CSC-2 | Chapter 6 | The Great Vehicle of the Civil Commons (2)

BEYOND THE REVERSE PROPAGANDA OF THE SYSTEM: UNDERSTANDING THE FORMATION OF CITIZENS IN FREE COMMUNITY AND MORAL CIVILIZATION

It is a violation of evolved humanity to have one safe sun to shine or one clean air to breathe for those possessing money demand, and another hazardous sun or air for others in accordance to their ability to pay private money-sequences. So too with all the life-goods of nature and evolved civilization.

The transnational money-sequence system is opposite. It predates the goods found in nature and community to multiply itself. Yet the legitimacy of government as life-organization at the social level is based on its ability to safeguard these common life-goods – not only from pollutions, depletions and destructions of the shared environment, but from the violations of human life by those actions and processes which effective human rights prevent. This is the preventative function of all legitimate government, and the civil commons which undergird it. The enabling function of both advances with life-capacity development across citizens. Those who cannot read or write are educated so that they can read and write to higher levels. Those who are unwell have access to the preventative functions and care required to protect against illness. The unpaid without money are ensured income as needed for their life-work, the elderly receive liveable pensions, and citizens in general enjoy clean water, untoxic air, and undiseased public places, green parks and city centres, public communications and arts facilities, safe sidewalks and treed streetscapes, libraries, information centres, play areas and wilderness parks. These are all the civil commons of human civilization and real development without yet a name of their ultimate value meaning.

Each and all of these public goods have one unifying criterion – to protect and enable life. Each and all are based on life-capital formations. None is available to all by market allocation.

This is why public investment is always required for society’s actual development, as opposed to aggregate money-value gains. Money returns to its proper role as means of life rather than master. By distinguishing these functions, we begin the nodal selecting out of the carcinogenic sequences.

The Collapse of Distinction Between Common Interest and Money-Demand Growth

The collapse of distinction between the common interest of society and what private market money demands is at the heart of the world crisis. Behind it lie moving wheels of invasion, expropriation and dispossession of public wealth that are not seen:

1. Public budgets and subsidies to grow armed forces, weapons manufacture and armaments exports whose expenditures typically exceed the total federal monies spent on education, health and social assistance, and whose dominant usage is to serve the interests of private money-sequence assets, operations, entitlements and expansions.
2. Continuous major subsidies, tax reductions and special exemptions to private corporations, investors and banking operations advancing and extending money-sequences of value with no accountability back to the societies paying for them.
3. Licensed giveaways of publicly-owned natural resources and broadcast airwaves to private industrial and media oligopolies to use in whatever manner maximizes their private profits with no public standards of truth, knowledge or cognitive capacity development.
4. Transfer of government control over the creation of money to private banks and financial institutions to increasingly extract debt-servicing from individuals and governments.
5. Continuous expenditures on special-interest infrastructures to serve the transportation, sale and consumption of market commodities which endanger human life and depredate the environment (for example, ever-widening roads, highways and water thoroughfares for high-powered, fossil-fuel engines).
6. In general, ever more intensive demand on public finances, ministries, departments, and agencies to serve large-scale private corporations and banks as their debt collector, armed-force protector, contract supplier, subsidizer, foreign lobby, and insurer against liability and loss.¹

But the transnational money-sequence system projects its disorder onto what it dispossesses. As the private money-sequences cumulatively all divert public revenues to serve them, peoples are told they should not ‘rely on government for handouts’ and that ‘a culture of dependency’ and ‘entitlement’ are ‘undermining society’ and ‘economic productivity’.

Self-Reliant Freedom Provided by Civil Commons, Not by Corporate Market

The reality is opposite. The life-serving functions of the public sector enable citizens to do autonomously what they could not if deprived of them. For example, the civil commons’ goods of health care, or pollution control, or recycling waste disposal, or a clean water supply, or artistically designed public spaces all enable productive individuality to flourish.

Consider higher education paid for by the public. It demands autonomy of learning, decision and performance as a necessary condition of access to it. Otherwise, one is cheating. Yet it is just as well known that purchase of others’ performance in the market is morally acceptable. Indeed the transnational money-sequence system increasingly conditions its consumers to be dependent on activity-displacing commodities. Passive commercial television hours a day, motor-driven lives replacing one’s own movement, commodities to ‘do everything for you’ – where is the money-title dependency end?

Yet moral meaning is reversed in the Great Sickness. Steering the whole is ‘unearned income’ as absolute right, the ever-growing entitlement that in fact ‘depends on government’ for every step – state backing of its demand, protection against diversion, deposit insurance for no cost, trillion-dollar bailouts of its greedy overreach, wars against any society disallowing it. How extreme can the reverse projections become? No life-function is required. The consumer consumes, the corporations sell what has been made by others. Workers are fixed to a wheel of Ixion on which one command is written, ‘Obey to consume’.

Throughout the evolved civil commons are stripped, and reverse-projection justifies every step. What enables people’s life-capacities to grow becomes money-sequences depriving them as ‘growth’. In contrast, the measure of a public health programme’s success is how free from expensive treatment people become; and of educational attainment how well people demonstrate autonomous learning without priced props.

Civil commons are easy to recognize, and so too their opposite. The Delhi satellite city of Gurgaon is a paradigm of the global disorder. It has vast luxury shopping, patio centres and parking lots. But it is without public sewage disposal, sidewalks, public lighting, and public green space – the epigone of the private city drowning in its own waste and high-priced commodities with no civil commons.

The free civil community is the lost life-standard of real development. It has common life-bases, clean public water, forest habitats, community health care, educational and cultural resources for all, homes for all, a public communications system, conservation rules and practices, free recreational life-spaces, social care for children and the aged, integration of the handicapped and shamanistic into daily life, environmental monitoring and protection, and public arts, centres and places of life-reverence.

Through the ruling categories of meaning, none can compute except to privatize, price and sell.

Life-Capital Principles of Public-Sector Organization Against Carcinogenic Corporate Bureaucracy

The corporate state performs accordingly. It proclaims the ‘public interest’ as it reverses the regulating laws and tax revenues whereby the common interest is in fact enabled. The public sector formations that enable the lives of citizens are declared ‘wasteful’ and ‘unaffordable’. To complete the reversal, the massive wastes of public funds via (i) to (vi) above are increased. Endless tax cuts to the corporate rich, non-defensive armed-force spending, resource giveaways without end, society’s life and life-capital hollowed out, and prison cages for the poor committing no offence against the person.

Bureaucratic structures within the state are not what privatization corrects. They reflect the disorder. Administrations mutate into corporate-CEO hierarchies to control all funds and partner with rich corporations to convert public sectors into private money-sequence operations. This is the underlying carcinogenic law of public sectors. How do they survive at all? Only by the committed life-vocations of those grounded in the public life-interest they serve – the real economy of the public sector.

In the wider world, the rise of the financial sector from 10 per cent to 40 per cent of all profits in the US since 1970 resets the economy to parasitic money-sequencing at the top. Heads of state become national corporate-CEO command posts funded in election contests by private money powers. Public-sector bureaucrats follow suit. Ever higher CEO salaries, benefits, underlings and restructurings multiply, while those serving the life-vocations of the public institution are cut back, casualized, outsourced, and dispossessed. In universities, for example, 60 per cent of the teaching or more may now be done by part-time contracts as tenured scientists increasingly serve proprietary corporate product development funded by public money. This corporatization of the university diverts ever more funds to central administrations with no ceilings on salaries, offices and perquisites. Salary corresponds to budget control not educational performance and corporate boards of governors with no academic qualifications decide the structure. Accountability of public money spent to the constitutional mandate of the public institution – ‘to advance learning and disseminate knowledge’ – does not exist. The inner logic is the corporate money-sequence system gone public – to maximize money revenues under central administration control as supreme regulator of decision.

Research hospitals express the same disorder. Their CEOs dispose over vast revenues and allocation without answering to any health achievement, or to those who actually touch and treat patients, or to the life-recovery of the ill under their management. The central public institution again mutates by the system law of money-sequencing to the top. Again the life-capital bases of society are increasingly deprived of the life-productive functions of healing, teaching and research to grow non-performing spending by the under 1 per cent in control of public funds unaccountable to any mandate of life-purpose.

The cure follows from the disease. Public expenditures not necessary to the performance of the defined life-vocation of the institution are reallocated to so perform. Education and health bureaucracies unaccountable to, segregated from and in budgetary control of the primary teaching and health care functions of public-sector institutions are made directly accountable to their life-enabling constitutional functions. There is no ‘iron law of oligarchy’ built into public sectors. The ‘bureaucratic waste and empire building’ are eliminable by release from the carcinogenic corporate model.² The disorder is:

1. exclusive control over and access to public budgets;
2. proprietary right from there to command subordinates in hierarchical chain of command; and
3. entitlement to special privileges, offices, services and margins of money not available to or required by those performing directly productive functions.

But not one of these powers or prerogatives is a necessary condition for efficient performance of any life-enabling public function. Not one belongs to any management level by public or electoral mandate. Secretarial-management support functions accountable to professional standards are essential. Multiplying non-performing hierarchies, higher salaries and perquisites are carcinogenic. Only service to the constitutional objectives of the institution qualifies as legitimate expenditure in any public sector.³

The Africans in bureaucratic social sectors call appropriators of non-productive offices and expenditures ‘the committee men’. Trotskyites and others have called their system of reproduction ‘the Stalinist bureaucracy’. In societies like Pakistan and less so Mexico, the organization of public-sector expenditures is so manipulated to serve office-holders that the education system itself has collapsed in sinecures and waste. In contemporary government, senior bureaucrats undermine the common interest they are employed to represent for more money-demand control to themselves and their private sequence lobbies.⁴ Life-capital principles, conversely, select against the bureaucratic cancer by two criteria:

1. they regulate financial accounting and disbursement to fulfil, and only to fulfil, the mandated life-enabling functions of the institution;
2. fulfilment of codified performance standards for these life-enabling functions are required of all recipients of public-sector expenditures for them to remain paid.

These principles of life-capital accounting reset public sectors to organizational capacity to work for the common life-interest against the money-sequence cancer. Civil commons service for youth in doing what is required for social and natural life-support systems steers recovery. Public funds are allocated to serve life and life-capital development alone. The waste system stops where life-capital allocation decides.

THE LIFE-AND-DEATH CHOICE-SPACE OF THE WORLD: LATIN AMERICA BEFORE AND AFTER 2000, CANADA VERSUS NORWAY TODAY

In the Western world, Norway provides a good example. The economic key to its success is that public resource wealth is structured to maximize public revenues for national public investment in citizens’ lives and life-capital bases with no transnational Wall-Street driven bank system deciding its fiscal, investment, currency, and public investment decisions.

The main vehicle is the National Pension Fund which stands as a public investment fund of $600 billion from conserved oil wealth to use as needed to serve the lives of its citizens. Its current focus is on secure and liveable pensions for its people, but is available to fund its advanced civil commons of universal health care, social security out of work, free higher education, and the other life-enabling programmes and life-capital bases. Norway’s resource wealth is publicly governed and publicly invested in public life-requirements – with management by the national Bank for the Ministry of Finance. Oil-drawing fees from private corporations proceed on publicly-set terms, nearly 90 percent of profit revenues. Norway demonstrates that even the global market’s most life-blindly aggressive industry and the ‘curse of oil’ that has ruined other countries in ecocidal looting and boom-and-bust cycles can be managed to enable the life-security and flourishing of the host society and people. It also shows that refusal of the EU financial straitjacket liberates society to prosperous self-determination.

In contrast, the oil-and-big-money control of government in Canada does the opposite with its ecologically ruinous mega project of boiling tar-sands with stem-river water over a widening vast area for 90 per cent of the profits to leave the country with no national public fund. Captured government subsidizes and enforces the vast depredation of pristine wilderness, lake and river waters and their resources as fast they can be boiled out. A despoiled world is behind in the name of ‘jobs’ (short term in resource extraction) and ‘new growth’ that destabilizes the economy by artificially oil-raised exchange rates, disemployment in other sectors, and non-stop cuts to public services.

In the background, Canada’s once proud health programme is privatized by suspending enforcement of long-term national health law. Unemployment insurance funds are raided so that less than 40 per cent of the jobless can claim. The country’s pension funds are reduced, and privatized in management including to buy armaments stocks. The nations’ signature public wheat marketing board is abolished against referendum, public broadcasting is defunded, and student debts multiply. The nation’s environmental monitoring and protection programmes are clear-cut, dirty-oil pipes dominate through the legendarily beautiful country to foreign processing and sale.

Meanwhile, Norway’s public investment in its people and life-capital bases on grows. The courses of Canada and Norway disclose the global life-and-death choice.

Life-Capital Values and Investment: The Known Imperatives of Recovery

South America’s leading Latin-speaking nations before and after 2000 reveal a similar life-and-death choice space. The continent-wide transformation began after the first edition of this study. Societies like Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador which had long been death-squadded and neo-liberal looted to destitution, democratically turned one after another to the alternative way.

Four principles of public policy turn from the syntax of transformation which is generalizable across nations. It has in fact worked over generations across continents. But the life-capital turn has been so systemically reversed by the money-sequence counter-revolution since 1980 that it is now amnesiac.

1. higher taxes and disincentives for the very rich – opposite to the neo-liberal de-taxation of the corporate rich impoverishing government and public life-support systems;
2. aggressive national recovery of control over publicly owned resources – oil reserves, forests and minerals by multiplied royalties / fees for extraction by private corporations;
3. public banking and investment to support the real economy of productive and co-operative investments – the public banking that the US, its satellites and the EU are politically and ideologically paralysed from undertaking within the Wall Street-led financial system as it bleeds them dry (and incapable of keeping up with Japan and China with no vast such revenues wastes);
4. policy-led elimination of structural depredation of the poor and the environment as the essential turning point of government enabled by (1), (2) and (3) – in Latin America more than halving poverty within a decade by escalated minimum wages, guaranteed incomes to mothers, and co-operatives multiplying productive jobs.

These policy shifts have worked in Norway and Argentina today, the US and Canada in their most democratic periods, Japan and China, and Scandinavia over almost a century. The variations are great across cultures and histories, geographical bases and assets, but all express this underlying syntax of recovery towards economic and public well-being.

Scandinavian democracies like Norway have already achieved the four-front turn to real economy, democracy and the public good. Latin America, on the other hand, leads the world in demonstration of the transformative possibility from the depths of the great sickness.

Progressive Taxation as a Primary Principle of Responsible Government

Progressive taxation is the best known public instrument to fund the public sector and keep the money party in line. US history itself teaches this. From 1945 to the end of the 1970s when taxes on the rich and corporations were more than twice as high as now, six times more at the top, there were no deficit crises, social sector slashings, or mass unemployment. From 1980 on when the first $500 billion tax cut favouring the rich was given by the Reagan counter-revolution, all have risen to crisis proportions.

Progressive taxes on the rich and corporations are now below taxes on low wages. As always, reverse projection is the justification. But as we have seen in prior sections, ‘big government waste and handouts’ are to the transnational money-sequence party. In fact, higher taxation of the corporate rich – the opposite of US rule from Reagan to Romney – is the only way:

1. the public can receive back the revenues required to sustain public life-infrastructure and economic services of society; and
2. government can recover the special costs that business and the rich demand for every step of their profitable transactions and high-consumption lives.

This logic of taxation is expressed by Oliver Wendell Holmes when he says in famous aphorism: ‘I don’t mind paying taxes because they buy me civilization.’ The private-money state is oppositely structured to grow private money-sequences to strip civilization. Few notice the money party throughout free rides on the public expenditures it refuses to pay for: (i) the domestic and foreign armed forces defending its interests, business transportation; (ii) the energy infrastructures structured to serve its operations and commodities, (iii) growing government tax and corporate subsidies at public expense, and (iv) the giveaway of public resources for private looting.

Reversal of progressive taxation has been the primary pathway of the disorder. Post-1945 Japan has never allowed the wasteful splurge of revenues on the top, and this is why it out-competes the US as well as by its less wasteful designs. Observe the correspondence.

Revealingly, even the right-wing US Supreme Court ruled in summer 2012 that by the power of government to tax is ‘conceded, complete and all-embracing’. It thus ruled against the challenge to government’s right to tax except by a night-watchman model serving only property and exchanges (the ‘libertarian’ option). The right-wing Court ruling, instead, approved a public health care plan as a ‘tax’. Private health insurance and big pharmaceutical corporations were well served with massive public subsidy and compulsory purchase of their high-cost profit plans. There was still no universal health care because states could refuse it, keeping millions of people excluded. Yet the taxation principle was upheld by the right-wing US Supreme court against 30 years of private money-party and libertarian denial.

Yes, the corporate rich could go on evading any taxation in multiple exemptions, shadow corporate shelters, giveaway capital allowances, orchestrated loopholes, lax enforcement, and off-shore evasions. All this is justified as ‘freedom’ and ‘incentive to invest’. In fact, the corporate rich do not invest. They flee their hosts and workforces overnight for lower or nil taxes and starvation wages, manipulate transfer prices across jurisdictions to defraud governments of public revenues, money-launder criminal proceeds through banks, dismantle productive corporations with tax-deductible loan-money, and hide trillions in tax-escape havens.

Governments used to regulate against all this, and can do so now with global digital tracking and detection. Progressive taxation plugs the giveaway exemptions, stops the tidal transfer to regressive taxes, does not cancel taxes on interest for takeovers of other firms, and criminally prosecutes tax-escape sites and methods. Justice and economy coincide.

As for ‘the job creation’, the transnational money-sequence system races in the opposite direction. It fires more than it hires with less than three percent of all employees working for transnational corporations. One big lie follows the last. ‘Creating higher living standards’ is another. When falling standards of life cannot be denied, peoples are then told they ‘must sacrifice’ – even as 80 per cent of ‘free capital’ moves across borders with almost none based in legal tender and capital deposits denounced as despotic. The sweeping falsehoods are so conventionalized as ‘economics’ that corporate taxes are ‘competitively reduced’ to nothing and net tax receipts. As Canada’s finance minister Flaherty says as he budgets another $100 billion of Canadian tax revenues to the corporate rich in 2012 while slashing life-protective programmes at every node, ‘the lowest corporate taxes in the OECD will be our brand’. Thus ‘competitive tax regimes’ produce a new ruling norm. The ‘1 per cent’ receives over 90 per cent of all income gains and over 90 per cent of all tax reductions at the same time with ever more demanded. This is the carcinogenic aggression in full view, always justified by reverse projection – as the Republican campaign does as I write.

It advances and deepens wherever is not repelled (Norway, Scandinavia) or reversed (Latin America). Elsewhere the multiplying private wealth is not only exempt from income and wealth taxes, but increasingly funds elections to ensure against any social immune response. A minimum transnational rate of tax on corporations, parasitic speculations and wealthy individuals, and illegality of tax evasion sites are the known remedies to begin by mandatory register and tracking. The stakes are not small, and the major conduits are all known. Already by 1998, there were $2 trillion of such international transactions every day, 97.5 per cent of all foreign exchange transactions (compared to under 20 per cent in 1975), and one-third – now much more – of all private assets hidden off-shore compared to none legally under prior capital controls.⁵ On July 22, 2012, world press services reported from the Tax Justice Network (TJN) that $21–32 trillion of tax-escape assets is so hidden, most managed by Swiss banks and Goldman Sachs, at an equivalent value of the GDPs of the US and Japan combined. In such ways, the currency life-blood of peoples belonging to less than 0.01 per cent of the world’s population is expropriated and committed to no life or life-capital function.

Yet any fraction of 1 per cent tax on speculations against currencies and bonds and derivatives gambling by ‘Tobin tax’ has been denied for over 20 years as the daily necessities of poor people are increasingly taxed and food, water and land are priced higher and taken. In synecdoche of the cancer system, Wall Street’s JP Morgan leads the tax-avoidance brigade with over 3,792 subsidiaries for the single function of off-shore and other tax evasion (the rest have around 2,000), while Goldman Sachs leads casino derivatives speculation on pollution credits, food and water at the same time (as also documented by the TJN).

The value programme is clear, but unspeakable. It does not matter if people’s lives in the tens of millions and society’s life-capital bases are cumulatively destroyed so long as transnational money-sequences keep growing. This is the ‘economic stability’ of the transnational money-sequence system. An unseen equation regulates beneath conscious awareness: transnational money-sequence free-riding = dispossession of societies and citizens = devouring of human and planetary life-support systems.

The Logic of Prosperity and Recovery Across Developed and Developing Worlds

After the private money-sequence meltdowns of South-East Asia in 1997, Russia in 1998, Brazil in1999, and Argentina in 2002, the leading societies of Latin America decided to turn policy to responsible economics and government.

In 1998 and 2000 the democratic victories of Venezuela’s United Socialist Party under Hugo Chavez led the Latin American Revolution against the ‘neo-liberal market fundamentalism’ which had dramatically collapsed one society after another. The surrounding societies understood. Whatever the pigeon-holing categories of ‘socialist’ or ‘capitalist’, ‘moderate’ or ‘extreme’, the underlying policy shift was decisive and historic. Whether it was 2003 with the Workers Party presidential victory in Brazil under ‘Lula’ da Silva, or the worker-supported victory of Nestor Kirchner in Argentina the same year, or the ‘Bolivarian revolution’ of Venezuela to begin, the transnational money-sequence cancer was resisted and turned back. Public taxation and investment and repulsion of foreign private money-sequence rule of sovereign resources and banking systems led the economics of recovery.

Comparison of tax-revenue ratios to GDP express the financial story. While the still impoverished Latin American societies of Mexico, Guatemala (the lowest tax rate), El Salvador, Peru, Dominican Republic, and Colombia have ratios of tax revenues to GDP in the 12–19 per cent GDP range, the most successful Latin American economies, Brazil and Argentina, have a tax rate of over 30 per cent. The case of Ecuador is illuminating.. A former ‘banana republic’ under neo-liberal, corrupt and military domination by the US – a familiar pattern across the continent before2000 – economist Rafael Correa was elected President in 2007. Leading by referendum-legitimated policies to break the private business-press domination of policy by scare propaganda, his government increased its revenues by dramatic increase in tax receipts from consistently enforced direct taxes on corporations and the wealthy. With the indirect control of tax administration favouring the corporate rich broken by democratic legitimation, the new revenues exceeded the near sevenfold increase in the public share of oil revenues.

Which society has not done better anywhere by higher taxes and resource rents on corporations and the rich? Compare Latin America before 2000 in borderless immiseration with neither, to after 2000 when both spiked and were consistently enforced. Public revenue flows are the lifeblood of society’s capacities to enable the lives and life-capital of the people, and these are their source. Latin America is not alone in showing the life-and-death meaning for societies. Compare the continuously high-tax Scandinavian societies with high and strict resource-revenue regimes to North America where taxes on corporations and the rich have been more than halved, and public resources are given away at every level from hydrocarbons to electromagnetic spectrums. The former prosper in life-security and balanced social and economic development. The latter go deeper into recession, jobless youth, looted environments, inequality and despair.

The Inner Logic of Self-Multiplying ‘Investments’ that Consume the World with no Life-Function

Behind the breaking of the planetary environment’s carrying capacities, behind government debt and deficit loads and crises, behind the ceaseless mergers, acquisitions and job-sheddings by corporate finance departments, behind the speed-ups of every process of work and resource extraction, behind the privatizations of evolved civil commons domains in every nation, there is one macro causal mechanism – deregulated private transnational money-sequencing to multiply more free of taxation and regulation.

Yet the inner turning wheel of ‘discounted cash flow’, has remained unspoken in public. It means that what is today $100 in real terms is equated to $100 + interest in one year ($110), two years ($121), or 20 years from now as the starting base from which all profitable ‘investment’ is calculated. Over time, this system of ‘investment’ is propelled to an horizonlessly expanding money-demand machine consuming life-systems as its programme of freedom. It engineers all that exists to extract more private money value from it faster on the basis of debt-price revenues on money the banks do not in fact have to lend.

For example of ‘how your money can grow’, the ‘investment’ of $10,000 will, by this money-sequence mechanism, be set into motion as new money-demand ever after and, in stock funds, over $5 million a few decades later (more exactly, an over 500-times increase in 43 years) as an exemplar of the wise portfolio ‘investor’.⁶ Exponentially multiplying money-demand system sets no bounds of greed as good, and this become normal expectation. The lives and conditions of life that the 500-times more money is extracted from are erased in the magic of compounding interest as a base for stock market escalation.

Such are the ‘rational expectations’ of the carcinogenic system’s agents stripping the life-world and ending in tumour ‘bubbles’. It moves to derivatives trading to cover bets both ways, multiplying the money-demand control of the future into the quadrillions with little or no legal tender to back the private money demand. All is good for the free traders, and the famed Black-Scholes Equation wins the Nobel Prize in 1997 – just before the Asian meltdown of that year in which Wall Street and other money-sequence speculators pillaged Asia’s real economies overnight. Still no-one points out that the famed equation – like the ruling money-sequence paradigm itself – refers only to money quantities across time, price, and interest-discount with absolutely no accountability or connection to the real economy, life-capital, or people’s lives. The multiplying new money riches from invaded Middle East and Central Asia oilfields lead debate instead. In the background the financial system is churning a quadrillion dollars of money-price derivatives and futures a year by 2007 – ten times the total worth of all products made in the last century – with no grounding in any life-means or base. Multiplying richer outcomes for ‘smart investors’ is the ruling storyline.

The more that can be extracted at no cost for no life-function is the meaning. Governments all the while rush to ensure the ‘free capital flows’ as ‘what produces wealth’ – free from all borders, public conditions, taxes, past regulations, pay standards, and society’s life requirements themselves – all that is required for life to survive and flourish. No economic demand is allocated to build and sustain them, but only more for their sequence liquidation into still more demand for fewer with no sustaining life-function required.

RECLAIMING PUBLIC RESOURCES = RECOVERING FROM THE MONEY-SEQUENCE CANCER SYSTEM

The ultimate value war is unseen – the war of money-sequence demand against life-capacity needs on every level. Where money demand violates life-capacity’s needs – that without which life-capacities are reduced – the lines of the money-sequence disorder are defined. Where private money demand seeks to multiply itself indifferent to and overriding natural and human life-requirements, it becomes carcinogenic.

Aristotle recognized the desire for money as an end in self as the ‘unnatural’ disorder of ‘chremastatik’. The last 30 years of private money-sequence rule has made it a world dictatorship. Now the transnational money-sequence system overruns all life-systems, resources and needs to multiply itself. Yet the problem is not the rights of private property or its money investments. The problem is private property in money demand seeking to multiply through public life-spaces and resources in which it does not have any private property or investment right.

Here is where the recovery of public control over public life-spaces and resources is the basis of society’s recovery and freedom. It begins with progressive taxation, but it goes deeper into the public resources owned by society. It goes to wherever ecosystem decline is increasing, climate change is speeding, soil and ocean degradation advancing, air and water pollution growing, rubbish and waste multiplying, human impoverishment growing at individual and collective levels. To reclaim the public life-space invaded by corporate commodity-cycles begins society’s life-regrounding. Effectively regulating against their destruction and despoliation is the civil commons of life-protective law and custom – the social immune system explained in prior chapters.

Public resources are more significantly reclaimed when they are looped into the economy as public wealth providers with public responsibilities for them. No private right can claim otherwise. In every society succeeding, the process is instituted. Norway is the most evident case as we have seen, but the Latin American Revolution has led a continent’s recovery from the transnational money-sequence predation. Oil resources in particular have been public wealth providers for life-serving public programmes, most famously in Venezuela where oil revenues formerly dissipated into local elite and US corporate pockets are publicly controlled or nationalized on the ground, and their profits invested in life-serving public programmes (with the environmental problems still unsolved as elsewhere). In spite of US-backed coup attempts, virulent ant-Chavez media campaigns, and old-class attempts at sabotage of the public-oil-resource base, massive on-the-street democratic support has prevailed. Venezuela funds its ‘Bolivarian revolution’ by now over $770 billion of social investment – when Western states are severely cutting back – more than doubling the social-programme share of the GDP from 8.3 per cent in 1998 to 18.7 per cent in 2012. Thus the lives of the majority poor have been dramatically uplifted in life and life-security – hundreds of thousands of new jobs in publicly funded co-operatives, universalizing literacy, educational and health programmes, constitutional legislation to ensure women’s equal rights, major extensions of public pensions, and halving of poverty rates.

The case of Ecuador too is paradigmatic. After Rafael Correa’s presidential election in 2007, the public’s share in the publicly owned resources of oil was raised from 13 per cent to 87 per cent. Oil companies were given the choice of staying or leaving, continuing under the new referendum-supported arrangements, or being nationalized with compensation. Nine of 17 companies remained. In all cases, successful turns to the real economy and provision of life-goods for people supplant private money-sequencing to more – unlike the Gulf countries where the oil is left in the in control of the transnational corporations and the oil-wealth government receives is disposed by royal dictate. Unlike Canada too, whose corporate state charges a small fraction of these rates for the public oil, and allows the oil party to dominate the country’s politics and economy, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador as well as Norway have deployed publicly owned resources for public life-serving purposes. Public services and programmes do not get continuously cut back as in North America and Europe, but increase as public wealth increases. Natural resource wealth does not get squandered away as fast as the resource money-sequencers can extract it, and public funds invest the wealth for public life-purpose instead of the wealth disappearing.

Another striking contrast in how natural resource wealth is managed and allocated for real economy and the people’s welfare by internal public investment, on the one hand, or for foreign private corporate money-sequence control and political debasement, on the other hand, is small but significant – Azerbaijan versus Trinidad and Tobago. Greg Palast reports in Vulture’s Picnic that Azerbaijan (militarily allied with Israel) receives a 10 per cent state share of oil revenues after five years with minimum drilling and related jobs required; whereas Trinidad and Tobago receives a 55 per cent public share of oil revenues, over five times greater, and receives its share from day one. Trinidad and Tobago has universal free public health care and education, liveable public pensions, and regionally high social security benefits. Azerbaijan does not, and seeks to reduce the costs of what social services it has. Both are small nations, so the differences are not of power but of public stand and direction.

The Unseen Civil Commons Base: Public Resources for Public Control and Benefit Across the Board

Oil is by no means the only kind of public wealth that can fund life-serving social investment. Exactly the same principles apply to all publicly owned natural resources as to oil – from other subsoil mineral assets to forests and forest habitats and their species to aquifers and rivers to public-zone fisheries to hydropower sources to the airwaves of telecommunications to public research and knowledge stocks. There are many trillions of dollars of public wealth in merely the last two cases in the US alone, as Ralph Nader has observed. Again there is the same life-and-death public policy choice-space for sovereign states. On the one hand, there is surrender to dominant private money-sequences under pretext of ‘development’ and ‘jobs’ which means, in fact, resource pillage, profit-taking elsewhere, and jobs with no future. On the other hand, the public’s life-capital heritage and economic base can be and is stewarded for the public’s life and life-capital bases by 80–90 per cent share of profits, as in Norway and Ecuador oil.

The same choice space is found with all publicly owned resources. Many of the great on-the-ground battles of the age have been fought over this underlying ultimate choice of societies – over their water as in the famed repulsion of the Cochabomba water privatization by Bechtel; over public rivers as in the struggles of India reported by Vandana Shiva; over precious public mineral resources mass-murderously seized from public ownership as with the privateer wars int he Congo; over publicly owned fisheries that have been effectively expropriated by private-profit factory-ship across the world’s oceans from Canada’s legendary cod fisheries to the coasts of Africa and Asia; over the clear-cutting of forests by vast timber concessions or privateer logging which destroy human, bird and animal habitats for fast move-on profits to the next old-growth inheritance (not just tropical rainforests in country-sizes from Brazil to Indonesia, Papua and Malaysia, but also great temperate mixed and boreal forests razed to rubble).

Or, finally, there can be a reclamation over public airwaves and telecommunications which have been occupied as private advertising and propaganda vehicles which simultaneously put heads of state in and out of power: like Ronald Reagan who was never criticized after granting monopoly urban markets; or British PM Tony Blair after favouring the Murdoch empire with tax avoidance and monopoly market rights; or the President of Mexico by the one-sided coverage of the media empire of Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man; and the rule of Italy by Silvio Berlusconi whose full-spectrum ownership of public airwaves and print media kept him out of prison for years despite judicial convictions.

In almost every case of these publicly owned resource bases, the unifying pattern is:

1. Publics are effectively robbed of three-quarters of the revenues they are due – countless trillions of dollars overall every year.
2. The publicly owned capital bases that have been effectively expropriated are degraded and despoiled by private money-sequence exploitation with no effective life-capital standards.
3. The democratic accountability of the management of all these life-capital bases is eliminated by private corporations responsible only to private market sales and dominant stockholders.
4. Political and economic control over societies’ fundamental resources is replaced by money-sequence conglomerates with no property rights to them.
5. The publicly owned resource bases – which include further trillions of publicly owned research – are thus occupied by private forces hostile to the common interest although they provide everything required in constitutional revenues and jurisdictions to serve the public good.

None of this is accidental. Every step of the transnational money-sequence system is structured to seize every one of these life-capital bases of societies.

As we have seen, even the basic sources of society’s research, development and knowledge have been increasingly occupied by for-profit corporate conglomerates unprecedentedly setting the agenda of public universities and higher research for monopoly patents. Where do we find exception to this moving invasion of public resources of every kind from subsoil assets and wildlife habitats to higher education?

Only where sovereign public government has made the exception – as Norway or the Latin America today, or the European Community or Canada before the Great Reversal – is any people’s life safe.

Reclaiming Citizen Life-Security and Flourishing by Public Option

In the global money-sequence system, any host society or environment can be dispossessed and replaced. Whether citizens understand or not, this system is in principle incapable of ensuring life-security to any community. Ever advancing elimination of secure jobs, lives and environments are expressions of the one-way disorder.

This is why the most voluminous financial asset of the public – savings for retirement in individual and public form – are forced into private money-sequence stock bets called ‘registered retirement plans’. By 1996 $350 billion in Canada and $4,000 billion in the United States savings were tax-credited, ploughed and state-directed into private-profit pension funds alone, and these swelling pension funds became the biggest suppliers of capital in global markets. What happened from the privatization-for-profit method of ensuring pensions for working people in the long term? In wealthy and once social democratic Canada, as the CCPA Monitor reports twelve years later, 80 per cent of workers now have no pension benefits from their employers; those that do have their defined benefits abolished; and for-profit plans are both insecure and cost 50 per cent more. In short, a systematic deprivation of people’s means of life through time relentlessly advances for both the public (immense tax losses) and individuals (most without pensions) to ‘supply the global capital market’ – decoded, to multiply private transnational money-sequences by dispossessing governments and people of their collective financial capacity for life-security of any kind.

With corporate-state schemes of tax deductions and pension privatizations, tsunamis of pension money have gushed out into the private money-sequences of ‘investment’ dealers and banks across borders while the future life-security of peoples rapidly declines. The stock markets spike up with all the new money and leveraged debt flooding into them, until the bubble-tumour collapses. In 1998, the combined money-demand value of US pension and mutual funds was $9 trillion, or 30 times the net money worth of the US’s 60 richest market agents with more new money-demand going into these financialized security funds every quarter than all the US superrich owned together.⁷ Public and individual pension funds were thus privatized into transnational money-sequences instead of as in the past lending to governments, investing in jobs for the young, or committing to some life-serving base.⁸ It was a great killing for the money-sequence rich performing no productive function. But the option of public and defined benefit pensions, the only option that ever works, was pre-empted by talk of ‘new riches’ for all, the oldest magic in the book.

The occupied public wealth bases run wide and deep. The public option for reliable life-security at far lower cost does not end with pensions. Public insurance for public benefit is a vast financial pool of real money for investment in the future life of loved ones. But life-insurance is so privatized, kept secret and squandered into executive empires it rivals the banks. The advantages of public option – collective economies of scale with no private money-sequencer costs – are as significant in economies of scale as the industrial revolution itself. They also eliminate the crippling take of unproductive and unreliable private money-sequencing. The long successful but little mentioned public life-insurance of Japan, for example, has shown this – but it too is under attack for privatization of its immense wealth. However aggressive the carcinogenic transnational money-sequences may become, one home truth remains constant. The democratically public option is alone structured to ensure citizens’ life-security in any enterprise at all.

Without the public option, all these vast funds stream to private money-sequence conglomerates which seek only to multiply themselves and are incapable in principle and fact of ensuring secure life-benefits to any citizenry on earth. As with pensions, health and life insurance, automobile insurance is now more than a trillion-dollar business worldwide and growing with dominant transnational corporations like All-State instituting the practice of ‘don’t pay’ as first response – a standard in private insurance domains like HMOs (Health Maintenance Organizations) even if it kills thousands, and now infiltrated  worker’s occupational safety boards (like Canada’s former Workmen’s Compensation Board, now compensation-denial ‘safety Insurance’). In every domain of life-security whatever, the public option works better in life-outcomes and money costs. The track record of public versus for-profit health insurance is the most long-term in data, but the performance pattern applies to other domains which have furiously fought against any public option while seeking to privatize more. As reported earlier, the US for-profit system has long been by far the most expensive in the world, has excluded a third of the population, demanded times more than all food costs together for monthly coverage, and has incontestably inferior health outcomes with more deaths from malpractice than from auto accidents, fire and guns put together.

There is no significant exception to the following economic law which is taboo to recognize. The public option is always better in both life and cost results. Yet even as demonstrations of this law keep occurring, private money-sequence lobbies bully and overwhelm public officials – properly a criminal offense. All the while, citizens seek life-security before all else in health, in future pension, in home, in higher education, in vehicle liability, and in informative mass media. But countless trillions of dollars worth of public wealth continue to be siphoned by private corporate money-sequencing with no proprietary right, at much higher cost, and with increasingly the opposite of life-enabling performance.

The public option in mass media may be the most needed of all. For-profit images and text whose sole regulator is self-maximizing private money-sequencing are in principle unreliable and distortive. Any thinking person knows this. But the for-profit media make have license to print money from their occupation of public airwaves while structured only to deliver consumers to big corporations. Throughout, the truth is what sells. What does not is ruled out. What criticizes the ruling money-sequence programme is unspeakable. In contrast, public broadcasters do not have to advertise non-stop to sell corporate commodities or gate-keep against economic heresy. Their mandate is the opposite – to reliably inform and enlighten the public – and their performance at doing so is incontestably superior (as in Britain and France).

The same problem arises in still sharper contradiction to the public interest with higher research and safety standards. They have been taken over by corporate pseudo-science and fraud. As now amply documented across domains, corporate ‘science’ keeps tests secret, selects only for results boosting sales, and attacks scientific critics and criticism. Scientific knowledge and public safety become themselves structured to sell corporate products with systematic repression of life-hazard information. Sickness epidemics and deaths grow into countless millions in consequence, as Chapter 1, ‘Decoding the Cancer System’, explains. Even public critics are attacked with Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Protest (SLAPPs). Life-and-death information is concealed, doctored, selected, and repressed in the very opposite of scientific method. Labels of genetic tampering and proved health dangers of contents are blocked by states themselves.

Public health care, public pensions, public insurance, public broadcasting and public science have proven so superior over decades that one wonders how it all could go so badly wrong. This is the nature of the disorder. It seeks only private profit in growing money-sequences overriding life-functions, and it cannot correct itself – however cumulatively deadly the outcomes.

An Anatomy of Why ‘Public-Private Partnerships’ Rob the Public

Despite the pervasive corporate media attacks on government, the record shows the public manages its wealth far better and at less cost than for-profit corporations – from the rule of law to income security benefits, from water and sewage to health care and education, from public broadcasting to environmental protection and product testing.

Public goods define human civilization because they alone are structured to ensure the universal goods necessary to even survive let alone live a human life. Economies of collective scale and no private-profit or transaction diversions of public funds cut costs by a demonstrated 20–50 per cent. These facts of civil commons evolution define society’s real development, and are the underlying reasons why privatization of public sectors is increasingly unacceptable to thinking publics.

Privatized methods are rammed through anyway with no option given to electorates by captured corporate states like the US, Canada, and Britain. But an in-between strategy of transnational money-sequence predation has thus been crafted as well – partial privatization for corporate profit by Private Finance Initiatives (Britain) or Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs, Canada), or other euphemisms elsewhere. These partial privatizations come in every form. The United Nations’ 2001 ‘Global Compact’ with the world’s most powerful corporations expresses the global programme of occupation. Pervasive slogans of ‘new efficiencies’, ‘innovations’, ‘cost savings’, and ‘better service’ pervade with no demonstration and against know facts. The invasive methods and public losses are predictable, but unreported:

1. profits do not return to the community;
2. the public loses money and assets compared to prior public control;
3. liabilities remain public;
4. failures are not compensated by the corporations responsible for them.

While corporations are protected by person rights, they are not accountable like persons. They use aliases at will, have no borders of place, no duties but to money profit, and no limit by death. They are the sole ‘persons’ with rights – called ‘investors’ – in the transnational trade and investment treaties written by corporate lawyers. British Lord Chancellor Thurlow (1731–1806) long ago warned, ‘the corporation has no body to be kicked or soul to be damned’. It is in this protean shape with no life or life-function that the transnational money-sequence system devours the life-world.

As predicted in the first edition of this volume, its corporate vehicles have rapidly moved into every domain of public funding there is – medical expenditures at every level, schools and universities, publicly funded research and science across domains, military outsourcing, infrastructure building and public works, electric energy supply and transmission, public transit and transportation of every kind, public water and sewer systems, transportation corridors, and even prisons. Wherever there is public money that can be privatized into corporate profit, there is corporate lobbying, pressure, bullying, and false promises to get at it.

An underlying equation rules across phenomena: manipulate perception = democracy = feed-line of public money = more money-sequencing = degraded life-function at individual and social levels. Research finds no clear case where such ‘partnership’ saves money or produces better life-services in any domain. Rather than cite endless examples, diagnosis here explains why these outcomes predictably occur.

1. There is no testing period or evidence to confirm or disconfirm claims.
2. Privatization processes are not accountable under contract to cost reduction or improvement.
3. Costs rise or multiply from the add-on of private profits, profit guarantees, higher bank interest charges, new transaction costs, private consultant accounts, monopoly conditions, cost overruns allowed, public bailouts, and few or no corporate liabilities specified in contracts.
4. Professional qualifications in the area of ‘partnership’ are not required of corporate decision makers (for example, in medical, school and university ‘public-private partnerships’ or ‘private financial initiatives’.
5. No improved life-capacities or capabilities of individuals and societies are ever measured or show.
6. No failure however great is acknowledged as the fault of the model itself.

(1) to (6) show the unscientific, unqualified, life-blind, and unaccountable nature of these ‘partner’ privatizations. One universal result is that public funds in the countless billions go to corporate money-sequences that could not otherwise be appropriated by them. This is the hijacking of the nutriments of the life-host known so well at the micro level of the disease. The ‘partner’ privatizations are nonetheless relentlessly pressed by politicians and corporate lobbies for the following reasons no press reports:

1. The politicians deciding for privatization partnerships are able to remove the costs of public investment from their books and so appear to be cost-reducing when in fact the opposite is true.
2. Public assets are transferred without sale to private corporate ownership by converting the buildings or other structures which are rented back in long-term contracts entered into operational expenses of government that do not show up all at once, but are irreversible.
3. Public workers’ jobs, pay, safety standards and benefits are reduced without apparent government responsibility which is abdicated to ‘the laws of the market’.
4. Provision for community or citizen agency to question, access records and accounts, vote out, or hold accountable any corporate principals or their financial allocations is ruled out.
5. The democratic political process is overcome by no-one evidently left accountable for the resulting costs and liabilities (off-book accounting for the politicians, contractual avoidance by the private corporations).
6. Financial and other support in elections is provided by the beneficiary corporations for the politicians and parties enriching them to sustain the public-money hijack not seen.
7. ‘Risk management’ is always claimed by corporate ‘partners’, but the financial risk in fact remains with the taxpaying public as the unstated condition of partial-privatization contracts.
8. Ideal new money-sequence opportunities are offered to big corporations in otherwise drying-up markets because of shrinking aggregate demand from hollowed-out citizens.

This is how the carcinogenic money-sequence system invades and occupies governments with few or none recognizing the inner logic of predation and spread.

TRACKING THE FALLS OF JAPAN AND THE EUROPEAN UNION TO TODAY

Twenty years ago as the collapse of collective life-bearings into global money-sequence chaos began, Japan too was swept into its vortex. It did not spend all the money its society had earned the way it had productively built it all out of the ashes of war.

The immediate causal mechanism was the same as in the US later – an economy led by housing and stock price bubbles driven by self-multiplying money-sequencing disconnected from and unaccountable to any life-capital ground. The money-tumour always bursts. But the incantation of the age, ‘Let the market decide’ continuously leads the hollowing out with no economic learning.

When the asset bubble of speculatively driven prices of real estate and Nikkei stocks broke in Japan as the richest banks in the world kept lending out for it with no public financial control for productive investment as in the great rise, fathomless debt and debt defaults multiplied at the same time. They still hollow out the system. The productive enterprises to invest in and steward as their successful automobile and electronic industries had done since 1950 by long-term public planning and massive capital allocation, faded into the background. Japan’s money-sequences kept being ploughed into other money-sequences without productive mission.

The government and financial ministry investing in the long-term objective of the best electronic and auto products in the planet had brilliantly succeeded. But the quantum leap required to deal with the pollutions of the machines it led the world in producing was not to be the new and needed direction. The Bank of Japan, we might observe, had repudiated the whole plan to build Japanese automobiles in the first place on the grounds that it violated the market tenet of ‘comparative advantage’. Banks lead backwards into debt charges on the future, not forward into new horizons of investment for the public life-good unless directed by responsible government.

In any case, as Japan’s money-sequences spun out of control, free-riding transnational money-sequences tiding in and out of other societies with no committed function caused vast economic meltdowns, not just long-term slump. East Asian ‘economic miracles’ collapsed overnight from Indonesia and Thailand to South Korea. Hundreds of billions of foreign money-demand masked as ‘free capital flows’ invaded with no productive function, and then destructively exited overnight in 1997–98. The result was – without capital controls like Malaysia or, more deeply, Japan – that the real economies of nations were ruined with tens of millions of victims. Gigantic foreign profits were made and bankrupt productive enterprises sold off to Wall Street and like money-sequences. But the societies lay pillaged as if invaded by a foreign army.

Japan has always been saved by its publicly controlled banking, investment and capital allocation system. That is why even if its debt is now over 220 per cent of its GDP, 90 per cent of its debt is domestically held, interest rates are set by the public bank, and no foreign money-sequence tides can hollow it out as elsewhere by government debt-bleeding by foreign banks or by ruinous capital flight. Yet after its asset bubble had so completely burst in the fury of private money-sequence multiplication and bank loans for it, Japan Inc the Producer was left with hundreds of billions of debt that could not be paid.

Japan had no outlets for money-sequence invasion like the US military-financial axis. In the background, the US-dominated Bank for International Settlements (BIS) that makes bank policy for the financial world raised reserve requirements on debt-loans which hamstrung Japan but not Wall Street. Having led the change, Wall Street evaded the regulation by another mutation – packaging debt-loans into fraudulent financial bundles labelled ‘securities’ and sold around the world as toxic mortgages rated triple-A by other Wall Street operators. The game unravelled in 2008 taking the world down, but not Wall Street whose transnational money-sequences have kept growing aided by trillions of public dollars to keep demanding more in debt servicing and manipulated futures prices – all backed by bank-money multiplying hundreds of times beyond legal tender. Take homes and pensions. Let children starve. Make the poor pay for schools. Lower wages and demolish public sectors. Grow luxuries for export or die. The money-sequence cancer has many expressions.

As for Japan, the fine machine shop of the world, it turned its vast earned wealth into the five biggest banks in the world. Too bad. Wall Street controls the BIS, the IMF, the rating agencies and has NATO to back it. Japan does not.

Japan’s predicament cannot be decoded by the ruling paradigm because it cannot in principle understand it, beginning with public control over capital allocation for productive purpose. When the democratically accountable Ministry of Finance was in charge, public investment for high technology reigned. But the Bank of Japan ironically got more in control after it led the housing bubble and crash – a familiar story for the big bank catastrophe across continents. So bank-hoarding of money and austerity became the new rule. Since 1998, Japan’s consumer prices have dropped to 1992 levels. Wages are down 7 per cent. Urban property prices are down 51 per cent. Tax revenues are down 14 per cent.⁹

Japan’s aggressive public-led investment in advanced productive enterprise was thus reversed by big-bank speculative lending. With capital allocation under public ministry direction, in contrast, the Japanese economy could have turned to manufacture the minimalist precision mechanisms the world desperately needed. Most of all it could have led the world in clean air and closed-loop vehicle systems that do not pollute. After all, gas masks have long been worn in Tokyo and elsewhere in Asia, and everywhere the same economic life-necessity for pollution-recycling mechanisms has been escalating in engine-and-oil economies and ever bigger cities. No-one could have solved the technical problem better than Japan.

But the real economy and life-goods do not compute in the transnational money-sequence system, and least of all to banks not under public control. Without such a plan for required real life-product and its unmoored banks loaded with bad loans Japan’s government pumped over $200 billion more public funds into the fallen bank money-sequences. Lock-stepping to the global market paradigm, the IMF and the US government demanded still more financial deregulation that had already hollowed out the ‘market miracles’ of Latin America and Asia by 2000.¹⁰ Japan’s government, not recognizing the gallows wit, meanwhile promised ‘a big bang’ of more deregulation in Japanese financial markets.

Captive inside the money-sequence disorder dragging its society down, Japan led by coiffed Prime Minister Koizumi moved to the global market panacea of privatization of keystone public assets – a standard invasive occupation of the carcinogenic system. In this case it was the venerable Japan Post (formerly Japan Postal Services Agency) that has been botch-targeted for sell-off from 2001 on. Long the stable public anchor of the Japanese economy, it helped ground Japan’s dramatic upward climb to productive leadership of the world – the largest personal savings pool in existence, a major public banking service, the nation’s public life-insurance system, the nation’s single largest employer and workforce, and a primary savings source for public investment free of debt-creating private banks (holding 25 per cent of the government’s debt with no private profiteering). In short, Japan Post – as well as delivering all the mail – had been the greatest public economic base in the industrialized world, grounding the nation’s finances, employment, communications, and insurance sectors all at once during Japan’s meteoric rise. It was the model for recovering public life-security and wealth.

Yet precisely because it carried such great public wealth, it was marked for ‘big-bang’ privatization – incanting capitalism’s myth of creation by destruction also found in fascism. Being the nation’s major financial asset and public economy base – compare it to Norway’s Public Fund – it became the primary target for private money-sequence liquidation and take. ‘Market magic’ still sweeps the planet. As I write, India opens its borders to Walmart to predate its local food and goods markets that sustain the aggregate demand of the country. Again, the invisible hand of miracles and metamorphosis to riches holds peoples in thrall while rising majorities become ever poorer in life-means.

Revealingly the major enterprise Japan’s fall by public bailouts of private money-sequences saved was the for-profit nuclear-power corporation TEPKO. It built its retaining walls ten metre slower than required to stand against a tsunami so as to increase revenues for private stockholders.

The Lesson Writ Large: The Macro Law of Economic Failure

The global panacea goes on being imposed the more its prescriptions fail. What is unnamed, however, is the underlying general law: modern economic crises always follow from money value and sequences delinked from life-needs and productive life-capital development.

In all the cases before us – from Japan and the Asian economies to the US and Europe today – every crisis follows from dominant money-sequences with no connection back to the life and life-capital requirements of the real-world economy. Conversely, all recovery comes from re-grounding and investing in them. This is what most of Latin America is doing today and any economy that works.

The money for this investment not only comes from progressive taxes and recovery of public resources. It comes through public investment banking to serve public life-purposes. The reverse now rules. As long as Japan stuck to immaculately fine engineered automobiles and electronic systems financed and led by public agency without vast financial waste in a private bank system, it was the most efficient economy in the world. It could have evolved into pollution-erasure circuits for a world of ever cleaner air and waters in expression of Japan’s ancient life-revering vision.

But even Japan lost its bearings in the private money-sequence growth system eating the world. From the fine machine shop of the globe leading out of the heavy industrial age with the impeccably clean precision of a new motor era, it became submerged in the runaway private money-sequencing with no productive ground. Its now unmoored banks lent for private speculation in future stock and land prices in the trillions. The lesson goes both ways. Ground public investment, credit and money creation in life-capital bases towards ever less polluting consumption – the only life-coherent paradigm there is – and there will be no economic system crises.

From Cancer System to Cure: An Overview of the Four System-Deciders

The cure is implicate in the disease. It is in understanding the recurrent economic collapses across cases that we find their common cause. This common cause is money-sequences in carcinogenic growth without life-capital regulators or bases. And the cure follows from this common cause. The known imperatives of recovery are the way forward with adaptations to different cases. The last and deepest imperative is ecological economy, diagnosed in the last section of this study.

The third system-decider of public policy is to gain public control over fictionalized money multiplication, the marrow of the transnational cancer system. It has led the still unfolding US economic collapse and has been amply analysed already. Now let us consider the multicultural rise by the once warring nations of Europe. It too has gone from world-leading prosperity to collapse with its life and life-capital bases being cumulatively consumed alive by the same carcinogenic money-sequence disease.

These cases of success and then disaster combine with the Latin American cases of pre-2000 neo-liberal destitution and economic enslavement to post-2000 recovery in productively life-based real economy.

The Life-versus-Death Choice-Space of Europe Over 60 Years

We need to recall in this time of Europe’s greatest crisis since the Great Depression and war a sweeping but now forgotten economic fact. Between 1947 and 1973 before the euro substituted for the European peoples, before transnational private money-sequences mutated into socially decoupled self-multiplication, the real GNP of Europe rose as much as in the previous two centuries put together.¹¹ This period expresses the inner logic of recovery not only from Depression and war then, but from new Depression today.

Underlying Europe’s historic 1945–75 recovery and advance were the four ‘system deciders’ now leading Latin America. In case of the European Union, the life-necessities of citizens were increasingly assured by progressive taxation and capital regulation, systematic public infrastructure investment, and life and income security programmes for all. Yet it is this real economy for the provision of life-goods otherwise in short supply that has been invaded and reversed by the transnational money-sequence disorder. In 2012 Italy, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece are, as so many societies before in the less developed world, in varying stages of economic reversal and ruin by the same causal mechanism.

Again an ultimate choice space confronts peoples. They can continue with ever more created-debt demands minted by private banks lending money they do not have to break societies on the wheel of endless debt, escalating inequality and declining production with the ruinous private-money system funded by captured governments themselves.

Or responsible government reclaims money and credit issue without mounting debt for natural and human life-capital investment, development and recovery with all the resources required – from sub-soil hydrocarbons and forests to research, pensions, security insurance and progressive taxation.

The Financial Inner logic of the Great Sickness

What is least recognized is that the transnational big private banks do not have the real money to begin with by which they subjugate individuals and nations to perpetual debt-service charges. They first depend on the debt payments to leverage again and again for more debt and takeovers. They then depend on public bailouts when the Ponzi scheme collapses. The consequence is public dispossession and ruin. Indebted governments not only serve this system by abdication to it. They feed it with continuous injection of society’s financial lifeblood to keep growing.

Dominant corporations don’t worry. They have their own banking operations in tandem with the banks, locate their capital off-shore tax-free, don’t pay taxes on debt interest, and can swallow productive smaller corporations without real money. So they do not complain. As for living individuals and small businesses, the banks close on their collateral and co-signers, and strip and sell the takings to leverage again for more of the same. Or vulture and equity funds do it with the banks as lender (for example, Mitt Romney). In the world being dispossessed to enrich the money-sequencers, increasing masses of individuals are bled dry by legalized shark-rate credit-card debt at 20–36 per cent. The bank money-sequence rapacity has no limit. The US banks charging the rate get the money at 1–3 per cent in what was a crime before 1980, and the US Supreme Court approve the large-jaw shark rates as legal ‘late fees’ with rate hikes required.

Outside the US homeland, the Jubilee Debt Campaign reports in The State of Debt, 2012, that the most heavily indebted countries can expect their debt servicing to foreign private banks to rise ‘by an average of a third’ after the global movement for debt relief partly succeeded tin 2001. In all such ways, massively deregulated and borderlessly invading private bank-debt money creations become exponentially more money-demand without legal tender to back them. They feed on people and governments at higher rates the more unable they are to pay, draining societies of their public health and education infrastructures as well as pensions, national treasures, jobs, and wages to pay the debt charges on fictionalized money.

Now it is Europe’s turn as African children still cannot go to school in order to pay the banks. With no evident notice, public government-to-government grants and low-interest loans for specified productive purposes that worked so well from the Marshall Plan to the 1970s no longer exist.

The tip of the iceberg now showing has been the fraudulently packaged mass-issued mortgages from Wall Street with invisibly escalating clauses sold as triple-A ‘securities’ that precipitated the European financial collapse. If still enough does not come in from government and individual debtors – and ever more multiplied amounts must be extracted for the carcinogenic system to continue – public treasuries are hollowed out next. The private banks of Wall Street, the US and the EU do not go bankrupt by the ‘laws of the free market’. They are saved by public money which is hijacked from the public, the real economy and life-capital bases to invest in more derivatives and takeovers. Captive government does not even issue instructions to serve productive function or employment. No Wall Street bank is made accountable for history’s greatest fraud. The effectively counterfeit money tides the banks create to launch their money-sequence invasions, seizures and impoverishments is least of all stopped. Instead the carcinogenic circuits metastasize across borders and oceans with public money continuously injected to sustain them.

As in the US, so in Europe. The real lives, work and life-conditions of publics are dispossessed along with life-serving social programmes of every kind to refinance and pay debts to the private bank system. The inner logic of the endless bank bailouts by public money is one across oceans, but not reported:

1. to pay private bank debt charges on money the banks never had;
2. with principal that cannot be paid down but only kept from compounding by debt-servicing payments;
3. with no requirement that the public money gushing into their private money-sequences will be used for any public or productive life-purpose;
4. while the refinanced private banks speculate in ever more takeovers, public bonds and currencies in trouble, and non-productive derivatives of every kind.

Throughout 2011 and 2012, the hundreds of billions in public money bailouts to the private banks are, instead, called the opposite of what they are – ‘bailouts of Greece / Spain / Portugal / Italy / Ireland’. Reverse projections become public facts. The hundreds of billions of public dollars and euros continuously going out to for-profit financial institutions has not once gone to social infrastructure, or job creation, or any other public or life-function. It all goes to private financial institutions not required to lend it out but free to casino speculate and debt create as they please. Financial liabilities left over from the carcinogenic private money-sequence system collapse are transferred to taxpayers to hold as their debts or toxic assets instead.

Austerity Programmes = Bleeding Peoples to Death to Pay the Banks More for Their Failure = Cancer Spiral

A very simple economic question arises on the ground. If the private banks get all the public money, how are societies whose tax revenues have crashed from the mass disemployment and capital flight precipitated by the bank-caused meltdown ever going to have the money to spend into the economy for any recovery? All the Keynesian instruments have been taken away by bank-written rules of the Maastricht Treaty and its successors. Greece and Spain, for example, in June 2012 have 50 per cent youth unemployment, and production has plummeted by over 20 per cent and getting worse. How do governments with collapsed revenues recover with no control over more public spending, interest rates, capital controls, or currency value? How can they even pay rising debt charges decided by Wall-Street credit agencies with nothing to pay?

The victim societies are thus commanded to cut their wages, fire their public servants, strip their public services, reduce their pensions and benefits, privatize their most valuable public sectors, in short, stop or reduce whatever public revenues go to life-means for their citizens to pay rising private bank debt-servicing.

In effect, sovereign societies are forced to commit economic suicide to pay rising private-bank debt charges that banks never had the money to lend in the first place. The bailouts have not only gone to private banks and financial institutions alone, but the money to the banks has been added onto the debts of governments and taxpayers to pay back, not the banks themselves.

Thus the IMF which has stripped developing nations over 30 years has been called in to lead the European Commission and Central Bank in the non-stop slashing of people’s wage, pension and other life-bases to pay up. No limit to dispossessing their lives regulates the strangulation, or the public funds going to the private banks. Wage and public life-supports are ratcheted down ever further to ‘pay the debts’ that all began with fabricated money. The biggest concession has been that the bailouts for the banks are not added to the debts of the collapsing governments – and even this is resisted by the bank-cancer system.

In these ways the debt spiral goes out of control more in Europe than the US. The US can print its own money in trillions of giveaways to the private banking system as the global currency of payment.

But then why with all this new money printed is there not inflation as a result? Another unspeakable law of life-dispossession built into the carcinogenic money-sequence system is:

The inflationary tide can only be stopped by the demand of countless millions of people, public programmes, jobs, and smaller enterprises being correspondingly reduced.

This is the carcinogenic law not evidently seen by anyone. Thus the private bank system keeps going with ever more public money backing its money-sequences through the lives and life-bases it strips.

How Did Europe Go So Wrong?

This is the unstated reason why politicians, officials, media and economists report that ‘government cannot afford’ its past public investments and ‘must pay down its debts’. This is a principal way in which the carcinogenic law is expressed. Even France’s new socialist President, Francois Hollande, declares this his principal task – justifying the 75 per cent tax on the million-a-year citizen income (applied only above the 1 million mark) while delivering the harshest austerity budget in 30 years to reassure ‘investors’.

Its leaders obey the carcinogenic law to ‘reassure investors’. Social investment which brought Europe out of worse ruins – and draws Latin America up now – is ruled out. In consequence, transnational money-sequencing by private banks and investors overrides the right to live as human in Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland, and Portugal. Still it is not enough. ‘Thirty per cent more reduction of all wages in Greece’, prescribes a lead German banker in spring 2012 after the Greek people have already been job-and-wage chopped to mass disemployment, including over 50 per cent of youth, loss of pensions, and spreading destitution.

Unless the sovereign nation repudiates the debt slavery as Argentina did in 2002, there is evermore ruin of people’s lives to finance the private bank system. This can only happen outside the EU financial straitjacket. But what about the European Union’s famed Charter of Fundamental Rights to save EU citizens?

Unhappily, human rights have not protected Europeans from ruin. Since the Maastricht financial straitjacket and the EU’s ‘free movement of capital’ with ‘no discrimination’, the absolute right of private money-sequencing across borders has overridden all social-democratic reforms. Rights to a human life fall before enforced debt servitude to private banks, escalating capital flight, newly instituted rights to abandon societies and workforces overnight, and transnational speculation with fictional money on bonds, currencies and derivatives – all backed by public-money bailouts if the system collapses.

Decoding the Financial Erasure of Responsible Government

‘How did the fall of the European Union itself happen after such historic social success protecting the life and life-capital bases of its peoples over 50 years?

The turning-point came with the ‘free movement of capital’‘ as the economic ‘pillar’ of the European Union: decoded, money-party control over national financial levers and transnational investment.

What is least seen is that ‘the independence of banks from political interference’ granted financial power to money-sequencing banks with no productive life-direction or control.

David Rockefeller was clear on the geo-strategy at work at the Bildersberg meeting in Germany in June 1991 as the Soviet Union fell:

A supranational sovereignty of intellectual elite and bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.

Rockefeller thanked the media leaders for having co-operated with ‘the plan’:

this plan for the world would have been impossible for us to develop if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years.¹²

Self-multiplying private money-sequencing to more with no accountability to any social host, life-space, natural or social life-support system is the result of this global programme.

Europe joined through the transnational money-sequence channels of which elected leaders are the masking validators. Thus the European Union’s defining 1996 Maastricht Treaty, rigidified further in the 2007 Lisbon Treaty, forged new chains of private money-sequence rule over sovereign peoples:

1. erasure of the powers of nations to increase or decrease money and credit supply,
2. thereby leaving control over the lifeblood of nations to the private banks;
3. with any spending beyond tax revenues to be reduced to 3 per cent of GDP,
4. ensuring permanent raids on public employment and social programmes to meet the formula for
5. free reign of private bank-money to rule the other 97 per cent of new demand and investment (the exact percentage of private financial money creation);
6. while removing all right of governments to control their country’s currency and interest rates,
7. to resist the carcinogenic transnational money-sequence system,
8. represented as the ‘fiscal discipline of governments’ and, if transgressed, requiring an ‘austerity programme’.

The financial bases of responsible economic government were thus abolished.

This is why the catastrophic results from 2011 on have required the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for the European Union. It validates the carcinogenic feeding cycles through its nations as they are dismantled.

Locking in Money-Cancer Rule by Reverse Projection

In revealing contrast, Argentina which rose out of ruin from 2002 on, was led by fiscal, monetary and exchange-rate policies now prohibited by the EU’s mutant financial system. Any expansion of public investment into life-capital bases which had borne the European Community up over half a century were now forbidden. It was not just an Argentina form of recovery Maastricht and Lisbon treaties forbade. All the fiscal and monetary instruments of national public authority, of Keynesian economics, of every success story of post-Depression economies, and of the human capital secret of economic success were ruled out before they could be thought.

Very few have observed the sweeping private financial takeover in motion. The official Left was bamboozled the Maastricht financial implications from the start. They did not see through the reverse mask of ‘protection against national currency speculation’. No-one demanded that the private currency attacks against sovereign states be recognized as a criminal act. The geo-strategy of picking apart national financial sovereignty to grow private money-sequences worked again. ‘Bank independence’ from sovereign peoples sunk its teeth in far more easily than ‘free capital and commodity flows’.

The Transnational Money-Sequence Treaties Called ‘Free Trade and Capital Flows’

In South Africa, the financial subjugation of post-apartheid government was managed in back rooms. In the larger world, the rule of private transnational bankers and corporate partners was managed by inter-state treaties – NAFTA, the WTO and Maastricht. The evil results were not long in coming.

By the turn of the millennium, the post-1990 race to the bottom of private corporate rule across borders bankrolled from behind by Wall Street and company had brought the highest unemployment and poverty rates in Europe since the Great Depression, and ever lower ratios of investment in productive economy.¹³

Freedom from all sovereign peoples and life-requirements was the money-sequence code. The new treaties all required that every nation must ‘remove all restrictions on the movement of capital’ – decoded, private money-sequencing across all borders in end-in-self multiplication including compounding bank-money debts and buyouts created without the real money to back them. Under Article 107 of Maastricht, there was still another ignored flag of the financial fascism in construction – prohibition of ‘any Member State’ or ‘other Community body or institution … seek[ing] to influence’ the ECB.¹⁴

In 2012, as we have seen, the ECB fortified its absolute power by unilateral drawing rights on national treasuries under the ‘European Stability Mechanism’ (ESM) pressed by Wall Street. Again no elected or sovereign authority had the right to say no, or even discuss the issue with the new bank Fuhrer.

In summary: The ruling money-sequencing system has all rights under treaty edict to control European nations’ currency, credit, debt, and public money re-capitalization and debt-servicing of private banks without limit or preference for nations themselves. Thus the US Federal Reserve-Wall Street-Treasury power metastasized to Europe.

In neither is there obligation to any life-capital base or productive function. Private money-sequence power to multiply itself unaccountable to any life-support system or sovereign public is built in. All requirements of universal life-needs of citizens are trumped by private transnational financial control of money issue. The European Union – long the most well-ordered socio-economic organization in the world – has thus made the carcinogenic programme its own. Its leaders cannot now see any way but more public-money guarantee to the money-sequences multiplying through their countries.

The Bank of Banks Ruling Behind the Scenes

The Basle Bank of International Settlements has been the centre-piece of the private bank system for a long time, but is little known. It is the central banker’s global directorate. Since the 2008 financial crash, the BIS, which superintended the very Wall Street banks which caused the crash, did not lose power from its failure to prevent it any more than Wall Street’s big banks which run the BIS. It used the greatest financial black-hole in history which its top members had created to lead the public money solution which has been a tidal flow out of public treasuries ever since – now defining Europe’s debt crisis. The ‘austerity programmes’ which the global collector, the IMF, imposes wring out the public money downstream and stem inflation from all the new money being transferred to the banks with no productive base or function. The BIS ‘new rules for the global financial architecture’, masked in financial jargon few can decode, merely obscure the underlying causal chain bleeding the world economy and the European Union into atrophy. The transnational money rule remains in the spirit of the legendary Rothschild motto, ‘Give me control of a society’s money supply, and I care not who makes the laws.’

The BIS first cut its teeth as the bank to extract reparations out of Germany after the First World War, giving rise to the Nazi nationalist reaction and the Holocaust. Its mechanism of reducing society’s economic capacities to impoverishment to enrich foreign finance set a covert meta pattern of financial occupation ever since. In between the breaking of Germany on the wheel of foreign financial demands to give rise to Nazism and the post-2008 Basle III rules it now prescribes, the banker cabal led by Wall Street always shows its black-suit neutrality for money across time. Less than 20 years later it handed over Czechslovakia’s gold to Hitler on his invasion of Prague in 1938.¹⁵ The same global money-sequence power continues its conversion of real economies into financial takings. Powerless societies in debt or defenceless against superpower invasion are worthwhile because all their resources can be money-sequenced to pay.¹⁶

As Professor Carroll Quigley observed in his classic Tragedy and Hope (long out of print), the aim of the BIS system is to ensure a ‘world system of financial control able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world’. As the record shows since, the still ruling principle is that central banks operate independently of government.

Reigning from the money centres of New York and now Bonn through the BIS as official coordinator, all alike are governed by money-sequence maximization overriding all sovereign society goals of real economic development, full employment, or any other common life-interest. Investigation will find no decision by the BIS to disconfirm this logic of global rule, whatever bubble-management algebra it coins next.

Meanwhile the public and its elected governments have no say over the financial tyranny stripping them. Once central banks sign onto the BIS dominated by Wall Street, unlimited money creation and debt servitude instituted by large private banks followed – displacing sovereign constitutional control over money and credit issue in the public interest. In Canada from 1939 to 1974, for example, the Bank of Canada provided the Canadian government with large sums of money at near zero cost – a public control over currency issue which enabled overcoming of the Great Depression, financing of the 1939–45 war against fascism, sovereign financing of the St Lawrence Seaway, the Trans-Canada highway, and universal health care and social security systems. Then in 1974 without government approval, the now infiltrated Bank of Canada adopted the rules and programme of the bankers’ supranational BIS mechanism and its ‘world system of financial control’.

Private banks continue to control money, credit and now bailouts against the most basic rights and interests of sovereign peoples – imposing vast private debt-servicing burdens on individuals (far beyond 100 per cent of their income in the US and Canada, for example) and such great burdens on sovereign governments that they are in perpetual deficit and danger of Wall Street downgrading to still higher debt payments. At the same time, this private transnational control of society’s credit and money issue with no productive or life-function distorts all investment towards its money-sequencing and against essential investment in the social and ecological support systems undergirding the real economy and life of nations.

The world’s peoples and governments are now in far greater servitude to the ruling programme than before they handed out all the public wealth after the 2008 crash. The unseen mechanism has covertly usurped sovereign public right, multiplied debt beyond all the legal tender in the world, and dispossessed societies, citizens and governments of their economies for limitlessly more private money-demand, debt creation and global control with no public comprehension of the interlocked meaning. The driver of the transnational money-sequences consuming the investment lifeblood of peoples remains undecoded. From public financing, pensions and student debts to the currencies and bonds of peoples to world climate, food and water futures, the meta-programme is to money-sequence all that exists.

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1. Ratios of external debt servicing + military spending to total government expenditures (ED + MS : TGS) provides a window on this pattern. The ratio is over 65 per cent for the United States, El Salvador, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Colombia, for example (International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, XI Congress, October 1993).

2. There are, according to David Gordon of the New School of Social Research, 17 million monitors and supervisors of the global market’s regime in the US alone, not counting their secretaries, assistants and office staffs. They cost the economy $1.3 trillion in 1994, or four times the total cost of US Social Security. This cost of ‘efficient’ market administration is estimated to now be, on average, 20 per cent of the cost of all goods produced (Jack M. Beatty, ‘What Election 96 Should Be About’, Atlantic Monthly, May 1996, and David M. Gordon, The Corporate System of Squeezing Americans, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). In the sphere of activity where we can compare their performances, health care, the US for-profit health care system spends 22–24 cents on the dollar for administrative costs, while the Canadian non-profit, public system spends 10–11 cents on the dollar. That is, the ‘market methods’ which are everywhere declared ‘necessary’ for making the public sector ‘operate more efficiently’ are twice as expensive (M. Phillips, ‘Canadian and US Health Care’, Canadian Perspectives, 1995, p. 3).

3. The constitutional objective of universities, for example, is normally worded in statute or other constitutional document of this institution as ‘the advancement and dissemination of knowledge’. My experience has been that adhering to such a codified and constitutional objective as obliging all members of the institution is not a ‘paper weapon’, but can steer an institution from a course of action that does not comply with it. In the cases with which I am familiar, a university was obliged to review and eventually forfeit a $55 million government-to-government contract as an executing agency with the Government of Indonesia, and a middle-sized city was required to pass an emergency control by-law to protect all of its older buildings from lucrative developer contracts by essentially individual action on behalf of codified purpose. Here we observe the civil commons on individual and statutory levels at once, based on a codified shared ground by which all are obliged, whether yet conscious of it or not.

4. A constitutional lawyer representing citizens for The Defence of Canadian Liberty against the secretive, unconstitutional, and electorally unaccountable process of negotiation of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment among the 29 countries of the OECD described her official meeting with the Chief Negotiator for Canada as follows: ‘Questions were not answered on the grounds of cabinet privilege … whether or not some form of negotiation issue was ever forwarded to cabinet … whether exemptions for first nations apply … who directs the negotiations, makes decisions … I came away struck by the enormity and extent [of the unelected power running the government]’ (Connie Fogel, ‘MAI Legal Challenge Report On Cross Examination of Federal Witnesses’, via Council For Canadians, June 24, 1998).

5. Bernard Lietauer, ‘$2 Trillion In Currencies Traded Every Day’, CCPA Monitor (March 1998), 16.

6. ‘Illustration of an Assumed Investment of $10,000’, Templeton Growth Fund Limited Annual Report, April 30, 1998, p. 3.

7. Peter Drucker, ‘The Idol Rich’, Report On Business Magazine, January 1998, p. 88.

8. In the 1998 Competitiveness Rankings by the World Economic Forum, the growth of child poverty, youth unemployment, environmental depletion and degradation, and every other indicator of societies in serious life-slippage – where ‘successful economies’ are in fact falling fast – is simply excluded from the index. This is how the value metric of the global market paradigm is systemically life-blind, and how nations which follow it can be hollowed out while believing they are ever more competitive.

9. Figures provided by Phred Vvorak and Eleanor Warnock, ‘High-Stakes Gamble for BOJ Chief’, Japan News, March 20, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323639604578368143556112754.html.

10. The figures referred to above are drawn from across the special issue of Newsweek (February 2, 1998) devoted to the Asia financial crisis; ‘How Big is Asia?’ The Economist, February 7, 1998, p. 72; Wall Street Journal, February 17, 1998, and Marcus Gee, ‘The Real End of Japan ’, Globe and Mail, April 18, 1998, p. D4.

11. Kieran Kennedy, ‘The Role of the State in Economic Affairs’, Studies (Summer 1985), 131.

12. Cited by http://freedomlaw.com/coffee.html which lists among its sponsors the Cato Institute, the Heritage, and the Mackinac Centre for Public Policy.

13. One in six Europeans lives in poverty, the average rate of unemployment is 11 per cent, and child poverty in central Europe has more than doubled in the 1990s (Tom Buerkle, ‘Poverty Afflicts One in Six Europeans’, International Herald Tribune News Service, May 16, 1995, and Ian Traynor in Bonn, ‘Children Pay Price For Democracy’, Guardian Weekly, April 27, 1998, p. 4). There has been at the same time an overall reduction since the 1970s of 33 per cent in the share of GDP going to investment (‘Euro’s Coming Like It or Not’, Guardian Weekly, March 8, 1998, p. 12). The latter editorial comments, ‘They [the member states] have driven their economies into the ground to fulfil their Maastricht vows.’

14. These descriptions are taken from the Treaty The Treaty’s negative impact on the public provision of life-goods, the quintessential function of the civil commons, also proceeds from prohibitions of any public enterprise that competes with the priced goods of the corporate market (see, for example, Helen and William Wallace, Policy-Making in the European Union, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 185–206).

15. William Krehm, ‘The Hidden Dossier of the BIS’, Economic Reform (May 1996), 4.

16. The Prime Minister of Malaysia described this uncontrolled money-sequence’s effects as follows: ‘Markets can also become corrupt … We are seeing the effect today – the impoverishment and misery of millions of people and their eventual slavery … Two decades of growth wiped out in two weeks … Vibrant economies have been reduced to begging for aid from the IMF … [It is] a recipe for slavery’ (Asia Pacific Conference, Vancouver, November, as cited in Bob Djurdjevic, ‘Wall Street’s Financial Terrorism’, Chronicles, 22, No. 3 (March 1998). While the models of slavery and terrorism used by the Prime Minister and the reporter may hold, the largely unintentional effects are better understood as an aggressive disease of social life-organization.