All of
this subterfuge from what should be called simply the bureau of statistics is totally beside the point. After Thomas Jefferson retired from the White House, he set up an execrable slave nail manufacture where 10 year old boys were whipped by brutal overseers if they couldn’t or wouldn’t keep up. This was “full employment” writ large.
Today our nations’ physical infrastructure is literally crumbling. We have a so called post industrial/information age/consumer economy of glamorous gadgets to wile away our hours in vacuous amusement so that we won’t dwell too much upon the decay. The percentage of the work force in prison is disgraceful.
We have allowed ourselves to be systematically looted by an irrational oligarchy. They worship the power that control over the financial system gives them. They have step by step removed the barriers of their tools in trade: the ability to create new instruments of chicanery. Glass-Steagall and Bretton Woods had to be abolished for this looting to proceed. So Arthur Burns instructed Nixon to end the mechanism of settling the imbalance of trade by removing the gold reserve from the dollar. Thus leading to currency arbitrage de-linked from our nations’ trade in physical goods. Gramm-Leach-Bliley ended the separation of depository institutions and speculative financial/insurance houses. Thus began the creation multi trillion dollars of esoteric “financial products” which in reality were nothing more than a replay of last century’s “bucket shops.” We are now nearing the fag end of this process. The speculative oligarchy’s real agenda has come to the fore. For instance, listen to their steadfast insistence on imposition of “IMF conditionalities” on Greece, et al. This, while there is an increasing crisis of spreading scarcity already of life saving medicines. This is the logic of forcing the paying off of uncollectible gambling debt known as derivative securities created out of thin air.
What is required is an orderly process of bankruptcy of the so called investment banks and an end to the illusion that we can honor their insane instruments of speculation. Banks must be brought back as depository institutions under a renewed Glass-Steagall. Further, we must establish sovereign control over credit issuance to both rebuild the wrecked physical economy and promote the development of large scale water projects here and internationally under a renewed Bretton Woods. Finally. we must return to the vision of the era of JFK’s space mission in financing manned space exploration and massively upgrading nuclear fusion research as an inexhaustible source of energy and resources through application of magneto-hydro-dynamics processing. Only with such reforms will employment numbers have any real meaning.
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