all that new credit granted somewhere and money created someplace ad infinitum to boot. 

Interest rates are both the destroyer of prosperity and the creator of dreams.

Using interest rates, the Philosopher Kings deliberately wiped out the vast majority of American manufacturing capacity and the blue collar skilled jobs that went with it.  Once the “virtuous cycle” was globally up and running, The Economic Science™ could claim it had “tamed inflation” and begin steadily reducing those job killing interest rates.  This about face then subsidized Wall Street’s speculation foray into a “technology based” economy and facilitated America’s transition into a sea of white collar jobs that produced little except waste and a bigger pile of debt.  And the squandering and inflation continued to work their magic on asset prices, and interest rates nearly ground the US construction industry to a halt.  America and its suppressed real wages were brought from the brink, and the Six O’clock Evening News could not shower enough praise upon the Ashkenazi genius of The Economic Science™.  But it was all economic theater As Seen on TV! 

And it was at this point just before 1980 when Joe Six Pack finally broke.  Sporadically employed, in poor health from a beer and cigarette too far, his local bowling alley long ago closed, and with a stack of “FINAL NOTICE” piled up on his kitchen table, he threw in the towel and, one after another, just quietly disappeared.  And those swarms of ineducable immigrants who had finally figured out the operating intricacies of the indoor plumbing flush toilet occupied Joe Six Pack’s former urban tenements by the millions.  Joe Six Pack had lost his social status, his standard of living, had an entire day of television viewing leisure, and was left with no political clout whatsoever.  And it only took 10 years to kill him off.  From Joe Six Pack’s vantage, America had abandoned him - yet he refused to question America’s greatness.  He still firmly believed that America had always been his country and that it could all still be fixed to become again what it was always supposed to be. 

But what Joe Six Pack never saw was that the permanent fix was in on August 15^th, 1971.  Joe Six Pack was not in on the joke. What he never saw was that the joke was on him.