Ferdinand Lundberg in his book America's Sixty Families, talked of the US as a dollar democracy and exposed the link between the old industrial bourgeois, the trusts and the finance industry. How the people that run these institutions intermarry, control industry and the politics of the nation. They fund the political parties and they bankroll the politicians. Lundberg explained this with reference to Roosevelt, Taft, Mckinley and others. Things haven't changed much, an addition here or there, except that the damage they do is more extensive and globalized. Clinton, Bush and Obama, are the bought and paid for mouthpieces of Wall, Street no less than Taft or Mckinley.
Reading Lundberg's book you will come across familiar names, JP Morgan, Rockefeller, Mellon, Goldman Sachs. The owners of these institutions form an exclusive club whose individual members rarely, if ever fall from grace. They shuffle around from one institution to another, up the ladder a notch here, down it there, but almost always they cling on, protected by the system the govern and the politicians they pay to run it. Some of them have long histories by US standards, linked to old slaveowning families.
Their members include the mass murderer Henry Kissinger; George Schultz, the old school Rockefellers, Melons and the Bush's of course.
Folks might be familiar with one of their operatives, John Thain. Thain is the coupon clipper who spent $1.2 million redecorating his office when he was at Merrill Lynch; meanwhile people were losing homes and their savings. Thain is relatively young, one of the "young guns" of the finance industry who has made lots of money for his buddies and for himself. Before working at Merrill Lynch he was CEO at the US Stock Exchange and before that he was with our old friends Goldman Sachs for 24 years, perhaps he hung out with Robert Rubin who was with Goldman for 26 years. Rubin, along with Henry Fowler and Henry Paulson is a former US secretary of the treasury, can't get a more lucrative deal than that for a thief. Talk about the fox guarding the hen house.
Thain now works for CIT, a company Business Week describes, as do most of their journals, as a financial services firm. These are institutions that facilitate the accumulation and allocation of capital and ensure the safety of the economic system that produces it. CIT filed bankruptcy last December. "As ugly as CIT's bankruptcy was---$2.3 billion of government bailout money vaporized..." (my added emphasis) Business Week writes, "it left Thain with a cushion against failure by eliminating $10 billion of company debt and pushing out significant repayment deadlines to 2013." Well isn't that nice. It seems it would be the taxpayer that is the hero here as it was our money that w as "vaporized".
They bribe these politicians for a reason.
So adept is Thain at stealing money from workers that the stock of CIT went up considerably on his joining it. The speculators who hope to benefit from Thain's thuggish ways expect that he will sell the company as, no doubt due to the bankruptcy, it pays "nearly as much to borrow money as it makes by lending it out." says BW. Wells Fargo on the other hand pays less than 1% for the money it borrows.
That made me think. What unproductive activity this is. But what an example of theft. The money we are talking about here is the product of Labor, it is the surplus created through the Labor process by paying workers less in wages than the value we create. I mean, would you swap a $20 bill for a $10? Of course not, it is an unfair and uneven exchange. But that's what happens to us all the time at work. We get less for our Labor power than it is worth. This set up is perpetuated by Thain, his masters and the politicians they install to run their dollar democracy and they use the rewards to make more. How much does it cost us to borrow back the money we have created?
Here's one example of how the wealth we create is being used. In the same issue of Business Week it reports that the show I saw advertised on the history channel is actually Bank of America's history of the US. The show is titled, "The History of Us.", we are all just one happy family. BofA paid $4 million for the right to have its version of US history on TV. See, out tax money ends up in the most unexpected places.
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