A Summary of the Book ”Surviving the Cataclysm”
by Edward Ulrich, updated November 25, 2024
[Update: November 25, 2024— I have updated the links to purchase the book.]
Surviving the Cataclysm by Webster Griffin Tarpley.
The comprehensive book “Surviving the Cataclysm - Your Guide Through the Greatest Financial Crisis in Human History” by Webster Griffin Tarpley offers an excellent view of the inner workings of the U.S. and world economy that is often concealed by the establishment media, and in the process the book hilights the futility of Barack Obama’s current economic strategies while outlining an effective plan for bringing the world out of its worsening depression and into economic growth and prosperity.
Major topics of the book include the huge economic problems being caused by the existence of toxic “derivative” speculation, as well as policies of the Obama administration wastefully pouring massive amounts of money into failed financial institutions rather than dedicating resources such as low-interest credit to restarting the dying U.S. industrial base for rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure.
The book is a thorough and engrossing explanation of global economics written in a manner that is easy for anyone to understand while also being detailed enough to serve as a reference for financial professionals.
This article summarizes only the chapters that make up the 2009 additions to the book, explaining the destructive economic policies of the Obama administration while laying out a strategy for recovering from the worsening depression. Information from the preface is summarized in this article point-by-point along with written descriptions of each of the new chapters.
Webster Tarpley’s website is located at https://www.tarpley.net/
Order the book from Amazon.
Jump to Sections of this Article ..
Key Points From the Preface to the 2009 Edition
Obamanomics: Cash for Trash: $12.8 Trillion for Wall Street
Chapter 1: Prologue to the 2009 Edition: Emergency Economic Recovery Program
Chapter 2: No to the Paulson-Bernanke Derivatives Bailout
Chapter 3: Force the Fed to Open a Main Street Lending Facility
Chapter 4: End the Fed - End Wall Street Bankster Rule
Chapter 5: Statement to the G-20 Summit, London, April 2, 2009
Back Cover
Obamanomics: Cash for Trash: $12.8 Trillion for Wall Street
Chapter 1: Prologue to the 2009 Edition: Emergency Economic Recovery Program
Chapter 2: No to the Paulson-Bernanke Derivatives Bailout
Chapter 3: Force the Fed to Open a Main Street Lending Facility
Chapter 4: End the Fed - End Wall Street Bankster Rule
Chapter 5: Statement to the G-20 Summit, London, April 2, 2009
Back Cover
Key Points From the Preface to the 2009 Edition
The 17 page preface to the 2009 edition explains a five part program for overcoming the world economic depression while defining four commonly identified economic philosophies which could potentially be implemented. It is explained why only one of the four philosophies would be sufficient to bring about necessary growth and prosperity through emphasising lending to mobilize the country’s industrial base for large scale infrastructure improvement programs.
Following are some key points from the chapter:
— Recovery of the economy will come about through eliminating speculative financial tools such as derivatives, and restarting factories for the production of tangible goods to put unemployed workers back to work. Production is the central issue more than only money, and production in the United States is currently being neglected as the world sinks deeper into depression.
— The most significant cause of the economic crisis is the “derivatives bubble” which amounts to $1.5 quadrillion dollars— which is one thousand five hundred trillion dollars of “notional” value, “notional” meaning the value of the assets pledged. Derivatives are financial paper based on other financial paper which are usually bets placed on fluctuations of other speculative values, and they are claimed to be a method of diminishing risk but rather they actually serve to amplify risk to extremely dangerous levels.
— Establishment “ruling class” economists try to mention derivatives as little as possible, and they have often been attempting to falsely blame the current economic condition on poor people defaulting on their subprime mortgages of slum properties which in reality is only a tiny piece of the picture.
Tarpley lays out a five-point program for overcoming the world depression:
1. Measures for re-regulation, nationalization, neutralization of fictitious capital, combating speculation, plus bankruptcy procedures and the preservation of labor, plant, and equipment
— The current economic crisis has been caused by deregulation and privatization of the financial markets, such as with the deregulation of the international currency markets carried out by Richard Nixon on August 15, 1971. Also Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were doing fine as government agencies until they were privatized.
— A federal ban should be re-instituted on derivatives contracts in securities of all types. “There must be no mercy for derivatives. Derivatives have no value. ... derivatives have negative value because we have to pay some garbage men to come and take them away. Derivatives must be shredded, deleted, or otherwise annihilated.” Derivatives transactions should become a federal crime.
— Eliminating derivatives will lead to the gutting of many Wall Street “derivatives monsters” such as J.P. Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and others. Almost every Friday afternoon Sheila Blair of the FDIC has been seizing and shutting down insolvent local banks in mostly rural areas while refusing to seize major bankrupt institutions such as J.P. Morgan Chase, Citibank, and the Bank of America. It is important that the major bankrupt institutions are put through Chapter 11 proceedings under federal judges who will start by eliminating associated derivatives which may destroy some of the institutions altogether, leaving a local and regional banking system that will most likely be salvageable along with the credit generating power of the U.S. federal government when it is acting as its own bank. Also a modern version of the Glass-Stegal act will need to be implemented which will mandate the absolute separation of commercial banks from the stock brokerages and investment companies.
— “Adjustable rate mortgages” should never have been legally sold in this country, and they need to be eliminated and made illegal. In the meantime it is very important to ban all foreclosures on primary residences for a minimum of five years or for the duration of the world economic depression, whichever lasts longer.
— The financial institution which has done the most damage to the taxpayers is the international insurance conglomerate AIG. U.S. taxpayers have already bailed out AIG with $180 billion, which will rise to $400 billion in the near future. The losses are centered around AIG Financial Products, which is a “hedge fund” set up in London to sell derivatives such as “credit default swaps,” and such activity is the brainchild of Wall Street financiers such as George Soros who are able to fly beneath the radar of the securities and exchange commission. “Once a hedge fund is regulated and transparent, it is no longer a hedge fund. We need to institute a regime of special surveillance for hedge funds.”
— “The SEC must immediately reinstitute strong measures against short selling. ...”
— “The U.S. Treasury .. must begin a vigorous offensive against the speculative manipulation of energy markets. ..”
2. Nationalize the Federal Reserve System and re-start lending and the credit system generally
— “The U.S. Federal Reserve system has always been an illegal and unconstitutional monstrosity by which control of credit creation, assigned by the U.S. Constitution to the executive and legislative branches of government, has been aggregated by cliques of unelected, unaccountable, and often unknown bankers working for private gain against the public interest.” Another long term complaint is that the Federal Reserve has kept its interest rates too high, which acts to prevent full employment which would create competition among employers for employees which would lead to a rising standard of living. The Federal Reserve expanded the money supply to set the stage for the 1929 crash, and more importantly it did not effectively defend the U.S. banking system in the crash of 1931. During the 1990’s, Alan Greenspan’s Fed was instrumental in starting the derivatives bubble which is growing to the point of being a threat to modern human civilization.
— The Federal Reserve should be nationalized by being set up as “The Bureau of the United States Treasury,” under the name of the “Bank of the United States,” which would make use of Congressional debate and laws for determining the size of the money supply, interest rates, and categories for federal lending and rediscount.
— The newly created “Bank of the United States” should issue abundant credit for economic recovery, and Obama’s approach has been to dump $12.8 trillion into the “zombie banking system of the derivatives monsters” in the hopes that the banks would then issue commercial loans for plants and equipment, despite the banks not having adequately extended credit for a productive economy for decades. “We must stop pouring trillions of dollars down Obama’s derivatives wishing well, while hoping that the credit system revives.”
— It is most important that loans go only to productive activity such as hard commodity manufacturing, creation of physical wealth in the form of “food, clothing, shelter, housing, infrastructure, machine tools, scientific research, pharmaceuticals, energy production, transportation equipment, producer’s goods of all sorts, and other technological objects which humanity requires for its survival. Production means mining, farming, light and heavy industry, steel, chemicals, plastics, housing and building construction, civil engineering, and many kinds of science and technology. .. At the same time, there must be a rigorous ban on the hijacking of this federal credit for anything that is not productive or socially necessary, [such as] financial speculation, financial services, drug money laundering, organized crime, and the like.”
3. Restart borrowing for production with a vast program for infrastructure development and science drivers for the modernization and recovery of the economy
— The “infrastructure deficit” of the United States could be approaching $10 trillion. The interstate highways systems, bridges, rail systems, drinking water and sewage systems, hospitals and the electrical grid are in disrepair and could greatly benefit from improvements and expansion. “We need present-day equivalents of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Apollo program, the transcontinental railway, the Erie canal, and the like. These projects spell tens of millions of modern productive jobs. Obama, by contrast, is offering bailouts to bankers.”
— Programs to drive scientific progress would create technical spinoffs, such as a new Apollo Moon mission and colonization of the Moon and Mars, more research into high energy physics, and a “Manhattan project” of biomedical sciences for humanitarian purposes would also help to eventually decrease the cost of health care in order to make sure that triage or rationing of care would never be resorted to. [Editor’s note -- Scientific progress is benefitting humanity as a whole, but it can be a dangerous double edged sword due to it increasing destructive abilities of increasingly smaller groups of individuals. Perhaps less focus should be spent on increasingly digging deeper, farther, faster, and smaller with technology and more focus being spent on distributing benefits of simple and practical technology along with improved education, socialization and repair of corrupt and misconfigured political situations.]
— “It is to be expected that the prime contractors for these projects will be agencies of the federal government, state governments, county and local governments, as well as regional consortiums among the States. These contractors will be priority recipients of long-term 0% federal lending from the Bank of the United States.” Private subcontractors should receive the same loans. Such programs will stimulate the production of capital goods, create many jobs, and reflate the credit system through local and regional banks. “As the recovery begins to build, private capital will come out of its panic bunkers and begin to join in, leading to an open-ended economic boom based on full employment and high rates of productive capital formation.”
— “Under no circumstances must public credit be channeled into the so-called alternative energy or 'green jobs’ boondoggles pushed by the Obama regime. As of today, solar panels and windmills, however modern, represent technologies which are inherently anti-economical and unworkable when it comes to generating base load electrical power. .. The entire misguided green jobs project has rightly earned the name of the gangrene economy, representing a fatal misdirection of scarce resources.” [Editor’s note: Updated February 21, 2020 -- While “green” technologies are often inefficient and impractical, potential does exist for much benefit to be derived from certain types of solar power in sunny climates, especially solar “sterling engine” power generators. Also “flywheel batteries” have many practical uses for efficiently storing and distributing electrical power. In any event, many of the green technologies being suggested by leftists such as the ones the Obama Administration were advocating for are impractical, and even worse the “green economy” has always been intended to be driven by a massive repressive bureaucracy which deceptively increases the loss of United States sovereignty for further empowerment of a dictatorial world government that is controlled by unelected bankers. See the article Section Directory: The Politics of Global Warming.]
4. Emergency relief for the victims of the depression
— It is important to protect working families from the devastating effects of the economic depression by making sure that unemployment insurance is open ended and fully funded during the crisis without limitations of the number of weeks that the worker can receive benefits. Also the food stamp program should be made available to all those who need it with the monthly benefits for a family being quadrupled. Also programs such as WIC and Head Start should receive more funding.
— During the New Deal, Harry Hopkins put almost five million people to work in a few weeks for agencies such as the Federal Emergency Relief Agency (FERA) and the Civil Works Administration (CWA). In contrast, Obama’s programs are the opposite of the New Deal through funding bankers with programs like TARP, the Fed’s TALF, and Geithner’s PPIP, which turns the federal government into a hedge fund in its own right.
— Massive amounts of revenue to support New Deal type of programs can come from a Tobin tax or securities transfer tax (STT) of 1% on all financial turnover in the stock markets, bond markets, derivatives markets as long as they exist, foreign exchange markets, and others. “The average citizen is groaning under an increasingly regressive sales tax burden. It is high time that the Wall Street financiers paid their fair share into a securities transfer tax which would represent in reality simply a sales tax on all financial transactions, to be paid by the seller.” Such a tax would also discourage parasitical speculation and market volatility.
— Medicare should be made available for all in the United States, which would replace wasteful insurance companies which operate with a high overhead. “Rather than imposing a single-payer system from the top down, or attempting to coerce anyone to buy any insurance or to change the insurance that they have, we must take the authentic New Deal approach by offering health insurance to all persons at a very attractive price in full confidence that, as the relative advantages of Medicare for all versus private health insurance become widely known, more and more people will gravitate into the Medicare option, most likely leaving private health insurance to 'wither on the vine’...”
5. International economics and a new world monetary system
— Since August 15, 1971, the U.S. has been living in the ruins of the Bretton Woods system, and the role of the dollar as the international reserve currency is no longer sustainable, so the U.S. should cooperate with other leading economic powers to form a system in which “the yen, the euro, the dollar, a possible Latin American regional currency, a possible Middle Eastern regional currency, and a possible Asian regional currency will participate on conditions of equality and mutual advantage.” A “supranational” bureaucracy should be created, but consisting of multilateral cooperation of sovereign states who share a commitment to economic recovery through tangible production of the physical means of human existence. It should be a significantly regulated system where the governments of the world tell the private sector what the acceptable range of currency fluctuations will be. A new institution possibly called the Multilateral Development Bank should be founded with several trillion dollars from the participating industrial powers to be given the task of facilitating large world-wide infrastructure projects.
— The German economist Wilhelm Lautenbach discussed at a 1931 meeting in Berlin four policy courses which could be followed to end the country’s depression and prevent Hitler’s seizure of power. Tarpley explains, “Whatever we think we may be choosing in the current depression, it is almost certain that we will in fact be choosing one of these four courses. Therefore, let us examine each one carefully, with all the diligence of a life and death decision.”
Tarpley explains aspects of each of the four potential major economic policy options, and why only option #4 is the ideal one:
Option #1: Deflation and budget cutting, liquidationism. The first policy option would be letting the depression take its course with minimal government intervention. This approach leads to massive deflation as experienced in the U.S. between 1929 and 1931, with huge rates of unemployment, bankruptcy of small businesses, factory closings, and general suffering including death by malnutrition and starvation. Such policies are accompanied with budget cuts due to claims of needs of “austerity” to balance the budget, where social programs are cut and justification for doing so is explained via propaganda teaching the population to “live within its means” and “purging excesses from the system.” In reality, such budget cuts benefit wealthy criminal plutocrats who have money and believe they will have money no matter what happens to the rest of the economy, and because of their inhuman cruelty and greed, they imagine that they will then be able to buy up valuable assets for pennies on the dollar. “These wealthy sociopaths are especially keen to target government run unemployment, food, and health programs so that starving and desperate workers can be forced to work for almost nothing to avoid starvation. For such plutocrats, every depression in an opportunity to institutionalize the low wage, sweatshop economy.”
— Andrew Mellon was “the high priest of liquidationism,” being the Secretary of Treasury who worked for the interests of the tiny Wall Street insider cabal during the 1920’s. Mellon said “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate ... It will purge the rottenness out of the system. ... People will work harder, live a more moral life.” Such an approach gives no thought to the people who will loose their lives or their health during the crisis. Liquidationism is popular among those who believe in “creative destruction,” and they themselves do not expect to be destroyed with it.
— Wall Street journalist and CFR member Calmity Shales has been continually quoted by right wing radio shows saying that the New Deal “prolonged” the depression, but her argument does not factor in the “human toll of morbidity, mortality, and ruined lives, despair or the permanent lowering of the living standards which her recipe of benign neglect would have entailed.” Also there is no guarantee that a suitable rebound would even follow such a catastrophic decent. Shales also falsely claims that the Great Depression was not ended by New Deal emergency government relief spending and programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, but rather by military spending due to the outbreak of World War II.
— Liquidationists today are demanding that the American people surrender to the forces of economic and financial depression without any attempt at self defense, which clashes with America’s optimism and can-do spirit. Many right wing Republican politicians and communicators are suggesting a strategy of liquidationism by giving analogies of it being similar to a folksy kitchen-table discussion on belt-tightening and thrift, but in reality there are no similarities between an individual household and a national government with aspects including credit, currencies, and sovereignty.
— Between March 1930 and May 1932, German Chancellor Heinrich Bruning reduced wages, reduced worker benefits, cut social welfare payments, robbed workers of unemployment insurance that was due to them, and increased taxes, which sharply declined the German living standard and increased unemployment. Hitler seized power the year that Bruning left office, with the damaged economy opening the door for the empowerment of his fascist dictatorship. “How strange that today persons calling themselves libertarians should recommend similar policies.”
Option #2: Increased government expenditures with the goal of producing a recovery based on consumer spending. The second policy option is similar to the policy of stimulus checks being distributed to individual taxpayers which the Bush-Paulson regime implemented, with the idea that additional spending generated would improve the economy— as long as the recipients spend their stimulus money. However, no amount of additional consumer spending on its own will be able to purchase a healthy economy.
— The economic recovery of a modern national economy which is in a depression depends on investments in capital goods such as nuclear reactors, steel mills, water systems, railroad systems, canals, mines, ect. Consumer goods such as automobiles, washing machines, and consumer electronics by themselves are not enough to increase the productivity of labor on the required scale. It is often said that two-thirds of the United States economy is now based on consumer spending, but unknowingly to some who point out this fact, it shows how sick the economy is and how urgently it needs expansion of capital goods production. “An economy where consumer spending plays the preponderant role is a spendthrift monstrosity which is destroying the prospects for its own future. A successful economy with viable prospects for the future is one that devotes increasing proportions of labor to capital goods and new branches of modern industry and technology.”
— At best, a burst of consumer spending due to government expenditure could lead to a weak and temporary upswing in the economic situation, but once consumer spending has been completed, the economy will fall back to its old depression rut with much debt being generated in the process. Such a consumer-led recovery is known as “Keynesian” economics, named after the British economist Lord Keynes who was adamant about demanding “non-productive” consumer spending which does not result in the accumulation of capital goods such as under a New Deal type of system.
— In 1936 France the regime of Leon Blum attempted a consumer led recovery by increasing wages, giving every worker two weeks of paid vacation, cutting the work week from 48 to 40 hours, and implementing a system of unemployment insurance, which did greatly increase government spending, but not enough to end the depression in France.
— In the early months of the Obama regime, many Democrat politicians in Congress pushed for spending to be included with Obama’s so-called stimulus, and some plans had merit of being able to prevent the collapse of regionally important economic activities, but such spending will not translate into economic recovery which would consist of increased capital goods production, rising standards of living, and full employment.
Option #3: A general reflation with abundant cheap credit for financial borrowers, or hot money recovery. The third option entails the country’s central bank offering vast amounts of cheap credit for interest rates as low as 0%, or even negative interest rates which subsidize the borrower who takes the loan, with most of the recipients being bankers. Under such a system, the returns for activities such as speculation and criminal activity such as drug money laundering is much higher than the rates of returns for activities such as farming, industrial production, and infrastructure building. This means that after such an economy collapses, cheap credit will flow preferentially into activities which are sociopathic, parasitical, criminal, or at the very least not productive, while hard commodity production will suffer from lack of credit due to the lower short-term rates of return for such production. Also in recent years cheap credit has been fleeing to other countries in the form of “currency carry trade” or “flight capital” which collapses national economies which are attempting to produce a recovery by issuing the credit in the first place, as has been happening in Japan from 1990 to the present.
— The Bank of Japan kept interest rates at or near 0% from 1995 into 2007 in a time frame known as the “lost decade of stagnation” in the Japanese economy, where Japan served as a massive “money machine” for speculative worldwide trade which drove the U.S. stock bubble, the dot com bubble, the housing bubble, and similar events in the U.S. and other countries. The Japanese considered offering such low interest credit to be an advantage due to the resulting lower value yen giving stimulus to exports, but all in all the strategy was a failure. However, even though Japan’s policy was a failure, it is the policy being attempted to be followed in an even larger scale by Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner who are controlling Obama’s economic policy.
— Ben Bernanke is known as “helicopter ben” for giving a speech where he suggested that a depression could be stopped simply by dumping bales of money out of helicopters with economic recovery resulting as the money was spent. The Federal Reserve under Bernanke has reduced the U.S. interest rates to 0%, and it is already clear that the policy will be a catastrophic failure. Most likely the policies will seriously damage the international value of the already battered U.S. dollar, and once the slide starts happening a panic could result where many around the world would attempt to dump their dollars. However, “As long as factories are intact and a skilled labor force exists, it is relatively easy to rearrange the universe of paper so as to put people back to work and restart production, and that is the heart of the matter.”
— A subset of the policy of lower interest rates, “hot money,” and reduction of the money supply is the policy of attempting to bail out insolvent financial institutions, as the Obama administration is currently doing. This policy is similar to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation set up by Herbert Hoover trying to bail out banking institutions in an attempt to prevent the collapse of the U.S. banking and credit system, which proved to be a futile attempt due to the banking panic at the end of 1932 which led to the shutdown of every banking institution in the country. Similarly, Obama’s strategies amount to pouring public funds down a “useless rathole,” creating impoverishment and serving no rational purpose whatsoever.
(THE MOST IDEAL) Option #4: Mobilizing the credit resources of the government and the banking system for the purpose of launching an ambitious program of infrastructure construction and development. Two aspects differentate this option from Keynesian policies. First is the emphasis of government lending over spending, such as forcing the central bank or national bank to issue cheap credit only for productive and large-scale projects which develop infrastructure that is clearly in the public interest. Such credit would not be made available for speculative, sociopathic, or criminal activity. The second point distinguishing it from Keynesian policy is the fact that Keynes insisted that the spending to stimulate the economy would have to be nonproductive, so that it would not compete with existing productive capacity which would lower the rate of profit. “Keynes thought it was fine for ditch diggers to dig ditches and then fill them up as a way of earning their daily wage from the government, but he was hostile to the idea of building new and more modern rail lines among the cities of Great Britain.”
— Lautenbach proposed that the German government launch an ambitious large scale program of infrastructure construction and modernization that would create many modern productive jobs paying decent wages, with benefits cascading through the German industries and economy. The key to the strategy was to force the central bank to honor a “rediscount guarantee,” which meant that any contractor or a subcontractor who was involved with working on the national infrastructure programs could be guaranteed that all of their commercial papers could be turned into cash by local banks, because those bankers could then immediately cash those papers with the central bank. This method allows credit to be supplied to productive and necessary parts of the economy without allowing money to flow into speculative or parasitical activities.
— Lautenbach’s infrastructure program could have “science drivers” added to it to get the economy going through technical spinoffs which would modernize the productive process in the workplace. Past examples include the space program of the 1960s which has led to the information technology and the internet today.
— “The idea of a rediscount guarantee was built into the New Deal program which finally and definitively ended the Great Depression in the United States during 1941 by reducing unemployment to lower levels. This was Lend-Lease, which harnessed the Federal Reserve and the banking system to provide credit for defense production. Each contractor and subcontractor was guaranteed that relevant commercial paper and bills of exchange would be automatically discounted by local bankers and turned into cash, since each local banker could be sure of commanding the support of the Federal Reserve system. This amounted to a de facto nationalization during wartime of the Federal Reserve system for national goals, not the whims of cliques of unelected and unaccountable bankers. It is clear that Lautenbach’s fourth option is the one we need to implement today.”
Option #1: Deflation and budget cutting, liquidationism. The first policy option would be letting the depression take its course with minimal government intervention. This approach leads to massive deflation as experienced in the U.S. between 1929 and 1931, with huge rates of unemployment, bankruptcy of small businesses, factory closings, and general suffering including death by malnutrition and starvation. Such policies are accompanied with budget cuts due to claims of needs of “austerity” to balance the budget, where social programs are cut and justification for doing so is explained via propaganda teaching the population to “live within its means” and “purging excesses from the system.” In reality, such budget cuts benefit wealthy criminal plutocrats who have money and believe they will have money no matter what happens to the rest of the economy, and because of their inhuman cruelty and greed, they imagine that they will then be able to buy up valuable assets for pennies on the dollar. “These wealthy sociopaths are especially keen to target government run unemployment, food, and health programs so that starving and desperate workers can be forced to work for almost nothing to avoid starvation. For such plutocrats, every depression in an opportunity to institutionalize the low wage, sweatshop economy.”
— Andrew Mellon was “the high priest of liquidationism,” being the Secretary of Treasury who worked for the interests of the tiny Wall Street insider cabal during the 1920’s. Mellon said “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate ... It will purge the rottenness out of the system. ... People will work harder, live a more moral life.” Such an approach gives no thought to the people who will loose their lives or their health during the crisis. Liquidationism is popular among those who believe in “creative destruction,” and they themselves do not expect to be destroyed with it.
— Wall Street journalist and CFR member Calmity Shales has been continually quoted by right wing radio shows saying that the New Deal “prolonged” the depression, but her argument does not factor in the “human toll of morbidity, mortality, and ruined lives, despair or the permanent lowering of the living standards which her recipe of benign neglect would have entailed.” Also there is no guarantee that a suitable rebound would even follow such a catastrophic decent. Shales also falsely claims that the Great Depression was not ended by New Deal emergency government relief spending and programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, but rather by military spending due to the outbreak of World War II.
— Liquidationists today are demanding that the American people surrender to the forces of economic and financial depression without any attempt at self defense, which clashes with America’s optimism and can-do spirit. Many right wing Republican politicians and communicators are suggesting a strategy of liquidationism by giving analogies of it being similar to a folksy kitchen-table discussion on belt-tightening and thrift, but in reality there are no similarities between an individual household and a national government with aspects including credit, currencies, and sovereignty.
— Between March 1930 and May 1932, German Chancellor Heinrich Bruning reduced wages, reduced worker benefits, cut social welfare payments, robbed workers of unemployment insurance that was due to them, and increased taxes, which sharply declined the German living standard and increased unemployment. Hitler seized power the year that Bruning left office, with the damaged economy opening the door for the empowerment of his fascist dictatorship. “How strange that today persons calling themselves libertarians should recommend similar policies.”
Option #2: Increased government expenditures with the goal of producing a recovery based on consumer spending. The second policy option is similar to the policy of stimulus checks being distributed to individual taxpayers which the Bush-Paulson regime implemented, with the idea that additional spending generated would improve the economy— as long as the recipients spend their stimulus money. However, no amount of additional consumer spending on its own will be able to purchase a healthy economy.
— The economic recovery of a modern national economy which is in a depression depends on investments in capital goods such as nuclear reactors, steel mills, water systems, railroad systems, canals, mines, ect. Consumer goods such as automobiles, washing machines, and consumer electronics by themselves are not enough to increase the productivity of labor on the required scale. It is often said that two-thirds of the United States economy is now based on consumer spending, but unknowingly to some who point out this fact, it shows how sick the economy is and how urgently it needs expansion of capital goods production. “An economy where consumer spending plays the preponderant role is a spendthrift monstrosity which is destroying the prospects for its own future. A successful economy with viable prospects for the future is one that devotes increasing proportions of labor to capital goods and new branches of modern industry and technology.”
— At best, a burst of consumer spending due to government expenditure could lead to a weak and temporary upswing in the economic situation, but once consumer spending has been completed, the economy will fall back to its old depression rut with much debt being generated in the process. Such a consumer-led recovery is known as “Keynesian” economics, named after the British economist Lord Keynes who was adamant about demanding “non-productive” consumer spending which does not result in the accumulation of capital goods such as under a New Deal type of system.
— In 1936 France the regime of Leon Blum attempted a consumer led recovery by increasing wages, giving every worker two weeks of paid vacation, cutting the work week from 48 to 40 hours, and implementing a system of unemployment insurance, which did greatly increase government spending, but not enough to end the depression in France.
— In the early months of the Obama regime, many Democrat politicians in Congress pushed for spending to be included with Obama’s so-called stimulus, and some plans had merit of being able to prevent the collapse of regionally important economic activities, but such spending will not translate into economic recovery which would consist of increased capital goods production, rising standards of living, and full employment.
Option #3: A general reflation with abundant cheap credit for financial borrowers, or hot money recovery. The third option entails the country’s central bank offering vast amounts of cheap credit for interest rates as low as 0%, or even negative interest rates which subsidize the borrower who takes the loan, with most of the recipients being bankers. Under such a system, the returns for activities such as speculation and criminal activity such as drug money laundering is much higher than the rates of returns for activities such as farming, industrial production, and infrastructure building. This means that after such an economy collapses, cheap credit will flow preferentially into activities which are sociopathic, parasitical, criminal, or at the very least not productive, while hard commodity production will suffer from lack of credit due to the lower short-term rates of return for such production. Also in recent years cheap credit has been fleeing to other countries in the form of “currency carry trade” or “flight capital” which collapses national economies which are attempting to produce a recovery by issuing the credit in the first place, as has been happening in Japan from 1990 to the present.
— The Bank of Japan kept interest rates at or near 0% from 1995 into 2007 in a time frame known as the “lost decade of stagnation” in the Japanese economy, where Japan served as a massive “money machine” for speculative worldwide trade which drove the U.S. stock bubble, the dot com bubble, the housing bubble, and similar events in the U.S. and other countries. The Japanese considered offering such low interest credit to be an advantage due to the resulting lower value yen giving stimulus to exports, but all in all the strategy was a failure. However, even though Japan’s policy was a failure, it is the policy being attempted to be followed in an even larger scale by Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner who are controlling Obama’s economic policy.
— Ben Bernanke is known as “helicopter ben” for giving a speech where he suggested that a depression could be stopped simply by dumping bales of money out of helicopters with economic recovery resulting as the money was spent. The Federal Reserve under Bernanke has reduced the U.S. interest rates to 0%, and it is already clear that the policy will be a catastrophic failure. Most likely the policies will seriously damage the international value of the already battered U.S. dollar, and once the slide starts happening a panic could result where many around the world would attempt to dump their dollars. However, “As long as factories are intact and a skilled labor force exists, it is relatively easy to rearrange the universe of paper so as to put people back to work and restart production, and that is the heart of the matter.”
— A subset of the policy of lower interest rates, “hot money,” and reduction of the money supply is the policy of attempting to bail out insolvent financial institutions, as the Obama administration is currently doing. This policy is similar to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation set up by Herbert Hoover trying to bail out banking institutions in an attempt to prevent the collapse of the U.S. banking and credit system, which proved to be a futile attempt due to the banking panic at the end of 1932 which led to the shutdown of every banking institution in the country. Similarly, Obama’s strategies amount to pouring public funds down a “useless rathole,” creating impoverishment and serving no rational purpose whatsoever.
(THE MOST IDEAL) Option #4: Mobilizing the credit resources of the government and the banking system for the purpose of launching an ambitious program of infrastructure construction and development. Two aspects differentate this option from Keynesian policies. First is the emphasis of government lending over spending, such as forcing the central bank or national bank to issue cheap credit only for productive and large-scale projects which develop infrastructure that is clearly in the public interest. Such credit would not be made available for speculative, sociopathic, or criminal activity. The second point distinguishing it from Keynesian policy is the fact that Keynes insisted that the spending to stimulate the economy would have to be nonproductive, so that it would not compete with existing productive capacity which would lower the rate of profit. “Keynes thought it was fine for ditch diggers to dig ditches and then fill them up as a way of earning their daily wage from the government, but he was hostile to the idea of building new and more modern rail lines among the cities of Great Britain.”
— Lautenbach proposed that the German government launch an ambitious large scale program of infrastructure construction and modernization that would create many modern productive jobs paying decent wages, with benefits cascading through the German industries and economy. The key to the strategy was to force the central bank to honor a “rediscount guarantee,” which meant that any contractor or a subcontractor who was involved with working on the national infrastructure programs could be guaranteed that all of their commercial papers could be turned into cash by local banks, because those bankers could then immediately cash those papers with the central bank. This method allows credit to be supplied to productive and necessary parts of the economy without allowing money to flow into speculative or parasitical activities.
— Lautenbach’s infrastructure program could have “science drivers” added to it to get the economy going through technical spinoffs which would modernize the productive process in the workplace. Past examples include the space program of the 1960s which has led to the information technology and the internet today.
— “The idea of a rediscount guarantee was built into the New Deal program which finally and definitively ended the Great Depression in the United States during 1941 by reducing unemployment to lower levels. This was Lend-Lease, which harnessed the Federal Reserve and the banking system to provide credit for defense production. Each contractor and subcontractor was guaranteed that relevant commercial paper and bills of exchange would be automatically discounted by local bankers and turned into cash, since each local banker could be sure of commanding the support of the Federal Reserve system. This amounted to a de facto nationalization during wartime of the Federal Reserve system for national goals, not the whims of cliques of unelected and unaccountable bankers. It is clear that Lautenbach’s fourth option is the one we need to implement today.”
Obamanomics: Cash for Trash: $12.8 Trillion for Wall Street
This chapter describes how the Obama regime is doing exactly the opposite of what would be needed to pull the U.S. economy out of its depression and start an actual economic recovery. A period of financial panic started during 2007 and 2008 which led to failures of many financial institutions, and the panic has been centered around a $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble which is currently astronomically multiplying losses. The most reasonable course of action would now be to restart the manufacturing and industrial sectors of the United States through rebuilding the country’s infrastructure and making technological progress, while also implementing regulations to prevent further abuses of the financial markets.
Chapter 1: Prologue to the 2009 Edition: Emergency Economic Recovery Program
This chapter is from an article written January 21, 2008 which contains 21 key points of a strategy toward stopping the current economic depression and creating economic recovery. Points mentioned include enacting laws to stop foreclosures until the end of the depression; raising the federal minimum wage; imposing taxes on Wall Street financial transactions; nationalizing the Federal Reserve; implementing Federally sponsored infrastructure projects; comprehensive re-regulation of the financial and banking system including a revival of the Glass-Stegal legislation; eliminating NAFTA and the WTO; along with many other suggestions.
Chapter 2: No to the Paulson-Bernanke Derivatives Bailout
This chapter is an article written September 23, 2008, which describes the bailout being pushed through Congress by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and other officials of the Bush regime with the help of Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Harry Reid, and others as being a “monstrosity for the ages, combining every hideous feature of monetarism, elitism, oligarchism, and sheer feckless incompetence.” Tarpley stresses the importance of blocking the bailout, gives much information about specifics of the economic problems, explains why the bailout is ineffective, and explains what strategies would be more suitable to creating economic recovery.
Chapter 3: Force the Fed to Open a Main Street Lending Facility
This chapter was originally an article written October 2, 2008 explaining that the Federal Reserve System is supposed to be an engine of credit for the American economy and it must be forced into serving the needs of the U.S. economy rather than “catering to the whims of anonymous cliques of unelected and unaccountable parasitical financiers and bankers.” It is explained that abundant credit should be supplied for production and commerce while preserving the system of local and regional banks by forcing the Fed to open a “main street lending facility” where producers of all kinds can receive immediate credit at between .5% and 1% interest to keep the economy going. It is explained how such lending is currently only reserved for parasitical speculative financiers and bankers. Also it is explained why a need exists for a modern equivalent of FDR’s Lend-Lease program, but not for war production this time but rather to re-start the collapsing domestic economy and move the country to full employment.
Chapter 4: End the Fed - End Wall Street Bankster Rule
This chapter explains why it is important to abolish the unconstitutional and illegal Federal Reserve System through nationalizing it. Currently the Fed is a privately owned bank that has been damaging the U.S. economy for almost 100 years by setting interest rates and the amount of money supply from behind closed doors, leading to de-industrialization, impoverishment, and a world economic and financial depression. It is explained how the Fed caused the crash of 1929, did nothing to stop the banking panic of 1932-33, and is the main cause of the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble which is currently devastating the world economy. Abolishing the Fed is a major step to re-industrialization, economic modernization, full employment, and rising standards of living for all people.
Chapter 5: Statement to the G-20 Summit, London, April 2, 2009
This chapter was originally an article written March 22, 2009, which explains that the U.S. is rapidly sinking into a catastrophic world economic depression brought on by de-industrialization along with privatization and deregulation of financial markets. The biggest cause of the economic problems is the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble, which should be frozen and neutralized due to being “fictitious” capital which destroys production.
Back Cover
Surviving the Cataclysm: Your guide to the greatest Financial Crisis in Human History. The Book that Shows the Way out of the World Depression. Here is the indispensable handbook for the present breakdown crisis and disintegration of the world financial, currency, and banking system. Webster Tarpley builds on his prophetic work of 1999, which showed the world heading for a financial cataclysm and economic depression due to deregulated derivatives speculation, the destruction of modern productive industry, the collapse of the U.S. standard of living, and a globalized hot money casino run by a tiny financier oligarchy. Tarpley calls for a return to the American system of political economy as exemplified by such figures as Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, FDR, and JFK.
Tarpley shows the criminal futility of the Bush - Paulson - Bernanke bailout of the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble, now continued under cynical and demagogic left cover by the Obama - Geithner - Summers - Bernanke clique. Obama is exposed as the worst Wall St. puppet in recent U.S. history, an anti-FDR peddling a New Deal in reverse for the benefit of zombie bankers, while the American people get the crumbs.
Surviving the Cataclysm advances a benchmark program for world economic recovery, full employment, scientific and technological progress, third world development, and the defense of our threatened civilization. It is a call for wiping out derivatives, banning foreclosures, and nationalizing the failed Federal Reserve System.
Cheap, no-interest Federal credit for production can build 1,000 hospitals, 100,000 miles of high-speed maglev rail, 100 fourth generation high-temperature pebble bed nuclear reactors, while rebuilding the interstate highways and water systems— creating tens of millions of high paid, capital intensive modern jobs in the process.
Tarpley makes the case for science drivers in exploration, colonization, and industrialization on the moon and Mars; high energy physics; and biomedical research. A special chapter discusses the way individuals can survive the crisis.
It you read one book on economics, let this be the one.
Surviving the Cataclysm: Your guide to the greatest Financial Crisis in Human History. The Book that Shows the Way out of the World Depression. Here is the indispensable handbook for the present breakdown crisis and disintegration of the world financial, currency, and banking system. Webster Tarpley builds on his prophetic work of 1999, which showed the world heading for a financial cataclysm and economic depression due to deregulated derivatives speculation, the destruction of modern productive industry, the collapse of the U.S. standard of living, and a globalized hot money casino run by a tiny financier oligarchy. Tarpley calls for a return to the American system of political economy as exemplified by such figures as Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, FDR, and JFK.
Tarpley shows the criminal futility of the Bush - Paulson - Bernanke bailout of the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble, now continued under cynical and demagogic left cover by the Obama - Geithner - Summers - Bernanke clique. Obama is exposed as the worst Wall St. puppet in recent U.S. history, an anti-FDR peddling a New Deal in reverse for the benefit of zombie bankers, while the American people get the crumbs.
Surviving the Cataclysm advances a benchmark program for world economic recovery, full employment, scientific and technological progress, third world development, and the defense of our threatened civilization. It is a call for wiping out derivatives, banning foreclosures, and nationalizing the failed Federal Reserve System.
Cheap, no-interest Federal credit for production can build 1,000 hospitals, 100,000 miles of high-speed maglev rail, 100 fourth generation high-temperature pebble bed nuclear reactors, while rebuilding the interstate highways and water systems— creating tens of millions of high paid, capital intensive modern jobs in the process.
Tarpley makes the case for science drivers in exploration, colonization, and industrialization on the moon and Mars; high energy physics; and biomedical research. A special chapter discusses the way individuals can survive the crisis.
It you read one book on economics, let this be the one.
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