The Octopus in the Room
Vivek, the Fed, and the Octopus in the Room
By Susan Kokinda
May 04, 2023
As the speculation-besotted western financial system lurches toward collapse, there are those within the establishment (and without) who have enough of a grasp of reality that they are challenging the Federal Reserve’s policies of recent decades. Such questioning broke out in the pages of the Wall Street Journal this week, with an op-ed by Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, which concludes, “The Fed should refocus to avoid repeating its past mistakes, and I intend to make the 2024 presidential race in part a referendum on the proper role of our central bank.” The Wall Street Journal replied the next day with an editorial board statement entitled, “Vivek Ramaswamy Takes on the Fed” and declares, “The role of the central bank in our economy is a presidential-level issue.”
Perhaps it takes the near-death experience of the financial system to finally call into question the so-called independence of the Fed. But neither Ramaswamy, and certainly not the Wall Street Journal, are prepared to, as they say, actually “go there.” “There” is the fact that it is the very system of central banking which is the problem, not the failures of varying Federal Reserve policies themselves.
Ramaswamy often shows a bit more of a relationship to reality than most, which, perhaps, isn’t surprising, because he is an entrepreneur, has a healthy opposition to the woke and environmental insanities of the elite, speaks favorably of Donald Trump, and does seem to actually be able to think.
His main assertion is that the Federal Reserve abandoned the policy it pursued in the 1980’s and 90’s of using monetary policy to maintain a stable dollar as the world’s reserve currency, in favor of using monetary policy to, instead, manage the business cycles. That he argues, has led to the whipsawing between too much liquidity and too little, and the resultant busts, bailouts, inflation, busts, bailouts…rinse and repeat. As President, he wants to influence the Fed to return to that earlier policy.
Ramaswamy’s basic problem is that he accepts the premise of managing anything through monetary policy itself. Take the question of a stable dollar. We had a stable dollar prior to 1971, under the post-war Bretton Woods System which was set into motion by Franklin Roosevelt. The dollar, as the world reserve currency, was pegged to a gold reserve standard, which “tethered” the dollar to a real, productive economy. Coming out of World War II, our industrial economy was the strongest in the world because of the depth and breadth of the war mobilization, and earlier great projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Once President Richard Nixon, under pressure from the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve, broke that tether on August 15, 1971, our currency, and increasingly our economy, has been at the mercy of the financier elite and has been gutted at an accelerating rate. The percentage of our workforce engaged in manufacturing has dropped from over 60 percent to less than 10 percent over the past 50 years.
But even the Bretton Woods System, which lasted for about 25 years, and the Glass-Steagall banking reform which was enacted in 1933 (to separate productive commercial banking from speculative investment banking) and which was repealed in 1999, were defensive mechanisms put in place to try to maintain our sovereignty and our physical economy within the central banking system which was imposed on the U.S in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve.
The power of that central banking system has metastasized over the past 110 years and no amount of “getting involved with Fed policy” is going to work in a world which is now dominated by a global elite of central banks, multi-billion dollar hedge funds, and mega-corporations. Nor will hand-waving gestures which simply advocate a return to Glass-Steagall have much impact, (other than to educate people on how a sane banking system might work), unless one is prepared to take down the global imperial system.
Only by taking a “sledgehammer to globalism,” as Donald Trump has called for, are we going to rescue our economy and the U.S. dollar, and reclaim our nation. That means eliminating the Federal Reserve, returning to national banking, and launching an in-depth economic mobilization. The elements of that mobilization include the 10 new “Frontier Cities” that Donald Trump has called for in his Agenda 47, the continuation and acceleration of his Artemis mission to the Moon and beyond, and LaRouchePAC’s Project Prometheus to build 1000 nuclear power plants in the coming decades. Most fundamentally, it demands a U.S. industrial policy centered on advanced manufacturing, the large-scale modern infrastructure platform necessary for an advanced economy, and a total reform of our educational and scientific research infrastructure to produce the scientific, engineering, and skilled labor force necessary for a productive and advancing society.
We encourage Vivek Ramaswamy to join in such a dialogue and to use the “bully pulpit” of a Presidential campaign to create the conditions for carrying out that revolution, under the Presidency of Donald Trump, in 2025.
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